Marie Drum had to ponder over the comments for a few moments before she saw the point. Then she burst into surprised laughter, calling to the others to come and see. "You little eggs!" she cried. An elaborate smirk was pasted to Grace's face. She was neither abashed nor hurt. It was nothing, she knew. He was quite comfortable, perfectly satisfied. This was just a last obeisance, demanded by the convention of his youthful creed, toward an unattainable freedom which it had been part of the creed to yearn for, but which he had sagaciously never made any attempt to attain and which he would not know what to do with if it could be attained. She sat down by Blake on the bearskin and closed her two hands over his arm in an arch attitude of consolation. They still had moments of embracing in public, or rather of staging their carefully burlesqued yet absorbed caresses, but these were no longer so compelling to watch, no longer acted on the audience as reminders of a love which transcended all obstacles. The audience was even a little impatient; after all, Blake and Grace could very well now embrace in private.
Jerry, who was a good musician, pushed Ted off the piano stool and began to play a song from the show he and Blake were working on.
"What do you think of that?"
Ted nodded and asserted that it ought to be a hit. It made him think, he said, of "Your Kisses Are Blisses," which had been their biggest hit.
"Funny about that," said Jerry reminiscently. "We had every song in the show picked for a hit but that. Blake was all for 'Is There Anything a Little Girl Can't Do?'"
Blake disengaged himself. "I'm still for that," he called. "It's a good lyric and a good tune."
"Maybe it was too much for them to remember," suggested Ted. "A tune ought to be simple, that's my idea."
Marie interrupted to say that this didn't always follow, naming one composer of many hits whose tunes were often complicated. They turned on her in mockery.
"Yeh, but what tunes!" said Jerry. "That fella knows his classics."
They began a rapt discussion of lyrics, tunes, what the public likes, and of what exactly had made "Your Kisses Are Blisses" so popular. Grace kept still, with her eyes fixed on space. During a pause she raised them and articulated gravely, "There's—something I thought—to tell you, Jerry." They all watched her.
"There's one thing that all hit tunes have in common," she pronounced, "whatever the other ingredients may be. They may or may not have words of one syllable, though they usually have. But whatever else they are, they're all—definite. For instance, 'Who—Who stole my heart away?' Or, 'Your Kisses—Your kisses are blisses.' One thing to settle in your mind."
There was a long silence while they all somehow felt that they should ruminate on this. Ted roused himself with an effort to prepare drinks. Marie Drum said, "We all go to bed early here," so they stayed only long enough to have some highballs and to play a few games of ping-pong. And then, since it was merely midnight, they trooped forth to a lunch wagon near the station to terminate the night life of Great Neck fittingly with sandwiches and coffee.
CHAPTER FIVE
A real-estate agent called for Blake soon after the lunch-breakfast to show him some land. Grace, plumped on the couch, was a spot of orange severely vivid in the midst of the Sunday morning frowsiness of the living room—flattened, disordered cushions and untidy carpets; a small green bowl on the piano spilling cigarette stubs and ashes. She was scanning the Sunday papers to see which of her publicity stories had got in. Every now and then she pounced on a sheet, stuck the point of her scissors through it, and neatly clipped an item.
"I'm busy collecting li'l items," she said sardonically, "li'l scraps of pa-a-aper! You go with Blake, Anita, and see the town."
So, from the back seat of the car, Anita solemnly surveyed the town. There seemed to be quite a lot of pleasant green grass and blue sky and sunshine and houses on hills and houses at the foot of slopes and houses along smooth streets and many vacant lots between. Occasionally, Blake stopped the car in front of one of the latter, while he and Jerry and the real-estate agent discussed its special virtues. They drove a good way out to a point of marshy land through which the Sound had filtered in pale streamlets and tiny pools. To one side an arm of the Sound stretched, long, blue, and deep, bearing yachts on its tranquil surface and many boats and a pier. Blake indicated the narrow fringe which was Sands Point Casino and another fringe which was Port Washington. A second agent joined them and stood with one foot on the running board, calling attention to the beauties of the landscape and suggesting other spots which they might see. The car faced the water, which drew their eyes over and beyond it with the insistence of all horizons. Even the real-estate agents gazed over their shoulders once in a while.
"Take Lake Success now," said one reflectively. "Been there yet? That's a mighty pretty country around Lake Success."
Anita, who had paid little heed, looked up quickly. The agent's face was quite blank as he went on to describe another section of this countryside. She glanced at the other agent and from him to Jerry. They were both absorbed in the talk. She grinned to herself and caught a sudden answering glint of amusement from a corner of Blake's eye, accentuated by the slightest turn of his head, so that it was like a wink between them. Anita at once forgave him the crease of fat above the collar of his shirt, blue-striped to-day.
