Six weeks later Larry spent a Saturday in Georgetown at Janice’s house where Bemrose had been living for more than a month. Arthur’s painful probing of the hotel and apartment situation had ended as it almost always ended these days, with no room and no apartment, and Janice insisted that he move into her guest room until he found something else of his own. She registered the room with the O.P.A. and he paid her the approved rental.
During the grim winter of ’43 when more planes were put into the English skies than returned to landing strips bedded in the Oxford-Cambridge villages, in the winter the Red Army, freed by the Stalingrad victory, advanced against Rostov in a drive to reopen the Caucasus and the Crimea, in the winter that MacArthur’s men, mopping up in Papua and the Solomons, awaited tensely “a Jap move of utmost importance,” and Montgomery, triumphant after El Alamein, stubbornly battled Rommel’s last outpost in Tunis, in the winter the home front retched at Hull’s choice of Vichyite Peyrouton for governor of Algiers, in that grim winter Janice bloomed. Larry figured that the times were hers. She seemed to understand and belong to the times, and they rewarded her.
It was the winter, Larry predicted, that Janice would look her most beautiful, just as there seems to be a year when almost every woman becomes life-ripened and achieves her fullest flavor, fragrance, color, and texture. With Janice this ripening must have been curiously delayed. In her twenties she was too scrawny and intense, with eyes that grabbed on too quickly. In her early thirties, the flesh retreated to her bones where it clung tight and dry. Now in her middle thirties, a radiance took hold. The black chips of eyes, which had burned defiantly and stubbornly, threw back opalescent lights of green, rose, and gold. The dull boy’s hair acquired brilliance, as if stroked fifty times a night, and the parched flesh satisfied its thirst, suffused by the racing fluid of vein and capillaries.
In the high-ceilinged drawing room of Janice’s house this afternoon in early February, Bemrose sat at the edge of the crowd and followed her pattern of light as it illuminated the guests. Larry, from a corner next to the damask-hung window, reflected that the significant moments of Bemrose’s life, and perhaps of many a modern man’s, were lived in crowds. Larry thought of the crowded evening at Professor Storey’s when Arthur had first begun to know Janice, of the crowded drawing room at home when he had become engaged to Lucy——
Larry thought he understood why many contemporary painters selected crowds to show the face of America. More and more the individual was judged by an impression snatched in a group. The crowd had become measure of the man, and the interest a man commanded in a crowd often mirrored his position in the social framework. Formerly a portrait by Rembrandt, Copley, or Gilbert Stuart told the story of a society, but today the crowd seemed to have replaced the individual as sitter.
About seventy-five cards spilled from a silver dish on the table of Janice’s entrance hall. She had invited some friends from the Russian embassy, and although she could not compete with the caviar and champagne they served at official functions, Janice had paid them a subtle tribute. Behind the drawing room in her study, she had used an empty magnum salvaged from the last embassy party to decorate the hearth. A Russian with shiny skull bent to examine the bottle, and as he wiped the dusty neck with his finger, he smiled approvingly.
Janice brought over a Senator to meet him, and immediately the Russian stiffened. Knowing they belonged to different planets politically, Janice steered them toward Arthur, apparently hoping that he could establish the two on amiable ground—whatever that area might be. Larry tried to imagine a mutually agreeable subject and ended with Donald Duck. Disney, in a future world government, would be a logical Secretary of Communications.
The other guests, including cabinet assistants, newspapermen, congressmen, and two Supreme Court wives, also gravitated to the cluster of quiet around Bemrose, as if he assured them respite from the crowd chatter. They had come to expect a quiet strength, a sound opinion from Arthur. Guests who met him, often for the first time, intuitively felt this quality. That’s what Janice told Larry. Larry, himself, had seen it happen in New York recently. With the dependable crowd instinct which used to sidestep his blustering, people now sought him out, attracted by his deep quiet, and seeming to find in it solace for their own worries or the world’s worries.
