Part 14

“You said once he didn’t have a chance with her.”

Arthur shrugged. “That’s when I wanted her myself. I used to think she could make me into a great guy. That she could and was holding back.”

“You didn’t exactly need her for that,” Larry said.

“I thought I did.”

“She might have been afraid you’d take advantage of her when she finished building you up,” Larry said. “The new, inflated you.”

“She might have been right,” Arthur agreed. “I never understood what I wanted from her and wasn’t getting. It came to me one afternoon when I was staring at the blank white space over my bed at the hospital. I wanted someone to tell me I was a great guy, every hour on the hour. Or look it if the words didn’t come out. She was too smart to settle for that,” he said.

“Before she went to China she wanted to come and see you. Steve said so.” Larry rang for a porter. He needed a drink.

“It would have been good to see her.” Arthur’s tone was calm, quiet. His sincerity seemed as unspotted as the white square that formed a headrest on the seat behind him. With or without steady limbs, with Janice or alone, Larry knew that he was in good shape inside.

Larry kicked at the suitcase under the opposite seat. “Look, try to take it easy when you get back. You’ll have to help Lucy. At first it may be a shock. Just the first few days----”

“These, you mean?” He pointed to the crutches.

“She’s prepared for them, but you’ll have to give her a chance to get used to-- You’ve always been so independent.”

“I’m--” The word stuck, and wouldn’t come. “Relaxed,” he said finally, rearranging his legs. “She won’t have to worry.”

Things went smoothly at Penn Station the next morning. The conductor had wired New York for a wheelchair to meet them, and a special attendant who was waiting on the platform in response to the telegram, seemed to know how to handle Arthur. He helped him into the chair, and later into a cab. The taxi driver was okay, too, and got right into the spirit of things. At the door of the house on Eighty-second Street Lucy watched, pale and quiet, and the cabbie stayed close by, supporting Bemrose into the hall and up the carpeted steps to the second floor. There was a bad moment at about the fifth or sixth step when Arthur lost his purchase and grabbed the railing. Figuring that Bemrose would manage better alone Larry shoved some bills into the driver’s hand and dismissed him. Arthur made it quite easily to the landing with only slight support from Larry.

Upstairs in the sitting room, sunshine crowded through the white mesh of curtains. A bowl of pink roses, bedded fern in a miniature glass bowl, brightened the coffee table.

“Well, this is pleasant.” Arthur smiled at Lucy, and his face resumed its old easy contour. He indicated the flowers. “They’re like the wallpaper you wanted for the bedroom last year,” he said.

“Are you tired from the trip? Shall I turn down your bed?” She leaned over him.

“I’d like a cup of tea,” he said. “Those stripes in the bedroom were a mistake. We should have had roses,” he admitted.

* * * * *

Later that day Larry told Bess that it wasn’t easy to see a strong man like Arthur Bemrose unbend. If Bess could have heard him on the train, trying to say thank you-- It made Larry feel like a heel to have him grateful. What was there for him to be so goddam grateful about? What had he done? Sit in the hospital with him? Bring him back to New York? Anyone would have helped a friend who was in the shape that Bemrose was.

Bessie refused to be upset over his illness. “You’ll see, Larry. It will do him good to know what trouble is. He had things easy for too long,” she insisted.

“You talk like all he had now was the measles,” Larry said, somewhat put out by her callousness. “This illness isn’t something he’ll get over in a few weeks.”

“He needed some real trouble,” Bessie repeated. “You watch, he’ll get along better with his wife after this.”

“But he can’t control his legs. His hands shake when he goes to light a cigarette,” Larry explained.

She poured him a fresh drink, and as he watched her plumply sensuous fingers around the glass, he remembered it was weeks that he had been missing her. Steve Holmes could have his girls in Florida. All he had wanted and had missed down there was Bessie.

“If he goes back into practice, why don’t you take that job he offered you a long time ago?” She splashed whiskey generously over the ice cubes. “You’d be able to help him get back on his feet, and it might not be so bad for you this time. He sounds much nicer than he used to be, not like such a boss.”

If not for Bemrose’s illness, it might have ended by his hating him, Larry realized. The process had already begun before Bemrose left for the Army. Larry couldn’t keep on accepting favors from him and not rebel eventually against the indebtedness. Now that he was able to do something for Arthur, now that it was two-way, he ought to be able to live around him again.

