BUtterfield 8 (15 page)

“We said ibbity-bibbity.”

“When you were a kid did you yell at girls named Marguerite like this: ‘Marguerite, go wash your feet, the Board of Health’s across the street’?”

“No, we never yelled that.”

“Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me went out the river to swim. Adam and Eve were drowned and who was saved?”

“Pinch-Me.” Then: “Ouch!”

“Did you go to dancing school?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Did your fella used to carry your ballet slippers for you in the fancy bag?”

“I didn’t have a fella.”

“Brothers and sisters I have none, but this man’s—”

“Oh, God, I could never do those.”

Or long stories beginning: “Once when I was a kid—” about killing a snake or breaking a finger or almost saving someone’s life. They would talk about the stories in
The American Boy,
both of them having been great admirers of Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, the stuttering fat boy created by Clarence Budington Kelland; and the Altschuler Indian stories, and the girls of Bradford Hall, and Larry the Bat and Silver Nell—wasn’t that her name? In the Jimmie Dale stories? They were for older people, but after reading them Eddie had gone around sticking gray seals all over the neighborhood. What kind of car did Gloria have? No car, until she was twelve or something like that, then her uncle bought a Haines, which he traded in on a National. Oh, but those weren’t old cars. Eddie’s father had a Lozier, an Abbott-Detroit, a Stutz Bearcat (which he smashed up three weeks after he bought it), a Saxon, an Earl, a King Eight—always buying cars. Of course a lot of Fords, a second-hand Owen Magnetic, and an airplane. He won the airplane as a gambling gain, but he was afraid to learn to fly. Had Gloria played Diabolo? Once, and got knocked on the head. Did you ever sell Easter egg dyes to win a motion picture camera? Did you ever know anyone who won a real Shetland pony by selling subscriptions to some magazine? No, but she had saved bread wrappers and won a pushmobile. What were your words for going to the bathroom? Did you ever really know a boy who robbed birds’ nests? No, that was like people making bathtub gin. Neither of them ever had seen gin made in a bathtub.

“I love you, Eddie darling,” she would say.

“I love you, Gloria,” he would say, but always wanting to say more than that, like: “No matter what they say about you,” or “I wish I’d known you five years sooner,” or “Why don’t you pull yourself together?”

She knew that and it had a sterilizing effect, which was what they wanted, but no good when they had it. “Eddie,” she would say, to change the subject, “why don’t you go to a dentist. You’re going to lose that tooth and it’ll spoil your smile. Go to my dentist tomorrow, now will you promise?”

He would take her home, but they knew she would go right out again, and after these happy evenings that always ended with their knowing they had nothing to look forward to, the next man who had her would say to himself: “Well, I thought I knew everything, but after all the places I’ve been, all the women, a kid, an American kid. . . . ”

Because of the Yale boys she had an abortion, and after that many benders. The night she picked up Weston Liggett for the first time she was coasting along from a bender which had begun after seeing Eddie. She had been home twice during this bender to change her clothes (she long since had had it well understood at home that she did not like to be questioned when she told her mother that she was staying with a friend uptown). A bad thing about days like that was to come out of a speakeasy in the afternoon and find it still daylight, and she would hurry downtown to fill in the remaining daylight with a bath and a change of clothes. The place where she encountered Liggett was a converted carriage house, with no character except for that. It was patronized by kept women and people in moderately good circumstances who lived in the vicinity. Gloria went there when some people she knew telephoned her and said they were all meeting there instead of another place. She went there—it was about nine-thirty in the evening—and discovered she was alone except for a couple, a sort of military grandfather and a young woman out to take him for whatever could be got out of him. Gloria said to the husky Italian who let her in: “I’m meeting Mrs. Voorhees and her party. I’ll wait for her at the bar.” She had a drink and was smoking and in walked Liggett. He sat at the other end of the bar, munching potato chips and drinking Scotch and soda. When he recognized Gloria he picked up his drink and joined her. “We’ve never met, but I’ve seen you so often—”

“Yes, with Billy.”

