Читать книгу Tuesday to Bed - Francis Sill Wickware - Страница 4

STANTON WYLIE, lying on his back in bed, with one arm crooked around his head on the pillow, opened his eyes slowly and wondered why he was awake. For a split second he even wondered where he was. He had one of those peculiar alarm-clock minds, and before dropping off to sleep at night he could tell himself what time he wanted to wake up in the morning and be sure of doing so with a very narrow margin of error. This was a trick which he simply accepted without attempting any psychological explanation, and the results often puzzled him. This Friday morning, for example, he awoke at eight-twenty (having set the mental alarm for eight-fifteen the previous evening) and from beneath half-closed lids obliquely regarded the curtains ballooning out from the windows with no immediate comprehension.

He licked his lips and stirred, aware of a feeling of strain in the crooked arm. Then his gaze—veiled by eyelashes which looked as thick as tree trunks in that strange focus—wandered from the curtains to an oblong of brown sole leather which seemed to be resting on the blanket at the foot of the bed. He vaguely recognized it, after a while, as the top of his overnight case, and he wondered what it was doing there. Then something snapped, and he remembered . . . Chicago; the Century this afternoon; the speech. Words began to parade through his mind. “Mr. President, Members of the Committee, ladies and gentlemen of the convention . . .”

He sat up, stretching mightily, yawning, running a big-fingered hand through tawny hair, and making the bed seem preposterously inadequate to support him. He reached out and automatically turned off the switch on the cord trailing from the blanket, then looked automatically toward his wife’s bed. It was empty. The covers were thrown back, with the top sheet piled into a little mountain—a brown sheet, with a diamond-shaped pink monogram, “E.B.W.” What is Betsy doing up so early? he thought, and then reached out for the switch on her blanket. She never remembered, never would remember, he thought, but indulgently. She wouldn’t be the same if she did remember, and he didn’t want to change her. He caught the whiff of her perfume from the sheets as he leaned toward her bed with his hand on the switch, and he experienced a sensation of tingling gladness as sudden and exuberant as a bursting sky-rocket. The speech has got to be good, he told himself. I want her to be proud of it.

The room was cool and dim. The brown carpet looked purple in the early light, and the pink walls were gray. Outside, a boisterous wind galloped across a slate-covered sky, and Stanton watched the lashing branches of the willow tree beyond the windows. Then he pushed two switches in a panel on the bedside table. Something hummed in the wall, and the windows slowly closed, with the curtains flapping once or twice before they resumed their sedate vertical folds. From above came a scratching, sputtering sound as the fluorescent tubes hidden behind the window valences abruptly flooded the room with daylight. Stanton touched a third switch, and the curtains rolled together like closing gates. The room—as Stanton blinked—came to life and color, with the mirrors in Betsy’s dressing alcove shining pink and brown and blue and reflecting sharp little facets from the bottles grouped on the mirrored top of the kidney-shaped dressing table skirted with the same pink-and-brown curtain material.

On the brown carpet between the beds Betsy’s nightgown made a small rippling pile of pink silk, and Stanton picked it up and smelled the fragrance of his wife. He worked the fabric between his Angers, thinking of the relative tensile strengths of silk and nylon thread, then pressed the gown to his face and inhaled Betsy’s perfume. Nylon was a fine invention, he decided, but it didn’t have the personality of silk. It was too cold. It couldn’t absorb the essence of a woman’s body and hold it and send it out again like silk. Somewhat incredulously he held the nightgown at arms’ length and studied it. Although he had been married to her for nearly fifteen years, Stanton never had lost his sense of wonder that anyone as lovely as Betsy could be his wife—or his wonder at the lovely, fascinating, mysterious garments she wore. I am a very lucky man, he told himself, and immediately added: The speech isn’t good enough. I’ve got to do something about it.

Then he let the pink silk splash back onto the carpet, and swung out of bed. In the bathroom he flicked switches again and there was a blaze of ultraviolet. He passed a cobra-headed electric shaver around his cheeks and chin, shed his pajamas and stepped into a glass-inclosed shower, where he pressed one of a row of insulated buttons on the wall and bathed in a spray automatically regulated to seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit “. . . ladies and gentlemen, to say that this is one of the proudest moments of my life would, of course, be an understatement,” he orated above the hissing of the shower. No, too self-conscious, he told himself. The beginning shouldn’t be so formal. Now how about this? . . .

He continued the rehearsal while drying himself with monogrammed towels which repeated the color combination of the sheets, continued while he dressed, abstractedly selecting a light gray tweed suit, blue chambray shirt and a navy tie with vivid red compasses, protractors and T-squares—Betsy’s find. “. . . We stand on the threshold of a new era,” he said to the mirror while he straightened the tie and adjusted a gold collar pin. I’ll say we do, he added to himself. His glance shifted from the mirror to a black wooden frame hanging a foot or so to the right, and for a moment all the life seemed to be blotted from his face. He stooped a little, and furrows stretched across his forehead and were gouged in slanting lines from the corners of his mouth. He was a big man, sparely built, and in that particular attitude he suggested one of the old Brady photographs of Lincoln—kindly, thoughtful, perplexed by a responsibility too vast for one man to face. Yet in the black frame he only saw the top third of a newspaper page, already starting to fade and yellow. It read: Oak Ridge Journal above a roaring black headline: IT’S ATOMIC BOMB!!!, with the dateline August 6, 1945. Attached to a corner of the frame was an oblong green plastic badge—MANHATTAN DISTRICT PROJECT—Stanton Wylie—some personal particulars, a cloudy thumbprint. That was all.

