BUtterfield 8 (11 page)

Roy Brunner was one jump ahead of the sheriff when he keeled over with his cerebral hemorrhage in his eyes. He had been letting the drive-in car-service eateries get along without him, as he figured to do something new with all those lots he had tied up. He had gained a local reputation for sagaciousness and public-pulse-feeling as a result of getting out of the miniature golf course business ahead of time. His new idea was a nickel movie on every available corner; showing newsreels and short subjects for a nickel. A half-hour show, and turn them out. That did not give them much for their money, as it meant only one short and two newsreels, but on the other hand it was a lot for their money. A nickel? What did they want for a nickel? It was only a time killer anyway. He was in Hollywood ostensibly working on this project at the time the grim reaper called. No papers had been signed, and he hadn’t seen the top men, but he was going to let them know he was in town tomorrow or the day after, and this party was just a little informal get-together with a couple of football coaches and golf professionals and what are known in the headlines as Film Actresses—extra girls. He had all the confidence in the world, and not without some reason. A man who is able to show the motion picture producers one example of how he called the turn of the public fancy can sell them practically anything, so long as he calls it Showmanship. But no papers had been signed.

“Your mother’s going to stay with Aunt Ella and me for the present,” Eddie’s uncle told him, and that settled a problem for Eddie. He did not want to stay around his mother. He loved her because she was his mother and sometimes he felt sorry for her, but all his life (he had realized at a time when he was still too young for such a realization) she was so engrossed in her own life work of observing the carryings-on of her husband that she was like some older person whom Eddie knew but who did not always speak to him on the street. She was a member of a Pioneer Family, which in California means what Mayflower Descendant means in the East. The Mayflower Descendants, however, have had time to rest and recover from the exhausting, cruel trip, and many have done so, although inbreeding did not speed recovery. But the Pioneers had a harder trip and not so long ago, and it is reasonable to suppose that many of their number were so weakened when they got as far as the Pacific littoral that they handed down a legacy of tired bodies. Roy Brunner had come out from Kansas on a train, and his wife became his wife—a little to his surprise—the first time he asked her. She’d never been asked before, and was afraid she never would be again. She would willingly have learned, in married life, the one important thing her husband was able to teach her, but he was tolerantly impatient with her, and went elsewhere for his fun. When it came time to acquaint Eddie with the facts of sexual life, and Roy acquainted him with them, his wife said to him: “How did you tell him?” The reason she asked was that she still had hopes at that time of finding out herself. But Roy’s answer was: “Oh, I just told him. He knew a lot already.”

Eddie knew that in his mother his uncle was figuring on a profitable paying guest. That annoyed him a little, but what was there to do? She wanted to be there, and it took care of everything satisfactorily. Mrs. Brunner gave Eddie five hundred dollars out of her own money, and having signed a power of attorney in favor of his uncle, Eddie returned to New York, believing that his allowance would continue.

It never came again. His father’s estate was tangled enough, and the Crash fixed everything fine. Eddie’s uncle was hit, though not crippled. He wrote to Eddie, who was a month and a half behind in the rent with a lease to run exactly a year longer. He told Eddie they all were comparatively lucky. “You are young,” he said, “and can earn your own living. I hope you will be able to send your mother something from time to time, as we can give her a roof over her head, a place to sleep and eat but nothing else. . . .”

Eddie sold his car for $35, he hocked his beautiful mellophone for $10. He gathered together, early in December, all his money and found he had not quite $200. His roommates had jobs and they were more than willing to have him keep his share of the apartment and owe them his share of the rent, but in January one of them lost his job in the first Wall Street purge, and in March they all were ousted from their apartment.