“Go on, help him out at the office,” Bessie urged.

Larry walked over to her and flattened a round curl against her cheek. “We’ll decide that later,” he said. “Right now I have other things on my mind.”

She pressed her lips unaggressively on his. “Were the meals on the train any good, Larry?”

_Chapter 17_

One June afternoon Bemrose stood on his crutches in front of the doctor’s office waiting for Larry to hail a cab at the corner. The dust of Eighty-third Street, gold in the five o’clock sun, touched the pavement with the light, speech, and feel of full summer. Across Madison Avenue the weathered brick of an old building glowed warm and solid behind swaying, languorous sycamores. No change of weather threatened. Summer had floated into the city, settled quietly, and was prepared to stay.

The doorman where Arthur’s doctor had an office must have left the front entrance to get a cup of coffee. The block seemed under lock and key. Bits of paper lay motionless in the street, and the windows of the apartments above sheered off empty and sightless. Larry started toward Madison Avenue for a cab when a pleasant older woman came out of the house, and finding no doorman, chatted with Bemrose. She called after Larry to get another cab for her if he could find one.

He gestured and whistled until a decrepit vehicle pulled up to the curb. Jumping on the runningboard, he directed the driver to Arthur who was shifting uncomfortably on his crutches, tired from the long wait and the strain of seeing the doctor. Larry offered the cab to the woman, but she assured him that she was in no hurry. He started to protest when Arthur thanked her and hobbled toward the taxi. A few months ago he probably wouldn’t have accepted such a favor, but now he didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He was soon chatting easily with the cab driver.

Larry noticed that Arthur went out of his way these days to make friends with people who performed the anonymous minor services--waiters, doormen, elevator operators, telephone girls and newsdealers. At a restaurant yesterday he soothed a belligerent waiter by asking whether he had ever made goulash and if, in his opinion, the sauce of the establishment’s product, which Arthur had ordered for lunch, were the right color. The waiter, a Hungarian, transferred the remaining beef cubes to Arthur’s plate, and spooning the sauce expertly, solemnly pronounced that real goulash should be a darker brown. He urged him to come back the next day when _sauerbraten_, the house special, would be served with _spaetzle_ and a sauce he could underwrite.

More people seemed to tell Bemrose their troubles now, probably figuring that a man on crutches knew about trouble and would understand. The cab driver was unloading his grievances against the Mayor, railing against the new traffic regulations and clarifying what the Mayor, in his opinion, could do to himself. He passed a soiled piece of paper to them through the lowered glass partition, and Larry saw it was a ticket for speeding.

Bemrose invited the driver to call him about the ticket in the morning, and asked Larry to write out the office phone number for the man whose name, according to a card facing them, was McGuinn. Before many more red lights his new client was offering Arthur a divorce case, something Haynes and Bemrose never touched, even when it meant alienating good clients of the firm. In the month since Larry had gone to work for Bemrose as his office manager, Arthur had insisted on referring three divorce actions, which involved good clients, to less fastidious colleagues, unwilling to mar the Haynes tradition of never handling a domestic matter. But now he seemed interested in the cab driver’s difficulties.

“I’m having trouble-trouble with my wife,” the man explained, taking sulky jerks at his steering wheel. “They say it’s tough-tough to get a divorce in New York the way things-things is bolixed up.”

“What’s the matter with your wife?” Arthur asked. The fellow’s double-jointed stutter had the effect of unlimbering his own speech.

“She never run-runs around,” McGuinn vouchsafed.

“Money troubles?”

But McGuinn apparently made out all right. His brothers owned property in Brooklyn near Coney, and cut him in regularly on rent from two of the houses. He had paid an income tax last year.

“Any children?” Bemrose prompted.

McGuinn whipped out a cellophane-covered snapshot of Georgie, Jr., drooling on a bib. The youngster seemed to be rolling up his daily weight gain.

“A youngster like that ought to keep you together.” Bemrose blew some dust off the cellophane and handed the picture back to McGuinn.

“We just don’t jell-jell,” McGuinn explained. “I’m a-always asking for night work because it’s no good-good going home.”

