Dennis would then take up his station on the couch and announce that he meant to spend the night. Wilting a little under stony stares and firm commands, he would plead with much native pathos that he felt "so womanless" when he woke up of mornings, sick, in his hotel room. At first Grace was on his side; she advised caution but she was ready to put her tolerance on record. Soon, however, she also became obdurate, because she had learned something of the female company which Dennis kept intermittently. Grace would have pitied Anita if Dennis had been swerved from her by more imposing attachments and she would have been far more interested in Dennis, but nothing lowers a man so much in the eyes of most women as the fact that he is attracted by her inferiors. No humiliation is more resented by a woman in love, at once removing her triumph over other women in at least having set up for her lover a criterion to which all those others must conform hereafter, and at the same time forcing her to brush elbows in his memories with women she would not choose to associate with in actuality.
Grace felt a bit patronizing toward Anita. Whatever Blake's faults were, he did have good taste in women. Still, she thought Anita had better hold on to Dennis. Since men are not like foxes and the scent of the last victim merely makes the trap more alluring, he might at least be used to catch more eligible admirers. Only, Anita, not notable for patience, saw so much of him that Grace was curious about the exact state of her emotions. She would have been surprised to learn that Anita had plenty of patience of a sort, that she could bear any set of circumstances provided she had marked off in her mind, like a date in a calendar, when it should end.
The novel was finished in April. After Grace had found a striking tide by searching through volumes of familiar quotations, it was delivered.
Then, Grace made up her mind to go abroad. The time was propitious. For expenses, she had her advance on the novel. She knew someone who would get her concessions from a steamship company. Things were very dull in the office; a periodic wave of economy had swept over it from the coast and Mr. Graves would be thankful if she took a leave of absence without pay during the summer months—in fact she was afraid he might require this of her and so it would be best to anticipate of her own accord.
The only flaw was that she did not want to leave Blake. "These long separations!" she said sagely. "It has always been my opinion that one should—stick around." However, leaving thus on the crest of accomplishment, at the height of her glory, she felt that this would be the time when Blake would miss her most and most long for her return. This would be the time when he would apprehend how many potent affairs of her own might call her from his side.
She departed on a Saturday morning, amid all the rites of farewell. Grace herself religiously observed occasions for ceremony among her friends. She generally kept them for the reason that people generally do, not because she wished to exactly, but in order to safeguard her own ceremonies from the forlornness of neglect.
Blake stood somewhat aloof from the group on deck of which Grace formed the focal point. It was one of the smaller boats, and there were only a few conspicuous-looking passengers, "interesting people." Now and then some girl or a man by himself would glance at Grace, choosing her and approving of her as a fellow traveler. No one would have dreamed that her traveling costume had been gathered with so much thought and taste; still, just because its harmony was so simple, it caught the attention of more expensively dressed women, who wondered what trick of modishness lay in the crisp pleats of her navy-blue printed silk, its suede belt, and the stockings which were, after all, just stockings but which seemed so exquisite on her legs, so in accord with the soft and graceful lines of what were, after all, merely suede shoes.
Mrs. Kline, who dressed well herself but with no such imaginative attuning to the event as Grace, could be seen gloating over Grace's "outfit," Grace's companions, and Grace's "friend," her title for Blake. Mrs. Kline knew him now. She even took a veiled semi-proprietary interest in him, as token of her approval, always asking after his health and his activities, especially now that his plays had been successful and he, a real playwright, provided her with free tickets to them. What inkling she had of the situation was not known, probably not even by Mrs. Kline herself, as she would not care to define suspicions which would force her to destroy her new amity with Grace and with so much of a personage as the playwright friend. Grace thought that her mother knew because she no longer questioned. To give Mrs. Kline a chance to further hide her head, Grace had suggested that marriage was so unsatisfactory, in view of the comments that Mrs. Kline herself made, that she preferred her independence. Mrs. Kline seemed to agree. As Grace said, "She agrees—if driven to it. She prides herself on being very modern. She has to pretend to agree, anyhow, seeing how—extraordinarily unsuccessful her own marriage was. And it was one of those real love matches too! She tells all her friends it's only—natural—I should hesitate."
At the sound of the first warning, Mrs. Kline proudly ceded Grace's final farewell to Blake. They clung together in wordless last promises, in last assurances drawn from each other's lips and arms. Mrs. Kline, keeping her eyes carefully off the pair, looked from one to the other of Grace's friends with a touching triumph. They might be safely married, but which of them would be relinquished—and only for a few weeks, too—so unwillingly?
Blake was tight-lipped. It was the first time that he had been left behind, not Grace. Without waiting for the others, he plunged from the leave-taking directly into the crowd that shoved down the gangplank.
Grace delayed Letty for a moment. "Look after him, will you? Make dates with him, Let." She had asked them all to "take care of him," partly so as to feel that he was safe within the bosom of her circle, partly because she was really worried lest he be left alone. It was Grace who had welded both of them into the group by her greater sociability that thus became another asset since, if Blake were to lose her, he would miss her twice as much, for herself and for the circle of companionship in her wake.
When the boat had gone Anita had the good luck to elude Mrs. Kline, whose eyes were swollen and whose tongue was feverish with the necessity for pouring out in sympathetic ears a résumé of the tributes paid to Grace. She set out for home, climbed the four flights of stairs, opened the door upon unexpected order—due to the efforts of Mrs. Kline, who had superintended the packing—and sank in relief upon the chafed gray velours of the couch cover.
They had no time to bother with the dressing and undressing of the apartment. Summer and winter—except for the time when Grace had had an orgy of repainting and the other time when she had added a gray carpet and a daybed in a burst of extravagance—the furnishings remained the same. The place was a bit close now. Some roses sent Grace too early and stuck into a milk bottle in the kitchenette sink were dropping a withered perfume. Anita disliked odorous flowers. She got up and flung them into a bright yellow waste basket and, as the basket overflowed with rubbish discarded by Grace, she set it outside the door. After a moment she rose again and picked up some bits of tissue paper and ends of twine that clung to the gray wicker armchairs. She looked into the bedroom whose dowdy odds and ends Grace had never thought it worthwhile either to banish or adorn. It was quite clear. Nothing of Grace remained. The furniture, the bowls and books and pictures, all of Grace's choosing and owning, were yet neutral enough to transfer themselves readily to the personality of the present occupant. Even the photograph of Blake in a silver frame seemed to have been placed on the bookcase only as an impersonal adornment.
The telephone rang. It always rang, ft seemed to Anita, when she had a moment to herself in the house. She did not feel like rising again. In any case there was no real need to answer it; the call was sure to be for Grace and Grace had gone. She let it ring unanswered. To Anita, who disliked the telephone, there was a great feeling of release in this.
She did not have to answer the telephone if she did not like. She did not have to go out, according to the unwritten code that had grown up between her and Grace; she did not have to go out even with Dennis, retaining him as an escort from a sense more of duty than of pleasure, because of a cowardly conformity to the social routine that was now expected of her. Grace's social scheme left no room for voluntary solitude for herself or anyone about her. Now that Anita was freed from it, she could see what a strain had been the constant necessity for going out, for making dates as a definite scheme of life, a scheme imposed on her, without a word, by Grace's example and assumption, by her own human fear of the incomprehension, the pity, the contempt, meted out to the dissenter.
