Part 10
Of course she did not see, nor did any of them, sitting there so politely mindful of the hand that held the money-bags. Nor did Rarick himself, for that matter. The need of his boy eventually coming into his affairs was more and more a pressing one, the inevitable contingency of primogeniture hovered closer; yet here he was, trying to foist him off on to a vague art-project. As it was, Avery had barely time to spare for these college years. Rarick was not minded to start him in overalls from the bottom up. Why teach a walking child to crawl? But little as Rarick could visualize his son cast into his future, the time was at hand when he must be tossed, as you would toss a youngster who must learn to swim, out into the monstrous sea of five-and-ten-cent things. High, tormenting tides of big business awaited Avery. A mantle of tin armor was hovering over his young shoulders. He was about to matriculate in that relentless university of highly limited enrollment which was to prepare him to be one of the richest men in the world. What Rarick had just suggested was as fantastic to himself as to the three who sat with masks of respectful attention drawn across their faces.
“How’s Avery’s second act?” was to explode in hilarity from Miss Adelbert’s lips as the committee of three emerged from the house of Rarick after this interview, and mounted a Fifth Avenue omnibus for an Eleventh Street restaurant, where more of their group anxiously awaited them.
And yet, after the palpable absurdity of what he had suggested came flooding over Rarick, the idea persisted. Even a few months of contact with these inquisitive pioneering young minds, might help Avery to feel healthy alienation from the world of Jenny’s making, which was already threatening to whirl around him. A few months of gambol in these adventurous fields of ideas before the lamb be shorn to the wind of being son to one of the richest men in the world.
“Let my boy in on the ground-floor of this new-theater idea--agree to take him into your fold when he comes out of college----”
“Why, of course, Mr. Rarick, if he is interested. We would want to meet him. See what’s on his mind. It could--er--of course be done. Always a place in a workshop like ours....”
“On that basis, then, and subject to specifications which Mr. Hellman will arrange at my dictation, you may consider that I will seriously take under advisement the matter of endowing your group.”
The three young people who finally, walking on air, turned their faces toward the Eleventh Street café, left Rarick sitting there crouched deeply in the enormous chair which faced the organ.
An idea had, for the moment, completely captured his fancy. What if the boy had somewhere imbedded in him a talent for this sort of creative thing. Not as a vocation. Naturally. But as an avocation. Something to keep him tinged at least with the adventurous quality of mind that flooded that young fellow Davies. Avery must not be cheated of his walking-trip through the Pyrenees. There was plenty of time later for the two-feet-on-the-ground business of training him to be the son of one of the richest men in the world.
Presently, Rarick began a letter to his son. Somehow, with the concrete pen on the concrete paper, the words began to clog in his brain. There were things that could not be broached out of a clear sky. Nothing had ever been said between father and son to prepare Avery for the popping of this notion into the head of his parent. The dread of seeming ridiculous in his son’s clear eyes began to matter above everything in Rarick’s tired brain, as he sat there, his pen drying above the paper.
It was difficult, practically impossible, to convey to his boy that the idea prompted by the three avid young faces, and most of all by the fellow named Davies, had not to do with their little enterprise itself, but somewhere behind it all was a symbol ... a symbol of some kind of release which he wanted for his boy.
One could not get that easily said, at least not without danger of appearing ridiculous to a college boy in his teens, who could want for a speed-boat as desperately as Avery had wanted for his.
The letter was to remain in the limbo of unwritten ones.
The first time Jenny received Ramon behind the closed door of her boudoir, a thousand misgivings assailed her. The creak of a chair was sufficient to stiffen her in his arms; a footstep on a stair startling her eyes into a listening expression, the pupils widening and full of dreads.
“Jenny, that is not nice! Of what are you afraid? Cannot two people have tea in privacy? Why do you not lock the door, if in your great big house you have no privacy?”
“No. No. There must be nothing like that.”
“But you make it like that with your nervousness.”
“I want your coming here to be the most natural thing in the world. I am going to begin to make it a habit to have afternoon cocktails always served in here. That will make it seem less strange. It is a nice room, isn’t it, Ramon--all these soft yellows----”
“Any room that contains you is a beautiful room.”
