Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  “Mara! How—why—?” asked Lynn, concerned, while Jennie, nodding her wheaten head, inquired, “Well, what the hades did you expect?”

  “How? Frank Houghton, of course!” said Mara viciously.

  “Frank?”

  “Naturally. Frank. Because of what Bill said last night. Because of what I said today.”

  “What did you say?” asked Jennie, interested.

  Mara flamed out at them both. “I had lunch with him. He said—he said he couldn’t risk losing his job or letting down his wife and kids, but that I could divorce Bill and take a flat somewhere and give him a key!”

  Lynn murmured something, but Jennie smiled a little.

  “And you didn’t like him enough?” she asked gravely.

  “Like him enough! As if I’d ever like any man enough!”

  “I don’t think you would. Neither would I,” said Jennie, “but that’s not saying that I wouldn’t accept, if the key were gold-plated and the flat had plenty of service.”

  “Well,” said Mara flatly in the little silence that followed, “I’m not downright immoral like you, Jennie Le Grande!”

  “No? I wonder what being moral is? Being immoral I suppose, is only a question of what you want to pay for things,” said Jennie without rancor, and vanished into the bedroom.

  “I hate Frank Houghton,” said Mara after a moment. “If he thinks he can do this and get away with it—I’m going down to see the boss tomorrow!”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Lynn advised her gently.

  “I shall. I won’t lose my job simply because I’ve been decent,” said Mara.

  She went the next morning to the office as usual. But Frank had taken, unexpectedly, a vacation. He was not there. His uncle was, however. The door of the private office shut upon Mara.

  When she came out, she was very pale. No one spoke to her as she walked through and out of the office. She rode downstairs in the swiftly falling elevator. She walked into the street, and stood there, irresolute. The shadow of the skyscraper loomed over her, cold, dark, save for the aspiring towers, which were hot with sunlight, and soared into the blue.

  She went back to the apartment and packed. She called a telephone number. “Bill,” she said—and her voice was soft—“Bill—I’m coming home—”

  She left a note for Jennie and Lynn. Lynn reading it, exclaimed, “How can she?”

  But Jennie turned her wise blue eyes on Lynn with something of pity in them. “She had to, don’t you see? What else could she do? She probably spun tall yarn to Houghton, thinking he’s say, ‘Oh, goodie, goodie, let’s all get divorced and change partners!’ Not that bird. He wasn’t even in love with her. Just crazy about having a woman make eyes at him and tell him how grand he was. Same thing with Bill and the other heart, see? Houghton got cold feet, I guess, and maybe spilled something to his uncle. So Mara’s let out. And she goes back to Bill. It’s all very simple,” said Jennie, yawning.

  It might be simple; but it made Lynn feel sick.

  12

  THE PERFECT HOST

  IN THE END LYNN WENT OFF FOR HER WEEK-End without telling Tom the name of her host. She had not seen him since the night at the apartment except at the office, nor spoken to him save briefly over the telephone. This intangible estrangement on his part worried her while it bewildered her. She did not know of his awkward and embarrassed explanation to Rawlson—“Sorry, old man, I’ve thought it over and decided not to”—nor Rawlson’s hot arguments and final, shrugged, “Well, if you won’t, you won’t, but I think you’re a fool!”

  No man likes being thought a fool, and that Rawlson did think it very sincerely, that it was with him no mere figure of speech, Tom was perfectly convinced. Now that he had thought it over, perhaps Lynn was right her hair-splitting and woman’s scruples. But that didn’t make it any easier for young Shepard, facing his friend. If Rawlson thought him a fool, cautious and unwilling to risk anything in “legitimate” business, he certainly felt like one; and he could give Rawlson no adequate reason for his about-face. Couldn’t, of course, bring Lynn into it. He’d stand doubly condemned; first for having talked over his business with a girl; second for permitting himself to be so influenced.

