A Time to Be Born, page 8
“Smith,” said Amanda icily, and went through the door.
Already Julian had proved how necessary he was to her, a reminder that Amanda did not at all relish. She sat down at a table and waited for Ken, angry at herself for increasing her nonentity by waiting for another nonentity. It did not improve her temper to have him tweak her hair as he came up behind her. She wanted to have the privileges of any other woman, but she didn’t want to be treated like any other woman.
“All right, you’ve proved it. I’m still on a leash,” he said, sitting down. “Wasn’t that all you wanted to know?”
“Stop saying things like that,” she said curtly. “You spoil everything.”
“Double whiskey sour,” he said to the waiter.
“Coffee,” said Amanda. It took her aback that the waiter showed no sign of recognizing her, nor did the couple at the next table whisper her name. She was so accustomed to go only to those places where she was known that this anonymity was a new experience. She didn’t like it. She had resented it for all the years before she married Julian, the years she wrote perfume copy in Paris, unsigned, bitterly envying every name that brought nods of respect, envying the Hemingways, Hepburns, Windsors, and Edens equally, without regard for the nature of their achievements, merely envying the applause.
Ken used to be her applause, assuring her she could do anything she set her mind to. He hated it, though, when she proved he was right. He still hated her, even though they were lovers again. Maybe he was just being clever. Maybe he sensed that once he gave in completely to her again she would be through with the game.
“I can’t stand you drinking in the morning,” she said suddenly, looking at his drink. “It’s so weak of you.”
“Another whiskey sour,” Ken said to the waiter. “Double.”
He looked at her with cold hostility.
“Why am I honored by your summons today?” he asked. “You proved I would come back running when you whistled. You proved that yesterday. Twenty-four minutes of glorious abandonment, by the clock—”
“Hush!”
“—not that I didn’t appreciate the favor. Not that I don’t want you in the same bed this very minute—”
“Ken—please!” She was really angry. “I might have known you’d be like this. I want to be nice, and you hate me for it.”
He looked stonily at his drink.
“Why not, for Christ’s sake? You kick me around for three years, you kick me out, then you want to see if I’m damn fool enough to come back. Just for the fun of it. You never had anybody love you the way I did, knowing all about you, knowing what a five letter woman you are and always will be, and still being fool enough to love you.”
Amanda did not hush him now, for this soothed her, brought back her power, reminded her that she was Amanda, the Amanda that nothing could hurt except anonymity. She was soothed, but she was curious, too, that anyone should care so much about anyone, and be so affected physically by any other human being. She looked at his face surprised and gratified that it should show pain, because this was a tribute to her of a sort she could not understand.
“So you call me up and say you have sixteen minutes and two seconds with no one to walk over, and I’m fool enough to come.” He tossed his drink down, and beckoned for the check. In the silence she glanced at her watch and he caught it.
“Have you found out what you want? Is my time up, now?” he mocked.
Amanda had found out what she wanted and his time was up, true enough, if truth was what he wanted. She felt warmed and satisfied, the little bruises of a few moments before quite forgotten. Now she was ready for Vicky, at least as soon as Ken would humble himself to ask for the next meeting. He would. He might try to be stubborn but she knew he would have to ask before they got to the door, and she was not going to make it easy for him. He surprised her by keeping grimly silent to the very moment of their parting at the train gates. He was doing it on purpose, she thought, because he knew she was too sure. It was clever of him, she admitted, for now she wondered about him and wondered if she really dared be sure again.
“Good-bye,” he said resolutely.
“Dinner tonight, you remember,” she said.
He nodded, still refusing to ask for another secret date, and now she was put out because she had taken the studio for no other reason than that. He was holding off to make her presumption seem silly, and a pleasurable sense of panic came over her. How stimulating it was to be uncertain of him! How clever, how terribly clever of him to tease her this way—unless he did mean a little bit of it.…
“Tuesday—between three and four,” she murmured, plunging.
