The New York Stories

by John O'Hara

  Less tentatively she took a fuller drag on her cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed, scratching little itches with her free hand and rubbing the area of the right clavicle. It was a little too soon to know how she was going to feel when she got to her feet, but so far the day was not as bad as some had been lately. Bravely, she stood up and went to the kitchen and put the water on to boil. By the time she finished her first visit to the bathroom the water would be ready for the instant coffee. Certain things she did methodically, no matter what might be said about her life in general. She was not, for instance, going to rack her brain with her seven o’clock problem until she had had some coffee.

  It was not necessary.

  On the kitchen table, under a pepper-mill to keep it from being blown away, was a note: “Seven P.M. Jimmy R.” It was in her handwriting, and now it all came back to her. She poured the hot water over the two teaspoonfuls of coffee powder, stirred it, put in a lump of sugar, took a sip, lit another cigarette, and slowly drank the strong hot brew. Jimmy Rhodes, who had brought her home last night, was coming for a drink at seven o’clock, and her entire future could depend on what happened then.

  In all the years she had been in show business, all the parties she had gone to, the meals and drinks she had had at the old Romanoff’s, the new Romanoff’s, at 21 and Elmer’s, the Copa and the Chez in Chicago, the This and the That in cities all over the country, the Savoy and the 400 in London, Maxim’s and the Boeuf in Paris—she had never met Jimmy Rhodes until last night. He had said exactly the same thing. “You know, Maggie, we should of met before this. I been hearing about you since—well, I go back to when you were singing with the old Jack Hillyer band.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “My God, you know my exact age.”

  “Within a year or two, most likely. Where you living now? Here, or on the Coast?”

  “Oh, here,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess the Coast is through,” he said.

  “Not for TV,” she said.

  “No, I guess not for TV, but who cares about TV?”

  “I do. I go out there every so often to do a guest shot,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t watch it much. What about Vegas?”

  “They don’t pay anything,” she said.

  “You know, I heard that, too,” he said. “I heard some of those people supposed to be getting like twenty-five gees, I hear it’s closer to two or three.”

  “If that, in a lot of cases,” she said. “There’s nothing there for me.”

  “Well, you don’t have to work anyway, do you?”

  “No, I don’t have to. Unless I want to eat. Whose gag is it? I formed a bad habit when I was young. Eating.”

  “Come on, I thought you—”

  “That’s what everybody thinks,” she said. “Do you think I’d take some of the jobs I take if I still had all that glue?”

  “Well, it was over a million bucks, wasn’t it?”

  “It was nowhere near that,” she said. “The papers called it a million-dollar settlement, but what it actually was was twenty-five thousand dollars a year. It’d take me forty years to get a million. So now you know. And I had lawyers to pay.”

  “Didn’t you make Robinson pay the lawyers?”

  “That was part of the settlement, yes. But it didn’t end there. In other words, the money my lawyers got from the Robinsons didn’t entitle me to a free ride for the rest of my life.”

  “What was the inside on that story, Maggie?”

  “The inside? There wasn’t any inside, unless you want me to tell you what Robinson was like in the hay, and there you’d be wasting your time, because I wouldn’t tell you. Not because I want to protect him. He didn’t care what people thought about him, but I just as soon forget about it. And I more or less have. That was a long time ago, and I’ve had to work for a living. I met worse than Robbie since then.”

  “Did he beat you?”

  “Sure he beat me. That was all proved in court.”

  “And that caused you to lose the child?”

  “Yes. The Robinsons’ own doctor had to admit that,” she said. “You got me talking about things I stopped talking about seventy-five years ago. Why?”

  “Well, I always wanted to meet you. I was in the army when your case came to trial, but I followed it in the papers.”

  “I didn’t know you were ever in the army,” she said.

  “The army, and then the air force. I was in air force public relations, mostly.”

  “Well, that figures,” she said. “What were you?”

  “I came out a major.”

  “No, I meant what did you do?”

