Part 2
His eyes, as he lifted them into quizzical peaks, made him look Asiatic in a way she detested. Oh yes, that closes the controversy, he was saying to himself. Oh yes. Oh yes. Rather, it kept it running in great sluices of talk through all-too-brief silences which he craved.
“No, Jenny, but it is scarcely necessary to argue that my greatest interests are here.”
“At the moment, yes. But your main office is practically now in the East. You are on trains half your time.”
That was true. But the prospect of reiterating, as if it had never been said before, this two-year-old argument between them, made him long to close his eyes and sink back, at least on to the rim of the slumber which had visited him so reluctantly.
“We have outgrown St. Louis, Rarick. Anyone can remain a big frog in a small pond.”
“My home is here.”
“You have the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful homes in America. Do you realize that you are rich enough to buy the home of the man who endowed the Metropolitan Gallery with the Ficke Collection? I have been prophesying for the six months, ever since the death of Emanie Ficke, that the house would come on the market. Don’t be all kinds of a fool, Rarick. Wire your bid.”
“And what then?”
And what then? She sat up in bed at that, her nightgown, plain but impeccably sheer, falling down off one shoulder, her brick-colored, eccentric hair, which she wore brushed up perpendicularly off her ears as if to accentuate the narrowness of her face, falling in thin spray along her shoulders. A sort of tremor, faint as a blue flame, seemed to burn along the pale wick of her lips, making them flicker.
And then what! The most beautiful house in the world, Rarick, built out of damned little ugly things.
Things. Things. Things and things. It was as if, so that he put his hands over his eyes to squeeze back their pressure, there came marching out of his insomnia the nightly procession of the million dishpans, bins of hair-pins, carloads of coin-purses, glass beads, curtain rods, rubber gloves, cotton stockings, eye-shades, flower-seed, pink soaps, tooth-brushes, darning-cottons, water-tumblers, salted peanuts, baby-dolls, lead-pencils, paper flowers, gimcrack vases, and chewing-gums.
“Things.”
“Exactly, Rarick. Titians out of stewpans. Conservatories out of cotton stockings. Pipe-organs out of gas tubing. Libraries out of tooth-paste. Polo ponies out of Eskimo pies. Rarick, where is your imagination!”
She was not the one to cajole with any grace. Her thin face, in a way that was no longer lovely to him, propped on its elbow, was all covered over with an expression that, starting with her lips, had burst like paper into flame. She desired with an intensity that was embarrassing. It grated Rarick horribly to see her wanting anything. It stretched her face so, drawing the tight skin back further still from the bony outline, nakedly, like a person biting down pain.
Wherever his imagination was, it left him lying there with his tired hand pressed against his eyes, and his lips lifted back slightly from his teeth, as her voice grated:
“Do you realize that you’re a richer man than Cyrus Breckenridge, Rarick?”
Trust Jenny to have heard, almost before the proposition had been put into writing, this newest offer of the Breckenridge group of Southwestern stores to buy in the Rarick chain. His reply to it had been to add six new links to his own. Youngstown, Altoona, Akron, Fall River, Lowell, and New Bedford. Her entire being was like a hateful little antenna. Sensing. He wanted her not to be hateful to him, and the knowledge that she was, kept him in a state of constant mental retribution toward her. Through the lattice of his fingers he regarded her, his lids half down to blur the eager, tight-skinned thrust of her face.
“I suppose I am a richer man than Breckenridge.”
“Hellman figures you out about the thirteenth richest man in the world, Rarick. Know that?”
