Chapter 5
Larry didn’t want to buy a paper, but he laid down three cents anyway, attracted by some violets in a vendor’s box next to the newsstand. He sighed because there was no one to buy them for at ten-thirty in the morning. Outside the Chanin building he stopped to sniff at spring. The restless April. When he was a kid, it was the season for rubbing holes in his black stockings playing pitch penny, a penny if he won, and a bloody nose if he lost. He lost either way because the cotton stockings cost a dime, and his mother couldn’t go on darning the darns forever.
Spring now might mean a girl and the chance to buy her violets, or it might mean going to the zoo and watching the sea lions clown. He liked the sea lions when they arched out of the water in a surprise move which showered the crowd around the pool, then climbed on a granite block and stretched in the sun until their shiny blackness turned the protective gray of the stone.
To be a sea lion. Others could look for spring in the woods, but Central Park was for Larry, and a box on Forty-second Street the place to gather spring violets. The flowers might have a refrigerator smell and be wrapped in tinsel tied with cheap blue ribbon, but they were New York violets.
New York for Larry was the place to spend the restless April; also the motionless August, the bleak November and February when slush clogged the gutters. At any season it was the place, through carbon monoxide mornings, noisy afternoons, and glittery evenings. Monday through Sunday it was the place. When Larry left it to go across the River to Hoboken, he felt as though his right arm had dropped off. When a returning ferry made him whole again, he outwaited corner lights to feel the New York crowd press around him. He would have written an ode to the North River, if he had been Shelley.
This morning he hated to leave the spring down here on the street for his office. The upturned sniffing faces told him, more eloquently than dogwood or tulip tree, that fifty miles from Times Square the brooks were spilling over, and the new leaves spreading their embroidery. The creeping phlox was out, too. He could tell it was out in the country by the number of topcoats recklessly being carried in town by men who felt two inches taller than when they had opened their eyes that morning.
Without greeting the lawyer in the room next door who shared the receptionist and office rent with him, Larry walked to his chair beside the narrow window. This morning he minded sharing the space with anyone. So far the spring day had belonged to him, and he didn’t want to part with even a fractional interest. He looked at some slips the operator handed him on the way in. If he had thought of it, he might have bought the violets for her.
Miss Baldwin, one of the messages read, would drop in around eleven o’clock. She had phoned at nine-thirty, at ten-ten, and at ten-twenty-five. Larry looked at his watch. It was five of eleven now. He felt that spring was on his team. He had an excuse not to work. He phoned a client who had an appointment with him at noon. “I have a fever,” he explained. “Spring fever. The doctor says I should stay in with it twenty-four hours after my temperature drops to normal.” Larry hung up while his client, a labor union official, grumbled about the clause in a new contract Larry had drawn for him.
Larry didn’t have long to wait. At eleven o’clock sharp, Janice knocked on the metal door. He pushed a chair close to his desk for her, and as she sat forward tensely, her woolen skirt riding above her knee, Larry saw that dark sacs outlined her eyes, and her face was thinner. It may have been suffering that had trimmed down her cheeks. They fell away in hollows under cheekbones augmented by the change.
She asked Larry if he knew anyone at the State Department who could help her get a visa. With the War looking worse, she didn’t wish to confine her field of operations to England. Everett’s had signed some affidavits for her the other day declaring that they had commissioned a series of articles on Sweden, but the State Department, typically uncooperative, had put her on a log-jam waiting list which didn’t look as if it would ever break. She must clear through Washington immediately. She had to straighten out her papers and get the Swedish visa at once.
Larry rolled back in his chair, the urgency wasted on him. It was spring, and in spite of the blue underpuffs of her eyes, she looked lovely, lovelier because she was tense and whittled down, the ruby-white padding gone, and the core of her showing.
“I’ve phoned Washington every day,” she objected. “My long-distance bill—” She built a week of annoyances into an assault on her dignity. With her sense of drama strained, each wrong number pyramided to a crisis.
“What does Bemrose say?” Larry inquired, thinking of offering to trade violets with her for the visa. “He ought to be able to dig up someone for you through Tom Newton, someone who knows the ropes in the department.”
“I can’t ask him.” The usually straight mouth was pulled down with fatigue.
“What’s the matter, Janice?” He forgot the violets, and leaning over, touched her shoulder.
