She told him he ought to go to the clubs and be with managing editors and publishers and people who really influenced opinion. She intimated it would be unwise to hang around with his friend Chuck Foley in the Chalet Restaurant, where only the wrong sort of newspapermen went. Her father had suggested that if he and McAlpine came to an arrangement it would be necessary, later, for McAlpine to go to France, Italy, and England to see with his own eyes what was happening in these countries; and she talked about Rome and Paris as if she would be walking with him through the streets of those cities, showing him around. She talked, too, about her father’s temperament and advised McAlpine on how to get along with him; if there were difficulties, she could be helpful in smoothing them out. And he would need an apartment with a good address. She might be able to find one for him if he wanted her to.
The warmth of her generous interest stirred McAlpine, and he wondered how he had evoked it, and how he had had the good luck to come on such a handsome woman when she was waiting shyly to attach herself to someone who knew how to appreciate the fullness of her ardour. They walked in the twilight, and she felt compelled to talk about herself. All she said, though, was that her own marriage had been a mistake; she felt that she hadn’t been married at all. It had only lasted three months because Steve had been such an alcoholic.
“I understand,” he said, knowing they had been really talking all week about the failure of her marriage, touching on it again and again when they talked about other things.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she insisted. “I know you’d expect me to say so. The Havelocks, though, were on my side from the beginning.”
“The Havelocks?”
“My husband’s uncle.”
“Not Ernest Havelock?”
“No, that’s another family. They’re around here too. There are as many Havelocks as there are Carvers. Why? Do you know Ernest Havelock?”
“It was the children, Peter and Irma – when I was a boy.”
“I heard someone say they were in Europe now. I like to think of you knowing people I might know.”
“Do you?”
She nodded, and he smiled down at her.
“Well, don’t get a wrong impression,” he said. “I was no family friend. The name reminded me of the time when I knew them. That’s all.”
“You mean you lived near them?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “My people had a little summer cottage at the end of the beach where the Havelocks had their big country home. A cottage stuck down among a swarm of other cottages. But you know how kids get around and meet each other. There was a pavilion, a dance hall, up on the highway, and all the kids used to go there. No,” he added half to himself, as he smiled, “I don’t think the Havelocks ever knew how important they were to me.”
“Important in what way, Jim?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with an easy laugh. “You know the way a name or a house looms up in a kid’s mind.”
“Their house impressed you?”
“I was never in it, and yet I nearly made the grade one night.” He was making it an amusing story. “It was almost a start in life for me. When I was fourteen! I must have been impressed, too, or I wouldn’t remember it so clearly, would I? The night I nearly made the grade I had been walking with my father and mother down the oiled road running behind the cottages, and I remember we had to step off the road because the Havelock car was passing. Peter and Irma and their cousin, Tommy Porter, from Boston, called out to me they would see me up at the pavilion. My mother – she died of cancer two years later – was impressed, I think, and so was my father. He’s still quite a guy, jolly and eloquent. He used to like writing poetry. He stood there making a speech about Havelock’s fine liberal interests and how he had practically known him for years since he saw him coming out of his Trust Company every day at noon time when he, himself, was coming out of the post office where he worked. I didn’t like listening to him because I liked him, and I had noticed that Havelock in his big car hadn’t even nodded to him.”
He was silent, remembering, and Catherine waited to hear about his youth and his family. His good humour as he looked back didn’t fool her, for when he spoke of his father and mother his tone changed; it was full of affection, and she was sure a wound was hidden under his calmness.
“I left my father and mother and went over to the pavilion and played the pinball machines; and a little later Irma and Peter and their cousin Tommy came, in their school blazers, and we fooled around, and I noticed a lot of big cars passing down the road to the Havelock house, and in a little while Irma said they had better be getting back to the house. They were having a party. City friends of theirs. And Tommy, their cousin, asked me if I wasn’t coming and I said I wasn’t invited, and he said neither was he, we were all on the beach, weren’t we, and I should be a sport and stick with them, so I followed along with Tommy.”
