October’s the pleasantest month of the year, in New York. Cool days
succeed one another _crescendo_, like states of mind in convalescence
after fever. The air is so clear that edges of tall buildings are etched
against the sky, sharp and clean as lines in Chinese paintings.
On sunny days the warmth of furs and Winter tweeds is just outrageous
luxury, and Fifth Avenue’s a fragrance blended of furs and tweeds and
boutonnières and new leather gloves and French perfume—and the
underlying scent of gasoline belongs there definitely as the smokiness
in Scotch.
Evenings sparkle with a feeling of things-about-to-happen-fast-again,
many theatres opening, everyone giving parties to people back from Paris
with gay or ridiculous stories about everyone else who was there.
One may live October through, and never see scarlet-stained Autumn
leaves, except as centrepieces on tea-room tables. Yet the fires small
boys build in obscure streets at dusk—fires of three barrel staves and
a soap-box—have somehow a pungency that’s reminiscent of heaped Autumn
leaves burning on well-kept suburban lawns.
* * * * *
I went to a gymnasium most afternoons between half-past five and dinner
time, because exercise kept me clear-headed writing copy in the daytime,
and fresher-looking through the evening. The gymnasium had a running
track on the roof. Going ’round and ’round it, regarding the view of
upper Broadway electric light signs, or thinking that the person who
invented the sweat shirt had no sense of design, or just counting off
twenty laps to the mile, and debating detachedly whether to be energetic
and run three miles, or lazy and stop at two, I felt very contented.
Thump, thump, thump, around a board track. It was a simple occupation,
but an absorbing one.
That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was
breathless, yet must go on running for ever, seemed to sum up my life.
Running, through days of posing as an efficient young business woman,
through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town.
Running from the memory of Peter, toward something or nothing, it did
not matter which.
“You’re a success,” said Lucia, one day. “Three times out of five, when
the telephone rings now, it’s for you. Ex-wife Grade A, you turned out
to be.”
Ex-wife Grade A, I was. Sex-appeal, dresses well, looks young, dances
lightly, can make wisecracks, and is self-supporting. Lets a man talk.
Does not gold-dig, except for another round of liqueurs after dinner.
Never passes out or gets raucous, or gets sick. Not susceptible to the
“I want you, I want you, I want you” attitude, but likely to succumb to
“pity me, my life is lonely”—once with any man.
Three men came to be fixtures among the transients.
The first was Nathaniel.
At a large and stupid tea, given by a woman in the agency for which
Lucia wrote copy, I noticed a tall young man wandering about looking as
if he wished himself elsewhere. I wished I were elsewhere too. The room
was crowded and hot, and everyone was talking advertising shop-talk.
Eventually someone presented the tall young man, and I recognized his
last name as one seen frequently on signs on skyscrapers in process of
construction.
“You don’t have to talk,” he said. “You look like a Drian drawing.”
That was so nice of him that I tried to talk as amusingly as possible.
But he continued to look as if he wished he were somewhere else, so
eventually I asked him what he was doing at the tea.
He explained that his father was a client of the agency, asked me how I
got there, and I explained that I was a friend of Lucia’s, who was a
friend of the hostess’s.
“Lucia,” he said, “is gorgeous but decadent looking. She hasn’t your
obvious wholesomeness.”
“Wholesomeness” was a term that had not been used frequently in
connexion with me, of late. It left me somewhat startled actually, but
pleased.
“Let’s go take a cab,” he said, “and drive right around the city. I hate
hot smoky rooms.”
Because he was such a nice scrubbed-looking young man, and also because
I had nothing to do until eight o’clock anyway, I went.
By “around” the city, he had meant literally that.—West Street by the
docks to the Battery, and up the far East Side, where bits of the river
showed at the street ends.
I thought he himself was about the most “wholesome” looking person I had
seen in months. He had brown hair that would have curled untidily, if it
were not so close-clipped, wide-set gay grey eyes, a curious sensitive
mouth, a good chin, a beautiful vaguely striped suit, and a necktie I
did not like. It looked a little consciously vagabondish. To offset
that, he had enormous, well-shaped muscular hands.
He was fun. He talked about the shapes and colours and flavours of
things. I knew in half an hour that he had a passion for beauty beyond
anyone I had ever met—an impersonal sort of passion for line and form
and tone. He talked about the curved hulls of ships, I remember, with a
warmth I had heard in other men’s voices when, over wine, they
remembered some woman whom they had loved very much.
I had decided that this Nathaniel person was altogether engaging, when
suddenly he took off his hat, bent down, kissed the corner of my mouth,
let me go instantly, and without drawing breath, announced, “You kiss
very badly. I shan’t kiss you again.”
I laughed and laughed and laughed. He grew embarrassed; he blushed
beautifully; I kept on laughing. When I could breathe I said, “Do you
always make that speech?”
“Tell you sometime,” he said. “There’s a marvellous show of modern
French painters at the Dudensing gallery. Could you leave your office a
bit early tomorrow and see it?”
“Love to,” I said.
Months later he told me about the speech in the cab.
The day before he met me, his roommate at college had been jeering him
about his lack of “line” with women, and had recommended kissing them
within the first hour of meeting, telling them they kissed atrociously,
and watching them prove how wrong that statement was. Nat said he had
felt the speech might also serve to indicate that he was enormously
sophisticated, and then he could go on taking women to art-galleries and
Russian restaurants, without bothering further about personalities.
However, since I did not react as he had expected, he dropped the line
from his repertoire.
