“Don’t try to be amusing,” she said. “There’s only one good thing about this, if you want to call it a good thing. It might have been you, if she hadn’t got all mixed up with the army.”
“Me?” I repeated after her, and I felt righteously indignant. “You know everything about Dottie and me.”
“Darling,” Helen said, “don’t you think I had a right to be worried when I heard that you and Dottie were on that trip to Paris? You know, she never wants to let go of anything. You were a piece of personal property, and she was simply furious when we got married.”
“Why, no,” I said, “she wasn’t. She was awfully nice about it. She said how glad she was for me. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “don’t you know anything about bitches? It would have been you if it hadn’t been poor old Mel Goodwin, and she would have said it was all your fault basically. She’s always been furious at me, and we hate each other’s guts. I really don’t see how I can be nice to her tomorrow.”
Perhaps nothing was ever over, even when you thought it was. I remembered that long flight over the ocean in the darkened plane. I remembered that rococo sitting room in the Ritz in Paris and Dottie whistling in the bedroom. She always whistled when she fixed her face and hair. If Major General Goodwin had not been there, Dottie and I would have been a long way from home. Then I remembered those adjoining bedrooms in that bleak hotel in northern France when Dottie had asked me to kiss her in a friendly way. It was a long way from anywhere.
I pulled myself back into the present. Farouche had dropped his rubber ring on my foot and his doing so relieved the tension. He wagged his beautifully brushed tail expectantly, and Helen looked benign. When I played with Farouche, it meant that I was getting used to everything.
“Darling,” Helen said, “we really ought to think about having another baby.”
I knew exactly why the idea had occurred to her at that moment. She was not thinking of the nursery and the bassinet and the good life as much as she was thinking of Dottie Peale.
There always came a time when you wearied of listening to the fallacies of self-justification because you learned finally the basic truth that no one in a jam was in a position to give you anything back. Such people were too busy with their own vagaries even for true gratitude. In the end they always did what they desired, and they might as well have done it from the first instead of making it a problem. This was the way I felt about Dottie Peale. I had studied a great many of her problems, including that of Henry Peale, whom she had not married for money or position—although she knew that everyone had thought she had—and possibly not for love either, in any accepted sense. She had married Henry Peale because she simply had to do something for someone—and there was Henry. This was what she said and what she may even have believed. Then there had been the problem of Dottie’s childhood background, which I had studied with her also—why she had not been able to adjust herself to it, and why she had left home and could not possibly go back and marry a boy who, for reasons entirely his own, thought that they were engaged and wrote her letter after letter and even followed her to New York. If Dottie had returned home, as I had once pointed out to her, she could have done a great deal for other people in a selfless way, including her parents, who, though I had never seen them, struck me as having many generous and agreeable traits, in spite of what Dottie said about their narrow-mindedness and mediocrity. Dottie could not help it if she always reached for something more than what had been given her and if she was always in revolt. At least this is what she said, and she could illustrate these points by telling many stories about herself in a very interesting way.
Dottie was always shuffling the cards of her past and dealing them out in a sort of intricate solitaire, only for me, as she always said, because I always understood her, and not for anybody else. She was very tired of having herself on her mind, but if you thought of the past, you could understand the present. There was the little private school in that small town—where her dresses had been too plain and the girls had never asked her to their parties—and there had been the birthday party that her mother had made her give. Then came the state college, a dreadful place, and the cousins who had lived on a Midwestern farm, and that column in the local paper about New York by O. O. McIntyre, and the poems of Emily Dickinson and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. I knew about her course in typing and shorthand. I knew how she had watched the trains go east and how she had come to New York herself one summer, thin, aloof and eager, with her overnight case and a dress she had cut from a Butterick pattern, and ten dollars in her purse. I probably knew her as well as anyone, but a time had come when Dottie Peale and I had lived through too many stories.
