4

She would not let me do that for her, but I had loved her, and I loved her still, yes, although now in a different way again (for passion, like poetry, cannot live by itself alone; it needs the bread of daily habit, the stuff of humbler actualities than itself to feed it and be transfigured by it), and I could not let her harm herself and Dan without some further effort to help her. Not yet, at least, even though now some more elaborate strategy was needed, since now she had drawn away from me again, had withdrawn more completely than ever into the Freddie-persona, and Freddie himself was there now, always pompously present and more officious than ever, and Dan was frailer, less steady even than before. They had all changed. Only I, it seemed, was the same.

They had changed with their surroundings. Their new apartment was high over the East River. You rose to it in an elevator that was lined with watered mirrors colored like a pool of the sea on a bright day, strange lucid green, pale and ripply, in which your reflection wavered like a monster fish as silently you rose and rose, until you emerged in their citadel of air and emptiness.

Here there were great walls of glass through which you looked out upon nothing at all but sky, or back upon the towers of Manhattan, and these, whether ghostly in evening mists or cut out in hard, isolated, daytime clarity, seemed unreal, an abstract fantasy of a city on a poster. Or these windows could be covered by pulling across them yards and yards of pleated gauze that fell from ceiling to floor in always slightly stirring folds, as if they should give forth whispers, and tinted, like the walls, in graded shades of gray. There were low, spare sofas with deep pillows and no arms, upholstered in rough materials of gray and beige and pale blue, all shot with silver, and in one wall, a low rectangular fireplace was cut, without mantel, without ornament, and there, on chromium irons, a fastidious log could blaze. Out of one wall burst a chamber (what can one call such a room that is not a room?) that was like a great shell or bell of glass, and here stood a round dining table, two tall plants with uneasy, savage leaves, and heavy tapers in ascetic standing racks. The walls of this establishment were entirely bare except for two pictures that hung with geometric precision on one wall—early Chiricos that looked out upon space as emptily as dead eyes. Every vestige of the elder Fords had been dismissed, every suggestion of their ostentatious clutter. Here was a new and terrible purity, sterility wrought into a style.

I came there as a friend, and saw at once the difference in them and in my status. Milly treated me with a gust of cool, swift verbiage that was like mockery, it was at once so intimate and so disengaged. There was no way of meeting her, or of laying the groundwork for what was to come next, either, except by boldness, and as soon as we were alone, I said, “Now you dislike me.”

“Darling!” she cried. “Don’t be absurd!”

“I think I’ve hurt you.”

“How?” High incredulousness.

“That business about Freddie.”

“Freddie? But darling, Freddie’s no problem!”

I spoke softly, dejectedly. “You understand, I hope, that I’m fond of Freddie. I like him fine, it’s only—”

“But of course! Of course!”

“Please, Milly—”

“But who would suggest that you don’t?”

“No one, I hope. But what I want to say is—the reason that—I would never have—I said that—”

She laughed. “Why are you making things so difficult for yourself, darling? No one’s accusing you of anything.”

“I want to be plain. I want this all to be straight. I did drive you away from me, and by one remark. My reason was: I do honestly think that Freddie’s bad for Dan. Also for you.”

Her chin sharpened a little but she never ceased to smile. “Darling, Grant, I seem to remember that you were worried only about losing me.”

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t lost me, have you?”

“Haven’t I?”

“Dear Grant, why would you be here?”

“All right,” I said.

“And I haven’t lost you, have I?”

“No.”

“Well, then—Everything’s lovely.”

“But Freddie—”

“Freddie! Freddie! He’s not lost to us.”

“No, certainly not.”

“Well—?”

She was as impossible as that. And how I had miscalculated! Some consolidation of temperament had taken place: gone, really, were both the cold agitation of speech that I had associated with Freddie, and the friendly composure that seemed to have belonged to Dan; or rather, part of each had gone and the two had come together in a cold composure; but what was wholly gone was the deeper, warmer grace that briefly had been mine. More simply, one can describe the change in action: some net had been drawn closer. Into it she had pulled those of whom she could be sure. She could not be sure of me, and I was now outside it, perhaps I was even viewed as dangerous. I think that already she wished that I would leave them, but nothing had reached the necessary stage of clarity at which she could say so plainly, and thus I was to be tolerated while we executed, for how long I could not know, this fantastic verbal dance in which all realities were denied.

But presently another opportunity presented itself, and I began again. “Consider Freddie then,” I said. “Think of it from his point of view.”

“Of what, Grant?”

“Of the situation he’s in.”

“You mean his living here? It’s a convenience for all of us, an obvious convenience.”

“Not that, particularly, but that too. It rather denies him the possibility of a private life, doesn’t it, if he has any such inclination? But really I mean the constant secondary role that he plays in every way.”

“Secondary role,” she reflected. “In which ways?”

“Is it good for a man to have no life of his own, not even a professional life, to be so completely identified with the interests of others?”

“Grant, Freddie’s a free man. He can choose anything for himself that he wants.”

“Yes!”

“But, of course, he can.”

“He’ll need some help, I’m afraid, at this stage.”

“Help?”

“Help.”

“From you, Grant?”

“After a period in which the morale has been sapped—”

She stopped me, and for the first time with an impatient speech. “Grant, it’s dangerous for men to try to play God.”

“Ah, yes,” I said quickly. “But isn’t that your wish—to be some kind of goddess?”

The sharpened chin, the fine, tightened nostrils relaxed. All hint of impatience flowed away. She stood up and smiled at me with positive benignity. “I hope that I’ll always be a goddess for you, Grant,” she said in the kindest voice, and laid her hand lightly on my shoulder.

