Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Oh,” she gasped, “I did not know it was so late! Get me a taxi, quick. Maman will be furious!”

  As soon as they were seated in the taxi, Roland put his arms around her. She brought her hand up against his chest.

  “No, M’sieur Ben—ton,” she whispered. “Oh no—please!”

  But when he kissed her, she did not struggle. She kissed him back, very simply and softly and sweetly.

  “This is very bad,” she said quietly, “I have never kissed anyone beside my Raoul before. I have very much shame now. All Americans think we French girls are very bad, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I,” Roland said solemnly, “think you’re wonderful.”

  “I regret that. You are too handsome and too impetuous, and I have been away from Raoul too long. I think I must go back now. I think I must not see you again.”

  “God, no!” Roland said.

  “Then you must be good. It is too bad that all strangers read only Maupassant and Flaubert. I do not know one girl like the creatures in their romans. I am engaged to Raoul. I am going to marry him. I love him very much. It is only that you are very handsome and very charming and I am a silly little Française, who is sometimes a little weak. But it means nothing. Est-ce que tu comrends ça, Roland?”

  “Yes,” Roland said; “I understand very well.”

  But she had called him both ‘tu’ and ‘Roland’ in the same sentence, and his heart was singing so loudly that he wondered if she could not hear the sound.

  That night he chatted for two hours with his aunt about family history, about Paris, about Athene. Then he went to bed, taking a bottle of red wine with him. The door opened and Martine came in.

  “You rang, m’sieur?” she said.

  Roland lay there and a slow grin lighted his eyes.

  “Come here, Martine,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “not here. If monsieur cares to honour me with a visit, I live on the Rue des Saintes Pères, number thirteen, just behind the Quai Voltaire. I shall be at home tomorrow night. And I shall be alone. Bon soir, m’sieur. Sleep well.”

  The next day, he spent the entire day with Athene. They covered widely separated sections of the city. First in the morning they went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and Roland chose what he wanted to see. So they started at Les Invalides, motored to Notre-Dame, climbed the hill of Montmartre, and visited Sacré Coeur. All day long Roland was silent, preoccupied. Even during a marvellously well-cooked lunch at a small Montmartre restaurant, he said scarcely two words. And he ate almost nothing.

  Athene sat there watching him, her blue eyes big with wonder. Suddenly, impulsively, she put out her hand.

  “I regret this,” she whispered; “I—I do not wish to make you suffer, Roland. For when you suffer, I suffer also and this is a very grave thing, you comprehend. I am promised. But, le bon Dieu knows, there is great confusion in my heart now. I—I think about you too much, and I am afraid—”

  “Don’t be, chérie,” he said morosely: “I’m nothing to be afraid of—”

  “Yesterday you weren’t; but today you are. Yesterday you were nothing but a gay, handsome—oh, so very handsome—stranger, who was mad and gay and impulsive; but today you are another thing, something I do not comprehend. And I have fear, because the madman of yesterday did not trouble me; but the way you are today, I want—”

  “What do you want, Athene?” Roland said.

  “I want to comfort you. And when a woman desires to comfort a man, that is grave. It can lead to so many things.” She stood up suddenly, abruptly.

  “Come,” she said, “let us go. Tonight I will ask Maman, and you can take me dancing, and we will be very gay.”

  He stood up.

  “No,” he said, “not tonight, Athene. I can’t.”

  “Oh,” she said, and the disappointment was mirrored clearly in her eyes. “Very well then—where do you want to go now?”

  “Doesn’t matter—just anywhere,” Roland Benton said.

  That night, when he had climbed the stairs of number thirteen, Street of the Sainted Fathers, Martine said calmly, “You see my room, m’sieur. You see how I live—”

  “Well?” Roland growled.

  “M’sieur is very handsome. I could, I think, grow quite fond of him. But such fondness is a luxury I cannot afford. M’sieur is very rich. If he is sufficiently kind, I might learn to be sentimental again. I’m not sure I can. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt anything but hatred for men—”

  “Why?” Roland said.

