into her freckled forearm. Yes, Hattie's arm was freckled, and so was
the bridge of her nose, in a little saddle. Once there had been a
prettiness to the freckles because they whitened the skin they sprinkled
and were little stars to the moon reddiness of Hattie's hair. But the
red of the moon had set coldly in Hattie's hair now, and the stars were
just freckles, and there was the dreaded ridge of flesh showing above
the ridge of her corsets, and when she leaned forward to stir her cheeks
hung forward like a spaniel's, not of fat, but heaviness. Hattie's arms
and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales. Kindly freckled
granite. She weighed almost twice what she looked. Marcia, whose hips
were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged it.
Mab smacking the Himalayas.
After a while, there in the window frame, Marcia closed her eyes. There
was still the illusion of a purr about her. Probably because, as her
kitten warmed in its circle, its coziness began to whir mountingly.
The September afternoon was full of drone. The roofs of the city from
Hattie's kitchen window, which overlooked Morningside Heights, lay flat
as slaps. Tranced, indoor quiet. Presently Hattie began to tiptoe. The
seventy-two jars were untopped now, in a row on a board over the built-in
washtub. Seventy-two yawning for content. Squnch! Her enormous spoon
into the copper kettle and flop, gurgle, gooze, softly into the jars.
One--two--three--At the sixty-eighth, Marcia, without stirring or
lifting her lids, spoke into the sucky silence.
"Momie?"
"Yes, Marcy."
"You'll be glad."
Hattie, pausing at the sixty-eighth, "Why, dear?"
"I came home in Nonie Grosbeck's automobile. I'm invited to a dinner
dance October the seventeenth. At their house in Gramercy Park."
The words must have gone to Hattie's knees, because, dropping a spat of
mulatto cold cream on the linoleum, she sat down weakly on the kitchen
chair that she had painted blue and white to match the china cereal set
on the shelf above it.
"Marcy!"
"And she likes me better than any girl in school, momie, and I'm to
be her chum from to-day on, and not another girl in school is invited
except Edwina Nelson, because her father's on nearly all the same boards
of directors with Mr. Grosbeck, and--"
"Marcia! Marcia! and you came home from school just as if nothing had
happened! Child, sometimes I think you're made of ice."
"Why, I'm glad, momie."
But that's what there were, little ice glints of congealed satisfaction
in Marcia's eyes.
"Glad," said Hattie, the word full of tears. "Why, honey, you don't
realize it, but this is the beginning! This is the meaning of my
struggle to get you into Miss Harperly's school. It wasn't easy. I've
never told you the--strings I had to pull. Conservative people, you see.
That's what the Grosbecks are, too. Home people. The kind who can afford
to wear dowdy hats and who have lived in the same house for thirty
years."
"Nome's mother was born in the house they live in."
"Substantial people, who half-sole their shoes and endow colleges.
Taxpayers. Policyholders. Church members. Oh, Marcia, those are the safe
people!"
"There's a Grosbeck memorial window in the Rock Church."
"I used to be so afraid for you, Marcy. Afraid you would take to the
make-believe folks. The play people. The theater. I used to fear for
you! The Pullman car. The furnished room. That going to the hotel
room, alone, nights after the show. You laugh at me sometimes for just
throwing a veil over my face and coming home black-face. It's because
I'm too tired, Marcy. Too lonesome for home. On the road I always used
to think of all the families in the audience. The husbands and wives.
Brides and grooms. Sweethearts. After the performance they all went to
homes. To brownstone fronts like the Grosbecks'. To cottages. To flats.
With a snack to eat in the refrigerator or laid out on the dining-room
table. Lamps burning and waiting. Nighties laid out and bedcovers turned
back. And then--me. Second-rate hotels. That walk through the dark
downtown streets. Passing men who address you through closed lips. The
dingy lobby. There's no applause lasts long enough, Marcia, to reach
over that moment when you unlock your hotel room and the smell of
disinfectant and unturned mattress comes out to you."
"Ugh!"
"Oh, keep to the safe people, Marcia! The unexciting people, maybe, but
the safe home-building ones with old ideals and old hearthstones."
"Nonie says they have one in their library that comes from Italy."
"Hitch your ideal to a hearthstone like that, Marcia."
"Nonie goes to riding academy."
"So shall you."
"It's six dollars an hour."
"I don't care."
