The Trespassers (15 page)

For a bit she just stood there, looking at him. The magic of those words, the burst of happiness in her as she heard his promise.

“Get your scholarship, and tell me what you have to have, and I’ll give it to you. Ten a week’s about four hundred for the school year. Then say another hundred for lab fees and extras. That’s five hundred. I’ll do that—”

She flung her arms around him then, and squealed and hugged him and danced up and down until he said impatiently, “Hey, look, for heaven’s, sake,” but she could tell he loved her.

Then the dreams started. Then, the blessed sense of being supported, of being offered help, of trusting her destiny to someone else stronger than she—the blessed sense of having an ally. It made the long hours of study easy; all through February and the first days of March, she never weakened. She couldn’t fail now.

The dreaming. No matter how she had to scrimp on everything else, she’d have just one Brooks sweater, natural camel’s-hair color, and a plaid skirt, all crispy pleats. She would study so hard at night, in her own room in the dorm, when the fun and teams were all over. She wished she could enroll for just everything, medicine and astronomy and biology as well as her regular arts courses. She could actually feel herself in her small, pretty room, and the single student’s lamp yellow on her desk, and no sound but a page turning and the heat hissing a bit from the radiator. Later there’d be the rushing sound of the waterfalls in the gorges, coming in through the open windows of springtime, and, from the Libe Tower, the chimes ringing out sweet and clear.

The dreaming, the relying on David, the sweet calm of trusting somebody else—they all made her task easier. April went and May came, and there were only a few more weeks of the deadening grind. May was very hot, and she began to feel too tired and draggy. June came. She never got to bed till one or later, cramming. She had nightmares about the exams nearly every night.

And at last it was Monday of Regents week. She took three that first day—three hours each. Mr. Derry had arranged everything with the whole faculty. She had to take each Regent on the day it was scheduled, though the hours could be switched when they overlapped. She did two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, four on Thursday, and one on Friday—thirteen Regents in all. Thursday was the worst day, with two to take at night, from seven to one in the morning. Mr. Derry always stayed for the evening exams, to proctor her. They would have sandwiches and a bottle of milk for their supper, and then she would start again.

When it was over, Mr. Derry only said, “You’re a fine girl, Vera. This took a lot of courage, I think.” Her heart roared and leaped inside her, the way it did about David.

A few days later the exams were all marked, and Mr. Derry told her privately her average was 93.4. She couldn’t miss the scholarship. David was proud when she telephoned.

“Good stuff, Vee,” David said, and again her heart leaped. “You’re going to be all right in this world. You
have
it.”

The final notification, from Albany, wouldn’t come till August. She got a job, in the office of a piano factory on the flats of Long Island City. It paid nine dollars a week; she saved seven, spending only commutation-ticket money. That would be seventy dollars by September. The Brooks sweater would cost twelve, and the skirt eight, and the rest would do for the clothes she simply had to have, to start with.

The summer days were hot and long, and August with its envelope from Albany seemed years off. But she could walk through the white stale dust toward the factory and feel the campus in October, sparkling under the clear high skies on the hill. And whenever or wherever a church bell chimed, that whole hot summer, it was instantly the quiet old Libe Tower and her own room in the dorm late at night.

Then it was August, and at last there was the crisp white official envelope, with the Albany postmark. She stood on the porch steps a moment and held it. She shut her eyes tight.

“Look, even if it isn’t—even if you failed—it doesn’t mean your life is really over or anything, you know that. Now look at it.”

Yes, oh God, she had a state scholarship. She ran back into the house and explained the whole thing to Mamma, and Mamma kissed her and wept a little, because she was so proud of her girl.

“I don’t care what Pop says now, or how he yells,” Vee said, and laughed exultantly. “I’m going away to college, like other girls. David thinks it’s right. That’s why he promised to help me—”

“Does Grace agree? Vee, are you sure she—”

“I don’t know about Grace. But David said—he promised—oh, Mom, darling, I’ll have the most glorious life—”

Then she was off, running for the train. It was a cool, windy day, almost like fall. The office hours flew and at five-thirty she was on the way to Brooklyn. The lists would be in the papers tomorrow and she had to tell David herself first. She had to see his face, and the way his eyes lit up; she had stayed away from the telephone all day, just so she could see his face when she told him it was definite.

Grace was in the office. She was talking loudly, vigorous gestures and positive sentences. She was waving an afternoon paper as she talked, and Vee saw a long list of names on the open page. David was sitting down. He said only hello when he looked up and saw Vee there. Grace whirled toward her; she had a new fall polo coat, in the most heavenly creamy camel’s-hair color.

“I’ve just heard about this—this crackpot idea,” Grace exploded, waving the paper around. “Business is rotten this year and of course he doesn’t think of his own children and their education—let them go to public schools, anyway, but a public college isn’t good enough for Miss Vera.”

Vera sat down. She looked at David. She was just waiting to hear what he’d say, how he’d stand up to Grace. He couldn’t get a word in edgewise right now, of course, but in about one second—

But David put his head down and closed his eyes. He pressed on them with the thumb and third finger, working the lids gently.

She sat waiting. She no longer heard what Grace was saying, exactly; the same old nagging voice, nothing new or surprising about it. In a moment now, any second now, David would let her have it. “But I
promised,
” he would say, and he would be terrible to hear, so quiet, so unflinching. In a moment now, he would say it, and this would be over.

He would, he would. You couldn’t give a promise like that and then have
any
reason come up that was good enough to make you break it. In just one moment more—

Grace’s voice went on. Vee thought, way off in some distant corner of her somewhere, that she didn’t even hate Grace, because this was just what you could count on from her. You despised it, but you could endure it because there was no shock to it. The thing that made you
hate
, made you loathe, made you know that never in all the long years ahead would you ever trust again or forgive—that thing was counting on somebody dear, relying, believing in somebody, and then having him let you down.

Then
you could hate, hate with a wild, implacable, crazy—oh, David, hurry, hurry and say something, my darling big brother, say it, say it…

From the open window, the seven-o’clock chimes from the Borough Hall floated in, sweet and clear. As they died away, Vera went blindly to the door and David didn’t stop her.

In the beautiful and expensive apartment, in the wide, luxurious bed soothed by the pale moonlight reaching in through the opened windows, Vera Marriner Stamford suddenly wept. Wept for that trusting sixteen-year-old in 1922. Wept for the pain-twisting into the dragging, weary months that followed; wept for the new hard core of lonely determination that formed through those months—“I will do it, anyway, I’ll do it myself, with no help from anybody.”

She had indeed done it. She had worked for a year, in an office during the day, as cashier in a restaurant until eleven each night. She had entered Cornell a year late, and worked there. She had worked summers, and in her third and fourth years, finally, Pop had relented and sent her thirty dollars a month. From the middle of her junior year onward, she had borrowed from the Student Loan, and then she’d been able to relax and have a happy period of carefree, easy college life. She’d been a top-rank student, and she’d been popular and well known, with beaus and parties and fun.

But there was a wariness about her planning and dreaming for the future. Always, always, her dreams were of what she would do herself; never was she quite able to believe that you could ever rely on any other human for help, for faith; you had forever to make your own way, lonely but not betrayed.

In her moonlit bed, in her delightful apartment, Vee’s weeping slowly stopped. That long-ago college girl could never have phrased her wary instincts with any such clarity. There was no proof now that they had even existed.

Yet, for some reason she didn’t understand, this evening’s sudden insight into Jasper’s being had sent her own thoughts flying backward through the tumbling years, backward to David’s fingers pressing on his closed eyelids.

The secret dynamo, whirring…

Erlenbach, Switzerland

20 Mai, 1938

I
AM SORRY TO
trouble you, particularly so since you had taken care of everything so precisely already. But the Consul in Zurich states that he must hold up our immigration visas until he should receive from you a notarized copy of your Federal and state income-tax returns. Perhaps the Consul in Zurich likes to make things more formal, for I understand from friends here that the Consul in Vienna has always considered the photostat copies of the canceled income-tax checks themselves adequate. In all logic they seem more conclusive than the tax return. But the Consul in Zurich seems of another mind.

So could I beg you to copy off the official returns, have them notarized, and send them to me here? We are assured that once they are in the Consul’s hands, the matter of visas will go easily. Again, we all thank you so sincerely for your help and collaboration, and hope to meet you soon.

Vera read the letter, in the spidery foreign script she had already seen twice in letters from Franz Vederle—once to thank her in advance for helping them in Mrs. Willis’ stead, and again to report the arrival of the registered letter with all the documents. She liked the way Dr. Vederle wrote, very simply, somehow touching in his almost but not quite perfect English and its slightly reserved gratitude to her, a stranger.

But this letter irritated her. So they weren’t en route by now, as she had imagined whenever she thought of them the past weeks. In all truth, she had thought little of them as specific persons; the rising, pitching crisis in the Sudetenland riveted the attention of everyone. Just this week, Nazi troops were marching on Czechoslovakia; reports were that Hitler had ten divisions mobilized along the Czech frontier. The
Anschluss
movie being run off again. Only the end might differ. War this time?

War or no war, one thing was sure: in still another country a new mass of humanity was already swirling along to the borders. Who would help these new ones? If there were indeed to be another world-enveloping war, then this would be one of the issues, perhaps buried beneath many other issues, but alive, burning with the roaring anger of decent people everywhere. This, the fact that men and women no longer could live where they chose, work as they chose, think and worship and study and sing as they chose. Yes, it would be one of the monstrous issues, and men would fight and men would die rather than sit forever disinterested and inert at the evil force that could create it.

She rang for Miss Benson.

“Benny, get out the file copies of my income-tax statements for 1936 and 1937, please. Federal and state. See if you can get some fresh blanks for those years. Copy them off; I have to send notarized copies of the forms themselves. It is stupid nonsense, but let’s get it off right away.”

“Yes, Miss Marriner.”

“Get Mrs. Willis for me, would you?”

What could one do, how could one fight now? Affidavits for one family, one well-known family—it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough.

“Ann, the Vederles haven’t left yet. The Consul there wants more stuff about my income taxes. Have you run into this kind of thing?”

“Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. It depends on the Consulate—some places you get the quickest kind of response, other places you strangle in delay.” Her big voice sounded apologetic. “I’m sorry you’re being bothered, Vee.”

“It’s no bother. The red tape gets me mad, that’s all. If you want me for any new affidavits—you know, Czech ones or something—”

“Oh, Vee, I
have
some new cases. I’ve been racking my brains—”

“I’ll take on somebody. I know the ropes now. Who is it?”

“I’ve got three, actually. You don’t suppose Jasper would take on one or two? I’ve been wondering whether to ask him.”

Vee didn’t answer immediately. Jasper and affidavits? It would never occur to her to ask him.

“Why, look, darling,” she could almost hear his voice saying to her, so rational, so convincing. “I’m giving everything I’ve got—my mind, my ability, my future—to starting a thing that might make the world better and safer for millions of people. I just mustn’t get off the path for this individual or that. Don’t you see the danger of diverting your energies?”

“Oh, Ann, I don’t know about Jasper,” she said slowly into the phone. “I imagine he’d agree instantly if you
did
ask him, only he’s so taken up now with the network—”

“I know. I just got wondering, because I’m so desperate about whom to turn to all the time. I—oh, I guess I’ll- not try it. I hate getting a turndown.” She hesitated. When she spoke again, contempt edged her words. “Humanity in headlines is his dish, not just a couple of poor slobs in trouble. I’ve always thought that about Jasper Crown and now I’ve said it.”

Humanity in headlines. That was cruel. And perceptive? Her own doubts—“the little people”—these last weeks she thought and pondered over Jas only in the intimate realm of their shared, secret. Now Ann had led her back to that other impersonal realm, and the old doubts foamed in her mind. If she herself were to ask him—no, she couldn’t risk it.