A Little Tea, a Little Chat

by Christina Stead

  He did not know that he was approaching those subjects which filled his father with terror. He only knew that then his father sat silent, swallowing everything, obedient, confused, yielding to him, and only at a certain moment (when an arrogant smile appeared in Gilbert’s eyes and his father knew he thought he had won and was turning generous), then only, gruffly telling him to come along, that he needed a little walk in the fresh air. Gilbert, in whom the sensual life was developing slowly, liked to drink, but not to be drunk. He thought of himself as a gentleman and esthete. He would rise then with dignity, follow his father, and outside on the sidewalk, draw his father’s arm through his: the good, manly son.

  The father, to avoid the boredom of his son’s company, and perhaps also to involve him in the low company he despised, now began to take Gilbert about with him, generally.

  At the same time Gilbert had fallen in love, frankly, according to his nature, with Miss Celia Grimm, who was not more than two years older than himself. He became, in the course of a few months, sunny, generous, comradely with women, mature, open with men, and a frank radical, already smiling at his father’s worn-out “socialist” sentimentality.

  This unexpected result of Grant’s introducing Gilbert to his real world was not clear to Grant, but he found the young fellow less human than ever. Then one or two accidental meetings and some gossip of the Goodwins’, an ill-natured crack about his age, enlightened him. Gilbert’s affair with Miss Grimm was of the most serious kind. Grant was thunderstruck. He resolved to get his son out of town and into something useful, if possible without waiting for the war to come to an end. Fortunately for his projects, Gilbert had fallen from a horse and injured his kneecap, and found himself discharged honorably toward the end of 1944. He threatened to re-enlist, tried to re-enlist, but was rejected. He spent a week or two in the apartment with his father, became unruly and vacuous and decided to get a job. He called his father’s place “the zenana”—another hit in the dark which Grant did not care for—and wanted his father to move with him to another place, or let him live alone. The father would not permit this extra expense, pleaded poverty, and had to endure the detested idea of the boy roaming round town looking for a job. He quarreled bitterly with his son about this project of looking for a job. Unknown to him, Gilbert put an advertisement into the paper, supposing that this was all that was necessary. This was a great step for him, an act of courage. He was throwing himself naked on a world without connections. Gilbert received no replies. His father at once pointed out to him his defects in the business world: “What can you do? What do you know? What have you to offer? The labor market is a market like any other. You cannot go and say, ‘Here I am, willing to work, but I don’t know what at!’ A laborer can do that, for he is strong like you are and has two hands and a set of muscles and he can carry things on his head, and does not ask for an accountant’s salary. But for your sort of job you have to carry things in your head—something different! What do you know, Gilbert? Nothing! You’re an abstraction and no abstraction is a commodity. Can you count—not much—” the father laughed ironically—“you can count your pennies, as you did when you were a child, you can put money into a bank account and draw a check on it, but you don’t know the meaning of a check. What is a check? You don’t know. Your handwriting is like a bit of secret writing. You can’t typewrite, you don’t know shorthand. Every little girl in the street knows these things and not you. You’ve been to war—so has everyone. My boy, do you know what you are? Grant’s son—and that’s your total stock in trade. I’ll get one of my friends to try you out at something, as Grant’s son.”

  Gilbert cried, “I’ll go and work with my muscles, my head, and my hands, as you say I won’t get jobs from one of your friends except as Grant’s son!”

  “Even your muscles are nothing much.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “If I had any sense, I’d let you go out there some frosty morning, and shiver for a job in an employment office or at a factory gate—but I’m damned if I’ll see you waste your time like that. I trained you in animal husbandry and chicken raising and I’ll get an accountant for you, and a muscle-man for you, and you’ll go out and look after my place in Jersey. That’s what you’ll do and nothing else.”

