One day in May he saw Barbara Kent walking along Fifty-seventh Street with an Army officer. She was well-dressed with a noticeable handbag and strange hat. She was lingering at the windows of an expensive dress store with the man. Grant walked rapidly past and then returned in time to see her face to face. The man was a typical B.P.O.E. dignitary, broad, about forty-five, with steel-blue eyes, Indian cheekbones, and gray hair.
“Public Nobody Number Five Million; I can cut him out. One of them chair warmers.”
He followed them into the restaurant across the street, and when the blonde went downstairs to telephone, followed her. He made an appointment with her for the following afternoon, and rushed upstairs. He was impatient to see her, “I’ll have it out with her: what about Florida, what about the elderly gent? Just a story between the girls? Or that gun moll wanted to get my eyes off Barb?”
He saw her every day for weeks. In the meantime, he had several disappointments. Miss Celia Grimm would not go up to his room with him and said he only “gave lip-service to socialism.” He felt ruffled and cheated, for usually his radicalism made his girls trustful and either cheap or for nothing: a radical girl should not take money for love. He put his failure down to her interest in the Negro people and complained about her: “She is a kind of invert or pervert I think. I take her to the Golden Tassel, and she dances with a Negro fellow.”
The other failure had been with the telephone girl at the office downtown, a handsome girl in black, whom he had seen dancing in night clubs with several men. He had given her a box of chocolates once, at another time five dollars to get some gloves for herself. Now she was engaged, and leaving to marry. He was so indignant that he discussed with Miss Robbins, his secretary, the possibility of making her give back the five dollars. “She knew she was going to cheat me, if she’s going to get married. I’d like the fellow to know what kind of woman she is. See if you can get his address. Say you want to give her a party.”
Miss Robbins refused. He said, “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I didn’t attract the girl, eh? After all, I don’t always win. And they don’t know what’s good for them, eh? Their privilege.”
For the time being he was in a good mood, but when he went through the front office and saw the girl sitting there with the earphones on, he fell into a fury again. He waited for her at six o’clock, putting off an appointment with Mrs. Betty Goodwin, but when he came up with her, instead of asking about the price of the gloves, his old habits got the better of him and he began to murmur, “Lovely girl, congratulations, don’t know why you wouldn’t try to make something of me instead of some young fellow.” In the end, he took her to a bar and had drinks with her, but got no further. Going home in the subway, he thought, She always gives me the impression she’s taking me over. Don’t like that.
Meanwhile, he had an interesting subject of conversation with Miss Russell. Why did Miss Russell lie to him about the elderly man and Florida? They had tea and a little chat several times about this. Paula did not like his new interest in Barbara, because as Grant put it to himself, “She has seen more of me than is good for her; and then, like me, she’s possessive, she’s greedy, she is from the Land of Grab,” and he believed she wanted to break off her engagement for him. In the White Bar, in Fifty-second Street, where he took his conquests when he became used to them, and where a good many handsome models and salesgirls went after work, Miss Russell, dressed in summer black, told him, “Barb and I don’t really like each other. Barb went off the rails at sixteen and men treated her badly, threw her out like an old shoe. When I first met her in Paris—”
“—in Paris!” ejaculated Grant.
“—she had bracelets, diamond, gold, platinum, up the elbow, service stripes; then she was seventeen and had seventeen of them. She struck hard luck and in a couple of years she had eaten them off. She was in a divorce suit in London when she was twenty-two. At one time she was married to a man named Madison who was madly in love with her and thought her a pure young girl. He took her out to the Coast to get her into the movies. She was dazzled by Hollywood, and though she didn’t care that much for Madison, she thought by going out with movie people she’d get a chance. She takes a good still, but she can’t act. Her husband died, she married a man named Kent and lived in Los Angeles in a little suburban house for two years, but she got tired of it and started to get into trouble with men. She began getting friendly with married men they knew. Then Kent left her, divorced her, she had no money, and she started getting men into jams. At first, it was accidental. Some man insulted her in the street and she won a suit. I think she wanted to marry again, but no one pleased her because she was ambitious. She hitched her wagon to a star. She’s quite honest really—serious-minded. She never had the strength of mind to go through with any marriage. She got sick of men so soon. I don’t think she really cares for them. She’s not a gold-digger at heart, but she finished up gold-digging. She has too good a head for figures. She can always calculate the chances. What’s the use of marrying somebody with flat feet, some jerk, and so dying of old age at thirty? Look at me—I don’t want to marry but I don’t want to roll round, either.”
