Part 18

“He wasn’t intentionally vicious,” Bemrose admitted. “His trouble was that he believed the best in people. Capital offered no threat to labor, and labor would smarten up in time and see class war didn’t get anywhere. No one, according to the Old Man, ever plotted against anyone else. Naïve, wasn’t it? I suppose he was wrapped in court wool for too many years. Street fights and brawls were just newspaper stories to him. He didn’t think they happened. Besides, he always thought more education would iron out the unreasonableness.”

Larry paced his step to Arthur’s measured gait.

“The Old Man himself, for all his learning, could never control his temper,” Arthur said. “On Sunday we’d go out to Arlington and read the names on the graves, and he’d growl at every fourth or fifth name. He was an eloquent hater. He could hate the dead as hard as he hated the living.” Arthur paused.

“Harder,” he continued. “I’m glad they let him go to Arlington. He always wanted to. I think he liked the idea of spending the rest of time across the bridge from Lincoln. You’ve seen that seated figure of Lincoln--the memorial by French.”

Larry nodded.

“The Old Man used to stand in front of it for hours, looking into Lincoln’s wise face. It was one statue he didn’t sneer at-- I think he felt Lincoln knew something human, something about the way people operate, that he had never got hold of.”

“How about taking the Old Man some flowers if we finish with Newton early?” Larry suggested.

“We’ll take him geraniums. He always said they smelled badly and looked awful, and that’s why he liked them. Honest. No frills about geraniums and no perfume worth mentioning.”

“You’re sure Newton’s office is down the hall?” Larry asked. “I bet we’ve passed fifty doors already.”

Arthur indicated some doors about a quarter of a mile further on. “Five minutes away. When Zantzinger, the architect, submitted blueprints for this tomb, he should have included roller skates.”

“Did the Old Man ever say what he wanted for you? What he really hoped? Was it the Supreme Court?” Larry asked.

“It might have been,” Arthur admitted. “He might have had it in mind. That is, before they moved it east of the Capitol and gave it the biggest columns and the biggest pediment and entablature of any tomb in Washington. He hated the biggest of anything. He had misgivings about the new Court and said they would get the swelled head once they’d moved over there. I’d see him stand in front of the new building, a Pigmy alongside those marble slabs, and wither the columns with his superiority. You could see them shrivel. Then he’d turn around and threaten me. ‘Wait ’til they send you up here someday!’ That’s how he put it.”

“Send you up, huh. Like Sing Sing.”

“He probably had naïve ideas of what I had to do in order to be ‘sent up.’ Write a few brilliant briefs and execute a couple of first-class jobs in Washington. That’s all there would be to it. I’d be noticed and they would invite me to sit on the Court.”

“Well, here’s your chance. Newton’s noticed you. What do you think he has lined up?”

A black cat ran in front of them, and Arthur twisted his left shoulder to look down the corridor, watching it slide along the floor. “Murder cases,” he said.

“You said it was a war job, didn’t you?” Larry asked. “I suppose that would have suited the Old Man down to the ground.”

“Sure. He’d say I was committed to fighting this War, and I ought to go on with it. Even if they hand me a tough assignment which doesn’t seem to be hooked up directly with the fighting. He’d say that if I believed in the War, I ought to work with everything I’ve got no matter where I come out, and if----”

It was the first time during the funereal walk that Bemrose’s speech stumbled.

“You’re tired.” Larry steadied his elbow.

“If brains are all I have left, I ought to fight with them,” Arthur concluded his thought.

Larry had a sudden flash of insight. The march down the long corridor showed Arthur’s incapacity to make war like other men. It confirmed his fears about others doing his physical fighting for him. His decision to consider Newton’s desk job was recognition that he considered himself through physically. He must feel that the quickness was drained from him. While he might believe hard in the War, he couldn’t physically execute his beliefs. The alternative was to accept Tom’s job and fight at a desk. Larry figured that was the way Bemrose reasoned about it.

“Lucy’s the one I have to worry about,” he continued. “This trouble of mine is costing real money. She’s never complained about the cost or the bother, but I haven’t any right to ask her to live on a dollar a year.”

“After all, she won’t have to, will she?” Larry pointed out.

