Aurine’s courting a deeper danger. That Oscar will catch on that her private thrift, private fear, is for him.
In the world of finance, he must appear to be king.
Hasn’t she often and often told me why? “Our world is cleaner, Queenie. We never make a man pay. Except in money.”
Though she knows living cheap wouldn’t bother Oscar for himself, only for her. And that’s it, you see. At the bottom of this holding company of interlocking ownership. She can’t let on to herself that she might be doing it for love. She has to keep herself up to the mark.
“I bought the place years ago, when it got rundown,” she says to him in her softest voice. “For a song.” That may be true, considering all sides of her. “Out of the housekeeping money.” Then she rallies, in order not to think less of herself. “After all, in all New York——” which means the people we know in it, “what woman’s had a higher housekeeping than me?”
Oscar answers smiling. “It can never be enough.”
Next day, he sends her a bibelot, not from Alexander’s, tucked inside the weekly orchid. Where does he get his secret income from, I wonder—at stud? Which since I’ve shocked them once too often, I don’t say. For a whole week after, he has that queer smile on his face, for how well he knows her. And another not too different one, for me.
“In that bordello you’re going to, Queenie,” he says, “see that you do as well.”
So it’s settled, Father. And that’s how I get out of the château.
It’s one hell of an exhaustion, being an old-fashioned girl.
But it’s not until the parties that I learn what’s in my own heart.
Looking back now at the loving crazy quilt of coming-out parties they patch up for me: A Stag at Oscar’s, with me the only doe; a Family Fuss at the restaurant, with no family but us; and an all-time Bye-Bye Blowout with the “girls” I can see from an aerial perspective of two months, which is plenty at my age, that they still think, “Wouldn’t sending her off with a man be the safest?” And are still hoping God will intervene.
It’s hard not believing in God, in my family. Harder even, Oscar says, than for lapsed Catholics. Aurine says, “It’s because God believes in us.” That’s her theology.
And I believe in her.
The Stag at Oscar’s
Oscar’s soiree is my first send-off, Father. Too bad you were in retreat. It’s only his cronies, dropping in more formally than usual, to what one of them once called the New York Athletic Club’s Theater Wing. Some still do come in straight from the steambaths over there. All are of an age to benefit from them. And they’ve known Oscar’s little ward Queenie all her life. They’re my other uncles. Still, sixty men and a girl, and not one of them too young to be a father-image—how could God help getting a little interested?
Like in my childhood, the party is stag. And since it’s for me, they all find this charming. The only change is from afternoon to evening. Plus that back then it wasn’t me, in my scrawny leotards, whose points the conversation was appreciating. And now has just toasted in champagne.
“I feel nostalgic already,” I say to Sam Newber. “I don’t know yet for what or who.”
“That’s what nostalgia is, you nit. And you don’t have to go to college to learn why.” Sam’s a sandy, marionette sort of person, polished very high, like one of his comedy successes of the forties I saw revived once. Very tuxedo stuff, with a few spiritual zonks for the male and female leads to sink into the sofa with, at the end.
“Maybe that’s what champagne is,” I giggle. I’ve always been able to talk to Sam almost like to a girl. Aurine can too—she says don’t let’s wonder why. Does Sam? “Imagine me not being able to drop in here every day, even for a coke.”
Imagine an arched double living room, fifty by thirty, and fifteen feet high, darkish except for the yellow Tiffany light at the tops of the oblong windows, and everything furnished from old stage sets—only the solid kind of three-acters, that used to have drawing rooms in Mayfair or Murray Hill. No flashy stuff, nothing surreal. One bent-wood rocker, from Weegie Jones’ farmhouse-ballad readings of the thirties, that even then was a flop. “Oscar’s letting him revive it,” I say. “But it still flops.”
“A lot of flops are here,” Sam says. “Some of mine.”
A lot of very elegant ones certainly are, from yards-long English breakfronts to those French bureaus that swell out like women. And seventeen pair of portieres, Father. Oscar says half of Paris comes into a room with that word. The other half comes from the thrift shops on Third Avenue. Plus twenty club chairs in black leather, said to come from the Hotel Marguery, which make it comfortable. I sink into one of them. It’s a room for men all right. Nothing cozy-chintzy. Or penthousey. That’s left to us, upstairs. This is the downstairs of life.
Two kinds of men are here. Mainly, Oscar’s clients from the big days, from the really famous opera singers, politicians, explorers, playwrights and legit stars, down to diplomats, royalties, tennis stars, any lecture name who could have filled a hall, once. The rest are the stooges; nice little guys who once worked those worlds in some way, columnists and ticket brokers and press agents, and one very old guy said to be the Barrymores’ butler—I’ve never known whether for stage or for real. As a child, I had no preference; in one respect, all their knees felt the same. I knew I was being dandled by men who liked women.
“It’s been a great background,” I say to Sam. I’m saying it silently to all of them, who though they’re deep in clubmen’s smoke at the moment, won’t have forgotten me and mine. These fine world-worn men, pledging their troth to me in cigar rings, and an occasional pinch, believed in us. And in spite of the scarcity of Cuban cigars, and the decline of the pinch—I believe in them.
Sam’s at the bookshelves. “Oscar must have over fifteen thousand books here. And over a thousand of them must be real.”
The rest are very fine vellum the stage designers used to buy by the yard. And set in a row of lighted niches under the brow of the books are the women Sam is looking at, in photos any size from one foot to life.
“Very selective,” says Sam. “Oscar’s not one to take everything he’s given, is he?” All the girls in Aurine’s set are there, each in the clothes of her big era—all the live ones. Sam is going down the line. “Why, I didn’t know Lalla was dead,” says Sam.
“Yes, Oscar never puts up a nude one until she’s gone.” When it’s respectful. For these are the girls these men in their time have belonged to. Pardon—have kept. Now and then in rotation. Though it’s true, Oscar doesn’t take just anything he’s given. Except for me.
I giggle again. “Once I asked Oscar who decided the size of the photos. He said, ‘Modesty, dear.’”
“True,” Sam says. “Here’s Dulcy, whom we all love in spite of her CIA connections. Only one foot and a half. Always so self-deprecating.”
“And there’s Taffy Rhys-Williams,” I point. “Who went off with Tekla’s rajah.” No loss. But no excuse either. “She sent herself back in a crate.” Five and a half feet of skin and pearls, and skin; when Oscar brought it upstairs to show Aurine, she said, “Well—practically dead.”
Aurine never comes down here. Her picture’s set a little apart from the rest, and is an oil painting, as a sign she belongs to the house. It’s from ten years ago. In a dress you could die for.
Sam’s staring at her. “Well, if you ever hang here, Queenie, you’ll know who you—were.”
I get straight up from the chair. “The girls are still stunning, all of them.” Most. The ones who are not, are no longer one of the girls.
“‘Fear of fa-ding——’ Sam’s humming a song from his play, ‘keeps us from fa-ding, dear.’ Oh, they do very well. Your aunt of course is unique.”
“Most of them are lots younger than——” I flip out a hand. Handsome men, distinguished is more the word, but attractive enough you could still die for them, I suppose. If you’re in the right dress. “Lots younger than any of you.”
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br /> “Sadly true, Queenie love. Here, give me that glass.” He takes it. “But outside this…club…the girls are even younger than that.”
“Not for Oscar.”
“Oscar too is unique. Why, looky here.” He’s filling my glass from under the rows of pictures, where the bar is always stocked with the wine and seltzer, the whiskey and the beer. And tonight, the champagne. And the cigars. Sam takes one. “Cigarettes, you bring yourself. And no women. Oscar’s an easy host. Easy on us.” He lights up. “Nowadays, the orgy is only one of sentiment.”
What’s he trying to tell me, talking as usual like one of his plays?
“Ladies used to appear, at his evening suppers,” I say. Catered from the Stage Delly, consommé to nuts. “Oscar’s poorer these days.” But I’m suddenly remembering how it used to be when I sat on laps as well as knees here. Way back. And way, w-ay livelier.
