Tomorrow Is Forever (16 page)

“I feel more like asking you to forgive me, Mrs. Herlong,” he said, and again he was speaking with the steadiness of tremendous control. “You were right in suggesting that there is a chapter in my life that is not easily remembered, and what you said did reopen it. There is no reason why I should not tell you it concerns the last war.”

“It was the war that crippled you?” she asked. She began to laugh in ironic anger. “Funny, in those days we never thought of its striking the Germans too. We always thought of the Germans as the fiends who were doing it to us.”

He did not answer that. He continued as he had begun. “My own disaster, like yours, would be easier to bear if we could look now upon a fresh new world and feel that what we went through had helped bring it to pass. But there's no fresh new world, there's only more of the same, and worse.”

“I told you not to try to answer me. Please don't try. There's no answer, for me or for you.”

“Yes there is,” he exclaimed decisively. “For a moment, sitting there, you had me almost believing that there wasn't. You said it was too late for you to start over. You are not required to start over. But you are required to keep going. Remember, your responsibilities are of your own creation. You aren't responsible for what's happening in the world, but you are responsible for how you take it.”

“I told you I couldn't take it. I can feel myself breaking at the prospect. I
can't
take it.”

“Yes you can,” he said sternly, “and you're going to.” His force was like a stimulus. Elizabeth exclaimed, “Do you believe I can, Mr. Kessler? You seem to know me pretty well by now—do you believe I can?”

“You can,” he returned earnestly, “because you've promised it, by every action of your life. Nobody required you to get married, or to have children, or to live so that you would be essential to their wellbeing. If you had wanted to, you might have been one of these whining creatures who takes to her bed at every annoyance and becomes the center of her little universe by demanding attentions she's too useless to get any other way. But you didn't do that. You outlived your own early grief. To do it you had to strip your character down to its core of strength, so that this is what they have seen of you, this is what you have taught them to expect. They believe in you. They need you, and they're going to need you more. In God's name, don't fail them.”

Elizabeth drew a long breath. Her chest felt tight. After awhile Kessler resumed his chair. He turned to her, saying,

“Right now, you are beginning to fail.”

She started. “Is it as obvious as that? Already?”

“Why don't you stop looking at this entirely from your own viewpoint?” he asked. “You wonder if you can take it—has it never occurred to you that Dick is taking it very well?”

“Dick? He doesn't seem to think very much about it.”

“He doesn't seem so to you, maybe. But he is thinking about it.”

“How do you know?” She was startled. “Has he said anything to you?”

“No. But I know he is, because I've been there.”

Elizabeth exclaimed, “Yes you have. Tell me what it's like!”

“It's a torment of bewilderment,” he returned. “You don't say much about it because everybody seems to understand it better than you do. You don't know the reason other people aren't explaining it to you is that they don't understand it either. You go around wondering how you're going to act like a brave hero because God knows you don't feel like one. You do a little blustering to cover up how scared you are. You're angry, mad as hell about the whole thing, you think you ought to feel like a killer but you don't—you keep telling yourself you're not a coward, you'll go out and do what you have to do, but all the time you keep wishing to God somebody would tell you why you've got to do it. That's what it's like, Mrs. Herlong.”

Elizabeth was sitting forward, her hands tight on the arms of her chair. “My God, that's what's going on in his mind! But why hasn't he told us? Mr. Kessler, why doesn't he ever
say
so?”

“I suspect it's because he knows what's going on in your mind, a lot better than you think.”

“You mean,” she said bitterly, “he knows his father and I aren't fit to be told. Because we have failed him, terribly.”

“Have you? Do you know you have?” He asked it quietly.

“Yes, I do know it!” she exclaimed. “If Dick has no idea what the war is about it's our fault. We were two of the people who thought we could avoid another war just by not wanting it. We always thought we were tolerant, broad-minded persons; we didn't hate anybody, we just wanted to be let alone. We were the people who read about Hitler and hoped we wouldn't have to do anything about him. Then Pearl Harbor, and we were angry. Dick was angry too. I was astonished at how angry he was. But all I could think of that day was ‘This means Dick.' I suppose I was so engrossed with it I didn't stop to realize Dick was there at the radio thinking ‘This means me.' He was mad. I thought he was mad with the Japs. I didn't know then—you're just beginning to make me know—that he was mad with us too, for letting this happen without making any of it clear to him. It's not clear to him now. He doesn't understand it and I can't tell him. I'm beginning to see the issues at stake, but I'm still inarticulate about them. Maybe I'm so frightened I'm paralyzed.” She broke off, and added more quietly, “There now, I've said it.”

