A Little Tea, a Little Chat

by Christina Stead

  Thus he had exposed his present defense. She had only observed his disquiet about the “photomontage.” She, meanwhile, had thought out her own situation and had seen that she had had a great mistake in marrying a naïve man. The best thing would be for her to marry Grant, whom she disliked and was tired of, but whom she knew she could manage, in his old age. She had to bring the thing into the open. In doing this she would be pulling against her counsel, Walker, and Goodwin’s friends, Goodwin himself, for all these expected that Grant would put up a good round sum. It was regarded not only as a good joke, but as sound business and a mild way of soothing Downs. Goodwin had yesterday afternoon offered to settle the whole thing to everyone’s satisfaction, by talking horse-sense into Downs. He would make the following proposition: That Grant should pay for the Reno divorce and lawyers and for the agreed-upon alimony; but the alimony would be “severance pay” to Downs, whose business was in a bad way and who would certainly be glad of the money. Goodwin was quite confident, “Walker has already been to Downs’s lawyer, Smitt, and Smitt was not too cold.”

  The blondine, who was in debt and overdrawn, sat for some time thinking over Grant’s defense and his attitude to her, and then reached out in her memory and considered what pressure she could bring to bear on Grant, or what use she could make of the few friends of his she knew outside the Goodwin circle. She felt very bitter against Grant and wanted to fling the blame for her whole spoiled life on him. She knew she was not a blackmailer but an injured woman, followed by bad luck, who was trying to get a portion of her rights and expectations from a malicious miser. The thought of the heavy weight of money lying in his banks, and of the properties abroad in his name, made her think more keenly of how desperate she was for a mere living. He was a hard nut to crack.

  She decided to go to Manetti’s that evening, not to make any trouble, but to watch Grant and see what company he might be keeping at the moment. If she worried the thing over for several days, with Goodwin and two lawyers working for her, and with them sought some business arrangement with her husband who might be got off, she would be able to get out of this mess. It came to her more forcibly what she would lose if this affair were whistled away. She was really thirty-seven. She had to get a marriage or a large sum of money out of it. She began thinking whom she could ask to write certain letters for her. She thought, I do no harm to the wives, for I open their eyes to what kind of a man they have got; and if I shake the basket hard enough one of those hard nuts will fall out and crack open his bank account. She lined up the men to whom she might reasonably apply for help, men to whom she had given consolation. She saw them in bright, hard light against a white sheet as in a police line-up. She arraigned them and thought each was guilty. The one nearest to her was Grant, then a French immigrant antiquary who had done well during the war folly, Murvieux, James Alexis, Hugo March, the rest were poor men, “love affairs.” She could get very little out of Alexis, with whom she had private arrangements. There was only the distant possibility that in a few more years he might take up with her; but never in a satisfactory way. He would ask her to live obscurely and without a name or any amusement on an orchard he had bought in Spain, if the monarchy came back.

  She had a luncheon appointment with Goodwin and Walker; she sat down to sketch out the letter which she would have sent to the wives. One of them would perhaps bring it out into the open. She thought about her project as she wrote. Would it be better to wait a while? To drag it nearer and nearer to the daylight herself—and yet be able to control the moment of exposure?

  After the interview with Grant she had found herself very depressed and had lost heart at the difficulties that hung upon her like a monstrous obesity. It seemed to her the lawyers and the Goodwins, who wanted her to stick Grant with the divorce, for malicious fun, were pushing her toward some disaster. Her husband’s lawyer had indicated, said Walker, that he would not be satisfied under ten thousand dollars. She did not believe she could get this sum even from Grant, and by the time it reached her husband would there be enough left to satisfy him and his mother and would there be a cent for her? Besides, the lawyer had told her she must work to show that she had a means of livelihood, better away from her cronies.

  At the last moment, a distrust of the Goodwins came to her: what was their interest in it all? In this friendless state she went with her mother to Manetti’s and through a screen of pot-plants observed Livy’s dinner party. The old woman’s pestilential suggestions, envious, venal, filled her ears until late into the night. She sent the anonymous letters.