  “All men are beasts, I learned that when I was twelve years old. But you, m’sieur, could be kind, I think—”

  “What the devil do you want?” Roland said.

  She kissed him very slowly, lingeringly, expertly.

  He tore away from her.

  “Name it!” he spat. “God damn it, Martine, name your price!”

  “Very little, M’sieur Roland. A little flat in a beau quartier—with lights and water and a kitchen and a bath. Pictures on the walls. Big windows through which the sunlight can come. A few pretty things to wear. It would cost you rather less a month, m’sieur, than one grand diner a deux at le Tour d’Or with Mademoiselle la Vicomtesse. And m’sieur will have the only other key.”

  A little less than a month later, on the twenty-eighth of June, he was lunching alone. Stormy was having lunch with a number of other grandes dames of the Cercle d’Art. Martine was serving him. She looked almost happy. The little flat on the Rue Lord Byron had changed her.

  She put his lunch on the table, and bent over the back of the chair, with both hands about his neck.

  “M’sieur is so very good,” she whispered.

  Roland smiled, and turned in his chair to kiss her. He felt her stiffen, and turned back again.

  Athene stood in the doorway. Her face was very white. Her lips moved, but she did not speak. Then the tears were there, hot and bright and sudden, in her eyes. She whirled; he heard the staccato click of her heels in the hallway, running. They clattered on the stairway, going down.

  He slammed the chair back, tore after her. But she had already reached the street. He ran after her, dodging through the crowd, not even realising the strangeness of there being a crowd at such an hour on that quiet residential street.

  He caught up with her, took her arm.

  “Let me go!” she cried, “you must not touch me! You come from that—from that—and touch me! Ah, no, m’sieur, your hands they are dirty, I think!”

  “Athene,” he pleaded; but the bawling newsvendor cut him off.

  “Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his Empress assassinated at Sarajevo! Austria hands ultimatum to Serbia! M. Poincaré advises calm!”

  She stopped dead, her face working.

  “What does it mean?” Roland whispered.

  “War,” Athene du Bousquier said.

  “Harvey’s coming by for me at seven,” Grace said, “so I might as well stay here until then. I told him I’d be here.”

  “Going to marry him?” Roland said.

  “I—I don’t know yet. He’s very nice; but he’s not—Hank. But then, nobody could be, I reckon. Roland—”

  “Yes, Grace?”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about the war? Not about Hank. I know how you feel about that and I don’t want to hear about it. Don’t think I could stand it, anyhow— But just the war itself, what it was like, I mean. You’d been fighting two years—nearly three, when we got into it,” Grace said. “Why did you do it, Roland? Why did you join the Foreign Legion?”

  “Because they wouldn’t let me in the Air Corps,” Roland said. “The Legion was more elastic—they welcomed crazy foreigners.”

  “But why did you fight at all? Was it all because of Athene?”

  “No,” Roland said; “it was because I got mad. I saw the first air-raid in September of ‘fourteen. I was walking up the Champs with Athene and a woman was killed right before our eyes. It made me so mad I tried to join the Air Force—I was alread
y a pilot, you know; but they wouldn’t let me in. So I joined the Legion.

  “Grandma’s right—I was spoiling for a scrap, Grace,” he said. “You see, I was already in love with Athene, and she was already engaged to a French pilot. Nice guy, too—I met him afterwards. And nothing I tried worked. She wouldn’t have any part of me.”

  “That is not true,” Athene said. “I was so very confused, chérie. I had believed myself to be in love with Raoul—and now I was spending all day and all night doing nothing but dreaming of Roland, which was very grave. I made up speeches how I was going to give Raoul back his ring and ask him to understand that the heart of a woman is, after all, a very foolish thing. But when I saw him again, he had already been called up—and I could not do it. It seemed such a little thing to give him, just a little happiness in the face of all the risks, all the dangers he would have to face. And I am glad I did because we had a week-end for a honeymoon, and afterwards, if you add up all his Permissions until 1916, they came to less than a month.”

