Curtain for a Jester Page 20

  “Not your fault, Mary,” Forbes Ingraham told her, and went back into the inner corridor. He went down it, away from his office, to a door at the end of the corridor, and opened it.

  “I keep telling you—” a tall man who stood behind a desk was saying—saying with emphasis, with feeling—to a slender, pretty girl with a shining cap of silvery blond hair—“that whatever he—” The man stopped speaking abruptly. He turned from the girl toward Forbes Ingraham, and ran his right hand through black hair, pushing it back. His eyes were black in a white face. “Oh!” the girl said, and said involuntarily.

  “Morning, Frank,” Ingraham said, in the soft voice which yet seemed to have more weight in the little room than the other man’s had had, for all its emphasis. Ingraham nodded to the girl, and said, “Phyllis.”

  She looked quickly from one man to the other. She flushed.

  “I’m—” she said, but shook her head.

  “That’s all, then, Miss Moore,” the black-haired man said, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Cuyler,” and Ingraham opened the door for her. He closed it after her.

  “Mary says you’ve something to take up with me, Frank,” Forbes Ingraham said. “If it won’t take too long—”

  It did not take long. Ingraham left the smaller office of Francis Cuyler, an associate of the firm of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb, at about eleven thirty-five and met Dorothy Lynch just outside the door. She was going, carrying her notebook, from the office of Reginald Webb back to the office, with its window on the reception room, she shared with Mary Burton and Phyllis Moore, and the office boy, Eddie Smythe, who was seventeen and much bothered about his complexion.

  Mr. Michael Fergus had been prompt. He was in the reception room when, returning from Francis Cuyler’s office, Ingraham reached it. Mr. Fergus was short, and broad, and had mustaches, which were formidable, and a beard. He sat, his knees spread and his hands on knees, in the precise middle of a leather sofa, and his attitude was that of a man who rejects comfort and is, indeed, about to spring. Years ago men of his appearance had been caricatured as anarchists; now they were considered prototypes of all Russians. Mr. Fergus had been born in Ohio; he wrote magazine serials in which young men of mild appearance turned intrepid adventurers, so disconcerting villainy and winning the affections of young women of pleasing anatomical structure. Despite his appearance, Mr. Fergus was devoutly Republican.

  “Good morning, Mike,” Forbes Ingraham said, in his gentle voice. Mr. Fergus surged forward. He clasped Ingraham’s hand; he appeared to shake his beard at Ingraham. He was ushered into the big office, and there sat on another leather sofa, his position as before. Forbes Ingraham inserted a fresh cigarette in his holder and lighted it. He lifted one of the telephones and said, “Will you send the Fergus contracts in, please,” and put it down again.

  “I’m not sure we can give them what they want, Mike,” he said, speaking slowly. “Unless we can get them to hold up until—”

  Dorothy Lynch brought the contracts. She was trim; in all respects, from prettily shod feet to carefully ordered brown hair, she was of precision design. She smiled at Michael Fergus, who waved his beard at her pleasantly; she put a sheaf of papers neatly in front of Forbes Ingraham, and was thanked, and went. “A glacial type,” Michael Fergus said, after the door closed on her. To this, Ingraham said only, and with impartiality, “Hm-m.” He leafed the contracts. “Here,” he said. “This is what can give us trouble.” He pointed. “We can’t be sure how the courts would construe, if it came to that. On the other hand—”

  Michael Fergus emerged from the big office a little before twelve, and his beard appeared to droop a little; it was even possible that he muttered into it. Ingraham watched him go, smiling faintly. He used the telephone, being connected with Reginald Webb.

  “Morning, Reg,” Ingraham said. “Mary says you seek conference. I’ve got five minutes or so if—”

  “It’s nothing important,” Webb said. “Thought you might like to look over the draft on the Avery answer. But since you were tied up—”

  “You know more about it than I do,” Ingraham told him. “You want to sit in on a lunch with Fleming?”

  “Not,” Webb said, with emphasis, “if I can help it, Forbes.”

  Forbes Ingraham made a small sound of amusement.

  “By the way,” Webb said, “is Nan coming in today?”

  “Yes. This afternoon.”

