Tomorrow Is Forever (25 page)

Kessler smiled at her. She had been right; he did believe that she was fully persuaded, and that was what he wanted. “Thank you, Mrs. Herlong. I want to put, shall we say, a part of tomorrow in your hands. Margaret.”

She was astonished. “You mean you want me to take her?”

He nodded.

“But don't you want her? I thought you loved her so much.”

“I do love her. But I shan't be here always.”

Elizabeth sat up straight, holding the arms of her chair. “What do you mean?”

“Look at me, Mrs. Herlong,” he said quietly. “Haven't you ever wondered how I have lived as long as this?”

She felt her features changing to express a surprise that, after all, should never have been there. He did look very tired. He had collected all his resources to tell her what he had told her, and now that he had finished the release of tension had let his face sag into lines of weakness and a great weariness. She answered him without trying to gloss her words.

“No, I haven't. Your life has hardly seemed to depend on physical strength—Mr. Kessler, forgive us! What a strain we have put on you! Dick, myself, all of us—we never stopped to realize you were ill.”

“That doesn't matter,” he answered, so quickly that it was like an interruption. “Please don't think it matters. If you let this trouble you I'll be sorry I spoke. Please!” he exclaimed insistently, for she had risen to her feet, ready to go before he wore himself out with any more talking.

Elizabeth sat down again. “Mr. Kessler, of course I'll take Margaret. I'll take her now if you'll let me. But don't you want to come with her? Why don't you let me take care of you, instead of staying here with nobody but a hired housekeeper? If you only knew how much I should like to do it!”

“No, no, that's not what I want. Thank you, but I only wanted to tell you that it's very unlikely I'll live as long as Margaret will need protection. When I can no longer be her father, will you be her mother?”

“Of course I will. No, please don't start to thank me. Spratt and I both love children; now that ours are growing up we've often said we wished we had another younger than Brian. So don't start being grateful.”

“You may get a great reward for it,” said Kessler. “I told you how brilliant her parents were.”

“Oh, that. I hope she's all you think her, but if she isn't, it makes no difference. She's a dear child. With all my heart I hope she won't need us, but if she does, we'll be very happy to have her. Don't fear for Margaret's future.” She spoke quickly and sincerely.

“I won't,” he promised her smiling. “Not for hers, nor for yours.”

“Thank you. Now I'm going. You are very tired.”

Elizabeth had stood up again. Margaret's future seemed less important just now than Kessler's strength. The longer she stayed the more she would exhaust him. Tired as he was, he did not want her to stay; every word he had spoken had been part of his effort to keep their lives separate. She added,

“Mr. Kessler, I hope I'm forgiven for troubling you today. Thank you for making me understand that I had made a mistake.”

He smiled at her again. “You are satisfied, aren't you, that you did make a mistake?”

“Oh yes.” She had to make it sound true. Seeking swiftly for words, she went on, “You do look like him. There's an odd resemblance about the eyes especially, but now I see it's only a resemblance. If I hadn't been so overwrought last night when I realized who it was you'd been reminding me of all this time, I shouldn't have gone so far as to believe you actually were Arthur.” That sounded convincing. Now she could thank him for what he had really done for her.

So she continued, slowly, “Mr. Kessler, I told you awhile ago that you had made me very happy. You have. I never realized before that being made happy isn't receiving something new, it's being made to understand what we have. You've done a great deal for me since I've known you. But for what you did today, I'll remember you to the end of my life.”

He was listening to her intently. “I believe you mean that, Mrs. Herlong,” he said in a low voice. “God bless you for saying it.”

How tired he was. There was so much she would have liked to do for him. Elizabeth remembered wistfully that she had never taken care of Arthur in an illness, because in the time she had known him he had never been ill. Kessler was looking at her with eyes that seemed to her the tenderest she had ever seen. He added,

“If I have done anything for you, thank you for having let me do it.”

He would not let her take care of his bodily weakness. But there was something more she wanted to give him. If he was Arthur, it would be a great acknowledgment; if he was not, he would still understand it.

She said, “Mr. Kessler, may I tell you something more about Arthur?”

Did he start faintly? She could not be sure. “Anything you would like to tell me, Mrs. Herlong,” he said.

“I told you I loved him very much,” said Elizabeth, “and losing him was a dreadful experience. But I've begun to understand, since I've been talking to you today, that that experience had a great deal to do with making my life since then as full and rewarding as it has been. You were right when you said that at the time of my first marriage I was a very innocent young girl. I simply had no idea of what life could do to me. I suppose it's always true of the very young, you see things happen to other people, but it doesn't enter your head that they can ever happen to you. So you don't build up any resistance, life hits you and you've got nothing to fight with.

