How Like a God

XI

He was moving up the second flight, into the semi-darkness, slowly and wearily. Involuntarily his left hand went into his trousers pocket and came out holding a ring with two keys on it, and still involuntarily his fingers selected one of the keys and turned it to the correct position for insertion in the keyhole.

He felt the key in his hand and looked down at it, wondering how it had got there...

That evening at the recital the expectation was dead before you saw her. You arrived early, to be sure of not missing Lucy’s entrance, and the two sturdy matrons on your right told each other all you didn’t care to know. One of them had heard her play in Vienna and had later met her in Cannes; the other had known her husband, who had left his estates in Bavaria to be with her on her American tour. Never had there been so devoted a husband, she declared.

And so on.

She was very beautiful, superbly dressed, perfectly composed. The audience loved her at once. You were thrilled for a moment as she stood at ease, graciously inclining her head to the applause; then as she sat down and began to play you felt bored and indifferent. This trained woman playing Mozkowski to a full house — what a place to come to, to find Lucy!

After the first intermission you did not return.

That winter Erma suddenly took it into her head to give Margaret and Rose a lift. She and Jane have always been funny together — in a way they genuinely like each other, but from the first they’ve always backed off a bit, as much as to say, you may be all right but just keep off my grass if you don’t mind. She didn’t get far with Margaret either — Margaret’s a strange kid and a good deal of a fool, thinking she’s in love because Doctor Oehmsen has articles in the American Science Journal.

But Rose jumped at Erma’s first gesture. Erma soon got fed up with her clever tricks, but Rose held on till she got what she wanted.

At first you thought she was after Dick, and maybe she was, but if so she soon found that Mary Bellowes was ahead of her. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes — it looked very imposing on the announcement, almost as imposing as one of her grand entrances into a drawing-room. Instantly Erma was on to her the first time Dick brought her around.

Later, after they had gone, you told Erma that Dick deserved better, and that as an older sister it was up to her to save him from so unpleasant a fate. She replied that the remark was your record for stupidity.

The wedding was as different as possible from your and Erma’s rustic nuptials; no Jersey parsonage for Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. You were best man, and when at a solemn moment Erma made a grimace and winked at you, you almost dropped the ring. They took a mansion on Long Island and four or five floors on the Avenue, and for the first time Dick began to take an interest in the private ledger. But even her furious assaults could not greatly disturb the serenity of those colossal columns; and they were restored again to assured security within the year, when Dick declared to you one day at lunch: “Bill, every woman alive ought to be locked up in a little room and fed through a hole in the wall.”

You decided that it was not a propitious moment for sounding him on a proposal that had occurred to you that morning. Only a few weeks previously you had returned from Ohio, from your mother’s funeral, and to your surprise Larry had not only accepted Jane’s invitation to come to New York for a visit, but had apparently settled down for an extended stay, having moved recently from Jane’s house to a couple of rooms on Twelfth Street. He had told you nothing of his intentions, but you thought it possible that five years of Idaho had been enough for him and that he might welcome another chance at the career he had once started so well and abandoned in disgust. You decided to ask Dick whether Larry was wanted and if so on what terms.

The project was temporarily set aside by the sudden appearance from nowhere of Mrs. Davis and your son. Day after day you went directly after lunch to the bare little room overlooking the dirty little West Side street, and sat there while he worked on your bust. You wondered what you would do with the darned thing when it was finished, until one day Paul said:

“The Greenwich Galleries over on Eighth Street would like to have this for a month or so, if you don’t mind; they’re going to have a little show of modern American sculpture.”

“When?”

“Around the first of April.”

It was arranged, with the proviso that your name should appear neither in the catalogue nor on the card. Before the end of March it was finished and delivered; and Paul, with several hundred dollars of your money in his pocket and an account opened for him in a Paris bank, was gone.

No sort of intimacy had developed between you; he was too shrewd and intelligent not to attempt to conceal how utterly you were to him merely a lucky find.

Twice you visited the Eighth Street galleries to see your head and face in marble publicly displayed, and to watch others looking at it, while pretending your attention was elsewhere. Then the confounded idiots, forgetting entirely the careful instructions given them by Paul, that it was to be kept there until you called for it, on the very day the show ended had it delivered to your address on Park Avenue. When you got home from the office there it was in the middle of the big table in the library, with a wreath of ferns and red roses around its brow and a circlet of yellow daisies hanging from its neck.

