shape. “A few changes won’t help. There’s something oblique about the
reasoning, and quoting the Judge doesn’t save it. All the facts are
correct, and intellectually she grasps the argument, but she doesn’t
really understand it. Inside she’s suffering from a kind of legal
indigestion. All except the part where she writes about the Old Man as
a human being. I wish to hell Carson had tackled the piece. He _might_
have gotten away with it, although it’s still a complicated argument
for a mass audience.” Bemrose frowned. “I’m not at all sure you can
boil down the case for an independent judiciary to single syllables.
Maybe a man could--a good experienced writer like Carson--but not a
woman writer.”
“How about a drink?” Larry stood up and signaled the bartender.
“I should have talked her out of it,” Arthur rubbed his forehead. “It’s
keeping me up nights. Her readers are going to get the wrong idea when
she quotes decisions of the Judge as if they were current and he had
written them yesterday. It isn’t fair. She could use _four_-syllable
words and it wouldn’t be accurate.”
“Didn’t she offer to let you have another look at the article?” Larry
sympathized, knowing that blurred thoughts and ideas that were slightly
off true gave Bemrose stomach pain.
“She promises--every time I see her.” Bemrose’s outsized ears darkened.
“I bumped into her at the Storeys’ at his fiftieth birthday party, and
I’ve been seeing a good deal of her. In fact all there is to see----”
* * * * *
When he did a jigsaw puzzle, Larry started with the important pieces,
the roof of a house or a tree trunk, and later filled in the foliage
and the sky. He picked out the border pieces and tried to frame the
puzzle. Then he scrambled to match the fuzzy, nondescript color inside.
At Danny’s Bar-Grill on Second Avenue that night, Arthur Bemrose
supplied the roof and the tree trunk. A few weeks later Janice Baldwin
pointed out the border pieces. Larry improvised the foliage, the
sky, and the fuzzy in-between. When he finished, he had a completed
landscape. This skill at putting human fragments together gave Larry
the kind of satisfaction that other men found in games or sports.
The piecing together of other lives until they made a picture was an
avocation that suited Larry Frank down to the ground.
From what Arthur had told him about Professor Storey and the parties he
gave in his old-fashioned apartment on Morningside Drive, Larry often
wondered why the Professor bothered to entertain. A man with Storey’s
reputation didn’t have to put himself out entertaining. He could have
lived like a semi-recluse and seen only a few special friends. Without
bothering to keep up the social amenities among his colleagues on the
faculty and their wives, Professor Storey could have sailed along
nicely on the strength of that physics medal he had won last year.
His work contributed clippings regularly to the University pressbook,
and he never would have been fired, or even questioned. Not if he had
snubbed the President of the University. But Professor Storey and his
wife gave their parties, spent more on entertaining than a limited
college salary would seem to allow, for only one reason apparently.
They liked people. They didn’t have to bother about extending their
long and impressive list of friends, but they enjoyed bothering, and
their parties showed it.
“It’s the most civilized house in New York,” Arthur had often
commented. “I’d rather go there than to any sold-out show on Broadway.
You meet more shirts that aren’t stuffed in one evening at the Storeys’
than almost anywhere else in a lifetime. And when they get people up
there, they know how to let them alone so they can have a good time.
There are so many people around who are special that no one ever seems
like anyone in particular.” Bemrose told Larry that anyone was likely
to show up at the Storeys’, anyone from the Ethiopian Emperor to some
obscure physics professor from an unknown college in one of the smaller
South American countries.
It appeared that the Storeys had an unwritten rule for parties which
they acted out, and which initiated guests took pains not to violate.
No serious talk. That was the rule. Laugh about anything, but when
adrenalin was loosed in the room, keep quiet. Occasionally a newcomer
who still fumbled English and hadn’t quite caught the lighter mood of
these gatherings would frame a halting question about politics, labor,
Negroes, or science. While he waited solemnly for the answer, Professor
Storey would pose one of his favorite conundrums--he collected
conundrums the way poets sometimes memorized limericks--and by the time
the guest had solved the problem, or the Professor told him the answer,
the ice was broken, and everyone in the room forgot that Storey, the
physicist, practically ate breakfast with a spectroscope.
With women guests, the Professor’s practice seemed fairly standard.
He’d sit on the swollen arm of an easy chair which created a fortress
around the guest, and he’d talk about the beauty of an elongated neck.
The Professor’s favorite women seemed to be swans.
