The Mulberry Bush (3 page)

Virginia Warfield married Michael Paull on the last day of September.

It was all sudden, all breathless; there was no wedding at Teresa's apartment, no champagne, no cake.

Afterward, lying awake nights through that strange autumn, she tried to set in order the events of that week, to wonder how it had happened, and sometimes, why?

She had married Mike in New York, at a quiet little church, where pigeons sat outside on the windowsills, and slanting beams of orange and blue light burned through stained glass, touching the ancient brown pews, the crimson carpet, the gold cross on the dim altar.

Before that, for days, Mike had given her no peace, no time to think things through. He was at her door early in the morning. When she came down to the street after a busy day in the office, there he was, waiting. She had to put him out often at midnight. Discovering that he was in love, Mike had put everything else out of his mind. And with the same reckless singleness of purpose with which he pursued all his impulses, he laid siege to Virginia.

His face thinned and his eyes grew haggard. Virginia fed him when he came, quite certain that he forgot food except when she made him eat. He ordered elaborate dinners for her and let his own portion stiffen ignored on his plate, while he leaned across the table to plead with her.

“Mike, I can't! It wouldn't work. If you'd listen to me—”

“Ginny, darling, I don't want to listen. Ginny, if you cared the way I care—”

“I—think I do care, Mike. But I can see clearly for all that. I can see what it would do—to both of us.”

“And what would it do—beside making us the two happiest people in the world? Ginny, I can't work. I'm going to ruin. I'm a wreck because I can think of nothing but you. I don't give a hoot if all the mad nations of the world slit each other's throats. I don't care how many women and children get bombed. History is making all around me and I'm blind as a mummy. I haven't written a line this week.”

“Then marrying me, obviously, would be about the worst thing that could happen to you.”

“Marrying you would make a man of me. Now I'm only half alive. A piece of a thing with a brain and hands and ears, but no heart. You've taken the heart out of me—it's yours forever. If you marry me—we won't be Mike Paull and Virginia Warfield—we'll be us. One heart and one dream. I'll be complete then. Not half a person and a poor half at that. You do love me, Ginny—why don't you break down and admit it?”

“Yes, I do love you, Mike. It's mad and crazy and there's no logic in it—I know it's dangerous—I've fought it—and you make it so hard for me to fight!”

“Well, then—”

“No, Mike. No—I'm right, and you know it.”

“You're wrong as the devil, and we both know it!”

So it went, on and on.

“Why don't you send that idiot of a traveling newspaperman about his business?” demanded Teresa. “I've seen him hanging around. He's keeping you all upset, and with all this work coming on—all the contracts to be closed for next year's business and the fall tours, you need your head. You let me get rid of Mike Paull. I'll send him back to Siam or somewhere in short order.”

“It isn't Mike altogether, Teresa. I'm so mixed up in my mind.”

“Mike Paull's at the bottom of it, and I've known that young lunatic longer than you have. Mike wants what he wants—for himself. He's not thinking of you—except as something that he wants. He never thinks of anyone but Mike Paull.”

“Mike isn't as bad as that, Teresa.”

“I know how bad Mike is. Oh, not wicked—I don't mean that, exactly. Probably he's decent and fairly honest—as far as newspapermen go—but he's completely mad. No more to be depended upon than the wind. If he gets an idea, he chases it till he tires—or another one comes along. So the quicker you tell him to get the hell out of your life, the better for you.”

In the end it was Teresa's hostility to Mike that decided Virginia. In defending him to Teresa, she had found herself defending him also to herself. Taking Mike's side, conceding his gentleness, his devotion, and admitting, too, that there was a warming thrill in knowing that Michael Paull, who was already an international figure at twenty-nine, loved her—Virginia Warfield, a pale girl from Tennessee, who had a job and a few friends but little else, besides bright hair and a deep loyalty toward the people whom she loved.

And then had come the night of storm, of wild rain and violent wind, following an afternoon of sullen, menacing, unseasonable heat, when the air pressed close and the sun went down in sulphurous smolder.

Virginia had taken the bus back to her apartment, and from the bus stop to her door she went at a run, but the rain caught her and drenched her to the skin.

