I Want to Go Home Page 23

  “Not on her throne?” Marta said. “Not in charge of everything? Not even on the telephone issuing instructions to—” She tired of it, suddenly. “The hell with it,” Marta Bromwell said. She looked out again at the fog. “The hell with everything,” she added. She looked into the fog for another moment. “And especially,” she said, and described the fog again as she had before. There were certain words, Karen thought, that Marta used with a peculiar relish, as if she had invented them; one would think, Karen thought, that no one else had ever heard them.

  “It isn’t only here,” Karen said, and was mild and reasonable and would have liked to push beautiful Marta out the window, although an attic window would have been better. “It isn’t only here. It’s all up and down the coast. From Hatteras to—”

  “So what?” Marta demanded, and now turned. “So what the hell?” She looked at Karen now, as if she were seeing her. “Don’t be so damned sincere, for God’s sake,” she said. “What difference does it make where it is? It’s here. Look at those damned trees!” She raised her hands as if about to tear her hair, but did not touch its smooth, its ordered, blackness. “The country and fog!” she said.

  “Actually,” Karen said, still in the voice of reason, still being what Marta—meaning heaven knew what—called “sincere,” “actually it’s much thicker in New York, according to the radio. No planes, ferryboats getting lost, ships not docking.”

  “Thank you, Miss Mason,” Marta said, and did manage to sound a little like Kaltenborn’s announcer. Then she spoiled it. “Miss Mason is brought to you every weekday at this time by Luzzywuffy, the world’s leading doll food,” she said. “What difference does fog make in New York, for God’s sake? Cabs are running, aren’t they? There are places to go, aren’t there?”

  So she’s beautiful, Karen Mason thought. So she’s the daughter-in-law of the household and I work here. So she’s Scott’s wife. So—

  “I suppose it’s part of living in the East,” she said. “Something one—grows accustomed to. I keep forgetting. Of course there aren’t any fogs in—Kansas, isn’t it? Or Iowa?” She was not being so “sincere” now, not to Mrs. Scott Bromwell, of Fifty-second Street, Manhattan, not to this cream-smooth (when she wanted to be) darling. She saw Marta about to speak, and finished quickly. “I’m so stupid about accents,” she said. She was not being sincere now, in any definition of the word. She was not, she thought with pleasure, being particularly fair. Marta had a good ear; if once she had spoken with the accents of the Middle West, she had listened to herself and changed.

  Marta responded; Marta was furious; fury was in her black eyes, in the movement of her curving mouth, in the blood reddening under her exquisite skin.

  “Listen!” she said. “You little—” Then she stopped, turning toward a sound, looking down the quite tremendous, today dusky, room. Karen turned, too. Although Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell had arrived with well-bred quietness, her mere presence in a room, even so large a room as this, seemed to exercise a kind of compulsion.

  “Such a dreary day,” Mrs. Lucretia Bromwell said, in a clear, carrying voice. She advanced midway of the long room and stopped in front of the large fireplace, set in the dark panelled wall. “Really, Marta, the fire’s almost out,” she said, and what was in her voice was patience, not impatience.

  “It’s quite warm,” Marta Bromwell said.

  “Of course it is, dear,” Lucretia Bromwell said. “It is always warm at High Ridge.” She paused momentarily. “Except in summer,” she said. “So delightfully cool then. Nevertheless—an open fire, in January, on such a gloomy day.” She smiled slightly. She had a face rather long than wide; she had gray hair which was cut short and fluffed out around her head; she had remarkably dark eyes and heavy eyebrows which made almost straight lines above them and were not gray but dark brown. She wore a black broadcloth suit and a severe white blouse, the white of the french cuff showing at her wrists. “A symbol, my dear,” she explained, with almost nothing in her voice to suggest that she was explaining the obvious. “An accent of brightness.” She paused again. “In a dull world,” she added.

  “I should have seen to it,” Karen said. “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Bromwell merely smiled again and shook her head. Her smile for Karen did more to warm her face.