He gave no indication of agreeing. She wouldn’t know until she had made all sorts of complicated arrangements with Bemel to cover her movements for that day. But of course he would be there. Of course she was right to be sure of him. Disappointed at the game losing its charm Amanda watched the crowd pouring through the gate. She hadn’t seen Vicky for ten years but she recognized the slight figure in the brown suit, the eager, restless walk, and the shining eyes. She was glad to see her, she was surprised to find, but even before Vicky had caught her eye Amanda was beginning to wonder how much would be expected of her. So her greeting was a shade less warm than Vicky’s, managing subtly to hint that the old intimacy was not to be counted upon.
“Why, it looks like any other city,” Vicky exclaimed, looking around the station. “It might be anywhere.”
Someone behind them laughed, and Amanda colored. She had never found provincialism refreshing and was impatient already with her protégée. She did not like it any better when Vicky gave an audible gasp at sight of the limousine.
“Oh, Amanda! How wonderful!”
“I’ll drop you at the studio and see you tonight at dinner,” Amanda cut in brusquely, and Vicky, accustomed to taking any uncomplimentary hint as specially made for her, did not find much more to say during the drive, nor did there seem any way of crossing the gulf of their long separation. Amanda clearly was not at all interested in any Lakeville news, and by a detached polite manner conveyed the idea that the Amanda of the old days was no more. Vicky was more subdued by this politeness than by any snub, and changed her manner immediately to the tactful taciturnity evidently required.
“Dinner tonight, as I said,” Amanda said in parting. “I’ll send for you.”
Vicky was too awed, this time, to even thank her friend. Thanks were probably highly provincial, she gathered.
Amanda drove on home in a state of rising irritation. Now she had started something, she thought, but no one need think her time or friendship would be commanded. No matter to what use she might put others, they would soon find Amanda Keeler was not to be used.
4
HE EVANSES KNEW EVERYONE, and by “everyone” I certainly do not mean you or me or any one we know. This meant that they had no time for friendships or personalities, since “everyone” shifted and “everybody” became “nobody” so often that it was silly even to remember first names. Neither Amanda nor Julian liked society, except as they could manipulate it in their own home. They knew whom they had there and what they expected to get out of them. At other people’s dinners half the time you were wasting your time just because the host wasn’t clear in his explanation of who his guests were.
“So that Craver chap was Southern Textiles,” Julian would bitterly complain to Amanda, reading the paper next day. “And I wasted the whole evening talking diamonds to that Hindu. Damn the Thorps, anyway, I’m too busy to waste time at their dinners!
“I spent half an hour being nice to that Corrigan,” Amanda indignantly responded. “I thought he was Pictures, and all the time he was just Little Theatre.”
This wanton waste of their time by other people was the cross Mr. and Mrs. Julian Evans shared in common, and they felt so completely justified in their complaining that they admitted it freely to would-be hostesses. It was as if they had to make up for the first twenty years of their existence which had been wasted in marbles, dolls, hoop rolling, and scooter racing. They might have spent those years building a social trust fund of Contacts and Culture instead of dawdling away at the maternal breast. No more idle fudge making or agate swapping; every smile, every “hello” must pay. At last, confining their social life to their own home as much as possible, the Evanses still regretted that they missed so much by lack of proper cooperation from their friends.
