Chapter III: Part 3

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.

Larry hung around until court recessed and he could corner the Magistrate in his chambers. He had known him for fifteen years, and the Judge, a crude, bloated murderer of the language, always called him “Cons’ler.”

The Magistrate confessed quite frankly that his hands were tied by politics. Just before he had come to court, his instructions were telephoned to him. The Judge’s lumpy shoulders framed a question. With all the reporters hanging around, what could he do? Cons’ler could see for himself. Okay, he’d reduce the sentence. Three days. It was the best he could offer. And if Cons’ler kept his mouth shut about changing the sentence, he’d appreciate the favor.

It left a bad taste in the mouth, like day-old garlic. Larry decided he should have done as Bemrose suggested and put up a fight for the judicial appointment in his district. He would have made a better judge than some of those lousy punks on the bench. Bemrose had hit it on the thumb. He should have raised hell for being passed over by the organization.

Supposing they did give him the appointment, though. He would be tied down to the Magistrates’ Courts for years. He ought to stay away and try to develop a higher type of practice. It was a nice idea, if he knew where to start. Not with some of the clients who came to _him_ for advice.

He reached across his study table for a recent biography of Woodrow Wilson, but decided he couldn’t tackle anything serious. On the way to the kitchen to fix himself a drink, he picked up a current issue of _Time_ and put it on the arm of his easy chair, planning to look through it later.

It wasn’t only the day in that scruffy court which depressed him, Larry decided, sipping his highball. He felt blue because Janice had sailed yesterday. She called him early in the week to say that Larry’s friend, Mr. Diamond, didn’t hold out much hope of getting her a visa. He had been turned down in a similar case by his friend at the State Department. Anyway, she had been thinking over her talk with Larry and felt that maybe she had better stick around and attempt to straighten things out with Bemrose. She had tried to reach him, but his office said he was in Washington. As soon as he came back----

For a day or so Larry speculated optimistically on how a marriage with Janice might round out Bemrose’s rather Spartan professional existence and also give her a reason for taking root in the United States. The day before yesterday, when he had convinced himself that everything would work out with them, she called to say that _Everett’s_ had received clearance for her passport and papers and booked passage for her to sail the same night. There was no possible out. She had tried but hadn’t been able to reach Bemrose. However, Larry better not tell him so. It might only upset him. When she returned, provided he weren’t tied up with any female clients, they might be able to straighten things out.

With reluctance Larry agreed not to say anything, although it was a damnfool promise on the face of it. When he heard from Bemrose, he knew how stupid it was to let her talk him into it. Bemrose was put out because Janice had sailed, and suspicious because she had talked to Larry, not to him. Hadn’t she left a message for him or her address?

Larry lied down the line, handing out the death sentence. The pinched, off-key voice at the other end told him Bemrose was suffering. Larry would have shaken Janice, if she were there, for causing him unnecessary pain. She could have reached him long distance if she had really been interested. Maybe she was just piqued, and that whole performance at his office had been an act.

Lousy. The situation seemed tied in a package marked nonreturnable. Bemrose’s routine must have been to wait until Janice came around. When she hadn’t turned up all these weeks, he apparently had decided to forget his injuries and go to her. Now that she had refused to wait and gone ahead with her own plans, it might make him angry enough to----

All Larry hoped was that Bemrose wouldn’t try to get even on the rebound. He tried to explain to him that Janice’s orders had come suddenly, without _Everett’s_ even bothering to warn her. In the rush of departure, she had probably forgotten to leave a message when she called and found that Arthur was out of town.

What made Larry think she _had_ phoned him, Bemrose wanted to know, pouncing on this information.

Larry eased his way out by saying it was only natural that she should call, no matter whether or not they had been seeing each other. She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye, he lied, angrier and angrier with Janice as he tried to cover up for her.

It was a dangerous trip and it was wartime, he explained to Bemrose. She wouldn’t just leave. She would try to reach him and say that she was going overseas.

Her safety must have worried Bemrose, too, Larry figured, because he was quick to pooh-pooh her danger. The authorities wouldn’t allow her to travel unless it were safe, he contended. But Larry knew that Bemrose realized no one could be safe in a combat zone.

