The Wars of Love Page 15

  “Yes,” she said, still in the faint voice, and suddenly she seemed small and human, vulnerable and entirely lovable. “I always consider that.”

  “Then, now, let’s stop.”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  “What?”

  “What we’re becoming, what we’ve become. You, a thousand miles away, and a thousand miles away from yourself.”

  “And you?”

  I hesitated. “You asked me, a year ago, to love you. I failed. Let me love you now, in any way you say, any way you want.”

  She wavered. Her eyes looked out at me as if for trust. Her arms were trembling, even as I tightly gripped her hands. “Let me help you,” I said.

  She closed those eyes and she shuddered. “Ah, you can’t help me now. You can’t—and sometimes I think that this is all I’ve really learned in my life—you can’t even help yourself.”

  I dropped her hands, I felt myself flush again, with anger now, and now my arms were trembling. Too loudly then, I said, “What in God’s name is your game, Milly?”

  “That’s not an attractive word.”

  “The thing that’s happening is not attractive, either. What are you two trying to do?”

  “There are three of us.”

  “You two against Dan. Why?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Don’t be childish!”

  I made myself speak calmly. “It’s you who are childish,” I said. “Don’t you see it? Childish to the point of villainy. Don’t you know it?” I put my hand on her sleeve. “Don’t you know it, Milly?”

  She moved away from me with a sharp gesture of dislike in her shoulders. “Dan’s sick, and I’m his wife, and Freddie’s his friend—”

  “His friend,” I broke in. “And your—”

  Her angry gray-blue eyes were like a seal, they stopped my mouth. “My?” she challenged me.

  I waited, I let her feel her strength, before I finished, and finished with lame logic, “His friend can be your lover?”

  How neatly then she turned the question away, as now she let herself smile upon me with slow, superior pity. “You can really ask that? You who don’t know what love is? We do. And we have only one purpose, and that’s to protect Dan, to get him well again. Is that a game?”

  “Protect him from what, for heaven’s sake?” I cried.

  “From disaster. He’s known one disaster that almost destroyed him—”

  “But that’s just it. You’ve cut him off from everything else. You’ve imprisoned him with that disaster. It’s all he’s got. He says so. It will ruin him utterly.”

  I had been speaking warmly, and she said, “You’re excited,” as she stared at me with unperturbed eyes. This enraged me. I moved to her swiftly and gripped her arms in their expensive fur, and without quite intending it, I began to shake her. “Listen to me!” I cried. “For God’s sake, listen! You’re unfitting him for everything, most of all for the ghastly truth!” I shook her.

  “Let me go!” she said sharply.

  “You’ve got to see, Milly. You’ve got to be made to see. How you and Freddie—”

  Her voice rose. “You bungling, treacherous fool!”

  Then I heard Dan behind me. “Grant!” he cried in a voice that was shrill with terror. I let Milly’s arms drop and looked round.

  “Oh, Dan!” Milly sobbed.

  His face was white and he was shaking, hanging on to one of those tall frames for support. “Get out, Grant,” he said. “Get out. Get out.”

  For a moment I wanted to laugh, for nothing else could have expressed my feeling for the outrageous excess in which we were there involved. But I did not laugh. I snatched up my coat and hat and started out. Yet I paused at the door. I turned to protest. When I saw that Milly had collapsed in Dan’s weak arms, that, superb irony, he was ostensibly comforting her—then I knew, for the first time, the full extent of his terrible dependence. There is that horrible thing in nature, the embrace of spiders.

  I did what I should have done long before: I sought out Josephine Drew. And if this were my story rather than theirs, what follows now would have to be a long interlude. When I found her, I said, “I didn’t expect to find you,” and I meant two things, meant not only that after so many years, four or five, it must have been, she might very probably not have been there at Windhaven any longer, but meant also that it had begun to seem unlikely that I would find in this world the woman that I needed. And what I knew almost at once was that this was she.

