Complete Stories (78 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
He is not a constructive humorist, though he is loud in his appreciation of the cuttings-up of Mr. Grew and Mr. Rinse. He expresses his convivial feelings by taking our own crowd right in on the inside with him, and giving it some pretty strong hints on the business outlook. Mr. Eddy, for all his dignity, is a regular little sunbeam in the matter of point of view. He as good as blurts it right out that he considers it little more than a question of time before business takes up its bed and walks. It may require quite a while, he says in all fairness, or again, it may not. And he suggests, less in words than in manner, that it would not be a bad notion for the members of our own crowd to make their plans accordingly.
Mr. Grew and Mr. Rinse are the twin lives of the party. Mr. Grew is the more spontaneous comedian, great at impromptu cracks and catch-as-catch-can punning. Mr. Rinse has a number of specialties, including an impersonation of “Dinkelspiel on the Telephone,” and a recitation of “How Tony Lose-a da Monk.” He isn’t one to push himself forward and insist on doing his stunts on all occasions, either, like so many of these home entertainers. Sometimes people even have to ask him to do them.
You couldn’t want to see a prettier picture of perfect clubbiness than our own crowd at these Saturday-night meetings. No wonder that the members declare, as each orgy breaks up, that they don’t know when they have had a better time or laughed themselves sicker. In the privacy of their various rooms, later, each couple decides that never in the history of social intercourse has there been a more congenial or an altogether dandier group.
The clubby spirit lasts well over into the next day, when, after a jolly morning on the beach, the ladies troop over to have an afternoon’s golf with their husbands. This makes it considerably easier for the boys to tear themselves away and return home by the evening train.
Naturally, as the season crashes to a close, our own crowd is brim ming with plans for practically incessant reunions all during the winter. Upon the heart of each member are graven the addresses and the telephone numbers of the others. There are promises of daily telephone calls, and of evening gatherings at least twice weekly; the men are to get together about every other day for lunch and the women are to have afternoons of knitting and chat several times during the week.
It will not be, they must mournfully concede, quite the same as being up at the Pebbly Point House, but it will be the immediately next best thing.
And then, when they get back to their several homes, it is just as if all those golden plans went suddenly bad on them. No one seems to be able to say quite why it is. What Mrs. Grew lays it to, and a very good explanation at that, is the way that one thing after another comes up.
When Mrs. Grew first comes home she finds things at the apartment pretty nastily shot up. The curtains have to be hung, the chintz pajamas must be taken off the furniture, there is a bad delay in traffic somewhere in the pipes of the kitchen sink that requires attention, two of the blue dishes have got themselves broken and must be replaced. And, as you can see, it all runs into time.
Then she annually discovers that she has not so much as a single stitch to her back. Naturally, something has to be done to relieve her condition, and Mrs. Grew is just the girl to do it. And you could scarcely ask her to hurry through the assembling of her winter wardrobe.
Hardly can she feel that she is decently clad once more before the winter’s social activities begin breaking out; and, as she often says, outsiders can have but little conception of the time and energy it takes to get Mr. Grew to put on his dinner coat and go out for an evening’s bridge. Then, too, there are the movies to be caught up with, and Mrs. Grew is almost never without a bit of shopping that must be done immediately. So she is amply justified in saying that she really hasn’t a minute that she can lawfully call her own.
Even during this long period of separation it is not as if the other members of our own crowd were not fresh in the memories of the Grews.
Au contraire,
if you’ll pardon my French. They are almost always with them in conversation. In fact the Grews are quite celebrated among their city friends for their informal little travelogues on their adventures at the Pebbly Point House. Whenever they are among those present at a social gathering they contribute to the entertainment of the guests by giving spirited accounts of the unspoiled wholesomeness of the hotel itself, and the perfectly corking times that can be had there—provided, of course, that you belong to the right set.
Au contraire,
if you’ll pardon my French. They are almost always with them in conversation. In fact the Grews are quite celebrated among their city friends for their informal little travelogues on their adventures at the Pebbly Point House. Whenever they are among those present at a social gathering they contribute to the entertainment of the guests by giving spirited accounts of the unspoiled wholesomeness of the hotel itself, and the perfectly corking times that can be had there—provided, of course, that you belong to the right set.
