The Red Right Hand

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  “More or less,” she told him, flushing.

  “I’ve been all through that myself,” he said. “Nine kids of my own now. It won’t be long till you’re like I am. Good luck to you.”

  She had picked up St. Erme at his hotel. He lived at the President in midtown, not far from her office. They had stopped at his bank in the neighborhood for him to get a check cashed; and since the bank was also hers, she wanted at the same time to draw out five or ten dollars herself—she had, as usual, only a little silver in her purse. They had left the car outside the bank, with their bags in it.

  The bank had been normally filled with customers for a Wednesday middle morning in a midtown bank— no more and no less. Perhaps fifty customers, perhaps a hundred. She had stood beside St. Erme at the counter by the front window, filling in the date and signature on her own little check, thinking with a feeling of fatality that it was the last time she would ever sign herself Elinor Darrie, and debating how much to make it out for, while he had been writing his.

  “Shall I make it ten or fifteen, Inis?” she had asked him doubtfully.

  He had smiled at her, with the happiness a man can feel who has a great deal of money, all of which is his to give now to the one loved woman, from this time forth.

  “Be extravagant, and make it twenty, my sweet,” he had told her, amused by the smallness of her financial transactions.

  He had laid his hand on her arm abruptly then.

  “The car!” he said, with a sharpness in his voice which startled her.

  “What’s happened to it?” she asked him, staring out the window. ‘It’s still there.”

  “A fellow crossing the street just back of it stopped and looked at it,” he said, relaxing. “It looked for a moment as if he might be reaching into it. But he seems to have gone on.”

  “You took out the keys, didn’t you?” she said. “You said you would.”

  “I was thinking of the bags,” he told her grimly. “I’ve got Dexter’s rubber formula in mine, for study. It’s this damned war. It makes us all spy-crazy. He was probably just a casual pedestrian, admiring the bus. But I think one of us had better keep an eye on it, just for luck.”

  She had given him her check to cash along with his while she had remained to watch the bags. She hadn’t seen how much his had been for at the time he had been making it out. She had assumed perhaps something like a hundred dollars. When he had reached the teller’s window in his line, she had seen him smiling back at her, however. She had thought that he wanted to say something to her. Out in front a patrolman had passed by the car, looking it over; and he seemed solid and substantial, so she thought she could leave the front window for a moment. Going back to join Inis, she had been in time to see the teller counting out a sheaf of fifty-dollar bills to him as she came up.

  “I asked one of the bank guards to keep an eye on the car,” he told her. “We’re all set now.”

  The teller—a sandy young man with hangdog eyes, who had tried once or twice, she thought, to address a flirtatious remark to her when she had come in with her firm’s deposits or her own modest salary—nodded moodily to her behind his wicket.

  “Fifty fifties’ he said. “Good morning, Miss Darrie. You’re undertaking a big new venture, I understand. I wish you luck with it, and much increase and prosperity.”

  She felt her face warm, as it had been at the garage when the man named Gus had spoken of his nine children. She walked away with her hand in Inis’s arm, out to the car.

  “Why does everyone always leer at you when they know you’re going to get married?” she said. “I rather wish you hadn’t had to tell him, Inis. Or anybody. I mean, until we are.”

  He smiled at her with wrinkling eyes.

  “I didn’t tell him,” he said. “He just guessed it, it seems, my sweet. He’s the one you told me has been casting sheep’s eyes at you, isn’t he? Young Sawyer. I’d forgotten about it. He’s a fairly decent young sprig, though. Perhaps we can have him to dinner and a show sometime, with some nice girl or other, when we get back.”

  “Why,” she asked him, “should we? I’ve hardly ever spoken more than a word to him, Inis. I wouldn’t even know his name, except for the sign on his counter. Why on earth should we have him to dinner and a show?”

  “I just thought that you might like to look forward to having a circle of friends of your own age,” he said tenderly. “Social life. Entertaining. Being a hostess, and things, like that. I don’t want you to feel in any way that, in marrying me, your life is ended. But it doesn’t make any difference about Sawyer, if you don’t like him.”

  “It isn’t that I dislike him,” she said. “He just seems like a nonentity to me.”

  “He is, of course,” St. Erme agreed.

  He passed her a bill, putting his bulging wallet away in his breast pocket, outside the bank door.

  “Put it in your purse,” he said.

  “Fifty dollars!” she exclaimed, with a breathless exclamation of pleasure, so that one or two passing pedestrians turned to look at her happy face. “Why, I only made out a check for twenty, Inis.”

  “I tore up your silly little check, sweet,” he told her, a little bored. “Your money’s no good any more. Try and use it.”

  “But what on earth could I do with all this money?” she said, as she put it carefully away. “I’ve never had so much before.”

  “All that money,” he smiled at her. “I don’t know. What can you do with fifty dollars? Treat yourself to a lunch at the Waldorf sometime, or buy yourself a crazy little hat. Or how much do crazy little hats cost?”

  “Not that much, I hope,” she said.

  For a moment they stood smiling at each other, out of sheer happiness over nothing. That she thought fifty dollars was much money. That he didn’t even know the cost of women’s hats.

