Elsinore by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online

Vanderwelle. He couldn’t meet her eyes. Under the tinted glasses, her eyes weren’t there. She might have been looking at the wall while she chatted with Holden. It infuriated him. He was feeling homicidal, but he’d never have touched the lady.
    He went down into the street with the old man, whose chauffeur appeared in a rented Plymouth. Holden could have found a better car in the meanest body shop. But Phipps wanted to be anonymous on the road to Chappaquiddick.
    And while Holden had been measuring the Plymouth, the chauffeur disappeared.
    â€œWho’s going to drive us to Chappaquiddick?”
    â€œYou are.”
    â€œThat’s the limit,” Holden said. “My dad was a chauffeur. I watched him suffer behind the wheel. It broke him, Mr. Phipps. It kept him a fucking child. I swore to myself that I’d never follow my dad into that line of work.”
    â€œBut I can’t take my chauffeur. It would ruin it for us. He’d know all our plans.… Get in. I’ll drive.”
    â€œYou’re too old. And you have bad feet. I’ll drive. But don’t make it a habit. I’d have to quit.”
    â€œI’ll sit up front with you, Sid. We’re companions. I won’t let you down.”
    He couldn’t escape that shadow, the shadow of his dad. It was a recurrent dream, a nightmare Holden had endured since he could remember. Holden wearing some kind of livery while he sat behind the wheel. Sidney Holden, the prince of chauffeurs in a peaked cap. But his uniform had eagles and stars and buttons of the United States. It was a soldier’s livery. Holden’s dad had been a soldier during the big war. But Holden couldn’t tell who he was driving in all the dreams. Now he saw the face. It was God, God in the back seat, wearing the cardigan of Howard Phipps, that hidden singer of holy songs. And Holden had to laugh. God had been a Pinkerton man.

    Phipps wanted to stop in New Haven for lunch. Holden shivered when he saw the towers of Yale. It was like coming to a foreign country, and he panicked for a moment, thinking they’d need some currency with a queen’s head. Oh, he’d dealt with Yalies before. He’d even been to the Yale Club in Manhattan. But the college startled him. He expected to see monks riding around on bicycles, and all he met were kids and tweedy men, dressed like they were living in a kind of noble poverty, a knighthood of books and baggy pants. Holden was glad he’d gone to Bernard Baruch.
    Phipps led him to a neighborhood behind the college. There were no towers. The streets were broken, and black children played in the rubble. Holden couldn’t find a restaurant. There was a merciless regularity to the small, dark buildings, like the inner walls of a heartland Holden had never heard about. The town was like Phipps himself, porous, with a lot of different pasts.
    And then, in those dark streets, Holden discovered a tiny Italian restaurant that didn’t have a signboard or a name in the window. Holden parked in front of the restaurant, and the two of them went inside and sat down. The waiters ignored them until Phipps shouted in some Italian dialect that must have been born in the streets of New Haven, because suddenly the waiters danced. A tablecloth materialized, together with silver, and a blue candle that no one would let Holden light all by himself.
    â€œWhat did you say, Mr. Phipps?”
    â€œI told them that their mothers slept with strangers, and their fathers only fucked cows and sheep, and if they didn’t serve us in a second, you would piss on the wall and fuck their baby sisters.”
    â€œThey could have gotten angry, and I would have had to fight the whole restaurant.”
    â€œHolden, you’re wrong. They love to be cursed. That’s the language that’s dear to them.”
    â€œWhen was the last time you ate in this restaurant?”
    â€œTwenty years ago.”
    â€œThen why