Part 20

“Rarick, could you wake up for a moment?”

“Yes. What is it, Jenny?”

“I am all right. I want to talk, though.”

She thought, a little bitterly, that she need not trouble to reassure him, who had no anxiety for her.

He was relieved that it had come. He had been lying there, pitying her in her sleep. A week had passed; and since she had not spoken, he had resolved to see Noon again the following day. But now it had come....

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something of a nuisance, Rarick. You never asked about what they found at the hospital--so there seemed no hurry.”

“I knew if there had been anything serious....”

“There isn’t. But I’m in for an operation.”

He tried to lift his words carefully into the casual.

“That _is_ a nuisance,” he said after a pause. “I thought perhaps there might be a little ulcerous condition there.”

“That is exactly what it is.”

“It is wise to operate, then, and clear up the difficulty once and for all.”

She could not help but reach out her hand and touch his lightly at the surge of relief that flowed over her at his calm, inferential way of regarding her recovery.

“I think so, too. Rarick.”

“We had better have it over at once, then, Jenny.”

We! Nothing he could have said would so have snatched away her terrifying sense of aloneness. She found herself wanting to reach out and touch his hand lightly again, and refrained.

“Any time you say, Rarick.”

“Suppose you let me take the matter in hand. I will arrange with Noon.”

“Yes, Rarick.” She felt so small, lying there beside him, so in need, so oppressed by sudden awareness of how solitary to be born--how solitary to die!

“I guess I’m a little frightened, Rarick. There is something about the knife--like cutting the rope to a moored boat----”

This time his hand felt for hers.

The very texture of her flesh, it occurred to her, scorchingly, had been softened, since last he had touched it, by a lover’s touch. If flesh, except by way of act of lips, could speak....

“The inevitable is frightening, Jenny, but chiefly because we usually have to sit on the rear seat and watch some one else at the wheel.”

She thought he was going to moralize, and stiffened.

“Let’s be honest, Rarick. Ulcers may be another name for--for anything. O God! Rarick, I don’t want to have anything terrible happen to me. I’ve so much to do, Rarick. So much that must be straightened....”

The mother of Avery was lying beside him, frightened. The feeling of chronic open wound somewhere around his heart began to move.

“We are going to come through this, Jenny.”

“We are, aren’t we, Rarick? It isn’t that I am afraid to die----”

It was!

“... it is just that I’m not ready, Rarick. So much to be straightened.”

Was the matter of this tawdry affair with the Spanish dancer with whom she was fiddling away time lying heavily upon her, he wondered, some of his dull and passive anger against her riding him for the moment.

“I don’t want to die, Rarick. I need you to bolster me over that silly fear. I mustn’t leave Jennifer. I mustn’t leave life. Funny; all of a sudden, it’s so sweet. We haven’t made much of a go of our lives together, have we, Rarick? Why?”

“Yes, yes, why?” How was it that the business of living had so cruelly deterred them from life itself? Jenny, here in her blazing tent that was hung in bracelets and shields and all the barbaric splendor of old, of which he had read in the histories, trembling empty-handed before a God she had never before found time to contemplate. She had paid God. Pew-rent. An occasional Sunday-morning obsequy. Ready-made reverences. He had approached with a new closeness when He had taken Avery. But now--now----

“Rarick, strange that we who have had so few joys together must always share the sorrows--first Avery--now this----”

Avery. Avery. Avery. His lips, from hurting, could not bear to say the word.

“I give myself the pollywoggles, Rarick, talking about death.”

“Then don’t, Jenny.”

“You must help me through, Rarick.”

“I will, Jenny.”

“I mean the courage part. ‘Spiritually,’ is the way the pious pulpiteers would say it. I do dread death, Rarick. Tomorrow I’ll laugh at tonight’s pollywoggles. It’s the nights--they get bad--you can help----”

“Yes, Jenny.” How? He wanted to. The mother of Avery must have it in her to rise on spiritual wings out of that fear.

“If I die----”

“You are talking morbid fancies....”

“If I should die, Rarick.”

“But why----”

“I want a beautiful casket. You can give it me. I want the most beautiful. One that will hold them for many a long while.”

