And so Raymond and Cora were married and went to live in six-room
elegance at Sunnyside and Racine. The flat was furnished sumptuously in
Mission and those red and brown soft leather cushions with Indian heads
stamped on them. There was a wooden rack on the wall with six monks'
heads in coloured plaster, very life-like, stuck on it. This was a
pipe-rack, though Raymond did not smoke a pipe. He liked a mild cigar.
Then there was a print of Gustave Richter's "Queen Louise" coming down
that broad marble stair, one hand at her breast, her great girlish eyes
looking out at you from the misty folds of her scarf. What a lot of the
world she has seen from her stairway! The shelf that ran around the
dining room wall on a level with your head was filled with steins in
such shapes and colours as would have curdled their contents--if they
had ever had any contents.
They planned to read a good deal, evenings. Improve their minds. It was
Ray's idea, but Cora seconded it heartily. This was before their
marriage.
"Now, take history alone," Ray argued: "American history. Why, you can
read a year and hardly know the half of it. That's the trouble. People
don't know the history of their own country. And it's interesting, too,
let me tell you. Darned interesting. Better'n novels, if folks only knew
it."
"My, yes," Cora agreed. "And French. We could take up French, evenings.
I've always wanted to study French. They say if you know French you can
travel anywhere. It's all in the accent; and goodness knows I'm quick
at picking up things like that."
"Yeh," Ray had said, a little hollowly, "yeh, French. Sure."
But, somehow, these literary evenings never did materialize. It may have
been a matter of getting the books. You could borrow them from the
public library, but that made you feel so hurried. History was something
you wanted to take your time over. Then, too, the books you wanted never
were in. You could buy them. But buying books like that! Cora showed her
first real display of temper. Why, they came in sets and cost as much as
twelve or fifteen dollars. Just for books! The literary evenings
degenerated into Ray's thorough scanning of the evening paper, followed
by Cora's skimming of the crumpled sheets that carried the department
store ads, the society column, and the theatrical news. Raymond began to
use the sixth room--the unused bedroom--as a workshop. He had perfected
the spectacle contrivance and had made the mistake of selling his rights
to it. He got a good sum for it.
"But I'll never do that again," he said, grimly. "Somebody'll make a
fortune on that thing." He had unwisely told Cora of this transaction.
She never forgave him for it. On the day he received the money for it he
had brought her home a fur set of baum marten. He thought the stripe in
it beautiful. There was a neckpiece known as a stole, and a large muff.
"Oh, honey!" Cora had cried. "Aren't you _fun_-ny!" She often said that,
always with the same accent. "Aren't you _fun_-ny!"
"What's the matter?"
"Why didn't you let me pick it out? They're wearing Persian lamb sets."
"Oh. Well, maybe the feller'll change it. It's all paid for, but maybe
he'll change it."
"Do you mind? It may cost a little bit more. You don't mind my changing
it though, do you?"
"No. No-o-o-o! Not a bit."
They had never furnished the unused bedroom as a bedroom. When they
moved out of the flat at Racine and Sunnyside into one of those new
four-room apartments on Glengyle the movers found only a long rough
work-table and a green-shaded lamp in that sixth room. Ray's delicate
tools and implements were hard put to it to find a resting place in the
new four-room apartment. Sometimes Ray worked in the bathroom. He grew
rather to like the white-tiled place, with its look of a laboratory. But
then, he didn't have as much time to work at home as he formerly had
had. They went out more evenings.
The new four-room flat rented at sixty dollars. "Seems the less room
you have the more you pay," Ray observed.
"There's no comparison. Look at the neighbourhood! And the living room's
twice as big."
It didn't seem to be. Perhaps this was due to its furnishings. The
Mission pieces had gone to the second-hand dealer. Ray was assistant
manager of the optical department at Nagel's now and he was getting
royalties on a new smoked glass device. There were large over-stuffed
chairs in the new living room, and a seven-foot davenport, and oriental
rugs, and lamps and lamps and lamps. The silk lampshade conflagration
had just begun to smoulder in the American household. The dining room
had one of those built-in Chicago buffets. It sparkled with cut glass.
There was a large punch bowl in the centre, in which Cora usually kept
receipts, old bills, moth balls, buttons, and the tarnished silver top
to a syrup jug that she always meant to have repaired. Queen Louise was
banished to the bedroom where she surveyed a world of cretonne.
Cora was a splendid cook. She had almost a genius for flavouring. Roast
or cheese soufflé or green apple pie--your sense of taste never
experienced that disappointment which comes of too little salt, too much
sugar, a lack of shortening. Expert as she was at it, Cora didn't like
to cook. That is, she didn't like to cook day after day. She rather
liked doing an occasional meal and producing it in a sort of red-cheeked
triumph. When she did this it was an epicurean thing, savoury, hot,
satisfying. But as a day-after-day programme Cora would not hear of it.
