“A queer thing,” I said. “You don’t think it’s mine, do you?”
“Yours? Of course not. But you must have known some of this.”
“Did you let him think that I had anything to do with it?”
“No. That’s what I’m complaining about—that you didn’t.”
“Well, he thinks I did. What happened?”
“I asked him, that’s all. And found out. The fellow’s a fascist. What did he think he was going to do on this magazine?”
“No, no. Now look—”
“Friendship blinds you, Grant.”
“He’s no great friend of mine, but I’ve known him for a long time, and I know what he’s like, and I really thought that he could handle this job.”
“So do I know what he’s like—now. And we can’t have a fellow like that on this staff!” Then, more patiently, he said, “You should have known that. Maybe you’re too humane.”
I smiled. “No. That isn’t the problem. Well, I’m sorry.…” And I was.
Freddie never really believed me again. I thought at first that I had persuaded him of my innocence in that miserable New World affair, but I do not now think that he ever relinquished his suspicions, and in the end he was convinced that I had indeed indulged myself in that act which, from me, would have been an insanely perverse betrayal of his interests. The real source of that betrayal was, of course, plain enough to me, and there it was in the open for us now, a thing perfectly evident between us, like an object, a shadow or a sword, over which we stared at one another, both of us knowing now, neither, of course, yet speaking. But knowing: knowing on Milly’s part that she had saved him from me; knowing on my part not only that I had failed to save her and Dan from him, for themselves, but also that for her there was logic in the act—insane logic, perhaps, but desperate logic, too (desperation, we finally learn, is almost more importunate than anything else)—a new and savage intensity and clarity in her determination to hold to herself what she had so fatally chosen as her life.
And still, in spite of this recognition, we went on for a few more months in a manner that seemed the same as before. There were cocktails, a concert or two, and an occasional invitation to dinner, maintaining the surface, and so I saw them five or six times at their apartment as that winter trailed to an end and we trailed on through the dreary fiction of a relationship that no longer existed. There was no more verbal dancing, nothing so flighty. Under the thin surface of that fiction everything was hostile and cold, and I maintained it only because of Dan, pitiable and shrunken, and tragically impervious.
The last time I saw them in that friendless establishment was in April. Freddie was again in charge of the household, as he was again fully engaged in the operations of the gallery, but things with him were not quite as they had been before, either. When he gave up his short-lived but childishly bright dream of becoming the elegant critic-connoisseur, he gave up something else, too, something physically manifested; for while he was not exactly heavier, his body seemed more slack, as though there had been a general loosening up of all the strings and bobbins that held him together, as though, indeed, his little sortie into independence was a major fact for him, a crisis, a one-and-only effort that, failing, left him with something else which, perforce, he would for the rest of his life treasure as the best. Their new alliance was one which neither of them quite wanted and to which neither of them could rise with any fullness of intent, but it had its logic, too: it bound them finally, and it bound Dan in with them. And so, at the same time that he underwent a slump of spirit that seemed to show in his very walk, there had also been some tightening of the nerves, some narrowing of the will, as with Milly, and this came to me like a message from his brooding, hazel eyes whenever he let them fall upon me in his new distrust and his new security.
It was April twilight, and in that violet light his face seemed to glimmer as he handed me a highball. “Milly and Dan will be in right away,” he said with some kind of mockery. “Sorry to keep you waiting. They did want to say good-by.”
“Good-by?”
“Yes, good-by again. We’re off once more.”
“Where?”
“Spain.” As though he had said Bermuda or Arizona. It was like a stab with a knife.
“Spain?”
“Dan needs a rest. We’re closing the gallery early—until October. Needs redecoration anyway. And Dan needs to get out of New York. Needs to get away from this tension.”
“So you chose Spain,” I said.
“Wonderful country,” he said with his curious new mockery. “Sun. Swimming. We can fish. Long motor trips. It will do just what Dan needs.”
“Don’t neglect to bait his hook,” I said.
