get drunk on a night like this. In spite of his tropical weight suit,
the back of his shirt was a washrag. “She’ll let him run the show,
she’ll be easy to live with. He’ll give her money--she’s never had
much. She’ll enjoy the social stuff.”
“Sounds like a business deal,” Steve said.
“What’s wrong with buying that, if the price is right? Maybe it’s as
good a reason as any. I wouldn’t know for sure.” Larry swallowed to get
rid of the bitter taste. “Did you have supper?” he asked abruptly.
Steve swung around. “Say, you don’t look good,” he said. “What the hell
are _you_ upset about? It’s not your funeral.”
“I had too much to drink,” Larry apologized.
“A couple of Scotch-and-sodas never made anyone look like you look,”
Steve insisted.
Larry knew it was no use. The artist had third and fourth sight.
Already in one evening Larry had told him more than he had confided to
Bessie in a month. Steve Holmes took x-rays. He didn’t waste time with
questions.
“Okay, so I like the guy.” Larry’s clammy fingers rubbed the moisture
from his palms. “He’s a great guy,” he went on, talking to himself in
the dark. “He’s what I always wanted to be, only it’s no use if you’re
not built for it. I know his faults, and I think he’s a great guy.”
Silently they walked along. They had this side of the street to
themselves. The green coaches lumbered by like middle-aged ladies with
diabetes, and on a bench near a bus stop across the avenue, two sailors
were draped around a couple of high school kids in purple sister
dresses.
Holmes made sympathetic noises. “I know what you mean. I’d believe him
if he told me the world was coming to an end next Friday night at seven
fifty-nine and a quarter.”
“Every man has to have his guy,” Larry broke in. “Arthur’s been mine.
For years. Since we were kids. I know every goddam one of his faults
and----”
Steve Holmes gripped Larry’s arm above the wrist. “Take it easy, boy,”
he said. “You’re okay. Where would you like to stop for a bite?”
Larry quickened his step, but his short legs were no match for Steve’s.
“You say he fell for Jan?” Holmes wanted to know.
“I thought he’d ask her to marry him, but they had a misunderstanding.
I think he was waiting for her to come to him.”
“Jesuschris’, how did he get over her?” It came out a wail, from the
bottom of Steve. “I’ve been trying, and Jesuschris’-- I haven’t seen
her for ten years, and she’s still around.”
Still around. Larry smiled.
“She should have married me,” Steve said. “You say she likes Bemrose?”
“When she found out what she thought he was about, she tried not to,”
Larry explained. “She tried to talk herself out of him but she didn’t
have much luck.”
“He’s a fifteen-story fool,” Steve exploded. “A fool.”
They had reached the scrubby uptown side of Fifty-ninth Street where
slit-entranced lunchrooms framed with neon lined the sidewalk. A
trolley jangled by, and Larry invited Steve to join him in a cup of
coffee across at Reuben’s, but Holmes said he wanted to get back to his
hotel.
From behind an oversized table at the restaurant, watching the women
in their cool cotton dresses drift in from the theater, Larry thought
of Bemrose going upstairs alone, away from the stale air and the dirty
highball glasses.
In a few weeks he wouldn’t be able to get away by going upstairs.
_PART II_
_Chapter 8_
Larry broke the eggs cleanly on the edge of the glass bowl, looked for
an egg beater, and took down paprika, salt, and pepper. Bessie humored
him on Sunday mornings and let him scramble the eggs his way, well
beaten and cooked over a low fire. Patiently Larry stirred, scooping
his fork along the side of the pan. The August sun blazed through the
windows. Larry knew that if he wanted the eggs right, they couldn’t be
rushed.
Larry opened the refrigerator and saw cool slices of honeydew melon on
white Wedgwood, and an oval platter of smoked salmon in neat rows. He
uncovered a top-of-the-stove oven where six shiny bagel were heating,
and sniffed. Bagel were doughnut-like rolls with tough, crisp crusts.
He remembered them nostalgically from home.
A container of cream was on the stove to be added at the last moment.
The cream splashed, and Larry mixed the eggs again before he spooned
them onto heated plates and called Bessie to help carry them in.
They ate in the foyer, where Elizabeth Brett, Bessie’s old school
chum, was waiting at the table. She sampled the eggs expertly. “They’re
wonderful. How do you get them so smooth?” she asked.
“He won’t even tell me,” Bessie pretended to complain.
“I wish he’d tell my cook,” Elizabeth’s flowers bobbed on her white
bouquet of a hat. “Mm-m,” she sighed contentedly. “I don’t know when I
last tasted a bagel.”
