by Rufus King
She touched, against her own convictions, on mountains and molehills, her decided preference in opening the house to strangers rather than to the permanence of acquaintances, the worries and eventual irritations of having them rooted beneath the roof. She asked again her legal status on the subject.
“Why surely, Lily, that end of it’s all right. You can do anything on earth with the place except mortgage it or sell it. Lily—how are things now? At this minute, I mean?”
“Nan wrote me this morning that she needs money. I’m drawing fifty and wiring it to her.”
Keith shoved a checkbook across the desk and handed her a pen. He knew her balance to be around ninety-two dollars. An idea occurred to him and he felt immeasurably easier.
“Look here, I’ve got it. I’ll fix up a chattel mortgage on some of the stuff. That’s something we can do. Just a small one, Lily, for running expenses right now.”
There it was: the things. But it wasn’t like selling them, and after some income started coming in, and after all, there was no other instant solution to (she admitted it) almost instant starvation and penury.
“Just a very small one, Lorrimer?”
“Very small. What’s Nan’s address in Detroit? I’ll take care of the wire for you.”
“Thank you. She’s staying at the Otis House.”
Lily gave him the address and wrote out the check.
Keith said diffidently, “How’s Nan doing, Lily?”
Her eyes were suddenly bleak.
“I don’t know. I made her promise to write if she needed money. That’s all I know, Lorrimer.”
“You do love her an awful lot, don’t you, Lily? I don’t blame you. Nan’s one of the nicest girls I know. I’ve wondered—”
He stopped abruptly and Lily said, “You’ve wondered what, Lorrimer?”
“I’m sorry, because it’s none of my business, except that I like Nan so much. I’ve wondered about Gene Forrest. Nobody could help seeing how far he was gone on Nan, and I rather thought she felt the same way about him.”
Lily’s expression changed subtly. Keith thought of it like something warm and fluid which all of a sudden hardens. It made him think of a movie show he had once been at when the machine suddenly stopped turning and left him there, looking at a still.
“Gene is so young, Lorrimer,” Lily said.
“He’s twenty-four.”
“That’s young.” She repeated the word with almost a stubborn fierceness. “Young.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I brought it up. I’ll get the papers ready. This is Friday. May I come up on Monday for you to sign them?”
“Of course, Lorrimer.”
“In the evening?”
“Surely, if you wish.”
They stood up, and Keith escorted her to the door of the bank. He stood watching her as she moved through the gloomy light and got into her car and drove away. He thought that that was why Lily had let Nan go to Detroit and become a stylist or window decorator or whatever it was: to get her away from Gene Forrest. It didn’t make sense.
Gene was all right. He was fine. His family was all right and he had cut out all his youthful capers and was doing a good job in Hendrickson’s law office and would someday be making real money. That was a funny crack about Gene being too young. Lily had meant it too. Now if Gene had been a lot older that would have made her attitude more reasonable.
Keith fleetingly hoped that Lily wasn’t going Russian in any morbidly inverted sense, the sort that was so impregnated in their plays. There was steel in her all right, laced through her lovely helpless softnesses. He’d rarely felt anything so inflexible as her attitude about Nan and Gene, and it was also there in her determination to go in for that hazardous bedding down of strangers. Well (he turned and presented his president face to the bank), you certainly never could tell about women.
Mrs. Moltenborry, one of their heaviest depositors, said for the second time, “It looks like a storm, Mr. Keith.”
Keith stared at her vacantly, beamed and floated on. She thought it a shame.
* * * *
Snow fell on Saturday.
Gene Forrest called on Lily during the afternoon. He had grown to consider his twenty-four years; since settling down at law at Hendrickson’s, as middle age. His face had a healthy Scotch look, wind-burned and full of heather, for he managed to get in considerable skiing and skating when not chasing around serving summonses or doing the dreary spadework on briefs. The tourist sign at the gates as he had been driving past the Elser estate had hit him like a blow. He just had to go in.
