by Gwen Bristow
Brian sighed. “It’ll be awful,” he objected.
“All right, let’s put it this way. If you go over to Mr. Kessler’s and he helps you put a bat’s skeleton together, you can play with his little girl one afternoon by way of saying thank you. If you don’t go over there, you needn’t do it.”
Brian mournfully considered the alternative. It was a struggle, but at last, after she had tried again to tell him the value of give-and-take in the world, he yielded. As she closed the door Elizabeth drew a long sigh of her own. “I don’t wonder so many parents let their children grow up to be monsters of selfishness,” she thought. “It’s so much easier. But then they grow up to grab, grab, grab, until they turn out to be fascists grabbing for the whole world.”
She went into her own room. Glancing at the radio, she wondered what fresh disasters she would hear about if she turned it on, and did not turn it on. She sat down at her desk and got ready to write some letters.
“Maybe my children are pretty self-centered anyway,” she was thinking. “Oh, for pity’s sake, why should I be discontented with them? They’re not malicious, disobedient, untruthful—they’re simply hard, and it’s the age they live in. We’ve tried to make them a decent lot, Spratt and I. But no parents can contradict the age they live in, because they’re a product of the age themselves.” Elizabeth turned to the desk and began writing an order for some tools needed for the Victory garden. She had finished this and several other notes when she heard Dick and Cherry come in. Going to her doorway, she watched them scamper up the stairs, enjoying the healthy windblown look of them. “Did you have a good time?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” said Cherry. “The sea was just beautiful and we all had a hot dog and Dick ate two egg sandwiches besides.”
“Meat shortage,” Dick explained. “They wouldn’t give us but one hot dog apiece.”
“I don’t know why you don’t kill yourself,” Elizabeth exclaimed.
Dick said he felt fine, which he evidently did. They said good night, and Elizabeth went downstairs. Spratt and Kessler should be finishing up their conference by now if they expected to go to work in the morning. They did appear in a short time, Spratt saying he didn’t know why Kessler insisted on taking a taxi when he’d be glad to drive him home. Shaking his head with good-natured insistence, Kessler said,
“I’m sure Mrs. Herlong will agree with me. I can’t drive, but it’s one of my principles not to let my friends drive for me if I can help it. It may be convenient tonight, but there will be times when it isn’t. Am I right, Mrs. Herlong?”
How sensible he was, Elizabeth thought, to accept his handicaps so frankly. “Yes,” she answered, “though either of us would be glad to drive for you, in principle you’re quite right.”
“Thank you. And now, since I don’t know where the telephone is, will you stop arguing and call a cab for me, Mr. Herlong?”
Spratt chuckled and complied. Kessler turned back to Elizabeth.
“Mrs. Herlong,” he said earnestly, “I can’t tell you how happy you have made me.”
It seemed a great deal to say in return for a pleasant evening, but he sounded as though he meant it. “We were all glad to have you, Mr. Kessler,” she answered. “You have quite won the hearts of the children.”
“They are delightful, all three of them. What a joy it is to see a home like yours. Your mode of living is so clear that it leaves no room for doubts. No one who spent an hour here could go away asking, ‘Are they happy? Are they free? Do they love each other?’ The answers are obvious.”
Elizabeth stood up to face him. “Are we really like that? Would you say it just to be pleasant?”
“Indeed not. You should be very proud of such an achievement.”
“It hasn’t been all mine.” She glanced at Spratt, who was returning from the telephone. “I’ve had a great deal of cooperation.”
Kessler’s eyes followed hers, then came back to her. “Yes, that is easily seen. I congratulate you both.”
He was no longer unsure of himself with her, or if he was, she was too much concerned with what he was saying to observe it. “You told me tonight,” she answered thoughtfully, “that we had a great deal of confidence. Sometimes I’m afraid my children have too much. Too much confidence in themselves, I mean, and too little in the intangible virtues.”
