Complete Stories (22 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
“There goes Haze,” her friends would say, watching her. “She’s off again.”
Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears freely. To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious. All sorrows became her sorrows; she was Tenderness. She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnaped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs. Even when the paper was no longer before her, her mind revolved upon these things and the drops slipped rhythmically over her plump cheeks.
“Honestly,” she would say to Herbie, “all the sadness there is in the world when you stop to think about it!”
“Yeah,” Herbie would say.
She missed nobody. The old crowd, the people who had brought her and Herbie together, dropped from their lives, lingeringly at first. When she thought of this at all, it was only to consider it fitting. This was marriage. This was peace.
But the thing was that Herbie was not amused.
For a time, he had enjoyed being alone with her. He found the voluntary isolation novel and sweet. Then it palled with a ferocious suddenness. It was as if one night, sitting with her in the steam-heated living-room, he would ask no more; and the next night he was through and done with the whole thing.
He became annoyed by her misty melancholies. At first, when he came home to find her softly tired and moody, he kissed her neck and patted her shoulder and begged her to tell her Herbie what was wrong. She loved that. But time slid by, and he found that there was never anything really, personally, the matter.
“Ah, for God’s sake,” he would say. “Crabbing again. All right, sit here and crab your head off. I’m going out.”
And he would slam out of the flat and come back late and drunk.
She was completely bewildered by what happened to their marriage. First they were lovers; and then, it seemed without transition, they were enemies. She never understood it.
There were longer and longer intervals between his leaving his office and his arrival at the apartment. She went through agonies of picturing him run over and bleeding, dead and covered with a sheet. Then she lost her fears for his safety and grew sullen and wounded. When a person wanted to be with a person, he came as soon as possible. She desperately wanted him to want to be with her; her own hours only marked the time till he would come. It was often nearly nine o’clock before he came home to dinner. Always he had had many drinks, and their effect would die in him, leaving him loud and querulous and bristling for affronts.
He was too nervous, he said, to sit and do nothing for an evening. He boasted, probably not in all truth, that he had never read a book in his life.
“What am I expected to do—sit around this dump on my tail all night?” he would ask, rhetorically. And again he would slam out.
She did not know what to do. She could not manage him. She could not meet him.
She fought him furiously. A terrific domesticity had come upon her, and she would bite and scratch to guard it. She wanted what she called “a nice home.” She wanted a sober, tender husband, prompt at dinner, punctual at work. She wanted sweet, comforting evenings. The idea of intimacy with other men was terrible to her; the thought that Herbie might be seeking entertainment in other women set her frantic.
It seemed to her that almost everything she read—novels from the drug-store lending library, magazine stories, women’s pages in the papers—dealt with wives who lost their husbands’ love. She could bear those, at that, better than accounts of neat, companionable marriage and living happily ever after.
She was frightened. Several times when Herbie came home in the evening, he found her determinedly dressed—she had had to alter those of her clothes that were not new, to make them fasten—and rouged.
“Let’s go wild tonight, what do you say?” she would hail him. “A person’s got lots of time to hang around and do nothing when they’re dead.”
So they would go out, to chop houses and the less expensive cabarets. But it turned out badly. She could no longer find amusement in watching Herbie drink. She could not laugh at his whimsicalities, she was so tensely counting his indulgences. And she was unable to keep back her remonstrances—“Ah, come on, Herb, you’ve had enough, haven’t you? You’ll feel something terrible in the morning.”
He would be immediately enraged. All right, crab; crab, crab, crab, crab, that was all she ever did. What a lousy sport
she
was! There would be scenes, and one or the other of them would rise and stalk out in fury.
she
was! There would be scenes, and one or the other of them would rise and stalk out in fury.
She could not recall the definite day that she started drinking, herself. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops upon a window-pane, they ran together and trickled away. She had been married six months; then a year; then three years.
She had never needed to drink, formerly. She could sit for most of a night at a table where the others were imbibing earnestly and never droop in looks or spirits, nor be bored by the doings of those about her. If she took a cocktail, it was so unusual as to cause twenty minutes or so of jocular comment. But now anguish was in her. Frequently, after a quarrel, Herbie would stay out for the night, and she could not learn from him where the time had been spent. Her heart felt tight and sore in her breast, and her mind turned like an electric fan.
She hated the taste of liquor. Gin, plain or in mixtures, made her promptly sick. After experiment, she found that Scotch whisky was best for her. She took it without water, because that was the quickest way to its effect.
Herbie pressed it on her. He was glad to see her drink. They both felt it might restore her high spirits, and their good times together might again be possible.
“ ’Atta girl,” he would approve her. “Let’s see you get boiled, baby.”
But it brought them no nearer. When she drank with him, there would be a little while of gaiety and then, strangely without beginning, they would be in a wild quarrel. They would wake in the morning not sure what it had all been about, foggy as to what had been said and done, but each deeply injured and bitterly resentful. There would be days of vengeful silence.
There had been a time when they had made up their quarrels, usually in bed. There would be kisses and little names and assurances of fresh starts. . . . “Oh, it’s going to be great now, Herb. We’ll have swell times. I was a crab. I guess I must have been tired. But everything’s going to be swell. You’ll see.”
Now there were no gentle reconciliations. They resumed friendly relations only in the brief magnanimity caused by liquor, before more liquor drew them into new battles. The scenes became more violent. There were shouted invectives and pushes, and sometimes sharp slaps. Once she had a black eye. Herbie was horrified next day at sight of it. He did not go to work; he followed her about, suggesting remedies and heaping dark blame on himself. But after they had had a few drinks—“to pull themselves together”—she made so many wistful references to her bruise that he shouted at her and rushed out and was gone for two days.