  37

  The next day she attacked Grant by telephone and in two rendezvous, in a height of sordid and jealous passion. She was ready to listen to any plot against Grant. Grant met her, for example, twice in the White Bar, but would not allow her to meet him at home. He seemed agitated and alien, over the phone, “You have me, sweetie, if no else stands by you, only don’t come here. I’m packing. I had a letter from my wife and she’s anxious about me—a bit dubious too, perhaps. Don’t blame her. I’m going to Cuba. Bit of business—Sam Positive—I have been very anxious about what you told me, darling, and about those photomontages. My wife’s telegram is very puzzling too.”

  She seized this opportunity, “It would not surprise me if my husband, that inexperienced man who is forty-five years old but is pure as a newborn child, and so must make the rest of us pay for it, if he sent a letter to your wife. He is calling everyone to witness how innocent he is and what kind of a woman I am, that is as he says. He said men like you should not be loose in society, that you ruined the lives of innocent women, meaning, of course, your poor wife. It was very touching. He said an example should be made of you so that you would not be able to hold up your head. I told him that if he had remained guaranteed pure by the Pure Food Act, at forty-five, it was a miracle. He threatened me and your family life, injecting his poison in the most fantastic, unexpected, unnatural places. Who is the wrongdoer, I said, you, or me, if you do such a thing as to write to innocent, ignorant people like Grant’s wife?”

  Grant muttered humbly, “What you say worries me very much, darling; and about those letters, if he is behaving like a madman and writing all over the country, we must stop them. Make him bring his proofs into court or settle the whole thing out of court, but not allow him to run amok. This is very serious. You can’t do anything with a man who’s running amok. It’s shoot him or tie him up. We’re innocent, sweetie. I’ve just been kind to you because you’re one of a large circle of friends and we have friends in common, and we all went out together on parties, it is hard to show harm in that. I suppose a man and a woman can have tea together without injuring the marriage bond, without having irregular designs on a contract. It is not actionable. They haven’t a case, sweetie. I helped you out—”

  “Oh, you’ve been marvelous,” she said icily.

  “I did my best for you.”

  “Excuse me, while I dry up my tears on that subject. Pardon me, Robert, you have been very cruel to me and I don’t know what to make of it. You are simply backing out of it and leaving me in the lurch. I got your note this morning and it made me furious, explaining why I was not in on the party last night. What a pity Mother and I ran into you as you were leaving with your gay party. You told everyone about the situation I am in. I heard you, otherwise should not have believed it, but not a word about your own part in it. ‘The blonde got into some trouble. Do me a favor and see if she’s there, I don’t want to run into her.’ What a pity I have good ears, not my own. You don’t suppose I have friends, do you? I give big tips and I have friends. Walls have ears. I turned to you for help. You try to turn tail and run, leaving me to face the pack. It wouldn’t be a wonder if I went out for revenge. It will be useless to pretend that we had tea together. Churchill was making inquiries behind my back and you confided in every stray dog in town. We had a long intimacy and no one would believe it, even if it is true, that we met about two hundred times, a lot of them in your flat, and you onl
y kissed my hand, and gave me a rose, like Karel Karolyi. Not with your reputation. Not with your unblemished character! Ha-ha. You try and call character witnesses. Will anyone believe it was tea? Where will the gull be found to think it was friendship? It was a friendship between a married man and woman. Under the circumstances they are entitled to think what they like. It was criminal if custom makes it so, even without the photographs and letters, the telegrams and cards from florists.”

  “You kept those?”

  “I’m a collector.”

  “I’ll pay the lawyer to get you off, that’s all, and it’s only because I don’t like to see a decent woman friend of mine—perhaps the photographs are of a different fellow altogether.”

  “I thought you said photomontage?”

  He started to bully, “I don’t want to hear any more about it. He’s scaring you. That sawny wouldn’t go through with it. Perhaps he knows something else you haven’t told me.”

  “An accident happened for which I was not responsible. Churchill has been crazy, insane, and following me for months. He had a detective—in a car outside my apartment house! I had no home life. I had to join a bridge club to get out a bit. Then I took singing lessons, just to get out. I went to work looking after a friend’s baby as a sitter—”

  “As a sitter—” he said, concerned.

  “It was to show what I did with my evenings. I have plenty of character witnesses. He opened my mail. I had to take a box. He counted my money—what did you do with the fifteen cents? My life was an agony. I was in a house of detention. He found I had no one keeping me—”

  “Eh?”

