“Now take insurance, that’s one of the fattest markets in the country, and it makes millions for anyone who touches it. The poorest son-of-a-bitch in the country works his hide off to pay insurance and see what happens when your automobile runs into another car, you try and get the claim. If you can sit it out, you get it, but you got to sweat for it. Me and my friends, we’re living entirely on inefficiency; but I’m an American patriot and I like to see efficiency. I could live on efficiency and make more out of it than I make on inefficiency…Well, I’m no reformer and if the goddamn suckers want to keep me fat this way, O.K. I’m not going to live on aspirin trying to make the country run better. But I got friends in Washington who are reformers, and they want to organize this country so they squeeze every last ounce of energy out of it and every last penny of profit; and those little weasels over there can have their wars and their Hitlers, they’ll show just like a Mexican jumping bean in the hopper of hell. Let them wear themselves out, we’re just getting into our stride, why, we didn’t even find a formula yet, but those wizards are working it out. Now this s.o.b.—Mussolini—he thought he had a good idea with his formula, the corporate state; but what’s that? Ice-cream soda for school kids. No American would want that kind of salad dressing. We only want one thing and that’s more efficiency and all the wheels grinding twenty-five hours a day, and this’ll be a country like there never was before on the face of the earth since we parted from the goddamn monkeys.”
“But, Hugo, you never talked like this before. He just sits there drinking whisky,” said Angela, opening her eyes.
March said, “She’s putting on some act and I don’t like it. If I never talked like this it’s because I can’t talk to a feeble-minded moron.”
“You see what I am to him,” she wept, her whole attitude pretty artifice and protest.
“Keep your puss closed or I’ll put something in it you can’t spit out. There’s only one real woman round here, she does the work and you’re an ornament.”
He said to Flack, “Let’s get out of here and get a breath of air.”
Mrs. March sulked. March shifted his glance to Fairy, who had been giving young Davis secret touches and lascivious glances, shielded as she thought by her father’s serious speech. March flipped a titbit at her across the tablecloth, called attention to her well-developed figure, her pretty face, sparkling, oval blue eyes, which resembled her mother’s.
“Gently, Fairy,” said he, noticing her right hand on Davis’s thigh. A cloud passed over her face, she shifted in her chair, let her hands and wrists play scales on the tablecloth, and burst out laughing, a foolish, open-mouthed laugh, with a weak rictus. The young admirer, Davis, an intelligent, dry-minded youth, smiled at March. He was the prospective son-in-law. Fairy went back to her public flirting, touching Davis on the collar, neck, ear, hair. March looked at this for a moment, and said in a strange tone, warning, firm, “Fairy, now behave, my little queen.”
She straightened up and dropped her soft underlip. In a few minutes, when her father had started to talk about the s.o.b. in the White House (meaning President Roosevelt), she went back, with side-glances of daring, to her play, Davis smiling but not openly encouraging her.
The father said, “Wait till you hear something. What are you going to have on your fifteenth birthday, Fairy?”
She laughed at him.
“Come, come, little sweetheart: what is Father going to give you?”
The mother frowned and tapped on the tablecloth. The girl laughed, “An evening dress.”
“Yes, the week before her fifteenth birthday, if she is a good girl and goes back to school and does not run away again, remember: my Fairy and I are going into town to get the very best evening gown we can buy, I don’t care if we go to Bergdorf’s, or wherever you like, and we’ll spend two hundred dollars, if you like. And I’m going to throw a big party for you, sweetheart, aren’t I? In the Iridium Room, on the Astor Roof, anywhere you say.”
“Cut low,” said the girl.
“I don’t approve of it, but what I say doesn’t count,” said the mother.
“I promised it and what I promise I perform. But until then, Fairy, you must wear the dresses they give you at school. Father will be angry. Father will not give you the evening gown.”
“Décolleté, décolleté. I won’t go back to school unless I can have a new dress now.”