She took his face between her hands.
“Sweet.”
“You do feel that way, don’t you, Jenny?”
“You know that I do.”
“Then what are we going to do about it?”
A question like that could send the fears rushing back over her.
“I don’t know, Ramon.”
“We cannot go on like this, Jenny.”
“Why? Of course not, Ramon----”
“It is not fair to me.”
“I know that, Ramon. There must be a way.”
“There must be a way--for me to live--if I am to go on neglecting my work this way----”
Once, when he pressed her thus, she had unwittingly asked him, “what work?” and filled his eyes with reproach that looked near to tears. His stalkings in this fashion around the subject of money, somehow sullied perfection.
“I have given up everything, Jenny. My teaching, my----”
“I know you have, Ramon.”
“I love giving up everything; but it has its practical side, dearest, since we live in a practical world.”
“I know that. There is a thousand-dollar-bill in registered mail for you now, dearest.”
It was like her to see that these transactions took place easily, in currency. He kissed her.
“That is for the thought,” he said; “the money itself is horrible, practical necessity.”
“That is for the kiss,” she said, kissing him back.
He would have slid easily off this sand-bar of a subject, but the procession of her thoughts matched the fact that she lay in his arms and his smooth olive pallor was hers to lift up a hand and stroke.
“How cruel and wrong and spiteful life can be, Ramon.”
“Not if we do something about it, to see that it is not so.”
It occurred to her, as she lay there, that everything there was to do about it she would never dare to do. And yet it was sweet to contemplate doing it.
In just such proportion as her sense of disloyalty toward Rarick grew, her efforts to reawaken some sort of a relationship between them began asserting itself. With the immemorial psychology of the guilty wife, she developed an entirely new attitude of solicitude where her husband was concerned.
She began the unprecedented business of leaving notes explaining her whereabouts on those evenings when she was not going to be at home when he arrived. Elaborate, unclever, and superfluous notes of evasion. She no longer pretended to be asleep mornings, while he moved about the bedroom. It was with difficulty that she held herself in leash, in order not to overdo these efforts to placate herself.
As it was, Rarick, always obtuse, only dimly noticed, and was not seriously impressed one way or another. Jenny would think ahead for five or ten minutes how best to casually introduce the name of Ramon into her conversation, so that if rumor by mischance should come wagging, he would cast it off as a distorted version of something she had herself told him. When she finally did trump up a manner to remark casually that Ramon was a dear boy, absolutely invaluable as a last-minute escort, so good-natured and harmless, it was to fall on what amounted to unheeding ears. Jenny’s prattle, particularly of late, was so constant. It gave you a headache if you did not let it run over the surface of your mind like so much patter. She was unusually nervous these days--talking more than usual.
The anomaly of her position, as she lay there in Ramon’s arms, smote and smote her. A woman could want to remain secure in her marriage and yet be passionately in love with some one not her husband. It was possible to want two things desperately at the same time. Not that Jenny was in love with her husband, but she was in love with wanting to remain secure as his wife.
“I want to arrange my life, Ramon--ours, I should say--so that while we are waiting for our ultimate happiness, everything connected with us shall seem casual.”
She did not quite know what she meant by ultimate happiness.
“You are the one to be considered, Jenny. It is heaven to be with you--to drop everything--my work--but a man must live.”
She did not again say, “What work, what work?” His boyishness was irresistible to her.
“There must be no gossip about us, Ramon. Even if my children are grown, Ramon, I am an ideal to them.”
“So are you to me.”
“It would kill me to hurt them.”
“You are good.”
“Thank God, though, I have reared them with sophisticated heads on their sensible shoulders.”
“It is you who are not sophisticated, my love.”
“I never want to grow sufficiently sophisticated, my Ramon, not to love our love as the dearest thing in life. Jennifer would be the first to want me to grasp at that part of life which has so nearly passed me by.”
