Her aunt broke down in sobs and Agatha and Bridget helped her away. All eyes were on Mrs. Broadstream, and for a moment Mimi was alone with her dead. His last words came to her—“I’ve lived a Jew and I die a Jew.”
Other people were coming up. It was her last moment alone with him, her last chance to do for him the thing he would have wished her to do—would have asked her to do if he could have asked—perhaps had been asking her to do from the shadows.
With a passionate gesture she flung her arms up and out over him as though to keep him from the sight of the others—to keep him for herself. And as she did so words came to her lips; words she had known as a child but did not remember that she knew; words that belonged to that life which she had tried so hard to put behind her for all time. Clear and loud her voice came echoing through the high, bare room, her arms held out to the shadows where she felt his presence lingering—to the shadows where she felt his eyes upon her—no longer sad, but happy, radiant, at peace.
“Sh’tna Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu Adonoi Echod!” she cried—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”
She was not even conscious of the stillness that rose in the room; nor how the stillness was broken by a chair hastily overturned somewhere in the back. Only she was suddenly aware of an arm that sprang to life about her shoulders and a voice that mingled tenderly with hers and led her halting accents in the prayer they said—two bereaved Jews above the body of that other and so-well-loved Jew who lay there among strangers in a strange land—the Kaddish—the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
MARY MARY
Fiction isn’t what it used to be since they stopped having good people and bad people. Nowadays a heroine doesn’t think she’s doing right by her readers if she doesn’t have at least one lapsus linguae in the course of her diary, and your villain has the most conflicting habit of stopping to pet the janitor’s grandson on the fire escape. Soon literature will be as confusing as real life, where the good lady on your right, who never misses church on Sunday, nags her invalid husband into acute dipsomania with attendant complications—after each of which, of course, she dismisses the attendant—while the bad woman on your left, who comes home every Sunday morning at a questionable hour with questionable friends in a questionable state of holiness—namely, alcoholiness—nurses her cook through the flu and anonymously sends the furnace man’s daughter to musical college. All of which, if you are Dulcinearsighted, and love to think of life as a lexicon, makes it very strenuous and confusing.
Which leads up to the fact that there were two girls whom Bunny Brinkerhoff might have married. Florry would have made a model wife for any man. Mary might have made a model wife for six or seven men if she could have taken them on simultaneously. But Bunny Brinkerhoff married Mary, leaving Florry to lead his brother Guilfoyle to the altar. And the funny part was that everybody aided and abetted and approved.
Everybody then proceeded to say that Mary ought to be ashamed of herself and a man like Roi Brinkerhoff deserved something better than a wife who was forever dancing, golfing, motoring and appearing at public places—not to mention disappearing from them—with men—men—men; or worse, man—man. But, on the other hand, Bunny himself was to blame for not putting his foot down. Everybody likes nothing better than marrying couples off and then deciding who is to blame—except deciding that both are, which satisfies everybody’s passionate devotion to abstract justice, at the same time offering up two victims to the ax.
“Somebody,” remarked Florry Brinkerhoff, during an intermission at a matinee, “ought to tell Bunny about Mack Mullen. He isn’t the right sort of man for Mary to be lunching with, day after day.”
“Mary,” announced Kit Logan, who was Mary’s chum, “is not in any danger from Mack Mullen. He has fringes on his cuffs. And if Mary must have her quart of blood before breakfast I’d rather see her with a man like Mack Mullen, who’s so impossible she couldn’t ever make the mistake of taking him seriously.”
“Well,” Marian Gillette commented, “he certainly isn’t the kind of man I’d choose to play around with if I had a good-looking husband like Bunny Brinkerhoff.”
“Child,” sighed Kit, “you’re going to break a leg some day hopping over bridges from such a distance. You don’t know what you might do if you ever got a husband of any sort. As for Mary, she has the laboratory itch. When any new kind of specimen heaves in sight Mary gets feverish if she can’t investigate him and find out what’s on the inside and what makes the wheels go round. And the people who know Mary and love her, understand that and don’t go round—”
“Nobody can say I don’t love Mary, and I always stick up for my friends,” volunteered Florry stiffly; “but I don’t think there’s any excuse for the way Mary leads men on.”
