The Last Meeting

I

JOHN came into the dingy, outmoded restaurant and waited for a moment until his eyes became adjusted to the semi-darkness of the place. He raised his thin face and stared steadily above the heads of the dispirited people who sat before him eating their lunches. After a moment his glance rested on the vacant table set in an alcove, and he noted with relief that it was screened somewhat by the palm that stood beside it, a spurious affair of paper and hemp which sprouted from dusty moss as false as its own raveling fronds. He went to the table and sat down, grateful all at once for the slight privacy which the alcove and the disintegrating shrub afforded. He took off his hat and his gloves and placed them on the chair beside him. . . . That, he thought quickly, would force his father to sit opposite him; there would be the width of the table between them, at least.

A middle-aged waitress, as faded as the background against which she moved, came up to serve him. She brushed crumbs and cigarette ash into her tray with a fretful, preoccupied gesture and spread a napkin over the stains that other diners had left behind them on the cloth. When she had finished, she fetched a bill of fare from a near-by table and put it before him. She stood looking at him incuriously with eyes which had once been fine.

‘I’m waiting for a guest. I won’t order until he comes.’

The waitress nodded and filled his glass with water. Then she walked in heavy-footed silence and sat on a bench near the entry to the pantry. Another waitress bearing a tray of empty dishes passed and they spoke to each other, laughed briefly, and then turned their heads away.

John looked at his watch once more. It was five minutes past one, and already his father was late, but the thought consoled him a little and he smiled bleakly. ‘Why should I expect him to be on time, or to do what he says?’ he thought. . . . ‘I imagine he’s changed very little in the past five years.’ He turned his head at an angle and looked at the door, conscious of the muffled, hammerlike sound of leather heels beating against the boardwalk. But he heard these things dimly, as if from another world, for he was at this moment concerned mostly with his own resentment. . . . His father had a colossal cheek to force himself on him this way! That was the sheerest cheek, and no mistake about it, after the way he had behaved in the past! . . . There was nothing his father had not done in the old days to shame them all, and it was because of him that he had left home just as quickly as he was able to make a living for himself. Since that time he had endured things, he felt, merely for the sake of his mother and his sisters, who had not been able to escape so easily: the arrogant demands for money which he could not afford, the drafts on his bank account which pride, at first, had made him honor, but which necessity had, at length, forced him to protest. Recently there was the embarrassing matter of the check which the bank official had questioned and which John had explained. . . .

‘But this is so obviously not your signature, Mr. Coates. It is n’t even an effective attempt. It’s plain to anybody that this is a bungling forgery.’ The official had stopped on an annoyed, ascending note as if he had meant to end his sentence with the words, ‘my good fellow,’ but had thought better of it. John had looked coldly at the official, thinking, ‘I’d be obliged if you would n’t patronize me quite so obviously, because I’m an English gentleman, the same as yourself, or at least you have no way of knowing that I’m not.’ He got up, hooked his umbrella over his forearm, and drew on his gloves, smiling with frigid amusement. ‘I’m afraid I must disagree with you, Sir Robert. That bungling forgery, as you describe it, is my signature, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll debit my account with the ten pounds.’

II

John shook his head, remembering this recent scene, and glanced again at his watch. It was a quarter past one, and he decided that he would not wait much longer. When his father had telephoned from the railway station that morning, explaining that he had just got in, he had felt a quick, depressed sensation in his stomach and his one thought had been that he must keep his father away from his office and his friends at all costs. He had been panic-stricken for a moment, not quite knowing what to do, and he was surprised at the exactly right note of heartiness he put into his voice when he did answer.

‘How long will you be in town, Father? You must have lunch with me, at least! . . . Shall I come to the station to meet you, or do you think you can find your way about?’

And his father had explained in his light, mocking voice which somehow gave the impression that he smacked his lips daintily over his words as if they were tangible things to be tasted: ‘I know my way about quite well, Mercutio. I lived here as a young man, long before I married your mother or before you were born. . . . You did n’t know that, I take it.’

‘No,’ said John. ‘No, I did n’t know that.’

There had been a moment of silence in which John sat drawing the profile of a man with exaggerated sideburns. He framed his picture in a triangle as precise as he could make it. ‘Is there any particular reason for your trip, Father? Is it on business?’ He drew a circle about the triangle and then obliterated his sketch with four quick, brutal lines.

