by Belva Plain
Mr. Lawrence did not reply. He was seeing the ignorance and the rudeness of Sabine’s loud whispers while the music was being played; he did not see the pathos. And in the next instant, Adam knew that he did not like the man. He could at least have nodded and smiled a little, the cold fish; he was the kind of person who would begrudge someone a piece of ice at the North Pole. This poor old woman—and could he ever have thought he’d be taking her part?—knew nothing about music, and the respected counselor-at-law despised her for it.
Emma’s fingers were racing across the keyboard. Adam managed to move nearer, where he could watch her earnest frowns of concentration, the slight sway of her body, and the strand of pearls, so long that the end must be hidden beneath her dress, between her breasts. Never in my life have I heard such music, he thought. For when and where could I have heard it? The piano sang. It rejoiced, it pleaded, soothed and seemed to soar; he could feel the beat of a small bird’s wings as it lifted itself above the trees, and returned, and went away again.
Then suddenly he had the feeling that Emma was speaking to him through the music, speaking only to him. He wanted her to finish, wanted all these people to disappear, evaporate and be gone, so that he could be alone with her when the music ended.
They walked down the familiar front steps and stood in silence, with their arms wrapped around each other, within a grove of spruce at the end of the lawn.
“I don’t trust myself to be in the same room with you,” he said. “Oh, Emma, how long will it be? I think of you every day, every night, all the time.”
“Give it a few months, and it will solve itself. She is already getting used to the idea, although she’s not quite ready yet to admit it.”
In a path of moonlight stood the bulk of that grandiose house, the house that would someday belong to her. There was no breeze, and the night was still, enchanted and still. For the last half hour, all through Emma’s music and now under the moon, Adam too had been enchanted.
Yet there was a solid foundation beneath his mood. Final arguments were being drawn up by Spencer Lawrence and Cace’s lawyers. Theo Brown called the merger a “bonanza.” Liking the word, he often repeated it.
“There’s real prestige in this bonanza, along with a pile of money. Of course, the old lady has to add a bit more, but she understands that. And you’ll get a great promotion, Adam, a dandy raise, no question about it.”
Well, that was fine. No charity from Mrs. R. would Emma’s husband ever accept, but a salary that he knew he well deserved was a very different matter. And thanking his stars for all these gifts, he kissed his Emma.
“You’ve been worrying all year,” she said when he released her. “Aren’t you all over it now?”
“Yes.”
“Honest?”
“Yes. Honest.”
“We’ll have the wedding soon?”
“Very soon. We both want it, and we need it.”
And he walked away down the hill, whistling softly to himself.
Chapter 13
Adam was at his desk in the office one morning, when to his surprise, Emma, who had never before been above the selling floors in the store, came in. He saw at once that she was agitated.
“What’s the trouble? What is it?”
“Sabine. She’s beside herself. Theo Brown phoned and told her to forget about the deal with Cace. It’s off. The figures don’t add up, and anyway, he’d been having his doubts about it recently and had been intending to tell her so. Now Cace has come up with new figures that she can’t afford, or should not spend. Something like that.”
“New figures? How much?”
“Half a million dollars, I think. But she was so upset that I couldn’t make sense of the story.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. I’ll call Theo right now.”
His heart sinking, Adam picked up the telephone.
“Hello, Theo? Emma Rothirsch is here with a story about the merger. Something about more money. Did you tell her aunt that it’s off?”
“Yes, after all the negotiations, I hate to tell you, it’s fallen through the cracks. The Cace people need more money, much more money, to do it the way they want it done. And your side simply doesn’t have enough.”
“I’m astonished, Theo. I don’t understand it. We had enough all along, so what’s happened now?”
“Well, since they’re giving up the store in the capital, the way the neighborhood there is changing, you know, they want to buy that extra piece of land next to the store here, and—”
“All of a sudden they want it? I never knew it was for sale. In fact, I don’t believe it is.”
Theo sighed. “Even if it isn’t, they want you to come up with another half million, or more. They’ve got very elaborate plans.”
“This is the most unbusinesslike, last-minute, crazy thing that I’ve ever heard of,” Adam said furiously. “It’s not even decent. It’s crooked.”
“No, no, no. It may be indecent, but it isn’t crooked, Adam. These things happen all the time. You’ve just not been out in the competitive world, but I’m an old hand and I know what I’ve seen.”
The feeling in Adam’s stomach had moved to his head, where it seemed a small hammer had started to pound. The rosy future, the marriage, the promotion he had hoped for in order to support Emma . . .
“I’ve got to talk to you, Theo,” he said. “This is too important to leave to the telephone. I’ll be right over.”
“Adam, I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it now. I’m up to my ears in work that a client needs by noon, and on top of that—you remember my father was sick a couple of months ago? He’s in the hospital again. My mother’s frantic, and I’ve got a two-hundred-mile drive before I can get there. I’ll see you in a few days and explain it all, if he doesn’t die. I’m awfully sorry, Adam. I hope you understand.”
Adam hung up. Understand? No, I don’t, not at all. He could give me fifteen minutes more before he leaves.
