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Star Dust

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"You've told me so little, dear."

"More than I've ever told a living soul. There's one thought I love to
carry about with me about Zoe. She was born out of captivity. No Chinese
shoes for her little mind or her little soul or body. I'm vague about it
now, just as I'm half crystallized about everything. But this time my
will to do is unlimited and unfaltering! Her whole life is going to be a
growth toward fulfillment of self. I want life to dawn upon her in great
truths, not in ugly shocks and realizations. She is a plant and I am her
trellis toward the light. Do you see? Do you? I may be as wrong as you
think I am, Mrs. Blair--terribly, irrevocably wrong--but I wouldn't take
her back there into that--that--sedentary fatness--I wouldn't--"

A musing sort of silence had fallen into a gloom that was thickening
into darkness.

"The more I see of your case, Lilly, the less I understand it. To think
of anyone in this world of suffering deliberately bringing it upon
herself. Why, my dear, it isn't any of my business, but when I think of
those parents of yours out there, comprehending nothing, and that poor
bewildered husband of yours, I could cry for them."

"Do you think I don't, Mrs. Blair, whole nightfuls of tears? Why,
yesterday at the Library in my home paper I saw a little local notice of
my mother's euchre club meeting at our house--it was a knife,
somehow--the pain of it--"

"I'm not saying so much about the husband, only, God knows why a woman
should throw away a life-time of protection just because a man chews
with his temples and--"

"Surely you haven't taken that literally! I only tried to symbolize for
you that the unimportant mannerisms that may even delight in one person
can become monstrosities in another. Oh, I haven't made you
understand--"

"Yes, dear child, you have made me understand this much. What a fine
sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take
me--that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of
Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody
who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want to
restrict me."

"Ah yes, but--"

"We had a little house on Dayton Street; must have been a hundred years
old, with funny little leaded panes and a staircase rising out of the
parlor to a queer old box of a bedroom with slant walls. We painted the
floors ourselves and Lon did the doors in burntwood. He had a feeling
for the artistic, Lon had. That was the way we met--that was--the
way--we--met."

"How?"

"He was a police sergeant then, and I was bookkeeping for the time for
Metz Producing Company. Lon used to drop in once in a while for passes.
Then he got to waiting for me evenings with little pencil drawings of
all the funny things that had happened to him during the day. I was
strong for him to get off the force and take up art, but even then, now
that I look back on it, I can see that Lon was fed up on propositions
that it was driving him half mad to resist. That in itself should have
put me on my guard, but it didn't. I don't know why I'm telling you
all this--"

"Go on."

"Oh, I must have known in a way that Lon was drinking in his effort to
keep his eyes shut to the bribe money that could have come his way. He
never came home to me under the influence, but toward--the end--his eyes
began to glassen up. I was all for getting his beat changed. You see, it
took him down into the gang and red-light districts. More than that, I
had my heart set on seeing him off the force altogether. I wanted to
keep my position for a year or two after we were married and send him to
Paris to study art. I've some cartoons in my trunk. That boy would have
made good as--Well, it didn't happen. I blame myself. Marriage made a
great baby of me, Lilly. You see, I'd never been coddled in my life--all
those years of struggle on my own. Well I just turned soft and he loved
to baby me. Why, when I went back to bookkeeping I had to learn it all
over like a beginner--that's how wrapped up I became in that little
home of ours!"

"How long, Mrs. Blair, did you live in it?"

"Fourteen months and five days. It was a tiny place and we didn't have
much to spend at first, but what I had I managed to good advantage. Lon
hated makeshift. He couldn't get the fun out of simplicity that I could.
He wanted to dress me up. He wanted a big house. Big. Everything big.
That was his undoing. That's what they called him in the Ring, I learned
later, 'Gentleman Lon.' And I never knew there was a Ring! Never knew
the filthy inside workings of the graft game existed. That's the way he
protected me from everything ugly--from poverty. Me, that had never been
protected from either. O God! if he'd only been truthful with me those
last few months. I--I can't talk about it--I--"

"Then don't, dear Mrs. Blair, I didn't mean to--"

"He began bringing home more money than was natural, but he always
explained it--a tip from a bucket shop on his beat--extra duty. If I had
been right strong those days I might have suspected. Once he walked the
floor all night, said it was a toothache, my poor boy! and let me fix a
hot-water bottle for him. Then two men came one evening and there was
some loud talk down in the parlor and I heard words like 'squeal' and
'gangsters.' He told me when he came upstairs that one of them was
Eckstein. But how was I to know who Eckstein was? Didn't, until I heard
it was he who had been--shot. I--You see, the captain had closed in on
Eckstein's place because of a personal grudge, and Eckstein came
running to Lon to save him. Threatened to squeal on Lon--on the whole
business--if he didn't. Lon was hot-headed--got frightened--lost his
head. O God! I don't know what--never will know--"

"Know--what?"

"That evening he stayed home and helped me fix up the nursery. Yes, I
was expecting in the spring. That's why he was so for keeping things
from me. We painted the woodwork white and gave a couple of coats to a
little brown crib I had picked up second hand. He was for buying an
enameled one on casters--he loved the best. Next night--next
night--he--didn't come home--and at eight o'clock the following morning
the extras were on the street--about the killing. Even then I didn't tie
up--Lon and Eckstein. O God! God! how could I--"

"Tie up what? Who?"

"He was a cat's-paw, Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught
and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this
city--men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and
prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn't know of my
boy, Lilly; you were too young then. The whole country knew him, eleven
years ago. Lon Elaine. It's easier Blair; no questions asked. It was the
beginning of a cleanup that my boy blazed the way for. He went to the
gallows, Lilly--my boy--"

"No! No!"

"He died a gunman. Thank God his child was born dead. But he lies in my
heart, Lilly like a saint washed clean. He sinned for love, and because
stronger forces than he wanted him for a tool. May every man on his jury
live to carry that truth to his grave. He killed in self-defense and he
sinned for love. I'll exonerate him in a play, yet! I will! I'll tell
them! I'll tell them!"

Told without hysteria, her tale had almost a droning quality on the
twilight. She was grim in her tragedy, and her lips were as twisted and
dried as paint tubes, yet Lilly crept closer, laying her cheek rather
timidly against the corduroyed one.

"Ida Blair," she said. "I see now. 'The Web'! Oh--Ida Blair."

They fell silent, the two of them, dry-eyed, cheek to cheek, drowning
back into a long twilight that finally blackened.

"I don't know why I've told you all this. It's been ten years since I've
talked it. But your telling me that you threw it all over--that little
home out there, and a man that was driving down deeply the stakes of his
home--threw it over because the black spot from his collar button made
you feel hysterical--Oh, I tell you there is a grin through the scheme
of things. A laugh. What old man Metz used to call a belly laugh."

Chin cupped in hand, Lilly stared out into a back yard that was filled
with the tulle of winding mist, the lighted rear windows of the houses
opposite blurry, as if seen through tears.

"Just the same," she said, her lips in the straight line peculiar to
this not infrequent reiteration, "I'd do the same if I had it to do
over again."

"How do you know that some day your child is not going to turn upon you
with the bitterest reproaches?"

"She won't; she's too much like me. That is why it is going to be
something sublime to have the rearing of her. It is going to be like
living my life over again the way I once dreamed it. I know even now
what she wants, before she puckers up her little lips for it. Of course,
you are right--he--they have the right to know. But take the shine off
that creature? Clip the wings of her spirit? Fatten her little soul back
there in that sluggish environment? She'd hate it as I hated! Oh you
must have seen for yourself that Sunday I took you out there. The little
live stars in her eyes. The plunge and rear to her little body. Never!
She's mine! We two! Out on the open road!"

"I shouldn't want the responsibility of rearing my child in a paid
institution if I had better to offer."

"I haven't better! I've proved to myself, Mrs. Blair, to what limit I
would go to--to save her from back there. Proved it--horribly! No--no,
she's mine. No, not even mine. She belongs to herself. As soon as her
little brain is ready to take it in, she shall decide; but until
then--she's mine."

"Lilly--Lilly--a father ignorant of his child!"

"They'd suck us back, I tell you! Self-preservation even against family
is a first law of life! Owls eat their young! So can human beings feed
on the thing they love. It's not these first years would matter. But
ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to
a star, but to a--a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems
to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big
houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and
musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want
my child to live roundly--in all her mental rooms. What is the use
closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I
want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good
from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The
right to live!"

"You're for woman's rights. You're one of those suffragists."

"I guess I am if woman's rights mean more breadth, more beauty, more
realization of our latent selves. Oh, I don't know what I mean. That's
been my curse."

In the darkness Mrs. Blair put up a hand to the sheen of Lilly's flowing
hair.

"You poor child! You funny girl. You need--"

"What?"

"The right man to sweep you off your feet."

"I knew you were going to say that. No, you're wrong. I'm not
essentially a man's woman, Mrs. Blair. Sex isn't even as big a part of
my life as it is of most women's. I can't flirt. I haven't an ounce of
coquetry in me. I think I almost hate--"

"You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you,
dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and
enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you
don't hate him, Lilly."

"Why--why--who?"

"Oh, I've seen it flash between the two of you. I've watched it being
silently born. Lilly child, look at me!"

"Why, Mrs. Blair! Why--Mrs. Blair! I've never seen him outside of office
hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night
from Chicago. Why, I--I'm a married woman! He's younger--than I--a year!
He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the
property room. Why, Mrs. Blair--of course if you look at me
like--that--"

She was suddenly in the older woman's arms, a passionate, a peony red
flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further
resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she
somehow blushed.

Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the
darkness.




CHAPTER VI

There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of
sooty black hair which he tried to japan down with a pair of swift
military brushes, in the way of woman's safest judgment of
Bruce Visigoth.

By the quieter kinetics of his own sex, he was a man's man. He
commingled easily in his clubs, a university, a Mask and Wig, a Long
Island Canoe, and the Gramercy. Preceding his brother in this last and
later proposing him.

The resemblance between the two was neither of form nor of feature.
Rather, it was fleeting as a wing; in fact, was just that. There was
something in the batting of the eye, a slant of lid, that showed the
mysterious corpuscles of the same blood asserting themselves. Yet it was
more the likeness of father and son; the older man shorter, wider of
thigh, and with none of that fleet, rather sensitive lift of head,
partly because his neck was shorter and not upflung as if so sensitive
to the very rush of air that the flanges of the nostrils quivered.

There was a more nervous organization to Bruce that gave him something
of the startled look of wild horse, particularly with the laid-back
Mercury wing effect to his hair.

In anger Robert had a répertoire of oaths that stained the air like the
trail of a wounded shark, his pupils receding to points and his mouth
pulling to an oblique.

Bruce, if anything, whitened and quieted. He had once, with hardly more
than a lightning lunge, broken a truck driver's wrist in an office
altercation over some manhandled scenery, and gone home rather sick
because the fellow's opened cheek had bled down over his desk.

His office manner was clipped, brisk, and highly impersonal. He
cultivated a little mustache to enhance that manner, yet the two
sixteen-year-old girls who pasted clippings into scrap books spitted
their curls for him, and, since his advent, even Ida Blair had discarded
her eye shade.

In moments of high pressure he stuttered slightly, grinding and whirring
over a sibilant like a stalled tire. Upon one occasion that was to be
memorable Lilly sat between the brothers, notebook in lap, her head bent
to dodge the fusillade of high words passing over it.

It was her third year in a firm that had not slipped a cog. She had
likened its growth to her child's--fine--sturdy--normal. There were
seven theaters now, lying at points between New York and Denver, a
quickening nervous system of them with New York its ganglia. An eighth
had just been acquired, through which transaction she had endured with a
vicarious anxiety that amazed her. There had been arduous after office
hours of deed, mortgage, and bill of sale, and to growing demands had
invested herself with power of notary public, proclaiming the same in a
neat sign above her desk.

It was the day of the consummation of this last deal, a Bronx Family
Theater, in fact, that occurred between the brothers one of those
bloodless chasms no wider than a sword blade, but hilt-deep.

After a morning series of conferences with two representatives of
Philadelphia capital and the vice president of a Surety Guarantee
Company, Lilly in her new capacity thumping down on document after
document that slid beneath her punch, the transfer was completed, and,
bursting out into the corridor, rather hoyendish with elation, she drew
up shortly to avoid collision with Robert Visigoth, himself still warm
with the occasion.

