Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“How do you know so much about Lenore? She belong to some ladies’ aid—or something? You don’t see her in church much. She doesn’t go.”

“The girls that interest you, Kit, naturally interest me.” She sighed lightly. “I’m getting older every year….”

“Young and pretty and sexy!” He always said that when she said she was aging. It always pleased her.

“Nonsense! Homely as a Missouri mule and twice the size! No, Lenore isn’t someone I’ve seen lately. I do recall she used to attend St. Stephen’s when she was an awkward, adolescent girl. I’ve inquired. It’s very easy. After all, her father’s in the bank.”

“So he is! Never thought of it, really. So he is. Old—what’s it?—old Buzz—no! Beau Bailey. He’s cashier, or something….”

“That’s correct.” Mrs. Sloan tinkled a coronation hand bell and the soup was removed. A huge roast was carried in. Both mother and son helped themselves not to one, but three thick slices. “The girl’s not merely pretty as a movie star. She’s bright. Did some really good work in college. Science, I believe. I like a scientific-minded woman. Sticks to facts. Realist. No folderol.”

Kit grinned agreeingly. “She’s high up in the brains department. You want to know why water expands when it freezes, or all about hydrogen bombs—Lenore can tell you. Who wants to know, though?” He helped himself to pan-roasted potatoes.

“And quite good at athletics,” Minerva said.

“What is this? You’re talking about the woman I love—at the moment—as if she were something entered in a state fair.”

“She wouldn’t make a bad entry. And that’s what I mean, in a way.

“Not the old Kit-your-duty-is-grandchildren-supply, is it, Muzz?” He glanced up keenly.

“By God, it is!”

Minerva took a long look, a sad look, this time, at the Rhineland castles imbedded vaguely in panels of crimson wallpaper. “You,” she said, “are the greatest triumph of my life.

But my sorrow is—I have you alone, Kit. Just you. I desperately longed for a big family. We needed children. Our holdings—the businesses—”

This, as her son suspected, was not wholly true. A large number of offspring would have provided stewards for the Sloan interprises; but Minerva, after painfully bearing one child, had taken counsel with half a dozen obstetricians and gynecologists to make sure nothing so agonizing and humiliating as childbirth would happen to her again. “I am determined,” his mother went on, “that you shall make a suitable marriage and provide me with grandchildren to replace the little brothers and sisters I was never able to supply for you, Kit.”

“I know! But—”

“A day,” his mother said firmly, “is surely coming when you cannot temporize. You’re well over thirty, Kit, and I’m aging…” She looked away a third time, her large face working a little. “Besides—”

“Besides?” If there was to be a new element in this old discussion he wanted to know it.

“Do you know, Kit, the Adams girl tried to get money from me, again?”

“Lord! I wish I’d never seen that babe!”

“You did, though. A bit too much of her. If you had been married, Kit, she wouldn’t have hag the gall—or the public sympathy—” He laughed. “Isn’t that a shade unethical, Muzz? To advocate marriage as a cover for carnal sin?”

“Unethical?” She tasted the word as if it were foreign. Her large eyes glinted. “Possibly.

But dam’ practical.”

“Have you ever thought that if I did marry—Lenore, say—and I’ll honestly confess I’ve done some thinking about it—maybe she’d dislike being a mere brood mare plus a convenient dodge?”

“Lenore,” said his mother, “can be handled.”

“That’s just what she can’t be. Since you seem so sure, I’ll tell you this much more. I don’t believe she’d accept me.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Have you asked her?”

“More or less—and in a way.”

“That sounds,” his mother answered, “like one hell of a halfhearted proposal!”

“Wasn’t a proposal. Just an inquiry. I said a few days back, maybe a couple of weeks, what if I asked her to marry me?”

“And she said?”

He gave a loud laugh. “She said, ‘Drive me home!’”

Mrs. Sloan’s eyes were briefly amused. “That all?”

“Not quite. She said if I were the last man on earth, why then, maybe, for the sake of the species, she’d consent.”

“Spirit.”

“Plenty. Maybe too much. If you want to know, Muzz, I’m fairly crazy about that girl, and she is totally uncrazy about me. I’ve tried all the tricks, and first base in still the other side of the moon.”

Mrs. Sloan considered that for a full minute. “Do you think you would marry her, if she did assent?”

“Search me. Maybe.”

“Suppose I added a mother’s urging?”

“You can’t hit women on the head with a club and drag them home any more. That’s just an old New Yorker joke.”

“An odd thing has happened at the bank,” she said, her tone altered.

Kit instantly understood the slight change; it showed in her physical bearing. There was tension, now almost visible—a bringing together of her features, a tightening of muscles in her big shoulders, a slight narrowing of eye. If cats allowed themselves to become gross with fat, such cats, seeing prey or suspecting some distant motion betokened it, would gather themselves that way.

The fact was, Kit understood more of what had been happening in this dinner hour than he showed his mother or even let himself know. He had resisted her efforts to marry him to suitable girls for numerous years. The effort had involved a variety of females in different places—Manhattan debs and Long Island finishing-school graduates, suitable young women from Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. Girls of good or prominent or rich family, met on transatlantic liners and at watering places abroad. A lovely countess who was only nineteen, in Paris; the daughter of a Knight, in London.

He knew this constant matchmaking activity was born of her indomitable desire to see her wealth managed by grandchildren bred, presumably under her aegis, for the job; and he could infer from the number of girls and young women presented to him that his mother did not feel love needed to be involved in a match. Perhaps his father’s derelictions were responsible for his mother’s feelings or lack of feelings. Perhaps she had grown to believe that woman as Wife was more institution than individual, owing to her own almost lifelong acceptance in that way.

The effect on Kit had been to make him contemptuous of the other sex; he usually thought and acted as if women were a dime a hundred. His mother’s constant production of them, his own incessant petty affairs with them, had also convinced him that the coin of good looks, wealth, a glamorous background and a reputation as a hero—attributes he possessed, or appeared to possess, in plentitude—was the coinage which bought women. The person behind did not matter, women apparently felt. That, in its turn, damaged the remnants of his ego.

For his ego, however large and confident it seemed to the world, was undermined, though he had repressed the fact that by the standards of other men he was a coward. He affected the casual, the debonair, the slangy and insouciant attitude he had seen amongst rich young men in many lands. But Kit’s was not the real posture of witty worldliness; that requires erudition and humor. He had neither. His efforts to be offhand, to understate, to be trivial where large issues were involved and so to exhibit wisdom by hiding its evidence, never came off. An uncured adolescence, a chronic infantilism, crept into his words. And the “Park Avenue accent,” the