Skyscraper (13 page)

“It will be now,” said Dwight, smiling, his hand lightly on Lynn's arm. “Let's circulate, shall we?”

Lynn couldn't remember half the names of people. Later the theatrical crowd arrived, straight from their dressing-rooms. Yes, that had been Lillie James, the motion-picture ingénue who has shot into stardom and was now making a new picture on Long Island. There was Mark Manners, the illustrator, who attached himself to Jennie, to Jennie's later commercial interest. There was George Fane, juvenile lead in “Let's Be Silly,” and Marise Marr, musical comedy star, and Babe Leonard, who wrote stark tales of the submerged millions and lived on Park Avenue from the proceeds. There were dozens of others, all very gay, all very friendly. There was Ike Kirschbaum, the “new” song writer-composer, who, they said, out-Gershwined Berlin. There were many more.

There was dancing, singing, with obliging artists doing impromptu turns. There was Gwen Hammond singing her latest melancholy blues song, and “Brownie” Bird, star of “Mulatto Madness,” singing her most famous version of “St. Louis Blues.” There was, very late, Sonny Carter and his gold-plated saxophone and one turn of hired talent, the three adagio dancers who had held all Manhattan breathless in the recent “Roamers
Revue.” And, of course, an orchestra.

Things to eat, things to drink, things to smoke; couples out in the terrace whispering, swinging idly in the great swings leaning on the parapet in the sweet spring night; laughter and the ceaseless murmur of voices. It was two o'clock, and the party was just well under way when Dwight gently but firmly detached Lynn from George Fane, with whom she was dancing; and, after taking her twice about the room, stopped by the terrace doors and led her outside. “Sure you're warm enough—shall I send for a wrap?” he asked.

“No, it's heavenly out here,” she said, looking over the terrace wall, drawing in deep breaths of the night wind, the subtle, small fragrance of earth and green, growing things.

“Did I annoy you taking you away from Fane? I annoyed him, that was very obvious.”

“I hardly think so. He'll find another audience,” she laughed. “He was telling me he couldn't get a break. “The women stars are always so jealous!”

“He's a conceited ass but a good youngster,” Dwight told her, indifferently, “even if he does break all the feminine hearts across the footlights.”

“He's not nearly as good looking as Tom,” she said absently, and wondered where Tom was and if he were having a good time. She'd danced with him a little earlier. The orchestra was playing bygone hits by request. “‘I can't give you anything but love, baby,'” Tom had sung, holding her close—“and that's no idle jest,” he had added abruptly. “There won't be any penthouses for a long time, Lynn.”

“As if I cared!”

“You do care—for me?”

“Idiot!” And she had looked up at him, gray eyes shining between the dusky lashes, lips curved in reproach.

“I want like the devil to kiss you,” Tom told her savagely, and a little sharp tremor of emotion troubled her pulses and sang in her veins and weakened her knees, very sweet, very disturbing. And she swayed a little closer to him and murmured, her breath catching, “Please don't look at me that way, Tom, I
can't bear it.”

A moment of pure desire, pure and perfect anguish, pure and ecstatic happiness—

Then Fane had cut in.

But something of that pleasant trouble, something of the burden of languor and painful, frustrated delight remained with her now, as she stood on the terrace and Dwight leaned beside her there.

In the room they had left they were now playing one of Gwen's great songs and she was singing to it, husky, sweet voice, the high notes fading like the subdued sound of smitten silver bells, drifting over the shuffle of feet, the voices, the piercing violins, the brassy yearning of the saxophones:

When my man's away, there ain't no peace
,

I dunno what to do—

Can't sleep, can't walk, can't smile, can't talk
,

Feelin' so doggoned blue—

When my man's away, I just sit and pray
,

God, bring him back to me
,

When my man's away, for a night, for a day

There ain't no peace for me
.

