Too Much Too Soon (17 page)

Next to the familiar battered suitcase checkered with ancient, classy travel stickers stood Langley.

“Daddy . . . .” she whispered.

“I say, looks as though it’ll be Grandpa before long.”

Her father’s whimsical tone reached back into her earliest childhood and her novel thumped to the floor as she flung herself into his arms.

He admitted he hadn’t eaten dinner and while she cooked for him, he sat companionably at the aluminum tube breakfast set which crowded the miniature kitchen. Pouring himself a drink from the nearly full scotch bottle that Curt had left, he told her the family news: Joscelyn had been advanced a full year in her new school and was having orthodontia, Crystal was brightening up the Clay Street mansion with the aid of a firm of Union Street decorators—“very
lavender young men,” Langley called them.

He ate the lamb chop planned for her tomorrow night’s dinner in two bites, swiftly cleaning his plate, confessing he would enjoy more of the peas and her excellent chips. Peeling the potatoes, she asked, “How’s the publishing house doing? You’ve never mentioned it in your letters.”

“Let business wait. I’m on holiday. But I do want the latest on Curt’s project.”

Honora fried the chips, explaining at length about the stabilized shoulders, the sand that must be graded, compacted and covered with layers of asphalt, the right drainage for the occasional desert flash flood.

“The sands of Araby! It’s always been a dream of mine to go there. But I must say I’m a bit surprised Curt left you. Now.”

“He doesn’t know about the baby.”

Langley poured himself a refill. “Dead soldier,” he said, setting the empty bottle on the window ledge. “Honora, this isn’t the sort of thing you keep from your husband.”

“He’d have stayed home, and this job is terrifically important for his career.”

“But still you must let him know.” Langley’s blue eyes grew bleak and she knew he was remembering her mother’s fatal hemorrhage at Joscelyn’s birth.

Sighing, she turned the potatoes. “I’ll tell him soon,” she said. “Daddy, you’re staying here, of course.”

“It’s rather tight quarters.”

“We’ll shift the couch in here for me and
you can take the Murphy bed.”

“Surely there’s a smallish hotel nearby.” He spoke uncertainly.

Glancing up from the sizzling frying pan, she noticed that his collar was wrinkled, as if ironed by an inexperienced hand.

“Daddy, you’ve come nearly five hundred miles to see me,” she said firmly. “No more talk about hotels.”

*   *   *

The next two days she took Langley on sightseeing tours, chattering happily as she drove. She was a prisoner released from solitary confinement. Occasionally Langley would grow silent, a temporary brooding that she attributed to their financial discrepancies—he had explained that since he was from out of town no bank would cash his checks.

She splurged on three bottles of Black and White. Though he never reached any degree of inebriation, two of them disappeared in two days.

The sofa on which she slept crowded the kitchen and they shifted the table and chairs into the main room, making every meal seem festive. His third day was Sunday, and they had the traditional English midday sabbath feast of roast beef, potatoes browned in the drippings and Yorkshire pudding followed by a trifle topped with whipped cream, mandarin orange slices and glazed violets.

After the coffee, Langley patted his lean stomach. “The best meal I’ve had since we left home.”

“Home? Is that any way to talk when your grandson’s going to be president?”

“
He’ll
be a proper American like you and your sisters. But me? Over here I make a hash of everything.”

“Daddy, that’s not true. Gideon never appreciated you. But your new employer has every faith in you.”

Beads of moisture appeared on Langley’s long, clean-shaven upper lip. “Honora, it’s time we have everything out in the open between us. There never was going to be a publishing house.”

She let out a little sigh, although from the first she had nursed uncertainties about this job.

Langley went on quickly, “This chap hired me to ghostwrite his book. He gave me half my fee in advance. His outline was idiotic schoolboy trash, a yarn of derring-do in the Boer War. I made the plot less ridiculous.”

“Naturally,” she said. “You’re a top-notch editor.”

“Last week the book was turned down by Little Brown. He had the gall to tell me I had taken the spirit out of the great work.” Langley drained his glass. “He refused to pay my second installment.”

“How unfair!”

