The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [6]
"We'll say our good-byes, then. Here's this morning's correspondence," said Doyle, handing him a generous packet of letters.
"Right sorry I'm not going with you." Larry stared at his feet and looked as mournful as a bloodhound.
"No more than I, Larry," said Doyle, banging him affectionately about the shoulders. "Don't know how I'll manage without you, but someone needs to mind the home front. No one better than you, old boy."
"Hate to think there'll come a moment you might need me and I won't be at hand, that's all."
"I'm sure Innes will do a bang-up job in your stead."
"Or die trying," said Innes, with a crisp salute.
"We'll write every day. You do the same. These are for the children," he said, handing over a bag of gifts and sweets.
"We'll miss you something terrible," said Larry, lower lip trembling.
"Keep the missus away from the damp, now, there's a good fellow," said Doyle, clutching Larry's arm, his voice husky with emotion. He turned away to hold back the tears. "Here we go, Innes. Onward. Off to conquer America."
"Bon voyage, sir," said Larry, waving enthusiastically even though they were only a few feet up the gangway. "Bon voyage."
The purser greeted them warmly as they boarded. The stalwart figure of Larry stood on the dock below, swinging his arm like a pendulum.
Behind him, a darting figure sprinted from customs for the gangway.
Ira Pinkus. Damn.
Doyle walked out onto the upper deck and took a deep breath of bracing salt air, alone for the first time since the tugs had led them from shore. A man of thirty-five, his six-foot-two-inch frame filled out by two hundred pounds of muscle well conditioned by a strict regimen of boxing and gymnasium work. His moustache thick, black, and well-groomed; his face more rounded now, ridged and shaped by experience; his eyes set with an authority justified by a worldly success his dress and manner suggested he had found more than agreeable. Doyle had about him the magnetic, unselfconscious aura of a man destined for great things, but he still considered himself first and foremost a family man and this long separation from his wife and three young children posed a trying deprivation.
The trimmings of fame did nothing to protect one from the plague of life's unhappy little surprises, as Doyle had quickly discovered, let alone the deeper discomforts of loneliness or emotional turmoil, while the daily maintenance of what seemed a prosperous life demanded such enormous expense of capital that the margin between income and outgo was shaved down to the same razor's edge that haunted every man's existence.
Not that Doyle expected sympathy for the trials of newfound affluence, however far short his actual worth fell from people's speculations—a jolly great distance indeed. No, he had made his bed and he was lying in it, eyes like dinner plates. He still didn't understand why the arrival of cash only momentarily preceded its abrupt departure—often for ridiculous objects put right to work collecting dust, neatly disappearing along an orderly line of retreat: closet, packing box, garage, garbage heap—but it did. And this from a native Scotsman, a man with thrift embedded in the fiber of his being, who had labored heroically throughout his life to avoid the unnecessary and extravagant.
No use fighting it: The migration of money must be respected as one of the fixed laws of nature. A man labors to earn enough to satisfy his basic biological needs—warmth, food, shelter, sex—then, in order to reward himself for his backbreaking work, carries right on spreading any surplus cash around for nonessential luxuries, until the basics are so thoroughly jeopardized it drives him back to start the damn business all over again. As trapped by our genetic destiny as salmon swimming upstream to die.
A week at sea: Good Christ, how he looked forward to it. To leave behind those grinding, commonplace headaches for a while. A fellow never realizes how responsibilities accumulate like stones in his pockets until he takes a swim. A week of his obligatory correspondence alone—sixty letters