Complete Stories (76 page)

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Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca

BOOK: Complete Stories
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After the theater, Mr. Lunt suggests that they drop in at a restaurant or a roof show for a while. He does it awfully well too; you’d think he did it ten or twelve times every year of his life. If he is a little slow on his cue Aunt Caroline helps him along with the laughing suggestion that they go to one of those cabaret places, which is the name that she has got up for them. As is but natural, she wants to see what all the talk is about.
Established at a ringside table, for which Mr. Lunt has helped a head waiter on towards an independent old age, Aunt Caroline again goes the full course, for she has always had a fine appetite, thank goodness. While she sups she gives a talk on how terrible it is for New Yorkers to eat so much rich stuff late at night, and how the only thing she really enjoys at such an hour is the hot chocolate served at McGovern’s drug store at the corner of Poplar Street. This light-hearted chatter makes it easier for Mr. Lunt to face the check for nineteen dollars and sixty cents.
With no kindly eye Aunt Caroline looks on the seething throng of exhilarated transients worming their way around the dance floor, and states that she simply does not know what the New People are thinking of, she declares she doesn’t.
Nor is she overcome when the professional part of the entertainment is in progress and the spotlights are turned on some of America’s Finest, costumed as the Twelve Leading Nonalcoholic Beverages or the Eight Most Popular Winter Resorts, or something along those lines—weaving sinuously around the tables and making a strong personal appeal to the gentlemen nearest them. Aunt Caroline blots out their singing by her somewhat protracted account of the much prettier divertisement given by the young ladies of the Lazy Daisy Club back home, who gave A Pageant of America’s Heroines to raise money for new weather strips for the clubhouse.
The music of one of the highest-paid living orchestras only serves to call to her mind what a pleasurable experience it would be for the Lunts to hear Mrs. Topping’s two boys, Earl and Royal, perform “The Jolly Haymakers’ Quickstep,” lively but not too fast, on mandolin and piano.
Time flies over those reminiscences, and it is not till somewhere around two o’clock that Aunt Caroline and the Lunts arrive at the silent apartment. Aunt Caroline frequently remarks on the way up that it is a mystery to her how New Yorkers stand the pace.
During the days of the visit Mrs. Lunt conducts her guest to a mat inée or two, so that she may have other opportunities to get in press work for the actors back home. The remainder of the time she shops, piloted by Mrs. Lunt.
Aunt Caroline does not trust the New York shops for important things like hats or dresses or shoes. The best they can hope to do for her is to supply her with hooks and eyes, sewing cotton and assorted needles. One year she did go so far as to give one of the larger department stores a chance to sell her a hair net. But she found it so far below the standard of those sold at G. F. Newins’ store on Spruce Street that ever since she has made a point of bringing quantities of hair nets down with her when she comes to New York. Nor has she ever allowed the unfortunate occurrence to die away in silence.
Yet Aunt Caroline likes to tour the more exclusive shops. It gives her many a laugh to look over the hats and gowns, and tell how much cheaper and more out of the ordinary are those shown by Miss Emma—Miss Emma Mullitt, in private life, and from a very nice family too—in her shops next door to the library on Grove Street.
VISITING AUNT CAROLINE
 
