Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 587
“All?” Mabel was but the more suspicious. “Funny I never heard you mention any out o’ town cousin of yours by marriage before, Arlene.”
“That so? Might be a good many things I’ve never mentioned, don’t you expect so?”
“I certainly do!” Mabel said in bitter complaint. “I never knew anybody that kept more mysterious with their best friends. You never tell me anything. I bet you got a past that if poor Roy knew all about it the very hair on his head would — —”
“That’ll do, Mabel!” Arlene spoke sharply, and this reference to her husband overspread her face with quick color; but, instantly realizing that her now deeply offended companion must again be placated, she said in a troubled voice, “Excuse me, Mabel; I didn’t mean it. You say I never tell you anything and maybe that’s so — I guess it’s kind of a habit.” She hesitated; but saw that it was necessary to continue her explanation. “Roy never wanted me to go on working at the Griswold after we were married and I wouldn’t of; but those days we just had to have the money. He hated my being there so much that afterwards — well, it’s something we just never talk about. You understand, don’t you? It’s like people that have been through a sickness or something they want to forget and so never mention.”
“You mean Roy can’t stand talking about it?” Mabel asked hungrily. “You mean he still gets sore on account of the sporty fellows that came in there and you — —”
“I mean we don’t talk about it,” Arlene said. “What I don’t talk about with my husband I just as soon not talk about with anybody else, Mabel.”
“Oh, certainly,” Mabel returned, courteous in resentment. Then, pondering, she tried to think of something further with which to fret her tall companion. “Say listen, Arlene; s’pose this good-looking cousin of yours comes to find out some day Gillespie Ives was crazy over her and you choked him off, why, what about that? Aren’t you even going to tell her?”
“No, I’m not.”
“But listen here; he’s Gillespie Ives, and she might think you hadn’t done her much of a favor. I don’t say I expect she’d flop right into a date with him or anything; but when a man like that gets that way, why, I bet she’d certainly at least want to know it. S’pose she finds out — —”
“Well, let her!” Arlene looked bored. “I’m not going to tell her.”
“But why not?”
“Gosh!” Arlene exclaimed. “She’s got a nice husband, and I don’t know her well enough to know what she’d do.”
“You don’t? I thought you said she’s your cousin.”
“By marriage,” Arlene said promptly, and yawned. “Listen, let’s quit talking about this, will you? There’s really nothing to it.”
“Okay.” Mabel’s assent was grudging; she felt that her curiosity had been treated as intrusive, something that happened too often when she was with Arlene. However, she postponed to a better occasion the reprisals natural under the circumstances, and the two friends walked on for almost a block, not talking.
They were nearing home; the yellow of the twilight was left only in the western sky, and the further distances of long, straight Garfield Avenue were obscured in gloom. A voluminous dirty smoke drooped down upon the street from the chimneys of smallish supposedly Spanish, Norman, Italian, Tudor, Georgian and Colonial houses and from the brick apartment buildings and from corner groceries, drug stores, delicatessen shops and shops that were semi-suburban branches of greater establishments downtown. Long ‘buses and longer trolley-cars rolled by crowded with the thrifty who didn’t put themselves to the expense of “all day parking” downtown, and no doubt carrying also some too poor or too economical to support automobiles. But most of the evening home-coming folk who lived along these upper reaches of Garfield Avenue, three miles or more from the thriving city’s center, whizzed by in those ubiquitous vehicles, sedans.
The sedans strove with one another, stole marches on one another, quarreled, edged one another callously into peril, complained of one another and cursed one another. One, a complainer, having passed squawkily by Mrs. Finch and Mrs. Parker, was itself just afterward fiercely upbraided for halting unexpectedly at the curb before an apartment building; and, at the same moment, as if the outcries of the profane sedans heralded the brilliant spectacle, twin straight miles of street lights leaped instantaneously into white radiance.
“There’s Ed,” Mabel said, alluding to the owner of the abused sedan, as he crossed the sidewalk and entered the apartment house. “Of the whole bunch he’s the rottenest driver, easy! They think they got it all over the rest of us ever since they bought that new Pontie. I was going to ask him how Carrie’s cold is; but he’s gone in. I certainly hope she won’t come near me while she’s infectious. Listen, hon, when’s this new couple going to move in?”