The mouth worked unhappily. “I don’t know.” Her defeated hands fell forward as she said, “He’s not around any more. I don’t know for how long. Sometimes I have a nightmare and think it’s for good.”
That was when he heard about the evening at the Storeys’ from her. And before that night, she admitted to Larry, from the first time that she had interviewed him at his office, she knew he was different from the others, that here was the man she had never known, the man whose existence she had divined and felt for years, certain that if he had life and shape and form, the chances were against her ever meeting him. She had found him, and by a miracle of coincidence, during a time in his life when he was free to love her; yet something had gone wrong.
She watched while Larry crossed the length of the room and came back to his desk. “If you feel that way about Bemrose, why do you want to go overseas?” he asked. “Why run away? Unless you’re afraid——”
“It might be hard to take when I did find out, but I don’t think I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m going over because it’s my job. I can’t just walk out on it.” She excavated a box of kitchen matches from her bag and struck one. It set up a blaze when it touched her cigarette. “I can’t do it even to rub Arthur Bemrose’s ego the right way.”
“Maybe he would like to believe that you care enough about him to stay home.”
“Would he care enough to quit his job?”
“So you think it’s the same, a man’s work and a woman’s,” Larry said.
“Why, yes, don’t you?”
One Saturday when they were kids living in a dowager brick house in Kansas City, Janice Baldwin and her twin brother sat on the disciplined grass next to the family tennis court and planned what they would do with their lives. Instead of going to Harvard, which was what the family had in mind for him, Bob would take a job on a freighter bound for Shanghai. Janice would use the train fare intended to take her to Wellesley, and find a newspaper job in New York. That’s how she would get the experience she needed for their work. In two years, when Bob sent for her, she would go to Shanghai and help him start a weekly newspaper in China, an English language paper. They would take the summers off every year and visit Peiping, Manchuria, and Tahiti. They would be free to go wherever they wanted to go. There would be no husband to tie her down and no wife for Bob. That was a clearly stated condition of the agreement. She stressed it in talking to Larry Frank.
She told Larry about a Saturday afternoon back home when the doubles match in the tennis court had broken up and she and Bob continued to play by themselves.
“Hit it across the Pacific, Jan!” he had coached her. She lunged for an angle shot to her backhand. All through the set she smashed her way through to China, happily indulging her adolescent fantasy. Her mother broke the dream when she neatly stitched across the lawn to say they were driving to the country club for dinner and ought to get ready.
Janice told Larry about another time when she and Bob rummaged in the attic and found Great-grandfather Baldwin’s journal. Her great-grandfather had traveled to Kansas in the late ’50s with other anti-slavers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Great-grandfather, the abolitionist, helped his friend, Charles Robinson, in the Wakarusa war against the pro-slavery crowd from Missouri. He gave Robinson free legal service and had a hand in framing the Wyandotte Constitution, a document which finally admitted Kansas to the Union.
Up and down the Kaw River they referred to Ezra Baldwin as “Robinson’s brains” and they rode from the Cimarron and the Neosho valleys to have Great-grandfather draw their wills. A crop of Ezras, named after him, sprouted like wild grass across the plains and constituted his legal fees.
Back East his friend, Lloyd Garrison, had written some verses which Great-grandfather copied into his journal:
Over and over again, at sixteen, the believing age, she repeated the verse to herself, Janice confessed to Larry. Bob assured her she was a match for man already. He was touched with Great-grandfather’s golden fluency, and she believed him. Janice wanted to believe that she was as good as Bob thought she was.
Her father died when they were seventeen, and Bob, abandoning the dream of the East, pitched in to learn the family tanning business. She came back from Wellesley the summer of her sophomore year, and he introduced her to Mary Ellen—empty little Mary Ellen with shallow eyes and skin you could see through. The following June Bob married her, and the next summer, as Janice boarded the S.S. Champlain on a college cruise to Europe, a cable from Bob announced the birth of Mary Ellen II.
More than a year after graduation, when Janice was rounding out her first six months in Washington as a reporter on the morning Gazette, Ezra Baldwin III was born to Bob and Mary Ellen, followed the year after by twins. Janice heard about the twins in Shanghai where she had wangled a job with Global News Service.
