It was going to be blowy up on the roof. Gusts of wind snapped the
bunting. The sheet of paper containing Rarick’s speech would be sure
to wave and rattle. Sometimes, in spite of having memorized, it became
necessary for Rarick, because of the numb nervousness, to read his
address.
Greeting his guests as they stepped out of the makeshift elevator,
the tongue of Rarick lay like chamois in his mouth. The great little
magnate swallowed his tongue. The great little magnate was heavy with
dread.
The panorama from the highest roof in the world unrolled before his
glazed eyes. Dime by dime, brick by brick, he had built his pinnacle.
It was of steel and it seemed to him it swayed a little in the high
wind that was going to be sure to flutter his sheet of speech in his
nerve-tortured fingers.
The Rarick Auditorium tilted its Gothic-shaped eyebrows out over the
vastest expanse upon which windows had ever gazed. It seemed to Rarick
that too many forces were meeting here for his endurance to bear up
under. The agony of the nervousness. Altitude. That insistent, that
terrible sense of the swaying of steel. The harbor moving out to sea.
The crawling, remote island below, the streets as negligible-looking as
slots. The dipping heavens....
Congratulatory phrases and the shrill extravagances of the women
cluttered the high, clean altitude.
Marvelous. Breath-taking. Oh! Oh! Oh! Dramatic! Stupendous!
Incredible. Finest--biggest--highest--tallest--most terrific--most
expensive--gigantic--Oh!--Oh!--Look!--See!--What?--Where?
Finest--tallest--highest--so--American!
One shook hands. One accompanied this one and that one to
this ledge and that. That down there? Oh, of course, the
Equitable Building. Over there? I say, Hellman, is that
Metropolitan Tower? No-o--think that’s the Municipal
Building down there. Telephone Building. Oh no, forty stories
higher--wonderful--panorama--finest--biggest--tallest--highest--so
American----
As Hellman confided to his wife, a large overweight woman, who was
in turn suspected of writing Hellman’s speeches for Rarick, the old
gentleman was a ton of coal on top of the occasion. In all of the
scene of animation on the half-completed roof, Rarick’s was the one
hesitant figure, requiring, on the part of Hellman, constant watching
and steering, or inevitably he gravitated to a corner, there to stand
unanimated, his twitching hands under his coat tails, making inaudible
replies to the high falsettos of the women, meeting, but never making
overtures of conversation to the men.
As a host, Hellman again confided to his wife, as he rushed past her
to pilot Rarick to the Commissioner of Police, the old gentleman would
make a first-rate funeral-director.
Motion-picture machines ground. Cameras clicked. Groups leaned against
parapets and were photographed. The wife of the Mayor, in a feather
boa that was well known to rotogravures, was snapped with the wife of
Rarick, who posed tall and lean, with sables high about her neck and
wrists. The entire group of sixty was photographed. Then twenty. Then
ten. Finally Rarick and the Mayor.
Luncheon itself, served by a bankers’ club in Wall Street, was a cold
and tasteless affair by the time it was relayed up the seventy-nine
stories. The wind was a nagging one that became bothersome to the women
and forced Senator Grimes to dine with his high hat clamped tightly
down against neuralgia.
There were souvenirs. Snow-storm paper-weights of the Rarick Building
enclosed in crystal.
At the escarole-salad course, Miss Jennifer Rarick, slender in black
tailored things and high white fox, apologetically late and becomingly
breathless, arrived with a young man named Davies, for whom an extra
chair had to be crammed beside Jennifer’s.
The occasion marched to the address by Rarick, who, by the time the
pistachio ice-cream arrived, knew that this was to be one of the
excessively nervous times he would be obliged to read his few remarks.
He did so after coffee, the decorous phrases, the mock humilities that
had been written for him either by his secretary or by the wife of his
secretary, dropping heavily on to the assemblage.
On occasions when Rarick made address, Jenny invariably rolled bread
balls and kept her eyes down. Zigzags of disagreeable sensation ran
up and down her spine. From his place beside her, the knee of Ramon
pressed up sympathetically against hers. “Awful!” she whispered, and
pressed back; “he simply should not attempt it.”
