“Taxi!”
“Go to the courthouse on Center Street, one block above City Hall.”
“There are lots of courthouses there, ma’am, which one?”
“I don’t know—never was there—drive down and we’ll see.”
* * * * *
“This might be it, driver; stop and I’ll ask that policeman.
“Officer, is this the courthouse where they hear divorces?”
“No, lady, this is worse; this is the Tombs prison. Go on another
block.”
The taxi-driver went on another block. When I got out, he said, “I wish
you good luck, ma’am,” so I gave him fifty cents for himself instead of
twenty-five.
The courthouse was a handsome new clean building. I climbed the wide
steps to the entrance slowly, feeling surprised more than anything else.
I had not ever planned to get to a divorce court; I did not want to be a
divorcée; yet, there I was on my way to meet my lawyer and my maid who
was witness for me, outside a room numbered 238.
* * * * *
The entrance hall of the courthouse was a great circular space. The
marble floor had brass animals set in it. Probably they were signs of
the zodiac. I remembered that the hall of the Boston Public Library had
brass animals set in it, too; and that I had liked to walk on the
animals when I was a child, because they felt so cool and slippery under
my feet.
This courthouse hall was filled with men who wore dark clothes and
secretive expressions, and smelt of cigar smoke.
My lawyer, who had been Lucia’s lawyer, had told me to wear black. Mr.
Charles Marshall Henry was the sort who would think of things like that.
It was my own idea though, to borrow the ensemble; so that I should not
have to appear in it again. I had been sure that I would have a
miserable time, anywhere I ever went, in the clothes in which I became a
divorcée.
I borrowed it from Helena, who had just brought it back from Paris.
Helena was going to take over Lucia’s apartment, when Lucia married.
Helena painted; did gorgeous fashion drawings, like a realist—and
played around in her spare time making masks. She sneered at those of us
who got involved with men; made three times as much money as Lucia and
I; was always disposed to lend it to friends that were hard-up; and had
a passion for reading Greek dramatists in the original. She had a plain
face, a supple figure (she played tennis with cool fury) and had an
absolutely perfect taste in clothes.
The coat and frock and hat she lent me, made me look like a young widow
discreetly inviting a future.
I tried to keep thinking of Helena, and whether Helena were really
happy, and what Helena valued most in life, as I climbed the stairs to
Room 238, so that I should not think of Room 238.
My maid was waiting outside the court-room door. She was a calm,
competent taciturn coloured person. When I asked her to be a witness,
after my lawyer said I must choose people who had known both Peter and
me during our marriage, she told me, matter-of-factly, that she had
started life as personal maid to an actress, and had been a witness in
three divorce cases already.
“Good morning, Nora. Do you remember everything that you have to say?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Let’s wait for Mr. Henry inside, Nora.”
I felt glad that she was calm, because my other witness had gone to
Chile for the Guggenheims, leaving nothing but depositions behind him.
I was quite calm, myself. Lucia had been afraid that I would be
disturbed, and had wanted to come with me; but a conference with one of
her clients prevented. I thought about Lucia for a while.
“Mis’ Patricia, is this what they call the noncombated court?”
“I don’t think that’s _exactly_ the name for it, Nora. It is the court
for non-contested divorce cases.”
“I knew it was something like that. Here’s Mr. Henry, ma’am.”
“Good morning, Mr. Henry. No, I’m not at all nervous, thank you.”
“Court will open immediately. Your case should not take more than twenty
minutes.”
Someone, long before had said to me something like “your case should not
take more than twenty minutes.” Long ago—in a taxi— Oh, yes, that
almost-forgotten doctor of mine.
(What did I have to think of that for? I have stopped being detached.
Something begins to ache horribly, in my heart. I had better look around
and not think.)
Nora is sitting up very straight, looking pleased and important. The
room is full of little groups, each composed of one lawyer, one woman
about-to-be-a-divorcée, one or two witnesses. They are just like the
little groups arriving in the waiting room of a maternity hospital. One
doctor, one about-to-become-a-mother, one anxious husband. But there are
no anxious husbands here. That’s a help.
The about-to-become-divorcées have the same tense expression that the
about-to-become-mothers had. . . . Well, I lived through that, too.
It is so _silly_ to mind. Just an incident in the career of a Modern
Woman. What the hell!
But I never expected it to happen to me. Neither had any of the other
females assembled, perhaps. I inspected them. One was all dressed up in
purple silk and purple rouge and hennaed hair. The corners of her purple
mouth kept twitching. Another looked seventy years old, and wore a
beaded bonnet and black silk gloves. I wondered why divorce came to her
so late. I thought she might well have put up with matrimony for the
little time remaining.
One woman wore a woollen shawl and another wore sables and Le Début
perfume.
“The referee is coming in; one stands up,” Mr. Henry said. The referee
was a very old man with an altogether gentle face. I thought that he
must have forgotten passion and anguish and ecstasy, twenty years before
I was born.
Mr. Henry explained that the clerk was reading the calendar, and that
mine was the second case.
I thought, “What do I want this for? Why don’t I walk out, here and now?
