Part 19

What sense of defeat was there perching now in the heart of her father, lying, himself, not forty of the appallingly expensive feet from her own bed. What bankruptcy there? What had Gratton meant by the really lonely person of her father? What indictment against her had lurked in his eyes? No. No. Rarick’s loneliness was of his own making. He had built it up massively about himself. Jennifer had not been cast out, because she had never been let in. Presently her mother would come home, carrying on her narrow shoulders enough in chinchilla and square diamonds to support a family of ten through a lifetime. She would go to that room--to that tomb--to that bed--to that sleepless little heart-twisting bankrupt there--Father----

After a while there was the sound of Jenny in the hallway. Jennifer, lying there, could hear the tinkling noise her sequined gown made as she came along. Like the welt that her body left on a bed, the footfall of Jenny was light. It fell past Jennifer’s door softly. It turned into snow, falling into a dream of Jennifer’s, that she was walking ankle-deep in it toward a student-lamp that burned in the window of a small mellow house, and that smelled of leather and a wire-haired terrier and a pipe that hung from an amused-looking lip....

* * * * *

Jenny had been to the closing function of what had been a series of elaborate entertainments in connection with a Street Fair which had been held down the center of Park Avenue, where junior members of social-register families pinned fifty-dollar carnations on the senior lapels of telephone-directory families.

Socially and financially, it had been a success. The Street Fair charity-week had concluded with a supper dance held at the residence of the chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Grant Fillimore Speigel, Sr., who had contributed her enormous ballroom for the purpose.

Entrance was by one-thousand-dollar check, and then only if you were bidden. It was one of those occasions when the Raricks were sure not to be overlooked. It was the first time Jenny had ever set foot in the old-fashioned Murray Hill home of the Grant Speigels. The evening had been sufficiently dull to keep its social inviolability to the fore in Jenny’s mind. She had apparently made a personal dent upon the consciousness of Mrs. Grant Speigel, and there was an engagement between them for luncheon three weeks hence. The evening had been more than justified. But her shoulders ached from fatigue; and once or twice during the supper, which you ate off of knees, the old sense of sickness had overtaken Jenny.

Ramon had not been there. She had taken Tom Lamentier, widowed brother-in-law of a Wilke-Barre, on the thousand-dollar check that should have admitted Rarick himself. Ramon, on one of the absences that was becoming more and more intolerably mysterious to her, was off on a week-end at the shooting-lodge of one of the sons-in-law of Mrs. Emanie Bursilap, an inclusion that was fantastic, so far as the burly Harrington Powers, who had married Edith Bursilap was concerned, and which must have been manipulated at no small discretion by his mother-in-law.

But at any rate, Ramon was returning tomorrow, and Jenny was lunching with him, quite openly, as they did upon rare occasion, at the Ritz. They must talk things out. Oh, how imperative it was that they talk things out! Something corrosive and frightening was at the heart of Jenny.

There was a list of memoranda under the lamp of her dressing-table that had been left there by her secretary, Miss Dang, and holding it down, as paper-weight, a small jeweler’s package, with a red seal splashed over it. It contained four dreaming, perfect little pearls, which she had ordered clipped off the end of one of her necklaces and mounted as studs. Ramon’s. The time had come when Jenny, no one the wiser, was resorting thus to the device of clipping such gifts off the edge of her magnificence. She had already presented Ramon with star-sapphire cuff-links off the rear end of another necklace; and the large canary-diamond center to another cigarette-case had been pried out by a jeweler and replaced with a blue diamond from a ring which Jenny no longer fancied. The canary had been worth thousands, and it was like Ramon, lover of beauty, to defer selling it, even in the face of needs that clamored.

One memorandum reminded her of an exceptionally early morning-fitting at Valli Sœurs before her eleven-o’clock contract-bridge lesson. Propped up conspicuously against a Lalique perfume-urn was an isolated item: “Dr. Noon telephoned that he will expect you without fail at his office at one o’clock tomorrow (Thursday).”

