price?” Larry asked. “Without performing any services?”
“I’m very useful, I watch the house,” Arthur protested. “Most of the
Georgetown police have been drafted. Someone has to keep an eye on the
house for her.”
“She always dressed well, but now she’s pretty,” Larry nodded toward
Janice. “You’re therapeutic.”
Arthur sobered. “Contented. It’s almost the first time the little man
inside hasn’t been sticking pitchforks in me, pulling and pushing me
out of shape.”
“Maybe it’s Janice. She’s happy you’re here, and she’s making a big
effort----”
“Other people have put themselves out,” Arthur reminded him.
“Maybe the life and the people down here suit you more,” Larry said.
“I’ve always been scared of people.”
Larry mocked. “You? Why you self-possessed bastard----”
Arthur’s voice was calm and insistent. “It’s the first time in my life
I’ve really felt at home with people.”
“Maybe it’s because they’re more your kind than--well, Ed and Marge,”
Larry speculated.
“Nothing wrong with Ed and Marge,” Bemrose insisted. “Trouble was with
me.”
Janice brought over Judd Harrison. He asked Arthur his opinion of the
Japs and their chances of jockeying a negotiated peace.
While he and Bemrose discussed the problem, Janice urged Larry to stay
overnight. “We’ll fix supper, just the three of us,” she promised.
“Bessie expects me home.”
“Just this once. When I’m happy,” she pleaded. The blood-red fingertips
crept along his collar. “You’ve almost always seen me at my worst,
Larry. Yes, you have. I’d like you to be around once when I’m----”
On the way upstairs to phone Bessie, Larry stopped to read the
inscriptions on some photographs which lined the wall--the picture of
a Chinese General whose name was elaborated in characters as ornate as
his medals, Janice in Paris with De Gaulle, Janice with Jimmy Doolittle
and Queen Elizabeth on an English airdrome, Janice in Honolulu at a USO
show surrounded by G.I.’s, and an old one of Janice in a cloth coat
down to the ankles on her way home from China.
In her bedroom Larry fingered the candlewick spread before deciding to
sit on the bed. The room was unpretentious, bright with rag rugs and
chintz, and the polished pine floorboards gleamed warmly. Larry settled
down and relaxed against a sturdy bedpost.
Bessie’s voice rang sweetly in his ear. “Having a good time, Larry? Is
it snowing? There’s a blizzard here.”
But Janice’s heels clattered across the wooden doorsill, and she
grabbed the phone from him. “He’ll call you back,” she told Bessie.
“There’s been an accident----”
As she dialed, Larry pictured Bemrose sprawled on the floor downstairs.
“For God’s sake, Janice!”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “Henry Chu, Chinese Embassy. Heart
attack.”
She gave the doctor crisp directions.
“Call Bessie back right away. She’ll be worried,” Janice insisted when
Larry offered to go downstairs with her. “There are three or four
doctors around, but they thought I ought to get his own physician. Poor
Henry, he’s green as a billiard table.”
Bessie also thought it was Arthur, of course. “You can tell me the
truth,” she insisted, still skeptical when Larry tried to reassure her.
“If you want me to call up his wife----”
Larry finally straightened her out. “Arthur is really in good shape.
He’s having the time of his life down here. You should see him, Bess.
He’s in his element.”
“That’s lovely, Larry. You stay over and have a good time. Did you take
your overshoes with you?”
Before he went downstairs, Larry tried to find a mystery he could read
tonight in bed. Janice had shelves of every thriller from Gaboriau
to Erle Stanley Gardner. He selected _The Golden Violet_ by Joseph
Shearing and put it on a table in Bemrose’s room.
If only it would last with Bemrose--if he could have just a year of
this, he’d be set up.
In the study downstairs Henry Chu’s eyelids fluttered weakly, and
Janice held a glass of whiskey for him to sip. He was birdlike,
frightened, and too young to have a heart attack. The other guests
had disappeared into the drawing room, and Henry Chu’s doctor was
explaining the history and symptoms of the case not to Henry, not to
Janice nor to Larry, not to the doctors who were in the next room, nor
to Caroline who was a patient of his and had waited outside to see if
she could help, but meticulously and earnestly to Bemrose.
_Chapter 25_
For all Bessie’s foreboding of a blizzard, the noise of gossiping birds
awakened Larry the next morning. He threw up the loose frame window
and let in the spring air. The worn stone steps of a house across the
street sagged gracefully in the early light, and a lilac bush was
putting out rows of buds prematurely. Except for the birds it was quiet
in the narrow, shaded street, and the uneven brick of the old houses,
painted dull red or white, recalled the lost leisure of another age.
