Chapter 28
By June of ’43 when Larry went down to spend another weekend with Arthur in Washington, the output of heavy bombers was beginning to outnumber submarine sinkings; Eisenhower had met in Algiers with De Gaulle; the military establishment at Pantelleria had been bombed out, and Italy’s supply system in the South was cracking. Invasion was expected any day, and people waited, content to read about B-17s grounded by weather in England, tolerant of the coal strike at home, sure that Jimmy Byrnes, head of the new O.W.M., and kingpin of Washington production czars, would soon have materials rolling to the invasion troops.
The night before Larry left New York, Bessie complained about his going. “I hope you don’t have to make many more trips down there,” she said petulantly.
Larry let it pass. Liz Brett had come in for a drink during the evening to tell them about her new husband, a forty-five year old captain in the Marines. Liz, imitating the kids, had met him one week when he was home on leave and married him the next. She wanted to get out to Pearl Harbor where he was stationed, and had almost talked a theatrical producer into sending her. In return she promised him a set for a play he was doing about the Pacific. There was so much trouble, though, in clearing her papers and passport that the producer was forced finally to rely on Navy photographs for his data. While she was telling this to Larry and Bess, Liz looked around the living room and noticed a tear in one of the slipcovers. She advised Bessie not to try and order new ones until the War ended and some decent fabrics again became available.
After Liz went home, Bess’s spirits took a nosedive. She walked around the room fingering rips, faulty zippers, missing snap fasteners, and threadbare spots in the chintz covers as if each were a badge of disgrace. Larry, jubilant because he had found a pair of black shoes on his expiring Number Seventeen ration coupon, tried to cheer her by saying that it might be his last trip to Washington to see Bemrose.
“I hope it is,” Bess said. “You can’t pick up and leave your practice every time he’s lonesome and wants to see you.”
“But he referred most of the practice to me.”
Her purple lips puckered. “The clients like you for yourself. You know they do.”
“They’ve really been coming in lately,” Larry admitted. “First thing you know I won’t be able to stay one of those Little Shots you admire.”
“You’ve worked hard for it, Larry. He did his friends a favor, recommending a good lawyer to them.” Her dark lips parted with curiosity. “What makes you think it’s the last weekend you’ll have to go down?”
“I have a hunch he’s going to start to get along without me. It took him years to shake off the Old Man, but he finally managed it. Next, I think he’s going to let Lucy go. That leaves me.” Larry stroked her neck, under the dark curls in back. “You’ll have more of me on your hands,” he threatened.
Bessie’s eyes petulantly refused to be glad. “Maybe he won’t need you, but that doesn’t mean anything. He likes you. He’ll want to see you.”
“Sure, once in a while. But not because he has to have another crutch to lean on. Once he stops depending on me——”
“Why don’t you wear your new tie, Larry?” she asked. “It goes much better with that suit.”
He fingered the small patterned maroon tie which harmonized with the dark red pin stripe in his sharkskin. “What’s the matter with this one? It’s a perfect match.”
“I suppose he’s going to marry Miss Baldwin,” she said. “But how can he if she’s overseas? Didn’t you say she went over for the invasion? I suppose the invasion’s important, but why did she go away and leave him by himself in that big house?”
“She left him with a good housekeeper. He’s getting along all right.”
“Maybe if he misses her enough, he’ll make up his mind. You’d think he would know by now. Didn’t you say someone named Holmes, an artist, used to be crazy about her?” Bessie asked. “I saved something from the paper about him.” She searched in the drawer of her desk for a clipping. “If it’s the same Holmes,” she said, handing it to him.
Apparently Steve had been out in Australia working on a series of paintings for a drug manufacturer and had been hurt in a jeep accident. He had been taken to a hospital with head injuries, Larry read, but they were believed minor, and he was expected to recover.
“She might hear about the accident and go to see him,” Bessie suggested.
“Where did you dream up a romantic idea like that? From England to Australia?”
“I don’t see why not. She could fly to Australia,” Bessie insisted.
“I’ve been trying to tell you she likes Bemrose. She’s not going to fly out to see Holmes. It’s Bemrose she’s crazy about.”
“If she’s so crazy about him, why did she go overseas?” Bessie stared stolidly ahead. “What’ll you do with the extra time, Larry? After they’re married?”
“I can work hard and become one of those corporation lawyers.” He stuck out his stomach.
“Silly.” She pushed it down. “How old was her aunt, the one who had the baby?”
“Whose? Lucy’s?”
“The aunt with the husband.”
“I should hope so.”
She frowned. “No, how old?”
“Forty-one, maybe forty-two. I don’t know exactly.”
Her eyes questioned him.
“You mean us?” he asked.
“I’m not saying we have to, Larry. I guess you’ve never wanted to very much, but you’re doing better now at the office and I thought— You’re taking a topcoat to Washington with you, aren’t you?”
He considered it on the train the next day. Maybe Bessie was right. They had never given it enough thought. In the hand-to-mouth struggle for a living since they were married, they hadn’t considered seriously the idea of having a family. Did he want one? And if he didn’t want children, what did he want? Not more clients. He had enough, the way things were going, to keep him busy at the office. Not a more active career in politics. He was sick and tired of the political scramble. Maybe a family. Maybe he ought to make a few plans of his own. Maybe he ought to take some of the advice that he had been busy dishing out to Bemrose.
When Larry arrived in Georgetown the next day, he found Fred Maxwell, an old beau of Janice’s, drinking brandy in the study with Arthur.
“Fred phoned around dinner time and said he was free tonight,” Bemrose explained. “You haven’t seen Washington until you’ve met Fred. He’s a landmark, like the Washington monument——”
“Old and dead,” Maxwell interrupted.
“Not according to Janice,” Arthur protested.
“She hasn’t been out with me for ten years. She wouldn’t know. By the way, I spoke to her today. She phoned in a story from London.”
“How is she?” Arthur sat forward in his chair.
“That’s what she wants to know. How you are. She gave me hell because I hadn’t been over to check up. Tell me a few details so I can square myself tomorrow when I talk to her.” Maxwell’s skinny leg hung loosely on his knee. The strong arch of his nose kept its slender tip from faltering, but his cheeks fell away in unashamed gulleys. A pompadour of graying hair offset his cadaverousness, and the humor lines around his mouth looked as if they might have been put there by off-color stories. Washington editor for Everett’s since 1915, Maxwell had hired Janice as a novice, taken her past the brass knockers into the big houses, and introduced her to Congress, Senator by Senator, over a series of whiskeys and sodas. For about a year she was “Fred’s girl.” Then they stopped seeing each other until Arthur moved down. Maxwell liked Bemrose the minute he met him and had hung around ever since.
“Fred is a bachelor, the lucky stiff,” Arthur told Larry. “They tell me he’s hell with women, but he’s always been too smart——”
“Too smart is right. I thought I was better off single. But lately I’ve found out there is a catch in this business of having your freedom. I didn’t figure out some of the other ways a man can be tied down. Guess how many nights a week I have off.” He held up a finger. “One.”
“Fred lives with his sister, and she hasn’t been well,” Arthur said.
“Cancer. It hit her a year ago,” Maxwell explained. “The doctor gives her another eight months. I go out the one night, and they phone me when she has pain and can’t stand it alone.”
Larry nodded his sympathy, and Arthur said, “I suppose there was a time when you thought about getting married——”
“About ten years ago was the last time, when Janice and I went around together. But I decided that I didn’t want to be tied down. I didn’t marry any of the others for the same reason. With Janice, I knew it was probably the last time I’d consider it. Getting too old.”
