"Huh? Where you going?"
"Oh, Ray, aren't you _fun_-ny! You know this is the Crowd's poker night
at Lil's."
The Crowd began to say that old Ray was going queer. Honestly, didja
hear him last week? Talking about the instability of the home, and the
home being the foundation of the state, and the country crumbling?
Cora's face was a sight! I wouldn't have wanted to be in his boots when
she got him home. What's got into him, anyway?
Cora was a Wilson Avenue girl now. You saw her in and out of the shops
of the district, expensively dressed. She was almost thirty-six. Her
legs, beneath the absurdly short skirt of the day, were slim and shapely
in their chiffon hose, but her upper figure was now a little prominent.
The scant, brief skirt fore-shortened her; gave her a stork-like
appearance; a combination of girlishness and matronliness not pleasing.
There were times when Ray rebelled. A peace-loving man, and gentle. But
a man. "I don't want to go out to eat. My God, I'm tired! I want to eat
at home."
"Honey, dear, I haven't a thing in the house. Not a scrap."
"I'll go out and get something, then. What d'you want?"
"Get whatever looks good to you. I don't want a thing. We had tea after
the matinée. That's what made me so late. I'm always nagging the girls
to go home. It's getting so they tease me about it."
He would go foraging amongst the delicatessen shops of the
neighbourhood. He saw other men, like himself, scurrying about with
moist paper packets and bags and bundles, in and out of Leviton's, in
and out of the Sunlight Bakery. A bit of ham. Some cabbage salad in a
wooden boat. A tiny broiler, lying on its back, its feet neatly trussed,
its skin crackly and tempting-looking, its white meat showing beneath
the brown. But when he cut into it at home it tasted like sawdust and
gutta-percha. "_And_ what else?" said the plump woman in the white
bib-apron behind the counter. "_And_ what else?"
In the new apartment you rather prided yourself on not knowing your
next-door neighbours. The paper-thin walls permitted you to hear them
living the most intimate details of their lives. You heard them
laughing, talking, weeping, singing, scolding, caressing. You didn't
know them. You did not even see them. When you met in the halls or
elevators you did not speak. Then, after they had lived in the new
apartment about a year Cora met the woman in 618 and Raymond met the
woman in 620, within the same week. The Atwaters lived in 619.
There was some confusion in the delivery of a package. The woman in 618
pressed the Atwaters' electric button for the first time in their year's
residence there.
A plump woman, 618; blonde; in black. You felt that her flesh was
expertly restrained in tight pink satin brassières and long-hipped
corsets and many straps.
"I hate to trouble you, but did you get a package for Mrs. Hoyt? It's
from Field's."
It was five-thirty. Cora had her hat on. She did not ask the woman to
come in. "I'll see. I ordered some things from Field's to-day, too. I
haven't opened them yet. Perhaps yours ... I'll look."
The package with Mrs. Hoyt's name on it was there. "Well, thanks so
much. It's some georgette crêpe. I'm making myself one those new
two-tone slip-over negligees. Field's had a sale. Only one sixty-nine a
yard."
Cora was interested. She sewed rather well when she was in the mood.
"Are they hard to make?"
"Oh, land, no! No trick to it at all. They just hang from the shoulder,
see? Like a slip-over. And then your cord comes round----"
She stepped in. She undid the box and shook out the vivid folds of the
filmy stuff, vivid green and lavender. "You wouldn't think they'd go
well together but they do. Makes a perfectly stunning negligee."
Cora fingered the stuff. "I'd get some. Only I don't know if I could cut
the----"
"I'll show you. Glad to." She was very friendly. Cora noticed she used
expensive perfume. Her hair was beautifully marcelled. The woman folded
up the material and was off, smiling. "Just let me know when you get it.
I've got a lemon cream pie in the oven and I've got to run." She called
back over her shoulder. "Mrs. Hoyt."
Cora nodded and smiled. "Mine's Atwater." She saw that the woman's
simple-seeming black dress was one she had seen in a Michigan Avenue
shop, and had coveted. Its price had been beyond her purse.
Cora mentioned the meeting to Ray when he came home. "She seems real
nice. She's going to show me how to cut out a new negligee."
"What'd you say her name was?" She told him. He shrugged. "Well, I'll
say this: she must be some swell cook. Whenever I go by that door at
dinner time my mouth just waters. One night last week there was
something must have been baked spare-ribs and sauerkraut. I almost broke
in the door."
The woman in 618 did seem to cook a great deal. That is, when she
cooked. She explained that Mr. Hoyt was on the road a lot of the time
and when he was home she liked to fuss for him. This when she was
helping Cora cut out the georgette negligee.
"I'd get coral colour if I was you, honey. With your hair and all," Mrs.
