Chapter 33

They never could recall how they had put in the rest of Tuesday morning, aside from reading the papers down to the auction notices, but they postponed the duty of reveling in the joys of New York till lunchtime. Then they had the great hours of shopping, and admitted that, in this, New York was superior. Jinny dropped the arm of her protector and stepped out and had a few things to say for herself.

She contradicted clerks, high impressive clerks with handkerchiefs like bishops’ mitres in their breast-pockets. She yearned over furs and Irish linens and perfume-bottles with gold crowns for stoppers and folding card-tables so sturdy that you could sit on them—the clerk enthusiastically proved it. (He was fired for it, that evening; the table might have collapsed.) But there was a hard shrewdness in her, and she bought only one per cent of the things that she would die if she did not have.

After dozens of tryings-on, while Cass sat on a plush chair in rooms carpeted to suffocation and wondered if he might smoke, and wished that he had a walking stick to rest his chin on, like the other male sitters, she did pick out a silk dress, a blue suit, and a lynx jacket.

Then she dropped again into panic.

“Cass! Let’s beat it! So many shops, so many puss-puss grass-widow clerks, trying to stick you with things you don’t want—they all get so blurry and alike. There’s no fun like there is at Harley’s or Tarr’s, where you know all the scandals about the clerks. I love you for bringing me to New York, and I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars, and I wouldn’t ever come here again for a billion. Oh, I do want to settle down now. I promise: I will read my chess manual. I will quit getting my queen taken. I promise!”

He kissed her in the elevator of a department store.

They assured themselves that though the Melchester dining-room did look stuffy, “We better have our dinner here, just this once, and not have to hurry to the theater.”

The air of the dining-room had been shut in there, among the Brussels sprouts and the damp napkins, ever since the hotel had opened, in 1913, and the stuffed veal tasted like the air, and the waiter, who was a family man and a commuter, had aching feet.

They spent most of their time at dinner in longing for the gaieties of the John William Prutts, and they went to the play as to an operation.

Cass knew Nord only as a bulky, tow-headed Swede in a loose black suit and an irregular bow-tie, lounging around his father’s farm. Jinny had never seen great acting, and she supposed that there would be a good deal of yelling and throwing up one’s arms and catching them again.

Bewildered, they learned tonight that great theater is more real than reality. Nord was the Little Man, a clerk who discovers that his boss and his wife and his daughters are all liars, who smashes his world and triumphs in defeat.

Jinny commented only, “Gee!”

Cass said, “I think in these theaters you can—‘go back,’ I think they call it, and see the actors in their dressing-rooms, and of course I’ve known Berg slightly all my life—I didn’t suppose he was like that! He’s an archangel. I’m glad I saw this with you. Well, shall we go back?”

“I’m scared to, but if you’re sure it’s all right—Course I was born only about six miles from his birthplace—and maybe I didn’t tell that to everybody in Florida!”

“Come on. Perhaps he’ll go out with us for a drink.”

“Don’t you dare ask him! Prob’ly everybody from Minnesota and points west comes in and bothers him. Come on! I don’t think we ought to go see him, but hurry or we might miss him!”

It was all traditional and right: the secret alley beside the theater, the stooped and hidden stage door, the doorman aged and Irish and misanthropic.

“To, uh, to see Mr. Nord. Mr. and Mrs. Timberlane,” Cass submitted.

“JUDGE Timberlane,” said Jinny.

But when they were admitted to the star’s dressing-room, it was such a littered coop, and the star, wiping off greasepaint, was just Ole Ice Berg Nord. He looked at Cass a little puzzled.

“You’re one of the Grand Republic Timberlanes, aren’t you?”

“Yes, my mother was Marah Nord. I’m sort of a second cousin of yours. I’m a lawyer.”

“Oh, now I have it straight.” Nord, a thick, undistinguished figure in a blazing silk dressing-gown, was cordial. “Cass—isn’t that the name? Mighty pleased you came back, Cass. Enjoy my show?”

“We thought it was magnificent.” Nord was obviously pleased. “Berg, this is my wife. Just married last year.”

“Delighted to see you, Mrs. Timberlane. This your first visit to New York?”

“Yes, it’s my first.”

“You enjoying your visit?”

“Oh, yes, so much. Well. That is. I don’t know as I’d want to live here. We’re fond of Minnesota.”

“So am I, Mrs.—uh—Timberlane”

Jinny must have seen in Cass’s pleased and honest face the prohibited come-out-and-have-a-drink look. Firmly taking her husband’s arm, she stated, “It’s been a great honor to be able to visit with you, and we must go now. Good night.”

