MR. BAILEY PARKED his car and walked down to the bonfire burning at the river side. He pulled off his mittens and held out his hands so they would warm faster. He stamped his feet on the frozen ground and searched the skaters with eyes that were tired but alert. He didn’t see Jimmie at first. The people went whizzing around and back and forth and through each other, like confetti on a miscellaneous breeze. Then Jimmie came shooting along from way up the river, skating like a hockey player; he dodged men and women and children with bird-flight motions, turned, showered crystals, and started to walk up the wooden ramp.
“Hey, Jimmie!”
“Hello, Dad.”
“They, said over at the paint works I’d find you here.”
Jimmie smiled a little. “Yeah. Nothing more I could help with today. We’ve got everything we can, going again. It’ll be six months before they get the shops rebuilt. And eight, or ten, for a new lab.”
“I know. I—want to talk to you. D’you mind?”
“Not at all.” Jimmie picked up a wood bench, tucked it under his arm, walked clumsily closer to the fire, and put down the bench. The men sat side by side. “Going to snow—about tomorrow. Snow hard. For a long while. What’s on your mind?”
Mr. Bailey seemed hesitant about getting to the point. “A lot of things. A hell of a lot of ’em. You seen Biff?”
“Not lately. Not in the last few days.” HI didn’t know you were taking care of the family of the colored man that got killed in the wreck.”
Jimmie shrugged. His face was bright with color. Underneath were the gray tones of fatigue and the sharp lines of strain. “What of it? Who told you?”
“Heiffler. I’ll—take over—that family.”
“Heiffler? Who the hell is Heiffler?”
“That intern. Came to the bank. He told me a lot of things.” Mr. Bailey sighed heavily. “Explained all about the psychology of Biff’s accident. I must say, I had to admit that I’d thought of it. Remember that evening at dinner? When Sarah accused us both?”
He took out a cigar. “I can see you do. Well, that night I didn’t want to be branded for having such an idea—before the whole family. Made me mad. But Heiffler explained it.
Maybe he’s right. And he told me that you had kept him from sending in a report to the army that Biff was—er—”
“Psychotic. Yeah. I did. He isn’t—any more.”
Mr. Bailey felt for matches and found he had none. He picked a board from the fire and used the hot end. “You know, if I’d discovered, at the time, that you’d done something to spoil Biff’s chances of honorably staying out of the service—I’d have been wild!”
“Wouldn’t have been honorable.”
Mr. Bailey nodded. “I can see the point. You’re a terrific stickler for basic facts.
But you were right. Biff’s put in for training, and if he got blackballed now I don’t know what he’d do.”
“‘Put in’? What do you mean?”
“Oh, volunteered. Enlisted. In another month he’ll be in shape again. Maybe less.
He was dawdling around the house there, just the fool with that nurse. That—what’s-her-name.”
“Genevieve. What happened to her?” Mr. Bailey looked at his son with an air of remote amusement that surprised Jimmie. “What always happens—to those girls. Some other man. A new case, professionally—and romantically. She got sick of Biff when Biff got well.”
Jimmie frowned. “It’s a pity, Dad, you never talked like that around home.”
“I act like a prig? All right. I believe in it—when you have growing kids. Trouble is, I learned just recently you three were grown up. Sarah getting married. Biff going around corrupting morals, and enlisting to fight. Jimmie, it seems to me that you’ve done a whole lot for Biff and your sister.” He spoke wistfully.
“Nothing much. Played older brother. I am one, after all. They are nice kids—in their ways. Needed schooling, like animals.”
“Why don’t you ask me what Biff enlisted in? Seems as if you would.” Jimmie cleaned slush from the runner of a skate. “Oh, I knew. Air Force.”
“You knew! Did he tell you?”
“No. I haven’t seen him, as I said. But I know Biff. Even in his most extreme mood of heroism Biff would do his best to maintain a glamorous background. Something the ladies would like.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
Jimmie turned toward his father. “Well, it’s flashy. Still, he’d make a peach of a flier.”
“You’re just a damned puritan,” Mr. Bailey said. Jimmie looked at him and suddenly laughed. His laugh was almost merry. “Gee! That I should live to see the day you called me a puritan! Maybe I am, though.”
The older man grunted. “You damn’ well are. Say, Jimmie. What really happened—the night of the fire? That was the thing that changed Biff. He won’t ever be the same again. But he wouldn’t tell me. I asked him, and he said never to ask him again. He said you had more insides than a herd of elephants. But that’s all. I—I’m your father, Jimmie—sort of, after all.”
