The Fourth Side of the Triangle

I The First Side Sheila

That oozing Tuesday in August, Dane was planning his weekend. The choices were several. He was invited to a party the guiding idea of which was to charter a canalboat in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and glide through Bucks County watching the south end of the mule head north along the towpath (or was it the north end heading south?), lallygagging around under the awning away from the gassy streets of the metropolitan summer. It was tempting to contemplate a floating journey through a tunnel of cool green trees; and afterward, in the evening, fireflies, lanterns on lawns, and dancing.

Or there was the invitation to join friends on Fire Island; the swimming would be better (Dane liked surf), and the trip was shorter.

A third choice lay up the Hudson, at an estate near Rhinebeck. It meant a pool for swimming (Dane detested pools), and the nuisance of formal dress; but the food would be superb, and one or two of the women, too.

Of one thing he was certain: wherever he wound up, it was not going to be in New York, broiling to death. No matter what.

But there was a matter.

Because this was before he found out about his father.

The first McKell had come to America while New York was still Nieuw Amsterdam, following a small disagreement with the Laird of the Clan. It was with some disquiet that the disgruntled immigrant subsequently observed the royal banner of the Stuarts waving over his city of refuge, Peter Stuyvesant not to the contrary; but the Duke of York and his lieutenants seemed not to be interested in any affront offered The McKell by his hot-tempered cousin. Gradually he came out of retreat; cautiously he began to buy a little and sell a little, to export and import in a modest way. This founding McKell took a wife, begat progeny, and died in the Presbyterian faith, leaving an estate of £500 and the advice, “Be aye canny wi’ sil’er and dinna spend it saftly.” His eldest son took the pioneer’s advice to heart so earnestly that he was reputed never to spend sil’er at all. In any case, the son left £1000 in the family strongbox and a sloop in the Hudson River.

So it had gone, McKell outdoing McKell in enterprise and thrift. During the Civil War the reigning McKell, one James, proved the man for the time. James hired a substitute in the draft, took contracts to supply the Union Army with black walnut wood for riflestocks, died seized of an apoplexy, and left almost $1,000,000. James’s son Taylor, having no war available in which to test his patriotism, exercised his energies by expanding the family trade in sugar, coffee, and tobacco. He also had the foresight to invest in shipping in a period when the American merchant marine was still a sludge of wreckage from the damage done by Confederate raiders and railroad competition. He died at a vast age, leaving over $3,000,000, a young son named Ashton, and a pew in New York’s Grace Episcopal Church.

Ashton McKell was in his mid-fifties when his son Dane made the seismic discovery about him. Many of Ashton’s contemporaries had failed even to maintain their original inheritances, blaming the unions, the income tax, the Crash, and that Traitor to His Class for their misfortune. Not so Ashton McKell. Ashton had doubled his portion before he was twenty-five, and then doubled that. And more. The ships of the McKell Lines sailed every sea. There was McKell coffee, supplied (under various brand names) to more American homes than the competition looked upon with happiness; and the coffee was more often than not sweetened with McKell sugar (no retail sales). And the cigarets inhaled afterward were certain to contain the products of the National & Southern Tobacco Company (a wholly owned McKell subsidiary). The combined worth of Ashton McKell’s interests came to something between $80,- and $100,000,000; even Ashton was not quite sure.

And he still had the first shilling the first McKell in America had ever turned over to a profit.

“Dane,” said Lutetia McKell. “There is something I must tell you about your father.”

Ashton’s drive was all thrust. “Take it easy?” he had once snorted to his doctor. “If I had it in me to take it easy, I’d have been clipping coupons for the past twenty years. Do you call that living?”

Not for him the slow life terminating in the long death. He liked to recall Zachary McKell. Old Zach had dropped in his tracks at the age of ninety-two after cutting the winter’s wood rather than pay a sawyer the outlandish fee of $1.00 a cord to do it for him.

“Moderation be damned” was Ashton’s credo. He smoked twenty cigars a day, ate rich and fatty foods, worked, played, and fought hard; in the chart room of his empire he delegated as little real authority as he efficiently could.

Dane was very like his father in appearance. He had inherited the high color, the Caesarean nose, the imperial chin, the wavy brown hair women liked to stroke. But where the father’s eyes were the chill gray of his ancestors from “the bleak and difficult Hebrides,” the son’s were the china-blue of his mother’s. And the clusters of muscle at the corners of Ashton’s mouth were missing from Dane’s except when Dane flew into one of his rages.

“Mother!” Dane sprang from the chair, pretending a surprise he did not really (and this was curious) feel. “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.”

But he could.

Ashton’s doubts about his son were of long standing. They had been born in Dane’s childhood. A boy who preferred books to football! Mendelssohn to “Old Man River” (and later, Mozart to Mendelssohn)! Languages to Math! Comparative Religion to Economics! Ancient History to Business Administration! Coin collecting to coin amassing! What kind of McKell had he spawned?

The father told himself that it was all “a phase,” like Dane’s incredible preference (at the appropriate age) for poetry over whorehouses. “He’ll grow out of it,” Ashton McKell kept saying. When Dane was in private school, his father was confident that prep school would “change” him. Groton having failed, perhaps Yale would succeed. Privately Ashton held that a hitch in the Marine Corps might prove a likelier agency, but of course the very idea could not be breathed to Lutetia, who considered the National Registration Act an affront to decent people. Dane continued to hack out his own trail.

For all his misgivings, Ashton McKell never once envisioned the worst. Dane dropped out of Yale, disappeared. His father found him toiling under a beefy sun in one of North Carolina’s tobacco plantations — not even McKell-owned! Later he took a job as a deck hand on one of the McKell freighters. But he jumped ship in Maracaibo, and turned up six months later in a Greenwich Village pad, shacked up with a long-haired girl with dirty bare feet and oil paint on her nose. He spent the better part of another year riding the rods and bunking down in hobo jungles; in the space of the following three years he was a Hollywood extra, a carny roustabout, buddy-buddy with a gang of braceros down around the Mexican border, a beach boy at Santa Monica, a field hand on a Hawaiian pineapple plantation, and legman for an alcoholic Chicago police reporter who needed somebody to keep him from being rolled and perhaps knifed in a Loop alley.

When Dane showed up at home, lean and hungry-looking as Cassius (his mother spent three marvelous months cooking for him with her own hands — a service, Ashton remarked wryly, that she had never rendered to him), his father said, “Every McKell for centuries has gone into the family business.”

“I,” said Dane, “am breaking the chain.”

It was as if he had announced that he was en route to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky to take the vows of silence.

“You mean you’re not?”

“Why should I, Dad? I don’t like business. Any business. Yours included... Anyway, it isn’t as if I had to.” Dane was on the pale side, but the McKell chin was noticeably firm.

“What in hell do you mean by that?” Ashton shouted. Silence swallowed the shout.

At least, the father thought, he’s not being flip about it. He realizes what this damned radical nonsense means... Ashton could not have endured it if the boy had been casual.

“I’m of age,” Dane said. “It doesn’t mean merely that I now have the vote and can join the lodge. Grandfather McKell and Grandfather DeWitt both made provision for me in their wills, Dad. What do I need business for?”

“You mean to say you intend to live without working? By God, Dane, that’s cheap — I mean, cheap!”

“I didn’t mean that at all. I’m going to work. But it’s work of my choice... In a way,” Dane said thoughtfully, “I didn’t choose it so much as it chose me.”

Ashton McKell did not live by bread alone. He was a confident communicant of his faith, and a vestryman. This rushed into his head. Appalled, he cried, “You’re going into the Church?”

“What? No.” Dane laughed. “I’m going to write.”

There was a blank space. Then Ashton said, “Well, I don’t think I understand. Write? Write what?”

A writer?

Ashton probed his memory. Had he ever known a writer? Known anyone who knew a writer? There was Lamont’s son Corliss, but he was a Socialist. And that young Vanderbilt, Cornelius — he hadn’t even had that excuse. And... yes, his late mother’s friend, Mrs. Jones, who had written novels under her maiden name of Edith Wharton. But — damn it all! — she had been a woman.

“So you’re going to write,” Ashton said slowly, and he asked again, “Write what?” searching his mind for a sensible explanation. He fell on one: his mother. His mother spoiled him.

“Fiction. Novels, principally,” Dane said. “I’ve already dipped my toes in the short story — one was published in a little magazine; I don’t suppose you found time to read it in the copy I sent you.” Dane smiled faintly. “I’m lucky. I mean, having the means to write without having to worry about rent money or the electric bill — or, for that matter, deadlines. A lot of writers have to write stuff they loathe, just to keep the fuel pump going. I don’t have to do that—”

“Because of money you didn’t earn,” said his father.

“I admitted I’m lucky, Dad. But I hope to justify my luck by producing good books.” Dane saw his father’s look and said carefully, “Don’t get me wrong. Supplying people with sugar and coffee is honorable employment—”

“Thanks!” Ashton said sarcastically. Nevertheless, he was touched. At least, he said to himself, the boy doesn’t accuse me of being a rotten capitalist exploiter or sneer at the way his people have been making a living for almost three hundred years.

“Only it’s not for me, Dad. I’m going to write. I want to. I have to.”

“Well,” said Ashton McKell. “We’ll see.”

He saw. He saw that it was neither phase nor fancy, but good solid ambition.

Dane took an apartment of his own in one of the buildings he had inherited from the estate of Gerard DeWitt. He did this with kindness, and for a long time scarcely a day passed without a visit home; but Ashton knew that it was not so much from genuine involvement as out of consideration for his mother’s feelings.

The boy worked hard, his father had to concede. Dane allowed himself exactly one weekend off each month; the rest was four walls, stuffy cigaret smoke, and the firing of his typewriter. He wrote, rewrote, destroyed, started over.

His first novel, Hell in the Morning, was a flop utter and absolute. No major reviewer mentioned it, and the minor ones were merciless. A typical notice from a provincial book column said: “Hell in the Morning is hell any time of the day.” He was scolded as “a rich man’s Nelson Algren” and “Instant Kerouac” and “a moth in the beard of Steinbeck.” One lady reviewer (“Why doesn’t she stay home and wash the dirty diapers?” roared Ashton McKell) remarked: “Rarely has such small talent labored so hard to produce so little.” Dane, who had been absorbing punishment like an old club fighter, in grim silence, cried out when he read that one. But his father (only Judith Walsh, Ashton’s private secretary, knew that the tycoon had subscribed to a clipping service) stormed and raved.

“The Duxbury Intelligencer! What’s that smelly little rag good for but to wrap codfish in?” and so on. Finally, anger spent, came consolation. “At least now he’ll give up this tomfoolery.”

“Do you think so, Ashton?” Lutetia asked. It was at one of the family dinners from which Dane was absent — his absences were becoming more frequent. It was clear that Lutetia did not know whether to be sorry for her son’s sake or glad for her husband’s. The struggle, as usual, was short-lived. “I hope so, dear,” Lutetia said. If Ashton thought writing was bad for Dane, it was.

“I simply don’t understand you people.” Judy Walsh was a more than occasional visitor to her employer’s home. Ashton required outlandish hours of his secretary, sometimes dictating well past midnight in his study, so that Judy was frequently there for dinner. She was important to Lutetia McKell in another way. Lutetia’s never-expressed regret had been for lack of female companionship. Her few nieces were too emancipated for her taste, and there was Judy, an orphan, trim, efficient, outspoken, and yet, under the independence, with a need no one but Lutetia suspected, a need like her own, feminine, and yearning for tenderness. Judy’s hair bordered on Irish red, and she had a slanty little Irish nose and direct blue Irish eyes. “Really, Mr. McKell.” Thus Judy, at Ashton’s remark. “Give up this tomfoolery! You sound like a character out of the Late Late Show. Don’t you know enough about Dane to realize he won’t ever give up?”

Ashton growled into his soup.

Dane’s second novel, The Fox Hunters, was a failure also. The Times called it “Faulkner and branch water, New England style.” The New Yorker said (in toto): “A teen-ager’s first experience with Life turns out to be not at all what he had thought. Callow.” The Saturday Review...

Dane continued to plow away.