Impulsively he put out a hand as if to pull the frame from the wall. Betsy always had objected to it—said it was morbid and out of keeping with the rest of the room, which it was. They had had quite an argument about it, with Betsy saying: “I don’t see the sense in it, Stanton. Why not hang it, if you must, in your office, or out in your workshop? Why here?” But he had insisted: “This is something easy to forget because we would like to forget it—or I would,” he had told her. “But I haven’t the right to forget it. I need to be reminded every day when I wake up and get dressed. Then maybe I’ll——” He never finished what he might have said, because Betsy shrugged impatiently and walked out of the room. “Oh, all right,” she said from the doorway. “Hang it there if you must, but it will just ruin——” The frame stayed on the wall, and neither of them mentioned it again. His hand stopped less than an inch from the badge. Then he dropped it to his side, and looked back into the mirror. “. . . stand on the threshold of a new era,” he repeated. “And it is up to us to see that it is the era of . . .” In the corner of his eye he saw the headline: IT’S ATOMIC BOMB!!! He shook his head in a puzzled way, and the lines deepened in his face. Betsy was so deft, so intuitive, so swift at forming opinions and grasping ideas, yet he never had been able to make her see what he meant, and he was sorry for that because he very much needed someone who would understand. But the last thing in his mind was blame of Betsy. No, it was his fault, he just couldn’t explain things very well, and anyway why should a woman who was such a wonderful wife be asked to think about such things?

His mood changed back to cheerfulness as soon as he turned away from the mirror and the black frame was out of sight. “. . . up to us to see that it is the era of achievement and promise—promise of a—” he proclaimed loudly on his way downstairs—“promise of a following era of even greater achievement. We can’t do all of it, ourselves, in our generation. But we have the tools at hand and the know-how in our minds and we can—— Damn!”

It was an old house, built for average Americans of the post-Revolution period, and since then average Americans had added several inches to their stature. When he wasn’t watching for it, Stanton invariably bumped his head against a beam halfway down the staircase. He often had determined to remove the beam and enlarge the shallow tunnel of the stairway, and after saying “Damn!” and rubbing his forehead he decided again to have the place ripped apart.

Then, as the pain in his forehead subsided, he studied the beam and thought: No, I can’t touch you or change you. I’ll let you be a reminder. You were right for the people who built this house and lived in it. They could walk under you, otherwise they wouldn’t have put you there. And when I bump my head, you remind me that people are bigger than they used to be. Not only bigger in body, but bigger—he paused—in mind. Perhaps not that even—bigger in hope and belief. . . . He stared at the wrinkled black slab, wondering whether his own words were true. . . . Hope and belief; hope for the future, and belief in the integrity and creativeness of man. As long as you remind me of those things, stay where you are.

“. . . promise of a following era of even greater achievement,” he said aloud. “. . . Not only for us, but for our children, the children of our children, and——” His brain soared; it would be a great speech, he decided—hope and belief, that would be the keynote. He would make them see, make them build, make them create, and he would go one better: he would build for hope and belief. He would build something white and shining and tall and triumphant which would dwarf even the ugly mushroom cloud which he had helped to slap across the face of heaven.

“. . . children of our children, privileged either to live in a world of beauty, striving and accomplishment,” he continued, ducking under the beam, “or foredoomed to hate, destroy and be destroyed. Because we are too stupid to appreciate our own cleverness. Because we are afraid of our own cleverness—afraid to let it work for us, to let us build and make and create what we should——”

At the foot of the stairs he was interrupted by the passage of a large, dark individual wearing a white apron and carrying a silver tray.

“Peace!” this personage cried, with an ivory smile. “Morning, Mist’ Wylie. Just toting your breakfast in for you.”

“Good morning, Supreme Love,” said Stanton. “Where’s Mrs. Wylie?”

“Mis’ Wylie? Why, I b’lieve—” she looked up at him, and for a moment—or did he imagine it?—the bland, black face wore a crafty, unfathomable expression—“she’s on the telephone. Now, you come on in and eat. I got that creamed chipped beef you been hollering for.”

She lumbered flat-footedly toward the breakfast room, calling back, “Now you come on, Mist’ Wylie. Don’t you let your food get cold.”

Stanton was about to follow Supreme Love when he heard Betsy’s voice around the corner from the living room. It was a rich, warm, husky voice, but now it sounded strained and urgent. “. . . Yes, yes, I’ll call you later, can’t talk now. Yes, later. Good-by.” He heard the hollow sound when she dropped the receiver back onto the base of the telephone, then the hurrying rustle of her moiré dressing gown. He called, “Betsy, I think I’ve got it. The speech is all set, and I want you to listen to this——”

Suddenly she appeared, saw him, and stopped as though she had run into an invisible barrier. “Why, Stan—I don’t know—how long have you been here?”