Mrs. Grew’s conscience gives her periodic bad spells, and she frequently remarks to Mr. Grew that she simply must call up the Eddys and the Rinses and have them up to dinner. She even goes to the length of setting dates for the function. First, she will have them when the new hall runner is laid down; then it shall be after she has had her georgette-crêpe dress dyed henna; then as soon as Helga learns how to make decent gravy.
But the first thing you know there it is Thanksgiving, and hardly have they parked the last of the minced turkey before Christmas is upon them.
Mrs. Grew sends cards to the Eddys and the Rinses, and feels a lot better for it. She and Mr. Grew receive from Mr. and Mrs. Rinse the cunningest card with a picture of a little boy and a little girl kissing permanently under the mistletoe, and a highly engraved sheet stating that Mr. and Mrs. Waldemere Newins Eddy extend appropriate greetings.
Finally comes the day when Mrs. Eddy is in town for a smattering of shopping, and Mrs. Grew runs virtually smack into her, right out in broad daylight on Forty-second Street. Her first idea is to turn and run, but she dismisses that as impracticable. She approaches her friend apologetically, fearful that Mrs. Eddy has been so wounded by her neglect that the best she will draw is a cold nod.
But Mrs. Eddy is even at the moment writhing under like pangs of guilt. Both ladies cover their embarrassment with an almost hysterical cordiality, and rush into an embrace, crying in chorus, “My dear, I don’t know what you must think of me! I’ve been meaning and meaning to call you up, but I simply haven’t had a minute!”
Before they part, Mrs. Grew has got it over with, and the Eddys are pledged to come to dinner the very next week. Mrs. Grew also vows to get Mr. and Mrs. Rinse, so that our own crowd may be reunited in full.
When she telephones Mrs. Rinse, Mrs. Grew is not able to protest that she does not know what Mrs. Rinse must think of her before Mrs. Rinse herself has got off the line. It also comes out that Mrs. Rinse’s intention to get in touch with the rest of our own crowd has seldom been off her mind, but what with one thing and another she has absolutely not had a minute in which to go about it.
She cordially accepts the invitation to the reunion, declaring that it will be almost like being up at the Pebbly Point House once again.
But the trick to it is that it isn’t. Before her guests arrive on the big night, Mrs. Grew has a shivery presentiment that the party is going to be a complete dud. She even expresses to Mr. Grew her wish that it were over, which gets no argument out of him.
The fraternal spirit of our own crowd seems to go utterly democratic during the winter. The members, so bubbling with mirth and
camaraderie
on the porch, are curiously diffident and constrained in the Grews’ living room. The boys, in particular, have all the ease of manner of those wanted by the police. The ladies size up one another’s costumes with the cold and wary gaze suggestive of the mien of strange dogs meeting for the first time.
camaraderie
on the porch, are curiously diffident and constrained in the Grews’ living room. The boys, in particular, have all the ease of manner of those wanted by the police. The ladies size up one another’s costumes with the cold and wary gaze suggestive of the mien of strange dogs meeting for the first time.
The crowd’s members even look odd to one another’s unaccustomed eyes. There is something strange, not to say bizarre, about Mrs. Eddy’s silhouette which never was apparent at the Pebbly Point House. There is something just a bit off about her dress, too, and it escapes the attention of neither of the other two ladies that she has evidently not yet got around to taking her jewels out of the safe-deposit vault. Mrs. Rinse, so fluffy and appealing amid rural surroundings, goes, somehow, a little sour in city clothes. The boys, so many glasses of fashion on the hotel porch, have a peculiar look about the collar and the line of the haircut.
Gathered at the dinner table, our own crowd cracks perceptibly under the strain of thinking up something to say. The boys ask one another with great heartiness if they have been getting any golf lately; but as none of them have, that closes that up tight. Mr. Grew tries out a few jokes here and there, but they cause scarcely a ripple. The ladies inquire brightly as to one another’s health during the time they have been separated; but that topic, even with Mrs. Rinse’s recent case of grippe, cannot be stretched out over more than twenty minutes. The snappiest they can do in the line of conversation is to give reports on the plays they have seen and agree on the distressing condition of the weather.
After dinner things go from bad to something terrible. Mr. Grew abandons all effort, and Mr. Eddy sits in impressive silence, breathing not a word of the business situation. Mr. Rinse, cajoled by his hostess, does render “Dinkelspiel at the Telephone” for old sake’s sake; but, away from the salt air, it seems to have lost its tang. Even he gets the idea, and does not give an encore.