“I knew all along that he was a common bounder. But while I was writing I could tell myself I had a new career, such as it was, in the same country with my girls. Now there’s no hope. None.” His small whimper was the
sound a whipped puppy makes.

She gripped his hand, which was the masculine version of her own, long and slender.

Langley gazed out at the tangled strip of garden. “I’ve been corresponding with Mortimer Franklin-Smith—you remember him don’t you? He’s at Brighton House. An opening’s come up, an excellent one, for a man with my qualifications.”

“In London?” she asked with a shiver. Was she about to be thrust back into her lonely cell?

Rising, he went into the kitchen. “The way things stand,” he said, “I must turn it down. I don’t have enough to cover my expenses, much less the fare.”

“That’s no problem.” She followed him. “Curt left me a healthy bank account.”

“I can’t take your money.”

“Daddy, you’re being silly. But I do wish you could stay until next month, when he’ll be back.”

“You know that nothing would please me more than to be here when my first grandchild makes his appearance.” The weak, refined features were flattened by desperation. “But a chance like this comes along once in a lifetime.”

He seemed to expect an answer, so she nodded.

“Honora,” he said, “there’s to be no nonsense. I refuse to take a single penny unless it’s done as a regular business arrangement, with interest and a note.”

The words sounded familiar. During the last debt-ridden year in England hadn’t she overheard
him snapping them into the telephone? “I’m your daughter,” she said.

“It must be a loan, and that’s that,” Langley said angrily, and did not look at her. “Around a thousand should cover me. Not pounds of course. Dollars.”

“A thousand?” she whispered.

“Of course if you can spare more I wouldn’t be quite so strapped. Could go second class, not third, and so on.”

The largest check she had ever made out was Dr. Capwell’s three hundred dollars. How much was left in the account? Imprecise with numbers, she frowned as she tried to recollect her exact bank balance, which was somewhere above twelve hundred dollars. Her father was watching her with that odd, rabbitlike desperation. Curt would be home in a few weeks. She could certainly get by on two hundred plus dollars, couldn’t she?

“A thousand is all I can manage.” She reddened. Somehow she felt as if she were letting him down.

The following day they were at Union Station hugging goodbye. Both were weeping.

*   *   *

That week Honora’s expenses cropped up everywhere. Dr. Capwell insisted she go to a radiologist on the next floor for X-rays. He also referred her to the dentist across the hall, who charged exorbitantly to fill a small cavity. She drove into the nearby Paloverde station and the mechanic told her she was in luck, coming in now: her brakes needed relining. Langley had
charged some gift ties on her account at the Broadway. Even so, her withdrawal stubs showed a reassuring balance of a hundred and thirty-five dollars and seventy-three cents.

A tropical rain slashed down on the day the Bank of America envelope arrived with her statement.

Her balance was thirty-five dollars and seventy-three cents!

“They’ve made an idiotic mistake,” she said over the thumping rain, and arranged the canceled checks in the order she had written them.

Unable to think properly, much less add in her head, she used a brown paper grocery bag for scratch paper, reconciling the checks against the stubs five times before she saw her even hundred-dollar mistake in subtraction. She began to cry. After several minutes, her sobs ended and her mind grew hard and clear. She got thoroughly drenched and ruined her cheap loafers on the way to the Western Union office.

For two days she did not leave the apartment, dozing erratically on the sofa and drinking far too many cups of tea as she awaited Curt’s reply to her cable.

Each time the baby stirred, clamminess would break out on her forehead. Her first duty lay with this helpless unborn creature, Curt’s child, who depended solely on her. Her blind, filial loyalty was gone.
How could I have handed a thousand dollars to Daddy. Crystal never would have given him almost all her money.

When by the third day there was no reply,
she walked through the unpleasantly hot wind—a Santa Ana, Angelenas called it—to the Western Union office. The clerk behind the counter told her the foreign currency exchanges were handled through a bank, suggesting she try her branch. Honora dog-trotted the five blocks to Cahuenga. The assistant manager told her the branch had not been cabled any funds from Lalarhein.

Honora trudged home. Though it was early for the postman, she unlocked her mail box. Inside were three thick envelopes from Curt.

The manager was slowly vacuuming the hall and this was the second of April with the rent unpaid, so Honora stepped outside, her fingers shaking as she opened the thickest letter. She gripped the fluttering pages.

The wind rattled bushes around her and the hard, clear light suddenly seemed excruciatingly bright. She sat on the front step, waves of dizziness washing over her.

Honora’s hands clenched on the wheel as she passed the wreck. One of the big trucks that plied between Los Angeles and San Francisco had gone off the road, the trailer rolling over on its side while the tall cab remained erect. Curt had told her that the steep grade of the Grapevine was holy hell on the big rig’s brakes. The mechanic had relined hers but what if the problem was recurring now?

Her neck ached with a cat’s cradle of tensions.

It was two days after she had received Curt’s letter. Two days of numbers that constantly plagued her—the sums on her unpaid gas bill, telephone bill, the price stickers on her calcium and Feosal pills, the bright figures in the supermarket.

There had been no response to her pleading telegrams.

Yesterday morning the manager had knocked on her door, her sagging face surrounded by a nest of metal curlers. “It’s the fourth, dear,” she said, the threat clear beneath her saccharine tones.

“I’m most awfully sorry, but Mr. Ivory’s deposit is in a foreign currency and the bank needs time to process it,” Honora replied, attempting breeziness. During the Sylvanders’ last penurious months in London, she had learned the humiliating art of lying to creditors.

“God knows in your condition I’d let it ride, but the landlord’s a Simon Legree about his rents. Seven days overdue and he has me tack up the eviction notice.”

Alone, Honora staggered to the couch and lay trembling. Eviction? Where would she go? If only she had, say, an extra hundred dollars she could eke out another month. She ran a shaky hand over her cold, moist forehead. Who would lend her a hundred? What about Crystal? Gideon’s threat against Curt remained fresh in Honora’s mind and she shook her head as if warding away temptation.

But what about Gideon himself?

How could she humiliate herself—and Curt, too, by inference—by floating a loan from their enemy? Besides, to face Gideon she would have to drive almost five hundred miles each way. How would the journey affect the baby? The pamphlet said that travel, like intercourse, should be restricted.

Could beggars be choosers? Rising unsteadily from the couch, she had searched through Curt’s papers for the Texaco map of California.

When, finally, she reached the bottom of the Grapevine she pulled over and walked around the car, filling her lungs with the pervasive sweetness of the mile-square alfafa fields. Each hour, religiously, she halted for five minutes, hoping that the rests would protect the embryo.

In Bakersfield, she bought Cheez-Its and a carton of milk. She drove and halted until the oncoming headlights became hypnotic, then she pulled over on the shoulder, locking both doors,
curling up with difficulty on the seat. Each time one of the big trucks passed, the old coupe shuddered. Late the following morning, she reached San Francisco. While the attendant filled her tank at a Standard station, she used the restroom to wash and change into the freshly ironed smock that she’d placed carefully in the trunk. In the metal mirror, she saw her pale, frightened face.

Parking near Maiden Lane, she climbed stiffly from the car. Her lower body felt heavy, as if the blood had congealed, and for a moment she was terrifed about the effect of the long drive on her child. Then she felt a reassuring kick.

The Talbott switchboard operator cast a suspicious, mascaraed eye at Honora’s maternity top. “Yes?” she asked.

“I’d like to see Mr. Talbott.”

“You have an appointment?”

“No, but—”

“Sorry. That’s the rule here. Nobody but nobody gets into Mr. Talbott’s office without an appointment.”

“He won’t mind my popping in. I’m Mrs. Talbott’s sister.”

“Say, you have even more of that adorable accent. Go on up.”

As Honora mounted the uncarpeted staircase, she thought of that afternoon she and Crystal had first visited Langley here. Was it only a year ago? It seemed centuries since the close-knit Sylvander family had begun unraveling.

The second-floor hall was cold and bare,
empty of the overflow of drafting tables—additional proof, if she needed any, of the slump.

One of her obsessions on the long drive had been how she would sneak by Gideon’s dwarfish, elderly secretary. The woman was away from her desk. Honora opened the frosted glass door with the unobtrusive gold lettering: