"The Web" was tried out in Baltimore the following April, Zoe, Ida Blair, and Bruce Visigoth traveling down on the same train with the company. It cost Lilly a pang for Zoe to miss the two days of school and a vocal, a French, and a piano lesson, but the theater attracted Zoe like the blithesome little moth she was. The duties of her High School combined with the unrelenting tutelage of Treiste molded her young days pretty rigidly to form, but more than once, during the rehearsals of "The Web," Lilly, seated in the black maw of the auditorium, would turn suddenly to the feel of her daughter's gaze burning like sun through glass into the darkness. The company adopted her as a pet. The director babied her. Once, as the afternoon rehearsal was disbanding, she crept up through a box to the stage. The footlights were dark, but she came down quite freely toward them, seeming to feel their mock blaze, and sang a snatch or two from the tenderestLiederever written, bits of Schubert and Hugo Wolf, the company gathering in the wings to listen and applaud.
The incident, slight as it was, brought the scratch of tears to Lilly's eyes and the pull of half hysteria to her lips. What if, after all, an incredible fulfillment was gathering about her like a vast dawn? "O God! please!"
And so, to the unending delight and amusement of Bruce, Zoe went along to Baltimore, Lilly pinching a little over the expense and pressing out ribbons and girlish accessories up to the last minute.
With Ida Blair, who had sunk back against years the colorlessness of cold dish water, herself more colorless, it was as if she had fired her one and only shot and run retreating behind the explosion.
Already her name had been linked with a co-author on programs and three-sheets, because a collaborator, a professional mender of plays, had been called in at the last moment to riddle the drama's somber story with a few "laughs." A character policeman, a comedy jury foreman, and a subplot of love story between the character policeman and an Irish cook had been "written in." The last act entirely revised, a happy ending substituted, and the theme of the story extricated like a jumping nerve.
It was the heroic treatment administered by experts to save what looked like unmistakable demise after the first Baltimore performance, and all the while Ida Blair sat mutely by, trying to probe through the actuality of her play or what was left of it, actually in the acting.
"The Steel Trap," as it was renamed, played to indifferent reviews and receipts the remainder of the Baltimore engagement, and lost money in Washington, but to the director, Bruce Visigoth, and certainly to Lilly, looked a potential property.
So after two weeks the play was removed, revamped, recast, still another play diagnostician called in, and under his surgery the third and fourth acts combined, and the original role of love story made to predominate what sociological note the play still contained. After an October tryout in Stamford and a New York opening of still doubtful reception, when the production hung between life and death and all the well-known exigencies of oxygen were applied in the form of "papering" the house with two weeks of free tickets, press-agenting,et al., the public decided to like it.
"Who Did It?" as it was re-renamed, settled down to a run of forty-three New York weeks, and along the Rialto the source of its authorship leaked out and became curbstone, and finally newspaper, patter.
At the end of six months Ida Blair had resigned her bookkeepership, erected a small but perfect plinth of blue granite in a certain hillside cemetery, purchased a story-and-a-half bungalow in the heart of two Long Island acres, and was raising leghorns and educating a niece by marriage.
For the forty-three metropolitan weeks, not to mention stock, foreign, motion pictures, and road incomes that were to accrue later, Lilly was receiving her share, never less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week and often considerably more.
It was a windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken reproach of her child.
That same winter a cashier's note with her weekly check announced a thirty-three and a third per cent advance in salary. Life had suddenly quickened its tempo. She was passing through one of those eras when events, long crouched, seem to spring simultaneously.
* * * * *
In April, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. Daily life, even to the indirectly touched, took on a new throb. Fourteen men employees of the Amusement Enterprise Company enlisted the first week. A service flag went up. Bruce Visigoth, outside the draft limit, immediately enrolled on a service committee, spending two days out of every week in Washington. Vaudeville ranks sagged suddenly and for a brief moment the gray-haired actor came back into his own. Office tension tightened. A nervousness set in. A telephone ringing could set Lilly's nerves to quivering and the telephone not ringing fill her with a nameless sort of anxiety.
More and more, too, it seemed to her, with the emotions always just a scratch beneath the surface those war times, that the agony of pretense between her and Bruce Visigoth could not endure. That he had applied for a commission in active service Lilly knew, but merely from correspondence. There had been no talk about it. She awoke nights, heavy with a dread she could not name.
Only the violent conjuring of her child and a vision of Albert Penny carried her rebellion past these bad places. Their frequent enforced conferences; the chance touching of their fingers, only to fly too instantly apart; the impeccable masks of indifference and elaborate casualness of manner; the forbidden singing through her entire being as he walked into the office and the imperturbability of the manner she must present to him. To contemplate a future futile with such dreary repetition became almost more than she could bear, and bitter with that salt were the lonely tears she cried at night.
Even the occasional appearance of Robert Visigoth came more and more to be a sort of biting irritant to a gangrenous spot she thought long since had hardened.
He had grown enormously fat and Rufus G. Higginbothom, dying, had enhanced that glutted look by bequeathing to his only daughter, Hindle, without stipulation, a leaf-lard fortune of some seventeen million dollars.
When his daughter, Pauline, was thirteen, he brought her to New York on one of his frequent fliers, parading the fat, freckled, and frightened youngster from one department to another.
"How much do you think she weighs?" he was fond of interrogating, with his small parental eyes full of pride. "Hundred and thirty-six for thirteen years. Not bad, eh?"
With about the sickest sensation she was ever to know, Lilly saw him this day lead his daughter past her open door, his face averted and the roll of fat at the back of his neck redly conscious.
It was after this incident that a half plan, long dormant, lifted its head. Every day in her comings and goings through the wide fireproof corridors of the Forty-second Street building a sign on a ground-glass door waved at her like a flag:
Playbroker
Authors'ManuscriptsPlaced
She had little doubt of her ability to launch out into a scheme of this sort for herself and liked to incubate the idea in the back of her head, going so far as to inspect a tiny office on the fifteenth floor, mentally furnishing it up, and visualizing her name in neat black letters on her own ground-glass door.
She did broach the subject to Zoe one evening, who, with her head wrapped in a brilliant fez improvised out of an old cushion top, stood before the mirror, attitudinizing her part in school entertainment.
"No! Don't go into anything tin horn like that! I hate for you to keep playingsecond fiddle."
In the pause that followed, hardly perceptible enough to hold the drop of a pin, Zoe flashed toward her mother, the colossal ego of her youth somehow penetrated for the moment.
"Why, Lilly—I—I mean—You know what I mean—"
"Of course I know what you mean, dear. Second fiddle!"
And so what with Zoe's growing demands and Lilly's rooted fear of any jeopardy to them, time marched on rather imperceptibly, except that Lilly thinned and whitened a bit, slendering down, as it were, to more and more sisterly proportions as her daughter shot up to meet her. They were shoulder to shoulder now, if the truth were known, Zoe a little in the preponderance.
Meanwhile, Zoe was growing restive of the somewhat irksome limitations of the Ninety-first Street apartment. She complained that the room was oppressive for her long hours of study and practice. Visits to the Daab studio, faithful in effect to a Doge's palace and where she was more and more a favorite, and also to the pretentious homes of one or two school companions, had an upsetting effect upon her. The long, gloomy neck of hallway depressed her and she voiced bitterly a secret aversion of Lilly's for the single bathroom with the ugly wooden floor and shallow bathtub. "Dump" she called the little flat, her brilliant blue gaze blackening up.
"I can't have the girls and boys visit me in this little two-by-four, dear. It's a dump!"
And so early in the run of "Who Did It?" the little group moved again.This time to a strictly modern, pretentious apartment in West EndAvenue, whose upper apartments boasted a river view and three baths andrented as high as four and five thousand dollars a year.
For twelve hundred Lilly obtained the ground-floor rear, no view, but five fairly large rooms and two capacious baths. And since such a house takes its tone from its highest-priced tenants, they enjoyed with them the uniformed hall service, the ornate entrancede luxeand foyerde trop.
In lieu of maid, Harry again occupied those quarters, his grandmother sleeping on a davenport in the sitting-dining-room. There were no roomers, Lilly carrying the resultant deficit.
She and Zoe again shared what corresponded to the parlor, this time a fairly large room, with alcove curtained off for sleeping quarters. They furnished it themselves, quite charmingly, too, and with a consensus of taste except where Lilly gave way to Zoe's really superior intuition.
There were plain écru walls, not papered, but, at Zoe's instance, painted and roughened up with a process called "stippling." The two-tone brown rug. An overstuffed couch of generous proportions and upholstered in a nicely woven imitation of Flemish tapestry. Along the back of this piece, which occupied virtually the center of the room, was a long, narrow table the exact length of the couch, with a pair of Italian polychrome candlesticks, gift of Gedney Daab, at either end.
A piece of old red brocade hung over the fireplace, covering the ugly mirror, and facing it a brown-rep fireside chair, coarse tan fishnet curtains, a pair of huge black-velvet floor cushions with orange-colored balls in each center, bespeaking a new art era which was dawning as colorfully and as formlessly as a pricked egg yolk.
An upright piano was stacked with music, and, in spite of Lilly's argument for them, no pictures on the walls, only a brilliant panel portrait of Zoe, signed Gedney Daab, her young form in faint profile against a background of cloth of gold, the face up-flung to a flow of sunlight that crossed the picture in a churchy ray.
"If we cannot have originals or etchings, we won't have any. I hate middle-classness."
"But, Zoe, dear—a few good prints. 'The Age of Innocence'—"
She kissed her mother on the mouth with all the outrageous patronage of youth.
"You're a darling, Lilly, but they just aren't doing it that way any more, dear."
So there were no pictures.
At the time of this move, Harry had been holding the position of clerk at the cigar, magazine, and book concession of one of the newest and noisiest of Broadway's terrific commercial hotels.
The hours were difficult, from noon to midnight, but within the seventeen months he had advanced from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week. A new, a surprising spruceness had laid hold of him. He took to exceedingly tall small collars and vivid neckwear, his suit very narrow and making him look less than ever his years.
Mrs. Schum, too, had taken on some of that well-being, and, though she complained constantly of a sciatic twist in her side, something had lifted from off her. Her patter about the house, in the slippers with the rubber insets, was lighter; she discarded the old jet-edged dolman with the humps on the shoulders and the slits for the arms, for a decent full-length black coat with a stitched braid border and self-covered buttons, gift of her grandson. There had been a present for Lilly, too, a light-blue, drugstore-purchased celluloid toilet set.
He no longer sat idle in his room, his light eyes futile with staring at space or his head down tiredly in his hands. Something had indeed come over Harry.
"After all," said Lilly, always readily buoyed, "the operation did accomplish!"
Sometimes, since his mornings were free, he rode down to the office with Lilly, eagerly insistent to pay her car fare and cram a return Subway ticket into the warm pink aperture of flesh where her glove clasped.
Once he bought her a little spray of heather off a vender's tray.
"Harry, you mustn't spend on me this way. You must begin to save your money for that right girl when she comes along."
Never quick with retort, he stood watching her dart into the foyer of the Forty-second Street building, a sudden silence shaping around him that had in it the little noises of birds singing. "Right girl," he kept repeating after her, or something like that, and remained there loitering for twenty minutes after her presence had fluttered through the revolving doors and into the elevator.
And then suddenly a quick succession of events set in.
One night Lilly and Zoe, returning from a Boston Symphony concert for which they held first-balcony season seats, found Harry trying to pour brandy between the clenched lips of Mrs. Schum, who lay rigid on the hall floor where she had fallen, her head bleeding from a sharp contact with the door.
Her poor face with the shriveled bags of flesh seemed suddenly shrunk, and, holding the flask against her teeth, Harry's hands were trembling so that the liquid poured in a thin stream off the edge of her mouth.
After half an hour of desperate and unavailing use of home remedies, Lilly sent for a doctor, one in the building, who came down in dinner clothes.
At twelve o'clock that night Mrs. Schum, without regaining consciousness, was rushed to the Saint Genevieve Hospital in East Seventy-eighth Street, for an emergency operation that had to do with a growth in her side.
It was Lilly's first contact with the casualty of sudden illness. In the little anteroom of the hospital, her hand in Harry's, she sat the remainder of the night through. He was constantly wiping away the tears from his light eyes and looking away to gulp. She reassured him where she could, tightening her hold of his hand.
"Don't—let them hurt her."
"They aren't hurting her, Harry dear. She can't feel at all under the anaesthetic."
"But they won't know. Gramaw won't let them know. Tell them, Lilly, she's that way—not to hurt her—please."
"Harry—dear!"
At dawn milk wagons began to clatter through streets no grayer than Harry's face. But at six o'clock Mrs. Schum was reported "as well as could be expected" and the operation apparently a success.
They rode home through the early morning, Lilly insisting upon a taxicab and Harry lying back, quite frankly spent, against her arm. Her vitality was unquenchable, mounted, in fact, under stress. Untired, she brewed him hot coffee, forced him to drink it and lie down; tidied up the little flat there at six-thirty o'clock in the morning, with a hit-and-a-miss it is true, but allaying all signs of confusion; fluted an Eton collar for Zoe and packed her off to school; and at half after eight, just out of a cold and invigorating shower, was combing out the fine electric rush of her hair, a pink Turkish bathrobe, the color of her firm, cool skin, wrapped tightly about her and caught in by a cord at her waist line.
Suddenly through the mirror she saw the door open, and before she could call out, Harry stood in the center of the room, his eyes running quite unmistakably over the contour of her sheathed body.
It was the first time he had ever violated the slightest nicety, and, outraged even in her pity for him, her hand flew up, drawing the robe closer at her breast.
"Don't come in!" she cried, retreating up against the dresser and turning her shoulder with the hair flowing over it toward him. "How dared you come in here without knocking! Go!"
He was crying, not seeming to know it, because he continued, even as she stood blazing at him, to stand staring through the rain of tears.
"Harry, you're forgetting yourself. You mustn't give way. Your grandmother is over the worst now—"
Suddenly he was on his knees, his back round and shaken with sobs.
"Lilly—Lilly—can't you see?"
"See what? Is anything wrong? Harry," she cried, stooping to shake him by the shoulder, "has anything happened again? Are you in trouble?"
He would not rise, following her, to her horror, by walking on his knees, pressing and pressing the hem of her garments, and before she realized it burning his kisses down into it. She fought him off, tearing from his grasp and staggering back against the wall.
"Harry—you're in trouble again."
He caught her bare arm, pressing his lips into the yielding flesh.
"Lilly, I can't hold back any longer. I love you. I'm all alone. With gramaw here I could hold back—somehow—but now—Lilly—Lilly—I love you."
She could only stare, her mouth fallen open and the rim of her eyes their widest.
"It's been so long to—hold back—so long. Since that first day at the street car—you kissed me—and now with gramaw gone—Lilly—"
She jerked him up from his knees this time, holding him firmly, even absurdly, by the coat lapels, shaking him.
"Harry, you've gone mad!"
"I love you, Lilly. All these years. I'm all alone now and—"
Her glance shot to the egress of the door, but, seeing that he anticipated her, she did not dart, but held herself back from him, her hands in an X across her breast.
"Harry," she said, trying to keep out of her voice a rising sense of fear, "you're not well You don't know what you are saying or doing."
"You treat me like a child, but I'm a man. Your age! You hear—a man with a man's feelings for a woman—for you—Lilly. You're my—be my—"
"You get out," she cried, her terror bursting out like a flame. "Get out or I'll call Mr. Alquist."
She referred to the superintendent of the apartment building, although she knew him to be well out of hearing. It is probable that Harry knew, too, because he had her by the elbows, pressing them in against her body and her hair flowing across his face.
"Lilly, Lilly, Lilly!" he kept repeating, breathing so heavily it sickened her to hear and feel it, and all the time fumbling with his free hand down into his waistcoat pocket, bringing up a bit of tissue paper which he tore at with his teeth, revealing the icy flash of a great oval diamond ring set up high in platinum. "It's yours, Lilly. I want to cover you with them. I want you to blaze with them—"
He pressed it on her finger, pushing it down the entire length, danced her hand before her, catching her to him finally and crushing her and the flow of her hair to him, kissing so fiercely down that red marks came out against her whiteness, and when her cry finally rose to a shriek let go of her, staggering back, his face, never quite clean of pimples, suddenly fat-looking and with a lionlike thickening up of the features.
"Ah—yah—yah—yah—yah!"
His incoherence was horrible and she began to sob at him through hysteria.
"You go! You get out! You stole that ring! You're a thief! You stole that ring!" she cried, thrusting it with a sudden quick hand down the V of his waistcoat. "Get out! Get out! Your grandmother—your—" Then, because words failed and her knees threatened to give way, she snatched up a book from the table, standing quivering and in the attitude of hurling.
He did go then, as if the book had actually struck, making a detour of her and his knees quite bent as he walked.
She finished her dressing in quick, fuddled movements, voice out in her breathing, buttoning up wrong and tearing open again in the grip of a nervous frenzy.
A panicky need to gain the outdoors seized her; air to sweep and somehow to cleanse her.
Before she was quite dressed, her belt not yet adjusted, in fact, the bell rang in three titters and a prolonged grill. She stood arrested, for some reason beginning all over her trembling. When Harry did not answer she went out herself, opening the door to a mere slit. A foot was pushed immediately in, crowding her back against the wall. Two men walked in, without removing derby hats, and at sight of them the nameless terror pinned her there in silence.
"Harry Calvert live here?"
She stood with her answer locked in her throat, conscious, on the moment, of Harry appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her. She wanted, for the same nameless reason, to motion him back, to shriek out a warning, to throw herself against his presence. To herself in quick repetitions:
"O God, make him go back!"
"Harry Calvert?"
"Yes," replied Harry from where he stood.
"Warrant for your arrest. Charged with entering the apartment of Mrs. J.King at Hotel Admiral and stealing one four-carat diamond ring valuedat five thousand dollars. More evidence than we know what to do with.You better come quietly."
"Harry, deny it! They've made a mistake! You haven't the right to come here at a time like this. There is sickness. His grandmother is dying at a hospital. You've made a mistake. Take me. I'll appear for him. I'll give his bail. All you want. Deny it, Harry. Harry!"
For answer a sharp explosion rang suddenly into the narrow hallway, banging and reverberating against the walls, crowding faces out behind an immediate purplish smoke.
"Harry! Harry! My God! Harry!"
He crumpled up quietly, one shoulder in the lead and his left leg bending under him, straightening out then, with half a writhe to his back.
"No! No! Help him! God! No! No! No!"
But yes. Harry had shot himself, very truly, too, through the heart.
There followed black weeks, with Mrs. Schum lying there on the edge of death, yet reluctant to go, Lilly's days an intricate pattern of hospital, office, and home.
She was more tired than she knew and for days after the tragedy went about with a springy little sob just behind her throat, which was perpetually taut from holding back tears.
The effect upon Zoe was telling. She whose solicitude for her mother had never been any too noteworthy and who with all the unthinking blitheness of an unthinking childhood had taken much for granted, developed, suddenly, a new consciousness.
She would literally drag Lilly away from the pressing board.
"Don't, Lilly. I'm old enough to iron out my own ribbons." Or: "Don't polish my shoes, Lilly. It's outrageous!"
"But, Zoe, I would rather you put the time on practicing or reading."
"I can do both."
One Saturday morning she was even awakened to an aroma of coffee, her daughter standing attendant at the bedside with a tray of steaming breakfast.
"Stay in bed this morning, Lilly. You look fagged. Let me take a message down to Visi for you. Oh, Lilly, do! I'll wear my new red tam."
"Nonsense! I'm going down as usual."
"But, Lilly, I want him to see me in it."
Probably Lilly regarded her daughter a second longer than the occasion warranted, because Zoe broke away from the gaze somewhat redly.
"Faugh! I hate him. He reminds me of a wild horse. But I'll show him some day that I'm on earth. I'm as full of my own ideals as he is of his."
"Of course you are, dear; but why so angry?"
"I'm not."
Then Lilly rose, smiling as she dressed.
The household was not easy of readjustment until finally were procured the services of one of the charwomen from the Bronx Theater, who prepared the meals and could flute Zoe's collars to the utmost delicacy.
At this time Zoe was an advanced junior in High School, president of her class, although the hawklike tutelage of Cleofant Trieste had delayed graduation for a year, slowing down her curriculum to meet his demands of harmony, languages, rhythmic dancing, and sports. She had a long, sure swimming stroke that could carry her again her length, rode with the fine fluid movement of a young body at one with her mount, and because of her five hours a week at gymnasium excelled in the rather uncommon sport of handball.
She no longer wore her hair in its great avalanche of curls down her back; they were caught in now with an amber barrette. Nights Lilly loved to brush them out until they flared to a dust of gold about her head. There was no light too dull for this hair to catch. It sprang out in radiance against any background.
"When you sing Marguerite, Zoe, you won't need a wig."
"Ah, but when I sing Electra—Thaïs—the real me—no namby-pamby Marguerite—no pearls—that's how I feel about Thaïs—as if she were a great opal full of fire. Hair," flopping her head backward with a bounce of curls, "is hot—it restricts. These curls—they are all hot and crawly around my neck, holding me."
"Poor Harry! You remember how he used to love to take you out walking to show off your curls?"
"Lilly, is Mrs. Schum going to get well?"
"I don't know. It frightens me. I cannot bear to look ahead for her, poor dear."
"If she gets well she'll have to know, won't she, that Harry didn't go to war?"
"Yes, and somehow—I couldn't stand her knowing that."
"She'll know it some day, anyhow."
"Yes, but then maybe where it will be easier for her to understand."
On her own responsibility Lilly had employed this subterfuge with Mrs. Schum. Slowly as she came clutching back at consciousness, the name of her grandson more and more on her twisted lips, Lilly whispered it down to her, closing her hand over the tired old bony one.
"Listen, dear Mrs. Schum, I've—news for you."
"They're all against him—"
"No, no, dear. While you've been so ill, what we had hoped for has happened. Harry's been accepted, dear—he's enlisted."
She crinkled her brow, trying to understand.
"They wouldn't take him. He wanted to fight for his country. They were all against him—"
"No, no, dear. It's all different now. Since our country is at war Harry has been accepted. The boys were rushed overnight to training camp. Thousands of them. He came weeks ago to tell you good-by, but you were too ill to know. He's on a transport now, dear, sailing to fight for his country. Aren't you proud? Aren't we all proud?"
The poor hands began to tremble, feeling their way up along Lilly's arm.
"Harry's gone—to war?"
"Y-yes—dear."
She seemed to speak then, through a pale transparent sleep, into which a new contentment pressed lightly.
"Harry's gone. Annie, he's a soldier. He's so gentle with me, Annie, a meek child, like you were. Never any back talk or a harsh word. Whatever wrong he did was forced on him by those working against him. They were all against him. His Mamma-Annie knows. She bore him and I raised him. Fight, Harry! The streak from your father can't keep you down. Show them, Harry, show them. Whatever wrong my boy did was forced on him by those working against him—"
"That's all past now, dear."
"He liked you, Lilly. He'd have gone through fire for you. You were always good to my soldier boy. I was forever finding old bits of things that you had thrown away among his belongings. Don't tell him I told you. Old pencils and old gloves. He was a great one for gathering up things for keepsakes after you had thrown them away. Gloves—found some old ones of yours under his pillow one morning. Not taking things, you understand, but just pulled out of the rubbish heap for remembrance."
"I do understand, dear."
And so the weeks of her illness and of Lilly's deception dragged on.
There were holes in the fabric of the story, obvious to any but Mrs. Schum's tired consciousness, and a too sudden inquiry could throw Lilly off her guard, but there was a flag with one shining service star glowing above the narrow bed, and evenings straight from the office Lilly would hasten to the hospital with fruits that could only be looked at, and newspapers to be unfurled and read.
"Is his name in the papers yet?"
"Not yet."
"Why?"
"I—You see, dear, the transport has just reached the other side."
"My boy will show them—"
The kindly spirit of the deception had fallen over the entire corridor. A maternity case in the room adjoining sent in a silk flag with hand-embroidered stars. The head nurse, herself on the eve of sailing for service, had shopped the flag with the one bright star. The doctor, fathering the lie, called her "captain" and saluted her upon entering the room with a flash of palm and a click of heels.
She could smile at this, but with lips as blue and shriveled as drowned flesh.
One night after she had dozed off and wandered into some phantasmagoria where she seemed to fancy herself seated in the bow of a boat with her daughter, she opened her eyes suddenly, reaching out for Lilly's hand.
"Lilly, your poor mother. Do you ever think of her?"
"Yes, yes, I do, dear."
"You remember, Lilly, how she used to rush down right from the breakfast table to the bargain bins for those pink and blue mill-ends she used to dress you so pretty in. My! wasn't she one for Valenciennes lace, though! Wouldn't she just dress Zoe up, though—"
"Wouldn't she!"
"She was a good woman in her way, Lilly, even with all her fussing and nagging. My! how she did used to nag! I understood her. The ketchup. She was a great one for condiments and would have them all over the other boarders. Ketchup and the best cut of the meat for you and your father. There was just no pleasing her. But I understood her—she's a good woman, Lilly."
"Indeed, mamma is good!"
"It's not that I don't glory in you, Lilly, and your having a wonder child. You know I've always gloried in you. You've a head on you I always say that's going to carry you beyond us all, but don't you ever feel, Lilly, that maybe your doings have been wayward?"
"I do. I do."
"Your mother. Your father, as patient and as fine a man as breathed. Your husband, I don't know him, but life is so short. So terribly short. So full of pain and regrets for what can't be undone. That's why I cannot go and leave my boy behind—to suffer alone. I want him to go first. He's not strong. What is life, except doing for those we love? Don't you ever feel that about them out there, Lilly? Life is so short—such a struggle—alone—"
"Dear Mrs. Schum, you—you—you're right."
"Ah, I know—-the young man in the box with you at 'The Web' that night it opened. Your boss. I know! He likes you, that young man does, Lilly. It's easy to see it in his eyes for you. That's why it's dangerous. Harry likes you, too—but not that way, I think. He saves your old gloves. That's always struck me as funny. They're all against him. The fire escapes; that's why I lock the doors. You hear—the fire escapes. Poor Lilly! just a little too much ambition and not quite enough talent to reach. I used to predict for you all the things that are cropping out in your child. Zoe is to be the one, Lilly. Not you—or Harry—or Mamma-Annie—Zoe! Funny his saving your gloves—"
These were the times that Lilly would sit there crying, old musty memories rising around her like kicked-up dust. There were whole evenings when her mother's name was constantly on the not always coherent lips, and to Lilly the old sense of the unreality of her universe, or was it herself, laid somewhat, by the busy years, would come surging again. Where were the visions for which she had climbed, spike-shod, up that loving wall of living flesh back there? How long since her last dream of self had vanished? Zoe was her answer.
One evening when Lilly arrived home from the hospital she found Zoe squatting in bed, her face naughtily screwed into a little grimalkin knot, elbows pressed into her sides, palms up, and all attitudinized to emulate a Chinese god. Holding this pose for a full minute after Lilly had entered the room, she began to bounce in hilarity up and down on the mattress, probably to allay her own sense of inner unease.
For the full round of the minute Lilly stared, her glance widening and darkening. Something had happened to Zoe. Something horrid.
"Don't you love it, Lilly? Don't stand there like you're frozen. Everybody loves it. All the models down at Daab's are wearing it this way. Thaïs does. Jeanne d'Arc does. Don't look at me that way."
Zoe had bobbed her hair. It hung quite straight, and in an outstanding shock, because of its thickness, just below her ears. Franz Hals would have loved the rectilinear contour of her. She was saucy. She was abbreviated. She was naughty; and liked to flop her head about for the soft throw of her hair.
Her mother dropped rather than sat on a chair edge, trying to keep down the storm of anger that had her by the throat and eyeballs.
"Your curls! All gone! Your beautiful hair! What have you done? You wicked girl! You—wicked—girl—you!"
It was the first time in all the largesse of her youth that such a tone had assailed Zoe. The very seventeenness of her revolted; she dropped her attitude.
"Why, Lilly—you—you're talking like other—mothers."
But the spank in Lilly's hand was suddenly singing against her palm and there was a rush of her not so forbearing forefathers to the very front.
"You horrid girl! How dared you? Don't come near me! Your beautiful hair that I've never been too tired to brush for hours! To have realized those gorgeous curls in you and for—for this! You horrid, selfish girl—selfish—selfish!"
All during this, her naughtiness fallen from her like a cloak, Zoe sat regarding her parent, her lower lip less and less steady. She might have been stunned, trying to keep her equilibrium by a series of rapid little blinks, Lilly meanwhile sunk into a heap and crying down into her hands.
"Lilly—dearest—darling—est—"
"Don't talk to me."
"But, Lilly—you—you've always wanted me to be true to myself."
"You're not true to yourself. You're true to a pose, a silly fad that you've picked up around the Daab studio."
"You always said if I wanted to be a circus rider I could, just so I was better than all the other circus riders. Well, I wanted to have my hair bobbed and I bobbed it bobbiest."
"Your comparison is stupid. You know it is. You've never taken a step before without talking it over with me. You know perfectly well I should not have interfered. I should have tried to make you see the folly of cutting off your beautiful curls, but if you had still insisted, off they might have come just the same. I think it is that as much as the loss of the curls. Your privilege has become a license. You've made everything seem ridiculous—me—you."
"Then you've made me so. If you want me to be like other girls you should have reared me like other girls. Have other girls' fathers who don't know they are on earth? Have other girls' mothers who—"
"Zoe!"
As if the words had been live coals scuttling off her lips before she knew, Zoe sat back, staring at her mother's stare, scalding tears already welling.
"Lilly, forgive me. I—I wish I could cut my tongue out. I didn't mean it that way; you know I didn't. If you don't forgive me I can't stand it," the stabbing consciousness of that impulsively flung reproach already through her like a hurting wound.
"You are right, Zoe, I—"
"I didn't mean one word, Lilly darling, not one eeny word. It's just that all of a sudden it seemed to me to be the freest, gladdest thing in the world to cut off my hair. That's it, free! Haven't you ever had that feeling, darling? Free! I wouldn't have done it, Lilly, if I had known how it would hurt. Lilly—darling—mother. If I've hurt you I want to just die. My own dear—Lilly—"
Her voice caught on the crest of a sob and she was at her mother's feet, seeking out her lap, tears rushing down over her incoherence.
"I'll grow it back again for you, Lilly. I'll make it up to you, sweetheart. I didn't mean that—what I said about fathers or—or other girls—you know I didn't. I'm bad. Terrible."
In some alarm, Lilly placed her hand on the shorn head, shuddering in spite of herself as if the ends were bleeding.
"Sh-h-h, Zoe! It upset me, dear, that's all—the shock of seeing you sitting up in bed there—with it off."
"I'll make it up to you, Lilly. In so many ways. Soon. It's settled, dear, that Auchinloss is coming to America in the fall to conduct. Trieste is going to arrange my audition for September. He promised to-day I'd be ready. Think, Lilly, my audition so soon. I'll have the wig made out of my own hair, dear, for Marguerite. Don't feel badly, Lilly; the wig will look—"
"I don't any more, Zoe. It was just the shock—"
"I know it was silly, dear, but it will grow quickly and I just had that feeling to be free—you see, dear—"
"I do see, dear, I do. Zoe, look at me. Doesn't it ever come over you, on the eve of so much, dear—that perhaps you do need his—your father's guardianship—"
"Now just because I saidthat. I tell you I'm a devil. I didn't mean it—not one word—"
"I know you didn't. It cropped out unconsciously. You're not to blame. He's a good man, Zoe, your father, and his steady hand might do much where I—may have failed."
"If you talk that way I can't stand it. You tell me so often he's a good man, I wonder if he really is—"
"You're getting beyond me, Zoe. I wonder if the day isn't inevitable when you are going to break out more and more into unconscious reproach."
"Lilly—no—no—"
"Oh, I don't only mean what you said just now. But it's on my mind more and more, now that you are old enough to decide for yourself. You cannot be sucked back any more into a life you would not tolerate. You can choose. That is what I have been waiting for. Doesn't the ache ever come over you, Zoe, to see your father? Just a natural instinctive ache, if nothing else—your grandparents—"
"No! No! No! I hate it all as you hated it. If you want to punish me terribly—for saying something I didn't mean—just talk them to me. I want wideness, must have it! Room! I—I could say it in music better than in words. Some day I shall compose a song that says it for me—the—the way I feel it. Don't stop now saving me from them. Wait. Wait, Lilly, until I sing. Trieste understands even better than you. I'm the surprise he keeps hinting about to everyone. I'm going to bowl them over at my audition. Lilly—have I ever failed you? Have I ever come in second for you? No, and I never will. You won't ever be sorry, Lilly—on my account. You won't even care that I've cut off my hair. Lilly dear, do you believe me? I'm always going to come in first for you. First!"
"I do, dear, I do."
And of course in the end they sobbed together, and lay far into the dawn, cheek to cheek, until finally Zoe dropped off to sleep and Lilly lay wide-eyed beside her, the perfume of her child's soft breathing against her cheek.
The next morning in the reading room of the Public Library a notice catapulted itself at Lilly from the second page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat:
L.H. Hines, president, and Albert Penny, vice president of Slocum-Hines Hardware Company, leave shortly for Washington, where they have been called to give expert advice upon installing American Canteen Service.
The day that followed seemed to Lilly vague with a sort of fog. A disturbing something lay against her consciousness and one of her unquiet nights was filled with the unaccountable crying. But morning invariably brought back reality and her workaday could envelop her busily, even happily.
Meanwhile, war, like a spreading wing, had blackened against the international sky. Somme, Vimy Ridge, Aisne had been bled, and more than ever the streets that led toward the embarkation points were the color of khaki, women frequently running alongside, crying and laughing bewildered farewells.
Some of this war hysteria, of which she was really no integral part, had, however, hold of Lilly. Her throat ached with it. Her state cropped out in her work. One afternoon she traveled to Newark for the purpose of seeing a Japanese sleight-of-hand act, and came away without sufficient impression of any kind to pass judgment.
Bruce Visigoth eyed her closely.
"You're tired," he said, commenting upon her failure to turn in the report. "You need a rest."
"No," she said, "it's just—a little of everything—I guess—then Harry Calvert—that was a shock, you see, and now his grandmother. I'm with her at the hospital every evening—and then this war—this futile bleeding—horror."
He could never, with her, keep his tone as level as his manner.
"Lilly," he burst out, "drop it all for a couple of weeks. You and the youngster come out to the place in Tarrytown. There are some things I want to talk over with you. I'm working now to obtain the rights to that little beauty from the Spanish you gave me to read. I'm going to produce after this war mess slows down. It is the exquisite kind of thing I'd expect you to find."
"I didn't. Zoe read it to me one evening. She was the one to see its possibilities."
"It's spring, Lilly, and I want you to see the place. My sister Pauline moved in last week. I want you to be our first guest. It's spring, Lilly—"
It was his first mention to her of the recent purchase of a one-hundred-acre estate at Tarrytown, although in her capacity of notary public she had officiated at the drawing up of certain papers and deed. Blue prints of plans had passed through her hands. That he had furnished it she knew, too, from the magnitude of breath-taking bills from decorators and dealers exclusive antique. It had piqued her more than she would admit, his failure to solicit even her advice or opinion. There was a framed photograph of plans on his desk in the office which her eyes studiously avoided. Furtively and with the edge of her gaze, she knew the house to be a low-length with Tudor peaks to it that gave her a nostalgia for pools of green quiet and the leafy whisperings of English countrysides she had never seen.
"I want you out at the place, Lilly, more than I can say. Please come. The way things are clouding up, there is no telling how soon they'll let me over for active service. Lilly?"
She shook her head.
"I can't. Zoe graduates next month, and—"
"Good Lord! the youngster!"
"Seventeen."
He whistled.
"Well, I'll be hanged. The sun-kid. Bring her out too, Lilly."
"Trieste is very strict with her. She is preparing for her audition in September, and even if it could be managed, there is poor Mrs. Schum, you know."
His eagerness would not endure obstacle.
"Bring her out, too. How's that, Lilly? I'll send a limousine full of pillows for her. It will take Pauline's mind off her loneliness, having some one to mother. We'll put her up in a sun room with a view of pine woods and Hudson River that cannot be surpassed. It's spring—Lilly—"
"Poor Mrs. Schum!" she replied, her smile tired and twisted. "I'm afraid her next journey will be a longer one than that."
"Poor soul! Does she still think that boy of hers is fighting?"
"Surely there is no wrong in saving her from the horror of the truth."
"You dear girl, of course, no. It's only that—somehow don't you think that before she passed on she ought to know that he's gone on before—even if you have to tell her that he died—gloriously?"
"I've thought of that," she said, looking away, "thought and thought of it."
"Lilly," he cried, reaching for her two hands She drew them back quickly and walked out.
That evening when she presented herself at the hospital the nurse met her outside the door with her finger to her lips.
"She is sinking, but conscious."
Confronted with her emergency, Lilly stood before that closed door, beating all over with her silent little prayer:
"O God, help me! Help me, help her!"
Mrs. Schum was quite conscious.
"Lilly," she said, reaching out a thin old hand that was covered with veins as round as cables, "I've been waiting."
"Here I am, dear."
"I think I'm done, Lilly. I—dream so much—of God."
"Why, you're better, dear!"
"No. I'm going. I wanted so to wait for my boy. The doctor, can't he help me to wait, Lilly? Ask him to help me to wait. I keep thinking he's over there somewhere—Harry—funny isn't it? Over there waiting. You've heard no news, Lilly?"
In this moment more propitious than she dared hope Lilly leaned over.
"Yes, dear, there is news."
"Harry?" she said quickly and sharply, lifting her head.
"Yes, dear—Harry—is—over there—waiting."
"His Mamma-Annie's boy—they were all against him. He can't stay back here alone—he needs me, doctor—help me to wait for him—"
"Listen, dear—Harry's gone."
"Where?"
"Why—over there—just as your intuition told you."
She pulled at the sheet with fingers as fleshless as the feet of a bird, moving her lips, vainly at first, and suddenly jerked herself up with a strength no doctor would have conceded her.
"He's dead, Lilly. My boy's dead. Please—please—it is so—isn't it? My boy's dead?"
"Yes."
"I knew it. Oh, Annie, you're the mother of a soldier. God wouldn't let me leave him back here—alone. I wouldn't have left him. There wasn't any good ahead for him. That's why I wanted him to die like a soldier. Before he should come to the bad places ahead. I can go so easy now. I'm done. God fixed it for me—Lilly."
She held the racked old form to her, kissed away tears that the washed old eyes could hardly yield, made a couch of her arms, and held her close so that their heartbeats met.
"Lilly, I feel so easy. I never felt so easy."
"Lie quietly, dear."
"Life can be hard, Lilly. And now—war. Make it easier for yourself. Don't let him out there—go over there—anywhere—reproaching. Your parents—your child—it's his as much as yours, Lilly. If I had gone first, my boy would have reproached. There is nothing so terrible, Lilly—as eyes that reproach—eyes—Lilly—don't."
"I—won't."
She drifted off then in the placidity of a sleep from which she was not to emerge.
* * * * *
Lilly walked home that early morning following. Her direction lay in a straight line through Central Park. Spring was out in firstlings of every kind. The baby nap of new grass. Trees ready to quiver into leaf. The sun came up from behind a sky line of skyscrapers, and as she was crossing the Mall a fountain rained up a first joyous geyser, some sparrows immediately plunging for a bath.
She sat down on a bench there in the lovely quiet, quite lax, and, because of its pressure, her natty little blue sailor in her lap. The air was like cool water and she closed her tired eyes to it.
Finally children began to trot past on their way to school. She heard their shouts and watched them. A father passed with his little girl by the hand and carrying her sheaf of books. A boy in knickerbockers lunged furiously on roller skates. Another drove his ball under her bench and she smiled as she drew aside to let him drive. A private in khaki threw her a flirtatious glance. The sun found her finally.
Then Lilly followed one of her curious and absolutely irrepressible impulses, one that must have been smoldering who knows how long.
She completed her walk through the Park. At Seventy-second Street, where she emerged, a family hotel, one of thosede luxemausoleums to family life, reared showily. Without pause she turned in there, finding out the telegraph desk; wrote her message largely and flowingly, leaning over while the operator read out the words to her:
Mr. Albert Penny, 5198 Page Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. Won't you include New York in your visit to Washington and if possible bring parents. Try to. Lilly Penny, 2348 West End Avenue.
Hearing that telegram repeated, the pencil marking time word by word, it seemed to Lilly that each one of them was released with the spring of an arrow from its bow, and that the operator recoiled, stunned, from the impact of the message.
"Well," she said, leaning farther over the desk, and for some reason shaping the word to a breathless question.
"Fifty-one cents," said the girl, through the inimitable laconism of gum chewing.
Six hours later there was a reply folded in Lilly's purse:
We leave to-day for Washington. Arrive New York next Sunday 2.03viaPennsylvania. Albert Penny.
An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Orestes' filled her nights, and how tired she was must have sopped into her pillow, but her capacity for the present lessened her dread and made more bearable the fluent and fateful passing of the time.
There were the details of the poor little funeral to be arranged. Lilly, who had never known death, was suddenly face to face with it again, at a time, too, when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it probably had its beginnings in Germany or India.
On the Wednesday of Mrs. Schum's funeral five of the Amusement Enterprise office force were home with it, one little telephone operator, who occasionally laid the surreptitious offering of an orange or a carnation on Lilly's desk, succumbing.
It was amazing how light the imprint of Harry and his grandmother. Of effects there were practically none. A few tired-looking old dresses of Mrs. Schum's. Eleven dollars and some odd change in a tin box behind a clock. Harry's pinch-back suit with the slanting pockets. A daguerreotype or two. The inevitable stack of modest enough but unpaid bills. Odds. Ends. And in a wooden soap box shoved beneath Harry's cot, old door bells, faucets, bits of pipe, glass door knobs, and, laid reverently apart, a stack of Lilly's discarded gloves, placed to simulate the print of the hand.
For days, Zoe, who had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in her school paper:
"Teach me to live, O God,If sorrow be to live,Then let me knowAll pain that it can give."
"Teach me to live, O God,To know the gold from dross,To live, dear God, to live.I care not what it cost."
And Lilly, the dear mother dust in her eyes, had the page framed beneath a faded photograph of Mrs. Schum, taken when her lips and breast were young.
To attune Zoe to the coming of her family was no small matter. She was outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst Lilly bled her sense of blame.
"You've made a farce of everything, Lilly. You've fought for a principle and, with it won, turned maudlin. What is the idea? To drag me back there to join the sewing circle and the local society for the prevention of spinsterhood to maidens?"
"You are not funny at all. You know you are clear of that kind of thing. You're like an arrow on its way to its goal. Straight and sure. Nothing can deflect you. That's why I dared."
"Well, then?"
"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has been."
"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."
"Zoe!"
"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."
"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."
"I'm reciting you."
"You darling boomerang!"
"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be, you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."
This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen keptDoll's House, Freud,Anna Karenina, and Ellen Key on the table beside her bed.
"Theories go down, Zoe, before life—and death."
She sat haughtily young, and without tolerance, her profile averted and trying to keep the quiver off her lips.
"Just when I'm ready to graduate and preparing for my audition—to have this—"
"Zoe—Zoe—don't make it harder—"
"I'm a dog, Lilly—forgive me."
"The entire abominable condition is my fault—"
"Then thank God for the abominable condition. I love you and everything you've done."
"Then be sweet to them for my sake. Your grandmother, she's going to be unlike anyone you have ever known. She's a great one to pick up the bread crumbs of life with a great ado. That's been her existence, dear—little things. And your grandfather, Zoe, he's so gentle. Somehow I imagine he is even gentler now. You remember I used to tell you how we'd play at hide and seek long after I was grown. Oh, Zoe, be sweet!"
"I will, dear."
"And—your father. Whatever his attitude may be, remember the fault lies in me—not him."
"Trust me, Lilly, if only he doesn't drop dead when he sees me!"
"Zoe!"
Between them the little drama was carefully rehearsed.
"Visi would pay big money for this act."
"You'll be your own natural sweet self, Zoe? No posing?"
"Don't worry. I suppose if the truth is known I'll have an aggravated case of stage fright."
"They'll know—everything, Zoe, before I let them see you. Just be simple, dear—and please—no dramatics!"
"It's all too dramatic for dramatics," she replied, cryptically.
It was finally decided that Lilly was to meet the train alone, settle the trio at the Hotel Astor, and arrive at the apartment in time for a dinner prepared by a cook and waitress especially brought in for the day.
"Break the news in a public place, Lilly—the hotel lobby or a taxi—-and avoid family fireworks."
"My news can't be broken."
"Why?"
"Smashed, rather."
At four o'clock the morning of the arrival, Lilly was up, moving with the aimlessness of great nervousness about the apartment. At that same hour Mrs. Becker was emerging backward from her sleeper, kimono-clad, and bulging through the curtains into the dark aisle.
"Carrie," her husband whispered after her, jutting his head out with a turtle's dart, "it's only three o'clock, Eastern time. Why are you getting up?"
"Because I want to," she said, plowing on.
Once in the dressing room, she fell to crying as she staggered and dressed, apparently because each object, as she took it up, fell from her fingers.
And yet the meeting occurred, as dreaded and anticipated moments often do, damply, and as a heavily loaded bomb, for one reason or another, can go off with a cat cough.
To the observer, what happened that early afternoon was simply a very trim and very tailored young woman, her boyishness of attire somewhat accentuated because her swift clean-cutness was so obviously its inspiration, greeting, in the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal, a trio of what was plainly a pair of travel-stained parents and perhaps an uncle.
Standing there peering between the grillwork as the train slid in through the greasy gloom, watching the run of "red caps" and the slow disgorging of passengers, Lilly saw it all in waves of movement, waves of heat, waves of gaseous unreality.
Then she spied them. Her mother in the old, familiar vanguard, her father with that bulge to his back from which the gray coat hung loosely, Albert struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of a "red cap."
Her first sense was of fatness, their incredible, caravaning, lumbaginous fatness! There was a new chin to her mother. Gone was the old pulled-in waistline, but the old love of finery was out on her hat in ostrich plumes, a boa of marabou lending further elegance. And her father! He was somehow behind himself, slanting out from neck to quite a bulge of abdomen, then receding again to legs that caught her throat with a sense of their being too thin to sustain him. The fringe of hair that showed beneath his slouch hat was quite white, too, and with that same clutch at her throat she saw that it was thin as a baby's can be thin.
It is doubtful if she would have known Penny. He was himself in sebaceous italics. The old stolidity of stature was there, but hardly the solidity. Like Mrs. Becker, he had chubbied up, so to speak, until he looked shorter. And Albert was bald. It showed out under the rear of his derby, like a well-scrubbed visage awaiting some deft hand to sketch in the features, as poor Harry had done it to the clothespins. His Scandinavian blondness was quite gone; there was just a fringe of tan hair left and his jowls hung a bit, of skin not quite filled with flesh.
All this in a telegraphic flash as she stood there waiting, and at the sight of her father, on his too thin legs, dragging his cane slightly so that it scraped, and in the other hand a sagging old black valise that she remembered, all the tightness at her throat relaxed suddenly, the tears coming so easily that she could smile through them.
The dragging of that cane, it hurt her poignantly, as little vagrant memories can.
They spied her out even as she spied them, and, bodybeat to bodybeat, she and her mother met, shaking to silent sobs and twisting hearts. Then her father, pressing the coldly smelling mustache to her lips and lifting her in the old way by the armpits, so that the instant closed over her like a swoon.
With Albert it was strangely easier; there was a pause as wide as a hair while he stood there blinking, and weighted with his unsurrendered luggage.
"Albert," she said, finding the word at last.
At that moment, a "red cap," wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new leather cases.
"Let go," he cried, in small anger. "That is a six-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent bag you are jerking."
Then he brought his gaze back to Lilly, his Adam's apple above the gray necktie throbbing so that it seemed to her his entire body must reverberate to the pistonlike process.
"Well," he said. "Well, well," the words dropping down into the dry well of a gulp.
But somehow after the episode of the luggage, everything was easier, forLilly at least. She could smile now.
Very presently they were actually in a taxicab together, the talk of the moment echoing against the silence of unspoken words taking shape between them.
"Papa!" she said, finally, from the little folding seat opposite him, stroking his hands and steadying herself with them against the throw of the cab. "Oh, papa, papa!"
He smiled back through crinkles that were new to her, patting her in turn and looking off.
Mrs. Becker fell to crying, pressing her handkerchief up against her eyes and trying to lift her veil above the tears.
"After all these years," she kept repeating. "Years. Years."
"Now, now, Carrie—you promised."
"What hotel?" asked Penny, one of the bags across his knees and one weather eye for the other on the driver's seat.
"The Astor; that is one of the best. I've your rooms all arranged for.My—my place is too small."
"A less expensive would do, wouldn't it, mother?" addressing himself, without once meeting Lilly's eye, to his mother-in-law.
"You're my guests," she said, trying to smile down old aversions. "This is my party."
"Years—" sobbed Mrs. Becker. "She looks the same, but I'm a stranger to my own child. Ben, we're strangers."