Children of the Ritz

Chapter Eleven

It wasn’t long, either. “Let’s get out of here,” he had said. And “Your dress would go awfully well with my walls for a background. They’re almond-colored. I’ve already asked Gil and some girl up, so it’ll be perfectly all right for you to come. I mean, we can go off in a corner some place and have a real heart to heart chat and I know they won’t bother us.”

So she had allowed herself to be persuaded.

In the house where he lived he had an entire floor to himself, and his windows seen from the street were already orange-tinted with conviviality when they got out of the cab, three needless gashes in the still pale world. He rang the bell in the vestibule, and the door opened for them with staccato ticks, like a very rapid clock. He put a hand to her elbow and led her in, she looking up into his face and mouthing animated gayeties as they moved endlessly up the long stairs.

Gil and his friend were there ahead of them, sitting facing each other under a lamp at one end of the long room, their hands on their knees like children staring at something very wonderful. Each had a little cup of copper-colored tea on the point of their knee, tea that had grown quite cold apparently.

Gil, very sallow, wearing a bow tie that seemed to stretch halfway to the tip of each shoulder and a soft collar that began well below the base of his throat, his hair turned into a mirrored surface by brilliantine or something or other, called out “Hello, Angela,” when he saw Wilder helping her off with her coat at the opposite end of the room. He went immediately back into his trance after that, a motionlessness that was punctuated, however, by a steady, imperceptible flow of conversation between his companion and himself.

Angela meanwhile was being shown around the place by Wilder, both of them saying very little. In the kitchen, the very whiteness of which hurt the eyes under a hundred-watt bulb, he had an alarm clock that had stopped at half past one five months ago, a few jugs of Five Fruits, and a Frigidaire. When she opened this, as a woman would, all she found in it was a bag of oranges, a bag of lemons, and a bag of eggs. “Suspicious!” she hissed at him immediately. The bedroom she merely looked into without crossing the threshold, wondering at the same time whom some of the photographs she saw on the dresser belonged to. There was also a phonograph in there, which she surmised must be full of laundry or something of the sort.

The only remaining room was the large one Gil and the girl were in and it was the sort of a room that expressed a man like Wilder perfectly. A man who, though happening to have been born, say, fifteen or twenty years earlier than those young things over there in the lamplight, was essentially younger than they were, loved life and its manifold delights more, could be reckless without being ridiculous, which they could not as yet, was handsome in a way that no youth of under thirty could hope to approach, just as the nearer the fruit to decay, the sweeter it tastes and the richer it looks. In short, one who had somehow captured and retained the great spiritual essence that men and women were seeking and scrambling for everywhere.

The walls of this room, as he had mentioned to her, had been painted a bisque color, and the rugs and the divan were a peculiar silver-gray that could assimilate untold quantities of cigarette ash without showing it. One suspected that they resembled Wilder in this; that he, too, could assimilate any number of experiences without showing it. Not that he had thrown them off, rather he had done what the oysters do when a grain of sand rubs them the wrong way, turned it into a pearl of wisdom.

There was a plaited tapestry on the wall hanging vertically like a scroll, showing a court lady of old Japan crossing a humpbacked bridge. There was a green pottery frog on the table, with cigarettes protruding from its huge nostrils. Felix, the cat, with his quizzical expression, black felt and waist-high, was squatting in one corner. There were a great many small lamps and one or two large ones, and they slashed the room with half moons and scimitars of light that made perspective very hard to gauge.

Everything had a detached carelessness about it. The cork-tipped cigarettes spilling from every conceivable glass and brass and lacquer receptacle, the chintz matches protruding like porcupine quills from unhappy cats and toads and turtles, and cocktail shaker with its inevitable clocklike refrain, when tilted, “Nobody knows how dry I am,” all combined to give the impression of a too constantly repeated formula of urbanity that was beginning to pall even on the inanimate objects it dealt in. Wilder, too, as he bent slightly forward, pouring a tinseled fluid into four sapphire glasses, had the air of a person who has long since stopped reasoning why he puts himself out for people, but goes ahead and does it, expecting no thanks and receiving none. Angela, as she stood behind his back watching him over one shoulder, could vision a long succession of parasites impinging on his civility. And Gil by no means the least of them.