“Why dwell on such non----”

“You can do that for me.”

That was what he could do for her.

“Somewhere back, Rarick, when I was a girl in Central High School in St. Louis, I remember we used to read in class, wasn’t it Héloïse or Annabel Lee or somebody slim and white in a poem, who dreamed of a casket lined in ailanthus leaves out of beaten silver....”

He supposed so, but why plan for death when there was life to be thought of?...

“Life, of course. Perhaps a better life than we have been pulling off together, Rarick. Death does terrify....”

What an Imperial Highness even the shadow of death could be, forcing to their knees those who approached.... “I shall never live to be an old man,” Rarick had once said to Gerkes, “therefore I want to make a friend of the idea of death early.” Jenny had neglected to make a friend of the idea. Poor Jenny. He would have given much not to have been too shy to reach over and fold the startled whiteness of her body against what comfort he had to offer. Fear was pecking at her....

“You know that beautiful ivory panel that you use for a chest door to your collection of jades? The one with the Virgin Mary seated, with a crown of pearls on her head?”

“Byzantium of the ninth century,” he said, mechanically.

“Isn’t it catalogued as the lower side of a casket?”

“Perhaps.”

“Rarick, I want that panel for the lower side of my casket.”

“Yes, yes; but that, we hope, will be many a long day away.”

“And those beautiful Episcopal croziers in gold and ivory, from the Walton Collection, that stand beside the organ, I want them for head-pieces. You can afford to build me the most beautiful casket in the world, Rarick, starting with those priceless antiques of old ivory and old gold. Don’t line it in satin, Rarick. I shall hate to lie in shiny white satin like a Catholic cook who has saved up for her funeral. I want to lie in leaves--ailanthus leaves of beaten silver ... you can do that for me....”

Of all the things he ached to do for her, now that the open wound of his heart was bleeding in pity for her fear, this was what she wanted of him. There was a pair of lines from Chaucer, engraved on an ivory oliphant of his collection:

A pair of tables all of ivory, And a Poyntal polish’d fetishly.

That was all he could do for Jenny. Send her “polished fetishly” out of the tent that was hung in the splendor of bracelets and shields.

“Of course, Rarick, I’m pretty apt to turn around on you and not die,” she said, pertly and mockingly out of the darkness, on a rattle of the brittle, malicious kind of humor she practiced. “You may not be rid of me, after all.”

“I don’t want to be, Jenny.”

“Do you believe, Rarick, in a beyond?”

He did passionately, now that it held his son. He dared not, however, because of the shyness, tell her that his belief in that ultimate reunion was chiefly what made the strings of days, laden with their job-lots of rubberized table mats and gilded curtain rods, bearable. You could not exactly tell a woman like Jenny, who, even while she quailed, might suddenly rattle off into one of her brittle moods, that somewhere across the chasm of death, a story that had never been spoken was waiting to be told by you to your boy.

“I believe in something, Jenny, beyond myself.”

“Do you ever pray?”

“Yes; but, like you, chiefly when I despair. I don’t suppose you would call that worship, so much as fear....”

“When Avery died, I didn’t fear. I blasphemed.”

He could not talk about him--to her----

“I fear now, but I don’t pray, Rarick.”

He wanted her to pray. Deep in his heart he knew that her need of prayer had come.

“Do you think it unbearably silly of me to keep wanting a casket made of ivory and old gold?” (Perhaps Ramon, passing around it, would see her lying there, the lovely color of the old ivory itself. Croziers at her head and feet. Priceless ones, the beautiful shape of a shepherd’s staff, one showing the Virgin and Infant, the other the Crucifixion....)

“I think it silly of you to be dwelling on death, although it sometimes seems to me, Jenny, that life is a means to death.”

He had not meant to say that.

“What?”

“Try to sleep.”

“Rarick, I--want to say to you--it sounds so silly--it will seem sillier in the morning--but now--tonight--I feel as if I want to say to you----”

“Get your sleep, tonight.”

