O I WENT TO TEA AT HER place and we talked it all over,” said Johnson, for now they were in the Havana Bar and the bartender’s name was Joe. “She says she knows you, you’re a good friend of hers. Why didn’t you tell us that to begin with, Orphen, so we wouldn’t have had to worry about libel? We’ve been trying to contact her for days. You could have given us a tip.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think of it,” said Dennis, but he did know why he had not spoken of knowing Effie; it had seemed a way of protecting her once his own damage was done.
“Do you know, Orphen, a woman like that can do a lot for a fellow,” Johnson said somberly. “As a matter of fact, Orphen—I’m speaking absolutely frankly and confidentially, understand—I could fall in love with a woman like that. Not that I mean any disrespect at all to Mrs. Johnson, but—well, take Mrs. Callingham. Say she is older than I am, what of it? It’s the quality underneath, understand, that sad, sympathetic quality. And lovely hands. Did you ever see such hands, Orphen? White tragic hands—delicate, expressive.… Ah, she’s a special person, Orphen, a very special person.”
“Effie has nice hands,” agreed Dennis guardedly. He felt his usual unreasoning resentment at another’s patronizing appreciation of Effie, and wondered why it was he could write a book about her but would certainly avenge such betrayal if anyone else had done it. He paid the check and they were out again in the street. In the quiet of three o’clock the Forties looked dingy, deserted, incredibly nineteenth-century with the dim lamps in dreary doorways; in these midnight hours the streets were possessed by their ancient parasites, low tumbledown frame rooming houses with cheap little shops, though by day such remnants of another decade retreated obscurely between flamboyant hotels. A ferret-eyed little streetwalker in a black beret scuttled past, thin childish buttocks outlined sharply under black satin biased skirt, skinny legs in sleazy silk stockings, large bony feet bulging out of flimsy strapped sandals. She vanished into a battered door marked 119, eyes flinging a sidelong contemptuous invitation at the two men as she turned the knob. Beside her door a dim blue light burned in a costumer’s window, shadows built a face for the suit of armor and eyes for the hideous African masks. From a dark alleyway a lean powerful gray cat sneaked out with thievish caution, laid its ears back guiltily at the suspicious clatter of garbage cans behind it, warily it darted between the two men and into another shadow from which came a snuffling sobbing noise, a faint female whimper, long-drawn-out, tired, complaining. An immense cavern suddenly yawned before them and from out this sinister darkness a great clumsy bus snorted and roared into the street, a small warning printed on its side—“LOS ANGELES-SEATTLE”; resigned transcontinental faces were appliquéd on the windowpane, straw suitcases, sample cases, honeymoon luggage loaded in the back. Dennis and Johnson waited as it wheezed out, strange clumsy monster thanking night for cover. A few steps to the left and a flaming “BAR” sign hypnotized them as if here indeed were a fresh thought, and here the bartender’s name was Steve and a Martini only twenty cents. A tight trim little hennaed woman in turquoise lace with a rather unbelievable bust sang Isle of Capri so nasally, so convincingly and withal so energetically that the languorous isle seemed to have undergone some potent glandular injection if not revolution itself.
“The way she talked,” continued Johnson dreamily and Dennis closed his eyes to invoke the memory of Effie’s light broken contralto tones, a feat indeed with so much tumult in his ears—“the odd gracious little expressions, oh, I don’t know how to describe it, Orphen, but let me tell you that Effie Callingham is an amazingly compelling personality.”
“You should know her better to really appreciate her,” said Dennis jealously. “Why did you have to see her, anyway?”
“We wanted to make sure she was taking your book all right after we found out you had real people in mind. MacTweed thought it best to smooth her over. And I’m glad I met her. Why, come in for a cup of tea, she said, I should be very happy to see you as soon as I get back from the hospital. We talked a little while—she told me some amusing stories about Callingham, showed me some pictures—it seems that once—”
Dennis’s lips slipped into a sardonic smile. Effie courting a new audience now for her Callingham connection. Then he thought of how desperately she must fear and hope for his return, how the thought of Andy must be in her head night and day, wondering what he would say to her, wondering how she must act, and his heart filled with hot burning pity and despair that she refused his friendship now that she needed it most, feared him, found hurt wherever she turned. Yet she welcomed Johnson, or anyone who allowed her a few rags of glamour.
