by Thomas Wolfe
And everywhere there was the strange fused miracle of the woman’s life. For, all these objects of a thousand different kinds, these chairs and tables, these jades and silks, all the drawings, and the paintings, and the books, themselves acquired on a hundred several occasions, themselves the product of a dozen periods, were brought together in this room into its magic and its harmony from the instinctive sources of the woman’s life.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the eye of Mrs. Jack should soften and her flower face take on an added glow of loveliness as she looked at her fine room. The like of it indeed, as she well knew, could no where else be found for “Here”—she thought—“Ah, here it is, and it is living like a part of me. And God! How beautiful it is”—she thought—“How living and how warm—how true—It’s—it’s not as if it was a place that we have rented—just another room in an apartment house. No—the whole place—” she glanced swiftly down the long and spacious width of the big hall—“It’s really more like some grand and noble house than like an apartment on Park Avenue. If it weren’t for the elevator there you’d think it was some grand old house. I don’t know—but—” a little furrow, this time of reflectiveness and of effort, came between her eyes as she tried to shape her meaning—“there’s something sort of grand—and simple—about it all.”
And indeed there was: the amount of simplicity which could be purchased even in those times for a yearly rental of fifteen thousand dollars was quite considerable. And as if this very thought had found in the phrasing of her mind an echo, she went on: “I mean—when you compare it with some of these places that you see nowadays—some of these godawful places that all these rich people live—I mean, there’s simply no comparison. I don’t care how rich they are, there’s—there’s just something here that money cannot buy.”
And really, as her mind phrased the accusatory words “all these rich people nowadays,” the volutes of her nostrils twitched again and her rosy little face glowed deeper in instinctive feeling of sharp scorn. For Mrs. Jack had always had great scorn of wealth: it was, curiously one of her unshakable and dogmatic convictions that she, herself, and none of her family could ever possibly be described as “rich.”
She was not “rich.” One thing was certain: she could never be called “rich”—“Oh, not really—not the way people are who really are—not the way—” and her mind now embattled to defensive consciousness, her spirit stubbornly aroused to feminine denial, she would curiously have looked for confirmation not at the hundred million people there impossibly below her in this world’s hard groove, but at that fabulous ten thousand who perhaps were there above her on the moneyed heights—and who, therefore, by the comparison, were “really rich.”
Besides, there really was no need for spurious confirmation. She was “a worker.” She had always been “a worker.” The evidence of her life of work, her love of work, her grand accomplishment of work was all about her—in those great books and folios of costume and design, thumb-worn and marked by such devoted ardours of study and of labor, upon the shelves; by the lovely grace, the human vitality of the costume drawings on the walls—costumes that had adorned the figures of some of the most celebrated and beautiful women of the time, and that even here, without the figure, had in their vital lines all the life, the movement and the character, of human personality, here in these designs as wonderfully present as if the voice, the eye, the living flesh and blood were also here. No, she was not “rich.” She had no need of riches—she had worked. One look at the strength, the grace, the swiftness of those small, sure hands—and with the thought, she lifted them before her, turned them, flexed them, and regarded them with a little smile—could tell the story of their owner’s life, of talent, energy and creative fashioning—a life of work. In that accomplishment lay deep pride, the last integrity of this indomitable person who now stood there looking at the wing-like strength and grace of those strong hands. “Is not my help within me?” Well, hers was. She had needed no man’s help, the benefits of no man’s purse, the succor of no man’s shielding strength. The wife of a rich man, the economic necessity for work had long been lacking in her life. But she had made her way. She had supported herself. She had gone on working. She had known insecurity in youth, hard toil in youth, doubt, perplexity, and sorrow in youth, but she had gone on working. And now in her forties, the wife of a wealthy man, secure from every need, and surrounded by every luxury that wealth could buy, she had made for herself a name that asked support from nothing. She loved clothes. She had always loved clothes, she had been born with a kind of poetry of clothes inside her. Clothes had a life for her, a philosophy, a meaning that translated the whole meaning of personality and character. As a result, she had for twenty years or more created for the theatre and for the purposes of art a gallery of costume that was touched with genius, and for fifteen years or more, she had been the chief designer for the most fashionable and expensive woman’s store in the country. For this reason there was ample justification for the look of quiet pride with which she now surveyed those small, strong hands. She had been born with a genuine and useful talent, and she had used it well, with energy, with intelligence and with a deep and grand integrity, a reverent respect for good work and for high achievement. She had created beautiful and enduring things—things that would endure because their quality was unforgettable. There had never been a lazy bone in her whole body. Therefore it is no wonder that she never thought of herself as being “rich.” She was a worker: she had worked.
