by Herman Wouk
“Stephen,” she said. He turned his head toward her, a slight lift in the eyebrows that were faintly tinged with gray. Laura hesitated for a moment, conscious of a great impulse to say something kind. “I think you’re very decent and wise.”
Stephen English laughed aloud, and Laura realized that she had not heard him do so until now. It was the kind of short, reluctant mirth with which someone joins in a joke at his own expense. He took her hand; Laura did not protest, nor did she wrest her hand away from him. They sat thus in a new unspeaking intimacy looking at the fire, and thus they were still fifteen minutes later when Mrs. Brennan rustled starchily into the room, decorated with the broadest of all possible smiles and bearing an exquisite service of tea.
It will be very hard, surely, to justify to the gentle reader what must seem a looseness in our heroine’s behavior. Remember, then, that even Noah, the only man deemed worthy of being saved from a world’s destruction, was described as being merely “righteous in his generation.” The manners of the time and place in which Laura lived took an exceedingly frivolous view of the importance of holding hands, and indeed of other, somewhat more searching liberties. Morality is eternal, but its modes fluctuate. A Japanese, they say, thinks nothing of bathing naked in the same tub with a stranger of the opposite sex, but a clasp of hands between the two would be a turning point. We ourselves observe with great calm our young ladies walking on beaches with all but a half-dozen crucial square inches of their skins exposed; an hour later, we are shocked to see one of them come in to dinner wearing a skirt which ends an inch above the knee. Laura was, beyond doubt, righteous in her generation; yet, betrothed though she was, she permitted Stephen English to hold her hand. That this was an inadvisable kindness will perhaps be seen in the sequel.
When Laura returned to her apartment at sundown, she observed with surprise that her mother was setting the dinner table for two. “I telephoned you that Andy was coming,” she protested.
“Andy telephoned at three o’clock and said he was sorry, but he suddenly found that he had to take someone to dinner for business reasons,” said Mrs. Beaton, smoothing the tablecloth daintily. “How was lunch with Mr. English and that famous artist? My, you’re moving in high company nowadays. You’d have been right at home with your uncle Woodrow in the White House.”
“Lunch was very pleasant,” said Laura, with a sinking at her heart which she could have in no way explained. “Did Andy say he would be here later in the evening?”
“No, he said he was afraid he was going to have to make a night of it. Strange that a millionaire finds time for you and a young fellow like Andy is so occupied,” said the mother, and was about to continue when she observed a dangerous gleam in her daughter’s eye, whereupon she prudently disappeared into the kitchen.
The telephone rang. Laura leaped at it; the radiance on her face as she put the device to her ear was the expression the old masters were always struggling for when they painted angels. The disappointment that quickly succeeded it was like the dropping of a curtain. “Hello, Stephen,” she said. “You’re much too kind to me. Thank you, but I’m having dinner at home.” A silence followed during which she was clearly being subjected to persuasion. “Stephen, I don’t like to be serious over the telephone, but don’t you think that it’s not proper for me to see you so often?” Another silence. Laura’s expression changed to one of resignation. “Yes, of course I’d enjoy that,” she said at last. “Do come up for a while after dinner. You can’t stay long because I have to work early in the morning. Good-by.”
As she put down the instrument her mother came out of the kitchen, carrying plates of bread and butter. “Who was that?” she inquired with the elaborate innocence of the eavesdropper. Laura told her wearily that Stephen English had asked permission to pay a call after dinner, and that she had been unable to think quickly of a gracious way to refuse him. Mrs. Beaton observed with gravity that she was sure it was perfectly proper, otherwise a fine gentleman like Mr. English would not suggest it, and furthermore, she was confident it would be a short, pleasant and very harmless little visit, and much nicer than sitting alone, wondering what Andy was doing. She returned to the kitchen as she said this, and no sooner had she passed out of her daughter’s sight than she executed a caper that was slightly at variance with her remarks and quite singular in a lady of advancing years.
No heroine, surely, should consider entertaining in her home a man other than the one to whom she is betrothed, but there’s such a majesty doth hedge a millionaire that one must deal lightly with a maiden whose sense of propriety falters before him. Yet I fear that this apology may be misplaced, and that all too many of my readers, even as Mrs. Beaton, only feel that Laura is at long last beginning to use her head.
