Against the Day (66 page)

“Meantime,” loosening her stays,
“this Vibe specimen is having a party Saturday night, and he says I can bring a
friend along. You’re probably not interested, rich folks’s depravity and so
forth—”

“Interested? Does Lillian Russell
wear a hat? Completely different story, girl—let’s see, Verbena owes me a
favor, I know we can borrow her red ball gown—”

   
“Katie,
for goodness’ sake.”

“No, not for you, you’d do better
with your hair down, in something more, what they call ‘ingenue’—”

They
went uptown to look for ball dresses. Katie knew a seamstress who worked in a
subbasement of the I. J. & K. Smokefoot department store and had a line on
returned or justoutoffashion numbers which could be picked up for a song.
Smokefoot’s was located along the Ladies’ Mile, far enough north to avoid
imputations of the unfashionable, yet not so far from others of its kind as to
present inconvenience to any female client determined to shop the day through.
All but clear of surface ornament, towering in gray modernity twelve stories
high and engrossing an entire city block, it might’ve struck the visitor from
out of town lucky enough to find an unjostled vantage point as more a monument
for simple goggling at, than a reallife marketplace actually to be entered and
engaged. Yet the size of the place was not due to whims of grandiosity but
rather dictated by a need for enough floorarea to keep rigorously set a veil
separating two distinct worlds—the artfully illusory spaces intended for
the store’s customers and the lessmerciful topography in between the walls and
below the bargain basement, populated by the silent and sizable regiment of
cashgirls, furnacestokers, parcelwrappers, shipping clerks, needlewomen,
featherworkers, liveried messengers, sweepers and dusters and runners of
errands of all sorts who

passed invisibly everywhere, like industrious spirits,
separated often only by

inches, by careful breaths, from the theatrical bustle of the
bright, sussurant

Floors.

As if two human figures in an
architectural rendering had briefly come to life and begun exchanging
pleasantries, oblivious to the lofty vision towering above them, the young
women swept toward the Sixth Avenue entrance, to either side of which stood two
doormen splendidly uniformed, living pillars before whose serene inertia one was
either intimidated into moving along or not. Let the hairoiled “bouncer” ply
his trade in the Bowery, the electrical gates of Fifth Avenue mansions swing to
or fro at the remote touch of a button—here at I. J. & K.
Smokefoot’s, without a word or indeed a physical movement, because of how and
where the Pillars stood, a visitor might know in not too lengthy an instant how
and where she stood as well.

“Jachin and Boaz,” grinned Katie,
indicating them with a headtoss.
“Guardians
of the Temple, First Kings someplace.”

   
“But
will these two let us in, do you think? and suppose they don’t?”

Katie
patted her shoulder. “Easier here than the employees’ entrance, my girl. Give
them the level gaze and the sketch of a smile, and as you pass, keep looking at
them sideways, as if you were flirting.”

   
“Me?
I’m just a kid.”

Inside
was everything that outside was not—luminous, ornamental, beautifully
swept, fragrant with perfumes and cut flowers, athrill with a concentrated
chic,
as if the crowds in the Avenues adjoining had been culled for particularly
modish women and they’d all just this instant been herded in here. Dally stood
breathing it in, till Katie took her arm. “Look at this bunch of old frumps, I
declare.”

   
“Huh?
You think so?”

   
“Well,
let’s have a look around, as long as we’re here.”

They ascended by Otis escalator, a
newlyintroduced conveyance which Dally found miraculous, even after she’d
figured out roughly how it had to work. Katie, who’d ridden them before, was no
longer impressed. “Gawking is O.K., but not too much, please, it’s New York. It
all looks a lot more wonderful than it is.”

   
“Sure
is a long way from Chillicothe, though.”

   
“All
right, all right.”

It
being her first time in a department store, Dally put herself through the usual
small humiliations, taking mannequins once or twice for real women, finding
herself unable to locate price tags on anything, gazing in alarm at an
approaching pair of young women, arm in arm, who looked exactly like her and
Katie, both regarding Dally with such queer familiarity, closer and closer

till Katie all but had to grab and shake her, muttering “Only
hayseeds walk into mirrors, kid.” By the time they got all the way upstairs,
Dally had drifted into a kind of daze.

It
was nothing, really, almost nothing, could have been another clothes dummy at
this distance, sighted across the deep central courtyard that ran vertiginously
up through all twelve floors, with only a filigreed ironwork railing between
shoppers and a plunge to the main floor, past the tranquilly ascending
diagonals of moving staircase and a scale replica of Yosemite Falls, down to
where a tiny harpist in shadows thrown by palm trees seemed from up here part
of the realm of the Hereafter. There on the other side of that hypnotic Deep
and the arpeggiations ascending out of it stood a figure in ladyshopper’s
streetwear in a violet and gray check, the egret plume on her hat articulating
sensitive as a hand, not looking at Dally in particular but somehow demanding
her attention. Before the clarity of the apparition, Dally knew she had to get
an immediate grip on herself, because if she didn’t, the next thing she knew,
she’d be running over there screaming, to embrace some woman who would of
course turn out to be a stranger, and all the embarrassment, maybe even legal
action, that was sure to go with that, and the word she’d be screaming would be
“Mamma!”

The
rest of the shopping tour floated by in nebulous incoherence. Dally seemed to
remember tea with cucumber sandwiches, a horribly saccharine harp performance
of “Her Mother Never Told Her,” two smart young matrons scandalizing the
tearoom by lighting up cigarettes—but none of it hung together, the
details were like cards tossed on the table of the day that upon inspection
could not be arranged into a playable hand.

On the way down to the basement,
Dally made sure on every floor to look for her, but the woman, tall, fair,
perhaps not real to begin with, had vanished. In addition, the harpist on the
street floor turned out to be not an ethereal young woman in a long gown but a
cigarchewing bruiser, just released from a lengthy stay at the Tombs, named
Chuck, who leered amiably at Katie and Dally as they passed.

In
the basement Katie made inquiries, and her friend Verbena emerged from the
scene behind the scene to lead them back and downward into an underlit chill
where conversation did not exist either because it was forbidden or because
there was too much work to be done, grimy pipes hanging from corroded brackets
ran along the ceilings, the smell of cleaning and dyeing solvents and steam
from pressers’ irons pervaded all the space, workers slipped by silent as
wraiths, shadowy doorways led to crowded rooms full of women at sewing machines
who did not look up from their work except with apprehension when they felt the
supervisor draw close.

·
    
·
    
·

They took
the sixth Avenue El downtown and got
off at Bleecker Street. There was some apricotpink light left in the sky, and a
southeast wind bringing up the aroma of roasting coffee from South Street, and
they could hear river traffic. It was Saturday night in Kipperville. Bearded
youths ran by, chasing girls in Turkey red print dresses. Jugglers on unicycles
performed tricks along the sidewalk. Negroes accosted strollers, exhibiting
small vials of white powder and hopefully inquiring faces. Street vendors sold
corn on the cob and broiled squabs on toast. Children hollered behind the open
windows of tenements. Uptown slummers bound for places like Maria’s on
MacDougal chatted brightly and asked one another, “Do you know where we’re
going?”

R.
Wilshire Vibe lived in an Italianate town house whose builder had found himself
helpless before the impulse to add BeauxArts detailing. It was on the north
side of the street, with Ginkgo trees in front, a pergola, and a mews running
behind.

A
butler or two bowed them in the door, and they ascended into a ballroom
dominated by a huge gas chandelier, blindingly bright, directly beneath which
was placed a sort of circular couch in winecolored plush skirted with gold
tasseling and provided with satin cushions in matching shades, accommodating
eight to sixteen nondancers each facing radially outward, referred to not
altogether in jocularity as an antiwallflower device, for those willing to sit
out dances here were obliged uncomfortably to occupy the great salon’s dead
center while the spectacle wheeled around them on a floor whose smoothness had
been finely calibrated by repeated applications of cornmeal and
pumice—the walls themselves, actually, being reserved for R.W.’s art
collection, which required a tolerant eye and on occasion an educated stomach
broadly indifferent to manifestations of the queasy.