Jimmie felt the touch of compassion. Mercy, in Jimmie’s present state of mind, was cheap enough. He wanted only to avoid all signs of drama. “I’ll tell you—if you’ll never repeat it. Somehow I think you won’t. And I think you’ll understand too. Other people would fail to. You know, I loved old Willie Corinth like a father.” His eyes lifted gravely. “Sorry. Willie was the greatest man Muskogewan ever had—maybe ever will have. Biff and I were scouting around behind the fire and we saw the old boy trapped in there. He could have jumped out the window, and we could have run fast and grabbed him—and I was set to try that. But he spent a lot of time burning the stuff in his safe. Took him forever to open it. I suppose—it was hot in there.” Jimmie halted. “Never thought about that!”
He was grimmer when he went on. “There was a chance of hauling him out—a ladder on a vat, a short jump to the roof, a flock of skylights. Biff saw that chance—and tried to get me to go. He was too rocky or he’d have tried. I realized that. I wouldn’t.
“I knew that if I tried Willie and I might both be lost. I knew what was in the papers that Willie was burning. It was the beginning of a very great idea. A new idea.
Something that would go a long way toward winning the war. I knew that Willie was scared the fire might not cook the stuff in the safe; scared that the idea—the principle—might become public. It was one of those things that, once conceived, any good chemist can develop.”
Jimmie spat. “It’s a beastly business, Dad, to let a good man die to keep a secret that may kill thousands of other men. Or—not even to try to save him. That’s what I did.
You see, since Willie was in there I had to stay out. He was burning the papers. And I’m the only other one who knew the idea. Not now, though. It’s gone to Washington. We were crazy to take on so much responsibility—even for a few weeks.”
“In other words,” his father said softly, “you refused to try to save him—in order to save an idea.”
Jimmie didn’t answer. He did not even look at his father.
Mr. Bailey coughed several times. He blew his nose. “So that’s what Biff meant by ‘insides’! Good God!”
Jimmie’s voice was as cold as the gray afternoon. “I think there is no need saying I would rather have gone up on the roof. I have been in a lot of fires. I’m not—too—afraid of them. As it turned out—and I’ve thought this over a thousand times—I’d never have made it. And I know, if I had, Willie would never have forgiven me for risking it.”
“He was a tough old duck,” Mr. Bailey agreed. “I presume you know he made me the head of his plant?”
Jimmie turned incredulously. “You!”
His father grinned over his chewed cigar. “Does it shock you? I’m a darned good business man, Jimmie! His will puts me in full charge of the business end. A committee of his chemist friends is to pick the technical head—unless you’ll be it. The part about you is a codicil.”
“You got another cigar?” Jimmie asked. Mr. Bailey produced one and offered it as if it were an important gift—solemnly, silently.
“I’m going back to England,” Jimmie said, after a while. “This chapter is washed up. There won’t be a lab for me to work in—here—for a long while—”
“You could help in redesigning the plant, Jimmie! I’ve already started jamming through the priorities. We’ll get material—and right now!”
“Lots of men can do that. The redesigning. Nope. I’m going back.”
“Mmmm. I don’t need to say—we’ll miss you.”
“Thanks.”
After a pause his father said, “What is it, Jimmie? What have they got—we haven’t? The British?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Dad. Not—with you feeling the way you do.”
“You might try.”
Jimmie smiled. “I couldn’t even begin to try!” But he did. “They were stuffy—class-conscious, contemptuous of other people. All that has been boiled out of them.
They’ve got the beginnings of some new kind of living. Being there exhilarates you without making you feel fatuous, if you can understand that. You know you’re with a bunch of people who are in the groove, and you don’t care about anything else. Whether you die doesn’t matter at all. They’ve got the high symbol of living for all the people everywhere—right in their laps! At the moment the demand of that symbol is to kill Germans. That’s simple; that’s essential; and everything else has to wait. You just realize all the time—that there is ‘ everything else.’ It’s enough to realize. Leaving them is like leaving a sacred place.”
Jimmie shook his head. “Coming here—well, here, you people don’t know what you have been living for. You don’t know what you want to live for in the future. Who you are. What you stand for. You’re scared of every little step that leads you into the future. And yet—the future exists, and some kind of steps must forever be walking toward it. In England they have one job above all others and they are doing it at any cost, because it has hope in it. Here, people just argue day and night—as if the whole course of man’s freedom, the existence of his soul, the promise of his future was a debatable topic—like whether or not to put new traffic signs on Main Street. Oh, hell! You can’t say it.”
Mr. Bailey started to speak and decided to say nothing. He flung the ends of several boards into the fire.
Jimmie stood. “Well, Dad. I probably will be leaving in a few days. I’ll come by.”
“You—you wouldn’t care to spend that time—with us?”
“If you want me to. I’d like it.”
“So would Mother. I dunno. She and I might change, I suppose.” His eye flashed.
“Not that I have, remember! I still think—even if we go in the war, and win, and things are all right afterward—it is not our affair. But it’s damned lonely at the house, now. Biff going—Sarah gone—you. Wilson was over last night. He’s full of conundrums he can’t answer—and tries to. Corinth certainly worked him over before he died. If the old man had lived I’d have bet Wilson would have lost the argument, in the end.”