It turned out to be the kind of New York August which made it technically possible to walk from back to peeling back at Coney Island, from the boardwalk to the sea, without once touching the scorched sand. It was the season when mild little men who had never been known to raise their voices ran through the streets slashing at people with an ax... when those New Yorkers who owned no air-conditioners used fans, and those who owned no fans slept on kitchen floors before open refrigerators, so that the overloaded circuits blew out, nullifying refrigerators, fans, and air-conditioners alike.

Tempers erupted, gangs rumbled, husbands slugged their wives, wives beat their children, offices closed early, subways re-enacted the Inferno, in the thick and dripping air hearts faltered and gave up the blood-pumping struggle, and Lutetia McKell told her son that his father had confessed to her: “There is another woman.”

“Mother!” Dane sprang from the chair, pretending a surprise he did not really feel. “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.”

But he could. Queer. A moment before his mother said, “There is another woman,” Dane could have said in truth that the thought of his father’s possible infidelity had never crossed his mind. Yet once the words were uttered, they seemed inevitable. In common with most of mankind, Dane could not think comfortably of his parents in sexual embrace; but in his case the Freudian reasons were complicated by the kind of father and mother he had. His mother was like a limpet clinging to a rock, getting far more than she gave; for she could only give acquiescence and loyalty as she moved up and down with the tides. Somewhere deep in his head flickered the thought: she must be the world’s lousiest bed partner.

It seemed obvious to Dane that his father, on the other hand, was a man of strong sexuality, in common with his other drives and appetites. The surprise lay not so much in the fact that there was another woman as in that he had been so blind.

So — “Are you dead sure? I can’t believe it.” — when he was certain from the first instant, and belief came flooding.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure, darling,” said Lutetia. “It’s not the sort of thing I would imagine.” No, Dane thought; you’d far likelier imagine a Communist revolution and a commissar commandeering your best silver service. “But for some time now I’ve... well, suspected something might be wrong.”

“But, Mother, how did you find out?”

Lutetia’s cameo face turned rosy. “I asked him what was wrong. I could no longer stand thinking all sorts of things.”

“What did he say?” So you do lead a mental life, Dane thought, after all. Funny, finding out about one’s parents at such an advanced stage of the game. He loved his mother dearly, but he would have said she hadn’t a brain in her head.

“He said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. There is another woman.’”

“Just like that?”

“Well, dear, I asked him.”

“I know, but—! What did you say?”

“What could I say, Dane? I’ve never been faced with such a situation. I think I said, ‘I’m sorry, too, but it’s such a relief to know,’ which it was. Oh, it was.”

“And then what did Dad say, do?”

“Nodded.”

“Nodded? That’s all?”

“That’s all.” His mother said, as he winced, “I’m sorry, darling, but you did ask me.”

“And that was the end of the conversation?”

“Yes.”

Incredible. It was like something out of Noel Coward. And now Dane realized something else. Just below the level of consciousness he had been aware lately of an aura of disturbance about his mother. It probably accounted for his uneasiness and reluctance to leave the city. Her dependence on her menfolk was bred into his bones.

As Dane once joked to Judy Walsh, his mother represented a species perhaps not quite so extinct — if there were degrees of extinction — as the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, or the Carolina parakeet, but rarer than the buffalo.

Anna Lutetia DeWitt McKell was an atavism. Born six years after Queen Victoria’s death, Lutetia in her single delicate body carried the Victorian spirit into the middle of the twentieth century, nursing it as if she were the divinely appointed guardian of the eternal flame. It was true that, being left motherless, she had been reared by a choker-collared grandmother who was by birth a Phillipse, and who never let anyone, especially Lutetia, forget it; the old lady considered herself spiritually, at least, a daughter of England (the Phillipses were Tories during the Revolution); she never failed to take offense at being called an Episcopalian — “I am an Anglican Catholic,” she would say. But the grandmother did not entirely explain the granddaughter. On the paternal side Lutetia inherited all the pride and prejudices of the ingrown Knickerbocker breed from which her father’s family descended. Between the Victorian and Dutch burgher virtues, Lutetia never had a chance.

Secretly, she still considered it “wrong” for young people of opposite sexes to be left alone together under any circumstances; the social freedom of the twentieth century bewildered and offended her. The very word “sex” was not used in “mixed” conversation by “ladies”; it had taken all her strength to utter the phrase “another woman” in the conversation with her son. There were other social distinctions as well in Lutetia’s lexicon. Judith Walsh, for example, was “a business associate” of her husband’s (and what a wrench it was for her to acknowledge that “a nice young woman” could be engaged in “business”!); had she had to think of Judy as an employee, Lutetia would inescapably have lumped her with the “servant class.” One always spoke politely, even kindly, to servants; but one did not, after all, dine with them.

Lutetia DeWitt had led the proper sheltered life; she had attended the proper young ladies’ schools; she had made the grand tour properly chaperoned; she had never been inside a night club (Lutetia called it a “cabaret”) in her life (a night club, after all, was a sort of saloon). She sipped a glass of sherry on occasion; beer she regarded as a food, which might be drunk for the purpose of gaining weight; whiskey was exclusively for men. She liked to devote at least one hour a day to her “needlework,” but this was never worked on in the presence of callers because it consisted of “tiny garments,” prepared for a lay sisterhood of her church which aided “unfortunate” young women.

She was, as Dane remarked to Judy, beyond belief. “I love Mother,” he said, “but to be in her company for any length of time is like living onstage during a performance of Berkeley Square.”

“Dane! What a thing to say.”

“I’ve had to live with her, Judykins.”

Divorced women who remarried were living in adultery; there was no more to be said on the subject, except of course that one was sorry for their unhappy children.

It was in the area of sex and marriage that Lutetia McKell’s upbringing expressed itself most strongly. A woman came to her marriage bed a virgin; the mere contrary thought was unspeakable. She would no more have thought of taking a lover than of allowing herself to be eaten by bears. Twin beds were as alien to her as prayer rugs or cuspidors, although separate bedrooms served certain marital situations. She knew dimly that in the unmapped seas in which husbands moved, there were such monsters as “loose women,” for each of whom there had to be a philandering man; in a vague way, while she disapproved, she also accepted. In this sense Lutetia McKell was far more middle-class French than upper-class English or American.

That she possessed an independent fortune was a felicity, a convenience that meant she had the means to indulge in private charities and bestow personal gifts. For family and domestic expenses she did not handle a penny or sign a check, and it had never occurred to her to demand the right as a matter of wifehood.

Lutetia McKell lived where her husband decreed, traveled when, as, and where he stipulated, bought what he told her to buy, ran her home as he wanted it run. She was happy when her husband seemed content; she grieved when he was out of sorts. She had no significant hopes or desires that were not Ashton McKell’s, and she felt no lack of any.

Still... “another woman”...

Why, the old goat, Dane thought.

Most deeply, he felt sorry for his mother; on another level, not so deep, he felt rather sorry for his father. But it was his mother who preoccupied him. How could she cope with a situation for which she had no background or resources? She was not like other women.

“It’s never happened before,” she said, and her lips compressed ever so slightly, as if to say, And it should not have happened now; but the lip compression was as far as the criticism would ever get. “I know that men have, well, certain feelings that women may not have, and there are undoubtedly situations in which they — you — cannot control yourselves absolutely. But with your father it’s never happened before, Dane, I’m quite certain of that.” It was as if she were pleading her husband’s case before some attentive court. She sat in her chair with hands lapped over, no hint of tears in her childlike blue eyes — a fragile figure of middle-aged porcelain.

He shouldn’t have done it to her, Dane ruminated. Not to Mother. She’s not equipped. Regardless of the deficiencies of their intimate life together, he shouldn’t have made her a victim of this commonest of marital tragedies. Not after living with her all these years. Not after taking her little Victorian self as it was and molding it to his accommodation. What did she have without her husband? Ashton McKell was her reason for being. It left her like a planet torn loose from its sun. Dane began to feel angry.

It made him re-examine himself, because at first he had been inclined to see it through male eyes. What might it be like to visit a father’s home and find some brittle, dyed creature in her sharp-featured forties... “Dane, this is your stepmother.” “Oh, Ashie, no! You call me Gladys, Dane.” Or Gert, or Sadie. Dane shivered. Surely his father couldn’t have fallen that low. Not some brassy broad out of a night-club line.

“Mother, has he said anything about a divorce?”

Lutetia turned her clear eyes on him in astonishment. “Why, what a question, Dane. Certainly not! Your father and I would never consider such a thing.”

“Why not? If—”

“People of our class don’t get divorces. Anyway, the Church doesn’t recognize divorce. I certainly don’t want one, and even if I did your father wouldn’t dream of it.”

I’ll bet, Dane thought grimly. He forbore to point out what Lutetia perfectly well knew — that so long as neither of the parties remarried after a civil divorce, no rule of the Episcopal Church was broken. But how could she stand for the adultery? To his surprise, Dane discovered that he was taking an old-fashioned view of his own toward the disclosure. Or was it simply that he was putting himself in his mother’s place? (All at once, the whole problem became entangled. He found himself thinking of the McKell money. The McKell money meant nothing to him, really — he had never particularly coveted it, he had certainly not earned a cent of it, with his two inheritances he did not need any part of it, and he had repeatedly refused to justify his legatee status in respect to it. Yet now the thought that the bulk of it might wind up the property of “another woman” infuriated him.)

“He’s cheated on you, Mother. How can you go on living with him?”

“I’m surprised at you, Dane. Your own father.”

She was ready to forgive adultery. Did the drowning woman refuse the life preserver because it was filthy with oil scum?

Lutetia sat patiently on a chair which a young male favorite of le roi soleil’s brother had given to his own female favorite — sat patiently and unaware of this aspect of the chair’s history — and stared without seeing it at a painting of the Fontainebleau school in which rusty nymphs languished under dark trees... a painting hanging where the portrait had hung of her Grandmother Phillipse, dressed in the gown she had worn on being presented to “Baron Renfrew” a century ago.

“I would give your father a divorce, of course,” she went on in her “sensible” voice, “if he wanted it. But I’m sure the thought has never crossed his mind. No McKell has ever been divorced.”

“Then why in God’s name did he tell you about this at all?” demanded Dane, exasperated.

Again the faintly reproving look. “Please don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, darling.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Why did he?”

“Your father has never kept secrets from me.”

He resisted an impulse to fling up his hands, and instead walked over to the big window to stare out at Park Avenue.

Dane was not fooled by his mother’s assertion of faith. His father had kept plenty of secrets from her. If he really didn’t want a divorce, it was because he wasn’t in love with the woman. And this made Dane even angrier. It meant that it was a cheap passing affair, a meaningless tumble in bed, for the sake of which the old bull was ready to give infinite pain to his wife and face the possibility of a dirty little scandal in the sensational press if the story should leak out.

Poor Mother! Dane thought. Up to now the nearest she’s come to scandal has been at fifth or sixth remove; now here it is just around the corner. A lady’s name appears in a newspaper three times in her life: when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies. To this quaint credo Lutetia subscribed completely. Didn’t she realize what she was facing? He turned from the window and said something to this effect.

“I had naturally thought about that,” Lutetia said, nodding. Was there a flicker of something in the depths of those blue eyes? “And I mentioned it to your father. He assures me that there is no chance anyone will ever find out. He is apparently being very discreet. Taking special precautions of some sort, I believe.”

I am awake, Dane said to himself, this is not a dream. They had discussed the cheating husband’s precautions against being found out, and let it go at that! It made his father almost as unbelievable as his mother. Or had Ash McKell become so accustomed to twisting her to his every whim that he now had nothing but contempt for her? Have I ever understood my mother and father? Dane wondered; and he was struck by the predicament of modern man, not merely unable to communicate but, oftener than not, ignorant of the fact.

Talk about faithful Griselda! The heroine of the Clerk’s Tale was flaming with rebellion compared to his mother. She had devoted her life so single-mindedly to the happiness of her husband that she even went along with his betrayal of her as a woman! Or does that make me some sort of Buster Brown-haired prig? Dane thought. Considered as a feat of character, there was actually something sublime in Lutetia’s meekness. Maybe it’s I who haven’t grown up.

“Mother.” His tone was gentle. “Who is she? Do you know? Did he tell you?”

