and values that we believed in, and when I look at people today it seems to me that what most of them need most badly is faith—faith in something—yes, even the ones who would laugh loudest at what I’m saying. . . .
“We all seem to be living in the shadow of something evil, something terrible,” he said with a sigh. “Stanton, I have to leave you now. I’m very tired—an old man, you know. This has been a strain. Here—” he placed a slip of paper on the desk—“here’s Woods’ phone number, and the address of this . . . ah . . . Dreamboat person. I told Woods you might call him Sunday morning. You can reach him at home until noontime. Well, nothing more I can say, I suppose. Except—” he leaned across the desk and put his hand on Stanton’s shoulder—“don’t let this get you down, Stanton. You’re a very decent man, and there aren’t many of us left. We can’t afford to lose you.”
Stanton scarcely was conscious of the old lawyer’s departure. He sat at his desk in a trance. Miss Rice came in and said something to him, but he didn’t hear it. His eyes ran back and forth across the first line of his manuscript. “Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, Ladies and Gentlemen . . .” but the words made no sense. He was quite surprised, presently, to find himself holding the telephone to his ear. The voice of Supreme Love cried “Peace!” He must have called his home, he supposed, but he had no recollection of it. Supreme Love repeated “Peace!” and Stanton managed to say, “Is Mrs. Wylie there?”
“Who this?” the maid demanded.
“Mr. Wylie.”
“Mist’ Wylie! Well, I never! You don’t sound like yo’self, Mist’ Wylie.”
“Is Mrs. Wylie there?”
“Mis’ Wylie? Why no, the madam ain’t home.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“You feeling all right, Mr. Wylie? You don’t sound——”
“Where is Mrs. Wylie?”
“Why, sir, I don’t know.”
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“No, sir.” Supreme Love sounded frightened. “She came back to the house from the station and changed her clothes. Le’s see, some gent’man called on the telephone from New York, and right after that she went out again.”
“Didn’t she say anything?”
“She just said she wouldn’t be home for dinner—at least, that’s what I think she said. Is something wrong?”
Stanton didn’t answer. He looked at the receiver for a moment, then carefully put it down on its base. He pressed a button on his desk, and when Miss Rice came in he said, “Do you have a newspaper out there, Helen?”
“Yes, I do, Mr. Wylie.”
“I wonder if you would look up the theatrical section, and find out if the play called The Lonely Road has a matinee this afternoon?”
“It doesn’t, Mr. Wylie. I happen to know because my aunt wanted to see it this week, and I tried to get tickets for her, but they were sold out. Matinees are Wednesdays and Saturdays.”
“I see. Thank you, Helen.”
She hovered in the doorway, looking at him with a curious expression. “Thank you, Helen,” he said again, and she closed the door.
Somehow he found himself at the windows. He didn’t know why he was there, didn’t even remember walking across the office from the desk. He stared out, seeing nothing, not blinking his eyes. Backed by the solid gray of the afternoon sky, the window glass dimly mirrored his face. He said to himself, His Betsy. His wonderful girl. God, it was funny. Venice, and Betsy, and the music of the tango orchestra those nights at Chez Vous. Betsy, lying under the mosquito netting. Those beautiful memories of her, those thoughts of her which filled his mind every day, those dreams. God, it was funny. So she was talking with Mrs. Hazen on the telephone, about the Red Cross Drive. Hah! So she couldn’t go to Chicago with him, she couldn’t just pick up and go, like that, because she had so many things she had to do. Hah! The social-events committee. Hah! So Jeremy had to go to the concerts at Carnegie Hall, and Betsy had to take him. Hah! So she was proud of him. Hah! So they would have a little man-to-man talk and they would see that they had nothing to argue about, really, did they? Did they? Did they?
Stanton said these things to himself mechanically, with neither anguish nor passion. He felt nothing, nothing at all. He caught the faint reflection of himself in the glass and tried to find some kernel of thought, or sensation—anything—within himself. But there was simply nothing at all. Absurdly, his mind wandered back to a hot morning in August when he was very young, when he had gone to the dentist to have his first extraction. He remembered the dentist pushing the needle into the roof of his mouth with a little crunch, the acrid taste of the novocain, and everything feeling numb and strange and his tongue wandering across the unfamiliar surfaces, and . . .
The thin, sharp wail of a siren stabbed upward from the avenue. A police emergency truck was scurrying like a green beetle between the traffic lines on Lexington. Somebody is dead, Stanton thought. They send out those emergency trucks only when somebody is dead; the siren is like women keening at a wake; it must be the loudest siren in the world. Now, who can be dead? Is it a man who fell on the subway tracks? Is it someone who turned on the gas and blew up an apartment? Is it another fashionable murder in Turtle Bay? Is it a woman who jumped out a window? Is it a child who accidentally swallowed Drano instead of milk of magnesia, and they suspect infanticide? Is it a bloated corpse someone spotted bumping the piers in the East River?
Or is it me? Stanton asked himself. Are they coming for me? Am I dead?
He felt something jerking at his sleeve—didn’t feel it, really—but became conscious of it, became conscious, too, of a voice close by mounting to a scream louder than the siren.
“Mr. Wylie! Mr. Wylie! What’s the matter?” It was Miss Rice. “Oh, Mr. Wylie, are you all right?”
“Yes—yes, Helen, I’m all right,” Stanton said. “What is it?”
“Oh!” The girl gasped with relief. “You’ve only got fifteen minutes to make the train, Mr. Wylie. I came in and told you three times, and you didn’t seem to . . . I was afraid something was . . . afraid you were ill. Oh, Mr. Wylie!”
“No,” said Stanton, wondering at his ability to say anything, since he was dead. “Everything is fine. I’ll go to the station.”
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