  “Oh—a little of this and a little of that. Public relations. I handled the war correspondents from the big papers and press associations. Fellows I knew in civilian life. And some of the big political brass.”

  “What did you do? Get girls for them?”

  “Well, yes, I introduced them to a few girls. How did you happen to pick that out?”

  “I didn’t pick it out, exactly. You were kind of famous for that, weren’t you?”

  “At one time, maybe. But I don’t have to do that any more.”

  “Now you’re a big shot. Well, I know that, too. I mean, I see your name in the papers. Jimmy Rhodes, Rhodes Associates and all that jazz.”

  “Why do you want to put me on, Maggie? If I did a little pimping twenty years ago, are you gonna hold it against me now? You ought to come and have a look at my office. I have forty-two people working for me. Six Harvard graduates. Two Vassar girls. A Bryn Mawr girl. I got a half a dozen of my people that are in the Social Register. I got the daughter of a United States senator and I just took on a retired major general of the air force. I got offices in London, Paris, and Madrid.”

  “My, you’re so important I’m surprised you’d even talk to me,” she said.

  “Well, there were some things I wanted and I never got,” he said. “You were one of them.”

  “Maybe you should have tried a little harder. I was as they say available.”

  “Not always, and I had a wife a good deal of the time. Two kids. A daughter just graduated from Wellesley last June, and my son’s a junior at Princeton.”

  “You said you had a wife. Past tense. What happened there?”

  “Well, she’s married again. Married a fellow he’s now the managing editor of a paper out West. He was one of the guys I got a girl for in London, and then he came home and moved in on my wife. They were cheating on me for four or five years before I ever got wise to it.”

  “And all that time you were behaving like a model husband.”

  “No, I couldn’t say that. But when they had me up before that Senate committee, that was when my wife and her boy friend hit me with the divorce suit, and I didn’t stand a chance. She got the children, and a bundle of dough. I was practically fighting for my life with those senators. I very nearly went to the cooler. And one night during the hearings I dropped in the Statler and you were there.”

  “I remember that date. Ted Straeter’s band. A two weeks’ booking and they held me over another week.”

  “It was before you married Robinson. He had a table at ringside. I stood. I didn’t have a table. And you sang ‘More Than You Know,’ which I’d never heard you sing before. And ‘So in Love.’ Those are two I remember. They were giving it to me but good in the Senate Office Building, and on top of that my wife’s lawyer had got in touch with my lawyer. I had about seventy-five Scotches and I said to myself, this was the night to move in on Maggie Muldoon. So I said to the maître d’, a friend of mine from the old days, how about fixing it up for me? He shook his head. ‘Not a prayer, Jimmy,’ he said. He pointed to Robinson. ‘Een like Fleen,’ he said. And he was right.”

  “Yes, I married Robbie two weeks later,” she said.

  “I know you
did. That was as close as I ever came to meeting you.”

  “Well, where would we be now if you had?” she said.

  “Sixteen years. Seventeen years,” he said. “You lasted two years with Robinson, and then you married another fellow. How long did that last?”

  “Four.”

  “What was his name again?” he said.

  “Dick Hemmendinger. Guitar player. Ladies’ man. Junkie. Crossword puzzle expert. And financial wizard—with my money. He died of pneumonia.”

  “Or froze to death? You ought to know, but didn’t I read about him freezing to death?”

  “Yes, you could have. They found him in an alleyway in Toronto, Canada. But it was pneumonia. Nobody ever knew what he was doing in Canada. I hadn’t heard from him in over a year, and I have to admit I hoped he was gone for good. Well, he was. He was very pretty when I first met him. Kind of on the order of Eddy Duchin. That kind of looks. And a good guitar player. But a bum, in spades.”