“Hope and belief, Betsy—that’s what I’ll tell them. To build, make, create—that’s the theme. We must believe, we must have hope, because otherwise we destroy ourselves. Do you see what I mean? Do you think it’s good?”

He paused, looking at her and waiting for her verdict, the way a dog might look at a man or a child at his mother.

Betsy took a deep breath and rustled toward Stanton. In the interval of those few feet he stretched his arms and hopes through the roof of his home, through the familiar atmosphere of his visible world, through the singing wilderness of space toward some undiscovered star sailing in pure seas of rightness and wonder.

As she approached him, Stanton thought, Everything I build is for her; she’s so lovely.

Actually the years were beginning to leave their imprint on Betsy. She was acquiring a matronly fullness around the bust, and though her legs were still youthful her ankles were perceptibly thicker. There was a prediction of sagging in the line of her jaw, and the corners of her mouth were starting to make a permanent downward curve which gave her an almost petulant expression.

But Stanton saw none of this. His indelible vision of Betsy was of the girl he married when she was two years out of Farmington, one of the notable beauties of the Eastern seaboard, and perhaps the most sought-after debutante in the entire platinum triangle between Cambridge, Hanover and Annapolis. Other girls maneuvered for Yale, Harvard and Princeton prom bids, and even bought them, one way or another. But Betsy was the kind of girl whose acceptance immediately conferred a social accolade, and for the really important parties she never had fewer than six or eight invitations to choose from. Those were the enchanted years when the music never stopped and the stag line stretched from the Meyer Davis orchestra playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” in the Boston Copley to the Meyer Davis orchestra playing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” in the smilax bowers of the New York Ritz, and magnums of Heidsieck were presented to departing couples at dawn because the hostess had ordered too much and the waiters would drink it up if it wasn’t given to the guests, and that would be bad for the waiters. Everyone—including the waiters—talked about United Corporation, Commonwealth and Southern, and General Motors. It was the best of all possible worlds, although up in the balconies where the chaperons sat there was some indignant muttering about the radical policies of that fellow Hoover.

Whether Betsy had been created for this bright, tight little dream world or the world for Betsy would be hard to say; at any rate, they complemented each other perfectly. Betsy then was as slim and graceful as an arrow. She had a radiant halo of straw-blonde hair and the most extraordinary eyes—in color almost a true violet, with black lashes. Her dancing was just short of Broadway professional standards. When she had a good partner and decided to cut loose with him, it was something to see. In no time all the other dancers would stop and form a big circle around them; Meyer Davis would waggle his baton for something especially intricate; and at the end there would be general applause, with Betsy blushing prettily as though she hadn’t realized anyone was watching.

In addition, of course, she had a good deal of money—not a real wad, according to the peculiar yardstick of the times, but enough to interest any number of young men accustomed to using the Social Register and Dun & Brad-street the way a horse breeder uses the studbook.

The brightest picture Stanton carried of her was not Betsy surrounded by stags at a coming-out at the Ritz, or even Betsy at their wedding on the vast, sheep-cropped lawn of her family’s place in Southampton, where she again was surrounded by tipsy gallants sweating under their frock coats on that hot June afternoon. He remembered her best when he had her all to himself, during their honeymoon in Venice, and he never looked at her without at least one flashing recollection of that fantastic summer when Elsa Maxwell was stage-managing the Lido and the Brenner Pass was nothing but an obscure and barren spot of the Italian Alps. He remembered Betsy in the bow of the mahogany speedboat dancing across the lagoon from the landing stage of the Danieli to the landing stage of the Excelsior Palace and back again . . . Betsy breakfasting with him at Florian’s . . . wild strawberries and hot chocolate, the wintry shadow of the campanile flung across the hot glare of St. Mark’s Square, and the fuzzy-legged German trampers thumbing their Baedekers . . . Betsy posing for snapshots in front of the candy-cane columns of the Doges’ palace, looking as dainty as a Dresden shepherdess in a stiff white piqué dress with a blue-and-white polka-dot sash . . . Betsy on the marble floor of Chez Vous, the candlelighted sunken garden night club on the Lido, dipping and wheeling to the music of the Argentine tango orchestra playing Adios Muachos, Plegaria, and Mama, Yo Quiero Un Novio . . . Betsy curled against him beneath the canopy of the gondola tied to the music barge in the Grand Canal, guitars and throaty singing . . . and Betsy lying in flushed, tender sleep under the mosquito netting while the fan whirred on the ceiling. . . .

Stanton never realized—it would have shocked him to realize—that by only remembering her as his bride he completely insulted her as his wife.

“Why, Stan, it’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful theme.” Betsy still had the violet eyes and the black lashes. But she looked down and turned her face aside when he kissed her, and her hands in the rustling sleeves of her dressing gown merely brushed his shoulders. When he put his arms around her she stiffened and backed away.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked.

