by Mary Astor
Without listening Herb went on. “The old man asked me what ‘field’ I was in—not, mind you, what I did for a living. I guess I went up a notch because I didn’t have to say ‘car salesman,’ although he probably would have fainted if I told him I did janitor work to pay for college. Even so when I told him he sniffed a little, ‘Chemist, eh? Interesting,’ and walked away. God, I wonder if the unemployment problem has any meaning to him—if it isn’t just a set of figures on paper.”
Gregg burst into laughter, loud and hearty. Herb stopped short and looked at him in amazement, because Gregg’s laughter was rare.
“Name the first baby after me, will you, Herb?”
In spite of himself, Herb went red to the ears, and he babbled, “Do you think anybody—noticed? I mean, we stayed out of the library, purposely, because the door was shut, and we naturally thought you wanted to talk privately about something——”
Still laughing, Gregg rolled on his side and looked up at Herb, who had shed ten years, looking like a guilty kid.
“Bells were ringing and lights were flashing all evening, old boy. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but Shakespeare did, so I could be wrong. Anyway I saw it happen tonight, with my own eyes.”
Herb broke into a grin. “She is something terrific, isn’t she?” But then he lay back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. “What chance have I got, with a girl like that?”
“Oh, brother!” Gregg snapped off the lamp between the beds. “Bring out the violins, play me sad songs—it’s entirely up to you—and to Elsie. You’ve got lots of time. Take it. Get to know each other.” He overlapped Herb’s “How!” with “Write letters. Make dates for weekends in New York. Behave yourself. Work hard. I took a look at the set of that girl’s chin, and I have a hunch that if she wants you—and loves you, nothing’s going to stand in the way. And I don’t think she’s got any such set of false values as you were tacking onto her father. Any more than I completely agree with you that he is so narrow-minded. The trouble with you, Herb, as I’ve always said, is that you think that because people are wealthy, because they have a traceable family, it follows automatically they are stuffed shirts. So you’re a self-made man. You’ve worked since you were sixteen without any help, you’ve been able to ‘take it.’ Well, that’s something to be proud of, very proud—but you never have to be defensive proud of it. Just be yourself. That’s the greatest thing any human being can do. And the more completely you are yourself, the more automatically will any false values give way. Lecture over. Good night. Boy, what dreams you’ll have tonight!”
“Tomorrow, we’re going skating—together.” Herb felt as though he would never be able to sleep in his tumultuous state of mind. But when he closed his eyes the images began almost immediately to lose color, to slip and slide into meaningless symbols, a long spiral stairway was made of glass—or was it ice? It didn’t matter.
But nobody went skating the next day, and Gregg was out of a job. Herb had phoned Elsie about noon, she sounded as though she had been crying, saying that her mother was very ill, they had called Dr. Hagedorn, and all through it she kept saying that Charlie was gone, and that she wouldn’t be able to see him. Finally, frantically, Herb persuaded her to let him pick her up for dinner at least. He had to take an eleven o’clock train that night to get to work on Monday afternoon. She said that he was to tell Gregg to come to the house, her father wanted to see him. It was all such an emotional conversation, Herb could make nothing of it, simply reporting the gist of it to Gregg, who took off ten minutes later in the rickety sedan that was one of the town’s three taxis.
The girls were not to be seen, Dr. Hagedom’s car was in the driveway, and Gregg supposed they were with Mrs. Carewe.
In the library were Walter, rigid with fury, and Jeff.
“I don’t know how you suspected, Nicholson, but you were right. My son is either a devil or a maniac.” He thrust out several crumpled pages of writing paper to him. As Gregg read it, his embarrassment increased, and he felt his own fury rising at the dramatic phrases: “My beloved family—” it said in a flourishing penmanship:
When you read this, the bird will have flown. Where to? The ends of the earth probably. I find I have a restlessness that is all-consuming. Life is just too unbearably dull for me at home. Mother’s whining sickens me—and my precious wholesome American type sisters bore me. I hate the spying intellectual snob that has been bought to watch me—and his hearty soda-fountain clerk boy friend. I don’t understand how you put up with it all, Dad, my sympathy is with you. I will be in New York for a while, I expect, before I really take off, and I wish you would cut a little red tape for me as I expect I will need a little more money than my usual monthly stipend between now and January second. I will wire you a P. O. Box address when I get to N.Y. Oh, and incidentally, Merry Christmas.
