by Leslie Ford
It could, of course, have occurred to a first-grader that she’d also, in that case, signed mine, which was more immediately important to me. As it didn’t occur to me, possibly Colonel Primrose was justified in his estimate of my mental age. It was Lucille I was worried about, not Eustace and not myself. Granted she was an hysterical fool, she wasn’t more of one than any woman would be in her position. It can’t be very reassuring to think your husband goes around rigging up booby traps in the dark of the night for people he doesn’t care much about. Household accidents are too frequent at best. Except that I still couldn’t see George Gannon doing it that way—not from what he’d looked and sounded like during our encounter that morning. It is only fair to admit, however, that my batting average in the crystal-ball league is point, zero, zero, zero.
“I’d just pull up my socks and go on over and talk to him, if I were you, Lucille,” I said. “Knock on the door. He’ll let you in. He lets a lot of other people in.”
She shook her head. “It’s a rule we made when we were first married. When he leaves home to work I never interrupt him.”
“All right,” I said. “If he finds you in a psychopathic ward when he comes out, at least you won’t have broken a rule. If he’s done any concentrated work the last twenty-four hours he’s a genius.”
“But he is, Grace. He really is.”
We were interrupted just as I started to say “Nuts” or something like it. There was no doubt at all that somebody was outside this time. It sounded like a stampede of wild horses, but it was only Sheep and my son.
“Hi, Lucille!”
They were both still on top of the world. And Lucille did the most instantaneous change of face imaginable. “Hi, Bill—hi, Sheep! How are the gifted amateurs making out?”
She relaxed and smiled at them, a little patronizingly but not too much, considering she was a producer’s wife.
“Amateurs nothing. We’ve arrived.”
Bill picked up the tray he’d brought me and that I’d not had a chance to do anything about. “Haven’t you heard the news? Didn’t Ma tell you? Eustace is polishing up the golden wings right now. But I’ve got to go. I’ve got an order for a double bicarb with a milk of magnesia chaser.”
“Across the hall,” Lucille remarked easily. “You’d better hurry. Give him my love, will you?” She turned to Sheep. His lean, freckled face was still a cobweb of smiles. “Is this the deal Eustace told me he’d made with my husband and Mrs. Kersey? Is that what you’re all so excited about? I can’t believe it.”
She went over to the table by the patio window and picked up her bag. “I thought you’d hate it. I thought it was a dirty stinking trick to play on—”
She stopped abruptly, listening a moment, reached across the table and drew the curtain to one side.
“Bless me, look who’s out here. You startled me, dear. Come back—we’ve all seen you now.”
Neither Sheep nor I had seen anything, but we saw then. It was Molly. She was still in her scuffed moccasins and white sox, and she’d put on her camel’s-hair coal but her hair was still slicked back as it had been when she was on her way to class and as it had been at Eustace Sype’s. She was pale as a small ghost as she came reluctantly in through the screen Lucille held open for her. Her eyes were pale too. She looked whipped and numb.
“Molly! Baby, what’s the matter?”
Sheep made a dive across the room to her. “What’s wrong, honey?”
She edged away from him, stepping aside so the coffee table was between them.
“She’s sold out and she didn’t want to be the one to break the news,” Lucille Gannon answered for her—unpleasantly, and with a laugh that didn’t make it any pleasanter. “Nothing like eavesdropping to get the real dope, is there, Molly?”
It must have been Molly we’d heard on the patio, instead of someone in the hall, I thought quickly, aware that Lucille was thinking the same thing.
“Why don’t you be honest for once? Why don’t you tell Sheep you’ve sold out to—”
“That’s enough, Lucille.” Sheep turned to her, his face hard.
She shrugged. “Ask her. There she is. Why don’t you ask her?”
“Molly—what is it?”
He turned slowly back to her. “Come on, honey. Don’t be this way, Moll.”
Her face turned up to his was helplessly revealing for a moment, before she lowered her long dark lashes and nodded her head. She moistened her lips.
“I’ve sold out, Sheep. She knows. Ask her.”
