Chapter II: Part 2

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.

“For heaven’s sake, stop fussing. You’ll rub off the finish,” said a plump red-faced woman. She giggled in an uncontrolled staccato. “He’s always at things,” she apologized, shaking hands with Larry. “Mighty nice of you, Mr. Frank, to help our niece with her case. Isn’t this a nasty night? Would you like a cup of tea, or something stronger? Put the water on for tea, Ed,” she decided quickly.

Mr. Daugherty undid his apron and turned toward the kitchen. A polishing, not a talking man, Larry thought, until he later found it was Daugherty’s wife who often canceled out his conversation.

Larry turned with relief to Lucy McVail. After the meticulous uncle and the gushing aunt, it was like looking into a cool, still well. Listening might easily be Lucy’s most useful quality, Larry reflected, remembering that he had mentioned this trait of hers to Bemrose. It wasn’t easy to tell how much she understood, but she listened. He unzipped his briefcase and spread some legal papers for her to examine. Precisely he took up each point in the settlement that Bemrose had worked out with her brother.

When the farm in Iowa was sold, they would divide the proceeds equally, she and her brother. The bonds at the bank, however, belonged solely to her, and they constituted the larger part of the estate. Mr. Bemrose thought she might consider cashing the bonds since he had checked on their current market price and found it was favorable. She might invest the money in an insurance annuity if she wanted to provide for her future.

Miss McVail probably knew, Larry explained, that her brother had capitulated after Mr. Bemrose’s second letter, the blunt one, in which he reminded Mr. McVail of three bonds he had wheedled out of his grandmother the week she died. Mr. Bemrose threatened suit for undue influence, and her brother apparently had reason to keep out of court. Larry noted that Lucy McVail winced. Not that it mattered _why_ he had finally agreed, Larry hastened to explain. Here was his signature. Now if she would just sign-- The farm might bring fifteen hundred dollars. Adding the bonds, she would be able to realize around six thousand in cash. It wasn’t bad. Mr. Bemrose thought she had done all right.

While Lucy McVail read the papers, the Daughertys fussed with teapot, cups and saucers. She read the documents as slowly as she had listened to him, Larry decided. Quietly she studied the long legal sheets, tracing each line with a square-ended finger. Cool and slender. Quiet and slender. Gray-blonde and slender. Larry noted and enjoyed her pale, attenuated beauty.

“Where shall I sign?” she asked at last.

“You’re sure that you haven’t any questions? Mr. Bemrose wanted you to understand all the details.”

“As long as you and Mr. Bemrose think it’s all right--” She nodded. “I trust you.”

Larry handed her a fountain pen, and she wrote her name in thin, tall letters that were squared off in a heavy line at the bottom.

She handed the agreement back to him.

“That’s your copy. Keep it,” he said. “Now sign this one to send to your brother.”

She repeated her signature, obedient as a fourth-grader.

“We didn’t discuss the fee. Do you think Mr. Bemrose--” A shadow crossed the pale eyes. “Well, you know what I mean. He has such important clients.”

“Not you. He’ll be easy on you,” Larry reassured her. “It’s a peculiarity of his, but very often even with his rich clients, he keeps down the fee. I’ve heard him refuse to take a cent from men who would pay anything he asked.” Larry tapped his thigh sharply with a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

“He must be well off, turning down fees from people who can afford to pay--” Marge Daugherty said. She dribbled a spoonful of tea into her full cup, cooling it. “He’s young to be so rich, isn’t he? Or did he come into the money? Tim Hoxter told us----”

Larry laughed. “All he ever inherited was a sister with t.b. He has a brother who never held a job in his life and a father in Albany who drives a truck when he can find some work. The mother keeps house for all of them on what Mr. Bemrose sends her.”

Larry got up and walked to the table where Ed Daugherty had gone back to the lamp. “That’s a nice job you’re doing,” he remarked.

Daugherty ran his fingers over the glowing wood, warming himself.

“I went home with him to Albany one Christmas vacation and met the family,” Larry explained to Mrs. Daugherty. “Bemrose has been supporting them since he was sixteen. He worked his way through college and law school besides. I don’t know how he ever did it. I couldn’t, but I have a brother who did just about the same--took care of my folks, sent me through school. Some people seem to have the capacity.”

