Complete Stories (75 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
I shouldn’t want to come out with the bald statement that the Lunts live as quiet a life as any couple in the city. You have to be pretty well up on your statistics before you can go around talking that way. But I will step right up and say that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Watson Lunt plod along in about as homey and unspectacular a manner as you would want to see. In fact, their high point in riotous living was touched five years ago, when Mr. Lunt nerved himself up definitely to take the plunge and sign it J. Watson.
In the first place, they are not exactly in the position of having it to throw around. Mr. Lunt is in the advertising business, and anybody will be glad to tell you where that was shot to, during the past few seasons. He is generally considered quite a boy in his own line of work. It is practically an open secret that it was he who thought up the slogan, “Good-by, Button Troubles,” for the Anti-Button Suit people; though it is perhaps not so widely known that the famous line, “Ask the Prince of Wales,” used by the Never-Slip Sleeve-Garter Company, was one of his brain children. He would be the first to say that he deserves no particular credit; it is simply that his mind happens to work that way.
THRILLING HOURS WITH RADIOHe had been connected with a small and determinedly doggy advertising agency for some time. There was a stretch of months when the phrase “connected with” would have been putting it rather too firmly. It would have been more in line with the facts to say that he was hanging on to the agency. For things down there were looking so thin that the office force regarded itself as but one jump ahead of the boys on the park benches. Indeed, Mr. Lunt got into the habit—from which he will doubtless never wholly recover—of looking on every pay envelope that did not contain the official raspberry as just so much velvet.
Even now that business is beginning to get the roses back in its cheeks, Mr. Lunt is scarcely able to present any parks to the city. His is what you could call a fair salary, but couldn’t really hail as fair enough. The Lunts make both ends meet, and let it pass at that. There is no chance of tying them in a large and dashing bow. What with the rent of the four-room apartment, and the wages of the handmaiden who returns to the bosom of her family every evening, Mr. Lunt is glad to be able to call it a month twelve times a year.
So you will be among the first to see for yourself that the Lunts can contribute little towards keeping the white lights blazing on Broadway of an evening. Eleven o’clock usually finds the apartment dark, and Mr. and Mrs. Lunt fairly into the swing of the night’s gay round of sleep.
Now and then they run so wild as to go to a movie—the movie house around the corner from them gets all the big feature pictures only a month or so after the Broadway film palaces are through with them, and you are pretty nearly always sure of a seat, if you make the theater by quarter past seven—and twice a month, say, they attend, in a body, some show that they have heard highly spoken of by their friends. The Lunts conscientiously read the newspaper dramatic reviews every morning, and ache for them when they are out of town and unable to procure a New York paper. But they regard them purely as reading matter. When they want dramatic criticism they ask their friends.
Occasionally they break out in a game of bridge with some other average New York couple, for a stake of half a cent a point. The losing side carefully copies down the sum lost on a slip of paper, and carries it over till the next meet, to be played off then.
The radio, which has recently come into their lives, has done great things for the Lunts. Now that Mr. Lunt has, with considerable difficulty and frequent muttered mention of biblical characters, got the apparatus installed, they are never at a loss for an evening’s stimulating pleasure. There they can sit, in their own living room, and listen to some kindly soul over in the Newark broadcasting station tell “How Johnny Musk-Ox Went to Old Daddy West Wind’s Party,” or they can hear a lecture on “Diseases of the Cranberry and How to Fight Them,” that keeps them right on the edge of their seats. As Mrs. Lunt says, she hasn’t the faintest idea what science is going to do next.
Every few weeks Mrs. Lunt puts on the black evening dress she picked up when one of the Fifty-seventh Street shops was having its sale, and Mr. Lunt dons his vintage dinner coat, and they go forth to a social gathering at the apartment of one of their friends. Conservative dancing is indulged in, to the strains of the phonograph. Between dances the ladies exchange amusing anecdotes of the bright things said by their children and the stupid things got off by their maids, while the gentlemen punctiliously offer one another cigarettes and solicitously ask if it doesn’t seem to be getting pretty warm. Over the refreshments things open up appreciably, and there is much hearty laughter over references to purely local incidents. Any strangers to the crowd who happen to have been invited can do little about helping the banter along.
