“I—I’ll go run your bath water,” she said. She went into the bathroom, turned on the faucets of the tub, and set the towels and mat ready. When she came back into the bedroom he was just entering it from the living-room, naked. In his hand he carried the bright magazine he had glanced at before. She stopped short.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re planning to read in the tub?”
“If you knew how I’d been looking forward to this!” he said. “Boy, a hot bath in a tub! We haven’t got anything but showers, and when you take a shower, there’s a hundred boys waiting, yelling at you to hurry up and get out.”
“I suppose they can’t bear being parted from you,” she said.
He smiled at her. “See you in a couple of minutes,” he said, and went on into the bathroom and closed the door. She heard the slow slip and slide of water as he laid himself in the tub.
She stood just as she was. The room was lively with the perfume she had sprayed, too present, too insistent. Her eyes went to the bureau drawer where lay, wrapped in soft fragrance, the nightgown with the little bouquets and the Romney neck. She went over to the bathroom door, drew back her right foot, and kicked the base of the door so savagely that the whole frame shook.
“What, dear?” he called. “Want something?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Nothing whatever. I’ve got everything any woman could possibly want, haven’t I?”
“What?” he called. “I can’t hear you, honey.”
“Nothing,” she screamed.
She went into the living-room. She stood, breathing heavily, her finger nails scarring her palms, as she looked at the fuchsia blossoms, with their dirty parchment-colored cups, their vulgar magenta bells.
Her breath was quiet and her hands relaxed when he came into the living-room again. He had on his trousers and shirt, and his necktie was admirably knotted. He carried his belt. She turned to him. There were things she had meant to say, but she could do nothing but smile at him, when she saw him. Her heart turned liquid in her breast.
His brow was puckered. “Look, darling,” he said. “Have you got any brass polish?”
“Why, no,” she said. “We haven’t even got any brass.”
“Well, have you any nail polish—the colorless kind? A lot of the boys use that.”
“I’m sure it must look adorable on them,” she said. “No, I haven’t anything but rose-colored polish. Would that be of any use to you, heaven forbid?”
“No,” he said, and he seemed worried. “Red wouldn’t be any good at all. Hell, I don’t suppose you’ve got a Blitz Cloth, have you? Or a Shine-O?”
“If I had the faintest idea what you were talking about,” she said, “I might be better company for you.”
He held the belt out toward her. “I want to shine my buckle,” he said.
“Oh . . . my . . . dear . . . sweet . . . gentle . . . Lord,” she said. “We’ve got about ten minutes left, and you want to shine your belt buckle.”
“I don’t like to report to a new C.O. with a dull belt buckle,” he said.
“It was bright enough for you to report to your wife in, wasn’t it?” she said.
“Oh, stop that,” he said. “You just won’t understand, that’s all.”
“It isn’t that I won’t understand,” she said. “It’s that I can’t remember. I haven’t been with a Boy Scout for so long.”
He looked at her. “You’re being great, aren’t you?” he said. He looked around the room. “There must be a cloth around somewhere—oh, this will do.” He caught up a pretty little cocktail napkin from the table of untouched bottles and glasses, sat down with his belt laid over his knees, and rubbed at the buckle.
She watched him for a moment, then rushed over to him and grasped his arm.
“Please,” she said. “Please, I didn’t mean it, Steve.”
“Please let me do this, will you?” he said. He wrenched his arm from her hand and went on with his polishing.
“You tell me I won’t understand!” she cried. “You won’t understand anything about anybody else. Except those crazy pilots.”
“They’re all right!” he said. “They’re fine kids. They’re going to make great fighters.” He went on rubbing at his buckle.
“Oh, I know it!” she said. “You know I know it. I don’t mean it when I say things against them. How would I dare to mean it? They’re risking their lives and their sight and their sanity, they’re giving everything for——”
“Don’t do that kind of talk, will you?” he said. He rubbed the buckle.