Sam shakes his head. “Uh-uh, that’s vintage you’re drinking. Oscar never stints anybody except himself. No—the word went round—years ago.”
“No girls from the outside?”
He nods. We both look at the gentlemen chatterers, their familiar heads all down the length of the room, like those cartoons with numbers that tell you who. And beside each head, the invisible one of a girl who isn’t here? Because if she were, she’d be years younger than Aurine?
“I don’t believe it,” I say. Sam’s his kind of playwright; Sam likes things neat. Besides—Oscar would never do anything so vulgar. As pass the word around that Aurine couldn’t take it. But most of all—Aurine’s deeper than that. Or simpler. She could handle it. She’d love to.
“I don’t blame you,” Sam says. “No girls at all, you nit. Except you, you lucky creature. How many ten-year-olds have had a salon like us?”
I am too stunned to speak of course, for the moment. Because of me? They stinted themselves of social pleasures that weren’t yet right for me? Oscar and Aurine. Why have I never thought of their doing something together? For love—they did it for love. Because of me, they haven’t kept themselves up to the mark.
Can I believe it? Answer—once you’re in the play yourself, you almost always can.
“What’s this Lewis Carroll drag you’re in, by the way?” Sam says, lifting a lock of the hair down my back and twitching the collar of my slightly schoolgirl blue velvet. Aurine had a fit when I put it on instead of the nifty she’d bought me. Be yourself, she said—it’s time. And it is. But they’ll never learn that I can’t do it here.
“A tribute to your childhood?” Sam asks. “Or saving our feelings?”
“Smart, aren’t you.” It’s a tribute to them all. Be myself like we are on the outside? It would never go. They’d be shattered. But I know how they think I am—or hope. “In breastplates and a see-through, Sam? You think that would go, here?”
“We-ell, let’s not think how.”
The laughing begins with me, then seeps over to him. Someone passing—is it the Barrymore butler?—grins at us and pours us more.
“Queenie, tell your uncle Sam,” Sam says. “What’s a smart girl like you bothering with college for?”
Can I tell like him? Though he’s the man I once overheard Oscar say Aurine had no envy to, I have to be delicate. Sam’s had women, but somehow you never meet him except in the gloomy periods afterward. Somehow, I hadn’t ought to mention penises. “Sam—I have to learn—why I really want to be a man.”
After a while, he looks up, and says “Flatterer.” Sam’s smart.
So then I can say it to him, “Why do you all really come here?”
He jerks up a sleeve, toward the photos. Am I also supposed to see they don’t make dinner jackets like that anymore? “History…and a place to go.”
Oh Sam, if you would write plays like that!
I must have said it out loud, Father. I’d had a lot.
For suddenly, he’s moving the arm, waving it, to point, point, fifty feet and back, from the window where we are. A long perspective. “My God, my God, why bother staging it?” he’s saying. “When life will!”
It’s the main house door he’s pointing at. A great carved-mahogany door, new when the old joint was, it’s high enough to carry a torch through. And Aurine is entering it. She’s standing there, filling it to the nth. History has to take a back seat.
Such entrances aren’t done anymore. Fifty feet of it, slow as royalty, through men who haven’t seen her for years, to their slow roar. She has on that dress in her picture. It doesn’t show much of her, by present standards. Except to me—what she’s done for the sake of it. One side of the dress is slashed to the hip. Her hips have that line she says has to be like the bottom of the fleur-de-lis. Like mine. Can’t be done after thirty, Queenie. She has. “It’s not only the weight, Queenie,” she’d said, “it’s what’s in the spine.” And in the heart. As she moves now, the rest of her—that smoky gauze, those tiger jewels, those shoulders—is a mist. Through which each of us can see clearly. One corner of her mouth is especially up.
Beside me I hear Sam say, “Fear of fading——” and choke on it. But being Sam, after we watch her disappear, allagazam! into the kisses, and rise again here and there like a ball of confetti on a champagne fountain, he’s able to turn to me and say, “Life’s done well.”
It’s what a man would say. I’m beginning to see it’s what a man must. But things are still tit-for-tat between them and me; I’m not my aunt yet. So I give it to him. “And Aurine.”