It was going to be difficult for Bemrose to live with himself for the next few weeks. If he were in love with Janice and had been waiting for her to come round, he must detest himself now because he had waited too long and she was out of reach. He must realize, Larry knew, that a letter, a cable, or a transatlantic phone call could hardly be expected to change the situation. There was too much to explain. Janice Baldwin had let him bluff the hand. While Bemrose held the chips, he had lost.

As Larry considered what must be Bemrose’s mood of hating-himself-and-the-world, he slumped deeper in his chair and the copy of _Time_ fell to the study floor. A man in Bemrose’s situation might turn around and do some damnfool thing to get even. There was nothing new about a man, driven by jealousy, acting irrationally against his own interests.

Larry stood up, contracted his shoulder blades until they almost touched, and shut the window. He felt chilly in spite of the warm May night. He might be catching a spring cold. Whether it was that, or his day downtown, or the pigheadedness of Janice and Bemrose, his spirits were clammy.

On his way to the bathroom for an aspirin he stooped to pick up the magazine. The hollow rooms further depressed his spirits. He began to wish that Bessie’s class were over and she would come home.

Bed looked good to him as he walked through the bedroom and saw the turned-down sheets. He undressed, built his pillows into a wall so that he could read in bed, and made up his mind to turn out the light as soon as his eyes felt heavy. Skimming the foreign news, he turned to _Time’s_ section on national affairs and saw Bemrose’s picture. The story, captioned “Transatlantic Braintruster,” credited him with the basic plan for Lend-Lease. His clear mental blueprint had enabled a government lawyer to draft the Lend-Lease bill in an hour and forty minutes, the story said.

Bemrose, 43, whose recreation is poker, has an agile, trained mind
(Columbia Law and Columbia) which makes him a favorite of New York
utilitymen and statesofficials.

Tweedy, mustached, no socialite but an Albany truck driver’s son, he
wears easily the mantle of his erudite fosterfather and former law
partner, Judge Winthrop Haynes.

Bemrose made a softspoken, backdoor entrance to diplomacy through
his intimate, Attorney-General Newton. His suave handling of British
bigwigs will result in future liaison assignments, it is said.

Larry let the magazine slide off the bed. So that’s what had kept Bemrose too busy to see him these past weeks and too preoccupied to straighten things out with Janice. They had called him pigheaded while he was figuring ways to keep the British on their feet.

Larry dialed Arthur’s number, jubilant at the news and anxious to congratulate him right away. The old closed-mouth. He’d like to punch him for becoming an international figure and keeping it quiet, for doing his heavy thinking solo, and pretending to hand Janice an option on the war. The so-and-so.

A Negro houseman who had worked for Judge Haynes answered. “Sorry, sir, Mr. Bemrose is in Washington tonight. He’s dining at the White House.”

Larry snapped the light and slid under the covers, determined to fall asleep before Bessie came home and asked him what kind of day it had been.

_Chapter 7_

Two doors west of Third Avenue on Eighty-second Street, Larry turned into the walk leading to Bemrose’s house. The muted stone dwellings on this quiet street looked as if they might belong to Boston Symphony subscribers who wore shawl-collared brocade evening wraps to the concerts.

Larry smoothed the flaps of his coat pockets before he rang the bell. He wondered if Bemrose had invited any of the poker crowd to this party, and if it weren’t a stag, why he hadn’t asked him to bring Bessie along.

The door opened, and the houseman reached for Larry’s sun-tanned straw with the paisley band.

“You’ll find them in there, sir,” he said. “There’s _quite_ a gathering. Yes _sir_, quite a gathering.”

After the tiled hallway, the drawing room felt sultry. Larry nibbled through the outer layers of the crowd and saw Lucy McVail, serene in gray chiffon, before the rococo hearth, her skirt fluttering free of her narrow hips. The scalloped brown fireplace seemed pleased to include her in its composition with the worn brocade wall. She stood alone, part of the room but not of the people, an island of tidiness in a disorganized surf. Her remoteness from the others seemed to bind her to the old house. A fluff of gray-blonde hair had damped down on her cheek, Larry noted, and her pale eyes looked out with the innocent speech of a solo flute.

Bemrose hadn’t seen Larry come in. There was time to hang back and enjoy the quiet picture that Lucy made, undisturbed by waves of tension which needled the room. The rest of the guests sounded like an orchestra before a concert, each tuning up on his own without regard for the others.

Above their alcoholic discord Bemrose’s voice rose stridently as he discussed the recent Nazi landing on Crete. “You’ll see. Those bastards will use it as a base. Next thing you know we’ll have air attacks on Egypt----.”

