Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
Complete Stories (59 page)
The pattern of the evenings changed. John Marble no longer came to sit on the porch. He arrived in his beautiful car and took Lolita driving through the gentle dark. Mrs. Ewing’s thoughts followed them. They would drive out in the country, they would turn off the road to a smooth dell with thick trees to keep it secret from passersby, and there the car would stop. And what would happen then? Did they—Would they—But Mrs. Ewing’s thoughts could go no farther. There would come before her a picture of Lolita, and so the thoughts would be finished by her laughter.
All the days, now, she continued to regard the girl under lowered lids, and the downturn of her mouth became a habit with her, though not among her prettier ones. She seldom spoke to Lolita directly, but she still made jokes. When a wider audience was wanting, she called upon Mardy. “Hi, Mardy!” she would cry. “Come on in here, will you? Come in and look at her, sitting there like a queen. Little Miss High-and-Mighty, now she thinks she’s caught her a beau!”
There was no announcement of engagement. It was not necessary, for the town sizzled with the news of John Marble and Lolita Ewing. There were two schools of thought as to the match: one blessed Heaven that Lolita had gained a man and the other mourned the callousness of a girl who could go away and leave her mother alone. But miracles were scarce in the annals of the town, and the first school had the more adherents. There was no time for engagement rites. John Marble’s business was concluded, and he must go back. There were scarcely hours enough to make ready for the wedding.
It was a big wedding. John Marble first suggested, then stated, that his own plan would be for Lolita and him to go off alone, be married, and then start at once for New York; but Mrs. Ewing paid him no heed. “No,
sir,
” she said. “Nobody’s going to do
me
out of a great big lovely wedding!” And so nobody did.
sir,
” she said. “Nobody’s going to do
me
out of a great big lovely wedding!” And so nobody did.
Lolita in her bridal attire answered her mother’s description of looking like nothing at all. The shiny white fabric of her gown was hostile to her colorless skin, and there was no way to pin the veil becomingly on her hair. But Mrs. Ewing more than made up for her. All in pink ruffles caught up with clusters of false forget-me-nots, Mrs. Ewing was at once bold sunlight and new moonlight, she was budding boughs and opening petals and little, willful breezes. She tripped through the throngs in the smilax-garlanded house, and everywhere was heard her laughter. She patted the bridegroom on arm and cheek, and cried out, to guest after guest, that for two cents she would marry him herself. When the time came to throw rice after the departing couple, she was positively devil-may-care. Indeed, so extravagant was her pitching that one hard-packed handful of the sharp little grains hit the bride squarely in the face.
But when the car was driven off, she stood still looking after it, and there came from her downturned mouth a laugh not at all like her usual trill. “Well,” she said, “we’ll see.” Then she was Mrs. Ewing again, running and chirping and urging more punch on her guests.
Lolita wrote to her mother every week without fail, telling of her apartment and the buying and placing of furniture and the always new adventure of shopping; each letter concluded with the information that John hoped Mrs. Ewing was well and sent her his love. The friends eagerly inquired about the bride, wanting to know above all if she was happy. Mrs. Ewing replied that well, yes, she said she was. “That’s what I tell her every time I write to her,” she said. “I say, ‘That’s right, honey, you go ahead and be happy just as long as you can.’ ”
It cannot be said in full truth that Lolita was missed in the town; but there was something lacking in the Ewing house, something lacking in Mrs. Ewing herself. Her friends could not actually define what it was, for she went on as always, flirting the skirts of her little dresses and trying on her little hair ribbons, and there was no slowing of her movements. Still, the glister was not quite so golden. The dinners and the bridge games continued, but somehow they were not as they had been.
Yet the friends must realize she had taken a stunning blow, for Mardy left her; left her, if you please, for the preposterous project of getting married; Mardy, after all the years and all Mrs. Ewing’s goodness to her. The friends shook their heads, but Mrs. Ewing, after the first shock, could be gay about it. “I declare,” she said, and her laugh spiralled out, “everybody around me goes off and gets married. I’m just a regular little old Mrs. Cupid.” In the long line of new maids there were no Mardys; the once cheerful little dinners were gloomy with grease.
