Part 3

Bemrose bore down on his palms which he had flattened on the table. “When the Administration finds out that I okayed it--and she won’t hesitate to let it be known that I was her authority--they’ll think I’m sniping at the Court.”

“What if they do? Will it hurt you in Washington?”

“I don’t give a damn about that, but the Court’s okay. The mossbacks obliged and died. The President got what he wanted. He didn’t have to pack the Court or torture the Constitution. Anyway it isn’t the Constitution that was tortured. It’s the economic ideas of a lot of people who still haven’t caught up with the times and probably never will.”

“Why don’t you ask her to show you the final proofs of her article? Tell her you’ve thought of some last minute changes. If she’s going to quote you as the authority for her article, she’ll want to keep you happy. She needs you worse than you need her.”

A tic worked behind Arthur’s mustache and pulled his lip out of shape. “A few changes won’t help. There’s something oblique about the reasoning, and quoting the Judge doesn’t save it. All the facts are correct, and intellectually she grasps the argument, but she doesn’t really understand it. Inside she’s suffering from a kind of legal indigestion. All except the part where she writes about the Old Man as a human being. I wish to hell Carson had tackled the piece. He _might_ have gotten away with it, although it’s still a complicated argument for a mass audience.” Bemrose frowned. “I’m not at all sure you can boil down the case for an independent judiciary to single syllables. Maybe a man could--a good experienced writer like Carson--but not a woman writer.”

“How about a drink?” Larry stood up and signaled the bartender.

“I should have talked her out of it,” Arthur rubbed his forehead. “It’s keeping me up nights. Her readers are going to get the wrong idea when she quotes decisions of the Judge as if they were current and he had written them yesterday. It isn’t fair. She could use _four_-syllable words and it wouldn’t be accurate.”

“Didn’t she offer to let you have another look at the article?” Larry sympathized, knowing that blurred thoughts and ideas that were slightly off true gave Bemrose stomach pain.

“She promises--every time I see her.” Bemrose’s outsized ears darkened. “I bumped into her at the Storeys’ at his fiftieth birthday party, and I’ve been seeing a good deal of her. In fact all there is to see----”

* * * * *

When he did a jigsaw puzzle, Larry started with the important pieces, the roof of a house or a tree trunk, and later filled in the foliage and the sky. He picked out the border pieces and tried to frame the puzzle. Then he scrambled to match the fuzzy, nondescript color inside.

At Danny’s Bar-Grill on Second Avenue that night, Arthur Bemrose supplied the roof and the tree trunk. A few weeks later Janice Baldwin pointed out the border pieces. Larry improvised the foliage, the sky, and the fuzzy in-between. When he finished, he had a completed landscape. This skill at putting human fragments together gave Larry the kind of satisfaction that other men found in games or sports. The piecing together of other lives until they made a picture was an avocation that suited Larry Frank down to the ground.

From what Arthur had told him about Professor Storey and the parties he gave in his old-fashioned apartment on Morningside Drive, Larry often wondered why the Professor bothered to entertain. A man with Storey’s reputation didn’t have to put himself out entertaining. He could have lived like a semi-recluse and seen only a few special friends. Without bothering to keep up the social amenities among his colleagues on the faculty and their wives, Professor Storey could have sailed along nicely on the strength of that physics medal he had won last year. His work contributed clippings regularly to the University pressbook, and he never would have been fired, or even questioned. Not if he had snubbed the President of the University. But Professor Storey and his wife gave their parties, spent more on entertaining than a limited college salary would seem to allow, for only one reason apparently. They liked people. They didn’t have to bother about extending their long and impressive list of friends, but they enjoyed bothering, and their parties showed it.

“It’s the most civilized house in New York,” Arthur had often commented. “I’d rather go there than to any sold-out show on Broadway. You meet more shirts that aren’t stuffed in one evening at the Storeys’ than almost anywhere else in a lifetime. And when they get people up there, they know how to let them alone so they can have a good time. There are so many people around who are special that no one ever seems like anyone in particular.” Bemrose told Larry that anyone was likely to show up at the Storeys’, anyone from the Ethiopian Emperor to some obscure physics professor from an unknown college in one of the smaller South American countries.

