A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Cinderella Magic

Sometimes it all seemed like a dream, one of those things that happens in books and talking pictures, but not to her, Patty Moran, of Sixty-Eighth Street and Ninth Avenue. Ninth Avenue, where the “El” trains rumbled by in front of the parlor and people ate corned beef and cabbage and had worries. Maybe it happened because she was eighteen. When you’re eighteen, dreams have a way of coming true.

First there were just the two of them, Laurence and Patty. No one ever knew where he ever got that name. Spelt with a U in the middle, too. He hated it. If you wanted to be his friend, you had to call him Larry, if you knew him well enough like Patty did. Or else just plain Mr. Cogan.

Patty was the one who could call him Laurence (with a U in the middle) and not risk getting a punch in the nose. Sometimes she did it when she wanted to tease him. He’d look at her and smile. After a while she found out he liked it. He’d call her up on the telephone and say, “This is Laurence with a U in the middle.” They’d been going together steadily for quite some time, nearly a year. And they knew they’d have to keep on going for another year, or maybe two, before there would be enough money to — if you know what I mean. But they didn’t mind that.

For all they knew, they were the only two in the whole wide world. Of course there were mothers and sisters and brothers and people like that — but they didn’t make Pat’s heart beat any quicker, the way it was doing right then, for instance, at the telephone.

“And what’s on your mind, Laurence with a U in the middle?” Pat said, pretending to be very matter-of-fact. “Admitting that you have one.”

“It’s about that dance, sweet Patty Moran,” he said. “They couldn’t get Killarney Hall for tonight, so they’re giving it downtown instead, at an armory on Park Avenue. I’ll wait for you at the door. Are you ready to leave soon?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll have to change my dress first. I forgot I was seeing you tonight.”

“Shame on you!” her mother laughed. “Standing there in your silver shoes and all, telling him that.” And she tried to take the phone away from Pat and say, “Don’t believe a word of it, Larry!”

Pat climbed up on a chair, phone and all, and winked at her. “How will I know this armory?” she said to Larry.

“It’s as big as a castle,” he said, “with a great wide awning over the door. Will you remember the number?” And he gave it to her. Pat called it out so her mother could write it down on a piece of paper for her. “I’ll be seeing you then,” she said, and ran inside just to take one more look at herself in the glass. But when she asked her mother for the number, Pat found she hadn’t written it down at all.

“I didn’t have any pencil,” her mother said, “but I kept it in my head for you. It’s 240.”

“I think he said 420.”

“If it isn’t one, it’s the other,” her mother said. “That’s easy enough.”

“Sure it is,” Pat said sarcastically. Her mother didn’t know very much about taxi fares. And Pat was going to take one because this was one night she was dressed the way she would have liked to go looking all through life, even if the total outlay was only about $18.50. She borrowed half a dollar from her mother and a dollar and a half from her big brother (who told her not to buy a Packard with it), bringing the total expense up to $20.

“Stop at 420 if it has an awning over it,” Pat told the driver. “If it hasn’t, go right on to 240.”

He looked at her to see if she really meant it, but she said, “You may proceed!” in her haughtiest manner, which took him so much by surprise, coming from anyone at 68th Street and Ninth Avenue, that he didn’t dare say another word.

When they got to 420, it had an awning over it, sure enough, and there were people going in dressed in furs and velvet.

“How do those girls do that on twenty a week?” Pat wondered. “Well, some of them may be making twenty-five; that explains it all. Stop here; this is the place,” she said to the driver, and saw by the meter that her money wouldn’t have lasted until the next address anyhow. And when an individual with gold buttons and braid all over him held the door open for her, she knew it was the armory, because she remembered that armories have something to do with men in uniform.

She didn’t see Larry standing anywhere so she went on in to look for him. And first there was a big glass spinning-door, with someone to turn it for you, and then there was a flight of marble steps to be climbed, and after that came miles of velvet carpet with palms growing along the side. But no Larry anywhere. Pat was afraid she couldn’t find her way back to the street by now anyway so she just kept on walking. Until a velvet rope stopped her. And still no sign of Larry.