“I’m not doing any kind of talk!” she said. “I’m trying to tell you something. Just because you’ve got on that pretty suit, you think you should never hear anything serious, never anything sad or wretched or disagreeable. You make me sick, that’s what you do! I know, I know—I’m not trying to take anything away from you, I realize what you’re doing, I told you what I think of it. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, think I’m mean enough to grudge you any happiness and excitement you can get out of it. I know it’s hard for you. But it’s never lonely, that’s all I mean. You have companionships no—no wife can ever give you. I suppose it’s the sense of hurry, maybe, the consciousness of living on borrowed time, the—the knowledge of what you’re all going into together that makes the comradeship of men in war so firm, so fast. But won’t you please try to understand how I feel? Won’t you understand that it comes out of bewilderment and disruption and—and being frightened, I guess? Won’t you understand what makes me do what I do, when I hate myself while I’m doing it? Won’t you please understand? Darling, won’t you please?”
He laid down the little napkin. “I can’t go through this kind of thing, Mimi,” he said. “Neither can you.” He looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s time for me to go.”
She stood tall and stiff. “I’m sure it is,” she said.
“I’d better put on my blouse,” he said.
“You might as well,” she said.
He rose, wove his belt through the loops of his trousers, and went into the bedroom. She went over to the window and stood looking out, as if casually remarking the weather.
She heard him come back into the room, but she did not turn around. She heard his steps stop, knew he was standing there.
“Mimi,” he said.
She turned toward him, her shoulders back, her chin high, cool, regal. Then she saw his eyes. They were no longer bright and gay and confident. Their blue was misty and they looked troubled; they looked at her as if they pleaded with her.
“Look, Mimi,” he said, “do you think I want to do this? Do you think I want to be away from you? Do you think that this is what I thought I’d be doing now? In the years—well, in the years when we ought to be together.”
He stopped. Then he spoke again, but with difficulty. “I can’t talk about it. I can’t even think about it—because if I did I couldn’t do my job. But just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean I want to be doing what I’m doing. I want to be with you, Mimi. That’s where I belong. You know that, darling. Don’t you?”
He held his arms open to her. She ran to them. This time, she did not slide her cheek along his lips.
When he had gone, she stood a moment by the fuchsia plants, touching delicately, tenderly, the enchanting parchment-colored caps, the exquisite magenta bells.
The telephone rang. She answered it, to hear a friend of hers inquiring about Steve, asking how he looked and how he was, urging that he come to the telephone and say hello to her.
“He’s gone,” she said. “All their leaves were canceled. He wasn’t here an hour.”
The friend cried sympathy. It was a shame, it was simply awful, it was absolutely terrible.
“No, don’t say that,” she said. “I know it wasn’t very much time. But oh, it was lovely!”
Woman’s Home Companion, December 1943
The Game
A week after the Linehams came back from their honeymoon, they gave their first dinner par
ty. The fete was by way of warming the new apartment, which awaited them completely furnished down to the last little gilded silver shell for individual portions of salted almonds.
It was in a big building on Park Avenue, not so far uptown as to make theater-going a major event; not so far downtown as to be assailed by the rumble and honk of native traffic and the screaming sirens of motorcycles, the spearheads for UN delegates quartered at the Waldorf.
The apartment was of many rooms, each light, high, and honorably square. Each, with its furnishings, might one day be moved intact to the American wing of some museum, labeled, “Room in Dwelling of Well-to-Do Merchant, New York, Circa Truman Administration”; and spectators, crowded behind the velvet rope which prevents their actual entrance, might murmur, according to their schools of thought, either, “Ah, it’s darling!” or else, “Did people really live like that?”