“Wiped away,” he said to Emma. “All our plans, the future, wiped away. Just like that.”
She flew across the room to his desk. When he looked up, he saw that her eyes were blazing with indignation.
“What do you mean by ‘all our plans’? You surely can’t mean our wedding?”
When he looked at her without speaking, she cried out, “You can’t mean it! Are you saying that we—that you and I together—can’t exist without Cace Clothiers?”
“I’m saying that you and I can’t live on what I earn here, and I have no idea where I could go to get a better salary than what I have now.”
“So?”
“So we can’t live on what I have now! I live in two little rooms that are barely large enough for one.”
“Adam Arnring, listen to me, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll show how I can live there with you, and love it, too.”
“It’s you who don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said sadly.
“All right. We’ll get three rooms. I can make plenty of money with my piano lessons.”
“I’m sure you could. But I don’t want to depend on my wife’s earnings. What kind of man do you think I am?”
“That’s nonsense. Don’t be silly. The time is coming when it’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to help support a family.”
“Maybe. But that time isn’t here yet.”
“Can you stop me from giving piano lessons if I want to give them?”
“No, but they wouldn’t pay the bills, anyway. I have obligations, my brother, my father . . . I wish money were not so important! Does it have to rule the world?”
“It does. Unless we go back to trading. I’ll give you a bag of potatoes if you’ll shoe my horse.”
“Don’t make jokes about this!”
There was a long pause until Emma said, “I’m not joking. Think about that house of Sabine’s. And this place where we’re standing is all hers, too. She loves to give, and she has nobody else to give anything to. Why shouldn’t we
take advantage of it?”
“She can give it all to charity. I don’t want it. I will not take it.”
No matter how much compassion I have for her, I will not live like a pet dog under her care.
“Fine, then, if that’s how you feel. I don’t need much, Adam. You may not believe it, but I don’t even want much—a little house, a very modest house in this town is enough for me. I’ve lived all my life out of trunks and suitcases. I want to settle here and live simply, and stay in one place.”
“And have children?”
“Of course. Children most of all, and you know why.”
She had no idea what things cost. She had never had to pay a bill. Yes, she bought modest clothes, but those pearls she wears, and the price of food—how well he remembered the grocery store! Children, sons who’d need to go to college. And if Emma was any example, daughters, too. She had no idea what she was talking about.
“Well,” he said, “I have work to do at this desk. I’ll think about this later.”
“And I have to go home. You know how emotional Sabine is. I would never have guessed what this means to her pride and prestige among her old-lady friends.”
When Emma had left, he sat thinking about Theo Brown. Their conversation had been so short; actually, it had been strangely perfunctory, considering this abrupt demise of what had been a very healthy proposition. People didn’t usually shrug off a defeat with such easy acceptance. To be sure, Theo was a cheerful, hearty man, a brisk optimist who could probably shrug things off faster than many other people do. He could have given me a few more minutes, Adam thought. Of course, if his father was in a hospital a couple of hundred miles away . . . naturally he needed to go. But this was such a terrible blow! Everything he had been counting on had vanished. Adam sat there, let the mail lie unread, and stared into space.
After a while, he got up and went downstairs, thinking that maybe an early lunch might revive him. Reilly was walking down the street when Adam caught up with him.
“You look as if you’d lost your best friend,” Reilly said.
“Not quite, but I’ve had an awful disappointment. You’ll never believe it, but the Cace merger is off.”
“Don’t tell me! How so?”
“I don’t know all the details yet. I have to wait for Brown to explain.”
“But there were lawyers working on it! I read it in Jeff Horace’s column.”
Sometimes Reilly could say such stupid things.
“Well, of course lawyers,” Adam said, a bit impatiently.
“So why don’t you go ask them? They would know more about it than Brown does.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll do that.”
He walked on toward a sandwich shop where he usually ate, looked into it, decided he wasn’t hungry, and continued around the square past a row of expensive stores and a small brick building filled with lawyers’ offices. Something in him recoiled at the thought of going in there to see Spencer Lawrence. That sarcastic snob wouldn’t give him more than five minutes of his valuable time.
Back at work, Reilly approached him. “I saw you heading toward the square. Did you see a lawyer?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, you should. Brown is an accountant, not a lawyer.”
Exasperating idiot!
“I know that, Reilly. I really do know that.”
Up in his private quarters again, he had just returned to the mail when the telephone rang.
“I’m having a time here,” Emma said. “She can’t understand what’s happened. All that extra money they want! Where is it to come from? Sabine is not the national bank. I called Theo Brown, but he’s left his office. Sabine thinks maybe you would be kind enough to ask Mr. Lawrence? She’s too upset to talk to him.”
“I have people here, Emma. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you later.”
When he had hung up the telephone, he took out the directory, called the office of Lawrence, Wiley and Wills, and asked for an appointment with Mr. Spencer Lawrence.
He could have predicted the style of the office: eighteenth-century furniture, a dignified, middle-aged receptionist, and above the mantel, a traditional portrait, undoubtedly of an ancestor, given the resemblance to Spencer Lawrence’s stern, frosty face. And again he had the feeling of intense dislike that had risen within him the first time he had met the man.
