Bemrose’s negotiations for the transfer of Miami hotels, stores, and
restaurants to the Army. Colonel Bemrose knew how to handle the press
and the townspeople, Lowell said. Hard feelings had been avoided, and
the deals went through on the split second. No officer had contributed
more to the smooth running of the school. In a few months Bemrose had
chalked up a record that many a regular Army man would envy. Larry
figured the colonel was West Point.
He told Larry that they still had plenty of headaches. They had the
problem of putting older men, the civilian experts, in top-notch
physical condition. It meant hardening them up, taking off fat,
teaching personal hygiene, even giving them a voice training course so
that they learned to sound like officers. Not only the men, but their
women made trouble. They ran down here, hysterical, and hung on like
leeches when the men needed the time for study. If they could drown the
women, it would increase the efficiency of the school. Colonel Lowell
nailed Larry with his intensity. He explained that he had counted on
Bemrose to help him solve some of the problems. It was bad luck, having
him crack at this time when things were beginning to get under way. He
couldn’t understand how Bemrose had passed his physical. He must have
been stringing along on low energy for years. A man doesn’t crack up
from overwork unless his resistance is down to start with.
Larry began to feel guilty under the colonel’s accusations. “I haven’t
seen him yet. I wanted to talk to you,” he broke in.
The colonel’s small bright eyes turned solemn. “You won’t like what you
see. It isn’t a pretty sight.”
“I wondered if his retirement could be postponed.” Larry suggested.
“He’s heart and soul in this thing. Maybe he’ll recover. Maybe in
another few weeks--” He fumbled aimlessly in his coat pockets. “It
means everything to Bemrose, being in it. If he thinks that he’s washed
up-- It’s hard to say what effect it would have on a man like that to
think he might be useless.”
“He can return to his law practice,” Lowell said.
“Right now the War is the only thing that interests him,” Larry
explained. “He’s a one-tracked person. When he used to be busy with the
law, that was the beginning and the end of everything.”
Lowell rapped his desk sharply. “I’d like to keep him. God knows I can
use him! I haven’t the say. The medical officer----”
“Major Graystone?”
Lowell dismissed him by rising and extending his hand. “Damned fine
record. Damned shame he cracked. The general was going to put him in
for full colonel. Get in touch with me when you get home with him. Let
me know how he stood the trip.”
The colonel’s clipped sentences stung in Larry’s ear as he rode into
Miami on the bus, crossing the causeway behind a line of Army trucks
past the leaden tankers in the bay. The man next to him pointed to a
shipyard across the water and said it was working full tilt on mosquito
boats for the Navy. A British cruiser lay at anchor next to a converted
pleasure yacht, renamed War Emergency II. There were plenty of tankers
and freighters down here, the man explained to Larry. You saw them come
into the harbor almost every night, escorted by subchasers. Sometimes
when there was a flash at sea, you couldn’t tell whether it was
lightning or gunfire. Chances are, though, it was gunfire. The other
morning some wreckage had been found on a hotel beach. It probably
came from a ship that was torpedoed. The man had seen columns of fire
several hundred feet high out at sea. He described them with his hands.
No question about it, they came from torpedoed tankers.
Across the street the man pointed to a sign in front of a hotel that
had been taken over: “Civilians keep out!”
They rode through a noisy business section of the city. “This is Jew
Town,” he told Larry in the disinterested voice of a tourist guide.
In the seat behind two women gossiped. “We’ll never be able to handle
them after the War. Not after their families stand out on the parade
ground Sundays and see ’em drillin’ with white troops. They got the
notion already they’re equal.”
As the women’s shrill voices ripped on, the dazzling white buildings
that lined the thoroughfare seemed to turn a dirty yellow. Larry
decided that the prejudices of the townspeople were something the Army
hadn’t been able to take over.
He got off the bus, found a Western Union office, and wired Lucy to
open the house and have it ready for their return. He waited at a dingy
intersection for the light to change and realized that he needn’t have
come miles out of his way to send the telegram. His hotel would have
transmitted it. Then he remembered that he hadn’t eaten since an early
breakfast on the train, and stopped at a delicatessen restaurant.
He ordered a tongue omelette, but decided he wasn’t hungry when the
waiter put it in front of him. Swallowing some weak coffee from a
lipstick-marked cup, he got up to pay his check.
A lanky form was draped over the cashier’s desk. Larry recognized
the sandy head and ugly yellow tweeds and laid a timid hand on Steve
Holmes’ shoulder, not sure that the rough, awkward frame would be there
the next minute.