The voice of Rarick went over its rutted road:
“... share with you--proudest moment of my life--generous
public--lifetime ambition--service of the people--humble
servant--owe everything to generosity of those who have encouraged
[applause]--temple of music dedicated to people [applause]--from
the people back to the people--your generous coöperation--my
humble efforts--fine spirit of coöperation in my organization
[applause]--thanks due to officials--employees [applause]--I wish I had
ability to express--dedicated to people--dedicated to people----”
“Awful! Awful! He said coöperation eleven times.”
Ramon’s knee so gently pressing hers! It made it easier, after the
polite applause had died down, to look up from her plate.
Thank God, chairs were scraping back. Another horror of an occasion
over. Curious, that the figure of Rarick could be so consistently a
depressant. Never knew it to fail.
“You mustn’t mind it, Jenny.”
“I do mind, terribly. Why does he attempt it? Oh, Jennifer, there you
are! Wasn’t it ghastly?”
“Not at all, Mother. Father is my idea of a bat in the pulpit, or
is it belfry? I love the bat, if only I didn’t have such a horror
of getting him caught in my hair. Gratton, you’re supposed to be a
word-prestidigitator. Pull me a phrase out of the blue that can do
justice to that view down there.”
They leaned over the parapet, young and exultant, stricken with the
wonder of what they were, even more than with the wonder of what they
beheld.
“It’s the book of life written on a postage-stamp,” he said.
“Putrid! I can do better than that. It’s the story of the circulation
of the blood being told by those crawling caterpillars down there.”
“Zero. It’s Lucifer being hurled, and splitting, as he strikes bottom,
into land and water, skyscrapers and taxicabs.”
Elegant, but dumb.
The wind in their faces could not budge her in the tight black helmet
that covered her head like close hair. It lifted the light tan thatch
of Gratton’s, though, as if it were a wig. It was difficult to indulge
in any but a breathless sort of discourse, and yet, they did discourse,
these two, smartly at first, young, exultant, and high-keyed each to
the other’s presence.
“The roof of the world isn’t so cozy as the low little old thatched
ones of Devonshire and English poetry.”
“After spending a summer in a picturesque, damp, uncomfortable and
gloomy thatched cottage in Sussex, I am convinced that love in a
cottage may lead to lumbago.”
“Love! Must all conversational roads lead to love?”
“Pretty many, I suppose, between the delightfully unattached like
ourselves. Daring to assume that you are as unattached as I yearn to
believe.”
“Your way, I suppose, of asking how, or if, I have recovered from my
last devastating love-affair?”
“Many a true word....”
“Many and many a true word ...” she said, fastening her hard, hurt eyes
upon him. “Well, to whom it may concern, the dead past has buried its
Berry. I’m so unattached it hurts! I think I’m in love now, with the
idea of being in love with you, Gratton.”
“I wish you could manage to get all the way through to being in love
with me, Jennifer. I need to be rich. I’ve a low kind of Indiana
background that I don’t seem able to live down. I can’t feel the swank
in evading my creditors. An unpaid dry-cleaner’s bill will insist upon
keeping me too worried to tackle a second act.”
“An admirable but low instinct, my lad, not acknowledged in circles of
the highest creative impulse.”
“I know it! But hang it all, my highest creative impulses, whatever
that means, get all obscured by fear that the dry-cleaner’s thirteenth
child may be dying of rickets, for need of pure, fresh milk. Of course,
dry-cleaner can probably buy and sell me ten times over, but that
doesn’t seem to lessen my obligation.”
“Go on.”
“Where?”
“Not being all the wise-crack things we seem to pretend to be, whenever
we are together.”
“It’s you who sets that pace, Jennifer.”
“I need the wise-crack, to divert the eye of the beholder from seeing
through how I do my poor little mental tricks. You don’t.”
“Jennifer, are you being humble?”
“I want to be.”