Again she surprised him. This descendant of a hundred Knickerbockers smiled her sweet and self-effacing smile. “I shouldn’t have told you any of this, darling. I’m sorry I did. You have your own problems. By the way, have you settled the question that was bothering you? I mean in your third chapter? I’ve been worrying about that all day,” and on and on she went in this vein, the subject of her husband’s unfaithfulness laid aside, as if she had put by her needlework for a more urgent activity.

I’ll have to find out myself who the woman is, Dane decided. It’s a cinch she’ll never tell me, even if she knows. Probably took some typical Victorian vow against ever allowing her lips to be “sullied” by the creature’s name.

“Never mind my third chapter, Mother. I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll stop talking about this: Do you want to come live with me? Under the circumstances?” Even in broaching the possibility Dane felt like one of Nature’s noblemen. The most rewarding act of his life so far had been to take an apartment of his own.

His mother looked at him. “Thank you, dear, but no.”

“You’re going to go on here with Father, as if nothing had happened?”

“I don’t know what she is,” Lutetia McKell said, “but I’m my husband’s wife, and my place is with him. No, I’m not going to leave him. For one thing, it would make him unhappy...”

You, said Dane silently, are magnificence incarnate. You’re also either telling me a lie, which ladies do not do, or telling yourself one, which is far likelier, and more in accord with modern psychology. By God, the old girl had some iron in her after all! She was going to put up a fight.

Dane kissed her devotedly and left.

He had to find out who his father’s mistress was.

Exactly why he must unveil the other woman, Dane did not pause to puzzle over, beyond wondering mildly at his compulsive need and overhastily discarding the notion that it had something to do with Freud.

It actually had to do with his mother. The mere thought of that pale and fragile creature setting out to do battle with the forces of cynicism aroused all his pity. It was an uneven fight. Somehow he had to find a way to help her. (And hurt his father? But to that point Dane did not go.)

He considered for only one horrid moment taking the direct route, confronting his father with his knowledge, demanding, “Who is she?” The whole scene was too embarrassing to contemplate. His father would either grasp him by the neck and the seat of the pants and hurl him bodily from the premises (and isn’t the fear of physical punishment at those great father-hands deeply hidden inside you, Dane?) or, worse, he might break down and weep. Dane did not think he could stand either eventuality. (Or even a third possibility, which Dane did not consider: that his father might simply say, “It’s none of your business, son,” and change the subject.)

In any event, as Dane saw it, subterfuge was called for.

Ashton McKell’s movements were generally predictable. He had fairly fixed times for getting to his office and coming home, for going to his club, for reading his newspaper, his magazines, his Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling. Home at seven, dinner at eight, five days a week. It was on weekends that the elder McKell did his personal brand of carousing; but at those times he caroused in the open.

Except...

Except, Dane suddenly realized, that for weeks now — or was it months? — his father had not got home until far past his usual hour on one night of the week, Wednesday. Dane could not recall his mother’s ever commenting on this phenomenon; and all that his father had said, on the single occasion when Dane brought the subject up, was the one word: “Business.”

What “business” was it that recurred Wednesday nights regularly? It seemed an easy leap to the conclusion that on Wednesday nights Ashton McKell made rendezvous with his mistress.

Nothing could be done about it today, which was Tuesday. But tomorrow... His weekend plans would have to be scrapped, Dane told himself, nursing the hunch that it would be a busy time.

He turned to the mumble-sheet in his typewriter.

Jerry at the old stone quarry. Ellen comes, rest as noted. Okay, but. WHY does Jerry go there? To swim? April — too early. Maybe to fish. Check: fish in stone quarries?

He pulled at his lower lip. Then he cocked his head and his fingers raced over the keys.

The elder McKell left his office promptly at noon as marked on Taylor McKell’s old Seth Thomas clock in the inner sanctum. Judy would quit her desk at 12:10, return at 12:55. Ashton would be back at 1 P.M. sharp.

August 17th, 12:05 P.M.:

“Judy? Dane McKell. My father there?”

“He’s left, Dane. Is your watch slow?”

A rueful laugh. “Damn it, it is.” Then, in a rush: “Look, Judy, I’ve got to see him this afternoon, but I can’t make it till after five. Do you suppose—?”

“That’s far too late, Dane. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Mr. McKell now leaves his office at four. Can’t you make it before then?”

“Never mind, I’ll catch him later, at home. Don’t even bother mentioning my call. How are you, Judykins? But I’m keeping you from your lunch.”

Judy thought as she hung up: That was an odd conversation. But then she shrugged and went off to lunch. She had long ago given up trying to figure out Dane McKell; too much thought about him was no good for her, anyway. The secretary married the boss’s son only in the movies.

Out into the August sun went Dane. He rented a car, a two-year-old Ford. His own little red MG might be spotted.

He picked up the Ford at a quarter past three, and by 3:45 he was parked outside the McKell Building. He thought it unlikely that his father would sneak out through the boiler-room exit or one of the side doors. Sure enough, a few minutes later up drove the big Bentley with Ramon, his father’s chauffeur, at the wheel.

Dane pulled away and circled the block. Now he parked at an observation post across the street, some distance behind the Bentley, and settled down to wait.

Ramon was reading a racing form.

What am I doing here? thought Dane. What in God’s name do I think I’m doing? Suppose I find out who the woman is, “unmask” her? Then what? How would that help Mother?

There was one possibility. Suppose the woman did not know her sugar-daddy was a married man. Suppose he had filled her full of a lot of hop about making an honest woman of her. One flea in her ear, and she might give him his hat.

And what does that make me? the McKell son and heir ruminated. A first-class heel is what!

Still... Dane shrugged. The compulsion was powerful. He had to find out the woman’s name. He would take it — somewhere — from there.

At 4:10 he stiffened. The massive figure of his father came striding through the revolving doors of the McKell Building. Ramon dropped his racing form, jumped out, and held the rear door open. Ashton McKell got in, Ramon ran around to the front, started the Bentley, and the big car swished off into the traffic.

Rather frantically, Dane followed.

The Bentley headed for the West Side Highway. It went north past Washington Market, past the old Sapolio Building, past the docks where the Atlantic liners berthed like comic book monsters, Dane in the hired Ford keeping several lengths behind. Where were they going? Over the George Washington Bridge to some ghastly New Jersey suburb, where Ashton McKell was keeping the widow of some insurance salesman in bourgeois splendor? Or up to 72nd Street and a doxy’s teddy-bear-filled flat?

But the Bentley turned off at a midtown exit, crept east over to Fifth Avenue, and headed north again. Dane had no opportunity to trim his speculations to the wind — he was too busy trying not to lose the other car.

Suddenly the chauffeur-driven car pulled up before a stout stone building of three stories which Dane knew well enough. He was puzzled. If there was one building in New York where his father could not possibly be holding an assignation, it was at this, the Metropolitan Cricket Club, that arch-bastion of ultra-respectable aristocrats.

Cricket itself no longer occupied the energies of the club, which had been founded in 1803 (Dane found himself thinking of Robert Benchley’s After 1903, What? — a good question). For who was left for the Metropolitan Cricketeers to play? The puberts of the Riverdale Country School? No British team would stoop to play them; and if the club membership could have brought themselves to step out onto a bowling pitch against the supple West Indian immigrants who still played cricket up in Van Cortlandt Park, the result would have been mayhem... It was a club, like other exclusive clubs, whose principal virtue was exclusivity. And indeed Dane gazed up at his elderly cousin twice removed, Colonel Adolphus Phillipse, who sat, seemingly growing out of the floor, in his window, with the New York Times, doubtless growling over the dangerous radicalism of Senator Barry Goldwater.

The Bentley drove off; Dane snapped around in time to see his father walking briskly up the worn front steps as if it were Tuesday or Friday, his club days. What was he going to do? Have a drink? Write a letter? Make a phone call?... Dane settled himself.

At the other side of the window, separated from Colonel Phillipse, sat white-whiskered Dr. MacAnderson, immersed in one of the bearded tomes from which for fifty years he had been culling information to support his theory that “the mixed multitude” which accompanied the children of Israel out of Egypt was in fact the ancestral horde of the Gypsy nation. Colonel Phillipse slowly turned a page of his newspaper, intent on not missing a semicolon of the latest transgression of the Federal Reserve Bank. And Dane wondered how long his father was going to remain inside.

He sat up quickly. The heat and the sluggard reveries of the two old men in the window had made him forget... He’s being very discreet, his mother had said. Taking special precautions.

What if this stop at the club was a “special precaution”?

Dane hustled the rented Ford around the corner and — sure enough! — there, at the rear entrance of the club, outside a public garage, sat the empty Bentley — Ramon had disappeared, apparently dismissed — and just coming out was Dane’s father.

Ashton McKell was no longer wearing the light linen suit made for him by Sarcy, his London tailor, nor the shoes (fitted to his lasts) from Motherthwaite’s, also of London, nor the hat of jipijapa fibers specially woven for him in Ecuador. The rather startling clothes he was now wearing Dane had never seen before. He also carried a walking stick and a small black leather satchel, like a medical bag.

Dane’s brow wrinkled. These could hardly constitute “special precautions” — a mere change of clothing. What was he up to?

The elder McKell walked past the Bentley and without warning climbed into a black Continental limousine, took the wheel himself, and drove off.

The limousine turned north, east, south, west... Dane lost track of direction in his awkward efforts to keep the other car in sight. The Continental had old-fashioned curtained windows, like a hearse, and the curtains were now drawn. What the devil?

It poked its nose into Central Park and began describing parabolas, for what purpose Dane could not imagine. Not to throw off pursuers — it was going too slowly for that. Was he simply killing time?

Suddenly the limousine pulled up and stopped, and as Dane drove by he saw his father get out of the driver’s seat and climb into the curtained rear. Dane parked around a nearby curve and waited with his engine running. He was baffled. Why had his father got into the rear of the car? There was no one else with him, Dane was almost positive. What could he be doing there?

Suddenly the Continental drove past him, heading toward an exit. Dane followed.

The limousine drove east and pulled up at a garage on a side street between Madison Avenue and Park. Dane slammed on his brakes, double-parking. He saw a garage mechanic come out with an orange ticket and reach into the Continental with it, nodding; he saw the driver of the Continental back out from behind the wheel and immediately hail a taxicab and jump in, to be driven off. The taxi had to stop at the corner of Park Avenue for a red light, and Dane pulled up directly behind it.

He was doubly puzzled now. There was something strange-looking about the passenger in the cab, viewed from the rear. But what it was he could not at the moment put his finger on.

The light changed, and the cab turned into Park Avenue. Dane turned, too... It was a very short trip, no more than six or eight blocks. The cab darted in toward the curb, its passenger jumped out, paid the driver, the cab drove off, and the passenger began to walk down Park Avenue.

Dane, creeping along, was utterly confused. His parents lived less than a block away. And the man who had got out of the taxi was not the same man who had driven the Continental away from the Cricket Club.

At least, that was Dane’s first impression. The man had gray hair, rather long and untidy at the neck. He wore a gray mustache, a Vandyke beard, and eyeglasses. A stranger.

One hand grasped a walking stick, the other a small black leather bag. The man was dressed all in tan — tan cords, tan straw hat, tan shoes — the same costume, as far as Dan could remember, that his father had worn on emerging from the club. Had there been another man waiting in the Continental after all? — a man who had exchanged clothes with the elder McKell behind the drawn curtains when he had pulled up in Central Park?

But why? And who could he be?

And then Dane knew.

It was not a stranger. It was his father. Disregard the clothes, strip off the mustache, beard, and wig, and the pupa beneath was — had to be — Ashton McKell.

His father in a disguise! He had put on the make-up during the stop in Central Park, behind the drawn curtains.

Dane almost laughed aloud. But there was a pathetic quality about that figure walking stiffly along the street with cane and bag swinging that discouraged levity. What in the name of all that was unholy did he think he was doing? “Special precautions”! He looked like someone out of an old-time vaudeville act.

There was no place to park. Dane double-parked and took up the chase on foot. His face was grim.

It became grimmer.

For the disguised Ashton McKell turned neither right nor left. He stumped up to the entrance of a building and went in.

It was a converted old Park Avenue one-family mansion, originally owned by the haughty Huytenses. The last Huytens had left it to “my beloved pet and friend, Fluffy,” but long before old Mrs. Huytens’ cousins succeeded in having Fluffy legally disinherited, the house had begun to decline. Dane’s maternal grandfather had made a bargain purchase of it in the latter days of the depression and turned it into an apartment building. It housed three duplex apartments and a penthouse, and Dane knew it intimately.

