Ten North Frederick (62 page)

“How do you get away with it?”

“You mean Betty?”

“Yes.”

“That's just it, my boy. If I came home looking debauched. But I don't. I don't drink too much. I drank more in the time we've been here than I ever do in New York.”

“But doesn't Betty wonder what you do at night?”

“She's in Scranton, most of the time. She knows I'm not going to stay in the hotel and have dinner in my room every night. She knows I go out.”

“I know, but when you're gone all night.”

“No calls between midnight and eight-thirty.”

“And you've never been caught.”

“Never been caught. Why should I be? Listen, boy, I don't want you to think I get laid every night. I don't. But every time I go to New York, yes. You know man is naturally polygamous, Joe. You know that. A stallion always has as many as forty or fifty mares. I've got a girl in Boston and one in Chicago and two or three in Philadelphia. And if Betty weren't along on this trip I'd be kept busy in Palm Beach.”

“Paul, you amaze me.”

“Yes, I imagine I do. The one big trouble with living in a small town, the best people haven't got the facilities for high-class adultery. Automobiles. Country roads. Sneaking off to camps in the woods. In New York nobody gives a damn. And I don't live there. I'm home every week-end, unless I'm out on Long Island or up in Connecticut. I'm a visitor. So my wife doesn't have to run across the dames I go to bed with. Not that they'd ever run across each other anyway. These dames are not exactly the Bryn Mawr type, but they're a damned sight better-looking because they haven't got a worry in the world except looking their best after six o'clock.”

“What would Betty do if she did find out?”

“Betty is very careful
not
to find out.”

“Oh, then she knows.”

“No, she doesn't know. But she doesn't try to know. And I don't want her to know. Listen, boy, I'm not a damn fool. I believe in our marriage. You don't think I'd ever marry one of these dames? I wouldn't leave Betty for anything. And don't forget, it's often harder to keep a marriage going than it is to break it up.”

Joe looked at him and said nothing.

“You're too much of a gentleman to ask me what's on your mind,” said Paul. “Yes, Betty and I sleep together. If I had to give up the other women, I would, if it meant breaking up with Betty.”

“Well, you have a daughter coming out next year.”

“Oh, not only that, Joe.”

“I must say you make it all sound like the only way to live.”

“Not for everybody. But for me.”

“No, I think you're a fucking hypocrite. And that's a good use of both words.”

“Well, and I think guys like you are the real hypocrites. You want it, but you're afraid to go after it.”

“It isn't always a question of being afraid. But I don't think you'd understand what I believe. It'd sound too sanctimonious.”

“I'll bet it would.”

“Oh, but I'll say it anyway. There's such a thing as respect. Giving up those other dames because you respect the woman you're married to.”

“You think I don't respect Betty?”

“I know damn well those dames don't think you do, and that's what matters, whether Betty ever knows about it or not.”

“You
are
a little Lord Fauntleroy. Tell me the truth, Joe. Did you ever stay with anybody but Edith?”

“Yes. But not since we've been married.”

“You know, you're almost due for some middle-aged wild oats, and then we'll see who's the hypocrite.”

“Oh, I'm probably a hypocrite, too, but in different ways. I don't think I could ever have an affair with a woman and then try to kid myself that I was having it because I liked to get eight hours' sleep. I don't say that I'm better than you are, but I believe my imperfections are less harmful than your imperfections.”

“Let's go up to the pool and have a look at the girls in their bathing suits.”

“They won't be there. It's raining.”

“So it is. Well, let's tie one on. I was thinking of asking you to go to Palm Beach, but you're too damn sanctimonious.”

“And I'm a very sound sleeper.”

Paul Donaldson from Scranton held his glass at arm's length and stared at it. “You know, I don't know but what you may be right. But I won't admit it. If I had to do over again there isn't a single piece of tail I'd want to give up. So I guess I consider myself a happy man. God knows I don't consider
you
a happy man. You go ahead and consider me a fucking hypocrite, but I consider you a miserable, unhappy bastard. You never got anything out of life and, boy, you wouldn't know how to start now.”

