Tomorrow Is Forever (14 page)

Elizabeth and Spratt both smiled back at him gratefully. Elizabeth wondered at their talking like this to a stranger. But just now Kessler did not seem like a stranger. From being a newcomer among them, he had subtly changed into a friend who made her comfortable with the security of mutual understanding. Whatever memory he had stirred within her, it must be some old experience of peace. Since overhearing the children yesterday she had felt unsure of herself and of them, but now, hearing him speak, it was as though she had slipped back into some forgotten period of long ago when everything was safe and right. He was saying to them,

“Your children can afford to be cynical about themselves because they don't know how superior they are to most of their fellowmen. They believe in the obvious because they've found it good. When you see people deliberately clinging to a belief in abstractions they don't know anything about, you can be pretty sure they need to do it, because everything they do know about is unsatisfactory.”

“How cheering you are!” exclaimed Spratt.

Elizabeth was looking up at Kessler. She asked,

“Mr. Kessler, have you and I ever met before?”

He started. For a moment he looked down. She looked down with him, and saw his hand tighten on his cane. She was to learn that he did this often, making an unconscious gesture toward his physical means of support when his spirit felt undefended.

But he hesitated only for a moment. His self-discipline had been learned in a long hard school. He answered,

“Before tonight? If we had, Mrs. Herlong, I can't believe I could have forgotten it. No, I am sure we have not.”

He had looked up, and was regarding her steadily. Elizabeth did not know that letting his eyes meet hers just then was one of the hardest achievements he had ever accomplished in his life.

He did it so well that she nearly believed him. “Maybe I'm wrong, then,” she said. “But tonight, as soon as you came in, it seemed to me that I had seen you somewhere and I couldn't think where it was.”

“Maybe,” suggested Spratt, sitting down and taking up the cigarette-box from the table, “you two saw each other at one of those big cocktail parties where you see hundreds of people and don't get to know any of them.”

“Very likely,” Kessler agreed readily, turning toward Spratt as though welcoming his suggestion. “I've been forced against my will to attend several of those. Or possibly,” he added, “you saw me at the studio. You come there now and then, don't you, Mrs. Herlong?” He glanced at her an instant as he spoke her name, and then became occupied with watching Spratt blow smoke-rings. “You might have caught sight of me walking from my bungalow to a projection room—chance glimpses like that sometimes tease our memories unmercifully.”

“I suppose it must have been something of the sort,” said Elizabeth. But she was still not satisfied. She continued, “But do you know, Mr. Kessler, when you came in I thought I knew you, and I thought you gave me a sort of startled look, as though you knew me too. You didn't?”

“If I stared at you rudely, I hope you will forgive me, Mrs. Herlong.” He spoke lightly, almost humorously, as though it were a trifling matter. “I hope you will remember that I had been looking forward to meeting you, more eagerly than you realize. Attractive women have not been a great part of my life recently, or happy homes either. In the life of an exile they assume an importance that you do not understand, and I hope will never have to understand.”

Elizabeth thought, “He protests too much,” but Spratt was agreeing, “Yes, I should think they would. Is that your taxi pulling up, Kessler?”

“I believe it is,” said Kessler. “Good night, and thank you both again.”

Spratt walked out to the taxi with him. Elizabeth took a cigarette from the box on the table and stood looking down at the remains of the fire. When Spratt came in she turned around.

“Spratt, I don't care what that man says. I
have
seen him before tonight.”

Spratt shrugged. “Wherever it was, you went there without me. I've been with Kessler every day for the past couple of weeks, and it never entered my head I'd seen him before. Probably a cocktail party, Elizabeth, or rambling about the studio.”

“It wasn't. I tell you, I
know
him.”

“All right, all right, you know him. He doesn't know you. He said so. I'm going to sleep on my feet. We talked and talked, and didn't get a thing done.”

“You didn't? I'm sorry.”

“His mind wasn't on his work. He kept bringing himself back from a great distance and repeating something he'd said fifteen minutes ago. I never saw him like that, he's usually sharp as a whip. Tired, I suppose—working all evening after working all day never is a good idea.”

Elizabeth laughed a little. “Maybe I'm a moron. But I still have a notion that his mind wasn't on his work because he was thinking about me.”

Spratt was puzzled. “I don't get it. If he thought he remembered you, wouldn't he have said so when you asked him?”

“Oh, I suppose he would.” She threw her cigarette into the fireplace. “Maybe he just reminds me of somebody else, and I'll wake up in the middle of the night remembering who it is.”

“Probably some fellow who kept a German delicatessen in Tulsa,” Spratt suggested. He yawned, and Elizabeth added,

“Go on up to bed, darling. Would you like to have me bring you a highball?”

“I would indeed. Thanks.”

Spratt was already in bed when she came up with the drink. He was tired and sleepy, and they did not speak of Kessler again. Now that she had talked about it to him, her impression had begun to seem rather silly.

