Waltz Into Darkness

15

The next morning, he thought she never had looked lovelier, and never had been more loving. All her past gracious endearment was as a coldness compared to the warmth of her consideration now.

She was in lilac watered silk, which had a rippling sheen running down it from whichever side you looked at it. It sighed as she walked, as if itself overcome by her loveliness. She did not stay at table as on other days, she accompanied him to the front door to see him off, her arm linked to his waist, his arm to hers. And as the slanting morning sunlight caught her in its glint, then released her, then caught her again a step further on, playing its mottled game with her all along the hall, he thought he had never seen such a vision of angelic beauty, and was almost awed to think it was his, walking here in his house, here at his side. Had she asked him to lie down and die for her then and there, he would have been glad to do it, and glad of her having asked it, as well.

They stopped. She raised her face from the side of his arm, she took up his hat, she stroked it of dust, she handed it to him.

They kissed.

She prepared his coat, held it spread, helped him on with it.

They kissed.

He opened the door in readiness to go.

They kissed.

She sighed. “I hate to see you go. And now I’ll be all alone the rest of the livelong day.”

“What will you do with yourself?” he asked in compunction, with the sudden — and only momentary — realization of a male that she too had a day to get through somehow, that she continued to go on during his absence. “Go shopping, I suppose,” he suggested indulgently.

Her face brightened for a moment, as though he had read her heart. “Yes—!” Then it dimmed again. “No—” she said, forlorn. Instantly his attention was held fast. “Why not? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing—” She turned her head away, she didn’t want to tell him.

He took the point of her chin and turned it back again. “Julia, I want to know. Tell me. What is it?” He touched her shoulder.

She tried to smile, wanly. Her eyes looked out the door.

He had to guess finally.

“Is it money?”

He guessed right.

Not an eyelash moved, but somehow she told him. Certainly not with her tongue.

He gasped, half in laughter. “Oh, my poor foolish little Julia—!” Instantly his coat flew open, his hand reached within. “Why, you only have to ask, don’t you know that—?”

This time there could be no mistaking the answer. “No—! No—! No!” She was almost vehement about it, albeit in a pouty, petulant child’s sort of way. She even tapped her toe for emphasis. “I don’t like to ask for it. It isn’t nice. I don’t care if you are my own husband. It still isn’t nice. I was brought up that way, I can’t change.”

He was smiling at her. He found her adorable. But still he didn’t understand her, which was no detraction to the first two factors. “Then what do you want?”

She gave him a typically feminine answer. “I don’t know.” And raised her eyes thoughtfully, as if trying to scan the problem in her own mind, find a solution somehow.

“But you do want to go shopping, don’t you? I can see you do by your look. And yet you don’t want me to give you the money for it.”

“Isn’t there some other way?” she appealed to him helplessly, as if willing to extricate herself from her own scruples, if only she could be shown how without foregoing them.

“I could slip it under your plate, unasked, for you to find at breakfast,” he smirked.

She saw no humor in the suggestion, shook her head absently, still busy pondering the problem, finger to tooth edge. Suddenly she brightened, looked at him. “Couldn’t I have a little account of my own—? Like you have, only— Oh, just a little one, tiny — small—”

Then she decided against that, before he could leap to give his consent, as he had been about to.

“No, that’d be too much bother, just for hats and gloves and things—” About to fall into disheartened perplexity again, she recovered, once more lighted up as a new variant occurred to her. “Or better still, couldn’t I just share yours with you?” She spread out her hands in triumphant discovery. “That’d be simpler yet. Just call it ours instead. It’s there already.”

He crouched his shoulders down low. He slapped his thigh sharply. “By George! Will that make you happy? Is that all it will take? God bless your trusting little heart! We’ll do it!”

She flew into his arms like a shot, with a squeal for a firing-report. “Oh, Lou, I’ll feel so big, so important! Can I, really? And can I even write my own checks, like you do?”