Dates! Anita, having for nearly two years scrutinized a succession of dates—Grace's elaborate ones, as well as her own more modest ones—was sure that for herself the amount of effort involved in dates would be too high a price to pay for any entertainment or any tributes to her vanity she might get out of them, or for any use she might subtly make, as Grace did, of the "dated" men. So much trouble! So much purposeful dressing; so much calculated listening and admiring; so much amiability; so much pliancy; so many bores to put up with; so many inane opinions to agree with; so many fumbling approaches to avoid or make fun of or be irritated by. And for what? For a meal, a couple of dances, a couple of drinks which like as not one didn't want, for two hours at the theater, for a telephone call next day or next week, and for the ability to exhibit the fact that one could entice. All in the wistful hope that once in a blue moon—oh! once in a very blue moon, perhaps—one would happen on a personality that was in harmony with one's own, whose companionship would be not a distraction from but an enhancement of pleasure; on that rare bird, a man with charm; on that even rarer bird, a modest man; on a conversation that required the activity of one's own mind; on love making that called for more than toleration.
The energy Grace expended on dates! The energy she expended on Blake! Anita understood that such effort might be expedient and no more onerous or even less onerous than effort spent on any other of the affairs of life for many women to whom marriage remained not only the most accustomed but the most profitable profession. But it was a profession which Grace's mind struggled to reject; she did not intend to be "only a wife," she proclaimed. Yet the obsession which possessed her, that she must not lose Blake, the instinct which urged her to adopt every means to secure herself to Blake, which bade her follow him regardless—would that obsession and that instinct leave her much of herself to withhold from the common plate? Perhaps such an obsession, such effort, was inevitable. It might be inevitable to set one's passion on a pedestal, then break one's neck trying to get to it. Anita only knew that, for herself, in the midst of any love, no matter how enthralling, she would always retain a sneaking suspicion of its comparative insignificance to her. This suspicion was to her like the most trifling chink in the wall of a prison, unmarked by all but the prisoner, but to become for him the means of his escape. A fatal sense of proportion, the ruin of many and many a love affair, would always hinder her.
At present she did not care if she never made another date, never went "out" again in her life. As for Dennis, someone would marry him pretty soon, Grace said, "unless you hurry, the first little sap who makes up her mind will get her hooks into him." Which, Grace intimated, was a pity on general principles, as little saps with their simple certainties and serviceable rules-of-thumb were apt to get away with so much, get the best end of everything. For once, Anita thought, Grace was right. And she would miss Dennis, too; she admitted that she was not unmoved by him, but was he, on the whole, worth for her the bother of maneuvering a marriage or the greater effort of glamorous love as she had observed it? It was beautiful, she insisted to herself—it must be beautiful. Grace and Blake were as devoted to each other as two people could well be. Only—only—neither could she hide from herself the under side of the pattern, which she had been forced to examine, the under side where there was no gloss and knots were tied.
Grace would say, of course, that she was a fool to "miss the experience." Grace quite granted that there were experiences other than sexual. She was skeptical of the theory of sexual experience as a sort of patent cure-all, particularly for the ills of women, with an inherent, magical power of enrichment possessed by no other eventuality, causing talented women to rise from the pillow geniuses, vixens to be transformed into saints, naïve souls into women of the world, and mean spirits into generous. At the same time, her imagination of the universe did not venture much beyond the realm of sex and she took it for granted that an experience was a certain concomitant of an action and necessarily nourishing.
To Anita there was nothing at all so inevitable about the value of an experience; it was merely the sum total of the delicate adjustments between a character and a situation, and that sum total might be for good or evil, for value or worthlessness, depending on the individual. She was influenced sufficiently by Grace's point of view to half-agree that perhaps she was a fool "to miss the experience." But the idea rebounded as harmlessly as a rubber ball from the granite common sense at the bottom of her nature. She simply could not see how a night with Dennis Meloney could make her a better woman. And the experience of marriage with Dennis Meloney would certainly make her a more bitter one.
Before she went off to lunch she took a last reassuring look about the place. Nothing was there to question, to collide or interfere. She was free to leave, and when she was ready she would be free to return. It was left alone like all space, and when she reëntered she would be alone in it, as in all space. The thought clutched at all the unrestrained and unrestrainable particles of her being and tugged her upward like a balloon. At the same time she paused in fear, with a premonitory chill, feeling the first weight of solitude press down upon her heart.
Book III
GRACE KLINE ANDREWS
CHAPTER ONE
One Sunday of the following March Grace set out to walk from her house to Letty's. She had been waiting now for three months since the event which even Grace had never fully dared to expect and which had caused her incredulous friends to exclaim as with one gasp, "What a marvelous break!" Blake's wife was dead.
But still Grace waited. Even in her work she felt becalmed. Her job had chosen this time to vanish; her book had sunk almost without a ripple, and she could not, as ordinarily, generate within herself sufficient power to counteract these circumstances. The best she had been able to do was to maintain the noise of activity, to keep the engine whirring on the same spot. She went about indefatigably as usual; the difference was not yet visible to the naked eye. She gave no hostages to failure; she wrote; she got odd jobs of publicity; whatever she economized on, she was careful not to economize on her appearance. Meanwhile, the circle of her friends stood about, cocking ears and eyes inquiringly and impatiently for the climax. They had been present a long time at this affair and did not hesitate to let her know that they would feel cheated unless it came to a fitting close. Renie Harrington suggested, when she had Grace up to dinner to observe with her own blue, ingratiating, cutting eyes, that "it would be so convenient to be able to put them at last into one bedroom on week-end visits." There were bets laid as to whether or not a marriage would occur.
Grace was taciturn. Drawing herself up with that retreat of her chin and advance of her eyes which had the effect of holding the other person at the end of a very long arm, she said with dignity, "I—don't know—what—our plans—will be."
Only Letty knew. As in the very old days when Grace had rushed up to the one-room-and-alcove harbor on Riverside Drive to spill tears on Letty's glossy spreads, and had cramped herself into the living-room couch of nights to cry in peace at Letty's house, so the road led back again to Letty.
Grace marched along briskly, decisively, but her cheeks were hollow, the skin drawn tense and translucent over them, while her eyes, twice as huge, the narrow coat from Paris patterned all over in orange wools and brown wools and held tight across her flat body, the gleam of queer, fragile stones set in spidery silver at her throat—all these conspired to resolve her into a new aspect, to give her a jeweled, plumaged, bird-of-preyish look.
On Sundays, the maid's day off, Harold and Letty spent the morning providing their baby with fresh air in Central Park. Grace knew where to look for them, just past an entrance by a little summer house. Harold was reading the Sunday papers within, while Letty walked slowly without, keeping pace with her little girl. She was about two years old, dressed in a short green wool coat and bonnet, and she shoved herself around in a tiny pen on wheels. Grace looked her over indulgently, admired her with preoccupation. Then the two girls sat down on a bench, while the child jerked herself back and forth by their knees.
For a long time Letty listened, nodding now and then. Too many confidences were deposited with her; she was a strongbox to her friends. And these confidences were all so simple really. They all boiled down to the fact that the man one wants is always the most difficult man to get, and that was no news to Letty.
"It's not that I'm not—sure of Blake in a way," concluded Grace. "But he's so—evasive. He won't see."
