A Time to Be Born, page 6
Families could give you a fine inferiority, out of their affection for you, all right. Very likely if Mother was still alive, Vicky would never dare take off, at all.
They came to the old Haven house just outside the town limits. It was in good shape, but the lawn around it was overgrown, and the porch covered with brown autumn leaves, fluttering around the boarded-up windows. Vicky remembered her mother and Aunt Tessie sitting on the porch watching the buildings going up all around them, as the town extended. The city’s extension program beat the depression by a few months and left the Haven house, relic of 1900, wedged in between rows of two-story, tax-paying business buildings. In twelve years the town hadn’t gotten enough money together to continue its project so the Haven house, owned by the city, stood idle and the new buildings flanking it remained half-untenanted, Mother died, and Aunt Tessie lived in Cleveland. There was her childhood home, Vicky told herself. Take another look and say good-bye.
“Belle’s going to get Aunt Tessie to take your room,” Ted said.
So they had sat up last night making their plans.
“She can help with the kids,” he pursued. “She lives alone there at the Willerton, so Belle thinks it would do her good to have a little home life. You want a family around you when you’re getting on like she is. Somebody handy in case you get sick.”
Her income will come in handy, too, Vicky thought.
“But you promised I could have Aunt Vicky’s room!” Joan’s eyes were wide with hurt surprise.
“I guess you won’t mind sleeping with your Aunt Tessie,” her father said.
“I do mind!” cried Joan. “Sleeping with an older person takes away your strength. Mrs. Murphy said so. It’s hygiene.”
“Course, when Vicky comes back we’ll just have to throw Aunt Tessie out,” Ted said, with a hearty laugh. “Can’t have an old maids’ home.”
“You could do worse,” Vicky said.
She cast a backward glance at the lake, twinkling blue and clear in the morning sun, and there, in spite of all her care not to see it, was the end of the car-line where she used to pick up Tom. There was a man standing there, now, and she was so sure it was Tom that she turned around hastily and looked straight ahead. It couldn’t be, of course, but it was enough to remind her that she must get away as fast as possible.
“Will you sent me autographs of any movie actors you meet?” Joan asked urgently.
Again Ted laughed.
“I guess your Aunt Vicky won’t be meeting anymore movie stars than you will, toots,” he said.
“You’d better send me your autographs,” Vicky said.
She must have looked unusually serious, for Ted patted her shoulder.
“Don’t worry about Aunt Tessie taking up your room,” he comforted her. “The little bit she’ll bring in doesn’t count that much. We’ll put you up, anytime, broke or not.”
Of course Ted was fond of her and wanted to be kind. But in her present supersensitive state she hated his clumsy references to losing her rent money rather than her company. Families were so damnably commercial. At your very christening they were already quarreling over who would get your locket if you died.
They dropped Joan at her school. Joan leaned out of the car and saw that the schoolyard was almost deserted and this brought from her a wail of disappointment.
“Gertrude and the bunch have already gone in!” she cried. “And I wanted to tell them about my aunt going to live in New York City! Oh, dear!”
Vicky laughingly kissed her, and in the embrace noticed that Joan was not only wearing her best perfume but had “borrowed” the chiffon scarf Vicky had tried to find that morning. It would be a trial for the child to have Aunt Vicky’s nice things supplanted by Aunt Tessie’s ancient scrap box. Evidently thinking about this or about Aunt Tessie taking away her strength in the night like some poison flower, Joan’s pretty eyes filled with tears. Vicky was touched.
“Stay in New York City till I get through school, Aunt Vicky,” Joan begged, waving her handkerchief after the car. “Then I’ll get married and come live with you.”