Bob still lived in the brick house at home and rolled the tennis court on Saturday. She often wondered if he minded settling in Kansas City. Once he wrote: “I think of how we planned to see it together. Have fun for both of us, Jan!” The first year or so she sent him carbons of her best stories, or cabled to him when she was abroad. After that she didn’t bother. Now and then she would visit them in Kansas City, but surrounded by the domestic clutter of Mary Ellen and the children, she felt more remote from Bob than in letters. It worked better when he came to Washington alone for a visit. Even then too many years and miles had gone by. He had forgotten that they had ever planned a life or a work together.
“Your brother has his home and family, but you’re still without roots,” Larry said. “You can’t go on acting out some dream you had when you were sixteen. You can’t keep on crossing oceans the rest of your life, expecting to see something new on the other side. There are a few basic things, and they concern what goes on inside of you. Once you’ve learned them—” Larry shrugged. “The rest is repetition and geography, but it doesn’t add anything fundamental to what you know.”
“I don’t do it any more to live up to Bob’s ambitions for me. That nonsense stopped when I got good at my job. At least I hope I’m free of any adolescent hangovers. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, how much of the pattern clings when you think you’re grown-up? Of course I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that I’m tied up with Bob.”
“So you’re good at your job,” he kidded.
“War is no time to be modest. I should be working at what I do best. So should you, and so should Bemrose. Anything else is a waste, and all materials are on the critical list, including brains and skill. No one will remember when it’s over what the critical commodities were, or who supplied them. Only a few of us will even want to remember, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not what we do it for. I can’t quit what I do best because Bemrose is self-centered, or bruises easy, and isn’t happy in wartime, or any other time, unless people do what he wants.”
She unlocked the amethyst that caught the center fullness of her high-necked black blouse. “I can’t chuck everything I know how to do,” she insisted. “It would be throwing away the best in me. When millions are being ground under Nazi tanks and children’s blood is being spilled, I can’t say it’s none of my business and sit home drinking Martinis to forget. My great-grandfather walked to Kansas to get into a fight that was peanuts compared with this one.” Her bracelet rattled angrily. “You don’t outgrow that in three generations.”
“But if what you want is here, and you may not have another chance—” Larry said.
“I still can’t!”
Larry sat back and studied a paperweight on his desk. It was in the form of a wooden monkey, and the comic figure writhed with anguish as it struggled to crush a cocoanut. “There’s one thing a woman can try when she wants a man,” Larry said.
She took out a cigarette and slammed the case. She let the cigarette drop to her lap. “If only he weren’t so stubborn!”
“For years they’ve been telling him he’s good,” Larry warned her. “You can’t expect him to get used to the idea that there’s any woman around who is as good as he is. Not all at once you can’t.”
“I’m not asking him for anything. I want to try and make him happy.” She threw back her head, thrusting forward the durable chin. “It’s a childish concept—happiness. There is no such thing, of course. There is relief from misery for brief moments.”
“I wonder if he would know how to accept that kind of gift from you. From anyone for that matter,” Larry said. “Happiness, or what passes for happiness today. Being less miserable, if that’s the way you like to put it. In the twenty years I’ve known him, Arthur has been on the giving end. I don’t think he’d know how to receive anything you might be able to give him. He’d have to learn——”
“What difference can it make who gives how much to whom?” She doused her cigarette and grabbed the arm of her chair. “It’s not a contest, Larry. I’m not competing with him.”
They had tried things out, and it had been all right for Janice but not for Bemrose. The competition he felt around her had carried over into bed, and he couldn’t allow her to make him happy. It would have been an admission that he was like any other man, and he couldn’t acknowledge as much without sacrificing some of his masculinity. He had to withhold that triumph from her. He had to assert his superiority as a lover who was able to smother her desire for any other man, but who found her somewhat wanting, something less of a success with him than at anything she had ever attempted. A compulsion as crude and uncontrolled as fire sweeping through a forest kept Bemrose aloof from her, his needs independent of her ability to satisfy them. Larry pieced this together from what she told him, and what he knew about Bemrose.
Her eyebrows formed puzzled triangles. “Do you think it’s Judge Haynes? Does he think it would be disloyal to Judge Haynes?”
Larry shook his head. “If the Judge were around, he would try to give Arthur the confidence he needs. I think he’s afraid of you, afraid of you and your success. Not sure enough of himself to compete with you. The Judge would convince him that he has every right to be certain. He’d spot the trouble in no time and straighten Bemrose out. You and the Judge would have gotten along.”