“If he had such a struggle, I don’t see how he can turn down fees.” Marge Daugherty clamped her lips.

“He’s not married, Marge,” Lucy said, so quietly that even a preposterous suggestion would have sounded reasonable, coming from her. “A man who isn’t married----”

“I guess it’s fun for him to work on big cases,” Larry speculated. “Fun for almost any lawyer,” he added. “The money doesn’t matter too much. He has a taste for hobnobbing with big shots. He lived around them for years when he made his home with Judge Haynes. They hire him for their lawyer, and first thing you know he’s their pal. He hangs out with half the people in Washington who count.”

“That’s the trouble with the New Deal crowd,” Ed Daugherty snapped.

Larry looked up startled, as though a clump of quiet woodland fern had suddenly acquired powers of speech.

Ed pulled a pipe out of his back pocket and reamed it. “Maybe your friend Bemrose is after power, like all the rest of them.”

“No, he just likes to help people, like he helped Miss McVail.”

She blushed. “He certainly has been nice to me.” The moving gray-blonde lashes shadowed her cheeks. “The day I went to his office the phone hardly stopped ringing, but he found time for my case just the same.”

“When he helps people and they put their confidence in him, he feels good. That’s all there is to it. The money is secondary with him,” Larry explained, conscious of going into needless detail, yet wanting to clarify it for himself. “With taxes what they are, money isn’t as important as it used to be. A man has to find other reasons for working, and Bemrose enjoys feeling useful. He’s like a lot of other people that way, only he knows better than most how to make himself useful.”

“But if his clients _have_ the money and want to pay him, I still don’t see why--” Marge Daugherty laughed, eyeing Larry shrewdly.

“Oh, Marge, what difference does it make? That’s Mr. Bemrose’s business,” Lucy said. She got up and walked to the hall. “Phil said yesterday he would pick me up at eight-thirty. I wonder if he forgot about our date.”

“It’s all right with _me_.” Marge Daugherty brought her forefinger sharply against her bosom. “As long as he doesn’t charge _you_ a big fee.”

“He won’t,” Lucy whispered. “Didn’t you hear what Mr. Frank said?” Her eyes apologized to Larry.

He signaled for her not to worry, relieved that she knew when to stand up to them and wasn’t always a good little girl.

He made himself comfortable in a chair next to Ed. “I suppose you voted for Willkie,” he said, wondering about the Phil who was calling for her and still thinking that Bemrose might have tried inviting her to dinner. She had a nice simplicity that was lacking in so many of the hard, lacquered women Bemrose took out. The difference might appeal to him if he gave her a chance. Larry wondered if Bemrose had ever known a thoroughly nice, unselfish woman.

“Yes sir, Willkie should have won,” Ed said. “Now they’ve got him wasting his time going over there to see Churchill. If we don’t watch out, first thing you know----”

“Do you mean you’re against Lend-Lease?”

“Well, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be neutral.” Ed obstinately bit at his pipe.

“If England goes under, we’ll have a real fight on our hands. My friend, Bemrose, thinks there’s a chance she might.”

“There’s three thousand miles of ocean for the Nazis to cross, and we’ve got a big navy, haven’t we?” Ed asked.

“The Czechs thought they were okay, nothing could touch them, and so did the Poles. I’m not saying we should get into the War, but I’d like to see Congress stop stalling and pass Lend-Lease.”

“Hugh Johnson has the right idea. He calls this free handout lollipopping all over the world, and that’s what it is,” Ed maintained.

“Ed’s pretty conservative,” Marge observed.

“Is that the bell, Lucy?” Marge picked up the cat and slipped it behind the kitchen door. “You answer it, dear.”

But Lucy had already disappeared down the long, floral hall.

While she was out of the room, her aunt explained that Lucy McVail had studied nursing in Des Moines but left early in her training to take care of her grandmother who broke her hip and was alone on the farm. When her grandmother died after months and months in bed, the Daughertys wrote Lucy to come to New York. They couldn’t afford to send her through nursing school, but they paid for her course at a business college, and she found a job in a few weeks.

“She’s a nice girl, not like girls in New York, but a sweet disposition,” her aunt volunteered. “Ed and I never had children, and it’s a change for us to have someone young around. I get a kick out of her boy friends.”

Ed pursed his lips, and his wife added hastily, “Oh, she’s a good girl.”

