“You a virgin?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you sure? Please tell me the truth.”
“Mm-hmm. I am.”
“Do you love me?” he said.
“Yes, I think I do, Joe.”
“How old are you?” he said.
“Twenty-five. Twenty-six soon. No. I
am
twenty-six.”
“Oh. Then you want to be a virgin when you get married. That’s why you are now.”
“I guess so,” she said. “I don’t know.” She ran her teeth over her lower lip. “It’s never been like this before.” She put her arm around his neck. He kissed her.
“Will you be engaged to me?” he said. “Is there anyone else?”
“No, there’s no one else important right now.”
“Well?”
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t want to announce it now, or anything like that, do you?”
“No. I suppose we’d better be sensible and let you have your trip and two months away from me and see if you still love me.”
“Do you love me?” she said. “You haven’t actually said so.”
“I love you,” he said. “And you’re the first girl I’ve told that to in—nineteen twenty-five—eight years. Do you believe me?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “Eight years. You mean since 1917. The war?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?” she said.
“She was married,” he said.
“Do you still see her?”
“Not for two years. She’s in the Philippines. Her husband’s in the Army and now they have three children. It’s all over.”
“Would you marry me if I weren’t a virgin?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. That wasn’t the reason I asked you if you were. I wanted to know because—do you want me to tell you the truth?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I was going to ask you to spend the night with me if you weren’t.”
“In which case you probably wouldn’t have asked me to marry you.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I do want you to marry me. You will, won’t you? Don’t get a yen for some Frenchman.”
“I won’t. I almost wish I weren’t going, but I guess it’s a good thing I am.” Her voice was low and dramatic.
“What makes you say it like that?”
“The obvious reason. I have a theory, Joe. I’ve always told
myself that when I loved a man enough to want to marry him, I’d have an affair with him before we announced the engagement, and then have a short engagement and get married practically right away.”
“Oh. That means you haven’t really been in love all your life.”
“No. It doesn’t mean that. Not quite. But I haven’t been in love since I made that decision. Since I’ve found out more about sex. God! Is that clock right?”
“A few minutes fast.”
“How many minutes fast?”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“No, honestly. Even if it’s a half hour fast look what time that means. We’ve got to go back. I hate to, but please, darling?”
“All right,” he said.
Half way back to town she remembered something that made her want to let out a cry, to melt away, to die. The worst of it was she would have to tell him now.
“Joe, darling,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I just remembered something, the worst thing I can think of. Oh, damn it all. I wish people…”
“What is it?”
“I’m not going to be able to see you tomorrow night.”
“Why not? Can’t you break it?”
“No. I should have told you before, but I didn’t know we were—I was going to. All this tonight, about us. Some people are coming over from Gibbsville to see me off.”
“Who? Who is the guy?”
“Well, it’s not just one person. There is a man—”
“Who? Do I know him?”
“I don’t know. Julian English. He’s coming, and some people named Ogden. I think you know them.”
“Froggy? Sure. I’ve met English a couple of times, too. He’s a college boy, isn’t he?”
“No. He’s out.”
“Are you in love with him? I hope not. He isn’t so hot. He cheats at cards. He takes dope.”
“He does not!” she exclaimed. “He doesn’t do any such thing. He
drinks
too much, maybe.”
“Oh, darling, don’t you know when I’m fooling? I don’t know anything about him. I’m not even sure I’d know him if I saw him. Yes, I would. But you’re not in love with him, are you?”
“I’m in love with you. Oh, I do love you. And that’s what makes it worse. I wish you could come along tomorrow night, my last night before I sail. But I don’t think that’d be so good.”
“Oh, no. Mr. English wouldn’t like it.”
“It isn’t that. I’m not only thinking of him. But Jean and Froggy are coming all the way from Gibbsville just to see me off and we planned a big bender in New York tomorrow night. I’m not a bit pleased about it now, but there’s nothing I can do at this late date.”
“No, I guess you’re right, damn it. You certainly are the will o’ the wisp if I ever saw it.”
“Are you going to write to me, a lot?”
“Fourteen Place Vendôme, every day.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, you’re a Morgan, Harjes girl, as distinguished from an American Express girl. I’ll write every day and cable every weekend. And what will I get for it? A postcard that I’d be ashamed to show to my own mother and a scarf from Liberty’s and maybe a Dunhill lighter.”
They stopped and bought a comb at a drug store before she would go in the Commodore, where she and Lib McCreery and Is Stannard, Bryn Mawr classmates who were going abroad with her, were stopping. The breeze ended when they stopped the car, and the heat came back and everything began to get a little unsatisfactory and she wanted to go to her room and lie in the water. Their farewell was hurried and she was too conscious of looking like the wrath of God to enjoy any minute of it.
That was one of the things he commented on in his first letters. He had to stay in New York, in the heat, while she was cooling off and feeling like a human being on shipboard. Her
letters were ardent and pleasant and pleased, full of new and sudden love. Nicholas Murray Butler and Anne Morgan and Eddie Cantor and Genevieve Tobin and Joseph E. Widener were on board. “I wonder if I love him” became a song the way she said it, and she would sing over and over to herself: “I won-der, I won-der.”
“Who? Joe Widener?” said Lib.
“The Joe part is right.”
“Joe English, the boy that came down to the boat?”
“His name is Ju, j u for Julian.”
“Well, who is it, then?”
“You wouldn’t know,” said Caroline.
“Oh, I know. The man who brought you back to the hotel in that awful condition.”
“That’s the one.”
But when his letters came they did not match her mood. Discontent and some petulance, and though she snatched at the love passages, she had to be honest with herself and admit that they read more like postscript material. She blamed the heat of New York and Reading and felt sorry for him and said so in her replies. He was the man all during her first trip to Europe whom she missed, with whom she wanted to share the fun of her discovery of foreign lands. And she missed him very much. Then she got a letter from him that soured her trip, or at least divided it into two phases. He wrote and wrote, for pages, but it all boiled down to one thing, which in subsequent days she recognized to be true: “…The truth is, darling, some kind of fate threw us together, but the same fate kept us apart the night before you sailed. Those people were fated to come and take you away from me that night. I have a feeling that if they hadn’t, you would have put into practice that theory that you spoke of the night we went swimming. But they did come, didn’t they? That being the case, you went away without putting your theory into practice and since then I have spoiled it as far as we’re concerned with another girl. So I suppose this ought to be quits. I feel like the devil…”
She didn’t believe the words, and then she wanted to cable him that another girl couldn’t make a difference. She loved him,
and she regretted as much as he did that she had not spent her last night in New York with him. If only she could have talked to him. But that was impossible, and letters or cables were no good. Late in the afternoon of the day she got the letter she groped through to an explanation for the shock of his letter (which, however, did not make her any less unhappy): he had jolted her by being, so far as she knew, the first man who had tried to be honest with her. Reason did that for her, and then for the first time in her life she made up her mind to get drunk. And that night she did get drunk, with a handsome young Harvard Jew, who turned out to be something fancy in her sex life; he took her by easy stages down the scale of Paris entertainment, ending with a “circus.” She didn’t remember about that until the next afternoon, when the memory, which she knew she could not have dreamt, came through her hangover. Then and there she wanted to pack and go home, but Is Stannard saved her sanity. When Lib McCreery had gone out to do some shopping Is came in and sat on Caroline’s bed. “Where did Henry take you last night?”
“Oh, God. If I only knew.”
“Were you that blotto?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Caroline.
“Don’t you remember anything?”
“Very little.”
“Did he—do you remember going to a place where a man and a woman—you know?”
“I think so. I’m afraid so.”
“That’s where he took me, too. I thought I’d die when I went with him. I don’t understand him. I wasn’t nearly so drunk as you were.
I remember.
Every detail. But I can’t understand Henry. He never touched me. All he did was to keep watching me. He didn’t watch
them,
just me. I think he must have got pleasure out of the effect it had on me, those people. I don’t think we’d better see that crowd again, that he goes around with. He wants me to go again and he wants you to come.”
“God, I feel so terrible. Do you think he did anything to me?” said Caroline.
“Oh, no. I’m sure he didn’t. He gets some kind of pleasure
out of watching us. There are people like that. You never went the limit, did you, Callie?”
“No.”
“Neither did I, and I think someone like Henry can tell that just by looking at you. I really do.”
“Then why does he—oh, I wish I were home.”
“Don’t worry. You notice he didn’t ask Lib. I’ve thought for years that Lib had an affair, probably more than one. So you and I are together on this. Just don’t say anything about it to Lib, and if Henry becomes too insistent we can leave Paris. Can I get you some aspirin or something?”
Caroline had had her scare, and she got drunk no more. For the rest of her trip she traded nothing but her dancing ability for the attentions of the English-speaking young men who were attracted to her; and for a year after that the frightening experience with Henry What’s His Name, and the disillusioning and humiliating experience with Joe Montgomery dictated her preference in men: they had to be clean, preferably blond, and not in the least glamorous or unusually attractive.