“That’s terrible! It somehow ... hurts. I prefer you naughty.”
“I think you do.”
“I think I don’t--really----”
“Gratton, guess why my face aches.”
“Too loaded with the seductiveness of youth and beauty.”
“Don’t rag. I am being profound and introspective. Altitude does that
to me. My face aches, Gratton, from pretending to look like what it
isn’t.”
“Perhaps it is your heart that aches, Jennifer.”
Their bright young eyes poured against each other and she did something
that was adorable to him. She placed her hand up against the region of
the heart in question, and her lips came lightly apart like a small,
thirsty bird’s.
“That’s it! The ache is down there and my face hurts from pretending
that it isn’t.”
“It’s too dear a face to ache.”
“Meaning expensive?”
“Not kind, Jennifer.”
“If I were to start in allowing myself to be kind to you, Gratton, I
might not know where to stop.”
“Wonderful of you to say that.”
“Wonderful to be able to say that.”
“It’s nice, our being this way,” he said, on a blurt of words.
“Yes. It rests the face.”
“What on earth do you mean, Jennifer?”
“Being this way. Just simple. To hell with persiflage.”
“I hope it isn’t all due to altitude that you’re so nice today. Perhaps
attitude has a bit to do with it?”
She grasped his arm. “Look down there, Gratton! See that steamer. Looks
like a fruit-boat, nosing into slip.”
“Where?”
“No, darling, we’re not docking boats this season on top of the
Woolworth Building. Look to the left. See, there’s the Aquitania,
beyond her are two ferries passing one another, and just beyond them
there’s a steamer sliding alongside her pier.”
“Yes! Two red funnels.”
“Right. I want a port, Gratton. I want to slip alongside a pier. That’s
what Father always says about you. You’ve destination.”
“What kind of port do you want, Jennifer?”
“A snug harbor into which I can bring useful wares--such as they are.”
“Yours would be first-rate.”
“Are you thinking, or saying, that?”
“Both?”
She hooked into his arm.
“Aren’t I grotesque to you, Gratton, up here on this peak of dimes.
Don’t I appall you?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Look at Father over there. Bewildered, frustrated, with dimes.
Sometimes he seems to me like a little man whose eyes have turned to
dimes and whose spirit cannot shine through them. Dimes have flowed
over his life, making of it a metal prairie. My mother stands in the
middle of such a prairie. I do. My brother lies buried in it. This
building is a monument of dimes to the futility of dimes ... and in a
way, a monument to the curious, groping genius of my father. I am part
of his great frustration--Gratton--never for a moment doubt but what I
know that.”
He laid his gloved hand against her mouth as if to crush back the
words and the wind tugged at them, and beyond, where both their gazes
focused, the harbor looked like a tarpaulin being dragged.
“There are times when I come perilously near liking you perilously,
Jennifer.”
“Like me enough to understand me, Gratton.”
“Then you understand him,” he said, and nodded to the form of Rarick,
who seemed perpetually to be hovering on the edge of groups to which he
did not quite belong.
“I try,” she said, on a small click of teeth. “I try. I try. I try.
Believe that.”
“Curious how simple he seems to me. A man who is too stern an idealist
to compromise. A man who asked for bread and got a gold nugget.”
“A gold brick, if you mean me.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m crazy to help him. I’m crazy to--love him.”
“I should think his pathos would help you to that; the pathos of his
terrible, heart-breaking grandeur.”
“It does.”
“Jennifer, you are sweeter today than I have ever known you. Please
don’t ever again let your face ache from looking like what it isn’t.”
“Yes, but what about my heart?”
“It’s a dear heart. In the right place.”
“Gratton, if you prove that to Father, some day, when I do things for
him that he won’t believe I had it in me to do, will I be proving it to
you at the same time?”
“If you haven’t already.”
“I need more money than anybody in the world, Gratton. The chances are
that I’m apt to always have money. I wouldn’t want ever not to have
money, and yet, I suppose that the only real chance I’d ever have to
show what I think I’m made of, is to wake up some morning broke--God
forbid!”