Sheffield smiled at him with pleasure as he took Gene’s hat and coat. Lily, in the living room, smiled at him, too, but not with so much apparent pleasure. Gene felt foolish now that he was inside and actually sitting down beside her. What could you say, except that he had seen the sign?
He said, “I saw the sign, Mrs. Elser.”
“Oh, yes. Then the snow hasn’t covered it?”
“No, it’s perfectly plain.”
“I had thought it might. A blizzard feeling, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. It’s little snow, very fine. It could turn into a blizzard.”
He felt hot and stuff, and his wind burn reddened more deeply. There were moments in a man’s life when you either exploded or didn’t, so he exploded. “Mrs. Elser, why don’t you like me?”
“But I do, Gene. I mean I’ve nothing whatever against you.”
“That’s a funny way of putting it. I don’t mean to be rude, Mrs. Elser. You know that.”
“Of course, Gene.”
“Everybody knows that the estate, well, wasn’t what everybody thought it was, but that sign, I mean nobody ever thought it was as bad as that. You can’t do it, Mrs. Elser.”
His intensity bewildered Lily.
“Tourists, Gene? They’re nothing to take so desperately.”
“No, Mrs. Elser, not tourists. Nan.”
“What on earth has Nan got to do with it?”
“You shan’t sacrifice her. I won’t let you.”
It had been a nervous, tiring day, and Lily’s head ached badly. She could not, she thought, put up with a scene that was evidently to be predicated upon the emotional tempests of young (and thwarted) love. She saw the synopsis, of course, in Gene’s earnest nut-brown eyes beneath their sun-and snow-bleached lashes: herself a tyrant mother offering Nan at the altar of some suitable, wealthy match, grinding the petals of true young love beneath the excuse of knowing what was best. Well, her head was in far too bad a state for any scene like that.
She said, “I know what you’re thinking, Gene, and it’s silly. I’ve no intention of forcing Nan into a rich match even if I could. Nan has an excellent mind of her own.”
“Then what was the matter with me?” It was a relief in a way to get down to brass tacks like this, after weeks and weeks of doubt and worry and of not knowing why or what. “Nan loved me, Mrs. Elser.”
“Did she say so?”
“No. I never asked her. I didn’t have to ask her, Mrs. Elser.” He added miserably, “You sent her to Detroit.”
“Gene, you must excuse me but I’m not feeling very well. I gave Nan permission to go to Detroit. I didn’t send her. You must believe that and, as I say, excuse me.”
He stood up, and his face was no longer ruddy but pretty white.
“You’ve got to forgive me for busting in like this. Maybe I was wrong. You get to thinking things are so sometimes just because you want them to be.”
He held out his hand.
“Good-by, Gene.”
“Good-by, Mrs. Elser.”
Lily felt empty and sad and lonely when Gene was gone, in the way she supposed all mothers must feel when they’ve had the miserable satisfaction of doing something which they know is right. Having forgotten (she supposed this too) thei
r own young assurances and fierce wants in the mellow smugness o£ the simple fact of maternity and the broadening, deadening wisdom that had come with age.
The snow fell all through the dreary afternoon, muffling and whitening the earth, and Sheffield said to Lily as he served dinner, “I’ve done turned on the light, ma’am.”
“Light?”
“On the signboard, ma’am.”
“Oh. Thank you, Sheffield.”
Of course Bellamy’s would have arranged a light when they had put the board up in the morning. So that the sign could be read by strangers who passed in the storm. It chilled Lily faintly to realize that the die was so definitely cast, that at any moment at all, from right now on all through the dark long night the bell might ring and a stranger would walk in with the right to pay for shelter, to go upstairs and do all of the things which were so commonplace in a guest: bathe, undress, go to bed.
Wander.
The word stuck, but Lily forced herself to think it out: wander about the house at night, perhaps leave it, on some mission which would be beyond her privilege to know, and then come back. In all the silent loneliness of the endless hours of the night the house would be the stranger’s to do in what he pleased.