Each room, in fact, already had museum qualities: impersonality, correctness, and rigidity. In the drawing room, indeed, the decorator had made chalk marks on the carpet to indicate where each leg of each piece of furniture must rest. The drawing room was done in mirrors that looked as if they had hung for months in hickory smoke, and its curtains and carpets and cushions were a muted green, more chaste than any white. There were flowers with that curious waxen look flowers have when they come from the florist already arranged in the vase. On the ceiling were pools of soft radiance; light, delicate and genteel, issued from massive lamps by routes so indirect they seemed rather more like detours. It was impossible to imagine the room with a fallen petal on a table, or with an open magazine face down on a sofa, or a puppy mark in a far corner of the carpet. It was utterly impeccable, and it was impossible not to imagine the cost of making it so and keeping it so. Happily enough in this blemished world, perfection is not unique; in the radius of twelve Park Avenue streets there must have been twenty rooms like it; all, like it, the property of nervous youngish men newly arrived at high positions in nervous youngish industries.
In the dining room—silver wall paper patterned with leafy shoots of bamboo—the Linehams and their six guests arrived at the finish of dinner. The dinner itself might well have been planned by the same mind that had devised the décor: black bean soup, crab meat and slivers of crab shell done in cream, roasted crown of lamb with bone tips decently encased in little paper drawers, tiny hard potatoes, green peas ruined by chopped carrots, asparagus instead of salad, and the dessert called, perhaps a shade hysterically, cherries Jubilee. It would have been safe to say that, within the before-mentioned radius of twelve streets, there occurred that night fifteen other dinners for eight, all consisting of bean soup, crab meat, crown of lamb, potatoes, peas and carrots, asparagus, and cherries Jubilee. That morning the same butcher and the same grocer, rubbing their hands, had made out the bills for all sixteen of them.
There was no division of men and women for the quarter hour after dinner. They went all together into the living room for their coffee and brandy. Little Mrs. Lineham poured the coffee, and her hand scarcely shook at all. She had the accepted and appealing timidity of the bride at her first appearance as hostess, and the condition was enhanced by the fact that the guests were her husband’s friends, whom he had known before he had ever seen or thought of her; but they had been so kind in their praises of the apartment, the food, the tableware, the champagne, her dress, and her husband’s newly gained ten pounds that she was almost entirely at ease. She felt all warm with gratitude to them.
“Oh, I think,” she said suddenly, “you’re all just lovely.”
“Cute thing,” two of the women said, and the third one, the one she liked best, smiled at her.
The drawing room was better for the presence of people, and this was a good-looking group, expensively dressed and carefully tended. The men wore the garb they could by now easily call Black Tie. (The steps in social ascent may be gauged by the terms employed to describe a man’s informal evening dress: the progression goes Tuxedo, Tux, dinner jacket, Black Tie.) The women wore gowns of such immediate mode they would have to be cast off long before the opulent materials had lost their gloss. Only Thelma Chrystie, the one little Mrs. Lineham liked best, evaded the mark of the moment; her gown was so classic in design that it might have been worn six months before the date or six months after; nor were her jewels in the current vogue. The others wore bands and chunks of massed stones and bright metals that made each lady look rather as if she had spent a night with an openhanded admirer from the deep jungle. Mrs. Chrystie’s ornaments were few and as delicate as frost.
Mrs. Chrystie was tall, pale, and still, three things that little Mrs. Lineham had always wanted to be. Emmy Lineham had always been described as a cute little trick, and she was therefore obliged to be rosy and to twitter. She admired Mrs. Chrystie for her looks, but loved her for a quality all her own, a peculiar warmth that seemed to flow from her, that melted all reserve and drew to her the trust of your heart. The gracious glow pervaded all those about her, even her husband, and made little Mrs. Lineham admire her all the more.
Not that Mrs. Lineham did not like Thelma Chrystie’s husband. Who could dislike him? Sherm Chrystie—doubtless they had started him off as Sherman, but that had been long forgotten—was a youngish man, though not of a nervous kind. Indeed, he had little to be nervous about, for unlike the other men he was not unsteady in a new business. He had no business, and there is nothing like a whopping big inheritance to abort apprehensions. He was a big pink man, and nowhere, save in the street, could he be seen without a glass in his hand. But drink only made him somewhat endearingly silly—that is, until late in the evening, when sometimes he would awaken refreshed after an audible and public nap, steal heavily to the liquor tray to fix himself a drink, and, in preparing it, would somehow break every glass but his own.