He looked at me with quick amusement and then said, solemnly, “No, of course not.”
I wanted to hit him. I said, “Spain in the spring of this year for a peaceful vacation! Really, Freddie, who are you kidding?”
“No one. We’ve thought about it a good deal. Spain will be perfect for a month or two. Really, of course, it’s Portugal we’re interested in, and I’ll be there most of the time.”
“Portugal.” I was not following him, except that he seemed still to be mocking me, and in the deepening light, blue now, his plangent features had taken on an evil glint.
“Lisbon,” he said, his voice dropping toward a whisper of delight. “Lisbon. God, it’s like a little door, almost the only one, almost the only hole out of Europe. And there they are, all of them, jammed up against it, trying to get out, having to get out as best they can, really willing to pay. Because, after all, it means their lives.”
“And they have pictures?”
He grinned at me with brutal boyishness. “Of course. Old and new. Off their stretchers. Rolled-up canvases in briefcases and bags. Walking around with them under their arms. Looking for buyers.” His elation made me turn away from him.
“You’ll kill two birds,” I said.
“Exactly. With one passage. This really is the moment to be there, the exact time, it couldn’t be better.”
“The squeeze has never been so tight?”
“Oh, we’ll do well!” he said, and laughed. “And Dan, too. Let’s have some light.” And in a moment he transformed that dim blue well of a room, dug out of sky, into its characteristically cold brilliance. It was like a signal. For at that moment, Dan and Milly came in from the corridor that led to the bedrooms. Milly walked ahead, walked rapidly toward me in an ice-blue satin dress that clung to her heavy thighs as she moved and whose neck was slashed down to the midriff. She wore large, cobwebby earrings of brilliants, and her hair, which seemed nearly white, was pulled up on her head and pushed forward and held there by some sort of flashing jeweled clasp. No simple blue flower now! Her hand in mine was as cold as she looked, and before I had even really seen Dan behind her, there flashed into my mind—perhaps because of that silly conversation about goddesses that we had had not very long before, and because the subject now was so much more relevant—into my mind that passage from Ulysses, where the hallucinatory nymph loftily addresses Bloom as follows: “We immortals, as you saw today, have no such place and no hair there either. We are stone cold and pure. We eat electric light.…” and poor Bloom, in a new abjectness, paces the heath and declares, “O, I have been a perfect pig!” Then I looked at Dan and saw that the application did not extend to him. He looked merely, thoroughly ill.
“Hello, darling! Sorry we were late. But Freddie’s taken care of you, hasn’t he?”
“Freddie always does. How magnificent you’re looking.”
She took my nearly empty glass. “Freddie,” she said, and held it out to him without taking her eyes from me. They rested on me with a blue, distant blankness, and I felt my own eyes dim over in a spasm of sorrow. “Dan,” I said to escape that empty look, and reached around Milly to take his hand. “I’m glad that you’re getting away.”
“I guess I need to,” was all that he said, and in his dark eyes there was anoth
er emptiness, a trance of terror.
“We all need to,” Milly interposed. “Freddie has some wonderful business to do, and I’ve come to the stage where a winter in New York undoes me.” Her silly artificiality was like a wall of glass between us, and held off on my side of it, my heart trembled with pity for her. Could I have saved her? I think not. For when she begged, “Love me again,” that is not quite what she had meant. And still, remembering that dim afternoon in the vast drawing room of the old Ford apartment when I told her that I loved her, I remembered too her small lost figure in the shadows, and I knew that now, in the hard role that she had found for herself, she was truly lost, the girl gone forever and no woman born. “Ah, thank you, Freddie,” she cried, and took two glasses from his tray, one very light, and gave the heavier one to Dan. I took another, Freddie the fourth, and then we sat down, and it was as if they were all waiting for me to talk. But what was there to talk about?
Only their plans. So I asked, “Aren’t there any restrictions on travel in Spain? Right now, one would think—”
Freddie broke in. “No. Why should there be? After all, for a change we showed the unusual good sense to stay out of an affair that was none of our business.”
