Very soon afterward, he was sent to Boston to cover a naval inquiry into
a submarine disaster. I felt half-alive while he was gone, but used my
leisure to solve the first problem in our relationship: how I was to get
any sleep. I worked from nine in the morning until five in the
afternoon: and Noel worked from two in the afternoon, until eleven, or
thereabouts, most nights, and then we wandered about the city until four
or five in the morning.
So I got myself a new job, as advertising manager of a specialty
shop—where no one cared if I did not appear before noon, provided I
worked until seven or eight at night.
During the week that I remained at my old office, after my resignation,
the wide-eyed little girl who had been an ambitious copy-writer, until
she decided to marry, came to see me. She was looking shabby, and
harassed. It appeared that her husband was not getting any of the salary
increases upon which they had counted so confidently, and she had
persuaded him to let her go back to work.
She wanted to know if I had heard of any vacancies, anywhere. So she did
inherit my job, as I had anticipated long before.
My new one paid less money, but I planned to make that up by doing more
free-lance advertising—it left me leisure to breakfast with Noel, which
was more important.
Noel wrote me a letter from Boston—the first I had from him.
(I turned to his letters to find that. It was written in pencil, on a
series of Western Union Special Blanks for Newspaper Correspondents.)
It began:
“The admiral of the battle fleet sits up very straight in the
centre chair on the opposite side of the long table—listening,
with a dark, long, weary, brooding face. A rear-admiral is
reading one message after another in a huge wad, that represents
the mobilization orders of the navy rescue force, after the
submarine went down.
“So far, it appears these orders mobilized only ships,
equipment, and crews—but not intelligence. I have come to
understand that a few men design machines and a great many use
them—and all seem very intelligent until an accident happens.
Then the user stands helpless at the machine and waits for
someone who understands it, like a banker who has dropped his
Swiss watch.
“The rear-admiral reads on. . . . And it occurs to me how nice
it would be if Patricia managed to turn up in Boston for a
week-end.”
Of course I managed it.
Noel did not leave New York again until Springtime—except for his
semi-monthly visits to his wife.
He had told me during a long conversation about mutual fidelity—a
conversation that I had been stupid enough to begin—that on these
visits he stayed with his wife.
He said then: “I don’t know, Patricia, whether she hates me—I could not
blame her if she did—or is fond of me, as one might be fond of a keeper
when one serves a life sentence. I mean, that I am her only remaining
contact with life. She hates to go about, because of that disfigurement,
and she sees no one but her sister and the maid month after month.
Sometimes she makes scenes if she hears that I have been about with any
particular woman. Her sister usually manages to find out.”
I said: “It must be difficult, Noel. I understand though. It was nice of
you to tell me.”
I did understand, but that did not comfort me very much. I was older
than I had been. I realized that there were women before me, in his
life. I could understand even, in some day that I hoped was distant,
there might be women after me. But I wished that I might have had him
awhile to myself.
Sometimes I thought of his wife—as a somewhat fantastic, altogether
tragic figure, hanging on the outskirts of Noel’s life. In moods when I
knew that I was looking particularly pretty, and feeling altogether
gala, I pitied her; because Ken had said that she was very pretty, once.
Less often, in moods when I wanted very badly to marry Noel and have a
red-headed baby, and forget everything in my life before I had known
him, I resented her.
On nights when I knew that Noel was with her, I walked up and down,
telling myself to be civilized, telling myself that he carried
responsibilities from his past, into his present—telling myself that it
was far better to have whatever of himself a first rate man had to give,
than to possess a second rate man wholly. I believed all that, but I
could not sleep at all, on the nights when he was with her. Finally, I
bought myself a long book, on every Saturday that he went to visit her,
and read it until morning. Then I slept, Sundays.
Or, on some of those week-ends, I visited Lucia, who was back from
Europe, finding suburban luxury pleasant. (It had turned out to be
luxury in Westchester, not Long Island.) Lucia had met Noel again. All
she said to me, was: “It’s not sensible of you, darling, but if it makes
you happy, why not? You’re looking younger than you’ve looked in years.”
There was a vacant apartment upstairs in the house where Noel lived.
Once, when I had to go home, because I could not appear at my office
next morning in evening dress, he said that he wished I lived upstairs.
I said I would move. From that beginning, we became involved in a long
debate on conventionalities. Noel insisted it would still be
particularly inconvenient for a woman to be compromised by a man who
could not marry her.
I did not care in the least, to what degree I was “compromised.” Of
course I wished that I could marry him—I wanted status and stability
and a baby. But at least I did have happiness on a day-to-day basis.
That was so much more than I had hoped to find, ever again, that I
managed to be philosophical (most of the time) about lack of status.
