The summer had come, all hot and brassy and then gone away. Fall and winter brought life-giving rains to a parched California and now spring had once again cloaked the brown hills with green. A soft rain was falling as Tod left the company car in care of the Barrister’s parking lot attendant.
He saw Tom Morse wave at him from a back booth and made his way across the room… stopping here and there to say a word or exchange pleasantries with various attorneys.
“Tod,” Tom said warmly, “it’s good to see you again.”
“Good to see you, too, your Honor.” Tod grinned. “Tom, you don’t look a day older than the last time I saw you.”
“Well, now… let’s see. That was over a year ago. No… by George, I shouldn’t look older. After all, I love a good, clean, healthy, wholesome and boring as hell life.” He cleared his throat and inspected the younger man. “You look different, though. You’ve lost weight, look tired.”
Tod shrugged. “I’ve been a little busy.”
Tom grunted, “Yes… I know. I’ve been keeping up with you in the Mercury-News and the Chronicle. Stories there all the time about Shelton and… ah…”
“Shelton and Jackson,” Tod said.
“Ah, yes. Shelton and Jackson. The fastest growing industrial security agency in the U.S., the papers say. Just how many people do you have working for you, anyway?”
“About two hundred and fifty on the industrial side; twenty-five or so on the private investigation section. I don’t have a definite figure, we’re expanding so rapidly.” He took a sip of his martini. “I just this morning signed a contract with the airport authority. That’ll mean another fifty or so patrolmen have to be hired.” He sighed wearily and took a deep drag on his cigarette.
Judge Morse gazed at him from under the thick gray eyebrows. He said casually, “You’ve come a long way… since last year about this time.”
“Yes… I guess it was largely a matter of waking up. I’ve changed. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, Tom. Stopped thinking about what I had become and what I should have been and began concentrating on what I could be… if I concentrated hard enough.” He grinned wryly, “All it took was twenty-four hours of concentration a day, seven days a week.”
Tom asked, playing with a matchstick and not looking at him, “No time out for play? No love life?”
Tod ground his half-finished cigarette out in the ashtray. He shook his head. “No play. No love life. No time… “ As incredible as it sounded, it was the truth. There had been no one, not even for one night or one short assignation in a motel. No one since Sylvia and that weekend in Santa Barbara almost fifteen months ago.
Tom wagged his head in dismay, “I don’t know what the young people are coming to these days.” Then he dropped the bombshell.
“Oh, incidentally, speaking of young people, I hope you don’t mind; I’ve invited Sylvia Akron to join us for lunch.”
Tod glared angrily at him and started to rise from the booth; he was pushed back by Tom’s hand. “Look, Tod,” he said sternly. “I want you to listen to me. Think of me as you did in the old days as a brother or father.” He held up his hand as Tod sought to interrupt. “How long are you going to make her do penance? My God! It’s been fifteen months. I don’t even sentence some gun-waving hoodlums that long.”
“Tom, you don’t know what in hell you’re talking about,” Tod growled unhappily.
“Don’t I? I know more than you give me credit for. I know, in spite of your protestations to the contrary, that you’re in love with her. And she freely admits that her life is nothing, absolutely nothing, meaningless, without you.”
Tod stirred restlessly, and the judge tapped the table with his cigarette case as though he were pounding the gavel in court. “Pay attention. Yes, I know far more than you could suspect. I know all about her infantile plan to get even with Bruce. She told me. Everything! I know the part you played in it, the photographs, the Santa Barbara hotel, the orgy in the Jolly… the Jolly whatever in hell it was. I know what she planned to do in Pebble Beach with the Negro swap club. What you don’t know is that she discarded that plan the instant you told her what she was really doing. I can relate to you word for word… your indictment of her the day you walked out on her. She remembers it. She feels it was justified. You had no way of knowing then that she had already come to the same conclusion about herself as you had. She hated herself She hated what she had done to the relationship between you and her. She recognized instinctively that you and she had had something special which, added together, made you both compatible to each other. You were able to talk to each other as man and woman and that’s something valuable right there. You had other things, individually and collectively. You were good for each other.”
Judge Morse peered at him. “Just look at you today. You brushed against her for only a brief moment as time goes, but some of it rubbed off on you. After meeting her, you realized that if you were ever to win or deserve a woman like her that you would have to better yourself, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. She made you realize what there was to be had in this world; she made you stop feeling sorry for yourself”
The judge looked down at his hands, inspecting them, looking at them as if he had never seen them before. “And so you know something. Some of you rubbed off on her. Since her divorce a year ago, she’s been working four nights a week as a volunteer in the Geriatrics Ward of the County Hospital; she hasn’t missed a single shift during that time. Some of those poor damned patients have no control of their bowels or bladders. Sylvia cleans them up, that’s her job. She soothes them and comforts them. They’re the children she’ll never have now… unless you and she.”
Judge Morse took a very deep breath. “I’ll say this, even knowing it might mean the end of our friendship, Tod. Whatever reason you had for breaking with her, that reason no longer exists. You don’t hate her, you never did. You love her. She loves you. You knew she was falling in love with you. To deny her and yourself the companionship and love and children you two could have together… to do this thing means that you, Tod Shelton, are in the exact same position she was in when she wanted to get revenge. You are being vengeful! I know you’re man enough not to let her money come between the two of you. As far as that’s concerned, you’ll probably be a millionaire yourself within three or four years at the rate you’re going. So there’s no reason why you two should not be together.” He stood. “Here she comes… you think about what I said.”
Tod looked up at the same moment Sylvia saw him. She stopped, a look of uncertain fright… and something else… crossing her lovely face. For a moment, it appeared as though she were about to turn away and run away from them. Tod felt his throat grow tight. She looked thinner, far more beautiful than he had remembered. This was the face that had haunted him all those sleepless, lonely nights a face that now loomed up out of the dreamworld passing into reality. As cautiously as some timid forest creature prepared for instant flight, she approached the table and waited for his invitation.
“Sylvia,” he said, his swollen throat unable to say more.
He saw the hot tears boil up in her eyes as, trembling, she held out her hand. He took it, held onto it.
“How… how… have you been… Tod?” she asked in a voice so low that it was almost inaudible.
He nodded his head several times rapidly, not trusting his voice, and seated her beside him. Then he said, uncertainly, “How have you been?”
She bit her lower lip and used the back of her hand to wipe away one tear that had begun running down her nose. “Do you want the horrible truth?” She gazed at him, the truth in her eyes… the truth, her own being, her hopes, her future, all mirrored in her eyes.
They were so engrossed in each other that neither noticed Tom Morse slip from the booth and make his way toward the exit. He stepped outside. The rain had stopped. Here and there the sun was breaking through the clouds. He took a deep breath then whistling jauntily, he crossed the street toward his offices. It was, he thought, turning out to be a fine day after all. A splendid day, one he was sure he would remember for all the rest of the days of his life.