"Her father's retired except for being director in banks. And,
momie--they don't mind, dear--about us. Nonie knows that my--father
is--is separated and never lived at home with us. She's broad-minded.
She says just so there's no scandal, a divorce, or anything like that.
She said it's vulgar to cultivate only rich friends. She says she'd go
with me even if she's forbidden to."
"Why, Marcy darling, why should she be forbidden?"
"Oh, Nonie's broadminded. She says if two people are unsuited they
should separate, quietly, like you and my father. She knows we're one of
the first old Southern families on my father's side. I--I'm not trying
to make you talk about it, dear, but--but we are--aren't we?"
"Yes, Marcy."
"He--he was just--irresponsible. That's not being--not nice people, is
it?"
"No, Marcy."
"Nonie's not forbidden. She just meant in case, momie. You see, with
some old families like hers--the stage--but Nonie says her father
couldn't even say anything to that if he wanted to. His own sister went
on the stage once, and they had to hush it up in the papers."
"Did you explain to her, Marcy, that stage life at its best can be full
of fine ideals and truth? Did you make her see how regular your own
little life has been? How little you know about--my work? How away I've
kept you? How I won't even play out-of-town engagements so we can always
be together in our little home? You must explain all those things to
your friends at Miss Harperly's. It helps--with steady people."
"I have, momie, and she's going to bring me home every afternoon in
their automobile after we've called for her brother Archie at Columbia
Law School."
"Marcy! the Grosbeck automobile bringing you home every day!"
"And it's going to call for me the night of the party. Nonie's getting a
lemon taffeta."
"I'll get you ivory, with a bit of real lace!"
"Oh, momie, momie, I can scarcely wait!"
"What did she say, Marcy, when she asked--invited you?"
"She?"
"Nonie."
"Why--she--didn't invite me, momie."
"But you just said--"
"It was her brother Archie invited me. We called for him at Columbia Law
School, you see. It was he invited me. Of course Nonie wants me and said
'Yes' right after him--but it's he--who wants Nonie and me to be chums.
I--He--I thought--I--told--you--momie."
Suddenly Marcia's eyes, almost with the perpendicular slits of her
kitten's in them, seemed to swish together like portières, shutting
Hattie behind them with her.
"Oh--my Marcy!" said Hattie, dimly, after a while, as if from their
depths. "Marcy, dearest!"
"At--at Harperly's, momie, almost all the popular upper-class girls
wear--a--a boy's fraternity pin."
"Fraternity pin?"
"It's the--the beginning of being engaged."
"But, Marcy--"
"Archie's a Pi Phi!"
"A--what?"
"A Pi Phi."
"Phi--pie--Marcy--dear--"
* * * * *
On October 17th "Love Me Long" celebrated its two-hundredth performance.
Souvenir programs. A few appropriate words by the management.
A flashlight of the cast. A round of wine passed in the
after-the-performance gloom of the wings. Aqueous figures fading off in
the orderly back-stage fashion of a well-established success.
Hattie kissed the star. They liked each other with the unenvy of their
divergent roles. Miss Robinson even humored some of Hattie's laughs. She
liked to feel the flame of her own fairness as she stood there waiting
for the audience to guffaw its fill of Hattie's drolleries; a narcissus
swaying reedily beside a black crocodile.
She was a new star and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie
in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran. So they could
kiss in the key of a cat cannot unseat a king.
But, just the same, Miss Robinson's hand flew up automatically against
the dark of Hattie's lips.
"I don't fade off, dearie. Your own natural skin is no more color-fast.
I handled Elaine Doremus in 'The Snowdrop' for three seasons. Never so
much as a speck or a spot on her. My cream don't fade."
"Of course not, dear! How silly of me! Kiss me again."
That was kind enough of her. Oh yes, they got on. But sometimes Hattie,
seated among her sagging headstones, would ache with the dry sob of the
black crocodile who yearned toward the narcissus....
Quite without precedent, there was a man waiting for her in the wings.
The gloom of back-stage was as high as trees and Hattie had not seen
him in sixteen years. But she knew. With the stunned consciousness of a
stabbed person that glinting instant before the blood begins to flow.
It was Morton Sebree--Marcia's father.
"Morton!"
"Hattie."
"Come up to my dressing room," she said, as matter-of-factly as if her
brain were a clock ticking off the words.
They walked up an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps
of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very
hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her
pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little
ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now.
Terribly. Morton was back.
His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister.
It could have been picked off, finger by finger. It was that kind of a
hand. But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again.