Her voice was dark and softly vibrant. I thought for an instant it was me she meant, but it was Lucille. The bitter lines at the ends of Lucille’s mouth were as deep again as if they’d been cut there, but fire was glinting in her eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean by that, Molly,” she said sharply. “All I know is what your friend Eustace Sype told me this morning—that you’re going to live with Viola Kersey, to repay an old debt, and that it’s superb for you because you’ll have furs and jewels and clothes and cars. Viola Kersey is taking you over. That’s all I know. And she’s putting up the money for a picture she thinks you’ll star in. If you mean anything else you’d better explain.”
“That’s all I meant,” Molly said quietly. “What else is there for me to mean, Lucille?”
“It depends on how long you’ve been eavesdropping. It’s a habit some servants—”
“I told you that was enough, Lucille.” Sheep’s deliberate tone was deadly. “Now I’m telling you to shut up and get out.”
She put her bag under her arm and moved a step or two toward the door. She stopped there and turned, her dark penciled brows arched a little.
“Of course it’s none of my business, Sheep,” she said lightly. “But aren’t you and Bill cutting bait, yourselves? When you talked to me about all this silly business of guardianship, you said if worst came to worst one of you might have to marry her. You’ve changed your minds about that, have you?”
I’ve said I thought Lucille Gannon was a fool. She was either more of one than I’d thought or one with an amazing amount of courage. The cold blue devils burning in Sheep’s eyes and the set of his jaw and the hard, thin slash of his mouth were things she faced cool and unruffled that I wouldn’t have cared to face at all. Or it could have been sheer effrontery.
There was a dangerous and grimly silent moment. Then Sheep said, “No. We haven’t changed our minds.”
“All right, then. Why don’t you marry one of them, Molly? If you haven’t sold out—if all this is against your will—why don’t you marry one of them? Or are you just waiting till one of them asks you?”
I would have thought then that Molly would have flamed into the small jungle cat I’d seen the day before. But she didn’t. The only evidence of it was a single sidelong look, contemptuous and violent, she cast toward Lucille, and a momentary stiffening of her body. Both stopped as Sheep turned to her.
“Will you marry one of us, Molly?”
She shook her head quickly. “No.”
It was clear and firm and positive, even though she did not look at him. She was looking at the floor, her pale, pointed face set and unyielding.
“Will you marry me, Molly?”
I saw the almost imperceptible quiver tremble across her face. She raised her eyes to him. The pulse in her smooth brown throat throbbed for an instant.
“No, Sheep. Thank you a lot, just the same.”
“I want you to marry me.”
He started to put his hands out to her, but she moved back quickly.
“No, Sheep. You don’t want to marry me, and I won’t marry you. She’s trying to make you do it—don’t you see? She’s trying to push you into it. She thinks she’ll get rid of me that way. She thinks I want something she’s got. But she’s wrong. I don’t. I just want to be let alone, and I’m not going to let her make anybody marry me just because she wants it that way!”
Lucille was drawing her gloves on with easy, and to my mind, maddenin
g deliberation.
“Oh, you misunderstand me, Molly. It’s just that I admire quixotic young men. Why don’t you be honest, dear? After all, you’ve lived here very happily, with your parents doing menial labor to help support—”
“Stop it! Don’t you dare speak of my mother that way!”
The little tiger cat sprang out in full violence then. Sheep stepped between her and Lucille.
“You’d better go.” It was me who said it, this time, and just at that moment the phone rang. I knew it was Colonel Primrose, and a wonderful time for him to barge in. But I picked it up. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or still more upset when it wasn’t the Colonel. It was the girl at the desk.
“Mr. Eustace Sype is in the lobby, Mrs. Latham. He’s hunting Sheep. Is he in your room?”
“Yes, he’s here. I’ll tell him.”
I put the phone down. Lucille was at the door, her hand on the knob, waiting. Molly had subsided a little, with Sheep holding her hand. She was quivering, still convulsed with helpless rage. As for Sheep, I didn’t know. It hardly seemed the time for him to see Eustace Sype, but there was no way out of it that I could see. “Eustace is in the lobby to see you,” I said.
