THE BUZZER HUMMED SOFTLY, and Vee picked up the phone. “Mr. Crown calling, Miss Marriner,” Miss Benson’s voice said. “Shall I put him through or wait till your meeting’s over?”
“I’ll take it now.”
“So I thought you could stop by for a cocktail,” Jasper began. Vee laughed at the abruptness, laughed because there was some thing gay in his deep, large voice. The others in the meeting went on politely talking.
“Hello,” she said. “Stop by at your place?”
“Yes. I’m up here now—about to start a meeting with some stockholders, but it will be over by five or so.”
“Well, I have a sort of date—” .
“Break it, why don’t you? I’ve got something for you and no April-fool gag either. I’ve got to stick around here on account of a long-distance call at six.”
For a moment she hesitated.
“All right then, I’ll stop by on the way home.”
“How about dinner? Why not with me?”
There was some elation in his voice that was special; something had happened or was happening that pleased him deeply. Probably some new triumph about the company; nothing else could make his spirits soar so high.
“We’ve a date, for the theater tomorrow night,” she said. “I—”
“What’s that got to do with tonight?” He laughed. “See you around five, then.”
She hung up and turned back to the meeting. Her own spirits were light; he was so appealing in a mood like this. She forced her mind back to the problem of employee schedules under the Wages and Hours Act.
At five-thirty she rang the flat brass bell of Jasper’s apartment, high up in the Sherry-Netherland. She heard his big voice inside say, “Never mind, Harvey, I’ll get it,” and a moment later he opened the door himself.
“Hello, you,” he said, and drew her inside.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I’ll give you a drink first.”
They went into the beautiful drawing room. Far below them lay the spring-freshening Park. He disliked modern rooms; his apartment was furnished with carefully sought-out treasures from antique dealers.
It was a calm room, with tall windows and quiet colors, with the unclouded eyes of an ancestor looking down from each of three walls. “Not my ancestors,” he was always quick to explain, “just any old ancestors—I bought them because they’re fine pictures, that’s all.”
Vee sat in the deep sofa, put her hat beside her, and looked at Jasper, waiting.
He smiled, watching the Negro, Harvey, bring in their drinks.
“Another million or so?” she asked, letting her voice mock him.
“No, this isn’t the company I feel good about. Oh, sure, that too. This meeting here this afternoon, they’ve just left; it’s a little ticklish, this deal—fat little Tim’s been trying to bitch me with everybody, and this was to straighten things out.”
“Oh. Is everything all right? You mean—”
“Sure. They’re all set.” He smiled. “Since Tim and I parted—”
“You never told me that Tim—”
“He’s out. I had to have a showdown with him, and he’s out of the picture.”
“Oh, Jas, how awful—he worked so hard and sold his station and—”
“You bet. But when I found he was working so hard for Grosvenor instead of Crown—” He stopped. His voice had changed in the last minutes; now the high good humor was gone, and all inflexion with it. It was without argument, without any need for self-justification.
Vee was obscurely troubled. She wondered what Timothy Grosvenor was thinking, wondered what his version would be. Often she had heard people say that Jasper Crown was ruthless, even slippery. But nearly always the accuser was someone who had fallen behind in a competitive situation, or someone who had worked for him, or someone who had heard a story from somebody else. Were the accusations correct, or were they only angry and distorted judgments born of defeat on some issue?
Whenever she heard from Jasper himself his own account of any such matter, his behavior or decision always seemed to her to be completely rational, thoroughly justified. Where was the truth in these things?
“Hell with all this—you’ll see later I’m right about things like this,” Jasper said, after sipping his drink through the silence that fell between them. “I told you I had something for you.”
“You did—let me see quick.”
She sat up expectantly; he rose, keeping his eyes on her, watching her expression. Her face was now eager and impatient, yet she felt that something spontaneous and happy had left both of their moods.
He went to a cabinet, brought back a small square box. It was of shrimp-pink leather, edged with a scalloped design in gold.
For a moment he held it in his open palm before her. She made no move toward it. That shrimp-pink leather—why, that was a Cartier box. But…o
Jasper pressed the pink button, the cover flew up, with its back to her so that she still could not see what was inside. Then slowly he turned the box around. Nested in the white satin, a diamond clip gleamed, a great star sapphire for its heart.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she whispered.
For a moment she stared at it, still in its box, still in his hand. She made no move to reach for it.
He snapped the lid shut, put the box into her hand. She opened it herself and stared at it again. She said nothing.
He waited. He saw some veiling of her eyes, some straightening of her lips. She made no move to lift out the clip and try it on.
“Don’t you like it?” he said finally.
“Oh, it’s—it’s beautiful. I think it’s maybe the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever held in my own hands.”