Morton's hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque
show.
Face to face. The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a
wire like a baseball mask. A burning prison of light. Fat sticks of
grease paint with the grain of Hattie's flesh printed on the daub end.
Furiously brown cheesecloth. An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the
gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks
seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie _au natural_ left around her
lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips
sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie
that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping
whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises
were in their pools, inviolate.
"Well, Hattie, I reckon I'd have known you even under black."
"I thought you were in Rio."
"Got to hankering after the States, Hattie."
"I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil. Sometimes I used to think
maybe it might have been a misprint--and--that--you--were--the--one."
"No, no. 'Live and kickin'. Been up around here a good while."
"Where?"
"Home. N'Orleans. M' mother died, Hattie, God rest her bones. Know it?"
"No."
"Cancer."
It was a peculiar silence. A terrible word like that was almost slowly
soluble in it. Gurgling down.
"O-oh!"
"Sort of gives a fellow the shivers, Hattie, seeing you kinda hidin'
behind yourself like this. But I saw you come in the theater to-night.
You looked right natural. Little heavier."
"What do you want?"
"Why, I guess a good many things in general and nothing in particular,
as the sayin' goes. You don't seem right glad to see me, honey."
"Glad!" said Hattie, and laughed as if her mirth were a dice shaking in
a box of echoes.
"Your hair's right red yet. Looked mighty natural walkin' into the
theater to-night. Take off those kinks, honey."
She reached for her cleansing cream, then stopped, her eyes full of the
foment of torture.
"What's my looks to you?"
"You've filled out."
"You haven't," she said, putting down the cold-cream jar. "You haven't
aged an hour. Your kind lies on life like it was a wall in the sun. A
wall that somebody else has built for you stone by stone."
"I reckon you're right in some ways, Hattie. There's been a meanderin'
streak in me somewheres. You and m' mother, God rest her bones, had a
different way of scoldin' me for the same thing. Lot o' Huck Finn in
me."
"Don't use bad-boy words for vicious, bad-man deeds!"
"But you liked me. Both of you liked me, honey. Only two women I ever
really cared for, too. You and m' mother."
Her face might have been burning paper, curling her scorn for him.
"Don't try that, Morton. It won't work any more. What used to infatuate
me only disgusts me now. The things I thought I--loved--in you, I loathe
now. The kind of cancer that killed your mother is the kind that eats
out the heart. I never knew her, never even saw her except from a
distance, but I know, just as well as if I'd lived in that fine big
house with her all those years in New Orleans, that you were the
sickness that ailed her--lying, squandering, gambling, no-'count son! If
she and I are the only women you ever cared for, thank God that there
aren't any more of us to suffer from you. Morton, when I read that a
Morris Sebree had died in Brazil, I hoped it was you! You're no good!
You're no good!"
She was thumping now with the sobs she kept under her voice.
"Why, Hattie," he said, his drawl not quickened, "you don't mean that!"
"I do! You're a ruiner of lives! Her life! Mine! You're a rotten apple
that can speck every one it touches."
"That's hard, Hattie, but I reckon you're not all wrong."
"Oh, that softy Southern talk won't get us anywhere, Morton. The very
sound of it sickens me now. You're like a terrible sickness I once had.
I'm cured now. I don't know what you want here, but whatever it is you
might as well go. I'm cured!"
He sat forward in his chair, still twirling the soft brown hat. He was
dressed like that. Softly. Good-quality loosely woven stuffs. There was
still a tan down of persistent youth on the back of his neck. But his
hands were old, the veins twisted wiring, and his third finger yellowly
stained, like meerschaum darkening.
"Grantin' everything you say, Hattie--and I'm holdin' no brief for
myself--_I've_ been the sick one, not you. Twenty years I've been down
sick with hookworm."
"With devilishness."
"No, Hattie. It's the government's diagnosis. Hookworm. Been a sick man
all my life with it. Funny thing, though, all those years in Rio knocked
it out of me."
"Faugh!"
"I'm a new man since I'm well of it."
"Hookworm! That's an easy word for ingrained no-'countness, deviltry,
and deceit. It wasn't hookworm came into the New Orleans stock company
where I was understudying leads and getting my chance to play big
things. It wasn't hookworm put me in a position where I had to take
anything I could get! So that instead of finding me playing leads
you find me here--black-face! It was a devil! A liar! A spendthrift,
no-'count son out of a family that deserved better. I've cried more
tears over you than I ever thought any woman ever had it in her to cry.
