Children of the Ritz

Chapter Five

“She isn’t back yet,” said Marie the maid.

Mrs. Pennington moaned feebly and fluttered her fingers in the air. Spasms of light shot from the emerald ring on her right hand and caught, and held, Marie’s hazel eye. The shirred apricot portières over the glass doors softened the light in the room to a sunset hue.

“She was on the wire shortly before twelve last night,” Marie said solemnly, wishing the stone were hers and seeing no reason furthermore why it shouldn’t be.

Diane gave vent to a click of impatience. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” she exclaimed.

“She told me not to say anything about it,” Marie answered.

“That’s strange,” remarked Diane dully. “Very strange. I must tell my daughter about it. My other daughter,” she added by way of explanation. She got up from the chaise longue and left the room, taking long strides forward with knees half bent under the bushels of lace that encircled her.

“Dear,” she said, knocking on Lyle’s door. “Dear.” And receiving no answer she marched in anyway, which was characteristic of her.

Lyle was standing at one of the windows. Her head was bent forward and the light played on the curves of her shoulders. She had not heard or else pretended not to have heard.

“Dear,” said Diane, “she isn’t back yet. And what do you think I’ve found out? Marie just told me she called up before twelve last night from town. So you see, she’s been away all night. Why, my dear, it’s unheard of!”

Lyle turned around. Her eyes were red and dilated and she was holding a telegram in her hand.

“Whom is that from?” her mother asked, noticing it. “It’s not from Angela, is it?”

Lyle looked at her defiantly. “Yes, it’s from Angela,” she told her. “It came over an hour ago. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

Diane reached for it. “Let me — let me see,” she gasped. The emerald on her finger gave out sparks as it darted for it.

Lyle put it behind her. “It won’t do any good for you to see it,” she said quietly. “She’s married.”

Her mother looked at her, standing like a statue carved of stone.

“No!” she screamed at last. “I won’t have it!” She stamped her foot viciously.

“Now you’re being childish,” urged Lyle gently.

“I tell you I won’t have it!” shrieked Diane. “She can get out.”

“The fact that she’s married,” argued Lyle, swaying with genuine distress, “isn’t so terrible. You might know she would do it sooner or later. But to do what she has done—”

“What—” choked Diane, “what do you mean?”

Lyle’s head sank forward upon her chest, as though she could not bear to meet her mother’s eye. Mortification colored her neck like wine rising in a crystal decanter.

“The chauffeur,” she said.

“You must be crazy,” said Diane, grown suddenly calm and turning pale as a sheet.

“She must be, not I,” Lyle corrected her. “It’s here in her message, unmistakably.” She smoothed its creases before her bedewed eyes and read aloud: “Haines and I are married.” A tear made a little transparent disk like candle grease on the waxed yellow paper. She turned it into a crumpled ball again and threw it from her.

“On top of what’s happened to father,” she said, “as though we haven’t had enough publicity! Oh, the fool! The little fool! They’ll hound us to death.”

Women had not screamed since 1914. Really smart women, that is. Diane did now, though. Harrowingly, as though her heart would break.

“My dear!” Lyle flew to the vanity table for a triangular crystal of smelling salts, looking like peppermint cubes in turquoise green syrup. Her mother, seated on an array of half-moon cushions, was sobbing lustily, talking all the while, though naturally what she said was very difficult to understand. Lyle paced back and forth morosely. Presently her mother relapsed into silence, and began picking gilt hearts and rosettes from the cushions under her.

“Don’t do that,” said Lyle, taking them away from her. “Remember, these things were all sold with the house. They no longer belong to us.” She flung them slowly on the bed one after another, occasionally overreaching herself and dropping one on the floor, where it lay like an overripe tropical fruit fallen from some tree of the Hesperides. The last to go was a doll thin as a shoestring, in a wide Bonaparte hat.

“I wish I were dead,” said Diane, bereft of cushions and passing the vial of salts sketchily back and forth under her nose a few times.

Lyle sighed. “Don’t talk like that. You simply make it harder for every one.”

“If I didn’t have courage to face these things—” making a gesture of despair with her hands, “I don’t know what I’d do.”

“The chauffeur,” murmured Lyle piteously, biting her lip.

“The chauffeur,” hiccoughed her mother, starting to sob all over again.