Only a few minutes away the Pentagon’s network of ramps confounded
visitors, and short-tempered lines a block long waited for rooms at the
Statler, but in this ancient settlement where Gilbert Stuart once had
an art studio, where Francis Scott Key lived and John Howard Payne was
buried, Larry felt a village peace.
He had breakfast downstairs with Arthur and Janice. After they had
loafed through the _New York Times_ and two cups of coffee apiece,
Janice asked about their plans for the day. “I have to finish a
piece that’s overdue,” she explained. “Why don’t you make some nice
arrangements, and if you feel like coming back around four, I’d love
to fix you an early tea.” She looked crisply iced in a chartreuse
housecoat.
Bemrose fumbled in the pocket of his old bathrobe and produced a card.
“How far is Thirty-first and L?” he asked. “Walk over there with me,
will you, Larry? If it’s not too far?”
Janice studied the address. “I think that neighborhood is colored.”
“It’s where the Old Man lived fifty years ago, when he was down here as
law secretary to----”
“A Supreme Court judge, wasn’t it?” Janice assisted. “I can’t place
the house. It may _not_ be colored. The neighborhood is mixed now, and
there’s really no way of knowing.”
“It’s only four or five blocks from here. Do you mind taking me over,
Larry?”
“Sure, let’s go. It’s a swell day to get out.”
“The car keys are in the hall table drawer. I’ll get them--” Janice
started for the door. “Will you mail my article for me in New York
tonight, Larry? It’ll save a day in getting there, and I’ll appreciate
it.”
But Arthur motioned her to come back. “Don’t bother with the car keys.
I’d like to go to this place on foot. It’s a kind of pilgrimage,” he
explained. “There are some things I’ve been meaning to straighten out
with the Judge.”
The sidewalks sagged like the doorsteps, and Bemrose stopped to rest
against one of the Lombardy poplars which lined the street. He was
wound up and wanted to talk about the Judge. “The Old Man put his faith
in the single brilliant mind working independently,” Bemrose recalled.
“He shied away from mass solutions.”
“It might help explain why he opposed labor unions,” Larry said. “Do
you remember the letter he wrote to his friend Didier, where he sneered
at the so-called common man? It always made me gag, that letter. The
Old Man was a Back Bay snob, but modern Back Bay, not the old Boston.
The roughnecks who spilled tea in the harbor were okay. They had guts,
all right. By the time their blood was passed down to the Haynes family
some of the democracy was filtered out.”
“I used to worry about that letter, too,” Arthur admitted. “He probably
didn’t mean it, but he was obsessed with the need for being different
from the herd. He believed in a man exaggerating his differences. He
always found for the minority.”
“A minority of one,” Larry added. “Haynes in agreement with Haynes.”
“He wanted me to develop along his own individualistic lines, and that
was a fallacy.” Arthur paused. “I might be fashioned in his image and
still only turn out to be a faint carbon copy, without the Old Man’s
vitality. I could pick up the mannerisms, follow the rules, and still
only be a watered down edition of him, the way those Back Bay customers
can’t begin to touch Sam Adams. Let’s say I did turn out to be a
reasonably good imitation of Haynes--without the Old Man’s wisdom, of
course. The point is, I wouldn’t be Bemrose.”
Arthur pointed to a hedge across the street. “Lovely box.”
They waited at the intersection before he attempted to swing across the
broken curbstone. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never happy
functioning alone. For all my eccentricities, I’m not a lone wolf.
When the War came along and I did that job on Lend-Lease, the Old Man’s
notions about my being a solitary worker seemed to go down the hatch.
I made what, for me, was a big discovery. I was more of a group man.
I had a kind of aptitude for working with people. Before, when I was
going it alone, well-- I really wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. Not
nearly as much as I thought, anyway.”
Arthur paused again to rest. “What goes on in private practice?
We worry whether A or B will collect the money, or hang on to his
franchise. But how many people except A or B and their families give
a damn? I can’t seem to get as worked up about A and B’s problems any
more. I was fairly happy working on Lend-Lease, pretty contented in the
Army, and I’m having a good time down here working for Tom. I think
it’s because the work in Washington and the work in the Army involved
doing something for more than one or two guys and their bank accounts.
