A Tender Victory

by Taylor Caldwell

  But Johnny repeated to Kathy, in a lower, deeper tone, “Yes, Kathy.”

  Again the silence fell on the older girl. She kept wetting her lips. She no longer gazed at Johnny; she looked at the floor, and she was looking into herself. When Emilie disentangled herself Kathy made no move to stop her. The little one stumbled to her feet and ran to Johnny, her arms outstretched. He caught her up in his arms and held her to him, and her long tangled hair floated about her.

  Then Kathy uttered a faint, agonized cry, and tears welled into her eyes. She jumped to her feet in one swift motion. But she did not go to Johnny. She ran to Mrs. Burnsdale, snatched up her arm, cried out again as she examined the scratch she had inflicted, then kissed it over and over again, sobbing. Mrs. Burnsdale bent down and laid her cheek on the child’s head.

  “There now, there now,” she said. “It doesn’t matter about the arm. You didn’t mean to do it. Did you?”

  But Kathy sobbed, clutching the arm remorsefully. “Sick in the head! Sick in the head! Like the boy!”

  She stopped abruptly, as if struck. She swung to Johnny rapidly. “Like the boy!” she exclaimed. “Like in Europe!”

  “Yes, darling,” said Johnny.

  Kathy smiled brilliantly, her round blue eyes shining. She came to Johnny and took his hand. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Then she ran to Dr. McManus, and kissed him too. “I am your girl,” she said. “After Papa’s girl.”

  “Well, you’ll have to do better than you did,” grumbled the doctor, and roughly smoothed her rumpled hair. “Thought you had more sense. My girl.”

  Mrs. Burnsdale said, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, and the stew on the stove! Kathy, come down at once and help me. Look, it’s dark outside. And the table not even set.”

  “Yes,” said Kathy, and followed the woman out of the room. The others followed, Johnny carrying Emilie, who had begun to yawn. Max still slept in peace.

  Jean and Pietro were waiting in the dingy parlor below. Pietro was gathered up in a knot in a chair, frightened and staring. But Jean was very calm and grave. He said to Johnny, “People been calling. Very sorry about Max, they say. They told me about Max.”

  Johnny stopped. He looked penetratingly at Jean, and with dread. But Jean smiled sadly. “So, Papa, it begins again, yes?”

  Johnny touched his shoulder. “Jean, it never stopped. It never will. Until people know about God.”

  Jean considered this lengthily, his pale eyes thoughtful. Then he nodded. “Yes, I see. It is the world. Yes.” Now he smiled without sadness. “But not afraid. Not with Papa.” He turned to Pietro and said severely, “Come, we wash hands and comb hair, and help Kathy. Work to do.”

  Dr. McManus cleared his throat. “No need to worry about these kids any longer. Er—someone taught them a lesson today, and they’ll never forget it.”

  10

  It was only when he was among “the people” that Lars (“Swede”) Swensen, who was not Swedish, used crude English, the kind of English he and so many others considered acceptable by “the workers.” He knew very well that the workers were mostly young folk who had had a full high-school education, and even a college education in many instances, and that bad or crude English was instinctively offensive to them. However, he operated on what he called “seduction by flattery.” By appearing “rough” and “homespun” to these workers he gave them the happy conviction that they were superior to him, in spite of his known wealth, and so they listened to him with affection. Too, he was in his fifties; he represented to them the “underprivileged” older generation who had not had their advantages. They became, paradoxically, irritable with their parents for their suspicions of this champion of the masses; older people, they said among themselves, were too ignorant to understand.

  There was an even more sinister use by Swensen of his seduction by flattery. He was effectively convincing tens of thousands of young men and women that formal education was not needed by the masses, but that their children would be better adjusted in a technological world if they were taught trades and vocations, exclusively manual. After all, was he not a successful man himself, who had never had more than five years of grammar schooling? He was rugged; he was self-made. By endless struggle he had emerged from the welter of anonymity. “I would have made it sooner,” he would say with his handsome grin, “if I’d had one of these here vocational educations. And by the way, what’re you doin’ for your kids in the schools? Why, right here in Barryfield (or Lexington or Philadelphia or New York or Chicago or Scranton or Pittsfield or Buffalo or Detroit, or Utica, Trenton, Portersville, or Greensburg) you ain’t got a tenth of the vocational schools you need for your kids! Liberal education! Hell, that’s for the teachers and professors and doctors and lawyers and such! Give your kids an education so they can use their hands, and amount to something.” Once, shyly, addressing a large union meeting in Detroit, he had spoken of the dignity of labor. “Picked it up from a professor,” he said. “But it’s got a kind of good sound, ain’t it? Sure. Labor. The reactionaries don’t like labor, and its good dirty hands. That’s why you don’t get your vocational school.”

