Chapter IX: Part 9

“What do you mean by ‘anti-social’? Whose society was he against?” Larry asked, grateful to have a human voice penetrate the mausoleum quiet of the hall and break the mournful rhythm of this walk.

“He’d take me to Rock Creek Park, and we’d race his game leg up and down the hills--they have real inclines over there. But it wasn’t the exercise he wanted. Mostly he’d want to talk.” Arthur bore down on his crutches as he reconstructed the Judge’s thinking while Larry watched to make sure that his crutches didn’t skid.

“He’d say that whenever labor got control, it began to fuss and rail against conditions. The more gadgets the working man bought and the more bathrooms he had, the more he complained about conditions. The Judge’s theory was that people had a better time without modern comforts, that when they lived poorer, worked harder, and didn’t have the benefits of education, they had more fun than with their high wages, their ideology, and their unions. He claimed that the soldiers who were with him at San Juan Hill laughed more and had a better time living in mud than the well-fed working man at home. He said when you shortened hours and gave people time and energy to complain, they would start being miserable, like the French peasants before the revolution. He called union leaders big business men who had forgotten what most business men knew--that the way to make a living was to work hard. As much as he liked the adventure and excitement of a military war, that’s as much as he hated class war.”

A Senator that Arthur knew stopped to say hello.

“Another labor-baiter,” he said when the Senator had gone.

“You wouldn’t call the Old Man----?”

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

Larry paced his step to Arthur’s measured gait.

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

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

Larry nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Send you up, huh. Like Sing Sing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grabbed his hand. “How personal?”

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Next time kick me around the block.”

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

“Come again.”

“What does Jan think?” Larry repeated.

There was silence from the other room.

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

_Chapter 23_

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

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

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

“That must have felt lovely.”

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

“Wasn’t he in once before this week?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They take them seriously in Russia.”

“Maybe they’re not as good-looking.”

“To the Russians they are.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell no.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. I may.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A euphemistic remark,” Arthur guffawed.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m glad you did,” Arthur said.

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

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

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

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

“I ran into a friend.”

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

“Buttons,” Arthur explained to Phil Kenyon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silently he sipped his cocktail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry bent to tie his shoelace.

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

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

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

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

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

“Not for several months.”

“I promised to let Tom know next week.”

Lucy brushed some wisps of hair from her cheek.

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

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

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

“He’s jumpy,” she admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

“But you have other plans?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have I?”

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

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

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

_PART IV_

_Chapter 24_

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

During the grim winter of ’43 when more planes were put into the English skies than returned to landing strips bedded in the Oxford-Cambridge villages, in the winter the Red Army, freed by the Stalingrad victory, advanced against Rostov in a drive to reopen the Caucasus and the Crimea, in the winter that MacArthur’s men, mopping up in Papua and the Solomons, awaited tensely “a Jap move of utmost importance,” and Montgomery, triumphant after El Alamein, stubbornly battled Rommel’s last outpost in Tunis, in the winter the home front retched at Hull’s choice of Vichyite Peyrouton for governor of Algiers, in that grim winter Janice bloomed. Larry figured that the times were hers. She seemed to understand and belong to the times, and they rewarded her.

It was the winter, Larry predicted, that Janice would look her most beautiful, just as there seems to be a year when almost every woman becomes life-ripened and achieves her fullest flavor, fragrance, color, and texture. With Janice this ripening must have been curiously delayed. In her twenties she was too scrawny and intense, with eyes that grabbed on too quickly. In her early thirties, the flesh retreated to her bones where it clung tight and dry. Now in her middle thirties, a radiance took hold. The black chips of eyes, which had burned defiantly and stubbornly, threw back opalescent lights of green, rose, and gold. The dull boy’s hair acquired brilliance, as if stroked fifty times a night, and the parched flesh satisfied its thirst, suffused by the racing fluid of vein and capillaries.