"Well," he said, slapping the side pockets of his waistcoat, "we pulled
it off, didn't we?" The possibility of an evening train back to Chicago
and of a big deal creditably accomplished quickening his well-being.

"Indeed we did!" she replied, heartily.

More and more, on these intermittent visits of his, the icy edge of her
self-consciousness was beginning to thaw. Probably because the years had
done their sebaceous worst with him. Somehow he had receded behind the
dumpling of himself.

"Have you seen this one of Rufus II, Mrs. Penny? I want to show you a
picture of a youngster with some kick to him. Look at those legs,
will you!"

He had married, three years previous, a Miss Hindle Higginbothom, the
only child of a Chicago leaf-lard magnate of household-word kind of
fame, and brother-in-law to his father's one-time law partner, O.J.
Higginbothom.

For three years now, as if caught in a suet destiny, he had lived in the
Lake Shore mansion of his father-in-law, making the Western city his
official headquarters for as long as seven and eight-month periods.
Ten, the year his first child was born.

Often his wife accompanied him on his trips to New York. She was an
enormous girl, looking ten years her senior, but with that fat kind of
prettiness which asserts itself so often in clear skin and
apple cheeks.

Her capitulation to matrimony, rather than to Robert Visigoth, was
complete. She was one of those inevitable mothers with little broody
household ways that no immense wealth could dissipate. The first year
there were twins. One of them died, but annually thereafter, until there
were six, she presented a chuckling grandfather with a literal heir.
Literal, because on each such nativity old Rufus Higginbothom, who had
found it easier to make millions than to learn to write, signed his
famous "X" to a five-hundred-thousand-dollar check of greeting to the
new arrival.

Robert Visigoth carried photographs of his babies and wife in a leather
pocket portfolio, referring to it constantly and with a great show of
casualness, "Oh, by the way, have I ever shown you--"

Lilly returned this to him now, with a rush of amused pleasure at the
bouncing rotundities of his newest born.

"He's a darling!"

"He was a little croupy before I left and I'm taking that six-three for
Chicago, Mrs. Penny, and I wonder if you would do something for me. I'm
caught empty-handed. Would you take a cab down to Ryan and Steger's (the
wife says they are the best for stouts) and select me a couple of right
nobby waists for her? Get the best, and you know pretty much about size.
The largest--you know. A few pairs of black silk stockings, extra
quality and extra size, would be nice, too. It would save me
considerable rush."

"I'll do my best."

"Well, that will be a darn sight better than the wife's when it comes
to clothes. She gets them tubby. Pick out something slick--on the order
of what you've got on."

"Why, this is only a two-dollar blouse!"

He flipped her a one-hundred-dollar bill.

"Don't come back with any change."

Late in the afternoon of this day which had transmitted its tremor of
large transaction throughout the offices, long since partitioned off
into ground-glass cells and softened with sound-eating rugs, Lilly was
summoned to the office of R.J., carrying with her the box containing her
purchases. Bruce was there, too, pacing between windows.

He met her up with an immediate inquiry.

"Mrs. Penny, did you go up to see that 'June Blossom' sketch last
night?"

"Yes. I'm writing my report on it."

Constantly now requests like this were tossed in the form of a pair of
tickets on her desk.

"Well?"

"Sweet, clean, and obvious."

He nodded in a short corroborative manner he had, drawing up alongside
the desk.

"Take a telegram, please. 'Mr. Sam Sadler, People's Theater, Cleveland,
Ohio. Book _June Blossom_ for week of nineteenth.' And now if you'll
sign and stamp this mortgage after my brother and I sign."

The box proved cumbersome, so before she took up pen she held it out to
R.J.

"The blouses," she said. "There is a blue and a maroon. I hope Mrs.
Visigoth is going to like them. And here is the change."

"That's mighty fine," he said, smiling until a second chin appeared. "A
trinket or two up his sleeve gives a fellow a right to ring his own
door bell."

He reached then, fumbling at the hasps of his alligator bag which stood
by, opening it out and stooping to insert the package.