“Perhaps----”

He wanted to hear and yet could not bear it. She wanted to get said what she could not bear to say. She had no real faith, herself, that once more in health, she might not ridicule this craven hour of her low-ebb. Nor had he.

Jenny, God willing, what with that wiry nervous vitality of hers, was in all probability going to recover. Why subject her, who, with her eyes on death, had cried only for ivory and old gold to contain the dust of her body, to any more self-revelations?

“Get back to sleep, Jenny.”

“Yes.”

Dozing off, she hated Ramon, pimp, who had tucked himself securely under the arm of a bat. And yet--in case--there was always the septic danger of an operation--in case--she wanted him to have to pass around the ivory bier, time and time again, and look upon the strange ivory beauty of her, lying in ivory....

At eleven o’clock the following morning, Jennifer, without appointment, presented herself at her father’s office, to be met by Hellman, whom she disliked and who in turn considered her a snip.

“Your father’s morning is filled with important conferences, Miss Jennifer.”

She looked what she always felt toward him. Spitfire.

“Save that, Mr. Hellman, to tell to some one who wants to sell him spool-cotton or teething-rings.” She looked pert and as natty as a little sailing-vessel in rig. Her hats were always such right affairs; this one, a warrior’s tight helmet of cocoa-colored felt, fitted her head like a wig. She was cocoa-colored from head to foot, in simple, unrelieved lines, a triple necklace of faceted amber beads lying in golden rope along her flat chest.

She was a thrill to the enormous office force on those rare occasions when she appeared, eyes slanting at her from all sides.

Almost too chic, slim, svelt, right, there was an air of artificial cocksureness about her that in some way must have accounted for Hellman’s sense of animosity.

“Tell my father I am waiting, Mr. Hellman.”

“The Des Moines manufacturer with whom he is in conference, Miss Rarick, has waited in New York two weeks for this interview. Your father is not even taking telephone interruptions.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, and flung one silk knee over the other as she sat herself down in the desk-chair Hellman had been occupying.

He took up a pad, scrutinizing.

“His next appointment is with Mr. Harold Bolt, president of the Banking Trust Company. Mr. Bolt is already here. Your father is lunching with Mr. Hiram Biltman and Mr. James Biltman. Most important.”

“Is it true,” said Jennifer, helping herself to one of Hellman’s cigarette-sized cigars, “that there is some prospect of Rarick Chain being incorporated with the Bilt Chain? As usual, my information comes from outside patter, but I do think that the old gentleman would be wise as hell to get out from under.”

“I am scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.

“Suppose I’d better tip off my friends to buy Rarick--common or preferred?”

“I’m scarcely in a position to say, Miss Rarick,” said Hellman, who was.

“Do cigars make you feel sickish?”

“No,” he said, and thought: But you do.

“I’ll finish it if you have to carry me out on a litter. Is that father buzzing for you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him I am here.”

“Mr. Bolt will....”

“Tell him I am here.”

When Jennifer was announced, the immediate thought smote Rarick that Jenny must have told her of what was impending. Yet that could scarcely be the case, since he had not yet conveyed the information to her that he had arranged with Noon during the morning that she was to enter the hospital that day week. Jenny was not the one to burden her daughter with such family-freight before it became necessary.

Now what?

The sight of her father in the settings of his offices was always impressive to Jennifer. Then, if ever, he was in the faint Napoleonic cast that she, too, suspected him of sometimes trying to achieve. The short, rather thickening body that he seemed to press to the ground with twice the weight that was actually his. The look in his eyes of seeming to see beyond some Elba. The way the thinning, center peninsula of his graying hair dipped into forelock. The “R” embossed on a wooden seal over the mantelpiece and on to his stationery that stood in a Florentine “R” embossed leather box.

What elements of greatness had gone afoul in her father? What elements of greatness had gone afoul in him in the same fashion that elements of cleverness in herself had likewise gone afoul? What little there was to her had gone afoul ... dear knows, dear knows....

Her father faced her, with the light from the window over his shoulder and full on her face. An old sense of unreality, where this girl was concerned, smote him. This urban, highly-polished, unillusioned, sure-eyed adult was his. He had begot one whom he scarcely knew.