“Talking to? Oh, just now—on the phone? Is that what you mean? That was . . . uh . . . Mrs. Hazen, about the Red Cross Drive. Come on, Stan—breakfast’s on the table, getting cold.”

“Do you really think it’s good?”

“Good? Good? What—?”

“My speech. The idea, theme——”

“Oh.” There was relief in her voice. “A marvelous idea, Stanton, really wonderful. I’m so glad you finally have it straightened out. You’ve been worrying over it all week, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had it on my mind,” he admitted. He was a little disappointed that she had nothing definite or positive to say about the speech; he wasn’t looking for easy words like “wonderful” and “marvelous,” but for something indicative of critical interest. Besides, she seemed abstracted by something, an abstraction which he had detected more and more often in the last few months, baffling and inexplicable. His mood of elation dwindled; probably it wasn’t any good after all, and Betsy was just trying to be nice.

“It’s the first speech I’ve tried to make since prep school,” he said. “I wish you——”

“You haven’t made it yet, Stan,” Betsy interrupted. “Come on, let’s have breakfast, shall we?”

She lightly slipped an arm through his and let a slender hand rest lightly on his wrist while she guided him toward the breakfast room.

It was silly to buy a house, Stanton reflected, only because you wanted a single room, yet the breakfast room was the reason Betsy had settled on the place. The original builders had located it on the summit of a long, low hill which stretched in a compass-true line from east to west, and along the entire southern exposure of the house they had installed a brick terrace with colonnades up to the second floor, which projected over the terrace. This arrangement had endured with only minor alterations until Betsy snapped her fingers and decided on the breakfast room. The colonnades were removed, although the contractor swore that without them the house would collapse in the first strong wind. The old bricks in the terrace were taken up and used to extend the side walls out to the line of the projecting second story. After some Herculean engineering, huge plate-glass windows which stretched from floor to ceiling were installed across the whole exposure. These could be raised or lowered at the touch of a button, and would disappear completely into the floor—a spectacular feature which had involved an awe-inspiring expenditure.

Betsy had decorated the room in stark white from end to end. The walls were whitewashed, and the floor was covered with a white fur rug made up of dozens of squares of goat hides which Betsy had imported from Mexico. The breakfast furniture was white wrought iron, and she even had found a white sideboard. In fact, the only relief from white was the vines spilling from the flowerpots hung every few feet along the back wall—these, and a pair of Marie Laurencin pastels in white frames. Stanton never cared for the room; it always made him feel as though he were having breakfast on a movie set, and aesthetically it displeased him because it was so out of keeping with the rest of the house. But Betsy wanted it that way, and that was that.

Otherwise, the house was comfortable and unpretentious—even modest, for Fairfield County. It was the kind of house which would be appropriate for a fairly minor advertising account executive, say, during the interim period of his career before he hit the really big money and moved on to a shore-front estate with stables and a private dock.

This was precisely what the former owner had done. Stanton occasionally ran into him at the country club, and never ceased marveling at the way the world rewarded a man for fanatic loyalty to things in which he didn’t believe. At least, Stanton didn’t see how it was possible for the man—who was reasonably intelligent—really to believe that his agency’s particular brands of tooth paste, breakfast food, and whatnot were any better than any others, yet he had heard him fervently proclaiming in the country club bar that Popsies (his breakfast-food account) was virtually the salvation of America’s children. But then, Stanton reflected, it was natural enough, because Popsies had put him on top of the ladder.

The man—his name happened to be Smith—was the first person in the whole evolution of the human race to realize that the basic thing about breakfast food (“basic” was Smith’s favorite word) was not flavor or nutritional value, but the amount of noise it made in a bowl of milk. Smith not only had had the luminous inspiration of advertising Popsies for sound instead of substance, but had developed a special microphone technique so that the actual sound of Popsies popping in milk could be broadcast as the theme introduction to the Popsies Parade radio program. Surely genius of this order deserved at least a fifty-foot oceangoing yacht, the shore estate, and a four-year psychoanalysis. Which Smith had.

As he entered the breakfast room Stanton perceived that Smith’s trail crossed his own glass-topped table, with the geraniums blooming in the pots attached to the white wrought-iron legs. Popsies were popping in the bowl in front of Jeremy, his son, named for an uncle of Betsy’s who conceivably might leave something. Jeremy was wearing Brooks Brothers suits to school. He had something of Betsy’s hair and eyes and more than a little of her manner.

“Hello, Dad,” said Jeremy. “There’s another story about you in the paper this morning.”

The white wrought-iron chairs with the white leather cushions were not designed for anyone of Stanton’s dimensions, and he settled himself with difficulty into one of them.

“Morning, Jerry. What are they saying about me this time?”