And went.

They stopped in the street and shone at each other.

Cass said proudly, “Nice fellow, isn’t he!”

“Marvelous.”

“Course off the stage, he seems like anybody else.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so! I can feel the tremendous reserved power in him. Oh, I could go for him in a big way!”

“Ye-es.”

“Let’s stop and get a drink some place—a quiet place, if there is one in this town—and then go to bed. Oh, Cass, I’m so tired, all that shopping—but is that plum-colored dress a vision! We certainly have one thing to boast of: we didn’t try and wheedle poor Berg into going out with us.”

“It might have been courteous to have asked him—”

“Oh, no, you can’t ask people like that.”

Berg Nord was meditating, “I wish I’d asked those people out for a drink—or they’d asked me. They made me quite homesick. I’d like to hear the Grand Republic news. But they’re probably busy on their stay here. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

In her own twin bed a little later, talkative and not sleepy, Jinny mused aloud, “Think of how brilliantly he must talk when he’s with his real friends.”

At Sardi’s, Berg Nord was saying to his agent, who was one of his three close friends, “I don’t want to be a hog about it, but you tell Hollywood I won’t even look at less than two hundred thousand. Know what I’m going to do, some day? Move back to Minnesota and stay there. You New Yorkers are a pain in the neck. Always thinking about money. . . . I’ll have another Scotch old-fashioned.”

Their lunch, on Wednesday, with Dennis Thane started jubilantly with recollections of law school, each of which began, “Say, do you remember the time I . . .”

Thane was effusive to Jinny.

“Is this your first visit to New York, Mrs. Timberlane?”

“Yes, it’s the first time.”

“Are you enjoying your visit here?”

“Oh, yes, very much, thank you.”

But after that the luncheon was less vivacious.

So they did more shopping and went to museums, thousands of museums, and went to a news-reel.

“Let’s take a chance and dine at Twenty–One or the Algonquin or one of those famous places, Jin.”

“Oh, I don’t know. They’re fascinating, but they scare me, Cass. Why don’t we just have dinner here at the hotel, where they know who we are, and then take in another movie and go to bed? There’s a bang-up movie opened on Broadway last night. I know it’s good because it was in Grand Republic two weeks ago, and Mrs. Higbee said it was swell. Would that be okay by you?”

“Certainly would. I never care for more than just so much horsing around. I thought eight days would be too short a stay here, and New York does wake you up and give you a lot of ideas, but I’ll be kind of glad when we get away next Tuesday. I’ve enjoyed every second of it, but I won’t be sorry to be home and shoot some golf with Roy.”

“And I’m crazy to see how much the decorators have got done. Oh, yes, I’m VERY glad we’re staying till Tuesday, but that will be about enough.”

A Thursday filled with trying on dresses, trying on museums, and churches, and deciding that their feet were too sore to go up and look at Grant’s tomb and the Rockefeller church, those appropriate neighbors. The day was magnificently crowned by having dinner with Avis Elderman, Bradd Criley’s emigree sister.

She remembered Cass perfectly, and forgave him for it.

She had glittering jet on her bosom, and she took them to the Colony Restaurant.

She said to Jinny, “I don’t think I ever met you in Grand Republic.”

“No, I lived in Pioneer Falls as a kid.”

“Oh!”

It took Avis a minute to swallow this, but she tried again:

“Is this your first glimpse of New York?”

“Yes, my first.”

“I trust that you are enjoying your stay here.”

“M.”

“Mr. Elderman and I are sorry that you are making such a brief sojourn. We had hoped to entertain you in our home. In Darien. In Connecticut, you know. Though of course we practically live in New York City—my husband’s office is here, map-manufacturing, and I come in and join him for an evening at LEAST once a fortnight, but still, we always say, even the city hasn’t a more exacting and delightful social life than Darien. You would enjoy it so much.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Jinny.

As Cass and she went to bed, Jinny snarled, “The very next time, I’m going to say, ‘No. Is it YOUR first visit?’”

And, after more meditation, “I thought Bradd was a lovely man, till I met his sister.”

When they awoke to devouring rain on Friday morning, Cass rejoiced, “Would I be a barbarian if I said, ‘Thank God, we don’t have to go out and look at the glories of New York all day long’?”

“Me too!”

He thought, he telephoned down to the porter’s desk, and presently he announced, “I find we can get reservations for the trip back home for Monday instead of Tuesday. What would you—”

“Darling! Swell! Grab ’em! I’m crazy to see the new house, and Cleo and Rose and Valerie and Roy and everybody!”

They went back to sleep, lying close together, comfortably and quietly. They breakfasted luxuriously, for the Melchester did unexpectedly run to English muffins and wild-strawberry jam. They got rid of the breakfast wreckage, and told the chambermaid to stay out till lunch-time. Free from the duties of sightseeing, they laughed as pointlessly as schoolchildren.

—Well, if this trip hasn’t accomplished anything else, it’s got rid of Jay Laverick, and brought her back to me.

They were normally a somewhat restrained couple, but today they reveled in the cheerful vulgarities of the bathroom. She scrubbed his back, in the tub, and laughed, and kissed the wet smoothness of his shoulder. He reached up his arms to encircle her with a sudden need of her, and her giggling died in a passionate quick breathing.

It was on that day of gaiety and benevolent bad weather that their baby was conceived.

“There couldn’t be a more wonderful lover than you,” she sighed.

They did admit the chambermaid—who looked at them suspiciously— but they did not dress till five in the afternoon, when the weather had cleared.

They had a small walk up Fifth Avenue. While they were out, Berg Nord tried to telephone them. He had their address from Avis Elderman (whom he hated). Nord had hoped to have them join him after the theater, but he did not leave his name. They never learned that he was a lonely man.

They came back to the dreariness of having to decide which urban delight they would work at that evening.

The telephone. Cass answered. “Yes? Timberlane speaking.” Then he shouted.

“Jinny! Do you know who it is? It’s Bradd Criley! He’s just landed here in New York, and he’s right here in the hotel, and he’ll be up here in five minutes!”

She sang, “That’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in my life!”

As Bradd came in, like a fresh wind from the Sorshay uplands, Cass thought that Berg Nord might be a sturdy trial lawyer, and Bradd, with that wavy hair that provides its own vine leaves, that round pale face and automatic smile, might be a romantic actor. But he got no further with the study, so excited were they all three, two men and a girl, the trinity of friendship—and of danger.

“You’re the best sight for sore eyes I’ve seen since we left home,” said Cass.

“You two look pretty good to me. What about you, Jin? Are you as glad to see me as your old man makes out he is?”

“My favorite brother, Bradd!” glowed Jinny, and kissed him.

Bradd summed it up, presently. “You have till Monday then—tonight and all day Saturday and Sunday? Can’t we all play around together? I’m here for the Wargates, but I don’t have to do a thing till Monday morning, except a few telephone calls.”

“Perfect!” said Jinny.

“I really came on a couple of days early, hoping to catch you two.”

“Oh, Bradd, you didn’t!” whispered Jinny.

“What’s your plans for tonight?”

“Not a thing.”

“Managed to see Life with Father yet?”

“Impossible to get tickets.”

Bradd crowed, “Not impossible for ME to get tickets! It’s a cinch, if you know the ropes. And I know every strand of the little ole ropes in this man’s town.”

“I’ll bet you do,” worshiped Jinny.

Bradd was already telephoning. “Berbetz? . . . This is Criley, from Grand Republic. . . . Fine. Just got in. Now listens my young friend. I want three for Life with Father for tonight, and I want good ones, get me? . . . Fine. I’ll pick ’em up at the box-office. I’ll be seeing you.”

Jinny was looking at him with admiration.

He ordered briskly, “Now I’ll run down and have a quick shower and be ready in half an hour. Let’s have an early dinner and have plenty of time to talk. We’ll go to the Algonquin or the Plaza, and then after the show, I’ll take you to Twenty–One or the Stork Club. Been to any of those places?”

Cass sighed, “We tried the Marmoset, but we felt like a couple of outsiders.”

“You won’t with me. They know me! I’ll be seeing you.”

When he was gone, Jinny triumphed, “Now we’ll have a tremendous time. But—I adore Bradd, but he is kind of a faker, isn’t he!”

“What?”

“About this hotel being so out of the world. About getting these tickets that you can’t get. The way he does it, he just pays some speculator about three times what they’re worth. And about being such a sweetheart to all the night-clubs. It’s just going there often enough, and tipping more than enough. The wise guy—the great man about town! Why, you’re twice as distinguished as he is, and you look it!”

“Oh, now, Jinny, you’re dead wrong. He isn’t a faker.”

“A show-off, then.”

“But he isn’t! Now, Jinny! I see him in the court room. He likes to make a jury laugh, but there isn’t a steadier or better-prepared advocate in the district, and same way with his approach to his friends. He has the heart of a boy, and it pleases him so when he can do things for you that he just bubbles over. You’ve got to like Bradd!”

“Oh, I do, lots. I just meant—It irritates me if anybody thinks we’re hicks just because we don’t spend all our time doing New York—on a Wargate expense-account!”