His big, hairy red hand released Molly’s abruptly. “Good,” he said. He took two long steps toward the door as Lucille pulled it open and stood quickly out of his way. It was a sort of Bombs Away effect over an alert bristling target—good, maybe, but I couldn’t think good for Eustace Sype.
“Oh, Sheep, stop! Oh, stop him, Mrs. Latham!”
He went out without a word or a glance back, and slammed the door behind him.
“Let him go, Molly,” Lucille said. “It’s fish or cut bait. You can’t play it both ways at once. Even you ought to know that much.”
It was Lucille’s parting shot. The door closed again. Molly was across the room in a flash then, tugging at the doorknob.
“Wait, Molly!” I said. “Please wait.”
I didn’t think she’d hear me, much less obey. But she did. She dropped her hands to her side and turned back to me.
Chapter Seventeen: Subdued tiger kitten
“I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT,” she said simply. “And she’s right. It’s fish—or cut bait.”
“It’s neither one, Molly,” I said. “It’s keeping your head, and not letting her goad you into a public scene.”
“Goad me—that’s the word. That’s what I was trying to say to Sheep. She’s been trying to do it ever since Bill first took me to her house. I don’t know why—I don’t know why she should hate me like she does. I don’t know why after she did everything she could to make the boys think I was a common, ordinary tart she’s trying to make one of them marry me now. I think she’s crazy.”
“I think she’s very disturbed,” I said. It was a mealy-mouthed thing to say. I don’t know why adults always feel they have to excuse each other to the very clear-sighted young. But Lucille was an old friend, and even if appeasement has proved a disastrous policy in maintaining a status quo, I was still trying to work it. “How long had you been on the patio, Molly?”
She was silent a moment. “I’d just come, when Bill and Sheep came in. I didn’t want to see them.”
“That isn’t the truth, is it, Molly?”
“It’s the pragmatic truth.” A smile lighted her eyes for a bare instant. “If that means what I think it means. I mean, so far as I’m concerned, that’s when I came. What I mean is, I didn’t hear anything she said about Mr. Gannon because I don’t believe it. I think she was lying. And I think she knows she was lying. But that’s none of my business. I came to see you.”
She gripped her hands together, as if there was pain in them that the pressure could relieve.
“About this afternoon,” she said evenly. “I didn’t want to tell Bill and Sheep. I wanted Eustace to tell them. He can make black sound like white. I—I wanted them to think as well of me as they could. I knew they’d—well, one of them would feel he had to marry me. We’ve talked about it—before Mrs. Kersey came. They didn’t know it was Mrs. Kersey, but I knew it. I knew her name, anyway. I didn’t know much about her.”
“What is it all about, Molly?”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you. Mother says I mustn’t tell. She says it would—just make trouble, for people I don’t want to make trouble for. People who’ve been awfully kind to me.”
“You mean your mother and father—”
She looked at me in quick surprise. “Oh, no. How could it make trouble for them? And it isn’t fair for Lucille to talk the way she does. I didn’t want them to work here, or anywhere, the way they do. But Mother wanted it that way. She said they’ve always worked and they’d go on, and I’d work, and if I made anything of myself the way they wanted to, then I’d take care of them. It was a sort of deal we’ve always had—because I love them very much, Mrs. Latham.”
That, I believed—as Lucille would have put it in this Hollywood jargon I knew I would never learn properly. But I did believe it. It was the one clear and steady light that shone through all of Molly’s complex simplicity.
“But that isn’t the reason I’m going to Mrs. Kersey. It isn’t the reason I won’t marry Sheep—or Bill. I wouldn’t marry Bill because—well, Bill’s different. He expects too much of me. He isn’t like Sheep. Sheep doesn’t expect anything. He just wants me to be myself. Bill’s fun—I don’t mean that, and I like him a lot—but he’s only thinking about—my career. He never thinks about me myself. Sheep’s different. A lot of times when I go out with Sheep we don’t go to the important places—we just go to a drive-in and have a hamburger and sit there and talk. He doesn’t care whether I’m educated or not. I guess he doesn’t have the—the sort of Junior-League standards Bill has, because he knows about girls—from a different angle, if you know what I mean.”