I turned my head swiftly and kissed her fingers, but she drew her hand away at once and laughed. “Only a goddess, please! Only a goddess!” And she walked away from me across that large, spare room, walked silently on the thick, pale carpeting, and chuckled as she went. Yes—a warm, low, complacent, nearly self-congratulatory sound for which, ridiculous as it may seem, I can think of no other word: she chuckled.

Through these skirmishes I began to catch glimpses of a means. Indeed, in those skirmishes I was clarifying the situation for myself, and directly it was clear, I would know how I should move, what I could do, being outside her interests, as I now was.

Now and until the end, my motivation lay almost entirely in Dan. As Milly was more composed in a certain electric way than she had been before, Dan, as I have suggested, was less so: frailer, less steady, rather fallen in upon himself, more querulous, his happy summer face pinched and paler, his hair rapidly graying. And, with Milly, Freddie, growing rather portly, wove and wove about Dan in his curious protective dance. All that winter this went on: they wove him in, they wove me out.

One evening in December I was there in that high uncluttered place, sitting through desultory conversation, staring at the surrounding darkness in which the lights of the apartment picked out gusts of snow funneling down on low, moaning winds.

“That’s bitter-looking snow,” Dan said.

“Freddie, dear, draw the draperies, won’t you?” Milly asked.

I thought of ragged Republican troops, ill-equipped, outnumbered, nearly routed, and when Freddie sat down again, I said, “It’s colder in Spain than it is in here.”

Milly glared at me and Freddie quickly said, “I went to see Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ again today. What a pretentious mistake!”

“Borax, Freddie?” I asked, using a piece of cant that he liked to throw into his remarks on pictures.

“Of course not.” He said it impatiently. “Picasso can’t paint badly. But he can paint so much better.”

“You don’t like it, Freddie? You’re practically alone in New York.”

“Such political painting is, in its way, as irresponsible as his political remarks.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you think of what he can do,” Milly said.

“When you think of something like the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon,’” Freddie went on, “and then of this—well, this cartoon! That’s what it is, of course.”

“It’s overrated,” Dan said. “Interesting, but not very rich, is it?”

“It’s rich in idea,” I said.

“I mean, of course, in the painting, as painting.”

“Is there something like that?”

“That’s about all there is in painting,” Freddie said. “How the painter puts on paint.”

I looked up at the pictures by Chirico, and thought of his allegiances, and of the connection between them and the dead world he had always seen in his imagination, and the heavy, glistening paint seemed to me to have the sheen of death. How a painter puts on paint, I would have ventured, is finally, in the whole human mystery were we but able to observe it, as much a matter of motivation by idea, or allegiance to idea, however negative, as any other action in the world, as for example, putting down in words statements of ideas themselves. But I had no interest in pursuing this line; we had been over it before, and there was no possibility of deflecting either Dan or Freddie from their stubborn aestheticism. I had, furthermore, a wish to turn the conversation to another subject, deliberately, for a change, to test this situation; for what I had by now come to think of as the shutting in of Dan from the world outside, as the purposeful limiting and cushioning of his experience, was still a matter mostly of impression. When I asked myself for particulars, they were elusive; I had a conviction, a feeling, but I wanted evidence.

So I said as mildly as I could, “Have you seen the evening papers?” and at once felt a tightening in Milly and in Freddie. “There’s a story,” I went on, “that would interest you, Dan, especially—”

Milly cut in with quite inappropriate finality. “We take two morning papers, and really, with everything in the world so dreary, that’s more than enough for me.”

And Freddie, in his old maneuver: “Let me fill your glass, fella.”

Fella! How did he really feel about me? As comradely as that? I was not sure. So expert had been Milly’s deceit in the spring that he had never suspected what went on then between us. And what else was there to suspect? I think that it was only Milly who was made uneasy by my presence, fearful that somehow I might now let him know. A pointless fear. Dan was, of course, impervious, as essentially unaware of me as, I am convinced, he was of Freddie. We were both simply there, objects that raised no questions for him. And so perhaps Freddie did feel friendship for me, or at least as warm a friendship as his uncertainties about me allowed. Some such uncertainties he must have felt, for that I was not a partner in his alliance with Milly, whatever that might be, must have been perfectly clear to both of them. I said, “Thanks, Freddie, why not?” and smiled at him.

“What was it, Grant?” Dan asked.

I toyed. “What?”

“You started to say—”

“Oh, Dan,” Milly cried. “Did Mrs. C. buy the drawings I sent her to look at?”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” he said, and then to me again, “Something about a news story.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I thought perhaps you’d heard about it. It’s about a theft at the Behn Studios—early this morning.”

“Behn’s? Really? No, I didn’t hear anything about it.”

“Here, Dan,” Freddie said, and interposed himself between Dan and me with the inevitable pitcher. When he straightened up again, he said to Milly, “She did come in. I’m sure she’ll want the drawings. She’d be a fool not to, at the price we’re proposing.”

Milly went on rapidly. “But Mrs. Cummings is so whimsical in her buying.” In her agitation, she had named a client’s name, and in their mysterious and secretive professional world, that was a laxity never permitted, even with only me to hear.

Freddie rushed ahead. “She holds out and holds out. And then is furious when she loses something that’s been urged on her and that she really does want. First she must always persuade herself that the entire negotiation rests solely on her judgment. In the meantime, someone else may very well have acted on ours. Will you have a cocktail, Milly?”

“No more, thank you, darling,” she said, and looked eagerly toward the dining chamber, where a servant was lighting the white tapers.

Dan had, for a change, maintained his interest in a chopped-off topic, and he said, “I want to hear the rest of Grant’s story. What was stolen, Grant?”

“A small Cézanne. But it wasn’t that so much that was interesting, as the way the fellow tried to bring it off.”

“He didn’t get away with it?”