Palm
trees grew everywhere, arecas, palmettos, Chinese fanpalms, ranging from squat
greenhouse specimens in wickercovered pots to twelvefoot foyer varieties to
stately coconut and date trees rooted somewhere far below and soaring to these
ballroom altitudes through openings expressly made for them in the intervening
floors and ceilings, creating a sort of jungle where exotic forms of life
glided, stalked, and occasionally slithered, demimondaines with darkened
eyelids, men with shoulderlength hair, circus artistes, soubrettes in
drastically nondemure costumes offering trays of Perrier Jouet, society ladies
with orange Tiffany orchid brooches vivid as flames at their bosoms, WallStreet
renegades who congregated near the gigantic bathrooms, where it was said R.
Wilshire had installed tickertape machines in every watercloset.

A
small orchestra on a stage at one end of the great room played selections from
various R. Wilshire Vibe productions. Miss Oomie Vamplet sang “Oh, When You
Talk That Talk,” which she had made famous in her role as Kate Chase Sprague in
Roscoe Conkling.

Having been deserted by Katie for
somebody in a cheap suit representing himself as a talent agent who wouldn’t
have fooled your grandma, Dally wandered out through some French doors. From
the roof garden, past soiled masses of gray and brown shadow, past the gaslit
windows and streetlamps in unrecognized vigil below the elevated tracks, far
uptown the illuminated city ascended against a deep indigo sky as if night up
there had somehow neglected to fall, sparing it in its golden dream of lighted
façades.

The young man was leaning on a
parapet gazing at the city. She had noticed him the minute she came in, taller
than the milling of partygoers around him, but nowhere near “grown,” turned out
almost too quietly, as if to advertise his inexperience. Maybe it was just all
the smoke in the place, but his features seemed to her, even this close up,
untouched—maybe never to be—by what she thought she knew already of
the harshness of the world. Made her think of kids she had played with, an hour
at a time, in towns passed through long ago, and the unforgiving innocence of
newsboys among the evening throngs announcing grand thefts, fires, murders, and
wars with voices pure as this customer’s own had to be—no, not tough
enough, not nearly, for what he would have to look in the face, sooner or
later, rich kid or whatever, though she doubted this, she knew by now what
these society boys were like, it was the Bowery Boy style with required changes
of class detail, is all it was.

He turned now and smiled, a little
preoccupied, maybe, and she became abruptly aware of this juvenile rag Katie
had all but forced her into buying, with its high neckline and yards of stupid
barndance flouncing
. . .
and in
Congo violet! with plaid trimming! Aaahhh! What was she thinking? Or not
thinking. It had been that nearsupernatural moment in Smokefoot’s, she guessed,
that maternal spectre in violet and gray that had sent her judgment so out of
kilter. She couldn’t even remember now what the dress had cost.

He had opened a cigarette case and
was offering her one. This had never happened before, and she had no idea what
to do. “You don’t mind if I. . .”

“I don’t mind,” she said, or something sophisticated like
that.

From inside came a drumroll, cymbal
tap, and short arrangement of “Funiculi, Funiculà,” as the lights were now
mysteriously dimmed to a cool interior dusk.

“Shall we, then?” gesturing for her
to go in first. When she looked around, though, he’d disappeared.

   
Gee,
that was fast.

Up
by the bandstand, a goodlooking older man in the usual magician’s outfit,
holding a glass of wine, tapped his wand against it, declaring, “It is
difficult to drink semiprecious stone, but in a stone world, drinking anything
else is an expensive luxury.” He inverted the glass and out tumbled a handful
of amethysts and garnets. When he turned the glass right side up again it had
wine in it, which he proceeded to drink.