Children of the Ritz

Chapter Ten

In the early hours of that same morning, Gil Pennington, preceded by a waiter, was ushered cautiously out of the basement door of a tranquil-looking brownstone house on West Fifty-fourth Street. In the case of this house, however, appearances were deceiving.

To look at the darkened windows, the flight of brownstone steps leading up to the front door, the old-fashioned slanting numerals gilded on the glass transom, numerals with scrolls the way they used to paint them back in 1902, you would never imagine that it contained at that moment between seventy and eighty people, including three hostesses of Broadway night clubs relaxing after their labors, and the entire cast, chorus as well as principals, of the Tiffany Follies, which went on at eleven, and again at one, but were now no longer in any condition to go on at all, it being four o’clock.

This house took ice during the daytime, just as other brownstone houses took ice, only this house took a surprising quantity of ice, more than any of its kind except a skating rink would want. This house took chinaware, too, and glassware, in job lots, and the laundry it sent out every Monday had to be taken away in a special truck.

To look at it now, at four in the morning, you would call it stone dead. Not a light showed anywhere. Not a murmur escaped. And yet both sides of the street were lined by quiet motors parked wheel to wheel, that had been standing there for hours and would continue to stand there for hours to come, until it grew light and the busses started to run on Fifth Avenue and smartly dressed colored maids began arriving at the apartment houses over on Park and Lexington, when they would silently melt away like frost before the advancing sun.

But around the time that Gil came out, things were only beginning to get under way, and the prices of drinks were going up hourly and half-hourly, so he had decided to leave while the leaving was good, since he had fooled the waiters long enough into believing that the tan shadow at the bottom of his glass where the cup was joined to the stem was good for one more round, and they had begun to look at him suspiciously, as one who was occupying valuable space without profit to them. For by that time several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry had gathered itself together in this modest Victorian manse, and several thousand dollars’ worth of sweet and furious liquors were in process of being tasted upon the tongue or spilt upon the tables. And there had been the inevitable quarrel between husband and wife over the man or woman at the next table, and the wife had emptied a glassful of precious liquid into her husband’s face, and their friends had come over to them and said, “Now, Polly,” and “That’s all right, Van.”

So another night was gone and another day had come and Gil was no happier. He never said, “Good morning, have a good night’s rest?” With him it was always, “Well, bohunk, how’d you like our happy party last night?” or “Hul-lo, Mabel, where were you when the lights went out?” And as he walked along Fifty-fourth Street, he suddenly came to the conclusion that it was a hell of a world, and he was glad he was going home.

He stood on a corner and flagged a taxi that he saw going along on the other side of the Avenue, and the driver made one of those sharp turns they dote on and came veering over to him, throwing the door open for him to get in.

“Town House,” he said, and stepped inside.

When they had reached there, he fished the dollar out of his pocket that would cover the cost of it approximately and got out. There was more light here than at the other corner, and he found himself staring into the equally astonished face of Dewey Haines.

Neither of them could say anything for a moment. Gil stood there with the bill sticking crisply out of his outstretched hand, Dewey at the wheel, his breath quite gone.

“For the Lord’s sake,” drawled Gil at last, slowly and disgustedly. “What’re y’ doing, breaking it in for a friend?”

“That’ll be fifty cents,” said Dewey, consulting his meter. “Never mind the side remarks.”

He “broke” the bill, that is, gave Gil five dimes in change, whereupon Gil handed him one back with the scornful remark: “Here’s your tip, son.”

He turned to go in, but Dewey flung the ten cent piece after him so that it struck him in the back of the neck, and promptly drove off, his little blue and lilac lights showing far down Central Park West.

Angela had gone back to her own room after putting the lights out in Dewey’s. She sat there awhile, sobbing spasmodically deep down in her chest, while the bulb under her boudoir doll shone out at her through its peach taffeta flounces like a silver-white gas torch eating its way through flakes of rust.