“I asked her about the wife, the one now sick here, you know,” said Johnson. “We had thought of getting in touch with her since we signed up Callingham, but they tell me they don’t give her more than a few days or weeks to live. Here’s the problem, Orphen, as it struck me—you’re up on this situation so maybe you know—is Callingham coming home, detesting America as he does, as a favor to Wife A who cabled him to come or for the sake of Wife B who is desperately ill? Which would you say pulled him over?”
In the brief moment it required to slip out of Steve’s domain around the corner into a little red-checkered tablecloth barroom named Hannah’s Place, Dennis pondered this question.
“You see what I mean, don’t you?” urged Johnson. “How would any man react in the same boots? After all he couldn’t have been around a marvelous woman like this first wife I was telling you about without having some little hangover of feeling for her. Remember this is the first word he’s had from her since he left. It says ‘Come.’ Supposing it’s the very word he’s been waiting for all these years, some sign that she wants him back no matter for what reason.”
“But it’s for the second wife—”
“Never mind her being sick,” interrupted Johnson, blinking a little to adjust his alcoholized eyes to the smoke-hazed blue of Hannah’s Place. “Never mind that part, the excuse for the cable doesn’t matter, the point is, the man gets his first hint of being needed and he comes like a flash. I swear I think it’s for Wife A and not for Wife B’s sickness at all.”
“I wonder,” said Dennis, and as he stared into space, space materialized in its orderly way into a large square windowcard tacked on the bar wall, with its simple tidings neatly printed in bright red:
OPENING MAY 10 AT THE GARDEN THEATRE
WITH TOMMY BENDER, FREDDIE CARVER,
AND THE
DANCE SENSATION OF PARIS
ASTA LUNDGREN, PREMIERE DANSEUSE
“This is April, isn’t it?” Dennis thought aloud. He pointed to the sign. “Had it occurred to you, Johnson, that Callingham might be coming over for no other reason than to launch his latest girlfriend, Asta Whosis, in her American debut?”
“By Jove!” said Johnson, staring. “Well, by Jove.”
He paid the check and they walked out into the sickly still gray of the Broadway dawn, the grisly ghost that waits outside barrooms to remind the merrymakers of their lost day, their misspent laughter, their ill-chosen companions.
“I hadn’t thought of that new girl at all,” said Johnson, blaming Dennis vaguely for this new disrupting thought, this unpleasantly plausible destroyer of romance. “I declare! That is the girl, isn’t it? Oh, confound it, Orphen, can’t the man have some loyalty, some deeper feeling than the lust of the moment? I know what a bounder you make him out in your book but, look here, would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”
Johnson scowled, unwilling to grant approval to such heresy. He was annoyed that his adoration for Effie Callingham should be affected by her husband’s indifference to her. He thought of Benjamin Constant’s bitter words about a woman—“people were against her because she had not inspired her lover with more consideration for her sex.” He followed Dennis to the steps of a taxi.
“Get in, I’ll drop you,” said Dennis.
Johnson drew back, face sinking abruptly into passionate despair.
“I can’t go home yet. I told you!” he cried plaintively. “Bing’s woman’ll still be there. I have no place to go. Old Bing’ll run me out again sure as you’re alive. I might as well be dead.”
“Come to my place,” suggested Dennis with a large gesture. “There’s a folding chair—plenty of room, old fellow, glad to have you.”
Johnson brightened. They rode downtown and at Dennis’s door Johnson breathed a sigh of happiness. “If you only knew what a relief it is to crawl in someplace with no fear of a perfumed handkerchief jumping out at you! This is damned decent of you, Orphen. I won’t forget this.”
Inside Dennis switched on the lights. An exotic perfume tainted the air, and on the bed sprawled a limp gray figure, the head falling slightly off the edge gave a curiously doll-like unreality to the marble face. The velvety shallow eyes rolled toward the intruders.
“Lora!” Dennis said, dumbfounded.
“The man upstairs let me in and I came down his fire escape,” her voice floated out of the red lips languidly, and her arm, drooping from her shoulder lifelessly, did not move. “I thought I’d come and stay with you. Okie was so mean.”
Johnson stood rigid gripping the back of a chair, his eyes in speechless reproach on Dennis.
“To tell the truth, Lora,” said Dennis rapidly, “this isn’t my place at all. It—er—it belongs to old Johnson here. I’ll be running along now. So long. Sorry, Johnson, old man.”
“Quite all right, old chap,” Johnson muttered mechanically and sat down, wild-eyed, on the bed as Dennis dashed down the stairs to the street.