Skyscraper (8 page)

He came of a generation of men whose wives had not worked. That is to say, they had kept houses and budgets, borne children, scrubbed and cooked and slaved and fought their way up into a little leisure and comfort. They had been pioneer women some of them, women who carried guns as well as babies, women who could wield an ax.

But they had not worked for money.

Or had they?

They had not, at any rate, worked for wages.

She said, startled, “But, Tom, unless I do go on working, it isn't possible.”

“Why not—if you're willing to sacrifice—”

She cried out, wounded, “Oh, I am, you know I am! But look at us—Jennie and me. She gets forty a week, my salary comes to a little less, not counting the Christmas bonus. And
we
barely manage.”

He said sullenly, “I won't always be getting just fifty.”

“No. No. Of course, you won't. But,” she cried again, “you haven't thought of me at all—of how much I like my work, how anxious I am to get on with it.”

“Where to?” he demanded.

She said, gray eyes dark with something near to anger. “There's Sarah's job sometime, if I fit myself for it. She isn't going to stop either. Tom, I'm only twenty-two—by the time I'm thirty—”

“By the time you're thirty, you'll be an old woman,” he said absurdly. Then he went down on his knees beside her, awkward, boyish, touching.

“I do love you so much—and you love me, you know you love me!”

He pulled her down, close, closer, kissed her with longing, with anger, with frustration. After a long moment during which they both forgot all that had led up to this emotional climax, she drew herself away.

“Tom, please—we're insane, both of us, we can't go on like this, you'll have to stop coming here, we'll go out, the way we used to. I wish,” she said brokenly, “that I'd never left the club!” What she meant was,
I wish I had not opened this particular door to temptation
.

“Then you won't marry me?”

“Oh, Tom”—suddenly she was tired, beaten down by fatigue—“oh, Tom, don't be childish! No, I won't marry you and give up my job.”

“That's enough, then.”

He flung himself out of the door. When Jennie came in half an hour later Lynn was in bed. She was crying. Jennie had her moments of tact. She did not switch on the lights; she walked into her bedroom instead and spoke to Lynn from that distance. “Lousy evening,” reported Jennie, with a yawn. “I'm getting fed up with this sort of thing. Give you a two-fifty table d'hôte and think they can get funny with their hands for that price. Boy, even to the buyers my legs are worth forty a week—and hands off!”

Lynn made no answer. She knew Jennie required none. She
was grateful to Jennie. She ached all over, she was one vast bruise. It was finished, then? Tom had asked her to marry him, and she had refused. Or had she offered to marry Tom, and he had repudiated her? Both, she fancied, crying very quietly.

She fixed herself some breakfast at home next morning, long before Jennie was out of bed. They did not travel to work together, it was an effort for Jennie to report—for breakfast—before nine-thirty.

“What difference does it make? The buyers don't get in till after ten,” said Jennie.

But at closing-time Tom was waiting by the elevators. He said, tucking her limp arm through his own, “I'm sorry, Lynn. I must have been crazy.”

It was not finished then. It was, as a matter of fact, just beginning.

They resumed their motion pictures, their bus rides.

When Tom came to the apartment, he brought Slim, or made sure Jennie would be there. Jennie was incurious. What Lynn did—or did not do—was Lynn's affair. If Jennie had thoughts on the subject she did not utter them. What's the use? Everyone's funeral is his own.

Then one spring day Lynn, coming into the trust officers' room, hesitated, seeing Sarah occupied. A man sat there by the desk, leaning forward laughing a little. “Come here, Lynn,” said Sarah.

 

 

 

ANYTHING YOU WISH, DAVID
THE MAN AT THE DESK WAS DAVID DWIGHT; HE ROSE as Lynn came up and held out his hand. He said easily, “Miss Dennet and I are old friends; she has told me so much about you.”

He was a rather short man, very well groomed. He had heavy gray hair, battered into sleekness. He had tired eyes and a quirked sort of mouth and the face and skin of a great actor, all the features mobile, the skin tended.

He
was
a great actor. He was one of the greatest trial lawyers
of the generation. To employ Dwight as your counsel was an almost certain admission that you were guilty and would be adjudged innocent. He had a low voice. It was an instrument of rescue or destruction, according to which side he was on. He had square, long-fingered hands, not always restrained in gesture. He had that thing called magnetism. No man had it to a greater degree save those historic men who move mountains and make empires.

He was 48 years old—perhaps.

He looked at Lynn and his eyes darkened a very little. He said lightly, “Sarah, I've bored you to death with my business. Why people die and leave their estates in my hands—even partly—is more than I can see. A more improvident and a less trustworthy person never lived.” His eyes lingered on Lynn's small face. He thought vaguely of spring, spring outside the great draped windows, spring in the country. His blood, never very stable, quickened. His eyes, never very stable either, were veiled. Then he raised them to Sarah Dennet's plain and pleasant face. He suggested gaily, “Let's celebrate, Sarah. Won't you and Miss Harding lunch with me? Please!”

Sarah looked at Lynn. Lynn smiled a little. A sensational man, David Dwight. She had read about him, heard about him. Why had Sarah never mentioned him? Sarah said, “We'd like to, wouldn't we, Lynn?”

He listened to Sarah, but he watched for Lynn's nod. He rose, satisfied. “I'll go in and talk to Norton,” he said, “until you're ready.”

He smiled at them both, and together they watched him walking, lightly as a car, toward the inner office. Lynn could see Tom's shoulders. She could see Tom's head now as he moved entirely into her line of vision. He was much taller than the older man. Yet Dwight did not seem dwarfed. In a courtroom one forgot lack of physical inches. She said to Sarah delightedly, “Isn't that a grand break? I never knew you knew him. He's awfully attractive, isn't he?”