Larry moved into the vacancy around Lucy McVail. He judged by her eyes which shifted slightly, like scraps of cloud gently moving, that she was pleased to see him. He told her that she looked cool in spite of the humid heat, and her pale eyes deepened in tone. A film as ephemeral as her gray gown kept slipping between them, and made it difficult to talk to her at first, but he was soon able to discuss her case and had launched on some theories of his about inheritance law when Bemrose elbowed in, accompanied by a man on the borderline of portliness who looked as though he financed a health club to restrain an opinionated waistline. The man’s rounded face, tomato pink, was crowned by a cap of babyfine white hair, parted at the side and brushed across the forehead like a small boy’s. Bemrose presented him. It was Davis Shore, the utility man, recipient of Bemrose’s recent free-legal-services. Larry backed away before there was a chance to introduce them while Shore, with a false try at democracy, was saying to Lucy as he left, “I used to run into a chap named McVail at the Knickerbocker Club. Any of your people?”

Bemrose called after Larry to get a drink, but he pretended not to hear. He watched Bemrose thread his way back to the door and welcome Judd Harrison, a Washington attorney who had often pooled his Washington influence with Bemrose’s in cases for anti-Administration clients. These clients constituted the profitable Wall Street side of Arthur’s practice. They were the business and financial men who, without his help or Harrison’s, might not have been able to set up appointments with the government agencies that had become vital to the running of their companies.

Judd Harrison was about four feet ten, and Bemrose had to stoop to shake hands with him. He joined Harrison in a champagne cocktail and proposed a toast. Guiding Harrison to a serving table across the room, he said in his low, easy voice, “Come over here and get one of your cigars. I stocked up on them last night. Then I’ll take you over and introduce you to the unlucky girl.”

The significance of Arthur’s remark did not reach Larry immediately. He thought of the newspaper pictures he had seen of Harrison and the oversized cigar with which he was always photographed. He thought of the compensatory device used by undersized men who smoked oversized cigars and chuckled to himself. A second later he realized what Bemrose had said, “the unlucky girl,” and why Shore, Harrison, and the other good client-friends, had been invited to a party on a hot night when the season for entertaining was about over. Larry figured that he had better look around and locate Lucy McVail’s uncle and aunt. They must be here, and if they were, they couldn’t be feeling any too much at home. From a corner near the bookshelves he heard Marge Daugherty’s uncontrolled titter.

Marge had had a few drinks and was animated, intent, and looking up at Ed Daugherty as if she could make him Charles Boyer just by looking at him that way. Ed tried to unlock her glance by directing his eyes everywhere except at her. He smiled with relief when he saw Larry walk toward them.

Larry took Marge’s glass. “This needs attention.” He had it filled with straight Scotch and asked the waiter for another like it. “Now.” He toasted her and finished his whiskey at a gulp. “Tell me how it happened. I’m trying to catch up. Things move fast around here.”

Marge shifted unsteadily to the other foot, and her husband shoved a chair under her. She rolled her eyes at Larry. “Don’t have to tell. You knew all the time.”

“No, I didn’t. Tell me. How long has it been going on?”

“A few weeks. He’s collecting the fee.” Her giggle became an incessant staccato.

“Marge!” Daugherty said. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

“Let her have fun. This doesn’t happen in the family every day. Come on, have another drink with me. How about you?” Larry asked Ed.

“I guess I could use another,” Ed admitted with excessive dignity.

Marge’s giggle had become permanent by the third refill, and Bemrose came over to tend to it. “What’s funny?” he asked, looking critically from Marge to Ed to Larry.

But before Larry had a chance to congratulate him, Judd Harrison had joined the group, bringing with him an argument that must have developed among some guests across the room. “Talk to those guys and try to shut them up before they leave here,” he cautioned Bemrose. “I swear they’re working for Vichy.”

Marge giggled, and Harrison looked at her curiously.

“Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty, my fiancée’s uncle and aunt.” Arthur frowned as he introduced them.

“Drink, Mrs. Daugherty?” Harrison asked. “That’s a beautiful niece you have. I understand they grow them like that in Iowa. Well, take care of her. This fellow will never do her any good. I’ve known him--how many years is it?”

