The Wars of Love Read online

  He looked surprised. “As a matter of fact, I have. I’ve been thinking recently of a book and I’ve been making some notes for it.”

  “Good. On what?”

  “Something to be called The Commerce of Culture. Really about the history and the function of the picture dealer.”

  “Oh, yes. But I was thinking of criticism. Haven’t you ever thought of that?”

  “What’s in your mind, Grant?”

  “I have an idea, Freddie. Can we talk about it? Let’s have lunch soon, shall we?”

  “Good!” he said, pleased.

  What had most impressed me earlier was that when Milly and Freddie let me give that inaccurate account of the Behn Studio theft, they were committing themselves to keeping from Dan the real story and felt quite safe in doing so. That meant that he would somehow be kept from reading about it next day; it meant that he could be closed off from even the professional gossip of Fifty-seventh Street; that he made only gestures of independence, that he was a fantastic prisoner. Without Freddie’s assistance, this captivity would be impossible. And therefore, if Freddie, through an appeal to his vanity, could be pried loose from them, and Dan, thrust out of the habit of his native passivity, were forced to make those gestures real—would it not be his salvation? And Milly’s, too, little as she knew in which direction her salvation lay? It all suddenly stood before me, complete and plausible, this beautiful possibility for aid. It would require, to be sure, some ruthlessness in regard to Freddie himself, but to that I was prepared to close my eyes; this was a familiar paradigm of means and ends, and my eyes were open to the greater good.

  At the offices of The New World, I had now a certain authority and prestige. I had been there for several years, I had worked in several departments and done several kinds of writing, and, in fact, as the political situation was growing more complex, more confusing, I was doing more and more work for the back of the book, those “cultural” pages where one could write without feeling the necessity of commanding all the final answers. It was in this connection that Freddie entered, for the art columns were, of course, at the back of the magazine, and we were presently going to need a new art man. My notion was to sell Freddie to the editor for that place.

  This fiasco need not be detailed in the telling. My editor was interested in Freddie’s qualifications, and Freddie, perhaps for the very reason that he had never before had the opportunity of being tempted by the charming prospect of seeing his opinions in print, succumbed to my proposal with all the fascination of the amateur. He had, it seemed, some idea of becoming one of those refined collector-critics of the old school, a lesser Berenson, perhaps, but of the contemporary, and he saw in my proposal an opportunity to begin this development, a chance to bring his name, together with his prose, before a public, and the sacrifice in money that it would mean was more than balanced in his mind by the prospect of a new and brilliant kind of extension of himself. Naïve to the point of folly! It was suggested that he write a few trial reviews of current shows, and in his eagerness, he did not consider for a minute, I think, the probable consequences. I knew from the outset that a less likely staff writer on that magazine could hardly be imagined, and that it would not be very long before his peculiarly tight and class-bound views would trip him into such illiberality of judgment that he would be out. I did not have enough interest in Freddie himself to wish to do him any harm, and I might have felt some qualms about this clear interference in his affairs if I had felt that I was doing him any real harm. I was not; and I might be helping someone who had indeed been dear to me, was still, and desperately needed help. When, in January, Barcelona fell, and the tragedy of Spain was over, I felt no new fondness for Freddie, it is true—no more for Freddie than for others like him who had been either indifferent to that tragedy or frankly on the side of evil—and still, my bitterness and disappointment did not direct themselves at persons, neither at Freddie nor at all the others. It was only Dan, in this, who mattered, and the change that overtook Dan almost at once, as Freddie became engaged in these other activities, is my vindication.