Sarah said yes, absently. Lynn vanished to make the rest room, to wash her hands, to powder her nose, to draw a lipstick
across her mouth with more than usual care. It was exciting, lunching with Sarah and David Dwight. He was an exciting man. A personality. If he argued for criminals, he also argued for lost causes. He knew everybody—people who lived on Park and Fifth, people who lived on side streets, back-stage people, cinema people, people who lived in Paris, London, Rome. Policemen knew him by name, gunmen knew him, dowagers knew him; he was the personal, legal representative of motion-picture stars, opera singers, millionaires, inventors, marathon runners, prize fighters, social leaders, murderers, thieves, bishops. His income was enormous and his extravagance a byword. Editorials were written to slay him. He wore an invisible armor. Columnists called him Dave. Judges called him Dave. Taxi men called him Dave. And newsboys.

Lynn went downstairs and joined Sarah and Dwight, who were waiting. Dwight said, “We'll go to a place I know.” He laughed. “I lunched with Norton—on this Manning business, Sarah, in one of the private rooms upstairs. Murals and pewter and noiseless waiters and a million-dollar view. And,” he added, “good food. But it all smelled of money. How long have you for lunch? An hour? Make it an hour and a half. I know a place with sand on the floor and white-washed walls, which has stood since the Revolution. It smells of partridges turning on a spit over a charcoal fire. We'll go there. Or would you rather not?”

He spoke to Sarah. His eyes were on Lynn. Sarah said, “Anywhere you wish, David.”

She had always said that; anywhere, anything.
Anything you wish, David, all my love, all my youth, all my passion, all myself. Break down the barriers; trample on the inhibitions; anything, David. She had said, in effect, it's over then; it must be right, because you said it's over. Anything you wish, David
.

He couldn't marry her twenty years ago. He was beginning to be known then. She was nobody, a raw Western girl, coming East to make her fortune. He had to marry—well. Marry money. He had done so. Anything you wish, David.

Love had been over long ago; if it was over for David
Dwight, in eighteen months and had lasted ten years for Sarah, that was another matter. It was over now. Her work satisfied her even as he had not; her blood pulsed cool and even in her veins. She had for him an affection, a loyalty, that could not be conquered by months, years of neglect. Now he came to see her—occasionally. She rested and entertained him. It had been years since he had made any reference to her relations with him twenty years ago. They were friends. She disapproved of him, of his way of living, of his easy separation from his wife, of his utter lack of preoccupation with his children. But she was his friend.

Tom, frowning, saw them go out. This man Dwight—poseur, lecher, bad actor, spendthrift, publicity-seeker—what was he doing with Lynn and Sarah Dennet?

He was doing with Sarah that which he had always done. He was having his own way.
Anything you want, David
. Yet, as she stepped into his car and made room for Lynn and Dwight beside her and the car slid smoothly from the curb, she was not remembering that once she had been this man's lover. She was not remembering that once she had struggled from madness to sanity, from suicidal desperation to a sort of apathy approximating peace. She was remembering nothing. You do not remember the things that are in your blood. You put no names to them. They are. They exist, part of you. You question them no longer.

And so Sarah said, that women who had been born proud and not humble, but whom love had once made docile and amazed, “It's nice of you to take us out, David.” And he answered, “It's sweet of you both to take pity on me, and come,” and Lynn asked tritely, “Isn't it the most gorgeous day?” And Dwight knew that it was. He liked falling in love. When he was in love he was young. And when he was young he was unafraid.

Why was Sarah not warned? Why should she be warned? Having said, for so long, “Anything you wish, David,” she said it now to an offer of luncheon, unexpected, a harmless pleasure for Lynn. Having once known David Dwight as something less a man than a force of nature, should she not now be on her guard?

But twenty years had passed; and she belonged to the women who make a fetish of possession, of the first man, the first love, which is the last. She had forgotten embraces, save the subconscious darkness of her nature, which she never contemplated now she had forgotten days and nights; she had forgotten tears and insanity. But she had not forgotten obedience. How should she know that asking her to luncheon, “you and Miss Harding,” he was asking her for Lynn?

He
knew.

 

 

 

HARMLESS AS A SERPENT
LYNN, RETURNING TO THE OFFICE FROM THE ancient tavern to which Dwight had taken her and Sarah, was late. She flew in, and went at the work on her desk with considerable animation.

“Well,” commented Miss Marple, shutting a file with emphasis, “You look as if someone left you a million and you'd started to spend it!” She glanced carelessly at the clock.

“I had a luncheon engagement,” Lynn told her guiltily.

“Tell that to Sarah the Slave Driver!”

“She was part of it,” Lynn said triumphantly.

She stayed late at the office that evening, to catch up. When she reached home Jennie was there ahead of her. Opening the door Lynn was greeted by a blast of blue smoke and, rushing into the kitchen, found Jennie shoving some curious-looking pork chops around on a frying-pan.

“For heaven's sake! You'll have the fire department out.”

“I was telephoning,” admitted Jennie. “How did I know the blasted things would go up in smoke? Here.”

She shoved the frying-pan into Lynn's hand, removed Lynn's hat and bore it off to the living-room closet. Returning, she swung herself up on the little kitchen table, flipped her lighter with a thumb, and drew in a long breath of Virginia tobacco. “Thought I'd be domestic for a chance and get some dinner,” she explained. “I didn't get a break. No one's asked me out for a week.”

“You were out last night, silly! Did you set the table?”

“I did. Well, it seems a week ago. What's new with you? You're late.”

“Plenty. David Dwight took Sarah and me out to lunch—downtown somewhere, funniest place you ever saw, benches and stalls, sand on the floor and the most divine food.”

“What did you eat?” asked Jennie with interest, then she added, “Dwight? You don't mean the lawyer, do you?”

“I do. We had oysters and game pies and —”