A Time to Be Born, page 13
Vicky was afraid to ruin this fine impression by a spoken word and her silence spoke so well for her that after a ten-minute monologue on the atom Uncle Rockman left her, repeating the compliment again and again.
6
HE CHIEF PROBLEM IN Ken Saunders’ life for the past three years had been the putting off of tomorrow. Ever since Amanda’s desertion he had devoted himself to not thinking, to taking whatever trains or boats were leaving at whatever station he happened to be. It struck him with some bitterness that at no point in his career had he ever arrived at any station in time for the Grand Orient Express; his voyages were never first class, his destinations never glamorous, his duties never poetic. He was no goodwill spreader in South America, no brace digger for secrets of the Aztec in Mexico;—no, he was merely compiling fruit statistics for an export journal. In Brazil he had no secret mission from the government to investigate the spy rings and unmask the Nazi agents—he was pamphleteer for a commercial hotel. In China he saw the war but nary a Soong sister, for his undistinguished duties there were in connection with a secondhand typewriting concern, and his social contacts more bibulous than political. This definite marking time in the career of such a promising journalist as Mr. Saunders had its penalties, for the Tomorrow he had postponed was bigger and blacker for the postponement. Saunders had usually pictured Tomorrow armed with a large club crouching behind night’s corner ready to pounce, and the greedy ogre was all the more bloodthirsty for the delay. There was Tomorrow waiting at the boat for him the instant he landed back in New York. Serious work to be taken up again, and a benumbed heart brought properly back to the pain of living. You would have thought, since travel is educational, that three years of it would have brought the young man to a better understanding of life’s burdens, but the truth was he had even less heart for them than before. The ambition to write novels seemed the silliest work in the world for a grown man, with war on every side; and the postures necessary for the new type of journalist were quite out of his nature. The fact that Amanda had made such a success of both these careers did not make them any more appealing to him, so that he ended up as Assistant Home Editor for no less a periodical than Peabody’s. Peabody’s had only recently taken an interest in the Home, but since the world of fashion seemed cracking up, smart editors were frantically trying to substitute interest in the hearth for interest in the pencil silhouette. Mr. Saunders, having been raised in an Oklahoma boarding house and being singularly uninformed on the mechanical and decorative equipment of any home, had at least a novel approach to his task and the recommendation of his friend Dennis Orphen. It was well paying and left his mind free for the friendly discussions of the tavern and resulting erudite arguments on international affairs. To tell the truth, drink seemed the only protection against the lacerations of his mind, now that he was back in New York, his foot rocking away once more on the much touted ladder of success. At this time the famous ladder was propped against nothing and led nowhere, and anyone foolish enough to make the world his oyster was courting ptomaine; yet the ladder tradition was still observed, and until the flames reached them young people were still found going through the motions of climbing.
Saunders was thirty-three, old enough to have been disappointed a thousand times, but still young enough to be surprised. He knew the world was filled with lies but he was always expecting the truth to pop up triumphant; its delay angered but did not disillusion him. In his hotel rooms he had the rejected manuscripts of the books he had written after his first eager, rather bad little novel. He and Amanda used to talk about how bad it was and how astonishing its success. Then they talked about how good the rejected books were and how astonishing their rejection. They talked, went to bed, argued, took each other for granted, then out of a blue sky Amanda married Julian Evans. Then Ken lost his job on a morning paper. Then he tried in vain to sell his old stories. Then he wrote a play that did not sell. Then he wrote a series of articles for a magazine that promptly went bankrupt. Then he looked out his hotel window and saw, as the final blow, that there was no use jumping, because a bare ten feet below was a roof for sunbathers from MacKinney’s Turkish Bath House. Suicide there was impossible and murder—for he would have flattened a few toasting fat men—was not to his fancy. So his wanderings began, and the not thinking. Back in New York, every ache was back with compound interest.
