by Belva Plain
“Talk about, Mr. Arnring? You couldn’t have waited until tomorrow during the business day, instead of intruding on the privacy of my home?”
“It’s not about business, Mrs. Rothirsch. It’s personal. A personal matter.”
Emma said, “Not now, Adam. Oh, please.”
“What’s this about?” demanded her aunt. In the brief silence that followed, she whirled to look at Emma, whirled to look at Adam, and then burst out with what seemed to Adam was like the roar of a wounded beast: “Don’t tell me that there is something between you two! Is that what I’m seeing on your faces? Is it?”
“You see—” Adam began, but was interrupted.
“Yes, I do see. I suspected something, out every afternoon on her bicycle since she’s been home, this girl here, out to the movies in the evening, out to dinner with some unknown friend driving through on the way to California, somebody she could certainly have invited to dinner here—oh, yes, I suspected there was someone else. I told myself I was wrong, but still I was wracking my brains trying to figure out who the man could be. How could I have dreamed it was a thing like this, a crazy thing like this—”
“Sabine. Aunt Sabine,” Emma cried. “This is not crazy. Not crazy, I tell you. You don’t know anything about us, and you have no right to call us crazy!”
Adam moved, put his hand on Emma’s shaking shoulder, and soothed her. “It’s all right. It’s all right. Leave this to me. Let me do the talking.”
And Adam, seeing how Mrs. Rothirsch’s face was turning as red as a wound, knew that it was his possessive hand upon Emma’s shoulder that had infuriated her.
“We can be angry without being frantic,” he said quietly. “You and I had some words once before this, if you remember, Mrs. Rothirsch. But that was a long time ago, and a lot of water has flowed peacefully under the bridge since then.”
“That has nothing to do with this, young man. You are still the employee, and I’m still Mrs. Rothirsch.”
“I’m well aware of that, and always have been. So may we sit down and talk to each other? Emma is trembling.”
“Emma, trembling? That’s not like her. She can be pretty defiant when she wants to be. I should be used to it.”
“Dear Auntie,” Emma said, “don’t be angry with me. Come, sit down on the sofa here and let us explain—or let Adam explain. That’s why he came.”
“Oh, so you knew he was coming?”
“I didn’t. It’s a good thing I didn’t because I would have talked him out of it, and now I’m glad he’s here.”
The old lady, as if she had felt a sudden weakness, sat down on a side chair so much too fragile for her weight that it creaked. Her suspicious stare traveled from Emma to Adam and back.
“Have you come here, for God’s sake, to tell me that you’ve run off and gotten married?”
“No,” Adam said, “I guess I’ve come here to say that we’d like to do it someday.”
“Well, that’s a relief. A person would think, the way you’re holding on to her, that you already were married.”
“He loves me, Aunt Sabine, and I love him.”
These words, which had never been spoken between them, now rang out as a single note of music might ring through a silence.
“Well! Well, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in my lifetime, but this is one of the craziest. You’re a bold, ambitious young man, Mr. Arnring, too ambitious for your own good. You don’t let anything get in your way, do you?”
Maybe I don’t, Adam thought. I am the one who pulled your dying business out of a hole and set it on its feet, after all. And standing tall above the two women, he answered proudly, “Yes, when it’s right and just to do so, I don’t let anything get in my way. Not anything or anyone.”
Mrs. R. threw up her hands and cried out, “You! Who do you think you are, to go after this marvelous, talented, beautiful girl? And she’s rich, too, isn’t she, Mr. Arnring? Of course, that hasn’t ever entered your mind, has it? Of course not, you’ll tell me.”
“You’re quite, quite wrong, Mrs. Rothirsch. It’s been on my mind all the time. If Emma had nothing, there’d be no problem. We’d manage, as most people in this world do.”
“Talk sense, will you? If you can.”
At the far end of the dismal room hung the portrait of this woman’s husband, his face glowering, his thick fists resting on a tabletop. He wrecked her life. He even struck her now and then.