On Sunday mornings Mr. Lunt gets in a lot of good wholesome sleep, so that he will be in condition to grapple with the puzzle page of the Sunday paper. Once that is off his mind he and his wife make an exhaustive study of the newspapers. Then Mrs. Lunt gets caught up on her correspondence, and Mr. Lunt, with the interest of the dilettante, endeavors to make the mainspring of the living-room clock listen to reason, or has a try at nailing together the place where the bookshelves have sprung.
It sometimes happens that one of their more prosperous friends asks the Lunts to make a day of it and come for a motor ride in the country. The friends would be surprised did they know what a treat a Sunday in the country isn’t, to the Lunts. As Mr. Lunt often says, there is no use talking, he likes his Sundays at home.
GAYETY ALWAYS ON TAPMrs. Lunt gets in a good deal more social life than her husband, for she can work it in in the afternoons. Intimates gather at her apartment, or she visits one of theirs, to put in a few rubbers of bridge or a few yards of sewing on lace-edged crêpe-de-chine underwear. In either case the afternoon comes to a climax in watercress sandwiches and tea.
You know, the curious thing about the Lunts, and the thing, perhaps, that goes farthest toward making them an average New York couple, is that they are not at all worked up over the calm of their existence. I don’t recall ever having seen their eyes brim with bitter tears over all the widely advertised gayety going on about them, in which they have no part. In fact, they really seem to go ahead on the idea that they are sitting comparatively pretty.
There is to them, as to the other average New Yorkers, something strangely reassuring in knowing that the hotels, the theaters, the dance clubs and the restaurants are always right there, ready and waiting for the time when the Lunts may have the price and the inclination to give the gay life a fair trial. In the same way there is a pleasant security in the thought of all the museums and the art galleries, the concert halls and the lecture chambers, always in action. The Lunts are easily the next-to-the-last people to patronize them, but there is something soothing in the knowledge that, in case they should ever see the light, there they are, all set. It gives them a feeling like having money in the bank. Or at least something like that.
Once a year, however, the Lunts lay aside the cloistered life, and burn up Broadway. This is on the occasion of the annual metropolitan visit of Mr. Lunt’s Aunt Caroline, from the town where he spent his boyhood days.
There are times when, dreaming idly in the gloaming, one finds oneself drifting into wondering why, barring acts of God and business trips, Mr. Lunt’s Aunt Caroline should ever feel called upon to come to New York.
Of course she does want to see her nephew and niece, whom she groups under the general heading of “those poor children”—a little phrase of hers which does not imply that the Lunts are in a thin way financially or that they are in bad health; it simply expresses her kindly pity for them because they live in New York. But even allowing for her natural desire to be with her dear ones, it does not seem that the sacrifice involved is worth it.
For Aunt Caroline seems to have a peculiarly poisonous time of it in the big city. She is unalterably against New York—a feeling which she splits with the something over seventy thousand transients that daily knock at its portals. The city-by-the-Hudson’s hem, all right to visit is to them, and it is nothing more.
Like them, Aunt Caroline sees in Manhattan nothing but a mammoth reminder of how much better things are done back home. The distress which her annual visit causes her would make the suffering in the Near East look like so much spirit of Mardi Gras.
And Aunt Caroline is not the girl to suffer in silence. She isn’t going to store it up in her mind, to brood over during the long winter evenings. She comes clean with it then and there. It’s a rather nice idea, too, because it gives her something to chat about all through her visit.
The big object of Aunt Caroline’s journey to New York seems to be to put the city in short pants, if you might say so. The moment she sets foot in the Grand Central Terminal she compares it audibly and unfavorably with the new railroad station back home, built as soon as a decent interval had elapsed after the old one burned to the ground. Escorted to the street by Mrs. Lunt, Aunt Caroline, after becoming promptly and passionately in the wrong as to which is up town and which down, gazes tolerantly up at the buildings and is reminded to tell, at considerable length, of the new six-story Beehive Store recently erected at the corner of Elm Street and Maple Avenue. The taxicab in which she presently finds herself but brings back audible memories of the superior qualities of the jitney line owned by that nice Mr. Gooch, who used to own the livery stable over on State Street.
