“Christ, there’s that goddamned tune, what is it, the Chapel in the Moonlight — I wish they’d lay off it.”
They turned their heads towards the machine at the back, the little glass coffin full of records, listened to the gross throbbing of the music — like a bad heart, thought Blomberg, and winced — then turned back again to their drinks.
“But she was always sorry for him. You see, he had had a bad time of it. Made what Boston called a mismarriage.”
“You mean to say he’s got a wife?”
“No. No. She’s dead. It really was a sad business, at that. He never would tell anyone about it, but from what one can gather she got some sort of hatred or dislike of him right after the marriage; maybe she fell in love with someone else — damned beautiful, too; I’ve seen photos of her. Which raised hell with him. Noni says he nearly went crazy. Nice to him in society, you know, when they went out together, but wouldn’t have anything to do with him at home. And always going away, somewhere or other.”
“Ahem. A marriage in name only. So what?”
“So of course he enlisted as a private when the war broke out, hoping to get himself honorably killed with a bullet in his eye or something; and then, by God, what do you think she did?”
“See if you can surprise me, Blom — and let’s put this down and go an’ get a clam. Or an oyster.”
“Yeah, sure, Key, but listen!..”
They lifted their glasses simultaneously; Key was again smiling a little, but with obvious sympathy. It began to look hopeful. Just the same, you never could tell with Key, he could be as stubborn as a mule, and he hated to admit his feelings. Better soft-pedal the sobstuff, and take it easy.
They slid off their stools, and turned to the left as they went out. Key had a toothpick in his mouth, and the jaunty angle at which it wagged was amusingly in character — like, in fact, everything he did. As for instance, his habit of looking over the tops of his dark glasses, the blue eyes suddenly very bright and mischievous. Like minnows. And of course the very quaint hat. The neat small derby, on the neat small head, was perfect, like something out of a comic strip.
At the oyster house they were in luck: the two first seats at the bar were vacant.
“What a break!” said Key. “And, by God, there are Fairhavens, too.”
“Baby! and big enough to go skating on. Two half dozens?”
“This place gets me. What with all them fee-rocious red lobsters about, and that bowl of tomalley, and old George here opening oysters as easy as winking — sometimes I just can’t bear it.”
“There’s something about marine life, and the fruits of the sea — it must be an atavism. When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.”
“Yeah. But now, go on and surprise me. With what Mrs. Gil did.”
“Well, it seems that Mrs. Gil, when she saw Gil off for the front—”
“What was the old song? He left her to go to the front!”
“Never mind, Key. It seems she repented of what she had done, and how she had treated him; maybe she was tired of her lover, if in fact she had ever had one — my own theory about it was, she was just one of them queer psychological ‘cases,’ with a funny kink or squeam or something — and anyway, whatever it was, she told him before he went that if he got back alive she would reward him by having a child. See?”
“You could knock me down with a lily!”
“Yes. Isn’t it nice? He came back; and she kept her word; and she had a child. And it killed her. And the child died too.… A very handsome little specimen of poetic injustice; one of those magnificently generous gestures of the oversoul or destiny or the universal time machine that make so much sense that you want to turn handsprings of joy. For six months Gil wouldn’t even go outdoors: it was Noni that saved him.”
“I take it this was some time ago.”
“Oh, sure! Years.”
“Okay. But it doesn’t quite explain, does it, why she should up and want to marry him now. You can be sorry for someone, but dammit, Blom, you ain’t got to marry them, have you? Oh, look what George has done! And shall we say, fair haven?”
He looked down at the noble dish of oysters, beaming.
“Fair haven! You know, that’s funny — she used to go there, or near there, in the summer, when she was a kid.… Nonquitt.… I went there once myself, and you never saw such wild roses in your life.… Gosh, aren’t these good!”
“Don’t talk — eat!”
They ate the oysters in silence; sat still for a moment, as for the completion of a ritual; then Key paid at the desk (as usual) and they went out. Without a word they crossed Tremont Street, and proceeded slowly to the foot of the marble stairs, in the middle of the next block, before Blomberg said:
“I take it we are once again going up these stairs to the Greeks?”
“It kind of looks like it, doesn’t it? Two minds with but a single thought.…”
In a front booth, from which they looked out at the fantastic lamplit rear walls — smooth and sinister as precipices — of the Metropolitan Theater — a view which unaccountably always made Blomberg think of Hamlet and Elsinore — they studied the pale blue mimeograph of the menu.
“I think while we’re thinking, Henry, we’ll have a couple of those nice big dry martinis. And then we can think even better.”
“Yes, Mr. Key.”
“Ha! I see lamb with okra, Blom. And I see stuffed vine leaves. And I see chicken livers en brochette! My God, it’s awful! What are you going to have?”
“Lamb with okra, every time. That little hexagonal vegetable is what I don’t like nothing else except.”
“Lamb brochette for me; I like the taste of the hickory wood.”
“Yes, the hickory wood.”
“Hang your clothes on a hickory limb! But you see, what I don’t get in all this, Blom, is why the rush to Mexico; why the hurry to marry a man she never wanted to marry before, and doesn’t love anyway; and above all why all the panic about it, when there’s so little cash that it’s got to be borrowed. Don’t think I’m being suspicious, because I am!”
He lit a cigarette, snapped the small silver lighter shut with a very competent little thumb, blew smartly on the lighted cigarette tip to make it glow, then removed the dark spectacles and placed them on the linen tablecloth. The question, in the tired blue eyes, was candid but friendly.… And this, Blomberg, thought, was the moment at which to go slow; the necessity must now come almost as if reluctantly from the circumstances of the situation; it must be in a sense as if he himself were only now making up his mind. And where to begin? At what obscure corner? Northeast or southwest? And with Noni, or Gil, or himself? Not himself, certainly, for it was apparent that Key was already sufficiently suspicious of his own connections with the affair. He stared out of the window at the mysterious blue-red lamplit brick of the walls of Elsinore, whistling softly a little ghost tune while he did so as if to gain time. Then he said gravely, and at once aware of the power of his dark face and conscious eyes on the quick receptivity of Key’s:
“She’s got to die.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s got to die. The doctors have given her six months — maybe a year at most — and maybe much less.”
“No!.. You don’t mean it.”
“Yes. Heart. Something wrong about the heart. She won’t tell me the details — won’t talk about it at all. Except for the main fact. She got the final confirmation day before yesterday, and called me up, and I went down to the Hull Street house — you know, she lives in a little wooden house down there in the slum by Copp’s Hill burying ground — and, my God, Key, I can tell you I never want to go through such a night in my life again.”