“You’re being horribly mean, Aunt Sabine,” Emma said now. “You ought to know better. You’ve been through enough in your life to understand why a person wants to keep his pride. It’s why—why he hasn’t yet asked me to marry him. I know that, even though he hasn’t said so. It’s because he has nothing—”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? Complaining about his salary? That handsome salary? Let’s see, for the last five years, let me calculate—why, he must have a nice few thousand in the bank—”
Emma interrupted. “He takes care of his family! A father with a heart condition, a brother who’s next to useless, and another brother in college preparing for medical school—”
This was all too personal, making some sort of virtuous hero out of him, and Adam broke in. “It’s nothing extraordinary. You take care of your family when they need it, that’s all. It’s elementary, nothing to be proud about.”
There was a long silence. The clock, a chunk of marble between two naked marble nymphs, struck eight. Adam sat down on the sofa and took Emma’s hand, while Sabine Rothirsch stared at the floor.
When a few minutes had passed, she looked up and said quietly, “Pride. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it, unless it’s false pride.”
Adam had had his full share of all that: Leo’s gibes, when he was really angry, about bastardy, or that girl who had broken her promise about the senior prom. Strange how such unimportant blows to one’s pride can still occupy a tiny slot in one’s memory.
Sabine was never accepted by the people whom she most respected. They laughed at her house, her clothes, and very probably her husband. Was that false pride? He thought it probably was.
“If you’re not ready to marry my niece, why are you here?”
“I guess it’s mainly that I wanted to make my position clear so Emma wouldn’t have to sneak out of the house to see me, and so I wouldn’t have to do any sneaking myself.”
“We’ve been writing to each other all year,” Emma said. “We’re adults, and you can’t stop us from doing whatever we want to do. But Adam’s right. It’s better and only decent that you should know everything.”
“Oh, I suspected something, Emma. That day you sat in the chauffeur’s seat with you both talking and laughing, and he the good-looking man he is, too good-looking. My mother always told me never to bother with handsome men because they can’t be trusted. And I listened to her, and—”
Sabine’s eyes were staring straight at the fierce-looking husband in the portrait. When she turned away, her eyes were wet.
“My husband worked for five dollars a week when we came here, did you know that?” she cried. “We lived in one room, but it was better than the hut and the fear that we had in Poland. Then after a while, we had a store, and then a bigger one, and then this one. We bought this house and hired people to keep it clean and plant flowers outside. But we have always been strangers here, do you know that? We were naturally not invited by the Christians, but even the Jewish people were divided; the German group is ashamed of us because we’re not educated. Do you think I don’t know what they say about this beautiful house? They say I have no taste. What am I supposed to know about taste? I was glad to have a bed to sleep in.”
Adam, listening to this lament, had the sense that he was the elder and the stronger of the two.
“It’s a funny thing about people,” he said gently. “Take those two old friends of mine in the store. Reilly tells me sometimes that you can’t trust the British, that they’re a cold lot. Archer talks about the Irish hanging out in the saloons.
”
This remark drew a wry smile as Mrs. R. replied, “Weren’t they a sloppy pair, those two?”
“Not anymore.”
“No, you’ve smartened up the place, you’ve certainly done that. I’ve noticed everything. I’ve never said anything about it, but that was only because I make it my policy never to interfere.”
No, Adam thought with some amusement, as long as the money comes rolling in, you don’t interfere.
Still, hostility, like smoke, had been quietly blown away. So it was time, it occurred to Adam, to return to basics, and he asked whether Emma and he were now free to see each other without any subterfuge.
“Because we are going to do it, anyway,” he added with a smile.
Mrs. Rothirsch sighed. “All right. But nothing, nothing at all is settled here tonight. Remember that Emma has to complete her M.A.”
“Of course, Aunt. I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
The old lady sighed again. “Emma is all I have, Mr. Arn—Adam. She was my husband’s favorite niece, only a baby when she came to us.”
