Noon was the man under whose care Jenny had been during this recent
little disturbance. An illustrious figure in medicine, who had recently
operated on an ex-President of the United States, and who was almost
certain to be called in first or named as consultant in the illnesses
of the great.
Could this little upset of Jenny’s have a graver significance than he,
Rarick, had realized? She had made so light of it. He had scarcely
regarded it as more than a faddistic bit of rest-cure. His trips to
the hospital had impressed him chiefly for the air of festivity in the
sick-room. Jenny lying in her frills and going through what she called
rigmarole. Even Dr. Noon himself, whom Rarick had encountered there on
one of those occasions, had held her pulse lightly and joked at her
joking.
Women got out of gear like that. Not Jenny, it is true, but the
expensive hospitals fairly yawned for the run of them.
There was something about this wiry woman, Jenny, that had seemed to
him, immediately after his marriage to her, to be highly cutaneous,
as if she were incased in an armor of brittle, but resistant skin.
Pain did not get at her. She never perspired. Her hands had the cool,
polished feel to them of having been dipped in tallow. It struck Rarick
that he had never seen her blood. If she had ever pricked her finger,
it had not yielded a drop.
That was why, without his being able to analyze it concretely, the
idea of Jenny in any kind of physical predicament was difficult to
conjure. She was part of a surface, just as she had lain lightly on the
ridiculous ruffled bed in the hospital, making no physical dent. It
again smote Rarick, funnily, that in her place beside him, Jenny never
left dent. Or warmth. Her side of the bed, when she rose from it, was
as cool and untouched-looking as if human form had not rested there.
And now this from the doctor under whose observation she had been,
suggesting that, after all, Jenny might be more than just a corporeal
surface....
It is imperative that you come to my office alone at four o’clock
this afternoon....
He did what was rather unusual for him. He thought up a pretext for
telephoning Jenny. She was not at home. Her secretary, the pale Miss
Dang, offered to locate her at one of three places. André Trianon’s
for a facial and wave. The Children’s Charity Show, in the Leslie van
Blarcoms’ ballroom, or in the Oval Room at the Ritz.
“No, never mind.”
There was something reassuringly normal about Jenny immersed in her
usual kind of morning, which was crammed to capacity with the piffle of
such minutiæ as facials, marionettes, Oval Room.
Probably it was on the score of just this frenzied futility that her
doctor wanted to see him. A woman as high-strung and curiously nervous
as Jenny might go on indefinitely and then snap. At least that was what
you heard was constantly happening to women in society, and perhaps
more especially to those so frantically on the rim of it. Well, you
could not expect even so astute a man as this Noon appeared to be, to
understand. No need to acquaint him with unnecessary facts, of course;
but precious little Rarick could do about it. Jenny wanted--well, Jenny
wanted what she wanted.
Nevertheless, at four o’clock, Rarick stepped out of his car and into
the tall, narrow building that contained the four stories of offices,
laboratories, consultation-and-observation rooms of Dr. John Noon.
The trip from the first step into the lower hall up to a fourth-floor
waiting-room was past five women in the starched uniforms of nurses.
One verified his appointment, and as he gave his name, mysteriously the
news was transmitted, and portières began to stir and eye-gleams to
appear between slits of door and curtain.
“The Five-and-Ten Rarick! Sh-h-h-h!”
Another nurse for his hat. Another to admit him into the two-passenger
elevator. Another to operate it. Another to meet him as he stepped out.
And still another to turn him over to still another, who rose from a
desk in the waiting-room and advised him that his wait would be brief.
It was. His summons into an inner office came almost immediately. It
struck Rarick with surprise that he was trembling. Here was a firm that
dealt in human destinies. He was doing business with it. What if Jenny
had a deep-seated illness of the blood and bone? All this was nonsense
about her corporeal specialness. She was frailty. Women somehow, soft,
complicated creatures that they were, were subject to mysterious
maladjustments. There were special hospitals for the diseases of
women. What if Jenny....
An old man sat at an old desk in an old room. At least, the Dr. Noon of
this room looked older than the Dr. Noon of the hospital. His desk was
as uncluttered as Rarick’s own. Again it was the uncluttered desk of a
busy man. There were two sheets of white paper spread on it.
Jenny’s destiny, thought Rarick, as he seated himself on the leather
edge of the chair proffered him.
“I have sent for you, Mr. Rarick, before communicating with your wife.
In cases like this it seems best.”
So then, Jenny did not know.... “In cases like this.” The great man
was meeting just another case. Jenny’s, perhaps a little special by
virtue of the impact of the name of Rarick, but to a man like Noon,
who ministered to the powerful ones of the earth, not sufficiently
differentiated to remove it from the category of “cases like this.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Rarick’s tests are in. I am going to explain our findings to you.”
“Yes.”
“You are not, I take it, the man to want beating around the bush.”
“No.”
“There is a possibility that Mrs. Rarick’s trouble may be a major one.
I say possibility advisedly, because an operation may reveal it to be
an unmalignant complaint that will respond to surgery. Miss Bart, bring
in Mrs. Rarick’s X-ray plates.”
What a devilish formula for saying everything there was to be said,
without saying anything. Surgery. Malignant. Operation. Major. So! This
was the whither of all the frenzied, struggling, ambitious years of the
Jenny Avery whose eyes, way back there in the St. Louis beginnings,
had turned with his toward the dream of the Pyrenees. This was the
whither? That he might sit in a doctor’s office, twenty-five years
later, without ever having walked those Pyrenees with her in the flesh
or the spirit, and listen to what sounded cryptically like her doom.
Jenny, who had seemed so frenziedly to be going some place through all
the years, must at last pause and heed....
“Here are our findings, Mr. Rarick. See this negative.” There was a
wall-frame ready to receive it, with an electric bulb behind, that made
transparent the story of the flesh of Jenny, told in bits of waving
lines and clumps of shadow. So there was the bit that was Jenny--on
glass--in light--in shadow----
“Those heavy spots in there, Mr. Rarick, are what concern us.
The X-ray cannot reveal their depth. But these shadows indicate
er--a--an obstruction--alimentary canal--may merely be ulcerous--if
inoperable--close up wound--but better to explore--in other
words--imperative that the attempt at surgery be made....”
God knows that was plain enough. All this elaborate preamble boiled
itself down to the fact that Jenny must go under the knife. Either
her complaint was operable or not. The exploratory knife would tell,
and, if operable--well, then, science, skill, turn of the knife,
destiny--what--Jenny was sitting squarely in the lap of the gods....
“The exploratory knife will tell?”
“You have about summed it up, Mr. Rarick. It is not improbable that
Mrs. Rarick’s complaint may prove itself to be of a nature that will
respond to surgery.”
