Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  An extension of that fear, more terrifying because there was no predictable end point, hung over her during the days after she had delivered the drawings and was waiting for some word of approval. It never came. When, finally desperate with anxiety, she had called Jefferson Clark, his tone of voice made her feel that she had annoyed him unnecessarily. The drawings, he said, were “quite all right” and the book was on the press.

  She had waited for publication day with the anticipation that, in some not quite realized way, the whole color and substance of her life would change. It didn’t. The day came and went without event. Her complimentary copies, badly packed and battered in the mailing, did not arrive until several days later. Her name was not on the jacket, only in small type on the title page. Five of her twelve drawings had not been used.

  The only person who asked for her autograph was Mamie Breckenridge, who had taught her high school class in “Art,” and Mamie had dictated an inscription that made the volume a tribute to her own genius as a teacher.

  Her father, of course, had praised the book but what pleasure she might have found in his approval was destroyed when he had said, after she had answered his question about how much money she had received, that she had been cheated. He told her that he had paid more than twice that amount to a New York artist for the design of a molded plastic housing for an electric hair dryer.

  There were reviews in the special children’s book issues of the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune, both praising her drawings, but even that reward was short-lived. A few days later she received a curt reply to a letter that she had written to thank Marybelle Hudson for having interceded in her behalf with Jefferson Clark. Miss Hudson coldly denied having had anything to do with the selection of an illustrator, the tone of her short note making it only too obvious that she was greatly disturbed that the illustrations had been more favorably reviewed than the text. Lory knew that she would illustrate no more books by Marybelle Hudson. As the weeks dragged by, she began to doubt if she would ever illustrate another book by anyone. There was no word of any kind from Clark-Dudley.

  It was a full year later when she received a note signed T. Martell. As she probably knew, he wrote, Clark-Dudley had been sold. Jefferson Clark was gone. The firm had a new policy. It was now publishing only low-priced children’s books for mass distribution through supermarkets and chain grocery stores, probably not the kind of thing she would be interested in illustrating, but if she happened to be in Philadelphia some day and wanted to waste a half hour he would be glad to talk to her.

  She had driven down that next morning. The Clark-Dudley offices were still in the same building but their atmosphere had changed. A platinum-blonde receptionist was the key motif of the new order. The lobby was now paneled in tube-lighted corrugated glass, broken with niches in which pyramided stacks of books were displayed like soap flakes, or canned soup, or the latest precooked baby food.

  Tony Martell’s littered cubbyhole at the end of a long corridor, safely beyond the boundary that supermarket merchandise managers were allowed to pass, was as incongruous to the scene as Tony himself. The artistic sensibility which his eyes admitted was denied by his manner. From the beginning—although not without continuing question—Lory sensed that Tony Martell wore the cloak of hard-boiled cynicism in the same way that the fearful so often hide behind bravado.

  “This is strictly a junk operation,” Tony had said, sipping coffee out of a wilted cardboard container. “We’re geared to a fourth-grade mentality and working like hell to make sure that nobody ever gets promoted to the fifth. We can’t use stuff like that Hawk book of yours any more, Lory. Too dangerous. Might destroy the little brats’ taste for comic strips. That’s our shining goal—prepare the youth of America for their destiny as readers of the comic strips. Now what are you doing around here, anyway? You’re no cartoonist. You’re an artist. What would you be doing illustrating this tripe about a space ship to Jupiter where there’s some queer element in the atmosphere that makes all of the visitors from earth act like intelligent human beings? Fantastic idea, isn’t it? Crazy as imagining that you might want to do this book. You don’t, do you?”

  Through that early spring she had done the illustrations for Space Ship to Jupiter, preserving the demanded format of the comic-strip panel yet striving to make her drawings as artistically sound as if they had been destined for a museum’s wall.

  There had been one flashed moment of reward—Tony Martell’s appreciative astonishment when she had unwrapped the package and handed him her first drawings. “Beautiful,” he had whispered. But then he had snapped down the curtain of his cynicism. “Afraid you’re counting on too much imagination, Lory. Kids have imagination—granted—but kids don’t buy books. Mama is the literary purchasing agent and she lost her imagination with her virginity. And you’ve made Jupiter much too beautiful—no monsters with sparks shooting out of their ears. Mama won’t like that. She wants something to scare the hell out of her little brats by telling them the next time they set fire to the davenport that some jughead goblin from Jupiter is going to shoot their little behinds full of astral buckshot. But we’ll take a swing at it and see what happens.”

  Her check, when it came that next week, was for five hundred dollars instead of the four hundred that Tony had originally promised her. She had made the mistake of telling her father. Grant Austen said that he had recently paid an industrial design firm a thousand dollars for the design of the molded cover for a bathroom scales.

  There were no reviews of Space Ship to Jupiter. Beyond an occasional word of regret for the down-grading of “a fine old publishing house” the reviewers now paid no attention to Clark-Dudley and its outpouring of cheaply printed books. There was no supermarket in Suffolk that handled the Clark-Dudley books. But Lory felt no regret that her friends wouldn’t see Space Ship to Jupiter. Her drawings were reproduced on paper as gray as newsprint, the color crudely raw, all subtlety lost. Heartsick, she told herself that at least there would be no more like it.