  Ingraham waited briefly for comment. He received none.

  “I’ve got a call in for Armstrong,” he said then. “I’ll be tied up with this NBC crowd and Miss Masterson’s troubles for an hour or so. Incidentally, Mary’s decided it’s ‘Waterhouse.’ You know, Reg, we’ll—” The other telephone rang, interrupting him. “Anyway,” he finished, “you want to talk to Armstrong if it comes through?”

  He waited only for, “Sure, I’ll talk to him,” and turned to the other telephone. He learned that the NBC people and Miss Waterson and her agent waited. He sighed, and asked that they be sent in.

  It was almost one-thirty when he got to the Pierre Grill, and it was a little after three when he got back to the offices of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb in a building of mature dignity in West Forty-fourth Street. Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North awaited him.

  “So,” Forbes Ingraham said, “you made it, finally.” He pointed at them with his cigarette holder.

  “Because we’re driving, instead of by train,” Pam North said. “And Cousin Wilmer, of course.”

  Ingraham nodded gravely, or almost gravely. He had known Pamela for several years; had no doubt that all, in time, would be clarified.

  “Wilmer,” Pam said, “is ailurophobe, but even without that we’ve decided that blood isn’t thicker than water—not Cousin Wilmer’s blood, anyway.”

  It was Jerry, standing, who ran a hand through his hair.

  “It really does make sense,” he said. He considered. “It did, anyway,” he added. “Before—” He looked at his wife.

  “Yes,” Ingraham said. “Well, come on—”

  “Oh, Mr. Ingraham,” Mary Burton said, her long face, her waved white hair, appearing in the information window. “Now they say Mr. Armstrong’s gone for the day, but if I tried his club—”

  “Yes, Mary,” Ingraham said. “Do that, will you? And not put anything through, except him if you get him, for the next half hour?”

  “Of course,” Mary Burton said. “I do hope it was the Pierre. After you’d gone I got to worrying whether—”

  “Yes, Mary,” Ingraham said, and took the Norths into his office. It was hot there. Ingraham opened one of the windows a few inches. Damp coolness came in, and street noises. He sat the Norths side by side on a leather sofa. He offered cigarettes, fitted one into his own holder. He said that he was glad that they had finally got around to it. He added that no lawyer likes to have his clients die intestate.

  “As things are at the moment,” Gerald North said, somewhat morosely, “it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference. But Pam feels we ought to try to provide for the cats. And that the stretch between Jacksonville and Miami is—” He shrugged. “So,” he said.

  “Well,” Pam said, “we couldn’t get anything except two roomettes, not even in the same end of the car. This way, if we run into a truck or something, we’ll be together, anyway. Which is the point, of course.” She looked at Forbes Ingraham. “About our making our wills,” she said, explaining all. “Before we go to Florida.”

  Forbes Ingraham nodded, still with gravity.

  “Isn’t it true,” Pam said, “that they assume the woman died first? Being the weaker vessel? In spite of the fact that women live longer than men? Generally speaking, of course?”

  There was no rule about it, Ingraham said—at least no rule which was universal. Courts had so held. Courts had held almost everything one could imagine.

  “Then,” Pam said, “when we hit this truck, Jerry inherits from me but Wilmer inherits from Jerry, being his only relative. And there’s nothing left for the
cats. It would be like Wilmer to have them killed, only he’d say put to sleep, probably. He says things like that. But the aunts, on the other hand, would be good to the cats.” She paused. “Even Martini,” she said, “if she’d let them.”

  “I take it,” Forbes Ingraham said, and pulled toward him the yellow pad. Half a dozen sheets were filled with his neat, small writing, and turned back. He wrote “Norths” at the top of a fresh sheet. “I take it,” he said, “that you don’t want to leave money to the cats, as such? Or in trust for them?”

  “Heavens no!” Pam said. “It always sounds so silly in the papers. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North, under the terms of wills filed for probate today, left their estate, estimated at’—hm-m. Anyway, to three cats named Martini and Gin and Sherry. It would be embarrassing.”

  Not, Jerry pointed out, under the circumstances she had, perhaps a little morbidly, assumed—not to them.

