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?”