She reached out and touched a crystal rod with a drop of French perfume at the end of it to her nostrils, then let it fall back into the bottle again with a tiny splash of precious essences, greener than ferns, greener than limes, greener than jade. A cool, shivery sweetness penetrated her head.

She went outside to the telephone and murmured querulously, “Are you on duty down there, Roy? This is Mrs. Haines. Listen, Roy, could I ask you to do something for me? I’m dying for some cigarettes and there isn’t one in the house... Oh, are they all closed at this time of night? Oh, I didn’t know that... Oh, you have? I don’t care what kind they are as long as they’ll burn. Bring them along up. I hope I’m not depriving you, Roy. I only want a couple so I can get some sleep.”

It was four, possibly five minutes before the ringing of the bell at the door announced Roy’s arrival. Angela hurriedly plucked a dollar bill from the desk drawer as a gratuity, and returned a moment later with a paper package of the cigarettes, very sharp, very coarsely-grained, and the package open at one end and only half full. They were heavily nicotined, so that each one turned yellow halfway to the hilt as she lit it. She sat there nevertheless until she had finished them all and her lips smarted and her tongue felt drugged.

So he had gone off and left her. Well! And then came the realization that she was free, that she could go back to her people and her people would have her back now. And behind this the thought raising its ugly head like a toad in subtly undulating grasses, “How long does he have to be away before I can sue for desertion? How long before we can be legally separated?”

This brought with it a sense of buoyancy, of untrammeledness, a delicious feeling of self-responsibility.

It was light outside now. She put out the boudoir lamp and the room turned from persimmon color to a blue-green, very cold, very still, very early morning. She went back to bed. And just as she was dozing off, and just as the biscuit-colored sun was watering the upper stories of the buildings, there was a metallic commotion at the latch of the front door and she heard Dewey come in. And by his footsteps he was very tired, very all-in.

Angela turned around, and beat her pillow to a fluff before settling herself to sleep, and the thought uppermost in her mind was not, “Where has he been?” but “What can I do to get even with him?”

They breakfasted at one in the afternoon, at which time the winter sun was already on its way down the windy sky toward Weehawken and the Jersey shore of the Hudson, behind which it would presently set. They had electric light at their breakfast table, because their dining room did not have a very good exposure, also because candlelight is viciously uncomplimentary immediately after getting up, accentuating the sallowness of the complexion the way it does.

Also they had coffee pumping under a glass dome halfway between them, they had buttered bread slowly turning brown against a lattice of electric wires. They had everything, every mechanical contrivance, every convenience, every necessity, but there was no soul to their home, nor did it seem there ever could be.

Angela had made a carefully premeditated toilet for this fatal breakfast of theirs. To accentuate her sense of injured wifely innocence and paint his guilt the blacker, she was in white. She had massaged the darkness under her eyes with cold cream.

She came into the breakfast room pale and wrathful and asked for Dewey. Florence, laying the table, volunteered the information that he was having his bath, whereupon Angela turned around, locked herself in her room and was seen no more for several hours. At the end of that time Dewey, freshly anointed, and having exhausted the newspaper and got nothing but household hints over the radio, turned to her as a possible though doubtful refuge from utter boredom. He was not disappointed.

He knocked on her door. “Aren’t you going to have any coffee?”

The door flew instantly open, as though she had been waiting patiently all this while. Then she came out, torn between self-pity and hot accusation.

“Good morning,” she said with deadly deliberation, “have a good night’s rest?”

“Fair,” he said absent-mindedly. He was opening a number of letters with the edge of his fruit knife and he came to one that seemed to startle him. He read it very closely and looked at her in amazement when he had finished it.

“When was it I opened that account of yours? Three weeks ago, wasn’t it?”

She nodded, biding her time.

“Read this from the bank. You’ve already overdrawn six hundred and fifty-two fifty.”

“I... what?” said Angela.

“What a fool I was to trust you!” he exclaimed bitterly, throwing his napkin at the toaster from which wisps of black smoke were already escaping warningly.