Long after Spratt and Elizabeth were both asleep, Kessler sat up in his apartment, thinking about her. He had seen Elizabeth, he had been into her home among those she loved best, and now that it was over he wondered why he had gone. Had it made him any happier to do this? He could hardly answer. He had seen what he wanted to see, Elizabeth the central figure of a happy home, and all he had said to her about it was true. But was he glad he had seen her there?

Certainly, at the beginning he had not been glad he had come. Though you prepared yourself for an event ahead, when it happened you found that you were not as ready as you thought. When he met Elizabeth at the door all his carefully rehearsed formality nearly went down before her. He had managed to get through those first minutes without betraying himself, but she would never know how close he had come to doing so. He had planned so many remarks to make to her, casual-sounding statements that would lead her to telling him all about herself, and he had not been able to make any of them. Thank heaven her children were not shy, and had chattered until he could recover a semblance of self-possession.

And then, in spite of all his efforts, he had nearly given himself away at the end. “Haven't you and I met before?” The question had come just when he had begun to feel at ease with her, and was talking to her like the friend he had dreamed of being when he went there. Its very frankness had taken him aback, leaving him no defense but a bare denial. He wondered if he had satisfied her. He could not be sure, but at least he had satisfied himself that though she might find him oddly familiar she had not suspected who he was.

Now the part of wisdom would be to let her alone. She had made her life without him and was content with it. She had, perhaps, more than he could have given her if he had returned uninjured from the war. He would never have made Spratt Herlong's income, for he had not that flair for material success. As for the rest—hard as it was to admit, the rest was none of his business. Elizabeth and Spratt were husband and wife. Their marriage had endured for twenty years and he was not going to endanger it now. He had come here from Germany to save Margaret, not to bring trouble to Elizabeth.

He could say all this to himself, but all the time he knew he was not going to ignore Elizabeth because he had not the power to make himself do so. She was there; he could see her whenever he pleased, and her children, who drew him nearly as strongly because they were hers. Spratt was the only one of them he would have been glad to ignore if he could, and he had to work with Spratt because he had to make a living. But he wanted to see Elizabeth again. Though he had left her such a little while ago, he already wanted it.

Then what could he do? He could keep away from her for awhile, until their next meeting would seem a casual one. He could keep himself better in hand than he had tonight, and if she still thought him familiar he could persuade her his memory was blank of the subject. And if she ever needed him—if there was ever any support or advice or consolation that he could give her—it hardly seemed possible that there could be, but if she needed him, he would be there.

After all, was it too much to ask? He wondered if she would ever know what it was to be so vastly lonely as he was now. Her life was so strong and copious—if he asked now and then for a crumb from the table, an hour of her time, an occasional assurance that he was her friend and she trusted him, was that very much?

He did not know. But he did know that right or wrong, he was going to ask it.

8

F
or several weeks Mr. Kessler did nothing about getting a bat for Brian, a reticence that both Spratt and Elizabeth admired. They had had experience of persons who wanted to move in on their lives and had started by trying to load the children with attentions. As they all liked Kessler she invited him to dinner again, and Spratt brought him in two or three times to have a drink on their way from the studio, so when Kessler had had time to be quite sure the Herlongs were accepting him as one of their friends he brought up the subject of the bat again, to Brian's great delight. Two days later he telephoned that he had obtained the bat, and made a date for Brian to come to see him.

It was very kind of him, Elizabeth thought, and she was glad to see her children's increasing friendship with him. Kessler never patronized them, and he had a great talent for minding his own business. He rarely mentioned the war unless somebody else brought it up, and when he did refer to national affairs he refrained admirably from making adverse criticisms of the President and from telling them what he thought Americans ought to do about anything. In fact, he listened to them a good deal more than he talked, though none of the children realized it. “He's swell,” they said of him.

Kessler said to Elizabeth, with a touch of wistfulness, “There is a great deal of you in all your children.” Occasionally she wondered why he seemed more interested in finding her characteristics than Spratt's. He and Spratt were good friends and Spratt frequently said his work on the picture was proving invaluable. But when he came to their home it was primarily to see her, a fact that Spratt observed with a sort of proud amusement. He liked other men to admire his wife.

Brian and Peter Stern visited Kessler so often that Elizabeth was sometimes afraid they were going to be nuisances, though Kessler insisted they were not. Brian saw little Margaret and announced grudgingly that she was not bad, so Elizabeth suggested the party. The next time Brian went to see Kessler she went by to get acquainted with Margaret. Kessler's modest street-floor apartment was kept for him by a motherly woman who came in leading Margaret by the hand and telling her to speak nicely to the lady, which Margaret did. She was an intelligent-­looking child, with big blue eyes and two fat pigtails, shyly polite; as Elizabeth rarely had any trouble getting along with children, their acquaintance began without difficulty. Margaret had learned the English language very well. Oh yes, she said, she went to school and she was learning to swim, and when asked if she would like to have a party with her school friends she nodded eagerly. When they had got that far in their conversation Kessler came in, having left Brian and Peter blissfully occupied with the bones of the bat. “I'm going to have a party!” Margaret announced to him.

