The Mulberry Bush (9 page)

She did not open the letter that night. She wanted to be calm and sane when she read it—not twisted and warped by all the wild thoughts that were rushing through her brain now. Morning would bring relief, a readjustment of values, the ability to judge what was important and pertinent and what was merely emotional.

She telephoned Teresa's nurse and told her that she would not return that night. Then she found a pair of clean pajamas, brushed her hair, and crept into her own bed. The rain increased, the quiet was restful, and presently she slept.

With morning, she deliberately deferred opening the letter until she had had her breakfast. The rain had stopped, the wind blew frostily, her rooms were chilly and fresh. She wrapped herself in a warm robe, made coffee, found a few strips of limp bacon in her tiny refrigerator, and one egg. No bread. She had forgotten to empty her breadbox and the half loaf that remained in it was green with mold. But the hot food was good, and she felt adequate again as she washed the dishes and made up her bed. A warm shower helped, too. She combed her hair, put on a dress of brown wool, did her nails, and smoothed on lipstick before she let herself sit down by the window to read Mike's letter.

By that time the sun had come out thinly, making the bare trees glisten, lying in a pattern of pale light on the rug. In that calm, prosaic light, all her tormented wretchedness of the night before seemed a trifle silly. Absurd, to go off the deep end, assuming the worst, counting everything lost, when very likely it would all be explained, smoothed out, when no doubt half her desperate imaginings were mere hysteria, the result of loneliness and the strain of not hearing from Mike and not understanding his silence.

As for Harriet Hillery, who knew the truth about her? Not a malicious gossip writer, certainly, nor a half-drunken newspaperman. That was a personal matter between Mike and that girl, and if Mike had neglected to talk about it even to her, his wife, didn't that mean that it was no longer significant, that it was ended for those two?

Naturally Mike had not discussed it, and if the newspaper people he knew drew wrong conclusions, that was their stupidity, their brash and avid propensity for concerning themselves with the personal affairs of other people, ignoring good taste and the sanctity of privacy; it was not Mike's fault.

“You are an adolescent, Virginia Warfield,” she told herself sternly. And then she opened the letter.

There were seven big sheets, typed on the stationery of the Gran Hotel Bolivar, typed hastily, with words crossed out and letters transposed, as though Mike's mind had been flying frantically ahead of his fingers.

It began: “Darling, darling Ginny!”

She read the words over several times, letting Mike's voice come back, his quick, tender smile, his laughter, the touch of his hands. He did love her—and what else mattered? This was their own, this was their love, and the world forever shut out. She felt warmed and safe again, as though she had been whirling in an icy stream, choking, battered against strange rocks, and suddenly a hand had caught her and pulled her back again into warmth and safety.

“I'm a dirty heel to have put off writing so long,” Mike began. (Odd that he should have said that—used Sam Hinchey's identical word.) “But there haven't been enough hours in a day for all I've had to do.”

She knew about that, too, the desperate pressing all day against time, work piling up, interruptions driving her mad, the telephone, wires to be answered, information to be hunted for; and at night, a weariness that dulled body and brain till hands quivered holding a pen, and sentences evolved themselves with wooden stiffness.

I've been thinking about you every minute and mad at myself because I didn't bring you along [Mike went on]. There are so many things I want you to see. All this old, old country—

Three pages of that. Virginia found herself skipping words, lines. The Inca, the dancing in the moonlight in the ancient square, the old temples, buried for years, excavated again, the goatherds sleeping in the sun— “But I read all this in Mike's column!” she was thinking, as she ran through the typed pages, seeking for something that was written for her alone.

Dave Martin is here. [And who was Dave Martin?] I told you about him—or did I forget to? [Oh Mike, you forgot. You forgot so many things!] Dave was with me in Spain and at Darbenut, the time the plane broke down—I told you about that. Today we went back into the hills to an old town, half modern, half so old that no one knows who built it—

“And I'll read about that tomorrow in Mike's column!” she said aloud, half bitterly.

Then, at the end, a paragraph. Erasures, a line crossed out, as though Mike had been worried and uncertain about telling her what he had to say.

You're the only girl I love, Ginny. [He had underlined the word “only.”] No matter what happens, remember that. You're my wife and I'm counting the days till I come back to you. And when the mail comes and there's no letter I feel lost and lonely all day long.

“And how do you think I've been feeling?” Virginia said aloud indignantly. “Day after day—two weeks and more—and not a word, not a line?”

