Waltz Into Darkness (10 page)

She
tried to smile, but the effect was dubious at best.

"Let
me see her letter a moment," she said at last.

He
went back to the table, brought it to her. But she seemed only to
glance at the very top line of the page, almost as if referring to
the mode of address in order to be able to duplicate it. Though he
told himself this thought on his part must be purely fanciful. Many
people had to have the physical sight of a letter before them to be
able to answer it satisfactorily; she might be one of those.

Then
turning from it immediately after that one quick look, she wrote on
her own blank sheet, "My own dear Bertha :" He could see it
form, from over her shoulder. Beyond that she seemed to have no
further use for the original, edged it slightly aside and didn't
concern herself with it any further.

He
let her be. He returned to his own chair, took up his newspaper once
more. But the stream of her thoughts did not seem to flow easily. He
would hear the scratch of her pen for a few words, then it would
stop, die away, there would be a long wait. Then it would scratch for
a few jerky words more, then die away again. He glanced over at her
once just in time to see her clap her hand harassedly to her forehead
and hold it there briefly.

At
length he heard her give a great sigh, but one more of shortpatienced
aversion continuing even after a task has been completed than of
relief at its conclusion, and the scratching of the pen had stopped
for good. She flung it down, as if annoyed.

"I've
done. Do you want to read it?"

"No,"
he said, "it's between sister and sister, not for a husband to
read."

"Very
well," she said negligently. She passed her pink tongue around
the gummed edge of the envelope, sealed it in. She stood it upright
against the inside of the desk, prepared to close the slab over it.
"I'll have Aunt Sarah post it for me in the morning."

He
had reached for it and picked it up before her hands could forestall
him, though they both flew out toward it just a moment too late. She
hadn't expected him to be standing there behind her.

He
slid it into his inside breast pocket, buttoned his coat over it. "I
can do it for you myself," he said. "I leave the house
earlier. It'll be that much sooner on its way."

He
saw a startled expression, almost of trapped fear, cause her eyes to
dodge cornerwise for an instant, but then they evened again so
quickly he told himself he must have been mistaken, he must not have
seen it at all.

When
next he looked she was stroking the edge of her fingers with a bit of
chamois penwiper, against potential rather than actual spots,
however, and that seemed to be her sole remaining concern at the
moment, though she puckered her brows pensively over the task.

15

The
next morning, he thought she never had looked lovelier, and never had
been more loving. All her past gracious endearment was as a coldness
compared to the warmth of her consideration now.

She
was in lilac watered silk, which had a rippling sheen running down it
from whichever side you looked at it. It sighed as she walked, as if
itself overcome by her loveliness. She did not stay at table as on
other days, she accompanied him to the front door to see him off, her
arm linked to his waist, his arm to hers. And as the slanting morning
sunlight caught her in its glint, then released her, then caught her
again a step further on, playing its mottled game with her all along
the hall, he thought he had never seen such a vision of angelic
beauty, and was almost awed to think it was his, walking here in his
house, here at his side. Had she asked him to lie down and die for
her then and there, he would have been glad to do it, and glad of her
having asked it, as well.

They
stopped. She raised her face from the side of his arm, she took up
his hat, she stroked it of dust, she handed it to him.

They
kissed.

She
prepared his coat, held it spread, helped him on with it.

They
kissed.

He
opened the door in readiness to go.

They
kissed.

She
sighed. "I hate to see you go. And now I'll be all alone the
rest of the livelong day."

"What
will you do with yourself?" he asked in compunction, with the
sudden--and only mometary--realization of a male that she too had a
day to get through somehow, that she continued to go on during his
absence. "Go shopping, I suppose," he suggested
indulgently.

Her
face brightened for a moment, as though he had read her heart.
"Yes-!" Then it dimmed again. "No--" she said,
forlorn. Instantly his attention was held fast. "Why not? What's
the matter?"

"Oh,
nothing--" She turned her head away, she didn't want to tell
him.

He
took the point of her chin and turned it back again. "Julia, I
want to know. Tell me. What is it?" He touched her shoulder.

She
tried to smile, wanly. Her eyes looked out the door.

He
had to guess finally.

"Is
it money ?"

He
guessed right.

Not
an eyelash moved, but somehow she told him. Certainly not with her
tongue.

He
gasped, half in laughter. "Oh, my poor foolish littieJulia--I"
Instantly his coat flew open, his hand reached within. "Why, you
only have to ask, don't you know that--?"

This
time there could be no mistaking the answer. "No--! No--! No!"
She was almost vehement about it, albeit in a pouty, petulant child's
sort of way. She even tapped her toe for emphasis. "I don't like
to ask for it. It isn't nice. I don't care if you are my own
husband. It still isn't nice. I was brought up that way, I can't
change."

He
was smiling at her. He found her adorable. But still he didn't
understand her, which was no detraction to the first two factors.
"Then what do you want?"

She
gave him a typically feminine answer. "I don't know." And
raised her eyes thoughtfully, as if trying to scan the problem in her
own mind, find a solution somehow.

"But
you do want to go shopping, don't you? I can see you do by your look.
And yet you don't want me to give you the money for it."

"Isn't
there some other way?" she appealed to him helplessly, as if
willing to extricate herself from her own scruples, if only she could
be shown how without foregoing them.