  The young man held out for several weeks, trying to land city jobs, but he saw his money in the bank getting lower, and he came to the conclusion that he had small ability and no training. He then tried two jobs with his father’s friends, Goodwin and an acquaintance of Spatchwood, but could not obey, could not be less the spoiled boy, saw no reason to change his manners: “I am not going to sell furs after all, why should I adapt myself? Is there any moral value to keeping your temper under insults and in lying about merchandise? You don’t know how Goodwin behaves in business, Dad.”

  The father now saw that he had only to await his hour; the ungifted young man, rendered more helpless by him, would soon capitulate. He now urged Goodwin to put up with the young fool’s insults and tempers, in order to disgust him forever.

  After Gilbert lost his job with the Goodwin fur firm (in which his father was a silent partner), he tried once more to get Grant to put money into educational films for after the war. He then went out to raise money himself, but without knowing where to go or how to get financing. He stood for two days, as the Christmas rush was approaching, in a department store, selling toy movie projectors. He was handsome and liked children. He made sales. But on the third day he came home and said to his father, “I have examined myself and tried myself out, no one can deny that; and I have written my findings down on two sheets of paper. The first tells what I thought about myself before I left the Army and just after, when I told you I intended to have a good time and see life and grope, and perhaps find—You remember I said to you that was my object and my right? The second sheet tells what I now think of my aptitudes and indeed general situation, now that I have tried to get a job and get financing for my film business. Underneath the second I have written a few lines about what I suppose to be my life pattern. Would you like to read them or shall I tell you?”

  Grant, after casting his eye impatiently over the strangely written sheets, said, “No time—tell me, quicker—”

  The son then, once more at ease, crossed his legs, spread out the sheets, and proceeded in his usual manner to analyze himself in stupefying detail. He found himself, in brief, a mediocre man who still hoped to have some place in society, but found nothing in himself to give out. He felt he should accept the first place offered to him, and unusually lucky to have a place carved out for him by his father. He concluded, “Don’t think I accept your offer of a situation with joy or satisfaction! I detest the prospect and know I shall not be happy. But it will give me a few years to look around; and I am not, after all, obliged to do anything, am I? But I feel a debt to society, since I did not actually fight for society, if you understand me; so I shall at least undertake this drudgery as a kind of penance, or, if you will, because I haven’t the guts to fight it out in the streets. I am an ordinary man, not even a malcontent or a roughneck; I am just a cypher or, as you put it, an abstraction. Perhaps this comes from the war or the scattering away of all ideas and aims by the war. I do not know. Perhaps I am just a function of a social situation. I do not know. But knowing all these things may be so and unable at present to face an empty life, I will go on your chicken farm…I hope you will write at once to Manfred the manager, tell him to get up the accounts, and make arrangements about the Manfreds leaving. I don’t like that woman and do not think she is clean. Please ask her to have the place cleaned; and tell her I shall be down on Saturday to make preliminary arrangements.”

  The father, startled at this, began to object, but the young fellow, having “thought this thing through,” was not to be put off. Grant, who was expecting a visit from Livy Wright for the week end and did not trust this new son with Manfred, could only get the descent on Largo Farm, the chicken farm, put off for one week.

  In th
e end, because of a new and more dangerous affair with the blondine, he was prevented from going.

  It was hard to lure Gilbert away from the prey he had smelled out. Gilbert’s natural inflexible rectitude, his only talent, had so far walked in the world unused; in the peculiar state of affairs at Largo Farm, he had found employment for it. The accounts were not only slightly at fault, but irrational, concealed; there were headings X and Y. There were signs of splits and handouts, things costing exactly three per cent more (one per cent, one per cent, and one per cent) than they should have, passing through three hands. Gilbert was not very good at arithmetic, but his rectitude itself served as an illumination and served him more than arithmetic. Gilbert had many angry sessions with his father, trying to point out to the old man, whom he now regarded as senile, how he was being robbed—“They take percentage after percentage—not a farmer roundabout but digs into your pocket.” Grant flushed, raised his eyes to the ceiling, laughed somewhat, and looked at his son in a confused way and would say, “Let’s go out for a Scotch-and-soda.”