I glanced at Milly, who was studying me with a rigid eye, and I said, “Well, no, he didn’t,” and now I was certain that Milly knew the story I was trying to tell. The thief, it seemed, was a young art student who wanted the picture for its own sake, and he had worked out an elaborate scheme for getting it, which involved his entering the gallery by a skylight and letting himself down by a knotted rope. He had cut the picture out of its frame, rolled it, strapped it to his back, and gone back up the rope, but when he was about to escape by the skylight again, he slipped and crashed to the tiled floor of that high room, where, quite thoroughly smashed up, he lay until a night watchman found him, and died a few hours later in a hospital.

“How late we are with dinner,” Milly said impatiently. “I will have another cocktail, Freddie. You’d better give us all one.” And so once more the story was interrupted.

“But what happened?” Dan asked as Freddie busied himself again. I went on with the story, and when Freddie turned to Milly to pour her drink, she rose to receive it, and then spilled it.

“Damn!” she cried. “All down my dress.”

Dan pulled out his handkerchief and, kneeling before her, wiped at her skirt.

“How silly of me!” she said.

“It’s nothing,” Dan muttered.

“So clumsy.”

“Then what, Grant?” The handkerchief moved more slowly over the skirt.

“When he was about to get out of there again—”

Then Milly said it plainly. “Please, Grant!”

Dan looked quickly up at her, at Freddie, and then at me. “What is this?” he asked rather shrilly. “Some kind of plot?”

“Darling, don’t be foolish. I want Grant to stop interrupting you until you’re finished.”

“I am finished,” he said as he straightened up. “What is all this? Has it something to do with me?”

“Darling, I don’t know the story. I don’t know what Grant’s talking about.”

“What are you talking about, Grant?” Freddie asked ominously. He was standing, too, holding his pitcher, and his eyes, like Milly’s, were not so much looking at me as trying to compel me.

I said, “There’s not much more. Just as the fellow was about to escape, a night watchman came in and caught him. The police have him, and the gallery has the picture, only slightly damaged.”

“Oh,” said Dan, as the three of them sat down again and the tension drained slowly out of their faces. Over her glass, Milly smiled at me with a suggestion of the old warmth, as though she could count on me after all, and Freddie said, “Good! To Cézanne!” Then dinner was announced, and we went in to that round table, where there was no longer any suggestion of a head or a foot or sides, and at which we sat in all the meaningless equality of childhood, while Freddie talked quite brilliantly of Cézanne. But what preposterous thing was being done to Dan in the name of love and kindness?

Freddie’s talk at dinner, following so immediately upon that demonstration of Dan’s predicament, showed me in a flash not only the desperate need for action in his behalf, but the possible action itself. After dinner I said casually to Freddie, “You talk so well about pictures, and once you said you’d thought of writing about them. Why don’t you?”

He looked surprised. “As a matter of fact, I have. I’ve been thinking recently of a book and I’ve been making some notes for it.”

“Good. On what?”

“Something to be called The Commerce of Culture. Really about the history and the function of the picture dealer.”

“Oh, yes. But I was thinking of criticism. Haven’t you ever thought of that?”

“What’s in your mind, Grant?”

“I have an idea, Freddie. Can we talk about it? Let’s have lunch soon, shall we?”

“Good!” he said, pleased.

What had most impressed me earlier was that when Milly and Freddie let me give that inaccurate account of the Behn Studio theft, they were committing themselves to keeping from Dan the real story and felt quite safe in doing so. That meant that he would somehow be kept from reading about it next day; it meant that he could be closed off from even the professional gossip of Fifty-seventh Street; that he made only gestures of independence, that he was a fantastic prisoner. Without Freddie’s assistance, this captivity would be impossible. And therefore, if Freddie, through an appeal to his vanity, could be pried loose from them, and Dan, thrust out of the habit of his native passivity, were forced to make those gestures real—would it not be his salvation? And Milly’s, too, little as she knew in which direction her salvation lay? It all suddenly stood before me, complete and plausible, this beautiful possibility for aid. It would require, to be sure, some ruthlessness in regard to Freddie himself, but to that I was prepared to close my eyes; this was a familiar paradigm of means and ends, and my eyes were open to the greater good.

At the offices of The New World, I had now a certain authority and prestige. I had been there for several years, I had worked in several departments and done several kinds of writing, and, in fact, as the political situation was growing more complex, more confusing, I was doing more and more work for the back of the book, those “cultural” pages where one could write without feeling the necessity of commanding all the final answers. It was in this connection that Freddie entered, for the art columns were, of course, at the back of the magazine, and we were presently going to need a new art man. My notion was to sell Freddie to the editor for that place.

This fiasco need not be detailed in the telling. My editor was interested in Freddie’s qualifications, and Freddie, perhaps for the very reason that he had never before had the opportunity of being tempted by the charming prospect of seeing his opinions in print, succumbed to my proposal with all the fascination of the amateur. He had, it seemed, some idea of becoming one of those refined collector-critics of the old school, a lesser Berenson, perhaps, but of the contemporary, and he saw in my proposal an opportunity to begin this development, a chance to bring his name, together with his prose, before a public, and the sacrifice in money that it would mean was more than balanced in his mind by the prospect of a new and brilliant kind of extension of himself. Naïve to the point of folly! It was suggested that he write a few trial reviews of current shows, and in his eagerness, he did not consider for a minute, I think, the probable consequences. I knew from the outset that a less likely staff writer on that magazine could hardly be imagined, and that it would not be very long before his peculiarly tight and class-bound views would trip him into such illiberality of judgment that he would be out. I did not have enough interest in Freddie himself to wish to do him any harm, and I might have felt some qualms about this clear interference in his affairs if I had felt that I was doing him any real harm. I was not; and I might be helping someone who had indeed been dear to me, was still, and desperately needed help. When, in January, Barcelona fell, and the tragedy of Spain was over, I felt no new fondness for Freddie, it is true—no more for Freddie than for others like him who had been either indifferent to that tragedy or frankly on the side of evil—and still, my bitterness and disappointment did not direct themselves at persons, neither at Freddie nor at all the others. It was only Dan, in this, who mattered, and the change that overtook Dan almost at once, as Freddie became engaged in these other activities, is my vindication.

