1
Some undistinguished men are heroes; some distinguished heroes are not men at all in the good sense of the name; and such a person was Kit Sloan. He was unaware of the defect as are thousands.
From his ancestors, he had taken his lithe, big body and the resilient “constitution” that went with it. From a forgotten forebear, probably a carefully forgotten one, he’d come by the
“Sloan darkness,” the coloring of eyes and hair and skin which had suggested to Nora Conner a Latin actor. Some said the Sloans had Italian blood, others said gypsy, and some, of course, hit upon the truth—commonplace in the west: an Indian squaw had participated in combining the Sloan genes.
No one who had lived a long life in either of the Sister Cities would deny that the Sloans had brains; any native of vintage age could add, often from harsh experience, that Minerva brought to the family an additional measure of shrewdness and force besides. Kittridge Sloan, in whom these elements presumably reposed, conceived of himself as so imbued and endowed with every needful quality as to make demonstration unnecessary save when he chose. He did not often choose. To be sure, he was obliged to do a certain amount of work to graduate from Princeton, where he’d been sent at nineteen. He enjoyed sports, however, and was so proficient at them that professors who might otherwise have failed him were possibly persuaded not to do so by anxious coaches. Besides, Kit invariably elected the easiest courses: he had a definite knack for finding paths of least resistance. Whether he could have exhibited, under pressure, the acumen of his parents remained unknown; he chose not to try, deeming it unnecessary.
He interrupted his undergraduate career for military service. His mother preferred the Navy, but Kit, for once opposing her wishes, went into the Air Force. Athletes have an affinity for flying, often, and Kit, who’d ridden the fastest horses and driven the fastest cars (with several mishaps in the Sister Cities which had been expensive to his family and more than bruising to his fellow citizens), took easily to flying.
He found himself in actual combat, as an interceptor pilot in the Eighth Air Force, over England, before he thought to regret the whole thing. Until he was shot at, he had kept his mind closed to that aspect of his temporary trade. But when, high in the British air, he felt and saw German bullets entering the delicate tissues of his plane, Kit went into funk. He dived clear of attack, leaving two wing mates exposed to a fate which both met soon and heroically. On the ground, he found a plausible explanation for his “lucky” escape. The attack upon six Nazi scouting fighters had not been observed by anybody save those engaged. It was a cloudy day.
Kit knew, however, that in some very present mission he would be obliged again to engage the foe and he knew he would, again, turn tail. He spent two febrile days trying to figure a way out of a situation which, until then, he had regarded as an exhilarating sport and which, to his horror, had become deadly dangerous. Then, on what he sweatily felt was the eve of his disgrace, he and his fighter group were reassigned to another field and a different activity. Buzz bombs had appeared over Britain and it was the task of Kit to intercept these, if possible.
Attacking buzz bombs was dangerous and demanded skill. Ram-jet engines drove the miniature planes at terrific speed, for that era. It was necessary to wait high above, spot one (or learn of an approach by radio) and dive down toward it, using the acceleration of the plunge to overtake the missile. When these bombs were shot at, they usually exploded in the air and the plane that did the shooting was often unable to evade the blast. Thus, some attacking planes, in the early days, blew up themselves to save London’s citizens; others on the same dedicated mission were torn to bits as they streaked into flying fragments. Soon, however, it was discovered that the slipstream of an overshooting fighter could be used to knock down a buzz bomb, tipping it over, causing it to crash prematurely in the open countryside rather than on the intended city.
This feat was a matter of technique and daring. And the VI’s had a negative characteristic which perfectly suited Kit’s personality: they did not shoot back. A cool and skillful pilot with very fast reflexes, Kit became one of the most celebrated assailants of the buzz bombs and so a hero. Where he would have failed altogether in the purpose for which he had been trained, this substitute endeavor matched his inadequate specifications. No one ever doubted, not even the men in his own squadron, that his “nerve” was anything but consummate. It was, so long as the risks he took involved only decisions made by himself. The appearance of any factor he could not control, such as hostile fire, alone unmanned him. He had cut close to pedestrians and other cars—and clipped a few—all his life: diving on a ton of HE carried by a zombie aircraft was no different. It could not hurt him so long as he made no blunders at the controls. That was his psychology and he came home to U.S.A., went back to Princeton, cloaked in a wreath of medals, Sister City awe and maternal ecstasy.
