Enchanted Isle

Enchanted Isle by James M. Cain Page B

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Authors: James M. Cain
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robbing a bank.”
    “OK, OK.”
    “She was fourteen years old. Teenagers are weird.”
    “I said OK. She was playing around with Vernick.”
    “And then kind of ran into trouble.”
    “You mean she came up pregnant?”
    “Yes, except she wasn’t quite sure yet. She was just a kid and kept hoping and hoping and hoping...and waiting. She was afraid to tell her mother. And then at last she’d waited too long. She had to go in a home and have the child, have you. Then she put the bite on Vernick, and his father backed her up, made him marry her. That was a week before you arrived, and his father, still wanting to do the right thing, went to her father, your grandfather Gorsuch, to pay what the home had cost. But he said, Mr. Gorsuch did, that he hadn’t yet got the bill, but whatever it was there was no hurry about it. But Vernick’s father wanted to lean over backwards and, instead of waiting, went himself to the home to give them a check so no bill would be sent Mr. Gorsuch. But the woman couldn’t say, or wouldn’t say, how much the bill would be, and he thought it was pretty funny. He asked her to please find out. And when she stepped in the next office, he tiptoed over to listen. And what he heard stood his world on its head, and his son’s world, and your mother’s world, and your world.”
    “What did he hear?”
    “‘But that’s all been taken care of.’”
    “Taken care of? By whom?”
    “That’s what stood all those worlds on their heads.”
    “Steve, I asked you, by whom?”
    “I don’t know by whom!”
    After a long time I asked, “Does Mother know?”
    “I can’t say what she knows.” And then: “Mandy, she was a teenage girl, a kid that liked a good time. Who knows what she knows?”
    “But if she doesn’t know, I don’t!”
    “I said, if I tell it you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
    “And I don’t have any father.”
    “You have me...if you want me.”
    “Want you? Want you? Steve, I want you as I’ve never wanted anything! Steve, be my father! Be my father always. I’ve...I’ve been hit by too many trucks. I can’t take any more!”
    By that time I was crying, and he came over and patted me, taking me in his arms and kneeling beside my chair. He said, “Mandy, I knew it would hurt. I warned you it was going to. I begged you not to make me tell it. But a deal is a deal, and if that’s what you wanted I had to go through. I want to be your father, and I promise never to take advantage. Well? I proved that I wouldn’t, didn’t I? Last night?”
    “Yes, Steve, and I was so happy.”
    “There’s one other thing, little Mandy.”
    “Yes, Steve? What is it?”
    “You can count on me, all the way.”
    He knelt there some little time, patting me, kissing me, and calming me down. Then we got to laughing, when he got his handkerchief out and let me blow my nose. He said I sounded “like the B&O freight every night blowing for College Park.” Laughing was what I needed, I guess, and I began to feel a lot better. And then when I looked there was Mother, skipping up on the porch in that graceful way she had. Steve jumped up and scrambled out in the hall, opening the door for her. Then she was in, pulling his ear and kissing him, I guess from habit, or maybe forgetting who she was married to. She was all smiles for him but hadn’t any for me. I mean she had hazel eyes, which took up the green she always wore, to contrast with her hair, which was a beautiful dark red. And they could be warm and friendly and gay, and in fact usually were, ’specially for a man. They flashed that way for Steve, but when she saw me they got hard, and when they were hard they were hard. I mean like a couple of marbles. Then she started in letting me have it, taking up right where she left off on the phone the night before. She ran over it, what a pest I had been since the day I was born. She was ’specially bitter about Vernick, about my going to him.
    But I cut in on her and asked, “Speaking of

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