Children of the Ritz

Chapter Seven

Two weeks later they were in their own apartment on the upper West Side, just off Broadway. It was called, quaintly enough, The Mark Antony, and on either side of it lay The Prince Humbert and The Marcus Aurelius. Dewey’s mother, when she came to visit them, thought this array of names simply grand. “Ours is called The Bonavista,” she sighed. “It don’t sound nearly so nice, does it?”

“It doesn’t sound nearly so nice,” corrected Margie, who was acquiring a manner.

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” declared Mrs. Haines stoutly. “What would you like me to do, speak French?” She gave her daughter a scornful look. “This one,” she related aggrievedly, indicating her with one thumb, “the airs she’s putting on would kill you.” She vouchsafed them an imitation, in a highly exaggerated falsetto with the lids of her eyes half shut. “Don’t call me Margie! My name’s Marjorie, I’d have you understand.” And she arched her throat and gave an affected little cough.

Margie seemed on the verge of taking offense and walking out of the place. “Ma will have her little joke,” she said bitterly. Then suddenly relapsing into the colloquial, “Gosh, if I had your sense of humor I’d drowned myself, no kidding, I would.”

“Gaffney,” said her mother, shaking with laughter, “don’t know what to make of her.”

“Oh, him,” said the disdainful Margie, frittering her fingers in the air, “he has nothing. No personality, nothing.”

When they had first looked at it the apartment consisted entirely of bare walls, hardwood floors and a big crystal chandelier in each room, on the style of 1910.

“They’ll have to come down,” said Angela, thoughtfully tapping her teeth; “they don’t use them any more.”

“Leave them; they look nice,” protested Dewey naively. “Like icicles.”

“No one lights their rooms from above,” she told him with great finality. So down they came, to be replaced in the long run by nothing at all.

By the time they were ready to move in they had managed to acquire two beds, a dwarf fir tree in a pot of hammered brass, a crinoline doll with an electric light socket under its skirts, and two dozen taffeta bolsters with gold and silver and crystal grapes appliquéd. These last Angela had had sent home. All this was gathered in one room, the other rooms standing as empty as the day the building was first completed.

The telephone had not been installed yet, although they had an expensive inlaid cabinet for it, in which Dewey was keeping his collars for the present. Angela had bought herself a silver and violet enameled toilet set, but there was nothing to lay it out on. She was used to having Marie do everything for her at home. Night after night the lights in some of the rooms were allowed to burn until morning. The doorbell would ring by the half hour and she never thought of answering it. Then later when she found out that she would have to attend to it herself she let the door stand open all day so that people could walk in and out without disturbing her. Months later the two of them were still making belated discoveries of things that had disappeared around this time.

One thing that Dewey found hard to understand was her passion for privacy. It almost amounted to an obsession with her. No doubt the fact that a good deal of posing and posturing before the mirror went on morning and evening had something to do with it. Dewey was the kind that would have laughed and she realized it and insisted on his taking a separate room. She had announced her decision the first night they were there, at four o’clock in the morning on their return from a rather monotonous expedition to Harlem, by throwing his pillows through the open door into the next room. The fact that her aim was bad and they both landed on the floor was a matter of little moment to her.

Dewey seemed not to take the hint. He took his shoes off and put them in her closet, and was going even further until she remonstrated sharply: “Dewey! Not in here. Please!” Dewey, who was not conscious of any guilt on his own part, simply stared at her bewilderedly. “Go outside now, like a good boy, I want to cream my face.”

He submitted silently but in great wonderment. And in the kitchen, a little later on, she explained herself at great length, perched on the edge of the sink in a wrapper of shell-pink marabou:

“I love you, but I wouldn’t drink from your water glass, not even from the opposite side of it. You could have the most dangerous illness in the world and I wouldn’t be afraid to nurse you, but not unless you had your hair combed properly and wore V-necked pajamas, and there was some one to bring flowers into the room. But I know that if I ever saw you sick to your stomach I would never go near you again, I couldn’t bear the sight of you. It’s not the big horrors that scare me, Dewey, it’s the little ones. There’s something indecent about sleeping in the presence of some one else. It’s like these public Pullmans where every one has to crawl onto shelves in front of every one else, and if some one snores the whole car knows it.”

