“Phew, I’m bushed,” Dave said. “Twelve hours from coast to coast is a miracle, but it’s still twelve hours in a row on your can. Let’s call for something and stay here.”
“How’s Anne?” Dave said when he’d phoned downstairs.
“Same as ever.”
“She’s one swell girl, all right.”
“Sure is.” They gazed at each other with blank, laconic eyes. Phil said, “We had dinner one night and the movies. I’ve had to stay pretty close to the house.”
“She know I was due tonight?”
Phil thought back. “I don’t think I said anything about the date—just the nine grateful Martinis.”
Dave laughed. “I promoted it to twelve in the letter I wrote her next day.” He took off his coat and tie. There was a knock, and a waiter brought in their drinks. After he left, Dave stretched out on one of the twin beds. “As long as you didn’t,” he said carelessly, “I think I’ll use the next couple nights to get some sleep. It’s just been a dizzy round of visiting and receiving out there.” Phil nodded. “Then when the gang gets here,” Dave added, “Carol and you and Anne and I can all get to work on them together.”
“Does Carol know what a railroad flat’s like?”
“Sure.”
“Will she mind?”
Dave sat up. He took a large swallow of his drink and put the glass on the bedside table. “The railroad flat?”
“Horatio Street, New York 14. Your palatial new dwelling.”
Dave picked up his glass once more. He looked at Phil; between his teeth he whistled, “the caissons go rolling along.” Phil looked down at his own tie and vest.
“Spot of gravy or something?” he asked. “Why the going over?”
For another minute Dave said nothing. “Kathy—” he said, and his voice was careful. “Didn’t she get it from you?”
“What from me?”
“My address out home?”
“Your—why, no.” The equivocal look of Dave was getting under his skin. Dave was feeling his way along; there was something he knew which Phil didn’t know.
“Minify needed it for some friend—” Phil said, and then saw it. “You mean that was a dodge. Kathy’d asked him not to say she—” Of course. “What about, Dave? Or is it on the QT?”
Dave shook his head slowly. “No reason it should be. She needed it to phone me long distance. Just a couple nights ago.”
Phil waited.
“She wants to sublease us her house in the country for as long as we want it,” Dave said. “She talked to me straight about the whole setup there, so we’d know what we’d be heading into.”
Phil got up from his chair. He began to walk up and down the small room. Dave watched him.
“She hadn’t even heard about the railroad flat,” Dave went on, “but when I told her, she said we could unload it overnight if we wanted. Even use it for our furniture, so’s not to need storage, and rent it furnished. She’d thought the whole thing through all right.”
“Yes. She must have.”
“Matter of fact, it wasn’t any flash call, anyway. She’d gone around to all the neighbors and told them. That took time. She didn’t say much about that part, but I kind of pieced it together afterward. Looks like some were O.K. and others gave her the old one-two.”
“I bet.”
“She’s going to live up there all summer, at her sister’s. If they dish anything out, she’ll be right there to take it.”
They fell silent. She was through with him, Phil was thinking, but she’d done this. She’d gone to them all, one by one, neighbors and acquaintances and friends for years, and repudiated the unwritten contract.
Dave was saying something. “Hold it a minute, Dave.” He had to sort this out a bit, see it, listen to it beat. It was only a beginning—people weren’t ever all of a piece overnight. But it was proof that she was beginning to change over from disapproval to action. Like everybody else in the slow process of change, she’d probably back and fill, see it clear and then lose it. He had gone in to John that day, ready to abandon the whole idea for the series—and that had been only an idea for some articles, while this thing of Kathy’s was an idea for a life.
A first step was always an important thing. You could respect it even if you didn’t overrate it. Whatever had at last clinched her decision to take this one step about the house, she’d done one actual thing which her own world would have to deal with. There was a contagion in any first action; as time went on, she would engage in others. Hadn’t it become easier and surer for himself, as he’d got into it more deeply?
“Finish your drink, Phil,” Dave said. “Would you like another sent up?”
Phil gulped the rest of his. This excitement in him was like a drunkenness, but one watery drink hadn’t done it to him. “No, thanks,” he said shortly, and glanced at his watch. It was midnight. He looked down at Dave on the bed. “I think I’ll run along now,” Phil said. “It’s pretty late.”
Dave didn’t stir. He smiled and said, “Take it easy, boy.”
Outside it was wet and cold. While they’d been upstairs it had rained. Phil walked a few blocks up Madison and then turned right. On Park there were lights in the tall buildings, but the city already had begun to go to sleep. On the puddled road, taxis whooshed by, and he remembered the other night he’d walked down this broad avenue in a misty cold just like this.
Had John preached at her? Had some special incident occurred? Or had that womanish softness of which he’d accused her, suddenly—or slowly—jelled? She who’d started the whole business of the series so long ago by putting Uncle John on the tight, small spot of logic—she had somehow discovered at last that proxies weren’t enough. The house was her first attack on her own. It never mattered which came first. The situation would always dictate different fronts to different people. Just so they were on the ready.
He was walking rapidly. He turned the corner into the side street where she lived. Through his turbulence a new question pierced. Had Dave accepted her offer? Was he going to take her house, move into a neighborhood where he knew he wasn’t wanted? Would he, Phil, urge him to go ahead, see it through, blast it apart? In a neighborhood or an inn or a club?
It was a big question. Dave had said something or other he hadn’t taken in. “Hold it a minute, Dave.” Maybe right then, Dave had been telling him Carol’s and his decision.
Before him on the glistening pavement a bar of light told him he was at Kathy’s house. The question would have to wait. Now there was no time.
He went through the lobby to the self-starting elevator. The bulb of dark glass above the bell glowed red, and far above, a burble told him the cage was starting down. In the dimmed hall, the red gleam shone like a small sunrise.
Crawling upward in the car, he had trouble with the simple matter of breathing. The knot had come loose; streamers from it were flowing through him. He got out at her floor and for a moment stood motionless. Then his finger jabbed the flat white button in the doorjamb. Inside two long rings sounded.
Seconds passed. Then Kathy opened the door.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1946, 1947 by Laura Z. Hobson
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Laura Z. Hobson Page 26