Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  Her head was on Sarah’s knees. The older woman touched the satin-soft hair with her long capable hand. She said, shaken, “Don’t cry for me, Lynn. As David says, it was over long ago. If you had cared for him I should have been silent, you would never have known. But you don’t care for him, Lynn; you love Tom. I had to show you how little you care for—David. If you had cared you wouldn’t have turned to me, thought first of me.”

  Dwight asked, after a moment, “Lynn, will you come here—to me?”

  She rose unsteadily and walked a few steps toward him. His hands went out to her, pleading, eager, ardent. She shrank away perceptibly. These were the hands that had known Sarah, intimately and in love; the hands that had betrayed her. Sarah was her friend. She cried out, “Don’t touch me—don’t dare to touch me!”

  Empty, defeated, his hands dropped to his sides again. He said sharply, “Lynn, you are being very foolish. Granted that I treated Sarah badly, many years ago; it has been, I thought, forgiven, has been, I hoped, forgotten. We have been good friends since.” He appealed to the other woman, “Is that not so, Sarah?”

  “I have been your friend,” she answered evenly.

  “She—she bears me no grudge. Look, Lynn, you know, you must have known that there have been other women in my life. You are modern enough, woman enough to understand that. I’m not a boy, to bring you first love, first passion.” He stumbled over that a little, loathing, fearing that verity. “But I bring you something worth so much more. Last love, love that will endure. For the rest of my life.”And, as she made no movement towards him, as her young, soft face hardened to a premature aging and her eyes remained hostile, he cried out helplessly, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lynn—this is beyond all reason! To—to repudiate me, for something which happened almost before you were born, for a moral scruple—”

  He stopped, a little appalled. He had belonged so utterly to her generation a short time before. Not any longer. She said, “It’s not a moral scruple. It’s Sarah. Can’t you see that makes all the difference? When I think, when I try to realize—” She fled back to the other woman, eyes warm for her, lips warm, arms about her. “Sarah, you’ve been so unhappy!”

  “Not for a long time,” Sarah told her. “And now perhaps you’d better go, David.”

  He looked at Lynn, but her eyes were averted from his own. He put his hand on the doorknob. He said, “I’ll come back.”

  No one spoke. The door opened under the pressure of his fingers. Tom, racing past, down the hall, toward the elevators, stopped, wheeled, and flung himself into the room. He said, “Oh, no, you don’t! You stay here!”

  There was a moment of utmost confusion. Sarah stiffened a little in her chair and sighed as a man sighs who is in the last extremity of fatigue. Lynn cried, “ Tom!”—incredulously. He looked like nothing on earth.

  “We’ll have this out!” he said.

  “You’ll excuse me,” Dwight commented coolly, “if I say I don’t care to stay—any longer.”

  “You’ll stay,” Tom contradicted. He was not quite himself, Lynn thought, her heart contracting. He’s been drinking. He had not been, save of the heady wine of violence.

  “Look here, you,” said Tom, and addressed Dwight. “Somehow, you found out that there was something going on at the bank. I don’t know how; it doesn’t signify. So then you went to Rawlson, and got all the dope you needed. And you’ve made money on his tip. You’ll make more, I guess. That doesn’t concern me; I don’t care how much jack you make or how you make it. What does concern me is—Lynn. Lynn thought I’d tipped someone off and was getting my whack. Well, I didn’t. You did. I got it out of Rawlson.” He looked with satisfaction at his knuckles. They, too, were bruised. “I’ll say he worked for his money! He didn’t tell me—until I made him. But before you go—you seem to be in a hurry—perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell Lynn and Miss Dennet that I didn’t have anything to do with this stock manipulation.”

  Dwight said clearly, “No, you didn’t. You’re too much of a fool. I’m not.”

  The door shut behind him.

  “Well!” said Tom, and looked from Lynn to Sarah, who were staring at him in silence. “Well, that’s that!” He felt idiotic. His fine high fervor had passed. He was let down. “I must look like the devil,” he said, after a moment.

  The spell that had been on Lynn’s limbs relaxed and released her and she flashed into life. She sprang to her feet and ran to him, putting up her arms. “Tom are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”

  “Who? Bob? Not as much as I hurt him.” Tom told her grinning. “Hey, what are you crying for? I’m all right,” he assured her.

