Chapter 3
A sleety wind from the Drive blew Larry across West End Avenue at Ninety-first Street. The doorman of the apartment house where Lucy McVail lived with her uncle and aunt reached from under the canopy to cover him with a tattered umbrella. Guided by its bamboo handle, Larry stamped into the vestibule and smoothed his upturned overcoat collar to prevent the layers of wet snow from sliding down his neck. He looked around the steamy entrance hall. A soggy red carpet matched a worn plush bench with pewlike back. Larry mounted three ill-covered stairs to the elevator, and when he saw the stucco walls freshly painted a poisonous green, he thought of a restaurant chain which had recently failed.
Upstairs the elevator man pointed to a shabby door at the end of a third-floor corridor where gas fixtures, no longer in use, remained bracketed to the wall.
Lucy, her skin a clear amber, her pale eyes only faintly tinged with color, answered his ring. Larry saw that with a hat off her blonde hair, light enough to be mistaken for gray, fluffed softly around her face. A white Persian kitten, done up in a blue satin bow, curled at her heel. They were two homebody females, and they made him feel warm with contentment.
She led Larry through a narrow hall where a long expanse of wall space was conscientiously covered by flower prints in cheap frames. In the living room her Uncle Ed, a can of English shoe wax in one hand, a soiled cloth in the other, sat polishing an end table. He had on a kitchen apron.
She introduced them, and Ed Daugherty tried to wipe off the brown stains before he put out his hand. “Things get gritty,” he apologized. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. What did you say the name was—Frank?”
The inexpensive furniture in the room had profited by his energy. Tables, chairs, and walnut secretary shone like new shoes. A mohair sofa and matching chair from an installment-plan establishment made Larry grateful for Bessie’s decorator friend, Elizabeth Brett, who had given them a more tasteful living room at home.
There was old and old—richly designed old such as Judge Haynes had left; shabby, comfortable old, the kind the Storeys probably lived with; run-down old like the entrance downstairs; and shined-up, immaculate old, neither particularly gracious nor comfortable. This.
Larry remembered the steep walk from the Albany station to a narrow alley where, in an apartment above the local hardware store, he had spent Christmas vacation with Arthur Bemrose one year. It was an oppressively shabby house, and Arthur must have been glad to forget it these past few years.
“When my aunt finishes the dishes, I’d like you to meet her,” Lucy said, and Larry came back from his thoughts of Albany where he recalled that the Bemroses owned a blue mohair sofa like this one.
A figured pink lamp shade dipped in fussy fringes, and Ed Daugherty tackled the green wooden base with his polishing wax. He had a stock of the paste in all colors, and chose a neutral shade for the lamp.
“For heaven’s sake, stop fussing. You’ll rub off the finish,” said a plump red-faced woman. She giggled in an uncontrolled staccato. “He’s always at things,” she apologized, shaking hands with Larry. “Mighty nice of you, Mr. Frank, to help our niece with her case. Isn’t this a nasty night? Would you like a cup of tea, or something stronger? Put the water on for tea, Ed,” she decided quickly.
Mr. Daugherty undid his apron and turned toward the kitchen. A polishing, not a talking man, Larry thought, until he later found it was Daugherty’s wife who often canceled out his conversation.
Larry turned with relief to Lucy McVail. After the meticulous uncle and the gushing aunt, it was like looking into a cool, still well. Listening might easily be Lucy’s most useful quality, Larry reflected, remembering that he had mentioned this trait of hers to Bemrose. It wasn’t easy to tell how much she understood, but she listened. He unzipped his briefcase and spread some legal papers for her to examine. Precisely he took up each point in the settlement that Bemrose had worked out with her brother.
When the farm in Iowa was sold, they would divide the proceeds equally, she and her brother. The bonds at the bank, however, belonged solely to her, and they constituted the larger part of the estate. Mr. Bemrose thought she might consider cashing the bonds since he had checked on their current market price and found it was favorable. She might invest the money in an insurance annuity if she wanted to provide for her future.
Miss McVail probably knew, Larry explained, that her brother had capitulated after Mr. Bemrose’s second letter, the blunt one, in which he reminded Mr. McVail of three bonds he had wheedled out of his grandmother the week she died. Mr. Bemrose threatened suit for undue influence, and her brother apparently had reason to keep out of court. Larry noted that Lucy McVail winced. Not that it mattered why he had finally agreed, Larry hastened to explain. Here was his signature. Now if she would just sign— The farm might bring fifteen hundred dollars. Adding the bonds, she would be able to realize around six thousand in cash. It wasn’t bad. Mr. Bemrose thought she had done all right.