  She was still there, for one reason, because her advancement on the staff had been rapid and she was no longer a nurse but, in effect, the resident director of the establishment. So I met a woman, that first time, dressed not in a white uniform as I had expected, but in a smart, highly tailored suit, and a woman who gave an immediate impression not of efficiency but of deep human warmth, whose entire ambiente was a rich and somehow serious sympathy. She was beautiful, but her beauty was not of feature alone; it seemed to be informed by the spirit of a clear and lovely intelligence that gave it candor, a profound candor. You will see why, in my mood, I was lost to her.

  Yet the curious thing is that, physically, in a superficial way, she was not unlike Milly, or, at least, shared in the type of Milly’s beauty. She had much the same stature, the same easy grace of movement that an earlier Milly had, and her face had the same structure of forehead, cheekbones, and jaw, the same triangular modeling. But her mouth was generous, and her eyes were brown, and her hair brown to auburn, so that, whatever the resemblance, the effect was of a quite different woman. As she was. They were like the good and wicked sisters of folklore. And thinking of Dan’s attraction to this woman and his later marriage to Milly, I could not help speculating on the curious singleness of our impulses, by which felicity and doom can be so closely bound together, that narrow margin of choice between them to which our own inclinations limit us.

  I told her a little about myself, of my relationship to Dan, and said that I had come on his account. She met his name with interest, even with pleasure, but as I began to tell her about his present condition, her warm expectancy turned to surprise.

  “But that’s awful,” she said. “He left here in nearly perfect shape. Why—he was fine, he had really come through wonderfully! I can’t believe—”

  We sat in a waiting room on the second floor of the sanitarium, our chairs pulled up before an enormous window, and we looked out, over the Sound, to the open wintry sea. For a moment, she kept her eyes on the breakers crashing over a distant point of rock, white spume on the gray. Then she looked at me again and said, “Of course, in that time, many things could have happened. What did happen?”

  “Nothing, particularly,” I said. “Weren’t the terms on which he was released rather strict for a nearly well man?”

  “Terms? Strict? Were they?”

  “His wife told me, when I first saw them again—and Dan seems to agree—that she was more or less under orders to protect him.”

  “From what?”

  “From every kind of shock, from knowledge of even the most ordinary kind of violence and suffering.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “For example. They keep newspapers away from him, and—”

  I broke off because she looked so bewildered. At last she said, “His wife was overzealous. I remember that Dr. Cardigan said that he mustn’t work too hard at first, that he ought to be relieved of any unusual burdens for a time, you know, that he should take things easy, as any convalescent should—All that, of course. But what you describe—it sounds like a continuing asylum.”

  “Yes,” I said, and as I told her more of Dan’s life, of that shelter that Milly and Freddie provided, her dismay grew. “I could cry!” she said softly at last, and her eyes were, as a matter of fact, dim, and then with a beautiful simplicity, she added, “I valued him.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ve undone everything, then.”

  “He must be made to come back here,” I sa
id.

  She glanced at me. “Has he suggested that he might?”

  “He’s thought of it, I know. But his wife seems to feel that her care is sufficient, and now he seems to think so, too.”

  “Can you persuade him?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “But he’d have to come voluntarily.”

  “Yes, and he would, I think, if you’d persuade him.”

  She started. “I?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her hands in her lap. “But that’s impossible,” she said. “Not only for ethical reasons, although those exist, too. But how could I go to him and not be misunderstood?”

  “You won’t?”

  “I can’t.”

  And by then I knew that I did not much want her to, at least, just then. I did not want her to become involved with them. And I said—I confess it—I said, instead of urging her, “I understand. Perhaps I can get hold of him, although I don’t at this moment quite see how, under the circumstances.”

  “You’ll try?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. Then awkwardly I asked, “Tell me, are you free to see me?”

  “Free? Why not?”

  “Good. Then can we have dinner tomorrow? In the city?”

  She said that she would be charmed. And I let three months pass while I pursued her.