“I went to college with his brother.”

“Yes, he told me.”

“My name is Liggett.”

“He told me that, too. I’m Gloria Wandrous.” The bartender relaxed then.

“Wandrous. I’ll bet people—it’s so much like wondrous.”

“Yes, they think I made it up, like Gladys Glad and Hazel Dawn and Leatrice Joy, names like that. I didn’t though. It’s spelt with an a. W, a, n, d, r, o, u, s, and it’s pronounced Wan-drous, pale and wan.”

“Not pale and won.”

“Mm. Not bad. Not
good
, but not bad.”

“Well, I don’t make any pretense of being a wit. I’m just a hard-working business man.”

“Oh, are business men working again? I hadn’t heard.”

“Well, not as much as we’d like to. What I was leading up to was, I suppose you have a date.”

“You didn’t think I came in here every night, the mysterious veiled lady that always sits alone sipping her apéritif?”

“That’s exactly what I thought, or hoped. I thought you came here to get away from the usual places—”

“Place, as far as you and I are concerned.”

“Right. But now look here, Miss Wandrous, don’t dodge the issue. Here is a hard-working business man with Saturday night as free as the air—”

“As free as the air. I have a friend a writer, he’d like to use that some time. As free as the air. That’s good.”

“You won’t go places with me, then?”

“Why go places? Isn’t this all right?” she said. “No, Mr.—”

“Liggett.”

“Mr. Liggett. No, I’m waiting for some people. It’ll probably be all right if you join us. You can sit here till they come and I’ll introduce you to those I know.”

“Oh, you don’t know them. Maybe you won’t like them.”

“That’s possible—here they are, or at least it sounds like. Hello there.”

“Gloria darling, you’ve never been so prompt. Why, Weston
Lee
-gett. I didn’t know you knew each other. Weston, why, you dog, you’ve broken up my party, but it’s all right. That means we have an extra man. See now. Gloria, this is Mr. Zoom, and uh, Mr. Zoom, and you know Mary and Esther, and, everybody, this is Weston Liggett, a great friend of Peter Voorhees. Didn’t you go to school together or something?”

“Prep school. Look, I don’t want to mess up your party. I’ll—let me buy you a drink, and—”

“There are four more people coming down from my house,” said Mrs. Voorhees. “Elaine and three men, so you really will be an extra man when we all get here. Oh, I wonder what I want to drink. A Stinger, I think. Elaine. If those men knew
you
were going to be here they wouldn’t have waited with Elaine.”

“They knew,” said Gloria.

“Only by name. Isn’t she lovely, Weston? She’s young enough to be your daughter, Weston. You know that, don’t you? You’re not pretending otherwise, I hope.”

“I’m going to adopt her,” said Liggett. “That’s what we’re here for, a few papers to sign and she’s my daughter.”

“What do you want with two more daughters I’d like to know?”

“Is anybody hungry?” said one of the Messrs. “Zoom.” “I’m gonna order some food. A nice filet mignon.”

“That’s not very nice after the dinner we had at my house.”

“Squop chicken? I never get enough to eat when I eat squop chicken. I told you that when we sat down. You gotta give me that. I told you when we sat down, I said frankly I said this is not my idea of a meal, squop chicken. I’m a big eater. Were you in the Army, Mr. Liggett?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then you know how it is. One thing I said to myself in France. I promised myself if I ever got back home the one thing I was never gonna do was go hungry. When I want to eat I eat.”

“Watch this trick,” said Mrs. Voorhees. The other Mr. Zoom was doing a trick. You balance a fifty-cent piece on the rim of a glass with a dollar bill between the coin and the glass. You snatch the dollar bill out from under the coin and—if the trick is successful—the coin remains balanced on the glass. “Fascinating,” said Mrs. V.

“I can do a better one than that with friction. You get friction in your fingers—”

“Shhhhh. Marvelous! I can’t even get it to stay on the glass, let alone make it stay after you pull the bill away. You have a wonderful sense of—I think I do want something to eat, after all. Waiter, have you any uh, that uh, you know, begins with a Z? It’s a dessert.”

“Zabag—”

“That’s it. I’ll have some. Nothing for you, Mary?”

“I know one with friction. You get friction in your fingers by rubbing them on the table-cloth. Wait till he puts the table-cloth on the table and I’ll show you. And you have to have a fork or a spoon. That’s the idea of it. You lift up the spoon with the—”

“Listen, Hoover’s all right.”

“Will you look at that old fool. Can’t he see she’s making a fool out of him? I’m glad my father died before he was old enough—”

“I’m sorry, Madame, the chef says—”

“Look at him. Does he get any thrill out of that?”

“It’s exactly like the old place. Exactly. The only difference is it’s on the uptown side now instead of the downtown side. It used to be on the downtown side but
now
it’s on the
up
town. I think they were terribly smart to preserve the same atmosphere. I said to—”

“Did you see that thing they had in
The New Yorker
I think it was the week before last?”

Listening, Gloria and Liggett found themselves holding hands. On her part a tenderness had come over her; at first because she felt responsible for Liggett, and then because she liked him; he was better than these other people. “When the others come we can leave, if you want to,” she said.

“Good. Perfect,” said Liggett. “Will it be all right with—”

“She won’t mind. She just hates to be alone. Two people more or less won’t make any difference.”

“Good. We’ll go some place and dance. I haven’t done any volunteer dancing for a long time. That’s a compliment, I hope you appreciate it. I haven’t done any volunteer dancing since I don’t know when. Of course I dance the Turkey Trot. You do the Turkey Trot, of course?”

“Mm-hmm. And the Bunny Hug. And the Maxixe. And the Can-Can. By the way, what was the Can-Can? Was it worth all the excitement they made about it or that I suppose they made about it?”

“Listen, beautiful Miss Wandrous, I am
not
old enough to remember the Can-Can. The Can-Can was popular around the turn of the century, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all popular at the turn of the century.”

“I can hardly believe that. At least I can hardly believe my ears now, hearing you admit that you weren’t popular any time in your life.”

“There have been lots of times when I wasn’t popular, and I’m beginning to think this is one of those times.”

They went to a lot of speakeasies, especially to the then new kind, as it was the beginning of the elaborate era. From serving furtive drinks of bad liquor disguised as demi-tasse the speakeasy had progressed to whole town houses, with uniformed pages and cigarette girls, a string orchestra and a four- or five-piece Negro band for dancing, free hors d’oeuvres, four and five bartenders, silver-plated keys and other souvenir-admittance tokens to regular patrons, expensive entertainment, Cordon Bleu chefs, engraved announcements in pretty good taste, intricate accounting systems and business machinery—all a very good, and because of the competition, necessary front for the picturesque and deadly business of supplying liquor at huge financial profit—powerful radio stations, powerful speedboats and other craft not unlike the British “Q” ships, powerful weapons against highjackers, powerful connections in the right places. And often very good liquor and enough good wine to set in front of the people who knew good wine and still cared about it.

Having got thoroughly drunk, picking up couples and dropping them, joining parties and deserting them, Gloria and Liggett went to his apartment as the last place to go. He had been wondering all night how he was going to suggest a hotel. He thought it over and thought it over, and kept putting it off. At the last place they went to, which they closed up, they took a taxi, Liggett gave his home address, and it was as easy as that. When Gloria heard the address she guessed it was no love nest she was going to, and when she saw the apartment she knew it wasn’t.

On Monday afternoon an unidentified man jumped in front of a New Lots express in the Fourteenth Street subway station. Mr. Hoover was on time for the usual meeting of his Cabinet. Robert McDermott, a student at Fordham University, was complimented for his talk on the Blessed Virgin at the morning exercises in her honor. A woman named Plotkin, living in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, decided to leave her husband for good and all. William K. Fenstermacher, the East 149th Street repair man, went all the way to Tremont Avenue to fix a radio for a Mrs. Jones, but there was no Jones at the address given, so he had to go all the way back to the shop, wasting over an hour and a half. Babe Ruth hit a home run into the bleachers near the right field foul line. Grayce Johnson tried to get a job in the chorus of The Band Wagon, a new revue, but was told the show was already in rehearsal. Patrolman John J. Barry, Shield No. 17858, was still on sick call as a result of being kicked in the groin by a young woman Communist in the Union Square demonstration of the preceding Friday. Jerry, a drunk, did not wake up once during the entire afternoon, which he spent in a chair at a West 49th Street speakeasy. Identical twins were delivered to a Mrs. Lachase at the Lying-In Hospital. A Studebaker sedan bumped the spare tire of a Ford coupe at Broadway and Canal Street, and the man driving the Ford punched the Studebaker driver in the mouth. Both men were arrested. Joseph H. Dilwyn, forty-two years old, had all his teeth out by the same dentist he had gone to for twelve years. A woman who shall be nameless took the money her husband had given her to pay the electric light bill and bought one of the new Eugenie hats with it. Harry W. Blossom, visiting New York for the first time since the War, fell asleep in the Strand Theatre and missed half the picture. At 3:16
p.m
. Mr. Francis F. Tearney, conductor on a Jackson Heights No. 15 Fifth Avenue bus, tipped his cap at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. James J. Walker, mayor of the City of New York, had a late lunch at the Hardware Club. A girl using an old curling iron caused a short circuit in the Pan-Hellenic Club. An unidentified man jumped in front of a Bronx Park express in the Mott Avenue subway station. After trying for three days Miss Helen Tate, a typist employed by the New York Life, was able to recall the name of a young man she had met two summers before at a party in Red Bank, N. J. Mr. and Mrs. Harvey L. Fox celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a luncheon in the Hotel Bossert, Brooklyn. Al Astor, an actor at liberty, woke up thinking it was Tuesday. John Lee, a colored boy, pulled the wings out of a fly in Public School 108. The Caswell Realty Company sold a row of taxpayers in Lexington Avenue to Jack W. Levine for a sum in the neighborhood of $125,000. Gloria Wandrous, after taking a warm bath at home, went to sleep while worrying over what she should do about Mrs. Liggett’s mink coat. Eddie Brunner spent the afternoon at Norma Day’s apartment, playing the phonograph, especially “The Wind in the Willows,” the Rudy Vallée record.

Monday afternoon Emily Liggett and her daughters came home by train. They got out of their taxi, carrying their coats and leaving the few bags for the doorman to see to. Emily went straight to her room and of all the things that happened to all the people in New York that day, none was more shocking to any individual than Emily’s discovery that her mink coat was not in her closet.

It had been such a good week-end; quiet and peaceful. Saturday was warm, Sunday morning was warm and in the afternoon it turned cool and made Emily think of the coat. It was time, really, to put it away, and she made a note of it as the first thing to do Tuesday morning. This year she would insure it for $3,000, half what it cost in 1928. She would insure it and hope something would happen to it so that she could get the money out of it. There were things she could do with $3,000, and she was getting tired of having a mink coat. She never had been happy with the actual possession of it. Something about the New England conscience; when you added up the maximum number of times you wore the coat in a season, multiplied that by three for three seasons, and divided that into $6,000 you got the cost of the coat each time you had worn it. And it was too much. It was a fair calculation, because she knew she could not get $3,000 for the coat now in any other way than insurance. As for getting $6,000 on it—ridiculous. Well, it had been a good week-end.

She opened the closet door, and the closet might as well have been empty. The coat was not there. She called the cook and the maid and questioned them, but her questioning and her own and their search did not result in finding the coat. Her questioning did not bring about any of the disclosures which the maid was pondering—the inference the maid had taken from certain little things she had noticed about Mr. Liggett’s bedroom and bath.

Emily telephoned Liggett, but he was not in the office and his secretary did not expect him back. Emily was going to call his two clubs and a speakeasy or two, because she thought the theft of the coat ought to be reported immediately; but she decided to wait and talk to Weston before notifying the police. When Liggett came home she told him about the coat. He was frightened; he was twice frightened, because he did not know it was gone, but when he learned it had disappeared he knew right away who had it. He told Emily it was best not to notify the police; that losses like that were immediately reported to the insurance company and that it was a bad thing to have to report to the insurance company. “All the insurance companies work together,” he said, “and they keep a sort of exchange blacklist. If your car is stolen all the other companies know about it in a week, and it affects your rating with the companies. It makes you a bad risk to lose a thing like that, and when you’re a bad risk it’s sometimes impossible to get insurance, and the least you get out of it is you have to pay a much higher preminum, not only on, for instance, the coat, if they get it back, but also anything else you decide to insure.” Liggett did not believe all this—in fact knew some of it to be inaccurate; but it covered up his confusion. That that girl, that swell kid, could be the same girl he had slept with last night, for whom he was feeling something he never had felt before, and all the time she was a common ordinary little thief—it was beyond him. It was more than beyond him. The more he thought of it the angrier he got, until he wanted to take her by the throat. He told Emily he would have a private detective agency look for the coat before reporting to the insurance company or the police. This was not the way Emily would have done it, and she said so. Why go to the expense of a private detective agency when the insurance company assumed that and would be glad to assume it rather than risk the loss of $3,000 for the coat? No, no, he insisted. Hadn’t she been listening to him? Didn’t she pay any attention? Hadn’t he just finished telling her that the insurance company kept blacklists, and the chances were the disappearance of the coat would have some simple explanation. The detective agency wouldn’t charge much—ten dollars, probably. And he would save that much in premiums by not reporting the loss to the insurance company. “Now please let me handle this,” he told Emily. Well, it seemed pretty irregular to her, and she didn’t like it. What if the private detectives didn’t find the coat? Wouldn’t the insurance company be very annoyed when he did finally report the theft of the coat? Wouldn’t they ask why he hadn’t immediately reported to the police? Wouldn’t it be better in the long run to do the regular thing? She thought it was always best to do the regular thing, the conventional thing. When someone dies, you get an undertaker; when something is stolen, you tell the police. Liggett almost said: “Who are you to talk about the conventional thing? You slept with me before you married me.” He was ashamed of that, of thinking it; but he guessed he always had thought it. It was just beginning to dawn on him that he never had loved Emily. He was so flattered by what she felt for him before they were married that he had been blinded to his true feeling about her. His true feeling was passion, and that had gone, and since then there had been nothing but the habit of marriage—he really loved Gloria.

And then he remembered that he did not love Gloria. He could not love a common thief. She
was
a common thief, too. You could see that in her face. There was something in her face, some unconventional thing along with the rest of her beauty, her mouth and eyes and nose—somewhere around the eyes, perhaps, or was it the mouth?—she did not have the conventional look. Emily, yes. Emily had it. He could look at Emily dispassionately, impersonally, as though he did not know her—objectively? wasn’t it called? He could look at her and see how much she looked like dozens of girls who had been born and brought up as she had been. You saw them at the theater, at the best cabarets and speakeasies, at the good clubs on Long Island—and then you saw the same girls, the same women, dressed the same, differing only in the accent of their speech, at clubs in other cities, at horse shows and football games and dances, at Junior League conventions. Emily, he decided after eighteen years of marriage, was a type. And he knew why she was a type, or he knew the thing that made the difference in the look of a girl like Emily and the look of a girl like Gloria. Gloria led a certain kind of life, a sordid life; drinking and sleeping with men and God knows what all, and she had seen more of “life” than Emily ever possibly would see. Whereas Emily had been brought up a certain way, always accustomed to money and the good ways of spending it. In other words, all her life Emily had been looking at nice things, nice houses, cars, pictures, grounds, clothes, people. Things that were easy to look at, and people that were easy to look at; with healthy complexions and good teeth, people who had had pasteurized milk to drink and proper food all their lives from the time they were infants; people who lived in houses that were kept clean, and painted when paint was needed, who took care of their cars and their furniture and their bodies, and by so doing their minds were taken care of; and they got the look that Emily and girls—women—like her had. Whereas Gloria—well, take for instance the people she was with the night he saw her two nights ago, the first night he went out with her. The man that liked to eat, for instance. Where did he come from? He might have come from the Ghetto. Liggett happened to know that there were places in the slums where eighty families would use the same outside toilet. A little thing, but imagine what it must look like! Imagine having spent your formative years living like, well, somewhat the way you lived in the Army. Imagine what effect that would have on your mind. And of course a thing like that didn’t only affect your mind; it showed in your face, absolutely. Not that it was so obvious in Gloria’s case. She had good teeth and a good complexion and a healthy body, but there was something wrong somewhere. She had not gone to the very best schools, for instance. A little thing perhaps, but important. Her family—he didn’t know anything about them; just that she lived with her mother and her mother’s brother. Maybe she was a bastard. That was possible. She could be a bastard. That can happen in this country. Maybe her mother never was married. Sure, that could happen in this country. He never heard of it except among poor people, and Gloria’s family were not poor. But why couldn’t it happen in this country? The first time he and Emily ever stayed together they took a chance on having children, and in those days people didn’t know as much about not getting caught as they do today. Gloria was even older than Ruth, so maybe her mother had done just what Emily had done, with no luck. Maybe Gloria’s father was killed in a railroad accident or something, intending to marry Gloria’s mother, but on the night he first stayed with her, maybe on his way home he was killed by an automobile or a hold-up man or something. It could happen. There was a fellow at New Haven that was very mysterious about his family. His mother was on the stage, and nothing was ever said about his father. Liggett wished now that he had known the fellow better. Now he couldn’t remember the fellow’s name, but some of the fellows in Liggett’s crowd had wondered about this What’s-His-Name. He drew for the
Record.
An artist. Well, bastards were always talented people. Some of the most famous people in history were bastards. Not bastards in any derogatory sense of the word, but love children. (How awful to be a love child. It’d be better to be a bastard. “If I were a bastard I’d rather be called a bastard than a love child.”) Now Gloria, she drew or painted. She was interested in art. And she certainly knew a lot of funny people. She knew that bunch of kids from New Haven, young Billy and those kids. But anybody could meet them, and anybody could meet Gloria. God damn it! That was the worst of it. Anybody could meet Gloria. He thought that all through dinner, looking at his wife, his two daughters, seeing in their faces the thing he had been thinking about a proper upbringing and looking at nice things and what it does to your face. He saw them, and he thought of Gloria, and that anybody could meet Gloria, and Anybody, somebody she picked up in a speakeasy somewhere, probably was with her now, this minute.

“I don’t think I’ll wait for dessert,” he said.

“Strawberries? You won’t wait for strawberries?” said Emily.

“Oh, good. Strawberries,” said Ruth. “Daddy, you’ll surely wait for strawberries. If you go I’ll have to eat yours and I’ll get strawberry rash.”

“You won’t
have
to,” said Emily.

“Gotta go. I just thought of a fellow. About the coat.”

“Can’t you phone him? A detective agency, surely they’d have a phone.”

“No. Not this fellow. He isn’t a private detective. He’s a regular city detective, and if I phoned him he’d have to make a report on it. If I went through the regular channels. I’ll get in touch with him through a friend of mine, Casey, down at Tammany Hall.”

“Well, where? Can’t you phone this Casey and make an appointment?”

“Emily,
must
I explain everything in detail? I just thought of something and I want to do it now. I don’t want any strawberries, or if they’re that good you can put them in the icebox till I get back.”