“I’ll be home all this evening and tomorrow and will be honored if you call. Of course, I’d call you but I find your name not listed . . . I suppose your customers would worry you to death if you were. Well, if you want to, you can dismiss the thought of your customers forever.
“I hope you will make me happy, Phebe.
“Yours, Llewellyn Nash.
“P.S. Whatever you decide to do I shall always think you the grandest girl in the world.”
“But not quite grand enough,” she said unsmiling, “to be the wife of Llewellyn Folsom Nash, Esquire, of Chestnut Hill, New York, Lenox and Paris.”
She threw the letter with its mixture of arrogance and humility into the little fire . . . not even watching to see it consumed. She gathered up the little heaps of money from the table, from the bed, from the floor, found a small box, in which she arranged it smoothly, neatly, and wrapped and tied the box. . . . For a moment she remained lost in thought, then stepped to the telephone and called Johnny Albans. He was, as she expected, at the Talliver boys.
In spite of the cold fury which possessed her, she had to smile, as she pictured the surprise on Johnny’s freckled face as Jerry Talliver announced to him that he was wanted on the telephone “by some woman.” She could see his inquisitive nose growing sharper, pointing yet further skyward.
“Johnny Albans speaking,” he said sharply. “Who is this, please.”
“Don’t call my name, Johnny. It’s Phebe.”
“Oh, hello! Hello! How are you?”
“You can do me a great favor. . . .”
“Name it.”
She explained about the recalcitrant customer . . . leaving for France, who just must have this forgotten portion of her dress. “Have you got the car there?”
“Jerry’s got something he calls a car. I can use that. Where’s it to go?”
“To Chestnut Hill,” she replied faintly.
“How’s zat!”
“To Chestnut Hill.”
“Golly, you did pick a night!”
“I know, I’m sorry but it means a lot to me, Johnny.”
“I know it does . . . to make you call me. I’m really honored. I’ll be right over. Zall right if I bring this brute Talliver along? He says I can’t take his car to unknown places.”
“I’d be glad for him to come. Then the one of you who isn’t driving can hold on to this package. . . . Don’t lose it, Johnny. It’s worth about $5000 worth of business to me.”
“Gosh, what is it? The Kohinoor?”
“Well it is . . . to her. You know how these rich people are. And listen, Johnny, I know she isn’t in. So ask for Mr. Llewellyn Nash . . . tell him you have a message from Miss Phebe Grant . . . and put the package right in his hand.”
Young Albans assured her she could bet her boots he’d place the doodad right in the johnny’s mitt. “Be right over, Phebe.”
In the yard next door grew a large maple tree. It stood close to the dividing fence, which was made of iron railings, and half of its foliage and its shade cast their benison on Phebe’s yard. It was partly on account of this tree that she had decided on this particular house. She never saw it without thinking of Nicholas and his fondness for trees.
Especially, after her great sorrow came upon her, she liked to lie in bed at night to try to descry its tracery against the darkling sky. In the morning it was the first thing her gaze sought upon awaking. . . . But tonight, the graceful, bare branches filled her with a sense of futility, with bitterness. For the first time she turned resolutely away, her back toward the window. She thought of Nicholas, she thought of Llewellyn; she thought of the Mother Goose book of her childhood days. One of the jingles read:
“Riddle me, riddle me, ree!
Perhaps you can tell me what this may be!”
She was a colored woman loving a colored man. But her skin was too white for him. So he had given her up. . . . She was a white woman, deeply interested in a white man. But for him her blood was too black. So he offered her insult.
CHAPTER IX
THIS last encounter with Nash left her delicate sensibilities sore and wounded. It actually reduced her to a state in which she was sunk in melancholy so deep, so thick . . . it was as though she could perceive it, nebulous yet clinging like a fog. Her old despair began to close in upon her; she felt helpless and weak; evidently for her, Phebe Grant, there was no anchorage under the sun.