Ted took her trunk to the station and then brought Vicky back to her office in the Bank Building. They stood by the elevator, neither knowing what to say. He was her big brother, all the family she had left, but now he was his wife’s family, and not a big brother anymore. It was high time she broke off from this symbol of the old nest, but Vicky had a feeling of panic, that even if this nest became more and more thorny, it would still be better than the great bare world into which she was going. Here was the bulletin board of the City Bank Building, with her name on it—“Victoria Haven, Room 652–653,” and there it was again, “Haven and Brown, Real Estate, Room 652–653.” The second mention was what straightened out her wobbling sentiments and stiffened her chin. The “Brown” stood for Mrs. Eudora Brown who had married Tom Turner that cruel day, and whose presence everyday in 652–653 was eternal reminder that Tom was gone, love was gone, four years of adoration mocked away.
“I guess you’ll miss having your own business, Vicky,” Ted said, looking at the bulletin board. “Not many kids your age ever got that far in Lakeville. It was too bad—”
He would say something about Tom Turner, now, and she couldn’t bear it, so Vicky threw her arms around him and kissed him, feeling, as she ran into the elevator, as if she was Little Eva floating off to a land far-off and bleak.
Her own name on the door was a fact more immediate than the chilly Paradise waiting a bare seven hundred miles away. Vicky braced herself, as she did these days, to say “good morning” to her partner and to hear whatever stabbing anecdotes of the Turner honeymoon Eudora cared to reveal. Fortunately Vicky had begun to smile, even though wryly, at the silver-framed portrait of Tom over Eudora’s desk, since for four years this very picture had hung three feet to the left over the Haven desk. That the man should have traveled so slowly in four years did begin to seem funny.
Eudora looked pinched and red-eyed, as if she and Tom had been quarreling. A bender with somebody else’s boyfriend was usually a gay, reckless occasion, but a bender with your own husband, if he was a man like Tom, was likely to end up in a fight, especially if the bender money was provided by the bride. It was easy to read the Turners’ career.
“I don’t know whether I can swing this office by myself or not,” Eudora said, plaintively. “It takes two, really. I doubt if Caroline is going to work out.”
Vicky sat with her hat on at her desk, emptying drawers, looking over memorandum pads, little reminders of how much this office had meant to her.
“Of course Tom thinks I’m so silly to worry,” Eudora said. “After all, I did a good job of selling bonds before I ever came in with you.”
“Sure,” said Vicky.
She was trying to keep her mind on the necessity to be fair. After all, it wasn’t exactly Eudora’s fault that she liked a party with other girls’ men, and if the men liked her best and one of them did marry her, that wasn’t her fault, either. The person at fault was, obviously, the man. Having cleared this matter up once and for all, Vicky was assailed by a fresh wave of dislike for Eudora and a passionate desire to be in her shoes as Mrs. Turner, red-eyed, unrespected, and all.
“Is that what you’re going to wear to New York?” Eudora inquired, critically.
“It’s the only suit I’ve got,” Vicky said curtly.
What did Eudora think a woman should wear on a train—that black satin, low-bosomed, picture-hat outfit that she got herself up in for city street wear?
“I saw Howard Keeler standing in front of the store,” Eudora said, after a moment, still watching Vicky as if she expected her to give up these departing arrangements at the last moment, and say the whole thing was a joke. Eudora did feel that Vicky’s leaving was an open reproach to her for taking her man, and probably the town would feel the same way. Impossible as the present cozy situation was, it would be worse with Vicky flown.
“Did you tell him I’d be seeing Amanda?” Vicky asked.
“I did, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t send any message or anything.” Eudora meditated on this, her sharp eyes still following Vicky. “I think he’s still so glad to have Amanda out of his hair that he doesn’t care whether she’s on top or on relief. Tom says he thinks Keeler doesn’t have any feeling about Amanda at all, except that she always nagged him when she was a kid for things he couldn’t give her.”
So Tom didn’t think Keeler had any feelings! A fine one to talk about feelings!
Vicky began dawdling, because she wanted to put off the words of farewell to Eudora, words that must sound natural and calm, and even friendly. She had to wait, though, because if she was taken off-guard she might say, “Good-bye, Eudora, good-bye because I can’t stand being in the same office with you anymore. And good luck, Eudora, because women like you always have good luck anyway, because you aren’t afraid to hurt anybody. Yes, good-bye, Eudora, and if you’d had any decency you would have been the one to go instead of sending me to a big lonely city where I’ll very likely die of loneliness.”