It is a wearing thing, this shopping, and Aunt Caroline is glad to drop in with Mrs. Lunt at Sherry’s or the Ritz, afterwards. Over the teacups, between intervals of glancing about and remarking that she hasn’t seen what she calls a really good-looking woman since she came to New York, she tells about the perfectly delicious tea—not anything like this—that you can get at the new Cozy Tea Room back home.
And so, what with one thing and another, the hours dash by, as on their hands and knees, and the time comes for Aunt Caroline to leave the white-light district flat for another year. Tearful at leaving those poor children behind her, she kisses her nephew and niece, urges them as a personal favor to her to take care of themselves, and departs for the great open spaces where men are men and there are no
couvert
charges, leaving the Lunts to make up the deficit in the next five or six months.
Once a year, when advertising in America can manage to stagger along without Mr. Lunt for three or four days, the Lunts do their share in the way of tightening up the home ties by paying a visit to Aunt Caroline. With her noted kindness of heart Aunt Caroline is logically aglow over her annual opportunity to give the poor children a chance to stop existing for a little while, and take a crack at living, for a change. She meets them at the train, beaming with welcome and bubbling with exclamations of how glad they must be to get out of that horrid old New York.
Her friends, too, get into the spirit of the thing, and congratulate the Lunts on their escape, on meeting them. The impression seems to have got around that they are up from North Brother Island for a day or two. Also, it seems as if Aunt Caroline had taken everybody aside and warned them that her nephew and niece would strive to press New York City on them for a gift, the only condition being that they establish residence there.
“Well,” is their cheery greeting, “I guess you’re pretty glad to get out of that New York, heh? I go down there once or twice a year, and I tell you I’m glad enough to get back home after a day or two. I wouldn’t live there if you gave me the place.”
You gather from the firmness of the tones that they have been turning down offers of Manhattan Island all day long, and are getting sick and tired of the thing.
They are interesting conversations, but somewhat one-sided. The Lunts have yet to get together and work up something notably snappy in the way of a come-back.
VILLAGE HIGH LIFE
 
The fun of visiting Aunt Caroline is not confined to exchanging friendly greetings with the natives. I don’t mean by that you should go crashing to conclusions. I can’t tell you how I should feel if you were to get the thing all wrong, and carry around the idea that Aunt Caroline’s home life is one mad round of pleasures. Just one good look at her would put that thought out of your mind forever. In fact, if you want to find the ideal exponent of average small-town life, Aunt Caroline is the very girl for you.
In the first place, she really hasn’t got it to burn. Though Mr. Lunt’s Uncle Phil left enough always to keep the wolf at a respectful distance from the door, Aunt Caroline is in no position to give away any libraries.
Then, too, as she delicately puts it, she is not so young as she used to be. Even when she was, the wild life was not being done by the town’s best families. And now, when after ten years of easy widowhood she has arrived comfortably at the middle fifties, she cares virtually nothing about making a habit of drinking champagne from slippers or being carried to the table in a pie. She has never had any desire to join the goings-on of the young married set, which she does hear are little short of scandalous, at the Country Club. Aunt Caroline seldom gives them a thought. Eleven o’clock, almost any night, finds her house dark, and her eight hours of sleep well under way.
Now I shouldn’t want you to leap to the other extreme and believe that Aunt Caroline and her friends don’t have plenty of wholesome enjoyment out of life. Indeed they do. And Aunt Caroline is only too glad to let the Lunts have a generous share of it when they come to visit her.
If they crave excitement there is a perfectly splendid moving-picture theater just three squares away from Aunt Caroline’s, which shows all the big feature pictures just a month or so after they have been shown on Broadway. All you have to do is to be sure to get there around quarter past seven, so as to be certain of getting a seat.
If they want to patronize the drama Aunt Caroline inquires among her friends if the attraction then on view at the Majestic Theater is worthy of their attention. If she gets enough favorable replies she, her nephew and her niece make a family theater party of it.
To vary things Aunt Caroline asks in enough friends for a few tables of bridge one evening during the Lunts’ stay. As a concession to the New York gambling spirit a stake of half a cent a point is agreed upon, with much laughter. When the rubbers are over, the losers put down the sum they have lost on a slip of paper, jokingly called a slate by the men, and all gayly agree to hold it over till the Lunts’ next visit, and play it off then.
And then, of course, there is always the radio. Aunt Caroline’s wealthy brother-in-law had it installed for her as a birthday gift, and you have hardly any idea of the comfort it has been to her. Sitting right there in Aunt Caroline’s third-story guest room, the Lunts can hear all about “Tommy Woodchuck’s Adventure with the Wishing Fairy” or listen to a discourse on “How Shall We Stop Our Forest Fires?” that they will never regret having heard. As Aunt Caroline often asks, Isn’t it just wonderful what things science can do?
The big night of the visit comes when Aunt Caroline puts on the lavender-and-gray changeable taffeta dress she had sent her by her sister in Boston, and, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Lunt, who are dressed accordingly, attends a social gathering at the house of one of her friends. It is quite a wild night. The comparatively younger guests dance to the music of the phonograph. Between numbers the dancing ladies join the elder matrons and discuss the quaint sayings of their children and their maids, while the men exchange cigarettes and inquire if anybody doesn’t want a window raised. Things grow pretty informal when the refreshments are served, and there are bursts of gayety over references to strictly local events.
The Lunts politely come in on the laughter, but they can’t do much to adding any helpful lines to the somewhat specialized conversation.
Mr. Lunt sleeps long and deep on the Sunday morning of their visit. It is just as well, too, because then his mind is all fresh for the puzzle page which comes in the
Sunday Clarion
. The guests and their hostess devote a large part of the day to missing nothing in the papers, and then Mrs. Lunt, following Aunt Caroline’s example, gets a few letters off her mind. Mr. Lunt, meanwhile, rambles about the house, striving to do something constructive about the limp G-flat on the piano, or seeking to discover what really is the matter with the hinge on the china-closet door.
Aunt Caroline often says that she loves her quiet Sundays at home. She really prefers them to the ones when her prosperous friends take her motoring through the surrounding country.
In the afternoons, while Mr. Lunt drops around at their various offices to talk over the old days with his one-time schoolmates, Aunt Caroline and Mrs. Lunt get in a little social intercourse. Some of Aunt Caroline’s friends come in for the afternoon or else she takes Mrs. Lunt with her to spend a few hours at one of their houses. They may play a bit of bridge or they may devote the time to putting in some work on crêpe-de-chine lingerie—it costs practically nothing at all when you make it yourself; and when you think of what the shops ask for it!
Either occupation just leads up to lettuce sandwiches and tea.
And so the time goes by, till the Lunts must return to New York. Aunt Caroline is annually pretty badly broken up over their leaving for that awful city. Tears blur her vision as she waves them good-by from the station platform, and the only thing that keeps her from going completely to pieces is the thought that she has again brought into their sultry lives a breath of real life.
The Lunts blow the annual kisses to her from the parlor-car window, and settle back to watch the old town go sliding past, a tolerant light in their eyes. As Mr. Lunt sums it up, it’s all right for a visit, but he wouldn’t live there if you gave him the place.
 
