A World Apart Page 2

trees was grey and yellow and cold.

  The house was there, just as he had left it. It was still a good-sizedmansion in comfortable ugly space-wasting Reign-of-Terror Tuscan,standing ornate and towered and turreted behind a fence of granite postsconnected by long iron pipes that sagged in the middle as the result ofchildren walking them on their way to and from the public schools aroundthe corner on Sheldon Street.

  Coulter turned left and felt the crunch of ashes under his tires as hedrove across the sidewalk, through the fence opening, into the drivewayto the open-doored garage awaiting him. He reminded himself to becareful of the jutting nail that had torn his glove.

  The concrete floor of the garage felt cold against the soles of hisshoes. Coulter stamped his feet as he turned on the heater and movedtoward the door. It stuck--he had forgotten about that--and he sworelustily as he exerted strength he had forgotten ever possessing to yankit clear of the snag and across the front of the building.

  He didn't want the Pontiac to freeze. Not when he had a date with EveLawton.... A date with Eve Lawton.... He hadn't thought of Eve in years,except on those occasional sleepless nights when he amused himself withseeking to visualize the women he had known in a Biblical sense of theword.

  Most of them were faceless units in a faceless and somewhat undignifiedparade. But not Eve. She wasn't pretty--not in the sense of thedoll-faced creatures that adorned the movie magazines or even thehealthy maidens with whom he occasionally rollicked since coming homefrom college.

  Eve had a sensitivity of feature that was a sounding board for heremotions. Coulter paused against the garage door and thought about her.With the knowledge of twenty years he knew now that what Eve had, or hadhad twenty years ago, was the basis of beauty, the inner intangiblewhich stamps a woman a woman above other women....

  _What in hell has happened to me, is happening to me?_ Coulter felt thechill of the evening wind stab deep into his bones. Then he looked downat his vanished embonpoint and patted with his gloves the flat hardnessthat had replaced it. It was all right with him as long as he didn'twake up too soon--before his date with Eve anyway.

  Coulter walked around the house and in through the front with its extrawinter doorway. There was the big square sapphire-blue carpet with theworn spot at the foot of the stairs. There was the antique cherry cardtable which, to his definite knowledge, should be standing in the fronthall of his own house in Scarborough, more than two hundred miles andtwenty years away.

  His mother appeared in the door of the library, edged with light fromthe cannel-coal fire in the grate behind her. She said, "Oh, there youare, Banny. I'm glad you're back in time for ... Heaven's sake, Banny!What's all this for?"

  Coulter felt himself grow hot with embarrassment. He and his mother hadnever been much given to outward show of affection. Yet, knowing shewould be dead within the year, he had been unable to resist the urge toembrace her. He was going to have to watch his step. He said, fumbling alittle, "I don't know, mother. I guess I just felt like it, that's all."

  "Well--all right." She was mollified, patted the blue-white hair abovedelicately handsome features to make certain no strand had beendisarranged. Then, "Did you remember to stop at MacAuliffe's and pick upmy lighter?"

  Feeling lost, Coulter felt in the pockets of his polo coat. To hisrelief he found a small package in one of them, pulled it out. It waswrapped with the city jeweler's tartan paper and he handed it to hismother. She said, "Thanks--I've missed it this last week."

  He had forgotten his mother was a smoker. Coulter took off his coat andhat and hung them up, trying to remember details of a life he had longsince allowed to blur into soft focus. She had taken up the habit abouta year after his father died of a ruptured appendix while on a huntingtrip down in the Maine woods.

  He noticed the skis and ski-boots and ski-poles standing at attention inthe back of the closet, wondered if he could still execute a decentChristie. Then, emerging, he said, "Just us for dinner tonight, mother?"

  "Just us," she said, regarding him with a faint frown from over afresh-lit cigarette.

  "Good!" he said. "How about a drink?"

  "Banny," said his mother with patient sternness, "you know as well as Ithat you're the family liquor-provider since your father died. I'm notgoing to deal with bootleggers. And there's nothing but a littlevermouth in the pantry."

