He watched her carefully as he said this to see if she would set her face in the mask of the young lady determined to show that she can’t be shocked. But she was quite natural. “Your father went to jail! How perfectly horrible for you.”
“It wasn’t fun.”
“What had he done? Or what did they say he’d done? Or would you rather not talk about it?”
“No, I was the one who brought it up. Of course I’ll talk about it. My dad was guilty of the dullest of crimes. He was caught with his hand in the company till. And it wasn’t to get money for his wife and kiddies, either. It was for more exotic pleasures.”
“Poor man, I hope he enjoyed them.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for him. lie felt sorry enough for himself. In fact, he died of self-pity. Not to mention the unkind cracks of his youngest born.”
“Was that you? You mustn’t mind. We always exaggerate our meanness to the dead.”
“Not I,” Harry retorted with a bitter laugh. “I won’t horrify you by giving particulars.”
She was too wise to insist. “When I hear about other people’s hard lives, I realize how easy my own has been,” she said ruefully. “I’ve been very spoiled. Or blessed, as they call it.”
“My life hasn’t really been hard. But I was banking on your thinking it was. I figured, if I shot off my mouth about my old man, you’d forgive me for being such a crumb the other night.”
“You don’t mean you made it all up?”
“Oh, no, it’s true enough,” he reassured her, smiling at her instant spurt of indignation. “God knows, it’s true enough. My father was always sentimental about ideals. That’s what made me distrust them.”
“Daddy’s not unlike you, you know. He has his black moods, too. The days when he describes Tower, Tilney & Webb as ‘Shyster, Beagle and Shyster.’”
“As what?”
“It was the name of the law firm in an old Marx Brothers comedy. Mother can always tell Daddy’s mood by the sound of his step in the hall. If she looks up from her needlepoint when he comes in and asks: ‘How’s Shyster, Beagle and Shyster?’ then I know it’s one of those days.”
“You make your old man sound almost human.”
“Oh, Daddy’s the most human person in the world! You’d love him, Harry, if you got to know him.”
Harry smiled at the incongruity of such a verb to describe any potential relationship between himself and the senior partner. “Of course, he asked me to dinner,” he allowed. “I owe him a lot for that, no matter how snooty his green goods boys are.”
“Are they snooty?”
“Well, I think they are,” Harry said with a shrug. “But maybe it’s just because I’m not one of them. Does your father know you’re out with me tonight?”
She looked away. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t tell Daddy everything I’m doing,” she retorted with an edge of irritation. “Why should I?”
“Not because he’d hate to have his daughter going out with a mick?”
“Oh, Harry!”
“I’m serious. Do you know that I have a brother who’s a priest? And two first cousins who are nuns? How would that sit in his Presbyterian soul?”
“My father is above religious prejudice,” Fran said with dignity. “Besides, he’d never have asked you to the house if he’d objected to our being friends.”
“Oh, so that’s it. You wouldn’t have gone out with me if I hadn’t been asked to the house?”
“Really, you’re too ridiculous. I wouldn’t have known you if you hadn’t been asked to the house. But if you can’t get that log off your shoulder, I’m going to take myself straight home.”
“No, no, Fran, please don’t do that. I promise to be good.” He took her hand calmly and folded it in both of his, but, although obviously surprised, she made no motion to pull it away. “Don’t worry about the church. I haven’t been to mass in a year. Only you probably mind that even more. All right, I’ll go. Next Sunday. Or with you to your church.”
“I don’t know where you got the notion that either I or Daddy are such bugs on religion. Honestly, I don’t care if you’re a Moslem.”
“Be careful now or I’ll be shocked. That’s the way with bad Catholics. We want all you Protestants to be good as gold.”
It was now apparent that they were going to be the best of friends. There had been talk in the taxi of a movie, but they went instead to a bar where they sat in a booth and she drank ginger ale while he drank beer. He talked an outrageous amount about himself, even working in the Korean war and the wound in his leg. She listened perfectly, but she talked, too. For the Korean war he had to hear about the girls in her Shakespeare class at Miss Irvin’s. It was all very fair. In the taxi afterwards, as they drew up at her door, he kissed her. It was a very light and gentle kiss, and like the Dubonnet there was only one of them, but he did not press her for a second. He had made enough botches for one lifetime. Something had intervened in his destiny, and he was learning to be wise enough to give it a free hand.
2
LEE OZITE, “Ozey,” as he was known to all, received a tense, minute-to-minute satisfaction, during the working hours of the day, in his merited reputation for efficiency. “Have you asked Ozey about that?” or “Has anyone put Ozey on the job?” was the first question a partner would ask when brought to a halt by any kind of procedural snag. As managing clerk it was his duty to see that the court calendars were answered, the papers served on time and the litigators notified of their dates for oral argument, but his jurisdiction, spurred by his own eagerness, had spread to cover traffic tickets, tips to court clerks, detectives in morals cases, any field, in fact, where the right word to the right person could solve the difficulties of the individual in conflict with the minor officers of organized society. To assist him he had three night law students who worked a six-hour day running his errands over the city and calling in every hour when he would give them a further task or else cry: “Head in!” in the bark of an operations officer sitting over a map. It made for a busy and satisfying day, but sometimes during the long evenings in Queens, where he lived in an apartment with his old mother and aunt, he would suffer doubts about his position in the office. Were the jocular compliments of the partners sincerely meant? Or was he just poor old Ozey with his panting law students and his ringing telephones? Like a mouse on a treadwheel?
At such moments he would become absolutely still except for his almond eyes which moved furtively from side to side. His aunt would glance up from her detective story and comment that he was looking like a Buddha again. And Miss Ozite was right; there was something synthetically Oriental about her nephew, something of Charlie Chan, something grinning and hand rubbing and faintly sinister. Fortunately, at just the right moment, somebody always laughed, and Ozey laughed with them.
“But some day I won’t,” he would tell himself grimly. “Some day I’ll have the last laugh.”
His fear of being laughed at had a natural counterpart in his fear of being unattractive to women. He realized, intellectually, that this fear was a foolish one. Ozey was bald on the top of his head and inclined to be fleshy, but his round head and face and firm, well-formed features went well with baldness, and his extra weight was evenly distributed over a short but muscular body. He liked to think of himself as the bald sexually potent Siamese monarch in The King and I. But he could never get over the apprehension that women, particularly “ladies,” would find him somehow unpalatable, perhaps, dreadful thought, even “greasy,” and his sexual experiences—up to his present and thirty-sixth year—had all been purchased.
But Ozey had one great hope, and that was marriage. He knew that women were more interested in marriage than in anything else and that they gave even unlikely proposals their most serious consideration. Ozey felt that allied to a handsome, good-tempered woman of size—he always pictured her as larger than himself—he would be surer of the respect of the world that he had to f
ace. He had another vision of Lee Ozite, again as the Siamese potentate but this time drawn in fiercer lines, a touch of Tamburlaine added, leading a large white naked Christian slave girl by a slender cord about her neck. Of course he would be nice to her, very nice to her. And the more he entertained this vision, the more he saw Doris Marsh in the role of the docile captive.
In real life, however, and as a tax associate, she ranked the managing clerk, and he would never forget her cool, justified reproach when one of his boys had filed a tax return at the wrong bureau. Yet on all other occasions she had been perfectly friendly, perfectly democratic. Unlike some of the associates she gave herself no airs and would linger in his office after checking the calendar for a few minutes of chat and jokes. When she leaned over his desk to read the law journal that was always spread out there, the proximity of her breasts and the sound of her breathing excited him uncomfortably. She was just the height of his Christian slave and had the same white soft skin. He would have preferred blond hair to black and grey, but, after all, the real world could never match fantasy. Was she aware of her effect upon him? Was she tantalizing him? When he had asked her once to lunch, she had agreed readily enough, and they had had a pleasant hour of shop talk, but when he had tried to push away the money that she handed him for the check, she had simply laughed and said: “Come now, Ozey. This isn’t a date.”
Did she mean she wouldn’t have had one with him? Ozey brooded furiously all that afternoon. But when he left the office, she happened to be going down in the same elevator and told him: “I enjoyed our lunch, Ozey. Do you realize not one of the other lawyers has ever asked me? You might think I was some kind of pariah.” Ozey was too thrilled to sit, in the subway, and all the way home he hung on a strap in a half-empty car, calculating the wisdom of a sudden proposal. She would be startled, to be sure. It might be fun to see just how startled she would be. There would be something titillating about marching into her office and suggesting the most intimate of relationships without a single preliminary. Right there and then, before the set of Prentice-Hall tax services and before she had had time to take off her glasses. Could she afford to turn him down? Shrewdly, rather meanly, he assessed her. She was near thirty; she would never be a partner; she was an orphan of obscure origin. Yet as Mrs. Ozite all these liabilities would immediately become assets. She would not be too much younger than her husband or too much more successful a lawyer, and she would bring no tiresome in-laws. Besides, since she was a professional woman, his mother and aunt were bound to dislike her, which would make the inevitable break with his own family a cleaner, neater thing.
If Ozey, however, was precipitate in his thinking, he was cautious in his actions, and it was a good two months from the day of their lunch to the day of his decision to ask her for a date. But as he stood in the doorway of her office with a sheepish smile, the question fluttering about his lips, she anticipated him.
“Ozey! I was just coming to see you.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
“Can you lunch with me? Or rather on me. I want to take you out and buy you a cocktail and pick your brains. It’s a personal matter.”
He grinned broadly. “You mean a date?”
“Would it were anything so pleasant.” She frowned and shook her head. “The fact of the matter, Ozey, is that I’m in a bit of trouble, and I need your advice.”
“What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
In the restaurant Doris drank a martini rapidly and then, to his surprise, ordered another. She seemed very agitated, as if she were finding it cruelly difficult to bring out whatever was on her mind. He watched her closely.
“You’d just better spit it out, Doris. Try to pretend I’m not here.”