CHAPTER 10
In which Andrew Reale improves an acquaintance,
and eats one Magic Dinner more than is supposed
to be healthy for a young man.
THE SNOW IS FALLING in a whirling veil in Central Park tonight. It has been falling steadily and heavily since sunset, and the trees are laden with a decorative burden, while the lawns and asphalt roads are blanketed in silent whiteness. The lamps are haloes around which dance innumerable snowflakes, fluttering ever down and down like dying little white moths. So thick is the snowstorm that beyond the lamps nothing can be seen of the artificial cliffs which march grimly to the four brinks of the park and halt there, baffled by the charm of Municipal Ownership; and tonight the park might be a thousand square miles of whiteness instead of a few besieged acres. Snow … snow … snow. The automobile traffic is all diverted to the straight avenues flanking the outside of the park, where monstrous machines thrust the snow aside as fast as it settles to the wet stone. The winding roads inside the park are deserted, and, as they gather the whiteness undisturbed, they are gradually merging into the lawns out of which they were first gashed. It is with difficulty that the ancient driver atop the ancient hansom cab–which intensifies the solitude by being the sole moving thing in it–can see his way through the sooty night and the milky storm, but the sense of the horse is better than the cabman’s eye, and he plods surely along straightaways and around curves that are stamped into his muscles. The noise of his hoofs is muffled to a padding such as might be made by a giant cat. The cabman utters no sound and thinks no thought. Inside the cab, the young couple are as completely alone as they might be at either Pole. This is well, since they are locked in most affectionate embrace.
It is with regret that I must identify the couple as Andrew Reale and Carol Marquis.
They remain thus, mouth to mouth, clinging to each other as the cab rocks them gently, for a length of time that is better imagined than specified. At last Carol takes her burning mouth from his, and, leaning back in his arms, whispers, “I know all about you. You’re engaged to Honey Beaton. Why are you doing this to me?” Andrew’s eyes are looking into hers. “I don’t know why I’m doing it. Shall I stop?” he says. A little white hand steals into the plentiful fair hair on the back of his head, and his mouth is softly pulled down on hers once more. The cabman blows snow-flakes out of his gray mustache and notices mournfully, through a rift in the storm, the straight line of lights on One Hundred Tenth Street, which tells him he is only half way around the park; and his slow mind, oscillating for a moment between wonder at the foolishness of his fares, and gratitude for the twenty-dollar bill with which he was bribed to accommodate their eccentric impulse, settles into a numbness matching that of his fingers and toes. Snowflakes drift inside the cab through a small opening of one window and settle unheeded on the girl’s fur coat. And it is cold inside the little wooden box, but there is no numbness in here, no numbness at all.
Sweet friend, may Heaven preserve you from error and keep you safe in the good paths of life; but if you are fated to stray, in order to learn the bitter lessons of straying, may one of your sins be a hansom cab ride through Central Park in a snowstorm, wrapped in the arms of a young creature who is not yours.
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br /> The chain of circumstances that had brought Andrew Reale into such peccant activity was curious, in that each link but the very last could be regarded as innocent–and probably was, to his best discernment. Confronted with the apparition of the girl in Talmadge Marquis’s office at a moment when a word from her could have engulfed all his hopes, he had seen no other course but to say to her, in a swift aside during introductions, “Mum’s the word, and I’ll take you to dinner at the Ferrara.” The girl had given him a single mischievous glance and muttered, “Done!” and thereafter had feigned indifference to him, and had made no mention of their encounter on the train. It developed that she had come to her father’s office to meet Michael Wilde and obtain an interview with him for her college newspaper, and shortly after her arrival she left with the talkative painter to visit his studio. The business meeting continued with a discussion of plans for the Stanfield program, and ended in an atmosphere of hearty good feeling as rare in Marquis’s office as conversations in ancient Hebrew–a complete triumph for Andy. In the spangled firmament of advertising, a new star was unmistakably beginning to glimmer.