“Then let’s see how it—”
“But I can’t take it, Jas. I simply can’t ever—”
“Can’t? Can’t ever? Why not? I want you t—”
“But I couldn’t ever take things like this. A present, yes. But, you know, not jewelry, not diamonds and sapphires and—”
“How conventional of you, Vee. Why should you bother with the set of rules that says you can do this and not that?”
“It’s not just convention,” she said. “It’s a—a whole attitude, with me. I simply would hate it if—if—”
He was vexed with her. Not just disappointed; of course he could not plan this surprise, chose this dazzling thing, offer it to her, and have her refuse it—could not, humanly, then escape disappointment, even hurt. But it was not either which was in his eyes now, in the imperceptible stiffening of his body. It was vexation, annoyance, even outrage.
It was part of his unspoken demand always that she see things his way, accept his rules and concepts about their relationship. When she resisted, his mood always changed; he became depressed and silent; their evening became heavy with an unnamable, sad friction.
She feared those evenings; long ago she had fallen into the habit of ignoring her own instinctive wishes; of following the pattern he set up for her, because she feared those evenings. It was so, even in small things; when they chose to dine at home, it was rare that Jasper came to her apartment and dined there. He liked his own cook inordinately, was completely candid about preferring her cooking to that of anybody else’s cook. Soon it was an unspoken arrangement between them that when they dined privately, it was at his place; it did not occur to him to wonder whether Vee would have preferred him to come to her. And she came to feel that it was too small a matter to turn into an issue.
That very afternoon on the telephone was merely another case in point. “I thought you could stop by for a cocktail.” Again it was too small a matter to turn into an issue, though they both knew he could have had his long-distance call transferred to any restaurant, any cocktail bar, certainly downstairs at his own hotel.
But the little issues, each too petty to balk at, each contributed its own thin strand to the tapestry of their relationship. Vee watched the strands warily sometimes—ignored them other times.
“You’d hate what?” Jasper asked.
“Don’t you see? It’s not conventionality; it’s just that if you gave me things like this—and I let you—it might, it could be—I’d hate it if the fact that we sleep together got translated into something with good practical aspects like acquiring jewelry.”
“But I don’t think of it that way at all. I want to give you a beautiful thing. I can afford it. You like it. Why is it any different from sending you a book or a picture or flowers?”
“It is different. Because—well, maybe because I couldn’t afford to buy this for myself. We know I can buy the books or pictures.”
“Oh, Vee, this is the damnedest.” Now he was openly irritated.
“Jas, please see—I’m sorry, because you planned something beautiful for me. But honestly, there’s something here—”
“We’ve been sleeping together long before this idea struck me. I’m not trying to buy your consent—”
“No, oh, no. Don’t. It’s just—look, when I think about us, when I think do I want to go on, do I want to quit—up to now, it’s been only on the basis of our being drawn to each other, or not drawn to each other. But if you started giving me gorgeous jewels I could get mixed up—I could unconsciously feel that you were a passport to possessions, a passport I wouldn’t want to have a fight with…”
“O.K., O.K., have it your way.”
He stood looking at her, his eyes quiet and oddly dead. He had never looked at her that way, and an unreasoning terror, like that of a child’s, bit into her heart. Then he took the pink box, snapped it shut, and chucked it on to the coffee table.
They sat moodily over the new cocktails Harvey brought in. They tried to talk about other things. The long-distance call came through, and when Jasper came back he found her with her hat on.
“I think perhaps I’d better not stay for dinner,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, darling, truly; it was so dear of you to think of it.”
“Don’t go. We’ll feel better after dinner. We might go for a drive later.”
He took her into his arms, and peace crept along her nerves.
“It’s all right,” he finally said. “Maybe I even like you for it.”
But the rest of the evening was strung like a tight chain across the hours, linked of long silences and short, difficult spurts of talk. Even the drive was silent and somehow motionless, as if they could not get away, for all the tearing speed of the car, from the uncomfortable geography of cross-purposes and clashing moods. When he drove her back to her door, he made no move.
“Want to come up for a nightcap?” she asked.
“Thanks, guess I’d better not.”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry, Jas—it was dear of you to think of it; that pleases me so.”
“Forget it.”
He waved and was off.
The next morning, she woke tired and unrested. Depression dragged inside her. The memory of the evening was a splinter of uncertainty that pointed it up sharp.
She walked to the office through the cool April morning. On her desk she found the Vederle documents and looked at them gratefully. They would take her back to the real world, away from the nebulous one of shadowy feelings and fears.
It had taken ten days for the documents to be drawn up. Now they were ready for mailing, properly sworn to, notarized, photostated.
