Tomorrow!

by Philip Wylie

  “I know! But—”

  “A day,” his mother said firmly, “is surely coming when you cannot temporize. You’re well over thirty, Kit, and I’m aging . . .” She looked away a third time, her large face working a little. “Besides—”

  “Besides?” If there was to be a new element in this old discussion he wanted to know it.

  “Do you know, Kit, the Adams girl tried to get money from me, again?”

  “Lord! I wish I’d never seen that babe!”

  “You did, though. A bit too much of her. If you had been married, Kit, she wouldn’t have hag the gall—or the public sympathy—” He laughed. “Isn’t that a shade unethical, Muzz? To advocate marriage as a cover for carnal sin?”

  “Unethical?” She tasted the word as if it were foreign. Her large eyes glinted. “Possibly.

  But dam’ practical.”

  “Have you ever thought that if I did marry—Lenore, say—and I’ll honestly confess I’ve done some thinking about it—maybe she’d dislike being a mere brood mare plus a convenient dodge?”

  “Lenore,” said his mother, “can be handled.”

  “That’s just what she can’t be. Since you seem so sure, I’ll tell you this much more. I don’t believe she’d accept me.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “More or less—and in a way.”

  “That sounds,” his mother answered, “like one hell of a halfhearted proposal!”

  “Wasn’t a proposal. Just an inquiry. I said a few days back, maybe a couple of weeks, what if I asked her to marry me?”

  “And she said?”

  He gave a loud laugh. “She said, ‘Drive me home!’”

  Mrs. Sloan’s eyes were briefly amused. “That all?”

  “Not quite. She said if I were the last man on earth, why then, maybe, for the sake of the species, she’d consent.”

  “Spirit.”

  “Plenty. Maybe too much. If you want to know, Muzz, I’m fairly crazy about that girl, and she is totally uncrazy about me. I’ve tried all the tricks, and first base in still the other side of the moon.”

  Mrs. Sloan considered that for a full minute. “Do you think you would marry her, if she did assent?”

  “Search me. Maybe.”

  “Suppose I added a mother’s urging?”

  “You can’t hit women on the head with a club and drag them home any more. That’s just an old New Yorker joke.”

  “An odd thing has happened at the bank,” she said, her tone altered.

  Kit instantly understood the slight change; it showed in her physical bearing. There was tension, now almost visible—a bringing together of her features, a tightening of muscles in her big shoulders, a slight narrowing of eye. If cats allowed themselves to become gross with fat, such cats, seeing prey or suspecting some distant motion betokened it, would gather themselves that way.

  The fact was, Kit understood more of what had been happening in this dinner hour than he showed his mother or even let himself know. He had resisted her efforts to marry him to suitable girls for numerous years. The effort had involved a variety of females in different places—Manhattan debs and Long Island finishing-school graduates, suitable young women from Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. Girls of good or prominent or rich family, met on transatlantic liners and at watering places abroad. A lovely countess who was only nineteen, in Paris; the daughter of a Knight, in London.

  He knew this constant matchmaking activity was born of her indomitable desire to see her wealth managed by grandchildren bred, presumably under her aegis, for the job; and he could infer from the number of girls and young women presented to him that his mother did not feel love needed to be involved in a match. Perhaps his father’s derelictions were responsible for his mother’s feelings or lack of feelings. Perhaps she had grown to believe that woman as Wife was more institution than individual, owing to her own almost lifelong acceptance in that way.

  The effect on Kit had been to make him contemptuous of the other sex; he usually thought and acted as if women were a dime a hundred. His mother’s constant production of them, his own incessant petty affairs with them, had also convinced him that the coin of good looks, wealth, a glamorous background and a reputation as a hero—attributes he possessed, or appeared to possess, in plentitude—was the coinage which bought women. The person behind did not matter, women apparently felt. That, in its turn, damaged the remnants of his ego.

  For his ego, however large and confident it seemed to the world, was undermined, though he had repressed the fact that by the standards of other men he was a coward. He affected the casual, the debonair, the slangy and insouciant attitude he had seen amongst rich young men in many lands. But Kit’s was not the real posture of witty worldliness; that requires erudition and humor. He had neither. His efforts to be offhand, to understate, to be trivial where large issues were involved and so to exhibit wisdom by hiding its evidence, never came off. An uncured adolescence, a chronic infantilism, crept into his words. And the “Park Avenue accent,” the

  “Harvardese” which he had endeavored to learn at Princeton and to polish in Britain, was an unstable asset: it deteriorated under emotional pressure to the Bat, nasal intonation of his background.

  He knew someday he would have to marry; he had long been indifferent to the female object of that necessity. He had put off the date, not to search for a mate he himself desired—that being plainly irrelevant to the question—but merely because his deepest wish was to avoid responsibility. He did not want now, any more than he had wanted at eighteen, to be tied down with a home, a woman, children, things he had to do. Life was “happy” for him only when he could, at will, jump into a Jaguar, or into a plane, or aboard a fast boat, and be gone. He knew he was mother-dominated and usually he thought that was for the best. But he also knew that within his mother was a tremendous “strength”—he never saw it as invidious, as selfish, as masochistic and sadistic—which (if he deliberately or even inadvertently offended her in some fashion she could not brook or would not) might cause her to renounce him, the apple of her eye. And that renouncement, he knew, would be absolute. He would be cut off without a penny—not in her will, but the day she renounced him. His next month’s allowance simply wouldn’t be deposited and that would be that.