A Washington hostess, whose Friday night suppers sowed items regularly in the gossip columns, approached Larry on miserly ankles. “You’re his best friend, aren’t you?” she asked sharply.
Larry backed toward the window away from her bulk of bosom.
“I hear the President is delighted he came to Washington. I hear the President regards him as one of the most brilliant lawyers we have. Wonderful how he manages to get around on those crutches—” She used her malnourished hands to emphasize the words.
“Wonderful how the President manages,” Larry said evasively.
The woman moved closer and watched Janice spar with one of the Everett’s editors, her legs astride and chest high. “Nice for both of them, his staying here,” she observed.
Larry lit her cigarette. “It’s a lucky thing she took him in with the hotels jammed.”
“Man in his condition doesn’t belong in a hotel! Plenty of room here. Good for her to have a man in the house. Good for everyone. I need someone in my barn.” Hawkishly she eyed Larry, but he unhooked himself. “You must let Janice bring you up some Friday night——”
He sat on the windowsill to recover, and felt immense relief. Washington paid attention to the woman. She’d stop the gossips. It was a real break, having her on their side. She’d make it seem patriotic for Janice to have taken him in.
“Caroline thinks you’re a lamb,” Janice said a few minutes later. “She claims you’re the best dressed man in the room.”
Larry glanced curiously at the sleeves of his blue coat.
“She talks too much. She’s a hyperthyroid. Come on and meet some of the nice people.”
Janice took his hand, but he said, “I’ll see how Arthur is.”
“You’ll never get near him. You’d think he was giving away red points.” The radiance dimmed for a moment. “I hope he’s having a good time. They’re all in love with him.”
She sighed. “You were right. He has changed. He’s stopped trying to be important.”
“He’s important to us,” Larry said.
“I think it’s the War,” Janice speculated. “At first I thought it was his illness, but now I don’t know. I think the War may have helped to pull him out of himself——”
“Your friend Caroline approves of his staying here,” Larry said.
“I try to invite people he likes, try to make it comfortable——”
“You do all right when you try,” Larry reassured her. “Go on back to your guests. I’m fine.”
The tomato face of Davis Shore gleamed under his white cap of hair. He motioned affably to Larry who, remembering Shore’s recent snub at the office, figured it must be the good liquor at work. “Here’s Mr. Bemrose’s associate,” Shore said to a lawyer Larry recognized from the Treasury. “He’ll tell us the catch in it. That preposterous scheme of Ruml’s to forgive nineteen forty-two taxes—” he explained. “I don’t see how the Treasury can afford to——”
“But forty-three is going to be an even bigger tax year,” the lawyer expounded patiently. “I’m trying to convince Mr. Shore that the Treasury won’t lose anything. It’s just a matter of bookkeeping.”
“Forgiving taxes! When we have a war to pay for! It takes genius to dream up such a scheme. I’d like to ask our friend, Bemrose——”
“I discussed it with Bemrose last night at the Morgenthaus’,” the lawyer reported. “He thinks it’s sound.”
Shore’s ruddy countenance turned an exasperated white. “Worst time in history for Bemrose to bury himself down here,” he confided to Larry. “We need him at our end of things in New York. We’ve tried to make it interesting. I wouldn’t want you to repeat this, Mr.—” He twitched uncomfortably.
“Frank.”
“Oh, yes, Frank. Well, our Board authorized me to invite Bemrose to become General Counsel of the company. Adams, who has been with us for thirty years, had an embolism. Fine fellow, Adams, but we don’t expect him back.”
“I suppose Arthur felt he couldn’t leave Newton,” Larry sympathized.
“Newton could fill the job with a dozen other men.”
“I don’t know. Arthur seems to think the work down here is important.” Larry rehearsed his most cordial manner. Someday Bemrose might be glad to be General Counsel to a utility.
“Thought I might tackle Newton to release him,” Shore said. “Didn’t I see Newton come in a few minutes ago?”
“He’s over there with Arthur.” Larry started toward the study.
