by Gwen Bristow
Kessler’s cane was poking at a tuft of grass. Nobody had turned on the lights in the rooms on this side of the house and it had grown dark outside. She could not see him, nor did she try to; she could barely make out the end of the stick, restlessly attacking the grass, but she did not turn her eyes toward him as she continued.
“Spratt is my second husband—you didn’t know that, did you? It’s not important in any personal sense between us, it never has been important and it wouldn’t be now except that my first husband was killed in the last war. I loved him very much. Of course now, looking back on it, it’s easy to say it shouldn’t have mattered so much, I was a young girl with all my life before me, and as it happened I met Spratt and everything turned out as you’ve seen it. But at the time there was no way for me to look forward. When I remember it—” She stopped.
After a moment Kessler asked, “Did you suffer so horribly?”
“I can’t tell you what it was. It wasn’t anything anybody could understand except somebody who had been through it. I had loved him so, and then all of a sudden he was dead. It was—anyway, I never went through anything like it before, and I never have again. Of course, it’s all over—I don’t even think of it very often, but now—” She stopped again.
There was a silence that seemed to last a long time. At last Kessler said, in a voice so low she barely heard him, “Yes? But now?”
“Don’t you understand? I can’t take it again. I can’t. I thought there never would be anything else like that. It was over and done with. My world had been shot to pieces, and I picked up the pieces and made myself go on living, and I was rewarded more than I ever dreamed of expecting. But I can’t do that another time. Even if I had the strength, it’s too late. I was twenty when I lost Arthur. God knows it wasn’t easy to go on then. But now I’m forty-four. If my world is shot to pieces again, it stays that way. I can’t go back and start over. And why should I be expected to? Life can’t be all beginnings and no fulfillment!”
As she broke off Kessler asked, “What is that exquisite scent that’s suddenly here all around us?”
“Night-blooming jasmine. Sometimes it blooms till late in the year. Are you listening to me?”
“If I hadn’t been listening I shouldn’t have asked about the flowers. I was just thinking, in a world so full of possibilities for pleasure, why should anyone have to say what you are saying to me?”
“Yes, why should we?” exclaimed Elizabeth. “Why should it be like this? I don’t know and I’m tired of asking. It’s too much to demand of us. It’s as though destiny were saying, The world is all broken up, start over and build a new one. Hurry and get it done so it will be all ready to be demolished again. We’ll give you just enough rest between strokes to make sure you’re quite conscious and sensitive to feel the next one. We won’t start the next war until your firstborn son is just old enough to be carried off. You thought you’d felt the last limit of pain, but you may find that you haven’t. If this happens, it will be worse.”
“It would be worse?” Kessler asked her. His voice seemed to have a thickness, a. slight unsteadiness, that was unlike him.
“Yes. Because before, there was only myself. If I had cracked, if I’d ended my own life or had lived on like a useless shadow, it really wouldn’t have mattered to anybody. But now it’s different. There are people who count on me. There’s Spratt—oh, I know Spratt goes striding around the studio lot like the most self-sufficient creature alive.”
“I have sometimes wondered,” said Kessler, “if you knew how much he depends on you.”
“Yes, I know. There’s a lot between us that I shan’t discuss. Say I’m his best friend and let it go at that. And there are the younger children. They need me so much more than they realize—if I weren’t equal to it they’d know then what they had lost. Don’t think I’m trying to say I’d be the only one who’ll be hurt by this war. Spratt loves Dick as much as I do. As for Cherry and Brian, heaven only knows what the war will take away from them. But what I do mean is that in the midst of anything that may happen, I’m the one who’d be expected to stand like a pillar. When you said I was the center of this household you were right. I’ve made it that way. I’ve wanted them to need me. I’ve done my best to make them feel that no matter what happened, trivial irritations or the most vital disillusionments, I would always be there to listen and understand. And now I’m about to fail them. They don’t know it yet—or maybe Spratt has guessed it in spite of me—but already, before we’ve been hurt at all, I’m cracking inside because I’m afraid.”
Again there was a silence. It lasted a long time. After awhile Elizabeth turned her head toward him. Kessler was sitting very still. By the starlight she could just make out the lines of his figure, lying back in the deck chair. He was no longer poking at the grass with his stick. It was resting at his side, his hand on it.
“You’re not answering me, are you?” she said. ‘There isn’t any answer. But thank you for listening.” After a moment she went on, “I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to say all this. I believe saying it to you has got it out of me so I won’t pour it all out to Spratt. That’s why I’m grateful.” She reached her hand out and laid it over his, as it rested on the head of his cane. To her astonishment, she found that instead of lying there lightly as she had thought, his hand was gripping the cane with such violence that the muscles were hard and the knuckles were like rocks. Elizabeth drew away quickly and sat up. “Mr. Kessler! What have I done to you?”
“Nothing,” he answered sharply, and sat up too, as though startled. “What is the trouble?”
“Why couldn’t I keep quiet?” she demanded of herself contritely. “Here I’ve been babbling like a child who thinks nobody has anything to do but listen—”
“But I wanted to listen!” Kessler exclaimed. “You’re not sorry you talked to me!”