"I
could slip it under your plate, unasked, for you to find at
breakfast," he smirked.

She
saw no humor in the suggestion, shook her head absently, still busy
pondering the problem, finger to tooth edge. Suddenly she brightened,
looked at him. "Couldn't I have a little account of my own--?
Like you have, only-- Oh, just a little one, tiny--small--"

Then
she decided against that, before he could leap to give his consent,
as he had been about to.

"No,
that'd be too much bother, just for hats and gloves and things--"
About to fall into disheartened perplexity again, she recovered, once
more lighted up as a new variant occurred to her. "Or better
still, couldn't I just share yours with you?" She spread out her
hands in triumphant discovery. "That'd be simpler yet. Just call
it ours instead. It's there already."

He
crouched his shoulders down low. He slapped his thigh sharply. "By
George ! Will that make you happy? Is that all it will take? God
bless your trusting little heart I We'll do it!"

She
flew into his arms like a shot, with a squeal for a firing-report.
"Oh, Lou, I'll feel so big, so important! Can I, really? And
can I even write my own checks, like you do?"

To
love someone, is to give, and to want to give more still, no
questions asked. To stop and think, then that is not to love, any
more.

"Your
own checks, in your own handwriting, in your own purse. I'll meet you
at the bank at eleven. Will that time suit you?"

She
only pressed her cheek to his.

"Will
you know how to find it?"

She
only pressed her cheek to his again, around on the other side of his
face.

She
allowed him to precede her there, as was her womanly prerogative. But
once he had arrived, she kept him waiting no more than the fractional
part of a minute. In fact so precipitately did she enter, on his very
heels, that it could almost have been thought she had been waiting at
some nearby vantage point simply to allow him first entry before
starting forward in turn.

She
accosted him before he had little more than cleared the vestibuk.

"Louis,"
she said, placing her hand confidentially atop his wrist to detain
him a moment, and drawing him a step aside, "I have been
thinking about this since you left the house. I am not sure I--I want
you to do this after all. You may think me one of these presuming
wives who-- Had we not better let things be as they are-- ?"

He
patted her arresting wrist. "Not another word, Julia," he
said with fine masculine authority. "I want it so."

He
was now sure that the idea was his own, had been from its very
inception.

She
deferred to his dictate as it was a wife's place to do, with a seemly
little obeisance of her head. She linked her arm in his and
accompanied him with slow-moving elegance across the bank floor
toward its farther end, where the bank manager had emerged and stood
waiting to greet them with courtly consideration behind a low wooden
partition banister set with amphora-shaped uprights erected
three-square about his private office door. He was a moonfaced
gentleman, the roundness of his face emphasized by the circular
fringe of carefully waved iron-gray whiskers that surrounded it, the
lips and sides of the cheeks clean-shaven. The gold chain across his
plaid vest front must have been composed of the thickest links in all
New Orleans, a veritable anchor.

Even
he, the establishment's head, visibly swelled like a pouterpigeon at
sight of Julia advancing toward him. The pride she afforded Durand,
in escorting her, in itself, would have made the entire proceeding
worth while had there been no other reason.

She
had donned, for this unwonted invasion of the precincts of commerce
and finance, azure crinoline, that filled the arid air with whispers,
midget pink velvet buttons in symmetrical rows studding its jerking,
pink ruching sprouting at her throat and wrists; a crushed bonnet of
azure velvet low over one eye like a tinted compress to relieve a
headache, ribbons of pink tying it under her chin, a dwarf veil
sprinkled with pink dots like confetti hanging only as low as the
underlashes of her eyes. Her steps were as tiny and tapping as though
she were on stilts, and her spine was held in the forwardcurved bow
of the Grecian bend almost to a point where it defied Nature's plan
that the human figure hold itself upright on the hip sockets, without
falling over forward out of sheer unbalance.

Never
had a bustle floated so airily, swaying so languorously, over a bank
floor before. Her passage created a sensation behind the tellers'
cagelike windows lining both sides of the way. Pair upon pair of eyes
beneath their green eyeshades were lifted from dry, stuffy figures
and accounts to gaze dreamily after her. The personnel of banking
establishments at that time was exclusively male, the clientele
almost equally so. Though a discreetly curtained-off little nook, as
rigidly segregated as a harem anteroom, bearing over it the placard
"Ladies' Window," was reserved for the use of the
occasional females (widows and the like) who were forced to come in
person to see to their money matters, having no one else to attend to
these grubby transactions for them. At least they were spared the
ignominy of having to rub elbows with men in the line, or stand
exposed to all eyes while money was publicly handed to them. They
could curtain themselves off and be dealt with by a special teller
reserved for their use alone, and always a good deal gentler and
older than the rest.

There
was no definite stigma attached to banks, for women; unlike saloons,
and certain types of theatrical performance where tights were worn,
and almost all forms of athletic contest, such as boxing matches and
ball games. It was just that they were to be spared the soilage
implicit in the handling of money, which was still largely a
masculine commodity and therefore an indelicate one for them.

Durand
and his breath-taking (but properly escorted) wife stopped before the
whiskered bank manager, and he swung open a little hinged gate in the
banister-rail for their passage.