by Gwen Bristow
On either side of her the mountains stood brown against the bright sky, thirsty for the winter rains. Here and there along the slopes were what looked like dead sticks five or six feet high. Next spring grass like green velvet would cover those gaunt hills, lupin and wild poppies would be blowing in sheets of purple and gold and the dead sticks would be tall white plumes of yucca blossoms. Along the roadside were houses half hidden in the folds of the hills, each with its garden a tangle of bloom. The wind blowing over the gardens brought rich damp odors to mix with the odors of gasoline and scorching tires from the cars hurrying along the pass.
The road wound magnificently through the canyon, one of those triumphs of engineering that Elizabeth could never regard as commonplace though nobody could live here without seeing them every day. It always lifted her spirits to be reminded of the energy that had conquered this countryside. She wished sometimes that she had been alive to come here in the early days, when the pioneers were confronting California like the knights of legend who drew their swords before a dragon guarding a pile of treasure. For had there ever been, she wondered as she drove among the mountains, another country where such wealth had been guarded by such barriers?—as though nature itself had stood up to say, “This, at least, you shall not take.”
It must have seemed impossible, if they had been people to whom anything seemed impossible, to live in a country of such tremendous mountains and such killing thirst. But they had conquered, not with swords but with machines and mathematics, and though Elizabeth’s knowledge of both was too sketchy for her to have described how it had been done, she was thrilled to comprehend the victory. When she reached the peak of the canyon road and looked across miles and miles of her country, and smelt the wild odors of dust and sage and gasoline and eucalyptus, and heard the swish of a hundred tires together with the swish of the wind in the glens, she felt, as she always felt at the top of the pass, that this was what it meant to be an American. It was no accident of birth, it was a way of thinking that made you part of the future instead of something leaning back on the past, an attitude that made you more excited by the Los Angeles Aqueduct than by any castle or cathedral left over from the Middle Ages.
Some people did not like it. That was all right for them; if they didn’t like it they could go rest on the mossy stones of some civilization that was old and tired, where they couldn’t possibly put in a new drainage system because there was a precious ruin standing in the way. Well, it didn’t get them much, this reliance on the old way of doing things. War and terror and hate, because the world did change, and if you resisted change it exploded on you. The future insisted on pushing the past out of the way, that was all there was to it—even Hitler, trying to enforce his ancient barbarism, admitted this when he called it the New Order, though as somebody had remarked, it wasn’t order and it certainly wasn’t new. Why couldn’t the Germans and Japanese understand that the whole trend of human thought was away from their brutalities? Why couldn’t they yield to the new world of science that made human beings healthy and their lives more worth living? Why couldn’t fools like Mrs. Farnsworth understand that their nonsense was as outmoded as it was ugly? No matter how much you liked the Middle Ages you couldn’t go back to them. The new world was here, it was real, it was California where they built highways over awful mountains and stored water until the desert was alive with ranches that could feed half of tortured Europe if only their submarines would let the food get in. It was so stupid, so maddeningly senseless.
Ahead of her a transport plane buzzed like a fly across the face of a cliff. Elizabeth wondered if it would be very difficult to learn to pilot a plane. “I’d probably break my neck,” she thought as she started downhill and put her foot on the brake. “Suppose I did? I’d rather break my neck having fun than let it get stiff with being bored. I’m certainly not bored,” she reflected as she guided the car along the downward curves. “Running a household for a movie producer and three youngsters is hardly what you’d call a life of effortless ease.”
The road flattened, and ahead of her lay the flowering plain of Beverly Hills. Elizabeth drove home. How pretty her house looked, glittering in the sun. It was not elaborate, but it was big and comfortable, and though everything about it was well kept it had a pleasant air of being in use. The gardener, who was busy among the chrysanthemums, had turned on the sprinklers to get the grass watered while he was working. On the lawn were three rows of six sprinklers each. Above them the mist spun like a dancer’s veils, throwing rainbows back and forth across the grass. From the back Elizabeth could hear shouts of young voices and the splashing of water in the pool. The children were at home, and evidently their dinner-guests were already with them.
In the driveway she paused to give some directions to the gardener. Her youngest, Brian, aged eleven, appeared with his bicycle. She called to him.
“Where are you going, Brian?”
“Scout meeting.” He looked up and down the street. “Peter’s supposed to come by and go with me. I said I’d wait in front for him. He ought to be here now.”
“All right.” She nearly added, “Be careful of the traffic,” but stopped herself. Brian was as expert with a bicycle as she with a car. He had never got himself hurt riding, and there was no sense in being overly fussy with him. From scanning the street he turned to look up at her.
“Mother, can I stay for dinner with Peter?”
“Has he asked you?”
“Not yet, but I’m going home with him after Scout meeting to see his lepidoptera—” Brian got out the word importantly—“and he might. I mean if he does, can I stay?”
“Not unless his mother asks you,” she answered gravely. “You mustn’t ever go to dinner with any of the boys unless their mothers ask you, Brian. If Mrs. Stern invites you to stay, tell her you aren’t sure, and ask her to call me up.”
“If Mrs. Stern calls you up, can I stay?”