“I would like, Jenny, to look up the fellow who has that paragraph about her in this week’s _Town Tattle_--about the affair at the Edgertons--and punch his----”
“Nothing like that, Ramon! Coming from you, it would look obvious. If only her father doesn’t see it! It will all be forgotten in a week; but meanwhile it is awful. Town talk. They say Berry had to marry Leslie to save her from a scandal and that Leslie had to announce it to save herself from Jennifer.... Ramon, what was that noise?”
“How nervous you are, my Jenny! Only something creaking.”
“I must get my household accustomed to taking my tea-hour for granted. It will make it so much easier for us, Ramon. Everything in my life hereafter will revolve around that, Ramon.”
“Jenny, how soon will we have a nook somewhere--ours--alone....”
She hid her face in her hands.
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Soon.”
“You remember, Jenny, what you promised?”
“What?”
“I am to fix up our nook--and bring you to it after it is all complete.”
“Yes.”
“It is hard to say what I must say now, Jenny, except that, between us, everything must be said.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I want to do that nook terribly. I would be doing something for--us.”
“You darling.”
“And yet, you see, my hands are tied. I do not do it.”
She knew what was coming and bated her breath for it because she did not want it to come.
“It takes money to fix up that kind of a place, Jenny.”
She lay in silence against his coat.
“Does it offend you to have me say that, Jenny?”
“No--only I hate the talk of money between us----”
“I know, dearest, but it must be said. I have given up my----”
“There is the thousand in the mail----”
“But I must live, Jenny. Besides, what is a thousand? You would not want me to build you a nook that was not worthy of our love.”
“It isn’t that he ever questions what I draw. But a conspicuously large amount is noticeable when I have nothing to show for it, and he is sure to think I am indulging the children against his wishes.”
“Surely you have money of your own.”
“Just a drawing-account. I’ve never bothered. He is generous.”
“But you say, yourself, you cannot even indulge your children.”
“That is his one difficult spot, Ramon.”
“It is not right. No woman should be dependent!”
“I’ve never thought about it in that light before. There has never been occasion.”
“You mean to say no properties are in your name!”
“Of course, silly! I’m always signing papers. I’m one of the stockholders in the new Rarick Building. I’m a big stockholder in the Rarick Chain. Don’t forget that, dearest.”
Jenny had not forgotten it. Neither had she forgotten certain easily accessible holdings which it did not please her to relate just now. She had no intention of permitting Ramon to furnish a place such as he described. Not for the present, at least, she told herself, when desire ate through the better part of caution. Having one’s cake and eating it, too, was almost as insanely paradoxical as it sounded. Besides, a mental picture that was repulsive to her, had a habit of leaning into her bliss with this boy.
Was she one of the horrible, wattled, painted women, as in the notorious case of the dowager, Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, who at seventy years, after her own youth had fled from her as if in disgust, still kept young boys in luxury for the sake of maintaining the delusion of that departed youth? Was this thing between her and Ramon no better than that? Sometimes it seemed to her she must find a way to peer into the heart of this youth, whose time of life, whose flexible, godlike body entitled him to the first bloom of a woman. He and Jennifer were of an age to frolic in the same gardens--and yet he seemed not to see Jennifer, for Jenny----
“Dear Ramon, everything will come out all right.”
“I love to hear you say that, Jenny,” he said, and crushed kisses against her eyes.
This time, of the volition of a force that was stronger than her fears, she reached out and turned the key in the door.
In the phraseology of Jennifer and Avery, between whom existed a gay nonsense-code, any period of time fraught with comings and goings, telephone bells, messenger boys, arrivals, departures, in, out, bang, hasten, bag, baggage, up, down, motor-cars, golf-bags, theater tickets, opera wraps, bridge tables, packages, flowers, caterers, bustle and rush, constituted a “day among the Raricks.”
Hurried scrawls of notes or telegrams, interchanged between them, read like this:
DEAREST AVERY: It’s been a hell of a day among the Raricks down home here. How cum with brother Rarick up among the Campus Cut Clothes Boys?