Then a young man wearing a flower in his buttonhole stepped up to her and said, “Your invitation, please?”

Pat didn’t at all like his speaking to her without a proper introduction, so she decided to become very haughty once more. “My invitation was by wire,” she said. “Laurence asked me down.” Before she had time to give him Larry’s last name, he had let down the rope and passed her on to a lady wearing black beads and eyeglasses.

“A friend of Laurence’s,” the young man said. “Invitation by telegram.”

Pat hadn’t meant telegram at all, she had meant telephone, but the lady said, “Oh, of course. Come with me, my dear. I’ll show you where Laurence is,” and took her to a room full of mirrors and girls powdering their noses. Pat looked at each one in turn, but their gold and silver and crystal dresses didn’t seem to matter so much after all because none of them were eighteen any more and the only way to look eighteen is to be it. So Pat decided all she must do was not to stand too near a very bright light in her organdy dress.

When she had left her wrap behind, the lady with the eyeglasses said: “Now I will bring you over to Laurence, and then I must hurry back on the receiving line. There he is, over there.”

Pat didn’t see him, but she followed her across a room nearly as big as the Roxy where dancing was going on, and suddenly she was standing in front of someone Pat had never seen before in her life and saying: “This is a good friend of yours, Laurence. See that she has a good time.” And without even waiting to be introduced, the lady walked off and left them. And the band played “Here we are, you and I, Let the world hurry by.”

For a minute he was as surprised as she was. “It isn’t Florence, is it?” he said. “No, she was blonde. It can’t be Bernice — she was shorter than you are. Or are you the girl I taught to dive at Miami last winter?” He was young and nice, but his eyes were a little sad as if he always expected to be disappointed and always got what he expected.

Pat stamped her foot decisively. “It’s me, that’s who!” she told him. “And where’s Larry?”

“I’m Larry.”

“You are not! Don’t try to fib!” she cried.

“Yes I am,” he said. “Laurence Pierce.”

Pat nearly fainted. “Why, I must be in the wrong place,” she said. “Isn’t this an armory?”

He seemed to think that was very funny. He could hardly stop laughing. “I must tell that to mother,” he said. “It ought to hold her for a while.”

“Do you mean to say you live here?” Pat gasped.

“Yes,” he said apologetically. “Just forty rooms but it’s home.” And he seemed kind of unhappy about it.

“I didn’t know,” Pat said. “Excuse me! I wouldn’t have walked in here like this for the world.” And she turned around to go, but he followed her and took her by the arm.

“Can’t we pretend just for a little while that this really is the place you were going to — and I really did invite you?”

“No,” said Pat firmly.

And she walked away a few steps farther, and again he came after her.

“Won’t you stay if I invite you here and now? I’m afraid I’ve been rude to you. Won’t you stay and let me make up for it?”

“Oh, I couldn’t—” Pat started to say. But she was already standing still and not moving any nearer the door.

“There’s something so real about you. Most of these girls here are just like dolls.” He looked down at the floor and said in a low voice: “No one that was real ever came near me before. And then you walked in the door.”

“The wrong door!” she said.

She should have gone while she still wanted to. But she didn’t want to very much any more. She thought of Larry Cogan waiting for her at the armory. But he could wait a little longer. His eyes had never looked as sad as this, so he could wait just a little longer for her tonight. He’d see her every other night in the year.

“Please stay,” he said. And he looked at her and she knew she would.

He called the orchestra leader over to them and he said: “Lower the lights and let’s have a waltz.” Then he looked at Pat’s dress that wasn’t gold or silver or crystal at all and added: “Play Alice Blue Gown.”

And then they were dancing and it all seemed a dream.

At eleven he said: “You haven’t told me who you are yet.”

Pat said: “I’m Patty Moran of 68th Street and Ninth Avenue.”

