He rubbed, but the nagging ache persisted. When would Bemrose be bright
enough to find out that wasn’t the way to handle a woman? Anyway not
Janice Baldwin. When would he learn to care enough for Janice Baldwin
or any other woman to want to find out?
_Chapter 5_
Larry didn’t want to buy a paper, but he laid down three cents anyway,
attracted by some violets in a vendor’s box next to the newsstand. He
sighed because there was no one to buy them for at ten-thirty in the
morning. Outside the Chanin building he stopped to sniff at spring. The
restless April. When he was a kid, it was the season for rubbing holes
in his black stockings playing pitch penny, a penny if he won, and a
bloody nose if he lost. He lost either way because the cotton stockings
cost a dime, and his mother couldn’t go on darning the darns forever.
Spring now might mean a girl and the chance to buy her violets, or it
might mean going to the zoo and watching the sea lions clown. He liked
the sea lions when they arched out of the water in a surprise move
which showered the crowd around the pool, then climbed on a granite
block and stretched in the sun until their shiny blackness turned the
protective gray of the stone.
To be a sea lion. Others could look for spring in the woods, but
Central Park was for Larry, and a box on Forty-second Street the place
to gather spring violets. The flowers might have a refrigerator smell
and be wrapped in tinsel tied with cheap blue ribbon, but they were
New York violets.
New York for Larry was the place to spend the restless April; also the
motionless August, the bleak November and February when slush clogged
the gutters. At any season it was the place, through carbon monoxide
mornings, noisy afternoons, and glittery evenings. Monday through
Sunday it was the place. When Larry left it to go across the River
to Hoboken, he felt as though his right arm had dropped off. When a
returning ferry made him whole again, he outwaited corner lights to
feel the New York crowd press around him. He would have written an ode
to the North River, if he had been Shelley.
This morning he hated to leave the spring down here on the street for
his office. The upturned sniffing faces told him, more eloquently than
dogwood or tulip tree, that fifty miles from Times Square the brooks
were spilling over, and the new leaves spreading their embroidery. The
creeping phlox was out, too. He could tell it was out in the country by
the number of topcoats recklessly being carried in town by men who felt
two inches taller than when they had opened their eyes that morning.
Without greeting the lawyer in the room next door who shared the
receptionist and office rent with him, Larry walked to his chair beside
the narrow window. This morning he minded sharing the space with
anyone. So far the spring day had belonged to him, and he didn’t want
to part with even a fractional interest. He looked at some slips the
operator handed him on the way in. If he had thought of it, he might
have bought the violets for her.
Miss Baldwin, one of the messages read, would drop in around
eleven o’clock. She had phoned at nine-thirty, at ten-ten, and at
ten-twenty-five. Larry looked at his watch. It was five of eleven now.
He felt that spring was on his team. He had an excuse not to work. He
phoned a client who had an appointment with him at noon. “I have a
fever,” he explained. “Spring fever. The doctor says I should stay in
with it twenty-four hours after my temperature drops to normal.” Larry
hung up while his client, a labor union official, grumbled about the
clause in a new contract Larry had drawn for him.
Larry didn’t have long to wait. At eleven o’clock sharp, Janice knocked
on the metal door. He pushed a chair close to his desk for her, and as
she sat forward tensely, her woolen skirt riding above her knee, Larry
saw that dark sacs outlined her eyes, and her face was thinner. It may
have been suffering that had trimmed down her cheeks. They fell away in
hollows under cheekbones augmented by the change.
She asked Larry if he knew anyone at the State Department who could
help her get a visa. With the War looking worse, she didn’t wish to
confine her field of operations to England. _Everett’s_ had signed some
affidavits for her the other day declaring that they had commissioned
a series of articles on Sweden, but the State Department, typically
uncooperative, had put her on a log-jam waiting list which didn’t
look as if it would ever break. She must clear through Washington
immediately. She had to straighten out her papers and get the Swedish
visa at once.
Larry rolled back in his chair, the urgency wasted on him. It was
spring, and in spite of the blue underpuffs of her eyes, she looked
lovely, lovelier because she was tense and whittled down, the
ruby-white padding gone, and the core of her showing.
“I’ve phoned Washington every day,” she objected. “My long-distance
bill--” She built a week of annoyances into an assault on her dignity.
With her sense of drama strained, each wrong number pyramided to a
crisis.