“I had loved Arthur so much,” she went on, “that when I lost him it was like the end of the world. But what kept me from going under completely wasn't my own strength, it was Arthur's. The first time I realized I had to make a new life it was because I realized that he wouldn't have wanted me to go on depending on him. If he could have seen me, he would have said, ‘Depend on yourself, on your own resources.' It was because of him that I learned to do without him. Sometimes, since then, I have wished I could tell him that. Since I can't tell him, I'm telling you.

“And I'd like to tell you too, that you've made me realize today that Arthur's greatest gift to me has been my splendid marriage to Spratt Herlong. Does that sound strange? Now that I understand it, it isn't strange at all. You see, in the first place, Arthur had made me believe in marriage. I know sometimes after a first marriage has been unhappy people find happiness in a second, but they must be very much afraid to undertake it. I wasn't afraid. Besides, losing Arthur had given me a very clear sense of values. I knew what real happiness was and real suffering, I knew it so well that I couldn't waste my emotions over trifles. In all these years nothing has surprised me more than the way so many people use themselves up over things that don't matter. I'm not heroic about it, it's just that I've learned what's important and what isn't, and as long as I have my husband and children I'm simply not capable of breaking my heart over a servant problem. What happened to me when I was very young was terrible, but I've been a better wife and mother than I could have been if it hadn't happened. And I'll be better than I was, now, because you've made me see it.

“You're right, I don't want Arthur back, not now. But I'm grateful to him, and I'm grateful to you.”

Kessler, who had risen when she did, had sat down as though too tired to keep standing. He had sat holding his cane rigidly, looking at it instead of at her while she talked. But he had listened, with a faint smile of gratitude, as though what she was saying brought him a great sense of peace. Now, still without looking up, he said, very low,

“Thank you, Mrs. Herlong. I hope you will never be so lonely that what anyone will say to you can mean as much as that means to me.” He was silent a moment. Then, “Goodby,” he said.

“Goodby,” said Elizabeth. She went over to him. He was still looking down. She bent and kissed his forehead quickly. Before he could say anything else she went out.

Kessler leaned his arm on the table by him and bent his head to rest on it. She was gone and she seemed to have taken all his strength with her. He thought of Elizabeth, leaving him for years of vigorous living. He was so tired that he could hardly imagine what it was like to be vigorous.

But he had given her those years to come. She had told him so, not dreaming how much her words meant to him. He was convinced now that she did not know who he was. But he knew, and that was enough. When she told him what Arthur had done for her, it was as though she was telling him that at last he had finished what he had set out to do that day in the German hospital. He thought of what he had said to Jacoby that day. “You never loved a woman enough to die for her.” It had been hard enough to die for her once. But in retrospect that seemed almost easy compared to what it had cost him today to kill his image in her soul.

But he had done that, and now that it was over he was glad he had done it. If he had not come back, the shadow of Arthur would have lain across all her life. But he had come back, and he had taken it away. He had finished. He had no reason to be troubled about Elizabeth's future or Margaret's. It would never be necessary for him to drive himself to another effort. He felt like a man who had done a good day's work and now could go to sleep.

13

A
s Elizabeth drove home she felt a vast release, as though Kessler had unlocked a store of hidden vitality within her. She looked up at the far-off mountains, glittering under the winter snow, and wished there were no gas rationing to keep her at home. But there was gas rationing, she reminded herself, there was a war, and such a surge of energy as hers was meant to be used.

She ran into the house and upstairs to her room, where she hurried to pick up the telephone.

“Dr. Myers? This is Elizabeth Herlong. May I come in one day this week to have my blood tested and see if the Red Cross can use any more of it? … Yes, but I haven't given one for six months, and they called me up yesterday to ask if I wasn't ready for another… . All right, Friday morning at ten, I'm writing it down… . Yes, the Marines, he's gone to boot-camp at San Diego… . Why, thank you, but I'm not the one to be congratulated, he is… . All right, I'll see you Friday.”

She dialed again. “I called to tell you I'll be glad to take a shift at the aircraft observation post… . Whenever you need me, mornings or afternoons, it doesn't matter… . Really, the Boy Scouts? I didn't know that. Brian would probably love it Saturday afternoons. I'll ask him when he comes in from school. You'll call me back, then?”

She put down the phone and stayed for some minutes where she was, thinking of Kessler.

Kessler, Arthur—the names challenged each other in her mind. She thought of Arthur as she had known him, young, beautiful, so full of vigor that he seemed to defy weakness and time. And Kessler, crippled and exhausted, but still powerful with his own inner strength. “I don't know,” Elizabeth said to herself again. “I don't know, I'll never know.”

But as she went around the house—as Cherry and Brian came in from school demanding milk and sandwiches, as she went into the kitchen to see if the cook had saved enough waste fat to warrant taking it to the butcher, as she sat down to help Brian with a knotty arithmetic problem—as she continued with all the familiar tasks, her own life closed around her with its own demands. She was glad she had said what she had to Kessler. It was all true. His was a great spirit; she and her children could be happier for having known him, without her troubling either him or herself with a problem she would never quite solve. She had her job and he had told her to stay with it. Her husband and children were her responsibilities, voluntarily undertaken. If she failed them now she was lost. Maybe one of these days she would tell Spratt about the events of last night and this morning. But not yet.

When Spratt came home that evening she only told him Kessler was ill and had asked if they would take care of Margaret. Spratt agreed without hesitation.

“Poor kid, of course we'll take her. You won't mind if she's a bit of trouble?”

“Of course not,” said Elizabeth. She nearly added, “Even if she were, I'd do anything on earth for him,” but checked herself. That would require explaining, and she did not yet feel ready to explain. Spratt was talking.

“Look here, Elizabeth, maybe that guy is too sick to work and is just keeping it up because he can't afford to stop. Do you suppose we could persuade him to take a rest?”

“Oh Spratt, please try! Make him let us pay for it. And please—”

“Yes, what?”

“Tell him it was your idea. I don't think he'd take it from me.”

“What an intense sort of person you are,” Spratt observed with a grin. “You feel things all the way through. All right, I'll give him a ring in the morning. Rather late for it tonight.”

The next morning she was up, having coffee, when Spratt came into her room.

“Thought I'd call Kessler now,” he said. “If he feels like seeing me I can go by on the way to the studio.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Now that you've slept on it, do you still feel like having Margaret here?”

“Yes, if you do.”

“It's all right with me.”

“You're a prince, Spratt.”

He chuckled. “Not me. You're the one who'll have to bother about her clothes and lessons and teeth and disposition. It won't be as easy as looking out for your own children, either.”

“Who said they were ever easy?”

“Your mind's made up, then?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” said Spratt. He sat down on her chaise-longue and picked up the phone.

“This is Spratt Herlong. Can I speak to Mr. Kessler? …
What? …
Ye … . Yes… . I understand… . I'll be right over.”

He set down the phone and turned to Elizabeth, who had been listening in alarm. “What is it, Spratt?” she asked.

Spratt wet his lips, and shook his head slowly, as though trying to get used to what it was he had just heard. He answered,

“Kessler died this morning at six o'clock.”

For a moment he and Elizabeth sat staring at each other. They were speechless with the curious shocked feeling of trying to get their minds adjusted to a sudden announcement of death. Spratt spoke first, saying something about having to call the studio. For a moment he was silent again, then he stood up.

“Lord, this is strange,” he said slowly. “Like being hit on the head. He never said anything about being that sick. I'd better get over there right away.”

“Yes, go right over,” said Elizabeth. She felt as if there was a great deal more she should be saying. But she could not get it out now. She asked, “Why didn't he tell us, Spratt?”

“Maybe he didn't know.”

“I think he did,” said Elizabeth.

Spratt went over to the door and opened it. “I guess we were about his best friends, too,” he said guiltily as he went out.

After he had gone Elizabeth sat where she was for several minutes, staring at the wall opposite. She noticed that as he passed Spratt had pushed a curtain with his elbow, and she studied the line of its fold, wondering why the fold was lopsided, until her eyes followed the line upward and saw that one of the curtain-rings had become detached from the fabric. It would have to be stitched on again. Housekeeping was a thousand details a week, just like that; no matter how competently one tried to keep up with everything, there was always something to be done. Kessler was dead. Kessler, who might or might not have been Arthur, was dead. It was fortunate she had had those curtains made before the war, for it was hard to get such good material these days. She would have to be careful not to let that ring get lost, for metal rings were hard to replace now. Kessler's last effort had been made to put her life on a solid foundation. Then he had quietly let himself go. Would he have tried so hard yesterday, when he must have felt himself near the end, if he had not had more than a simple friendly interest in her? He had told her he did not expect to live long. But perhaps he did not suspect how little time he actually had, and was merely preparing for Margaret's safety in case he did not last another ten years. If he had really suspected the end was so near, why had he not told her the truth? Or had he told her the truth? She would never know.

It hardly seemed patriotic to keep good metal rings like that only to hold up a curtain. Maybe she should replace them with plastic rings and turn the metal in for salvage. But that would take a great deal of time, for each one had to be sewed on separately, and she had promised to give her free time to the aircraft observation post. You couldn't just telephone for somebody to come in and do work like that any more, as you used to. One had to have curtains for the dim-out. It was very difficult to know what was the most important contribution one could make to the war, one's time for this or for that. Kessler was dead. Kessler who might have been Arthur was dead, and she did not feel anything. These last few days had taken more out of her than she had known. She was drained of emotion. There seemed to be nothing within her but a dull sterility.