“Why? Doesn’t your wife make you a nice home?”

“She’s a swell-swell cook,” McGuinn admitted. “She keeps the house clean, and she irons my shirts-shirts, but we don’t j-jell. We ain’t the right combi-combination.”

“And you want a divorce?” Arthur asked.

“I was think-thinking of it.”

A red light held them up, and Bemrose leaned back, his eyes half closed. “Go easy on this divorce proposition,” he said. “Better make sure you want one. You have a nice home, nice kid, and your wife’s not chasing other men. What are you looking for--excitement?”

“I saw a guy pull-pull a hold-up a block from here,” McGuinn volunteered.

“That’s the point,” Bemrose said. “You can see all the hold-ups, murders, street brawls, knifings, and race riots you want for excitement. If things get dull in this neighborhood, you can drive up to Seventh Avenue.”

“Maybe I should be satis-satisfied,” McGuinn conceded. “She’s a sweet-sweet kid, but you know. Blah!” He threw out his underlip in disgust.

“Supposing you do live on milk and crackers at home. You can order steak when you go out,” Bemrose told him.

“I guess you’re right, boss. I know it ain’t easy to get un-unhitched.”

“Ain’t always good sense,” Bemrose echoed. He handed McGuinn a twenty-five cent tip, but the driver shook his head.

“Figure they pay you more than two-two bits for advice,” he said. “I got off cheap. Call you in the morning, boss, about the t-ticket. Watch your head with them crutches.”

While they waited for someone to answer the doorbell, Larry said, “You did all right. I didn’t know you could do such a job of selling marriage. You sounded like an old hand.”

“What the hell? By the time that guys pays for a divorce and finds himself a floozy-- What’s he going to get that’s any better?”

Lucy opened the door, and if Bemrose had wanted to present his new client, McGuinn, with an argument for marriage, he couldn’t have found a better example than Mrs. Bemrose in a sheer dark blue dress with sleeves that showed the creamy white of her upper arms. There had been changes in Lucy these past months, Larry decided. Having something to do, someone to look after had given her an animated look of accomplishment.

As if to demonstrate her new security, she kissed Arthur full on the lips before she stepped aside to let them into the house. He slid his crutches onto a hall chair, and Larry spontaneously kissed her, too, wanting to for the first time he could remember, somehow warmed by her new awareness. He invited himself to stay for a drink before Lucy had a chance to tell him about the Martinis that were mixed and waiting upstairs.

She asked to hear the details of their visit to the doctor’s. Larry debated how much of the truth he should tell her. So far the doctor had remained fairly noncommittal in his talks with her. Larry himself went out of his way to report signs of progress in Bemrose which he noted at the office. The day Arthur walked twenty feet to the water cooler without crutches, Larry phoned her at once. She’d be encouraged to fuss more over Arthur’s comfort, Larry felt, if she thought he were improving. Her optimism would be communicated to Arthur.

Recently Larry had begun to wonder whether this somewhat unrealistic optimism might someday react unfavorably. Lucy might reproach him for his lack of candor someday when she found out that Arthur really hadn’t improved. He had learned to use his crutches with greater skill, and he was more resigned to his condition, but the nerve sheaths had not healed. Larry had considered easing Lucy into the facts, gently while he reported what the doctor had said, but in this pleasant room, on an unruffled summer day, with Bemrose apparently contented and reconciled, Larry decided to continue the deception until some marked change in Arthur necessitated greater frankness.

“Did the doctor really think he was better?” Her gray eyes widened.

“He’s doing fine.” Larry studied the stem of his cocktail glass. “The doctor expects him to have a remission any time now.”

The old anxiety, when she worried about Arthur’s dislike of the Daughertys, shadowed her forehead.

“That’s nothing bad. His symptoms will disappear. That’s what it means.” Larry laughed deep and low.

“Oh.” Slowly the concern thawed from her face. “That’s wonderful. Do you hear, Arthur? The doctor says you’ll be well.”

Instantly Larry regretted having extended her hopes. He might have let things ride along, saying that the doctor had found Arthur about the same. Actually he had been discouraged that Bemrose’s walking had not improved at a faster rate. The doctor told Larry privately today that he might decide to try typhoid shots or sodium cacodylate if there weren’t a change soon.