  But six months later Tony had asked her to come to Philadelphia.

  “Quite a hot number, aren’t you, gal?” he had said with his lip-twisting grin, surprised when he discovered that she didn’t know that her book had sold almost a million copies. “You’re the Mickey Spillane of the kid book racket and the front office is panting to sign you into permanent white slavery. How about a contract to do two more at a thousand bucks a throw?”

  Tony had laughed away her objection and taken her down the glass-paneled hall into the great glittering office where she was introduced to the president, a little pot-bellied man with a set smile that made him look frighteningly like her father. Tony and the president had taken her to lunch at the Fontainebleau Room in the Hotel Ivanhoe, toasting “more million-copy sockeroos” with their third Martinis, to which she could respond only with an empty sherry glass and flaming embarrassment.

  In the end she had signed the contract, feeling no exultation, motivated only by the pressing need to fill the empty hours of the days ahead and the vague hope that the signed contract might give her the courage to tell her father that she could no longer go on living in Suffolk. But of course she hadn’t—as she had known she wouldn’t—and somehow she had managed to exist through the repetitious monotony of Space Ship to Venus and Space Ship to Saturn.

  During the long days in her studio, introspection sharpened by loneliness, Lory began to suspect that her desire to be an artist had been largely self-deception, motivated by a recognition that she had always been someone apart from the crowd, never the center of admiring friends, never one of those most envied girls who could pick and choose among a half dozen clamoring beaus, always handicapped by the fact that she looked like “such a dear, sweet child.” No one ever believed that she was as old as she really was. Even at art school, the instructors had treated her as if she were a child prodigy. Ray Cummings, the one boy she had dated in Philadelphia, had admitted that one of his friends who had seen them together had
kidded him for being a “cradle snatcher.”

  She was old enough now so that the mistake was no longer made but, looking back, her impelling desire to be accepted as an adult seemed a logical explanation for the urge to gain recognition as an artist. She had reached that goal now but it had, if anything, set her even more apart than she had ever been before. There was often the feeling that people around Suffolk experienced a certain embarrassment in her presence, acting as if she lived in a world quite different from their own. An “artist” didn’t quite fit in with “the crowd.” When she was invited out to dinner and a hostess was forced to provide an extra man, it usually turned out to be either Dale Withers, who taught English at the high school and once had a sonnet published in a poetry magazine, or Somerset Hart who was the “decorator” at the Home Store. Both of them were what Suffolk called “artistic,” the generally accepted meaning of the word being not entirely complimentary.

  In December, when she had taken down the last of the drawings for Space Ship to Saturn, hurriedly revised to fit a sudden change in format, she had protested another assignment in the same series and Tony, surprisingly, had said, “I was wondering how long you could take it. I’ll see if I can’t dig up something a little less corny. There’s a pretty good chance of it now—we’re making so damn much money around here that the front office is about due for a sudden attack of artistic integrity. Sit tight and I’ll deal you in.”

  Tony had made good on his promise. The manuscript had finally arrived, a translation from the French of a completely charming tale about a teen-age romance, alive with illustrative possibilities, and the roughly penciled dummy that Tony had given her was an encouragement to freedom rather than the confining dictation that his layouts for the other books had been. She saw at once that it was a chance to go on from where she had stopped with The Knight of the Hawk but, terrifyingly, there had been no responding rise of creative imagination. She felt only the dead emptiness of her mind, a lethargy of spirit that she could no longer blame on Tony and Clark-Dudley. Nor could she blame her father. That, too, had been self-deception. She was an adult. She was twenty-six years old … old enough to live her own life … to have her own home …

  Involuntarily, her eyes dropped from the top of Orchard Ridge and her mind, as if freed from the suggestion of the endless milling of the hovering crows, settled into a simpler pattern. Looking down from second-story height across the high hemlock hedge, she saw the row of little houses that now crowded in against the back line of the estate. Her eyes came to rest on a kitchen window of one of the houses. The light that had been turned on against the grayness of the day was as yellow as liquid honey. A young woman in an organdy-frilled red apron was lifting a baby into a high chair … a woman no older than herself …

  Lory backed a step from the studio window, conscious of the embarrassment of invading a denied privacy, yet unable to break the grip of the scene’s fascination. She saw with an artist’s eye—“Madonna and the Child”—but her senses were the senses of the woman in the kitchen, hearing the gurgling laughter in a baby’s throat, feeling the aliveness of that little wriggling body, smelling the milky aroma of its warm breath, knowing that …

  There was the sound of an opening door on the floor below. She tensed, listening. There were footsteps coming up the stairs and she recognized them as her mother’s. Quickly, she crossed back to her drawing board, reaching it as the door at the head of the staircase opened.

  Her mother stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the light from below. “I didn’t want to disturb you, dear, but Paul called and asked me to tell you that he’d pick you up about six tonight.”