It was understood, of course, that Freddie would sever his connections with The Ford Gallery if he were finally to have the place on The New World, but for the five or six weeks that he was writing his sample pieces, which were not for publication, he was free to maintain it. To do his pieces creditably, however—and within their limits they were very able—he necessarily had much less time to give to the gallery, and Dan, in turn, found himself in a position where he could not choose but exercise his judgment and assert his taste, his tact, his business sense. This was really the first opportunity he had had to do so with any independence, and he began to feel himself as an entity. While Milly sat somewhat stonily by, and Dan complained mildly that Freddie had abandoned him, both still expressed excited interest in his venture. And Dan positively began to change again. How thrilling is even the promise of the rebirth of a man! Milly let me feel the cold force of her dislike, but Dan’s visible strengthening more than justified me as I watched Freddie in the precarious bliss of that new self-importance for which I was happy to accept the responsibility.

Milly was beyond my understanding, and necessarily; I was, as events would presently show, still ignorant of her, for all our intimacy. Thus now I could only conclude that for the sake of a wholly servile Freddie she would choose an ailing Dan. But that this was not quite the way she posed her terms of choice I had yet to learn.

My plot developed with a smoothness that should have warned me. The editor liked Freddie’s preliminary pieces and asked him to come into the office and work with the staff for a few weeks before either of them made a final commitment. Freddie thus withdrew entirely from the daytime operations of The Ford Gallery. He still lived with Dan and Milly, of course; I had not yet devised means whereby he could be maneuvered out of that hold on their lives, and until I did he would continue to exercise at least an advisory control in their affairs. Yet the happy change in Dan was so great that I could hardly have in justice wished for more on his account.

On a February evening, when I came to the apartment earlier than I was expected and found Dan alone, we stood before one of the great windows and looked out at paltry winter stars deep between huge gray clouds that hung on the sky like outer draperies, and Dan said, “I’m going to remember these early months of this year.”

“Yes?”

“The time of the healing. Good God, what’s been wrong with me?”

“One of those long things that just take time. Now you’re snapping back. And you look it, Dan.”

“Three months ago I was ready to go back to the sanitarium. One night I even telephoned. I was about to ask for Jo Drew. Who knows, she may still be there. But then I lost my courage and hung up.”

“Jo Drew?” I had not heard the name before.

“Josephine Drew. A nurse. She did most for me when I was in that place. A wonderful girl.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Now I’d like to see her for other reasons, just as a person, because she is wonderful. I don’t know why I haven’t. You’d like her, Grant.”

“Why haven’t you seen her?”

“Sickness and pride, I guess. That’s no doubt part of my whole miserable business. Have I seen anyone?”

“Well, do now.”

“It’s as though I’m just waking up,” he said. Then suddenly he looked dubious. “I don’t think Milly.…”

“Milly?”

“I’m not sure that they like each other.”

Oh, what an innocent he had always been! “Milly knows her?” I asked.

“Slightly. And some years ago now, of course.”

“They haven’t seen each other either?”

“No, no. Why should they have seen each other?”

And then when Milly came in, breathless and surprised to find me already there, I said, after the greetings and the exclamations, “Dan’s been telling me about Josephine Drew.”

Nothing happened to her face. “Josephine Drew,” she said, and then, glancing at Dan, “Oh, yes. Have you seen her, Dan?”

“No. I thought it might be pleasant if we did.”

“Of course. But it’s been so long—do you know where she is?”

“I hadn’t thought—I haven’t thought of her—I only thought—” Suddenly he was all uncertain again.

“We’ll see, dear,” Milly said briskly, and told us then, in some detail, how really mild it seemed for February. But when Freddie, looking very cheerful, came in a few minutes later, she said almost at once, “Freddie, Dan’s been speaking of Josephine Drew. Do you remember her?”

His face did show something, it dulled somehow as he said, “Of course,” and looked at me and at Milly again. Then there was nothing but a thick silence, while that glance between them held, until I said, “How did it go today, Freddie?” and he seemed to wake up abruptly and said, “Oh, fine, fine!”

And fine, fine seemed to provide the refrain that ran through dinner, at least for Dan and Freddie, as Dan, out of his new independence and Freddie out of the promise of his near success, babbled on together. I waited for another mention of Josephine Drew, but it did not come; she seemed, indeed, to have been forgotten by all of them, and I became aware, as the animation of the two men mounted with their wine, that Milly spoke less and less. She toyed with her food, turned her wineglass before her interminably but hardly touched her wine, and at last let her eyes rest on me where I sat opposite her, and then, moodiness suddenly falling away, smiled directly at me with a warmth not only of friendliness but even of affection such as I had not seen for months and that, at this moment, struck me as entirely unaccountable. Nor did I understand much more clearly when, after dinner, Dan and Freddie having withdrawn briefly to Dan’s desk in another room, Milly and I were alone together and she made her extraordinary plea.

We were in the large, glassed-in room, staring at empty coffee cups and brandy glasses, and suddenly Milly got up and turned down the bright lights. I stood up, too, and then, without a word, she walked swiftly toward me and put her arms around my neck. “Love me,” she said quietly and desperately. “Oh, love me again.”

I gasped. “I do love you.”

“No, no. You don’t at all.”

“But for months now, you’ve disliked me.”

