I bought a rose chiffon frock and a wide-brimmed transparent hat to wear
to Lucia’s wedding, and went home to take her to dinner.
Lucia was sitting on the floor, surrounded by strapped trunks and bags,
and a half-packed suitcase, reading. She looked up and smiled. “I have
found a motto for you, Pat—_the_ perfect motto for any young divorcée.
Listen—
‘_Live thou whom life shall cure_
_Almost of Memory_ . . .’”
“Who wrote it?”
“Kipling.”
“I don’t think it is a perfect motto—the ‘almost’ ruins it—and why
read poetry the day before your wedding anyway?”
“The ‘almost’ makes it accurate . . . Arch sent me this (it’s ‘The Years
Between’) when he went to France. We were engaged then. I believe he
thought he was going to die fast and heroically—and he marked those two
lines in the book, to be consolation to me if he did die. Do you want
the book—I am not taking it along to Sam’s house.”
“Thank you. . . . Where do you want to dine?”
“At the Waldorf—if you hadn’t planned anywhere else. We can get a table
by the Fifth Avenue windows, and watch people go past. Sam wants to
bring over some relatives at ten tonight, and I said he could, Pat, do
you mind? I had planned to save this whole evening for you.”
“That’s all right. Kenneth may be turning up later anyway—he is dining
with that mysterious friend of his on the ‘Times’—the man he doesn’t
want me to meet—Noel Something-or-Other. You must have heard Ken talk
about him.”
“Yes.” She got up and began to comb her hair.
“I’m going upstairs to dress, Lucia.”
“No, wait a minute. When is Ken going to California?”
“The first of next week.”
“He won’t be back, Pat, you know.”
“He knows that himself. But when the weather began to grow warm he
developed a sudden ache to see the Pacific again before he died. I shall
miss him. I shall have a dismal summer, without you, or him.”
“I’ll send you a postcard from every fjord in Norway, Pat. . . . Tell me
something—were you ever in the least in love with Ken?”
“No, really.”
“That’s good—I wondered, because you have been seeing him so often.”
“He and Nat and Bill are the only men I know who want nothing of me but
my waking hours.”
Lucia laughed, and I went to dress.
At the Waldorf, I wanted to tell her that I had loved sharing an
apartment with her, and that I liked her better than any woman I had
ever known—but Lucia and I were inarticulate with each other about
things like that. So we talked of places Lucia and Sam would visit, and
things I wanted her to get me in Paris, and ate tomato en gelée, and
lobster, and alligator pears—the preposterous sort of meal women order
when they are dining together. Warm summer dusk deepened along the
Avenue outside.
Lucia began to talk again, of Kenneth. “Odd that one doesn’t feel very
sorry for him. He has, so obviously, had his quota of golden moments.”
“Yet you wouldn’t say he had a happy life, precisely.”
“Well, who has? You? Or I?”
“Not happy, but certainly not boring. We have come a long way from a
couple of simple New England girlhoods anyway—have seen so much more
than if we had married stability when we were seventeen.”
“I told you that you’d become reconciled to being an ex-wife, Pat.”
“I am reconciled to it when I have a new dress, or am eating the kind of
food I like, or dancing to good music. Let’s talk about something else.
I’m reconciled only when I don’t think about whether I am or not.”
Lucia said: “Pat, how often do you think about Peter nowadays? You have
stopped talking about him at last.”
“I think about him often—almost all the time when I am not occupied.
But, I think of him as someone I used to know—not, any more, as a
person of importance to me in the present. I don’t know what he is like
now, really. Judith must know that much better. I know what he was like
when he was younger. . . . It is a little as if he were dead. . . .”
“Well don’t try to manage a resurrection some time that you are bored.”
“No chance, Lucia. Even I can learn—”
* * * * *
We drank iced coffee and looked out at the Avenue.
“There’s Kenneth,” said Lucia. He was walking very slowly, with a man I
did not know.
Lucia knocked on the windowpane with her ring. Ken saw us, seemed to
hesitate, then waved his arms to indicate that he would join us.
After a minute, Kenneth and the other man came into the dining-room. As
they crossed the room toward us, I said to Lucia,
“Isn’t he attractive?” meaning the other man, not Kenneth.
“All right if you like the red-haired type. I don’t, because I belong to
it.”
Kenneth said something to Lucia, to the effect that she looked like a
hybrid between a bride-to-be and a healthy angel, and introduced the
man. It was Noel about whom I had been hearing for so long.
Lucia thanked Ken for the cigarette box he had sent her, and everyone
began to talk about marriage and Norway and California and the Black
Hills. The Black Hills were included because Noel was leaving to spend
the summer there, reporting the summer holiday of Mr. Coolidge.
After five minutes, Noel and I began to talk to each other. I cannot
remember at all what we talked about—I can only remember three things
he said, and those were inconsequentialities.
The first was: “Marriage is like war—an experience that no adventurous
man would evade, and no sensible man repeat.”
The second was: “Coolidge is the best living demonstration that, if you
keep silent long enough, something fortunate may happen to you.”
The third was: “Your voice is like a ’cello.”
Those statements were not extraordinary—they were just the sort of
thing men say. They had nothing to do with something that had happened
when he sat down, and began to talk.
When he sat down and began to talk, I said to myself: “This is why I
have powdered my face, and bought pretty clothes, and done calisthenics,
all the long time since Peter stopped loving me. I always believed, in a
corner of my head, that some day, somewhere, something lovely might
happen to me yet. This is it.”
He had dark red hair and eyebrows. He had a warm gay voice. He had
beautiful broad shoulders, and a strong chin with an incipient dimple in
it. All that did not matter.
He looked as if he found women interesting, but not a bit as if women
were the major pursuit of his life. I began to wish that I had behaved
better, in the last years. Then I remembered that he was going to the
Black Hills next day, and knew that it was unlikely that I should ever
see him again. I decided that would not have happened to me if I had
behaved better.
He said that he had known Kenneth since the war, and I asked him if he
had been in the Twenty-Sixth Division, too; and when he said that he
had, I asked him if he had paraded in Boston with the Division in the
Springtime of 1919.
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “But I _saw_ that parade. I watched it from the front row of a
grand stand on Commonwealth Avenue. I was seventeen years old.” I was
thinking, “Why could I not have met him then?”
He seemed to understand the implications. “I rode on a white horse,” he
said helpfully.
Then we laughed.
I remembered for a minute that we were being extremely rude to Kenneth
and Lucia. She was gathering up her gloves and things. Apparently they
were talking about Life.
(_Life_ had suddenly a warmth, a feeling of importance, significance
again that evening.)
“It’s a gorgeous procession to watch from a decent seat in the shade,”
Lucia was saying. “But such a tiring parade for the marchers.”
“But marriage does not mean retirement, Lucia,” Kenneth said.
“In certain cases it may be considered as securing a very advantageous
grand stand seat,” Lucia said; smiled, and stood up to go.
“Stay here, Pat. I have to meet Sam and I’ll see you later tonight.”
She said to Noel, gravely, “Patricia is a very lovely girl. Good-bye.”
She said to Kenneth, “I shan’t be seeing you again, my dear. No, don’t
come to the door with me. I have a desire to walk home alone and
contemplate—whatever I happen to contemplate.
“Kenneth, it has been so nice to know you. Whenever I see a portrait of
any of the younger, more-reckless-and-braver-looking Cavaliers, I shall
be reminded of you. Good-bye.”
He said, “Thank you. Have a happy life, Lucia.”
She smiled at us, and walked out alone, between the rows of tables, a
slender, red-haired girl, in a yellow-flowered dress. I thought, “There
goes my dearest friend.” I thought, “I wonder what Lucia thinks about,
really.” I thought, “I shall miss her acutely.”
And I turned back to Kenneth and Noel.
Noel and I talked, and Kenneth listened, and looked amused.
After some time Kenneth said something about “seeing them off,” and I
realized that Noel and Kenneth were _both_ going to Chicago the next
day.
It developed that Kenneth had decided to start to California a week
earlier than he had planned, so they might make that part of the journey
together.
“Oh dear,” I said, “This is just my evening for bowing people out of my
life for ever,” and then realized that was a tactless thing to say to
Kenneth; and, to compensate, I devoted myself to him as we all walked
uptown together.
Noel left us, on the corner of Forty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. He
had to go to the “Times.”
He said, “Will you be seeing Kenneth off?”