“Of course.”
“I am sorry to have been obliged to call you here on such a mission,
Mr. Rarick. There is, of course, reason to feel concern. On the other
hand, there is reason to feel optimism. Strong constitution, excellent
health-history ... hope....”
“Of course. Of course....”
“... In case you feel the need of more opinions--stand ready to call in
consultants--but nothing puzzling in the situation--no emergency, but
advise haste--immediate operation--every day may count....”
“Of course. Of course. Of course.”
“I--shall discreetly advise your wife--do not acquaint any other
members of your family--keep atmosphere free of anxiety--spare her
any undue nervous shock--I will be the one to advise her--make
all arrangements--within week--exceedingly regret--better to look
situation squarely in face--keep sanguine--extremely glad to have
met you, Mr. Rarick--long been an admirer. Rarick Building fitting
monument--uncertain weather for this time of year--Miss Scow will show
you to the elevator--Have Mrs. McCormack come in--Good afternoon, Mr.
Rarick----”
Late sunlight lay on the stoop of the house as he left it.
“Where, sir?” said his chauffeur, after he had stood at attention for
several minutes after Rarick had seated himself in the car.
“Where? Just drive.”
“Sacred Cow,” a three-act comedy by Gratton Davies, produced by the
Internationalists, Inc., failed.
It was one of those failures _d’estime_ that closed its doors to a
large audience of repeaters and deadheads and received obituaries and
epitaphs from a minority not mighty enough to sustain it.
It was a galling failure to Gratton. “Sacred Cow” had been purposely
written in the out-and-out key of high comedy. A burlesque in sheep’s
clothing, the bray to sound behind the straight-faced baa. Nothing of
the sort happened. Gradually, but surely, during rehearsals, it seemed
to Gratton that his play became broadly the thing he had wanted it to
be only inferentially.
“Sacred Cow” as a social satire wore its burlesque on its sleeve, and,
failing, carried down with it three years of the work and high hope of
its author.
As Gratton, in the scant words he had to say about the _débâcle_,
remarked, it was not the failure that hurt. A good legitimate failure
that was a fellow’s own, was one matter. But, hang it! “Sacred Cow”
had not been his failure. It had been a failure of interpretation,
direction, and production. His own version of “Sacred Cow” still
remained to be seen.
Gratton’s tongue had been so neatly in his cheek when he wrote that
play; and yet, all the loud braying had gone over the footlights in his
name. In his young, passionately ambitious, rebellious name.
In the eyes of certain of the groups about whose opinions he youthfully
still cared most, he had written a rather obvious and old-fashioned
slap-stick satire.
To Gratton, at that stage, the most damning of all possible indictments
was “old-fashioned.”
In the eyes of certain critics who, even while they admitted his
intent, scored him for precisely the indiscretions of which he had been
guiltless, he had sprained a wrist trying to be clever, but a wrist
that very conceivably might some day write the significant comedy of
manners that this one seemed to forecast.
In the eyes of the box-office, he had committed the fatal sin of
failing to entertain.
And so Gratton wore his failure ruefully, if silently. It hurt.
Strangely enough, and bothersome to her because she thought it
despicable, a sense of relief welled in Jennifer when Gratton’s failure
came.
But she had not until then realized with what submerged sense of
dread she had read the brilliant manuscript, lingered through many
of the rehearsals, attended tryouts, and for long hours sat opposite
Gratton across a restaurant table after a siege in the theater had been
particularly trying or discouraging to him.
Dispassionately, Jennifer desired success for Gratton. But
passionately, greedily, almost enviously, she was jealous of it. He
was somehow more closely hers while he only skirted achievement. Not
that he ever permitted her to cross certain ice-barriers of aloofness
in him that baffled and wounded her terribly; but while he was hungry
and hankered, she was sort of a self-constituted wailing-wall. He
needed her to come to when he was tired and discouraged almost beyond
endurance, as they began in rehearsal to bray his play. He sought
her out over their favorite restaurant table in the bow-window of a
small restaurant opposite the theater, or they journeyed down for a
kitchenette-brewed luncheon in the quiet of his three small rooms over
a bookstore in West Fourth Street, or just walked around the milling
block of the theater, or sometimes had tea out of beautiful little
white jade Ch’ieni-Lung cups in Jennifer’s small sitting-room, which
had been redone in Chinese lacquer.
There was no outside world to lean into the quiet of these little
retreats. Neither Gratton’s world, which was one you wedged into and
which would not come to you, nor Jennifer’s, which seldom, if ever,
played up that kind of street. Gratton came mighty near needing
Jennifer, those days of rehearsals, and Jennifer was jealous of her
rôle.
His success might snatch it from her; and about Gratton, to Jennifer
at least, was something of the foreordained kind of success of a
single-track mind. There was about him, even before he achieved,
the aroma of a man who cannot be deterred. He had given up a place
in the throne-room of a magazine that was rapidly becoming the most
significant publication of the sort ever accomplished in America,
without a backward glance, because the time had come, due to a scanty
inheritance, when he could afford to fasten his level eye upon the goal
of his choice.
Gratton wanted to say it in dramatic form. You knew inevitably that
sooner or later he would. Without compromise. He had started to do that
with his magazine.
Jennifer, in inchoate fashion, sensed this. Elusive, self-sufficient
by nature to a degree that she found terrifying, his success, when it
came, would hedge him in more securely into a world which he loved
a little more than he despised, and which he was one day to rebuke
brilliantly in two plays, “Marsdon and Son” and “The Tragedy of
Laughter.”
Gratton wanted one thing, really. To get said this brilliant foment.
Jennifer knew that and found it frightening.
She told him so one evening, about a month after “Sacred Cow” had gone
down to its by no means ignominious failure. They were at dinner in his
rooms, a Japanese student, who came in by the hour, serving them at a
table drawn up before the fire.
It was Jennifer who had first suggested these excursions to Gratton’s
rooms. Their booky, firelit shabbiness rested her. Fascinated her a
little. They were intimate, lived-in, purposeful sort of rooms. They
pretended no period. They catered to the needs of their owner. The
need of a good couch, with a head-lamp for reading. The need of an
extra-built table with a spacious top for spreading papers. The need of
book-shelves, that had overflowed into stacks of volumes standing in
rows on the floor.
The smell of these rooms was tobacco and wood fire, leather and
wire-haired spaniel.
When Jennifer had first suggested their going there, Gratton had
acquiesced at once. As a matter of fact, she had only said it out of
an indefinite desire to arouse in him some spark of the personal or
protective. Gratton should have demurred at subjecting her to what
might so easily be interpreted as a compromising act. Instead, he
casually agreed, in the impersonal manner so characteristic of him.
