The Incredible Charlie Carewe

by Mary Astor

  It was snowing again and the windshield wiper kept a bouncy rhythm to Charlie’s whistling tune. There was very little traffic, the wind kept blowing spindrifts of snow from the piled-up shoulders of the highway. He was enclosed in a white world, and his blood sang to the call of strange gods, the call that was dearer to his heart than anything else. He pulled up to the side for a moment so that he might fill and light a pipe, and in the momentary silence, sudden gusts whipped at the canvas of the convertible’s top, sounding like the sail on the Vee Cee when she was lulled into the wind. Around the pipestem he grumbled an old resentment at the reminder. “Stinkin’ little skiff! Just wait, Miss V.C., someday I’ll hand you aboard the schooner Double Cee—if there’s room for you!” He caressed the smooth ivory ball of the gearshift which bore the design of two written notes of music budding from a single line. He wondered, delighted that he had never appreciated their full significance before. It had simply seemed to be a clever way of putting his initials together, but now it was as though in precognition he had put down the fate of this day. “Up the scale, Charlie boy—up the ladder! Boy, am I going to show ’em!” Just whom he was going to show what, and how he was going to go about showing it, was not important. But the multitudes were already saluting him in awe, the world gasped in amazement at having produced such a genius, and he was weary from acclaim. He meshed the gears and the car skidded back into the road. The tires sang, the wind sang, and the call of his gods sang and moved him swiftly onward toward the city.

  The voice of a tug on the East River hoarsely demanded the right of way. Alma Beatrice Shelley’s nose was flattened into a tiny shape against the streaming windows of her important world, an apartment in the East Seventies overlooking the river. Her breath steamed a small area as she echoed the tug, “Hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo!” A strong pair of hands lifted her from the floor and up to a white starched shoulder. “I’ll hoo-hoo you, young lady, right off to bed—let’s say good night to Mommy and Daddy, now.”

  “I want Daddy to ride me in—take me ride, Daddy!”

  “Coming up, sweetheart—one taxi, coming up.” Jeff was wheeling himself through the dining-room entrance into the big living room. Behind him, Virginia and Zoë Appleby were lingering over their coffee. Virginia interrupted the flow of conversation to call out, “Come say ‘night’ to Zoë first, Alma, like a good girl,” but the child was already being swung up onto Jeff’s shoulders, squealing, “Go fast, Daddy, go fast!”

  Jeff laughed, “Once around the park, and then to bed. Okay?”

  To Alma, her father’s means of locomotion was infinitely more fascinating than that of the other people in her world, for the invalid chair was part of his personality. She had no recollection of a time when he walked, tall and strong, nor did she remember the long gap in time when he was gone, for she had been safe and sound and warm and happy in her crib. In another part of the city her father had lain, equally helpless and cared for, battling through bitterness and shock, trying not to cry out, “Why me!” And coming through the clouds of pain and bewilderment to find an overwhelming gratitude, for Virginia and his baby, his home, the fact that they would never have to worry about money as did so many other tragic victims of polio, and the fact that he could still someday design the most beautiful buildings and homes and bridges in the world right in his own sky-swept studio.

  The “taxi ride” was all too short for Alma, once around the living room, passing out kisses en route to Mommy and pretty Zoë, who smelled so delicious, through the hall to Daddy’s studio, where the rain was thundering on the skylight, and splashing on the terrace, beyond the french windows, then back into Miss Archer’s waiting, firm hands. Another hug and a slippery kiss all around. It would be fun to start all over again, but Miss Archer was unshakable about the fact that she was sleepy. Yawning, suddenly drooping onto the capable shoulder, Alma had to agree with her.

  “More coffee, Jeff?” asked his wife.

  “After that, I think I need a slug of brandy!” he laughed. “That baby is getting heavy as an ox. Isn’t she too fat, Virge?”

  “Fat! You’re mad. Actually she has very small bones, she weighs just a bit under for her age——”

  “Okay, okay, Mama, she’s perfect, sorry I mentioned it but she does have the feel of a small round Rubens.”

  “Her face is pure Botticelli,” put in Zoë, thus winning a smile from Virginia. “I’m sure Charlie and I would have children as beautiful, although probably the girls would be dark,” she said, touching the pale gold of her hair.