That week Mrs. Davies came to see her. Pleased, yet wondering, Phebe came down from her room feeling a strange foreboding. Her visitor came to the point immediately.
“I wanted you to be sure to know this, dearie. I wanted you to get it straight so no one could spring it on you as a surprise . . . Nick and Marise are married.”
Phebe sat down suddenly in the chair, her knees buckling under her. “When did it happen, Mrs. Davies?”
“I don’t know, child. But from the letter it sounds as though it had taken place sometime ago. . . . Of course I always knew Marise liked him . . . and for a long time I thought he liked her. Then after he started going with you so steady . . . I hoped it would come out all right and that he would marry you.”
“Marry me, when you knew Marise wanted him?”
“Yes, because those two can’t help from making each other unhappy . . . they are both too headstrong, too willful, too set on having their own way . . . each of them. Nicholas doesn’t know it himself, but he’s an old-fashioned man; he wants a woman to live for him, to put him ahead of everything, to wait on him. . . . He wants to take care of her, to kiss her good-bye in the morning and find her there at night and to kid himself that she’s been waiting there for him all day.”
“I’m . . . I’m afraid Marise won’t be like that.”
“I know Marise won’t be like that,” affirmed her mother stoutly. “And another thing. Marise always wanted him, now she’s got him. She’ll want to feel every minute that he’s there, grabbing on to her, she won’t let him feel safe and at peace . . . I know her. She’ll be flirting with every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes her way, just to get him worked up and excited. Just to make him keep reaching after her . . . and she always beyond his reach.”
“You don’t think she loves him?”
“Like a stick of dynamite loves a match, Phebe. I tell you it’s just a mess.” She rose, her wide figure seeming to billow past the sides of the chair on which she had been sitting; she rolled her eyes dramatically toward the ceiling. “Lawd, you know!”
For a second, with her old generous gesture, she held Phebe close against her kind breast. “I always loved you girls who used to come to my house to play with my Marise . . . I wanted you to be happy. I still hope you’ll be happy, Phebe. . . .”
“I’m sure I’ll be, Mrs. Davies.”
On Sunday afternoon Christopher called for her. . . . It was the Sunday before Christmas. There was snow on the ground; the excitement of Christmas festivities in the air. . . . This time they drove far, far out North Broad Street to the Roosevelt Boulevard. The vast thoroughfare was almost deserted; they parked safe and warm in his closed car on some unknown sparsely settled side street. On the shivering trees a few sere leaves hung desolate, yet somehow full of promise.
There and then he asked her to marry him. “I love you very deeply, Phebe, very truly and with loyalty. I loved another girl once . . . I asked her to marry me. But even as I spoke I knew she was not the one . . . I don’t feel that way about you, Phebe, I know you’re the one. Do you think you could love me?”
“The idea is still new to me, Chris, but,” she said in surprise, “I think I might.”
“I think I ought to make plain to you, Phebe, that I’m looking for someone who loves her home, who wants children, who wants to love and to accept love. . . . But there’s something else besides. I want someone who is willing, within reason, to help me in my life’s work.”
“Why,” she said in bewilderment, “there’s no way, is there, in which I could help you with your medicine?”
“No, I don’t mean that. . . . My life’s work is to try to restore my father. He’s a broken man since Oliver’s death. Perhaps you’ll let me talk to you about that some day. . . .”
She looked into his strained young face. “Oh, Chris, you’ve been unhappy. . . . I know what it is . . . I’ve been unhappy too! Yes, dear, I’ll marry you. I’ll help you.”
“We’ll help each other,” he said gratefully. They clung together in the shadowed intimacy of the car.
They would marry in the late spring and they would find a little house not too far away from the Cary homestead because Christopher did not want to be too far from his father.
It seemed so strange to Phebe never to hear him mention his mother with any expression of concern or regard. She had gone with him to see both parents and had been very much struck with the change in Dr. Cary, whom she remembered as a big, finely built, even stalwart man. Now, although actually as tall as Christopher, he seemed curiously shrunken and wasted. Even new clothes recently cut and fitted hung loosely from his shoulders, his son told her. His fine ruddy whiteness had turned to a greyish, sallow cast, which nothing seemed to alter, and in his eyes was a look of perpetual sadness.