‘No. No, it has n’t anything to do with business, except in a remote way. I merely wanted to visit the place again, to see some of the old friends I remember.’ There was a short silence and in a moment his father added, ‘I have been sick, as your mother probably wrote you. I have been quite sick.’

It was then that the older man suggested lunch at Ravino’s and John agreed hastily before his father reconsidered his choice. He knew of the place vaguely as being close to the boardwalk in the more down-at-the-heel end of town, but he had never been in it. At any rate he was not likely to meet any of his friends there, and for that he was grateful; but he was puzzled, nevertheless, that a man of his father’s florid tastes should have chosen such an obscure place. He rested his elbows on the cloth before him and cupped his thin, aristocratic face in his hands. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, but opened them with nervous prescience at the exact instant his father came through the door with aged jauntiness and stood posed inside the room as if he had expected a burst of applause. John pushed back his chair and stood up, thinking, ‘How thin he is! How he has changed since I saw him last!’ but he made no sign of recognition. Then their eyes met across the room and his father came rapidly toward him, his hand stretched forward as if this were a thought-out entrance in one of his forgotten, romantic plays. He was, John noted, wearing a soft, pale green hat which was years too young for him, and his light topcoat was too pronounced both in its cut and in its checked lavender and fawn pattern.

‘Well, this is really very nice! You’re looking well, Mercutio. I’m glad to see you.’

John said: ‘I wish you would n’t call me that, Father. I don’t use the name any more. I’ve taken the name John since I left home.’ But to himself he thought: ‘How spruce he looks in his finery — how spruce and how ridiculous! . . . And how very conscious he is of the effect he’s making on people at the other tables.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the name Mercutio. It’s a very distinguished one, as a matter of fact.’

‘Possibly so, Father; but I don’t like it, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ve played the rôle hundreds of times. It’s a very good name, and very unusual.’

‘I find it slightly absurd, I’m afraid.’ He sat down again, smiling with the correct shade of cordiality at the coffee stains on the cloth which the waitress had failed to hide.

‘Oh, very well. Very well.’ The older man hung up his coat and hat and sat opposite his son while he removed his lemon-colored gloves. He stuffed them into the pocket of his topcoat and rested his hands on the cloth. John moved his eyes and examined his father’s hands, noting dispassionately that they were as brittle and bloodless as cracked porcelain, and of the same yellowish white; that the nails were swollen a little and the tips of his fingers were blue. It was then he knew that his father was going to die, that before long he would be free of him forever. He looked up from the table, thinking these things, and read the framed signs that hung on the wall: Ravino’s Still Hocks; Ravino’s Dry Amontillado Very Choice; Ravino’s Sparkling Moselles For All Occasions, his lips moving slowly to form the words. When he spoke, his voice was calm, devoid of all emotion.

‘How did you amuse yourself this morning, Father? I hope you found something interesting to do.’

‘I walked about looking at the old places I remembered, but they’ve torn so many of them down.’

‘Yes. Yes. That’s quite true.’

The petulant waitress came toward them and waited while they ordered their luncheons. She adjusted another napkin on the table and filled the two glasses to their brims, her free hand resting professionally on her hips. When she had finished, she bent forward and switched on the lamp that stood on the table, and instantly the older man’s face emerged sharply from the blurring duskiness of the alcove. It was then John saw that his father’s hair and eyebrows had been dyed a hard, brittle black and that against his parchment skin there were spread two unmistakable, fan-like reaches of theatrical rouge.

‘I went this morning to call on some of the old friends I remembered, but they’re mostly dead now. The ones who are alive did n’t seem to place me.’ He laughed with disbelief. ‘I did n’t think the people here would ever forget me, a small place like this. . . . I played three summers here in repertory, and I was something of a sensation. I tell you, my boy, I packed them in. Things were much different in those days. I was known as Cyril Mullarney then, but my manager made me take my own name when I made my first appearance in London.’

Cyril sighed, leaned back in his chair and glanced up at the waitress. He sat up straight and examined her more closely, his eyes half closed. He had seen her before somewhere, he was sure of that, but he could not quite remember the occasion. He shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the matter from his mind. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘this place has changed since my day. When I was a young man, Ravino’s was the exclusive place to go, but look at it now! Everybody came here in those days: all the fashionable people. There were private dining rooms upstairs where we held our parties. It was all very gay.’