The car drove slowly up the red graveled incline, creeping home like the disobedient culprit it was, and the two people in it seemed timidly to encourage its sloth. They looked at each other with humorously poignant eyes, as much as to say, “This is our medicine, isn’t it?”

“We’ll both go in together,” said Angela, as though there had been some doubt about this in their minds.

“I should’ve got some clothes,” remarked Haines, looking down at his form as they stepped up to the door. He still had on his uniform and chauffeur’s cap, that Angela had once thought so natty but that she now abhorred as badges of servitude on one who had become her husband. Her own purple suit was extremely disordered from sitting in the car for so long, and her limbs ached. She lacked even the spirit to apply the rouge and powder that she felt she needed so badly.

The door opened. Marie was the only one left of all their servants.

“How do you do, Miss Angela?” she said.

Angela was still eighteen in more respects than one. She showed her the ring. “Look. I’m Mrs. Haines now.”

Marie’s looks devoured it. “Wouldn’t it knock your eye out?” she commented. “Congratulations.” She smiled diffidently. And then to Dewey, whom she had once favored in her mind above all others, holding out her hand and gazing at him eloquently.

Angela had gone ahead. She took off her hat, perfectly at home, and stood before a mirror in unhurried contemplation of herself. Dewey came up to her.

“Let’s wait downstairs and send them word that we’re here,” he suggested.

“I look a fright,” she answered, holding her hands tightly pressed to the sides of her face. “No, we’ll do nothing of the sort. Come on, we’ll go up and face the music.”

“Brr!” he answered, turning up the collar of his coat and clasping it tightly about his throat.

“If I could creep to my room,” lamented Angela, still transfixed before the glass, “and slap on a coat of powder at least, and change to something presentable, why, half the battle would be won.”

“Never mind that now,” he said, manlike, anxious to have it over with. “You’ve lived with ’em all your life; why worry about your appearance?”

They took each other by the hand and flew up the stairs side by side like two frightened birds, skipping two and three steps at a time. Carried by their own momentum and arriving breathless at the head of the staircase, they balanced themselves precariously on the very edge of the topmost step, almost slipping back for a time. There they leaned against each other like two empty meal sacks, laughing softly under their breaths and making inane remarks.

“Let’s whistle and run away.”

“I’ll hold my knuckle against the door and you give it a push.”

But Angela, losing her nerve, spread her fist at the last moment, so the only result was a dull whack against the panel.

They jumped back and would have fled downstairs on the slightest provocation.

“Maybe they’re not in there,” whispered Dewey hopefully.

“Sure they are. That’s Mother’s—”

The door opened. It had seemed to Angela many times before now that Lyle was always behind doors that opened like that in this house, catching you when you were sneaking out early at night, catching you when you were stealing in late at night. She was there now. The eyes of the two sisters met and strove for mastery. Until Lyle’s, feeling Dewey’s glance upon them, were deflected toward his in spite of themselves. She hadn’t wanted to look at him.

“My husband,” said Angela, with a little explanatory twist of the wrist.

Lyle drew her long foamy sleeves up before her by clutching her shoulders protectingly with opposite hands. She stepped back before them into the room, overturning an edge of velour carpet that threatened to but did not quite upset her balance.

“They’re out here in the hall,” she said to Diane without taking her accusing eyes off them.

“I won’t see her.” Diane’s petulant voice reached Angela standing there on the other side of the door. She turned quickly to Dewey.

“You sit out here on the stairs, sweetheart, and wait for me,” she ordered. “I’m going in there and find out where I stand.”

She walked in and the door slowly swung about on its hinges after her and shut the room off from view. Some one on the inside, Lyle most likely, gave it the slight final pressure that caused the latch to click into its socket, and seal them in there for awhile with their secrets and their troubles.

Countless minutes had elapsed and countless cigarettes had gone up in smoke between Dewey’s thin straight lips. Not a sound had come through from the other side of the panel, not even a footfall or the shifting of a chair. He sat there, his hands flung loosely between his knees, wondering vaguely what was going on. Like women, they were talking about clothes most likely. That was all women seemed to care about. Once his sister Margie had gone to Atlantic City for a week-end and when she got back she spent a whole day telling his mother what she had seen girls wearing on the boardwalk. And Margie, at that, was less feminine than the run of them.

