Part 8

“Not so well.” Bemrose sponged his neck with a paper napkin.

“The hot weather?” Larry asked.

“I don’t know. Not feeling well.” His tone said to forget about it and go on with the game.

A companionable murmur circled the table. “Too bad.” “It’s a helluva summer to be in town.”

Larry could tell that something was cooking with Cy. They called him total-recall O’Malley. He had a deceptive baby roundness--turned-up nose, second chin, football shoulders and talky blue eyes. If he telephoned to ask someone for lunch, Cy sometimes gabbed for an hour, then made the lunch date anyway and gabbed some more.

“Did you hear what happened to Danny?” Cy asked. “A drunk came in the other day with a live lobster and handed it across the bar, told Danny it was a present for him. You know Danny. He’s polite; so he says, ‘Thanks, I’ll take him home to dinner.’ This drunk shakes his head and says, ‘Naw, he’s had dinner, take him to the movies.’”

The joke wasn’t that funny, but it broke the tension, and the small, hot room went up in a roar. Chuck Adams grabbed his ankle, Hagerty delightedly shook hands with himself, and Paul Schmid put a hand on Bemrose’s arm. The releasing laughter, which seemed louder because Bemrose had kept them bottled up, rolled through Danny’s sagging door and down the rickety stairs.

There was a sudden conscious silence while the sound blew out like radio tubes. Bemrose turned on Cy without a word and his look was the closest thing to a right hook that Larry had ever seen.

The game broke up, and Larry left Bemrose waiting at the curb for a taxi. Larry didn’t even bother to offer to hang around and have a drink with him.

He had started down the street in his shirtsleeves, his coat uncomfortably weighing on his arm, when someone called to him, and there was Arthur H. in person.

“Have a heart. It’s no night for a track meet,” Bemrose complained.

They headed for Larry’s apartment. Bemrose was puffing and the sweat ran in rivers down his face.

“What have you been doing?” he asked amiably.

“Not a helluva lot,” Larry said. “I looked for you at that Red Cross dinner last week, the one at the Starlight Roof. I thought you usually went.”

“Shore always invited me,” Bemrose explained. “This year I took tickets, but he didn’t say anything about sitting with him. I didn’t want to go alone if he were there with a big party.”

“He must have figured you were on your honeymoon,” Larry said. “That’s what I figured when I didn’t hear from you.”

“I would have called and asked you up to the house, but we’re redecorating,” Arthur apologized. “Tonight is the first time in weeks I’ve been out. We haven’t seen a soul.”

“Don’t let it worry you,” Larry said. “Too hot anyway to see people.” He stuffed a damp handkerchief into his back pocket.

They had reached the denuded canopy frame in front of the apartment house where Larry lived. He and Bessie had been trying to get Bemrose down for fifteen years, but this was the first time he made it as far as the door. “Come on up. Bessie’s in Woodmere at her father’s place,” Larry urged.

Bemrose nodded and followed him. Upstairs he inventoried the room. “Nice place,” he said, walking around, and pausing in front of the Soyer. “That’s a powerful painting you have there.”

Larry raised the blinds and opened the front door to get some cross ventilation. He brought two bottles of beer from the kitchen.

“Have you heard anything from Janice Baldwin?” Bemrose asked casually. Too casually.

“Not a word.”

“The internal revenue man was in about a tax matter she turned over to me,” Bemrose said. “It’ll have to wait.” He drank the foam off his beer. “I suppose you have her address----”

“No, but _Everett’s_ must have it.”

“Split another with me?” Bemrose pointed to the remaining bottle of beer which was on the tray. “Never mind about Janice. She’ll turn up.”

He left the room to wash, and when he came back, picked up a rose quartz ash tray from the table and traced the uneven edge with his finger. “I suppose she’s on her way home,” Bemrose said. “She must have seen everything there is to see in Sweden. It’s been more than two months.”

“Maybe she stopped in England,” Larry suggested. “She might be trying to get to the Continent.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t do that,” Arthur said quickly. “That’s too risky.”

There were risks and risks, Larry couldn’t help thinking. There was the risk of seeing Bemrose again. It might be a chance that Janice didn’t dare take at the moment.

“How would you like to come down to my office and give me a hand?” Bemrose asked. “I mean on a permanent basis.”

He must be having a brainstorm: Larry hadn’t thought seriously of being in an office with Bemrose since college.

“My time is taken with seeing clients and trying cases,” Arthur explained. “The office isn’t run right, I’ve neglected it. How about coming in as office manager?” He turned sharply toward Larry. “The practice is growing--I could offer you something substantial.”

Larry swallowed. “It’s swell of you to think I can do it----”

“It would mean security for you,” Bemrose interrupted. He tapped the table with the end of a fresh cigarette, shaking out the loose tobacco. “The way I see it, some years a fellow with a small practice makes out all right, and some years--” He shrugged. “This would mean a steady income for you. There wouldn’t be any bad years.”

With effort Larry located his voice. “It’s swell of you, but I have to think about my clients.”

“Go ahead and work for them. On the side. I don’t want any cut in your practice.”

And you aren’t planning to cut me into any of yours, Larry thought. A few years with Bemrose, and he might end up by not having a practice.

“It’s a big step, closing up shop. I’ll have to have plenty of time to think it over,” Larry said.

Bemrose surveyed the living room with his hand. “What does it cost you and Bessie to live? As high as eight or nine thousand?”

“I’m not sure about going into business,” Larry tried to explain. “At your shop I’d be taking care of detail, handling routine matters. I sort of like plugging away at the law and helping people. Office routine doesn’t sound like a helluva lot of fun.”

“You’re the one man who could run the place right. I could make the money interesting--I could do better than nine thousand. As a matter of fact, I could underwrite considerably more.”

“Let me think it over,” Larry promised. “You’d make a swell boss, but I’ve been on my own for a long time.”

Worry cut into Arthur’s forehead, and Larry felt sorry for him.

“Haven’t we always gotten along like silk?” Bemrose asked. “In the old days at school we used to talk about practicing together. I don’t see why----”

“A fellow gets used to working for himself. He gets used to doing things his own way. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If I decide that it’s too late now to come with you, I’ll help you find someone else. I’ll start looking around for you. There must be someone who’d jump at it.”

“How about Bessie? When is she coming home?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Well, ask Bessie. And don’t forget to tell her I’ll make the price right. Have a long talk with her.”

Larry nodded. “I’d come in a minute if I didn’t have things set up for myself. There isn’t another office in town I wouldn’t quit to work for you, but there’s something about practicing for myself--well, you ought to know.”

Arthur buttoned the damp collar of his shirt. He stood up and put out his hand. “If you should happen to hear from Janice, I’d appreciate your letting me know.”

* * * * *

The next day Larry went swimming with Bessie at the Rockaways. The beach was a honeycomb of flesh that shaded from bright pink to bronze, and every inch of neat, fine sand had been disarranged by the bathers. Next to the narrow oblong that Larry and Bess had marked for themselves, a yowling infant who wouldn’t eat the banana it was being offered kept them from talking. By the time Larry finally got around to telling Bess about Bemrose’s proposition, his mind was just about made up. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that a junior partnership might have saved face for him and made the deal possible, but it was too great a defeat at this point for him to give up his practice for a straight salary. If Bemrose had thought it through, he would have seen it himself. A junior partnership would have been the thing to offer him, Larry decided.

On this Sunday afternoon at home, Larry went over the pros and cons. He had been arguing them with himself the past few weeks and began to see why Bemrose’s offer failed to interest him. He shied away from it, not for the reasons he had suggested to Arthur, that it was a blind alley which cut him off from the active practice of the law. The real reason he wanted to turn it down was _because it came from Bemrose_. It was rather startling to find out that he felt that way. He must be afraid of Bemrose. He must be scared of being pushed around by him. Thinking about it, here on the sofa, he felt the moisture on his forehead turn clammy. Was he also worried that Bemrose would try to high pressure him when he found out he was turning him down? Was he afraid that he might not be able to stand up to Bemrose? It was an uncomfortable thought.

“Feel any cooler?” Bessie flopped on the end of the sofa, and shoved the damp curls off her forehead.

“I think I’m going to turn down that offer,” Larry said.

“You’re not worried about the stories Liz told, are you?”