After that, a line had been crossed out. But it was possible to read, under the x's, what Mike had started to type and then thought better of it.

“If you should hear any odd stories,” she read the obscured words. So he knew, or he feared, that she had seen that item in the papers. And after he had begun his explanation, he had changed his mind, decided to wait, perhaps, decided it might be better to ignore it. And now, as she reread the letter, she read between every line an uncertainty, the worried haste of a troubled conscience. It was a duty letter, not spontaneous, in spite of the loverly phrases here and there; in spite of the misspelled rush of affectionate reassurances at the close; in spite of the naive crosses at the bottom of the page. She folded it and put it back into the envelope.

Nothing was solved, nothing was cleared up. Mike loved her—so he said. He missed her—but he had waited seventeen days to tell her so. And now, perhaps, seventeen more days would go by—.

She put on her hat and coat and went to the office. She telephoned Teresa dutifully.

“I hope you're feeling better today?”

“No, I'm not. I'm feeling definitely low,” snapped Teresa. “Why on earth didn't you come back? You know I'm not well enough to cope with these creatures. The doctor came and made an absurd scene—as though my blood pressure was any worse than it has been for years! I told him I'd been living with my blood pressure and if it ever did go down to normal, it would probably kill me. And now the nurse is going around with a smug, righteous face on her—arguing that I have to stay in bed. I told her I was going to the office as soon as I learned how to use these foul crutches—and what did she think of that?”

“But you aren't, you know, you mustn't,” protested Virginia. “It's getting ready to freeze outside—there'll be bad weather. Just tell me what you want done, Teresa.”

“How can I tell you when you're over in Georgetown? Is that Gargan girl there? Send her up here. I want some letters written. And tell her to bring a dictionary along if she's forgotten how to spell.”

“Miss Harrison wants you to come up to her apartment and bring your notebook,” Virginia said to Mary Gargan, as she hung up. “Are all the folders ready to go out?”

“Not all yet,” Mary Gargan's fingers trembled as she fumbled a pile of envelopes. “I was just addressing these. Goodness, she'll keep me there all day—” she looked frightened and unhappy. “She'll scold and ask the most personal questions—and then I get nervous and do everything wrong.”

“Don't let her make you nervous. She's high-strung now—confinement irritates her, she has always been so active—but most of it is just her manner. And if you listen patiently to Miss Harrison, you can learn a great deal. She's really a very remarkable woman.”

“Miss Warfield,” the girl hesitated, gathering up her notebook and pencils, “I was going out to lunch, so if someone telephones here—will you explain, please—” Her pale face was even paler, her eyes looked desolate.

“Certainly. But you'll probably be finished by lunch time.”

“Oh, I won't! She'll go on and on—changing her mind—” Mary was almost in tears.

“Is this such an important luncheon engagement, Mary?”

“It's . . . Oh well, it doesn't matter!” Mary flung on her brown coat with the cheap fur collar. “Everything is terrible anyway!”

“This,” said Virginia, smiling at her, “has the sound of a sentimental affair to me. If he calls, I'll be very careful to explain, Mary, that it wasn't your fault.”

“Well—thank you, Miss Warfield.” Mary's voice was a little sulky, and there was a weary and harried look in her eyes.

“Poor child, he's probably being cagey—and she's in love,” Virginia decided when Mary had gone. Past her first youth, Mary was undoubtedly clutching at the trailing garment of romance, anxious and unhappy for fear it would slip from her fingers.

Virginia was grateful for a little hiatus, for quiet in the office. Now she could sit down and answer Mike's letter. She would write in the same tone as in her former letters. She would raise no issues, begin no arguments. She would not put Mike on the defensive, she would not whimper. She would stand fast on her pride, however life worked out for the Michael Paulls.

Afterward, if Mike chose to tell her—but that was his affair.

“If he does still love me—” for all her carefully achieved attitude of calm, that
if
still persisted. But she kept any nagging unease out of the letter. She told him about the Gambles, casually, because after all, it was all casual. They were friends now, she and Bruce. But she could not resist a perverse impulse to write:

All that you're doing sounds so exciting. I was so interested when I read it in your column. You are a very lucky person, Michael, me lad.

And then at the end, the perverse feeling having got the better of her coolly controlled determination, she added a line.

Has no one ever told you about a woman's curiosity? I have heard some odd stories. And laughed at them as I am laughing at you.

“Now,” she said with a dry little grimace, as she jerked the sheet out of the typewriter and signed her name, “let him worry!”

