The Key to Nicholas Street Read online

  She wheeled around on the seat, and even while she was speaking furiously her fingers were busily plaiting her hair.

  “Do you mean to say you’d approve of Bettina’s marrying that man?” she demanded.

  “I’d approve of Bettina’s marrying anyone in the world she wanted to, as long as he wasn’t diseased or criminal.”

  Her eyebrows went up triumphantly. “And what makes you so sure that this high and mighty Matthew isn’t a criminal?”

  I looked at her, stupefied. “Now what in heaven’s name put a crazy idea like that into your head, Lucille?”

  “Crazy?” she said, and looked me up and down. “Oh, you’re so sure of yourself, aren’t you, Harry? Always the one with the deep thoughts that are just a little too much for anyone around him to understand. Always the quiet one who sits in the corner and laughs at everyone because they aren’t as smart as he is.”

  I could feel the little tremors of rage quivering in my arms and legs as always happened when she started to talk like this, and I tried to get a grip on myself.

  “Lucille,” I said quietly, “we’ve been through this routine too many times before to make it worth repeating. All I wanted was some reason for your saying what you did about Matt.”

  “All right,” she flashed out, “I’ll give you one! Did it ever dawn on you that when a man suddenly leaves a good job to go hide himself someplace there must be a reason for it?”

  “But there’s a dozen reasons why a man would leave a job, even a good job! And as for hiding—if Matt is hiding from anyone he’s certainly doing the poorest possible job of it. Listen, Lucille, there’s nothing wrong with making melodrama of what somebody might do, but when it comes to charging him with crimes and outrages because you don’t like him, even you ought to have more sense than that!”

  She smiled, and, upset as I was, I had to marvel at the subtle difference between that vitriolic twist of her lips and the warmth and good nature they would take on when she stepped outside the door where she might meet someone.

  “I might have a lot more sense than you imagine, Harry. Enough to call right to that magazine office where he worked, and talk direct to his boss. Mr. Morrison. Mr. Wallace Morrison. And he didn’t laugh one little bit when he found out I was calling about Mr. Chaves!”

  “Lucille, that was outrageous. How you could do anything like that ….”

  “Please keep your voice down, Harry. There are other people in the house besides us. Mr. Morrison made it mighty clear that your friend, Matthew, had walked out on his job without a by-your-leave, that they were very anxious to get hold of him, and glad I called to help them out. What do you make of that, Harry?”

  Truthfully, I didn’t know what to make of it, but I knew Lucille well enough to wish that I had been at that phone instead of her in order to make heads or tails of the matter. I told her as much, and her eyes narrowed.

  “Then if it means as little to you as that,” she said, “I suppose his rotten immorality wouldn’t mean anything at all!”

  I shook my head wearily. “Immorality. Lucille, why don’t you give up and admit it. You might dislike the man for a lot of reasons—he’s careless about his clothes, he’s not afraid to look you in the eye—but what have crime and morals to do with it? And if he’s being immoral, certainly Bettina is being every bit as immoral. It takes two to make that kind of sin, and that’s the kind you’re talking about, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I’m not talking about Bettina.”

  “All right, about whom?”

  “About that woman next door. That Ballou woman!”

  I was afraid to look into the glass at my own face then. The same sickening wave of jealousy I had known when I first found out how close Matt was to Kate went through me, and it must have drained the color from my face as suddenly as it turned my knees to jelly and caused me to throw out my hand and catch the edge of the bedstead for support.

  “Harry, what is it!” Lucille said.

  I steadied myself. “Nothing. A little sick, that’s all. Maybe sick of all this nonsense.”

  “Then you don’t believe he’s carrying on with that woman right under our noses?”

  “No,” I said, and meant it. “I don’t.”

  “And what makes you so sure of that?”

  “I’m sure, that’s all!” I cried. “She wouldn’t …!”

  Lucille faced me rigidly, her hands frozen into the long plait on her chest.

  “She, Harry?” she whispered, and needed no more than the expression on my face to tell her everything. Her fingers fumbled uncertainly in the plait now. “You mean, that woman and you …”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it, Lucille,” I said desperately. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to put it to you, but I guess I waited too long. I’m honestly sorry it had to come out this way.”

  “You and that woman,” she repeated numbly. Then the full understanding of that seemed to dawn on her, and her voice became shrill and violent. “That was smart of you, wasn’t it! You and that woman laughing at me for a fool! Harry Ayres and his whore laughing at me for the twenty-three years I put in being a fool to him!”

  I could have hit her then, but when I took a step toward her she held her ground. She knew me too well, knew that what she had said would not only anger me, but would handcuff me with a paralyzing sense of guilt, and she was right.

  “Lucille,” I pleaded, “I would have given anything if things could have been worked out without hurting you. But if it can’t be done that way, and it’s clear enough that it can’t, at least let’s try not to say and do things we’ll both be sorry for afterwards.”

  “Sorry for?” She clutched her breast in a drearily familiar gesture. “What do I have to be sorry for, Harry? That I married a fool who can’t keep away from any slut that happens to look at him twice? Art lessons!” she cried, and her fingers dug into her breast. “Oh, yes indeed, Harry, you must have learned a lot about art from her. And those trips to New York. Business trips for the tired businessman, weren’t they? What am I supposed to do now, Harry? Lie in bed next to you and wonder how many others there were before her?”