Each time he left the place in a rage, he threatened never to come back. She did not believe him, nor did she consider separation. Somewhere in her head or her heart was the lazy, nebulous hope that things would change and she and Herbie settle suddenly into soothing married life. Here were her home, her furniture, her husband, her station. She summoned no alternatives.
She could no longer bustle and potter. She had no more vicarious tears; the hot drops she shed were for herself. She walked ceaselessly about the rooms, her thoughts running mechanically round and round Herbie. In those days began the hatred of being alone that she was never to overcome. You could be by yourself when things were all right, but when you were blue you got the howling horrors.
She commenced drinking alone, little, short drinks all through the day. It was only with Herbie that alcohol made her nervous and quick in offense. Alone, it blurred sharp things for her. She lived in a haze of it. Her life took on a dream-like quality. Nothing was astonishing.
A Mrs. Martin moved into the flat across the hall. She was a great blonde woman of forty, a promise in looks of what Mrs. Morse was to be. They made acquaintance, quickly became inseparable. Mrs. Morse spent her days in the opposite apartment. They drank together, to brace themselves after the drinks of the nights before.
She never confided her troubles about Herbie to Mrs. Martin. The subject was too bewildering to her to find comfort in talk. She let it be assumed that her husband’s business kept him much away. It was not regarded as important; husbands, as such, played but shadowy parts in Mrs. Martin’s circle.
Mrs. Martin had no visible spouse; you were left to decide for yourself whether he was or was not dead. She had an admirer, Joe, who came to see her almost nightly. Often he brought several friends with him—“The Boys,” they were called. The Boys were big, red, good-humored men, perhaps forty-five, perhaps fifty. Mrs. Morse was glad of invitations to join the parties—Herbie was scarcely ever at home at night now. If he did come home, she did not visit Mrs. Martin. An evening alone with Herbie meant inevitably a quarrel, yet she would stay with him. There was always her thin and wordless idea that, maybe, this night, things would begin to be all right.
The Boys brought plenty of liquor along with them whenever they came to Mrs. Martin’s. Drinking with them, Mrs. Morse became lively and good-natured and audacious. She was quickly popular. When she had drunk enough to cloud her most recent battle with Herbie, she was excited by their approbation. Crab, was she? Rotten sport, was she? Well, there were some that thought different.
Ed was one of The Boys. He lived in Utica—had “his own business” there, was the awed report—but he came to New York almost every week. He was married. He showed Mrs. Morse the then current photographs of Junior and Sister, and she praised them abundantly and sincerely. Soon it was accepted by the others that Ed was her particular friend.
He staked her when they all played poker; sat next her and occasionally rubbed his knee against hers during the game. She was rather lucky. Frequently she went home with a twenty-dollar bill or a ten-dollar bill or a handful of crumpled dollars. She was glad of them. Herbie was getting, in her words, something awful about money. To ask him for it brought an instant row.
“What the hell do you do with it?” he would say. “Shoot it all on Scotch?”
“I try to run this house half-way decent,” she would retort. “Never thought of that, did you? Oh, no, his lordship couldn’t be bothered with that.”
Again, she could not find a definite day, to fix the beginning of Ed’s proprietorship. It became his custom to kiss her on the mouth when he came in, as well as for farewell, and he gave her little quick kisses of approval all through the evening. She liked this rather more than she disliked it. She never thought of his kisses when she was not with him.
He would run his hand lingeringly over her back and shoulders.
“Some dizzy blonde, eh?” he would say. “Some doll.”
One afternoon she came home from Mrs. Martin’s to find Herbie in the bedroom. He had been away for several nights, evidently on a prolonged drinking bout. His face was gray, his hands jerked as if they were on wires. On the bed were two old suitcases, packed high. Only her photograph remained on his bureau, and the wide doors of his closet disclosed nothing but coat-hangers.
“I’m blowing,” he said. “I’m through with the whole works. I got a job in Detroit.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She had drunk much the night before, and the four Scotches she had had with Mrs. Martin had only increased her fogginess.
“Good job?” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Looks all right.”
He closed a suitcase with difficulty, swearing at it in whispers.
“There’s some dough in the bank,” he said. “The bank book’s in your top drawer. You can have the furniture and stuff.”
He looked at her, and his forehead twitched.
“God damn it, I’m through, I’m telling you,” he cried. “I’m through.”
“All right, all right,” she said. “I heard you, didn’t I?”
She saw him as if he were at one end of a cannon and she at the other. Her head was beginning to ache bumpingly, and her voice had a dreary, tiresome tone. She could not have raised it.
“Like a drink before you go?” she asked.
Again he looked at her, and a corner of his mouth jerked up.
“Cockeyed again for a change, aren’t you?” he said. “That’s nice. Sure, get a couple of shots, will you?”
She went to the pantry, mixed him a stiff highball, poured herself a couple of inches of whisky and drank it. Then she gave herself another portion and brought the glasses into the bedroom. He had strapped both suitcases and had put on his hat and overcoat.
He took his highball.
“Well,” he said, and he gave a sudden, uncertain laugh. “Here’s mud in your eye.”
“Mud in your eye,” she said.
They drank. He put down his glass and took up the heavy suitcases.
“Got to get a train around six,” he said.
She followed him down the hall. There was a song, a song that Mrs. Martin played doggedly on the phonograph, running loudly through her mind. She had never liked the thing.
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