BUtterfield 8 (23 page)

Before he left the place Eddie of course had found out that his old friend De Paolo had struck it rich; he was in charge of the work on Benny the Beetle, the company’s own plagiarism of Mickey Mouse. . . .

On twenty-five a week Eddie figured he could even go to a movie now and then and get a load of Benny the Beetle. It was too much to hope for a steady job in an art department, where they certainly would pay more than twenty-five a week, but if the friendship with De Paolo had got him this far, no telling how far he would get when Polly—De Paolo—came to town, always providing Polly hadn’t gone high-hat and wouldn’t pass him up. But he didn’t think Polly would go high-hat. High-powered, maybe, but not high-hat.

And so Eddie breathed in streams of tobacco smoke, tobacco that he had dug out of the luxurious bottom of the can, where it was still faintly moist and had a flavor. He had $23 and some change, he didn’t know how much, in his kick right now. Five dollars for canned goods would leave $18 plus, and would assure him of food for at least a week. Take Norma to a show, tickets at Joe Leblang’s. Explain the situation to Norma, whom he had permitted to pay his rent on a loan basis, in return for which he put up her kid brother, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, who came to town every other week-end to see a girl friend of Norma’s. Norma had her own money, left her by a grandmother, and she also had a job as secretary to an assistant professor at N. Y. U. She and her brother were orphans and her brother had his own money too, but in trust until he was twenty-one years old.

What about Norma, anyway? Eddie now asked himself. He had the feeling that his troubles were over, temporarily, and he wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to marry Norma. He thought back over the years, and it might as well have been Norma all along. His succession of girls always had been about the same general type; smallish, usually with breasts rather large for the girl’s height; sometimes the girl would be chunky. They had to have a feeling for jazz that was as good as you can expect in a girl. They had to be cute rather than blasé, a little on the slangy side, and come to think of it, all of them including Norma had to go to bed for one day out of every twenty-eight. They were all fundamentally the same, and probably they were all fundamentally Norma.

About love Eddie was not so sure. The thing that he supposed existed, that kept together a man and woman all their lives and made them bring up children and have a home and that kept them faithful to each other unquestioningly and apparently without temptation—he had not seen that in his own home and so he was not personally acquainted with it. He was not sure that he ever had seen it, either. He knew, for instance, that he saw the parents of his friends in a way that was totally unlike the way his friends saw them. All through his adolescence he practically took for granted that Mr. Latham and Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Dominick and Mr. Girardot, fathers of his closest friends of that period, were unfaithful to Mrs. Latham and Mrs. O’Neill and Mrs. Dominick and Mrs. Girardot. He never spoke of it, because his friends never did, but if they had he was sure he would have come right out and said what he thought. He had it thought out beyond that: he believed that those fathers were human, and subject to desire, a thing which did not have to be forgiven except in the case of his own father. His own father had inadvertently taught him to accept infidelity in all other fathers but himself. On the other hand Eddie liked absolute faithfulness in a wife, not so much because his own mother practiced it, but because as a result of her practicing it she became finally a much better person in his eyes than his father. The years of being constant were a lot like years of careful saving, compared with years of being a spendthrift. It was just that it was easier to be a spendthrift than to save. Of course sometimes you saved for nothing better than a bank crash, but even though you lost everything that was in the bank, you still had something around the eyes, something in the chin, that showed you had been a saver. Sometimes he would say to himself: “Yes, but your mother was pretty stupid.” All right, what if she was? She had kept her promise, which was more than his father had done. Eddie had no liking for the fellows in college who thought it would be swell to have a father who was more like an older brother. If his father had been an older brother Eddie would have been likely to give him a punch in the nose. Not that he idealized any other father he knew, but because he never met a father whom he regarded as the ideal did not mean that none such existed. Psychology and the lines of thought it indicated mildly fascinated Eddie, and he approved some of it; but he was not willing to ascribe, say, fidelity to a weakness or a dishonesty. Maybe it all did come down to the value of a promise. You gave your word that you would not sleep with another woman; in either case it was a promise, and if you couldn’t depend on a promise then nothing was any good.

He was always telling himself that when he got older and knew more he would take up the subject of promises. But he hoped the day never would come when he did not believe a promise—just a promise, and not all the surrounding stuff about Gentleman and Honor—was a good and civilized thing.

