So when the second telegram came it was almost a reflex action to call Mal at the lab. It was nearly midnight, and he had been there since nine that morning. ‘I’ll meet you outside at the parking lot,’ Harriet said, and hung up.
She was sitting, immobile and shrunken in the front seat of the car. As he approached she looked at him with dull eyes, and slid over to the passenger seat.
‘You drive,’ she said. Her tone was a hoarse whisper.
‘Harriet, what is it?’
She faced him fully then. ‘It’s Josh this time, Mal. I’ve had a wire from Dad. He was shot down.’
He put out a hand to touch her, but she shrank back.
‘No …’ Then she shook her head wildly. ‘I don’t think I can take it a second time, Mal. I’m afraid … of what I’ll do when I start to believe it’s true.’
He pressed the starter, and backed out of the lot. The brick buildings swept by them with a rush of air, and then he was out in the dark Los Angeles streets. He drove then for hours, the long flat roads to the desert. The September air was cool on their faces, and the wind whipped Harriet’s hair into her eyes, stinging and blinding her. She did nothing to hold it back, just sat there with tense, folded hands. In the faint starlight they could see the dim outlines of the mass of the two mountains, San Jacinto and San Bernardino, towering back off the pass. The desert wind was cold now, the empty spaces silent and black, broken abruptly by the lights of the all-night diners, and the neon signs of the motels. They swept through Palm Springs. Harriet saw none of it; she was aware of nothing until Mal abruptly drew to the side of the road and switched off the engine.
Then he turned to her, and put both his hands on hers as they lay in her lap.
‘Harriet … I’m afraid for you when I see your hands folded … like this. You do it each time ‒ the night Josh went away, the time the news came about Steve. Why can’t you cry instead of folding your hands, and shutting your grief up between them.’
She looked down at them, slowly spread her fingers apart. ‘How else shall I contain it, Mal? I have to live with it, and Joe taught me not to cry.’
He lifted her hands and held them within his own. ‘You have to learn to cry, Harriet. You have to learn to trust someone well enough to trust them with your grief. You have to move close to someone … to share your pain like a human, not nurse it in misery, dumbly, like an animal.’
She caught back her breath in a long sigh.
‘Do you trust me, Harriet?’
She nodded. ‘Yes … yes, completely.’
He got out of the car, and went around to her side. She felt his arms about her body, and the surprising strength and ease as he lifted her, and carried her across the sand.
The stars were clear, and infinitely far away; a cold wind drove across the desert, and moaned low in the cactus and sage brush. His hands upon her firm, and skilful, and he talked softly, close to her ear. It was a fearful wonder to feel the pain as he entered her, and she shouted aloud with it, but her shout was almost one of fierce gratitude and joy. In the movements of her body, responding to his, she rode out the demons of grief and loneliness, using their passion to express and exorcise all the protest, the resentment. She heard her own voice crying out in the silence, crying Mal’s name, and Steve’s and Josh’s; but the pain in her was now a physical one, one that Mal was imposing on her, and she braced her hand and shoulders back in the sand, and thrust herself at him, claiming him, drawing him to her again and again, calling out to him for it not to stop. And as they moved together in a wild, rocking motion, she suddenly felt the tears on her face, and the unearthly peace in her mind and body as release came.
They drove back to Los Angeles on the long, flat roads, through the quiet hours of the dawn and sunrise, seeing the first flush on the peaks. Their journey was as silent as the outward one had been; they were both weary, but they sat close together, and Harriet’s hand lay limp and still on Mal’s leg. The city had begun to stir for the day when they entered it. Mal pulled in at a drive-in, and after they had ordered breakfast, and while Harriet was combing her hair and putting on lipstick, he walked to the next corner and bought a paper. He hurried back to the car and she could tell that his thoughts were not with her, but concentrated wholly on what was in the paper. He opened the door and slid in beside her. ‘They’ve dropped an atom bomb on Japan ‒ Hiroshima,’ he said.