By that time, so long as the issue did not rise in fact, Kit had completely repressed his short-term awareness of any combat defect. He could talk air slaughter on even terms with any ace.
On a cold, gray day, shortly before Thanksgiving, feeling at loose ends and noting (on the bathroom scales, after rising and showering) that he had gained five unwanted pounds, Kit made two decisions which he regarded as important. He would skip lunch for a week. And he would get more exercise.
At breakfast he told his mother, with the urgent solemnity of a businessman who had decided to open a new branch, or a surgeon, to open a peritoneum. They were sitting in the upstairs breakfast room of the Sloan mansion, looking out over their landscaped acres on Pearson Square which, in Victoria’s time (or Garfield’s or Grover Cleveland’s), had been the center of River City bon ton but now, save where Minerva held the fort, was much like the decayed area a mile or so on the other side of Market Street: a run-down neighborhood in which the big houses were compartmented for roomers, or hung with signs denoting piano and voice instruction, furniture repair, spiritualist readings, philately and whatnot, or torn down and replaced by already shabby row houses, which in some instances had yielded again to supermarkets and filling stations.
“Five pounds,” Kit said with a shake of his handsome head.
Minerva shook hers in sympathy. “But why not eat a small breakfast and a small lunch?”
“It’s a problem, I admit. If I don’t eat lunch at all, I’ll get hellishly hungry. That means, I’ll have to do something pretty interesting in the afternoon, to stave off the old pangs. So I thought I’d drive the Jag out to the airport and fly first. Then back to town and the A.C. for squash. The fellows wanted me to play for the club and I was too lazy. But I’ll change my mind.
A rubdown up on the roof solarium, maybe a cabinet bath, perhaps even a few fast rounds with Percy Wigman, on days when there’s time—and home again. All reduced. Or, if it’s an evening out, home and change and scram.”
“I wish you wouldn’t fly.”
“I know, Muzz. Silly of you.”
He went at the matter of losing five pounds, and diverting his mind from hunger’s pangs meanwhile, with great intensity. His heredity had, after all, geared him for large enterprise and since he’d eschewed them he was obliged to undertake small things in a big way. His red Jaguar roared north from Pearson Square and west the five miles on Elk Drive to Gordon Field, the civil airport. He’d phoned ahead; his fast, small plane was ready. He took off, ignoring rule and law, in the manner of hot Soviet pilots, retracting his landing gear to become air-borne.
High above the vast panoply of the two cities, he stunted. People on the ground watched with fascination. Old hands at the airport, even if they’d missed the take-off, identified the pilot by his performance in the air.
After half an hour, Kit tired of using the gray sky for a trampolin and came down closer to the cities, separated by a leaden river, which soon would freeze and bear a burden of dirty snow on its ice. He cut south and on the way came close to earth. Using the deserted Gordon Stadium as a kind of inverted hurdle, he made several passes into it at an altitude lower than its cement circle of seats, its press stand and TV stalls. The maneuver, also illegal, reminded him of faster and trickier antics over Britain. That thought sent him farther south and west to Hink Field, the military airport, where, keeping to the letter of the law, he annoyed several junior officers in Flight Control by circling the area at the closest permissible approach and shooting past nervous young men in trainers.
Swinging, then, on an arc of several miles, he bethought himself of Lenore Bailey. It was easy, at five thousand feet, to sight the metal glint of Crystal Lake. He came in over it low, circling its banks, unmindful of wincing patients in the Jenkins Memorial Hospital, and, zooming, twisting, he sorted from the residences below the intersection of Walnut and Bigelow.
