Love & Mrs. Sargent

by Patrick Dennis

  THURSDAY

  I.

  “Remember,” Sheila said, “two wrongs do not make a right You have made one serious mistake already. Do not compound it now with another that is, to begin with, criminal and could possibly be fatal. If you do not want to keep your baby, it can be placed for adoption. Many decent couples—no, change that, Floodie—Many lonely couples would be eager to give your child a happy home and there are reliable agencies in your city that can arrange for this. What is her city, Floodie? I forget.”

  “Seattle, Mrs. Sargent.”

  “Oh, yes. Paragraph. I understand how desperate you feel, but I must repeat that I do not know of any doctor who would perform such an operation and, again, that not only would the doctor be guilty of a crime, but so would his patient and so would the person who arranged the appointment. Blah, blah, blah. Sheila Sargent.” She cast a furtive glance at Peter, who was stretched out in a chair reading the Chicago Tribune, She felt rather annoyed with him without quite knowing why. His attitude seemed somehow changed—ever so slightly—last night and this morning. “I don’t blame you for reading the newspaper,” she said gaily. “Have you ever heard a more boring pack of letters? People with grudges against their in-laws, minor etiquette problems, girls with. . . .”

  “Just boning up on the local ax murder,” Peter said. “When the Trib gets its teeth into something juicy like this, you can easily tell that it’s first cousin to the New York Daily News.”

  “Oh, that terrible Polish man!” Mrs. Flood said. “I see they’ve found him. Honestly, these foreigners who come over here. No better than animals. . . .”

  “Is there much more, Floodie?”

  “Quite a lot, Mrs. Sargent. The next one says: I have been going with a married man who says he loves me and wants to marry me but he can’t get a divorce because his wife is a very religious Catholic and also a bedridden invalid not expected to live much longer.’ Paragraph. ‘I believed this until I saw his wife out bowling! I also found out that she isn’t any Catholic and. . .”

  “Oh, my God!” Sheila sighed. “Another of those. If I had a dollar for every fool woman who believed that her boy friend was hopelessly tied to a Catholic invalid! Honestly, you’d think a healthy Protestant girl—or a practicing Christian Scientist—hadn’t a hope of getting married. Tell her to tie a can to the lying son of a. . . . Say, speaking of sons, has anyone seen Dicky this morning?”

  “Why, no, Mrs. Sargent. I came down to breakfast at the usual time. But he wasn’t there. Not that he ever eats enough to. . . . Oh, thank you, Taylor.” Taylor had come silently into the room and laid the household mail on the desk, “Mail call, everyone!” Mrs. Flood cried gaily. “I mean the fun mail, Oooooh! Here’s the new Vogue.”

  “Taylor,” Sheila said, “has Dicky had breakfast this morning?”

  “No, Miz Sargent. Neither of the young people been downstairs.”

  “Then would you please go up to his room and wake him? I mean it’s one thing for Allison to lie abed during the Season but. . . .”

  “Yes, Miz Sargent,” Taylor said, retreating.

  “Hmmmm,” Mrs. Flood said, peering over her reading glasses. “O-G’s is having a big sale. I do wish I could wear their shoes, but my foot is so tiny that. . . .”

  “Is that The New Yorker I see there, Floodie?” Sheila asked.

  “Oh yes! And would you look at the cover! I don’t know where they think of all these clever. . . .”

  “Could I, please? Thank you.”

  Putting down the newspaper, Peter watched Sheila open The New Yorker and turn immediately to the book section. He saw her mouth set unpleasantly and he was reminded—just as unpleasantly—of the things Dicky had said about his mother the evening before. Then she closed the magazine and carried it to the desk. “Excuse me, Floodie,” she said, “I just want to put this in the drawer with the. . . . Floodie! What’s happened to the magazines I put in here yesterday?”

  “Magazines, Mrs. Sargent?”

  “Yes. Time, Newsweek, The Saturday Review. You haven’t. . . .”

