“Not much like what I used to want. And much more than I ever expected
to have, now.”
[Illustration]
Half-past eight.
My cab was held up in traffic. I lighted a cigarette. Everyone kept
saying to me, nowadays, “You’ll feel differently after your divorce,” or
“You’ll feel better after your divorce.” Just as they say, “You’ll feel
better after you have your tonsils out,” or “after the baby is born,” or
“after you eat.”
I wondered if doctors said to the very old, “You’ll feel better after
you’re dead.”
Committed to divorcing Peter, with the suit filed, and the lawyer’s
retaining fee paid, I knew no more whether I wanted to divorce Peter,
than I know what sort of coat I should want for the Springtime of 1940.
If I had held on, for six months more, or six years, would Peter have
come back, ultimately? And would I have wanted him, or not?
The traffic signals changed. I told the driver to hurry.
[Illustration]
Eleven o’clock.
The ambitious young copy-writer, who would probably have my job some
day, knocked on my office door.
“Things are quiet today, aren’t they,” she said.
“Yes, thank God.”
“I wanted to ask you to luncheon,” she said shyly. “You see—you are
older than I, and married, and a successful business woman; and I wanted
some advice.”
Well, I was twenty-five, she was probably twenty-one. I myself had
thought twenty-five a fairly advanced age, four years before I reached
it.
“I am sorry I can’t lunch with you. I have an appointment with the
misses’ dress buyer. But why don’t you sit down now and tell me about
it.”
She stumbled about for a beginning.
“Your work is going very well these days. I have been meaning to tell
you so,” I said.
“It isn’t that. Thanks awfully, though . . . I want to get married.”
“How very nice. I can arrange for you to get a leave of absence whenever
you want it,” I said.
“No. The thing is—the man I’m thinking of marrying insists that I give
up my job. He doesn’t want his wife to work. He hasn’t very much money,
but he will make more all the time . . .” She stopped.
“Same old marriage versus career problem?”
“Yes.”
“How old is this man?”
“Six months older than I. He’s twenty-two.”
“Do you care very much about him?”
Tears filled her large innocent blue eyes. “I love him _terribly_,” she
said.
I was surprised by my own enthusiasm. “My dear child, marry him—and if
you have to get a job some day you’ll get one. If there’s anything I can
do to help—I mean I can give you notes to people who will sell you your
furniture wholesale—do tell me about it. . . . Tell me some more about
your fiancé.”
She talked and talked. She said she would be leaving in two weeks.
She had not needed my advice—she would have married him anyway,
probably. She would have done well, in advertising.
Instead, she would eat canned beans the night before her husband’s pay
day, or something of the sort, I supposed. And I would have to teach
someone her job.
I wondered if I meant the rhapsodies in which I finally told her that
she must not let love go by, or words to that effect . . . and decided
that I meant them, in some moods.
[Illustration]
Five o’clock—telephone ringing.
“Pat, it’s Nathaniel—I’m celebrating—have you a dinner date?”
“Yes, I have a dinner date, but I should like to celebrate, briefly.”
“I’ll meet you at the side door at five-thirty.”
End of the day. Hands-and-neck bathed. Face cold creamed, lipsticked,
rouged, powdered.
Nat waiting at the side door.
“Hello, small girl. You’re looking lovely. My aged father up and gave me
a raise. He made two hundred thousand in the market last week, so he
raised my salary from fifty to sixty dollars. Let’s have cocktails.”
Giacomo’s bar. Clover Clubs cold as ice cream, and pink as fingernail
salve.
“Nat, where have you been all these two days?”
“I forgot to tell you—so excited about my raise—I’ve been on a
trip—longest trip I’ve taken since my brother died sudden—I’ve been to
Philadelphia—papa’s building a bank there.”
He looked worn, and dismal.
“It’s grand about the raise, Nat. . . . And some day, some day you’ll go
places . . . and see all the lovely pictures in the world.”
“Yeah—some day when I’m fifty and my eyesight is so bad I can’t see
anything smaller than a twelve by twenty foot mural.”