He was lying on his bed, thinking these things, and he suddenly felt disgust with himself. For only yesterday he had come within inches of laying Gloria, and months ago he had promised Norma that he would not stay with anyone else. All his self-satisfied introspection went away and he could not find anything anywhere in his thoughts that would justify what he had all but done. It was not his fault that it had not been done. There it was, the first time his promise to Norma had been put to a test, and right away, without even thinking about it, he was ready for Gloria, very God damn ready; and it was worse because he had come so close without thinking about it. It was possible that if he had thought it out he would have found a reason, if no other reason than that he would stay with Gloria and stop staying with Norma. Then next he was thinking the thing he always thought when he was getting out of one romance and beginning another: the self-reproach that he was no better than his father; that he was his father’s son. Maybe the psychoanalysts would tell him that that helped to explain how he would be faithful to a girl for months, then get another girl and be faithful to her until he was unfaithful. That’s the way it had been, and almost the way it was this minute, with Norma and Gloria. But he had not stayed with Gloria; for that break he thanked his luck. If he had he would have had to tell Norma. But he hadn’t. That seemed to him an important thing, one of the most important things in his life, and at that moment he decided he had found the girl he wanted to marry. A laundry called him on the telephone, and that prevented his having an affair with Gloria. Good. Something beyond his understanding had intervened, he was sure of that; maybe it was only his luck. Well, he wasn’t going to fool with his luck. When he saw Norma tonight he would ask her to marry him. No money, no job, no nothing. But he knew she was the one he wanted to marry. He laughed a little. He was pretty proud of Norma, and he loved her very much. He was already loyal to her, too; in the sense that in his mind he could defend her against the kind of thing Gloria might say about her: he could hear Gloria calling Norma a mouse-like little creature (although Norma was the same size girl as Gloria, and, speaking of mice, it was not hard to imagine someone saying Norma had a mind like a steel trap). Eddie let his loyalty go to Norma and did not try to deny to himself that this probably was at the expense of his loyalty to Gloria.

It was strange about Gloria, how he always had had this feeling of loyalty to her. Offhand he could not recall a time when there had been any need for it; yet he knew that with the life Gloria led there probably were dozens of people who said things about her that, if he heard them, would evoke a loyal response and some kind of protective action on his part. He had been ready to defend Gloria at any time when he might meet someone who said things about her or did things to her. By God it was an instinctive thing: that first night he saw her he lent her money when money was life to him. It saddened him to think of the things implicit in his decision to marry Norma. One of these things was the giving up part. Maybe he was wrong (he admitted) but always it seemed to him as though he and Gloria were many many times on the verge of a great romance, one for the ages, or at least a match for the love and anguish of Amory and Rosalind in “This Side of Paradise” and Frederick and Catherine in “A Farewell to Arms.” He nodded to an undefined thought: that yes, to marry Norma was a sensible thing and if out of the hundred pounds of the relationship between himself and Norma there was one ounce sensible thing, that one ounce was an imperfect, unromantic thing. All right; what of it? There never had been much romance in his past romances, and he distrusted romance for his own self; in a sort of Elks-tooth way his father had been a romantic guy, and he was not going to have any of that. He was in no danger of it, either, he was sure; his mother had not been like Norma. Disconnectedly he found himself off on a tangent, realizing how awful parturition must have been for his mother, all that stuff about getting up on a table and having a doctor look her over, and her realization that “the little one” she talked about and thought about and felt, also was a hideous little thing called a foetus. (He was able to think of this without any identification of the foetus as himself. You may say, “That was me,” but you cannot imagine yourself as being no bigger than the present size of your foot.) No, it wasn’t so disconnected as he called it; Norma never would speak of “the little one.” If she were pregnant she would know beforehand what was going on inside her, and she would know about the placenta and all that. He hoped Norma would not have much pain. But what stuff this was! this thinking about Norma deliberately having a baby when he had not yet seriously asked her to marry him. She might fool him and say no; there was that chance. “A celluloid cat’s in hell,” he assured himself, but a chance.