The last mail came at nine. There was a letter in it from Nan, very brief, oddly restrained: the wire for fifty had been received; there were thanks, a warmingly deep expression of love and a completely obscure sentence which read, “Things just do happen, don’t they, Mother?” Across the bottom were the usual scratches of crosses, only there were more of them, and Lily thought they seemed feverish and as if they’d been crossed on in haste. Her head hurt as if it would split.
It snowed through Sunday, and by Monday a gale was whipping it into a blizzard, grounding all planes, blocking roads and thoroughly disrupting traffic. The afternoon held the somber qualities of night.
The doorbell rang at four.
* * * *
The stranger stood up as Lily entered the living room.
She saw that Sheffield had taken his hat and coat, leaving him a dark, stocky man in a pin-striped serge suit that slipped over the border line of conservative tailoring. Lily thought of his black hair as having a gangster gloss, and she thought that he could not spend very much of his time in the sun. His eyes, as she advanced closer to him, became more penetrating, and their expression of sharp concentration did not change as he held out his hand and his lips widened into a smile over strong, good teeth.
“Mrs. Elser? My name is Parne. Chester Parne. It’s quite a storm, isn’t it? I didn’t know you caught them like this in Ohio.”
Lily took his hand, finding it cold and hard in, curiously, a lifeless sort of way.
“We’ve had more snow this winter than in a good many years, Mr. Parne.” (What on earth did you say next? Baldly, the price? She had come to think during Saturday and Sunday and the earlier parts of today—all of which had been void of tourists—that none would apply, that the plan was a dud: a blessing that was far from being unmixed.) “Won’t you sit down?”
“Thank you.” Parne arranged himself with initial formality in a brocaded lounge chair, lifting his trouser legs to preserve their creases, then carefully placing his white, manicured fingers on his knees. “I hope you’ve room for me.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I’m heading East, but I ask you!”
His gesture encompassed impassable drifts and the biting, blinding coldness of the snow. Lily wanted to respond to his determined cordiality, feeling that it should have sprung from her rather than from him, but there were slender contradictions about him which stirred her uneasiness and set her nerves on edge. A cigar (she thought), a good hotel, T-bone smothered in onions and whisky straight, an accomplished skirmish with the girl at the newsstand, with the girl at the telephone switchboard—all of such things would have been more in keeping than a capricious decision to pass the night in problematical comfort and certain boredom in a masked house.
“There is an excellent hotel in town, Mr. Parne. I’m thinking of your dinner; We’ve unfortunately few facilities for entertaining—for serving, I mean, meals.”
Parne settled back in the lounge chair and sprawled his legs a little, looking Lily over: Not bad. Something like that tomato he’d put the bee on last year in Philadelphia. Very firm in all the right places and still upholstered. In fact very (to cut it short), very nice.
“Don’t give it a second thought, Mrs. Elser. I’m not hard to please. I always say that potluck sometimes produces the tastiest dish. Hotels!” Lacquered fingertips brushed them away. “Your sign assured me that I wouldn’t have to drive another foot. You’ve no idea how bad it is out and how glad I was to find shelter. What a magnificent secretary!”
Lily flushed slightly and said, “Yes, isn’t it? A Sheraton.”
Parne stood up and walked over to it, balancing expertly on the balls of his feet so that his movements seemed flowing. He rested fingertips on the wood’s patina, softly stroking it, while his penetrating eyes flicked everything over. He can’t, Lily told herself, walk off with that. But she knew there was nothing like that in his mind. Nothing (this conviction made it worse) so simple. A swift urgency to ask him to leave took shape, and she was trying to decide how to word it, how to enforce it, when Sheffield came in, looking futilely everlasting, like a pressed fern which any unaccustomed disturbance would crumble.
“The gentleman’s bags are upstairs, ma’am. Would you wish me to go with you, sir, while you put your car in the garage?”
Parne turned reluctantly from the Sheraton secretary (it seemed to absorb him) and looked intently at Sheffield.