They selected their food while the heavy-footed waitress noted their orders on a pad. She returned almost at once and put the food on the table before them, and again Cyril looked at her speculatively. He raised his finger and stroked his lip with the mannered, graceful gesture that he had used in so many of his old successes.

‘I’ve known you at some time in my life,’ he said positively. ‘I can’t place you now, but it must have been many years ago.’

The waitress, whose vocabulary had of late been modeled after the American movies she had seen, threw back her head and spoke from the corner of her mouth. ‘Sure you have. Sure. So what?’

’I remember now,’ said Cyril. ‘ It all comes back to me. It was the last season I played here. You wrote me a note and met me at the stage door. You had a girl friend, and I brought along a man from the company named Arthur Holden. I was called Cyril Mullarney in those days, don’t you remember? We came to this very place for supper.’ He laughed with delight, his porcelain cheeks stretched tightly across the bones of his face.

The waitress turned and stared. ‘ So what? ’ she repeated sullenly. ‘So what, big shot?’

‘I even remember your name,’ continued Cyril proudly. ‘It’s Annie Wheatley.’

John leaned back in his chair, so that his face was more completely screened by the dusty palm. ‘It is n’t necessary for him to talk so loudly,’ he thought. ‘He’s grotesque enough as it is.’

The waitress said: ‘I never saw you in my life before, and what’s more if you don’t take your hand off my knee I’ll call a police officer.’ She looked contemptuously at the old man, and then turned to John, seeing his embarrassment. ‘Scram!’ she said. ‘Scram, big shot! ’ She laughed disdainfully and winked, as if she and John shared a common secret. All at once Cyril became very gay. It was n’t possible for her to have forgotten him. She must remember him. His pictures had been in all the papers and on the boards before the theatre. He had had dozens of letters from his female admirers, just as he had received the note from her.

The waitress drew back. ‘Scram!’ she said. ‘Scram!’ She walked away, disappearing into the obscurity of the service pantry.

‘She has n’t forgotten me!’ said Cyril. ‘She remembered me very well.’ He lifted his dying hands again, and again he turned the turquoise and silver ring on his finger.

‘Have you been sick long, Father?’

‘She remembers me very well, you can be sure of that.’

‘ Did the doctor say what the trouble is?’

‘A doctor’s concern is to frighten you so badly that you ’ll pay his outrageous bills, Mercutio.’

’Did your doctor succeed in frightening you that badly, Father?’

‘No,’ said Cyril in delight. ‘No, I can’t say that he did.’

III

There was a long silence between them while they ate, but at last Cyril spoke again: ‘Being sick so long has left me short of funds. It’s only temporary, of course, until I get an engagement for the summer.’ And John, chewing steadily, looked up and nodded. His father was coming into the open now. They were getting down to the real reason for his visit. But his father need expect nothing from him this time; he refused to be bled any more.

The waitress came out of the pantry with her friend, a woman as frayed as herself. They stood whispering together while the waitress touched her hair and her cheeks and nodded her head to indicate the direction in which her friend was to look. It was as if she said: ‘Yes, he’s really got rouge on! . . . There! There, back of the palm. You can’t see him very well from here!’ The second woman picked up a handful of silver and walked carelessly, too carelessly, in the direction of the alcove. She stopped at a near-by table and began to rearrange it. She raised her eyes in anticipation of what she would see, but she got no farther than John’s cold stare fixed steadily upon her face. She lowered her head, gathered up her silver in confusion, and retreated.

All at once John felt an unaccustomed fury within himself. He beckoned to the waitress who had served them and who still stood by the door awaiting her friend’s incredulous corroboration of what she had just been told. She started to turn, but he crooked his finger imperiously and she came toward the alcove. She waited at his elbow.

‘This fork that you gave me is dirty,’ he began in his cold, passionless voice. ‘You can see that it has n’t been cleaned properly.’

She took the fork and examined it, turning it over and over in her hands, not quite knowing what to say. ‘I don’t clean the forks,’ she said at length. ‘I’ll tell them about it in the kitchen.’

John smiled steadily. ‘You don’t clean your fingernails either, it seems, but that, I take it, is a matter of personal choice, Miss Wheatley.’

The woman’s neck turned red. She glanced quickly at her soiled hands and as quickly put them behind her back.