He was already as married as though he were half of Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Brunner. Did babies sometimes come out upside down because that was the position of their parents when the baby was conceived? Could parents tell which lay had made the baby? How long did the husband and wife have to stop sleeping together when the wife was pregnant? (He had heard the story about an artist who tried to stay with his wife when she was being wheeled into the delivery room.) What if Norma had a dwarf: would the doctors let it live? What if they had a baby and it turned out to be an hermaphrodite? Would Norma’s beautiful breasts get so painfully sensitive that he would not be able to touch them while she was pregnant? Did they always lose their firmness after pregnancy? What was this stuff about tearing? Did it mean
literally
tearing? ripping open when she did not stretch enough? Could doctors keep the size of the baby down so it would not endanger the mother’s life? How much did a baby cost?

Well, it cost more than he would be able to pay for a long time, so he might as well stop thinking about it. He ought to be glad he had enough money to take Norma to a show tonight, that’s what he ought to be.

Wednesday passed for all those living in the world at that time, and it was Thursday. It was for instance payday for James Malloy, who had been living since Monday on borrowed dollars. For Gloria Wandrous it was all of a sudden the day on which she would give up Liggett. She had had a good night’s sleep. Wednesday evening she had spent in the bosom of her family, after trying without success to talk to Eddie on the telephone. She had a good dinner at home, of things she liked: her mother’s cream of tomato soup with just a touch of sherry in it; roast beef, scalloped potatoes, succotash, lettuce and mayonnaise (homemade), ice cream with strawberries, coffee and a lick of Curaçao. Her uncle had to go uptown after dinner and Gloria was left with her mother. Her mother had not been so bad. They talked about the clothes she had bought that day, and Mrs. Wandrous, who knew something about women’s clothes, reaffirmed her trust in Gloria’s taste. She said Gloria had clothes sense. “That’s one thing about you I never had to teach you even as a little girl. You always had good sense about clothes. Oh, so few girls have it these days. Sunday before last, you know when I went for a drive with Mrs. Lackland, we drove past Vassar College. Now you’d think those girls would know how to dress, at least have sense enough to put on something decent on Sunday. But no. Sweater and skirt, sweater and skirt, all the way up and down the street from Poughkeepsie proper to the college. And the same sweater, and the same skirt. I said to Mrs. Lackland, if those girls were told they
had
to wear a uniform the way girls have to in preparatory school, why, they’d yell and scream and have school strikes and everything. But there they were, just the same, wearing a uniform. And it isn’t as though they dressed any better when they came to New York. But I suppose they have no style.
You have.
You have style. I noticed those things you bought today. I was afraid for a minute when you asked to try on that one dress at Altman’s. I knew it was wrong for you but I didn’t want to say anything till after you tried it on.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have bought it.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted to try it on. They’re handy.”

“Well, I don’t think so, Gloria. When I’m tempted to buy a dress because I think it’s going to be handy, I think twice about it. Those handy dresses, so-called, I should say a woman won’t get as much out of one of those as she will out of a really frivolous dress. I mean in actual number of hours that they’re worn. Take your black satin . . . ”

Clothes, and cooking, and curiously enough the way to handle men, were matters in which Gloria had respect for her mother’s opinions. Packing, housecleaning, how to handle servants, what to do for blotches in the complexion, kitchen chemistry, the peculiarities of various fabrics—Mrs. Wandrous knew a lot about such matters. It occurred to Gloria that her mother was a perfect wife. The fact that her husband was dead did nothing to change that. In fact that was part of it. And any time anybody had any doubt about how well her mother could manage a house, all they had to do was count up the number of times Gloria’s uncle had had to complain. No, her mother was a fine housekeeper, and she knew how to handle men. Gloria often would hear her mother say that if So-and-So did such and such she’d be happier with her husband. What Gloria meant was that her mother, dealing with her kind of man in her kind of life, was just as capable as she was with baking soda in the kitchen. Mrs. Wandrous knew what baking soda could be made to do, and she knew what the kind of man she would be likely to have dealings with (who bored Gloria to death) would do. It was almost a good life, Gloria decided. Without regret she recognized the impossibility of it for her; but a pretty good life for someone like her mother.