  It was understood, of course, that Freddie would sever his connections with The Ford Gallery if he were finally to have the place on The New World, but for the five or six weeks that he was writing his sample pieces, which were not for publication, he was free to maintain it. To do his pieces creditably, however—and within their limits they were very able—he necessarily had much less time to give to the gallery, and Dan, in turn, found himself in a position where he could not choose but exercise his judgment and assert his taste, his tact, his business sense. This was really the first opportunity he had had to do so with any independence, and he began to feel himself as an entity. While Milly sat somewhat stonily by, and Dan complained mildly that Freddie had abandoned him, both still expressed excited interest in his venture. And Dan positively began to change again. How thrilling is even the promise of the rebirth of a man! Milly let me feel the cold force of her dislike, but Dan’s visible strengthening more than justified me as I watched Freddie in the precarious bliss of that new self-importance for which I was happy to accept the responsibility.

  Milly was beyond my understanding, and necessarily; I was, as events would presently show, still ignorant of her, for all our intimacy. Thus now I could only conclude that for the sake of a wholly servile Freddie she would choose an ailing Dan. But that this was not quite the way she posed her terms of choice I had yet to learn.

  My plot developed with a smoothness that should have warned me. The editor liked Freddie’s preliminary pieces and asked him to come into the office and work with the staff for a few weeks before either of them made a final commitment. Freddie thus withdrew entirely from the daytime operations of The Ford Gallery. He still lived with Dan and Milly, of course; I had not yet devised means whereby he could be maneuvered out of that hold on their lives, and until I did he would continue to exercise at least an advisory control in their affairs. Yet the happy change in Dan was so great that I could hardly have in justice wished for more on his account.

  On a February evening, when I came to the apartment earlier than I was expected and found Dan alone, we stood before one of the great windows and looked out at paltry winter stars deep between huge gray clouds that hung on the sky like outer draperies, and Dan said, “I’m going to remember these early months of this year.”

  “Yes?”

  “The time of the healing. Good God, what’s been wrong with me?”

  “One of those long things that just take time. Now you’re snapping back. And you look it, Dan.”

  “Three months ago I was ready to go back to the sanitarium. One night I even telephoned. I was about to ask for Jo Drew. Who knows, she may still be there. But then I lost my courage and hung up.”

  “Jo Drew?” I had not heard the name before.

  “Josephine Drew. A nurse. She did most for me when I was in that place. A wonderful girl.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Now I’d like to see her for other reasons, just as a person, because she is wonderful. I don’t know why I haven’t. You’d like her, Grant.”

  “Why haven’t you seen her?”

  “Sickness and pride, I guess. That’s no doubt part of my whole miserable business. Have I seen anyone?”

  “Well, do now.”

  “It’s as though I’m just waking up,” he said. Then suddenly he looked dubious. “I don’t think Milly.…”

  “Milly?”

  “I’m not sure that they like each other.”

  Oh, what an innocent he had always been! “Milly knows her?” I asked.

  “Slightly. And some years ago now, of course.”

  “They haven’t seen each other either?”

  “No, no. Why should they have seen each other?”

  And then when Milly came in, breathless and surprised to find me already there, I said, after the greetings and the exclamations, “Dan’s been telling me about Josephine Drew.”

  Nothing happened to
her face. “Josephine Drew,” she said, and then, glancing at Dan, “Oh, yes. Have you seen her, Dan?”

  “No. I thought it might be pleasant if we did.”

  “Of course. But it’s been so long—do you know where she is?”

  “I hadn’t thought—I haven’t thought of her—I only thought—” Suddenly he was all uncertain again.

  “We’ll see, dear,” Milly said briskly, and told us then, in some detail, how really mild it seemed for February. But when Freddie, looking very cheerful, came in a few minutes later, she said almost at once, “Freddie, Dan’s been speaking of Josephine Drew. Do you remember her?”

  His face did show something, it dulled somehow as he said, “Of course,” and looked at me and at Milly again. Then there was nothing but a thick silence, while that glance between them held, until I said, “How did it go today, Freddie?” and he seemed to wake up abruptly and said, “Oh, fine, fine!”