He laughed apologetically. “Isn’t it ridiculous how you remember these little details?”
“No, go on,” she said.
“A kid remembers, I think, because he sort of likes everything to happen right, and when it doesn’t it sticks in his memory.” Again he laughed softly. When he got to the Havelock gate, he said, he trailed in with the cousin. It was the first time he had been inside the big hedge, and there were the wide green lawns and the fountains and the big sprawling house. Strange kids in English flannels came toward them from the terrace, and he was shy and hung back. “I forgot to say I had a little spaniel,” he said, “and I was glad he was there, dancing around. Then Mrs. Havelock came out. She was stout and had streaks of grey in her hair, and she just looked at me, and I felt awful because I had shorts on and an old sweater and my hair was rumpled. ‘Who’s that boy?’ she asked, and her son, Peter, said idly, ‘Oh, that’s Jim McAlpine – he lives down at the end of the beach.’ All she said was, ‘Oh.’ She didn’t tell me I wasn’t invited. It was her wooden expression that hurt me and made me move closer to Tommy Porter. When she left us I wanted to behave with dignity and let her see, if she were watching from the house, that Tommy counted on me being with him.”
They picked up two croquet clubs, he said, and began to knock the ball back and forth. It was getting dark and he missed the ball and it shot past him and through the hedge, and he ran out the gate to get it. He tossed the ball over the hedge, then stood there, feeling lonely, yet glad he had got out, for now they would notice that he was not with them. Now Tommy or Peter would call out, “Oh, Jim! Where’s Jim gone? Hey, Jim,” and come down to the gate and look along the road for him.
He knew it might take some time before they noticed that he was missing, so he waited, with the spaniel wagging its tail and looking up at him. It began to get dark. Where there had been only the one evening star there were now many stars.
The voices on the lawn faded away toward the house, and no one called him; but they might not miss him, he thought, till they got inside. The moon rising over the lake shed its light on the roof of the Havelock house and gleamed through the thick hedge.
Lying down beside the hedge he watched the gleam of the Havelock lights. The moon rose a little higher. Then the road was all moonlight, and the little spaniel which had been lying beside him got to its feet and began to bark and circle around, then rush at the Havelock gate. The dog came frisking back at him to rub its nose in his neck and then darted at the gate again and scratched and whined. The bright moonlight was driving the dog crazy. From the house came the sound of a piano, and singing and laughing, and in chorus all the songs he knew so well.
The lights gleamed through the high hedge, and he watched them and waited, forgetting about his spaniel until he heard it scratching at the hedge beside him, thrusting its nose at the break in the hedge he had been making with his own hands. Suddenly the dog squeezed through the hedge and barked and bounded at the Havelock house.
“Come back, Tip, come back,” he called. Then he stopped calling. One of the Havelock children might recognize t
he dog’s bark and come out. “It’s Jim’s dog out on the road. Jim must be out there. I thought he was here,” they would say. “Let’s go and get him.”
A door opened, a shaft of light slanted across the lawn, and his heart thumped in his throat. A servant’s voice cried, “Go on, scat, do you hear, scat!” and the dog yelped and came running back to the hedge and wriggled through and into his arms. He held it hard against him, staring at the house. Then he jumped up, still holding the dog in his arms, and backed away from the tall dark hedge. He started to run down the road, and as he ran his pounding feet beat out the words, “Who’s that boy? Who’s that boy?” He stopped, breathing hard, his fists clenched, and stared back at the gleaming hedge, darker than the night, and whispered fiercely, “Just wait. Just wait.”
He walked along with Catherine, remembering, and then he laughed again. But she was shocked that he could reveal himself so calmly and finish the story with an easy laugh. I could never tell that story about myself, she thought. No one she knew would put himself in that light – a boy outside a hedge. No touch of snobbery troubled him, for he had faith in himself; he had reached his goal; the job on The Sun was to be his; he could afford to smile at his beginning. He had revealed himself to her in order to draw her closer to him, just as his arm tightening on hers drew her closer; she felt she was wanted in the secret part of his life and wanted right at the beginning. She was happy and proud and quietly content. “You’ll come to dinner tonight, won’t you, Jim?” she asked suddenly.