Arlene had become absent-minded. “Who?”
“This couple that’s such friends of Roy’s — Foot, didn’t you say their name is? When they going to move in?”
“Oh, the Foots,” Arlene said. “Pretty soon, I guess. Roy’s only a friend of his; he’s never even seen her yet and I just barely know her, myself. He’s a real nice fellow, though, Ernest Foot.”
“Think they’ll do for the bunch, Arlene? Think we’ll want to take ’em in?”
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “She’s awful good-looking. Look, there’s Ola.”
A thin, long-legged schoolgirl, roller-skating on the cement sidewalk, clattered toward the two young women. “He’s home,” the skater said to Arlene. “How about some eats?”
Mabel was glad this application didn’t concern her; she thought it nuisance enough to have to get supper for herself and Art. “Ain’t that a kid all over? Never stop making you do something for ’em from the day they’re born till they get married and give you the go-by for good. Not me!”
Ola, not removing her skates and preceding her mother and Mrs. Finch, clattered into the stone-faced entrance of the eight-storied brick apartment building. The vestibule, paved with black and white tiles, ended in two open glass doors with a glass transom above them, and the transom bore in neat gilt lettering the building’s title, “The Lorenzo”. The owner’s reticence in omitting to state what Lorenzo this namesake implied may have been either modest or uninformed, though certainly he wished to hint enticingly of magnificence. Nor was this wish of his ungratified by various tenants; young Mrs. Finch seldom entered the building without lifting a complacent glance to the name upon the transom.
“The Lorenzo,” she murmured now with pleasure. “I always like to have people notice me turning in here, don’t you, hon? Art says it may be a little old-fashioned, but it’s lots more dignified than those new ones up the Avenue. I expect even your Mr. Gillespie Ives’d think we’re at least a little somebody if he saw we lived here.” She lowered her voice to a suggestive, confidential tone. “You going to tell Roy about him, hon?”
“What!” Arlene was surprised and irritated. “I told you — —”
“Oh, yes,” Mabel said quickly. “I forgot. On account you don’t like to talk about anything that dates back to your old days at the Griswold. I forgot.”
They passed between the glass doors and ascended four stone steps to a corridor, where Ola, still wearing her skates though seriously practising some tap-dancing steps, was awaiting them. Mabel was effusive over the long-legged little girl’s show of talent, and, for the time, made no more mention of Mr. Gillespie Ives. What she injuredly said to herself, however, was, “Thinks she put that over on me!”
III
OLA REMOVED HER skates in the elevator, which was operated by a young mulatto woman whose expression, recognizably habitual, was that of a person cogitating upon something superior but remote. Alternating the languid conveyance of news and audible plyings of chewing-gum, she informed Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Finch that their husbands had lately arrived. “Just carried Mr. Ed Stem up, too,” she added, during the ascent. “Ought to get a hair cut. Hasn’t had one since that last boil.”
“He say how Mrs. Stem’s cold is?” Mabel asked. “She been out to-day, Emma?”
“Not as I’ve saw,” Emma replied. “Heard her kachoo couple times when I been up to the eighth.”
She opened the grilled iron door of the floor she’d just mentioned; the passengers stepped into the corridor, and Emma, chewing with more vigor, descended in brilliance from their sight. Mabel turned to the left, and, laughingly calling, “Olive oil, gals!” to Arlene and Ola, who had gone to the right, she walked thoughtfully to a varnished, brown door at the upper end of the corridor. Between the two upper panels of this door, which was mate to all the other doors in sight, there was a calling-card held by a thumb-tack and engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch”, with “The Lorenzo” added near the left lower corner.
Mabel, being Mrs. Arthur I. Finch and at home, turned the octagonal brass knob of the door and entered a passage so slight in dimensions that five or six steps took her through its other doorway, where she was immediately in possession, so to speak, of almost the whole of her apartment. It was a room somewhat larger than the pinched hallway promised; the carpet was deep green, the ceiling was pale green, and the wallpaper, beginning as green at the white-painted baseboards, altered its tint talentedly at about the level of the eye and finished as increasingly radiant orange at the ceiling. White-painted double doors in one wall seemed to promise a spacious room beyond; but this was misleading, since a double bed now stood on its head, concealed behind these double doors. To the furniture, which was almost identical in all the apartments of the Lorenzo, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch had added a few personal items of their own — a radio cabinet, a red-legged card-table with indigenous brass ash-trays, and two dangerous-looking one-legged “smokers’-stands”, one beside each of the two “double-stuffed” easy-chairs. The Finches also owned, of course, an article not at present in view — a sedan — and upon the sedan they had to pay taxes.
Clinking sounds and the smell of boiling coffee came through the open door of the kitchenette. Mabel called in that direction, “You there, hon?” Not awaiting a response, she continued, “That’s right; you just go ahead and set the nook table, Art. I’ll be back in a minute and do all the rest. Got something funny to tell you later if you’re a good boy.”
She returned to the corridor outside and began to walk toward its other end, passing varnished brown doors, carded like hers and all of them portals to ingeniously compacted dwelling-places inhabited, for the most part, by young or youngish couples not essentially differing from Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch. To Mrs. Finch’s mind, however, three of these doors were incomparably more interesting than the others, since on the other side of these three dwelt members of “the Lorenzo bunch”, that exclusive group centralized on this, the top floor of the Lorenzo.
The bunch preferred the top, feeling themselves there in more ways than one. They lived there, devoting their lives to the enjoyment and the intricate little inflictions of one another’s society; and, of all the various clusters of human beings piled up in the Lorenzo — struggling up or sinking down in the world, and pleasantly unconcerned with the world’s future or past, or with anything at a distance from themselves — the bunch lived in the most unrelaxed intimacy. They might indeed have been upon a little ship, passengers so deeply engaged with one another’s smallest affairs as to be unaware of the vessel’s destination.
Mrs. Finch pushed a pearly disk in a shallow socket beside a door that bore a card engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Rice” and, of course, also “The Lorenzo”. A man’s voice called “Kmin”; she entered a hallway twin to her own and an apartment almost as close kin to hers. An addition to young Mr. and Mrs. Rice’s furniture, however, instantly caught Mrs. Finch’s eye.
“Well, if you aren’t the nervy little copy-cats!” she cried. She first addressed the visible occupant of the apartment, a red-haired young man seemingly more interested in his evening newspaper than in her; then she called more loudly toward the open door of the kitchenette, “Say listen, Lide! Where’d you get the front to imitate I and Art and buy you these brass-and-mahogany smoking-stands?”
Mrs. Rice, black-haired, bright-eyed, button-nosed, slim and vivacious, showed herself briefly in the doorway. “Art and you took out a patent on ’em? Better tell Marcy and Burton they can’t sell any more, huh? How about Art getting those crash pants last summer right the next day after Charlie got his? What’s on your mind, sport? Come on in here; I’ll let you open this can for me while you’re spilling it.”
Mabel went into the kitchenette, and red-haired young Mr. Rice at once paid no attention to his newspaper. The little more than whispered conversation in the kitchenette, reaching his ears as suppressed poignancies of sound merely, let him know there was news afoot more piquant than any he could find in the paper. Emphatic sibilances from Mabel and gloating exclamations from Lida reached him; and continued repetitions of the one word he could plainly distinguish — the pronoun “she” — were not needed to inform him that the two were busy over one of the other ladies of the Lorenzo bunch.
The confidential talk, somewhat hurried, ended with “All under your hat, hon!” spoken archly by Mabel, as she came forth. “You tuck it away, see?”
She was reassured from the kitchenette. “Got you sport! Nerts even to my red-head!”
Mr. Rice was again apparently engrossed in his paper; but Mabel knew better. She gave him a mocking glance, said, “Don’t read too hard! Olive oil, Big Boy!” and departed, having produced within him just the disturbance — annoyance and curiosity mingled — believed by most of the wives in the bunch to be any husband’s proper condition.
“She’s got a front!” he said, after obeying his wife’s summons to the little table in the kitchenette nook. “You’d think Marcy and Burton’d haf to go out of business just so Mabe and Art’d own the only smokers’-stands in town. What was all that she was getting off her chest in here to you about this soup?”
“Soup?” his wife echoed. “What you mean, soup?”
“That’s what she was talking about, wasn’t it?” He tried to speak uninterestedly, but failed; and his facial expression, too, striving to be one of indifference, deceived nobody. “Thought I heard her talking about soup. Was she griping over our getting ours at Marcy and Burton’s because she and Art get theirs there?”
“Soup? Go right on thinking it was all about soup,” young Mrs. Rice said; then deliberately looked impenetrable.
He had to become franker in his questioning, to endure rebuffs and to be told several times that what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. To appetize him the more for the revelation, Mrs. Rice withheld it until they were washing the dishes together; then she told him all that Mabel Finch had told her. Innocently, he avenged himself for what he had been put through.
“Who’s this Mr. Gillespie Ives?” he asked.
Disgusted, Mrs. Rice attacked him. “Always showing you grew up in Hendersville! Once a rube always a rube, ain’t it the truth? Listen, strawstack; Gillespie Boulevard’s named for his family — but what’s the use? You’d never know who’s the goods in this town, not if you read the Sunday Society Section for a hunderd years!”
“Me? I wouldn’t read it once for a hunderd dollars; those people gripe me. What I’d like to know, though, who’s the girl Arlene says was such a looker this bird was after her? Who’d Arlene say she was, Lide?”
“Said some cousin of hers by marriage from out o’ town. Likely! Mabe’s dumb; but she didn’t swallow that.” Mrs. Rice rubbed dishes with a towel and chattered musingly. “Every time I been downtown with Arlene I’d notice if we met some real well-dressed fellow — sometimes maybe even with a white mustache — he’d tip his Fedora and kind of give her the funny eye as we passed him, and say listen, would she look conscious! Usually get out of even telling me his name; just say it was some fellow used to eat sometimes at the Griswold when she was cashier there. I guess Arlene was some sport around this town in those Griswold days. Some sport! Boy!”
“Think so, Lide?”
“Do I? Look at this afternoon. Boy! Roy may be quiet; but if I was her I wouldn’t take many chances on what he’d do. I’d like to know what he’d think about it if somebody told him.”
“I like Arlene,” Charlie said. “I guess everybody does; yet at the same time she always does seem to be holding something out on you.” He looked eager. “Arlene’s a mighty good-looking woman. How much you believe it amounts to, Lide?”
At that, Mrs. Rice thought it high time to sit on him again. “You thinking of starting in to find out on your little own?” she asked, and, the dishes being finished, informed him that she was going up the hall to the Stems’ apartment to see how Carrie’s cold was.
Young Mrs. Rice had no respect either for germs or for the theory that they spread contagions. In the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Edson Stem she sat on the sofa with her head so close to Mrs. Stem’s stricken sinuses that caller and hostess were able to converse in whispers only. Poor Mr. Ed Stem, engaged with after-dinner solitaire, had to postpone knowing what it was all about until Lida Rice had replied to Charlie, over the telephone, that she was coming, they’d be in plenty of time for the second show at the Garfield Avenue and that he’d better sound more polite and keep his shirt on.
Meanwhile, separated from the home life of the Stems by a partition, Arlene Parker sat looking across the center table at her husband. Aided by a meditative cigar, he was studying some figures he’d been writing in a pocket note-book; and he remained unaware of his wife’s thoughtful gaze. Like her, he was long and thin; but, unlike her, he wasn’t handsome. He was dark, a little rugged and gaunt, with a lank, sallow jaw and shadowed friendly eyes; a quiet-seeming man with a look of being both reliable and self-reliant. Young Ola, disposed in acute angles upon the sofa with a technical work upon dancing from the city library, was long-legged and long-armed, like both her parents; but her expression was an exaggeration of her mother’s — Ola appeared to be a very storehouse of severely guarded secrets.