“You have a standing invitation any Sunday, Liz,” Larry said, grinning.
He looked through the graceful arch to the living room and felt
grateful to Liz, as he often had before. On this shriveling August
day the dark emerald walls soaked up the heat, and the bright white
fireplace with its oblong of unframed mirror fitted the serene Brett
color plan. Chintz for the easy chairs. A lemon-colored sofa and
striped woolen draperies. Ivy in white stands. The color was Brett, as
though she had stood by, adding white to the paint and weaving it into
each clean-looking fabric.
It was her color, but their home. At first Larry had been afraid to
tell her about the Soyer painting, the gift last year of a client who
owed him a fee. Bessie and he had thought that the somber, grayish
picture of a girl with legs askew and knob knees bent might offend
Liz, but she felt the power in the picture at once, said the girl in
the painting looked like a high school chum in the Bronx who had lost
her job during the thirties and tried to commit suicide with a rusty
pair of scissors. Her school friend had the Soyer’s overlarge hollows
for eyes, Liz said thoughtfully, while she searched her handbag for a
picture hook to hang the painting.
Liz had made her way from a cold-water flat in the Bronx to the shop on
East Fifty-seventh Street. _Elizabeth Brett, Inc., Interiors._ Bessie
first met her when she was Lizzie Browarsky and they were freshmen at
Hunter. Already Liz was designing her own clothes and painting sets
for the dramatic club. In her junior year she quit and went to art
school at night, and apprenticed herself during the day to the home
furnishings section of a department store. There Liz made friends with
an editor of a decorating magazine who introduced her to a society
woman who was looking for someone young and energetic as a partner.
The woman’s husband had gone broke on Wall Street, and she supported
herself by decorating for wealthy friends. Liz, who had brains and a
fresh color sense, delighted her employer’s clients, and Brett jobs
began to be talked about and photographed. Friends of friends and total
strangers visited the cramped upstairs office. When the business moved
a year ago to a spacious street location, Liz bought out her associate,
changed the firm name, and hired three assistants to handle the
traffic. Liz deserved a lot of credit, Larry admitted. In fifteen years
she had put herself at the top. Watching her thick-knuckled fingers on
the slippery roll, Larry wondered, as he often did, how coarse-fibered
Liz with her mottled strawberry skin, gossipy mouth and emphatic
hips managed to get along with the airplane trade. Her own scheme of
dressing was the reverse of the rooms she designed. She used too much
makeup, loaded herself with gaudy costume jewelry, and on a scorcher
like today, she wore a long-sleeved black crepe dress. Her voice was
Bourbon, straight, she said “yeh-uh” for “yes,” and was the last person
anyone would associate with the pure cool beauty of an interior by
Brett.
Judged by standards of self-made success, Liz was the counterpart
among Bess’s college friends of Bemrose among his. Both had come up
from a curbstone. They both served wealthy clients. Only the edges of
Arthur H. Bemrose were engine-turned while Liz Brett had hangnails that
snagged. Her energy exploded like a hundred firecrackers set off at
once while Bemrose’s was a steady glow.
They were on a second cup of coffee when Bess said, “Tell him, Liz.
What you were telling me before.”
“I’ve been having a little trouble with your pal, Bemrose,” Liz said, a
cigarette between her lips.
Larry struck a match for her. “Where did you tangle with him?”
“He asked me to do over his old house on Eighty-second Street.” The
white hat tossed as she inhaled. “I met him at a party of a client of
mine. I did a house for this woman on the Cape. He seemed like a nice
guy, and I hoped there was a little something between them. When I saw
that he had married another girl, I wrote, congratulating him. About a
month ago he called to ask me how I’d like to do over his house.” She
tilted the fragile chair and blew a smoke ring. “I should have been
smart enough to know when _he_ called instead of Mrs. Bemrose----”
“Tell him about the bedroom paper,” Bessie prompted.
Larry looked curiously at his wife. The dark purple lips which usually
curved with good nature twisted pouting, insistent, toward Elizabeth.
Lightning threatened in her brown eyes which ordinarily were so warm
and cloudless that they reminded Larry of a perfect stretch of weather.
Thin lines of moisture had collected in the folds of her plump neck.
Bess’s wavy dark hair which almost always obediently circled her face,
accentuating its roundness, jabbed from the temples in straight,
stubborn ends. The play of dark lips and blinding white teeth, a study
of light-and-shadow which Larry never tired of watching, struck him now
as greedy. He thought of a small, furry animal badgering its victim.
This wasn’t his usual sweet, gentle Bessie.
“What _about_ the wallpaper?” he asked.
“Nothing that will make any difference in a hundred years.” Elizabeth
had caught his amused tone.