“By the way, Frank, what are you doing now that Bemrose’s office is closed?”
“I’m back at my practice.”
“Downtown?”
“Midtown.”
Shore winced. “Too bad you couldn’t stay with him. Fine training for a lawyer to work around Bemrose.”
“My old roommate is putting up with me.”
“Then you’re tied up—” Shore added vaguely.
Arthur was telling an Englishman where he could buy ladies’ girdles to take back with him to London when Shore and Larry walked into the room.
“Just moved to Washington and he knows where to shop for girdles,” Tom Newton kidded.
“I hope you’re not going to keep him down here,” Shore said.
Newton tossed a cigarette into the fire. “He signed up for the duration plus six months.”
“I don’t want to lose my job,” Arthur said. “I like my boss.”
Affectionately Newton stroked his shoulder. “You’re pretty good at your job for a youngster just out of law school.”
“Why don’t you put in a youngster?” Shore asked. “We need him for that Reynolds case. Isn’t another lawyer who understands our problems and can try the damn case. How about giving him six months’ leave?”
Newton pretended sympathy. “We’d like to oblige, but in Europe there’s shooting going on.”
“He’s only chairborne infantry,” Shore remarked, and Larry waited for Bemrose to wince.
“Why shouldn’t I stay here and have the privilege of wasting some of the taxpayers’ money?” Arthur chuckled. “Everyone else does. How about it, Tom?”
“I have orders from the White House to keep him on the payroll,” Newton said. “If you don’t want to upset the Commander-in-Chief, you’ll stop trying to seduce him with your retainers.”
Shore flattened his babyfine hair across his forehead. Apparently resigned, he said, “I don’t suppose you can recommend a lawyer.”
“What’s the matter with—” Arthur started to say.
A lady columnist jostled Shore and spilled the Martini he had in his hand. She plopped on the arm of Bemrose’s chair. “Is it true you have the goods on that Yorkville reptile? Come on, give. I hear you have enough to hang him.” She wiped her face with a soiled chiffon handkerchief. Turning her back on the others, she fingered Arthur’s lapel.
Janice streaked across the room. “Your friend, Vorosoff.” She interrupted the girl. “I theenk he would like to make with you circle around park.” Janice bowed, impersonating the Russian. “At the door he is waiting in black cloak. Very dremetikal.”
When the columnist had gone, Janice sat down, exhausted. “You’d have been misquoted in every Morris paper,” she told Bemrose. “All seventy-nine of them. I meant to warn you——”
“My press secretary,” Arthur said, pointing to Janice. “She has the best legs in Washington.”
“Fool!” Janice grabbed Tom Newton and shouldered her way to the drawing room.
“They are,” Larry said. “I never noticed. Anything I can get you?”
“I have everything,” Arthur said cryptically. “You’re staying over tonight, aren’t you?”
“You’ll be dead by the time this crowd leaves. You won’t want to stay up and talk. You’ll be worn out.”
“I want to talk to you about that case of Shore’s. Maybe we can get him to turn it over——”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did,” Larry protested. “It’s way over my head.”
“I’d help you with it. That part is easy. But I have to figure out an angle with Shore. We’ll have to sell you to him. Subtlely, of course.”
“He wouldn’t want me,” Larry said.
“Who gives a damn what he wants? There’s a good fee in it——”
“You never charged him.”
Arthur laughed. “This time he’ll pay through the nose.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Is it true old Caroline wanted to rape you?”
Larry fingered the buttons on his double-breasted coat. “She didn’t waste much time on me. She was too busy giving you and Janice the green light. It’ll be okay on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line. They listen to Caroline.”
“Didn’t you tell her I was a married man?”
“I don’t think she cares.”
Solemnly Bemrose fingered the strands of his mustache.
“So you think you rate a bedroom and bath for the O.P.A. ceiling price?” Larry asked. “Without performing any services?”