“I’m beginning to strangely suspect you of being made of what you think
you are.”
“Don’t make this strong man weep, Gratt. She might proceed to tell you
how ghastly lonesome and misunderstood she is. Than which....”
“Don’t take advantage of my youthful susceptibility. I am on the verge
of thinking you more of a person than is good for my peace of mind.”
“... and so, snapping out of the mood of better-self which had crossed
her fair and petulant face, the fêted and ill-fated heiress to the
Rarick millions hurled her champagne tumbler from her hand and--ate the
glass....”
“Idjut!”
He stooped to pick up her glove which had fallen crumpled to her feet.
“Give me your hand,” he said. “I’ll draw this on for you.”
“Are you suing for my hand?”
“No.”
“Well, then, keep my gauntlet until you are ready to come suing.”
“Idjut,” he said again.
This was the conversation between those two, as they stood at the
parapet, overlooking the world, high wind in their faces, and their
words jerked off their lips and swallowed up by gusts. Once or twice
Rarick hovered. The very atmosphere about them was built up of the
kind of particles that kept him gingerly on edge. Their sureness
and brightness and youngness oppressed him with a sense of his own
unsureness. He felt ill at ease, just as much so, in a very different
way, as he did when he bobbed about helplessly among the dancing young
men with no faces in particular, that Jenny dangled around with her as
you would bangles on a bracelet. That was pretty generally his feeling
about the narrow young dancing-men, who looked as if they might be slid
back into their shoe-boxes at night, and put in place along the shelf.
This Davies, now, was another matter. This fellow had a sure,
uncompromising look to him. He knew what races were worth entering--for
him. He knew his track--he knew his goal....
Even as he stood there, keyed by the slim Jennifer beside him, to his
facetious worst, Rarick, abominating what was sure to be the flying
foam of their conversation, was ready to like him. He had written that
message, “I think I understand what you failed to get said to Avery....”
“Well, young man,” said Rarick, greeting him a little later, “how is
the enterprise coming along?”
“Not for the moment, so surely as this one of yours, sir. This building
has been headed for its roof ever since you laid the cornerstone. We
are not certain yet where we are heading.”
“We’ve just come from a reading rehearsal of one of Gratton’s plays,
Father. Talk about not seeing the woods for the trees! We couldn’t hear
the lines for the adenoids.”
“That remark, I shall explain to your daughter when I have her alone,
Mr. Rarick, was both unæsthetic and untrue. The fact is, the cast at
the moment doesn’t measure up.”
“Gratton’s polite way of saying, Father, that the first thing the
committee did after feeling money in its pocket was to go out and
buy the most expensive Broadway casting-director they could find,
thus launching the experimental idea safely and smugly toward the
commercial theater from which it was so passionately revolting when you
came across. You should have endowed Gratton, Father. Not a half-baked
idea.”
“Jennifer!”
“Modesty ill becomes you, my young man. You may leave something to
be desired as a playwright, but you are as bona-fide an idealist as
ever let himself in for a bumping. But anyway, I’m for Gratton’s play,
Father. Louder and funnier--more situations and less psychology--is
all anyone could have asked of the first rehearsal. Also a new and not
quite so comic hat for the leading lady.”
“I’d like to come around sometime, Mr. Rarick, and talk to you about
this baby of yours ... that is what it is, in a way ... your money made
it possible.”
“Are you speaking of me, sir? Father, I think the young man is about to
sue for my hand.”
“Jennifer, idiot, if your comedy cannot be funnier, let it at least
be deferred. I’ve a notion you’ll be interested in seeing first hand,
sir, what we are doing with your money. Jennifer isn’t entirely correct
in what she says; but it does seem that with money in our cash-box
the committee is about to commit the understandable error of becoming
pretentious. I’m for adhering to our pre-affluent _répertoire_. I would
like to talk over our production end with you, sir.”
A broad, slow smile moved across the sallow features of Rarick, seeming
to widen them, his lips lifted, revealing seldom-revealed white oblongs
of teeth, then drew back as slowly as portières.