It was all there; they read it in silence, appalled and stunned by the sum of its meaning. Gradually its implications began to dawn on Harriet, the probability of a Japanese surrender, and the end of the war. The thought of Josh was bitter now.
She turned to him suddenly. ‘Mal … did you and Steve have anything to do with this?’
He shook his head. ‘Not directly.’ He tapped the paper. ‘This must have been the most closely guarded secret of the war. But we were working on instruments that rode in the plane with it … but, of course, we didn’t know what they’d be used for. I guess Steve would have worked on it if he’d made it out to Tinian.’
She folded over the paper and laid it on her lap. ‘The war will probably end soon, won’t it,’ she said quietly.
‘I suppose so.’
They waited in silence until their breakfast came. When the girl had clipped the trays on, and handed them their coffee, Mal took the paper from Harriet and handed it to her.
‘Here ‒ have you seen this.’
The girl glanced at the headlines. ‘Oh … that bomb, you mean. Yes, we heard it on the radio. That sure was a big one. Thanks.’
She walked away from them slowly, reading.
Mal called her from his office that night. She stood in the Edwardes’ hall to take the call, and she listened to Mal’s voice; in the kitchen the Edwardes were having a rumbling, continuous argument about what they were going to do now that the war was going to end, and they’d be laid off at Lockheed.
‘Are you all right, Harriet?’ Mal said. ‘Will you be able to sleep? Shall I come over?’
‘No. I’m all right, Mal. I feel sleepy, and I know I’ll be all right.’
There was a long pause, and then she heard the crackle of paper close to the phone, and then the click of a cigarette lighter. ‘Harriet?’
‘Yes?’
‘When … when you have time to sort things out a little … will you think about marrying me?’
She cradled the phone close to her, closing her eyes for a second, and feeling her weariness, but also a quiet peace. ‘I love you, Mal. Good night.’
‘Good night.’
They never saw each other after that morning in the drive-in. Harriet went on the night shift after that, and two mornings later, when she got back to the Edwardes’, Mary met her at the door.
‘It’s another of those telegrams, Harriet.’ She twisted her hands nervously. ‘I’m late now for my shift, but I had to wait … I didn’t think there was anyone else close to you, but I thought I’d wait …’
Harriet ripped it open. It was from the Army Department, and it informed her that Captain Stephen Dexter was alive. He was being flown into a hospital in San Francisco. When she got the story from him afterwards she learned that he and two other men had survived when the plane went down, and had reached a small island in a rubber dinghy. They had been fed and nursed by the natives there, and had waited until a naval patrol had sighted their signals. The area had been clear of Japanese, and so they had known it was only a matter of waiting.
Harriet just had time to telephone Mal before her plane left for San Francisco. As they talked her flight number was announced, and she hung up. Walking towards the plane on the tarmac, she realised that she couldn’t recall a single word of what they had said to each other.
Five
Laura Peters drove back to New York on the afternoon the Laboratories opened in a sober mood. Until this day she had only half-believed that the move to Burnham Falls was final and inevitable, even though in the last year she and Ed had planned every detail of their house, had become membe
rs of the River Bend Club, and she had bought a whole new wardrobe of country clothes for this altered existence.
It had seemed an enjoyable pastime ‒ from their Park Avenue apartment ‒ to plan a country house. The trouble was that she hadn’t really been able to believe in it until she and Ed had walked to-day through the empty rooms, and knew that within a week they would be living in them. The panic had come down on her then abruptly, and this time she wasn’t able to shake it off. It wasn’t any use pretending that Burnham Falls was the periphery of New York; it was irreconcilably remote from what Laura thought of as New York ‒ the tight little area a dozen blocks wide stretching diagonally across Manhattan from the East Seventies to Times Square.
It had been Larry, her first husband, who had made her conscious of the brittle, glittering world that he loved, and who had made her feel that success on its terms was the only thing that could matter. He had loved her also, but he had loved her as a part of the world he sought ‒ a fellow-seeker of the limelight, a companion on a voyage. Larry might not ever become a great writer, but he already had a Pulitzer Prize to prove how well he understood his world.