He did not need Emma’s quick glance to understand that this fiction would have to be respected; if Sabine had been younger, a different fiction would have been used, and Emma would have been presented not as a niece, but as a daughter. An hour ago, he would have thought it impossible that he could feel such compassion for this fractious, pathetic old woman.
When the clock struck nine, he rose to go, leaving behind him an atmosphere totally different from the one into which he had entered. Who would have believed that the terrible-tempered Mrs. R. had actually been won over? She would deny it, but he knew with certainty that she had been.
Chapter 12
It seemed to Adam that he had always been worried about something. Now suddenly, his worries had evaporated into bright air. Pa still had a heart condition, but he was under a doctor’s good care and his condition was stable. Leo was still Leo, holed up in his room with books, sulking and sullen as ever, but he did seem to be getting over his crushing rejection by Bobby Nishikawa’s sister. And Doris, who had been on Adam’s conscience because he had misled her and misled himself, too, now had another admirer and was no longer on his conscience.
The happy news was even happier. Jonathan was starting to send out applications to medical school. His letters were filled with reports about his work, and glowing descriptions of his darling Blanche. And Emma, whom he would keep as a secret until the proper time, was coming home.
No, he could ask for nothing more, only that life might stay like this.
Sabine had wanted a celebration of Emma’s double degree in Music Education and Performing Arts. At the long dinner table, he faced the enormous candelabra, the heavy silver, and the clustered roses, aware that his inclusion among the guests was a sign of acceptance on Sabine’s part. Of course, the crowd at this party was a motley one; the only people there who belonged to what Sabine considered “society” were her lawyer, Spencer Lawrence, and his wife. The others were old widows, a few elderly couples, the family doctor with his wife, and half a dozen college friends of Emma’s, two of them accompanied by prosperous young husbands.
“Theo Brown isn’t here,” said Emma, possibly in answer to someone’s question. “There’s illness in the family, and he had to go out of town.”
Theo, an old friend by now, would have been the one guest with whom Adam had very much in common. Nevertheless, the party was interesting, it being his first formal dinner complete with catered French food, elegantly served in one of the ugliest dining rooms a person could imagine.
He was seated next to Emma not far from the hostess, at the table’s end. The talk was, not unnaturally, of world events.
“Regardless of Wilson’s promise,” said Spencer Lawrence, “we are going to fight. It’s inevitable.”
He spoke with authority. Tall, earnest, with lean, haughty features and appropriate gray at the temples, he even looked authoritative. It must have cost some effort on Sabine’s part, Adam thought, to introduce the likes of me to Spencer Lawrence. No one else but Emma could have forced her to do it. And he wondered whether Lawrence could possibly have recognized him from those occasions when, in Francine’s luxurious brothel, he, Adam, had stood inconspicuously among the outer circle that liked to hear what was being said by the big names.
It was of course a long time since he had been there; never once since Emma . . . He wondered why in the first place so many married men patronized it. Years ago at home, the men who went to Gracie’s had been almost all young and unattached. He thought of Pa and Rachel, doubting whether if Pa had been able to afford the extra cost, he would ever have gone there. But then he thought: Am I naive?
Well, naive or not, he could not ever imagine himself wanting any woman other than Emma. And he tried not to let this yearning show too boldly whenever his gaze fell upon her bare shoulders and her bright hair.
Dr. Macy remarked, “I was interested to see last week the column of Jeff Horace’s where he talked about Cace Clothiers and the Rothirsch store. I often wonder how the dickens he gets all his details. He seems to know everything that’s going on. Anyway, it sounds as if the merger will be a jewel in our downtown.”
Adam was amused. He was a nice fellow, the doctor. Jeff was another nice fellow, always helpful when asked to be.
Lawrence scoffed. “The man’s a gossip columnist, nothing more.”
“Of course,” the doctor conceded, “though sometimes he is interesting. This was about the architecture, about plans for a courtyard with a retractable glass roof. Very unusual, I thought. Very attractive.”