The Ile de France was sailing at midnight. In a week, the Vederles would have the registered letter with this handful of legal and financial papers; they would call at the American Consulate, buy their railroad and steamship tickets, and be on their way. A month after Anschluss; that was fast, decisive.
She opened the top sheet. It was the photostatic copy of the seven checks which had paid her 1937 income-tax installments. “This check is in payment of an obligation to the United States and must be paid at par.”
That small legend was stamped on the face of each of the four checks made out to the Collector of Internal Revenue. In all the years she had been paying Federal taxes and receiving canceled checks, she had never noticed that authoritative command—weren’t all checks always paid at par? The small revelation raised her attentiveness to a higher notch. She was dealing with august and mighty governments in this whole matter of affidavits; she’d better not be offhand about it.
She hitched her chair up foursquare and went on to the next document.
It was a stately assurance from her bank to the world at large that she had banked with them for eight years, was regarded by them as in the highest degree financially responsible and reliable. The usual. She gave little more than a glance to it.
Then came the affidavit itself. This was five closely typed pages of legal foolscap, headed AFFIDAVIT OF SUPPORT. She read carefully, watchfully, to learn precisely what it was that the undersigned, Vera Marriner Stamford, being duly sworn, deposed and said.
Some lengthy matters about her own birthplace, present residence, marriage, divorce, freedom from dependent relatives, and such. Then “…that deponent is especially interested in, and desirous of promoting, the welfare of Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, M.U., and his wife, Christa Vederle, and their infant son, Paul Vederle, eleven years of age, and their infant daughter, Ilse Vederle, five years of age….
“…That Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle was born in Austria in 1899. Mrs. Christa Vederle was born in Budapest, then Austria-Hungary, in 1903…
“That Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, his wife and two children, are Aryan. The Vederle family was not and is not, however, in sympathy with the Nazi political government now in power in Austria since the union of Austria with Germany and its incorporation into Germany as an integral portion thereof…”
Vee closed her eyes for a moment. An integral portion thereof. The Vederle family was not and is not, however, in sympathy. She got a sudden vision of a curly-haired five-year-old girl picked up from her toys and dolls and made to cross continents and seas because she was not and is not, however, in sympathy with Hitler, or Franco, or Mussolini, or Stalin…
She went back to the reading of what she had duly sworn to and said.
“Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, prior to the recent political changes in Austria, had built up and enjoyed a lucrative medical practice in Vienna…graduate of the University of Vienna…specialized in psychiatric studies and became a psychoanalyst. During the past ten years Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle has become internationally known and has enjoyed an international reputation as an outstanding and respected analyst. Many Americans have gone to Vienna to become his patients. They value him highly. He has prepared many scientific papers and has been a leader in the seminars of the Psychoanalytical Institute of Vienna. Informed circles would accord him a rating of one of the first ten most important psychoanalysts in Vienna…
“Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle…” (Couldn’t they leave out the given names by now? Did they think that some Consulate official might read this document and become bewildered suddenly, if they switched to a simple, stark Dr. Vederle? Oh, these legalities.) “Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle and Christa Vederle, his wife, being fundamentally opposed to the Nazi regime in Austria, decided voluntarily to give up their lucrative practice and to leave the country…and are exceedingly anxious to immigrate to the United States of America and become American citizens.
“Deponent feels that the United States of America would gain internationally recognized professional ability by permitting their entry into this country…also feels that their entry into this country would be in harmony with the traditions of the United States of America to accord to political refugees a haven of refuge.”
Vee stopped, went back, reread the last sentences eagerly. A lift of pride and love of country moved her. This was good American talk, fundamental and of the essence. For all the deponent this and deponent that, these last phrases were right out of the grist of the American idea, way back there when men first sought out this wild and lonely land so they could be free to meet and vote and work and worship as they needed to. Pilgrims making their hazardous landing…fur-capped hunters shooting wild turkey for those long-ago Thanksgivings…small white churches of many denominations building in New England, side by side…her own family long ago…
All those forgotten days lived in this wordy document going off to some foreigners she had never seen.
She shook her head sharply and went on to the next paragraphs about the Vederles’ private capital of forty thousand Swiss francs, their chances of building up quickly a sustaining income in this country, her own financial status, her employment; she was “willing and in a position to post a bond if the Immigration Authorities or the American Consul shall deem the delivery of such a bond necessary or advisable…hereby assuming full responsibility for…the would-be immigrants, and promises and guarantees that…they will never become a burden or public charge upon the United States of America, or upon any city, county, or municipality there.
