8
It was early in the morning of December 8, a Monday, that Grant called Flack, with an immense, jovial, mysterious excitement, asking if they had heard of the Pearl Harbor surprise attack the day before. He shouted, “What’s the idea, eh, Edda? What’s the idea? Force us in against Germany, make us crazy with two enemies at the gates, make us send troops to Europe, make us fight for the Soviet Union, eh? Crazy, eh? Miscalculated. Glad it was the Japs and not the Russians. Ho-ho. You and David would have been in trouble! Ho-ho. Didn’t mean that, just a joke, my dear girl. Tell David to get down to the office as soon as he can.”
The city was released. The war-tension of months, the uncertainty, were at an end. It was like news from Mars: they had never thought anyone would dare to attack them, mighty nation that they were, but it had only the effect that the first hard punch has on a strong youth. Everyone was downtown. In that morning, Flack and Grant sold all Grant’s Government bonds at superb prices, many others being ashamed to sell at that moment, and they bought steel shares which had fallen since people were nervous, not knowing which way things would turn. Grant felt the absolute freshness of his youth that morning. He calculated all day, walked briskly round the downtown area, listened to rumors and the thousand projects which had already sprung up. In the next few days they all considered what primary produce would be needed in war, as well as cotton, he went with Flack in a car to look at old disused piers and sheds in the Hudson, he wrote letters to all his correspondents in Europe and elsewhere, and considered forming a shipping company in Valparaiso to send contraband of war to Japan. Flack was found sufficiently pusillanimous to shake his head at this idea, while laughing. Grant shouted, “My dear boy, when the golden harvest has begun, take a scythe in your hand.”
“I’ll ask Edda.”
“She’ll say no; but I’ll ring her up and try to perr-suade her.”
They spent days in the office now, Flack being once more apparently Grant’s factotum.
They wrote to England, Switzerland, Chile, the Argentine, especially those interested in dyes, shipping, and the export of such general merchandise as can be used to disguise arms, ammunition, rare chemicals, drugs. Downtown, everyone was in a rare state of pleasurable excitement, of hope. The marasmus had passed. Brains churned. Everyone went out handshaking and deploring with the ear cocked for the moneyminting half-word. One of their acquaintances stopped in the middle of Broad Street to shake his head over the war news, clasp hands and declare heartily, “When I was four a fire swept the whole block in which my family lived. My father, mother and sisters took shelter with some neighbors. I collected all I could, vases, chamberpots, pictures, dusters, and took them to a vacant lot. A woman came along and said, ‘How much do you want for the vase, sonny?’ I sold it. I sold the lot. They thought I had gone in the fire. Everyone got their insurance, I had pocket money: no one lost by that catastrophe, as they say in the papers.”
Flack and Grant would meet several people, then rush back to the office to talk things over, write more letters.
“I want to do something my size, we sue a Government, for argument’s sake, Beaver, Broad and Co. have five hundred suits a year against the Government in peacetime: look at the chance wartime gives you! A Government can’t help treading on your toe, infringement of contractual rights, property damage, property falsely sequestrated. I have that stuff of Laura’s, they think it’s Italian, it’s mine, at least I can prove it, there’s that. We must look up something else. There are the other Governments too. We can easily think up something. They’ll get in a pack of white-collar majors, paper shifters will go to war without knowing anything about business and we can’t miss this chance. We can make a forchun, my boy, without undertaking any contracts, nothing where you might get in the wrong. Let them get in the wrong. I’ll have the law on my side. That’s the principal thing in a suit with the Government: then the same letter-file majors don’t know what to say. And basically, my dear boy, Government is honest: don’t know how to wriggle out of it.”
They spent some time bathing in this flood of opportunities and plans, and the German declaration of war on December 1 gave them fresh prospects. David Flack drew no salary but was content with the promise of percentages in this new world, excited, upset.
“We got a blood transfusion, they gave us a blood transfusion,” declared Grant every day.