He had been brought up in it.

It was his parents’ home.

The pattern was now clear except for one point... the most important point.

Everything about his father’s extraordinary precautions smacked of secrecy. The elder McKell on Wednesday afternoons had his chauffeur drive him in the Bentley to the Cricket Club. The Bentley was left in the garage behind the club, and Ramon, given a few hours off, discreetly vanished. Meanwhile Ashton McKell changed clothes in his room at the club. He sneaked out through the rear entrance, picked up the Continental, and drove away. In Central Park, at a secluded spot, he stopped the car, got into the rear of the tonneau, and applied his disguise. Then he drove over to a garage — he probably uses different ones, Dane thought — left the Continental, and took a taxi to the corner of the Park Avenue block where the McKell apartment building stood. And it was all so timed that he would enter the building while the doorman was at his dinner — a precaution against being recognized, in spite of the disguise, by John. He ran a lesser risk on leaving the building, when the doorman was back on duty, for John would not pay as much attention to a departing visitor as to an incoming one. The medical bag alone gave him some of the invisibility of Chesterton’s postman.

And when he left, he simply went back to the garage where he had parked the Continental, drove down to the Cricket Club after removing his make-up — probably in Central Park again — changed back into his ordinary clothes in his room at the club, and had Ramon, back on duty, drive him home in the Bentley.

The unexplained question was: Whom was he doing all this for? Whom was he visiting in his own apartment building?

Dane waited for the tall gray-uniformed figure of the doorman to reappear under the canopy.

“Oh, Mr. Dane,” the doorman said. “Mrs. McKell isn’t in.”

“Any notion where she went, John, or when she’ll be back?”

“She went to that Mr. Cohen’s gallery to see some rugs, she said.” The doorman, as usual, transformed Mir Khan from Pakistani to a more comfortable New York name. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

The doorman’s “I don’t know” sounded rather like I dawn’t knaw. John Leslie was a “Geordie,” or Tynesider, from the north of England; and his speech came out both Irish and Scottish, with rich overtones of South Carolina. In his teens Dane had smoked forbidden cigarets in Leslie’s basement apartment, left and received messages there which presumably would have been frowned upon by his parents.

“Well,” Dane said with deliberate indecisiveness. Then, with a laugh: “Incidentally, John, I noticed a man going into the building a while ago whom I’d never seen here before. While you were at dinner. Gray hair, chin whiskers, wearing glasses, and carrying a medical bag. Is somebody sick?”

“That would be Miss Grey’s doctor,” said John Leslie. “I saw him leave a few times and asked Miss Grey once who he was, and she said Dr. Stone. How are you coming along with your book, Mr. Dane? You must tell us when they print it, now. The missus and me have your other books, and we like them champion.”

“Thanks, John.” Dane knew that his two books lay in the Leslies’ cabinet beside their picture of the Royal Family. “Oh, don’t mention to Mother that I’ve been by. She’d feel bad about missing me.”

Dane made his way to Lexington Avenue and a bar that advertised No Television. The interior was cool and smelled of malt, as a proper bar should, and not of spaghetti sauce and meat balls, as a proper bar should not. He ordered a gin and tonic and drank it and ordered another.

Miss Grey. Sheila Grey.

So she was “the other woman.”

It was a proper shock.

Sheila Grey, rated on anyone’s list, was among the Top Ten of international haute couture. And she was not much older than Dane (old enough, he thought, to be the old bull’s daughter). In the United States her reputation as a fashion designer made her one of the Top Three; there were some who acclaimed her first among equals. She had the penthouse.

Dane reorganized his emotions. Whatever this was, it was no longer an ordinary liaison. Ash McKell certainly was not “keeping” Sheila Grey, who could well afford half a dozen penthouses; this could not be an affair of love-for-money. Could it be — he felt a chill — love? In that case, God help Mother!

And now the theatricalism made a little more sense. You couldn’t meet a woman like Sheila Grey in a motel somewhere, or tuck her out of sight in the Westchester countryside. She would be strongly independent; as far as Dane knew, she was not married; if a lover were to rendezvous with her, it would have to be in her apartment. Since her apartment happened to be in the same building occupied by her lover and his wife, he could only visit her surreptitiously. Ash McKell had chosen disguise.

It must make him wriggle, Dane thought. His father’s conservatism was constantly embattled with his zest for living; in this, as in other respects, he was a paradox. He would writhe at the necessity of making a fool of himself, at the same time that he mastered the technique of theatrical make-up. It was really rather skillfully done.

But then everything Ash McKell set out to do he did skillfully. Dane had never known that his father knew karate until the night they caught a sneak thief in the McKell apartment. His father had broken the man’s wrist and three of his ribs with no more than a few blurred gestures.

Dane ordered a third gin and tonic, and over this one he felt anger return. It was all very complex, no doubt, but there was nothing complex about Ashton McKell’s romance. To commit adultery almost directly over his wife’s head! It was plain vulgarity, mean as hell.

Did his mother know that her rival occupied the penthouse?

Dane tossed off his drink. Whether she knew or not (and if he were betting on it, he would have bet that she knew), something had to be done.

He did not attempt to rationalize the compulsion, any more than he could have rationalized his feelings toward his mother. She was silly, arbitrary, hopelessly old-fashioned, out of place and time, and he adored her. Whether he adored her because of what she was or in spite of it did not matter. Her reason for being was threatened, and who else was there to remove the threat?

Now a rather leering interloper crept into his thoughts.

What to do next... break up the affair, certainly, but how? He asked the question, not rhetorically — he had no doubt that it could be done — but in order to organize his modus operandi... That was when the intruder crept in.

For the first time, under the liberating influence of the alcohol, Dane admitted to himself that his feelings were not unmixed. He did feel sorry for his mother. He did feel angry with his father. But why was he also feeling enjoyment? Self-satisfaction, really?

Dane ordered another gin and tonic.

First, there had been the ridiculous ease with which he had uncovered the identity of his father’s paramour, and their trysting place. Small as the triumph was, it gratified him. We all like to think we’re so noble, he reflected, when what really pleases us in our relationships with others is our little part in events, not theirs.

To self-satisfaction he had to add excitement. The emotion was definitely there, his personal response to a challenge. It derived from the nature of the situation. It was a story situation — one of the oldest in literature, true; still, it might have come from anyone’s typewriter. It raised plot questions. How would I handle it if it were a situation in one of my stories? Could people be manipulated in life as handily as on paper? If they could... Here was real creation! — the creation of action and reaction in context with a cast of flesh-and-blood characters, one of whom was himself.

And the delicious, the best part of it was that it would be done without any of the principals being in the least aware that they were puppets!

Am I a monster? Dane wondered, sipping moodily at his fourth gin and tonic. But then aren’t all writers monsters? Cannibals feeding off the flesh of friends and enemies alike, converting them into a different form of energy for the sheer joy of digestion? (And how much of it, Dane thought ruefully, followed the human economy and went down the drain!) The truth was, any writer worth his salt would give a year off his life for a chance like this. (Thackeray coming downstairs, weeping. “What is the matter, Henry? “I have just killed Colonel Newcombe!” How the old boy would have risen, like a trout to the lure, to such an opportunity!) It was commonplace for authors to make lemonade out of the lemons handed them by life, and poor pink stuff it became, too. How would the real thing look and taste...?

By his sixth gin Dane was drawing bold lines on the table with the condensation from his glass. Thus, thus, and thus:

He would contrive to meet Sheila Grey.

He would make love to her.

He would make her love him.

He would displace his father in her life.

That should do it.

How would his father react to being deposed by his son? Or by having to “share the latchkey” with him (Dane’s writing mind foresaw the possibility that this Sheila, still uncomprehended, might be the sort of woman to whom the notion of sleeping with father and son on alternate nights was amusing)? Of course, he felt sorry for the old man (how old is old, Dane?). The blow to his ego would be shattering. Well, serve him right. Send him back where he belongs, to Mother.

After that, what? Drop her, go back to work? Why not? Serve her right, breaking up a solid ’Murrican home, Episcopal yet! Dane chuckled, the chuckle turning giggly.

There was no doubt in his mind, after the seventh gin and tonic, that he could pull it off. What the deuce ’d she look like? He tried vainly to recall. He had passed her in the lobby on three or four occasions, but each encounter had happened to coincide with a love affair, when other women hardly existed for him. He had seen her photo in Vogue and the Sunday papers several times, but her face remained a blank. She couldn’t be outstandingly ugly, or some impression would have lingered. So she must be relatively pleasant to look at, thank heaven.

He decided to order just one more drink.

He was hung over when the telephone rang on his desk. The shrilling made him wince. It was all of a piece with his general outlook on life this morning, for his cogitations had led him into a cul-de-sac, and he had not yet worked his way out of it.

In sober determination to act boldly, he had composed imaginary dialogue for their opening conversation:

Miss Grey, I’m working on another novel — I don’t know if you’ve seen my earlier ones...?

I’m afraid not, Mr. McKell, although I’ve heard about them. (That seemed a reasonable preconstruction. The elder McKell could hardly have avoided mentioning his son’s literary achievements, such as they were, and Sheila Grey, a VIP in her own right, could hardly be construed as caring a damn.)

My books haven’t raised anything yet but a slight stench, I’m afraid. But I have high hopes for this one — if you’ll help me.

If I’ll help you, Mr. McKell? (That would be the raised-eyebrow department. Perhaps a shade interested.)

You see, Miss Grey, one of my leading characters is that of a famous dress designer. If I wanted to research a cab driver, all I’d have to do is ride around in cabs. But a great fashion figure — I’m afraid you’re the only accessible one I’ve heard of. Or am I presuming?

Ordinarily what she would say was You certainly are, but under the circumstances he foresaw a Well... just how can I help you?

The secret of making people interested in you, Dane had learned, lay not in helping them but in getting them to help you. By letting me watch you at work would be the irresistible response. She was bound, no matter how jaded fame had made her, to be flattered.

Or was she?

Here was where Dane’s hangover had ached.

Sheila Grey might be flattered if he were Tom Brown or Harry Schnitzelbach. But he was Ashton McKell’s son. His head throbbed with caution. To achieve an appointment he would have to give her his name. And no matter how little time elapsed between his request for an appointment and his plea for her help, it would be more than long enough to set her to wondering.

And to becoming forewarned and, therefore, forearmed.

It wouldn’t do.

So he had been prowling his apartment, chewing on his thoughts, trying to crack the problem. If you can’t go through, go around kept running about in his head. But he could not think of how to go around.

That was when the telephone rang, and he winced and answered it.

It was Sarah Vernier.

“You’re annoyed, Dane,” she said. “I can tell. I’ve interrupted your work.”

“No, Aunt Sarah, it’s just that—”

“Dear, I simply wanted to know if you’d come up to Twenty Deer for the weekend.”

Mrs. Vernier was not his aunt, she was his godmother; and it was not spiritual consanguinity that drew them together but a mutual fondness of long standing. Twenty Deer had been one of his favorite places as a boy; and Sarah Vernier’s charm, plus the excellence of her table and her French husband’s cellar, preserved its attractions for him as an adult. It was the estate near Rhinebeck which — before his mother’s revelation — had been one of his possible choices for the weekend he had sworn not to spend in the city.

“I’m afraid it’s impossible, Aunt Sarah,” Dane said.

“Shoot!” she said. “What is it with everyone? Somebody must be spreading the rumor that we have the plague up here.”

“I wish I could come, I really do.”

“I’ll bet you do. It’s a new girl, isn’t it, you devil?” Mrs. Vernier sounded pleased. “Tell me about her.”

“It’s worse. A new book, Aunt Sarah.”

“Oh, dear, that obsession of yours.” The weekend was ruined, no one was coming to Twenty Deer, she would be alone with Jacques — sweet man, wasn’t he? but one of those infernal enthusiasts. Two years ago it was organic farming, last year orchids, now it’s falcons.

“Messy, smelly, savage things,” said Mrs. Vernier. “Fortunately, he keeps them in the barn, so I’m spared the sight of them. As a result, of course, I never see Jacques, either. I’ve half a mind to come into town, just to teach him a lesson.”

And, “Why don’t you?” said Dane strongly.

