She was delighted with his praise. She freely admitted she felt smug and conceited at the way it had gone, and that pleased him, too. Of course she did; what human creature wouldn’t?
And then, quite without warning, he leaned forward across the table.
“Vee,” he said gently. “Are you happy? Is there something I could help you with? You know I am trained to help, sometimes at least.”
She made none of the startled gestures, the immediate denials. She looked down at the brandy ballon in her hand, and for a time seemed not to have heard his question. He did not repeat it.
“Why d you think I am not, Franz?”
“Many things made me wonder, even when you were at Ascona with us. Your face sometimes, a way of looking far off into the trees and not knowing that then a sadness was upon you. The fact, too, that you rather shut Christa off once, when she asked about your illness—”
“Did I? I didn’t know I had been so apparent.”
“And today at the airport, before you saw me,” he went on. “I looked at you, and you seemed tired and as if you were not so cheerful these past weeks. There is a certain tension in your manner sometimes—for the eye that can see.”
She looked away. These last weeks had not been cheerful, no. When she had left Ascona, some formless sense of drifting arose in her, as if the visit to them and the anticipation before it had been a buoy which was finally floated out from under her. The old agony had not come back in its terrifying strength and tenacity—but she lived again with the depletion, the lonely cipher of emptiness where once were love and passion and dreams of a specific happiness. Then she would think of Jasper again, of The Jonathan, and the walk through the night, the firelit room, and the elation and sureness. Then she would remember the telegram putting off the trip to Connecticut for just two days—and the sick knowledge in her heart that something- foreboding and terrible hung over them…
She would fight off the memories. She would cut them clean with the scalpel of will power and determination. But then a few hours later, they would be putting out new cells of life, like some crafty, stubborn cancer that spread beyond the surgeon’s power to halt it.
It was not as it had been; she knew that. The pain was no longer the unbearable pain, the unendurable heartbreak. Her new clarity, new peace, had not deserted her completely.
“No, I’m not so very happy,” she answered at last. “But there’s nothing to do but wait it out some more.”
He nodded. Some subtle change had come over him. He was just a little aloof, impersonal. He did not speak immediately.
“You know, Vee, the full analytic process is a very long, difficult one,” he said at last, almost as if he were lecturing in a classroom. “One cannot, that is, the patient cannot, build up neurotic patterns for ten, twenty, thirty years and then find quick magic in an analyst’s office to remake those patterns in a few hours. There is no magic. Will power won’t do it, making New Year’s resolutions won’t do it. No, it is a long process, tedious, often most painful.”
She was interested. Apart from Ann Willis, she had never known anyone who had been analyzed. Ann had changed, her life was happier than it was when they had first met, and her marriage more secure. But Ann never talked much about the period of analysis itself.
“But apart from people who need the help of full analytic treatment,” Franz went on, “there often are times in anybody’s life when tragic things have happened perhaps, when one seems for a while quite—how shall I say?—quite rudderless and adrift.” He saw her eyes close quickly, but he made no comment. He saw, too, her fingers press more tightly around the brandy glass, “In such times, often it is enough to have a few hours’ discussion with a psychoanalyst. Sometimes he can help one to gain new insight, and often then the whole situation eases.”
He paused. She raised her eyes, found his alive with his sympathy, dark with compassion. She found a lump in her throat that would not be swallowed out of existence. Compassion, understanding of another’s heart—she had never had them from Jas. Desire, yes, and admiration and sometimes fun and gaiety, but never this silent look which said, “I know it hurts, and I hurt with you.”
Suddenly she put her hand out and covered his where it lay on the table. He turned his palm up, and held her hand in his own.
“Franz, I—you can’t know how just your caring—” She broke off. Her voice was not steady enough; the thick sound was in it. He waited for her to go on; his hand spoke to her of his readiness. When he saw that she could not, he released her hand, and sat back again.
