by Gwen Bristow
Elizabeth smiled appreciatively. “It’s refreshing to meet a man as honest as you are.”
“Thanks,” returned Spratt, “though I didn’t know there was any special virtue in speaking one’s mind.”
“There is in knowing one’s mind,” said Elizabeth.
Spratt laughed a little. They had finished dinner in a restaurant, and as Spratt happened not to have a show to cover that evening they had ordered more coffee and stayed to talk. She asked,
“What do you want to do in pictures ultimately, Spratt?”
“Produce them,” he answered without hesitation. “I like the executive end. But I shouldn’t want to be a producer until I’ve had some experience in writing, or at least supervising a story, and directing. It’s a good thing to know what other people are doing before you try to tell them how to do it.”
“And you’ll do your best,” she added, “to pack an honest product in your little tin cans?”
“Certainly,” he said, laughing frankly. “A first-class product worth a first-class price.”
She laughed back at him. “You’re not an idealist, are you, Spratt?”
“Not the classic variety, at any rate.” He paused a moment, and remarked, “Elizabeth, it’s so much easier to dream about the ideals we can’t reach than to do the best job we’re capable of doing.” He paused again, poured cream into his coffee, and in a rare expression of confidence he added, “I guess I saw too much of that when I was a youngster. I come from a long line of visionaries who were too sensitive to take the world as they found it and get anything done. I don’t like it.”
“Please go on,” she urged.
He smiled wryly. “My father was professor of Egyptology and Semitic languages at Columbia University. We lived in one of those genteel apartments uptown where nice people spend generations putting new collars on their old clothes and keeping up appearances. In our family we never had enough of anything but soap. Know the type?”
She nodded, beginning to understand him.
“Half my father’s salary was always going to support relatives so delicate-minded they couldn’t do anything but write bits of verse for the magazines and lament the decline of culture. The other half went mostly for books, and soap. Books, soap, toothbrushes, neat patches and the appurtenances of gentility.” He shivered.
“I think I’m really getting to know you,” said Elizabeth. “May I venture a guess?”
“Go ahead.”
“So now half your salary goes for postage on letters to the delicate-minded relatives, telling them they can either go to work or starve, it’s all one to you.”
“How right you are,” said Spratt.
They began to laugh again, and Elizabeth started telling him about Aunt Grace and her cups of tea. “My aunt would really be sorry to see the millennium arrive, for if there were no affliction there’d be nobody for her to pester with good works. In consequence I sometimes think I’m hard-hearted. But I simply loathe patronizing the poor.”
“Now we do understand each other,” said Spratt. He gave her a companionable smile across the table. “I like you, Elizabeth.”
“I like you too,” she said.
By this time they were spending their evenings together several times a week. It was characteristic of Spratt’s forthright habit of mind that several nights later, when they were having dinner again, he suddenly interrupted a pause in the conversation to say to her,
“Elizabeth, may I ask you a personal question?”
“You can ask it, of course,” she returned, “though if it’s very personal I don’t promise to answer it. What do you want to know?”
“About your husband,” he said.
Elizabeth looked down at the reflection of an overhead light on the surface of her coffee. “My husband was killed in the war,” she answered briefly.
“Forgive me, won’t you?” said Spratt.
She looked up. Spratt was regarding her with a friendly contrition.
“I’m sorry,” he continued. “I can see it’s not easy for you to recall it.”
“No, it’s not,” said Elizabeth. After an instant’s pause she went on, “Why did you want to know?”
He smiled. “Frankly, for self-protection. Shall I explain?”
“Why yes, I wish you would.”
He leaned a trifle nearer her. “Well, this isn’t an easy town to get around in, Elizabeth. You are Mrs., and you wear a wedding ring, but you live alone and I’ve never heard you mention your husband. We’ve been seeing a good deal of each other, and I’d like to keep on seeing you, but I wanted to make sure. I’ve had—well,” he said with a shrug, “one or two embarrassing experiences with unexpected husbands turning up. I hope this doesn’t make you angry,” he added.
“Why no, of course it doesn’t. I don’t mind saying it surprises me. I suppose I take it for granted that everyone knows I’m a widow, or at least that if I weren’t widowed or thoroughly divorced I shouldn’t be going out with men as casually as I do. But maybe I’ve been a bit naive for Hollywood—and anyway, as you noticed, I’m still reluctant to talk about it.”
“Then we shan’t talk about it,” he said gently. “Thank you for understanding why I brought it up.”
There was a pause. “Were you in the army?” she asked.
“For a little while. I never got across.”
“And when did you come here?”
“In the first winter of the world’s hangover.” He spoke readily, evidently glad to turn the course of her attention. “Before we went into the war I had worked for an advertising agency in New York. We handled a lot of moving picture advertising, so after the war they sent me out to organize a branch office in Los Angeles. Then I got a chance to do studio publicity.”