“Oh, no!” Her breath was on my neck, her moist cheek against my chin as she strained upward, weeping silently. “Don’t let me do it, Grant, don’t please.”

“Do what, my dear?”

“Don’t let me be worse!”

I was silent as I tried to understand her. “I’ll do anything you want,” I said.

“Then love me again, and let Freddie go.”

“Freddie? How—let him go?”

“This silly magazine business. He’ll be no good at that. Please—drop it.”

“But he’s quite good at it, really. And he doesn’t want it dropped!”

“But I do. Do it for me, then, and love me again, so that I won’t be worse than I am.”

She sounded more desperate than I had ever heard her, and she was clinging to me with tense arms, and it was quite honestly that I said, “Milly, I don’t understand you. Not at all.”

She drew away a little and stared down at our feet. She wiped her eyes. Still looking down, she said, “Dan needs him so. Why do you insist?”

“But Dan demonstrably doesn’t,” I did insist. “It’s good for both of them. Wonderful. Watch—it will make Dan.”

She looked up at me again. There was a kind of dim pain in her eyes, but now no affection whatever for me. That had come and gone like a breeze. She said, “Oh!” with something like dismay, and then turned from me entirely and walked to the windows. The two men came back into the room, we sat down again round the chaste fire, and for the rest of that evening I was unable to engage her glance. Now she seemed intent only on Freddie.

The following Sunday was a mild, mild day, the truly false spring, and there were still to be blizzards and gales before the real spring came, the city to be choked with snow; but for that day the air was soft as April, and in the middle of the afternoon Dan called to say that they were driving into the country for an early supper and would I come along. When they came for me, Freddie was driving and Milly sat beside him. I got into the back seat with Dan.

We crossed the Hudson and drove north; we found an inn; we dined. And there was nothing remarkable about that evening except that Milly, in considerable contrast to her behavior of a few nights before, seemed almost drunk with animation, but a false animation, electric and a little wild and meaningless. On the way back to the city, this mood sustained itself, and seemed to quiet rather than to animate the rest of us. When we passed an amusement park, garish with lights and splitting the night with its blaring sounds, Milly insisted that we stop. We wandered among the crowd that the mild evening had drawn. We found a shooting gallery with pistols, and we all bought a few rounds, but Milly, in her curious excitement, could hit nothing, whereas Dan, amid Milly’s exclamations and Freddie’s fulsome compliments, did best, and he did superbly, so that over and over he won another round, until the sheer skill of his performance became tiresome.

“Why, that’s fine, Dan, that’s fine!” Freddie said, as though he were encouraging an invalid in a long convalescence, and I said as bluntly as I could, “You’re just as good as you always were, Dan. The only one of us who is.”

“But let’s go on!” Milly cried, and we went on, and found a Fun House. We crashed about through corridors of distorting mirrors, stumbled up and down shaking stairs, balked before jigging, phosphorescent skeletons that leapt up before us in dark rooms, and always led by Milly, as though this nonsense were a quest, on and on.

Then we came finally to a point near the exit where a smooth, enormous wooden saucer revolved crazily in the floor, first in one direction, then violently in the other. And although this pit already contained two sailors and two shrieking girls in wild disarray, their limbs all tangled and their bodies sprawling, Milly slid in among them, and Freddie after her. But almost at once something disastrous happened. She had miscalculated the thing somehow and injured herself. Freddie, struggling for a semblance of balance, was holding onto her and shouting to the man who manipulated the levers that operated the device. It ground to a sudden halt, and the sailors helped Freddie bring Milly out of it. She had hurt her ankle and her lip was swollen and bleeding, but she impatiently dismissed the operator, who was mildly concerned, and wanted nothing from Dan but his handkerchief. We helped her outside and started for the car, and although she could not put her weight on the injured foot, she continued to laugh. “It’s nothing. I was just silly. It’s nothing at all.”

And it wasn’t, really, and yet it was grotesque that it should have happened to her, and when we came to the car and Freddie brusquely ordered, “Grant, you drive. We’ll put Milly in the back,” she did, it seemed to me, sob once or twice even as she laughed. Freddie managed to arrange her as comfortably as possible on the back seat, with her back up against a window and her bruised leg stretched out along the seat. Then Dan said, “I’ll sit with Milly,” and Freddie replied, “But I’m already here, Dan. Why not leave it this way?” And indeed he was very substantially there, sitting on the edge of the seat, his arm around her shoulders to cushion them. Dan got in with me.

In the highway darkness, when there was no point in further expressions of concern, we all fell silent, and Dan’s head drooped in a doze. There was little traffic, and I drove fast and intently. Occasionally I thought I heard whispering, murmurous sounds behind me, but I could not turn. At a traffic light, I took occasion to readjust the rearview mirror and said a word or two over my shoulder, and then we drove on again, fast and intently. But I heard those sounds again, tender and murmuring, and, without reducing our speed, I looked into the mirror as another car came toward us. In the flash of its headlights, I saw one of Milly’s white hands on the dark cloth of Freddie’s shoulder, and I saw his mouth on her cheek.

Now, when it was too late, I understood: she had become “worse,” and my poor plot had been subverted.

It came to a rapid ruin. Only a few afternoons later, flushed and angry, Freddie lurched into my cubicle of an office and demanded, “Why did you do it?”

“Do what, Freddie?”

“Get me in here only to get me out. Why?”

I stood up. “What do you mean?”

“The inquisition I’ve been through.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you!” His hands were shaking, and he put them on my desk, palms down, fingers spread out, to steady them, and, shoulders thrust toward me, he said in a moment, said slowly, “I don’t think you ever did like me, Grant.”

I came around the desk and took hold of his arm. “Freddie, be quiet. I’m not even going to pursue that. You’re excited. Calm down and tell me what happened.”