  Kit had two frequent fantasies related to such matters. He imagined himself the victim of his mother’s fury, and could only see as his way out taking up his plane for a last nose dive into the ground. If she managed to get the plane grounded before he could reach it, there were cars-even rental cars. He had often noted a buttonwood tree that stood on a sharp curve on Elk Drive, about halfway to the airport. He could hit that at a hundred or so. His other fantasy concerned the sudden, unexpected death of his mother and his inheritance of everything that bore the name of Sloan. It was his most frequent daydream.

  Looking at his mother now, Kit realized that she had, as so often, mustered some fresh, intangible force to abet her will. Part of her strategy had appeared: he had never before thought that being married would serve a useful purpose in relation to his conduct with the whole world of women. He could see that point. And he could see farther: if he failed to acknowledge it, his mother might, that being her nature and her method, make certain some young lady in the future behaved in such a fashion as to make the point unforgettable. Minerva Sloan was not above ally-ing herself with another against her son, when the allegiance was designed to accomplish some ultimately “good” end.

  She had said, “Suppose I add a mother’s urging?”

  It might have been a warm suggestion, sentimental, kindly.

  It was not, as he knew by her abrupt tenseness. “Mother . . .” he began.

  The deliberations were interrupted by the butler, who came in carrying a telephone on a jack.

  Jeffrey Fahlstead had served the Sloans for more than thirty years. For twenty, they had called him “Jeff.” An Irishma
n, he was, like Willis the chauffeur, unbent by age, stiffened, rather. “It’s Washington, D.C., ma’ am,” he said.

  Minerva took the phone, spoke her name, and soon shot a quick annoyed glance at her son.

  From the conversation which developed, Kit gathered guiltily that his afternoon Bight was dimly viewed by various persons who wanted him grounded, or relieved of his license, put in jail, or given a lunacy test. Complaints had already gone to high Federal authorities. Into this dilemma his mother barged serenely, however. She could have used the “friendly tip” from an important Washington official to have him grounded; and Minera didn’t like the risks her son took by flying. But she wanted, that evening, something else from Kit.

  Listening to one side of the talk, Kit realized that his mother, coming forcefully to his aid, was going to fix, grease and appease everything and everybody. His mother, he reflected, was completely indispensable to him. The least he could do was to please her in this matter of marriage.

  When she hung lip, she didn’t even make it a long lecture. “Take me weeks to get the thing straightened out,” she said, concluding it, “and don’t ever fly like that again! But, Kit, I want to go back to our previous talk.” She nodded the butler out of the room. “As I said, an odd thing has happened at the bank.”

  “Really? What, Muzz?”

  “You know John Jessup?”

  He shook his head.

  “You should remember him from childhood. An old horse thief—and one of the smartest men in Larkimer County! Made millions, in cattle mostly. He was one of your father’s cronies, years back. It’s not important. The thing that’s important is this: the bank takes care of his holdings. He doesn’t even look things over for long periods. Trusts us, of course, and leaves us free to make certain kinds of changes, so his holdings are open always and we have a limited power of attorney.”

  “Somebody cleaned him out!” Kit guessed.

  Minerva’s eyes acknowledged the guess. “Not cleaned him out. Just took six thousand, in bonds.”

  “Who?” And, of course, he knew. “Beau Bailey! But he’s been with you forever! Muzz!”

  Mrs. Sloan was looking at her china rail-seeing, now, the expensive plates it supported.

  “There is no proof, as yet, and Beau denies it, of course. As a matter of fact, the theft of the bonds was a good thing for the bank, showed us an old-fashioned, inadequate method of keeping track that made it easy for certain people to purloin things. We’ve stopped that system. Jessup came in today, missed the certificates himself, reported. They could have been taken any time in the past several years. Though the ink on the receipt appears quite fresh. However, I suspected Beau instantly—”

  “Why Beau, particularly?”

  She smiled. “There shouldn’t be any little secrets between mother and son, should there?

  I suspected him, Kit, because I almost hoped it would be Beau. I needed, for reasons I trust are now clear, a better hold on Beau even than the power to fire him. He could get a good job in several banks, not only because he’s adequate, but because he knows so much about the operations and activities of Sloan Trust. I must say, the moment I thought of Beau and checked to make sure he’d had the opportunity, I did realize that I knew—heaven knows how! Gossip, I suppose—that Beau had always stage-managed a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year way of life on a seventeen-thousand-five-hundred salary.”

  “They do sort of put on dog, in a small, cheesy way. Like a modernized housefront and barbecue pits, and Netta Bailey—a harridan if I ever saw one—goes for clothes.”

  “Of course,” Minerva went on, “I then really did some digging. I’ve spent the day at it, largely. Most absorbing. Beau’s run up bills just everywhere. He belongs to seven clubs that require stiff dues, stiff for him. They’ve sent that girl through college lavishly. But what I finally learned—after all, a bank has to have connections with all sorts of people—is that Beau’s been betting the horses for some time. And losing.”

  “So? What’s it got to do with Lenore? She never struck me as lacking in guts. If her dad’s disgraced, I can imagine she’d bear it. Get a job. She’s had some dandy offers for everything from modeling in New York, and a Hollywood screen test, to working in labs at Hobart Metal.”

  Minerva chuckled. “Be ironic, wouldn’t it? Beau took Hobart bonds.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “I’ve decided it’s past time for you to marry, Kit. I merely felt I should make sure, by a heart-to-heart talk with you, that you really liked Lenore Bailey. She’s quite suitable, and any suitable girl would satisfy me, as I’ve said a thousand times, if I’ve said it once.”

  “Would the daughter of a bank thief be suitable?”

  “As far as her father’s concerned, he isn’t what people generally mean by a thief. He’s merely ambitious; he’s got more ambition than moral strength. He probably found himself in a situation he thought desperate—it was inevitable he would, sooner or later, with his living standards—and sold his soul for a miserable six thousand dollars in bonds. I’ve seen brighter men do it for less.”

  “What’s the pitch?”

  “The bank, of course, made instant restitution to Jessup. I ordered the matter kept in strict confidence. I haven’t proved it against Beau, but I know now 1 could, by asking certain people the right questions in the right way.”

  “Meaning a certain big-shot bookie?”

  “How right! I could readily, through Netta—I see a good deal of her, one way or another—she’s one of a number of social bootlickers who see to it they stay in my good graces—

  I could easily have a talk with her. I could ask her to get a note from Beau admitting the defalcation. I could then arrange to recover the bonds—he must have borrowed cash on them somewhere in Green Prairie or River City—and that, also, could be learned. Netta could and would see to it, afterward, that any little wish of mine, or yours, was met, Kit.”

  “Very nice little shotgun wedding—with both barrels pointed not at the groom, but the bride’s papa.”

  “I said, Kit, that I wanted to know how you felt about Lenore. And then I wanted you to act—not fiddle years away.”

  It was all there, he thought, laid on the table, on the damask, right in front of the centerpiece, the bowl of flowers. His last ideas concerning demurrer came to him, and were unvoiced. He did not mention the early background of Netta Bailey. He did not need to. The Sloan name would compensate, socially, for nearly any background stain. And, suddenly, a brand-new vision had come into his mind. He could see himself married to Lenore, no longer engaged in a struggle with her, but holding a lifelong whip over her. If they married because she had to, because she’d done it to save her father from prison, probably she’d go on saving him all her life. Kit could come and go as he pleased, do as he pleased, be as free as he pleased, and she’d have to take it because of a Signed confession his mother had somewhere.

  This opportunity, to become a husband and remain what he thought of as a “man,”

  appealed to him greatly. Lenore, he had intuitively known, was emotionally far stronger than he.

  She would have managed him and bossed him. Now, it would be another kettle of fish. He was aware that Minerva had gone through the same thought process, come to the same conclusion and was prepared to explain it if necessary.

  He got up, walked around the table, kissed her fervently. “All right, Mother. I don’t know if it’ll help my cause. But it might. She’s about as headstrong and independent a wench as I ever met. I’d need a way to handle her!”

  “I think,” his mother answered, “we’ve discovered a way.”

  2

  The vast airfield shook with motor noise in the gray, windy afternoon. A dozen huge bombers had left the hardstands and roared out on the runways to take off on a regular training flight.

  Each one had six propellers. Each prop sent back a wash of air and dust and din, adding it to the boring Texas wind.

  Chuck Conner, Lieutenant Conner, close
d the door of the office with difficulty. The building behind him, long, low, caked from its corrugated roof to its foundations with dirt, was like fifty buildings parallel to and behind it and fifty more, barracks, on the opposite side of the field. Chuck hunched in his coat, took a better grip on the brief case under his arm and looked for a jeep. There wasn’t any in the vast, concrete environ. Just cement and wind and stinging dust, cold, and the planes moving like things from Mars, far out on the Hat, tremendous field.

  He walked.

  Another day, another job, he thought.

  A jeep buzzed behind him and he got aboard. Riding was colder. The sky was a yellowish-gray, the color of old laundry soap. The clouds must be moving fast, he thought, but they were without definition, so you couldn’t tell.

  The jeep stopped at a less dusty building, less dusty, less caked by the wind, because GI’s cleaned it with water every day. Chuck went through a storm door and a second door and performed the military amenities with the officer of the day. He went to the colonel’s conference room, turned over his brief case to Sergeant Lee, saluted. There were four men in the room: Colonel Eames, the Commanding Officer, Major Wroncke, Major Taylor and Captain Pierce.