Tomorrow Is Forever (21 page)

“Be honest, Mrs. Herlong,” he said to her in a low voice. “Do you want to talk about the war, or the picture business?”

“The picture business,” said Elizabeth.

He nodded. The others were talking; Kessler said to her, “You are doing this very well, Mrs. Herlong. Keep it up. Don't forget all we said about it. Now I shan't refer to it again unless you do.”

She smiled gratefully and picked up her drink. Kessler lifted his, and to her surprise she saw the cocktail trembling in the glass. That strong hand of his was not steady. Odd—she was sure she had never seen it quiver before. He saw her notice it, and when he had set the glass down he said,

“Not tonight, but one day soon I should appreciate having a talk with you. Whenever it's convenient.”

“Why of course. About me?” she asked.

“No, this time about me. I have a very great favor to ask of you.”

“You know I'd do anything in my power for you, Mr. Kessler. At least I hope you know it.”

“I believe you would. You are very generous. That is why I don't hesitate to ask it.”

“Tomorrow? Or will you be busy at the studio?”

“I'll be at home tomorrow. Will you call me?”

She promised, and picked up her drink again. A cocktail never did any real good, of course, but it did quiet one's nerves and help keep up the pretense of being a good sport. “I'm glad Mr. Kessler is here,” Elizabeth thought. “It's a bracer to have somebody around who knows just what I feel like. But I won't crack up. I'm probably going to drink too much, but we're all going to; we don't do it often, but tonight I think we will. But I won't crack up.”

Spratt ordered another round of drinks, and dinner. Irene said to Elizabeth, “Look at all these boys in uniform. Good heavens, most of them are
children.
They ought to be at home doing their lessons. Damn Hitler. Damn Tojo. I'm not as brave as you are, Elizabeth. When Jimmy goes I'll be a shivering wreck.”

“No you won't. You think you're going to give way, but you don't. You don't think you can take it, but you find you can.”

Irene shrugged. She turned abruptly to Spratt.

“Spratt, I see by the
Motion Picture Herald
that
April Morning
grossed a hundred and fifty per cent of average its first week in New York. I'm proud to know you.”

“More than we ever expected,” said Spratt. “But you can't judge by New York. Wait till it gets to the sticks.”

“The only modest man in Hollywood,” said Irene.

“Don't you believe it,” said Mr. Stern with a grin. “He's not modest, he's just whistling past the graveyard. In case the sticks slap him down, you know.”

Everybody laughed good-naturedly. The party became gay and usual. They were good friends; it did not matter that each one was playing a part and the others knew it. They had come to Chasen's for the chance to do so. “If you still have your shoe-coupon,” Irene said to Elizabeth, “I saw some beautiful walking shoes at Bullock's-Wilshire.”

“Smart and comfortable at the same time?” Elizabeth asked. “That's what I need now—shoes wear out so fast with all this walking.”

“Remember how we used to take the car out every time we wanted to go three blocks?”

“Do I! It's probably going to do wonders for us, walking and bicycling instead of driving everywhere, and all these vegetables from the Victory gardens.”

“Yes, I suppose we'll stay young and beautiful forever. They say the English are really getting a more balanced diet now than they did before the war, though it's frightfully monotonous. They never were as vitamin-crazy as we were.”

Spratt was saying, “But you can't cast Blakeney as a juvenile, Stern! Those pouches under his eyes.”

“They're learning to do a lot with gauze since the army took all the young ones. We're testing him tomorrow.”

Kessler chuckled. “Gauze won't help that face. A thousand up-all-nights have left tracks on it.”

“Aren't there any pretty juveniles,” exclaimed Mr. Stern, “with just a slight heart-murmur?”

“The army takes 'em for desk duty,” Spratt said sadly. “Why not rewrite the script to make him a romantic lover of forty?”

“You'd think,” Irene said to Elizabeth, “those men would get fed up with pictures
sometime
.”

“They never do. You should know that by now. It's like eating, one meal is hardly over before you want another. I have a brilliant idea, but nobody will listen to it.”

“What?” asked Kessler.