But now, her inspection of the big room satisfied and ended, she turned quickly to investigation into other things. The living room gave on the dining room through glass doors opening from the right. These were now closed and curtained filmily. Mrs. Jack moved toward them at her quick and certain little step and threw them open. Then she stopped short, her small strong hand flew quickly to her bosom. She gasped out an involuntary little “Oh!” of wonder and delight. It was too beautiful! It was quite too beautiful! But really it was just the way she expected it to look—the way all of her parties looked—the “way” that made her parties memorable to fame and history. None the less, every time she saw it, it filled her with the emotion of a grand and new discovery, a wonder of new joy.
Everything had been carried out beautifully—to perfection—and—well, it was just too grand and lovely! All she could do was gasp and stare at it. Before her the great slab of the dining table glowed faultlessly, a single sheet of walnut light. The great chairs, old Italian chairs with stamped backs of ancient leather, had been drawn back and placed against the walls. This was to be a buffet supper—the guests could come and help themselves according to their taste and whim and—well, the materials of the banquet were there before her on that noble table.
That mighty table simply groaned with food. The mind and memory of man could scarcely contemplate the lavish total of its victualling. Upon an enormous silver trencher at one end there was a mighty roast of beef done to a turn and crisply browned all over. It had just been “begun on” at one end, for a few succulent slices had been carved away to leave the sound rare body of the roast open to the inspection or hunger of anyone who might be tempted by its juicy succulence.
At the opposite end, upon another enormous trencher, and similarly carved, was a whole Virginia ham, sugar cured and baked and stuck all over with a pungent myriad of cloves. Just to look at it was enough to make one’s mouth water, and to smell it brought tears of happiness into one’s eyes.
And in between and all around that massive board was a staggering variety of mouth-watering reliefs. There were great bowls of mixed green salads, bowls of chicken salad, platters containing golden slabs of smoked salmon, the most rare and delicate that money could buy or the market could provide. There were dishes piled with caviar and countless other dishes loaded with a staggering assortment of hors d’oeuvres, with mushrooms, herring, sardines and small, toothsome artichokes, with pickled onions and with pickled beets, with sliced tomatoes and with deviled eggs
, with walnuts, almonds, and pecans, with olives and with celery—in short with almost everything that could tempt the tongue or tickle the palate of jaded man.
It was a gargantuan banquet. It was like some great vision of a feast that has been made immortal on the page of history and of legendry. It was like something that you read about. In these thin modern times where even the board of wealth is for the most part tainted with a touch of meagreness, where there is in general and so curiously, in especial, in the houses of the great, a blight of not-enoughness, there was here a quite triumphant staggering excess, an overwhelming too-muchness out of everything. And yet, the whole thing was miraculously right.
It was, perhaps, an even greater triumph for the genius of a woman’s taste that it could provide a herculean banquet of this sort and yet control and govern it with the same faultless and instinctive rightness with which it governed everything it touched—a shelf of old worn books, a piece of old worn silk, a little idol on the mantle, or a simple drawing on the wall. There was, indeed, in the vision thus provided by that lavish table a concept of abundance, a breadth of imagination and a boldness of execution on which few other people in the world, and no one in the city, would have dared to venture. Certainly, in those pyramided vertices of wealth that now blazed all around her in the nocturnal magic of their skyflung faery, there were other purses that could have so provided, but there were no other spirits that could so have dared.
Few “rich” people would have dared venture on a banquet such as this of Mrs. Jack’s and in this fear of venturing they would have been right. Only Mrs. Jack could do a thing like this; only Mrs. Jack could do it right. And that was why her parties were such very famous things, why everyone who could, and was invited, would always come when there was going to be a party at the Jacks’. For, wonderful to tell, there was no where on the surface of that lavish board a suggestion of disorder or obscene excess. That groaning table was a miracle of noble planning and of right design. Just as no one looking here could possibly have wanted anything to be added, so could no one here have felt that there was any need.
And everywhere, from the centre of the great, rich board where on a carpet of thick lace a great bowl blossomed with a fragrant harvest of cut flowers, to the four edges of the table where stood in orderly array big stacks of the grand plates which she had bought in Dresden years before, and gleaming rows of old and heavy silver, the knives and forks and spoons so strong in weight and beauty, which she had brought from England—everywhere, even in the arrangement of the countless dishes—there was evident this same instinctive faultlessness of taste, this same style that never seemed to be contrived, that was so casual and so gracious and so right.
To the right the polished service of the great buffet glittered with an array of flasks, decanters, bottles, syphons, and tall glasses, thin as shells, which covered it. Elsewhere, two tall delicately lovely cupboards of the Colonial period stood like graces with their splendid wares of china and of porcelain, of cut glass and of silverware, of grand old plates and cups and saucers, tureens, and bowls, and jars, and pitchers, as smooth as velvet and as rich as cream. The great room with its simplicity and strength, its delicacy and massivity, had also been touched everywhere with the same spirit of casualness and grace, of power and beauty that one felt everywhere.
