look. She had on a white print dress with purple, red and green splotches that looked like a colored plate from a textbook on visceral diseases in a final stage. Her face was heavy and looked as if she’d been crying, and her pale blue eyes searched my face with a tremulous pathetic uncertainty and no sign of recognition at all.
“Are . . . are you Mrs. Latham?” She wavered a moment. “I’m Lena Brent . . . Mrs. Rufus Brent. I’m a friend of Tom and Marjorie Seaton’s.” Her eyes moved down to the framed photograph of my two boys on the pembroke table. “You look so much . . . younger than I’d expected,” she said. “Are these your sons? You really. . . .”
(“Don’t let ’em feed you that, Ma, it’s because we’ve had a hard life, withered before our time. . . .” I could see it in the two engaging faces.)
As she looked back at me then, her face lighted incredibly with the most lovely smile I think I’ve ever seen. It transformed her utterly. If some kind of magic wand had touched her or my eyes that were seeing her she couldn’t have been so totally another being. All the uncertainty and the heaviness, even the splotchy print, had dissolved in a warm soft radiance. She had an almost other-worldly quality of simplicity and kindliness that was really beautiful. It hadn’t been her smile entirely. Her voice was so sweet, and so clear and gentle in an almost childlike way that the smile was only the completing of the whole illusion of youth and loveliness—if it was illusory, if it wasn’t the flesh that was the illusion and the spirit the true reality.
“I’m very fond of boys,” she said. “I have a picture of our two. Would you like to. . . .”
“I’d like to very much, Mrs. Brent,” I said.
She undid the catch of her green straw bag. “It was a Mother’s Day present. They went down together and had it taken for me.”
She opened the folder she’d taken out, her face shining with the tenderness mothers are supposed to have and often don’t, or conceal because it isn’t very fashionable any more. “That’s Rufie Jr. on the left, and Robbie.”
And fine looking lads they were, clean-cut, alert and intelligent. You could see they were having their pictures taken as a labor of love and having fun while they were at it. But it was the middle picture I was most absorbed in, and utterly astonished by.
“They’re wonderful,” I said. “And is this your daughter?”
It would be less than the truth to pretend I wasn’t curious about the picture I’d heard of, at the beauty shop and again at dinner. Between the two boys was a girl, seventeen, I’d say, no lipstick, her hair, lightish in the picture and probably red as her mother’s had no doubt once been and indeed still was, slicked back and tied with a ribbon, and about as weedy and unglamorous as the dreary school uniform she wore. She was holding her lips pressed together, to keep from laughing or to cover up the braces on her teeth perhaps, or maybe both. Her eyes had a scared half-twinkle in them, as if her brothers were also invisibly on the sidelines there trying to make her laugh, as do or die she kept her eyes resolutely glued on the camera. But it was not the face of a girl who’d be around gangster hangouts. It was a lovely young face, sweet and very sensitive, but with a firm little chin half-tilted, determined not to let her brothers make her grin and spoil the picture.
“She’s sweet,” I said.
“That’s . . . that’s Molly. She’s all—” She bent her head, the radiant joy gone from her face. “Oh, I don’t know what happens to people!” she said suddenly, and with such naked poignancy that it made my spine quiver. “You do everything you can for your children, but there’s nothing you can do to help them. They still have to suffer, you can’t ever do anything to save them!”
She took the folder quickly from my hand. “Oh, forgive me, please!” she said. “I didn’t mean to distress you, talking about my children. That’s not why I came. Marjorie Seaton’s been begging me to come, but I . . . I was’ afraid. Then I heard some people talking about you, and I saw your name on the list they sent us of the garden party tomorrow. It’s being given for us, you know.”
I didn’t know, and what’s more I didn’t know there was anybody left in Washington who could keep that kind of secret, with all the people who’d give their right arm to meet the head man of the Industrial Techniques Commission.
“—Gate crashers,” she added, no doubt at the look on my face. It sounded so strange in that incredibly gentle voice of hers that I blinked as if she’d used one of Sergeant Buck’s favorite outdoor words. “We haven’t been going out,” she said. “But they thought we should, just to . . . to let people see we aren’t really peculiar. And I thought you wouldn’t mind, perhaps, if I came before I met you.” Her look was an appeal as well as an apology. “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind. . . .”
“Not at all, Mrs. Brent,” I said. It was difficult for me too.
“You see, Marjorie says you know a Colonel Primrose she thinks you could persuade to . . . to help me, Mrs. Latham. And I do need help. I need it desperately.”
She didn’t have to tell me, though I didn’t know how desperately she did need it, even then, when I could see what she was going through, trying to control herself.
“You can’t know what it’s been like, these last months,” she said. “I didn’t want my husband to come to Washington, and he didn’t want to come. They persuaded him it was his duty. He knew he’d be attacked, of course. But he didn’t expect all the personal vilification Mr. Vair is heaping on him—But it isn’t only that.”
She said that hurriedly, as if I’d get up and ask her to leave if she didn’t explain.
“It’s the time it wastes, and the lack of confidence that other men in the industrial fields who don’t know him are bound to have, whether they realize it or not. And my husband’s a hard man, Mrs. Latham, but he can be hurt. He doesn’t mind about the wart on his nose.” The little smile she gave me lasted only for that instant. “He is upset when Mr. Vair says his father died alone in a state institution. It wasn’t an insane hospital, as Mr. Vair implies. It was consumption he had, and the family paid everything they could, when he was moved there for special care. My husband was just eleven years old then . . . and everybody dies alone, Mrs. Latham.
“And he’s terribly upset about the Brentool Plant out in Taber City. I don’t know whether you know that’s where Mr. Vair comes from. You see, my husband didn’t want to take that plant either, but friends in the Air Force were terribly worried, the way the Congress was closing everything down. They knew the war wasn’t really over. When Mr. Vair attacks them as well as him, as thieves and traitors, it’s not easy. And the men at the plant stop work, and their children throw rocks and mud at the superintendent’s car.”
She fumbled at her bag to get her handkerchief out.
“But it’s not even that that frightens me Mrs. Latham,” she said simply. “It’s. . . . Molly, our daughter, that I’m frightened about.” She hesitated painfully. “She had a . . . a very serious accident, a terrible accident, really, and she hasn’t got over it. That’s why she isn’t here with us. And you can’t know what it’s like, Mrs. Latham, having people around, prying and snooping. It’s been worse since we’ve been here. My husband doesn’t know . . . about all that, and about the anonymous letters. I burn them so he won’t see them. And the telephone calls. I try to keep all that away from him. Because . . . that’s what terrifies me. My husband adores Molly. He worships her. She’s all he lives for, really. And now, there’s some photograph of her. . . .”
That,