Your loving son,
Charles
Gregg laid the sheets gently down on Walter’s desk, unobtrusively, quietly, so that his gesture would convey no comment. It was not for him to say what he felt. That it was a piece of the rankest cruelty, full of fake hostility and chest-thumping. He saw his job sprouting wings, but at the moment, in his sympathy for the family, it took very little room in his thoughts.
“ ‘Incidentally, Merry Christmas,’ ” Walter growled. “He never gave a thought to what kind of a Christmas he was making for his mother.”
“What about her, Mr. Carewe? How is she feeling?” asked Gregg.
“Not good. It would have been better if she’d thrown a good case of hysterics, but she just lies there—and won’t talk. She won’t even cry.” Walter’s voice came from a tight throat.
Jeff spoke from the other end of the room, where he had been striding, nervously. “What do you want us to do? We can’t very well go after him—he’s almost twenty-one, he has a right to do what he pleases.”
“Including hurting people?” asked Walter. “Why did he think it necessary to write such a stupid, brutal letter? Did you ever have any hint, Gregg, that he felt so bitterly about us—and you?”
“No—and I don’t think he does feel ‘bitter,’ ” replied Gregg, with some caution. He kept thinking, “What can I offer in sympathy, in reassurance—and still stick to the truth?” Aloud he said, “I rather imagine that, on the contrary, he is very much aware of doing something that you will find painful, and being unable to experience pain, emotional pain, himself, his only ‘out’ is to rationalize it—to dream up excuses for his restlessness.”
“What do you mean”—Walter was looking at him in astonishment—“ ‘unable to experience emotional pain’?”
Gregg evaded the question. “Well, I doubt if he knows much about it, at his age——” He was glad he had not added “or ever will.” He dared not, because for one reason he was out of his sphere. He knew from talks with Larry Payne that there was a type of personality floating around in the world, tossed like a ball between the courts and the institutions, called legally sane in one and not technically eligible for the other. Trelat described it as “la folie lucide,” Larry had said. But in this environment, this warm, solid room, and the household itself, deeply concerned and upset over a loved one, Charlie was not a “type.” He was a son—a brother, he was like the changeling of fairy tales, the child whom a wicked witch had placed in the cradle and removed their own. And where was their own? Was his existence simply a creature of their combined ideas of what their son and brother should be, or had the evil changeling somehow assumed the body and being of Charles Carewe, and now was taking over, smiling, cruelly saying, “I don’t belong to you?”
Gregg made a mental note to look up the basis of fairy tales and myths. They were certainly an easy solution of many painful problems, and undoubtedly had been used as such. Today there was no such easy “out.” Those solutions were considered absurd and unbelievable and ignorant. And yet here today there was ignorance involved; knowledge, being accepted, could have spared them much pain and anxiety, would have saved them fr
om feeling, “What have we done!” Bravely and unappalled, they could have faced a physical disability, but a mental deficiency or handicap somehow was still something that “couldn’t happen to us.”
His eyes happened to fall on some finely bound volumes of Dostoevsky, and for a moment he considered calling Walter’s attention to Nicolay in The Possessed, as an example, but dismissed the idea quickly. He shook his head a little. He must come down to earth, he thought. Theories and literature were not helpful at this moment—he must meet their trouble in the area which concerned them. Suddenly he realized Walter was speaking to him.
“I’m sorry, Gregg—this business seems to leave you out on a limb. The only possible thing I can do is to assure you that you will be paid until June as we discussed, and somehow, stand by, in case the young gentleman changes his mind.”
“Thanks, Mr. Carewe, I appreciate your even thinking about my small problems at a time like this. I only wish I could help in some way. Would you like me to talk to Mrs. Carewe?”
Walter pulled on his chin. “I don’t know, honestly—I’m sure it wouldn’t be wise at the moment. Virginia’s with her now, she’s got a level head. Funny,” he said, reflectively, “she seemed to know it was coming—for years!”