“Men don’t need any more leading where Mary is concerned than a six-year-old needs to be led into a lollypop den,” said Kit. “You’d have to post a sentry to keep them away.”
“Well, then, Mary ought to begin posting,” asserted Marian. “It isn’t fair to a man—”
“Fiddlesticks.” Kit was impatient. “Why don’t they stay away if they’re such frail blossoms? Of course I admit I’d like to see Mary learn to say no—”
The curtain was going up, but Florry ventured to say in that last moment in which so many important things always remain to be said, that someday Mary was going to carry things too far, and to wonder why it was Bunny never put his foot down.
As a matter of fact, he did, several times. But either he put it down too lightly or picked it up too soon, for nothing permanent ever came of it. Of course he had never done anything drastic like issuing an ultimatum or threats or anything like that, partly from the normal American adult male dislike for scenes and partly from a hazy fear that did he utter such an ultimatum and did Mary fail to live up to it—with the odds strongly in favor of the failure—it would be rather hard on Bunny Brinkerhoff. There were only two things on earth Bunny Brinkerhoff was afraid of. One was that someday he might be called upon to face existence without Mary Mary—so called because she was the most consistent person in the world—and the other was that someday a four-alarm fire would break out in his neighborhood and he would miss it.
Bunny was what is known as a buff, or, in the language of his home city, Toledo, a piker, a congenital fireman. At the first sound of the siren up would come Bunny Brinkerhoff’s blond head with the hair all plastered back in molasses-taffy docility; up would go the corners of his blue eyes behind his bone-rimmed glasses; up would go his ears—well, as up as they could—and he was half an inch less than six feet of tense, listening, straining-at-the-leash expectancy.
At the second call he was murmuring absent excuses to the hostess—if she happened to be between him and the door—and by the time the untrained ears of the other people present had sent messages to their untrained brains to the effect that there must be a fire somewhere, Bunny Brinkerhoff was on a trolley or a taxi or haply the non-business end of some fire apparatus headed in the direction of the blaze.
Firenginetis is just like any other kind of sickness. If you’ve inherited it it’s hard to get it out of your system. One of Bunny Brinkerhoff’s earliest and outstandingest recollections was a daguerreotype of his Grandfather Brinkerhoff trying to look unconscious of a red shirt and a tin trumpet. Back in the old Goose Neck days grandpa was Foreman of Niagara 4, which was a pretty important job. He was the boy who used to yell through the trumpet, and all that the other fellows had to do was to put the fire out.
Instead of taking him to the menagerie of a Sunday morning Grandpa Brinkerhoff used to lead little Roi to the engine house, where the chief gave him a hook-and-ladder catalogue after which his mother wondered why her Roisie had lost interest in all the nice sheepsies with all the nice wooly wooly wool in the picturebook.
At the age of seven he took his dog Don to the engine house to be clipped, where he showed such appreciation of the shin
y nickel engine that the firemen adopted him and Don on the spot, even permitting the latter to roll to fires with them.
As he grew older, being a lovable youth, he had many friends in all the varied walks of life, as the saying is. But his deepest and most passionate friendship was for the operator at fire headquarters who used, whenever there was a real fire—say, a third or fourth alarm affair—to call up his friend Bunny and give him the glad word. By that time Bunny was rated a regular fireman, with a fireman’s privileges—so long as he did not make a fool of himself—and a regular turn-out—rubber hat and coat and boots with water proof pants fastened over them, and a badge marked Toledo Fire Dept.
When he came to New York as sales manager of the Vehie Rubber Company the first friends he made were at the engine house nearest the frat house where he lived. Bunny spoke the firemen’s language and he used to bring them magazines and candy and cigars and bang rather bad music on the terrible old square piano which the company had salvaged from a fire somewhere. And soon he became pretty popular with the men.
