The Moth

  “We’ll do our best.”

  “I think he rates a bonus.”

  “Just that—a bonus?”

  “Well?”

  “He does—but say it bigger.”

  “You mean real money?”

  “We’d better.”

  “Jack, I’d say the main thing is: To keep building Seven-Star, so as it grows, his prospects grow and he has an incentive!”

  “Yeah, but money talks.”

  I guess it was two or three months after that, when Denny had been with us nearly a year, that she came up to me at the refinery, where I’d gone to talk with Rohrer about putting a new unit in. I was standing at one of the stills when she came down the concrete stairs, said she wanted to see me, and went off in the direction of the office. I went over there. I was no sooner in the room than she piled in: “Jack, why didn’t you tell me Mrs. Deets was here.”

  “Denny’s wife?”

  “She’s been here a week.”

  “I didn’t know it.”

  “He didn’t mention it to you?”

  “Not a word.”

  “You didn’t notice he’d moved from the Castile?”

  “He hasn’t. When I stopped by the desk this morning the girl was still taking his messages. She’d never be doing that if he’d left there. She’d say he’d checked out. I was in the hotel business once. I know.”

  “He’s paid up till the end of the month.”

  “Then he hasn’t moved.”

  “Doesn’t this all strike you as very peculiar?”

  “It’s his business. And his wife.”

  “Couldn’t you have made it your business? A little?”

  “I like to be friendly, I like to do things for people, I like to help a guy get settled, I like to welcome a girl to a strange place, and maybe have some flowers waiting for her when she sees her new living room for the first time. But I’m no goddam mind reader.”

  “You can hardly blame him, though.”

  “For what?”

  “For keeping it quiet. After the queer way you’ve acted.”

  “I? About what?”

  “His wife, Jack. Stop cracking dumb!”

  “I’ve never said one word to him about his wife.”

  “Well, good God! Isn’t that acting just about as queer as they come—or am I crazy? After all, you knew he was married, he’s mentioned a hundred times he was married, he talks about writing his wife, and you’ve never said a word to him about her. Is that how things are done? Is that so nice and friendly?”

  “His wife is from Baltimore. Or so I suppose.”

  “So what?”

  “I don’t want to hear about Baltimore.”

  “Jack, I’m not crazy.”

  “O.K., so I am.”

  She lit a cigarette, snapped the ashes at the ash tray four or five times, and began charging up and down like some kind of a leopard. I tried to talk. “Yeah, he mentioned about his wife, or tried to. He’s tried to mention about a good many things, including my family. I’ve cut him off. I’ve tried to make it plain to him I don’t want any news from home, and I’ve got my reasons. I never hid anything from you, particularly, and if you want to know what my reasons are, I guess I can tell you, but I’d prefer not to. I had a row. With my father. So I blew. I beat it out of there, but what I want to hear about him, or Baltimore, or any of it, is nothing. I’ve encouraged him strictly to keep his mouth shut about anything personal, and he’s done it.”

  “But Jack—I was never so embarrassed in my life as when I blew into his office just now, over there at the Jergins Trust Building, just to say hello and ask how things were going, and he was standing there talking with this girl, and come to find out it was his wife, and she’d been here a week, and they’ve gone and taken a place on Willow Avenue, and I hadn’t even been around to see if there was something I could do. Good God, Jack—is that making him like us? Is that saying bonus in a big loud tone of voice?”

  “I tell you I couldn’t guess it.”

  “Yes, but that’s the whole point. When I actually did get him off by himself for a minute, and put it up to him what was the big idea, I couldn’t even get him to talk then. He said you’ve acted so queer about the whole thing he supposed you’d prefer he said nothing about it, and so they did it this way. Jack, what are you hiding?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There must be something.”

  “There is absolutely nothing, except what I’ve told you.”

  “Look at me, Jack.”

  “Listen, if you’ve got a shut-off valve, close it.”

  “O.K., but they’re coming to dinner.”

  “So all right, count me out.”

  “No!”

  “Then count me in.”

  “Jack, they’re due at seven. I want you there at a quarter of, shined up and pretty, and I want you to take over the champagne, and see that she—”

  “Suppose she likes gin?”

  “Champagne!”

  “All right, but stop yelling.”