“Mr. Evans, Mr. Harris,” hostesses said, and when Julian impatiently whispered his inquiry, “Who is Harris?” he only received the bright reply that Mr. Harris was from the Middle West, and had a very handsome wife. Who in heaven’s name wanted to know that Mr. Harris was Zeke Harris, a bright Lutheran boy from Indianapolis who ran away from home to be a brakeman on the B. & o. Railway, became dispatcher, married a million, had a tough time all around before he reached the top, but always idolized his mother? Mr. Harris was, in the Evanses’ labor-saving shorthand, “Wall Street.” Elva Macroy was not just a stunning blonde who never got the man she wanted so ran through four marriages to forget him. No. Elva Macroy was not that unhappy individual, she was “Washington”! The insignificant little man with the careful English was not Mama Felder’s little boy Izzy, but “Pictures, Inc.” and here and there, annoyingly disguised as human beings, were The Theatre, Bethlehem Steel, Education, Palm Beach, Southern Pine, Racquet Club, The Ballet, and of course Russia. Naturally the persons symbolizing these matters changed from time to time and for that reason it always seemed a waste to Julian to learn their names. A few names, if sufficiently in the public prints, naturally did stick but no one felt more cheated than Julian, if after remembering for years that Hawkins was Public Utilities, and Public Utilities was Hawkins, suddenly Hawkins became Cotton, and Public Utilities was Purvis.
In their own home, however, the problem resolved itself easily, with Miss Bemel and Mr. Castor providing guest lists with their social value in parentheses. In the case of Vicky Haven, the parentheses enclosed the terse apology “(school friend)” and in the case of Ken Saunders, Miss Bemel had not even considered his name in journalism of sufficient importance to mention but merely said “(escort),” adequate excuse for any male guest.
Having been instructed by Amanda, before Wednesday’s dinner party, that he was to take a paternal interest in her young friend. Julian remembered to direct a look of keen concern in Vicky’s direction during the cocktails, occasionally stepping to her side and asking, “Well, Betty, are you having a good time?” but being set straight on the name remembered to call her “Verna” the rest of the time. Since this was the only personal attention Vicky received during the cocktail period she was grateful to him, and tried to act very much at ease by taking a martini every time it was offered and refusing the canapés. This was because what she really wanted was the canapés, having had nothing but coffee since she got off the train, but she had learned long ago that whatever she wanted was certain to be bad form or in some way wrong. So, when she wanted a highball, she took a martini, and when she didn’t want to smoke she took a cigarette. She was not helped in poise by her inner astonishment at actually being in New York, actually being here at a fabulous dinner party at the Julian Evanses’, hobnobbing with all these great names, for she knew they must be great names even if she couldn’t quite catch them.
At Amanda’s dinners the gentlemen were never permitted to have their brandy alone because Amanda had a pathological horror of being left alone with women, particularly wives. Life was too short, she felt, to waste on these creatures of her own sex who had nothing to add to either her glory or her information. For the same reason neither Amanda nor Julian dared injure their acquisitive faculties by drinking. While guests had martinis, the Evanses had tomato juice; at table they permitted themselves only a solitary glass of champagne during the wine course, this as a concession only to the dignity of the vintage, and during the liqueurs they sipped at ice water. For some reason this temperate example made the guests go to extremes of thirst, and it was rumored around town that although the Evanses’ dinners usually ended before midnight the sedate worthwhileness of the event sent the guests afterward to dens of ripest vulgarity. Taxi drivers hung about the corner watchfully when the Evanses entertained, well aware that at least one elegant group, emerging from the mansion, would demand Harlem, even Coney Island, while others, restrained for hours in intellectual converse, would demand a tough waterfront dive or Third Avenue beerhall.