In the morning I remembered immediately that Dottie had invited herself to lunch. Ever since we had bought the place in Connecticut, she had been saying that she must drop in to see us. Helen had always begged her to wait until everything was decorated, and Dottie had always understood perfectly. She would not drop in suddenly, she said, although she could not wait to see Helen in her new setting. I wished that I did not know so well what Dottie would say and think. I knew she would make me think things that were disloyal to Helen, but this would not be the real reason for her coming. The reason would be to review the pros and cons of her new-found happiness.
Ever since I had worked on the night shift of the newspaper, I had been able to sleep through a morning, and it was after eleven when I awoke. It took me an instant to recollect where I was, something that still happened to me quite frequently at Savin Hill, and then I saw that it was raining and that the bare trees were dripping coldly and moistly against a grim gray sky. I saw that Helen’s bed was empty, and then I saw that Camilla was standing beside me. It must have been Camilla’s concentrated attention that had finally disturbed my sleep. She had not moved or spoken as I had been pulling my wits together, but suddenly she giggled in the thoughtless, rudimentary manner of childhood.
“Daddy,” she said, “you look so funny waking up.”
For that matter, Camilla looked pretty funny herself. She was wearing her jodhpurs and her tiny tweed coat and little stock and a gold horseshoe pin. Her hair was in a single braid, clubbed and tied with a black ribbon. She reminded me of an eighteenth-century picture of a child dressed like an adult.
“Hello,” I said, “are you going riding?”
Camilla giggled again and nodded.
“You can’t,” I said, “it’s raining.”
“Oh, Daddy,” Camilla said, “don’t be silly. Don’t you know that Mr. Delaney has his Saturday class in the indoor ring?”
It was still curious, at least to me, that Camilla should be obliged to learn to ride a horse. The idea was an anachronism. Horses were no longer a necessary means of locomotion. They were only social symbols. Camilla must ride because someday she might meet a nice boy upon another horse and marry him and live happily ever after. Fortunately she had another asset—her mother’s eyes and nose and hair, because there might not be any horses or jodhpurs or Mr. Delaneys, the way the world was going. Everyone clung blindly to the hope of eventual security, and the little girl dressed in jodhpurs was a pathetic symbol of that hope. What would happen to Camilla eventually and what could I do about it? I was sure I did not know. Would she be like her mother or would she be like Dottie Peale? The future lay somewhere within her, but I could not read it. There was no solid Victorian future any longer. There were no William Ernest Henleys any longer, making us the masters of our fates and the captains of our souls.
“Mummy told me to tell you to wake up,” Camilla said. “Oscar’s bringing up your breakfast.”
“Where’s your mother now?” I asked.
“She’s arranging things downstairs,” Camilla said. “She acts as if there’s going to be a luncheon party.”
“It isn’t a real party,” I told her, “just one lady.”
“Well,” Camilla said, “good-by, Daddy. Miss Otts is waiting for me, but I’ll be b
ack for lunch.”
It seemed to me when she had gone that she had left me for good already and that I had never known her. Days were too full and time moved too rapidly. I would not know much about Camilla today because Dottie Peale was coming to lunch and we were going to the Brickleys’ to dinner. I remembered what old Mr. Goodwin had said to Melville in the drugstore in Hallowell. There had never been time for him to learn much about Melville Goodwin either. It seemed less and less possible to compress the details of life within the frame of time.
The wailing hum of a vacuum cleaner sounded in the living room as I came down the stairs. Mr. Brown had been brought in from outside to do the rugs, and next he would do the green carpet on the stairs. Mrs. Griscoe, the cleaning woman, was dusting the library. Oscar and Hilda were setting the dining room table, and Williams was waxing the hall floor. Helen was arranging flowers and supervising. The electric waxer and the vacuum cleaner made the house sound like an industrial plant. However, it was to have all the earmarks of a simple informal lunch—just the Skeltons at home.
Helen was wearing a whipcord suit that made her look as efficient as Dottie Peale.