“You’re a riot,” he drawled genially.

“One day when I was a little girl I fell asleep on the beach in the sun, and two other little girls came along and saw me, and when I opened my eyes I found them both standing there staring at me very solemnly the way children do sometimes. I beat it right home and when I got to my room and saw myself in the glass I was all blushes for some unknown reason. My dignity was wounded. Ever since that day I’ve hated the idea of being seen asleep by any one.”

“I never heard of that before,” he marveled. “I think you ought to go to some nice doctor and have him find out why you feel that way.”

“It’s just that I like my cake to have a nice icing. You could kiss a dozen other girls on the side and still I’d kiss you, but if you didn’t always shine your shoes I’d be disgusted and wouldn’t want you in the house with me a minute.”

He gave her a blank look, as much as to say, what did shoe polish have to do with kisses?

She continued to swing her feet back and forth under the sink, supremely confident that she was making herself understood.

“Cut some bread,” she said suddenly, “and pare the edges off and throw them away. Just the white heart of it, and I’ll toast it and dip in the yolk of an egg. Never had French toast? Never heard of it even? Oh, it wouldn’t be anything at nine in the morning, but at four, with you in the kitchen, let me tell you.”

She struck a match, turned something in front of the porcelain range, and a row of twinkling blue beads came into existence in the satanic depths of it, like midget sapphire stalactites in a cavern.

“I feel as though I were playing with dolls all over again,” she said. “Never thought the day would come I’d be in an apartment all my own with a real husband and everything.”

Dewey laughed.

“Oh, your ears are so cute,” she exclaimed, “like little pink lettuce leaves. I could bite them off!”

“Lettuce leaves aren’t pink,” he reminded her. “My mother used to get them off a pushcart—”

“Great guns,” she sighed, “don’t be so literal.”

Her hand, shivering with tenderness, passed slowly down his cheek and she let two fingers linger over his lips, as though establishing a mystic communion between them.

“This time of night is nicest,” she breathed. “No crowd, no pocket flasks, no dairy lunch rooms. Just you here with me in this little white kitchen. Sometimes I think I love you more than any woman ought to love any man, even her own husband.”

A mood of intense self-revelation had taken possession of Dewey, overstepping the self-consciousness that ordinarily would have been there. He sucked his cigarette till the red thread that encircled the end of it seemed to spin toward his lips.

“When I was twenty I had charge of a filling station over in Queens. Sometimes in the summer I used to work there all night, trees all around, and you’d hear the wind in the trees saying, ‘Why don’t you get married? Why don’t you get married?’ And around five, gee, it used to get swell — when you shaded your eyes from the big arc lights you could see the sky over in the east getting pinker by the minute, and the gasoline stains on the cement would turn pink along with it and kind of reflect the sky. And I’d wipe my hands on a rag and roll my overalls up and quit, and honestly I felt so good I just stuck my fingers to my nose and laughed at life. All I wanted money for was a new tie or two; all I wanted love for was because all the other fellows had it and it was nice to have some one to go to the movies with on Saturday night. Don’t I wish I was twenty again.”

And Angela, entranced by his mood and the moment, gazing at him with the watery eyes of a doe.

“And then one day, it only seemed as if a few weeks had gone by, but I wasn’t twenty any more. All I knew was I wanted love because I had love to give. All around me there were smiles and handshakes, and there I was. I thought of the dozens of girls I’d kissed in dozens of cars; it only made me lonely to think of it. I wondered if any of them remembered. Most likely not. Just a boy and a car and a moon, I suppose.”

A thrill of unreasonable fear shot through her.

“I guess I’ve seen a thousand suns go down and been alone a thousand evenings. What enemies of ours those suns are that go down in the evening and never come back any more. Oh, Dewey, to think that we’ve got to grow old like all the rest have... Look, dearest, it’s getting light. Put out the electricity and you can see it better.” She put her head on his shoulder. “Be nice to me, Dewey,” she pleaded. “All our lives is a long time. Let’s be friends even though we are in love with each other.”

They stood looking out of the window with their arms tight about each other’s waists, almost as though they were afraid of being taken from each other.

“Dearest.”

“Dearest.”

