Chapter 23
The next afternoon in New York Larry bumped into Davis Shore leaving Arthur’s office. Shore jerked his recognition and moved on.
“Someone tell him a clean story? He looks downhearted,” Larry observed.
“He wanted me to take a case for him. I referred him to Harrison,” Arthur said.
“That must have felt lovely.”
“I thought it would, but it didn’t,” Arthur went on signing his mail.
“Wasn’t he in once before this week?”
“Yes. He’s been after me to try this new case ever since Albany. He must have heard about my argument up there.”
“And it didn’t feel good to turn him down?” Larry asked. “If I were you, I think I would have stuck in the knife and twisted it.”
“You wouldn’t pull a leg off a dead spider. There’s no fun in that,” Arthur said.
“What kind of cattle boat did his ancestors come over on anyway? He must have something to cover up, or he wouldn’t be such a snob.”
“He’s a helluva good reason for accepting the job in Washington,” Arthur agreed. “I wonder if Tom really has anything on that Nazi crowd. If he has and we can prove——”
“I’ll help you home with your bag,” Larry offered. “You’ve had a long enough day, coming right down here from the sleeper this morning. I don’t suppose you’ve told Lucy yet?”
“When I called up to say we were back, I hinted about it.”
“You’ll have to tell her all the details. Let’s get going.”
On the way uptown, Arthur outlined some of the ideas he had for Newton. Exhilarated, his thoughts turning with propeller speed, he was already at work on the indictments. Larry realized that it would take more than Shore’s offer of a big case to keep Bemrose in New York for the duration.
Their cab stopped for a WAAC parade that was crossing Thirty-fourth Street. The dumpy first lieutenant who barked the marching orders looked more like a tough sergeant from World War I than the dewy-eyed model silhouetted against a flag in the current WAAC recruiting poster. Oblivious to the slush underfoot, the girls stepped out smartly. Their seriousness filtered through the sidewalk crowd, and two men straightened, a woman heavily burdened with packages stopped to watch, and an old man uncovered his head.
“Give ’em hell, girls!” Bemrose touched his fingers to his forehead. “It’s a fine thing, isn’t it, when women have to do your fighting?” he said to Larry.
A month or a week ago he wouldn’t have joked about it, Larry knew. He was too busy licking his wounds a month ago. It wouldn’t have been funny.
“If they draft me, I wouldn’t mind a job next to the little redhead on the end,” Larry observed.
“She’s not in the chorus, she’s a soldier.”
Larry shrugged. “I can’t take a good-looking woman seriously.”
“They take them seriously in Russia.”
“Maybe they’re not as good-looking.”
“To the Russians they are.”
“I can’t help it. When a woman’s good-looking——”
“I know, I know. You want to go to bed with her,” Arthur said.
The last WAAC cleared the Avenue, and an angry honking from behind jolted their driver into action. Larry took a last mournful look at the neatly covered buttocks moving in disciplined rows. “Helluva waste of women,” he sighed.
“Them women ain’t wasted,” Arthur said. “Ask any G.I. if you think so.”
The remains of last night’s heavy snowfall clogged traffic, and pedestrians waiting at bus stops stood back gingerly to avoid being splashed. The piles of soiled snow melting in the gutters furnished dirty contrast to a window at the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue which sparkled with clean-lined modern glassware.
They rode silently past the stone transverse which divided Central Park. Bemrose turned abruptly toward Larry. “Does Lucy know she lives in Washington?”
“Not from me. I took them both out to dinner when you were at Maxwell Field, but she hasn’t talked to me about her since. Did she write you about going out with me that night?”
“The longest letter I ever had from her,” Arthur said. “She was wound up. You didn’t tell her anything that night?”
“Hell no.”
“No, of course not,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “I haven’t anything to worry about. She’s never been jealous.”
“What did she write you about the night we all had dinner?”
“I remember how she put it in the letter. She wrote ‘Miss Baldwin is still in love with you.’”