“Well?”

“Guess this is the last time I’ll ever visit you in these old offices, Father. This time next year you’ll be in the Rarick Building.”

“I think so,” he said, and leaned over the vast smooth surface of his desk, to move a crystal paper-weight half an inch. His way of dismissing preamble and asking her to come to the point.

“It’s about Cataract Lodge, Father.”

He paused in the act of withdrawing his hand from the paper-weight, his attitude listening.

What had she heard, and how?

“It’s a large order I am about to ask, if anything can be in the nature of a large order for you.”

What had she heard?...

“As I have figured it out to the day, Father, we have occupied the Cataract exactly six and one-half months in four years.”

“All part of the larger waste,” he said, dryly.

“I knew I could count on you for that agreement,” she said, too brightly.

Smart girl. Pretty girl. His. It would be easy to be proud of Jennifer. He thought of a sales-manager’s slogan that hung over the desk of one of his department managers. “Be Yourself.” Jennifer was not Least of all, when she was with him. Something must be wrong with him--Rarick----

“Father, I’ve talked over a plan I have in mind with Mother, and it is all right with her, if it is with you.”

Whatever it was, rest assured she had talked it over with her mother first. The old jealousy stirred miserably in Rarick.

“I have lately had occasion, Father, mostly through Gratton Davies, to mix up with some of the girls and boys who write, or are trying to write. You know, the beginning crowd that is trying to get it said in plays and verse and articles and such. Novelists. Fellows who hold up the mirror, mostly crookedly. Dramatists, meaning the set that is still writing plays for the trunk or bottom drawer. After seeing these struggling writers knocking about the bedlam of this town, an idea has begun to knock about my so-called brain, Father. Most of them need a decent place to work. The notion that a nation’s epics and not-so-epics must necessarily be composed in garrets, went out of style with whipping-posts.”

Her brand of pretentious cleverness was always anathema to him. Be Yourself.

“Father, let us hand over Cataract Lodge as a sort of all-year workshop to this crowd from here and everywhere, who haven’t got the where or the withal. Let’s rescue ‘literachure’ from the jaws of the hall bedroom, the sound of the steel rivet, the smell of the lodging-house, and the sight of city swill. I’ve always had such a yen myself for writing, Father, without being able to do much more than make a cross-sign for my signature, that after meeting a few of these youngsters--I kind of thought--well--give me Cataract Lodge to turn over to them, Father. There are forty-eight rooms, not counting eight big airy ones over the boat-house and eight over the garages. Create a foundation committee, Father, deed over the Cataract and the three hundred acres, and maybe some day you will have given lodging to the birth of the great American novel, or the near-great.”

What was she up to? Was it possible that she and this young Gratton Davies----

“Think it over, Father. It’s a grand idea, and our chance to have about the only kind of finger we can ever hope to have in making the world safe for genius. It’s a concrete, definable world, Father, if you make its hair-pins, its jig-saws and its salt-cellars. There isn’t such a well-defined law of supply and demand for soul-commodities. It pays better to manufacture mirrors than to hold them up to nature. That line sounds like Gratton!”

Gratton again!

“Father, am I a daughter denied or indulged? I know the appraisal on the place. One hundred and ninety thousand, without the buildings. You would think nothing of that for a factory site, Father. Regard this as an intellectual factory.”

Her way of capturing his understanding. Regard this as a factory site. His way of being important to letters--factory site--manufacture of ideas....

“Father?”

Pretty Jennifer. It was part of his consistent faculty for error, where his family life was concerned, that she should come to him with such a request at a time like this. For a moment he played with the idea of a recapitulation of his plans. He wanted to capture her, pretty thing, so shy of him, with sugar on his finger tips; but his plans were too deeply laid; so deeply laid that what he finally said was twice too portentous.

“It is unfortunate that you should come to me at this time on such a mission, Jennifer. I have had on my mind for some time to discuss a certain matter with your Mother; but now that her illness has come up, I do not want her bothered. Cataract Lodge is sold.”

“Sold?”

“Possession does not go into effect so long as I exercise my annual option-privilege of renting it from the new owners.”