  And fine, fine seemed to provide the refrain that ran through dinner, at least for Dan and Freddie, as Dan, out of his new independence and Freddie out of the promise of his near success, babbled on together. I waited for another mention of Josephine Drew, but it did not come; she seemed, indeed, to have been forgotten by all of them, and I became aware, as the animation of the two men mounted with their wine, that Milly spoke less and less. She toyed with her food, turned her wineglass before her interminably but hardly touched her wine, and at last let her eyes rest on me where I sat opposite her, and then, moodiness suddenly falling away, smiled directly at me with a warmth not only of friendliness but even of affection such as I had not seen for months and that, at this moment, struck me as entirely unaccountable. Nor did I understand much more clearly when, after dinner, Dan and Freddie having withdrawn briefly to Dan’s desk in another room, Milly and I were alone together and she made her extraordinary plea.

  We were in the large, glassed-in room, staring at empty coffee cups and brandy glasses, and suddenly Milly got up and turned down the bright lights. I stood up, too, and then, without a word, she walked swiftly toward me and put her arms around my neck. “Love me,” she said quietly and desperately. “Oh, love me again.”

  I gasped. “I do love you.”

  “No, no. You don’t at all.”

  “But for months now, you’ve disliked me.”

  “Oh, no!” Her breath was on my neck, her moist cheek against my chin as she strained upward, weeping silently. “Don’t let me do it, Grant, don’t please.”

  “Do what, my dear?”

  “Don’t let me be worse!”

  I was silent as I tried to understand her. “I’ll do anything you want,” I said.

  “Then love me again, and let Freddie go.”

  “Freddie? How—let him go?”

  “This silly magazine business. He’ll be no good at that. Please—drop it.”

  “But he’s quite good at it, really. And he doesn’t want it dropped!”

  “But I do. Do it for me, then, and love me again, so that I won’t be worse than I am.”

  She sounded more desperate than I had ever heard her, and she was clinging to me with tense arms, and it was quite honestly that I said, “Milly, I don’t understand you. Not at all.”

  She drew away a little and stared down at our feet. She wiped her eyes. Still looking down, she said, “Dan needs him so. Why do you insist?”

  “But Dan demonstrably doesn’t,” I did insist. “It’s good for both of them. Wonderful. Watch—it will make Dan.”

  She looked up at me again. There was a kind of dim pain in her eyes, but now no affection whatever for me. That had come and gone like a breeze. She said, “Oh!” with something like dismay, and then turned from me entirely and walked to the windows. The two men came back into the room, we sat down again round the chaste fire, and for the rest of that evening I was unable to engage her glance. Now she seemed intent only on Freddie.

  The following Sunday was a mild, mild day, the truly false spring, and there were still to be blizzards and gales before the real spring came, the city to be choked with snow; but for that day the air was soft as April, and in the middle of the afternoon Dan called to say that they were driving into the country for an early supper and would I come along. When they came for me, Freddie was driving and Milly sat beside him. I got into the back seat with Dan.

  We crossed the Hudson and drove north; we found an inn; we dined. And there was nothing remarkable about that evening except that Milly, in considerable contrast to her behavior of a few nights before, seemed almost drunk with animation, but a false animation, electric and a little wild and meaningless. On the way back to the city, this mood sustained itself, and seemed to quiet rather than to animate the rest of us. When we passed an amusement park, garish with lights and splitting the night with its blaring sounds, Milly insisted that we stop. We wandered among the crowd that the mild evening had drawn. We found a shooting gallery with pistols, and we all bought a few rounds, but Milly, in her curious excitement, could hit nothing, whereas Dan, amid Milly’s exclamations and Freddie’s fulsome compliments, did best, and he did superbly, so that over and over he won another round, until the sheer skill of his performance became tiresome.

  “Why, that’s fine, Dan, that’s fine!” Freddie said, as though he were encouraging an invalid in a long convalescence, and I said as bluntly as I could, “You’re just as good as you always were, Dan. The only one of us who is.”