“But that's assuming I'd
want
to start now,” said Joe.

 • • • 

Ann was one of a thousand, and many more than a thousand, girls of good family who were living in New York, working in New York, getting from their jobs some sense of belonging to something besides the Junior League and the country club, which were the community in which they would have lived back home in Dayton, in Charlotte, in Kansas City, in Gibbsville. Each girl thought she was living according to her own plan, but there were so many like her that a pattern had developed. They would go to New York, stay at one of the women's residential hotels until the search for a job, any respectable job, was successfully ended. “I thought I'd go to secretarial school and do some modeling.” The job found, the next move was to find an apartment with a girl of similar background and tastes and not much more and not much less money at her disposal. Sometimes the apartment would start with three girls instead of two, but a three-girl arrangement almost never worked out. In the first year or two the girl would be invited to dinner at the homes of Mother's and Dad's New York friends, and then the Friends of the Family would forget all about the girl from Dayton and Charlotte and Kansas City and Gibbsville, and she would begin to make her own life with office friends and friends of office friends and young men who had grown up in Kansas City or Gibbsville, attended Choate and Williams, had jobs in New York and, usually, considerably less money to spend than the girls. The Kansas City girl and the Choate-Williams boy might become fond of each other, fond enough to go to bed together, but there was little talk of love. The boy was not really interesting, not as interesting as The Boss. The girl was not really desirable to the boy, who was busy using Squadron A as the first step toward the Racquet Club and with an eye on the richer and just as pretty girls on the North Shore of Long Island. The boy would practice economies by buying his suits at Broadstreet's or Roger Kent while still going to Brooks for the right shirt. He also would economize by taking the Kansas City girl to the Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street, so that he could swing a dinner at “
21
” for a girl he had met through the Squadron. The boy would learn the language of his type: “I went to a place called Choate,” he would say to the sister of a Grottie. “I come from a place you probably never heard of—Indianapolis.”

The outlander boy and the outlander girl stayed away from their Bohemian fellow-townsmen who lived in the less expensive sections of Greenwich Village. “Carol? Yes, I saw her last fall, at the theatre. Yes, she still keeps up with her painting. At least she was then. I think she was going to marry a Jap, but it fell through.”

Ann's first job was found for her. “I'll find a job for her, Joe,” said Alec Weeks. “It probably won't be anything very interesting or exciting, but it'll give her something to do and pay her a small salary.” The job, paying twenty-five dollars a week, was in the library of the firm of Stackhouse, Robbins, Naismith, Cooley & Brill, the successor to Wardlaw, Wardlaw, Somerfield, Cooley & Van Eps. The lawyers at Stackhouse et al. liked to look things up themselves, but when only a certain book or two were needed they would telephone their library, give the titles of the books, and Ann would carry them to the lawyers making the requests. Her other duties consisted of seeing to it that the yellow paper and sharpened pencils were on the refectory tables, and that the lights were turned off after the lawyers left the library, and that no cigarettes were left burning in the glass ash trays or on the shelves of the stacks. She also saw to it that the room temperature was kept fairly uniform and that there were extra packages of Zymole Trokies for Mr. Meade, the firm's librarian, an elderly gentleman who had once done a-year-and-a-day in Atlanta but preferred not to talk about it.

Ann grew weary of the subway trips between her apartment and Cedar Street, and the unstimulating work, and Mr. Meade's throat-clearing and spitting. She heard about, and took, a job in a bookstore on Madison Avenue, where she could walk to work and have her opinion sought and make five dollars a week more than Stackhouse, Robbins, Naismith, Cooley & Brill had been paying her. It was
1935
and she was twenty-four years old.