Letty nodded briefly. "I know."
"Well, I'll tell you what I can do," she said at length in a matter-of-fact tone. "If you like I'll make a date with him and talk to him like a Dutch uncle. I'll tell him that he's causing you a lot of unnecessary trouble and worry and embarrassing you before your friends and that it really is about time he realized it. I think that should work. Blake likes me."
"Yes, he does," agreed Grace. Some such plan had been in her mind. She gave a long sigh of relief but added almost at once, "Don't be too—don't rub it in, Let. Be a little careful. You know—you can't—bludgeon Blake."
"Oh, of course," said Letty, shrugging. "I'll be tactful. Little Mrs. Tactful Fix-It, that's me."
The two girls looked into each other's faces. Letty's eyes wavered before the intent appeal, the clutching hope, in the countenance of Grace. She stared at the asphalt path, dejected, somewhat petulant before the present necessity and the final futility of her errand. Why did Grace have to clutch so? And she could no more feel why than one with full control of his muscles can feel why a person in a nervous spasm is powerless to unclose his fingers. She had to stop and search for reasons in her mind and from them argue herself into sympathy. She had to remember that to share a home with Harold and only Harold, to have him and him alone there in the morning and there at night, had once seemed to her the most blissful of all eventualities. Consciously there was no accounting for this sentiment now; the veiling, aching glamour effused from, old times, old feelings, rose ever and ever more wanly on the horizon and ever and ever more imperceptibly faded like receding smoke. But far be it from Letty to counsel anyone against even the slight sustenance of distant smoke! She said in a lower voice, "I suppose I might as well make the date right away—can't Monday; got a date with li'l Leroy—Tuesday maybe—and talk to him and get it settled."
Grace and Blake were married a week later. Blake had always liked and trusted Letty. Once she had set before him, with a directness that—as she was not involved—could be at once persuasive and unexacting, what Grace's feelings were and what his inaction seemed to mean to outsiders, he had understood. He was surprised. He supposed he had always intended to marry Grace, that she was aware of his intentions, and that therefore the need for action nullified itself. Some day he supposed they would find themselves standing before a justice of the peace who probably would fall from heaven before them at the propitious moment. He was rather resentful to be confronted with the reality of arrangements while he was in the midst of a mild, unmarried peace, while they were both free, he thought. Still, if delay made Grace miserable, he agreed with Letty that they might as well get it over with. He only stipulated that, lest his haste should seem indecent or suspicious to his parents, the nuptials should be secret until he had had a chance to "plant the idea" in their minds. Grace thoroughly comprehended such a plan. As for his state of mind, it no longer hurt her though it would always make her sigh. After so many years, she had still to scheme in order to convey to him subtly, so as not to frighten or antagonize him, what to her were the plainest phases of human relations. So it was. And so, no doubt, it would always be.
The morning of the wedding was dank and gray. Grace awoke earlier than usual, dressed in a sticky half-light, and tramped through the living room to bang the coffee pot on the gas stove. A good deal of methodical noise always followed her risings and Anita, shaken out of sleep by the hangings and tramplings, stared at her resentfully from the daybed. Since the loss of her job Grace had developed a systematic mania for avoiding the purchase of meals. She collected lunch dates and she collected dinner dates and she had taken to fixing her own breakfasts. Anita could only admire the resourceful way in which she circumvented ill fortune, but in the mornings it was quite a nuisance.
The coffee boiled; Grace shut the bedroom door and spoke through the telephone, very low. By prearrangement, she was calling up her mother, who had exacted a promise to be at least told of the marriage. Grace said over the phone, "Ma? How—are you? ... Well, I'm calling according to schedule.... Yes. To-day." She gulped her coffee over the sink in the kitchenette. Although she went back and forth from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, crossing the living room every few minutes, she avoided Anita, who lay with eyes half shut and the bedclothes pulled tight and warm about her. The latter was accustomed to Grace's intervals of self-sufficient hauteur. They meant that things were entirely satisfactory with Grace at the moment and she had no need of encouragement. Anita would ask no questions.
There were three rings of the bell and Anita heard Grace trample through the bedroom, down the short hall, and the sound of a brass key in a brass lock.
Letty was waiting downstairs in the chill, early-morning grimness that overlaid the street. People passed, silent, preoccupied, bent on work and nothing else. From the Fifth Avenue corner came gigantic hammer blows, hard, spiteful, even, one, then an—other—then an—other ... then the long, raucous shriek, the bellow tearing raw flesh from raw flesh, of a riveting machine. Grace was aware for the first time that the old houses near Fifth Avenue, guarded by plaster statues of lions and angels, by moldy lawns and rusted iron gates—the house where Diana Reece had once had a studio, where Grace had gone to draw fresh, sheer stockings over her white legs on the way to new, exciting dates with new, exciting men in the days of Harry Strauss; where she had borrowed Dee's key and met Blake in the days when he used to return to Brooklyn for dinner; where Anita had once lived as a ghost—those houses had vanished and the steely ribs of a skyscraper were being riveted together in their stead. They must have been demolished some time ago but Grace had never noticed.
"Look, those old houses are gone!" she exclaimed to Letty.
They paused and peered up and down the street. Two new structures had been built across the way, where there had once stood a modest red and white brick hotel and some rooming houses. They were of sandstone, beetling as far as possible over the sidewalk, projecting as high as possible into the sky. They were tipped with gold and the long strips of windows straight up and down, divided by strips of sandstone straight up and down, glinted iridescently. The old brownstone fronts and the old red-brick fronts and the small, white, rebuilt houses seemed compressed to suffocation between skyscrapers at the head and impending skyscrapers at the foot.
"The street's changing so," said Grace rather wistfully.
They turned the Sixth Avenue corner, continued past the El station and so down to Blake's house. Grace rang three times. This street was still serene with glossy shops composed behind their shut doors and their smooth displays, with a limousine dozing before the tall, white apartment building across the way and next to it a sedate little gray dwelling sleeping with shuttered windows behind a No Parking sign. All the speakeasies in all the basements of all the sere-looking brownstone houses were closed at this hour.
Blake came down rather pale and cold, a little hoarse, blinking. He never rose so early. They caught a taxi to the Tube station at Herald Square. Letty giggled. "We're off at the post," she said.
The train to Newark was not as deserted as they had expected and a headachy light oozed through it. What weird people to ride to Newark at such an hour—old women with newspaper bundles that somehow hinted to the senses of pickles, men in overalls with pitted noses. What for? "They can't all be going to get married," said Letty wonderingly.
Grace knew a lawyer, an old admirer, who had an office and political influence in Newark. She had arranged with him to prepare a secret way for them. They taxied around a gray-green park into a region of tall, sooty granite. Grace's friend was waiting in his office and his car was parked on a side street. They walked to it, Grace with the lawyer and Letty with Blake. Recovering from the blight of the chilly morning, Letty hugged Blake's arm. "He mustn't get away," she called back to Grace.
"By the way, have you got a ring?" said the lawyer suddenly.
Blake had never thought of it. They halted on the sidewalk and laughed and laughed.
"You could use mine," said Letty. "It married me good and fast."
But Grace's friend stopped at a jeweler's and insisted on buying one for her. A thin circlet of white gold. "It's a wedding present," he declared with a smirk.