Eudora stopped looking over the mail and began fiddling with her fingernails.
It was time to go. There were a million and one things to be attended to around town before she went to the train, and she would not be back in the office at all. It would be silly to say good-bye to Tom, Vicky thought, or would it be sillier to avoid saying it?
“I suppose you think you’ve left me a pretty good thing here,” Eudora said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You march off to New York, and it’s my luck to be left with this. Oh, never mind, I know it’s better than what I was doing when you met me, and there’s money to be made in it. But why should it always be you that gets everything?”
Vicky was dumfounded, particularly since Eudora then put her head down on the desk and started sobbing. You would have thought it was Vicky who had won the husband, and not Eudora. Vicky had wept too often herself over Eudora’s piracy, not to be steeled against her now. She took a firm grip on the doorknob to make sure of a quick exit if emotions got too high.
“You’ve got your husband, Eudora,” Vicky said weakly.
Eudora lifted her face, shaking her wavy red hair impatiently.
“I don’t need a husband!” she exclaimed. “It’s too much responsibility! I want to go places, and lead my own life, and have a little pleasure out of life!”
She blew her nose, choked back further sobs, and said, in a restrained voice, “Good-bye, Vicky. Hope you have a good time.”
Vicky hurried out and down the elevator once more, confused and unhappy over this mixing up of cards. She wished the train left at once instead of hours later, for the longer the delay the greater chance there was of seeing Tom Turner and breaking down. Later, when she actually got to the station she saw his battered Buick parked by the depot, and her heart failed her. She managed to get on the train without turning around, even when she heard his familiar voice calling, “Vicky! Hi, Vicky, good-bye!”
3
O SOONER HAD AMANDA started the strings working for Vicky than the idea seemed a brilliant lifesaving inspiration. This younger protégée from the Middle West would be a springboard to freedom for her, Amanda thought, a perpetual alibi, a private cause that Julian could not touch. She had not dreamed, until she saw Ken Saunders again, how restricted her life as a public figure and public wife was becoming. She had been complacently certain that she was a person to be envied by thousands, men and women alike, and this knowledge had sustained her to such an extent she had given little thought to whether she enjoyed her position herself or not. But then the meeting with Ken Saunders opened a whole cage of gagged, imprisoned thoughts, the desire to be loved for herself alone—what nonsense, but there it was!—the wish to gratify perfectly idle, time-wasting whims. From this long-concealed cage was also released an astonishing reserve of resentment at being denied simpler rights of an average woman; she did not dare flirt, have little adventures that the most ordinary pretty waitress might have, yield to a first impulse, overeat, make a fool of herself, play with the wrong people, in short she was actually underprivileged as a female. Amanda wanted to conquer the established world rather than rebel against it, so she was not prepared to kick over her crown for a peasant frolic. She wanted both. And she was obsessed with the idea that Vicky could be manipulated to provide her with these lost rights. It wasn’t really as if she was preferring the careless pleasures of the average woman to the prerogatives of her lofty position; it was simply, so Amanda told herself, that in order to be a really great person you must have all the experiences of the simple person! This was very much what Julian had told himself when he divorced his first wife for Amanda; he had assuaged his genuinely painful remorse by telling himself that a man, to give the full power of his genius to the public, must be sexually well adjusted. So Amanda, planning secret consolations, assured herself that it all came under the heading of “the full life making the full human being.”
