Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “It’s awfully kind of you to pick me up here, Sid,” she said. “You won’t mind waiting a minute, will you, until I finish one piece of business? Sit down by the conference table. Miss Strode, will you please bring Mr. Skelton some cigarettes and an ash tray?” She gave me a winning smile. “We don’t smoke at Peale House as a rule, but you can be an exception.”

  “Why, thanks a lot,” I said.

  “I won’t keep you waiting more than a minute,” Dottie said. “Miss Strode, will you tell Mr. Taylor I’m ready to see him now with that paper sample.”

  I knew that Dottie would not keep me more than a minute, if she said so, and I also knew that she had asked me there to impress me, out of habit and not because it was necessary.

  “What are you laughing at?” she asked when Miss Strode closed the door.

  “Nothing,” I told her, “just hysteria.”

  “Darling,” Dottie said, “don’t be so damned funny. You can be funny at luncheon but not at Peale House.”

  It was really quite a show. Miss Strode returned with an ash tray, matches and a package of cigarettes, and behind her came a youngish man in a double-breasted suit carrying a sample of paper.

  “Oh, Mr. Taylor,” Dottie said, “you see what I mean, don’t you, when you hold it to the light?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Peale,” Mr. Taylor said, “you were perfectly right about it, and Mr. Jennings has checked.”

  “Good,” Dottie said. “Be sure to get Mr. Harris himself on the telephone.… Oh, have you ever met Mr. Sidney Skelton, Mr. Taylor?”

  “Why, no,” Mr. Taylor said, “but I’ve often enjoyed hearing him. How do you do, Mr. Skelton.”

  “You might call me up at home and tell me what Harris says,” Dottie told him. “There isn’t anything else, is there, Miss Strode?”

  “No, Mrs. Peale,” Miss Strode said. “I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

  When Miss Strode closed the door behind her again, Dottie giggled suddenly, as though we were children.

  “Darling,” she said, “you must admit I make them snap into it.… We might as well be leaving now. Bernard and the car are waiting. Shall we have my Bernard take us uptown? Or shall we have your Williams?… What are you laughing at now?”

  “You know damned well what I’m laughing at,” I said.

  She walked around the desk and put her arm through mine.

  “No man can be a hero to his valet, Dot,” I said.

  “Darling,” she told me, “I am really not preposterous. I don’t know why I always like it when you think I am.”

  “Because I always have,” I said. “It goes with the Chanel Five.”

  “Oh, Sid,” she said, “I wonder why we never got married.”

  I looked at her and looked around the room.

  “You know damned well why,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “oh yes, I know, but we do get on so well together, don’t we? We don’t have to pretend anything. All the cards are on the table.”

  It was true that there never had been any make-believe, at least not for a long, long time. She walked toward the door and glanced at me over her shoulder.

  “God,” she said, “it’s nice to see you, darling.”

  And I was glad to see Dottie, too. I had forgotten what good friends we were, and that there were no friends like old friends—with occasional reservations.

  XXI

  No Mothers to Guide Them

  I had seen very little of Dottie since her marriage to Henry Peale and, except for that war trip overseas, very little of her after Henry Peale’s death. When you stepped very suddenly from one category to another, you did not always have the capacity for bringing old friends with you. You no longer had the former common interests, or even the same kind of money. However, having found myself in ascending circumstances during the last two years, I could sympathize with Dottie’s problems more than I had a year or so before. They were still more complex than mine, but now I, too, had been thrust unexpectedly into a style of life to which I was not accustomed.

  It was preposterous to think of descending from my Cadillac, even if it was a company car, and walking with Dottie into the Peale residence and hearing Dottie say “Hello, Albert” to her butler. When the door closed behind us, I was thinking that we were in a larger, more complicated version of Savin Hill. We were both interlopers, not legally but spiritually. We were both intelligent enough not to make fools of ourselves, but still we did not belong. In the end we could only do the best we could, as other boys and girls do when they try to get ahead. Other poor girls had married wealthy husbands and other poor boys still came into the chips rapidly in some way or another. This, as they still said over the air, was America.

  The house had been built in the early nineteen-hundreds along those pseudo-English, pseudo-baronial lines that were popular in the days when Robert W. Chambers wrote The Danger Mark and The Fighting Chance, and when the gay young blades quaffed champagne from the slippers of the girls of their choice and white doves were occasionally released at banquets at Delmonico’s. The house had a frontage of at least thirty feet. The entrance hall was paved with marble. A dark oak double staircase swept upward. In one gloomy corner, near the door through which Albert the butler had retired with my hat and topcoat, was a suit of armor on a pedestal. I had never seen one of those things outside of a museum, except once, in an English country house during the war, but in the Peale house it looked moderately appropriate.

  I had never made any comment on the house to Dottie because there had always been Henry Peale or company when I had been there before, but now I felt impelled to whistle softly in a slightly vulgar way.

  “All right,” Dottie said, “all right. What about that little shack of yours in Connecticut?”

  “It isn’t quite the same,” I said.