As a matter of fact, he did. His confidential secretary, Harry Hellman, an exceedingly stout young Jew, with excellent qualifications for his position, had called his attention to that new fact only that week. He had thought about it subsequently and with the sustained sort of incredulity that had caused him to clutch toward reality by repeating to himself such phrases as: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John Rarick, born Fancy Prairie, Iowa, October 7th, 1870, son of Anna Masey Rarick and John Geoffrey Rarick. m. Jenny Avery, St. Louis, 1898. President Rarick Chain, Inc. Vice-president Dime Savings Bank. Vice-president Ajoy Soap Company. Board directors Dime Savings Bank. Board directors Corn Belt Traction Company. Vice-president Empire State Trust Company. Vice-president Croton Mills. Trustee Guaranty Trust Association. Director St. Louis Art Center; Municipal Opera Company; Americana Association; Lapidarian Club Society; Hispano Association; Society for Preservation of Indian Culture; Missouri Historical Association; Member of.... Me, John G. ... all those ... me, John!
It was like Jenny to take this dazzling fact, rather indiscreetly handed her by Hellman, for granted, and without wasting either analysis or wonderment upon it, begin to cut her cloth accordingly. One became the thirteenth richest man in the world and then set immediately about adjusting one’s life to the requirements of being the thirteenth richest man in the land. Hers not to reason why.
He was being constantly ashamed of the way she could grate on him. Coming from Jenny, the selfsame statement that had caused him a rise of goose-flesh when Hellman had called his attention to this new notch on his hickory stick, filled him with a dull resentment.
What new desires and cravings and ambitions for herself, and, worst of all, crazy plots for her children, were there left to set in motion?
What was it that being the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the world could give her that she had not enjoyed as the wife of the thirteenth hundredth richest man in the world?
It did not seem so long ago to Rarick when their first car, a Buick sedan, had stood new and shiny one Sunday morning at the curbstone of their seven-room house on Kensington Avenue, and Jenny, with his overcoat thrown on over her kimono, had rushed out to try its upholstery. There had been a small tag on the steering-wheel:
That was about as demonstrative as Rarick could bring himself to be, even back in the days before their fairy tale had begun to happen.
“Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over,” he had written during the fifth year of their marriage. During the first year he had sent her a modest little traveling-case for a birthday present, but the card had read: “Pack my love and some of our dear dreams in this, for our walking-trip through the Pyrenees.”
That had been before the acquisitive, tight-skinned look had spread itself over the face of Jenny: before the fox had leaned out of the nervous and intelligently homely face of the girl he had been proud of himself for choosing from a world that seemed to him populated with girls with no faces at all, only a vacuous geometry of pleasantly related features.
No one but God and Rarick knew that the dowry that went with Jenny had played no part in his choice. Sometimes, as the something flowed out of their relationship that had been precious to him, it seemed there must be some way to tear open the secret chambers of his heart and reveal this truth to Jenny, on to whose lips, not so many years after marriage, had crept occasional innuendo.
What she did not or would not remember was that it actually was well after their engagement that Rarick, a young man from the outside of her circle, had come to know about the twenty-five hundred dollars.
What she did and would remember, as if her mind were a magnifying-glass under which a small mental image could become Gargantuan, was the hot August day when they had taken the street car together for the Union Trust Company, and withdrawn from her safety-deposit box there, the twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds which were to be converted into capital investment in the Nick Nack Store.
That fact, in these years when Jenny was already buying an eighty-five-hundred-dollar bauble far more casually than she had once bought an eighty-dollar one, never lost its luminosity in the dark places of her mind. It was a piece of phosphorescent memory. A cold, flameless light that tinged every aisle of her mind where he was concerned, and which she kept dancing before the eyes of her husband like a signalman on a bridge at night swinging his lantern.
Behind her reminder to him that he was the thirteenth richest man in the world there trailed the unspoken tagline, “thanks to the start I gave you by intrusting you with my inheritance,” a string of words which, spoken or unspoken, traveled through him in a groove that innuendo had worn down, his live nerves the trolley of transmission. Rebuttal would have meant the fatal act of admission to her implied word. Rarick had learned various kinds of silences.
“I haven’t minded the years of your stubborn refusal to pretty nearly everything I’ve asked for myself, Rarick. It is Jennifer now. I want the child to see the light of her fifteenth birthday in the Ficke house. That’s not asking much of a man many times a millionaire. The pity is that it has to be coaxed out of you.”