“Aren’t you happy about it, Arthur? Isn’t it wonderful?” Lucy asked eagerly.

“I’m very happy,” he said quietly.

Larry had as little faith in Bemrose’s seeming contentment as in today’s summer weather. First, second, and last Arthur was a realist, and if he thought protest would benefit his condition, he’d demonstrate noisily. Since quiet and placidity seemed indicated, he remained calm. While he was insecure and helpless, Arthur would behave and be docile around Lucy. The change in him was probably opportunist, the way a small boy behaves when he has to. Larry would have liked to believe that the transformation went deeper. A major illness _might_ have that effect on some men, but he couldn’t convince himself that Bemrose had gone through any fundamental change.

The upstairs telephone jangled noisily, and Bemrose’s calm left him as he picked up the receiver and talked to Davis Shore. Larry saw puckers of concern gather in his chin.

“Anything wrong?” he asked when Arthur hung up.

“How can I tell?” Bemrose’s hand shook as he fingered a crease in his trousers. “He wants to see me tomorrow morning about that appeal, the one that has been up for months, since long before I went into service. I can’t understand why he’s in a hurry. Court has recessed.”

“What time are you seeing him in the morning?”

“Eight a.m.”

“Oh, Arthur--” Lucy put out her hand in a frightened stab at authority, but the unfamiliar power conferred by his helplessness soon drifted through her fingers. “You’re supposed to sleep until eight. The doctor told us----”

“Does Shore know you’ve been sick?” Larry asked.

“Who doesn’t know?” Bemrose asked with unexpected bitterness. Or self-pity.

“Everyone understands, and everyone is sympathetic,” Lucy protested. “You could have asked Mr. Shore to make it later. He would have understood.”

Larry tried to warn her. “That’s all right. I’ll pick Arthur up in the morning.”

With synthetic brightness, she changed her tack. “You haven’t told me how you like working at the office, Larry.”

“Is anyone supposed to like working?”

She hesitated a moment before her laugh caught on. It lapped at the ceiling and flowed in ripples toward the wall.

“We’ll make a decent lawyer out of him if he gives us time,” Bemrose said.

“I have to take that, too,” Larry objected. “It isn’t enough that I see his bills are paid and he stays out of jail.”

“Does he order you around?” Lucy asked, taking up Larry’s line of abuse.

“He orders everyone around. That poor Miss Thompson. Have you ever _seen_ Miss Thompson?” He covered his eyes.

“She looks very intelligent,” Lucy said.

“Intelligence isn’t what I admire in women. I like women who keep their brains out of their faces.”

“I gave her money a year ago to buy herself a new hat. Did she ever buy it?” Bemrose asked.

“What she needs is one of those schools that give you a new personality,” Larry insisted.

“Maybe just a trip to the beauty parlor regularly,” Lucy suggested.

“Beauty’s too much to expect,” Larry insisted. “A less-than-ugly-parlor.”

Bemrose shook with quiet laughter. “She’s been around so long,” he said helplessly. “I never bothered to look. I never took the time.”

“He must be a busy man,” Larry said to Lucy. “I’d just as soon look at the lawyer who used to share my office, and he never won any beauty prize. Did I ever tell you about Moe? He was this big--” Larry measured his shoulder. “And he used to get a cold water permanent for the hair growing out of his ears.”

“Oh, Larry--” Lucy laughed and the threat of Davis Shore’s phone call was forgotten for the moment.

In a little while, when Larry felt they were both all right, he got up to go. He had walked as far as the stairway when Bemrose called after him, “Don’t break your neck to get here in the morning. I have a hunch Shore isn’t going to keep the appointment.”

_Chapter 18_

Arthur invited the poker crowd to play at his house on a hot Saturday night in July. It was the first time the boys had visited him at Eighty-second Street. The game was set up in the dining room where Cy O’Malley, Tremont, Dick Reber, Hagerty, Chuck Adams, Paul Schmid, Lucy’s Uncle Ed, and Jack Michaels, a friend of Ed’s, were hard at play. Bemrose, who sat in the game for a while, was taking it easy now, stretched out on a sofa in the air-conditioned living room, visiting with Larry and with Edna Michaels.