  “All right,” Marta said. “All right, mother Bromwell. I’ll—”

  But already Lucretia Bromwell, who had made her point, had moved toward the panelled wall and reached out and pressed a button in it. There was no sound in the big room, but almost instantly, as if the act of pressing a button had in itself materialized her, a maid came into the room and Mrs. Bromwell said, “The fire, Flora. Tell Charles.” The maid said, “Yes, Mrs. Bromwell,” and disappeared again and Mrs. Bromwell left the inadequate fire and crossed the room to the younger women by the window. She looked out at the fog and shook her gray head at it, chidingly. “Such a ridiculous winter,” she said. “Not at all what we’re accustomed to, is it Karen?” She smiled again at Karen. “Usually so much snow,” she said. “Isn’t there, dear?”

  “Last winter—” Marta Bromwell said, in her low, rich voice. But her mother-in-law did not wait for her to finish.

  “Not like this,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “No. But not a real New England winter, was it, Karen? More like the winters they have in the Middle West, I suppose. Iowa?”

  Marta smiled with great sweetness.

  “Nebraska, darling,” she said. “Don’t you remember? Scott stationed there? Meeting me there, at a party for service men. For ‘the boys’? In Omaha?”

  “All those other states,” Mrs. Bromwell said, tolerantly. “I’m afraid you find the fog trying, Marta. D’you know what I’d do in your place?”

  “Probably, darling,” Marta said. “But tell me. Go for a walk? Like Scott?”

  “So sensible of you to think of it, dear,” Mrs. Bromwell said, seeming not to conceal surprise. “A nice walk is so good for the nerves.” She looked at Marta. “And the figure too, of course,” she added.

  But Marta Bromwell, if she was being assailed, knew herself on that point to be unassailable, and her smile showed it. Mrs. Bromwell did not change the subject, but she changed her approach. Why, she asked, didn’t the three of them bundle up and—But she broke off and shook her head. It was selfish of her, but she did want the lists got off to Dr. Fomer at the rectory, and since Karen was going to New York that evening, she supposed …

  “You and I then, Marta,” she said, in a tone which indicated the matter settled.

  “Darling,” Marta said, “I’d love—” She broke off because a man came in carrying logs and busied himself at the fireplace. As if caught in a children’s game of living statues, the three women were immobilized and silenced by this phenomenon, although nothing in what they had been saying would have seemed too personal for a servant’s ears. After a moment, this fact apparently occurred to Marta and she went on, although Charles had not left the room.

  “I’d love to,” she said. “But what about Rudolph? He has to leave so soon. And we can’t be gone when he leaves, can we?”

  “I doubt,” Mrs. Bromwell said, “whether Mr. Haas will actually steal the silver.”

  “Really!” Marta said. She flushed slightly and a good deal of the throaty softness left her voice. “For God’s sake! If you think for one minute I—”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Bromwell,” Karen said. “Marta. I really must get at those lists.”

  “And I,” said Marta, instead of whatever she had been about to say, “want to talk to Scott. If he’s back.” She looked at the older woman and her black eyes showed nothing whatever; they were merely black eyes, without expression. “You’ll excuse both of us, won’t you?” she said to Mrs. Bromwell, and after a second added a single word, “darling.”

  Mrs. Bromwell said, “Of course, dear,” to Karen and merely looked at Marta. When she was alone, Lucretia Bromwell, who had been named for Lucretia Mott, also a resolute woman in her fashion, went to
the window and looked out of it at the fog. It had, she thought, been a mistake to make that remark about Mr. Haas. Even at seventy-six one could make quite elementary mistakes although, she was forced to admit, fewer in her case than in most. The fog, she thought, was growing heavier. Now one could scarcely make out the nearest trees. It was really, of course, no afternoon for a walk.

  It was then a few minutes after four on the afternoon of the last Monday in January and, although the sun would not set for an hour—if even the sun, in the fog which wrapped the eastern seaboard, could keep to its course—the grayness of the day was deepening. Mrs. Bromwell left the window and walked to the now brightly burning fire. She was a tall woman, substantially built, and she moved with remarkable vigor as she crossed the room. When she reached the fireplace, she stood for a moment looking into the fire and then rang again for the maid. “The lights please, Flora,” she said when the maid materialized. “It gets dark so early.”

