The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  Did she belong? Why must this little uncertainty linger like a barb in her heart? She belonged to Mike. That half-hour in the little church, with the sun casting jewels of blue and orange on the minister’s white vestments, had settled that forever. Yet why did this lost and detached feeling grow every day heavier—an oppression, part pain and part a wincing dread, part dull patience grimly held to. Sometimes, waking in the night, it was as if New York had never happened, as though it was a dream she had dreamed, lovely, ecstatic—and brief. And then had come morning, prosaic and drab, tramping the dream to death with doubts and commonplaces.

  They went to the hospital to see Mary Gargan and found her changed, looking young and small and glowing.

  “You’ll be out of here in a day or two at this rate,” Virginia said, kissing her, “and then you must forget it all, Mary, and be happy.”

  “Oh, I will. He was here—Frank, I mean.” Her heavy features wore a rosy flush. “Oh, Miss Warfield—I owe so much to you! I was such a fool—but it all looked so hopeless. I hope you—” she glanced shyly at Bruce Gamble, “will be happy, too.”

  Virginia changed the subject quickly, told Mary about Oscar Harrison.

  “Good gracious—she must owe him thousands,” Mary cried. “She never sent big checks—just fifties and hundreds—and always a long way apart. Two or three letters would come in before she would send one. And that business makes money—I ought to know, I’ve handled the bank account for years, and the income tax, and everything.”

  “I’m going to have the books gone over. Mrs. Harrison will be furious. But it’s the only right thing to do.”

  “She was a dreadful woman.” Mary spoke as though Teresa were already dead. “I worked for her for years—she must have put him out just before I went there, for certainly I never saw him. But now I suppose I’ll go back and work for her again. For a while, anyway.” The rose color came back again into her cheeks.

  “There,” said Virginia, when they were back in the car again, “you have two aspects of marriage. Poor little plain Mary, whom Teresa insists that she despises, though she does keep her on because Mary does the work of two people and does it well—Mary, eager to help her Frank out of his troubles—and beside her there’s Teresa, who practically threw her husband away because he wasn’t the spectacular success she wanted to be.”

  “You can’t judge marriage by two such unusual cases,” Bruce argued. “Look at this town—miles of roofs and under most of them, happiness and content.”

  “Lift off the roofs and you’ll see them squirming like worms!” Teresa had said once. That was the Sunday—they had bought cheese and rye bread and blueberry pie—that was the day Mike had said, “This is a hell of a life, Ginny Warfield. Why don’t you marry me and make a human being out of me?”

  Pain, reaching and tender, was in her heart—and then with it came a bitter suspicion that perhaps shrewd and ruthless Teresa had been right. Perhaps she had married the wind—the wind that had no home, and wanted none—the wind that must be free!

  Chapter 18

  The office telephone rang and Virginia answered mechanically.

  “Harrison Tours, Miss Warfield speaking.”

  “Virginia,” said a quick voice, “this is Avis Andrews. I’m sending Bruce for you tomorrow—you’re to spend the day with us.”

  “Tomorrow—” Virginia reached for the calendar. All the days had run together lately. Tomorrow was Sunday. And this, couldn’t be the fourth day of November—but it was! She had been married five weeks. “It’s awfully hard for me to get away on Sunday, Avis,” she said.

  “Nonsense—just run away. We want you,” Avis insisted. “Bruce will come about eleven. And he’s talking of leaving—Mexico or some other horrible place—unnecessary, really. He’s needed here in the laboratories but he’s getting restless. I hope you can persuade him to change his mind. At eleven, then. Goodbye.”

  Avis hung up without giving her a chance for further argument. And in the morning Bruce would arrive, prompt to the minute, and calmly ignoring her protests, carry her off in his masterly fashion.

  This, Virginia knew, was the approach of the hour of reckoning. She had put off too long already what in honor she had to do. She had to tell Bruce about Mike. She had to confess that all these weeks she had acted a deception—a lie really. And she had to admit that she was married to a man whose ignoring kept her lying awake nights now, aching with puzzled unhappiness.