A CRITICAL GUESTIn the short ride to the Lunt apartment she manages to work in at least three times the line about “New York may be all right for a visit, but I wouldn’t live here if you gave me the place.” That is Aunt Caroline’s favorite, really, though she is only slightly less fond of that other sparkler of hers—“We live, back home; you exist, in New York.”
Epigrammatic—that’s Aunt Caroline down to the ground. There can be little doubt but that she picked up the mantle of Wilde somewhere.
Aunt Caroline stays with the Lunts but three or four days, but in that brief while she tears their bank roll wide open. She is not the sort of visitor who gets along on a couple of bus rides, a jaunt up the Statue of Liberty, a ramble through the Aquarium and a trip to the Hippodrome, and then returns home, broadened with travel.
She goes in for being entertained on a large scale. In the first place, she wants—and only natural too—to mingle with the pleasure seekers and learn what goes on in what she looks upon as the Hollywood of the Atlantic Coast. And in the second place—or no, on thinking it over, it would really be better to put this one first—Mr. Lunt has an admirably normal desire to demonstrate to Aunt Caroline, and thus vicariously to the inhabitants of his native town, that he has got along so spectacularly since leaving the village green that money is little, if any, object to him.
And then, besides, Mr. and Mrs. Lunt do want to give Aunt Caroline just the best of good times. I keep forgetting that one.
So every evening of her stay Aunt Caroline and the Lunts attend a highly popular play—naturally Aunt Caroline wants to see the big successes—sitting somewhere along about the fifth row, center. As a tribute to his personality the ticket agency has taken Mr. Lunt in on the inside, and let twenty-five dollars cover the three tickets.
During the play’s unfolding, Aunt Caroline sets up an opposition entertainment—a discourse in full detail on the higher merits of the productions given weekly by the Florence Hemingway-Lester De Vaux stock company at the Majestic Theater back home. Those about her gather from her remarks that people from all over the world flock there, as to Oberammergau. She frequently wishes aloud that Mr. and Mrs. Lunt could see Miss Hemingway’s and Mr. De Vaux’s company present
Lord and Lady Algy
. She even volunteers, out of the goodness of her heart, to send them word next time the comedy is revived, so that they can abandon everything and rush right up.
AUNTY MAKES THE MONEY FLYLord and Lady Algy
. She even volunteers, out of the goodness of her heart, to send them word next time the comedy is revived, so that they can abandon everything and rush right up.
Before the theater the Lunts, as is only fitting, have taken Aunt Caroline to dine at the Biltmore, the Knickerbocker Grill, the Commodore or the Pennsylvania; even on their annual outing they seldom feel quite up to making the grade at the Plaza or the Ritz.
Aunt Caroline takes it all pretty personally. She looks coldly about at the neighboring diners, and remarks that if you want to see a really stylish woman you should hurry and meet Mrs. Doctor Robbins, who lives in one of those new two-family houses out by Oak Park, and has every single stitch made in the house by a seamstress.
She all but runs a temperature over the prices that are demanded for the dishes she selects. But she courageously goes right ahead and orders them anyway, a dogged look about her mouth as if to say, “I’ll put this management in its place!” I forget just who it was that got the bill passed through the Senate making it a misdemeanor for Aunt Caroline to eat anything but such foods as lobster thermidor, breast of guinea hen under glass, hearts of palm and baked Alaska when she is dining out. Certainly she never takes a chance on breaking the law.
During dinner she beguiles her host and hostess by comparing the food before her with that served by the Misses Amy and Lucretia Crouch at Ye Signe of Ye Greene Teapotte, which they are conducting over in the old Lewis house on Evergreen Street—food which, she asserts, is the finest that has ever passed her lips.
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