“We must see him often,” Christopher said frequently. “I wish,” he added wistfully, “he might live with us.”
But of course this was impossible as that would mean the including of Olivia . . . “with whom I certainly don’t want to live,” Phebe told herself.
Olivia had scarcely changed at all . . . just a trifle less slender, just the merest thickening of her whole neat figure; a barely perceptible fading of her thick chestnut hair . . . perhaps she would be grey in a few years. But about her, nothing stricken; nothing broken. The lines of her mouth were more firmly, more determinedly fixed than ever. She expressed neither surprise, pleasure nor dislike at Christopher’s announcement of his plans. Secretly she disapproved of marrying a woman who moved among colored people; equally secretly she was glad of Phebe’s color since it would save any possible embarrassment.
But she made no secret at all of her dissatisfaction with the young folk’s plan of moving into a street which recently had received a considerable influx of Negroes. She had hoped that her son would move into an entirely white neighborhood, establishing new contacts, new acquaintances.
But this Christopher flatly refused to do. “You know as well as I that there’s no money for that kind of thing,” he told her coldly. “And I wouldn’t consider it if there was. There’s not going to be any of that nonsense in my household.”
They had waited cannily for the February furniture sales. They would buy it and have it held in readiness for their marriage. “It will make us feel as though things were really happening,” Phebe said. She was glad of the bustle and excitement, glad of the peace and the assurance of Christopher’s love, but there were times when for weeks her thoughts were only surface thoughts. She did not dare go too far back to the consideration of her old dreams. She wished ardently she were married, settled, safe.
The night before they were to go on their first shopping trip her lover came to her, his young face set and haggard. “I don’t know but what I ought to release you, Phebe. We were going to be poor enough, goodness knows. But I have no right to ask you to marry an absolute beggar.”
“What’s the matter, Christopher?” My God, she thought. Not marry? She saw the dull procession of purposeless, lonely days closing in on her once more.
Drearily he told her the whole sad story, the cruel saga of a man who had lost his grip on life. “I should have been more careful; I should have insisted on asking him to turn over all his affairs to me. Poor Dad, I’d have pulled through somehow!”
Gradually his whole tidy fortune had been dissipated. The house on Eleventh Street was lost inevitably. His insurance was gone; his holdings, his investments were reduced to nothing in the final debacle of the Great Depression.
“All that we have left,” said Christopher bitterly, “is the house on Thirty-eighth Street without one cent to run it and this old junk-heap of a car. . . .”
“And me,” said Phebe gayly, “and this house, and my job.” She could cope with this kind of disaster.
“I’ve known poverty all my life,” she reassured him. “Look, Bunny-Boy, why don’t you all come here? . . . I’ll turn Mrs. Nixon out. . . . See, darling, it really is an ill wind that blows nobody good. What I’ve suffered from that woman’s curiosity!
“Mother can have the third-story front; you and I’ll have the third-story back . . . it’s the largest room in the house. Your father and mother can have the second front. That will give us the middle room for our own den and study and you can have the second story back for your father’s and your own offices. A carpenter and a few partitions can work wonders. Then you can rent your own house and that will give your family something to live on until things pick up.”
He was dubious about it at first. “Oh, Phebe, I didn’t want you to set out so heavily burdened. . . . How will you ever manage the house with your work and all?”
“Darling, you don’t know my mother.”
“But, darling,” he rejoined, trying to be facetious and dismally failing, “you see, I do know my mother. I don’t suppose she’s ever touched a broom, a pot or pan, or a dishcloth since she’s been married. . . . And poor old Sally! Can you imagine our turning her out?”
