“Will you sit down and read a book for a while, like a nice child. . . .
It’s all right . . . I just want to be by myself.”
I sat down. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. I shed tears
over all the rotogravure pictures; and knew that was a silly thing to
do.
Suddenly I thought, “Maybe he’ll kill himself. I must tell him not to.”
I opened the bedroom door softly. He did not hear me. He was lying face
down across his bed, sobbing.
That was the only time I ever saw Peter cry.
I did not dare go in. I went back and stared at the livingroom wall. It
was cream-colour. It needed redecorating, but not badly.
After awhile, I heard Peter taking a shower. He came in, looking all
right, or pretty nearly.
“Listen, Pat, I have a short speech to make, and don’t interrupt,
darling. You’re an enormously desirable young woman, and I’ve never
taken the least care of you. I have encouraged you to drink and that
sort of thing. This show is my fault. We won’t talk about it any more.
Only . . . you won’t do it again, will you?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Never. But it wasn’t your fault, you trusted me.”
“More to the point if I’d looked after you a bit. . . . Well, my dear,
go take a shower, and dress, and I’ll mix cocktails, and we’ll have a
couple and then go calling. Might find out what Rickey’s doing.”
I dressed, we had two Manhattans apiece, and went to see Rickey. He
mixed highballs. After my first, Peter took my glass away. “The child’s
cutting down on liquor, Rick. It’s bad for her nerves,” he said. Rickey
looked surprised, but said nothing.
He and Peter got pretty drunk, and talked about football.
After two weeks I said to Peter, “Look here, if on second thought you
want me to go home or anything, because of that show, tell me.”
He said: “Forget about it, angel. I have.” He had not, but I did not
speak of it again.
Then we had three very serene months. Small things were different. Peter
censored what I drank; and when Bill Martin, whom I had known in Boston,
came to town and asked me to go roof dancing, Pete said he did not want
me to go.
I did not mind at all. I had loved Peter before all this and I loved him
twice as much after. I thought he was so marvellous about it. I still
do.
I thought: “I will try to make it up to Pete by being good-tempered
always, and looking as pretty as possible, and following all his
stories, and not being extravagant any more.” I felt very grown-up.
One day Peter said, “You know, you are turning out the loveliest person
to whom to be married. Just a perfect wife.”
Then I was really happy again.
* * * * *
It was the week after that that Hilda Jarvis came to New York.
Any estimate I give of that woman’s character will necessarily be
inaccurate, I suppose. She told me once, when she was being kind and
explaining why I was so bad for Peter, that I had no moral sense, and so
could not understand people who did.
And I told her that might be so, but that I had more sense about men in
my left thumb than she did in her whole hundred forty-five pound body.
All our conversations became as irrelevant and vicious as that. We never
had talked the same language. That had not mattered, all the years we
lived around the corner from each other in Boston, because we only
talked about books, clothes and her struggles with her Aunt Genevieve.
She was wonderful to her Aunt Genevieve.
Let me try again. . . . Hilda was a little rigid in her joints, likewise
in her soul. She was well built and had capable hands and feet. She had
smooth long brown hair, blue eyes that would have looked deeper if she
had rouged her cheeks under them, but she would not. She was a very pure
girl. She should have married some simple soul, and made him an amiable
wife. Of course, she would have got very fat, after a couple of placid
children.
Yes, I do dislike her. She convinced me of the relativity of virtue:
i.e. if a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out
of nineteen of them, on a purely percentage basis she is a good deal
more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went.
She had not married, because her invalid aunt would not let her go about
and meet any men. She was unpaid nurse, companion, secretary and
housekeeper for this aunt. She had a boring life, and was extremely
pleased with the idea of visiting us in New York for three months, when
I asked her. (The aunt had been invited to Florida, and Hilda was not.)
Pete and I both had salary increases, and actually achieved an apartment
with an extra bedroom. So I could ask her. She was our first and last
house guest.