It hadn't been entirely true. She hadn't laughed. Even now, when her attitude had calmed to the dispassionate detachment of an observer, of waiting for developments and purposing to do nothing whatever to bring them about, she did not feel like laughing.

The telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver.

“Harrison Tours speaking.”

“Mary?” said a masculine voice. A nice voice, speaking in a low tone.

“I'm sorry. Miss Gargan had to go out on business. I'm not sure when she'll return. Is there a message?”

“No, thank you.” There was the click as the speaker hung up.

“Poor Mary, there goes her lunch date. And she thinks he'll be offended and take someone else out, I suppose.”

But she forgot Mary and plunged into the mass of work she had to do. Why did people ask the same questions over and over? Women were the worst, elderly, home-keeping women; afraid of the world and strange places, yet consumed with curiosity about them. She thought about old Mrs. Gamble and on an impulse mailed to her an assortment of literature describing tours and cruises to the West Indies, the Panama Canal, and even to Alaska. The little old lady would not stir away from her fire in the winter weather but perhaps she would get a vicarious thrill or two, reading about palm trees in the moonlight, and tradewinds blowing along strange, romantic shores.

She had her lunch sent up and ate a sandwich and drank milk mechanically, while she read proof on a new booklet. Then the telephone rang again, and Mary Gargan's timid voice said, “Miss Warfield?”

“Oh Mary, hello—Mary dear, I did my best. But he hung up before I could explain.”

“Oh, Miss Warfield—it isn't that—it's Miss Harrison. She's just—Miss Warfield,” Mary's voice rushed tensely, “I—I think she's dead!”

Teresa Harrison was not dead. She lay, cold and blue, breathing very slowly through her mouth, her body twitching, her face covered with sweat.

The doctor was already there when Virginia arrived, he folded up his stethoscope as she came to the bed and looked at her soberly.

“You're a member of her family?” he asked.

“I'm her assistant in her business. Is it—”

“Come out here,” he took her by the arm and led her into the pantry. “It's her heart,” he said when the door had closed, “I've been expecting it.”

“It's serious then?”

“Never know exactly how serious a heart attack is. She may rally—and she may not. But she'll have to be entirely quiet for a long time. I want two more nurses. She'll have to be watched constantly. No visitors and no excitement.”

“That will be hard to do. I have to be at the office all day—and she doesn't obey orders gracefully. Could she be moved to a hospital?”

“She shouldn't be moved now. I'll give positive instructions that no one is to be admitted.”

“He'll need a policeman to enforce those instructions,” Virginia was thinking, knowing Teresa and Teresa's friends. But she said quietly, “I'll do my best, doctor.”

Mary Gargan was sitting on the edge of a gilt chair, looking stiff and frightened.

“She was dictating—and raging at me between letters as she always does—and all at once she looked queer, and gasped, and collapsed before the nurse could get to her. Now what do we do, Miss Warfield?”

“We go back to the office and carryon. Stick with me, Mary—this will be tough going. Miss Harrison kept so many details in her own hands. Do you know anything at all about her relatives? Has she any, anywhere? You handled all her correspondence.”

“She has a husband,” Mary said, abruptly.

“Good gracious! Divorced?”

“I think not. She sends him checks occasionally. Sometimes with a very curt note, sometimes just the check without a word.”

“Do you think we should notify him? Where does he live?”

“No, I don't think so. I think—things weren't pleasant between them, Miss Warfield. And I wouldn't know where to write him. We always addressed the letters to hotels in different cities—a letter would come from him and she would answer or just send some money.”

“We'll keep out of her personal affairs then, at least until she is well enough to give us definite instructions. Odd—I've worked for her all these years and never knew that she had a husband living.”

“Naturally I didn't discuss it, Miss Warfield. She warned me specially not to. And she was always furious when she heard from him. She'd rage around and make speeches about how much money she had made—and how men were no good.”

Strange how one went along, accepting people, knowing so little about their lives, Virginia thought, as she prepared to attack the work at the office. The work was not going to be easy. Teresa had kept a jealous hold on all the details, she had had a passion for personal execution that was almost violent. She had managed all the outside people herself, the widows who chaperoned parties of college girls, the men—young college men, usually, working their way—who handled cruises and camping trips. Virginia knew their names, some of them she knew by sight, the reports were all in the files, but the responsibility descending so suddenly was a little bit crushing.

“Get out Mrs. Harrison's letters first,” she told Mary, “and then we have to do something right away about those Cuban contracts. Mrs. Harrison planned to go down there soon—I don't know what to do. I can't possibly go. I may have to send you, Mary.”