  The result was natural. A grouch. Tom, unable to forget that he had been adjudged an imbecile in the eyes of another man, and, if not “dishonest” and “disloyal,” at least an incompetent in the eyes of the only girl in the universe, took to rebuilding his set as a man takes to a strong drink, and to drowning his loss of self-esteem in summer static. Moreover, through Hank he had come to know one of the supervising engineers at UBC, and so spent his lunch hours in the tower, sneaking into the control room, or, en route there, pausing in the wide hall to look down through the windows into the great two-storied studio where orchestras played with ease, sound, and fury, of which no note penetrated walls or windows, yet whose music was miraculously and eerily released from the loud-speaker in the reception room not far away.

  Hank said one evening, “Why not break away from your blasted bank and come where your job will give you a kick? I think Noonan’s quitting; you might make it there. You’ve got enough background, your engineering and the Y course.”

  “Lynn would never stand for it,” Tom told him gloomily. “She’s set on my becoming a sort of carbon copy of J. P. How much would I drag down to start with?”

  “Forty-five. But you’re not likely to become a millionaire,” said Hank grinning, long legs on the mantel, while Slim, knocking the ashes from a rank pipe, said, “Not by a long shot. But then neither will I. Public utilities only make stockholders rich.”

  Tom ignored this plaint. “Forty-five? Almost what I’m getting now,” he murmured, “but, no, she’d never stand for it.”

  “Wimmin!” said Hank. Slim said nothing. It had been weeks since he’d seen Jennie. She had given him definitely the air. He’d been crazy about her, too. Crazy to think she’d ever look at him twice! And now here was Lynn, professing to care for his friend but blind to the urgencies of his nature. Not all a man’s needs had to do with women, after all. A man had to have a job he was keen on, or he went empty-hearted all his life long, dissatisfied, a misfit. He tried to tell Tom something of this in his slow inarticulate way.

  “Future? What’s the future in that dump of yours?” he wanted to know. “All you do is keep an engagement pad straight and run around and yes people.”

  “I’m supposed to be learning the business,” Tom grinned deprecatingly.

  “Oh yeah? And when you’ve learned it, what then?”

  Tom didn’t know definitively. Between the $50 a week the Seacoast Company gave him, plus Christmas bonus and a chance for modest investments, and the straight $45 of the UBC there wasn’t a hell of a lot of difference, he conceded; but if you went into radio the future was never more nebulous than at the bank. And then there was Lynn to consider.

  “Put it up to her,” advised Hank. “If she’s the right kind of a girl she’ll see your point. You could serve your time on the checkerboard and perhaps get into the lab. You’d like that.”

  He wouldn’t like it. Research work, looking for something no other man had found, finding it perhaps, or working to perfect the vague dream of someone who’d gone before. Lord, he’d love it! If only you didn’t have to think of money in this man’s work. “Wish someone would leave me a million!” he said.

  Yes, he’d ask Lynn. He’d been an ass, sulking for these last few days; it wasn’t, after all, her fault that he’d listened to Rawlson’s suave schemes.

  He telephoned her eventually, all set to say, “I’ve a proposition; can I come up and sell it to you?” It would be this: that she would agree to his leaving the bank and getting into the UBC outfit; then, if when the depression passed there would be no question of losing her job, they would marry and work together Because of his own dissatisfaction with his job and his longing, growing stronger daily, to be somewhere where he would feel perfectly at home, doing something he believed to be imp
ortant and constructive, he was beginning to understand Lynn’s attachment to her own work.

  But Lynn wasn’t in; no one was in that evening. She was, as a matter of fact, at Sarah’s.

  Saturday morning he saw her, but not at breakfast—she didn’t come into the cafeteria—but later in her office. Impossible to say much, with Miss Marple’s shrewd eye on him, and the other girls turning to look, just, “Suppose I buzz up tonight?”

  She said, “I’m sorry. I’m going away for the weekend.”

  His jaw dropped. “Weekend? You didn’t tell me.”

  “I haven’t talked to you—much,” she reminded him.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded, more abruptly than he realized.

  She did the very natural thing; told the truth, or half of it; hedged. She answered a little stiffly, “With Sarah. We’ll be back in time for work Monday.”