“I’m going to like 68th Street and Ninth Avenue,” was all he said to that.

At twelve she said: “I’ll have to go now.”

At one she was still saying she’d have to go. Finally at two she went.

He went with her as far as the spinning glass door, and she saw a big car waiting outside.

“I can’t go with you,” he said, “because it’s my sister Agatha’s coming-out party and she’ll scratch and bite. But Bob will see that you get home safe.”

“Goodnight, Law.”

“Goodnight, Pat.”

That was all they said. They didn’t have to say much. Pat lifted up the speaking tube and said, “Sixty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue,” and she took a rosebud from the crystal holder and held it in her fingers and looked at it for a long time. “Little flower,” she said finally, “what am I going to do about this?” But the flower didn’t answer.

Her mother was sitting by the open window fanning herself with her apron when Pat got in.

“Look at me!” she groaned. “You see me in the condition I’m in, all weak and warped, from answering that blessed telephone the livelong night. If Larry Cogan’s suicide is announced in the papers tomorrow morning, you’ll have yourself to thank for it. Your brother Tom counted the calls and he says there were twenty-eight of them. Myself, I think there were one hundred and twenty-eight.”

Pat threw her arms around her and hugged her. “Bless you for getting that address wrong.”

“I’m not asking you what happened,” her mother said, pretending to be very much offended, “because Mrs. Moran’s daughter is above rayproach, but I am asking you, daughter or no daughter, the next time you decide to break an appointment, see that your poor old mother doesn’t have to make all the excuses for you.”

“Mother,” Pat asked her, sitting on her lap, “can a girl love two people at the same time, both in a different way?”

“If she does,” her mother answered, “one of them gets left in the end.”

Pat thought a good deal about that before she went to sleep.

The next day two things happened. The first was Larry’s (her Larry’s) phone call before she was even awake.

“What did you do that to me for last night?” he demanded. This went on for quite some time. Pat’s mother even brought the coffee out to the telephone so she could drink it while they were arguing and not lose any time.

“You must have money to burn,” Pat said among other things, “throwing nickels away like you did, just to keep my mother awake half the night.”

He went on and on. “You ought to know by now without being told,” Pat said. “Well, if I have to say it, all right then — I love you. And don’t think for a minute that means you can boss me as much as you please.”

“For the like of those three words,” he said, “I’d gladly live the night over again, worried and jealous and all, glad of the chance.”

“Well,” said Pat, “no one’s asking you to.”

And that night at supper-time the doorbell rang. Tom went to answer it, and when he came back to the table, he said to Pat: “There’s a chauffeur out in the hall with a message for you.” She jumped up and when she got there found Laurence’s chauffeur standing in the door.

“Mr. Pierce sent some flowers over with his regards,” he said, touching his cap. “Can I have them brought up?” And without waiting for her answer, he went out to the head of the stairs and called down: “All right.”

On second thought Pat wasn’t at all sure she liked the idea. Presents the first thing when they had only met the night before for the first time. If he had been poor, it wouldn’t have mattered, but he was rich and it didn’t look right. She knew her mother wouldn’t say anything, but she didn’t want to give the neighbors a chance to talk. In fact she was just about to ask him not to bring them upstairs when in they came, a whole heap of them, and behind them Laurence himself, looking pleased and just a little embarrassed as though he didn’t know whether she’d be glad to see him or not.

“I had to,” he remarked, throwing the flowers in a corner without even giving them to her. “Been thinking about you the live-long day, ever since I first woke up.”

So had Pat but she didn’t say so.

“Are you angry because I came here without being asked?”

“I did the same thing at your house last night,” Pat laughed. “But you didn’t have to bring a whole florist shop with you just to come and see me.”

He was still out of breath from coming up those stairs of hers, and he was just like a little boy with his eyes so eager and all. “I’d like awfully to have you ask me to dinner,” he said.

And they walked in together and Pat said, “Mother, I have company for you. This is Laurence Pierce of 420 Park Avenue, and he’s staying to supper.”

