His brother Lester.
“Come now, honey.” I took her tear-streaked face in my hands. “I know you too well to go for that kind of talk. Let’s have no more now. You go upstairs and pack and we’ll get out of here before Sammy arrives.”
“Where to?”
“You’re going home—to Lester.”
“No,” she moaned, pulling away. “Can’t do that.” She covered her face with her hands. “How can I? What can I tell him?”
“You changed your mind …”
“Changed my heart.”
“… flew back to New York on the spur of the moment. You called me at my hotel to meet you at the airport. You were afraid to go home without talking to someone first, to find out how Lester felt …”
“How can he take me back?” she cried. “I was so horrible to him. Taunted him for being so weak. Knew he couldn’t help himself. Made him worse. How could he do anything about Sammy when even I couldn’t?”
“Listen to me, Julie.” I took her by the shoulders. “He’s going out of his mind, that’s how much he misses you and wants you back. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Don’t know. Why are you here, why am I here? How can I be in love with Les, knowing all the time that someone like Sammy was able to get me to come here, to make me feel—?”
“You don’t know what you feel or what you think,” I said, with anger and impatience in my voice. “You’ve been through too much … quarreling with Lester, running away from Sammy and yourself, running to a divorce you never really wanted. You’re all confused like the rest of us. Sammy’s got us all going in circles. Hitch your wagon to a star and go crazy from it. And in case you don’t know it, you’re more than a little tight, too. Now go on.”
“Can’t.” She shook her head.
“Okay, you can’t.” I went past her, out to the foyer and up the winding staircase two steps at a time. Her grip was under the bed; there was a dress in the closet, a few things on the dresser and in the bathroom. You travel light when you’re hell-bent for disaster. I swept everything into the bag and hurried back downstairs to the living room.
Her big dark eyes went wide with the realization that I wasn’t fooling.
“Al, I don’t feel so well,” she moaned.
“Did you wear a coat?”
She nodded dumbly.
I put on my own, grabbed my hat and went to the closet in the foyer. A silver-blue mink, bought with money, bought with the ashes of Lester’s self-destruction.
She struggled, but I got her into it.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You better leave him a note.”
“But what’ll I say?”
I yanked open the top drawer of the huge secretary and found a gin rummy score pad … Sammy 24, Felicia 78… an unfinished game. I ripped off the sheet, wondering if Felicia Warburton still regretted she had stopped playing cards that night. “Here,” I said, “say good-by … say you hate him … say you love him … say anything, but make it fast. And make sure there’s no mention of me. I’ll be right back.”
I went to the kitchen.
Kelly was seated at the white enameled table, talking to himself over the funnysheets of some bygone Sunday. He looked up at me. “No more gin, huh?”
“If I ask you for a big favor, pal, will you do it for me?”
He gave me a wink. “You betcha, boy.”
“Just don’t tell Mr. Hogarth I was here tonight. Okay?”
He peered at me with bleary eyes. “Ya goin’, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“The brudder’s wife, she goin’ wit’ ya, huh?”
I nodded.
He broke into a wet, silly laugh. “Wha’ time is it?”
I pulled back my sleeve and glanced at my wristwatch. “Five after ten.”
He chuckled. “The boss’ll be here in anudder half ’n hour. He be awful mad. Crazy mad, huh?” He stared at my hands as though hypnotized as I began to peel off the crisp new bills.
“You’ll never tell him I was here tonight,” I said slowly. “The lady called a taxi and went away by herself. You didn’t see me here. Okay? Fifty bucks.”
I held out the folded bills, but he just stared at them.“Maybe he hit me … boom boom … for lettin’ her go.” He got up and went into a shadow-boxing stance.
“C’mon, pal.” I thrust the money toward him.
“Naw,” he shook his head. “Gimme a cigarette.”
I groped in my pockets. “I gave you all I had.”
“Gimme the watch.” He grinned.
“Now wait a minute …” The gift from Connie.
“Gimme the watch,” he said.
Slowly I undid it from my wrist and he snatched it.
“You swear you’ll never tell him?”
He nodded solemnly.
“On your mother’s grave?”
Tears came to his eyes. He crossed himself quickly and nodded. Then he began to cry, blubbering softly as he sank down at the table to stare blindly at the watch in his hand.
I left him that way and hurried back to the living room. “Let’s go,” I said to Julie. I picked up her suitcase and led her outside to the car waiting there for us in the moonlight. She sat beside me in silence, staring straight ahead, as we pulled away.
Back on the highway, city-bound, I glanced at her. She looked awful. “You need some air,” I said, lowering her window.
She nodded, and put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes, and I could feel the tension going out of her body like a sigh. She snuggled closer, breathing deeply. And before long, she was asleep. I gazed down at her. She was like a little girl now, a tired little girl who had run away from home. I was seeing her now not as I had seen her before, not as Sammy might have seen her tonight, but as Lester had always seen her, and would see her again.