While Lucy McVail read the papers, the Daughertys fussed with teapot, cups and saucers. She read the documents as slowly as she had listened to him, Larry decided. Quietly she studied the long legal sheets, tracing each line with a square-ended finger. Cool and slender. Quiet and slender. Gray-blonde and slender. Larry noted and enjoyed her pale, attenuated beauty.
“Where shall I sign?” she asked at last.
“You’re sure that you haven’t any questions? Mr. Bemrose wanted you to understand all the details.”
“As long as you and Mr. Bemrose think it’s all right—” She nodded. “I trust you.”
Larry handed her a fountain pen, and she wrote her name in thin, tall letters that were squared off in a heavy line at the bottom.
She handed the agreement back to him.
“That’s your copy. Keep it,” he said. “Now sign this one to send to your brother.”
She repeated her signature, obedient as a fourth-grader.
“We didn’t discuss the fee. Do you think Mr. Bemrose—” A shadow crossed the pale eyes. “Well, you know what I mean. He has such important clients.”
“Not you. He’ll be easy on you,” Larry reassured her. “It’s a peculiarity of his, but very often even with his rich clients, he keeps down the fee. I’ve heard him refuse to take a cent from men who would pay anything he asked.” Larry tapped his thigh sharply with a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
“He must be well off, turning down fees from people who can afford to pay—” Marge Daugherty said. She dribbled a spoonful of tea into her full cup, cooling it. “He’s young to be so rich, isn’t he? Or did he come into the money? Tim Hoxter told us——”
Larry laughed. “All he ever inherited was a sister with t.b. He has a brother who never held a job in his life and a father in Albany who drives a truck when he can find some work. The mother keeps house for all of them on what Mr. Bemrose sends her.”
Larry got up and walked to the table where Ed Daugherty had gone back to the lamp. “That’s a nice job you’re doing,” he remarked.
Daugherty ran his fingers over the glowing wood, warming himself.
“I went home with him to Albany one Christmas vacation and met the family,” Larry explained to Mrs. Daugherty. “Bemrose has been supporting them since he was sixteen. He worked his way through college and law school besides. I don’t know how he ever did it. I couldn’t, but I have a brother who did just about the same—took care of my folks, sent me through school. Some people seem to have the capacity.”
“If he had such a struggle, I don’t see how he can turn down fees.” Marge Daugherty clamped her lips.
“He’s not married, Marge,” Lucy said, so quietly that even a preposterous suggestion would have sounded reasonable, coming from her. “A man who isn’t married——”
“I guess it’s fun for him to work on big cases,” Larry speculated. “Fun for almost any lawyer,” he added. “The money doesn’t matter too much. He has a taste for hobnobbing with big shots. He lived around them for years when he made his home with Judge Haynes. They hire him for their lawyer, and first thing you know he’s their pal. He hangs out with half the people in Washington who count.”
“That’s the trouble with the New Deal crowd,” Ed Daugherty snapped.
Larry looked up startled, as though a clump of quiet woodland fern had suddenly acquired powers of speech.
Ed pulled a pipe out of his back pocket and reamed it. “Maybe your friend Bemrose is after power, like all the rest of them.”
“No, he just likes to help people, like he helped Miss McVail.”
She blushed. “He certainly has been nice to me.” The moving gray-blonde lashes shadowed her cheeks. “The day I went to his office the phone hardly stopped ringing, but he found time for my case just the same.”
“When he helps people and they put their confidence in him, he feels good. That’s all there is to it. The money is secondary with him,” Larry explained, conscious of going into needless detail, yet wanting to clarify it for himself. “With taxes what they are, money isn’t as important as it used to be. A man has to find other reasons for working, and Bemrose enjoys feeling useful. He’s like a lot of other people that way, only he knows better than most how to make himself useful.”
“But if his clients have the money and want to pay him, I still don’t see why—” Marge Daugherty laughed, eyeing Larry shrewdly.
“Oh, Marge, what difference does it make? That’s Mr. Bemrose’s business,” Lucy said. She got up and walked to the hall. “Phil said yesterday he would pick me up at eight-thirty. I wonder if he forgot about our date.”
“It’s all right with me.” Marge Daugherty brought her forefinger sharply against her bosom. “As long as he doesn’t charge you a big fee.”
“He won’t,” Lucy whispered. “Didn’t you hear what Mr. Frank said?” Her eyes apologized to Larry.
He signaled for her not to worry, relieved that she knew when to stand up to them and wasn’t always a good little girl.
He made himself comfortable in a chair next to Ed. “I suppose you voted for Willkie,” he said, wondering about the Phil who was calling for her and still thinking that Bemrose might have tried inviting her to dinner. She had a nice simplicity that was lacking in so many of the hard, lacquered women Bemrose took out. The difference might appeal to him if he gave her a chance. Larry wondered if Bemrose had ever known a thoroughly nice, unselfish woman.
“Yes sir, Willkie should have won,” Ed said. “Now they’ve got him wasting his time going over there to see Churchill. If we don’t watch out, first thing you know——”
“Do you mean you’re against Lend-Lease?”
“Well, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be neutral.” Ed obstinately bit at his pipe.
“If England goes under, we’ll have a real fight on our hands. My friend, Bemrose, thinks there’s a chance she might.”
“There’s three thousand miles of ocean for the Nazis to cross, and we’ve got a big navy, haven’t we?” Ed asked.
“The Czechs thought they were okay, nothing could touch them, and so did the Poles. I’m not saying we should get into the War, but I’d like to see Congress stop stalling and pass Lend-Lease.”
“Hugh Johnson has the right idea. He calls this free handout lollipopping all over the world, and that’s what it is,” Ed maintained.
“Ed’s pretty conservative,” Marge observed.
“Is that the bell, Lucy?” Marge picked up the cat and slipped it behind the kitchen door. “You answer it, dear.”
But Lucy had already disappeared down the long, floral hall.
While she was out of the room, her aunt explained that Lucy McVail had studied nursing in Des Moines but left early in her training to take care of her grandmother who broke her hip and was alone on the farm. When her grandmother died after months and months in bed, the Daughertys wrote Lucy to come to New York. They couldn’t afford to send her through nursing school, but they paid for her course at a business college, and she found a job in a few weeks.
“She’s a nice girl, not like girls in New York, but a sweet disposition,” her aunt volunteered. “Ed and I never had children, and it’s a change for us to have someone young around. I get a kick out of her boy friends.”
Ed pursed his lips, and his wife added hastily, “Oh, she’s a good girl.”
“I think she should be a nurse, now she has the money for it,” Ed interjected. “Those stenographers where she works are a hard-boiled, Broadway bunch. She should be in a more refined atmosphere. She don’t know how to act sophisticated. She don’t know how to talk fast. Have you noticed how she takes her time with every word? It’s all right on a farm where there’s no hurry, but in a big office——”
“When they have a figure like that, they don’t waste it in a hospital emptying bedpans, do they, Mr. Frank?” Mrs. Daugherty winked suggestively. “At least in business she has a chance to meet someone. The fellow who’s taking her out is a salesman from her office. How come that friend of yours never married? Mr. Bemrose. He can’t be any youngster.”
“Marge!” Her husband sh-shed her.
Lucy McVail was following a sleekly combed man into the room, her blonde head showing above his. He was around thirty, and Larry was surprised to see that he had a small black mustache which could have been plagiarized from Arthur H. Bemrose except that it was a neater, better barbered edition.
“Mr. Kenyon, Mr. Frank,” Lucy introduced them.
Phillip Kenyon’s wide, warm grin was a handshake. “We better push along, Lucy,” he said. “They say the line goes around the block.”
“What are you seeing?” Marge wrinkled her nostrils inquisitively.
“Philadelphia Story. At the Music Hall.”
“Oh, I hear it’s swell.” Marge reproached her husband with a sigh. “You two better run along.”
“I’ll walk to the subway with you,” Larry offered.
“Don’t rush.” Ed folded his polishing rag: “I’m finished with this job. In a little while we can listen to the news.”
“Thanks, but I think I’d better go.”
Lucy brought Larry his coat, and Phil Kenyon held hers as if it were sable instead of tweed, looking compliments in five figures. Crossing Ninety-first Street, they drew away from Larry into an invisible circle. She clung to Phil’s arm, letting him screen her from the storm, and he tucked her hand inside the wool lining of his glove.
“I looked for you tonight at five,” he said.
“I know.” She sounded regretful. “Mr. Anderson started to dictate, and I didn’t get away until six-thirty. I tried your extension——”
“Mr. Kenyon works at the Green Network, too,” she explained to Larry.
They had things to talk about.
Larry decided abruptly that he needed cigarettes from the stand next to the subway. A masculine wind and Phil Kenyon swept her down the stairs, and she turned and fluttered a mitten at him.
Larry felt as if he had seen a clean family movie. It seemed right, sharply right, for those two. Happily ever after. He wished Arthur Bemrose had something as good. He wished Bemrose knew just one wholesome, unscheming woman who would be more interested in making a home for him than what she would get out of it in security or social position.
Arriving winded on the subway platform from a senseless habit of always running down the steps, Larry waited to make sure that Lucy McVail and her friend were on the train ahead.