She had met him four months after she had arrived from Los Angeles, time enough to have used up the little store of money she had, and to have called three times at every agent’s office on her list. In Los Angeles she had done the usual extra’s work at the studios, and had played three small roles in Little Theatre. They had brought no movie contracts, not even a screen test. She moved on to New York because every casting agent in Hollywood had had her on his books since she was eight years old; she was now nineteen and she had been around Los Angeles too long for anyone to discover her. But in New York, as on the Coast, it was not nearly enough to be merely pretty.
So she worked nights as a waitress at Auguste’s, a small French restaurant on West 47th Street which catered to the theatrical profession ‒ not the big time stuff, such as producers and directors. Auguste’s was for the unglamorous workers in the theatre ‒ the wardrobe mistresses, the stage hands, the electricians. In those days Larry had been an assistant stage manager.
He watched her for many nights before he actually spoke to her. He was a plain, unremarkable man, short and heavy-set, in his late thirties. He was working with Arthur Grimsby’s hit musical Golden Opportunity, and he told her right away that he was going to write plays; it took a little more time to learn that he was already successful as a short story writer ‒ Cosmopolitan, the New Yorker, The Atlantic. As a staff writer for Stars and Stripes in the Pacific, he had been able to keep on writing and selling fiction, as well as doing his routine work, all through the war. Now, in 1946, he should have been ready to make a career of it ‒ except that he was hungry for the theatre, not the printed page. He had finished, he told her, four plays, but none of them was yet the one he wanted to show to a Broadway producer. He had had one play produced in summer stock just before the war.
She looked at him with respect; she had never known a writer before, at least not one who made any money from it.
He began to wait for her every night after he had eaten at Auguste’s. They would ride together in the subway to her hotel off Broadway in the West Nineties; then he walked ten blocks south to his own third-floor walk-up. He wrote until seven or eight o’clock in the morning, and slept until it was time to go to the theatre. There was a business-like determination about Larry; he wasted little time on dreaming.
It puzzled Laura that he had never expected her to do more than kiss him; he had been in and around the theatre long enough to know what were accepted as the rules. He was neither naive nor unsure of himself. Since the time when she had played as an extra in an early Shirley Temple movie which had given her mother the idea that she was destined to become a star, Laura had more or less understood that beauty was an item for barter; when she was sixteen the knowledge was no longer vague, but certain and defined.
On Sundays, when the theatre and Auguste’s were closed, they walked in the Park for a few hours, and then Larry took her back to his apartment and cooked an elaborate meal for her on a tiny stove and a hot-plate. He was a good cook, quick and neat, and he learned early that she was useless in the kitchen.
The New York summer moved into its full stride; the sidewalks and buildings enclosed an endless, almost terrifying heat. Larry’s apartment was stifling, but not so bad as Laura’s, which was next to the roof. It was too hot to walk for long in the Park on Sundays, and Laura spent most of the day lounging in the big chair in Larry’s room. The blinds were drawn against the glare outside. After Larry had prepared the meal, he handed her the Sunday papers, and he himself went to the typewriter. He sat at his work table for hours at a stretch, the sweat running off his face, and his white T-shirt clinging to his body.
She thought about him a great deal as she lay there, somnolent in the heat. The principal feeling she had for him was gratitude, because he had saved her from the aching loneliness of New York. He seemed as humble and dependable as a dog, giving, and asking for nothing.
One day, a day in August when the heat lay upon the city like a blanket, she spoke her thoughts.
‘Larry … Larry, why don’t you want to make love to me?’
He didn’t seem surprised, but he took his time about answering. He took off his glasses, and leaned back in the chair.
‘Because I’m in love with you, Laura, and I’m patient.’
‘I don’t understand …’ His manner disturbed her; she wished she had not asked the question.