The affidavit thereafter wound up with quick, packed paragraphs about deponent’s positive knowledge that the Vederles were in excellent health, had never been convicted of any crime or misdemeanor whatsoever, did not advocate the overthrow of the present form of government by force, and thus, “that deponent, as a responsible American citizen, hereby respectfully requests that the Honorable American Consul will issue an immigration visa to the said Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, Christa Vederle, his wife, and their two infant children, Paul Vederle and Ilse Vederle, and thus permit them to come to the United States of America for permanent residence herein. Sworn to and subscribed…”
Vera smiled. This cautious and loquacious document didn’t overlook much. Still, a kind of security hid between all the sedate lines fenced in neatly at either side by the blue-lined margins of the foolscap pages. An assurance that nothing had been forgotten, that now nothing could go askew.
She gathered the various documents together, slapped their edges briskly on the desk, aligning them, folded them, and slipped them into the envelope. She glanced at her watch and rang for Miss Ben- son. Just then the buzzer hummed twice. Perhaps Jasper was telephoning.
“Vee, darling, it’s Ann. You haven’t mailed the Vederle stuff yet, have you?”
“Just this minute going to. Why?”
“Glad I caught you. I just had a cable. They couldn’t wait. They’re already on their way to Switzerland. Mail them there instead, will you? The Karl Hof, Albanstrasse, Basel,” Vee wrote it down.
“O.K., Ann. You’d have been too late in five minutes. It’s going Ile de France.”
“Have you heard direct from Vederle?”
“No. I’m writing a brief note to him, though, to go with all this stuff. There is a lot of it, isn’t there?”
‘Yes, but it saves on red tape later.”
She rang again, then waited for Miss Benson to address a new envelope. She wrote a brief letter, on her private stationery; it was her first personal communication with the Vederles, and she felt a little shy as she wrote.
Dear Dr. and Mrs. Vederle,
Enclosed is everything you will need to present to the American Consul. Mrs. Willis and her lawyer have really been in charge of the entire matter—all I have done is sign my name to the documents they put in front of me. I feel sure that between us we have overlooked nothing, and I hope that your travels toward a new life in this country can begin at once. I do hope we shall meet when you arrive. I would so like to wish you well personally.
Cordially,
VERA M. STAMFORD
“Register it, will you, Benny?” she said. “That’s done, thanks be, and I feel better.”
As she said it, a shrimp-pink box flew open in her mind; diamonds and a great sapphire glistened in white satin. She was odd about jewels, she reflected. They were beautiful, yes. But they were still stone.
Jasper Crown was an inveterate first-nighter. Something in him was most completely satisfied in the theater on opening nights. The taxis and private cars moving up to the lighted marquee, the furs and jewels and brilliance of the women, the staring crowds on the sidewalk, all gave him pleasure.
He would walk down the aisle slowly, look about, greet people; if he paused for a moment, he invariably tapped lightly on the knuckles of his left hand with the flat black disc of his collapsed silk hat. This gesture had all the delicacy of a woman tapping with a frothy lace fan, yet it was not grotesque as he did it.
Going to the theater with him for the opening of a play was important to Vee always; tonight she dressed for it with a nervous self-consciousness. He would be withdrawn and silent as he was last night; no, he would be offhand and talk only of the network. She was ready ten minutes too early.
She rang for her maid, Dora, a crisp slim, Swedish-American girl who had been with her for five years. Dora came in with a square florist’s box, its green tulle ribbons untied. Vee’s heart leaped and left apprehension behind.
In a few moments she heard the house buzzer sound from the kitchen. Jasper had sent his car for her early.
But in a moment, another bell rang, and she heard Dora at the front door, Jasper’s voice giving her “Good evening.”
She waited for a moment, then went in to the living room. He was turned away from her, examining for the hundredth time the tides of the books on the bookshelves.
“Hello.” He wheeled around at her voice, came toward her.
“God, you’re beautiful in that,” he said.
“Thanks for the gardenias, Jas—it was sweet to make me feel—”
He waved it aside.
“I changed my mind about dinner at home,” he said. “We’ll have a drink here and dine out.”
She rang for drinks. He lit a cigarette, walked the room with it, waited until Dora had brought in the Manhattans and left again. He took his drink to the window, stared out, the lines in his back drawn sharp against his dinner jacket. Vera watched him. Could it be that last night’s impasse had troubled him all the long day, too?
He came toward her at last, where she was standing near the fireplace, took her glass out of. her hand, set it down with his.
“Darling, you’re lovely. Ever since last night I’ve been—”
He took her into his arms, kissed her, with passion and need. Instantly she felt herself transformed. The desirable, the necessary woman, wanted and triumphant because she was wanted. She hadn’t felt this, he hadn’t made her feel this, since they’d come back from Montego Bay. Even when he made love to her, he had not made her feel this intensity of feeling through the brief clamor of sex.