Angela reached over and disconnected it. “Florence,” she called, “more bread. My husband burned the toast. You fool.” This last addressed to him.

“I did not. Will you mention one thing, one single solitary thing,” he insisted, “you’ve got with that money? I’d be interested to hear—”

“Very well,” she said, “I will if it will make you any the happier. I got an orchid in a flower shop one day.”

“You got an orchid,” he repeated sarcastically. “You got an orchid. Well, it must have been powdered with diamond dust to cost that sweet amount of money.”

“The orchid cost two fifty,” she answered. “Please don’t try to be funny; you’ll need your sense of humor a little later on.”

“That leaves six hundred fifty still to be accounted for.”

“If the bank knows so much,” she replied resentfully, “why don’t they tell you what I did with the money? Or else why don’t they mind their own business altogether? They—”

“Please try to understand that the bank is only interested in keeping its accounts straight.”

“So good of the bank.”

“It’s the last cent you’ll get until the first of the year. I told you so at the time and I meant it. That was the agreement.”

“I can sue you for non-support,” she cried hotly.

“You cannot. Not as long as there’s a roof over your head and food on the table—”

“There are other things not quite so harmless.” She tapped her cigarette on the table top until it grew bent and warped and unfit to smoke. Then she folded it back on itself and flung it into a dish. The moment was hers at last.

“Such as coming in at seven in the morning after being out all night. Exquisite in a married man, I must say.”

He looked at her disgustedly. “I’ll slap that hall boy a slap he won’t forget in a hurry—”

She gave him a superior smile, triumphant, merciless.

“I didn’t get the information from the hall boy. You’re just the kind that would beat up one of the colored help. Preferably on the sidewalk out in front of the house. And I can see you in a restaurant, when they overcharge you, hitting the waiter in the face. The point is not how I found out, but that you put me in such a position that I have to find out you’re not in your room at five in the morning.”

He squinted at her. “And of course you immediately think all the rotten things you can.”

“Yes, I immejitly do,” she said, mocking his pronunciation. “There isn’t a theater or a movie open after one o’clock. I suppose you’ll tell me you were in the art museum looking up Rodin. One thing is certain. It’s no use denying you don’t spend your after-midnights in this apartment.”

“What do you want from me anyway? There’re times I can’t sleep, and I put on my hat and go down and smoke a cig in the lobby—”

“Are you sure you never go farther than the lobby?” she asked, cruelly casual. “Well, I telephoned down to Roy for some cigarettes myself and you weren’t within a couple hundred miles of the place, if you must know.”

He looked at her strangely. “Sometimes I take a little walk to exercise my legs, go down the line to an all-night lunch room and have a sandwich or a piece of pie.”

“Peculiar, what appetite will do for one.” Suddenly she said, “I hate a man that cheats. I can’t think of anything worse than doing what you’ve done behind my back.” The way she said it brought back Joan and all the immemorial martyrs to earth.

“My mother warned me against you,” he mimicked in a shrill falsetto.

“I don’t know how you can sit there and face me,” she exclaimed. “You’re a cheat, that’s all you are, a cheat.”

“You’re the one that’s cheated, not I. And I don’t mean in the way that you mean, either. Let me show you something.” He forced his way past her in a blind rage and pulled gorgeous filmy things from the hooks and rods of her clothes closets. “This, and this, and this,” he cried. “They don’t grow on trees!” They came down on his shoulders, cascades of clashing beads and snaky metal tissues flashing like comets falling to earth and smoky billows of black lace tumbling about him like dust from charcoal.

“You’ve bought and bought and bought. You’ve bled me dry. And now we’re broke.” He stopped suddenly and pointed toward her dressing table.

“Look at that!”

A huge square bottle of perfume, taller than a coffee urn, jet black, with gold corners and a gold stopper.

“Five hundred and twenty-five dollars for that alone. So you can take the stopper out once or twice a day and pass your handkerchief back and forth over the mouth of the bottle. And then lose that same handkerchief going down in the elevator. You’re like all women — selfish. A man that marries one of you is a fool.”