  Delivering the message from Paul was a transparent excuse. There was nothing urgent about it. It could easily have waited until lunch-time. Her mother had something else on her mind. But she was still standing in the doorway, respecting their understood but never mentioned agreement that the studio was not to be entered without invitation.

  “You’re not disturbing me,” Lory said. “Come in.”

  Lory Austen’s relationship with her mother had never been as she had wanted it to be, and she was sure that her mother was no less dissatisfied, yet they had rarely been able to break down, for more than a passing moment, the indefinable but oddly impenetrable wall between them. Lory had come to accept the situation, not with the bitterness that she might have held if there had been any doubt of love, but with genuine sympathy for her mother’s inability to conquer the reserve that made it so difficult for her to express affection, or to create the atmosphere in which affection could be easily offered.

  There was no lack of respect in Lory Austen’s appraisal of her mother. Humanly, she admired most those qualities that she herself did not possess—stature, poise, strength of mind as well as body, the whole city’s recognition of her long service as an effective leader of civic and charitable organizations. Miriam Austen wasted no time on nitwit diversions, concentrating her full energy on such solidly tangible accomplishments as the establishment of the city’s first day nursery, the addition of a children’s wing to the hospital, and the financial solidification of the county’s welfare program, a task that had previously baffled a half dozen supposedly better qualified males.

  Lory suspected—never with verification—that some of the channeling of her mother’s energy into public service had resulted from her failure to find an adequate outlet in marriage, a feeling that grew out of thinking of her parents as living through a quietly unhappy relationship. She had never heard either of them raise a voice against the other, but neither had she observed any evidence of that warmhearted sharing that she thought of as the essence of marriage. The blame, Lory thought, was largely her father’s. Her own experience had taught her that he accepted expressed love as an invitation to domination. The slightest display of even sympathetic understanding seemed to encourage him to become a difficult and demanding person, selfish and self-centered. When she had come back to Suffolk that fall after she had graduated from art school, her father had seemed a worn and tired man, enervated by the constant frustration of his plans to build his company into the great corporation that he envisioned. Out of sympathy she had let him talk to her—even, in the beginning, encouraged it—not realizing that she was being trapped into displacing her mother as her father’s closest confidante. Night after night, using one subterfuge after another, he would call her into the library to discuss his business problems, turning silent if her mother entered the room, seemingly most pleased when he heard his wife’s footsteps on the staircase as she finally went upstairs to bed.

  Although her mother had never evidenced resentment, it was difficult for Lory to believe that some such feeling did not exist. They were mother and daughter, but they were also woman and woman, and Lory’s imagination left no doubt as to how she would feel in a reversal of roles. It was that awareness, almost as much as an understanding of her mother’s natural reserve, that had made it so difficult for her to make any move toward the fulfillment of her earnest desire for a warmer relationship. But there was still hope, aroused again now by the evident eagerness with which her mother had accepted her invitation to come into the studio.

  Lory cleared a chair, avoiding the embarrassing incongruity of a formal invitation to sit down, then stripped off her smock and began a quick rinse of her hands in the little brush sink behind her drawing board.

  When Lory turned back, Miriam Austen was sitting watching her. “Paul told me you are going down to the Elberths’ farm tonight?”

  “Yes,” Lory said, flinching at the realization that she had thoughtlessly failed to share her plans, a little thing that she could have done so easily, and it would have meant something to her mother. “Yes, Grace is having a dinner party for some friends of Gene’s from Baltimore. The man is an artist. I suppose that’s why she invited me.”

  “It’s the first time you’ve seen Paul for a long while, isn’t it?”

  “Ages,” Lory said lightly, flipping a hand towel. “Grace a
sked him to bring me and there was no way the poor man could get out of it.”

  “You know that isn’t true,” Miriam Austen said, earnestly sober. “Paul has called you for dates, time after time.”

  There was a reaching quality in her mother’s voice, a tentative bid for intimacy, and Lory accepted it, pulling over the stool from behind her drawing board, quickly perching herself on it, a teasing smile on her face. “Would you really like to have Paul Bronson for a son-in-law?”

  “Don’t be silly, dear.”

  “I might be able to manage it,” Lory said, mocking seriousness. “Of course, Dad would have to give Paul control of the company for a dowry but that shouldn’t be too high a price to pay to get rid of an old-maid daughter.”

  “Oh, Lory, you’re not!” Miriam Austen said, the words escaping, revealing embarrassment.

  Lory reached out for her mother’s hands. Their damp warmth evoked a strangely distant memory, something stored from childhood, unremembered since. “Don’t worry about me, Mother. I’m all right.”

  Their eyes met and, astonished, Lory saw the warning mist of waiting tears and the fleeting passage of a tremor across pale lips. She knew then that her mother’s concern was not what she imagined it to be. It was something more serious than that.

  “What’s the matter, Mother?”

  There was silence during that moment of moments when the barrier between them was being challenged—and then it yielded to the soft impact of Miriam Austen’s low voice. “Lory, what’s wrong at the plant?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Something is. I know it. I’m terribly worried about Grant.”

  They had broken into new ground now. Lory could not remember her mother ever before, talking to her, calling her father by his given name.