B.F.’s Daughter, page 23
“Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mother,” Polly said.… “No, give him more than that, Timmons.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Fulton said, “but they’re very much the same thing. Don’t you think they are, Bob?”
“Yes,” Bob Tasmin answered. “Anything with wizards and fairies always is.”
“I never knew B. F. was Bottom,” Polly said. “You never told me that.”
“He’s ashamed of it, dear,” Mrs. Fulton said, and she laughed. “He’s ashamed of the queerest things, but to get back to who wrote the plays—did anyone ever show you the cipher in the second folio?” She stopped at the sound of a distant door closing. “That must be Mr. Fulton now”—and she left the tea table and hurried to the door.
“Burt,” she called. “Is that you, Burt?”
“Thanks,” Polly whispered, “for being so sweet to Mother.”
You could always look at someone else’s parents tolerantly, but not your own.
“Don’t take it so hard, Poll,” Bob said. “Everybody’s mother goes to lectures.”
“I don’t mind you,” Polly began, “but whenever I bring a man here …” She stopped. Mr. Fulton entered the drawing room with his arm around Mrs. Fulton’s waist.
“Poll,” he said, “give us a kiss.… Why, hello, Bob.”
Mr. Fulton crossed the room quickly and shook his hand, seizing his elbow at the same time. His sandy hair looked rumpled as it always had. His clothes looked as though he had put them on in a great hurry.
“Where have you been keeping yourself?” he asked. “How’s the law? How’s that concern, that firm of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say it was mine, sir,” Bob Tasmin said.
“Don’t call me ‘sir,’” Mr. Fulton answered. “You’re Bob and I’m B. F. Now wait, don’t tell me, and I’ll remember the name of that concern.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if he told you?” Polly asked.
“Don’t tell me,” Mr. Fulton said. “Wait. Don’t be so impatient, Poll. I’ve got it. It’s Barstow, Barstow and Weiss.”
“Bryce,” Bob Tasmin said.
“Yes, I know,” Mr. Fulton said. “I just said it to see Poll jump. Poll’s always afraid that Glad and I are going to say the wrong thing. Poll’s a Bryn Mawr girl. She’s always right.”
“Father,” Polly said. “Who let you out in that tie? Come here and let me fix it.”
“No,” Mr. Fulton said. “Bob and I are going to leave you girls. I want to have a little talk with Bob.”
“Don’t take him away,” Polly said. “What are you going to do—ask him his intentions?”
Mr. Fulton took Bob Tasmin by the arm.
“Come on, Bob,” he said.
Bob could not imagine as they walked together into the hall what Mr. Fulton had to say to him that could not be said anywhere.
“I was thinking about you the other day,” Mr. Fulton said. “You’ve been sort of on my mind.”
Mr. Fulton opened the door of a small room down the hall. It obviously belonged to Mr. Fulton and to no one else. In it were letter files, a desk with a typewriter, a bare table with two telephones, an architect’s elevation of a factory, some brown leather armchairs, and an ash receptacle.
“I might have taken you into the library,” Mr. Fulton said, “or somewhere upstairs, but I can always think in here. I don’t keep moving furniture around in my head, or wondering where it came from, or why the owners had to sell it. I’ve had my mind on that quite a good deal lately. Well, sit down, and don’t mind me. I like to move around. How’s your father, Bob?”
“Father?” he asked. “Why, Father’s pretty well.”
Mr. Fulton put his hands in his pockets and drew them out again.
“I saw him a few days ago. He dropped in to see me. I hadn’t seen George for quite a while.”
He stopped as though he expected Bob to speak, but Bob Tasmin could only look at Mr. Fulton blankly. He thought at least his father might have told him.
“You know,” Mr. Fulton said, “the way people are. We see each other, and then we get busy and we don’t see each other—like you and me, Bob. When I saw George, I began to think of you. Well, that’s about all except—” Mr. Fulton put his hands back in his pockets. “Well, I’m glad everything’s all right.”
“Oh, yes,” Bob said. “Everything’s fine. Mother’s well, and Will’s looking for some sort of job in a publishing house.”