He glanced at the folded copy of the Westport Herald lying beside his plate, and saw the headline: WESTPORT MAN TO RECEIVE COVETED ARCHITECTURAL AWARD; WILL ADDRESS CHICAGO GROUP. He read the story perfunctorily: “Mr. Stanton Wylie, of Crestview Road, Westport, departs this afternoon for Chicago, where he will attend the annual banquet of the American Association of Architects and Industrial Designers, to be held tomorrow night at the Hotel Stevens. The banquet will be marked by the formal presentation of the Association’s 1947 annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American architecture. Considered the most coveted prize in the profession, the award this year went to Mr. Wylie for his plan and model of ‘the ideal American city,’ which was four years in preparation. Mr. Wylie, still in his thirties, is the youngest architect to receive the award since it was first established in 1910, and in an unprecedented decision, the Association’s prize committee voted unanimously for his entry. . . . Four thousand contestants . . . Award consists of a scroll, a gold medal and $1,000. . . . A native of New York City, Mr. Wylie has been a resident of Westport for a number of years and is prominent in numerous civic and charitable activities. . . . A graduate of Harvard University and the Harvard School of Architecture . . . Worked on the Manhattan District Project at Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the war. . . . His wife, Elizabeth Wylie, is active in club and society affairs throughout Fairfield County and is well known as a charming and popular hostess. . . .”

“Dad, is your speech going to be on the radio?” Jeremy asked.

Stanton looked up quickly. Not, he noted, “Is your speech going to be good?” but “Is it going to be on the radio?” Why? He hated the fact that of late Jeremy was beginning to irritate him, and mostly because of questions like that. Why?

“No, thank Heaven, it won’t be,” he said. “I wouldn’t want my friends listening in. I may make a fool of myself.”

“No you won’t, Dad. I’ll bet you’ll wow them.”

“Well, I’m glad you have so much confidence in me. Come to think of it, I did win a debate once, when I was at Ely.”

“When will the article about you be in Life, Dad?”

“I’m not sure,” Stanton said. “When they called me the other day, the girl told me they wanted it ready to go to press Tuesday. They sent the photographer yesterday, but here it is Friday, and I haven’t even met her yet. I don’t see how they can do it so fast.”

“She’s meeting you on the Century this afternoon, isn’t she?” Betsy asked. “What’s her name?”

“Mm . . . Mainwaring, I believe,” he said. “Nancy Mainwaring. Now,” he added severely to Jeremy, “please don’t go telling people in school about this.”

“Why not, Dad?”

“Because—well, for one thing, it may not appear at all. It hasn’t even been written yet, and I’m hanged if I know what they can find to say. Furthermore, I don’t care much for the idea of being written up in a magazine like that. I’m not used to all this fuss.”

“Oh, that’s silly, Stan,” Betsy said. “You can’t expect Jeremy not to be excited about his famous father. Why, I’ve told all my friends about the Life article.”

“Well, I wish you hadn’t.”

“Oh, Stan, they’re so jealous! It does my heart good, after listening all these years to them yapping about the big deals their husbands put over, to be able to say that you are going to hit Life.”

Stanton frowned. “Betsy, I don’t like to be thought about in those terms. Or talked about.”

“Don’t you want us to be proud of you, Stan?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, Are you proud of me, or proud of the publicity I’m getting? But instead he said, “I rather hoped you were a little proud of me already.”

“Oh, Stan, don’t act like a wounded child! You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But—oh, let’s not argue about it. I want my breakfast.” He started to apply himself to his grapefruit, then looked up at her. “I’m sorry, sweet. Didn’t mean to bark. It’s just that everything has happened so suddenly.”

“I know, Stan. It’s all right.” She reached over and ever so lightly squeezed his hand. In return, he took hers and held it in a firm grip. He saw her again only as the slim blonde sprite with bouffant skirts whirling in the Ritz ballroom with the crowd circled around her, saw her—in short—as a child.

“I wish you were coming with me, Betsy,” he said gently.

Jeremy, having disposed of his Popsies, observed his face and said, “Hubba, hubba!”

“That’ll be enough out of you, Jerry,” Stanton said. “I’ve told you before I don’t want you to use that expression, least of all in——”

“Oh, Jerry didn’t mean anything, Stan,” Betsy said. She detached her hand. “It’s just the way they all talk.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Jeremy said quickly. “I forgot.”

“Well, don’t let it happen again, hear? Being sorry isn’t any excuse, and neither is ‘I forgot.’ ”

“Yes, Dad.”

“How about it, Betsy? Won’t you come along?” Stanton continued. “I can change my space on the Century and get a bedroom. Or——” Or you could even share the roomette with me, two of us squeezed into the same berth, the way we used to travel. But he checked himself; Betsy wouldn’t consider anything like that.

“I’d just be in your way, Stanton,” Betsy said.

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t be in the way at all. Why would you?”

“You’re going to be involved for hours with the Life girl, being interviewed,” Betsy said. “Then you’ll be dashing around Chicago all tomorrow, pillar to post. Then you’ll want to have some time with your mother. You’re going to see her, aren’t you?”

“She’s meeting me for breakfast at the Ambassador. But what difference does that make? And what difference does my schedule make? You’ve got plenty of friends you could spend the day with.”

“There isn’t a soul in Chicago I care about seeing,” said Betsy. “Besides, Stan, it’s out of the question. I can’t just pick up and leave like that. I’ve got a dozen things I simply have to do tomorrow.”

“Such as what?” Stanton inquired.

“Why, there’s the Community Chest meeting for one thing, and the social-events committee of the country club is getting together to go over the plans for the Halloween party. Don’t forget,” she added pettishly, “you were the one who wanted me to get into all these activities.”

“Was I? I certainly don’t remember advising you to get on the social-events committee. It takes up more of your time than all the other things together. Oh, well,” he sighed, “I guess there isn’t much point. I did hope——”

The appearance of Supreme Love with the creamed chipped beef put an end to the discussion. It was Stanton’s favorite breakfast dish, but for several minutes he left it untouched. He sat back as far as the wrought-iron chair would allow and studied his wife. The Lincoln lines crept back across his face. He was remembering the old, gay, careless days when Betsy would have gone with him—anywhere, any time—like a shot, brushing aside objections and obstacles with a shrug of her shoulders or the toss of her head. It was very puzzling. He knew that the mood of two people in love is a fragile thing, ephemeral as a rainbow, having no more substance than a cup of air, as fleeting as December sunshine on a hillside, yet when people loved and lived together why shouldn’t the mood become stronger and more binding instead of more illusory?

“Don’t let your beef get cold, Stan! I practically had to bribe the manager of Gristede’s to get it for you. What’s the matter?”

“What?”

“You were looking so peculiar.”

“I was thinking.”

“Thinking? Thinking what?” Betsy sounded impatient. “Stan, I’m sorry I can’t go to Chicago with you, but that’s no reason——”

“I wasn’t thinking about that, Betsy.”

“Well, then what?”

Stanton straightened up in his chair and applied his fork to the chipped beef. “I was thinking about something I seem to have lost, and wondering where I lost it. The beef is very good, Betsy. Thank you.”

“Something you lost? What was it?”

He looked at her levelly, and after an instant her eyes wandered to some distant spot on the landscape beyond the vast windows of the breakfast room.

“I’m not sure that I know,” he said. “Perhaps it never existed. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Really, Stan!” Betsy exclaimed. From Jeremy came a sound which might have been a suppressed snicker. Stanton glanced at him, but Jeremy had a napkin spread over most of his face, and bent his head.

They proceeded with their separate breakfasts in silence. Then Betsy said, “Oh, by the way, Stan . . . uh . . . what time are you getting back?”

“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “It depends on how late the banquet goes on and whether I can get a plane afterward. There was some talk about a get-together with the committee after the banquet. An informal celebration, or something. If all goes well, I’ll be here for late breakfast Sunday morning.”

“Oh.” Betsy sipped her coffee demurely. “I thought you said you were going to stay over and spend Sunday in Winnetka with your mother?”

“Yes, I was planning on that, but Mother’s busy all day Sunday, so what’s the point? Anyway—” he looked at her in surprise—“how did you remember that? I only mentioned it once, and that must have been two weeks ago.”

“Why, I don’t know. I have a reasonably good memory, Stan.”

“No, I’m coming back just as soon as I can. Let’s make Sunday a real day, Betsy—go off somewhere together, what do you say? You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to put the car on the Bridgeport ferry and go over to Long Island. We could drive out to Montauk and take a look at the ocean. I haven’t seen any real ocean for months. Then we could have a big shore dinner on the way back. What do you say to that?”

Jeremy and Betsy exchanged glances.

“It sounds lovely, Stan, but we can’t do it this Sunday.”

“Why not? What’s to stop us?”

“Well, Jerry’s got a date to go riding with the Johnson boys in the morning, and then in the afternoon there’s the Hopkins’ cocktail party.”

“Oh, Lord! You didn’t accept, did you?”

“Certainly I did. They always give wonderful parties.”

“As far as I’m concerned, no suburban cocktail party is wonderful, or anything like it.”

“Well, I enjoy them,” she said, again with the pettish tone in her voice. “Just because you can’t drink is no reason why I shouldn’t see my friends.”

“There’s no need to be so tart,” Stanton said. “Especially in front of Jerry.”

“Well, I think you’re unreasonable. I really do. You never want to go anywhere.”

“I beg your pardon. I just got through suggesting a trip to Montauk Sunday. Every week end it’s the same routine—cocktail party Friday afternoon as soon as I get off the train; dinner party Friday night; Saturday, two or three cocktail parties in the afternoon, dinner dance at the club and a few nightcaps at somebody’s house afterward so that we don’t get in until four or five; Sunday, the same thing—buffet luncheon, drink, drink, drink all afternoon until time for another cocktail party. It seems to me that once in a while we might do something different.”

Being a nondrinker put Stanton at a painful disadvantage in Fairfield County, where social life is fueled almost exclusively by alcohol. He would wander miserably through these affairs, with a celery stalk in one hand and a glass of ice water or ginger ale in the other, maintaining a fixed smile as long as he could and wishing that he was back in his library or out in his workshop. Meanwhile the air grew thicker, the martinis warmer and more potent; the canapes dried out and began to curl at the edges; the voices became louder and shriller, and the talk less and less coherent. Someone invariably let a cigarette burn out on the living-room rug, and someone else invariably spilled a drink on an antique table and forgot to wipe it up. The hostess would bite her nails and scream that it didn’t make a bit of difference, honestly! Hurry up and get a rag, John! Don’t just stand there.

