He was gratified, but not unduly surprised. He’d never had any real doubts but that she’d follow his behest. Even apart from what she now knew, what was there for her here and why should she want to cling to it?
He said her name then, as he’d told himself he would. “Marjorie?”
And she answered it, from out of sight, as he’d told himself she would. “Press? Yes, right away.”
Just as though there’d been no revelation between them last night. Just as though last night had never been. Just as though today had followed yesterday, but with no darkness — no double darkness — in between.
She came in from the bedroom the next moment, already hatted and with handbag tucked beneath her arm, and seeing to the right fit of her gloves.
“I have everything done,” she said, and her eyes fell on him for a moment without any strangeness, without any memory of strangeness, then went down to her glove buttons again. “Everything’s put in the bags. There’s only one thing, and you didn’t tell me what you wanted me to do about that.” She pointed. “That’s that little Victrola over there.” It had never played again after the night it had played “Hello, Frisco” so endlessly.
“I completely forgot about that myself,” he admitted. “It’s been down there on the floor so long.”
“But the superintendent’s wife — she was in here awhile ago — told me she’s going to speak to him about it; she’s always wanted one herself, and they might be willing to give us something for it.”
“Oh, let them have it,” he said with a dismissive swing of his arm. “It’s too much trouble to carry with us anyway.”
He turned away from it. He extended his arms, tentatively, toward her, and she didn’t see them, though she was looking right at him.
“Press,” she said, over and across them, “I’m not going to San Francisco, with you. I’m going to New York, without you. We’re both going away, but we’re not going the same way.”
Three
New York Once More
I
Marjorie was modish again, as she had been in ’14, that first year that Press had met her. She was in a coat very similar to one that he’d seen her wear at that time, even allowing for the changes a year and a half might have been expected to produce in the fashions. The dark green of bottle glass, with a chin-tight little collar of red-gold kit fox. On her head a toque of bottlegreen velour, a black aigrette standing up straight from the front of it, as from an Oriental sultan’s turban. A tiny barrel muff hung from one hand, scarcely seeming to offer room enough for two to be inserted. The bottoms of her shoes were glistening patent, the gaiter part was champagne kid, studded all down the sides with jet buttons.
She was New York again. Using it as a descriptive noun. It stood out all over her, that vague yet so distinct cachet that only two places in the world have ever been able to give women, that patina, that reflection; so that one can say “She is Paris” or “She is New York,” but one cannot explain why.
She was in the drawing room of the Seventy-ninth Street house, and the doors at the end of it had been closed to afford privacy. She was walking back and forth laterally, the short way — the room was longer than it was wide — as one does when engrossed, measuring one’s own share in a discussion, thinking over carefully each answer given to each question, both before making it, and while making it, and even in retrospect, after having made it.
He was seated, grave of mein. Sometimes looking at her. Tapping with the rim of his eyeglasses, lightly, troubledly, against the arm of the chair he sat in.
The conversation had been going on for some time. It had started as a brief passing salutation, a look-in at the doors, on her way out. But now whatever expedition she had originally been on had been lost sight of, and the conversation had become the pressing thing, and not the sortie. As such things sometimes develop, reversing their own ratios.
“Then this is more or less of a separation?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. Father. He’s not here with me. Isn’t every visit home that a wife makes without her husband, more or less of a separation; can’t it be called that?”
“It can,” he said shrewdly, “when she calls it ‘home,’ where she has come without him, and calls it merely ‘that place,’ where he has remained without her. As you’ve been doing, in nearly all our conversations.”
She sighed wearily. “Oh, Father, you’re in one of your lawyer moods.”
“I’m in one of my being-a-father moods,” he said ruefully.
The eyeglass rims tapped, the patent shoes twinkled restlessly across the floor.
“Marjorie, what is it you’re keeping from me?”
This time she sighed without the spoken protest, as if to utter that further were merely a waste of time.
“I raised you. You grew up under this roof with me. I know that broken-doll look on your face. I know that I-fell-down-on-my-roller-skates-and-barked-my-knees trembling to your chin. I know that wounded oh-there-was-the-most-wonderful-boy-at-the-party-last-night, all-of-nineteen, and-some-older-girl-of-eighteen-came-and-took-him-away-from-me-all-because-he-thought-I-was-too-young expression deep in your eyes. I can’t buy you a new doll as I used to, or give you a shiny fifty-cent piece to make your knees stop smarting, or buy you a new dress, so you can go back to the next party and win him back — and find out you don’t want him after all. Time won’t let me any more. Time is the enemy of fathers who have little girls. But I can do this — always this — to the end.” His eyeglasses had dropped to the rug. His arms were open wide, straining to accept, to hold her close, in remembrance of past consolations. “Time won’t take this away from me.”
Her lips trembled, and with a melting motion, she started toward him, toward the sanctuary he offered; then checked herself, and turned her head aside, to avoid meeting the light of sympathy in his eyes, drawing her like a beacon.
“No,” she murmured stifledly. “I know that place inside your arms too well. Don’t make me weaken. I’m trying not to make a fool of myself. Help me.”
“Is it foolish to open your heart to your father?” he coaxed.
Slowly, unwillingly, step by tremulous step, she came nearer. Everyone has to go to someone, at certain moments. No one can stand all alone.
“You wouldn’t be Marjorie if you weren’t loyal. Be loyal, among strangers, in the face of the world. Are you among strangers now?”
She was in them now. His arms closed tenderly, understandingly.
“What has he done to you?”
“Nothing, nothing...”
Then the sobs came, as she had foreseen, in that place of tenderness; the melting away of resolution and of bravery. They came in an anguished torrent, and she hid her face upon his breast, and he stroked her softly and held her for awhile, and didn’t speak till they’d ebbed again.
“Tell me, and I’ll understand. Not for you alone, I’ll understand for the two of you. Tell me, and I’ll try to help. Not you alone, I’ll try to help the two of you. I’m older than you are, than he is. Tell me, and I’ll make the skinned knee stop stinging, as I used to long ago, remember? Remember how it was?”
“Father,” she moaned feverishly, threshing her head from side to side against the pillow of his chest, “you don’t know what you’re saying at all! You can’t. This is something you can’t. You can’t understand him — in this. You can’t help him...”