Part 15

“I never saw the inside of a nice house until I moved away,” Edna Michaels said. “Until I was seventeen, I never knew people had dining rooms.”

“You think _you_ were poor,” Arthur protested. “I still can’t spend fifteen cents for a shine without feeling guilty. Do you know how many miles I used to walk to save fifteen cents?”

He had always tried to walk away from it, Larry decided, by excelling at college, by pushing and stretching his talent in practice, and by overdoing for others.

“Do you remember the time you shined my dad’s shoes with the wrong polish?” Edna asked.

Lucy and Marge, who had been busy in the dining room serving drinks, came over to empty the ash trays. Arthur made room for Lucy on the sofa next to him. “Go on, Edna, I’d like Lucy to hear.”

“You usually came around on Saturdays to sell dad a shine,” Edna reminded him. “I think you charged three cents, but most of the time he didn’t have that much on him. This Saturday he was flush and told you to go ahead. The kitchen was dark, and you shined his brown shoes with black polish. Boy, was he mad when he found out! He sent me right over the next morning to get you.”

Delighted, Arthur pressed Lucy’s hand. “I’ll never forget that Sunday. It was way below zero, and the garage pipes were frozen solid.”

“Dad threatened to sue you if you didn’t pay for the shoes,” Edna said.

“Hell, they were probably his only pair. They laced up high and must have cost him five dollars. It took me about a year, but I paid him back, didn’t I? Ten cents a week. I used to have nightmares about going to jail.”

“Kids always worry about things like that,” Edna added. “Once I knocked against a stove at a hardware store, and something crashed. I was sure the stove was broken, and I’d be locked up if the storekeeper found me. I ran out of the place scared, and for years wouldn’t walk near the block.”

“You don’t think your old man was mean enough to have me put in jail?” Arthur asked.

“He was mean enough, all right.”

“Mine was the sweetest, the mildest--” Bemrose looked thoughtful. “I didn’t know him well, not even as well as I knew the high school principal. As a kid I didn’t try to understand him, I took him for granted. Most of his life he was broke, and when he finally got hold of some money, he gave it away. A distant cousin looked me up not long ago and said my father had given him the money to finish medical school. He has a good practice now, and wanted to repay the family.”

“What’s his name? The doctor’s?” Marge said. The cross-hatching showed clearly under her eyes, and her mouth set tightly.

“Feeling nauseous?” Lucy picked up Marge’s hand which fell limply to her lap again.

Bemrose looked at Marge and reached for his crutches. He hobbled to the phone, balancing carefully on the telephone stool. Tremont Friendly called to him from the dining room to take a hand in the game, but Arthur went on dialing. “Ask him to do it as a special favor for Mr. Bemrose,” he told the operator.

On his way back to the sofa, Bemrose touched Marge’s cheek affectionately. “Make yourself comfortable upstairs,” he said. “The doctor will be over. I left word with the messenger service to reach him.”

“Why didn’t you let me phone for you?” Larry protested.

A few minutes later chairs shifted in the dining room, and Ed Daugherty wandered in with Jack Michaels. He glanced around nervously and asked for Marge.

“Upstairs resting,” Arthur told him. “What’s the matter? Is the game breaking up?”

“We’re sitting out a round or two,” Ed explained. “She hasn’t one of her migraines, has she?” he asked anxiously.

“I think Lucy said her stomach’s upset,” Arthur told him, and Edna nodded.

“She shouldn’t have had the shrimp salad,” Ed pulled gravely at his pipe. “She can’t take care of seafood, and she’s always ordering it. She’s allergic to shrimp.”

“Remember the Saturday we thumbed a ride out to the lake?” Edna broke in.

“Your brother was sent to bring us back,” Arthur assisted her.

“Can’t you two stop rehashing old times?” Ed sounded irritable. “What’s going to happen, Arthur? Are we or aren’t we going to open a second front? We seem to be taking our time.”

A second front. Less than a year ago he thought we should stay out altogether, Larry reflected. The hindsighters always were good at making a big noise, as if to cover up their wrong guesses.

“The Army’s not paying me to think any more,” Arthur said.

“You read the papers, don’t you?” Ed snapped. “All this dillydallying! Troops sitting over in England and Ireland twiddling their thumbs.”

Their guns, Larry silently corrected.