“Oh, hullo!” Steve’s red face came to life, and his big head indicated
the swinging door. “Let’s get out of this pig pen.”
They walked toward the lavish, streamlined shops of Lincoln Road. Steve
told Larry he was down on a job for _Everett’s_. They had assigned
him to do oil paintings of the commanding general and of a Navy man.
If Jimmie Doolittle showed up, Steve was going to try and do him on
his own. He had always liked that tough little so-and-so. He got the
assignment because Janice had introduced him to the art editor of the
magazine. It was a swell break. There was healthy money in the work.
Larry listened halfway, and refused Steve’s offer of a drink.
“Still worried about that guy?” Steve’s head twisted sharply toward him.
“This time there’s really something to worry about.”
Larry reported his talk with the medical officer, and Holmes
accelerated his gait. Larry, trotting beside him in the pure white heat
of early afternoon, felt a salty swamp collect inside his belt.
“Jesuschris’, that’s lousy.” Holmes’ bony shoulders lunged forward.
“Have you seen him?”
“I’m on my way up there.” Larry grabbed Steve’s arm. “Say, won’t
you----”
“I’d just as soon skip it for now.” Holmes slowed down. “Maybe in a day
or so if you say it’s okay. Want me to walk you up?” he offered.
“Do you think I should phone Janice and let her know?” Larry asked. She
could drop whatever she was doing and come down. If anyone would make
Arthur feel better, she would: They could tell him that _Everett’s_ had
sent her down to write the captions for Steve’s paintings.
“Phone her?” Steve looked at him. “She’s on her way to China. She left
San Francisco Friday.”
“That’s the second lousy break,” Larry said.
“The third.” Steve pulled at his bulky knitted tie, the red one he had
worn at Arthur’s reception. “She turned me down again, and she meant it
this time.”
Larry looked his sympathy.
“We got drunk one night, and she told me she was still in love with
him,” Steve said. “It kills her that he married that girl. It kills
her, and it gives her hope. She doesn’t see how it can last.”
“Why didn’t she stick around then?” Larry asked.
“The Air Force ordered the story on China and got her a top priority.”
“Did you think she was going to accept you on the rebound?”
Steve pocketed his thick knuckles. “I guess I thought so, but it’s no
use. She’s got him in her protoplasm. Part of her is marked ‘Bemrose.’”
“Now that he’s sick she might give up the idea of having him,” Larry
said. “It looks as if his marriage will have to last now, whether or
not----”
“Might as well try to take an acorn away from a squirrel when he has
his teeth fixed sharp in it,” Steve predicted. “She’s not giving up.”
“He might be a cripple the rest of his life.”
“Won’t faze her. Not Janice. She’ll hang on harder. That’s the kind of
suffering she enjoys. You’ll see. She’ll prove she wasn’t wrong about
him, and she’ll prove to him that she can take it. I think she’s crazy,
but--” Steve shrugged.
They were around the corner from the hospital. “Sure you won’t come up
with me?” Larry asked.
“There are a couple of girls at the hotel who look as if they’d eat
dinner. I’m going to call for them. Join us later,” Steve offered.
Larry refused for the evening, but promised to give Steve a ring the
next day and jotted down the number of the hotel. He watched Steve’s
clumsy frame disappear along the crisp, sun-baked thoroughfare, sorry
for Holmes, for Janice, for himself, but sorriest of all for Bemrose.
Following the walk kept immaculate by the Army, he reached wearily for
the cool glass door of H building, hoping when he saw Arthur that he’d
remember what Major Graystone had told him and be able to act as if he
didn’t notice anything was wrong.
_Chapter 16_
Three weeks later Larry wheeled Arthur onto the train for New York.
From his seat in a drawing room, Arthur pointed to the group of
resplendent new second lieutenants who waited, lean and bronzed, on the
station platform. “See that look they have,” he said. “They’re so--” He
halted as the speech mechanism slowed down. “Alive,” he continued.
“They’re swell kids. I hope the tough going over there won’t knock it
out of them.”
“They’ll win the war first.” Arthur’s right hand shook as he tried to
manipulate the wheel on a cigarette lighter.
“Here, let me do that.” Larry took it from him and held the flame close
to the tip of Arthur’s cigarette. “What about the older men? Are they
hopped up, too?”
“They know the score. They’re pretty--” Again he faltered. “Grim.”