  The unspoken implication in Avis’s voice had been plain. Bruce was restless and it was the fault of Virginia Warfield. He was in love, and his desire for her was aided and abetted by his family. The gentle pressure would be applied more firmly. Bruce was in love with her—and couldn’t she see how splendid he was, how honorable, how tender with women? Couldn’t she see his kindness to his old mother, that his child adored him, that his dog went into ecstatic hysteria when he appeared, that he was substantial and steadfast—and good? She knew too well how it would be. Smiles and little meaning looks, gay conversation thinly masking subtle intent. She herself made one of them—part of the family, the pleasant Gamble family. And then she would have to tell Bruce that she was a walking lie. Not a deliberate lie—not in words—but a lie, just the same. The wife of Michael Paull.

  She was married to Mike—but to Mike, what was she? Merely a brief and happy interlude, a light episode, another girl who had loved him? Before her, Harriet Hillery—and before Harriet, how many? Was she one of many—undistinguished, except for the fact that in a moment of excitement, Mike had married her? Was she just another mulberry bush? “Darling, darling, Ginny!” And after that, silence and loneliness and worry, torturing doubt and stabbing fear. She had to confess to that, look Bruce Gamble in the face and own that she did not know how she stood—so that he might not completely despise her. Confess that she had not even pride left—the pride that could walk away with head up and spine stiff as a poker!

  Bruce was on time—he would be on time! He had too many virtues—he was smug with virtues, always around when trouble came, always ready and patient and understanding— Oh, that was unfair! Because she was hating herself and hating Mike a little, too, for this intolerable position in which she found herself, she need not hate Bruce, too. Because every nerve in her body was strung taut as a red-hot wire, and the back of her head felt as though it had been beaten with an iron bar, she need not vent her irritation on Bruce.

  She must smile and wear a brown hat that made the amber of her eyes darker, she must think of gay, casual things to say, she must bend and kiss the shrunken, purpled face of Teresa Harrison and say lightly, “Bye, darling. Get well, now, before I come back.”

  And then there was the twisting road through the woods—with holly trees beginning to gleam red, and the Patuxent River crawling between willow banks and, of course, Bruce would choose this quieter way, when there was a perfectly good broad highway so thronged with traffic that there would be no chance for intimate talk!

  She talked—like a wild woman, she thought with self-contempt—leaving no small pauses, no intervals into which intimate thoughts could creep. Words—build a wall of them, build it high and glittering and cold and tough as glass. No doors, no windows, build it against the inevitable, the approaching catastrophe, the reckoning.

  She heard her own voice, stimulated, almost babbling, and once she caught Bruce looking at her curiously—but he would think that all this was nervous reaction from the strain she had been under. Probably he was planning now to have Avis give her a sedative tablet later and see that she got some rest! He was planning to be kind and to keep her precious and cared-for—and that only added misery to torment. Why—why had she been such a fool? Why had she let things go on at all? She must be adolescent, as Teresa had said. Teresa was a hard woman, but her perceptions were swift and shrewd and she was seldom wrong.

  The door of the brown bungalow opened upon the usual homey atmosphere—a l
ittle exaggerated today, Virginia’s too-tight nerves warned her. Merry hugging her and chattering, the pup’s excited yelps, Avis’s enthusiastic greeting and, in a chair by the fire, old Mrs. Gamble beaming, reaching for both Virginia’s hands and saying, “My dear girl—my dear, dear girl!”

  There was dinner, in the middle of the day, with Bruce at the head of the table, carving with quiet efficiency, and old Mrs. Gamble sitting beside Virginia, being waited upon like a princess and being regally gracious and sweet. The old lady talked a great deal, emphasizing all her remarks by laying cold, small fingers on Virginia’s wrist.

  She said, “This great, stubborn boy of ours thinks he wants to go dashing off to Mexico or some other place a million miles away—and here are Thanksgiving and Christmas, practically upon us—no time for a man to be running away from his family. You help us out, my dear—you tell him he’s not to go.”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t have much influence,” she said flatly. “Bruce and I are working people, you see, Mrs. Gamble. Most of the things we really want to do must be given up because the job comes first.”

