Complete Stories (70 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
Figures themselves hold no terror for her; she has all the latest statistics at her tongue’s tip—the number of times an evening that the Hopping girl dances with the Comee boy; the number of suitors imported from the city by the elder Miss Staley; the number of hours, to date, that the visiting belle from New Orleans has spent on the moonlit pier. Mrs. Bracket, as she sits at her pleasant task of punching holes in a potential centerpiece and carefully sewing them up again, is cordially ready to quote you the correct figures in any of such cases.
It is Mrs. Bracket who is the acknowledged head of the rocking-chair board of censorship. Thus far, none among the hotel guests has been stamped with her approval.
In fact, the only guest upon whom she can conscientiously bestow her thorough approval in every way is Mrs. Ramsay Bracket.
MR. GEORGE WILLISIt would be in no way overstating the case to call Mr. Willis, as many another admirer has called him before, the life of the hotel. It is impossible to conjure up a mental picture of the hotel front without visualizing his figure in its specially reserved rocking-chair on the end.
The gay frocks and sweaters of the ladies are given value by the dark note of his blue serge suit. To show that he has a fitting sense of appropriate attire for a seaside resort Mr. Willis affects navy blue serge suits, vaguely suggestive in cut of the uniform of a sea captain. He heightens this effect by wearing a crisp white yachting cap with a glistening black vizor and, as a concession to the summery weather, completes his costume with such cool touches as white canvas shoes and a white necktie fresh from the capable hands of the laundress.
No business drags him away to the city; an adequate income assures his being dependably on hand all summer long, standing ever ready to fetch a chair, to open a parasol, to pick up a dropped knitting needle, to make a fourth at bridge, to hold yarn, or to read aloud from the headlines—and to do it all with a geniality that verges on the jocose.
In fact, as a joker he is highly thought of. His humor depends almost entirely upon his personality; it is not, as the ladies agree, so much what Mr. Willis says as the way he says it. He has a trick of looking upon a sunny sky and saying: “A pretty nice day, if I do say so myself,” which fairly convulses his hearers; while his dry dismissal of a rainy day as “Fine weather—for ducks” must really be heard to be appreciated.
He is in no way appalled by being oftentimes, for a stretch of midweek days, the only man about the porch; indeed, Mr. Willis seems to thrive on it. It is with enormous tact that he distributes his attentions, so that no one lady may read unintended meanings into them. Common talk has it that many wily spinsters have sought to draw him into matrimony, and some of the more optimistic element even hold to the idea that he will succumb yet.
But the summers flit by, changing Mr. Willis’ hair from an interesting gray to a distinguished white, and he still doggedly remains a bachelor—thus conferring an inestimable boon upon some fortunate woman.
Ladies’ Home Journal,
September 1920
September 1920
An Apartment House Anthology
Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens much prefer living on the ground floor, they often say. Sometimes, when Mrs. Cuzzens is really warmed up to it, she puts the thing even stronger, and announces to the world that she would turn down flat all offers to live on an upper floor, in this or any other apartment house in New York City, even if you were to become desperate at her firmness and present her with an apartment rent free.
In the first place Mrs. Cuzzens is never wholly at her ease in an elevator. One of her liveliest anecdotes concerns an aunt of hers on her mother’s side who was once a passenger in an elevator which stopped short midway between floors, and doggedly refused to move either up or down. Fortunately it all ended happily. Cries for help eventually caught the attention of the janitor—it seemed little short of providential that he had always had quite a turn for messing around with machinery—and he succeeded in regulating the power so that Mrs. Cuzzens’ aunt reached her destination practically as good as new. But the episode made a terrific impression on Mrs. Cuzzens.
Of course it is rather dark on the ground floor, but Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens regard that as one of the big assets of their apartment. Mrs. Cuzzens had a pretty nasty example of the effects of an oversunshiny place happen right in her own family. Her sister-in-law—not, Mrs. Cuzzens is careful to specify, the wife of the brother in the insurance business, but the wife of the brother who is on the road for a big tire concern, and is doing very well at it—hung some French-blue draperies at her living-room windows. And in less than a year the sunlight turned those curtains from their original color to an unwholesome shade of greenish yellow. Why, the change was so marked that many people, seeing them in this state, almost refused to believe that they had ever been blue. Mrs. Cuzzens’ sister-in-law, as is perfectly understandable, was pretty badly broken up about it. Naturally Mrs. Cuzzens would hate to have a thing like that happen in her own home.
There is another advantage to living on the ground floor. The rent there is appreciably smaller than it is on the stories above, although Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens seldom if ever work this into the conversation. Well, it is easy to overlook it, in the press of more important reasons for occupying their apartment.
A Mean Eye for Freak NewsMrs. Cuzzens has a fund, to date inexhaustible, of clean yet stimulating anecdotes, of which the one about the elevator and the one about the curtains are representative. She specializes in the unique. Hers is probably the largest collection in the country of stories of curious experiences, most of them undergone by members of her intimate circle. She is generous almost to a fault in relating them too. About any topic that happens to come up will be virtually certain to remind her of the funny thing that once happened to her Aunt Anna or the queer experience her Cousin Beulah had that time in Springfield.
Her repertory of anecdotes undoubtedly had much to do with attracting Mr. Cuzzens to her, for Mr. Cuzzens leans heavily to the out-of-the-ordinary himself. In his after-dinner reading of the newspaper he cheats a bit on the front-page items, just murmuring the headlines over, and gathering from them a rough idea—if you could really speak of Mr. Cuzzens as harboring a rough idea—of what is going on in the way of the conventional hold-ups and graft inquiries. But he casts a mean eye over the oddities in the day’s news. He never misses the little paragraph about the man in Winsted, Connecticut, who intrusts a family of orphaned eggs to the care of a motherly cat, with gratifying results to one and all; or the report of the birth on an ocean liner, to a couple prominent in steerage circles, of a daughter, named Aquitania Wczlascki in commemoration of the event.