“Don’t let that distress you.” Kessler glanced at Spratt and Elizabeth together. “Isn’t adolescence the time when we doubt everything we can’t see? Don’t you remember?”
“Yes,” said Spratt with a short laugh, “I shouldn’t like to go through the teens again. But sometimes I feel like Elizabeth—I seem to remember that we had a few beliefs in those days. This younger generation has never seen anything but disillusion.”
“Our generation,” said Kessler, “began with expectations and underwent despair when the world didn’t live up to them. Maybe it’s better to begin with nothing, because then when you do come to believe in the higher potentialities of humanity, it’s because they’ve been proved to you.”
“You almost frighten me, Mr. Kessler!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Because that means, doesn’t it, that it’s up to the older generation to prove them?”
“Could we ask for a better job?” he inquired smiling.
Elizabeth and Spratt both smiled back at him gratefully. Elizabeth wondered at their talking like this to a stranger. But just now Kessler did not seem like a stranger. From being a newcomer among them, he had subtly changed into a friend who made her comfortable with the security of mutual understanding. Whatever memory he had stirred within her, it must be some old experience of peace. Since overhearing the children yesterday she had felt unsure of herself and of them, but now, hearing him speak, it was as though she had slipped back into some forgotten period of long ago when everything was safe and right. He was saying to them,
“Your children can afford to be cynical about themselves because they don’t know how superior they are to most of their fellowmen. They believe in the obvious because they’ve found it good. When you see people deliberately clinging to a belief in abstractions they don’t know anything about, you can be pretty sure they need to do it, because everything they do know about is unsatisfactory.”
“How cheering you are!” exclaimed Spratt.
Elizabeth was looking up at Kessler. She asked,
“Mr. Kessler, have you and I ever met before?”
He started. For a moment he looked down. She looked down with him, and saw his hand tighten on his cane. She was to learn that he did this often, making an unconscious gesture toward his physical means of support when his spirit felt undefended.
But he hesitated only for a moment. His self-discipline had been learned in a long hard school. He answered,
“Before tonight? If we had, Mrs. Herlong, I can’t believe I could have forgotten it. No, I am sure we have not.”
He had looked up, and was regarding her steadily. Elizabeth did not know that letting his eyes meet hers just then was one of the hardest achievements he had ever accomplished in his life.
He did it so well that she nearly believed him. “Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she said. “But tonight, as soon as you came in, it seemed to me that I had seen you somewhere and I couldn’t think where it was.”
“Maybe,” suggested Spratt, sitting down and taking up the cigarette-box from the table, “you two saw each other at one of those big cocktail parties where you see hundreds of people and don’t get to know any of them.”
“Very likely,” Kessler agreed readily, turning toward Spratt as though welcoming his suggestion. “I’ve been forced against my will to attend several of those. Or possibly,” he added, “you saw me at the studio. You come there now and then, don’t you, Mrs. Herlong?” He glanced at her an instant as he spoke her name, and then became occupied with watching Spratt blow smoke-rings. “You might have caught sight of me walki
ng from my bungalow to a projection room—chance glimpses like that sometimes tease our memories unmercifully.”
“I suppose it must have been something of the sort,” said Elizabeth. But she was still not satisfied. She continued, “But do you know, Mr. Kessler, when you came in I thought I knew you, and I thought you gave me a sort of startled look, as though you knew me too. You didn’t?”
“If I stared at you rudely, I hope you will forgive me, Mrs. Herlong.” He spoke lightly, almost humorously, as though it were a trifling matter. “I hope you will remember that I had been looking forward to meeting you, more eagerly than you realize. Attractive women have not been a great part of my life recently, or happy homes either. In the life of an exile they assume an importance that you do not understand, and I hope will never have to understand.”
Elizabeth thought, “He protests too much,” but Spratt was agreeing, “Yes, I should think they would. Is that your taxi pulling up, Kessler?”