Virginia sat on the edge of her mother’s rumpled bed. There was the sharp odor of some stimulant that Dr. Hagedorn had given her. Something in the glass beside her bed, pungent and clean. Beatrice’s skin had an unpleasant yellow-ivory transparency, and the dew of tension was at her hairline. She opened her eyes and looked at her troubled daughter with suddenly clear eyes.
“I’m not behaving very well, Virginia, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Mum, please, darling, don’t worry about that. You’ll be perfectly fine when you get your strength back.” The little soothing noises put into words, Virginia thought, to comfort the sick. She searched her mind for something, something that would rouse her mother from the waxlike stillness she had sunk into. Lord, if she would only get mad! Furious, throw something—anything but this give-up-itis, this crawl-into-a-hole-and-die attitude. She rose, as once again her mother seemed to drift off into sleep, and joined Elsie, who was doodling on an envelope at the rosewood secretary, at the other end of the room.
“Asleep again,” whispered Virginia. Elsie slammed the pencil down, and it bounced to the carpet. “Sh-h! Elsie, let her rest!”
Elsie gripped the retrieved pencil like a small dagger. “If I had that brat here this minute, I’d—I’d——”
Virginia stretched out on the chaise longue, running her fingers up the back of her neck, losing them in the dark cloud of her hair. “What I can’t understand,” she whispered as she lay back, “is why Charlie wanted to burn his bridges, why did he have to take cracks at everybody, just because he wanted to leave home?”
“Virgie, you know that Dad’s held him pretty tightly—and Mum too for that matter.”
“Much more so than either of us,” Virginia agreed. “I don’t think either of them realize it, you know. They let us have a lot more freedom—and I think it’s been because they, well—trusted us more.”
“ ‘Wholesome American type’ girls. Ee-ugh, what a smug picture!”
Elsie forgot her irritation and giggled a little. “Wonder what he’d say if he knew I was madly in love with the ‘soda-fountain clerk’!”
Virginia, shushing her again, got up from the chaise and said, “Let’s go into our room, so we won’t disturb Mum—I want to talk to you about that——”
Passing by Beatrice’s bed on their way out, they paused and looked at the quiet figure. She was breathing more deeply and a little color had returned to her cheeks—only her fingers at the edge of the blanket cover were active and seeking its texture, as though they had a life of their own.
In the girls’ room, they kicked off shoes and plopped themselves on the bed as they had done all their lives, for naps, for arguments, for cross-legged late-at-night gossip.
Elsie had no desire to evade discussion of Herb—her thoughts had held very little besides for the past eighteen hours, and Charlie’s dramatic disappearance had upset her only very temporarily, and only because it had worsened her mother’s condition.
“Just don’t let it show, Elsie, for heaven’s sake! Dad would be really suicidal.”
“Don’t tell me! ‘And who, my dear, is Herbert Jenner?’ ” she mimicked an exaggerated kindly tone. “ ‘Why, Dad, you know what Charlie said—he’s a soda-fountain clerk——’ ” She succumbed to her laughter, holding her ribs and tears coming out of her eyes. “Where on earth,” she gasped, sobering, “do you suppose Charlie got that fantastic idea? Just because Herb works among bottles and flasks and retorts and smelly liquids and wears a white jacket. I must ask him next time to mix me a raspberry soda——” And she was off again.
Virginia laughed a little, but said, “Come off it, girl, it’s not that funny.”
“I know it’s not. Boy, I would pick a guy who had to work for a living, and an orphan to boot! I know Dad was promoting Jack Sinclair—all nice and proper Boston.”
“What do you mean, ‘pick a guy’?” Virginia interrupted. “You only met him last night!”
“Remember how you and Jeff fell in love—remember how you told me it happened all in one moment—and you were kids!”
“But Jeff and I have known each other all our lives—we know each other’s faults and moods and likes and dislikes—we’ve got a basis for marriage.”
“But love, Virgie—love—it happens in a split second—I’ve never felt this way before in my life—I know, I know.” She stretched her arms above her head in exultation. “Blast it all,” she switched quickly, “I suppose it would be just too too frivolous, if I called him and kept our skating date——”
Virginia smiled. “It would—but I doubt if anybody would miss you——” and as Elsie with a delighted little scream bounced off the bed, “Now wait a minute—better phone me, so I know where I can reach you. I honestly don’t think Mum’s going to get worse—Dr. Hagedorn is coming by again this evening——” but Elsie was already at the phone, calling the Inn.
