The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  He put the flowers into an empty milk bottle and set them in the middle of the card table. He jerked drawers open and found a little cloth and napkins, knives and forks and spoons. He lit the gas under the broiler, put Virginia’s tiny kettle to boil, peeled the avocado and drenched its green flesh with the dressing.

  The kettle hummed. He opened the can of coffee, sniffed its fresh fragrance. Where the heck did Ginny keep the cream pitcher? Sugar in the bowl—that was lucky. He’d forgotten to buy sugar.

  The flowers looked wobbly, so he moved them to the dressing table, propping the blooms against the mirror. The hot smell of the heating broiler made the rooms stuffy, so he put up the window again and stood there watching for the bus. It did not come, and he turned down the flame, pushed back the bubbling kettle, looked at his watch. Almost eight o’clock. What did that old slave-driver mean anyway, keeping a tired girl on the job half the night?

  Well, she could get her another girl tomorrow. His wife was through. He’d tell Teresa so himself and let her rage!

  The bus came in sight again, and Mike put out the lights quickly, stood ready to flick the switch when Ginny opened the door. Surprise, Ginny—here’s your long-lost husband! But the bus did not stop. It grumbled on past the corner, with a slow grinding of gears.

  He turned on the lights again, stood glaring, his face set and worried.

  What if she had gone out—to dinner, somewhere—what if she wasn’t coming home? That orchid—he scowled at it, jabbed his foot on the lift of the garbage can, dropped the dead flower in. With sudden, piqued anger, he jerked the silly apron off, tossed it in the corner. Then he tensed again, for a car door had slammed in the street below, he heard the street door close and light feet come quickly up the stairs. No voices. She was alone. He did not put out the lights. He stood in the middle of the room, watching the doorknob, waiting for it to turn, his heart pounding a little.

  The footsteps paused outside the door. But the knob did not turn. Instead, a light knock sounded on the panels.

  Mike opened the door. A woman stood there, a tall woman he had never seen before, in a dark fur coat and a hat with no particular style.

  She looked at him, a little puzzled.

  “Miss Warfield’s apartment?” she asked.

  “Yes. She hasn’t come back yet. Will you come in?” Mike opened the door wider.

  “Thank you.” She walked in, looking around curiously—at the table set for two, at the flowers on the dresser. “I’m Mrs. Andrews,” she said. “I’m a friend of Miss Warfield’s. She’s rather late.”

  “Yes.” Mike pulled up a chair for her. “She’s late. I’ve been waiting some time. I’m Michael Paull.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Andrews, sitting down a trifle stiffly. Her face looked stiff, too, and suddenly Mike realized how it looked to an outsider, even to a friend of Ginny’s. The table set, his hat tossed on the bed, cigarette stubs in the ashtray—.

  “I,” he said quickly, “am Miss Warfield’s husband.”

  Avis Andrews jerked as though she had been struck. She got to her feet.

  “What?”

  “It isn’t generally known.” Mike was enjoying himself. “We’ve been married—for some time. I’ve just gotten back from South America.” He saw that the name Michael Paull had meant nothing to this woman, and his vanity was a trifle touched, but the fun of watching shocked astonishment change her features made up for it. He’d try that technique on everybody—just a sudden cool statement—and watch them gasp and stare. He’d try it on Teresa. “And now where’s the champagne you promised us, old lady?” he’d tease Teresa.

  “I—can’t understand—” Avis Andrews was fumbling her gloves uneasily, “why we weren’t informed. Miss Warfield was a close friend,” she added, clipping her words.

  “We’re planning to announce it immediately—now that I’ve come back,” Mike said, breaking out his most practised smile, “so—you have the honor of being the first to know.”

  Her face shut up like a fist, her eyes turned cold.

  “I’m flattered, I’m sure,” she said crisply. “Will you tell your wife—that I called, please? On second thought—I may see her myself. She’s employed at the Harrison place still, isn’t she?”