She had banished the maid. Four rooms could not accommodate her. A woman
came in twice a week to wash and iron and clean. Often Cora did not get
up for breakfast and Ray got his at one of the little lunch rooms that
were springing up all over that section of the North Side. Eleven
o'clock usually found Cora at the manicure's, or the dressmaker's, or
shopping, or telephoning luncheon arrangements with one of the Crowd.
Ray and Cora were going out a good deal with the Crowd. Young married
people like themselves, living royally just a little beyond their
income. The women were well-dressed, vivacious, somewhat shrill. They
liked stories that were a little off-colour. "Blue," one of the men
called these stories. He was in the theatrical business. The men were,
for the most part, a rather drab-looking lot. Colourless, good-natured,
open-handed. Almost imperceptibly the Crowd began to use Ray as a target
for a certain raillery. It wasn't particularly ill-natured, and Ray did
not resent it.
"Oh, come on, Ray! Don't be a wet blanket.... Lookit him! I bet he's
thinking about those smoked glasses again. Eh, Atwater? He's in a daze
about that new rim that won't show on the glasses. Come out of it! First
thing you know you'll lose your little Cora."
There was little danger of that. Though Cora flirted mildly with the
husbands of the other girls in the Crowd (they all did) she was true to
Ray.
Ray was always talking of building a little place of their own. People
were beginning to move farther and farther north, into the suburbs.
"Little place of your own," Ray would say, "that's the only way to live.
Then you're not paying it all out in rent to the other feller. Little
place of your own. That's the right idear."
But as the years went by, and Ray earned more and more money, he and
Cora seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the right idear.
In the $28.50 apartment Cora's morning marketing had been an orderly
daily proceeding. Meat, vegetables, fruit, dry groceries. But now the
maidless four-room apartment took on, in spite of its cumbersome
furnishings, a certain air of impermanence.
"Ray, honey, I haven't a scrap in the house. I didn't get home until
almost six. Those darned old street cars. I hate 'em. Do you mind going
over Jo Bauer's to eat? I won't go, because Myrtle served a regular
spread at four. I couldn't eat a thing. D'you mind?"
"Why, no." He would get into his coat again and go out into the bleak
November wind-swept street to Bauer's restaurant.
Cora was always home when Raymond got there at six. She prided herself
on this. She would say, primly, to her friends, "I make a point of being
there when Ray gets home. Even if I have to cut a round of bridge. If a
woman can't be there when a man gets home from work I'd like to know
what she's good for, anyway."
The girls in the Crowd said she was spoiling Raymond. She told Ray this.
"They think I'm old-fashioned. Well, maybe I am. But I guess I never
pretended to be anything but a home girl."
"That's right," Ray would answer. "Say, that's the way you caught me.
With that home-girl stuff."
"Caught you!" The thin straight line of the mouth. "If you think for one
minute----"
"Oh, now, dear. You know what I mean, sweetheart. Why, say, I never
could see any girl until I met you. You know that."
He was as honestly in love with her as he had been nine years before.
Perhaps he did not feel now, as then, that she had conferred a favour
upon him in marrying him. Or if he did he must have known that he had
made fair return for such favour.
Cora had a Hudson seal coat now, with a great kolinsky collar. Her vivid
face bloomed rosily in this soft frame. Cora was getting a little
heavier. Not stout, but heavier, somehow. She tried, futilely, to
reduce. She would starve herself at home for days, only to gain back the
vanished pounds at one afternoon's orgy of whipped-cream salad, and
coffee, and sweets at the apartment of some girl in the Crowd. Dancing
had come in and the Crowd had taken it up vociferously. Raymond was not
very good at it. He had not filled out with the years. He still was lean
and tall and awkward. The girls in the crowd tried to avoid dancing with
him. That often left Cora partnerless unless she wanted to dance again
and again with Raymond.
"How can you expect the boys to ask me to dance when you don't dance
with their wives! Good heavens, if they can learn, you can. And for
pity's sake _don't count_! You're so _fun_-ny!"
He tried painstakingly to heed her advice, but his long legs made a
sorry business of it. He heard one of the girls refer to him as "that
giraffe." He had put his foot through an absurd wisp of tulle that she
insisted on calling a train.