Seeing that the party is about to sink into a decline, Mrs. Grew, in a desperate effort, brings out the album with the word “Snapshots” burned into its leather cover. It is crammed with photographs of interesting events at the Pebbly Point House, which ought to do much in the way of bringing up jolly reminiscences. There are those snapped on the beach, slightly groggy in effect owing to too bright a sun, of groups of toweled young ladies drying their hair and mounds of athletic young men stacked in human pyramids. There are the tennis-court groups, with the principal humorist looking cock-eyed at the camera through the mesh of his racquet. There are the views taken on that day when the spirit of carnival was rife, and the men dressed up in women’s clothes and took on the girls at baseball. There are close-ups of the man who has charge of the rowboats—there’s a character!—and of Mr. Armbruster holding aloft a freshly caught snapper, and of the winners in the water sports being presented by Mr. Blatch with suitably engraved silver eye cups.
The guests gather about the album and examine each snapshot dutifully. But when the photographs were taken each family of our own crowd had a set of prints made from the films, so any element of surprise is rather apt to be missing.
Eventually Mrs. Eddy glances at the clock and with an extravagant start of surprise declares they simply must run if they are to catch the 10:40. Mrs. Rinse also is overcome by the flight of time, and the only thing she can do about it is to make plans for immediate departure, explaining that if they don’t make the 10:17 they may have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Mr. Rinse backs her up by remarking that that’s the way it is when you live on Long Island.
Mrs. Grew implores them not to think of going for hours to come, rising as she does so to lead the way to her bedroom for the ladies to get their wraps. It is there settled by Mrs. Eddy that our own crowd must get together the next week at her house. The news is passed on to the boys, who notably refrain from throwing their hats up in the air about it.
On their way to their trains Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Rinse can find but sparing praise for the taste in which the Grews’ apartment is decorated, and they agree that the dessert at dinner was a sharp disappointment to them.
It is somewhat difficult to get Mr. Grew into the spirit of the thing on the day of the Eddys’ dinner, but he eventually listens to reason, and they embark for the Oranges in the evening. Our own crowd, they find, has not turned out in full force for the occasion. That afternoon Mrs. Rinse has telephoned that she is just about devastated at the incident, but an old school friend of hers, whom she hasn’t seen for she doesn’t know how many years, has dropped in to stay with her, and she cannot see any way out but for her and Mr. Rinse to forgo the reunion.
The evening whirls by almost exactly as did the one dedicated to the Grews’ festival, even to the poring over the collection of snapshots. The Grews tear themselves away in time to catch the 9:26 back to town, explaining that they have been up late so much recently. Mrs. Eddy prays them to stay over for another two or three trains, but she is, after all, fairly reasonable about taking no for an answer.
It is while they are waiting at the station that Mrs. Grew announces to her husband that before she’d let herself get as fat as Ethel Eddy she doesn’t know what she would do. Mr. Grew confines himself to asking, purely for the rhetorical effect, why the hell people who live in the suburbs think it’s any treat to you to tramp out there to dinner.
This fête does not entirely clean up our own crowd’s winter schedule. Still another get-together meet is held, this time at the Rinses’. But owing to the roughest kind of luck, the Grews find themselves unable to attend. Mrs. Grew telephones Mrs. Rinse the day before to tell, with a break in her voice, how a man has come on from Mr. Grew’s firm’s Chicago office, and they simply cannot get out of dining with him and his wife. The only thing that consoles her, she adds, is the confidence that Mrs. Rinse understands how those things are.
The crowd’s winter sessions having closed, things get pretty well back to normalcy again, and the days roll by until, as is no more than to be expected, summer comes around. Somehow, the crowd’s spirit of
camaraderie
seems to be closely tied up with the warm weather. Like the stirring of the sap, if you don’t mind something rather radical in the way of a simile, is the feeling of tender warmth for the Eddys and the Rinses that rises in the Grews with the first balmy days of June. As the time approaches for them to leave the city it seems as if they could hardly wait to get up to the Pebbly Point House and join up with the right set once again.
camaraderie
seems to be closely tied up with the warm weather. Like the stirring of the sap, if you don’t mind something rather radical in the way of a simile, is the feeling of tender warmth for the Eddys and the Rinses that rises in the Grews with the first balmy days of June. As the time approaches for them to leave the city it seems as if they could hardly wait to get up to the Pebbly Point House and join up with the right set once again.
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