Mr. Fulton nodded. “I don’t know much about the publishing game,” he said, “but it’s always struck me that they ought to be able to print and bind books in one machine—just put in the paper at one end and have the books come out the other. Well, I always get mixed up with ideas like that. There’s a company I work with up near Pittsburgh. Bulwer, Bulwer Machine. George was talking about it. It’s on the big board.”
He stopped and Bob Tasmin did not speak. Mr. Fulton jingled some money in his pocket and looked at the floor. “I gather your father’s been playing around with Bulwer, Bob. Personally, I don’t know much about that sort of thing. The boys keep me too busy thinking of ways to keep the plants going.”
Mr. Fulton stopped again, and Bob Tasmin finally knew that he had to say something.
“That must take all your time,” he said.
Mr. Fulton nodded.
“We’re going to have a little meeting at Bulwer on Wednesday. Now, Bob, this isn’t strictly ethics, but I’ve just been thinking if you were to hear somewhere, not from me particularly, but just from somewhere that Bulwer’s earnings are holding up, and that they’ll declare the dividend, well, I have an idea, Bob, that your father might like to know.”
Mr. Fulton stopped again. His eyes moved up from the carpet, and he and Bob glanced at each other. His eyes looked gray and cool, and he was smiling faintly, very faintly. It must have been the way he looked when he did business with strangers.
“We’ve got to stick together these days, Bob,” Mr. Fulton said. “I’m trusting you to do it right. I think your father would like to know.”
Bob Tasmin moved uneasily in his chair. There were all sorts of imponderables in that room, queer questions of ethics and loyalty. He had never had business dealings with a man of Mr. Fulton’s caliber. It reminded him of the time he had boxed with a professional at Yale, just in a friendly way. Mr. Fulton had the same smoothness, the lack of lost motion. He wished he were not sitting down with Mr. Fulton standing in front of him, but it would be awkward if he stood up.
“You’re being very kind,” he said. “That’s a lot for you to do.”
Mr. Fulton looked down at the floor again and clasped his hands behind him.
“Well, Bob,” he said. “It doesn’t cost me anything.”
“No,” he said, “but it’s a lot for you to do.”
All at once his mouth felt dry and his voice was hoarse.
“I don’t want to tell him that, Mr. Fulton,” he said. “I can’t.”
He wished he might have had the poise of Mr. Willoughby. Mr. Fulton did not look surprised, but his voice had changed.
“Why can’t you, Bob?” he asked.
He would have to tell Mr. Fulton … there was no way out. It was better to tell it quickly, and bluntly.
“Well, you see,” he began, “this noon …” He wanted to make it very clear that his father had not actually asked him, that he had seen how it would have looked. “… and then I just happened to meet Poll,” he heard himself saying. “I didn’t know he had been to see you. The main thing is, I don’t want you to think I came here on purpose. I don’t want him to think so either. He wouldn’t like it, afterwards.”
“Why, that’s all right, Bob,” Mr. Fulton said. “That’s all right.”
“You did think so, didn’t you?” Bob Tasmin asked.
“Well,” Mr. Fulton said, “I’ve got a mean sort of mind, Bob. I won’t say it did occur to me, and I won’t say it didn’t. You don’t know who your friends are always.”
“Well,” Bob Tasmin said, “as long as you don’t think so now.”
“All right,” Mr. Fulton said, and he rattled the change in his pocket. “I’ll take care of this myself, Bob. I was thinking a little of going out to Gray’s Point tomorrow. I guess I’ll go and look up George.”
It was a play in human relationship that one could go over endlessly in one’s thoughts, considering how it all might have been said differently. The memory was acutely embarrassing to Bob as at times the episode had made him feel disloyal to his family, and at other times it had a sort of honor-of-the-school aspect with a priggish aftertaste. Yet that old desire of his to make it emphatic that he did not want anything from the Fultons, and that he was not to be used in that way, usually made him end by believing he had done the best he could.
Mr. Fulton had handled the situation without appearing to handle it at all.
“I guess you’d better stay here and have dinner, Bob,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Bob Tasmin answered, “but thanks just as much.”
“I wouldn’t leave now,” Mr. Fulton said. “We won’t be friends if you do that.”
