by Mary Astor
Gregg protested, “ ‘Keeper’ is a strong word, Charlie.”
“I know, I know, Gregg—but I resented like hell not being able to go back to finish out the semester, and I’ve taken it out on you.” His smile was a warm apology, and then, turning to Herb in explanation, “I got into a bit of a mess at the beginning of the term.” He dropped his eyes to the tick-tack-toe he was drawing. “I don’t think you know this either, Gregg, I’ve never told it, because it sounds too damned egotistic, but it was really because of a couple of gals. Women fighting over me! Can you imagine!” He chuckled modestly, but as though the modesty was obligatory and he was pleasantly resigned to the fate of always being the prey of fighting females.
“One of them was the wife of a professor—a foolish lonely woman—I spent a little time with her, read her poetry, stuff like that—but she got it bad, poor thing.” He sighed at the memory, and lifted his shoulders in a “What was I to do?” gesture.
“It’s my own feeling that the professor got wind of the dear lady’s attraction to me and put a younger girl in my path, just to prove to her that she was too old to flirt.” Gregg was listening, fascinated. This was a brand-new version. He had not even heard of the “professor’s wife.” If this were true, then he could understand more clearly why his being thrown out of school had been so completely without qualification. So far all he had heard was that a girl had pursued him so thoroughly, practically throwing herself at him, that on the night of the Halloween party he had been a little drunk and had lost his head.
Charlie was pounding the table softly in emphasis and frustration. “Well—I made a pass at the kid—she was a pretty piece—she screamed for help—and pulled my world down around my ears.” He was silent, as though he could not go into further detail without being ungentlemanly.
The silence extended itself and Herb broke it, weakly. “Yeah, women are like that——”
Gregg shot him a look, one eyebrow raised, his lips twisting, that said, “Oh, brother!” and then went on, quickly, “Nothing has happened to ‘your world,’ Charlie—I’d say you were in pretty good shape.”
Quickly Charlie said, “Oh, no reflection on you, my friend—you’re damned easy on me. I don’t see, sometimes, how you can put up with me, letting me goof through assignments. Of course, you are rather handsomely paid!”
Gregg felt a rush of blood to his face. “I’m not paid to let you ‘goof’—get that through your head, Charlie. And I intend——”
Charlie cut him off with, “Sorry, sorry—I’m always misunderstood when I speak the truth—it’s a habit of mine, it just seems impossible for me to be dishonest.” And before Gregg could explode he turned to Herb, who was hiding the lower part of his face in his coffee cup. “Herb, I’m sure you understand—this man is my friend. He has the patience of Job, and I’m a very sensitive, very impatient person. I resent being fettered in any way. I hate being ‘crowded,’ and I’m apt to hit out at the person nearest to me.
Herb felt his own impatience beginning to rise. To his straightforward mind, there was no problem. “Why let yourself be crowded then?” he asked. “Chuck the whole thing. Hop a train. Go somewhere and do whatever it is you want to do. Gregg says you’ve got a good brain, you’ll probably be a success at whatever you put your mind to—you’ve got dough, health, personality. I’m afraid I agree with Gregg—you’re in pretty good shape.”
Charlie smiled, a small sad smile. “Herb—you’re very kind. I appreciate it—I really do. I can see why you two guys are such close friends. You’re both interested in the other fellow’s problems. You’re unselfish, not like most people. Will you do me a favor?” He leaned forward, his dark eyes intense, serious. “Come for dinner tonight, both of you. I want you to meet Dad; my poor mother will probably be too ill to come down to dinner, but she’ll see you for a minute anyway. I’m not sure, but I think my younger sister will get in late this afternoon—she’s a doll. I want you to see the reasons why I can’t just ‘chuck’ things——”
Herb protested. “Well, I don’t know—I don’t want to butt in——” looking at Gregg, who shrugged and said, “Why not? Thanks a lot, Charlie.”
A plumpish waitress in starched blue and white asked pleasantly if there would be anything else. The three men agreed there was nothing and Charlie reached for the check she was holding, with a deaf ear to the protests of both Herb and Gregg. He peeled a fifty-dollar bill from a wallet that looked as though it contained brothers. “Sorry.” Charlie smiled apologetically. “Can you handle this?”
“Certainly, sir, thank you,” said the waitress, unimpressed.
Charlie gazed after her retreating form and shook his head. “Might be nice—without a girdle—more bounce to the ounce.” And then laughed loudly at his own joke.
“See you later, fellows—I’ll grab the local hack and beat it home—tell the folks to break out the ancestral silver.”
The two men remained silent at the table. The luncheon crowd had thinned and the anemic winter sunshine was beginning to draw charcoal shadows at the base of the birch trees.
Herb looked at the quiet landscape, watching a little girl in a red knitted snowsuit climb over a snow-covered low rock wall, and a barking collie taking it in a leap. For a moment they disappeared, and he waited until they came into view again, the collie ahead and the child after him, before he spoke. “Poor guy,” he said.
Gregg looked up from his not so charitable thoughts. “What do you mean, ‘poor guy’?”
“Just that—poor little rich boy. I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the tea in China. I think he’s swell—a little wet behind the ears, that’s all.”
Gregg said, “I think I’d better make a phone call. Call Mr. Carewe, I mean, and tell him Charlie invited us.”
“What for? He was going right home and——”
“Home,” Gregg said, “is ten minutes from here. Nobody knows what can happen in that ten minutes in Charlie’s head. Enough to make him forget he even asked us. And you’ve got to admit that would be pretty embarrassing for us. Show up there, and nobody knows we’ve been invited for dinner.”
“Well, he seemed anxious to have us—to prove something to us. At least it seemed so to me.”
Gregg fished for some change in his pocket. “Be back in a minute—or better still—let’s get some air. If you’ll go up to the room and get our coats, I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
“Right.”
Gregg was leaning on the cigar and cigarette counter looking idly at a movie magazine when Herb descended the stairs into the deserted lobby. There was one old couple sitting close to the dying fire at the end of the room, looking out at the street, or rather in the direction of the street, in a vapid, meaningless way, without perception, just looking because they had eyes whose function was to see, and they could let their eyes go on seeing, without disturbing whatever it was that was going on in their minds, if anything.
Gregg had the same “spectator” look on his face, and Herb thought how chameleonlike Gregg was. He had always seemed able to be at home in any surroundings. He never looked like a stranger, never intruded his own personality on the picture, but Herb knew he was absorbing every facet of it. He would have made a good detective, Herb thought, like that Hercule Poirot character of Agatha Christie’s. He soaked up information like a sponge. The smells and sounds and looks of things and people. In conversations he seemed to be listening more for the little signs, a tone of voice, a hesitant question, than to the actual words a person was saying. It had made Herb very uncomfortable when he first knew him. He had the impression, and he remembered the dull burning of angry ego, that what he was saying was boring to this intellectual snob. He laughed to think he had categorized him as such, at the time, for Gregg had said, “I exercise my humility by reading. The more I read, the more I study, the more I am appalled by how little one human being can know in a lifetime—and even that thought is hardly original.” They had become friends after a nodding acquaintance in the l
ibrary at Columbia over a period of months. Gregg was swotting over his doctorate, preparing for a teaching career, and Herb was about to chuck college for a paying research job. Small pay it was and would remain, it seemed, but it meant everything to Herb because he had no family, no one to please but himself, and it was the kind of work he had always wanted to do since he was a ten-year-old fooling with a Christmas toy diem set. They had discussed this in the little Italian restaurant, in the long walks around the reservoir in Central Park. That was during the Lillian part of his life. When he’d almost got married to the dumbest dame in the world.
He and Gregg had known each other for about a year, and they had been to some Village party together at a walk-up flat full of artsy-craftsy decorations, and the smell of cheap wine, onions, and garlic, and everybody talked at once, very clever and superior and boring as hell. And Lillian had seemed by contrast to be a fresh springtime breeze. She was “just a working girl,” a stenographer at a big wholesale china place up near Gramercy Park, and Herb thought he had found the girl of his dreams. She had a primness, a coolness that looked out of flat aqua-blue eyes, her ash-blonde hair was clean and shining, bunned and braided over her ears. And no one was more amazed than Herb when, during a pouring storm one night in her own plain little flat, she suggested he stay overnight. That was the beginning of a semi-domestic relationship that Herb felt would eventually culminate in marriage. She had a little boy who lived with her parents in Brooklyn, about whom she talked incessantly: how hard it was not to have him with her, and how bad for the child not to have a real home.
He had talked over the situation with Gregg, who had simply listened. After a while the three of them would have dinner together at the flat, or Lillian would get a girl from the office and they would double-date for a movie. And all the time Gregg simply was there, and listening. Pretty soon Herb began to see the whole business through Gregg’s eyes. They had finished one of Lillian’s unimaginative meals, mostly heated up from cans and cardboard containers from the delicatessen. Lillian had been on the “when Herb and I are married” theme. Herb was sprawled on the sofa, and Gregg sat opposite them in a beat-up leather chair, smoking a cigar. He had been leafing through a stack of magazines on the table and in the quiet gesture of simply straightening them somehow made Herb feel he was saying, “Look at this—nothing but True Story, movie magazines, lurid romances—look around you, this is not just poverty, this is tasteless—look at the Kewpie dolls on the mantel,” and Lillian was simpering about “what fun” it was going to be to have a man around the house whom she could take care of—of her philosophy about her own sex, that women made a mistake thinking they could be dominating and hold a man. Of how wonderful it would be when Herb got a real job and they had money enough to have a nice place, with a room for Freddie. And something began to crawl inside Herb’s ribs.
Later they were walking fast together up by the lake in Central Park. Both of them were puffing too hard for speech, and when they finally reached a bench Herb had exploded.
“All that stupid bitch wants is a meal ticket and a father for her bastard son.”
“That’s right,” Gregg had said, laconically. As if to say, “It’s your life, and it’s fine with me, if that’s what you want.”
“How the hell do I get out of this, Gregg?” Herb said finally.
“Just remind her of the depression, Herb. That her dream of a guy getting a ‘real job’ is pretty slim, and she’d better keep looking for better husband material.”
It hadn’t been that simple of course. There had been very wet and stormy scenes, in which Herb had felt like a louse. Then Lillian had made the mistake of going to bed with a new bachelor tenant from the floor below, and told Herb about it, trying to make him feel that he had driven her to it, that she had been “desperate for comfort,” that it meant nothing to her but had saved her from suicide. For a moment Herb’s male rage caught fire and then disappeared in a huge icy wash of pure contempt. And that had been that. It somehow was as clear and simple as the way Gregg had straightened the stack of magazines. They were there, he was not interested in trash, although it was all right if somebody else was. Just as now, as he stood leaning on the cigar counter, Gregg put a magazine back in the rack beside it and looked up and saw Herb coming down the stairs.
“Did you get hold of him?”
“Yes. He seemed very pleased—‘delighted’ was the word he used. Charlie was down in the wine cellar, in search of something extra special in the beverage line, he informed me, said he was rushing around like a nervous hostess.”
As they stepped outside onto the veranda the cold air hit them like a fist, and they hunched their collars up and dug their hands into their coat pockets.
“Wow!” Herb said. “It’s really cold—no more snow tonight, I’ll bet.” The sun had disappeared into a gray haze, the street was deserted, and the wind had risen in little whipping gusts. They swung into their familiar harmony of walking, the duet of their heels crunching crisply in the packed snow. Except for the fact that Herb knew it was unlike Gregg to be “offended,” he seemed to be withdrawn; perhaps he was regretting the importance he had given to Gregg’s character the night before, perhaps the rum had excited him into a rare exaggeration of the situation, giving it unnecessary sinister outlines, and now perhaps after the luncheon he felt foolish. Because young Carewe seemed no more than the usual product of wealth to Herb’s thinking. Money was a great thing to have—it brought time to do the things you had to do, something that those who inherited it rarely appreciated. In the very act of working to get money you sharpened up, it seemed, making you more aware of the preciousness of being able to work without thinking about where the next dollar was coming from. Like Doc Payne, hopelessly enmeshed in treating colds and measles, and filling in at Bellevue’s emergency, patching up cracked heads, frustrated by time running out, when he wanted to practice psychiatry.