I checked my anger. “Of course. But a country just out of war—I’d suppose—”
“Spain?” Milly asked mildly, and looked from me to Freddie and back again.
“Well, restrictions or not, I don’t understand it,” I said, “I don’t understand you.”
“Why not?” Freddie asked promptly.
“You want to give Dan a rest, get him out of tensions, and you take him to a country that’s just been torn in two, where the blood must still be running, political murders going on at a mass rate—”
Dan shuddered in his chair, and “What are you talking about?” Milly asked angrily.
Freddie laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get a rise out of Grant, that’s all. I told him we were going to Spain. Of course, we’re not, Grant. Your convictions make you gullible. We are going to Portugal. And to France. Marseilles is another of those doors.”
I felt myself flush, and now, I thought, I’d let them have it, my knowledge, and I said, “Very funny. Really, if you want to give Dan a rest, why don’t you two go abroad alone and leave him with me?”
Each of them jerked a little, each except Dan, who only lifted his eyes to me and smiled wanly.
“Are you serious?” Milly asked with a stiff laugh.
“Why not?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Freddie.
In anger I had taken that plunge and now I was unwilling to climb back. “Why not?” I repeated. “Dan, you let them plan too much for you.” I was looking only at him, refusing to accept their signals of eye and mouth. “Why do you? Do you want to go on this expedition? Or is it only that Milly and Freddie feel you should? How long since you’ve made any plans for yourself?”
“They plan well,” he said quietly, with a tremor of agitation in his voice.
“We plan together,” Milly said. “Will you be kind enough not to interfere?”
I caught the blue blaze of her look. “I’m making a friendly suggestion,” I said, “and quite seriously. If Dan needs looking after, I’d be only too delighted.”
“What nonsense!” Freddie exploded. “Of course, Dan wants to go. We wouldn’t want to go without him. We’re going primarily on business, and there’d be no point in going at all without the benefit of Dan’s judgment.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “Dan’s judgment.”
Freddie put his glass down with a thump. “Well?” he demanded as he rose to his feet.
“How long since you’ve let Dan use it?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Grant,” Milly said with slow deliberateness, “will you please—”
Dan giggled. “What a funny quarrel,” he said. “What’s it about?”
I stood up. “What indeed?”
“We’re not quarreling, dear,” Milly said, as if he were a child.
Then Freddie made the really preposterous remark. “If only you could get a decent long vacation sometime, Grant, and come with us. That would be the solution.”
“Yes,” said Milly quickly in a weird imitation of pleasure. “That would be!”
They were hoisting me back up on the safe shelf of our usual conversational inanities, and when poor, simple Dan said, “Wonderful idea! Can’t you, Grant, this time? Can’t you try?” it was clear that I was back up there, and for the moment I could only smile.
“I’m afraid not, not this time,” I said. And it was almost as if the very room gave forth a sigh of relief.
“We’ll think of you in the hot New York summer,” Milly said.
“Pity me. Well, I must be going.”
“Already?”
But I was not quite ready. Half way out I stopped and said as casually as I could, “Queer business about that French boat, isn’t it?”
“French boat?”
“The Paris. Bringing the French art over for the Fair.”
“What art?” Dan asked. “What boat?”
Milly laughed. “Grant, you must spend all your time reading newspapers.”
“A good deal of it.”
Freddie brushed by me on his way to the vestibule, and Dan asked, “What art?”
“A number of pictures were destroyed by fire on this boat—”
“Nothing at all serious,” said Milly.
“I’m interested,” I persisted, “in the way that, try as you may to keep them separate, even art and political violence get mixed up.”
“An accident,” Milly said firmly.
“What happened?” from Dan.
