The Best of Everything (6 page)

"Come on," he said, "111 put you in a taxi."

She kept a foot away from him all the way down the haU and descending in the elevator, and when they were finally on the street. He hailed a taxi and held the door open for her. She cHmbed in as quickly as she could, and with her hand on the inner handle said, "Good night."

"Wait," he said. He handed her two dollar bills, crumpled together. "For the fare. I hope you don't live in the Bronx."

She shook her head.

"Take it." He pressed the money into her hand and she shrank from his touch. "Your books," he said. He had carried the envelope with the four paperback novels in it all the way down in the elevator and she had not noticed because she had deliberately been avoiding looking at him. "Don't forget to read them," he said pleasantly. He tipped his hat, and shut the taxi door. It took her a moment to remember her own address.

The inside of the private, dark taxi was comforting. She pushed the envelope of books to the far side of the seat as if it were a dead animal, and put her face in her hands. Funny . . . she did not feel

like crying again, she did not even feel like shrinking away from the memory of the forbidden, unexpected kiss that had so frightened her. As a matter of fact, now that she was alone and safe, the feeling of the kiss returned, at fixst frightening and then vaguely thrilling and wonderful. Mr. Shalirrmr had kissed her. Mr. Shalimar . . . She should feel resentful, she knew, she should feel angered. But she felt instead the stirring of a new feeling, a kind of romantic intoxication. It warmed her, secretly and a little guiltily now that she had embraced it, all the way home.

Chapter 3

Port Blair, where Caroline Bender lived with her family, is a town situated along the line of the New Haven Railroad and is distinguished by its utter lack of pleasant suburban qualities. Its major industries are a candy factory and a street of small modern bars and small old-fashioned whore houses. In the evenings its population swells with visitors from the snootier neighborhoods, mostly domestic help and chauffeurs from the homes and estates of near-by Greenwich, Scarsdale, Port Chester and Larchmont. The police roam in prowl cars picking up anyone suspicious-looking, and on Monday mornings, especially after such big weekends as July Fourth and Memorial Day, the court is overflowing. In the very center of town there is an eight-block-square oasis of large, beautiful homes, tree-lined streets and jealously guarded privacy, which fifty years ago was the original town of Port Blair. The gin mills, the honky-tonks, the cheap cafes, all came later, at first slowly, and then, as the candy factory was established, rapidly and vigorously, surrounding the old suburban area but never succeeding in choking it off.

The people who live in this eight-square-block area are the doctors, the lawyers, the large business owners and the most prosperous tradespeople of the town. They hide their homes behind tall hedges and send their children away to camp and summer resorts and college. But they always send their children to the Port Blair Public High School, because if they didn't, they would be considered snobs

1799478

and it would be bad for business. Caroline's father was a physician, and he had inherited the large colonial-style house where thev lived, and his practice, from his father. Caroline's mother came from a middle-class family in New York City. She and her husband had met at a college dance when he was attending medical school and she was an undergraduate. Thev went steady immediately, were married as soon as he was graduated, and after his internship they moved to Port Blair. At the time, the new Mrs. Bender was delighted to hve in what seemed to her to be the country, but she soon changed her mind. The narrow life, the small selection of close friends, the ugly little town, depressed her, and she determined that her daughter and young son would end up New Yorkers, as she was, or at least in a better part of Westchester. It was Mrs. Bender who insisted that Caroline go to RadcHffe (to be near Harvard boys) and it was Mrs. Bender who sat up with Caroline night after night to see that she learned her Latin verbs (Caroline's weakest subject) so that she would get a high mark on her college board exams and be accepted. Her son Mark was six years younger than Caroline, so she did not have to do anything about him at present, but she was already worrying and planning secretly to have him break out of the Port Blair High School mold and spend his senior year, at least, at Lawrence-ville. It was not that she was a social climber. It was simply that she considered life in Port Blair a dead-end street to many of the things that made life rewarding and stimulating, and she did not want her children to get to like it. That would have been easy. The younger generation enjoyed life in Port Blair, they had their own friends, their parties, their groping romances. But Mrs. Bender remembered something different and, to her, infinitely more desirable.