A stab of concern smote Jenny. For the first time since her period at the hospital, a sense of the old discomfort had been over her at dinner. Tiresome old body. Well, Dr. Noon would have to wait. Apparently his findings were not bothersome. There was something casual about the message. As it was, the bridge lesson would have to go overboard. Ramon was meeting her early.

The maid slid her out of the sequined gown and laid the string of square diamonds in a satin-lined box with a groove for each stone, and placed it and the chinchilla wrap in a steel vault at one end of the bathroom.

In her underthings, Jenny looked like a paper doll. Most fastidious in her personal habits, there was about her one specific carelessness that her maid swapped below-stairs with servants who are hawklike in such appraisals. Invariably Jenny went to bed with her make-up on. It was as if her frail flesh, tested by function after function to the limit of endurance, could not hold up under the smearing process of having it removed. Jenny slept in her painted lips, her mask of white enamel, and her high and narrow coiffure.

It was this Jenny, in a black-chiffon nightdress through which her body shone like a narrow candle, who finally made her way to the room where already lay her husband.

Lightly, in the painted mask off which her lips stared so redly, she placed herself beside him, drawing over her half of the sheets and coverlets. Lightly, silently, she lay wakeful beside him.

Lightly, silently, he lay wakeful beside her.

Due no doubt to subtleties of presentation, the news that she was to be let in for a surgical operation did not at first come as shock to Jenny.

Lying face downward on her chaise-longue, with her arms flung to a peak over her head in an attitude of relaxation taught her by a masseuse she had brought home from Stockholm one summer, Jenny’s predicament, phase after phase of it, began procession across her awareness.

Good Lord! What was the matter with her? Sitting there in his office, himself seeming so invulnerable to body ill, perhaps Noon had told her everything except the truth. What if I have cancer? Millions of women have had before me. Was Noon holding off facts that might terrify----Nonsense! A man like Noon had no time for subtle psychological evasions. Besides, no man could simulate his kind of casualness....

Good Lord! acting like an old-wife poring over a medical book and reading her own symptoms into every page. Not every woman with a pain in her side had cancer.... Good Lord!... Fool--fool--fool----

Take the case of Mrs. de Witte Yonge, wife of the Austrian ambassador, with whom she had recently had the honor to dine. Mary Yonge had just successfully undergone a major operation. You belonged to a negligible minority if you still boasted an appendix. Dr. Noon seemed of the opinion that much of her own difficulty might hover around that superfluous organ. So interesting to hear Dr. Noon explain the history of the atrophy of that organ.... Dr. Noon so graphic....

Come to think of it, Jenny’s florist-bills alone--to say nothing of inroads into Rarick’s conservatories--to friends who were constantly convalescing from operations in hospitals, were enormous. Naturally you got things the matter with you in the course of a lifetime. Didn’t expect your motor-car to run without overhauling, did you? Well, same principle applied to the human body....

Of course, the serious side to the story might be in the cards, too. Didn’t cross that bridge, however, until you came to it. Particularly if that bridge happened to be across the Styx. Nifty of herself to indulge in grim humor at a time like this, Jenny decided. Don’t cross the bridge across the Styx until you come to it. If Fifi Putnam, with her tubercular history, had survived three major operations, why not Jenny? Dr. Noon had been by no means certain hers would be major. Lydia Mason, to be sure, had died on the table, but Lydia had been awfully wrong on the inside ever since the birth of her third child. Besides, the--the sort of thing that did for Lydia, ran in her family. Look how Georgie Prescott had gone to his operating-table weighing one hundred and twelve pounds, and now tipped into the heavy-weight amateur class at all the private boxing-bouts at the Beaverbrook Club. An operation was something to be casual about these days. In the main, Jenny truly was. There were little scare-spots in her. As a matter of fact, the day she saw Noon, she had returned home from his office instead of going on to meet Roxy Gravure at the Dog Show, where Roxy was showing a pair of the finest Kerry Blues ever registered.

The very smell of Dr. Noon’s offices, she told herself, had been unnerving. They invented everything else, why must doctors’ offices and hospitals continue to reek to heaven of the suggestion of antiseptic....