  “You won’t have to wonder about that,” I said. “There’s never been anyone but her. There never will be.”

  “Never will be?” she echoed, and there was genuine bewilderment in her voice. “What do you mean, never will be? What are you getting at?”

  “For God’s sake, Lucille, what do you think we’ve been talking about? I want a divorce.”

  That seemed to rock her on her feet. She stared at me, wide-eyed.

  “A divorce? After twenty-three years, a divorce?”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “Has being married to me meant so much to you that you can’t bear to give it up? Be honest, Lucille. Twenty-three years ago you married the man with the best clothes, the biggest car, the most money in his pocket of anyone on Nicholas Street, where the competition was always tough. Three years later when it blew up in your face you let him know in plain language that he was a dud, a washout, and the biggest disappointment of your life. And there was never a time after that, Lucille, when you changed your mind about that, was there?”

  She was very pale, but obviously in control of herself again.

  “I’m beginning to understand, Harry. Somehow or other—I don’t know where or when or what—but somehow or other I’ve done you a great wrong. The fact that there’s another woman, a cheap, good-looking woman ten years younger than me, who didn’t get gray hairs bringing up your children, that doesn’t mean anything. No, somehow I’ve done you a wrong, and so, bag and baggage, out I go from the house where I’ve lived twenty-three years!”

  “Lucille,” I protested, but she cut me off with a rising voice.

  “You spoke your piece, Harry, so now you’ll hear me out! If I didn’t have fifty witnesses to stand by my side right now I might feel different. But there isn’t a soul on Nicholas Street who wouldn’t bear witness to the
kind of wife and mother I’ve been, although none of them will ever have to. And they won’t have to because there isn’t going to be any divorce!”

  “You’re not talking sense, Lucille. For one thing, I never said you’d have to get out of the house. I’ll be the one getting out. For another thing, there isn’t any answer to all this except divorce, and certainly you have all the grounds you need for it.”

  She smiled at me in that sweet and deadly manner of hers.

  “Certainly I do, Harry, but we’ll just make the best of it, because I still say there isn’t going to be any divorce.”

  “Even with your knowing about me and Kate Ballou?”

  “I told you, Harry, I’ll just have to make the best of that.”

  I felt like some clumsy animal backed into the corner of a cage with the trainer’s whip flicking him unmercifully. And I could swear there was a look on Lucille’s face now almost of bland interest in what my next move would be.

  “Look,” I said, “if it’s your idea that you’re going to block me off by pretending to overlook everything, I might as well explain that there are more ways than one of getting a divorce. The law is a complicated business, and if it’s a case of my having to crawl through a loophole to settle this, I promise you that I’ll do it, Lucille.”

  “I’m not thinking of the law, Harry.”

  “Then what are you thinking of?”

  “I’m thinking of that woman. Harry,” she said suddenly, “do you really feel about her the way you’d have me believe?”

  “I’m in love with her, Lucille.”

  “That sounds very touching.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I said angrily. “Get down on my knees and swear to it?”

  “At your age?” she jeered. “No, I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to forget this divorce business once and for all, Harry, because if you don’t that woman’s life is going to be turned into one hell on earth!”

  She was not joking. She was Lucille at her grimmest, and into my head flashed a dozen fantastic pictures of her seeking out Kate, confronting her, badgering her, for all I knew, assaulting her. I couldn’t think of anything to say in the face of that. I could only feel the dead weight of misery pressing me down.

  Lucille nodded slowly. “I mean that, Harry. I swear it on my children’s lives that if you try to go through with this I’ll make that woman pay a hundred times for it.”

  “I can’t give her up, Lucille!” I said. “My God, now that I’ve found her—you don’t know what it means.”

  “I didn’t say anything about that, Harry. I was talking about divorce.”

  For some strange reason that shocked me more than anything else she had said.

  “You mean,” I said incredulously, “that even if I saw her—that if things were the same—”

  “You’d be a fool to do it. Not only because it’s indecent and filthy, but because she isn’t worth it.”

  “But if I did?”

  “You’re to forget this divorce nonsense, Harry. You’re never to mention it again.”

  I shook my head in bewilderment. “But how could you stand knowing what was going on, and pretending it wasn’t so. I don’t understand you, Lucille.”

  “Don’t you?” She reached for the plait of hair and began working at it again, almost abstractedly. “Maybe that’s because you don’t know how a woman feels, Harry. It’s nice to live in a house on Nicholas Street, but not so nice when you see all the furniture in the house is falling apart. It’s nice to hear about the good times Freda and Rose have, and the trips they take, but it’s not so nice when you think the farthest you’ll ever go is for a ride to New York if your husband ever gets around to asking you.

  “Everything that Rose and Freda have I had right in my hands, too, Harry, for a couple of years, and then you took it away because you just plain didn’t know how to run your own business. But there’s one thing you won’t take away. I’m Mrs. Harry Ayres, and there’s plenty in Sutton, plenty right on Nicholas Street, who are glad to say hello just because of that. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, and it’s not going to hurt me, either. Does that make sense to you, Harry?”