The father spoke in warning tones again, and she drooped; but he added tenderly, “When you are fifteen you will get a diamond bracelet, too.”
“A wristwatch,” she said.
“Go out now, Fairy.”
He glanced with intense, covetous fondness at the strange girl who was not even looking at him but at Davis, and flirting again as foolishly as a young dog. “I want it, I want it. I have pretty shoulders, Maxim told me.”
Her father watched her go out with an expression of fondness and doubt, “She’s so innocent for her age. I’m glad she has picked out a good boy like Davis. I told Davis she’ll have a hundred thousand dollars when she marries and I’m going to let her marry at seventeen, if she wants it. She doesn’t know what it’s all about now; she’s just like one of my white chicks out there. I keep her caged up, too, it’s better.”
“He married me at seventeen too; I regret it. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see life,” said the wife impudently. March took no notice of her. Angela said shrilly, “She’s too young to have a boy or get married, but of course what I say doesn’t count.”
March half rose and looked cruelly right into his wife’s mouth, “I’ll come round the table and smack your puss in a minute; stop your goddamn clacking, I’m sick of it.”
“I’m going upstairs,” said the wife.
“Scuttle up, if you don’t I’ll tread on you,” said the man.
The wife ran off. However, at the door, she stopped, was smiling again, seductive in the pale blue velvet slacks she had been wearing since before lunch. She said naughtily, “I’m going riding.”
Presently they saw her, smacking her crop against her legs, pulling on white gloves. She had a blue ribbon in her hair. The men looked at her as she walked through the house, through the kitchen. March said roughly, “I’ve got Claud keeping an eye on his mother now; she’s been up to her tricks again.”
Flack knew nothing of her tricks and said nothing. After lunch they sat in one of the porches while March drank four or five heavy whisky-and-sodas, then they took a walk, to see the land. Presently March became sullen. “Where did the goddamn bitch ride to? I’ll shut her up.” He told Flack now his wife was certifiably feeble-minded and he intended to have her put in a private asylum. She had no more decorum than an animal.
Davis had taken the Fairy for a drive in the car. Presently they came back, excited and mischievous. The Fairy had had two cocktails, although they were forbidden to her. “It’s all right if it’s with you, Boy,” said March to Davis, “but otherwise it’s not allowed.”
The young girl laughed foolishly and said the boys always gave her cocktails; her father could not stop her. “They’ll do anything I ask them. They’ll kiss me, too, if I let them; they let me do anything if I let them kiss me. If I could wear a midriff evening dress, they’d do anything for me,” said she, stretching in the seat. The father looked at her with touching belief, “You mustn’t say those things, Fairy; you don’t know yet what it’s all about, queenie,” he murmured. “You’ll go back to school and when you’re a woman you’ll wear your evening gown.”
The young couple got out of the car and went indoors, declaring they would find some drinks in the kitchen, even if “old Downey” tried to stop them. “I hate that old bitch, she hates my mother.”
March seemed happy now that his daughter was at home, but as nightfall approached he became more vindictive in his remarks about his wife. Presently she rode in, tired, querulous, and called to an as yet unseen man to take her horse. She strolled in, pulling off her gloves, and asked her husband for a drink.
&nbs
p; “You know goddamn well you can’t drink.”
The wife, turning to Flack, said, “Because I’m supposed to be weak-minded, you know. Well, I will drink and I do drink, if not with you, then with others, who are kind to me. I have friends; he doesn’t know I have people who are sorry for me. I have a friend Marie, haven’t I, Hugo?”
“Yes, she has a friend Marie, and Marie is a goddamn fine woman, and if it weren’t for Marie I’d shut you up tonight. Go away and get yourself fixed up for dinner; you can’t eat your dinner in pants, the way you did your lunch.”
She laughed and strolled off upstairs. The husband said, “She knows she can’t get away with anything. And I mean what I say.”
After dinner, the young couple set off in Davis’s car to take Fairy back to her convent school.
“Mummy’ll come and see you next week,” cried the wife.