  “No,” Dottie said, “it isn’t but it’s the same in principle. Darling, I can’t help it. There’s an income from a special trust fund running it.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said, “don’t exhibit social guilt.”

  “Oh shut up,” Dottie said. “We might as well take the elevator up to my study. I don’t believe you’ve ever seen it, have you? I did over the top floor after Henry died. I spend most of my time there when I’m not entertaining.”

  Of course there was an elevator, one of those automatic lifts with a row of electric buttons. When the door closed, she looked up at me.

  “Sid,” she said, “do you remember?”

  “Yes,” I answered, and I remembered that I had kissed her in that elevator when I had first dined there during the time I had been recalled for a month from the Paris Bureau.

  “Sid,” she said, “I really think just to be polite …” and she turned her cheek toward me. “Darling, I’m awfully glad to see you.”

  I had not seen Dottie’s study. Nothing else in the house had ever looked like her, but the study did. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything. The rear windows opened on a little terrace with a row of potted fir trees along its railing. The curtains were yellow brocade, and there were Chinese carpets and a sofa in front of the fireplace and a desk with her typewriter and sharpened pencils and all her favorite books along the walls—and two very good Renoirs. She had always liked Renoir because, as she said, Renoir’s people were always having such a happy time.

  “Sid,” she asked me, “does it remind you of anything? I mean the fireplace and the sofa and the books and the typewriter.”

  “You mean your place in the Village?” I asked her.

  “Don’t you think it’s like it?” she said. “Do you remember how you used to wait for me when I changed before we went out somewhere?”

  I could see what she meant. Her general taste had not changed, and it was a little like her two-room apartment in the Village only vastly larger.

  “Well,” she said, “pour yourself a drink—everything’s over there on the table—and sit down. My room’s in front and I’m going to put on an
other dress, but I’ll leave the door open.”

  It was a little like her old apartment in the Village and I also thought of the suite at the Ritz in Paris when I heard Dottie whistling in her bedroom.

  “Darling,” Dottie called, “are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m fine” and then she went on whistling.

  “Maybe you’d better take sherry,” she called, “we’re going to have champagne at lunch,” and then I heard her swear.

  “What is it?” I called back.

  It was only a run in her God-damned stocking but she would be finished in a minute. It was almost like old times, almost but not quite.

  I never thought until I heard her whistling, what a difficult time she must have had at first being Mrs. Henry Peale. I had only thought before how well she had succeeded. She had told me once that Henry’s family and friends had been very kind to her on the whole—as people were when obliged to make the best of an accomplished fact. They had never thought that Henry would marry, at least not so suddenly, but now that they saw her they said they could understand why he had, and they were so glad that Henry was happy, and now that Dottie was making Henry so happy, perhaps she could be on some of the family’s charitable committees. Well, as she told me once, she was still on some of those committees. Nevertheless she had to face the fact that she had always felt gauche with Henry’s family and friends and that basically she was shy. She simply did not fit. Yet on the whole she had succeeded with them. She had accomplished this through the book business, which was a world in itself, what with publishers and authors, and then there were her theater friends. The Peale family finally had liked to be asked to her Sunday supper parties, now that she knew everyone or almost everyone. Dottie had always been quite a girl.

  I sat there waiting, under the illusion that I was younger and still working on the paper, and that there were no broadcasts and no Helen or Camilla, which I am sure was the effect that Dottie desired. It was as if everything we had gone through were still in the future when she came back into the room. She was wearing a purple dress and a gold bracelet and a topaz pin. She did not look at all as though she were nearly forty. The blatantly unobtrusive cut of the dress indicated that it had been made for her and that it had probably cost about three hundred dollars. She sat down on the sofa beside me with that prim sort of schoolgirl posture that I remembered from the days on the paper. For a moment, though of course it did not last, we were a boy and girl together, at the end of a working day, and I thought of the song “What street compares with Mott Street in July?” even though it was late October.

  “Darling,” she said, “it’s just like old times, isn’t it? Snap out of it and get me some sherry.”

  Of course I knew Dottie well enough to know that she was consciously setting this scene of old friendship and of enduring congeniality because she wanted something from me. It would not be anything tangible, I knew, since she had everything in that line she desired. It would be something more in the nature of affirmation, of sympathy and support. Though I could begin to make guesses already, it was entertaining and instructive to watch her create the setting. She did it so well, in fact, that occasionally I honestly believed that she simply wanted to see me, and this may have been partially true.

  She had always understood men better than women. When she wanted, she was like a dancer who could follow any lead, conforming without the least apparent effort to any taste or intellect. I had forgotten how utterly entrancing she could be if she wanted or how much she knew about things that interested me. She knew the broadcasting world a good deal better than I did, and she had some very good anecdotes about Soviet diplomats and domestic politics. I was reasonably sure that she did not listen to my broadcast every evening, but she gave the impression of having followed it consistently. She knew Art Hertz, and she felt just as I did about Art—that it was wise to talk things over with him carefully before he started on the script—and she knew Gilbert Frary, and she could imitate him perfectly. She even knew that new phrase of his, “without the slightest ambiguity,” and then she used one of her own which I had not heard before.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying it’s only your voice,” she said. “I always knew you could get somewhere if you ever wanted to. You’re better than all the rest of them, because you have more developed mental capacity.”