It appeared that the Storeys had an unwritten rule for parties which they acted out, and which initiated guests took pains not to violate. No serious talk. That was the rule. Laugh about anything, but when adrenalin was loosed in the room, keep quiet. Occasionally a newcomer who still fumbled English and hadn’t quite caught the lighter mood of these gatherings would frame a halting question about politics, labor, Negroes, or science. While he waited solemnly for the answer, Professor Storey would pose one of his favorite conundrums--he collected conundrums the way poets sometimes memorized limericks--and by the time the guest had solved the problem, or the Professor told him the answer, the ice was broken, and everyone in the room forgot that Storey, the physicist, practically ate breakfast with a spectroscope.

With women guests, the Professor’s practice seemed fairly standard. He’d sit on the swollen arm of an easy chair which created a fortress around the guest, and he’d talk about the beauty of an elongated neck. The Professor’s favorite women seemed to be swans.

Bemrose was an old timer at the Professor’s parties. He had been attending them since law school and knew the pattern by heart, and it upset him a little to think that Janice Baldwin could turn things upside down. Apparently it only upset Arthur H. Bemrose. As far as Larry could tell, none of the other guests seemed to mind.

“Einstein was there once. Another time I ran into old Nicholas Miraculous himself. No one paid any special attention to either of them, but when this Baldwin girl turned up--” Arthur reported.

“President Butler never wore an evening dress cut down to the navel,” Larry reminded him soothingly. “I’ll bet she was set up. Last night at the Astor, when she moved around behind that loud speaker--” Larry recalled her bloody fingernails and the brightly cut eyes, shiny as onyx, and figured that Janice Baldwin must have been an agreeable contrast to the unmade-up faculty wives at the Storeys’.

As Bemrose described the evening, she had taken over the one big sofa in the room, and the other guests hung over her, sat on the floor at her feet and listened, or leaned against nearby tables. All the traffic seemed to be going one way. People left the dining room where the rug had been rolled for dancing and came over to her. Mrs. Storey’s famous hot appetizers were left to cool on the piano.

Bemrose seemed the only one there who wanted to do anything else. The rest of them were more than willing to listen to Janice. Last night at the Astor, Larry’s own peas had turned to rubber while he listened to her; so he understood it. She told heart-warming stories about the English people, among the first stories of their kind to reach the United States first hand. Janice Baldwin had seen it all on the spot. She had stood with her British friends in the rubble. She had helped them dig out their tea cozies and bedpans. She knew what it meant to be frozen solid inside with fright and act as if the greengrocer had forgotten to deliver a bunch of parsley.

Many weeks later, after Larry had come to know Janice Baldwin, he accused her of turning the Storeys’ undignified sofa into a lecture platform, and she denied it. She insisted that the others made her talk about the War, and she kept tossing them the ball. But by then Larry had memorized her quick, grasping hands and decided that the ball would never wander very far from her. She wanted to keep the talk light, even the talk about the War, Janice told Larry. She only related anecdotes, the amusing things that had happened during the blitz. It was some of the others who insisted on being serious and wanted her opinion on how long it would take before we’d be in it. She was sick of talk about it. She’d had a bellyful in England, all the war she could take at the moment. She was back in New York for a breather, and she wanted to try and forget it for a little while. That’s why she had bothered to put on a long dress and come to the Storeys’ party. She wanted to dance.

Bemrose must have had the same idea. He used his long legs to bridge the floor sitters and pulled her out of it before the question period had progressed very far. “You’re wearing her out,” he told the others, noticing all the time that she was stimulated and alive with their flattery. But they took the hint and went back to the neglected appetizers. In a few minutes it was like any other party at the Storeys’.