  “Keeping company with me.”

  “I know, I know, darling,” rumbled Grant cheerlessly.

  “And you, like the rest, suspect me; you leave me in the lurch when I most need a friend. There you are at base headquarters, while I’m in the firing line. I didn’t get the check yesterday or this morning.”

  Grant at once went into action. “Look, sweetie, I have no dollars at the moment, I had several big shocks financially. Goodwin lost all that money in wolf, Poynter needed three thousand dollars for his lawyers to get him out of jail, I paid Walker five hundred dollars for you—my partner, damn fool, dropped fifteen thousand dollars—I’ll be in the hole at the year-end, don’t like that. I’m sorry. My funds are tied up abroad, can’t get a cent out. Just pay my hotel bill and keep my family.”

  “You surprised and disappointed me last time I saw you. You told me you would go to Boston and see your wife and come back and stand by me, and you’re still here. And in your note this morning, signed by your secretary, you say for three weeks. You say you have to go to Cuba—how am I to live? What will happen if it gets to the newspapers? All those head waiters sell to the gossips. I have no money to buy those newshounds and Churchill has!”

  “You can go and see the lawyer and do anything you please, tell him he’ll be paid. The lawyer can go the limit to protect you and get Downs cooled off. But I don’t want to pay Downs. Does he want to pimp? Besides, why should I? What does it look like? Them photos are photomontage. Those letters are forged. That fella’s crazy, he’d make up anything.”

  Her voice was acid: “Look, darling, we can both be very inconsiderate and unkind; or we can both be considerate and make the best of an unfortunate mistake, an accident. The latter course is by far the wiser one—especially for you. A woman is always in an unfortunate situation. People have dirty minds. You have been most indiscreet. You talk loud and big; everyone in the restaurant the other night could have heard you if they had listened. Walls have ears, too. No one would believe your teatime story. They only have to bribe the elevator boy or the doorman in your hotel. Or Mrs. MacDonald, and they’ll make up some story to please the gossip columns. And I frankly have been stupid. I looked upon you as my friend and was indiscreet. You made a solemn promise to me and you backed out of it.”

  He laughed suddenly and clearly, “My dear girl, you’re a married woman! I’m married. I could make no solemn promise. If I made it, it wasn’t solemn—you can’t go into court with that.”

  “Oh, I know your horseplay and cheap calculations. But I went out on a limb for you; I compromised myself, a married woman, and no one would exculpate you. You have not an unblemished reputation, you either. Just let the gossip columnists get hold of your name once and you’ll hear a horse-laugh from here to the Battery. Let us be serious. The fact is that neither of us can afford to stand on ceremony. We are in this together and in deep.”

  “Just let your husband try to get money out of me, we can get him for extortion, intimidation, blackmail, compounding a felony, everything,” said Grant.

  “I don’t want to be dragged through the mud to save you a few dollars; and if I am held up to ridicule, so you will be.”

  “Don’t exaggerate the situation, you’re nervous,” said he nervously.

  “I wouldn’t dream of exaggerating the situation. I couldn’t exaggerate the situation. My life is an agony. But I have no time to think about myself. My needs are too urgent. I can’t pay the rent. I shall be dispossessed. I can’t confide in Mother. It would kill her. Even Downs can’t pay the rent, he’s a dope and a dupe and he’s broke. You are asking my sympathy for your forty-thousand-dollar loss and other losses, and telling me you must leave me to be crucified, to run after your wife when I find out she has one hundred thousand dollars and more in her own name. What does she need your sympathy and support for? So I can only think of my own small losses which must make you laugh in your sleeve. What an imbecile getting excited about five hundred dollars, about being put out on the sidewalk, and going back to pavement-pounding! How small it all seems to you, that a person can cut their throat for what to you is petty cash that you spend in two evenings at even your cheap cabarets! You cannot make up forty thousand dollars by the year-end, good, but five hundred dollars would be peanuts to you. I am tired of your horseplay, my dear Robert. Five hundred dollars is very small for my present needs, and I only say that because that would keep me from the gutter.

