The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  “But you aren’t, you know, you mustn’t,” protested Virginia. “It’s getting ready to freeze outside—there’ll be bad weather. Just tell me what you want done, Teresa.”

  “How can I tell you when you’re over in Georgetown? Is that Gargan girl there? Send her up here. I want some letters written. And tell her to bring a dictionary along if she’s forgotten how to spell.”

  “Miss Harrison wants you to come up to her apartment and bring your notebook,” Virginia said to Mary Gargan, as she hung up. “Are all the folders ready to go out?”

  “Not all yet,” Mary Gargan’s fingers trembled as she fumbled a pile of envelopes. “I was just addressing these. Goodness, she’ll keep me there all day—” she looked frightened and unhappy. “She’ll scold and ask the most personal questions—and then I get nervous and do everything wrong.”

  “Don’t let her make you nervous. She’s high-strung now—confinement irritates her, she has always been so active—but most of it is just her manner. And if you listen patiently to Miss Harrison, you can learn a great deal. She’s really a very remarkable woman.”

  “Miss Warfield,” the girl hesitated, gathering up her notebook and pencils, “I was going out to lunch, so if someone telephones here—will you explain, please—” Her pale face was even paler, her eyes looked desolate.

  “Certainly. But you’ll probably be finished by lunch time.”

  “Oh, I won’t! She’ll go on and on—changing her mind—” Mary was almost in tears.

  “Is this such an important luncheon engagement, Mary?”

  “It’s . . . Oh well, it doesn’t matter!” Mary flung on her brown coat with the cheap fur collar. “Everything is terrible anyway!”

  “This,” said Virginia, smiling at her, “has the sound of a sentimental affair to me. If he calls, I’ll be very careful to explain, Mary, that it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well—thank you, Miss Warfield.” Mary’s voice was a little sulky, and there was a weary and harried look in her eyes.

  “Poor child, he’s probably being cagey—and she’s in love,” Virginia decided when Mary had gone. Past her first youth, Mary was undoubtedly clutching at the trailing garment of romance, anxious and unhappy for fear it would slip from her fingers.

  Virginia was grateful for a little hiatus, for quiet in the office. Now she could sit down and answer Mike’s letter. She would write in the same tone as in her former letters. She would raise no issues, begin no arguments. She would not put Mike on the defensive, she would not whimper. She would stand fast on her pride, however life worked out for the Michael Paulls.

  Afterward, if Mike chose to tell her—but that was his affair.

  “If he does still love me—” for all her carefully achieved attitude of calm, that if still persisted. But she kept any nagging unease out of the letter. She told him about the Gambles, casually, because after all, it was all casual. They were friends now, she and Bruce. But she could not resist a perverse impulse to write:

  All that you’re doing sounds so exciting. I was so interested when I read it in your column. You are a very lucky person, Michael, me lad.

  And then at the end, the perverse feeling having got the better of her coolly controlled determination, she added a line.

  Has no one ever told you about a woman’s curiosity? I have heard some odd stories. And laughed at them as I am laughing at you.

  “Now,” she said with a dry little grimace, as she jerked the sheet out of the typewriter and signed her name, “let him worry!”

  It hadn’t been entirely true. She hadn’t laughed. Even now, when her attitude had calmed to the dispassionate detachment of an observer, of waiting for developments and purposing to do nothing whatever to bring them about, she did not feel like laughing.

  The telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver.

  “Harrison Tours speaking.”

  “Mary?” said a masculine voice. A nice voice, speaking in a low tone.

  “I’m sorry. Miss Gargan had to go out on business. I’m not sure when she’ll return. Is there a message?”

  “No, thank you.” There was the click as the speaker hung up.

  “Poor Mary, there goes her lunch date. And she thinks he’ll be offended and take someone else out, I suppose.”

  But she forgot Mary and plunged into the mass of work she had to do. Why did people ask the same questions over and over? Women were the worst, elderly, home-keeping women; afraid of the world and strange places, yet consumed with curiosity about them. She thought about old Mrs. Gamble and on an impulse mailed to her an assortment of literature describing tours and cruises to the West Indies, the Panama Canal, and even to Alaska. The little old lady would not stir away from her fire in the winter weather but perhaps she would get a vicarious thrill or two, reading about palm trees in the moonlight, and tradewinds blowing along strange, romantic shores.

  She had her lunch sent up and ate a sandwich and drank milk mechanically, while she read proof on a new booklet. Then the telephone rang again, and Mary Gargan’s timid voice said, “Miss Warfield?”

  “Oh Mary, hello—Mary dear, I did my best. But he hung up before I could explain.”

  “Oh, Miss Warfield—it isn’t that—it’s Miss Harrison. She’s just—Miss Warfield,” Mary’s voice rushed tensely, “I—I think she’s dead!”

  Chapter 13

  Teresa Harrison was not dead. She lay, cold and blue, breathing very slowly through her mouth, her body twitching, her face covered with sweat.

  The doctor was already there when Virginia arrived, he folded up his stethoscope as she came to the bed and looked at her soberly.

  “You’re a member of her family?” he asked.

  “I’m her assistant in her business. Is it—”

  “Come out here,” he took her by the arm and led her into the pantry. “It’s her heart,” he said when the door had closed, “I’ve been expecting it.”

  “It’s serious then?”

  “Never know exactly how serious a heart attack is. She may rally—and she may not. But she’ll have to be entirely quiet for a long time. I want two more nurses. She’ll have to be watched constantly. No visitors and no excitement.”

  “That will be hard to do. I have to be at the office all day—and she doesn’t obey orders gracefully. Could she be moved to a hospital?”

  “She shouldn’t be moved now. I’ll give positive instructions that no one is to be admitted.”

  “He’ll need a policeman to enforce those instructions,” Virginia was thinking, knowing Teresa and Teresa’s friends. But she said quietly, “I’ll do my best, doctor.”

  Mary Gargan was sitting on the edge of a gilt chair, looking stiff and frightened.

  “She was dictating—and raging at me between letters as she always does—and all at once she looked queer, and gasped, and collapsed before the nurse could get to her. Now what do we do, Miss Warfield?”

  “We go back to the office and carryon. Stick with me, Mary—this will be tough going. Miss Harrison kept so many details in her own hands. Do you know anything at all about her relatives? Has she any, anywhere? You handled all her correspondence.”

  “She has a husband,” Mary said, abruptly.

  “Good gracious! Divorced?”

  “I think not. She sends him checks occasionally. Sometimes with a very curt note, sometimes just the check without a word.”

  “Do you think we should notify him? Where does he live?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think—things weren’t pleasant between them, Miss Warfield. And I wouldn’t know where to write him. We always addressed the letters to hotels in different cities—a letter would come from him and she would answer or just send some money.”

  “We’ll keep out of her personal affairs then, at least until she is well enough to give us definite instructions. Odd—I�
��ve worked for her all these years and never knew that she had a husband living.”

  “Naturally I didn’t discuss it, Miss Warfield. She warned me specially not to. And she was always furious when she heard from him. She’d rage around and make speeches about how much money she had made—and how men were no good.”

  Strange how one went along, accepting people, knowing so little about their lives, Virginia thought, as she prepared to attack the work at the office. The work was not going to be easy. Teresa had kept a jealous hold on all the details, she had had a passion for personal execution that was almost violent. She had managed all the outside people herself, the widows who chaperoned parties of college girls, the men—young college men, usually, working their way—who handled cruises and camping trips. Virginia knew their names, some of them she knew by sight, the reports were all in the files, but the responsibility descending so suddenly was a little bit crushing.

  “Get out Mrs. Harrison’s letters first,” she told Mary, “and then we have to do something right away about those Cuban contracts. Mrs. Harrison planned to go down there soon—I don’t know what to do. I can’t possibly go. I may have to send you, Mary.”

  Mary looked startled and then panicky. Her face clouded and tears came into her eyes.

  “Oh—please, Miss Warfield—I couldn’t possibly go!”

  “Nonsense—of course you could go. You know more about this business than I—you should, you’ve been here practically since the beginning.”

  “But, Miss Warfield—I just can’t go away from Washington now—” Mary choked and then recovered herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just—why does everything happen at once? All the things that drive you crazy?”

  “I don’t know.” Virginia heard herself echoing Mary’s sigh. “But it happens that way. It’s some perversity of fate. Life goes along prosily—for years, and then suddenly, things begin cracking around your ears as though one calamity exploded another. We may be able to arrange the Cuban contracts from the office. The letters will have to be translated—you’ll know which ones. I’ll depend on you to handle that.”

  She would have to move back to Teresa’s apartment. There was no one to take the responsibility there. Food had to be ordered, the nurses paid, a maid engaged in place of the sulky slattern Teresa had put up with; there would have to be a power of attorney arranged so she could carry on the business, and explaining that to Teresa would be a touchy business. There was no time to brood over her own personal problems, and Virginia was grateful for that. She merely went round and round in a bewildered circle, getting nowhere, when she tried to think those problems through. Better not to think, now that her days were tense with activity, her nights so filled with tasks left over that there was no nervous energy left for thinking, and she dropped exhausted on the bed of Teresa’s guest room every night, aching from head to foot with weariness.

  There was no time to write letters, and no letter came from Mike.

  Teresa improved slowly. Her rebellious state of mind retarded her recovery; she raged continually at the doctor, the nurses, most of all at Virginia. She lay very flat, her face flushed, her eyes glittering, her profile upturned, bleak and aging and bitter. Under frequent hypodermics, she relaxed and lay as if dead, but when she roused it was to a continual state of frustrated fury, and gentle remonstrance only made her worse.

  When Teresa had been ill four days, Mary Gargan laid a letter on Virginia’s desk.

  “Here’s another one of those—from that person I told you about. I didn’t open it but I know the handwriting. What shall I do about it?”

  “She wouldn’t want us to see it. And she’s too ill to see it herself. The doctor said particularly that she wasn’t to see her mail yet. It will just have to wait.”

  Mary was drooping more than ever now, she was abstracted and made endless mistakes; the wastebasket overflowed, as she typed pages and tore them up to do them over.

  “Our stationery bill will be appalling, Mary,” Virginia protested, kindly. “Can’t you be just a little more careful? Perhaps it’s your eyes. Have you had them tested lately?”

  Mary gave her a wild look and then suddenly began to cry, desolately, throwing her arms out on the desk and burying her face in them.

  “Mary—for heaven’s sake, pull yourself together!” Virginia was irritated. “If you’re ill—if you’re not able to work—”

  “Oh no—it’s—I can’t tell you!” Mary gulped and mopped her face with a handkerchief. “Only—sometimes I feel as though I wanted to die. Miss Warfield—” she looked up, her stolid face sharpened, “were you ever in love?”

  Almost, Virginia laughed. She controlled herself with an effort and felt swift contrition at the sight of the girl’s tormented eyes and piteous mouth.

  “Of course. All women fall in love—and out again, over and over. Nobody ever dies of it.”

  “But—when it’s so hopeless—” Mary’s wail was anguished and her tears streamed again.

  “I see. It’s like that, is it? Doesn’t he love you?”

  “Oh, yes,” eagerly, “but—she won’t get a divorce.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary.” She would not be judicial and she would not add to Mary’s misery by pointing out her folly. “It’s just one of those things that nothing can be done about, is it?”

  “She’s so—horrible to him!” Mary’s cheeks showed scarlet patches and her mouth was grim. “She doesn’t want him—and she won’t give him up. And she keeps him in debt till he’s almost crazy. I get so sorry for him—he hasn’t had a new suit, even, in three years. And she keeps his car—he never gets a chance to use it and she’s always out places—he knows she goes out with other men, he could get the divorce himself but he says it wouldn’t be the decent thing to do. And I can’t see why he wants to be decent to her—and make us both so miserable!”

  “But you wouldn’t want him if he weren’t honorable and a gentleman, Mary. After all, she is his wife.”

  “A poor kind of a wife!” sniffed Mary. But she returned to her work, evidently relieved by her outburst. “What I hate about it,” she went on, “is that we can’t see each other unless we sneak. We eat lunch at the same place—they have booths and we can talk. But he’s always nervous for fear she’ll come in and make a scene.”

  “Where did you meet him, Mary—though perhaps I shouldn’t ask.”

  “Why, he does our printing. He’s the one that comes up here with the proofs—and Mrs. Harrison was always sending me down there with cuts and copy and things.”

  Virginia recalled, rather indefinitely, the grayish, mousy young man who came up occasionally from the printing office. She had looked at him a hundred times and never really actually been aware of him. The Man Nobody Sees. Mike had written that. And there were so many of them, a city full of them—all people, feeling, suffering, frustrated or happy, decent men, as Mary put it—men who wouldn’t abandon worthless wives, men who went on patiently, doggedly, doing the thing they had to do.

  She looked keenly at this printer when he came again, saw a colorless man of around thirty, with drab hair and shoulders a little bent. Only his eyes were important. They were brown and gentle and had a tired look, a look of enduring. But she saw them brighten as he talked to Mary, and a pink flush crept into Mary’s face, making her grow almost pretty. On an impulse, Virginia put on her hat and coat.

  “Mary can attend to these proofs, Mr. Ryder,” she said, “I have an appointment.”

  Let them have this little moment alone, the poor, harried young things.

  Life, she was thinking as she went down in the elevator, must have been planned by a joker. So many lives tangled, so much useless unhappiness—and did the mind that had made the plan sit off on some godlike eminence and laugh at the thwarted writhings of the little creatures caught in the web that had been spun for their undoing?

  A raw wind was blowing off
the Potomac, bringing the first briny threat of cold weather, as she went out, and she turned her collar up to her chin and bent her head against the gale, almost colliding with a man who was coming in.

  “Hello,” said Bruce Gamble, steadying her, “I was just coming up to see you.”

  “Oh, how are you, Bruce? I’ve been so frightfully busy lately. Mrs. Harrison is very ill from a heart attack and I’m trying to run the business alone.”

  “Come inside where I can look at you.” He opened the door of the drugstore in the building. “Or were you going somewhere in a hurry?”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere at all. As a matter of fact, I was condoning an affair between the poor little secretary in our office and a man who has a wife. They’re pathetically in love and the wife is a vindictive person, so I gather, who refuses to let the man go, though she doesn’t want him herself. It’s wrong, of course—it’s not even respectable—but I walked out and left them together. I couldn’t endure their pitiful, hungry eyes.”

  “Just a blind sentimentalist—without a moral to her name! Don’t you know that by all the canons you should have preached them a homily on the sanctity of the marriage vow?”

  “Oh, the marriage vow is unoutraged, I’m confident of that. They’re both nice people—that’s what makes it so tragic. And the poor girl is eating her heart out, and our work suffers.”

  “Ah, I see. She’s a materialist and not a sentimentalist. Shall we sit down here? That chap over there in the white outfit is stewing up something hot in that chafing dish. It smells like chocolate. It is chocolate. Boy—two!”

  “With a marshmallow on top—two marshmallows,” added Virginia. “How is Merry?”