I stepped down harder on the gas. I wanted to get her back to him, back where she belonged, back over this highway to his astonished arms. But why was I hurrying? There was plenty of time till midnight.
The headlights coming at me from the opposite lane were bright and swift in their passage, as though eager to escape the city, like Sammy would be, somewhere in that stream of northbound traffic in his robin’s-egg blue convertible, hurrying home to the relaxation of a good night’s sleep he had never counted on. Faster I went, as though to flee the scene of enraged discovery …
As we neared the city, I felt her stirring on my shoulder.
“Hello,” she murmured sleepily.
“Almost there,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Al?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I ever told you that I like you?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said.
“You, I like … Les, I love … Sammy, I … I guess Sammy I feel sorry for …”
“See that you make it stick.”
“For always,” she sighed, putting her head back on my shoulder
“How do you feel?”
“Wonderfully better,” she said.
“The fresh air did it.”
“No, not just that way. Inside, too. I feel so much better in here … purged … released from something that’s had me in a nasty, horrible grip for too long. Just talking about it, Al, admitting it … it doesn’t seem to hurt any more. Gone, like a bad dream.”
“Named Sammy.” I turned to her. “What sort of farewell message did you leave him?”
“Oh, that. I just wrote: ‘Don’t wait for the laugh, Sammy. This is one joke that’s never going to pay off.’ But he’ll never believe that that can be possible. Only you and I and the walls of that God-awful living room know the whole story, and walls can’t talk and you won’t, ever, will you, Al?”
I glanced at her, and saw her eyes searching mine desperately for some quick assurance that whatever she had lost, and found again, would not be kicked away by somebody else.
“ I didn’t hear a word you said tonight,” I smiled at her.
She gave my arm a squeeze. “Than
ks.”
“For nothing.” I turned back to watching the road ahead.
“For everything. Please, Al, I mean that.”
“Okay, okay.”
Thank me, then. Thank me for doing whatever I had to do to save whatever it was I was trying to save. For a while tonight, I had even managed to forget what that was. I had even managed to forget that all this was for me—not for her, not for Lester, but for me.
Thanks for nothing.
I shoved my foot down to the floor-board, as though in anger … sixty-eight … seventy … seventy-five … spurting ahead … pulling away swiftly from the big black Lincoln Continental that had been dragging at my tail ever since Scarsdale …
I got her to the apartment house on Sutton Place at five minutes past eleven.
I jumped out and went up with her in the elevator.
She needed someone to carry her grip.
She needed someone to hold her trembling hand.
She needed someone to tell her that everything was going to be all right again.
Also, there was a little matter of payment on delivery.
Even as her key was fumbling in the lock, he opened the door and saw her. He looked at her, and then at me, and his lips were quivering. He wanted to say something, to tell her in some way what this meant to him … this opening the door of their home, their barren home, and seeing her standing there with shining eyes, seeing her walking in and going into his arms. He wanted to tell me what I had done for him. But all he could do was shake his head to hold back the brimming tears, and then they were weeping in each other’s arms, making silly little sounds like children who didn’t know the words yet. And he walked with her to the bedroom, hugging her to him.
“Don’t go, Al,” he said.
I waited in the foyer.
In a moment he was back, drying his eyes with a handkerchief, trying to stem the happy laughter that was bubbling up inside him. He had the envelope in his hand.
“Al, Jesus …” He looked at me with the gratitude shining in his tired eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing. Please.” I took the envelope from him, trying to get it out of sight, into my pocket, as though it were something unclean, which it was.
“Aren’t you going to look inside first?” he said.
I pushed back the flap. The scripts were there—but torn into a thousand little scraps of paper. “What …?”
He was smiling at me. “Just in case I failed to hear from you tonight. Just in case I’d be tempted to do something I’d always regret. I could never do that to you, Al.”
To me? Or did he mean to Sammy?
The other cheek.
I turned away.
“Davey Farber had a mother living somewhere in New York,” he was saying in a soft voice. “Perhaps this Christmas an anonymous friend will remember her. Is that so bad?”
I shook my head wordlessly.
No. That would not be so bad.
I left him, then. I left the both of them alone to rediscover their love for each other.
The night was still young. My work was finished. And Connie would be waiting for me.
I went down in the elevator.
Out to the sidewalk.
Fluttering the scraps into the trash-basket on the corner. Breathing deeply of the clean night air.
Knowing, at last, that I was in the clear, I was home free.
Knowing, too, that something good and decent had come out of it, for them at least.
Walking to my car.
Feeling great about everything.
Feeling young and healthy and in love with the night.
And then hearing the voice suddenly coming at me out of the darkness.
Whirling.
And seeing him sitting there in his car.
Seeing the triumphant grin on his face.
Remembering, suddenly.
Knowing, suddenly.
Seeing him sitting there in his new car.
“Hello, Preston …”
In the big black Lincoln Continental that had been secretly stalking the hot trail of scandal.