  “Counting your chicks already?” smiled Jeff, as he poured a bit of brandy into each of their glasses. “If persistence is any factor in winning the heart of a Carewe, you’ve got it. Personally, I never found it necessary, thank God,” and Virginia leaned to his kiss.

  “Just wait and see, my friend. I’ll make a bet with you that you’ll be best man at our wedding.” Zoë had smooth cheeks which cracked into deep dimples when she smiled or laughed, and it was no small part of her charm. At twenty-eight, Zoë Appleby had more than her share of the world’s gifts bestowed on her by her widowed father. She had lived like a princess, and taken for granted that her wishes were everybody’s command. Graciously she had turned down the offers of marriage from the money-seekers. She could spot them a mile off, after a few stern lessons from her father, and her own experience had hardened her and made her shrewd in her summing up of the males in her coterie. She could have had any of them at the beckoning of a bejeweled little finger—but she wanted Charlie, and Charlie seemed indifferent. At the moment her campaign was in full swing. She had made herself an intimate of the Shelleys, quite frankly telling Virginia that she wanted her co-operation in getting Charlie to see that she would make an ideal wife for him.

  “I’m tired,” she had said, “of simply being an ‘item’ in Cholly Knickerbocker, of dangling ornamentally from the arm of the boy genius of Wall Street.”

  Virginia and Jeff had done their best to dissuade her. “He’ll never have any stability, Zoë.”

  “Who needs it? Besides there’s something about the word ‘stability’ that sounds dull.”

  Virginia put in, “I love him, but——”

  “Exactly, you love him, but—I love him without any buts.”

  “Well, I don’t, frankly,” said Jeff. “I find it difficult even to respect him—although I admit I am charmed by him when he’s around. But he’s a—a disappointing person, Zoë. Walter and Beatrice, his own parents, are either on a mountaintop or a toboggan, they live in a kind of tense fear at what he’ll do next.”

  “They bore him, darling!”

  “I’ll let that pass—for the moment.” Jeff was beginning to despair, the girl was completely blind, apparently. “Have you seen that office of his? It looks like something in the movies; that Gothic board room! I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a pin spot to light his face when he is presiding. And the girls—they look as if they had been promoted when he gives them a pat on the fanny!”

  Zoë was calmly surveying the ice-blue tips of her sandals. Easily she folded her hands behind her head in Charlie’s relaxed “don’t give a damn” gesture. She smiled, and the dimples appeared. Her breasts tightened and lifted with her arms, the softly draped sleeves of her blue crepe dress falling away and stirring the delicate fragrance of her custom-made perfume. “Neither of you dear people,” she said, “seem to get the idea at all. I know Charlie. I know all the things he seems to be. Undependable, thoughtless—even heartless at times. But I have the strength to give him purpose. I can protect him from himself. He is a lousy businessman—really—I know that. Intuitive, sharp, he doubles, halves, triples and loses money for accounts that make conservative investors shudder, and then makes it all back again. He might lose his shirt completely someday—but maybe I can prevent that. I love him because money seems to have no value to him——”

  “Oh, now, Zoë!” Virginia interrupted. “What would he do—what would he be—without it?”

  “He’ll
never be without it, Virgie love, because somebody will always be around to take care of him. I want to be that person. I want you to make him see that.”

  The rain had stopped. Deep in the canyon of the street below the faint tooting of horns could be heard again. Jeff and Virginia looked at each other over the coffee table, in quiet hopelessness which Jeff tried to express. “What can we say to you, Zoë? You’re in love and determined to marry Charlie. All we can do is say to Charlie that he’s a lucky guy.” He smoothed the tartan cashmere over his knees.

  “Damn!” cried Virginia from her corner of the big couch. She held up a shapeless hunk of fluff. “I forgot to decrease, and now I’ve got to take the whole thing back about six rows. Catch!” she said to Jeff, tossing him the ball of yarn. “Wind it up while I pull out this mess. I don’t know why I persist in making itty bitty things, when my fingers are meant to do nothing but pound a typewriter.”

  “How’s the book coming?” asked Zoë.

  “Don’t get me started, Zoë, you’d find it dull. I’ve just uncovered some evidence, about Richard III and Henry VII, that makes me feel my historical novel is going to turn into a first-class whodunit.”