In all her subsequent visits to his rooms--for meals, for afternoon
cocktails, for brief interludes in between the exigencies of
rehearsal--Gratton never so much as lingered at the business of helping
her remove her wraps.
Her coming was too impersonal to matter much one way or another. He
fell in with her suggestion to dine at a restaurant just as casually.
It was as it should be. It was as Jennifer, bruised, would have told
you she desired it to be; and yet....
“Are you as self-centered as you seem, Gratton?” she asked him one
evening, after the Japanese student had washed his last dish and
departed, leaving them seated over coffee.
“I reckon I are, Jennifer. I think an awful lot of me.”
“You do nothing of the sort. You are interested in everything from
better Chinese babies to the decadence of our decade; from the decline
of philosophy to ‘Kilts, why plaid’? Things and movements and causes
and literatures and new schools and, to use a grand old smear of a
phrase of my father’s famous fossil, Dr. Gerkes, who eloped with a Lapp
or something off-color, things ideational are your major interests. I
want you to be interested in me, Gratt. I may not be ideational, but
I’m mighty nice, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”
“Hang it, Jennifer! I’m not even sure you’re nice!”
She raised her eyes at him across the small litter of after-dinner
dishes between them, bit off a third of a lump of sugar, and drank her
coffee through it slowly.
“You mean that, Gratt?”
“I think I do, Jennifer.”
“I’m not so sure, either, that I’m nice,” she said, slowly.
“Wonder if we both mean the same thing by nice.”
“Don’t qualify.”
“Haven’t the slightest intention of it. I don’t know whether money has
harmed you, Jennifer, but it hasn’t made you a nicer person.”
“Money-conscious!”
“One has to be, where you are concerned. Every bit of assurance you
have is, consciously or unconsciously, founded on your recognition of
the authority that goes with great wealth. Any stock dramatist could
write you, Jennifer. You are fundamentally, I think, sound and fine,
but....”
“Don’t qualify.”
“Damn it, Jennifer, I’m not! That’s just it. You cannot imagine that
I would dare not to qualify. That’s part of your assurance. But let
me go on. Fundamentally sound and fine, but cocksure with a sense of
power. Spoiled, chiefly because you are spoilable material. Grown
simply big and not big, simply. Chaser after false gods. Wise-cracker.
More self-ful than selfish, but a little of both. Clever. Good mind
and nothing to do with it. A giver, but considerably more of a taker.
Vain, but not without reason. Good intentions. Feeble execution. A
non-producer. A personality. A faker. A darling Jennifer, that’s you.”
“Yes, Mr. God, but why, since you say that I am fundamentally f. and
s., don’t you make me over?”
“I haven’t the right.”
“What if I give it to you?”
“What if I can’t?”
“I see. You mean you haven’t the right that goes with caring enough to
do a big job like that?”
“If you will be personal, I wouldn’t be it that cruelly, if I were you.”
“I’m lonely as hell, Gratton.”
“Are you, really, Jennifer, or is it just a dramatic state of mind that
for the moment, seems desirable to you?”
“Lord, you’re cold!”
“What are you lonely for, Jennifer?”
“For the kind of thing you are not saying to me now.”
“Well put, my lamb! May you never know more of the reaches of profound
loneliness! I know a lonely man, Jennifer. Your father.”
“Well,” she cried, high and angrily; “well, well, what if he is?
So is everybody connected with him. Shut-outs from one another.
And Father, don’t you forget it, has done his share of shutting
out. All of us have, in our family, I’m afraid. My brother--between
us--we--we--somehow managed to shut Avery out of life. Mother is a
shut-out if ever there was one. God knows Father is. I am. The rich
Raricks, if anybody should ask you, are a bunch of bankrupts. You talk
about Father being lonely, damn it, as if I didn’t know! Well, just the
same, you can’t do anything about somebody who lives on Mars, can you?
Neither can I do anything about Father. He is simply where I can’t get
at him, wherever that is. Damn it, always has been! I’ve tried. Father
is a man who ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee from life, and
got stung when the waiter brought him caviar and diamond-back terrapin
instead. I’m part of the banquet he found himself served up with, along
with the terrapin and caviar. He can’t digest me. Lonely--as if I don’t
know how lonely he is...!”
“You don’t really, Jennifer. You perceive it with that clever brain of
yours. You don’t know it, though, as one who is really lonely can know
it in another.”
“I suppose you mean as you can know it.”
“Yes, Jennifer.”
She blew him a ring of smoke; and across the table, in the mellow light
of an old-fashioned oil-burning student-lamp, with a parchment map of
Eastern Europe for a shade, they regarded each other slowly.
“Have we the newfangled complaint called sex-antagonism, Gratton?”
“I don’t think the discussion important here.”
“You never do, when it concerns us. Are you open to a discussion about
dialectic writing, or how about the use of pleonasm in Irish drama,
Gratton?”
“Jennifer, that isn’t kind.”
“You’re not.”
“You’re so blamed brittle, Jennifer. You break to pieces under a
fellow’s touch.”
“How do you know? You’ve never touched me.”
“That isn’t worthy of you.”
Tears sprang across her eyes.
“Just like me to blurt that out to you, of all people, whom I most want
to impress. Don’t think I’m in love with you because I said that.”
“I don’t.”
“I want--oh, I don’t know how to say what I want out of life,
Gratton--but I want--passionately----”
“That’s it, Jennifer. You’re a wanter. You want and you won’t pay.”
“Do you know the nicest thing about me, Gratton?”
“I think you are the nicest thing about you, Jennifer.”
“No, the nicest thing about me is the fact that I like you, Gratt.”
“Don’t say that. It hurts. First, because it is not true, and secondly
because I hate your arrogance; but your meekness would just about kill
me. Humble, you would break my heart, Jennifer.”
“I am humble, Gratt, before the things you stand for.”
“Good Lord! don’t say that, Jennifer!” he said, and kicked back his
chair and began to plow into a rubber pouch for pipe tobacco. “I’m
jolly well what you said I am. A self-centered, would-be egomaniac,
trying to get on, by crawling away from that center known as self....”
“Your saying that I am fundamentally f. and s. means a lot to me,
Gratt.”
“You are, Jennifer, and some day somebody is going to sink the proper
kind of shaft and mine the f. and s. out of you.”
“Who and how?”
“A husband with the sense to understand you.”
“I think I prefer to remain fundamentally unsafe and unsound.”
“The devil you do!”
“Your way of rubbing in the fact that there is a serious possibility
that I may be in love with you.”
“Scarlet-fever symptoms may only mean measles.”
“You mean because of what I was idiot enough to tell you about Berry?”
“No; but now that you remind me....”