“My hours, young man, for conferring advice for the furtherance of our
native and esoteric drama are for the present overcrowded, but if you
will consult with my Mr. Hellman, he will arrange an appointment.”
“Darling,” said Jennifer as they turned away, “I wish to commemorate
this occasion by sliding down seventy-nine stories and rushing to the
first corner orangeadery for an ade--or a ginfizz. You may not realize
it, but you succeeded in eliciting a smile and a witticism from my
father.”
“I’m for him.”
“I’m of him.”
“That makes me vicariously for you.”
“Viciously, did you say?”
And so on and so on and so on, as, stepping into the elevator they
began descent through the stories of steel that were rising to the
tunes of the jingling of the dimes.
* * * * *
By unexplainable oversight that offhand would seem almost impossible,
Rarick, what with Hellman rushing off with the newspaper men and the
guests paying their departing platitudes, was left on the roof alone
after the elevator man had made his last descent and apparently gone
from the building. There were no bells. It meant a walk down thousands
of stairs that were little more than ladders. For an hour now, the
sun had been in behind banking clouds, the wind stiffening. Meanwhile
Rarick waited, hoping for a return of some of the waiters to clear away
the few remaining camp-chairs, or for a watchman on his rounds.
It was not unpleasant up there on the rim of his skyscraper, except
that with the rising wind he could have wished for a warmer coat.
Clouds scurried low, and the heavens seemed to scamper. Vessels with
slanting funnels were riding out on their first lap eastward. There
were a few coming in. You could tell by the direction of the slant of
the funnels and the way the waves fawned at the cutting prows.
With the instinct of man to ponder from high places, Rarick, looking
out, looking down, stood with his elbows on a parapet and his cheeks
crushed between his palms.
The leaping bridges rushing to jerk land to land. Ships that not
improbably were majestically putting to sea or making harbor on some
such petty mission as dolls with peach-skin faces or pressed-tin
ash-trays. Belching funnels of fruit-steamers that were packed
with enormous cargoes of green-skinned bananas to sell by the puny
penny-piece off East Side pushcarts. Vertically below, the winding
of the crisscross streets, slots into which to drop your dime; the
winding play of elevated railroad; the animated dartings of the specks
of little humans rushing about with hearts buttoned up underneath
their coats. The moving clouds, the moving streets, the moving
waters, the ever-moving specks of heartbeat. The little Rarick,
elevated on his parapet of the nickels and the dimes. The little
Rarick--contemplating....
What Rarick was actually contemplating at the moment, as he stood there
in the midst of space, in the midst of a Saturday afternoon--his last
guest gone, Jenny with her narrow youth, Jennifer with her heckled and
heckling companion--was, that here he stood with miles of steps to walk
down and no place in particular to go after he had walked them.
One of those hiatuses which, because they occur so seldom in the map of
a busy man’s affairs, flabbergast.
Well, here goes!
It was almost dusk when he reached the street, after the fifty and more
flights of stairs, mortar streaks along his coat, the dizzying descent
and the Saturday-afternoon bedlam of shoppers, ferry-boat commuters,
trucksters, newsboys, clerks, stenographers, brokers, causing the scene
to seem to sway by the time he reached sidewalk-level.
Women with oilcloth bags, that had been stocked at a Rarick
Five-and-Ten across the way, jostled him.
There was a small triangle of park opposite, set out sparsely with
the geometry of two dusty maple-trees, two scrofulaed benches, a
refuse-can, and an inset of gray grass. There was a vacant place on
one of the benches, between a bulging woman with one of the oilcloth
shopping-bags and a sandwich man who had unhooked his boards and had
sat down to rest from them. There Rarick slid in.
The red front of the Five-and-Ten was ground into the pallid scene.
Its windows glittered. There was a handkerchief display this week, of
pink and blue and striped cotton squares. Rarick had sat in conference
on this buy of the two million run-of-the-mill output of a New England
concern. The vista that faced him was plastered with the small cotton
squares edged in a horrible kind of cotton lace that presently, after a
washing or two, would fray into so much string. Cotton handkerchiefs,
destined to dry against mirrors and window-panes; cotton handkerchiefs
for the customers with the cotton-looking faces who poured in and out.