The Club Ferrara, like the setting of the “Decameron,” was a pleasant retreat where aristocrats gathered to escape a spreading epidemic–in the older instance, bubonic plague, in the present one, equality. The proprietor was a chevalier dauntless in die tottering cause of privilege, and his prices formed a steep wall which only the stoutest purses could scale. Outside, the throng sweated and pressed, and one or two of the hairy mob might even fight their way each evening inside the walls, but always they were confronted in the outer hall by this Aramis, skilled in parrying the bludgeon of raw gold with the pliant steel of insolence. It followed, naturally, that the Club Ferrara was considered the most desirable place in New York at which to dine. The interior of the club was decorated with murals depicting the life of Lucrezia Borgia, but the research and toil of the artist went for naught, since at the club the animal act of feeding was veiled in a fashionable gloom which obscured his work and also, mercifully, the coloring of many of the patrons.
Andy’s offer to take the Marquis girl to the Ferrara had been an inspiration, for it was the very shrine of the Beautiful Brahmins. A devotée who came here twice in one week acquired thereby an increase of caste and was distantly envied by her sisters who could contrive to immerse themselves in this Ganges only once, limited as they were to collegian escorts of good family whose weekly allowances were consumed like stubble by an evening at the Ferrara. Andrew was a familiar figure at the club, for in the entertainment of clients his purse was the exchequer of the Republic Broadcasting Company itself. The proprietor bowed and spoke pleasant words of greeting to the couple, and conducted them to a table directly beneath a panel depicting Lucrezia and Pietro Bembo in a guilty kiss.
No reader under thirty-five will fail to agree that a thousand dinners at restaurants may go by, undistinguished one from another, and then, suddenly, one will come that is fatefully perfect. The wine invigorates like Ponce de Leon’s fountain, the roast chicken is a miracle of brown excellence, the asparagus is green as emeralds, the rolls are warm snowballs in a crust of gold, and there never was such a swooning sweetness of ice cream; and all this, by the luckiest of coincidences, happens on the very evening when one first dines with a young person who is destined stage–to become of Great Importance. Andrew Reale had eaten such a magic dinner once before, six months earlier, when he had taken the pretty Dixie Cigarette Model-of-the-Month, Honey Beaton, to dinner. It did not occur to him at all now–for he was, truthfully, in an unreflective stage–that there was anything more than delight in the fact that tonight he was eating another one.
The note struck in the relationship between a young man and a young lady in the first hour of their acquaintance often persists unchanged until stilled by separation or death. This dinner was the breakfast on the train all over again for Andrew and Carol, with the added warmth of renewal, and a merriment engendered by their conspiracy to hide his folly from her father. The girl archly threatened to expose him whenever, as she pretended, an item of the dinner displeased her, as, “This rice is cold. I’m going to tell my father everything,” whereupon Andrew never failed to produce extravagant and ridiculous pleas for mercy. This inexhaustible joke kept them gay, and Andy, feeling again the buoyancy that the girl inspired in him, proceeded to talk about himself with abandon, and found the subject fruitful, with the youngster’s attentive dark eyes fixed on him. Again there were the short, pertinent questions dropped into his pauses for breath, urging him on to further self-revelation; again there was intense laughing appreciation of every point and sympathetic admiration of each opinion or plan. Once or twice, with a vague sense of the lack of balance of the dialogue, he tried to shift the focus to her, but the girl impatiently dismissed herself as “just a school kid,” and brought the conversation back to the topic on which he was never unable to resume his eloquence.
The dinner vanished, together with two quarts of champagne. Carol’s laughter at Andy’s wit grew louder and more prolonged, her threats to inform on him more frequent, his miming of a suppliant more absurd. Between bursts of mirth she told him that she had decided to fix his fate by the quality of his rhumba dancing: if he proved the best with whom she had ever danced, her lips were sealed, otherwise he must face Talmadge Marquis’s fury. Andy took up the challenge. He was accustomed to the assurances of young ladies that he was, as they invariably put it, “a divine dancer.” Which member of the Trinity he was supposed to resemble in this attribute had never been specified, to the knowledge of the recorder.