“There’s no reason why we should be pushed into anything until we’re thoroughly prepared,” Arthur said. “There’s no percentage in losing the few trained men we have.”

Some of the poker players trooped in from the dining room and gathered around Arthur.

“How about a little aggravation?” Cy O’Malley nodded toward the card table.

“You seem to be doing all right without me. Maybe Larry would like to sit in.”

“The host should be in the game,” Tremont reminded him.

“Ask Emil Post,” Chuck said, kidding Terry. “Come on, Arthur, you’ll never get another chance to play with us in a swell, air-cooled dump like this. Wait until Danny hears about the uptown competition.”

“Where’s Lucy?” Cy O’Malley looked around.

“She went upstairs with my wife,” Ed replied. “My wife’s allergic to seafood, and she ordered shrimp----”

“Tell Lucy to come down so I can make love to her.” Cy went to the dining room to find his highball, and on his way back called up the stairs. “Hey, Beautiful, come on down, I want to make love to you.”

Arthur laughed and turned to Edna Michaels. “My pals.”

Cy called to the others. “Time is money. What are we waiting for?” He settled on the arm of Edna’s chair and offered her a drink out of his glass. “Have you been here all evening?” Helplessly he addressed the others. “Why do we have to play poker when there are beautiful women around?”

Tremont lingered behind. “Sure you won’t join us, Arthur?”

“Not just now. The doctor’s coming over, and I’d have to quit anyway.”

“I’m sorry.” Terry looked concerned. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Thanks, but I’m feeling all right. He’s not coming to see me.”

Terry puckered his lips old-maidishly. “It’s sweet of you to have us up, Arthur. You know how much we all appreciate it, and we want to thank Mrs. Bemrose for going to the trouble----”

Cy whooped from the dining room, “Sandwiches!” and rushed in with a plate of food. “Found them covered up on the sideboard.”

“Maybe Mrs. Bemrose wanted to save them for later,” Terry protested.

“Uhnnufu.” Cy stuffed his mouth with sliced ham and rye bread. Swallowing, he said, “Danny can take lessons from Mrs. Beautiful,” and started back to the dining room, the plate tilted precariously.

From the doorway he turned around and winked at Edna.

Waving to him she said to Arthur, “They’re quite a gang.”

“The last few years I lost track of what really went on with any of them. I got too busy.” He turned to Larry for confirmation. “Larry tried to brief me. He was always telling me not to swap old friends for new clients, but a fellow gets--” Bemrose faltered. “A fellow gets caught up,” he finished.

“They feel swell about your inviting them. Reber and Hagerty told me it was the best session we’ve had since college,” Larry said.

“They’re good boys.”

Bemrose took an envelope out of his pocket and drew the diagram of a parlor problem in geometry which had to do with burning a hole in a carpet, and by one strategic cut, piecing the carpet into a standard size rug. “They’re right on the ball,” he said, preoccupied. “More than can be said for the clients. When the boys heard I was sick, they all wanted to know what they could do, but the clients, particularly the ones I thought were my friends----”

“Marge and Ed have been mighty attentive,” Larry reminded him.

“My own family couldn’t have done more. If I had a family that acted like one,” Arthur explained to Edna. “Not that I blame the folks. I lost touch with them, too, except for mailing a check home every month.”

“Has your mother been down since you’re sick?” Edna asked.

“My sister, Helen, still has t.b., and mother had to go to the mountains with her,” Bemrose explained.

“Give me her address, I’d like to write to her.”

Bemrose started Jack Michaels and Ed Daugherty on the rug problem and they worked silently with pencil and paper while he napped and Larry sat quietly with Edna, hearing the slap of poker chips from the next room.

When the doorbell rang, Lucy called down to Larry. The servants were out for the evening. Lucy had purposely let them go out so the boys would feel more at home.

The doctor, a harassed man with blotchy complexion and inflated cheeks, asked anxiously at the door, “Did Mr. Bemrose have an accident?”

“No, he’s fine,” Larry assured him. “It’s Mrs. Bemrose’s aunt. She took sick suddenly.”

“A neurological case?”

“You’d better talk to Mr. Bemrose before you go up.”

Larry returned to the next room and tapped Arthur’s shoulder. Bemrose instinctively reached for his crutches when he awakened, the way a myopic feels for his eyeglasses in the morning.