“I think she should be a nurse, now she has the money for it,” Ed interjected. “Those stenographers where she works are a hard-boiled, Broadway bunch. She should be in a more refined atmosphere. She don’t know how to act sophisticated. She don’t know how to talk fast. Have you noticed how she takes her time with every word? It’s all right on a farm where there’s no hurry, but in a big office----”

“When they have a figure like that, they don’t waste it in a hospital emptying bedpans, do they, Mr. Frank?” Mrs. Daugherty winked suggestively. “At least in business she has a chance to meet someone. The fellow who’s taking her out is a salesman from her office. How come that friend of yours never married? Mr. Bemrose. He can’t be any youngster.”

“Marge!” Her husband sh-shed her.

Lucy McVail was following a sleekly combed man into the room, her blonde head showing above his. He was around thirty, and Larry was surprised to see that he had a small black mustache which could have been plagiarized from Arthur H. Bemrose except that it was a neater, better barbered edition.

“Mr. Kenyon, Mr. Frank,” Lucy introduced them.

Phillip Kenyon’s wide, warm grin was a handshake. “We better push along, Lucy,” he said. “They say the line goes around the block.”

“What are you seeing?” Marge wrinkled her nostrils inquisitively.

“_Philadelphia Story._ At the Music Hall.”

“Oh, I hear it’s swell.” Marge reproached her husband with a sigh. “You two better run along.”

“I’ll walk to the subway with you,” Larry offered.

“Don’t rush.” Ed folded his polishing rag: “I’m finished with this job. In a little while we can listen to the news.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d better go.”

Lucy brought Larry his coat, and Phil Kenyon held hers as if it were sable instead of tweed, looking compliments in five figures. Crossing Ninety-first Street, they drew away from Larry into an invisible circle. She clung to Phil’s arm, letting him screen her from the storm, and he tucked her hand inside the wool lining of his glove.

“I looked for you tonight at five,” he said.

“I know.” She sounded regretful. “Mr. Anderson started to dictate, and I didn’t get away until six-thirty. I tried your extension----”

“Mr. Kenyon works at the Green Network, too,” she explained to Larry.

They had things to talk about.

Larry decided abruptly that he needed cigarettes from the stand next to the subway. A masculine wind and Phil Kenyon swept her down the stairs, and she turned and fluttered a mitten at him.

Larry felt as if he had seen a clean family movie. It seemed right, sharply right, for those two. Happily ever after. He wished Arthur Bemrose had something as good. He wished Bemrose knew just one wholesome, unscheming woman who would be more interested in making a home for him than what she would get out of it in security or social position.

Arriving winded on the subway platform from a senseless habit of always running down the steps, Larry waited to make sure that Lucy McVail and her friend were on the train ahead.

_Chapter 4_

Larry shifted on the stiff sofa outside the dining room of the Downtown Law Club, and shivering, slipped his hands under his pocket flaps. He hated this morgue and remembered that Bemrose had joined because Judge Haynes used to like the codfish cakes they served on Friday.

A burdened coat rack which crowded the small entrance hall hung over Larry. He walked to the window, watching the wet March snow take on the gray of the skyscrapers as it flurried ineffectually and blew to the ground. The tail end of March, and time for Arthur Bemrose to terminate his winter’s hibernation. Larry knew that he couldn’t have been solidly busy for two months, but he was too busy to see anyone. Always just leaving when Larry offered to drop around at the office. Too busy to play poker with the gang. Over the phone he had grown sharper, shorter. Before Larry could invite him to lunch the other day, Bemrose snapped him off. If that’s how it was, if he thought he could get away from whatever was bothering him by isolating himself-- It didn’t make sense. When a man was miserable and had a friend he could talk to----

Larry paced the hall to the gilded iron door of the elevator. The old car crept inch by inch up the shaft as though conquering an Alp. Watching it, Larry wondered why Bemrose had phoned him this morning after all the weeks of silence. “Have lunch with me at the Downtown Club, I’m bringing a girl.” That’s all he had said.

Larry never could stand waiting. Especially here. Not just because many of the lawyers who belonged to the club had more clients than he did. It was the stuffiness. He took a breath, but didn’t get any air in his lungs. It must feel like that in a submarine.

