Part 21

There hung over the Rarick household the air of some one about to be married or about to set out on a voyage of exploration. Boxes and packages began to arrive at the house three days before Jenny left it. Books. Bed jackets. A tiny tickless clock with a radium-and-ruby face. One of the first of the packages was a bulky one that sent Jenny and Jennifer into hilarity, including a chuckle from Rarick. A large cactus-plant arrived, well boxed, and with its tough, hand-shaped leaves sprouting needles. Hildegarde had sent her sister-in-law a token of her concern, a card with this angular message attached: “With the hope that your pain will be no greater than a prick from this cactus.”

“One prick from Aunt Machiavelli’s floral offering and your convalescence will terminate suddenly, all right,” cried Jennifer, between gusts of laughter.

“She meant well,” said Jenny, and sat down suddenly with darkening eyes fixed on the ridiculous sprawling object.

A flash of the first real concern she had felt or expressed, darted over Jennifer. “You’re not turning forbearing and last-will-and-testamenty, are you, darling, just because you’re going in for an appendix? You know perfectly well that your austere and well-meaning sister-in-law is a turkey-gobbler with a wattled neck.”

“God forbid!” said Jenny, and contemplated the frenzied-looking cactus with all the absurd wryness she could muster.

“Jenny Avery,” cried Jennifer, huddling up beside her mother on to the chaise-longue, where she was resting between telephone calls, “I couldn’t bear to have you turn forbearing and turn-the-other-cheeky. It would frighten me into a half-belief that you are really sick. Please be cheeky, darling, instead of turn-the-other-cheeky.”

“Jennifer, if anything unforeseen should happen....”

“Mother, I can’t bear it! Why are you talking like that? You mustn’t frighten me, darling. It’s disgusting.”

“Jennifer-idiot, stop being a cry-baby all over my new water-wave. I haven’t the slightest intention of terminating my earthly engagement at this time. I am speaking of the unforeseen....”

“Oh, I know. Of course.”

“If I should die, Jennifer----”

“Mother, I can’t bear it. You’ll make me hysterical.”

“If I should die, Jennifer, of which I haven’t the slightest damnedest intention----”

“Then cut out the requiem mass.”

“I want you to be a good girl....”

“And not smear my pinafores....”

“And not smear your pinafores, and be good--and happy, Jennifer. I haven’t been either. I’m rotten at moralizing, darling; I’ve never done much for you except love you and....”

“If you say that, I’ll drown myself under eighty of these pink-satin pillows. If I’m a mess, I’ve myself to blame. Myself, my own self, nobody but myself.”

“As a mess, Jennifer, you are clever, beautiful, rich, and desirable. I want you to be good and happy. I haven’t been good and happy, Jennifer.”

“If you don’t stop it,” cried Jennifer, taking a long strand of her mother’s red-sun-colored hair between her fingers, “I’ll yank.” She did, and as they fell together among the heaps of pillows the telephone, for the dozenth time that hour, began to crow.

Strange days for the Raricks. Family dinner three nights in succession, no guests, but Jenny at table in the kind of tea-gowns she affected, high at the neck, low laces or furs crowding about her wrists, the rather mediæval effect blending with the sonorous splendor of the dining-room.

It was all as strange to Rarick as it was to his women. Butlers moved through the vaulted gloom outside the circle of the dozens of burning candles that hung over the table, and swapped comments behind pantry doors at the spectacle of the Raricks dining _en famille_. To be sure, three out of the three evenings Jennifer slid off quickly to engagements, even before dessert, leaving Jenny and Rarick to contemplate, with self-consciousness, an evening over coffee in the library, to the marching colored-glass stories of the operas.

One of these evenings, the Quartette came in.

It was strange to be sitting with Jenny, listening, while the room filled up softly with the selections Rarick liked best. Mozart B-Major, No. 8, with its beautiful ’cello interlude. Beethoven A-Major, op. 18, No. 5, in its rilling variations of tone and color. There came Schubert, D-Minor! “Death and the Maiden.” Fortunately, Jenny neither knew it nor asked about it, but sat with her arms laid out along the sides of her chair, and her head back against the eunuch tapestry, vagrant thoughts drifting on the rhythm-tides.

