Читать книгу Tuesday to Bed - Francis Sill Wickware - Страница 5

AT THE Westport station, Betsy pulled into the line of cars disgorging husbands for the nine fifty-five, and stopped opposite the door of the waiting room. She flicked the gearshift lever and pressed her foot down on the brake pedal. She put her hand on his shoulder and turned her face toward him. “Well, Stan, here we are. Don’t you want to kiss me good-by? You’ve scarcely said a word since we left the house.”

“Of course I want to,” Stan muttered. “Pull ahead a bit, Betsy; let’s talk for a minute or two. I have something I want to tell you.”

“All right, Stan.” She eased the car ahead a few feet. In front of them other cars were backing and turning in the narrow roadway, and from behind came a staccato honking. “We can’t stop here,” Betsy said. “There’s nowhere to park.”

“Pull over by the side of the platform, just for a second,” he told her. “They can squeeze by, if they have to.” The honking grew insistent, and he added: “I guess they don’t want to, though.”

He put his arms around her swiftly, drew her close and brought his mouth against hers. For a moment she pressed herself toward him and parted her lips for his kiss, with her fingers clasping the back of his neck, behind his ears. The paisley bandana she had been wearing slipped down, and he ran a caressing hand over her shining blonde hair. Beneath his arms he felt her body tremble, and from her throat came something like a sob. Then she drew back.

Stanton grinned at her. His spirits had risen immeasurably during their embrace, and the sense of aloneness which had come over him at breakfast suddenly lifted. She was his girl again; still the wonderful, beautiful Betsy he had married.

“I couldn’t leave you that way, darling,” he said. “I’m sorry I was grumpy at breakfast—probably just worried about the speech and everything, subconsciously.”

“It was mostly my fault, Stan. I’m sorry.”

The honking behind was growing in volume; a police whistle shrilled. At the corner the red-faced cop who was on duty at the station during rush hours shouted, “C’mon! C’mon! You can’t stay there! You’re blocking traffic!”

“What I wanted to say is, when I get back we’ll have a man-to-man talk Stanton said quickly; “take a little inventory of ourselves and look at these things we argue about, and we’ll see that they’re not worth the time of day. Because we don’t have anything at all to really argue about, Betsy. Do we?”

“No, dear,” said Betsy. “Of course we don’t.”

The whistle shrilled again, and the cop started to approach from the corner. Stanton opened the door and got out, dragging his suitcase. Then he leaned across the seat, and Betsy again tilted her face for his kiss and put her hands on the back of his neck. “All the luck, Stan, dear. I know it will be great. I am proud of you.”

“I love you, sweetheart,” he said. “You make me very happy.”

He closed the door reluctantly, and the car slid away. The approaching cop stopped halfway from the corner and said, “Lovebirds!” in a disgusted voice. Stanton smiled at him, and waved once at Betsy just before she turned and went out of sight.

He strode into the waiting room, picked up a Times at the newsstand and emerged onto the platform just as the east-bound Boston express went roaring past, sucking a small cloud of dust from the ballast on the roadbed and causing everyone on the platform to squint and retreat an involuntary inch or two. A cold, damply penetrating northeast wind was blowing, and against the solid gray sky the lower clouds bobbed about and collided with one another. Stanton rather liked mornings like this. He pictured the Sound, a wet field of rugged gray-green furrows, and the muddy whitecaps slapping on the diminishing beaches in front of the summer cottages. It wasn’t real ocean, of course; salt water, but not ocean. He could nearly visualize and hear the real thing—the booming oncoming crash and the retreating sigh of the sledgehammer breakers pounding the granite abutments of North America along the Atlantic coast. It would be nice, he thought, if Betsy arranged so that next week end we could——

“Morning, Stanton,” he heard a voice at his side. “Keeping bankers’ hours these days, I see.”

Stanton recognized the voice, and turned. “Oh, good-morning, Mr. Hazen. Is this your regular train? I usually get the eight-thirty.”

“Why don’t you drop the Mr. Hazen and just call me Chester?” Hazen inquired. “We’ve known each other a long time. I’m only old enough to be your father, after all. Why make me sound like your grandfather? Next thing, you’ll be calling me ‘sir,’ and I’ll have no more to do with you.”

“How about Sir Chester, as a compromise?” Stanton suggested. “An interim arrangement, until I get used to the Chester?”