For I begin to see what makes my aunt tick.
At the height of the muddle—for me—and the romance—for them—is when I begin to. It’s when they’re taking her pic and mine. Oscar is. And is it only him she’s looking at when she spreads her arms wide—not from secondhand Hollywood but from the heart—and cries out, “I love you all. You’re all simply beautiful!”
No. For to me she whispers then, “Aren’t they! Must you really leave?”
Yes, Auntie. I must. Beautiful as you are, the romance here is so thick I can’t drink it. I’m my age; I can see the history of the men. I can see what they’re envying. They don’t envy us of course, her or me. Or even the girls on the outside. What is it then? What is it, with them? With Sam here? What gives all their noble pans that look of suffering? That Arctic explorer, like he wants the tundra again. Sam here, like he wants a new tux. Can it be they’re all envying their former, other, better days? Can it be a man spends most of his life envying himself?
And my aunt knows it. She hasn’t come here only to show them how well she’s lasted, but how well they have. She believes in them. Should I envy her for that?
I’ve an idea college won’t teach me it.
Just then, the old butler cries out, “And what about girlie there? Does she think we’re beautiful?” There’s a slide of laughter—and a hopeful hush. How romantic they are, the older ones! That butler. There must be a hundred-year age difference between him and me—ninety for him, and a hundred and ninety for me. I have this time lag. But Aurine’s waiting, her eyes shining. Oscar too. Even Sam. The picture we all make ought to be the one of the year any year.
“Oh I do, I do!” I cry. “You’re all so young.”
A Family Fuss
Pass on to the Family Affair, a low joke at which Oscar still laughs himself into hiccups. “Who starts all the dirty jokes anyway?” he’ll choke, his eyes streaming. “God.” Certainly some providence wants to keep my attention on penises, Father. And we can thank the Lord it wasn’t a public day at the restaurant.
We’re all there en famille, that Monday lunch, and as usual in some excitement over who the family will be today. The girls of course are the constants, barring long Indian engagements like Taffy’s with her rajah, or other road tours. Or new members of the sisterhood, which since the girls are now in their late thirties or early forties hasn’t happened for some time.
Now and then, there’s still a stray like Martyne’s “sister-in-law” from Chattanooga; Martyne isn’t married, but the boy friend who sent
the girl up and away was, and has since got her back again, with a note from Martyne: “I took her to the track, hon, but all that wahoo-in’ bothers the horses. And the men up here like girls with more teeth.”
Or there was Alba’s real cousin from Italy, a lovely chick but not fitted for free lance, who takes one look at the girls and gets herself married hard and fast in that New Jersey nitespot advertises it has a “bride’s staircase.” You have to start being one of these girls early, I remind myself grimly, or it doesn’t take; sixteen is pretty late.
It’s the men who make our surprises, in the back of L’Alouette; Oscar says he wouldn’t go through his maiden voyage toward those banquettes again even for Aurine. Such a hemming and hawing as goes on among the gents, over the new member of the family, such peals of introduction from his lady sponsor, who is bound to make him look bigger in the world he’s big in than the other men are, and all this time the quiet assessment from the other girls, who are treating him like any family does a newborn: “Looks exactly like her old Mackenzie, regard the nose! Mack—remember him?” And how he didn’t pay her bills? Plus among the male regulars their own silent exchange, relieved or resigned. Well old boy—I see you’re still here. And so, you see, am I. We both can still afford the best.
The girls make every effort to convince them of it. Today, not even Indian summer yet, “not even Jewish New Year” murmurs Oscar, and only the washday beginning of the week, there’s as much fur at this little Ninth Avenue affair of forty tables, as there is at Christmas, he says, at St. Moritz.
First, Dulcy, always our trenchcoat girl, strolls in from Washington in her new one of shaved seal, that costs twice as much as mink—nobody here bothers with that old stuff. No ruffles for Dulcy, except her eyelashes. She’s on the arm of Potto Brown, who the girls say is the sweetest of all her rotations, and is called “the Commander” here, because he’s an Admiral of the Fleet.
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