Grant said, “Roll round with me and I’ll show you things you haven’t seen yet, you’re only naïve, you don’t know much, you’re only young yet.”
“I don’t believe in any man any more. I’m tougher and smarter than Barb. Barb has moments when she goes romantic and thinks someone will do something for her. She always lets the right moment pass. She never calls the turn, and wastes their money. She skims off the cream and when the men get tired of her, she tries to make them do something for her. She has them eating out of her hand. When it’s too late, she tries to make a profit.”
“I thought you said she calculated everything.”
“So she does, but she hasn’t the patience. She’s only a plunger: she has no technique. She’s restless. No man ever made her happy.”
Said Grant, getting restless, “She’s like me, no woman ever made me happy. Sometimes I thought I met the right woman. Take you. You wouldn’t take a chance with me. That ’ooman in Boston, my wife, is no good to me. Never loved me. Now when it’s too late, she tries to make me come back. Just like Barb. It’s a type—stupid. A woman like you could keep a man. I’m looking for an oasis in my desert, a rose on a blasted heath. Barb’s not my type at all. First time I saw her, I thought, she’s just a scrubwoman. She looks down and out, dissolute. You look well kept, good breeding.”
“Barbara’s had a lot of money spent on her, but she’s just a tramp,” said her friend; “sometimes she could have taken a bath in Goldwasser.”
Grant mused, “She doesn’t look like that, but you never can tell with women. Some of them are all on the surface, all on their backs, you might say; others are like old wine: dirty outside, cobwebs—the better, the more you taste, and it stays on your tongue. I don’t see much of her. Dangerous, eh? Not the sort for me to play around with. I’m looking for romance. My heart needs a home, a cradle, eh? I’ve used myself up, played too hard. Now I need a woman, a mother, a sister, a sweetheart, a friend. That’s what that cow in Boston doesn’t realize. I need a mother now. She could have me back. But it’s too late now. Now I’ve met you.”
The interview had the usual successful ending and Grant was interested to see that a hardy quick girl like Paula Russell, with only occasional misgivings, was beginning to believe that she could replace Laura, the dangerous love, in his life. She was beginning to think about marrying him.
He was easily bored these days. Two years ago, he had arranged a partnership with a talented young cotton broker named McMahon who had put in $60,000 to Grant’s $40,000, and who, though he required Grant’s signature for checks, could deal in his own name. McMahon was active, but, as it seemed to Grant, when he felt flush of animal spirits, the young fellow took long chances, perhaps to impress Grant, who had promised him the management of a new firm in the Argentine. Two youngish cotton dealers, who had been with him for
fifteen and seventeen years, meanwhile watched over Grant’s interests in the firm. These men had been promised partnerships in Grant’s old business which he proposed to put on a new footing in New Orleans very soon. The air of New Orleans did not suit him, he said, at his age. This business he had delayed from year to year. Now it looked like war, and it must wait till the war was nearly ended or quite over, for Grant suspected that all basic commodities would be differently controlled after the war. He was marking time. In the meantime, the two youngish men, James and Butters, remained devoted to his interests. He promised the general managership of the new house, and sometimes a partnership, to each one separately, conferred with each in secret, and taking each aside at times, deplored the other’s lack of talent. It was simple: he would say, “a nervous, capricious sort of fellow that I saved from a very awkward situation, and who is grateful, but who perhaps overestimates my devotion to him. I want results. He made that mistake in ’36,” and this of each one. Meanwhile, he got Flack, in his spare hours, to help him with a Memorandum on the Supply and Distribution of Cotton, Given the Redundant Inventories, cotton being then the outstanding surplus of the world. This memorandum, a secret, and exhibited separately to James and Butters as his own rough work, was to bear the names of Robert Owen Grant and Mr. James or Mr. Butters, as the case required. Flack, meanwhile, had been promised a percentage of Grant’s cotton exchange profits, in compensation for these consultations.
Grant’s brain which had been functioning, to his own profit, with uncommon energy since the age of four or five, was now empty and ached. He had no more need for money, as his estate was settled in respect of his elder son; and the other boy, a weakling, he considered only as “a contingency.” His will was drawn up; there were only two beneficiaries, one of them the “contingency,” the other, Gilbert. The only problem for him was to make legitimately his current expenses, about $30,000 yearly, and since he could make any reasonable amount in any one year, he also spent very freely. He made his $30,000 in a few hours daily and through his organization, on the Cotton Exchange.
He had no hobbies. He could not read more than a few consecutive sentences in any book or newspaper unless they referred immediately to himself or his interests. Thus he might read a few words on Robert Owen, a few on Lancashire, a few words on cotton control; but in general he missed all the points. He well knew this and would throw down newspapers in the faces of his friends and managers, saying, “What’s the point? What’s he getting at?”
He spent many hours by himself. He jingled his money, walked up and down, pouted, frowned, sighed, thought of writing to friends long forgotten, recollected injuries done to him by the dead, called women, bought new clothes for himself, tried to think of some little thing, some out-of-the-way thing, like a buttonhook for gloves, that some freak friend wanted, the kind of thing that would take hours or days to unearth. He had little pleasure out of his own real hobby, libertinage; and he gave none. Women fell away from him, but he did not know why; and he retained only the venal. He had little to muse upon. Few women he knew wrote letters, and most of these contained requests for money, put in some roundabout or clumsy form. He kept what he got, and would conceal them, for further meditation, in various places: in the bottom of the dustcovers over his many suits; some were in his collarbox, some in his hatboxes, some under the paper lining of the drawers. Every time there was a question of moving, or of sending clothes to the cleaners, he had some interesting hours, during which he would lock the door of his apartment while he went over everything looking for the private matters he might have cachéd.
After he had left the place, gone on a trip, or after the clothes had left for the cleaners, he would fret about some intimate letter or bill which he thought lost. Then he would run backwards and forwards between the cleaners and his apartment, and send his secretary over the same trail, or even some crony, like Goodwin.
In June, at the settling of accounts, he deferred payments to Flack till the end of the year. Edda, Flack’s daughter, sent him in the mail a caricature of himself. Flack defended his daughter. They quarreled and Flack left off jackaling for him, for the time being, saying that he would get another job easily enough. A cotton speculator in New Orleans had offered Grant a participation for the sum of $25,000. He was a rising man, everyone whispered his name; but Grant had thought up a few schemes for going in with Bentham, this speculator, without putting up a cent. Flack now said, “Bentham will go in with me, for my brains, quicker than with you for your prestidigitation: from you he wants money, but he would go in with me for my wits.”
Grant was not sure that this was not true. He watched angrily and used friends as spies. What was Flack doing? All he heard was that Edda Flack, the young daughter, had got a job as a comic-strip continuity artist. No one knew what Flack was doing. But the report was that Edda, the daughter, kept telling everyone, “Let Robbie Grant watch out, he will tread on a banana peel.” Grant was uneasy. Flack had been his best friend for long years.
5
About July, 1941, he found himself in this becalmed area. He had no pleasure from his friends. He was tired of being invited out, town was going to empty soon. He had made many concrete promises to many people and he was tired of their faces round him. He went to Boston to see his wife and Andrew, aged seven, the son remaining at home. He did not like the boy, an interesting, tender neurotic who clung to his father and cried every time he left the house. He blamed his wife for the boy’s sensibility.