  All this was part of the master plan to stratify and freeze and immobilize the American people into classes. The work had begun years ago, before World War I. It was going very well. For the first time in their robust and vital flux of life, where a man today was a laborer and the superintendent of a huge steel mill tomorrow, or where an obscure student of physics in a small town today was a famous scientist a few years later, the American people were self-consciously beginning to think of themselves as groups, minorities, and, most dangerous of all, as classes, and to develop the illusion that as groups, minorities, or classes they must think the fallacies of this illusion.

  “Swede” Swensen lived in a penthouse of extravagant luxury in New York, a matter carefully kept out of the newspapers, and away from any honest union leader and, of course, from the workers. He would say, “Well, now, sir, I live in a kind of a nice flat in New York; keep it for my headquarters. But I sleep anywhere. What does it matter, anyway? The world’s my home.”

  Mr. Lars Swensen was too important a man to waste his time. When he appeared anywhere, to be with any of his associates, the matter was vital.

  Lorry Summerfield, in the telephone booth of the small drugstore near her father’s offices, wiped her damp hands and deposited the demanded coins for her call to New York. She had been afraid that her brother, Barry, would not be at home this hot Saturday afternoon, and she felt a relaxing in herself of deep gratitude that he was about to answer her call. She leaned forward and said eagerly, “Barry! Swensen’s here again—with him. I saw him coming in—it must be important—”

  Her brother’s suddenly tense voice answered her. “Yes. He’s been around to a number of newspaper offices all over the country. He isn’t concentrating, this time, on the big national newspapers, just the grass-roots publications. I haven’t been able to get a lead, as yet, for the kind of newspapers who follow his prodding aren’t the kind who’ll give out information.” He laughed, a short hard bark of laughter very similar to his sister’s. “Get what you can for me, Lorry, and let me know. I’ll put it in my column. ‘The Watchman’ in the New York Star sometime next week. By the way, the Star’s circulation’s gone up one hundred thousand, and that’s good news. Good girl, Sis.”

  The “good girl” emerged from the telephone booth. The shop was cool and clean, and she hesitated, glancing at the soda fountain. The owner greeted her affectionately, but his eyes were curious. Now, why did Miss Lorry Summerfield often use the drugstore telephone, when she had such a fine big office next to her father’s? Girls at switchboards gossiped, of course. “A soda on the house, Miss Lorry?” he asked, coming from behind his counter and snapping his fingers at the boy who presided over the cold delights.

  “No thanks, Jim,” said Lorelei Summerfield. “I’m in a hurry. Sunday edition tomorrow, you know. Things humming, as usual. I just remembered that I had to make a quick call, a
nd couldn’t wait.”

  “Sure,” said the stout little man quickly. He had served this girl his special fountain joys since she had been a child. He watched her as she hurried out. Well, it was none of his business. She was a fine girl, in spite of that silly name inflicted on her by her sillier mother, with her silly “artprint” dresses and trailing chiffon scarves and queer earrings. The girl had had the sense, when only five years old, to insist that her name was Lorry, not Lorelei, and the name had remained for twenty-two years. Why hadn’t so beautiful a girl ever married? She had all the advantages, hadn’t she? She wasn’t “stuck” in Barryfield. She was more often in Philadelphia and New York and Europe than in her home town, acting as correspondent for her father. Good photographer, too. He’d seen some of her work in Life and other magazines. But nothing she ever photographed was as interesting, beautiful, or exciting as herself.