In the high-ceilinged drawing room of Janice’s house this afternoon in early February, Bemrose sat at the edge of the crowd and followed her pattern of light as it illuminated the guests. Larry, from a corner next to the damask-hung window, reflected that the significant moments of Bemrose’s life, and perhaps of many a modern man’s, were lived in crowds. Larry thought of the crowded evening at Professor Storey’s when Arthur had first begun to know Janice, of the crowded drawing room at home when he had become engaged to Lucy----

Larry thought he understood why many contemporary painters selected crowds to show the face of America. More and more the individual was judged by an impression snatched in a group. The crowd had become measure of the man, and the interest a man commanded in a crowd often mirrored his position in the social framework. Formerly a portrait by Rembrandt, Copley, or Gilbert Stuart told the story of a society, but today the crowd seemed to have replaced the individual as sitter.

About seventy-five cards spilled from a silver dish on the table of Janice’s entrance hall. She had invited some friends from the Russian embassy, and although she could not compete with the caviar and champagne they served at official functions, Janice had paid them a subtle tribute. Behind the drawing room in her study, she had used an empty magnum salvaged from the last embassy party to decorate the hearth. A Russian with shiny skull bent to examine the bottle, and as he wiped the dusty neck with his finger, he smiled approvingly.

Janice brought over a Senator to meet him, and immediately the Russian stiffened. Knowing they belonged to different planets politically, Janice steered them toward Arthur, apparently hoping that he could establish the two on amiable ground--whatever that area might be. Larry tried to imagine a mutually agreeable subject and ended with Donald Duck. Disney, in a future world government, would be a logical Secretary of Communications.

The other guests, including cabinet assistants, newspapermen, congressmen, and two Supreme Court wives, also gravitated to the cluster of quiet around Bemrose, as if he assured them respite from the crowd chatter. They had come to expect a quiet strength, a sound opinion from Arthur. Guests who met him, often for the first time, intuitively felt this quality. That’s what Janice told Larry. Larry, himself, had seen it happen in New York recently. With the dependable crowd instinct which used to sidestep his blustering, people now sought him out, attracted by his deep quiet, and seeming to find in it solace for their own worries or the world’s worries.

A Washington hostess, whose Friday night suppers sowed items regularly in the gossip columns, approached Larry on miserly ankles. “You’re his best friend, aren’t you?” she asked sharply.

Larry backed toward the window away from her bulk of bosom.

“I hear the President is delighted he came to Washington. I hear the President regards him as one of the most brilliant lawyers we have. Wonderful how he manages to get around on those crutches--” She used her malnourished hands to emphasize the words.

“Wonderful how the President manages,” Larry said evasively.

The woman moved closer and watched Janice spar with one of the _Everett’s_ editors, her legs astride and chest high. “Nice for both of them, his staying here,” she observed.

Larry lit her cigarette. “It’s a lucky thing she took him in with the hotels jammed.”

“Man in his condition doesn’t belong in a hotel! Plenty of room here. Good for her to have a man in the house. Good for everyone. I need someone in my barn.” Hawkishly she eyed Larry, but he unhooked himself. “You must let Janice bring you up some Friday night----”

He sat on the windowsill to recover, and felt immense relief. Washington paid attention to the woman. She’d stop the gossips. It was a real break, having her on their side. She’d make it seem patriotic for Janice to have taken him in.

“Caroline thinks you’re a lamb,” Janice said a few minutes later. “She claims you’re the best dressed man in the room.”

Larry glanced curiously at the sleeves of his blue coat.

“She talks too much. She’s a hyperthyroid. Come on and meet some of the nice people.”

Janice took his hand, but he said, “I’ll see how Arthur is.”

“You’ll never get near him. You’d think he was giving away red points.” The radiance dimmed for a moment. “I hope he’s having a good time. They’re all in love with him.”

She sighed. “You were right. He has changed. He’s stopped trying to be important.”

“He’s important to us,” Larry said.

“I think it’s the War,” Janice speculated. “At first I thought it was his illness, but now I don’t know. I think the War may have helped to pull him out of himself----”

“Your friend Caroline approves of his staying here,” Larry said.

“I try to invite people he likes, try to make it comfortable----”

“You do all right when you try,” Larry reassured her. “Go on back to your guests. I’m fine.”

The tomato face of Davis Shore gleamed under his white cap of hair. He motioned affably to Larry who, remembering Shore’s recent snub at the office, figured it must be the good liquor at work. “Here’s Mr. Bemrose’s associate,” Shore said to a lawyer Larry recognized from the Treasury. “He’ll tell us the catch in it. That preposterous scheme of Ruml’s to forgive nineteen forty-two taxes--” he explained. “I don’t see how the Treasury can afford to----”

“But forty-three is going to be an even bigger tax year,” the lawyer expounded patiently. “I’m trying to convince Mr. Shore that the Treasury won’t lose anything. It’s just a matter of bookkeeping.”

