Chapter VII: Part 7

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.

“She never run-runs around,” McGuinn vouchsafed.

“Money troubles?”

But McGuinn apparently made out all right. His brothers owned property in Brooklyn near Coney, and cut him in regularly on rent from two of the houses. He had paid an income tax last year.

“Any children?” Bemrose prompted.

McGuinn whipped out a cellophane-covered snapshot of Georgie, Jr., drooling on a bib. The youngster seemed to be rolling up his daily weight gain.

“A youngster like that ought to keep you together.” Bemrose blew some dust off the cellophane and handed the picture back to McGuinn.

“We just don’t jell-jell,” McGuinn explained. “I’m a-always asking for night work because it’s no good-good going home.”

“Why? Doesn’t your wife make you a nice home?”

“She’s a swell-swell cook,” McGuinn admitted. “She keeps the house clean, and she irons my shirts-shirts, but we don’t j-jell. We ain’t the right combi-combination.”

“And you want a divorce?” Arthur asked.

“I was think-thinking of it.”

A red light held them up, and Bemrose leaned back, his eyes half closed. “Go easy on this divorce proposition,” he said. “Better make sure you want one. You have a nice home, nice kid, and your wife’s not chasing other men. What are you looking for--excitement?”

“I saw a guy pull-pull a hold-up a block from here,” McGuinn volunteered.

“That’s the point,” Bemrose said. “You can see all the hold-ups, murders, street brawls, knifings, and race riots you want for excitement. If things get dull in this neighborhood, you can drive up to Seventh Avenue.”

“Maybe I should be satis-satisfied,” McGuinn conceded. “She’s a sweet-sweet kid, but you know. Blah!” He threw out his underlip in disgust.

“Supposing you do live on milk and crackers at home. You can order steak when you go out,” Bemrose told him.

“I guess you’re right, boss. I know it ain’t easy to get un-unhitched.”

“Ain’t always good sense,” Bemrose echoed. He handed McGuinn a twenty-five cent tip, but the driver shook his head.

“Figure they pay you more than two-two bits for advice,” he said. “I got off cheap. Call you in the morning, boss, about the t-ticket. Watch your head with them crutches.”

While they waited for someone to answer the doorbell, Larry said, “You did all right. I didn’t know you could do such a job of selling marriage. You sounded like an old hand.”

“What the hell? By the time that guys pays for a divorce and finds himself a floozy-- What’s he going to get that’s any better?”

Lucy opened the door, and if Bemrose had wanted to present his new client, McGuinn, with an argument for marriage, he couldn’t have found a better example than Mrs. Bemrose in a sheer dark blue dress with sleeves that showed the creamy white of her upper arms. There had been changes in Lucy these past months, Larry decided. Having something to do, someone to look after had given her an animated look of accomplishment.

As if to demonstrate her new security, she kissed Arthur full on the lips before she stepped aside to let them into the house. He slid his crutches onto a hall chair, and Larry spontaneously kissed her, too, wanting to for the first time he could remember, somehow warmed by her new awareness. He invited himself to stay for a drink before Lucy had a chance to tell him about the Martinis that were mixed and waiting upstairs.

She asked to hear the details of their visit to the doctor’s. Larry debated how much of the truth he should tell her. So far the doctor had remained fairly noncommittal in his talks with her. Larry himself went out of his way to report signs of progress in Bemrose which he noted at the office. The day Arthur walked twenty feet to the water cooler without crutches, Larry phoned her at once. She’d be encouraged to fuss more over Arthur’s comfort, Larry felt, if she thought he were improving. Her optimism would be communicated to Arthur.

Recently Larry had begun to wonder whether this somewhat unrealistic optimism might someday react unfavorably. Lucy might reproach him for his lack of candor someday when she found out that Arthur really hadn’t improved. He had learned to use his crutches with greater skill, and he was more resigned to his condition, but the nerve sheaths had not healed. Larry had considered easing Lucy into the facts, gently while he reported what the doctor had said, but in this pleasant room, on an unruffled summer day, with Bemrose apparently contented and reconciled, Larry decided to continue the deception until some marked change in Arthur necessitated greater frankness.

“Did the doctor really think he was better?” Her gray eyes widened.