They took their meals out, that is, when they took meals at all. Angela’s idea of a meal was to send out to the nearest drug store for a frosted chocolate powdered with cinnamon whenever she felt the need, which became surprisingly frequent at times. At the end of one month when Dewey discovered what the bill she had run up on these refreshments alone amounted to, he nearly fell over.

“I never knew,” explained Angela innocently, “they could come to that much. I used to tell the elevator boy to get one for himself, too, each time he went out for me.”

“I suppose,” said Dewey, flinging out the wildest accusation he could think of, “each time you sent him for cigarettes you told him to help himself to a package of those too.”

“Why, yes,” she answered tranquilly. “That was the least I could do. After all, he was putting himself out for me.”

“It’s a good thing,” he told her morosely, “you weren’t buying automobiles.”

He pulled a pencil out of his pocket and a piece of paper and sat down to figure. “They charge twenty-five cents for those, don’t they?” he said, looking at her.

“How do I know?” she said impatiently. “I never stopped to find out. Suppose they do. What’s twenty-five cents? Don’t make yourself ridiculous adding up quarters and dimes.”

“At any rate,” he announced suddenly, bouncing his pencil off its point, “you had two hundred and forty frosted chocolates in the past thirty days.”

“I did not,” she cried indignantly.

“Making an average of eight a day for you and the colored boy, between you. I give up,” he went ahead, “I don’t see how you did it.”

“I never heard of anything so trivial in my life,” said Angela, crumpling the paper in her fist and kicking it under the table. “What are you going to do when I start buying clothes?”

“When you start buying?” he echoed. “What’ve you been doing for the past few weeks, giving a rehearsal? You could open a department store right now with all the stuff you’ve got inside there.”

“Rags,” she said scornfully. “I was never worse off in my life. Believe me, my mother used to give me carte blanche.”

“I don’t blame her,” he said promptly, “you need a good stiff lecture once in a while. What surprises me is that you’re willing to admit it.”

“Oh, why,” she cried melodramatically, bringing her fist down on the table, “did I marry a man without education!” And she ran into the next room to have the first cry of her married life, that deliciously poignant first cry of all.

“Oh, well, if we’re going to quarrel,” growled Dewey, putting on his hat and going out.

He went to pay a visit to his mother. She, too, at Margie’s suggestion, had shifted the one brief block westward from Amsterdam to Broadway that made all the difference in the world. She was still timid about passing the colored boys on duty in the vestibule, arrogant in their uniforms, and firmly grasped the gilt bars of the elevator with one hand whenever she stepped into it. She would have preferred to use the stairs (good old stairs!) but Margie wouldn’t let her. “We’re paying for this elevator, Ma,” she used to say.

“Are we?” replied Mrs. Haines, mystified. “What for? If it was mine I’d throw it out.”

Dewey found her alone in the house, sitting there rather forlornly as though she didn’t know what to do with her hands. That she had already undergone a rigorous if elemental training was obvious. Her fingernails were enameled a rabid red-violet. She had on a black silk dress that covered her everywhere and fitted her nowhere, and her feet had been cruelly wedged into black satin pumps with ribbon bows that cut like a knife, almost disappearing between the folds of flesh. On the table lay Fitzgerald’s story, All the Sad Young Men, and a blue pottery cat with an elongated neck.

She had the windows open, giving her the benefit of listening to all the taxis and trolleys and trucks that passed by the house and of watching the sky grow slowly dark over sidewalks that shone with light.

“Hello, Ma,” said Dewey, kissing her on the forehead. “All alone?”

“Yeah. Margie’s out collecting a trousseau. She gave up her job, you know.”

“She going to get married?”

“She’s going to get engaged. She says she can feel it coming on.”

“She must be good,” he commented dryly. “Why aren’t you out for a walk, instead of sitting up here all by yourself like this?”

“I’m not used to the neighborhood,” she answered with a touch of melancholy. “It makes me leery.”

“You ought to be out seeing all the pretty things in the windows, Ma, and amusing yourself.”

She patted his hand. “It’s good to hear some one call me Ma for a change. What do you think of that sister of yours, she won’t call me Ma any more? I’m Bessie to her now. I know what she’s aiming for, because it slipped out by mistake once or twice. She’d like to call me Betty. Bessie isn’t stylish enough for her. Just let her try,” she vowed darkly. “Ye can go just so far with me and no further. I’ll wallop the bloomin’ daylights—”

“Never mind, Ma,” he laughed, “it’ll all come out right.”

“She makes me put on shoes that you can’t walk in without splitting the sides out of them. She took away the only warm thing I have to wear, my sweater that I crocheted with my own hands. She took me to a booty shop for a shampoo and when I came out of there I found the devils had turned my hair all red underneath. What kept them from cuttin’ it off altogether the Lord only knows. The other day she brought me this book to read; you’d think I was a kid in school. Look at it. Sad it says, as though I’m not sad enough myself without me reading any sad books. Gimme your pencil, Dewey.”

She pulled it over to her and vigorously scratched the S off the title page. Then over it she added a G and an L in large quivering capitals.

“Now will you look at it,” she said triumphantly, holding it up for him to see. “Now it’s the way it should be. Now ye can read it without being made gloomy by the very thought.”

Dewey flung it down and his eyes searched her face with tender meaning. “You’re unhappy, Ma, aren’t you?” he told her quietly, putting his arm around her. “You don’t need to tell me, I know you are.”

“You’re a good boy,” she said, bending over his hand and touching it with her lips.

“ ’Cause I am, too. Isn’t it funny, Ma, you and I — we’re both that way?”

She didn’t press him for an explanation, didn’t ask any questions; she seemed to understand.

“Would you like to go back to the old place on Amsterdam Avenue?” he asked her presently.

“Too late for that now,” she said. “I couldn’t be happy there either any more, now that I know things for what they are. Besides, you couldn’t get Margie near there at the end of a red-hot poker; she’d rather die than go back, and what would I be doing there alone, tell me that? She won’t even let me talk of the old flat; she says she’s going to bury the past and do the Black Bottom on its grave.”

“Would you care to come with me — with us, I mean?”

She gasped as though it were sacrilege. “Me under the same roof with a Pennington? Oh, Dewey, how you talk!”

“You’re as good as anybody else in this world,” he exclaimed hotly, “and maybe just a little bit better. What do you talk that way for?”

“If I don’t suit Margie,” she urged plaintively, “and she just one of ourselves trying to show off, how will some one that’s not used to it feel about me, some one that’s the real thing?”

Dewey stood up, dug his fists deep into his pockets, and stood looking out the window to curb the sudden resentment he felt, and which he was unable to express for the moment. All at once he whirled on her. “What is this real thing, Ma? If you’re not real, then nobody is — no, not even my own wife, if I have to say so myself.”

“Dewey,” she pleaded.

“Don’t talk like a baby, Ma. I’ve been places you never have. I worked for Mrs. Craig once. She had money that would have made the Penning-tons look broke even before they really were. I never was in her bathroom, but they used to say she had jeweled water taps in the tub, and you’d see her very often carrying a little red baby monkey around in her arms for a pet. But under all that stupidity, and with it all, she was real — don’t make any mistake about it, she was real. Just as real as you are. I think she would have liked you, Ma, if she had known you. And yet I bet she wouldn’t have liked your own daughter Margie for a minute, just because she’s trying to be something that she isn’t. Very few people are real in this world, Ma, but Mrs. Craig was one, even if she did have a perfumed monkey hanging around her neck, and you’re another, even if you do point with a chop bone or a stalk of celery instead of using your finger.”

The room was growing quite dark now; they could scarcely make out each other’s faces in the half light. And yet outside the lighted show cases seemed to fill the air with dancing golden sparks that hung like gleaming powder suspended over Broadway, while an endless current of people moved restlessly in opposite directions, gay people, their voices and their excited laughter and the surge of their feet rising in a majestic undertone to the open windows.

“How about it?” Dewey begged. “Honestly, Ma, if you knew how sick I am of orangeade breakfasts at soda fountains!”

She took a long time about answering. “This marriage of yours,” she said slowly, “may be a success or it may be a failure, God forgive us. But whichever way it turns out, let it stand or fall by itself. I don’t want the fault to be mine. They’ll be putting the blame on me, first thing.”