‘I don’t know the class of people who come here as a rule,’ said John. ‘Possibly they don’t mind. I’m afraid I find it slightly ’ — he paused and smiled again, weighing his words — ‘slightly nauseating,’ he said at last.

‘Yes, sir.’

Cyril had stopped eating and was looking from his son to the waitress as if not quite understanding what was taking place.

‘You are Miss Wheatley? ’ said John.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You may give me the check, please.’ He took the slip and folded it into squares. ‘The gentleman to whom you were so rude is my father, if that interests you.’ Then he got up and helped his father with his coat, proud that no sign of his fury escaped to the watching world. Cyril looked at his son’s grave face and at once his own face became grave, as if he could adjust himself instantly to the atmosphere about him, could be depended upon to fall immediately into any situation and read his lines appropriately, even though he had not known what had gone before.

When he had settled with the cashier, John held the door for his father and followed him to the pavement outside. He was, on the whole, pleased with his handling of the waitress and with the manner in which he had put her at once in her place. He had been cool, dispassionate, and completely master of his hands, his voice, and his face, and the thought would have, on another occasion, pleased him; at the moment, the problem of his father, and what he had better do with him, negatived his earned satisfaction.

His father reached out suddenly and took his son’s arm, and John stiffened slightly at the touch, but he lifted his head and smiled his steady, uncompromising smile as they walked along the promenade, talking of things which they both knew to be of no importance, the penetrant breeze from the sea lifting Cyril’s coat and swirling it about his knees. After a moment John glanced at his father and then turned his head, for in the sunlight the dyed hair and eyebrows were fiercely revealed, and the spread rouge stood out like crimson patches on yellow cloth. He wondered, then, just what it was his father demanded of him this time and how long he purposed staying. He was willing to do his duty within reasonable limits, but his personal life, he felt, was his own and he had no idea of sharing it with his father or of introducing him to his friends. Making a place for himself in this stolid, unfriendly town had not been easy, but he had succeeded at last by the unaltering force of his character, and he was accepted now. He would not have that new security jeopardized. . . .

IV

They turned after a moment and went into a small park. They sat together on a bench and watched the sea flashing with silver in the chill April sunlight. They had exhausted their protective talk and they were both silent for a time, neither quite knowing what to say. Again John glanced at his father, and again he turned his head away. He would let the future take care of itself, he decided. He would sit here for a decent interval and then go about his business and dismiss the whole matter from his mind. Perhaps it had been a mistake to see his father in the first place. He would not make that mistake a second time. Certainly he would refuse his father the money which he would, inevitably, ask.

Cyril, as if understanding his son’s thoughts, began to talk again, his eyes fixed on the sea with desperate craftiness. ‘I’m disappointed with my trip on the whole, Mercutio. It has been quite disappointing. My expenses have been very high of late.’ He turned the turquoise ring on his finger and added, ‘My sickness, of course. . . . I had thought to raise money among my old friends here, but it seems not.’ He drew his coat about his thin body and shivered with distaste, as if at some humiliating memory.

‘I’m sending home all the money that I can possibly afford. I keep very little for myself.’

‘Yes, yes, Mercutio. I’m not denying that. But I’m used to so many things, and I can’t give them up now. It’s different with you.’

‘There’s one thing, at least, that you must give up,’ said John, smiling fixedly. ‘You must give up signing my name to checks. That is forgery, as you know.’

‘You take those things too seriously,’ said Cyril. ‘I knew you’d send me the money. It was n’t forgery, really. I merely signed the check with your name to save time.’

‘Yes,’ said John. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘If I could raise twenty pounds I think I’d call the visit off and go back home to-night,’ said Cyril wearily. ‘The whole thing has been a bitter disappointment.’

’I’m sorry, but I haven’t twenty pounds, Father.’

Again there was a long silence, and then Cyril, as if trying a new attack, began to talk about the daughter who had married the year before and moved to Bristol, while John listened uneasily, suspicious of his father’s sudden interest in her welfare. It appeared that the family rarely heard from her, and it almost seemed as if she were trying to forget that they existed, or that she was ashamed of them now. He had been thinking before his illness of visiting her, to assure himself that she was quite happy in her new home and that her husband treated her with consideration, for he knew her pride, and if her marriage was not successful she would never say a word about it, being much like himself in that respect. . . . At any rate, he would like to make sure.