‘I don’t want an affair with you, Laura. I want you to love me.’
He turned back to the typewriter, but the keys didn’t start tapping.
She moved very softly, easing herself out of the broken-springed chair, laying the papers gently on the floor. She unbuttoned her blouse, and drew it off, and then let her skirt drop. Noiselessly she slipped out of her sandals, and took off her bra and briefs. Then she went across to him. He started a little at her touch, and she bent and put her lips against his.
‘Larry …’ she said quietly, ‘until I love you, will you take me as I am?’
His hand came up, and he touched her breasts wonderingly; then he put both arms about her, and pressed his face against her firm belly.
‘God, you’re so beautiful, Laura!’
He was a good lover, as he was good at most things.
She kept trying for a part, because something about the theatre was eating into her now ‒ in spite of the shoddy teachers her mother had sent her to, and the ideas she had formed in the studios that acting was a mechanical thing. She read Variety, and followed Larry’s tips about who was casting. The job at Auguste’s left her days free to sit about in agents’ offices, but it gave her little time for sleep. She grew thinner.
By dint of nailing Arthur Grimsby down for three minutes, Larry managed to get her in to read for a seven-line part in a play Grimsby was producing. She knew he consented only because Larry was a valued employee, whose efficiency Grimsby respected. She tried the part and made a miserable hash of it. Larry was seated in the darkened theatre, a few rows behind Grimsby. Afterwards he took her to Gallagher’s and ordered roast beef and cheesecake for her, and made her eat it.
‘You’ve got to be taught, Laura,’ he said. ‘God! ‒ it was terrible what you did on that stage. You don’t know how to speak ‒ you don’t even know how to walk. You looked like an awkward kid, and you were meant to be a sexy bundle making a play for a man.’
Larry had been promoted to stage manager for the show Laura had read for, a play called One by One, by a young Pacific veteran. Larry was going to Boston for rehearsals and the try-out.
‘If only Marshall can get the point across, we’ll have a smash hit … and I’ll have a steady job for two years.’
‘Don’t you mind working on another man’s play?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve got something of my own to say, and I’ll say it … all in good season. There’s room for a lot of people in the theatre.’
&nb
sp; So he went to Boston, and Laura missed him acutely. She grew despondent, even though she had a note from him every day.
Then he called from Boston. ‘Laura, we’re in! It’s a hit! The critics are crazy about it!’
‘Well … that’s wonderful!’ she managed to say. ‘I mean … really wonderful!’ She felt a sudden pang of envy for the success that abruptly belonged to a young, unknown man.
He said, ‘It’ll run two years … at least.’
She laughed faintly; she was feeling very tired. ‘Larry … you sound as if it was your play.’
‘Baby, I don’t care whose play it is just so long as it gives me two seasons of steady work. With luck I won’t have to go on the road for two seasons, and I’ll have a play ready for Broadway at the end of that time, or I’ll bust!’
On Broadway, One by One was a smash hit. Larry gloated over the reviews as if they had been written about his own play.
‘This is money in the bank,’ he said to Laura, pointing to The Times. ‘Now we can get married.’
She stiffened. ‘Who said anything about getting married.’
He reached out and took her face between his two hands. ‘Baby … because I need you here with me all the time, not just on Sundays. And you … I think you need me, too. You need someone to take care of you, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be me.’
She frowned, and a little tremor went through her body. She was at a moment of committing her future to Larry ‒ and then she laughed wryly inside herself because her present was such a poor thing. She didn’t know whether she had any great faith in Larry’s ability to bring off successfully the play he was writing ‒ or whether he had a great dream of the theatre and would indulge it at the cost of ignoring his talent in another direction. Larry could be making a mistake, and perhaps she was about to join him in it. But if not Larry ‒ then what? Or whom? She didn’t love Larry but outside this beat-up apartment on the West Side there was the world of strangers, the vague promises of help and there was the loneliness of this great, crushing, brutal city. And there was the deepening conviction that she couldn’t make it by herself.
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