Bemrose steered him away, quiet, competent again, and in command. “Show me who was doing the talking,” he said to Harrison. “I want to keep them away from Charlie Worden. Charlie’s with the State Department, and he’s right over there waiting to be misinformed.”

Bemrose turned and explained to Larry, “We don’t want any pro-Vichy talk to reach him. Charlie has a distasteful infirmity. He lets other people make up his mind, and when he’s had a few drinks----”

“What’s eating that fellow and Arthur?” Ed shrugged.

“They aren’t having fun like us,” Marge said. “We’re having fun, aren’t we?”

But Larry decided he had had enough. He must follow Bemrose and try to talk to him. He must tell him it was wonderful that he was getting married. Uncertainly Larry looked around, careful to avoid the fireplace and Lucy.

“Where the hell did you get that?” A lanky man of around forty with untonicked hair, a yellow tweed suit, and a bright knitted tie, lifted the highball Larry had in his hand. “Just what I need,” he said, putting out a bunch of red knuckles. “Steve Holmes, Kansas.”

“The artist?” Larry asked, standing up tall to him.

“Same.”

“Bemrose has one of yours at his office--wheat fields.”

“That’s it.” Holmes smiled.

A waiter passed a tray, and Holmes lifted off three drinks at a time, handing one to Larry.

“Come along,” Larry said. “I want to hear Bemrose give some fellows a piece of his mind.”

Holmes’ paw clamped Larry in place. “That pretty boy over there got hold of me when I came in.” He nodded toward a bald blond who talked with his hands. “Damned sterile atmosphere. Stick around,” Holmes urged.

Larry realized that except for Lucy McVail and her aunt, the party was a stag. If Bemrose had invited Mrs. Shore-- Larry supposed there was one--she hadn’t accepted. Nor Mrs. Harrison. Nor any other wives. That made it all right about Bessie not being here.

“Where did he find the girl?” Holmes asked bluntly.

“In his office. She’s a client.”

Holmes whistled. “She looks as if she can use some warming up.”

“Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

“No, you tell me.” He kept Larry’s arm immobilized with one hand and tilted his glass with the other. “Does she talk?”

Larry shrugged. “I think so. She listens.”

“Jeezuschris’, why would a guy like Bemrose want to sew himself up----”

Larry smiled at Holmes and blurted out, “There was a swell girl--from Kansas.”

Holmes swooped on Larry, questioning.

“She’s a writer. She doesn’t live in Kansas now. Janice----”

Holmes was doubled up, grabbing his knee. “Don’t tell me he could have had Jan Baldwin,” he moaned.

“Do you know her?” Larry asked, figuring that it wasn’t likely. Bemrose would never have invited a friend of hers.

“Know her?” Holmes bent over. “I’ve been crazy in love with her since I was three years old.”

It was a senseless coincidence, Janice following Bemrose around, managing to get in tonight with this fellow, Holmes. But the party was a disorganized, thrown together affair. Anything could happen.

The man that Holmes had tried to avoid walked toward them, swaying in the artist’s direction. “Oh, hello.” He laughed self-consciously. “From the back I thought you were Stokowski. Did you ever hear about the time Stokie conducted in Los Angeles?”

He was telling his story with the polished enthusiasm of an anecdotist, but this room somehow didn’t seem the setting for anecdotes. It buzzed with the confusing Big Questions that were being asked without any real hope of finding the answers. This fellow was off key with his anecdotes, putting too much of himself into too little, Larry decided.

He hurried Steve Holmes toward the fireplace, and the overplump womanish voice called after them. “You must ring me up for lunch, you really must.”

Davis Shore had remained with Lucy McVail, and they hadn’t progressed beyond the weather, from what Larry could overhear. Shore saw them coming over and sidled away, nodding a thank you.

Larry watched Steve Holmes take Lucy on. Holmes stabbed at her with a few phrases that seemed to hurt him as they came out. Lucy countered with her remote smile. Apparently discouraged, the artist threw a bony shoulder forward and rested uneasily on one foot, his wordless way of saying “Yes, ma’am.”