They returned past a huge stone castle that resembled a church. Blake halted before it and told Anita to bow her head in contemplation. "That's Jack Omley's house," he said, mentioning a wealthy lyric writer. "The house that jack built. Must have cost around two hundred thousand. I go and look at it when I want inspiration. It's a monument to book-and-lyrics."
Jerry clamored to be shown a house that music had built. "It's you lyric writers who make the jack," he complained.
After they had called for Grace and delivered up Jamie in terror to his first social engagement—a children's party given by Mrs. Saling, young wife of the producer for whom Grace worked ("And what a soft thing she fell into," remarked Grace, as they left the place with its curving lawn decorated by gay colored balloons and the party dresses of children) they spent part of the afternoon looking at more houses. An airy, delicate, wistful little gray cottage "that nestled," Grace said; white frame buildings with green blinds; bright stucco bungalows; houses as precise as little jewels cut out of glowing brick, with tessellated walks surrounded by clipped verdure; romantic structures obscured by trees on hilltops—all these Grace liked. Blake wished to buy a lot and build so that his parents could live with or adjoining them, while Grace preferred a small, separate place which they could use for summers.
They passed by the dwelling of a famous writer, humped on a hill like a white elephant, which Anita had asked to see, and—just beyond—the convivial house of a famous editor, where women in all colors of silk sport dresses and men in shirt sleeves and men in tennis trousers were playing croquet on the lawn. "That crowd has a perfect passion for games," said Grace, peering from the car. She knew all the people and called off their names to Anita: the celebrities of a certain set in which she did not move though she had cast glances thereon.
Blake swerved the car and re-passed. "I suppose you want to get a glimpse of Raphael," he said to her teasingly, but with a hint of irritation. Grace did not answer. "Or should it be Rafe now?" persisted Blake. She smiled a secret, half-complacent smile and looked at Anita. She said they might as well stop by and visit Betty Rose Crawford who had the lead in We Are Three. "You might be interested in her," she told Blake and Jerry. "You know—Saling picked her from a chorus. This is only her second part. She sings and dances quite well."
"She wouldn't do for Boy Friends," said Blake. "No name."
"Well, it wouldn't hurt you—to just talk to her, would it? And you might happen to like her."
They found Betty Rose Crawford with her hair down her back, sitting under a striped awning on a sunny lawn. She was being entertained by the young actor whose house it was and whom she hastened to introduce with due decorum as her fiancé, managing also to inform them that her mother shared the house as chaperon. She was very pretty, brown-eyed, brown-haired. A faint simper lingered about her mouth as she talked in a sweet, high voice with the Anglo-American stage accent. She had the syrupy self-assurance of some stage children, and, sitting under the becoming colors of the awning, with her charming hair about her, sending her young man here and there for chairs and cocktails, chattering back-stage gossip, she put even Grace in the shade with her utter consciousness of herself as the center of attraction. She was the sort of girl who signifies her girlish purity and naïveté by telling, a little humorously, stories about children (little boys always) who lay flowers at her feet and old people (old men always) who worship her. After having interpolated into her talk suggestions of the many business offers she was always getting, she took them into the house and urged Jerry to play for her. He played some of the tunes for their new show, while she hummed them and laughingly took a few dance steps.
Jerry was ready to be smitten. On the way home he proclaimed that she was a sweet girl.
"She's pretty enough. But she wants too much money," said Blake thoughtfully. "We can get someone better known for that. Nancy Tuxson, for instance."
Grace remonstrated. "But she's so homely! For this show, it's my idea that a pretty girl who's not known is much better than a homely girl who is known."
Through dinner they debated the relative merits of Nancy Tuxson and Betty Rose Crawford and, upon withdrawal to the living room, they continued against a background of radio and Dad Andrews. Anita sat and waited. She had seized upon Jerry's announcement that he meant to borrow Blake's car and drive home that night with an eager explanation of how she had to rise so early to be on time for work that it would be much more convenient for her to accompany Jerry. Grace's objections had been overruled. There was now nothing to do but wait. Jerry took his place at the piano. Blake chanted the words of a lyric that he had lately finished while Jerry drummed the tune to go with it. Blake, Anita inferred, was uncertain of the song and wanted to know what the rest thought. She said it was very nice. Grace, however, had heard the words before. She undertook some helpful criticism. It was a good enough song but it didn't "hit" her; she couldn't "be crazy about it."
"It's not up to the standard of the funny songs you and Jerry have written," she said.
"It's not meant to be a funny song," replied Blake coldly. "It's an answer or theme song."
He and Jerry busied themselves over the piano, Jerry strumming while Blake changed a rhyme here and a sentence there. They went on to other tunes.