Charlie waggled the receiver impatiently on the french phone in his handsome suite at the Ritz. From his window was the lovely view of the Boston Common, white and snow-laden. He had been installed only a few minutes, long enough to shed his coat and open his suitcase for a bottle of rye. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, which were still a little numb and cold from the long drive. He was in high spirits, and while he waited for room service he chuckled in satisfaction. Boy, had he thrown a bomb! He only wished he could have somehow been there to savor the effect—like Tom Sawyer, he thought, when Tom and Huck Finn came back and attended their own funeral.
He ordered an elaborate supper from the waiter who arrived at his request. With the large menu in one hand and a drink in the other, he paced the room, while the waiter patiently wrote, crossed out, and rewrote his order.
Suddenly Charlie said, “I’d forgotten! The country’s civilized again. Have you been able to engage a what-do-you-call-it—a sommelier? And more important what is the state of your wine cellar?”
“Excellent, sir. We have been anticipating repeal for some time—I can have Mr. John call you when I——”
Charlie smiled warmly, reaching into his wallet. “Ask him to come up—I hate telephoning about so serious a matter as the choice of wine——”
The waiter palmed the ten-spot as though it were a paltry quarter, but his “Certainly, Mr. Carewe,” indicated that the entire staff would be as prompt, efficient, and eager to serve Mr. Carewe as the most dedicated slaves.
To Charlie, an empty wallet was like being naked in the streets. Ridiculous and unnecessary. He woke around eleven the following morning, with only a slight dryness in his mouth, a mild headache. That was the trouble with liquor for him, he thought. He could never drink enough to have a really good time. For a while the world was simply enchanting, filled with fascinating people, and then withou
t warning, all he wanted was sleep. The night before was a bit hazy. He remembered giving some money to a bellboy for a phone number. Then a “Mr. and Mrs. Adams” had been announced. The man, short, thickset, conservatively dressed except for a large diamond ring on his little finger, had stayed only long enough to down a quick drink of brandy. He spoke very little, except to explain to Charlie that they worked the big hotels this way, so the house dicks wouldn’t get curious, and that he’d find “Pearlie” lots of fun. Somehow “Pearlie” was an extremely vague figure. He looked over at the twin bed beside him and it was empty, the pillow hollowed, and the coverings thrown back only a little as though the occupant had slid out from under them, quietly. On the desk he found a note in a rounded childish hand on the hotel stationery.
“Thanks, Charlie,” it read. “You’re real cute. I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months. Call me any time you come back to our town. Love, Pearl.” His wallet was quite empty. Charlie laughed loudly, remembering. He had been so tired that nothing but the comfortable routine of preparing for sleep had occupied him. He had carefully showered and brushed his teeth, put on pajamas, and crawled into the other bed, muttering, “Night, Pearlie,” and had been asleep in a moment.
With beaming alacrity, the wallet was filled again, in recognition of the solidity back of Charlie’s flourishing signature. The desk clerk, the bell captain, the doorman all beamed at Charlie, wished him well, and assured him that they would all be glad to see him again sometime.
The world was a wonderful place, thought Charlie, as the miles rolled away beneath him. The check at the hotel would probably bounce. He always drew out his money from the bank as soon as it was deposited by his father, because a fat wallet was pleasant and more impressive than figures in a bankbook. His father would cover for him, of course, and on January second he would be twenty-one, and then the whole lovely hunk—well, half of it, anyway; there was the other half to be turned over when he was an old man of thirty—would be his for the asking at the whisk of a pen. He didn’t want anyone to know where he was for a while. Freedom was too sweet. He had left his home address at the hotel, so the check would be returned there. He had made it out for sixteen hundred eighty-two dollars and seventy-eight cents, after apparently making some quick calculation in his check stub at the cashier’s desk. “Like to keep the balance in round figures,” he smiled, and the clerk smiled indulgently at this harmless eccentricity.