Except for Bemrose it was. He was no Arthur Murray graduate but he danced all evening with Janice Baldwin when he wasn’t getting her a drink. It seems they had quite a few of both. They must have spent hours circling the uneven dining room floor to a rusty phonograph which creaked out of tune, and each time the needle dragged sourly at the end of a record, they held on, her head mussed against his dinner coat. By one-thirty, after the birthday cake had been cut, most of the guests cleared out, and only a few old friends were left. The Professor concentrated on Janice Baldwin, maybe to find out how Arthur H. Bemrose would take it, or maybe to prove that he was still good at fifty. He danced waltzes with her and whirled past Bemrose who was sulking against the wall, taking meticulous pains not to bump him. They were still waltzing an hour later. By that time the Professor had told her the original versions of most of the stories he cleaned up for his class. It was Mrs. Storey who broke up the evening by coming in to fold the extra bridge chairs. When Janice left with Bemrose, the Professor accompanied them to the door and kissed her moistly on the cheek.

Whatever set off Bemrose’s fear of “a brainy woman” must have occurred in the next thirty minutes, Larry figured. He hadn’t much confidence in Bemrose’s explanation of being scared of a woman because she had brains. He realized that Arthur’s fear came from something buried inside of him that he probably wasn’t aware of, not even vaguely.

It was hard to guess what happened between them on the way home, but Janice Baldwin was no chase-me-I’ll-chase-you woman, and if she were crazy for Bemrose, she probably said so, Larry surmised. That would have scared the hell out of him. Bemrose made a living out of his natural suspicion. He held postgraduate degrees in it. If she seemed to be crowding him, or let on that she had thought he might be at the Storeys’ that night and that’s why she had come, he would have shied off. Then and there. For all her directness, she must have been smart enough to sense the kind of special personality this was. There was something about the core of him, something that made up his individuality, which had to be kept immaculate, and she knew enough not to trespass. He had come back for more, a test of her understanding. Any mistakes she made hadn’t been too serious. He told Larry that he had been seeing her pretty regularly the past three weeks, almost every night that she wasn’t signed up to speak at a public dinner.

“What do you do? Go up to her apartment?” Larry asked.

“Yes, we stay there alone, or she has people in.”

“Anyone you know? Or strangers who make you uncomfortable?”

“I know most of them.” Bemrose’s mustache twitched.

“How come that you’ve never met her before if you know so many of the same people?”

“I guess my luck held for years. If Carson hadn’t put the evil sign on me and told her to call about that damned article----”

“I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. When you said you were seeing her, I was beginning to feel better. I don’t mind telling you that I was worried the other day when you passed up the one Tim Hoxter brought in. It’s time you got in trouble with a woman. Serious trouble,” Larry said. “I’d have been happy to see you make a date with that Miss McVail. Maybe she hasn’t much upstairs but she has looks. When someone like Janice Baldwin comes along with both--” Larry dusted his coat sleeve, wondering whether maybe he had gone too far.

“I lived enough years around a woman with brains. Or don’t you remember Mrs. Haynes?”

Larry realized that Bemrose had somehow niched Janice Baldwin with that austere old lady who twisted her straight hair into a punishing knot at the nape of her neck.

“It never seemed to cramp the Judge’s style,” Larry said. “They could be twenty or sixty. He always did all right with women. You’ve told me stories yourself----”

“That was fun. That wasn’t serious.”

“Well, what’s this? Miss Baldwin hasn’t asked you to marry her, has she?” Larry leaned diagonally against the corner of the booth, and his knee bumped against the table leg.

“After three weeks?” Bemrose laughed. “When she does, I’ll tell her that she’ll have to get your approval. How would you like to meet her?”

“I’d like to. But not for the reasons you think. I would really like to know whether she thinks we’ll have to get in the War,” Larry said. “Go over there and fight, I mean.”

“Goddammit, we ought to be in it!” Bemrose exploded with sudden violence. “We’ve become a goddam nation of fence sitters. Do you realize we’ve been in every other major war since the eighteenth century? Well, we have. I looked it up the other day. And here’s the biggest, most important war in history, and we do nothing. Supposing England loses this one. Supposing she goes under----”

“Wait until we start throwing in everything we’ve got.”