  28

  During the summer, Barbara Downs had come back to town and taken a flat in a fashionable street near the center. At first, things had been cool between Grant and his old flame, but presently they were daily companions, though Grant, at Barbara’s request, concealed this new phase of the affair from their friends. They met at the Pickwick Hotel and once or twice they had run into Goodwin or Walker, one of Barb’s lawyers, there, but both had promised to say nothing. Churchill Downs, a delicate, romantic man with old-fashioned ideas of housekeeping, would not have permitted Barbara to meet men outside the home. Grant once more opened accounts for Barbara and her crony, Miss Russell, at Manetti’s, Paul’s, and other small French-style restaurants where she was known. His friends missed him; he became absorbed, difficult at the office. He hurried from work and was up late every night. He began to drink too much again. Barbara, in order to meet him at night, pretended to be taking a course in some difficult language. She was very good at languages and did actually study a little on her own, to show that she was making progress. She seemed to have changed with this last marriage. Downs loved her, gave her fair housekeeping money, but was strict about accounts. Barbara would find it hard to get a divorce from him. She was already bored by the man, horrified at the prospect of sitting at the table with him at lunch and dinner. She told Grant simply that she could not tolerate the company of any one man, that Grant himself was the nearest she had come to a tolerable friend. With her husband she was obliged to conceal her real feelings, her experience, her genuine views of life. He did not allow any gossip in the house, believed she was injured but pure, and really disliked her reading novels and going to movies, but for her sake tolerated it. Barbara was quite able to please her husband and her mother-in-law, but had become very nervous with the strain of the long deception. She told Grant, “It is really not worth it; I only feel I am myself when with you!”

  Grant not only paid for her many extra expenses, but became her moral support. With her he did not repeat so many of his saws, nor sing of his castles in Spain: they had the same intense, prolonged, profound interest in petty domestic details, in buying, comparing prices, changing cleaners, in backbiting, small profit-taking, bonus-getting, in discharging servants; they liked to talk about cures for colds, and change one drugstore for another to test the coffee, or the aspirin tablets. Either would go a mile to change a ten-cent plastic comb or forty blocks to get some rare herb at a backstreet herbalist. Besides this, Barbara was still very handsome, and Grant, in his best days, still looked the powerful, successful business man. Grant had begun spending big money again, on his beloved, but he had something to do: he was never at a loss. At times he said to her, “But what does he do, Downs? Does he wait at home for you?”

  “Oh, he loves to listen to the radio and read a good book; he is a nice man: I have nothing to say against him. Only I don’t get enough money; and he’ll never let me go.”

  She could not stand the boredom and went off to Saratoga Springs, Grant sending her her extra expenses.

  One day in November, 1943, Goodwin with Betty, drinking in the White Bar, and quarreling about the supply of sheepskins for fur, in the world, which Goodwin had oversold, declared to Grant, “You don’t know about the supply of sheepskins because you don’t know anything. I’ll prove it. You don’t know Barbara Downs is getting a divorce and you’re a co-respondent. You’ll stink to high heaven, you’re a member of a syndicate and you don’t know even that; and I’ll prove it, here it is in an out-of-town gossip column, a blond, business man, eh?”

  The unsuspecting husband, not a fool, as Barb had supposed (said Betty Goodwin), was given the alarm by one of Barb’s own friends, it was thought, some jealous woman, blackmailing. This had all happened months ago, and while Barb had been amusing herself, the evidence had collected against her, even through the efforts of “Brauner, Arthur,” who had become her husband’s friend. Goodwin shouted, “And while you were showing them the Land of Canaan, she showed them the milk and honey. Oh, boy—the Old Honeybear was asleep at the switch.”

  And the evidence had collected against her and the “syndicate” of co-respondents. Grant had seen Barb every day for tea and a chat at his apartment and did not know this. Barb did with him what she liked; and what about the others?

