A Time to Be Born, page 24
“Really?” the guest was bound to exclaim. “Oh, do tell us about her! What a woman!”
There was nothing to do but to smile desperate assent or else to make a fool of her hostess by saying this great friendship was no more.
Once Vicky thought wildly of saving Mrs. Elroy the trouble of introduction by pouncing on each guest as they entered and saying, “How do you do? I’m a personal friend of Amanda Evans. Isn’t that perfectly wonderful of me?” Then let Mrs. Elroy face the embarrassment! Well, she must either stay away from the Elroys from now on, or else accept the character they gave her. Not such a flattering character, at that. Mrs. Elroy was saying, in essence, “Here is a young woman of no consequence as you can readily see. But she has justified her existence and her presence in our home by the virtue of personal acquaintance with the great lady of our time, Amanda Evans. If there is any other charm to be found in Miss Haven greater than this one we mention, we have failed to perceive it.”
Miss Finkelstein all over, Vicky thought savagely. She began to yearn for Uncle Rockman’s kindly red face, but Uncle plainly would have none of the younger set collected by Nancy and Tuffy.
“He’ll come in for supper, though,” Tuffy answered Vicky’s inquiry. “He won’t come to any of these prewedding parties and besides he can’t stand Nancy’s beau. God, who can?”
“I’ll betcha he gives Nancy a whacking good check for a wedding present,” mused young Plung, thoughtfully fondling his fragile beard.
Tuffy laughed raucously.
“Don’t be an idiot, Plung. It if wasn’t for that wedding check Nancy would call the whole thing off in a minute. The man’s a complete drip! But Nancy’s passed up too many chances already, and besides she can’t hold anybody very long.”
It was a fact that although Nancy had had many men fall for her violently at first sight, she had no holdovers, either among beaux or women friends. She took up with people quickly and was immediately dissatisfied, feeling vaguely cheated. She brushed them off with such callous rudeness there could be little fondness left for her, then snatched hungrily at some new casual acquaintance and repeated the whole process. She was like a child taking one greedy bite from every bonbon in the box, restlessly searching for some unpredictable sensation, spoiling the lot for herself and for others.
“Old Nancy’s pretty fickle all right,” agreed Plung wisely.
Vicky felt called upon to make some defense of her friend.
“I think you’re unfair to Nancy,” she began, but Tuffy brushed aside this protestation.
“Oh, she and Mama hang on to you because you’ve started Uncle Rockman coming to the house again. He always asks first if you’re coming, so Nancy and Mama ask you to keep him in good humor.”
“You sure need Uncle Rockman,” chuckled young Plung.
At that moment Nancy spied the little group in the corner and hurried over.
“Vicky, don’t run away right after supper, because Harry and I are going out for a little nightcap. You’ll come along, won’t you, angel?”
Chaperoning an engaged couple was not the most fun in the world, or being an extra woman, but Vicky was touched by this evidence of Nancy’s affection.
“Don’t do it,” Tuffy nudged her. “Why should you be stuck with him just because Nancy has to be?”
This remark irritated Nancy so much that she rushed to her mother immediately, imploring her to make Tuffy behave at parties, for she ruined everything by her talk and bad manners and insinuations about Harry.
“It’s not that I don’t like Harry, Mother,” Nancy said plaintively. “It’s just that we don’t have the same interests, Mother. He’s a terrible bore, but Tuffy has no right saying so.”
Mrs. Elroy looked alarmed, and glanced hastily around to see if such naughty words had been heard in the clamor of the party.
“Nancy, you mustn’t say such things about your fiancé!” she exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Not until you’re married!”
“At least Vicky will come along with us tonight,” Nancy sighed, for the only possible way to get through the evenings with Harry was to have an affair with him or have a sweet, harmless person like Vicky along to share the burden of boredom. An affair was out of the question, for no matter how free a girl might be with other men she had certain moral scruples about sleeping with the man she intended to marry. She had managed to get through the courtship period by dragging Harry to Twenty-One or the Stork Club or the many other places Manhattan provides for couples who hate to be alone together. In such noisy surroundings it was possible to sit for hours with no more conversational expenditure than a word to the waiter or the little grunts necessary to a game of gin rummy. Occasionally they would see another bride-and-groom-to-be showing open affection for each other and this was a cue for Harry and Nancy, too, to hold hands. Neither one had close friends to join them, and it made Nancy cross to find that people left an engaged couple alone as if the condition was dangerously contagious.