  “What did you, marry him on the rebound?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He was with Hillyer when I first started out with the bands, but I was Hillyer’s girl then. My God, I thought Jack Hillyer was all a girl could ask for. I would of no more thought of cheating on Hillyer, and he was paying me two hundred a week, except weeks when the horses weren’t running so good. Most people used to complain about one-nighters, but I didn’t. I liked the one-nighters. That meant I got paid. But when we got booked into a hotel or a club date, then Jack’d make a contact with the local bookmakers and I could never be sure if I was going to get paid that week. So a couple times I had to borrow money from the sidemen, like Dick Hemmendinger. For coffee and cakes. Lipstick. The hairdresser. I remember one night in Boston, I showed up with my hair all straggly and no makeup on and Hillyer took a look at me and blew his lid. ‘That’s what you get,’ I said. After that he never held out the whole two hundred, but when he broke up the band he was still in me for over a thousand. And the price of one abortion. But imagine having a kid by that louse, what he probably would have been like. Anyway, that was how I first got to know Dick, and then he wrote me a very sympathetic letter when I was in court with Robbie. I saw Jack Hillyer about two weeks ago, standing at the corner of Fifty-second and Broadway. Over there near the Local 802 offices. You know, he was just standing there on the curbstone, not with anybody, and he looked about seventy-five years old. I could still recognize him, but he was old. He even had a cane. I went up and said hello to him. I said, ‘Do you remember me, Jack?’ And he looked at me, but I’m positive he’s blind in one eye. ‘Yes, hello there,’ he said. But he didn’t know me. ‘It’s the Muldoon,’ I said, and he said, ‘The Muldoon, oh, yes. The Muldoon.’ Then when he said it a couple times he remembered me. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was around looking for musicians. He said he was starting up a new band. The big name bands were coming back, he said, and he’d been talking to—then he named off a half a dozen musicians, and at least half of them were dead. He said he was going out with an integrated band and he was getting Fletcher Henderson to do most of his arrangements. Well, how long is it since Fletch passed on? Is it ten years? It’s at least five. He looked just awful, Hillyer. Clean, but an old polo coat and a Tyrolean hat with a feather in it. This man I’d been to bed with a hundred times or more, and there he was all wrapped up in an old polo coat that was too big for him. So was his hat. His hat was too big for him, it sort of rested on his ears. And his chin kind of kept moving up and down, even when he wasn’t talking. You know, I was brought up a Catholic and thought I got over all that a long time ago, but standing there talking to Jack Hillyer, this man I used to quiver when he touched me, I suddenly after all these years got a guilty conscience. Sin. I committed sin with this old man. I didn’t, you know. I mean, I slept with him all those times, but then he was young and built like a lifeguard. Shoulders, and no waistline. I never thought of sin in those days. But here he looked like he could of been my own father, and that made me feel like I ought to tell the whole thing in confession. His neck. The back of his neck so thin and weak-looking. I didn’t mind the lies he was telling. He was always a liar. In fact, that was all that was left of the original Jack, the lies. I don’t know how to explain it, how he made me feel sinful. Anyway, I said to him I remembered I owed him twenty dollars from the old days, and I was glad I ran into him. He took the twenty dollars and looked at it, and I knew it would have killed him to part with it, but he said, ‘Well, if you’re sure you can spare it, and I said yes, and he stuffed it in his coat pocket. Then something went through his mind and it slowly dawned on him that he actually had twenty dollars on him, and he said how would I like to go to Charlie’s and have a drink, but I said I had to run. And he began to remember me. I mean, you could see that something was telling him that he used to sleep with me and he said we ought to get together. In the voice of an old man, with his chin moving up and down. And I said to call me, I was in the phone book, which I’m not, and it wouldn’t of made any difference because he’d already forgotten my name. So I said goodbye and left him standing there. I saw him put his hand in his pocket and feel the money, but he just kept standing there.”

  “Jack Hillyer,” said Jimmy Rhodes.

  She took a long sip of her drink.

  “You thinking about Hillyer?” he said.

  “I’m thinking about you. There’s something you told me and it isn’t quite kosher.”

  “No? What’s that? What did I say?”