They brought their ten-cent pieces to this fount of abominable things
with an acquiescence that had pathos in it. Kitchenware, celluloid
fine-combs, under-arm shields, glass jewelry, were the mission of these
men and women who, from the heights only a few moments before, seen as
specks, had seemed sublime. Ten-cent trailers after ten-cent things!
He watched them come. He watched them go. The woman on the bench beside
him began to open a package and count hair-pins. Rarick pins. Children
emerged from the red front opposite, jamming Rarick lollypops along
tongues. Women lugged Rarick mops and Rarick clothes-hangers. Men came
out with Rarick celluloid collars and Rarick ten-cent socks tucked
into their coat pockets, and more Rarick lollypops, for more babies,
turning gummy in their Rarick paper bags.
The feet that turned in at the fount of Rarick were for the most part
tired, crooked feet. The splayed feet of women who have borne too many
children under too many handicaps. The side-tilting feet of men who are
on them too many hours a day. The pitiful feet of girls in short vamps
and tall heels. Tawdry feet, filled with a mysterious eagerness.
Contemplating them for at least two hours, Rarick finally dove down
into the subway, and home, to write throughout the evening at the
document that was slowly becoming his will.
The third day that Jenny’s meals, every nine of them, had consistently
disagreed, she rather angrily decided to see a specialist.
Deep down within herself she sensed the trouble. As a child she had
been subject to fits of nervous indigestion following punishment or
spells of rage. She had subsequently outgrown all this, and, for the
years since, had enjoyed the singular hardihood that is so often the
lot of the wiry and apparently nervous temperament.
Jenny could and did truthfully boast that she had never spent a day in
bed. Small ailments, such as the sciatic twinge that had come of late,
yes. But in the main she was entitled to regard herself as a creature
well thewed.
The old nervous unease, asserting itself in this physical fashion, was,
as Jenny frenziedly diagnosed it to herself, due to a sense of panic
that went to the very roots of her being. It smote her with terror,
with a sense of aloneness, with a growing despair of years, such as
nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet.
Ramon was growing tired. The symptoms were out in him. The guarded
manner. The wary voice. The evaded appointment. The placating manner.
The roving eye. Slowly, surely, unrelentingly, the realization was
closing in on Jenny.
His telephone no longer responded to her call when too well she
knew he was lying within reach of it. The old punctiliousness about
appointments was a thing of the past. Almost invariably now it was a
matter of waiting for him; and on one or two occasions he had failed
to appear at all, sending a telephone message, explaining unavoidable
delay, by way of the cashier of the tea-room where already Jenny
awaited him.
His tendency to be irritable was growing. He disliked the pink, Chinese
polish to her finger nails; hated the manner in which she shrouded her
throat in furs and tulles, and told her so.
“It makes you look so blamed manufacturedly exotic.”
“But, Ramon, you once told me that Dusé and Bernhardt----”
“Never mind what I once told you. This is now.”
“Why, Ramon!” she gasped, tears spurting. “Why--Ramon!”
He had leaned over the table of the tea-room to pat her hand, as
you would the hand of some one who innocently irritates you beyond
endurance.
“Never mind, dear.”
Never mind! Jenny was minding to such a degree that when she laid
herself in bed at night, after a day filled with a tormenting attempt
to drown out with activities the rising fears about Ramon, the blood
kept whirring in her veins and flooding her with flushes.
The boy was tiring, no doubt of that. More-frequent exchange of
handclasps that left notes of larger and larger denomination in his
palm did not seem to matter, except for the moment.
The pallor of terror was high in the face of Jenny these days; so high
that Jennifer, marveling at such a lapse in her mother, reproved her
for rouging badly.
“A bit thick, darling.”