“The young ones will be grim when they come back,” Larry said, as the
train moved out of the station and headed north along the coast. “You
can’t expect them to keep that shiny, eager look they have now.”
“Those kids know the score already. They’re the greatest bunch of
realists the country’s ever produced,” Bemrose said earnestly, carried
along in unbroken phrases by his conviction. “I’ve got to get back to
them, Larry,” he said. “There’s work to be done, and no time to do it.”
“You’ll be okay, fella. Give yourself a chance.”
So Bemrose expected to return to service. Larry had tried to unwind the
red tape for him the past three weeks, and it had seemed interminable,
in spite of Major Graystone’s efforts to expedite action by the
Retirement Board. Graystone appeared first before the Disposition
Board which notified the commanding general and recommended Bemrose
for retirement. Then the Retirement Board, a group of nine men, five
of whom were doctors, met at a general hospital and determined that
he should be retired rather than returned to duty or given limited
service. Their recommendation went to the War Department in Washington
which finally sent orders for his retirement. Even if Bemrose someday
seemed equal to the job physically, Larry realized he would have to
go all through this procedure again. But his recovery was doubtful.
Graystone had insisted that he wouldn’t see service again in this war.
“What do you hear from Bessie?” Arthur shifted his awkward legs toward
the window by taking hold of his knees and directing them.
Larry had made it a point during these weeks not to talk to Bemrose
about home. He kept in touch with Lucy by telephone but didn’t repeat
their conversations to Arthur. He avoided mentioning his own affairs
because he didn’t want him to think or worry about what was ahead--the
house, Lucy, or the problem of reopening his office.
“Bessie’s fine. She’s glad I’m having a spring vacation for a change.
It’s the first one I’ve ever taken.”
Bemrose’s hand shook as it reached toward him. “I want you to know I’m
grateful you came down.” He paused, waiting for the words to steady
themselves. “You helped save my life.”
As Larry watched the overbright green of the Florida spring weave past
the train window, he realized there never had been an occasion until
now for Bemrose to thank him. Thank him or anyone. It was the first
time he had needed a favor, unless Larry counted the attempt some
months ago to persuade him to join the office. Larry wondered if Arthur
were going to ask him again to wind up his practice and come in with
him.
“That’s the first time I’ve thanked you for anything,” Bemrose said.
“It’s the first time I thanked you, and you’ve been doing things for
me most of my life. I never got the habit of thanking people.” Bemrose
let his disturbed hand finish the sentence. “I always expected everyone
else to thank me.”
“Most of the time you gave them reason to thank you,” Larry said.
“You can’t thank someone for pulling out the best inside of you. I
can’t thank you----”
“Skip it,” Larry said.
“I can’t thank you for making believe you didn’t find anything but the
best when you reached in.” He sounded as if he were presenting a case
objectively in arbitration.
Arthur turned his head, and softly addressed the somnolent grasses.
“_Who restores and comforts me._” His voice was rhythmic quiet.
“I looked a long time at the white ceiling of that hospital,” Arthur
said. “I figured out a few things.”
He traced the metal catch on the train window and studied the grime on
his finger.
“Did Professor Storey go in?” he asked abruptly.
“I heard he was doing some special research for the Army,” Larry said.
“I don’t think they gave him a commission, but there won’t be much
teaching at the University this year. He’s using his laboratory for the
Army project.”
Arthur nodded approval. “The Air Force can use him. There are problems
concerning light, the question of blackouts.”
“I think he’s working on that.”
“The blackout thing in Miami wasn’t licked,” Arthur said. “We had the
boys study in an inside hall at night so they wouldn’t turn on the
lights in their rooms. Someone was always breaking the rules. We never
knew whether that had much to do with it, but plenty of tankers were
torpedoed right off the coast.”
“At the hotel the guests put card tables up in the hall because they
couldn’t play in their rooms,” Larry said. “It was damned funny. You’d
see a couple of codgers hunched under a bridge lamp in a narrow hall
squinting at the aces. One night in Miami I tripped over a pair of
pinochle players set up for business right outside the door of my room.”
“What about Judd Harrison? Did he--” Bemrose had trouble talking again.
“Go in?” Larry prompted. “I don’t think so. Not the last I heard.”
Arthur fussed with his legs. “Remind me, I’ll talk to him. They need
Judd.”
Larry told him about running into Steve Holmes the first day he was in
Miami, and about Steve’s job--the break it was for him to get work from
_Everett’s_ and how glad he was for a chance to see Miami during the
War. Steve had wanted to come and visit him at the hospital, only he
was assigned to go to Key West and paint the portrait of an admiral.
They talked in circles about Steve. They talked about everything but
Janice.
Finally Bemrose wanted to know whether Steve ever saw her, and as he
asked, the old tic returned.
“He did before she left.”
“Then she--?” Impatient lines tugged at Arthur’s forehead.
“China.”
“That’s good. She’ll do a swell job,” Bemrose said. “They need her
to put dynamite under the boys in Washington.” His fingers slipped
unsteadily among the coarse strands of his mustache. “The right kind of
stories will help do it. I’d like to have a look at that war out there
myself,” he added wistfully.
“Steve asked her to marry him, and she turned him down.”
“Too bad, he’s a helluva fine fellow. She won’t do better than Steve.”
Bemrose looked concerned.
“You said once he didn’t have a chance with her.”
Arthur shrugged. “That’s when I wanted her myself. I used to think she
could make me into a great guy. That she could and was holding back.”
“You didn’t exactly need her for that,” Larry said.
“I thought I did.”
“She might have been afraid you’d take advantage of her when she
finished building you up,” Larry said. “The new, inflated you.”
“She might have been right,” Arthur agreed. “I never understood what I
wanted from her and wasn’t getting. It came to me one afternoon when
I was staring at the blank white space over my bed at the hospital. I
wanted someone to tell me I was a great guy, every hour on the hour. Or
look it if the words didn’t come out. She was too smart to settle for
that,” he said.
“Before she went to China she wanted to come and see you. Steve said
so.” Larry rang for a porter. He needed a drink.
“It would have been good to see her.” Arthur’s tone was calm, quiet.
His sincerity seemed as unspotted as the white square that formed a
headrest on the seat behind him. With or without steady limbs, with
Janice or alone, Larry knew that he was in good shape inside.
Larry kicked at the suitcase under the opposite seat. “Look, try to
take it easy when you get back. You’ll have to help Lucy. At first it
may be a shock. Just the first few days----”
“These, you mean?” He pointed to the crutches.
“She’s prepared for them, but you’ll have to give her a chance to get
used to-- You’ve always been so independent.”
“I’m--” The word stuck, and wouldn’t come. “Relaxed,” he said finally,
rearranging his legs. “She won’t have to worry.”
Things went smoothly at Penn Station the next morning. The conductor
had wired New York for a wheelchair to meet them, and a special
attendant who was waiting on the platform in response to the telegram,
seemed to know how to handle Arthur. He helped him into the chair, and
later into a cab. The taxi driver was okay, too, and got right into the
spirit of things. At the door of the house on Eighty-second Street Lucy
watched, pale and quiet, and the cabbie stayed close by, supporting
Bemrose into the hall and up the carpeted steps to the second floor.
There was a bad moment at about the fifth or sixth step when Arthur
lost his purchase and grabbed the railing. Figuring that Bemrose would
manage better alone Larry shoved some bills into the driver’s hand and
dismissed him. Arthur made it quite easily to the landing with only
slight support from Larry.
Upstairs in the sitting room, sunshine crowded through the white mesh
of curtains. A bowl of pink roses, bedded fern in a miniature glass
bowl, brightened the coffee table.
“Well, this is pleasant.” Arthur smiled at Lucy, and his face resumed
its old easy contour. He indicated the flowers. “They’re like the
wallpaper you wanted for the bedroom last year,” he said.
“Are you tired from the trip? Shall I turn down your bed?” She leaned
over him.
“I’d like a cup of tea,” he said. “Those stripes in the bedroom were a
mistake. We should have had roses,” he admitted.
* * * * *
Later that day Larry told Bess that it wasn’t easy to see a strong man
like Arthur Bemrose unbend. If Bess could have heard him on the train,
trying to say thank you-- It made Larry feel like a heel to have him
grateful. What was there for him to be so goddam grateful about? What
had he done? Sit in the hospital with him? Bring him back to New York?
Anyone would have helped a friend who was in the shape that Bemrose was.
Bessie refused to be upset over his illness. “You’ll see, Larry. It
will do him good to know what trouble is. He had things easy for too
long,” she insisted.
“You talk like all he had now was the measles,” Larry said, somewhat
put out by her callousness. “This illness isn’t something he’ll get
over in a few weeks.”
“He needed some real trouble,” Bessie repeated. “You watch, he’ll get
along better with his wife after this.”
