The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories

  She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly rouged a la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.

  But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.

  She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.

  'What's that?' she cried. The words were not a question - they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. 'Stand up!' she said to her grandson, 'stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!'

  The young man looked at her in trepidation.

  'Blow!' she commanded.

  He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.

  'Blow!' she repeated, more peremptorily than before.

  He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.

  'Do you realize,' she went on briskly, 'that you've forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?'

  Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing - even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.

  'Young ass!' cried Caroline. 'Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.'

  This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.

  'Do you think I don't know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm soft. I'm not!' She struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. 'And I'll have more brains left when you've got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.'

  'But Grandmother--'

  'Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren't for my money might have risen to be a journey-man barber out in the Bronx - Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber - you presume to be smart with me, who once had three counts and a bonafide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.' She paused, took breath. 'Stand up! Blow!'

  The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.

  'Found you at last,' he cried. 'Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and your secretary told me he thought you'd gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight--'

  Caroline turned to him irritably

  'Do I employ you for your reminiscences?' she snapped. 'Are you my tutor or my broker?'

  'Your broker,' confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. 'I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.'

  'Then do it.'

  'Very well. I thought I'd better--'

  'Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson.'

  'Very well. I--'

  'Good-by.'

  'Good-by, Madame.' The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.

  'As for you,' said Caroline, turning to her grandson, 'you stay just where you are and be quiet.'

  She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.

  'It's the only way,' she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. 'The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.'

  'Oh, yes,' chuckled Merlin. 'I know. I envy you.'

  She nodded, blinking.

  'The last time I was in here, forty years ago,' she said, 'you were a young man very anxious to kick up your heels.'

  'I was,' he confessed.

  'My visit must have meant a good deal to you.'

  'You have all along,' he exclaimed. 'I thought - I used to think at first that you were a real person - human, I mean.'

  She laughed.

  'Many men have thought me inhuman.'

  'But now,' continued Merlin excitedly, 'I understand. Understanding is allowed to us old people - after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.'

  Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream.

  'How I danced that night! I remember.'

  'You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms were closing about me and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment. It came too late.'

  'You are very old,' she said inscrutably. 'I did not realize.'

  'Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then - I no longer knew how.'

  'And now you are so very old.'

  With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.

  'Yes, leave me!' he cried. 'You are old also; the spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in my face?'

  'Give me my book,' she commanded harshly. 'Be quick, old man!'

  Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a bill.

  'Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these very premises.'

  'I did,' she said in anger, 'and I'm glad. Perhaps there had been enough done to ruin me.'

  She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson moved toward the door.

  Then she was gone - out of his shop - out of his life. The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed, wrinkled Miss McCracken.

  Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit cropping out unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life a zest and a glory.

  Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:

  'Still spunky old piece, isn't she?'

  Merlin started.

  'Who?'

  'Old Alicia Dare. Mrs Thomas Allerdyce she is now, of course; has been these thirty years.'

  'What? I don't understand you.' Merlin sat down suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.

  'Why, surely, Mr Grainger, you can't tell me that
you've forgotten her, when for ten years she was the most notorious character in New York. Why, one time when she was the corespondent in the Throckmorton divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn't you read about it in the papers.'

  'I never used to read the papers.' His ancient brain was whirring.

  'Well, you can't have forgotten the time she came in here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came near asking Mr Moonlight Quill for my salary, and clearing out.'

  'Do you mean that - that you saw her?'

  'Saw her! How could I help it with the racket that went on. Heaven knows Mr Moonlight Quill didn't like it either, but of course he didn't say anything. He was daffy about her and she could twist him around her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims she'd threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right. The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress! Of course he was never rich enough for her, even though the shop paid well in those days.'

  'But when I saw her,' stammered Merlin, 'that is, when I thought I saw her, she lived with her mother.'

  'Mother, trash!' said Miss McCracken indignantly. 'She had a woman there she called "Aunty" who was no more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one - but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for life.'

  'Who was she?' cried Merlin. 'For God's sake what was she - a witch?'

  'Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you couldn't pick up a paper without finding her picture.'

  Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world, passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually they became the friends of his boyhood out there, urging him to come and play before the last dark came down. He was too old now even for memories.

  That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said:

  'Don't sit there like a death's-head. Say something.'

  'Let him sit quiet,' growled Arthur. 'If you encourage him he'll tell us a story we've heard a hundred times before.'

  Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.

  'O Russet Witch!'

  But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

  Crazy Sunday

  I

  It was Sunday - not a day, but rather a gap between two other days. Behind, for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits under the crane that swung the microphone, the hundreds miles a day by automobiles to and fro across a county, the struggles of rival ingenuities in the conference rooms, the ceaseless compromise, the clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives. And now Sunday, with individual life starting up again, with a glow kindling in eyes that had been glazed with monotony the afternoon before. Slowly as the hours waned they came awake like Puppenfeen in a toy shop: an intense colloquy in a corner, lovers disappearing to neck in a hall. And the feeling of 'Hurry, it's not too late, but for God's sake hurry before the blessed forty hours of leisure are over.'

  Joel Coles was writing continuity. He was twenty-eight and not yet broken by Hollywood. He had had what were considered nice assignments since his arrival six months before and he submitted his scenes and sequences with enthusiasm. He referred to himself modestly as a hack but really did not think of it that way. His mother had been a successful actress; Joel had spent his childhood between London and New York trying to separate the real from the unreal, or at least to keep one guess ahead. He was a handsome man with the pleasant cow-brown eyes that in 1913 had gazed out at Broadway audiences from his mother's face.