Amanda kept Miss Bemel so busy with little memoranda about her arriving friend from Lakeville, that the secretary took an active dislike to the newcomer. Miss Bemel admired more than anything else the ruthlessness of her employer, and in the case of this Miss Haven, Amanda appeared to be acting like an almost normal, if not sentimental, person. Why should Mrs. Evans, having made a point of silence regarding her Ohio background, implying usually that this had been a mere taking-off place for foreign travel and a most sheltered convent life abroad, suddenly risk this desirable picture by sponsoring a schoolmate who was certain to be no credit in any way to the household? Miss Bemel hoped this was not the beginning of philanthropic symptoms on her employer’s part, for that she scorned. As a woman who from birth had been ridiculed for bulk, hairiness, varicosities and greed, Miss Bemel had always been forced to humble herself, not merely to win friends, but to keep people from loathing her on sight. Thirty sordid years had been spent in placating those richer, prettier, kinder, wittier, older, younger, than she. Therefore her position with Amanda Keeler offered heavenly release to Carrie Bemel, sweet vengeance for all those years. As the great lady’s personal, private secret-keeper and buffer, Miss Bemel was allowed to insult at least a dozen people a day, and to enjoy immeasurably the spectacle of her superiors fawning over her as representative of a great name. Boys having left her strictly alone during the formative years, she had been permitted leisure to acquire an excellent education and to develop her brain to a point where its outcome was well worthy of Amanda Keeler Evans’ signature. She even enjoyed the arrogance with which Amanda mentioned “my articles,” “my opinion.” To have confessed to being more than Amanda’s patient secretary would have lowered Amanda’s prestige, and would have done herself no good. So Miss Bemel gloried in Amanda’s insolence and multiplied it, herself, by a hundred.
Every morning Miss Bemel turned in a complete digest of the dinner conversations or chance comments of important officials who had visited the house. Miss Bemel had taken all these words down in shorthand in her unseen chamber outside the dining room or from invisible vantage grounds elsewhere in the house, and these were then checked with other information, and eventually woven into the printed words as the brilliant findings of Amanda Keeler Evans. Miss Bemel saw nothing the matter with this arrangement, since her own rise to power accompanied her mistress’ ascension.
To tell the truth, Amanda would have been genuinely surprised to learn that any writer of consequence had any other method of creation. There were a number of minor scribes on liberal weeklies who were unable to afford a secretary, that she knew, but she had no idea that this was anything more than the necessary handicap of poverty. The tragedy of the attic poets, Keats, Shelley, Burns, was not that they died young but that they were obliged by poverty to do all their own writing. Amanda was reasonably confident that in a day of stress she would be quite able to do her own writing, but until that day she saw no need, and in fact should a day of stress arrive she would not be stupid enough to keep to a writing career at all, but would set about finding some more convenient means of getting money.
Even if the public had discovered, through malicious enemies, that Amanda’s first knowledge of what she thought about Britain’s labor problem, Spanish Rehabilitation, South American Co-operation, America First, War with the Far East, was the moment she read Miss Bemel’s “report” above her own signature, no one would have thought the less of her intelligence, for the system was blessed by pragmatic success. The most successful playwrights, the most powerful columnists, the most popular magazine writers, seldom had any idea of how to throw a paragraph together, let alone a story, and hired various little unknown scribblers to attend to the “technical details.” The technical details usually consisted of providing characters, dialogue and construction, if the plot was outlined for them, as well as the labor of writing. Sometimes the plot itself was assembled by this technical staff, for individuals were far too busy in this day and age to waste time on the petty groundwork of a work of genius; it was enough that they signed their full name to it and discharged the social obligations attendant upon its success. The public, querulous as it was with the impractical gyrations of the unknown artist, made up for this by being magnanimously understanding of the problems of the successful man, so it all evened up in the long run. Amanda was just as entitled to her “genius” as any of the other boys on Broadway or in the public prints.
Miss Bemel was going over the dinner list with a frown.
“It won’t be necessary to include this Haven woman in the Wednesday dinner, will it?” Miss Bemel asked.
Amanda was in a devilish temper today, and Miss Bemel had noted the temper seemed to have sprung itself simultaneously with the wave of big-sister sentimentality for her friend from Lakeville. It was another mark against the coming visitor.
“Certainly, Miss Haven will be invited,” snapped Amanda. “Her name’s there, isn’t it? Does that usually mean the person is to be omitted? Am I in the habit of giving you a list of people NOT to ask, Bemel? For God’s sake, Bemel!”