"We might as well go upstairs," said Grace. "We're not wanted here."
"You might as well," said Blake, still frozen. Jerry, from the piano, promised abstractedly to call Anita when he was ready. She had no choice but to follow Grace up to her room.
Grace settled herself on the linen cover of the bed in a field of green wool embroideries. Anita lingered by the door with an anxious ear cocked for the first long pause of the piano.
"They'll be hours yet," Grace assured her. "Move a chair over and shut the door, will you?"
Anita sighed within herself and moved over the armchair of maple and rested her elbows on its graceful arms. There was a silence. She could feel Grace's eyes fastening themselves in full somberness upon her. She stared at a rag rug of aquamarine and emerald and apple green and rose.
"What do you think of all this?" said Grace directly.
"Oh, it's all right." Anita, glancing up for a second, repented. There was that somber appeal in Grace's wide-open eyes which she never could withstand. It was as if Grace's topcoat of assurance were blown aside by a puff of wind and revealed her for that moment in all her nakedness—living tissue eaten alive by all the ants of care and worry; living tissue, shuddering, covered with the cold sweat of subterranean fears. "Well, you know, suburbs were never much in my line—a childhood inhibition, I guess," she said uneasily.
"Were they ever in mine?" demanded Grace. "It's like a judgment on me!" she exclaimed. "To get away from Ma and uptown domesticity only to fall into the clutches of Mother Andrews and—suburban domesticity. You know Blake's idea, don't you? He'd be—perfectly satisfied to live out here all the time with Mother and Dad and Jamie."
"Not that I'd mind bringing up Jamie," she went on, "or even living here so much—alone. But it's Mother Andrews who brings up Jamie, and you see how, don't you? The way she brought up Blake! Of course, Blake won't see and I can't—interfere. But I have to watch it. And Mother Andrews! She was crazy about Edith, you know. And she doesn't say a word, but every time she looks around the house I can feel her thinking—how much—Edith would have enjoyed all this."
She paused. Anita did not know what to say.
"And I thought Blake wanted to be free!" Grace concluded with a sardonic twist of her mouth.
After another pause she muttered, "I wouldn't mind being free myself—if you should want to know." She peered at Anita to see how startled she might be.
Anita was, in fact, a little surprised. "You don't mean a divorce, do you?"
Grace's eyes became huger than ever and took on the remote depths of tragedy. "I had—thought of that," she said slowly.
As Anita did not reply, she lowered her eyes, then refastened them to Anita's face. "I have—grounds, too," she stated. The effect of her words, the sudden lift of Anita's brows, was satisfactory. She added, "Oh, nothing I can actually point to! But—I have my suspicions. And I would have found out, too," she said with a reminiscent giggle. "I had almost got it out of Jerry one afternoon—you can get anything out of Jerry, you know—but Letty happened to be staying here and she came in and guessed what I was up to and jumped on me. She said I would resent Blake's cross-examining a friend of mine about my doings and so I had no right to ask Jerry about Blake's. I've never seen Letty so—boiling mad!"
"She was right, too," said Anita.
"I suppose." Grace shrugged. "I didn't mean to do anything about it. I just wanted to know. But I'm—practically sure anyhow."
"Well, it would be very funny for you to rave on the subject of marital infidelity," said Anita without further ado.
Grace was not abashed. "So Letty said. But I don't mean to rave. Only—one can get a divorce on that ground, can't one? It's something to know."
"And Blake has changed so," she continued more soberly. "Honestly, I don't mind this—not much. No, I don't," she repeated to Anita's slight glance of disbelief. "I get crushes too easily myself—not to—understand—infidelity, if it's only physical. You know I always did draw a distinction between physical and mental infidelity," she reminded Anita. "I don't—like the idea, but I can see how—some little chorus girl you don't give a snap for can get you physically. It didn't last long. Only I gave Blake credit for—for more fastidiousness. You remember the girl who rushed up to me Saturday—while we were waiting for Blake? That's the one. She's so—so coarse! And he's changed in other ways. He used to read a lot, you know, and talk about—things and now——"
"And he's getting fat," she sighed.
Anita thought that the piano had stopped below, but as soon as she half-rose she heard it again. The words that had been shaping themselves in her mind at last forced themselves impatiently past her tongue. "Oh, it's not really so bad," she said. "Aren't you rather dramatizing all this?"
There was a sudden movement of Grace's eyes; deliberate and velutinous, they stared into Anita's—simple, as simple as opalescent windows uncurtained to the world because they need no curtains to hide their interiors, presenting surfaces full of light and an embossed blankness behind which anything may be fancied and anything lurk. "I suppose so," said Grace, and smiled.
The eyes of the two girls met without passing each other, leaving them no wiser in words or in the mind, wiser only in inarticulate imagination. The moment fled and they could not recall just what it was they had tried to understand but they were pleased nevertheless. Some of the present constraint vanished and they talked for a while almost as they had in the old days when, just before going to bed of nights, they had undertaken to clarify to each other and to visualize each other's universes.
"Not that I don't admire your talent for self-dramatization," Anita said. "It's by making oneself all-important and the things one wants all-important, after all, that one gets them. That's where I miss out. I never could make any idea seem important enough to bother about much, or any person, not even myself. Whereas you exalted the idea of yourself and Blake together and made everything and everyone subsidiary to that idea and—you got what you wanted."
"Not quite," said Grace.
She added shrewdly, "You always did give me credit for too much calculation, you know. A lot of things were just—by-products, just happened. I had some good breaks. But you're right, in a way."
She thought for a while, moving restlessly. "Oh, I suppose I'll—settle down," she said, and shrugged. At the same time her eyes began a new plea to Anita.
"Sometimes," she said, "I think I might as well drop it all, be a dependent woman and cling and live in the suburbs and all that. It's so much easier. But when you've—not been dependent for a long time, it's hard to change. And then there's Ma. I have to take care of her."
She went on slowly, with her insistent eyes enlarging themselves on Anita's face. "I could have a baby. I'd even—thought of that! A baby might—solve everything. I'd sit around and be supported and keep house. In that way I'd get rid of Mother Andrews. And Ma would have to—manage. Blake would get used to the idea. As a matter of fact, I don't think he'd mind so much any more. He's made a good deal of money, you know—and he thinks he may get a movie contract—soon—which will mean more."
She paused expectantly. Anita was about to dismiss the subject with a prosaic, "Well, why don't you have a baby then?" but this sounded too brusque even to herself. She said instead, "Blake might not mind, but don't you think you might?"
"Oh—I don't know," said Grace. "I used to be so ambitious. But sometimes I think all I want—is to sink way down, to have an easy life, a soft life, money, clothes, good times, not be so—taut all the time with work and Blake and mother-in-law. I'd like to find some way of—abandoning myself!"
She said in a lower voice, while an expression faintly complacent, faintly defiant hovered about her mouth, and her eyes acted as a searchlight on Anita's face: "I've been—making a few experiments along those lines, if you should—care to know. I seem to be—more sensual—than I used to be."
Anita didn't care to know and hurried from the verge of further confidences. "Well, abandon is something one certainly can't plan anyhow. The minute you plan it, it isn't abandon."
There was another long silence. Grace sat there, her feet dangling, her hands in her lap. And at length the words which Anita had felt would be spoken some time that night emerged from her lips:
"All the same, I wish—Edith hadn't died."
They seemed to linger for an instant on the air.
"It was all so much better then," Grace said. "She would have got a divorce in time," she explained quickly. "She would have kept the child, you see, and I—wouldn't be in for all this mess of domesticity."
"'Ah! the good old days when I was so unhappy,'" quoted Anita. She rose and stretched. She was somewhat contrite to be so eager to go and, turning to Grace, she added, "But I don't think you and Blake will break up. I hope not. It would be such a pity."
"No," said Grace, "I don't think so either." She shook her head.
"I don't really believe I'll ever give Blake up," she admitted quietly.
And these, Anita thought, were the most sincere words that Grace had uttered. Less than most people would she be able to concede that any drama, in which she had fought and agonized and plotted to build up a principal part, could ever be trivial.
Something in her attitude, so still at the moment, summoned from the past a wraith that rose and fringed and shielded like smoke the familiar contours of her sweater dress; her clutching eyes; her long, pliant lips held together with just a trace of hauteur. Did she remember? Did she remember a girl with big eyes in a thin face, twisting a handkerchief tight enough to tear it, twisting and tearing with fingers like teeth, and another girl keeping quiet as a mouse from sympathy that was greater without words? Was she thinking perhaps that the misery of that moment had all been wasted? Or was the misery of that moment some subtle sustenance to her? Did it have its part in the veiling, aching glamour effused from old times, old feelings, thus softening now and then the troubled insistence of her eyes?
"You know," said Grace, "I really—believe—I wouldn't mind having a baby. It wouldn't interfere so much with my work. I needn't have a job. I could—write. And then it would be—an experience. What do you think?"
The air of the suburban night filled the interim with the nauseous singings of mosquitoes and the chitter of insects. Surely Jerry must be through! She must get home to-night! And the pressure of Anita's boredom and her distaste was so great that she had an instant when she could feel her nerves squeezed out of her and swimming before her eyes: infinitesimal iridescent worms swimming in liquid air before her.
THE END