  That was that. He turned and left the room after a moment. She saw at her desk, staring after him, his height and breadth, the outdoors sort of walk, so out of place somehow in these surroundings. She felt small, ashamed. Why hadn’t she said, “We’re going down to David Dwight’s; it will be fun; I wish you were coming, darling?”

  She hadn’t said it, no matter why. He’d been—different. Since the night in her apartment, she had waited to have him come to her and say, “You were right. I’ve told Rawlson. Let’s forget it.” But he hadn’t said it.

  Dwight drove them down himself in his small open car. There was another man with him, a polo player. Lynn found herself in the front seat with Dwight, the polo gentleman, politely bored, with Sarah in the back. It was a bright, warm day, too warm for comfort in the city, and the Long Island roads were crowded with cars, and dusty; even the trees were filmed with dust, blanketing their radiant green and dropping in the heat. “I hope you brought a bathing-suit,” said Dwight.

  She assured him that she had. He drove well, effortlessly, smiling, a little too fast but with perfect surety. He was hatless, and the faint wind stirred by their passage ruffled his thick gray hair. He was tanned, and his teeth were very white against the smooth brown skin.

  “I’m glad you came,” he told her. “I was afraid that young man of yours wouldn’t let you.”

  “He hasn’t anything to say about it.”

  “No? And he hadn’t anything to say about the job I offered you, either?” he asked her.

  She was silent a moment; then she replied, “Of course not,” without conviction.

  Dwight laughed. “What a very poor witness you’d make,” he mocked her. “I would tie you into knots on the stand! Of course—yes. Of course, he said, ‘I’d rather see you starve than working for that old reprobate!’”

  “He didn’t say anything of the kind,” she denied indignantly.

  “Well, perhaps he didn’t put it quite as strongly. But whatever he said he was right,” agreed Dwight cheerfully. “I thought it over myself afterward. I was ready to stand by my bargain, of course, but I realized that you are entirely too distracting to make a good amanuensis.”

  He had never spoken to her in that way before, as lightly, as caressingly. She rather liked it—but was warned. She said with equal lightness, “Well you needn’t worry, need you? As the distraction never materialized.”

  He leaned a little nearer, cut a corner, sent her suddenly against the side of the car, gasping a little. They rode on smoothly. He said, “I do worry.”

  In the back seat the polo player yawned and, by way of making idle conversation with Sarah, jerked a thumb toward the front seat in a fashion pardonable only to six millions and a string of ponies, and growled, in his usual manner, “Looks like old David was making a play for the youngster—What did you say her name was?”

  Sarah hadn’t said. Dwight had said it, in the unintelligible manner of all introductions. Sarah, her heart tightening, replied, “Her name is Lynn Harding. She’s by way of being my goddaughter.”

  “Bet Dave would like to be her godfather,” said the polo player, who was celebrated for things other than tact and brilliance. “Looks as if he were offering her about half of his kingdom this minute.”

  Sarah spoke of the scenery. But she was not happy. Was it possible that David Dwight’s kindness to Lynn meant—anything? It wasn’t possible. Surely he owed her, Sarah, too much to—

  What did he owe her, exactly? A little belated loyalty perhaps; certainly, a sense of decency. She felt herself flushing with anger, glowing with it.

  But to what had his kindness amounted? A party, luncheon now and then, dinner. David liked pretty girls. She’s always known that. That was why it had seemed so utterly incredible to her once, and still seemed so, that he had ever cared for her. But Lynn!

  No, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, he dared not—use her as a screen, as a convenience. Besides Lynn had no interest in him. For the first time Sarah felt a definite gratitude to Tom Shepard for loving Lynn, for being loved by her in his turn.

  Why had she been so blind—if she had been blind? Was it because she, so unable to break loose from the old ties, the old associations, saw David Dwight through the eyes of twenty years ago? Saw him, perhaps, without love but still with illusion? He might do as he wished, possess a hundred women, cast them aside, be notoriously unfaithful to his wife, as he had, for the sake of his wife’s money, been unfaithful to Sarah, and she would still regard him with the condoning and veiled eyes of what had once been pure passion and incredible tenderness.