Kessler said in a low voice, “I understand.”

“You do, don't you?” she pled.

“Would you believe me if I told you I loved your son, Mrs. Herlong? I do love him. He's so much like the son I used to think I might have.”

“You never had any children, did you? Margaret told me this afternoon you adopted her after her parents died.”

“No, I never had any children,” he returned steadily. “That was another of the things the war made impossible.”

“Oh,” she said faintly. After a moment she exclaimed, “Yet you have conquered, Mr. Kessler. You have gone on living, living well and nobly, in a world that left you absolutely nothing to live for. How did you do it? It seems strange that I who have everything should turn to you who have nothing, and say ‘Please help me.' But I do. Because right now it seems that it is you who have everything and I who have nothing. Will you help me?”

He asked, “Do you want me to try to tell Dick what he's being asked to fight for?”

“Yes! Can you? Will you?”

“I'll try. I'll do my best.”

“Thank you! You can do it better than I can. You've seen it. And you are so wise, so gentle, so—how can I say it? I mean you're the only man I know I'd trust to do it well.”

There was a brief silence, then he said, “And you?”

“I'll take it, Mr. Kessler. Forgive me for being such a coward.”

“Yes, you'll take it. You aren't a coward. A great many of us think we are until the time comes to be one, when we find we aren't. And incidentally,” he continued, “don't let me meddle with your affairs, but whenever you feel like telling somebody how difficult it is, won't you talk to me?”

“Isn't it very hard for you to listen? It was tonight.”

“Suppose it is? That makes no difference. You and I understand something these others do not. We know what it means to be alone in the universe. Knowing that, it may be that we can give each other courage now.”

“Each other? I wish there were some way I could be of use to you.”

“You have been, Mrs. Herlong.”

“Why, how?”

“Don't ask me to explain. There are no words.”

“I don't know what you mean. But there's one thing I do know—I'm a lot farther from a crackup than I was when I began talking to you this evening. Thank you for being my friend, Mr. Kessler. I needed you.”

He did not answer her, and there was another long silence. At length Elizabeth said suddenly, “Mr. Kessler, we have met each other before. When was it?”

“You've never met me before this fall, Mrs. Herlong.”

“Then why do I keep thinking I have? I'm not given to visions and superstitions! I don't believe you were a king in Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”

“There weren't any Christians when there were kings in Babylon,” he retorted.

“Don't laugh at me. If we've never met before this fall, why do I keep this curious illusion that we have? Why did I feel that sense of recognition the first time you came into my house? When you were telling us about teaching Margaret to appreciate the world around her, it was as though you were repeating something I'd heard you say already. Just now, while you were talking to me, it was as though you were an old friend I knew I could count on because I knew you so well. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

Kessler answered her as though brushing the matter aside. “Sometimes two persons do understand each other very well from the start because they have congenial minds. When that happens a friendship grows fast, as ours has. That's all, Mrs. Herlong.”

“All right,” she yielded unwillingly. “I've got to accept that because I can't explain it any other way. At any rate, I'm glad to have found such a friend.”

“Can you go to dinner with the others now,” he asked gently, “and let them think we've been talking about the flowers?”

“Good heavens,” she exclaimed, springing to her feet, “I forgot about dinner. Spratt will be back any minute, famished, and I haven't started to get dressed. Come on indoors, Mr. Kessler, it's really grown very cold here. I'll be down in a few minutes.”

She heard him laugh softly as he got up. “You do feel normal, don't you?”

“Yes, I do. Isn't it lucky life keeps calling us back with little things?”

