Sweet Smell of Success

by Ernest Lehman

  Her hands knitted almost by themselves now as she relaxed in the chintz-covered chair and listened to the crackling of the logs in the white brick fireplace and the soft lapping of high tide against the bulkhead outside. But the low, insistent laughter of her husband and the Sanderson woman kept intruding from across the room, where they sat on the flowered sofa playing gin rummy and sipping incessant Cuba libres.

  She looked up at the sudden explosion of excitement. Henry had gone gin and was holding the woman’s bare arm.

  “I’m murdering you, Gertie. You mind?”

  His eyes had a hard, bright look.

  The red-haired woman returned his gaze boldly as she gathered the cards together. “I like it,” she murmured. “Do it again.”

  Lottie watched her husband reach for the half-empty glass on the coffee table and gulp down the rum-and-coke, and she began to feel the slow, familiar sadness creeping up on her, like the fog that was moving in from the sea to lick noiselessly at the windows of the deserted inn. It was eight-thirty and the night was dying. In a few days she’d be returning to Boston with Henry. She could not put off any longer what had to be done.

  The Sanderson woman had gotten up from the sofa, flattening her bare midriff as she smoothed the green cotton skirt over her hips. “Now you sit there, Henry,” she said loudly. “I’ll get ‘em this time. I’m going to see if I can’t get that character to make with the rum so’s we can taste it. Or do I mean feel it? Good God, I don’t know what I mean.”

  She walked with small, careful steps toward the little bar in the next room, moving precariously on her high black-and-gold platforms.

  Lottie waited, allowing her husband’s gaze to follow the woman to the doorway, and then she spoke to him.

  “Would you like to go into town to the movies, Henry? We still have time to make the late show.”He swung around with a start, as though he had forgotten she was in the room, but his face quickly lost expression. “What’s playing?”

  “High Destiny,” Lottie replied. “I hear it’s not bad.”

  His face came alive. “But didn’t we—why, sure. We saw that back in Boston last spring.”

  Lottie shook her head. “You must have seen it without me,” she said evenly.

  Henry stared at her blankly, waiting, saying nothing.

  She turned to the fire, because she did not want to see the look that would come into his eyes. “Would you mind very much if I went alone?”

  She was aware of a foghorn groaning somewhere out in the channel and the Sanderson woman’s voice softly cajoling the Negro boy behind the bar in the next room.

  When Henry finally spoke, the words sounded muffled. “Well, if you really want to. …”

  She got up quickly without looking at him. “I’ll go call a cab.”

  “If that’s what you want to do. …” He shuffled the cards nervously.

  The Sanderson woman came back into the room holding a glass carefully in her left hand while she sipped from the one in her right. “That’s my boy, that Warren,” she sang out, passing Lottie. “These are positively poisonous.”

  Lottie walked into the small, pine-paneled room and managed a smile for the lad in the white coat behind the bar as she picked up the phone and asked the operator for the number.

  “Summer is over, isn’t it, Warren?”

  The Negro nodded gravely. “Soon as you and Mr. Gerson and Miss Sanderson leave, guess they’ll just close up this beachhouse. Summer gone is a sure sad thing.”

  His eyes were heavy. He’d be dozing off again almost before she left the room.

  “Hello, Al?” Lottie said. “This is Mrs. Gerson out at the beach-house, Pilgrim Inn.” She spoke rather more loudly than was necessary, because suddenly there was silence in the next room. “Can you take me into town to the theater? You’d have to come right out, though. It’s almost quarter to nine.”

  Al said that he’d be there in a few minutes.

  “And you’ll pick me up afterwards, won’t you—around eleven-thirty?”

  Al said that he would.

  She started to say good night to Warren, but the boy’s eyes were closed. She returned to the sitting room, to the chintz-covered chair beside the fireplace. Henry and the woman were concentrating too intently on the cards in their hands.

  “He’s calling for me,” Lottie said, sitting down.

  “Swell,” Henry said. “It’s your pick, Gertie.”