Mary looked startled and then panicky. Her face clouded and tears came into her eyes.

“Oh—please, Miss Warfield—I couldn't possibly go!”

“Nonsense—of course you could go. You know more about this business than I—you should, you've been here practically since the beginning.”

“But, Miss Warfield—I just can't go away from Washington now—” Mary choked and then recovered herself. “I'm sorry,” she said, “it's just—why does everything happen at once? All the things that drive you crazy?”

“I don't know.” Virginia heard herself echoing Mary's sigh. “But it happens that way. It's some perversity of fate. Life goes along prosily—for years, and then suddenly, things begin cracking around your ears as though one calamity exploded another. We may be able to arrange the Cuban contracts from the office. The letters will have to be translated—you'll know which ones. I'll depend on you to handle that.”

She would have to move back to Teresa's apartment. There was no one to take the responsibility there. Food had to be ordered, the nurses paid, a maid engaged in place of the sulky slattern Teresa had put up with; there would have to be a power of attorney arranged so she could carry on the business, and explaining that to Teresa would be a touchy business. There was no time to brood over her own personal problems, and Virginia was grateful for that. She merely went round and round in a bewildered circle, getting nowhere, when she tried to think those problems through. Better not to think, now that her days were tense with activity, her nights so filled with tasks left over that there was no nervous energy left for thinking, and she dropped exhausted on the bed of Teresa's guest room every night, aching from head to foot with weariness.

There was no time to write letters, and no letter came from Mike.

Teresa improved slowly. Her rebellious state of mind retarded her recovery; she raged continually at the doctor, the nurses, most of all at Virginia. She lay very flat, her face flushed, her eyes glittering, her profile upturned, bleak and aging and bitter. Under frequent hypodermics, she relaxed and lay as if dead, but when she roused it was to a continual state of frustrated fury, and gentle remonstrance only made her worse.

When Teresa had been ill four days, Mary Gargan laid a letter on Virginia's desk.

“Here's another one of those—from that person I told you about. I didn't open it but I know the handwriting. What shall I do about it?”

“She wouldn't want us to see it. And she's too ill to see it herself. The doctor said particularly that she wasn't to see her mail yet. It will just have to wait.”

Mary was drooping more than ever now, she was abstracted and made endless mistakes; the wastebasket overflowed, as she typed pages and tore them up to do them over.

“Our stationery bill will be appalling, Mary,” Virginia protested, kindly. “Can't you be just a little more careful? Perhaps it's your eyes. Have you had them tested lately?”

Mary gave her a wild look and then suddenly began to cry, desolately, throwing her arms out on the desk and burying her face in them.

“Mary—for heaven's sake, pull yourself together!” Virginia was irritated. “If you're ill—if you're not able to work—”

“Oh no—it's—I can't tell you!” Mary gulped and mopped her face with a handkerchief. “Only—sometimes I feel as though I wanted to die. Miss Warfield—” she looked up, her stolid face sharpened, “were you ever in love?”

Almost, Virginia laughed. She controlled herself with an effort and felt swift contrition at the sight of the girl's tormented eyes and piteous mouth.

“Of course. All women fall in love—and out again, over and over. Nobody ever dies of it.”

“But—when it's so hopeless—” Mary's wail was anguished and her tears streamed again.

“I see. It's like that, is it? Doesn't he love you?”

“Oh, yes,” eagerly, “but—she won't get a divorce.”

“I'm sorry, Mary.” She would not be judicial and she would not add to Mary's misery by pointing out her folly. “It's just one of those things that nothing can be done about, is it?”

“She's so—horrible to him!” Mary's cheeks showed scarlet patches and her mouth was grim. “She doesn't want him—and she won't give him up. And she keeps him in debt till he's almost crazy. I get so sorry for him—he hasn't had a new suit, even, in three years. And she keeps his car—he never gets a chance to use it and she's always out places—he knows she goes out with other men, he could get the divorce himself but he says it wouldn't be the decent thing to do. And I can't see why he wants to be decent to her—and make us both so miserable!”

“But you wouldn't want him if he weren't honorable and a gentleman, Mary. After all, she is his wife.”

“A poor kind of a wife!” sniffed Mary. But she returned to her work, evidently relieved by her outburst. “What I hate about it,” she went on, “is that we can't see each other unless we sneak. We eat lunch at the same place—they have booths and we can talk. But he's always nervous for fear she'll come in and make a scene.”