* * * * *

Arthur braced himself for the final sprint down the hall and swung along silently. This last wordless stretch seemed longer than the initial mileage. Larry had a sense of proceeding to a waiting doom at the end of the cryptlike corridor. Then, as swiftly as the brush of a cat’s tail, the mood of bleak fate altered. A figure stepped from Newton’s door into the hall and turned sharply toward them. She stopped, cried out, and reached to steady Bemrose.

Larry saw the tightly wrapped face and dark searching eyes and knew that this was the inevitable and recurring pattern in Bemrose’s life--a long face with high cheekbones and oversized eyes, an economy of smooth, dark skin distributed over a large-boned frame. This was the leitmotif relentlessly performed and encored.

“Tom told me he was expecting you.” Janice kept her hand on the sleeve of his overcoat.

Arthur rejoined the living with his smile and swung around accusingly. “Did you write Janice?” he asked Larry.

With exaggerated fervor, Larry protested. “Of course not. I thought this trip was going to be business.”

“Tom won’t give you more than an hour. It’s a madhouse in there.” She indicated the door. “I’ll pick you up and drive you to the house for lunch. I have a place in Georgetown, and a new painting by Julio de Diego someone lent me for the drawing room. You’ll have to see the painting. Is it all right if I come back at one?” She glanced nervously at her watch.

Larry offered to check with Newton’s secretary and find out. He found five secretaries in a reception room large enough for a Legion convention and promptly located the one who knew about Bemrose’s appointment.

A resigned and weary line waiting to see the Attorney-General eyed Larry hostilely as he hurried past the pale blue walls, indirect lighting, and chromium to the outer hall.

“Newton will see him in five minutes,” Larry touched her cheek. “You don’t mind if I look at your house another time, do you, Jan? I have some personal business to take care of.”

She grabbed his hand. “How personal?”

“No, honestly. I’ve been promising a client for a month that I’d see a man in the O.P.A. about the ceiling price on bone buttons.”

“You’ll drive him back to the hotel in time, won’t you, Jan?” He guided Arthur to Newton’s door. “We’re planning to catch the five o’clock home.”

“No one has to drive me to the hotel. I’ll get a cab,” Arthur protested, but Janice reassured Larry with a nod that she would take care of him.

* * * * *

They missed the five and the six o’clock back to New York, and Larry, tired of waiting for Bemrose, changed their parlor car seats to a drawing room on the sleeper. After a late dinner which consisted mainly of succulent chincoteagues on the half shell, one of the reasons for coming to Washington, Larry always figured, they went up to their hotel room. Larry unpacked his toilet kit in the next room while Bemrose told him about the interview with Newton.

“It’s cloak and dagger stuff,” he explained. “Work with the F.B.I. drawing up indictments against Nazi sympathizers in this country. The F.B.I. has the evidence, and my job would be to make it legal under section nine, title eighteen, of the federal code.”

“Have you grounds for indicting the bastards?” Larry asked. “They’re slick operators, particularly that Yorkville jerk--you know the one I mean. They probably are smart enough to sweep up good and clean when they finish a job.” Larry threw away a torn tube of shaving cream. The wartime metal was like tissue paper and had split the second time he used the tube.

“They’ve tried to stir up insubordination and mutiny in the Army and Navy,” Arthur said. “Distributed printed matter advising disloyalty and refusal of duty.”

“What can they get?” Larry asked. “What’s the maximum?”

“Ten years’ imprisonment, or a ten thousand dollar fine, or both.”

Larry whistled. “And Tom thinks the F.B.I. has the goods that will nail them?”

Arthur nodded. “Tom has to make it stick. That’s not so easy.”

“Every time I hear those birds talk about how Roosevelt asked the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor--” Larry spit into the wash basin. “The bastards should be locked up. Remember Jan and that fellow Richter, the art dealer?”

“You understand it’s graveyard, Tom’s proposition,” Arthur reminded him.

“What kind of money did he talk? You told him a dollar-a-year was out----”

“He recognizes my medical expenses are heavy, and thinks he can stretch the job to pay eight or nine thousand. I can manage on that. Not in style, but we can live. I still have to talk to Lucy and see how she feels about pulling up stakes in New York.”

“I hope you can get rid of the slimy bastards. That would be an accomplishment, all right,” Larry said enviously. “If you decide to come down here and close the office, I may try for a commission.” He walked in from the bathroom, and threw his toilet kit on the bed. It bounced on the damask bed cover.