The elevator door creaked open, and Janice Baldwin stepped out with Bemrose. Her sharply tailored suit of gray wool, the gray cap that hugged her head and hemmed her straight hair, produced a trimness Larry wouldn’t have associated with the rounded evening Janice. Only the generous mouth linked daytime and evening editions, the widely spread mouth and shiny black chips of eyes. They brightened the dim hall.

Shifting a bulky pouch bag to the other arm, she thrust her hand toward him. It was a sharp, compact weapon. “You must be Larry Frank.”

Arthur grunted a greeting and handed his coat to the check girl. Larry asked Miss Baldwin if she would like to leave her overshoes, and as she bent down to tug at the zippers, she seemed suspicious of his solicitude.

Bemrose’s tweedy heft preceded them to the dining room, and Larry began to be glad he was along, deciding her trim five feet three inches needed support if Bemrose began to throw his weight around.

At the table Larry waited for him to help Miss Baldwin out of her coat, but he searched the menu and let her struggle alone. Self-consciously Larry picked up his napkin and examined the dingy silver. At last he leaned over and helped her free the sleeves of her suitcoat from her snug woolen blouse.

“Your public,” Bemrose said irritably.

“Nice public.” She grinned at Larry and rattled the shiny amethyst links on her arm. The pert head, angled in his direction, excluded Bemrose.

Shifting his chair slightly, Larry disengaged her attention. He looked beyond the row of tables that hugged the wall. The snow, now turned to sleet, slapped peevishly against the glass. March was laughing up its sleeve in a last spurt of vengeance before the soft arrival of spring. Larry looked at Janice Baldwin, and her sense of being superlatively, glowingly alive retrieved him from the dirty dullness outdoors.

When Bemrose shoved the menu toward her, she passed it on to Larry. “You order for me,” she said sweetly.

Uneasily he turned to Bemrose. “You know what’s good here on Friday,” he said. “Scallops? Bluefish? How about some codfish cakes?”

Janice Baldwin was a study of contrived blankness, and Arthur said gruffly, “I’m having the fishcakes.”

“Is that all right with you?” Larry realized that she had succeeded in making him responsible for her. The two of them against Bemrose. That seemed to be the way she wanted them teamed up.

“Does he always decide what people should eat?” she wanted to know.

“Now----”

“He’s your friend. Ask him what I’ve done,” she said. “He nearly bit my head off when I met him downstairs a few minutes ago. And I didn’t keep him waiting, I was there right on time.”

The garrulous ears darkened. “It’s not your fault,” Bemrose admitted. “I should know better than to make a lunch date. All morning I’ve been in a jam, the usual jam. This time it’s the bill I drafted for Newton. The House Committee doesn’t seem to want it, and Newton insists that I come down to Washington and meet with them. I know they’re making a mistake. They should let it go to the Senate as is, then make their changes when it comes back to them, but they’re not going to listen to me. People only listen when it costs them more than they can afford.”

The statement contradicted Bemrose’s recent policy of not charging his clients, but Larry let it ride. He turned to Miss Baldwin. “Arthur likes things to go right the first time. Usually he doesn’t need more than one try.”

“And he sulks when they don’t go right.”

“Do you remember in our second year at school you got mad because the _Law Review_ turned down an article you wrote?” Larry asked Bemrose. “I can still remember the subject. It was ‘Decisions.’ You were so put out when the article was returned that you quit studying for about two weeks. For you, that was like going on a hunger strike. We went to the movies every night. We saw about fourteen B pictures.” Larry’s chuckle came out easily from the bottom of his vest.

“Twenty-eight, you mean. Every show was a double feature.”

“That was when you almost decided to give up the law, wasn’t it?” Larry asked.

Bemrose bungled a smile. “Too bad I didn’t before my emotions were involved. Sometimes I envy the fellows who hate their jobs, the clock watchers. They don’t care whether things go right or wrong. They go home and forget about it, and they never get ulcers.”