“What does Bemrose say?” Larry inquired, thinking of offering to
trade violets with her for the visa. “He ought to be able to dig up
someone for you through Tom Newton, someone who knows the ropes in the
department.”
“I can’t ask him.” The usually straight mouth was pulled down with
fatigue.
“What’s the matter, Janice?” He forgot the violets, and leaning over,
touched her shoulder.
The mouth worked unhappily. “I don’t know.” Her defeated hands fell
forward as she said, “He’s not around any more. I don’t know for how
long. Sometimes I have a nightmare and think it’s for good.”
That was when he heard about the evening at the Storeys’ from her. And
before that night, she admitted to Larry, from the first time that
she had interviewed him at his office, she knew he was different from
the others, that here was the man she had never known, the man whose
existence she had divined and felt for years, certain that if he had
life and shape and form, the chances were against her ever meeting him.
She had found him, and by a miracle of coincidence, during a time in
his life when he was free to love her; yet something had gone wrong.
She watched while Larry crossed the length of the room and came back to
his desk. “If you feel that way about Bemrose, why do you want to go
overseas?” he asked. “Why run away? Unless you’re afraid----”
“It might be hard to take when I did find out, but I don’t think I’m
afraid,” she said. “I’m going over because it’s my job. I can’t just
walk out on it.” She excavated a box of kitchen matches from her bag
and struck one. It set up a blaze when it touched her cigarette. “I
can’t do it even to rub Arthur Bemrose’s ego the right way.”
“Maybe he would like to believe that you care enough about him to stay
home.”
“Would he care enough to quit _his_ job?”
“So you think it’s the same, a man’s work and a woman’s,” Larry said.
“Why, yes, don’t you?”
* * * * *
One Saturday when they were kids living in a dowager brick house in
Kansas City, Janice Baldwin and her twin brother sat on the disciplined
grass next to the family tennis court and planned what they would do
with their lives. Instead of going to Harvard, which was what the
family had in mind for him, Bob would take a job on a freighter bound
for Shanghai. Janice would use the train fare intended to take her to
Wellesley, and find a newspaper job in New York. That’s how she would
get the experience she needed for their work. In two years, when Bob
sent for her, she would go to Shanghai and help him start a weekly
newspaper in China, an English language paper. They would take the
summers off every year and visit Peiping, Manchuria, and Tahiti. They
would be free to go wherever they wanted to go. There would be no
husband to tie her down and no wife for Bob. That was a clearly stated
condition of the agreement. She stressed it in talking to Larry Frank.
She told Larry about a Saturday afternoon back home when the doubles
match in the tennis court had broken up and she and Bob continued to
play by themselves.
“Hit it across the Pacific, Jan!” he had coached her. She lunged for
an angle shot to her backhand. All through the set she smashed her way
through to China, happily indulging her adolescent fantasy. Her mother
broke the dream when she neatly stitched across the lawn to say they
were driving to the country club for dinner and ought to get ready.
Janice told Larry about another time when she and Bob rummaged
in the attic and found Great-grandfather Baldwin’s journal. Her
great-grandfather had traveled to Kansas in the late ’50s with
other anti-slavers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company.
Great-grandfather, the abolitionist, helped his friend, Charles
Robinson, in the Wakarusa war against the pro-slavery crowd from
Missouri. He gave Robinson free legal service and had a hand in framing
the Wyandotte Constitution, a document which finally admitted Kansas to
the Union.
Up and down the Kaw River they referred to Ezra Baldwin as “Robinson’s
brains” and they rode from the Cimarron and the Neosho valleys to have
Great-grandfather draw their wills. A crop of Ezras, named after him,
sprouted like wild grass across the plains and constituted his legal
fees.
Back East his friend, Lloyd Garrison, had written some verses which
Great-grandfather copied into his journal:
Though woman never can be man,
By change of sex and a’ that....
In all that makes a living soul
She matches man, for a’ that.
Over and over again, at sixteen, the believing age, she repeated the
verse to herself, Janice confessed to Larry. Bob assured her she was a
match for man already. He was touched with Great-grandfather’s golden
fluency, and she believed him. Janice wanted to believe that she was as
good as Bob thought she was.