In the beginning she disapproved of us both somewhat—our cocktails,
cigarettes and conversation—and Pete was a trifle bored with her
attitude. But after we had taken her to a couple of amusing Italian
restaurants, she had decided she was seeing life. Over two glasses of
red wine she just bloomed. I thought it was rather sweet and a trifle
pathetic—so revelatory of the very little gaiety she had ever had.
Pete discovered one evening that she read French poetry superbly, and
was delighted. It was one of his passions. I could read French, but my
teachers had been bad, and my pronunciation was awful. So they had a
lovely time, beginning with François Villon, and going on from there,
two or three evenings a week, while I worked. (I had taken a couple of
free-lance advertising accounts that occupied evenings, temporarily, to
make money for a beaver coat.)
Hilda fell in love with Pete, over the French poets. I thought that was
understandable, and nothing to worry about. She had never seen as much
of any man as she had of Pete, and he was utterly charming. He liked her
by now—she was so placid and amiable and well-mannered.
I meant to do something dextrous about her—considered who among the men
we knew would be likely to find her attractive and not too dull; and
planned to have him about a good deal, and see if the transfer of
affection from Pete could be effected with no damage anywhere.
But I was extremely busy, and tired all the time, and let the thing
slide. I knew that she was growing increasingly absorbed in Pete,
because she began to be definitely rude to me. She was always objecting
to the amount of lipstick I used, or the lowness of my decolletage, or
the shortness of my skirts. It irritated me somewhat, but I was too busy
to bother.
One rainy Friday evening I had a choice of intruding on a poetry session
of Peter and Hilda, or dining with Rickey, who was the only person at
this era with whom Pete was willing to have me dine. That was logical
enough. Rickey was his oldest friend, and the person he trusted most.
Rick and I had already adjusted any embarrassment there might have been
between us. In ten minutes, when the occasion offered, he told me he was
sorry that it had happened, because of Pete. He did not know what, if
anything, I had told my husband; but, on the basis that what had
happened was a regrettable accident, he and I were at ease with each
other.
With a choice of being audience at a poetry evening, or dining with
Rick, therefore, I decided on Rick. I telephoned Peter that I would be
home at eleven or thereabouts. He took Hilda to dinner.
By eleven Hilda had pulled my life about my ears, and felt she had
performed her Christian duty in so doing. Though I maintain that she
used unscrupulously a weapon put into her hand at that dinner, to effect
what she wanted.
Pete got drunk. He began to talk about me. Hilda grew patronizing about
me, as an impulsive and unstable person. Peter, to be comforted by this
stable and “good” girl for the terrific and unhealed hurt I had dealt
him, grew confidential, understandably enough.
He told Hilda that I _was_ impulsive and unstable; so much so that I had
been unfaithful to him, with four or five different men.
Well—Peter had never met Hilda’s Aunt Genevieve.
He did not know that Hilda had been brought up to believe in good and
bad women; black and white; right and wrong; vice and virtue; and that
her life had contained no experience to modify her confidence in
absolutes.
She said: “Poor Peter. She’s an utterly worthless and promiscuous woman.
I’m pretty sure she had four or five affairs with men in Boston before
she met you. Perhaps she can’t help it. But you—you understand honour
and keeping faith. You should put her out of your heart before she lets
you down again.”
(It might be labelled footnote to a life. Maybe Hilda believed what she
said, since on Pete’s statement I was “bad.” But it was not until two
years later, at one of our rare dinners together, that Pete explained
what Hilda had told him.)
What she told him was not true. I had never had any affairs before I
knew Peter.
* * * * *
I went home that Autumn evening in ’25, feeling tranquil, feeling gala,
to a Peter who was through with me; and I was never to know why, while
the knowledge could conceivably be useful.
I let myself in. The apartment was dark. Undressing, I said to Peter,
who stirred restlessly, “Rick and I saw an awfully amusing show.”
He said, “I don’t care what you saw.”
I thought, “He’s very cross . . . probably fed up with evenings with
Hilda. Must do something about that.” And went to sleep.
Next day when I came home, Peter asked me for a divorce.
Just like that, with no introduction.