On the northwest corner, the Bailey house sent up chimney smoke. Kit dived fast, pulled out hard, and blew the smoke into the yard. He climbed at full power and came down in a series of loops. He took all of Walnut in a roaring run, at the end of which he zoomed and came back-upside down.
These antics attracted a large and almost unanimously indignant audience among which he could not spot Lenore. People ran out of their thunder-stricken houses—mothers with babies in their arms, housewives with sudsy hands; carrying dish towels, waving pans and pots, and irate businessmen who lunched at home, with shaking fists and tucked napkins. Netta Bailey appeared, in a kimona and hair curlers, which the pilot could not discern; Beau was not there. He did not practice the economical but plebian custom of lunching at home. And Lenore was downtown shopping.
When he could not spot the girl, but only her mother, Kit made one last run over the bare treetops of Walnut Street, flying at crop-duster’s altitude, and winged back toward the airport.
On the way, he dived through the low-hanging drift of yellowish smoke which was being blown by a west wind from the Hobart Metal Products plant across the center of the two downtown regions. He whipped the smoke into satisfying patterns and took a tum above the skyscrapers of Green Prairie and River City. They rose magically out of the factory smoke and stood above them in a single cluster at what seemed the heart of one great metropolis.
His last trick was a pass at the steel stack of the refining plant beyond the metalworks—a tall column topped by a flame which consumed waste gases and sent a horizontal smoke-trail of its own across the city. Not realizing that the blaze was self-illumined, Kit tried to extinguish it with his prop-wash much in the same way he had once diverted buzz bombs from their courses.
But after three passes at the flame he gave up and left both the stack and the plant foreman burning.
He drove back to town, played brilliantly for an hour and a half at squash with Freddie Perkman, took assorted baths and then, in a terry-cloth robe, went out in the solarium of the River City A.C. for his massage. The glass-enclosed summit of the skyscraper building furnished a three hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the cities, obstructed only here and there by the few taller structures. Kit, having just had an even better view from the air, didn’t even glance through the enormous windows of the square-sided roof garden. He lay down on a table and submitted to the attentions of the masseur, who had greeted him with, “Glad to see you in the club.”
“Had to come back, Taps; getting fat.”
“Taps” Flaugherty, accustomed to the truly overweight bodies of River City’s well-to-do, grinned at the near-perfect specimen on the table. “Can’t see an ounce, Mr. Sloan.”
“The scales can,” Kit grunted.
An hour and a quarter later, the red Jaguar took him home. At eight, precisely, he sat opposite his mother in the shadowy dining room of the Sloan mansion, gustily spooning soup.
“Have a good day, son?”
“Passable.”
“Any plans for the evening?”
“Thought I’d pick up Lenore Bailey “
That suited Mrs. Sloan for an opening. Her eyes fastened briefly on her hungry son and moved thoughtfully into the distances of the formal room where the gold rims of place plates gleamed from china racks, and cabinets of cut glass sparkled dully.
“You’ve seen a lot of the Bailey girl, lately.”
“Yeah.”
“Does that mean anything, Kit?”
He smiled at his mother. “Ask Lenore.”
She passed that up with a gesture that was partly disdainful and partly indulgent. She thought, with pride, that the Sloan men had always possessed a way with women. She was able to feel pride, not rancor, now that her husband was occupying a plot in Shadyknoll, with a thirty-foot obelisk to mark the grave of a great industrialist, banker and rakehell. Her son’s
“conquests,” as she thought them (though he rarely found himself obliged to use aggression), did not in her opinion belong in the same category as her late husband’s “vices.” There was the mitigating fact that Kittridge was an “irresistible young man”; her spouse had been an “old fool”; there was a further alleviating circumstance in the fact that morals, amongst smart young people, had changed. In sum, there was (though she did not admit it) the fact that her husband’s perennial blonde had driven Minerva half mad with jealous fury, while she found herself taking in her son’s amours an almost masculine and quasi-participatory interest.
“You in love with Lenore?”
“Hell, Muzz. I love ’em all—if they’re pretty. If they’re as pretty as she, I love double.”
“She’s an interesting girl.”