Janice listened. “I thought maybe because he and Mrs. Haynes lived an abnormally secluded life——”
“That was Mrs. Haynes. She did feel strange with people and stayed at home pretty much, but it wasn’t the Old Man’s notion of how to live. He went out without her. They say he used to tell her about the other women he met at dinner parties. From anything I ever heard, the Judge had a good, healthy respect for women. I don’t think Bemrose got any of his ideas from him.”
“Then what is it?” The straight hair waved sharply. “I have to know. I have to find out why.”
“If he’s afraid of you, maybe a few drinks——”
The black eyes flooded with misery. “He’s not afraid of me.”
“Are you sure you’d know about that?” Larry questioned her. “I doubt if he would know it himself. There were plenty of conditions of his childhood which might explain why he’s afraid. Insecurity over money, insecurity with his parents. Give him time to get used to you.”
“He doesn’t want time,” she insisted.
Larry picked up her hand and tried to stroke comfort into the fingers. She would find lovers who were easier to live with. Bemrose might be too much to handle, even for a woman as experienced as she was.
When the phone rang, Larry picked it up with the left hand so that he could hold on to Janice’s. It was his client, the union man, asking if he couldn’t break up his fever with some aspirin and come to the company meeting at two o’clock.
“It’s not that kind of fever,” he patiently explained and promised to call his client back.
“I’ll clear out,” she offered, breaking loose from him. “I really didn’t expect you to do anything, but I had to talk it out, and you’re——”
“His oldest and best friend.” Larry finished it for her, and they laughed.
“I’m a helluva friend. He doesn’t come near me with his trouble, but sometimes all on my own I find things out.”
She sat down again, balanced uneasily on the edge of the chair.
“I saw him on Fifth Avenue last night. He didn’t see me, but I watched him stop and look in Tiffany’s window,” Larry volunteered.
Her lips shook slightly like dry leaves. “He wasn’t alone?”
“He was with a client of his.”
“A woman.”
“She never seemed to interest him. I used to think——”
“Last night when they were looking in Tiffany’s, did he interest her?”
“He always would. She takes a man on faith, especially a man like Bemrose who has more brains in his little finger than anyone Miss McVail ever knew.”
“With this girl, there would be no competition?” Janice asked.
“He could be perfectly at ease, perfectly comfortable.”
“Then what am I upset about? She sounds all right for him.”
“Do you really want to go to Sweden?” Larry asked abruptly. He pulled a phone book out of the bottom desk drawer and turned to the Ds.
“Don’t you think—” She sounded high and tentative, and her hand shook slightly as she fumbled with the catch on her bloated handbag.
But he had handed out enough advice for morning. Without a fee, like Arthur H. Bemrose. The rest was up to Janice. She’d have to decide whether to stay and try for him.
“Go to see this fellow, Diamond.” He pointed to a name at the top of the page. “I think he can fix you up with your visa. I’ll phone him this afternoon.”
“Who is he? I’ve had such rotten luck.” She fished a red notebook out of her bag and wrote down the address.
“He’s pals with that Mrs. What’s-her-name in the State Department,” Larry said. “I think Bemrose would do better for you but——”
Janice nodded and sealed the notebook with a pencil that slipped into a loop at the side.
“Larry, I don’t know how to——”
They got up together, and she put out her hand. Changing her mind, she kissed him.
“Sometimes he gives me reason to be grateful.” Larry blotted her lipstick off his cheek with the show handkerchief he wore in his breast pocket.
“You better call your client and tell him aspirin did the trick,” she suggested.
“I don’t bother with clients on a day like this. It’s against my principles. Wait, I’ll go down with you.”
They threaded the crowded lobby and stepped onto the sidewalk. She touched his sleeve. “Aren’t you going to need your coat?”
“Come on,” he said gruffly, taking her elbow.
The hurriers wore their winter faces but Larry steered her to the violets, and tossed a coin into the vendor’s box. “I’ve been wanting to buy these all morning.” He handed her the corsage. “Have you a pin for the lady?” he asked the old woman.
Like a parent buttoning a child’s snowsuit, he fastened the violets to Janice’s coat. “Let me know if Diamond turns you down.”
The royal color against her face darkened her hair and made her skin dazzling pale. “Maybe I’ll have to stick around,” she said. “Maybe the Swedes won’t have me either.”
He cradled her hands in both of his. Whatever happened, she could count on him.
As she backed away, and the crowd came between them, the misery washed out of her face. She smiled, and Larry saw that her eyes sparkled happily with tears.