  “Why heavens, Mrs. Sargent, I haven’t the faintest idea. I never read those magazines. Too depressing. I always say there’s so much unhappiness in the world, who wants to. . . .”

  “Are you quite sure you didn’t absent-mindedly put them. . . . Yes, Taylor?”

  “Miz Sargent, Dicky isn’t in his room. Bed hasn’t even been slept in.”

  “Thank you, Taylor,” Sheila said tensely.

  “Goodness,” Mrs. Flood continued, “the work was so light yesterday that I finished the letters and the bills before lunch. Then I drove into the village for some . . . well, for a few things I needed and spent the afternoon in my room. If you like, I’ll look in the library, but I can’t imagine who. . . .”

  “Would you please, Floodie? And, Floodie, would you give me that big ring of keys I keep in the desk? Dicky may have spent the night in the tool shed working.”

  “Here they are and I’ll simply comb the library. . . . Unless Allison. . . . But then she wouldn’t open your desk.”

  “Come with me, please, Peter “ Sheila said.

  The tool shed was just as it was when Peter had left it the afternoon before, the purloined magazines out in plain sight.

  “So he found out,” Sheila said.

  “Yes,” Peter said miserably, “I guess he found out.” He paused to see what Sheila would say next.

  “But how?” Sheila said. ‘Where did he get these . . . these smear jobs?”

  “It’s not very hard, Sheila. They’re available at any newsstand or drugstore in Lake Forest. Dicky’s not blind and he’s not a shut-in. I suppose when he went out yesterday he stopped off to buy. . . .”

  “He didn’t buy this,” Sheila said, flourishing a page from the Chicago Daily News. “I tore it out of the newspaper and hid it in my desk on Monday. Someone has taken the trouble to show these things to him. Floodie!”

  “Oh, stop it, Sheila! Why would a chuckle-headed old chump like Flood do that? She may be a damned fool, but she hasn’t got a mean bone in her body.”

  “Allison?”

  “Allison wasn’t even here. She was at some beauty parlor with you.”

  “Then who? Who would have brought these miserable magazines out here to undermine that poor child’s confidence? Who could have been so low and vile and. . . .”

  “Sheila. Make sense! You can’t expect to hide things from the kid forever. These are big magazines. They’re available in the millions. Anyone with two bits can buy one.”

  “But somebody was out here. I know it. Look! Two glasses. Scotch,” she said, sniffing one of them. “And in this one—vodka. He must have had two people out here. Dicky hardly touched a drop.”

  “Dicky was stinking.”

  “What?”

  “I was out here, Sheila, and Dicky was as drunk as a lord.”

  “And I suppose you brought him this,” she said, holding up a copy of Worldwide Weekly, “One thing he didn’t get out of my desk was your little left-wing Literary Digest!”

  “No, I didn’t bring it to him. Do you think I want to rub the kid’s nose in his own failure? He was reading it when I got here. It”—he faltered—”it isn’t exactly a twenty-one-gun salute.”

  “The vileness!” Sheila said, scanning the review and throwing the magazine down.

  “It’s . . . it’s pretty bad. They’re all pretty bad.”

  “But I notice,” Sheila said furiously, “that the review in Worldwide is the worst of all—the most devastating, the most slanted, the cruelest. Of course you couldn’t have warned me! Oh, no! That would have spoiled the surprise! It’s so much more fun to break the poor child’s heart—and mine. Oh, you must have had a perfect ball writing this!” She kicked viciously at the copy of Worldwide.

  He grabbed her by both shoulders. “Sheila, for God’s sake stop it! Get hold of yourself. I never heard of Dicky before Monday. And I haven’t reviewed a book since I was in college. Worldwide is a big m
agazine. There are fifteen separate editorial departments on four floors. I haven’t any more to do with the book reviews than you have with Howard Malvern’s crossword puzzles. I didn’t even see this week’s issue until Dicky showed it to me yester. . . .”

  “Of course,” Sheila said, sinking into a chair. “Forgive me, darling, I. . . I was just so damned upset and, well, hurt. And when I think of poor Dicky with all these other writers hating him—envying his father and me—closing in on him. . . .”