Bemrose was an old timer at the Professor’s parties. He had been
attending them since law school and knew the pattern by heart, and
it upset him a little to think that Janice Baldwin could turn things
upside down. Apparently it only upset Arthur H. Bemrose. As far as
Larry could tell, none of the other guests seemed to mind.
“Einstein was there once. Another time I ran into old Nicholas
Miraculous himself. No one paid any special attention to either of
them, but when this Baldwin girl turned up--” Arthur reported.
“President Butler never wore an evening dress cut down to the navel,”
Larry reminded him soothingly. “I’ll bet she was set up. Last night
at the Astor, when she moved around behind that loud speaker--” Larry
recalled her bloody fingernails and the brightly cut eyes, shiny as
onyx, and figured that Janice Baldwin must have been an agreeable
contrast to the unmade-up faculty wives at the Storeys’.
As Bemrose described the evening, she had taken over the one big sofa
in the room, and the other guests hung over her, sat on the floor at
her feet and listened, or leaned against nearby tables. All the traffic
seemed to be going one way. People left the dining room where the rug
had been rolled for dancing and came over to her. Mrs. Storey’s famous
hot appetizers were left to cool on the piano.
Bemrose seemed the only one there who wanted to do anything else. The
rest of them were more than willing to listen to Janice. Last night
at the Astor, Larry’s own peas had turned to rubber while he listened
to her; so he understood it. She told heart-warming stories about the
English people, among the first stories of their kind to reach the
United States first hand. Janice Baldwin had seen it all on the spot.
She had stood with her British friends in the rubble. She had helped
them dig out their tea cozies and bedpans. She knew what it meant to
be frozen solid inside with fright and act as if the greengrocer had
forgotten to deliver a bunch of parsley.
Many weeks later, after Larry had come to know Janice Baldwin, he
accused her of turning the Storeys’ undignified sofa into a lecture
platform, and she denied it. She insisted that the others made her talk
about the War, and she kept tossing them the ball. But by then Larry
had memorized her quick, grasping hands and decided that the ball would
never wander very far from her. She wanted to keep the talk light, even
the talk about the War, Janice told Larry. She only related anecdotes,
the amusing things that had happened during the blitz. It was some of
the others who insisted on being serious and wanted her opinion on how
long it would take before we’d be in it. She was sick of talk about
it. She’d had a bellyful in England, all the war she could take at the
moment. She was back in New York for a breather, and she wanted to try
and forget it for a little while. That’s why she had bothered to put on
a long dress and come to the Storeys’ party. She wanted to dance.
Bemrose must have had the same idea. He used his long legs to bridge
the floor sitters and pulled her out of it before the question period
had progressed very far. “You’re wearing her out,” he told the others,
noticing all the time that she was stimulated and alive with their
flattery. But they took the hint and went back to the neglected
appetizers. In a few minutes it was like any other party at the
Storeys’.
Except for Bemrose it was. He was no Arthur Murray graduate but he
danced all evening with Janice Baldwin when he wasn’t getting her a
drink. It seems they had quite a few of both. They must have spent
hours circling the uneven dining room floor to a rusty phonograph
which creaked out of tune, and each time the needle dragged sourly at
the end of a record, they held on, her head mussed against his dinner
coat. By one-thirty, after the birthday cake had been cut, most of the
guests cleared out, and only a few old friends were left. The Professor
concentrated on Janice Baldwin, maybe to find out how Arthur H. Bemrose
would take it, or maybe to prove that he was still good at fifty.
He danced waltzes with her and whirled past Bemrose who was sulking
against the wall, taking meticulous pains not to bump him. They were
still waltzing an hour later. By that time the Professor had told her
the original versions of most of the stories he cleaned up for his
class. It was Mrs. Storey who broke up the evening by coming in to fold
the extra bridge chairs. When Janice left with Bemrose, the Professor
accompanied them to the door and kissed her moistly on the cheek.
Whatever set off Bemrose’s fear of “a brainy woman” must have occurred
in the next thirty minutes, Larry figured. He hadn’t much confidence
in Bemrose’s explanation of being scared of a woman because she had
brains. He realized that Arthur’s fear came from something buried
inside of him that he probably wasn’t aware of, not even vaguely.