  When the invitation came it made him sure that he was getting somewhere. Ordinarily he did not go out on Sundays but stayed sober and took work home with him. Recently they had given him a Eugene O'Neill play destined for a very important lady indeed. Everything he had done so far had pleased Miles Calman, and Miles Calman was the only director on the lot who did not work under a supervisor and was responsible to the money men alone. Everything was clicking into place in Joel's career. ('This is Mr Calman's secretary. Will you come to tea from four to six Sunday - he lives in Beverly Hills, number--.')

  Joel was flattered. It would be a party out of the top-drawer. It was a tribute to himself as a young man of promise. The Marion Davies crowd, the high-hats, the big currency numbers, perhaps even Dietrich and Garbo and the Marquis, people who were not seen everywhere, would probably be at Calman's.

  'I won't take anything to drink,' he assured himself. Calman was audibly tired of rummies, and thought it was a pity the industry could not get along without them.

  Joel agreed that writers drank too much - he did himself, but he wouldn't this afternoon. He wished Miles would be within hearing when the cocktails were passed to hear his succinct, unobtrusive, 'No, thank you.'

  Miles Calman's house was built for great emotional moments - there was an air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid an audience, but this afternoon it was thronged, as though people had been bidden rather than asked. Joel noted with pride that only two other writers from the studio were in the crowd, an ennobled limey and, somewhat to his surprise, Nat Keogh, who had evoked Calman's impatient comment on drunks.

  Stella Calman (Stella Walker, of course) did not move on to her other guests after she spoke to Joel. She lingered - she looked at him with the sort of beautiful look that demands some sort of acknowledgement and Joel drew quickly on the dramatic adequacy inherited from his mother:

  'Well, you look about sixteen! Where's your kiddy car?'

  She was visibly pleased; she lingered. He felt that he should say something more, something confident and easy - he had first met her when she was struggling for bits in New York. At the moment a tray slid up and Stella put a cocktail glass into his hand.

  'Everybody's afraid, aren't they?' he said, looking at it absently. 'Everybody watches for everybody else's blunders, or tries to make sure they're with people that'll do them credit. Of course that's not true in your house,' he covered himself hastily. 'I just meant generally in Hollywood.'

  Stella agreed. She presented several people to Joel as if he were very important. Reassuring himself that Miles was at the other side of the room, Joel drank the cocktail.

  'So you have a baby?' he said. 'That's the time to look out. After a pretty woman has had her first child, she's very vulnerable, because she wants to be reassured about her own charm. She's got to have some new man's unqualified devotion to prove to herself she hasn't lost anything.'

  'I never get anybody's unqualified devotion,' Stella said rather resentfully.

  'They're afraid of your husband.'

  'You think that's it?' She wrinkled her brow over the idea; then the conversation was interrupted at the exact moment Joel would have chosen.

  Her attentions had given him confidence. Not for him to join safe groups, to slink to refuge under the wings of such acquaintances as he saw about the room. He walked to the window and looked out towards the Pacific, colourless under its sluggish sunset. It was good here - the American Riviera and all that, if there were ever time to enjoy it. The handsome, well-dressed people in the room, the lovely girls, and the - well, the lovely girls. You couldn't have everything.

  He saw Stella's fresh boyish face, with the tired eyelid that always drooped a little over one eye, moving about among her guests and he wanted to sit
with her and talk a long time as if she were a girl instead of a name; he followed her to see if she paid anyone as much attention as she had paid him. He took another cocktail - not because he needed confidence but because she had given him so much of it. Then he sat down beside the director's mother.

  'Your son's gotten to be a legend, Mrs Calman - Oracle and a Man of Destiny and all that. Personally, I'm against him but I'm in a minority. What do you think of him? Are you impressed? Are you surprised how far he's gone?'

  'No, I'm not surprised,' she said calmly. 'We always expected a lot from Miles.'

  'Well now, that's unusual,' remarked Joel. 'I always think all mothers are like Napoleon's mother. My mother didn't want me to have anything to do with the entertainment business. She wanted me to go to West Point and be safe.'

  'We always had every confidence in Miles.'

  He stood by the built-in bar of the dining-room with the good-humoured, heavy-drinking, highly paid Nat Keogh.

  '--I made a hundred grand during the year and lost forty grand gambling, so now I've hired a manager.'

  'You mean an agent,' suggested Joel.

  'No, I've got that too. I mean a manager. I make over everything to my wife and then he and my wife get together and hand me out the money. I pay him five thousand a year to hand me out my money.'

  'You mean your agent.'

  'No, I mean my manager, and I'm not the only one - a lot of other irresponsible people have him.'

  'Well, if you're irresponsible why are you responsible enough to hire a manager?'

  'I'm just irresponsible about gambling. Look here--'

  A singer performed; Joel and Nat went forward with the others to listen.

  II

  The singing reached Joel vaguely; he felt happy and friendly towards all the people gathered there, people of bravery and industry, superior to bourgeoisie that outdid them in ignorance and loose living, risen to a position of the highest prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained. He liked them - he loved them. Great waves of good feeling flowed through him.

  As the singer finished his number and there was a drift towards the hostess to say good-bye, Joel had an idea. He would give them Building It Up, his own composition. It was his only parlour trick, it had amused several parties and it might please Stella Walker. Possessed by the hunch, his blood throbbing with the scarlet corpuscles of exhibitionism, he sought her.