by Gwen Bristow
“Oh no, not trouble,” she answered, “it’s just this. I knitted Dick a pair of socks and he’s crazy about them, he says they are ten times as comfortable as the ready-made socks they get in the Marines and he wants a lot more. But with taking care of the house and watching for planes at the observation post, I really haven’t time to make so many. Would you make some socks for Dick if I taught you how?”
“Oh yes!” cried Margaret. Then, uncertainly, “Do you think I could learn? Could I make socks good enough for a Marine to wear?”
“Of course you can. The first one seems complicated, but after that they’re easy, so easy you can learn to knit without even looking at it.”
“Ah,” Margaret sighed eagerly. “Would he wear them, do you think?”
“Why Margaret, if you knew how much he wanted them! Will you really make them? I’d be so grateful, and so would Dick.”
“Oh yes, yes! When can I learn?”
“Right now. I have some needles and yarn in my room.”
The idea of doing something important was a stimulant for Margaret’s wounded soul. Elizabeth could have knitted a dozen socks with the effort it took to teach Margaret to turn a heel, but Margaret needed a place in the universe more than Dick needed socks. In her next letter to Dick, Elizabeth asked him to send a word of encouragement. Dick had not literary gifts, but he had an understanding spirit, so he scribbled back,
“Dear Margaret, I hear you are making me some socks. That’s swell of you. I sure do need them. Yours as ever, Dick.”
Margaret was not used to receiving letters addressed to herself. She was thrilled, and thought it enormously polite of him to have scrawled in tiny letters on the corner where civilians would have had to put a stamp, “Free. Thank you, Congress.”
She spent some time studying her name as he had written it on the envelope. That night when Elizabeth came to tuck her in bed, Margaret detained her. “I’ve got something to ask you,” she said bashfully.
“Go ahead.” Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed.
“You won’t be mad with me?”
“Not a bit.”
“Well, I was thinking—it would be nice—you said I was going to be American—” She hesitated.
“Indeed you are,” Elizabeth encouraged her.
“—and your little girl just like I was born to you—” Margaret paused again for confirmation.
“You are my little girl.”
“Well—my father—Mr. Kessler, he is dead and I belong to you now, and I thought it would seem more like I really belonged to you if—if—” She stopped again.
Elizabeth spoke gently. “If you had the same name as the rest of us?”
Margaret nodded vehemently. “How did you know? Do you mind? Can I?”
“I know because I was going to ask you what you wanted your name to be. You remember I told you we would get you some papers making you our little girl and an American. We are getting them, so you can be Margaret Herlong from this minute if you want to be.”
“Can I? Oh, thank you, Elizabeth!” Margaret put her arms around Elizabeth’s neck and hugged her. “Will you tell them at school I’ve changed my name?”
“Suppose I go to school with you in the morning, and see your teacher.”
“All right. All right. Then—Elizabeth.”
“Yes?”
“Then nobody can ever make me go back to Germany, can they?”
“Never, never, never. Why Margaret, we couldn’t let you go back now! We’d miss you so.”
Margaret sighed with drowsy happiness. Elizabeth drew the covers over her and gave her a final good night kiss. She went out to find Spratt.
“We haven’t finished yet,” she told him. “She’s still afraid. But we’ve started.”
“If she knows we want her, that’s enough for now,” said Spratt.
14
The Spring that year was late and chilly. Every night a fog rolled in from the sea, and for half the day it made a thick gray cloud over the sky. In the cool weather the winter flowers continued to open, but even the calla lilies were smaller than they had been, as though they knew their time should be over and they were as tired of blooming as everybody was of looking at them.
Then all of a sudden, one morning the sun began to shine on time, and almost simultaneously the country burst into flower. There was still snow on the mountains, but in the valleys the magnolias and the purple jacaranda trees began to bloom, roses tumbled over the fences, poppies and lupin blew on the slopes, and along the canyon roads were hundreds of acacia trees shaking their golden curls. The birds made an enchanting racket all day, and at night there was always a little wind and a thousand small rustlings, while in the dark the scent of jasmine swept out in an invisible cloud to enfold the whole town of Beverly Hills. To Elizabeth, who had always been deeply aware of the beauty of the earth, the sudden flowering brought a heightened sensitiveness, in which, no longer occupied with the immediate duties of adjustment, she thought a great deal about Kessler.
She wondered if they had hastened the end by asking so much of him. That he had been eager to give it did not ease her feeling that they should not have asked it. At last, one evening, she said this to Spratt.
“Did we demand too much, Spratt?” she asked. “If we did—” She stopped, looking at him guiltily.
Spratt sat down by her and put his hand over hers. “Suppose we did, Elizabeth?”
“Not you. Except maybe in expecting him to work at his job when you didn’t know he wasn’t equal to it. But Brian and Dick, and especially myself.”
Spratt answered, “I don’t know. But if we did, it was what he wanted. Kessler wasn’t the sort of man who could endure to feel useless.”
Elizabeth heard him gratefully. “Do you really believe that? You aren’t just trying to make me feel better?”