“He’s doing fine.” Larry studied the stem of his cocktail glass. “The doctor expects him to have a remission any time now.”

The old anxiety, when she worried about Arthur’s dislike of the Daughertys, shadowed her forehead.

“That’s nothing bad. His symptoms will disappear. That’s what it means.” Larry laughed deep and low.

“Oh.” Slowly the concern thawed from her face. “That’s wonderful. Do you hear, Arthur? The doctor says you’ll be well.”

Instantly Larry regretted having extended her hopes. He might have let things ride along, saying that the doctor had found Arthur about the same. Actually he had been discouraged that Bemrose’s walking had not improved at a faster rate. The doctor told Larry privately today that he might decide to try typhoid shots or sodium cacodylate if there weren’t a change soon.

“Aren’t you happy about it, Arthur? Isn’t it wonderful?” Lucy asked eagerly.

“I’m very happy,” he said quietly.

Larry had as little faith in Bemrose’s seeming contentment as in today’s summer weather. First, second, and last Arthur was a realist, and if he thought protest would benefit his condition, he’d demonstrate noisily. Since quiet and placidity seemed indicated, he remained calm. While he was insecure and helpless, Arthur would behave and be docile around Lucy. The change in him was probably opportunist, the way a small boy behaves when he has to. Larry would have liked to believe that the transformation went deeper. A major illness _might_ have that effect on some men, but he couldn’t convince himself that Bemrose had gone through any fundamental change.

The upstairs telephone jangled noisily, and Bemrose’s calm left him as he picked up the receiver and talked to Davis Shore. Larry saw puckers of concern gather in his chin.

“Anything wrong?” he asked when Arthur hung up.

“How can I tell?” Bemrose’s hand shook as he fingered a crease in his trousers. “He wants to see me tomorrow morning about that appeal, the one that has been up for months, since long before I went into service. I can’t understand why he’s in a hurry. Court has recessed.”

“What time are you seeing him in the morning?”

“Eight a.m.”

“Oh, Arthur--” Lucy put out her hand in a frightened stab at authority, but the unfamiliar power conferred by his helplessness soon drifted through her fingers. “You’re supposed to sleep until eight. The doctor told us----”

“Does Shore know you’ve been sick?” Larry asked.

“Who doesn’t know?” Bemrose asked with unexpected bitterness. Or self-pity.

“Everyone understands, and everyone is sympathetic,” Lucy protested. “You could have asked Mr. Shore to make it later. He would have understood.”

Larry tried to warn her. “That’s all right. I’ll pick Arthur up in the morning.”

With synthetic brightness, she changed her tack. “You haven’t told me how you like working at the office, Larry.”

“Is anyone supposed to like working?”

She hesitated a moment before her laugh caught on. It lapped at the ceiling and flowed in ripples toward the wall.

“We’ll make a decent lawyer out of him if he gives us time,” Bemrose said.

“I have to take that, too,” Larry objected. “It isn’t enough that I see his bills are paid and he stays out of jail.”

“Does he order you around?” Lucy asked, taking up Larry’s line of abuse.

“He orders everyone around. That poor Miss Thompson. Have you ever _seen_ Miss Thompson?” He covered his eyes.

“She looks very intelligent,” Lucy said.

“Intelligence isn’t what I admire in women. I like women who keep their brains out of their faces.”

“I gave her money a year ago to buy herself a new hat. Did she ever buy it?” Bemrose asked.

“What she needs is one of those schools that give you a new personality,” Larry insisted.

“Maybe just a trip to the beauty parlor regularly,” Lucy suggested.

“Beauty’s too much to expect,” Larry insisted. “A less-than-ugly-parlor.”

Bemrose shook with quiet laughter. “She’s been around so long,” he said helplessly. “I never bothered to look. I never took the time.”

“He must be a busy man,” Larry said to Lucy. “I’d just as soon look at the lawyer who used to share my office, and he never won any beauty prize. Did I ever tell you about Moe? He was this big--” Larry measured his shoulder. “And he used to get a cold water permanent for the hair growing out of his ears.”

“Oh, Larry--” Lucy laughed and the threat of Davis Shore’s phone call was forgotten for the moment.

In a little while, when Larry felt they were both all right, he got up to go. He had walked as far as the stairway when Bemrose called after him, “Don’t break your neck to get here in the morning. I have a hunch Shore isn’t going to keep the appointment.”