They were spending a good deal of money now, but Ray jousted the
landlord, the victualler, the furrier, the milliner, the hosiery maker,
valiantly and still came off the victor. He did not have as much time as
he would have liked to work on the new invention. The invisible rim. It
was calculated so to blend with the glass of the lens as to be, in
appearance, one with it, while it still protected the eyeglass from
breakage. "Fortune in it, girlie," he would say, happily, to Cora.
"Million dollars, that's all."
He had been working on the invisible rim for five years. Familiarity
with it had bred contempt in Cora. Once, in a temper, "Invisible is
right," she had said, slangily.
They had occupied the four-room apartment for five years. Cora declared
it was getting beyond her. "You can't get any decent help. The washwoman
acts as if she was doing me a favour coming from eight to four, for four
dollars and eighty-five cents. And yesterday she said she couldn't come
to clean any more on Saturdays. I'm sick and tired of it."
Raymond shook a sympathetic head. "Same way down at the store. Seems
everything's that way now. You can't get help and you can't get goods.
You ought to hear our customers. Yesterday I thought I'd go clear out of
my nut, trying to pacify them."
Cora inserted the entering wedge, deftly. "Goodness knows I love my
home. But the way things are now ..."
"Yeh," Ray said, absently. When he spoke like that Cora knew that the
invisible rim was revolving in his mind. In another moment he would be
off to the little cabinet in the bathroom where he kept his tools and
instruments.
She widened the opening. "I noticed as I passed to-day that those new
one-room kitchenette apartments on Sheridan will be ready for occupancy
October first." He was going toward the door. "They say they're
wonderful."
"Who wants to live in one room, anyway?"
"It's really two rooms--and the kitchenette. There's the living
room--perfectly darling--and a sort of combination breakfast room and
kitchen. The breakfast room is partitioned off with sort of cupboards so
that it's really another room. And so handy!"
"How'd you know?"
"I went in--just to look at them--with one of the girls."
Until then he had been unconscious of her guile. But now, suddenly,
struck by a hideous suspicion--"Say, looka here. If you think----"
"Well, it doesn't hurt to look at 'em, does it!"
A week later. "Those kitchenette apartments on Sheridan are almost all
gone. One of the girls was looking at one on the sixth floor. There's a
view of the lake. The kitchen's the sweetest thing. All white enamel.
And the breakfast room thing is done in Italian."
"What d'you mean--done in Italian?"
"Why--uh--Italian period furniture, you know. Dark and rich. The living
room's the same. Desk, and table, and lamps."
"Oh, they're furnished?"
"Complete. Down to the kettle covers and the linen and all. The work
there would just be play. All the comforts of a home, with none of the
terrible aggravations."
"Say, look here, Coral, we don't want to go to work and live in any one
room. You wouldn't be happy. Why, we'd feel cooped up. No room to
stretch.... Why, say, how about the beds? If there isn't a bedroom how
about the beds? Don't people sleep in those places?"
"There are Murphy beds, silly."
"Murphy? Who's he?"
"Oh, goodness, I don't know! The man who invented 'em, I suppose.
Murphy."
Raymond grinned in anticipation of his own forthcoming joke. "I should
think they'd call 'em Morphy beds." Then, at her blank stare. "You
know--short for Morpheus, god of sleep. Learned about him at high
school."
Cora still looked blank. Cora hardly ever understood Ray's jokes, or
laughed at them. He would turn, chuckling, to find her face a blank. Not
even bewildered, or puzzled, or questioning. Blank. Unheeding.
Disinterested as a slate.
Three days later Cora developed an acute pain in her side. She said it
was nothing. Just worn out with the work, and the worry and the
aggravation, that's all. It'll be all right.
Ray went with her to look at the Sheridan Road apartment. It was one
hundred and fifty dollars. "Phew!"
"But look at what you save? Gas. Light. Maid service. Laundry. It's
really cheaper in the end."
Cora was amazingly familiar with all the advantages and features of the
sixth-floor apartment. "The sun all morning." She had all the agent's
patter. "Harvey-Dickson ventilated double-spring mattresses. Dressing
room off the bathroom. No, it isn't a closet. Here's the closet. Range,
refrigerator, combination sink and laundry tub. Living room's all
panelled in ivory. Shower in the bathroom. Buffet kitchen. Breakfast
room has folding-leaf Italian table. Look at the chairs. Aren't they
darlings! Built-in book shelves----"
"Book shelves?"
"Oh, well, we can use them for fancy china and ornaments. Or--oh,
look!--you could keep your stuff there. Tools and all. Then the bathroom
wouldn't be mussy all the time."
"Beds?"
"Right here. Isn't that wonderful. Would you ever know it was there?
You can work it with one hand. Look."
"Do you really like it, Coral?"
"I love it. It's heavenly."