Although Mrs. Bender mourned the end of her daughter's engagement to Eddie Harris, it was not for the same reasons Caroline did. She was not a sentimental woman, and because her daughter was beautiful and talented and only twenty years old she was sure that another fiance would appear in due time. What was one Eddie Harris? One college senior looked like another to her, they were aU unformed, you could only guess what their futures would be. It was true that Eddie had a great deal of charm for a boy his age, he was poised, and he knew how to talk to older people as if he really enjoyed it. His musical talent was negligible; he played the piano the way the boys in her day had played the mandolin. She could picture

him better in public relations, perhaps, or in advertising. He came from a good family, he was attractive, and with his education and ambition she would have liked to see him as a husband for Caroline. When he sent Caroline that letter from Europe Mrs. Bender decided immediately that he was immature, flighty and selfish. Her major regret was that Caroline had spent so much time at college with him, when she could have been meeting other desirable boys. It would not be so easy to meet "friends" (her euphemism for "a good catch") in Port Blair after graduation. When Caroline expressed a wish to find a job in New York, Mrs. Bender was proud of her for taking the whole unhappy affair so well. She knew Caroline had no particular career ambitions, but nowadays a girl had to work even if she didn't need the money. You didn't stay home and rot, especially if you lived in a place like Port Blair—and rot was the word, Mrs. Bender said, for what would happen to a girl in Port Blair.

Dr. Bender was a typical small-town doctor, despite the fact that Port Blair was nothing like a typical small town. He liked people, and people liked him, coming to him with their family troubles as well as tlieir physical ailments. He was the kind of man who is more appreciated by his friends than by his family. The women who came to him with their aches and pains, real or imaginary, went away sighing enviously for that lucky Mrs. Bender the doctor's wife. He was such a gentle, giving-in sort of man, and he gave so much of himself to his patients and their silly, tedious problems that he had very little left to give to his family. He never took his son to a football game. He often fell asleep right after dinner, in front of the television set or with a medical magazine in his hands, and then like as not he would be aroused an hour later for an emergency house call. Almost the only girl in town who didn't confide in Dr. Bender was his daughter Caroline. She confided exclusively in her mother, and her mother came to guard this privilege with something that was very like jealousy. It was often, "Your father doesn't know about those things." And Dr. Bender, who loved and respected his wife very much, came to say more and more often, "Ask Mother. She knows," until finally there was no more reason for him to have to say it at all.

When Caroline brought home the manuscript the night of her first day at Fabian, it was her mother she told. And when she read it, and found to her amazement that she did not agree with Amanda Far-

row's comments at all but found the novel to be boring in spite of its facile style, it was her mother she consulted.

"I read this book last night, Mother. Well, a manuscript reaUy. They're probably going to publish it because Miss Farrow said it was wonderful. I read it and I thought it was downright dull. Do you think I'm in the wrong field? I thought I knew about hterature, but this book really put me to sleep. Maybe there's a secret about paperback books."

"You always had good taste" her mother said staunchly. "A book is just a book as far as I can see. Everybody's entitled to his own opinion. I never could stand The Scarlet Letter myself, and that's a classic." This reminded Mrs. Bender of an English Literature course she had taken in college, and what the professor had said to her, and she went oflF into one of her lengthy nostalgic anecdotes about college, which was one of her ways of escaping temporarily from life in Port Blair. Caroline had heard the story before, and many others very much like it, and she finished her breakfast coffee drifting off into her own thoughts.

They would more than likely pubhsh the manuscript-but she thought it was so dreadful! Was it any of her business? But she'd read it. ... The manuscript was due to go next to Mr. Shalimar, the editor-in-chief, and it was she who was supposed to put it on his desk. If she were to type up a comment sheet with her personal opinion of the manuscript, the worst he could do would be to throw it away and tell her to stay in her place. He wouldn't fire her; he would understand the overenthusiasm of a novice on her first job. And she might just possibly be right, or at least worth listening to. Perhaps he would let her read some other manuscripts. With her comment in such complete opposition to Miss Farrow's, she had to know if she was on the right track-otherwise it was aU too bewildering; her editorial hopes, her beginning feeHngs of responsibility toward the company . . .