  “Sounds marvelous, darling,” but her heart wasn’t in it, for Zoë was repairing her lipstick in a small gold mirror, and wondering how to get the conversation back onto Charlie, without being too much of a bore. She rose and went to the tall windows, staring out at the lights and the blackness that was the river.

  Behind her, Jeff was winding the wool too tightly—as it pulled taut between them, Virginia looked up quickly to protest, to find Jeff’s eyes on her, teasing, warm. “I love you so much,” he whispered; then, as she shook her head in a smile, he turned to Zoë. “Helps, doesn’t it?”

  Zoë spun back to them, the dimples gone, her eyes sparkling with tears. “Helps what, for God’s sake!” The two took no notice of the heartache in her voice.

  Jeff went on, “To look at water—to spread your thoughts over it like a net.”

  Zoë looked out at the river again, sniffling. “My net doesn’t haul up any fishes, that’s the trouble—solutions, I mean.”

  Virginia said, “When Jeff and I were on our honeymoon in Europe we were always gravitating to the call of watery vistas.”

  “The night we decided on this apartment,” added Jeff, “we took it because of the view of the river, because we seem to be ‘water people.’ ” They were making conversation so that Zoë could recover her composure, but they were remembering a V-path of moonlight from the Point back home. And how in Europe they walked in the mist along the Thames, poked at bookstalls beside the Seine, and later, whenever troubles rose, one of them would say, “Let’s go find some water to look at.” They could project their worries, get them outside themselves, plunging them into the lazy flow of a river, or tossing them over a waterfall; staying close together, saying nothing, until their minds felt clarified, cleaned from emotional confusion, resting in reality once more.

  There was a difficult silence for a while, and Virginia tried to help. “Where did you say Charlie was going tonight?”

  Zoë’s tears had not stopped. “I said he was taking a client to dinner, because that’s what he said, but I know damn well it’s not true.”

  “How?” inquired Virginia. “How do you know——”

  “Because—well, because he likes to boast, for some reason, about who he’s hooked—he always goes into detail with me about his strategy, how big-shot Brown or Smith or whoever is no match for his cleverness, and so on and on. But when he just says, airily, ‘a client,’ I know—I just know, that’s all.” She picked up a table lighter and snapped it viciously at her cigarette. “Those crummy people he draws like flies—says he’s ‘helping’ them.”

  “What people, Zoë?” asked Jeff, hoping to make her talk it out. Virginia knitted on, without expression.

  Zoë took a deep breath and sat down squarely in a chair, forgetting, for once, to drape herself into her usual chic line.

  “I don’t want to hurt you people, I doubt if I can, I envy you that Charlie’s actions no longer really concern you—you’re so safe——” The tears were about to spill again, but she recovered herself. “You know that Dad is thoroughly unimpressed by Charlie. We had an awful fight not long ago. He had no right—anyway, I made the mistake of crying on his shoulder one night, when I was feeling sorry for myself—like tonight; he took it upon himself to find out a few things about my guy—dreadful things, I don’t really care, because I know I could change everything. Apparently Charlie just gets—well, restless, sometimes, and goes off and gets drunk with some really dreadful characters—holes up in some miserable dump for a few days; once he got tossed into jail, but he waved enough money and indignation around so that it never got into the papers. Then he ‘comes back’ from an ‘out-of-town business trip’ blithe and gay as you please. And none the worse for wear.”

  Jeff said in astonishment, “Zoë, why in hell do you bother with such a person! Don’t worry,” he assured her, “Virginia and I know the score, you can’t offend us, but what beats me——”

  Zoë flashed at him like a mother defending a child, “Listen, he isn’t the first ‘scion of a noble family’ to sow a few oats.”

  “He’s twenty-seven years old, Zoë—it’s a little late for oat-sowing:,

  “And I’m twenty-eight. I could steady him. I know he loves me—he isn’t just a no-good guy, somebody you just dismiss as not being worth bothering about.”

  “Well . . .” Jeff’s tone was lower, quiet. “Let’s have another drink and put a pin in it for tonight, what do you say?”

