I was admiring a particularly stylish wrap coat luxuriously trimmed with silver fox and sported by a well-shod matron, when Mr. Benchley said, “You know, Mrs. Parker, I enjoyed last evening.”
“Stopped by Polly’s, did you?”
“I meant the séance business, dearie. Moments of sheer terror between naps; lots of foolishness, of course, but fun, nonetheless. I think there is amusing fodder for an article about it all, whatchathink?”
The fur-trimmed woman marched gracefully into Bergdorf’s as if she owned the store. Well, guessing what she must spend on clothes, she could probably buy the place.
“I should think it would be quite humorous.”
“I should think, too,” he said, and I could almost see the wheels of invention turning inside his well-groomed head.
“Just leave out the part where she gets murdered, will ya?”
“You’re right: That part’s not funny at all, at all,” he said brightly, a feigned frown as he shook his head. And then he caught my eye and flashed that winning grin. Behind that handsome brow clever inventions were bubbling and bursting in creative zeal. My friend could find humor in the mundane, and pull out nonsense from order like a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat.
I don’t know where Mr. Benchley gets all of his energy. Juggling the various tasks of writing witty commentary, reviewing plays four nights a week for Life magazine, performing on Broadway (he’d made a smash a couple of seasons ago in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue), supporting wife Gertrude, two sons, various bootleggers, and an occasional mistress, and providing countless acts of kindness, laughter, and companionship to any and all who cross his path, he manages to do it all with an infectious joy, even when he is himself less than joyful.
As the taxi continued across Fifth Avenue and along Central Park South toward the West Side, I gazed out at a park ablaze with amber, ochre, and lemon yellow against a vivid blue sky. Cross-hatched with the dark charcoal of tree trunks and yearning black limbs, the effect was striking: an abstract cathedral glass depicting the season’s swan song. Hacks and horses lined the wide thoroughfare as we passed the Plaza Hotel. Next came the Central Park Apartments building on the south side of 59th Street, which, facing the park, afforded its residents the spectacular view of 840 acres of woodland, landscaped gardens, lakes, and rolling pastures.
As I held Woodrow firmly by his collar, his stance rigid and determined, with his ears angled back and eyes narrowed against the wind in exultant pleasure, I watched as Mr. Benchley penciled a line or two in his pocket notebook. I thought, I love this man with all my heart. He is brother, father, mentor, gentle critic, and best friend. He is my confidant. There isn’t anything I can’t, or am afraid to tell him—except for one thing: I am ever so grateful that he watches over me as attentively as he has for more than a half-dozen years since we met while working at Vanity Fair.
You’d think we’d be on a first-name basis, but it’s a deliberate affectation, of course, that we should address one another by our surnames. When we were first introduced to each other by our boss, Frank Crowninshield, back in ’19 (”Mrs. Parker, I’d like you to meet our editor, Mr. Benchley”), it sort of took. It is in times of emotional distress or affectionate appeal that I call him “Fred.”
Part of the man’s appeal is his impeccable manners, a Victorian chivalry, and an endearing, almost ridiculous, gurgling chuckle he gaily emits, underscoring his many screwball, yet always brilliant, observations. Those qualities, and the fact that he tolerates my pathological use of profanity by pretending to ignore it (although I’ve caught him wincing from time to time), make him a perfect companion.
Men admire him for his sense of fair play, diplomacy, and honor. He is totally engaged when in conversation and listens to others with rapt attention. His jovial presence, sincere interest, and friendly encouragement can make the most ordinary fellow feel special for having met him. He is never churlish, petty, rude, or mean-spirited, and, although he is the first to denounce an injustice, he is self-deprecating enough never to appear superior. But, to all who admire and have the good fortune to call him “friend,” he is a cut above the rest.
All agree he cuts a dashing style—and rug.