But she was glad she had told him what she had at the last, just before she left him yesterday. If he was Arthur, she had told him how much he had enriched her life, and it had been so much more than she could have told him twenty-five years ago. “He said,” she was thinking, “that we don't want the dead back. In one sense he was right, after a long lapse of years it's true that we have remade our lives without them. But in another sense we do want them back, to say to them all we didn't say or couldn't say while they were with us. If I was talking to Arthur yesterday, he knew by the time I left him how much fruit his life with me had borne. It was all I could do for him, but I'm glad I did that much.”

There was nothing more she could do now. Nothing but sit here, staring at the curtains.

But she suddenly remembered that this was not true. There was still something she could do, something she must do at once. She must get Margaret.

Elizabeth sprang up. At the idea of Margaret, alone again in her desolate little world, she found that she was not quite as numb as she had thought. She had to get Margaret now, before the child began to feel utterly abandoned. She began to hurry into her clothes.

When she reached Kessler's apartment she found that Spratt had been there and gone, to attend to the last arrangements somebody had to attend to. The housekeeper was very busy, answering the telephone and carrying out the various instructions Spratt had given her. Margaret was curled up in a big chair in the corner where the tree had stood last Christmas. She had put on her clothes in a haphazard fashion very different from her usual neatness—yesterday's crumpled dress, one shoelace untied, the parting between her pigtails carelessly awry. When Elizabeth approached her Margaret looked up, showing a streaky little face worn out with her having cried too much.

Elizabeth did not say anything. She sat down in the big chair, for Margaret did not take up much room and there was space for her at the edge of the seat. She put her arms around Margaret and drew the untidy little head to rest against her. For a moment Margaret clung to her without speaking, then she gave another choking little sob.

“He died,” she said brokenly. “Everybody that belongs to me dies.”

Elizabeth felt like sobbing too. She was not used to hating anybody. But with Margaret in her arms she felt that if all the words of hate in every language could be rolled into one they could not express how much she hated fascists and what they accomplished.

“Not everybody, Margaret,” she said gently. “We belong to you too.”

Margaret looked up at her again. She shook her head slowly.

“No, you don't belong to me.”

“Don't you want us to belong to you?”

Margaret was puzzled. “You?” she asked. “You and who else?”

“My husband, and all our family. We want you to belong to us. And we won't leave you. You'll stay with us always.”

“With you?” Margaret did not understand. “You want me to stay with you?”

“Yes, we want you to come to us today. Right now. Wouldn't you like to have me be your mother?”

“You're not my mother,” Margaret answered hopelessly. “My mother is dead.”

“I'm not your mother, but I'd like to be. I love you, don't you know that? And I've wanted another little girl. My daughter is so big now, she's nearly grown, and I've wished so often I had a little girl to play with. Don't you want to come with me, and let me be your mother?”

Margaret considered. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “You mean,” she asked incredulously, “you want me to come live with you?”

“Yes, that's what I mean.”

“For how long?”

“For always.”

“And be just like yours? Like other girls and their mothers?”

“Just like that.”

“What will Mr. Herlong do?”

“He'll be your father.”

Margaret began to smile a little bit. “Does he like little girls?”

“Oh yes. And he likes you especially.”

“And I'll live with you—in that big house with the swimming pool?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“Will Brian let me go swimming?”

“Why of course. Whenever you please.”

“Would he show me his bugs and things, do you think?”

“I'm sure he would.”

Margaret smiled again, shyly but more happily this time. “That would be nice. Living at your house, Mrs. Herlong.”

“You needn't call me Mrs. Herlong any more, if I'm going to be your mother.”

“What do I call you, then?”

“If I'm your mother, don't you want to call me that?”

But Margaret shook her head, with a frightened look. “Oh no, do I have to? My mother died, and my father died, and I called Mr. Kessler father, and he died. If I called you mother, you—” She stopped, appalled by the enormity of it.

Elizabeth did not insist. “All right, you don't have to. My name is Elizabeth, would you like to call me that?”

“Elizabeth,” Margaret repeated. “It seems funny.” She paused a moment to think, and asked, “When do I go over to your house?”

“Right now. I'll drive you there, and I can come back to get your things. Unless you'd rather show me now where they are.”

“I'll show you.” Margaret scrambled down from the chair. She stood in the middle of the floor, still confused by this second re-orientation of her world. “It's funny,” she said slowly. “It's all funny. Yesterday he was here, and now he's dead. And now I'm going to live with you. Can I bring the microscope?”

“You can bring anything you want.” Elizabeth took her hand and they started for Margaret's room. “I'm going to like having you with me,” Elizabeth assured her.

“I'll like it too,” said Margaret. She stopped and looked up seriously. “Mrs. Herlong—Elizabeth,” she said, “I'll be good.”

“Of course you will, darling. Were you afraid I thought you wouldn't be good?”

But Margaret was in earnest. “I'm a refugee,” she said quietly.