They went indoors, and Elizabeth ran up to her room. She felt better than she had felt for many weeks. Kessler had given her the only possible answer, she told herself as she got a dress out of her closet. When you had to do the impossible, you went ahead and did it, that was all. Spratt and her children were going to need all the fortitude she had. Spratt had never failed her, and no matter what happened, she was not going to fail him now.

9

K
essler was her friend, and he remained so. But during the next few weeks this very fact made it impossible for Elizabeth to lose her curious sense of this friendship's being an old intimacy renewed.

She tried to tell herself not to be foolish. You saw somebody by chance, you remembered without knowing you remembered, and when you saw him again you knew this wasn't the first time and it worried you until you could recall that earlier meeting. It was a common experience in Hollywood to look up in a restaurant and catch sight of a familiar face at another table, and give a nod and smile before you recognized the face as that of some actor whom you had seen a dozen times playing those obscure roles in pictures which everybody saw and nobody remembered. That happened so often that many professional bit-players habitually smiled and nodded at anybody they saw looking at them with that puzzled I've-seen-you-somewhere expression, just so as not to appear discourteous.

If that happened with actors, why not with other people? She might easily have seen Kessler in a theater lobby, in the Brown Derby, on the streets of the studio lot, not once but many times before the night Spratt brought him to dinner. Elizabeth was annoyed with herself for being unable to accept this as the answer.

She liked Kessler so much, and yet he had for her an almost irritating attraction. His wise sympathy never ceased to delight her. Yet with it there was always the bothersome sense that she had done all this before. Though she tried to ignore it, and laughed at herself for it, the feeling would not down. It kept returning, like the teasing involuntary search for a name, a line, or a tune long ago forgotten and too unimportant to be worth remembering, but which lay so close to the surface of her consciousness that no matter how much she tried to ignore it, it kept trying to push through, troubling her in the most unexpected places by knocking on the door of her memory and demanding that it be let in. She would have been glad to let it in and so be rid of it, but this required opening a door to which she had long since lost the key.

She was ashamed to keep asking Spratt to help her remember. She had tried that several times, and he only laughed and shook his head. “Wherever you saw him, I wasn't there. And if you'll forgive me, my dear, I suspect Kessler wasn't there either. He certainly doesn't remember you.”

All of a sudden one day it occurred to her. “Is it possible that I can't remember because I don't want to remember?” The idea was startling, but the longer it stayed with her the less startling it became. She had read about the thoroughness with which the mind rids itself of matters it does not want to remember.

And then, without any more effort on her part, the question ceased to annoy her. She did not deliberately put it aside; as long as she had tried to do that she had been unable to achieve it. But for some reason, as soon as it occurred to her that she had forgotten something she did not want to remember, the question simply ceased to exist. Queer, she thought, how it had pestered her in the beginning. As if it mattered. He was a splendid friend to have. Both she and Spratt, as well as the children, were drawing into closer intimacy with him, and now she could be glad they had all found so excellent a companion without worrying about whether or not she and Kessler had previously exchanged a glance at the Brown Derby. Kessler enjoyed coming to their house. Spratt often brought him in after work, when he would advise Brian about mounting his specimens or discuss school and the day's events with Dick and Cherry. Kessler had not yet said anything to Dick about Dick's approaching part in the war. He was too wise to walk up to him with a peremptory “I want to talk to you,” without first making sure Dick was ready to listen. But the subject of the war appeared one day unexpectedly.

Margaret was going to have a Christmas party for some of her schoolmates, and Elizabeth suggested that she and the two older children come to Kessler's apartment one afternoon to decorate the Christmas tree. As it was hard to buy ornaments in the stores they brought their own, part of an abundance left over from earlier holidays. Margaret was there, jumping with excitement while Kessler looked on. He liked Christmas, and enjoyed her pleasure in it. While he was showing Elizabeth the silver fountain pen Spratt had given him as a Christmas present, Dick was dragging in a ladder, and calling to Elizabeth to move out of his way. “We'll start at the top,” he said, setting up the ladder by the tree and beginning to climb. “You hand me the junk, Cherry.”

With Elizabeth's assistance, Cherry handed up the junk. Margaret helped, her arms full of tinsel and her eyes wide and joyous. “It's just beautiful,” she kept saying over and over. “It's just
beautiful
.”