A few days after Noel said that he wished I lived in his house, I had
lunch with the girl who had been an eager copy-writer, when I was
assistant advertising manager—the girl who now held my old job.
She was looking completely forlorn. “I am going to leave my husband,”
she said. “We quarrel every day, because I make more money. He says that
proves the materialism of America. Or sometimes he says that I don’t
understand his character.” She shed a few inconspicuous tears. “Now he
spends five evenings a week with a girl who’s supposed to understand him
better. So I thought if I left him, for a while, he might be glad to
have me back.”
“He might,” I said. “Where are you going to live?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might know of some girl with whom I could
share an apartment. My furniture is in storage—we have been living in
hotels since I went back to work.”
So I took the child to meet Helena, who was touched by her
helpless-kitten attitude, as I had thought Helena would be. In a week,
the child moved into the apartment which Lucia had shared with me, and I
with Helena.
Helena said, “Well, Pat, I enjoyed living with you. For heaven’s sake,
come to see me often; and if anything goes wrong with your Great Love,
come on back. Meanwhile, I’ll teach the blue-eyed infant you wished on
me, her way around the city.”
On a Saturday, when Noel was out of town, I moved into his house. When
he came back, he scolded me for being so reckless, but he was so pleased
that he could not stop grinning while he scolded me.
In the Spring, he went to Albany, to attend the trial of a woman
politician accused of mis-use of public funds. He came to New York
week-ends, and I began my career as a daily letter-writer.
* * * * *
I took the letters I had written to him at Albany from the box, and
looked through them.
“DEAREST—
“I shall be so glad to see you when you do get back that I
shan’t be able to talk, shan’t be garrulous at all, for at least
five minutes, anyway.
“I see by all the afternoon papers that your lady politician’s
case is due to go to the jury tomorrow, but I believe the jury
will deliberate ninety-eight hours; then they will disagree, all
but one for conviction. The one juror will hold out for
acquittal because the defendant looked like HIS MOTHER, who was
a good old-fashioned female who couldn’t read or write . . . or
manage funds, either. Then the case will be re-tried; that will
take until election time; the defendant will be convicted by
Christmas. People will point you out as the oldest resident of
Albany, by then. The defendant will appeal; there will be long
arguments; the case will be re-tried. By then, you will be
growing grey haired; and myself, sedate. After fifteen more
years the defendant will die, and the feminists will work
miracles of check post-dating over her grave. There will be a
legend about you, too, who followed her faithfully forty years;
I shall be long dead, of waiting for a telegram saying you are
coming home. . . .”
After a week-end:
“BELOVEDEST—
“I was so happy, walking down the street this morning after two
whole days with you, that when I passed two truck drivers one of
them said to the other: ‘Jes’, look at that girl _smile_.’ And I
didn’t have the grace to be embarrassed.
“If you are permanently resurrected from Albany by the week-end,
I shall just go completely joyous, and have to be restrained
from singing in speakeasies, or otherwise behaving in an
undignified manner.
“Noel, am I undignified? Oh darling, please am I not dignified,
always or occasionally, or ever? Please, please dearest will you
teach me to be dignified? All my life I’ve wanted to be
dignified. I never thought of it until five minutes ago,
though.”
He was sent to Wisconsin in June, to cover President Coolidge at the
Summer White House, and I saw him off at the Pennsylvania station,
behaving well enough until he was gone, and then sobbing so hard in a
taxi, on my way home, that the driver spoke to me when I was paying the
fare. He said: “Listen, kid, I don’t know what it is, but whatever it
is, don’t take it that way, kid.”
After three weeks, when we corresponded between New York and Superior,
Wisconsin, by telegraph and telephone, we decided it was not to be
borne, and I arranged a leave, and went out to spend a month with Noel,
living in Duluth, twenty miles away, and wandering about its main
streets, contentedly, all day, while he was busy.
It appears that Noel sat down, the night I left Wisconsin for New York,
and wrote to his wife, asking her if she would not be just as happy, if
she divorced him. His wife did not want a divorce, however, and sent her
sister to New York to inquire among mutual acquaintances of hers and
Noel’s, as to any new reason he might have for asking for freedom.
The sister found out all the facts there were to find, concerning Noel
and me. It was much more my fault than his that the facts were so easily
accessible. Noel’s wife did not tell him, at that time, that she knew of
my existence. She just wrote him that she could not bear the thought of
being a divorcée.
After I came back from Duluth, I wrote to Noel: “Consider that I have
put both arms around your neck, and my head happily against your
shoulder, and have said that I believe remembrance of the lights of Lake
Superior, will glow happily in my heart for all my life.”
And, when I was making an effort to write a gay letter:
“I have thought of a CAREER. Plan to open a speakeasy for tired business
women, where they can go alone, and have liquid dinners, without being
stared at for drinking alone. . . . Come into partnership with me, my
darling.”