They went their separate ways. One of the roommates had a married sister living somewhere in suburban New Jersey. He went there. The other, the fighter, died of pneumonia in a room off Avenue A. Eddie did not even hear about it until long after his friend’s body had been cremated. Eddie went from rooming-house to rooming-house, in the Village at first, and then in the West Forties, among the Irish of Tenth Avenue. He stayed uptown because it saved a dime carfare every day. He tried every place, everyone he knew to get a job. He was a helper in a restaurant one week, picking dirty plates off tables and carrying trayfuls of them to the kitchen. He dropped a tray and was fired, but he paid something on his rent and he had kept his belly full. He thought of driving a taxi, but he did not know how to go about it. He knew there had to be licenses and other details, and he did not have the money for a license. He tried to be an actor, saying he could play comedy character parts. The only time he was picked he revealed right away that he had had no experience: he did not know what a side was, nor anything else about the stage. One night, very hungry, he allowed himself to be picked up by a fairy, but he wanted his meal first and the fairy did not trust him, so he punched the fairy one for luck and felt better, but wished he had had the guts to take the fairy’s bankroll. He sold twenty-five cent ties in fly-by-night shops and was a shill at two auctions but the auctioneer decided he was too tall; people would remember him. Then, through his landlady, for whose children he sometimes drew funny pictures, he heard of a marvelous opportunity: night man in a hotel which was more of a whore-house. It was through her Tammany connection that she heard about the job. He operated a switchboard and ran the elevator from six in the evening to eight in the morning, for ten dollars a week and room, plus tips. Customers would come in and the password was, “I’m a friend of Mr. Stone’s.” Then Eddie would look the customer over and ask him whom he wanted to see, and the man would give the name of one of the three women. Eddie then would call the room of the woman named, and say:”There’s a friend of Mr. Stone’s here for you,” and she would say all right, and Eddie would say: “She says she’s not sure she remembers you. Will you describe her to me?” And the man would either describe her or say quite frankly that he’d never been there before, and all this was stalling. It gave Eddie a chance to look him over carefully and it gave the woman a chance to prepare to entertain the visitor, or get dressed and get ready to be raided, if Eddie pulled back the switchboard key which rang her room. He was instructed to turn down men who were too drunk, as the place was not paying the kind of protection that had to be paid by clip joints. Eddie never turned anyone down.

On this job he met Gloria. She came in one night, plastered, with a sunburned man, also plastered, who wore in his lapel the boutonniere of the Legion of Honor. Eddie was a little afraid of him at first, but he guessed it would be too early in the season for a cop to have the kind of tan this man had. And the man said: “Tell Jane it’s the major. She’ll know.” Jane knew and told Eddie to send him right up. The girl, Gloria, went with him. Eddie made the wise guess that this was Gloria’s first time here, but not her first experience being a spectator. The major kept smiling to himself in the elevator, humming, and saying to Gloria: “All right, honey?”

The major gave Eddie a dollar when they reached Jane’s floor, gave it to him as though that were the custom from time immemorial. Eddie returned to the switchboard. Then in about twenty minutes he heard footsteps, and standing before him was the girl, Gloria.

“Will you lend me that dollar he gave you?” she said. “Come on, I’ll give it back to you. You don’t want any trouble, do you?”

“No. But how’ll I know you’ll give it back to me? Honestly, I need that buck.”

“You don’t have to pimp for your money, I imagine.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, but here, take it.”

“I’ll bring it back tomorrow. I’ll give you two bucks tomorrow,” she said. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“You mean what is a nice girl like me doing in a place like this,” said Eddie.

“Good night,” she said, “and thanks a million.”

He had a feeling she would return the money, and she did, two nights later. She gave him five dollars. She said she didn’t have change for it, and he took it. “What happened the other night, anything?” she said.

“Your friend got stinko and Jane had to send out for a bouncer,” he said.

“Oh, you’re not the bouncer?”

“Do I look like a bouncer?”

“No, but—”

“But I don’t look like an elevator boy in a whore-house either, is what you’re trying to say.”

“Are you from the West?”

“Wisconsin,” said Eddie.

“What part of Wisconsin?”

“Duluth,” said Eddie.

“Duluth is in Minnesota.”

“I know,” said Eddie.

“Oh, in other words mind my own business. Okay. Well, I just asked. I’ll be seeing you.”

“I have something belonging to you, Miss Wandrous.”

“What!”

“Your purse, you left it in Jane’s room when you left in such a hurry. That’s why you had to borrow the buck, remember? I took the liberty of trying to identify the owner, but I couldn’t find you in the phone book. I didn’t think I would.”

“Oh.”

“I was going to take a chance that you were still living at the address on your driver’s license. You better get a new license, by the way. The 1928 licenses aren’t any good any more. This is 1930.”

“Did you show this to anybody?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I just didn’t think it was anybody else’s business. It wasn’t mine, for that matter, but it’s better for you to have
me
look at it than turn it over to, well, one of the boys we have around here sometimes.”