“No one—”

“Never mind,” she said. “It takes little enough to upset things. I’ll stay where I am, and I’m only hoping Margie will marry Gaffney before she gets any worse. He’s a human being at least, and I’ll be that much better off with him round. Not being improved and made stylish every minute of the day.”

“Well, have it your own way,” said he. “You always had good common sense. Probably you’re right.” He pressed her hands affectionately.

“Come around,” she said, “for three square meals a day. And bring her with you. One thing this place has is an elegant kitchen range. I’ll make you both a veal stew that you never saw the like of yet.”

“Murder,” he said humorously.

As he was leaving the house he met Margie coming in the doorway. She had just paid a taxi driver his fare.

“Hel-lo, Dewey,” she said, not without affectation.

“Hello, Margie.” She’ll let me get away with it the first time, he thought, but not twice. Meaning in regard to her name.

“So glad to see you. Been to call on... ah... Betty? I call her Betty now.” She laughed apologetically.

“I came over to see Ma,” answered the uncompromising Dewey.

A slight embarrassment fell between them, due to his unwillingness to meet her on her own ground.

“Well, I’ve got to be getting back,” he said finally. “Walk me up a little way?”

“Surest thing,” she said. “I’ve been riding around in a cab all day. I need the exercise.” She slipped her arm through his with a touch of coquettishness, since he made a good foil for her own charms on the street.

Dewey lost his temper slightly. “You do a lot of cab riding nowadays, I notice. Between you and Angela, you’d think we were millionaires. Lookout you don’t wake up by having a rock bounced off your head one of these days.”

He did not mean this literally of course. Rather he meant that their daydreams would have a cruel awakening. Margie understood what he meant perfectly. Moreover, she was not a little gratified at his mentioning her in the same breath with Angela. It seemed to place her definitely in Angela’s class. And that was what she wanted more than anything else. Ever since their encounter in the chop suey palace or joint (according to your point of view) she had studiously copied every detail of Angela’s bearing and costuming that she could call to mind. The amethyst collarette never left her throat, except at times such as when vanishing cream was being applied, when it would only have been in the way. She read the New Yorker because Dewey had told her that Angela took it, and talked of flea circuses and Spanish furniture without having the least idea of what they were like. To all this superficial layer of would-be smartness were added colorful mannerisms of her own that could not be suppressed for long, or that she was not conscious of, as the case might be.

“You can’t expect things of Angela,” she answered, irritatingly vague.

“What things?” he wanted to know.

“Things like economy,” she said, eyeing an old-rose cloche she saw in a show window longingly as they passed it by.

“Why not?” he demanded. “If she’s not used to it at least she can learn. You ought to see the clothes she piles away and never looks at.”

She moistened her lips. “Tell me about them,” she said greedily. “What kind are they?”

Now it was his turn to be tantalizingly indefinite. “Oh, all kinds,” he answered.

“What are some of the colors?” she persisted.

“Blue, green, pink — all colors.” She could have choked him, although realizing he was doing the best he could under the circumstances.

“Be particular,” she said, never having heard of the word specific.

“I can’t,” he said, “I’ve told you all I know. Blue, green, pink — all colors.”

“Isn’t that just like a man,” thought the exasperated Margie. “Darn ’em, what good are they in an emergency anyway?”

“Her bill for frosted chocolate floats alone amounted to sixty dollars in one month,” he related.

“Oh,” gasped Margie enviously. A very expressive oh this was, meaning she would have liked to do the same thing. It must be a smart thing to do, since Angela had done it.

“I’m dying for one right now,” she admitted shamefacedly. “I’m afraid to mention it now that you’ve told me that about Angela. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll pay for my own. How will that be?”

“Don’t be insulting,” he said quietly, leading the way into a confectionery shop.

Margie, sitting down beside a hand-painted chiffon lamp shade, saw herself in the large mirror across the way, a mirror with a green-gold frame. A waiter stood at her side, bowing from the waist to signify that he was ready to take her order. A waiter vaguely bored with Margie and with the world in general. A little over a month ago she had been contented to sit in that awful place on Amsterdam Avenue with the pianola and the sticky glasses.

“A frosted chocolate,” she said, “and beat it up well.” This last with an expressive twirl of the little finger in mid-air. “Wupped cream,” she added as an afterthought.