“No, Mummy won’t come and see you next week. Mummy’ll stay away,” said the husband. And he took his friend away to the smokeroom, explaining that one of the reasons for sending the daughter to the convent school was the silly, weak behavior of the mother. “If I could, I’d take her away from her altogether. I’ve told the school I’ll take her away if they allow her mother to see her.”
At eight-thirty the host, having drunk several more heavy whiskies, fell to snoring on the porch couch, and the son and guest, after reading books in different rooms, themselves went upstairs. The next morning, the two men, become very friendly, were talking about business matters and March was once more showing his furniture and paneling to be admired, when on an impulse he began opening the desk, library shelves, bar, and cupboards. He slid aside a double panel under the bookcase and showed a collection of modern guns, revolvers, hunting rifles, guns for street and field warfare.
“I can sight and pretty damn near kill a deer at ten miles—or a man. I could get anyone coming up that drive.” Then he bent down and looked round at his friend, his heavy face suffused with blood, his large blue eyes clouding. “I’ve even got a submachine gun amongst others.”
“You’re not the only one who collects guns, I know; but the others collect Civil War stuff,” said Flack, somewhat uneasily.
March straightened up, “And I spent money on what can come in useful, no antiques that’ll go off backwards.”
“Expect a private war up here?”
March pushed to the panel, which concealed the heavier guns, and locked the door, saying, as he put the keys in another drawer which he locked, in his habitual ominous tones, “It-could-be. I think—we—are—damnwell—living our whole goddamn lives in a state of siege. There are too many smart monkeys about for my liking.”
Flack changed the subject, dragging in Grant’s affair for the first time—“a woman he played around with and got involved with and who has been dancing with officers in Washington. I wanted to save him from himself and suggested that she might be on the police records, she must be.”
March poured himself a drink, sat down, “It’s not that dishface blonde that he’s been chewing my ear off about? What was her name before she married this Adams? Just that, and where she was born. Has she got a friend, heavy sugar—? Easier to trail a woman by a man.”
The next day, Flack made the only other reference to the matter as they drove in, early in a sparkling morning, almost spring. He said, “Robbie telephoned Washington from our place and from his own and God knows where else. They’d have him down, the idiot, perhaps as her friend, he’s always making a mighty noise, a chorus boy imitating the heavy—it was pretty indiscreet, any way you look at it, if she is a spy.”
“What the hell gives you the idea that she’s a spy?”
“There’s a war on and they use women like the blondine.”
“Don’t she get enough out of Grant? Is he busted?”
“He paid forty thousand dollars for her in one year, then gave her the gate. She always has a hedge. She married the hedge. It was no soap. He spanked her in public or something—who cares? That’s all in the day’s work to a girlie like that. She has a delightful friend, Paulie Russell, who spies on her, hoping for a few hot dinners from Grant, a couple of bottles of perfume—she’s the soubrette. It’s better than the Salvation Army, though she has to sing psalms for it and listen to Robbie’s line, ‘I’m a radical, I’m a romantic,’ Jesus C. Christ, you don’t know him—and then she wears better clothing than the Army lassies. Probably Grant promised to marry Paula, he always does; it’s the short road to what he calls the honey. The girls soon find it conspiracy in law for him or them to agree to break by fraud a signed contract, viz., marriage, and they get mad, especially the kind Robbie picks. Then they leave him, or they truly do him damage—the old honeybear always talks too much—or they decide it’s easier to be taken on again at cheaper pay. The Hollywood method; throw him out, he’ll come crawling back: Grant’s own invention though—no marriage, a cocktail about once a week, or at first six pairs of stockings at Christmas, but the following Christmas, two pairs, and the next Christmas a jar of marmalade—ha-ha-ha—he works them down to bargain prices. Then he drops them altogether, unless he uses them as a floorwasher; but he never lets up on his sweet song and he keeps plenty of houris hanging round, all at different stages of his System, as he calls it, and not even a ground plan before him, all in his head—what a brain, it could have been used for something better, as he said! He gets them at last—and if they’re leftists, at first—to sell honey free. It’s the System.”
