Read The Old Man and Me Online
Authors: Elaine Dundy
The Old Man and Me (9 page)
“Well, I’m glad we went,” said Dody, “I didn’t want to at first but I learned a lot.”
“You too? Funny. That’s what I was thinking.”
“It didn’t come over me until almost the end. I kept wondering: what’s she done to make him behave in such a beastly way towards her? I mean, what’s she done wrong originally? Why should she always get the dirty end of the stick?”
“I don’t think I’m following you.”
“And do you know what I decided? It’s because she kept forgiving him all the time. So then, of course, he thinks he really hasn’t done anything wrong so he can go right on doing it. It’s a lesson for us all, isn’t it? You keep on being tolerant and looking the other way and patching things up and suddenly you get to be her age and there you are out on a limb and you’ve lost him anyway.”
“Dody, what are you talking about? Bardot must be all of twenty-two.”
“Bardot? Who said anything about Bardot?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if we saw the same movie. Who do you mean?”
“His wife, of course, you know, Jean Gabin’s wife who kept on being so tolerant of him all the while he was making such an ass of himself over what’s-her-name.”
Would it never end?
“Now, Dody, we’ve been through all that,” I murmured for maybe the hundredth time. I leant forward yawning. I bent down to pick up my shoes. The slightest effort was making me dizzy. It was one o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted. I rose and stretched and loosened the belt and zipper of my dress and rubbed my waist with relief. My clothes were itching and binding me, my skirt pasted to my body in lumpy bunches from having been sat in for so long.
“To bed...to bed...” A great roar of a yawn overtook my words and almost dislocated my jaw. “We’ll figure it all out in the morning. I’m finished, you hear? Beat. Bushed. Fatigued out of my skull.”
Dody was sitting bolt upright, taut and alert, crisis written all over her face. “It’s now or never,” she insisted in a trembly voice, shaking her head stubbornly. “What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
”
I knew that pain was making her selfish but at that moment I really hated her. I was so bored. I was so bored with being bored. I sank back into the damp, crumpled sofa and tried again, hoping that the loosening of my clothes might send the blood circulating through my system sufficiently to force my mind down new channels. How many women, I wondered, are sitting up this way at this very moment, all over the world, and asking each other this very question?
A new thought: What did my friends back home do when they got divorced? Not many of them had been married long enough to get divorced. However, first things first:
What did they do?
O.K. One of them had gotten a job, and one of them had joined an exercise class. The third went back to school.
“You could get a job.”
No she couldn’t, she assured me, recoiling at the thought. A job: how could she in her present state? She’d fall to pieces all over the place. And besides, what did she know? What could she do? She was completely unskilled, completely untrained. The more she thought about it the more it confirmed her worst fears. She was fit for nothing. Absolutely nothing but running a house for her erratic husband and trotting along after him. And now, evidently, she wasn’t even fit for that. She might as well kill herself.
“Or you could go to exercise classes,” I broke in quickly before we slid back into the mire.
This struck her as even more senseless. Whatever for? she wanted to know. What would that do?
“Well then, what about some kind of school?” I played my last card without much hope and started to unhook my garter belt under my shirt and strip off my stockings preparatory to flight. I had done all I could; I could do no more.
Dody rushed joyfully to my side hugging me and skipping about. I was a genius, she knew it. She knew I’d come through. School! To think she’d never thought of it herself. That was exactly what she’d been doing when she’d first met Scotty. She’d been in the middle of her third term at Art School and having a marvellous time too, when he came along. She should never have quit. None of this would have happened if she had. But never mind, she was going to be philosophical. It wasn’t too late—thanks to me. She’d enroll again. Start life all over again. And she wouldn’t feel silly doing it, either. That was the best part because all kinds of people went to that Art School, all kinds, and all ages, and oh, heavens! Look what time it was! And she must rush off to bed now so as to get up bright and early and go down there and register first thing in the morning.
And goodnight, goodnight. And pleasant dreams. And sleep tight.
