“No,” Larry said, and he touched his face with his hands to see if he could feel there the welts, lines, and other changes that must have been worked in the last few hours.
“You work in a restaurant, don’t you?” the conductor asked.
“No,” Larry said quietly.
“That’s funny,” the conductor said. “When I saw the soup-and-fish I thought you was a waiter.”
It was after one o’clock when he got off the train. The station and the cab stand were shut, and only a few cars were left in the parking lot. When he switched on the lights of the small European car he used for the station, he saw that they burned faintly, and as soon as he pressed the starter they faded to nothing with each revolution of the motor. In the space of a few minutes, the battery gave up the ghost. It was only a little less than a mile to his house, and he really didn’t mind the walk. He strode briskly along the empty streets and unfastened the gates to his driveway. He was fastening them when he heard the noise of running and panting and saw that the dogs were out.
The noise woke his wife, who, thinking that he had already come home, called to him for help. “Larry! Larry, the dogs are out! The dogs are out! Larry, please come quickly, the dogs are out and I think they’re after someone!” He heard her calling him as he fell, and saw the yellow lights go on in the windows, but that was the last he saw. II
Orville Betman spent the three summer months alone in New York, as he had done ever since his marriage. He had a large apartment, a good housekeeper, and a host of friends; but he had no wife. Now, some men have a sexual disposition as vigorous, indiscriminate, and demanding as a digestive tract, and to invest these drives with the crosslights of romantic agony would be as tragic as it would be to invent rituals and music for the bronchial tree. These men do not, when they are eating a piece of pie, consider themselves involved in a sacred contract; no more do they in the bounding act of love. This was not Betman. He loved his wife, and he loved no other woman in the world. He loved her voice, her tastes, her face, her grace, her presence, and her memory. He was a good-looking man, and when he was alone other women pursued him. They asked him up to their apartments, they tried to force their way into his apartment, they seized him in corridors and garden paths, and one of them, on the beach in East Hampton, pulled off his bathing trunks, but, thus incommoded, the only love he had was for Victoria.
Betman was a singer. His voice was distinguished not by its range and beauty but by its persuasiveness. He gave one recital of eighteenth-century music early in his career and was roasted by the critics. He drifted into television and for a while dubbed voices for animated cartoons. Then, by chance, someone asked him to do a cigarette commercial. It was four lines. The result was explosive. Cigarette sales shot up eight hundred per cent, and from this single commercial he made, with residuals, more than fifty thousand dollars. The element of persuasiveness in his voice could not be isolated or imitated, but it was infallible. Whatever he praised in song?shoe polish, toothpaste, floor wax?hundreds and thousands of men and women would find his praise irresistible. Even little children heeded his voice. He was very wealthy, of course, and the work was light.
He first saw his wife on a Fifth Avenue bus on a rainy night. She was then a young and slender woman with yellow hair, and the instant he saw her he felt a singular attraction or passion that he had never felt before and would never, as it happened, feel again. The strenuousness of his feeling made him follow her when she left the bus, somewhere on upper Fifth Avenue. He suffered, as any lover will who, moved by a pure and impetuous heart, well knows that his attentions, whatever they are, will be mistaken for a molestation, and usually a revolting one. She walked toward the door of an apartment house and hesitated under the awning long enough to shake the raindrops out of her umbrella.
“Miss?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“Could I speak with you for a minute?”
“What about?”
“My name is Orville Betman,” he said. “I sing television commercials. You may have heard me. I…” Her attention wandered from him to the lighted lobby, and then he sang, in a true, sweet, and manly voice, a commercial he had taped that afternoon: “Gream takes the ish Out of washing a dish.”
His voice touched her as it seemed to have touched the rest of the world, but it touched her glancingly. “I don’t look at television,” she said. “What is it you want?”
“I want to marry you,” he said sincerely.
She laughed and went on into the lobby and the elevator. The doorman, for five dollars, gave him her name and circumstances. She was Victoria Heatherstone and lived with her invalid father in 14-B. In the space of a morning, the research department in the station where he worked reported that she had graduated from Vassar that spring, and was doing volunteer work in an East Side hospital. One of the apprentice script girls had been in her class and knew her roommate intimately. In a few days, Betman was able to go to a cocktail party where he met her, and he took her out to dinner. His instinct when he first glimpsed her on the bus had been unerring. She was the woman life meant him to have; she was his destiny. She resisted his claims on her for a week or two, and then she succumbed. But there was a problem. Her old father?a Trollope scholar?was indeed an invalid, and she felt that if she left him he would die. She could not, even if it meant constricting her own life, hold the burden of his death upon her conscience. He was not expected to live for long, and she would marry Betman when her father died; she became, to express the genuineness of her promise, his mistress. Betman’s happiness was exalted. But the old man did not die.