“Be careful, Gratt ... because if there is any sure test for me to
determine whether or not I am in love with you, it is to compare what I
am feeling now to what I did not feel then. The most counterfeit part
of that entire situation was me. Not Berry.”
“Out of the frying-pan and into the divine fire,” he said, and tilted
her face with the tip of three fingers.
It was the first time he had ever touched her.
Reliving the scene to herself later, at home, in bed, under covers, it
seemed to her that she had felt illuminated, like a switchboard. Lights
had popped out all over her, in goose-flesh, each prickle a bulb. He
had done it with the light touch of three fingers, tilting her chin
slightly backward.
She remembered with a flaying flush that she had sat down on the
couch and crammed a pillow into the small of her back, and, trying to
command a level voice, had said, “Sit down, Gratt, here, beside me, and
let’s talk things over.” Knocking out his pipe, he had said, with a
casualness that made her ridiculous:
“No. Come along. There’s a mystery-play over at the National, and I
feel in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin.”
He had felt in the mood for who-killed-cock-robin when, at the touch of
the three finger tips that had tilted back her chin, Jennifer had been
brought to realize how phony had been everything that preceded this....
It was after midnight when Jennifer arrived home after the
mystery-play. The lift, if you used it in the dead of night, made a
soughing noise that could be disturbingly heard throughout the house;
and, after her habit, she wound up the great curlicue of staircase
instead. A rose-window, bits of its floral design said to date from
a twelfth-century cloister at Tours, shone down into the majestic
forest of stone pillars of the hallway. Under it, Jennifer paused for a
moment. She loved its bath of color. Like an enormous flower it bloomed
over the tiredness of her spirit that transmitted itself in fatigue
to her body and made the walk upstairs a drag. There were rings under
the eyes of Jennifer, and her cheeks were narrow planes of pallor. The
tiredness that had clamped down upon her after she left Gratton, made
her shoulders droop and her feet creep. She wound on slowly....
There were routine signals along the way, to tell her certain trifles
that registered languidly along her brain. Her father was in bed. She
could tell by the closed bedroom door and the color of the rim of night
light. Her mother was not yet in. The figure of the maid in the Breton
cap nodding in a chair with her mouth open, as she passed Jenny’s
boudoir, testified to that.
Ever since she had been old enough to take cognizance of it, there
had been something horrible to Jennifer in the idea of the bed and
bedroom which her parents had so submissively shared throughout the
years. It was one of the few subjects Jennifer had never dared broach
to her mother. But it was horrid to her. There was something of a tomb
about that chamber. In it lay dead love. About it were strewn wilted
passions. Two husks lay side by side in it, desire long since dead.
Florentine chamber-of-horror....
Jennifer’s maid was waiting for her, and there was a glass of chilled
orange-juice on a table beside her bed; and on the bed itself, her
night things of rosy satin and pale lace. She fell out of her clothes,
and into them, gratefully eager to have her lights out before the
arrival of her mother. So long as a lamp burned in one or the other
of their boudoirs, they never went to bed without exchange of tiptoe
visits. Youngish visits, curled up on the chaise-longue in Jennifer’s
dressing-room, or Jenny’s. A curious quality of girlishness had
persisted in Jenny. There had never been a time when to Jennifer,
who adored her, there had not been something of sister in their
relationship.
Just the same, it was with a sense of relief that Jennifer found
herself deeply in bed, lights clicked out, and still no Jenny.
The sense of hurt that was out all over her had not necessarily direct
bearing on the evening she had just spent with Gratton. It was rather
the sense that had risen to its culmination with this evening, that
nothing she could hope to be or do was to have bearing upon the life of
Gratton. He was constantly flipping her off, as he would ash off his
cigarette. She merely had flavor for him. He sometimes said of her that
she gave him appetite for work.
“By sense of contrast?”
“Probably.”
And probably it was. Not because she exhilarated him. Not because she
was some one who was restless for his achievement. His plane of life
was one that excluded her. And suddenly, lying there in a little knot
of pain in bed, Jennifer, as she had never desired in her life, wanted
access to that plane. Everything that heretofore had been of prime
importance to Jennifer was secondary, if not second-rate, to Gratton.
Always had been. Unconsciously, in what he revealed to her about his
past life, was he constantly showing himself up to her. The things that
mattered most to her were the things that Gratton had never even had
time to despise.
For instance, the two years that Gratton had lived in Oxford, England,
doing graduate work there on money he had earned waiting on table
at a summer hotel, Jennifer had been making notoriety for herself
at the baccarat tables of Cannes. The summer he had spent living on
seventy-five cents a day in a room in Assisi that overlooked the upper
and lower chapel of St. Francis, and writing one of the plays that
helped make his trunk excess baggage, Jennifer had been lying most of
her days on Lido sands in a bathing-suit that looked painted on, her
head lounging against the lap of a well-oiled young Italian count to
whom she was reported engaged....
How far the Raricks had missed fire! Two of them, Jennifer and her
father, lying there now, with elaborate walls between them, in a pile
of grandeur that rose above them in the elegance of this Renaissance
tomb, one of them lying out there in a slim boy’s grave, into which the
worms must be finding way by now.
What sense of defeat was there perching now in the heart of her father,
lying, himself, not forty of the appallingly expensive feet from her
own bed. What bankruptcy there? What had Gratton meant by the really
lonely person of her father? What indictment against her had lurked in
his eyes? No. No. Rarick’s loneliness was of his own making. He had
built it up massively about himself. Jennifer had not been cast out,
because she had never been let in. Presently her mother would come
home, carrying on her narrow shoulders enough in chinchilla and square
diamonds to support a family of ten through a lifetime. She would go
to that room--to that tomb--to that bed--to that sleepless little
heart-twisting bankrupt there--Father----
After a while there was the sound of Jenny in the hallway. Jennifer,
lying there, could hear the tinkling noise her sequined gown made as
she came along. Like the welt that her body left on a bed, the footfall
of Jenny was light. It fell past Jennifer’s door softly. It turned
into snow, falling into a dream of Jennifer’s, that she was walking
ankle-deep in it toward a student-lamp that burned in the window of
a small mellow house, and that smelled of leather and a wire-haired
terrier and a pipe that hung from an amused-looking lip....
* * * * *
Jenny had been to the closing function of what had been a series of
elaborate entertainments in connection with a Street Fair which had
been held down the center of Park Avenue, where junior members of
social-register families pinned fifty-dollar carnations on the senior
lapels of telephone-directory families.
Socially and financially, it had been a success. The Street Fair
charity-week had concluded with a supper dance held at the residence of
the chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Grant Fillimore Speigel,
Sr., who had contributed her enormous ballroom for the purpose.