The Saturday Evening Post,
July 22, 1922
Our Own Crowd
 
Mr. and Mrs. Grew annually take it pretty personally when the end of the season arrives and they must call it a summer. Of course, Mrs. Grew feels it only due to society that she get back to the apartment and find out what steps, if any, the agent has taken about that crack in the dining-room ceiling; but she is just about unhinged at the idea of leaving the Pebbly Point House and facing the harsh realities of life once more. If Mr. Grew, who is a perfect wizard at ferreting out the sunny side of things, did not call to her attention the fact that it is but a matter of eight or ten months before another summer will be upon them and they will find themselves—barring acts of God and a rise in the hotel rates—at the Pebbly Point House once again, it is doubtful if she would be able to pull herself together for the journey home.
Mr. and Mrs. Grew do not by any means imply that every visitor to the Pebbly Point House gets as much out of it as they do. It all comes down to a question of getting in with the right set, that impeccable group picturesquely summed up by the Grews in the phrase “our own crowd.” And, of course, you will find it pretty uphill work attempting to make the social grade at first. But once you get to be one of the boys, the Grews join in reassuring you that “fun” isn’t half the word for it.
You couldn’t ask for anything much fairer than the rates at the Pebbly Point House. The catch to it is that good news like that always gets around pretty quickly, and so the hotel is approximately as exclusive as the subway.

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