Larry nodded. “I wasn’t sure how she’d react. It’s hard to tell about her. I don’t suppose you’ll say anything about running into Jan yesterday.”
“I don’t know. I may.”
“Well, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Larry promised.
Arthur let them in with his house key, and Larry called upstairs to Lucy. She emerged, flushed and breathless, from the kitchen on the ground floor and embraced Arthur warmly. “Was the sleeper awful? Are you dead?”
“I had a tough trip, too.” Larry offered his cheek.
When she promptly responded, he had the pleasant guilty sense of perhaps having done her an injustice for months.
Larry straightened his tie, a new one of geometric daring. “Some taste, isn’t it?”
“Your ties are always—” she hesitated—“different.”
“A euphemistic remark,” Arthur guffawed.
She drew her cool, amber brow together. “What does euphemistic mean, Larry?”
Larry put his arm around her. “He doesn’t know either. He’s showing off. He was afraid he’d come home and find you in the WAAC.”
She disengaged herself from Larry. The kitchen door, which she had carefully shut behind her, swung open and Phil Kenyon, his mustache pert and bristling, greeted them from behind a trayful of Martinis.
Arthur waved to him affably. “Hello. You must have read my mind. How about bringing them upstairs?”
“Get the olives I left on the table, Lucy,” Phil directed. “I heard you’d be back this afternoon,” he told Bemrose. “I ducked out of the office early to be on hand.”
“I’m glad you did,” Arthur said.
“Remember Randolph?” he asked Larry when they had all settled in front of a fire upstairs. “He belonged to one of the big shops downtown.”
“Don Randolph. Winchester and Seymour,” Larry prompted.
“That’s the fellow. The State Department called him in to do a hush-hush job, made him a full colonel, and sent him to England last spring on a secret mission. That was more than nine months ago, and his wife just had a baby——”
Lucy blushed. “Did you see someone in the State Department who told you?”
“I ran into a friend.”
“I forgot to tell you about the O.P.A.,” Larry broke in. “My client is going to have to make two or three holers instead of four if he wants to crack the ceiling price.”
“Buttons,” Arthur explained to Phil Kenyon.
“He’ll need a new mold, and molds use war material,” Larry continued. “It’s a waste of time, material and labor to make new molds, but he has to do it to get around the O.P.A. In the end he charges his high price on the new line. The ceiling price only holds on old merchandise.”
“That’s one of the bad features of O.P.A.,” Bemrose acknowledged. “Just the same it’s doing a job.” He stretched lazily and poured himself another Martini.
“I think Larry has a point,” Phil Kenyon started to argue, but Lucy’s silence headed him off.
The pale eyes were on Bemrose waiting for him to say something about Newton’s offer.
“I met a Senator down there—” he started to say.
“Arthur!” Her tone reproached him. “Phil’s interested, too. You can talk about your job in front of him.”
Silently he sipped his cocktail.
“You three talk, I’ll run along,” Kenyon offered.
“Lucy’s right. We haven’t any secrets you can’t hear. Stick around.”
“Newton offered me just what you’d expect,” he continued. “He wants me to come down and fight the Battle of the Department of Justice.”
Lucy walked away from the fire, her slender fingers trailing below the tailored cuffs of a gray-blue woolen dress. The closely woven fabric concealed her fragility. She looked remarkably durable.
“How would you like to move to Washington?” Arthur talked to her back as she crossed the room.
She stopped alongside Phil Kenyon’s chair and picked up a box of matches from the table. He took it out of her hand and struck a match for her. For an instant, their glances met.
Larry bent to tie his shoelace.
“How do you think you would like to move down?” Arthur asked.
She returned slowly to her chair opposite him. “I won’t be able to leave New York. Marge is going to have a baby.”
“Why, that’s great! Maybe there’s hope for Bess and me,” Larry raised his glass. “Good for Ed, the son-of-a-gun.”
