The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  “You go back to bed,” Virginia said. “I’ll attend to Teresa. You won’t know what she’s had, so you couldn’t possibly put anything on the chart. You can’t manage Teresa Harrison. No one can. She does what she likes.”

  “I think she’s a mental case,” said the nurse passionately. “I’d leave right now—but you get in wrong with the registry if you walk out on a case.”

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t leave,” begged Virginia. “We’ll muddle through somehow. I’m not having fun, either.”

  “I don’t see why you work for her. You could get plenty of places, couldn’t you—you’re so attractive—and men like you, I’ve noticed. I think she’s the most impossible woman I ever knew.”

  “Because she’s successful,” Virginia said. “She’s very shrewd and clever at her business. And I want to be successful, too. I’m willing to give up a lot for it. Go back to bed now and rest. I’ll handle Teresa till morning.”

  She melted ice cubes and stirred the tall drink mechanically, but the little nurse’s “Why?” was repeating itself sharply in her brain. Why was she doing this—being utterly miserable and uncomfortable, bearing the brunt of Teresa’s exasperations, her insults, her condescending arrogance? She was a man’s wife—Mike would take care of her, gladly. She had money in the bank—all that money he had given her. If she wrote, “I’m so tired of working, Mike,” she knew what his answer would be. If—said the sick uneasiness in her heart—there was an answer!

  Terror caught at her sometimes in the nights. What if Mike were ill somewhere—fever—some obscure jungle thing? But surely Bill Foster would know. Then she remembered that even if Bill knew how Mike was, where he was—to Bill, she herself meant nothing at all. Just a girl he had met briefly in New York. One of Mike’s girls, Bill’s casually dismissing look had said. She should have known—just from that look in Bill Foster’s eyes—Oh dear God, let me stop thinking!

  What, her terrified imaginings said, if after all she had been only another pleasant episode in Mike’s exciting life? What if, now that he was far enough away to see things in his old whimsical, sardonic fashion, she was to him only another—mulberry bush? She reminded herself how long the miles were, how slow the ships. She got out maps at the office and traced distances—a little appalled when she reckoned the miles.

  She had written letters, filling page after page with a chatty, inconsequential narrative of her days, trying not to be effusive, to be loving and yet delicately reserved, because men were instinctively shamed and made uncomfortable when a woman gave too much. They hated a debt, a claiming that was too insistent, even the claiming of love. And Mike had talked so much of freedom. They were to be free—there should be no clinging, no reproaches, no holding to grievances, no injured martyrdom.

  Impulsively she added a paragraph at the end of a letter.

  “Don’t forget—our bargain holds. We’re free. But if you should want to write—same address.”

  She sealed it, then abruptly tore the envelope open again, ripped the letter to bits. That hint that if he wanted to write—that was not the proud voice of freedom. That was the hungry whimper of a slave. It was her pride that had interested Mike, her maidenly, small-town reserves, the primness that she had been unable to overcome that had kept delicately always a little aloof.

  He had teased her about it. “I ought to keep you wrapped in cellophane, Ginny—like a gardenia. You’ve got a kind of gardenia soul, even if your topknot does flame like a poinsettia. But you’ve got fire in you too—a nice kind of fire. The danger for you is that you might let it burn on a lot of wrong altars. That darned conscience of yours could turn sacrificial and fanatic mighty easy.”

  Had he been warning her gently then that worship could prove as tiresome to him as mulberry bushes? She sat before Teresa’s desk and looked out over the treetops of the avenue, where a few sad, wet leaves clung.

  “I won’t write again—till I hear from him,” she said, evenly. And then she would read between the lines and tune her message across the wide spaces, to Mike’s key. Black ink on white paper lasted so long. “And yet—it can’t be that I don’t believe in Mike!” she told herself desolately.

  Every morning, she looked for Mike’s column, but it was all old stuff, things he had done in Washington and New York. Then, one morning after Teresa had been especially trying, she saw Mike’s byline, and under it “Lima, Peru.”