“You’ll like Walter Carewe,” Gregg finally said, breaking into Herb’s free-floating thoughts.
“I liked Charlie,” replied Herb with a grin, looking at him sideways. “Ought I to apologize?”
“On the contrary,” Gregg said, smiling a little himself, “I expected you to like him. He has the art of being charming down to a science. I just hope you’ll be around to watch when it slips.”
“When what slips?”
“The mask. The façade of sanity.”
Herb turned to face him in astonishment, but the rising wind moaned around the corner of a brick building, clutching at them like a desperate beggar, and they both staggered a little under the sudden onslaught.
“The hell with this,” cried Gregg, grabbing his hat, “let’s get back to the Inn.”
It wasn’t very hard for Gregg to understand why Charlie couldn’t “chuck things.” The “fetters” that he spoke of were made of the kind of material that the average person would be happy to be shackled by, even though Gregg thought, “No man loveth his fetters, be they made of gold . . .” and Charlie’s were partially, literally, made of gold, but they also were forged of the love of a fine but bewildered family.
He looked around at the candlelighted table, thinking with curious warmth how he and Herb had been welcomed almost hungrily. There was a feeling that a “best foot forward” effort had been made, solely because Charlie had seemed to take an interest in bringing a couple of his friends to his home. Not only was Elsie present as Charlie had anticipated, but also Virginia and Jeff Shelley. It had been a pleasant surprise to see them again, although when he had said so Virginia smilingly raised her eyebrows and said, “Didn’t Charlie tell you? We try to come up every other weekend on account of Mum.” Walter had explained that the doctor had been in earlier and Beatrice’s blood pressure was way down again, and he didn’t think it advisable for her to exert herself in any way. What Walter didn’t explain, naturally, was that Beatrice had been more unreasonable than he could remember, with a kind of snobbism that was totally unlike her.
He had gone in
to her room as soon as Charlie told him about inviting Gregg and Herb for dinner, hoping anxiously that she would make the effort to at least be with them for dinner. She had been reading Anthony Adverse sitting up in bed, and as though even holding the heavy volume was too much for her it had slipped out of her hands to the floor, and she was sound asleep, her reading glasses askew. Walter was about to close the door silently and leave her when she jumped violently, looking at him in a quick animal fear, then quickly she smiled anxiously. “Come in, come in, darling, I must have dozed off. I didn’t sleep a wink last night and I just felt exhausted.”
Walter sat down on the edge of the bed, and with his fingers smoothed the worried lines on her forehead, explaining about the arrangement for dinner. “It’s been so long, Bea—years, I guess—since Charlie has even suggested bringing someone home, I think it would be nice if you would be at your place tonight. It’s been so long since we’ve all been together.” Walter felt that he had been eating tray meals in his study forever. Beatrice had seemed to prefer to eat alone, in bed, saying that it was depressing for her to have someone watch her and reprove her for not eating enough. When the girls were home they usually went sailing out on dates, and usually Charlie disappeared in the afternoon after his classes with Gregg, returning late at night, banging his bedroom door shut. The whole damn house was like a morgue, he thought. Even now he felt as though he were walking on eggs, as though he were being unreasonable to suggest that they have a family dinner and entertain two nice young friends for their son. But Bea was unpredictable these days. It was tough for her, of course, going through the change so early—he guessed that that was what was making her have a difficult time. He worried that she was actually weakening herself by giving in and staying in bed all the time. Of course, she did have terrible insomnia, and she refused to take any “dope” for it, as she called the little pink capsules Dr. Hagedorn left for her. And now, just as he had feared, she began to get very excited.