Her father died when they were seventeen, and Bob, abandoning the dream
of the East, pitched in to learn the family tanning business. She came
back from Wellesley the summer of her sophomore year, and he introduced
her to Mary Ellen--empty little Mary Ellen with shallow eyes and skin
you could see through. The following June Bob married her, and the next
summer, as Janice boarded the _S.S. Champlain_ on a college cruise to
Europe, a cable from Bob announced the birth of Mary Ellen II.
More than a year after graduation, when Janice was rounding out her
first six months in Washington as a reporter on the morning _Gazette_,
Ezra Baldwin III was born to Bob and Mary Ellen, followed the year
after by twins. Janice heard about the twins in Shanghai where she had
wangled a job with Global News Service.
Bob still lived in the brick house at home and rolled the tennis court
on Saturday. She often wondered if he minded settling in Kansas City.
Once he wrote: “I think of how we planned to see it together. Have
fun for both of us, Jan!” The first year or so she sent him carbons
of her best stories, or cabled to him when she was abroad. After that
she didn’t bother. Now and then she would visit them in Kansas City,
but surrounded by the domestic clutter of Mary Ellen and the children,
she felt more remote from Bob than in letters. It worked better when
he came to Washington alone for a visit. Even then too many years and
miles had gone by. He had forgotten that they had ever planned a life
or a work together.
“Your brother has his home and family, but you’re still without roots,”
Larry said. “You can’t go on acting out some dream you had when you
were sixteen. You can’t keep on crossing oceans the rest of your life,
expecting to see something new on the other side. There are a few
basic things, and they concern what goes on inside of you. Once you’ve
learned them--” Larry shrugged. “The rest is repetition and geography,
but it doesn’t add anything fundamental to what you know.”
“I don’t do it any more to live up to Bob’s ambitions for me. That
nonsense stopped when I got good at my job. At least I hope I’m free
of any adolescent hangovers. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, how much of
the pattern clings when you think you’re grown-up? Of course I can’t be
sure, but I don’t think that I’m tied up with Bob.”
“So you’re good at your job,” he kidded.
“War is no time to be modest. I should be working at what I do best.
So should you, and so should Bemrose. Anything else is a waste, and
all materials are on the critical list, including brains and skill. No
one will remember when it’s over what the critical commodities were,
or who supplied them. Only a few of us will even want to remember, but
that doesn’t matter. That’s not what we do it for. I can’t quit what I
do best because Bemrose is self-centered, or bruises easy, and isn’t
happy in wartime, or any other time, unless people do what he wants.”
She unlocked the amethyst that caught the center fullness of her
high-necked black blouse. “I can’t chuck everything I know how to do,”
she insisted. “It would be throwing away the best in me. When millions
are being ground under Nazi tanks and children’s blood is being
spilled, I can’t say it’s none of my business and sit home drinking
Martinis to forget. My great-grandfather walked to Kansas to get into
a fight that was peanuts compared with this one.” Her bracelet rattled
angrily. “You don’t outgrow that in three generations.”
“But if what you want is here, and you may not have another chance--”
Larry said.
“I still can’t!”
Larry sat back and studied a paperweight on his desk. It was in the
form of a wooden monkey, and the comic figure writhed with anguish as
it struggled to crush a cocoanut. “There’s one thing a woman can try
when she wants a man,” Larry said.
She took out a cigarette and slammed the case. She let the cigarette
drop to her lap. “If only he weren’t so stubborn!”
“For years they’ve been telling him he’s good,” Larry warned her. “You
can’t expect him to get used to the idea that there’s any woman around
who is as good as he is. Not all at once you can’t.”
“I’m not asking him for anything. I want to try and make him happy.”
She threw back her head, thrusting forward the durable chin. “It’s a
childish concept--happiness. There is no such thing, of course. There
is relief from misery for brief moments.”
“I wonder if he would know how to accept that kind of gift from you.
From anyone for that matter,” Larry said. “Happiness, or what passes
for happiness today. Being less miserable, if that’s the way you like
to put it. In the twenty years I’ve known him, Arthur has been on the
giving end. I don’t think he’d know how to receive anything you might
be able to give him. He’d have to learn----”
“What difference can it make who gives how much to whom?” She doused
her cigarette and grabbed the arm of her chair. “It’s not a contest,
Larry. I’m not competing with him.”
They had tried things out, and it had been all right for Janice but not
for Bemrose. The competition he felt around her had carried over into
bed, and he couldn’t allow her to make him happy. It would have been an
admission that he was like any other man, and he couldn’t acknowledge
as much without sacrificing some of his masculinity. He had to withhold
that triumph from her. He had to assert his superiority as a lover who
was able to smother her desire for any other man, but who found her
somewhat wanting, something less of a success with him than at anything
she had ever attempted. A compulsion as crude and uncontrolled as
fire sweeping through a forest kept Bemrose aloof from her, his needs
independent of her ability to satisfy them. Larry pieced this together
from what she told him, and what he knew about Bemrose.
Her eyebrows formed puzzled triangles. “Do you think it’s Judge Haynes?
Does he think it would be disloyal to Judge Haynes?”
Larry shook his head. “If the Judge were around, he would try to give
Arthur the confidence he needs. I think he’s afraid of you, afraid of
you and your success. Not sure enough of himself to compete with you.
The Judge would convince him that he has every right to be certain.
He’d spot the trouble in no time and straighten Bemrose out. You and
the Judge would have gotten along.”
Janice listened. “I thought maybe because he and Mrs. Haynes lived an
abnormally secluded life----”
“That was _Mrs._ Haynes. She did feel strange with people and stayed at
home pretty much, but it wasn’t the Old Man’s notion of how to live.
He went out without her. They say he used to tell her about the other
women he met at dinner parties. From anything I ever heard, the Judge
had a good, healthy respect for women. I don’t think Bemrose got any of
his ideas from him.”
“Then what _is_ it?” The straight hair waved sharply. “I have to know.
I have to find out why.”
“If he’s afraid of you, maybe a few drinks----”
The black eyes flooded with misery. “He’s not afraid of me.”
“Are you sure you’d know about that?” Larry questioned her. “I doubt
if he would know it himself. There were plenty of conditions of his
childhood which might explain why he’s afraid. Insecurity over money,
insecurity with his parents. Give him time to get used to you.”
“He doesn’t want time,” she insisted.
Larry picked up her hand and tried to stroke comfort into the fingers.
She would find lovers who were easier to live with. Bemrose might be
too much to handle, even for a woman as experienced as she was.
When the phone rang, Larry picked it up with the left hand so that he
could hold on to Janice’s. It was his client, the union man, asking
if he couldn’t break up his fever with some aspirin and come to the
company meeting at two o’clock.
“It’s not that kind of fever,” he patiently explained and promised to
call his client back.
“I’ll clear out,” she offered, breaking loose from him. “I really
didn’t expect you to do anything, but I had to talk it out, and
you’re----”
“His oldest and best friend.” Larry finished it for her, and they
laughed.
“I’m a helluva friend. He doesn’t come near me with his trouble, but
sometimes all on my own I find things out.”
She sat down again, balanced uneasily on the edge of the chair.
“I saw him on Fifth Avenue last night. He didn’t see me, but I watched
him stop and look in Tiffany’s window,” Larry volunteered.
Her lips shook slightly like dry leaves. “He wasn’t alone?”
“He was with a client of his.”
“A woman.”
“She never seemed to interest him. I used to think----”
“Last night when they were looking in Tiffany’s, did he interest her?”
“He always would. She takes a man on faith, especially a man like
Bemrose who has more brains in his little finger than anyone Miss
McVail ever knew.”
“With this girl, there would be no competition?” Janice asked.
“He could be perfectly at ease, perfectly comfortable.”
“Then what am I upset about? She sounds all right for him.”
“Do you really want to go to Sweden?” Larry asked abruptly. He pulled a
phone book out of the bottom desk drawer and turned to the Ds.
“Don’t you think--” She sounded high and tentative, and her hand shook
slightly as she fumbled with the catch on her bloated handbag.
But he had handed out enough advice for morning. Without a fee, like
Arthur H. Bemrose. The rest was up to Janice. She’d have to decide
whether to stay and try for him.
“Go to see this fellow, Diamond.” He pointed to a name at the top of
the page. “I think he can fix you up with your visa. I’ll phone him
this afternoon.”
“Who is he? I’ve had such rotten luck.” She fished a red notebook out
of her bag and wrote down the address.
“He’s pals with that Mrs. What’s-her-name in the State Department,”
Larry said. “I think Bemrose would do better for you but----”
Janice nodded and sealed the notebook with a pencil that slipped into a
loop at the side.
“Larry, I don’t know how to----”
They got up together, and she put out her hand. Changing her mind, she
kissed him.
“Sometimes he gives me reason to be grateful.” Larry blotted her
lipstick off his cheek with the show handkerchief he wore in his breast
pocket.
“You better call your client and tell him aspirin did the trick,” she
suggested.
“I don’t bother with clients on a day like this. It’s against my
principles. Wait, I’ll go down with you.”
They threaded the crowded lobby and stepped onto the sidewalk. She
touched his sleeve. “Aren’t you going to need your coat?”
“Come on,” he said gruffly, taking her elbow.
The hurriers wore their winter faces but Larry steered her to the
violets, and tossed a coin into the vendor’s box. “I’ve been wanting to
buy these all morning.” He handed her the corsage. “Have you a pin for
the lady?” he asked the old woman.
Like a parent buttoning a child’s snowsuit, he fastened the violets to
Janice’s coat. “Let me know if Diamond turns you down.”
The royal color against her face darkened her hair and made her skin
dazzling pale. “Maybe I’ll _have_ to stick around,” she said. “Maybe
the Swedes won’t have me either.”
He cradled her hands in both of his. Whatever happened, she could count
on him.
As she backed away, and the crowd came between them, the misery washed
out of her face. She smiled, and Larry saw that her eyes sparkled
happily with tears.
_Chapter 6_
Usually Larry felt lost when he came home and didn’t find Bessie, but
tonight he was glad there was a meeting of her first aid course at the
Red Cross so that he could be alone.
On the way home from the office he had stopped at Rabinowitz’s
restaurant on Second Avenue for a plate of borsch. It wasn’t the finest
borsch he had ever tasted, but after a day at the Magistrates’ Court,
he was glad to eat dinner at Rabinowitz’s. The discord of moving china,
scraping chairs and wisecracking waiters seemed almost restful compared
with the uproar of the courtroom.
If only there were some way to practice law and stay out of the
Magistrates’ Courts. He was tired of the sordid bickering between
client and lawyer, lawyer and judge, and lawyer vs. lawyer. Larry
was afraid that he might acquire their look of stinking cigars and
suits that appeared rusty even when they were new. Professional
scum--that was a fair description of what practiced in the lower
courts. It usually took as much work for a lawyer to represent a small
client as a large corporation, and it almost always meant twice the
responsibility. Every claim counted so much more to the client who
started with nothing, and whose entire financial status might depend on
the outcome of his law suit. A smart lawyer steered around the little
cases with their whopping headaches. But Larry had always boasted that
he would try _any_ case in any court as a matter of professional pride.
Lawyers should feel as great a responsibility as doctors in helping
people. That had always been Larry’s belief, but after today he wasn’t
as sure of his ground.
The City had slapped a violation on the bakery belonging to his client.
A new Building Commissioner at City Hall was plastering a rash of
violations on little properties all over town, although they often
represented an owner’s sole income and might force the proprietors into
bankruptcy. Like Larry’s client.
Poor sucker, he would almost certainly have to let his building go
now. When Larry first heard of the case, he thought of turning it
down, knowing someone high up in the administration was crusading, and
anything he tried to do would be a waste of his time. His hunch had
been right. In court this morning, he faced not only the Judge, but six
unsolicited reporters and a battery of photographers. The minute Larry
opened his mouth, the Magistrate bawled him out, and good-citizenship
lecture number forty-one was delivered. What did Larry’s client mean,
letting innocent men work in a death trap? Didn’t he know there might
be a fire, and people might be killed? Did he want their lives on his
conscience? The reporters took it down, every word, and Larry yelled
back at the Judge to be certain and make it a good story. In these
courts a lawyer practiced with his lungs rather than his brains. The
lawyer who could outshout the bench usually won his cases.
But apparently today Larry hadn’t been in good enough voice, or it
took more than vocal power. His client was fined one hundred dollars
and given a six day jail sentence. The fine was bad enough--Larry knew
it meant his client would go into debt--but the jail sentence was a
disgrace that would torture his conscience for years.
When the next defendants drew identical penalties, Larry began to
smell a rodent. Later, in the corridor, a friendly lawyer from the
Corporation Counsel’s office hinted that the Magistrate had acted
“on orders.” It was the sort of thing he used to hear about Tammany,
Larry cynically recalled, but didn’t expect in an enlightened “reform”
administration.