Vicky, without knowing the legend, felt the same way and found herself getting slightly fuzzy during the dinner, which made the affair seem even more wonderful than before. It was true she had as yet found no way of cracking the conversation, and so far as the party went she was positive she was a great dud, but it was a fine thing to sit between a genuine lord and a millionaire banker, having them talk monumental matters across your face for six courses. It made her realize how insignificant a small-town nobody like Tom Turner was, and she could look back and marvel that she had ever wept over such a trivial person. Of course dinner with a trivial person like Tom used to be fun, no element of which ever intruded into the Evanses’ dinner. But fun and glamor, perhaps, didn’t mix, and at least this was something to write Ethel Carey about for home-town gossip. Vicky felt very pleased anticipating how this would sound in a letter and how it would chagrin the Tom Turners. For some reason women, flouted in love, invariably find an incomprehensibly satisfying revenge in soaring socially. “I will give a white-tie dinner for eighteen,” they promise themselves. “How he will burn up when he hears about it.” Or else they will be the guest at such functions. The idea that the defaulting lover will be hopelessly chagrined by this social soaring (no matter how he may abhor such a formal life) is as fixed in the female mind as is the child’s dream of avenging itself on Teacher by slowly flying around the room with smiling ease. The net effect on both teacher and lover is more apt to be merely a mild astonishment tinctured with irritation rather than remorse. But Vicky treasured the thought that Tom would realize what a superior person he had thoughtlessly tossed away when he heard that she was being sponsored by the great Julian Evans and the famous Amanda. It might make him a little discontented with the ordinariness of his present wife, who could never possibly achieve such distinction.
Vicky watched her old school friend with awe and admiration. There was Amanda conducting the dinner as a symposium, herself the leader, extracting facts, data, opinions, and then repeating the routine in the after-dinner coffee hour, during which Amanda and Julian refreshed their minds on what they had learned at dinner with further discussion, Julian giving out a good deal of it as his own original thought and Amanda repeating the best she had heard without quotes. It was as if anything that went in her ear forthwith belonged to her by the laws of nature, and the lives or opinions of her guests belonged to her in the same say. Amanda’s very lips seemed to move simultaneously with the lofty statements of her experts; she signed the words the second they left the other speaker’s lips. Vicky saw no harm in this but only cause for despair that she herself had nothing to contribute to Amanda’s store. While the Lord Somebody on her right told one on Churchill, Vicky combed her mind desperately for some comparable tidbit, but what Uncle Charlie said to the new farmhand back in Lakeville did not seem appropriate, or what Amanda’s daddy said when he sold the Howard suit to the candy store man next door.
It was not, Vicky thought, that she was embarrassed by being present in such distinguished company; it was worse than that—it was that she wasn’t even present. She was surprised when one of the master minds spoke to her, so certain was she that she must be invisible. It was like having actors in a film suddenly talk back to you. She saw herself in a mirror and said, “Well, I am here all right, that dowdy little thing must be me.” The new dinner dress had seemed a treasure till she set foot in the Evanses’ house and then Amanda’s trailing cloth of gold made everything else seem the dullest of rags. Vicky had, in her first uneasy effort to establish the old girlish intimacy with Amanda, asked if she looked all right—should she wear the little gray capelet in back like a cowl or in front over her bare bosom?
“Either way you like, dear,” Amanda had graciously advised with an appreciative glance at herself in the mirror. “You look sweet just as it is.”
Then with a final fond stroke of her hip line and a tender pat to her blonde hair Amanda turned from the mirror and led the way to her other guests, leaving Vicky with the conviction that Amanda’s eyes saw so little but Amanda that she wouldn’t have known if other women’s dresses were wrongside out or upside down.
Thinking of how to describe to Ethel Carey this thrilling debut into New York life, Vicky looked carefully at the men. There must be someone among them on whom she could fasten as a possible suitor, mentally if not in reality. She hadn’t really expected, after the weeping, worry and fatigue of packing of the last few weeks, to look her best, but she had expected to get at least a polite flicker of interest. Up to the second round of liqueurs no one had fallen at her feet, and Vicky was obliged to console herself with the thought that they were mostly so old that such a fall might prove fatal anyway, and no girl’s charm is enhanced by a flock of elderly corpses around her hem. The one young man who looked possibly human sat in a corner staring stonily into space and addressing no one. This was the Mr. Saunders Amanda had explained she had invited for Vicky’s exclusive delight. Vicky, casting a hopeful glance at him from time to time, saw nothing to encourage her, but for the sake of her letter to Ethel made private notes on his appearance, and the manner in which he divided his looks between Amanda, Julian, and the opposite wall, with gloomy intensity.