“It sounds cheap. How do you know he has any money?”
“I’ve gone over his list of securities. I know the address of his trust funds and I’ve witnessed his will. I’m his do-all and net-nothing.”
“What do you want to lick his behind for? It still sounds cheap, keeping you for a yes-man. It don’t appeal to me. I offered you a participation. You could have done better with me.”
“He keeps me to be his no-man, don’t you understand? You know damn well I’m a leftist and I have to speak my mind. Now with your crowd of bums, I have to drink whisky every evening at five and say nothing. I can’t do it, Hugo. I prefer that guy with all his faults and his strange, sweet song. I tell him he’s going nuts when he begins to think he’s Mussolini. He goes to all newsreels in the hope of seeing Mussolini behaving like a chimp on a stone balcony.”
“I thought he was a radical?”
“He’s a radical like I’m a Dupont.”
“I still don’t see what’s in it for you—you got to pay your rent.”
“He’s asking Edda and me along with him to Rome and to Lake Como after the war.”
“Where the hell’s Lake Como? Do you want to go fishing?”
“He’s got a chalet, that’s a kind of cottage, and a house in Rome.”
“And he’s taking you free? Tell that to the King of Denmark. Why should he waste dough on you? I guess he’s taking you to see the etchings, as he says.”
“You don’t understand Robbie, Hugo. He’s a tenderhearted man and he never forgets he was once a poor boy.”
“If he never forgets he was a poor boy that’s a good reason for him to hate poor boys.” March made a loud Bronx cheer, and continued, “Well, be that as it may, and I think you’re, frankly, nuts, I don’t think he’s got any money; anyhow, in Wall Street, I go on a rule: every man is worth one third of what he is said to own.”
“Grant is worth much more than one million dollars,” said Flack sharply.
“That’s not peanuts; but they said he was worth more. What is his object with the blondine—is it a payoff or is it honey? That’s sweet, I love that!”
“He says he wants to make her disgorge: she got valuables out of him. It’s a question of vanity.”
“A sucker for women.”
“He paid out one hundred thousand dollars once—all told. I knew him then, too.”
“What makes him think this one is a spy?”
“She knows someone in a legation.”
“That’s all he knows?”
“I love that,” said March. Presently he began to talk about stocks and bonds with Flack. “I presume Grant is doing pretty well in the market if he pays you for your advice.”
Flack made no reply. In the afternoon Flack brought Grant to Beaver Street to meet Hoag and March. Said March, weightily, “I understand you want to find out about a certain party, a woman. I have an informant I have contacted this morning. My informant is Edison Furnivall Carter, you can check up on him, but you can’t talk to him; he doesn’t talk to strangers. I did Carter a favor, and he does me favors. He just informed me he believes he recognizes the name of the party you are interested in. He’s not sure and he won’t commit himself until I confirm the bona fide of my party. To do me a favor he’ll take a gander at the documents for me, or get a man he can trust. He don’t usually do it, he has clerks for that, but this is the kind of thing you wouldn’t want a clerk to be in possession of—am I right? Question One: What do you want to know? Question Two: Will you pay a sum of money, say five hundred dollars, to a patriotic charity, sending the check to Carter, whose reputation is of the highest? Question Three: Do you want to try some other method first, as hiring a private dick?”
This composure upset Grant. He walked up and down the office. He looked through the glass partitions into the general office. March asked for money and all he offered was a three-barreled name. Flack, at once sensing Grant’s mood, recommended that instead of spending so large a sum as $500 which March had mentioned to him, Grant first of all employ a Washington detective. This would cost perhaps much less since they might find out something the first week. On the other hand, it was like taking a lottery ticket while the other was a sure thing: he would know at once, perhaps tomorrow.
A Little Tea, a Little Chat Page 11