She got close against the resplendent tree and looked up through the branches. “I can see you up there, Dick! Look at me.”

He bent down, scratching his face on the branches. “Sure, I see you. Hello.” As he leaned over, a collection of glass balls slipped out of his hand and smashed on the floor at her feet.

“Oh!” Margaret cried in dismay.

“It doesn't matter,” Cherry reassured her, “there are plenty more.”

“You've hung up about all it will hold, anyway,” Kessler observed as the door opened and the housekeeper came in to tell Margaret her supper was ready. Margaret shrank back against the tree, looking down at the broken glass before her.

“I—I'm scared,” she confessed. “I might fall down and get cut.”

“Yes, so you might,” Elizabeth agreed. “Come give her a lift, Dick.”

“Okay. Wait a minute, Margaret.”

Dick scrambled down from the ladder. Remarking that he had jolted some lights out of place, Cherry climbed up to adjust them. Dick reached across the broken glass.

“Put your arms around my neck and hold tight so I can lift you, Margaret. There you are. She'll be along in a minute,” he said to the housekeeper, and as she went out he swung Margaret across the pile of glass and set her down. “Right?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Right, thank you. I'm always scared of falling down on broken things. I fell down once, and got a bad cut on my neck. See?” She drew the collar of her dress aside.

Dick bent to look at the scar she showed him. “Why, you did get a bad cut. How did that happen?”

“A man kicked me,” said Margaret, “and I fell down.”

“What?”
said Dick.

The eyes of them all turned to her—Elizabeth, her hands full of tinsel, Cherry on the ladder adjusting the lights, Dick standing beside Margaret at the foot of the tree. Kessler, sitting in his chair near by, said nothing. But Margaret appeared not to realize the start she had given them.

“What man kicked you?” Dick demanded, and stopped, absorbing the idea of men who kicked little girls.

Margaret answered without any excitement. “The man who killed my mother.”

She said it as matter-of-factly as a German child in a happier era might have said, “The Three Bears.” For an instant the others around the Christmas tree stood immobile, frozen with a horror the more shocking because Margaret seemed unaware that there was any reason why they should be surprised.

Elizabeth could not say anything at all. She was thinking, “We hear of these things. A thousand anonymous deaths, ten thousand of them, and we're blunted. But hearing it, like this, this makes it sharp again.”

Cherry was the first of them to catch her breath. Standing on the ladder by the tree, she gasped, “But Margaret—where were you? When was this?”

“In Germany. A long time ago—oh, a long time ago,” Margaret answered, looking up at her. “I was very little.” She glanced at Elizabeth. “I told you, didn't I, Mrs. Herlong? I told you my mother and father were dead.”

“You told me they were dead,” Elizabeth said with difficulty. “But you didn't tell me what happened to them.” She glanced at Kessler. He was looking at Margaret, his mouth tight with pity, but he did not try to stop her.

“They came looking for my father,” Margaret explained. “He wasn't there, and my mother said he wasn't there, but they wouldn't believe her, and they broke things up looking for him. They were terrible men, the Nazis, they used to push us off the street, and my mother would not take me out. They broke things up, and they hit her, and I was scared and I cried, and the man kicked me out of the way and I fell down, and when I saw the blood I got more scared than ever. It was dreadful.” She shivered. “Nobody does things like that here in Beverly Hills. But my mother bandaged up my neck and made it stop bleeding. She was a doctor and she knew how to do things like that. She didn't cry at all. I don't cry either now, I'm too big. The Nazis were gone then. She made me take some medicine. It tasted awful, but she made me take it, and I went to sleep. But I know they came back while I was asleep, because they killed her, and they killed my father too.”

Dick swallowed and wet his lips. He had heard stories like this before, but hitherto they had been something that happened to people who had the far-off quality of anonymity. Hearing it reported as a matter of course by a little girl in his own home town was something else again. He looked at Kessler, and back at Margaret. Cherry, who had sat down on top of the ladder, was looking at Kessler too, as though they both wanted him to say it hadn't really happened like this.