Erma, having apparently just finished this decorative effort, was seated at the piano. When you entered she crashed into the Polonaise Militaire. You tried to laugh, but it was too much for you. Suddenly she left the piano and came towards you, towards the table.

“I tried to fix it up as nice as I could,” she said, reaching over and pretending to adjust the daisy necklace. “There have already been three men after it for the Hall of Fame, but John and I chased them. Bill dear, it’s marvelous — that indomitable will, that gallant fling of the head — I’ve decided to call it William the Conqueror.”

You turned and left the room, and the house; got a taxi and went to the Club, and spent the night there. But by the following afternoon you felt better about it, especially about Erma. She might be cruel and pitiless, even malicious, but she was right. You went home, and entering, called out:

“Vive William the Conqueror!”

She chose to be semi-serious about it, after you had explained its origin and reason of being and she had poured you a cup of tea.

“Your young sculptor is either very stupid or a first-rate satirist,” she said. “I’m sorry he’s gone; why didn’t you bring him to see me? He made gorgeous fun of you, Bill. It saddens me.”

“There are masterful men,” you observed.

“None with a sense of humor,” she replied. “And, besides, you aren’t masterful at all.”

That evening William the Conqueror was stowed away in a corner of your dressing-room. But you couldn’t resist the impulse to show it to Jane, swearing her first to secrecy. You pulled it out nearer the light and introduced it derisively as William the Conqueror, explaining that it had been christened by Erma. She looked at it from all sides and then sat down on the floor in front of it and looked up at you.

“It’s extremely good,” she said, “but it isn’t you.”

“No? Why not.”

“It’s too—” she hesitated. “It’s too stupid. It’s what you would be like if you went around bumping people off of sidewalks.”

That was the evening of your birthday party — your fortieth birthday — another of Erma’s unlikely gestures. Lord, families are jokes — look at that bunch around that table! Jane, Larry, Margaret, Dick, Victor. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes Carr was there, too. And Rose...

Rose, you reflected, knew what she was about better than most; she’s the only person you’ve ever seen work Erma successfully, by sheer impudence. She had her way with Margaret too, you learned that evening. Up in your room, after the party. Jane told you she had that morning had a final interview with Mrs. Oehmsen and arranged definitely that the divorce proceedings should be postponed until autumn. October at the earliest. Rose’s wedding was set for the middle of September; so Margaret could be a maid of honor a full month before she became a corespondent; and Rose, off on a European honeymoon, would be three thousand miles from tabloids.

“How did you persuade her?” you asked.

“I told her that if she didn’t promise to wait Margaret would go off to the South Seas, and Dr. Oehmsen would follow her, and she’d lose all her fun.”

You reflected that Rose, whom you actively disliked, was the only member of the family who had got any considerable thing out of you. It was at your wife’s house that she had carried on her campaign and captured her husband. Jane and Margaret, nothing; Larry...

That wound had been reopened, but with less loss of blood. One day at lunch you said to Dick:

“By the way, I’m wondering about Larry. He seems to be hanging on here for no particular reason, and it’s just possible he’s fed up out there and would like to try his hand again at selling a few carloads of bridges. If he should ask me about it I’d like to know what to say. How do you feel about it? Would you want—”

You were stopped by the surprise on Dick’s face. He said:

“I’m buying Idaho and Larry’s going to run it. Hasn’t he told you?”

From the explanation which followed you gathered that shortly after Larry’s arrival in New York he had gone to Dick with an ambitious and carefully formulated proposal for buying an enormous tract of land, practically the entire valley in which his present modest ranch was located, and engaging simultaneously in cattle-raising and dry farming on a large scale. Dick had agreed to furnish over half a million cash capital, and the plans were now almost complete.

You were humiliated and furious. When that night you went to your room to undress, you observed that the maid’s carelessness had left William the Conqueror out of his corner, pushed out away from the wall. There he was with his gallant head facing you, smiling and confident. In a sudden fit of rage you hauled off and gave him a kick, and nearly broke your foot in two.