He stood at the wall, waiting, to let all the events of the day drop away from him, to feel free, to know that the next span of time was his.
When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or believe it, at first. He saw the silhouette of a woman, then of a bellboy who put down a suitcase and vanished. The voice he heard was Lillian’s: “Why, Henry! All alone and in the dark?”
She pressed a light switch by the door. She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a pale beige traveling suit that looked as if she had traveled under glass; she was smiling and pulling her gloves off with the air of having reached home.
“Are you in for the evening, dear?” she asked. “Or were you going out?”
He did not know how long a time passed before he answered, “What are you doing here?”
“Why, don’t you remember that Jim Taggart invited us to his wedding? It’s tonight.”
“I didn’t intend to go to his wedding.”
“Oh, but I did!”
“Why didn’t you tell me this morning, before I left?”
“To surprise you, darling.” She laughed gaily. “It’s practically impossible to drag you to any social function, but I thought you might do it like this, on the spur of the moment, just to go out and have a good time, as married couples are supposed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind it—you’ve been staying overnight in New York so often!”
He saw the casual glance thrown at him from under the brim of her fashionably tilted hat. He said nothing.
“Of course, I was running a risk,” she said. “You might have been taking somebody out to dinner.” He said nothing. “Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?”
“No.”
“Did you have an engagement for this evening?”
“No.”
“Fine.” She pointed at her suitcase. “I brought my evening clothes.
Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?”
He thought that Dagny would be at her brother’s wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. “I’ll take you out, if you wish,” he said, “but not to that wedding.”
“Oh, but that’s where I want to go! It’s the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody’s been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. There isn’t any better show in town—nor better publicized. It’s a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you’d expect from Jim Taggart.”
She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. “I haven’t been in New York for years,” she said. “Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion.”
He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.
She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. “Oh but, darling, I’m not relieved! I’m disappointed. I did hope I’d find a few cigarette butts smeared with lipstick.”
He gave her credit for the admission of the spying, even if under cover of a joke. But something in the stressed frankness of her manner made him wonder whether she was joking; for the flash of an instant, he felt that she had told him the truth. He dismissed the impression, because he could not conceive of it as possible.
“I’m afraid that you’ll never be human,” she said. “So I’m sure that I have no rival. And if I have—which I doubt, darling—I don’t think I’ll worry about it, because if it’s a person who’s always available on call, without appointment—well, everybody knows what sort of a person that is.”
He thought that he would have to be careful; he had been about to slap her face. “Lillian, I think you know,” he said, “that humor of this kind is more than I can stand.”
“Oh, you’re so serious!” she laughed. “I keep forgetting it. You’re so serious about everything—particularly yourself.”
Then she whirled to him suddenly, her smile gone. She had the strange, pleading look which he had seen in her face at times, a look that seemed made of sincerity and courage: “You prefer to be serious, Henry? All right. How long do you wish me to exist somewhere in the basement of your life? How lonely do you want me to become? I’ve asked nothing of you. I’ve let you live your life as you pleased. Can’t you give me one evening? Oh, I know you hate parties and you’ll be bored. But it means a great deal to me. Call it empty, social vanity—I want to appear, for once, with my husband. I suppose you never think of it in such terms, but you’re an important man, you’re envied, hated, respected and feared, you’re a man whom any woman would be proud to show off as her husband.
You may say it’s a low form of feminine ostentation, but that’s the form of any woman’s happiness. You don’t live by such standards, but I do. Can’t you give me this much, at the price of a few hours of boredom? Can’t you be strong enough to fulfill your obligation and to perform a husband’s duty? Can’t you go there, not for your own sake, but mine, not because you want to go, but only because I want it?”
Dagny—he thought desperately—Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question—he could not appear before her with his wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off—he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action—because he knew that he would commit it.
Because he had accepted his secret as guilt and promised himself to take its consequences—because he had granted that the right was with Lillian, and he was able to bear any form of damnation, but not able to deny the right when it was claimed of him—because he knew that the reason for his refusal to go, was the reason that gave him no right to refuse—because he heard the pleading cry in his mind: “Oh God, Lillian, anything but that party!” and he did not allow himself to beg for mercy—he said evenly, his voice lifeless and firm: “All right, Lillian. I’ll go.”
The wedding veil of rose-point lace caught on the splintered floor of her tenement bedroom. Cherryl Brooks lifted it cautiously, stepping to look at herself in a crooked mirror that hung on the wall. She had been photographed here all day, as she had been many times in the past two months. She still smiled with incredulous gratitude when newspaper people wanted to take her picture, but she wished they would not do it so often.
An aging sob sister, who had a drippy love column in print and the bitter wisdom of a policewoman in person, had taken Cherryl under her protection weeks ago, when the girl had first been thrown into press interviews as into a meat grinder. Today, the sob sister had chased the reporters out, had snapped, “All right, all right, beat it!” at the neighbors, had slammed Cherryl’s door in their faces and had helped her to dress. She was to drive Cherryl to the wedding; she had discovered that there was no one else to do it.
The wedding veil, the white satin gown, the delicate slippers and the strand of pearls at her throat, had cost five hundred times the price of the entire contents of Cherryl’s room. A bed took most of the room’s space, and the rest was taken by a chest of drawers, one chair, and her few dresses hanging behind a faded curtain. The huge hoop skirt of the wedding gown brushed against the walls when she moved, her slender figure swaying above the skirt in the dramatic contrast of a tight, severe, long-sleeved bodice; the gown had been made by the best designer in the city.