  “She runs the Harrison place,” Mike corrected, resenting her tone. “Good night.”

  She did not answer. She went down the stairs, her heels thumping the boards viciously.

  “Such nice people!” said Mike aloud, closing the door.

  In the street, Avis Andrews jerked open the door of her car angrily. That girl—with her big brown eyes and that hair—she had done this to Bruce. And they had thought her so ladylike and so quiet, and all the while she had been merely—sly! Shameless—running around with other men!

  “At least,” Avis jabbed her key into the switch and stepped on the pedal with fury, “she’s going to know that I know! And she’s going to know what I think!”

  There was a personal quality in Avis’s wrath. She had thought everything working out so smoothly—and now she’d have to delay, put Dan Thomas off again. She couldn’t leave Bruce now—he’d be stricken with shock and disappointment. “Perhaps it will be a lesson to him,” she thought grimly. “He’ll stop running around the country, picking up women on planes and in hotels.”

  The door of the office of Harrison Tours stood open as Avis stalked down the hall, and she saw Virginia’s bright hair bent over a desk, and beside her a gray-haired, stooping little man. They were studying a map and they did not look up till Avis was fairly in the room.

  Then Virginia said, “Oh, Avis—” and stopped when she saw the strange, cold look on Avis’s face. “Mr. Harrison—Mrs. Andrews.”

  “How do you do?” Oscar Harrison murmured and withdrew to a file case, busying himself there.

  Avis stood very straight. “I’ve just come from your apartment, Virginia,” she said. “And there—I met your husband!”

  Virginia’s hand groped for the back of the chair. Mike! Mike—in Washington!

  “Why—” she began breathlessly, but Avis’s eyes were like blades leaping at her.

  “I—do not know why you have done this cruel thing,” she said frigidly. “Pretending—making my brother fall in love with you—”

  “I did not make Bruce fall in love with me.” Virginia stood her ground, though her hands were shaking. Mike—Mike was here. Oh, go away, Avis—let me think! “I tried to keep Bruce from falling in love with me,” she went on quietly. “I told him I—loved someone else. I told him it was no use.”

  “You did not tell him you had married someone else. I suppose you are married?” Avis said nastily.

  Virginia threw up her head, and her cheeks flamed dangerously.

  “Yes, I am married—to a man who is famous and successful—and fine I did not tell because we had an agreement not to tell and because—”

  “Because it was her affair—and no one else’s,” said little Mr. Harrison, quietly coming to her defense.

  “It’s the affair of our family—if she deceived my brother,” snapped Avis.

  “It’s undoubtedly his affair—but probably he’d prefer to settle that himself,” Harrison countered.

  Avis got herself out of the office, her back and neck very stiff.

  “Thank you,” Virginia said to Oscar Harrison. “I—have been foolish—but after all it is my marriage. I—could you finish this alone? My husband is here—”

  “Certainly. Run along. I’ll see to everything.”

  The telephone rang as Virginia was putting on her hat. She frowned at it, then remembered that Mike might be calling, but Oscar Harrison had picked up the receiver first.

  He spoke a few words, and she saw his face change.

  “She—died, ten minutes ago.” He hung up the receiver.

  Chapter 20

  They stood, a littl
e stunned, looking at each other. Teresa was dead. For a moment Virginia was overwhelmed by this sudden calamity. Mike had come home—and now Teresa was dead. Oscar Harrison’s sensitive face was twitching and she saw that his hands trembled.

  “We’ll have to go,” Virginia said dazedly. “There’s no one else.”

  “You think—you think I should go?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Of course. You’re the only family she has. I—I’d like to telephone first—my husband is in town.”

  She dialed the number quickly, then dialed again but there was no answer, Mike must have tired of waiting, he might be on his way to the office now. She felt a pang of unease, wondering what Avis might have said to him. Avis had been so changed and strange in her anger. But she could not wait, she had to go to Teresa. There was no one else to take charge.