The girl who lived with her in the East
64
th Street walkup was from Buffalo, New York, and always said “Buffalo, New York.” Her background was the same as Ann's, in that her father was a lawyer, quietly rich, and a class behind Joe Chapin's at New Haven. She was likewise an only daughter and a non-college girl who had gone to Farmington and an American school in Florence, Italy. The apartment arrangement was more or less inevitable after they compared backgrounds over many cups of coffee in the Barbizon drug store, where they both were living during their early New York days. They might also have taken the apartment together without the common backgrounds, since they had liked each other from the beginning. They never were introduced. They introduced themselves in the drug store, and after they began sharing the apartment one of them would occasionally say to the other, “I don't believe we've met.”

Kate Drummond was a cool, self-sufficient beauty, whose hair was black and whose skin was creamy. She was half an inch shorter than Ann, who was five feet, five inches tall, but Kate, with her slender nose and narrow shoulders, seemed taller than Ann. She was one of the girls who had made good her announcement to do some modeling, but the work bored her and exhausted her and she took her name off the lists, even before giving up the room in the Barbizon. It was not until they had lived in the apartment for a month that Ann realized that she really knew nothing about Kate, nothing that could not have been guessed by any observant person.

Ann had not known, for instance, that Kate did not have a job. She had known about the modeling work, and assumed that that was what she did in the daytime. But after they began living together, Kate remarked that she was looking for an easy but entertaining and not confining job. She would get up and have a morning cup of coffee with Ann, wash the breakfast dishes, make the beds, and “putter” until it was time to go out for lunch. She kept the household accounts, sent out the laundry, bought the magazines, the phonograph records, the gin and vermouth, and ordered the food for their evening meal.

Ann's protests that all the work was being done by Kate were answered by Kate's insistence that it all gave her something to do. And then they had their first confidential conversation.

They had had their cocktails and lamb chops and ice cream, and they were having their cigarettes and coffee. “Tonight I insist on doing the dishes,” said Ann.

“All right.”

“Why, Kate? No argument?”

“No. There may be an argument, but not about that. Ann, have you ever wondered why I never seem to go out with men?”

“Yes, but I thought you probably had a beau in Buffalo.”

“I have a beau, but not in Buffalo. And he's not a beau. I have a lover, or I'm his mistress, as you prefer. He doesn't keep me, and I certainly don't keep him. But there is a man that I'm having an affair with, and I've got to tell you about it because I took the apartment with you under false pretenses. I wasn't completely frank with you.”

“Well, you didn't ask me anything like that, either.”

“No, but there's more to it than that. This man is married and I'm in love with him, which is why I haven't taken a job. He comes here in the afternoon.”

“Oh,” said Ann.

“We very seldom have any nights together, but he's been here—at least once a week. I know
you're
not a virgin, without your ever coming out and saying so. But if you consider it messy to have me meet my—lover—here, I'll stop until you can find another girl to share the apartment. Or, if you feel very strongly about it, I'll give you my half of next month's rent and leave right away.”

Ann took a deep drag of her cigarette. “So you knew I wasn't a virgin,” she said. She smiled.

“Right away,” said Kate. “I wouldn't have liked you if you'd had that lingering virgin look.”

“Well,
I'll
tell
you
something that will make you and your lover look very inexperienced.” She then told Kate the story of her marriage to Charley Bongiorno, all of it. As she finished, she looked at Kate and saw that there were tears in her eyes. Kate got up and put her arms around Ann, who now wept for the first time in years.

“What I meant when I said I knew you weren't a virgin, I put it badly. What I meant was I could tell you'd been in love. It left a mark on you, Ann, but it isn't a scar. It's beautiful.”

“Oh, dear. I'm all right.”

“You started to tell it flippantly, didn't you? But halfway through I almost wanted you to stop, because I knew the ending. I could guess.”

“Well, I'm glad you let me finish. I feel better, I really do. And I guess you know the answer to your question about moving out.”

“I think I knew anyway,” said Kate. “Do you want to have men here, I mean spending the night? Is there anyone you would like to have spend the night?”