His hand reached out and pressed mine. “I don’t believe,” he said with a sort of rough gentleness, “and I don’t want you to either!”
The car gave a sudden swerve and I was thrown against him. Then it straightened course again, and I heard him swearing softly under his breath.
“What was that? What happened?”
I saw him turn to look back, so I turned too.
A small figure was crouched on one knee, in the roadway behind us, as though it had jumped aside suddenly just now and overbalanced in the act. It picked itself up unhurt, and the white of a pinafore fluttered about it as distance whisked it back away from us into the gloom. It was a little girl. She looked after us in pert indignation for a moment, then she turned and scampered offside to the roadway.
The car coasted idly to a belated halt moments later, not because of what had so nearly happened—for that was already over and done with by then—but because of its implications, as they slowly filtered into our minds. And, I suppose, unconsciously he braked, as one punctuates a sentence by putting a period at the end of it.
We sat looking forward. And we didn’t turn to meet each other’s glance. I think that was what we both wanted to avoid more than anything else. Behind us in the darkness there was no longer anything to see; the ghost-child had vanished.
We didn’t speak of it; we didn’t need to. Our words were dinning in each other’s ears without that. And each would only have been saying to the other what the other was already saying to himself.
I thought, Here at last is the incident impossible to reverse, with only one side to it. Here is the thing I wanted a moment ago, with the label stark and unmistakable: “This is the right side; there is no other.” But this is not the way in which I wanted it.
I was conscious of him sitting there beside me, and I thought poignantly, Where is all your logic now? Where are all your arguments now? Poor darling.
“Come on, father, let’s go home,” I said in a small, stifled voice.
The car glided forward again.
“Shall I take the wheel for you?” I offered.
“No,” he said, “it gives me something to do; it’s better than—”
I knew what he meant. He kept squinting forward, but he wasn’t seeing the road so much. I opened my bag, and took out a morsel of handkerchief. “Father, your face is all moist up there.” I dabbed at his forehead with it. “She gave you a bad fright, that brat.”
“Here,” he said, “try one of these while we’re getting there.” I had my own cigarettes, but he took his out of his pocket and handed them to me.
I think we were both trying to be very gallant and considerate of each other. I think we both knew we were lying our heads off to each other, without a word of it being said.
We were near home now. “Jean,” he blurted out. “We’ve never been hypocrites, you and I. We’ve always been frank with each other. Don’t let’s start changing that now. It’s on both our minds. Don’t let’s take it into the house with us. Let’s get it out and over with here and now.”
I nodded, waited.
“That was a coincidence, back there just then.” His voice rose, almost to a shout. “I don’t care what the odds were against it, fifty-fifty, eighty-twenty, or a hundred to one; that was a coincidence, I tell you!”
“Is that what you want to think?”
He hit the wheel rim. “It’s what I want both of us to think! It’s what it has to be! Nothing else will do. Jean, I’ve never tried to control your thinking, and I’m not going to begin now. Every time anyone’s out driving a car, such a thing might happen. He happened to drop a sarcastic remark at random, because he begrudges anyone the use of a car, he’s envious of those who own one. And the incident just happened to match up with it. The streets are always full of children. And any time you’re driving, you’re likely to have such a thing happen.”
But it had never happened, with either one of us at the wheel, until tonight. And this was a little girl. I didn’t say that to him aloud.
Faith, they say, is a stubborn flame that can’t be quenched, that will not die. But so is skepticism. It’s just as hard to put out. I could sense that it was flaring up in him again, brighter, more defiant than ever.
“It’s just a coincidence,” he said, and his jaw locked tight. “A shot in the dark that hit its mark.” He turned and winked at me jauntily. “Now let’s get back to our ‘dinner guests,’ shall we?”
“We’re not having anyone for dinner,” I said. “Just the two of us, you and I.”
“I know that as well as you. And even if we were, do you know of anyone who wears a diamond watch at her knee?”
I laughed that out of the side of the car.
He was smiling now in a steely sort of way. You can disbelieve, and smile that way, but you can’t be detached, uninvolved emotionally, and still smile that way. “Just a freak of coincidence,” he slurred. “A lot of bunk.”
I turned and squeezed his arm with almost convulsive appreciation. “I’m glad you feel that way about it!” I said fervently. “If you only knew how glad I am!”
And I meant every word of it, although I couldn’t join him in it myself.
III
I thought the living-room windows looked unusually bright, as we got out of the car and went into the house. We’d been away, they should have been dark.
He noticed it too. “One of the servants must have forgotten to turn out the lights in there after her,” he remarked casually.
“Probably that new girl. She doesn’t know how to work switches.”
It wasn’t an important infraction, after all.
The place seemed to be full of voices as we opened the door. Laughter drifted toward us, and the buzz of modulated conversation.
The butler came hastening toward us from the back of the hall to apprise us. “Mr. and Miss Ordway are here, sir. And another lady. They said they’d wait for you to return.”
There wasn’t anything presumptuous in that. They were brother and sister, friends of his of forty years standing, honorary “aunt” and “uncle” to me in my own childhood.
