Complete Stories (34 page)

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Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca

BOOK: Complete Stories
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Miss Wilmarth had dressed for dinner. She had discarded her linen uniform and put on a frock of dark blue taffeta, cut down to a point at the neck and given sleeves that left bare the angles of her elbows. Small, stiff ruffles occurred about the hips, and the skirt was short for its year. It revealed that Miss Wilmarth had clothed her ankles in roughened gray silk and her feet in black, casket-shaped slippers, upon which little bows quivered as if in lonely terror at the expanse before them. She had been busied with her hair; it was crimped and loosened, and ends that had escaped the tongs were already sliding from their pins. All the length of her nose and chin was heavily powdered; not with a perfumed dust, tinted to praise her skin, but with coarse, bright white talcum.
Gerald presented his guests; Miss Wilmarth, Mr. Minot; Miss Wilmarth, Mr. Forster. One of the young men, it turned out, was Freddy, and one, Tommy. Miss Wilmarth said she was pleased to meet each of them. Each of them asked her how she did.
She sat down at the candle-lit table with the three beautiful young men. Her usual evening vivacity was gone from her. In silence she unfolded her napkin and took up her soup spoon. Her neck glowed crimson, and her face, even with its powder, looked more than ever as if it should have been resting over the top rail of a paddock fence.
“Well!” Gerald said.
“Well!” Mr. Minot said.
“Getting much warmer out, isn’t it?” Mr. Forster said. “Notice it?”
“It is, at that,” Gerald said. “Well. We’re about due for warm weather.”
“Yes, we ought to expect it now,” Mr. Minot said. “Any day now.”
“Oh, it’ll be here,” Mr. Forster said. “It’ll come.”
“I love spring,” said Miss Wilmarth. “I just love it.”
Gerald looked deep into his soup plate. The two young men looked at her.
“Darn good time of year,” Mr. Minot said. “Certainly is.”
“And how it is!” Mr. Forster said.
They ate their soup.
There was champagne all through dinner. Miss Wilmarth watched Mary fill her glass, none too full. The wine looked gay and pretty. She looked about the table before she took her first sip. She remembered Camilla’s voice and the men’s laughter.
“Well,” she cried. “Here’s a health, everybody!”
The guests looked at her. Gerald reached for his glass and gazed at it as intently as if he beheld a champagne goblet for the first time. They all murmured and drank.
“Well!” Mr. Minot said. “Your patients seem to be getting along pretty well, Miss Witmark. Don’t they?”
“I should say they do,” she said. “And they’re pretty nice patients, too. Aren’t they, Mr. Cruger?”
“They certainly are,” Gerald said. “That’s right.”
“They certainly are,” Mr. Minot said. “That’s what they are. Well. You must meet all sorts of people in your work, I suppose. Must be pretty interesting.”
“Oh, sometimes it is,” Miss Wilmarth said. “It depends on the people.” Her words fell from her lips clear and separate, sterile as if each had been freshly swabbed with boracic acid solution. In her ears rang Camilla’s light, insolent drawl.
“That’s right,” Mr. Forster said. “Everything depends on the people, doesn’t it? Always does, wherever you go. No matter what you do. Still, it must be wonderfully interesting work. Wonderfully.”
“Wonderful the way this country’s come right up in medicine,” Mr. Minot said. “They tell me we have the greatest doctors in the world, right here. As good as any in Europe. Or Harley Street.”
“I see,” Gerald said, “where they think they’ve found a new cure for spinal meningitis.”
“
Have
they really?” Mr. Minot said.
“Yes, I saw that, too,” Mr. Forster said. “Wonderful thing. Wonderfully interesting.”
“Oh, say, Gerald,” Mr. Minot said, and he went from there into an account, hole by hole, of his most recent performance at golf. Gerald and Mr. Forster listened and questioned him.
The three young men left the topic of golf and came back to it again, and left it and came back. In the intervals, they related to Miss Wilmarth various brief items that had caught their eyes in the newspapers. Miss Wilmarth answered in exclamations, and turned her big smile readily to each of them. There was no laughter during dinner.