‘There’s no necessity for that, Father. I hear from her regularly. She wrote me last week. She’s quite happy.’

Cyril raised his hand and stroked his lips with his forefinger, his eyes narrowed in shrewdness. ‘I’d like very much to read her letter,’ he said after a long pause. ‘I’d like to assure myself at first hand.’

John said, ’I’m afraid I have n’t the letter with me. I left it in my desk at the office’; but almost before the words were off his tongue he knew that he had blundered.

‘Shall we go to your office together and get it?’ said Cyril gently. ‘It will give me a chance, as well, to see where you work, and to meet your employers.’

John shook his head quickly, lifted his umbrella, and began jabbing at pebbles in the path. ‘Why do I permit him this power over me?’ he thought. ‘I’m a grown man. He could n’t exploit me this way unless I permitted it.’ He held the umbrella against his legs and furled the silk more tightly with his cold hands. When he had finished he fastened the snap and looked steadily outward at the sea, knowing himself defeated. It would be better, he said at last, if he went alone for the letter, and if his father waited for him there in the park. The office was being redecorated, and everything was in confusion. He got up and straightened his necktie, calculating how much money he could possibly spare, wondering if his father would be content with less than the twenty pounds that he demanded. ‘I’ll take a taxi,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back very soon.’ He turned and walked away, afraid that Cyril might overrule the plan, but his father sighed, leaned back against the bench, and began to rotate the silver and turquoise ring on his finger.

V

When he reached his desk, John counted the money that remained in his pockets and examined his bank balance again, although he knew to the shilling the amount that he possessed. He shook his head helplessly. He would have to ask the cashier for another advance, no matter how greatly he disliked doing so. He concluded his arrangements at length, and wrote Cyril a note: ‘Dear Father: I am enclosing eighteen pounds. It is all I have at the moment. I hope that you have had an enjoyable trip. Please give the family my regards when you see them to-morrow.’ He blotted the sheet on which he had written his message, folded it exactly over the notes, and slipped it into the envelope containing his sister’s letter. Then he buttoned his topcoat, glanced at himself in the mirror above the washstand, and went out of his office.

His father was sitting on the bench where he had left him, but he got up expectantly at John’s approach and braced himself against the seat, swaying slightly. John handed him the envelope, and Cyril, feeling its added bulk, smiled and nodded in approval, his parchment skin pulled so tightly over the bones of his face that he seemed to be a dead man revived for an occasion of gayety after years in his grave rather than one who was only now going to death after a long and happy life.

‘The waitress’s name was Blanche Wheatley; not Annie. The girl she brought for Holden was named Annie.’

‘Yes,’ said John.

‘You were very rude to her, Mercutio. Unnecessarily rude.’

‘Yes,’ said John.

Cyril had become very animated, very arrogant now that he was in funds again. He excitedly shaped the new jade-green hat more becomingly to his head, half-turned toward the town, and glanced longingly at two girls who passed arm in arm down the promenade.

John said: ‘I’m afraid that I must be getting back to work. I’ll say good-bye now.’

‘You must n’t blame me too bitterly later on,’ said Cyril. ‘You must n’t expect to change me at my age.’

John said: ‘No. No, of course not.’

He watched while his father turned from the small park and passed on to the promenade, hesitated, and then walked in the direction that the girls had taken, his fingers touching and retouching his new hat, his silver ring, and his dyed moustache as though he thought himself still the actor of romantic rôles to whom a world of women wrote their amorous, pleading notes. Then all at once his father’s retreating figure trembled and shattered before John’s eyes, and he knew, then, that the defenses he had built up so laboriously in the past years had failed him at last, and without warning, and that he was stretched again on the rack of old issues which could never be settled for him in this world. He turned and walked toward the bandstand, his eyes unfocused against the blurred and wavering sea, his hands closed so tightly that he could feel the bite of his nails against his flesh. . . .

He would be all right in a minute or so, but he was, he thought scornfully, behaving at this moment precisely like the emotional French, who weep and embrace in the streets: he was a man with no more dignity than those Americans who call noisily to acquaintances across dining-room floors. . . .

‘Father! Father!’ he said.

He hooked his umbrella over his forearm, raised his thin, delicately chiseled face, and closed his eyes. He pressed his hands against his face and willed not to remember. ‘Father! Father!’he said. . . . And then a long time later:‘Father!’ . . .