She didn’t understand now, she could not guess what wild voltage was charging through him or why, but an equal charge leaped within her heart and her blood. Something had happened to him, he was on the brink of something strange.
“God, Vee, what do people ever marry for?” It was so suddenly and angrily said, she half doubted its saying. “Marriage kills things like this, like the way we feel, it dulls and creeps and bores.”
She made no answer. He began again his walking about the room.
“Sometimes it works out,” she finally said. “Marriage sometimes fulfills people.”
“It didn’t you. Didn’t me and Beth. Doesn’t work out for most people. Certainly not for anyone with a big demanding job of work to do.”
“That makes it harder, I suppose. I think marriage is a tough human assignment. Maybe the toughest.”
“Well, the toughness doesn’t scare me. Don’t think I’m ‘opposed’ to marriage on principle—like some Bohemian left-banker. But—”
His voice cut; he sat down and plunged his face into his hands. She saw his shoulders work up in a spasm of tension. This was all so astonishing, the reason for it so hidden from her. She was lost on the road by which he had traveled to this unexpected place in his feelings. She knew nothing of how he had got there, or why. She waited, silently watching him.
“I’m for marriage, because I’m for—well, having children, carrying on the line, and all that. That justifies marriage. But if there weren’t children, there’s no reason for marriage except conventionality.”
“It’s a good reason, having children.”
“Well, maybe that’s why I’m—”
His powerful hands gripped each other, opened, gripped again. Vee knew something more profound than he had ever let her share was edging to the surface. She wished that she could help him, but knew not how or why he needed help. She went over to him, where he sat, sat beside him, and laid her hand on his arm.
“Jas, darling,” she said at last, and wondered at the inexplicable tightness in her own throat. “Is there anything you’re trying to tell me? You know I’ve never, I think really never, dug at you for revelations about yourself, or your own secrets—but if there’s anything hurting you that you want to tell—”
He looked at her. Then his voice came, abrupt and harsh.
“Beth and I tried to have a child. We couldn’t manage it. Doctors said she was all right. It’s me that isn’t.”
“No! Oh, I don’t believe it.”
“You can believe it, all right.” His eyes, last night so remote and dead, now bared a deep old pain and said that it was the only insupportable pain. Within her a new emotion flared, expanded. For the very first time she lost all wariness, all sense of sparring to keep her feelings matched for casualness with his own. For the first time, she felt, “God, I love this man.”
“When was this? That the doctors said it, I mean?” The words were very quiet. Then suddenly, “Oh, Jas, oh, darling, what hell for you—”
He took her hand, held it to his face.
“I—so often I’ve wanted to tell you this, Vee. But I—then last night, all through the evening—it had something to do with that God-damned clip—I don’t know what—”
He broke off, looking to her to see if she could follow that obscure connection. She nodded.
“When did the doctors say it?” she asked again.
“About ten years ago. That was about two years after we were married.” Now his voice was dry, unfeeling, as if he were reading some mechanical report. “I didn’t believe it either, any more than you do. I stumbled out of the guy’s office, I remember; a couple of days later I went to another doctor. More tests. He said it too. Then there came all the business of almost suicide; I mean it quite literally. Nights of that; weeks of that. That was just an emotional orgy, but I didn’t know it was then.”
“No.”
“I couldn’t believe it, I tell you. I’d always assumed that if you were perfectly normal about sex, you were bound to be—” He shrugged, laughed, a ratchety, tight laugh. It was mocking and somehow unpitying, even of himself. “A man can be a hellion in bed and still be sterile. That’s what I hadn’t known. Kind of a bad shock to get it straight from two doctors. So, anyway, I didn’t commit suicide—or am I being redundant?” He looked at his watch. “Hell, we’ll be late for the curtain.”
“Damn the curtain,” Vee said. “Look, darling, haven’t you been to a doctor since then? Couldn’t it change? They’ve learned so much since ten years ago—”
“No. Never. I never will. I’m not going to stir up all that misery again. Vee, it did something to me—”
“I know. I know it.”
“It’s too damnably ugly to bear again. After the suicide business, there followed months, years maybe—every day, about four times, or ten, I’d say, ‘You’re no good, really—you’re not a man, really—every mean little snot on the street can get his wife pregnant and have a son—but not you.’ ”
His work, his success, his thirst for power.
“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “I—”
“Hell with it all. There are lots of ways to live a life. Come on, let’s finish these and get some dinner fast.”