What would Peter say if I walked out and telephoned him that this was a
preposterous thing to happen to the nice young people he and I had been?
. . . Peter wouldn’t say anything, probably. He’d just hang up the
receiver.”
I thought: “Probably _all_ these cases are collusive. I must remember
when I am asked that question, to say ‘Yes’ because it reads, ‘Was this
adultery committed _without_ your knowledge and consent?’”
I remembered hearing someone say at a party, that the only grounds for
divorce in New York state were adultery or perjury—usually perjury. I
wished that perjury might have been one of a few things I had missed.
They were hearing the first case. I tried not to listen. I looked about,
and remembered that divorce courts were supposed to be funny, so I tried
to be amused.
The room was clean and bare and furnished in walnut. Bleak sunlight
drifted in . . . but March sunlight was usually bleak, and I had lived
long enough to get over being sentimental. At least I should have got
over it.
(I loved you so, Peter. Well, I do not love anyone else _so_.)
The witness testifying said, “and a woman was in bed, and she covered
herself up with the blanket.”
(_Do not listen to it._ Where else should she be? Every co-respondent’s
place is in a bed.)
I tried to pull myself together. I watched the sunlight slipping across
all the ugly faces. I thought how Cabell would describe that
court-room. . . . Something like:
“to this dreariness comes high romance, and that gay challenge that
once, when she was twenty, she flung at time and habit and poverty and
all the other women who would love his handsome face and cool voice, in
the end comes just to this.”
* * * * *
(Ours was to be for ever and ever, on those summer evenings when we sat
on a roof and never saw surrounding smokestacks because we were looking
at the moon; and did not mind the street noises, because, in an
apartment across it, a man was playing Chopin. . . . But that was ages
ago. . . . Five years. . . . His fault, my fault, it does not matter
now. We were both too young, we were both spoilt. It does not matter
now. All there is left of the power we had to stir each other, is a
wonderful ability to make each other wince.)
I felt that I never wanted to see Peter again. If I never saw him,
perhaps, when I was old, I would only remember things like the Chopin
music.
On the witness stand, someone stopped talking.
Mr. Henry said: “Remember to speak slowly, so that it will be easy for
the referee to hear.” The skirts of Helena’s black ensemble swished as I
walked up to the witness chair.
“Do you solemnly swear . . . the whole truth . . . and nothing but the
truth?”
“Yes.” (First lie. My divorce is costing me four hundred dollars and
four lies. I am glad that my voice is steady.)
“When were you married to the defendant, Peter—”
“December 27, 1921.”
(We eloped . . . our families thought we were too young, but they sent
us wedding presents afterward. We were married on Peter’s pay day so
that we had money to celebrate. He made thirty-five dollars a week on
the “Telegram.” We went to dinner at Mouquin’s. There is no Mouquin’s
any more.)
“Where were you married?”
“At the Municipal Building in this city.”
(The deputy city clerk stood on a red dais between two palms and said,
“God bless you both, _NEXT_” all in one breath. I carried pink roses the
cleaning woman in Pete’s apartment gave me. She pressed a white organdie
dress that had got mussed in my suitcase on the way from Boston, so that
I could wear it to be married. I wonder what happened to that woman. She
used to smoke cigarettes while she scrubbed floors.)
“Adultery, on January 12, 1927?”
“Yes.” (Second lie. Not with that poor little unwashed wench. She was
probably so glad to get the fifty dollars Pete paid her . . . and she
looked so horribly scared.)
“Without your knowledge and consent?”
“Yes.” (Third lie. Peter and I spent two hours arranging it the week
before. It would not have taken so long, if we had not quarrelled most
of the time.)
“And you have not voluntarily cohabited with the defendant since that
date?” (How dirty the formal phrasing sounds . . . Peter came, very
drunk, to see me later that same night. He said I had looked so
disturbed. Poor darling, he looked disturbed himself. That was the only
time in years that we have been friendly. . . . That is as much of a
happy ending as we shall ever have.)
“Asking no alimony?” (He does not have to pay for refusing to live with
me.)
(Mr. Henry is bowing me off the stand. Now it is Nora’s turn. I do not
have to listen. It takes so much longer than getting married. Damn it, I
am going to cry. That will probably please Mr. Henry . . . it looks so
authentic. I shall weep five minutes for Peter, because I loved him all
of five years.)
Nora: “He had on a blue silk dressing gown.”
(I bought it for him just before he left me, when I was trying to prove
to him that I could be nicer to him than Hilda. It was a good-looking
dressing gown, and undoubtedly it has been much admired. Nora looks as
cheerful as can be. This is probably the big day of her year. She will
tell all her Harlem friends about it. They all will hear that _this_
“lady” wept. I wonder how her others took it.)
Mr. Henry read Dudley’s deposition. I hoped that Dudley was having a
nice time in Chile. I thought that I would probably never see him again.
I remembered Peter and Dudley and a girl of Dudley’s and myself, having
breakfast-and-bridge parties on rainy Sundays. We played excited bridge
for a tenth of a cent a point, and I felt adult because we had cocktails
from breakfast time on.