Mrs. Ewing made several journeys to see her daughter and son-in-law, bearing gifts of black-eyed peas and tins of herring roe, for New Yorkers do not know how to live and such delicacies are not easily obtained up North. Her visits were widely spaced; there was a stretch of nearly a year between two of them, while Lolita and John Marble travelled in Europe and then went to Mexico. (“Like hens on hot griddles,” Mrs. Ewing said. “People ought to stay put.”)
Each time she came back from New York, her friends gathered about her, clamoring for reports. Naturally, they quivered for news of oncoming babies. There was none to tell them. There was never any issue of those golden loins and that plank of a body. “Oh, it’s just as well,” Mrs. Ewing said comfortably, and left the subject there.
John Marble and Lolita were just the same, the friends were told.
John Marble was as devastating as he had been when he first came to the town, and Lolita still had not a word to say for herself. Though her tenth wedding anniversary was coming close, she could not yet give shape to her dresses. She had closets of expensive clothes—when Mrs. Ewing quoted the prices of some of the garments, the friends sucked in their breath sharply—but when she put on a new dress it might as well have been the old one. They had friends, and they entertained quite nicely, and they sometimes went out. Well, yes, they did seem so; they really did seem happy.
“It’s just like I tell Lolita,” Mrs. Ewing said. “Just like I always say to her when I write: ‘You go ahead and be happy as long as you can.’ Because—Well, you know. A man like John Marble married to a girl like Lolita! But she knows she can always come here. This house is her home. She can always come back to her mother.”
For Mrs. Ewing was not a woman who easily abandoned hope.
The New Yorker,
August 27, 1955
August 27, 1955
The Banquet of Crow
It was a crazy year, a year when things that should have run on schedule went all which ways. It was a year when snow fell thick and lasting in April, and young ladies clad in shorts were photographed for the tabloids sunbathing in Central Park in January. It was a year when, in the greatest prosperity of the richest nation, you could not walk five city blocks without being besought by beggars; when expensively dressed women loud and lurching in public places were no uncommon sight; when drugstore counters were stacked with tablets to make you tranquil and other tablets to set you leaping. It was a year when wives whose position was only an inch or two below that of the saints—arbiters of etiquette, venerated hostesses, architects of memorable menus—suddenly caught up a travelling bag and a jewel case and flew off to Mexico with ambiguous young men allied with the arts; when husbands who had come home every evening not only at the same hour but at the same minute of the same hour came home one evening more, spoke a few words, and then went out their doors and did not come in by them again.
If Guy Allen had left his wife at another period, she would have held the enduring interest of her friends. But in that year of lunacy so many marital barks were piled up on Norman’s Woe that the friends had become overly familiar with tales of shipwreck. At first they flocked to her side and did their practiced best to medicine her wound. They clicked their tongues in sorrow and shook their heads in bewilderment; they diagnosed the case of Guy Allen as one of insanity; they made blistering generalizations about men, considered as a tribe; they assured Maida Allen that no woman could have done more for a man and been more to a man; they pressed her hand and promised her, “Oh, he’ll come back—you’ll see!”
But time went on, and so did Mrs. Allen, who never in her life before had been known to keep to a subject—on and on with her story of the desperate wrong that had been done her, and she so blameless. Her friends had no energy left to interpolate coos of condolence into the recital, for they were weak with hearing it—it, and others like it; it is the terrible truth that the sagas of the deserted are deplorably lacking in variety. There came a day, indeed, when one lady slammed down her teacup, sprang to her feet, and shrieked, “For Christ’s
sake,
Maida, talk about something else!”
sake,
Maida, talk about something else!”
Mrs. Allen saw no more of that lady. She began to see less and less of her other friends, too, though that was their doing, not hers. They took no pride in their dereliction; they were troubled by the lurking knowledge that the most ruthless bore may still be genuinely in anguish.