  “You’re working too hard, Bruce tells me. A woman can’t drive herself as a man does—and men shouldn’t do it. Look at the men we read about who drop dead—almost every day I read of another in the papers. And for women it’s so much worse. They haven’t the endurance—”

  Oh, holy heaven, endurance! As though any man or any sheltered and protected woman, anybody at all, could endure more than I’ve been living through lately, Virginia was thinking. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to put her head down between the crystal goblet and the silver bread-and-butter plate and cry. She wanted to scream and run, out into the wan sunlight of this November afternoon. Through the woods and down the quiet roads, away from people, away from herself! And she had to sit politely and say, “Yes, indeed,” and “Thank you, no more asparagus.” She had to butter little rolls, and pretend to eat, and feel Bruce’s eyes upon her and Avis watching, and even the child, Meredith—and trampling nearer and nearer, black as storm, heavy as doom, that inexorable hour when she must destroy herself in their eyes.

  Secretly married! How young, how silly—how cheap! They would never understand; they had been an old, proud family for generations, these Maryland Gambles. Old Mrs. Gamble, with her heavy gold chain and her manners of a spoiled duchess, and Avis, whose strong, pleasant face wore not one touch of make-up—and Bruce. They would be sorry and polite, but they would be outraged in private and angry because they had been deceived. And in the end they would despise her—and be kind! So properly kind. The sort of kindness they had for tradespeople and for the Negro servant in the kitchen and rheumatic, old, black Julius—the kindness that pressed the receivers down below their own proud plane and damned them to commonness and mediocrity forever.

  Somehow, the day got itself over. Avis played, but today, commanded by her mother, she played Strauss waltzes, and gay bits of Schumann, and the Hungarian dances of Liszt.

  “I’m very modern,” old Mrs. Gamble said, “till it comes to music. When I hear music, I want to hear a tune.”

  Virginia did not walk with Bruce. She refused his invitation with a little lift of the eyebrows.

  “I’m terribly tired today, and this fire is heavenly. Do you mind?”

  She played an endless game with Meredith, jumping little counters around a board, shaking dice in a paper cup, knowing very well, that over her head the complacent eyes of the three Gambles were meeting in small, wise looks, telling each other that Virginia got on beautifully with children. And then, at last, it was dusk, and she could rise and sigh, and laugh a little and say, “This has been a lovely, restful day, but I do have to go. My patient will be waiting very impatiently to hear all about it.”

  Her hat on, her coat buttoned, Avis hovering, Merry hugging her, pressing close against her, Mrs. Gamble’s hands reaching.

  “We all like you so much, dear girl. We feel that you’re almost one of the family.”

  And then the dusky road back to Washington, and Bruce sitting very straight beside her, his eyes on the road.

  He did not speak at all for several miles, and then, sharply, he cleared his throat and said, in a quick, harsh voice, “Virginia—”

  The road and the shadowy thickets of pine, the dusk and the wan, opal light in the west all seemed to be rushing up into Virginia’s face, taking her breath, choking her. Her hands were so tight on her purse that her knuckles ached and there was pain at the roots of her nails. Here it was—the inevitable.

  She heard her own voice, rasping a little, strange.

  “Don’t say it, Bruce!”

  He turned and looked at her, and the car wobbled on the edge of the pavement so that he had to jerk it straight again.

  “Don’t say it, ever!” Virginia said again, keeping her eyes straight ahead.

  He did not speak again. He drove her to Teresa’s door in silence, and helped her out. She held out her hand.

  “Goodbye, Bruce.”

  “Goodbye, Virginia,” he said flatly. “This is goodbye. I’m leaving—Mexico, I think—”

  “Good luck,” she said, and smiled at him thinly and walked through the door. She heard his car snarl to a sudden start. He was gone—and she had not told him.

  Back at the Gamble house, Avis Andrews and her mother sat on opposite sides of the fire.

  Old Mrs. Gamble rubbed one rheumatic hand with the other.

  “If she doesn’t take him, he’ll go,” she said. “The trouble with working women is, they’re so self-satisfied and so independent.”

