The Firemen’s Fair
On the creaking ferris wheel Purcell and Mary made an oddly matched, if attractive, couple. Purcell at least
looked
awfully strange wearing a dinner jacket at a firemen’s fair.
He had stuck with the Lyric Women in the ballroom until the last crumbling
petits fours
had been washed down with the last acid swallow of Riesling-type wine, until the last clattering trayload of coffee cups had been carried out, until Pallas Athene Smith had thumped ominously with her gavel, cleared her throat menacingly into the public address system and bawled out “Ladies, fellow members of the North American League of Lyric Women, Daughters of Sappho!” Then Purcell had bolted. The elevator had been so long in coming that he had dashed down the fire stairs, and he’d been in a taxi on the way to Mary before he realized how winded he was, how unsuitably dressed.
They had set out aimlessly from the Baldwin house on Palm Frond Avenue, bound for nowhere when the lights, the noise of the carnival, had attracted them. As such things went, this was strictly a tank town affair, badly laid out and spottily attended. The few crackers and local oldsters who had turned out to do their fire laddies honor gaped, awe-stricken, at the splendor that was Purcell, the prettiness that was Mary. Bits of Mary’s blue angora sweater had come off on Purcell’s jacket, but he hadn’t minded in the least. He’d put an arm around her in the Whirligig, kissed her in the Caterpillar. Mary had said “D-David” shyly and then kissed him back, timidly at first and then with a growing ardor that had stunned Purcell.
And he’d been quite the boy, had Purcell, winning a kewpie doll, a pair of hideous boudoir lamps and a ghastly set of plastic-backed toilet accessories nested in sleazy rayon at the shooting gallery. Mary had laughed delightedly and accepted each tawdry tribute as though it had been the Hope Diamond.
Together they had consumed hot frankfurters filled, apparently, with sawdust and gristle, between cold, stale buns. They had guzzled tepid root beer, chemical orange juice, a sluggish, cornstarchy mess called Milton’s Million Dollar Malted. Laughing up into his face, Mary had fed him Karamel Kora, and ancient peanuts coated in salt and cold grease.
Hand in hand they had wandered through the fun house, examined their reflections together in the distorting mirrors. “Look, David,” Mary had said, giggling at her tall emaciated image, “Mrs. Goodenow. Just call me Etta.”
Moving to another mirror she had swayed cold and haughty, a stately giraffe with a tiny head poised on an endless neck. “Now I’m Edythe St. Clair Conyngham. ‘But of
course I
know the
Algernon
Jukes family. Rilly, deah.
He
was a classmate of my husband’s and
she. . .
Oh, no, darling. I feel splendid. Rilly, I do. But I was just finishing my sixteenth brandy when I
thought
I detected something
fun-ny
in the fudge.’ “
Mary had squealed as the gust of compressed air blew her skirts up and, accosted in the Chamber of Horrors by a man in a black union suit on which a realistic skeleton was outlined in phosphorescent paint, she shrieked and threw her arms around Purcell.
The side show had been disappointing in a sordid fashion. Promised rarities from the four corners of the globe, they had had to make do with a double calf foetus bobbing in alcohol; a dispirited Negro who shook the bars of his cage and, when called upon, made guttural noises suitable, presumably, to the wilds of Borneo; an obviously padded fat woman; a laconic old gentleman covered with gooseflesh and blotchy tattoos; a wizened midget lady who sang “Annie Laurie” in a voice like nails going through a meat grinder.
For an additional twenty-five cents they had been offered the delights of George-Anne, half man and half woman.
“Want to see the hermaphrodite, baby?” Purcell had asked her. “Learn the facts of life?”
“No thank you, David. Mr. Wenton’s enough.” Then Mary had blushed to the roots of her hair and hidden her face in his satin lapels.
Now suspended in air, at the very top of the ferris wheel, Purcell put his arms around Mary and kissed her again. He had wanted the kiss to last a long time and so, obviously, had Mary. But hardly as long a time as it did last. Purcell was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. When he opened his eyes he saw that they were down on the ground, the center of an admiring gaggle of yokels. “Ten cents for another time around, mister,” the roustabout was saying, his grimy paw outstretched.
“Oh!
David!”
little Street said. Hand in hand they fled through the grinning crowd. They paused at the merry-go-round just long enough to see a strange sight—Mrs. Dukemer, seated demurely side-saddle on a dappled wooden horse, her skirts fluttering in the breeze, a cornucopia of pink cotton candy clutched absently in her hand. At her side Mr. Mather rode astride a milk-white charger. Silently they went away.
