The Incredible Charlie Carewe (13 page)

He and Gregg had known each other for about a year, and they had been to some Village party together at a walk-up flat full of artsy-craftsy decorations, and the smell of cheap wine, onions, and garlic, and everybody talked at once, very clever and superior and boring as hell. And Lillian had seemed by contrast to be a fresh springtime breeze. She was “just a working girl,” a stenographer at a big wholesale china place up near Gramercy Park, and Herb thought he had found the girl of his dreams. She had a primness, a coolness that looked out of flat aqua-blue eyes, her ash-blonde hair was clean and shining, bunned and braided over her ears. And no one was more amazed than Herb when, during a pouring storm one night in her own plain little flat, she suggested he stay overnight. That was the beginning of a semi-domestic relationship that Herb felt would eventually culminate in marriage. She had a little boy who lived with her parents in Brooklyn, about whom she talked incessantly: how hard it was not to have him with her, and how bad for the child not to have a real home.

He had talked over the situation with Gregg, who had simply listened. After a while the three of them would have dinner together at the flat, or Lillian would get a girl from the office and they would double-date for a movie. And all the time Gregg simply was there, and listening. Pretty soon Herb began to see the whole business through Gregg’s eyes. They had finished one of Lillian’s unimaginative meals, mostly heated up from cans and cardboard containers from the delicatessen. Lillian had been on the “when Herb and I are married” theme. Herb was sprawled on the sofa, and Gregg sat opposite them in a beat-up leather chair, smoking a cigar. He had been leafing through a stack of magazines on the table and in the quiet gesture of simply straightening them somehow made Herb feel he was saying, “Look at this—nothing but
True Story
, movie magazines, lurid romances—look around you, this is not just poverty, this is tasteless—look at the Kewpie dolls on the mantel,” and Lillian was simpering about “what fun” it was going to be to have a man around the house whom she could take care of—of her philosophy about her own sex, that women made a mistake thinking they could be dominating and hold a man. Of how wonderful it would be when Herb got a real job and they had money enough to have a nice place, with a room for Freddie. And something began to crawl inside Herb’s ribs.

Later they were walking fast together up by the lake in Central Park. Both of them were puffing too hard for speech, and when they finally reached a bench Herb had exploded.

“All that stupid bitch wants is a meal ticket and a father for her bastard son.”

“That’s right,” Gregg had said, laconically. As if to say, “It’s your life, and it’s fine with me, if that’s what you want.”

“How the hell do I get out of this, Gregg?” Herb said finally.

“Just remind her of the depression, Herb. That her dream of a guy getting a ‘real job’ is pretty slim, and she’d better keep looking for better husband material.”

It hadn’t been that simple of course. There had been very wet and stormy scenes, in which Herb had felt like a louse. Then Lillian had made the mistake of going to bed with a new bachelor tenant from the floor below, and told Herb about it, trying to make him feel that he had driven her to it, that she had been “desperate for comfort,” that it meant nothing to her but had saved her from suicide. For a moment Herb’s male rage caught fire and then disappeared in a huge icy wash of pure contempt. And that had been that. It somehow was as clear and simple as the way Gregg had straightened the stack of magazines. They were there, he was not interested in trash, although it was all right if somebody else was. Just as now, as he stood leaning on the cigar counter, Gregg put a magazine back in the rack beside it and looked up and saw Herb coming down the stairs.

“Did you get hold of him?”

“Yes. He seemed very pleased—‘delighted’ was the word he used. Charlie was down in the wine cellar, in search of something extra special in the beverage line, he informed me, said he was rushing around like a nervous hostess.”

As they stepped outside onto the veranda the cold air hit them like a fist, and they hunched their collars up and dug their hands into their coat pockets.

“Wow!” Herb said. “It’s really cold—no more snow tonight, I’ll bet.” The sun had disappeared into a gray haze, the street was deserted, and the wind had risen in little whipping gusts. They swung into their familiar harmony of walking, the duet of their heels crunching crisply in the packed snow. Except for the fact that Herb knew it was unlike Gregg to be “offended,” he seemed to be withdrawn; perhaps he was regretting the importance he had given to Gregg’s character the night before, perhaps the rum had excited him into a rare exaggeration of the situation, giving it unnecessary sinister outlines, and now perhaps after the luncheon he felt foolish. Because young Carewe seemed no more than the usual product of wealth to Herb’s thinking. Money was a great thing to have—it brought time to do the things you had to do, something that those who inherited it rarely appreciated. In the very act of working to get money you sharpened up, it seemed, making you more aware of the preciousness of being able to work
without
thinking about where the next dollar was coming from. Like Doc Payne, hopelessly enmeshed in treating colds and measles, and filling in at Bellevue’s emergency, patching up cracked heads, frustrated by time running out, when he wanted to practice psychiatry.

“You’ll like Walter Carewe,” Gregg finally said, breaking into Herb’s free-floating thoughts.

“I liked Charlie,” replied Herb with a grin, looking at him sideways. “Ought I to apologize?”

“On the contrary,” Gregg said, smiling a little himself, “I expected you to like him. He has the art of being charming down to a science. I just hope you’ll be around to watch when it slips.”

“When what slips?”

“The mask. The façade of sanity.”

Herb turned to face him in astonishment, but the rising wind moaned around the corner of a brick building, clutching at them like a desperate beggar, and they both staggered a little under the sudden onslaught.

“The hell with this,” cried Gregg, grabbing his hat, “let’s get back to the Inn.”

It wasn’t very hard for Gregg to understand why Charlie couldn’t “chuck things.” The “fetters” that he spoke of were made of the kind of material that the average person would be happy to be shackled by, even though Gregg thought, “No man loveth his fetters, be they made of gold . . .” and Charlie’s were partially, literally, made of gold, but they also were forged of the love of a fine but bewildered family.

He looked around at the candlelighted table, thinking with curious warmth how he and Herb had been welcomed almost hungrily. There was a feeling that a “best foot forward” effort had been made, solely because Charlie had seemed to take an interest in bringing a couple of his friends to his home. Not only was Elsie present as Charlie had anticipated, but also Virginia and Jeff Shelley. It had been a pleasant surprise to see them again, although when he had said so Virginia smilingly raised her eyebrows and said, “Didn’t Charlie tell you? We try to come up every other weekend on account of Mum.” Walter had explained that the doctor had been in earlier and Beatrice’s blood pressure was way down again, and he didn’t think it advisable for her to exert herself in any way. What Walter didn’t explain, naturally, was that Beatrice had been more unreasonable than he could remember, with a kind of snobbism that was totally unlike her.

He had gone into her room as soon as Charlie told him about inviting Gregg and Herb for dinner, hoping anxiously that she would make the effort to at least be with them for dinner. She had been reading
Anthony Adverse
sitting up in bed, and as though even holding the heavy volume was too much for her it had slipped out of her hands to the floor, and she was sound asleep, her reading glasses askew. Walter was about to close the door silently and leave her when she jumped violently, looking at him in a quick animal fear, then quickly she smiled anxiously. “Come in, come in, darling, I must have dozed off. I didn’t sleep a wink last night and I just felt exhausted.”

Walter sat down on the edge of the bed, and with his fingers smoothed the worried lines on her forehead, explaining about the arrangement for dinner. “It’s been so long, Bea—years, I guess—since Charlie has even suggested bringing someone home, I think it would be nice if you would be at your place tonight. It’s been so long since we’ve all been together.” Walter felt that he had been eating tray meals in his study forever. Beatrice had seemed to prefer to eat alone, in bed, saying that it was depressing for her to have someone watch her and reprove her for not eating enough. When the girls were home they usually went sailing out on dates, and usually Charlie disappeared in the afternoon after his classes with Gregg, returning late at night, banging his bedroom door shut. The whole damn house was like a morgue, he thought. Even now he felt as though he were walking on eggs, as though he were being unreasonable to suggest that they have a family dinner and entertain two nice young friends for their son. But Bea was unpredictable these days. It was tough for her, of course, going through the change so early—he guessed that that was what was making her have a difficult time. He worried that she was actually weakening herself by giving in and staying in bed all the time. Of course, she did have terrible insomnia, and she refused to take any “dope” for it, as she called the little pink capsules Dr. Hagedorn left for her. And now, just as he had feared, she began to get very excited.

“How,
how
can you be so lacking in understanding! Tell me, why should I exhaust myself to be
gracious
, for heaven’s sake, to Charlie’s tutor and some unknown friend of his. Just
who
are they, anyway! Herbert Jenner! Who is
he?
” And she began to cry, without sobbing, just great tears streaking themselves in a river down her cheeks. Panting a little, she drew out some tissue from under her pillows and blew her nose, but the tears wouldn’t stop.

Walter patted her shoulder comfortingly, wordlessly. He never knew what to do when these floodgates opened. It seemed that no matter what he said he only provoked more, so he had learned to be silent. “Never mind, never mind, honey—we’ll manage.” He left the room quietly, and Virginia, with an armful of school clothes she was going to take downstairs to be sent to the cleaner’s, emerged from her room across the hall. He raised his hands in a hopeless gesture, shaking his head.

Virginia said, “Don’t worry about it, Dad, we’ve got a whole beautiful mess of quail that we can break out of the freezer—we’ll have a scrumptious dinner—and I’ll be just the best hostess in the world.”

Walter put an arm about her. “That’s my girl—I guess it
is
asking too much of Mum.”

Dinner was over, the meal had been really “scrumptious” as Virginia had promised. Doreen and the butler had cleared the plates and filled the coffee cups, and at the moment no one felt inclined to make a break in the comfortable conversation that ebbed and flowed around the table. Above their heads, the heat of the candles making a clear bright tunnel in the center, a nimbus of smoke swirled and eddied around them, a gentle bond, delicately uniting the elements of a chance gathering. Charlie was bored with it. On his right hand, Gregg was discussing with Virginia the Julius Meier-Graefe biography of Vincent Van Gogh. On his left Herb was absorbed in Elsie, as he had been ever since he arrived, leaving him, Charles, to make small smoke rings, into which he would point the end of his cigar. At the opposite end of the table, Walter and Jeff were deep in the international situation.

“I feel that the danger is that Europe may not let Germany wait,” Jeff was saying. “Hitler is sharp enough to know that the longer he waits, the better his Reichswehr and Storm Troops become, the more arms and munitions he can hoard up and the better chance he will have to strike for success. But there has certainly been a lot of talk about a ‘preventive war.’ Those fellows, the strategists in Paris and Warsaw and Brussels, know what Hitler is up to, I’m sure.”

“But, Jeff,” Walter said, “there isn’t a man who has been a soldier who would want to start another war—not after the last one. And I think that even Hitler realizes that both Czechoslovakia and Poland have heavily fortified frontier cities. Pilsudski’s troops could plow their way in three weeks to Berlin. No—no, Hitler’s motives are too obvious, as you say, for him to get away with anything.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Jeff, staring into the tawny swirl in his brandy glass.

The radio in the living room was making a station break and the Sunday evening symphony from Chicago was being announced.

“And yet, in a way, Vincent was the more productive of the two brothers. Isn’t it strange,” Virginia was saying to Gregg, “how one artist will use paint to pour out his soul, and another,” nodding toward the sounds of Beethoven coming from the radio, “will use music.”

Gregg laughed shortly. “It would seem that the more normal one is, the less need there is to express oneself.”

Virginia smiled. “Don’t you think it’s probably that a whole person expresses himself satisfactorily to himself in all the little things of the day—I mean——” She hesitated.

Gregg laughed again. “That perhaps if everybody was ‘normal’ we wouldn’t have any artists in the world?”

“Perhaps there are a lot of artists who would resent that. . . . What do you think, Charlie?”

She had caught a glimpse of Charlie’s face beyond Gregg’s shoulder. It carried an expression of complete boredom; he was drumming on the table, his gaze in an odd smile fastened on nothing.

“Charlie?” she repeated anxiously, trying to draw him into the conversation.

“Hah?” he said. “I wasn’t listening. Why don’t we get out of here, Virge, my legs are asleep.”

Virginia looked around the table. “Of course, if you like, Charlie—everybody seems so happy, though, I hate to break it up.”

“Well, I’m not ‘happy,’ ” he growled. “I can’t keep my eyes open. I want to go to bed.”