On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped into despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before, there being
365
mornings in a calendar year. In general the cause of her despair was remorse, two kinds of it: remorse because she knew that whatever she was going to do next would not be any good either. The specific causes of these minutes of terror and loneliness were not always the words or deeds which seemed to be the causes. Now, this year, she had come pretty far. She had come far enough to recognize that what she had done or said last night did not stand alone. Her behavior of a given night before, which she was liable to blame for the despair of any today, frequently was bad, but frequently was not bad enough to account for the extreme depth of her despair. She recognized, if only vaguely and then only after conquering her habit of being dishonest with herself, that she had got into the habit of despair. She had come far away from original despair, because she had hardened herself into the habit of ignoring the original, basic cause of all the despair she could have in her lifetime.
There
was
one cause.
But for years she had hardened herself against thinking of it, in the hope of pushing it away from her and drawing herself away from it. And so mornings would come, sometimes as afternoons, and she would awake in despair and begin to wonder what she had done before going to sleep that made her so full of terror today. She would recollect and for a fraction of a fraction of a second she would think, “Oh, yes, I remember,” and build up an explanation on the recollection of the recognizably bad thing she had done. And then would follow a period of inward cursing and screaming, of whispering vile self-accusation. There was nothing she knew of that she would not call herself during these fierce rages of self-accusation. She would whisper and whisper the things men say to other men when they want to incite to kill. In time this would exhaust her physically, and that left her in a state of weak defiance—but not so weak that it would seem weak to anyone else. To anyone else she was defiance; but she knew that it was only going on. You just go on.
For one thing, you get up and get dressed. On this Sunday morning she did something she often did, which gave her a little pleasure. The drawstring of the pajamas she was wearing had come undone in the night, and she opened the pajamas and laughed. She said to herself: “I wonder where he is.”
She got out of bed, holding the pajamas to her, and she was unsteady and her body was pretty drunk, but she walked all over the apartment and could not find him. It was a large apartment. It had one large room with a grand piano and a lot of heavy, family furniture and in one corner of that room, where there was a bookshelf, there were a lot of enlarged snapshots of men and women and boys and girls on horseback or standing beside saddle horses. There was one snapshot of a girl in a tandem cart, a hackney hitched to it, but if you looked carefully you could see that there was a tiestrap, probably held by a groom who was not in the picture. There were a few prize ribbons in picture frames, blues from a Connecticut county fair. Some pictures of yachts, which, had she examined them carefully, the girl would have discovered were not many yachts but duplicate snapshots of the same Sound Inter-Club yacht. One picture of an eight-oared shell, manned; and one picture of an oarsman holding a sweep. This picture she inspected closely. His hair was cut short, he was wearing short, heavy woolen socks, a cotton shirt with three buttons at the neck, and a small letter over the heart, and his trunks were bunched in the very center by his jock strap and what was in it. She was surprised that he would have a picture like that hanging in this room, where it must be seen by growing girls. “But they’d never recognize him from that picture unless someone told them who it was.”
There was a dining-room almost as large as the first room. The room made her think of meats with thick gravy on them. There were four bedrooms besides the one where she had slept. Two of them were girls’ bedrooms, the third a servant’s room and the fourth was a woman’s bedroom. In this she lingered.
She went through the closets and looked at the clothes. She looked at the bed, neat and cool. She took whiffs of the bottles on the dressing table, and then she opened another closet door. The first thing she saw was a mink coat, and it was the only thing she really saw.