Hazen chuckled. “Agreed. Lawyers always like a compromise—if it’s favorable.”

Stanton chuckled with him, but he was not quite at ease. Chester Hazen was a local pillar of society and one of the first citizens of Westport, and it was true that Stanton had seen a good deal of him as a fellow member of several political and civic-improvement committees which Hazen either inspired, or financed, or both. But they had associated only as fellow members, not socially. The Hazens belonged to a much older, wealthier and infinitely more settled community within the concentric communities of admen, brokers, successful artists and writers and miscellaneous entrepreneurs. There was plenty of traffic to and fro between the outer concentric rings, but virtually no social penetration of the hard, permanent core of Westport life represented by the Hazens and a few other families like them. Stanton worked constantly with Hazen on committees, yes, but the Hazens never had invited the Wylies to dinner, and the Wylies never had invited the Hazens because it went without saying that the Hazens would have prior engagements. So why, Stanton wondered, the sudden Chester? He was not the sort of man—indeed, the last sort of man—to be impressed by anything like the Chicago award.

Some people in Westport—mostly on the outer concentric rings—said that Chester Hazen was nothing but a rapacious old Wall Street lawyer who had stolen millions in his heyday and now was trying to atone for his former depredations with a pretense of good works. Stanton didn’t know whether it was true or not, and didn’t care a great deal. It seemed to him that what Hazen was doing at present for the general welfare mattered more than what he might or might not have done forty years ago. Anyway, he was a cultivated and engaging old gentleman who looked as though he might have stepped out of The Pickwick Papers or just climbed down from the top of the Liverpool-London stage in one of those old prints. He had a merry face—bright pink cheeks and clear blue eyes with white tufted brows which sprouted like spring tulips. He was half a foot shorter than Stanton, and he had a massive, leonine head of white hair which gave him the appearance of a wigged English barrister. Stanton never saw him without thinking of the lawyer in Conrad’s Youth: “. . . fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honor. . . .” Hazen also happened to be a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm with clients like DuPont, Standard Oil and General Electric; Hazen himself had won a million-dollar patent suit for one client within the month. Even at his age he was a bit of an exquisite. He carried a cane, which he didn’t need, and he tapped Stanton’s suitcase and said, “Off to Chicago, eh?”

“Yes, Mr.—Sir Chester.” Stanton smiled.

“Ha! Sir Chester, well, that’s all right. Not going to congratulate you again, Stanton, about your honors, know all that. Think I told you last week how pleased—it’s great, great!”

“Thank you. I don’t know how great it’ll be after tomorrow night. I’m supposed to make a speech.”

“Speech! Nothing to it!” Hazen flicked his cane. “Listen—tell you a little trick. Something I learned a long time ago, when I tried cases in court. It’s a banquet, isn’t it? The speaker will introduce you?”

“Why, yes, I suppose so,” Stanton said. He was now quite perplexed. Why should Chester Hazen—?

“All right! After you’re introduced and stand up, don’t start talking right away. Wait a few seconds. Look them over. Look slowly—slowly, mind you—from left to right across the audience and then back and forth so you cover as many faces as you can. Then wait another second or two. That makes them wonder whether you’re stalling, or whether you’ve forgotten what you wanted to say, or whether—anyway, you have their attention, main thing. It works. It always works.”

“Is that the secret of your success?” Stanton said, smiling. “Hypnotizing juries by staring at them?”

“Never mind. Remember what I say when you stand up behind that table.”

“I will,” said Stanton. “And thanks for the tip. It certainly comes from one who knows.” He expected Hazen to withdraw at this point, but the old gentleman showed no disposition to leave.

“Don’t you usually go south about this time of year?” Stanton inquired. “You’re not going to sit out one of our Connecticut winters, are you?”

“No, no, I’m too old. The cold gets into my bones, and I stiffen up like a board. No, as a matter of fact, I’m leaving Sunday—be back once or twice a month, of course.”

“Mrs. Hazen going down with you, I suppose?”

“Mrs. Hazen? Oh, she’s been down all week. Left last Monday with her sister, to open the house.”

Stanton frowned in a puzzled way. “That’s funny,” he said.

“Eh? Funny? What’s funny about it?”

“Not her being down South, of course. It’s just that I thought I heard Betsy—Mrs. Wylie—say she had been talking to her on the phone this morning, about the Red Cross Drive. I must have misunderstood.”

