was gleaming white, with green shutters and window boxes full of hanging begonias.
On the uneven brick sidewalk Molly stopped short and listened intently.
“—Isn’t that my phone?”
She ran through the white gate and up the iron steps. I could hear the muffled peal of the bell sounding again. She got the key out of her bag, unlocked the door and ran in.
“She’s done a swell job, hasn’t she?” Randy said casually. He looked up at the white face of the little house. “She damn near killed herself, scraping and painting and patching plaster.—God, I hope that’s him, the stinking . . .”
He stopped without finishing it. We stood there listening. We could have heard her voice, but we didn’t, and then a light went on in the back room, making a yellow path through the doorway. We went up the steps and inside.
Molly was in the front room, staring down into the fireplace. As Randy switched on the light she turned around and smiled, quickly and too brightly.
“They’d hung up.”
“Then let’s stick around till he calls again.” Randy said. “He probably didn’t even know you were living here. He wouldn’t have had a key——”
She put her hand on his arm.
“You’re sweet, Randy—but . . . don’t! Please don’t!”
She tried to smile. “I’ll get my things. If you want a drink there’s some ice downstairs.”
She went out into the tiny hallway and up the stairs. I could hear her feet going across the floor and the creak of a bed, and that was all.
Randy stood there a moment, pulling a brush hair out of a blob of paint on the mantel.
“I’ll get some ice,” he said curtly. “God, this makes me sore. A guy like that . . .”
“Listen,” I said patiently. “There must have been a slip-up. I can’t believe there wasn’t.”
The look he gave me made me feel old and infirm and feebleminded.
“—I was going to get some ice, wasn’t I.”
I waited. It was the first time I’d been in the house since she’d painted the woodwork. If you looked too carefully the old chocolate-brown still showed in places, but it was very pleasant, and a superhuman job in this weather. And now she was upstairs alone with it, and all the fun it was going to be to show Cass what she could do, in between being a nurse’s aide four hours a day and working at the ration board and all the other things she did, was lying like a lump of uncooked dough in the pit of her stomach.
Downstairs I could hear Randy swearing at the ice cubes. From outside in the street came a burst of high laughter from some unrestrained libido, full rich voices from the colored church around the corner drowning it suddenly with “Marching Down the King’s Highway.” In the warm duskiness of the surrounding night the little house with its smell of wet plaster and fresh paint seemed very pathetic and young and lonely.
I could hear Randy plodding up the stairs, ice clinking against glass, and the creak of the floor above as Molly began to move around again. Suddenly the phone rang in the back room. Randy stopped, ice bucket in hand, looking at it, his lean sunburned face expressionless. The next instant Molly was flying downstairs. She’d changed her dress and taken off her evening slippers. She was barefooted, with one shoe in her hand, her face lighted up in a poignantly transparent denial of everything she’d said before.
When she said “Hello,” her voice was a further betrayal, and it was even more of one when she said, “Oh, hello, Courtney.”
She listened silently for a moment.
“Thanks a lot for calling. No, I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve got to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn. I’ll see him tomorrow. Goodbye.”
When she turned her face was drained of everything. Even her eyes were pale. She shook her head and picked up her shoe from the table by the phone.
“Cass is at the Durbins’,” she said calmly. “He was too busy to come to the phone. Courtney wanted me to come over.”
She went back to the hall. “I’ll be down in a second, Grace. Will you see the lights are off downstairs, please, Randy?”
She’d just got upstairs when a woman’s voice called from the street—“Yoo-hoo, Molly! Cass?”—and we heard a lot of feet scraping up the iron steps.
3
I recognized Julie Ross’s voice.
“Hello, angels, can we come in a minute? We didn’t know you’d got home till we saw you through the kitch——”
Julie came in through the front room door and stopped short, her face blank for an instant.
“Oh, hello, Grace. Hello, Randy. We thought it was Cass and Molly.”
The “we” consisted, besides herself, of one large, fat-faced untidy man with a lot of moist black hair, his pongee suit dripping wet, and a man with a long face, gray hair and a quick pair of slate-blue eyes who looked as if he’d stopped on the top step, taken a cool shower and stepped into a linen suit just off the ironing board. He looked, furthermore, as acutely embarrassed as he was cool. The large man did neither. He was very hot and not embarrassed in the least. He was almost a comic strip figure, I thought, he had such a waggish good humor about him. It wasn’t until I looked beyond the smile-crinkled bags around his eyes that I had the slightly uncomfortable feeling that if I had to meet one of them on a dark night, the other one would be safer.
Julie waved her hand toward them without looking around.
“—Do you know these people?”
“No,” Randy said. He added, “Do you? And who are they?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him, anybody,” Julie said. “The clean one’s Mr. Austin, and I can’t pronounce the other one’s name so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was Cass we wanted to see. Somebody said he was getting back tonight. I thought maybe he’d run into my sainted husband out in the wilds, and I thought I’d like to know whether he’s still alive or can I start looking around. I don’t suppose you’d like to give us a drink.”
“Have a cigarette,” Randy said. He pulled a moist unattractive pack out of his pocket. “Grace and I just decided alcohol makes you hotter and the hell with it. If you’ll just stick around a few minutes you can have the whole place to yourselves. We’re shoving off.”
“Oh, I see,” Julie said brightly. “You want us to stay. Sweetie, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. Fresh paint makes us break out. Tell Molly goodbye. Goodbye, Grace.”
The two gentlemen backed out, the immaculate Mr. Austin bowing politely and still more embarrassed, the large wet man with the unpronounceable name looking hotter and wetter and still more good-humored.
“Goodbye, Randy dear,” Julie called back. “If you ever have to make a crash landing I hope it’s in a nice field of poison ivy.”
I heard them close the gate. Randy stood looking at me.
“Now, how the hell did they know Cass was due in?” he asked grimly. “I know that big wet guy. Wait a minute—he signed my short snorter bill in Cairo a couple of years ago.”
He pulled out his wallet and held a tattered dollar bill under the light on the table.
“Here we are,” he said. “ ‘Lons Sondauer.’ ”
He looked at me again. “Where the devil could Julie have picked him up? He’s some kind of great big screwball—rich as a skunk.”
“Did he recognize you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, I wasn’t in uniform then.—I’d like