We went in and the buzz rose to a crescendo for a minute. Louise Ordway rushed forward to kiss me, as was her immemorial prerogative. Then to him: “Harlan, you’re not annoyed with us for doing this, are you? We were on our way to … and when I saw how close we were, I said we simply mustn’t pass by without dropping in to see Jean and Harlan … after all, I don’t care how late we get there, I’d just as soon not get there at all. And Maria has been hearing so much about the two of you from us, for years past …”
She was one of those people who speak without punctuation. I had at one time thought she must have modeled herself after those characters you see in drawing-room comedies, but later in fairness I was more inclined to believe it was the other way around.
“I would have been annoyed if you hadn’t,” my father said.
The other person was a statuesque blonde, in her late thirties or early forties; a Continental type, who spoke with a spice of accent. She wore a clinging sheath of black dinner gown which emphasized her graceful stature; they were all three in evening clothes.
“Maria Lisetta,” Louise whispered to me on the side, in postscript to the more formalized introductions, “of the Rumanian State Theatre in Bucharest. We’ve known her for years in Paris. It’s her first trip over, she’s staying with us. Did you ever see her over there? She’s my standing rebuttal to those people who keep insisting women aren’t as brainy as men. Eight languages, my dear …”
“Louise is being my press agent again.” The celebrity smiled from the other side of the room. “I can tell by that animated look her face takes.”
She was almost pulsingly charming. You succumbed, or at least became aware of it, from the moment your eyes first rested on her. Expressed baldly like that, it should have been a quality in her disfavor; I dislike arduously exercised charm. But this was unforced and unsynthetic, an innate attribute that could
be no more held against her than her height or the coloring of her eyes. It was just a certain personality pattern that happened to fall into pleasing form to the greatest possible number of people.
Weeks was lingering unobtrusively just beyond the doorway, waiting until he’d caught my father’s eye.
“About dinner, sir?”
“Oh, yes,” my father said. “For five, of course.”
What else could he have said—could anyone have said, even though his very life were at stake?
Then he turned, and found me looking at him, and our eyes met in unspoken but devastating understanding.
We had dinner guests, after all. And who could have known a short while before that we would have?
“I think,” he said brittlely, moving toward the shaker, “that I’ll have one of these Martinis the rest of you are having. But double.”
And I understood.
Louise remarked discerningly, “Are you sure we’re not infringing on anything? You both look a little worn and—well, on edge.”
“We had rather a long drive in the car just now,” I said.
“And where did you get that odd-looking coat, my dear?”
I looked down at it and swallowed, and didn’t know what to answer for a moment.
My father came to the rescue. “Borrowed it,” he said quickly. “It was chilly in the car.”
“I think I’ll go up and change,” I said. “Would you care to come up and powder, mademoiselle? Louise?”
“At my age very little improvement is possible,” Louise answered, “and the potential returns are practically nil. You two run along.”
As soon as we were up there, Lisetta turned to me confidentially. “I am so glad you ask me to come up. You—how you say it? —save my life. You have one of these—” she circled one finger helplessly in the air “—I could borrow? That is one English word I do not know yet. I have an accident in the car. I do not care to mention it in front of Tony—”
She thrust one exquisitely molded leg out before her, and drew up the clinging black sheath nearly to her hip on that side.
“Oh, a garter,” I said quickly.
“Elastique,” she nodded. “I have to do what I can until I find first aid. I am ingénieuse.”
Just below the dimpled knee a diamond-outlined wrist-sized watch twinkled exotically, like a rosette at the side of her calf; the black silk cord it was attached to stretched to its uttermost limits of expansion to support her silk stocking in unfurrowed smoothness.
“I take it off here, put it on there. But if someone have asked me the time in the meantime—” She shrugged in humorous dismay.
Then suddenly the hem of her dress had dropped to the floor again, she straightened, took a quick step toward me in unfeigned concern.
“What is the matter, Mademoiselle Jean? You look so white, so—You are feeling ill? Shall I ring for someone?”
“No,” I said weakly, “I’ll be all right—”
“Here, come, sit here for a moment.” She put her arm solicitously around me and led me to a chair. “You have some cologne? I freshen your forehead with it.”
“No, thank you, I’ll be all right.” I smiled gratefully at her. “I’m glad you came up here with me, though.” I looked around, a little uncertainly. “Doesn’t this room frighten you a little? Isn’t there something about it—?”
“It is a lovely room,” she said quietly, and stroked my hair reassuringly once or twice.
“I’ll hurry up and change,” I said, bending to my shoe. “We mustn’t keep them waiting.” I knew she was standing there looking down at me without saying anything, though I didn’t raise my eyes. “Talk to me, mademoiselle,” I pleaded. “Talk to me while I’m changing. Talk to me about Bucharest or Paris or the theater or yourself. Talk loud, and fast. Oh, won’t you please keep talking!” And suddenly I turned and buried my face and burst into wild sobs for a moment or two like a frightened child.
We were a little late getting down to the others.