  I did not see the others, and I did not want to, nor, now, did I want Jo to see them, for that, I felt, might somehow involve the risk of my losing her. She kept a room in a small residence hotel in town where she spent about half her nights, and so it was easy for me to be with her. And this time, love and need were so real for me that they disarmed me totally. I behaved like an awkward boy who is too shy to attempt his first kiss, agonizingly as he wants it, and yet, when I was not with her, I suffered from a more drastic agony of loneliness, that sense of being outside. For those few months, our relationship was that of friends, and from this woman, for whom intelligence counted, who had a deep interest in ideas and events and a passionate devotion to human character, it seemed to me most probable that only out of friendship could love come. In that friendship, meanwhile, I had discovered the basis of the relationship that I needed now above all else.

  I did not see the others, and when Jo asked occasionally, “What of Dan Ford?” I would explain again that since he had ordered me out of the gallery, and Freddie and Milly had both made it clear that they would prefer no further intrusions from me, I was delaying until some plausible opportunity enabled me to go there, or some accident threw us together. I did want Jo to go to Dan, for I felt that she could persuade him where I could not, but I did not want her to go until she was mine or had promised to be.

  Then a curious circumstance forced my hand. Late in February, in the middle of an afternoon, as I was walking toward Fifth Avenue on Fiftieth Street, I saw Dan come toward me. He was running. He wore no hat, his hair was white, and his hands clutched his coat around him because his arms were not in the sleeves. His face was gray and his horrified eyes were staring far beyond me. “Dan! Dan!” I shouted as he passed me. I turned. He was still running. Then he stopped and for one long moment stared back at me, the eyes wide with panic, his mouth open. “Dan, wait!” I called. But he did not wait. He turned again and ran more quickly, with his coat slipping awkwardly off one shoulder, and then turned a corner onto Madison Avenue. I ran after him. When I came to the corner, he was no longer in sight. Where he had gone, what he was doing there, and why he was running, I had no idea, but quite clearly events had taken some ghastly turn.

  That night I told Jo, and I begged her now to go to Dan.

  “It sounds dreadful. But how can I? I have pride, damn it!”

  “But pride isn’t really involved, Jo, is it? And really, he’s beyond misunderstanding your motives. He’ll have no interest in them!”

  “I don’t want to be stubborn about it, or self-important. I would like to help him. But it’s not easy to divide yourself, as you seem to think I can.”

  “Divide yourself?”

  “Yes. The friend-nurse, on the one hand, who has only the interests of a former patient at heart, and then, on the other, well, don’t you see, damn it—the jilted bride?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that what it comes down to?”

  “How?”

  She looked at me with that beautiful candor. “You know what happened, don’t you? I thought you did, since you knew about me at all. You seemed to understand why I couldn’t very well go to him.”

  “But, Jo, Dan didn’t break that off!”

  “Of course he did,” she said quietly.

  “But Dan told me that you—”

  “Then he lied,” she said promptly, and was silent. Then a long, frightful pause seemed to swell out in the silence like a thing, until at last she broke it with a kind of awful thoughtfulness in her voice. “Perhaps he didn’t lie.”

  “Dan doesn’t lie,” I said.

  “You mean—” And now she looked at me with horror.

  “Yes.”

  Then that came out. We were sitting at a restaurant table facing each other, and while she spoke, she looked straight at me, and in the middle of her story I reached out and took her hand where it lay on the table. She told me quite directly, very simply, how on one April evening, as they were walking together through the grounds of the sanitarium, they had discovered and declared their love, and how, after that, in only a few weeks, Dan seemed completely well. Their plans were to be married immediately, as soon as a satisfactory substitute could be found for Jo at the sanitarium. Jo herself telephoned Milly to come for Dan, and she came in her car to take him back to the city. They told her together of their plans, and she seemed very happy for them, and then she took Dan away. Two days later Milly came again, with Freddie, and Freddie sat beside her silently as Milly talked. She took Jo’s hand and told her to be brave, and she wept gently with her as she gave her the message which Dan—“poor, dear Dan”—was not man enough to bring her himself: he asked to be released from his promise, which he felt had come largely from his gratitude, for now, away from the sanitarium, he found that he could not, after all, marry her. And surely, Milly argued, it was better that Jo should discover this weakness of character, this indecisiveness, then, before it was too late.… Oh, Milly was plausible! And Freddie said: “We’ve known him all our lives. He’s impulsive, he’s generous to a fault, he’s our best friend, but he is not, Miss Drew, strong!”