“The few hours’ discussion with the analyst,” he said, as if there had been no break in his thought, “can sometimes recognize and classify the actions out of which arose the disaster, can show them as part of a characteristic pattern perhaps, either in you or—or in the other person. I am only guessing, you understand. But if it should be that, then at least the sense of the accidental meaninglessness tends to disappear.”
“Don’t, Franz,” she whispered. “Don’t. Not now. I want to—but I just can’t. Sometime I will tell you. But not now. It would just stir it up—and I’m forgetting it.”
“I never would urge you, Vee. But I have wondered whether—perhaps with your illness there were not some profound emotional shock—” He stopped abruptly. “This is enough now. If you ever think I can help you—”
“Oh, I know that. You are so—” She broke off. In her mind a surprised voice said to her, “You could fall in love with him—don’t do that—stop that.” Aloud she said, “Who’d ever have dreamed we’d all get to be real friends?”
He looked at her quizzically. Her face flushed, but she smiled again; as if some crisis had just passed.
“I will tell you a secret,” he said. “Long ago, back in Vienna, when Mrs. Willis first wrote that she was turning our affidavits over to a friend of hers, I was very much disappointed and let down. ‘A stranger?’ I thought. ‘Oh, that is too bad.’ ”
They laughed. The question about Vee seemed dismissed.
“But we’re not strangers now, Vee,” he went on.
“No. We’re not strangers now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AUGUST DAWNED SULTRY and hot all over Europe. It was as though the war clouds that everybody spoke of were physical phenomena muffling the earth, choking off the free winds from the mountains and the seas. Across the ocean, too, the clamping, muggy heat nagged at men’s nerves, already chipped from the inner onslaught to which they had so long been subjected.
In New York, high up in his hotel apartment, Jasper Crown sat over the pile of morning newspapers. He had torn small items from the Times and the Tribune. Then he turned to the tabloids. In each he came to a page that carried his picture. The story with each picture was less than a hundred words long. Merely the fact. Thank God for that.
Suddenly he scooped the papers up and hurled them to the floor. He became aware that his jaw muscles ached, and he dropped his lower jaw, so that his teeth were no longer gritted against each other. This thing was no surprise, not any longer. But it still could fill him with a roaring fury.
Weeks ago, two months ago, when his lawyer had first told him of the action Beth was bringing, he had guffawed in scorn. But his dough-faced lawyer had listened to his scorn and derision and remained serious. She could do it. It wasn’t an ordinary case, no; it didn’t happen often, no; but she had evidence in writing, to back up the testimony she’d give. And her own lawyer in Nevada was a very able man. He would not have taken it on if he didn’t think there were at least a better-than-even chance to win for her and set the decree aside. And then, there were the imponderables—if the court believed her story, if the Court were disposed toward her—
“You’d better tell me all the facts yourself, Mr. Crown, otherwise I don’t know how we can counter this.”
He had thrown him out indignantly, if words could throw a man out of an office. But two days later he had sent for him again. Then he had told him, with reservations abou
t names and motives of course, the basic facts of the whole ghastly thing. Technically she was right about October first. But technicalities weren’t ever the whole story. He could merely deny her allegation of fraud—no, damn it, there was the letter he had been softheaded enough to dash off in a florist’s shop. Well, then, he could even get hold of some girl to swear that on October first—pay her five thousand dollars and have her swear that she was pregnant then, when he had seen Beth the day before she left for Reno.
“You’re a famous man, Mr. Crown. Pretty dangerous to give the court any sort of fancy story under oath. If it were proved false—” He hesitated. “As for the girl idea—that would lay you open to blackmail forever. And if it ever hit the papers—”
The dough-faced lawyer went on, Jas remembered, to expound the law. He had wired their own Reno lawyers two days ago, asked them to look into the whole matter of precedent and the like. It might be that Mrs. Crown would have to prove that there had been positive elements of duress as well as the fraud perpetrated that she claimed. It might even be that she would be advised to resort to equitable relief in the New York courts. “That would probably mean a great deal of publicity for you, though, Mr. Crown.”
The very idea of a public hashing out of all the details had rattled his nerves like dice in a box. And the final recourse of an appeal to the higher courts if she did win, with the even greater publicity—no, it was a luxury he was too famous to afford.
In the end, he had seen that he had better admit he was in a box and follow what his expert counsel advised. There was, after all, only a slim chance that Beth could win.
Well, yesterday a telegram had told him she had won. Last night he had waited up for all the first editions, but there was nothing in them. Now, here it was. Nothing out-and-out embarrassing. Just DIVORCE DECREE SET ASIDE, and details of place and dates.
God damn it, it was enough. He had spent many bitter hours figuring out the workings of Beth’s mind that had brought this revenge about. Revenge, he was sure, was at the bottom of it. Revenge and jealousy. And tigerish resentment that he had wanted the divorce when she had not. Now she had fixed him. She had found out he was not married and had no child, and then she had seen the way to fix him. He could almost hear her saying, “Even if it’s true—which I don’t believe—that he can have children, he’ll have to come back to me if he really wants them. Otherwise he’ll never have any at all.”
Well, he would never have any at all. He would kill her if he ever so much as laid eyes on her now. And that meant—oh, Christ, that meant that now, forever—
Suddenly he clamped his hands over his face. His fingers dug into his scalp just above the hairline; his thumbs hooked hard around his ears. Inside his palms, his face contorted.
“Dear Jesus, I didn’t realize it was the only chance I was ever to have,” his mind’s voice whimpered to him, “I didn’t think that, I didn’t ever think that.”
Over the bell in the hall downstairs, the sliver of an engraved card read Mrs. Jasper Crown. Beth was back in New York, in another apartment that was similar to, but a little larger than, the one she had had before.
She was seeing some of her old friends again, calling them up one by one and asking them over. Only to one of them did she break down and tell the whole story of the action to set the divorce aside.
This friend had never met Jasper Crown. Though she had given Beth her promise not to repeat the story to a soul, she had always had a private rule to keep no secrets from her husband. That night she told him.
He was a junior partner in Mandreth, Drake, and Niles. He had never met Crown either, but he knew the inside financial angle on his Midaslike genius. The idea that a man who could not have children should stoop to such lies and fraud and pretend that he was like other less sensational but more masculine men, that was really a honey of a story, He had promised his wife to keep it to himself.
But one day a week or so later, he had four old-fashioneds with one of the other partners.
That partner was old Mandreth himself, who had always resented the way Crown vaunted his own youthfulness. The story charmed him, in a neat way. A few days later he had a telephone call from an old business acquaintance. Timothy Grosvenor was in town and wanted to see him. Mandreth had put him off when he’d been in town the last time, but now he was more gracious. Poor Grosvenor had had a pretty tough year, trying to get started all over again in the radio business, this time on the Coast. They met at Mandreth’s club, and it was obvious that Grosvenor was still burned up over what had once happened between him and Crown.
“That bastard Crown,” Grosvenor exploded quietly when he had heard the whole story. “So that explains his inhuman, insane lust for fame and power. I always knew there must be something queer there.”
Then Grosvenor’s face had taken on some sort of remote look, as if he were planning something. For an uneasy moment, Mandreth wished he had not confided in him. He exacted a second promise to keep it under the rose.
At the Stork Club that night, Timothy Grosvenor renewed acquaintance with one of the better-known tabloid columnists. He handed along the newest yarns from Hollywood and then said, “And this one is too messy to use exactly, but…”
By the middle of August Jasper Crown began to have the feeling that people were looking at him in some odd, speculative way. Not everybody, of course, not the clerks and stenographers, but the executives, the stockholders, the people who counted with him. One day he walked unexpectedly into Giles Craven’s office, and Frank Terson slashed a sentence off in the middle and actually stuttered for a moment or two. And one night he went into a bar for one of the solitary nightcaps he’d fallen into the way of taking, and he saw a newspaperman look at him and then look quickly away and say something to his companion. He’d noticed that kind of thing several times recently.