What was Ramon wanting? The apartment? The retreat to which he used to
refer? Her discretion continued to shrink from that. The present suited
her so well. Careful. Satisfying. Cautious. Having your cake and, as
Ramon repeatedly added these days, eating it, too. But, curiously, even
that mooted subject was laid now. Ramon no longer talked in terms of
their jewel-box of a rendezvous which was to be of his designing.
Was Ramon’s eye straying? The younger girls, including Jennifer,
interested him strangely little. Significantly little, the men would
have put it. He had appeared at the opera in Mrs. Emanie Bursilap’s
box of late. But that was unthinkable. Emanie Bursilap was a
great-grandmother, and sixty-eight if a day. Rich beyond the count,
it is true, but a rather horrible great-grandmother, with a wattled,
wrinkled face that had been lifted into a mask, and a neck with grooves
for the pearls to nest in. A naughty old gray bat of a woman, jealous
of her own daughters and haunted by terrors of becoming what she
already was.
Had the time come when Jenny must face her issues? What issues? It was
unthinkable that this outward scheme of things, this scheme of having
her cake and eating it, too, could ever be any different until--until
what? Until something happened! Well, things did happen. Death changed
the maps of families. Women had been left widows before--free--O God,
forgive me for that thought----
Ramon must be placated. There had never as yet been a time when Jenny,
in Ramon’s behalf, had drawn against her account for sums that would
be noticeably unusual. But, in a pinch, that could be managed. There
were ways of arranging with jewelers and furriers for bills to be
presented for goods never delivered. That was a common device employed
by women who, unbeknown to husbands, lost large sums at gambling. You
arranged with your furrier, for instance, to send in a statement for
a five-thousand-dollar mink coat. You returned the wrap, but paid the
check, which in good time was returned to you in currency by your
tradesman....
When one was desperate ... and yet, somehow, terribly, relentlessly,
Ramon did not seem to want to be placated. What--what in God’s name did
one, who felt the universe slipping, do to reclaim it?...
It was then that digestion seemed to go nervously back on her and that
Jenny decided to visit the specialist. Actually, Ramon’s antipathy for
illness was something reprehensible, of course, but at the same time,
adorable and fascinating and fastidious in him. His sympathies poured
out, you felt sure of that; but the little sense of aversion would
creep in, wounding his æsthetic sense. Illness to the young blade Ramon
was decay, antithetical to his sleek beauty. No wonder that he shrank.
Illness was something from which you protected Ramon.
As a matter of fact, be it said for Jenny, illness, hers, was something
from which she, in general, protected those about her.
It was an acutely wretched week of physical distress that preceded this
visit to the specialist, about which neither Jennifer nor Rarick had
inkling. Not even the maid in the Breton cap, a stanch south-of-France
woman, who had served Jenny well and long, knew to what extent she had
been in torment.
The physician, a social-register one in East, slightly East,
Sixty-third Street, to whom she finally presented herself, directed
her, after discovering that the seat of her difficulties lay in an
anatomical area two and three-quarter inches removed from the region
on which his skill focused, to an eminent man in East Seventy-second
Street, who, after a more or less cursory examination, awaited
Jenny in his office, while she climbed back into her clothes in the
examination-room.
A trying moment, this interval between physical examination and
doctor’s verdict, and one that added to Jenny’s state of general
nervousness and made her sharp with the attendant nurse.
It was not that she feared. It was more the idea that in the handsome
adjoining office was sitting a professional figure endowed with the
power of certain vital verdicts.
If there were anything serious the matter with her--well, that was
life--and death.
If there was something only superficially wrong--dear Ramon....
The verdict was neither so good as she had hoped nor so bad as she had
feared.
Some digestive complication. His manner was casual and reassuring.
Thank God for that. Life was good. But the best method of diagnosis and
determination would mean a short period of observation at a hospital.
Few days. A little troublesome but nothing to worry about. X-rays.
Fluoroscope. Test meals. A chill rattled itself against Jenny. Hospital!
“Nothing to be alarmed about. Most efficient method. Merely a
checking-up process.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
Then and there the matter was arranged by telephone.