It was hard to guess what happened between them on the way home, but
Janice Baldwin was no chase-me-I’ll-chase-you woman, and if she were
crazy for Bemrose, she probably said so, Larry surmised. That would
have scared the hell out of him. Bemrose made a living out of his
natural suspicion. He held postgraduate degrees in it. If she seemed
to be crowding him, or let on that she had thought he might be at
the Storeys’ that night and that’s why she had come, he would have
shied off. Then and there. For all her directness, she must have
been smart enough to sense the kind of special personality this was.
There was something about the core of him, something that made up his
individuality, which had to be kept immaculate, and she knew enough not
to trespass. He had come back for more, a test of her understanding.
Any mistakes she made hadn’t been too serious. He told Larry that he
had been seeing her pretty regularly the past three weeks, almost every
night that she wasn’t signed up to speak at a public dinner.
“What do you do? Go up to her apartment?” Larry asked.
“Yes, we stay there alone, or she has people in.”
“Anyone you know? Or strangers who make you uncomfortable?”
“I know most of them.” Bemrose’s mustache twitched.
“How come that you’ve never met her before if you know so many of the
same people?”
“I guess my luck held for years. If Carson hadn’t put the evil sign on
me and told her to call about that damned article----”
“I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. When you said you were seeing
her, I was beginning to feel better. I don’t mind telling you that I
was worried the other day when you passed up the one Tim Hoxter brought
in. It’s time you got in trouble with a woman. Serious trouble,” Larry
said. “I’d have been happy to see you make a date with that Miss
McVail. Maybe she hasn’t much upstairs but she has looks. When someone
like Janice Baldwin comes along with both--” Larry dusted his coat
sleeve, wondering whether maybe he had gone too far.
“I lived enough years around a woman with brains. Or don’t you remember
Mrs. Haynes?”
Larry realized that Bemrose had somehow niched Janice Baldwin with that
austere old lady who twisted her straight hair into a punishing knot at
the nape of her neck.
“It never seemed to cramp the Judge’s style,” Larry said. “They could
be twenty or sixty. He always did all right with women. You’ve told me
stories yourself----”
“That was fun. That wasn’t serious.”
“Well, what’s this? Miss Baldwin hasn’t asked you to marry her, has
she?” Larry leaned diagonally against the corner of the booth, and his
knee bumped against the table leg.
“After three weeks?” Bemrose laughed. “When she does, I’ll tell her
that she’ll have to get your approval. How would you like to meet her?”
“I’d like to. But not for the reasons you think. I would really like to
know whether she thinks we’ll have to get in the War,” Larry said. “Go
over there and fight, I mean.”
“Goddammit, we ought to be in it!” Bemrose exploded with sudden
violence. “We’ve become a goddam nation of fence sitters. Do you
realize we’ve been in every other major war since the eighteenth
century? Well, we have. I looked it up the other day. And here’s the
biggest, most important war in history, and we do nothing. Supposing
England loses this one. Supposing she goes under----”
“Wait until we start throwing in everything we’ve got.”
“When do we start? You tell me!”
But Larry couldn’t help thinking about the danger to Arthur H.
Bemrose, not to England. That’s one reason he would never be a success
like Bemrose. He couldn’t get stirred up about the major social and
political considerations of the time. When they broke up tonight, he’d
spend his time thinking about whether Bemrose was ever going to find
the right woman, and the War would be forgotten.
“I don’t see the harm in going up to her place,” Larry said, wondering
if it might have been the competition Janice Baldwin offered Bemrose,
people sitting around at her apartment firing questions at her about
the War, the way they did at the Storeys’, and Arthur in the background
keeping quiet. It was a new experience for him, Larry knew. He wasn’t
used to playing unless he could be front and center.
Bemrose tilted his glass, trying to locate a last drop.
“I’ll order you another,” Larry offered, realizing that whatever it
was, Janice Baldwin had him offside. He didn’t believe that theory
about brainy women which Arthur had advanced, in spite of the college
sweetheart and Mrs. Haynes. Something dark and hidden must be gnawing
at Bemrose, something that made him fearful. That’s how Larry Frank
figured it.
“Another thing that worries me is that Newton gave me a job to do, and
I can’t make a dent in it. He wants it in a rush, day after tomorrow.
Last night I stayed down to work, but I couldn’t make any headway. I
felt like hell.”
Larry lifted two drinks from Danny’s tray. “Sure, I know. That’s how
the real thing feels sometime.”
“Well, you should know more about it than I do. Here’s to Bessie. Long
may she wave!” Bemrose raised his glass. “From now on I better stick to
what _I_ know--I better go back to the office tonight and get that job
done for Tom.”