They came to the old Haven house just outside the town limits. It was in good shape, but the lawn around it was overgrown, and the porch covered with brown autumn leaves, fluttering around the boarded-up windows. Vicky remembered her mother and Aunt Tessie sitting on the porch watching the buildings going up all around them, as the town extended. The city’s extension program beat the depression by a few months and left the Haven house, relic of 1900, wedged in between rows of two-story, tax-paying business buildings. In twelve years the town hadn’t gotten enough money together to continue its project so the Haven house, owned by the city, stood idle and the new buildings flanking it remained half-untenanted, Mother died, and Aunt Tessie lived in Cleveland. There was her childhood home, Vicky told herself. Take another look and say good-bye.
“Belle’s going to get Aunt Tessie to take your room,” Ted said.
So they had sat up last night making their plans.
“She can help with the kids,” he pursued. “She lives alone there at the Willerton, so Belle thinks it would do her good to have a little home life. You want a family around you when you’re getting on like she is. Somebody handy in case you get sick.”
Her income will come in handy, too, Vicky thought.
“But you promised I could have Aunt Vicky’s room!” Joan’s eyes were wide with hurt surprise.
“I guess you won’t mind sleeping with your Aunt Tessie,” her father said.
“I do mind!” cried Joan. “Sleeping with an older person takes away your strength. Mrs. Murphy said so. It’s hygiene.”
“Course, when Vicky comes back we’ll just have to throw Aunt Tessie out,” Ted said, with a hearty laugh. “Can’t have an old maids’ home.”
“You could do worse,” Vicky said.
She cast a backward glance at the lake, twinkling blue and clear in the morning sun, and there, in spite of all her care not to see it, was the end of the car-line where she used to pick up Tom. There was a man standing there, now, and she was so sure it was Tom that she turned around hastily and looked straight ahead. It couldn’t be, of course, but it was enough to remind her that she must get away as fast as possible.
“Will you sent me autographs of any movie actors you meet?” Joan asked urgently.
Again Ted laughed.
“I guess your Aunt Vicky won’t be meeting anymore movie stars than you will, toots,” he said.
“You’d better send me your autographs,” Vicky said.
She must have looked unusually serious, for Ted patted her shoulder.
“Don’t worry about Aunt Tessie taking up your room,” he comforted her. “The little bit she’ll bring in doesn’t count that much. We’ll put you up, anytime, broke or not.”
Of course Ted was fond of her and wanted to be kind. But in her present supersensitive state she hated his clumsy references to losing her rent money rather than her company. Families were so damnably commercial. At your very christening they were already quarreling over who would get your locket if you died.
They dropped Joan at her school. Joan leaned out of the car and saw that the schoolyard was almost deserted and this brought from her a wail of disappointment.
“Gertrude and the bunch have already gone in!” she cried. “And I wanted to tell them about my aunt going to live in New York City! Oh, dear!”
Vicky laughingly kissed her, and in the embrace noticed that Joan was not only wearing her best perfume but had “borrowed” the chiffon scarf Vicky had tried to find that morning. It would be a trial for the child to have Aunt Vicky’s nice things supplanted by Aunt Tessie’s ancient scrap box. Evidently thinking about this or about Aunt Tessie taking away her strength in the night like some poison flower, Joan’s pretty eyes filled with tears. Vicky was touched.
“Stay in New York City till I get through school, Aunt Vicky,” Joan begged, waving her handkerchief after the car. “Then I’ll get married and come live with you.”
Ted took her trunk to the station and then brought Vicky back to her office in the Bank Building. They stood by the elevator, neither knowing what to say. He was her big brother, all the family she had left, but now he was his wife’s family, and not a big brother anymore. It was high time she broke off from this symbol of the old nest, but Vicky had a feeling of panic, that even if this nest became more and more thorny, it would still be better than the great bare world into which she was going. Here was the bulletin board of the City Bank Building, with her name on it—“Victoria Haven, Room 652–653,” and there it was again, “Haven and Brown, Real Estate, Room 652–653.” The second mention was what straightened out her wobbling sentiments and stiffened her chin. The “Brown” stood for Mrs. Eudora Brown who had married Tom Turner that cruel day, and whose presence everyday in 652–653 was eternal reminder that Tom was gone, love was gone, four years of adoration mocked away.