  That was quite a phrase, developed mental capacity, something you could take or leave. She laughed when I told her it didn’t mean anything at all.

  “Darling,” she said, “you still don’t know much about women, do you? You don’t know how happy a woman is to be wrong, really wrong, if someone she’s fond of proves she’s wrong. I’m so happy that I was wrong about you, Sid. It makes me respect you so much, and there are so few people I can respect. It used to make me furious when I thought you were wasting your time, but everything you did was subconsciously right, and here you are. That’s what I mean by developed mental capacity.”

  She sat on the sofa with her feet curled under her and shook her head and smiled at me wistfully.

  “I know I missed the boat,” she said, “but still it makes me feel proud. I’m a little envious, too, when I see you and Helen together, but not in a mean way, darling. I keep wanting to help you still. You know how I used to try, and God, you were exasperating. Sid, I wish you’d admit something.”

  “I’ll admit that you’ve always wanted to help some man,” I said, “but then most women do.”

  “Darling,” she said, “that’s perfectly true, and the awful thing about it all is that I’ve never been able to help anybody except perhaps poor Henry. I wish you’d just admit that I could have done a lot for you. Please admit it, Sid.”

  She looked at me in her most appealing schoolgirl way. She had her chronology somewhat mixed but not entirely. She seemed to have forgotten how long she had been married to Henry Peale, and I might have reminded her that after Henry’s death she had not tried in the least to help me. Instead, she dropped me like a hot potato. I was a failure without a future in those days.

  “Why, yes,” I said, “of course you could have helped me, Dot.”

  “Thank God you admit something sometime,” she said. “Sid, it’s queer, isn’t it, that nothing changes when we see each other?”

  Being with her had always been like a game, but now I could watch her playing it, unemotionally, as though I were an observer at a conference. I knew that she had manipulated our conversation exactly as she had wanted. She had talked about me, and herself and me, and now we were going to talk about her.

  “Now just a minute, Dot,” I said, “before I forget to ask you. Didn’t you say over the telephone that you were worried about Gilbert Frary and me, or something along those lines?”

  Dottie assumed an expression that was partly cryptic and partly amused.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying that if I had thought you were going to mull over it. Did it really bother you, darling?”

  “Not much,” I said, “but you probably wanted it to, didn’t you?”

  Dottie’s cryptic expression changed and she looked delighted.

  “Of course I wanted you to be worried,” she said, “because I wanted to be sure you’d come to see me. There really wasn’t anything else, but it is interesting if you feel a little uncertain about Gilbert.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?” I asked.

  “Well, darling,” she said, “you know how I’m able to sense things and how interested I always will be in you. When I think of you and Gilbert, I sometimes get intuitively worried, but I haven’t really heard anything at all in any whispering gallery, and now that I’ve talked to you about the program, I know everything’s in order, and I’m so glad. Let’s forget it.”

  I was relieved that I had been right—that she had nothing to tell me that I didn’t know.

  “All right, he does disturb me sometimes,” I said—“but let’s forget it.”

  “Still if anythin
g ever should come up—anything like a break with Gilbert—you’ll promise to come right to me, won’t you, darling?” Dottie said. “You know how dreadfully happy I’d be to help in any little way. Darling, I wish I didn’t feel so unfulfilled. It’s a most terrible feeling. I suppose I’m spoiled. I suppose I’ve always got everything I’ve wanted.”

  There was a discreet knock on the study door.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, “there’s Albert with our lunch.”

  “That’s tough,” I said, “just when you were getting somewhere-after all this build-up.”

  “Oh, what’s the use,” Dottie said, “in trying to be fascinating with you? I wish to God you didn’t know so much about me. Anyway, it’s going to be a damned good lunch, and we’re going to have champagne.”

  “Then we’ll pick it up where you left off,” I said. “We’ll just remember, you’re feeling unfulfilled.”

  Dottie glanced at me and shrugged her shoulders.

  “All right,” she said. “Just remember you couldn’t have ever fulfilled me. If you want to wash, you can use my bathroom in there Come in, Albert.”

  Obviously Dottie preferred having her meals in her study, and I did not blame her after what I remembered of the dining room downstairs. Albert the butler and a maid came in, pushing tables on wheels like room service in a hotel, and they knew exactly how to turn one end of the room into a little dining alcove. Albert opened the champagne and took the tops off the lacquer soup bowls, and then Dottie told stories about the State Department until Albert asked if there were anything more and went away. It was a simple luncheon but it was very good—clear soup and squab and mixed green salad and Camembert cheese and coffee.

  “I hope it’s what you wanted,” Dottie said. “I know you don’t like much in the middle of the day. If you’re finished, let’s take the champagne over to the sofa. Do you remember the first time we ever drank champagne?”

  “Yes,” I said.