  “Give it up, Sheila. His notices were all lousy. That’s not a conspiracy—or even a coincidence.”

  “They weren’t all bad,” Sheila snapped. “There’s a very good one appearing this weekend. A real rave.”

  “You mean the one you wrote, Shelley Sands.”

  “Who told you that?” Sheila said, staring at him wide-eyed.

  “Your son did. Right in this room. Yesterday.”

  “That’s impossible!” Sheila shouted. “The only person who knew about it was. . . .” She stopped, took a deep breath and then began again. “Really, Peter,” she laughed, “I believe you boys must have been drinking.”

  “One of us was. Go on.”

  “Well, I mean really, darling, can you really believe such a fantastic story!”

  “I don’t know,” he said. There was a pause. “Anyhow, Sheila, it doesn’t matter very much what I believe. The important thing is what Dicky believes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the kid’s no fool. He. . . .”

  “Well, naturally Dicky’s no fool. The son of Richard Sargent. A Yale graduate. . .”

  “He was kicked out of Yale, Sheila.”

  Without even hearing, Sheila went on, “Just twenty and already an established writer. A fool would hardly. . . .” The woman wasn’t even trying to make sense, Peter realized.

  “Sheila!”

  “What?” She was silent.

  “Dicky can barely write his own name.”

  “How dare you! You have the gall to tear down a gifted, creative. . . .”

  “It seems to be the general consensus of opinion,” he said, gesturing to the magazines on the floor. “What did The New Yorker have to say this week?”

  “Who cares about The New Yorker! Shallow, smug, supercilious comic book! Oh, I knew they’d all be lying in wait for poor Dicky. If there’s anything they hate it’s success.”

  “And Dicky’s a success, isn’t he? Maybe not a critical success, but he’s selling like hot cakes isn’t he?”

  “You bet he is. He’s on the best-seller list of the Trib next Sunday. The book shops can’t keep Bitter Laughter in stock.”

  “Especially the shops where you have a charge account, Sheila.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you over-rated your son’s writing ability, Sheila, but you forgot about his gift for reading. He found your book store bills yesterday at the same time he found the magazines. After that it wasn’t hard for him to figure out who Shelley Sands was. Sheila, how could you do that to the kid?”

  “Do? Do? What have I done to Dicky that’s so dreadful?”

  “To begin with, you put him up to writing the book in the first place—or so he says.” He watched her carefully.

  “That isn’t true. Oh, I talked it over with him. Gave him some ideas, some pointers, saw to it that he met my publisher. And what mother wouldn’t try to help her son get started on the career of his choice?”

  “Are you so sure Dicky did the choosing?”

  “Well, with his name and his background what else would he be? A school teacher, a salesman, a taxidermist—some little nonentity like that?”

  “Sheila, it’s not so terrible to be ‘some little nonentity.’ We can’t all be Great Artists. For every famous writer or painter or singer or dancer or playwright there have to be a few hundred bus drivers and plumbers and stock brokers and policemen and ordinary people like that. Not everybody has what it takes to be creative.”

  “Well naturally, darling. And that may be true of run-of-the-mill citizens. But with Dicky it’s different. He has background and breeding and education. He has the example of his father before him. He has me to help him—oh, not that I’m a patch on his father—he has a publisher and a ready-made audience. He has unlimited time and money. Why, he even has this perfect writer’s retreat where he can be. . . .”

  “In other words, Dicky only lacks two things.”

  “And what are they?” Sheila said with a tense little smile.

  “Desire and talent.”

  “Now, you just listen to me, Peter Johnson. . . .” Sheila fumed.

  “Wait, Sheila, please. You’ve got some kind of thing about Dicky, God knows you’re critical enough of other writers. What’s that best-seller about sex in a hick town you were laughing at the other night? Babylon Corners or something like. . . .”

  “Oh, Peter! You can’t compare Dicky with some big-breasted bumpkin who goes sniffing around the local privies until she has enough stink to put into a long, trashy, dull novel about sodomy in South Dakota. I mean. . . .”

