Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Her mother was sitting by the open window fanning herself with her apron when Pat got in.

“Look at me!” she groaned. “You see me in the condition I’m in, all weak and warped, from answering that blessed telephone the livelong night. If Larry Cogan’s suicide is announced in the papers tomorrow morning, you’ll have yourself to thank for it. Your brother Tom counted the calls and he says there were twenty-eight of them. Myself, I think there were one hundred and twenty-eight.”

Pat threw her arms around her and hugged her. “Bless you for getting that address wrong.”

“I’m not asking you what happened,” her mother said, pretending to be very much offended, “because Mrs. Moran’s daughter is above rayproach, but I am asking you, daughter or no daughter, the next time you decide to break an appointment, see that your poor old mother doesn’t have to make all the excuses for you.”

“Mother,” Pat asked her, sitting on her lap, “can a girl love two people at the same time, both in a different way?”

“If she does,” her mother answered, “one of them gets left in the end.”

Pat thought a good deal about that before she went to sleep.

The next day two things happened. The first was Larry’s (her Larry’s) phone call before she was even awake.

“What did you do that to me for last night?” he demanded. This went on for quite some time. Pat’s mother even brought the coffee out to the telephone so she could drink it while they were arguing and not lose any time.

“You must have money to burn,” Pat said among other things, “throwing nickels away like you did, just to keep my mother awake half the night.”

He went on and on. “You ought to know by now without being told,” Pat said. “Well, if I have to say it, all right then — I love you. And don’t think for a minute that means you can boss me as much as you please.”

“For the like of those three words,” he said, “I’d gladly live the night over again, worried and jealous and all, glad of the chance.”

“Well,” said Pat, “no one’s asking you to.”

And that night at supper-time the doorbell rang. Tom went to answer it, and when he came back to the table, he said to Pat: “There’s a chauffeur out in the hall with a message for you.” She jumped up and when she got there found Laurence’s chauffeur standing in the door.

“Mr. Pierce sent some flowers over with his regards,” he said, touching his cap. “Can I have them brought up?” And without waiting for her answer, he went out to the head of the stairs and called down: “All right.”

On second thought Pat wasn’t at all sure she liked the idea. Presents the first thing when they had only met the night before for the first time. If he had been poor, it wouldn’t have mattered, but he was rich and it didn’t look right. She knew her mother wouldn’t say anything, but she didn’t want to give the neighbors a chance to talk. In fact she was just about to ask him not to bring them upstairs when in they came, a whole heap of them, and behind them Laurence himself, looking pleased and just a little embarrassed as though he didn’t know whether she’d be glad to see him or not.

“I had to,” he remarked, throwing the flowers in a corner without even giving them to her. “Been thinking about you the live-long day, ever since I first woke up.”

So had Pat but she didn’t say so.

“Are you angry because I came here without being asked?”

“I did the same thing at your house last night,” Pat laughed. “But you didn’t have to bring a whole florist shop with you just to come and see me.”

He was still out of breath from coming up those stairs of hers, and he was just like a little boy with his eyes so eager and all. “I’d like awfully to have you ask me to dinner,” he said.

And they walked in together and Pat said, “Mother, I have company for you. This is Laurence Pierce of 420 Park Avenue, and he’s staying to supper.”

And Laurence sat right down in the first empty chair and tucked a napkin in his collar the way Tom had his.

Pat’s mother fussed with her hair and looked nerved for a minute, but Laurence said, “My, that stew smells good,” and she looked pleased and proud and helped him to some of it.

Then afterwards, while they were all sitting in the front room and Tom was pumping a music-roll through the pianola, in walked Larry Cogan.

“I dropped in to take you to a movie,” he said to Pat matter-of-factly.

“I can’t tonight, Larry,” she said. “We have company. This is Mr. Pierce — Mr. Cogan.”

Larry hardly shook hands with him at all. He had understood even quicker than Pat thought he would. She could tell he didn’t want to stay, but he was awkward and didn’t know how to get out of the room now that he was in it. So he sat around and tried to ignore Laurence.

Pat’s mother asked her to come out in the kitchen and help her serve some cakes and homemade wine. Pat didn’t think it would be a very good idea to leave the two of them alone like that. “If they fight in my sittin’ room, I’ll throw them both out with my own hands,” her mother observed.

But when Pat hurried back to them, she found them standing around the pianola singing, or at least trying to, while Tom pedaled. That showed her what kind of a person Laurence was, that when he wanted to make people like him, they liked him in spite of themselves.

Larry left soon after and she went out into the hall with him. “Do you like Laurence a little better now that you know him?” she asked anxiously.

“I’d like him a whole lot better than that even,” he admitted, “if it wasn’t for his coming between you and me.”

“Don’t say that, Larry,” Pat begged. “He hasn’t.”

“Maybe you don’t know it yet,” he said, “but he has. Anyway, think it over good and carefully first.”

“Larry—!” she called after him, but he had already gone down the stairs.

Pat had known Laurence about a week when he started to bring up the subject of marriage. Their marriage. Pat laughed it off mostly, with her heart doing all sorts of queer tricks inside her. One time she simply remarked, “Don’t let’s build castles in the air.”

He had lots of answers to make to that, oh lots of them. He made them, all right. Pat saw that it was up to her to bring him back to earth again.

“Did you ever stop to think what your family might have to say?” she suggested.

“It doesn’t matter what they say.”

“It matters a great deal to me,” she told him.

“Why should it?” he asked curiously. “You don’t even know them.”

“But don’t you know what they’d say — what everybody would say — if you married me?”

“That I was the luckiest boy alive, if they knew you as I do.”

Pat turned her head away. “No. They’d say I married you for — for your money. Oh, I wouldn’t blame them,” she said quickly. “I’d think that too if I heard it about some other girl.”

“Maybe it would be true about some other girl,” he answered, “but it isn’t true about you.”

“When Ninth Avenue marries Park Avenue,” she said, “no good comes of it.”

“We’ll see about that!” he said determinedly. “We’ll show them they’re wrong for once.”

The very next day he said to her over the phone, “Don’t make any engagements for Thursday night. You’re having dinner at my home — I want you to meet my family.”

As she hung up, Pat said to herself, “Here is where I lose him.”

And she couldn’t tell if she was sorry or if she was glad. Dreams shouldn’t come true; you lose them that way.

Thursday morning a box came. When she opened it, there was a dress inside, of apricot velvet with a silver orchid on one shoulder. And a card — “Miss Agatha Pierce.” Pat knew that he had sent it and used his sister’s card so she wouldn’t feel hurt. She sent it back. “I’m going to be fair to myself and fair to him,” she told her mother. “His family will see me as I am, in my little blue dress from Lerner’s. The rest is up to them.”