The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (15 page)

“But someday I won't,” he would tell himself grimly. “Someday I'll have the last laugh.”

His fear of being laughed at had a natural counterpart in his fear of being unattractive to women. He realized, intellectually, that this fear was a foolish one. Ozey was bald on the top of his head and inclined to be fleshy, but his round head and face and firm, well-formed features went well with baldness, and his extra weight was evenly distributed over a short but muscular body. He liked to think of himself as the bald, sexually potent Siamese monarch in
The King and I
. But he could never get over the apprehension that women, particularly “ladies,” would find him somehow unpalatable, perhaps, dreadful thought, even “greasy,” and his sexual experiences—up to his present and thirty-sixth year—had all been purchased.

But Ozey had one great hope, and that was marriage. He knew that women were more interested in marriage than in anything else and that they gave even unlikely proposals their most serious consideration. Ozey felt that allied to a handsome, good-tempered woman of size—he always pictured her as larger than himself—he would be surer of the respect of the world that he had to face. He had another vision of Lee Ozite, again as the Siamese potentate but this time drawn in fiercer lines, a touch of Tamburlaine added, leading a large white naked Christian slave girl by a slender cord about her neck. Of course he would be nice to her, very nice to her. And the more he entertained this vision, the more he saw Doris Marsh in the role of the docile captive.

In real life, however, and as a tax associate, she ranked the managing clerk, and he would never forget her cool, justified reproach when one of his boys had filed a tax return at the wrong bureau. Yet on all other occasions she had been perfectly friendly, perfectly democratic. Unlike some of the associates, she gave herself no airs and would linger in his office after checking the calendar for a few minutes of chat and jokes. When she leaned over his desk to read the law journal that was always spread out there, the proximity of her breasts and the sound of her breathing excited him uncomfortably. She was just the height of his Christian slave and had the same white soft skin. He would have preferred blond hair to black and gray, but, after all, the real world could never match fantasy. Was she aware of the effect upon him? Was she tantalizing him? When he had asked her once to lunch, she had agreed readily enough, and they had had a pleasant hour of shop talk, but when he had tried to push away the money that she handed him for the check, she had simply laughed and said: “Come now, Ozey. This isn't a date.”

Did she mean she wouldn't have had one with him? Ozey brooded furiously all that afternoon. But when he left the office, she happened to be going down in the same elevator and told him: “I enjoyed our lunch, Ozey. Do you realize not one of the other lawyers except Harry Reilley has ever asked me? You might think I was some kind of pariah.” Ozey was too thrilled to sit, in the subway, and all the way home he hung on a strap in a half-empty car, calculating the wisdom of a sudden proposal. She would be startled, to be sure. It might be fun to see just how startled she would be. There would be something titillating about marching into her office and suggesting the most intimate of relationships without a single preliminary. Right there and then, before the set of Prentice-Hall tax services and before she had had time to take off her glasses. Could she
afford
to turn him down? Shrewdly, rather meanly, he assessed her. She was near thirty; she would never be a partner; she was an orphan of obscure origin. Yet as Mrs. Ozite all these liabilities would immediately become assets. She would not be too much younger than her husband or too much more successful a lawyer, and she would bring no tiresome in-laws. Besides, since she was a professional woman, his mother and aunt were bound to dislike her, which would make the inevitable break with his own family a cleaner, neater thing.

If Ozey, however, was precipitate in his thinking, he was cautious in his actions, and it was a good two months from the day of their lunch to the day of his decision to ask her for a date. But as he stood in the doorway of her office with a sheepish smile, the question fluttering about his lips, she anticipated him.

“Ozey! I was just coming to see
you.”

“Well, that's nice.”

“Can you lunch with me? Or rather
on
me. I want to take you out and buy you a cocktail and pick your brains. It's a personal matter.”

He grinned broadly. “You mean a date?”

“Would it were anything so pleasant.” She frowned and shook her head. “The fact of the matter, Ozey, is that I'm in a bit of trouble, and I need your advice.”