That was all he had to say. There was nothing harder to deal with than obligation or gratitude, and Mr. Fulton must have been forced into that position often. At any rate, he had arranged it somehow so that Bob Tasmin never did feel particularly grateful. He only felt that Mr. Fulton liked him.
Once Polly asked Bob Tasmin about it, at a time when he never minded telling her anything.
“I always wondered what he wanted to talk to you about,” Polly said. “Darling, that must have been terrible for you. You do have a lot of guts. I don’t know why I keep forgetting it.”
Then she shook her head and laughed.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Bob Tasmin said.
“I wasn’t laughing at you exactly,” she told him. “I was just thinking of you in there with B. F. I was just thinking it was all so exactly like you—reliable, like a clock.”
He was never sure whether she approved or whether it annoyed her.
“B. F. is so damned surprising,” she said. “Look at the way he manages people. I wish he’d realize how good he is—as a person, I mean—but he never has the time.”
Sooner or later her mind always got back to her father. She said she knew it was an obsession with her. She did not want to be dominated by B. F., but she could see it coming on.
“I don’t want him to, but someone’s got to,” Polly said. “You’ve got to dominate me before he does, darling. Damn it, please go ahead and dominate.”
XVII
It Was Bound to Happen Sometime
Bob Tasmin did not know when it was that he fell in love with Polly Fulton. You could never set a date on such a thing. It might have been sometime while she still had braces on her teeth and was going to Heatherbloom Hall or it might have been the night when she had been sitting at that table with all those other adolescents. He had left Babs Weatherby flat to dance with her, and Babs was quite a number, too, in or out of a rumble seat. Yet his common sense told him that none of this was true. They had started quietly liking to be with each other, and seeing more of each other, sometime in 1930. It must have been that take-it-or-leave-it phase that his mother’s generation called being “interested in each other,” not that there was much opportunity to be interested. Polly was usually away at college, and he was often working late. Besides, there were a lot of men around, all sorts of them, who were always taking Polly out. The hell of it, she used to say, was that she couldn’t tell whether they liked her or the idea of living on B. F.
When the Fultons moved out to Gray’s Point that next spring, he saw more of Polly than he had for a long while, and that autumn, in the beginning of her last year at Bryn Mawr, they began writing each other, so that he always knew when she was in town. Polly began to talk to him frankly about her “young men” as Mrs. Fulton called them, the way Harry Fulton did about the stars in the motion picture magazines, and Bob was able to take a lofty academic interest in them though he was certainly not anxious to be identified with any of that crowd. They were just the sort who would hang around people like the Fultons.
The girls who went to dances were selected with meticulous care, but the main requirements for the men they met seemed to be dancing ability and passable evening clothes. Those friends of Polly’s all came from the stag line or were friends of friends in college, and most of them represented what Bob Tasmin considered borderline types—not solid, self-respecting boys, because most of these did not want to make themselves conspicuous by running after a wealthy girl. However, some very rich, neurotic boys gave Polly quite a rush.
There was Ira Drackling, for instance, whose father owned the Drackling Drug chain and a racing stable. Ira used to take Polly around to speak-easies, and for a while Polly felt he was romantic, but Ira was always being followed about by friends who, Polly said, were lousy, and when he had too much to drink, he was always getting into fights. Polly would not have minded so much, she said, if Ira were any good at fighting, but someone was always knocking out his teeth, or knocking him cold, and there you were.
Then there was a friend of a friend of Apples Sandler named Simeon Something, and Bob Tasmin was told that Simeon was going to be a playwright. He was one of those boys who referred to the Lunts as “Alfred” and “Lynn,” and to Gertrude Lawrence as “Gertie.” He had always just been or was just going to some party with Alfred and Lynn, and he was always just about to read something or other to Gertie. It was quite clear to Polly that Simeon did not really know anyone, but she said it was sweet of him to want to know people like that. There was also an English boy who had been in some sort of scrape at Oxford, and so had come to America because he loved America. His family gave him a little something on which to live while he was looking for a good post in some bank or manufacturing business. Polly said he had his limitations, but she had learned a lot about life from Cyril; he had beautiful manners and he was someone you could take out anywhere.