“See how things shape up with me first,” Arthur suggested. “There may be a job down here for you. Or this thing of Tom’s might only last a few months. Maybe I’ll even decide to keep the office going.”

Larry frowned and sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

“There I go again, telling you what to do while I go out and cut myself a slice of war. I guess I’ll never learn,” Arthur apologized. His voice was high and strained. “You do what you want.”

“It’s okay.” Larry went back to the bathroom for a shoe cloth.

“Next time kick me around the block.”

Larry bent over the tub and wiped his shoes. “What does Jan think about your moving down?”

“Come again.”

“What does Jan think?” Larry repeated.

There was silence from the other room.

Larry waited for Bemrose to answer, and when he didn’t hear anything, he went into the bedroom, circled the bed and picked up the phone. “You’re packed, aren’t you?” Larry asked him. “I’ll find out from the bell captain what time the train is made up. Let’s get to the station early and grab some sleep before we pull out.”

_Chapter 23_

The next afternoon in New York Larry bumped into Davis Shore leaving Arthur’s office. Shore jerked his recognition and moved on.

“Someone tell him a clean story? He looks downhearted,” Larry observed.

“He wanted me to take a case for him. I referred him to Harrison,” Arthur said.

“That must have felt lovely.”

“I thought it would, but it didn’t,” Arthur went on signing his mail.

“Wasn’t he in once before this week?”

“Yes. He’s been after me to try this new case ever since Albany. He must have heard about my argument up there.”

“And it didn’t feel good to turn him down?” Larry asked. “If I were you, I think I would have stuck in the knife and twisted it.”

“You wouldn’t pull a leg off a dead spider. There’s no fun in that,” Arthur said.

“What kind of cattle boat did his ancestors come over on anyway? He must have something to cover up, or he wouldn’t be such a snob.”

“He’s a helluva good reason for accepting the job in Washington,” Arthur agreed. “I wonder if Tom really has anything on that Nazi crowd. If he has and we can prove----”

“I’ll help you home with your bag,” Larry offered. “You’ve had a long enough day, coming right down here from the sleeper this morning. I don’t suppose you’ve told Lucy yet?”

“When I called up to say we were back, I hinted about it.”

“You’ll have to tell her all the details. Let’s get going.”

On the way uptown, Arthur outlined some of the ideas he had for Newton. Exhilarated, his thoughts turning with propeller speed, he was already at work on the indictments. Larry realized that it would take more than Shore’s offer of a big case to keep Bemrose in New York for the duration.

Their cab stopped for a WAAC parade that was crossing Thirty-fourth Street. The dumpy first lieutenant who barked the marching orders looked more like a tough sergeant from World War I than the dewy-eyed model silhouetted against a flag in the current WAAC recruiting poster. Oblivious to the slush underfoot, the girls stepped out smartly. Their seriousness filtered through the sidewalk crowd, and two men straightened, a woman heavily burdened with packages stopped to watch, and an old man uncovered his head.

“Give ’em hell, girls!” Bemrose touched his fingers to his forehead. “It’s a fine thing, isn’t it, when women have to do your fighting?” he said to Larry.

A month or a week ago he wouldn’t have joked about it, Larry knew. He was too busy licking his wounds a month ago. It wouldn’t have been funny.

“If they draft me, I wouldn’t mind a job next to the little redhead on the end,” Larry observed.

“She’s not in the chorus, she’s a soldier.”

Larry shrugged. “I can’t take a good-looking woman seriously.”

“They take them seriously in Russia.”

“Maybe they’re not as good-looking.”

“To the Russians they are.”

“I can’t help it. When a woman’s good-looking----”

“I know, I know. You want to go to bed with her,” Arthur said.

The last WAAC cleared the Avenue, and an angry honking from behind jolted their driver into action. Larry took a last mournful look at the neatly covered buttocks moving in disciplined rows. “Helluva waste of women,” he sighed.

“Them women ain’t wasted,” Arthur said. “Ask any G.I. if you think so.”

The remains of last night’s heavy snowfall clogged traffic, and pedestrians waiting at bus stops stood back gingerly to avoid being splashed. The piles of soiled snow melting in the gutters furnished dirty contrast to a window at the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue which sparkled with clean-lined modern glassware.

They rode silently past the stone transverse which divided Central Park. Bemrose turned abruptly toward Larry. “Does Lucy know she lives in Washington?”

