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

“Billy, talk to Luthe, will you? What’s the matter with him? Has he had a drink or something? I can’t get him to give me my coat.” And her whole form shook slightly with appreciative risibility.

He called and Luthe appeared almost instantly there beside her in the gallery opening, holding the mink lining-forward in both arms. Like someone who has been waiting in the wings the whole time and takes just a single step forward to appear and play his part.

“Luthe, what are you doing?” he said amiably. “Is that Mrs. Stone’s coat you’re holding?” And before she could interject “Of course it isl” which it was obvious she was about to do, he added: “Read the label in the pocket lining and see what it says.”

Luthe dutifully peered down into the folds of satin and read, “Miss Bernette Brady.”

There was a pause, while we all got it, including herself. It was Miss Brady’s coat, but not — any longer — Mrs. Stone’s. Dwight stepped over to a desk, lowered the slab, and hastily inked something on a card. And then he went to her with it and handed it to her. “Bernette,” he said, “take this with you.”

It was an ordinary visiting or name card. She held it bracketed by two corners and scanned it diagonally, puzzled.

“What’s this for?”

“I’ll call him and make an appointment for you,” he said quietly. “Go in and talk to him. The whole thing’ll be over in no time.”

“What do I need a lawyer for?” she blurted out.

I understood then, without the aid of the card. An annulment.

Anger began to smolder in her eyes. She gave him warning, but a warning that was already too late to avert the brewing storm. “That isn’t funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny.”

Her fingers made two or three quick motions and pieces of cardboard sputtered from them.

“Think it over,” he urged, a second too late.

“I just did,” she blazed. “Just then.” She quirked her head sideward, then back toward him again. “Is Luthe going to give me my coat?”

“Come back for it,” he drawled soothingly. “It’ll be here — waiting for you — any time you say...”

Her voice was hoarse now, splintered. “Then let’s be consistent, shall we? How about it?”

Her hands wrestled furiously at the back of her neck. The pearls sidled down the bodice incision. She trapped them there with a raging slap, balled them up, flung them. They fell short of his face, they were probably too light, but they struck the bosom of his shirt with a click and rustle.

“Bernette, I have people here. They’re not interested in our private discussions.”

“You should have thought of that sooner.” Her hands were at her earlobe now. “You want them to know you gave me things, don’t you? You don’t have to tell them! I’ll tell them!” The ear clips fell on the carpet at his feet, one considerably in advance of the other.

“You can’t carry that out down to its ultimate...”

“I can’t, hunh? You think these people being here is going to stop me, hunh? The hell with them! The hell with you yourself! I’ll show you! I’ll show you what I think of you!”

She was beside herself with rage. There was a rending of satin, and suddenly the dress peeled off spirally, like a tattered paper wrapper coming off her. Then she kicked with one long silk-cased leg, and it fluttered farther away.

She had a beautiful figure. That registered on my petrified mind, I recall. We sat there frozen.

“Keep your eyes down, ducky,” I heard Jean warn the Cipher in a sardonic undertone. “I’ll tell you when you can look up.”

For a moment she posed there, quivering, a monotoned apparition all in flesh tints, the undraped skin and the pale-pink silk of vestigial garments blending almost indistinguishably.

Then she gave a choked cry of inexpressible aversion, and darted from sight.

Dwight raised his own voice then, but not in rage, only for it to carry to a distance. “Luthe, that raincoat in the hall. Put it over her.”

A door slammed viciously somewhere far down the gallery.

None of us said anything. What is there that can be said following such a thing?

Jean was the first one to speak, after the long somewhat numbed silence that followed. And, probably unintentionally, her matter-of-fact minor-keyed remark struck me as the most hilariously malapropos thing I had ever heard. I wanted to burst out laughing at it.

She stirred and said with mincing politeness: “I really think we should be going now.”

A six-week interval, then. It must have been fully that; I didn’t time it exactly. Oh, why lie? Why write this at all, if not truthfully? I counted every week, every day, every hour. I didn’t tally them up, that was all. At least once every day I had to remind myself, unnecessarily, “I haven’t seen him since that explosive night. That makes it a day more, that I haven’t seen him.” It worked out at something like six weeks.

Nothing happened. No word. No sight. No sign.

Was he with her once more? Was he with somebody else entirely different? Was he alone, with nobody at all? Where was he? What was he doing? Was he still in New York? Had he gone somewhere else?

I had it bad. Real bad.

Finally I sent him a little note. Just a little note. Oh, such a very little note. “...I haven’t heard anything from you in some time now—”

A coward’s note. A liar’s note, a liar even to myself.

The phone rang the next afternoon. I made a mess of it. I dropped the phone. I burned myself on a cigarette. I had to trample the cigarette out first. Then I hung onto the phone with both hands, when I’d once retrieved it.

He said things. The words didn’t matter; it was just the voice they were pitched in.

Then he said: “I don’t dare ask you and the Medills to come up here after what happened that last time.”

“Dare,” I said faintly. “Go on, dare.”

“All right, would you?” he said. “Let’s all have dinner together and—”

When I told Jean that he had called, about fifteen minutes later, she said the strangest thing. I should have resented it, but she said it so softly, so understandingly, that it never occurred to me until later that I should have resented it.

“I know,” Jean said. “I can tell.”

She murmured presently, “I think we should. I think it’d be good for us.”

How tactful of her, I thought gratefully, to use the plural.

So back we went, the three of us, for another glimpse at this real-life peepshow that went on and on with never an intermission, even though there was not always someone there to watch it.

He was alone. But my heart and my hopes clouded at the very first sight of him as we came in; they knew. He was too happy. His face was too bright and smooth; there was love hovering somewhere close by, even though it wasn’t in sight at the moment. Its reflection was all over him. He was animated, he was engaging, he made himself pleasant to be with.

But as for the source of this felicity, the wellspring, you couldn’t tell anything. If I hadn’t known him as he’d been in the beginning, I might have thought that was his nature. He was alone, just with Luthe. We were only four at the table, one to each side of it, with candles and a hand-carved ship model in the center of it.

Then when we left the table, I remember, we paired off unconventionally. I don’t think it was a deliberate maneuver on anyone’s part, it just happened that way. Certainly, I didn’t scheme it; it was not the sorting of partners I would have preferred. Nor did he. And the Cipher least of all. He never schemed anything. That left only Jean; I hadn’t been watching her...

I think I do recall her linking an arm to mine, which held me to her. And then she leaned back to the table a moment and reached for a final grape or mint, which resulted in reversing the order of our departure. At any rate, the two men obliviously preceded us, deep in some weighty conversation; she and I followed after. We gave them a good headstart, too. She walked with deliberate slowness, and I perforce had to follow suit.