She left the room and went back to his room and picked up her things; her shoes and stockings, her panties, her evening gown. “Well, I can’t wear that. I can’t go out looking like that. I can’t go out in broad daylight wearing an evening gown and coat.” The evening coat, more accurately a cape, was lying where it had been carefully laid in a chair. But when she took a second look at the evening gown she remembered more vividly the night before. The evening gown was torn, ripped in half down the front as far as the waist. “The son of a bitch.” She threw the gown on the floor of one of his closets and she took off her pajamas—
his
pajamas. She took a shower and dried herself slowly and with many towels, which she threw on the bathroom floor, and then she took his tooth brush and put it under the hot water faucet. The water was too hot to touch, and she guessed it was hot enough to sterilize the brush. This made her laugh: “I go to bed with him and take a chance on getting anything, but I sterilize his tooth brush.” She brushed her teeth and used a mouth wash, and she mixed herself a dose of fruit salts and drank it pleasurably. She felt a lot better and would feel still better soon. The despair was going away. Now that she knew what the bad thing was that she was going to do, she faced it and felt all right about it. She could hardly wait to do it.
She put on her panties and shoes and stockings and she brushed her hair and made up her face. She used little make-up. She opened a closet door and put her hand in the pockets of his evening clothes, but did not find what she wanted. She found what she wanted, cigarettes, in a case in the top drawer of a chest of drawers. She lit one and went to the kitchen. On the kitchen table was an envelope she had missed in her earlier round of the apartment. “Gloria,” was written in a round, backhand style, in pencil.
She pulled open the flap which was sticky and not tightly held to the envelope, and she took out three twenty-dollar bills and a note. “Gloria—This is for the evening gown. I have to go to the country. Will phone you Tuesday or Wednesday. W.” “You’re telling me,” she said, aloud.
Now she moved a little faster. She found two hats, almost identical black felt, in one of the girls’ closets. She put one on. “She’ll think she took the other to the country and lost it.” She was aware of herself as a comic spectacle in shoes and stockings, panties, black hat. “But we’ll soon fix that.” She returned to the woman’s closet and took out the mink coat and got into it. She then went to his bedroom and put the sixty dollars in her small crystal-covered evening bag. She was all set.
On the way out of the apartment she stopped and looked at herself in a full length mirror in the foyer. She was amused. “If it wasn’t Spring this would be just dandy. But—not bad anyway.”
She was amused going down in the elevator. The elevator operator wasn’t handsome, but he was tall and young, a German, obviously. It amused her to think of what would happen to his face if she opened the mink coat. “Shall I get you a taxi, Miss?” he said, without turning all the way around.
“Yes, please,” she said. He would not remember her if anyone asked him to describe her. He would remember her as pretty, as giving the impression of being pretty, but he would be a bad one to ask for a good description. All he would remember would be that she was wearing a mink coat, and anyone who wanted to get a description of her would know already that she had been wearing a mink coat. That would be the only reason anyone would ask him for a description of her. He was not the same man who had been running the elevator when she came in the apartment house the night before; that had been an oldish man who did not take his uniform cap off in the elevator. She remembered the cap. And so this young man naturally did not question her wearing a mink coat now instead of the velvet coat she had worn coming in. Why, of course! He probably didn’t even know what apartment she had come from.
She waited for him to precede her to the big iron-and-glass doors of the house, and watched him holding up his finger for a taxi. She decided against tipping him for this little service—that would make him remember her—and she got in the taxi and sat back in the corner where he could not see her.
“Where to, Ma’am?” said the driver.
“Washington Square. I’ll tell you where to stop.” She would direct him to one of the Washington Square apartment houses and pay him off, and then go in and ask for a fictitious person, and stall long enough for the driver of this taxi to have gone away. Then she would come out and take another taxi to Horatio Street. She would pay a surprise call on Eddie. Eddie would be burned up, because he probably would have a girl there; Sunday morning. She was in good spirits and as soon as she got rid of this cab she would go to Jack’s and buy a quart of Scotch to take to Eddie and Eddie’s girl. At the corner of Madison the driver almost struck a man and girl, and the man yelled and the driver yelled back. “Go on, spit in their eye,” called Gloria.