  Lorry Summerfield hurried down the short street to the fine modern building which housed the Barryfield Press. Passers-by followed her with their eyes, and some of the eyes were not too friendly. Too good for Barryfield, was she? And all those things about her in the Philadelphia and New York newspapers. Always being rumored engaged to somebody or other with a big name, and never getting married. She drank a lot, it was said. Bad disposition, too, never noticing anybody on the streets on which she stirred up chaff and dust and soot in the violent passage of her big, shiny Cadillac, her nose in the air, her expression contemptuous. Not like her “old man,” who was everybody’s friend. She hated him, it was said, and he so good to her, and letting her work as one of his editors. Probably as bad as her half brother, who’d taken his stepfather’s name when poor Mac Summerfield’s terrible divorced first wife had remarried. Barry Lowell, he called himself, and nobody knew where he was most of the time. Just like his sister. The name Summerfield wasn’t good enough for him!

  Lorry, her beautiful carved face pale with the heat, ran up the carpeted steps of the private entrance and silently pushed open the blond mahogany door. She glanced into the square hall, with its black and white marble floor. Two doors led off from it, one leading to her father’s sumptuous offices, and one to her own. Everything was soundproofed; she could hear nothing. She pushed open the door of her private office, ran to her desk, and sat down. The turquoise silk of her summer dress clung to her long and graceful body with uncomfortable dampness, and her stockings felt like sheaths of clammy metal on her exceptionally pretty legs. She kicked off her black slippers, to allow the cool air conditioning to flow over her feet. Now she began to shiver as the heat of her flesh was whisked away from her. The drops of water on her face turned cold. She patted it with paper handkerchiefs. Opening a box of cosmetics she kept at hand in a desk drawer, she looked at herself briefly. Her oval face, just a trifle too long, was the tint and texture of ivory, completely colorless except for large tilted eyes the color of her dress, and her bitter if voluptuous mouth. She had her father’s face, and she detested it, as she had detested it for years. She had his eyes too, and his long, slender nose, his pointed, smooth chin. There were stains like bruises in the delicate skin under her eyes, the marks of despairing, sleepless disgust.

  She smoothed her fragile hands over her very smooth blond hair, which was drawn back from her face and rolled in a large knot near the top of her head. Then she slumped in her chair and stared somberly into space. In some way she must get into her father’s office. When Swensen was there he never wished to be disturbed.

  She glanced at her desk to see if anyone had laid anything there recently of sufficient importance to serve as an excuse to go into her father’s office unannounced. But it was too early. Only the morning paper lay near her blotter. With growing anxiety she took it up, glanced up and down the black columns. All at once she stopped. On the second page, right hand, was a column mentioning “an attack on a child, Max Fletcher” by some obscure young criminal. The boy had been slashed by a knife, the police had reported, during a “childish quarrel.” He was one of the five adopted children of the new minister of the Church of the Good Shepherd on Malone Street. The Press reporter had been interested by the fact that Max and his “brothers and sisters” were all refugees brought to this country by the minister, who had been a chaplain in the Army. Their parentage was unknown, but they had been prisoners in various concentration camps in Europe, “victims of the late Nazi horror.” Max, it was noted, was only eleven years old. The family had arrived three days ago, and were living in the parsonage with their adopted father. The other children’s names were given: Jean, Pietro, Kathy, and Emilie.

  Interesting, thought Lorry Summerfield. John Fletcher. The minister. John Fletcher! Somewhere, at some time, she had heard that name. Had he been decorated for valor, perhaps? Had he distinguished himself in a certain manner? She frowned intently. In some way the name stirred her strangely; she felt an unfamiliar warmth, an urgent desire to remember. She read the story again. A man in his middle thirties. He had asked the police not to take into custody the boy who had attacked his “son” Max. But the police had turned the youth over to juvenile authorities.

  The Church of the Good Shepherd—on Malone Street. A miserable neighborhood! She knew it well. Then she remembered something else. This was “Uncle Al’s” church! He was the one man in Barryfield whom her father openly hated, openly courted. Excitement flooded the girl. Dear old Dr. Al, with his wicked mouth, his savage eyes, his great, tender hands, his honor and his ferocity! Now she smiled, and the bitterness went from her face and it was utterly gentle and lovely. He would have a real story to give her. And, in the meantime, she had the excuse to go into her father’s offices.