Lily said with a sharp edge of desperation, “Mr. Parne isn’t staying. Mr. Parne will want dinner. He has been very kind about our lack of facilities, but I’m sure he will prefer the hotel.”
Years of an ingrained and profound sense of hospitality forced Sheffield to leap into the breech before, in miserable confusion, he realized the impertinence of his move.
“We’s a small roast for this evening, ma’am.”
Parne’s smile flashed at Lily, diligently encompassing her, broadly certain of its powers which had never (viz: tomato after tomato) let him down.
“What did I tell you, Mrs. Elser, about potluck?” The smile shifted to Sheffield. “Thank you very much. I hope the old bus will start. She’s been coddled by a winter in southern California. Well, I’ll be seeing you, Mrs. Elser.”
Lily heard Sheffield out in the entrance hall getting things from the coat cupboard. It was like a mire where every step to extricate yourself only got you in deeper. Mr. Parne’s bags were upstairs. Surely, in hotels, it must be done when any doubt existed. It would take ten minutes, possibly longer, to put the car away. She knew it stupidly vague, this expectancy, this dread that somewhere among Mr. Parne’s belongings some clue would exist to focus his contradictions into an understandable explanation, no matter how melodramatic.
Like a gun (shoulder holster and harness complete—Lily knew her Class Bs) or thousands in hot money or a sealed metal case: dope. She thought, I’m the only dope. I started this tourist idea and I’ll go through with it. The man’s probably a traveling salesman (no, he wasn’t) with a larded wife and six little larded brats all bottled in five rooms and bath in a suburb.
Lily thought this while her feet were carrying her up the wide curve of mahogany stairs. A case-hardened blonde was more likely, with a glass jaw and a speedily evanescing liver. She found Parne’s bags in the end most room of the north wing. Her faint hope that they would be locked vanished. Sheffield had opened them and they gaped at Lily from a luggage stand, all bright new pigskin.
Perhaps if she just ran her fingers through their contents carefully, just felt. She did this, and everything felt like clothes except for a leather case which held toilet articles. No gun, no hot money and no dope. Nothing whatever to pin a
dismissal on, to place Mr. Parne among that sinister fraternity where she felt he belonged. Faintly, from downstairs, came the sound of a closing door.
The heavy front door.
* * * *
Lorrimer Keith called at eight.
Sheffield told him while he took off his hat and coat of the advent of Mr. Parne. Sheffield regretfully feared, remembering Mr. Parne’s attack upon the roast and Mr. Parne’s elegant little finger movements while sipping from a glass, that Mr. Parne was not quite folks. Mr. Parne’s table talk, too, had at moments been weighted with an innuendo more suitable to certain rustic odic murals than to the gentility. Colonels, of course, sometimes had a gusto for that sort of thing, but not men of the breed of Parne.
Keith’s hair, had he been pelted, would have risen straight on end when he went into the living room and Lily introduced him to Parne. How like her (Keith thought, briefly gripping the white, dead-like hand) to retain her charm of social courtesy even for this porker who was paying for his food and bed.
“Wretched night, Mr. Parne.”
“You’ve said it, Keith. I certainly thank the little lady here for having a place to hole into. Local?”
“Oh—yes, I live in town.”
“What’s your line?”
“Banking.”
“I get it.” Parne smiled jovially and patted Keith on the back. “A Republican. Well, it takes all kinds. Me, I’m in leather. I’ll use your library to get off some mail if it’s all right with you Mrs. Elser.”
“Certainly. The stationery—”
“Take it easy. I’ll find it. Glad to meet you, Keith.”
They waited until Parne’s wake was gone.
“Lily—”
“I know, Lorrimer, but what could we expect? It’s all part of the game. I’ll shower you with clichés in a minute, like taking the bitter with the sweet.”
“Lily, you can’t be here alone with that man.”
“But I’m not.”
“Oh, those two.” Keith shook Sheffield and Delilah out of the picture. “Look here, I’ll get hold of somebody—I’ll send my housekeeper up to stay with you.”