I went to my room and stripped off the rest of my clothes, flung on my pyjamas and got into bed. The night began in earnest. I lay staring at the wall. Where once had crouched the toy animals of my childhood there danced kaleidoscopic images of the day. Suddenly the kaleidoscope gave a turn, a wrench, flipped over and there hidden under the bits of coloured-paper conversation was my pain: that moment at the Antique Fair when, brooch pinned to my shoulder, I had wheeled around to confront
myself in the mirror. Something C. D. had said. A rich man’s darling.
He had been right about me. I had been a rich man’s darling, all right. A very rich man’s very darling. And very cherished.
And indulged. And cosseted. And adored. But only until I was twelve.
“Because you can’t love her and love me too!” I screamed at my father. I, Betsy Lou Saegessor...Saegessor. Yes. None other than the step-daughter of Pauly who had married my father and then, when he died, went on to marry C. D. McKee. Surprised you didn’t I? Or had you guessed already? I know. What a way to tell a story! But it can’t be helped. It has to be told the way it happened. And it didn’t happen “at the beginning” (and Christ, if I had begun at the beginning I’d still be there, wallowing in self-pity, poor motherless child), it happened when I met C. D. And at first it didn’t look as if I ever would, and then finally I did, and then this, and that, and the other, and here I was now lying in bed wide awake and remembering all that terrible time of long ago when I’d stood at the window crying bitterly, tears streaking down my face, looking down from the great height of our brand-new apartment, all the way down the length of Park Avenue, looking down while the lights of the cars flashed and flickered past and stuck pins into my throbbing head and aching eyes, and I was screaming at Poppie, “Because you can’t love her and love me too!”
Because he was going to marry her, he said.
I looked back into the window seeing nothing any more, blinded by my fright. To have reached the end of my life so young. To have successfully snatched Poppie from the husband-hunting, fortune-chasing matrons of Scarsdale, uprooted everything, hearth, home, worldly goods, single-handed with one gigantic tornado-like effort. To have successfully deposited him, in safety, in New York, only to lose him there.
“You can’t marry her. You can’t. I won’t let you. I’ll run away for ever and you’ll never see me again and you’ll see. You’ll be sorry. It isn’t fair,
it isn’t fair
.” The rhythmic crescendo upon crescendo, over and over again. Facing him now. Showing him what he was doing to me, guts, gizzards, innards, everything, the red raw soreness of my pain. And what was he doing, my Poppie, to answer all this? What was he doing to console or to explain? There is no memory of it. Only his closed face and myself betrayed. And that whole year in New York—a whole year of betrayal.
I leaned my head against the icy window-pane (did he even say, Come away from that window, did he even care?). To have foreseen it for a whole year. To have died every day, each minute with its knowledge and still know that the ultimate death would be worse. To use every weapon known to ingenuity and to have them break one by one in my hands while my enemy looked on and smiled. In my mind I saw my dead body floating in the river and heard her laughter floating above, on top of the water, in the air, everywhere triumphant.
To have seen it coming before they did. To have watched it. To have inadvertently caused it to happen. Now to have to live with it every second of the time.
To be thrown aside. Shut out. He knew I had no friends like others. No one to turn to. No sisters, brothers, no mother who died when I was seven. No family, only him. Alone and shut out. Always, from now on.
To have walked into his office from the first day there in New York and seen her, the new secretary, not young but small,
petite
(that horrid word). A redhead. Bright red hair, whitish around the edges, white eyelashes and pale eyebrows pencilled in brown. A redhead’s skin, dead white. A hateful perky look. Hard blue eyes and an efficient mouth. A hard pert little pointed nose. Even her clothes—a trim wool dress with a perky little bow, neat and shrewd. Experienced. “I’ve worked for X and for X and for X.” All references excellent. Candid: “My last salary was such-and-such but I left because I felt I was worth more.” She knew she was worth more. She’d worked all her life for what she’d got. Industrious. A little girl from the wrong side of some Middle-Western tracks. “I have my mother to support back home.” Appealing? Hardly. Ruled by economics. All figured out. Not ambitious so much as efficient. Neat stacks of safe investments, small steady dividends. At least thirty, but that little-girl look in spite of it. (Why, I seemed to tower over her and I was only twelve.) Smallness, perkiness, unworldliness. Naïve. Her gauche, un-Society ways. All of which was supposed to blind us to the fact that the minute she set foot in his office she was out to catch Poppie, catch him and trap him. But no, it was me—irony of all—poor little motherless me, so lost, so all alone in the world, so always hanging around the office after school for want of anything else to do, she pretended, that first caught her sympathy, made it “not just a job,” interested her in “us.”
If only I’d
not
been there all the time on guard—would she have taken longer to discover he was a widower and available, longer to figure out he had no one else in mind? But I had to be there whenever I could. I had to watch. And yet I couldn’t stop her. For she was capable of going after what she wanted—and capable of getting it. And finally, in the end, nature told her exactly how she would triumph over me: she had age on her side. Age against my need, age against my love, age against the past, against everything. It was bitter, irrevocable. It had happened.
And I had seen from the beginning that dealing with Pauly was going to be different from dealing with the others. It was a whole different thing. How could I make Poppie see how awful she was when she didn’t actually do anything awful? How shallow and limited and hum-drum she was when these were the very qualities that so admirably fitted her for the job of being his secretary? How could I make him see how her presence was going to spoil everything for US, now that the fun was beginning, now that Poppie was rich, getting richer all the time, spoil all our plans for the thrills and adventures that lay before us, my father and I, when her presence was so unobtrusive?
With the others it had been easy, poor things, how easy it had been. All I had to do was make them criticize me. And since nothing is simpler for an adolescent, no matter how well-behaved, than to provoke the criticism of a Suburban Woman, it could be accomplished with the minimum effort. They came, these women, with their pre-formed patterns of behaviour, with their pre-formed social sets, very often with their pre-formed families, and with their pre-formed theories of bringing up children, and one by one they would fall into the trap. “Should she be allowed—?” They invariably prefaced their fatal mistakes with these four words. “Should she be allowed to stay up so late?” Or, “do her homework with the radio on?” or, “eat this food?” Or, “read that book?” Or, “play outdoors after dark?” It never failed. They couldn’t keep their hands off me. They poked and poked until they found something; they were trying to be helpful. They might by-pass all the obvious “Should she’s” only to get caught up in some point of infinitesimal triviality (“Should she be allowed,” asked one, “to wash her hair before going to bed?”). They rose to bait, and quick as a flash we would exchange amused glances, Poppie and I, and they were hooked, poor fish, they were cooked; their day was over. For what right had they to presume to criticize the upbringing of a child as healthy and happy as I; who was good in school, and liked by all, and who, moreover, was the apple of her father’s eye? None, of course. They were nothing but bossy busy-bodies who would make our lives intolerable if allowed to intrude.
But Pauly, as I say, was different. Never having lived in a “society” or a “set,” never having been married, she couldn’t presume; and therefore she was immune to the temptation. Besides, it wasn’t in her nature. She was outside that. She was outside without being an outcast. She fitted in nowhere. She was a white-collar girl but she was not a career woman. She was in a state of flux.
What could I say against her? She was satisfactory.
Coming at the end of a long line of lazy, ill-tempered, slow-witted incompetents who couldn’t grasp even the basic fundamentals of an expanding business, let alone one that was growing in leaps and bounds, Poppie was more than satisfied with her. She was a definite asset. At that time he was opening his chain of stores all over the country. She could be trusted with the details as if she was like a partner, but she was never like a partner, she never wanted to be. She simply executed his orders. She never thought for herself. That was what was so irritating about her. I mean she had a smallness of spirit, a lack of interest in things in general. As far as I could make out she never thought about anything—except the business. And him, of course. Oh yes, him. That was what she was
really
thinking about all the time but the business was the camouflage and it paid off. There was no doubt about it, she was very good for the business. Poppie was delighted. “My secretary will handle that,” “My secretary will see that it all goes smoothly,” he would say, each time with increasing satisfaction. My secretary. He never called her Miss Plant—and he never called her Pauly to my face. I saw that he didn’t dare. And yet there she was, this ordinary, everyday little person, penetrating further and further into every corner of our lives just when Poppie and I, alone, should have been sailing to the height of our glory.