insisted Gus. “Better for Polly and better for you. The doctor’s been here, so we know it isn’t anything horrible, and anyway we’ll be home early. If you stayed here, there’s nothing you could do but watch her temperature and give her pills. Maddelena can do that and Polly’s just as happy playing with Maddelena as she would be with you, maybe happier. Maddelena is much nearer a child’s level than you are.”
Meg yielded reluctantly. “A party should be fun,” she moaned. “But driving fifty miles on a winter day and leaving Polly ill…”
“This isn’t fun, this is business,” said Gus firmly. “We must hold Amos’s hand while Vera is around.”
“Don’t worry, Mommy, I’ll be here,” said Hugh, relishing melodrama. “I’ll call you at once if anything goes wrong, so you can dash back.”
Gus quelled him with a glare. “Nothing is going wrong. How could it? We’ll only be gone a few hours.”
Meg knew that Gus hated to leave Polly ill almost as much as she did herself. They had never left Hugh with a fever when he was Polly’s age. But by the time Polly came along they had learned that a slight temperature in childhood rarely meant serious illness. A sore throat was something that would bear watching because so many serious illnesses began that way, but, thank God, nine times out of ten it wasn’t serious at all.
She dragged herself into her room and put on the old black velvet. A tortoise-shell locket and chain matched the high comb in her hair, and she wore the big ruby Gus had bought for her with his commission on Amos’s first movie sale. Even the glitter of its great red eye did not raise her spirits today. Even the soft, thick folds of her fur coat could not warm the chill in her bowels.
I must tell Gus now. I must. I’ve waited too long already. But still she was silent.
She tried to imagine how Vera’s face had looked when she read that letter. Had the dulcet voice lost its saccharine smoothness for once?
Imagination boggled. This just wasn’t one of those annoying mishaps that could be straightened out by a frank apology. “So sorry I called you an incompetent actress and a vicious woman. I didn’t really mean it, you know.” This was a colossal blunder, an irrevocable declaration of war. And how was it going to affect the fortunes of Augustus Vesey, Inc., member of the Society of Authors’ Representatives?
Meg knew all about the literary side of the agency. An editor’s daughter, herself an author of short stories, she was useful to Gus as a first reader, winnowing the slush pile of unsolicited scripts that came into the office and selecting the few that might stand a chance after revision. It was she who had discovered Amos Cottle when she found the script of his first book in a mass of trash that Gus had handed over to her without bothering to read himself one week end five years ago. But Meg had never been able to understand the financial side of the agency. She had no idea just how important Amos Cottle was to them.
Maybe Vera would never get the letter. Maybe she hadn’t stopped at the studio on Saturday to pick up her last mail. Maybe Catamount secretaries were careless with letters for actresses who left the studio in a huff and it would never be forwarded. Maybe the postman would break a leg, or maybe Vera’s plane would crash.
Meg tried to drag her mind away from such a wicked thought. But the image persisted balefully. Fog, a great transcontinental plane crashing in flame against a peak in the Rockies, and a soft voice that suddenly began to scream like a slaughtered animal.
When they ran into fog on the parkway, the coincidence seemed like a materialization of her evil thought. The world was a mass of dirty, damp cotton wool pressing in on every side, clogging speed and blurring vision. Other cars were glaring yellow headlights with no form or substance, going much too fast for comfort. In her morbid frame of mind she found herself running through the terms of her will and wondering whom Gus would marry if he survived and she didn’t. All the while, gnawing underneath the surface of her thought, was a little maggot of guilt. She couldn’t stand it any longer. She must tell Gus now, before the party.
“Gus.”
“Yes?”
Again the words wouldn’t come. Not right away. She must lead up to this confession somehow. “Gus, how does Amos himself really feel about Vera?”
Gus hesitated. “It’s hard to tell about Amos. He was damn glad to see her go. We both know that. He told us all about it. But he’s reticent about her now, and of course she must have some attraction for him or he wouldn’t have married her in the first place. Just how strong that attraction will be when he sees her again, I don’t know. Sometimes he seems to miss her, but perhaps he’s just lonely.”
“Poor Amos!” Meg was touched. “I never thought of it before but he must be lonely. No family, no friends, just business associates like you and Tony and living all alone in that big, isolated house. Yet he hardly ever goes to parties.”
“In our world it’s hard for a reformed alcoholic to lead a normal social life,” said Gus. “There are so few parties without drinks, and it’s awkward to demand ginger ale when everyone else is mopping up gin and tonic. As it is, nobody knows about his weakness except you and me and Tony. You never told anyone, did you?”
“Of course not. Not even Philippa.”
“I think Amos is wise to lead a hermit’s life,” went on Gus. “He works hard at his writing, he reads a lot, he plays a little golf with Tony and he goes to town once a week for the TV show. He has no financial worries or family problems. It’s an ideal life for a writer of talent.”
Meg glanced at him sidewise. “Do you really believe Amos has a great talent? Just between you and me and the lamppost?”
“You should know. You discovered him yourself.”
“That was his first book and it was so much better than those other scripts I was reading. But these later books…”
“Meg, how often have I told you that you aren’t really capable of appreciating anything written since 1910? Amos is extremely representative of his period and it’s a period you hate. His output is prodigious and yet it has never fallen below the standard he set himself in that first book. That is always a sign of superior talent. His success was immediate with his first book. All the critics hailed him as a rising star. That wasn’t accident, you know. Amos has something. Just what it is, I can’t say, but, whether you like his later stuff or not, his writing has that mysterious something that makes people want to read his books.”
“The Cottle touch.” Meg sighed. “That man in today’s Tribune doesn’t like it at all.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’re allowing yourself to be influenced by a review?” Gus poured scorn into the word review. “Emmett Avery is an old rival of Maurice Lepton’s. Avery’s review was probably written to take Leppy down a peg because he’s gone all out for Amos every time.”
“What a mean thing to do!”
“Don’t worry about that review of Avery’s. It’s the first adverse criticism Amos has ever had in a literary journal of major importance, and that’s a sign of his final success. A writer hasn’t arrived until one important critic has said publicly that his work stinks. Then all his admirers leap to his defense, and the controversy stirs up more excitement about him than ever before.”
“You’ll be making me think that Tony planted Avery’s review in the Tribune!’
“You