_Chapter 18_

Arthur invited the poker crowd to play at his house on a hot Saturday night in July. It was the first time the boys had visited him at Eighty-second Street. The game was set up in the dining room where Cy O’Malley, Tremont, Dick Reber, Hagerty, Chuck Adams, Paul Schmid, Lucy’s Uncle Ed, and Jack Michaels, a friend of Ed’s, were hard at play. Bemrose, who sat in the game for a while, was taking it easy now, stretched out on a sofa in the air-conditioned living room, visiting with Larry and with Edna Michaels.

The Michaels were new friends whom Marge and Ed Daugherty had brought around recently. Edna came from Albany and reminded Bemrose that they used to walk home from school together. Once he might have shied off Edna because she came from Albany, but ever since his illness, he seemed to want to talk about the old days. Maybe this recollection of his childhood relieved Arthur, or maybe it was just that he liked Edna.

Tonight Larry noted that Edna sat with one foot twisted under her in a defiance of comfort which seemed to pattern her life. She had left home at sixteen when her mother forbade her to squander a week’s salary on a red straw hat. Edna bought the hat, bummed a ride to New York, and as rapidly as nature’s lethargic process would permit, gave birth to a girl and boy by different men, unencumbered by marriage. She supported the children working as Jack Michaels’ secretary, learned the textile business from him, and when she became indispensable during and after business hours, he married her. That was ten years ago, and there had been another son by Jack who amiably transferred his name to the preceding anonymous offspring.

An unretouched white that streaked Edna’s dark hair was the only index to these rather severe episodes. Larry noted that she had retained her plump cheeks, unlined lips, and firm, single chin, but not by taking care of herself, he knew. In the milieu of lava around Edna, things exploded, seethed, boiled, erupted, or went dramatically flat. The source of eruption was always Edna herself who, even on days that ran smoothly, had a trick of inflating phases, moods, and chance incidents into “problems.” Edna’s ’teen age children did not merely refuse to wash or dress neatly, but “went through adolescence” with all the farce and tragedy she could inject into the inevitable transition. Her servants were not drab recruits from Harlem’s wage-earning thousands, but “types,” meriting the bold master stroke of a Hemingway. Instead of going through an early menopause aided by sound therapy, Edna manufactured enough adrenalin, thyroid, and estrogens to swing her giddily over the troughs of depression which bogged down other women. Since Jack Michaels had rescued her from major catastrophe, she had constantly been in minor trouble, synthesized, Larry decided, for the pleasure Edna had in telling about it.

Arthur bought aisle seats to Edna’s performances. He was encouraging her now to tell Larry a story she had excavated earlier in the week about the Albany days. Bemrose’s head lay back on the sofa as he laughingly recalled the details.

“Tell him about the time your brother Micky tied fifty knots in the sheets my mother hung up in the yard. Tell him what she did,” he urged.

“Clapped his ears and said his father must be a crook and his mother a whore to have such a kid.” Edna fluttered her eyelids in a false show of refinement.

“That was my mother all right. Her language upset my father’s sense of what was decent and proper. He was furious the time she rented an apartment over a garage. Do you remember that place?”

Edna nodded. “There was nothing wrong with it. It had steam heat.”

“It didn’t have a street address. My father worried what to tell people when they came to visit us. ‘We can’t tell them we live _between_ number one forty-five and one forty-six,’ he’d say.”

“Couldn’t you tell them one forty-five and a half?” Larry asked.

“My mother wasn’t bothered for a minute. The rent was cheap, and it was the first steam-heated place we’d ever lived in. The entire two years we stayed there my father refused to invite anyone to the house.”

“People couldn’t stay away from your mother. They came anyway.” Edna talked rapidly with teeth that worked up and down like a cutting edge. “My mother always said she’d bust if she couldn’t tell Mrs. Bemrose her troubles.”

“She never went to school past the third grade, but all sorts of people used to ask her advice,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “The high school principal scared most of us. He was a quiet scared little man himself, a history teacher who lived in the time of Alexander the Great. He hated administrative work, and cut interviews short with the students so he could get back to his research. My mother went to see him about a college scholarship for me, and he kept her in his office for three and a half hours.” Arthur shrugged. “I still don’t know what they talked about, but I remember mother invited him to have coffee with us above the garage, and my father almost died of shame.”