Trivial words and an important truth. The husky voice made magic of the dragging morbidity of the music, invested with the eternal glamor of human longing and the tinsel-tawdry lyric. Only the truth remained, heartbreaking. “Hokum,” commented Dwight and Lynn's side, “but like most hokum so infernally veracious—”

She said, in a dreaming voice, “It's—lovely, so real—”

“Women feel like that, I suppose,” he told her idly, or with apparent casualness, “and, believe it or not, some men.”

“Yes.” She clasped her hands on the wall in front of her and stared out into the darkness. There were not many lights at this time of the morning. But the stars were big and very near.

“It's a pity things have to be so complicated,” Dwight said, throwing his cigarette to the stone floor, crushing it under his
heel. “Pity that love's so willful. Other women's men, other men's girls, we don't stop to think of that, do we?”

“I suppose not.” She remembered Mara, for no good reason, and spoke of her. “A girl I know,” she said, confident that he would understand.

When she had told the little there was to tell he said slowly, looking away from her, looking out to the velvet arch of the heavens.

“You can't do anything. Isn't she just like most of us, caught in a trap of her own contrivance, struggling, hurting herself, trying to manufacture a little happiness, a little escape? She calls it ‘having a good time.' I spoke to you the other night of the skyscrapers, didn't I? Sometimes I see them from another angle. Tremendous traps, opening and closing on time signals. I watch the girls and women come out of their doors, evenings, hurrying toward their homes, happy or unhappy, but always preoccupied with the fear of losing their economic independence—if it is independence; leading such disseminated lives—the life of the skyscraper, ordered, patterned, the life of the home—whether it contains the family unit of parents, fraternal relations, or husbands and children.

“Possibly your friend is disregarding the red light in order to make her life more bearable; possibly, like so many women forced to earn their livings and having little interest in the means, she is simply trying to bend one of the oldest forces in the world to her own small ends—in short, she accepts invitations from a man who may be able to guarantee her job to her. Yet perhaps she is only escaping. As for her husband, she probably loves him. But love, the strongest thing in the world, the poets say, is a delicate thing. It bruises with ease, it shatters at a touch. Love in a walk-up”—he laughed a little, quite low—“with lovers trying to budget love the way they budget finances, with little wives working, and coming home disheartened and tired, with bills to think about and a run in the last pair of stockings. With grouchy husbands and fatigued wives, with the smell of cabbage and laundry soap, with babies crying—love nourished upon occasional routine embraces and stereotyped kisses—love
has to be stronger than I believe it is to rise above that” he said.

Lynn drew a deep breath.

“I suppose you're right. I hate to think you're right. I won't believe it,” she answered childishly. “Tom—Tom and I.” She was silent. He did not disturb her, his heart beat thickly, he held himself in a close and calculated restraint; her voice went on, still dreaming, thinking aloud she was, and he knew it, “Tom and I are different. We must be different. Waiting's hard,” she said with that unconscious natural cruelty of her, “when you're young and love each other. Sometimes I don't know what to think. I can't see ahead. We'd be plain crazy to marry—now. Perhaps we'd be crazy to marry even if I kept on working. Yet I can't give up my work. And Tom doesn't want me, married and working—”

Dwight said, with a deliberate lightness, “If I were Tom, even if I knew as much as I do now, I'd want you, I suppose, at any price, and at any risk. But possibly he's right.”

He touched her hand. He said, on a deepened note, “Lynn, you're such a dear little person—” He felt her hand move under his, a startled gesture. In the darkness his mouth was ironic. He went on smoothly, “If I had a daughter—” That was damned funny too. He repeated it, savoring its comedy. He had a daughter. Two of them. Large, rawboned girls who had inherited their mother's plainness and who disapproved of him. Girls he would have disliked if he had met them as strangers, but without a break he went on—“a daughter like you.” There he stopped, his voice effectively breaking. And why not? For a moment, superb actor, always living his part, he saw himself purged of any passional impulse toward this small girl beside him, visualized himself, perfectly paternal, indulging only in the soft, anxious, benevolent paternal emotions.

