A Time to Be Born, page 31
All the way coming home she made plans, calculating exactly what steps must be taken to make her pursuit plausible, just what angle to give Julian in order to insure his backing up to the moment when she dare dismiss it. One thing was certain—that no matter how elusive a man might be here in New York, he was easy prey on foreign soil for the girl from home. Say, she managed to get over there in the next month or so, she was positive they would be lovers soon after. He proposed staying abroad at least a year, this time, or even till the end of the war, if end there ever would be. Very well, she would stay, too. Let Julian be the one to ask for the divorce. Settle herself in Callingham’s bed, first, then let matters take their proper course. The future looked so satisfactory to Amanda that it almost made up for her dissatisfaction at the way the evening had been taken away from her. She came into the house in a glow of secret excitement, even humming to herself, as if the victory had already been won.
She went into her own suite at once and here was her first shock, for Julian sat in her bedroom looking like a thundercloud. He never before had taken such a liberty and surprise overcame her, surprise and a sense of guilt at the thoughts she felt must be printed clearly on her brow.
“Why, Julian! What is the matter?” she gasped.
He stood up and pointed his finger at her, his face distorted with such fury that for the first time she was terrified of him.
“Get out of this house, you tramp!” he choked. “I know all about you. I’ve had you watched these many months. I know the kind of slime you are, now! I’ve got the whole story—the whole record! Don’t dare to deny it—I’ve got witnesses. You can’t sleep with me—no, oh no. But everybody else! Callingham, that’s the man. I’ll break you both! I’ll show you how puny you are. Both of you! I built him up. I made you. I can tear you both apart like a toy, do you hear, like some toy!”
Amanda thought, “Oh, my God, he means murder! … He’s gone crazy! … This is the end of me!”
She backed toward the door but Julian followed her, shaking a trembling finger at her, his eyes wild and bloodshot, his voice strange and shaking with hatred.
“You took that apartment with your sidekick Victoria Haven, so you could have men there. You roped me in. You made me believe your lies, your trickery. All right, but you’re going to pay. You’ll find out there are men that can beat you at your own tricky game! You forced me to marry you, ruin my good home, give you the greatest chance a girl ever had! Then you cheat and lie to pay me back. ‘I Came from the Wrong Side of the Tracks’! You bet you did, and by God, you’re going back there. That’s where you belong, you—you tramp, you slut, you—” Suddenly Julian shook his fists at the futility of expressing his rage and his voice rose to a shrill cry. “Damn you! I’ll kill you! Making fun of me—trying to wreck my life, using me to pimp for you, even, to bring you bigger and better men to cheat! Driving my poor wife mad! Get out—”
“Julian—please—” Amanda tried to get away from his reach but he seized her arms and forced her back to the bed, his hands closing on her throat so that her necklace broke and the pearls rolled over the floor. Amanda started to scream but his hand closed over her mouth, and this at least gave her respite from strangling. His fury had made him weak so that she managed to struggle out of his reach and run toward the door, trampling her hat under foot and trying to clasp together her dress where he had torn it. He came after her, panting, veins standing out on his head so that even in her fright she thought he must be going to drop dead of heart failure any minute.
“Get out of this house, do you hear me?” he screamed, and there was a sound of servants stirring somewhere outside, a sound Amanda did not know whether to welcome or fear. She stumbled over a chair and he caught at her dress, again, but she freed herself with a mighty wrench and made the door just as Mrs. Pons and her husband, both in nightclothes and white with fear, got to the hall. Amanda ran past them, Julian close behind her, and she heard a lamp crash past her as she flew downstairs, and the frightened cries of the servants. She got to the floor below, falling down on the landing, a slipper dropping off, which she dared not stop to retrieve. A vase crashed on the step behind her, just missing her, and she found herself crying out a prayer for help, though there seemed no hope, the servants paralyzed into futility.
“Curse you—curse you—” Julian was sobbing somewhere behind her. “Get out of here—get out of this house—damn you, damn you—oh, damn you!”