Was it possible, Adam wondered, that Theo Brown had let someone see the plan Adam scrawled one day when they were having a sandwich lunch in his office?
Lawrence scoffed again. “Worthless chitchat. None of his business.”
Well, any plan that Adam had scrawled was indeed not worth anything; he was far from being any architect, even though he did like to conjure up plans for fun.
“He needs to fill space,” Lawrence continued. “So many dollars for so many lines.”
Now Adam began to have toward Lawrence a feeling of intense dislike. The man seemed to snap words out of his mouth as if he were an angry judge quoting the law from his bench.
Dr. Macy was not frightened into silence. Half laughing, he returned to the subject of Jeff Horace.
“If you know Jeff well, and I do, he can tell you a whole lot of interesting stuff that doesn’t get into the papers. He’s got stuff about Francine’s place that could fill a book if anybody wanted to write one. But nobody would, because who would print it?”
Mrs. Lawrence wanted to know what Francine’s place was. “It sounds like a French dress shop.”
“Is everyone ready for dessert?” Sabine interrupted. “They’re meringues, and they do get soggy if they have to wait.”
Even Adam knew that this was not true. Sabine was mortified by the doctor’s subject, and became more so when he answered Mrs. Lawrence’s question.
“It’s a house of delight, with very beautiful young ladies who entertain gentlemen.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Lawrence. “I’m sorry—I had no idea. It isn’t—it surely isn’t here in town?”
“Not very far away,” the doctor replied.
Theo Brown, good-hearted and open-minded, would be getting a kick out of this, Adam thought, stifling laughter.
“That’s disgusting! A woman should certainly divorce her husband if he ever . . . I certainly would.”
Two of Sabine’s elderly lady friends agreed at once with Mrs. Lawrence, while a third reconsidered. “A divorce is nothing to be proud of, either, my dear. It’s very messy.”
Another woman objected to that. “Only in America. In England the best people get divorced if they’re unhappy, and it’s no disgrace there as it is with us.”
Sabine’s poor face was purple with distress as this perfect party seemed to be deteriorating, and so Adam spoke out.
&n
bsp; “More importantly, Mr. Lawrence, I read yesterday that there were definite signs in Washington that Wilson is weakening about this war.”
Emma agreed at once. “It does make sense, doesn’t it? I mean, six of our ships just gone down, all the men drowned. It makes you shudder. I don’t think it can go on.”
So the conversation was adroitly steered into another direction. The meringues, surrounded by strawberries, appeared a moment later, and Adam was left with the pleasant thought that Emma and he had saved the day for Sabine.
Over demitasse in the living room, she made an announcement. “Let’s all go to the music room. I haven’t asked Emma, but I’m sure she’ll be happy to play something for us.”
“Oh, please not,” Emma said. “Nobody wants it. This is a party, Aunt Sabine.”
“They’ve never heard you play. They’ll all love to hear you.”
Emma glanced at Adam, her lips moving without sound over the words I’m sure they wouldn’t.
“Just one piece. Anything you like, Emma.”
Sabine was so proud of her Emma! He would never have expected to be on her side, but he nodded to Emma: Do it.
There was scarcely enough room for everyone to stand in the music room, where the glossy black piano took up a third of the space.
“It’s a concert grand, not a baby,” announced Sabine. “I bought it for her,” she added, extending her arm, “when she was this high.”
Emma paused before announcing that she would play a Beethoven sonata called “To Therese,” straightened her position on the seat, and began to play, while Sabine nodded approvingly and whispered to the Lawrences that they would love this piece.
“I’ve always loved it, all my life. It’s one of my favorites.”
Adam did not miss the interchange of glances between the Lawrences. A smile twitched and died on the man’s stern lips.
“Just look at those hands,” Sabine whispered. “I’ll never understand how she does it. She loves to play Mozart—no, Schubert, I mean. He has such a distinctive style, don’t you agree?”