Then, too, this season of seasons, just when Jenny had made what she considered her most important social wedge! Mrs. Grant Speigel had undoubtedly taken a fancy to Jenny. Herself one of the founders of the Cosmo Club, she had all but volunteered to put Jenny up for membership. They had lunched together. Jenny was already harboring the plan of arranging an elaborate function around the dowager figure of Mrs. Grant Speigel. The surgical operation would put a serious kink in that important plan. In countless plans.

Then, of course, there was that wave of recurring fear about Ramon. In the scare-specked hours which followed her knowledge that in a week she must go on the operating-table, her thoughts and fears, trepidations and concerns, had floated about without anchorage.

It was difficult to imagine Ramon coming to her through the etheric smell of hospital corridors. Prying nurses! She had successfully kept the period of her observation in the hospital from him. But this time he must know. How curious to be confronted with the need of telling Ramon that she must go to a hospital for an operation.

There were situations in which you simply could not imagine certain people. Perhaps, though, thought Jenny, on the anxious drive home from Dr. Noon’s, it is just the providential circumstance to tide us over this bad place. Jenny, in laces, on her bed of pain, wan to him, esoteric, might conceivably, by way of temporary and delicious lassitude, fascinate more than in health.

He had been distrait at lunch at the Ritz the day before. Terribly so, the lurking pain in her side seemed to collide with the fear that kept knocking about in the region of her heart.

There was a card crushed into the hand that was flung high over her head as she lay on the chaise-longue. It was part of the damnable wrongness. It had added to her impending state of high nervousness to receive this invitation from Mrs. Grant-Speigel to week-end at her place in Lenox beginning the very day that she had arranged with Dr. Noon to enter the hospital. The night she would probably be plowing her way out of ether, a wound in her side, was to be a gala one at the opera, when a visiting queen was to sit in the Gerinald box, which adjoined the Raricks’, to say nothing of the minutiæ of plans that clotted the lines of her engagement-book and which suddenly had become part of a daily routine that was precious.

Then there was this business of telling Rarick and Jennifer--to Jenny, a shamefaced procedure of trying to get said to your intimates the intimate things that had to do with the plights of the flesh. Jennifer must not be frightened. Rarick would be kind....

Lying there, crushed into a silence that moved in a procession of her incipient terrors, there crept slowly into Jenny a desire that had to do with Rarick. Even if her illness turned out to be as responsive to the knife as it promised (Noon had been so casual!), there persisted in Jenny a sense of need of Rarick. To be sure, he would in all probability do little more than sit humbly beside her or at best say lusterless things, but just the same he would be there!

An impulse to cancel her four-o’clock engagement with Ramon at the tea-room the next afternoon flooded over Jenny. But even as she considered, she knew that, punctiliously, dragging herself up from the chaise-longue, she would be at the appointed place at the appointed time.

It was in the intervals between seeing Ramon that revulsions like this could sometimes overtake her. Revulsion of self. A commiserate desire to creep back somehow into the old unevil life with Rarick that dated back to the days when she had first set up housekeeping and had presented a first child to the serious young man who, with his feet on the clay banks of the Meramac and his eyes on the Pyrenees, had wooed her.

Time and time again, these periods of revulsion had ridden her, and time and time again receded, leaving her marooned on the strange shores of her infatuation for this boy with the eyes that nowadays were more insolent than amorous, and whose half-baked æsthetics, even as she succumbed to them, she realized were spurious.

For the moment, in her fright, Jenny turned to Rarick. Ramon, who hated illness, might find her ugly to him. Rarick, on the other hand, was not the man to waste impatience or rebellion upon the inevitable. His sympathies, always susceptible, were not hard to muster. He was a kindly light on a landscape that to Jenny had suddenly become threatening and sinister.

Jenny, who had no God in particular, except one she resurrected for herself in times of great stress, felt suddenly and terribly the need of God and Rarick. Her emergency God had last been on her lips in her paroxysms of grief and pity over Avery. She was about to have need of Him again. His name bubbled along her lips in tears. God, get me out of this. God, pull me through. God, make a better person of me. God, I need you. God, spare Jennifer any shock. God, forgive me all--everything. And, strangely, paradoxically, even as she lay there, chastened of mood and supplicating: God, keep me well and desirable to Ramon.