“I guess you’ll miss having your own business, Vicky,” Ted said, looking at the bulletin board. “Not many kids your age ever got that far in Lakeville. It was too bad—”
He would say something about Tom Turner, now, and she couldn’t bear it, so Vicky threw her arms around him and kissed him, feeling, as she ran into the elevator, as if she was Little Eva floating off to a land far-off and bleak.
Her own name on the door was a fact more immediate than the chilly Paradise waiting a bare seven hundred miles away. Vicky braced herself, as she did these days, to say “good morning” to her partner and to hear whatever stabbing anecdotes of the Turner honeymoon Eudora cared to reveal. Fortunately Vicky had begun to smile, even though wryly, at the silver-framed portrait of Tom over Eudora’s desk, since for four years this very picture had hung three feet to the left over the Haven desk. That the man should have traveled so slowly in four years did begin to seem funny.
Eudora looked pinched and red-eyed, as if she and Tom had been quarreling. A bender with somebody else’s boyfriend was usually a gay, reckless occasion, but a bender with your own husband, if he was a man like Tom, was likely to end up in a fight, especially if the bender money was provided by the bride. It was easy to read the Turners’ career.
“I don’t know whether I can swing this office by myself or not,” Eudora said, plaintively. “It takes two, really. I doubt if Caroline is going to work out.”
Vicky sat with her hat on at her desk, emptying drawers, looking over memorandum pads, little reminders of how much this office had meant to her.
“Of course Tom thinks I’m so silly to worry,” Eudora said. “After all, I did a good job of selling bonds before I ever came in with you.”
“Sure,” said Vicky.
She was trying to keep her mind on the necessity to be fair. After all, it wasn’t exactly Eudora’s fault that she liked a party with other girls’ men, and if the men liked her best and one of them did marry her, that wasn’t her fault, either. The person at fault was, obviously, the man. Having cleared this matter up once and for all, Vicky was assailed by a fresh wave of dislike for Eudora and a passionate desire to be in her shoes as Mrs. Turner, red-eyed, unrespected, and all.
“Is that what you’re going to wear to New York?” Eudora inquired, critically.
“It’s the only suit I’ve got,” Vicky said curtly.
What did Eudora think a woman should wear on a train—that black satin, low-bosomed, picture-hat outfit that she got herself up in for city street wear?
“I saw Howard Keeler standing in front of the store,” Eudora said, after a moment, still watching Vicky as if she expected her to give up these departing arrangements at the last moment, and say the whole thing was a joke. Eudora did feel that Vicky’s leaving was an open reproach to her for taking her man, and probably the town would feel the same way. Impossible as the present cozy situation was, it would be worse with Vicky flown.
“Did you tell him I’d be seeing Amanda?” Vicky asked.
“I did, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t send any message or anything.” Eudora meditated on this, her sharp eyes still following Vicky. “I think he’s still so glad to have Amanda out of his hair that he doesn’t care whether she’s on top or on relief. Tom says he thinks Keeler doesn’t have any feeling about Amanda at all, except that she always nagged him when she was a kid for things he couldn’t give her.”
So Tom didn’t think Keeler had any feelings! A fine one to talk about feelings!
Vicky began dawdling, because she wanted to put off the words of farewell to Eudora, words that must sound natural and calm, and even friendly. She had to wait, though, because if she was taken off-guard she might say, “Good-bye, Eudora, good-bye because I can’t stand being in the same office with you anymore. And good luck, Eudora, because women like you always have good luck anyway, because you aren’t afraid to hurt anybody. Yes, good-bye, Eudora, and if you’d had any decency you would have been the one to go instead of sending me to a big lonely city where I’ll very likely die of loneliness.”