“Forgiving taxes! When we have a war to pay for! It takes genius to dream up such a scheme. I’d like to ask our friend, Bemrose----”

“I discussed it with Bemrose last night at the Morgenthaus’,” the lawyer reported. “He thinks it’s sound.”

Shore’s ruddy countenance turned an exasperated white. “Worst time in history for Bemrose to bury himself down here,” he confided to Larry. “We need him at our end of things in New York. We’ve tried to make it interesting. I wouldn’t want you to repeat this, Mr.--” He twitched uncomfortably.

“Frank.”

“Oh, yes, Frank. Well, our Board authorized me to invite Bemrose to become General Counsel of the company. Adams, who has been with us for thirty years, had an embolism. Fine fellow, Adams, but we don’t expect him back.”

“I suppose Arthur felt he couldn’t leave Newton,” Larry sympathized.

“Newton could fill the job with a dozen other men.”

“I don’t know. Arthur seems to think the work down here is important.” Larry rehearsed his most cordial manner. Someday Bemrose might be glad to be General Counsel to a utility.

“Thought I might tackle Newton to release him,” Shore said. “Didn’t I see Newton come in a few minutes ago?”

“He’s over there with Arthur.” Larry started toward the study.

“By the way, Frank, what are you doing now that Bemrose’s office is closed?”

“I’m back at my practice.”

“Downtown?”

“Midtown.”

Shore winced. “Too bad you couldn’t stay with him. Fine training for a lawyer to work around Bemrose.”

“My old roommate is putting up with me.”

“Then you’re tied up--” Shore added vaguely.

Arthur was telling an Englishman where he could buy ladies’ girdles to take back with him to London when Shore and Larry walked into the room.

“Just moved to Washington and he knows where to shop for girdles,” Tom Newton kidded.

“I hope you’re not going to keep him down here,” Shore said.

Newton tossed a cigarette into the fire. “He signed up for the duration plus six months.”

“I don’t want to lose my job,” Arthur said. “I like my boss.”

Affectionately Newton stroked his shoulder. “You’re pretty good at your job for a youngster just out of law school.”

“Why _don’t_ you put in a youngster?” Shore asked. “We need him for that Reynolds case. Isn’t another lawyer who understands our problems and can try the damn case. How about giving him six months’ leave?”

Newton pretended sympathy. “We’d like to oblige, but in Europe there’s shooting going on.”

“He’s only chairborne infantry,” Shore remarked, and Larry waited for Bemrose to wince.

“Why shouldn’t I stay here and have the privilege of wasting some of the taxpayers’ money?” Arthur chuckled. “Everyone else does. How about it, Tom?”

“I have orders from the White House to keep him on the payroll,” Newton said. “If you don’t want to upset the Commander-in-Chief, you’ll stop trying to seduce him with your retainers.”

Shore flattened his babyfine hair across his forehead. Apparently resigned, he said, “I don’t suppose you can recommend a lawyer.”

“What’s the matter with--” Arthur started to say.

A lady columnist jostled Shore and spilled the Martini he had in his hand. She plopped on the arm of Bemrose’s chair. “Is it true you have the goods on that Yorkville reptile? Come on, give. I hear you have enough to hang him.” She wiped her face with a soiled chiffon handkerchief. Turning her back on the others, she fingered Arthur’s lapel.

Janice streaked across the room. “Your friend, Vorosoff.” She interrupted the girl. “I theenk he would like to make with you circle around park.” Janice bowed, impersonating the Russian. “At the door he is waiting in black cloak. Very dremetikal.”

When the columnist had gone, Janice sat down, exhausted. “You’d have been misquoted in every Morris paper,” she told Bemrose. “All seventy-nine of them. I meant to warn you----”

“My press secretary,” Arthur said, pointing to Janice. “She has the best legs in Washington.”

“Fool!” Janice grabbed Tom Newton and shouldered her way to the drawing room.

“They are,” Larry said. “I never noticed. Anything I can get you?”