  “The fog, ma’am,” Flora said, moving toward the nearest lamp. “Really, the days are getting longer. William wants to know, will you have cocktails here? And is Mr. Haas staying over?”

  “We will, Flora,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “Mr. Haas isn’t. Although he’ll be here for cocktails, I imagine.”

  “I thought he wasn’t,” Flora said, turning on another lamp. “He’s getting his things together. And shaving. I could hear the buzzing.” She paused with fingers on a lamp chain and looked at Mrs. Bromwell. “Shaving,” she repeated.

  “Mr. Haas’s professional activities begin in the evening,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “I presume his hours are necessarily—irregular.”

  “Yes’m,” Flora said, turning on the final lamp. “I heard he works nights. With a band.”

  It was a way of putting it, Mrs. Bromwell thought. No doubt Mr. Haas would have preferred a different phrasing.

  “I believe he conducts an orchestra,” she said. “Thank you, Flora.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Flora said, and de-materialized.

  Mrs. Bromwell stood by the fireplace for several minutes after the maid had left, and as she stood there she began to tap the floor nervously with the ball of her right foot, as if she, like her daughter-in-law, were finding the continuing fog trying to the nerves. Then she moved decisively away from the fireplace and out of the room. The door she used took her into an enormous central hall—everything was outsize at High Ridge—and from it she went up a broad flight of stairs. On the second floor, she went to her right down a long, and wide, corridor to a door near its end, reached toward the knob as if to enter and then, apparently thinking better of it, knocked on the door.

  “Marta?” she said, after a moment, and then did turn the knob. “I’m afraid I—” she said, going into the room and closing the door behind her.

  It subsequently appeared that Scott Bromwell went into the East Room of High Ridge, which to the police seemed to have almost as many rooms as the White House, shortly after his mother left it. As to this, not having encountered her—he had gone into the East Room from the library, behind it—Scott could not be sure, since he found only an empty room with a fire burning brightly and all of the lamps on. He looked around the room and then, drawn by the same unhappy attraction as had drawn his wife, his mother and his mother’s secretary, he went to one of the tall windows which, even on bright days, so inadequately provided the room with light, and looked out it at the fog. Looking at it, he shivered in the warm room. He tapped his fingers nervously against one of the muntins. He was standing there when Rudolph Haas entered, but turned away from the window quickly when he heard the other man.

  “All packed?” Scott Bromwell said. There was a certain sharpness, almost as of impatience, in his voice. Yet a smile appeared nervously on his face, which was long like his mother’s; which seemed, because of its thinness, to be longer than it was. He had his mother’s straight brows, and something of her nose, which had been called, by someone, commanding. Now and then his left eyelid seemed to flutter, in a movement which was not quite a tic. There was no tranquility in his face, and there was a great deal of intelligence. He was tall and rather noticeably lean; his hair, which apparently once had been dark, was almost completely gray. In spite of that he looked to be in his early thirties, as he was.

  Rudolph Haas was tall, too, but he was neither lean nor fat, nor did his face show now the nervous mobility of Scott Bromwell’s. He was tanned, in spite of the season; he had very clear brown eyes, set well apart, and thick, obedient black hair, in which the marks left by a comb’s teeth still were visible. He was assured in Mrs. Bromwell’s East Room, even when Mrs. Bromwell was in it, a conjunction of circumstances which brought uneasiness to not a few. But he looked, and the reason for this was obscure (except perhaps that he was rather noticeably well groomed) as if he would be even more at home, if not more assured, in a hotel suite. He smiled pleasantly at Scott Bromwell now and said, “All packed,” in a light, pleasantly modulated voice.

  “And,” he said, “I’d better be pushing off before too long.” He went, in his turn, to one of the windows and looked out of it. He turned back and said that it seemed to be getting no better.

  “You’ll make it,” Scott Bromwell told him, shortly. “Guide on the center line after dark.”

  Haas shrugged slightly and smiled even more slightly and said “Thanks.”

  Scott Bromwell looked at Haas and the left eyelid flickered.

  “For everything?” he asked.

  Haas seemed to find less significance in the question than Scott Bromwell’s tone implied.

  “But of course,” Rudolph Haas said. “It’s been—”

  “You know what I mean,” Bromwell said. The eyelid flickered again. Haas looked full at the other man, taking time to look at him. He spoke, then, slowly.

