"I see. And how will that make me look, when your announcement is made—the only one of the four with the egotism to insist on the use of his own moniker!"
"I don't think anyone would give it a thought. We needn't make simultaneous announcements of the four grants."
"But people will be bound to associate them!"
Dexter was nonplused by this wholly unexpected objection. "I'll be glad to do anything you suggest to avoid it."
"I don't suggest, Fairchild. I stipulate! Here are my terms. My funding of the Suffolk home will be subject to this double condition: not only must it be given my name; the other three homes must be given the names of their donors!"
"But, my dear Cranberry, that may cost us the Colonel's grant! I had already suggested that his home be named for him, and he said it was against his principles."
"Then you'll have to persuade him to change his principles."
"And if I fail?"
"Then you'll have one less home, that's all."
"But, really, I cannot see how the others will affect you. I beg you to consider..."
"You have heard my terms, Fairchild. Good morning. If I see you back here tomorrow, I shall assume they have been met."
Dexter felt dazed as he made his way out of the store. He could hardly believe that he was actually going to have to go to the other donors with so unbecoming a proposition. And would they be big enough to make such a sacrifice? Did he even want them to? The counters that he passed seemed to be overflowing with luxuries; the well-dressed female customers pushed past each other to be the first to buy. He thought again of Rosalie's letter about the Vermont boy. What right did they have to ask mere boys to pour out their young blood on the red dirt of Virginia while these sharp-toothed old harpies jostled each other in the hunt for silks and satins? He felt his fingers tighten on the handle of his cane. If he didn't get out of there soon, there might be a scene like Christ with the money changers in the temple.
He decided to call at 417 Fifth Avenue and ask Mr. Handy's advice. He had not seen the old gentleman for a week. Perhaps he would be able to persuade the Colonel to allow his name to be used. But Mr. Handy, when met, was not in a mood to talk about anything but his remarkable experience over the preceding weekend. He had been just going out when Dexter rang the doorbell, but he immediately turned back into the house, guiding his son-in-law by the elbow to the billiard room, where he made him sit down and listen.
"So delighted you called, dear boy! I came up from New Jersey this morning after the most fantastic weekend I've ever had in my life. I've been dying to tell someone about it. You know my cousin Rusty Hatch. Well, only last Sunday he made Ward McAllister a bet of twenty-five hundred dollars that he couldn't take a deserted country house in Bernardsville and fix it up in five days' time so that he could entertain a house party of twelve for the weekend. And it had to be a weekend, too, with all the trimmings: service, horses, food, wines, music, the works. The loser would pay all expenses, in addition to the bet. Well, Rusty should have known Ward better. McAllister went to work, and, by Jove, a magic castle materialized! I was lucky enough to be one of the favored guests. Lily and Rutgers were there, too. You should have seen it, Dexter! On Saturday afternoon there was a drag hunt for the younger fry, and that night a dinner of eight courses and six wines followed by a string quartet and then dancing! Rusty didn't even wait for Sunday before conceding. At midnight, as we all cheered, he raised his champagne glass to toast Ward and write him his check."
Dexter gazed at the old man as if seeing him for the first time. "I must write Rosalie about it," he said in a flat tone. "I'm sure she'll be amused."
Mr. Handy coughed. "Of course, it might not seem as amusing to someone on a hospital ship," he cautioned. "One tends to lose one's perspective in the face of so much suffering."
"You don't think, sir, that Mr. McAllister may have lost some of his?"
"And your father-in-law's?" Mr. Handy's temper had immediately exploded. "I assume his is gone, too! Well, let me tell you, young man, that you don't win wars by pulling long faces. I've done my share in this conflict, and if I choose to relax over a weekend I think I'm entitled to do so without being made to feel a heartless old fool by my own family!"
"Mr. Handy!" Dexter exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "Let me apologize, sir. Please! I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm tired. Perhaps I've been working too hard."