–Murals depicting the life of Lucrezia Borgia–
They proceeded, accordingly, to the Krypton Room on the roof of the skyscraping Hotel Saint James, where brown South Americans played the music of their continent, to which, at that time, citizens of the land of the free took pleasure in agitating their bodies. Andrew and Carol were soon weaving happily under the strange whitish light of the fluorescent tubes filled with krypton gas, which gave the room its name. (The title was first selected by the hotel manager under the impression that Krypton was a metal with which the walls could be decorated: the mistake was discovered only subsequent to an extensive publicizing effort, and the krypton-light tubes were ordered at great expense, as the name was considered most smart and modern. The lights had the effect of making anyone who stood directly under them look extraordinarily ill, and feminine habitués like Carol exhibited much ingenuity in maneuvering, outside their scope.)
Since the dance called the rhumba resembled nothing so much as a stylized fertility rite, and since the music to which it was danced was in a congruent mode, our hero soon found himself regarding his partner with sentiments that did him little credit. If the large quantities of wine which he shared with her were intended to quench these feelings, they were unsuccessful. Carol Marquis did not become giddy, but her eyes took on sparkle, her cheeks reddened and she danced in a manner that might have won applause from the Indians among whom the inflammatory rhythms were born. Andrew was swept up in the flood of her energy. Higher and higher rose their spirits. During a break in the music they walked into the foyer to enjoy the view of New York for which the Krypton Room was known, and, as they gazed out on the splendid panorama of the towers of light, a snow cloud rolled in from the sea, and all vanished except an electric glow, rose-within-white. Clouds of such appearance must float around the near approaches of Heaven. Huge flakes began to hurl themselves against the window and cling there. “Oh, Lord, look at the snow now!” cried Carol, and grasped Andrew’s hand impulsively with warm, tense little white fingers that scratched a bit, so long and sharp were the nails. “Let’s go out and roll in it!”
To fetch their coats, to drop seven hundred feet, to rush out into the storm and feel the tiny stabs of snowflakes on their faces, was the work of a minute. Holding hands, laughing, shouting, and singing, they ran the two blocks that separated them from the lawns of the park, where snowdrifts were already beginnin
g to pile. The many people walking along the cold street with their faces buried miserably to the eyes, people unwarmed by wine and the rhumba, wondered who these noisy fools might be, and passed on. No sooner had Andrew and Carol gone by the stone wall that divided the snarl of city traffic from the dark stillness of the park, than the girl, true to her word, threw herself on the ground and rolled around in the snow like an animal. Andrew regarded this spectacle with astonishment for a moment, then flung aside his hat and imitated her, finding the crunch of the snow under his chest and shoulders a very exhilarating sensation. A few moments of this, and the girl jumped up, shaking the snow from her hair and her furs. “This is wonderful. I want to ride in a hansom cab. Come on, there’s a dozen at the plaza.” She gave a sharp little tug at his hand to help him up, and they ran along the path to the plaza through the thickening storm.
Most of the cabmen had abandoned their posts in the face of the snowfall and had sheltered their ageing steeds in the warmth of stables; but a few necessitous or inert drivers still sat on their high seats, huddled in blankets to the armpits, wrapped in shawls the rest of the way, shrinking from the snow under their ancient top hats, and exhibiting out of all this protection a minimum of red nose, as a sort of shingle to indicate that, weather or no, they were open for business. Dashing up to the reddest of these, Carol shouted, “How much to ride around the park?” A pair of eyes only slightly less red than the nose appeared dimly from under the brim of the top hat, and gazed at the girl with filmy wonder. “What, in this storm?” spoke a voice, its indignant overtones somewhat lost in traversing two layers of thick wool. “Yes, in this storm. How much?” said the girl impatiently. The eyes vanished for a moment while the driver looked into his soul, then reappeared: “It’s cruelty to the poor horse. I was just fixing to take her to the stable. I couldn’t do it for less than twenty dollars.” Carol whirled on Andrew. “You’ve got twenty dollars, haven’t you?” she said, but the green bill was already whipping in the cold wind on its brief journey from Andrew’s wallet to the cabman’s pocket. The girl leaped into the rickety vehicle, her escort followed, and the equipage moved off into the white curtain that was masking the world. Scarcely had the carriage passed from the cloudy brilliance of the street lamps into the gloom of the park, when Carol and Andrew moved into each other’s arms without a word. Mouth found mouth; and thus they remained, with few perceptible changes, until the moment that opens this chapter, when the unhappy author was forced to intrude upon this desperate scene, in order to move his story along.