She climbed the two flights of stairs, dripping, shaking wetness from her new hat ruefully, the coloring of her purse staining her wrist and her glove, her shoes leaving damp prints on the stairs. Outside, the storm shook the old house, and darkness descended like a hot blanket, so that she groped along the unlit hallway to her door. And when she opened it, there was light, and music from the radio, and a delicious smell of coffee—and Mike.

He came out of the kitchenette, grinning at her, one of her rubber aprons over his clean shirt, his cuffs turned back.

“Gee gosh, Ginny—get those wet things off, quick!”

“How on earth,” demanded Virginia angrily, “did you get in?”

“No trouble.” He laid two knives and two forks out on the card table. “These old locks—open 'em with a bottle opener. That's what I did. Change your clothes before you take cold. Why didn't you take a taxi?”

“The rain began just as I left the bus. Mike—can't you see that you mustn't do things like this? What will the people in the house think? They'll think I gave you a key.”

“Didn't see a soul. Nobody saw me come in. Stop paging Emily Post and Mrs. Grundy, Ginny, and get those wet shoes off. We have steaks and mushrooms and mock turtle soup. You should have seen me carrying up groceries like a well-tamed husband.”

“Oh, Mike—what am I going to do with you?”

“I could answer that, but it would be the same old answer. Hurry up—I'm putting the steaks to broil.”

She shut herself in the bathroom and sank on the edge of the tub, leaning her forehead on the cold porcelain of the washbowl. Her brain was throbbing, her heart hurt to agony. She did love Mike. If she sent him away, she knew her heart would go, aching, after. That only a shell of her would be left—a brittle, wooden thing that would go on hollowly, saying, “Yes, Teresa. No, Teresa”; go on folding circulars and addressing envelopes and writing alluring sales letters to Oklahoma oil people and the deans of girls' schools, go on being bereft and dead forever and ever!

Mike shouted, “Hey, there—get a move on!” and she got up stiffly and shed her sodden garments and hung them on the shower rod to dry. Then she scrubbed her chilled flesh with a towel, put on some boyish pajamas of yellow silk and a green-flannel robe and slippers—and opened the door.

And there stood Mike. Without the absurd apron, with his coat on and his hair brushed back.

He opened his arms and in a choked, shaken voice, said, “Oh, Ginny! Oh, Ginny!”

Blindly, heedlessly, knowing that this was madness, this was sweet danger, and not caring at all, Virginia went into his arms.

After an interval that never came quite clear in Virginia's mind later, they ate the steaks, and the soup that had simmered until there was only a scant bowlful left, drank the coffee and looked at each other with eyes that were still a little dazed. And then Mike, gathering Virginia up in his arms, rocking her in a big chair with her head tucked down against the hard feel of his collarbone, told her his news.

“I have to go to South America, Ginny. Bill telephoned this morning—Bill Foster, my boss—syndicate manager. I'll have to go. And I can't take you with me. But I'll have three days in New York and I can take you there. Three days, Ginny darling—a three-day honeymoon!”

“But Mike—South America! You'll be gone—how long?”

“Only God and Bill Foster know—and I'm not sure that Bill knows. But the minute I'm free I won't wait for a boat—I'll come flying back to you.”

The minute he was free! Mike, who had always been free. Who was holding tight to his freedom now—she shut her heart grimly against the sour, stern pessimism of common sense.

She packed a bag and wrote a note to Teresa—a vague sort of note telling Teresa that some family matters had called her away for a few days. She could not bring herself to tell Teresa the truth. She had to come back and face Teresa's eyes and hear her carping voice. And after all, marrying Mike
was
a family affair—so she had told the truth. Mike would be her family—legally and forever she would belong to Mike, And no one, not even Teresa, not even Bill Foster, could undo it.

So she married Mike in the little church, with the first thin sun of morning coming in through the windows, jeweling the minister's vestments and the benign pinkness of his bald head, the ribald mosaics of red and blue, and the pigeons teetering and curtsying on the windowsill, and an anxious little acolyte in a red cassock lighting two candles for them. Two candles burning bright! One for her and one for Mike.