“Come and get them,” said Wilder, straightening up from his task.

Gil and his friend rose and journeyed over, pleasurably unhurried. She put both hands to her waist and straightened herself with a slight hitch that reminded Angela of the expression “shifting your gears.”

“Beverly, this is my sister, Mrs. Haines,” said Gil.

“ ’Lo,” said Beverly very non-committally. The sort of girl, probably, that didn’t like other girls. Which is usually because other girls don’t like them. She sidled around to Wilder, making some remark that began, “Say, there’s one thing I’ve been dying to find out about you—” and was lost to Angela in the opening of Gil’s conversation.

“I suppose you know that Mud and Lyle sail for Europe to-night at midnight?” he told her.

She looked at him defiantly, “What am I supposed to do, break down and cry about it?”

“Deny it all you want, but I’ll bet that’s what you feel like doing right this very minute.”

She didn’t answer, an admission that he was not far from right.

“It’s your own funeral,” he went on gloomily. “What did y’ have to go and get married for?”

“Has Mud said anything about — about my going over with them?”

“She’d be only too glad. She’s back clipping coupons again, and you know how that tickles her. Things are looking much better. Why don’t you give in? You know you made a mistake; why not admit it? No one expects anything more than that of you; you’re only human like the rest of us. Come away from him and you can get your separation on the other side. I really feel sorry for the fellow and sorry for you, too. You’ll both be better off apart, and the sooner you get that through your head the better.”

And with all this the thought: Yes, one’s life is a pitiful thing at best, and one has to make the most of it in fairness to oneself. Everything follows something else in due course. After garters come socks, after parties come headaches, after marriage divorce. Paris! Six months’ interlude and then freedom. She could go where she wanted, she could do what she wanted, she could spend what she liked. She wondered if Jerry would wait that long. Hard to say. Jerry was Jerry, and New York was lively.

And now Gil had taken her by the hand and was pleading almost in her ear.

“You will come back to us, won’t you, Angela? Don’t care what he says, make the break. You’ve got to, you’re an individual. I’d rather see you lying dead at my feet than with him another six months. Come on, sis! Where’s the old Angela that had so much common sense?”

Cocktail tears came to her eyes. “Nobody in the world cares about Angela. Poor Angela.”

“Here, here,” said Wilder. Beverly looked at her curiously.

“I had a row with him this morning,” she said. “I’m not going to stand it any more. Let me speak to Mud over the phone, boys.”

Gil couldn’t hand the phone to her quickly enough, and Wilder drew out a chair for her with alacrity. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and laid it aside, and called her mother’s number.

Gil and Wilder, with a mutual look at her across their shoulders, went over to a window and stood with their drinks in their hands, while the little gas bubbles in the glass kept rising to the surface, then changing their minds and going down to the bottom again.

“What grounds would Angela have?” murmured Wilder.

“Indifference, incompatibility, insult, mental cruelty,” recited Gil glibly. “He threw all the dresses in her closet on the floor and wiped his feet on them, you know. Did I tell you I caught him driving a taxicab late one night? Driver’s license and everything. I think he’s a bootlegger. I’m saving it as a coup de grace in case she decides not to go.”

“Mud,” Angela was saying at the phone, “you’re not leaving without me? You’re not leaving your baby behind, Mud? Oh, no, you might have guessed it. We don’t get along at all. He stays out nights. I can’t get away soon enough.”

She turned away exultantly. And now she had made up her mind. The gates were opening to her and she must get back in while she could. “I’m sailing at twelve,” she said. “Mud’s having an extra reservation put in for me.” She seized her glass.

“Up high, everybody,” she said. “A toast. To the Paris that makes free women of us.”

Their eyes met, hers and her Jerry’s, over the rims of their glasses, and their lips smiled.

“There never was a town like Paris,” Gil amended. Period of imbibing the waters of joy. The telephone rang.

“There goes your reservation,” said Beverly cynically.

Wilder finished his drink, tasted his lips narrowly, and put his glass down. He frisked a handkerchief to his mouth and stuffed it back into his breast pocket. Then he lifted the receiver from the hook. The pitiful trilling stopped and a voice said, “Is this Wilder?”