To love someone, is to give, and to want to give more still, no questions asked. To stop and think, then that is not to love, any more.

“Your own checks, in your own handwriting, in your own purse. I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven. Will that time suit you?”

She only pressed her cheek to his.

“Will you know how to find it?”

She only pressed her cheek to his again, around on the other side of his face.

She allowed him to precede her there, as was her womanly prerogative. But once he had arrived, she kept him waiting no more than the fractional part of a minute. In fact so precipitately did she enter, on his very heels, that it could almost have been thought she had been waiting at some nearby vantage point simply to allow him first entry before starting forward in turn.

She accosted him before he had little more than cleared the vestibule.

“Louis,” she said, placing her hand confidentially atop his wrist to detain him a moment, and drawing him a step aside, “I have been thinking about this since you left the house. I am not sure I... I want you to do this after all. You may think me one of these presuming wives who— Had we not better let things be as they are—?”

He patted her arresting wrist. “Not another word, Julia,” he said with fine masculine authority. “I want it so.”

He was now sure that the idea was his own, had been from its very inception.

She deferred to his dictate as it was a wife’s place to do, with a seemly little obeisance of her head. She linked her arm in his and accompanied him with slow-moving elegance across the bank floor toward its farther end, where the bank manager had emerged and stood waiting to greet them with courtly consideration behind a low wooden partition banister set with amphora-shaped uprights erected three-square about his private office door. He was a moonfaced gentleman, the roundness of his face emphasized by the circular fringe of carefully waved, iron-gray whiskers that surrounded it, the lips and sides of the cheeks clean-shaven. The gold chain across his plaid vest front must have been composed of the thickest links in all New Orleans, a veritable anchor.

Even he, the establishment’s head, visibly swelled like a pouter-pigeon at sight of Julia advancing toward him. The pride she afforded Durand, in escorting her, in itself, would have made the entire proceeding worth while had there been no other reason.

She had donned, for this unwonted invasion of the precincts of commerce and finance, azure crinoline, that filled the arid air with whispers, midget pink velvet buttons in symmetrical rows studding its jerking, pink ruching sprouting at her throat and wrists; a crushed bonnet of azure velvet low over one eye like a tinted compress to relieve a headache, ribbons of pink tying it under her chin, a dwarf veil sprinkled with pink dots like confetti hanging only as low as the underlashes of her eyes. Her steps were as tiny and tapping as though she were on stilts, and her spine was held in the forward-curved bow of the Grecian bend almost to a point where it defied Nature’s plan that the human figure hold itself upright on the hip sockets, without falling over forward out of sheer unbalance.

Never had a bustle floated so airily, swaying so languorously, over a bank floor before. Her passage created a sensation behind the tellers’ cagelike windows lining both sides of the way. Pair upon pair of eyes beneath their green eyeshades were lifted from dry, stuffy figures and accounts to gaze dreamily after her. The personnel of banking establishments at that time was exclusively male, the clientele almost equally so. Though a discreetly curtained-off little nook, as rigidly segregated as a harem anteroom, bearing over it the placard “Ladies’ Window,” was reserved for the use of the occasional females (widows and the like) who were forced to come in person to see to their money matters, having no one else to attend to these grubby transactions for them. At least they were spared the ignominy of having to rub elbows with men in the line, or stand exposed to all eyes while money was publicly handed to them. They could curtain themselves off and be dealt with by a special teller reserved for their use alone, and always a good deal gentler and older than the rest.

There was no definite stigma attached to banks, for women; unlike saloons, and certain types of theatrical performance where tights were worn, and almost all forms of athletic contest, such as boxing matches and ball games. It was just that they were to be spared the soilage implicit in the handling of money, which was still largely a masculine commodity and therefore an indelicate one for them.

Durand and his breath-taking (but properly escorted) wife stopped before the whiskered bank manager, and he swung open a little hinged gate in the banister-rail for their passage.

Durand said, “May I present Mr. Simms to you, my dear? A good friend of mine.”

