The Ypsilanti Daily Press

The Rest of My Life
With
You
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Judith managed to talk to Irene about motion-picture studios . . . as she thought of Matthew .. . it just had to be. That's why nothing else, no one else, was satisfactory.

She was twenty-three years. Grown-up, or so she had fancied. But she had not grown up until a moment ago. Girl into woman, as quickly as that, and more painfully than she could ever have imagined.

Presently Judith was able to say, "I'm afraid I must leave now, I'm going out to dinner." She smiled at Irene. "Thanks for letting me come, it was such fun."

What am I saying? she thought wildly.

Matthew was speaking. He was asking, "Where are you going? Maybe it's my way."

She could not look at him, she dared not. Judith thought, with a sudden aching sorrow: Not your way, Matthew, never your way.

She named her hotel, and he said cheerfully, "Right up my alley. I'll drop you off."

"That's just what he will do," remarked his mother resignedly, "if you aren't careful, demon driver."

Irene said instantly, "He's a very good driver, really, Judith." She looked up smiling and Judith, looking at her as if for the first time, saw that her eyes were beautiful with patience and hope.

"You needn't be afraid."

"I'm not afraid," Judith asserted vaguely.

"I'm safe all right," said Matthew, consoling. "Come along, Judy, your dinner date won't mind being kept waiting but my patient will raise Cain. How about you, mother?"

"I'm staying for dinner."

"Steady boarder," Matthew grumbled.

"Judy, will you get going?"

Judith kissed Mary and took Irene's hand. She said, "I'll see you soon, I hope," and somehow escaped from the pleasant room with the firelight and its air of waiting and intimacy. But it was not escape, for Matthew was beside her, with all that same lovable, exasperating arrogance which years ago had sent her tagging at his heels, grateful for a word or a command.

He had his hand on her arm and she held herself completely rigid, determined not to pay any attention to it, not to feel, not to think.

They went outside where the wind blew chilly and wet, the lazy flakes came down and melted. And Matthew said, taking her toward the car, "Don't slip! No, do slip. I have a way with ankles." He laughed and added, "Some buffalo robe you have there."

It was a mink coat, dark, silky, Aunt Ella's latest Christmas gift.

The snow stung Judith's eyelids-- was all that sting due to snow?-- and settled briefly on her bright brown hair and little cap of mink.

She said, "Aunt Ella's very generous."

"Who's her doctor?" smiled Matthew.

He put her in the car and they started for the hotel. He drove too fast, but she was not afraid: not of his driving, nor of the slithery streets nor the startled policemen. . . . One stopped them and Matthew said, his license ready, "I'm on a call."

The officer looked dubiously at Judith, shook his head, then said, "I'm warning you, doc," and let them go on.

"I can get out of anything," boasted Matthew complacently, and she could have killed him.

He talked of Irene on the way to the hotel. He talked of his mother and of his work. He talked, without embarrassment, of the baby.

"Seems silly, doesn't it?" he chattered. "Me with a kid!"

Judith said, a little tartly, "It doesn't seem silly to Irene."

"Oh, women!" exclaimed Matthew, dismissing them with tolerant affection. "She and mother drive me nuts! So many dozens of this, so many dozens of that. Twice in his life a man is completely submerged, on his wedding day and when he is an expectant father."

He laughed and added, "Look here, what's this I hear about you being engaged and then giving the poor guy the air?"

She said, "That's it."

"What? Is this double-talk?"

"I mean that's what you heard and that's all there is, there isn't any more."

"Okay," said Matthew, his friendly conversational gesture rebuffed; "if that's the way you feel, don't confide in uncle."

She said, "There isn't anything to confide. He--Dan--was very attractive. I liked him a lot, but--" Judith broke off. "Just one of those things," she ended.

Matthew spoke gently. She wished that he wouldn't. It made things worse. "I'm sorry, Judy."

"I'm not, not now," she said. "Just at first . . . Well, I hate to hurt anyone."

They were at the hotel. She felt his hand on hers. She heard him say, "So long . . . be seein' you," and saw the car shoot away to make the light. She was unaware of how long she stood there on the wet cold pavement to watch it.

Lobby. Smiling desk clerk. Elevators. The long walk down the corridor. Her door and her mother and Aunt Ella sitting there, with some utterly strange woman and a tab with cocktail glasses.

"Have a good time?" her mother wanted to know, and "Tell us all about it," urged Aunt Ella, presenting the elderly and dour guest, whose name Judith never learned.

She smiled at them. "It's late, I have to bathe and dress and then fly. Early curtain, I think Jimmy said."

"Jimmy Treadway?" asked Aunt Ella, and her plucked eyebrow twitched.

"The same."

She had met him in California. He was playing polo there. He was very eligible and very good looking and, she thought, rather in love with her although he hadn't got around to saying it yet. For a little while Judith had thought, it would be easy to love six feet of amusing manhood, and six million dollars.

Now it wouldn't be easy.

She went into her bedroom, beautifully furnished with the cold and impersonal luxury of a great hotel, took off her coat and hung it up. She put her hat away, laid her bag aside, her gloves. It was entirely mechanical. She thought of the frock she would wear and of the scent she would choose to make fragrant the big tub of steaming water. She thought of a new lipstick.

Wrong color lipstick, Matthew had said.

Judith cast herself across the bed. She did not cry, she could not. She told herself: I will not, I will not. . . . I will not think of him, I will not acknowledge... Surely you could compel your emotions? You could even kill them.

Someone knocked. It was Anna, Aunt Ella's maid, who came in with her shrewd live eyes, her wooden battered face, and her wooden body. She looked like something out of Noah's ark. Her hair was scant, black and as shiny as if painted on, and there were round spots of color in her cheeks. She said that she would draw Judith's bath and lay out her frock.

Dinner, and dancing. The play. Judith never afterward remembered what it was about. A supper club and more dancing . . . Jimmy bending his tall head and putting his cheek against her own and saying, "You're much too alluring. I think of you too much. When are we seeing each other again?"

It was very late when Judith reached home. Anna had laid out her nightgown, her robe and slippers. There was a special delivery from Dan... poor Dan, dear Dan! There were flowers from someone else. And a note from her mother on the pillow. "Dear, I hope you had a good time, do sleep late."

Judith sat in front of the mirror and, while patting in the cream, thought: What's the use; What a crazy life, every day you put your face on and take it off, half a dozen times maybe.

I'm pretty, she thought, I'm young . . . Dan loved my face-- others have too. I have a good figure. I'm young and terribly healthy, I'll live for years and years. Years. She'd forget, perhaps very soon. Perhaps this was like some swift and sudden illness, striking without warning, leaving you limp and weak, then convalescent and at last cured.

Judith went to bed and the traffic noises reached her, there on the eighteenth floor. Suddenly, an ambulance lifted its shrill compelling voice. . . . Ambulance, hospitals, doctors, Matthew. It all came back to him, after all.

I've known him forever, and I don't know him at all, Judith told herself. He thinks of me as a kid. Why shouldn't he? He's married. He's been married for three years. He's in love with his wife. . . .

(To be continued)

Copyright, 1943, by Faith Baldwin Cuthrell
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.