“Shakespeare had to present all his plays without any women. It's no sillier for a girl to play Romeo than for a man to play Juliet. If the war lasts two more years you'll be driven to it.”

They found this so funny that two aged waiters paused to glance at their table wistfully, wishing that they had heard the joke so they could repeat it to a columnist dining in another booth, who was known to pay liberally for quips by well-known persons.

“Real French brandy,” Mr. Stern observed with appreciation. “Not much of this left.”

“We won't suffer too badly when it gives out,” said Spratt. “Some of the California brandies are very good.”

“I wonder if the Japs are rationed stiffly,” said Irene. “I hope they are.”

“They don't need to be,” said Spratt. “They never ate much besides rice and dried fish, did they?”

“Serves them right,” said Mr. Stern. “I detest meat rationing. I never did learn to like fish. We always had such a lot of meat at home. We would, of course, being there in one of the meat capitals of the world.”

“Where was your home, Mr. Stern?” asked Kessler.

“Kansas City. Those Kansas City steaks!” he sighed reminiscently. “Have you ever eaten steak in Kansas City, Mr. Kessler?”

“I believe not. That's one of the pleasures I'll look forward to after the war.”

“You probably got one on the train, on your way to California,” suggested Mr. Stern. “Coming from New York you must have changed trains in either Kansas City or Chicago. Which was it?”

Kessler tasted his brandy. “Chicago,” he said.

Something clicked in Elizabeth's head. He had pronounced it
Chicawgo.
A hot summer day in Tulsa, herself by the pool, the extraordinarily vivid young man on the grass beside her. “Chicawgo. I can't seem to say it any other way. It's like a birth certificate, isn't it?”

“My God,” she thought, “am I drunk or is this the way you feel when you're about to faint?”

The others were still discussing ration points. Their words were a bumble of sound around her. Talking to them with his habitual unobtrusive geniality, Kessler was giving her no particular attention. Elizabeth's eyes clung to him, her lips slightly parted and her whole body tense as she stared. All the details of his appearance suddenly fitted into a pattern, so evident that it was as though some voice within herself, unheard by the others but loud in her own ears, was crying out
Arthur.

She saw, as though for the first time, the way his eyebrows grew, those crinkles about his eyes, that vertical line above the bridge of his nose, which had been very faint when she knew him. She saw the way his finger stroked the handle of the cup while he talked. She heard his voice, thicker and deeper than it used to be, the words spoken with a faint German accent, but Arthur's voice.

Arthur had died in a German hospital. But there he was, so close that she could have touched him. She did not touch him, for in that first moment of recognition she was paralyzed into immobility. What a fool she had been—for six months she had been seeing him and hearing him speak, and she had not seen him or heard him. But there he sat at her elbow, Arthur who had been dead for nearly twenty-five years.

Chicawgo—what a tiny key to unlock such a tremendous door! She remembered Dick and his problem in physics. “You can't do the problem, you try everything and you can't make it, then a tiny detail, and there it is.”

Had she ever before heard Kessler pronounce the name of Arthur's native city? That first evening at their house something had been said about his trip from New York to California—had he mentioned then that he had come by way of Chicago? She could not remember. But she had heard it now, it had fitted with everything else that hitherto had been a puzzle, and now she knew.

Kessler was making a casual remark to Spratt, something about being nearly ready to submit the treatment of a new story.

“He doesn't know I know,” Elizabeth was thinking. “He has lied and lied to me. I asked him if we had met before, and he said no. Good heavens—is it possible that he
doesn't
know? Is it conceivable that Arthur, who was my husband, doesn't know me? I didn't know him. But I have changed a great deal less than he has. I'm not crippled or bearded, I haven't got so used to speaking a foreign language that there are traces of it on my tongue. Of course he knows me. He said he didn't, but he does. How did he stay alive? Why didn't he tell me then? Where has he been? Aren't we ever going to get out of this place? I've got to get away from here, I've got to think. Shall I tell Spratt?”