“No, I’m not just trying to make you feel better. I think more of you than that. If you took your problems to him, and Dick took his, if Brian used up a lot of his energy with bats and bugs, none of you did anything he wasn’t asking you to do.” He smiled at her, understandingly. “You’d be like that yourself, Elizabeth.”
“Would I? I don’t believe I’ve ever thought about it.”
“Well, think about it a minute—what’s worse than being thrown away in a corner like a wornout coat? If I had five more years of activity or ten more of uselessness, I’d choose the five. What do you say?”
She did not hesitate. “I’d choose the five, too. Anything would be better than feeling nobody wanted me.”
“Then don’t be troubled about Kessler. He did what he wanted to do, he had what he wanted and he knew he had done a good job. When is there a better time to call it quits?”
Elizabeth did not answer. Her chin on her hand, she was silent for several minutes—for so long, in fact, that at last Spratt gave her a broad comprehending grin, saying,
“Go ahead and say it, whatever it is.”
Elizabeth raised her head slowly. “I’ve not known whether or not I should say it. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I’m going to, because I can’t bear to have anything between us that isn’t open for us both to look at. Spratt, do you remember I told you Kessler reminded me of somebody?”
“Why yes. Did you finally remember who it was?”
She nodded. Looking straight at Spratt, she said, “He reminded me of Arthur.”
“Oh,” said Spratt. After a moment he added, “That’s curious. A crippled German—I thought you said Arthur was strong as an ox and all that.”
“He was. I suppose that’s why I couldn’t place the recollection for so long.”
“Well, I’m glad you got it figured out if it was any relief to you. Funny how those chance resemblances tease us sometimes. But why should you be scared to tell me that?” Spratt asked with some amusement. “After all these years you don’t think
I’m working up a case of jealousy against Arthur!”
“No, not that,” said Elizabeth. She was tempted to leave it there, but after a moment’s hesitation she continued. “Spratt, you remember the night after Dick went to boot-camp, when we had dinner at Chasen’s? I’d had too many cocktails, and with that brandy afterward—maybe it was that, I don’t know, but all of a sudden I realized who it was he had been reminding me of, and I got a downright conviction, not that he looked like Arthur, but that he was Arthur.”
“My God,” said Spratt. “You must have really been tight!”
“Maybe I was. But anyway, that’s what I thought.”
Spratt was staring at her in amazement. “I hope you didn’t spill any of this to Kessler.”
“Yes I did. That same night. When you left him here while you drove over to the Sterns’ to get that script. Of course he told me he wasn’t.”
“He must have thought you were a lunatic. Elizabeth, stay away from Manhattans. They’re insidious.”
“That’s not all I want to tell you. I went to see him the next day.”
“To apologize?”
“To see whether or not I was right. He did look like Arthur—maybe ‘look like’ is the wrong phrase. I mean, in the way he thought and spoke and acted, he was like him. He told me again that he wasn’t Arthur. But he told me something else too, and this is what I want to tell you now.” She spoke earnestly. “Spratt, he reminded me of what a ghastly tragedy it would be if Arthur, or any man long dead, should by some miracle return to interfere with the lives of people still living. He reminded me of all that you and I have together, all the things I should have known and thought I knew, but never until then knew so completely—of what it means to be married for twenty years, to have built a citadel of refuge for each other—” she was looking directly at him as she spoke—“he made me see this, all new and fresh as if it had just been given to me, what we have, and how much I love you.”
Spratt took both her hands in his. “My dear girl,” he said gently, “did it take that to make you know?”
“Do you know how much I love you, Spratt?”
“Of course I know,” said Spratt.
He paused, but she waited, for she saw that he was about to say more. Spratt was not a romantic lover. His devotion to Elizabeth was far more evident in what he did than in what he said, and he accepted her affection for him in the same way. Now he told her so, still holding her hands and smiling at her tenderly as he spoke.
“Don’t you prove it with every step you take and every word you say?” he asked her. “Why Elizabeth, I get it every time you answer the phone. It comes across. You say, ‘Yes, Spratt, this is Elizabeth,’ and you might as well be saying, ‘Spratt, here’s the one human being in the whole world who’s always on your side, who believes in you no matter what kind of fool you make of yourself, who knows you better than anybody else on earth knows you and in spite of it somehow still thinks you’re a swell guy.’ I get it every time. Do I have to tell you that?”
“No, you don’t have to tell me. Only sometimes it’s good to be told.”
“I love you too, Elizabeth,” said Spratt. “Don’t you know it?”
“Yes, oh yes.” She smiled at him happily, pressing the hands that were holding hers, and her spirit felt warm and at ease. She went on, “Mr. Kessler didn’t need to make me understand how much we loved each other, I knew that. But what he did make clear to me was how much more we loved each other now than we did when we got married, how much we had built up between us, a few big things and ten thousand little things that we share with each other and not with anybody else. Like tonight when we were having cole-slaw for dinner and you said to me, ‘Remember that wonderful coleslaw we had at that funny little restaurant in San Francisco?’ It’s such a trifle, but all those trifles—You get it, don’t you?”