It was as easy as that. In a moment he would be astonished at the speed of his inspiration; now he had time for nothing but following it up.

“But everyone’s away, dear,” Sarah Vernier said. “No one at all is left in New York.”

“You can always,” Dane said, “do some shopping.”

“But with whom? You’re aware, my dear, that your mother is no fun, bless her — she might as well get her things from the Salvation Army. And you’re too busy. Or,” she asked suddenly, “are you?”

“For you, Aunt Sarah? Never!”

So easy. Sarah Vernier and her shopping were proverbial in and about their circle. It was one of the few subjects on which she could be a bore. So Dane knew all about her favorite shopping places.

As usual, she began with trivia and worked her way up. She visited Tiffany’s and ordered — for her husband — cuff links with falcons on them. Then she picked up two cut-glass toothpick holders at the Carriage House for her collection. At a “new little place” in the East 80s she (eventually) came away with a “darling” hat. At Leo Ottmiller’s bookshop, since the falcon-ridden Jacques’s happiness was still on her conscience, Mrs. Vernier purchased The Boke of the Hawke.

They lunched at the Colony.

She attacked her vichyssoise and cold chicken with good appetite. “Where shall we go next?” she asked. “Oh, Dane, this was an inspiration. I’m having such fun!”

“Macy’s?”

“Don’t be wicked. I know!” she cried. “Sheila Grey’s.”

And Dane said — as if he had not brought Sarah Vernier half the length of the Hudson Valley for this sole purpose without her slightest suspicion of it — “Sheila Grey’s? Of course,” with just the right touch of vagueness. He must have heard her say it a hundred times: I always get my things at Sheila Grey’s.

On the sidewalk outside the Colony, she said, “You look like a porter on safari. Why don’t we leave the packages somewhere?”

“They’re light as air.” It was an important part of his plan to arrive at his goal looking the very picture of Gentleman Helping Lady on Extended Shopping Tour. He handed her into the taxicab before she could insist.

So here they were.

Sheila Grey’s Fifth Avenue salon.

While Mrs. Vernier was exchanging greetings with the sharply tailored, gray-haired chief of saleswomen, Dane artfully wandered off, still holding his godmother’s packages. He did not want to set them down. Not just yet.

He had become genuinely interested in the reproduction of a Pieter de Hooch — whoever selected the pictures in the salon had evidently not learned his trade at the feet of those who decorated American hotel rooms with thousands of mock-Utrillos and pseudo-Georgia O’Keefes — when a voice behind him said, “Let me take those from you, Mr. McKell.”

Wheeling, he looked into the face of a woman his own age, chic, a little abstracted, the tidiest bit untidy. Dane was about to decline when she simply took the packages from him.

“My name is Sheila Grey, Mr. McKell.”

It could not have been more beautifully executed if he had prepared two weeks for this moment. He had not seen her approach, he had not recognized her, and his reaction was therefore genuine.

“Thanks, Miss Grey. How stupid of me not to recognize you.”

She handed the packages to a young woman who had materialized from somewhere and just as promptly snuffed herself out; and she smiled.

“There’s no reason why you should. If you were a female, I’d be worried.”

Dane murmured something.

His heart had not jumped; his flesh was not crawling; he was feeling neither rage nor contempt. He was wondering why when Sarah Vernier came up, beaming. “Sheila, this is my godson, Dane McKell. Isn’t he lovely?”

“I’d hardly select that adjective, Mrs. Vernier,” Sheila Grey smiled. “Or don’t you object to it, Mr. McKell?”

“I never object to anything Aunt Sarah says, Miss Grey. Incidentally, how did you know who I am?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You addressed me by name twice a few moments ago.”

“Did I?” Did her make-up conceal the slightest flush? “I suppose I must have known who you were from seeing you in the lobby of your parents’ apartment building. You know I have the penthouse?”

“Of course,” said Dane ruefully. “This is my stupid day.”

She was neither short nor tall. She was slender, on the pale side (or was that her make-up?), with lustrous brown hair and gray, gray eyes. Her features were so regular that they seemed to Dane to have no character; certainly he would never have invented her as a femme fatale for a book. He wondered what had attracted his father, who had access — if he wanted to take advantage of his opportunities — to scores of far more beautiful women. It was not her youth alone; youth could be bought, or rented. There had to be something special about her; and he felt a slight anticipation.

“Is this part of the international couturière’s image?” Dane asked, gazing around. “I mean all this unoccupied space? Or do you have invisible customers, Miss Grey?”

“They’re invisible at this time of the year.” She smiled back. “The summer doldrums are at their height. Or is it depth? However you measure doldrums.”

“I’m not enough of a sea-dog to know.”

“Dane, I thought writers knew everything,” said Sarah Vernier, delighted at the opening thus presented to her. “You know, Sheila, Dane’s in town working on his new book.”

“Then you and I are in the same leaky boat, Mr. McKell.” Her eyebrows (unplucked, he noticed) had gone up.

“You’re writing a book, too? On haute couture, I suppose.”

“Heavens, I can barely write my name.” He rather liked her laugh; it was fresh and brisk and brief, like a frank handshake. “No, I’m staying in town to work on my new collection.” Sarah Vernier went, “Ohhhhhh...!” with a rising inflection. The showing was scheduled for November, the designer went on. “I should really be home at my drawing board right now. In fact...” Dane saw that she was preparing gracefully to withdraw.

“Sheila, you mustn’t!” wailed Mrs. Vernier. After all, she had come all the way from Rhinebeck, no one else could wait on her properly, she wanted summer and fall things, too — “Dane, help me.”

“I’d be the last one to keep another suffering soul from creative agony, Miss Grey, but if you’ll spare Aunt Sarah a little more of your time I’ll drive you home afterward.”

And “There!” exclaimed Mrs. Vernier in a you-can’t-refuse-now tone of voice. And “Oh, no, no, that won’t be necessary—” Sheila, hurriedly. And how do you like the pressure, dear heart...? Dane went on boyishly: He had never met a designer before, he threw himself on her fellow craftsmanship, and so on. “And think of poor Aunt Sarah, doomed to wear the same miserable rags.”

“I’ll have you know, Mr. McKell, those ‘rags’ came from my shop.”

“Oh, but Sheila,” cried Mrs. Vernier, “I got them here in April.”

“The riposte supreme,” Dane murmured. “Surely you can’t expect a woman to wear clothes she bought in April? It’s unconstitutional, Miss Grey.”

“Is that a sample of your dialogue?” Sheila dimpled. “Well, all right. But if the French and Italians sweep ahead of us next season, you’ll know just where the fault lies.”

“I accept the awesome responsibility. I’ll turn myself over for being spat upon and stoned.”

“While I go bankrupt. Now, Mr. McKell, you sit over there on that chesterfield and twiddle your thumbs. This is women’s work.”

It was clear that she was, if not exactly interested, at least amused. Perhaps, too, the element of danger contributed to her decision. Or am I overstating the situation? Dane thought. Maybe she figures this is the easiest way to get rid of me. Give the little boy what he wants and then send him off with Auntie.

“Sheila, what do you think about this one?”

“I don’t. Billie, take that away. Bring the blue and white shantung.” After a while, skillfully, the designer had Sarah Vernier almost entirely in the charge of her staff, while she sat beside Dane and they chatted about books and New York in midsummer and a dozen other things. Occasionally she put in a word to resolve a doubt of Mrs. Vernier’s, or overrule a suggestion of her salespeople. It was all most adroitly done. She can handle people, Dane thought. I wonder just how she goes about handling Dad.

“I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon,” Sheila Grey said suddenly, rising. Dane jumped up. “Mrs. Vernier won’t have to wear rags after all. Now I really must get home.”

“I’ll drive you, as promised.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, Mr. McKell, although it’s noble of you to make the offer. You have to take care of Mrs. Vernier. I’ll grab a taxi.”

“Supper?” he asked quickly.

She looked at him — almost, he thought, for the first time. Had he pulled a boner? Going too fast? She had remarkable directness in her cool gray eyes that warned him to be very cautious indeed.

“Why would you want to take me to supper, Mr. McKell?”

“I have ulterior motives. The fact is, I have to research a designer — and I can’t think of a pleasanter way to do it, by the way, now that I’ve met the woman Aunt Sarah’s raved about so long. Is it a date?”

“It is not. I’m going home and working right through the weekend.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve made a bloody pest of myself.”

“Not at all. It’s I who’s sounding ungracious. I could lunch with you on Monday.”

“Would you? That’s awfully kind. One-ish? One-thirty? Name the time and place, Miss Grey.”

Sheila hesitated. It seemed to Dane that she found herself in a dilemma. That means I’m not repulsive to her, he thought; and he felt a tingle suddenly.

“If you’re really interested in my work, in the whole area of fashion... Tell you what, Mr. McKell. Why don’t you plan to get here a bit earlier Monday? Say, at noon? Then we can go over some of the basic things.”

“Wonderful,” said Dane. “You can’t know what this means to me, Miss Grey. Monday at noon, then. Aunt Sarah?”

“Oh, you two do like each other,” cried Mrs. Vernier, glowing.

Dane had been normally aware that women wore clothes and that their creation was a matter of considerably more moment than, say, the designing of a nuclear flattop. He knew vaguely that there was rivalry between the Continental and American dress houses, and that it resulted in a secrecy that made the answer to Does Macy’s tell Gimbel’s? meekly affirmative. But he was hardly prepared to find Pinkerton guards standing watch over every nook and cranny of Sheila Grey’s establishment except the salon itself.

“It’s almost like the CIA!” he exclaimed.

The comparison was not inexact. In a hugely different degree, on an infinitely smaller scale, the behind-the-scenes scenes of high fashion did have a faint air of the Pentagon gone mad. Men with the dedicated look of the career idealist, women who gave the impression of having studied at the secretive feet of Mata Hari, zealous underlings of the three sexes, and assorted females who could have been camp followers, sat poring over plans, screwed up their tired eyes at sketches, moved from office to office in zombi-like withdrawal; they examined swatches as if the bits of material were secret weapons, and peered with tucked-in lips at lovely young models who, for all the excitement their beauty generated, might have been made of plastic. Here clothes were the only living things.

“And this is an annual event?” Dane asked.

“Yes. Let me show you.” Dane followed Sheila, attending her litany — Marc Bohan of Dior, Crahay of Nina Ricci, Castillo of Lanvin (like so many medieval saints, or feudatories, or even Isaac of York or Macdonald of the Isles), Cardin, Chanel, Jacques Heim, Balmain, Goma, Vernet, and the all but hallowed Yves St. Laurent. From Sheila’s tone, Dane gathered that St. Laurent could cure scrofula by a laying on of hands.

“And that’s just France,” Sheila was saying.

He was actually taking notes.

“It’s like wine,” Sheila explained. “Any reasonable Frenchman will admit that certain French wines are inferior to their American counterparts. But we’re such snobs! We’d rather tipple a mediocre vintage with a French label than a first-rate California. It’s the same with clothes. All right, St. Laurent is tops. But it’s not because he’s French, it’s because he’s St. Laurent. Another thing that blows me sky-high is the women who won’t wear a gown unless it’s designed by a man. It makes me want to spit!”

“It becomes you,” said Dane. It did, too; anger put color into her cheeks, and a sparkle in her eyes that made them flash.

She stopped herself with one of her fresh, quick laughs. “Let’s go to lunch.”

“I had forgotten lunch could be fun,” Sheila Grey said. “Thank you, Mr. McKell.”

“Could you make it Dane?”

“Dane. Are you sure you’re writing a book with a designer-character in it?”

“Why would you doubt it?”

“I suppose I don’t care for people with hidden motives.” She laughed. “I’m always on the watch.”

“The only hidden motive I could have would be very personal, and I can’t imagine any woman resenting that.”

“At this point,” said Sheila, rising, “I’ve got to get back to the galleys.”

“Can we do this again soon? Tomorrow?”

“I shouldn’t...”

“Another session at your place, then lunch again?”

“Get thee behind me! All right, I surrender,” and that was that. He took her back to Fifth Avenue, and she talked shop all the way, Dane scribbling away.

Taking stock of the afternoon, he came to certain conclusions about Sheila Grey. She was accessible, at least in the sense that what Sheila fancied, Sheila took. Had her affair with his father begun in much the same way — directly, without persiflage? Had she run into Ashton McKell in the elevator, decided then and there, This man is for me, and invited him up for a drink?