“I _have_ everything,” Arthur said cryptically. “You’re staying over tonight, aren’t you?”

“You’ll be dead by the time this crowd leaves. You won’t want to stay up and talk. You’ll be worn out.”

“I want to talk to you about that case of Shore’s. Maybe we can get him to turn it over----”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did,” Larry protested. “It’s way over my head.”

“I’d help you with it. That part is easy. But I have to figure out an angle with Shore. We’ll have to sell you to him. Subtlely, of course.”

“He wouldn’t want me,” Larry said.

“Who gives a damn what he wants? There’s a good fee in it----”

“You never charged him.”

Arthur laughed. “This time he’ll pay through the nose.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Is it true old Caroline wanted to rape you?”

Larry fingered the buttons on his double-breasted coat. “She didn’t waste much time on me. She was too busy giving you and Janice the green light. It’ll be okay on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line. They listen to Caroline.”

“Didn’t you tell her I was a married man?”

“I don’t think she cares.”

Solemnly Bemrose fingered the strands of his mustache.

“So you think you rate a bedroom and bath for the O.P.A. ceiling price?” Larry asked. “Without performing any services?”

“I’m very useful, I watch the house,” Arthur protested. “Most of the Georgetown police have been drafted. Someone has to keep an eye on the house for her.”

“She always dressed well, but now she’s pretty,” Larry nodded toward Janice. “You’re therapeutic.”

Arthur sobered. “Contented. It’s almost the first time the little man inside hasn’t been sticking pitchforks in me, pulling and pushing me out of shape.”

“Maybe it’s Janice. She’s happy you’re here, and she’s making a big effort----”

“Other people have put themselves out,” Arthur reminded him.

“Maybe the life and the people down here suit you more,” Larry said.

“I’ve always been scared of people.”

Larry mocked. “You? Why you self-possessed bastard----”

Arthur’s voice was calm and insistent. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve really felt at home with people.”

“Maybe it’s because they’re more your kind than--well, Ed and Marge,” Larry speculated.

“Nothing wrong with Ed and Marge,” Bemrose insisted. “Trouble was with me.”

Janice brought over Judd Harrison. He asked Arthur his opinion of the Japs and their chances of jockeying a negotiated peace.

While he and Bemrose discussed the problem, Janice urged Larry to stay overnight. “We’ll fix supper, just the three of us,” she promised.

“Bessie expects me home.”

“Just this once. When I’m happy,” she pleaded. The blood-red fingertips crept along his collar. “You’ve almost always seen me at my worst, Larry. Yes, you have. I’d like you to be around once when I’m----”

On the way upstairs to phone Bessie, Larry stopped to read the inscriptions on some photographs which lined the wall--the picture of a Chinese General whose name was elaborated in characters as ornate as his medals, Janice in Paris with De Gaulle, Janice with Jimmy Doolittle and Queen Elizabeth on an English airdrome, Janice in Honolulu at a USO show surrounded by G.I.’s, and an old one of Janice in a cloth coat down to the ankles on her way home from China.

In her bedroom Larry fingered the candlewick spread before deciding to sit on the bed. The room was unpretentious, bright with rag rugs and chintz, and the polished pine floorboards gleamed warmly. Larry settled down and relaxed against a sturdy bedpost.

Bessie’s voice rang sweetly in his ear. “Having a good time, Larry? Is it snowing? There’s a blizzard here.”

But Janice’s heels clattered across the wooden doorsill, and she grabbed the phone from him. “He’ll call you back,” she told Bessie. “There’s been an accident----”

As she dialed, Larry pictured Bemrose sprawled on the floor downstairs. “For God’s sake, Janice!”

She covered his mouth with her hand. “Henry Chu, Chinese Embassy. Heart attack.”

She gave the doctor crisp directions.

“Call Bessie back right away. She’ll be worried,” Janice insisted when Larry offered to go downstairs with her. “There are three or four doctors around, but they thought I ought to get his own physician. Poor Henry, he’s green as a billiard table.”

Bessie also thought it was Arthur, of course. “You can tell me the truth,” she insisted, still skeptical when Larry tried to reassure her. “If you want me to call up his wife----”

Larry finally straightened her out. “Arthur is really in good shape. He’s having the time of his life down here. You should see him, Bess. He’s in his element.”