  “No, Sheila, you can’t compare the two. That big-breasted bumpkin, vulgar as she is, can write circles around Dicky and that’s because she wants to write, while Dicky. . . .”

  “Damn you! Who the hell do you think you are? I’ve been around writers ever since I met Dick—and I mean real writers. Why, I’ve forgotten more about good writing than you’ll ever. . . .”

  “Yes, Sheila. You have forgotten. Dicky’s writing is a blind spot with you. You want him to succeed so badly that you’ve lost all of your critical faculties—at least as far as your own son is concerned. It’s not your fault. I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve seen actors fight to get walk-ons for their daughters and think the kids are Katharine Cornell when the poor girls can hardly put one foot in front of the other. It happens in business too; the chairman of the board pushing junior. Well, wishing won’t make it so.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, Peter,” Sheila said with a controlled impatience, “I know all that. But you forget one important thing, darling, and that is that I am a professional. I know all the ins and outs. I can spot bad writing at a hundred. . . .”

  “You didn’t spot it when it was right under your nose, Sheila. This is really bad stuff. Read the reviews.”

  “Oh, Peter! Can’t you see that those reviews were all rigged? They were just out to get my child. You’re talking like a fool.”

  “And you’re talking like a paranoiac. If you’re such a pro, you can’t honestly believe that the critics on five big weeklies would all go into cahoots to gang up on an obscure first novelist just because of his dead father—who was worshiped by the whole working press. They’d all lean over backward to say something nice, if they could. It’s just that you want so desperately for him to succeed as a writer that you can’t—or won’t—realize that. . . .”

  “You’re damned right I want him to be a success!” Sheila flared. “Is that so wrong, so immoral, so abnormal?”

  “Sheila,” Peter said calmly, “your son Dicky staggered out of this room at five o’clock last night. He was so drunk he could hardly walk. He was in his car and down the drive before I could stop him. He hasn’t come back yet. I think that a natural, adoring mother would be a hell of a lot more concerned about whether he’s dead or alive than where he stands on the bestseller list.”

  “Oh, my God!” Sheila gasped. “Oh, but of course. Oh, but really, darling, I am worried. So worried, in fact, that I didn’t even stop to think of the real issue. I’ll call the police right away. The chief is an old pal of mine. He’ll do everything.” Sheila went to the tortoise-shell telephone. She paused for a second and then turned to Peter. “Darling,” she said, “do you need a drink as desperately as I do?”

  Twenty minutes had elapsed since Sheila’s calm, charming conversation with the police department. Peter squirmed wretchedly in his chair, rattling the ice in his empty glass and watching Sheila as she smoked and sipped her drin
k with maddening poise. Pretty cool, he kept thinking, pret-ty cool.

  The telephone rang and he leaped to his feet. “I’ll get it, darling,” Sheila said. She let the telephone ring a second time and then she picked up the receiver. “Hello? . . . This is she. . . . Oh, yes, Captain. . . . Oh, that’s wonderful! . . . No car of that description in any trouble anywhere nearby? How very efficient you are, Captain. . . . Of course. . . . He probably bunked in with some friend and didn’t bother to call me. You know how thoughtless young people are. . . . Well, thank you again, Captain. Good-by.” She rang off and turned to Peter. “Don’t you loathe people who say ‘Good-by, now’?”

  “What did he say about Dicky?”

  “There, darling, you see, it’s nothing. Not a car anything like Dicky’s in any kind of accident from Chicago right up to the Wisconsin border. Aren’t you relieved?”

  “Yes. Aren’t you?”

  “Why, of course I am. Now let’s go out for lunch some place and then come back and take a walk. I love it when there are lots of whitecaps on the lake. I mean, it’s so exciting when a storm is brewing.”

  “All right,” he said listlessly.

  “And Peter?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Dicky’s writing. And what’s more, I think you’re absolutely correct. I have been blind. I’ve shut my eyes to Dicky’s real trouble. On the next book, I’m going to stand right over him and help him with every word.”