“Not for myself, oh no. But I was so absorbed in myself I didn’t realize how I might be affecting you. Have I brought back something that’s better forgotten? Forgive me, please forgive me, if I’ve tried you too far.”
Kessler stood up abruptly. He turned and moved a step so as to face her. She looked up at him standing between her and the stars, a black figure that gave an impression of strength in spite of the crippled body.
“I feel more like asking you to forgive me, Mrs. Herlong,” he said, and again he was speaking with the steadiness of tremendous control. “You were right in suggesting that there is a chapter in my life that is not easily remembered, and what you said did reopen it. There is no reason why I should not tell you it concerns the last war.”
“It was the war that crippled you?” she asked. She began to laugh in ironic anger. “Funny, in those days we never thought of its striking the Germans too. We always thought of the Germans as the fiends who were doing it to us.”
He did not answer that. He continued as he had begun. “My own disaster, like yours, would be easier to bear if we could look now upon a fresh new world and feel that what we went through had helped bring it to pass. But there’s no fresh new world, there’s only more of the same, and worse.”
“I told you not to try to answer me. Please don’t try. There’s no answer, for me or for you.”
“Yes there is,” he exclaimed decisively. “For a moment, sitting there, you had me almost believing that there wasn’t. You said it was too late for you to start over. You are not required to start over. But you are required to keep going. Remember, your responsibilities are of your own creation. You aren’t responsible for what’s happening in the world, but you are responsible for how you take it.”
“I told you I couldn’t take it. I can feel myself breaking at the prospect. I can’t take it.”
“Yes you can,” he said sternly, “and you’re going to.” His force was like a stimulus. Elizabeth exclaimed, “Do you believe I can, Mr. Kessler? You seem to know me pretty well by now—do you b
elieve I can?”
“You can,” he returned earnestly, “because you’ve promised it, by every action of your life. Nobody required you to get married, or to have children, or to live so that you would be essential to their wellbeing. If you had wanted to, you might have been one of these whining creatures who takes to her bed at every annoyance and becomes the center of her little universe by demanding attentions she’s too useless to get any other way. But you didn’t do that. You outlived your own early grief. To do it you had to strip your character down to its core of strength, so that this is what they have seen of you, this is what you have taught them to expect. They believe in you. They need you, and they’re going to need you more. In God’s name, don’t fail them.”
Elizabeth drew a long breath. Her chest felt tight. After awhile Kessler resumed his chair. He turned to her, saying,
“Right now, you are beginning to fail.”
She started. “Is it as obvious as that? Already?”
“Why don’t you stop looking at this entirely from your own viewpoint?” he asked. “You wonder if you can take it—has it never occurred to you that Dick is taking it very well?”
“Dick? He doesn’t seem to think very much about it.”
“He doesn’t seem so to you, maybe. But he is thinking about it.”
“How do you know?” She was startled. “Has he said anything to you?”
“No. But I know he is, because I’ve been there.”
Elizabeth exclaimed, “Yes you have. Tell me what it’s like!”
“It’s a torment of bewilderment,” he returned. “You don’t say much about it because everybody seems to understand it better than you do. You don’t know the reason other people aren’t explaining it to you is that they don’t understand it either. You go around wondering how you’re going to act like a brave hero because God knows you don’t feel like one. You do a little blustering to cover up how scared you are. You’re angry, mad as hell about the whole thing, you think you ought to feel like a killer but you don’t—you keep telling yourself you’re not a coward, you’ll go out and do what you have to do, but all the time you keep wishing to God somebody would tell you why you’ve got to do it. That’s what it’s like, Mrs. Herlong.”
Elizabeth was sitting forward, her hands tight on the arms of her chair. “My God, that’s what’s going on in his mind! But why hasn’t he told us? Mr. Kessler, why doesn’t he ever say so?”
“I suspect it’s because he knows what’s going on in your mind, a lot better than you think.”
“You mean,” she said bitterly, “he knows his father and I aren’t fit to be told. Because we have failed him, terribly.”
“Have you? Do you know you have?” He asked it quietly.
“Yes, I do know it!” she exclaimed. “If Dick has no idea what the war is about it’s our fault. We were two of the people who thought we could avoid another war just by not wanting it. We always thought we were tolerant, broad-minded persons; we didn’t hate anybody, we just wanted to be let alone. We were the people who read about Hitler and hoped we wouldn’t have to do anything about him. Then Pearl Harbor, and we were angry. Dick was angry too. I was astonished at how angry he was. But all I could think of that day was ‘This means Dick.’ I suppose I was so engrossed with it I didn’t stop to realize Dick was there at the radio thinking ‘This means me.’ He was mad. I thought he was mad with the Japs. I didn’t know then—you’re just beginning to make me know—that he was mad with us too, for letting this happen without making any of it clear to him. It’s not clear to him now. He doesn’t understand it and I can’t tell him. I’m beginning to see the issues at stake, but I’m still inarticulate about them. Maybe I’m so frightened I’m paralyzed.” She broke off, and added more quietly, “There now, I’ve said it.”