“That’s lovely, Larry. You stay over and have a good time. Did you take your overshoes with you?”

Before he went downstairs, Larry tried to find a mystery he could read tonight in bed. Janice had shelves of every thriller from Gaboriau to Erle Stanley Gardner. He selected _The Golden Violet_ by Joseph Shearing and put it on a table in Bemrose’s room.

If only it would last with Bemrose--if he could have just a year of this, he’d be set up.

In the study downstairs Henry Chu’s eyelids fluttered weakly, and Janice held a glass of whiskey for him to sip. He was birdlike, frightened, and too young to have a heart attack. The other guests had disappeared into the drawing room, and Henry Chu’s doctor was explaining the history and symptoms of the case not to Henry, not to Janice nor to Larry, not to the doctors who were in the next room, nor to Caroline who was a patient of his and had waited outside to see if she could help, but meticulously and earnestly to Bemrose.

_Chapter 25_

For all Bessie’s foreboding of a blizzard, the noise of gossiping birds awakened Larry the next morning. He threw up the loose frame window and let in the spring air. The worn stone steps of a house across the street sagged gracefully in the early light, and a lilac bush was putting out rows of buds prematurely. Except for the birds it was quiet in the narrow, shaded street, and the uneven brick of the old houses, painted dull red or white, recalled the lost leisure of another age.

Only a few minutes away the Pentagon’s network of ramps confounded visitors, and short-tempered lines a block long waited for rooms at the Statler, but in this ancient settlement where Gilbert Stuart once had an art studio, where Francis Scott Key lived and John Howard Payne was buried, Larry felt a village peace.

He had breakfast downstairs with Arthur and Janice. After they had loafed through the _New York Times_ and two cups of coffee apiece, Janice asked about their plans for the day. “I have to finish a piece that’s overdue,” she explained. “Why don’t you make some nice arrangements, and if you feel like coming back around four, I’d love to fix you an early tea.” She looked crisply iced in a chartreuse housecoat.

Bemrose fumbled in the pocket of his old bathrobe and produced a card. “How far is Thirty-first and L?” he asked. “Walk over there with me, will you, Larry? If it’s not too far?”

Janice studied the address. “I think that neighborhood is colored.”

“It’s where the Old Man lived fifty years ago, when he was down here as law secretary to----”

“A Supreme Court judge, wasn’t it?” Janice assisted. “I can’t place the house. It may _not_ be colored. The neighborhood is mixed now, and there’s really no way of knowing.”

“It’s only four or five blocks from here. Do you mind taking me over, Larry?”

“Sure, let’s go. It’s a swell day to get out.”

“The car keys are in the hall table drawer. I’ll get them--” Janice started for the door. “Will you mail my article for me in New York tonight, Larry? It’ll save a day in getting there, and I’ll appreciate it.”

But Arthur motioned her to come back. “Don’t bother with the car keys. I’d like to go to this place on foot. It’s a kind of pilgrimage,” he explained. “There are some things I’ve been meaning to straighten out with the Judge.”

The sidewalks sagged like the doorsteps, and Bemrose stopped to rest against one of the Lombardy poplars which lined the street. He was wound up and wanted to talk about the Judge. “The Old Man put his faith in the single brilliant mind working independently,” Bemrose recalled. “He shied away from mass solutions.”

“It might help explain why he opposed labor unions,” Larry said. “Do you remember the letter he wrote to his friend Didier, where he sneered at the so-called common man? It always made me gag, that letter. The Old Man was a Back Bay snob, but modern Back Bay, not the old Boston. The roughnecks who spilled tea in the harbor were okay. They had guts, all right. By the time their blood was passed down to the Haynes family some of the democracy was filtered out.”

“I used to worry about that letter, too,” Arthur admitted. “He probably didn’t mean it, but he was obsessed with the need for being different from the herd. He believed in a man exaggerating his differences. He always found for the minority.”

“A minority of one,” Larry added. “Haynes in agreement with Haynes.”

“He wanted me to develop along his own individualistic lines, and that was a fallacy.” Arthur paused. “I might be fashioned in his image and still only turn out to be a faint carbon copy, without the Old Man’s vitality. I could pick up the mannerisms, follow the rules, and still only be a watered down edition of him, the way those Back Bay customers can’t begin to touch Sam Adams. Let’s say I did turn out to be a reasonably good imitation of Haynes--without the Old Man’s wisdom, of course. The point is, I wouldn’t be Bemrose.”

Arthur pointed to a hedge across the street. “Lovely box.”

They waited at the intersection before he attempted to swing across the broken curbstone. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never happy functioning alone. For all my eccentricities, I’m not a lone wolf. When the War came along and I did that job on Lend-Lease, the Old Man’s notions about my being a solitary worker seemed to go down the hatch. I made what, for me, was a big discovery. I was more of a group man. I had a kind of aptitude for working with people. Before, when I was going it alone, well-- I really wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. Not nearly as much as I thought, anyway.”

Arthur paused again to rest. “What goes on in private practice? We worry whether A or B will collect the money, or hang on to his franchise. But how many people except A or B and their families give a damn? I can’t seem to get as worked up about A and B’s problems any more. I was fairly happy working on Lend-Lease, pretty contented in the Army, and I’m having a good time down here working for Tom. I think it’s because the work in Washington and the work in the Army involved doing something for more than one or two guys and their bank accounts. Maybe I’m just kidding myself, of course, but a war seems to indicate we ought to do more. The individual seems to be most useful when he is part of something bigger. Alone, very often, unless he’s another Robinson Crusoe, he can’t even survive. And unbombed islands are fairly scarce today.”

Arthur looked up at the clouds that lay curled and frozen in the gray-blue sky. “I suppose I should have my sights up there,” he said. “But at heart--I might as well face it, Larry--I’m probably a goddam piston.”

After a few minutes he said, “Do you remember the number of that house?”

Larry walked on ahead to investigate. He saw it was the faded yellow house, third from the corner.

“The Old Man wouldn’t have wanted you to go on pulling and pushing yourself out of shape,” Larry assured him when he returned, noting the sweat on Arthur’s chin and forehead. “You’re not trying to be like him, and that’s what he believed in. You’re being yourself. I think that’s all the Old Man ever wanted.”

Arthur laughed. “Not the Old Man. I’m afraid he would call it a decadent philosophy--losing identity in the crowd, becoming _like_ other men, agreeing with the opinions of others, working _with_ them instead of apart from them----”

“He’d understand you have to work it out your own way,” Larry insisted. “Do you want to go inside the house? Supposing the people who live here----”

It was the Negro section, as Janice had guessed. The old boards of the steps were whittled and grayed, and a broken rocker from last summer tilted face down against the porch rail. In the yard alongside the house, a boy and girl in red sweaters stared at them. Larry rang the rusty bell, and a woman of around twenty-five opened the door.

Arthur took off his hat. “I wonder if it would be possible to see the room at the head of the stairs to the left.”

“That’s our room and it’s not for rent.” She talked briskly, like a Northerner. “My husband and I have been living here two years and expect to stay.”

“I don’t want to rent it.” Bemrose’s tone was persuasively low, the voice he used for juries. “If it won’t inconvenience you, I’d like to look at the room.”

“The bed hasn’t been made. I just got back from church a few moments ago. I was going to fix some coffee for breakfast,” she added grudgingly.

“Perhaps if it wouldn’t disturb your family----”

“There’s only my husband and myself. He’s working in the garden.”

“A friend of mine used to live in your room,” Bemrose explained. “He’s dead now, but I remember him talking about the house and the neighborhood. In his time there were ships in the Potomac and the wharves were stacked with sugar and molasses----”

“That’s interesting about the River. My grandmother used to live down there at the water. I guess it’ll be all right for you to come up,” she relented. “The stairs are steep.” She looked dubiously at his crutches. “You wait down here anyway while I tidy the room.”

The stiffly furnished sitting room had a handwinding gramophone and a wicker fern stand painted green. Larry sat in a wooden rocker with stamped carving on a seat pad of flowered cotton. Arthur, exhausted from the walk, relaxed in a tan velour armchair and rested his head against a freshly starched antimacassar. A sepia print of a child posing as Cupid, like one Larry remembered from his boyhood, was framed in a heart-shaped mat. With its pink cotton draperies and lace curtains, Larry figured that the room could have looked pretty much like this in the Judge’s day.