by Belva Plain
“It’s true,” Hennie said. “Yes, it’s true. I expected it. The same as his father. The wars take our men. Yes, yes.” She covered her face with her hands.
Nora, the young maid, was terrified, and she began to wail. “Oh, Mr. Sherman, what’ll we do?”
Leah’s screams brought the cook from the kitchen, and she, too, began to sob. “Mr. Hank … I gave him cookies after school. Mr. Hank.”
“We’ll need the doctor,” Bill said quickly. “My wife needs help. And Hennie, too.” For Hennie was still sitting with her hands over her face, not making a sound. “Will one of you call him, please?”
Leah’s terrible primitive cries were loud enough to be heard on the street. “I want to die! Let me die, do you hear me? Leave me alone!” as Bill swept her up and carried her, kicking and struggling, to bed.
When the doctor had given her heavy sedation, he and Bill came back downstairs where Hennie was sitting quietly with Nora. Bill came over and took her hand.
“I didn’t mean to neglect you, but I had to take care of the emergency. Dear Hennie,” he said. “Life hasn’t treated you very well these last few years.”
“There are a few million others it hasn’t treated very well, either.”
“Do you never cry?” he asked her gently.
“I don’t seem to. I don’t know why I can’t.”
“I’ll give you some medicine to help you sleep,” the doctor said.
“And you’ll sleep here,” Bill told her. “Across the hall if you need me.”
On the way out the doctor said, “It’s curious how differently people react. Unspeakable as it is, Leah will come out of this better than Hennie will.”
“She’s so much younger.”
“It’s not that. She lets go. Things don’t get corked up.”
The two men stood for a moment looking out to the street, where an old couple walked a huge white poodle and two little girls in plaid dresses went skipping. It was absolutely crazy that human beings were being killed on the other side of the ocean.
“Not even a funeral, for whatever comfort that is,” Bill murmured. His wet eyes shone in the dusk.
The doctor answered, “It is a comfort. The prayers, the music, the friends … We’ll go to services with her Friday evening or Saturday morning, of course.”
“Of course.”
“She’ll be able to go. She’ll be under control when she wakes up tomorrow morning.”
Bill took his hand. “Thanks for everything. I’ll take good care of her. And of the old lady, too,” he added. “Poor soul.”
“Knowing you, you’ll take good care of everybody. Good night, Bill.”
Twenty-one
The war had been over for more than a year when Paul finally came home, having spent the intervening months as a relief volunteer in the devastated areas of northern France. His last sight of Europe was the wreckage of the harbor at Le Havre, where the Germans in the rage of defeat had blown up the railway and the docks. Yet in the midst of ruin lay hope and a good deal of pride, too, in an America that had given such massive aid to the war and was now giving it again to the peace.
America itself, he saw, was booming. People seemed to be in need of everything, of cars, houses, and shoes; money was beginning to circulate as fast as blood in the arteries of a long-distance runner.
Marian had exchanged her Palm Beach house for a larger one, lavish with fountains, Spanish tile, and royal palms. The season had been growing longer, she explained, and more of their friends had acquired the Florida habit during these years when the Riviera was closed to them.
Although she had obviously prepared for his homecoming with new clothes, and was making an attempt at gaiety with festive menus and flowers in every room, he sensed her anxiety. She looked much older. There were few lines in her face, but there were signs of suffering in her questioning eyes. Are you going to leave me again? they asked. Can I depend on you?
He replied obliquely to her unspoken questions. “It’s good to be back.” And looking around the room, he felt the welcome, even of inanimate things: Joachim’s crystal horse, books, and the photographs of his parents in carved walnut frames. “You’ve had them reframed!”
“Oh, do you like them?”
“Beautiful, Marian. You’ve kept everything beautiful. You always do.”
“So you’re really glad to be home?”
“Of course I am. Glad to be here and to stay here.”
A small, pleased smile quivered at her lips, and after a moment she said softly, “You had a terrible time. About Hank, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I wrote a note to Leah when I heard.”
“That was good of you.”
“Not that I’ve changed my mind about seeing her. But I did feel sad. He was such a nice boy.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“Almost a son to you, the nearest you ever had to a child of your own.”
Melancholy seeped over the red flowers on the table.
“I guess I’ll start making the rounds tomorrow,” he said briskly. “Let people know I’m back.”
Leah was the person he dreaded to see. The letter in which he had told her about Hank’s death was the most painful piece of writing he had ever had to do. He supposed that she would want him to tell it to her all over again, which would revive his anguish. The scene had blackened his wakeful nights and fired his dreams for too long, and he was still trying to get free of it. And so he was relieved to postpone the meeting by stopping off first at Alfie’s.
There, it seemed like old times. Alfie’s new office, although a good deal smaller than the one he had occupied in the heyday of the twenties, was at a good address, well situated on the nineteenth floor, with a view to both the rivers.
Alfie’s clothes and his posture also bespoke the return of prosperity, and Paul told him he looked well.
“I feel well,” he answered. “Keeping busy, that’s the ticket. Keeps you young … terrible thing about young Hank, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Paul said.
“It was pretty awful here when we got the news. I don’t know who was worse, Leah or Hennie. It was Freddy and 1917 all over again.” Alfie regarded Paul carefully. “Is that why you stayed longer over there?”
“In a way, maybe that had something to do with it. I should see Leah today, I know, and I’m not looking forward to it.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll be all right. It took her about six months to get going again, but she’s back in shape, right as rain. Took another floor for the business and bought the building. Putting out her own line of perfume with a big ad campaign. Never could keep Leah down, could you?”
Paul acknowledged that you couldn’t.
“And you can’t have heard about Meg, either. She’s going to be married.”
“No! She never wrote anything.”
“It happened suddenly. Last week while you were sailing home. If you wait a few minutes, you’ll see her and Larry. Lawrence Bates. They’re in the city today to buy a ring.” Alfie beamed. “A real nice guy. Everybody likes him, even Meg’s kids. He’s a vet. I’ve given them a piece of land at Laurel Hill for an office.”
Paul’s immediate reaction when they walked in was a warm spread of pleasure. By the end of the hour, his pleasure had firmed into satisfaction.
Larry Bates had a strong handclasp, a ruddy, open English face, and a simple manner. In short, he was the masculine complement to Meg, who, now in sweater and skirt, with her pretty windblown hair, seemed suddenly to have become again the girl Paul remembered. It was as if, after all these years, she had stepped out of a disguise and once more revealed her self.
There was irony: Here at last was the husband who would be able to get Meg into the club to which Alfie had so long aspired, but Larry Bates would almost certainly not be interested in any club. He came from a midwestern farm, and the farm, even though he had become a doctor, was still part of him.
“You’re going to be very happy,” P
aul said when the time came to leave. “I see it ahead of you.”
And Meg answered, “It wouldn’t have happened, we wouldn’t even have met, without you.”
Her words glowed in Paul as he made his way downstairs. But after a few steps out into the street, the glow subsided; he began to feel a stirring, not exactly of pain, but rather a small suggestion of pain, something that had begun that morning and been renewed in the atmosphere of Meg’s happiness. He had been walking rapidly, encouraged by the fresh April air, which was still cold, and by the general rhythm of the city in which everyone seemed to be bent on going someplace in a hurry. It came to him now that once he had gotten past seeing Leah, there was nothing else he had to do for the rest of the day. He hadn’t planned to take up work at the office until Monday next. And if he were never to go back to the office, what difference would it make? His partners had managed very well without him these last years. Who needed him? What was there to look forward to? Unlike Meg, who could now look ahead again, down years that he hoped, that he believed, would be good ones, he had no one.…
Envy, he thought as he stopped before the window of a bookshop and stared in; the truth is that I’m envious and empty.
So he would go back to the office, to his charitable causes and occasional women. A dreary prospect.
He resumed his walk to Leah’s shop. Best to get that over with, anyway. Perhaps, as Alfie had said, it wouldn’t be too terribly hard.
When he announced himself, he was directed to her office at the rear. He passed through a series of salons, all very hushed in dove gray and dusty rose, in which at proper intervals stood life-size models wearing taffeta or brocade or Irish tweed. He found her busy at a Chinese lacquered desk in a pretty flower-papered cubicle.
With a cry like a war whoop, she jumped up and threw her arms around him. “I don’t believe what I’m seeing! It’s been a century! How’s your shoulder? You never told us about it! We had to hear it from your friends.”
“It’s nothing.” The better to see her, he held her at a little distance. Except for a fine ray of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, she was no different. “But you, I worried terribly about you.”
Her eyes filled. “I’m as all right as I’ll ever be … Bill pulled me through. And he was wonderful to Hennie too. He’s a prince, Paul.” She sat down again at the desk, clasping her hands under her chin. “You know,” she said softly, “marrying Bill is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Again there came that faint stir of envy, which shamed him, so that he made himself respond with grace.
“I’m so glad. And glad for Meg, too. I’ve just come from seeing her.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? What a change after Donal!”
“What’s been happening to him? Do you know?”
“Flourishing, naturally. He pulled his money out of Germany just in time.”
“If I remember correctly, he always said Hitler was unbeatable.”
“It’s Donal who’s unbeatable. God knows, they may be making him an ambassador yet. Still, as Hennie says, we mustn’t forget what he did for Dan.”
“She’s a good soul, Hennie is, better than I am. I still resent that he was able to do it when I wasn’t.”
“Nobody’s better than you. Don’t you ever realize what you do for other people?”
The praise embarrassed him. “Oh,” he said, “one tries. We all try to do what we can.”
“We had a letter …” Leah’s voice was almost a whisper. She began again. “We had a letter from a captain, someone who saw what you did when Hank—when Hank was killed. He said you ran out, you tried to cover him, to take the shots yourself.”
She seemed to expect a response. There was only one thing he could think of to say.
“I loved him.”
“Marian wrote me a letter, but I never see her. She found out something, I suppose.”
“Perhaps.”
“Meg hinted something once, I thought. Then she wouldn’t say any more.… You don’t want to say anything either, I see.”
“There’s nothing to be gained,” Paul said.
Then there was a silence. We people have been away from each other too long, he reflected. We don’t want to go back through the calendar of lost time. At least, I don’t.
So he said, “I see you’ve a deskful of papers. I mustn’t keep you.”
“No need to rush away. I’ve been waiting for you anyway, to tell you something.” A troubled frown drew lines across Leah’s forehead. “Something I ought to tell you.”
“Nothing bad, I hope?”
“To me it doesn’t seem so. But perhaps it will be sad for you. I don’t know.”
“Well?”
“All right, this is it from the beginning. I’d been dressing a bride, doing a whole trousseau. The girl’s marrying a refugee, a doctor from Vienna. And one day we happened to be talking about what’s happened in Europe, and I happened to mention you, my cousin Paul Werner, who’d rescued people in Germany. Your name just slipped out, and it seems that the girl knows you.”
Something leapt in Paul. But he put it down and waited.
“Why don’t you ask who she is?”
“Fine, I’ll ask. Who is she?”
“She’s Iris Friedman.”
He knew that his face had on the instant gone bright red, with the heat running up his neck. And he stammered words without meaning. “A—coincidence.”
“Not really. This is the most fashionable establishment in the city for bridal gowns. Any bride who can afford to, comes here.”
The pulses were hammering now. She was twenty-seven. It had taken her a long time. She wouldn’t have appealed to most men. Sober and shy … He remembered the eyes, the beautiful, soft, intelligent eyes.
“Is she—is she happy?”
“Oh, yes, she’s thrilled. Very much in love, I think. And her father’s outfitting her in grand, grand style.” Leah’s curious, frank gaze rested on Paul. “I saw the mother, too. A striking woman. Very distinguished.”
“You spoke about me?”
“Not to her. That conversation was with Iris.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Not much. Only that she’d met you a couple of times, that you knew the family, or had known them.” Leah put her hand over Paul’s. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, to bring this back. I just thought you might want to know. She’s lovely, Paul, not pretty, but very fine, different from what I usually see coming in here.”
“Yes, different. I remember.” And he stared down at the cherry-red nails that were lying on his hand.
“Paul … I still have my bad habit of putting my foot in my mouth. Are you still chasing a fantasy? A ghost that can never come to life?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“I’m the last person in the world to hurt you, after what you’ve done and been, but I told you once before that you’re wasting yourself and I’m telling you now again. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Well, then. Oh, my dear, I truly wanted you! But you didn’t take me, so I took Bill instead, and it’s been wonderful. Meg hung on with that bastard long after she should have quit, but now she’s got someone really perfect for her. So what I’m asking is: When are you going to start living?”
“I’m living.”
“You’re not. You and Marian—”
Paul cried sharply, “I can’t abandon her, Leah.”
“Who’s asking you to? There are other ways.… You’re annoyed with me,”
Paul swallowed hard. “It’s all right. I’m not annoyed.”
“Forgive me.”
“It’s all right, I said.”
“Do you want me to tell you any more about Iris?”
He both did, and did not.
“The wedding’s to be June twelfth at half past four, at Temple Israel.”
“Well,” he said, “I can only hope life will go better for her than for—” He did
not finish.
“Than for her mother, or for you.”
A sudden awareness brought Paul up short. “And you? You’re not complaining, and you’ve had enough cause.”
“What good would it do? Listen, you were on your way to Hennie’s. She phoned. She’s expecting you.”
Paul stood up. “I’m going. Don’t let’s be strangers, Leah. We’ll have to see each other once in a while.”
“Of course. Give Hennie my love.”
Hennie had grown thinner and grayer but, as vigorous in her enthusiasms as she had ever been, was still working with the world’s refugees who, in the aftermath of the war, had multiplied a hundredfold.
“Damned old men who start the wars!” she cried. Her gaze moved across the room and came to rest at a photograph of Hank. His ardent face looked out of a broad silver frame, undoubtedly a gift from Leah and undoubtedly the most expensive object in Hennie’s parlor.
A silent, sad recall filled the next few moments, until she broke the silence with deliberate cheerfulness.
“This won’t happen again. This time the world’s learned a final hard lesson. We have the U.N., and Russia wants peace as much as we do. Between the two of us, we’ll keep it.”
And the Russians made a pact with Hitler when it suited them, Paul thought, but didn’t say.
Hennie mused, “We’ve seen a great deal, you and I, from the time I used to read Grimms’ fairy tales to you.”
Something in her tone, an echo, a sense of déjà vu, took hold of him, for she was sitting on the same old sofa with the same shabby carpet under it, and he was back in his despair over Anna before his wedding, pleading with Hennie for advice—advice that she had given and he had not taken. The room was suddenly too small and the walls closed in. He wanted to get out, to feel space and motion.
“The trick is to be busy,” Hennie said. “The survivors are coming through now, and I get home tired every night, which is the best thing for me.”
The survivors. Not Joachim and Elisabeth, not Ilse nor Mario.
“Where are they coming from?” he asked.
“Everywhere. They were all poured into Poland, into the camps, from the corners of Europe, Germany, Italy, Greece, everywhere.”
