Top of the Hill

  THE TOP OF THE HILL

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  TO MARIAN

  VOLUME

  ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was by chance that he met Dunky Aldridge on Thursday on Fifth Avenue after work. It was an unlucky meeting, although they greeted each other cordially and had had good times together and had drunk considerable beer in each other’s company. But on Saturday morning, Aldridge was one of the two men who were killed.

  “Where’ve you been, Mike?” Aldridge asked. “I haven’t seen you around the drop zone in months. Sneaking away doing secret jumps?”

  “I got married three months ago,” Michael said, feeling that was enough reason for any absence.

  “Congratulations.” Aldridge slapped him on the back. He was a burly, red-faced man who had played football in college. They had both started skydiving at the same time at the field and had made many jumps together. “How’s it going?” Aldridge asked.

  “Euphoric,” Michael said.

  “Slippers and fireside time now?” Aldridge asked. He laughed, because they were the same age—thirty. “Keeping away from the old pernicious haunts?”

  “More or less.”

  “Would it be against your marriage vows to have a drink with an old pal?”

  Michael looked at his watch. “Half-hour before I have to report for duty in the kitchen,” he said.

  They went into the Gotham bar and they were there more than thirty minutes and had more than three Scotches.

  “You still look in pretty good shape,” Aldridge was saying. “In fact, I’d say marriage has leaned you down a bit.”

  “I do my push-ups.”

  “Listen, we’ve got two pretty hot new shots at the field. We’re doing a four-man star on Saturday morning. If we find a fourth. Like you, for example.”

  Michael hesitated. Since he had met Tracy, his wife, he hadn’t done any free-falls. Or anything much but think about her and spend as much time as he could with her and get through his chores at the office. The sight of his friend stirred old memories. Aldridge wasn’t really his friend, except in the rough comradeship around the DZ and in the nearby saloon—they had never even had dinner together and Michael had not thought of inviting him to the wedding and he didn’t know whether Aldridge was a Republican or a Democrat or a Maoist or if he was married or was rich or poor or even why he was called Dunky. But they had always gotten along well with each other and Michael trusted him.

  “It sounds like a nice idea,” he said.

  “Bring the lady. Give her a thrill. Her old man dropping out of the sky like a shining angel.”

  “Maybe I will. If I can get her out of bed. Saturday momings’re tough.”

  “Tell her it’s her chance to meet some fine, upstanding, red-blooded American boys.”

  “I’ll pass the word along,” Michael said. He took Aldridge’s office telephone number and promised he’d call him in the morning.

  Aldridge insisted upon paying for the drinks, as a wedding present, he said, and they went out and Michael got a cab and went uptown, hoping he didn’t smell too strongly of Scotch.

  Over dinner, which was laid on a table in front of the fire, he stared entranced at his wife and thought of how Aldridge’s eyes and the eyes of the other men at the field would light up when they saw her. He told her about the plan for Saturday morning and she frowned. “Jumping out of airplanes,” she said. “Isn’t that for kids?” “They’re all men, about my own age.”

  “What do you do it for?”

  “Fun,” he said. He had known her for more than five months but he hadn’t ever told her what other kinds of fun he had indulged in before they met. Time to begin, he thought. “Haven’t you ever had a feeling you’d like to fly?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “One of the mythical longings of the race,” he said. “Remember Icarus.”

  “Not such a happy example,” Tracy said, laughing.

  “Anyway, you could try it, too. Not free-fall, at least not at first. Just attached to a line that opens your parachute automatically. The earth never looks quite that beautiful again. A lot of girls do it.”

  “Not this girl,” Tracy said decisively.

  “Still, will you come?”

  “Why not?” She struggled. “If my husband’s crazy I might as well find out what he’s crazy about. Anyway, I have nothing else to do on Saturday morning.”

  It was a bright sunny day as they drove out of New York toward the field in New Jersey. As usual, when he left the city, Michael felt exhilarated. Tracy, beside him in the car, dressed in a loose wool coat with a scarf against the brisk autumn weather, gleamed, fresh and excited, like a coed going to a football game with her best beau and looking forward eagerly to the evening’s parties.

  “There’s a great country restaurant not far from the field,” Michael told her as they turned north on the Jersey side of the river, where the trees were fading into muted russets and gold along the road. “For lunch. Wonderful daiquiris and lobster.”

  “Ummn,” She looked across at him curiously. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m scared the other fellas’re going to think I married a dog.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. “Next time, I’ll have my hair done.”

  McCain, who ran the jump center and who had taught Michael how to free-fall, was waiting at the shed with the other two men who were to make the jump, and the plane was warming up on the strip. McCain had laid out the target area on the grass, which had just begun to turn damp after the night’s frost. The men were affable and polite and obviously impessed with Tracy. McCain, usually a man with the rough manners of an old top sergeant, even said, “Mrs.

