Love & Mrs. Sargent (4 page)

“When you came out, you cared. I just don’t,” Allison said matter-of-factly. “Where’s Dicky?”

“Dicky?” Mrs. Flood said blankly. Her mind was not attuned to rapid changes of topic. “Oh,
Dicky,
Why he’s in his studio. Writing of course.”

“You mean in the tool shed?”

“Allison! What
is
the matter with you? Your mother put I-don’t-know-how-much time
and
money into doing it over for him. Goodness, dear, I wouldn’t mind living in such a shed: kitchenette, bathroom, darling little bar. After all, your brother’s
got to have some place to write his books. I mean, a creative young novelist like. . . .”

“Just what did
you
think of Dicky’s novel, Floodie?”

“What? Dicky’s novel?” Mrs. Flood’s mind once more shifted gears. She really liked to get on a subject and
stay
on it. “Why . . . well, I mean . . . why, I thought it was splendid. Perfectly
splendid.”

“You didn’t even read it,” Allison said.

“Now see here, young lady,” Mrs. Flood said indignantly, “I
typed
it. But that was nearly a year ago and having it handed to me in little dribs and drabs and Dicky’s penmanship so difficult. . . . And I’m
b
usy,
Allison. Busy with your mother’s work. I don’t have
time
to read.”

“What you mean is, you haven’t read it. Have you?”

“Well, no. But I intend to and I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely.”

“It’s perfectly lousy, Floodie. Poor Dick.”

“Allison Sar-gent!” Mrs. Flood gasped. “You should really
have. . . .
” Mrs. Flood’s tirade was halted by Bertha, who entered the room again to place a tray of decanters on the coffee
table. A Lady did not have Scenes before servants. “Bertha, just
look,” Mrs. Flood said effusively. “Miss Allison has a new red dress! I was just saying to her that she really should have her picture taken just this way—in color of course. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t think the shade suits her,” Bertha said. “Good evening,
Miss Allison.”

“Neither do I. Good evening, Bertha.”

Mrs. Flood waited patiently while Bertha left the room. Then,
lowering her voice ominously, she returned to Allison. “Now you
just listen to me, Allison Sargent,” she said dangerously, “if you had any
notion
of what your poor mother had to go through with
Dicky and his book—helping him, encouraging him whenever he thought he couldn’t write another line. . . .”

“If you’d ever
read
some of Dicky’s lines, instead of just pounding them out on the typewriter, you’d have discouraged him,” Allison said. “He didn’t want to write that novel, Floodie,
and you know it.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort, Allison Sargent,” Mrs. Flood hissed indignantly. “But I do know that you’re just about the worst little ingrate I’ve
ever
seen! When I think of the sacrifices your poor mother has made so that you and Dicky. . . . Oh!” Too outraged to go on, Mrs. Flood made a great show
of snatching a cigarette from her case, jamming it into her holder
and flicking her lighter. Then, through the smoke, she noticed that Allison was almost in tears. Mrs. Flood was not an unkind woman. “Allison, darling,” she said. “You’re young. Oh, I know.
I was, too—about a million years ago. Coming out can be very
nerve-racking and you always
were
shy. I was, myself. Now do run upstairs and get ready for this magazine reporter. And, Allison, dear? Why don’t you try a really bright lipstick and perhaps a bit of blue on your eyes—just to please your mother?”

“Oh, for God’s sake! What’s the use?” Allison said and slammed out of the room.

Exhausted, Mrs. Flood sank into a chair and pondered the ways of the young.

VII.

The express elevator reserved just for Sheila and a sort of bodyguard composed of two ladies wearing committee badges was a nicety which Sheila appreciated. Now all she would have to do would be to get down to the ground floor, make her good-bys to the committee girls, move graciously through the little throng of women who “just had to have a word in private” and sink into the back of the car.

“The most successful luncheon meeting we’ve had since Bishop Sheen addressed us,” one of the women was saying,

“Why, thank you,” Sheila said. “The bishop
is
a hard act to follow.”

“He was only a monsignor then,” the other woman said.

“Well, I certainly am honored,” Sheila said. “But I’m glad you didn’t tell me until
after
the meeting. I’d have been much too frightened to have opened my mouth.”

“You? Oh, never!” The ladies laughed delightedly.

“Bishop Sheen comes from Peoria,” the woman Sheila remem
bered as Mrs. McCarthy said. “My own people are from there.”

“Is that so?” Sheila said, all alert interest.

“Ground floor.”

“Oh, dear,” Sheila said. “So soon. Well do let me thank you again for a delicious luncheon and I really have enjoyed meeting you and talking to all of you. It’s been a real pleasure.”

“Oh, can’t we. . . .”

“I won’t let you take me another step,” Sheila said. “The two
of you must be exhausted organizing this big luncheon—all those details. I can’t think how you do it all. Well, good-by again and—again—thank you.”

With long, rapid strides, Sheila was halfway to the front door before they could protest.

“Isn’t she a darling,” Mrs. McCarthy said to her friend. “Such a lady and so utterly, utterly sincere.”

“Just between you and I, Maureen,” her companion said, “I think she was
better
than Bishop Sheen.”

VIII.

Farthest flung of the buildings on the Sargent place was the tool shed. Seventy or eighty years ago, when the place was new and run as a very small and by no means self-sustaining farm, the tool shed had housed garden tools. When Sheila had taken over the place, a large window had been cut into the shed’s south wall and Sheila had entertained a wan hope of raising there a few orchids and gardenias with, perhaps, a camellia tree or so. The notion had been a fetching one, but Sheila had had
no knack with flowers and, before too many hundred of dollars’ worth of plants had been killed by her loving ministrations, the
project was abandoned. After the children were born, the tool shed became a play house where, it was fondly hoped, Dicky
and Allison would hold sedate nursery teas for their little friends
and thus spare the main house. That idea died a-borning when Bertha, paying a surprise visit with Ovaltine and ginger snaps, had interrupted a game of strip poker involving the children of
some of the finest families in Lake Forest. The place was then fitted up as a workshop when Dicky had been interested in building things. And, after he had built a smallish snipe, the tool shed functioned as a boat house until Dicky and the craft
capsized in a sudden storm on Lake Michigan. Only Mrs. Flood,
who spoke of the place now as “Dicky’s Studio,” had ever called it anything except the tool shed and it had never been markedly successful in sheltering much more than a few hoes and rakes.

But now that Dicky was home from college, now that he had published a novel and had a career, the tool shed had undergone its most rigorous renovation.

Advised by the young architect who had erected the breeze-ways, Sheila had done over the tool shed as a surprise for her son when it had been fairly definitely decided that he would become a writer like his father before him. The walls had been refinished in a soft blue (”for tranquility”), with a large expanse of platinum walnut paneling (”for warmth”). Dicky’s father’s old
desk—smartly bleached—and his grandfather’s Sheffield inkstand—
lacquered against tarnish—lent, as the architect said, “tradi
tion.” An old Worcester mug—”amusing and colorful”—was filled
with freshly sharpened pencils.

The paneled wall was nicely tricked out with shelves to hold the tools of a writers trade—
The Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Fowlers
Modern English Usage, a
Merriam-Webster
New In
ternational Dictionary,
a
Cosmopolitan World Atlas,
Roget’s
International Thesaurus,
Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations,
the com
plete works of Sheila Sargent bound in blue suede and the works of Richard Sargent
p
ere
in pale calf. Quite a lot of shelf space had been left bare for the coming works of Richard Sargent, junior. An impressive series of panels also burst open to reveal an electric typewriter (blue), an electric pencil sharpener,
hi-fi and concealed television, for the architect also considered
himself something of a specialist in “the economy of space.”

On the cork floor (”for quiet”) was a sculptured beige rug (”for area interest”), surrounded by some comfortable chairs upholstered in tortoise shell leather and a blue tweed convertible sofa, matching exactly the blue of the walls and the Roman
blinds. The place, finished off with some Regency lamps, a few
modern tables, an antique map of the Bahamas and some prints
of Napoleonic guardsmen in tortoise shell mats, was finally pronounced a “fine, masculine workroom for a writer” by the archi
tect who knew nothing of writing and even less of masculinity.