“What are we waiting for? Let's go!”

In the restaurant Doris drank a martini rapidly and then, to his surprise, ordered another. She seemed very agitated, as if she were finding it cruelly difficult to bring out whatever was on her mind. He watched her closely.

“You'd just better spit it out, Doris. Try to pretend I'm not here.”

She turned to him with a sudden defiance as if he had merged with his whole sex into a single enemy. “Very well, I'm pregnant,” she declared. “I'm having a baby, and I've got to get rid of it. It's very early, so it shouldn't be too hard.” She seemed to sense now from his gaping face that he, at least, was without responsibility for her plight. “I've come to you, Ozey,” she continued in a humbler tone, the tears starting to her eyes, “because I don't know where else to turn. They all say you can do anything. I thought you might be able to get me a decent doctor.”

Pregnant! Ozey was transfixed. For a few moments he could not swallow, so thick was his throat, so wild and overwhelming his mental pictures. So
that
was what his tall, cool tax girl had been up to while he was blushing for the fantasies of what he had wanted to do with her! At first this new idea of her moral abandonment made her even more desirable, and he felt himself swooped up by the dizzy thought that he could have been the father of her child. But then the truth and jealousy, like a team of plowhorses, came crashing into the fragile barn of his illusions.

“Who is the man? Do I know him?”

Ozey's aggressive tone took her by surprise. “What does that matter?”

“A lot. If he's in the office, I don't want the risk of speaking to him. Much less of shaking his filthy paw!”

“But, Ozey, he doesn't even know!”

“Then he
is
in the office?”

Doris seemed helpless before this new complication. “All right, he is. But what good will a quarrel between you and him do me? Please, Ozey, can't you help me?”

“Of course I can help you. I can get you the best doctor in the business this afternoon. It won't be cheap, but what's that when your life might be at stake? And if you can't raise the money, I'll lend it to you.”

“Oh, Ozey.” Her tears fell freely now. “What a friend you are. What a kind, true friend. What a man. What a real man.”

“You needn't worry,” he said with a swelling heart. “I shan't make a scene with your friend. I shall go to him quiedy and firmly and see that he pays your doctor, if nothing else.”

Doris looked at him with murky eyes. “I'm in your hands, Ozey. I must do as you say. I must trust to your discretion. It was Harry Reilley.”

“Harry Reilley!”

Reilley was the associate whom Ozey most admired in the office. He was not only large and blond and easily sure of himself, qualities notably lacking in Ozey, but he was somehow above, or at least aside from, the petty rivalries of the hierarchy. There was absolutely no difference in the way Reilley spoke to Ozey and in the way he spoke to Clitus Tilney. Ozey had been pleased, rather than soured, by the current office rumor that Reilley was taking out the senior partner's daughter. But now!

“I thought he was after the Tilney girl,” he said in a flat voice.

“No doubt he is,” Doris said bitterly. “Dear Harry makes a brave show of being one of the people when all he really wants is to marry the boss's daughter. I was just a rung in his ladder. And a fool not to have known it.”

Ozey wondered from what level to what Doris's “rung” had conducted her ruthless lover, but she was obviously in no mood for analytic inquiry. Besides, the maddening idea that Harry's open, candid front had all along been only the mask of a mercenary ambition made him want to believe her. What did Reilley really think of Ozey? As a poor sap, grateful for a smile and a clap on the shoulder, who would still be managing clerk (if he was lucky) when the firm was known as Tower, Tilney & Reilley?

“I guess we've both been rungs in Mr. Reilley's ladder,” he said bitterly. “But Mr. Reilley hasn't reached the top of that ladder yet. And rungs can break, you know. And send him toppling down.”

“He's a cheap, lying Irishman! And if that's what Miss Tilney wants, with all
her
advantages, all I can say is that I congratulate her on a splendid match!”

For the rest of their lunch they tore Harry to pieces, but over the coffee they turned to the matter in hand. It was agreed that Doris, who had still a week of vacation due her, would take it starting the following Monday and that Ozey would get hold of his doctor that afternoon.

