Complete Stories (73 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
This past season has been particularly crowded for Mrs. Tippett. Twice her volunteered aid has been accepted by a woman she met at Mr. Tippett’s cousin’s house, and she has helped arrange the counters at rummage sales. In short, things are coming along nicely with the Tippetts. They have every reason to be satisfied with their life.
Which is remarkably like Mr. Tippett’s business, in that, though there is not much in it, it brings them in contact with some awfully nice people.
THE TOP FLOOR EASTThere was a time when Mrs. Huff kept her own carriage and lived in a three-story house with a conservatory between the dining room and the pantry. I don’t feel that I am violating any confidence in telling you this, because Mrs. Huff would be the first one to say so.
All this was some time ago, when Mrs. Huff’s daughter Emma was still in school—in private school, Mrs. Huff is careful to say. And one good look at Mrs. Huff’s daughter Emma will convince you that her schooldays must have been indeed some time ago.
Shortly before Mr. Huff did what his widow refers to as passed on, the fortune began to meet with reverses, due mainly to Mr. Huff’s conviction that he could put Wall Street in its place during his spare time. Mrs. Huff clung as long as possible to her own carriage and the three-story house with the conservatory, but she had eventually to let them go, in the order named. For a good many years, now, she has been settled in this apartment, in the midst of as much of her palmy-days furniture as could be wedged into the place.
But to Mrs. Huff those good old days are as yesterday. They are as fresh in her mind and her conversation. She can—does, even—go on for hours about how often they had to have the palms in the conservatory replaced, and how much they paid for the fountain, which represented a little girl and boy holding a pink iron umbrella over themselves—she can see it now. From there she drifts into reminiscences of all the trouble they had with drunken coachmen before they got their old Thomas, who was with them twelve years.
Mrs. Huff and her daughter live the calm and ladylike life befitting former conservatory owners. They are attended by one maid, Hannah by name, who was once Emma’s nurse. She does the housework, washing, marketing and cooking; arranges Mrs. Huff’s hair and corsets; remodels the ladies’ clothes in the general direction of the styles; and is with difficulty persuaded to accept her wages each month—the same wages—which is rather a pretty touch of sentiment—as she was getting when she first entered Mrs. Huff’s employ. As Mrs. Huff says, Hannah is really quite a help to them.
Mrs. Huff relies chiefly for her diversion on the funerals of her many acquaintances and connections. She reads the obituary column each morning in much the same spirit that other people look over the What Is Going on Today section. Occasionally if the day is fine and there is no really important funeral on hand she takes a little jaunt out to a favorite cemetery and visits various friends there.
Her minor amusements include calls on many sick and a few healthy acquaintances, and an occasional card party. Her stories of how often they had to change the palms and how much they paid for the fountain are the features of these affairs.
Miss Emma Huff suffers slightly from hallucinations; no, suffers is hardly the word. She manages to get quite a good time out of them.
She is under the impression that she is the desired of every man with whom she comes in contact. She is always arriving home fluttering from her adventure with the overzealous clerk in the shoe shop, or the bus driver who was too careful about helping her alight, or the floorwalker who almost insisted on taking her arm to direct her to the notions. Miss Huff never dares stay late at a friend’s house, for fear some man may spring from the shadows and abduct her on the way home.
Between adventures Miss Huff does a good deal of embroidery. If there were ever a contest in putting cross-stitch baskets on guest towels she would be entered scratch. Also, she is a mean hand at copying magazine covers in water colors. Last year she made all her own Christmas cards, and if all goes well she plans doing it again next Christmas.
Once or twice it has been suggested by relatives or overintimate friends that it might be rather nice for Miss Huff to commercialize her talents. Or, if her feeling for art would not allow that, she might find some light and ladylike employment—just to pass the time, is always hastily added.
Mrs. Huff awards these advisers with what, in anybody else, would be a dirty look. She does not waste words to reply to any suggestion that a daughter of hers should enter the business world. For Mrs. Huff can never forget that she once kept her own carriage and lived in a three-story house with a conservatory between the dining room and the pantry.
THE TOP FLOOR WESTThere are, of course, a Mr. and a Mrs. Plank, but they sink indistinguishably into the background. Mrs. Plank may be roughly summarized as a woman who always knows what you ought to do for that indigestion, while Mr. Plank is continually going into a new business where “none of us is going to get much money at first.”
The real life of the Plank party is Arlette—Mrs. Plank let herself go, for the only time in her life, in the choosing of her daughter’s name.
Arlette is, at the present writing, crowding nineteen summers, and she looks every day of it. As for her mode of living, just ask anybody in the apartment house.
Arlette stopped school three years ago by her own request. She had no difficulty in convincing her mother that she had enough education to get along with anywhere. Mrs. Plank is a firm believer in the theory that, unless she is going to teach, there is no earthly use of a girl’s wasting her time in going all through high school. Men, says Mrs. Plank—and she has been married twenty-one years, so who could be a better judge—do not select as their wives these women who are all full of education. So for the past three years Arlette’s intellectual decks have been cleared for matrimony.
But Arlette has not yet given a thought to settling down into marriage. There was a short season when she thought rather seriously of taking up a screen career, after someone had exclaimed over the startling likeness between her and Louise Lovely. But so far she has taken it out in doing her hair in the accepted movie-star manner, to look as if it had been arranged with an egg-beater.
Most of Arlette’s time is spent in dashing about in motors driven by young men of her acquaintance. The cars were originally designed to accommodate two people, but they rarely travel without seven or eight on board. These motors, starting out from or drawing up to the apartment house, with their precious loads of human freight, are one of the big spectacles of the block.