“Everything looks all right, Helen,” I said. “Why don’t you leave it alone?” It was a useless remark, but the activity made me nervous.
“I don’t see how you can sleep in the morning,” Helen said. “I’ve been up since seven. You know how particular she is. She always sees everything.”
Helen did not realize that this abnormal neatness was as revealing as untidiness. Women were more vicious and more intolerant than men.
“All right,” I said, “but you’ll get it looking like a feature piece in House and Garden.”
Dottie had never let anyone forget that Helen had once worked on a similar magazine.
“You know what she used to say about Tenth Street,” Helen said. “I’m not going to have her saying …” She stopped and called to Mrs. Griscoe and told her not to forget the powder room.
“What aren’t you going to have her say?” I asked.
“I’m not going to have her say, ‘Poor Sidney.’ I heard her say it once.”
In some ways women were surprisingly obtuse. Helen should have known that nothing she could ever do would prevent Dottie from saying, “Poor Sidney.”
“Poor Sidney,” I could hear her saying as soon as she got back to town, “you should see what Helen’s done to him—even the dog with the rubber ring and the little girl like a picture in a Sunday supplement.”
“Well,” I said, “never mind it, Helen. You can say, ‘Poor Mel.’”
Poor Sidney and poor Mel. Both the girls would say it.
“Sidney,” Helen said, “I wish you would go upstairs and put on some older clothes so you won’t look self-conscious.”
“But aren’t we both?” I said. “Isn’t this whole effort self-conscious?”
“Oh, Sidney,” Helen said, “please go upstairs and read the papers. I’m busy and I’ve got a headache. I want you to mix the Martinis yourself instead of having Oscar bring them in. She won’t look natural until she has one in her hand. Dottie and her damn Martinis!”
As General Gooch had said, no one ever knew everything about anybody. I had never realized that Helen, who usually took a charitable view toward everyone, felt so strongly about Dottie Peale.
Upstairs I changed into a suit I had owned for years, before I had met Helen, in fact, which had been in moth balls during the war. It was a suit which I could never bring myself to throw away, because it reminded me of old times. Its knees and elbows were worn thin by old times, and I was reasonably sure that Dottie would remember it. If she did, I could imagine what she would say.
“Poor Sidney,” she would say, “in a state of absolute revolt, clinging to that old brown herringbone, the suit that I made him buy before he ever met her. It was pathetic. It made me want to cry.” Yet if I wore a new suit, nothing would be improved, because Dottie would say again, “Poor Sidney, completely regimented by that wife of his and overdressed as usual.” Nothing would be right for Dottie Peale and nothing would be right for Helen.
I tried to concentrate on the morning news while I listened to the dripping of the rain, but instead I remembered how glad Dottie had seemed to be when Helen and I were married and all the kind things she always said about Helen, and I also recalled the kind things Helen had said about Dottie. At least my mind was off Melville Goodwin, now that I was the vertex of a triangle. It was not Dottie’s fault, I was thinking, that she was a girl who could never let anything go entirely. She was a perfect example of the type that could never get on with women, and also she was the type that never got on for long with men.
“Sid,” I heard Helen calling, “Sid, please come downstairs. She’s here.”
Helen had seen before I had that Dottie’s town car, driven by Bernard, that chauffeur of hers, was turning into the white-fenced drive. Dottie Peale and I had gone a long, long way since we were working on the paper, and were very young and were very merry. Though middle age had hardly touched me, I felt a twinge of senility as I saw Dottie in the car. We had traveled a long, long way, and only a very little of it together, but here we were.
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “not that suit,” and she could remember my clothes, too, but it was too late to change again, and the car was at the door. I held an umbrella for Dottie while Bernard helped her out, not that she ever needed to be helped. Helen had done right to wear something tailored. Dottie, too, was in a suit, cool and austere, with a topaz brooch at her throat, no noisy bangles—an honest, simple girl.
