XXII

Happiness Was Just around the Corner

He should have learned, as Rhoda had. He should have listened, while he had the chance, to the sayings and the maxims of great men like the Hertimes and the Bramhalls. If he had paid heed, the grinding in the street would not have been so low tonight; but, truthfully, he could not have listened then any more than he could now, because he was not made to hear their Ben Franklin type of wisdom. He had not been born with the patience and perception to discover the grains of wisdom that existed in the sayings of Henry Ford, Sr., and Andrew W. Mellon. He had other fish to fry, and his own activities in the winter of ’29 were time-consuming. Success sparkled like the breakfast champagne at the Hotel Bulwer before it went flat and he was bored with it, but he had to face the aftermath: new friends, new problems, new vistas, and the never-to-be-wholly-grasped essences of his craft. The truth was he preferred the words of Sophocles, Molière, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and O’Neill to the pontifications of Rhoda’s big parade—and he still preferred living to security. He did not mean that there was not pleasure in the easy inflow and outflow of large sums; but he had always been bored with advice on how to keep them. It was true that he had always been financially impotent, and, frankly, he did not care.

“But you can’t know,” Dick Bramhall said, “whether you can ever do anything like Hero’s Return again.”

Right as rain. Of course you never knew. It was the fear that moved creation, but Bramhall did not understand the drives of uncertainty. He measured them in money, which was not the honest measure.

“You don’t have to explain,” he could hear his voice from the past answering the Bramhall voice. “I know what you mean. Maybe I’m afraid you’re making me too damn safe. If I save too much money, why should I try to do it again?”

“I don’t quite follow you on that one,” Dick said. “There’s some connection in the sequence I must have missed.”

It was a difference in conditioning. Arthur Higgins would have understood, but not Dick Bramhall, and after all, why should he?

If it had not been for Dick, the best friend he had ever had, as Rhoda had reminded him on several occasions, the royalties from Hero’s Return and the motion-picture money, too, flowing to his bank in a constant stream, would have gone, as Rhoda put it, “down the drain”—a phrase which she had picked up in the big parade. But there was always some return for money or effort, no matter how it might be squandered, in experience and memory. And these might have paid some sort of dividend, and accrued some sort of interest, that would have surprised the Bramhalls and the Hertimes.

When they got back from that Palm Beach visit, Arthur had given him a room in the office where he could work on Littte Liar and they moved from the Bulwer to a small suite in the Plaza while they were looking for an apartment; and the secret was out now about Rhoda and the baby. Little Liar was what had taken most of his time, and there were problems newer and different from any at Palm Beach: problems of flatterers, of importuning parasites, of friends and enemies. The rewards of literary success were vastly greater, then. Ever afterwards he had always felt deep sympathy for new figures in the American drama. He could wince at adulation, for there was nothing easier and nothing worse than believing you were better than you were. There was nothing more enervatingly consuming than the poison of conceit, and he could still thank his Providence that he had got Little Liar to the condition of an acting script before he had ever become a literary figure. No wonder he was busy; no wonder he had no time to worry about money or about where they were going to live.

It was Rhoda and Dick Bramhall who fixed the budget and piped the tune. He might have been a fool not to notice. He had never worried greatly why it was that, no matter how busy he and Rhoda were, there was always time to see the Bramhalls. They had always been great friends and, as far as he knew, there had never been any talk; and there had been no reason for any, because Bramhall was not that kind of man. Actors, playwrights, and promoters, and sometimes lawyers, could afford to be—but no good investment banker. But why else had Dick Bramhall been so kind and patient, if he had not been in love with Rhoda? He could see the picture now, and his respect for Dick Bramhall grew as he saw it. If Dick had loved, he had loved from a distance, or he would not now be Chairman of the Board. Then there was Rhoda. Rhoda would not have had it any other way because Rhoda had loved him then, not Bramhall.

He was already growing used to the mutations of Rhoda’s voice, so that he could quite accurately fit those alterations from the norm with her moods.

“Darling,” she said, “I know you’re busy, but do you miss me?”

“Yes,” he said, “I always do.”

“Oh,” she said, “half the time you’re more in love with that play of yours than you are with me.”

It was what any wife might say, and he was already experienced enough to feel a twinge of guilt.

“That isn’t so,” he said. “I forget about it as soon as I see you.”

“Oh no you don’t,” she said. “You’re in love with that man’s conscience. It makes me nervous when I think that you can think of things like that.”

“You shouldn’t be,” he said. “That whole idea came to me before I ever saw you.”