“I’m very useful, I watch the house,” Arthur protested. “Most of the Georgetown police have been drafted. Someone has to keep an eye on the house for her.”
“She always dressed well, but now she’s pretty,” Larry nodded toward Janice. “You’re therapeutic.”
Arthur sobered. “Contented. It’s almost the first time the little man inside hasn’t been sticking pitchforks in me, pulling and pushing me out of shape.”
“Maybe it’s Janice. She’s happy you’re here, and she’s making a big effort——”
“Other people have put themselves out,” Arthur reminded him.
“Maybe the life and the people down here suit you more,” Larry said.
“I’ve always been scared of people.”
Larry mocked. “You? Why you self-possessed bastard——”
Arthur’s voice was calm and insistent. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve really felt at home with people.”
“Maybe it’s because they’re more your kind than—well, Ed and Marge,” Larry speculated.
“Nothing wrong with Ed and Marge,” Bemrose insisted. “Trouble was with me.”
Janice brought over Judd Harrison. He asked Arthur his opinion of the Japs and their chances of jockeying a negotiated peace.
While he and Bemrose discussed the problem, Janice urged Larry to stay overnight. “We’ll fix supper, just the three of us,” she promised.
“Bessie expects me home.”
“Just this once. When I’m happy,” she pleaded. The blood-red fingertips crept along his collar. “You’ve almost always seen me at my worst, Larry. Yes, you have. I’d like you to be around once when I’m——”
On the way upstairs to phone Bessie, Larry stopped to read the inscriptions on some photographs which lined the wall—the picture of a Chinese General whose name was elaborated in characters as ornate as his medals, Janice in Paris with De Gaulle, Janice with Jimmy Doolittle and Queen Elizabeth on an English airdrome, Janice in Honolulu at a USO show surrounded by G.I.’s, and an old one of Janice in a cloth coat down to the ankles on her way home from China.
In her bedroom Larry fingered the candlewick spread before deciding to sit on the bed. The room was unpretentious, bright with rag rugs and chintz, and the polished pine floorboards gleamed warmly. Larry settled down and relaxed against a sturdy bedpost.
Bessie’s voice rang sweetly in his ear. “Having a good time, Larry? Is it snowing? There’s a blizzard here.”
But Janice’s heels clattered across the wooden doorsill, and she grabbed the phone from him. “He’ll call you back,” she told Bessie. “There’s been an accident——”
As she dialed, Larry pictured Bemrose sprawled on the floor downstairs. “For God’s sake, Janice!”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “Henry Chu, Chinese Embassy. Heart attack.”
She gave the doctor crisp directions.
“Call Bessie back right away. She’ll be worried,” Janice insisted when Larry offered to go downstairs with her. “There are three or four doctors around, but they thought I ought to get his own physician. Poor Henry, he’s green as a billiard table.”
Bessie also thought it was Arthur, of course. “You can tell me the truth,” she insisted, still skeptical when Larry tried to reassure her. “If you want me to call up his wife——”
Larry finally straightened her out. “Arthur is really in good shape. He’s having the time of his life down here. You should see him, Bess. He’s in his element.”
“That’s lovely, Larry. You stay over and have a good time. Did you take your overshoes with you?”
Before he went downstairs, Larry tried to find a mystery he could read tonight in bed. Janice had shelves of every thriller from Gaboriau to Erle Stanley Gardner. He selected The Golden Violet by Joseph Shearing and put it on a table in Bemrose’s room.
If only it would last with Bemrose—if he could have just a year of this, he’d be set up.
In the study downstairs Henry Chu’s eyelids fluttered weakly, and Janice held a glass of whiskey for him to sip. He was birdlike, frightened, and too young to have a heart attack. The other guests had disappeared into the drawing room, and Henry Chu’s doctor was explaining the history and symptoms of the case not to Henry, not to Janice nor to Larry, not to the doctors who were in the next room, nor to Caroline who was a patient of his and had waited outside to see if she could help, but meticulously and earnestly to Bemrose.