He found himself wishing that he were meeting her under other circumstances. He admired her honesty of mind and manner, her forthright differences from most women — even the sprinkle of freckles he had faintly made out in natural light. Oddly, she did not arouse a man’s fighting instinct in the battle of the sexes. You could move comfortably in on her, without fuss, and she would either reject or accept in an uncomplicated way. He liked that.

Dane sighed. Between himself and Sheila Grey stood his father’s selfish arrogance and his mother’s helpless self-denial. This woman had chosen to become his father’s mistress a couple of dozen feet above the head of his mother; she would have to take the consequences.

But the only sinister thing in their growing relationship skulked in his own heart. Sheila was delightful. She chewed popcorn like the teenagers around them in a drive-in movie, watching a Blob from Outer Space crush tiny people underfoot and topple buildings until the clean-limbed young scientist with the gorgeous laboratory assistant destroyed him with his newly invented death ray. She clapped her hands at a tiny place he introduced her to, run by devotees of a Hindu sect, and ate her curds and whey as if she had stepped out of a Mother Goose book. When the bearded proprietor pressed a piece of fig candy on her, saying, “It promotes regularity, Sahibah,” Sheila smiled, and took it, and remarked, “I wish something could be done to promote regularity in high fashion. We caught someone using a miniature camera this morning. Naturally I fired him and destroyed the film. But you can’t help wondering if somebody got away with it yesterday. We’ll know about it if copies of our line go on sale on 14th Street, selling for $7.98, the day after our fall showing.”

It appeared that the art of couture espionage was highly developed. “I could give you material for a dozen novels,” Sheila said moodily.

“I’m having enough trouble with this one,” Dane said, grinning. “Incidentally, how about dinner at eight?”

This time her gaze impaled him. “You’re silly,” she said. “Nice, though. I’ll be wearing a mantilla and chewing on a red, red rose.”

Dane began to feel uneasy. Things were going too well. But then he shook the feeling off.

They dined at a little Belgian restaurant with outrageous prices, took a ferry ride to Staten Island, visited Hoboken, where they strolled about for a bit, agreeing that parts of the city had a Continental air — Dane compared it to the 14th Arondissement. On the ferry coming back, standing side by side in the bow, he took Sheila’s hand. She might have been any woman he liked. Her fingers lay cool and friendly in his clasp; the breeze lifted her hair and played with it. The great docks loomed, and Dane felt a twinge. Quite without calculation he said, “How about the Central Park Zoo tomorrow? The grilled armadillo there is out of this world.”

“You’d produce it, too.” Sheila’s laugh sounded wistful. “No, Dane, I’ve been playing hooky far too long. You’re wicked-bad for me.”

“Supper? I know an Armenian joint—”

“I really can’t, I’m too far behind. Tomorrow is out.”

Tomorrow was Wednesday. The thought struck him like a club. Of course. She wouldn’t date Yves St. Laurent himself on a Wednesday night. Wednesday nights were reserved for Daddy-o.

But there were other days and nights — the fights, the ballet, opera in a Connecticut barn, a county fair, a formal dinner at Pavillon one night and chopped liver at Lindy’s the next. On several occasions they spent the evening at Sheila’s apartment, listening to the hi-fi or viewing the summer re-runs on TV. On such occasions Sheila fed him.

“I have an understanding with the frozen-food people,” she told Dane, paraphrasing the old joke. “They don’t design clothes and I don’t stand over a hot cookbook.”

“Don’t apologize,” Dane said. “TV dinners constitute our only native art-form.”

She laughed, throwing her head back. Viewing the cream-smooth neck, he felt a lecherous stir and wondered if he shouldn’t encourage it. After all, he had been squiring her around for some time now without a single pass. Wouldn’t she begin to wonder?

The phone rang. Still laughing, Sheila answered it. “Oh, hi,” she said, in a remarkably different tone, moving back into the chair; and Dane sighed — the moment had gone. “How are you?... No, I’m fine... I couldn’t say.” She glanced at Dane, a mere flicker, and he said to himself: It’s my father. He got up and went to the window, and her voice sank. The reflection showed him a scowling and — it seemed to him — evil face.

“I’d like a drink,” Sheila said from behind him. The phone call was over; comedy, recommence! “Something tall and ginny. Be my bartender?”

He turned to her; they were face to — the image persisted, it seemed to him — evil face. She seemed faded, even coarse, the smile on her lips complacent. This is the way of an adulterous woman,/ She eateth and wipeth her mouth and sayeth,/ I have done no wrong... He felt sick at heart, and he was glad of the excuse to turn away and tinker with bottles and ice cubes.

From time to time Sheila received other telephone calls — twice in her office while he was with her, twice more in her apartment — which, he assumed from her guarded tone, were also from his father.

One night at the end of August they attended an old movie in an art theater on the Lower East Side; it was almost 3 A.M. when they emerged. In the car he put his arm around her. She slipped away. “I don’t believe in one-arm driving. Isn’t this safer?” She put her arm around him.

In spite of himself, Dane felt a shiver. “Shall we stop somewhere? How about Ratner’s and a glass of borsht?”

“That pink soup with sour cream in it?” Sheila pursed her lips. “I think I’d prefer a nightcap. Let’s have it at my place.”

“All right.”

It seemed natural. Entering the apartment building lobby was, as always when he was in Sheila’s company, something of a shock — knowing that his parents lay asleep overhead — but he had steeled himself by this time; he did not dwell on it. He did not dwell on much of anything these days.

“Come in, Dane.”

“I’m suddenly reminded,” Dane said, following Sheila into the penthouse apartment, “of the experience of a friend of mine. He accepted the offer of a tropical-looking beauty he met at a party to come up and have a nightcap in her apartment, and when they walked in, lo, there pacing the floor was an economy-size ocelot. Arthur swears it was as big as a leopard. Needless to say, all he got that night was a drink, and he spilled half of that on the rug.”

“Well, my ocelot got the evening off,” Sheila said, “so don’t spill yours. Not on this rug. Handwoven in Jutland, I’ll have you know. Name your poison, pardner.”

The living room, furnished in Scandinavian Modern, was dimly lighted. Always peaceful-looking, it seemed extraordinarily so on this occasion. A feeling of contentment invaded Dane, in the van of which marched a wiry little excitement. It was the queerest thing. Sheila mixed their drinks at her bar, humming to herself the absurd tune to an absurd W. C. Fields song they had heard at the art movies; she reached for the ice, and he caught a quiet smile on her face.

So it happened — not by calculation, not with his father standing aghast and outraged in the living-room archway, not as part of a created plot, but as naturally as breathing. Dane put his arms around her. Sheila turned with the same smile, lifted her perfect face and half closed her eyes, and they kissed.

Her lips, her body, were sweet and soft and full. He had never thought of her body before except in a repellent image, lying in his father’s hairy arms.

Dane heard her say, “I’m glad you waited, darling,” saw her hand him his drink, raise her own. They drank in silence, looking into each other’s eyes. Then Dane set his glass down and took her hand, her strong white little hand with the smudge of violet India ink on the palm, and he kissed it, a brush of his lips; and left.

As he undressed for bed, the thought occurred to him for the first time that night: I’ve accomplished my purpose. I’ve got her. Now all I have to do is arrange the pay-off.

But it’s gone all to pot.

And the horrifying thought: I’ve fallen in love with her.

He was in love with his father’s mistress. It was not as if the kiss symbolized a beginning; it was an ending, a climax of days and nights of exploration and intermingling of ideas and attitudes and laughter and close silences; a seal to a compact they — he — had never suspected they were making. I’m glad you waited, darling... It was the same with her; she had experienced the special quality of their relationship, sealed with the kiss. If there was a beginning at all, it was not the beginning of an affair; it was the beginning of a lifetime.

Suddenly the whole incredible structure crashed about his head. Whom was he punishing? His father, yes; but his mother more. Himself most of all.

It was not supposed to be that way. It was all wrong, twisted out of any semblance to the shape he had been fashioning. Everyone was going to be hurt — mother, father, himself... and Sheila.

He tossed for most of what was left of the night.

Dane awakened to a sense of purpose, almost recklessness. That was the way it had worked out. The hell with everything else.

But with breakfast came caution. Think it over, he told himself, don’t rush it, perhaps you’re reading a fantasy into what could have been a mere kiss of the moment, as meaningless to you as to Sheila. He did not really feel that way, and he was sure that Sheila did not; still, it had to be taken into account. Take a day or so to simmer down, to let matters adjust themselves to some realistic yardstick.

As the day wore on he found himself hungering for her voice. Work was out of the question. Suppose by his silence he made her think he was having second thoughts? She mustn’t think that, mustn’t. Besides... that voice, that deep and husky telephone quality it did not have at other times...

“Sheila! Dane.”

“I know.”

It was like warm honey, that voice.

“I’ve got to see you. Tonight? This afternoon?”

“No, Dane, I want to think.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Sheila.”

She did not reply at once, as if she were fighting him, or herself. “I know, Dane,” she finally said. “Tomorrow.”

She came straight into his arms. There was a nerve in the hollow of her throat that jumped when he kissed it. It was some time before he said anything. Then he held her close and said, “Sheila, I want you to marry me.”

“I know, Dane.”

She knew!

“Then you will?” he cried.

“No.”

It was like setting his foot down where a step should have been, but was not. A scalding wave of humiliation washed over him; and suddenly he thought of his father. This was how his father would feel; this was his punishment for having planned the whole dirty thing. Was she laughing at him? Had she seen through him from the start?

He looked at her wildly.

“Darling, I’m not refusing you,” murmured Sheila, and she took his head between her hands and kissed him on the lips.

“I guess I’m too thick-witted to get it.”

“I love you, Dane. You can have me right now. But not as your wife.”

Not as my wife? “Are you married?” She was married...

“Heavens, no!” She laughed at that. Then she looked into his face and without a word went to the bar and splashed brandy into a snifter and held the glass to his lips. He took it from her roughly.

“You mean you’ll sleep with me,” he said, “but you won’t marry me.”

“That’s right, darling.”

“But you just said you love me.”

“I do.”

“Then I don’t understand!”

She stroked his cheek. “I suppose you considered yourself a thoroughly seasoned old rip, and here you have to discover that you’re just a sweet old square. No, not yet, Dane. I must get this over to you. It’s important to both of us.”

What she went on to say was not at all what he was expecting. She made no reference to Ashton McKell; she was not, after all, rejecting a new love in favor of the incumbent. She had known for some time, she told Dane, that she loved him.

“I’m speaking only for myself, dearest — I know my ideas are anti-social, and that society couldn’t exist if everyone acted according to my views. I’m essentially a selfish woman, Dane. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to people; but I’m most concerned with what happens to me in this very short life we’re given. I suppose I’m a materialist. My notion of love doesn’t require marriage to consummate it, that’s all. In fact — I’m speaking only for myself — I reject the whole concept of marriage. I’m no more capable of being happy as a housewife, or a country club gal, or a young suburban matron than I am of renouncing the world and taking the veil.

“Maybe love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, as the song says,” Sheila went on, taking his cold hand, “but I’m an electronic-age-type dame. To me a ring on the finger is like a ring in the nose. What a mockery modern marriage is! No wonder divorce is one of our leading industries. I can’t stomach the hypocrisy of marriage, so I side-step it. Can you picture me billing and cooing ten years after in a vine-covered cottage beside a waterfall?”

She laughed. He looked at her woodenly.

“The trouble is, of course, that I don’t need a man to support me. I certainly don’t need your money — I have plenty of my own. I don’t hanker after social position; I have a pretty elevated position in my own sector of society. And I certainly couldn’t subordinate myself to your career, because I have my own — what’s worse, mine is made, while yours is still in the making. Marriage is all right for women in a bourgeois society...”

“What about children?” Dane asked her bitterly. “Doesn’t your advanced concept include the little matter of children?”

“Not especially. Let those propagate the race who can’t propagate anything else; Lord knows there are enough of them. I love children as much as the next woman, but in this life we have to make hard choices. I’ve made mine, and motherhood has no place in it. So you see, Dane, what you’ve fallen in love with.”

“I see, yes,” he said.

“We can be happy without marriage. As long as we stay in love. Don’t you see that, darling?”