Obviously she was leading up to something or she would not have called him at the Higgins office.

“Darling,” she said, “I’ve been house hunting, and finally I’ve found a most wonderful apartment.”

“You mean,” he asked, “you’re settling for one on Beekman Place?”

“Oh no, dear,” she said, “not with elevators and men with gloves. This is informal and perfectly beautiful, and something that all our friends will feel at home in, even your queer new friends. It has a back yard and we can plant a garden.”

“Where is it?” he asked.

“It’s on Lexington Avenue in the Thirties,” she said. “Now please don’t ask questions until I see you. It’s two stories in the dearest old brownstone-and-brick house, and it looks just like something built out of a box of blocks.”

“Oh no,” he said, “not out of blocks.”

“Wait until you see it, dear,” she said. “It’s just the way New York ought to look. Dick says so.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Dick Bramhall,” she said. “What other Dick is there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of Dicks these days.”

“He’s been awfully sweet,” she said. “When I called him at the bank about this place, he came right around to see it. Marion’s at her Parliamentary Law Club.”

“What sort of club?” he asked.

She laughed, not because it was amusing, but because she was impatient. He could already identify the laugh.

“I know it’s a queer name,” she said. “But anyway, that’s what it is, and they talk about things. You know how Marion likes to talk.”

“You’re damn well right I do,” he said. “She must be wonderful at the club. Do you think she’s filibustering?”

She laughed again.

“Well anyway,” she said, “Dick knows you’re going to be crazy about it, and we’re here at the Plaza now. Dick thinks it would be nice if you came up if you could. He has some figures and things to show you. He says we ought to be on a budget.”

Then he began to laugh, himself.

“Yes, I’ll come right over,” he said, “and if it makes you happy, we’ll go right on a budget.”

The banks, the custodians, the contracts, the lawyers, the agreements, the investment portfolios with their neat blue covers and their rustling pages—and God only knew how the covers had started being blue—he was accustomed to those things now. He had learned to sign docilely where he was told—“not here, Mr. Harrow, but there on the other line that has the red seal on it.” If he could not face figures, he had learned to make a good attempt at facing facts, but it was different then. The lease that Rhoda and Dick presented to him at the Plaza was the first one he had ever signed and the account of his income from the Custody Department was the first of its sort that he had ever seen.

“Just sit down and look it over, Tom,” Dick said up there in the Plaza. “I’m afraid Rhoda’s tired after all that house hunting. Sit down and read it and then see if you can tell me that you don’t believe that figures talk.”

When it came to figures, Tom had always implicitly believed everything Dick told him and he had never regretted it. He was new at numbers, but the sound of Dick’s voice gave him a feeling of being able to put a bundle he was so clumsily carrying upon shoulders trained to bear burdens—and after all, that was what trust departments of banks were for. Why blister your thumbs cutting coupons when people like Dick Bramhall could get people to do it for you?

“A lot of money does seem to be coming in,” he said.

It was approximately the right thing to have said for Dick would have paid a clever remark no heed.

“The account is coming on nicely,” Dick said, “and a few acquaintances who know about theatrical properties tell me that the earnings will be the same for a very appreciable length of time. It isn’t so very much money, but it’s new money—and new money is always interesting.”

“I suppose you mean there are all sorts of things you can do with new money,” Tom said.

“Tom, I wish you wouldn’t interrupt,” Rhoda said. “Dick’s given this a lot of thought.”

He felt no resentment. He only felt, as he felt afterward, poignant and humble gratitude for the skill and patience Dick displayed.

“We are in a position now,” Dick said, “where we can begin to make a tentative budget, and I’ve made a vague sort of breakdown—not on that sheet, the other sheet.”

“Tom,” Rhoda said, “you’re holding it upside-down. Dick, I told you he was hopeless about numbers.”

He was not annoyed. Rhoda and Dick together never had annoyed him.

“I’ll be awfully glad to take your combined word for it,” he said. “It will be all right with me if I earn it and you two budget.”

“You’re missing a good deal,” Dick said. “It’s fun budgeting with Rhoda.”

It was not intended as a joke. He could not remember that Dick Bramhall had ever cracked a single joke about money.

“Well, just so long as you don’t carry the budgeting to bundling, it will be all right with me,” he said.

A blush suffused Dick’s Palm Beach tan.

“Now, Tom,” he said, “you know I didn’t mean it that way.”

It was time to laugh loud enough to permit Dick to join in the general merriment.

Somehow those budgets had always followed the same uninspiring pattern.