“You sold Cataract over our heads!”

“I suppose it amounts to that.”

“Why?”

“For reasons too intricate to enter into here.”

“You mean to tell me----”

“Are you catechizing me?”

“Father, you are not in any possible money difficul----”

“No, I am not.”

“If I thought it were that, then of course I would under----”

“You would be a misled young woman.”

“Then why?” she cried, and stamped her foot, a quick sheet of tears forming in her eyes. “Why?”

“So far as you are concerned, Cataract Lodge is still yours, to do everything you want with except give away. I like your impulse, daughter, but it is out of the question.”

“But why?” she cried, rising and stamping the desk three times with her gloved hand. “Why? Why? Don’t treat me like a half-wit, Father. Why did you sell Cataract Lodge?”

“For the same reason that I have sold Thousand Island Camp and Beaupré and the Nice property.”

“Father!”

“For reasons of greatest importance to me, but with the leaseholds which I have retained in each case, of no great importance to you or your Mother, since you are left free as ever to use them as you have heretofore.”

“I think it is abominable,” she said, frankly crying now. “Mother and I have every right to feel rottenly treated. Of course, it is all yours to do with as you will; but it might have been decenter, Father; it might have been kinder, it might have been treating us more like human beings and less like chattels, to have told us.”

“I meant in good time to tell your Mother. This illness changed that.”

“Mother isn’t as ill as all that....”

“Never forget this, Jennifer. I have deeply-founded reasons for every move I make. You have never taken the time to be logical....”

“I--I simply don’t know what to say to you, Father. You have me flabbergasted, as usual. I came here full of a desire to do something that had a wallop in it for someone besides myself. I came here because, God knows why, I still harbored the shred of a delusion that there was some way to get through to you. Somehow, this seemed to me the kind of thing, if I put it up to you--even if the idea did come from me--might help not only others, but--but us. I came here with the desire to give a leg to the kind of people who are going to do in life what I haven’t the guts or the brains or the character to do. But I don’t want Cataract Lodge now. Even if it were yours to give--the desire has died.

“What I came most of all wanting out of you, I should have known I wasn’t going to get!” cried Jennifer, “I should have known!” and stalked out of the office, with the bright tears standing in her eyes, and leaving him seated there, smeared with pain and pallor, the look of hunchback out in his face.

Jenny’s secret apprehensions grew. She was afraid for her flesh. Rapiers of hot steel were beginning by now to jump through the pain in her side. She did not betray by word, the rising tide of fear; but as her mind began to take on the cruel habit of visualizing that moment when the ether-cone would descend and consciousness plop over into lethal torpor, the skin began to stretch across her face like hauled tarpaulin. No one must be allowed to see her in that horrible aftermath when a vagrant mind led one to say dangerous, revealing, etheric things. What was that slide of steel into the perfect mesh of her flesh to reveal?...

In a way, these thoroughly mundane terrors, reasoned Jenny to herself, were blessed antidote to that whipping of the spirit to which she had so cruelly been subjected by Ramon. Literal stabs of pain kept her mind to the literalness of the flesh....

And yet, to Jennifer, even though her father had said to her once in a voice that had for the moment given her pause, “Your mother may be a sicker woman than we realize,” there was something of a game in this going of Jenny to the hospital again.

Jenny had seen to it that it was like that.

“They think I’ve an appendix,” she told her daughter, “and I’m going to have it out for all it’s worth. I don’t see why I should spare my friends. Look at Irene Dinehardt. Freddie figured out for me the other night on the back of an opera-program, that she was in the hospital three weeks and cost her friends thousands in gifts and flowers. I’ve sent my share. Now let them send theirs.”

True to her word, she began to spend her mornings, torn as she was with frenzied desire not to be alone and yet not to exert herself, looped around, in the angular way she had of sitting, the blue-enamel French telephone in her boudoir, notifying friends.

By hook and crook, mostly crook, her daughter laughingly assured her, Jenny had managed to prevail upon Dr. Noon to stretch hospital routine sufficiently to obtain for her a three-room suite, which was accomplished by the simple device of opening doors between the ordinary type of room.