“No-o-o. But I’m afraid I wouldn’t be happy taking orders. It’s the queerest thing, Bess. I always thought I wanted to practice with Arthur. For years I’ve dreamed about it, and now when it’s offered to me, I don’t want it. Maybe I never really wanted it. I guess if I really had, I would have wormed an offer out of him long before this. What do you suppose made me stay away from it?”

“Don’t take it if you feel like that, Larry.”

“But it might not be the best thing for _you_, Bess. If I took it, we could afford a place in Westport maybe, for the summer. We wouldn’t have to go to Woodmere, or swelter in town. This is no fun for you.”

“Don’t you worry, Larry. Papa likes to have us come to Woodmere.” She plucked her flowered housecoat to let the air through.

“If I had the money to be independent, I’d cut loose from Tammany, and we’d move out of the district. This furniture would look a lot better in an apartment uptown. We ought to give some thought to that angle, Bess.”

“Don’t take something you don’t want on account of me.” She fanned herself with the sport section of the Sunday paper.

“I might not accept it for your sake, but I’d be _turning it down_ for both of us. Say the word, and I’ll--” He took her hand.

“I always thought you didn’t care much about practicing law.” She held on to him and soothingly stroked his arm.

“Most of the time I don’t. Not my type of practice. But every once in a while I have fun. That Brunswick case I handled last week-- It takes time to build the right kind of practice, but I’m not in any hurry, am I?”

“You’d rather do it yourself,” she said thoughtfully. “I understand.”

“Arthur H. Bemrose needs me like a hole in the head,” Larry laughed. “Wait and see, when he hears I’m turning him down. He’ll make me think I’m indispensable. Only who is? I know some fellows think there is such a thing, but the country’s too big. It takes more than one man to make any part of it click. Where do you find men that are indispensable? In business? In Washington? Where? No one individual is needed that bad, I don’t care _who_ he is. HAYNES and BEMROSE is going to get along fine without me. You’ll see. In a few years--hell, next year at this time--it won’t matter a damn whether I work for Bemrose, or he works for me.

“That’s the way I feel. If it’s all right with you, kid,” he added.

“We have a nice life, Larry. Would you like to go to an air-cooled movie?” Bess asked, with the homely irrelevance he loved. It subtracted the universal from tough situations. It always made big decisions easier for him.

Later on the subway he told her, “Your friend, Liz, is a swell girl, but I’m glad you’re you.”

She rested her hand on his knee. “I’m glad you’re not Arthur Bemrose. Keep on being a Little Shot, Larry. I like Little Shots. They’re nice to live with.”

She sighed. “Warm, isn’t it?”

_Chapter 9_

Bemrose’s secretary was on her way to the washroom when Larry stopped her in the corridor. “Keeping you busy?” he asked.

Even for a woman who didn’t use makeup, she looked drawn and abnormally white. The fine lines under her eyes seemed to have reproduced by dividing, and heavy purple lined her lower lid. “I’m so glad you’re going in to see him, Mr. Frank,” she said. “He’s not himself lately.”

“You look done in yourself.”

“That’s what _he_ says.” She nodded toward the office door. “He just gave me money to buy a new hat. He says I need it to pick me up.” She shook her head miserably. “It won’t keep me from worrying about him. I tell you, he’s not himself, Mr. Frank.”

Larry flipped his hat against her plain flannel skirt. “Buy yourself that bonnet and cheer up.”

“I didn’t want to take the money, Mr. Frank. I don’t need a hat.”

“Take it anyway,” Larry advised. “To make _him_ feel better.”

Plaintively she said, “But, Mr. Frank, I haven’t worn a hat in three years.”

Larry had been avoiding Bemrose, not wanting to come to grips with him about the office-manager deal, but he couldn’t put off seeing him forever. He opened the reception room door tentatively. It was after five, and no one seemed to be around; so he went on through to Arthur’s room.

“Hello.” Arthur blinked up from some papers. “Thanks for coming over. I’m just finishing up.”

“Take your time.” Larry walked to the window. Three camouflaged cargo ships, about ten thousand tons each, steamed up the River. They were probably Lend-Lease. We must be sending a whale of a lot of stuff overseas. The poor devils over there certainly needed it--this past month the Heinies had stepped things up. If the newspapers were telling it straight, half of London slept underground, taking it unmelodramatically on the spine.