“The pity of it” clung in a burr-like phrase to his brain.
The pity of it. The pity somehow of everything, including this flavorless beginning of another day. Pretty Jennifer, who had everything, and now, at barely fifteen, was so cruelly fretted, aided and abetted by a doting mother, with wanting more than everything. After all, if you had two motor-cars, there was only left for you to want three, if the goal of your acquisitiveness was things. And things. And things. It was an entirely different kind of wanting from the desire to own a Buick sedan when you owned no car at all. The difference between desiring a Buick sedan when you owned no car, or desiring a third car when you already owned two, was all the difference in the world. The pity of it. Jennifer at fifteen, who had a good mind, was a good pupil, and was a phantom of delight to her father, already too busy wanting more than everything.
That kind of thinking made him heavy and pedantic and old-as-the-hills, as a father.
The little girl who wanted more than everything.
Damn her mother.
The phrase shot through his mind like a burst of flame, startling him horribly.
Under cover of Jenny’s steady runnel of accusative and importuning talk, he began to reason with himself, to calm himself, to rid his mind of the taste of the phrase that had shot through his mind in sacrilege to this woman who shared his bed.
As mothers went, Jenny would have stood impeccable before any jury. She wanted passionately for her young. She was forever baring herself to his scorn by asking in their name. She was a doting, gloating mother, fierce for her offspring, yet, withal, sweet with them and to them. Many a night through she had sat unnecessarily, but tirelessly, beside the bed of Avery, whose first years had been precarious ones. The death of two infants had gone hard with her. Jennifer was her doting, her waking, and her sleeping thought.
Rarick, whose manner was not fortunate with his children because he was seldom at ease with them, could not have formulated into words, except in vague fashion to the effect that she spoiled them, the stubborn wall of opposition which he erected between himself and Jenny’s plans and dreams for her children.
“It is as if you were jealous of them,” she had barked at him once, hysterically, when he was opposing an indoor roller-skating rink across the top of the house.
No. No. No.
Without his knowing how to reach out a hand to stay them, except in vague fumings and consistent conservatisms, the entire kingdom of his household was drifting like a bit of land disassociating itself from the mainland to become island, out into some high tide beyond his reach. Jenny and Jennifer and his boy Avery were on that island. He was back helplessly on the mainland; and Jenny, mark you, mind you, no otherwise to it, was to blame! The bitterness of that tore at him constantly, like a flame pulling itself off the candle.
Jennifer, for a time, while she had been a little pupil at Mary Institute, had been something of an eager student, with a hint of her mother’s old air of desire to know, about her. Rarick had said little, but her school reports had been a source of deep private pleasure to him; and once he had carried about in his pocket an essay of hers, written on ruled paper, called “WHY WE LOVE RUSKIN.” He had filched it off her desk and returned it there a few evenings later when he observed the child scrambling among her possessions for what might have been the essay.
Rarick had not, up to that time, known who Ruskin was, and it elated him no little that the enlightenment should have come by way of his daughter. “In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed,” the thirteen-year-old daughter of Rarick, undismayed by discursive eagerness and floriated mannerism, had written in her roundly vertical chirography. It was this phrase out of the mouth of his babe that must have lain engraved upon Rarick’s memory when, years later, he acquired, at what was said to be an astonishingly high price, a page of the original manuscript of Ruskin’s _Præterita_.
Suddenly that brownish, rather studious Jennifer of those days back in the solid square house on MacPherson Avenue had slipped from her little-girlhood into a high-strung, mature-faced disciple of her mother’s ambitions for her. The home in Westmoreland Place. Finishing school in Tarrytown.
Now here was family history repeating itself. It had been the same way when Jenny began to “feel her oats,” as Rarick was in the habit of putting it, in the MacPherson Avenue house, and was casting an eye toward Westmoreland Place. Jennifer’s graduation reception must be held in the new home, and not in the twelve-room yellow-brick one on MacPherson. The neighborhood was running down so. Stores. Flats. Even the G. H. Francises were talking of selling.