Those months in that boarding house in Peach Tree Street down in New
Orleans! Peach Tree Street! I remember how beautiful even the name of
it was when you took me there--lying--and how horrible it became to me.
Those months when I used to see your mother's carriage drive by the
house twice a day and me crying my eyes out behind the curtains. That's
what I've never forgiven myself for. She was a woman who stood for
fine things in New Orleans. A good woman whom the whole town pitied! A
no-'count son squandering her fortune and dragging down the family name.
If only I had known all that then! She would have helped me if I had
appealed to her. She wouldn't have let things turn out secretly--the way
they did. She would have helped me. I--You--Why have you come here
to jerk knives out of my heart after it's got healed with the points
sticking in? You're nothing to me. You're skulking for a reason. You've
been hanging around, getting pointers about me. My life is my own! You
get out!"
"The girl. She well?"
It was a quiet question, spoken in the key of being casual, and Hattie,
whose heart skipped a beat, tried to corral the fear in her eyes to take
it casually, except that her eyelids seemed to grow old even as they
drooped. Squeezed grape skins.
"You get out, Morton," she said. "You've got to get out."
He made a cigarette in an old, indolent way he had of wetting it with
his smile. He was handsome enough after his fashion, for those who like
the rather tropical combination of dark-ivory skin, and hair a lighter
shade of tan. It did a curious thing to his eyes. Behind their allotment
of tan lashes they became neutralized. Straw colored.
"She's about sixteen now. Little over, I reckon."
"What's that to you?"
"Blood, Hattie. Thick."
"What thickened it, Morton--after sixteen years?"
"Used to be an artist chap down in Rio. On his uppers. One night,
according to my description of what I imagined she looked like, he drew
her. Yellow hair, I reckoned, and sure enough--"
"You're not worthy of the resemblance. It wouldn't be there if I had the
saying."
"You haven't," he said, suddenly, his teeth snapping together as if
biting off a thread.
"Nor you!" something that was the whiteness of fear lightening behind
her mask. She rose then, lifting her chair out of the path toward the
door and flinging her arm out toward it, very much after the manner of
Miss Robinson in Act II.
"You get out, Morton," she said, "before I have you put out. They're
closing the theater now. Get out!"
"Hattie," his calm enormous, "don't be hasty. A man that has come to his
senses has come back to you humble and sincere. A man that's been sick.
Take me back, Hattie, and see if--"
"Back!" she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the
word. "You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street
when I prayed on my knees and kissed--your--shoes and crawled for your
mercy to stay for Marcia to be born? Well, if you were to lie on this
floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I'd walk out on you the
way you walked out on me. If you don't go, I'll call a stage hand and
make you go. There's one coming down the corridor now and locking the
house. You go--or I'll call!"
His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme,
seemed all tan.
"I'll go," he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever
so slightly unfrocked--"I'll go, but you're making a mistake, Hattie."
Fear kept clanging in her. Fire bells of it.
"Oh, but that's like you, Morton! Threats! But, thank God, nothing you
can do can harm me any more."
"I reckon she's considerable over sixteen now. Let's see--"
Fire bells. Fire bells.
"Come out with what you want, Morton, like a man! You're feeling
for something. Money? Now that your mother is dead and her fortune
squandered, you've come to harass me? That's it! I know you, like a
person who has been disfigured for life by burns knows fire. Well, I
won't pay!"
"Pay? Why, Hattie--I want you--back--"
She could have cried because, as she sat there blackly, she was sick
with his lie.
"I'd save a dog from you."
"Then save--her--from me."
The terrible had happened so quietly. Morton had not raised his voice;
scarcely his lips.
She closed the door then and sat down once more, but that which had
crouched out of their talk was unleashed now.
"That's just exactly what I intend to do."
"How?"
"By saving her sight or sound of you."
"You can't, Hattie."
"Why?"
"I've come back." There was a curve to his words that hooked into her
heart like forceps about a block of ice. But she outstared him, holding
her lips in the center of the comedy rim so that he could see how firm
their bite.
"Not to me."
"To her, then."
"Even you wouldn't be low enough to let her know--"
"Know what?"
"Facts."
"You mean she doesn't know?"