Maybe I’m just kidding myself, of course, but a war seems to indicate
we ought to do more. The individual seems to be most useful when he
is part of something bigger. Alone, very often, unless he’s another
Robinson Crusoe, he can’t even survive. And unbombed islands are fairly
scarce today.”
Arthur looked up at the clouds that lay curled and frozen in the
gray-blue sky. “I suppose I should have my sights up there,” he said.
“But at heart--I might as well face it, Larry--I’m probably a goddam
piston.”
After a few minutes he said, “Do you remember the number of that house?”
Larry walked on ahead to investigate. He saw it was the faded yellow
house, third from the corner.
“The Old Man wouldn’t have wanted you to go on pulling and pushing
yourself out of shape,” Larry assured him when he returned, noting the
sweat on Arthur’s chin and forehead. “You’re not trying to be like him,
and that’s what he believed in. You’re being yourself. I think that’s
all the Old Man ever wanted.”
Arthur laughed. “Not the Old Man. I’m afraid he would call it a
decadent philosophy--losing identity in the crowd, becoming _like_
other men, agreeing with the opinions of others, working _with_ them
instead of apart from them----”
“He’d understand you have to work it out your own way,” Larry insisted.
“Do you want to go inside the house? Supposing the people who live
here----”
It was the Negro section, as Janice had guessed. The old boards of the
steps were whittled and grayed, and a broken rocker from last summer
tilted face down against the porch rail. In the yard alongside the
house, a boy and girl in red sweaters stared at them. Larry rang the
rusty bell, and a woman of around twenty-five opened the door.
Arthur took off his hat. “I wonder if it would be possible to see the
room at the head of the stairs to the left.”
“That’s our room and it’s not for rent.” She talked briskly, like a
Northerner. “My husband and I have been living here two years and
expect to stay.”
“I don’t want to rent it.” Bemrose’s tone was persuasively low, the
voice he used for juries. “If it won’t inconvenience you, I’d like to
look at the room.”
“The bed hasn’t been made. I just got back from church a few moments
ago. I was going to fix some coffee for breakfast,” she added
grudgingly.
“Perhaps if it wouldn’t disturb your family----”
“There’s only my husband and myself. He’s working in the garden.”
“A friend of mine used to live in your room,” Bemrose explained.
“He’s dead now, but I remember him talking about the house and the
neighborhood. In his time there were ships in the Potomac and the
wharves were stacked with sugar and molasses----”
“That’s interesting about the River. My grandmother used to live down
there at the water. I guess it’ll be all right for you to come up,” she
relented. “The stairs are steep.” She looked dubiously at his crutches.
“You wait down here anyway while I tidy the room.”
The stiffly furnished sitting room had a handwinding gramophone and
a wicker fern stand painted green. Larry sat in a wooden rocker with
stamped carving on a seat pad of flowered cotton. Arthur, exhausted
from the walk, relaxed in a tan velour armchair and rested his head
against a freshly starched antimacassar. A sepia print of a child
posing as Cupid, like one Larry remembered from his boyhood, was
framed in a heart-shaped mat. With its pink cotton draperies and lace
curtains, Larry figured that the room could have looked pretty much
like this in the Judge’s day.
The woman directed them upstairs while she stayed down to fix
breakfast. The soles of Bemrose’s shoes stuck to the corrugated matting
of the steep oak steps, and he steadied himself on the polished stair
rail. Upstairs in the small, sunny room there was only one chair; so
Arthur sat on the bed. He reached into his coat pocket for the Judge’s
letters and studied a faded sketch in one of them. “That’s where the
commode must have stood.” He pointed to the North wall. “His desk was
here at the window, and----”
“I wonder where he put the bed. Maybe just where they have it.” Larry
studied the crude drawing from over Arthur’s shoulder.
“No electricity, of course. He must have worked by kerosene lamp.”
“What do you figure this was? A book shelf?” Larry indicated a line on
one of the sketches.
“I imagine so. It must have been here, above the bed.” Arthur studied
the plaster. “They knocked it down and painted over the wall. Look.”
“Just a minute.” Larry ran his fingers over lumps in the plaster.
“Here, do you suppose?”
Arthur shrugged. “How could he stand it without heat in winter?”
“He probably used wood or kerosene.”
“It must have been a cold cubbyhole,” said Bemrose, shuddering.
“It’s warm today, and there’s no heat on.” Larry felt the radiator.
“This is still February.”