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “If you mean more than you say. It was very kind of you and Mrs. Bromwell, and your mother, to have me. Did you mean something else?” He spoke evenly, as if there were importance in his words.

  “I—” Scott began, and interrupted himself and said, “Skip it, shall we?”

  “By all means,” Haas said. “If there’s something to skip.”

  Scott Bromwell laughed, and seemed to surprise himself.

  “You’re quite a character, Mr. Haas,” he said. He smiled, but with no amusement and no warmth. “I’ve nothing against you. I think you’re out of luck,”

  “Do you?” Haas said, without curiosity, without inviting an answer.

  “Skip it,” Scott said again, and then Marta opened the door from the central hall and came into the room. She said, “Rudolph!” and then, “Oh—hello, Scott.” She smiled at both men and turned to Haas.

  “How’s to give a girl a lift?” she asked. “Out of the fog that covers her?”

  Both men looked at her, Haas pointedly at the lightweight wool dress, which had been cut adeptly and with intention.

  “A very becoming fog, my dear,” he assured her. “Of course, if you—”

  “I think, darling, it would be unwise,” Scott Bromwell said. “Quite unwise. I’d wait until morning.” He paused. “At least,” he added.

  She hesitated only a moment and then said, “Of course, Scott.” She smiled at Haas and just perceptibly shrugged. “The master,” she said. “Dear Scott.” Then, to Haas, “A drink before you go, anyway?” Haas would, he told her, be delighted to have a drink.

  “Shouldn’t they get his car out, Scott?” Marta said then, and appeared to wait.

  Scott said “of course,” again with the unamused smile, and went across the room to press the button by the fireplace. A butler materialized this time, instead of Flora. “Drinks, William,” Scott said. “And have them run Mr. Haas’s car out.” William bowed slightly, made an appreciative sound, and went away. He returned almost at once wheeling a portable bar. “Haas?” Scott said, moving toward the bar. “Marta?”

  They both wanted martinis. Scott dropped ice into the liquid already in the mixer, stirred, pou
red, twisted lemon peel. He poured himself a good deal of scotch and added a little soda. He passed the drinks, kept his own, lifted it slightly toward the others—lifted it with a certain irony—and drank.

  The three were still standing when the door from the central hall again opened. A small girl galloped through it like a black-maned pony, said, “Hi!” with exuberance and then, abruptly, stopped galloping. She looked up at Rudolph Haas.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you’d gone.”

  “Elspeth!” Marta Bromwell said.

  “You told me,” Elspeth said. “Daddy, didn’t she tell me?”

  “Come here, baby,” Scott said, put his glass on a table and squatted to her level. Elspeth came. She circled his neck with active arms. She said, “Daddy, she did tell me.” She turned, without leaving her father’s arms. “Mother, you did tell me,” she said.

  “Really, Scott,” Marta Bromwell said.

  “You’re being rude, Pethy,” Scott said, gravely. “You’ll make Mr. Haas think you want him to go.”

  Elspeth Bromwell said, “Oh,” and seemed about to go on.

  “And of course you don’t,” Scott Bromwell said, firmly, as if he were talking to someone his own age. “Do you?”

  “No-o-o,” Elspeth said, with no conviction. Her father shook his head at her. She turned toward Haas.

  “I don’t care if you’re still here, Mr. Haas,” Elspeth said. But then she added, “Grandma’s got such a big house.”

  Haas laughed and, after a moment, Marta joined him. But by that time Laurence Bromwell, who was called “Lorry” by everyone, and who was five years old, and as fair as Elspeth was dark, was warm-skinned, had come into the room, less rapidly than his sister. Lorry looked thoughtfully at everyone and then, slowly, smiled. He said, “ ’Lo,” and evidently had, for the moment, no further comment.

  Lucretia Bromwell and Karen Mason came in after Lorry and, behind them, a slim young woman in a gray dress with white collar and white cuffs. She stopped just inside the door while Mrs. Bromwell and Karen joined the others. Scott released his daughter, who went off, again at a gallop, to the fireplace and, with rather startling abruptness, lay down in front of it on her belly.