  She scanned the column swiftly. Mike’s bright, astringent style, his crisp fascination with whatever was unique around him—and with it, statements that indicated conclusively that he was, definitely, urbanely housed and fed, adjacent to postal facilities, well, and able to work and explore. Quick, shamed anger burned her.

  So—her haunted misgivings had had a basis of fact.

  “All right, friend Michael, if you don’t want to write!” her teeth clicked together. Her fingers clenched. Her face, if she had taken the trouble to look at it, was drained and stiff, her eyes darkened and dry with aching fury.

  That was the night the telephone rang, and the nurse, answering it, said, “It’s for you, Miss Warfield. It’s a man.”

  Virginia took the receiver, wondering a little. Her father, perhaps, something wrong at home—but it was Bruce Gamble’s voice that came over the wire.

  “Just in town for a few hours—I thought you might be persuaded to have dinner with me.”

  “But, how did you find me?” Virginia was trying not to sound stimulated and too bright.

  “Easy enough. Two telephone numbers on the Harrison Bureau literature. I tried one—no answer. So I called the other. If you aren’t busy, could I come along—say at eight?”

  “Oh—of course. I’ll be ready at eight.” She hung up.

  “Who is it?” demanded Teresa bluntly. “Not that ink-fish?”

  “It’s a friend.” Virginia was cool. “A friend—of Mike’s,” she prevaricated. “He’s taking me out to dinner.” She would not give Teresa the malicious satisfaction of knowing that things were wrong. She had enough to endure from Teresa now, without adding to it Teresa’s triumphant “I told you so’s.” “Oh, dear,” she worried, “all my good clothes are over in Georgetown.”

  “Wear my lace blouse,” offered Teresa. “It won’t be much too big—and it won’t show under your coat. It’s supposed to be good—it ought to be, I paid the creature enough for it. And you can have my pearls.”

  “Thank you—you’re awfully good, Teresa.”

  “Time you went out somewhere,” snapped Teresa, “mooning around here with a face like a haunted tomb or something!”

  Across a little table, Virginia said to Bruce Gamble, “This is what I needed. I’ve been so fiendishly tired lately. Mrs. Harrison is still ill, and I’ve had everything to do—such a lot of responsibility—and she isn’t terribly easy to please. Brilliant people never are. They’re so impatient with mediocrity.”

  “Not calling yourself a mediocrity?”

  “I’m even worse. I’m a timorous mediocrity. And when you’re a bold personality, when you’ve gone up against the world and tamed it and made it feed you and buy pearls for you and respect you, as Teresa has, anxious fumbling can be awfully irritating.”

  “Leaving Teresa out of it—and personally she sounds like very cold brass to me—one of those ruthless females with an eye like a saber—stop me if I’m throwing mud on any idols,” he grinned. “But to continue—without Teresa—are you doing anything this weekend? Or on Sunday? I thought—my sister’s a rather nice person, and it only takes an hour or so to drive up there, and you could see Meredith. I’m just one of those fathers—want to show off my cute kid—” There was a thin flush on his face, under the brown, and he turned a fork over and over.

  This, thought Virginia, was going too frighteningly fast. But he didn’t know, of course, about Mike. Thinking of Mike made her chin jut a little, her lips tighten.

 
“Telephone me on Saturday night,” she said impulsively. “I’ll let you know definitely then. And now, you ought to eat your duck, shouldn’t you? It’s so much better hot—”

  In the Gran Hotel Bolivar, Mike Paull was reading a letter from Bill Foster.

  It was a raucous letter, a letter with jeers and hoots in it, and Mike was a little puzzled till he read the clipping Bill had attached to the page with a blob of paste.

  When he had read the clipping Mike felt cold—and scared.

  “Good Lord!” he muttered. “If Ginny saw this—”

  She read that obscene column, he knew. Women always read it. Harriet. . . .

  He jerked the table into the middle of the room and bumped Elvira down upon it. He hunted for stationery and found none and rattled the telephone receiver, yelling for a boy.

  “Got to write to her—quick—gosh, what will she think? My Lord—it’s not two weeks—it can’t be—” Elvira leaped and rattled for an hour. When Mike had sealed the letter and put a special-delivery stamp on it, he felt weak.