I felt sorry for him. He had spent seven years paying the cheque for the
brother who had died gaily via the alcohol-chorine route. But everyone
paid the cheque for everyone else, after all. And some day his father
would leave him money to go places and see things.
“Darling . . . if you want me to cut my dinner date, I’ll try to, and we
can go riding about until you feel better.”
“No, Pat. You are a dear, though. You’re always cheerful. Did you have a
hard day?”
“No. Advised a young woman to choose love before the advertising
business—and marry a man who makes fifty dollars a week.”
“You are a reckless girl. You should be married yourself, but not to
anyone making less than fifty an hour. Your taste in clothes is too
subtle.”
“How percipient you grow, Nathaniel.”
“Well, I like to look at pictures, and so I notice you.”
Nathaniel’s efforts at compliments always embarrassed me. They were so
solemn.
I told him the story about the farmer’s daughter who had a grandmother,
and I told him that Lucia was really going to marry Sam, and I told him
that he (Nathaniel) was an ever-so-bright hour in any young woman’s
day—and then I said I must go home to dress carefully, because I was
dining with Horace.
Nathaniel was impressed. “America’s greatest portrait painter.—Pat,
will he do a picture of you? I’ll borrow money from the doctor to pay
for an option on it.”
“I doubt if he paints me—he’s not definitely through with his Spanish
girl.” And then I wished I had not had four Clover Clubs so fast,
because Nathaniel hated to hear things like that about people whose work
he admired.
“His sense of colour is marvellous, Patricia.”
I talked to him about colour—of paintings, of skies, of buildings—and
had him happily stirred about the possibility of making New York the
most colourful city in the world by the time I left him to go home to a
sombre silent dinner with his father.
[Illustration]
I met Lucia coming downstairs as I was going up. She was wearing a white
and gold dress, and a wrap with a white fox scarf. “Lucia you look
heavenly. Is all this in honour of your affianced?”
“Yes, darling, in honour of him and his brother from Chicago, and dinner
at the Ritz.”
“I never knew Sam had a brother from Chicago.”
“The brother has four children dear, and a healthy wife. No good to you,
in the soon-approaching days of your freedom.”
“Not having any, I told you.”
“We’ll see about that, Pat. Speaking of men you are not going to marry,
has Kenneth got keys to your apartment?”
“Yes, I forgot to tell you. I gave him keys some time ago; so that he
could sit about and wait to take me to Harlem, if he turned up late.”
“Well, he’s been poking his once beautiful head in and out of my door
for an hour, demanding you. He is very drunk. Poor Ken, he looks like
the wandering Jew gone Nordic. He left some time ago, though. I heard
him falling downstairs. Were you dining with him?”
“No, dining with Horace.”
“What are you doing, trying out all the self-advertised Great Lovers in
New York, one after the other . . . or do you want a sketch of yourself?
He never makes them until afterward. Says it’s not anatomically possible
. . . I suppose it’s all right for you to amuse yourself though—and you
have been cutting down on adventures recently, haven’t you?”
She sat herself in the niche by the landing, where once, I suppose,
before the house got remodelled, a saint or a bust of a statesman or
perhaps even a virgin had sat.
“Pat I have a minute to talk. Are you very unhappy about divorcing
Peter?”
“I don’t think about it. I _have_ cut down on what you call
adventures—they are no good to me. At first, I thought I could take
them as easiest way to forgetting Peter, but that doesn’t happen. I’m
not designed for a just-for-the-fun-of-it woman, perhaps.”
“Never mind—I couldn’t make that grade, either. I’ll find you a
husband. I’ll have lots of spare time after I’m married. Meanwhile have
fun with the Great Lovers.”
“Horace is no Great Lover so far as I know—and he’s ages old, Lucia.”
But Lucia stood up, and started downstairs. Her voice floated back with
her perfume. “Great Lovers—men who’ve ‘known a hundred women,’ and
boast of it—they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and
so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra.”