“Please sit down, Mr. Arnring. I had intended to speak with Mrs. Rothirsch this afternoon about the Cace merger. Unfortunately, I was unable to do it earlier today because I was in court. However, here you are. And since I have permission from her to explain the entire unfortunate matter, I shall do so.”
“Then it really is ‘unfortunate’? I had hoped not, Mr. Lawrence.”
“Well, I daresay that from Mr. Brown’s point of view it is quite fortunate.”
A little smile flashed across Lawrence’s lips and vanished without a glimpse of teeth. A hawk. A predatory bird looked like him. . . .
“Why is that? I don’t understand.”
“It’s rather complicated from a legal standpoint. Since you are a merchant and not a lawyer, I shall put the matter in layman’s terms. Mr. Brown has formed a syndicate which will pay far more than Mrs. Rothirsch can pay to satisfy Cace Clothiers. These people have tempted Cace with a plan that will quadruple the size of the property. They plan to make Mrs. R. a buyout offer that she will be unable to refuse.”
It took only a minute for Adam to grasp the essence of this description. Then it took several minutes more, during which time he was silent, to absorb the fact that the instigator, the organizer of this scheme, actually was Theo Brown. He was stunned.
“But Theo and I,” he stammered, “we’re friends. He was one of the best friends I’ve ever had. Are you sure? . . . I mean, can there be any mix-up, any misreading? . . . Sometimes things get confused in the telling.”
“No misreading. Do you remember a dinner we attended? I was annoyed, perhaps visibly so, by all that mention of the Cace deal. It is very unwise to have such matters bruited about in the yellow-dog press that imbeciles read. That business about the courtyard, the retractable glass roof—”
Adam almost jumped out of his seat. “That was my idea! I made a sketch of it one day when I was in Theo’s office. They have something like it somewhere in Europe. I remember a photo—”
“A sketch? But nothing formal? No blueprint, no basis for a lawsuit?”
“No. It was just a passing thought, a doodle. Theo Brown was my friend,” he repeated. “I would have sworn by his loyalty, his kindness, his honesty—”
Lawrence waved his hands in rebuttal. “Then it’s a good thing you aren’t practicing law,” he said.
Adam, filled with grief and sensing the end of the interview, had to ask a final quick question. “Is there anything, anything at all, that can be done?”
“Nothing. They’re quite within the law. Unless you can come up with enough money to outbid Brown’s syndicate, you have to accept defeat. That’s life.”
With a sinking heart, Adam asked how much Mrs. R. would need. And after learning that half a million dollars might possibly do it, but only possibly, he thanked Mr. Lawrence and went out with his sinking heart down close to his boots.
The way home took him near to the park where Emma and he had met in secret on that summer day that now seemed so long ago. She, who was not an angel—and here in spite of all the troubles, he had to smile—had looked like one in her white dress and her hat with the single rose.
Next he had to pass the store. The green awnings and the flower boxes were still there where he had once placed them, and he remembered the simple pleasure he had felt on the day he bought them. The fine facade of the old building had been cleaned so that it now gleamed white in the sun. At the right-angle turn around the corner, he went past the addition that had been added three years ago. Here at this entrance the name Rothirsch was permanently carved beneath the cornice. He thought of some brief remarks that had gone between the architect a
nd himself when he, Adam, had observed that it might be good to make this entrance match the old one. It had been no business of his to speak out on that subject, and he had a moment later regretted what the architect had every right to resent: a suggestion from someone like Adam. But instead, to his surprise, the man had accepted the suggestion.
“You know, Mr. Arnring, as I think it over, I do believe you are right. It would look better. Yes, you are right.”
He drove out toward the highway. Here was the boardinghouse where he had spent those first weeks among the lady schoolteachers. Who could have predicted how his life would change over the next few years?
Somebody knocked at the office door, and spoke. It was Reilly’s voice. “Adam? Archer’s here with me. We’d both like to see you.”
Adam said wearily, “Come in.”
What could they want, those two? After all this time, and the true affection he had for them both, they were still a pair of simpletons from a comic strip.
Reilly began. “Remember what you said a couple of days ago about the merger, and I said you should go to a lawyer? Well, we’ve got some information that you need to hear. I heard it last night at the bar near my house.”
“Notice, he said ‘I,’ not ‘we,’ ” objected Archer. “Because I don’t go to bars.”
“Sure, we know. Don’t interrupt me. I need to tell Adam. Some guys were talking about that big deal. This one, I don’t know his name, I don’t think he lives in town, as a matter of fact he doesn’t, I think he lives in Rosedale—”
“Go on,” said Adam, already starting to fidget with impatience. “Go on.”
“Well, this guy drives a car for a rich guy here, I forget his name, but he’s a friend of our accountant, and he and Theo Brown were in the car, and they were talking, and you’re right about what you said, Brown’s cooking something up.”
“I still can’t believe it!” Adam cried. “So natural, so warmhearted—it doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense,” Archer said gloomily. “You’re still young. You’ll find out when you’ve lived a little longer.”