“Where did you meet him, Mary—though perhaps I shouldn't ask.”

“Why, he does our printing. He's the one that comes up here with the proofs—and Mrs. Harrison was always sending me down there with cuts and copy and things.”

Virginia recalled, rather indefinitely, the grayish, mousy young man who came up occasionally from the printing office. She had looked at him a hundred times and never really actually been aware of him.
The Man Nobody Sees
. Mike had written that. And there were so many of them, a city full of them—all people, feeling, suffering, frustrated or happy, decent men, as Mary put it—men who wouldn't abandon worthless wives, men who went on patiently, doggedly, doing the thing they had to do.

She looked keenly at this printer when he came again, saw a colorless man of around thirty, with drab hair and shoulders a little bent. Only his eyes were important. They were brown and gentle and had a tired look, a look of enduring. But she saw them brighten as he talked to Mary, and a pink flush crept into Mary's face, making her grow almost pretty. On an impulse, Virginia put on her hat and coat.

“Mary can attend to these proofs, Mr. Ryder,” she said, “I have an appointment.”

Let them have this little moment alone, the poor, harried young things.

Life, she was thinking as she went down in the elevator, must have been planned by a joker. So many lives tangled, so much useless unhappiness—and did the mind that had made the plan sit off on some godlike eminence and laugh at the thwarted writhings of the little creatures caught in the web that had been spun for their undoing?

A raw wind was blowing off the Potomac, bringing the first briny threat of cold weather, as she went out, and she turned her collar up to her chin and bent her head against the gale, almost colliding with a man who was coming in.

“Hello,” said Bruce Gamble, steadying her, “I was just coming up to see you.”

“Oh, how are you, Bruce? I've been so frightfully busy lately. Mrs. Harrison is very ill from a heart attack and I'm trying to run the business alone.”

“Come inside where I can look at you.” He opened the door of the drugstore in the building. “Or were you going somewhere in a hurry?”

“I wasn't going anywhere at all. As a matter of fact, I was condoning an affair between the poor little secretary in our office and a man who has a wife. They're pathetically in love and the wife is a vindictive person, so I gather, who refuses to let the man go, though she doesn't want him herself. It's wrong, of course—it's not even respectable—but I walked out and left them together. I couldn't endure their pitiful, hungry eyes.”

“Just a blind sentimentalist—without a moral to her name! Don't you know that by all the canons you should have preached them a homily on the sanctity of the marriage vow?”

“Oh, the marriage vow is unoutraged, I'm confident of that. They're both nice people—that's what makes it so tragic. And the poor girl is eating her heart out, and our work suffers.”

“Ah, I see. She's a materialist and not a sentimentalist. Shall we sit down here? That chap over there in the white outfit is stewing up something hot in that chafing dish. It smells like chocolate. It is chocolate. Boy—two!”

“With a marshmallow on top—two marshmallows,” added Virginia. “How is Merry?”

“Merry's very low in her mind. The pup has fleas and has been banned from sleeping in her bed. They're a disconsolate pair when night comes.”

“And you are a hard-hearted parent.”

“Oh, I'm soft enough. One wail and I'm putty in her hands, and she knows it too darned well. Avis is the grim one. She's been reading articles by some medical fellow on the plagues and horrors disseminated by fleas. She goes around with a spray gun, and the pup dives under something whenever he sees her coming.”

Virginia laughed. It was pleasant to laugh again. It seemed weeks since she had relaxed and been carefree.

“This is good.” She stirred the steaming cup. “I was tired and didn't realize it.”

“Mrs. Harrison is pretty sick?”

“She's critically ill, though she doesn't know it. She may never be well again. And that may mean,” she added with a sigh, “that I'll be looking for another job.”

He set his cup down. “I could suggest an opening—but you're not interested.”

“Please, Bruce, we made a bargain about that!”

“I'm sticking to my bargain. We're friends. Isn't it a friendly act—to feed a woman who won't stop to eat till she totters in her tracks?”

“I wasn't tottering. It was the wind,” she declared. “Are you off soon to any wild places?”

“The oilfields, perhaps. Not definite yet. We're perfecting some new stuff for oil men—seismographic shots. Are you yearning to be rid of me?”

“Of course not, silly. I'm merely interested.”

“Interested enough to have dinner with me tonight? I'm staying in town.”

“It's so hard to, do, Bruce. I'm running Teresa's apartment—and the only time I have for that is at night.”