Mr. Handy, immediately mollified, rose to place a pardoning hand on his shoulder. "I think you have, dear boy. Now I really look at you, you do seem a bit peaked. Go home and get some rest. Go to a music hall. Remember what makes Jack a dull boy. It must be lonely for you at home without Rosalie."
"The Pierce is due here tomorrow."
"That's fine! We'll have a party! Do you meet her at the dock?"
"No. She likes me to wait till all the patients are disembarked."
"Very well. Give her all my love. And bring her to dinner here tomorrow, will you?"
Dexter returned to his office, where he had supper at his desk, working late. By the time he got home, both boys were already in bed, so he retired, but could not sleep. Lying awake in the dark he could make no sense out of an image that kept coming back and back to him. It was of himself, alone, standing on top of one of those strange pyramids discovered in Yucatan. He seemed to be arrayed in a robe of some stiff outlandish cloth and to be waving his arms to a multitude below. He shook his head repeatedly to dispel the crazy vision.
And then, suddenly, sitting up in bed with a start, he recalled the talk with Rosalie in which she had likened him to a high priest. So that was the image! Of himself, at the top of the steps of the pyramid, swaying in a sort of crazy dance, brandishing a knife, calling for human victims. But none would come. He saw that as he lay back on his pillow. The people below were united now. They would creep slowly up the pyramid stairway, step by step. And when they had reached the top, they would throw him down, so that his body, like a big floppy doll, would turn over and over, bouncing from step to step, his skull crushed, the poor rag piled at last in a little heap at the bottom, to the squeals and laughter of all.
Exhausted, he fell asleep.
24
THE Franklin Pierce, white with tall black funnels and the red sign "U.S. HOSPITAL" painted on her fender, lay lashed to a narrow pier, like the carcass of a leviathan. Dexter could discern no sign of life on board except for a sailor on guard at the gangway, and he deduced that the sick and the dead had already been removed.
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Fairchild's aboard," the sailor answered him. "Miss Handy went ashore an hour ago, but your wife says she can never get her paperwork done until the ship's cleared. May I say that we're all great admirers of Mrs. Fairchild, sir?"
"No more than I!"
He was directed to a passageway at the end of which he found a small office and Rosalie, dressed in gray, working at her desk. She turned around without starting when she heard him, but as she took in his pallor she jumped up with a little cry.
"Dexter, you look done in! Are you ill?"
At this he felt at last the full impact of his fatigue. "I guess I'd better sit down." He seemed to drop into the chair by her desk. She scanned his countenance anxiously.
"Can I get you something? What's wrong?"
"No, no." He held up a hand to stay her ministrations. "I'll be fine. I'm a bit tired, that's all. I think it's the shock of this business about your father's weekend."
"Father's weekend? What on earth are you talking about? Don't tell me the old boy's been kicking up his heels!"
Dexter, frowning at her lightness, proceeded gravely to relate the story of the McAllister-Hatch bet and how it was won. He thought that she looked at him rather strangely as she listened.
"And that's what's upset you?" she asked.
"Well, doesn't it you?"
"Oh, I'm used to Father. You should be too, by now."
"But in wartime, Rosalie!"
She shrugged. "What can you do about it? He's a pret
ty old dog to learn new tricks."
He thought he detected a totally new tone in her voice in so referring to her parent. "I suppose you're right. But it seems to have knocked the stuffing out of me. Last night I kept dreaming about it. Waking up and then dreaming about it again. I saw myself somehow stretching my arms out, and reaching and reaching, and I seemed always just about to snatch the laurel of victory from the hand of a kind of marble effigy—the statue of a woman, I think—a Mrs. Stowe or a Mrs. Howe perhaps—and then suddenly there was a jerk at my jacket, and there was your father, with vine leaves in his hair and holding a jug, a veritable old Bacchus, pulling me back and crying, 'You'll be late for the party, my boy!' And then I'd snarl at him, like an angry dog, but he'd just cackle with laughter and make me feel a fool. Oh, such a fool! The last time I actually woke up sobbing!"
"Poor Dexter. Imagine! Mrs. Howe holding the laurel. What a picture! But you shouldn't have made such an idol of Father. You forget, he's an old man."
"So was Cato."
"Yes, so was Cato. Well?"
"But don't you care if the war is lost?"
"Will that be the result of Papa's weekends?"
"I suppose I must seem half-crazy to you," he said, with a deep sigh. "But then you never believed in the war."
"I didn't, in the beginning. But I think I've changed."
"You have?"
She seemed to be considering how to put it. "I guess I don't know just what people mean by believing in it. I believe we had better win it."
"What has changed you?"
"The cost of it. The ghastly cost. I can't bear to have it all in vain. I had thought, if we could only avoid bloodshed, the Southerners themselves might ultimately see that slavery wasn't going to work. But now, with all the bitterness of the war, who knows? And when I think of the thousands of young men butchered and worse than butchered..." For a moment she closed her eyes. "No, we can't go back to slavery after all that. We have to go on." Her voice rose to something like a wail. "Even if Fred has one day to be part of it!"
He gazed at her admiringly. "Well, nobody can say you've lost your nerve." And then, suddenly the room seemed to spin. "What's going on? Are we ... are we under way?"
"Dexter! You are ill!"
When he recovered consciousness he was lying in a bunk in a semidarkened cabin, aware of being clad in pajamas. Next, he became conscious of a small porthole just above his head. Then he heard Rosalie's voice at his side.
"You're going to be perfectly all right, dear. You're in one of the Pierces cabins. You fainted, and we put you to bed. You may have a mild case of pneumonia. You're going to stay right here where I can look after you."
He turned his head to look at her. "Won't the ship sail? Won't I be using a bunk needed for a soldier?"
"She won't sail for at least a week. By then you'll be ready to go home."
"But won't I be interfering with your work?"
"A husband comes first. Even in wartime."
He closed his eyes, with a feeling of blessed relief, and slept again.
The next day passed in a kind of euphoria. Being on a vessel gave him a sense of utter remoteness. He was detached from work, from war, from friends and family, from everything and everyone but Rosalie. And she was a different Rosalie, stronger, firmer, more solicitous, kinder. He basked in rest and coolness. He would lie happily alone, when she was busy elsewhere, and listen to the slap of water against the ship's sides and the cry of the gulls. He almost felt that he did not want to get well.
They began to talk more as his health improved. They discussed the trips of the Pierce and his work on the commission. Would the war be the making of Joanna? Might she even yet marry? She told him that Jules Bleeker was writing a pro-Confederate column for a London newspaper and that he and Annie had split up.
"Yes, I heard. Charley told me. She'll never stay with any man."
"She's as giddy in love as Father is with his parties!"
"Ah, but your father works for the cause." After a pause, he continued in a different tone. "Rosalie?"
"Yes, dear?"
"May I ask you something serious? Do you think you and I could ever go back?"
"To where?"
"To the way we were when we were first married."
She gave the sheet she was folding a sharp pat. "Should you really want to? Were we so fine then?"
"Of course, I know you never really approved of me. Not from the very beginning. You thought I was worldly and snobbish."
"You were certainly worldly. I'm not so sure you were snobbish. And I think I might not have minded your worldliness—after all, my background was not exactly ascetic—if I had thought it was sincere. Like Papa's. But there was always something ... well, artificial about it."
"You mean I put it on?"
"In a way. As if you were under some kind of a dark duty to be worldly."
"But that sounds crazy!"
"Maybe you were a bit crazy. I was even sometimes half-afraid you might convert me! Because there was something fanatical about you. Everything had to be so black or white."
"Well, you won't have to worry about my blacks and whites anymore," he said ruefully. "They have all blurred."
"No doubt you'll repaint them again neatly enough when you recover."
"Oh, Rosalie! You're laughing at me again."