DEAR JENNIF: This day among this Rarick has been no go. This Rarick has a new speed-boat. This day among this Rarick has been spent feeling seasick in and about said speed-boat. It’s a wamble. To be a wamble means to be built for land and live on water. That’s me, too. I am built for where I ain’t....
That was about as far as these two ever ventured across the chasm of the six years’ difference in their ages.
Jennif was a peach, but you couldn’t let off steam to her, because when you tried to talk she was always listening to some one beyond your shoulder who wasn’t there.
You couldn’t talk to Avery, whose mind was always on his own young stuff. Hard to make out what his own stuff was. But there was something to Avery, all right. The boy ran deep ... he already knew the strange heart-aches of seeing illusions tarnish and had learned his game of compromise. Life among the Raricks wasn’t the joke he pretended it was....
* * * * *
The “day among the Raricks” that precipitated a galling scene between Jennifer and her father began as any run-of-the-mill day for Rarick, for Jenny, and for Jennifer might have begun.
JENNY’S DAY
This particular one started with a pain in her side. An annoying neuralgic one, against which she usually carried tablets in a beautiful gold-and-enamel snuff-box (Napoleona) which she had begged from Rarick’s collection.
Rarick, who had slept no better and no worse than usual, and whose night had been a procession of projects for the Rarick Building, dropped into one of his brief deep slumbers just as Jenny beside him flew awake, her lids popping back suddenly.
The flooding memory of the night before, when she had dared, because the chauffeur was new, to drive home from the opera with Ramon by way of three circumferences of the Park, came sparkling over her in goose-flesh.
It made her shudder. It made her lift eyes that were still brilliant from the night before, up to the sound-eating radiations of shirred brocade that hung in a canopy over the bed and then dropped in more sound-eating drapes between her and the vista of six full-length windows that looked out on Fifth Avenue.
There was a small blue-enamel French telephone, a blue-enamel thermos carafe, a blue-enamel engagement-pad, and the blue-enamel box of tablets on the night table beside her. One of these tablets she presently swallowed.
This habit of her early awaking was still abominable to her. Precious hours of needed rest, even when they were filled with contemplations that were sweet to her, were wasted lying in bed thus, waiting for her day to begin.
How he slept! Deep in the cave of his pillow, with his face upward. “Little man, you! What do you know of me--here--lying by your side--sharing your bed? Nothing!”
A fear smote her. What if he knew more than she realized! That was absurd. He was not astute.
How strange, after all these years of the disillusionment of a love-life that had spluttered out like a feeble match, that a Ramon should find her desirable. It made her lie slim and straight in bed, with arms folded across her breast in the beatific attitude of feeling herself desirable.
The aspirin made one pleasantly at ease.
What if that were not Rarick beside her, but----
She shuddered with a rousing distaste of self. Horrible, horrible, to lie there imagining.... There were certain scavengers of thoughts that must be kept locked in the inner boxes of the mind. It made one feel shameful to have a thought like that pop out. Just the same, the whole meaning of life would be changed and exalted if that were not Rarick lying there, but, yes, but Ramon! How horrible of her. How poisonous.
What if Rarick should die? No. No. No! And yet she could never really see the wickedness of trying to visualize the effect upon herself of the death of another. Death was one of the few certainties of life. Rarick would die some day. Either before or after her. If before? She was not wishing it. She was thinking it.
It was difficult to visualize life free of the strain of simultaneously wanting to remain impeccably married to Rarick and yet continue to be desired by Ramon. A life free of the strain of daring to ride three times around Central Park with Ramon because the chauffeur was new, and yet all the while dreading, with undercurrent of fear, the indiscretion of it. The strain of obeying that trick in her make-up which demanded that she be thrice as solicitous of Rarick for every disloyal act with Ramon. The strain of keeping herself free from the shadow of a doubt in the minds of her children.
What if Rarick should die and his restraining hand were left off that household? What if she were herself, but free! A woman of terrific wealth, suddenly released from over twenty years of the indefinable depressant of a man who had grown rich with his lips tight. Would Ramon be lying beside her then?...
She swung out of bed, shuddering, and, ringing for her maid, hurried toward her boudoir.