Entrance was by one-thousand-dollar check, and then only if you were
bidden. It was one of those occasions when the Raricks were sure not
to be overlooked. It was the first time Jenny had ever set foot in
the old-fashioned Murray Hill home of the Grant Speigels. The evening
had been sufficiently dull to keep its social inviolability to the
fore in Jenny’s mind. She had apparently made a personal dent upon
the consciousness of Mrs. Grant Speigel, and there was an engagement
between them for luncheon three weeks hence. The evening had been more
than justified. But her shoulders ached from fatigue; and once or
twice during the supper, which you ate off of knees, the old sense of
sickness had overtaken Jenny.
Ramon had not been there. She had taken Tom Lamentier, widowed
brother-in-law of a Wilke-Barre, on the thousand-dollar check that
should have admitted Rarick himself. Ramon, on one of the absences
that was becoming more and more intolerably mysterious to her, was
off on a week-end at the shooting-lodge of one of the sons-in-law of
Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, an inclusion that was fantastic, so far as the
burly Harrington Powers, who had married Edith Bursilap was concerned,
and which must have been manipulated at no small discretion by his
mother-in-law.
But at any rate, Ramon was returning tomorrow, and Jenny was lunching
with him, quite openly, as they did upon rare occasion, at the Ritz.
They must talk things out. Oh, how imperative it was that they talk
things out! Something corrosive and frightening was at the heart of
Jenny.
There was a list of memoranda under the lamp of her dressing-table that
had been left there by her secretary, Miss Dang, and holding it down,
as paper-weight, a small jeweler’s package, with a red seal splashed
over it. It contained four dreaming, perfect little pearls, which she
had ordered clipped off the end of one of her necklaces and mounted as
studs. Ramon’s. The time had come when Jenny, no one the wiser, was
resorting thus to the device of clipping such gifts off the edge of
her magnificence. She had already presented Ramon with star-sapphire
cuff-links off the rear end of another necklace; and the large
canary-diamond center to another cigarette-case had been pried out by
a jeweler and replaced with a blue diamond from a ring which Jenny no
longer fancied. The canary had been worth thousands, and it was like
Ramon, lover of beauty, to defer selling it, even in the face of needs
that clamored.
One memorandum reminded her of an exceptionally early morning-fitting
at Valli Sœurs before her eleven-o’clock contract-bridge lesson.
Propped up conspicuously against a Lalique perfume-urn was an isolated
item: “Dr. Noon telephoned that he will expect you without fail at his
office at one o’clock tomorrow (Thursday).”
A stab of concern smote Jenny. For the first time since her period
at the hospital, a sense of the old discomfort had been over her
at dinner. Tiresome old body. Well, Dr. Noon would have to wait.
Apparently his findings were not bothersome. There was something casual
about the message. As it was, the bridge lesson would have to go
overboard. Ramon was meeting her early.
The maid slid her out of the sequined gown and laid the string of
square diamonds in a satin-lined box with a groove for each stone, and
placed it and the chinchilla wrap in a steel vault at one end of the
bathroom.
In her underthings, Jenny looked like a paper doll. Most fastidious in
her personal habits, there was about her one specific carelessness that
her maid swapped below-stairs with servants who are hawklike in such
appraisals. Invariably Jenny went to bed with her make-up on. It was as
if her frail flesh, tested by function after function to the limit of
endurance, could not hold up under the smearing process of having it
removed. Jenny slept in her painted lips, her mask of white enamel, and
her high and narrow coiffure.
It was this Jenny, in a black-chiffon nightdress through which her body
shone like a narrow candle, who finally made her way to the room where
already lay her husband.
Lightly, in the painted mask off which her lips stared so redly, she
placed herself beside him, drawing over her half of the sheets and
coverlets. Lightly, silently, she lay wakeful beside him.
Lightly, silently, he lay wakeful beside her.
Due no doubt to subtleties of presentation, the news that she was to be
let in for a surgical operation did not at first come as shock to Jenny.
Lying face downward on her chaise-longue, with her arms flung to a peak
over her head in an attitude of relaxation taught her by a masseuse she
had brought home from Stockholm one summer, Jenny’s predicament, phase
after phase of it, began procession across her awareness.
Good Lord! What was the matter with her? Sitting there in his
office, himself seeming so invulnerable to body ill, perhaps Noon
had told her everything except the truth. What if I have cancer?
Millions of women have had before me. Was Noon holding off facts that
might terrify----Nonsense! A man like Noon had no time for subtle
psychological evasions. Besides, no man could simulate his kind of
casualness....
Good Lord! acting like an old-wife poring over a medical book and
reading her own symptoms into every page. Not every woman with a pain
in her side had cancer.... Good Lord!... Fool--fool--fool----
Take the case of Mrs. de Witte Yonge, wife of the Austrian ambassador,
with whom she had recently had the honor to dine. Mary Yonge had
just successfully undergone a major operation. You belonged to a
negligible minority if you still boasted an appendix. Dr. Noon seemed
of the opinion that much of her own difficulty might hover around that
superfluous organ. So interesting to hear Dr. Noon explain the history
of the atrophy of that organ.... Dr. Noon so graphic....
Come to think of it, Jenny’s florist-bills alone--to say nothing of
inroads into Rarick’s conservatories--to friends who were constantly
convalescing from operations in hospitals, were enormous. Naturally
you got things the matter with you in the course of a lifetime. Didn’t
expect your motor-car to run without overhauling, did you? Well, same
principle applied to the human body....
Of course, the serious side to the story might be in the cards, too.
Didn’t cross that bridge, however, until you came to it. Particularly
if that bridge happened to be across the Styx. Nifty of herself to
indulge in grim humor at a time like this, Jenny decided. Don’t cross
the bridge across the Styx until you come to it. If Fifi Putnam, with
her tubercular history, had survived three major operations, why not
Jenny? Dr. Noon had been by no means certain hers would be major. Lydia
Mason, to be sure, had died on the table, but Lydia had been awfully
wrong on the inside ever since the birth of her third child. Besides,
the--the sort of thing that did for Lydia, ran in her family. Look how
Georgie Prescott had gone to his operating-table weighing one hundred
and twelve pounds, and now tipped into the heavy-weight amateur class
at all the private boxing-bouts at the Beaverbrook Club. An operation
was something to be casual about these days. In the main, Jenny truly
was. There were little scare-spots in her. As a matter of fact, the day
she saw Noon, she had returned home from his office instead of going on
to meet Roxy Gravure at the Dog Show, where Roxy was showing a pair of
the finest Kerry Blues ever registered.
The very smell of Dr. Noon’s offices, she told herself, had been
unnerving. They invented everything else, why must doctors’ offices and
hospitals continue to reek to heaven of the suggestion of antiseptic....