Kessler said in a low voice, “I understand.”
“You do, don’t you?” she pled.
“Would you believe me if I told you I loved your son, Mrs. Herlong? I do love him. He’s so much like the son I used to think I might have.”
“You never had any children, did you? Margaret told me this afternoon you adopted her after her parents died.”
“No, I never had any children,” he returned steadily. “That was another of the things the war made impossible.”
“Oh,” she said faintly. After a moment she exclaimed, “Yet you have conquered, Mr. Kessler. You have gone on living, living well and nobly, in a world that left you absolutely nothing to live for. How did you do it? It seems strange that I who have everything should turn to you who have nothing, and say ‘Please help me.’ But I do. Because right now it seems that it is you who have everything and I who have nothing. Will you help me?”
He asked, “Do you want me to try to tell Dick what he’s being asked to fight for?”
“Yes! Can you? Will you?”
“I’ll try. I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you! You can do it better than I can. You’ve seen it. And you are so wise, so gentle, so—how can I say it? I mean you’re the only man I know I’d trust to do it well.”
There was a brief silence, then he said, “And you?”
“I’ll take it, Mr. Kessler. Forgive me for being such a coward.”
“Yes, you’ll take it. You aren’t a coward. A great many of us think we are until the time comes to be one, when we find we aren’t. And incidentally,” he continued, “don’t let me meddle with your affairs, but whenever you feel like telling somebody how difficult it is, won’t you talk to me?”
“Isn’t it very hard for you to listen? It was tonight.”
“Suppose it is? That makes no difference. You and I understand something these others do not. We know what it means to be alone in the universe. Knowing that, it may be that we can give each other courage now.”
“Each other? I wish there were some way I could be of use to you.”
“You have been, Mrs. Herlong.”
“Why, how?”
“Don’t ask me to explain. There are no words.”
“I don’t know what you mean. But there’s one thing I do know—I’m a lot farther from a crackup than I was when I began talking to you this evening. Thank you for being my friend, Mr. Kessler. I needed you.”
He did not answer her, and there was another long silence. At length Elizabeth said suddenly, “Mr. Kessler, we have met each other before. When was it?”
“You’ve never met me before this fall, Mrs. Herlong.”
“Then why do I keep thinking I have? I’m not given to visions and superstitions! I don’t believe you were a king in Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”
“There weren’t any Christians when there were kings in Babylon,” he retorted.
“Don’t laugh at me. If we’ve never met before this fall, why do I keep this curious illusion that we have? Why did I feel that sense of recognition the first time you came into my house? When you were telling us about teaching Margaret to appreciate the world around her, it was as though you were repeating something I’d heard you say already. Just now, while you were talking to me, it was as though you were an old friend I knew I could count on because I knew you so well. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
Kessler answered her as though brushing the matter aside. “Sometimes two persons do understand each other very well from the start because they have congenial minds. When that happens a friendship grows fast, as ours has. That’s all, Mrs. Herlong.”
“All right,” she yielded unwillingly. “I’ve got to accept that because I can’t explain it any other way. At any rate, I’m glad to have found such a friend.”
“Can you go to dinner with the others now,” he asked gently, “and let them think we’ve been talking about the flowers?”
“Good heavens,” she exclaimed, springing to her feet, “I forgot about dinner. Spratt will be back any minute, famished, and I h
aven’t started to get dressed. Come on indoors, Mr. Kessler, it’s really grown very cold here. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
She heard him laugh softly as he got up. “You do feel normal, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Isn’t it lucky life keeps calling us back with little things?”
They went indoors, and Elizabeth ran up to her room. She felt better than she had felt for many weeks. Kessler had given her the only possible answer, she told herself as she got a dress out of her closet. When you had to do the impossible, you went ahead and did it, that was all. Spratt and her children were going to need all the fortitude she had. Spratt had never failed her, and no matter what happened, she was not going to fail him now.
9
Kessler was her friend, and he remained so. But during the next few weeks this very fact made it impossible for Elizabeth to lose her curious sense of this friendship’s being an old intimacy renewed.
She tried to tell herself not to be foolish. You saw somebody by chance, you remembered without knowing you remembered, and when you saw him again you knew this wasn’t the first time and it worried you until you could recall that earlier meeting. It was a common experience in Hollywood to look up in a restaurant and catch sight of a familiar face at another table, and give a nod and smile before you recognized the face as that of some actor whom you had seen a dozen times playing those obscure roles in pictures which everybody saw and nobody remembered. That happened so often that many professional bit-players habitually smiled and nodded at anybody they saw looking at them with that puzzled I’ve-seen-you-somewhere expression, just so as not to appear discourteous.
If that happened with actors, why not with other people? She might easily have seen Kessler in a theater lobby, in the Brown Derby, on the streets of the studio lot, not once but many times before the night Spratt brought him to dinner. Elizabeth was annoyed with herself for being unable to accept this as the answer.