“David, I just
can’t”
Mary said as a tired old waiter slammed a pizza down in front of them. It was a good yard across, blistering hot and studded with garlicky little slices of sausage.
“Try, baby,” Purcell said tenderly. “You’ve got to take a little nourishment just to keep up your strength.”
Somehow they managed to eat it all, washing it down with glasses of Chianti. And as they ate, Purcell opened up and talked about himself. He told Mary about his boyhood in Ashtabula, Ohio; even about his mother. Purcell had never talked about his mother to anyone and few people who knew him had found it possible to believe that Purcell could ever have had anything as normal as a mother. He told Mary about his stint in the Army, about the jobs he had had in one hotel and then another, about the kind of hotel he would someday like to own. Purcell had never talked so much or so long in his life and his discourse was brought to an end only by the waiter standing wearily at their table.
“Two o’clock, mister. I gotta close up.”
“Two
o’clock!”
Mary gasped. “Oh, it
can’t
be. I’ll be dead in the morning. Mr. Wenton will. . .”
“Time for bed, baby,” Purcell said, taking her arm. “It’s a school night. Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
With his arm around her waist they had strolled along Palm Frond Avenue, dark save for an occasional bathroom light left burning. Mary’s neat little head was against his shoulder. They didn’t speak until they drew abreast of 495.
“Here we are,” Mary whispered, handing him her latchkey.
Purcell put the key in the door and then took her hand fiercely. “Mary, baby,” he moaned, “I can’t leave you now. Not here. Not like this.”
“Please,” she whispered. “It’s late. It’s after two. I’d ask you in, but Mr. Baldwin—”
“Is that you, Mary?” a voice called out through the darkness.
“Y-yes,” little Street answered. “I’m just coming in. Good night, David,” she whispered. “It’s been a lovely,
lovely
evening. Thank you.” With that she was gone. No farewell kiss, no anything.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” Purcell said. “I’ll be double goddamned.”
711
It was seven o’clock, and Purcell murmured a drowsy hello and rolled over. His daily schedule insinuated itself into his subconscious: he was at the Desk with a late check-out and an early arrival. There was a credit balance of five hundred dollars loose in his mind, and every time he rolled over he picked up the credit balance on the bookkeeping machine.
With his opportunities and any sense, he ought to marry some rich old girl with high blood pressure who would take him out of all this. Instead of that, he was carrying the torcheroo for a little secretary.
Purcell looked at the radium dial of his watch. It was seven, all right, and the Browne-Smythes were coming in on the
Silver Meteor.
He fingered their letter abstractedly, the housekeeper was bound to overlook something. Moxley had fixed everything up in brindle brown by accepting another reservation for L. Harvey Crull, Jr. when L. Harvey had only been on the blacklist for the last three years, and there wasn’t a decent house in the state that would touch him.
L. Harvey Crull, Jr. was sixty-five, seventy, Purcell supposed, and he had thought about women and about God for so long that in the end he had gotten them all mixed up, confusing
frottage
comfortably with the Holy Spirit. Such times as L. Harvey Crull did not spend putting pamphlets announcing the Second Coming under doors, he spent chasing upstairs maids down corridors and into enclosed fire escapes.
If the house dicks didn’t keep on their toes, L. Harvey would probably try to make Dukemer through the wicket and bring her to God at the same time. Thinking of L. Harvey reminded Purcell of George, the new elevator man. Just because there hadn’t been any trouble yet didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. George and L. Harvey had the same eyes, and probably a deep community of thought and feeling. He would fire George in a minute if elevator operators weren’t a damned sight scarcer than Junior Vice-Presidents.
The babe in 1414 needed watching too, or his name wasn’t Nick Carter, Jr. She wasn’t the type to make trouble for anybody, but right now she was floundering badly. Quite a babe, too, and a lady at that. At considerable personal sacrifice, he, D. Purcell, might throw in his little brown body. He had sent them home smiling before.
It was twenty minutes of eight, and Purcell found himself suddenly dressed. This would make Moxley’s jaw drop, he told himself. He was Mama’s Little Helper, a Boy Scout. The only joker to that was that he had been a Scout once, and when he thought about it, it didn’t seem so long ago at that. At the rate he was going though he guessed he’d never be an Eagle, but he remembered wood smoke and frying bacon and Taps. There wasn’t anything prettier, either. “—All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh—”
Mary was probably getting up too in that damned house she lived in on Palm Frond Avenue. He looked at his watch again and thought about last night. They hadn’t really done much, but all of it had been satisfactory. A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent. John loves Mary and fifty demerits for good old Baldwin.