“You won’t say anything about wanting to stay unless she suggests it first?”
“No, I won’t. Honest. I promise.”
“All right then, if she calls me.”
“Okay,” said Brian, with confident satisfaction. “Oh, there he is. Hi, Peter!” He swung to his bicycle and was off.
“How busy they are,” Elizabeth thought as she looked after the two little boys whisking down the street. “Everything they do is so important. I wish life was always like that. Oh, fiddlesticks and fury, I don’t either. Getting wistful about childhood is a temptation, but how dreadful if childhood lasted sixty years. Living always on the top of things, with no idea what goes on underneath.”
Laughing at herself, she started the car again and drove toward the garage at the back. The children did not notice her at once, so Elizabeth pressed the brake and paused a moment to watch them. Her two older children, Dick and Cherry, were there by the pool with their two friends. One of the latter was a leggy freckled girl named Julia Rayford, whom Dick for some obscure reason considered beautiful. Elizabeth could not see that the child had any beauty except what went with health and high spirits, but she was glad Dick admired her, for Julia was a nice girl and as she was Cherry’s best friend they all got along amiably together. Cherry, now, was a really adorable creature, all curves and a cascade of dark hair, and her two-piece bathing suit, clinging wetly to her luscious person, did more to emphasize her hips and her round young breasts than to conceal them. Elizabeth suddenly thought, “Good heavens, how fast I’d have been arrested if I’d gone swimming as nearly naked as that when I was her age! But she’s really lovely.”
Since Cherry was his sister, Dick rarely paid much attention to how she looked, but it was quite evident that the fourth member of their party was aware of her charms; he was a classmate of Dick’s, who, since his name was Herbert Clarendon Whittier, was known to his intimates as Pudge. At the moment Pudge was shaking the lemon tree while Cherry scrambled around gathering the lemons as they fell. Dick sto
od poised on the diving-board, evidently about to perform some marvelous feat for the admiration of his girl friend, who sat with her legs dangling into the water at the shallow end, watching him. What a healthy-looking creature he was, Elizabeth thought, and how he was growing up. He really looked more like a man than a boy now, and she suddenly thought of Dick as he had been when he was so tiny she could carry him on one arm, and he was soft and warm and smelt like talcum powder. “That’s how it goes,” she thought. “Strange, and of course it isn’t strange at all, it’s been happening like this for ten thousand years, but it still seems strange when it happens to yourself. Now before many years more he’ll marry some immature little girl like that Julia Rayford, and she’ll have a baby, and he’ll come in and bend over it with that same Good-Lord-it’s-alive expression that Spratt had the first time he saw Dick. If it’s a boy they’ll name him Richard Spratt Herlong III and if it’s a girl they’ll argue about every name from Amaryllis to Zillah and compromise on some prosaic family name like mine, and I’ll get a smug matriarchal air about me, and we’ll all have a grand time and be just as excited about it as if it hadn’t happened to anybody else. Of course, before that we’ll have to get through the war. Oh, why should any group of power-mad scoundrels have the power to send the world into a holocaust? Boys like Dick—I will not think about it now. He doesn’t think about it. Or I wonder if he does?”
She recalled Dick at the radio the day of Pearl Harbor. She came into the living room, as stunned as everyone else was that day, to find him listening, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an expression of horror almost grotesque on so young a face. As she entered he looked up at her and said deliberately, “The yellow-bellied bastards.” She gave an exclamation, shocked to discover he had such an expression in his vocabulary, but all he did was grin mirthlessly and reply, “I know some worse words than that and if you don’t want to hear them you’d better go out and listen to the portable in the garden with the boss, because I feel like saying them.” Elizabeth was astonished, not only at his words but at his vehemence. It was the first time Dick had ever seemed to her like anything but a fun-loving little boy. The news from Pearl Harbor had shocked him into a strange and sudden maturity. She went out to the garden and told Spratt what he had said. Spratt answered tersely, “I know just how he feels.” “So do I,” said Elizabeth, “I couldn’t have scolded him with any conviction.” They listened awhile to the enraging radio voices, and suddenly she exclaimed, “Spratt! We’re in the war. That means that before long—it means Dick.” Spratt said, “Yes. I wish it meant me.” Elizabeth got chilly all over, but she told herself that day for the first time, “I don’t have to face it yet!”
She wondered how Dick felt about it now. She was not sure. Dick spoke of the war sometimes, with the matter-of-fact assumption that when he came of age he would get into it, but right now it seemed less important to him than campus affairs, probably because by the reckoning of seventeen anything a year ahead was too remote to be of pressing concern. “Good heavens above!” she broke off her thoughts, for Dick rose up from the board, turned over twice in the air and cut like a knife into the water, reappearing just in time to hear Julia exclaim, “Dick, that’s wonderful! Do you think I could learn to do it?”
Pudge saw Elizabeth first. He called, “How do you do, Mrs. Herlong?” and the others turned to wave at her. Elizabeth waved back as she drove the car into the garage. When she had put it up she walked across the grass toward the pool.
“Hello, all of you. Cherry, what on earth are you going to do with all those lemons?”