  “What you want,” Ingraham said, “is everything to each other, if surviving; then the aunts—you’ll have to give me their names, Pam—then—then what?”

  “The Authors League Fund,” Jerry said, and looked enquiringly at his wife.

  “I’d as soon authors as anybody,” Pam said. “The poor things.”

  She gave the names of the aunts; they agreed on executors; it was all simple enough, and painless enough. With notes completed, Ingraham leaned back. He would draw the wills up, have them typed. The next day they would—

  A telephone rang. Ingraham spoke into it softly, briefly. He said, “I’ll call you back.” He hung up, took the other telephone from its cradle and said into it, “Please, Mary. I told you—”

  “Come in and sign,” he said. “With witnesses, in your presence and in the presence of each other. About this time all right?”

  The morning would be better, Jerry said. They compromised on noon.

  “While you’re here,” Ingraham said, then, and talked briefly, in his soft voice, of a plagiarism suit threatened against North Books, Inc., for which Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb were counsel. He did not, Ingraham said, regard the suit as especially threatening.

  “Sam probably told you that,” he said. “We went over it together before I went abroad. Of course, we’ll watch it.”

  He had leaned forward as he spoke; now he leaned back again. He lighted a fresh cigarette. He looked across the room, at the opposite wall, and there was a line vertical in his broad forehead.

  “Sam Schaeffer had a damn good mind,” he said, to the distant wall.

  Jerry North said, after a brief pause, that he had been sorry to hear. Forbes Ingraham looked at him, at Pam. He nodded.

  “One of those senseless accidents,” he said. “Happen all the time, but—hard to accept, all the same.”

  He paused. “Still expect him to open that door”—he gestured toward a door in a side wall of the big office—“and walk in—and you always thought of Heywood Broun and the ‘unmade bed’—and say, ‘Ingraham, I’d like you to look at this.’ Great man for last names, Sam was. And almost everybody called him Sam, and he liked it.

  “Senseless damn thing,” Forbes Ingraham said again. “Keep wanting things to make sense. You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?”

  “Everybody does,” Pam said. “And things don’t.”

  “Well,” Forbes said, “we’ve still got to try to make them, I suppose.”

  In the street below, a truck backfired with violence, and somebody leaned on a car’s horn. Ingraham reached back and closed the window. They would never imagine, he said, that the office was sound-proofed. With the result that people could shoot off firecrackers in the hall outside, or yell their heads off for help, and he’d never hear them. But the traffic four floors below might as well be in the room. If—

  The telephone rang, softly. Ingraham answered it in his soft voice. He said “Yes,” and again said “Yes.” He said, “In about five minutes,” and put the telephone gently back in its cradle. The Norths were standing by then, and Ingraham stood too, and came from behind his desk. But his movements were unhurried. He helped Pamela with her coat; he said, looking out a window, that he envied them their trip south. He walked with them to the door, and through the library to the reception room.

  A slender woman in her thirties sat on the leather sofa, in the company of a mink coat. She smiled up at Forbes Ingraham when he appeared behind the Norths, and crushed out a cigarette in an ashtray. She gathered the mink toward her and Ingraham said, “Hello, Nan. With you in a minute,” and crossed the reception room with the Norths to the door. He said, “About noon, then,” and opened the door for them and saw them through it. Outside, Pam said, “Such a nice man” and, “that mink must have cost thousands.” Gerald North, no man to arouse sleeping minks, rang for the elevator.

  The rain had stopped; the wind blew gustily through Forty-fourth Street, but now from the northwest. It bustled the Norths toward the east; when a cab stopped for them, it bounced them into the cab and, down the avenue, toward home, the cab seemed to scud with the wind. They were safe inside the apartment, and had greeted the cats—Pam assured the cats that it was being arranged for them to be taken care of if “anything happens”—before Pam reminded Jerry that they were not destined to remain there.

  “Margaret’s cocktail party,” she said and then, “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten,” just as Jerry was about to. Jerry said, “Oh, no, Pam,” and was told that they had promised. “And,” Pam said, “it isn’t raining any more,” to clinch matters.