1414
For almost two weeks now Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles had been spending more and more time in her own room, 1414. In the beginning, she had been unnaturally vivacious; had written enthusiastic letters back to Easton, gone to the best clubs with what she supposed were the right people; but the strident gaiety of the clubs, the insistent luxury of the shops, the blatant sunshine, had depressed her suddenly. All of the men had appeared to think that popping into bed with them was her fair share of the evening’s entertainment, and although she would have liked desperately to hurt Faunt—hurt back—she couldn’t quite come up to the mark.
Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles couldn’t eat very much because she was so unhappy, but she could sleep as long as she had her little chased-crystal pillbox and she had wanted to be alone, think things out for herself. But for days now she had been increasingly lightheaded. The focal point of consciousness had risen steadily, higher and higher, until the floor, her hands, quite commonplace things like her comb and brush, had receded to a dizzy unreasonable distance. But now at last, she told herself, she was able to take a detached, comprehensive view of her relations with Faunt; be, from her cloudy height, impersonal.
Any number of people had, from time to time, found 1414
so conducive to self-analysis, introspection, that they had sat
down very decently against the bathtub and sent a bullet
through their heads or hanged themselves with their belts.
One enterprising young man had even been able to swallow almost a whole box of toothpicks. 1414 had seen miscarriages and accidental shootings, royal flushes covered insecurely, and a battery of burst appendices and minor fatalities.
1414 was really 1313, but thirteen is, notoriously, an unlucky number; melancholy things are more than likely to happen in a thirteen room, and hotel men have learned that
it is wiser to skip comfortably from twelve to fourteen.
Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles was the second Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles. Back home in Easton, Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles was known as Number Two. It had seemed a great thing to her once that Faunt had wanted her, but the magic had gone out of their relations; she was very unhappy, and that was why after six, no, seven years of marriage she had come, bereaved in spirit, to Florida.
For a long time her marriage, her love for Faunt, had been the mainspring of everything she did, but she had finally realized that she was somehow an interloper, not to Easton, of course, because if Faunt was a Charles, she had been a Cravatt, but to Faunt himself.
At first she had been inclined to blame Faunt’s attitude on Mrs. Charles Number One, had been distracted by jealousy of that gentle shade, for she had been made increasingly aware of the first Mrs. Charles’s extreme gentility, her illustrious family, her consummate delicacy in being unable to withstand the rigors of childbirth.
Yes, she had been sick and sore with jealousy until she had found out that it was not poor Virginia who mattered at all. Virginia had never been more than the chalice, the sacrosanct vessel, that had held Little Faunt, as Dr. Kinnealy had been the holy oyster knife that had delivered him, as it were, on the half shell to Faunt’s mother. Faunt had never really been married to anybody but his mother. Now she knew that if poor Virginia had been indelicate enough to linger, she would have outlived her usefulness. Virginia had produced her pearl, and to exist at all after that would have been anticlimactic.
She hated Faunt, Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles told herself, hated Little Faunt. Of course Big Faunt was psychopathic.
She supposed that he had most of the obsessions that she had ever read about. When she had first married Big Faunt though, she had thought that Little Faunt would come to live with them; had seen herself all tenderness and understanding, wise in her ways with the motherless child, had even thought that it would be fun to have a baby of her own, a girl perhaps. With my hair and his eyes. With his teeth and my nose.
What a little doll she would have been, Mrs. Charles thought, and swallowed, without water, a tablet from the chased-crystal pillbox. She knew better now, of course. In the end, and over a period of time, Big Faunt had made everything distressingly clear. Little Faunt’s rhythm must not be disturbed by the advent of what was, after all, a comparative stranger. There could be no further children because everything must go intact to Little Faunt. Big Faunt’s insurance, his mother’s property, even the house in which she lived with Faunt, were dedicated.
Faunt was at once the chicken and the egg, transmitting in his own person the certain powers residing in his mother to the higher felicity of existence inherent in Little Faunt.
Big Faunt too was only a vessel, a link between the peculiar virtues of his mother and the peculiar virtues of his son. Yes, Faunt was crazy, as balmy as a summer night. A nervous shudder attacked her suddenly, hysteria mounted within her, and she swallowed another tablet. She was of no real importance to Faunt since she could never be a Charles in blood and bone. She was not even Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles, Number One. At that she laughed suddenly to herself, continued to laugh beyond laughter.