“When do we start? You tell me!”

But Larry couldn’t help thinking about the danger to Arthur H. Bemrose, not to England. That’s one reason he would never be a success like Bemrose. He couldn’t get stirred up about the major social and political considerations of the time. When they broke up tonight, he’d spend his time thinking about whether Bemrose was ever going to find the right woman, and the War would be forgotten.

“I don’t see the harm in going up to her place,” Larry said, wondering if it might have been the competition Janice Baldwin offered Bemrose, people sitting around at her apartment firing questions at her about the War, the way they did at the Storeys’, and Arthur in the background keeping quiet. It was a new experience for him, Larry knew. He wasn’t used to playing unless he could be front and center.

Bemrose tilted his glass, trying to locate a last drop.

“I’ll order you another,” Larry offered, realizing that whatever it was, Janice Baldwin had him offside. He didn’t believe that theory about brainy women which Arthur had advanced, in spite of the college sweetheart and Mrs. Haynes. Something dark and hidden must be gnawing at Bemrose, something that made him fearful. That’s how Larry Frank figured it.

“Another thing that worries me is that Newton gave me a job to do, and I can’t make a dent in it. He wants it in a rush, day after tomorrow. Last night I stayed down to work, but I couldn’t make any headway. I felt like hell.”

Larry lifted two drinks from Danny’s tray. “Sure, I know. That’s how the real thing feels sometime.”

“Well, you should know more about it than I do. Here’s to Bessie. Long may she wave!” Bemrose raised his glass. “From now on I better stick to what _I_ know--I better go back to the office tonight and get that job done for Tom.”

“Some sleep will do you more good. Go on home, it’s almost two o’clock. Tomorrow let me come down and help you at the office while you knock out Newton’s work. You’ll be able to do it with your left hand when you’re rested.”

Bemrose was delighted with the offer. “It will take a big load off me if you wind up the McVail case,” he said. “I can’t let Tim down, and it’s been a headache. We finally have an agreement worked out with the brother. He’s a terrible guy, that brother. But someone ought to explain the papers to her. I don’t want her to sign anything until she understands what she’s signing. If there’s ever a kickback--Tim might not be here to help her the next time.”

“I’ll see if she’s free tomorrow night. I’ll take the papers up to her house if she is,” Larry offered.

“I’ll try to make it up to you sometime,” Bemrose promised. “That case has been a ridiculous worry to me.”

When Larry helped him on with his coat, he noticed that the tension had eased. Bemrose’s arms moved freely through the wide cuffs, and his eccentric lip lay quiet.

“Remember, hit the hay when you get home,” Larry cautioned, putting him into a taxi and giving the driver Bemrose’s home address.

* * * * *

As Larry walked along Second Avenue, the handwritten signs on the store windows shouted to an empty house. Larry liked the wide street at night when, in contrast with the chattering crowds that spilled over sidewalks and thoroughfare during the day, it was toned down by the dark and quiet. He stepped along carefully to avoid some bumpy strips of ice on the pavement, and while he was walking, he went to work on the inside pieces of the puzzle.

He thought of Janice Baldwin as he had seen her centered at the speakers’ table the night before, a chunky amethyst bracelet hung on her wrist and lustrous purple stones to match the bracelet in a collar around her neck. He thought of the black fur wrap she must have handed Arthur as they were leaving the Storeys’, an extension of her dark hair and brilliantly black eyes. She would have stepped into Bemrose’s car talking and laughing, the Professor’s kiss still damp on her cheek. After that evening with Storey and his friends she would have no doubt of being admired and wanted. Bemrose would sense it and drive around the block looking for a place to park. When he found a spot, he would use his emergency brake, but carefully keep the motor running. He would kiss her methodically at first, taking pains to hit her straight, generous mouth head on, and thoughtfully he would stay there until the first, fine heat had gone from her. Then he might move away to the left of the wheel, leaving her alone for a few minutes, and begin to think of how she might fit into his life, and that meant figuring whether she would be good for his law practice.