Then, too, this season of seasons, just when Jenny had made what she
considered her most important social wedge! Mrs. Grant Speigel had
undoubtedly taken a fancy to Jenny. Herself one of the founders of the
Cosmo Club, she had all but volunteered to put Jenny up for membership.
They had lunched together. Jenny was already harboring the plan of
arranging an elaborate function around the dowager figure of Mrs.
Grant Speigel. The surgical operation would put a serious kink in that
important plan. In countless plans.
Then, of course, there was that wave of recurring fear about Ramon. In
the scare-specked hours which followed her knowledge that in a week she
must go on the operating-table, her thoughts and fears, trepidations
and concerns, had floated about without anchorage.
It was difficult to imagine Ramon coming to her through the etheric
smell of hospital corridors. Prying nurses! She had successfully kept
the period of her observation in the hospital from him. But this time
he must know. How curious to be confronted with the need of telling
Ramon that she must go to a hospital for an operation.
There were situations in which you simply could not imagine certain
people. Perhaps, though, thought Jenny, on the anxious drive home
from Dr. Noon’s, it is just the providential circumstance to tide
us over this bad place. Jenny, in laces, on her bed of pain, wan to
him, esoteric, might conceivably, by way of temporary and delicious
lassitude, fascinate more than in health.
He had been distrait at lunch at the Ritz the day before. Terribly so,
the lurking pain in her side seemed to collide with the fear that kept
knocking about in the region of her heart.
There was a card crushed into the hand that was flung high over her
head as she lay on the chaise-longue. It was part of the damnable
wrongness. It had added to her impending state of high nervousness to
receive this invitation from Mrs. Grant-Speigel to week-end at her
place in Lenox beginning the very day that she had arranged with Dr.
Noon to enter the hospital. The night she would probably be plowing
her way out of ether, a wound in her side, was to be a gala one at the
opera, when a visiting queen was to sit in the Gerinald box, which
adjoined the Raricks’, to say nothing of the minutiæ of plans that
clotted the lines of her engagement-book and which suddenly had become
part of a daily routine that was precious.
Then there was this business of telling Rarick and Jennifer--to Jenny,
a shamefaced procedure of trying to get said to your intimates the
intimate things that had to do with the plights of the flesh. Jennifer
must not be frightened. Rarick would be kind....
Lying there, crushed into a silence that moved in a procession of her
incipient terrors, there crept slowly into Jenny a desire that had to
do with Rarick. Even if her illness turned out to be as responsive to
the knife as it promised (Noon had been so casual!), there persisted
in Jenny a sense of need of Rarick. To be sure, he would in all
probability do little more than sit humbly beside her or at best say
lusterless things, but just the same he would be there!
An impulse to cancel her four-o’clock engagement with Ramon at the
tea-room the next afternoon flooded over Jenny. But even as she
considered, she knew that, punctiliously, dragging herself up from the
chaise-longue, she would be at the appointed place at the appointed
time.
It was in the intervals between seeing Ramon that revulsions like
this could sometimes overtake her. Revulsion of self. A commiserate
desire to creep back somehow into the old unevil life with Rarick that
dated back to the days when she had first set up housekeeping and had
presented a first child to the serious young man who, with his feet on
the clay banks of the Meramac and his eyes on the Pyrenees, had wooed
her.
Time and time again, these periods of revulsion had ridden her, and
time and time again receded, leaving her marooned on the strange shores
of her infatuation for this boy with the eyes that nowadays were more
insolent than amorous, and whose half-baked æsthetics, even as she
succumbed to them, she realized were spurious.
For the moment, in her fright, Jenny turned to Rarick. Ramon, who
hated illness, might find her ugly to him. Rarick, on the other hand,
was not the man to waste impatience or rebellion upon the inevitable.
His sympathies, always susceptible, were not hard to muster. He was
a kindly light on a landscape that to Jenny had suddenly become
threatening and sinister.
Jenny, who had no God in particular, except one she resurrected for
herself in times of great stress, felt suddenly and terribly the
need of God and Rarick. Her emergency God had last been on her lips
in her paroxysms of grief and pity over Avery. She was about to have
need of Him again. His name bubbled along her lips in tears. God, get
me out of this. God, pull me through. God, make a better person of
me. God, I need you. God, spare Jennifer any shock. God, forgive me
all--everything. And, strangely, paradoxically, even as she lay there,
chastened of mood and supplicating: God, keep me well and desirable to
Ramon.
And, of course, she did see him that following afternoon at four. As
a matter of fact, she sent a chauffeur to her milliner’s so that she
should have to wear a new tall and narrow Russian turban of black
krimmer that glittered down the front with a long dagger of diamonds.
Ramon might find it effective and amusing. Her white face, long and
narrow as the hat itself, not a rim of hair showing, was almost like a
transparent face, on to which had been hung a deep-crimson butterfly
made of two painted lips. Strange, glittering Jenny, at whom people
stared without admiring.
As usual, on the edge of one more experience of seeing Ramon, her
revulsion fell away from her and became anticipation that tingled.
There were picked words with which to tell Ramon this thing; words that
would not offend or frighten or hurt him. Ramon was a sensualist by
extraordinary virtue of the fact that he shrank so from wounding the
senses. His senses. She would wound them ever so much less than she
would charm them....
Riding along in a snide taxicab toward the place of their appointment,
the ordeal ahead of her began to set itself like a stage.
She saw herself, tilted on her hospital bed, surrounded by tall Lalique
jars of lilies and a jade bowl of green orchids with flecks on them, at
her side. She would bind her hair in a tight fillet, so that her face
shone out like a sly, sophisticated nun’s. Ramon had once jerked the
hair back from her face, held the bandeau of his handkerchief tight
above her brow, and called her that. Sly, sophisticated nun. She liked
being called that. Sly, sophisticated nun. He had not meant it really,
had said it to her in the key of endearment and had kissed her throat
through the barrier of high, scented ruche that closed it in like a
wimple. Well, well, no matter how hard had been the sledding; the
wretchedness of the deception; the dreadful sense that somehow Avery,
Jennifer, and Rarick had been smirched, and decencies that sprang from
the very magnesia of the soil of the years in St. Louis, defiled ... it
had been worth it.
To have never had this, toward which she was riding in the abominable
yellow taxicab with cigar-butts on its floor, lean into her life and
redeem some of its vanished luster was unthinkable. It had been worth
it ... was worth struggling to hold....