Bemrose bent over and rubbed his legs which were stretched lifelessly on the sofa. “She insists they talked about children. He probably wanted her advice on how to run the school.” His voice, low and rhythmic when he was relaxed like this, gave Larry as much pleasure as a good performance at the theater. “A Mrs. Allen, one of the society women in town, took a shine to mother when she came to talk to her once about a neighborhood settlement house. Every month after that mother was invited for coffee at the Allens’ big place near the country club.”

“I never saw the inside of a nice house until I moved away,” Edna Michaels said. “Until I was seventeen, I never knew people had dining rooms.”

“You think _you_ were poor,” Arthur protested. “I still can’t spend fifteen cents for a shine without feeling guilty. Do you know how many miles I used to walk to save fifteen cents?”

He had always tried to walk away from it, Larry decided, by excelling at college, by pushing and stretching his talent in practice, and by overdoing for others.

“Do you remember the time you shined my dad’s shoes with the wrong polish?” Edna asked.

Lucy and Marge, who had been busy in the dining room serving drinks, came over to empty the ash trays. Arthur made room for Lucy on the sofa next to him. “Go on, Edna, I’d like Lucy to hear.”

“You usually came around on Saturdays to sell dad a shine,” Edna reminded him. “I think you charged three cents, but most of the time he didn’t have that much on him. This Saturday he was flush and told you to go ahead. The kitchen was dark, and you shined his brown shoes with black polish. Boy, was he mad when he found out! He sent me right over the next morning to get you.”

Delighted, Arthur pressed Lucy’s hand. “I’ll never forget that Sunday. It was way below zero, and the garage pipes were frozen solid.”

“Dad threatened to sue you if you didn’t pay for the shoes,” Edna said.

“Hell, they were probably his only pair. They laced up high and must have cost him five dollars. It took me about a year, but I paid him back, didn’t I? Ten cents a week. I used to have nightmares about going to jail.”

“Kids always worry about things like that,” Edna added. “Once I knocked against a stove at a hardware store, and something crashed. I was sure the stove was broken, and I’d be locked up if the storekeeper found me. I ran out of the place scared, and for years wouldn’t walk near the block.”

“You don’t think your old man was mean enough to have me put in jail?” Arthur asked.

“He was mean enough, all right.”

“Mine was the sweetest, the mildest--” Bemrose looked thoughtful. “I didn’t know him well, not even as well as I knew the high school principal. As a kid I didn’t try to understand him, I took him for granted. Most of his life he was broke, and when he finally got hold of some money, he gave it away. A distant cousin looked me up not long ago and said my father had given him the money to finish medical school. He has a good practice now, and wanted to repay the family.”

“What’s his name? The doctor’s?” Marge said. The cross-hatching showed clearly under her eyes, and her mouth set tightly.

“Feeling nauseous?” Lucy picked up Marge’s hand which fell limply to her lap again.

Bemrose looked at Marge and reached for his crutches. He hobbled to the phone, balancing carefully on the telephone stool. Tremont Friendly called to him from the dining room to take a hand in the game, but Arthur went on dialing. “Ask him to do it as a special favor for Mr. Bemrose,” he told the operator.

On his way back to the sofa, Bemrose touched Marge’s cheek affectionately. “Make yourself comfortable upstairs,” he said. “The doctor will be over. I left word with the messenger service to reach him.”

“Why didn’t you let me phone for you?” Larry protested.

A few minutes later chairs shifted in the dining room, and Ed Daugherty wandered in with Jack Michaels. He glanced around nervously and asked for Marge.

“Upstairs resting,” Arthur told him. “What’s the matter? Is the game breaking up?”

“We’re sitting out a round or two,” Ed explained. “She hasn’t one of her migraines, has she?” he asked anxiously.

“I think Lucy said her stomach’s upset,” Arthur told him, and Edna nodded.

“She shouldn’t have had the shrimp salad,” Ed pulled gravely at his pipe. “She can’t take care of seafood, and she’s always ordering it. She’s allergic to shrimp.”

“Remember the Saturday we thumbed a ride out to the lake?” Edna broke in.

“Your brother was sent to bring us back,” Arthur assisted her.