“Yes, this is Wilder. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to my wife.”

Facetiously, “Just which one is your wife?”

“This is Haines.”

“Yes, I suspected as much.”

And Angela, who had guessed, darted over signaling to him frantically with her hands. No, no, no. Not here.

“Sorry, she’s not here.”

“I happen to know she is. Put her on, will you?”

“No. Quite impossible. She’s not here.”

“You ought to be above that sort of thing, Wilder.”

And Angela, changing her mind at the last moment, now that he had committed himself, taking the phone away from him, “Here, let me talk to him.”

“I told him to say that, Dewey. You have a cheek—”

“I knew you were there anyhow, so what’s the difference?”

“I–I dropped in with Gil.”

“Well, then suppose you drop out again.”

“Still, you needn’t hound me as though I were a criminal.”

“All the same, don’t you think you’ve been there long enough on your first visit? Or is it your first visit, after all?”

“That will do, Dewey,” she said, “I think you’ve said enough for one afternoon.”

“I’ll have more to say to you before I’m through. Put your things on.”

“No,” said Angela, “not when you talk like that. I’ll be damned if I will.”

“What’s he saying t’ you?” said Wilder, sullen-mouthed, trying to take the phone out of her hand.

She edged him off with her elbow. “Don’t,” she said quietly, “it would only make things worse.”

The fear that Wilder might break in on the conversation and bring matters to a head prevented her from hearing a good deal of what Dewey was saying. And Dewey was saying plenty, in that low voice of his, which had a whine to it over the wire that didn’t do justice to the state of mind he was in right then. He was not whining; he was commanding.

“Tell him you’ll drop him a postcard from Paris,” sneered Gil from a corner of the room.

“Let’s have dinner and go to a show, the devil with him!” said Wilder loudly, bringing his face as close to the mouthpiece of the phone as he could get it.

“Please, Jerry,” pleaded Angela, shaking her head at him in desperation. “Don’t you see you’re not helping me a bit by doing that?”

“What does he think you are anyway, a convict out on parole?”

Dewey had overheard him and was on fire. Angela sighed forbearingly. “Yes, I know you’d love to knock a few of his teeth out,” she agreed, “but gentlemen don’t talk that way to their wives. No, I’m not coming back. I’ve just been asked out to dine and dance and I’m going, if it’s the last thing I do. Ha, the shoe pinches when it’s on the other foot, does it?” she cried exultantly.

“I’ll find the two of you if I have to look for you in every night club going,” vowed the wrathful Dewey.

“Do that little thing,” she said sarcastically. “Let me know how they appeal to you,” and rang off.

She knew they were all watching her and refused to look at them. She crossed the room to where her toque lay, gleaming like a silver Christmas tree ornament, and put it on and drew her coat around her listlessly.

Wilder addressed her anxiously: “You’re not going? You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

“I’m going back for my things,” she said. “I won’t have time later if we’re going out. The boat leaves at twelve sharp.”

He telephoned for a taxi and led her to the door with his arm around her waist, murmuring, “Don’t you think I’d better go with you? He may try to force you to stay there.”

“More probably he’s on his way over here now with a few handy bricks in his back pocket. Let’s get out.”

“Ou!” squealed Beverly, “how thrilling.”

“You two run along; we’ll stay and watch him foam at the mouth,” said Gil.

Driving back, the park was plum-blue now and its lights, when seen through the three transparent sides of the taxi, resembled white beads strung on invisible threads that hung suspended between earth and sky.

Wilder kept the taxi waiting at the door while Angela was upstairs collecting her belongings. The maid related that Dewey had left not more than ten minutes before her return with a glitter in his eye, no doubt on his way over to Wilder’s to hand out punishment. They must have crossed each other at some point in the park, that park whose lights were as numerous as grains of barley. Angela and the maid worked frantically to collect her things, and posted the elevator boys to warn them in time in case he should return. Afraid to linger long enough to change to evening clothes, she drove from there over to her mother’s with Wilder, the maid, and an armful of dresses, silk stockings, and lingerie, snatched up at random. It was now seven o’clock and she had only five hours left to her in New York.

“We’ll celebrate,” said he. “I’ll show you a night you’ve never had before.”