I love Mr. Benchley with all my heart, but we are not, as some have suggested, lovers. He is married and has children. I am recently divorced, by mutual understanding, from my husband, Eddie, who came home from the Front, from the War to End All Wars, wounded in mind and spirit. His life had lost all purpose and meaning and he had become helpless from morphine and drink. Eddie had found only melancholy, not joy, when he returned to our marriage. One day, he left me to return to the safety of the family manse in Connecticut. When I think of Eddie, I find only melancholy, too.
As we turned north at the monument at Columbus Circle, marking the entrance to the southwest corner of Central Park, Mr. Benchley closed his little notebook and slipped it into his inside breast pocket.
“So, who is it we are going to see, now?” he asked, with that endearing laugh flitting around his words. “A mesmerist? A voodoo witchdoctor?”
“Miss Ada Leopold.”
“Is she the medium I’ve read about, the one who can manifest ectoplasm from out of her . . . uhh, the most private regions of her body?”
“Is that what they call it, hmmm? Ectoplasm?”
“That I would like to see!”
“I’ll bet you would, you old dope! Sorry, but our Miss Ada reads Tarot cards.”
“Not nearly as intriguing as watching ectoplasm flow—”
Dashing away the unpleasant ectoplasmic image from my mind, I said, “Perhaps she’ll read your future.”
“I haven’t written it yet.”
Number One West 72nd Street is best known to New Yorkers as the Dakota apartments.
The building had been named after the western territory as a sort of joke because when it was being constructed in 1884, it was so far north and west of the prestigious and fashionable townhouses and mansions of Murray Hill on the east side of town and so far north of well-settled Central Park South that it seemed isolated from civilization. The Dakota was the first luxury apartment house built on a grand scale.
Successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, and self-made men and their families, no matter how much their financial wealth commanded, were still considered to be in trade and therefore could never be numbered among Ward McAllister’s socially acceptable (if stuffy) Four Hundred. Not wishing to live in hotels, or in the dark, depressing flats bordering the avenue el-trains, and not wishing to purchase or build town homes, these well-to-do tradesmen were being offered the opportunity to live extravagantly in a gabled castle featuring all of the amenities of the prestigious homes of the gentry—not side-by-side as in respectable townhouses, but in homes stacked one above the other. This was viewed as outrageous by Mrs. Astor and her friends. But the services offered at the Dakota were those to be had in the very finest of hotels: housekeeping, laundry, and dining and maid service included at no extra charge—and all at a very low rent.
The nouveau riche grabbed at the chance to live like royalty, in mahogany-paneled suites of seventeen rooms plus servants’ quarters. And if such arrangements were not comme il faut in the eyes of Mrs. Astor, the Four Hundred be damned! The wealthy residents of the Dakota were part of the new Ten Thousand! So what, that when you looked out from your seventh-floor window, where you could see downtown and beyond to the Battery and to the Trinity Church steeple pointing to Heaven, or west, across to Orange County, New Jersey, or all the way up to Tarrytown, thirty miles to the north—so what, that when you gazed out from your window, your eyes first took in the travesty of ramshackle shacks and squatters’ shanties across the street, with their pig pens and burning garbage heaps, from the south side of West 72nd Street all the way down to 59th Street? Central Park was just across the street! Draw the shades on the shacks; raise the shades on the park view.
The building of the Majestic Hotel, the year I turned one, in 1894, got rid of t
he unsightly shanties in the immediate area while blocking off the sublime, sweeping view down to the Battery.
I grew up in a townhouse at 214 West 72nd Street, just west of Broadway. By 1894, ten years after the building of the Dakota was complete, the West Side neighborhood was quite the fashionable place to live for well-to-do families. It was like a small village within the metropolis. I passed by the big, imposing Dakota every morning from the time I was rolled to Central Park in my perambulator by my nurse. Later, with ice skates hung over my shoulder, I passed it on the way to the frozen lake with my sister, Helen, and later still, as a young woman, when strolling alone under the arbor of wisteria at the park’s entrance while my invalid father napped.
As a child I’d been fascinated, if repelled, by the nightmarish, carved stone faces jutting out from the elaborately carved friezes, still and silent, like Gothic sentinels at the gate. I feared they came alive late at night. Bearded sea-gods, wild-haired Medusas, and devilish urchins stared down forebodingly at those who might venture in through the main gate to the courtyard. I went to an afternoon tea party there once, with my stepmother, when I was eight, and some years later, to the apartment of a girl I went to school with at the Blessed Sacrament Academy. Her family had a fifteen-room apartment, with nine fireplaces, overlooking the park. It was a beautiful, sprawling home, and I began to imagine that the gargoyle monsters were not really so terrible because they protected all who lived within.
The taxi pulled up to the main gate, and we got out.
At the little gatehouse, a uniformed guard asked our business, and after stating it, we were sent in through the iron gates to the courtyard. We passed the fountain and went into the office to be announced by the concierge. From there we were directed to one of the four elevators, an elaborate birdcage affair, its operator an elderly Irish woman dressed in old-fashioned black bombazine, who took us up to the fourth floor.
Before we had a chance to knock on Miss Ada’s door, it creaked open, and we stood face to face with Siegfried Franken.
He took one look at us and his face turned ashen. His discomfort betrayed, his cow eyes flitted from side to side; he took a small step back. Then, suddenly flashing a toothy smile that brought hyenas to mind, he said in his hissing, accented English, “Ahh, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Benchley, how unusual to see you again.” He clicked his heels and half-bowed.
“I’ll say,” I said.
Mr. Benchley clicked his heels and bowed back.
We walked past him and into the foyer while he remained rooted where he was, holding the doorknob. No more words passed between us for a long moment as Mr. Benchley and I took in the beautiful details of the room. Siegfried Franken’s awkwardness grew palpable. His apprehension might have been dispelled had Mr. Benchley or I engaged in any kind of small-talk, but there was something about the squirrelly little man—well, let’s just say that Bad Dorothy held no charity in her heart to help relieve his discomfort. Even Woodrow Wilson refused to sniff his pant cuff.
“I was just leaving,” he finally said in his sneaky voice, breaking the silence.
He was halfway out the door when Mr. Benchley said, “Did you hear Madame Olenska’s been shot to death?”
Stopped dead in his tracks, he slowly, cautiously, turned and peeked around the door.
“Shot?”
“Madame Olenska was found this morning, dead, shot in her bed by her assistant, Caroline.”
“She shot by assistant, Caroline? But, why Caroline shoot her?”
“She didn’t.”
“She didn’t?”
“Shoot her.”
“But you say—”
My hangover was returning. My head was beginning to pound. I had to put an end to the insanity. I said: “Caroline found Madame’s body this morning. Madame had been shot in her bed.”
“Forgive me. My English not so good.”
“That makes the two of you,” I said, rolling my eyes at Mr. Benchley.
A rustle and flutter announced Miss Ada’s arrival from beyond red velvet and gold-bullion-fringed draperies that swooped to the sides of the arch, affording a peek into the depths of the apartment. She stood between the crimson folds like a character on a miniature proscenium, a Punch & Judy show. And by the looks of the tiny creature, she’d definitely be cast as an exquisite Judy.
Dressed in shades of chocolate brown and royal purple, a fringed shawl of moss-green paisley draped at her elbows, dripping with necklaces and earrings of Moroccan amber and turquoise and ivory and tooled silver beads, with a bandana of purple and gold stripes encircling auburn hair that fell in long ocean waves to her waist, she stood no more than four-feet-ten. I towered over her by a full inch.
She was thirty or forty—perhaps as old as fifty, I don’t know. She was truly ageless in spite of her gypsy-bohemian-artsy-craftsy garb. Actually, the colors and patterns combined beautifully, and with those huge, limpid green eyes fringed with long black lashes, her porcelain skin, and her blood-red Coty lips she could have been taken for one of those international dolls bought by tourists for their nieces during travels abroad. Hungarian, I’d say. Standing beside her made me feel dowdy for the prim bows on my pumps and my simple tailored navy suit whose only adornments were a row of pearl buttons down the front.