Now he laughed, withdrawing his hand. He said simply, “I wish you belonged to me.”

She replied the perfect thing then; she said, turning to look at him, her little face pale, red-lipped, glamorous in the dim lighting of the terrace where Chinese lanterns, monstrous flowers swung in the gentle wind, “But you're far too young to have a
daughter like me—”

She thought of her own father, gray, stooped, the X-ray burns on his hands, the shrewd, wise, kindly eyes. She sent him her love over the miles. He'd be on his way home now, with her mother. Suddenly she was homesick for them both.

“I'd like you to feel that I am your friend, your very good friend; that there is nothing I would not do for you. If you won't permit me a vicarious paternity—how about an avuncular interest?”

She said sweetly, “I'd like a friend, best of all.”

“You can always count on me,” he told her; meant it, at the moment; not asking himself upon what she could count; not really knowing.

She put her hand in his. This was what she had wanted all along. He said, the control breaking a little, the veneer cracking, the theatrical backdrop forgotten, knowing himself on dangerous ground but risking the consequence. “A bargain, then—? and—to seal it?” he murmured, bending toward her. “You will not misunderstand, dear Lynn.”

Still he dared not risk too much. He kissed her lightly, briefly, and, with absurd adherence to fictional standards of a bygone day, upon the smooth white forehead she presented to him, his lips glancing over the dark and subtle arrow of the little widow's peak. I point the way, said the arrow, to sweeter contacts—

She was not afraid; not even warned. The night had its own spell, his voice another, she had spoken to him as one speaks to oneself—and was disarmed.

Now she smiled faintly, and stood apart from him; not that his arms had been about her, simple that she had moved close to him with the instinct of the animal seeking—what? Warmth, comfort, human affection?

Tom, in the doorway, looking for her, saw them. He had not seen the kiss, so absurdly, so delicately chaste. He saw Lynn move away. She was white in the glow of the lanterns, white in the dusky night shadows, white face, white dress, the banked fire of garnets flickering at her ears and throat and wrists, the fire of her lips burning, he knew, though he could not see them
clearly.

But she had been too close to Dwight.

Tom went back into the room; and poured himself a drink; two drinks; three. Jennie, conducting her small but entertaining affair with the illustrator, cocked a knowing blue eye at him. Sore about something, probably Lynn. Going to try and drink the cellar dry; don't blame him. She then thought, deftly maintaining her conversation with the artist, I must trip Lynn off.

She did so later. She said confidently, “I'm tight. But can still walk. Why not? It isn't often I have a chance to high expensively. But Tom's had enough. He's peeved about something. Watch your step.”

Dwight had gone over to a group of his guests. Lynn watched him a moment, with grateful, friendly eyes. He was a dear. He did understand. A lot more than he said. She went in search of Tom, troubled, but not very much so. She found him at a punch bowl, having made the rounds of the various other liquids, highball, cocktail, liqueur.

“It's late, Tom,” she said.

“I didn't think you'd realize it,” he told her, observing Wilkins's assistant serving the punch with a heavy silver ladle.

“Oh, but I do, I'm tired! Let's go home now,” she coaxed him. “Several people have left.”

“It's all the same to me,” he agreed, without looking at her, a little drunk, more than a little drunk, but his voice still unthickened, his eyes clear, his step steady, marked by, perhaps, a more pronounced swagger.

Yet so different a Tom from the one who had held her close and sung—“I can't give you anything but love, baby.”

He couldn't. That was what ate at him now, that was what all of Dwight's costly intoxicants could blunt, that was one vitally important fact.

Gloomily he watched Lynn slip back across the room to speak to Jennie; gloomier still he observed her go up to Dwight, draw him momentarily aside. Her lips moved. She was saying, “We must go now, really.” And Dwight was reminding her, “Tomorrow's Sunday. Little girls can sleep. Must you go?”