  “And you, you telling us that she had fallen for you but too late—shabby old wolf, no one would buy you or sell you, but she did, for her business is rotten old skins and—”

  Grant flushed and lowered his head; but his eyes blackened, for Goodwin was the blondine’s friend and what did this attack mean? The man frothed on, vain and vile.

  Grant said, “They have nothing on me, nothing on me. I’ve not been near the woman except for tea—she came up to my place on her way to the station, with all her bags and her little cat—she left the valises in the lobby, I told her not to—but she was on the way to Saratoga and it wasn’t in this place, it was another, besides, that was months ago—and supposing she did—I always had a suite, that is not evidence enough, I know. No, no, they have nothing on me. Besides, perhaps it’s just a rumor.”

  They told him much more. Her husband had left her. She was out of money. She would be “out on the street”…and would resort to anything. He went to the booth in the lobby and telephoned the woman, “Come back at once, Barb, I just heard some news that gave me a terrible shock. I must see you.”

  But she would not come till the following day and he left his guests after a short, irritable moment with them. All knew that he had telephoned her. He left them downstairs, went up in ill humor. After taking several glasses of brandy, he went to examining the linen closets, his suits and Gilbert’s. The young man used the place when in town. Grant discovered a pair of pants with muddy cuffs, a pair of shoes that had some excuse for being sent to the mender’s, a laundry list on which one sheet was marked as missing. Though it was nearly eleven, and Mrs. MacDonald had permission to retire at ten, he rushed through the silent, shining kitchen, and seeing a line of light under her door, knocked loudly. She came out in her dressing gown, her white hair in plaits. Her radio was still on. He dragged her out to the linen closet for an explanation about the missing sheet, then from closet to closet, fussing and complaining. She said at last, “But I think something has upset you, Mr. Grant, for you would not have me up like this unless you had something on your mind.” Her voice trembled with weak emotion.

  At these kind words, he changed his cry of “My good woman” into “You’re pair-fectly right”—for he spoke a sort of Scottish with her—and sent her back to bed. He went into the young man’s room, looked through his drawers, and set the letters and pencils in neat piles. He found an old notebook in which he had once pasted clippings about foreign cotton markets—a thing he had thrown away and Gilbert had kept. He glanced through a packet of letters from his wife to Gilbert—things he had never read and did not read now. But he noted their different tones, slavishly affe
ctionate:

  Your poor little Dixie-mamma is very much alone but whenever I feel it too much I take a good nap, and this seems to make the time pass. I think of my Little-Bear and send you big hugs, big, big hugs from Middle-Bear. These last days have been so cold, there has been nothing to do but tuck up on the sofa and shut my eyes and sleep. Christmas is coming and I will see all my Dodos.

  Your loving Dixie-girl.

  There were fifteen or sixteen letters, perhaps, almost identical; no turbulence, no reprimand, no plan appeared in them. Grant sat down and thought about his big affairs. His wife, first.

  She was very pretty and very rich and—why not? The marriage improved his position. He was then building up his fortune. He had had no time to think about Dixie or his infant son, Gilbert. The thing had accomplished itself by the will of society, without protest from him. The grand affair with Laura had put an end to all his regrets: twelve years of misdemeanor had ended in this romance, his only moment of exaltation. Even so, he had proceeded with this foreign beauty with a business caution. When he received her letter, full of the passion, self-denying courtesy, and youthful recklessness of love, he had not replied to it. She had left her husband, a rich man, and mentioned Grant’s name to him. She was, in Grant’s view, ruining herself by losing a large regular income. Who would support her parents now? They had stripped themselves to give her a dowry, only part of which would remain with her. Grant did not reply to this letter. Laura had waited a week and wired: “Did you receive my letter? Telegraph.”

  Grant had not replied. After three weeks had passed, he had a note typed in his office,

  Dear Madame Manganesi,

  A brief urgent business trip will bring me to Rome as soon as conditions permit. I shall stay at the Bristol where they know me. I have some financial matters to go over and am thinking of making certain investments in Rome; perhaps you and your husband would meet me for tea and could suggest the name of someone. I am looking forward to seeing you.