There was only one boy that winter whom she could really go for, she told Bob Tasmin, and he was a divinity student named Waldo Goldsborough, and you needn’t think it was such a funny name either. Waldo had played football at Colgate, and she didn’t care whether Bob Tasmin called him a muscular Christian or not, because that was exactly what he was. He coached basketball teams at an East Side Boys’ Club, and he gave Polly a Book of Common Prayer, and to Mr. Fulton, Bruce Barton’s life of Christ, The Man Nobody Knows. Mr. Fulton once said that he was sorry when Polly got tired of Waldo Goldsborough because he was the only one in all that crowd who didn’t think life was a trick out of which you could get something for nothing.
“I can’t get it through my head,” he said, “all these friends of Poll’s aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen. I guess Poll likes unemployables. She’s that age.”
Polly said this was not true at all. She said there must be something about her that attracted them, but at any rate, they weren’t dull. All the dull, serious boys always said the same things, and they were afraid of anyone who had a mind. At least she didn’t go to sleep talking to her friends. All she wanted was to know interesting people, but how could anyone be interesting unless he had lived? She wanted to meet polar explorers, lone eagles, or anthropologists.
“All right,” she said to Bob, “you make fun of Simeon, but at least he’s been around where those people are, and that’s more than you have.”
“Well, suppose he has,” Bob said.
“Well, do you know Alexander Woollcott?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Good heavens, no. Why should I?”
“I don’t know why you shouldn’t,” Polly said. “Do you know F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
He had never met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he had never met Hemingway or Franklin P. Adams, and he did not know Walter Lippmann either, and he knew no one on the stage.
“I just don’t see those people, Poll,” he said.
“Well, who do you know?” she asked. “You must know someone.”
When he stopped to think of it he had a good many friends, but not one of them was in this category. Some were married, working downtown and involved with apartments and diaper services; others who were still unmarried were worried about keeping their jobs. Tasmin had to admit that most of them did not have much lightness of touch or originality. He also knew some former college athletes, some good golfers and some excellent tennis players, but they could only discuss their specialties. Frankly, his particular crowd in Yale and New York had been a pretty wild crowd once, along the pattern of what was already being called the Jazz Age, but now they had settled down, and those who had not settled had gone somewhere else.
“I don’t see how you can go around with no one but lawyers and stockbrokers,” Polly said. “Don’t you know anyone else?”
That must have been the point at which he thought of Milton Ouerbach. He had first known Milton at Yale in a friendly, casual way, for he had been taught that it was a good thing to have a speaking acquaintance with everyone in the class. He and Milton had once heeled for the News together and had both been dropped, and then they had met again in that course in English Composition. Since then he had seen Milton occasionally at the Yale Club, but Bob had always been just about to play squash, and Milton never played anything.
“Well, I know a newspaper man,” he said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Polly asked. “I’ve always wanted to meet newspaper men. Is he like something in The Front Page?”
“He’s peculiar enough,” he told her. “He used to write free verse in college, and he never takes any exercise. He’s on the Herald Tribune and he lives in Washington Square.”
“If I gave a party, would you ask him here?”
“I can’t just pick someone up cold and ask him somewhere,” he told her, “and I don’t know whether you’d like him, Poll.”
She said, of course, she would like him. He must have been partly in love with her by then, or he never would have considered seriously brushing up his acquaintance with Milton. He must have wanted her to see that he was not in a rut, and perhaps he was secretly afraid that he might be in one. At any rate he called Milton at the Tribune and a few days after that he and Milton had dinner at Sardi’s, and Milton introduced him to a book reviewer and a police reporter and an actor who was a friend of Dudley Digges. Then he went one night with Milton to an Italian place in the Village, and afterwards to a party at someone’s apartment where he met a great many people who were against capital and the profit motive and who knew all the fine points of difference between Stalinists and Trotskyites. When he awoke the next morning, Bob realized that he had been to one of those parties of long-haired men and short-haired women, except that all the men had haircuts. He had sat there arguing and drinking red wine from a gallon jug, and it had not been such bad fun either, because they all had passionate convictions and no great power of reasoning, and he had tied all of them into knots. Yet they must have liked him in spite of the names they called him, because the next week Milton asked him to a party at his apartment and asked him to bring a girl. This was an opportunity for Polly, he thought.