“Did you have your double drink?” I accosted my father. “Well, now I’m going to have one of my own. A triple one.”
When they left we saw them to the door together, and watched them get into their car and go away, standing there in the doorway, he on one side of it, I on the other. We kept looking out until the big oblong patch of night it gave us was empty. Empty, with just stars. Then we closed the door, and we were alone together. No, not alone; if we only had been alone, but we weren’t; this thing was in there with us.
We walked back toward the stairs together, still a door’s width apart, he on one side of the hall, I on the other. I don’t know why; it was as if we were afraid to come together.
I went up without saying anything, and he went inside, to where the liquor cabinet was, and I heard him open it.
Then a few moments later I heard him come up in turn, and go into his room, and close the door.
Then later still I came out of mine, and went over there, and knocked.
“Come in, Jean; come in,” I heard him say in a flat, forlorn sort of way.
He was in robe and pajamas, sitting on the edge of his bed. The far edge, with his back to me. There was a bottle of brandy on the small table there, and a little pony of it riding the flat of his hand, unsupported, as though he were testing it for weight. Or perhaps it was efficacy.
He didn’t turn; he said, with the back of his head still toward me, “Are you pretty badly shaken up?” Then without waiting for my answer, “I know; so am I.”
I sat down on the other side of the bed from him, but slantwise, looking toward him. “She even had the watch on her knee; that Rumanian friend of Lou’s.” I already couldn’t remember her name, it had gone out the door with her.
He swallowed the brandy quickly, as though forestalling someone who had been about to take it away from him. “Done up brown,” he said, with a little inward cough. “Every t crossed and every i dotted.”
I smoothed the patch of counterpane nearest my hand. “Everything but the broker.”
The pony held brandy in it again. “You have to allow a slight margin of error. I don’t hear from Walt for months at a time any more, these days. My stock-dabbling days are years behind me. But who’s to know that but you and I? Or am I taking away the last slim straw you might—?”
“You’re taking away nothing, because I have nothing.”
“But that diamond leg watch, Jean,” he went ahead in a smothered voice.
Again someone tried to take his brandy from him, and again he warded them off and got it down.
“Who was to know that, even you and I?” I said softly. “Even Louise, in the same car with her, didn’t know it.”
He didn’t answer. I was sorry for a moment I’d said it. Yet, if I hadn’t, he would have thought it anyway, so what difference did it make?
The back of his head made a quick little move again. Like a nod toward the ceiling.
“It’s the shaking up it gives you. It’s like everything suddenly taking a half turn around on its pivot, so that you have to learn to walk on your ear. I like my universe nice and level, not on the bias.”
The cork clucked.
“I’m going to do something I haven’t done in twenty years; I’m going to drink myself into bed and drink myself asleep.”
I reached out and patted him understandingly on the back. Then I got to my feet. “I guess I’d better go along. I can’t stay here in your room all night.”
“Will you be all right in there?” he said.
“In there or in here,” I said. “It goes with you. It has nothing to do with places.”
“You’re right. The ones that have to do with places are the easier things to duck.”
I went over to the door and opened it.
He didn’t look around, still sat there shoulders sloped. “Well, we’ll get used to it,” he said. “You can get used to darn near everything, even ground glass nudging into your backbone. We’ll work out some way of living with it.�
��
He raised his pony, looked at it.
“But tonight it’s not much fun, is it?”
“Tonight it’s not much fun,” I assented wryly, and I closed the door.
He was down ahead of me in the morning. I still carried the night under my eyes, in graduated shading. But otherwise it was morning, and the sun was cauterizing everything. Especially those twinkling motes in the sky.
His melon was standing there waiting for him on a bed of shaved ice, with his letters beside it, but he wasn’t at the table. I found him in the other room, holding the telephone to the side of his head.
He must have been listening, he wasn’t saying a word.
He turned and saw me, and as I started to go out again he beckoned me over to him with his head.
“The one remaining thing came out too,” he said to me quietly. “This is Walt Myers on the line now. His call.… No, Walt, go ahead; I was just saying something to Jean.”
The sun cooled off a little; if there’s such a thing as chilly sunshine, that was it over there, forming a livid gangplank from the window sills to the floor.
He saw me start to turn away again, and his free hand quickly reached for me and held me there, with a sort of pleading urgency. “No, wait; don’t go. I want you to stay here by me.”
There was something infinitely poignant about the little abortive gesture that struck straight into my heart; his wanting me to stand there by him; an instinctive cry of loneliness, of helplessness, of bafflement, from him of all people. Yes, the axis of our world was on the bias, all right.
I stood there by him, and he put his free arm about my shoulders and held me that way. And as I stood against him, I could feel his heart going a little faster than it should have. Not because of what Myers was saying to him. But because it was Myers.
“My Consolidated shares,” he breathed to me in an aside. “I didn’t even remember I had any—”
Then he listened again.
Then he said, “Something’s happened since closing time yesterday; he doesn’t know what it is himself. They’ve hit the chutes, they’re tobogganing—”
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 12