She reached the front door and by some miracle the lock worked at once and she was able to get outside into the midnight street before he could get to her. She ran, gasping and limping on her one shoe, holding her torn dress together, down the street. Someone must have managed to hold Julian in time, for the door did not open and she began murmuring, “Oh, thank God, thank God!” her forehead dripping with perspiration, her throat throbbing with the pain of his choking. There was a taxi on the corner and she sank into it, sobbing.
“Where to?” the driver asked. “Where to, Mrs. Evans?”
She was glad he knew her. At least, with her torn gown and one shoe off he did not mistake her for someone to be taken to the police station. Mrs. Julian Evans was still a name to protect the most suspicious circumstances. She sat still for a moment rocking back and forth with little gasping sobs, unable to think. It was something that Julian’s detectives had never spotted the Ken Saunders affair. They had gotten the crime right but the man wrong. Then she remembered something, and gave the driver the address. At Twenty-One she sent him in to get Callingham, and presently he came out.
“What in heaven’s name—” exclaimed Callingham.
“Take me to your hotel please,” she said.
He flung away his cigarette, and looked at her, frowning.
“I’ll have to borrow some shoes for you first,” he said. “What size?
“Six,” said Amanda.
He went back into the restaurant and came out, smiling, with a pair of blue pumps.
“Hope you don’t mind blue with your gray dress. I’m not a good shopper. I took the first thing I could get. The driver can take them back.”
He didn’t say anything when she gasped out her story. If she had been more sensitized to other’s reactions or less upset, she might have felt his bracing himself against her. But all she could think at the time was that she was out of Julian’s murderous reach, and by some miracle was safe with Callingham.
“Take me with you, Andrew,” she implored him. “You must take me with you.”
“It’s not as easy as all that,” he said, almost irritably. They reached his hotel and she managed to compose herself enough to enter. Now she began to wonder what he would do with her. No man could walk out on a lady in her own present plight. He took her arm, out of the elevator and led her to his suite. His valet was clearing up the ravages of the recent party.
“One thing, you can’t stay here,” he said scowling. “Bad enough with Julian thinking all that rot, without giving him reason to believe it. He might even have his detectives here this minute.”
“I don’t care,” said Amanda. “Nothing would convince him any differently anyway.”
He looked away from her, still frowning.
“I can tell you it isn’t going to help you or me,” he said. “Julian says he’s going to break us and he could almost do it. I doubt if he can ruin us but he can make a hell of a lot of trouble. Frankly, I don’t like it at all.”
“We’d be in it together,” said Amanda. “We’re already in it. It’s too late to do anything about it.”
He laughed, unwillingly.
“I’m in love with somebody else, you know, and I’m going to marry her someday.”
“No, you’re not,” said Amanda. “You’re going to marry me.”
“How?” he fended. “You’re still married, and I’m going to Africa tomorrow and may never set eyes on you again.”
“I’m coming over on the next boat,” said Amanda. “I’ll fix everything, never fear.”
Callingham looked at her reflectively.
“Has it occurred to you that you may find it harder ‘fixing’ everything once you break with Julian? I don’t think you know yet what you’re up against, my dear girl. Personally, I’ve gotten along damn well before without Julian Evans’s backing, and I can do it again. But you’ve used the man up to the hilt. What makes you think you can do without him now?”
He was being difficult. It was going to be harder than she thought.
“You’ll help me,” Amanda said.
“Don’t count on it!” He grinned at her. “I’m not risking my hide and reputation for anybody, even a lovely anybody like you. Another thing, I’d better get you out of here as quietly as possible before hell breaks loose again.”
“I don’t care if it does,” said Amanda boldly. “I’m staying with you tonight.”
He burst out laughing.
“Fine. I never pass up a pretty gift like that. It won’t change my mind on anything, though.”
“It might,” Amanda said, tossing her head.
“The talk is that you’re no good in the hay, my dear,” Callingham chuckled. “But I like to be open to conviction.”