At the theater, she scarcely watched the stage. Her own thoughts claimed her; they had to be sifted out, aligned into some new pattern. For the first time, and for some reason that was cloaked even yet, he had let her see deep into his always secretive heart. And her reaction had been so violent, so sudden a realization that because he was in pain, she loved him. Often she had guessed that he was a tormented man, despite all his triumphs, despite all the varnished-over sheen of success and power. But he had never let her see his unhappiness naked, never given her any clue to the reasons for it. Tonight, without warning, he had torn away his own remote self-sufficiency and let her share his pain. And within her, the hundred small things wrong between them forgotten, rushed this torrent of desire to help, to restore, to ease his suffering.
A frightening and beautiful exhilaration flooded her. For all his faults, for all the egotism and self-centeredness of him, Jasper Crown was the most compelling man she had ever known. Tonight he had turned to her, in pressing need, and a new phase had opened in their relationship. It was dangerous to love a man like this…
She tried to nail her attention to the performance beyond the footlights. But she could not. To love again, to abandon one’s destiny to another’s care—how sweet, how desirable, a boon it would be. Career woman, indeed. No one ever saw underneath surfaces, ever looked for the shaping motive, the driving force that made men and women turn their external lives on the lathe of escape from inner disappointment or failure.
Just as Jasper had this—what must be a primitive inadequacy, a basic inferiority—driving him on to an endless, show of strength, so there were buried in her own life the secret whirring dynamos of past bitternesses and shock. Long ago her own brother David…It was odd to think of David now. She closed her eyes and could see him, his head a little bent in the old way, pressing his fingers against his closed eyelids, thumb against the right one, middle finger against the left, and the other fingers gracefully extended away from his face. It was as if he were there, standing between her and the lighted stage. Something had brought him to mind now. She must think back.
Back…back…way back there somewhere, when she was a high-school girl in a starched middy blouse and pleated navy-blue-skirt…there, somewhere, one of her own secret dynamos had begun its quiet and fearful whirring, creating the secret dark energy that was to power her later life, her external success, her independence of anyone’s help or promises.
Promises…pledges…faith in another human being…She slid her arm through Jasper’s where it rested on the chair arm between them.
He looked at her; whispered, “Pretty heavy going, isn’t it?” and turned back to the stage. After a moment she slipped her arm away again and forced her eyes to look, her ears to listen.
Vee lay in her wide bed, alone now that it was two o‘clock and Jasper gone. Even the light on the bedside table was off; she lay on her side, thinking, searching.
Promises…a promise…the defined and certain syllables that were actually spoken or the untongued understanding that was equally a pledge.
Of this was the stuff of human relations created. Of this was the stuff of treaties between nations, laws, affidavits of support, agreements between governments and peoples…the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights. A promise that there shall be no illegal entry or seizure. A pledge that there shall be due process of law—that one shall have freedom of assembly or of worship.
Of promises and pledges—lives were made, marriages begun or ended, happiness held or shattered. In a persistent and vague turmoil, Vee’s thoughts swirled and sought something that seemed important and necessary to her.
Once her whole life hinged on a promise…but that was David, that’s why his image had crossed her mind tonight. David whom she had loved.
In the secret library of her mind was one book she never touched. It stood as a companion volume to the hazy pages of My Childhood, but its special story dealt only with her last year at high school. Over its piercing pages, there was still no soft haze of forgetting; better to leave it there, untouched, forgotten. And with it, the memory of that terrible day…
Tonight, though, something within her was forcing her. For the first time in years, she slowly opened its forbidding covers…
She was sixteen and the only desire of her heart was to be like the other girls and go away to college. Like the Gale twins, preparing to go to Vassar, and Smitty, prattling about Ann Arbor, and Jo, oh, best of all, Jo, who was going to Cornell.
Last Christmas she and Jo had hitchhiked up to Ithaca, and from that minute on, nothing else mattered. She had to go to Cornell, too, had to; she could imagine how it would be, swinging across the campus to classes, studying hard, going out for the teams, getting asked to tea-dances at one of the big houses. Ithaca was so beautiful, the wind blowing free and clear down the gorges, the chimes ringing out the quarterhours.
Her mother understood, but from the first moment Pop said no. Training school was good enough; all this going away to college was aping the rich, and he would not permit it. She begged, she argued, she cried, but it remained no.
If she had any money, she would go, anyway, no matter what he said. Maybe she could do something, work, win a scholarship. The next day she talked to Mr. Derry, the principal. The second semester of her senior year was just starting. He told her then of the state scholarships. They were based only on a student’s Regents marks throughout the whole of high school. They paid a hundred dollars a year for four years. Perhaps—if she really was so bent on going—perhaps she could take one or two Regents examinations over, to better her grade. It was quite legal.
If she could win a scholarship—maybe then, with a hundred a year, she could persuade Pop to give in, to give her a little more…only ten dollars a week from him, and what she could earn Summers—she had it all figured out.
“Could I take them all over, Mr. Derry?”