Simultaneously, as the mouth of that valise yawned, the two men leaped
forward so that their heads came together resoundingly and absurdly, but
not before the bag had exposed its surface articles: a pair of
tortoise-shell military brushes, a packet of documents, and a precious
silver and lapis-lazuli box about the dimensions of a playing card, the
kind usually dedicated to such elusive addenda as stamps, collar
buttons, or sewing box in a lady's overnight bag.

From where she sat, shorthand book open, pencil poised, Lilly had
observed it quite casually, although it was some time before she could
co-ordinate it with what ensued.

Suddenly there was the flash of the two men to their feet, R.J., an
ox-blood surging into his face, kicking shut the valise, his brother
whitening and quivering.

"Why did you lie about that box!"

"What do you mean?" said Robert, through his teeth, his color so livid
that teeth and eyeballs seemed to whiten.

His voice like the splitting of silk, Bruce plunged down a pointing
forefinger toward the bag.

"Open that up," he said.

"The hell I will."

With one swift stroke from the lighter and lither of them, the bag was
on its side, spilling its contents of tortoise-shell hair brushes and
the silver box, Bruce standing above it, tightening of jaw and knuckles.

"Liar!" he cried. "Liar!"

To Lilly it seemed that out of these years of apparently placid
relationship, with something avuncular, even of father and son in it,
here were suddenly and terribly Cain and Abel, elemental with an itch
for each other's throat.

"Say that again, by God! and you'll regret it."

"Liar! Liar!" he reiterated over and over, standing and towering over
the spilling bag. "Why did you lie to me about that box? Three years ago
I asked you for it. The spring after her death. Just before the auction.
Wasn't it sufficient that I let you and Pauline settle her personal
effects between you? Only that little box--somehow I wanted it. Father
gave it to her the first Christmas of their marriage. She always kept it
on her table. You were welcome to all the rest between you. All I asked
for was that little box of mother's. And to think that yesterday, the
anniversary of her death, I mentioned it again. Liar! Liar! Lost! Never
been found among her effects! Bah! Liar! It's a little thing, a trinket
that she loved, but I wanted it. You hear, I wanted that trinket. She
used to keep jelly beans in it for me when I came in from school. It's
little--the littlest thing that ever happened between us, but it's the
meanest, and God knows in my dealings with you all my life there have
been enough of the little meannesses to contend with. But you have won
your last mean little advantage outside this office. You and I can play
the cards in business, particularly when we play them six hundred miles
apart and where it is a case of man to man out on the mat. But outside
this office we play quits! There aren't going to be any more nasty
little personal issues with you, because there aren't going to be any
at all. You're a liar and a hundred per cent bigger one over that little
trinket of a box than if the stakes had been bigger. You hate to give,
unless it's so much for so much. Your sense of fairness is vile! It's
penny mean! Liar!"

With a lowering of head Robert lunged then, his lips dragged to an
oblique, threads of red cut in his eyeballs.

"Eat those words or, by God! I'll ram them down your throat."

"The hell I will."

"Gentlemen!"

They were crowded against the door, their breathing flowing against each
other's face, gestures uplifted.

Her eyes black and her notebook crushed up to her, Lilly's voice rang
out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a
whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up
rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had been diverted to her.

They were suddenly and quiveringly themselves again, the panther laid.

"You'll rue this," said Robert, walking back with some uncertainty of
step to his desk, his eyes still slits.

Bruce lifted the box rather tenderly, even with the greeny pallor of his
rage still out and his features straining for composure.

"I'll have it valued and send you a check--"

"Damn you!" With snarl-shaped lips the older brother lunged again, this
time their bodies meeting and swaying for clutch.

"Bruce!"

The use of his given name, the curdled quality to her voice, had their
way. There was a moment of blank staring between the two men, of Bruce
placing the box gently on the desk and walking out without slamming the
door, and Robert sinking down into the swivel chair, trying to bring the
oblique pull of his lips back to straight.

"Get out," he said, without looking at her.

She did, tiptoeing and fighting down the sense of sickness.

And thus, out of a bauble of silver and lapis lazuli, was reared a tower
of silence between these brothers as high as fifteen years is long.
Large affairs for their joint unraveling lay ahead, dramatic in their
magnitude. The Union Square Family Theater was very presently to become
first a tawdry, then a discarded link in the glittering chain of
playhouses that was to gird the country.

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