But what Stanton mostly objected to was the behavior—after a certain point—of the women. He doubted whether the fine old Eskimo custom of wife trading was quite as widely established in Fairfield County as some of the talk he had heard would indicate, but is the later stages of the cocktail parties a goodly proportion of the wives seemed to be doing their best to make it universal. There was a certain type of woman in the station-wagon set—usually a woman in her middle or late thirties, with two or three children—who by day shot golf in the eighties or showed prize setters or served as expert crew on her husband’s International Class boat in the Saturday afternoon races, and who looked wholesome and healthy and chaste as a statue. By night, after eight or ten drinks, the same woman would begin to lurch and slobber, repeat unspeakable limericks and locker-room stories to the party at large and twine her pudgy arms around the neck of the nearest male. As often as not she would disappear with him and come back looking smeary and disheveled—and then disappear with somebody else. All of which seemed to be taken for granted by everyone but Stanton, who stood by and watched and listened with a mixture of amazement and disgust. Looking at these women, he always had the feeling that they probably were leaking from every aperture.

Whenever they stayed late at a party—and Betsy rarely wanted to leave early—Stanton endured assaults by one or several of them. They would lurch up and lean against him heavily, spilling part of their drinks on his sleeve, and saying something like: “H’lo, big boy, let’s play house, just you and me. . . .” He would never forget the night when he had been quietly reading on a sofa and the drunken wife of one of his neighbors first planted herself in his lap, then swiveled around, lay down across him, pulled her knees up until they nearly touched his face, and spread them apart. . . . He saw her on the station platform the next morning, prim and pure as a daisy. She and her husband waved to him cheerfully, as though nothing whatever had happened. Betsy of course knew about the incident and thought it was funny. That Stanton couldn’t understand.

Of course Betsy had nothing in common with these women. Her conduct was above reproach. But she never expressed any protest against the conduct of the others. And Stanton did, at least to himself.

“Stan, I’m not trying to drag you out against your will, just for my own entertainment,” Betsy said. “It’s for your sake, too.”

“For my sake, too. I see. Or, rather, I don’t see.”

“Look, Stan, you know the Hopkinses. Everybody will be at the party.”

“Yes. Including the usual contingent of bright young admen.”

“Exactly. And why not? That’s the point. You’re famous now. They’ll——”

“They’ll all want to meet me, is that it? And now they’ll want to commission me to design new labels for their canned tomatoes or whatever it is? Why, do you know that Bill Smith asked me to design a new box for his damned Popsies? He wants me to design a box with a top that pops when you open it. How do you like that?”

“What’s the matter with that, Stan?”

“What’s the matter with it? Do you want me to design Popsie boxes?”

“It would mean a good deal of money, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, certainly. A new pop-top box for Popsies, probably worth five thousand. But——”

“With your name, ten thousand. Think—designed by Stanton Wylie, winner of the 1947 award for the——”

“Just a minute. If the award means anything at all, it means that maybe I’m capable of creating something worth while. At least, I hope that’s what it means. Anyway, I’m not going to pervert it for the benefit of breakfast-food manufacturers who may think that my name will help them sell more of their sawdust. Of course I turned down Smith’s job. I should think you would have wanted me to.”

“Oh, Stan, you’re so silly about some things. You know I admire the idealistic approach, and all that, but is there anything wrong with money?”

“No, but there’s a lot wrong with some ways of making it.”

“I suppose that comes close to being an epigram, doesn’t it? Very neat, Stan. But just remember, you’re always taking on assignments that pay nothing. You wasted most of last week on those plans for the youth center.”

“Was it wasted? I don’t think so. In view of the delinquency rates, it seemed to be important to design an attractive and usable place where boys and girls would like to go instead of hanging around dance halls and street corners.”

“Stan, I’m not arguing about that. It was a wonderful thing to do, and you can do it again. But at the same time, here’s your chance to cash in, and why not? What harm is there in picking up five or ten thousand for a box top? You could do it in a day!”

“Yes, and be pegged as the guy who accidentally won the big prize and sold it to anyone with cash to buy it. Like Shakespeare writing Sunday-supplement articles. Would you like that?”

“Nobody would say that, Stan. You’re in business. You’re supposed to be making money.”

“Maybe nobody else would say it, but I’d say it to myself, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Well, you might think about my side of it.” Betsy sipped her coffee and sighed in a resigned way. “After all——”

“Don’t say it, Betsy,” Stanton interrupted. “I’ve heard it before and I don’t want to hear it again. You’re spending your income and dipping into your capital to keep this place running the way you want it. You don’t need to. My income is enough to support any sensible family, and anytime you want to live on them, I’ll be delighted——”

Supreme Love darkly reappeared in the doorway. “Jerry, yore school bus is outside, tootin’ the horn for you.”