“It was cold and small and mean, but it didn’t prevent him from writing
that noble prose of his. They were better men in those days. I don’t
know how they did it.”
The woman appeared with two cups of coffee on a tray. “I thought you
might like some.”
“Why, that’s very kind of you.” Arthur reached for the coffee. “I hope
you don’t mind my sitting on your bed after you went to the trouble of
making it.”
A powerfully built Negro in a khaki windbreaker put his head through
the door. The woman introduced him as her husband. After chatting for a
few minutes Bemrose showed them the Judge’s sketches.
She had heard of Judge Haynes and wanted to know more about him.
Arthur described what he looked like. The Judge knew every inch of
Georgetown by seeing it on foot, Arthur explained. He could tell you
where all the well-known lawyers had lived--Gautt, Morsell, Durlop, the
Coxes, Ould, and Caperton. He loved books, he had written a series of
famous letters, and had been a distinguished lawyer before he sat on
the bench.
“I’ve often wondered--was he really a liberal?” the man wanted to know.
“His decisions made him look like a liberal,” Arthur qualified. “He
usually decided in favor of the fellow who was down, but in his heart
I don’t think he honestly believed that all men are free or equal. I
think he felt that they might have been born that way, but education
gave some a tremendous jump on others.”
“Wasn’t he right!” The man grinned. “We sure go along with him there,
don’t we, Martha?”
“We worked our way through Howard,” she explained.
“Specializing in anything?” Arthur asked.
“I took a major in statistics. I work at the Department of Commerce,”
the man volunteered. “Martha was a home economics major.”
“I have a job as assistant housekeeper at a medium-sized hotel.”
The Negro sat down heavily on the bed next to Bemrose. “Going to
college helps, but it’s a long way from being equal,” he said. “During
the War they’ll make exceptions and take anyone for the job, but wait
until peace breaks out-- We’ll be the first to go. That’s the way
it was during the Depression, and conditions haven’t changed. Not
fundamentally they haven’t.”
“We can’t let ourselves think that way,” Larry protested. “We’re trying
to put an end to that kind of discrimination. Isn’t that one of the
reasons we’re fighting? I don’t say we’re going to succeed. And of
course I’m biased. I have a personal stake in the outcome, like you
have. I make myself believe it’s going to get better.”
The man looked dubious. “I wish I could go along with you.”
“Have you a picture of Judge Haynes?” Martha asked.
Bemrose looked through his wallet. “I must have left it in another
billfold. I’ll write home for one. Would you like to have copies of
some of these letters?”
The man nodded. “We would appreciate it if you could spare them.”
“I’ll send them to you,” Arthur promised. He thanked the couple for the
visit and the coffee and got up to go. The man motioned Larry aside and
helped Bemrose with his powerful hands, almost lifting him down the
stairs on his broad palms.
“I gather you folks must have walked over. Would you like a taxi?” he
offered.
But Bemrose preferred to make it back to Janice’s on foot.
The couple waved goodbye to them from the front porch, and when Larry
turned around for a last look at the faded, yellow house, he saw the
man walk through the gate, probably back to his gardening.
After a silent few blocks Arthur said, “There was one of those letters
I wanted them to see, but they’d better read it themselves. When he
was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, the Judge wrote his family
from Washington. I’ll try to quote, ‘You don’t see much outward sign
of equality between colored and whites. If they are equal, as Jefferson
said, it must be a state of mind, and true equality a way of feeling
inside.’”
“More of them might have the feeling, if people treated them as you do.”
“Those two helped me get things straight a little,” Arthur said. “I’m
glad we found them living there.”
“Did you notice? You didn’t try to give them any advice, not even when
they began worrying about after the War,” Larry remarked.
“And I’m not looking for advice any more. Not even from him,” Arthur
said of the Old Man.
Larry nodded. “Seems to me you’ve straightened things out with him
pretty well. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve just about freed
yourself.”
Larry looked up at the clouds, which appeared whiter than usual because
the sky was such a deep blue, and noted that they moved impersonally
through the heavens.
_Chapter 26_
Lucy had gone back to her old job at the Green Network, and Larry
dropped around at her office to take her to tea a few days after he
returned to New York. It was a dirty February afternoon, too slushy to
look for a restaurant outside; so they went down to the drugstore in
the building. A woman who conducted a successful household program,
a radio comedian, and the M.C. of a quiz show occupied stools at the
fountain.