“Tonight?”
“I know Daddy would like it, too.”
“Of course I’ll come,” he said.
It was an intimate dinner made bright with easy conversation. They sat around, taking their time.
“Have lunch with me tomorrow, Jim,” Mr. Carver said when McAlpine was leaving. “I’m speaking to my managing editor, Horton.” And after McAlpine had gone, he said to Catherine, “You like him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like him a lot. He’s interesting.”
“Mind you, he hasn’t got a nickel.”
“But he hasn’t been a businessman.”
“And he’s staying at the Ritz. Just a gesture. Burning his professorial bridges behind him.”
“I like that, too. Don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t hold it against him.”
“Is there something you do hold against him?”
“Yes, there is something, Catherine.”
“Oh. But I thought you were enthusiastic?”
“I am. I am. But after all, my dear, I run a newspaper. And that quality of his which you’ve noticed too – I mean his absolute faith in his own judgement—”
“Yes, I’ve noticed it.”
“It isn’t just faith in himself. It’s an unshakable belief in what he thinks he sees.”
“But that’s rare and good,” she insisted.
“I know it’s rare. And I know it’s good,” he agreed. “I like it, too. But I do run a newspaper. I have to wonder if a man like that doing a column on the paper might some day embarrass me. It’s simply something I have to take into consideration.”
“Oh, you’re trying to be so cautious,” she said, laughing. “But you don’t fool me. I know you’re sold on him.”
“I am,” he admitted. “Only I want to make sure I won’t be left holding a tiger by the tail.”
TWO
The next night at eleven McAlpine was to meet Catherine at the radio station where she was making an appeal for funds for crippled children on a program sponsored by the Junior League. With time on his hands, he intended to have a drink with Chuck Foley. Though they had been separated by the war and the fact that they worked in different cities Foley was still his best friend. Years ago Foley, an advertising man, had wanted to be a poet and had written one slight volume of sentimental verse. But after he had become an account executive in a Montreal agency he had stopped writing poetry, rarely saw his old college friends, and paid his wife to keep away from him. Yet he always wanted to know what was happening to McAlpine. Before he had got his university job, McAlpine had had one bad winter when he had been broke and in debt and had gone around shivering in a light spring coat. Foley, who was doing well at the time, had been the only one who noticed that McAlpine looked thin and cold. He had pretended he needed a new coat and had bought one and had come around to McAlpine’s place with his old perfectly good and expensive coat, claiming he didn’t need it any more. McAlpine had always remembered that coat.
Loafing in the hotel lobby as he waited for a telephone call from Foley, McAlpine made fluent French conversation with the desk clerk. A big red-faced man wearing a Persian lamb hat came out of the elevator and called, “Why, hello, McAlpine. Foley didn’t tell me you were around. What are you doing here?” McAlpine had no recollection of him at all.
“What am I doing?” he asked, forcing his heartiness as he tried to place him. “I’m wondering why the same Foley didn’t tell me you had that hat. It makes you look like a character.”
“When you can afford to buy a hat like this one,” the big man said, “you’ll know you’ve landed on your feet.” Glancing at McAlpine’s conservative clothes he added, “Sure I’m a character, but anybody can look like Truman.” With a big laugh he took McAlpine’s arm, asked how he was doing with the French girls, admitted it was all right to have a splurge with them for the sake of the novelty, warned him he would learn in the end it was better to confine himself to girls like his own people; and when the switchboard operator called, “Here’s your party, Mr. McAlpine – will you take it now?” he followed him to the booth, shook hands, and said, “Check on it with Foley,” and departed.
“I’m to check on something with you, Chuck,” McAlpine said. “I’m to get tired soon of the French girls. Is that a fact?”