  “Some things I remember and some things I don’t, especially before and after I had seventy-five drinks. But I know this much, Mr. Jimmy Rhodes Associates. You’re some kind of a liar.”

  “I’m a habitual liar,” he said.

  “You are? So am I. That is, I’ll tell one to get out of something any time. Mind you, I don’t like to be a liar, but in this rat-race that I been in for the past seventy-five years, I never knew anybody that wasn’t a liar. Sooner or later, you catch them. But I caught you right away. You said you read about my divorce while you were in the army, but the war was over when I got my divorce. I didn’t even marry Robbie till after the war, and if you think back a minute, you just proved it. But your touching little story about being in Washington when I was working at the Statler. That was a couple years after the war. I ought to know when I got married. You see this rock? Six carats. Robbie gave it to me the week we got married, and it’s just about the last thing I got left of his presents. But if you wanted to take the trouble to look inside, if you had a magnifying glass, you’d find the date. April the fifth, 1948. So that makes you a liar.”

  “Well, it wasn’t much of a lie. I got a little mixed up, that’s all.”

  “Perfectly all right,” she said. “I knew there was something wrong about your stories, because I made a record of ‘So in Love,’ and I had Robbie at the studio with me. It was the first time he ever saw a recording date, and that had to be at least a couple years after the war.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re still in love with Robinson,” he said.

  “Well, maybe I am. You know, I get these moments when I think back over some fellow. Sometimes it’s Robbie. Sometimes it’ll be Jack Hillyer. Dick Hemmendinger. George Waller.”

  “There’s George Waller over there in front of the fireplace.”

  “I know. I came with him. We’re nothing now, but we did a little swinging a few years ago. Now I just call him up when I want somebody to take me to a party and I don’t have an escort. George went fag a couple years ago.”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” he said.

  “But every damn one of them—and I didn’t give you the whole box-score—they all meant something to me at the time. You take like Hillyer, Jack Hillyer. I was a young kid singing with a band and I was naturally stuck on Hillyer. But if I didn’t get stuck on Hillyer, I was the only girl traveling with fifteen musicians and every one of them more or less on the make. I knew one
girl—well, never mind. She was with a bigger band than Hillyer’s, and she went through them all. But lucky for me I liked Hillyer, and the guys working for him didn’t try very hard. Then I went into a couple of shows, and radio, and I married Robbie. He was a dumb cluck, but he had all that glue. And I want to tell you, any time I hear anybody talking about the rich people and the way they live, they can ask me, because Robbie’s family were really loaded. And I had close to four years of that. They didn’t like me, but I was their son’s wife, so I got the full treatment. My own personal maid, my own personal car with a chauffeur. I could go to the best restaurants in town and I didn’t even have to sign the tab. They put the tips on. Twenty percent for the waiter, ten percent for the captain. I didn’t even have to sign my initials. Of course when you have to level and be the man’s wife, just you and him, that’s the payoff. You’re just the same as if you were married to a thirty-five-dollar-a-week guy like my father was, back in Hazleton, PA. Not that Robbie was so bad. But after Hillyer he was kind of a nothing and he knew it, and that’s why he began using me for a punching-bag. Some day I knew I’d have to go back to work, and I didn’t want him to ruin my looks, so one day I just walked out and didn’t come back. There was no objections by his family, and they sent me all my jewelry and clothes. They kept the Cessna. I had a little Cessna I learned to fly, and I logged over two hundred hours in it, but it belonged to some corporation of Mr. Robinson’s. It was the only real fun I had all the time I was married to Robbie, was flying that airplane. That, and getting gassed. My grandfather was a lush, and my old man was a strict temperance man, but I take after my grandfather. He used to hold up a glass of whiskey in front of him and smile at it and say, ‘My assistant.’ He always called it his assistant. So do I, but people don’t know what I’m talking about. They think I’m saying my ‘assistance,’ but they’re wrong. I consider it my assis-tant. I don’t know what I’d do without my assistant.”

  “Would you care for another assistant?” said Rhodes.