Seeing Amanda was worse than not seeing her. Everything in his nature recoiled from what she now represented. He resented the years he had mistaken her cool indifference for restraint. Her life seemed monstrous to him, and the fact that he was still in love with her was as frightening to him as if he found himself in bed with General Motors. Failure frightened him, looming up all the sharper by Amanda’s success. He seldom slept. He wondered if he was through. He was thirty-three. Sometimes people were through at thirty-three. Thirty even. They became old drunks. The world was full of old drunken failures. Has-beens. Warnings. Men who didn’t realize they were never any good anyway—just lucky enough to hold a job a few years and then—zoom! He, at least, had been wise enough to take whatever job had come up, a thought that was at least a comfort on payday no matter how unpleasant such compromises were the rest of the week. But, unless he went to bed tight, he stared at the ceiling all night, smoking cigarettes, waiting for Tomorrow to spring.
What did other men do whose lives suddenly came apart like a cheap ukulele? What did they do when they realized that perhaps there would be no second chance, no reconsidering, no retrieving? What did they do when the hopes that push the wheel stopped, when magic failed, and fear alone remained, rusting the soul; when the days rattled off like dried beans with no native juice, no hope of flavor; when fears, batted out the door like flies, left only to return by window? What did other men do, suspecting that what was for them had been served—no further helping, no more love, no more triumph; for them labor without joy or profit, for them a passport to nowhere, free ticket to the grim consolations of Age? Was it true, then, that this world was filled with men and women merely marking time before their cemetery? When did courage’s lease expire, was there no renewal possible? What specialist in mediocrity determined the prizewinners and ruled what measure of banality was required for success? These were the thoughts that brightened Ken’s nights, and since they were very similar to the dark queries that clustered around Vicky Haven’s pillow, it was the most natural thing in the world for them, these two frightened people, to have the merriest lunches together in the Peabody Building. Since neither Ken nor Vicky was the sort to reveal private problems, each found the other most comforting, and almost disgustingly carefree.
“You’re even beginning to look like a Peabody front girl,” Ken accused her, one noon at Chez Jean. “Have you done something to yourself or is it just that propinquity has opened my eyes?”
Vicky pretended this question was merely academic and shrugged her shoulders.
“I mean it,” Ken insisted, frowning at her. “I ask you out because Miss Finkelstein tells me you’re the type girl who’s very deep. I try to talk to you about life in the large and all you do is waggle your little peepers and look seductive.”
“I wasn’t trying to look seductive,” Vicky maintained. “I was only trying to look interested. I’m the type girl that tries to give everything to what the gentleman is saying. Later I mull it over in my mind and can’t make head nor tail of it.”
Ken continued to study her in some perplexity.
“What have you done? Either you’re fatter or thinner or you’ve had your hair dyed. It’s always something like that when women change.”
“Not dyed. Highlighted is the new word,” said Vicky. “Can’t I have any secrets? It’s this hat, too. And new clothes. Now I spend every cent on my back.”
“A fine thing in times like these,” rebuked Ken.
“It gives me all the more to donate to Bundles for Britain,” said Vicky stoutly. “Nancy Elroy told me so. And then I charge everything because, with inflation, money won’t be worth anything anyway. So that leaves me cash for massages and rhumba lessons and perfume that drives men mad.”
Ken looked at her with unmistakable pleasure.
“If you were twenty years younger I’d make a play for you, no fooling,” he admitted.
“I wasn’t always the girl that I am now,” Vicky warned him. “I was fat and freckled and bald. Typhoid. I was crazy about the boys and I let them cheat off my quiz papers. I giggled all the time, too.”
“Youth is all I demand of a woman,” said Ken. “Too bad you’re too late to get me. I would have been your man. Have dinner with me.”
It was one thing to go out to lunch with someone from your office, man or woman, and it was quite another to have anyone desire these contacts prolonged into the private hours after five. Vicky was as delighted as she had been when Nancy Elroy had promoted her to the lofty level of personal and family friend. Mr. Saunders had never made any overtures toward her outside the office, beyond escorting her home from the occasional parties to which Amanda invited them. Vicky alone got a secret kick out of Julian’s taking for granted that Ken was her beau, but Mr. Saunders did not seem to realize this attitude of Julian’s. The couple was plainly enough linked together by being the two nobodies in a drawing room of notables, all uttering notable remarks. Taking her home, Saunders usually made caustic comments on the group or else was moodily silent; in either case left her at her door most impersonally. Vicky might have thought it odd she was never asked to the Evanses’ without Ken, except for the fact that she liked that part about the evening the best, counting on him for support.
Today, after his offer, she was suddenly emboldened to make an advance herself. She had secretly thought of doing so, ever since she first met him, but his manner, genial but impersonal, had discouraged her, heretofore. Ethel Carey had wired that she was coming to New York that day. What fun it would be to exhibit apartment and new man to friend from home all in same blow!
“Why don’t you come to my apartment?” she now invited him. “I’ll make a curry. Besides I have a friend from home coming.”
Mr. Saunders did not seem at all appalled at the brazenness of the suggestion. He even declared that he personally would make the rice. He was such a superb ricemaker, he stated, that he could, if necessary, make rice for fifty to a hundred guests at the drop of a hat. This offer decided Vicky to make a real party of it. She would invite Nancy Elroy and her fiancé. She was so puffed up at the prospect of her first social undertaking, that it was all she could do to keep from inviting the entire Peabody staff, from Mr. Peabody right down to Irving Finkelstein. She was even more set up when Ken walked down the corridor to visit her office, on the way back from lunch.
There Miss Finkelstein, in a brand new sleek Dorothy Lamour hairdo and a great deal of clanking jewelry to which she referred as “Spanish Barbaric,” gave Mr. Saunders a gracious nod. Vicky saw that her own stock had risen with her secretary because of being lunched by a young male member of the staff. Even the front office girls and models seldom had Big Dates at noon; they clustered around the drugstore lunch counter downstairs in the building, feasting on tuna fish sandwiches and malties.
“Someone has been trying to get you on this telephone, Mr. Saunders,” Miss Finkelstein informed him, and handed him the receiver.
Vicky hung up her hat and combed her hair. She would send Irving out for supplies, she decided, and then carry them home herself in a taxi. She would order some wine—but before that she must send Miss Finkelstein up to Nancy’s desk with the invitation to dinner. This would be a big night, maybe the real beginning. And then Vicky saw that Kenneth was stammering over the telephone looking embarrassed.
“It’s Amanda,” he said to Vicky. “She wants you.”
Very well, she would invite Amanda, too. Julian, Miss Bemel—anybody.
“Darling,” Amanda rushed to speak before Vicky could begin. “Ken tells me he had some sort of tentative engagement with you tonight. The thing is, I want you both here, Julian has to fly to Washington and there will just be three or four of us.”
“But I can’t,” Vicky said. “Ethel Carey’s coming for dinner, and perhaps some other people.”
There was a shocked pause.
“You can get out of that,” Amanda said curtly. “Simply leave a note for Ethel.”
If she’d said to bring Ethel, too, it would have been easier, Vicky afterward reflected, but Amanda was taking no chances on old friends outside of Vicky.
“I’m sure Ken would rather come here,” Amanda said, with a short laugh. “Your cooking may be better than my Pedro’s, but I swear your liquor isn’t, and that’s what counts with Mr. Saunders. So, just leave a note for Ethel and I’ll see you around eight.”
“But I haven’t seen Ethel for months,” Vicky protested. “No, Amanda, I’m sorry.
“We might as well go,” Ken murmured.
This decided Vicky. Whatever she had to offer was nothing in the face of a royal command from Amanda, in Mr. Saunders’ eyes. Very well, let him go there. But that was no reason for letting Ethel down.
“I’m sure I’d like to, Amanda,” Vicky continued carefully. “Ken will probably come up, but I couldn’t possibly.”
“Oh, the hell with Ethel Carey!” Amanda’s voice was impatient, almost shrill. “There isn’t a reason in the world you can’t do me this little favor. You don’t need to go through life being kind to Lakeville!”
Vicky was puzzled by being wanted so much, but she was adamant. If Amanda let down old friends, she, Vicky, didn’t have to. Amanda was genuinely angry with her for being so stubborn, and after she hung up Vicky saw that Ken Saunders was looking silently at the floor with an expression she didn’t understand, but which must mean disappointment. He must have thought she would actually hold him to their engagement, so she quickly set him right.
“I’ll ask you another night,” she said, trying to sound very cheerful. “You go up to Amanda’s.”
He stood there, lighting a cigarette, looking as if he was about to say something. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “All right,” he said. “We’ll make ours some other time.”
Miss Finkelstein, gliding back in, looked sharply from one to the other. Silent partings always looked like romance, but whatever romance there was in this scene must have ended unsatisfactorily, for Miss Finkelstein’s keen eyes did not miss the fact that Vicky was dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief and trying to hide her face by picking up invisible matters from the floor.
“Miss Haven!” Miss Finkelstein exclaimed, in awe. “Did something happen? Did he—Miss Haven, you’re not crying!”
Vicky took a firm grip on herself.
“Hay fever,” she explained. “I always get it this time of year. I think it’s the martinis.”
With the baffling remark she blew her nose so many times you would have thought she had to test the instrument thoroughly before permitting it to leave the factory.
2
NO SOONER had Ken Saunders disappointed her and Amanda gotten mad than Vicky knew that there would be more grief to come. Some people’s nerves react to approaching evil or approaching beneficence as to temperature changes. They have a sense at night of danger rolling up like rain clouds, a sense, too, when the danger has passed. Something clutches the heart, a cold wind blows by, the thing is about to strike. This faculty is not connected with the intellect nor is it a supernatural power, but a gift as simple as a good sense of smell.
“There will be a letter,” Vicky prophesied gloomily as she walked home that night. “Or maybe it will be a telephone call, somebody at the door.”
Passing a gypsy tearoom she was almost tempted to go in and try to draw mysterious information from the fortune-teller, but she remembered that the last time she had done this, the gypsy had foretold an unpleasantness that had immediately come true. No use running out to meet trouble. A gypsy should be required to be wrong, or else she became an affront to science.
If she was to lose her job such news would surely have reached her at the office before she left, so it could scarcely be that. At the newsstand on her corner, Vicky surrendered to an Astrology magazine, and rather guiltily looked up Virgo’s chances for today and tomorrow. Today, advised the journal, Virgo was under Saturn. Up till 1:30 P.M. she should have traveled, concluded arrangements to stabilize finances, collected outstanding debts, sold property, settled domestic issues, challenged life, increased earning power, made personal contacts; 1:30 to midnight should be devoted to getting at basic facts, postponing journeys, forming ideas, making personal adjustments and saving money. Tomorrow, under Neptune, she was to travel, write, speak her mind freely, take a long walk, and avoid gambling. After 1:30 journeys should again be avoided, investments made, old debts collected, responsibilities accepted and temper held in check.
Reeling at the generosity of the advice given, Vicky hastily replaced the magazine on the rack. Evidently, to please the stars, millions of Virgos, if that was their plural term, were racing around on journeys all A.M. and trying to get back to base in time to postpone any P.M. journeys. Her own muddled hunches were far more reliable, she decided, and since whatever was to be was bound to be bad from the chilly feeling down her spine, she might as well go straight home and get it over.
No mail in the mailbox, however. The janitor denied that any telegram had been delivered. But no sooner had she gotten in her apartment than the telephone rang and there was mischief itself on the other end of the wire. It was Ethel Carey, just arrived in New York.
“Come right up, dear.” Vicky managed to sound convincingly happy over the telephone. “I can’t wait to see you.”
There was a pregnant pause and then the blow fell.
“Vicky, I can’t.” A sigh. “Darling, can you stand some bad news?”
So this was where it was coming from.
“That’s what I live for,” Vicky encouraged her.