Eudora stopped looking over the mail and began fiddling with her fingernails.
It was time to go. There were a million and one things to be attended to around town before she went to the train, and she would not be back in the office at all. It would be silly to say good-bye to Tom, Vicky thought, or would it be sillier to avoid saying it?
“I suppose you think you’ve left me a pretty good thing here,” Eudora said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You march off to New York, and it’s my luck to be left with this. Oh, never mind, I know it’s better than what I was doing when you met me, and there’s money to be made in it. But why should it always be you that gets everything?”
Vicky was dumfounded, particularly since Eudora then put her head down on the desk and started sobbing. You would have thought it was Vicky who had won the husband, and not Eudora. Vicky had wept too often herself over Eudora’s piracy, not to be steeled against her now. She took a firm grip on the doorknob to make sure of a quick exit if emotions got too high.
“You’ve got your husband, Eudora,” Vicky said weakly.
Eudora lifted her face, shaking her wavy red hair impatiently.
“I don’t need a husband!” she exclaimed. “It’s too much responsibility! I want to go places, and lead my own life, and have a little pleasure out of life!”
She blew her nose, choked back further sobs, and said, in a restrained voice, “Good-bye, Vicky. Hope you have a good time.”
Vicky hurried out and down the elevator once more, confused and unhappy over this mixing up of cards. She wished the train left at once instead of hours later, for the longer the delay the greater chance there was of seeing Tom Turner and breaking down. Later, when she actually got to the station she saw his battered Buick parked by the depot, and her heart failed her. She managed to get on the train without turning around, even when she heard his familiar voice calling, “Vicky! Hi, Vicky, good-bye!”
3
O SOONER HAD AMANDA started the strings working for Vicky than the idea seemed a brilliant lifesaving inspiration. This younger protégée from the Middle West would be a springboard to freedom for her, Amanda thought, a perpetual alibi, a private cause that Julian could not touch. She had not dreamed, until she saw Ken Saunders again, how restricted her life as a public figure and public wife was becoming. She had been complacently certain that she was a person to be envied by thousands, men and women alike, and this knowledge had sustained her to such an extent she had given little thought to whether she enjoyed her position herself or not. But then the meeting with Ken Saunders opened a whole cage of gagged, imprisoned thoughts, the desire to be loved for herself alone—what nonsense, but there it was!—the wish to gratify perfectly idle, time-wasting whims. From this long-concealed cage was also released an astonishing reserve of resentment at being denied simpler rights of an average woman; she did not dare flirt, have little adventures that the most ordinary pretty waitress might have, yield to a first impulse, overeat, make a fool of herself, play with the wrong people, in short she was actually underprivileged as a female. Amanda wanted to conquer the established world rather than rebel against it, so she was not prepared to kick over her crown for a peasant frolic. She wanted both. And she was obsessed with the idea that Vicky could be manipulated to provide her with these lost rights. It wasn’t really as if she was preferring the careless pleasures of the average woman to the prerogatives of her lofty position; it was simply, so Amanda told herself, that in order to be a really great person you must have all the experiences of the simple person! This was very much what Julian had told himself when he divorced his first wife for Amanda; he had assuaged his genuinely painful remorse by telling himself that a man, to give the full power of his genius to the public, must be sexually well adjusted. So Amanda, planning secret consolations, assured herself that it all came under the heading of “the full life making the full human being.”