Back home, she had nothing to do in Gibbsville except to play bridge with the girls in the afternoon bridge clubs, and the mixed clubs in the evening; to take a course in shorthand and typewriting at the Gibbsville Business College, with vague notions of a winter in New York in the front of her mind; to turn out for the Tuesday women’s golf tournament-and-luncheon; to wheedle contributions on the various tag days; to act as chauffeuse for her mother, who could not learn to drive a combustion-engine car; to give her share of parties. She kept her weight under 115 pounds. She bobbed her hair. She drank a little more than the sociable amount, and she grew mildly profane. She came to know herself to be the most attractive of the Lantenengo Street girls. Without getting the rush that the girls still in school would get at dances, she still was more universally popular; the boys in the school crowd danced with her and so did the males of all ages up to forty, and a few did who were more than forty. She never had to pretend that she was having a better time sitting with a highball than she did on the dance floor. The girls she knew liked her without calling her a good
sport or trusting her too far with their husbands or fiancés. They really did trust her, but they did not trust their men.
At the beginning of the summer of 1926 she recapitulated, and acknowledged that she was getting a little hard. She saw most frequently Julian English, Harry Reilly, Carter Davis, and a man from Scranton named Ross Campbell. Julian English was a habit, and she suspected that he went on seeing her because she never said anything about his Polish girl, who was reputed to be beautiful, but whom no one had seen. Harry Reilly was lavish and considerate; in his way, so crazy about her that he was almost self-effacing. Carter Davis was too predictable; she was certain she could tell how many years it would be before the day came when Carter stopped drinking and trying to pick up Irish girls after church Sunday night, and settled down and married a Lantenengo Street girl. “But it won’t be me,” she said. “Imagine life with a man whose deepest passion was bridge. And the Philadelphia Athletics. And the Cornell football team. God!” Ross Campbell was the most likely prospect for marriage. He was older than the others except Reilly, and he was something that did not exist in Gibbsville; one of those Harvard men, tall and slim and swell, who seem to have put on a clean shirt just a minute ago—soft white shirt with button-down collar—and not to have had a new suit in at least two years. He was not rich; he “had money.” He had big strong teeth and his charm had something to do with a deceptive awkwardness, a result of his height, and his St. Paul’s–Harvard voice and accent. He became a non-resident member of the Lantenengo Country Club as a matter of course when he began to see Caroline, and that was when Caroline first noticed that he was, besides everything else, a snob. He told her he was going to join. “I’ll ask Whitney Hofman to put me up. I think it’d be best to ask him to get someone to second me. I don’t really know anyone else.” He knew some others as well as he knew Whit Hofman, but Caroline saw that what he meant was that Whit Hofman, being the richest and the impeccable young man of Gibbsville, was the only man of whom he would ask a favor. And so Ross was put up by Mr. Whitney Stokes
Hofman, seconded by Mrs. Whitney Stokes Hofman; initiation fee $50, annual dues $25. Then she noticed that he was a bit on the stingy side. He always added restaurant charges before signing the checks. He rolled his own cigarettes, which may have been an honest preference in tobacco, but looked like an economy; and once after winning a few dollars in a bridge game at the club he pocketed his winnings with the remark: “That covers my gas and oil expenses this trip. Not bad.” This somehow did not fit in with what you would expect of a man whose life work was “keeping the estate’s affairs in shape. I have to. Mother doesn’t know the multiplication table higher than the six-times table.” Caroline began to see that she was right about his not being a coal-region rich man. Some of the things that made him himself were things that she liked—his manners, his manner, his way of walking into any party with a smile that was pleasant enough but at the same time said, “What have you got to offer me?” She liked the simple fact of his not ever trying to kiss her; she liked it and kept postponing her inquiry as to the reason for it. But by postponing that, or any and all inquiry, she did something else; she lost interest in him. The day came when she did not have to postpone the analysis of his diffidence, and she became merely satisfied with his diffidence. There was no showdown, because she let him see what had happened: she did not care if he never came to Gibbsville. She did not condone her behavior. She knew that her friends—and not only those of her own sex—were for the first time a little in awe of her, practically rediscovering her, because Ross Campbell so obviously was interested in her. She was sorry for her friends, who already were thinking of the New York and Boston ushers; and in a not quite sincere way, she was sorry for herself. After all, there had been six or seven times when she had liked him so enormously at particular moments that she wanted to get closer to him, to put her arms around him. But she never had, and the whole thing spilled away. It wasn’t long before it became very, very easy to think of him as a stick, a stuffed shirt.