The Black Angel (23 page)

I prudently let the entire matter lapse after that. It was the better part of valor. The elastically temporary sojourn became a permanent stay.

I changed from the hotel room, which I had used as a springboard for meeting him, to a little one-room studio place over on Fifty-third, just east of Second Avenue. He'd helped me to find it, since I was supposedly still a little green in New York. There was not only the matter of expense, which was as actual a consideration to me on the real plane of my existence as on the camouflaged, two-dimensional one in which I presented myself to him, but my former surroundings had outlived their usefulness. I felt we were now at, or soon to approach, a stage, he and I, in which I needed more privacy, more seclusion, to work effectively.

He accompanied me there the day I moved in. In fact, took me in his car.

I said to myself, “It is only right that he should be on hand from the very first day, the very first minute that this room begins. For the day
he
ends the room ends with him. It is of him and for him and because of him; it is through him alone that it has any reality. Without him it isn't there at all.”

Little room on Fifty-third Street that I expected to forget so soon.

I wasn't expecting it.

I could feel his eyes on me, studying me from close range, and finally I chose to become aware, said: “What are you looking at me for like that?”

“I'm trying to think what to call you.”

“Isn't it a little late for that?”

“There's something about Alberta; it's too stiff; it doesn't ride easily on the tongue. Do you remember the night we first met? I told you I'd give that up after a week, and it's long past that now. I have to find some name for you. Some name of my own. Stand up and let me look at you. I'll see if I can get one.” He held me poised before him, his hands to my sides.

His eyes went deep, went lonesome. I saw that and I tried to keep it light. “This is the oddest christening. I'm a little old and tall, aren't I? I should be held in someone's arms and have on a long trailing nightgown-dress. Who's there to sprinkle the water on my head?”

“Don't,” he said. Just that one word. With a haunted severity.

I shut up and looked away, waiting for it to blow over by itself.

“Turn your head this way again, toward the lamp, so that the light falls softly on your face from the other side.”

His breath caught.

“That soft light, what it does to you. You look like an——”

He rose slowly to his own feet before me, his hands still to my sides.

I smiled a little, waiting.

“I've found one for you,” he breathed. “You've got the face of an angel. I'm going to call you Angel Face. Angel Face I'm going to call you.”

I wrenched myself away so suddenly, in such momentarily maddened pain, his hands were left there stretched out, empty, measuring off the space where I had been. And I was all the way across the room, not just a step away, a yard away, but all the far way across, as though he'd taken a knife to me and probed right there where my heart was.

I saw his lips moving and I couldn't hear what he said. I didn't want to, anyway.

He came over to me then, took my hands and drew them down from over my ears, where they'd been pressed in fierce closure.

“What have I done to frighten you?” he said. “Why are you covering your ears like that? Look, you're white—your eyes are so big——”

“Don't ever call me that name,” I said shakily. “Don't even say it over a second time now to remind yourself what it was. Don't use it again, Ladd, or I'll—you'll never see me again. Call me any other name, anything you want. Anything but that.”

“There was someone else once, is that it?”

He made his peace with my past.

“There would have had to be, with a face such as you've got. You weren't born yesterday.”

I leaned against him and closed my eyes against his shoulder and saw a face before me that he didn't know was there.

Then later, of course, I was immeasurably glad I'd gone. But at the time I didn't dream it would profit me anything. Everything comes so by chance, so haphazardly, even in the best-laid schemes.
He
was the one I was interested in, not his background, his mother and sister, or whoever it was, as the case might be.

In addition, I was convinced there was the usual situation lurking behind it:
he
wanted me to be there; he was pulling the strings to force a sort of grudging affability out of them, considerably against their own inclinations, and in short was forcing me down their throats.

It was his sister's birthday.

The invitation, of course, I had disregarded as being something he'd been responsible for himself, even though she put an inked personal message on it in addition. “Do come, so anxious to meet you, have heard so much about you from L.”

I tried all the stalls I knew to get out of it.

“I don't belong there.”

“You don't belong there! You're my Alberta; you belong wherever I am. What are we, the landed aristocracy or something?”

“No, but I mean I'll have no mutual interests with anyone that's there.”

“Fine, because you wouldn't have a chance to exchange them if you did! You're going to be with me all evening; no one else is going to get near you. I'm just looking out for myself in this, you see. I
have
to be there. Don't you want me to enjoy my own sister's party?”

Finally I even fell back on the most moth-eaten excuse of all.

“I have nothing to wear.”

“You've been going around with me pretty steadily, and you've never been arrested yet for indecent exposure.”

Then when the dress had come and I'd sent it back, the next time I saw him I said: “Don't ever do that again, young man, or when the night of the party does come you'll show up carrying your arm in a sling!”

He only laughed. “I could have sworn it wouldn't work. I told them so at Carnegie's when I picked it out.”

“I hope you laid side bets on it,” I said maliciously.

And even when she called me herself on the phone, just before the affair, I still said to myself knowingly:
“He
put her up to it.”

“This is Leila Mason. Now, you're not going to be mean to me, are you? I've been trying so hard to get Ladd to bring you. And—well, there's no telling with Ladd; he can be very selfish about his friends. Come. As a special favor to me, won't you?”

After I'd hung up I wasn't so sure. It didn't seem to me that any amount of browbeating could have extorted that much from a sister if she were congenitally unwilling. She must want me herself. And I wondered why.

I went.

It was about what I'd expected it to be. But for the number of rooms that you kept encountering if you were foolish enough to keep progressing, and an occasional crystal chandelier like an inverted wedding cake, it was any party in anyone's home above the twenty-five-thousand-a-year bracket.