“How do you know?” he inquired with ample suspicion, and he said in the same breath,
“This is good soup.”
“You better not have any more. There’s roast beef—Yorkshire pudding—I knew you’d be famished.”
“How do you know so much about Lenore? She belong to some ladies’ aid—or something? You don’t see her in church much. She doesn’t go.”
“The girls that interest you, Kit, naturally interest me.” She sighed lightly. “I’m getting older every year….”
“Young and pretty and sexy!” He always said that when she said she was aging. It always pleased her.
“Nonsense! Homely as a Missouri mule and twice the size! No, Lenore isn’t someone I’ve seen lately. I do recall she used to attend St. Stephen’s when she was an awkward, adolescent girl. I’ve inquired. It’s very easy. After all, her father’s in the bank.”
“So he is! Never thought of it, really. So he is. Old—what’s it?—old Buzz—no! Beau Bailey. He’s cashier, or something….”
“That’s correct.” Mrs. Sloan tinkled a coronation hand bell and the soup was removed. A huge roast was carried in. Both mother and son helped themselves not to one, but three thick slices. “The girl’s not merely pretty as a movie star. She’s bright. Did some really good work in college. Science, I believe. I like a scientific-minded woman. Sticks to facts. Realist. No folderol.”
Kit grinned agreeingly. “She’s high up in the brains department. You want to know why water expands when it freezes, or all about hydrogen bombs—Lenore can tell you. Who wants to know, though?” He helped himself to pan-roasted potatoes.
“And quite good at athletics,” Minerva said.
“What is this? You’re talking about the woman I love—at the moment—as if she were something entered in a state fair.”
“She wouldn’t make a bad entry. And that’s what I mean, in a way.
“Not the old Kit-your-duty-is-grandchildren-supply, is it, Muzz?” He glanced up keenly.
“By God, it is!”
Minerva took a long look, a sad look, this time, at the Rhineland castles imbedded vaguely in panels of crimson wallpaper. “You,” she said, “are the greatest triumph of my life.
But my sorrow is—I have you alone, Kit. Just you. I desperately longed for a big family. We needed children. Our holdings—the businesses—”
This, as her son suspected, was not wholly true. A large number of offspring would have provided stewards for the Sloan interprises; but Minerva, after painfully bearing one child, had taken counsel with half a dozen obstetricians and gynecologists to make sure nothing so agonizing and humiliating as childbirth would happen to her again. “I am determined,” his mother went on, “that you shall make a suitable marriage and provide me with grandchildren to replace the little brothers and sisters I was never able to supply for you, Kit.”
“I know! But—”
“A day,” his mother said firmly, “is surely coming when you cannot temporize. You’re well over thirty, Kit, and I’m aging…” She looked away a third time, her large face working a little. “Besides—”
“Besides?” If there was to be a new element in this old discussion he wanted to know it.
“Do you know, Kit, the Adams girl tried to get money from me, again?”
“Lord! I wish I’d never seen that babe!”
“You did, though. A bit too much of her. If you had been married, Kit, she wouldn’t have hag the gall—or the public sympathy—” He laughed. “Isn’t that a shade unethical, Muzz? To advocate marriage as a cover for carnal sin?”
“Unethical?” She tasted the word as if it were foreign. Her large eyes glinted. “Possibly.
But dam’ practical.”
“Have you ever thought that if I did marry—Lenore, say—and I’ll honestly confess I’ve done some thinking about it—maybe she’d dislike being a mere brood mare plus a convenient dodge?”
“Lenore,” said his mother, “can be handled.”
“That’s just what she can’t be. Since you seem so sure, I’ll tell you this much more. I don’t believe she’d accept me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Have you asked her?”
“More or less—and in a way.”
“That sounds,” his mother answered, “like one hell of a halfhearted proposal!”
“Wasn’t a proposal. Just an inquiry. I said a few days back, maybe a couple of weeks, what if I asked her to marry me?”
“And she said?”
He gave a loud laugh. “She said, ‘Drive me home!’”