  “I think I’ll need the pink coat,” Lottie said. “Would you mind, Henry? It’s upstairs on the bed.”

  He put the cards down. “I’ll just be a minute, Gertie.”

  “Take your time. I have all night.”

  The floors of the beachhouse were thin, and Lottie could hear Henry’s heavy footsteps upstairs. They had a lovely double room with a fine view of the harbor, and it had been quite peaceful up there while the room next to theirs had been used as a storeroom. It was only after Mrs. Turner had cleared the storeroom out just before Labor Day to accommodate the Sanderson woman that Henry had become tense and irritable. You could always hear her humming, or taking a shower, and sometimes you couldn’t help smelling the heavily perfumed toilet water she used, right through the connecting door.

  Lottie watched her sitting there on the sofa with her brown legs crossed provocatively as she ran a comb with crackling strokes through her long red hair, and she thought of all the others, so much like this one in their glittering female cheapness. She remembered the blond cashier at Schrafft’s, and the little nightclub singer, what was her name? Yvonne Chalet—or Corbet? And the stenographer in Paul Bowker’s office—the little fool hadn’t even known Henry was married. And of course that young hoyden with the summer theater group at Bar Harbor. What a dreadful mistake Lottie had made with her.

  But that was the only way you could ever learn, by trial and error. You had to make the mistakes before you knew how to compromise. She had boldly stepped in and dragged Henry away from the actress, only to reap a winter of misery and despair as a consequence. That was before she had discovered the unfailing certainty of the pattern: the rising crescendo of his restlessness, and then, afterwards, the quick guilt and remorse and the long, blessed periods when he wanted only to forget. It was so much more secure to accept him that way, the only way, than to fight reality and try to live with a man who would hate her for what he thought he was missing.

  She glanced toward the doorway as he came back into the room with the coat over his arm. In the firelight he looked almost youthful and handsome again; the light was caught by his graying hair and his teeth gleamed whitely against his deep sun-tan. She hoped the Sander son woman appreciated Henry and realized that he was not like those other married men, back now in their cities, who had pecked away at her on the sun deck and at the beach and in the dining room and at the bar like awkward, hopeful roosters. Henry had had the good sense to bide his time. He was like Lottie in that respect.

  “Here you are, dear,” he said.

  She stood up and turned her shoulders to him but he just handed her the coat and moved to the sofa, his eyes flickering over the freshly combed red hair as he sat down. “Sorry, Gertie.”

  Lottie got into the coat as she heard Al’s station wagon crunching up the driveway and two short toots of his horn.

  “He’s here,” Henry said to the cards. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Lottie took a deep breath as she passed the sofa, then chided herself immediately for her foolishness. She knew very well that the heavy fragrance which always seemed to cling to the woman, just as it filled the corridor outside her room, was a cheap and vulgar odor. There should have been no need for this last-minute reassurance.

  Outside, the headlights of Al’s station wagon cut feeble beams through the fog. She pulled the coat closed at the neck as she walked down the gravel path. She would chatter with Al all the way into town, listening eagerly to his embellished versions of the latest town gossip, because it was harder to think while you were listening. And when she got to the
theater, she would try to lose herself completely in the story on the screen.

  It was not a pleasant picture, nor a very good one. She had seen it back in Boston in the spring. But that did not matter. She did not mind seeing a picture over again. Sometimes it was more comforting that way. Sometimes you could stand anything, no matter how bad it seemed to be, as long as you knew how it was going to come out in the end. …

  Clear Connection

  VIC STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF his hotel room, filing his polished nails in the fading light of early evening. His oyster-white shirt, monogrammed in navy blue, was open at the neck, and his blue slacks were sharply creased down to his tan moccasins. He smelled faintly of after-shaving lotion, and of the Canadian Club in the bottle on the dresser.

  When the telephone rang, he glanced at his wristwatch, and a faint smile flickered across his smoothly shaven face as he walked over to answer it. He picked up the receiver, smiling at his reflection in the mirror on the closet door, and said, “You’re ten minutes early, honey, but I’m—”

  “Hello, Vic, how are you?” It was a man’s voice.