There
was
a mother, but counter to all my expectations, which had run toward a domineering, bejeweled dowager, she was a shadowy, wispy little nonentity, fragile-looking as Dresden china, who weighed about ninety pounds, talked with fluttering wrists à la Zasu Pitts, and seemed to have the status of a pet Persian kitten in the household. Even the guests, I noticed, would give her a sort of pat in passing, so to speak, and then go on to somebody of more consequence.

It was the sister who counted. She was a tall, lovely girl. She was Ladd all over. She had all his charm of the individual and then some additional little facets of her own as the due of her sex. She greeted me with her two hands clasped to my one.

“Well, you did! You never can get together with anyone you really want to at this sort of thing, but at least it helps to break the ice. Now remember, no matter what happens, if the very building burns down around us, we're going to get in at least
one
heart-to-heart talk before it's over, even if we've got to wait all night. Ladd, make her stay.”

“I'll make her.”

She rushed off again, pointing her finger at me commandingly. “Remember, we have a date.”

“She's charming,” I said to him.

“She'll do,” he answered with typical brotherly luke-warmness.

It was Ladd, Ladd, Ladd all evening. He was almost grotesque about it, the way he kept me to himself. We danced a little in one oversized gallery where they had four or five players working at instruments, sipped an occasional champagne cup, roamed around a little. He showed me some of the rooms.

“How many are there, anyway?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said half contemptuously. “I just sleep in one of those nearest the door and go in and out a lot.”

I laughed.

And as I say, none of it amounted to anything. I had no hopes of or for anything; I was just killing time there, so I let the evening drift by.

Around half-past twelve they started to thin out, and in another half-hour the backgrounds were once more clearly visible in all the rooms. I'd quite forgotten about her; I thought it had just been lip courtesy. He looked at his watch, said we'd done our duty, and he suggested that I get myself together and we'd go for a drive in the open air before he took me home.

He only released me from his protective custody now, at the very end, because I was going into a room where other men were hardly likely to follow me, I adduced. And at any rate, I sat there for a few moments in a preserve still piled fairly high with mink and brocade wraps and fooled around with my face a little.

I don't know whether she'd had her weather eye out and had seen me go in or had happened to look around after I was gone and had missed me; anyway, within a moment or two she came dashing in after me.

She swooped past without stopping, caught me by the hand as she did so. “Come on,” she said. “This won't do. I have a special place for us.” She took me into some little private sitting room of her own—it hadn't been open to the party—and rang for someone.

“We'll have a glass of champagne in here by ourselves,” she said. “All right with you? I haven't had a chance to get down to the bottom of one all evening.”

I said it was all right with me and meant it.

She was, now that I looked at her more closely, fully as lovely as she had seemed to be outside in the crowd, and that wasn't a test that I'd been at all sure she would pass. It was a loveliness of mind as well as appearance. She was cultured, but not in a cold, bookish way. Switzerland, Paris, the usual background, I suppose. But it wasn't just a veneer, as with so many of her kind. She had absorbed it. Young as she was, she was mellow with it. She was well baked, golden brown with civilization.

She poured for us when they'd left the champagne and then brought out the cigarettes. Then she sat down and loosed the bands of her backless sandals. I made some complimentary remark about a diamond bowknot she was wearing, just to do my share at starting us off together, and she said it was Ladd's gift.

And then it happened. And this is how it happened.

We were looking around for a light, and neither one of us had one.

“I should have asked him just now——” she said and went over and opened a drawer.

I sat waiting.

“There's usually a lighter on this table of mine, but somebody seems to have removed it,” she said. She closed the first drawer and opened a second. “I'll go out and get some,” she said. Then suddenly she said, “Oh, never mind, here's an old book of them left over in here.”

She came back and settled herself beside me once more and lit the cigarettes for us.

I lost track of the opening part of the conversation. I suppose it was girly-girly stuff, anyway. I kept looking at it where she was holding it absently in her hand.

It was blue and it had that single
M
on it. It was a duplicate to the one I'd taken from behind the door seam at Mia Mercer's apartment.

I pretended my cigarette had gone out. I said, “May I?” and took them from her. I struck one, but what I was really doing was looking at it hard at closer range.

It was the same, the same folder I'd sat comparing on the bed in the furnished room that night they'd brought me back Kirk's clothes.

I said offhandedly, “Are these yours?”

“Ladd's, really. I made him a gift of a tremendous bale of them one Christmas. Silly sort of gift, wasn't it? But if I remember correctly, I think I did it because I'd used up all my own Christmas funds by the time I got around to him, so I simply put in the order with Father's tobacconist and charged it to his tobacco account. He never did really use them much, and since then they've been sprouting up all over the house. I don't think we'll ever get to the end of them.”

I kept them in my own hand from this point on. Absently, as she had. They were going out of here with me when I left tonight.

Success had a curious pewter lackluster to it; it wasn't bright at all.

She'd become serious suddenly. About Ladd and me, evidently, though I'd missed the original point of transposition. “You don't know what you mean to him,” she was saying. “Oh, my dear, I don't know how you feel about him, and it's not my place to ask you——” She stopped a minute, then went on: “He can't tell you this. I'll have to. Don't let him become too set on you. You mustn't. For your own sake. There are reasons why—why things with Ladd should never go beyond a certain point.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. It wasn't the usual stuff. Are you good enough for him? Will you do? She was trying to warn
me
against
him
. I could sense it. It radiated from her. There was no mistaking it.

Suddenly he stood there looking in the doorway at us. He didn't look pleased. “What've you been saying to Alberta?” He sounded a little crisp about it, I thought. Even taut. “Anything I shouldn't hear? You wouldn't go deep on me now, would you, Leila?”