Lucy tried to smile, but didn’t make it.
“When is she expecting the baby?” Arthur inquired dully.
“Not for several months.”
“I promised to let Tom know next week.”
Lucy brushed some wisps of hair from her cheek.
“Is Marge having a tough time?” Larry asked.
“It isn’t easy for a woman of forty-two to have her first baby!” Lucy’s careful diction failed to conceal the agitation she felt.
“Ed carrying on and upsetting her?” Larry asked.
“He’s jumpy,” she admitted.
“Maybe he’s having the baby,” Arthur injected bitterly.
“Oh, Arthur—” Lucy’s eyes were wet, and Larry realized that it was she, not Ed, who was having the baby for Marge. As long as she was married to Arthur, the chances were that she wouldn’t have any of her own. She probably felt a desperate necessity to stick with Marge.
Uneasily Phil Kenyon said something about having to keep an appointment, and Lucy went downstairs with him to the door.
“That’s that, I guess.” Arthur fingered the stem of his glass, but his hand trembled. He slumped deeper in his chair.
“I’d take the job anyway,” Larry said. “She’ll follow you in a couple of months when Marge is out of the woods.”
“She wants a baby. She can’t have a baby with me,” Arthur’s shoulder jerked. “It isn’t a good feeling for a man to know that——”
Larry made no comment. A few minutes later he said, “Let her move down with you and come back to New York weekends. Tell her she can stay up here with Marge the last few weeks. Marge wouldn’t want you to give up an interesting job.”
“Well, I can’t settle it this afternoon. I’m pooped.” Bemrose pulled himself out of the chair, and his body hung a dead weight on the crutches. “Tell Lucy I’m going to grab some sleep before dinner.”
He found her at the head of the red-carpeted stairs, and they sat at the top of the landing, her fingers limply trailing the step below.
“It isn’t fair to you, either, Larry,” she complained. “Not after you gave up your practice. He shouldn’t walk out on you like this.”
“He absolutely must cut himself a piece of war,” Larry pointed out. “When a guy like Bemrose stops doing the big thing, he stops.”
“I guess if that’s what he wants to do, he should go to Washington.” There was the strength of element-proof chromium in her cool appraisal.
“But you have other plans?”
She nodded. “I can’t leave, and to tell you the truth, Larry, I don’t want to leave. I’ve been happy the last few months. I’ve felt—well, younger.”
Larry sensed the quality of the unstrained, carefree friendship with Phil Kenyon. He realized how it contrasted with the more mature burdens of her marriage. It was the difference between childhood and a grown-up world. Lucy may never have known a real childhood. She perhaps was catching up on what she had missed.
“If you like, I’ll go down to Washington with Arthur and stay with him for a few months to get him settled,” Larry offered.
She stared ahead miserably: “You’ve done enough, Larry. You have to think about yourself and Bessie——”
“I could only stay for a few months,” he admitted. “Bessie wouldn’t like me to be away any longer. But if it will help you out——”
Competently she straightened the round, schoolboy collar of her dress. “I’ll find a place for him down there if he likes, then come back. Once he’s busy at Newton’s office, he’ll be all right.”
“You mean you’ll come back to New York alone?”
“He has friends in Washington, and it’s his kind of place. He needs room to think in, and I can’t give it to him. I know he feels cramped around me. I’ve about decided that he always will. I’ve just been waiting for him to get well enough to look around for what he needs.”
Larry covered her hand which lay on the step next to his. “I used to wonder if you’d grow up,” he said.
“Have I?”
“You’re willing to give up what belongs to you, even though you have a mortgage. You helped put Arthur back on his feet. You have rights. It takes guts and some pretty grown-up feelings to surrender a valuable property.”
“You don’t make people happy by owning them,” Lucy said. “And you can’t really own them unless they want to belong.”
He asked her to come downstairs with him while he looked for his coat. On the way out he smiled and said, “I like your friend Kenyon. He’s okay.”