Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

the parlor car. At New Haven she thought she saw a familiar face on the platform. She hurriedly picked up her coat and handbag and quit her comfortable seat for the steamy confines of the crowded day coach. Hiding herself behind the unmeaning pages of an open magazine, she had time to reflect on the impulse which had started her on such an arduous trip through the storm.

It was anger, she knew; consuming, almost unreasonable resentment against the smooth suave technique which made amorous conquests so easy for Paul. Her first thought had been that he had deliberately sought out Babs Tredwill to show Norma that his attractiveness still held sway. It was the sort of thing which might amuse Paul Gerente, make him narrow his slightly slanting eyes and lift his thin-line eyebrows in an expression of unholy joy.

That crooked mocking smile had made him famous on the stage. Norma found she was clenching the magazine between her hands and put it down. She had lived close to that smile for a year. She knew the hopelessness of trying to convince Babs Tredwill that across a breakfast table it might become most unpleasant to see.

“Why can’t I win Babs over? Why won’t she be friends?” Norma wondered unhappily, and suddenly felt very much alone. Babs would see nothing but unwarranted interference if she ever learned that Norma had called on Paul.

There was an even deeper problem to be faced with Thaddeus, whose love for her was blindly unreasoning. He had despised Paul Gerente for years. His methods with Barbara would be harsh and uncompromising. He would flatly forbid the girl to see Paul again or mention his name. Neither Norma nor anyone else could ever point out to Thad that such a course would play right into Paul’s clever hands. Whatever Paul Gerente wanted of Babs he would get quickly enough once Babs’s father knew. Babs would dutifully listen to Thad’s heated orders, then calmly and more determinedly go her own way.

Norma needed weapons to fight Paul. He was a man of force and violence; not physical, but mental force and violence, which made it still more difficult. Nothing but pressure brought to bear would turn him out of his way; yet when she tried to recollect some weakness she might use against him, to find some vulnerable spot for her attack, she was forced to conclude that Paul Gerente had lived his life with a calculating prudence which left him in the clear. Open-handed and begging, she would have to go to him and ask for an understanding he had never shown. Her own good sense told her that her plea would be met with cynical laughter, but there was nothing else to do.

Above the clacking of the train wheels she could almost hear him saying, “You’re jealous, Norma—and fading slightly, too. Or perhaps I’m the one who’s aging. I’ve heard that as men get older they prefer their women younger and more unsophisticated—even a trifle dumb.” He would pause there, and pull one corner of his mouth back into a deep indentation before he concluded, “Haven’t you?”

Weary with battling her unseen foe, she finally dozed uncomfortably away. It was nearly seven when she arrived at Grand Central Station. Struck by a pang of hunger, she realized that she had eaten scarcely anything all day. Downstairs, perched on a stool at the Oyster Bar, she ordered a Manhattan cocktail, but it failed to bring her cheer. She ordered an oyster stew and found with the arrival of the food that her appetite had gone. She left her meal half finished and went upstairs to a row of phone booths where she searched through the book for Paul Gerente. He was back in an apartment in Greenwich Village on West Twelfth Street, where he had lived prior to their marriage ten years before.

Afterwards, when she looked back on that evening, her verdict was that a sense of furtiveness governed her acts all the way. Instead of going to the taxi exit and getting a cab, which she normally would have done, she walked through the press of homeward-bound, package-laden commuters and dipped down into the East Side subway. She caught an express to Fourteenth Street, and stood uneasily on the short ride downtown, conscious that the tired faces of women were eyeing her enviously, estimating the value of her furs.

When she came up into the neon-lighted garishness of Fourteenth Street she discovered that the snow had mixed slushily with rain. Reckless of the fact that the wet muddy streets were splashing her sheer stockings ruinously, she hurried along head down until she turned by Hearn’s department store into the comparative quiet of Fifth Avenue.

She stopped by the churchyard on the corner of Twelfth Street and gazed up at Paul’s windows a short distance away. A light shone under drawn blinds. Sleet struck sharply against the back of her neck, bringing with it a sobering touch of cold reality. It was followed by a moment of indecision. After an entire day of inner turmoil she was facing the ordeal of meeting Paul Gerente again without an intelligent word to say.

She forced herself to go on. Paul lived in a walk-up. A taxi, with its windshield wipers working busily, swerved into the curb and stopped in front of Paul’s apartment house when Norma was two doors away. Still motivated by a sense of doing something foolhardy and wrong, she stepped into the lighted vestibule of the house next to Paul’s. Ostensibly reading names on the polished-brass letter boxes, she watched the taxi through the slanting rain and snow.

It may have been the familiar staccato click of high heels which told her that it was Babs descending the brownstone steps of the house next door. Possibly her overwrought senses were super-keen, and in the back of her mind she had expected all along to find Babs there. She huddled back as far as possible into a corner of the vestibule. She couldn’t