Complete Stories (60 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
Yet good came of them, for it was through one of the benighted advisers that Mrs. Allen met Dr. Langham.
Though Dr. Marjorie Langham earned her own living, she had lost none of her femininity—doubtless because she had never trod the bloody halls of medical school or strained her bright eyes studying for an M.D. With one graceful leap she had landed on her slender feet as a healer of troubled minds. It was a year when the couches of such healers had not time to grow cool between patients. Dr. Langham was enormously successful.
She was full of anecdotes about her patients. She had her own way of telling them, so that the case histories not only were killingly comic in themselves but gave you, the listener, the fine feeling that you weren’t so crazy after all. On her deeper side, she was a woman of swift comprehensions, and of firm sympathy with the hard lot of sensitive members of her sex. She was made for Mrs. Allen.
Mrs. Allen did not go direct to the couch on her first visit to Dr. Langham. In the office filled with chintzes and cheer, she and the Doctor sat opposite each other, woman and woman; Mrs. Allen found it easier that way to pour forth all. The Doctor, during the relating of Guy Allen’s outrageous behavior, nodded repeatedly; when she was told, on request, Guy Allen’s age, she wore an amused little smile. “Well, of course, that’s what it is,” she said. “Oh, those middle forties! That dear old dangerous age! Why, that’s all that’s the matter with him—he’s going through the change.”
Mrs. Allen pounded her temples with her fists, for being such a fool as not to have thought of that before. There she had been weeping and wailing because it had completely slipped her mind that men, too, are born into the world with the debt of original sin laid on them; Guy Allen, as must everyone else, had reached the age of paying it; there was the whole matter. (In the last two cases of broken marriages of which Mrs. Allen had heard, that year, one of the outgoing husbands was twenty-nine and the other sixty-two, but she did not recall them to memory.) The Doctor’s explanation so relieved Mrs. Allen that she went and lay down on the couch.
“That’s the girl—relax,” Dr. Langham said. “Oh, all the poor women, the poor idiot women! Tearing their hearts out, beating themselves with their ‘Why, why, why?’s, breaking their necks to find a fancy reason for it when their husbands walk out, when it’s just the traditional case of temporarily souped-up nerves and the routine change in metabolism.”
The Doctor gave Mrs. Allen books to take home with her, to read before her next appointment; some of their authors, she said, were close friends of hers, women recognized as authorities on their subject. The books were written, as if by one pen, in a fluid, conversational style, comfortable for laymen. There was a sameness about their contents; each was a collection of instances of married men who had rushed out from their beds and boards in mad revolt against middle age. The revolts, as such, were rather touching. The wild-eyed mobs were without plan or direction, the nights were bitter cold, they sickened for home. Back came the revolutionaries, one after one, with hanging heads and supplicating palms, back to their wise, kind wives.
Mrs. Allen was impressed by these works. She came upon many a passage which, if the books had belonged to her, she would have underscored heavily.
She felt that she might properly be listed among those wives who waited at home, so kind, so wise. She could say, in all humility, that many people had told her she was almost too kind for her own good, and she could point to an act of true wisdom. In the first black days of her misery, she had sworn an oath to herself that she would make no move toward Guy Allen: Might her right hand wither and drop off if she employed it to dial his telephone number! No one could count the number of miles she had walked, up and down her carpets, fighting to hold to her vow. She did it, but the sight of her saved right hand, fresh and fair, brought no comfort to her; it simply reminded her of the use to which it might have been put. From there, she thought of another hand on another dial, always with new pain that Guy Allen had never called her.
Dr. Langham gave her high marks for keeping away from the telephone, and brushed aside her grief at Guy Allen’s silence.
“Certainly he hasn’t called you,” she said. “Exactly as I expected—yes, and the best sign we’ve had that he’s doing a little suffering on his own hook. He’s afraid to talk to you. He’s ashamed of himself. He knows what he did to you—he doesn’t know why he did it, the way we do, but he knows what a terrible thing it was. He’s doing a lot of thinking about you. His not daring to call you up shows that.”
It was a big factor in Dr. Langham’s success that she had the ability to make wet straws seem like sturdy logs to the nearly submerged.
Maida Allen’s cure was not effected in a day. It was several weeks before she was whole. She gave all credit to her doctor. Dr. Langham, by simply switching the cold light of science on the reason for Guy Allen’s apparent desertion, had given her back to herself. She was no more the lone, lorn creature, rejected like a faded flower, a worn glove, a stretched garter. She was a woman brave and humane, waiting, with the patience that was her crown jewel, for her poor, muddled man to get through his little indisposition and come home to her to be cheered through convalescence and speeded to recovery. Daily, on Dr. Langham’s couch, talking and listening, she gained in strength. She slept through the nights, and when she went out to the street, her straight back and her calm, bright face made her seem like a visitor from a fairer planet, among those of the bowed shoulders and the twitching mouths who thronged the pavements.
The miracle happened. Her husband telephoned to her. He asked if he might come to the apartment that evening to pick up a suitcase that he wanted. She suggested that he come to dinner. He was afraid he couldn’t do that; he had to dine early with a client, but he would come about nine o’clock. If she was not going to be at home, would she please to leave the suitcase with Jessie, the maid. She said it was the one night in she didn’t know how long that she was not going out. Fine, he said, then he’d see her later; and rang off.
Mrs. Allen was early for her doctor’s appointment. She gave Dr. Langham the news in a sort of carol. The Doctor nodded, and her amused smile broadened until virtually all of her exceptionally handsome teeth showed.