Hoyt had advised her.
"Why, that's my name! That is, it's what Ray calls me. My name's really
Cora." They were quite good friends now.
It was that same week that Raymond met the woman in 620. He had left the
apartment half an hour later than usual (he had a heavy cold, and had
not slept) and encountered the man and woman just coming out of 620.
"And guess who it was!" he exclaimed to Cora that evening. "It was a
girl who used to work at Nagel's, in the binoculars, years ago, when I
started there. Calhoun, her name was. Laura Calhoun. Smart little girl,
she was. She's married now. And guess what! She gets a big salary
fitting glasses for women at the Bazaar. She learned to be an optician.
Smart girl."
Cora bridled, virtuously. "Well, I think she'd better stay home and take
care of that child of hers. I should think she'd let her husband earn
the living. That child is all soul alone when she comes home from
school. I hear her practising. I asked Mrs. Hoyt about her. She say's
she's seen her. A pindling scrawny little thing, about ten years old.
She leaves her alone all day."
Ray encountered the Calhoun girl again, shortly after that, in the way
encounters repeat themselves, once they have started.
"She didn't say much but I guess her husband is a nit-wit. Funny how a
smart girl like that always marries one of these sap-heads that can't
earn a living. She said she was working because she wanted her child to
have the advantages she'd missed. That's the way she put it."
One heard the long-legged, melancholy child next door practising at the
piano daily at four. Cora said it drove her crazy. But then, Cora was
rarely home at four. "Well," she said now, virtuously, "I don't know
what she calls advantages. The way she neglects that kid. Look at her! I
guess if she had a little more mother and a little less education it'd
be better for her."
"Guess that's right," Ray agreed.
It was in September that Cora began to talk about the mink coat. A
combination anniversary and Christmas gift. December would mark their
twelfth anniversary. A mink coat.
Raymond remembered that his mother had had a mink coat, back there in
Michigan, years ago. She always had taken it out in November and put it
away in moth balls and tar paper in March. She had done this for years
and years. It was a cheerful yellow mink, with a slightly darker marking
running through it, and there had been little mink tails all around the
bottom edge of it. It had spread comfortably at the waist. Women had had
hips in those days. With it his mother had carried a mink muff; a small
yellow-brown cylinder just big enough for her two hands. It had been her
outdoor uniform, winter after winter, for as many years as he could
remember of his boyhood. When she had died the mink coat had gone to his
sister Carrie, he remembered.
A mink coat. The very words called up in his mind sharp winter days; the
pungent moth-bally smell of his mother's fur-coated bosom when she had
kissed him good-bye that day he left for Chicago; comfort; womanliness.
A mink coat.
"How much could you get one for? A mink coat."
Cora hesitated a moment. "Oh--I guess you could get a pretty good one
for three thousand."
"You're crazy," said Ray, unemotionally. He was not angry. He was
amused.
But Cora was persistent. Her coat was a sight. She had to have
something. She never had had a real fur coat.
"How about your Hudson seal?"
"Hudson seal! Did you ever see any seals in the Hudson! Fake fur. I've
never had a really decent piece of fur in my life. Always some mangy
make-believe. All the girls in the Crowd are getting new coats this
year. The woman next door--Mrs. Hoyt--is talking of getting one. She
says Mr. Hoyt----"
"Say, who are these Hoyts, anyway?"
Ray came home early one day to find the door to 618 open. He glanced in,
involuntarily. A man sat in the living room--a large, rather red-faced
man, in his shirt-sleeves, relaxed, comfortable, at ease. From the open
door came the most tantalizing and appetizing smells of candied sweet
potatoes, a browning roast, steaming vegetables.
Mrs. Hoyt had run in to bring a slice of fresh-baked chocolate cake to
Cora. She often brought in dishes of exquisitely prepared food thus, but
Raymond had never before encountered her. Cora introduced them. Mrs.
Hoyt smiled, nervously, and said she must run away and tend to her
dinner. And went. Ray looked after her. He strode into the kitchenette
where Cora stood, hatted, at the sink.
"Say, looka here, Cora. You got to quit seeing that woman, see?"
"What woman?"
"One calls herself Mrs. Hoyt. That woman. Mrs. Hoyt! Ha!"
"Why, Ray, what in the world are you talking about! Aren't you
_fun_-ny!"
"Yeh; well, you cut her out. I won't have you running around with a
woman like that. Mrs. Hoyt! Mrs. Fiddlesticks!"
They had a really serious quarrel about it. When the smoke of battle
cleared away Raymond had paid the first instalment on a three thousand
dollar mink coat. And, "If we could sub-lease," Cora said, "I think it
would be wonderful to move to the Shoreham. Lil and Harry are going
there in January. You know yourself this place isn't half respectable."