  “I’m not crying, I’m laughing. Yes, I am crying, but just because I’m happy.” She was close in his arms now, she was saying, “Tom, please forgive me, please—”

  Sarah got out of her chair and walked stiffly toward the door. She was terribly stooped. She said dimly, “Everything’s all right now.”

  But they did not hear her; nor her going.

  Tom put Lynn in a chair and managed to occupy the same chair himself. She said, “All these days and nights, I’ve been waiting; hoping—hoping you’d come back, Tom. I was ready to take you back, if only you’d come, even if you had done it. I’d gotten so I didn’t care. But—but I would have believed you, if only you’d told me again.”

  “I was an ass,” he agreed amiably, “flinging myself out like that. Of course everything looked pretty black, against me. Dwight? How the hell he caught on—”

  She said, and it hurt her terribly to say it, “It was my fault. Down there in the country, I told him. I put it to him—as a case—a hypothetical case—to see what he’d think. But—” She stopped, remembering.

  “Then how—” asked Tom, bewildered.

  “He asked Sarah later, quite casually, if you had any close friends in the bank. He’d known I’d meant you, of course. I—admitted it. Sarah told him, yes, you went around with Bob Rawlson. The rest was easy.”

  “Too damned easy. He’s cleaned up; there’s no doubt of that. If it gets about it won’t be healthy for him around here. I mean, people will sort of give him the Bronx cheer And Rawlson will lose his job.”

  “He’s going abroad—David Dwight, I mean.”

  “He’d better. And stay there too. The climate should agree with him.” He shook her, a very little. “You—don’t care, do you? About his going, I mean? You see, I saw you—at that Jap place tonight.”

  “Tom, you didn’t! No, I don’t care. I never want to see him again. Tom, were you really at the Cherry Blossom? You saw me?”

  “With these old eyes. I was up there with Erickson, supervising the broadcast. I came back to town and went right to Sarah. I was—crazy, I tell you. I thought—all sorts of things. Sarah headed me off. She questioned me on the bank business, sent me to find Bob and get the truth out of him, told me, that is, to find out if he’d blabbed to anyone. So I did. I came back. I couldn’t help it, no matter how late it was, to tell her. You could have knocked me over with a coupling pin when Bob did come across, spitting teeth and blood—oh, sorry,” he said hastily, as Lynn shivered. “I saw Dwight’s car outside. Spoke to his man. Saw him coming out of here. Came in, and found you—and Sarah. Boy, she’s a corker,” said Tom sincerely, “If it hadn’t been for Sarah—”

  “Oh, poor Sarah!” said Lynn, remembering.

  “Why—Here, not going to spill over again, are you?”

  She would not tell him why. She never told him.

  “Tom,” she asked, “can you ever forgive me—for getting you into this mess? For telling David Dwight?” She said suddenly, in perfectly honest astonishment. “And I thought I was such a good business woman, so closemouthed; so loyal. But I was just a fool, because I thought him kind and wise, thought I could trust him.”

  “He was wise all right!” Tom grinned. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Lynn was—his own.

  “But—how can you trust me?” she wailed. “Tom, I’ll go to Mr. Norton, I’l
l explain, I’ll tell him everything.”

  “Lord, don’t! He might offer me my job back,” said Tom, “and I’m nuts about my present one.”

  “But you do forgive me—for doubting you?”

  “Sure I do,” he said uncomfortably. “Anyone would have doubted me. Talk about circumstantial evidence. And it was a lot my fault, not coming back and making you see reason. With a club if necessary. Treat ’em rough, that’s my motto from now on. I’m good at that—and at making people see reason,” he told her gaily and caressed gingerly his bruised knuckles.

  Lynn said, “Mr. Norton should know. Rawlson’s there —and—”

  “Forget it,” ordered Tom. “How much do you love me?”

  “So much that I’ll marry you, any time you want!” she told him.

  She was not uncertain of retaining her position: she trusted Sarah to see her over that difficulty; and besides, the bank no longer talked of letting the married women employees go since business had grown better.

