Skyscraper (20 page)

There was no way in which to reach Mara.

If only she would come home—alone.

She did not. With a sick feeling, physical as well as mental, Lynn heard her coming up the stairs—with Houghton. It was long after midnight. They were talking. They thought themselves so safe. Lynn rose and groped for her robe and slippers again. She wouldn't lie here like a coward, her head almost beneath the sheet, she'd stand by Mara; she had to.

The door opened. “Good night, Frank,” said Mara to the man with her. “Bill!” said Mara, and screamed—not loudly but loud enough for Lynn to hear.

Bill said, “Don't get all hot and bothered. I haven't a gun. Wouldn't use it if I had. Just wanted to know where you were—and with whom. That's all. I've found out now. Thanks a lot, Houghton—I suppose you
are
Houghton—for bringing my wife home safely. You can get out now,” he suggested, pleasantly.

Houghton stepped forward, heedless of Mara's frantic—“Go now—
please
go, Frank.” “I don't like your tone, Burt. I see no harm in taking your wife to dinner. I'd be grateful you'd modulate your voice and somewhat change your attitude.”

“I'd be grateful to you, if you'd get out,” Billtold him, rising and advancing toward the taller, more slender man. “I want to talk to Mara; and I'd rather do it in your absence. I'm not concerned about you. If Mara wants to dine—until midnight—with a man in order to keep her little tuppenny job she can do it—”

“To keep her job?” asked Houghton, bewildered.

“Sure, that's how they all do it,” Bill told him, very ugly.

“Good little old S.A. Vamp the boss—or the boss's nephew and your job's safe. And now—
will
you get out?”

“Mara—”

“Oh, please go,” she cried out. “Please—don't—don't believe him, Frank—”

“You'd better believe me,” said Bill. “What good would it do you not to? You're a married man, I believe. Mara's married, too, although she appears to forget it sometimes.”

Lynn said, appearing suddenly, “You'd better go—Mr. Houghton.”

He went, withdrawing a shocked, bewildered face. Bill growled at her, “You don't have to be in on this either, Lynn.”

“I don't intend to be,” she said clearly, “but—I'm right here, within call.”

Bill Burt laughed. “I'm not going to beat her up,” he said. “She isn't really worth the effort.”

Mara was crying, in the same shabby chair in which Lynn had wept some hours since. She was saying—“Never been so humiliated—” and other incoherencies over and over again.

Lynn went back to the bedroom. There was nothing else for her to do. But there even with the door closed she could hear.

Bill stood with his wife. He asked, “How far has this affair with Houghton gone?”

“It isn't an affair—how dare you—just because a man is decent to me!”

“I see. Well, he needn't be decent any longer. You're coming
home now. I've got a job out West. It starts in two weeks. You're coming West with me.”

“Why don't you ask your beauty-parlor girl friend to go?” Mara wanted to know.

“She doesn't happen to be my wife. She'd make me, I imagine, a damned-sight better wife than you've made me,” said Bill, “but I married
you
.”

“If you think I'm going to condone—”

“You'll have to,” he told her soberly “Granted I was unfaithful to you—what of it? There are worse things than that where a man's concerned. Granted, if you like, that you've been unfaithful to me—”

“I haven't! I haven't!”

“No, I don't suppose you have. You're not the type,” he said sincerely, “to come across. That doesn't matter either. We're going to start over again, you and I, on what's left. It wasn't my fault that I lost my job—”

“Nor your fault that you didn't find another?” she demanded.

“No. Do you think I liked it, sitting home day after day, waiting for you to come and remind me you were supporting me? That's a hell of a position for a man to be in. You might have made it a little easier for me, saved my pride a little, encouraged me. But you didn't. Every day it was the same—”

“Every day
you
were the same,” she accused him, “growling about this, complaining, ugly—”

“I had to have something left, didn't I?” he asked her oddly. “What did you want me to do, run around and wash dishes and sing, ‘Goody, goody, the wife's got a job, and I can stay at home and do the housework?' What do you take me for? It wasn't any easier for me to accept what you grudgingly gave me than for you to give. If my disposition was rotten—well—perhaps it wasn't all my fault.”

“What about Betty?” she demanded. “Where does she come in?”

“Nothing. Nowhere. That's over and done with. She was—kind. That's more than you were. It's over, I tell you. She understands. And you're coming West with me.”

She cried shrilly, “I'm not. I'm not. I never want to see you again. I'll divorce you—”

“Better be careful,” he warned her.

“I'll divorce you,” she repeated. “I can take care of myself!”

Surprisingly, he said nothing for a moment. Lynn, in the bedroom, heard him walk to the door. There she heard him pause, and his words reached her clearly.

“Think it over, Mara. You've got ten days before I have to start. You know where to reach me.”

The door closed.

“Brute! Beast!” cried Mara at the wooden barrier, and cast herself upon the couch and wept noisily.

Lynn did not speak or stir. She was not so sure. She thought, Marriage can't be like that. But it was. She thought, How can they go on, after the things they've said to each other? Bill said,” We'll begin over again on what's left.” What is left? They'll get together again maybe, hating each other, underneath, if that's marriage—she halted, frightened. But my marriage with Tom wouldn't, it couldn't be like that, she thought. Oh, if I believed for a minute that Tom and I could stand shouting ugly words at each other I—

Somehow the business of Mara and Bill, who really mattered so little to her, made her feel insecure, soiled.

A little later Mara came into the room, and shivering in the warm night air undressed and climbed into bed. Lynn, pretending to sleep, lay still, far over on her side of the mattress. Mara said, “You
are
awake, aren't you? How you could sleep through that?—You heard what he said. Before I'd go West with him, I'd—I'd—”

“What?” asked Lynn practically.