“A large suite, doctor?”
He placed his hand across the mouthpiece.
“The hospital is too crowded to allow for suites, Mrs. Rarick. You are
fortunate to be able to obtain a single and bath. Is Friday all right?”
“Yes.”
The suite did not matter, except for Ramon. Flowers to the ceiling of
a sitting-room. Chaise-longue. None of the onus of illness. One simply
could not be ill in a hard white hospital fashion, for Ramon’s sake....
“... besides, Mrs. Rarick, I have no intention of confining you to the
hospital those few days. You may leave every afternoon after we have
tinkered at you for a few hours, but you must have all your meals at
the hospital and return six o’clock evenings for your dinner and early
bed.”
Perhaps, then, Ramon need never know! There could be nothing seriously
amiss with one who was allowed such leniency. Come to think about it,
Bettina Slocum had been obliged to undergo such observation last month,
only to discover that her trouble all the while had been due to nothing
more than tooth infection.
Ramon need not know. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would pass quickly.
She could disappear under pretext of week-end. Nuisance, having to tell
Jennifer and Rarick. And, oh dear, Friday was the Gluxom dinner (not
that the Gluxoms really counted) and Saturday the automobile contest at
the Garden, a society competitive gala contest for the most beautiful
car. Jenny’s new special-body Twin Hercules had just arrived from
Italy--oh dear....
* * * * *
What a disgusting nuisance! They rode you down formaldehyde-smelling
corridors on something that resembled the hand-trucks on which porters
rumble trunks at railroad-stations. They stood you up against walls
and unwound you of your last decent shred of sheet, and forced you to
drink lead-heavy liquids that made you transparent, so that they could
watch the tiresome processes of your alimentary canal or whatever it
was. They stretched you on a table and covered you with metal plates
and took pictures of your liver or whatever it was on the side where
the sciatic pain made you feel like a persimmon. They punctured your
perfectly good arm and drew thimblefuls of blood that felt like
bucketfuls. They counted your pulse and they counted your blood and
they took your metabolism, whatever that was. Internes, such unhandsome
ones, laid dingy ears to your heart....
So Jenny took the overhauling, for the most part in good nature,
rushing back to the hospital apologetically late, and creating in
her wake a confusion, a specialness, and a lavishness that were as
outwardly annoying as they were secretly impressive to the nurses.
The rich Mrs. Rarick was a patient not soon to be forgotten even in
a hospital designed to meet the needs of the rich. Jenny lay in her
narrow bed that was fluffed up as if it were a shell to hold the pearl
of her magnificence. The young internes related among themselves,
in hilarity, the amount of clawing it took to part the sheets and
the laces and the billows that confined the patient. Placing an ear
to the breast of Jenny was not just that. Laces crept up around the
stethoscope like saucy surf. The slim ridge of Mrs. Rarick was the
least of all in that bed. Silks, laces, scents, puffs, made it riotous.
Jenny, packed in splendor.
Rarick sat stiffly in the room the evenings he came to visit her.
Strangely, his comings created almost as much stir as the arrival of a
motion-picture star, two weeks before, for a major operation. Nurses
and internes remained on duty, past hours, to catch glimpses of him as
he arrived and departed. The head chef lurked behind a doorway. But for
the most part, except for Jennifer, who darted in and out, and the maid
in the Breton cap--who occupied a room adjoining--secrecy prevailed.
At the end of the three days, Jenny, her maid, her pillows, her special
bedding, her framed photograph of Avery, her bottles of scents, her
thermos flasks, her silver flower-vases, her special breakfast china,
her frilled bed-jackets, her character dolls and stuffed dogs, departed
from the hospital for home.
Three days after that, the reports on her tests were completed.
Something that had not happened to Rarick in years occurred one
morning. At least it had not happened to him since his clerkship days
in Schwebbe’s hardware store.
A peremptory command, in the form of a hand-delivered message, lay on
his desk. Hellman had laid it face-up on the top of his sorted mail.
It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
this afternoon. Regard this as confidential.