But she was free now at last, insubstantial as the chuckling, whispering wind, no longer Faunt’s creature but a willful wraith that floated, careless of ordinary limitations. She would go down to the bar and have a drink to celebrate, she told herself, and she dressed carefully, putting on her gold linen suit and sandals, her grandmother’s topaz necklace and earrings.
Faunt was mad, she told herself again in the elevator. He was Ophelia and Crying Mary and Hamlet, Oedipus Rex and the little boy who loved patent leather boots. Without humor, Faunt called his mother Dearest and meant it. Faunt had his own ideas of the proprieties. There was no occasion when he could not suddenly smile his little, close-lipped smile and say that he had to be at Dearest’s.
Dearest, the Dowager Mrs. Ellsworth Charles, had admired the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett so extravagantly that she had named her only daughter Sara Crewe after Mrs. Burnett’s other great classic,
The Little Princess,
but Sara Crewe was dead.
Yes, it was all very funny, with the wind teasing and chuckling on her balcony, and the fearful night pawing at her window sill. Mrs. FauntleToy Charles took yet another tablet out of her pillbox, laughed tremulously with the wind. All Easton knew about Sara Crewe, but Mrs. Ellsworth Charles did not know that they knew, and not even Faunt dared tell her.
Mrs. Charles felt a sudden, foolish kinship with poor Sara Crewe. Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles had been alone every Saturday, Sunday, and legal holiday since she had been married. “Little Faunt,” Faunt had said in explanation, and smiled again his faint, tight-lipped smile.
In the corridor, she allowed a tablet to dissolve, relishing the bitter taste from long habit, on her tongue. Faunt was schizophrenic and manic depressive and paranoiac, she told herself glibly, her head mounting higher and higher, but if she could have him always as he was sometimes, she wouldn’t ask for anything more.
Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles left the bar abruptly. She had been talking to herself and Faunt very sensibly at a corner table when she had realized that people were staring. She interrupted the conversation to pique them, lowered her voice, spoke in a confidential whisper, explained things to Faunt, how she was free, that he would never get her again, that she could float now away from him, float higher and higher and higher, and away.
She continued then, gesturing occasionally, forming words slyly with her mouth, as she rode to the thirteenth floor. In 1414, she washed her hands again carefully, washing the soap with her hands, and then her hands with the soap. She would like to thrash the spoiled little brat until her arms ached, she told herself, while it seemed to her again that all the disillusion of her marriage centered in Little Faunt.
It was wrong, of course, to hate a child. She was a wicked woman, she supposed, the cruel stepmother of fairy stories. It wasn’t really the child’s fault either, it was Big Faunt’s. She bit her lips, clenched and unclenched her hands, washed them again. It was just that she was very tired, tired of hearing about the little fellow; hated Faunt for making a fetish out of a natural obligation. Fauntleroy Schuyler Charles, Junior, regarded reasonably, was a thin little boy with a big nose, a bed-wetter at eleven.
Yes, she hated both Faunts, yet she remembered when, not so very long ago, she had blessed the year and the month and the day and the hour of Big Faunt’s birth, when her love had been a quick well of enchantment.
The throat of Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles contracted spasmodically. Nerves, she supposed, but she had the remedy for that in her little chased-crystal pillbox. She crossed the room, opened the French doors. The days and nights in Florida without Faunt had been little separate deaths, she decided from the balcony. A spangled sky was freshly polished for the tourist trade and the imported turf in the Pleasaunce spiraled up at her, wrapped her again in a gray-green blanket of thought; but time crouched, waiting, and the golden bowl was broken.
Faunt’s tight-lipped smile still mocked her, and the buoyancy of Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles became suddenly quite intolerable. In easy pleasure, her finger tips brushed cloud fronds in the gun-metal sky, stroked purple shadows in the lawn of the Pleasaunce, investigated the twisted outlines of a banyan tree.
Lights came on in adjacent wings, and Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles sensed cloudily the stir she was somehow commanding, saw again the gray-green blur of the Pleasaunce.
She swung astride the balcony, and a chilly little moment hung suspended when no breeze stirred and no bud opened, when the mandrake root was barren and no star fell. Little breakers hesitated and were lost in a swirl of white foam. Now the silver cord was loosed, and now the pitcher broken at the fountain. “Our Father who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will—” Then, thinly and from afar, Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles heard herself screaming and was desolate.