“Can’t you two stop rehashing old times?” Ed sounded irritable. “What’s going to happen, Arthur? Are we or aren’t we going to open a second front? We seem to be taking our time.”

A second front. Less than a year ago he thought we should stay out altogether, Larry reflected. The hindsighters always were good at making a big noise, as if to cover up their wrong guesses.

“The Army’s not paying me to think any more,” Arthur said.

“You read the papers, don’t you?” Ed snapped. “All this dillydallying! Troops sitting over in England and Ireland twiddling their thumbs.”

Their guns, Larry silently corrected.

“There’s no reason why we should be pushed into anything until we’re thoroughly prepared,” Arthur said. “There’s no percentage in losing the few trained men we have.”

Some of the poker players trooped in from the dining room and gathered around Arthur.

“How about a little aggravation?” Cy O’Malley nodded toward the card table.

“You seem to be doing all right without me. Maybe Larry would like to sit in.”

“The host should be in the game,” Tremont reminded him.

“Ask Emil Post,” Chuck said, kidding Terry. “Come on, Arthur, you’ll never get another chance to play with us in a swell, air-cooled dump like this. Wait until Danny hears about the uptown competition.”

“Where’s Lucy?” Cy O’Malley looked around.

“She went upstairs with my wife,” Ed replied. “My wife’s allergic to seafood, and she ordered shrimp----”

“Tell Lucy to come down so I can make love to her.” Cy went to the dining room to find his highball, and on his way back called up the stairs. “Hey, Beautiful, come on down, I want to make love to you.”

Arthur laughed and turned to Edna Michaels. “My pals.”

Cy called to the others. “Time is money. What are we waiting for?” He settled on the arm of Edna’s chair and offered her a drink out of his glass. “Have you been here all evening?” Helplessly he addressed the others. “Why do we have to play poker when there are beautiful women around?”

Tremont lingered behind. “Sure you won’t join us, Arthur?”

“Not just now. The doctor’s coming over, and I’d have to quit anyway.”

“I’m sorry.” Terry looked concerned. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Thanks, but I’m feeling all right. He’s not coming to see me.”

Terry puckered his lips old-maidishly. “It’s sweet of you to have us up, Arthur. You know how much we all appreciate it, and we want to thank Mrs. Bemrose for going to the trouble----”

Cy whooped from the dining room, “Sandwiches!” and rushed in with a plate of food. “Found them covered up on the sideboard.”

“Maybe Mrs. Bemrose wanted to save them for later,” Terry protested.

“Uhnnufu.” Cy stuffed his mouth with sliced ham and rye bread. Swallowing, he said, “Danny can take lessons from Mrs. Beautiful,” and started back to the dining room, the plate tilted precariously.

From the doorway he turned around and winked at Edna.

Waving to him she said to Arthur, “They’re quite a gang.”

“The last few years I lost track of what really went on with any of them. I got too busy.” He turned to Larry for confirmation. “Larry tried to brief me. He was always telling me not to swap old friends for new clients, but a fellow gets--” Bemrose faltered. “A fellow gets caught up,” he finished.

“They feel swell about your inviting them. Reber and Hagerty told me it was the best session we’ve had since college,” Larry said.

“They’re good boys.”

Bemrose took an envelope out of his pocket and drew the diagram of a parlor problem in geometry which had to do with burning a hole in a carpet, and by one strategic cut, piecing the carpet into a standard size rug. “They’re right on the ball,” he said, preoccupied. “More than can be said for the clients. When the boys heard I was sick, they all wanted to know what they could do, but the clients, particularly the ones I thought were my friends----”

“Marge and Ed have been mighty attentive,” Larry reminded him.

“My own family couldn’t have done more. If I had a family that acted like one,” Arthur explained to Edna. “Not that I blame the folks. I lost touch with them, too, except for mailing a check home every month.”

“Has your mother been down since you’re sick?” Edna asked.

“My sister, Helen, still has t.b., and mother had to go to the mountains with her,” Bemrose explained.

“Give me her address, I’d like to write to her.”

Bemrose started Jack Michaels and Ed Daugherty on the rug problem and they worked silently with pencil and paper while he napped and Larry sat quietly with Edna, hearing the slap of poker chips from the next room.

When the doorbell rang, Lucy called down to Larry. The servants were out for the evening. Lucy had purposely let them go out so the boys would feel more at home.

The doctor, a harassed man with blotchy complexion and inflated cheeks, asked anxiously at the door, “Did Mr. Bemrose have an accident?”

“No, he’s fine,” Larry assured him. “It’s Mrs. Bemrose’s aunt. She took sick suddenly.”

“A neurological case?”

“You’d better talk to Mr. Bemrose before you go up.”

Larry returned to the next room and tapped Arthur’s shoulder. Bemrose instinctively reached for his crutches when he awakened, the way a myopic feels for his eyeglasses in the morning.

Larry pointed toward the hallway and whispered the message to Arthur, trying not to attract Ed’s attention.

“I’ll go up with him,” Arthur volunteered.

“Talk to him in the hall. I’ll take him up.”

“No, I want to.” Stubbornly Bemrose swung to the door and greeted the doctor whom he invited to follow him.

“Let me,” Larry offered.

“Marge would do it for me,” Arthur insisted, and handing his crutches to Larry, managed the stairs alone by clinging to the handrail.

Larry kibitzed the game a while, and finally had the boys deal him in. He lost fifteen dollars in the next half hour. Paul Schmid suggested that they quit, ribbing him about starting to play too late to get his money back, but Larry didn’t mind the loss. He was anxious to clear out so that the Bemroses could look after Marge undisturbed.

When the boys went in to say goodnight a little later, the doctor had gone and Arthur, Lucy, and Marge were downstairs in the living room. Larry sat down next to Marge. “Is it serious?” he asked.

“I have to go to another doctor in the morning and take a test.” She rolled her eyes and pressed Larry’s arm. “Don’t say anything to Ed.”

“Have you figured out the rug problem?” Larry called over.

Ed’s eyes looked red from rubbing them. “It’s a stickler, all right. Are you sure it can be done with one cut?”

“Absolutely. Your nephew solved it in ten minutes.”

“Arthur did?” Ruefully Ed took out his watch. “We must have been at it half an hour.”

At the door Cy picked up Lucy, tossed her in the air, and kissed her goodbye on both cheeks.

Breathlessly she tried to answer Larry about Marge. “Arthur will remember the name of the test.”

“Ascheim-Zondek,” Arthur said.

“You mean she might be--” Incredulously Larry looked at Marge.

Outside the entrance Ed was mopping his face and complaining about the heat.

_Chapter 19_

The old problem of what to do about Tammany plagued Larry. A few days ago, about eight weeks before the city election, he had been approached to take a special job in the clubhouse of his district. It wasn’t a Mayoralty election year, and the assignment wouldn’t involve much work, but now that Larry was on the firm’s payroll, he wanted to discuss it with Bemrose.

Arthur was watching two window washers who swung from their leather straps on the ledge outside his office window. It was like working on the top mast of a ship fifty stories high and made Larry dizzy to look at them.

He sat down next to Arthur’s desk where the windowsill screened the penthouse of the Bankers Club next door and gave him the illusion of being at sea. A river barge seemed to disappear between the buildings. When Larry mentioned this visual illusion, Arthur explained the operation of the barge canal system around New York: Newtown creek, Coney Island creek, the Gowanus canal, Flushing creek, and Mill Basin on Jamaica bay where coal, oil, cement, and carload freight unloaded. Arthur knew these obscure waterways as well as most New Yorkers knew the piers where the giant liners tied up. Before the War he had fancied himself a marine expert and always kept the shipping page of the _New York Times_ on his desk. Even without referring to it he could identify most of the freighters in the river as well as the lesser craft.

Larry explained the recent Tammany proposal. “They’ll come back,” Larry prophesied. “A political organization always comes back. There’s reform for a while and things are reshuffled, but the public eventually tires of reform and wants a change. When that happens, Tammany is organized to get out the votes. Things are back where they started, with a new set of faces on the billboards but the same local bosses running things.”

“Don’t waste your time with Fourteenth Street. Hook up with the labor crowd,” Arthur advised him.