He stood in the centre of the absurd living room, a tall, lank, awkward
figure, a little stooped now. His face was beginning to be furrowed with
lines--deep lines that yet were softening, and not unlovely. He made you
think, somehow, as he stood there, one hand on his own coat lapel, of
Saint-Gaudens' figure of Lincoln, there in the park, facing the Drive.
Kindly, thoughtful, harried.
They moved in October first.
The over-stuffed furniture of the four-room apartment was sold. Cora
kept a few of her own things--a rug or two, some china, silver,
bric-à-brac, lamps. Queen Louise was now permanently dethroned. Cora
said her own things--"pieces"--would spoil the effect of the living
room. All Italian.
"No wonder the Italians sit outdoors all the time, on the steps and in
the street"--more of Ray's dull humour. He surveyed the heavy gloomy
pieces, so out of place in the tiny room. One of the chairs was black
velvet. It was the only really comfortable chair in the room but Ray
never sat in it. It reminded him, vaguely, of a coffin. The corridors of
the apartment house were long, narrow, and white-walled. You traversed
these like a convict, speaking to no one, and entered your own cubicle.
A toy dwelling for toy people. But Ray was a man-size man. When he was
working downtown his mind did not take temporary refuge in the thought
of the feverish little apartment to which he was to return at night. It
wasn't a place to come back to, except for sleep. A roost. Bedding for
the night. As permanent-seeming as a hay-mow.
Cora, too, gave him a strange feeling of impermanence. He realized one
day, with a shock, that he hardly ever saw her with her hat off. When he
came in at six or six-thirty Cora would be busy at the tiny sink, or the
toy stove, her hat on, a cigarette dangling limply from her mouth. Ray
did not object to women smoking. That is, he had no moral objection. But
he didn't think it became them. But Cora said a cigarette rested and
stimulated her. "Doctors say all nervous women should smoke," she said.
"Soothes them." But Cora, cooking in the little kitchen, squinting into
a kettle's depths through a film of cigarette smoke, outraged his sense
of fitness. It was incongruous, offensive. The time, and occupation, and
environment, together with the limply dangling cigarette, gave her an
incredibly rowdy look.
When they ate at home they had steak or chops, and, perhaps, a chocolate
éclair for dessert; and a salad. Raymond began to eat mental meals. He
would catch himself thinking of breaded veal chops, done slowly,
simmeringly, in butter, so that they came out a golden brown on a
parsley-decked platter. With this mashed potatoes with brown butter and
onions that have just escaped burning; creamed spinach with egg grated
over the top; a rice pudding, baked in the oven, and served with a tart
crown of grape jell. He sometimes would order these things in a
restaurant at noon, or on the frequent evenings when they dined out. But
they never tasted as he had thought they would.
They dined out more and more as spring drew on and the warm weather set
in. The neighbourhood now was aglitter with eating places of all sorts
and degrees, from the humble automat to the proud plush of the Sheridan
Plaza dining room. There were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafés,
chop suey restaurants. At the table d'hôte places you got a soup,
followed by a lukewarm plateful of meat, vegetables, salad. The meat
tasted of the vegetables, the vegetables tasted of the meat, and the
salad tasted of both. Before ordering Ray would sit down and peer about
at the food on the near-by tables as one does in a dining car when the
digestive fluids have dried in your mouth at the first whiff through the
doorway. It was on one of these evenings that he noticed Cora's hat.
"What do you wear a hat for all the time?" he asked, testily.
"Hat?"
"Seems to me I haven't seen you without a hat in a month. Gone bald, or
something?" He was often cross like this lately. Grumpy, Cora called it.
Hats were one of Cora's weaknesses. She had a great variety of them.
These added to Ray's feeling of restlessness and impermanence. Sometimes
she wore a hat that came down over her head, covering her forehead and
her eyes, almost. The hair he used to love to touch was concealed.
Sometimes he dined with an ingénue in a poke bonnet; sometimes with a
señorita in black turban and black lace veil, mysterious and
provocative; sometimes with a demure miss in a wistful little
turned-down brim. It was like living with a stranger who was always
about to leave.
When they ate at home, which was rarely, Ray tried, at first, to dawdle
over his coffee and his mild cigar, as he liked to do. But you couldn't
dawdle at a small, inadequate table that folded its flaps and shrank
into a corner the minute you left it. Everything in the apartment
folded, or flapped, or doubled, or shot in, or shot out, or concealed
something else, or pretended to be something it was not. It was very
irritating. Ray took his cigar and his evening paper and wandered
uneasily into the Italian living room, doubling his lean length into
one of his queer, angular hard chairs.