  “It will ruin his life,” said Avis gloomily. “He’s never been like this before—altogether carried away. I’m going to talk to her, myself.”

  “It’s unwise to meddle. You’ll be sorry,” warned Sally Gamble.

  “She may not understand—that I’m marrying Dan Thomas, and that I’m taking Merry. She may be a bit overwhelmed by the Gamble family. I’ll go to see her—tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Monday.”

  “Monday is as good a day as any.”

  “She stays in that office all day.”

  “I’ll go at night. I know where she lives.”

  Chapter 19

  Mike wandered aimlessly around the empty apartment. He looked at the mail he had put on the table. Circulars, a bill or two, a personal letter with a Tennessee postmark and a doctor’s address on the back of the envelope. Hunter Warfield, M.D. That would be Ginny’s father. He’d known, of course, that she had a family, but he’d never considered them. To him, she had been detached from the whole world, his Ginny, and even the claims of Teresa Harrison had irritated him.

  He took the glass with the withered flower and poured the stale water into the sink and the pulpy ruin of the orchid with it. Orchids—women didn’t buy orchids for themselves! They bought flowers past their first freshness from sad-looking old women on windy corners. Who was buying green orchids for Ginny? He’d find out about that! Then he remembered, with a returning depression, that his own situation was not too defensible. But all that had been cleared up, he recalled with relief. Harriet had been swell. She could have made things tough and unpleasant, but instead she had let him go, with a careless flick of her fingers and a casual goodbye.

  It hit him with a dreary impact that, very likely, Harriet had decided that he wasn’t worth bothering about. They had been talking about him, she and Bill Foster, just before he walked into Bill’s office. And Bill’s manner had been definitely nasty, definitely lacking in respect for a columnist who earned fat commissions. Mike’s skin tightened and grew cold, and sweat popped out around the edges of his hair. What if Bill had told Harriet that Mike Paull was through? Thirty—the ending—came some time for every newspaperman. Thirty and good night! But not when a man was only twenty-nine, not when he had filched closely guarded secrets from hostile officials, not when he could write as Mike
Paull could write.

  “The devil—I am good!” he snarled to himself. Why didn’t Ginny come? He pushed up a window and leaned out. That old iron-face, Teresa, was working her to death. Teresa, lying up comfortably in her bed, with nurses and doctors dancing around, giving Ginny the tough jobs, grinding her youth and her loveliness down. He’d put a stop to that. He’d lay down the law, now, tonight, when she came. He’d talk like a husband and he’d mean every word. He had money yet, plenty of money. And there were other markets beside Bill Foster. He’d take a crack at radio, maybe.

  “How would you like a bungalow in California, Mrs. Michael Paull? Roses over the door and a wolfhound on the mat. How would you like a husband who worked an hour or two every day, and took you out in his yacht in the mornings? How would you like a long, red car with white tires, and white leather inside, and your monogram in silver on the door?” The bus stopped. He waited tensely. He jumped and put out the light. Then he watched again at the dark window, but no Ginny. Only a tired man, trudging off under the street lamp, a bundle under his arm.

  The bundle stirred Mike’s imagination. Why hadn’t he thought—he picked up his hat and dashed out, forgetting to lock the door, going back to do it and then realizing that he couldn’t lock it, he hadn’t the key. No matter. This was a quiet house. No danger of prowlers.

  He had to walk blocks before he found an open shop where he could buy the things he wanted. He took a taxi back up the hill, bundle-laden, and noted immediately that the windows were still dark. That was all the better. Give him time. He panted up the two flights of stairs and pushed the door open.

  The little green rubber apron still hung on the hook behind the door of the little kitchenette, and he poked his head through the neck opening and tied the strings, grinning impishly. Quickly he snapped twine and dumped food out of moist bundles and paper sacks. A thick steak, a roll of fresh butter, rolls, a can of coffee, a bottle of cream. A fat avocado, too, and a little paper container of salad dressing. And along with these, a coconut cake, a bottle of wine, and three big pink chrysanthemums.