And, of course, she did see him that following afternoon at four. As a matter of fact, she sent a chauffeur to her milliner’s so that she should have to wear a new tall and narrow Russian turban of black krimmer that glittered down the front with a long dagger of diamonds. Ramon might find it effective and amusing. Her white face, long and narrow as the hat itself, not a rim of hair showing, was almost like a transparent face, on to which had been hung a deep-crimson butterfly made of two painted lips. Strange, glittering Jenny, at whom people stared without admiring.

As usual, on the edge of one more experience of seeing Ramon, her revulsion fell away from her and became anticipation that tingled.

There were picked words with which to tell Ramon this thing; words that would not offend or frighten or hurt him. Ramon was a sensualist by extraordinary virtue of the fact that he shrank so from wounding the senses. His senses. She would wound them ever so much less than she would charm them....

Riding along in a snide taxicab toward the place of their appointment, the ordeal ahead of her began to set itself like a stage.

She saw herself, tilted on her hospital bed, surrounded by tall Lalique jars of lilies and a jade bowl of green orchids with flecks on them, at her side. She would bind her hair in a tight fillet, so that her face shone out like a sly, sophisticated nun’s. Ramon had once jerked the hair back from her face, held the bandeau of his handkerchief tight above her brow, and called her that. Sly, sophisticated nun. She liked being called that. Sly, sophisticated nun. He had not meant it really, had said it to her in the key of endearment and had kissed her throat through the barrier of high, scented ruche that closed it in like a wimple. Well, well, no matter how hard had been the sledding; the wretchedness of the deception; the dreadful sense that somehow Avery, Jennifer, and Rarick had been smirched, and decencies that sprang from the very magnesia of the soil of the years in St. Louis, defiled ... it had been worth it.

To have never had this, toward which she was riding in the abominable yellow taxicab with cigar-butts on its floor, lean into her life and redeem some of its vanished luster was unthinkable. It had been worth it ... was worth struggling to hold....

Contrary to his habit of late, Ramon was in the tea-room first, seated at the small table toward the rear, under a wall-bracket of one incandescent bulb with a pink-paper tissue shade. They could count on this place to be fairly empty at this hour. She could smell his cigarette smoke and see the black shellacked armor of his hair as she entered. Their public habit was to shake hands formally. It struck her with chill that the hand which had used to cling to prolong that instant was something inanimate that had to be propped around her own, like a dead one.

What subsequently happened, although she was not to realize it, amounted, considering the facts of Ramon, to a display of courage on his part. With what secret misgivings, fear of scene, and perhaps terror of slaying with pain, Ramon must have prepared what he was about to launch without giving her opportunity to preamble, Jenny was never to know. He came at her in short hammer-blows that left her stunned and unable to resuscitate in time to stave them off.

“I want good hot tea quick,” she said, and drew off the long, beautiful gloves which she always wore in heavy, loose crinkles along her forearm.

“I cannot stay to tea,” he said, shortly.

The pain in her heart and the pain in her side began to thump simultaneously.

“Why not, dear?” she said, evenly.

“I am going away.”

“Where?” she said, evenly again, as if her words were to be quiet oil on so much troubled water.

“You have seen it coming. You have made it hard.”

“What, Ramon?” she said, trying to quiet herself, and the jumping of the pains, with the thought that always there had been women who had been forced to face just such stark misery as this one of losing love. There might be women, at this very moment, in this very city, who were being crucified as she was being crucified....

“I am sailing straight for Seville tomorrow with Mrs. Bursilap. We will be gone--indefinitely.”

“You mean Mrs. Emanie----”

“You know whom I mean, Jenny. It is your way of always making it so hard for me.”

“But, Ramon--Emanie Bursilap--seventy, if a day--grandchildren....”

“Beggars cannot be choosers. You know what I am by temperament. I cannot struggle. One must live.”