Blake was still sleepy. Grace was nervous and curious.
The judge into whose chambers they were ushered mistook Letty for the bride. When his error was pointed out he turned but languidly to Grace, appearing to feel that she would do as well. He asked each whether they had been divorced. It seemed that he had a prejudice against marrying divorced people. He was so sure there would be a divorce somewhere—"He smells a divorce," Grace murmured to Letty—so sure that he would not have to bother after all, that he hardly looked up at them before this question.
There was an element of triumph in replying that Blake was a widower. Even the judge raised an eyebrow and devoted one whole glance of interest to Blake alone. "I thought he was going to say, 'Well, aren't you the lucky guy!'" giggled Letty afterward. In five minutes the ring had been slipped on Grace's finger. The judge noticed at last that she was good-looking and he kissed her.
"Ugh! One of those nasty, wet kisses," said Grace to Letty, scrubbing her mouth with a handkerchief the minute the door closed behind them.
The lawyer thought they ought to have a breakfast, but Letty had had hers and Grace wasn't hungry and Blake professed to distrust New Jersey coffee. The lawyer shook hands with them. He stood on a street corner, hesitating between sentiment and skepticism, and finally discarded the former as likely to amuse such sophisticated people. He wished them luck with a wink and left them.
"Well, you're married now," said Letty to Blake.
"I know. I've been married before," retorted Blake.
Grace and Blake were both disposed to be glum on the ride back. Even Letty was pensive. Though they joked and Grace sniggered and Letty giggled from time to time, the vows that had been uttered struck them all with a sense of disappointment. Beside the glamorous shadow of the unwritten, unspoken, yet irresistible promises that those two had been conscious of so long at every meeting, the vows, articulated at last, became disconcertingly meager and pallid, as a cherished thought, a lovely symbol in the mind, forms itself into but a sentence of the usual words, the common and oft-repeated figures of expression, when put down on paper.
Blake left them, after kissing Grace lightly, to finish his morning's sleep which the wedding had interrupted. Letty hailed a taxi, squeezed Grace's hand, and left to finish her morning's duties which the wedding had interrupted. And Grace, that having been attended to, set out in earnest to find herself a new job.
As the marriage was such a very secret one, Anita did not learn of it for several days.
CHAPTER TWO
Though it had not been discussed between Blake and Grace, it was taken for granted that the difference in their status would be only one of convenience. There was even a certain novelty? a certain spice, in the fact that they could now listen to the footstep on the stairs with the serenity of those who know that a wedding certificate can, hey, presto! be produced, like the serenity of a magician who knows that he can at will produce the vindicatory rabbit from his coat sleeve. For enough of the tradition in which they had been reared lingered on, like the rites of a religion in which no one now believes or the grammar of a language that no one now uses, to necessitate the devices of secrecy when both the reason for and the secrecy itself were gone.
A honeymoon certainly had no place in their ideas. Soon after the wedding Blake and Jerry went off to Havana. Afterward, Jerry refused to believe in the marriage on this account; he said no bride would have let a bridegroom roam so freely. When finally convinced, he could not recover from the injustice of a state of things that caused him to have more trouble with the girls he didn't marry than Blake had with the girls he did marry.
On Blake's return it happened that Grace had an opportune invitation to visit friends opportunely far away. There was no reason for her to refuse, as she claimed the same freedom that Blake did. In consequence, when she came home their reunion crystallized into a motor trip with the Moseses. Grace was rather amused at the simplicity of a trick, not quite conscious on her part—and such an old-fashioned trick! She supposed she would have to plan for these marital vacations, exactly as Beatrice Fairfax advised.
Blake had bought a car. Years of suppressed desire seemed to lurk behind his proud engrossment with it. He would keep to the wheel each day as long as possible, ignoring the protests of Harold and Letty, who had had to bring their child, and becoming more and more irritated by the fretfulness of the child. Grace, too, began the journey by annoying him. It was raining when they started, and after lunch in a small Connecticut town Grace and Blake went into the first shop to buy a slicker for her. The rural shopkeeper looked from one to the other in some surprise when Grace opened her purse to pay. Blake pushed in front of her and threw the bills on the counter. He walked out of the shop, Grace following, smiling, sighing resignedly to herself. They were so silent for some time afterward that Letty finally demanded to know the reason. But Blake would not answer.
Grace said quizzically, "It's because I can't get used to being—legitimate."
And, in truth, the restiveness between them had its source, as she guessed, in the uncertainty of her own attitude. She had long ago accepted the fact that Blake never wanted all of her at any one time, that he was scared and bewildered by and resentful, too, of any hint of a self that lay beyond the part which suited his mood of the period, refusing to regard it as another hue in the spectrum of a personality but considering it, in the way in which a man considers those traits in a woman which do not coincide with his own expectations, as blameworthy or inconsistent.
On this journey, the first they had ever been able to take together, Grace was abstracted with searching for what part of her antagonized Blake now, so as to eliminate it and substitute that which he might expect now. She had not thought he wished her to act "wifely," as she would put it to herself. Indeed, she had felt that while, with her, he saw no other way that could so fittingly make the world take for granted their attitude toward each other, the marriage had come before he had quite had time to think that he had decided for himself—that he was irritated by the idea of compulsion—and it behooved her to keep her state of wifehood as much in the background as possible. The scene in the shop seemed to offer a clue of another sort. But it was hard to reconcile his offense at a small motion of independence before the world with the gloomy silence in which she remembered he had received news of the final loss of her job. She had not blamed him then at all, discerning in his silence his memories of an economic reliance that had oppressed him in the past. She was well aware that her attitude of self-sustenance in every way had been one of her chief attractions at first, in contrast to the then irksome attitude of his wife.
Not yet having come to any conclusion about his present mood, she took refuge in patience. She did not hear, she did not see, she was as unobtrusive as possible, she said nothing. It rained during the first two days in which they traveled about Connecticut and Massachusetts.
When they reached the seaside hotel that Blake had chosen, the sun came out, a glad and powerful ally that caused Grace to loosen her armor. She came down to breakfast cheerfully next morning, fortified by a marcel. Letty and Harold were feeding their child with a great deal of parental care and merriment. Grace did not mind. She was fond of the little girl and laughed as indulgently as Letty when the child banged her spoon on the plate or dropped oatmeal with a pensive preoccupation over the tablecloth. On Blake's appearance, they had all eaten and were sitting back, in the sun.
"Hullo," said Grace, quite forgetting her disguise.
And Letty, who had been taking her cue from Grace, commented briskly, "How come you're up so early in the morning?"
"Probably wants to get some golf. The links here are good," said Harold.
They all looked toward him eagerly to share their good spirits.
"I don't want to get some golf," said Blake with emphasis. "I did want to get some sleep, but Grace being one of those risers with the dawn, I suppose that's out of the question."
Grace's eyes turned slowly from one to the other of the Moseses as she adopted her special tone, at once resigned and explanatory, for Blake's idiosyncrasies. "Blake has such a hate on mornings. I tried not to make any noise," she murmured. "I walked about in stocking feet, honest to Ga-awd!"
"Is that so? They sounded more like bricks," said Blake. He examined her closely. "Was it for that marcel you got up? I might have known. That will be Grace's initial step on entering Heaven, won't it, Grace? As soon as St. Peter opens the gates you'll sweep past to locate, by instinct, the nearest beauty parlor, won't you, Grace? How does your instinct work in that respect, by the way? Is it by the sense of smell you locate them or by a sense of direction? Tell us."
This was one of Blake's humors which Grace recognized and knew how to combat, or rather how not to combat. She was even a little gratified at his acute observation of details concerning her; if habit had sharpened, it had at least not dulled his awareness of her. She could even smile at the pungent truth of some of his remarks, albeit it was a rueful smile.
"And he used to rush up to me on the street and say how beautiful I was," she interpolated under her breath to the others.
Blake snorted.
"If you want to quarrel on your honeymoon, far be it from me to prevent you," said Letty. "Harold and I started ours with a grand scrap. Remember?"
It was Harold's turn to look rueful.
"There were some awfully cute bellboys in the hotel," explained Letty with a giggle, "and Harold thought I paid too much attention to them. But don't fight about a marcel," she besought Blake. "Save that for when you've been married a long time like us. It'll come in handy then. Now, it seems so—so picking!"
That last had been a mistake, as Letty understood instantly. Anger with Blake was a state of ice, not of heat. Instead of quickly bursting with it, he slowly froze about his anger, locking it securely within. They were all chilled by him, even the child who had been trying to reach his place across the table with her spoon. He glowered at her so that she began to wail. Blake rose and flung down his napkin. "I'd better leave this happy domestic circle," he said, and walked away.
Harold was too wise to open his mouth. Across the table the two girls glanced at each other and Grace shrugged so as to convey her bafflement to Letty. Nevertheless, she went quickly upstairs and subjected her face and hair to the mirror. Any criticism of her looks, even this which she knew arose from other reasons, was sure to terrify Grace. The wave was a bit too tight. This reflection filled her with an unease which all Letty's reassurances could not still, which a pale yellow felt hat, pressed down till the brim met her eyebrows and, in the sun, enhancing her skin to a brilliance that made it a plastic materialization of the brilliant air and deepening her eyes to soft midnight, could not remove. Only the visual admiration of the lobby and the beach, the impression which she made on other people, finally brought back her composure.
She wore her hat hopefully to lunch. But Blake, though freshened by golf, still clung to his ill-will; there was no one like Blake for remembering what had annoyed him. As the child had been the last focal point of irritation, he surveyed her mannerisms very coldly. Grace thought it had been a pity to bring the child, but after all it was Blake who had planned this trip for all of them. If anyone's fault, it was his, and she rebelled against the shafts that, flung at her, she knew were meant for the Moseses and the child. Letty knew too and was tired of being tactful. "What an oil can of a husband you turned out to be," she said crisply.
The long day drew to the close which might have been foretold. Letty and Harold sat morosely over the dinner table; the child had been put to bed, and Grace was in a state of mounting and stifling resentment. She was so very quiet that she might have been on the verge of tears. Blake thought so. She went up to their room very suddenly. When, some time later, he followed, he expected to find her in that condition which would finally thaw a mood of which he himself was tiring but which he had, from early childhood, learned to rely on others to evaporate for him.
Grace was just finishing her evening toilette. It always soothed her to look after herself physically. She slipped a barrette about her hair at the nape of her neck, smoothed down the waves which enclosed the now clear forehead, the cheeks that seemed rounder, in a sleek, soft frame. She was pleased with the effect and studied it for a few moments in the glass. She turned to him and would have spoken but remembered and swallowed the words. He spoke for her.
She considered the glass without expression, very still.
He spoke again with a sneer.
"All right," she said evenly. "You can torment me as much as you like. But when it gets too much for me, I have a way—to make you sorry."
He was so taken aback that he laughed out loud.
"What'll you do?" he said.
She made a small, menacing nod to her reflection in the glass. "I know what I can do."
This time she planted her eyes full on him, eyes so dry, huge, shooting such a triumphant brilliance at him from the hard pupils and the distended, gleaming whites, that he blinked. He watched them with a half-amused curiosity turning into a vague alarm. "Tell me. What will you do?"
"Nope. I won't tell you," she said. She curved her lips about the secret which seemed to give her a malicious pleasure. "Only, if you ever make me do it, you'll be sorry."
He remained silent now, she could see, really worried. Stealing looks at her from time to time, the set of her face scared him. And she was so dry-eyed. It was not that Grace cried easily, but he seemed to recollect that no fault of his, or at least nothing that had been a grave fault to her, had been revealed to her hitherto without his being able to measure the extent of her hurt and his pardon in the melting of her eyes and the upwelling and flow of her tears. Now he was at a loss. She had not been hurt—could not be hurt—as her actions and demeanor declared to him—so how could he sue for pardon? A phrase he had once used to her, in the need of the moment, not half-meaning it but using it because it rose to his lips, returned to thrust itself at him, to become fatefully clear—like an old prophecy. "When you don't cry any more, I'll know you don't care any more." And this explanation was so apparent to him that he grew quiet and pale with it. He waited, sunk in imagination, watching her move about the room, more and more anxious for some sign that might reassure him.
At length, as she made no such sign, he was forced to remind her of what he had once said. The words dropped from his lips involuntarily, as a tentative inquiry. But, falling slowly from his lips, stumbling across such a wide distance, they reached her, these words with their old associations, like old friends in some dire trouble whom one must at once, without question, comfort and aid. So she was placated.
He had behaved very well after that, Grace told Anita. She said with a smile that changed into the motions of her deliberate snigger on further thought: "I had no idea what I would do, you know. I just said it on the spur of the moment to stop him. He was getting—unbearable. And—you know how—you can frighten a person more by a threat if you don't—don't define it? If they don't know just—where—they're going to be hit? Blake was very scared. He pretended to tease me about it afterward, but just the same I could see—he had it on his mind.'"
She paused. Her lips drew together in a resolute line and in her new, slower tone there lingered a trace of vindictiveness. She had just picked up a clock from the dresser and her fingers grasped it tightly as she faced Anita.
"But when he kept asking me what I meant to do, joking about 'my little mystery,'" she added, "I started to wonder what I really could do—if it came to that—what really would punish him. And now—I know." She halted again, savoring her victorious secret with her eyes and her smile.
She would have continued even without the prompting question, had to continue, would have ignored and overridden any interruption, like an actress finishing her speech regardless of all distractions.
"It occurred—to me," she said, and articulated each phrase slowly, "that—all I would have to do would be to go to his mother, who thinks—he is so very perfect, and tell her the whole story—how we lived together long before Edith left him, in what circumstances the baby was born, and why he didn't—get called Junior!"
She laid the clock down firmly on top of a suitcase and concluded, "She'd never recover from the shock."
"Oh, you wouldn't actually do that," said Anita.
"I might," said Grace with a shrug.
They were packing up to leave the apartment. Grace as usual "knew someone" who would take it off their hands, as it had been decided that she should move into Blake's place.
"I don't think I'll take that—or that," Grace said, flinging old things into a corner. "Can you use this?" She held up a dressing gown that Anita had long admired.
"What do you want for it?" said Anita.
Grace hesitated. "It's old—but it's still good." She was torn between her first generous impulse to give and the later impulse, fruit of experience, not to give without a return. Anita had always been careful, she hardly knew why, not to permit Grace's first impulses to win, never to accept without a return, and the return she preferred to make, the return that seemed to her least complicated, was of money. She hazarded a price. It was too much, but somehow she had always rather give Grace too much—in money—than too little. It eased her conscience.
Grace handed over the dressing gown. She closed the last suitcase. She felt a little uncomfortable about accepting the money, Anita could see, and when she had put it into her purse she said suddenly, with the effect of having found a way to make the transaction fair, "It's not time for the moving men yet. Let's go down. I'll buy you—a soda."
Anita smiled.
They stepped over the luggage. Grace searched for her keys. From the hallway Anita could see the sad, dead spaces of the living room—piles of shapeless furniture, heaps of miscellaneous débris.
With a final bang, the door swung to.
CHAPTER THREE
They were to continue to see a great deal of each other, as Grace was not the sort of old-fashioned spouse who is swallowed up by her husband's life. And at first she did manage to meet Anita often, usually when she was troubled and wore what Anita had begun to think of as her "bird of prey" aspect, the signal for some new worry or some new need. She couldn't make any dates, she confided in a tone which tried to be humorous while her eyes exhibited her very real concern. Admirers, both long-established and potential, had suddenly vanished. Or, if she chanced upon one, as she did several times on the street and in restaurants when Anita was with her, their withdrawal was obvious enough to embarrass Anita. They were glad to see Grace; they looked at her with pleasure. Then, when, on leaving, Grace fixed her eyes on them and said, "Why don't you—call me up—sometime?" or, with a measured insistence, "Let's have—a date soon—shall we?" their uneasiness became apparent in the wandering of their eyes and the hasty indefiniteness of their replies.
"Do you see? They couldn't run from me worse if I had the plague!" exclaimed Grace.
Another time, at a dinner party, she sat next to a one-time boy friend who had not been entirely tractable in his day because of doubts as to her status. Such overtures as she cared to make now, however, had been circumspectly passed by. "My Gawd! You ought to have seen the respect with which he treated me," said Grace, with some alarm in spite of her satisfaction.
She applied to Anita: "Letty says it's because I've just been married and they think I can't want to make dates with other men, that I'm only—kidding them." Her eyes implored Anita for serious consideration.
Anita thought it might be so.
"If they only knew!" wailed Grace.
"Blake has a girl now," she said disconsolately. "A nice little chorus girl. He has quite a crush on her. He says it's such fun to use the old line and tell the old stories to some girl who drinks them in as if they were new." An indulgent smile hovered about her mouth. "I know—just how he feels."
After a pause she was struck by a thought which, it occurred to Anita, probably had been in the back of her mind all the time. She raised her eyes and tested the ground with her phrases. "I thought—I might even start something—with Dennis," she said. "I'm that desperate!" She added, "That is, if you don't mind."
Anita could not help chuckling. "You'd better apply to Dennis."
"Oh, Dennis!" said Grace confidently.
But Anita was not so sure, since Dennis was in the throes of the very fate Grace had foreseen. The very girl of her prophecy apparently, a sweet, firm little creature, whose tactics Anita noted with admiration, had Dennis in tow, or so nearly in tow that it didn't matter. He went about proclaiming over convivial tables, "To think that a sweet little girl like that should care for a bum like me!"
However, it was not long before Grace came to call on Anita in a happier frame of mind; she had a job, a better job than the old. She wanted to borrow Anita's house in order to entertain a new swain that evening. Blake had planned to stay in and work, thus making her own home unavailable.
"It feels so strange to have to borrow apartments again," she complained. "Ironic, isn't it? For the first time since I left Ma I haven't—even a nook—I can feel is quite my own."
She looked around Anita's room with the disappointment with which it always filled her. The house stood in the old Chelsea district on a block that was still pimpled with tenement houses. Though it shone to the point of bedizenment with varnish and fresh paint, it was a rickety, meager little house. And Anita's home was so bare—bare floors, nearly bare walls, painted furniture and not much of it that seemed stripped to the bone; color, charming and harmonious color, that decorated instead of softening. The vague, comfortable, and comforting quality in a room that makes one sink into it and wish to stay in it, the quality meant by "lived in," which has nothing to do with taste, which means only perhaps that the room is accustomed to people, needs them, is ready to adapt itself under their eyes to whatever they require of it—this quality was missing here. Grace was always a little on the verge of leaving in Anita's home.
The second summer of their marriage, the Andrews' went to London to put on one of Blake's shows. Grace's return was heralded by such a vigorous determination to get Anita to go apartment hunting with her and by such a mound of worries in connection with her father and mother-in-law, who had moved East with Blake's child, that the mere sound of her voice began to bring to Anita the immediate, warning reflex, "What does she want now?" By the following year, Anita barely knew that Blake had thought of taking a house in Great Neck, buying a house, perhaps, as Grace informed her dejectedly in the course of a sudden telephone call. This overture brought the same reflex with it, had the sound of a distress call from a proud liner to a humble little tramp steamer which never would have got the least attention otherwise. Anita had long ago resolved not to make initial advances to Grace because, unless these came at the propitious moment, Grace did not trouble to disguise their inconvenience. A remnant of gratitude still caused her to feel that she ought to come when whistled to, but she was so disinclined that Grace had been compelled to offer inducements other than that personal company which is usually considered sufficient for old friends.
"Well, since you can't have dinner with me," she had said at last incredulously, "if we do take the house, you must come out for a week-end. I'll let you know."
Nor did Grace forget. Anita was an assistant now, instead of a secretary, and one day, in the absence of the chief, the employment bureau's press agent "hung" a story on to her. The afternoon that story appeared, Grace called up to congratulate and to give a definite invitation. It seemed more than a coincidence to Anita. What a perfect scent for success Grace had! Nevertheless she felt ashamed almost at once of so cynical an appraisement and scolded herself. It was kind of Grace to ask her out; it was indeed a long time since they had seen each other. She agreed to call for Grace on Saturday afternoon.
Grace was working for a theatrical producer and had her name on the elevator directory, her name on the door, a stenographer and a room almost to herself, concrete evidences of her rise which she felt she ought to acknowledge ironically so that no one could think she was proud of them or that they really meant anything to her.
A new musical comedy was being cast and, as Grace shared her office with the man who "saw" people for it, she with her appurtenances was almost swamped by a collection of show folks who stood, sat, chatted, were quiet, yet nevertheless had all the same attitude and the same expression—the patient attitude, the waiting face. The man who saw people, of course, had not yet returned from lunch, might not return at all that day, as Anita heard Grace reply a dozen times within the few minutes. At the same time, she was carrying on a telephone conversation with the press agent for a charity ball who wished her to urge the cast of We Are Three to attend for the good of the firm—and the ball. While Anita waited, she concluded the talk, scribbled some notes on her date pad, and declared, "That's all I'm going to do for Sweet Charity this bright Saturday afternoon." She picked up a large, pale blue silky straw hat from her desk and made for the door, only to be summoned back by a fresh ring of the phone. It was the dramatic editor of the Weehawken, New Jersey, High School Gazetteer, demanding free tickets to review We Are Three. Grace rolled her eyes in despair and said politely that she was sorry but this was impossible as the show was selling out. "You see," she confided gravely, "I would be glad to—oblige you but I am not even allowed tickets for the daily paper people.... Yes.... Later perhaps.... Good-bye. Come along," she gasped to Anita, "before any more pests call up."