  “If I were Dave Martin,” he told himself, “I’d get very, very drunk!”

  Chapter 9

  She would, Virginia decided, go to Baltimore. She had to get away for a few hours from the sound of Teresa’s voice, from the crowd that made the apartment a rendezvous, from the strain of the office, all the tension that beat on her nerves till they lay like hot wires under her flinching skin.

  Avis Andrews, Bruce Gamble’s sister, had written a cordial little note of invitation.

  “I won’t go for the weekend, but I will spend Sunday there,” Virginia made up her mind. Sunday was always a frenzied and shattering day at Teresa’s, and Teresa inevitably raised shrill objections whenever Virginia suggested returning to Georgetown.

  “For heaven’s sake don’t desert me! What could I do with only these dull creatures to depend on? That nurse meets people at the door with a look on her face as though I were lying in the morgue—and as for that imbecile in the kitchen—”

  But on Saturday, Virginia mustered her courage and announced very firmly, “I’m leaving you tomorrow. I’m spending the day with a friend in Baltimore.”

  “It’s going to rain tomorrow—and Baltimore is a miserable place when it rains.”

  “I’m going, Teresa. I simply have to get away for a little. I’m worn out.”

  “When you’re my age, you can talk about being worn out!” sniffed Teresa, offended. “If I had half your vitality, I’d be making a hundred thousand a year. Did those Cuban letters go out?”

  “I mailed them at noon.”

  “Tell Mary I haven’t been satisfied with the appearance of the correspondence lately. I trained that girl. She knows how to write letters properly.”

  “Mary,” Virginia said, “has been terribly depressed for the past few days. I think she’s having trouble of some kind—family trouble perhaps—something she can’t talk about.”

  “Her family live out in Indiana or some other vague place. And it couldn’t be a man—she’s unattractive as a Jersey cow with those square cheekbones and those big, solemn eyes. And she’s not so young—twenty-seven or eight.”

  “Even a woman of twenty-eight can have worries and heartaches,” Virginia reminded her. “I’ve tried to be as gentle and patient as possible with Mary.”

  “Don’t be patient. Snap her out of it. I’ll give her a jolt myself if she doesn’t improve. It’s no kindness to allow people to get slack.”

  Certainly, Virginia told herself, as she finished up her work that Saturday night, she was not going to be ruthless with Mary Gargan. Mary was a faithful girl, a bit colorless, with a soft and lovely voice and an almost naive capacity for loyalty and devotion. Twice, lately, she had seen definite evidence of tears on Mary’s pale face.

  “I’m going to help her if I can,” she thought, “but perhaps it’s something she can’t talk about.”

  Just as the gnawing ache and anxiety in her own heart was something that could not be talked about, something that had to be borne silently, with chin up and eyes cool and stony with pride.

  It was raining when she dressed on Sunday morning.

  “I told you,” said Teresa. “You’ll have a wretched day.”

  Virginia did not answer. Answers, with Teresa, only provoked her to further cynicisms, sarcasm, and sneers.

  A soft dress of green wool, with ivory buttons and an ivory necklace helped Virginia’s state of mind. Her fur coat was wearing a trifle at the cuffs, but it was well cut and had an air, as did the scrap of green-velvet hat she tilted over one eye. Brown suede shoes, a brown purse.

  “All this to visit another woman?” inquired Teresa dryly. “Even a new shade of lipstick?”

  “Women dress for other women, Teresa, my dear. Surely you know that? Much nicer to stun and stagger another woman than to impress a man. A man would see that I had a green hat on—if he saw that much.”

  Bruce Gamble came with a car at nine o’clock, and they drove northward through the quiet rain. All the leaves had fallen, and the woods looked sad and dead, the fields fallow with corn-stubble, or muddy with turned furrows gathering little pools and rivers.

  “Too bad it rained,” Virginia said.

  “Sometimes rain is cheerful and friendly,” Bruce remarked. “I like this rain. It shuts people in who enjoy being together—it shuts other people out. It makes a fire cheerful and a good cup of coffee twice as welcome, and it’s a sort of pause. Hectic living slows down and relaxes a little when it rains.”

  “You haven’t told me,” she reminded him, “how it is that you’re here instead of in Utah or Nevada.”

  “It snowed up there,” he said, “an unusually early and heavy fall that closed the passes and many of the mountain roads. A lot of the work I’m interested in closed down, so we decided to wait till spring. I’ll be working here now for a while—and I like that.”

  Virginia was not sure that she herself was so pleased. She liked Bruce—his friendliness, his little attentions helped to relieve the strained monotony of her days, but if he was staying nearby it meant that a definite reckoning was at hand and that her own situation would have to be made clear. And for days, while her thoughts went painfully round and round on the wincing treadmill of her heart, she had been pondering just what was her situation? Definitely, she was married to Michael Paull. But if he had married, her under the spell of a momentary and casual infatuation, only to kiss her and fly away—

  “I won’t let myself think about it today,” she told herself firmly. “Today is a little breathing space in the midst of the chaos my life has gotten into. Today I’m going to rest.”

  Bruce Gamble’s house was a low, brown-shingled bungalow set among trees in a pretty suburb, beyond the hideous “row” houses that made so many streets monotonous. Shrubbery dripped along the drive and the eaves ran streams, but the minute the car stopped, a tall, bright-eyed woman in a brown skirt and scarlet sweater came running across the porch with an umbrella.

  “It would rain!” she cried. “Get under, quick. I’m Avis Andrews. I’m so glad to see you, Miss Warfield. Don’t bother about me—rain won’t hurt me, but we must save your pretty hat.”

  The door opened on warm brown dimness, old-fashioned dark wood, crimson rugs, chrysanthemums in a brass bowl, and a scamper and scramble as a wire-haired dog and a yellow-haired little girl flung themselves at Bruce Gamble in a hysteria of squeals and yelps.

  “This is Meredith.” Bruce set the child on her feet and pushed the tumbled blonde hair back from her eyes.

  “How do you do, Meredith.” Virginia held out her hand.

  “Your glove’s wet,” said Meredith gravely. “How do you do?” She remembered her little curtsy then, smiled and flushed diffidently, then danced away, the puppy leaping excitedly after. Over her shoulder she shouted, “We’ve got chicken for dinner! And cherry pie.”
>
  In the bedroom, where Virginia set her hair in order and repaired her make-up, Avis Andrews waited about solicitously. She was so animated to be the sister of quiet Bruce, she was obviously younger, and it was equally obvious that she adored her brother.

  “Bruce has talked so much about you, Miss Warfield,” she said, “that we feel as if you were an old friend.”

  “He was very kind to me in Colorado.” Virginia smoothed her lipstick, leaning close to the mirror. “I was new at traveling and he helped me a great deal.”

  “Bruce is a dear—and he has been simply—pathetic, since Patty went. Mother and I have done our best, but it seemed impossible for him to adjust himself. Patty—” she let her voice sink a little, “was one of these lovely, helpless little blondes—you know, the kind of woman men worship and wait on hand and foot. I’ve always felt betrayed that I wasn’t born like that, instead of being so tough and practical and healthy. Bruce was more like a father to Patty than he is to his own child. Merry’s wholesome and matter-of-fact and she takes care of herself quite adequately. Here’s Patty’s picture—she was a raving beauty. Ghastly, isn’t it—to have to die at twenty-four?”

  Virginia looked at the delicate, lovely face framed in a cloud of fair hair. No, Meredith was not like her mother.

  “She was lovely,” she said. “No wonder Bruce was desolate at losing her.” She called him Bruce now, and he said “Virginia,” because it had seemed strained to go on being formal.

  “But he doesn’t have to keep on being desolate!” Avis Andrews argued. “It’s so unhealthy. That’s why—well, I’m glad you came today.”

  “It’s a pleasant change for me, too.” Virginia was casual. “I’ve been caring for an ill woman who is—well, rather exhausting.”

  “Mother not coming?’“ asked Bruce, as they went into the small dining room later, Meredith dancing ahead, her “best dress” swishing briefly around her sturdy brown knees.