  “You know, Jeff”—Virginia stuck her needles into her work, and got up to get the brandy—“I keep remembering, the day Charlie left for New York in such a big hurry—no, it was the night before—we were all together—and Gregg Nicholson was trying to explain that Charlie might be mentally ill in some way; I often wondered. I’ve met a few others, like Charlie, in a sense—having a peculiar type of personality——”

  “Oh rot!” said Zoë. “Charlie is Charlie, and as for Gregg Nicholson, he bores me completely. I can’t see why Charlie lets him hang around. He’s thoroughly dull, thoroughly the pedagogue. He would find no welcome in our home, I can tell you that.”

  “I wouldn’t pursue that area, if I were you, Virginia,” said Jeff to his wife, “you might find something that would make everybody unnecessarily miserable.”

  “But, Jeff,” Virginia replied quickly, “you always face things, why not face this? If it’s true, we might save a lot of grief—and help Charlie.”

  Jeff caught her eye and shook his head. “Or cause a lot of grief—to your mother and father, to Alma and Herb and Elsie—stop it, Virginia.”

  “I’m sorry,” Virginia whispered, and Zoë burst into laughter.

  “I can see Charlie submitting to a psychiatrist! He’d read up on a few books first and have the poor man so confused he’d think he was crazy! No”—she shook her head with its cap of gold—“I don’t buy that one, darlings; because if there’s anything the matter with Charlie, I know, I feel it in my bones, that the remedy is me, just plain me.”

  It was high noon of the kind of day when the city seems to reach into the sky and pull the season down around itself like a radiant garment. There is a sweet mildness in the temperature, the flower shops bulge with color. And the horn tooting and the rush of cars seem to express exuberance rather than the usual hostile urgency.

  There was full press coverage of the Appleby-Carewe nuptials. There was police protection, as the sidewalk was jammed for a look at glamor and wealth; hushed now, as the organ vibrated in low emotional wave lengths. The pageant was at the climax of its meticulous preparation, and jangled nerves were settling in satisfaction that nothing, so far, had gone wrong. No toe tripped on a rug, no delicate material snagged on anything. Not a candle sputtered, not a blossom but held its petals intact. There were still a few beaded upper lips of tension. Virginia released her hold
on her father’s hand to touch her own lips gently with her handkerchief. On her other side Jeff, in his invalid chair, sat in the right aisle, holding an enchanted Alma on his knees. Virginia was trying to rid herself of the small resentment that Charlie had been obstinate about having Gregg as his best man instead of Jeff. “My oldest friend and revered teacher—besides, I need his help, and Jeff is hardly——” Also, Zoë had airily announced that she simply had to have Maude Olsen as her matron of honor—“She would be terribly hurt, poor darling—I’ve known her since we were in high school.” And, she might have added, had always been served by her with unquestioning devotion. Ever since the engagement had been announced, Zoë had ceased, paradoxically, to be one of the family. Any and all of Jeff’s and Virginia’s offers of assistance were graciously refused, because she didn’t want them to “bother.” “The real reason being,” Jeff had said one day, “that she’s embarrassed.”

  Still holding the phone in her hand, Virginia said, “She practically hung up on me! Nobody’s in that much of a hurry. What’s she got to be embarrassed about? Hasn’t she won? Isn’t this her great hour of triumph?”

  “She’s confided too much in us. Don’t you see, darling? She’s admitted to being a fool, she’s admitted that Charlie’s an unholy mess—and now she wants to forget that she ever said anything of the kind.”

  Zoë had found a new word for Gregg’s “dullness.” He was “dependable” and therefore useful to her. “I think it’s wonderful that Charlie wants you to be his best man, Gregg dear.” And laughing, she had said, “I’m sure you’ll see to it that Charlie won’t take it into his head to run out on me at the last minute.” Her laughter meant that of course she was being funny, that such a thing could never happen, but Gregg knew that her fear was real. “He’ll be there, Zoë—don’t you worry. He’ll be there—for the wedding.” Gregg knew that he had an easy job. He knew that Charlie had a full set of antennae regarding other people’s responses to any given situation. Charlie was quite aware that people attached tremendous significance to things like “Love and Marriage,” “Right and Wrong.” Because he was never deeply involved he could anticipate emotions. He could repair a sensitive situation with what seemed like great tact, or he could add a word that would make it burst into flame. Getting attention and applause was sometimes a lot of bother, full of annoying details, but extremely satisfying.