  “I’ll leave a note for Mike,” she decided. She typed a few lines on a sheet of paper, folded it and wrote his name on the outside, fastened it to the door with a thumbtack.

  Oscar Harrison buttoned his overcoat. He looked somehow smaller, grayer. She held to his elbow as they went down in the elevator.

  He loved Teresa, she was thinking. She had been cruel and unfair to him, but he never stopped loving her. He looked bereft. He said in a flat, dazed voice, “Thirty years—since I married Teresa.”

  Virginia had grown to like the quiet little man. He had been a tower of strength to her in this last frantic week, competent and quick in carrying out the work she had asked him to do, and the plans for the Cuban trip were completed. She had felt an increasing feeling of reproach against Teresa, but now that feeling was oddly and quickly ended.

  Strange how death changed the perspective, softened all the harsher outlines with the pale mist of pity. To be dead was to be swiftly forgiven for all things, to be justified, to be in need of championing. Death took a ruthless advantage of the finer impulses in people who were fortunate enough to be living. It wiped out errors and left only pathos and uncertainty. Was it because, as Bruce Gamble had said, there were no endings? Only an abrupt breaking of a chain, the sudden obliteration of a picture, for which no one was ever ready?

  Clever, not too scrupulous, remorseless when anything blocked her path, Teresa had made her way. And now, suddenly, that way was ended. Teresa had met an opposing force her vivid, aggressive nature could not down.

  Virginia rode through the dim streets with Oscar Harrison sitting silently by her side, and the knowledge that Mike had come home and that she could not go flying to him, tore at her. All her doubts and anxieties were suddenly dwindled to mere shamed memories. Mike had come home—to her. He had gone to the apartment first of all, gone expecting to find her there. He was hers—she let her heart sing a little, forgot for a little to feel sorrow for poor Teresa, dead.

  Only an hour or two—the sad routine of affairs that death necessitated, to be gotten over—and then she would fly to Mike. And forget, when she crept into his arms that there had been nights of tormented wretchedness and days of dragging worry, nights and days that had made her heart sore and heavy.

  The night nurse was waiting anxiously when they arrived at Teresa’s apartment. The doctor, she said, had come and gone.

  “There was nothing for him to do,” the nurse said. “It was just a quick collapse—no pain, she just drifted away. I didn’t call anyone but you. I thought you would want to attend to everything. I’ll stay if you want me.”

  “I’ll be grateful if you will stay,” Virginia said. “This is Mr. Harrison. He will make the arrangements.”

  “Oh,” said the nurse, hiding surprise under her quick professional manner. “I fixed her up a little—if you want to see her.”

  Oscar Harrison went into the bedroom alone. He stayed for a long time and Virginia waited, setting the living room to rights, discarding faded flowers and the stacks of newspapers that had accumulated. She telephoned her own apartment again, but there was still no answer.

  Then Oscar Harrison came out, looking shrunken and pathetic, and there was on his face an incredulous and troubled look, as though the things the years had done to Teresa had shocked him. To him, in this last hour, Virginia suspected, Teresa had still been the vital, animated, and sparkling girl he had married thirty years before. He sank into a chair and his hands were still tremulous.

  “You—take care of, things,” he said to Virginia. “You’ll know whom to call. I want her to have the best. The best of everything. She earned it.”

  No lingering resentment. He was now only a broken and aging man who had lost his wife, had looked on her drained and sharpened features and seen there the finality that awakens the old dread in every breast.

  There was a great deal to do. Quiet men came, and Teresa was taken away.

  “I had better telephone the newspapers,” Virginia remembered. “She had so many friends.”

  So she called Sam Hinchey and the morning paper, giving them what facts she had, which were not many. Even Teresa’s husband did not know her age.

  “She was past twenty when we were married,” he said, “but she never told me exactly. She’d been teaching, school quite a few years—”

  “She was older than he or she would have told,” Virginia decided. Poor Teresa, clinging desperately, with devices like hair dye and massages and grim corseting, to youth. Her hair had showed white at the roots, lately.