The door opened narrowly and Angela inserted herself in the space it offered, her face still turned toward the center of the room. It was a hurt face, flushed and distraught. Her clenched hand fumbled with the crystal knob.

“He’s my father,” she said, “and I’m going in to him. He’ll be the first to understand.”

“But you mustn’t,” they were saying apprehensively; “we haven’t told Father anything.”

A slim hand came to rest upon her shoulder and a cloud of voile came after it like mist. That was Lyle, he knew. Angela shook herself free.

“No,” she said plaintively, “you said you’re through with me. Be through.” She looked defiantly out to where Dewey sat. “He’s my husband and I’m going to stick to him. I came to say good-by, that’s all.”

She pulled the door shut after her.

Then all the tension left her, all the resistance, and she dropped limply down beside him on the stairs.

“They said they’re through with me, Dewey,” she said pitifully. “What’ve I done that they should say a thing like that? Dewey, Dewey, I can’t help it — I can’t — help it—” She cried violently, her face buried against his coat, her hands reaching up imploringly to his shoulders. He touched his lips to the top of her head and smoothed her hair with one hand. The door had opened once more and Lyle was bending over her.

“Angela child—” She wanted to take her from him.

“Please!” said Dewey, motioning her off. “A minute ago you were through with her—”

Her hands dropped disappointedly and she went back into the room like a crestfallen archangel, her long butterfly sleeves drooping out behind her.

“Our side has won the first victory,” he thought. “Angela dear, look up at me.”

The wet lashes of her eyes stood out in little points like the rays of a star.

“Get your things, honey. We’ll go back to New York.”

At once she became animated.

“Yes, precious, we’ll go ’way from here, won’t we? Oh, Dewey, if you only knew how I hate this house! By this time to-morrow we’ll have our own, won’t we, darling? You wait downstairs. I’ll be with you in a jiffy. I want to get some of my chiffon stockings. And don’t let me forget to say good-by to Father.” At the top of the next flight of stairs she halted in dismay and called down to him: “Oh, Dewey! What’ll we do about the car? It’s really theirs, you know. I never thought of that.”

“Sh!” laughed Dewey, motioning her to be more tactful. “Never mind about that now. We’ll take a taxi.”

“Certainly,” she agreed spiritedly, “who wants their old car anyway!” She slammed the door of her room after her, adding darkly, “I’ve always suspected it of being a 1918 model, at that.”

She put on all the lights and stood perfectly still a moment, looking about her. Her room. The feather fans a daughter of Montezuma might have envied, the mother-of-pearl mandolin with the pale blue streamers, the black and orange fool’s cap from some Hallowe’en party where they had ducked for apples and the face powder had drifted from their chins onto the surface of the faintly fragrant water. The rhinestone dice, the portrait of Vincent Lopez, famed musician, tinted in blue appropriately enough, and autographed by him in white ink. A pair of treacherously beautiful slippers, one of whose spidery filigree heels, breaking off on the most celebrated dance floor in America, had sent her crashing down to her knees in the midst of everybody and everything, while they bellowed, “Give this little girl a hand!”

Everywhere a profusion of gilt-banded cigarette ends that had been living their own lives as recently as yesterday morning and hadn’t been cleared away yet in the domestic confusion that was slowly overtaking this house. Deceitful lipsticks that seemed a neutral orange only to turn like chameleons to a gashy butcher red once they had been rubbed on. Crystal chokers, theater programs (Merry Merry, Twinkle Twinkle, No No Nanette), a succession of letters — most of them had delighted her at breakfast and been blah by the time luncheon came around. Letters that began, “Angela dear, I’ve been thinking over what you said to me last night—” Others that began, “Dear Angela: I can’t believe you really meant it when you said—”

And still others that began, “My dear Angela: If that’s the way you feel about it—”

Boys’ hearts seemed to break so easily. But then they mended so easily too. She shook her head. That wasn’t love. But to leave all this with Dewey, your arm in his, and step over into the future, a future that was lapping at your feet like dark water, that must be love. That must be love.

A recklessness, the wildness that a gypsy or a Tartar might know, took hold of her. “This,” she cried, “this stale old place.” She was going out into the world, to live and love and laugh. New days for old. She was going to drink her drink at last, instead of just sipping around the edges.