“Darling,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. How’s the country squire?”
Everything was as gay and rural as an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, in spite of the rain. “All the way up the road,” she went on, “I’ve been wondering which ancestral mansion could be yours. Bernard called up Williams for the directions, you know. I just couldn’t believe it was this one.”
“Well, well,” I said, “and how’s the little city mouse?”
Dottie glanced at me sideways.
“Darling,” she said, “I can’t wait until I see absolutely everything. It all looks so exactly like you.”
“That’s just what I’ve always felt about Seventy-second Street,” I said, “but I never could bring myself to tell you.”
Dottie gave my arm a savage pinch.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, “shut up. Let’s get in out of the rain.… Helen, darling, how beautiful this is!”
“Dottie, dear,” Helen said, “it’s so sweet of you to come out on such an awful day.”
Helen and Dottie Peale were being very civilized indeed. There was no rough stuff, scarcely an awkward moment. There were no roundhouse swings or smacks of gloves. There were no cuts from glancing blows. They were so glad to see each other, so fond of each other, so mutually admiring, that it was hard to believe what Helen had said about Dottie. A mutual bond had drawn them together, because they were both so fond of me—Dottie merely in her tender, maternal way. Occasionally they discussed me as though I were not present, but also they had so much to say to one another. Dottie could always see everything without appearing to notice, and I knew she was not missing anything.
“Darling,” I heard her say, as she and Helen walked arm and arm into the living room, and they seemed to have completely forgotten me in their joy in seeing each other, “no wonder they were sorry to lose you from that magazine. I had lunch with Diana Paul only last week, and Diana was saying that there was no one like you, with restraint and taste combined with so many new ideas. What fun you must have had fixing everything, and you’ve done it terribly quickly and it’s all so perfect. It’s—it’s like a stage set for that old play Berkeley Square, isn’t it? And yet it isn’t Berkeley Square, dear. It’s absolutely you, and you were so right in not consulting Sidney’s taste, because Sidney has no taste, has he? It’s you in your own setting. I don’t really see how you can do any more about anything.”
“If
you say so,” Helen said, “everything must be all right, Dottie, dear. I’ve been on pins and needles to know what you would think of the house.”
Dottie laughed delightfully and affectionately.
“Darling,” she said, “you must really learn not to mind what other people think. Hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may, but then there isn’t a chip around here anywhere.”
“All in order because of you, dear,” Helen said. “Sidney doesn’t let me forget your love of order for a minute.” Then she, too, laughed affectionately. “But now we’re on quotations, there is a divinity that shapes our ends, isn’t there? Roughhew them how we may.”
“Did Sidney teach you that, dear?” Dottie asked. “Sidney’s a liberal education for poor girls like you and me, isn’t he? You can’t help learning from him, just by osmosis. Whose end, darling?”
“Yours,” Helen answered, “or mine. Anybody’s end.”
Dottie laughed and Helen laughed. They both seemed to be having a wonderful time.
“Now, Sidney,” Dottie said, and she smiled at me encouragingly, “Helen got that line from you, didn’t she? Darlings, I can’t tell you how I love being here. Where shall I sit so I won’t be roughhewn? I don’t want to perch on the wrong museum piece.”
“Darling,” Helen said, “I’ve never known a museum piece that didn’t suit you.”
“Now girls,” I said, “suppose you both relax and we’ll have a drink.”
It was about time under the circumstances, because everything was growing brittle.
“Helen, dear,” Dottie said, “Sidney’s beginning to look positively corn-fed, isn’t he? It’s wonderful what you’ve done to him, darling.”
Nothing that had been said would be forgotten, and furthermore it would probably grow to be all my fault when Helen took it up with me later.
“Now, girls,” I said, “let’s all take it easy, girls.”
The round was over when Oscar came in with the cocktail tray.
“Let’s have Martinis,” I said. “Why don’t you make them, Dottie?”
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 61