Once for three days in succession, I did not hear from him. So I wired,
“How are you?” He explained later that there was no language to describe
how damnably uncomfortable he was, so he did not answer the wire for a
day.
By then, I had decided that he did not love me any more. By the day’s
end—it had been a hot day, and I had to work very hard—I was
contemplating suicide. I wrote him:
“This is a love letter for Noel and nothing else but . . . it will
probably turn out full of profanity, but I can’t help that. I don’t know
when the thought first came, to add to general hellishness of New York
in the humidity, that you were annoyed with me. I suggested in my
telegram that you wire me. What you should say, I don’t know. ‘It is
cool here, I am working hard,’ maybe. Well, you would take it for
granted that I knew that.
“However, the thought that you were annoyed, grew beautifully, grew
through ‘He thinks I am just bingeing about with Nat and Bill and
whoever turns up, very pleased with myself until I thought there must be
a Wisconsin Wench. And I hope she drowns in Lake Superior and goes from
there to hell, but I _do_ hope she appreciates him, in the meantime.’ Is
that my maternal instinct?
“Then I tried to be philosophical, and steady. The Philosophical Effort
may entertain you. It amounted to this:
“In a friendship, _affaire_ or whatever inadequate label one affixes to
the things you and I share, a greater trust of the other person is
implicit than in marriage, or any arrangement where one can lean on
organized status.
“In the Love-Outside-Marriage that is so commonplace, now, what with new
freedom and old divorce laws, there are no fences to enclose two people,
and very few cushions against shocks. That’s all right. I don’t mind. We
have discussed that.
“Candour has to do, instead of fences and cushions. If you were annoyed
with me, if your feeling toward me changed, I believe that you would let
me know, specifically and immediately.
“Generalities. . . . Adult women who try to ‘understand’ men, make no
effort to enclose them. But women (in love) can put up with being
enclosed, well enough. If you said to me, ‘Sorry but it makes me dismal
to think of other people holding your hand, and what-not, and would you
mind not going out with other men at all?’, I would stay at home.
“You won’t say that, though. You believe in this freedom more than I do.
I just believe in it for men. Nevertheless, I do accept dinner dates,
don’t I? . . . Not as I used . . . I don’t ever try to acquire any new
men. . . . But I did go out with three people this week, and two of them
made love to me. (The other was just a couple of lunch dates.)
“My grandmother would have mourned your absence—I mean your
grandfather’s—in tears over her embroidery, perhaps. I bet I mourn
yours more violently, in a cab with the wrong person, or in a speakeasy
over a drink that I’m not having with you.
“I go to dinner, and I try to be amusing . . . sing for my supper, why
not? And if there is a dreadful instant, when I think, ‘I wish I would
find a telephone message from him on the switchboard when I get home,’ I
am more likely to say, ‘yes, I’ll have another, thank you,’ than to look
bored and sleepy. There is nothing to go home for—no message will be on
the switchboard.
“As for the rest—on its merits. I don’t row if I get kissed once in the
course of the evening, or so. I don’t invite it, and I make it obvious
that I’m damn well not reciprocating.
“The only person _I_ want to kiss is wandering around the Great
Northwest—and I wish Coolidge would get nostalgia for the sight of the
dome of the White House.
“Footnote to all this. . . . You said once that you thought incidental
necking was awfully boring. So do I. But that is one of the things about
which you are extraordinary. Most men do seem to feel they’ve achieved
something, in a minor way, if they succeed in touching their lips to a
woman’s chin or thereabouts, a couple of times in an evening. It makes
me feel slightly like riding in a crowded Subway, but it’s nothing to
make a scene about. Just part of all this damn freedom.
“Finally, about the possibility of your Wisconsin Wench. I hope not, but
I don’t care except with those instincts that can’t be helped. Shan’t
ask, want you always to do what you want. _But_, any Wisconsin Wench
will have to be just miraculous, to be half as good, or nice-tempered or
angelic to you as I plan to be when you come home at last.”
That night, an hour after I posted that letter, Noel telephoned from
Wisconsin, and we spent ten extravagant minutes talking gay nonsense. I
told him I had written an outstandingly dumb letter that he might as
well tear up unread.
But he answered the letter, this way:
“Patricia—
“I miss you steadily. I have not taken to wenching. I have sat around
talking politics with the old men or listening to young men (the
photographers) talk of their probably fictitious dealings with the local
virgins. I have a memory of you that seems undiminished in warmth, with
which I go tranquilly to sleep, alone.
“This summer will end. And, darling, darling (as you say in your ’cello
voice) I am closer to you at two thousand miles distance, than I could
be to any other woman in my arms.”
* * * * *