If Larry had guessed right about Janice Baldwin, she wouldn’t stop to consider whether or not Bemrose would benefit her future. She would operate from the heart, and if what she felt about Bemrose was the real thing, she’d hope that some of her sparks would catch on and warm him.

That’s how Larry Frank doped it out in his amateur way, reflecting on the phenomenon that made him content to live a large piece of his life through others. It was perhaps a strange characteristic, although he had seen the same trait in other men, a willingness to exist vicariously through someone else, as if a man’s own qualities could never satisfy him and he could fulfill himself only through another’s achievements. It was as if Larry had been born knowing that his existence would move on an uneventful plane and his excitement and adventure must come through Bemrose. Arthur Bemrose acted as his filter, intensifying the color of his life. Arthur Bemrose, who was along the lines of what Larry’s father would have liked of his son, made it possible for him to live recklessly and imaginatively without taking the risks, Larry wasn’t particularly ashamed of this quality in himself. Some men were made to do and others to watch. He had no urge to prove to the world that he was capable of action. It satisfied something in him just to sit back, observe, and piece together his conclusions. It was a pastime of which he never tired.

As for feeling any guilt because he was a disappointment to his late father, Larry knew that Ephraim Frank had come to this country for the chance to live his life in his own way. If the manner chosen by his son was to live at second hand, through others, to look at the rat race but stay out of it, what was wrong with such a decision? Nothing as far as Larry could see.

_Chapter 3_

A sleety wind from the Drive blew Larry across West End Avenue at Ninety-first Street. The doorman of the apartment house where Lucy McVail lived with her uncle and aunt reached from under the canopy to cover him with a tattered umbrella. Guided by its bamboo handle, Larry stamped into the vestibule and smoothed his upturned overcoat collar to prevent the layers of wet snow from sliding down his neck. He looked around the steamy entrance hall. A soggy red carpet matched a worn plush bench with pewlike back. Larry mounted three ill-covered stairs to the elevator, and when he saw the stucco walls freshly painted a poisonous green, he thought of a restaurant chain which had recently failed.

Upstairs the elevator man pointed to a shabby door at the end of a third-floor corridor where gas fixtures, no longer in use, remained bracketed to the wall.

Lucy, her skin a clear amber, her pale eyes only faintly tinged with color, answered his ring. Larry saw that with a hat off her blonde hair, light enough to be mistaken for gray, fluffed softly around her face. A white Persian kitten, done up in a blue satin bow, curled at her heel. They were two homebody females, and they made him feel warm with contentment.

She led Larry through a narrow hall where a long expanse of wall space was conscientiously covered by flower prints in cheap frames. In the living room her Uncle Ed, a can of English shoe wax in one hand, a soiled cloth in the other, sat polishing an end table. He had on a kitchen apron.

She introduced them, and Ed Daugherty tried to wipe off the brown stains before he put out his hand. “Things get gritty,” he apologized. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. What did you say the name was--Frank?”

The inexpensive furniture in the room had profited by his energy. Tables, chairs, and walnut secretary shone like new shoes. A mohair sofa and matching chair from an installment-plan establishment made Larry grateful for Bessie’s decorator friend, Elizabeth Brett, who had given them a more tasteful living room at home.

There was old and old--richly designed old such as Judge Haynes had left; shabby, comfortable old, the kind the Storeys probably lived with; run-down old like the entrance downstairs; and shined-up, immaculate old, neither particularly gracious nor comfortable. This.

Larry remembered the steep walk from the Albany station to a narrow alley where, in an apartment above the local hardware store, he had spent Christmas vacation with Arthur Bemrose one year. It was an oppressively shabby house, and Arthur must have been glad to forget it these past few years.

“When my aunt finishes the dishes, I’d like you to meet her,” Lucy said, and Larry came back from his thoughts of Albany where he recalled that the Bemroses owned a blue mohair sofa like this one.

A figured pink lamp shade dipped in fussy fringes, and Ed Daugherty tackled the green wooden base with his polishing wax. He had a stock of the paste in all colors, and chose a neutral shade for the lamp.