“Who asked you to check with me?”
“A big guy whose name I can’t remember. In a fur hat.”
“Men in fur hats don’t know what I think about anything,” Foley said brusquely. “How are you doing with the great publisher?”
“Fine. Tell me something about the great publisher’s daughter. What was her husband like?”
“Just another pleasant drunk – in the leather business.”
“What was the trouble between them?”
“Search me. Maybe her husband got tired handling leather.”
“Come on, Chuck.”
“Maybe Miss Catherine was a dragon. Maybe the poor guy got married and woke up and wondered why. Who do you know who wants to get married? Shall we meet where we met last night? The Mount Royal?”
“At the Peel Street entrance.”
“I may bring someone along with me. I’m not sure yet, but I may.”
“Who?”
“A little girl in the office. I’ve been having a drink with her. She’ll be good for us.”
“I have to meet Catherine.”
“It’s got nothing to do with Catherine,” Foley insisted. “Don’t you like meeting someone fresh as a daisy? Come on. It won’t do us any harm to have a drink with her. We may end up believing the dew is still on the grass. I’ll be seeing you in twenty minutes. Okay, son?”
“I’ll be there,” McAlpine said, and he hoped the girl would not show up.
It was the way the snow had begun to fall that gave everything a lazy deceptive mildness. Looking up at the faint feathery wisps of snow, McAlpine wondered if he ought to go back and get his overshoes. He went along Sherbrooke and turned down Peel. The night was still mild, but the snow now streamed in thin lines across the lighted Mount Royal entrance. At that time the taxis had left for the station; there was no traffic jam. The doorman stood idly at the curb. Across the road from the open upstairs windows of the Samovar came the sound of gypsy music and a contralto wailing and then a little burst of applause. McAlpine, in the shelter of the hotel entrance, looking up vaguely at the open windows of the nightclub, wondered why he hadn’t asked Catherine to go dancing with him.
From the
nightclub across the street came a slim girl in a short-sleeved black dress who stood in the lightly falling snow and waved to two swarthy men standing a few feet away from McAlpine. They beckoned to her and she crossed the road, leaving her footprints in the snow, and soon they were laughing and joking with her while one held her bare arm. She was very pretty, and the fact that the men had only needed to beckon to her offended McAlpine. Now she was going back, going alone into the Cadillac Restaurant, and the pair watched her. “Yeah, it’s like that,” one said, snickering coarsely and making a motion with his fingers. “Not bad either. Why didn’t you say you wanted to?” Listening like an Arab, McAlpine grew more offended. His sense of order was disturbed. At least the two men should have crossed the road to the girl. They were mugs. A slim good-looking girl like that shouldn’t have known them. It was all wrong.
McAlpine was not usually concerned with what went on on the street. Now it was different because of the way the snow was falling; maybe it was the whiteness of the street in the lights; but instead of going into the hotel lobby and buying a copy of the Nation and sitting down he stood there. A passing taxi left two black streaks on the snow-powdered road and stopped in front of the hotel. A French Canadian priest from Quebec City got out and with a fastidious air helped his sister, a middle-aged woman, to alight from the cab. With an elegant gesture he put a small tip in the driver’s hand.
There was Foley coming up the street in his expensive camel-hair coat and brown fedora, and with him was the girl in one of those plain fawn-coloured belted trench coats. She was hatless. Her fair hair was parted in the middle and, with the snow melting on it, she looked like a child.
“Hi, Jim,” Foley said. “This is Peggy Sanderson.” By the way the girl smiled McAlpine knew she had heard all about him.
“How do you do?” he said as she put out her hand. The expression on Foley’s face caught him off balance. Foley was an indifferent, red-headed, cynical, freckle-faced man with glasses, and Miss Sanderson wasn’t even his girl; but he looked as if he had just had three quick drinks, and he obviously expected McAlpine to feel just as good as he did.
The Loved and the Lost Page 2