Larry found it difficult to tune in sharply on what Fred Maxwell was saying. He kept thinking of Janice. Almost everything in the room reminded him of her—the licks of shadow on the ceiling, the ink spot on the leather top of her desk, a mess of papers under her Chinese bronze weight, her uncovered typewriter, and the wall of ragged bindings piled crazily to fill the bookshelves. He found himself believing that she was out on a late assignment. She’d come in dead beat any minute and ask for a cup of coffee or for some of the brandy.
“It’s fellows like me who get hooked,” Maxwell said. “The kind who know all the answers. We feel good about ducking responsibility. Then, when we’re too old, we wake up and find that everything else has passed us by, too. That place of mine is a hospital, a morgue. Do you know the fellows I envy? The plodding Joes who took responsibilities when I was busy making fun of them and have some swell kids to show for it today. I’m the big freedom guy. Only freedom’s caught up with me. It was an illusion anyway, and it didn’t last. If I had it to do over again, I would have married a dumb little girl when I was twenty-five, the kind who believed me when I told her that I had to work a couple of nights a week.”
“Wouldn’t Janice have let you out?” Bemrose asked.
“She was never that dumb.” Maxwell tapped the table with the bowl of his meerschaum pipe. “After fifty-three years I know my limit with a woman,” he said. “It’s six months. I’d have done fine with the right kind of wife. I’d have had a home today, not a hospital, and on the side I’d have had enough variety.”
“To six months with a woman!” Bemrose lifted his glass.
“To Janice.” Maxwell altered the toast. “Why don’t you stop kidding around, Bemrose? Why don’t you get a divorce and marry her? By the way, how are you feeling? If I know Janice, she’ll have me on the phone first thing in the morning. Your symptoms are going to cost Everett’s plenty.”
“He hasn’t any symptoms,” Larry said. “Have you?”
“You can tell her I have a cold feeling of anger when I fall over the bedroom slippers she forgot to put in her closet.”
“You should hear Bess,” Larry said. “She’s furious that Janice left you in the house alone. She thinks it’s an outrage——”
“Who’s Bess?” Maxwell asked.
“My wife.”
“Well, you tell Bess that the readers of Everett’s would be outraged if this fellow made a housekeeper of her.”
“How long before the invasion?” Bemrose asked suddenly.
“Six months to a year,” Maxwell said.
“But I thought——”
“Sure, I know. So does everyone else. That’s why all those correspondents are sitting over there. There are enough of them in England to sink the damned island. They could come over here and get back again half a dozen times before anything happens.”
“Then she could come home and get back?” Larry said.
“Why don’t you hang around the office tomorrow morning and talk to her when she phones?” Fred asked Arthur, his ghostly face coming to life. “Tell her that you’ve thought about it and you don’t want her to go in on the first wave. You don’t think it’s safe.”
“I’m not sure I want her to go in at all,” said Bemrose, his jaw set obstinately.
“That’s no way to get her to say ‘yes,’” Maxwell advised. “How about it? Do you want to come down tomorrow and talk to her on the phone?”
Silently Bemrose quizzed Larry.
“Maybe he’d rather cable her,” Larry suggested. “The connection might not be good, and she might not be able to hear him over the phone.”
“Larry’s right. I think I’d rather cable,” Arthur said gratefully.
He found a lined yellow pad on Janice’s desk, and rolled a sheet of paper into her typewriter. Deliberately his fingers tackled the keys. “Take it down for me, will you?” He folded the message and handed it to Larry. “When you get there, you can read it.”
At the corner of the dark, cool street, Larry disregarded the blackout and struck a match. He held its flame close to the message.
MAXWELL SAYS YOU HAVE TIME COME HOME
MARRY ME WILL YOU TAKE RISK LOVE
ARTHUR BEMROSE
Although Larry knew it was one of the last errands he was going to do for Bemrose, he didn’t feel any special regret. He wasn’t even sorry about giving up an old habit. He saw the trolley coming, and stepped briskly into the street to signal it.