From there the talk went back to moving pictures. As he drove her home, Spratt said, “I’d like to see you over the weekend if you can manage it.”
“I can, easily.”
“Good. Would you rather go dancing at a night club Saturday night or spend Sunday at a swimming pool?”
“Sunday, swimming.”
“Terrific, so would I. I’ve got to do a layout on one of my beauties, and I can do it either Saturday night or Sunday. So I’ll get rid of it Saturday night, and pick you up Sunday morning. I belong to a rather good country club and we’ll go there—swim, late lunch by the pool, get sunburnt in the afternoon. Right?”
“Splendid.”
He stopped the car in front of her apartment house and went up with her. At her door Spratt said,
“Elizabeth, about what came up at dinner. Don’t run away from it. Look at it hard, and take it.”
“I do try to, Spratt,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve been trying to for a long time now, but I can’t always. Sometimes it—comes back. As if it had just happened yesterday.”
“I think I understand. Though maybe I don’t—nothing’s easier than believing we understand experiences we’ve never had. But the longer you live the more you find out that life consists mostly of getting used to things we don’t like. Keep trying.”
“I will, Spratt.”
He went on, “You know, most of us, when we say happiness, mean the absence of change. And that’s just fighting the facts. Our lives are always changing in spite of anything we can do about it. Eventually, if we learn anything, we learn to take what happens and go on with it.” He stopped abruptly, half abashed. “Queer, my talking like this. I don’t often. But there it is—I wish I could offer you more consolation.”
“Why, you have,” said Elizabeth.
“Have I? How?”
“By being you. It’s hard to explain.”
“Thank you.” He took both her hands in his and gave them a hard grip. “You’re a swell girl, Elizabeth.”
When she went into her room and turned on the light she felt a new elation.
She had not seen this side of Spratt’s nature before. Finding it made her feel that for the first time since she came to California she had acquired, not another companion to amuse her leisure, but a friend who would be there when she needed him.
The following Sunday, as they were driving home, after a brisk day of sun and water, she leaned back in the car, saying drowsily, “I’ll probably be asleep by eight o’clock tonight. I’m so tired!”
“I am too,” said Spratt, “fun-tired. Let’s do this often.”
“I’d like to. But I thought you worked most of your weekends.”
“So I do, but that’s been because there was nobody interesting to play with. I work too hard.”
“Are you just beginning to realize that?” she asked.
“Not exactly, but I’m just beginning to admit it. Work can be like liquor sometimes, an escape from too much of one’s own company.”
She glanced up, expecting him to go on, but Spratt remarked on the coloring of the desert hills in the sunset and said no more about himself. Remembering his remark later, however, she thought she should have expected it. She might have realized long ago that like so many other brilliant and ambitious men, Spratt was essentially lonely. Yet she had not realized it, and she was glad to do so now. She needed his friendship; it was good to know that in spite of his self-assurance Spratt also had need of her.
When he asked her to marry him she was not surprised. She did not answer him at once. Spratt had given her so much, more than she knew until now, when she had to consider the possibility of letting him go. But she wanted to be fair, and in fairness there were matters that had to be explained.
She explained them on an evening when they were in her apartment, Spratt listening with quiet attention while she spoke. She told him how she had loved Arthur, and how she had suffered at being told he was dead. “It can’t be easy for you to hear this,” she said.
“It’s easier now than it’ll ever be again,” he answered. “Go on.”
Elizabeth stood up. Moving around behind her chair she put her hands on the back of it and held it while she talked.
“Spratt, you told me to take this out and face it. I’ve tried to. I’ve tried to be practical, to tell myself everything I might tell somebody else. I’ve said to myself that maybe Arthur wasn’t worth what I gave him, maybe nobody ever born could deserve so much. Maybe it was just a young girl’s infatuation, taking all the romantic heroes of her dreams and embodying them in the form of a handsome lover. I can say all this, I can accept it with the cool reasoning part of my mind, but beyond that it doesn’t go. My emotions, my spirit—what the poets would call my heart—simply won’t accept it. Because I had what I had. The simple truth is that for the year we were married Arthur gave me an experience of ecstasy. If he had lived I might have been disillusioned. But what I’m trying to tell you is that I wasn’t disillusioned, and now I never will be. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes. But you haven’t said whether or not you want to marry me.”
“I do want to. But I’m not sure you’re going to want to marry me. If you don’t want to, say so. You’re too fine and honest to have anything less than the truth from me, or to let me have anything less than that from you. Spratt, when Arthur died something died in me. What I feel for you—it’s strange to call it love, because it’s so different. It’s not adoration that sees no faults. It’s thoughtful and realistic. I like you, I admire you, I have tremendous respect for you. I trust you completely. I’d tell you anything. I know you’ll never fail me. But I can’t give you what I gave Arthur, because I haven’t got it to give. It’s just not there any more.”