“She can come twice a week, to wash and do the heavy cleaning. . . . Christopher, don’t worry. . . . We’ll manage. Only, darling, we’ll . . . we’ll have to marry first, won’t we?”
To Christopher’s surprise he had no trouble persuading either his father or his mother to accept the change. Cary, Senior, bewildered and grateful was glad to let go of responsibilities. His son thought indeed that this might be the first step toward his ultimate recovery. But Olivia afforded the real surprise. She merely commented:
“I always told Doctor he didn’t know how to manage his affairs. I think I’ll go to my mother’s in Boston while you’re making the change.”
There was an orgy of packing, of rejecting, of storing the old household effects of the establishment on Haverford Avenue. The young couple had decided not to spend money on new garnishings but simply to transfer the comparatively unworn and carefully protected furniture from Dr. Cary’s home to Phebe’s . . . Olivia’s fastidiousness was finally standing her in good stead.
The packing and the moving were at last completed, but the experience was a nightmare while it lasted. But finally it was over. And on a blackly frozen twenty-eighth of February, Phebe Grant, Spinster, became the wife of Christopher Blanchard Cary. If they had wanted a large wedding, it would have been impossible, so weary were the bride and groom. Only four people were present at the ceremony, Dr. and Mrs. Christopher Cary, Senior, Mrs. Sarah Grant and poor Sally Ladislof. Phebe would have liked to include Mrs. Davies but decided against it because she did not want to incur Olivia’s displeasure on her wedding day.
CHAPTER X
NERVE-RACKING as had been the nightmare of moving, Phebe found herself now a bewildered participant in a nightmare far worse, a nightmare which apparently might have no end.
There were now five people in the house, her mother, her new parents-in-law, her husband and herself. Dr. Cary was practically a nervous wreck, needing, however, only a great deal of rest and composure, fresh air, good nourishing food. Phebe and Christopher were the wage earners. The keeping and management of the house devolved on the two older women. . . .
All might easily have gone well if it had not been for Olivia. From the beginning she insisted on acting as though neither the house, nor indeed anyone in it, was any affair of hers. Furthermore, she made it very plain that she considered Mrs. Grant only another servant, taking, most unsatisfactorily, the place of Sally.
In the mornings Phebe rose, ate breakfast with her husband and sent him off on his rounds in the dilapidated car. Almost all of his practice was still out work and paid him very little. . . . His wife, knowing
the discouragement that must greet him during the day, did her utmost to start him off with a sense of well-being. . . . In the night he was too worn for any but the pleasantest topics. She would not, she simply would not worry him with these details which she was sure would very shortly adjust themselves.
After his departure she walked with Dr. Cary to the beautiful public square at Fifty-eighth Street. In the cold weather they paced its borders several times. In the spring she would sit down with him and read him bits from the paper. Once she had him safely and comfortably ensconced, home once more, in the pleasant back parlor, she was off to her work. She made up for her lateness by not going out to lunch, satisfying herself with a sandwich and a glass of milk in the fitting rooms.
Later there would be the long jaunt home in the crowded subway, dinner more often without Christopher than with him; another stroll with Dr. Cary. Her mother would be waiting for her in the little den, ostensibly to talk about the house but actually to furnish fresh instances of Mrs. Olivia’s misdoings. Finally when exhausted, nervous, sick with fatigue, bewilderment and disappointment she lay down in her room, she would hear Christopher’s step on the stair, his clear young voice asking for her . . . and she must nerve herself again to this new encounter.
For he would be as weary as she; he had traversed vast distances without the receipt of one cent; sometimes it would turn out there had been no real need for his visit. Or perhaps he would discover in a patient, new and disquieting symptoms which would send him hurrying back to the hospital for consultation with the director, a staunch friend. Or it might be that he would need to spend hours reading up on this baffling case. . . . In that event, it helped him, he said, to have Phebe near him.
There were nights when they woke up, poor tired things, at three o’clock sitting opposite each other in the little study . . . the light at full tilt . . . the prospect of another weary day looming only a few hours ahead.
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