“I told you I was getting warmer every minute, didn’t I?”
And watching him, helplessly, as he drove away …
VII
Only yesterday … only last night …
My God, it couldn’t have been only last night!
I stood outside the door of the studio watching for Lester, not knowing what I would say if he showed up. There was really nothing you could say to change things now. It was too late for words. Somehow, as I stood there being jostled by the people crowding in, I knew that what ever was going to happen was out of my hands, beyond my control. I had done everything I could; I was exhausted; and besides, it no longer mattered to me, one way or the other.
The column had hit the newsstands at noon.
It didn’t name names, or draw diagrams. It didn’t have to.
It could stand up on the filth of its own nasty implications.
It was called “Brother, Can You Spare a Wife?”
And no one had seen Lester since.
I went inside now and watched them scrambling for seats, hearing their little yelps of eagerness, seeing on their faces the look of anticipatory enjoyment. I thought of the countless millions just like them in millions of living rooms all over the land, pulling the chairs up closer, making the last minute adjustment of the knob, watching the flickering screen of the magic box with that same inward smile of impending delight as they, too, got ready to be triggered by Sammy Hogarth into the vast and joyful explosion.
The laughter of a nation.
Born of misery and despair.
I had stayed in my hotel room most of the day, refusing to take calls, trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible. And when finally I had emerged, the message box at the desk had been filled. One from Julie, about Lester. And five from Sammy, the last one demanding: “Be in my dressing room before the show.”
An hour ago, I had answered the summons, confronted the face, dark and brooding as he closed the door and turned to me, sucking furiously on the damp, unlit cigar. “Nice of you to come. A big favor. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it. Don’t think I don’t know what a busy man you are, what a big thing it is you should do me the honor.”
I saw the newspaper on the dressing table. “Look, Sammy, about the Elwell column, I’m sorry, if that means anything to you.”
“Sorry?” he sneered. “For what? It’s good. It’s great. I love it. It’s beautiful.” He was pacing the floor of the narrow dressing room like an animal in a mirror-lined cage. “That filth Elwell. He thinks he hurts me. A gnat buzzing at an elephant. Nothing he can do, nothing he can say is as big as forty million people laughing at Sammy Hogarth at one and the same time. He can’t touch me. Nobody can touch me.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” I said. “I thought—”
“You thought. You’re always thinking. A brain. Like Lester. Always figuring things out. Well, you were wrong. I like it. I love it. Let them read it and talk about it. Let them know that Sammy was the one she was always hot for.” The thick layer of pancake cracked in an ugly smile. “Maybe they’ll be a little jealous, too. She ain’t so bad, even if she is married to that flea.”
“You haven’t by any chance seen him today?”
He whirled on me in sudden panic. “No! And I don’t wanna see him either!”
I started for the door
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Well, if you have nothing else to say to me …”
“Say to you? No, I got nothing else to say to you. I got something to give to you though.” He strode swiftly to the table and came back with something dangling from his outstretched hand. “Yours, isn’t it?”
I stared at the wristwatch, swallowing hard.
He knew, then. He knew everything.
I saw the bruised knuckles of his hand. Kelly, the poor son of a bitch …
“Yes,”
I said, in a hollow voice. “It’s mine.”
He dropped the watch into his other hand. Then he turned it over and read the inscription on the back. “‘All my love, darling … Your Connie.’” He looked up at me. “Your Connie,” he said mockingly. “My Connie is your Connie. My secretary is your what?”
I spoke quietly. “We’re going to be married next week, Sammy.”
He sucked in his breath. “Married!” His face darkened. “How long … how long you two been …?”
“Four months,” I said.
“Behind my back. …”
“We didn’t see any need to spread it around.”
“A big man,” he sneered. “I was making something out of you. Soon you could’ve had the pick of the field and you pick a—”
“That’s enough, Sammy.” My fists tightened.
“Sneaking behind my back … “ His voice rose. “Sneaking like last night …”
“If you give me a chance I can tell you all about last night. I can—”
“I don’t wanna hear about it! I know everything there is to know. For me you do nothing. For him you do everything. Butting in where it’s none of your business …” Hysteria crept into his voice. “Making trouble for me. Upsetting me just when I gotta have peace, gotta be right! You’re just like him, two of a kind!”
“Whatever I did, I had to do,” I said. “Whatever I did was for one reason only.”
“For me!” he shrieked. “Go ahead, tell me you did it for me!”
Go ahead. Why not?
I stared at the face, seeing the rage and the guilt and the deep nagging fear.
Show him how you did it to save him from ruinous publicity. Knowing what he knows about last night, he hasn’t tossed you out yet. He must need you, still. He’ll always need you. Wrap it up. Seal it. Tell him how you did it for him. Go ahead …
“For me, for Sammy,” he was shouting, “who took you when you were nothing!”
And I heard the answering voice and it was mine, but it was saying, “No, Sammy, for myself, not for you. I did it to keep you from finding out the truth about me.”
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