It was a short meal, as courses went. After it, Miss Wilmarth bade the guests good-night and received their bows and their “
Good
night, Miss Witmark.” She said she was awfully glad to have met them. They murmured.
“Well, good night, then, Mr. Cruger,” she said. “See you tomorrow!”
“Good night, Miss Wilmarth,” Gerald said.
The three young men went and sat with Camilla. Miss Wilmarth could hear their voices and their laughter as she hung up her dark blue taffeta dress.
Miss Wilmarth stayed with the Crugers for five weeks. Camilla was pronounced well—so well that she could have dined downstairs on the last few nights of Miss Wilmarth’s stay, had she been able to support the fardel of dinner at the table with the trained nurse.
“I really couldn’t dine opposite that face,” she told Gerald. “You go amuse Horsie at dinner, stupid. You must be good at it, by now.”
“All right, I will, darling,” he said. “But God keep me, when she asks for another lump of sugar, from holding it out to her on my palm.”
“Only two more nights,” Camilla said, “and then Thursday Nana’ll be here, and she’ll be gone forever.”
“ ‘Forever,’ sweet, is my favorite word in the language,” Gerald said.
Nana was the round and competent Scottish woman who had nursed Camilla through her childhood and was scheduled to engineer the unknowing Diane through hers. She was a comfortable woman, easy to have in the house; a servant, and knew it.
Only two more nights. Gerald went down to dinner whistling a good old tune.
“The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, Ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be——”
 
The final dinners with Miss Wilmarth were like all the others. He arrived first, and stared at the candles until she came.
“Well, Mary,” she cried on her entrance, “you know what they say—better late than never.”
Mary, to the last, remained unamused.
Gerald was elated all the day of Miss Wilmarth’s departure. He had a holiday feeling, a last-day-of-school jubilation with none of its faint regret. He left his office early, stopped at a florist’s shop, and went home to Camilla.
Nana was installed in the nursery, but Miss Wilmarth had not yet left. She was in Camilla’s room, and he saw her for the second time out of uniform. She wore a long brown coat and a brown rubbed velvet hat of no definite shape. Obviously, she was in the middle of the embarrassments of farewell. The melancholy of her face made it so like a horse’s that the hat above it was preposterous.
“Why, there’s Mr. Cruger!” she cried.
“Oh, good evening, Miss Wilmarth,” he said. “Well! Ah, hello, darling. How are you, sweet? Like these?”
He laid a florist’s box in Camilla’s lap. In it were strange little yellow roses, with stems and leaves and tiny, soft thorns all of blood red. Miss Wilmarth gave a little squeal at the sight of them.
“Oh, the darlings!” she cried. “Oh, the boo-fuls!”
“And these are for you, Miss Wilmarth,” he said. He made himself face her and hold out to her a square, smaller box.
“Why, Mr. Cruger,” she said. “For me, really? Why, really, Mr. Cruger.”
She opened the box and found four gardenias, with green foil and pale green ribbon holding them together.
“Oh, now, really, Mr. Cruger,” she said. “Why, I never in all my life—Oh, now, you shouldn’t have done it. Really, you shouldn’t. My good mercy! Well, I never saw anything so lovely in all my life. Did you, Mrs. Cruger? They’re
lovely
. Well, I just don’t know how to
begin
to thank you. Why, I just—well, I just adore them.”
Gerald made sounds designed to convey the intelligence that he was glad she liked them, that it was nothing, that she was welcome. Her squeaks of thanks made red rise in back of his ears.
“They’re nice ones,” Camilla said. “Put them on, Miss Wilmarth. And these are awfully cunning, Jerry. Sometimes you have your points.”
“Oh, I didn’t think I’d
wear
them,” Miss Wilmarth said. “I thought I’d just take them in the box like this, so they’d keep better. And it’s such a nice box—I’d like to have it. I—I’d like to keep it.”
She looked down at the flowers. Gerald was in sudden horror that she might bring her head down close to them and toss it back high, crying “wuzza, wuzza, wuzza” at them the while.
“Honestly,” she said, “I just can’t take my eyes
off
them.”
“The woman is mad,” Camilla said. “It’s the effect of living with us, I suppose. I hope we haven’t ruined you for life, Miss Wilmarth.”