“Some sleep will do you more good. Go on home, it’s almost two o’clock.
Tomorrow let me come down and help you at the office while you knock
out Newton’s work. You’ll be able to do it with your left hand when
you’re rested.”
Bemrose was delighted with the offer. “It will take a big load off me
if you wind up the McVail case,” he said. “I can’t let Tim down, and
it’s been a headache. We finally have an agreement worked out with
the brother. He’s a terrible guy, that brother. But someone ought to
explain the papers to her. I don’t want her to sign anything until she
understands what she’s signing. If there’s ever a kickback--Tim might
not be here to help her the next time.”
“I’ll see if she’s free tomorrow night. I’ll take the papers up to her
house if she is,” Larry offered.
“I’ll try to make it up to you sometime,” Bemrose promised. “That case
has been a ridiculous worry to me.”
When Larry helped him on with his coat, he noticed that the tension
had eased. Bemrose’s arms moved freely through the wide cuffs, and his
eccentric lip lay quiet.
“Remember, hit the hay when you get home,” Larry cautioned, putting him
into a taxi and giving the driver Bemrose’s home address.
* * * * *
As Larry walked along Second Avenue, the handwritten signs on the store
windows shouted to an empty house. Larry liked the wide street at
night when, in contrast with the chattering crowds that spilled over
sidewalks and thoroughfare during the day, it was toned down by the
dark and quiet. He stepped along carefully to avoid some bumpy strips
of ice on the pavement, and while he was walking, he went to work on
the inside pieces of the puzzle.
He thought of Janice Baldwin as he had seen her centered at the
speakers’ table the night before, a chunky amethyst bracelet hung on
her wrist and lustrous purple stones to match the bracelet in a collar
around her neck. He thought of the black fur wrap she must have handed
Arthur as they were leaving the Storeys’, an extension of her dark hair
and brilliantly black eyes. She would have stepped into Bemrose’s car
talking and laughing, the Professor’s kiss still damp on her cheek.
After that evening with Storey and his friends she would have no doubt
of being admired and wanted. Bemrose would sense it and drive around
the block looking for a place to park. When he found a spot, he would
use his emergency brake, but carefully keep the motor running. He would
kiss her methodically at first, taking pains to hit her straight,
generous mouth head on, and thoughtfully he would stay there until the
first, fine heat had gone from her. Then he might move away to the left
of the wheel, leaving her alone for a few minutes, and begin to think
of how she might fit into his life, and that meant figuring whether she
would be good for his law practice.
If Larry had guessed right about Janice Baldwin, she wouldn’t stop to
consider whether or not Bemrose would benefit her future. She would
operate from the heart, and if what she felt about Bemrose was the real
thing, she’d hope that some of her sparks would catch on and warm him.
That’s how Larry Frank doped it out in his amateur way, reflecting
on the phenomenon that made him content to live a large piece of
his life through others. It was perhaps a strange characteristic,
although he had seen the same trait in other men, a willingness to
exist vicariously through someone else, as if a man’s own qualities
could never satisfy him and he could fulfill himself only through
another’s achievements. It was as if Larry had been born knowing that
his existence would move on an uneventful plane and his excitement
and adventure must come through Bemrose. Arthur Bemrose acted as his
filter, intensifying the color of his life. Arthur Bemrose, who was
along the lines of what Larry’s father would have liked of his son,
made it possible for him to live recklessly and imaginatively without
taking the risks, Larry wasn’t particularly ashamed of this quality
in himself. Some men were made to do and others to watch. He had no
urge to prove to the world that he was capable of action. It satisfied
something in him just to sit back, observe, and piece together his
conclusions. It was a pastime of which he never tired.
As for feeling any guilt because he was a disappointment to his late
father, Larry knew that Ephraim Frank had come to this country for the
chance to live his life in his own way. If the manner chosen by his son
was to live at second hand, through others, to look at the rat race but
stay out of it, what was wrong with such a decision? Nothing as far as
Larry could see.
_Chapter 3_
A sleety wind from the Drive blew Larry across West End Avenue at
Ninety-first Street. The doorman of the apartment house where Lucy
McVail lived with her uncle and aunt reached from under the canopy to
cover him with a tattered umbrella. Guided by its bamboo handle, Larry
stamped into the vestibule and smoothed his upturned overcoat collar to
prevent the layers of wet snow from sliding down his neck. He looked
around the steamy entrance hall. A soggy red carpet matched a worn
plush bench with pewlike back. Larry mounted three ill-covered stairs
to the elevator, and when he saw the stucco walls freshly painted a
poisonous green, he thought of a restaurant chain which had recently
failed.