There was really nothing wrong with Harry’s manners or looks, and that was against him from the start, for having nothing offensive about him was an offense in itself. He had a clean, round face with neat little features and neat little ears and brows. He took care that his hands were nicely kept with lotions and immaculate manicures, since hands were so important in card playing. No over-fragrant fumes rose from his sleek brown hair, and his toilet water had only a tang of blameless pine about it. Ears and nose were free of vagabond hirsutae, and his teeth were as faultless as if they were false. As for his clothes they were purchased at the proper places and unobtrusive, for Harry was convinced that everything conspicuous was bad taste and everything inconspicuous good taste. His voice was pitched to a soothing monotone, and his language suspiciously genteel. You would have thought from his careful diction and proper grammar that he had never been to college at all, but had been brought up by some menial with a vulgar reverence for the dictionary. He said “Agreed!” and “Surely!” and “in that regard,” and “aren’t I?” If he witnessed some restaurant brawl he was pained. “You just don’t do those things, you know!” he would say. “You just don’t!” and Nancy sighed with annoyance, because Fate had sent her a would-be gentleman in the season all the girls were marrying roughnecks!
“After the wedding it won’t be so bad around here, maybe,” Tuffy said hopefully. “Mama and Nancy are trying to make Harry join the Canadian Air Force so he can have his uniform in time for the wedding. He won’t look so sappy, then. And it will give Nancy a chance to fly back and forth to Canada to visit him the way the other girls are doing. Plungy, why don’t you do that? Nancy’ll burn up if I get a chance like that too.”
Mr. Plung seemed extremely infantile to be of any value as a warrior, but for that matter so did all the other little fellows, barely in long trousers, chattering blithely of their preference for the navy because of this, or the engineers because of that. Mr. Plung put an end to Tuffy’s hopes by stating that he didn’t like Canada much from camping trips he’s spent there, and furthermore he didn’t like camping. He thought he’d go ahead with his plans to study percussion, and if he had to, he’d play in the Army band at a summons from his country. “Oh, yes, percussion!” Vicky said, utterly mystified. It seemed a noble enough course to Tuffy, judging by her grave nods of agreement, but it did ruin her plans of annoying her sister. A more immediate means of effecting this end suggested itself, however, and she suddenly led Plung and two undersized, eczematic lads off to the “nursery” to listen to some Bix Biederbecke records with appropriate stampings. Vicky was drawn again into Mrs. Elroy’s little circle, and urged to tell the amusing story about Amanda Keeler Evans running away from home that time, which showed what a really human side the girl had, you know, so different from her public impression.
“This is awful,” Vicky thought desperately, squirming out of her task as gracefully as was possible. “I’ve got to tell them I am not Amanda’s friend anymore and it’s no good being nice to me on that score because I never can produce her here, never could have and certainly can’t now.”
The few guests Nancy had permitted Tuffy to ask from the very young set were now being herded out by the carefully instructed Tuffy to Hamburger Heaven. Tuffy was not required for the family supper this Sunday because Uncle Rockman was bringing an elderly gentleman friend, and naturally the talk would be on a lofty mature plane which would not brook juvenile interruption.
“I am really quite flattered that Rockman is favoring us by bringing a friend,” Mrs. Elroy confided in Vicky, as the departure of guests gave her a moment for her own tea. “I’ve told him over and over again that I should—all of us should—be delighted to meet his friends here. I want him to feel that this place is still his home, and his friends are welcome. He knows I am perfectly willing to be his hostess at any time he cares to entertain, but he always takes his friends to his clubs or the Gotham and we practically never meet them. They must think, really, that we’re to be ashamed of.”