“Why, Mrs. Cruger,” Miss Wilmarth cried. “Now, really! I was just telling Mrs. Cruger, Mr. Cruger, that I’ve never been on a pleasanter case. I’ve just had the time of my life, all the time I was here. I don’t know when I—honestly, I can’t stop looking at my posies, they’re so lovely. Well, I just can’t thank you for all you’ve done.”
“Well, we ought to thank you, Miss Wilmarth,” Gerald said. “We certainly ought.”
“I really hate to say ‘good-by,’ ” Miss Wilmarth said. “I just hate it.”
“Oh, don’t say it,” Camilla said. “I never dream of saying it. And remember, you must come in and see the baby, any time you can.”
“Yes, you certainly must,” Gerald said. “That’s right.”
“Oh, I will,” Miss Wilmarth said. “Mercy, I just don’t dare go take another look at her, or I wouldn’t be able to leave, ever. Well, what am I thinking of! Why, the car’s been waiting all this time. Mrs. Cruger simply insists on sending me home in the car, Mr. Cruger. Isn’t she terrible?”
“Why, not at all,” he said. “Why, of course.”
“Well, it’s only five blocks down and over to Lexington,” she said, “or I really couldn’t think of troubling you.”
“Why, not at all,” Gerald said. “Well! Is that where you live, Miss Wilmarth?”
She lived in some place of her own sometimes? She wasn’t always disarranging somebody else’s household?
“Yes,” Miss Wilmarth said. “I have Mother there.”
Oh. Now Gerald had never thought of her having a mother. Then there must have been a father, too, some time. And Miss Wilmarth existed because two people once had loved and known. It was not a thought to dwell upon.
“My aunt’s with us, too,” Miss Wilmarth said. “It makes it nice for Mother—you see, Mother doesn’t get around very well any more. It’s a little bit crowded for the three of us—I sleep on the davenport when I’m home, between cases. But it’s so nice for Mother, having my aunt there.”
Even in her leisure, then, Miss Wilmarth was a disruption and a crowd. Never dwelling in a room that had been planned only for her occupancy; no bed, no corner of her own; dressing before other people’s mirrors, touching other people’s silver, never looking out one window that was hers. Well. Doubtless she had known nothing else for so long that she did not mind or even ponder.
“Oh, yes,” Gerald said. “Yes, it certainly must be fine for your mother. Well! Well! May I close your bags for you, Miss Wilmarth?”
“Oh, that’s all done,” she said. “The suitcase is downstairs. I’ll just go get my hat-box. Well, good-by, then, Mrs. Cruger, and take care of yourself. And thank you a thousand times.”
“Good luck, Miss Wilmarth,” Camilla said. “Come see the baby.”
Miss Wilmarth looked at Camilla and at Gerald standing beside her, touching one long white hand. She left the room to fetch her hat-box.
“I’ll take it down for you, Miss Wilmarth,” Gerald called after her.
He bent and kissed Camilla gently, very, very gently.
“Well, it’s nearly over, darling,” he said. “Sometimes I am practically convinced that there is a God.”
“It was darn decent of you to bring her gardenias,” Camilla said. “What made you think of it?”
“I was so crazed at the idea that she was really going,” he said, “that I must have lost my head. No one was more surprised than I, buying gardenias for Horsie. Thank the Lord she didn’t put them on. I couldn’t have stood that sight.”
“She’s not really at her best in her street clothes,” Camilla said. “She seems to lack a certain
chic
.” She stretched her arms slowly above her head and let them sink slowly back. “That was a fascinating glimpse of her home life she gave us. Great fun.”
“Oh, I don’t suppose she minds,” he said. “I’ll go down now and back her into the car, and that’ll finish it.”
He bent again over Camilla.
“Oh, you look so lovely, sweet,” he said. “So
lovely
.”
Miss Wilmarth was coming down the hall, when Gerald left the room, managing a pasteboard hat-box, the florist’s box, and a big leather purse that had known service. He took the boxes from her, against her protests, and followed her down the stairs and out to the motor at the curb. The chauffeur stood at the open door. Gerald was glad of that presence.

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