“Is that why----”

“No, Jenny. You wanted, as you say it so well in your language, to have your cake and eat it, too. You were too afraid for yourself. You were not generous. I mean in the spirit. You would not risk. I go with Mrs. Bursilap, and her granddaughter Ellen, to Seville, as secretary and interpreter. Ellen does not know it, but there her grandmother and I are to be married.”

“I see,” she said, her lips feeling so dry and gritty against her teeth that they felt to her as if they must make a scraping sound as she lifted them to smile. “I see.”

“I am glad you do. I have never pretended to you that I am what I am not. One must live.”

“I see.”

If only she could stop mouthing “I see!” She wanted to cry out into the cheap, tawdry stuffiness of that tea-room. She wanted to see his face darken because her fingers were at his throat. She wanted to hurl arms about his knees and anchor there to this lean, narrow pillar of her happiness. And there she kept sitting, smoothing her long, sinuous gloves which were the color and scent of gardenia, and mouthing, “I see.”

And suddenly it smote her that in her hour of need, there she sat in a specked, third-rate tea-room, being dismissed across a dingy tablecloth by a narrow young man who was trying to keep his furtive eyes pretentious. Jenny, who had borne Avery, who had been too precious for life, and Jennifer, in whom leaped flame; Jenny Avery who, twenty-six years before, had been wooed by a serious young man whose mind was tipped with beauty, sitting there being dismissed by a gigolo who had found her fare too meager.

“I see.”

“The--Mrs. Bursilap does not know about--this. She is not so broad about some things. You must never----”

“I see.”

She looked at him from under the high, narrow turban; and his eyes, as if hooked on to the dagger of diamonds, would not travel down to meet hers.

“I wish you happiness, Ramon,” she said, politely.

“I will have to be going,” he said. “Packing.” And placed a dollar-bill under the glass of orangeade he had pretended to be drinking before she arrived.

“I see.”

It dawned upon her, as they neared the door, that the aluminum-colored limousine which she had noticed at the curb as she stepped out of the taxicab, must be waiting for him.

“I will take you home, Jenny,” he said, flushing.

“No, please, a taxicab,” she said, and shuddered along her teeth.

He hailed one, and, assisting her into it, stood bareheaded at the curb, replacing his hat, as she drove away, with a swinging gesture that had given her many a thrill.

Even as her misery blurred her last glimpse of him, the fantastic and devastating thought smote her that his young, slim body-beauty had gone back into the sea, as a fish floundering off its hook dives back, only to be baited again.

Now that the bolt had come straight and sure at her feet, there was only a deathly kind of fatigue of the spirit, hard to endure, but far from being the active torment against which she had been steeling herself.

Ramon going over into the fold of Mrs. Bursilap suggested the wattled and ugly thought to her of a bright bird of flight being folded into, along with little insects of prey, the webbed wings of a bat, and fast becoming part and color of that horrible under-arm débris.

There were folds of old flesh down the face of Mrs. Bursilap that must be down her body too, and pleats of loose skin along her upper arms, and a cave of shadow on either side of her lean old nose that made her bat-like. And as if to bear out the unconscious cousinship, she wore gray mostly, fine chiffons that floated and formed web between her body and arms.

Ramon folded into that, was something to shudder over, rather than to shed the salt tears one locked in the keg of one’s heart. She had shuddered her share, hurt pride, shocked vanity, loneliness, and a modicum of grief for a fantasy that had perished, going down before horror of Ramon and horror of self.

It was as if suddenly she had walked out of some foul lethal garden into gray but open day. Rarick was in the day, precisely as if she had been off in some long, embroidered faint, from which she had just emerged to find him precisely where she had left him. A little grayer, a little graver, without eagerness, certainly without gayety, and, consistently as ever, remote from her. And yet so substantially there; for which, and without shame, she showed her gratefulness.

She woke him up one night, as she thought, out of a sound sleep, when her growing panic of the operation was heavy upon her.

“Rarick,” she said, softly, filled, there in the dead hours of the night, with a lonely fear that if she did not speak she would cry out.

He stirred lightly as he lay motionless in his insomnia, not quite sure that she had spoken.