“So there you are,” she said. “And there he is. And who is the one that told you so? Now listen to me. This is important—maybe the most important part of your whole treatment. Don’t lose your head tonight. Remember that this man has put one of the most sensitive creatures I ever saw in my life through hell. Don’t soften up. Don’t fall all over him, as if he was doing you a favor coming back to you. Don’t be too easy on him.”
“Oh-h-h, I won’t!” Mrs. Allen said. “Guy Allen will eat crow!”
“That’s the girl,” Dr. Langham said. “Don’t make any scene, you know; but don’t let him think that all is forgiven. Just be cool and sweet. Don’t let him know that you’ve missed him for a moment. Just let him see what
he’s
been missing. And for God’s sake, don’t ask him to stay all night.”
he’s
been missing. And for God’s sake, don’t ask him to stay all night.”
“Not for anything on this earth,” Mrs. Allen said. “If that’s what he wants, he’ll ask me. Yes, and on his knees!”
The apartment looked charming; Mrs. Allen saw to it that it did, and saw that she did herself. She bought masses of flowers on her way home from the Doctor’s, and arranged them exquisitely—she had always been good at that—all about the living room.
He rang the bell at three minutes past nine. Mrs. Allen had let the maid off that evening. She opened the door to him herself.
“Hi!” she said.
“Hello, there,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, simply fine,” she said. “Come on in. I think you know the way, don’t you?”
He followed her into the living room. He held his hat in his hand, and carried his coat over his arm.
“You’ve got a lot of flowers,” he said. “Pretty.”
“Yes, aren’t they lovely?” she said. “Everybody’s been so kind to me. Let me take your things.”
“I can stay just a minute,” he said. “I’m meeting a man at the club.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said.
There was a pause. He said, “You’re looking fine, Maida.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said. “I’m about to drop in my tracks. I’ve been going out day and night.”
“It agrees with you,” he said.
“Notice anything new in this room?” she said.
“Why—I said about all the flowers,” he said. “Is there something else?”
“The curtains, the curtains,” she said. “New last week.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “They look great. Pink.”
“Rose,” she said. “The room does look nice with them, don’t you think?”
“Great,” he said.
“How’s your room at the club?” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I have everything I want.”
“Everything?”
she said.
she said.
“Oh, sure,” he said.
“How’s the food?” she said.
“Pretty good now,” he said. “Much better than it used to be. They’ve got a new chef.”
“What fun!” she said. “So you really like it, living at the club?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m very comfortable there.”
“Why don’t you sit down,” she said, “and tell me what was the matter with it here? Food? Shaving mirror? What?”
“Why, everything was fine,” he said. “Look, Maida, I’ve really got to run. Is my bag here?”
“It’s in your closet in the bedroom, where it always was,” she said. “Sit down—I’ll get it for you.”
“No, don’t you bother,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
He went toward the bedroom. Mrs. Allen started to follow, then thought of Dr. Langham and stayed where she was. The Doctor would surely consider it somewhat lenient, to go into the bedroom with him, the minute he came back.
He returned, carrying the suitcase.
“Surely you can sit down and have a drink, can’t you?” she said.
“I wish I could, but I’ve really got to go,” he said.
“I thought we might exchange just a few gracious words,” she said. “The last time I heard your voice, it was not saying anything very agreeable.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You stood right there, by the door—and very attractive you looked,” she said. “I’ve never seen you awkward in your life. If you were ever going to be, that was the time to be it. Saying what you did. Do you remember?”
“Do you?” he said.
“I do indeed,” she said. “ ‘I don’t want to do this any more, Maida. I’m through.’ Do you really feel that was a pretty thing to say to me? It seemed to me rather abrupt, after eleven years.”
“No. It wasn’t abrupt,” he said. “I’d been saying it to you for six of those eleven years.”
“I never heard you,” she said.
“Yes, you did, my dear,” he said. “You interpreted it as a cry of ‘Wolf,’ but you heard me.”
“Could it be possibly that you had been planning this dramatic exit for six years?” she said.
“Not planning,” he said. “Just thinking. I had no plans. Not even when I spoke those doubtless ill-chosen words of farewell.”
“And have you now?” she said.
“I’m going to San Francisco in the morning,” he said.
“How nice of you to confide in me,” she said. “How long will you be away?”
“I really don’t know,” he said. “We opened that branch office out there—you know. Things got rather messed up, and I’ve got to go do some straightening. I can’t tell how long it will take.”
“You like San Francisco, don’t you?” she said.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Good town.”
“And so nice and far away, too,” she said. “You really couldn’t get any farther off and still stay in America the Beautiful, could you?”
“That’s right, at that,” he said. “Look, I’ve really got to dash. I’m late.”
“Couldn’t you give me a quick idea of what you’ve been doing with yourself?” she said.
“Working all day and most nights,” he said.
“That interests you?” she said.
“Yes, I like it fine,” he said.
“Well, good for you,” she said. “I’m not trying to keep you from your date. I just would like to see a very small gleam of why you’ve done what you have. Were you that unhappy?”
“Yes, I was, really,” he said. “You needn’t have made me say it. You knew it.”
“Why were you unhappy?” she said.
“Because two people can’t go on and on and on, doing the same things year after year, when only one of them likes doing them,” he said, “and still be happy.”
“Do you think
I
can be happy, like this?” she said.
I
can be happy, like this?” she said.
“I do,” he said. “I think you will. I wish there were some prettier way of doing it, but I think that after a while—and not a long while, either—you will be better than you’ve ever been.”
“Oh, you think so?” she said. “I see, you can’t believe I’m a sensitive person.”
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