“There seems to be a whale of a lot for Miscellaneous, Dick,” he said.

“I know,” Dick said, “but I think we can afford to be generous, Tom. The insurance comes first and then I’m assuming you’re going to write lots more darn good plays.”

“Well,” he said, “the goose can keep on trying if you don’t squeeze him.”

“That’s exactly the point and picture I’m presenting,” he said. “In a few years the hope is that your savings backlog will have reached a point where there won’t be too much squeeze.”

“But there ought to be some squeeze,” Rhoda said. “Remember what I told you about his being lazy, Dick.”

“All right,” he said, “just a little squeeze.”

“Please listen, Tom,” Rhoda said. “Now tell him about the apartment, Dick. It’s a darling place, Tom, and I told the man we’d take it.”

“You told him we’d take it without my seeing it?” he asked.

Rhoda had already moved a long way from Niagara Falls.

“Dick wanted you to see it,” she said, “but I decided we ought to take it before someone else could snap it up. Tom, it’s going to be wonderful—an enormous living room, big enough to dance in—and it’s going to look like you.”

“I thought you said it looked like a house built out of blocks,” he said. “Do I look like something built out of blocks?”

“Darling,” she said, “the rent’s ridiculous for two floors in that big house, and our own stairs. Dick, isn’t the rent ridiculous?”

“The bank only wants to break even,” Dick Bramhall said. “It’s being held for the land—and I was surprised, personally, at the plumbing.”

“In a nice way, I hope,” Tom said.

“It’s—er—noisy,” Dick Bramhall said, “but in wonderful condition for one of those old brick-and-brownstones. It was the Rossiter house, and old Mr. Rossiter must have gone all the way on the plumbing.”

“Who were they,” Tom asked, “the railroad or the steamship Rossiters?”

He said it as a joke, but Dick weighed the question.

“The old gentleman, from what I’ve heard, was in railroads mostly,” he said, “but partly in copper.”

“That explains it,” Tom said, “copper piping.”

“As a matter of fact, the hot water is all piped in copper,” Dick said.

“Darling,” Rhoda said, “you’re just going to go crazy over it when you see it.”

“All right,” he said, “maybe I’d better sign the lease while I’m still sane.”

“Right there,” Dick Bramhall said, “on the line with the red seal at the end of it.”

Everyone who lived in New York for an appreciable period of time had developed the impression that the place had been steadily going to the dogs since the first time he saw it, and, in Tom Harrow’s estimation, everyone sharing this conviction was correct. New York was not what it had been when he first remembered it in the days before World War I. It had been almost the New York of O. Henry in those days, but later it had lost its geniality and graciousness. Its taste for spaciousness and food and comfortable living had been dissipated. It had digested too many disparate and desperate people. It had contorted itself too often while struggling with its perpetual growing pains. Its manners, never good, had steadily deteriorated, along with its traffic and rapid transit. The newer, brighter civic efforts, like Rockefeller Center, were more brash than beautiful. The marks of the old graciousness, the occasional residential street of brown-stone houses with their stoops and basement entrances, now filled him only with malaise. Those places were mere faint memories of yesterday; and, when he thought of it, the old house on Lexington Avenue, whose first two floors and back yard he and Rhoda had occupied, had been exactly this. Yes there had been a difference, and he feared he knew what the difference was. It was the gap between youth and age. New York had always been a town of youth, no place for valetudinarians.

During the Roosevelt era, a rash of histories of Ameriica had been published coping with the economic and social wrongs practiced by capitalists (notably Mr. Jay Gould, who never, in these volumes, seemed to have done right) upon the exploited masses. Not so long ago, while turning over one of these newer interpretations, he had come upon an illustration of a parlor of a well-to-do family in the 1880s. It had immediately reminded him of that strange house on Lexington Avenue. The house had been bought by the bank, along with the other houses on the block, to become in the next few years the site of an apartment building. But the house itself had never given hints of its eventual dissolution. Although its gutters leaked and water made stains on its brownstone façade, it had the complacency of the picture in the history book.

Its hot-water heating system, doubtless the latest word in comfort when Mr. Rossiter had installed it, was almost a parallel to the heating systems of the Palace of Knossos at Crete, or to the ruined Roman villas on the Palatine. The plumbing, too, was truly surprising; the toilet bowls had floral designs. The parquet floors could not be imitated today, because no carpenter protected by a zealous union would take the pains to lay such floors in New York, where the lifetime of a building seldom exceeds twenty years. Its sliding doors, its walnut finish, were reminiscent of an early Gothic novel.