I was aware of Freddie behind me, and in a moment he was helping me into my coat. I said, “No, it wasn’t an accident. They’re holding an Italian workman for sabotage. The fascists didn’t want that ship to get over here. And besides the damage to the pictures—” Freddie was positively shaking me into my coat and I tried not to smile as I finished “—besides the damage the fire did to the pictures, a number of men were killed.”
Silence, and then, from Dan, in a whisper, “Killed?”
“I’ll walk out with you,” Freddie said. “I have an errand to do before dinner.”
“Good-by, Grant,” Milly said, giving me her hand with a smart thrust.
“Bon voyage! And do get a rest, Dan.”
He looked at me with a dim stare, and as Freddie led me out of there by the arm, I looked back over my shoulder, and I wanted to cry it out loudly now, Dan, you poor, blind baby, what preposterous thing are you letting them do to you?
Outside in the street again, in the soft gray evening, where the air was large and the vistas long, it was possible to believe that one was sane. Yet Freddie was walking beside me with a deliberate tread, off on some errand that was a clear invention, and while he was there, the madness from which I had just been plucked trailed me still. I did not propose to help him bring out whatever sentiments weighed upon him, and we walked in silence. We had gone a long block and turned west into a crosstown street before he began. Then he began mildly enough. “You can see how really sick Dan is.”
“Yes, I can.”
“You might be more helpful.”
“You didn’t start me off very helpfully, with that nonsense about Spain.”
“I’m sorry. That was a bit of self-indulgence, and I am sorry. But that was my fault, not theirs, and you might have spared Milly, not to say Dan.”
“Did I harm them?”
“You don’t seem to recognize Milly’s worth. What sort of wreck do you think Dan would be now if it weren’t for her?”
“Worse?”
He snorted impatiently. “Good God, if you had known what he was! A walking dead man. Even Milly and I—we were like shadows to him, he hardly knew we were there. Then the sanitarium. The people there did a lot for him. He has his ups and downs now, needs still, of course, a kind of constant protection, needs
rest and a reasonable freedom from responsibility, and all this Milly gives him. I told you before, it was his marriage that saved him.”
“It was so quick, wasn’t it?” I said blandly.
He glanced at me closely from under the brim of his hat, and he said, “No quicker than it had to be. She married him to save him.”
“You mean she didn’t really love him?”
“Love him? Certainly she loved him.”
“I mean—” Then I found myself fumbling for words, almost ashamed under his blank stare, which was intended, it seemed, to make me feel that I was uttering obscenities.
“What do you mean?”
“Yes—what? Love. What does it mean?”
“I suppose she always loved him. But her marriage—there was more in that than anything that there had been before.”
“Did you know their plans?”
He gave me that close look again. “No, I didn’t. When I knew about it, they were married. In a way, there was an element of self-sacrifice there, and Milly had the grace not to want that question raised or discussed. And she was right.” We had come to Third Avenue, and at a corner, nearly under the elevated tracks, he stopped and said, “She was right because it was their marriage that brought him back to life.”
“You mean, Freddie, that life we’ve just come from up there? Is that life at all? Good God!”
A neon sign, flashing nearby, turned his face savage red and gray by turns as he stared at me, and I could not see what anger was gathering there, or what was pulsing in his weirdly gleaming eyes. But suddenly he had hold of my arms in a terrific grip, and his fantastic, straining face was nearly touching mine. “You keep out of this!” he shouted. “We’re his friends. We know what he needs. We love him! Get that straight, and from now on, you keep out of this!”
There had been no transition. Anger had blown up like a wind, mine no less than his. I wrenched my arms free and shoved him violently against the building behind him. “Get your filthy hands—” I started, but did not finish, for he recovered himself at once and he had seized the front of my coat at the chest in one fist, and was drawing back the other. We were reenacting, with the same unreasoning and undefined anger, that attic scene of our boyhood. Only it came to me suddenly that we were not boys, and that he was something of a buffoon, and I began to laugh. “Don’t be an ass, Freddie,” I said. “You wouldn’t hit me.”
The Wars of Love Page 13