“But he can’t control his legs. His hands shake when he goes to light a
cigarette,” Larry explained.
She poured him a fresh drink, and as he watched her plumply sensuous
fingers around the glass, he remembered it was weeks that he had been
missing her. Steve Holmes could have his girls in Florida. All he had
wanted and had missed down there was Bessie.
“If he goes back into practice, why don’t you take that job he offered
you a long time ago?” She splashed whiskey generously over the ice
cubes. “You’d be able to help him get back on his feet, and it might
not be so bad for you this time. He sounds much nicer than he used to
be, not like such a boss.”
If not for Bemrose’s illness, it might have ended by his hating him,
Larry realized. The process had already begun before Bemrose left for
the Army. Larry couldn’t keep on accepting favors from him and not
rebel eventually against the indebtedness. Now that he was able to do
something for Arthur, now that it was two-way, he ought to be able to
live around him again.
“Go on, help him out at the office,” Bessie urged.
Larry walked over to her and flattened a round curl against her cheek.
“We’ll decide that later,” he said. “Right now I have other things on
my mind.”
She pressed her lips unaggressively on his. “Were the meals on the
train any good, Larry?”
_Chapter 17_
One June afternoon Bemrose stood on his crutches in front of the
doctor’s office waiting for Larry to hail a cab at the corner. The
dust of Eighty-third Street, gold in the five o’clock sun, touched
the pavement with the light, speech, and feel of full summer. Across
Madison Avenue the weathered brick of an old building glowed warm
and solid behind swaying, languorous sycamores. No change of weather
threatened. Summer had floated into the city, settled quietly, and was
prepared to stay.
The doorman where Arthur’s doctor had an office must have left the
front entrance to get a cup of coffee. The block seemed under lock and
key. Bits of paper lay motionless in the street, and the windows of the
apartments above sheered off empty and sightless. Larry started toward
Madison Avenue for a cab when a pleasant older woman came out of the
house, and finding no doorman, chatted with Bemrose. She called after
Larry to get another cab for her if he could find one.
He gestured and whistled until a decrepit vehicle pulled up to the
curb. Jumping on the runningboard, he directed the driver to Arthur
who was shifting uncomfortably on his crutches, tired from the long
wait and the strain of seeing the doctor. Larry offered the cab to
the woman, but she assured him that she was in no hurry. He started
to protest when Arthur thanked her and hobbled toward the taxi. A few
months ago he probably wouldn’t have accepted such a favor, but now he
didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He was soon chatting easily
with the cab driver.
Larry noticed that Arthur went out of his way these days to
make friends with people who performed the anonymous minor
services--waiters, doormen, elevator operators, telephone girls and
newsdealers. At a restaurant yesterday he soothed a belligerent waiter
by asking whether he had ever made goulash and if, in his opinion,
the sauce of the establishment’s product, which Arthur had ordered
for lunch, were the right color. The waiter, a Hungarian, transferred
the remaining beef cubes to Arthur’s plate, and spooning the sauce
expertly, solemnly pronounced that real goulash should be a darker
brown. He urged him to come back the next day when _sauerbraten_, the
house special, would be served with _spaetzle_ and a sauce he could
underwrite.
More people seemed to tell Bemrose their troubles now, probably
figuring that a man on crutches knew about trouble and would
understand. The cab driver was unloading his grievances against the
Mayor, railing against the new traffic regulations and clarifying what
the Mayor, in his opinion, could do to himself. He passed a soiled
piece of paper to them through the lowered glass partition, and Larry
saw it was a ticket for speeding.
Bemrose invited the driver to call him about the ticket in the morning,
and asked Larry to write out the office phone number for the man whose
name, according to a card facing them, was McGuinn. Before many more
red lights his new client was offering Arthur a divorce case, something
Haynes and Bemrose never touched, even when it meant alienating good
clients of the firm. In the month since Larry had gone to work for
Bemrose as his office manager, Arthur had insisted on referring three
divorce actions, which involved good clients, to less fastidious
colleagues, unwilling to mar the Haynes tradition of never handling
a domestic matter. But now he seemed interested in the cab driver’s
difficulties.
“I’m having trouble-trouble with my wife,” the man explained, taking
sulky jerks at his steering wheel. “They say it’s tough-tough to get a
divorce in New York the way things-things is bolixed up.”
“What’s the matter with your wife?” Arthur asked. The fellow’s
double-jointed stutter had the effect of unlimbering his own speech.