  “You know, Robbie, there is such a thing as normal expectations. We have no written agreement, but you owe me a good deal. If a man ruins a woman’s reputation, breaks up her marriage, it does not look very good for him in the public eye. He can hardly go back to his wife and children and say, ‘Respect me, my hands are clean, my conscience, too, my head is high.’ No, he must say, ‘Do what I say, don’t do what I do.’ Your wife, who is a child, would never stand for what Churchill threatens. If a man doesn’t intend to make reparation and he breaks up a woman’s marriage, and breaks up his own marriage, what will a jury think of him? Perhaps he is not in cause, but even in the State of New York do you know it is unlawful to commit adultery? You did not know that? Well, you would not come into court with clean hands. Then I know your line of defense, which would be broken down by a clever lawyer in two minutes and you would have committed perjury, contempt of court as well. And the court would see that you abuse a woman, break up her marriage, make promises to her, and then allow her to be crucified—this will not impress the jury or the newspapers.”

  “The jury—the newspapers—” he expostulated.

  “You have got Churchill roused. He is an honest man who never knew there was anything wrong. The majority of the jury will be just like him, men in moderate circumstances who would not like their wives to be seduced away on a bargain basis, by a rich Don Juan—such men hate Don Juans: you won’t stand a chance—”

  He murmured, “Good God, I am not going to trial—”

  “Naturally, Churchill would see you were called as a ——Listen to me, don’t interrupt. Your happiness and mine depend on it: we are just as if we were married, we’re one in this. You know that even a small amount of money can seem very, very important to men like those who will be in the jury. And if they heard that I sought assistance from someone who had led me to believe that he sought understanding and help and had had a shock, and needed consolation; and that he
promised her something for the future, and did not scruple to break up her marriage, and that he was unhappy at home and took every kind of comfort from her, and that he was, relatively, to the men in the jury, very rich—well, will they cry their eyes out about forty thousand dollars and three thousand dollars—if you could bring in such dealings before their eyes without compromising your whole life? Yet, they will say, when this woman, who has been a real friend to him, asks for a little loan and a little help, especially a woman who can show she is working honestly at a job, and has taken night jobs as a sitter for a few dollars—and a photographer’s model, dressed, anything respectable—and he never so much as sends a Valentine—and if this rich person has got this poor woman, the sitter, this so-called criminal, this unfortunate, into this very situation himself, forcing her to work as a sitter—what will the members of the jury and the press think of such a person, so very much richer relatively than themselves?

  “I will tell you, Robbie, what they will say. They will say, ‘Here is a man-about-town who took a woman and used her for what he wanted, lied to her, and left her in the lurch when he saw a bit of danger to himself; he was playing with matches, he started a fire, and then ran off yelling for the hook-and-ladder crew, leaving her to get burnt up. He turned tail and left her without a roof over her head when he has ten or twelve roofs over his, and some in enemy country; and when her husband gets into a bad temper and gets suspicious because of his ignorance of the world, then this man runs off to the West Indies, or to dear wifie.’ What a sweet picture! ‘Here is a hunted, unfortunate woman,’ they will say, ‘and the man does not take any consequences of his own acts, who says he is only a friend and does not behave like any friend in the whole world.’ A rich man throwing away thousands in cabarets, and paying two hundred and forty-five dollars monthly for a place to bring women, and corrupting a fine, respectable old woman, his housekeeper, does not appeal very much to a jury which can hardly pay its own rent. Don’t forget it is not a crime, it is only natural for a woman to see a rich man friend helping her out a bit when her bills are behind-hand: that is not a crime or a felony. That is not grand larceny or arson, or extortion. A man goes to a friend and says, ‘Please help me out this month and I will pay you back.’ The rich man says, ‘No, I can’t give you fifty dollars.’ People say he’s a miser. A woman can say the same—my husband is inexperienced and suspicious, please help me out, I’m a little rash and I ran up bills. I like to dress nicely and the fashion changes so often. Is a woman worse than a man? Yes, she is, but she is more unfortunate in the eyes of a jury, too. And they say, he is a miser and he is an extortioner. He paid her with a rope around her neck. They say, ‘She was perhaps a bad girl, but not mean, she did something for this man, he threw himself upon her sympathy’; they think she is weak, perhaps not one hundred per cent unblemished, but they like a good time themselves, and they think, Must the man get off scot-free if he has a good time too?