And Laurence sat right down in the first empty chair and tucked a napkin in his collar the way Tom had his.

Pat’s mother fussed with her hair and looked nerved for a minute, but Laurence said, “My, that stew smells good,” and she looked pleased and proud and helped him to some of it.

Then afterwards, while they were all sitting in the front room and Tom was pumping a music-roll through the pianola, in walked Larry Cogan.

“I dropped in to take you to a movie,” he said to Pat matter-of-factly.

“I can’t tonight, Larry,” she said. “We have company. This is Mr. Pierce — Mr. Cogan.”

Larry hardly shook hands with him at all. He had understood even quicker than Pat thought he would. She could tell he didn’t want to stay, but he was awkward and didn’t know how to get out of the room now that he was in it. So he sat around and tried to ignore Laurence.

Pat’s mother asked her to come out in the kitchen and help her serve some cakes and homemade wine. Pat didn’t think it would be a very good idea to leave the two of them alone like that. “If they fight in my sittin’ room, I’ll throw them both out with my own hands,” her mother observed.

But when Pat hurried back to them, she found them standing around the pianola singing, or at least trying to, while Tom pedaled. That showed her what kind of a person Laurence was, that when he wanted to make people like him, they liked him in spite of themselves.

Larry left soon after and she went out into the hall with him. “Do you like Laurence a little better now that you know him?” she asked anxiously.

“I’d like him a whole lot better than that even,” he admitted, “if it wasn’t for his coming between you and me.”

“Don’t say that, Larry,” Pat begged. “He hasn’t.”

“Maybe you don’t know it yet,” he said, “but he has. Anyway, think it over good and carefully first.”

“Larry—!” she called after him, but he had already gone down the stairs.

Pat had known Laurence about a week when he started to bring up the subject of marriage. Their marriage. Pat laughed it off mostly, with her heart doing all sorts of queer tricks inside her. One time she simply remarked, “Don’t let’s build castles in the air.”

He had lots of answers to make to that, oh lots of them. He made them, all right. Pat saw that it was up to her to bring him back to earth again.

“Did you ever stop to think what your family might have to say?” she suggested.

“It doesn’t matter what they say.”

“It matters a great deal to me,” she told him.

“Why should it?” he asked curiously. “You don’t even know them.”

“But don’t you know what they’d say — what everybody would say — if you married me?”

“That I was the luckiest boy alive, if they knew you as I do.”

Pat turned her head away. “No. They’d say I married you for — for your money. Oh, I wouldn’t blame them,” she said quickly. “I’d think that too if I heard it about some other girl.”

“Maybe it would be true about some other girl,” he answered, “but it isn’t true about you.”

“When Ninth Avenue marries Park Avenue,” she said, “no good comes of it.”

“We’ll see about that!” he said determinedly. “We’ll show them they’re wrong for once.”

The very next day he said to her over the phone, “Don’t make any engagements for Thursday night. You’re having dinner at my home — I want you to meet my family.”

As she hung up, Pat said to herself, “Here is where I lose him.”

And she couldn’t tell if she was sorry or if she was glad. Dreams shouldn’t come true; you lose them that way.

Thursday morning a box came. When she opened it, there was a dress inside, of apricot velvet with a silver orchid on one shoulder. And a card — “Miss Agatha Pierce.” Pat knew that he had sent it and used his sister’s card so she wouldn’t feel hurt. She sent it back. “I’m going to be fair to myself and fair to him,” she told her mother. “His family will see me as I am, in my little blue dress from Lerner’s. The rest is up to them.”

And that’s the way she went there, in an outfit costing $18.50. He sent the car for her, of course. Pat met his mother and his sister and her fiancé. There were just the five of them. And they were going to be very nice to her, Pat could tell. They were going to be very nice to her and show Laurence how unsuitable she was for him. So she played up to them and helped them along, and she even said and did things that she knew were wrong. She said hello to the butler, and she pushed her spoon toward her instead of away from her when they served the soup. But they didn’t seem to notice anything, and after a while she forgot to pretend any more and just became her natural self. And before she knew it, dinner was over and she was alone with Laurence’s mother and sister. His mother put her arm around Pat and said, “You’re a lovable child. What I like about you is that you’re so natural. I can understand how Laurence feels.”