  “There’s room for us both here, till the lease runs out.” She looked around the little room and tried unsuccessfully to fit Tom and his great height and breadth into it as a permanent picture. She laughed shakily.

  “You’re so darned big,” she complained, “but we’ll manage. We’ll go on working, both of us. And saving. And some day, we’ll get a place of our own.”

  “You’re darned right, we will. We’ll get married tomorrow,” he exulted, “and look here, Lynn, you needn’t be worried about my job. I mean, I’m making good. I’ve been talking to ‘em up there about some of my ideas. They’re going to let me take a crack at the research laboratories. I’ve got a keen slant on things, I think—I’ve been working on an idea, it has to do with sending out more than one program over the same wire. It would save ‘em money. They—they’ve been darned decent to me. The sky’s the limit if I hit on anything that will make for progress. I’ll work! And gosh, Lynn, how I love it!”

  “I know you do. Sometimes, I think, more than you do me.”

  “It’s different,” he said absently. Her heart contracted again. She would always share him with his work; he had, in a genuine sense, the creative mind, the mind that is curious and constructive and eager and visionary. She thought proudly, I wouldn’t have him any different.

  “We’ll get married tomorrow! I have to wire home and see if they’ll come on for it. I think they will. Mother and Father, I mean; I couldn’t be married without them,” she told him.

  “Then we’ll wait,” he agreed, “but not long. Mother and Father—that sounds pretty darned good to me—They must be swell, Lynn, or they’d never had you—and Sarah—she’s family too. And Hank and Slim—we’ll have a regular wedding party,” he planned boyishly. He looked down at her and grinned, “Going to ask Dwight?” he wanted to know.

  She shook her head.

  “He wouldn’t come,” she said soberly, “even if I did; as if I’d ask him, after—everything.”

  “I suppose he wouldn’t—‘Wedding bells are ringing for Lynn-ie but not for Lynnie and me,’” sang Tom, off-key. “See here, you—you didn’t fall for him, just a little bit, did you?”

  She said, “No,” definitely. She added, “Although I did go out with him, Tom, quite a lot after—after we quarreled. I was—lonely.”

  “Sure, I understand. But he was crazy about you,” said Tom. “You needn’t deny it!”

  She did not. She said nothing. She was to make no comment on the subject of David Dwight as long as she lived. Not even, when a year or more had passed and Tom, picking up a newspaper, chortled, “Well here’s a hell of a note—your old boy friend Dwight gets himself all married to an English show girl, aged nineteen. How’s that? Feeling sort of low, Lynn?”

  But that was still a year away.

  “Tom, you must go,” she said. “It’s terribly late. What will people think?”

  He rose, dumping her unceremoniously, picking her up again to kiss her, not for the first time that evening.

  “I don’t want to go. But I will. Now that I know I’m coming back,” he said, “and pretty soon. To stay.”

  She said wistfully, “I wish Jennie would be with us—when we get married.”

  “Jennie?” He frowned. “Don’t worry your head about her. Slim, poor devil, he’s sunk, drinks too much. He told me you’d seen him.”

  “He didn’t understand,” she said, low. “She didn’t want him to. I’ll tell you some day. No,” she said reconsidering, I can’t even tell you. But try to believe, Tom, that it wasn’t all Jennie’s fault.”

  “I’ll believe anything you say,” he told her, “but we’ll have old Slim over a lot, won’t we, and try and cheer him up and find some cute little trick to console him? Not as cute as you are,” he added.

  He kissed her again.

  “Tom, you’ve got to go,” she said, and then, “I’m so terribly happy. Sure, sure I’m forgiven?”

  He was sure; he made her sure. Presently he was gone. Suddenly almost sick with fatigue, she undressed and went to bed. Lying there in the darkness she tried to think. But her thoughts were kaleidoscopic. Dwight, asking her to marry him—in the spring, in England. She thought, in utter astonishment, is it possible that—that I was even tempted? She thought wonderingly of Sarah—remembering how, the door opening, she had seen her there, waiting, her face a mask of tragedy.