It seemed to him there was anxiety in her eyes. As for him, the Grand Marnier was gone by now, together with his anger and most of his sickness. Only emptiness was left.

“No, Sheila, I don’t. I don’t say what you propose is immoral — the hell with that; it’s worse. It’s impractical. If marriage without love is hateful, so is love without marriage. It has to creep instead of walk, skulk in dark corners, hide—”

“It has to do no such thing,” Sheila retorted. Her head was cocked, her tone cool. “You’re talking like a schoolboy, darling, do you know that? Last night — satisfied with a kiss in the dark. Really, Dane! And now this goody-goody talk. What’s next? Are you going to tell me you’ve been keeping yourself chaste for your one and only little wifie? The difference between us is that you’re a romantic, and I’m a merchant realist.”

So there it was — the shrew hidden in every woman, the flash of carnivorous teeth, the bite.

He had thought of himself as taking his pleasure when and where he could create it, a reasonably sophisticated man. And here was Sheila, making him feel like a — what had she called him? — a schoolboy! Looking at her, he felt abjectly estranged. No trace of warmth or womanliness seemed left in the symmetrical face before him. It was like a Greek sculpture, smoothly inscrutable with secrets buried in time. Her philosophy was as far beyond him as his was beyond his mother’s. Maybe he was still a Yaley at heart: have fun while you’re unattached, then settle down with a wife — have fun afterward, too, if you could get away with it.

But Sheila’s philosophy seemed contemptuous of any standard. He was sure he could never catch up with her, even surer that he didn’t want to. And yet... a line from a poem he had jeered at came into his head: La Belle Dame sans Merci/ Hath thee in thrall.

It was as if she knew it, for she chuckled; and even this tiny sound from her throat made him hunger.

“Oh, Dane, don’t look so woebegone,” she cried. “Instead of being married lovers, we’ll be lovers, period. Dane... don’t tell me you’ve never had a woman!” She looked at him with absolute horror.

He was glad that she was not smiling when she said it, or he might have leaped at her. The brandy had been a mere stopgap; the beginning of the old feared roaring stirred in his ears. Careful, he warned himself; keep control, as he felt his hands become fists.

“Yes, I’ve had women, but I must seem impossibly old-fashioned to you. Because I’m strictly a one-woman man. Well, I’ve had my share of disappointments. This seems to be another of them.”

“Oh, Dane.” She moved away a little. “You say you’re a one-woman man. Don’t you mean you’re a one-woman-at-a-time man? And that’s just right with me. I shouldn’t want it any other way. I’ve no intention of sharing you with somebody. We’re not far apart at all. Isn’t that true?” When his mouth clamped tighter, Sheila said, “I don’t mean I’d never consider marriage. In a way, it would be up to you to show me that marriage — with you — is what I really want.

“But I don’t want it at this particular time, not even with you. I’m a one-man-at-a-time gal, and right now that man can be you. But you must understand that while I’d be yours and yours only, I don’t know for how long. A week, a month, five years — maybe forever; how can either of us tell? You notify me when you want out, and I’ll do the same.”

Was he, could he really be, in love with her?

Dane began to pace, and Sheila sat back and watched him with that same trace of anxiety. Did this mean she was giving the old man the gate? Or was she playing some sort of game with both of them? Damn this development! It had really fouled everything up. (How could love foul up anything? So maybe he wasn’t in love with her after all.)

He stopped before the ottoman and took her hands in his. “All right, baby, we’ll let the plot write itself. On your terms. Maybe I’ve escaped a fate worse than death. Lovers, is it? Let’s get started.”

Her arms tugged, and he let himself fall.

The next morning he was in a more comfortable frame of mind. Having savored the taste and depths of her, he could not doubt her. It was not a game — however brief it might turn out to be, it was not a game. He was convinced that she had told him the truth.

So Sheila was a one-man-at-a-time woman, and he had accomplished his purpose. In her forthrightness, Sheila would certainly have told his father, at the start of their affair, what she had told Dane; so it could come as no surprise to him when she broke it off.

This should send his father back to his mother, with no need for a confrontation — no need, when it came to that, for either of his parents to know how the trick had been accomplished. There was no reason for the elder McKell to learn that Sheila’s new lover was his son; and let Lutetia think her husband had settled back in the nest of his own volition. It would comfort her.

But something was — not exactly wrong; off-key, perhaps. He offered Sheila a key to his apartment, and she refused it. “Not yet, darling. I’m still enjoying my illicit status.” Instead, she offered him a key to hers.

And when the following Wednesday came, he could not see her. “I’m only human, darling,” she said over the phone, a smile in her voice. “Not tonight. Tomorrow night?”

That Wednesday night, as usual, Ashton McKell did not come home at his other-weekday hour. He was gone all evening.

Sheila had lied to him. It must be that. Yet how could it be? Or was she easing his father off? That was it. He was probably taking it hard, and she had decided to let him down gradually. Still, it meant that he and his father were sharing Sheila’s circular Hollywood bed. It left him with a vile taste.

Until Wednesday, September 14th. On that day Dane phoned his mother to ask how she was. She was fine, Lutetia said, although disappointed.

“Your father and I were planning to lunch together downtown,” Lutetia said. “While we were discussing it at breakfast, there was a phone call from Washington. It was the President’s appointments secretary. The President wanted to see Ashton today, so there went our plans.” She laughed her tinkly laugh. “I must say Father didn’t seem to appreciate the honor. He was actually annoyed. Almost balked at letting me pack his overnight bag. In the end, of course, he went. You don’t turn down the President of the United States.”

Overnight bag...

“Sheila.”

“Dane? Hi, darling!”

“See you tonight?”

“Well...”

“How about dinner at Louis’s?”

“All right, dear, but let’s make it early. I’ll have to be back before ten.”

“How come?”

“I still have gobs of work to do on my designs before the collection is finished.”

He could not help wondering what she would use as an excuse after her collection was completed. At the same time, he was puzzled. Overnight bag... Had the whole story of the presidential call been a put-up job? Or just the part about overnight?

They had Louis’s special salad, which was not on the menu, but Sheila ate it as if it had been prepared by a diner chef. He was asked please not to dawdle over his coffee. They were on the sidewalk at 9:30.

“How about a nightcap, Sheila? A quick one?”

She apparently could not find a plausible way to refuse. Upstairs: “Would you make it yourself, darling? Nothing for me. I’ll just change into my working clothes, then you’ll have to go.”

Calmly Dane said, “I’m not going.”

Sheila laughed. “Come on, pardner, have your drink and skedaddle.”

“I don’t want a drink. And I’m not going.”

Her laugh turned uncertain. “Dane, I’m not sure I like this. I must get to work.”

“You’re not going to work, and I’m not leaving.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“You’re trying to get rid of me. I’m not going to be got rid of.”

For a moment Sheila was quiet, as if weighing certain factors against her temper. Then she said in a light voice, “Listen to the man! Are you keeping me, O Lord and Master? I pay my own rent, buddy-boy, and you stay when I say, and you leave when I tell you to, and right now I want you to leave.” When he stood there, saying nothing, her face turned to ice. “Dane, leave now. I mean now. Or you’ll be sorry.”

“My father will be here any minute, won’t he?”

It was as if he had struck her. “You know!.. I suppose you’ve known all along. I see, I see now. That’s why—”

“That’s why I’m staying. Yes, sweetie pie, that’s why.”

He was disgusted with her and with himself and with his father and even with his mother. He stripped off his jacket and laid it across the back of an armchair, and his silver cigaret case, a gift from his mother, dropped out of the pocket. He picked it up and took a cigaret and found his hands shaking so badly he could not light up.

“I’m waiting for my father,” he muttered, tossing the case on the chair. “What’s more, I intend to tell him about you and me.”

With a smothered half-cry, Sheila went to the picture window, to the door, back to the middle of the room. “All right, Dane. Stay and be damned to you. I can’t very well put you out by force.”

“You didn’t have the guts to tell him. Or maybe you never meant to?”

“That’s foul, Dane. That really is!”

“One man at a time, I believe you said. Didn’t you mean one family at a time?”

To his stupefaction, she burst out laughing. “This is very funny. Funnier than you could possibly imagine!”

“You have a peculiar sense of humor!” Every speck of the love he had felt for her was vanishing with the speed of light. Dread began heavily to build up, and with it the insane rage he had been guarding against.

“You think I’ve been sleeping with your father?” Sheila cried. “Let me tell you something, little boy — we aren’t lovers; we never have been. There’s nothing in the least physical about our friendship. Yes, and that’s exactly what it is — friendship! We like each other. We respect each other. We enjoy each other’s company. But that’s all. Of course you won’t believe it. Maybe nobody would. But, so help me, Dane, it’s the truth. For your own sake, if for no one else’s, you’d better believe that.”

He could see his own fists, hear his own shout. “Can’t you think of a more convincing story than that? Friendship! Don’t you think I know the old man’s been parking his shoes under your bed every Wednesday night? I’ve seen some of his clothes in your bedroom closet!”

“He’s been coming here, yes, and he keeps a change of clothing — some comfortable things—”

“To talk over the little events of the week, I suppose, over a tea cozy? In slacks and a dressing gown? What kind of triple-headed idiot do you take me for? For God’s sake, don’t you have the decency to admit it when you’re caught with your pants down?”

He choked; there was a roaring in his ears. He became faintly aware that her lips were moving.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Dane. I don’t want to say things about—”

“You’d better not,” he heard himself growl.

“—about your mother. But apparently I offer your father a... a scope, an experience, that makes it possible for him to talk to me in a way in which he could never talk to his wife. We have a very special and wonderful relationship. It helps him to come here every Wednesday night, Dane. And I’m terribly fond of him.”

“Why am I bothering? Helps him! How? Come on, spin a few more of your lies to me!”

She flared up at that. “It helps his feelings about himself as a man, if you must know — a man in relation to women. I tell you, Dane, he’s my friend, not my lover! He couldn’t be my lover even if he wanted to! There! Are you satisfied now? Now do you understand?”

Dane stood dumb. He couldn’t be my lover even if he wanted to...

“You mean you won’t let him be? Is that your yarn?”

She said, white-lipped, “I mean he’s physically incapable of it. Now you know.”

He could not — could not — believe it. Ashton McKell, big, hairy, strapping, vigorous, virile Ashton McKell, incapable of physical relations with a woman?

He sank onto the ottoman, dazed. The very shock of the thought generated its own believability. Nobody, not even a witch, would invent a story like that about Ash McKell. It had to be true. And suddenly he saw how far this went toward explaining the thrusting McKell drive in business, his tapeworm hunger for commercial expansion. A compensation!

But if that were the case, why hadn’t his mother said anything? The question answered itself. Lutetia McKell could not have brought herself to mention a thing like that, to her son above all people.

“So now you know the truth,” Sheila was saying, and she sounded urgent. “Dane, please, won’t you go? I’ve been trying to find a way to tell your father about you and me without hurting him. Let me work this out my own way. Help me spare him.”

He shook his head violently. “I’m going to tell him myself. I’ve got to know whether this is all true or not.”

She clapped her hands in sheer exasperation. “You’d do that? You’d leave him not one shred of self-respect? His own son! Don’t you know how ashamed he is of his impotence? Dane, if you do that, you’re a rotten, despicable—”

He flung out his arm. “You bitch! Don’t call me names!”

“Bitch?” Sheila screamed. “Get out of my apartment! Now!”

“No!”

She slapped him with all her might.

And then it came. With a rush.

She was not aware at first what her slap had loosed. For she had started for the house phone. “You leave me no choice. I’m calling John Leslie up here to get you out. I never want to see you again.”

From childhood the great flaw in his make-up had been his temper. It had been a hair-trigger thing, exploding at his governess, the servants, other children, his mother — although never his father. Ashton had blamed Lutetia (“You’ve spoiled him”) and hoped that the other boys in boarding school would whip him regularly enough to cure him. But his rages had seemed to feed on violence; and it was not until he was an upperclassman at college that Dane had taught himself restraint. But the lava of his temper was always boiling under his skin.

Now Sheila’s hot words, his own guilts, the underlying fear of the confrontation with his father, made him erupt. He leaped at Sheila, whirled her about, and seized her by the throat. He felt, rather than heard, his own voice rumbling, jeering, cursing, choking with hate.