Contrary to his habit of late, Ramon was in the tea-room first, seated
at the small table toward the rear, under a wall-bracket of one
incandescent bulb with a pink-paper tissue shade. They could count
on this place to be fairly empty at this hour. She could smell his
cigarette smoke and see the black shellacked armor of his hair as she
entered. Their public habit was to shake hands formally. It struck
her with chill that the hand which had used to cling to prolong that
instant was something inanimate that had to be propped around her own,
like a dead one.
What subsequently happened, although she was not to realize it,
amounted, considering the facts of Ramon, to a display of courage on
his part. With what secret misgivings, fear of scene, and perhaps
terror of slaying with pain, Ramon must have prepared what he was about
to launch without giving her opportunity to preamble, Jenny was never
to know. He came at her in short hammer-blows that left her stunned and
unable to resuscitate in time to stave them off.
“I want good hot tea quick,” she said, and drew off the long, beautiful
gloves which she always wore in heavy, loose crinkles along her forearm.
“I cannot stay to tea,” he said, shortly.
The pain in her heart and the pain in her side began to thump
simultaneously.
“Why not, dear?” she said, evenly.
“I am going away.”
“Where?” she said, evenly again, as if her words were to be quiet oil
on so much troubled water.
“You have seen it coming. You have made it hard.”
“What, Ramon?” she said, trying to quiet herself, and the jumping of
the pains, with the thought that always there had been women who had
been forced to face just such stark misery as this one of losing love.
There might be women, at this very moment, in this very city, who were
being crucified as she was being crucified....
“I am sailing straight for Seville tomorrow with Mrs. Bursilap. We will
be gone--indefinitely.”
“You mean Mrs. Emanie----”
“You know whom I mean, Jenny. It is your way of always making it so
hard for me.”
“But, Ramon--Emanie Bursilap--seventy, if a day--grandchildren....”
“Beggars cannot be choosers. You know what I am by temperament. I
cannot struggle. One must live.”
“Is that why----”
“No, Jenny. You wanted, as you say it so well in your language, to have
your cake and eat it, too. You were too afraid for yourself. You were
not generous. I mean in the spirit. You would not risk. I go with Mrs.
Bursilap, and her granddaughter Ellen, to Seville, as secretary and
interpreter. Ellen does not know it, but there her grandmother and I
are to be married.”
“I see,” she said, her lips feeling so dry and gritty against her teeth
that they felt to her as if they must make a scraping sound as she
lifted them to smile. “I see.”
“I am glad you do. I have never pretended to you that I am what I am
not. One must live.”
“I see.”
If only she could stop mouthing “I see!” She wanted to cry out into
the cheap, tawdry stuffiness of that tea-room. She wanted to see his
face darken because her fingers were at his throat. She wanted to hurl
arms about his knees and anchor there to this lean, narrow pillar of
her happiness. And there she kept sitting, smoothing her long, sinuous
gloves which were the color and scent of gardenia, and mouthing, “I
see.”
And suddenly it smote her that in her hour of need, there she sat in a
specked, third-rate tea-room, being dismissed across a dingy tablecloth
by a narrow young man who was trying to keep his furtive eyes
pretentious. Jenny, who had borne Avery, who had been too precious for
life, and Jennifer, in whom leaped flame; Jenny Avery who, twenty-six
years before, had been wooed by a serious young man whose mind was
tipped with beauty, sitting there being dismissed by a gigolo who had
found her fare too meager.
“I see.”
“The--Mrs. Bursilap does not know about--this. She is not so broad
about some things. You must never----”
“I see.”
She looked at him from under the high, narrow turban; and his eyes, as
if hooked on to the dagger of diamonds, would not travel down to meet
hers.
“I wish you happiness, Ramon,” she said, politely.
“I will have to be going,” he said. “Packing.” And placed a
dollar-bill under the glass of orangeade he had pretended to be
drinking before she arrived.
“I see.”
It dawned upon her, as they neared the door, that the aluminum-colored
limousine which she had noticed at the curb as she stepped out of the
taxicab, must be waiting for him.
“I will take you home, Jenny,” he said, flushing.
“No, please, a taxicab,” she said, and shuddered along her teeth.
He hailed one, and, assisting her into it, stood bareheaded at the
curb, replacing his hat, as she drove away, with a swinging gesture
that had given her many a thrill.
Even as her misery blurred her last glimpse of him, the fantastic and
devastating thought smote her that his young, slim body-beauty had gone
back into the sea, as a fish floundering off its hook dives back, only
to be baited again.
Now that the bolt had come straight and sure at her feet, there was
only a deathly kind of fatigue of the spirit, hard to endure, but far
from being the active torment against which she had been steeling
herself.
Ramon going over into the fold of Mrs. Bursilap suggested the wattled
and ugly thought to her of a bright bird of flight being folded into,
along with little insects of prey, the webbed wings of a bat, and fast
becoming part and color of that horrible under-arm débris.
There were folds of old flesh down the face of Mrs. Bursilap that must
be down her body too, and pleats of loose skin along her upper arms,
and a cave of shadow on either side of her lean old nose that made her
bat-like. And as if to bear out the unconscious cousinship, she wore
gray mostly, fine chiffons that floated and formed web between her body
and arms.
Ramon folded into that, was something to shudder over, rather than
to shed the salt tears one locked in the keg of one’s heart. She had
shuddered her share, hurt pride, shocked vanity, loneliness, and a
modicum of grief for a fantasy that had perished, going down before
horror of Ramon and horror of self.
It was as if suddenly she had walked out of some foul lethal garden
into gray but open day. Rarick was in the day, precisely as if she
had been off in some long, embroidered faint, from which she had just
emerged to find him precisely where she had left him. A little grayer,
a little graver, without eagerness, certainly without gayety, and,
consistently as ever, remote from her. And yet so substantially there;
for which, and without shame, she showed her gratefulness.
She woke him up one night, as she thought, out of a sound sleep, when
her growing panic of the operation was heavy upon her.
“Rarick,” she said, softly, filled, there in the dead hours of the
night, with a lonely fear that if she did not speak she would cry out.
He stirred lightly as he lay motionless in his insomnia, not quite sure
that she had spoken.
“Rarick, could you wake up for a moment?”
“Yes. What is it, Jenny?”
“I am all right. I want to talk, though.”
She thought, a little bitterly, that she need not trouble to reassure
him, who had no anxiety for her.
He was relieved that it had come. He had been lying there, pitying her
in her sleep. A week had passed; and since she had not spoken, he had
resolved to see Noon again the following day. But now it had come....
“I’ve been meaning to tell you something of a nuisance, Rarick. You
never asked about what they found at the hospital--so there seemed no
hurry.”
“I knew if there had been anything serious....”
“There isn’t. But I’m in for an operation.”
He tried to lift his words carefully into the casual.
“That _is_ a nuisance,” he said after a pause. “I thought perhaps there
might be a little ulcerous condition there.”
