But he wasn’t. He valued her now more than he had ever thought possible. He watched in her the awakening of a sharply individual temperament. She liked quiet and simple things. She was developing the capacity to discriminate and shut the trivial and the unessential out of her life. He tried giving her books; then wisely he gave up that and brought her into contact with a variety of men. He made situations and then explained them to her, and he was pleased, as appreciation and politeness began to blossom before his eyes. He valued, too, her utter trust in him and the fact that she used him as a standard for judgments on other men.
Before the Farrelly picture was released, she was offered a two-year contract on the strength of her work in it—four hundred a week for six months and an increase on a sliding scale. But she would have to go to the Coast.
“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait?” she said, as they drove in from the country one afternoon. “Wouldn’t you rather have me stay here in New York—near you?”
“You’ve got to go where your work takes you. You ought to be able to look out for yourself. You’re seventeen.”
Seventeen—she was as old as he; she was ageless. Her dark eyes under a yellow straw hat were as full of destiny as though she had not just offered to toss destiny away.
“I wonder if you hadn’t come along, someone else would of,” she said—“to make me do things, I mean.”
“You’d have done them yourself. Get it out of your head that you’re dependent on me.”
“I am. Everything is, thanks to you.”
“It isn’t, though,” he said emphatically, but he brought no reasons; he liked her to think that.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. You’re my only friend”—and she added—“that I care about. You see? You understand what I mean?”
He laughed at her, enjoying the birth of her egotism implied in her right to be understood. She was lovelier that afternoon than he had ever seen her, delicate, resonant and, for him, undesirable. But sometimes he wondered if that sexlessness wasn’t for him alone, wasn’t a side that, perhaps purposely, she turned toward him. She was happiest of all with younger men, though she pretended to despise them. Billy Farrelly, obligingly and somewhat to her mild chagrin, had left her alone.
“When will you come out to Hollywood?”
“Soon,” he promised. “And you’ll be coming back to New York.”
She began to cry. “Oh, I’ll miss you so much! I’ll miss you so much!” Large tears of distress ran down her warm ivory cheeks.
“Oh, geeze!” she cried softly. “You been good to me! Where’s your hand? Where’s your hand? You been the best friend anybody ever had. Where am I ever going to find a friend like you?”
She was acting now, but a lump arose in his throat and for a moment a wild idea ran back and forth in his mind, like a blind man, knocking over its solid furniture—to marry her. He had only to make the suggestion, he knew, and she would become close to him and know no one else, because he would understand her forever.
Next day, in the station, she was pleased with her flowers, her compartment, with the prospect of a longer trip than she had ever taken before. When she kissed him good-by her deep eyes came close to his again and she pressed against him as if in protest against the separation. Again she cried, but he knew that behind her tears lay the happiness of adventure in new fields. As he walked out of the station, New York was curiously empty. Through her eyes he had seen old colors once more; now they had faded back into the gray tapestry of the past. The next day he went to an office high in a building on Park Avenue and talked to a famous specialist he had not visited for a decade.
“I want you to examine the larynx again,” he said. “There’s not much hope, but something might have changed the situation.”
He swallowed a complicated system of mirrors. He breathed in and out, made high and low sounds, coughed at a word of command. The specialist fussed and touched. Then he sat back and took out his eyeglass. “There’s no change,” he said. “The cords are not diseased—they’re simply worn out. It isn’t anything that can be treated.”
“I thought so,” said Jacob, humbly, as if he had been guilty of an impertinence. “That’s practically what you told me before. I wasn’t sure how permanent it was.”
He had lost something when he came out of the building on Park Avenue—a half hope, the love child of a wish, that some day—
“New York desolate,” he wired her. “The night clubs all closed. Black wreaths on the Statue of Civic Virtue. Please work hard and be remarkably happy.”
“Dear Jacob,” she wired back, “miss you so. You are the nicest man that ever lived and I mean it, dear. Please don’t forget me. Love from Jenny.”
Winter came. The picture Jenny had made in the East was released, together with preliminary interviews and articles in the fan magazines. Jacob sat in his apartment, playing the Kreutzer Sonata over and over on his new phonograph, and read her meager and stilted but affectionate letters and the articles which said she was a discovery of Billy Farrelly’s. In February he became engaged to an old friend, now a widow.
They went to Florida and were suddenly snarling at each other in hotel corridors and over bridge games, so they decided not to go through with it after all. In the spring he took a stateroom on the Paris, but three days before sailing he disposed of it and went to California.
IV
Jenny met him at the station, kissed him and clung to his arm in the car all the way to the Ambassador Hotel. “Well, the man came,” she cried. “I never thought I’d get him to come. I never did.”
Her accent betrayed an effort at control. The emphatic “Geeze!” with all the wonder, horror, disgust or admiration she could put in it was gone, but there was no mild substitute, no “swell” or “grand.” If her mood required expletives outside her repertoire, she kept silent.
But at seventeen, months are years and Jacob perceived a change in her; in no sense was she a child any longer. There were fixed things in her mind—not distractions, for she was instinctively too polite for that, but simply things there. No longer was the studio a lark and a wonder and a divine accident; no longer “for a nickel I wouldn’t turn up tomorrow.” It was part of her life. Circumstances were stiffening into a career which went on independently of her casual hours.
“If this picture is as good as the other—I mean if I make a personal hit again, Hecksher’ll break the contract. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says it’s the first one I’ve had sex appeal in.”
“What are the rushes?”
“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first time I’ve had sex appeal.”
“I don’t notice it,” he teased her.
“You wouldn’t. But I have.”
“I know you have,” he said, and, moved by an ill-considered impulse, he took her hand.
She glanced quickly at him. He smiled—half a second too late. Then she smiled and her glowing warmth veiled his mistake.
“Jake,” she cried, “I could bawl, I’m so glad you’re here! I got you a room at the Ambassador. They were full, but they kicked out somebody because I said I had to have a room. I’ll send my car back for you in half an hour. It’s good you came on Sunday, because I got all day free.”
They had luncheon in the furnished apartment she had leased for the winter. It was 1920 Moorish, taken over complete from a favorite of yesterday. Someone had told her it was horrible, for she joked about it; but when he pursued the matter he found that she didn’t know why.
“I wish they had more nice men out here,” she said once during luncheon. “Of course there’s a lot of nice ones, but I mean—Oh, you know, like in New York—men that know even more than a girl does, like you.”
After luncheon he learned that they were going to tea. “Not today,” he objected. “I want to see you alone.”
“All right,” she agreed doubtfully. “I suppose I could telephone. I thought—It’s a lady that writes for a lot of newspapers and I’ve never been asked there before. Still, if you don’t want to—”
Her face had fallen a little and Jacob assured her that he couldn’t be more willing. Gradually he found that they were going not to one party but to three.
“In my position, it’s sort of the thing to do,” she explained. “Otherwise you don’t see anybody except the people on your own lot, and that’s narrow.” He smiled. “Well, anyhow,” she finished—“anyhow, you smart Aleck, that’s what everybody does on Sunday afternoon.”
At the first tea, Jacob noticed that there was an enormous preponderance of women over men, and of supernumeraries—lady journalists, cameramen’s daughters, cutters’ wives—over people of importance. A young Latin named Raffino appeared for a brief moment, spoke to Jenny and departed; several stars passed through, asking about children’s health with a domesticity that was somewhat overpowering. Another group of celebrities posed immobile, statue-like,
