Tomorrow Is Forever (6 page)

Since it was useless to explain to Aunt Grace, Elizabeth kept quiet and went on doing what she had to do. If she was going to leave, the break had to be entire. There was no other way. She parted with everything except a few keepsakes too precious to be given into alien hands, but even these she packed in a covered box which she put underneath the clothes in her trunk when she took the train for Los Angeles.

As she crossed the continent she looked out with amazement at the immensity of her native land. No book of geography had given her any conception of such space. This, she told herself as she looked out at the cities, the ranches, the desert, this was what Arthur had died for. Every acre of it was a safe place where Americans could live in security. Watching the states go by, Elizabeth felt as if she was drawing strength from the strength of her country.

In Los Angeles she learned to typewrite, and took the first job that offered itself through the employment office of the business school. It happened to be a minor clerkship in a law office, where a large part of the business was concerned with the contracts of Hollywood actors. This was before the days of the great agencies, and actors were supposed to handle their own contracts with the advice of privately retained lawyers. Elizabeth's work was mostly routine, answering the telephone and copying legal documents, but the moving picture business was young and even her own small contact with its bounding growth was interesting enough to demand all her attention.

When she woke up in the morning she no longer faced the blankness of an empty day, and at night she was tired enough to go to sleep. She had an apartment consisting of one room with a bath and kitchenette, but she was not uncomfortable. With the other girls in the office she talked about the immediate affairs of the day. She never talked about Arthur. They had not known him and could not be interested in him, and this was the reason why she had come to California.

As for the men in the office, they might have been sexless for all the thought she gave them. The first time one of them asked her to have dinner with him she felt startled, with a curious under-feeling of resentment; but it was the most ordinary sort of invitation from a friendly young fellow who disliked eating alone, and she accepted, though still with a sense of strangeness. But they had a pleasant evening, talking about nothing more personal than the bad temper of their boss and the unreasonableness of all actors, and when she came back to her apartment she looked at herself in the glass thinking, “I do believe I'm getting normal again.”

She was getting normal again; she could feel it, like the return of equilibrium after dizziness. Her fellow-workers liked her and she was beginning to enjoy their companionship. When she got a promotion and a raise she felt a justification of herself that was real delight. As her job in the office brought her into contact with a great many employees of the moving picture industry, her acquaintance increased and with it her invitations. She lost her sense of strangeness at going about with men who were not Arthur. There were plenty of them to go out with, and there was nothing unpleasant in discovering again that she was an attractive woman. She did not try to pretend to herself that she was happy, but she was not unhappy either. There were still hours when she ached for Arthur but she was grateful for what she had.

She had been in California two years when she met Spratt Herlong.

Spratt worked in a studio publicity department. It was sometimes necessary for him to visit the office where Elizabeth was employed, to get information about screen players under contract to his company. The girls in the office liked him, because while he was always friendly he never stared meaningfully at their legs while he talked to them, or sat on their desks killing time that they would have to make up by staying an extra hour to finish the day's assignment. Though she had not been long in Hollywood, Elizabeth had already had sufficient experience of both these habits to appreciate the lack of them. She observed also that Spratt worked hard and got results in the form of a great deal of magazine and newspaper space for the actresses he was paid to publicize, and her own brief career in the business world had taught her to admire anybody who concentrated his attention on doing his job well.

As Spratt was invariably good-humored and reasonable in his requests—in contrast to some of his colleagues, who were too impressed with ideas of their own importance to take the trouble of being either pleasant or reasonable with office clerks—she responded by giving him all the assistance she could, even when it meant extra effort on her part. Spratt was grateful, and proved it not only by telling her so but by sending her tickets to premieres, coming by to drive her home in the evening, or calling up for lunch or dinner. Elizabeth liked him increasingly. Before long she found herself hoping, when she started for work in the morning, that there would be a call from him to enliven her day.

Spratt was very unlike Arthur. Later, Elizabeth thought that one reason for her immediate pleasure in his company had been that he roused her interest without at the same time rousing her memories. Spratt was terse, practical and coolly ambitious. He liked the moving picture business and intended to be successful in it. His expectation had no elements of uncertainty­—he was as matter-of-fact about it as a man who walks toward a chosen destination with the purpose of reaching it. Elizabeth had no doubt of his getting what he wanted. Spratt knew his trade. Though he had never done anything in a studio more important than direct publicity build-ups for actors, he had learned so much about how pictures were put together that he astonished her with his technical expertness. He rarely talked about himself, but he enjoyed talking about his business, and he regarded it, with characteristic clearness, as a business and not an art. “Look around you,” he said practically. “Hollywood is a factory town, where several big industrial plants manufacture a product that is packed in tin cans and shipped out to be sold to consumers. The honest manufacturers do their best to turn out a product that will be worth the money they get for it. That's all.”

Elizabeth smiled appreciatively. “It's refreshing to meet a man as honest as you are.”

“Thanks,” returned Spratt, “though I didn't know there was any special virtue in speaking one's mind.”

“There is in knowing one's mind,” said Elizabeth.

Spratt laughed a little. They had finished dinner in a restaurant, and as Spratt happened not to have a show to cover that evening they had ordered more coffee and stayed to talk. She asked,

“What do you want to do in pictures ultimately, Spratt?”

“Produce them,” he answered without hesitation. “I like the executive end. But I shouldn't want to be a producer until I've had some experience in writing, or at least supervising a story, and directing. It's a good thing to know what other people are doing before you try to tell them how to do it.”

“And you'll do your best,” she added, “to pack an honest product in your little tin cans?”

“Certainly,” he said, laughing frankly. “A first-class product worth a first-class price.”

She laughed back at him. “You're not an idealist, are you, Spratt?”

“Not the classic variety, at any rate.” He paused a moment, and remarked, “Elizabeth, it's so much easier to dream about the ideals we can't reach than to do the best job we're capable of doing.” He paused again, poured cream into his coffee, and in a rare expression of confidence he added, “I guess I saw too much of that when I was a youngster. I come from a long line of visionaries who were too sensitive to take the world as they found it and get anything done. I don't like it.”

“Please go on,” she urged.

He smiled wryly. “My father was professor of Egyptology and Semitic languages at Columbia University. We lived in one of those genteel apartments uptown where nice people spend generations putting new collars on their old clothes and keeping up appearances. In our family we never had enough of anything but soap. Know the type?”

She nodded, beginning to understand him.

“Half my father's salary was always going to support relatives so delicate-minded they couldn't do anything but write bits of verse for the magazines and lament the decline of culture. The other half went mostly for books, and soap. Books, soap, toothbrushes, neat patches and the appurtenances of gentility.” He shivered.

“I think I'm really getting to know you,” said Elizabeth. “May I venture a guess?”

“Go ahead.”

“So now half your salary goes for postage on letters to the delicate-minded relatives, telling them they can either go to work or starve, it's all one to you.”

“How right you are,” said Spratt.

They began to laugh again, and Elizabeth started telling him about Aunt Grace and her cups of tea. “My aunt would really be sorry to see the millennium arrive, for if there were no affliction there'd be nobody for her to pester with good works. In consequence I sometimes think I'm hard-hearted. But I simply loathe patronizing the poor.”

“Now we do understand each other,” said Spratt. He gave her a companionable smile across the table. “I like you, Elizabeth.”

“I like you too,” she said.

By this time they were spending their evenings together several times a week. It was characteristic of Spratt's forthright habit of mind that several nights later, when they were having dinner again, he suddenly interrupted a pause in the conversation to say to her,

“Elizabeth, may I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask it, of course,” she returned, “though if it's very personal I don't promise to answer it. What do you want to know?”

“About your husband,” he said.

Elizabeth looked down at the reflection of an overhead light on the surface of her coffee. “My husband was killed in the war,” she answered briefly.

“Forgive me, won't you?” said Spratt.

She looked up. Spratt was regarding her with a friendly contrition.

“I'm sorry,” he continued. “I can see it's not easy for you to recall it.”

“No, it's not,” said Elizabeth. After an instant's pause she went on, “Why did you want to know?”

He smiled. “Frankly, for self-protection. Shall I explain?”

“Why yes, I wish you would.”

He leaned a trifle nearer her. “Well, this isn't an easy town to get around in, Elizabeth. You are Mrs., and you wear a wedding ring, but you live alone and I've never heard you mention your husband. We've been seeing a good deal of each other, and I'd like to keep on seeing you, but I wanted to make sure. I've had—well,” he said with a shrug, “one or two embarrassing experiences with unexpected husbands turning up. I hope this doesn't make you angry,” he added.

“Why no, of course it doesn't. I don't mind saying it surprises me. I suppose I take it for granted that everyone knows I'm a widow, or at least that if I weren't widowed or thoroughly divorced I shouldn't be going out with men as casually as I do. But maybe I've been a bit naive for Hollywood—and anyway, as you noticed, I'm still reluctant to talk about it.”

“Then we shan't talk about it,” he said gently. “Thank you for understanding why I brought it up.”

There was a pause. “Were you in the army?” she asked.

“For a little while. I never got across.”

“And when did you come here?”

“In the first winter of the world's hangover.” He spoke readily, evidently glad to turn the course of her attention. “Before we went into the war I had worked for an advertising agency in New York. We handled a lot of moving picture advertising, so after the war they sent me out to organize a branch office in Los Angeles. Then I got a chance to do studio publicity.”

From there the talk went back to moving pictures. As he drove her home, Spratt said, “I'd like to see you over the weekend if you can manage it.”

“I can, easily.”

“Good. Would you rather go dancing at a night club Saturday night or spend Sunday at a swimming pool?”

“Sunday, swimming.”

“Terrific, so would I. I've got to do a layout on one of my beauties, and I can do it either Saturday night or Sunday. So I'll get rid of it Saturday night, and pick you up Sunday morning. I belong to a rather good country club and we'll go there—swim, late lunch by the pool, get sunburnt in the afternoon. Right?”

“Splendid.”

He stopped the car in front of her apartment house and went up with her. At her door Spratt said,

“Elizabeth, about what came up at dinner. Don't run away from it. Look at it hard, and take it.”

“I do try to, Spratt,” she said in a low voice. “I've been trying to for a long time now, but I can't always. Sometimes it—comes back. As if it had just happened yesterday.”

“I think I understand. Though maybe I don't—nothing's easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had. But the longer you live the more you find out that life consists mostly of getting used to things we don't like. Keep trying.”

“I will, Spratt.”

He went on, “You know, most of us, when we say happiness, mean the absence of change. And that's just fighting the facts. Our lives are always changing in spite of anything we can do about it. Eventually, if we learn anything, we learn to take what happens and go on with it.” He stopped abruptly, half abashed. “Queer, my talking like this. I don't often. But there it is—I wish I could offer you more consolation.”

“Why, you have,” said Elizabeth.

“Have I? How?”

“By being you. It's hard to explain.”

“Thank you.” He took both her hands in his and gave them a hard grip. “You're a swell girl, Elizabeth.”

When she went into her room and turned on the light she felt a new elation. She had not seen this side of Spratt's nature before. Finding it made her feel that for the first time since she came to California she had acquired, not another companion to amuse her leisure, but a friend who would be there when she needed him.