“That is exactly what it is.”
“It is wise to operate, then, and clear up the difficulty once and for
all.”
She could not help but reach out her hand and touch his lightly at the
surge of relief that flowed over her at his calm, inferential way of
regarding her recovery.
“I think so, too. Rarick.”
“We had better have it over at once, then, Jenny.”
We! Nothing he could have said would so have snatched away her
terrifying sense of aloneness. She found herself wanting to reach out
and touch his hand lightly again, and refrained.
“Any time you say, Rarick.”
“Suppose you let me take the matter in hand. I will arrange with Noon.”
“Yes, Rarick.” She felt so small, lying there beside him, so in need,
so oppressed by sudden awareness of how solitary to be born--how
solitary to die!
“I guess I’m a little frightened, Rarick. There is something about the
knife--like cutting the rope to a moored boat----”
This time his hand felt for hers.
The very texture of her flesh, it occurred to her, scorchingly, had
been softened, since last he had touched it, by a lover’s touch. If
flesh, except by way of act of lips, could speak....
“The inevitable is frightening, Jenny, but chiefly because we usually
have to sit on the rear seat and watch some one else at the wheel.”
She thought he was going to moralize, and stiffened.
“Let’s be honest, Rarick. Ulcers may be another name for--for anything.
O God! Rarick, I don’t want to have anything terrible happen to me.
I’ve so much to do, Rarick. So much that must be straightened....”
The mother of Avery was lying beside him, frightened. The feeling of
chronic open wound somewhere around his heart began to move.
“We are going to come through this, Jenny.”
“We are, aren’t we, Rarick? It isn’t that I am afraid to die----”
It was!
“... it is just that I’m not ready, Rarick. So much to be straightened.”
Was the matter of this tawdry affair with the Spanish dancer with whom
she was fiddling away time lying heavily upon her, he wondered, some of
his dull and passive anger against her riding him for the moment.
“I don’t want to die, Rarick. I need you to bolster me over that silly
fear. I mustn’t leave Jennifer. I mustn’t leave life. Funny; all of
a sudden, it’s so sweet. We haven’t made much of a go of our lives
together, have we, Rarick? Why?”
“Yes, yes, why?” How was it that the business of living had so cruelly
deterred them from life itself? Jenny, here in her blazing tent that
was hung in bracelets and shields and all the barbaric splendor of old,
of which he had read in the histories, trembling empty-handed before a
God she had never before found time to contemplate. She had paid God.
Pew-rent. An occasional Sunday-morning obsequy. Ready-made reverences.
He had approached with a new closeness when He had taken Avery. But
now--now----
“Rarick, strange that we who have had so few joys together must always
share the sorrows--first Avery--now this----”
Avery. Avery. Avery. His lips, from hurting, could not bear to say the
word.
“I give myself the pollywoggles, Rarick, talking about death.”
“Then don’t, Jenny.”
“You must help me through, Rarick.”
“I will, Jenny.”
“I mean the courage part. ‘Spiritually,’ is the way the pious
pulpiteers would say it. I do dread death, Rarick. Tomorrow I’ll laugh
at tonight’s pollywoggles. It’s the nights--they get bad--you can
help----”
“Yes, Jenny.” How? He wanted to. The mother of Avery must have it in
her to rise on spiritual wings out of that fear.
“If I die----”
“You are talking morbid fancies....”
“If I should die, Rarick.”
“But why----”
“I want a beautiful casket. You can give it me. I want the most
beautiful. One that will hold them for many a long while.”
“Why dwell on such non----”
“You can do that for me.”
That was what he could do for her.
“Somewhere back, Rarick, when I was a girl in Central High School in
St. Louis, I remember we used to read in class, wasn’t it Héloïse or
Annabel Lee or somebody slim and white in a poem, who dreamed of a
casket lined in ailanthus leaves out of beaten silver....”
He supposed so, but why plan for death when there was life to be
thought of?...
“Life, of course. Perhaps a better life than we have been pulling off
together, Rarick. Death does terrify....”
What an Imperial Highness even the shadow of death could be, forcing
to their knees those who approached.... “I shall never live to be an
old man,” Rarick had once said to Gerkes, “therefore I want to make
a friend of the idea of death early.” Jenny had neglected to make a
friend of the idea. Poor Jenny. He would have given much not to have
been too shy to reach over and fold the startled whiteness of her body
against what comfort he had to offer. Fear was pecking at her....
“You know that beautiful ivory panel that you use for a chest door to
your collection of jades? The one with the Virgin Mary seated, with a
crown of pearls on her head?”
“Byzantium of the ninth century,” he said, mechanically.
“Isn’t it catalogued as the lower side of a casket?”
“Perhaps.”
“Rarick, I want that panel for the lower side of my casket.”
“Yes, yes; but that, we hope, will be many a long day away.”
“And those beautiful Episcopal croziers in gold and ivory, from the
Walton Collection, that stand beside the organ, I want them for
head-pieces. You can afford to build me the most beautiful casket
in the world, Rarick, starting with those priceless antiques of old
ivory and old gold. Don’t line it in satin, Rarick. I shall hate to
lie in shiny white satin like a Catholic cook who has saved up for her
funeral. I want to lie in leaves--ailanthus leaves of beaten silver ...
you can do that for me....”
Of all the things he ached to do for her, now that the open wound of
his heart was bleeding in pity for her fear, this was what she wanted
of him. There was a pair of lines from Chaucer, engraved on an ivory
oliphant of his collection:
A pair of tables all of ivory,
And a Poyntal polish’d fetishly.
That was all he could do for Jenny. Send her “polished fetishly” out of
the tent that was hung in the splendor of bracelets and shields.
“Of course, Rarick, I’m pretty apt to turn around on you and not die,”
she said, pertly and mockingly out of the darkness, on a rattle of the
brittle, malicious kind of humor she practiced. “You may not be rid of
me, after all.”
“I don’t want to be, Jenny.”
“Do you believe, Rarick, in a beyond?”
He did passionately, now that it held his son. He dared not, however,
because of the shyness, tell her that his belief in that ultimate
reunion was chiefly what made the strings of days, laden with their
job-lots of rubberized table mats and gilded curtain rods, bearable.
You could not exactly tell a woman like Jenny, who, even while she
quailed, might suddenly rattle off into one of her brittle moods, that
somewhere across the chasm of death, a story that had never been spoken
was waiting to be told by you to your boy.
“I believe in something, Jenny, beyond myself.”
“Do you ever pray?”
“Yes; but, like you, chiefly when I despair. I don’t suppose you would
call that worship, so much as fear....”
“When Avery died, I didn’t fear. I blasphemed.”