Kessler looked down at her and smiled fondly. Again Elizabeth felt a flash of recognition. “I've seen him somewhere, I know I have,” she thought. “Maybe he doesn't remember, but I'm sure of it.” However, she did not mention the subject, for Margaret was talking, and by the time they had arranged the date of the party and other details she felt it was time to go.

On the way home she made up her mind that though he might think her foolish for persisting, the next time she happened to be alone with Mr. Kessler she was going to ask him to rack his brain and figure out where it was she had met him. There was no good reason why it should seem so important to her to remember, since it must have been a very casual meeting to have escaped her so thoroughly, but these occasional twinges of recollection teased her. Just for the instant when he had looked down at Margaret with a tender little smile, not only the expression of his face but his whole attitude had been so familiar that she had felt as though she was watching someone she had known for years. Then it was gone, and now she could not remember at all.

Since Margaret's party was going to strain their already overtaxed problem of household help, Spratt suggested that he bring Kessler over that evening, leaving him there while he drove Margaret and some of the other guests home, and then that he, Kessler, Elizabeth and the two older children go out for dinner. Elizabeth agreed gladly. She had managed to keep servants so far, but she wanted to give them no grounds for complaint. The party went very well, for Margaret was not shy among friends of her own age. They played in the pool, gobbled sherbet and cake without noticing that war exigencies had made it impossible to get ice cream, and were happily tired when they were finally coaxed back into their clothes and their parents began to arrive to take them home. Margaret came over to Elizabeth.

“Thank you for the party, Mrs. Herlong. We had a very good time.” She spoke with careful politeness.

“I'm so glad you enjoyed it. We want you to come over often—tell your father I said so.”

Margaret was evidently glad to hear this. “Thank you, I'll tell him. Mrs. Herlong, may I pick one of those purple flowers on the fence?”

“Why of course, But the stems are strong—wait a minute and I'll get a pair of scissors.” When she brought the scissors Margaret was waiting. “We can cut a lot of them if you like,” Elizabeth offered. “There must be thousands of blossoms here on the fence.”

“The yellow ones are the same sort of flower as the purple ones, aren't they?”

“Yes, and the deep orange ones too.”

“The dark ones have yellow centers. That's pretty. What do you call them?”

“Lantana.”

“Lantana,” Margaret repeated. “I've seen a lot of them here, but I never knew the name. They bloom all the year round, don't they?” She gathered the bouquet into her hands. “You must like flowers,” she suggested, looking around, “you have so many of them.”

“I do like them. We used to have some beautiful beds there on the other side of the pool, before we put in the Victory garden. You enjoy flowers too, don't you?”

“Oh yes.” Margaret nodded vigorously. “Do you like to put them under a microscope and see how they're made?”

“I don't think I've ever done that. Where do you have a microscope? At school?”

“No, at home. My father shows them to me. He knows all about flowers. We put lots of things under the microscope at home and we look at them. It's fun.”

“Your father certainly knows a lot. But he was some sort of doctor in Germany, wasn't he?”

“Not exactly a doctor. He worked in the laboratory. But my real father was a doctor.”

“Your real father? Isn't Mr. Kessler your father?”

“Oh no,” said Margaret, her blue eyes serious across the lantana. “My real father died. And my mother too, and I was very sick. That was a long time ago when I was little. But I remember being very sick, and before I was well we left the hospital, late one night, and we rode a long way in an automobile in the dark, and I started to cry. I don't cry now, I'm too big, but I was little then and I cried, and he—you know, my father, Mr. Kessler—he said he would give me something to put me to sleep so I wouldn't be so tired, and he did, and I went to sleep, and when I woke up he told me I was his little girl now. That's how he got to be my father.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth. Not wanting to push Margaret into details of what might be a Nazi atrocity better forgotten, and which was none of her business anyway, Elizabeth went on, “I'm sorry your real parents died. But isn't it fortunate you could get another father right away? And such a fine father, too. You must love him very much, don't you?”

“Yes, sometimes I don't remember at all that he isn't my real father. I like him better than some girls like their fathers. He plays with me.”

“You must have a lot of fun together.”

Margaret nodded. She had begun to tell more details of their games when they caught sight of Kessler and Spratt walking down the driveway toward the back lawn. As she and Margaret went to meet them Elizabeth watched Kessler's slow limp and the wise, kindly expression of his features, and thought what a battle such a man must have had to show no evidence of resentment toward life for what it had done to him. No wonder Margaret liked him better than some girls liked their fathers. She was a fortunate child to have such a guardian.

