The Fountainhead (69 page)

The door of his room was locked to protect him from his mother. Last night, seeing his furious restlessness, she had forced him to tell her the truth. He had snapped that he was married to Dominique Francon, and he had added some sort of explanation about Dominique going out of town to announce the marriage to some old relative. His mother had been so busy with gasps of delight and questions, that he had been able to answer nothing and to hide his panic; he was not certain that he had a wife and that she would come back to him in the morning.

He had forbidden his mother to announce the news, but she had made a few telephone calls last night, and she was making a few more this morning, and now their telephone was ringing constantly, with eager voices asking: “Is it true?” pouring out sounds of amazement and congratulations. Keating could see the news spreading through the city in widening circles, by the names and social positions of the people who called. He refused to answer the telephone. It seemed to him that every corner of New York was flooded with celebration and that he alone, hidden in the watertight caisson of his room, was cold and lost and horrified.

It was almost noon when the doorbell rang, and he pressed his hands to his ears, not to know who it was and what they wanted. Then he heard his mother’s voice, so shrill with joy that it sounded embarrassingly silly: “Petey darling, don’t you want to come out and kiss your wife?” He flew out into the hall, and there was Dominique, removing her soft mink coat, the fur throwing to his nostrils a wave of the street’s cold air touched by her perfume. She was smiling correctly, looking straight at him, saying: “Good morning, Peter.”

He stood drawn up, for one instant, and in that instant he relived all the telephone calls and felt the triumph to which they entitled him. He moved as a man in the arena of a crowded stadium, he smiled as if he felt the ray of an arc light playing in the creases of his smile, and he said: “Dominique my dear, this is like a dream come true!”

The dignity of their doomed understanding was gone and their marriage was what it had been intended to be.

She seemed glad of it. She said: “Sorry you didn’t carry me over the threshold, Peter.” He did not kiss her, but took her hand and kissed her arm above the wrist, in casual, intimate tenderness.

He saw his mother standing there, and he said with a dashing gesture of triumph: “Mother—Dominique Keating.”

He saw his mother kissing her. Dominique returned the kiss gravely. Mrs. Keating was gulping: “My dear, I’m so happy, so happy, God bless you, I had no idea you were so beautiful!”

He did not know what to do next, but Dominique took charge, simply, leaving them no time for wonder. She walked into the living room and she said: “Let’s have lunch first, and then you’ll show me the place, Peter. My things will be here in an hour or so.”

Mrs. Keating beamed: “Lunch is all ready for three, Miss Fran ...” She stopped. “Oh, dear, what am I to call you, honey? Mrs. Keating or ...”

“Dominique, of course,” Dominique answered without smiling.

“Aren’t we going to announce, to invite anyone, to ... ?” Keating began, but Dominique said:

“Afterward, Peter. It will announce itself.”

Later, when her luggage arrived, he saw her walking into his bedroom without hesitation. She instructed the maid how to hang up her clothes, she asked him to help her rearrange the contents of the closets.

Mrs. Keating looked puzzled. “But aren’t you children going to go away at all? It’s all so sudden and romantic, but—no honeymoon of any kind?”

“No,” said Dominique, “I don’t want to take Peter away from his work.”

He said: “This is temporary of course, Dominique. We’ll have to move to another apartment, a bigger one. I want you to choose it.”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t think that’s necessary. We’ll remain here.”

“I’ll move out,” Mrs. Keating offered generously, without thinking, prompted by an overwhelming fear of Dominique. “I’ll take a little place for myself.”

“No,” said Dominique. “I’d rather you wouldn’t. I want to change nothing. I want to fit myself into Peter’s life just as it is.”

“That’s sweet of you!” Mrs. Keating smiled, while Keating thought numbly that it was not sweet of her at all.

Mrs. Keating knew that when she had recovered she would hate her daughter-in-law. She could have accepted snubbing. She could not forgive Dominique’s grave politeness.

The telephone rang. Keating’s chief designer at the office delivered his congratulations and said: “We just heard it, Peter, and Guy’s pretty stunned. I really think you ought to call him up or come over here or something.”

Keating hurried to the office, glad to escape from his house for a while. He entered the office like a perfect figure of a radiant young lover. He laughed and shook hands in the drafting room, through noisy congratulations, gay shouts of envy and a few smutty references. Then he hastened to Francon’s office.

For an instant he felt oddly guilty when he entered and saw the smile on Francon’s face, a smile like a blessing. He tugged affectionately at Francon’s shoulders and he muttered: “I’m so happy, Guy, I’m so happy ...”

“I’ve always expected it,” said Francon quietly, “but now I feel right. Now it’s right that it should be all yours, Peter, all of it, this room, everything, soon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come, you always understand. I’m tired, Peter. You know, there comes a time when you get tired in a way that’s final and then ... No, you wouldn’t know, you’re too young. But hell, Peter, of what use am I around here? The funny part of it is that I don’t care any more even about pretending to be of any use.... I like to be honest sometimes. It’s a nice sort of feeling.... Well, anyway, it might be another year or two, but then I’m going to retire. Then it’s all yours. It might amuse me to hang on around here just a little longer—you know, I actually love the place—it’s so busy, it’s done so well, people respect us—it was a good firm, Francon & Heyer, wasn’t it?—What the hell am I saying? Francon & Keating. Then it will be just Keating.... Peter,” he asked softly, “why don’t you look happy?”

“Of course I’m happy, I’m very grateful and all that, but why in blazes should you think of retiring now?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean—why don’t you look happy when I say that it will be yours? I ... I’d like you to be happy about that, Peter.”

“For God’s sake, Guy, you’re being morbid, you’re ...”

“Peter, it’s very important to me—that you should be happy at what I’m leaving you. That you should be proud of it. And you are, aren’t you, Peter? You are?”

“Well, who wouldn’t be?” He did not look at Francon. He could not stand the sound of pleading in Francon’s voice.

“Yes, who wouldn’t be? Of course.... And you are, Peter?”

“What do you want?” snapped Keating angrily.

“I want you to feel proud of me, Peter,” said Francon humbly, simply, desperately. “I want to know that I’ve accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure that it wasn’t all—for nothing.”

“You’re not sure of that? You’re not sure?” Keating’s eyes were murderous, as if Francon were a sudden danger to him.

“What’s the matter, Peter?” Francon asked gently, almost indifferently.

“God damn you, you have no right—not to be sure! At your age, with your name, with your prestige, with your ...”

“I want to be sure, Peter. I’ve worked very hard.”

“But you’re not sure!” He was furious and frightened, and so he wanted to hurt, and he flung out the one thing that could hurt most, forgetting that it hurt him, not Francon, that Francon wouldn’t know, had never known, wouldn’t even guess: “Well, I know somebody who’ll be sure, at the end of his life, who’ll be so God-damn sure I’d like to cut his damn throat for it!”

“Who?” asked Francon quietly, without interest.

“Guy! Guy, what’s the matter with us? What are we talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Francon. He looked tired.

That evening Francon came to Keating’s house for dinner. He was dressed jauntily, and he twinkled with his old gallantry as he kissed Mrs. Keating’s hand. But he looked grave when he congratulated Dominique and he found little to say to her; there was a pleading look in his eyes when he glanced up at her face. Instead of the bright, cutting mockery he had expected from her, he saw a sudden understanding. She said nothing, but bent down and kissed him on the forehead and held her lips pressed gently to his head a second longer than formality required. He felt a warm flood of gratitude—and then he felt frightened. “Dominique,” he whispered—the others could not hear him—“how terribly unhappy you must be....” She laughed gaily, taking his arm: “Why, no, Father, how can you say that!” “Forgive me,” he muttered, “I’m just stupid.... This is really wonderful....”

Guests kept coming in all evening, uninvited and unannounced, anyone who had heard the news and felt privileged to drop in. Keating did not know whether he was glad to see them or not. It seemed all right, so long as the gay confusion lasted. Dominique behaved exquisitely. He did not catch a single hint of sarcasm in her manner.

It was late when the last guest departed and they were left alone among the filled ash trays and empty glasses. They sat at opposite ends of the living room, and Keating tried to postpone the moment of thinking what he had to think now.

“All right, Peter,” said Dominique, rising, “let’s get it over with.”

When he lay in the darkness beside her, his desire satisfied and left hungrier than ever by the unmoving body that had not responded, not even in revulsion, when he felt defeated in the one act of mastery he had hoped to impose upon her, his first whispered words were: “God damn you!”

He heard no movement from her.

Then he remembered the discovery which the moments of passion had wiped off his mind.

“Who was he?” he asked.

“Howard Roark,” she answered.

“All right,” he snapped, “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to!”

He switched on the light. He saw her lying still, naked, her head thrown back. Her face looked peaceful, innocent, clean. She said to the ceiling, her voice gentle: “Peter, if I could do this ... I can do anything now....”

“If you think I’m going to bother you often, if that’s your idea of...”

“As often or as seldom as you wish, Peter.”

 

Next morning, entering the dining room for breakfast, Dominique found a florist’s box, long and white, resting across her plate.

“What’s that?” she asked the maid. “It was brought this morning, madam, with instructions to be put on the breakfast table.”

The box was addressed to Mrs. Peter Keating. Dominique opened it. It contained a few branches of white lilac, more extravagantly luxurious than orchids at this time of the year. There was a small card with a name written upon it in large letters that still held the quality of a hand’s dashing movement, as if the letters were laughing on the pasteboard: “Ellsworth M. Toohey.”

“How nice!” said Keating. “I wondered why we hadn’t heard from him at all yesterday.”

“Please put them in water, Mary,” said Dominique, handing the box to the maid.

In the afternoon Dominique telephoned Toohey and invited him for dinner.

The dinner took place a few days later. Keating’s mother had pleaded some previous engagement and escaped for the evening; she explained it to herself by believing that she merely needed time to get used to things. So there were only three places set on the dining-room table, candles in crystal holders, a centerpiece of blue flowers and glass bubbles.

When Toohey entered he bowed to his hosts in a manner proper to a court reception. Dominique looked like a society hostess who had always been a society hostess and could not possibly be imagined as anything else.

“Well, Ellsworth? Well?” Keating asked, with a gesture that included the hall, the air and Dominique.

“My dear Peter,” said Toohey, “let’s skip the obvious.”

Dominique led the way into the living room. She wore a dinner dress—a white satin blouse tailored like a man’s, and a long black skirt, straight and simple as the polished planes of her hair. The narrow band of the skirt about her waistline seemed to state that two hands could encircle her waist completely or snap her figure in half without much effort. The short sleeves left her arms bare, and she wore a plain gold bracelet, too large and heavy for her thin wrist. She had an appearance of elegance become perversion, an appearance of wise, dangerous maturity achieved by looking like a very young girl.

“Ellsworth, isn’t it wonderful?” said Keating, watching Dominique as one watches a fat bank account.

“No less than I expected,” said Toohey. “And no more.”

At the dinner table Keating did most of the talking. He seemed possessed by a talking jag. He turned over in words with the sensuous abandon of a cat rolling in catnip.

“Actually, Ellsworth, it was Dominique who invited you. I didn’t ask her to. You’re our first formal guest. I think that’s wonderful. My wife and my best friend. I’ve always had the silly idea that you two didn’t like each other. God knows where I get those notions. But this is what makes me so damn happy—the three of us, together.”

“Then you don’t believe in mathematics, do you, Peter?” said Toohey. “Why the surprise? Certain figures in combination have to give certain results. Granting three entities such as Dominique, you and I—this had to be the inevitable sum.”

“They say three’s a crowd,” laughed Keating. “But that’s bosh. Two are better than one, and sometimes three are better than two, it all depends.”

“The only thing wrong with that old cliché,” said Toohey, “is the erroneous implication that ‘a crowd’ is a term of opprobrium. It is quite the opposite. As you are so merrily discovering. Three, I might add, is a mystic key number. As for instance, the Holy Trinity. Or the triangle, without which we would have no movie industry. There are so many variations upon the triangle, not necessarily unhappy. Like the three of us—with me serving as understudy for the hypotenuse, quite an appropriate substitution, since I’m replacing my antipode, don’t you think so, Dominique?”