Her day began earnestly now, with a nine-o’clock appointment with the executive of a large firm of decorators, who was coming to inspect the ballroom, with an eye to erecting at one end of it a gondola-shaped stage, on which Jenny proposed to give a charity fête called “A Doge for a Day.”
At ten o’clock she had a henna-rinse and shampoo, a long-drawn but imperative performance that accelerated the pain in her side and made her nervous. During this subsequent hour and a half in the hands of her hairdressers, maid, masseuse, her head in towels, her face under cream, her fingers and toes in the simultaneous process of mani- and pedi-cure, Jenny went through the performance of an interview with her head housekeeper, Mrs. Dill. She was exacting in her enormous household management, known to be fair enough, but demanding careful and detailed accounting of weekly expenditures, which, even after years of the experience of living at the very peak of American high standards, remained titanic to her.
“Thirty dollars a week for milk, Mrs. Dill? We don’t bathe in it!”
“That fruit bill is fantastic, Mrs. Dill. What is that item? Five pounds of grapes, fifteen dollars? Well! Of course, I know you do your part, but isn’t that buying grapes by the carat?”
“Surely, Mrs. Dill, there is some mistake. Seven hundred dollars for the florist’s this month, and only three large dinners. Well!”
The days of her conservative girlhood in the modest house where she had spent the first twenty years of her life were deeply rooted. The servants’ wages of twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and the greengrocer, the caterer, the butcher, and the laundry bills in proportion were to remain unabatedly startling to her.
There was one item on these statements which always smote Jenny with a kind of anger. Generous though she was, after a fashion, the fact that the bill for the servants’ meat could mount to hundreds for the month was constantly roiling. Mrs. Dill saw to it that their supplies came from the same shops where the family viands were marketed. Of course, the servants should be well provisioned, and one must close one’s own eyes to the fact that Mrs. Dill shopped with an eye to her commissions, but it did seem that the ordinary cuts of meat from the ordinary shops should have sufficed for them. She had never found voice to convey this to any of her housekeepers, but the earlier training of the wife of one of the richest men in the world would persist. It would have angered Rarick to have her question these food expenditures for the servants, and it was not, she told herself, that she really did question them. It was the principle of the thing. It did seem that a good stew of fowl would suffice for the servants’ table instead of the boned squabs which were sent from Baltimore in cotton waddings.
Certain traits that had been developed back there in the pressed-brick eight-room house in St. Louis had persisted in the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the world.
At eleven o’clock Jenny emerged from the barrage of cold cream to accompany Jennifer to a loft over an armory, there to enter vigorously into a fencing-lesson with a master from Turin. When Jenny fenced, a curious flame leaped into her eyes. Jenny’s “glitt,” her daughter called it. With her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her face in the tight vise of a grimace, she danced to the steel on the balls of feet that were surprisingly nimble. Her mother’s fencing inspired Jennifer--who was lovely at the thrust herself--to peal after peal of hilarity.
“You’re the spirit of war let loose, Moth, only don’t bite your tongue. Down with humanity! Long live sin!”
Nevertheless, these hours exhilarated Jenny, not only seeming to help the pain at her side, but endowing her with a new sense of body buoyancy. She took an extra lesson a week now. “Good measure for you,” she told Ramon. “I must at least be one-hundredth as lithe as you are.”
At twelve o’clock in this day of a Rarick, the executive committee of the Manhattan Hospital for Crippled Children met at the home of Mrs. Bursilap Dobson. This home, a somber brown one that still occupied wide footage in a once highly conservative section of Madison Avenue that was rapidly giving way to business, was one that Jenny had never entered on a social basis. Curious, too, because Mrs. Bursilap Dobson apparently went out of her way to be gracious to Jenny. On these occasions of the weekly committee meetings, they exchanged doctor, steamship, opera-box and motor-car preferences, as well as lore concerning their sons who had attended the same preparatory school. Most of the time, at Mrs. Dobson’s request, Jenny remained after the meeting for a bit of chat.
It stopped there.