Hazen’s head was tilted back. He seemed to be making a concentrated inspection of the thick black power lines strung between high black steel towers marching along the right of way. He half turned to Stanton and started to say something, then stopped. “What’s the news this morning?” he asked, glancing at Stanton’s paper.

“I haven’t looked at it yet.” Stanton unfolded his Times. The significant headline—the one over the two right-hand columns—read: GROMYKO AGAIN REJECTS U. S. ATOM PROPOSAL. SAYS BOMB MUST BE SHARED WITH ALL.

“Same thing,” he said. “The Russians are still saying ‘no.’ ” He paused and scanned the first paragraph of the story. “I wish that once in a while the peace news could be as good as the war news used to be. Remember the war headlines toward the end? Advance, enemy routed, successful invasion, new landings—victory? Now what have we got?”

“Hmph, see what you mean,” Hazen agreed. “Still, I had the idea you were more or less pro-Russian, Stanton? You don’t sound it.”

Stanton laughed. “A good many people seemed to get that idea. It started with a letter of mine that was published in the Westport Herald. I simply pointed out that thirty years after the American Revolution we were a pretty cantankerous and self-conscious nation ourselves, and that maybe the newness of the regime over there had a good deal to do with the way the Russians are behaving. I wrote the letter because I thought it might cut down some of the violent talk I’d been listening to around here, but of course it didn’t. People began talking about me as though I were in the pay of the Kremlin.

“No, I’m not pro-Russian,” he continued. “I’m not especially anti-Russian, either. I just have no patience with self-righteous dogmatists, whether they’re Russians, Republicans, Baptists or anything else. Here’s our train,” he added, as the blunt green nose of an electric locomotive came into sight down the track and rumbled across the drawbridge over the Saugatuck. Stanton had seen occasions when all traffic on the New Haven was blocked at this point so that a couple of kids in a sailboat could go through the bridge.

He was positive that Hazen would bid him adieu as they boarded the train, but instead the old lawyer said, “Mind if I sit with you?”

“Of course not,” Stanton said. “I’d be delighted.”

“I’m glad I ran into you,” Hazen said, after they were settled. “I nearly called you at your office yesterday.”

“So?” Stanton smiled. “I can guess what about—those plans for the youth center, isn’t that it? Actually, I drew them up in rough last week, but I haven’t submitted them yet because I’m waiting to hear what we can get in the way of materials. You know, we talked about glass brick for the façade? I’m afraid we’ll have a tough time getting any before late spring, and we want to have the center finished by then. Of course we could put up a temporary wall and replace it later on when the glass brick is available. How does that strike you?”

“Eh? Yes, yes, I’ll recommend it.” Hazen coughed in an embarrassed way and looked out the window. “I’d never worry about you doing the plans, Stanton, or anything else you said you’d do. Always know I can depend on you. Not like some of these other fellows we have on the committees, all promises and no performance.” He paused. “No, there was something else I thought I might want to discuss with you.”

“Well,” said Stanton. “Here I am. Shoot.”

Hazen shook his head. “This wouldn’t be quite the place, I’m afraid. Anyway, it may turn out to be nothing at all.”

“You’re being very mysterious.”

“Am I? Well, that’s a lawyer for you. However,” he said carefully, “I may want to get in touch with you later today. You going to be in your office?”

“Yes, until traintime. I’m taking the Century.”

“Mm. Ah . . . got a pretty busy day ahead?”

“No,” said Stanton. “I’m going to answer my mail, if there is any, and then polish my speech a bit—oh, and practice looking at audiences, slowly, left to right,” he added with a smile. Hazen did not smile in return. “I don’t think I could keep my mind on any work today.”

“Well, as I say, I may call you toward the end of the morning. In fact, I might want to drop around to see you. Be all right?”

“Why, certainly.” Stanton’s expression was bewildered. “But . . . I wish you’d give me some idea of what this is all about?”

Hazen again shook his head. “No, not now. It’s just—something. Perhaps nothing. I’ll know later. Mind if I look at part of your paper?”