“I don't know,” she admitted forlornly. “Lynn, what
shall
I do?”

“Do you—love Frank Houghton?”

“Of course not,” replied Mara virtuously, “I'm married.”

To her own and Mara's astonishment Lynn laughed wildly. She said, “Sorry. Go to sleep, Mara; perhaps things will be different tomorrow.”

They were. For when Jennie and Lynn entered the apartment together that evening they found Mara walking the floor. As they came in she turned on them angrily, and cried out, “I've lost my job!”

“Mara! How—why—?” asked Lynn, concerned, while Jennie, nodding her wheaten head, inquired, “Well, what the hades did you expect?”

“How? Frank Houghton, of course!” said Mara viciously.

“Frank?”

“Naturally. Frank. Because of what Bill said last night. Because of what I said today.”

“What did you say?” asked Jennie, interested.

Mara flamed out at them both. “I had lunch with him. He said—he said he couldn't risk losing his job or letting down his wife and kids, but that I could divorce Bill and take a flat somewhere and give him a key!”

Lynn murmured something, but Jennie smiled a little.

“And you didn't like him enough?” she asked gravely.

“Like him enough! As if I'd ever like any man enough!”

“I don't think you would. Neither would I,” said Jennie, “but that's not saying that I wouldn't accept, if the key were gold-plated and the flat had plenty of service.”

“Well,” said Mara flatly in the little silence that followed, “I'm not downright immoral like you, Jennie Le Grande!”

“No? I wonder what being moral is? Being
im
moral I suppose, is only a question of what you want to pay for things,” said Jennie without rancor, and vanished into the bedroom.

“I hate Frank Houghton,” said Mara after a moment. “If he thinks he can do this and get away with it—I'm going down to see the boss tomorrow!”

“I wouldn't, if I were you,” Lynn advised her gently.

“I shall. I won't lose my job simply because I've been decent,” said Mara.

She went the next morning to the office as usual. But Frank had taken, unexpectedly, a vacation. He was not there. His uncle was, however. The door of the private office shut upon Mara.

When she came out, she was very pale. No one spoke to her
as she walked through and out of the office. She rode downstairs in the swiftly falling elevator. She walked into the street, and stood there, irresolute. The shadow of the skyscraper loomed over her, cold, dark, save for the aspiring towers, which were hot with sunlight, and soared into the blue.

She went back to the apartment and packed. She called a telephone number. “Bill,” she said—and her voice was soft—“Bill—I'm coming home—”

She left a note for Jennie and Lynn. Lynn reading it, exclaimed, “How can she?”

But Jennie turned her wise blue eyes on Lynn with something of pity in them. “She had to, don't you see? What else could she do? She probably spun tall yarn to Houghton, thinking he's say, ‘Oh, goodie, goodie, let's all get divorced and change partners!' Not that bird. He wasn't even in love with her. Just crazy about having a woman make eyes at him and tell him how grand he was. Same thing with Bill and the other heart, see? Houghton got cold feet, I guess, and maybe spilled something to his uncle. So Mara's let out. And she goes back to Bill. It's all very simple,” said Jennie, yawning.

It might be simple; but it made Lynn feel sick.

 

 

 

THE PERFECT HOST
IN THE END LYNN WENT OFF FOR HER WEEK-End without telling Tom the name of her host. She had not seen him since the night at the apartment except at the office, nor spoken to him save briefly over the telephone. This intangible estrangement on his part worried her while it bewildered her. She did not know of his awkward and embarrassed explanation to Rawlson—“Sorry, old man, I've thought it over and decided not to”—nor Rawlson's hot arguments and final, shrugged, “Well, if you won't, you won't, but I think you're a fool!”

No man likes being thought a fool, and that Rawlson did think it very sincerely, that it was with him no mere figure of speech, Tom was perfectly convinced. Now that he had thought
it over, perhaps Lynn was right her hair-splitting and woman's scruples. But that didn't make it any easier for young Shepard, facing his friend. If Rawlson thought him a fool, cautious and unwilling to risk anything in “legitimate” business, he certainly felt like one; and he could give Rawlson no adequate reason for his about-face. Couldn't, of course, bring Lynn into it. He'd stand doubly condemned; first for having talked over his business with a girl; second for permitting himself to be so influenced.

The result was natural. A grouch. Tom, unable to forget that he had been adjudged an imbecile in the eyes of another man, and, if not “dishonest” and “disloyal,” at least an incompetent in the eyes of the only girl in the universe, took to rebuilding his set as a man takes to a strong drink, and to drowning his loss of self-esteem in summer static. Moreover, through Hank he had come to know one of the supervising engineers at UBC, and so spent his lunch hours in the tower, sneaking into the control room, or, en route there, pausing in the wide hall to look down through the windows into the great two-storied studio where orchestras played with ease, sound, and fury, of which no note penetrated walls or windows, yet whose music was miraculously and eerily released from the loud-speaker in the reception room not far away.

Hank said one evening, “Why not break away from your blasted bank and come where your job will give you a kick? I think Noonan's quitting; you might make it there. You've got enough background, your engineering and the Y course.”

“Lynn would never stand for it,” Tom told him gloomily. “She's set on my becoming a sort of carbon copy of J. P. How much would I drag down to start with?”

“Forty-five. But you're not likely to become a millionaire,” said Hank grinning, long legs on the mantel, while Slim, knocking the ashes from a rank pipe, said, “Not by a long shot. But then neither will I. Public utilities only make stockholders rich.”

Tom ignored this plaint. “Forty-five? Almost what I'm getting now,” he murmured, “but, no, she'd never stand for it.”