Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“I can see, Audrey. What I can’t understand is, why your father didn’t tell you what he had found out.”

“Jimmie. Go get me that magazine! I can’t bear not to know right now how he looks!”

He brought the magazine from the library. Audrey had removed the traces of her tears and moved their chairs arm to arm. For a long time she stared at the photograph of

“Lawrence Wilton.” It was not large, but the features were quite clear. “It is Larry, all right,” she said slowly. “Only—he’s changed. He looks—softer. Not in character, but in his feelings.”

“Why,” Jimmie repeated, “didn’t your father tell you? He was tremendously moved that night.”

“No doubt. One decent hour with his conscience—alone. Oh, he didn’t tell Mother, I suppose, because he can get a certain revenge on her that way. Revenge for her endless nagging and irritability. And, I suppose, he didn’t like his mental picture of the swoon she’d go into. Mother would probably try to get the governor to get the State Department to get Larry right straight out of the RAF.”

“I don’t know your mother.”

“She’s been ill. Not faking, I believe.” Audrey shrugged. “How is it with you, Jimmie?”

He told her. Told her about his father, and Biff, and Sarah. He found that telling her was like putting down a painfully heavy load and resting. She listened with such concentration, such changes of expression, and yet with such complete and uninterrupting attention, that Jimmie described his inward life, explored it, complained about it, for almost half an hour in a single stretch.

At the end she said, “No wonder you’re low!” She smiled. “I heard about the great toss-out-the night it happened. A man who was there came over to Dan and Adele’s—”

“It wasn’t on a Wednesday! Or a Friday, either!”

Audrey’s eyes shone briefly. “No. I’m over there a lot—now. Anyhow, this man repeated most of your eloquence. I didn’t know, Jimmie, that you’d been—wounded.”

“Let’s skip that part.”

“Can’t I even see?”

That was like the more familiar Audrey. “No.”

“All right.” She performed an exorbitant pout, and dissolved it. “You’ve made me very happy anyhow—about Larry. Very happy. It was worth all the weeks I’ve been through. Just that, alone. Let’s talk about something different. Biff, for example. He is a cad, you know.”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

Audrey nodded, slowly, up and down. “Yep. Cad. The very kind the lady novelists write about. A hero—also. The novelists seldom stop to think that, in the case of superheroism—” she barely glanced at him—“there is a compensatory caddishness.

Generated, at times, by doting women. At other times, by too much adrenaline in the pride.”

“Damn it, you sound like Willie!”

“Oh,” she responded equably. “Willie said that first.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Frequently. I’d about die if I didn’t. He’s my second love—next to you.”

“He hasn’t said anything to me about seeing you.”

“Of course not, you thickhead! I forbade him.”

“Oh.”

There was a pause. Audrey ended it. “I hear your dad has squabbled with your mother. Things are messy at your house. Biff’ll be home in a day or two—in good condition. Sarah’s in the dumps again. Quite a little party. It shows, according to Willie, that your family regrets pushing you off the threshold.”

“I didn’t want to go—entirely. I was just beginning to hope that they were still human. Then—whammo!”

“I know. Biff’s a cad about women, but someday he’ll give his time to some noble, if flashy, cause. Your father is really a good egg. Bank-struck. It’s like being stage-struck—only, with different boards.”

“So your father said.”

She assented with a grim nod. “Oh, he can recognize homely virtue. Just—never achieve it. Too complex. Sarah—I dunno. She’s a gorgeous, miserable creature. She must have been terrific the day she read my diaries—”

Jimmie started. “Willie told you that! ”

“We have no secrets. He told me also you threatened the—the”—she was mocking—“extreme penalty to shut her up. Very chivalrous. Never had the male of my species offer to kill for me, before. I was positively touched. And greatly relieved, believe me!”

“I was out of my head with rage—”

“—and acted very—what we call ‘British,’ no doubt. I recall Sarah’s Harry. A merry-eyed, curly-haired youth with a fine figure, if a girl may say so, and a talent for staying violently alive all night long. What did Sarah have to say on the angle that he was part Jewish? News, incidentally, to me.”

“Sarah didn’t have anything to say. Never mentioned it. Mother told me.”

Audrey nodded again. “I remember, too, your mother, in the period when she was pouring ice water on that romance. Buckets of it. I thought, then, that she was going to unscrupulous lengths. She practically locked Sarah in the house, and she tore around Muskogewan grafting little abscesses on the reputation of the boy. At the time I presumed the tales were true. Musicians have a way of getting around—too much. Maybe they weren’t, though. He didn’t have that roving look. Or the sultry one, like Biff. Just—gay. I—” She broke off.

“You what?” Her manner changed, stepped up its intensity.

“Jimmie! Do you suppose it’s possible that—that Sarah never knew her passion was part non-Aryan? I mean to say—”

“Good God!” Jimmie studied the idea. “ He’d tell her.”

The girl shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe he thought she knew. After all, in New York, where he lives, it’s no secret. His middle name’s Jewish, and the family he’s related to helped finance the Revolutionary War. I remember reading that in a publicity story about the band he plays in. Suppose your mother got hold of the fact—”

“She did. She said so. Dad went to New York and came back with the information.”

“—and never told Sarah. Just sabotaged the thing on other grounds. The evidence would support the theory. Damn it, Jimmie, that would be a dirty trick!”

“Still—Sarah gave him up.”

Audrey was sitting straight in her chair. Her eyes flashed. “Wait! Let’s think! Your mother finds out your sister’s boy friend is partly Jewish. Your sister doesn’t know. Your mother is positive that it would make no difference whatever to your sister. So—she improvises. She turns the town against the lad. She makes Sarah fear that, if she married Harry, everybody would hate her and that Harry would probably desert her. That sort of stuff. Besides which, your mother works personally on the poor gal, day and night, to make her sign off. The pressure gets unbearable and Sarah, who is not an iron woman, finally does sign off—against her will, nature, desire, hope, wish, et cetera.”

“It could be,” Jimmie said slowly. “Shall we phone her up?”

Audrey smiled. “Efficient business man! ‘Do it now!’ It’s a delicate topic, Jimmie. Lemme think. Maybe we ought to phone up Harry, first. See if he’s still carrying the torch, too. After all, he may have gone the way of all flesh.”

“A point.”

Fifteen minutes later, excited, feeling at the same time a benighted fool, Jimmie was in a phone booth waiting for Mr. Meade to be summoned. He could hear a dance band playing faintly in the Chicago hotel he had called. Not faint was the pressure of Audrey’s chin on his shoulder. She had crowded into the booth with him—and unscrewed the bulb there, for “privacy.”

In a moment Jimmie heard a man’s voice, young, worried, suspicious. “Yes? This is Harry Meade. Is Muskogewan calling me?”