By the time he finally explained “how badly you kiss,” I knew a great
many other things about him. He was the only surviving son of a man who
had gone from small-job contracting to skyscraper building, and from an
Allen Street tenement to a residence in the East ’Sixties, in the course
of twenty-five years or so.
His older brother had died in an automobile smash-up to which the chorus
girl with him contributed a flavour of champagne and scandal, when Nat
was twenty.
The father turned white-haired over night, blamed himself for having
allowed the boy too much money to spend, and thereupon brought Nat home
from college, put him in the business, allowed him fifty dollars a week
and a charge account at a tailor’s, and administered lectures to him at
intervals on the evils of drink and women.
Infrequently the old man went on Gargantuan benders of his own, locking
himself and a half case of Scotch in the library his dead wife had
acquired, and telephoning for meals to be left outside on trays. He was
discovered usually, when Nat and the family physician forced their way
in on the second or third day, sullen, silent, holding in shaking
gnarled hands a silver cup his dead son had won at tennis, or some
casual letter about football and the necessity for an increased
allowance that the boy had written him.
When Nat was summoned home from college, at the time of his brother’s
much-publicized passing, his father’s physician had told him that his
father was likely to die suddenly of heart disease, at any moment, or
perhaps not for twenty years, depending principally on whether he had
any further shocks. He was not to be irritated or opposed in anything.
So Nathaniel grinned at the fifty dollar salary that never was
increased, charged clothes nonchalantly at the tailor provided for him,
and threw overboard ideas of studying architecture in Paris. He wanted
to travel, to see paintings in Florence, hear Wagner in Bayreuth, feel
the sun blaze down on the pyramids. He never went farther from New York
than his father’s country place on Long Island.
He took me to art exhibits, concerts and concerts and concerts,
beer-gardens where the Kapellmeister alternated the hilarity of “Ei, du
Schöne Schnitzelbank” with the poignancy of “Nur eine Nacht.” He took me
to the only Chinese restaurant on Pell Street where the chef had been
trained to cook for a Mandarin. He took me ten blocks out of our way to
dinner to show me the design on the wrought-iron doors of a new building
on Madison Avenue. And to the Lido and Montmartre to dance, and to
Pierre’s to lunch, and to speakeasies where he who had never seen
France, moistened the labels of cognac bottles, hopefully, to see if the
Hennessey water-mark showed through.
Once he talked to me about women. Like this. “Patricia, I’m conscious of
possessing a very unfashionable virtue.”
“What do you mean ‘a very unfashionable virtue?’”
“I’m lightly sexed or something. Women don’t bother me a bit. I should
rather go to bed alone at ten o’clock on Saturday night, so that I can
get up at six Sunday and go riding in Westchester, than spend the night
in the arms of any women I ever saw. Do you suppose there’s something
wrong with me? Should I try to set up a coat model on Central Park West,
with my fifty a week spending money, to prove I’m virile?”
“No, what for, unless you feel like it. . . . But why do you spend so
much time with me, if you don’t like women?”
“I don’t think about you as female. You’re decorative, like a well bred
young collie pup . . . and besides you laugh at things and like to look
at pictures.”
“You’re a comfort, Nathaniel.”
He was; he made me feel peaceful, usually. Rarely, he irritated me, with
his habit of averting his gaze from the emotions and desires and
struggles of people. He was always overlooking the ugliness of
passersby, to get a better view of some tower looming black against a
background of scudding clouds.
Yet he was the only practising Christian I knew. I discovered
accidentally, after I had known him a very long time, that, most weeks,
half of the fifty dollars which was almost all his father’s fortune that
he was permitted to handle, went to an old chauffeur of theirs, who had
gone half blind from drinking wood alcohol.
Nat thought it was very funny, to be the poverty-stricken heir to a
million or two.
I said that fifty dollars a week was almost all he had. Besides that,
the family doctor gave him a hundred dollars occasionally, adding the
amount to his bill to Nat’s father. The doctor suggested that method to
Nat, as preferable to endangering his father’s heart by making scenes
about money. So, when Nat ached for an Anders Zorn etching or something
of the sort, he got the money for it from the doctor.
Nat worked quite faithfully at the skyscraper-building business from
nine to five, disposing of steel and masonry by the ton, while dreaming
of skyscrapers all of glass and coloured tile, with terraces to make New
York look like a taller version of the hanging gardens of Babylon.
He never asked what I did with my evenings when I was not with him. I
suspected him of preferring not to know.
* * * * *
There was also Kenneth.
One day, lunching at the Algonquin with Lucia, I stared at the back of
the head of the man at the next table, and wondered why it should remind
me of Boston, and my half-forgotten cousin Roger who had gone to war and
death with the Twenty-Sixth Division. The man at the next table had the
most completely golden hair I ever saw. Roger’s hair had been very dark.
Roger was the first man I ever loved, I suppose. He was at Harvard Law
School when I was a freshman at Radcliffe. He wanted to be a lawyer en
route to being a statesman; because, he said, America needed more
statesmen and fewer politicians. I was sure he would be a statesman or
anything he wanted, because he was so good-looking.
When he went to Plattsburg, I took a course in the Principles of
Government, so that I could be a help to him when he became a statesman.
He had said, gaily, that he would marry me after the war, if I would
promise to grow up nicely for him while he was gone.
The Twenty-Sixth left from Framingham, and I drove up alone through a
dripping August dawn, wearing my best rose-coloured organdie dress under
a raincoat, to say good-bye to him.