His love for the blonde had disappeared like an empty transparent thing, some cast shell of a sea-animal. The thought of the money nagged but for the moment. “To hell with her: I’ll make it back overnight; we’ll put it in profit and loss,” said Grant.
He had been moldering for years with the world closing in on him. This new international outlook gave him an interest in new women. At the moment, he found himself virtuous also. He picked up a Spanish woman of great beauty, in one of the big hotels, took her up to his room for the usual long-distance call, and when he came back from his bedroom with his coat off, found her sitting just as she had entered, chaste, still, touching, without a smile, on his sitting room lounge. He did not even kiss her. He took her downstairs again, gave her a drink, and after waiting a moment for the flame to stir him, took her back to her hotel in a taxi. He thought his virtue might melt in the taxi, but it did not. Instead, he said to her, “What were you doing in the hotel?”
“Waiting for men.”
“Why do you do this, you’re not suited to it?”
“I’m a widow, and have no money.”
“Have you been successful?”
“This is my first day at it.”
This gave Grant intense pleasure. He made an appointment with her for the next day. She did not keep it. He told Betty Goodwin all, adding, “I let her off and that set her on the right path; she’s gone home again—a beautiful woman! I could have had her and I gave her up of my own free will.”
When out with Sue, a wealthy libertine trying to better herself by radical frequentations, he met again Celia Grimm, who was collecting funds for refugees from fascism. He promised her that he would contribute “When you convince me—that’s your business, isn’t it? You see, I am a socialist myself—I gave a five-pound note once in London, to one of the ugliest women you ever saw; but she made a brave speech—I’m not tight in the purse-strings like you think, but you’ve got to appeal to my sentiment. That’s something your radical friends don’t appreciate. They don’t enlist human nature on their side. Say to a man with money, ‘Give.’ He won’t. But enlist his sympathy, tell him children are starving, they need fresh air, milk—take time off, take him around in a car, show him sharecroppers—he can’t stand it. He’s only human.”
He expressed a desire to meet “these Negroes of yours and see what you see in them—you see, I’m trying to understand, there’s no prejudice in me.”
He was taken by Celia Grimm and the warmhearted libertine, Sue, to a party given by a Hollywood writer in an apartment in a run-down house on Park Avenue. Here he met some permanent celebrities of the circles in which Celia and Sue lived. He delivered several of his speeches about human nature and was not greeted by the applause he had in cabarets from his “Communist” girl friends. He was naturally humiliated and thought they were at fault. If Miss Russell, who said she knew the Marxist circles of several European and South American countries, and the blonde, and Gussy the International Brigade woman and other cabaret radicals agreed with him, this society, obviously, was simply trying to push out an intruder, a business man.
At the party, Sue became infatuated with a stranger and left without a good-bye. As he took Celia Grimm to her parents’ home in a taxi, he held her hand and told her that she was right, he had got over his race prejudice. He realized the Negroes had charm, personality, they were different from us and probably knew more about love. Miss Grimm’s reply to this was not what he expected, but he took no notice of it. He was not even disappointed that she did not kiss him good night. He was anxious and elated. He had made an appointment for the next afternoon with Mrs. W
ood, the wife of one of the Negro celebrities. He had plunged into it. After listening carefully to what a group of people were saying, and learning a few phrases, he had gone over to Mrs. Wood, sitting by herself on a red velvet settee.
He told her he was a newcomer to the radical movement, though a socialist all his life; that he believed in the rights of minorities, and a few other things he had learned; and said that now, looking at her, he knew his intelligence, which had acted first, was really just instinct, for she appealed to him as a very unusual woman. He saw that the gulf between the races did not exist, and that if it had been created by first a feudalism and then capitalism, it could be bridged by understanding and, especially, love. He asked her if she believed in love at first sight; said that he now, tonight, had proof it existed. He liked her looks, she looked like the kind of woman he had always been searching for—only due to his old-fashioned upbringing and to being at heart an Englishman, and to having spent so much time abroad where he had no opportunities of meeting women like her, he had never thought of looking at them. Now it had come to him in a flash that love was no respecter of persons nor of race. He did not want anything wrong. He wanted to assure her of the purity of his intentions. Would she meet him the following afternoon, in some quiet place for tea and a little chat?—he wanted her advice. But she must tell him where, for he was practically a child in the world, went out little, rarely met women.
The Negro woman, whose husband was a great ranter, and who was tired of sitting, evening after evening, on a settee, red velvet or bare cane, was overwhelmed by this attack. She told him where to meet her: it was in a bar in the Village where the mingling of races was possible, a Spanish bar known only to the radical élite.
Grant was extremely flattered at being taken to this bar. He put money in the jukebox, danced with her. She was a remarkably elegant and light dancer.
She was very simply dressed. He wanted to get her a pair of gloves. Then came the problem of where to buy the gloves; they could not enter his usual stores together, and where to meet more intimately. These new obstacles interested him at first, but very soon began to bore him. He did not care for the pursuit nor for adventure. Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance: “I got no time for futures in women.”
In the end the woman arranged it with a friend. After two or three meetings in one week, he failed to call her up. Once or twice she left a message with the hotel clerk, but she never dared to call. He went back to his uptown bars.
9
He spent Christmas with his family as usual but returned to spend New Year’s Eve with the Flacks, as was his custom. He thought of them, since they were not money-seekers, as good luck. Once the New Year had come in, he dismissed them and either went to bed or to a cabaret, but he feared to bring in the New Year with bad people. With the Flacks this year he found Edwin Burgess, a poet admired by Flack who “did not sell ten copies.” Grant was enchanted, and took Burgess and his chubby, young, dark wife along with him to dinner, and then back to his hotel to see the New Year in. They listened to the radio and sleepily drank brandy. He looked at them with oyster-eyes and smiled. A cream-skimmer, he thought, a profit-taker, a man sitting on the backs of the poor who entertained such singularly poor and honest persons on New Year’s Eve, had every chance of avoiding the evil eye for the year to come. The superstition went further, with him, as always, trapped him. If this man sold only ten copies and was yet a fine writer, he would be willing to write, on a percentage basis, Grant’s best selling idea of All I Want Is a Woman. He took the man aside, into the other room, and made an appointment with him for the following week. The wife was quite pretty and so discontented with her life that she was surly. Grant spoke to her a moment as they waited for the signal on the radio, took her hand when they sang Auld Lang Syne, and made an appointment with her in town for the next week. He felt he had his reward when a few days later, a Sunday, a friend telephoned him in the morning to say that he had seen Barbara in Jacksonville, Florida, with a young naval officer. He had traced the girl to a hotel for Grant’s sake and found her living there with her mother, still as Mrs. Kent. Grant telephoned the Flacks and rushed down to them in a taxi. Edda opened the door.
“Where’s Jacksonville?” said Grant.
He kissed Edda on both cheeks, rushed in, whirling hat and cane, “Where’s Jacksonville? Is it chic? What’s she doing with a young naval officer?”
Flack came out, putting on his dressing gown, and grinned, “First town in Florida you hit going to Miami! It’s not chic, it’s fatback and grits. How the hell do I know? Who?”
“Give me some of that like a good girl! I mean the blonde,” said Grant, taking a cup of coffee off the table, draining it and holding out the cup for more.
“What blonde?”
“The blondine, Mrs. Kent, Mrs. Adams—the one who got divorced. Never wrote. Don’t understand it. Got to get my silver tea tray back. Silver picture frames. Took me for a ride—taught me a lesson.”
“If it isn’t too much to ask, would you mind putting a little order into your gibberish,” said Flack.
“That woman’s kept me in the dark since Reno. I’ll find her. I’ll take the train. I’ll surprise her.”
“That would surprise me,” said Edda.
“Listen, my boy, Davie, can’t go there myself, got to stay in town, Sam Uzzazuzz is in town, Jigago, want you to go, Davie, pay you the out-of-pockets, do me a favor, hunt her up and her party. Taught me a lesson. But she’ll pay me back.”
But Flack refused to go to Florida and so did Edda, in her turn. From their apartment Grant telephoned several hotels in Jacksonville, without success. He made Flack go out and get a list of hotels in Jacksonville. They telephoned all these.
Flack wearied, said, “Perhaps she only went to the hotel for a cocktail on the way home.”
“That’s it, that’s it! Where would be her next stop?”
The next day, Grant got to their flat before eight in the morning. He had traced Mrs. Kent to Washington. From their flat he now telephoned Washington—for the fourth time that morning, as he confessed. He told them his hopes, fears, sorrows.
This went on for nearly an hour. At length he believed that he had found the hotel, something in the porter’s voice giving him a cue. He therefore asked Edda to telephone the same hotel and ask for Mrs. Adams in the name of Mrs. Goodwin. This was done. The porter at once replied that Mrs. Adams was staying at the hotel with Mrs. Jones, but was out. Grant rejoiced, and began talking fast, telling the whole story over again, mixing up his ideas that she was innocent, and had been ill and had bad luck and had lost faith in him, with notions that she had betrayed him, was a cheat, and brought bad luck to all men. Presently, he took them out to dinner at the Brevoort. Grant, still full of joy, did not know what he was saying and certainly not what he was hearing. He went on talking madly, “If she’s in Washington, it’s only natural, as one day she told me she had been connected with a legation. She’s a very bright young woman, understands all the details of business. She had some schemes for smuggling currency and furs to Mexico, also perfumes; naturally I didn’t listen to her, but they were all right—that is to say, some holes in them, but if you picked out the good from the bad—but there’s nothing wrong about her. What if she went out with a young naval officer? There’s nothing wrong in that. I let the poor girl down, I said I was through with her. She lives with her mother, poor girl, that shows a good heart and her mother’s an innocent old woman, born and brought up a lady who doesn’t know where her daughter gets her money, when she gets it from men. That is—she does something not quite correct, not quite clean—now she fleeced me of forty thousand dollars and gave me nothing in return. And I told her, ‘Be good to me and I’ll give you anything. You call the numbers and I’ll get them for you, if you’re good to me. Just you name it, I’ll get it,’ I told her. Can’t blame her if she took money after tha
t.
“There’s always a man behind it. She told me that Schlaugenberger, that ace she knew, seduced her as a young girl, wouldn’t marry her, set her on the wrong track…She’s innocent, that girl, I swear it. I can’t get along without her. Tried to, can’t. That’s flat…And a thing I don’t often talk about, never in public, never to you, Edda, never to your father, but it’s the secret, she’s honey to me, I’m a honeybear, and she’s got honey. She’s sweet when she’s alone with me, she’s—” He went on pitiably talking about her as she was in love, with a big, drawn, hungry, old face.
“What if she has no use for me now? I got used to her. You don’t think she’d go with any young fella she picked up? A woman might—wartime, it’s a kind of patriotic feeling—but no woman falls for that braid and that clam kind of face.”
After weeks and months of pretending, even to himself, that he was looking for a soulmate, someone to finish his days with, of running round furiously in lecheries that lasted and lies that glittered only for an hour, this all burst out of him, his need for the blonde woman. When he saw they were sitting silent, he shouted, “But I’ll get over it, I’m only anxious to make her pay for all she did to me, the money—that’s lost; but the silverware, the furs—I’ll make her give it back. There are skeletons in her closet. I’ll make them rattle. It isn’t the money, I’m not mean—not avaricious—if it’s a big love affair I give big pay—but if she’ll come back to me and say, ‘I made a mistake, it’s you I want, forgive and forget,’ then I will do the handsome, too. ‘Let’s start a clean sheet,’ I’ll say. Forgive and forget. But no naval officers. What’s your advice, Edda? You’re a woman! I’ll take your advice. You know by instinct. Tell me what to do. Does she love me? What’s your opinion?”
A Little Tea, a Little Chat Page 8