Margaret had run ahead of her. As Elizabeth met them she was talking to Kessler.

“We had the best time! I can swim all the way across the pool, the short way, not the long way. And look, these are named lantana and they grow on the fence.”

“I should have warned you,” Kessler said to Elizabeth, “that Margaret would demand a sample of anything she saw that was unfamiliar to her. Either she was born inquisitive or I've infected her with my own curiosity.”

“I like children who ask questions,” Spratt commented. “How are they going to learn anything if they don't?”

“Margaret's been telling me,” said Elizabeth, “how you encourage her with a microscope.”

He laughed, and then said soberly, “I'm glad she enjoys that. In these days—or for that matter any days—we can't foretell what children are going to live through, but we can be pretty sure it won't all be pleasant. But nobody is utterly desolate if he's learned to appreciate the world around him.”

“That's a good reason for knowing something about science,” Spratt approved. “Not that I know much about it myself.” He began to chuckle at a sudden recollection. “That reminds me—a couple of years ago when Elizabeth and I were in Chicago we went to the Field Museum of Natural History and looked at the dinosaur skeletons. I'd never thought much about dinosaurs, but we were reading in the guidebook how these creatures had ruled the earth for a million years, which is a lot longer than human beings have ruled it, and all of a sudden I burst out laughing, because it occurred to me right there, ‘Who the hell does Hitler think he is?'”

“We laughed all the way back to the hotel,” said Elizabeth. “It was the first time either of us had ever thought Hitler was fundamentally funny.”

The garden had grown chilly. Spratt gathered up Margaret and several others whom he had offered to take home, and Kessler said he would occupy himself with a book while Elizabeth changed for dinner. She went through the den, where Dick sat by a table agonizing over his lessons. Dick was evidently in the throes of struggle. His papers strewn on the floor and table, he sat holding his head between his fists, his hair wildly rumpled and his forehead wrinkled with anguish. Elizabeth paused at the door.

“What's the trouble, Dick?”

He groaned without looking up. “Mother, did you ever get through physics?”

“Not very gloriously, and I'm afraid I've forgotten most of it.”

“I liked physics in high school.” With an effort Dick untangled his hands from his hair. “I still like it, but every now and then you get a problem that simply will not make sense—” He shook his head, looking at her through a fog.

“I wish I could help you!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

“Oh, I'll get it. It's always the same. You can't do the problem—you try everything and you can't make it, you go nuts, and then you see some tiny little detail you've already seen a thousand times but you never noticed it, and there it is, click-click like a safe opening, and the answer is so simple you want to kick yourself around the block for not having seen it in the first place.” He laughed at himself. “Then when you go to school the next day you say, ‘That third problem was a humdinger, wasn't it?' and the dumbest guy in the class says, ‘Why, that's the only one of the whole bunch I could work.'”

Elizabeth laughed too. “I remember it used to be like that with Latin translations. Why don't you stop till after dinner? We're going to Romanoff's.”

Dick gave his head a violent shake as though to stir up his brain. “Think I will. Evening paper come? I'll read the funnies.”

“It should be here. I'll see.” She went out to the front lawn, Dick following her. In front of the house Spratt and Kessler were shepherding the little girls into the car. Dick picked up the Hollywood
Citizen-News
from the grass and moodily began to open it. Black war-headlines went across the front page. Elizabeth glanced around, thinking how little Beverly Hills had the look of being in a country at war. The dancing flowers, the damp odor of grass, the noise of carpenters repairing the house across the street, all seemed so ordinary. Margaret, about to get into the car, paused and looked up at Kessler.

“Why do you see those men hit with the hammers before you hear them?”

He smiled at her. “We always see things before we hear them, because the noise comes to us by sound-waves and the sight by light-waves, and the light-waves get to us faster.”

Margaret frowned, puzzled.

“I'll explain it better when I get home after dinner, if you're still awake—” Kessler had begun to say, when Dick shouted, “Holy Jerusalem!”

He had shoved the paper untidily under his arm and was laughing at their astonished stares.

“It's that physics problem. It's about sound-waves and I was figuring with the speed of light. Oh, such a dope, such a dope—thank you, Margaret!” He was off into the house.

Elizabeth explained what Dick was talking about. As the children drove off with Spratt she was wishing her own problems had so ready a solution. That was why physics and mathematics were such satisfying studies, the answer was there to be found, no matter how hard you had to look for it you knew it was there all the time, and when you found it there was no doubt of its being right. She waved goodby to the children, and Kessler expressed thanks for Margaret's happy afternoon.

“Are you tired?” he added. “Wouldn't you like to rest for a minute before going up to dress?”

“I'm not really tired, just a bit breathless. But it might be pleasant to sit down for a minute or two. What shall we do?”

“It's about time for a news broadcast.”