Mrs. Grant was nervous, difficult, and tried to divert him with her garden and the new gardener. The boy was more clinging than ever. Grant thought all the time of the blonde. She seemed to be with him. The third time he had given her a fair bit of money, she had spent it on clothes. She had not murmured at the small sum, not said anything about another meeting. One day she said she needed more money, he had given it to her. She knew an old woman who had been good to her in Washington. He found out that the address and name were correct, and then gave her money for the old woman. She always pleased him. He would sit on the lounge and mutter hastily, “I just made a bit of money, what do you want a check for?”
She took it, after some little hesitation, the sum a little larger each time. He liked it. He thought: My fault if I offer it. She never apologized, demurred or said she would pay back, but only, “I need it.”
He had begun to buy what she needed. He paid for photographs of her and silver frames for them. She was simple, gentle, easy to get on with when he gave her money. She never refused him, made irreducible feminine reasonings about everything, which he believed in, prattled personalities, friends she had picked up, lovers, and told of them with the fragrance of a past innocence—it was in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium. She had few moods of any kind, except when he, in a temporary fit of avarice, refused her money. Then she paid him out. He admired this. At present he had a winning streak. In July she received money from abroad from her father, James Alexis Jones, who went by the short name of James Alexis. Grant said he had brought her luck and she brought him luck. He had begun to see her every afternoon. He resented the other men she went out with, and while in Boston this time, he made up his mind to get her to move to a midtown hotel at his expense. He had become tired of Miss Russell: she was a campaigner. She had a bad influence on Barbara.
When he returned from Boston he had his plans made. The blonde woman went to live at the fashionable midtown Grand Hotel, a place with bars, restaurants, a night club, a roof garden, coiffeurs, dress shops. It was the resort of business and society people all day long. She began to dress to suit the place and to send him her bills, not only for clothes. She changed her airs to suit her position and quarreled with him. He often went to see her early in the morning but was not admitted. He would sometimes taxi uptown at midday and find her still in bed in some fine negligee; in the afternoon he would find her just up, very handsome, soft. He was delighted to take her out. They would go shopping almost every afternoon. On Sunday he found her in bed
drinking chocolate and reading the comics. He reproved her for her laziness and the disorder of the room. She was untidy, would rather buy a garment than repair it. She complained that she needed a maid. She needed hundreds of things he had never bought for a woman before, all to keep her in order. She never seemed to be able to assemble a complete toilette. She was not the sort of woman to spend all the afternoon looking for just one kind and color of gloves. She bought rashly. He had fretted and marveled in Rome at Laura’s energy for so small a thing as a pair of rose gloves. Now he saw it was a kind of economy and smartness, and he admired Laura for this long distance in time. The blonde had not her quality and was a waster.
“You will never have a cent,” he told her regretfully.
Barbara frowned, “Mother did all that for me; I am too miserable thinking about myself to bother.”
Her mother was in Ireland, she said, working for some wealthy Anglo-Irish in an outlandish castle with portraits, tapestries, horses, dogs, children and Catholic peasantry. Grant had seen numerous letters from the mother who wished to come to the U.S.A. He said, “A woman your age doesn’t need a mother.” Suddenly he laughed. But the blonde, “You will never understand that mother is the only one who never let me down. She’s an old-fashioned woman; she keeps me straight.”
“Get her over!”
“With what? I have no money. I’m always one day from the street.”
“Don’t talk that way, my dear girl.”
“That’s your story.”
“Don’t be a grasshopper, be an ant; imitate me: put something by for a rainy day.”
“I’d rather die. I can’t fight my nature.”
“You make me worry about you, Barb.”
After a pause, Barb continued, “Mother is just a poor grandmother living with those back country squires, taking care of their ignorant little girls. It’s not pleasant for me to think of my best friend working as a nursemaid.”
A Little Tea, a Little Chat Page 4