Star-Dust Part 55

"Mrs. Penny, did you go up to see that 'June Blossom' sketch last night?"

"Yes. I'm writing my report on it."

Constantly now requests like this were tossed in the form of a pair of tickets on her desk.

"Well?"

"Sweet, clean, and obvious."

He nodded in a short corroborative manner he had, drawing up alongside the desk.

"Take a telegram, please. 'Mr. Sam Sadler, People's Theater, Cleveland, Ohio. Book _June Blossom_ for week of nineteenth.' And now if you'll sign and stamp this mortgage after my brother and I sign."

The box proved c.u.mbersome, so before she took up pen she held it out to R.J.

"The blouses," she said. "There is a blue and a maroon. I hope Mrs.

Visigoth is going to like them. And here is the change."

"That's mighty fine," he said, smiling until a second chin appeared. "A trinket or two up his sleeve gives a fellow a right to ring his own door bell."

He reached then, fumbling at the hasps of his alligator bag which stood by, opening it out and stooping to insert the package.

Simultaneously, as the mouth of that valise yawned, the two men leaped forward so that their heads came together resoundingly and absurdly, but not before the bag had exposed its surface articles: a pair of tortoise-sh.e.l.l military brushes, a packet of doc.u.ments, and a precious silver and lapis-lazuli box about the dimensions of a playing card, the kind usually dedicated to such elusive addenda as stamps, collar b.u.t.tons, or sewing box in a lady's overnight bag.

From where she sat, shorthand book open, pencil poised, Lilly had observed it quite casually, although it was some time before she could co-ordinate it with what ensued.

Suddenly there was the flash of the two men to their feet, R.J., an ox-blood surging into his face, kicking shut the valise, his brother whitening and quivering.

"Why did you lie about that box!"

"What do you mean?" said Robert, through his teeth, his color so livid that teeth and eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed to whiten.

His voice like the splitting of silk, Bruce plunged down a pointing forefinger toward the bag.

"Open that up," he said.

"The h.e.l.l I will."

With one swift stroke from the lighter and lither of them, the bag was on its side, spilling its contents of tortoise-sh.e.l.l hair brushes and the silver box, Bruce standing above it, tightening of jaw and knuckles.

"Liar!" he cried. "Liar!"

To Lilly it seemed that out of these years of apparently placid relationship, with something avuncular, even of father and son in it, here were suddenly and terribly Cain and Abel, elemental with an itch for each other's throat.

"Say that again, by G.o.d! and you'll regret it."

"Liar! Liar!" he reiterated over and over, standing and towering over the spilling bag. "Why did you lie to me about that box? Three years ago I asked you for it. The spring after her death. Just before the auction.

Wasn't it sufficient that I let you and Pauline settle her personal effects between you? Only that little box--somehow I wanted it. Father gave it to her the first Christmas of their marriage. She always kept it on her table. You were welcome to all the rest between you. All I asked for was that little box of mother's. And to think that yesterday, the anniversary of her death, I mentioned it again. Liar! Liar! Lost! Never been found among her effects! Bah! Liar! It's a little thing, a trinket that she loved, but I wanted it. You hear, I wanted that trinket. She used to keep jelly beans in it for me when I came in from school. It's little--the littlest thing that ever happened between us, but it's the meanest, and G.o.d knows in my dealings with you all my life there have been enough of the little meannesses to contend with. But you have won your last mean little advantage outside this office. You and I can play the cards in business, particularly when we play them six hundred miles apart and where it is a case of man to man out on the mat. But outside this office we play quits! There aren't going to be any more nasty little personal issues with you, because there aren't going to be any at all. You're a liar and a hundred per cent bigger one over that little trinket of a box than if the stakes had been bigger. You hate to give, unless it's so much for so much. Your sense of fairness is vile! It's penny mean! Liar!"

With a lowering of head Robert lunged then, his lips dragged to an oblique, threads of red cut in his eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"Eat those words or, by G.o.d! I'll ram them down your throat."

"The h.e.l.l I will."

"Gentlemen!"

They were crowded against the door, their breathing flowing against each other's face, gestures uplifted.

Her eyes black and her notebook crushed up to her, Lilly's voice rang out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had been diverted to her.

They were suddenly and quiveringly themselves again, the panther laid.

"You'll rue this," said Robert, walking back with some uncertainty of step to his desk, his eyes still slits.

Bruce lifted the box rather tenderly, even with the greeny pallor of his rage still out and his features straining for composure.

"I'll have it valued and send you a check--"

"d.a.m.n you!" With snarl-shaped lips the older brother lunged again, this time their bodies meeting and swaying for clutch.

"Bruce!"

The use of his given name, the curdled quality to her voice, had their way. There was a moment of blank staring between the two men, of Bruce placing the box gently on the desk and walking out without slamming the door, and Robert sinking down into the swivel chair, trying to bring the oblique pull of his lips back to straight.

"Get out," he said, without looking at her.

She did, tiptoeing and fighting down the sense of sickness.

And thus, out of a bauble of silver and lapis lazuli, was reared a tower of silence between these brothers as high as fifteen years is long.

Large affairs for their joint unraveling lay ahead, dramatic in their magnitude. The Union Square Family Theater was very presently to become first a tawdry, then a discarded link in the glittering chain of playhouses that was to gird the country.

Toward this end R.J. and Bruce Visigoth steered, with an impeccable oneness of purpose, the destinies of an enterprise audacious in its concept and ultimately to be spectacular in its fulfillment.

But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the heart, can kill, bloodlessly.

CHAPTER VII

When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's pa.s.sions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible pa.s.sions lay just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could conjure began to form staring circles around her--the Visigoths. Minnie Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!

She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched with perspiration.

"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."

She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.