Mr. Simms said with a gallant inclination, “I am inclined to doubt that, or you would not have delayed this for so long.”

She cast her eyes fetchingly at him, certainly not in flirtation, for that would have been discreditable to Durand, but at least in a sort of beguiling playfulness.

“I am surprised,” she said, and allowed that to stand alone, the better to make her point with what followed.

“How so?” Simms asked uncertainly.

She gave the compliment to Durand, to be passed on by him, instead of directly, face to face. “I had thought until now all bank managers were old and rather forbidding looking.”

Mr. Simms’ vest buttons had never had a greater strain put upon them, not even after Sunday meals.

She said next, looking about her with ingenuous interest, “I have never been in a bank before. What a superb marble floor.”

“We are rather proud of that,” Mr. Simms conceded.

They entered the office. They seated themselves, Mr. Simms seeing to her chair himself.

They chatted for several moments on a purely social plane, business still having the grace to conceal itself behind a preliminary screen of sociability, even where men alone were involved. (Always providing they were of an equal level.) To come too bluntly to the point without a little pleasant garnishing first was considered bad mannered. But year by year the garnishing was growing less.

At last Durand remarked, “Well, we mustn’t take too much of Mr. Simms’ time, I know he’s a busy man.”

The point had now arrived.

“In what way can I be of service to you?” Simms inquired.

“I should like to arrange,” said Durand, “for my wife to have full use of my account here, along with myself.”

“Oh, really,” she murmured disclaimingly, upping one hand. “He insists—”

“Quite simple,” said Simms. “We merely change the account from a single one, as it now stands, to a joint account, to be participated in by both.” He sought out papers on his desk, selected two. “And to do that all I have to do is ask you both for your signatures, just once each. You on this authorization form. And you, my dear, on this blank form card, just as a record of your signature, so that it will be known to us and we may honor it.”

Durand was already signing, forehead inclined.

Simms edged forward another paper tentatively, asked him: “Did you wish this on both accounts, the savings as well as the checking, or merely the one?”

“It may as well be both alike, and have done with it, while we’re about it,” Durand answered unhesitatingly. He wasn’t a grudging gift-giver, and any other answer, it seemed to him, would have been an ungracious one.

“Lou,” she protested, but he silenced her with his hand.

Simms was already offering her the inked pen for her convenience. She hesitated, which at least robbed the act of seemingly undue precipitation. “How shall I sign? Do I use my own Christian name, or—?”

“Perhaps your full marriage name might be best. ‘Mrs. Louis Durand.’ And then you’ll remember to repeat that exactly each time you draw a check.”

“I shall try,” she said obediently.

He blotted solicitously for her.

“Is that all?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“That’s quite all there is to it, my dear.”

“Oh, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” She looked about her in delighted relief, almost like a child who has been dreading a visit to the dentist only to find nothing painful has befallen her.

The two men exchanged a look of condescending masculine superiority, in the face of such inexperience. Their instincts made them like women to be that way.

Simms saw them off from the door of his office with an amount of protocol equal to that with which he had greeted them.

Again the bustle floated in such airy elegance above that workaday bank floor as bustle never had before. Save this same one on its way in. Again the sentimental calflike eyes of cooped-up clerks and tellers and accountants rose from their work to follow her in escapist longings, and an unheard sigh of romantic dejection seemed to go up from all of them alike. It was like the sheen of a rainbow trailing its way through a murky bog, presently to fade out. But while it passed, it was a lovely thing.

“He was nice, wasn’t he?” she confided to Durand.

“Not a bad sort,” he agreed with more masculine restraint.

“May I ask him to dinner?” she suggested deferentially.

He turned and called back, “Mrs. Durand would like you to dine with us soon. I’ll send you a note.”

Simms bowed elaborately, from where he stood, with unconcealed gratification.

He stood for several moments after they had gone out into the street, thoughtfully cajoling his own whiskers and envying Durand for having such a paragon of a wife.