  The patrolman was still by the car when they crossed the sidewalk and got into it. Nothing had been touched, apparently. Nothing was missing. The patrolman smiled at them. Wealth, youth, beauty, and carefree joy. A sunlit summer day. The world before them. A fine big shiny powerful car with its top down, smoke gray, with blood-red cushions. No doubt he envied them. He would have liked to get in himself, and go riding off with them, to the world’s end. But he had his job, to watch out for thieves and all other kinds of criminals, and he could not afford to leave it, even if they had asked him to come along.

  With the shadow of a smiling nod he turned away, to go about his business....

  It was not until they had gone several blocks from the bank that Elinor realized, with a belated arithmetical computation, the size of the check that Inis must have drawn. Fifty fifties—twenty-five hundred dollars which he had with him in his purse, plus whatever else he might have had before, and less only the bill that he had handed to her. It seemed an appalling sum to her, merely to be earning around in one’s pocket for day-by-day expenditures, even if they should be gone a month.

  But his standards of money weren’t the same as hers, she realized. She would have to get used to many different values of all sorts, from the small and narrow ones she had always known.

  She had already phoned her office, earlier in the morning, to say that she would begin her vacation which had been offered her, if still convenient; though without telling what she was doing.

  There had been that disappointment the previous afternoon at the license bureau and she had been glad that she had not told anybody then. Perhaps there was some subliminal uncertainty, some shadowy inquietude still lurking below the threshold of her mind, that another unforeseen event might again occur to thwart them. A presentiment, however formless and dim, of some dark opposing hand rising up against her and Inis.

  Yet perhaps that is only hindsight on her part—she wasn’t sure, when she spoke of it to me. She told no one, anyway; and St. Erme had no one whom he needed to notify. There was no one who knew that they were going anywhere, except Dexter and the colored boy who had delivered the car to her, and Gus at the garage. A
nd Dexter or the colored boy or Gus had not known where they were going, or what roads they would take.

  They didn’t know themselves. They had no planned itinerary. They just started rolling, up the Grand Concourse, and out along the Bronx River Parkway; and then taking this road and that bearing in the general directions east and north, as a way might appeal to one or the other of them, knowing they would find Connecticut at the end, just where God had planted it, by and by. There isn’t much traffic on any roads these days, and they had the way mostly to themselves They passed only a few cars heading the opposite direction, and there was only an occasional one ahead of them or behind them, going the same way.

  Assuming that someone had been standing in line behind St. Erme at the teller’s window in the bank, and had seen him cashing his big check, and had tried to follow them, he must have been driving an invisible car, paler than any smoke, transparent as glass. For there were miles and miles of bright sunlit concrete highway, and miles and miles of shady winding macadam side roads, where there was no other car in sight at all....

  They stopped for a late luncheon somewhere still in New York State, at a roadside teahouse built over a water mill, overlooking a pretty reservoir lake. There was only one other customer, an old, old man with a bald shiny head and toothless gums, who sat across the dining room from them, out of earshot, munching his soft food, and who paid no attention to them. Elinor remembers him because he was such a funny-looking old man, and she teased Inis that he would look like that someday, and asked if he would still expect her to love him. It seemed a joke to her that Inis and she would ever really be old. Age happened to other people, but it would never happen to them. They would always be in summertime and in love, and this day would last forever.

  But Inis had taken it a little seriously, and had asked if he seemed old to her. He had—though she did not tell him—seemed a great deal older than she when she had first met him, with the crinkles about his eyes, and the air of hidden depth and experience a man gets from living. But she had forgotton the difference in their ages now, to a large extent.... Her joking remark about the old man had cast a shadow on the moment, and the bright day seemed darker, and the sound of the purling water mill beneath their feet like the sound of rain on graves or like weeping. There had come a dark invisible shadow between them at the table; and she had known that she, too, would someday be old, and that before that day came, even, she would be without Inis. Though how soon, she did not know.

  The old man left the teahouse before they did, and went off in his car another way. There was no one who followed them from there.

  There is no trace of Corkscrew yet that I can see.

  It was after half-past three when they reached Danbury, over the line to Connecticut. They learned about the five-day law there, and learned also that Massachusetts to the north had a three-day law, and that the nearest place where they could get married without delay was Vermont.

  They sat down in a booth in a little stationery and icecream store, and talked it over. It was too late to get to Vermont that day. It seemed to Elinor, and it may have seemed to Inis, that there was some malignant fate opposing them. That an invisible hand had risen up against them, blocking them off.

  If they went back, it would take the bloom off the whole thing. The hour, the mood, might never come again. Never the time and the place. There would always be between them a sense of frustration and retreat—of postponement for a few days more, and a few weeks, and perhaps forever. Yet to stop at some hotel overnight even with all due circumspection, even though being married tomorrow, was something of which she could not conceive. Greenwich Village had not gone that deep with her. Behind her was her old Amish grandmother and all the strict training and deep instincts of her life.

  Inis had not liked the thought particularly, either. He had his own sense of reticence, his distaste of being a common show. The picture was offensive to him, as well—of going to a desk and registering, either as man and wife or under their own names, demanding separate rooms, before the eyes of the lobby loungers and the bellboy’s curious smirks, while the clerk turned the book around, and read it with a slow fish-eye. He had sat brooding, drumming his brown fingers on tire booth table, a little dispirited that she should have suggested going back, and trying to think what they might do.

  He had brightened then, with his white smile flashing, suddenly remembering old John R. Buchanan, the steel king, the President’s special adviser and one of the great men of the country, whose big summer estate was up near Burlington, just over the border in Vermont. Old John R. Buchanan had been his father’s closest friend, and would be more than glad to have them as his guests.

  It was too late to reach old John’s place in Burlington before one or two o’clock tonight, an hour which would find the whole household dead. But if they made the trip at a leisurely pace, taking a good time out for supper, and stopping for coffee at lunch wagons in Pittsfield and other towns en route, they could reach the Buchanan place around six or seven in the morning, when some of the house servants would be up. They could catch a short sleep there finally, and be on hand when the license office opened up, with nothing more to stop them.

  More than just providing them with a place to sleep, old John Buchanan would probably want to arrange a wedding party for them in grand style. What Inis remembered in addition was that the old man had a lakeside cabin farther up in the Green Mountains, a dream place beside a deep blue water, never used, which he had built for his daughter, who had died on the eve of her wedding several years ago, and the first use of which, if he should ever marry, he had promised to old Lefty St. Erme’s son and his bride.

  He had forgotton about it, because when old John had made the offer he had no idea of ever marrying. But now, in the stress of fighting against their frustration, against the dark invisible hand held up against them, as she expressed it, he thought of old Buchanan’s house and afterward of that beautiful honeymoon place up in the mountains.

  Inis had a road map in his pocket, and they had sat there in the booth, picking out the route on it, counting up the distances between towns. And it didn’t seem too long and tiresome in prospect, taking it at a leisurely pace, with plenty of stop-offs on the way, and bed at the end. Elinor had felt gay again, infected by his enthusiasm. The way seemed suddenly clear, and there were now a definite shape and plan to what had all been rather planless and shapeless before, their wedding trip. She put from her mind the disquieting thoughts which she had had of turning back.

  They would make an adventure of it. They would get picnic supplies here in Danbury, and stop at some pretty spot along the way for supper, perhaps beside a secluded lake where they could have a swim, building a fire afterward and watching the shadows of the flames while the night deepened and the stars came out, lingering until the embers died; and then going on, drifting up through the hills in the warm starlighted darkness, with those stops at the lighted lunch wagons in the little sleeping towns, and on again, while the night faded, and the pearl dawn came, and the pink dawn. And so they would be there at the end, still fresh, still eager, no more tired than from a night of dancing, ready for buckwheat cakes and Vermont sirup and sausages and bed. And after they had slept, they would be married in the great Buchanan drawing room, with flowers and organ music and a wedding cake, and perhaps an heirloom gown lent by Mrs. Buchanan, and old John himself to give her away; and all those other things which a girl dreams of for her wedding, even though she is without any family of her own and is getting married rather suddenly, on the spur of the moment, without any trousseau or any plans. And afterward they would go up to that paradisaic lakeside cabin in the hills.

  And so their honeymoon life together would begin, and go on and on. With never a dark invisible hand rising up against them....

  Inis St. Erme did not know, of course. He had no way of knowing it. It was just a macabre coincidence that it had suddenly occurred to him that old John R. Buchanan had his summer place near Burlington. But it
is a little disquieting to realize that he had planned to take his young bride to a dead man’s house. For at that very hour yesterday afternoon when they had sat making their bright plans in the little ice-cream parlor in Danbury—though it is a matter quite apart—at his great estate in Burlington, on a white table in a quiet room, old John Buchanan was dying beneath my knife.

  Inis and she had gone out of the dark little stationery and ice-cream parlor, and had found a chain grocery next door, where they loaded up with provisions.

  There was that sense of an unduplicable experience, the first grocery-buying together, and St. Erme had found pleasure in ordering quantities of everything he saw, with a lordly hand—enough food, it seemed to Elinor, to have lasted the two of them a month, though she, thriftier and more housewifely-wise, would have restrained him. For the rationed commodities, she had her own cards with her in her purse, providently. Inis, a hotel and restaurant liver, had never applied for ration books, and for the moment, until she produced hers, was stumped when he found that they were necessary for cheese and ketchup....

  A small detail, ration books. But only one of many. Considered altogether, there were so many small details of which St. Erme did not seem aware. Like the too-high curbs and misplaced hassocks which tripped him up because he had not realized they were there, there were those trivial but obvious things which escaped his mental vision, in the same way, as if he suffered from a blindness in it, as well.

  Item, his ignorance of New York marriage laws. Item, his failure to estimate how far they might be able to travel on Dexter’s gas coupons, and to lay out their itinerary from the beginning accordingly. Item, his neglect to phone John R. Buchanan’s home from Danbury, to give notice that he was coming with his bride. Item, ration books.