  26

  THE HOUSE IN BEVERLY had a big entrance hall, with stairs rising out of the far end, a living room the size of Grand Central off on the left, and a little sitting room, with a table I used for a bar, off to the right. I didn’t see the dinner rated all the whoopdedo that Hannah gave it, but I checked everything I needed, the whisky, brandy, and gin, for whatever cocktails they might want, with the cherries, olives, lemon peel, and orange on little saucers, and the champagne she doted on, well chilled. Irene, who had been brought up from Long Beach, came in with a tray of canapés, and right on the dot of seven the bell rang and she went out to answer. But Hannah was coming down the stairs, and said she’d go. I took out the champagne and began twisting off the wire. Denny came in, and I said the nicest welcome for anybody was champagne with the cork popping out of the bottle just as they came in the door. He seemed to like the idea, and I said why the hell hadn’t he let somebody know he had a new arrival coming. He said getting settled first seemed the simplest way, so that was how they did it. I noticed how well he looked in his dinner coat. Like everybody else that comes to California he’d gone in for the salad-and-citrus diet, and it had slimmed him down, and for the sunshine, so he’d picked up color. Then I heard voices, and nudged the cork with my thumb and shook the bottle a little, so I could pop it when ready. Then I turned to the door so I could see the grand effect. Well, it popped all right, and it must have been a grand effect too, because I stood there with the champagne slopping all over the rug and up my sleeve, till Denny grabbed it and turned it into the ice bucket to get it still enough to pour—and still I stood there, with my mouth hanging open and my feet rooted to the floor. Who came through the door was Margaret.

  After a while, when I got so I could speak and had the champagne wiped off my fingers, I shook hands and reached for whatever I had in the way of gags, while Hannah looked at me in a queer sort of way from the door. Then at last I got a glass in everybody’s hand and we said here’s how, and I looked Margaret over. She had on a dark-green velvet dress, gold shoes, and a gold fillet around her hair, and looked better than I had ever seen her. She was a little older than I, but I think anybody would have said she was ten years younger. Hannah had on her usual gold lame, but she seemed to like Margaret all right, specially as Margaret smelled like money, and if there was one thing Hannah went for it was that. So after five or ten minutes we settled down and things eased. So then I said: “Well, for God’s sake, when did this happen?”

  “Oh—couple of years ago.”

  She looked at Denny, but he was looking at me. “Jack, goddam it, what are you trying to hand me? Do you mean to say you didn’t know it?”

  “Until now, I hadn’t the least idea of it.”

  “But the papers carried yards about it.”

  “I haven’t seen a Baltimore paper in eight years.”

  “And from all I had to say about the Leggs, and Margaret, and everything you never guessed it? You didn’t tu
mble at all?”

  I wanted to say if I’d had the slightest suspicion of it he’d never have been sent for, but all I said was no.

  Hannah said: “Well, I do wish you’d catch me up on things.

  Mrs. Deets, you and Jack seem to have known each other—was it something, shall we say, serious?”

  “Oh, heavens no. We all grew up together, that’s all.”

  At least it cleared the air, so we could talk. But there was none of that remember-the-time-when that people generally have if they’re holding a reunion, which told me Denny knew everything, and didn’t want to talk about it any more than I did. But that easy feeling, once we had it, began to get a little too easy, anyway on Margaret’s end. I mean, Hannah began asking about her family, and Margaret told about her father and mother and “little sister,” and said she was doing everything she could to get them to come out here, as she knew the California climate would do wonders for them, especially her father, who hadn’t been well, and pretty soon her family, and how comfortable they would be in Santa Monica, and stuff like that, seemed to be all she knew to talk about. After dinner I saw Hannah hide a yawn, and fact of the matter it was getting pretty dull. It was dull because you could see that Margaret and Denny were nuts about each other, and I guess that’s about the dullest thing in the world to be around, a happy couple.

  Pretty soon Margaret said: “Jack, do you ever sing any more?”

  “Not to people I like.”

  “He was a boy soprano, Mrs. Branch.”

  “Oh, and you heard him?”

  “Heard him? I used to play for him.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh, we were in vaudeville together, me with a white dress with a blue sash, Jack in a Buster Brown collar and flowing black tie. Remember, Jack? Or have you forgotten?”

  “I’ve been trying to forget it, don’t worry.”

  Then Margaret began telling stuff about our tour together. She even remembered the woman that got to bawling over my singing out there in Loew’s State on Broadway, and how we had folded up in the wings from laughing about it, and even remembered the name of the song. It was The Trumpeter, and pretty soon she remembered how it went, and sat down to the piano and transposed it to a low key and I sang it. Hannah sat there listening, then got up and switched off the overhead light, then camped off in a corner with the firelight shooting through her eyes. When I got through she said: “Well, goddam it, you don’t have to make me cry.” We all laughed and had another drink.

  “What was between you, Jack?”

  “Me and Margaret?”

  “Yes. There was something—more than music.”

  “Kid romance was all. I took her to dances, or at least a few dances, when I’d be home from college. On vacation. Stuff like that.”