  “I think I’ll go now,” Virginia told Oscar Harrison when all the arrangements had been finished. “That is—if you will stay. They’ll bring her back later—and I don’t like to leave her alone.”

  He looked around the apartment a bit vaguely.

  “I don’t know—she might not want me to stay,” he faltered. “Even now—I wouldn’t like to do anything that would have annoyed her.”

  “I think—that if she were here now, she would want you,” Virginia said. “I’m sure you are the one person in all the world that she would want beside her.”

  He brightened a little at that. “I’d better bring my things over from the hotel, then.”

  “I’ll go to my apartment,” she said. “I’ll write the number here, in case you want me. And I’ll come back the first thing in the morning. But just now I do want to see my husband.”

  Riding through the silent streets of Georgetown, it came to her that now there would be changes. She knew little of the status of the business, of the agreement between the Harrisons. Perhaps this would mean the end of Harrison Tours, the end of her job. But that was not now the dreary prospect it might have been, for Mike had come back. The money Mike had given her was safe in the bank, and perhaps now there would be the little house and the washing machine and the lawnmower—safety and peace and no more roving— Oh, please God, she shut her eyes and her fingers tight in pleading fervor, please God, let there be no more roving! No more wild places calling to Mike’s restless spirit, no more wars, no more of this terrible, straining loneliness!

  The apartment was dark when she arrived at the house, but she went up the two flights of stairs light-footed. Mike would come back. Sooner or later, when he had sought her without finding her, he could come back.

  She flicked on the light—and there was the little table set for two!

  “Oh, Mike—darling—”

  In the kitchen, the steak lay ready on oiled paper with bits of butter over it, the salad was made, the coffee in the pot. She jerked off her street clothes quickly, put on the housecoat Mike had bought for her in New York, a soft, gray, clinging, lovely garment with touches of hyacinth-purple at the neck and hem. She put on the little apron and lighted the broiler again. Any minute now, he would come. He had brought flowers! She buried her face in the soft pink blooms. How cheap, how silly to have doubted him ever! She repaired her make-up carefully, brushed her hair to a shine, then, deciding that the apron spoiled the effect, she took it off.

  Anxiously, she watched at the window. Surel
y he would come soon! He’d go to Teresa’s probably, but she had told the night nurse that she was going home, and the nurse had promised to stay till Oscar Harrison returned.

  At last a taxi came charging up the hill, and Virginia held her breath, her hands at her throat, her heart pounding, till it stopped in front of the house. She drew back from the window and stood waiting, a little dismayed to feel herself shaking from head to foot.

  Steps on the stairs—she knew how many, how many on the second-floor landing. And now he was outside the door—knocking, she flew to open it.

  “Hello, Red-top,” said Sam Hinchey.

  Almost she wept. “Oh—” she said, confused, knowing that her face was burning, sick with disappointment. “Oh—how do you do? Will you come in?”

  He stepped inside, looked around uncertainly.

  “Pretty late to come calling,” he laughed a little, “but I wanted a few more facts about Miss Harrison. The boss thinks she rates a half-column with pictures—successful businesswoman—all that stuff.” He got out the inevitable pad of folded newsprint paper, leaned against the doorframe.

  “I’ll give you what I know,” said Virginia patiently, “It isn’t extensive—Teresa was rather a lone wolf. But her husband is at the apartment—he could give you dates, beginnings—things like that.”

  “I didn’t know she had a husband.”

  “Neither did I, till just lately.” She told him what he wanted to know, hurriedly, nervously, praying that he would go before Mike came. She did not want to be embarrassed by the presence of an outsider when first she saw Mike.

  At last he folded the paper, clipped his pencil to his pocket again, shrugged up the collar of his overcoat.

  “Oh, by the way—I saw Mike Paull today,” he remarked.

  “You saw him—today?” she tried to keep her tone casual.