Upstairs the elevator man pointed to a shabby door at the end of a
third-floor corridor where gas fixtures, no longer in use, remained
bracketed to the wall.
Lucy, her skin a clear amber, her pale eyes only faintly tinged with
color, answered his ring. Larry saw that with a hat off her blonde
hair, light enough to be mistaken for gray, fluffed softly around her
face. A white Persian kitten, done up in a blue satin bow, curled at
her heel. They were two homebody females, and they made him feel warm
with contentment.
She led Larry through a narrow hall where a long expanse of wall space
was conscientiously covered by flower prints in cheap frames. In the
living room her Uncle Ed, a can of English shoe wax in one hand, a
soiled cloth in the other, sat polishing an end table. He had on a
kitchen apron.
She introduced them, and Ed Daugherty tried to wipe off the brown
stains before he put out his hand. “Things get gritty,” he apologized.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance. What did you say the name
was--Frank?”
The inexpensive furniture in the room had profited by his energy.
Tables, chairs, and walnut secretary shone like new shoes. A mohair
sofa and matching chair from an installment-plan establishment made
Larry grateful for Bessie’s decorator friend, Elizabeth Brett, who had
given them a more tasteful living room at home.
There was old and old--richly designed old such as Judge Haynes had
left; shabby, comfortable old, the kind the Storeys probably lived
with; run-down old like the entrance downstairs; and shined-up,
immaculate old, neither particularly gracious nor comfortable. This.
Larry remembered the steep walk from the Albany station to a narrow
alley where, in an apartment above the local hardware store, he had
spent Christmas vacation with Arthur Bemrose one year. It was an
oppressively shabby house, and Arthur must have been glad to forget it
these past few years.
“When my aunt finishes the dishes, I’d like you to meet her,” Lucy
said, and Larry came back from his thoughts of Albany where he recalled
that the Bemroses owned a blue mohair sofa like this one.
A figured pink lamp shade dipped in fussy fringes, and Ed Daugherty
tackled the green wooden base with his polishing wax. He had a stock of
the paste in all colors, and chose a neutral shade for the lamp.
“For heaven’s sake, stop fussing. You’ll rub off the finish,” said a
plump red-faced woman. She giggled in an uncontrolled staccato. “He’s
always at things,” she apologized, shaking hands with Larry. “Mighty
nice of you, Mr. Frank, to help our niece with her case. Isn’t this a
nasty night? Would you like a cup of tea, or something stronger? Put
the water on for tea, Ed,” she decided quickly.
Mr. Daugherty undid his apron and turned toward the kitchen. A
polishing, not a talking man, Larry thought, until he later found it
was Daugherty’s wife who often canceled out his conversation.
Larry turned with relief to Lucy McVail. After the meticulous uncle
and the gushing aunt, it was like looking into a cool, still well.
Listening might easily be Lucy’s most useful quality, Larry reflected,
remembering that he had mentioned this trait of hers to Bemrose. It
wasn’t easy to tell how much she understood, but she listened. He
unzipped his briefcase and spread some legal papers for her to examine.
Precisely he took up each point in the settlement that Bemrose had
worked out with her brother.
When the farm in Iowa was sold, they would divide the proceeds equally,
she and her brother. The bonds at the bank, however, belonged solely to
her, and they constituted the larger part of the estate. Mr. Bemrose
thought she might consider cashing the bonds since he had checked on
their current market price and found it was favorable. She might invest
the money in an insurance annuity if she wanted to provide for her
future.
Miss McVail probably knew, Larry explained, that her brother had
capitulated after Mr. Bemrose’s second letter, the blunt one, in which
he reminded Mr. McVail of three bonds he had wheedled out of his
grandmother the week she died. Mr. Bemrose threatened suit for undue
influence, and her brother apparently had reason to keep out of court.
Larry noted that Lucy McVail winced. Not that it mattered _why_ he had
finally agreed, Larry hastened to explain. Here was his signature. Now
if she would just sign-- The farm might bring fifteen hundred dollars.
Adding the bonds, she would be able to realize around six thousand in
cash. It wasn’t bad. Mr. Bemrose thought she had done all right.