  She sprang up from her chair, went into the outer office, where her secretary was studiously typing, and ran into the hall, the newspaper in her hand. She pushed open the door to her father’s offices, to be confronted, as usual, by his secretary, a wan young man with an intense, taut face, fanatical black eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, and a body that seemed composed exclusively of hard and quivering wires under an excellently tailored suit. Lorry Summerfield despised him. Her father had brought Edgar Sloan from New York to be his confidential secretary, and he was being paid a salary so large that it was a matter of constant astonishment to the staff. But Lorry had not been in the least astonished. She knew.

  “Mr. Summerfield’s in conference, Miss Lorry,” he said. He had a low voice, as intense and as piercing as his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Who?” she demanded, curtly.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he murmured.

  Lorry stared at him, the turquoise of her eyes vivid with dislike. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” She tapped the newspaper. “I’ve got a wonderful story for him. We’ve overlooked it, made it just a routine report. It can’t wait.”

  “Well, can’t we just send out another reporter on it for the Sunday edition?” He was looking at her with that furtive admiration and desire of his, which so infuriated her. “We don’t have to disturb Mr. Summerfield.”

  His hand stole to the intercommunication box and he flipped the switch, bending down to speak. “Mr. Summerfield, Miss Lorry insists on seeing you immediately. She says it’s very important.”

  “In half an hour,” replied Mr. Summerfield impatiently, but Lorry ran to the desk, and bent down and shouted, “Not in half an hour! It won’t wait, if we’re to get it into the paper tomorrow! I’m coming in.”

  Edgar Sloan stood in her way, uncertainly. She looked at him with contempt, and, as if she had struck him, he jumped aside. She flung open the door of her father’s office and stood on the threshold.

  Everything here was in her father’s favorite blond mahogany wood, enhanced by green and coral draperies at the windows and a dark-green rug on the floor. A few abstract paintings, carefully selected for their complementary colors, hung on the pale-emerald walls. MacDonald Summerfield sat behind the glimmering golden expanse of his neat desk, which matched the color of his thin sleek hair. He was a tall, thin, and aristocratic m
an, much younger in appearance than his actual age, and with an amazing resemblance to his daughter. But there were no stains of sorrow under his eyes, no sharp lines about his mouth, like hers. He was all suavity and health and sureness. Near him, with a lustier fairness than his own, sat the large and solid bulk of “Swede” Swensen.

  Both men rose, Swensen smiling with pleasure, Summerfield frowning. “Really, Lorry,” said Summerfield. But his face softened, changed almost pathetically, at the sight of his beloved daughter who hated him without—to him—any logical explanation. Hadn’t she always been his darling? She had never told him how, or why, she had come to this open loathing of him. Once she had adored him, and this adoration had continued up to about four years ago. She had been a willful child, a willful young girl, but he had denied her nothing. At any rate, a psychiatrist had said with smug confidence, “I hate to mention it, but it’s my opinion she’s competing with you—perhaps for the newspapers, or something else.”

  As usual, she was ignoring him. She was smiling brilliantly at Swensen, and was holding his large pink hand tightly. “Now, why should Dad hide you from me?” she demanded, and tilted her head archly. “He knows I’m always so glad to see you, Lars, and we have so much in common.”

  “You’d have seen him at dinner tonight,” said her father irritably. “Well, what is it anyway, Lorry?”

  But Lorry sat down, being careful to flare her turquoise dress about her lovely legs like an unfurled fan. She beamed at Swensen and he drew his chair closer to hers, and she could smell the freshness of him. He was a handsome, brightly colored man, with light-gray eyes and waving fair hair, a broad nose and a splay mouth, which was always faintly smiling. He exuded power and determination, and was all compactness in spite of his size. “Cigarette, Lars?” she asked, after he had had his long and lustful study of her. She knew that neither her father nor Swensen smoked; nor did they often drink. Swensen always carried cigarettes for his friends, and he produced a gold cigarette case with alacrity, and a gold lighter. Lorry took her time, allowing him to touch her fingers in a delicate caress. Mr. Summerfield’s frown began to tighten.