“You’re not thinking of doing all that, Vera, are you?” Mr. Derry said, and there was a sort of look on his face, as if he liked her.
“Oh, I’d do anything to get away to college, anything.” Her voice thickened suddenly and she felt ashamed and embarrassed.
She was going to take ten Regents over when June came around, and of course her three seniors besides. Mr. Derry arranged a study table for her—she had to cram all those old subjects back into her head, and keep up with her senior work, too. Each day she left school, left the girls behind with their chattering and loafing around and walking down to Papayanka’s for nut sundaes—each day she went home and started in at the pile of freshman and sophomore and junior books stacked up on her desk.
But she didn’t care how hard it was.
She didn’t tell either Pop or Mamma—time enough for that later, when she had won it. She told nobody, not even the girls.
One Sunday David and Grace brought the two kids out. Vera didn’t feel close or easy with Grace, she was always complaining about the high cost of everything, though David was really rich now. He was a lawyer and made twelve thousand a year.
He didn’t visit often; Vee bet he stayed away because he was sick of quarreling with Pop about the Versailles Treaty and the League. David just couldn’t stand up to him when Pop got going good and proper about what he believed. David would try talking back awhile; then he would just sit listlessly, listening; he would bend his head a bit and close his eyes, pressing his thumb over one eye and his middle finger over the other, his other fingers flaring away from his face. It was a trick he had; it always made him look tired and a little sad.
That day, she waited until Grace was in the kitchen with Mom, and then she told David what she was doing. It all tumbled out crazily how she felt about getting away. David hadn’t gone away to college either.
“Please, please understand, David, please talk to Pop about Cornell, make him feel it, make him see I have to go—he can afford it.”
Then David nodded.
“You get your scholarship, Vee, and earn what you can summers and things, and I’ll make up the rest of it.”
For a bit she just stood there, looking at him. The magic of those words, the burst of happiness in her as she heard his promise.
“Get your scholarship, and tell me what you have to have, and I’ll give it to you. Ten a week’s about four hundred for the school year. Then say another hundred for lab fees and extras. That’s five hundred. I’ll do that—”
She flung her arms around him then, and squealed and hugged him and danced up and down until he said impatiently, “Hey, look, for heaven’s, sake,” but she could tell he loved her.
Then the dreams started. Then, the blessed sense of being supported, of being offered help, of trusting her destiny to someone else stronger than she—the blessed sense of having an ally. It made the long hours of study easy; all through February and the first days of March, she never weakened. She couldn’t fail now.
The dreaming. No matter how she had to scrimp on everything else, she’d have just one Brooks sweater, natural camel’s-hair color, and a plaid skirt, all crispy pleats. She would study so hard at night, in her own room in the dorm, when the fun and teams were all over. She wished she could enroll for just everything, medicine and astronomy and biology as well as her regular arts courses. She could actually feel herself in her small, pretty room, and the single student’s lamp yellow on her desk, and no sound but a page turning and the heat hissing a bit from the radiator. Later there’d be the rushing sound of the waterfalls in the gorges, coming in through the open windows of springtime, and, from the Libe Tower, the chimes ringing out sweet and clear.
The dreaming, the relying on David, the sweet calm of trusting somebody else—they all made her task easier. April went and May came, and there were only a few more weeks of the deadening grind. May was very hot, and she began to feel too tired and draggy. June came. She never got to bed till one or later, cramming. She had nightmares about the exams nearly every night.
And at last it was Monday of Regents week. She took three that first day—three hours each. Mr. Derry had arranged everything with the whole faculty. She had to take each Regent on the day it was scheduled, though the hours could be switched when they overlapped. She did two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, four on Thursday, and one on Friday—thirteen Regents in all. Thursday was the worst day, with two to take at night, from seven to one in the morning. Mr. Derry always stayed for the evening exams, to proctor her. They would have sandwiches and a bottle of milk for their supper, and then she would start again.
When it was over, Mr. Derry only said, “You’re a fine girl, Vera. This took a lot of courage, I think.” Her heart roared and leaped inside her, the way it did about David.
A few days later the exams were all marked, and Mr. Derry told her privately her average was 93.4. She couldn’t miss the scholarship. David was proud when she telephoned.
“Good stuff, Vee,” David said, and again her heart leaped. “You’re going to be all right in this world. You have it.”
The final notification, from Albany, wouldn’t come till August. She got a job, in the office of a piano factory on the flats of Long Island City. It paid nine dollars a week; she saved seven, spending only commutation-ticket money. That would be seventy dollars by September. The Brooks sweater would cost twelve, and the skirt eight, and the rest would do for the clothes she simply had to have, to start with.