  "Snooping again," he said, carefully unsmiling. Good God, it was stillProhibition! Memory stabbed at him, bringing what had so recentlyemerged from past into present clearly into focus, technicolored focus."I've got a little surprise upstairs in my closet."

  He found himself taking the stairs two at a time without effort. Shawhad definitely been right, he decided when he discovered the exertionhad not winded him in the slightest. He went into the big roomoverlooking the front lawn, now covered with much-trodden snow, that hehad fallen heir to after his father died.

  Karen, the Swedish-born second maid, was opening the bed. He hadcompletely forgotten Karen, had to battle against staring at her. Shewas a perfect incipient human brood-mare--lush not-yet-fat figure, broadpelvis, meaningless pretty-enough face. Now what the devil had been hisrelations with _her_?

  Since he couldn't remember, he decided they must have been innocuous. Hesaid, "Hi, Karen, broken up any new homes lately?"

  She said, "Oh--_you_, Mr. Coulter!" She giggled and fled, stumbling overthe threshold in her hurry.

  Coulter looked after her, his eyebrows high. Well, he thought, here wassomething he had evidently missed entirely. Karen's crush was painfullyapparent, viewed from a vantage of two decades of added experience. Orperhaps he had been smarter than he remembered.

  The gallon of home-made gin was stuck behind the textbook-filled cartonon the back floor of his closet, where somehow he had known it must be.It was between a third and half full of colorless liquid. He uncorkedit, sniffed and shuddered. Prohibition was going to take a bit ofgetting used to after two decades of Repeal.

  Half an hour later he sipped his rather dire martini and listened to hismother talk. Not to the words especially, for she was one of thosenearly-extinct well-bred women, brought up in the horsehair amenities ofthe late Victorian era, who could talk charmingly and vivaciously and atconsiderable length without saying anything. It was pleasant merely tosit and sip and let the words flow over him.

  She looked remarkably well, he thought, for a woman who was to diewithin a year of galloping cancer. She seemed to have recovered entirelyfrom the emotional aftermath of his father's death. So much so that hefound himself wondering how deeply she had loved the man with whom shehad spent some thirty-eight years of her life.

  She was slim and quick and sure in her movements and her figure, ofwhich she was inordinately proud, resembled that of a girl rather thanthe body of a woman nibbling late middle-age. Slowly he realized she hadstopped talking, had asked him a question and was awaiting his answer.He smiled apologetically and said, "Sorry, mother, I must have beenwool-gathering."

  "You're tired, lamb." No one had called him that in twenty years. "Andno wonder, with all that _run_ning around for Mr. Simms on the_news_paper."

  Mr. Simms--that would be Patrick "Paddy" Simms, his managing editor,the old-school city-room tyrant who had taught him his job so well thathe had gone on to make a successful career of public relations and theorganization of facts into words--at rates far more imposing than thosepaid a junior reporter during the Great Depression.

  In his swell of memories Coulter almost lost his mother's question asecond time, barely managed to catch its meaning. He sipped his drinkand said, "I agree, mother, the burning of the books in Germany _is_ athreat to freedom. But I don't think you'll have to worry about AdolphHitler very long."

  She misread his meaning, of course, frowned charmingly and said, "I _do_hope you're right, Banny. Nellie Maynard had a few of us for tea thisafternoon and Margot Henson, she's tre_men_dously chic and her husbandknows _all_ those big men in the New Deal in Washington--not that hea_grees_ with them, thank goodness--well, _she_ s
ays the big men in theState Department are really _wor_ried about Hitler. They think he maytry to make Germany strong enough to start an_oth_er war."

  "It could happen, of course," Coulter told her. He had forgotten hismother's trick of stressing one syllable of a word. Funny, Connie, hiswife--if she was still his wife after whatever had happened--had thesame trick. With an upper-class Manhattan dry soda-cracker drawl added.

  He wondered if he were going to have to live through it all again--theNRA, the Roosevelt boomlet, the Recession, the string of Hitler triumphsin Europe, the war, Pearl Harbor and all that followed--Truman, the ColdWar, Korea, McCarthy ...

  Seated across from her at the gleaming Sheraton dining table, whichshould by rights be in his own dining room in Scarborough