  “And I,” Roland said, “was going through hell all that time because you were too bloody kind-hearted. Reckon the only thing that kept me from being killed was Grandma’s prayers, because I sure Lord didn’t know what I was doing more than half the time.”

  “You had your sale Martine,” Athene said tartly.

  It was hot, even on the veranda. Athene and Grace went down to the end of it and sat in the swing. They swung back and forth, chattering like a couple of magpies. Roland sat on the porch steps near Sarah’s big rocker. She was already beginning to doze off, and he was glad of that because now he wouldn’t have to talk to her.

  At Aunt Stormy’s he had found Jeb and Patricia Dupré, who had stopped off to see Stormy, on their way to Switzerland.

  Just before noon Roland, clad in his blue uniform of a soldat deuxième classe, came into the salon with a second young American. He was tall, with a thin face plentifully supplied with freckles under his red hair. He was ugly with that humorous ugliness that is so much more attractive than good looks.

  “Hello, everybody,” he said.

  “This,” Roland said, “is Quentin Longwood, better known to everybody as Mono, because he’s obsessed with the idea that all aircraft should be monoplanes.”

  “Did you,” Quentin snorted, “ever see a biplane bird?”

  “What on earth is he talking about?” Pat said.

  “Nobody knows but him,” Roland said, “and I’m not sure he knows, either. Well, Auntie—what about putting on the feed-bag? We’re starved.”

  “Your manners,” Stormy said, “are as atrocious as ever. Very well, come along.”

  The meal, despite war-time shortages, was excellent. No one talked very much.

  “We will have coffee in the petit salon, Martine,” Stormy said. “Come on, everybody—”

  “Tell me,” Jeb said, once they were seated again, “what made you join the Foreign Legion, Roland? I’ve always contended it was because you’d fallen in love with Paris.”

  “That was part of it,” Roland said, “but mostly it was because of Athene.”

  “Athene?” Pat said.

  “The girl I’m in love with,” Roland told her. “Fat lot of good it does me, though. She’s married to a French pilot. Quite a decent chap, too. I’ve met him—”

  “You mean,” Stormy said dryly, “he was a decent chap, Roland.”

  Roland whirled in his chair.

  “What the devil do you mean, Auntie?” he said. “He’s dead,” Stormy said. “I had a letter from Athene last week. He was shot down above Verdun. His squadron mates identified the man who killed him. It was Captain Boelcke. Athene seems proud of that. I don’t see what comfort she gets out of it—”

  “Boelcke,” Quentin said, “is the greatest ace in the German Air Force. No wonder she’s proud.”

  “Good Lord, Auntie!” Roland said. “Now I’ve got to get down to Pau! So Athene’s a Widow—Good Lord God!”

  They all heard the clatter of the coffee-cups on the tray.

  “What’s the matter with you, Martine?” Stormy said. “You’ve spilled the milk! Go get some more. I’ve never seen anything so clumsy.”

  But Pat was staring at the girl’s face.

  “Those Bentons!” she murmured; “those damnable Bentons!”

  Sarah was leaning back in the rocker, her mouth open a little, snoring gently. From the porch glider, Athene’s silvery laughter pealed out, and Grace joined her. Roland smiled at them, and retreated once more into his memories.

  Poor little Martine. She’d had a rough life. But I never could have married someone like her. Didn’t even dream she was hoping for that. She was good for one thing—the best at that—absolutely the best I’ve ever met. The hell of it is that the only way a woman gets to be that expert is by lots of practice. Shop-worn goods. We Bentons may be the world’s greatest whoremongers, but we don’t marry them.

  There was just one more time after that—that last leave we had when we’d finished our brevet at Avord on the Nieuports. Mono and Bertie Nichols—poor devil—and me. Just before they sent us down to Pau for aerobatics and gunnery.

  Yes, that was the last time with Martine. Didn’t even see her again until 1918, right after—right after I murdered Hank. There’s no other way to put it—I murdered him, and that’s what’s given me this sickness which has ended all my hunger for life, so that though I am married to an angel, warm and generous and loving, I don’t want to—no, that’s not true—I cannot. This black sickness blocks me. Funny, I was never like this before. Take that last time with Martine, for instance. . . .