“Sure, I get it,” he returned. “I guess that’s marriage, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” She went on, with a shade of diffidence. “Spratt, do you remember, when you and I first talked about getting married, I told you about that—that golden rapture of being in love with Arthur, and how I never could have it again?”
“I remember,” he answered simply, in a low voice.
“What I want to tell you now,” she said slowly, “is that somehow, while I was talking to Mr. Kessler, I understood for the first time how really unimportant that has become. It just doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t matter. I love you now more than I ever loved Arthur, and I want you to know it. Do you understand?”
To her astonishment, Spratt gave a low matter-of-fact sort of chuckle. “Yes, my dear, I understand it, and it’s about time you understood it too. If I remember right, I told you then I didn’t want any rapturous adoration from anybody. I wanted just what we’ve got. You and me and the youngsters, counting on each other as we do. That’s what I want, and if I know you after all these years, it’s what you want too.”
“It is!” she exclaimed fervently. “You’ve made me a very happy woman, Spratt—that’s what I’m trying to say, and I love you more than I’ve ever loved anybody else in my life. That’s all.”
“I suppose every girl has a romantic hero when she’s very young,” Spratt said coolly. “But if she turns into a sensible woman,” he added, with a warning rebuke in his voice, “she doesn’t go about trying to find him again.”
“I deserved that,” Elizabeth acknowledged. “But it’s over. You don’t know how completely over it is.”
“I think I do. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be telling me all this, would you?” Spratt smiled at her wisely. “You didn’t tell me when you thought you saw Arthur’s face on poor Kessler. Elizabeth, that still isn’t troubling you, is it?—I mean Kessler looking like Arthur.”
“Oh no! You’re right—if I were still troubled about it I’d never have dared to mention it. It’s all gone—it just doesn’t matter.”
Spratt stood up. He examined a tiny spot on the window-curtain. “You could have found out, you know,” he said dryly.
“What do you mean? How?”
Still without looking up from the curtain, he said, “Soldiers in the last war were fingerprinted. I believe the prints are still on file in Washington.”
“Oh!” Elizabeth started. She sprang up too, and went to him, taking his arm so he had to turn around and face her. “But it doesn’t matter, Spratt! That’s what I’ve been telling you. I was mistaken, and even if I wasn’t—it’s not important. Arthur isn’t there. Don’t you understand?”
Spratt took hold of her elbows and pulled her close to him. “You dear goose, of course I understand. I haven’t been married to you for twenty years without knowing you have more imagination than is good for you. If you didn’t have a tough practical magnet like me to pull you down from your flights of fancy, heaven knows where you’d have got yourself by now. You’ve been terrified at Dick’s joining the Marines because once before in your life you saw a man go off to war and not come back.”
“Did you know that?” she gasped.
“Of course I knew it. It’s about time I said so. Dick knows it too, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve been going around not mentioning what was on your mind because you were so afraid of it. Why didn’t you mention it?—or why didn’t I, for that matter, since I’m supposed to be the tough member of this partnership? Well, I’m mentioning it now. Nobody can promise you anything, but there are a few plain facts you might look at. Men aren’t dying in this war the way they did in the last one, they have blood-plasma and the sulfa drugs and plenty else they didn’t have in those days. When people like you say they want to face facts, why do they always mean they want to face unhappy ones? Why the hell don’t they pick out a few pleasant facts to face while they’re doing it?”
Elizabeth drew a long breath. She lifted her chin and smiled at him suddenly. “Spratt, you’re wonderful. Of course I knew th
at, but I’ve been so scared I didn’t think of it. Why didn’t you remind me before?”
“Heaven knows. I’m not the only goose in this family. I suppose I kept hoping that if I didn’t say I knew what you were thinking about you’d stop thinking about it, and I didn’t want to think about it either. But my dear, what with remembering and being afraid, you’ve had Arthur on your mind for about six months. No wonder as soon as you got a drink too many you went about seeing him. Now listen, Elizabeth. You and I are both up against too much, right now, concretely, to be worried by any past abstractions. Get it?”
Elizabeth remembered what Kessler had told her. She nodded. “I do get it. Maybe you still don’t know how well.”
“All right, maybe I don’t. But we’ve got a job to do. We’ve got to make a decent life for ourselves and our children, and we’ve got to take that poor scared kid of Kessler’s and undo Hitler’s work on her. We can’t start breaking our hearts, for instance, by remembering that she’s just one of millions and we can’t do anything about the others. You’re the sort who’s in danger of that sort of worrying, you know—it’s a temptation, but it’s no use.”
“I know it’s no use. I can’t save the world, though I’d like to. If you catch me forgetting to stick to my own corner of it, remind me.”
“Never fear, I will. I’ve seen too many people wasting their energies on cobwebs when they might be doing a job of work.” He kissed her hard. “I love you, my dear, and I know you love me better than anybody else. Now go say good night to the children, and tell Cherry if she wants to finish reading The White Rose of Flanders she’ll have to get it from the library. The copy she took out of my room belongs to the studio story department.”
Elizabeth kissed him back and went out to do her motherly missions. She was thinking how clear things became when she finally summoned courage to take them out and look at them.