Sensing that Mrs. Sargent was in dead earnest about her son’s writing career, the architect had pushed his luck even further. With a lot of talk about “spatial concepts,” he had installed a small bath in buff tile, complete with dolphin faucets, big brown towels, and a combination shower stall and steam room. One never knew when an author, deep in the throes of creation, would need a quick Turkish. And, as the tool shed
was located nearly fifty paces from Bertha’s kitchen, the architect
had installed behind sliding jalousies a trim little galley and bar
with stove, refrigerator, copper sink, Waring Blendor and Italian
earthenware and Danish silver for six. Again, wasn’t it the most
natural thing in the world for a male novelist to break off in mid-
chapter and run up frozen daiquiris and a puffy soufflé? It had cost Sheila a pretty penny but she had considered it a sound investment for now Dicky lacked nothing to speed him on his way as a major writer of our times.

In his eighteen months of occupancy, Dicky had never availed
himself of the shower or the steam room. The manly brown towels were changed weekly only because a certain amount of dust settled upon their voluptuous folds. Dicky had never sat at
his father’s desk, never used the electric typewriter or the electric
pencil sharpener, although he had once wondered idly if such
a gadget might not be used for shorter arid snappier circumcision
rites among savages during the twenty-first century. An unusual idea, he admitted, but there was hardly a book in it. What writing he did was done sprawled out on the sofa with a twelve-cent ball-point pen and a pad of lined yellow paper. The encyclopedia, the atlas, the Fowler, had never been opened. The toilet was used mostly for emptying ashtrays and the stove had never been used at all. The bar facilities, however, had been called
into play more and more over the past several weeks. An empty
vodka bottle lay in the copper waste basket in the kitchenette and three other empties were hidden in the bottom drawer of the desk. Dicky rationed his throwing out of bottles to one bottle every other day. Two or three times a week Dicky dirtied up some extra glasses with tomato juice and left them around the room so that it would look to Bertha as though friends had dropped in for Bloody Marys. Actually Dicky had no friends and the only people who had ever visited the tool shed in its present guise were Sheila, Allison and Mrs. Flood. Sheila’s daily visits were limited strictly to business and she discouraged her daughter and her secretary from doing anything to disrupt Dicky’s creative flow. What flowed the most was vodka.

Dicky lived on a weekly stipend of one hundred dollars which
Mrs. Flood paid over on Wednesdays. His mother had been very brisk and business-like about the money, “This is not an allowance, dear,” she had explained, “It is a writer’s
subsidy
to keep you going until your royalties start rolling in. You know I don’t begrudge you the money, but now that you’ve—now
that you’re not in Yale any longer—well, I mean a boy of twenty
ought to think about earning his own living. Your father was
only eighteen when he started working summers for the old Evanston
News-Index.
It hardly kept him in cigarettes but the
experience was invaluable—invaluable toward becoming both a
newspaper man
and
a
man.
Floodie will keep careful track of what’s been paid out and I expect it to be paid back out of your earnings. Oh, and if it isn’t enough, Dicky, let me know.”

It was enough. Dicky was a creature of habit because Sheila encouraged routine. Into the tool shed every morning at ten; luncheon on a tray at one; call it a day at five; shower and change; cocktails at six. Every Wednesday Dicky drove to the bank to cash his check. Then he drove to the barber shop for a haircut and a shine. (Sheila disliked shaggy necks and Dicky’s father before him had always had
his
hair cut on Wednesdays.) Then he drove west—pitching one of the accumulated empty bottles out of the car every half mile or so—to a cut-rate liquor
store on the Skokie Highway for seven more quarts of Smirnoff’s
hundred proof. Dicky realized that he could have effected a considerable saving by getting it in case lots, but he didn’t trust himself with that much vodka on hand. One bottle a day kept him going until the cocktail hour, when he openly downed two scotch mists, and nobody suspected anything.

His vodka ration locked into the trunk, Dicky would drive north to Waukegan where he paid a weekly visit to two torpid whores who worked in a large trailer hitched to a small Chevrolet. The girls claimed to be sisters. One was named Shirley, the other Almeda, They depended mostly on the Great Lakes Naval Station for their clientele and then only in the evenings and on Sundays. Therefore they welcomed Dicky’s Wednesday afternoon calls. He was known to them as Royal Stewart. One called him Roy-boy, the other Honeybunch. They had no idea that he was Richard Sargent, junior, but they were bright enough to
sense that he was a rich kid from Lake Forest and they charged
accordingly. After some dispirited badinage concerning Dicky’s
astonishing proportions, his formidable prowess as a lover—neither of which, as Dicky knew, happened to be in the least noteworthy—Dicky would take into a curtained alcove which
ever sister happened to be operant that week and perform quickly
and joylessly that rite, the very notion of which was said to
drive other men to madness. He considered the experience, when
he thought of it at all, to be something a man Simply Does, like shaving every morning or acquiring regular toilet habits. He was always home by sundown, stretched out on the blue sofa, his pen, his pad and his vodka at hand.