  “But let’s go on!” Milly cried, and we went on, and found a Fun House. We crashed about through corridors of distorting mirrors, stumbled up and down shaking stairs, balked before jigging, phosphorescent skeletons that leapt up before us in dark rooms, and always led by Milly, as though this nonsense were a quest, on and on.

  Then we came finally to a point near the exit where a smooth, enormous wooden saucer revolved crazily in the floor, first in one direction, then violently in the other. And although this pit already contained two sailors and two shrieking girls in wild disarray, their limbs all tangled and their bodies sprawling, Milly slid in among them, and Freddie after her. But almost at once something disastrous happened. She had miscalculated the thing somehow and injured herself. Freddie, struggling for a semblance of balance, was holding onto her and shouting to the man who manipulated the levers that operated the device. It ground to a sudden halt, and the sailors helped Freddie bring Milly out of it. She had hurt her ankle and her lip was swollen and bleeding, but she impatiently dismissed the operator, who was mildly concerned, and wanted nothing from Dan but his handkerchief. We helped her outside and started for the car, and although she could not put her weight on the injured foot, she continued to laugh. “It’s nothing. I was just silly. It’s nothing at all.”

  And it wasn’t, really, and yet it was grotesque that it should have happened to her, and when we came to the car and Freddie brusquely ordered, “Grant, you drive. We’ll put Milly in the back,” she did, it seemed to me, sob once or twice even as she laughed. Freddie managed to arrange her as comfortably as possible on the back seat, with her back up against a window and her bruised leg stretched out along the seat. Then Dan said, “I’ll sit with Milly,” and Freddie replied, “But I’m already here, Dan. Why not leave it this way?” And indeed he was very substantially there, sitting on the edge of the seat, his arm around her shoulders to cushion them. Dan got in with me.

  In the highway darkness, when there was no point in further expressions of concern, we all fell silent, and Dan’s head drooped in a doze. There was little traffic, and I drove fast and intently. Occasionally I thought I heard whispering, murmurous sounds behind me, but I could not turn. At a traffic light, I took occasion to readjust the rearview mirror and said a word or two over my shoulder, and then we drove on again, fast and intently. But I heard those sounds again, tender and murmuring, and, without reducing our speed, I looked into the mirror as another car came toward us. In the flash of its headlights, I saw one of Milly’s white hands on the dark cloth of Freddie’s shoulder, and I saw his mo
uth on her cheek.

  Now, when it was too late, I understood: she had become “worse,” and my poor plot had been subverted.

  It came to a rapid ruin. Only a few afternoons later, flushed and angry, Freddie lurched into my cubicle of an office and demanded, “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what, Freddie?”

  “Get me in here only to get me out. Why?”

  I stood up. “What do you mean?”

  “The inquisition I’ve been through.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you!” His hands were shaking, and he put them on my desk, palms down, fingers spread out, to steady them, and, shoulders thrust toward me, he said in a moment, said slowly, “I don’t think you ever did like me, Grant.”

  I came around the desk and took hold of his arm. “Freddie, be quiet. I’m not even going to pursue that. You’re excited. Calm down and tell me what happened.”

  He drew his arm roughly out of my grasp. “Ask your editor,” he said, and slammed out.

  The editor was almost as angry as Freddie. “A nice spot you put me on,” he said.

  “What is this?”

  “Did you know this fellow’s politics?”

  “I know him. He’s not political at all.”

  “You’ve been around long enough to know that that usually means the worst politics.”

  “What happened?”

  “This came in today,” he said, and slid a sheet of notepaper across his desk. I read the few typewritten lines. As an old friend of “The New World,” I advise you to ask a few questions of Mr. Grabhorn before you employ him. Ask him, for example, for his opinion of Franco, of Chamberlain, of F.D.R., or ask him to give you his views of the idea of WPA art. Ask him, too, whether he has squeezed fine pictures out of helpless refugees for a small fraction of their worth. That was all; there was no signature.