Lucia met me at the dock. It was a great comfort to see her. I said
“Thank heaven, darling, you aren’t likely to dash off to Asia or South
America or elsewhere, permanently, ever. I look forward to spending
week-ends with you in Westchester when we’re both doddering.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You are looking all beautifully rested. But tell
me, are you convalescing?”
“I think so.”
I got my baggage through the customs, and we started uptown in Lucia’s
car. I hauled a bottle of Crême Yvette out of my blouse, for Lucia, and
said: “I’ve been wearing corsets all day for your sake, to keep this
from falling through. I hope you are appreciative.”
“Oh darling, my favourite liqueur,” she said. “But I don’t know whether
I can drink it. I’m going to have a baby . . . I think I’m very pleased
and Sam is of course radiant . . . I’m dieting like mad, though, so that
I shan’t permanently ruin what figure I have . . . they give you a funny
diet.”
“That’s grand about the baby if you want it,” I said.
Lucia’s conversation was noticeably circuitous; her usual method of
approaching some news that might be distressing in effect.
She looked out of the car window. “It always seems to rain in New York
when people come back from cruises, I’ve noticed,” she said. “Peter and
Judith have a daughter, I hear.”
I was not glad or sorry or especially interested. I said: “Everyone
seems to be doing something about the next generation, except me.”
“You’re young yet, Patricia. . . . Listen, Nathaniel’s staying with us.
His father finally died, and left Nat all his money, with a note, saying
that he appreciated the years Nat gave up to looking after him. Nat is
taking it very hard . . . the note seems to have made him feel that he
never was nice to his father . . . was impatient with him and so on. All
that sort of thing is so dreadfully futile. . . . But Nat is in
something of a state.”
“I know,” I said, “Nathaniel is such a dear.”
Lucia looked at me for an instant, speculatively.
“No, darling,” I said, “All I want is peace. I feel as old as Time, no
matter how perennial I look.”
“I know,” said Lucia, “A comfortable fact about all of us, though, is
that we have got through so much, so fast, there can’t be much left. I
doubt if this will be a long-lived generation. We shall reach sedateness
via emotional exhaustion, by forty—and die of senility at
forty-eight. . . . I was afraid that the news about Nathaniel would
disturb you.”
“Or was it the news about Pete you were afraid of?” I asked. “Nothing is
ever going to disturb me much, again.”
“That’s grand,” said Lucia. She looked very preoccupied. Then: “Pat,
would you think me a horribly greedy woman, if I got the chauffeur to
open this bottle somehow, and stop for glasses somewhere, and we drank
some of the Crême Yvette, now? I do adore it . . . and I’m so afraid the
doctor will forbid it. If I had a little, before I asked him, it
couldn’t hurt me, much.”
We drank Crême Yvette all the way to Lucia’s house, and were unable to
eat dinner, but the Crême Yvette had tasted so good that we did not
care.
Nathaniel seemed very glad to see me. He _was_ looking unhappy. “He’s
lost his occupation in life,” Lucia said, later. “He has been devoted to
his father for the eight or nine years since he was twenty, and feels
lost with no responsibility, now. I am going to suggest that he adopt an
orphan, poor darling.”
Nevertheless, Sam and Lucia and Nat and I had a pleasant enough
week-end, and then I went to work.
January went by slushily and drearily, so did February. I worked very
hard, and missed Noel very badly, and hunted through the “Times” for his
stories as they appeared. They were not signed, and I was never quite
sure whether they were his, or someone else’s. They were written from so
very far away.
One rainy March day, I found Nathaniel waiting for me in my hallway,
when I came home from work. He was looking more cheerful than I had seen
him, all Winter. When I brought him upstairs, he began flinging
bright-coloured booklets, from an envelope he carried, all across a
couch. They were travel booklets.
His voice was jubilant. “Pat, the doctor says I should leave the
business in the hands of the office-manager—he knows more about it than
I do, anyway—and go on a trip. Do you know, I haven’t been anywhere for
so many years, I didn’t realize that I could go, now.”
I took off my hat, and laid it on a table, and smoothed my hair. I
should miss Nat, too, but it was nice that he should go places . . . he
had wanted to, for so long.
“Where are you going, Nat?”
He began picking up booklets and waving them at me. “I don’t know.
Bermuda, Cuba, Florida, New Orleans.”
“You blessed idiot,” I said. “Why not around the world?”
He looked at me as if I had produced two full sized rabbits from the
small hat on the table.
“My God,” he said, “I _could_ go ’round the world.”
“Wait a moment, darling, and I’ll mix you a drink to help you get used
to the idea,” I said. “You must promise to send me postcards of mosques
and things.”
I was tired, and had a cold, and wished I could summon more enthusiasm
about it, because Nat was such a pleasant person.
“Don’t mix a drink yet,” he said. “I want to tell you something . . . I
want you to come along with me.”
I stared at him. He began to talk very fast. “I want you to marry me, I
mean. Oh, I know you’ve never thought of that—I mentioned it just once
when I was tight, I think. Perhaps I am not passionately in love with
you, but if you don’t mind that, we might have fun. You are very gay to
go places with . . . it would be lovely to have you along on a trip
’round the world, and I should be very lonely, by myself. I _am_ fond of
you, you know.”
I still stared at him. I said: “I am fond of you, too . . . I suppose I
like you better than any man I know, nowadays.”