She threw a mean look past me and Mr. Benchley, which landed painfully on Siegfried Franken, and a little gasp escaped his throat before he hotfooted it out the door.
Punch would not return.
“Miss Ada Leopold?” I asked, holding out my hand.
The frown broke into a dazzling, pearly smile that dimpled her cheeks.
After introductions all around, and much fuss over my little man, Woodrow, she ushered us through a large reception room, filled with dozens of tall and broadleaved plants basking in brilliant southeast sunshine, and into a parlor as exotically patterned and dressed as she. She indicated a plump, upholstered davenport, and we sat down opposite her seat, a throne of jewel-toned tapestry. Her many bracelets jangled as she settled herself.
From amid the jungle flora, wildlife began to appear, stalking us from around a Chinese screen, from behind a velvet drapery panel, and from underneath a shawl tossed over a chair. Three Siamese cats stretched and slithered into view, but were stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of Woodrow Wilson, who had taken a particular fancy to Miss Ada, sitting at attention at her skirts. He whined when he saw the cats, and nervously shifted from side to side on his front paws, like Dempsey dancing before leading with his left, his bug-eyes shifting from me to the cats in anticipation of my signal to give chase.
Before I could give him a warning to behave, one of the cats strutted over to inspect the intruder. After a nose-to-nose onceover, the sleek creature sidled up to Woodrow with brazen feline seduction. Shocked, Woodrow remained still, dignified and tolerant as another cat approached and rolled on its back in a submissive pose at Woodrow’s paws; the third shamelessly tickled Woodrow’s chin with a come-hither tail. Charmed, my little man began to pant, and abandoning any thought of a chase, let out a sigh as he slid down in acquiescent recumbence beside Gervaise, Etienne, and Nana.
I was a little surprised when Mr. Benchley said he was most anxious for Miss Ada to give him a reading. But, then, I could understand that his interest in the woman was piqued. She really was quite charming.
She turned her chair toward the small round table, and bade Mr. Benchley to sit in the chair opposite. I moved to a bench close by to better see what she was doing.
“Do you want to know everything I see?” she asked.
“Were you going to leave something out?”
“Sometimes, people don’t want to know everything. It disturbs them.”
“Oh, you mean like telling them they’re going to die next week, and that sort of thing?” he said, shuffling the deck of tarot cards as she’d instructed.
“I never tell a person when or how he will die. People are too susceptible to suggestion, you see. Tell someone he will get hit by a car, and
he might unconsciously step in front of a truck. But if I see danger, I will warn of it, because often the future can be changed by the very choices we make.”
“Ahh, yes. Forewarned is forearmed, is that the idea?”
“Yes. Now, when you think the cards are shuffled properly, cut them into three stacks and place them face down.”
She began to turn over the top cards from each stack revealing their elaborate, colorful face designs, and to place them on the table in the form of a crucifix. For a few moments she studied the cards, and then scrutinized Mr. Benchley as if seeking answers behind his eyes.
“The Hierophant in the center represents you, the revealer of secrets, of mysteries.”
“Aww, you can’t tell him anything he doesn’t spill around town,” I said. “That’s no mystery!”
“Look, I’m surrounded by women,” he said, pointing to the images on the two cards flanking the Hierophant.
“There are two women in your life.”
“Do they have names?”
“The High Priestess and Temperance.”
“Temperance! That’s a dirty word where I come from,” I said.
“They are at odds with each other.”
She threw a fast glance at me.
“Beautiful women fighting over me, how delightful.”
“One is in danger. The other is the danger.”
“I suppose that’s not so delightful, after all; it’s a little bit spooky,” said Mr. Benchley with a chuckle. ”Who’s who in that equation?”
“You take nothing seriously,” said Miss Ada, taken aback.
“Only death, but I can find the humor in that, too.”
[Dorothy Parker 03] - Mystic Mah Jong Page 5