"I'm late," she said, kissing her mother on the cheek. She took the envelope and headed for the door. "Oh, I forgot. I won't be home for dinner. I'm going to eat with a girl from the oflBce."

"Oh? Someone interesting?"

"I hope so," Caroline said, smiling. "So long."

She was ten minutes early for her train, and she stood on the outdoor platform watching her breath go off in puffs of smoke on the

cold clear air. Up ahead, where the smoker would stop, were the men who commuted every day; very few, however, because most of the men who lived in Port Blair worked in Port Blair. There was Stan Rogers, hung over, leaning against one of the station pillars, his eyes heavy lidded, his face pink and shiny with razor scrape. He had been a year ahead of Caroline at the high school, which made him Eddie Harris' age, and he had married a Port Blair girl right after graduation. They now had four children, the oldest of whom was three and a half. His shoes were so worn and scuffed she could notice it from here, and she recognized his jalopy parked in the station lot as the same one that had so impressed the girls his senior year at the high. And there were the Litchfield sisters, one fat and one thin, who always dressed identically, as if they thought they were twins, or seven years old instead of thirty, and who worked as comptometer operators in an insurance company. She nodded at them and began to stroll in the other direction.

There was someone she didn't expect to see on a commuter train-Mrs. Nature, a friend of her mother's and wife of the local dry-cleaning king. "Clothes Cleaned the Natube Way," their signs read, and people who saw them thought it was some new mysterious and healthful process. Actually, the owner of the shops (there were four) was named Francis P. Nature. He was now one of the wealthiest men in town.

"Caroline! Yoo-hoo!" Mrs. Nature was waving at her. Caroline walked over to her.

"I'm so glad to see you, Caroline. I was going to call you up tonight, but now I won't have to. I took the Hberty of telling a young man to call you up."

"Oh?"

"He used to go out with Francine; oh, not seriously, but just once in a while. She thought he was quite nice." Since Mrs. Nature had married off her only daughter she had mellowed to the extent of sending all her daughter's old beaux to the other single girls in her group. Caroline had never cared much for Francine, an extremely loud and nervous girl, and she was not particularly delighted at the prospect of one of Francine's castoffs.

"His name is Alvin Wiggs," Mrs. Nature went on. "Now, you may hate each other—I don't know, and I never make promises. I always say to the girls: It's only one evening out of your life, and I'm not

sending you a husband. Of course, if it works out, and you do find you're just crazy about each other, Fd be dehghted."

Alvin Wiggs! Caroline thought. Mrs. Alvin Wiggs. God help us.

"Is he attractive?" she asked.

'Tou may think so. Francine thought he was very attractive. I ahvays say looks are the same as anything else, it's a matter of taste. He's going to call you at your office. He might even call you up today, because I gave him your number last night. As I say, I never make promises, and you may hate each other. But I think he's a lovely boy."

"Well, it was very nice of you to think of me," Caroline said politely. It would have been nicer, she was thinking, if Mrs. Nature had asked her first if she wanted anyone to call her up. "What does he do?"

"He's in his family's business," Mrs. Nature said. "He works for his father. They're in the mannequin business."

There was the eight oh five, roaring into the station. As usual, it stopped too far ahead of the station platform and everyone had to run to board it. Caroline and Mrs. Nature ran alongside each other, not really together, not really apart. "Oh, I just hate this train," Mrs. Nature panted. "But I have to go into New York to send some wedding gifts. I can't put it off any longer. So many of my friends' daughters have gotten married."

"I'm going to sit in the smoking car," Caroline said,

"Oh . . . well, I'll see you, then. I can't stand the smoker. Call me up and tell me how you like Alvin."

They parted, waving, and Caroline crept into the last seat in the car, next to the window. She looked out through the dusty, smeared glass, and watched as the station and then the outskirts of Port Blair slipped past. Blind dates . . . She could not decide which was worse, the anticipation or the final actuahty. A year ago, six months ago, she had thought she was through forever with the unholy three of the single girl: loneHness, being unprotected and blind dates. Now it had started again.