  Storrs, if you’d like to come along for the ride, there’s room. You can be the jump master.”

  “I’ll just stay planted on the ground where I belong, Mr. McCain, if it’s all the same to you,” Tracy said. “One bird in the family is enough.”

  McCain grinned and said there was a pot of coffee on the stove in the shed if she got cold.

  As the men walked out toward the plane, Aldridge whispered, “Holy man, Mike.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael said innocently.

  “That’s what I call a fitting audience for our skill and daring is what I mean, you sneaky bastard.”

  Then McCain was explaining how they were going to do the relative work, as free-fall multiple maneuvers were called—giving them the sequence in which they were to exit, reminding them to break away at 3,500 feet, no matter how well or poorly they made the star, so that they would have the necessary five seconds to get safely away from each other before they opened their chutes at 2,500 feet. It was all old stuff to the four men, but they listened carefully. If McCain suspected that anybody’s attention was wandering he was just as lief to call the whole flight off.

  They got into the plane, McCain at the controls, with the door stripped off, the doorway open, the wind gusting in, cold and biting. They gained speed and took off. Michael looked out the window and saw the small figure in the blue coat standing waving next to the shed. Maybe, he thought, one day I’ll get her to see what it’s like.

  At 7,200 feet, they jumped, one after the other. They made a good star at 3,500, planing and meeting up and touching hands in a circle, then peeling away from each other. Aldridge was the fourth man out. They had separated as programmed, when, for some rea
son that nobody would ever discover, the third man opened his chute immediately. Aldridge crashed into it at about one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, and hit the man as the chute collapsed. The doctor later said they were both killed instantly, so they were spared the terror as they streamed down to earth, while Michael and the other man, swinging safely from their parachutes, and McCain at the controls of the plane, watched helplessly.

  At least she didn’t cry, Michael thought as they drove slowly back to New York, with the shadows of the afternoon already streaking the road, at least that. He put out his hand to touch hers. Her hand lay still, her face averted as she stared out the window. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Please don’t say anything,” she said. “For a long while.”

  When they got to the apartment, he made himself a drink, but when he asked if she wanted one, she merely shook her head and went into the bedroom and lay down, fully clothed, coat and all, as though her bones, to their marrow, were freezing.

  He must have fallen asleep sitting in the easy chair, the empty glass on a table beside it, when she came in. She still had on her coat and scarf. He had never seen her face so pale. “You’re not ever going to do anything like that again, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe next week. Maybe next year.” “Next week?” she said incredulously. “What sort of man are you?”

  “Several kinds.”

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “I love you. But I don’t want to be a man who loves you and lives scared.”

  “What’re you trying to prove?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I’ll find out later.”

  “You didn’t tell me all this time.”

  “The subject didn’t come up.”

  “Well, the subject has come up now.”

  “I’m sorry, darling, I can’t honestly promise anything.”

  “I thought the man was your friend.”

  “He was. If it’d happened to me, he’d be up next week.”

  “Macho idiot,” she said contemptuously.

  “It isn’t even that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He shrugged. “When I find out, when I really understand, I’ll tell you.”

  She sat down opposite him. There was only one lamp on, at the other end of the room, and her face was in shadow, only her eyes glistening. She had waited to cry. At least she had waited. Strong woman.

  “Michael,” she said, “I have something to tell you.” Her tone was flat and emotionless and troubling.

  While he was sleeping in the chair he had dreamt that Tracy had left him and he had searched, first in the empty apartment, then vainly in the darkened streets for her, almost seeing her, a flick of cloth disappearing around a stone comer. “You’re not going to tell me you’re leaving me, are you?”

  “No,” she said, still in the flat dead voice. “The opposite of that. What I have to tell you is that from now on, after today, I’m going to stop taking the pill. I want to have a child.”

  He stood up then and slowly walked, without speaking, to the window and looked down. In the light of a streetlamp down below an old woman with a cane was being helped out of a taxi. It’s the wrong thing to be seeing at this moment, Michael thought, the inevitable decay and the approach of death when the start of a new life is the subject of conversation.

  “Well?” Tracy said.

  He turned and tried to smile at her. “Well, give a man a little time to think.” He went over to her and bent and kissed the top of her head. She sat rigidly. “You have to admit, it’s pretty sudden.”

  “What’s sudden about it? You may disappear like that.” She snapped her fingers, the sound like ice crackling in the quiet room. “I don’t want to be left with nothing—nothing. Anyway we’ve been married three months. I’m twenty-nine years old. You’re thirty. As far as I know you may never see thirty-one. How old was your mother when you were born?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Well . . . ?”

  “Those were different times.”

  “Every second is a different time. That doesn’t stop people from getting bom.” She moved to the sofa and sat down on it. “Come here and sit by me.”

  He went over and sat next to her. She was shivering under her coat. I must refuse, he thought, to surrender to her anguish. “I destroyed my mother,” he said gravely. “I think the real reason she died so young was me. She never admitted it even to herself, I think, but she knew I hated her.”