“They ought to bring the tourists here after they’ve been to
_Superman_,” Larry remarked. “They would find out more about radio than
in those glass cages they have for visitors upstairs.”
Lucy smiled indulgently. She laid her black suède gloves on the plastic
table and smoothed the fingers. “Arthur always liked this drugstore.
How is he?” she asked.
“I think he’s fairly well found himself down there. Better off than he
seemed to be practicing law in New York.” Larry found himself imitating
her cool detachment.
She confided in her gloves, stroking the fingers as she talked. “I’m
glad. Is he working hard?”
“I think he puts in a reasonably full day. He may have even dropped a
few pounds----”
Her face clouded with maternal concern.
“Oh, he’s in good shape,” Larry reassured her.
“And Janice?”
“You know Janice. Going strong.”
“Did he tell you she took him to a specialist at Johns Hopkins, a
doctor who’s a friend of hers?” Lucy asked.
“I didn’t have time to hear the medical details,” Larry admitted.
“There was too much going on--a big party on Saturday and people around
most of the weekend.”
“Arthur always liked big parties.”
Larry noticed that a minute ago Lucy had said: “Arthur always liked
this drugstore.” Apparently he was the past tense. It gave Larry a
twinge to hear her talk about him in that way.
“Is he getting over the feeling of being an invalid?” Lucy asked,
dribbling lemon into her tea. The wedge slipped from her slender
fingers. “I think he needed a change. If I had gone down to Washington
with him, it would have been taking his nurse along. I think he had to
do it alone.”
Lucy sighed. “She’s good for him, Larry. That’s what I really want to
say.”
Good for him. Larry thought of the sleek dark head which had havocked
the last few years of his life, tormenting and taunting him, trampling
his sleeping and his waking----
“It’s what he always wanted, Larry. It’s what he really wanted when he
married me.” Lucy’s shallow eyes turned on him. Only now he could not
be certain of their lack of depth.
“Why did he marry you then?” Larry asked her.
“I suppose it was kind of a business deal. For both of us. He wanted
a home and a wife he could dominate, and I wanted what I thought was
security. There’s nothing wrong with a business deal that doesn’t work
out,” she added, echoing an old conviction of Larry’s.
“I’m glad she found room for him at her house where it’s comfortable,”
Lucy continued after a moment. “I’m glad she invites her friends over.
They’re probably his friends already.”
Larry reached for her coat which had dropped over the low chair and was
trailing the rubber flooring. He draped it gently over her shoulders.
“That’s all right, Larry.” Her smile faded. “It has to do with
something inside of him. Something that wants to find whatever’s
exceptional about his work or his friends. Or even at home. I was
brought up to be unexceptional. My mother would have called it showing
off if we ever tried to be different.”
Larry found himself admiring, of all qualities, Lucy’s good manners.
The neutral quiet which had always shrouded her seemed to become a
positive, tangible asset.
“He talked while I was down there about _not_ wanting to be
exceptional,” Larry said. “He claims that he’s happiest as a group man,
working with other people. He claims that he doesn’t want to stand out
in any way.”
“Maybe he talks that way, but Arthur can’t help being exceptional.” She
paused. “It would be like changing the color of his skin for him to
try. I used to think he needed someone plain around him for balance.
Someone like me.”
“With your face?” Larry protested.
“I talked myself into thinking that no house was big enough to hold two
exceptional people, but I wasn’t really honest about it,” Lucy said.
“Now he can see the difference. Now that he’s around someone who can
give him the kind of life he wants.”
“So that’s how you have it figured out. When did you start thinking
so?” Larry asked.
“When he first asked me to marry him, I guess. You know how you do at
first. You figure it out with your mind. Your common sense tells you
that’s how it is. But you don’t honestly believe it. You don’t really
feel it-- You know it’s not what you really think.”
“But you finally did begin to think so?” he asked.
“When he took sick,” Lucy explained. “I wanted him to get well. That’s
all I seemed to care about. I wanted it so hard that I would have
settled for anything-- I was willing to forget about myself--just so he
got back on his feet. Don’t think I was trying to be wonderful or have
him thank me. I guess I was just scared. I prayed for him. When I saw
him on crutches the first time, I didn’t want to live unless he could
get well.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a fool, Larry,” she added. “But I was
almost glad when he came home with you that afternoon and said he’d
like to move to Washington. I knew what it meant. I knew it was his
chance to get away----”
“And you didn’t mind?” he asked her. “You were willing to have him get
away?”