  “Not one of those,” Jerry said, seeming to beseech higher power than Pam. “Why? What’s she celebrating?”

  “I suppose,” Pam said, “the arrival of five-thirty. Or six, really. You’ll like it, once you’re there.”

  He liked Margaret, Jerry said. They would not see Margaret, except for an instant on arrival, perhaps another on departure. But these parties of hers—

  “They,” Jerry said firmly, “constitute unlawful assembly. Or loitering with intent. Why can’t we—”

  “We promised,” Pam said. “Also, it may be fun—sometimes they are. Everybody’ll be there.”

  “God knows,” Jerry said, morosely.

  “Well,” Pam told him, “that’s who she knows—everybody.” She considered this. “Everybody we know, anyway,” she said, compromising.

  “That man she has,” Jerry said, “makes martinis in advance. Pours them out of a bottle. Listen—once I got one with an olive and lemon peel.”

  If this would not dissuade Pam from party going, nothing would. It did not …

  Margaret lived on Park Avenue, in an inflated apartment. She had been, for twenty years, the dutiful wife of an older man who shared—who exaggerated—Jerry North’s distaste for social gatherings. He referred to them as brawls, and considered them blessed neither to give nor to receive. He had died—rather appropriately, alone in a hotel room while on a business trip—and his wife, after a decent interval of regret, had begun to make up for lost parties. She was pretty and blond—rather like a fluffy kitten—and in her middle forties. When the Norths arrived a little after six, she greeted them as “darlings!” and assured them that they would know everybody and gently brushed them into a tremendous room which reminded Jerry of Grand Central at five-ten, except that nobody was running.

  They did not know everybody. At first, indeed, it appeared that they did not know anybody. Bereft of hostess—who could be expected to return, but was now saying “darlings!” to an arriving group of four—the Norths stood, wearing party smiles which fitted a little tightly, and watched strangers drink. In the distance, to be glimpsed as if in a forest, a man in a white jacket moved slowly, carrying a tray. He did not seem to approach.

  “What it is,” Jerry said, after several minutes—“what it is, we’re in a dead spot. Come on.”

  They went, slowly, smiling the smiles of those who are co-guests without being acquaintances, feeling like new members of a country club, in the direction taken by the man in the white coat. Progress w
as tentative, of necessity somewhat apologetic, wary of jostling. Eventually, seeming to have got no place in particular, it stopped.

  “We seem to be hemmed in,” Pam said. “We—”

  “The Norths,” a softly pleasant voice said behind Jerry. “Still alive, I see.”

  “Well,” Pam said. “Such a small world.”

  “It is,” Forbes Ingraham said, “part of the service of the firm. Can’t have you dying before you sign, you know.” He looked at their empty hands. “Of thirst, apparently,” he added. “He went thataway.” He indicated, with a movement of his handsome head. “He—”

  “Darlings!” Margaret said, emerging in a small clearing nearby. “You haven’t anything to drink!”

  “No,” Jerry said.

  “We’ll have to do—” Margaret said, but then the clearing closed around her and she vanished.

  “I can’t,” Pam North said, “remember ever seeing so many tall people.”

  “These are the Norths,” Forbes Ingraham said, and pulled a slender woman from between two masculine backs. The woman had warmly brown hair and through it a streak intensely white. Her smooth skin was deeply tanned. She said, “I know they are.”

  “Mrs. James,” Forbes said. “Phoebe James.”

  “At,” Phoebe James said, “one of those terrible do’s in Pittsburgh, wasn’t it? I mean, very nice do’s, actually. Book and author.”

  “When you were an author and we were a book,” Pam said.

  Phoebe James grinned at her. The grin was widely white in her tanned face.

  “Darlings!” Margaret said, emerging from a new direction. “I’ve got somebody coming.” She beamed at the Norths, at Forbes Ingraham and Phoebe James. “So nice you’ve all—” she said, but was submerged again.

  But then a man in a white jacket broke through, and offered drinks. The Norths took martinis—which this time contained no added oddities. Forbes Ingraham exchanged an empty highball glass for one not empty; Phoebe James, whose last historical novel had perched in eminence, and for months, near the top of the list, shook her white-streaked head.