“About the stripes,” Bessie persisted.
“You know the house,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a mausoleum.”
Larry nodded.
“He won’t let her get rid of the old furniture,” Liz explained. “So
Mrs. Bemrose thought that by keeping the walls light and slipcovering
some of the heavy pieces, she’d brighten up the place.”
“_Who_ thought of that?” Larry laughed.
“I did.”
Bessie motioned to him impatiently. “That’s what she is paid for,
Larry. Go on, tell about the stripes.”
“We had agreed to use a pale blue sprig paper for the bedroom to keep
it delicate,” Liz continued. “We had already selected a matching carpet
and fabrics. Even samples for lamp shades. Her heart was set on that
blue.”
“But he wanted stripes,” Bessie interrupted.
“Bottle green and tan stripes,” Elizabeth explained. “An inch wide.
They would have been okay for the study, or in a man’s bedroom where
the furniture was made to order, but----”
“She lost, I guess,” Larry said.
“She cried all the way through a good dress of mine. Scared to death
that she’d never understand him. Children, it isn’t friendly at the
Bemroses’. It isn’t friendly.” Elizabeth walked to the mirror and
stroked her upswept coiffure with clumsy fingers.
“I guess they’ll sleep with stripes.” Larry shrugged.
“You haven’t heard about the cook,” Bessie protested.
“Let’s skip it,” Elizabeth ran a thumb along a pocket comb.
“No, he ought to hear,” Bess insisted. “To listen to Larry talk about
Arthur Bemrose, you’d think he was-- Well, sometimes you do make me
sick,” she said defensively.
Larry looked more reproachful than he felt. He knew Bessie was jealous
of the time he spent with Arthur, but it didn’t bother him. He
attributed it to feminine possessiveness and was rather flattered by
her jealousy.
“What about the cook?” Larry asked, to humor Bessie. “I might as well
know everything.”
“If cooks are good, they’re _usually_ a little crazy,” Elizabeth
explained. “This one at the Bemroses’ makes like a genius, but he fired
her because he claims she came home drunk.” Elizabeth smiled. “If she’d
work for me, I’d gladly keep her in Scotch, cases of it. Anyway Mrs.
Bemrose says the cook was sick, not drunk, and begged him to hang on to
her, but he won, of course. Next day the cook was--” Elizabeth jerked a
thumb toward the door. “I tell you, infants, it’s not friendly at the
Bemroses’.”
Bessie watched apprehensively for Larry’s reaction, but he stacked the
dishes unconcerned.
“Leave those. I’ll do them after Liz is gone,” Bessie said. “Don’t go
yet, Liz. Tell him about the draperies.”
“Look, honey, how about letting him alone? He thinks we’re a couple of
hellions.”
“Aren’t you?” Larry innocently asked.
“A thing like that shows up a man’s character,” Bess insisted. “Larry
ought to know about it. For his own protection,” she added mysteriously.
“And you should get a job running a quiz program,” Liz said.
Larry pinched his nose delightedly. An embarrassed flush, rising on
Bessie’s neck, colored her lower jaw.
“The other afternoon about five-thirty I was supervising the hanging of
draperies for the upstairs study when Bemrose came in,” Liz continued.
“He blurted out something at her and when I turned around, she was
trembling. A lawyer named Harrison was waiting for him downstairs, and
Bemrose had asked her to have her dinner sent up on a tray so that he
and this other lawyer could be alone.
“I invited her to come home with me and look at a bedroom screen I
had been trying to describe to her, thinking she might want to order
one like it. Bemrose fell over himself thanking me. He can be damned
ingratiating when you give him his way--”
“You bet he can. And sometimes even when you don’t give him his way,”
Larry said.
“I decided he was getting off too easy, and it would do him good to
suffer,” Liz said. “I asked, ‘How about inviting us downstairs for
cocktails? I’ve been on my feet all day. I can use a drink.’”
She sat down and shifted her hips on the narrow chair. “Mrs. Bemrose
tried to shush me and say they mustn’t be disturbed. She offered to
have _our_ drink sent up. But I put my foot down and said I wanted to
get away from the mess in the sitting room.
“Bemrose finally saw he was licked. He asked us to join them,” Liz
continued. “When we got downstairs, he fixed a nice, smooth Martini,
and he went out of his way to behave. He kept cutting us into the
conversation, and his friend Harrison--he told some good stories.” She
smiled speculatively. “I like that little runt.”
“Make a try for him, Liz. He’ll keep you in sables.”