His voice was more confident than it had been. “Better come along then,
Pat. And that’ll be that.”
I remembered having heard someone say that his father made decisions
fast.
“Nat, dear, just a minute.” I felt very tired.
I wanted to say—to God or Noel or someone who would understand: “I have
travelled such a long way, all the way through youth, I think, and I am
so tired. You must not blame me too much, for taking what shelter
offers, now.”
I smiled at Nathaniel and I said, “I’ll be able to talk in an instant,
darling. Is that all right?”
“Of course, Pat, child,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
I looked at my hat, lying on the table, beside an unread copy of the
“Times.” I looked at the dark outside the windows. Rain was splashing
hard against the panes. I wished that I were not too tired to think.
And a wave of remembrance of Noel swept over me. Vividly, as if I had
seen him an hour before, I could remember his smile, and the exact shade
of his hair, and the way his mouth felt when he bent down to kiss me.
Noel—who had lifted me, for a while, to the level of his
strength. . . . Remembrances enfolded me warmly—ebbed, ebbed and were
gone. I stood alone, in a room with Nathaniel.
I said, “Nat, how about my gaudy past? I am supposed to have had one,
you know.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Would have had one myself, if I’d been you, no doubt. That doesn’t
bother me. I’d as soon not know the details, though.”
I said: “All right. I’ll marry you, Nat dear. Thank you for asking me.”
We both laughed; he kissed me; and we went to dinner.
Lucia was very pleased.
We were married one April afternoon at the Municipal Building, where,
long ago, someone with the same name as I, had married Peter. A phrase
in the ceremony seemed vaguely familiar.
“Do you promise—to cleave to him only, forsaking all others, as long as
you both shall live?” Well, this time, it might be true.
Because Nathaniel’s father had died so recently, we had no other
celebration.
We were sailing that midnight—going around the world.
* * * * *
All our friends came to the boat, to wish us _bon voyage_. I said
appropriate things, in answer to their felicitations, until my throat
hurt from talking and talking.
Bill was ill and could not come to the boat, but he sent us a case of
champagne, by his own bootlegger, a very large Italian who appeared
suddenly, made a flowery speech wishing us long life, and gave us a
detailed account of his difficulties in getting the champagne aboard. It
was excellent champagne.
We began to drink it immediately—when it was almost all gone, people
began saying “good-bye.”
Lucia drew me aside, and said: “Do you like your ermine wrap? I helped
Nathaniel choose it for you.”
I said: “It’s a beautiful one. Why did he want to get me an ermine
wrap?”
“Ever since he read ‘The Green Hat,’ Nat thinks ermine wraps are robes
of romance. Pat, he’s a grand person.” She hesitated, then. . . . “It’s
none of my affair, Pat, but are you thinking that Asia is a large place,
or a small one?”
We regarded each other. I said: “It is a large place, Lucia. Still one
never knows. . . .”
Lucia said: “That’ll be all right, I suppose.” She ran her finger down
the ermine cloak. “It might be labelled ‘Success in the American
edition,’ Patricia.”
We smiled at each other. She went away. Everyone else was gone, except
Nathaniel.
He said, “Patricia, I’m going upstairs to send a wire or radio or
whatever one sends at the last minute, to Bill, to thank him for the
wine. Then I’ll come back to take you on deck, so that we can watch New
York go by.”
“All right, darling. I want to put on some fresh make-up, anyway.”
The steward was clearing away the champagne bottles and glasses from our
livingroom. I went into our bedroom. Champagne bottles and glasses were
all over the place. I put on fresh lipstick and powder and perfume. I
felt warm with champagne, and interested in going around the world.
There was a long mirror on the door of the bedroom. I walked toward it,
and stood still.
In the mirror, a small, slim young woman stood. She had black straight
shining hair, grey eyes, and a curved red mouth. Around her eyes, there
were faint shadows, that would be lines in ten years, but not for ten
years. She wore a rose-coloured net dress. One side of its ruffled skirt
swung out like a half-opened fan. She wore an ermine wrap, negligently,
over her shoulders. They were creamy shoulders—that many men had
kissed—and that now, only one man would kiss, probably.
She did not look happy or unhappy. She looked a little tired and a
little amused.
I wondered what she was like, underneath her attitudes. But I knew now,
that neither I nor anyone else would ever be sure as to that.
She and I bowed to each other gravely, and I went to join Nathaniel.
* * * * *
Nathaniel and I stood silent. The ship moved smoothly down the river,
and we watched New York move past. Nathaniel put a friendly hand on my
shoulder.
Slipping past, slipping past, the lights of city skyscrapers, and with
them all my life. Peter, Patrick, Kenneth, Lucia, Noel—voices and
sounds of people and things I used to know.
Nathaniel spoke. “You won’t be lonely, Patricia?”
“No, my dear.”
He flung his arms out toward that fantastic skyline.
“We shall come back, Patricia, and build a skyscraper or two . . . then
we’ll go on again . . . I want to see all the cities of the world.
Capetown, and Budapest and Moscow,—Canton and Calcutta and Yokohama
. . . I love the sounds of their names.”
His voice grew graver.
“I mean to be very good to you, Patricia.”
It was easy to slip an arm through his, it would be easy to be very good
to Nathaniel, always.
“What are you thinking, Patricia?”
“That I mean to make you a perfect wife, Nathaniel.”
He smiled down at me, happily.