“Not from me. I took them both out to dinner when you were at Maxwell Field, but she hasn’t talked to me about her since. Did she write you about going out with me that night?”

“The longest letter I ever had from her,” Arthur said. “She was wound up. You didn’t tell her anything that night?”

“Hell no.”

“No, of course not,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “I haven’t anything to worry about. She’s never been jealous.”

“What did she write you about the night we all had dinner?”

“I remember how she put it in the letter. She wrote ‘Miss Baldwin is still in love with you.’”

Larry nodded. “I wasn’t sure how she’d react. It’s hard to tell about her. I don’t suppose you’ll say anything about running into Jan yesterday.”

“I don’t know. I may.”

“Well, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Larry promised.

Arthur let them in with his house key, and Larry called upstairs to Lucy. She emerged, flushed and breathless, from the kitchen on the ground floor and embraced Arthur warmly. “Was the sleeper awful? Are you dead?”

“I had a tough trip, too.” Larry offered his cheek.

When she promptly responded, he had the pleasant guilty sense of perhaps having done her an injustice for months.

Larry straightened his tie, a new one of geometric daring. “Some taste, isn’t it?”

“Your ties are always--” she hesitated--“different.”

“A euphemistic remark,” Arthur guffawed.

She drew her cool, amber brow together. “What does euphemistic mean, Larry?”

Larry put his arm around her. “He doesn’t know either. He’s showing off. He was afraid he’d come home and find you in the WAAC.”

She disengaged herself from Larry. The kitchen door, which she had carefully shut behind her, swung open and Phil Kenyon, his mustache pert and bristling, greeted them from behind a trayful of Martinis.

Arthur waved to him affably. “Hello. You must have read my mind. How about bringing them upstairs?”

“Get the olives I left on the table, Lucy,” Phil directed. “I heard you’d be back this afternoon,” he told Bemrose. “I ducked out of the office early to be on hand.”

“I’m glad you did,” Arthur said.

“Remember Randolph?” he asked Larry when they had all settled in front of a fire upstairs. “He belonged to one of the big shops downtown.”

“Don Randolph. Winchester and Seymour,” Larry prompted.

“That’s the fellow. The State Department called him in to do a hush-hush job, made him a full colonel, and sent him to England last spring on a secret mission. That was more than nine months ago, and his wife just had a baby----”

Lucy blushed. “Did you see someone in the State Department who told you?”

“I ran into a friend.”

“I forgot to tell you about the O.P.A.,” Larry broke in. “My client is going to have to make two or three holers instead of four if he wants to crack the ceiling price.”

“Buttons,” Arthur explained to Phil Kenyon.

“He’ll need a new mold, and molds use war material,” Larry continued. “It’s a waste of time, material and labor to make new molds, but he has to do it to get around the O.P.A. In the end he charges his high price on the new line. The ceiling price only holds on old merchandise.”

“That’s one of the bad features of O.P.A.,” Bemrose acknowledged. “Just the same it’s doing a job.” He stretched lazily and poured himself another Martini.

“I think Larry has a point,” Phil Kenyon started to argue, but Lucy’s silence headed him off.

The pale eyes were on Bemrose waiting for him to say something about Newton’s offer.

“I met a Senator down there--” he started to say.

“Arthur!” Her tone reproached him. “Phil’s interested, too. You can talk about your job in front of him.”

Silently he sipped his cocktail.

“You three talk, I’ll run along,” Kenyon offered.

“Lucy’s right. We haven’t any secrets you can’t hear. Stick around.”

“Newton offered me just what you’d expect,” he continued. “He wants me to come down and fight the Battle of the Department of Justice.”

Lucy walked away from the fire, her slender fingers trailing below the tailored cuffs of a gray-blue woolen dress. The closely woven fabric concealed her fragility. She looked remarkably durable.

“How would you like to move to Washington?” Arthur talked to her back as she crossed the room.

She stopped alongside Phil Kenyon’s chair and picked up a box of matches from the table. He took it out of her hand and struck a match for her. For an instant, their glances met.

Larry bent to tie his shoelace.

“How do you think you would like to move down?” Arthur asked.

She returned slowly to her chair opposite him. “I won’t be able to leave New York. Marge is going to have a baby.”

“Why, that’s great! Maybe there’s hope for Bess and me,” Larry raised his glass. “Good for Ed, the son-of-a-gun.”