The Michaels were new friends whom Marge and Ed Daugherty had brought around recently. Edna came from Albany and reminded Bemrose that they used to walk home from school together. Once he might have shied off Edna because she came from Albany, but ever since his illness, he seemed to want to talk about the old days. Maybe this recollection of his childhood relieved Arthur, or maybe it was just that he liked Edna.

Tonight Larry noted that Edna sat with one foot twisted under her in a defiance of comfort which seemed to pattern her life. She had left home at sixteen when her mother forbade her to squander a week’s salary on a red straw hat. Edna bought the hat, bummed a ride to New York, and as rapidly as nature’s lethargic process would permit, gave birth to a girl and boy by different men, unencumbered by marriage. She supported the children working as Jack Michaels’ secretary, learned the textile business from him, and when she became indispensable during and after business hours, he married her. That was ten years ago, and there had been another son by Jack who amiably transferred his name to the preceding anonymous offspring.

An unretouched white that streaked Edna’s dark hair was the only index to these rather severe episodes. Larry noted that she had retained her plump cheeks, unlined lips, and firm, single chin, but not by taking care of herself, he knew. In the milieu of lava around Edna, things exploded, seethed, boiled, erupted, or went dramatically flat. The source of eruption was always Edna herself who, even on days that ran smoothly, had a trick of inflating phases, moods, and chance incidents into “problems.” Edna’s ’teen age children did not merely refuse to wash or dress neatly, but “went through adolescence” with all the farce and tragedy she could inject into the inevitable transition. Her servants were not drab recruits from Harlem’s wage-earning thousands, but “types,” meriting the bold master stroke of a Hemingway. Instead of going through an early menopause aided by sound therapy, Edna manufactured enough adrenalin, thyroid, and estrogens to swing her giddily over the troughs of depression which bogged down other women. Since Jack Michaels had rescued her from major catastrophe, she had constantly been in minor trouble, synthesized, Larry decided, for the pleasure Edna had in telling about it.

Arthur bought aisle seats to Edna’s performances. He was encouraging her now to tell Larry a story she had excavated earlier in the week about the Albany days. Bemrose’s head lay back on the sofa as he laughingly recalled the details.

“Tell him about the time your brother Micky tied fifty knots in the sheets my mother hung up in the yard. Tell him what she did,” he urged.

“Clapped his ears and said his father must be a crook and his mother a whore to have such a kid.” Edna fluttered her eyelids in a false show of refinement.

“That was my mother all right. Her language upset my father’s sense of what was decent and proper. He was furious the time she rented an apartment over a garage. Do you remember that place?”

Edna nodded. “There was nothing wrong with it. It had steam heat.”

“It didn’t have a street address. My father worried what to tell people when they came to visit us. ‘We can’t tell them we live _between_ number one forty-five and one forty-six,’ he’d say.”

“Couldn’t you tell them one forty-five and a half?” Larry asked.

“My mother wasn’t bothered for a minute. The rent was cheap, and it was the first steam-heated place we’d ever lived in. The entire two years we stayed there my father refused to invite anyone to the house.”

“People couldn’t stay away from your mother. They came anyway.” Edna talked rapidly with teeth that worked up and down like a cutting edge. “My mother always said she’d bust if she couldn’t tell Mrs. Bemrose her troubles.”

“She never went to school past the third grade, but all sorts of people used to ask her advice,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “The high school principal scared most of us. He was a quiet scared little man himself, a history teacher who lived in the time of Alexander the Great. He hated administrative work, and cut interviews short with the students so he could get back to his research. My mother went to see him about a college scholarship for me, and he kept her in his office for three and a half hours.” Arthur shrugged. “I still don’t know what they talked about, but I remember mother invited him to have coffee with us above the garage, and my father almost died of shame.”

Bemrose bent over and rubbed his legs which were stretched lifelessly on the sofa. “She insists they talked about children. He probably wanted her advice on how to run the school.” His voice, low and rhythmic when he was relaxed like this, gave Larry as much pleasure as a good performance at the theater. “A Mrs. Allen, one of the society women in town, took a shine to mother when she came to talk to her once about a neighborhood settlement house. Every month after that mother was invited for coffee at the Allens’ big place near the country club.”