Sheila struggled; her resistance fed his fury. His fingers tightened... It was not until her face turned livid, her cries became gurgles, her eyes glassed over and she went suddenly sodden under his hands — it was not until then that a shudder shook him and awareness returned.

Sheila lay collapsed on the floor, barely able to support herself on her forearms, breathing in great gasps. But breathing. Dane stared down at her. There was nothing he could say. It was all over between them. How could she ever look at him again without fear?

His plans — to help his mother — punish his father — marry Sheila... all, they were all strangled by that single burst of homicidal fury. What was any of them worth now?

She was alive. He could at least take satisfaction in that.

Dane seized his coat and ran.

Sheila got to her knees, pulled herself erect, toppled onto the ottoman.

She spent some time learning to swallow again, her hands trembling on her bruised throat. She felt cold and sick; her body was racked with shudders. Gradually they subsided, her gasps became normal breathing, her racing heart slowed down.

The thought kept hammering in her head: He almost killed me. He wanted to; it was in his murderous eyes... Little things came back to her. Hadn’t there been signs? His unnatural sulkiness when thwarted? His easy excitability? His inexplicable silences?

Quivering, Sheila scrambled up and went to the bathroom and turned on the cold-water tap. She was drying herself when she heard a key in her door.

It was Ashton McKell.

He looked tired. But his face lit up as he saw her.

“Well, the nation’s fate is secure for tonight, anyway,” he said. “Old Ash McKell has given the President — good evening, Sheila” — he kissed her, sank onto the ottoman — “the benefit of his advice. Now all he has to do is take it. Sheila? Something wrong?”

She shook her head. Her hand was on her throat.

He jumped up and went to her. “What’s happened? Why are you holding your throat?”

“Ash... I can’t tell you.”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No. No.”

“Did someone hurt you?”

“Ash. Please—”

“Let me see your neck.”

“Ash, it’s nothing, I tell you.”

“I don’t understand.” He was distressed and bewildered.

“Ash, I don’t feel well. Would you understand if...?”

“You’d like me to leave?”

Weeping, she nodded. He hesitated, patted her shoulder, picked up his bag and hat, and left.

Sheila looked out her window at the nighttime city for a few minutes after Ashton McKell’s departure. All at once she turned away and hurried into her workroom. She pushed a pile of unfinished fashion sketches aside, took a sheet of note-paper and envelope from a drawer, sat down.

She wrote rapidly:

She did not even bother to reread it. She thrust it into an envelope, moistened the gum, sealed it securely, and on the envelope wrote: To be opened only in the event I die of unnatural causes. Now she searched her drawer, found a larger envelope, inserted the first envelope into it, sealed the outer one — heavy and yellow — and on its face wrote: For the Police. She hesitated, slipped the envelope into a bottom drawer of her desk, bit her lip, shook her head, took the envelope from the drawer, and dropped it on her desk. I’ll find a better place for it in the morning, she told herself.

Sheila sat back now, exhausted to the point of nausea. After a moment she got up and went over to an easy chair in a half-stumble and sank into it. Dizzy, sick to her stomach, shocked to the core, she felt as she imagined people feel when they are dying. If I died right here and now, she thought, I wouldn’t care.

Her eyes closed...

Later, she could not imagine at first why she was in the easy chair. All of a sudden it came back to her. A glance at her watch told her that less than ten minutes had elapsed.

She visited the bathroom again, dipping a washcloth in cold water, bathing her eyes and neck. My God, what a nightmare, she thought.

Sleep was out of the question, creative work. Yet it was either back to her drawing board or to bed with a sleeping pill, unless... Routine, that was it. There were always mindless matters to lose oneself in, rituals of invoice checking, sample matching, note jotting...

It was as if she had reached a refuge on her hands and knees. Sheila sat down once more at the desk in her workroom.

This affair had turned out monstrously, monstrously. The best thing to do was to forget it (could she ever forget the clutch of those fingers on her throat?). And she reached for a pile of papers in the desk bin.

Her hand remained in midair.

Someone was in her living room.

Her hand felt paralyzed. She forced it — a sheer act of will — to move toward the telephone, watching it as if it were part of someone else’s body. One fingertip clawed at the dial, pulled.

Whoever it was moved stealthily. From the living room into the bedroom.

Far off, a voice spoke. Sheila started. It was in her ear.

“Operator.” She tried to keep her voice steady in its whisper. “Police. Quick.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“Yes.”

Sheila’s teeth chattered on the sibilant. Then there was no sound but the air-conditioner. Then a man’s voice said, “Seventeenth Precinct, Sergeant Tumelty.”

“Someone is in my apartment.”

“Who is this, please? What’s your address, phone number?”

Sheila told him. “Just hurry,” she whispered.

“Don’t panic, Miss Grey. Lock the door of the room you’re in. We’ll have somebody—”

“It’s too late!” screamed Sheila. “No — no — don’t shoot—!”

At the sound of the shot Sergeant Tumelty automatically jotted down the time, 10:23 P.M., and said sharply, “Miss Grey? Was that a shot, or...?”

He recognized the next sound. It was the snick of a receiver being set down on its cradle.

The sergeant got busy.

Just after midnight Dane, seeing the lighted windows in his parents’ apartment, went up and found his mother alone in the music room, watching an old film on television, Quality Street, from James Barrie’s 1901 drama of manners. No buckets of blood for Lutetia. In spite of Dane’s protest she turned off the set.

She kissed him on the brow. “Wouldn’t you like something to eat, dear? Or some cold lemonade?”

“No, thanks, Mother. Father’s not back?”

“No. I suppose he got through too late in Washington. After all, he did take an overnight bag.”

“And what have you been doing with yourself?” Dane wandered idly about the music room.

“Being just too wickedly slothful. The servants left at eight, and I’ve been sitting here ever since watching the television.”

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear,” smiled Lutetia.

“I’ve got something to ask you. Something very personal.”

“Oh?” She looked puzzled. The specific area of his question would never occur to her even as a speculation.

“I hope you understand that I wouldn’t ask such a thing if it weren’t very important for me to know.” He was casting about for some “nice” way to phrase the question.

“Of course, dear.” She laughed uncertainly. “You do make it sound... well...”

The way occurred to him. “Do you recall the annulment of the Van Der Broekyns marriage?” She immediately turned pink; she remembered. “His second marriage?” Lutetia nodded reluctantly. “What I have to ask you is this: Has it been, well, that same way with Dad?”

“Dane! How dare you!”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I must know. Has it?”

She refused to meet his eyes; sitting there, she was actually wringing her hands.

“Has it?”

He could barely hear her “Yes.”

And he was astounded. It was true. Sheila had told him the literal truth. He had never been so bewildered in his life.

“But Mother, I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me this before, when we were discussing...?”

“There are some things one simply doesn’t reveal,” Lutetia said stiffly, “even to one’s children. Especially to one’s children.”

“Mother, I’m not a child any more. I’ve known the facts of life for a long time, although my upbringing in that respect has been more like that of a tulip.” His bitterness was beginning to well up. He bit his lips, and the pain calmed down. “If Dad’s had this, well, condition, you tell me how he could have been unfaithful to you, as you said.”

“Infidelity is not just... physical.” Her lips were drawn up in a snarl of tension. “There’s infidelity of the spirit as well. Your father’s father and mother lived together for fifty-one years without having to find another woman or man.”

“Mother, Mother.”

He studied her, at a loss. How could he have arrived at his age knowing so little about his parents? His father, with problems both physical and psychological Dane could now only begin to guess at, going through his elaborate monkeyshines — drawn car shades, changed clothes, disguise, like some character out of E. Phillips Oppenheim or Conan Doyle — merely to visit another woman he could not even sleep with; his mother, tormented with such cloudy concepts as “infidelity of the spirit” to cover her outraged Victorian feelings...

“Mother.” He went over to her, stooped, took her hands. “I’m just beginning to realize how awful this must be for you. Would you like me to stay overnight?”

She busied herself preparing his old room with the zest of a woman welcoming back one of her menfolk after a three-year whaling cruise. They kissed and parted for the night. He lay in bed staring at the college banners on the wall. His mother, he knew, was on her knees in her room, praying; he envied her. His thoughts ranged afield, but kept coming back to Sheila Grey. What was he feeling so persistently and profoundly? Uncleanliness? Indecency? Revulsion?

For his actions of the evening, search as he might, he could find no trace of justification.

The next morning, dressing, thinking it would soon be fall and that he had hoped to have his book finished by the end of the year — a goal that now seemed parsecs away — Dane hunted for a cigaret. The box on the bed table was empty, and he went through his coat pockets.

He found a crumpled pack of cigarets, but no cigaret case. His silver cigaret case was missing. With a thump of his heart he realized that he could not recall having seen it or felt it after visiting Sheila’s the night before.

He found his lighter and lit one of the out-of-shape cigarets — one sock on, the other off — telling himself: Forget her. Forget her.

After a while, hands shaking badly, he finished dressing.

He almost cried out when he walked into the dining room. His father was seated at the table drinking coffee. When had he come in? And with what story? The elder McKell looked haggard, as if he had not slept; his clothes were wrinkled. This was unprecedented.

“Morning, Dad. How was your trip?”

“All right.” Ashton’s voice seemed stifled. His eyes, Dane noted now, were bloodshot. He raised his coffee cup, set it down, moved the saucer, fiddled with the sugar tongs. Dane was relieved when his mother joined them.

She was paler than usual this morning. It was evident that she had already talked to her husband. Dane wondered what he had told her, what she had said to him.

But beyond brief, almost formal, exchanges, breakfast was consumed in silence. Looking up from his eggs from time to time, Dane would catch his father’s eye; the eye would immediately move elsewhere. Dane tried to interpret the look. Baleful? Reproachful? Secretive? Frightened? He grew uneasy. It’s time the curtain came down on this whole thing, Dane thought, feeling his temper rise, pushing it back down, sitting on it. Not that again.

“Well!” Ashton McKell said abruptly. “This table is about as lively as Wall Street on Sunday morning.” His whole demeanor had changed. “And it’s my fault. I’ve been working too hard. I’m worn out. Lutetia, what would you say to a trip somewhere? Just the two of us? A pleasure trip?”

“Ashton!”

“Now that the tourists are coming home, we could go to Europe. No business — just sightseeing with the rest of the rubbernecks from the States. I promise I wouldn’t visit a single branch office or customer.”

“Oh, Ashton, that would be simply lovely. When would you plan to go?”

“Why not now?” The tycoon’s lips were taut. “We can leave as soon as we get a good boat. One of the Queens. I’ll arrange for passage this morning. No flying this time — a leisurely sea crossing—”

“Let’s go to Paris first!” cried Lutetia. “Where shall we stay?”

They chattered away about plans like newlyweds. So Sheila had been telling the truth about that, too. She had been tapering him off, letting him down gently, and at last he had got the message. Or was it something else—?

“We’ve never been to Luxembourg,” Ashton said enthusiastically. “—Yes, Ramon?”

“The car is ready, Mr. McKell,” the chauffeur said.

“Wait for me.”

“What is it, Margaret?” asked Lutetia. Ramon withdrew, and old Margaret, the senior maid, had come in.

“Callers, ma’am.”

“At this hour? Who are they?”

“Policemen, ma’am.”

“Policemen?”

The roaring began in Dane’s ears. He barely heard his father say, “Show them in, Margaret. Lu, you let me handle this — you, too, Dane”; was barely conscious of the entrance of two men in plainclothes, one of them a giant of a man with a gravelly voice.

“I’m Sergeant Velie of police headquarters,” the big man said, flipping open his shield case. “This is Detective Mack of the 17th Precinct. I’m sorry to disturb you so early in the morning, but you know what’s happened in this building—”

“Happened?” Ashton McKell was on his feet. “No, Sergeant, we didn’t know. What is it?”

“The tenant of the penthouse, Miss Grey, was murdered a little before half-past ten last night.”

Lutetia McKell was slewed around, one delicate hand gripping the back of her chair; her husband’s pallor took on a corpselike lividity. Dane fought down the ugly and familiar roaring by sheer savagery.

“What we want to know, sir,” Sergeant Velie was saying, “is if you people heard anything around the time of the murder...”

Ashton McKell’s knees buckled and he pitched over with a thud.