It might have been the fog of Scotch whiskey that made him overly critical of Lucy, but Larry began to lose patience with her remoteness. She wore the Victorian house becomingly, he decided, because it represented her era. If someone like Professor or Mrs. Storey had been around, they would have spotted the anachronism. Bemrose wouldn’t want them around at this time. He wouldn’t want to defend his choice of Miss McVail. Not that there weren’t many reasons for it. Larry could see that much himself. Bemrose could always feel secure with Lucy McVail and depend on her to be worshipful of him, gentle and selfless and undemanding. Their marriage would be no competitive jockeying for superiority, as with Janice Baldwin. She was a woman with whom to settle down, with whom to be comfortable. Nevertheless these excellent reasons were bound to sound like rationalization, Larry knew, to a man like Professor Storey or to anyone else who could spot a real motive from a secondhand one.

Bemrose was bringing the anecdotist over to meet Lucy, and Steve Holmes pulled out hastily. Larry followed Steve as soon as he had grabbed a drink off a passing tray, and in a stupor of heat, noise, and alcohol, they circled the smoky room, inhaling wisps of talk.

“_They’re still picketing the White House ... goddamn saboteurs._”

“_Hard-boiled Harold should be good in the oil business._”

“_How can a fellow tell, the way they have priorities screwed up?_”

“_... Lady in the Dark, fifth row._”

“_A swell job. We wouldn’t have Lend-Lease if not for ...._”

“_Grew says it’s putting off an operation for cancer, and he’s one man who ought to know about Japs._”

The bits of talk stuck to Larry like sweat. He listened and he kept on drinking. The last two glasses were brandy, and his thinking blurred. He wondered about Marge Daugherty stranded in the next room with Ed, and he listened for her grating giggle. He shuddered when it reached him, proclaiming that Marge was tied down permanently. Larry looked around for Bemrose. He found him with the Vichyites, arguing in a voice that was pitched too high, his lips tight as a trap, and realized that it couldn’t be Vichy alone which had Bemrose worked up.

“Sonafabitch Darlan. If we don’t watch out, the French Navy--” Bemrose was saying. “To hell with the pussyfooting. We’ll never be able to play ball with them anyway.”

Steve Holmes pulled Larry out of the group around Arthur.

“Some other guy ought to lay her first,” Steve said. “Some guy ought to heat up that hunk of marble for him. He needs a woman who can wring him out. Look. One of these days he’s going to blow himself up.”

From the fireplace, Lucy nodded to them and smiled.

“Someone ought to heat her up,” Steve repeated. “She isn’t ready to take on Bemrose.”

Larry told Steve to stick around before he rushed upstairs. As he made it to the washbowl, Larry remembered that a skimpy lunch was the last solid food he had eaten, and that in the past hour he had mixed champagne, whiskey, and brandy. He couldn’t tell whether he was upset at the heart or at the stomach, but he thought of Janice Baldwin and wondered what she was doing. He thought of her huddled in an air raid shelter, or queuing up for a canned news handout.

None of it made him feel better. Larry wet a cloth and put it to his head, figuring that tomorrow it might be Janice’s turn to feel not so good. He’d cable her about Bemrose. She was a reporter, and would want to know the news when it was hot.

* * * * *

A couple of hours later Larry walked down Fifth Avenue with Steve Holmes. They stopped for a light at Seventy-sixth Street, across the street from the rough stone synagogue with the steep steps.

“I can’t get it,” Steve said for the seventh time since they had left Bemrose’s. “After all these years without being sewed up, I don’t see why--”

“She’ll take care of his house,” Larry said.

Steve’s sandy head twisted sideways in a question.

“The way he wants it,” Larry explained. “He’ll tell her and she’ll listen. That’s the way he likes it. No competition.”

“Who else does he tell?”

“The clients. The client-friends. You know that business about not charging them a fee if they’re his friends.”

From across the street he smelled the dank summer green of Central Park. A breeze from the west carried broken dance tunes through the darkness from the Mall.

Steve stopped. “Come to think of it, he never sent _me_ a bill. The last time I got even. I shipped him a picture.”

Larry nodded. “Would you do _him_ a favor if he asked you to?”

“Ye-e-es,” Holmes drawled, uncertainly.

“The chances are he doesn’t want anything from us, but Davis Shore who was there tonight-- Bemrose doesn’t take any money from him either.”

Steve whistled.

“A fellow like Shore could do him favors,” Larry speculated.

“Shore was the one talking to her when we came up?” Holmes asked.

“With the pink face.”

“He looked a little dry in the mouth trying to find something to say,” Holmes observed. “Maybe he’s not making the client-friends happy, getting hitched to her.” His head dropped forward, and he lengthened his stride.

Larry puffed to keep up with him. Only a fool would have let himself 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_