He drew his arm roughly out of my grasp. “Ask your editor,” he said, and slammed out.

The editor was almost as angry as Freddie. “A nice spot you put me on,” he said.

“What is this?”

“Did you know this fellow’s politics?”

“I know him. He’s not political at all.”

“You’ve been around long enough to know that that usually means the worst politics.”

“What happened?”

“This came in today,” he said, and slid a sheet of notepaper across his desk. I read the few typewritten lines. As an old friend of “The New World,” I advise you to ask a few questions of Mr. Grabhorn before you employ him. Ask him, for example, for his opinion of Franco, of Chamberlain, of F.D.R., or ask him to give you his views of the idea of WPA art. Ask him, too, whether he has squeezed fine pictures out of helpless refugees for a small fraction of their worth. That was all; there was no signature.

“A queer thing,” I said. “You don’t think it’s mine, do you?”

“Yours? Of course not. But you must have known some of this.”

“Did you let him think that I had anything to do with it?”

“No. That’s what I’m complaining about—that you didn’t.”

“Well, he thinks I did. What happened?”

“I asked him, that’s all. And found out. The fellow’s a fascist. What did he think he was going to do on this magazine?”

“No, no. Now look—”

“Friendship blinds you, Grant.”

“He’s no great friend of mine, but I’ve known him for a long time, and I know what he’s like, and I really thought that he could handle this job.”

“So do I know what he’s like—now. And we can’t have a fellow like that on this staff!” Then, more patiently, he said, “You should have known that. Maybe you’re too humane.”

I smiled. “No. That isn’t the problem. Well, I’m sorry.…” And I was.

Freddie never really believed me again. I thought at first that I had persuaded him of my innocence in that miserable New World affair, but I do not now think that he ever relinquished his suspicions, and in the end he was convinced that I had indeed indulged myself in that act which, from me, would have been an insanely perverse betrayal of his interests. The real source of that betrayal was, of course, plain enough to me, and there it was in the open for us now, a thing perfectly evident between us, like an object, a shadow or a sword, over which we stared at one another, both of us knowing now, neither, of course, yet speaking. But knowing: knowing on Milly’s part that she had saved him from me; knowing on my part not only that I had failed to save her and Dan from him, for themselves, but also that for her there was logic in the act—insane logic, perhaps, but desperate logic, too (desperation, we finally learn, is almost more importunate than anything else)—a new and savage intensity and clarity in her determination to hold to herself what she had so fatally chosen as her life.

And still, in spite of this recognition, we went on for a few more months in a manner that seemed the same as before. There were cocktails, a concert or two, and an occasional invitation to dinner, maintaining the surface, and so I saw them five or six times at their apartment as that winter trailed to an end and we trailed on through the dreary fiction of a relationship that no longer existed. There was no more verbal dancing, nothing so flighty. Under the thin surface of that fiction everything was hostile and cold, and I maintained it only because of Dan, pitiable and shrunken, and tragically impervious.

The last time I saw them in that friendless establishment was in April. Freddie was again in charge of the household, as he was again fully engaged in the operations of the gallery, but things with him were not quite as they had been before, either. When he gave up his short-lived but childishly bright dream of becoming the elegant critic-connoisseur, he gave up something else, too, something physically manifested; for while he was not exactly heavier, his body seemed more slack, as though there had been a general loosening up of all the strings and bobbins that held him together, as though, indeed, his little sortie into independence was a major fact for him, a crisis, a one-and-only effort that, failing, left him with something else which, perforce, he would for the rest of his life treasure as the best. Their new alliance was one which neither of them quite wanted and to which neither of them could rise with any fullness of intent, but it had its logic, too: it bound them finally, and it bound Dan in with them. And so, at the same time that he underwent a slump of spirit that seemed to show in his very walk, there had also been some tightening of the nerves, some narrowing of the will, as with Milly, and this came to me like a message from his brooding, hazel eyes whenever he let them fall upon me in his new distrust and his new security.

It was April twilight, and in that violet light his face seemed to glimmer as he handed me a highball. “Milly and Dan will be in right away,” he said with some kind of mockery. “Sorry to keep you waiting. They did want to say good-by.”

“Good-by?”

“Yes, good-by again. We’re off once more.”

“Where?”

“Spain.” As though he had said Bermuda or Arizona. It was like a stab with a knife.

“Spain?”

“Dan needs a rest. We’re closing the gallery early—until October. Needs redecoration anyway. And Dan needs to get out of New York. Needs to get away from this tension.”

“So you chose Spain,” I said.

“Wonderful country,” he said with his curious new mockery. “Sun. Swimming. We can fish. Long motor trips. It will do just what Dan needs.”

“Don’t neglect to bait his hook,” I said.

He looked at me with quick amusement and then said, solemnly, “No, of course not.”

I wanted to hit him. I said, “Spain in the spring of this year for a peaceful vacation! Really, Freddie, who are you kidding?”

“No one. We’ve thought about it a good deal. Spain will be perfect for a month or two. Really, of course, it’s Portugal we’re interested in, and I’ll be there most of the time.”

“Portugal.” I was not following him, except that he seemed still to be mocking me, and in the deepening light, blue now, his plangent features had taken on an evil glint.

“Lisbon,” he said, his voice dropping toward a whisper of delight. “Lisbon. God, it’s like a little door, almost the only one, almost the only hole out of Europe. And there they are, all of them, jammed up against it, trying to get out, having to get out as best they can, really willing to pay. Because, after all, it means their lives.”

“And they have pictures?”

He grinned at me with brutal boyishness. “Of course. Old and new. Off their stretchers. Rolled-up canvases in briefcases and bags. Walking around with them under their arms. Looking for buyers.” His elation made me turn away from him.