The little brown jug of a Jennifer of the MacPherson Avenue house was now the slip of a young miss, straight as a paper-cutter, with the sophisticated eyes that for the life of him her father could never catch and hold in a glance.
And now that brown child back there, whitened because her freckles seemed to have come off, this Jennifer whom he was casting about, in his futile way, to save, what was left of her, for himself, must have her fifteenth birthday in a house on Fifth Avenue that almost faced the Metropolitan Museum.
To think that he, John Rarick, who had once dreamed dreams no bigger than that walking-trip through the Pyrenees, should be in a position to give her such a house. Was Jenny, after all, the natural and doting parent, and was he to Jennifer the grudging, silent father? Was he too finished with youth to know his own children?
Could his dreams for Avery, the boy, slip between his fingers, too, as this mother of his began to demand his rights for him? Would Avery grow up alien to a father who seemed to have no shred of youth left that would enable him the better to understand the youth in his children?
From what was it he was struggling to save them? His own innate sense of rightness could be no deeper than his wisdom, and who was he to be cocksure of his wisdom? After all, what was the meaning of this success, which sometimes threatened to seem chimeric to him, if it was not to enable him to do just such things as give Jennifer her fifteenth birthday in one of the most beautiful and expensive houses in the world?
Success had done its share to teach Rarick himself new and complex appetites. He was a philatelist of elaborate and expensive tastes. There was in one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which was hanging over the foot of the bed, a famous Gnostic gem, heliotrope, engraved with the sacred name “Abrasax.” A museum in Boston had been bidder against him for that gem. There were in that same pocket, result of those same tastes acquired through his growing wealth, an ominous and luminous opal, a tiny agate ring with a runic inscription of the late-Saxon period, and a transparent aquamarine cut _en cabochon_ with the figure of a hump-bull. In his library, at this period, were celebrated “firsts” upon the shelves; a Tintoretto, a Greuze, and a triptych of the Cimabue period upon his walls.
What Jenny was demanding for herself and her children were the equivalents of the runic gems, the celebrated firsts, and the misty Greuzes.
No wonder, as she lay there beside him, silent for the moment, the lines about her thin lips were tight with the distaste of their state of constant asking, and the stretched look across her face was the look that had been written there by the constant and almost automatic opposition he had been erecting for years against the nature of her desires for herself and her children.
His children, even the small boy Avery, approached him only through the mother. The mother herself approached him as a diplomat goes to the conference table, her points carefully tabulated in the portfolio of her mind.
A man, if he loved them, could hold out only so long against his children....
He swung himself to a sitting posture on the side of the bed, and reached for a robe to slip on over his nightshirt. He was short, somber, gnome-like, and a little ridiculous in his nightshirt; and he never forgot it.
“I’ll buy you the Ficke house, Jenny.”
During the last six months of the six years the Raricks had occupied the Ficke mansion, a man by the name of Dr. Felix Gerkes had lived on the top floor of the house. He occupied two rooms and a green bathroom with a frieze of mermaids over the tub. His meals for the most part were brought to him and served on a card table beside a window that overlooked Central Park, which separated him in a diagonal from the Museum, where he had spent twenty-one years in the archæological department. He was also an Indianologist of first-rank repute, a man who had been frequently endowed with honorary degrees in the realms of scholarship and science.
He was the author of numerous brochures and pamphlets, a text-book on geology that was in general use throughout American colleges, had written three books on amulets, precious stones, and meteorites, and was regarded as a foremost living authority on religious uses of stones among primitive peoples.
He was a lean, shabby fellow, with a walrus-like mustache and a conspicuously prominent forehead with thin stringlets of hair brushed sidewise across what threatened to become a bald horseshoe. His clothing, so loosely it hung, seemed to have no points of contact with his body.
The women of the household, even though weeks might pass without their so much as encountering him, and then only in a hallway or on the rare occasions when he dined with the family, thought him repulsive, and considered it disgusting of Rarick to insist upon having him there.
A curious bond existed between these two men. They had first met when Rarick had been directed to him for advice concerning a contemplated purchase, for his collection, of a necklace of banded and variegated agates, onyx, carnelians, and sards, attributed to the first century, A.D.
In the course of a long and enlightening conversation with this wise, strange man, who wore a hexagon-shaped Chinese skull-cap with a crystal button on its peak, Gerkes had quoted from the _Pantagruel_ of Rabelais, reciting almost word for word that part of the book which describes the oracle of the Dive Bouteilly and its seven columns of sapphire, jacinth, diamond, ruby, emerald, “_more brilliant and glistening than those which were set in place of eyes in the marble lion stretched before the tomb of King Hermias. The sixth column of agate, the seventh of transparent syenite with a splendor like that of Hymettian honey, and within appeared the moon in form and motion such as she is in the heavens, full and new, waxing and waning._” In the further course of that casual hour’s conversation, Gerkes had discoursed upon the seven heavens of the Mohammedans, white lapis-lazuli, the sack of Constantinople by the Sassanian Persian king, Khusrau II, Navajo silversmiths, Figdor collection in Vienna, use of black and white enamel on bezel, cramp-rings, Edward the Confessor, native Indian mountaineers of California, Liberian silver, Catherine von Bora and her marriage to Martin Luther, Cleveland Museum of Art, Antiochus IV, aluminum kitchenware, alleged curative effects of violet-blue, John Ruskin on crystals, balas-rubies, Flinders Petrie, Field Museum of Natural History, and the snake story in _Gesta Romanorum_.
Rarick, who had just returned from Atlanta, where he had contracted for the annual run-of-the-mill output of two million cotton handkerchiefs of the largest three concerns in the South, sat in the musty little office of Gerkes, which was laid out at the moment with stone arrow-heads of a Navajo collection, and let the wisdom of this slow man flow against ear-drums that were still throbbing with the barter for the delivery of the two million cotton squares that were to be sold in eleven hundred and eight stores at five cents apiece.
There were lying undercurrent in Rarick’s mind at the time of this talk, an impending conference of the Mountain region and Eastern store-managers, with an eye to further standardization of window display; a contemplated monopoly of the output of a paper-napkin factory near Brattleboro, Vermont, and a trip to Springfield, with one of his buyers, a German, for the purpose of demonstrating to an American toy-manufacturer how to produce a celluloid doll, the equivalent of the German product, which could retail for ten cents. There was further at work under the surface of Rarick’s consciousness, a major plan for the formation of a policy, not yet revealed to his company, for the establishment of a Rarick store in every city of seven thousand or over, in the entire country.
Years of nights of lying awake over that immense project were about to fructify into action.
The thirteenth richest man in the world sat in that musty pocket of an office with Gerkes until museum attendants began to turn off the lights and rattle keys. Then Gerkes, who loved talk, and who, deep in the midst of a discourse on amber deposits in the Stone Age, had found a listener, clapped on his shapeless hat and walked home with Rarick across the twilit park, depositing him at his door, without so much as a glance up at the pale splendor of the façade of the Ficke house, which John Rarick had purchased by sealed bid at sensational auction seven years before. That meeting was the beginning of an impeccable friendship between these two.
A week later, Rarick invited Gerkes to lunch at a downtown business men’s club. Gerkes did not belong to the world of men to whom lunch is a social or business ritual. He either took his off a lunch-stand in the vicinity of the Museum or cut slivers with a pocket knife off the small loaf of American cheese he kept in a desk drawer along with a box of Swedish biscuit.
His imperviousness to surroundings was colossal. He had once lunched with the King of England over a matter pertaining to the Jubilee jewels, and was unable later to describe the occasion in anything except the contents of the discussion.
He ate sparingly of Rarick’s carefully ordered luncheon, giving little if any heed to it, and once more, apropos of the first-century string of agates and sards, let his discourse flow from the crammed stock-room of his mind.