  The smile faded. “Who is this?”

  “Steve. Who do you think?’

  “Steve?” Vic frowned, puzzled.

  “Steve Price.”

  “Steve? No!”

  “Yeah. How you been, Vic?”

  “Well, how … I mean … when did—?”

  “This morning. Four hundred and eighty of us on one boat. Special train clear in from Frisco. You should’ve seen Ann’s face when I walked in. Well, how you been, Vic?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.” Vic sank down slowly on the bed. “This is really a shock. I didn’t—”

  “A pleasant surprise, huh?”

  “I should say so. I sure am glad to hear your voice again. You know, when I heard you were with the Thirty-seventh on Luzon I was beginning to—”

  “You didn’t have to worry about me,” Price laughed. “I had too much to come back to. Right, honey?”

  “What was that?”

  “I was just talking to Ann. She’s right here beside me.”

  Vic looked at the mirror and licked his dry lips. “Where are you now?”

  “Home,” Price said. “Out in the country.”

  “I see,” Vic said slowly. “It’s such a good connection. I thought maybe you were downstairs in the lobby.”

  “I’m sitting in the room I’ve been dreaming about for twenty-two months and it looks better than ever. Right, honey? Say, chum, I wanna thank you for all you’ve done.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Vic said.

  “No, I mean it. You don’t know what it meant to me, to know that Ann wasn’t sitting home all the time with a wet handkerchief, missing all the fun, maybe thinking about what it would have been like if she hadn’t married a guy who was overseas and—”

  “Look kid—”

  “I mean it, Vic, I want you to know how much I appreciate it. What the hell, you’re a single guy. You could’ve done plenty okay for yourself if you wanted to. Ann wrote me all about it, how nice you’ve been to her, taking her to the movies and the shows and always calling to see that she wasn’t in the dumps.”

  “It was nothing, really.” Vic swallowed the dryness in his mouth.

  “Some guys I used to know, they were great friends with Ann and me, but when I went in, that was the end. Never called Ann, bothered to see how she was, or anything. But not you. You were a real pal. …”

  “How was it at San Manuel?”

  “… Why, hell, you were even better to her than I was when I was keeping company with her. You could never catch me riding all the way up to Westchester with her at two in the morning after a date in town. Hell, I used to just put her on the train at Grand Central and shove a magazine in her hand and say, ‘So long, toots. Look out for the conductor.’”

  “Steve—”

  “Christ, you didn’t have to ride all the way up here just to see her to the door.”

  “How does it feel to be back?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when I see you, and I do wanna see you, buddy. I got a lot to tell you, and you got a lot to tell me too. Right?”

  “Any time you say.” Vic shifted the phone to his left hand while he dried the palm of his other hand on the bedspread.

  “How about dinner tomorrow evening?”

  “Sounds okay to me,” Vic said.

  “Just the three of us. You don’t mind if I bring Ann?”

  “I … uh … damn it, I just remembered. I have to work the night shift tomorrow.”

  “I see.” Price was silent for a moment. “Well how about coming up here some night for a little of Ann’s home cooking?”

  “Funny how clear you sound—like you were down in the lobby or something.”

  “Here, I’ll let you speak to Ann. Maybe you two can work out some night when we can all get together.”

  “Hello? Steve? Wait a minute.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t bother putting Ann on. I got an idea and—”

  “I’ll ask her if she wants to speak to you. Hold on Vic.”

  “Steve!”

  There was silence on the other end, and Vic got up from the bed, holding the phone tightly.

  “How do you like that?” It was Price again. “She said she has nothing to say.”

  “Look,” Vic said quickly. “Why don’t just you and I have lunch together in town?”

  “I got a better idea. When’s your day off?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “You still got your Winchester?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Fine. We’ll spend the day hunting up in the woods—just the two of us—alone.”