  He wouldn’t do that to her, no matter how little he cared for her now; he wouldn’t tamper with Lynn’s happiness.

  Thus she reassured herself. But the chance remark of a man whom she had never seen before and would never again, once this weekend was over, had put her on her guard.

  They reached the small, busy town, turned into the side road, and, passing between the gate posts of Dwight’s property, eventually drew up before the house. Lynn took a deep breath. “Glad you like it,” said Dwight, as servants came forward to take the bags, to take the car to the garage. “I had an idea it would be becoming to you when I built it.”

  She was unwary enough to remind him—“But you didn’t know me then.”

  “I knew I was going to know you,” he answered, with his unwavering regard.

  She was a little flushed, stepping out of the car.

  The house was in the American farmhouse style. Part of it was quite old, as American farmhouses go; the remodeling, the additions had been done with reverence. It was shingled, painted white, and had blinds that were neither green nor blue but a faded mellow mixture of both. There were wide verandas and windows, all about it were gardens, and a small untouched orchard ran, laughing, down the slopes to the blue water.

  They went between low hedges of box to the open door, which boasted a fanlight of great beauty brought from a house in Salem.

  The door opened directly upon a wide long living-room, with furniture which, if for the most part antique, was comfortable and had achieved the perfectly right look of semi-shabbiness combined with beauty and stability. There was an enormous fireplace, and there were many flowers. The stairs leading upward were slender and polished, the banister hand-carved and lovely.

  Sarah and Lynn had connecting rooms, each with a bath. They looked on flowers and trees and water, and the curtains bellied in a breeze that was soaked with salt and scented with roses.

  “I’ve never been in a lovelier house,” said Lynn, wandering into Sarah’s room and watching her unpack. “What’ll I wear?”

  “He doesn’t go in for formality,” Sarah told her vaguely. “Sports things, I guess. There will be people for dinner. We’ll change then. Yes, the house is lovely. Not, however, what I would have expected of David.”

  “You’ve never been here before?” Lynn asked her.

  “No.” Sarah realized with a start and with a return of warning that she never had been there before. Yet David had had the place—how long?—five years? Once he’d had a place in Maryland. She remembered that. She reca
lled it now and then, turned her mind from it with an effort of the will. No, she had never been asked here. She’d seen him all these years, off and on. Lunch, dinner, a play, parties. But he had never—

  Why had he—now?

  Lynn was back in her own room, discovering, exclaiming. “Such an adorable desk,” her voice drifted back to Sarah, who stood perfectly still in the center of her room, unseeing eyes on the suitcase she had opened, a silk stocking dangling from her capable hand.

  A little later Lynn and Sarah went downstairs. Lynn wore a tennis frock of yellow silk. She had brushed her hair until it shone; the black satin arrow was pointed upon her forehead.

  Dwight and the polo player waited for them. “There are other people coming,” Dwight said casually. “They’ll turn up before tea. How about some tennis?” he asked Lynn.

  She said doubtfully that it had been ages since she played; she’d probably make a mess of it.

  There were rackets in the cupboard under the stairs. Dwight led the way to the court. “Never saw the sense of tennis,” said the polo player, striding, bowlegged, besides Sarah, “too dam’ strenuous!”

  The court was on a rise of ground overlooking the water. The very high back stops were tapestried in late ramblers; there was a four-foot bed of perennials round three sides. There were metal, painted chairs, umbrellas. It had taken them only two hours to run down; it was not more than four o’clock now, and the pellucid sunlight lay in Dwight’s eyes as he took his place across the court from Lynn.

  He beat her, not too easily. She played a good game, lithe; her serve was almost vicious. But he played a better game. They played two sets, Sarah and the polo player—whose name, it appeared, was Travis—watching.

  “I like beating you—by a slight margin,” Dwight told Lynn as they left the court and went to join their small audience.

  His eyes were friendly as he spoke; more than friendly. Lynn said: “Next time! You took an unfair advantage of me—I haven’t played in so long. You play—a lot?”