She turned to him with a sudden defiance as if he had merged with his whole sex into a single enemy. “Very well, I’m pregnant,” she declared. “I’m having a baby, and I’ve got to get rid of it. It’s very early, so it shouldn’t be too hard.” She seemed to sense now from his gaping face that he, at least, was without responsibility for her plight. “I’ve come to you, Ozey,” she continued in a humbler tone, the tears starting to her eyes, “because I don’t know where else to turn. They all say you can do anything. I thought you might be able to get me a decent doctor.”
Pregnant! Ozey was transfixed. For a few moments he could not swallow, so thick was his throat, so wild and overwhelming his mental pictures. So that was what this tall, cool tax girl had been up to while he was blushing for the fantasies of what he had wanted to do with her! At first this new idea of her moral abandonment made her even more desirable, and he felt himself swooped up by the dizzy thought that he could have been the father of her child. But then the truth and jealousy, like a team of plow horses, came crashing into the fragile barn of his illusions.
“Who is the man? Do I know him?”
Ozey’s aggressive tone took her by surprise. “What does that matter?”
“A lot. If he’s in the office, I don’t want the risk of speaking to him. Much less of shaking his filthy paw!”
“But, Ozey, he doesn’t even know!”
“Then he is in the office?”
Doris seemed helpless before this new complication. “All right, he is. But what good will a quarrel between you and him do me? Please, Ozey, can’t you help me?”
“Of course I can help you. I can get you the best doctor in the business this afternoon. It won’t be cheap, but what’s that when your life might be at stake? And if you can’t raise the money, I’ll lend it to you.”
“Oh, Ozey.” Her tears fell freely now. “What a friend you are. What a kind, true friend. What a man. What a real man.”
“You needn’t worry,” he said with a swelling heart. “I shan’t make a scene with your friend. I shall go to him quietly and firmly and see that he pays your doctor, if nothing else.”
Doris looked at him with murky eyes. “I’m in your hands, Ozey. I must do as you say. I must trust to your discretion. It was Harry Reilley.”
“Harry Reilley!”
Reilley was the associate whom Ozey most admired in the office. He was not only large and blond and easily sure of himself, qualities notably lacking in Ozey, but he was somehow above, or at least aside from, the petty rivalries of the hierarchy. There was absolutely no difference in the way Reilley spoke to Ozey and in the way he spoke to Clitus Tilney. Ozey had been pleased, rather than soured, by the current office rumor that Reilley was taking out the senior partner’s daughter. But now!
“I thought he was after the Tilney girl,” he said in a flat voice.
“No doubt he is,” Doris said bitterly. “Dear Harry makes a brave show of being one of the people when all he really wants is to marry the boss’s daughter. I was just a rung in his ladder. And a fool not to have known it.”
Ozey wondered from what level to what Doris’ “rung” had conducted her ruthless lover, but she was obviously in no mood for analytic inquiry. Besides, the maddening idea that Harry’s open, candid front had all along been only the mask of a mercenary ambition made him want to believe her. What did Reilley really think of Ozey? As a poor sap, grateful for a smile and a clap on the shoulder, who would still be managing clerk (if he was lucky) when the firm was known as Tower, Tilney & Reilley?
“I guess we’ve both been rungs in Mr. Reilley’s ladder,” he said bitterly. “But Mr. Reilley hasn’t reached the top of that ladder yet. And rungs can break, you know. And send him toppling down.”
“He’s a cheap, lying Irishman! And if that’s what Miss Tilney wants, with all her advantages, all I can say is that I congratulate her on a splendid match!”
For the rest of their lunch they tore Harry to pieces, but over the coffee they turned to the matter in hand. It was agreed that Doris, who had still a week of vacation due her, would take it starting the following Monday and that Ozey would get hold of his doctor that afternoon.
Everything proceeded as smoothly as matters ordinarily did in Ozey’s department. It took him onl
y two discreet telephone calls to secure the doctor, and on Monday the abortion was successfully performed. Ozey had visited the doctor on Sunday and paid him a thousand dollars in cash. It had contributed not a little to his excitement that he had obviously been regarded as the father. When he called on Doris at her apartment on his way home from work, three days after the operation, he found her in a dressing gown, a bit pale and teary, but very grateful and glad to see him. She threw her arms around him and gave him a hug.
“Oh, Ozey, you old darling, how good of you to come. Do you know I haven’t even told Madge?” Madge was the girl with whom she shared the apartment. “She thinks I’ve just got some woman’s trouble. Which God knows I have! But what a friend you’ve been, Ozey. Sometimes I think my only friend!”
She insisted on moving about the room to mix him a drink, to get him an ash tray, although he begged her to sit still, and when they were settled at last, she kept staring at him with eyes of poignant humility. Ozey was pleased with the change from the easy, assured professional woman, and it somehow seemed, because he had produced the money and the doctor, because he was sitting there in the full armor of a business suit while she was vulnerably attired in an old blue dressing gown and a pair of soiled pink slippers, that it was he and not Reilley who had brought her to this sorry pass. He shuddered with excitement at the idea that one good tug at that dressing gown could transform her into his Christian slave.
“I want to be your friend, Doris,” he muttered. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve always wanted to be your friend.”
The next morning, at half past nine, Ozey went to Harry Reilley’s office and demanded in a barking tone the price of the abortion. Harry’s face hardened as he listened.
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