Larry pointed toward the hallway and whispered the message to Arthur, trying not to attract Ed’s attention.

“I’ll go up with him,” Arthur volunteered.

“Talk to him in the hall. I’ll take him up.”

“No, I want to.” Stubbornly Bemrose swung to the door and greeted the doctor whom he invited to follow him.

“Let me,” Larry offered.

“Marge would do it for me,” Arthur insisted, and handing his crutches to Larry, managed the stairs alone by clinging to the handrail.

Larry kibitzed the game a while, and finally had the boys deal him in. He lost fifteen dollars in the next half hour. Paul Schmid suggested that they quit, ribbing him about starting to play too late to get his money back, but Larry didn’t mind the loss. He was anxious to clear out so that the Bemroses could look after Marge undisturbed.

When the boys went in to say goodnight a little later, the doctor had gone and Arthur, Lucy, and Marge were downstairs in the living room. Larry sat down next to Marge. “Is it serious?” he asked.

“I have to go to another doctor in the morning and take a test.” She rolled her eyes and pressed Larry’s arm. “Don’t say anything to Ed.”

“Have you figured out the rug problem?” Larry called over.

Ed’s eyes looked red from rubbing them. “It’s a stickler, all right. Are you sure it can be done with one cut?”

“Absolutely. Your nephew solved it in ten minutes.”

“Arthur did?” Ruefully Ed took out his watch. “We must have been at it half an hour.”

At the door Cy picked up Lucy, tossed her in the air, and kissed her goodbye on both cheeks.

Breathlessly she tried to answer Larry about Marge. “Arthur will remember the name of the test.”

“Ascheim-Zondek,” Arthur said.

“You mean she might be--” Incredulously Larry looked at Marge.

Outside the entrance Ed was mopping his face and complaining about the heat.

_Chapter 19_

The old problem of what to do about Tammany plagued Larry. A few days ago, about eight weeks before the city election, he had been approached to take a special job in the clubhouse of his district. It wasn’t a Mayoralty election year, and the assignment wouldn’t involve much work, but now that Larry was on the firm’s payroll, he wanted to discuss it with Bemrose.

Arthur was watching two window washers who swung from their leather straps on the ledge outside his office window. It was like working on the top mast of a ship fifty stories high and made Larry dizzy to look at them.

He sat down next to Arthur’s desk where the windowsill screened the penthouse of the Bankers Club next door and gave him the illusion of being at sea. A river barge seemed to disappear between the buildings. When Larry mentioned this visual illusion, Arthur explained the operation of the barge canal system around New York: Newtown creek, Coney Island creek, the Gowanus canal, Flushing creek, and Mill Basin on Jamaica bay where coal, oil, cement, and carload freight unloaded. Arthur knew these obscure waterways as well as most New Yorkers knew the piers where the giant liners tied up. Before the War he had fancied himself a marine expert and always kept the shipping page of the _New York Times_ on his desk. Even without referring to it he could identify most of the freighters in the river as well as the lesser craft.

Larry explained the recent Tammany proposal. “They’ll come back,” Larry prophesied. “A political organization always comes back. There’s reform for a while and things are reshuffled, but the public eventually tires of reform and wants a change. When that happens, Tammany is organized to get out the votes. Things are back where they started, with a new set of faces on the billboards but the same local bosses running things.”

“Don’t waste your time with Fourteenth Street. Hook up with the labor crowd,” Arthur advised him.

They had been over it all before. Larry tried to explain that the American Labor Party would have to play ball with Tammany if it expected to get anywhere in the city. The present Fusion crowd had found that the Mayor played footie with Tammany Hall when he needed extra votes. If Larry started with a new organization, he explained to Bemrose, he’d have to sacrifice his equity in Tammany Hall and begin at the bottom with a set-up that probably would lose. That was the history of many third-party movements. They served as a healthy public irritant, very often, and they influenced elections, but they seldom turned out a decisive vote. Larry had been through the leanest years with Tammany. By ’45 the Hall would elect its candidate for Mayor and come back. They would pick a man who looked independent, but he would be a Tammany man. No matter what kind of front the Hall gave him. And the A.L.P., in return for post-election favors, would back Tammany. If Larry stuck it out, he’d be entitled to a plum himself.

“What makes you think they’ll pay off?” Bemrose asked.

“Give them till the end of forty-five, and they will.”