She fetched a wry smile at this and shook her beautifully built coiffure so that the lavender gleamed in its shining surface like amethyst. Vicky murmured her congratulations at family feeling finally overcoming Uncle Rockman’s bachelor eccentricities, and almost at once the two gentlemen arrived, bringing a head scent of cigars and fresh newspapers and manly Scotch, welcome change from the spearmint and Coca-Cola atmosphere they were replacing. Mrs. Elroy resumed her sweet, genteel smile, tilting her fine head at a more queenly angle, and welcomed her brother-in-law’s friend with arch reproaches for their tardiness, and for Rockman’s naughtiness in not bringing his friends oftener to what was really his home. Nancy placed a daughterly right arm around her mother’s blue lace back, leaving her engagement hand free for an informal but glittering handclasp.
“And here is Nancy’s friend, Vicky Haven,” Mrs. Elroy said in fluty tones, drawing Vicky to her side. “Perhaps Rockman mentioned her.”
The stranger looked piercingly at Vicky.
“Oh, so this is the gal you spoke of, Rocky?” he asked, mysteriously enough.
“Vicky is a childhood friend of Amanda Keeler Evans, you know,” Mrs. Elroy went on, while Vicky found her knees slowly melting beneath her. “Vicky is more or less Amanda’s protégèe, aren’t you, my dear? You must tell Doctor Swick some of your amusing stories about Amanda.”
“Fine,” said Doctor Swick. “As a matter of fact I met the young lady at the Evanses home just a week or two ago.”
The familiar black bullet-eyes once more shot through rimless lenses at Vicky, giving her once again the burning picture of that whole dreadful evening. she had a frantic impulse to shriek out, “All right, go ahead and tell what happened, you old monster. Tell how I was insulted and humiliated, and maybe that will stop Mrs. Elroy from making it all the worse right now.”
But nothing would stop Mrs. Elroy, now, for if both her guests had met at the Evanses table, then she was all the more honored to have them her guests, and she urged the quailing Vicky to give Doctor Swick all her data on Amanda, her doting friend. Vicky escaped by getting Nancy to go to the bedroom with her, an exit gladly accepted by Nancy who was annoyed by her mother’s elegant efforts to be coy. Smoking a cigarette and gulping down some martini left on the dressing table, Vicky decided to confide in Nancy a little of her problem.
“I can’t go through with supper facing that awful man, Nancy,” she blurted out. “You see—well—he was there when Amanda said some things to me, and—well, he just looks at me as if he knew all about me. You see—”
It was even harder to tell than she thought but Nancy unexpectedly helped her, by being almost ominously interested.
“You mean you’ve quarreled with Amanda?” Nancy broke in, after a brief silence. “You’re not on good terms with her?”
“No, you see—it was about the apartment. You see—I guess I told you I lived in her—well, what she used for an outside workroom. So—”
“I didn’t know that,” Nancy said, in almost an offended tone. Vicky recalled that the reason she’d never mentioned it here was that the Elroys were sure to make conversational capital of such an arrangement, stressing the intimacy of the thing. But Nancy now saw another meaning.
“You mean she paid for the apartment?”
“Yes, but she never used it at night—”
By Nancy’s cold intent eyes Vicky knew she was putting her foot in it, implicitly confessing that she had never been anything but a charity to Amanda and had boasted of equality in order to win the Elroy friendship. She stumbled on, trying to explain without telling really anything, but only succeeding in making herself sound like the most unscrupulous of impostors. Nancy fell silent, ominously, and only said, “Come on, we’d better be going out. Supper will be ready.”
There was nothing to do but pray for strength to get through the meal, drinking as much as she could get of the martinis in case heavenly support was not enough. Uncle Rockman beamed rosily at her and won a wave of love from her by his dogged insistence that he’d never heard of any Amanda Keeler Evans since she was no connection of his great friend Doctor Keeler of Leland Stanford, and by discoursing weightily on the Dobler effect and various scientific phenomena; and just as Mrs. Elroy resolutely snatched the conversation to speak of a violet at the Flower Show being named the Amanda Evans, Uncle Rockman triumphantly snatched it back by declaring that the violet was the shrillest color in the spectrum, an octave higher than any other color as Doctor Swick himself could testify. Mrs. Elroy’s voice rose higher and higher in her efforts to keep the conversation within her own gracious bounds, but a word was enough to set Doctor Swick off on war, and a fresh drink was enough to make Uncle Rockman interrupt, with renewed radiance on his own joyous world of the abstract. His eyes sparkled, he flushed, he positively bubbled with joy in his own fountain of youth, the atom, the electron, the measuring of the soul, the surveying of infinity. Vicky alone was entranced by his words, for Doctor Swick wanted to talk and Mrs. Elroy wanted to please. Nancy was silent and as usual Harry Cosgrove Jones, IV merely agreed or exclaimed and obliged everyone but pleased nobody by his tact.