It might still work, Amanda thought, just as it had with Julian. With this farewell memory she could count on winning him over completely when she reached him in Africa. This was the way she had planned it and this was the way it would have to be. Unless, for the first time, something went wrong for her. Unless he was a stronger man than she. Unless he, in his own egotistical way, had other plans. Unless Julian really could put a hex on her.
Even under Callingham’s rough embrace there came, along with her usual annoyance at the damage to her permanent, Amanda’s first doubts.
14
OCKMAN ELROY HAD Vicky Haven on his mind to the point of inconvenience. He would be strolling through the park, swinging his cane, dodging kiddycars and admiring the amiable antics of the sea lions, when he would think of a nice fact about sea lions which he would like to impart to some willing ear, and Vicky’s was the only willing ear he had ever found. He would turn into the Metropolitan Museum for distraction and there would be a Tibetan temple piece and some Egyptian funerary jewelry suggesting a dozen informative tidbits certain to enchant his niece’s friend. In the back room of the Plaza as soon afterward as modern conveniences could whisk him there he would contemplate the cathedral architecture of the sacred room, doubtless its appeal for the group of young curates drinking beer in the corner, and he would think that perhaps he would change his drinking habits to gayer surroundings, places more suited to a young woman. He had never been the problem drinker that his brother Beaver had been, inasmuch as he had never been provoked to such excesses by a good wife. Still, he would begin either tomorrow or day after tomorrow to moderate his requirements so as not to alarm a gentle little thing like Victoria. He supported these vows with an extra highball, but this only made him long for company, someone who liked good conversation which he felt bubbling up in him like a whistling teakettle about to blow.
“Victoria is the only good talker I’ve ever met in a woman,” he told himself flatteringly enough, the picture of her charming young face coming before him, eyes fascinated, lips parted not in speech but in breathless interest. Yes, he admitted it, he would like nothing better than to offer his hand in marriage to the girl! It was not that he was at the age where youth excited him, for even in the often treacherous fifties it alarmed rather than intrigued him. The musical shows then popular with their rousing teenage casts brought out the Scrooge rather than the lecher in him, and he would have preferred to send the kiddies packing off to bed while he listened to Fritzi Scheff, or better still, nobody. No, he reflected, little Miss Haven was the very woman he should have had twenty-five years ago, and the difference in their ages was Time’s mistake not his own.
Being a trained philosopher, he was accustomed to make his choices in life first and justify them afterward. Why had the thought of marriage never before struck him with anything but revulsion? Why did it suddenly occur to him as if the institution was his own invention, so pleased was he with the impulse? Even philosophers are naïvely astonished to find themselves subject to the ordinary rules for human behavior, and Rockman, having had a most enjoyable, self-indulgent bachelor life, was genuinely amazed at the strange, unexpected loneliness of the bachelor fifties, the middle age for which marriage was made. His indulgences now seemed his privations. Engagements for lunch or dinner with their pleasant absence of permanent responsibility, their casual “good-bye” restoring his privacy once again to him, now seemed insulting compromises to his need for constant companionship; they were fraught with the fear that in another moment, after one more nightcap, one more for the road, he would be alone again, his prized barriers safely up once more; but now they offered prison instead of freedom, and through their bars the chilly fingers of Age, gaunt and lonely, clutched at him.
Once his mind was made up Rockman was only impatient with his delay in informing Vicky. He chuckled at the picture of what consternation his move would bring to his brother’s family! What a stew Nancy and her mother would be in when they found him married to their discarded friend! Hastening to the address Miss Finkelstein had given him, he entertained himself with another pleasing picture—a honeymoon of travel which enabled him to lecture on the scenery to his enthralled bride. A florist’s shop reminded him of a bridegroom’s duties, and he stopped to purchase a great box of roses. With this under one arm, his cane under the other, he arrived at the Thirteenth Street apartment. Delaying his happiness a little longer, he paused to admire the puppies in the pet shop before ascending the steps to the entrance hall. Here he encountered a brisk young woman in a most imposing uniform.