The summer days were hot and long, and August with its envelope from Albany seemed years off. But she could walk through the white stale dust toward the factory and feel the campus in October, sparkling under the clear high skies on the hill. And whenever or wherever a church bell chimed, that whole hot summer, it was instantly the quiet old Libe Tower and her own room in the dorm late at night.
Then it was August, and at last there was the crisp white official envelope, with the Albany postmark. She stood on the porch steps a moment and held it. She shut her eyes tight.
“Look, even if it isn’t—even if you failed—it doesn’t mean your life is really over or anything, you know that. Now look at it.”
Yes, oh God, she had a state scholarship. She ran back into the house and explained the whole thing to Mamma, and Mamma kissed her and wept a little, because she was so proud of her girl.
“I don’t care what Pop says now, or how he yells,” Vee said, and laughed exultantly. “I’m going away to college, like other girls. David thinks it’s right. That’s why he promised to help me—”
“Does Grace agree? Vee, are you sure she—”
“I don’t know about Grace. But David said—he promised—oh, Mom, darling, I’ll have the most glorious life—”
Then she was off, running for the train. It was a cool, windy day, almost like fall. The office hours flew and at five-thirty she was on the way to Brooklyn. The lists would be in the papers tomorrow and she had to tell David herself first. She had to see his face, and the way his eyes lit up; she had stayed away from the telephone all day, just so she could see his face when she told him it was definite.
Grace was in the office. She was talking loudly, vigorous gestures and positive sentences. She was waving an afternoon paper as she talked, and Vee saw a long list of names on the open page. David was sitting down. He said only hello when he looked up and saw Vee there. Grace whirled toward her; she had a new fall polo coat, in the most heavenly creamy camel’s-hair color.
“I’ve just heard about this—this crackpot idea,” Grace exploded, waving the paper around. “Business is rotten this year and of course he doesn’t think of his own children and their education—let them go to public schools, anyway, but a public college isn’t good enough for Miss Vera.”
Vera sat down. She looked at David. She was just waiting to hear what he’d say, how he’d stand up to Grace. He couldn’t get a word in edgewise right now, of course, but in about one second—
But David put his head down and closed his eyes. He pressed on them with the thumb and third finger, working the lids gently.
She sat waiting. She no longer heard what Grace was saying, exactly; the same old nagging voice, nothing new or surprising about it. In a moment now, any second now, David would let her have it. “But I promised,” he would say, and he would be terrible to hear, so quiet, so unflinching. In a moment now, he would say it, and this would be over.
He would, he would. You couldn’t give a promise like that and then have any reason come up that was good enough to make you break it. In just one moment more—
Grace’s voice went on. Vee thought, way off in some distant corner of her somewhere, that she didn’t even hate Grace, because this was just what you could count on from her. You despised it, but you could endure it because there was no shock to it. The thing that made you hate, made you loathe, made you know that never in all the long years ahead would you ever trust again or forgive—that thing was counting on somebody dear, relying, believing in somebody, and then having him let you down.
Then you could hate, hate with a wild, implacable, crazy—oh, David, hurry, hurry and say something, my darling big brother, say it, say it…
From the open window, the seven-o’clock chimes from the Borough Hall floated in, sweet and clear. As they died away, Vera went blindly to the door and David didn’t stop her.
In the beautiful and expensive apartment, in the wide, luxurious bed soothed by the pale moonlight reaching in through the opened windows, Vera Marriner Stamford suddenly wept. Wept for that trusting sixteen-year-old in 1922. Wept for the pain-twisting into the dragging, weary months that followed; wept for the new hard core of lonely determination that formed through those months—“I will do it, anyway, I’ll do it myself, with no help from anybody.”
She had indeed done it. She had worked for a year, in an office during the day, as cashier in a restaurant until eleven each night. She had entered Cornell a year late, and worked there. She had worked summers, and in her third and fourth years, finally, Pop had relented and sent her thirty dollars a month. From the middle of her junior year onward, she had borrowed from the Student Loan, and then she’d been able to relax and have a happy period of carefree, easy college life. She’d been a top-rank student, and she’d been popular and well known, with beaus and parties and fun.
But there was a wariness about her planning and dreaming for the future. Always, always, her dreams were of what she would do herself; never was she quite able to believe that you could ever rely on any other human for help, for faith; you had forever to make your own way, lonely but not betrayed.
In her moonlit bed, in her delightful apartment, Vee’s weeping slowly stopped. That long-ago college girl could never have phrased her wary instincts with any such clarity. There was no proof now that they had even existed.
Yet, for some reason she didn’t understand, this evening’s sudden insight into Jasper’s being had sent her own thoughts flying backward through the tumbling years, backward to David’s fingers pressing on his closed eyelids.
The secret dynamo, whirring…