“Quick! Get Jerry’s place on the phone for me — the number’s on the pad there. I’m too excited to find it! I want to talk to Marion Scalero. Nobody else.”
“I don’t have to find it. I know the number of Jerry’s place,” the awestricken Tenacity said.
“Well, get it for me; don’t stand there, you fool!” Bernice barked.
Tenacity collapsed onto the telephone bench as though she had had a heart attack and picked up the instrument with trembling fingers. “Marion Scalero, understand!” Bernice reminded her, and to me, wringing her hands in an agony of impatience, “She can have anything I’ve got! Oh, if I can only get around her in some way—!”
Tenacity having stated her number, we both held our breaths, listening and waiting. Bernice edged closer to her, ready to take the instrument from her.
Suddenly Tenacity put the phone down and turned to Bernice. “Their number’s been disconnected.”
She stamped her foot. “Don’t tell me that! It can’t be! We were up there only Saturday—”
“That’s what the chief operator just said to me,” Tenacity insisted.
“They may have moved out since then,” I observed.
“Look in the directory under apartment houses,” she instructed Tenacity exasperatedly, “and call up the building they live in; maybe they can tell us what’s happened. Only hurry it up, will you, hurry it up!”
I strolled over to the window meanwhile and started to look idly down into the street. “Keep away from there!” Bernice said to me sharply. “Don’t show yourself at the window, you never can tell who’s watching!”
I withdrew leisurely, a little bored with all this melodrama, and went into the serving pantry to get some more gin and vermouth, which it seemed to me she needed more than she ever had in all the time I had known her. I came back, holding one in each hand, just in time to hear Tenacity saying, “They were dispossessed Monday morning on account of all the noise up there Sa’day night; they didn’t leave any address with the superintendent.”
Bernice literally snorted with dismay and began to screw up her face once more into that horrible mask of panic. “Here, try this.” I quickly forestalled her, afraid she was going to lose her head again. She drank, sketchily and drippingly, and brushing her hand quickly past her lips, said: “Wade, there’s only one thing left for me to do now—” And giving me a meaning glance, she turned to look at Tenacity. “Wait a minute, don’t say anything!” she murmured.
Tenacity was still sitting at the telephone, staring from one to the other of us with her thick lips dropping open.
“You can go home now, you’re through for today,” Bernice said to her briskly. And throwing open a drawer, she took out some money and put it in her hand without counting it.
Dismay burst its way through Tenacity’s opaque features. “Ain’t you gonna need me no more?” she piped thinly.
“Oh, sure, you come back about nine in the morning, like you always do,” Bernice assured her hypocritically. “This is just so I won’t forget what I owe you. Now hurry up and go, will you!” And she actually went to the door and held it open for her, impatience expressed in every line of her body.
Tenacity got to her feet, moved across the room toward the door, and through it — and was instantly effaced by the shutting of the panel, which Bernice effected almost before her skirts were out of the way. “Now!” she exhaled, leaning her back against the door for a moment as though to gather fresh energy from it.
“What’s the one thing you said was left for you to do?” I asked eagerly, going to her. I already knew, though — something told me.
“I’m going with you, if you’ll still let me,” she said.
“My baby!” I cried gleefully.
She caught at my shoulders and shook me anxiously. “Can you do it, though? Can you make it? It’s got to be right away — not next week, not even tomorrow. I’ve got to get out of here by tonight, I tell you!”
“It’s a cinch, nothing to it!” I said elatedly. “There’s a train for Chicago at about nine-thirty, and we can take the Santa Fé from there tomorrow morning—”
She began to pull dresses out of a closet, then stopped to throw off her violet satin kimono right before me. “No time for modesty right now!” she gasped. “When was it you say you saw her — yesterday?”
“About one in the afternoon.”
“Well, the damage’s been done long ago — there’s not a minute to lose — if I want to see thirty!
“Wade, do something, will you!” she cried, in the act of twisting a dress that had just dropped over her shoulders this way and that around her waist. “Don’t stand there watching me — do you think I’m kidding you, or what?”
“Well, I’m waiting for you,” I said. “We’ll leave here together.”
“How can we?” she wailed, snapping a row of little hooks closed over her ribs with the agility of someone playing a musical instrument. “I’ve got to throw some things into a valise, and it’s twenty-five to five now! The banks closed an hour and a half ago — and you’ll need some money, won’t you! What are you going to do?”
“Gee, you’re right!” I yelled. “I never thought of that! I can get in if the manager’s still there — otherwise I’m sunk!” And I bolted for the door. “I’ll pick you up here in less than an hour.”
“No, don’t come back!” she called after me. “I’ll meet you at the station at train time. I’ll be through before you most likely, and I don’t want to wait alone here in the apartment. But for God’s sake, see that you get there!”
“Grand Central — lower level — eight-thirty or quarter to nine!” I babbled wildly, half tearing the door from its hinges.
In the foyer I was fleetingly aware of Tenacity’s presence in the background, standing before the mirror pretending to put on her hat or something. “Mister Wade,” she said querulously, “is Miss Bernice fixing to fire me, or what—?”
“Look it up in the almanac,” I said roughly, and was gone.
I jumped into the first taxi I came across — this was no time to count pennies — and made a beeline for the Corn Exchange, my branch. It would be much further away from where Bernice lived than two or three of the other branches!
I had no time to be happy that we were going away together at long last; there was too much to do first. I could be happy later on, on the train. But how glad I was (I told myself) that she was high-strung, neurotic, or whatever you want to call it, and imagined all sorts of dreadful things would happen to her if she stayed in New York after I made no more than a casual remark to some girl who was somebody’s sweetie; how lucky for me. Otherwise I never would have got her to go with me. Too vivid an imagination and perhaps too much liquor and too little sleep over too long a period of time had accomplished what no amount of love and devotion could have.
But at the moment there were other things I was just as glad about, too. I was glad I had struck up an acquaintance with that insipid trombonist in the jazz band at the Pier the first summer Maxine and I were down in Atlantic City seven years ago, never dreaming that he would outgrow his insipidity, discard his trombone with his white flannel trousers, and become first a teller in a bank and then the manager of that bank — or at least, of the branch I dealt with. Otherwise, what chance would I have had of withdrawing money from a three-o’clock bank at quarter to five in the afternoon?
When we got there, the doors were closed, but I rang the bell and motioned frantically to the watchman through the glass. He motioned back to me that the bank was closed (as though I didn’t know that!), that it was too late, to go away, or something to that effect.