Lucy tried to smile, but didn’t make it.

“When is she expecting the baby?” Arthur inquired dully.

“Not for several months.”

“I promised to let Tom know next week.”

Lucy brushed some wisps of hair from her cheek.

“Is Marge having a tough time?” Larry asked.

“It isn’t easy for a woman of forty-two to have her first baby!” Lucy’s careful diction failed to conceal the agitation she felt.

“Ed carrying on and upsetting her?” Larry asked.

“He’s jumpy,” she admitted.

“Maybe he’s having the baby,” Arthur injected bitterly.

“Oh, Arthur--” Lucy’s eyes were wet, and Larry realized that it was she, not Ed, who was having the baby for Marge. As long as she was married to Arthur, the chances were that she wouldn’t have any of her own. She probably felt a desperate necessity to stick with Marge.

Uneasily Phil Kenyon said something about having to keep an appointment, and Lucy went downstairs with him to the door.

“That’s that, I guess.” Arthur fingered the stem of his glass, but his hand trembled. He slumped deeper in his chair.

“I’d take the job anyway,” Larry said. “She’ll follow you in a couple of months when Marge is out of the woods.”

“She wants a baby. She can’t have a baby with me,” Arthur’s shoulder jerked. “It isn’t a good feeling for a man to know that----”

Larry made no comment. A few minutes later he said, “Let her move down with you and come back to New York weekends. Tell her she can stay up here with Marge the last few weeks. Marge wouldn’t want you to give up an interesting job.”

“Well, I can’t settle it this afternoon. I’m pooped.” Bemrose pulled himself out of the chair, and his body hung a dead weight on the crutches. “Tell Lucy I’m going to grab some sleep before dinner.”

* * * * *

He found her at the head of the red-carpeted stairs, and they sat at the top of the landing, her fingers limply trailing the step below.

“It isn’t fair to you, either, Larry,” she complained. “Not after you gave up your practice. He shouldn’t walk out on you like this.”

“He absolutely must cut himself a piece of war,” Larry pointed out. “When a guy like Bemrose stops doing the big thing, he stops.”

“I guess if that’s what he wants to do, he should go to Washington.” There was the strength of element-proof chromium in her cool appraisal.

“But you have other plans?”

She nodded. “I can’t leave, and to tell you the truth, Larry, I don’t want to leave. I’ve been happy the last few months. I’ve felt--well, younger.”

Larry sensed the quality of the unstrained, carefree friendship with Phil Kenyon. He realized how it contrasted with the more mature burdens of her marriage. It was the difference between childhood and a grown-up world. Lucy may never have known a real childhood. She perhaps was catching up on what she had missed.

“If you like, I’ll go down to Washington with Arthur and stay with him for a few months to get him settled,” Larry offered.

She stared ahead miserably: “You’ve done enough, Larry. You have to think about yourself and Bessie----”

“I could only stay for a few months,” he admitted. “Bessie wouldn’t like me to be away any longer. But if it will help you out----”

Competently she straightened the round, schoolboy collar of her dress. “I’ll find a place for him down there if he likes, then come back. Once he’s busy at Newton’s office, he’ll be all right.”

“You mean you’ll come back to New York alone?”

“He has friends in Washington, and it’s his kind of place. He needs room to think in, and I can’t give it to him. I know he feels cramped around me. I’ve about decided that he always will. I’ve just been waiting for him to get well enough to look around for what he needs.”

Larry covered her hand which lay on the step next to his. “I used to wonder if you’d grow up,” he said.

“Have I?”

“You’re willing to give up what belongs to you, even though you have a mortgage. You helped put Arthur back on his feet. You have rights. It takes guts and some pretty grown-up feelings to surrender a valuable property.”

“You don’t make people happy by owning them,” Lucy said. “And you can’t really own them unless they want to belong.”

He asked her to come downstairs with him while he looked for his coat. On the way out he smiled and said, “I like your friend Kenyon. He’s okay.”

_PART IV_

_Chapter 24_

Six weeks later Larry spent a Saturday in Georgetown at Janice’s house where Bemrose had been living for more than a month. Arthur’s painful probing of the hotel and apartment situation had ended as it almost always ended these days, with no room and no apartment, and Janice insisted that he move into her guest room until he found something else of his own. She registered the room with the O.P.A. and he paid her the approved rental.