“Like hell they will. The local political system in this country stinks. When a good man joins an organization and is willing to work, he’s buried in a clubhouse while the top manipulators who keep out of the newspapers run the show and hand their private yes-men the judgeships.”

“That’s why fellows like you don’t monkey with politics,” Larry said. He sometimes wished that he could stay out himself, but the political habit was strong in him.

“The system soils a man all the way up. Until he becomes President,” Bemrose said. “Even then he’s not always able to wash it off. Personally, I think it’s a mistake for the President to mix in local politics.”

“They all do,” Larry protested. “It’s what keeps the organization together.”

“Well, it’s wrong.”

“Take your own case, Arthur. If they offered you a job in Washington now, you’d probably grab it with the War going on. As soon as the War ended, you’d go right back to private practice and keep on practicing until someone decided you were Supreme Court material. You’d get out of the public eye fast. How can we have first class men in public office as long as fellows like you won’t stick?”

“I don’t know the answer,” Arthur admitted. “We ought to pay good men more. We should educate the public to respect men who make a career of Congress.”

“Are you kidding?” Larry asked. “With characters like Bilbo in Washington, do you expect people to take Congress seriously?”

“It’s a paradox, but the people are always better than the government they elect,” Bemrose pointed out. “They are, you know. It isn’t true that they get the government they deserve, or that the government they elect represents them. Look at the people organizing right now to fight the War. When they really want to tackle a job----”

“They don’t think local politics are important,” Larry said. “They can’t see struggling to elect a guy who is going to sit in Congress with Bilbo.”

“Damn it, it is important!”

“Well, if it’s important, I’d better stick to Tammany Hall,” Larry said. He thought of Judge Haynes’ private contempt for “the people” and wondered how far Bemrose had freed himself from the Judge’s influence.

Arthur’s secretary announced Davis Shore, and Bemrose suggested that Larry stay in the room.

“I meant to--” Arthur swallowed, awaiting the next word. “I was going to ask you to sit in anyway. You ought to meet the clients.”

It wasn’t necessary for the managing lawyer to meet clients, Larry knew, but he appreciated the effort to make him feel like part of the firm. He had avoided Davis Shore ever since that glimpse of him at Bemrose’s reception when Shore clumsily tried to extricate himself from the tête-à-tête with Lucy.

“I’d rather not stay,” he decided.

“Oh, sit down.”

Davis Shore padded in and halted expectantly in front of Bemrose’s desk.

“Mr. Frank, my associate.”

Larry jumped up and offered Shore his chair, although there were three others vacant.

“Frank, Frank, there used to be a member of the Board at Southern Power and Light--” Shore hung on to Larry’s hand as he traced the relationship. He hoarded his voice so that it was high and as immature as the babyfine white hair.

“All my folks live in Brooklyn!” Larry overshook Shore’s hand.

“I didn’t know Arthur had a new associate,” Shore said, bewildered. “Very helpful right now to have a good friend about.” He indicated the crutches. “Excellent idea to have an associate right at the elbow.”

Arthur sucked at his cheeks and shifted his legs restlessly. The marbles seemed to be back in his mouth, impeding his speech.

“I guess you want to talk business, I’d better be going,” Larry said, louder than he intended. He knew how to act when he met an important client like Shore. Only it was coming out wrong. Bemrose should have known better than to try and bring them together. With a snob like Shore, Arthur would have had to submit drawings in advance of Larry’s family tree. He knew that Davis Shore picked lawyers with the right social connections, as much as he selected them for their ability.

Larry wondered in what decade the social circles in American life began to crystallize. Way back, he guessed. When some of the early statesmen wrote of equality, they really meant an exchange among those who already were social equals. They described a uniform society of landowners, with non-agrarian whites and Negroes excluded. The distinction persisted and had intensified with each generation. Davis Shore of Oyster Bay didn’t sit down to dinner with Larry Frank of Second Avenue if he could help it. Nor with Arthur Bemrose divorced from the impressive Judge Haynes connection. It wasn’t a pleasant realization, but Larry had come to accept it, and Arthur should have known better than to try and cross the line.

On the way back to his desk down the corridor, Larry recalled a letter of introduction which Haynes had given a prominent American jurist to Didier. “See that he meets some of the legal brains of France,” Haynes had written. “You needn’t bother to entertain him socially. I don’t think he’s interested in society.... I will be careful in the future, my old one, not to abuse your hospitality and will refer only very special people to you.”