  “And then,” I said, “she must have gone to him—from you.”

  She stared at me. “I was five years younger then. I had never been so hurt. And I was poor, and he was rich. And yet I thought that I should not let it go that way. Not that I didn’t believe her. I did—completely. But for his sake. I felt that I should make him face me. But I was hurt, and I couldn’t. And my whole life was changed. I settled down at Windhaven.”

  She looked down at her plate for a long time, and finally I said, “Then you can go to him now, can’t you?”

  “Yes.” But still she did not look up.

  That evening Jo telephoned Windhaven and arranged to be in town until noon of the next day. As it turned out, she was to be there much longer. Next morning, at about ten o’clock, I telephoned the gallery and asked for Dan. The girl who answered did not want to let me speak to him. “Mr. Ford’s not well this morning, and is not taking any calls.” I gave her my name and said that I must speak to him, that it was absolutely imperative, and that I would come to the gallery if she would not put him on the telephone. His voice was faint. “Grant?”

  “Dan, I saw you in the street yesterday, running. I don’t think you saw me. But I knew that something had happened.”

  “Yes. I’m through here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m through here. I can’t go on.”

  “Dan, I’ve found Josephine Drew.”

  Silence, and then, “What, Grant?”

  “Josephine Drew. I’ve found her. I know her wel
l. She’s coming to talk to you.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. May I bring her?”

  “She’s with you? Jo Drew?”

  “Outside this phone booth. We’re ten minutes from you. May I bring her right now? I won’t come in with her. Just she and you.”

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice had gone almost entirely away.

  And then I said, “But, Dan. There’s something else. I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding. She’s going to marry me.”

  Silence.

  “Dan, Dan. Are you there?”

  Then two feeble words. “I’m glad.”

  “We’ll be right there, Dan.”

  I came out of the telephone booth and said to Jo, “It’s worse than I thought. Something drastic has happened to him. But he’s ready for you.” And as we got out of our taxi at the door of the gallery, I said, “But it’s better that I shouldn’t come in with you. I’ll walk to the river and back. About forty-five minutes. Then I’ll meet you here, outside. Don’t hurry. I’ll wait. Right?”

  “All right.” She pressed my hand and went up the stairs and into the door. I started walking east.

  It was a mild gray day and I walked slowly to the end of Fifty-seventh Street, where there is a small, brick-paved square. I leaned on an iron railing and looked at a nurse holding four pale balloons, blue and yellow, and a single child, with four others, blue and pink. The leafless trees thrust up their awkward branches and a few sparrows hopped through them and swept away. The sparsest snowflakes drifted on the air. Something about the scene, perhaps just those balloons with their poor show of color in the general grayness, made me suddenly and acutely aware of the poverty of human experience and its pathos, and as I turned to start back to meet Jo, whose life with me, I was determined, would be rich and various, I thought again of Milly, who was so different from her. Was she, I wondered, striving all the time for what seemed to her to be “identity,” a real maturity of being? Then how mistaken! Her vanity—no, it was not vanity. It was a strange inversion of egotism, in which she seemed to absorb the qualities of the men who bolstered it; as if, not content to bind them to her, she must acquire their virtu as well—the emotional aggressiveness of the fascistic Freddie; the once charming indifference to reality of the aesthete, Dan; and when she and I had had our brief affair, even some of the human tolerance that, I perhaps flatter myself, is my quality, and with that, some of my insecurity. It was very strange, this thing about Milly, as if, never “possessed” herself, she must make possession hers. Could even Josephine Drew undo the bands of that possession?