• • •
In the same neighborhood another girl was sitting at one end of a rather long refectory table. She was smoking, reading the paper, and every once in a while she would lay the cigarette in an ash tray and, with her free hand, rub the damp short hair at the back of her neck. The rest of her hair was dry, but there was a line deep in the skin of her head and neck that showed where a bathing cap had been. She would rub her hair, trying to dry it, then she would wipe her fingers on the shoulder part of her dressing gown, and her fingers would slide along the front of her body and halt at her breast. She would hold her hand so that it partly covered her breast and the fingers rested under her arm, in the armpit. Then she would have to turn a page of the paper and she would pick up the cigarette again and for a while she would hold it until the heat of the lighted end warned her that it was time to get a shorter hold on the cigarette or get burned fingers. She would put it in the ash tray and start all over again with the rubbing of the hair at the back of her neck.
Presently she got up and was gone from the room. When she came back she was naked except for a brassière and panties. She did not go back to the table, but stood on one foot and knelt with the other knee on a chair and looked out the windows that ran the length of the room. She was in this position when a bell rang, and she went to the kitchen.
“Hello. . . . Ask him to come up, please.”
She walked hurriedly to the bedroom and came out pulling a cashmere sweater over her shoulders and wearing a tweed skirt, light wool stockings and brogue shoes with Scotch tongues that flapped a little. Another bell rang, and she went to the door.
“Greetings. Greetings, greetings, and greetings. How is Miss Stannard? How is Miss Stannard.”
“Hello, Jimmy,” said the girl. She closed the door, and immediately he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“Mm. No response,” he said. He tossed his hat in a chair and sat down before she did. He offered her a cigarette by gesture and she declined it with a shake of her head.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Yes, I’ll have some coffee if it’s any good.”
“Well, I made it and I drank two cups of it. It’s fit to drink, at least.”
“Ah, but you made it. I doubt if you’d throw away coffee you made yourself.”
“Do you want some or don’t you?”
“Just a touch. Just one cup of piping hot javver for the gentleman in the blue suit.”
“How
about
the blue suit? Didn’t you get What’s His Name’s car? I thought we were going to the country.” She looked down at her own clothes and then at his. He had on a blue serge suit and white starched collar and black shoes. “Did you get a job in Wall Street since I last saw you?”
“I did not. That goes for both questions. I did not get the car from Norman Goodman, not What’s His Name. You met him the night we went to Michel’s and you called him Norman. And as for my getting a job in Wall Street—well, I won’t even answer that. Norman phoned me last night and said he had to drive his father to a circumcision or something.”
“Is his father a rabbi?”
“Oh—don’t be so—no, dear. His father is not a rabbi, and I made that up about the circumcision.”
“What are we going to do? You didn’t get someone else’s car, I take it. Such a grand day to go to the country.”
“I am in the chips. I thought we could go to the Plaza for breakfast, but seeing as you’ve had breakfast. I’m supposed to be covering a sermon, but I should cover a Protestant sermon on a nice day like this. I don’t know why they ever send me anyway. They get the sermons at the office, and all I ever do is go to the damn church and then I go back to the office and copy the sermon or paste it up. All I do is write a lead, like ‘The depression has awakened the faith of the American people, according to the Reverend Makepeace John Meriwether, don’t spell it with an
a
or you’re fired, rector of Grace Methodist Episcopal Free Patrick’s Cathedral.’ And so on. May I have some cream?”
“I’m afraid I’ve used up all the cream. Will milk do?”
“Damn, you have a nice figure, Isabel. Move around some more. Walk over to the window.”
“I will not.” She sat down. “What do you really contemplate doing?”
“No Plaza? Not even when I’m in the chips?”
“Why are you rich?”
“I sold something to
The
New Yorker
.”
“Oh, really? What?”
“Well, about a month ago I was on a story up near Grant’s Tomb and I discovered this houseboat colony across the river. People live there in these houseboats all winter long. They have gas and electricity and lights and radios, and all winter the houseboats are mounted on piles, wooden piles. Then in the Spring they get a tug to tow them out to Rockaway or some such place, and they live out there all summer. I thought it would make a good story for the Talk of the Town department, so I found out all about it and sent it in, and yesterday I got a check for thirty-six dollars, which comes in mighty handy. They want me to do some more for them.”