Each to their respective rooms, with eyes that said, “I hate you.” “Me too.” Two doors that slammed as one. Two hearts that beat like twenty. Handkerchiefs and the blowing of noses. Rattling of small objects on two dressing tables. Then silence, broken only by the spat of a match against sandpaper, the sibilant rustle of an emeryboard to and fro, to and fro, against the corner of a fingernail, while outside Florence removed the charred toast from the toaster and shook her head, not over them but over it.

Dewey, feeling now that for all the time he had known and lived with her he had never done more than scratch the surface of her personality and love, had ridden down in the elevator less than five minutes before. At that unaccustomed hour the street looked newly minted as he surveyed it from the twilight gloom of the long, mirrored foyer. The rays of the afternoon sun seemed to cover everything with peachdown. All the bitterness melted from him. And he was sorry.

Why hadn’t he tried explaining to her? Why had he stepped all over her best loved party dresses? What was the good of doing a thing like that? Why rough-house, why pretend to be brutal, when inside of him all there was was tenderness for her? She had said he cheated. But she mustn’t think that, she mustn’t. Now was the time to tell her, before she hardened against him and put him out of her heart. Angela, whom he had left only a moment ago. He had the switchboard operator give him a connection to his own apartment. He recognized her voice. She was talking to somebody on the same wire.

“Really, all I have to go through is perfectly killing. I never know what to expect next. He just got through trampling all over my party dresses. For all I know, he may turn on me next. These people aren’t like ourselves, you know. They see their fathers beat their mothers, and they don’t think anything of it; they’re brought up on that idea—”

And now a man’s voice broke in, for the first time in many minutes. “Yes, I know how it is. Still, I don’t think he’ll go that far. I don’t know him very well, but he seems to be a pretty regular sort. You must remember he—”

“That’s the man of it, but I’m a woman and I know him better than any one.”

“I’d like to see you for a little while and then maybe we can talk this whole thing over. Why not have a drop of tea with me?”

“Yes, we could, couldn’t we? Shall we? Let’s say we do.”

“Why don’t you come up here? It’s fifty-two East.”

“Oh, but I... well, you see I—”

“Suppose we make it the Biltmore then.”

“All right,” she said crisply, “that listens good to me.”

“About five? How’ll that be?”

“Gorgeous. I may be a tinny-winny bit late—”

“Won’t matter.”

“Want me to dress how?”

“Anything in the way of blue. No flowers. There’ll be some there for you.”

“Heavenly. You won’t mind if I’m a little bit late? I’m sure I won’t be, but in case I am, you know. Good-by, da’ling.”

She hung up. He hung up too. Then Dewey pulled the plug out of its socket and let it fall with a click, as though that little catch in his heart he had told Angela about one day were shutting too. He took a pencil out of his pocket, the point of which he wet between his lips, and made a note of Wilder’s address. Then he sauntered out on the street, still oddly fresh and sunny and swarming with charming things in long tan silk stockings all going various places with an air of conscious virtue.

And a little later Angela was one of them, stepping into a taxi at her door and sitting back in it with her knees drawn up before her and being driven through the winter leaflessness of the park from the west side of the city to the east side. The honey-colored sun had set but it was not yet dark. It was that crystalline translucency that comes a few minutes before dusk every evening, when all the houses and all the streets seem so very spotless and clean and there are no detached shadows, only a sort of impending doom hanging over everything.

Back into her own world again, the world she knew so well. Young men in raccoon coats inches thick stood about in the lobby, and they didn’t need little triangular orange or crimson or pale blue pennants; college was written all over them, in the jauntiness of their turned down hats and the way they could pinch the knots of their neckties and make them stay narrowly triangular for hours after that one little pinch.

“Very footballish to-day,” decided Angela, and thought of the many times she had been here before. She progressed through the seething foyers and alleys, and was good to look at, and many looked. She had the air and mien of a child-widow of sixteen (most deadly of human creatures).

