by Zenith Brown
“Grace,” she said abruptly, “—have you got company?”
I shook my head a little blankly. “Why?”
“Then would you let me stay all night tonight?”
“Now wait a minute, Molly!”
I didn’t have to look at Randy’s African sun-scorched face under the thatch of burnt-up hair that used to be brown to see that he was taking the whole business as hard as Molly was. His voice was enough.
“I’m not staying in that house tonight,” Molly said quietly. “I said I wouldn’t, and I’m not. If Grace won’t let me stay with her I’ll . . . I’ll go to a hotel.”
“They’re all full,” Randy said. “Don’t be a dope. Give the guy a break, won’t you? He’d have let you know if he could have.”
“He let Courtney know, didn’t he? If he could get word to her, he could to me—if he’d wanted to.”
“Maybe she just heard it tonight. If you’d been home you——”
She shook her head. “Courtney’s known it the last four days. I knew there was something, the way she’s been acting. I’ve been wondering what it was.—And don’t tell me I’m crazy. I’ve had just all I can take.”
Her voice quivered a little.
“Can I stay with you, Grace?”
“Of course,” I said.
Randy shrugged. “No use standing here till we draw a crowd. I’ll get a taxi. You can do as you please.”
He strode on toward Connecticut Avenue, and I started on as Molly stood there for an instant fishing around in her bag for her compact.
It was hard to know what to do. If she’d been married to anybody but Cass Crane, if he’d let anybody but Courtney Durbin know he was coming back, it might have been easier. Any other man coming home to a girl he’d married and left a week afterwards, to be gone four or five months heaven knows where, would have deserved every benefit of the doubt. But somehow not Cass. It may all just have gone back to the fact that Cass was the man every gal who’d come out in Washington for the last five years had decided she wanted to marry. But he’d belonged to Courtney, and nobody could get him away. When she married D. J. Durbin and it was assumed he was on the block again, the postman literally staggered up his front steps. But he was at the Durbins’ just as he’d been at Courtney’s own house before, and he and Courtney were at all the same parties together, because D. J. Durbin didn’t go out and Cass went in his place. Then he was sent to South America, and came home one Thursday. He and Molly were married on Saturday, and he was gone the next Saturday. And now . . .
She’d caught up with me on the narrow sidewalk.
“—Do you suppose he’s forgotten he married me?”
“I . . . think he’d remember, darling,” I said. “At least, it’s customary.”
“I mean, seriously. He might have got a fever, or . . . something. I mean . . . well, I haven’t heard from him for a long time, and Courtney told somebody he wouldn’t have married me if he’d——”
“You mean he had a fever when he married you,” I said. “And now he’s over it, and he’s forgotten, the way you’d forget a delirium?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“I know it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I don’t want to stay at home tonight, Grace.”
There was a catch in her voice again.
“I’d just make a scene . . . or I’d act as if it didn’t matter. And—it’s got to be either me or Courtney. It can’t be both. It just won’t work that way. I’m not that . . . that smart.”
“All right, Molly,” I said. We were at the top of the slope and Randy was waiting on the corner with a taxi. “You come to my house tonight, and tomorrow you can see.”
It wasn’t to be quite that simple.
“I guess I ought to stop by the house a minute,” she said when we got in the cab. “I . . . I’ve got to get a toothbrush, and my uniform.”
“Right,” Randy said. He told the driver. His voice was casual and matter-of-fact, but he took hold of her hand and gave it a tight squeeze. If he hadn’t been in love with her, I suppose, he wouldn’t have been standing by as he was, though it’s always seemed to me the young are capable of a lot more unselfishness than they’re given credit for. If an occasional eyebrow had been raised about these two, it would have reflected more on the minds of the raisers than on them. And Courtney’s calling Molly a whited sepulchre, and a two-timing little rat, has always seemed to me rather ironic to say the least. The trouble with Courtney is the trouble with a lot of women whose mothers forgot to tell them about eating their cake and having it too, and making their bed and lying in it, and those other useful bits of information preserved in the domestic time-capsules of yester-year. Though at the moment and on the face of it, Courtney Durbin seemed positive proof that such things are as obsolete as the recipe for A Very Nice Face Pomade made out of mutton tallow and attar of roses that I’ve still got at home, in my great-grandmother’s spidery script.
The taxi slowed down on 26th, and turned a little dubiously, as well it might, into the end of Beall Street. Molly and Cass’s house is the only one in the block that has so far reversed the blight that most of the rest of Georgetown has been rescued from, to become a landlord’s Garden of Eden with the Rent Control Board its only serpent . . . if an anaemic gartersnake can so be called. It’s the second house from the corner. They bought it the day they were married, from a cousin of my cook Lilac who’d got a war job and was moving to civilized quarters. It looked then as if it would collapse in an unlovely heap of rotten boards if you bounced a ping-pong ball off it. The house next door on the corner, by the parked space above the drive along Rock Creek, was both too expensive and too far gone . . . so far gone, in fact, that it’s still empty, rats and fungi its only life, an old wisteria vine and the boards nailed across the sashless windows all that holds it together at all. The house we stopped at had no resemblance whatever to its original self or to any of its neighbors. It was gleaming white, with green shutters and window boxes full of hanging begonias.
On the uneven brick sidewalk Molly stopped short and listened intently.
“—Isn’t that my phone?”
She ran through the white gate and up the iron steps. I could hear the muffled peal of the bell sounding again. She got the key out of her bag, unlocked the door and ran in.
“She’s done a swell job, hasn’t she?” Randy said casually. He looked up at the white face of the little house. “She damn near killed herself, scraping and painting and patching plaster.—God, I hope that’s him, the stinking . . .”
He stopped without finishing it. We stood there listening. We could have heard her voice, but we didn’t, and then a light went on in the back room, making a yellow path through the doorway. We went up the steps and inside.
Molly was in the front room, staring down into the fireplace. As Randy switched on the light she turned around and smiled, quickly and too brightly.
“They’d hung up.”
“Then let’s stick around till he calls again.” Randy said. “He probably didn’t even know you were living here. He wouldn’t have had a key——”
She put her hand on his arm.
“You’re sweet, Randy—but . . . don’t! Please don’t!”
She tried to smile. “I’ll get my things. If you want a drink there’s some ice downstairs.”
She went out into the tiny hallway and up the stairs. I could hear her feet going across the floor and the creak of a bed, and that was all.
Randy stood there a moment, pulling a brush hair out of a blob of paint on the mantel.
“I’ll get some ice,” he said curtly. “God, this makes me sore. A guy like that . . .”
“Listen,” I said patiently. “There must have been a slip-up. I can’t believe there wasn’t.”
The look he gave me made me feel old and infirm and feebleminded.
“—I was going to get some ice, wasn’t I.”
I waited. It was the first time I’d been in the house since she�
�d painted the woodwork. If you looked too carefully the old chocolate-brown still showed in places, but it was very pleasant, and a superhuman job in this weather. And now she was upstairs alone with it, and all the fun it was going to be to show Cass what she could do, in between being a nurse’s aide four hours a day and working at the ration board and all the other things she did, was lying like a lump of uncooked dough in the pit of her stomach.
Downstairs I could hear Randy swearing at the ice cubes. From outside in the street came a burst of high laughter from some unrestrained libido, full rich voices from the colored church around the corner drowning it suddenly with “Marching Down the King’s Highway.” In the warm duskiness of the surrounding night the little house with its smell of wet plaster and fresh paint seemed very pathetic and young and lonely.
I could hear Randy plodding up the stairs, ice clinking against glass, and the creak of the floor above as Molly began to move around again. Suddenly the phone rang in the back room. Randy stopped, ice bucket in hand, looking at it, his lean sunburned face expressionless. The next instant Molly was flying downstairs. She’d changed her dress and taken off her evening slippers. She was barefooted, with one shoe in her hand, her face lighted up in a poignantly transparent denial of everything she’d said before.
When she said “Hello,” her voice was a further betrayal, and it was even more of one when she said, “Oh, hello, Courtney.”
She listened silently for a moment.
“Thanks a lot for calling. No, I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve got to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn. I’ll see him tomorrow. Goodbye.”
When she turned her face was drained of everything. Even her eyes were pale. She shook her head and picked up her shoe from the table by the phone.
“Cass is at the Durbins’,” she said calmly. “He was too busy to come to the phone. Courtney wanted me to come over.”
She went back to the hall. “I’ll be down in a second, Grace. Will you see the lights are off downstairs, please, Randy?”
She’d just got upstairs when a woman’s voice called from the street—“Yoo-hoo, Molly! Cass?”—and we heard a lot of feet scraping up the iron steps.
3
I recognized Julie Ross’s voice.
“Hello, angels, can we come in a minute? We didn’t know you’d got home till we saw you through the kitch——”
Julie came in through the front room door and stopped short, her face blank for an instant.
“Oh, hello, Grace. Hello, Randy. We thought it was Cass and Molly.”
The “we” consisted, besides herself, of one large, fat-faced untidy man with a lot of moist black hair, his pongee suit dripping wet, and a man with a long face, gray hair and a quick pair of slate-blue eyes who looked as if he’d stopped on the top step, taken a cool shower and stepped into a linen suit just off the ironing board. He looked, furthermore, as acutely embarrassed as he was cool. The large man did neither. He was very hot and not embarrassed in the least. He was almost a comic strip figure, I thought, he had such a waggish good humor about him. It wasn’t until I looked beyond the smile-crinkled bags around his eyes that I had the slightly uncomfortable feeling that if I had to meet one of them on a dark night, the other one would be safer.
Julie waved her hand toward them without looking around.
“—Do you know these people?”
“No,” Randy said. He added, “Do you? And who are they?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him, anybody,” Julie said. “The clean one’s Mr. Austin, and I can’t pronounce the other one’s name so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was Cass we wanted to see. Somebody said he was getting back tonight. I thought maybe he’d run into my sainted husband out in the wilds, and I thought I’d like to know whether he’s still alive or can I start looking around. I don’t suppose you’d like to give us a drink.”