The thought of Spratt gave her power to move. She changed her position slightly, and glanced across the table at him. Giving superficial attention to something Mr. Stern was saying, Spratt was watching her with an inconspicuous but unmistakable expression of concern. His eyes were saying, “Careful, you've had too much to drink.”

Elizabeth nearly laughed out loud. Too much to drink—that would be his interpretation. Possibly he was right. Those Manhattans had amounted to more than she generally took in an evening. She had to behave normally now, for Spratt's sake as well as her own. There was nothing he detested more than noticeable conduct in a public place. She had to move, to say something.

“This can't last forever,” Elizabeth told herself desperately. “Somebody will suggest that we leave, we aren't going to sit here all night. I can get out soon, I can speak to him, but not now. For the next few minutes I must be ordinary. If I've had too much to drink so have they all, we had the same cocktails, their attention is a bit blurred too and they won't notice me as much as if nobody but me had had those Manhattans—except Kessler—Arthur—he didn't have the second round. He may notice.”

She picked up her coffee and took a sip from it. The coffee was nearly cold. Evidently it had been quite a while since the waiter brought it. She drank the coffee quickly, hoping it would sharpen her attention, and with a great effort she forced her mind to focus on what they were saying.

“When it's today in America is it yesterday or tomorrow in Japan?”

“Yesterday.”

“Tomorrow.”

“It's tomorrow,” said Elizabeth, “because we sometimes get Tokyo on the radio shortwave band, and they always refer to Pearl Harbor as having happened December
eighth
.”

(“There now, I've spoken. I've answered quite as if nothing had happened.”)

“I don't believe I have ever heard the Tokyo broadcasts directly,” Kessler was saying. “What do they say about Pearl Harbor?”

Spratt answered, evidently relieved that the drinks had not made Elizabeth as hazy as he had feared. “They call it a glorious victory,” he said, “undertaken in self-defense, since the Americans were going to attack Japan any minute.”

“The rats,” said Mr. Stern.

Spratt agreed and continued, “And they call General MacArthur the laughing-stock of the Orient, and Roosevelt a paranoiac warmonger leading his befuddled country to destruction, and ask why we don't give in now and make peace, since we can't possibly win—most of it in a beautifully modulated feminine voice. She speaks perfect English, probably went to college in Seattle. They wind up by playing
Old Black Joe
.”

“Why
Old Black Joe
?”
Kessler asked.

“Don't ask me why the Japs do anything, Kessler.” Spratt gave a short ironic laugh. “Why don't you all come over some evening and listen? We can usually pick up the broadcast around ten.”

“Speaking of time,” said Irene, “do you know it's getting very late? We really must be getting along,” she suggested, turning to her husband.

To Elizabeth's inexpressible relief he agreed with her. Spratt asked for the check, and Kessler asked a waiter to get him a taxi. Elizabeth got up with the others. She heard the Sterns telling her it had been a pleasant evening, and heard herself answering. Holding her handbag tight so that the pressure of the clasp on her hand would keep her aware of her surroundings, she went with them toward the checkroom at the front, where they paused while the girl brought their coats. Spratt held her coat for her. As he slipped it around her he bent to speak to her in a low voice.

“How do you feel, Elizabeth?”

“I'm all right.” She made herself smile at him reassuringly, hoping he could not hear the pounding of her heart.

“That brandy hit you for a minute, didn't it? Sure you're all right now?”

She nodded. Dear Spratt. But Arthur—somehow she had to speak to him.

A waiter approached them. “Mr. Kessler?” he said, and Kessler turned. The waiter said there was some trouble about getting the taxi. They were hard to find these days, fewer taxis in service, and so many people using them to save gas—

There would be no problem, Spratt assured Kessler. He himself had to go by the Sterns' to get a script from Mr. Stern, but he would take Kessler home with Elizabeth, and if Kessler didn't mind waiting there he'd come back and pick him up, no trouble at all.

Little as he liked making his friends play chauffeur for him, Kessler reluctantly accepted. So they would have a few minutes alone, Elizabeth thought as she got into the car with Kessler and Spratt. But could she speak to him tonight? She was not sure she could say anything coherent.