Larry reflected on Judge Haynes’s honesty with Didier. “I will be careful to refer only very special people.... You needn’t bother to introduce him to society.” A man might be an eminent jurist, and still not an acceptable dinner companion. Haynes, with his worldly shrewdness, had accepted that narrow and unpleasant reality. Arthur had accepted it while Haynes was alive.

Since the War, since Janice, since his illness, Bemrose had begun to construct a world without those barriers, a cellophane overlay he superimposed on the old social map. Bemrose had perhaps started with the wrong two men--Shore and himself--but Larry realized that if he were not part of the experiment and had not smarted under Shore’s patronizing scrutiny, he’d be cheering for Bemrose. As it was, he cheered with his emotions but not with his common sense instincts.

Larry occupied an office next to a large room which housed the secretarial staff. Miss Thompson, who kept the girls quiet while she was at her desk, did it unconsciously with the cold set of her masculine features. As Larry turned into his room, he saw that her office chair was vacant. The girls buzzed in a happy release of spirits.

“I swear it’s the truth,” said the assistant who came to work in open-toed shoes and no stockings. “He said I could quit any time Joe got a furlough.” She giggled nervously. “He used to hit the ceiling when I threatened to quit. That’s how I got my last three raises.”

“’Ja hear what he did with Mr. Osterlink?” The file clerk crossed her feet and fluttered some papers she was putting into a folder. “He called in Mr. Osterlink and gave him a raise before he even asted, and if there’s a father’s draff, Mr. Osterlink will have to go.” She jerked her thumb toward the door. “He didn’t even ast for the raise. Canyuh imagine?”

The other girl sighed. “A big change has come over Mr. Bemrose. It must be because he’s sick.”

“He’s just learnin’ to appreciate. You wait ’til some more of ’em are drafted. They’ll all start appreciatin’.”

“He’s sadder since he came back from the Army.” The older girl mooned in her chair. “Even when he’s nice and talks to you, it makes you feel like bawling.”

“Doesn’t make me--” The girl clicked the file drawer shut.

Miss Thompson’s rubber heels, tapping the linoleum, silenced them, and Larry tried to concentrate on the proof of a brief.

A shriek roused him, and he saw Miss Thompson rush to her window. He hurried to his own. A man in shirtsleeves, balanced precariously, walked the narrow ledge of the penthouse next door, swaying as he placed one cautious foot in front of another, his arms waving in the wind.

“Quick, Mr. Frank! He’s trying to commit suicide,” Miss Thompson called. She dashed over to his door. “I’ll phone the police.”

The man had turned the corner, and his left foot slipped off the ledge. Larry gripped the windowsill, as if to maintain the man’s balance for him.

“The police are there now!” Miss Thompson reported in an uncontrolled staccato. “They say he won’t come back in. They’re talking to him, and he doesn’t pay any attention.”

Larry watched the man’s back and could sense his muscles twist beneath the flimsy white cloth of his shirt. His arms balanced like feathers, light and graceful as a ballet dancer’s. No one should try to prevent a man from picking his own method of committing suicide, Larry decided. He should be able, if he liked, to fling himself forty stories to the pavement with as great a display of eccentricity or exhibitionism as he pleased.

“Oh, stop him, Mr. Frank!” Miss Thompson pushed her hands against the window, as the man teetered again.

The next minute it was over. The figure had walked West toward the river, into the pure unsooted air. Windows opened and an ambulance wailed urgently.

Miss Thompson crawled back to the chair behind her desk, blanched and shaking. The other girls covered their eyes, too sensitive to want to decipher the undignified pulp of blood and flesh below. Larry could skip it, too, and decided that he needed a cup of coffee.

He glanced at Miss Thompson on his way out, reflecting that her sex life occurred vicariously behind an office desk. She continued to tremble in an orgasm of terror.

When Larry returned, he found a message to see Mr. Bemrose at once.

Arthur was slumped in his chair, looking blitzed. The mounting mishaps of the afternoon had culminated in the desperation written on Bemrose’s face.

“I knew there was something wrong when he didn’t show up for the appointment the other morning,” Arthur said.

“The morning we came in at eight o’clock? You mean he didn’t keep the appointment?”

“When he called me at home the afternoon before I knew----”