The ships seemed to be moving right along. They had passed Forty Wall and were headed for the Empire State building, doing a good seven or eight knots.

The brief Bemrose was reading crinkled as he turned the pages. Otherwise the room was quiet as Sunday at Salem Fields cemetery. Larry felt clammy cold, although it was exceptionally mild for after Labor Day. The sun was setting in geometric orange strips, and black smoke from the Jersey factories turned the sky into a modern, mechanized painting. The quiet was ominous. Larry realized the phone must be shut off and wondered why Bemrose hadn’t asked an operator to wait. He kept thinking about the job Arthur had offered him and wondered if pressure would be used on him to accept it. Larry examined his blue suit for lint, locating a few specks on the cuff. He wished Bemrose would say something and break the silence.

“With you in a second.” Bemrose made a margin note on the long sheet and took off his glasses. He walked over and stroked Larry’s back affectionately. “How are you doing, boy?

“I have to clean up the work on hand,” he apologized. “I don’t want to leave the clients high and dry.”

“Going somewhere?” Larry asked.

“To war.”

Bemrose’s left shoulder twitched, a new form of the lip tic. Larry watched the moving tweed of Arthur’s coat, so preoccupied with the jumping muscle that he didn’t realize what Bemrose had said.

But the sense of it finally came through to him. “So you’re saving me the trouble of turning down that job you offered me, huh?”

“That’s right! I won’t be needing you now.” Bemrose grinned.

Along with a sense of relief, Larry felt somewhat let down. He had been fighting round after round with himself and came out winner. Now Bemrose made the victory unimportant. While he had chewed over the offer of the summer, Arthur was three jumps ahead of him. Ahead of him by months. Maybe years. Larry admired the hell out of Bemrose’s sixth sense of what was going to be important, his way of smelling things out ahead and giving them priority. As far back as Larry could remember, Bemrose had done priority thinking, long before the word, priority, had come into general use. In anyone else he would call it vacillation perhaps, but in Bemrose it was something else. Flexibility, foresight.

“Did the Army finally take you?” Larry asked.

“Nobody will promise me anything. I don’t know what they need to get going. The facts were in when the Nazis marched into Poland. If a business man sat around waiting for facts and more facts--” Bemrose threw up his hands. “The facts are in, and they sit around, tied hand and foot. 1941, the year of the great sitting paralysis--that’s how they’re going to write about it someday.” He turned on Larry angrily. “Well, let the rest sit around paralyzed. Let the rest of them enjoy warming their fannies. I’m going to get in. The only question is how.”

“Have you put out any feelers?” Larry asked.

Bemrose nodded absentmindedly. “Listen to this.” He shuffled in his middle desk drawer and pulled out a folded notepaper. “Judge Haynes wrote it in 1918,” he said. “We were one helluva time getting into _that_ war, too, and this was an answer to a letter he received from Didier saying the French liked Wilson’s new policy.” Bemrose squinted at the faded writing, tracing the lines until his finger reached the middle of the yellowed paper. “‘Every night I thank God that we are in it with you. I pray we have not come in too late. We must prepare for setbacks because we waited long. I sorrow to think of the days, the months, and the years we allowed to slip by.’”

He read the words solemnly. His deep, full tone crowded the spacious room.

“It could have been written today,” Larry admitted.

“Whenever I have a question, that’s what I do--look back to the Old Man. Nine times out of ten he had already answered it.”

It was curious, his saying that, when Larry had just been thinking about Bemrose looking forward, not backward. He supposed ideas had to come _from_ something, go through a process of change to fit the times, take on the color of a fresh personality, and come out pointing _toward_ something different. Bemrose’s came from Judge Haynes but pointed toward a philosophy of his own. He had a sense of history along with a view of the future.

“I wonder how he’d think I should get in,” Bemrose said wistfully, slipping the Judge’s letter into a corner of his blotter pad.

“What about asking your friend, Tom Newton?” Larry inquired.

“I haven’t seen any of that Washington crowd for months.” Bemrose frowned. “I’ve written Tom twice to get in touch with me when he’s in New York. We wanted to have him up to the house. I can’t figure out why I haven’t heard from him.”