They read in silence until the train paused briefly at 125th Street, then rolled through the jungle of Harlem tenements. From the elevated tracks it was possible to peer down into the bleak, uncurtained windows and glimpse the most intimate and sordid vignettes. Stanton never saw these mean, barren little rooms and the stark, crumbling ugliness of the tenements without a sense of inner protest. What conceivable reason or excuse was there for people living that way, in Manhattan, in 1947? Yet he knew that these buildings along upper Park Avenue were veritable palaces compared with the tenements he had seen in some other slum sections.

“Ah . . . by the way, Stanton—” Hazen’s voice startled him—“seen that actor fellow lately?”

“You mean Billy Paige?”

“That’s the one.”

The train rocketed into the long tunnel leading to Grand Central. Some of the more impetuous commuters stood up and started putting on their coats and hats, moving toward the vestibules.

“Why—” Stanton considered—“I saw him a little while last Sunday. He came out for tennis and stayed for the cocktail party afterward at the club. What makes you ask about him?”

“Just happened to think of him,” Hazen replied. “What do you think of that chap, anyway?”

“Well, I don’t know. I never thought much about him, one way or the other.” Paige was a little too deft, a little too facile, a little too well-dressed, a little too aggressively handsome for Stanton’s taste, but he was pleasant enough and seemed to know a lot of funny stories. He was about thirty and had rather suddenly become a prominent Broadway figure on the strength of the leading part in the first big hit of the season.

“These theatrical people—I don’t seem to have much in common with them,” Stanton said. “They live in a world of their own and they don’t have much interest in anything else. At least, I find it hard to talk to them. But Betsy—Mrs. Wylie—gets along with them pretty well. She’s interested in the theater.”

He reflected that her interest of late had become almost irritating. Betsy pretended a superior knowledge of all phases of stagecraft from playwriting to baby spots, had dragged Stanton to any number of bad plays he didn’t want to see, and at times referred to people like the Lunts as “Lynn and Alfred” although she never had met them.

“Paige is sort of a lightweight, if you know what I mean,” Stanton went on. “But he’s all right; I like him well enough. He’s a very good dancer, too—at least, that’s what Betsy says. You know, she’s very keen on dancing, and I’m much too tall for her. She likes dancing with him.”

Hazen’s eyes were half closed, and his expression was inscrutable.

“Grand Central!” a conductor bawled from the end of the car. The train slid to a stop alongside the gray concrete platform. Stanton and the lawyer edged into the line of passengers and were propelled through the vestibule.

As they were climbing the ramp to the marble floor of the terminal, Hazen said: “Where’d you meet this Paige fellow, Stanton?”

Stanton had almost forgotten about Billy Paige. He glanced quickly at the lawyer, but Hazen was looking at the floor of the ramp. Stanton said, “Mr. Hazen, why are you so interested in Paige?”

“Oh, just wondered about him—seen him around,” Hazen said. “Where’d you meet him?”

“Well—” Stanton had to think about just when he had met Billy Paige—“in Westport, early in the summer. They opened the Playhouse with a revival of Private Lives, and Paige had the lead—the ex-husband of what’s-her-name, Anna? Something like that.”

“Amanda,” Hazen said. “Very amusing part.”

“Yes. He was good in it, very good. Afterward——”

They passed through the gates above the ramp and emerged in the vast stir and turmoil of the station. They stood there, making a little eddy in the stream of people issuing from the trains.

“Afterward, somebody—I think it was the McRaes—gave a party for the cast. We were invited, and that’s how we met Paige. Why, Mr. Hazen?”

The lawyer seemed to be pondering the animated signs on the station walls. On the near side these urged the smoking of Chesterfields and the drinking of Four Roses; on the far side, Alka-Seltzer was recommended for that headachy feeling. Against the tall eastern windows the New Haven had erected a photo-mural glorifying an autumn vacation in the Berkshires. Overhead, golden gods sprawled on the blue vault of the ceiling and tossed casual golden stars back and forth.

Hazen tapped the marble floor with his cane and said, “Ah . . . you will be in your office all morning? Definitely?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you may hear from me. Nice to see you anyway, Stanton. I’ll get a cab out here. Too old for these subways, you know.”

“Mr. Hazen——”

But the old man only nodded, and stepped spryly into the moving crowd. Stanton stared after him for several seconds, frowning. He was conscious of a vague feeling of disquiet, even apprehension, as he walked slowly toward the Lexington Avenue doors and crossed the street to the Chrysler Building. Why should Chester Hazen even be aware of the existence of Billy Paige, let alone have so many questions to ask about him?