They tried—each tried once—inviting her to pleasant little dinners, to take her out of herself. Mrs. Allen brought her King Charles’s head right along with her, and stuck it up, so to say, in the middle of the table, a grisly centerpiece. Several male guests, strangers to her, were provided. In their good humor at meeting a new and pretty woman, they made small flirtatious sorties. Her return was to admit them to her tragedy, going on, past the salad and through the Mocha mousse, with her list of proven talents as wife, chum, and lover, and pointing out, with cynical laughter, just where
those
had got her. When the guests were gone, the hostess miserably accepted the host’s ultimatum on who was not to be asked again.
those
had got her. When the guests were gone, the hostess miserably accepted the host’s ultimatum on who was not to be asked again.
They did invite her, though, to their big cocktail parties, the grand mop-ups of social obligations, thinking that Mrs. Allen could not pit her soft voice against the almighty noise of such galas and so her troubles, unspoken, might be for a while unthought of. Mrs. Allen, on her entrance, went by straight line to acquaintances who had known her and her husband together, and inquired of them if they had seen anything of Guy. If they said they had, she asked them how he was. If they said, “Why, fine,” she tendered them a forgiving smile and passed on. Her friends gave up the whole thing.
Mrs. Allen resented their behavior. She lumped them all together as creatures who could function in fair weather only, and uttered thanks that she had found them out in time—in time for what, she did not state. But there was no one to question her, for she spoke to herself. She had begun the practice while pacing the silent rooms of her apartment until deep into the night, and presently she carried it with her out to the street, on her daily walk. It was a year when there were many along the sidewalks mouthing soliloquies, and unless they talked loud and made gestures other pedestrians did not turn to look.
It was a month, then two months, then nearly four, and she had had no direct word from Guy Allen. A day or so after his departure, he had telephoned the apartment and, first inquiring about the health of the maid who answered (he was always the ideal of servants), had asked that his mail be forwarded to his club, where he would be staying. Later that day, he sent the club valet to gather his clothes, pack them, and fetch them to him. These incidents occurred while Mrs. Allen was out; there had been no mention of her, either to the maid or through the valet, and that made a bad time for her. Still, she told herself, at least she knew where he was. She did not pursue the further thought that at most she knew where he was.
On the first of each month, she received a check, in the amount it had always been, for household expenses and herself. The rent must have been sent to the owner of the apartment building, for she was never asked for it. The checks did not come to her from Guy Allen; they were enclosed in notes from his banker, a courtly, white-haired gentleman, whose communications gave the effect of having been written with a quill. Aside from the checks, there was nothing to indicate that Guy and Maida Allen were husband and wife.
Her present became intolerable to Mrs. Allen, and she could see her future only as a hideous prolonging of it. She turned to the past. She did not let memory lead her; it was she who steered memory back along the sunny bypaths of her marriage. Eleven years of marriage, years of happiness—perfect happiness. Oh, Guy had had a man’s little moods sometimes, but she could always smile him out of them, and such minute happenings only brought them more sweetly together; lovers’ quarrels wax the way to bed. Mrs. Allen shed April tears for times gone by; and nobody ever came along and explained to her that if she had had eleven years of perfect happiness, she was the only human being who ever did.
But memory is a tacit companion. Silence banged on Mrs. Allen’s ears. She wanted to hear gentle voices, especially her own. She wanted to find understanding—that thing so many spend their lives in seeking, though surely it should be easy to come upon, for what is it but mutual praise and pity? Her friends had let her down; then she must collect others. It is surprisingly difficult to assemble a fresh circle. It cost Mrs. Allen time and trouble to track down ladies of old acquaintance, which for years she had succeeded in never bringing to mind, and to trace fellow-travellers once pleasantly met with on shipboard and in planes. However, she had some responses, and there followed intimate sessions at her apartment in the afternoons.
They were unsatisfactory. The ladies brought her not understanding but exhortation. They told her to buck up, to pull herself together, to get on her toes; one of them actually slapped her on the back. The sessions came to take on much of the character of the fight talk in the locker room between the halves of the big game, and when it was finally urged that she tell Guy Allen to go to hell, Mrs. Allen discontinued them.
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