The phone rang, and Bemrose grabbed the receiver as if it were a lifeline. “Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “We’ll make it another time.” His voice sounded tired.

“Professor Storey,” he explained. “They were coming to dinner Friday night, but he’s going out of town.”

Larry watched his shoulder twitch. It was too bad, Bemrose and Lucy in the Brett-decorated house not quite able to organize a dinner party. Larry remembered what Steve Holmes said about Bemrose not making the client-friends happy. Maybe Liz Brett’s stories had made the rounds, and the others were uneasy. A man taking it out on his wife, his wife of three months, was no fun to be around.

“When I get into the War, we’ll close the house,” Bemrose said.

“But you just finished remodeling.”

“Hell, if they _came_ to dinner, she would be scared. She’s never been around anyone much except that Aunt and Uncle.”

Larry pulled a shabby piece of yellow copy paper out of his side coat pocket, and shoved it toward Bemrose. The note was from Janice.

While Arthur read, the shoulder quieted down. The large ears stood out when he reached the last paragraph where Janice had casually sent him regards. It was as though he were straining to catch the tone of her voice.

“You could cable her,” Larry suggested. “She knows people in London. There may be something over there with Lend-Lease----”

“I’d rather try for the Army,” Bemrose said. “The Army will be in it longer.” He handed back the letter. “Good to hear from her.”

His face was lonesome between the oversized ears, and his ample frame looked lost in the outsized tweed coat. The sound of him was humble, too. Larry had never seen a man take to marriage harder. He wanted to say, “Look, it’s a business deal. If it’s grinding you up, why not get out of it? Don’t tear yourself to pieces.” But he kept still.

“I’d like you to hear a part of this brief.” Bemrose pulled some papers from under a jade paperweight. “I won’t try to read the whole thing to you, just parts of it. Lucy’s picking me up in twenty minutes.”

Arthur had told him about the case once, and Larry knew that it involved an appeal from an order of the N. Y. Supreme Court, Special Term. The order granted Bemrose’s client, a Times Square hotel, permission to join an insurance company as party defendant in the suit brought by a guest who had lost valuable papers which were stored in the hotel vault. The insurance company claimed that the jury would be prejudiced in the plaintiff’s favor if it knew the hotel were insured. Juries notoriously brought in thumping verdicts against insurance companies. The companies were fighting the court order desperately, Bemrose explained. If a precedent of impleading them as third parties were established, it might result in huge future losses.

Larry could see the point. There was a settled rule in negligence cases that insurance companies could not be brought into court. It practically amounted to an invitation for heavy damages. The companies in this case had ganged up against Arthur’s client, and he was sweating over his reply brief. He had struggled with the case since spring and won his motion in Special Term on a section of the Civil Practice Act which he unearthed, a section no one else had used for years. While Larry didn’t grasp all the subtleties of Arthur’s argument, there was really no need to. In his practice, he’d never come up against a pack of insurance company lawyers. Anyway, he understood enough to know that Bemrose had turned in a job.

Bemrose paced around Larry’s chair. “_Now_ the so-and-sos have some unofficially reported English cases. They’re going to claim that if the Judge at Special Term had seen these cases, he’d never have granted the motion. Take a look.” He picked up the appellant’s brief from his desk and handed it to Larry. “The English citations start on page ten.”

Larry concentrated on the text, and saw the cases _were_ fairly damaging. “I wouldn’t worry. The Appellate Division won’t reverse it,” he said reassuringly.

“You can never tell with that court. That last English case worries me. It says the real issue should be decided on the merits without supervening and prejudicial circumstances being interposed. The Judge couldn’t say it any plainer. It’s right there.” He pointed to the brief from across the room. “A third party procedure which brings the insurance company before the Court is objectionable.”

Larry turned back to page ten and saw that Bemrose was quoting _verbatim_. In a few minutes he’d be tossing volume, section, and page numbers at him, not only of this case but all the others. Larry had heard of people who memorized railroad timetables. Arthur probably could if he ever had to. If it meant winning a case. His mind was superspeed film which recorded case references infallibly. The boys at law school used to say, “Don’t bother to look it up. Ask Arthur.”