“Come here, Margaret,” said Kessler gently.

She went to him, and he put his arm around her.

“It was dreadful in Germany,” said Kessler. “But we aren't afraid any more.”

She looked up at him artlessly. “Oh no, of course not. Not here.”

“Nobody does things like that here,” said Kessler. “There aren't any Nazis in America.”

“Oh no,” Margaret said again. She laughed at a recollection. “When we first came here,” she said to the others, “I was scared of the men in uniform. But they were just policemen and soldiers. They didn't bother anybody.”

“No, everybody is safe here,” Kessler went on. “Nobody comes into a house without being asked. If they want to come in they ring the bell, and if you tell them not to come in they stay outside. Nobody is scared in the United States. Margaret used to be scared, but she isn't any more.”

“It's different here,” said Margaret.

“And your supper is getting cold,” Kessler suggested. “You'd better go eat it.”

“All right.”

“And aren't you going to thank Mrs. Herlong and Dick and Cherry for helping you with the tree?”

“Oh yes! It's just wonderful. Thank you so much.”

“We're glad we could help,” said Elizabeth. She took Margaret's hand and went with her into the dining room where her supper was ready. Margaret started to eat with a healthy appetite, evidently not appalled by the story she had told. When Elizabeth returned to the front room Dick was still standing by the tree and Cherry still sat on the ladder, apparently too horrified to move; Kessler was speaking to them.

“If it seems cruel to let her go on talking, it's less cruel than making her shut it up inside herself. I thought it was easier on you to listen than it would have been on her if I had told her to stop.”

“But what sort of cattle are they?” Dick exclaimed. “We hear a lot of things about them, cruel and vicious and all that, but not just going around kicking little girls!”

“I told your mother once,” said Kessler, “that your only fault was that you didn't realize how superior you were to your neighbors.”

“To my neighbors? But I don't know anybody like that!”

“No,
you
don't know anybody like that.”

“Good Lord,” said Dick. He went over to another side of the room and sat down.

“Why did they kill her parents?” Cherry asked breathlessly.

“They didn't. Her parents killed themselves.”

“Ah!” Cherry let go her breath audibly.

“Margaret thinks the Nazis killed them. They killed so many others. I haven't tried to tell her any differently. She doesn't understand suicide.”

“But why?” exclaimed Cherry. Then she added apologetically, “I'm sorry. I guess it's none of my business.”

“There's no reason why you shouldn't know,” Kessler answered. He glanced at Elizabeth. “Shall I go on, Mrs. Herlong?”

“Yes, if you can bear it. After all, Mr. Kessler, we've heard it before. It's been in the papers and on the radio.”

Cherry said what they had all been thinking. “But it's different when it happens to somebody you know! You mean it happened to Margaret's family like what we read about?”

“Why yes, the same old story,” Kessler answered. “She and her mother were shoved off the sidewalk, she didn't have enough to eat and even when her parents went without there wasn't enough for her, they saw other children beaten and starved and knew there was nothing else in store for Margaret. Their old friends crossed the street when they saw Margaret's parents coming because they were afraid to be seen speaking to Jews. They tried and tried to get away and every door was shut against them. They stood it as long as they could. They were a brave and gallant pair. But that day Margaret told you about, her mother's spirit broke. She tried to kill Margaret, and she succeeded with herself. She was a doctor and there were still a few drugs in the house. The only reason she didn't succeed with Margaret was that she wanted the child's death to be quick and easy, and she gave her too much.”

Cherry was staring at him, unconscious that there were tears in her wide-stretched eyes.

“And her father?” Dick blurted.

“He and I came in together. We had been out to buy food. We had to stand in line to buy it, and I tried to help him, because as I am not Jewish things were easier for me. But I can't stand in line very long, or carry any parcels except what I can put into my pockets. We used to do the buying, it was too frightful for Margaret and her mother on the street. When we came in we thought they were both dead. We knew the house had been searched because it was in such disorder. Jacoby—Margaret's father—knew they would come back for him. With Margaret and her mother gone he had no more reason to keep trying. He was like an insane man. He had no gun—they had taken that long before—so he stepped out of the window.”