The Skids for EddieIt is remarkable how without the services of a secretary Arlette prevents her dates from becoming mixed. She deftly avoids any embarrassing overlapping of suitors. Her suitors would, if placed end to end, reach halfway up to the Woolworth Tower and halfway back.
They are all along much the same design—slim, not too tall, with hair shining like linoleum. They dress in suits which, though obviously new, have the appearance of being just outgrown, with half belts, and lapels visible from the back.
The average duration of Arlette’s suitors is five weeks. At the end of that time she hands the favored one a spray of dewy raspberries and passes on to the next in line.
The present incumbent, Eddie to his friends, has lasted rather longer than usual. His greatest asset is the fact that he is awfully dry. He has a way of saying “absotively” and “posolutely” that nearly splits Arlette’s sides. When he is introduced he says, with a perfectly straight face, “You’re pleased to meet me,” and Arlette can hardly contain herself. He interpolates a lot of Ed Wynn’s stuff into the conversation, and Arlette thinks it is just as good as the original, if not better.
Then, too, he knows a perfectly swell step. You take three to the right, then three to the left, then toddle, then turn suddenly all the way around and end with a dip; the effect is little short of professional.
But Arlette has lately met a young man who has his own car and can almost always get his father’s limousine when he takes you to the theater. Also, his father owns a chain of moving-picture houses, and he can get a pass for her.
So it looks from here as if the skids were all ready to be applied to Eddie.
Mrs. Plank worries a bit over her daughter’s incessant activities. She hears stories of the goings-on of these modern young people that vaguely trouble her, and she does wish that Arlette would take more rest. Naturally, though, she hesitates to bring the matter to her daughter’s attention. Occasionally she goes so far as to hint that Arlette might take a little interest in watching her do the housework, so that she can pick up some inside stuff on household matters that might be useful in her married life.
For all Mrs. Plank wants, she says, is to live to see her daughter making some good man happy.
Arlette’s ideas, now, seem to be more along the lines of making some good men happy.
The Saturday Evening Post,
August 20, 1921
August 20, 1921
Men I’m Not Married To
No matter where my route may lie,
No matter whither I repair,
In brief—no matter how or why
Or when I go, the boys are there.
On lane and byways, street and square,
On alley, path and avenue,
They seem to spring up everywhere—
The men I am not married to.I watch them as they pass me by;
At each in wonderment I stare,
And, “but for heaven’s grace,” I cry,
“There goes the guy whose name I’d wear!”
They represent no species rare,
They walk and talk as others do;
They’re fair to see—but only fair—
The men I am not married to.I’m sure that to a mother’s eye
Is each potentially a bear.
But though at home they rank ace-high,
No change of heart could I declare.
Yet worry silvers not their hair;
They deck them not with sprigs of rue.
It’s curious how they do not care—
The men I am not married to.
L’EnvoiIn fact, if they’d a chance to share
Their lot with me, a lifetime through,
They’d doubtless tender me the air—
The men I am not married to.
“Oh, boy!” people say of Freddie. “You just ought to meet him some time! He’s a riot, that’s what he is—more fun than a goat.”
Other, and more imaginative souls play whimsically with the idea, and say that he is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Still others go at the thing from a different angle, and refer to him as being as funny as a crutch. But I always feel, myself, that they stole the line from Freddie. Satire—that is his dish.
And there you have, really, one of Freddie’s greatest crosses. People steal his stuff right and left. He will say something one day, and the next it will be as good as all over the city. Time after time I have gone to him and told him that I have heard lots of vaudeville acts using his comedy, but he just puts on the most killing expression, and says, “Oh, say not suchly!” in that way of his. And, of course, it gets me laughing so that I can’t say another word about it.
That is the way he always is, just laughing it off when he is told that people are using his best lines without even so much as word of acknowledgment. I never hear any one say “There is such a thing as being too good-natured” but that I think of Freddie.
You never knew any one like him on a party. Things will be dragging along, the way they do at the beginning of the evening, with the early arrivals sitting around asking one another have they been to anything good at the theatre lately, and is it any wonder there is so much sickness around with the weather so changeable. The party will be just about plucking at the coverlet when in will breeze Freddie, and from that moment on the evening is little short of a whirlwind. Often and often I have heard him called the life of the party, and I have always felt that there is not the least bit of exaggeration in the expression.
What I envy about Freddie is that poise of his. He can come right into a room full of strangers, and be just as much at home as if he had gone through grammar school with them. He smashes the ice all to nothing the moment he is introduced to the other guests by pretending to misunderstand their names, and calling them something entirely different, keeping a perfectly straight face all the time as if he never realized there was anything wrong. A great many people say he puts them in mind of Buster Keaton that way.
He is never at a loss for a screaming crack. If the hostess asks him to have a chair Freddie comes right back at her with “No, thanks; we have chairs at home.” If the host offers him a cigar he will say just like a flash, “What’s the matter with it?” If one of the men borrows a cigarette and a light from him Freddie will say in that dry voice of his, “Do you want the coupons too?” Of course his wit is pretty fairly caustic, but no one ever seems to take offense at it. I suppose there is everything in the way he says things.
And he is practically a whole vaudeville show in himself. He is never without a new story of what Pat said to Mike as they were walking down the street, or how Abie tried to cheat Ikie, or what old Aunt Jemima answered when she was asked why she had married for the fifth time. Freddie does them in dialect, and I have often thought it is a wonder that we don’t all split our sides. And never a selection that every member of the family couldn’t listen to, either—just healthy fun.
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