“Make lemonade,” said Cherry, and Pudge added, “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not, but you’ve shaken down enough to make about four gallons. Pick up the rest of them in a towel or something, Cherry, and bring them in; we can use them.”
“I’ll get the ice,” Dick offered, scrambling out of the pool. “Julia, you and Pudge wait for us here, you don’t know where things are.” He took up a towel from the grass and began scrubbing his lean brown legs. “The trunks are drippy, but I won’t go anywhere but in the kitchen,” he promised before Elizabeth could give him any orders.
“All right,” she agreed, and started for the house. Crossing a balcony that ran along the back, she entered the den which the children were allowed to use as their own, and paused to glance with curiosity at some disreputably dusty old magazines stacked up against the wall. They looked like the accumulation of years from an attic; what the children meant to do with them she could not imagine, unless one of the schools was having a drive for the Salvation Army.
The door leading to the kitchen burst open and Dick put his head in.
“Mother, do you want a glass of lemonade?”
“Why yes, I’d love one.”
“You’ll have to come get it, unless I’m allowed on the rug.”
“I’ll come get it,” she said hastily, and went into the kitchen before he could bring his dripping trunks into the den. Dick and Cherry were making a great racket with ice cubes and glasses, their suits leaving puddles on the linoleum and bringing unhappy glances from the cook. “What are all those old papers doing in the den?” Elizabeth asked as she accepted a glass from Dick.
“They’re ours,” Cherry answered, “Julia’s and mine, I mean. We’ve got to write an essay for costume design about the evolution of twentieth-century clothes. Julia found those old magazines up in the attic at her house and we’re going to get some ideas from them.”
“I see. Don’t bring them into the living room unless you dust them off.”
“Okay,” said Cherry. She disappeared with the pitcher of lemonade, and Dick held up a box of cookies he had found on a cupboard shelf.
“Can we have these, mother?”
“Such appetites! Very well, take them.”
“Thanks.” He followed Cherry out to the pool. When she had conferred with the cook about dinner, Elizabeth went upstairs.
She glanced into Spratt’s room. Everything there was in order—cigarettes in the boxes, matches and ashtrays beside them, Time and Newsweek on the table, along with a couple of novels from an agency and a notebook in which Spratt could scribble ideas about their picture possibilities. She made sure his pencils were sharpened, drew a curtain across one window through which the sun was pouring in to fade the rug, and went through the communicating doorway into her own room.
This was her favorite spot in the whole house. Much as she loved her family there were times when she was glad to be alone, and this was the only place that was entirely hers. Here everything was arranged to please herself—the bed with its monogrammed blue cover, the dressing-table with long lights down either side and convenient shelves for her creams and perfumes. In one corner stood her radio, so she could listen to the programs she liked without interruption, and in another corner the desk and wastebasket that Spratt called her office, since it was there that she wrote letters, paid bills, jotted household memoranda and took care of the various other tasks that had to be performed with pen and paper. By a window was her chaise-longue, and on the table beside it lay the book she was reading, her cigarettes, a desk calendar, her private telephone and notebook of unlisted numbers. Though the windows were usually open her room always had a faint fragrance of its own, compounded of toilet soap and the lotions she used to protect her skin from the dryness of the air. Whenever she came inside and the familiar scent greeted her, Elizabeth felt delightfully welcome.
She took a long lazy bath, brushed her hair and got dressed for dinner in a white satin hostess gown Spratt had given her on her birthday, a fragile, impractical garment of the sort one would hardly ever buy for one’s self but which one loved to receive. As she stood before her glass drawing up the zipper, Elizabeth considered her reflection and decided that she looked extremely well. She took care of her skin and hair, for one thing, and what was more important, she had kept her figure under control, so that her
waist and hips were as firm as ever. Her husband’s favorite gifts to her were beautiful clothes—a candid tribute, for a picture producer had to know a good deal about women’s apparel and Spratt would not have brought her clinging gowns if he had not been sure she could wear them.
For a moment she stood turning the radio knob. The radio mourned that there were no flowers in its garden of love, offered her a remedy for acid indigestion and inquired persuasively if she was troubled by nagging pains in the small of her back. With a wrinkling of her nose, Elizabeth switched off the voices and decided to read until it was time to get out the makings of the dinner cocktails. If she started now she could probably finish her novel. Stretching out on the chaise-longue, she took up the book and found the place where she had left off last night. It was not an intellectual treat, but it was interesting—after reading All This and Heaven Too she had learned that the English author who wrote under the pseudonym of Joseph Shearing had published, several years before, another fictionized version of the Praslin murder, and Elizabeth was well enough acquainted with the sinister Shearing heroines to be sure that the governess as portrayed here would not be a fit companion for anybody’s children. She had not been disappointed. Having begun an evil career on page one, the damsel was now behaving most wickedly, demure in her bonnet and shawl while she dreamed up yet more sins. Absorbed in the lady’s beruffled iniquity, she was annoyed when she heard the buzz of her telephone. This phone was not connected with the others in the house and its number was known only to her best friends, so the call could be for nobody but herself. She pulled her attention out of the book, put her cigarette into the ashtray and reached reluctantly for the phone. Spratt’s voice greeted her.