“I believe it is,” said Kessler. “Good night, and thank you both again.”
Spratt walked out to the taxi with him. Elizabeth took a cigarette from the box on the table and stood looking down at the remains of the fire. When Spratt came in she turned around.
“Spratt, I don’t care what that man says. I have seen him before tonight.”
Spratt shrugged. “Wherever it was, you went there without me. I’ve been with Kessler every day for the past couple of weeks, and it never entered my head I’d seen him before. Probably a cocktail party, Elizabeth, or rambling about the studio.”
“It wasn’t. I tell you, I know him.”
“All right, all right, you know him. He doesn’t know you. He said so. I’m going to sleep on my feet. We talked and talked, and didn’t get a thing done.”
“You didn’t? I’m sorry.”
“His mind wasn’t on his work. He kept bringing himself back from a great distance and repeating something he’d said fifteen minutes ago. I never saw him like that, he’s usually sharp as a whip. Tired, I suppose—working all evening after working all day never is a good idea.”
Elizabeth laughed a little. “Maybe I’m a moron. But I still have a notion that his mind wasn’t on his work because he was thinking about me.”
Spratt was puzzled. “I don’t get it. If he thought he remembered you, wouldn’t he have said so when you asked him?”
“Oh, I suppose he would.” She threw her cigarette into the fireplace. “Maybe he just reminds me of somebody else, and I’ll wake up in the middle of the night remembering who it is.”
“Probably some fellow who kept a German delicatessen in Tulsa,” Spratt suggested. He yawned, and Elizabeth added,
“Go on up to bed, darling. Would you like to have me bring you a highball?”
“I would indeed. Thanks.”
Spratt was already in bed when she came up with the drink. He was tired and sleepy, and they did not speak of Kessler again. Now that she had talked about it to him, her impression had begun to seem rather silly.
Long after Spratt and Elizabeth were both asleep, Kessler sat up in his apartment, thinking about her. He had seen Elizabeth, he had been into her home among those she loved best, and now that it was over he wondered why he had gone. Had it made him any happier to do this? He could hardly answer. He had seen what he wanted to see, Elizabeth the central figure of a happy home, and all he had said to her about it was true. But was he glad he had seen her there?
Certainly, at the beginning he had not been glad he had come. Though you prepared yourself for an event ahead, when it happened you found that you were not as ready as you thought. When he met Elizabeth at the door all his carefully rehearsed formality nearly went down before her. He had managed to get through those first minutes without betraying himself, but she would never know how close he had come to doing so. He had planned so many remarks to make to her, casual-sounding statements that would lead her to telling him all about herself, and he had not been able to make any of them. Thank heaven her children were not shy, and had chattered until he could recover a semblance of self-possession.
And then, in spite of all his efforts, he had nearly given himself away at the end. “Haven’t you and I met before?” The question had come just when he had begun to feel at ease with her, and was talking to her like the friend he had dreamed of being when he went there. Its very frankness had taken him aback, leaving him no defense but a bare denial. He wondered if he had satisfied her. He could not be sure, but at least he had satisfied himself that though she might find him oddly familiar she had not suspected who he was.
Now the part of wisdom would be to let her alone. She had made her life without him and was content with it. She had, perhaps, more than he could have given her if he had returned uninjured from the war. He would never have made Spratt Herlong’s income, for he had not that flair for material success. As for the rest—hard as it was to admit, the rest was none of his business. Elizabeth and Spratt were husband and wife. Their marriage had endured for twenty years and he was not going to endanger it now. He had come here from Germany to save Margaret, not to bring trouble to Elizabeth.
He could say all this to himself, but all the time he knew he was not going to ignore Elizabeth because he had not the power to make himself do so. She was there; he could see her whenever he pleased, and her children, who drew him nearly as strongly because they were hers. Spratt was the only one of them he would have been glad to ignore if he could, and he had to work with Spratt because he had to make a living. But he wanted to see Elizabeth again. Though he had left her such a little while ago, he already wanted it.