The ladies of the household joked among themselves over
what they called Dicky’s Afternoon Off. They were a little mysti
fied, a little curious, but they chose not to pry. Dicky, after all, was the Man of the Family.

But today was Monday. Dicky lay on the blue sofa, his shirt open, his belt loosened, his moccasins kicked off. On the table
next to him were the squat glass of ice and vodka, his cigarettes,
the ball-point pen and the yellow pad. At the top of the pad were written, in Dicky’s cramped hand, thirteen words:

Chapter Three
PARIS
Paris lay before them like an oasis in the desert.

These thirteen words—one for every half hour—represented his literary output for the day. All the lights were off, save for a dim one shining through the shutters of the bar. A honey blonde gazed at him from beneath impossible eyelashes, her breasts rose and fell, a tear coursed down one cheek. Finally she
spoke in husky, breathless tones. “But don’t you see, darling,” she said, “you’ve got to marry me. I . . . I’m going to have a baby—
our
baby.”

A man’s voice, loud and urgent, burst in. “We will return to
Memory Movie Matinee
after this brief message: Feel a cold coming on? Feel head-achey, irritable, all run down? Don’t wait until a pesky cold gets
you
down. Get Hay-Spray
today.
Yes, folks, Hay-Spray, that amazing new nasal spray containing . . .”

Dicky reached out and pressed the remote control button. The room was quiet. Glassily, he stared at the television screen. A chesty young man appeared, stripped to the waist. His face indicated extreme agony. Silently, violently, he sneezed. Suddenly his skin seemed to melt away and Dicky was treated to a sort of X-ray image showing the unfortunate young gentleman’s sinuses, his inflamed throat, his lungs—all filled with a terrible, dripping, sludge-like mucous. Then a dainty hand wearing a prop wedding ring as wide as a watchband held out a plastic spray bottle of Hay-Spray.

Dicky lifted his glass and looked into the vodka. It was a welcome change. He had heard the commercial so many times that he knew it by heart. He knew, for example, that Hay-Spray had been developed in the laboratories of a world-famous nose and throat specialist; that it had brought welcome relief to millions of hay fever and cold victims; that its soothing, medicated film went to work on
all eight
sinus cavities as well as delicate membranes of the throat and lungs. From the corner of his eye he saw Hay-Spray permeating the nooks and crannies of the model’s head and torso. Dicky knew that Hay-Spray was hell on bacteria and he watched the silent television screen
where a lot of spermatozoic-looking little squiggles were being mowed down by a single whish of Hay-Spray. He knew, too, that
in a recent independent survey, three and a half doctors out of every four recommended Hay-Spray and he knew that he would next see the young model, by now wearing a white shirt and a dimpling boyish grin, tying his necktie jauntily while the owner of the delicate hand would be saying, “Darling, shouldn’t you be in bed?” Dicky took another swallow of his drink and turned the sound back on. “In bed?” the handsome young model was saying. “Not on your life! Thanks to amazing new Hay-Spray, I could lick my weight in wildcats!”

Dicky heard the door of the tool shed open. He sat up with a start. “M-Mother?” he said, squinting through the gloom.

“No, Dicky. It’s Allison.”

“And now,” the television set blared, “to return to Act Seven of todays
Memory Movie Matinee, She Paid the Price,
starring lovely. . . .” Dicky reached out and turned off the set. The room was in darkness.

“
Writing in Braille these days?” Allison asked as she moved around the room turning on lamps.

“I was just thinking,” Dicky said, getting unsteadily to his feet.

“Thinking about
She Paid the Price?
That must have been a very profound thought since the movie was made before either of us was born.” She pressed a hidden button and a walnut
panel slid majestically across the television screen. “I don’t know
how you can watch that stuff, Dicky—you, the intellectual of
the family.” Her voice was slightly tinged with sarcasm. It had
always taken Allison and Dicky just a little time to warm up; a
guarded moment or two of lofty self-assertion before they relaxed
and admitted to themselves how very dependent they were upon one another. “Mind if I sit down in this gracious model room, or
am I interrupting a cosmic moment in the writer’s. . . .”