“Have a cigarette,” Randy said. He pulled a moist unattractive pack out of his pocket. “Grace and I just decided alcohol makes you hotter and the hell with it. If you’ll just stick around a few minutes you can have the whole place to yourselves. We’re shoving off.”
“Oh, I see,” Julie said brightly. “You want us to stay. Sweetie, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. Fresh paint makes us break out. Tell Molly goodbye. Goodbye, Grace.”
The two gentlemen backed out, the immaculate Mr. Austin bowing politely and still more embarrassed, the large wet man with the unpronounceable name looking hotter and wetter and still more good-humored.
“Goodbye, Randy dear,” Julie called back. “If you ever have to make a crash landing I hope it’s in a nice field of poison ivy.”
I heard them close the gate. Randy stood looking at me.
“Now, how the hell did they know Cass was due in?” he asked grimly. “I know that big wet guy. Wait a minute—he signed my short snorter bill in Cairo a couple of years ago.”
He pulled out his wallet and held a tattered dollar bill under the light on the table.
“Here we are,” he said. “ ‘Lons Sondauer.’ ”
He looked at me again. “Where the devil could Julie have picked him up? He’s some kind of great big screwball—rich as a skunk.”
“Did he recognize you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, I wasn’t in uniform then.—I’d like to know what this is all about, Grace. Julie isn’t turning an honest penny introducing the right people, is she?”
He grinned at me suddenly. “You may have gathered that Mrs. Ross gives me a pain.”
Molly was just coming down.
“Half a second,” she said. She went to the little panelled cupboard set in the wall in the back room and took out a bottle of Scotch. “I’d just like to . . . welcome the prodigal—if he happens to come back.”
She smiled quickly at us and went out into the hall and down to the dining room. In a minute she came back with a Waterford decanter with the usual silver chain and plaque around its neck. She put it down on the cocktail bar improvised from an old-fashioned washstand, and set Randy’s thermos tub beside it.
“There,” she said. “Let’s go before somebody else drops in.”
She looked at Randy for an instant. “You shouldn’t have been rude to Julie Ross. She hasn’t heard from Spud for months, and his family have practically told her they’ll take the kids and she can support herself. That’s one thing about Courtney, even if I do have to say it. Julie’d just about have been in the street if it hadn’t been for her.”
“She can afford it,” Randy said calmly.
“So can a lot of people, but they don’t.”
Molly closed my front door behind Randy and came back into the sitting room. It used to open out onto a green lawn with masses of flowers in the borders against the brick wall. Now it opens onto something that has very little resemblance to the idea I had when calluses meant nothing, and I had a vision of a horn of plenty, with young carrots and stringless tender beans and tiny yellow squash rolling out of it onto my dinner table, with possibly a dewy basketful for the Old Ladies’ Home. That was when I was reading the front of the seed catalogue, and hadn’t bothered to look in the back, at the pictures of sprays and the price of rotenone and nicotine and copper sulphate, or even remotely suspected the infinity of various-legged things that make a leaf without holes chewed in it an unbelievable miracle. Still, the pungent smell of a ripe unpicked tomato has something that ambergris and all the perfumes of Arabia don’t have. I was sniffing it through the open window, hoping that the night’s invisible invasion would leave a few of them intact for the morning—not round and rosy like in the pictures but deformed and misshapen, poor things but mine own—when I heard Molly cross the room behind me.
I looked around. She’d gone over to the fireplace and was sitting in the wing chair, staring at some point a long ways past the blackened bricks in front of her, paying no attention to Sheila’s paw resting on her knee.
I haven’t said very much about what Molly Crane looks like, because it’s
a little hard to say. It depends so much on what’s going on inside her. If she and Courtney Durbin were sitting side by side—which was beginning to appear increasingly unlikely—hardly anyone would look twice at her, because Courtney is a really beautiful woman. But if one did look twice, with a perceptive eye, he’d see there was something there. It’s an intangible quality, difficult to name. There’s not more than four years’ difference between her age and Courtney’s—twenty-two, and twenty-six or so—but in the terms other than years that make people seem younger or older there’s more difference than that. I suppose it’s the difference between having a gardener in to plant your radishes and doing it yourself, or having the maid walk the dog on a leash instead of taking him along to the corner store and letting him chase a cat if he wants to. I’d always thought of the quality of simplicity and gaiety Molly has as being something she’d never lose, no matter how old she gets, but I wasn’t so sure as she turned out of herself just then and looked around at me. She seemed to have come a long journey back from somewhere I’d never been, and to have aged a lot while she was there, in the same way that Courtney was older.
“I ought to go to bed,” she said abruptly. “But do you know what’s going to be the hardest part of all this to take?”
I shook my head.
“It’s all the people who’re going to be so kind to me to my face and then say ‘I told you so—these hit-and-run war marriages . . . none of them last.’ ”
She got up quickly, went over to the window and stood looking out a long time before she turned around again.
“—I know all the things Courtney’s been saying.”