Once outside, she tucked her hat over her hair, using the glass of the elevator shaft as a mirror, and heaved a great sigh of relief.
"I can't bear to be around when there's casting," she said. "All this week I've been grabbing my hat at odd hours and dashing out of the office. They're so—pitiful! It's no good telling them Mr. Whoozis won't be in, probably'll never be in. They won't believe. And they won't go. I don't see how you can stand having people come to you for jobs day in, day out."
"Oh, well... It's rather nice anyhow when you have the jobs to distribute," said Anita. "You ought to know. You've found work for plenty of people."
Grace sniggered. "Yes. Blake says I ought to open—an employment bureau on the side. I've even got into the bad habit of suggesting girls I run across for his shows."
She was wearing a pale blue silk blouse and skirt, minutely tucked and pleated by way of flaunting its simplicity. The color, so unusual for her, had by its novelty the effect of emphasizing anew the hazy glow which her skin shed under the summer sun, the gentle fullness which her cheeks now had. She looked lovelier than ever, Anita thought, and said so.
"That's a nice dress you have on, too," said Grace, scrutinizing the green of Anita's summer jersey. "The nicest I've ever seen on you. I suppose it's—by way of celebration?"
The warning signal jerked in Anita's brain while she hated herself for it. She was liking Grace so much at the moment.
"And that reminds me," went on Grace, "speaking of jobs and all. You wouldn't need—a stenographer—would you? My little cousin is looking for work."
"No. We've already got one," said Anita shortly. After a moment she amended: "It's not exactly in my line; we're only supposed to get work for adolescents or the handicapped. But I run across all kinds of jobs. I'll—I'll watch out for her."
"I'll let you know," were words Anita had sworn would never, never pass her lips.
They had still to call for Blake at a theater where he was rehearsing a road company of his last show—he now staged his own shows, Grace explained.
They walked a few blocks which seemed surprisingly gay and sunny. White structures had sprung up everywhere, taking the place of the squat old tortured frontages—a slender and glittering generation, slimly arrogant, flaunting a hard chastity of line in a sunlight that, striking full on every revealed angle, could not abash but only made them more shining. The theater was new and also white. The asphalt in front of it had but just been laid and returned to the sun a million infinitesimal sparks, as if it were set with diamantes.
They went around by the stage entrance and found some chorus girls issuing brightly and, just within the open door, talking to Jerry Barker, a man of whom Anita could observe at first solely the crease made by fat above the pink-striped collar of his shirt. Coming nearer, she was disconcerted to recognize Blake. She had seen less of him than of Grace and had not met him at all these last months. Hitherto, a slight expansiveness in his bearing and appearance, an ease of flesh and movement due to prosperity, had been attractive. But all Anita could think of now was how the flesh had finally spread and filled every inch of his fine gray suit. Her expression must have been obvious. Blake said almost at once, in the unconscious avowal of one who knows just what the fault is for which he desires to forestall blame, "I'm going to reduce." However, at the same time he looked at Anita hopefully, as if trying to judge from her face whether, after all, it would really be necessary to reduce. To Anita's surprise, he remarked, "You look well yourself" (the first time she had attracted so much of social amiability from Blake), and asked them to wait with Jerry while he fetched his car from the garage.
They were waiting thus when the principals tripped out. All of them greeted Jerry and several greeted Grace. Then followed a few chorus men and finally a last relay of chorus girls. A few of these also knew Grace and waved to her as they walked into the street. One girl left her companion for a moment and dashed over.
"How nice you look, Grace!" she exclaimed, running her eyes over the large hat and the pale blue of the dress.
"Thank you."
"You look so stylish!" added the girl. "Real up-to-date," she pronounced with an approving nod of her head, and sped away.
There had been a frigid note in Grace's voice which did not quite accord with the quizzical glance she gave Anita. "I suppose I'm just another little-wife-in-navy-blue-georgette to them. Probably because I wear sleeves in the daytime," she murmured.
CHAPTER FOUR
On the way out, Grace and Anita sat in the back seat, Jerry in front with Blake. Grace said that Letty had been asking about her and that soon they must "all get together." Only, it was difficult to arrange for week-ends; there were so many people one had to invite.
Anita was embarrassed, sensing a subtle apology which Grace, in fact, did feel that she owed. Grace had always declared that when she had a house Anita would be free to come and go in it. She had found, however, that a hostess who wishes her hospitality to be effective is like a producer who must choose his players for the contributions each can make to the success of the show. Anita was simply "not the type." Grace didn't believe Anita cared. She remembered that she had asked her up now and then for dinner when no other people would be present and Anita had not seemed very eager. Nor had Anita ever shown much interest in the crowd. But she certainly did not wish Anita to feel, because of the necessary gaps in their social relationship, that Anita had been dropped as a friend.
Anita turned the subject by inquiring after Letty.
Letty did not look so well, Grace said; her hair had a lot of gray in it. "She says all she seems to do now is take care of her child and sit around and watch 'us active people.' But Harold is getting to be—quite the ladies' man. He sends roses to Evelyn Linden whenever they have a date."
"To Evelyn Linden? I shouldn't think Harold would be interested in Evelyn Linden."
"Harold and Evelyn Linden?" said Grace, and took on her remote look of having and withholding secret information. "Is that going on? Oh, my! Apace!"
Anita knew of old that Grace's omniscience demanded an audience. But there was a tinge of satisfaction, almost of malice, in her tone which took Anita by surprise. It was almost as if she enjoyed the advantage over people of knowing something about them—liked to "have something on them."
"Evelyn Linden as good as told Letty," went on Grace after a pause, "that if it weren't for their friendship the affair would be—serious."
"And what did Letty say?"
"Said it was all right with her. But I don't think she cares for the idea especially. I notice she and Evelyn don't see so much of each other. However—that is not why Letty looks as she does. It's because—she has no one now. She's hunting around, as it were. I've always said there was nothing like love to improve one's appearance," she concluded with unction.
Anita was aware that Grace glanced at her expectantly. She made no answer. She had begun to suffer from the same strange, harried tension in Grace's presence that she had felt at their last meeting, as if she were running a sort of race with Grace's troubles, flying before Grace's inevitable confidences, yet not being able to avoid glimpses of them out of the corner of her eye (as one subconsciously follows the movements of a pursuer) and at the same time being obliged instinctively to protect her own.
It was a relief anyhow not to be shown through the house, a temporary one and therefore, though lavish enough, not considered worth the showing. Anita had decided that the showing of houses was a mania inherent in suburbs, to which even people who would never dream of exhibiting a city apartment succumbed. She was grateful not to be forced to eulogize her surroundings. The living room was large and cool as a cave, with half-drawn shades and curtains of a thin beige silk through which the sun oozed yellowly, and the couch and armchairs, disposed about the brick fireplace, allowed one to sink as into feather beds. There was an enormous piano and an only slightly less enormous radio and a glossy phonograph from which Grace drew the melodious sorrows of a Negro spiritual. Grace had adopted "Water Boy" to be intelligently and critically ecstatic over as Anita recollected she had once adopted the plump little f's of a well-known illustrator, and she insisted on analyzing the effect of "Water Boy" upon her soul as she had once insisted on analyzing the effect of the little f's.