“Darling,” Rhoda said, “it’s going to cost us almost nothing, and, do you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” he said, “I can see exactly what you mean.”

“And there’s a little man and his family who lives in the basement,” Rhoda said, “who will look out for the furnace and the fireplaces for almost nothing. His name is Balsamo. Dick spoke to him and made the arrangements.”

“Balsamo?” he said.

“I think that’s what it was,” she said. “He’s very friendly.”

“That will help,” he said, “if he’s friendly.”

“You see,” she said, “this is something that your friends and my friends both will understand.”

It was the first time that she had mentioned that difference between her friends and his friends. The break had been more intuitive than actual, but she had understood the Hertimes and the Bramhalls better than he.

“You see,” she said, “it’s both theatrical and practical—and wait till you see upstairs. There’s a huge bedroom for us and a room for two maids and one for Harold.”

“Who’s Harold?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “If it’s a boy, I told you I want to call him Harold.”

“All right, if he’s a boy,” he said, and she kissed him.

“Dick says there are auction rooms,” she said, “where you can buy things very cheaply if you wait.”

“All right,” he said, “I want a four-post bed and a clock to go over there, and I suppose we ought to have a crib or a cradle.”

“Not a cradle,” she said. “Harold wouldn’t like it. We’re not coming over in the Mayflower.” And she kissed him again.

“There’ll be lots of things,” she said, “rugs, curtains, all sorts of things. I’ll do most of it, but I want you to like it all.”

“Why, Rhoda,” he said, “I’m going to love it all.”

She looked again at the large, high-ceilinged rooms.

“To think that you and I should end up in a place like this,” she said.

“Don’t put it that way,” he told her, “this is only a beginning.”

It was queer to think that they both could be right, with such conflicting statements, because, now he looked back on it, it was a beginning and also the beginning of the end. The same thing doubtless happened in other marriages and would happen in more to come; the worst of it was, that most of mankind (excepting always those who were helped by psychoanalysts, either of the Freudian or the Jungian school) never knew where they were going until they had got there; and when you were there, you could never find a backward turn.

He was amazed now at the obtuseness that had been around him like a fog in those first years in New York, for it was the one time in his life when he did have everything; but he could remember thinking then that there would be more, lots more, that he and Rhoda were only barely moving toward a broader firm foundation of marital contentment. There would be the child and more plays, better plays. There would be more friends, trips abroad, more times when he and Rhoda could get away together, more ways that he could make her happy. Now he could wonder if he did not have some faint premonition then. Happiness seemed always to have been in the retrospect or in the future, and this might have been true with Rhoda, too.

“Wait,” she was always saying, “until we get the heavy curtains up.”

“Wait,” she was always saying, “until we get Harold’s nursery fixed.”

“Wait,” she was always saying, “until we have our first big party and use the Sheffield candelabra, and wait until we get the right sort of worktable for your room upstairs. Everything is going to be marvelous when everything is done.”

It was going to be, and of course they had been happiest while they were waiting.

If the living room in the apartment did not look like the picture in that American history book, it always had the dignity that belonged to its generation. There was a colored maid named Myra, a very good cook-waitress who came by the day from Harlem, and also there was a cleaning woman for two days a week; and then, of course, when Hal arrived, there was a baby’s nurse and someone else. He could not recall their names and faces any longer, but Rhoda had learned to run a household as readily as she had learned everything else, and they always were able to save money. He wished now that he had been more interested in these details, but he could only remember, now, his contentment whenever he reached Lexington Avenue and his delight at having Rhoda there to meet him, while all the little things he should have treasured had slipped through the meshes of his memory.

Hal was to arrive in late June, which explained why they had stayed in town all summer and why afterwards he could agree with New Yorkers who said that New York was at its best then. At least it was so in those days, and the two floors were cool. Rhoda, who had never cared for flowers until then, had got a little man—she had now reached the stage where she could call a great many people little men—to plant some things in the back yard, and another little man installed an inexpensive garden fountain. He remembered the musty odor of the yard of an evening, pervading, but not unpleasant, like other New York backyards that had been turned into gardens in those enlightened days. It did not matter whether or not the plants did well; you could always get the little man to put in new ones, and you could always listen to the dripping of the fountain.

“Darling, the stock market keeps going up all the time, doesn’t it?” Rhoda said.

“Does it?” he asked.

“Don’t you even look?” she said. “You read and read the paper.”

“I look sometimes,” he said, “and I’m going to one of those offices sometime next week. I want to see the tickers. They say boys run around and chalk numbers up on blackboards in a place called a customers’ room.”

