Pale Betrayer Read Free

moment out of time, it seemed, was being given him in which to weigh the last possibility of turning back. He could excuse himself to Janet Bradley who was showing him the dummied pages of her latest book, cross the room to her husband and say to him: “Peter, old man, I got you into something you didn’t know about …” But suppose it turned out that nothing had happened in Athens, that contact had not been made at all? He had been given a moment in which only to relish the last sweet dregs of a cup he had once thought would be bitter tea. Watching Peter tap his head, the sycophants hanging breathlessly for the wisdom he was expected to shake loose, Mather had no regrets. After all, his own greatest moments had always come from turning chagrin into triumph.
    Janet turned the last page of Child of the City , a photographic study of the East Twenties, where she and Peter lived, to the Bowery’s edge. Mather noticed her fingers tremble. It gave him an unexpected, an almost shocking thrill, to discover that Janet cared so deeply that he liked the book and, by extension, that he liked her. He remembered then Jerry’s intimation—the misfortune of Mather’s inadequacy to such opportunity—and the memory crippled the brief, exquisite emotion. It would not spring again, wish as he might to conjure it. He pitied Janet almost as much as he did himself. He reached out his hand to her in the need to have and give sympathy. But Janet, interpreting the gesture by her own heart’s dictate, clutched the book in both hands and looked toward her husband. Her lips met, about to say his name.
    At that instant Bradley snapped his fingers. “Skaphidas,” he cried. “That’s the name, Nikos Skaphidas.”
    Steinberg, to those around him, said: “Oh, God. No wonder you didn’t get the point. I forgot to say the man in the story …”
    His wife, Louise, cut in: “Bob, you always do that!”
    Spontaneously the murmur of conversation resumed all through the room. Mather watched Janet, trying to catch her eyes, to seek the best of himself reflected there, his lost salvation.
    “Janet …” He caught her hand and kissed it. Anyone in the room, observing, would say it characteristic of him: Eric was a great kisser of hands.
    But Janet said: “Thank you, Eric.”
    “It’s a beautiful book, you know. One would expect it to be, coming from you.”
    She inclined her head in acknowledgment of his praise. To escape the intimacy with which she could not cope, she said: “There’s more coffee. Shall I warm it?”
    He shook his head and forced her to endure a few seconds of his scrutiny. She suffered it with great poise, only the faint telltale pulse moving at her throat. Still she would not meet his eyes, keeping Peter within her gaze.
    “Do you love him, Janet?” he asked quietly.
    “Yes!” She tilted her chin and the word had come too quickly. A cry in the wilderness. Mather felt it at his own heart’s core. The clock behind him rasped, about to strike the hour of nine. How bitterly ironic to reach two climaxes at once in a life so barren of such moments. The others in the room had begun to move, the eagerness of the young scientists to see the film irrepressible now that the time had come. Mather heard Peter say: “Mind, there may not be anything we don’t know …” But even as he said the words his eyes were shining. He wanted to see it as much as they did.
    Mather allowed himself one last thought of Janet: he wondered how he would feel about her after this night had passed. “I’d better go too,” he said. “I’ve promised to look in on the Imagists.”
    “What are the Imagists?” Janet asked.
    “Well, they’re neither beats nor Beatles, certainly. They’re latter-day worshippers of Eliot and Hume, and they’re so square, they’re cubed.” He smiled down at her and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Thank you, my dear, for everything.”
    As he moved across the room the clock struck nine. Louise