And his sister said, “You were right not to wear that gaudy dress he sent you. You don’t need it. You look too sweet this way.”

“All we want is to see Laurence happy,” his mother said. “And if you really care for him—”

Pat knew what she was going to say. She had seen it in the pictures a great many times before. It was always: “You will give him up if you really love him.”

But his mother went on: “When I was your age, I was selling flowers in a restaurant. I don’t see what right anyone has to stand in your way if you love each other.”

Pat didn’t wait to hear any more. She began to cry.

“Oh, I can’t pretend any more!” she sobbed. “I don’t need to tell you how much I love him. But what am I going to do? You know what people will say.”

“About his money?” Mrs. Pierce said. “Well, let them! You’re one girl in a thousand and Laurence believes in you. Isn’t that enough?” And she gave her a little kiss. “I’ll see you and Laurence through this,” she said.

And the next day there was a diamond on Pat’s finger that hadn’t been there before, and Pat kept looking intently at it.

All it seemed to do was bring the tears to her eyes. “My darling Larry!” she said to her mother. “How can I give him up? Oh, it’s tough sometimes to be a girl.”

“Well, it’s either one or the other of them,” her mother said, “or else it’s bigamy.”

And Larry himself wouldn’t listen to anything Pat tried to say. “Did you think I’d stand in your way?” And when he smiled at her that way, she could almost hear her own heart breaking inside her piece by piece. “Wouldn’t I be the man to do that! He’s got a combination hard to beat — love and money. Don’t throw yourself away on Mrs. Cogan’s little boy.”

And he took her in his arms and kissed her, the first time he’d ever done that in all the time they’d known each other. Greetings and farewell!

“Say the word,” Pat sobbed, “and nothing matters but you.”

“Good-bye’s the word,” he murmured.

Sometimes a little thing makes up your mind for you. Molly Reardon, who lived on the floor below, walked in one night about two weeks before the wedding. Pat had never liked her much anyway.

“What’s all this going on around here?” she said to Pat’s mother. “A snappy car parked in front of the flat every night and reporters snooping around trying to find out who the lucky girl is. I hear Pat has caught a swell. Pretty soft for her. How’d she do it?”

Pat was in the other room drying the supper dishes when she heard her say that. She dried her hands and went in to them then. And a minute later Pat’s mother had to call out at the top of her voice, “Tom! Tom! Come in here quick before that sister of yours breaks all my best plates!”

Molly Reardon ducked once to the right and once to the left, and then she managed to escape into the hall in a big hurry, followed by a salad-bowl.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Pat sobbed when they had calmed her down. “That’s what they’ll all be thinking. Caught a swell, have I? Just because he’s rich and I’m poor. And maybe some day he’ll begin to think so too. That’s what I’m afraid of. Some day he’ll forget and think it was the money.”

“Not if he loves you he won’t,” her mother assured her.

“I want to keep this dream,” Pat told her. “It may be the only one I’ll ever have. I want to keep him forever, just like he was this one month I’ve known him.”

And she called up Laurence’s house, but she asked for his mother, not him.

“You said you used to work for your living when you were my age,” she said, “so you ought to understand. Make him understand too.”

And when she was all through, Mrs. Pierce just said, “Poor Laurence” and hung up.

Then Pat rang a certain other number. Corned beef and cabbage for the rest of her life.

“Larry,” she said, “I’m to be married, and I want you there.”

“You know I’d do anything for you,” he said, “even this. Where is it, 420 Park Avenue?”

“No,” Pat said, “68th Street and Ninth Avenue. And don’t keep me waiting because you’re to be the groom.”