“You’ll kill two birds,” I said.

“Exactly. With one passage. This really is the moment to be there, the exact time, it couldn’t be better.”

“The squeeze has never been so tight?”

“Oh, we’ll do well!” he said, and laughed. “And Dan, too. Let’s have some light.” And in a moment he transformed that dim blue well of a room, dug out of sky, into its characteristically cold brilliance. It was like a signal. For at that moment, Dan and Milly came in from the corridor that led to the bedrooms. Milly walked ahead, walked rapidly toward me in an ice-blue satin dress that clung to her heavy thighs as she moved and whose neck was slashed down to the midriff. She wore large, cobwebby earrings of brilliants, and her hair, which seemed nearly white, was pulled up on her head and pushed forward and held there by some sort of flashing jeweled clasp. No simple blue flower now! Her hand in mine was as cold as she looked, and before I had even really seen Dan behind her, there flashed into my mind—perhaps because of that silly conversation about goddesses that we had had not very long before, and because the subject now was so much more relevant—into my mind that passage from Ulysses, where the hallucinatory nymph loftily addresses Bloom as follows: “We immortals, as you saw today, have no such place and no hair there either. We are stone cold and pure. We eat electric light.…” and poor Bloom, in a new abjectness, paces the heath and declares, “O, I have been a perfect pig!” Then I looked at Dan and saw that the application did not extend to him. He looked merely, thoroughly ill.

“Hello, darling! Sorry we were late. But Freddie’s taken care of you, hasn’t he?”

“Freddie always does. How magnificent you’re looking.”

She took my nearly empty glass. “Freddie,” she said, and held it out to him without taking her eyes from me. They rested on me with a blue, distant blankness, and I felt my own eyes dim over in a spasm of sorrow. “Dan,” I said to escape that empty look, and reached around Milly to take his hand. “I’m glad that you’re getting away.”

“I guess I need to,” was all that he said, and in his dark eyes there was another emptiness, a trance of terror.

“We all need to,” Milly interposed. “Freddie has some wonderful business to do, and I’ve come to the stage where a winter in New York undoes me.” Her silly artificiality was like a wall of glass between us, and held off on my side of it, my heart trembled with pity for her. Could I have saved her? I think not. For when she begged, “Love me again,” that is not quite what she had meant. And still, remembering that dim afternoon in the vast drawing room of the old Ford apartment when I told her that I loved her, I remembered too her small lost figure in the shadows, and I knew that now, in the hard role that she had found for herself, she was truly lost, the girl gone forever and no woman born. “Ah, thank you, Freddie,” she cried, and took two glasses from his tray, one very light, and gave the heavier one to Dan. I took another, Freddie the fourth, and then we sat down, and it was as if they were all waiting for me to talk. But what was there to talk about?

Only their plans. So I asked, “Aren’t there any restrictions on travel in Spain? Right now, one would think—”

Freddie broke in. “No. Why should there be? After all, for a change we showed the unusual good sense to stay out of an affair that was none of our business.”

I checked my anger. “Of course. But a country just out of war—I’d suppose—”

“Spain?” Milly asked mildly, and looked from me to Freddie and back again.

“Well, restrictions or not, I don’t understand it,” I said, “I don’t understand you.”

“Why not?” Freddie asked promptly.

“You want to give Dan a rest, get him out of tensions, and you take him to a country that’s just been torn in two, where the blood must still be running, political murders going on at a mass rate—”

Dan shuddered in his chair, and “What are you talking about?” Milly asked angrily.

Freddie laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get a rise out of Grant, that’s all. I told him we were going to Spain. Of course, we’re not, Grant. Your convictions make you gullible. We are going to Portugal. And to France. Marseilles is another of those doors.”

I felt myself flush, and now, I thought, I’d let them have it, my knowledge, and I said, “Very funny. Really, if you want to give Dan a rest, why don’t you two go abroad alone and leave him with me?”

Each of them jerked a little, each except Dan, who only lifted his eyes to me and smiled wanly.

“Are you serious?” Milly asked with a stiff laugh.

“Why not?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Freddie.

In anger I had taken that plunge and now I was unwilling to climb back. “Why not?” I repeated. “Dan, you let them plan too much for you.” I was looking only at him, refusing to accept their signals of eye and mouth. “Why do you? Do you want to go on this expedition? Or is it only that Milly and Freddie feel you should? How long since you’ve made any plans for yourself?”

“They plan well,” he said quietly, with a tremor of agitation in his voice.

“We plan together,” Milly said. “Will you be kind enough not to interfere?”

I caught the blue blaze of her look. “I’m making a friendly suggestion,” I said, “and quite seriously. If Dan needs looking after, I’d be only too delighted.”

“What nonsense!” Freddie exploded. “Of course, Dan wants to go. We wouldn’t want to go without him. We’re going primarily on business, and there’d be no point in going at all without the benefit of Dan’s judgment.”

“Ah yes,” I said, “Dan’s judgment.”

Freddie put his glass down with a thump. “Well?” he demanded as he rose to his feet.

“How long since you’ve let Dan use it?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Grant,” Milly said with slow deliberateness, “will you please—”

Dan giggled. “What a funny quarrel,” he said. “What’s it about?”

I stood up. “What indeed?”

“We’re not quarreling, dear,” Milly said, as if he were a child.

Then Freddie made the really preposterous remark. “If only you could get a decent long vacation sometime, Grant, and come with us. That would be the solution.”

“Yes,” said Milly quickly in a weird imitation of pleasure. “That would be!”

They were hoisting me back up on the safe shelf of our usual conversational inanities, and when poor, simple Dan said, “Wonderful idea! Can’t you, Grant, this time? Can’t you try?” it was clear that I was back up there, and for the moment I could only smile.