They had been over it all before. Larry tried to explain that the American Labor Party would have to play ball with Tammany if it expected to get anywhere in the city. The present Fusion crowd had found that the Mayor played footie with Tammany Hall when he needed extra votes. If Larry started with a new organization, he explained to Bemrose, he’d have to sacrifice his equity in Tammany Hall and begin at the bottom with a set-up that probably would lose. That was the history of many third-party movements. They served as a healthy public irritant, very often, and they influenced elections, but they seldom turned out a decisive vote. Larry had been through the leanest years with Tammany. By ’45 the Hall would elect its candidate for Mayor and come back. They would pick a man who looked independent, but he would be a Tammany man. No matter what kind of front the Hall gave him. And the A.L.P., in return for post-election favors, would back Tammany. If Larry stuck it out, he’d be entitled to a plum himself.

“What makes you think they’ll pay off?” Bemrose asked.

“Give them till the end of forty-five, and they will.”

“Like hell they will. The local political system in this country stinks. When a good man joins an organization and is willing to work, he’s buried in a clubhouse while the top manipulators who keep out of the newspapers run the show and hand their private yes-men the judgeships.”

“That’s why fellows like you don’t monkey with politics,” Larry said. He sometimes wished that he could stay out himself, but the political habit was strong in him.

“The system soils a man all the way up. Until he becomes President,” Bemrose said. “Even then he’s not always able to wash it off. Personally, I think it’s a mistake for the President to mix in local politics.”

“They all do,” Larry protested. “It’s what keeps the organization together.”

“Well, it’s wrong.”

“Take your own case, Arthur. If they offered you a job in Washington now, you’d probably grab it with the War going on. As soon as the War ended, you’d go right back to private practice and keep on practicing until someone decided you were Supreme Court material. You’d get out of the public eye fast. How can we have first class men in public office as long as fellows like you won’t stick?”

“I don’t know the answer,” Arthur admitted. “We ought to pay good men more. We should educate the public to respect men who make a career of Congress.”

“Are you kidding?” Larry asked. “With characters like Bilbo in Washington, do you expect people to take Congress seriously?”

“It’s a paradox, but the people are always better than the government they elect,” Bemrose pointed out. “They are, you know. It isn’t true that they get the government they deserve, or that the government they elect represents them. Look at the people organizing right now to fight the War. When they really want to tackle a job----”

“They don’t think local politics are important,” Larry said. “They can’t see struggling to elect a guy who is going to sit in Congress with Bilbo.”

“Damn it, it is important!”

“Well, if it’s important, I’d better stick to Tammany Hall,” Larry said. He thought of Judge Haynes’ private contempt for “the people” and wondered how far Bemrose had freed himself from the Judge’s influence.

Arthur’s secretary announced Davis Shore, and Bemrose suggested that Larry stay in the room.

“I meant to--” Arthur swallowed, awaiting the next word. “I was going to ask you to sit in anyway. You ought to meet the clients.”

It wasn’t necessary for the managing lawyer to meet clients, Larry knew, but he appreciated the effort to make him feel like part of the firm. He had avoided Davis Shore ever since that glimpse of him at Bemrose’s reception when Shore clumsily tried to extricate himself from the tête-à-tête with Lucy.

“I’d rather not stay,” he decided.

“Oh, sit down.”

Davis Shore padded in and halted expectantly in front of Bemrose’s desk.

“Mr. Frank, my associate.”

Larry jumped up and offered Shore his chair, although there were three others vacant.

“Frank, Frank, there used to be a member of the Board at Southern Power and Light--” Shore hung on to Larry’s hand as he traced the relationship. He hoarded his voice so that it was high and as immature as the babyfine white hair.

“All my folks live in Brooklyn!” Larry overshook Shore’s hand.

“I didn’t know Arthur had a new associate,” Shore said, bewildered. “Very helpful right now to have a good friend about.” He indicated the crutches. “Excellent idea to have an associate right at the elbow.”

Arthur sucked at his cheeks and shifted his legs restlessly. The marbles seemed to be back in his mouth, impeding his speech.

“I guess you want to talk business, I’d better be going,” Larry said, louder than he intended. He knew how to act when he met an important client like Shore. Only it was coming out wrong. Bemrose should have known better than to try and bring them together. With a snob like Shore, Arthur would have had to submit drawings in advance of Larry’s family tree. He knew that Davis Shore picked lawyers with the right social connections, as much as he selected them for their ability.