“Like me. I’ll never have ulcers, or any of the other tension diseases people get from worrying,” Larry said. He turned to Miss Baldwin. “I like what you’ve been writing about England. I get a lot out of the way you say it. Over here, people like me still have no idea----”

Her hair fell forward, screening her face. She stroked the cabochons of her bracelet and talked down at the tablecloth. “I feel it. All my friends over there have been bombed out. It’s the only thing I seem to want to write about. I’d like to make everyone feel it. We’re sitting on dynamite over here, but we don’t know enough to get off. If there were only some way, short of bombing, that would make us feel the urgency-- If a writer had the power and could show us that it’s close to our last chance----”

“You’ll be going back, I suppose,” Larry said. It was inconceivable that Janice Baldwin would sit out the War comfortably in New York.

“The British Consulate has promised to arrange transportation for me in a month. They phoned yesterday.” Without turning her head, the eyes moved sideways toward Bemrose.

His knife dropped and hit the table. “I thought you told me----”

“I said _if_ I could do it without upsetting _Everett’s_ schedule. You know I promised Pat. You were right there.”

“Naturally she wants you to go. That’s how an agent collects ten percent. Miss Baldwin is always letting her agent railroad her into jobs she doesn’t want,” Bemrose complained to Larry.

“If you wanted me to stay here, you should have said so the other night.” Janice’s eyes were bright and bitter, like a quinine-loaded wine.

“I heard you tell Pat there wasn’t any new material over there. You had already covered the story, and five hundred other reporters were hanging around the British Isles for a news break. I thought you asked her to get you out of it,” Bemrose said.

“The other night I may have felt that way.”

“You’d think she would be satisfied to stay in this country and pay attention to her job. She’s always going places,” he grumbled.

“But it _is_ my job,” Janice Baldwin objected. “He doesn’t understand that I’d like to sit home and do it, but I have to look at what’s going on, not just read about it. That’s my particular gix. It’s the only way I can work, being there on the spot and seeing things happen.” She appealed to Larry. “Maybe other people can absorb it from the newspapers, but I have to be on hand and see it myself. I was trained that way. I’m an old time reporter. I always will be----”

“On the fly, going somewhere every minute. I don’t see how she accomplishes anything. A person ought to have a base.” Bemrose’s mustache jerked in a light staccato.

“For a man who thinks he’s anchored, you seem to spend most of your time on trains,” she said crossly.

“I wanted to get back in time to go with you Wednesday night. At the last minute Newton asked me to meet him on the hill. That’s practically a command. I had every intention----”

They had been over it before. Her pat on his hand said skip it.

She left Bemrose alone with the back of her head and turned toward Larry. “Tell me more about him at law school.” In a voice that dripped apple blossoms.

Larry tried to warn her. This was no time. Not when Bemrose was strung up like a radio aerial.

The waiter arrived with their order, and the thick dishes clattering on his aluminum tray drowned out Janice Baldwin. They settled down to the fishcakes, Arthur jabbing his angrily.

“At law school did you all know he would be good?” she asked after a few minutes.

Larry tucked his left hand into his trouser pocket while he ate with the right. “Sure. We tried to tell him so, but he kept on working. The way he worked, you’d think he was going to flunk out. Night after night he’d grind, except the one time he got upset about the _Law Review_ turning down his article.”

“What did you think he should be doing?”

“Playing poker with us. What do you think?” Larry laughed. “You see law school wasn’t enough. Not for Arthur. He got himself a job after class clerking in a law office downtown.”

Silently Bemrose remashed his potatoes.

“Didn’t you try to talk him out of working like that? It couldn’t have been good for him.”

Larry put both hands in his pockets and moved his chair back from the table. “We were scared of him. He was better than we were, and we all knew it. I guess we resented him, but we didn’t dare interfere. It would have been like trying to stop a tornado. You know it’s going to change the shape of almost everything that is in its path, but the force is too great. You don’t dare try and stop it.”

She nodded, letting her food turn cold.

Her tense listening acted like caffeine. Not that Larry needed any special stimulant to talk about Arthur H. Bemrose. What he was saying seemed to make sense, although it had taken time and perspective to understand. It was strange lately--Tim Hoxter, the Daughertys, other people pumping him about Bemrose--a sign, maybe, that Arthur was becoming famous.

“So he scared you and the rest of the boys. You didn’t know what he was about, but you respected it. Or is respect the word?” She searched Larry’s face. “You were afraid of it. It was stronger than you. You didn’t know whether it was good or destructive, but you felt its strength.”

“Why not hold it until the morning they print my obituary? Then you can do a real job,” Bemrose interrupted. “Let’s order some dessert and get out of here.”