"Know! Know you for what you are and for what you made of me? I've
kept it something decent for her. Just the separation of husband and
wife--who couldn't agree. Incompatibility. I have not told her--" And
suddenly could have rammed her teeth into the tongue that had betrayed
her. Simultaneously with the leap of light into his eyes came the leap
of her error into her consciousness.
"Oh," he said, and smiled, a slow smile that widened as leisurely as
sorghum in the pouring.
"You made me tell you that! You came here for that. To find out!"
"Nothin' the sort, Hattie. You only verified what I kinda suspected.
Naturally, you've kept it from her. Admire you for it."
"But I lied! See! I know your tricks. She does know you for what you are
and what you made of me. She knows everything. Now what are you going
to do? She knows! I lied! I--" then stopped, at the curve his lips were
taking and at consciousness of the pitiableness of her device.
"Morton," she said, her hands opening into her lap into pads of great
pink helplessness, "you wouldn't tell her--on me! You're not that low!"
"Wouldn't tell what?"
He was rattling her, and so she fought him with her gaze, trying to
fasten and fathom under the flicker of his lids. But there were no eyes
there. Only the neutral, tricky tan.
"You see, Morton, she's just sixteen. The age when it's more important
than anything else in the world to a young girl that's been reared like
her to--to have her life _regular_! Like all her other little school
friends. She's like that, Morton. Sensitive! Don't touch her, Morton.
For God's sake, don't! Some day when she's past having to care so
terribly--when she's older--you can rake it up if you must torture. I'll
tell her then. But for God's sake, Morton, let us live--now!"
"Hattie, you meet me to-morrow morning and take a little journey to one
of these little towns around here in Jersey or Connecticut, and your lie
to her won't be a lie any more."
"Morton--I--I don't understand. Why?"
"I'll marry you."
"You fool!" she said, almost meditatively. "So you've heard we've gotten
on a bit. You must even have heard of this"--placing her hand over the
jar of the Brown Cold Cream. "You want to be in at the feast. You're so
easy to read that I can tell you what you're after before you can get
the coward words out. Marry you! You fool!"
It was as if she could not flip the word off scornfully enough, sucking
back her lower lip, then hurling.
"Well, Hattie," he said, unbunching his soft hat, "I reckon that's
pretty plain."
"I reckon it is, Morton."
"All right. Everybody to his own notion of carryin' a grudge to the
grave. But it's all right, honey. No hard feelin's. It's something to
know I was willin' to do the right thing. There's a fruit steamer out of
here for N'Orleans in the mawnin'. Reckon I'll catch it."
"I'd advise you to."
"No objection to me droppin' around to see the girl first? Entitled to a
little natural curiosity. Come, I'll take you up home this evenin'. The
girl. No harm."
"You're not serious, Morton. You wouldn't upset things. You wouldn't
tell--that--child!"
"Why, not in a thousand years, honey, unless you forced me to it. Well,
you've forced me. Come, Hattie, I'm seein' you home this evenin'."
"You can't put your foot--"
"Come now. You're too clever a woman to try to prevent me. Course
there's a way to keep me from goin' up home with you this evenin'. I
wouldn't use it, if I were you. You know I'll get to see her. I even
know where she goes to school. Mighty nice selection you made, Hattie,
Miss Harperly's."
"You can't frighten me," she said, trying to moisten her lips with her
tongue. But it was dry as a parrot's. It was hard to close her lips.
They were oval and suddenly immobile as a picture frame. What if she
could not swallow. There was nothing to swallow! Dry tongue. O God!
Marcia!
That was the fleeting form her panic took, but almost immediately she
could manage her lips again. Her lips, you see, they counted so! She
must keep them firm in the slippery shine of the comedy black.
"Come," he said, "get your make-up off. I'll take you up in a cab."
"How do you know it's--up?"
"Why, I don't know as I do know exactly. Just came kind of natural to
put it that way. Morningside Heights is about right, I calculate."
"So--you _have_--been watching."
"Well, I don't know as I'd put it thataway. Naturally, when I got to
town--first thing I did--most natural thing in the world. That's a
mighty fine car with a mighty fine-looking boy and a girl brings
your--our girl home every afternoon about four. We used to have a family
of Grosbeaks down home. Another branch, I reckon."
"O--God!" A malaprop of a tear, too heavy to wink in, came rolling
suddenly down Hattie's cheek. "Morton--let--us--live--for God's sake!
Please!"
He regarded the clean descent of the tear down Hattie's color-fast cheek
and its clear drop into the bosom of her black-taffeta housemaid's
dress.