Bunny Brinkerhoff’s eyesight, with the aid of his horn-rimmed specs, was as good as anybody else’s; good enough for driving an ambulance for a year and a half in France before we went into the war. But none of the idiotic examining boards before whom he came, in his various and desperate endeavors to get into the service, could be made to listen to reason. There was one time when he memorized the chart and so managed to be sent to a training camp, where, however, the darn fools took away his glasses before he could even glimpse their double-blank chart, much less memorize it; and consequently he shortly found himself back home again, where he alternately fumed and sulked until he learned, between frantic trips to Washington, that the fire department was short of men and an auxiliary force was being organized for the emergency.
Bunny was made sergeant of an all-American auxiliary fire-fighting unit consisting of Frank and Benny, an Italian who drove a fruit wagon and his Jewish chum, who had run to fires all their lives; a Scandinavian who was the Svenska edition of my brother Sylvest; a member of the Swiss Salvation Army: and one native New Yorker with a wife and two babies, who hampered but were unable to check his career as an amateur fireman.
For eighteen months this auxiliary company drilled, spent from three to five nights a week at the fire house performing regular firemen’s duty—being carried out of blazes feet first; taking a deal with the rest in subcellar workers; Bunny in particular being laid on a sidewalk more than once and tendered the gentle offices of the pulmotor; getting a whack from the negotiable end of a hose which knocked the breath out of him and then sent him after it; and nearly losing a thumb by reason of a two-hundred-pound woman whom he was carrying out of an Italian tenement without having stopped to pry her teeth loose from it. I mean the thumb.
At the end of that time the service was disbanded and Bunny Brinkerhoff received a badge and the indefinite extension of his privileges as an honorary member of the fire department, at the discretion of his captain. And although when he married Mary he moved out of the neighborhood he was still at all times welcome at the fire house and could feel sure of a bed any nights he chose to sleep there—as, for instance, when Mary was away. And sometimes when she wasn’t. Of course Mary didn’t enjoy being left alone. And she was always sure that every fire Bunny went to, was going to be his last and she might just as well get used to the idea of a veil though they always did get tangled in her lashes. But she never exercised her wifely prerogative and asked him to quit. Other women used to say they wouldn’t put up with such a thing—not for a minute. But then, they themselves were flawless wives, like Florry, who felt that perfection was the stern duty of humanity and who, ever since she had achieved it herself and helped her husband to approach it, had been rather busy at odd moments straightening out kinks for the rest of the world.
Florry was a plump, dark woman with an agreeable complexion and a disagreeable voice, and it was in a large sealskin dolman and an anti-kink crusading spirit—for surely no really good woman enjoys such a mission—that she dropped in to see the vice president of the Vehie Rubber Company, and open his eyes to what people were saying about his wife and Mack Mullen.
This Mack Mullen was a very dark sheep. Nobody had a good word for him. He was an unsuccessful writer. He was violent. He was unkempt. He was shabby. He lived somewhere in the village, naturally, whence he emigrated only to attend the theater, for the purpose of writing acid articles about it; and to see Mary, for what purpose heaven only knew. He was rude, he was vulgar, he was radical—manifestly an impossible person. And Mary was seeing him every day.
Bunny wanted Florry to think he was not worried. He tilted back his swivel chair against the wall to prove it. There must have been an immoral streak somewhere in Bunny, for although Florry was his sister-in-law, and an undeniably good woman, Bunny could only with the greatest difficulty maintain his liking for her at freezing point. Most of the time it kept flopping below zero.
So Bunny thanked her for her good intentions and interest—he realized she meant it all for the best—and assured her rather coldly that he knew about Mary’s friendship for Mullen, and while he personally did not hanker after Mullen’s company—as a matter of fact he could not abide him and would walk miles to escape one of his tirades—nevertheless, he did not feel that he had the right to dictate Mary’s preferences.
Of course Florry, filling to capacity a small leather armchair on the opposite side of his desk, understood all that. But did he know Mary had Mullen at the house every time he, Bunny, was out, and also had lunch with him either at home or downtown nearly every day?