Ramon was on the high seas by now. On an ocean that sometime, somehow, she had hoped to sail with him. One swallowed the pain, grinding finger-nails into tapestry. To have had a lover who could endure to be coveted by Emanie Bursilap! Shame of that! To sit there quietly, lapped with the low surf of this small and lovely music, and only the wall of her sick flesh to conceal from Rarick what her heart knew. Little man, you. Rarick, with his head slightly forward and his fingers forming a chapel. We are stranger to each other, even now, than if one of us had never been born. How like you, to touch your finger-tips that way! Lightly. Shyly. Without intensity. Little man, you.

He had changed so little in the amazing years. The same little man she had used to contemplate across the covers of the bed in the house in Westmoreland Place in St. Louis. A hunchback face. A hunchback without the hunch, but with the hurt, lean face of one. A little bitter. Frustration. Well, well, well, what about her frustrations? Avery’s? Jennifer’s? God spare Jennifer. What was out over Jennifer? She was soft these days, in a lovely way, and subdued, in the way the fellow at the ’cello sometimes placed a lulling hand against strings that had been struck. Was Jennifer in love with Gratton? Soon get that nonsense out of her head. Strange that the brilliant match she was sure to make was so slow in coming. “I am too needed by her,” thought Jenny, “to be snatched out of life.” Best to sit tight with Jennifer. Let her have her head with this Gratton fellow. Up to a point. Strange that a youth like Rodney Martens, thirty millions, a Brownlee Martens, direct descent, clever, brisk, up-and-coming, literary after a fashion, had never, somehow, troubled to follow up his casual acquaintanceship with Jennifer. Something could be done about that. Best to go slowly with Jennifer. Let this present absorption in the playwright fellow wear itself down.... I am too needed here.

So this was how he, Rarick, largely lived his evenings. His colored-glass operas. This Quartette. His unpronounceable gems, that, when mounted, were ineffective and looked only semi-precious. Even Gerkes, fossil, had gone. Found himself a squaw bride off somewhere in a blubber-eating country. That, too, was Rarick for you! How like him to pick for his close friend a man to whom an Eskimo bride was satisfaction! What was there about him, Rarick, that created the little area of isolation around him? Even Jennifer, when she spoke to her father, rarely looked him in the eyes, but between, as if staving off his glance. That was not right. Her period of convalescence would be a good time to soften things up somehow between these two. After all, he was entitled to his daughter. Since the death of Avery, it had always seemed to Jenny, fantastically, that the furrow between Rarick’s eyes was the shape of a cross. He was entitled to Jennifer. Naughty Jennifer, so alien to this man, her father. A kind father, in so far as his understanding went. It was time to see that he got some kindness in return. He was being kind now. Trying to please. Trying to help her cast out fear. And yet, there was nothing she could do for that little man there, or that he could do for her. It was terrible, it was vacant, it was loathsome to sit there beside this man--this husband who was being kind to her--parched, as with a thirst, for the kind of kisses that Ramon, pimp, on the high seas with Emanie Bursilap, had to bestow. God, I need to be forgiven....

It could be said that Jenny, narrow, frilled, as elaborate as Bernhardt, and her pallor quite beautiful, went to her ordeal with something of the fanfare of Marie Antoinette riding her tumbrel through the populace. The motor-car that bore her was followed by a smaller one bearing outfittings that were part of the pomp and circumstance of her arrival. A bed-cover of ermine, with a heavy double fringe of black tails. An almost-life-size photograph of a head of Avery, framed in jade, his young throat bare, his eyes unsmiling. The cactus, for a laugh. Flowers, anticipating her arrival, were stacked in hospital vases of painted tin, only to be rearranged when Jenny arrived, with her urns and her vases and her graduated silver bowls.

The hospital--one accustomed to the vagaries of the celebrated and important--grinned, the impersonal patter of the most highly personal environment in the world passing around from nurse to interne to doctor.

“The Five-and-Ten Mrs. Rarick! New-rich, but, oh, how rich!”

“Hope she takes a fancy to the fine hand behind the ether,” said the anæsthetist, “and endows my children’s ward at Island Hospital.”

“Hope she hears of the beautiful, Titian-haired, and virtuous girl in the supply department and decides to make her an heiress,” said the red-haired miss in charge of the linen-room.

“Do your best, girls,” admonished the head nurse; “she may come through and endow our joint-disease wing.”

“She can have her millions,” said a girl in the training department, “but, oh, how I could do with a ninety-five-dollar civet coat in Macy’s window. If only she would take ninety-five dollars’ worth of fancy to me.”

And so on, as Jenny, who came in like thunder, was put to bed in a bower that later, an interne said, made him feel as if he were wading through a meadow to reach her pulse. A meadow of the elaborate magnificence of Jenny. There were present, at her installation, the maid in the Breton cap, who, after seven years, knew practically no word of English, but understood Jenny’s execrable French to the syllable, and the English girl named Daphne Dang, whose rôle was not exactly definable, but who had been at Jenny’s elbow in rôles of every capacity from seamstress to masseuse to secretary for the last ten years. Peacock, the first butler, whom Jenny had hired for his name, carried in cushions and a screen of Aubusson panels to protect the opening door from revealing sight of hospital corridor.

It struck Rarick, as he entered, that not a friend had felt close enough to intrude upon this arrival. There were already telegrams and notes that Jenny opened and pinned against the screen. They were the personal touches toward which she seemed to be stretching her long, cold, clear-looking fingers as toward a live grate.

He wondered, without bitterness, how she had managed with the Spanish dancing-boy about whom she was always being so elaborately casual. Poor Jenny! There were the records of the social struggle of the years pinned along that Aubusson screen. A poor, insecure record. It would never do to express some of the surge of tender sympathy for her futilities which he felt sweep over and hurt him for her. This was the time to be quick and concise and clear and sure. That was the manner which seemed most successfully to keep her in a state of feeling reassured. Treat it all as a matter of course. Give directions as you would for the arrangement of one of her ballroom functions, or charity bazaars. Jenny caught gratefully at that spirit of casualness. It hypnotized fear.

But a last-minute dread had reappeared. If only she did not prattle as she came out of the ether. At best, there had always been something terrifying to Jenny at the idea of losing consciousness. There were imperative reasons why Jenny must not prattle. Steadfastly she ground into her mind the intention to go down into unconsciousness with her mind a blank, no loose fears, memories, thoughts, desires, or regrets floating around in it. Yet, what furtive bits of seaweed of unspoken thoughts might drift to the surface of a mind unanchored by consciousness! A new fear smote Jenny. Suppose, with Rarick standing beside her bed, she should unconsciously reveal to him the tortuous secret windings of those underground rivers of her mind that carried so much along them that was traitorous to him. Then, too, how could she endure the thought that her daughter be smirched with some of that flotsam and jetsam, as it floated to the surface and revealed itself in words?

A terror of delirium began to settle on Jenny.

“Rarick,” she said to him, as he stood beside her bed the evening before her operation, “I want you to promise me something.”

She had been so free of this mood of last-minute promises. It astonished him that never once had she spoken in terms of her will. She had one, made the tenth year of their marriage. A simple, hand-written document, duly legalized. As a matter of fact, she had never been acquisitive in that sense. For purpose of tax distribution, huge holdings were in her name. These papers she had signed without even troubling to read them.

Now Rarick began to chide her, in the playful mood she seemed to demand of the occasion.

“What solemn promise? That I will not break the will?”

“Seriously, it will be terrible to me, Rarick, if you or Jennifer come into the room to visit me until a day after the ether has worn off and I am once more my presentable self. I don’t want you or Jennifer to know how green I can look. Promise me that.”

“Of course,” he said.

What lay in the troubled hinterlands of her mind? What was she afraid of revealing? As if there were anything much that Jenny could reveal to him that he did not already know or suspect. Poor, frightened Jenny! For the first time her affairs were in danger of slipping a bit out of her hands. He wanted her to keep them there as desperately as she felt that need. No more than she, did he desire the revelation of those fetid places that had gathered scum in the years of swampy silence between them. Ugh!

“Jennifer, see to it that they don’t come near me with one of those hideous Mother Hubbard hospital night-gowns. If the pain in my side doesn’t kill me, the touch of canton flannel will.”

“I’ll dike you out in silk, mi-darling, and a fol-de-rol of lace.”

“Don’t let them be efficient and hygienic and sheety about my bed, either, Jennifer. No matter what kind of damaged goods they bring back to it, I want to be tucked back into this--make them stack it up for me while I am attending my own op., darling. It will occupy your mind.”

“If you aren’t careful, I’ll make the bed myself.”

“Then I hope to heaven you have to lie on it.”

“Isn’t she beautiful, Father, lying propped up there in her well-known magnificence?”

“You look very well, Jenny.”

She slitted her olive-colored eyes and turned her head away. One was supposed to feel chastened in hours such as this. She did, of course. But what if her secret distastes of the inadequacies of this man, persisting even now, should leap through and spatter him with words of contempt?

“I want you to go now, Rarick. You, too, Jennifer. Promise me that you will both remain out until they have me all out of the ether.”

“We promise.”

“Of course.”

They were a constrained lot, the three of them, and finally, all bent to keeping casual, there were good-nights; and the final departure went something like this:

“Don’t forget to have Miss Dang telephone my regrets to the Planets. Rarick, hadn’t you better keep this emerald ring of mine in your waistcoat pocket along with your other glitts? I forgot to put it in the safe.”

“Let me slide a packet of this Mirabel sachet under your pillow before I go, Mother. It’s the latest squak. There are some novels and a copy of _Vanity Fair_ and _Town Topics_ in that lower drawer, Nurse, in case my Mother wants to read. I’ll bring around the new _Spur_ tomorrow.”

“Good night, Jennifer.”

“’Night, Jenny Avery.”

“Good night, Rarick.”

“Sleep well, Jenny.”

“Sure to. Good night....”

The bed that Jenny left the following morning for the operating-room was built up during her absence, by her daughter, the maid in the Breton cap, two nurses, and Miss Dang, into its pyramid of finery. Tilted, there was a look of cornucopia to it, the way the avalanches of little laces and the fine pink mists of sheets seemed to spill.

All morning, it stood waiting in its elaborate sort of trance for the return of its occupant.

Jenny was not to come back to it.

It was one of those operations that after the first few moments, become hopeless.

It came as shock to Rarick, that the suggestion to unload himself of the great property of his town house should come from his daughter.

They had been sitting over after-dinner coffee, on one of those evenings which, during the months since the death of Jenny, his daughter had dutifully apportioned off, as if allowing him just so much time out of the more-than-ever crowded budget of her days.

In a sense this was true. Since the death of her mother a rigid, self-made rule, which she had not allowed to lapse in the fifteen months, except during the periods of absence from the city, had been to set apart two evenings of the week, either to accompany her father to a concert or opera, or remain with him in his library.

The concussion of her mother’s death, coming, as it should not have been permitted, out of an ignorance and innocence of the facts, had been an irritant that sent her skyrocketing into a state half noisy, half hysterical.

“I don’t give a damn for anything now!” she had cried, the morning they had begun to pluck the finery from the waiting hospital bed of Jenny, as you would pluck the feathers from a swan. She had gone rather consistently about not giving it.

“I’d be a fine one to go into mourning, wouldn’t I?”--when she troubled at all to explain. “She would be the first to hoot laughter at it. She despised long faces and emotional side-shows.”

That was probably true. There had been no ostensible period of mourning for Avery, even in the days when Jenny’s face had resembled a wax mask that was melting downward from the corners. To Rarick, the formal period of mourning did not even occur.

The affairs of household went on pretty much as usual, except that after the first blank weeks of shock, Jennifer began to cram the evenings with occasions. The formal dinner, never too frequent a function with Jenny, because of the strain of Rarick, who never attended, became the rule. The house glittered, that winter, with the clusters of lights at its portal going full blast, and the curb lined with motors. When the solemn doors swung backward, loiterers, who sometimes stood in line formation on both sides of the stoop, could glimpse the molten glow of Hispano Moresque art: the grand staircase that wound upward with the curving gesture of a lovely woman’s two arms; the liveried figures of butlers in knee-buckles and claret-reds; the round burning pool of the rose-window, with its dominant purple of crushed grape.

They were mixed parties Jennifer held that year, frantically-assembled parties, without social rhyme or reason; social-fringe assemblages that Jenny would have tried to avert; sometimes parties with the servants mopping up small pools of wine from the dining-room floor the morning afterward, and scraping the marred surface for fresh waxings.

In the main, Rarick did not protest, except on the occasion when young Rodney Martens, finding one of the butlers’ bicycles propped in a rear hall--where he must have been groping, between dances, for air to clear his fuddled brain--had ridden it into the ballroom about three o’clock in the morning, plunging into a great crystal-and-lapis-lazuli candelabrum of fifty bulbs, toppling it over, blowing the fuse, and crashing the evening into darkness, as he landed in a ringing mess that stirred the household and reached Rarick as he lay abed, sleepless.

“I dislike to have to mention it to you, Jennifer; you are no longer a child, but either you pick your friends with more discrimination or don’t have them here.”

That was the evening, seated over coffee, in the library, her eyes level and burning under her straight bang, that Jennifer burst forth:

“Let’s chuck it, Father. Sell the house!”

Sell the house! He could have told her, almost as far back as her mission to him in behalf of Cataract Lodge, that he had already sold it.

“That is,” she added, grinding out her cigarette with a sort of fierce enjoyment at the timeliness of her thrust, “unless you have already.”

He had.

“It’s a morgue. It’s a tomb. It’s a mausoleum. I hate it.”

“Then what?” he said, with his chin touching his shirt-front and his eyes up at her.

“Then what? Anything. Take me to--to Korea--Abyssinia--at least they are destinations.”

He regarded her slowly, as if he could not have done marveling that she had no wisdom. She had been away twice that winter. First to Paris, scuttling home after a month, full of what she called the French heebie-jeebies. Later on, there was a yachting cruise out of Florida waters, for which she must have stood sponsor for all expense. Rarick’s impulse, when Hellman presented him with bills amounting to twenty-one thousand dollars for this week’s divertissement, had been to discipline her by radical way of refusal, under threat of public declaration, to meet any such future expenditures! But when the time came for him to take up with her the matter of what he regarded as wanton and cruel waste, she took her place across the table-desk from him with a child-like obedience that made her suddenly seem very small to him and tortured, and something failed him. There was a wild kind of distress about Jennifer, these days. She had the look of a person who wants to rip open his collar for more air. She had the rolling look to her eye of someone frightened. The disagreeable thought smote Rarick that almost anything might happen to a girl that taut. What hurts you, Jennifer? he wanted to say to her. Tell me where the trouble lies?

She could not have told. He realized that. It is possible that he himself could have analyzed it before Jennifer. In those bruised and somehow resentful months after her mother’s death, self-analysis in Jennifer had given way before a sort of dull pride in her capacity for pain. You were wretched. You blazed away with a chronic kind of grief for the slender slab of Jenny lying out there beside Avery in her ivory casket lined in silver ailanthus leaves, that the Sunday papers had got wind of. Hers not to appraise. Hers only to clasp hands to a throat that was always thickening with tears, and hanker for the strange kind of maternity that had gone with Jenny.

“Jenny Rarick has left me in a hell-hole,” she once told Gratton, whom she was seeing on fitful occasions. “I can’t seem to get out of it, chiefly because I can’t seem to want to get out. Isn’t it strange, Gratt? I know I’m in hell, but I can’t want sufficiently to climb out. How do you make that out?”

“Stop trying to make yourself out, Jennifer,” he had replied. “That’s your trouble, perhaps.”

“I hate you,” she had replied to that, and walked out of his room. He did not follow. Waiting on the threshold outside his door for a moment, it had seemed to her that nothing ever in the world could matter so much as his following her, to unlock her clenched hand and tuck his into it. He, too, stood waiting on the room side of that door, waiting to do just that, his body rigid, though, against the move.

Rarick, trying as he had done all of her life, to clamber on to some basis of intimacy with this girl who was so shy of him, and again watching these months of her misbehavior, began, a little grimly, to understand.