Never once had Mrs. Chrystie been known to protest his excesses. Part of her peculiar warmth must have been her consideration for every human being. Never would she humiliate him before others by telling him he had had enough and urging him to have no more. Never would she be so cruel as to ask him to come home when he was having a good time. She had even been seen—when he was incapable of pouring a drink for himself—to mix one and, with her warm gentle smile, put it in his hand.
Mr. McDermott, the male half of another couple among the Linehams’ guests, went to no such extremes in his pleasures as did Sherm. Mr. McDermott was in all things cautious almost to the point of timidity. He had achieved his present title and position in a vast spider web of radio networks by means of both hard work and the constant proffering of figurative red apples. But he had not attained his ease. He could not forget the many other men who had previously risen to the tall stature that was now his. He had seen them crash like oaks. Any day he expected to hear the cry “Timber!” for his own fall. His wife was a handsome, healthy woman, voluble and fond of giving information.
The other guests were Mr. and Mrs. Bain. The Bains were the Bains, in no way singular.
Bob Lineham, the host and bridegroom, was still lean despite the ten pounds acquired on the honeymoon. He was the tallest man there and the most pleasing to look at, but he was not so uncommonly beautiful as to warrant the utter adoration with which the little bride seemed almost to swoon as eyes followed him. His voice was so quiet that one must lean toward him to listen; you would sit back again not quite fulfilled but always expectant of his next utterance.
Sherm had scarcely had time to be empty-handed after his second great bowl of brandy when the Linehams’ butler and waitress entered, single file, with trays of various whiskies, additional brandy, ice, water, and soda.
Bob went to the table to serve his guests, Emmy trotting after him, but Sherm was there first. Mrs. Chrystie, on a sofa, listened warmly while Mr. McDermott quoted Hooper ratings to Mr. Bain. Across the room Mrs. Bain, regardless of chalk marks, drew her chair close to Mrs. McDermott’s.
“That little thing just worships the ground Bob Lineham walks on,” Mrs. Bain said.
“He’s simply blossomed. He’s blossomed like a flower. And after that broken life of his for two years.”
“Nearly three,” Mrs. McDermott said. “I thought he’d never pull out of it. They usually don’t, if they don’t marry again right away.”
“I never knew his first wife,” Mrs. Bain said. “We didn’t meet Bob till after——”
“Oh, Alice was a wonderful girl,” Mrs. McDermott said. “Not exactly pretty but awfully nice-looking. My, she used to get such a wonderful tan. She was a wonderful athlete. She had all kinds of cups and things for tennis and golf and swimming. That was the strangest thing about it. She was such a wonderful swimmer. Why, she swam like a man!”
“Well, that’s the way it always happens,” Mrs. Bain said. “The good ones get careless, I suppose, and even the best of them can get a cramp or something. Poor man, I don’t see how he ever got over it.”
“Oh, the Chrysties have been wonderful to him,” Mrs. McDermott said. “He just depended on them.”
“Weren’t they there when it happened?” Mrs. Bain asked.
“It was up at their place at the lake,” Mrs. McDermott said. “Alice and Bob were there for Bob’s vacation. They didn’t have a nickel, you know. Thelma was Alice’s best friend.”
“She’s been awfully good to this one,” Mrs. Bain said, meaning the second Mrs. Lineham.
“They can all say Emmy’s none too bright,” Mrs. McDermott said, “but, after all, her dad’s head of Davis, McCord, Marsh and Welty, and all they are is the biggest agency in the advertising business. Now look at Bob; Emmy’s father made him a vice-president just like that. Thelma must be really delighted about it. She’s been a wonderful, wonderful friend, and I know she’s going to be just as nice to this little thing as she was to Alice.”
Complete Stories Page 39