That Wednesday night after she went to bed she lay there trying, not very hard, to read, and thinking about her mother. Now there was a woman who had known (Gloria was sure) only one man in her entire life. Known meaning slept with. And that had not lasted very long. Yet after twenty years her mother was able to recall every detail of sleeping with a man, almost as though it had happened last night. She had not discussed it at any length with her mother, but now and then a thing would be said that showed how well her mother remembered. Think of living that way! Going to bed these nights, so many nights through so many years; some nights dropping off to sleep, but surely some nights lying there and saddened by the waste of shapely breasts and the excitement in oneself with a man, and the excitement of a man’s excitement. And then nothing to do about it but lie there, almost afraid to touch one’s breasts, probably, or anything else; and remembering one man long ago. There was only one possible explanation for being able to live in memory like that, and Gloria felt tears in her eyes at the thought of her father’s and mother’s love.

It showed, too. It showed in her mother’s face. It worried Gloria a little to come around again to a theory she sometimes had that a woman ought to have one man and quit. It made for a complete life no matter how short a time it lasted. Gloria resolved to be a better girl, and after a long but not unpleasant time she fell asleep, preferring her own face but thinking well of her mother’s.

She had breakfast in her room. It was too warm a day for breakfast in bed. To have breakfast in bed ought to be a luxury and not a nuisance, and it was a nuisance when covering over the legs was a nuisance, as it was this day. She drank the double orange juice and wanted more, but Elsie, the maid, had gone back to the kitchen out of call. Gloria drank her coffee and ate her toast and poured another cup of coffee. Then a cigarette. While having breakfast she was busy with her hands. With no one to look at her she swung her butter knife like a bandmaster’s baton, not humming or singing, but occasionally letting her throat release a note. She felt good.

What, if anything, she had decided the night before had not been changed by the morning and the good night’s sleep, principally because she had not fixed upon a new mode of life. The good night’s sleep she knew had a lot to do with the absence of her usual morning despair, but it wasn’t that she was happy, exactly. It came close to the feeling that she was ready for anything today, whereas if she had come to a solemn decision the night before to be an angel thenceforward, she would now be having a special kind of gayety—not removed from the despair—that was cap-over-the-windmill stuff. No; today she felt good. The big problem of Liggett would be settled somehow, not without an awful scene and maybe not right away, but it would probably be all right—and that concession was a step in the right direction, she thought. She felt good, and she felt strong.

She looked at the advertisements in the paper while smoking her second cigarette. She had a patronizing, superior feeling toward the advertisements: she had bought practically all the clothes she wanted and certainly all she would need. She had her usual quick visit to the bathroom, and then she had a lukewarm bath and she was dressing when her mother called to her that Ann Paul was on the phone and wanted to speak to her, and should she take the message? Yes, take the message, Gloria told her mother. The message was that Ann wanted to have lunch with her. Gloria said she would come to the phone. She didn’t want to have lunch with Ann, but she had known Ann in school and did want to see her, so she asked Ann to come downtown if she could, and Ann said she could.

Ann lived in Greenwich where she lived an athletic life; sailing her own Star, hunting and showing at the minor league horse shows and in such ways using up the energy which no man had seemed able to get to for his personal use. In school Ann, who was very tall for a girl, was suspect because of a couple of crushes which now, a few years later, her former schoolmates were too free about calling Lesbian, but Gloria did not think so, and Ann must have known that Gloria did not think so. She called Gloria every time she came to New York, which was about twice a month, and the last two times Gloria had not been home for the calls.

Ann came downtown, parked her Ford across the street from Gloria’s house, and went right upstairs to Gloria’s room. Ann was in the Social Register, which fact impressed Gloria’s mother as much as Gloria’s indifference to it. Ann was always made to feel at home in Gloria’s house.

“I had to see you,” said Ann. “I have big news.”

“Ah-hah.”

“What?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why did you say ah-hah as if you knew it? Does it show?”

“No. I knew there was something. You’ve never looked better.”

“Look,” said Ann, and extended her left hand.

“Oh, you
girl!
Ann! Who is it? When? I mean do I know him or anything?”

“Tell you everything. His name is Bill Henderson and you don’t know him and he’s at P. and S. and gets out next year and he went to Dartmouth before that and he’s even taller than I am, and I haven’t the faintest idea when we’re going to be married.”