  That last time, the first week of October, 1916, was their last permission in Paris before having to report to Pau, which was by then the goal of all Roland’s hopes. All through his training at Juvisy and Avord, he had kept a map hanging over his bed with Pau ringed in red ink and an arrow pointing out Athene’s home village of Bousquier, seventeen kilometres away. That was where Athene was, he was sure. After her husband’s death it would have been only natural for her to go back there. But, in spite of that, when he got that last permission, without going to visit his Aunt Stormy at all, he went straight to the little flat on the Rue Lord Byron that he had provided for Martine.

  And that had been the last time, the very last time, the end of Martine. For all that, flying out of Pau, he had made a faked forced landing at the Bousquier château and seen Athene again. Every other leave from them on until the war ended he had spent with Athene, never seeing Martine any more except that one time—that one terrible time.

  After I had murdered Hank, he thought bitterly.

  The girls were laughing again; but something about their laughter caught his attention. Athene’s was clear, soaring, silvery; but Grace’s laughter had a darkness in it, an undertone of pain.

  “What are you laughing at?” he said.

  “I was telling Grace, chérie, about that time we met Hank on the Avenue de l’Opéra, and he tried so very hard to explain to me the complicated business of how he and you were related, mon cher. Do you remember that, Roland?”

  “Yes,” Roland said, smiling, remembering it, one of the good times, one of the best, that day in the spring of 1918 when he had seen Hank Dupré again for the first time since the war began. He had come out of the Café de la Paix with Athene on his arm; and it was there, standing on the Avenue de l’Opéra, trying vainly to signal a taxi, that Hank Dupré caught up with them.

  They sat in a little café near the avenue and talked. Hank told them about Grace, showed them her picture.

  “I shall look forward to meeting her,” Athene said, “when Roland brings me to America after the war. But in the meantime you must be careful and do not get killed. It is bad to lose a nice husband whom one loves—I know.”

  “Oh, I’ll handle the Boche all right,” Hank said. “By the way, Roland,” he continued, “Buck’s over here, too. He’s with a coloured labour battalion.”

  “Best place for him,” Roland said
. “The black brother doesn’t make a good soldier. No guts.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Hank said. “They say Buck’s father was a hero in the Spanish—American War.”

  Roland snorted contemptuously.

  “Were you there?” he said.

  “Tell me about your grandmere,” Athene said. “Roland makes her sound—enchanting.”

  “She is enchanting. She married Roland’s great-grandfather, the first Benton, and she’s kept the family going ever since. And that was a job! The Bentons are the wildest, craziest, most wrong-headed folks that the Lord God ever blew the breath of life into. That is, if He did. I’ve always suspected that the Devil had a hand in it—”

  “You Duprés aren’t any saints,” Roland said.

  “I include us among the Bentons,” Hank answered.

  “But if you are Duprés, how can you?” Athene asked him.

  Hank and Roland stared at each other.

  “Go on,” Roland grinned, “tell her—you started it.”

  “The Duprés,” Hank said slowly, “are Bentons. You see, we all had the same great-grandfather. Old Tom Benton didn’t always behave himself. He was already married to Grandma when he met my real great-grandmother, Lolette Dupré. So, of course, we had to be called Duprés.”

  “This is very confusing,” Athene said. “You mean that you are all—illegitimate?”

  “Only my grandfather, Clinton Dupré,” Hank said, his face getting redder all the time; “after that, all the rest of us were the product of quite proper weddings, except—”

  “Except?” Athene prompted.

  “My father, Jeb. There was a little mix-up between Roland’s grandfather and mine over—oh, good Lord, Roland, how did I get into all this?”

  Roland was choking with laughter.

  “What he really means, chérie,” he said, “is you’re looking at the first Dupré in history who isn’t a bastard—not in the literal sense, anyhow.”

  Athene smiled.

  “I have changed my mind,” she announced primly. “I shall not marry you, Roland. For if your family is so very terrible, what would our children be like?”