No, he maintained, keeping his balance with difficulty since the chair seemed bent on returning, he never inquired what Mary did with her time. It was hers to use at her own discretion.
Why on earth was he so furious at Florry? Shouldn’t his anger have been directed toward Mary?
But did he think it right for Mary to go down to that man’s studio alone for tea?
Florry delivered this without looking at her brother-in-law, being rather intent on an inspection of her agreeable complexion in the mirror of her vanity case.
Bunny’s chair and his jaw came down hard. And his voice had a strained inflection as he replied that if Mary had taken tea with Mullen in his studio Mary was the kind of woman who could take tea with a man in his studio.
“But that’s just it,” interjected Florry, closing the vanity case. “Can she? Everybody’s talking about her and Mullen and saying you ought to know.” She met his eyes frankly.
Bunny began to clean his pipestem vigorously and thanked Florry. If people were talking he would speak to Mary. But, of course, Mary’s friends—he gave the cleaner a vicious jab through the pipestem—knew that it was all right for Mary to take tea anywhere she chose; in fact, that anything Mary did was quite above question.
The way he said it—as though she, Florry, had been caught doing something wrong, instead of Mary! It made her perfectly furious!
“Well,” she admitted, not without asperity, bunching the dolman protectingly about her plump shoulders, “we know that anything Mary does is quite above question, but you can’t expect other people to believe that it’s quite all right for Mary to let Mack Mullen make love to her.”
Bang! Bunny’s fist came down on the desk and Bunny was on his feet towering over his sister-in-law like a very thundercloud of righteous wrath, his rather pinkish face absolutely purple, his blue eyes flashing such black fire that in some way his bone-rimmed spectacles grew misty.
Well, he needn’t look at her in that way, because Miss Batchford sat in back of them on a Fifth Avenue bus one evening, and she heard Mullen making love to Mary all the way up.
And furthermore, if he was going on that way—calling Miss Batchford names and almost throwing her, Florry, out of his office when she was doing a disagreeable duty just for his own sake—why then, in justice to herself, Florry
had to leave him a letter which she hadn’t meant to show him at all, because she knew how it would make him feel. After which she pressed her dolman lovingly against her righteously indignant breast and took her departure. He needn’t think his Mary was such a saint. Nobody else thought so.
No, nobody else thought so, and yet in some miraculous way Mary escaped the unpopularity that usually falls to the married woman whose lack of saintliness takes the direction of other men. Women loved her—especially truculent colored washwomen and superior saleswomen in the corset department; even wives, probably because she took such pains to make them. And oh, patriarch of tritisms!—dogs and children adored her. You see, everybody—man, woman, child and policeman—was Mary’s oyster. And Mary was a glutton for sea food. Hard shells preferred. She liked to crack them with her teeth. The harder the better. That was why Bunny had first come to call her Mary Mary.
To Bunny, Mary Mary was the sixth day in the week. Because after God made her he rested. Not because she was his, Bunny’s, wife. Even strangers admitted that they had never seen anything quite so lovely as Mary Mary. She was little and piquant, with eyes the exact color of Circassian walnut, almond shaped, very large and luminous, of a vivacity which seduced the meek and a wistfulness which disarmed the strong. She had smooth hair, which she wore in braids around her oval face and everybody referred to it as black, but it wasn’t. It was the color of Spanish mahogany.
Her chin was pointy and her mouth suffered from arrested development. So small was it, in fact, that you wondered how there was room inside for the full set of apparently normal teeth which flashed at you whenever Mary Mary wasn’t being wistful. She had dark, slightly tinted skin and a surprisingly full column of throat—for so small and wiry a body. Her lips never needed any lipstick, although she was forever daubing at them out of sheer contrariness. But even she couldn’t tell whether she had or hadn’t unless she happened to remember. Her hands were full of gestures and she never sat with both feet where they could smite the eye of the beholder at once, and sometimes it would have taken an X-ray to locate either of them.
The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery Page 14