“Rockman, dear,” Mrs. Elroy finally interrupted, when a dish of crab meat ravigote stopped the philosopher’s tongue temporarily, “won’t you let Doctor Swick finish his sentence?”
“All right, call me a bore,” chuckled Uncle Rockman, with a wink at Vicky. “Victoria likes to hear me, don’t you, girl? Victoria’s the only intelligent woman I ever met. I told you so, Swick.”
“Yes, said Doctor Swick, staring at Vicky. “You told me.”
“I don’t think any of us have realized how very intelligent Vicky is,” said Nancy slowly.
Doctor Swick was her evil genius, Vicky thought. Wherever he went he made trouble for her, just by being present. She wanted to make him squirm, too, and so she said, courageously, “Doctor Swick finds much to admire in Hitler, don’t you, Doctor Swick?”
“Oh, no, Doctor Swick!” Mrs. Elroy was definitely shocked, and Vicky was pleased to see that the doctor grew red, and flustered.
“I may have made some remark in a satirical sense,” he said stiffly. “Naturally I have no respect for the Nazi régime.”
Mrs. Elroy looked reproachfully at Vicky.
“Of course not. How could anyone respect people who are willing to be led by such an upstart as Adolf Hilter? The Kaiser was at least a gentleman, an aristocrat, but imagine letting yourself be led by a common hoodlum.”
As this special reason for discounting nazism was a fresh twist to the problem, everyone was silent, and Mrs. Elroy eagerly strove to persuade Doctor Swick of her political awareness.
“He used to sit around in cafés with other hoodlums in Munich, or Berlin or wherever it was,” she said, daintily brushing crumbs away from her plate. “They sang songs and actually walked from one café to another in the middle of the streets, singing and playing instruments. Hoodlums.”
The picture of Hitler as a musical hoodlum was the only appealing thing Vicky ever heard about him, but this vulgar unconventionality seemed to have aroused the Elroy political conscience as no other atrocities could, and Mrs. Elroy went on in this vein, repeating what a cousin of an attaché in Germany had told her personally about Hindenburg’s dinner for his new Chancellor years ago, when all the ambassadors simply ignored the upstart, who did not know his way around among the noble glasses and cutlery, and who was snubbed by everyone naturally, since in those days no one ever dreamed the common people would consent to be led by a wrong-fork-user, a cafésitter.
So that’s why people like the Elroys are against Hitler, Vicky thought, getting angry. They would stand for any barbarism but mean birth and bad manners, and it was a cruel trick for them to make a Cinderella of the monster just by their contempt for him. How dared people like the Elroys and Julian Evanses be on our side, besmirching it with their snide reasons? Making country club of a great cause, joining it only because its membership was above reproach, its parties and privileges the most superior, its officers all the best people? Why didn’t they stay on the oppressor side where they belonged and where their tastes actually were? They did in the Spanish War, and for the same reasons that they switched over in this war. Vicky was aware of a wave of indignation bringing unexpected strength to her spirits.
“You don’t object to cannibalism, then,” she said. “It’s the table manners they use, isn’t it, Mrs. Elroy?”
Uncle Rockman was staring at his sister-in-law with a peculiar hostility.
“I actually believe you’d excuse the bastard if he was a Groton boy,” he said in a choked voice. “Louise, you’re talking like a damned fool. Isn’t that so, Victoria? I’ve a good mind to get up and walk out of this house, by God.”
“He’s joking, of course,” Harry Cosgrove Jones smilingly explained to Nancy, who was looking at her uncle in alarm, naturally enough, since she had never before seen him as anything but a benign, hoodwinked Santa.