She took out a heavy gilt disk, opened it in two and looked carefully at her nose. The next moment she had a mist of face powder swirling about her.

“F’eaven’s sake,” remonstrated Dewey mildly. “F’eaven’s sake! Why not do your sand scraping home?”

For a minute she was the old Margie again. “I like your nerve,” she chirped. Then she laughed self-consciously and said, “I’ll be through in a minute, dear,” in the tone of a woman talking to her sweetheart. Her transition of mood puzzled him.

Margie was thinking: “If people only knew I was with Dewey Haines, the former Miss Pennington’s husband, right this very minute, I wonder what they’d say!” She raised her voice purposely, so that it carried well beyond their own table.

“Oh, Dewey,” she said, “this is delicious, Dewey.”

A group of girls and youths seated at the next table turned around with one accord to look at them.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if that was Dewey Haines,” some one remarked. “Didn’t you hear her just call him Dewey?”

“That isn’t her,” one of them said emphatically. “I know her picture too well by now.”

“Most likely she was just kidding when she called him that. Have you heard the one about all the taxi drivers in town changing their names to Dewey so they can grab off some society girl and retire from business?”

Every one laughed at this sally.

“Leave it to you,” Dewey remarked bitterly to his sister; “always ready to start something. I haven’t forgotten about that squawk of yours in the papers, either.”

“You don’t need to get mad at me, Dewey dear,” she expostulated in a high-pitched voice, hoping some one would take them for sweethearts. “That’s just like you, Dewey, you al—” He cut her short by reaching over and clasping his hand over the entire lower part of her face. He held it there a good thirty seconds. She emerged from this ordeal a good bit out of humor but triumphantly conscious that every one in the place was watching them.

“You don’t need to get so rough about it,” she remonstrated under her breath, and anxiously remodeled her lips with a stub of rouge.

“Waiter, the check,” said Dewey, and he added blackly, “the next time I bring you any place with me, I’ll make sure you have lockjaw first.”

“Mustn’t be peeved in public,” said the playful Margie, strutting out through the door as though she owned the world. “Don’t forget you’re a celebrity now.” She turned to him and pinched his cheek. “Don’t you know you’re the most well known man there is in town to-day?” she said admiringly. “It ought to make you feel like a million dollars.”

“It makes me feel like thirty cents, you mean. When the whole city rings with your name you feel like jumping in the river, that’s how it is.”

“Catch me doing that,” she scoffed. “I’d fake a diary and sell it to the picture papers if I were you.” She shook hands with him, her arm bent back at shoulder level as she imagined it was done in society. “Give my regards to Angela. Tell her she’s on my mind all the time.”

She started down Broadway, her shoulders bunched together as though she were cold, her whole body swinging to the tiny steps she forced herself to take, as though she were walking on eggs. He caught up with her and touched her on the shoulder. She turned and the look of quick anger in her eyes gave place to one of recognition.

“I thought it was some fresh—”

“Don’t walk like a chorus girl,” he advised her, “or some one will. And another little thing; you want to let up pestering Ma with all this or I’ll see to it that you go back to work.”

Her hand crept insinuatingly up under his lapel.

“Dew-ey,” she pleaded in a honeyed baby voice. “Wuss matter? Huh, Dewey?”

“Now, no fooling, Margie, I mean it.”

She stamped her foot suddenly at that. “Don’t call me Margie!” she blazed. “Don’t you ever call me that again. My name’s Marjorie, if you please.”

“All right,” he laughed, “Margie or Marjorie, it’s all the same to me. But listen to what I’m saying and don’t go trying any of your improvements on Ma. If she wants to wear her old sweater around the kitchen, let her. If she wants to wear shoes that are her own size, with honest to goodness heels the way shoes should be, let her. Don’t be nagging the life out of the poor old soul or I’ll come there one of these fine days and turn you over my knee and spank you the way I used to when you was fifteen.”

“Was fifteen, Dewey?” she echoed, theatrically shocked. “And you that used to work for Mrs. Craig. What would she say if she could hear you!”

“She’d probably say it was rude to correct any one’s speech, if you want to know the truth of the matter.”

“G’by, Dewey,” she simpered. “Take care of yourself.”

“G’by, Mah-jurry. Leave it to me.”