“Don’t let his fun and high spirits fool you. You’ll come to love him.”

“Anything for peace,” she said. “All right, I’ll love him then.”

“Good!” said Cass.

At the Algonquin, Bradd pointed out one timid drama critic, one savage playwright, and two bored actors. Then they settled clown to the news from Grand Republic. . . . Harley Bozard had been seen at Austin with a handsome woman from Minneapolis. Major Umbaugh had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel. Jamie Wargate was now a flyer.

Then Bradd spoke seriously.

“New York seems to have brought you two even closer together. Jin, I’m glad you’ve got the Jay Laverick nonsense out of your system.”

“I never had any in it!”

“Oh, yes, you did! Jay’s an attractive heel, and a good friend of mine, but I wouldn’t trust him across the street with a deaf virgin aged seventy. He does the sympathy racket. Listen, young lady: Cass never would jump you properly about Jay, because he’s a sensitive gent, Cass is, and he’s afraid of you. I’m not. So— just how strongly did Mr. Jay express his ambition to make you?”

Cass was surprised that he was not indignant at this intrusion, and Jinny merely sputtered, “He never expressed anything of the kind! I wouldn’t let him!”

“You couldn’t help letting him. Didn’t he ever say anything—very whimsy and make-believe, the little darling!—about you and him starting an arty tea-room together—he put up the cash and you the good taste?”

“Ye-es, he did make some cracks about my talent for watercress.”

“That’s his standard line. I know you have too much sense to fall for him really, but still, you did let him stick around, and you better cut him out and cleave only to the dumb breadwinners like the Judge and me. We won’t let you down. Now you can tell me how I’ve been butting in.”

“Well, you have! And I won’t be bullied!”

“Tut!”

“I’ll fall for whom I like. I’m a free woman.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Oh, you make me tired,” she said, so feebly that Cass and Bradd smiled at each other, and presently she was smiling with them.

If Cass found it too breathless, Jinny was exhilarated by the different New York that Bradd disclosed to them. He took them to three night-clubs, in which he was cordially greeted by, if not with, fatted calves, and on top of that, he injected them, at one o’clock in the morning, into a pent-house party being given by a man who, Bradd explained, was a very important, high-class man, with a lot of influence in Washington, the representative of a chain of Western banks.

Jinny decided that, after all, she had been born to pent-house life; to the glass bar and the Dali drawings and the couch long enough to seat eight people, to the garden outside and the nervous lights in the skyscrapers that formed its mountainous horizon; born to the attentions of gallantly drunken gentlemen.

Thousands of men were telling Jinny that she was beautiful; thousands and tens of thousands of ageless women were shrieking that she must have another drink immediately, till the coils of people inside the pent-house seemed thicker and darker than the coils of cigarette-smoke. Suddenly even the gregarious Jinny could not endure the blare of voices, and she slipped out on the terrace.

So she beheld a New York new-born and celestial. She was astonished to come out not to a light-pointed darkness but to the rising sun. Four hours had gone in four minutes.

The pent-house was thirty stories up, on an apartment-house on Central Park West, looking eastward to Fifth Avenue and the park. To the northeast, incomprehensible waterways led through a golden mist to the open sea of Long Island Sound, and over them the bridges arched and vanished in a smudge of factories and airfields. The bulky castles of Fifth Avenue and beyond seemed but a narrow strip of gold-touched black floating upon the waters, and for a moment the ponderous city was as graceful as Venice.

To southward a thousand towers reached toward the sun, while just at her feet, far down, Central Park was still a dawn-dark labyrinth, with the reservoir like one of her own Northern lakes.

At her shoulder, Bradd’s voice murmured, “New York can be beautiful, eh? It’s London and Paris and San Francisco all in one.”

“Yes, I didn’t know how beautiful till you showed it to me, Bradd. I was scared of it, but I think I could love it.”

He kissed her, and in gratitude she responded recklessly. Bradd drew back. “We didn’t mean that! It was just an accidental salute to the sun. Don’t you ever tell that priggish Grand Republic lawyer about it.”

“Cass is NOT a prig—”

“I didn’t mean him. I meant that—what’s his name? Bradd Criley? The fellow who thinks you’re his sister. Are you?”

“Yes!”

Elbows on the parapet, they were talking quietly when Cass came out to find them. He was pleased when he saw their fresh, dawn-cooled faces.

“You two are the only people here that look as if you’ve ever slept, but as it’s tomorrow now, how about thinking of going home?” he chuckled.

“Fine!” said the artless Bradd.

On Saturday and Sunday, Bradd was the most conscientious pleasure-giver since Dennis the hangman. He took them to two theaters, for a drive in a victoria in Central Park. On Sixth Avenue he bought a dozen of the marzipan cakes that Jinny loved even more than candy, and they three walked down the street boldly eating them out of a paper bag. Sunday, they drove to Jones Beach and on to a restaurant with tables on the terrace.

By now, Jinny considered New York just as good as Grand Republic. But not Cass.

Bradd paid his share of all the bills, but he did not show off by trying to pay more. In all their arguments he took Cass’s side against Jinny or Jinny’s side against Cass, with equal cheerfulness. And he bought for her the first orchid of which she was ever the proprietor.

She confided to Cass, “You were entirely right about Bradd. He wasn’t trying to impress us about how well he knows New York. He just has a lot of fun exploring it, and he loves to have his friends share it.”

When Bradd had seen them off on the train, on Monday, Cass said to her, “Now you really begin to appreciate Bradd.”

“Yes—thanks to you.”

They returned to Grand Republic; they moved into the new house; the fall term of court opened; and the first case over which Cass presided was the divorce-suit of Beecher Filligan against his wife Pasadena, with Mr. Jay Laverick warmly referred to in the testimony.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

FILLIGAN VS. LAVERICK

Beecher Filligan had only a minority share in the ownership of Havock & Filligan, contractors, but he also played at architecture and he had inherited a brickyard and a cement works. In the peerage of Grand Republic he rated as a viscount, with the highest distinction in the playing of backgammon. He was forty, and a friend of Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick.

His wife Pasadena, born in that Oxford of the Pacific Coast, was probably beautiful. She looked like a poor color-reproduction of a Botticelli goddess of rather late spring. She was derivative in everything except her make-up, in which she showed talent, care, and diligence.

Beecher was sick of her, sick of her mildly clattering tongue, her extravagance, and her monotony in bed. He wanted to get rid of her, and since he had no legal reasons, he set about creating them.

He knew that, despite her cow-like amiability when she had everything she wanted, she could be shrill and stubborn if she thought she was being cheated, so the fault had to be seemingly hers, and his the forgiveness or the vengeance.

Jay Laverick took notice of every halfway-pretty woman who seemed obtainable, and Beecher saw to it that Pasadena should appear extremely obtainable.

She was a Talking Woman, and like most Talking Women she was too busy babbling to notice what was happening about her. Her telephone calls, to announce that she would come and play bridge next Thursday, took half an hour. By going out to the kitchen and being orally helpful, she could get any cook to quit during the first fortnight, and Beecher usually went to sleep to her inane discussion of something that would have happened if it had only happened.

Beecher was not utterly to be blamed for his cold plotting against her. His plan had started one evening when, after he had complained absently about her extravagance and her astonishing tendency to get accidentally kissed at country-club dances, she had sneered, “Well, if I’m so lousy, why don’t you DO something, and not just yap about it?”

Not till two years later, when she was already married to the reluctant Jay Laverick, did she realize that Beecher had done something.

Beecher, in the oldest and simplest of tricks, began his work by having Jay at the house for three-handed rummy and being called out to the cement works at ten P.M., then telephoning at eleven that he would not be able to return till two. Venus and Freud did the rest.

Beecher’s careful labor was almost ruined by Jay’s getting interested in a much prettier and livelier woman, young Jinny Timberlane, so he had Jay for house-guest at his summer camp on Lake Winnemapaug, was called away “for two days,” and returned late that same night. He despised Jay for an amateur Don Juan when he found them both in her bed, and asleep.

He said to Jay, “I ought to kill you, and I do happen to have a loaded rifle here, but I think the only decent, civilized way out of this horrible mess that you two have dragged me into is for you to marry her as soon as I divorce her.”

Jay said, Why certainly; that’s what he had intended to do, all along.

Pasadena, with her rouge smeared, was very distasteful to Jay.

Later, in chambers, Pasadena reported to judge Timberlane, “Beecher practically cried over all that he had tried to do for me, and I just despised him. After that, I was sure I wanted to marry Jay, who is a real man, not a whiner. But I will say for Beecher that he did manage to make me feel like considerable of a heel.”

She was distasteful to Judge Timberlane in any state of make-up. He said, “But, Pas, any husband must sense it at once if his wife even begins to stray, and what I don’t understand is how either you or your husband could be taken in by such an obvious wolf as Laverick.”

“Don’t you dare say anything against Jay! He’s a gentleman, even when he’s drunk, and he’s going to marry me.”

He was, and he did.