  “Denny knows about it?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And still he said nothing? About marrying her?”

  “Not a word. And I had no idea of it.”

  “Then it was queer.”

  “I don’t get it at all.”

  “Unless...”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s still torching for you?”

  “I saw no sign of it.”

  “Me neither. What’s your idea of it, Jack?”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  “I didn’t feel any strain, though.”

  “You can’t tell what she told him that made him feel self-conscious all this time he’s been out here. About me, I mean. Maybe she blew it up big, when he was courting her. Maybe she gave him the idea she’d heard from me, and he better propose, and that’s why he thought I was in touch with Baltimore. However, it seemed to me that whatever it was, it’s all over now, and they’d like to forget it and start over.”

  “I felt that too.”

  “So—?”

  “Sure, let’s let ’em. I rather liked her.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “And he’s a duck, Jack.”

  “He’s developed into something.”

  “And he’s crazy about her.”

  “He’s that all right.”

  “And she is about him. They’re sweet.”

  “Nothing like it.”

  “You really mean that, Jack?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “Well—why not?’ That’s a poem, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, sure, I really mean it.”

  I had stayed after they left, and sat with her by the fire, and talked a while, and left, yawning, like I was dead for sleep, and had to get back to Long Beach, on account of heavy work next day. Then I was driving, and then I was forty, fifty, or sixty miles down the line, at some damned place, maybe Oceanside, sitting by the sea, trying to shake it out of my head, what was hammering in there, that felt the same as it had felt that day in the park when I was three years old, and saw the moth fly away through the trees. Once I was in the car, it was no trouble for me to put together what the mystery was all about. My letter to Denny had crossed them up bad, him and Margaret both. It might mean what it said, and it might mean nothing but a feeler, a lead, a trick, that pretended to be interested in him, and actually be pointed at Helen. But, if he wasn’t doing anything at the time, except sit around University Place and listen to Mr. Legg talk, they had to know. And the only way to find out was for him to come out here, take a look around, and report. But after he’d been here a while, and told me nothing, he probably felt too self-conscious about it to mention it. Either that or he had brought Margaret out here, long before they said she had come, used the Castile apartment as a front, and then got nervous I’d find it out, or see her by accident, and decided it was time to spill it. All that, though, I had figured out long before dinner was over, and what was racing through my head now was Helen. Just the thought that I might see her again was enough to send me out into the night to this pile of sand by the sea, shivering at the color of the moon on the waves, face to face with what I had run away from that awful night eight years before. I stayed there till dawn, and then I came back to my apartment at the Castile, went to bed, and tried to think. After a while I knew what I was going to do. I had done everything, turned my back on what I said I believed in when I had it tough, ratted on a friend, hung on with this cold bitch who could give me what I wanted out of life—to be kingpin in this terrific business, to have money, to be a shot. And I didn’t mean to lose it all now, just for the sake of something I had given up years and years before. I was going to kill the moth. And I was going to do it when I saw her that night, by putting my cards in front of her—or some of my cards, enough to make her do what I wanted, as I thought.

  “Hannah, Denny’s got to go.”

  “You mean—we fire him, just like that?”

  “We can make an adjustment. Give him a credit. Whatever seems right. But—get rid of him.”

  “In spite of his—success with our retail sales? They’ve doubled, by the way, did you know that? The telescopes are a hit, and the advertising is getting terrific results.”

  “I know about it.”

  “And in spite of your friendship?”

  “I hate that part, but—he’s out.”

  “... May I ask why?”

  “There’s more to it than I told you.”

  “Involving her? Margaret?”

  “I didn’t mean to deceive you. I was kidding myself.”

  “You mean there was an affair?”

  “No, but we were engaged. We were to be married.”

  “And—?”

  “I don’t want her around.”

  “You mean you’re torching for her?”

  “I mean it’s messy.”

  “Not if it’s over.”

  “It would make me uncomfortable every time I saw her, as it did last night. And what’s more, the funny way he acted tells me he’s just as uncomfortable about it as I am. It’s just something he ought not to have allowed to happen. If they got married, so O.K. But he could have told me. He could have told
me, and bowed out, because God knows I’d not have wanted him, in any way, shape, or form, if I had known it.”

  “Just a question of taste?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  She leaned back and puffed on her cigarette through the long holder she used and sipped her champagne. Around nine thirty she said she had a headache. I left, glad I didn’t have to talk about it any more. I drove down to the Castile and went to bed and I guess I dropped off to sleep. Then there was a banging on my door. I got up and opened and she was there, in sweater, slacks, and polo coat. “Hannah! What are you doing here?”