  I didn’t know then whether it did or not. I could only see that sooner or later I had to bring all this to Kate, and it might mean the end of something I was struggling so desperately to hold on to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kate had once wryly remarked on the incongruity of a man’s traveling a hundred miles every couple of weeks to meet his next-door neighbor, and that incongruity was never so apparent as during the week which followed. She was at home in Sutton all that week, yet I made no move to see her.

  The truth is that while I carried the key to 159 as well as the key to the studio on my chain I had never yet been in the house next door. It is one thing to have the eyes of Nicholas Street casually turned your way; it would be quite another to thrust the obvious squarely into them, and I even regretted the arrangements Kate had made with Junie to have the stoves tended and an occasional cleaning given the house because it made Junie a sort of uncomfortable link between the two houses. After I knew those arrangements had been made I always felt subtly blackmailed by Junie even while I told myself I had no reason for thinking so.

  So I let that week pass, and the day after Kate left for the city I followed her there. It was a miserably hot day, the first one of the summer, and nothing seemed to go right. I was overdressed, and my coat bore me down like an anchor when I left Grand Central. I had not made a reservation at my hotel, and when I got there it seemed to have been taken over from top to bottom by a convention of college instructors, no less, who were as red-faced and drunken and noisy as any set of salesmen on a spree could be. There were no rooms available, sorry, I’d have to look elsewhere, the room clerk told me, and that meant another hour of heat and noise and traffic before I was finally settled.

  In expectation of settling my affairs satisfactorily with Lucille I had ordered a ring for Kate several weeks before, a small emerald set into a plain gold band which she had admired in a shop window on upper Fifth Avenue. It cost more than I could afford, but Kate, who could casually buy herself anything she wanted at the drop of a hat, had forced me into the position of either being extravagant or of falling back on the small gift of purely sentimental value. I had not been prepared for Lucille’s triumph, the extravagance now reeked of irony, and when I went to pick up the ring the engraving on the band, Kate and Harry, left a bitter taste in my mouth.

  When I got to the studio it took all my courage to walk up those creaking stairs, and when Kate saw me she read my feelings at once.

  “What’s wrong, Harry?”

  “There’s an unholy stench of turpentine in here, isn’t there?”

  “No worse than usual.” She threw open the door I had just entered. “There, maybe that’ll stir up those old fossils across the hall.”

  I dropped into a chair, and she stood over me worriedly. “I think the heat’s got you dished. Not used to New York in the summer, are you? Think a drink would help any?”

  “No,” I said, and gave her the box with the ring in it. She opened it, looked startled, and then slowly and admiringly studied the ring.

  “Harry,” she said gently, “you mean just because I said I liked it—Oh, Harry, this is a fantastic gift for anyone stinking of turpentine like I do right now, but you’ll just have to overlook the smell.”

  She leaned over me and put her lips to mine, and for that instant all my misery evaporated under the charge of excitement that touching her could give me. I held her like that until we were both breathless, and when she stood up again I said, “Not only rich and good-looking, but the kind of woman who never looks at a gift and says, ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’ What more could a man ask for?”

  “Nothing,” she said cheerfully. “With a paragon like me at his beck and call a man would be crazy to ask for more. Or dead,” she added meaningfully.

  “Probably dead,”
I agreed. “With a palette knife in his back.”

  “As long as that’s understood—” She held up her arm with the hand bent back in that gesture women use when they are preening themselves on their jewelry. “The only thing you’ve left out, Harry, is the occasion. Something I’ve overlooked? An unbirthday present? There should be some occasion, shouldn’t there?”

  So that was it and there was no escape from it. And even trying to soften it as much as possible in the telling didn’t make it any more pleasant. Perhaps it would have been more gallant to omit the explanation of Lucille’s chief weapon, her threats against Kate, but I think it would have been the sort of tin-foil gallantry that Kate despised, would have led to a dreary round of explanations and lies none of which could have rung true to her, and so I omitted nothing. When I was done Kate sat there for a long time slowly turning the ring around and around on her finger before she looked up and spoke to me.

  “You know, Harry, in her own way she’s a remarkable woman. She knows what she wants, she knows how to take it and keep it. And for all my virtues, that’s more than I’ve been able to do.”

  “Do you think I was wrong in giving in to her?”

  “I think you and I see exactly the same pictures in our heads, Harry. Headlines: Father Deserts Brood for Love Nest! Redheaded Artist Turns Home-Wrecker! Oh, yes, and it’s Greenwich Village, too, or close enough to it to make it really juicy. And maybe a hysterical woman screaming at you in the hallway, or chasing you right down Fifth Avenue. If you think I’m brave enough or tough enough to face that kind of thing, Harry, you don’t really know me. I’d gladly die for you, but it has to be in some way with a little dignity attached to it.”

  “Can we go on this way then, Kate?” I only asked that because I wanted some reassurance, but she jolted me by saying, “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean everything’s been made so different just by Lucille’s knowing. Don’t you see, even if she doesn’t do anything, she knows.”