People always talked about him, he knew that, talked of his success as head of the company and also as one of the most famous news analysts on the air. But this was different. There was something silent and furtive about this, not the open admiration he had become used to.
He would shrug it off, but burrlike it clung, anyway. He wanted to ask somebody about it, but there was no one he trusted enough now to lay himself open to the charge of being nervy and oversensitive. There was no one he was really intimate with, anyhow. That little blonde he’d started with a couple of months ago, yes, that was intimacy in the clinical sense. But she was good for nothing except bed. He never talked to her about anything that mattered. Oh, the hell with it all; having a divorce decree set aside was unusual enough, so they were gossiping about that, and the hell with it.
Then one day during a business luncheon, it happened. Everybody had had a second round of drinks to loosen things up, for it promised to be a fairly boring session with a couple of out-of-town station owners who were signing on with JCN. With the second drink, somebody, told a limerick, and then the dirty stories started. Giles and Frank seemed to enjoy them, but Jasper prayed that the food would come soon, and let him end the “social” part of the meal.
“Well, there was this poor guy named Child,” one of the visitors started, after the preceding joke had earned its salacious laughter. He was grinning over it himself, and he slapped the table, to show that an uproarious one was coming. “And this guy, see, he’d been married fourteen years but couldn’t have any children. The poor bastard was as sterile as a piece of gauze.” Giles Craven kicked the speaker’s shin under the table. Jasper saw him do it.
Frank Terson leaned forward. “I think we’d better start the business talk now,” he said smoothly. “It’s getting on. Giles, why don’t you explain—”
Giles began to speak rapidly. He looked anxiously at Terson and then on off into space. Neither of them looked at Jasper.
He sat with them all throughout the luncheon, playing his part, saying his words. But within him a disease ate at his vitals. So that was what everybody was whispering. Somehow they had heard more than the bare facts the pap
ers had printed, and they had built this out of it and were spreading it around with the savage glee that always went into any attack on great public figures. “Sterile as a piece of gauze—”
“But, Christ, it’s not even true now,” his mind shouted. “For ten years I thought it was true, and all that time it was a secret. Now it’s not true—it’s not—God damn it, I can have a child like any other man.”
But he could never prove that as long as he lived. Forever he would know that people around him were whispering to each other.
Without waiting for coffee, he made some rapid excuses about another appointment and left the table. Outside he began to walk, striding along in the bursting August heat. The city’s air washed heat into the very streets and buildings. But he did not know it, he did not feel it. He felt only the scabrous, diseased thing in his flesh and knew there was no surgery in the world that could rid him of it now. He would have to live with it forever.
He knew that she was in New York again. He wanted to find her, go and confront her, beat her with his rage for this betrayal to their past. But he could see how it would be, her inert body seated before him, her stubborn silence. He could even hear her voice saying, when she finally spoke, “But, Jas, it was the story of my life, too; I only told it to one or two people. It belongs to me, too.”
He walked on harder, faster. He couldn’t get away from the sick torture of it, of knowing that he wouldn’t ever have another chance.
Beth had guaranteed that; she would hang on until she died. He was a man who had always had every chance he wanted. But now, Jesus, now this ruthless woman had betrayed him.
Even in the morning, the late August heat lay over Paris in motionless weight. Vee had arrived late the night before from Amsterdam. From her shaded room at the Hôtel du Rhin, she could look down on the Place Vendôme and see sharp-edged lights and darks of shadow, announcing another day of cloudless glare. She wondered how comfortable the Vederles were at the Hotel Pérey. The Cité du Retiro was a pleasant inner square, tucked in off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but in this windless heat, it could not be turning out well for them.
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