Larry turned to Janice Baldwin. “All I can tell you is that we would have given a right eye to be as smart as Bemrose.”

“What’s so goddam wonderful about being able to use your head? You were all exposed to an education, and an expensive education. If any of you had _wanted_ to work--” Bemrose threw the words bitterly at Larry.

Larry had been feeling sorry for Bemrose because he was in a jam with the Baldwin girl, but now anger shot through him like strong whiskey. His neck protruded with it, and sweat stood out on his forehead. He tightened his fists until his finger joints hurt.

Larry pushed back his chair. “I have some time-killing to do for a client uptown,” he said, rising. “Nice to have met you, Miss Baldwin. I’ve admired your work. I wanted to ask you about the War.”

“Hold on, you haven’t had your coffee or dessert.” Bemrose violently motioned to a waiter.

“I’ve had dessert,” Larry said. “Don’t bother.”

“Please.” Janice Baldwin put her hand on his sleeve. “It was my fault. I was upset because he spoiled our plans the other night, and he was just getting even.” Her eyes turned spaniel-soft toward his. “Stay, Larry.”

It warmed him to hear her call him Larry. It warmed him to look at her cheeks which were the red of a pomegranate, and to see her moist black eyes directed toward him.

“Another time,” he said. “They’re expecting me back at the office.”

“Please--” Her intensity told him that she understood how deep the cut went.

Larry felt sorry for her. A woman who, in a few minutes, had managed to mess up a good, solid thing that had gone on for years between two men. And without intending any harm. Bemrose had maneuvered her into an unpretty position, and she apparently understood the implications, every shading and counter-rhythm.

“All right.” He pulled back the chair as if to change his mind.

“Larry knows what he has to do.” Bemrose held to his fluke advantage, anxious to prove that she was to blame. “I’ll be seeing you, fellow,” he said, motioning to Larry as if it were a little matter they could straighten out in five minutes alone, when there were no women around intent on Creating a situation.

Larry left the table, and she turned on Bemrose. As Larry reached the entrance hall, the high frequencies grew fainter, but he heard her say, “I _didn’t_-- A decent, considerate guy. It’s your unspeakable arrogance----”

Larry waited for the check girl to locate his coat, and glancing back to the dining room, saw Bemrose take over. The ears were red all the way across the room, and his upper lip must have had St. Vitus’s dance. Janice Baldwin’s hanging black hair kept time with each arbitrary phrase as he instructed her in how to treat his friends.

A dull pain spanned Larry’s forehead as he stepped into the creaky car. He rubbed, but the nagging ache persisted. When would Bemrose be bright enough to find out that wasn’t the way to handle a woman? Anyway not Janice Baldwin. When would he learn to care enough for Janice Baldwin or any other woman to want to find out?

_Chapter 5_

Larry didn’t want to buy a paper, but he laid down three cents anyway, attracted by some violets in a vendor’s box next to the newsstand. He sighed because there was no one to buy them for at ten-thirty in the morning. Outside the Chanin building he stopped to sniff at spring. The restless April. When he was a kid, it was the season for rubbing holes in his black stockings playing pitch penny, a penny if he won, and a bloody nose if he lost. He lost either way because the cotton stockings cost a dime, and his mother couldn’t go on darning the darns forever.

Spring now might mean a girl and the chance to buy her violets, or it might mean going to the zoo and watching the sea lions clown. He liked the sea lions when they arched out of the water in a surprise move which showered the crowd around the pool, then climbed on a granite block and stretched in the sun until their shiny blackness turned the protective gray of the stone.

To be a sea lion. Others could look for spring in the woods, but Central Park was for Larry, and a box on Forty-second Street the place to gather spring violets. The flowers might have a refrigerator smell and be wrapped in tinsel tied with cheap blue ribbon, but they were New York violets.

New York for Larry was the place to spend the restless April; also the motionless August, the bleak November and February when slush clogged the gutters. At any season it was the place, through carbon monoxide mornings, noisy afternoons, and glittery evenings. Monday through Sunday it was the place. When Larry left it to go across the River to Hoboken, he felt as though his right arm had dropped off. When a returning ferry made him whole again, he outwaited corner lights to feel the New York crowd press around him. He would have written an ode to the North River, if he had been Shelley.