Here, too, all was in readiness and the mistress, after a moment’s long inspection, in which delight and wonder were again commingled with a satisfied appraisal, walked rapidly across the room and through the swinging door that separated it from the pantries and the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. As she walked through the narrow hallway that led past the pantry to the kitchen she heard the rich excited voices of the maids, their lilty brogue, and laughter broken by the gutturally mixed phrases of the cook.
Here, too, the mistress found a scene of busy order and of readiness. The big kitchen glittered like a sheet of tile—it was a joy to see. You could have eaten your dinner off the floor. The great range with its marvelous hood, itself as large as those one sees in a big restaurant, seemed to have been freshly scrubbed and oiled and polished till it glittered like a jewel. The vast company of copper cooking vessels, the skillets, kettles, pots and pans, the frying pans of every size and shape, from those just large enough to hold a fair sized egg to those so huge it seemed that one might cook in them the rations of a regiment, had been scrubbed and rubbed and polished until Mrs. Jack could see her face in them.
The big kitchen table in the centre of the room was so startlingly clean and white that for a moment one had a shocked illusion that the table really belonged in a surgeon’s office. Even the very pantry shelves, the drawers and cupboards and the bins looked as if they had just been freshly scrubbed and gone over with sand-paper and above the voices of the girls there brooded the curiously quiet, intent, dynamic hum of the great electric ice box which was itself, in its white splendor, like another perfect jewel.
“Oh this!” thought Mrs. Jack, “Oh this—” Her small clenched hand flew up against her breast again, her breath came quickly, and her eyes grew bright as stars. “This is quite the most perfect, lovely thing of all!” she thought. “This is the best room in the house. I love the others—but is there anything in the world as grand and beautiful as a fine kitchen! How wonderful! How strong and clean and beautiful!—and God!”—as her eye caught the gleaming rows of copper pots and pans—“How grand they are, how thrilling and how beautiful! And how Cookie keeps the place! She is a queer old thing but my God! She can cook and she can keep a kitchen! If I could only paint it! If only I had never given up my painting! I’d like to have a try at it—but no! It would take a Brueghel to do it! There’s no one nowadays to do it justice—and God! Oh, Cookie!”
And now, at last, she spoke these words aloud: “What a lovely cake!”
Cook looked up from the great layer cake on the table to which she had been adding the last prayerful tracery of frosted icing and for a moment a faint smile illuminated the gaunt, blunt surface of her germanic face. “You like him, yes?” said Cook. “You think he is nice?”
“Oh, Cook!”—cried Mrs. Jack, with a face flushed with excitement and in a tone of such eager childlike earnestness that Cook smiled this time a little more broadly than before—“It is the most beautiful—the most wonderful—” she turned away with a comical shrug of despair as if words failed her and then said humorously: “Well, all I can say is, you can’t beat Gilbert and Sullivan, can you?”
The literary significance of this remark was probably lost on Cook and the smiling maids, but no one, not even a Chinaman, could have missed the intent of the emotion it conveyed. Cook laughed gutturally with satisfaction, and Molly, smiling, and in a brogue that could have been cut with a knife said: “No’m, Mrs. Jack, that you can’t!”
Mrs. Jack looked happily about her. Everything had turned out perfectly, better than she could possibly have hoped for. Nothing had been forgotten, everything was in readiness. Janie and Lily in their trim, crisp uniforms, and with their smiling, rosy faces, were really awfully pretty and Molly—she looked swiftly at Molly with relief—Molly, although much older than the other girls, looked indeed the middle aged woman that she was, but looked also clean and plain and sober as Molly used to look. Thank heaven! She had pulled herself together, she hadn’t had a drink: drink worked on her like poison, you could tell the moment that she’d had a single one. But everything had turned out perfectly: it ought to be a glorious party.
PIGGY LOGAN
• • •
At this moment the buzzer of the bell rang sharply. Mrs. Jack clapped her little hand up sharply to her deaf right ear, looked rosily, inquiring around her as she always did when she was not certain whether she had heard, and said quickly: “Hah? Did the bell ring, Janie? Is there someone at the door?”
“Yes’m,” said Janie, coming to the door of the maids’ sitting room. “I’ll go, Mrs. Jack.”
“Yes, you’d better, Janie, I wonder who—” she cast a puzzled look
up at the clock up on the wall, and then at the little shell of platinum on her wrist. “It’s only 8:15! I don’t think any of them would be this early. Oh!—” as illumination came—“I think, perhaps, it’s Mr. Logan. If it’s Mr. Logan, Janie, show him in. I’ll be right out.”
“Yes, Mrs. