Nothing So Strange (2 page)

“No, I don’t think so. I liked him. When you like people you don’t weigh
them up like that. At least I don’t.”

“You never felt there might be things he was keeping from you?”

“We weren’t close enough friends for me even to think about it. He wasn’t
a very talkative person, anyway.”

“You mean that if he’d had any secrets he’d probably not have shared them
with you?”

“Maybe not. And I might not have shared mine with him. We were neither of
us the tell-everything type.”

He looked at me till I thought I was going to blush, so of course I did
blush. As if satisfied, he pressed down the clasp of his briefcase and stood
up. I saw then that he wore black shoes.

“Well, Miss Waring, I guess that’s about all. Thank you for coming
over…. And if by any chance we should need to bother you again….”

“It’s no bother at all to
me
, but I have an idea something must be
bothering
you
. Can’t you let me in on it?”

“No,” he said, smiling completely for the first time. He had good strong
teeth and the smile made rather babyish dimples. I took off ten years from my
first guess of his age; perhaps he was thirty-five.

“A secret?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Top secret?” (They like you to use their jargon.)

“Just a secret.” (Perhaps it wasn’t their jargon.)

“I see.”

I smiled back and walked towards the door. He overtook me, yet somehow
without hurry, before I reached it; turning the handle, he put himself with
me in the doorway. “Nice of you to come so promptly. I hope you didn’t make a
special trip—any time within a few days would have been all right.”

“Oh, I go downtown quite a lot.”

“Your father’s office?”

“Oftener the Village. More in my line than Wall Street.”

“Ah yes, of course. Writers and artists.” He cupped my elbow with his
hand. “I’ll have to think over your request for Brad’s address. Might be able
to oblige you, though of course we’re not a bureau of missing persons….
Well, thanks again…. Good-by.”

“But he isn’t exactly missing if you know his address, is he?… Good-by,
Mr. Small.”

In the elevator going down I thought I had done rather well. Or had I?…
Suddenly I realized that he had called him
Brad.
Was that to test me?
But of course I would have admitted readily enough that I used to call him
Brad. Nothing significant about that. It was probably their
technique—to leave you with a feeling that they know more than you
think they know, so that you can chew it all over and work up a fine state of
nerves afterwards.

I took a taxi uptown and had early dinner alone at the
house. There were
plenty of friends I could have called up, but I didn’t feel like making a
date with anyone, or even going to a movie later on by myself. The weather
was probably the last cold spell of the winter; a bitter wind swept in from
the north, and ice crackled where there had been any water in the gutters.
Even after a couple of cocktails the dining room looked so big and dreary I
was glad to have coffee upstairs and turn on all the lights in my personal
rooms. It’s a cheerful suite on the fifth floor—bedroom, bathroom,
dressing room, and den; I was allotted them as a child, and have never wanted
anything bigger, even when the rest of the house was free for me to choose
from. The furniture is good solid stuff from either New or Old England; my
mother probably bought it at the auctions she liked to frequent. And the
heating vents are built in the window sills, so that you lean on them and
burn your elbows if you want to look down and see what’s going on in the
street. Nothing much, as a rule; those middle sixties between Park and Fifth
keep pretty quiet. That evening, as I looked down, I saw the familiar steam
curling out of the manholes, and from the look of it as it scurried I knew
the temperature had dropped a good deal since I left the downtown office. The
low sky held captive the glow of the city; anglewise across Park Avenue I
could see the Rockefeller buildings lost in clouds about the thirtieth floor.
John came in to pull the blinds; I told him not to bother, I would do it
myself later.

“There’s still supposed to be some rule about lights,” he said.

“All right, then, pull them down.” At that stage of the war New York
didn’t bother much about the partial blackout, but John’s a stickler about
such things. We’ve been real friends from my childhood. My father enticed him
from a duke about twenty years ago, since when he’s become naturalized, but
he still calls himself English except when English visitors ask him if he is,
then he says he’s American or, if further pressed, a Scot.

“Are you going out again, Miss Jane?”

“Not me, I’m off to bed soon with a good book.”

“Not
Forever Amber
, I hope?” He has a corny humor, unchanged from
the time I was young enough to appreciate nothing else.

“No. I take my history straight. Always did, ever since I studied it in
London.”

I don’t know what made me bring that up, but I realized it was the second
time that day I had mentioned something that I often go months without even
thinking about.

He said, as he pulled the blinds and then the curtains: “I’d like to see
London again sometime.”

“You probably could, when the war’s over.”

“They say it’s considerably changed.”

“I’ll bet our part hasn’t. Hampstead Heath and round about there.”

“Several bombs fell near the house, I’ve been told,” he said thoughtfully.
It was still “the house” to us both. “Can I get you anything?”

“No thanks—I’ll be asleep very soon, I’m terribly tired. Good night,
John.”

After he had gone I stood at the window, pulling aside the blinds just
enough to see that it had begun to snow. The two great cities, each with its
own flavor, hold you like rival suitors, perversely when you are with the
other; and that night, as I watched the pavement whitening, I thought of
those other pavements that were called roadways, and the subways tubes, and
the whole long list of equivalents Brad and I once compiled as we tramped
across Hampstead Heath on a day when other things were in our minds.

I first met him at Professor Byfleet’s house in Chelsea,
but I didn’t
catch his name when we were introduced, or perhaps we weren’t—the
English are apt to be slack about that sort of thing, they are civil but not
solicitous to strangers, and when you visit one of their houses for the first
time it’s hard not to feel you are among a family of initiates, or else a
dues-paying but nonvoting member of a very closed-shop union.

This dinner at the Byfleets’ wasn’t anything important, at least by
comparison with many we went to; Byfleet was an anthropologist who wanted my
father to finance an expedition to New Guinea, so he doubtless thought he’d
have us meet his friends. I suppose they’d all been told we were rich
Americans, with the blow softened by adding that my mother was English. My
father never did finance the expedition, anyhow.

As I said, I don’t remember actually meeting Brad, but when we got to the
table I noticed him some way further down on the other side, next to my
mother. Now and again I glanced at him, and with a rather odd feeling that I
had seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t be sure; he was good-looking
in a restrained way, with dark, deep-sunken eyes, a long straight nose, and a
chin that was firm without being aggressive. There was also a mood of gravity
over him, tempered by a sort of intermittent nervousness as if he were
waiting for a chance to say something, not because he wanted to, or had
anything to say, but because he thought everyone must be wondering why up to
halfway through dinner he hadn’t spoken a word. I hoped my mother would soon
take pity on him, but his other partner moved first, and I could see that the
more she tried to draw him out the more he drew himself in. She was one of
those voluble unkempt Englishwomen who invade a conversation rather than take
part in it, and have a conspiratorial smile for the maid or butler, just to
show they’ve been to the house before.

I missed what was happening across the table for a while, for my own
neighbor engaged me, a hearty professor of biology who mentioned, apropos of
the veal cutlets, that man had only scratched the surface of his possible
gastronomic repertoire, that practically the entire insect world was an
untapped storehouse of taste novelties, that dried locusts made an excellent
sandwich, that there were many edible caterpillars fancied by the Chinese,
and that native tribes in the Andean foothills pick lice from each other’s
heads and eat them with gusto. He seemed surprised when I wasn’t upset, and
after I had accepted another cutlet he confessed that he often opened up like
that to
jeunes filles
whom he found himself next to at dinners,
because in the event that they were bores their distress at least made them
momentarily entertaining; but he could see I was not a bore, so perhaps I
would now talk about something serious. I said I could never talk seriously
to any man with one of those bristly little toothbrush mustaches, and was it
true that in certain crack regiments of the British Army men were compelled
to have them? He answered, Good God, how should
he
know, better ask
our host, who was a recognized authority on totem and taboo. After that we
got along fairly well, and presently he paid me what many Englishmen think is
the supreme compliment; he said he wouldn’t have guessed I was American.

Suddenly I was relieved to see that my mother, across the table, was
talking to her nervous neighbor. I knew then that everything would be all
right. She was adept at putting young men, indeed men of any age, at their
ease; she didn’t mind if they talked politics or business or art or
sport—even if they were intellectual she never tried to match them at
it, and if they weren’t she would make them feel a freemasonry existing
between her and them in a world, or at a table, of highbrows. Actually she
was cleverer than she pretended—not that she was especially modest, but
in her bones she felt that men do not like clever women, and what she felt in
her bones counted more than anything she could think out with her
intelligence. She had had an upper-crust education composed of governess,
boarding school, then finishing school abroad, and probably she had forgotten
95 per cent of everything she had ever learned from textbooks; but she had
done nothing but travel and meet some of the world’s most interesting people
for almost twenty years, and the result was a quick-minded knowledgeableness
unspoiled by knowledge. It made her understand politicians rather than
politics and diplomats rather than diplomacy. She talked plenty of nonsense,
and it was easy to trap her, though not always to prove that she was trapped;
and she would go on discussing a book she said she had read but manifestly
hadn’t, or she would break up a dull conversation with some fantastic
irrelevance for which everyone was secretly grateful.

After dinner I wasn’t anywhere near the nervous man, but when the party
broke up it appeared we were scheduled to drop him where he lived, which was
in our direction, and because we were also taking two other guests on their
way, he sat in front with Henry. We dropped these others first and then he
moved inside, but there was hardly time for talk before he began urging us
not to drive out of our way, his place was only a short walk from the main
road, anywhere near there would do. But my father insisted: “No, no, we’ll
take you right up to your door”; so Brad had to direct Henry through a
succession of side streets, and eventually gave the stop signal in the middle
of a long block of four-story houses with basements. He said good-night and
thanked us, bumping his head against the top of the car as he got out.

“North Dakota,” my father said, as we drove away.

“Yes, he told me too,” said my mother. “I’d have known it was somewhere in
the Middle West from his accent.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said, and mentioned the Englishman’s
compliment to me.

My father smiled and seemed in an unusually good humor. He wasn’t always,
after parties at other people’s houses. He said: “I find my own Kentucky
drawl a great help with the English. It makes them think me tough and
guileless, whereas in reality I’m neither.”

“And in reality you haven’t even got a Kentucky drawl,” said my
mother.

“Haven’t I? How would you know?… Well, coming back to Dakota. I had some
talk with him after the ladies left the table. Seems he’s a research lecturer
at your college, Jane.”

“Then that’s where I must have seen him before. I had an idea I had.”

“A young man of promise, from all accounts,” my father went on. “Byfleet
spoke highly of him.”

My mother commented: “If we’d had any sense we’d have dropped him at the
corner as he asked us. He probably didn’t want us to know the sort of place
he lives in.”

“Oh nonsense. A boy like that, making ends meet on a few fees and
scholarships—nobody expects him to stay at the Ritz. Probably has to
count every penny, same as I did when I was his age in New York. It’s good
for him, anyway, till he gets on his feet…. Brains, good looks, and a
tuxedo—what more does he need?”

“He’s very shy,” my mother said.

“That’ll wear off.”

“So will the tuxedo. It was frayed at the cuffs already.”

My father looked interested. “You noticed that, Christine? I’ll tell you
what
I
noticed—he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, and he was
hoping you’d rescue him from that Hathersage woman he was next to, but you
didn’t till nearly the coffee stage…. Must read her new novel, though. They
say it’s good.”

That was typical of my father; he respects achievement and is always
prepared to weigh it against not liking you, so that in practice he likes you
if you are successful enough. Julian said that once, and he was successful
enough; doubtless therefore in those days my father thought Brad was going to
be successful enough. I remember arguing it out with myself as we drove
home.