“You’re Mr. Elroy, I believe,” she said. “I met you at Victoria Haven’s other place. I’m Ethel Carey from her hometown.”
“Of course,” said Rockman, who remembered neither faces nor names. “Are you—er—calling on her now?”
Ethel looked at him in surprise.
“Oh, no, I’m just here making arrangements about storage and subleting and all that for her, while I’m in town. The wedding was so unexpected, you see, it didn’t leave her time to do anything, so she left it all to me.”
“The—ah—you said the wedding?” Rockman asked dumbly.
“If you can call such a helter-skelter business a wedding!” Ethel exclaimed, with a shrug. She opened the mailbox, extracted some letters, dropped them in her purse. “Naturally, with Ken going into the Army, Vicky was too rattled to do anything ceremonial, so—”
Rockman shifted his roses to his other arm.
“She—she married Saunders, then?” He tried not to show the desolation in his heart.
Ethel nodded.
“Thank heavens, she’s got something she wanted at last,” she sighed! “Goodness knows how it will work out, what with him at camp, somewhere in the South, but she says she’s going to follow him wherever he goes. Poor lamb is so crazy about him! I’m not sure, myself. Do you think he’s good enough for her?”
Rockman set the box of flowers down, and mopped his forehead.
“Saunders? Ideal man for her, I would say,” he said bravely. “Perfectly splendid chap. Couldn’t have done any better. Certain to be happy. Best thing in the world for her. Wish ’em every happiness. Perfectly mated, I would say. Fine thing. Wonderful thing.”
Ethel blinked as his enthusiasm mounted.
“I wish I was as optimistic as you about it, Mr. Elroy,” she said, shaking her head. “But of course marriages aren’t awfully important nowadays anyway. War makes love and all that sort of thing seem sort of silly, doesn’t it?”
“It does, indeed,” agreed Rockman. “I take it you’re leaving here now? So am I. Er—would you care to have a drink with me, say at the Brevoort Terrace? I’m rather at loose ends.”
“So am I,” said Ethel. “Everything seems so haywire, lately. Vicky getting married out of a blue sky, Amanda Keeler Evans shooting off to Africa so mysteriously, and Julian making a fool of himself with all those statements about her. There must be something funny about it somewhere or he wouldn’t go to such trouble to say there wasn’t. Besides, everybody knows he’s started the divorce proceedings. You knew Amanda Keeler, of course?”
Rockman followed her down the steps to the street, and in her preoccupation she did not notice that the florist’s box had been left in the vestibule of the apartment.
“Keeler—Keeler—Amanda Keeler,” he repeated, frowning. “Don’t think I ever heard of her. Unless she was kin to Doctor Vestry Keeler, of Leland Stanford. A very sound man, Vestry Keeler—a good scholar. I remember when I worked with him at the University of Chicago—”
2
“THERE ISN’T a thing in the papers about it,” marveled Vicky, sitting up in bed with her sandy topknot barely visible above the mound of Sunday papers. “How strange!”
Ken was pecking at a typewriter by the window, his fine new honeymoon dressing gown belted with a rag of a necktie. He looked up in amazement.
“You’re not looking for Cholly Knickerbocker’s account of our wedding, are you, my love?” He came over and gave her a benign, pitying kiss on the forehead. “Haven’t I explained to you, pet, that people like us don’t make news? What were you expecting—front page headlines—‘SAUNDERS TAKES HILLBILLY BRIDE TO SHADY HOTEL’? No, dear, people like us have to push each other out the window before we’re news. Even then we’re only good for two sticks.”
“I’m looking for Amanda, silly,” Vicky answered, pulling him down beside her. “You never see a thing about her anymore. Ethel Carey claims she followed Callingham to Africa, but here it says his fiancée, Asta Lundgren, has flown to Egypt to marry him.”
“Never mind, Amanda will get along,” Ken shrugged. “She may not get who or what she wants but she’ll get something.”