Wilder darted out at her from some carpeted byway she had overlooked, and she gave him the tips of her gloved fingers,

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

“A little late, I know.”

“That much more pleasure to see you.”

Dark blue overcoat that that particular year called for, derby (back again after the war years), smoked pearl in his white silk neckcloth. He would do very nicely. Now she had pinned the orchids and the two yellow roses he had given her to the black velvet of her dress. Yellow roses the size of harvest moons. She turned to him. “Must beautiful things like this ever die?”

“Always.” Softly spoken, like a man that has seen many roses die in his time and knows there is no remedy.

Now they were moving forward again, his finger tips touching her elbow, and faces drifted past them as in a dream, like motes dancing in the pupils of their eyes, faces that turned slyly to look after them as they went by.

Her own world once more, and she must never leave it again, no, never. A table for two. Soft lights like moths filled the background of this big well-bred room, where people were sitting two by two and two by two and two by two, he and she and she and he and he and she. And meanwhile the yellow roses, more perfect than any other two roses in the world, giving their lives splendidly against Angela’s black velvet side, made the air a luxury to breathe.

She watched him hold the sugar over the cup, and saw the cube glitter like splintered diamonds in the lamplight. Then it turned amber halfway up, drinking in the tea-like dye, and dissolved before her eyes and he let the rest of it go with the remark, “Of course, sugar’s superfluous in any cup you touch, we all know that.”

Here it was his manner carried the thing off. From parrot-like flattery he turned it to a gentle, admiring burlesque of what other men have said to other women at other such times. She accepted it in the way he meant it, and not literally.

The light from the taboret lamp filtering through garlands of heavy-beaded fringe caught into loops, turned the upper part of her face into a lace mask.

“I hate to have to call you Wilder all the way through,” she said, “I think I’ll call you Jerry.” She pointed her coffee-colored cigarette straight into the spark of the small gold pocket lighter he was holding for her.

“I’ve always called you that anyway except to your face.”

“And you oughtn’t, naturally, say things behind any one’s back that you wouldn’t say to them pointblank.”

The middle of the room was suddenly taken over by an outpouring of fox trotters, and a moment later, cause following effect, he and she became aware of music going on close by them but conservatively muffled.

Angela gave her chair a little hitch away from the table. They got up and went to dance, leaving two disconsolate little gilt-handled cups standing there alone, leaving her cigarette unwinding its soul on the edge of a dish in platinum skeins like incense, leaving the rich fur of her coat spilling over and smothering the fragile chair she had been sitting on, leaving her gloves impregnated with sachet, and her little kit bag, an undulating rhinestone heart set in glycerined black ostrich feathers, leaving a silver samover and éclairs coated with red chocolate mercilessly raked open and left to die there spilling their golden custard linings.

“I’ve often wondered about you,” said Jerry Wilder, “and the courage it must take.”

“It’s getting so it’s impossible,” said Angela, retreating rhythmically before him. “Really, I don’t see how it can keep up.”

Her world. Her world. Looking over his shoulder she saw it in a great swimming semicircle, and the little lights on all the little tables seemed like beacons calling her in from gloomy unknown seas.

“Really, you must get away, Angela,” Wilder told her, “before you are dragged down out of your depth. You must reach out and save yourself. You must come back to the people that know you. Why, child, the whole world’s before you, it’s waiting for you. You can’t go on with this sort of thing.”

“You speak my language, Jerry,” she smiled sadly against the side of his coat. “I feel like a person living in a strange house among strangers. Let’s sit down. I feel sort of weak and wobbly, and awfully glad. I want you to know. I want you to know.”

And as they walked back to where they had been sitting a refrain, like the droning of a swarm of unseen bees, followed querulously after her.

“Poor little rich girl, poor little rich girl, better take care!”

She covered the tips of her ears and murmured, “That vile song.”

“They’re beginning to confide in each other,” said her cigarette, winking at his.

“It won’t be long now,” said the pear preserve to the peach preserve.