“Remember not to buy anything. Remember what Dick said,” she told him. “It’s all too high.”

“I don’t want to buy anything,” he said. “I want to watch the faces. I want to hear the talk.”

“With all those friends of yours,” she said, “who come around for drinks, I’d think you hear enough conversation without going to a stockbroker’s.”

“There are different kinds of talk,” he said. “I want to get it classified.”

“You mean dialect and things like that?” she asked.

“No, not that,” he said. “Some people say one thing; others with the same thoughts express them differently. Stockbrokers talk alike and bankers in a slightly different way. I like to listen for the difference.”

“Does Dick Bramhall talk like a banker?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “he’s the norm for a banker.”

“It isn’t very nice of you to be horrid about him,” she said, “after what Dick’s been doing about everything.”

“It isn’t horrid to say that someone talks like a banker,” he said. “Don’t you wish I’d talk like one?”

“Sometimes, not always,” she said. “Tom …?”

“Yes?” he said.

“Tom, after the baby’s born and we have a good nurse and everything, couldn’t you and I go away somewhere and have a trip—not Niagara Falls, but somewhere farther?”

“That sounds swell,” he said. “Somewhere without the Bramhalls and the Hertimes.”

“And let’s make it without the Higginses,” she said, “and without the people from the Hero who keep coming around, and especially without Delia Duneen.”

“Why without Duneen?” he asked.

“Because I’m tired of seeing her sitting around loving you,” she said, “and thinking how much happier she could make you than I can.”

“Duneen?” he said. “Why, Duneen can’t think as long as that consecutively about anything but herself.”

“Never mind,” she said, “she keeps getting you mixed up in her thought sequence.”

“Darling,” he said, “I’m not mixed up in any Duneen sequence. She’s a sweet but stupid little girl. Don’t worry about Duneen.”

“All right,” she said, “and don’t worry about Dick Bramhall.”

“I don’t,” he said, “why should I?”

“And you needn’t take that tone about him,” she said. “I don’t think he’s very happy with Marion.”

“Did he ever tell you so?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, “he wouldn’t dream of telling a thing like that.”

“You bet he wouldn’t,” he said.

“That isn’t kind,” she said. “Don’t keep saying things like that about Dick. Anyway, let’s go away somewhere. Abroad.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “Whereabouts abroad?”

“Oh, anywhere,” she said. “Let’s go to France. They say it’s beautiful in Antibes.”

“Who told you?” he said.

“Why, Dick,” she said. “And he says the exchange is very favorable. The poor French keep having trouble with the franc.”

It was strange to recall the echo of her words, now that the poor Americans, despite enlightened struggles, were having troubles with their dollar. He could hear the dripping of the backyard fountain still. Of course each drip was counted and had to be paid for, but this did not amount to much. Superficially none of it amounted to much—not Dick Bramhall, not Duneen. If two people really had each other, they had everything and needed nothing more. There were no Bramhalls or Duneens those summer nights while he and she were waiting for the baby, only the fountain, which was connected with the city meter, but everything in life was metered in some way or other, and someone was always ringing the bell and saying, “Gas man, here to read the meter.”

Perhaps obstetricians, and midwives before them, had always gone to great pains to make childbirth appear like a simple, merry affair. He had been lulled into a sense of security by having Dr. Jellison, who had been recommended by friends of the Bramhalls as the best man in New York, say that Rhoda would have an easy time of it.

“You see,” he said, in one of his early talks—it had always been his practice to see each couple together—“your wife has a beautiful pelvis.”

It had seemed to Tom stuffy of Rhoda to be annoyed.

“I don’t know why he should have made that remark in front of you,” she said.

“Well, he was only dealing with facts,” he told her. “I don’t think anything personal was intended.”

“It sounded personal to me,” Rhoda said, “and I’m going to speak to him about it.”

Rhoda was already learning how to put people in their places and until after Harold was born Dr. Jellison made no more than a veiled anatomical remark again.

But the knowledge that she was going to have an easy time of it had made them both confident. He remembered that in spite of the pains that had started, as they had about six in the early evening, she was in high spirits driving to the hospital.

“I don’t mind it as long as it’s your baby,” she said, “and I’ll look better when it’s over. Now don’t look worried, Tom.”

“I’m not,” he said, “as long as he said it’s going to be all right.”

“Of course it’s going to be all right,” she said, “and it’s going to be a boy, and I don’t want you around until it’s over.”