“Tell the driver to hold it a minute, will you please?” said Stanton. And to Jeremy he added: “Sorry, old boy, I didn’t mean to have all this bickering.”

“It’s all right, Dad,” said Jeremy, finishing his cocoa.

“No, it isn’t,” Stanton said. “I don’t know why we seem to—— Well, let’s have the Long Island jaunt next week, shall we? Let’s plan it for Saturday. Invite one of your friends, if you’d like to. How about that nice little girl you had at the birthday party—what’s her name?”

“Anne,” said Jeremy. He stood up. “I b’lieve Mom has something planned for me Saturday. I better go now, Dad, or the bus will leave me.” He presented a fresh, cool cheek for Stanton’s kiss. “Hope the speech goes over with a bang. ’By, Mom.”

After he had gone Stanton sat without speaking for a minute. Then he said, “So Saturday’s out, is it? What’s the reason this time?”

“Why, Stan, I talked to you about the series of children’s matinee concerts at Carnegie Hall, didn’t I? Next Saturday is the first one.”

“I don’t remember your mentioning it. And Sunday?”

“Sunday the school is having its annual charity bazaar. For which particular worthy cause I can’t remember. Anyway Jeremy’s going to be in charge of the pies and cakes booth.”

“I see. How often are these concerts?”

“I told you—Saturdays.”

“Every Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“And how long does the series last?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometime in April I think. Now what’s the matter, Stan?”

He looked at her and said, “I should think you could figure that out for yourself.”

“Well, I can’t.” Betsy shrugged impatiently. “I suppose you’re annoyed about the concerts, is that it? It’s high time Jeremy started to learn something about musical appreciation. It’s just as important to his general education as arithmetic and grammar, and I should think——”

“You don’t need to go on,” Stanton interrupted. “It isn’t the concerts themselves. I have no objection to your taking him to concerts—I suppose you will be taking him, won’t you?”

“Of course. I can’t very well send him to Carnegie Hall with Supreme Love, can I?”

“No, I suppose not.” Stanton stared at his coffee. As he often did when he was preoccupied, he tapped on the table top with the heavy gold seal ring which he wore on his left hand.

“Please don’t do that, Stan. It’s nerve-wracking.”

“What? Oh—sorry. I didn’t realize.” She often had chided him about his unconscious habit.

“And I wish you wouldn’t look so moody,” Betsy said. “Why do we have to start the day this way?”

“I don’t know,” Stanton replied. “I certainly don’t enjoy it.”

“Well, then, let’s be cheerful.”

“I was very cheerful when we started breakfast,” he said. “Don’t you see, Betsy? I’m worried about Jerry. I never have any time with him. When he was a little boy, I kept looking forward to when we could do things together—the three of us, or Jerry and I by ourselves. The things that families are supposed to like to do together, but never seem to get around to doing. Before the war he was too young for much of that. Then during the war I was away so much there was no opportunity. And since I came home—well, it’s the same. Either Jerry’s always busy, or you are. We never have a chance to do things together.”

Betsy said nothing, and Stanton continued: “He’s enrolled in camp for the summer, and next fall he goes away to prep school. Between these concerts and his social engagements the week ends are knocked out all winter and spring. I . . . all I’m saying is that I’d like to be able to get to know my own son. And apparently that isn’t going to be possible. When he goes away to school it will be a break with home. I’ll see him an hour or so, now and then, between parties during his vacations. There’s nothing in that sort of relationship. No, it’s a strange situation for me, Betsy, and I don’t like it.”

“Oh, Stan, you’re just being morbid,” Betsy said. “The child isn’t going into exile; you’ll have plenty of chance to see him whenever you want to. We’re simply trying to give him some of the advantages you had. Why, when you were Jerry’s age, you . . .”

She went on talking in a quick, strained voice, but Stanton was oblivious to what she was saying. He perched on the uncomfortable wrought-iron chair, blinking in the glare of light coming through the windows and peered around the garish breakfast room almost as if he never had seen it before. He was conscious of a peculiar and most disconcerting sensation—one which he had experienced more than a few times lately—of being completely alone in his own home even when he was surrounded by people. It made him feel as though he were standing on the edge of a vast canyon and trying to shout across it to someone on the other side, but never getting any answer except the echoes of his own voice. Strange, strange, that it was possible to move so far away from those who were supposed to be so close.

“Stan!” Betsy’s voice broke through his remoteness. “Aren’t you listening to me?”

“Yes, dear, of course.”

“Well, why not answer me then? I said, if you want to catch the nine fifty-five we’d better be getting ready.”

“Oh.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “Yes, you’re right.” He drained his coffee cup and rose. “Do you want to take me to the station, or shall I call a taxi?”

“No, I’ll be glad to take you,” Betsy said.

“I can just as well get a taxi, if it’s any trouble.”

“No, I have to go in to do the week-end marketing anyway. I’ll slip into a dress while you finish packing,” she said, on her way out of the breakfast room. “Everything’s in your bag except your dinner jacket. Now come on, Stan, or you’ll miss your train.”

“Yes, dear,” Stanton said, and followed her.