  Sarah—

  She turned her tired mind from the scene which had followed—then, Tom, the bruise on his cheek, his collar torn, his tie a string, awry—

  Tom’s arms, Tom’s kiss, Tom’s proved innocence; her own unconscious guilt, meaning, she discovered with a pang of astonishment and dismay, so much less than his embrace—

  “Sarah, if I can make it up to you, show you how grateful I am for what you did for me—” she whispered in the darkness.

  21

  THEIR SKYSCRAPER

  THE NEXT MORNING, TOM CALLED FOR HER, his hours, as it happened, more or less coinciding with her own, or at least his early hours. They drove uptown in the “new car.”

  “It runs,” said Lynn, “like a dream.”

  “We’ll go honeymooning in it.”

  “Tom, I can’t get away.”

  “Neither can I,” he admittedly cheerfully, “but there’ll be next summer—and vacations. Man,” said Tom, addressing the blue back of a traffic policeman, “Man, ain’t Nature grand!”

  He parked in a great garage not far from the Seacoast Building. They walked—to breakfast and to work, together. Perched on the high stools—“Do you remember?”they asked each other simultaneously, and their coffee cooled while the white jacket attending their needs asked, “What, so early in the morning?” but grinned in sympathy nevertheless.

  The great building hummed all around them. “Jennie’s gone,” said Lynn, sitting there on the stool, “and Mara.”

  “They made a mess of things,”Tom said bluntly. “We won’t.”

  “Not,” agreed Lynn, “as long as we love each other And that will be always.”

  The cafeteria was tilled with clatter and bustle, plates rattled, containers steamed, people tramped in and out. “Golly,” said Lynn, gasping, “I’m late!”

  She fled to work. Miss Marple, plucking a pencil from behind a newly exposed ear, asked sourly, “Why the bright and cheerful morning face? Someone left you a million?”

  “Two,” Lynn told her solemnly.

  Sarah. It would be hard to face Sarah, she thought. Yet somehow it was not. Later, forced to go to her desk on business, she reached it almost with reluctance. Sarah looked up. Lynn stared at her. Sarah, in black, white collar, white cuffs, her eyes preoccupied, her face serene—

  “About this report of Mr. Johnson’s,” Sarah asked.

  Listening, Lynn’s eyes were pulled, against her will, to the open door of Norton’s office. Norton’s small, dark typist sat there, busy. She saw no one else.

  Sarah smiled faintly. “I understand Mr. Rawlson is—ill,” she said.

&n
bsp; Lynn laughed outright. “And how!” she agreed.

  “I’ve been talking,” said Sarah, “to Mr. Norton. You—needn’t look so worried, Lynn. It’s all right. He understands everything. And Rawlson will send in his resignation.”

  A moment later she watched Lynn leave the room, walking with her easy, light step between the big desks, the pillars. Sarah’s eyes were heavy. She thought, it hasn’t made any difference to her, as far as I’m concerned. She wont’ speak of it again.

  Yet she did so, on her wedding day her hand fast in Sarahs’—

  Dr. Harding was talking to Tom in the living-room of Sarah’s apartment. Mrs. Harding, an older Lynn, was talking to the minister, wiping her pretty eyes, trying to smile—“It seems so strange to have her married—and away from home,” she was saying, “but he seems like a fine boy.”

  “If I knew how to thank you,” Lynn murmured, “If I knew how to tell you how grateful I am, Sarah—”

  Sarah stooped and kissed her. “You can tell me,” Sarah answered, “by being happy, always, Lynn.”

  It was dusk. A little later Tom and Lynn would go away for their brief honeymoon weekend together.

  Alone, after the Hardings had gone to their hotel, Sarah looked from her windows into the darkness of the night. She thought, queer, he should sail, tonight—

  She thought of the thing she had done, the loyalty she had shattered forever, for another loyalty. She thought of the look she had seen in David Dwight’s eyes, a look of utter astonishment, astonishment too great for reproach. She had realized then that somehow she was an unacknowledged part of him; that without ever giving it consideration he had nevertheless counted upon her as the one stable thing in his shifting world. She had failed him for Lynn. She was not sorry. Yet now she bowed her head and wept, slow, difficult tears. They fell on her clasped hands and she regarded them amazedly—as if she had looked to see blood and saw instead something colorless, and evanescent.