"Not really. I'm laughing at both of us. My blacks and whites were as bad as yours. Worse! Oh, I was such a prig, Dexter! So sure of my sincerity, my honesty, my deep, deep heart! But I've learned on this vessel that nobody needs my silly heart. I'm just as useful as I am competent, not a whit more. And that made me do some thinking about hearts. What right did I have to think I had any more than you? Any more than Annie?"
"Oh, you have more than Annie."
"Annie started life with a heart. Only perhaps it got smothered somewhere along the line. Yours, my dear, is fine. You mustn't worry about it."
"I'd like to think we could go back."
She rose. "I think that's enough for now. We must remember you're still a convalescent. I'll put this quilt over the porthole. You should rest, my dear."
When she had done this, she leaned down in the semidarkness to kiss him on the forehead. It was more than the kiss of a devoted nurse, if perhaps less than that of a devoted wife. But he felt that it might do—and certainly that he would try with everything he had to make it do. When the door was closed behind her, he smiled to himself at the idea that his old ego was coming back with his health. He was going to insist that she love him at least as much as she had loved the war!
25
ROSALIE was discouraged about Dexter's convalescence. He remained for five days on the Pierce and then spent a week in bed at Union Square. The pneumonia seemed to take care of itself, but his spirits continued low. When he got up he would amble slowly about the second story, standing for minutes on end staring down into the street. His doctor told him that pneumonia was a well-known depressant, but even so, his languor and apathy gave her concern.
Dexter himself insisted that he was perfectly all right and that she could now return to her vessel, but she suspected that he dreaded her going. She discussed this with Charley Fairchild one afternoon in the front hall, as he was leaving, after visiting Dexter upstairs.
"You're really going back?" he asked in dismay.
"Well, not till Dexter's well enough, of course. But in time I think I must. Don't you?"
"I'll be perfectly frank with you, Rosalie. I don't think Dexter can manage without you. He doesn't seem to be able to organize himself. He's been working much too hard. None of the other commissioners put in the hours he does. They all have their own businesses to carry on. But Dexter doesn't even come to our office anymore."
"I thought you didn't need him," Rosalie responded in surprise. "I thought you were handling everything so beautifully! And let me say at once, Charley, that I consider that the men who are keeping the businesses running for their partners in war work, are contributing just
as much to the cause! They will be the unsung heroes of the war."
"That's all very well." Charley showed little enthusiasm for her endorsement. "And I know Dexter likes to think I'm carrying his load. But the truth is, I'm not. He's a far better lawyer than I. The clients will stick along with me for a while, but if it's a long war, we're going to lose a lot of them. Dexter owes it to himself and his family not to let the practice he took so many years to build up go to ruin."
"But what can I do about that?"
"If you're home, you can make him go to the office at least two or three days a week. That should do the trick. I've tried, and he won't listen to me. But he can't disregard you, when you're pleading for yourself and the boys!"
Rosalie felt the coils of his argument closing uncomfortably around her. "But how can I use a selfish argument in times like these? Besides, would it be fair? I can't pretend that the boys and I depend altogether on his law practice. Dexter knows I have substantial expectations."
Charley frowned, as if to shield her from embarrassment. "That may be more questionable than you think. As a member of the firm that represents your father I should not make any disclosure of his affairs, but I think, under the circumstances, I may be justified in telling you that he has made some unfortunate investments in the past three years and that he is living well beyond his income."
"But that's terrible! You mean he might die and leave Joanna strapped?"
"It's nice of you to think only of Joanna."
"Well, she's the one who'd be worst off. She has no trade, unless she goes in for professional nursing. There really ought to be some way that parents who accept the sacrifices of grown-up children should obligate themselves to look after them!"
"You mustn't be too hard on your father. He's always been an optimist. He has no concept of how much he's spending."
"Then someone should tell him!"
"Who? A daughter who's off at sea? But the really important thing is for you to get Dexter back to work. Both at the Sanitary Commission and at his law office. Forgive me for saying it, Rosey, but I can't help feeling that a man of Dexter's capability is going to be more valuable to the Sanitary Commission than one more nurse. Valuable though I'm sure that nurse is."
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