I smiled—though she was certainly making a first-rate prig out of my first-born.
“I haven’t said it the way I mean it,” she said quickly. “It’s just that Bill’s still sticking to our original deal. And Sheep—”
“—has fallen in love with you. Is that what you mean, Molly?”
She blushed. It’s an old-fashioned term, but it’s what was happening. A radiance warmed her throat and cheeks and softened her eyes as she looked at me.
“I guess that’s what I mean. Bill would be disappointed if I was a flop, but Sheep wouldn’t care. He’d say it wasn’t my fault. He’d say the hell with it, Hollywood didn’t know its own business. You can see, can’t you? It isn’t that I don’t think Bill’s swell. It’s just that sometimes I get tired showing off, and it’s nice to have somebody I can be natural with. I don’t know. I guess I’m sort of in love with him too. Mother says we’ll both get over it.”
She shook her head. “Anyway, I can’t disappoint Mother and Dad, after the way they’ve worked. I don’t want to disappoint Bill either. But I’ve got to take care of Mother and Dad. I’ve got to do that.”
“Can’t you do it without going to Mrs. Kersey?” I asked. “Do you want all the things she’s going to be able to give you?”
“I don’t want any of them. I just have to go. Mother says I have to. But it—it won’t make any difference in me. That was what Mother was afraid of.”
She took hold of the doorknob again. “But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you not to tell Bill and Sheep I didn’t want to go and Mother made me. That’s why I wanted Eustace to see them. But now Lucille’s torn it, and they’re going to think— Well, I guess I’ll get over that too. I didn’t use to know what Mother meant when she talked about your duty, and doing it no matter what happened, but I guess I do now.”
“There are various ideas of what duty is,” I said.
“I don’t think so. You can always tell duty. It’s what you don’t want to do—it’s what you fight against inside you. Duty’s when you realize how it’ll hurt other people, and you have to choose between that and what would be easiest for you.”
> Dear me, I thought. If the remnants of the other postwar flapper and bathtub gin era had imbued their off spring with the beliefs Rose and Morris Shavin had instilled in their child, they wouldn’t be viewing her contemporaries with such hideous alarm. My own standards seemed horribly debased in terms of hers.
Molly raised her bead sharply, listening, drew a quick breath, her eyes widening, and then darted across the room to the patio window. She was too late. Bill was in the door before she could get out.
“Molly! What the hell—”
“What the hell what?”
“What’s going on, Molly? What’s Lucille—”
“Lucille’s saying I sold out.” She hesitated for a moment, and went on steadily. “She’s right, if you want to take it that way. I’m going to live with Mrs. Kersey. She’s got money to throw away and she wants to throw it away on me. I’d be— I’d be a fool if I didn’t grab the chance while I’ve got it.”
Bill stood there, staring at her, speechless. She went on, her face a little pale but her voice steady.
“After all, Bill, you and Sheep didn’t expect me to trail along forever, did you? Fun’s fun, but you must have realized the first big chance I had to get somewhere I wouldn’t stop and ask your permission.”
I will say this for my son, that he took it like a man. He stood there, a little recovered from the initial shock, looking at her without a word.
“I’ve got to have clothes, I’ve got to see other people, I’ve got to live where I’m comfortable, I’ve got to—”
“You’ve said enough, Molly.”
He interrupted her quietly. “You don’t have to say any more. It’s okay—if that’s the way you want it. So long. I won’t be seeing you.”
He went out. The room seemed filled with disappointment and disillusionment, anger and hurt, in a stunned silence that had its center in little Miss Molly McShane. I don’t know what she’d expected him to do, but it wasn’t that. She closed her mouth and swallowed, and looked at me, her face quite blank.