“I’m afraid not, not this time,” I said. And it was almost as if the very room gave forth a sigh of relief.

“We’ll think of you in the hot New York summer,” Milly said.

“Pity me. Well, I must be going.”

“Already?”

But I was not quite ready. Half way out I stopped and said as casually as I could, “Queer business about that French boat, isn’t it?”

“French boat?”

“The Paris. Bringing the French art over for the Fair.”

“What art?” Dan asked. “What boat?”

Milly laughed. “Grant, you must spend all your time reading newspapers.”

“A good deal of it.”

Freddie brushed by me on his way to the vestibule, and Dan asked, “What art?”

“A number of pictures were destroyed by fire on this boat—”

“Nothing at all serious,” said Milly.

“I’m interested,” I persisted, “in the way that, try as you may to keep them separate, even art and political violence get mixed up.”

“An accident,” Milly said firmly.

“What happened?” from Dan.

I was aware of Freddie behind me, and in a moment he was helping me into my coat. I said, “No, it wasn’t an accident. They’re holding an Italian workman for sabotage. The fascists didn’t want that ship to get over here. And besides the damage to the pictures—” Freddie was positively shaking me into my coat and I tried not to smile as I finished “—besides the damage the fire did to the pictures, a number of men were killed.”

Silence, and then, from Dan, in a whisper, “Killed?”

“I’ll walk out with you,” Freddie said. “I have an errand to do before dinner.”

“Good-by, Grant,” Milly said, giving me her hand with a smart thrust.

“Bon voyage! And do get a rest, Dan.”

He looked at me with a dim stare, and as Freddie led me out of there by the arm, I looked back over my shoulder, and I wanted to cry it out loudly now, Dan, you poor, blind baby, what preposterous thing are you letting them do to you?

Outside in the street again, in the soft gray evening, where the air was large and the vistas long, it was possible to believe that one was sane. Yet Freddie was walking beside me with a deliberate tread, off on some errand that was a clear invention, and while he was there, the madness from which I had just been plucked trailed me still. I did not propose to help him bring out whatever sentiments weighed upon him, and we walked in silence. We had gone a long block and turned west into a crosstown street before he began. Then he began mildly enough. “You can see how really sick Dan is.”

“Yes, I can.”

“You might be more helpful.”

“You didn’t start me off very helpfully, with that nonsense about Spain.”

“I’m sorry. That was a bit of self-indulgence, and I am sorry. But that was my fault, not theirs, and you might have spared Milly, not to say Dan.”

“Did I harm them?”

“You don’t seem to recognize Milly’s worth. What sort of wreck do you think Dan would be now if it weren’t for her?”

“Worse?”

He snorted impatiently. “Good God, if you had known what he was! A walking dead man. Even Milly and I—we were like shadows to him, he hardly knew we were there. Then the sanitarium. The people there did a lot for him. He has his ups and downs now, needs still, of course, a kind of constant protection, needs rest and a reasonable freedom from responsibility, and all this Milly gives him. I told you before, it was his marriage that saved him.”

“It was so quick, wasn’t it?” I said blandly.

He glanced at me closely from under the brim of his hat, and he said, “No quicker than it had to be. She married him to save him.”

“You mean she didn’t really love him?”

“Love him? Certainly she loved him.”

“I mean—” Then I found myself fumbling for words, almost ashamed under his blank stare, which was intended, it seemed, to make me feel that I was uttering obscenities.

“What do you mean?”

“Yes—what? Love. What does it mean?”

“I suppose she always loved him. But her marriage—there was more in that than anything that there had been before.”

“Did you know their plans?”

He gave me that close look again. “No, I didn’t. When I knew about it, they were married. In a way, there was an element of self-sacrifice there, and Milly had the grace not to want that question raised or discussed. And she was right.” We had come to Third Avenue, and at a corner, nearly under the elevated tracks, he stopped and said, “She was right because it was their marriage that brought him back to life.”

“You mean, Freddie, that life we’ve just come from up there? Is that life at all? Good God!”

A neon sign, flashing nearby, turned his face savage red and gray by turns as he stared at me, and I could not see what anger was gathering there, or what was pulsing in his weirdly gleaming eyes. But suddenly he had hold of my arms in a terrific grip, and his fantastic, straining face was nearly touching mine. “You keep out of this!” he shouted. “We’re his friends. We know what he needs. We love him! Get that straight, and from now on, you keep out of this!”

There had been no transition. Anger had blown up like a wind, mine no less than his. I wrenched my arms free and shoved him violently against the building behind him. “Get your filthy hands—” I started, but did not finish, for he recovered himself at once and he had seized the front of my coat at the chest in one fist, and was drawing back the other. We were reenacting, with the same unreasoning and undefined anger, that attic scene of our boyhood. Only it came to me suddenly that we were not boys, and that he was something of a buffoon, and I began to laugh. “Don’t be an ass, Freddie,” I said. “You wouldn’t hit me.”

Two or three curious spectators had gathered around us. He glanced at them, then let go of my coat and let his fist drop. It had all taken less than half a minute. We stared at each other. I laughed again. I had an impulse to forgive him for everything.

The stragglers drifted away, and suddenly Freddie turned and started back in the direction from which we had come. Then I wanted to call to him. “Freddie, come back! For God’s sake, let’s be men!” I wanted to call. But I did not, and I watched his implacable back as it disappeared among others.

Then an unpleasant experience came over me. There, among all the slam-bang of traffic, among all the street noises, the horns, the shouting, the laughter, under the sudden horrible clatter of a train overhead, among the hundreds of human beings who were surging up and down the sidewalks—in the throbbing heart of the city, I was suddenly alone; there seemed, quite simply, quite horribly, to be no one else in the world.