Every hour of those precious three days, she told herself, “I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry.” This Mike she had married was a man that neither Teresa, nor Bill Foster, nor any of the sophisticated crew Mike knew, would have recognized at all. This was a gallant, tender and understanding lover—a Mike who was all her own.

Somehow, cannily, Mike kept the report of their marriage out of the papers.

“If that mob I know up here ever found out about it—good night!” he said. “We'd be hauled around to cocktail parties and photographed and have gags pulled on us—we don't want any other people, do we, Ginny? I want you and you want me—and that's enough for us.”

He took her to quiet places for dinner, avoiding name bands and floorshows—all the café haunts of the other writers. They walked till they were weary and shopped in big stores for the lovely, useless things that caught Virginia's eye, and for clothes that dazzled her. If she so much as admired a thing in a window, Mike was on his way inside instantly.

“Try it on. Like it, Ginny? All right—send it.”

Mr. and Mrs. M. C. Paull. Mike's middle name, she learned, was Cato.

“Irish, Roman, and Dutch. That's goulash for you. My mother was Irish, bless her bright eyes. She left me her imagination and that dramatic, emotional thing they get from their wild, mystic air. And my father was a Dutch shipbuilder's son, born in Hoboken. He's living somewhere around there—we'll look him up some time.”

“Mike—you don't know where your own father lives? Mike, that's dreadful.”

“Oh, he gets along. He's a substantial old chap. Getting old now, too. He was middle-aged when I was born. We agree perfectly—he never worries about me and I never worry about him. He married again, ten years ago.”

“My father married again, too, but I adore my stepmother. We've kept very close—even though I've been away seven years. I ought to write—”

“After I'm gone you'll have time.”

After Mike was gone—and he could speak of it so casually! All that last day she tried not to let him see. Fought to be calm and gay-hearted, too. As though three thousand miles or more of land and water and empty air were nothing at all—only a little space, only a little time.

All that day it was like dying a little, inch-by-inch, hour-by-hour. The strain of it was in Mike's face, too, and Virginia seeing it, comforted herself in her own desolation with fierce gladness. Mike was suffering, too.

They did not talk very much. They went about woodenly, eating meals, packing Mike's bags, putting a new ribbon in the typewriter and extra ones in the grip, putting in quinine for malaria, and flea powder, and a spray for Mike's sensitive throat.

But whenever they came near to each other, Mike's arms would open, and Virginia would creep into them, and they would cling together silently. And if Mike looked over her shoulder and saw far places and the old excitement touched him, at least she did not know.

She said, “Mike—I'm not going to tell Teresa that we are married—not yet. I'm not going to tell anyone—not even my family. Not till you come back. My father's a country doctor—he's old-fashioned—he'd think this way we are going to have to live for a while was outrageous. Let's not tell till we can begin living—like people—it will make things easier—for me!”

Mike frowned into the distance. He seemed about to begin an argument—and then to think better of it, and his face brightened.

He said, “Well, after all—we know we're married. Who else matters, really? Nobody!”

“Don't forget, then—when you write to me—after all, a lot of married women keep their own names when they're in business.”

“It won't be much fun—addressing letters to Miss Virginia Warfield. But I'll try to remember.”

“Oh, but it will be fun—because you'll know what a joke we have on everyone.”

“About money now—you are my wife, aren't you?”

“I hope I am. If I'm not—well, this is pretty awful.”

“Okay—that's settled then. Here—” he took out a thick roll of bills, snapped a rubber band around them. “I never could figure out what to do with money. Now I know. I'll earn a million for you, Ginny. I'll write my book—take a crack at the radio maybe—this is swell! Now I've got something to work for.”

“Mike—I can't take all this!”

“Why can't you? Did I hear that Reverend chap say something about worldly goods, or didn't I? Well, there's my worldly goods—and I hereby thee endow. Stick it in a bank or something. It rains darned easy in this climate.” He laid the money in her hands, closed her fingers tight over it, and then kissed her taut knuckles. “But for gosh sakes, don't get held up,” he warned. “Ugly women have been tossed off bridges for less than you've got in that wad—and I'd hate to think what could happen to a pretty one.”