  “I … uh … Well, let me see now—”

  “I won’t take no, pal. I’ll pick you up in the car and we’ll go up to that little shack on Henderson’s Knob and clean our rifles.”

  “But—”

  “I picked up a lot of tricks I’ll show you, about cleaning weapons and—”

  “Look, Steve—”

  “—and then we’ll have ourselves a little plain and fancy shooting.”

  “Steve—”

  “And I won’t take no.”

  Vic sank down on the bed, weakly.

  “I’ll pick you up at nine.” Price sounded louder than ever.

  “This is no kidding,” Vic said, “but I just remembered—” He stopped short as the door buzzer sounded. “Hold on a minute.”

  He put the phone on the bed and walked quickly to the door and opened it.

  She wore a green tailored suit and no hat and she smiled at him with an easy familiarity as she came in. “You smell divine, darling,” she said.

  “What are—I thought you were home!” He stared at her for a second, and then he rushed to the phone.

  “Hello, Steve? … Hello?” He jiggled the phone and his voice rose frantically. “Steve!”

  “Honey,” she said, “what is it?”

  He looked at her numbly and his hands trembled as he put the phone down. “Did you come through the front lobby?”

  “Vic, tell me.” She shook his arm. “What is it? What’s wrong?” He stood there with a stricken look on his face and the beads of perspiration growing on his forehead. And then, as he knew it would, the door buzzer began to ring.

  The Unguarded Moment

  HE SAT IN THE SOFT, DEEP CHAIR listening with his third ear to the faltering voice of the girl on the couch, and with those other, more easily fooled ears to the sounds of the city drifting in through the inch of opened window. For a moment his eyes wandered from the pad in his lap and rested on the long, tapering legs and the firm, female contours of her body, lying there so open and unguarded beneath the drab wool dress. And once again he found himself wondering how long it would be before she succeeded in emerging from lifelong selfdespair and discovered the fact of her beauty, and how long before she would try to use it against him as an instrument of lure and involvement.

  Th
e harsh ring of the telephone at his elbow cut through the mono - tone of the girl, shattering in one shrill burst of sound the whole tortured, illusory world she had so ingeniously created this morning for his absorption.

  He glanced quickly at the clock on his desk, knowing in the instant that he did so that he had betrayed him self to himself. For in that one quick glance he had said: Perhaps it is exactly eleven o’clock, a time when she would call, knowing that it would be all right because I would be between patients. He had revealed to himself that he still dared to hope she would change her mind and not leave him … that she was not this very minute on a train somewhere between Westport and Grand Central Station, somewhere between home and Reno, Nevada, somewhere between him and Phillip Sebastian.

  He glanced at the clock and it was only five minutes to eleven.

  The girl on the couch lay tensely silent, twisting the ring on her right hand, waiting for him to answer the phone and dispense with the intruder and come back quickly into her world to help her escape from it.

  He took the receiver from its cradle.

  “Dr. Trask speaking.”

  “Dr. Trask, this is Mrs. Pearson. Donald’s mother.”

  “Oh yes.” So this was the voice, the carrier of the germs of belittlement. It was only a little less imperious than he had pictured it, deafening him now for the moment …

  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  “I said I have decided that Donald is not to see you any more,” the voice announced. “I don’t like the way he is acting toward me and I don’t like his attitude toward anyone else either. You’ve had him for eight months, Dr. Trask, and I don’t think you’ve done a thing for him except make him disrespectful and ungrateful. He was far better off before he started going to you, and if he had only listened to me in the first place—”

  “Donald is twenty-four,” he spoke quietly. “Don’t you think he is old enough to be permitted to decide this for himself?” He glanced at the girl on the couch and thought: Forgive me, dear, broken Elizabeth, for not being able to protect you from hearing even a part of this, but I shall make it up to you some day.“You know very well the decision would not be his.” The voice was harsh. “It would be yours, Dr. Trask. Everything he does and says and thinks is yours. This isn’t my boy. My boy wouldn’t be having such ideas and saying the things to me that he does. It’s you Dr. Trask. You’re the one who is ruining my child.”