“Thanks. I’ll buy my own,” Liz said. “I think Bemrose would have asked
us to dinner if he hadn’t been afraid of reversing himself. Harrison
was having a good time. He thought I was the life of the party. What is
he? A corporation lawyer?”
Larry nodded.
“Bemrose wouldn’t let on, of course, that he wanted to change his
mind,” Liz said. “It’s no _kinderspiel_, living with that guy. It takes
quite a woman.”
Elizabeth removed a cylinder of red paste from her bag. She used a
fingertip to spot each cheek and worked in the daubs of color. “That
poor little thing had better catch on quick or----”
“He has a heart as big as he is,” Larry protested.
“He wants Larry to manage his office,” Bess said. “What do you think,
Liz? You’re a judge of character. It’s a big step for Larry, closing
his own office. My father says going into business with a man is like
marrying him.”
Larry was grateful that Bess never reminded him he had taken her from
a home with two servants. She never suggested that they wouldn’t have
this apartment if her father, a successful diamond merchant, hadn’t
furnished it for a wedding present. For fifteen years Bess had plugged
away with Larry, counting on him to become a Judge, or at least a
Magistrate, but keeping the thought in the back of a bottom drawer.
Bemrose’s offer was the first real professional break he had had since
law school. Since he told her about it, Bess had gone around the house
absorbed, thoughtful, looking questions instead of asking them. She
pretended to resent Arthur and his success, but Larry knew the firm
name of HAYNES and BEMROSE was an overbright sun that watered her eyes.
In the small veins of her heart, Bessie probably hoped that he would
accept the offer.
“Larry’s a pretty good judge of character. He doesn’t need my advice,”
Elizabeth said, walking over and affectionately tugging the knot of
his tie. “Now children, I really must--” She crushed some long white
gauntlets at her wrist. “The eggs were scrumptious. Ask me again!”
Before Larry could say, “I’ve already turned down his job,” Elizabeth
was on her way, and the door clicked.
Gratefully Larry took off his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and stretched
out on the yellow sofa, placing a newspaper under his shoes. Bessie was
busy in the kitchen. He’d have to tell her someday and might just as
well line up how he was going to put it. He’d have to go back a month
to that stinking evening----
* * * * *
Larry would never forget that night in the middle of July. It was
impossible to get a breath of air if a man had a pair of lungs like
Dempsey. The gang decided they might as well forget the humidity and
play poker because it was better to be out and occupied than to stifle
and be bored at home. There was no point in going to an air-cooled
movie, either, and come out later to the steaminess of Times Square.
They set up the game at Danny’s, and griped like hell because Danny
had promised every summer to put in air conditioning and hadn’t done
anything about it.
Although Bemrose was married the end of June, none of the gang had
seen him since long before his engagement. The usual stag dinner which
the boys would have liked to give him hadn’t been discussed. Larry,
himself, hadn’t heard from Bemrose since the party at his house five or
six weeks ago.
Naturally the boys wondered about Lucy, what she was like, and when
Larry dealt, he tried to satisfy their curiosity. He put down the
cards to illustrate Mrs. Bemrose’s symmetrical distribution when
Bemrose unexpectedly walked in, and the evening was finished. The gang
attempted to congratulate him, but their good wishes went stale as warm
beer. Bemrose looked edgy, miserable. His coat slipped from the back of
his chair, and he let it lie in Danny’s sawdust.
The first round of the game everyone stayed. There was almost a hundred
dollars in the pot. Cy O’Malley raised, Bemrose called, and Cy put down
three ten spots. Arthur beat him with four kings and hauled in the
chips, a wedding present from the boys. The next hand was deuces wild,
and Bemrose drew two deuces. He was four hundred bucks ahead in a half
hour, a run of luck that happened once in a year of Saturday nights.
Ordinarily someone would have wisecracked, “What’s the matter? Your
love life sour?”; tonight the boys were very careful. Very, very
careful.
With the third beer, Tremont Friendly, punctilious Terry who answered
every letter and remembered every birthday and the only one likely to
be hurt because Bemrose hadn’t invited the rest of them to the wedding,
decided to do the right thing. He cleared his throat, and precisely
raised his glass. “A toast to Arthur’s wife, boys,” he said. “To Mrs.
Bemrose’s health.” Self-consciously he pointed the glass at Arthur.
Bemrose grunted his thanks, put down his beer without drinking, and
shuffled the cards for the next round.
Terry looked as though he had been slapped.
This furtiveness of Bemrose’s was a little silly, Larry decided, even
if he had married late in life and wanted to appear matter-of-fact
about it. A man couldn’t hide a new wife in his vest pocket, because he
felt ill at ease as a husband.