Then what could he do? He could keep away from her for awhile, until their next meeting would seem a casual one. He could keep himself better in hand than he had tonight, and if she still thought him familiar he could persuade her his memory was blank of the subject. And if she ever needed him—if there was ever any support or advice or consolation that he could give her—it hardly seemed possible that there could be, but if she needed him, he would be there.
After all, was it too much to ask? He wondered if she would ever know what it was to be so vastly lonely as he was now. Her life was so strong and copious—if he asked now and then for a crumb from the table, an hour of her time, an occasional assurance that he was her friend and she trusted him, was that very much?
He did not know. But he did know that right or wrong, he was going to ask it.
8
For several weeks Mr. Kessler did nothing about getting a bat for Brian, a reticence that both Spratt and Elizabeth admired. They had had experience of persons who wanted to move in on their lives and had started by trying to load the children with attentions. As they all liked Kessler she invited him to dinner again, and Spratt brought him in two or three times to have a drink on their way from the studio, so when Kessler had had time to be quite sure the Herlongs were accepting him as one of their friends he brought up the subject of the bat again, to Brian’s great delight. Two days later he telephoned that he had obtained the bat, and made a date for Brian to come to see him.
It was very kind of him, Elizabeth thought, and she was glad to see her children’s increasing friendship with him. Kessler never patronized them, and he had a great talent for minding his own business. He rarely mentioned the war unless somebody else brought it up, and when he did refer to national affairs he refrained admirably from making adverse criticisms of the President and from telling them what he thought Americans ought to do about anything. In fact, he listened to them a good deal more than he talked, though none of the children realized it. “He’s swell,” they said of him.
Kessler said to Elizabeth, with a touch of wistfulness, “There is a great deal of you in all your children.” Occasionally she wondered why he seemed more interested in finding her characteristics than Spratt’s. He and Spratt were good friends and Spratt frequently said his work on the picture was proving inv
aluable. But when he came to their home it was primarily to see her, a fact that Spratt observed with a sort of proud amusement. He liked other men to admire his wife.
Brian and Peter Stern visited Kessler so often that Elizabeth was sometimes afraid they were going to be nuisances, though Kessler insisted they were not. Brian saw little Margaret and announced grudgingly that she was not bad, so Elizabeth suggested the party. The next time Brian went to see Kessler she went by to get acquainted with Margaret. Kessler’s modest street-floor apartment was kept for him by a motherly woman who came in leading Margaret by the hand and telling her to speak nicely to the lady, which Margaret did. She was an intelligent-looking child, with big blue eyes and two fat pigtails, shyly polite; as Elizabeth rarely had any trouble getting along with children, their acquaintance began without difficulty. Margaret had learned the English language very well. Oh yes, she said, she went to school and she was learning to swim, and when asked if she would like to have a party with her school friends she nodded eagerly. When they had got that far in their conversation Kessler came in, having left Brian and Peter blissfully occupied with the bones of the bat. “I’m going to have a party!” Margaret announced to him.
Kessler looked down at her and smiled fondly. Again Elizabeth felt a flash of recognition. “I’ve seen him somewhere, I know I have,” she thought. “Maybe he doesn’t remember, but I’m sure of it.” However, she did not mention the subject, for Margaret was talking, and by the time they had arranged the date of the party and other details she felt it was time to go.
On the way home she made up her mind that though he might think her foolish for persisting, the next time she happened to be alone with Mr. Kessler she was going to ask him to rack his brain and figure out where it was she had met him. There was no good reason why it should seem so important to her to remember, since it must have been a very casual meeting to have escaped her so thoroughly, but these occasional twinges of recollection teased her. Just for the instant when he had looked down at Margaret with a tender little smile, not only the expression of his face but his whole attitude had been so familiar that she had felt as though she was watching someone she had known for years. Then it was gone, and now she could not remember at all.