She looked across the room at him, listening steadily in the half-glow of a reading lamp some distance away. She concluded,
“It would hurt me terribly to lose you. But it would be worse to know I had been less than completely honest with you. There may be another woman who can give you what I can’t, and if that’s what you want, please, please tell me so.”
She heard a soft, smothered little sound from his direction, and saw to her amazement that Spratt was laughing. He stood up and came over to her.
“My darling girl, you told me I was honest. I am, and I’m going to prove it. If any woman offered me the sort of total worship you’re talking about, she’d throw me into a panic.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them as he continued, in comradely fashion. “Forgive me for laughing. I wasn’t laughing at you, but at the idea that anybody could possibly think I might want to be adored like that, which you’ll have to admit is ridiculous. Elizabeth, if I may be brutally frank—if that’s what you were when you were a young girl I’m glad you got rid of it before I met you. I want you the way you are.”
Quite suddenly, she began to laugh too. This way of talking about marriage was so different from the shining rapture with which she and Arthur had talked about it.
“Then you do want me, Spratt?”
“You bet I do.”
“You’re not going to be sorry for what’s past?”
“I should say not. You see, Elizabeth, it’s really quite simple. I love you as you are. What you are must be the result of what’s happened to you before. If it had happened differently, you’d have been a different sort of woman now, and I shouldn’t have loved you. It makes sense.”
“You’re the only man I know,” said Elizabeth, “who always makes sense.”
They were married soon after that. She had never had reason to be sorry. Spratt had been brilliantly successful in his work, they had their three children, their long unbroken affection, and the peace of mind that came from knowing themselves of supreme importance to each other. It was a good life.
4
It was a good life—then what was she doing here, curled up on the chaise-longue in a tight little knot of pain? Elizabeth sat up and looked around the room. A bar of sun had moved a little way across the rug. There on the table was her desk-calendar, open to the page for tomorrow, with. “Kessler to dinner 7:30” scribbled across the bottom. No more than half an hour had passed since she wrote it, but half an hour of her old torture had been enough to make her feel now that she had waked from an intolerable nightmare.
But she had waked from it. Like its predecessors, this period of recollection had gone as abruptly as it had come. Elizabeth pushed a lock of hair off her forehead and reached for a cigarette. “What a fool I am,” she said, her eyes on the picture of Spratt that was standing on her desk. She had a picture of Arthur packed away somewhere in the back of a closet, but it had been years since she had looked at it. She wanted Spratt there, Spratt whom she loved, her children’s father. Spratt and her children were what she lived for. They filled up her thoughts—except for these rare minutes of agony, minutes that were more cruel because they had to be borne in silence. She could tell Spratt anything on earth but this. She could mention Arthur to him without self-consciousness, as she did sometimes—“There was a man like Mr. So-and-so in the company Arthur worked for in Tulsa, one of those pseudo-intellectuals who bought first editions for no reason but to show them off. I remember one day Arthur said he …” Just as simply as that. And they would chuckle over Arthur’s wisecrack and go on talking. But no matter how seldom they occurred, she could not tell Spratt that there ever did occur such experiences of black anguish as the one she had just passed through.
And why in the world should she, Elizabeth asked herself now. It was over, gone completely until the next time, if there ever should be a next time. By tomorrow she would have forgotten it. Already the fact that she had been powerless to escape it was making her ashamed of herself, and glad to ignore such absurdity. The air was growing chilly. The children should have come in from the pool by now, and she hoped they had hung up their suits properly. It was about time she went downstairs and got out the cocktail tray to have it ready when Spratt came in.
The telephone rang again, and when she answered it she felt pleasure at the normal steadiness of her voice.
Her caller greeted her cheerfully. “This is Irene Stern, Elizabeth. How are you?”
“Fine, never better.”
“And Spratt?”
“Working himself to death and flourishing on it.”
“Any news on the picture, or do I dare ask?”
“Good news, I hope. Anyway, a new writer who seems to have ideas.”
“Anybody I know?”
“I don’t think so. He’s just off the boat.”
“Oh dear. Spikka da Inglis?”
“Fairly well, I believe. They’re better at languages than we are.”
“They should be, can’t go a hundred miles over there without needing a new one. Elizabeth, I called to ask if it’s all right for Brian to stay for dinner with Peter.”
“Irene, you’re an angel about that child, but are you sure it’s no trouble? Brian takes half his meals with you as it is.”
“It’s no trouble and I wish you’d let him stay. He and Peter are upstairs getting starry-eyed over a new collection of bugs—Elizabeth, is it really necessary for the Scouts to encourage such a fearful interest in natural history? Peter does nothing these days but mount insects.”
“I know, Brian’s room looks like all I’ve ever heard about delirium tremens. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“It must be a recent craze,” said Irene Stern. “I remember Jimmy—” she was referring to her older son—“Jimmy was an enthusiastic Scout, but he never had this passion for creeping things.”