Mrs. Sloan’s eyes were briefly amused. “That all?”
“Not quite. She said if I were the last man on earth, why then, maybe, for the sake of the species, she’d consent.”
“Spirit.”
“Plenty. Maybe too much. If you want to know, Muzz, I’m fairly crazy about that girl, and she is totally uncrazy about me. I’ve tried all the tricks, and first base in still the other side of the moon.”
Mrs. Sloan considered that for a full minute. “Do you think you would marry her, if she did assent?”
“Search me. Maybe.”
“Suppose I added a mother’s urging?”
“You can’t hit women on the head with a club and drag them home any more. That’s just an old New Yorker joke.”
“An odd thing has happened at the bank,” she said, her tone altered.
Kit instantly understood the slight change; it showed in her physical bearing. There was tension, now almost visible—a bringing together of her features, a tightening of muscles in her big shoulders, a slight narrowing of eye. If cats allowed themselves to become gross with fat, such cats, seeing prey or suspecting some distant motion betokened it, would gather themselves that way.
The fact was, Kit understood more of what had been happening in this dinner hour than he showed his mother or even let himself know. He had resisted her efforts to marry him to suitable girls for numerous years. The effort had involved a variety of females in different places—Manhattan debs and Long Island finishing-school graduates, suitable young women from Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. Girls of good or prominent or rich family, met on transatlantic liners and at watering places abroad. A lovely countess who was only nineteen, in Paris; the daughter of a Knight, in London.
He knew this constant matchmaking activity was born of her indomitable desire to see her wealth managed by grandchildren bred, presumably under her aegis, for the job; and he could infer from the number of girls and young women presented to him that his mother did not feel love needed to be involved in a match. Perhaps his father’s derelictions were responsible for his mother’s feelings or lack of feelings. Perhaps she had grown to believe that woman as Wife was more institution than individual, owing to her own almost lifelong acceptance in that way.
The effect on Kit had been to make him contemptuous of the other sex; he usually thought and acted as if women were a dime a hundred. His mother’s constant production of them, his own incessant petty affairs with them, had also convinced him that the coin of good looks, wealth, a glamorous background and a reputation as a hero—attributes he possessed, or appeared to possess, in plentitude—was the coinage which bought women. The person behind did not matter, women apparently felt. That, in its turn, damaged the remnants of his ego.
For his ego, however large and confident it seemed to the world, was undermined, though he had repressed the fact that by the standards of other men he was a coward. He affected the casual, the debonair, the slangy and insouciant attitude he had seen amongst rich young men in many lands. But Kit’s was not the real posture of witty worldliness; that requires erudition and humor. He had neither. His efforts to be offhand, to understate, to be trivial where large issues were involved and so to exhibit wisdom by hiding its evidence, never came off. An uncured adolescence, a chronic infantilism, crept into his words. And the “Park Avenue accent,” the
“Harvardese” which he had endeavored to learn at Princeton and to polish in Britain, was an unstable asset: it deteriorated under emotional pressure to the Bat, nasal intonation of his background.
He knew someday he would have to marry; he had long been indifferent to the female object of that necessity. He had put off the date, not to search for a mate he himself desired—that being plainly irrelevant to the question—but merely because his deepest wish was to avoid responsibility. He did not want now, any more than he had wanted at eighteen, to be tied down with a home, a woman, children, things he had to do. Life was “happy” for him only when he could, at will, jump into a Jaguar, or into a plane, or aboard a fast boat, and be gone. He knew he was mother-dominated and usually he thought that was for the best. But he also knew that within his mother was a tremendous “strength”—he never saw it as invidious, as selfish, as masochistic and sadistic—which (if he deliberately or even inadvertently offended her in some fashion she could not brook or would not) might cause her to renounce him, the apple of her eye. And that renouncement, he knew, would be absolute. He would be cut off without a penny—not in her will, but the day she renounced him. His next month’s allowance simply wouldn’t be deposited and that would be that.
Kit had two frequent fantasies related to such matters. He imagined himself the victim of his mother’s fury, and could only see as his way out taking up his plane for a last nose dive into the ground. If she managed to get the plane grounded before he could reach it, there were cars-even rental cars. He had often noted a buttonwood tree that stood on a sharp curve on Elk Drive, about halfway to the airport. He could hit that at a hundred or so. His other fantasy concerned the sudden, unexpected death of his mother and his inheritance of everything that bore the name of Sloan. It was his most frequent daydream.
Looking at his mother now, Kit realized that she had, as so often, mustered some fresh, intangible force to abet her will. Part of her strategy had appeared: he had never before thought that being married would serve a useful purpose in relation to his conduct with the whole world of women. He could see that point. And he could see farther: if he failed to acknowledge it, his mother might, that being her nature and her method, make certain some young lady in the future behaved in such a fashion as to make the point unforgettable. Minerva Sloan was not above ally-ing herself with another against her son, when the allegiance was designed to accomplish some ultimately “good” end.
She had said, “Suppose I add a mother’s urging?”
It might have been a warm suggestion, sentimental, kindly.
It was not, as he knew by her abrupt tenseness. “Mother…” he began.
The deliberations were interrupted by the butler, who came in carrying a telephone on a jack.
Jeffrey Fahlstead had served the Sloans for more than thirty years. For twenty, they had called him “Jeff.” An Irishman, he was, like Willis the chauffeur, unbent by age, stiffened, rather. “It’s Washington, D.C., ma’ am,” he said.
Minerva took the phone, spoke her name, and soon shot a quick annoyed glance at her son.
From the conversation which developed, Kit gathered guiltily that his afternoon Bight was dimly viewed by various persons who wanted him grounded, or relieved of his license, put in jail, or given a lunacy test. Complaints had already gone to high Federal authorities. Into this dilemma his mother barged serenely, however. She could have used the “friendly tip” from an important Washington official to have him grounded; and Minera didn’t like the risks her son took by flying. But she wanted, that evening, something else from Kit.
Listening to one side of the talk, Kit realized that his mother, coming forcefully to his aid, was going to fix, grease and appease everything and everybody. His mother, he reflected, was completely indispensable to him. The least he could do was to please her in this matter of marriage.
When she hung lip, she didn’t even make it a long lecture. “Take me weeks to get the thing straightened out,” she said, concluding it, “and don’t ever fly like that again! But, Kit, I want to go back to our previous talk.” She nodded the butler out of the room. “As I said, an odd thing has happened at the bank.”
“Really? What, Muzz?”
“You know John Jessup?”
He shook his head.
“You should remember him from childhood. An old horse thief—and one of the smartest men in Larkimer County! Made millions, in cattle mostly. He was one of your father’s cronies, years back. It’s not important. The thing that’s important is this: the bank takes care of his holdings. He doesn’t even look things over for long periods. Trusts us, of course, and leaves us free to make certain kinds of changes, so his holdings are open always and we have a limited power of attorney.”
“Somebody cleaned him out!” Kit guessed.
Minerva’s eyes acknowledged the guess. “Not cleaned him out. Just took six thousand, in bonds.”
“Who?” And, of course, he knew. “Beau Bailey! But he’s been with you forever! Muzz!”
Mrs. Sloan was looking at her china rail-seeing, now, the expensive plates it supported.
“There is no proof, as yet, and Beau denies it, of course. As a matter of fact, the theft of the bonds was a good thing for the bank, showed us an old-fashioned, inadequate method of keeping track that made it easy for certain people to purloin things. We’ve stopped that system. Jessup came in today, missed the certificates himself, reported. They could have been taken any time in the past several years. Though the ink on the receipt appears quite fresh. However, I suspected Beau instantly—”
“Why Beau, particularly?”
She smiled. “There shouldn’t be any little secrets between mother and son, should there?
