They were polite enough to each other when he left to take the train. He kissed her, and she smiled. He got into the little station-wagon beside Andrew, raised his hat and shook it in amiable farewell, and left her standing in the doorway in her negligee. She had at least come downstairs to see him off. The thought occurred to him that if he never saw her again—a not unusual thought at some of their partings—he would remember her as the source and repository of numerous hours of various pleasures. For that he had married her.
Daisy Thorpe, successor to Marian Strademyer at the Lockwood office, stood in front of George’s desk, ticking off with her pencil the items on her notepad. “… And last but not least, Mr. Edmund O’Byrne. Phoned twice yesterday and twice the day before. He was going to phone this morning, but he hasn’t. You can reach him at Watkins 2044 if you wish to, but if he’s in the same condition he was when I talked to him, you won’t get much sense out of him.”
“The condition being a state of intoxication?” said George.
“To put it mildly. I refused to give him your number on the Cape,” said Daisy Thorpe.
“Thank you. If he calls again, I’m not here. No! Wait a second. Call our broker and find out the latest price on a stock called Magico. It’s not listed on the Big Board.”
“Right away?”
“Please,” said George.
He waited while she had the conversation with the broker. She hung up. “It is on the Big Board. It closed yesterday at 92½ and opened this morning at 93,” she said.
“Hmm,” he muttered. He remembered his last conversation with Ned O’Byrne. The name of the stock was easy to recalclass="underline" Magico. A radio company. His memory of the figures O’Byrne had mentioned was somewhat vague, but it came back to him that O’Byrne planned to get out when the price reached 40 or 50. “Get me Mr. O’Byrne,” he said.
“I happen to know the Watkins number is a speakeasy, Mr. Lockwood.”
“I happen to know it, too. Do you go there?”
“Every Sunday evening.”
“Odd we’ve never run into each other there.”
“Oh, I’ve only been going there lately, since I moved,” she said. She called the number and got O’Byrne on the telephone.
“Ned? George Lockwood. I just got your message. How’ve you been?”
“Are you on the Cape, or in town?”
“I’m at my office. What can I do for you?” said George.
“Can you have dinner with me tonight?”
“Yes, as it happens, I can. Where and when?”
“I’ll meet you at 42 West Forty-nine, seven o’clock. Is your wife with you? We want to be sure of a table.”
“I’m alone. How about you?”
“I’m alone too,” said O’Byrne. “However, that can be rectified, after I’ve talked to you.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said George.
Throughout the rest of the day he wondered what O’Byrne had on his mind. There was an unmistakable ring of confidence in O’Byrne’s voice which probably was related to the price of the Magico stock. But at seven o’clock, when they met at the 49th Street address, O’Byrne was showing the effects of a day’s hard drinking.
“I never wrote to you about your brother because I didn’t know him. Also, because you didn’t write to me about my brother.”
“I didn’t know about your brother,” said George. “What happened to him?”
“I didn’t think you did. He fell in front of a subway train, a few weeks before your brother died. There wasn’t much in the papers about it. Princeton football star killed in subway. Two or three inches of type and that was all.”
“I’m sorry, Ned. It was probably one of those days that the New York papers missed the train. Although you might have thought I’d have heard about it later.”
“Well, you didn’t, so you’re forgiven. Kevin never amounted to anything much. A wife and two children in East Orange, and a job in an insurance agency. Not even a partnership. Just a job. That isn’t what I’ve been calling you about. Our unfortunate brothers. And I don’t want to borrow any money from you. I’m doing pretty well in that respect, I’m happy to say. You won’t remember, but I told you the last time I saw you, that night we had dinner together, I had a stock tip. Well, it turned out to be a good one.”
“Vaguely. General Electric, or something, wasn’t it?”
“Hell, no. Mine was a real speculation, but it’s on the Big Board now and I’m sitting pretty. Let’s sit down. Georgetti, can we have this table? And two more Planter’s Punches, please.”
They sat down. “George, I’m going to put it right on this tablecloth for you. I’ve debated with myself, what was the right thing to do. I gave the subject a lot of thought, and I finally came to the conclusion that by and large, you and I were pretty good friends. We were good friends in college, and while I haven’t seen so much of you since those days, I still consider you a friend of mine.”
“And rightly so,” said George.
“You have to be patient a minute, because what I have to tell you isn’t something you blurt out without any preamble.”
“We have all evening,” said George.
“It won’t take that long, I can assure you,” said O’Byrne. “First I have to ask you, did that mess your brother got into have a very bad effect on you?”
“More than I realized at the time. Why?”
“The same with me. It wasn’t so much the initial shock as the slow realization that this is a son of a bitch of a life. Kevin was a nice, decent guy. Married to a dull woman and had two uninteresting kids. Never made any money to speak of. Then one day he fell in front of a train on the Lexington Avenue subway. Heart attack. Much, much later I found out that for about twenty years he’d been in love with a woman that he couldn’t marry or that wouldn’t marry him because they were both Catholics. She came to see me after he was killed, to ask me if I’d do her a favor. The favor was to get something personal of Kevin’s, like a ring or a stickpin or any small thing that he wore or carried around with him. It finally came out that what she wanted was a pair of rosary beads that he always carried. You know what they are, rosary beads?”
“Oh, sure.”
“These were silver beads on a silver chain, very small, in a little silver box the size of a pillbox. She had nothing of Kevin’s. They’d never been able to exchange presents, because her husband or Kevin’s wife would have noticed it. For twenty years this woman and my brother had been in love. Maybe a couple of times a year they could manage to go to bed together. Not often, though, and she told me that they gave each other up several times and then they’d go back together again. Walks in the park. Rides on the Fifth Avenue bus. Trying to keep it platonic, which was just as hard for them as it was to have an assignation. Her husband was the exact counterpart of Kevin’s wife. Unsuspecting and dull. A lawyer. Quite prominent in Catholic circles. The son of a friend of my father’s. The nearest thing to a priest that a married layman can be. More money than Kevin ever had, and the two couples never saw each other.” He sipped his drink,