Jimmie said, “Well—”
“Bring your stuff over before supper, huh?”
“All right.”
Jimmie went into the skating house to change his shoes.
The next day he walked around on the property of the Corinth Paint and Dye Works in a delirious fall of snow. A gang of men were clearing the debris from the rectangles where buildings had burned. As fast as they pried open a fresh, black wound in the whiteness the flakes swirled down upon it, healingly. When the whistle blew for noon and the men quit, Jimmie stalked toward the gate. He was wearing high boots and breeches; under his arm was a roll of blueprints. He waved at the man in the guardhouse.
“Going to lunch, Mat. Be back in about an hour.”
“Okay, Jimmie.”
“Hello.”
There was Audrey parked at the hydrant again.
Parked at the brightly scratched hydrant. Audrey, gleaming and delicious, against the lithographic landscape. She was smiling, as she nearly always was, and her face was sun-tanned to a deeper buff-pink than ever. Jimmie stopped first and came toward her slowly, explaining to himself in an idiot way that she’d gotten the sunburn in the Carolinas. He didn’t climb into the coupe. He walked to the driver’s side. Audrey had opened the window. He leaned on it.
“I hear you’re going to England,” she said. “I stopped by your house.”
“Yeah. In a few days.”
She looked at him. “Running away to think it over didn’t do any good, Jimmie. I threw the whole book at myself—all the rules about what a girl should do when disappointed in love. I traveled. I flirted with other men. I took long walks and got interested in other things. And it was just as phoney for me as a thing could possibly be.
You’re the only man I can never pretend with. You’ve just about—! I don’t know what you’ve done to me.”
“And I don’t know what you’ve done to me, Audrey. Something. I’ve always thought you were a fraud. A complicated fraud, like your dad. Acting. Never real, never sincere, because acting was an obsession. I just about couldn’t stand it—but I always barely could. You see I don’t live just for loving a woman. Not now. Not—ever. Even if I loved you with all my heart and all my life. I still—”
Audrey said, “Goodness.” She wrinkled her nose. “What talk! I understand that! A man who felt any other way wouldn’t be more than a third of a man. One third of a man—two thirds of a ghost. What the hell do you imagine made me fall for you? Why do you suppose I’ve been chasing you like a—a—a little beagle?”
“I thought it was that obsession. You had to prove something.”
She nodded. “Sure. I still do. I have to prove I love you. I have to prove I always will. Now—you’re going to roar away again. To England. So I’ve got to go to England.”
“What!”
“It’ll be a terrible nuisance. I’m broke. I’ll have to volunteer for some kind of job. Borrow money from someone. Vamp the State Department. Get Dad’s friends to high-pressure people. I’ll probably wind up in the Land Army, dressed like you, pitching hay. Instead of—”
Jimmie’s smile was absent-minded. “You really mean that, don’t you? You’re really going to England!”
“If I have to. You ought not to make me though, Jimmie. The only two men I revere are going to be there. You. And Larry, if he still—exists. You say we go to England—so that’s where we go. When I heard about it I was sore for a minute. I thought it was quitting. I thought it was beneath you. After all, you were born an American citizen. If Americans are behaving as badly as you say I thought you ought to stick around and help straighten them out. But I was sore only for a second. If you decide it’s England—I start looking at the travel folders. No matter what I get in, I could see you—once in a while.”
Jimmie thought. “You mean, you believed I ought to stay here, and you nevertheless decided that because I was going there you would?”
“We Wilsons,” Audrey answered, “are a rapacious lot. And also, we never quit! Besides, this is my first experience with being right, and knowing it. I don’t intend to let go of it. Sure, I thought you ought to stay. But I think something else, a lot harder. You’ve heard the theme. ‘Whither thou goest—’ Something of that sort.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“In which case, I will too.” Audrey began to cry.
Jimmie looked over his shoulder, ignoring her tears.
He stared at Willie Corinth’s plant, in the process of reconstruction. A huddle of buildings, melting to nothing behind the shifting curtain of snow. Buildings to house the dreams of men—dreams that could be destructive, and dreams that could be beautiful and creative. Opposites. A quiet hung over the scene, a lunch hour tranquility; at one o’clock the clamor would begin again, the energetic progress of rebuilding on the tomb of the unrecovered ashes of Willie Corinth.
Thinly, far away, a boy’s voice hawked the first edition of the day’s Dispatch.
Something about England. The sharp-angled, stagey scene blurred before Jimmie’s eyes.
This, too, was something about England. Something about all human living. His mind screwed down like a vise until it squeezed out every thought of himself and every feeling about Audrey—until it rigidly gripped one element alone: the symbol he’d named for his father! Man’s freedom, man’s soul, man’s future, man’s hope.
He looked back very slowly. Their eyes met. Across the cold air between them—air misty with his breath—they exchanged surrender and possession.
“All right, Audrey. We’ll stay.”