I suspected him, Kit, because I almost hoped it would be Beau. I needed, for reasons I trust are now clear, a better hold on Beau even than the power to fire him. He could get a good job in several banks, not only because he’s adequate, but because he knows so much about the operations and activities of Sloan Trust. I must say, the moment I thought of Beau and checked to make sure he’d had the opportunity, I did realize that I knew—heaven knows how! Gossip, I suppose—that Beau had always stage-managed a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year way of life on a seventeen-thousand-five-hundred salary.”
“They do sort of put on dog, in a small, cheesy way. Like a modernized housefront and barbecue pits, and Netta Bailey—a harridan if I ever saw one—goes for clothes.”
“Of course,” Minerva went on, “I then really did some digging. I’ve spent the day at it, largely. Most absorbing. Beau’s run up bills just everywhere. He belongs to seven clubs that require stiff dues, stiff for him. They’ve sent that girl through college lavishly. But what I finally learned—after all, a bank has to have connections with all sorts of people—is that Beau’s been betting the horses for some time. And losing.”
“So? What’s it got to do with Lenore? She never struck me as lacking in guts. If her dad’s disgraced, I can imagine she’d bear it. Get a job. She’s had some dandy offers for everything from modeling in New York, and a Hollywood screen test, to working in labs at Hobart Metal.”
Minerva chuckled. “Be ironic, wouldn’t it? Beau took Hobart bonds.”
“I don’t see—”
“I’ve decided it’s past time for you to marry, Kit. I merely felt I should make sure, by a heart-to-heart talk with you, that you really liked Lenore Bailey. She’s quite suitable, and any suitable girl would satisfy me, as I’ve said a thousand times, if I’ve said it once.”
“Would the daughter of a bank thief be suitable?”
“As far as her father’s concerned, he isn’t what people generally mean by a thief. He’s merely ambitious; he’s got more ambition than moral strength. He probably found himself in a situation he thought desperate—it was inevitable he would, sooner or later, with his living standards—and sold his soul for a miserable six thousand dollars in bonds. I’ve seen brighter men do it for less.”
“What’s the pitch?”
“The bank, of course, made instant restitution to Jessup. I ordered the matter kept in strict confidence. I haven’t proved it against Beau, but I know now 1 could, by asking certain people the right questions in the right way.”
“Meaning a certain big-shot bookie?”
“How right! I could readily, through Netta—I see a good deal of her, one way or another—she’s one of a number of social bootlickers who see to it they stay in my good graces—
I could easily have a talk with her. I could ask her to get a note from Beau admitting the defalcation. I could then arrange to recover the bonds—he must have borrowed cash on them somewhere in Green Prairie or River City—and that, also, could be learned. Netta could and would see to it, afterward, that any little wish of mine, or yours, was met, Kit.”
“Very nice little shotgun wedding—with both barrels pointed not at the groom, but the bride’s papa.”
“I said, Kit, that I wanted to know how you felt about Lenore. And then I wanted you to act —not fiddle years away.”
It was all there, he thought, laid on the table, on the damask, right in front of the centerpiece, the bowl of flowers. His last ideas concerning demurrer came to him, and were unvoiced. He did not mention the early background of Netta Bailey. He did not need to. The Sloan name would compensate, socially, for nearly any background stain. And, suddenly, a brand-new vision had come into his mind. He could see himself married to Lenore, no longer engaged in a struggle with her, but holding a lifelong whip over her. If they married because she had to, because she’d done it to save her father from prison, probably she’d go on saving him all her life. Kit could come and go as he pleased, do as he pleased, be as free as he pleased, and she’d have to take it because of a Signed confession his mother had somewhere.
This opportunity, to become a husband and remain what he thought of as a “man,”
appealed to him greatly. Lenore, he had intuitively known, was emotionally far stronger than he.
She would have managed him and bossed him. Now, it would be another kettle of fish. He was aware that Minerva had gone through the same thought process, come to the same conclusion and was prepared to explain it if necessary.
He got up, walked around the table, kissed her fervently. “All right, Mother. I don’t know if it’ll help my cause. But it might. She’s about as headstrong and independent a wench as I ever met. I’d need a way to handle her!”
“I think,” his mother answered, “we’ve discovered a way.”