“You’re a good egg. I just happened to think who it is you remind me of.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I ought to. I’ve heard it often enough.”

“Who?”

“Lindbergh.”

“Yes, that’s right. I guess you would hear that a lot. When is your night off?”

“The second Tuesday of every week.”

“No night off? I thought they had to give you a night off.”

“They break a lot of ordinances here, ordinances and laws. Why, what do you want to know about my nights out for?”

“We could have dinner.”

“Sure. Do you think I’d be here if I could take girls out to dinner?”

“Who said anything about taking me? I just said we could have dinner. I have no objection to paying for my own dinner under certain circumstances.”

“For instance.”

“For instance eating with someone I like.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said, but he could not prolong the flippancy. This was the first time in months that anyone had spoken a kind personal word to him. She understood that.

“Get somebody to work for you, can’t you?”

“Why should I? . . . Hell, why shouldn’t I? There’s a jiggaboom had this job before me is working down the street now. He just runs the elevator at a hotel now, maybe he might work for me if they said it was all right. I don’t want to lose this job, though.”

The Negro said he would be glad to take over Eddie’s job for a night, and Mrs. Smith, Eddie’s boss, said it would be all right but not to make a practice of it, as the girls upstairs did not like Negroes for agents.

Thus began the friendship of Gloria and Eddie.

 • • • 

It would be easy enough to say any one of a lot of things about Gloria, and many things were said. It could be said that she was a person who in various ways—some of them peculiar—had the ability to help other people, but lacked the ability to help herself. Someone could write a novel about Gloria without ever going very far from that thesis. It was, of course, the work of a few minutes for the 1931 editorial writers (who apparently are the very last people to read the papers) to find in Gloria a symbol of modern youth. She was no more a symbol of modern youth than Lindbergh was a symbol of modern youth, or Bob Jones the golfer, or Prince George, or Rudy Vallée, or Linky Mitchell, or DeHart Hubbard or anyone else who happened to be less than thirty years old up to 1930. There can be no symbol of modern youth any more than there can be a symbol of modern middle age, and anyway symbol is a misnomer. The John Held Jr. caricature of the “flapper” of the 1920’s, or the girls and young men whom Scott Fitzgerald made self-conscious were not symbols of the youth of that time. As a matter of fact there was no tie-up between the Scott Fitzgerald people and the John Held people. The Scott Fitzgerald people were drawn better by two artists named Lawrence Fellows and Williamson than by John Held. Held drew caricatures of the boys and girls who went to East Orange High School and the University of Illinois; the Held drawings were caricatures and popular, and so people associated the Fitzgerald people with the Held drawings. The Fitzgerald people did not go in for decorated yellow slickers, decorated Fords, decorated white duck trousers and stuff like put-and-take tops and fraternity pins and square-toed shoes and Shifter movements and trick dancing and all the things that caught on with the Held people. The Held people
tried
to look like the Held people; the Fitzgerald-Fellows people were copies of the originals.

The average man, Mr. Average Man, Mr. Taxpayer, as drawn by Rollin Kirby
looks
like the average New York man making more than $5,000 a year. He wears Brooks clothes, including a Herbert Johnson hat, which is a pretty foreign-looking article of apparel in Des Moines, Iowa, where J. N. Darling is the cartoonist; but in New York, Kirby’s territory, the Kirby taxpayer is typical. He is a man who wears good clothes without ever being a theater-program well-dressed man; it is easy to imagine him going to his dentist, taking his wife to the theater, going back to Amherst for reunion, getting drunk twice a year, having an operation for appendicitis, putting aside the money to send his son to a good prep school, seeing about new spectacles, and looking at, without always being on the side of, the cartoons of Rollin Kirby. But no one would call this man a symbol of middle age or American Taxpayer. If he walked along the streets of Syracuse or Wheeling or Terre Haute he would be known as a stranger. He would be picked out as a stranger from a bigger city, and probably picked as a New Yorker. And a Held flapper would have embarrassed any young snob who took her to a Princeton prom. And a Fellows young man, driving up in his Templar phaeton to the Pi Beta Phi house at a Western Conference University would have been spotted by the sorority girls even before they saw the Connecticut license on his car. There
are
typical men and women, young and old, but only editorial writers would be so sweeping as to pick out a certain girl or a certain boy and call him a symbol of modern youth.