  “Those are the risks you take.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “There’s no law I know of in America that says, ‘Go thou now and procreate.’ ” He sighed. “And I was the unhappiest and most unappealing little boy anybody had ever seen. At the age of twelve I was contemplating suicide.”

  “You’re not twelve anymore. You’re a big grown man with a good job and a bright future and a wife, who as far as I know, loves you.” “Let me tell you something about my job”—if ever there was a time for truth and resolution this was it—“I despise it. If I thought I had to continue in it for the rest of my life I’d be the twelve-year-old boy again, contemplating suicide.”

  “Melodrama,” she said harshly.

  “Call it what you will,” he said. “With a family I’d be locked in for good. The chains would be permanent.”

  “I suppose I qualify as one of the chains, too.”

  “You know I don’t think that.”

  “I don’t know what you think.” She stood up. “I’m going out for a walk. I don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight.”

  He watched her stride toward the door and click it shut behind her. Then he sat at the table before the fire and poured himself a glass of whiskey.

  He was still there at the table, with the bottle of half-finished whiskey in front of him, when she came back. She didn’t greet him, but went into the bedroom.

  When he went in two hours later, walking unsteadily, the light was out and she was asleep or pretending to be asleep. When he got into bed she did not make her usual move toward him and for the first night since they were married they didn’t make love.

  He couldn’t sleep and he got out of bed and went back to the living room and the second half of the whiskey bottle.

  I remember Mama, he thought drunkenly. The title of an old play. He sat staring into the semidarkness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Michael Storrs Jr. stopped being Jr. at the age of five, when his father was killed in a barroom brawl. Lila Storrs, the mother of Michael Jr., a fragile, overeducated, incompetent beauty of twenty-eight, called the death irresponsible. The elder Storrs had been an executive in his father-in-law’s bank in Syracuse and as far as anyone knew was not in the habit of patronizing saloons. He had stopped in at the bar on his way home after what had been perhaps an especially wearing day at the bank and while sipping his first glass of bourbon had witnessed an extremely bloody fight between two of the other men at the bar and had stepped between them and tried to get them to quit. One of the contestants, later identified as a man who had been released three days before from the Mattewan Prison for the Criminally Insane, had pulled a knife and killed the young banker with one stroke.

  Later in life the son was to come to the conclusion that his mother’s description of his father’s death was inaccurate. If anything, Michael Storrs Sr. was killed in the praiseworthy attempt to be responsible—to his class, the law of the land and the civil relations one expected to be shown in public places by the citizens of a peaceful democracy.

  Certainly the death could have been avoided—Storrs could have stepped quietly down to the other end of the bar or merely paid for his drink and slipped out—but Mrs. Storrs, who loved her husband dearly, held the firm conviction that in moving to the center of violence he had put last things first, had forgotten his wife and only child and risked the entire family’s happiness for the sake of an aberrant
whim or a mild distaste at being forced to endure the sight of two ruffians disturbing the pleasure of his first drink of the day.

  “He was killed for a feather,” she said, somewhat obscurely.

  The effects were momentous, especially for the fatherless son. His mother made a nunnery out of widowhood, vowed never to marry again and to devote her life to the care and upbringing of the boy in such a way that the accidents of life would leave him uninvolved and forever safe. Thus the boy was overindulged, overprotected, overfed on highly nourishing and scientifically chosen foods, kept from the hurly-burly of ordinary childhood, forbidden to climb trees, go out for teams, consort with rough children, play with toy guns or bows and arrows and to go to and from the neighborhood school unescorted. His mother drove him to school in the morning and watched until the students were assembled in the yard and marched off to class, and she was there waiting at the gate, standing, watching anxiously, to drive him home when the children came trooping out of the building in the afternoon. When other boys were playing baseball, young Michael was practicing the piano, for which he had no talent. During the summer vacations, when his classmates sported in swimming pools and on beaches and perilous playgrounds, he was taken, well guarded against sunstroke and offensive foreigners, on extended tours of museums and churches in France, Italy and England, since along with the other burdens the boy had to bear there was the heavy weight of his mother’s family’s wealth to confound him. In the evenings, along with recapitulations of the wonders they had seen that day, he was treated to loving lectures on proper behavior. Profanity was an evil in the eyes of God, masturbation was the cause of untold disasters in later life, sly little girls and wicked older men would try to lure him into comers where unmentionable temptations would be offered to him, belligerence had led to his father’s death and contributed to wars in which beautiful young men like himself were killed in the millions. He was the staff upon which she must lean and she would always expect him to remember her words, even after her death; he had a fine and promising future and his grandfather would be there to help him in every possible way if his grandfather thought he was worth it; he was the only thing she loved in this world and he must never, never disappoint her. If Freud had been at the table his giant groan would have been heard from Vienna to Catalina Island,