Amanda kept Miss Bemel so busy with little memoranda about her arriving friend from Lakeville, that the secretary took an active dislike to the newcomer. Miss Bemel admired more than anything else the ruthlessness of her employer, and in the case of this Miss Haven, Amanda appeared to be acting like an almost normal, if not sentimental, person. Why should Mrs. Evans, having made a point of silence regarding her Ohio background, implying usually that this had been a mere taking-off place for foreign travel and a most sheltered convent life abroad, suddenly risk this desirable picture by sponsoring a schoolmate who was certain to be no credit in any way to the household? Miss Bemel hoped this was not the beginning of philanthropic symptoms on her employer’s part, for that she scorned. As a woman who from birth had been ridiculed for bulk, hairiness, varicosities and greed, Miss Bemel had always been forced to humble herself, not merely to win friends, but to keep people from loathing her on sight. Thirty sordid years had been spent in placating those richer, prettier, kinder, wittier, older, younger, than she. Therefore her position with Amanda Keeler offered heavenly release to Carrie Bemel, sweet vengeance for all those years. As the great lady’s personal, private secret-keeper and buffer, Miss Bemel was allowed to insult at least a dozen people a day, and to enjoy immeasurably the spectacle of her superiors fawning over her as representative of a great name. Boys having left her strictly alone during the formative years, she had been permitted leisure to acquire an excellent education and to develop her brain to a point where its outcome was well worthy of Amanda Keeler Evans’ signature. She even enjoyed the arrogance with which Amanda mentioned “my articles,” “my opinion.” To have confessed to being more than Amanda’s patient secretary would have lowered Amanda’s prestige, and would have done herself no good. So Miss Bemel gloried in Amanda’s insolence and multiplied it, herself, by a hundred.
Every morning Miss Bemel turned in a complete digest of the dinner conversations or chance comments of important officials who had visited the house. Miss Bemel had taken all these words down in shorthand in her unseen chamber outside the dining room or from invisible vantage grounds elsewhere in the house, and these were then checked with other information, and eventually woven into the printed words as the brilliant findings of Amanda Keeler Evans. Miss Bemel saw nothing the matter with this arrangement, since her own rise to power accompanied her mistress’ ascension.
To tell the truth, Amanda would have been genuinely surprised to learn that any writer of consequence had any other method of creation. There were a number of minor scribes on liberal weeklies who were unable to afford a secretary, that she knew, but she had no idea that this was anything more than the necessary handicap of poverty. The tragedy of the attic poets, Keats, Shelley, Burns, was not that they died young but that they were obliged by poverty to do all their own writing. Amanda was reasonably confident that in a day of stress she would be quite able to do her own writing, but until that day she saw no need, and in fact should a day of stress arrive she would not be stupid enough to keep to a writing career at all, but would set about finding some more convenient means of getting money.
Even if the public had discovered, through malicious enemies, that Amanda’s first knowledge of what she thought about Britain’s labor problem, Spanish Rehabilitation, South American Co-operation, America First, War with the Far East, was the moment she read Miss Bemel’s “report” above her own signature, no one would have thought the less of her intelligence, for the system was blessed by pragmatic success. The most successful playwrights, the most powerful columnists, the most popular magazine writers, seldom had any idea of how to throw a paragraph together, let alone a story, and hired various little unknown scribblers to attend to the “technical details.” The technical details usually consisted of providing characters, dialogue and construction, if the plot was outlined for them, as well as the labor of writing. Sometimes the plot itself was assembled by this technical staff, for individuals were far too busy in this day and age to waste time on the petty groundwork of a work of genius; it was enough that they signed their full name to it and discharged the social obligations attendant upon its success. The public, querulous as it was with the impractical gyrations of the unknown artist, made up for this by being magnanimously understanding of the problems of the successful man, so it all evened up in the long run. Amanda was just as entitled to her “genius” as any of the other boys on Broadway or in the public prints.
Miss Bemel was going over the dinner list with a frown.
“It won’t be necessary to include this Haven woman in the Wednesday dinner, will it?” Miss Bemel asked.
Amanda was in a devilish temper today, and Miss Bemel had noted the temper seemed to have sprung itself simultaneously with the wave of big-sister sentimentality for her friend from Lakeville. It was another mark against the coming visitor.
“Certainly, Miss Haven will be invited,” snapped Amanda. “Her name’s there, isn’t it? Does that usually mean the person is to be omitted? Am I in the habit of giving you a list of people NOT to ask, Bemel? For God’s sake, Bemel!”