Everything proceeded as smoothly as matters ordinarily did in Ozey's department. It took him only two discreet telephone calls to secure the doctor, and on Monday the abortion was successfully performed. Ozey had visited the doctor on Sunday and paid him a thousand dollars in cash. It had contributed not a little to his excitement that he had obviously been regarded as the father. When he called on Doris at her apartment on his way home from work, three days after the operation, he found her in a dressing gown, a bit pale and teary, but very grateful and glad to see him. She threw her arms around him and gave him a hug.

“Oh, Ozey, you old darling, how good of you to come. Do you know I haven't even told Madge?” Madge was the girl with whom she shared the apartment. “She thinks I've just got some woman's trouble. Which God knows I have! But what a friend
you've
been, Ozey. Sometimes I think my only friend!”

She insisted on moving about the room to mix him a drink, to get him an ashtray, although he begged her to sit still, and when they were settled at last, she kept staring at him with eyes of poignant humility. Ozey was pleased with the change from the easy, assured professional woman, and it somehow seemed, because he had produced the money and the doctor, because he was sitting there in the full armor of a business suit while she was vulnerably attired in an old blue dressing gown and a pair of soiled pink slippers, that it was he and not Reilley who had brought her to this sorry pass. He shuddered with excitement at the idea that one good tug at that dressing gown could transform her into his Christian slave.

“I
want
to be your friend, Doris,” he muttered. “You can't imagine how much I've always wanted to be your friend.”

***

The next morning, at half past nine, Ozey went to Harry Reilley's office and demanded in a barking tone the price of the abortion. Harry's face hardened as he listened.

“Assuming that all you say is true and that I was responsible, why should I deal with you?”

“Because I'm acting for Doris. And because I paid the money.”

“Why don't you get it from her, then?”

“Do you mean to tell me, Reilley, that you'd put all the expense on her?” Ozey's voice became high and shrill. “Is that the kind of guy you are?”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” Harry said angrily, “before we start the name-calling. Since you seem to know so much about it, you may as well get it all straight. Doris and I spent a weekend together. She was just as keen on the idea as I was. But a girl her age who's been smart enough to be admitted to the bar ought to be smart enough to take precautions. I don't see why I should be stuck with the whole cost of that weekend—always assuming, of course, that it
was
that weekend . . .”

“You cad!” Ozey cried, jumping to his feet.

Harry was on his feet at the same moment, and with a heavy hand on Ozey's shoulder, he pushed him roughly back into his chair. “Now let's take it easy, shall we? Let's not get ourselves hurt. I don't know why you're involved in this, and I'm not going to ask. But in return for my tact, I insist that you appreciate my position. I do
not
know that I'm the guy who knocked Doris up. But I admit I might be. And considering all the factors in the situation—and a few that you don't know about—I think I'm doing a hell of a lot more than most men would do in offering you five hundred bucks.”

Ozey debated the beautiful gesture of spurning this, but when he left Harry's office he had the check in his billfold, postdated to give Harry time to raise the money. As he passed Mr. Tilney's office on his way back to his own, he felt that the dragging weight of his hatred for Reilley was what brought him to a halt. He took a quick step past Miss Clinger's desk and pushed his head boldly in the open doorway.

“May I see you a minute, Mr. Tilney?”

Tilney looked up in surprise. His dealings with the managing clerk were infrequent and usually handled through Miss Clinger. “What can I do for you, Mr. Ozite?”

Even with his present preoccupation, Ozey had a sour moment to reflect that Tilney made a point of calling the other associates by their first names. “It's a personal matter, sir. May I close the door?”

Tilney stared. “Oh, I hardly think that will be necessary.”

“I mean personal to you, sir,” Ozey explained. “It's about your daughter.”

Tilney's eyes flashed forbiddingly, but he rose, walked quickly to close his door and then turned to face Ozey with his fall height and presence. “Now, Mr. Ozite,” he said softly, “will you be good enough to tell me what's on your mind?”