“Give Lucy my love,” Larry said easily. “When you came in, I was
telling the boys about her. By the way, how is she these days? I know
she’s beautiful, but otherwise----”
“Not so well.” Bemrose sponged his neck with a paper napkin.
“The hot weather?” Larry asked.
“I don’t know. Not feeling well.” His tone said to forget about it and
go on with the game.
A companionable murmur circled the table. “Too bad.” “It’s a helluva
summer to be in town.”
Larry could tell that something was cooking with Cy. They called him
total-recall O’Malley. He had a deceptive baby roundness--turned-up
nose, second chin, football shoulders and talky blue eyes. If he
telephoned to ask someone for lunch, Cy sometimes gabbed for an hour,
then made the lunch date anyway and gabbed some more.
“Did you hear what happened to Danny?” Cy asked. “A drunk came in the
other day with a live lobster and handed it across the bar, told Danny
it was a present for him. You know Danny. He’s polite; so he says,
‘Thanks, I’ll take him home to dinner.’ This drunk shakes his head and
says, ‘Naw, he’s had dinner, take him to the movies.’”
The joke wasn’t that funny, but it broke the tension, and the small,
hot room went up in a roar. Chuck Adams grabbed his ankle, Hagerty
delightedly shook hands with himself, and Paul Schmid put a hand on
Bemrose’s arm. The releasing laughter, which seemed louder because
Bemrose had kept them bottled up, rolled through Danny’s sagging door
and down the rickety stairs.
There was a sudden conscious silence while the sound blew out like
radio tubes. Bemrose turned on Cy without a word and his look was the
closest thing to a right hook that Larry had ever seen.
The game broke up, and Larry left Bemrose waiting at the curb for a
taxi. Larry didn’t even bother to offer to hang around and have a drink
with him.
He had started down the street in his shirtsleeves, his coat
uncomfortably weighing on his arm, when someone called to him, and
there was Arthur H. in person.
“Have a heart. It’s no night for a track meet,” Bemrose complained.
They headed for Larry’s apartment. Bemrose was puffing and the sweat
ran in rivers down his face.
“What have you been doing?” he asked amiably.
“Not a helluva lot,” Larry said. “I looked for you at that Red Cross
dinner last week, the one at the Starlight Roof. I thought you usually
went.”
“Shore always invited me,” Bemrose explained. “This year I took
tickets, but he didn’t say anything about sitting with him. I didn’t
want to go alone if he were there with a big party.”
“He must have figured you were on your honeymoon,” Larry said. “That’s
what I figured when I didn’t hear from you.”
“I would have called and asked you up to the house, but we’re
redecorating,” Arthur apologized. “Tonight is the first time in weeks
I’ve been out. We haven’t seen a soul.”
“Don’t let it worry you,” Larry said. “Too hot anyway to see people.”
He stuffed a damp handkerchief into his back pocket.
They had reached the denuded canopy frame in front of the apartment
house where Larry lived. He and Bessie had been trying to get Bemrose
down for fifteen years, but this was the first time he made it as far
as the door. “Come on up. Bessie’s in Woodmere at her father’s place,”
Larry urged.
Bemrose nodded and followed him. Upstairs he inventoried the room.
“Nice place,” he said, walking around, and pausing in front of the
Soyer. “That’s a powerful painting you have there.”
Larry raised the blinds and opened the front door to get some cross
ventilation. He brought two bottles of beer from the kitchen.
“Have you heard anything from Janice Baldwin?” Bemrose asked casually.
Too casually.
“Not a word.”
“The internal revenue man was in about a tax matter she turned over
to me,” Bemrose said. “It’ll have to wait.” He drank the foam off his
beer. “I suppose you have her address----”
“No, but _Everett’s_ must have it.”
“Split another with me?” Bemrose pointed to the remaining bottle of
beer which was on the tray. “Never mind about Janice. She’ll turn up.”
He left the room to wash, and when he came back, picked up a rose
quartz ash tray from the table and traced the uneven edge with his
finger. “I suppose she’s on her way home,” Bemrose said. “She must have
seen everything there is to see in Sweden. It’s been more than two
months.”
“Maybe she stopped in England,” Larry suggested. “She might be trying
to get to the Continent.”
“Oh, she wouldn’t do that,” Arthur said quickly. “That’s too risky.”
There were risks and risks, Larry couldn’t help thinking. There was the
risk of seeing Bemrose again. It might be a chance that Janice didn’t
dare take at the moment.
“How would you like to come down to my office and give me a hand?”
Bemrose asked. “I mean on a permanent basis.”
He must be having a brainstorm: Larry hadn’t thought seriously of being
in an office with Bemrose since college.