She whipped slim brass rods laden with dresses out of all the closets, so that they stood out into the room like pennants. Passing the low lacquered phonograph, she threw it open and pointed the needle on a song that was a favorite of hers, echoing her sentiments as closely as it did. “Pleasure mad,” whined the negress imprisoned within the disk, “I must have my fun! Never sad, always set for somethin’ new.”

“Marie,” said the hysterical Angela into the telephone, “come upstairs and help me pack.”

Her manner of commencing was odd, to say the least. She threw off her purple suit, which she never wanted to see again, so fed up with it was she, and began to rub cold cream into both cheeks at once in ever-widening white circles. She gave the late garment which lay on the floor in two pieces a kick from time to time until it was far enough away to be out of her immediate reach. And then, when she was all through massaging, unable to lay her hands on a towel for the moment, she picked it up and started to scour her face with the hem of it. “Ugh,” she said, “the nasty thing!”

Marie knocked and was told to come in.

“Well, I’m leaving,” Angela announced. “What do you think of that!”

“Sure,” Marie agreed, “you’re going on a honeymoon, but you’re coming back when it’s over, aren’t.”

“I’m going for good,” said Angela. “You won’t see me any more, not if you live to be a hundred. The family’s through with me and I’m through with them. And believe me!”

“No!” said Marie as though she were unable to credit it. “Don’t tell me that!” As a matter of fact, she had the makings of a very good little actress.

“Turn off the Ford,” said Angela, busy with a new dress, “it’s running down.”

Between the two of them in a very short time they had the room looking like an Arab tent after a sandstorm. Articles of intimate apparel were scattered about underfoot. Party dresses and party shoes garnished the bed. Angela had whipped a rope of artificial pearls round one of the lights on the wall and then promptly forgotten all about it. “You can have this,” she was saying lavishly, “and you can have that. I don’t want ’em. I’m sick of looking at them. I’ll get other ones, I suppose. Everything’ll be new this winter. They don’t wear them like that any more, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” lied the crafty Marie; “that’s gone out quite some time ago already.”

“Don’t you think Dewey’s a dear?” said Angela, putting on her hat before the glass.

“He’s a sweet thing,” answered Marie piously, “to take you away when there’s been so much trouble here lately.”

“I knew you’d agree with me,” said Angela from the door. “Finish up in here, and send the things to the Ritz. And don’t forget the name; I’m Mrs. Dewey Haines.”

“Angela.”

Angela paused dramatically at the bottom of the stairs and turned slowly around on her glistening spike heels, as though they were pivots dug into the ice-smooth floor. She was not consciously posing, and yet the way in which she allowed one knee to sag against the other, the way in which the back of her hand sought her waist, argued a rehearsal of posture at one time or another prior to this.

It was Lyle. She came running down after her, her feet darting in and out like little satin mice. There was a pleading look on her face.

“Child, child, you’re not going through with this? Why, this is a farce.”

Angela grew piqued.

“A farce?” she breathed exasperatedly. “I’d like any one to call your marriage a farce and see how you’d take it.”

Lyle tried to reason with her, desperately anxious to stay on the right side of her, not to offend her, that is, any more than she had already been offended.

“No, no, dear,” she explained hastily, “not your marriage. Your leaving us like this, that’s what I meant. Don’t you see, dear? Why, think of Father and Diane.”

“Oh, you sound just like one of these mammy songs!” exclaimed Angela impatiently. “Why drag in all this sentimental stuff? You heard the way Mother spoke to me a little while ago.” She tightened her grip on the red Morocco envelope under her arm preparatory to breaking off the conversation. “Good-by, dearest, I’m going.” Offering her lips to be kissed. “Come and see me some time when I have a little place of my own.”

Lyle became at once ice, glittering, superb. “And you expect me,” she sneered, “to call on you in the home of a former chauffeur of ours. Oh, it’s to laugh!” She tossed her head and laughed shrilly.

Angela, before she realized it, had slapped four fingers against the side of her face.

“That’s what you get for casting reflections on my husband,” she heard herself say. She couldn’t believe she had done it.

Lyle turned away from her and stood a minute over by the stairs, then went up them quietly and quickly. In imagination Angela saw herself at her feet, clasping her about the knees. “Darling, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She couldn’t bring herself to the point, somehow. Too late for that now.

She turned and went out the front door, her puckered chin quivering, her eyes blinded with tears.

Dewey had a large lavender-checkered taxi waiting in front of the house.