They ate Virginia ham and spinach and marshmallowed sweet potatoes and a pudding of a golden flakiness that had slices of rose gelatin tucked into it. There was a white-aproned Negro cook in the background and a red-cheeked youngster, a "mother's helper," who waited on table.
Blake had apparently turned over his child to Mother Andrews (Grace's name for her mother-in-law) as the result of an old agreement that he was to be relieved of all that harassed and be tendered only that which could be enjoyed. She was mild, pretty, faded, with thin lips, and she sat obscurely at table. The boy, Jamie, sat by her and received from her, in an undertone, the few corrections which he disregarded with an almost exact copy of Blake's manner of disregard. Grace had said that Jamie was just like Blake.
He was still a little shy with Grace, and she was not so foolish as to throw herself abjectly, sweating with the anxiety for approval, on a child's mercies. She had once explained to Anita that she believed the best way to get his affection was, with a child as with a grown-up, always to leave some concrete evidence of good-will. When Jamie had first come East, and she used to visit him with Blake, she had never appeared empty-handed. She still returned to the formula from time to time. To-day she had brought him a book of stories and pictures of pirates.
After dinner he came to her side in the living room and took her hand, looking sideways in embarrassment and flushing a little, in token of thanks. He wished to have the pictures explained. The two girls put their heads together to concoct suitable versions under the watchful eyes of Mother Andrews. She said nary a word. But Anita, as Grace had managed to convey while they stood for a moment by the piano and waited for the others to leave the dining room, had used the word "devil" at table in front of the child. It seemed that Mother Andrews had revised certain words for Jamie. A devil must not be termed a "devil" before him but suffered a saccharine change and become a "monkey."
The child listened with wide-open, clear blue eyes, across which a flash, caused by a deep breath, shot now and again. They knew he was pleased only because he offered, with his sideways look and flush, to show them how he "took falls." They went to the door and watched him in the fading light tumble down on the cropped lawn many times and regain his balance gracefully, swiftly. "You'll have to disown him," said Grace to Blake. "He'll turn into a hoofer yet." Blake made a face. Hoofers were people he professed most to detest. The child looked from one to the other avidly, not understanding but sensing another reserve that perhaps ought to hedge him in.
However, in spite of his outward detachment, Blake looked up when Jamie was sent to bed and waited and bent his cheek forward for the good-night kiss. The boy went on to Grace and kissed her, too, then lingered before Anita, who had lit a cigarette. It was the cigarette that held his attention. No doubt he had been told that every cigarette was a nail in one's coffin. He looked like that. At length he made up his mind not to notice her. He hastened by without so much as a murmur, turning and peering at her as he made his farewells to the others and sending her one last, clear-blue, reticent gaze from behind the banister at the foot of the stairs. Then he could bear it no longer and revealed the judgment which had been on the tip of his tongue. "Ladies don't smoke," he said.
Anita was irritated enough to ask, "Who told you that?" despite Grace's optic warning.
"It said so in a book," he replied securely.
"Is that so?" said Anita, less to the child than for the benefit of Mother Andrews. "There are a lot of other things in books. For instance, it says in a book, 'Children should be seen and not heard.' Do you believe that?"
They all laughed, even Mother Andrews, and the child himself saw the point and bent his head a little ruefully. But no one spoke. Blake wore an air of assent, rather than otherwise, to the child's prudishness.
Mother Andrews went up to bed soon after, making various tactful signals to her husband to remove himself also. She was very good about that, Grace whispered, in contrast to Dad Andrews, whom Grace liked better but whose delight in the company of young folks made him often far too stationary. He sat on for a long time that night, nice-looking, gentle, youngish, and rather wistful except when the numerous opinions he had formed about the theater and the traffic situation, even in so short a period, led him to inject himself into the talk. Blake set his chin and ignored the interruptions until the constant calls of his mother from above finally tore Dad away. Then Grace, sighing with relief, wished to know what they meant to do with the rest of the evening. "Marie Drum wants us to come over and see her house," she said, to Anita's alarm. The men debated whether or not they would work.
"Or we might go over to Olive Lytell's," added Grace. "I had to see her at the theater last night and she said she was giving a party."
"Well, why don't you and Anita go over while we work?" suggested Blake with unwonted kindness.
But Grace said decidedly that she would not think of going without him.
They went to the Drums' after all because Marie and Ted Drum burst into the house to fetch them. Ted Drum was—had been—a song-and-dance man and had been featured in one of Blake's shows. He was dark, curly-haired. Grace introduced him as "one of those freaks of Nature who can't read notes and never took a lesson in their lives but who can play any tune on the piano by ear." Marie Drum rhapsodized on the subjects of furniture, landscape gardening, the prices of trees, and the difficulties of getting in touch with their architect. "He's not at his office for weeks and he doesn't answer his telephone. Of course, they say he's a dipso and his private life is smeared all over the place, but I haven't found anyone to suit us so well. The only way to get him is to send him a night letter to his home, I've found. He's got to open a telegram."
"We must remember that," said Blake to Grace—and to the Drums, "I was thinking of getting him myself."
Finally, it seemed easiest to go and inspect the Drums' house.
All bungalows made of pink stucco were exactly like all other bungalows made of pink stucco to Anita. This pinkness stood against the sky, dark blue as it should be, and over the house a slim moon was poised, a wispy, silvery circlet. Marie Drum pointed to it with pride, as if it had been a stage property. Such a nice moon for a pink stucco house! Anita followed in resignation, observing the house from every angle, observing it from top to bottom, observing "cute" staircases and the patchwork quilt in the guest room and the Colonial furnishings of the bedroom and the polished purity of the kitchen and the rosy tiles and pink-embroidered towels of the bathroom, while Marie Drum tripped on feathery feet (she had been a dancer), in a huge black hat which never left her head even in her own home, tripped before them up and down stairs, opening doors and explaining antiques. Grace asked questions about the furniture, after which she made an excuse to Anita, "I may have to choose some myself soon." The Drums had overlooked no accessory that could contribute to their domestic pride. They had a dog and they even had a visitors' book.
The living room was strictly and stiffly Colonial. Balanced sedately on the high-bred chairs, one breathed one's thankfulness to catch sight of a grand piano—and then a radio—and then a ping-pong set. And the white bearskin before the fireplace, spontaneous effusion from the hearts of Ted and Marie Drum in the midst of glacial floor spaces, was like a dear, dear old friend.
While Ted sat down to the piano and strummed popular tunes without ever having taken a lesson, Marie fluttered about, coralling them to sign the visitors' book. Grace took up the pen first, unwillingly, and signed herself, "Grace Kline."
Marie objected. "Oh, no. Sign your full name. What do you want to join the Lucy Stone League for?"
"I don't want to," said Grace. "I don't have to. I can't get anyone to call me anything but Grace Kline. When the grocer says 'Mrs. Andrews,' I jump. Really."
She peeped toward Blake, who was listening. "Well, since you insist..." she remarked and put down an "Andrews."
Marie Drum stood over her. "And write something—write something bright under Remarks." Grace hesitated, then added a dash after "Grace Kline Andrews" and wrote "—By Request!" with a flourish. She watched Blake read it and handed him the pen. He set down firmly, "Blake Andrews," and in the Remarks column he wrote, with a snort, "—By Command!" and threw down the pen.