The longer he lived, the more convinced he became that you had to pay for everything, whether it was for failure or success or routine living. He had never, like governments or citizens he could mention, attempted avoidance, but the practice was unfair because, more often than not, other people were involved when the chips were down. Rhoda had been talking so much about security that he was already beginning to revolt against it. There was no safety in living, and in the end, about all you got out of life was learning how to face truth without sidestepping to avoid it.

Rhoda had been in the delivery room for about an hour and Tom had been waiting alone in a small reception room when he saw Dr. Jellison in his clean, white duster walking down the corridor. He saw the doctor for several seconds before the doctor knew he was being watched, and there was no way of forgetting those seconds because it was very seldom that one saw behind the academically compassionless medical front. For that second or two Jellison was more human than he had ever appeared. His step was slow and he looked deathly tired—until he saw that he was being watched. Tom Harrow had always distrusted doctors after that, even the best or ablest of them. He had never liked the arrogance of their assurance or their priestlike assumption that they were different from other people. Granted that all this was necessary in their profession and a part of their professional conditioning, he still did not admire it. You could have them as friends until you were a patient, and then inescapably the veil dropped down.

“Oh, there you are, Tom,” the doctor said. “Well, it’s a boy—seven-and-a-half pounds.”

Tom felt no relief because he had seen the doctor’s face and had observed the hesitation in his step out there in the corridor.

“Rhoda thought it was going to be a boy,” he said. “How’s Rhoda?”

There was no longer a trace of uncertainty. If he no longer trusted doctors, he admired them; when he had a doctor in a play produced in 1938, he knew the scene was good, because his mind, when he wrote it, was back there in the hospital with the aura of ether that had emanated from Dr. Jellison.

“She’s having a transfusion,” he said. “She hemorrhaged just when I thought the party was over.”

Again that frightful American barbarism of turning nouns into verbs struck him as one of the worst parts of medical semantics; the lighthearted business of calling such a thing a “party” showed that the doctor was modern, and Dr. Jellison was still trying to maintain the pose when he went on with the rest of it.

“I’m afraid once will be enough,” he said. “But we’ll talk about that later. I’d better go back now.”

There was no use analyzing the sort of fear Tom had felt. Times might change, but moments of sickly terror never did. Circumstances might alter significance, but not the moment itself. The terror that he felt was that Rhoda might be leaving him. All their times together, which were more vivid than the separate times themselves—all the small things that made up a personality—were mingled with the memories: the wiry, unbrushed look of her hair when she awakened in the morning; the softness of her face when she was aroused from sleep; the swiftness of her smile.

She was deathly pale when he saw her and there was a sickly smell of ether in her hair.

“Darling,” he said to her, “I am awfully glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad I am, too,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose you. There’s so much we can do. We’ll have a wonderful time.”

They had been closer together then than they had ever been before or since, and you could not take away the essence of that memory.

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

“Who?” he said.

“Why, Harold, of course,” she said.

“No, not yet,” he said. “All right, we’ll call him Harold.”

Watching through plate glass while the baby was held up by a nurse who would still have been ugly without a gauze mask, Tom had not been impressed, at the time, by Harold.

It was appalling to him, occasionally, when he found himself in the company of learned men, to realize his own lack of deep specific knowledge. He could skim the surface of many subjects, but he had no grasp of any except on the single one from which he gained his livelihood. He knew a few of the basic principles underlying writing better than the average professor of literature or drama. This was only natural, since these people were theorists, not obliged to live by writing. The best of them seldom realized that craftsmanship or the ability to use words was the basis of all artistic effort. These individuals, preparing their lectures and writing their doctorate theses, spoke eloquently of art and life; but few of them appreciated how far life itself diverged from the printed page or the spoken line of the theatre. Writing was a heady brew, but it was never life itself. Actors or characters on a printed page did not behave like normal human beings. The problems of people in drama were not like those in real life. They were tenser, crisper, more sudden, more contrived, and limited by human patience, because those situations were the work of men, not gods. Situations had to be shaped and made comprehensible. They never could be vague, as they often were when molded by the gods. There were a great many clever people who did not know what life was about, but the audience had to know the meaning when you wrote the show. In those days, when they had everything, that was often the trouble with broken marriages—and he had seen a lot in his time—you seldom knew they were broken until they were smashed. All those people on the side streets of the city, those dextrous men who riveted broken porcelain—even their skill never made the object the same again, and they were better at it than the psychiatrists and the lawyers. But his mind was still back there at the time when they had everything and all the while everything had been slipping through his fingers.