“How long have you known him? What’s he
like?
”

“Since Christmas. He’s from Seattle and he spent Christmas with friends of mine in Greenwich which is how I happened to meet him. I sat next to him at dinner the night after Christmas, and he was the quiet type, I thought. He looked to be the quiet type. So I found out what he did and I began talking about gastroenterostomies and stuff and he just sat there and I thought, What is this man? He just sat there and nodded all the time I was talking. You know, when I was going to be a nurse year before last. Finally I said something to him. I asked him if by any chance he was listening to what I was saying, or bored, or what? ‘No, not bored,’ he said. ‘Just cockeyed.’ And he was. Cockeyed. It seems so long ago and so hard to believe we were ever strangers like that, but that’s how I met him, or my first conversation with him. Actually he’s very good. His family have loads of money from the lumber business and I’ve never seen anything like the way he spends money. But only when it doesn’t interfere with his work at P. and S. He has a Packard that he keeps in Greenwich and hardly ever uses except when he comes to see me. He was a marvelous basketball player at Dartmouth and two weeks ago when he came up to our house he hadn’t had a golf stick in his hands since last summer and he went out and shot an eighty-seven. He’s very homely, but he has this dry sense of humor that at first you don’t quite know whether he’s even listening to you, but the things he says. Sometimes I think—oh, not really, but a stranger overhearing him might suggest sending him to an alienist.”

“He sounds wonderful! Oh, I’m so glad, darling. When did he go for the ring and all?”

“Well—New Year’s Eve he asked me to marry him. If you could call it that. Sometimes even now I can’t always tell when he’s tight. New Year’s Eve he was dancing with me and he stopped right in the middle of the floor, stopped dancing and stood away from me and said: ‘Remind me to marry you this summer.’”

“I like that. This summer.”

“No, I guess not this summer. But I don’t know. Oh, all I care about is I guess this is it, I hope.”

“It sounds like it to me. The real McCoy, whatever that is. So what are you going to do this summer? Where is—what’s his name? Bill?”

“Bill Henderson. Well, he wants to go home for a little while just to see his family and then come back. I—I’m sort of embarrassed, Gloria. I don’t really know. When he gets ready to tell me something, he tells me, and I never ask him. But what I wanted to see you about, can you come up for the week-end tomorrow? Bill’s coming, and I forget whether he’s just getting ready for examinations or just finishing them. See? I don’t know anything. I just sit and wait.”

“That’s good preparation for a doctor’s wife.”

“So everyone tells me. But what about it, can you come?”

“I’d love to,” said Gloria. Then, thinking of Liggett: “I have a half date for the week-end, but I think I can get out of it. Anyway, can I take a rain check if I can’t make it this week?”

“Of course. Do try to get out of the other thing. Is this other thing—would you like me to invite someone for you? I mean is there someone that—I could ask your other date.”

“No. It was a big party, a lot of people, not anyone in particular.”

“Then I won’t ask anyone for you till I hear from you. Will you call me? Call me tomorrow at home, or else call this afternoon and leave word. Just say you’re coming. And of course if you think you can’t come and then change your mind at the last minute and decide you can, that’s all right too.”

“All right. I’ll most likely call you tonight.” Gloria noticed that Ann seemed to have something else to say. “What, Ann? What are you thinking?”

“I can tell
you
, Gloria,” said Ann. “Darling, I’ve had an affair. Bill and I. We’ve had an affair. Almost from the very beginning. Do you think any the less of me?”

“Oh, certainly not, darling.
Me?”

“I never knew about you. I’ve always thought you had, but I could never be sure. It’s only in the last six months I found out why you can’t be sure. It doesn’t show on you. You know? You think the next day you’re going to be a marked woman and everybody on the street will know. But they don’t. And men. Men are so funny. Mothers tell us all our lives that boys lose respect for girls that they go all the way with. But they must have changed a lot since my mother was our age. At first I was so frightened, and then I saw that Bill was the one that really was frightened, not I. I don’t mean about children only. But they’re so helpless. When we’re with people I’m quiet as a mouse and sit there listening to the great man, or when we’re dancing I think how marvelously witty he is, with his sense of humor. But when we’re really alone it all changes. He’s entirely different. At first I used to think he was so gentle, terribly gentle, and it almost killed me. But then I realized something—and this isn’t taking anything away from him. He
is
gentle, but the things about him that I used to think were gentle, they aren’t gentle. The really gentle things he does aren’t the same things I thought were. What I mistook for being gentle was his own helplessness, or practically helplessness. Yes, helplessness. He
knows
everything, being a medical student, and I don’t suppose I’m the first for him, but—Lord! I don’t know how to explain it. Do you see what I mean at all?”