These specialties of Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens work in together very prettily. They provide many an evening of instructive and harmless entertainment, while so far as expense goes, the only overhead is three cents for an evening paper.
Mr. Cuzzens puts on the slippers he got last birthday, and Mrs. Cuzzens unhooks a bit here and there as the evening wears on and she can feel reasonably sure that no one will drop in. As they sit about the grained-oak table in the glow of the built-in chandelier Mr. Cuzzens will read aloud some such fascinating bit of current history as the announcement of the birth, in Zanesville, Ohio, of a calf with two heads, both doing well. Mrs. Cuzzens will cap it with the description, guaranteed authentic, of a cat her mother’s cousin once possessed which had a double set of claws on each foot.
Clever Mr. CuzzensWhen the excitement of this has died down Mr. Cuzzens will find an item reporting that a famous movie star has taken a load off the public’s mind by having her eyelashes insured for one hundred thousand dollars. That will naturally lead his wife to tell the one about the heavy insurance her Uncle David carried, and the perfectly terrible red tape his bereaved family had to go through before they could collect.
After twenty minutes or so passed in their both listening attentively to Mrs. Cuzzens’ recital, Mr. Cuzzens’ eye, sharpened by years of training, will fall on an obscure paragraph telling how an apple tree near Providence was struck by lightning, which baked all the fruit. Mrs. Cuzzens will come right back with the story of how her little nephew once choked on a bit of the core of a baked apple, and the doctor said it might have been fatal if he had got there half an hour later.
And so it goes, back and forth, all evening long.
But the Cuzzens have their light side too. They often make a night of it at the movies. In fact Mr. Cuzzens, who is apt to be pretty slangy at times, says that he and the little woman are regular movie fans. Mr. Cuzzens loses himself so completely in the display that he reads each subtitle aloud. If it seems to him worthy, and if the operator leaves it on long enough, he reads it through twice. Both he and his wife take deeply to heart the news pictures, showing a grain elevator destroyed by fire in Florence, Georgia; or the living head of Uncle Sam formed by a group of Los Angeles school children.
Any trick effects on the screen leave Mrs. Cuzzens bewildered. She can never figure out how, for example, they make a man seem to walk up the side of a house. However, Mr. Cuzzens is awfully clever at all that sort of thing—more than one person has told him he should have gone in for mechanical work—and he explains the process on the way home.
Occasionally Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens patronize the drama. There is a theater near them to which come plays almost direct from their run lower down on Broadway. The casts are only slightly changed; just substitutions in five or six of the leading roles. Both the Cuzzenses prefer comedies of the wholesome type, setting themselves on record as going to the theater to be amused. They say that they wouldn’t go around the corner to see one of those unpleasant plays, for there is enough trouble in this world, anyway. And after all, who is there that can give them any argument on that one?
Now and then they devote an evening to cards, playing a little interfamily game with Mr. Cuzzens’ married sister and her husband. The sport is kept absolutely clean. No money changes hands.
In the daytime, while Mr. Cuzzens is busy at his office—he is with a firm that makes bathroom scales, and it’s as good as settled that they are going to do something really worth while for him the first of the year—Mrs. Cuzzens is occupied with her own activities. She often complains that the days aren’t half long enough for her, but nothing really satisfactory has been done to remedy this, as yet. Much of her time is devoted to shopping, for there are always button molds to be matched, or a strip of linoleum for the washtubs to be priced, or a fresh supply of trick paper for the pantry shelves to be laid in. She is almost over-conscientious about her shopping. It is no unusual thing for her to spend an entire day in a tour of the department stores, searching for a particular design of snap fastener or the exact match of a spool of silk. She reaches home at the end of one of these days of toil pretty well done up, but still game.
And then there are her social duties. She is one of the charter members of a bridge club which numbers just enough to fill two tables comfortably. The club meets every fortnight, giving the players a chance to compete for the brocade-covered candy box—the winner must supply her own candy, which is no more than fair—or the six embroidered, guest-room-size handkerchiefs, which the hostess donates in the interest of sport.
During these functions Mrs. Cuzzens takes part in a great deal of tense conversation about the way the skirt was gathered over the hips and came down longer in front. She also gives, and receives, ideas on novel fillings for sandwiches, effective patterns for home-knit sweaters, and simple yet snappy dishes for Sunday-night supper.
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Cuzzens is a native of New York. Up to a year or so after their marriage they helped swell the population of a town in Illinois which at the last census had upward of one hundred thousand inhabitants. They celebrate Old Home Week by a visit to the folks every year, but they congratulate themselves heartily that Mr. Cuzzens’ business prevents their staying more than a week. For they agree that after eight years’ residence in what Mr. Cuzzens aptly calls the big city they could never bring themselves to live in a small town again.
As Mrs. Cuzzens puts it, life in New York is so much broader.
THE SECOND FLOOR EASTThe Parmalees are always intending to move, but somehow they never get around to it. Several times Mrs. Parmalee has come out flat with the statement that the very next day she is going to look for an apartment farther downtown. But what with one thing and another coming up, she never seems to be able to make it.
Yet after all, as they argue, they might be a whole lot worse off than staying right where they are. Of course they are pretty far uptown, away from the theaters and restaurants; but everybody in their crowd, including themselves, has a car. So, to use Mr. Parmalee’s very words, they should worry! It has often been remarked of Mr. Parmalee that it is not so much what he says as the way he says it.
Again, Mrs. Parmalee points out that it doesn’t really matter much where they live, for they are hardly ever home, anyway. To which Mr. Parmalee retorts, just like a flash, that she has said a forkful!
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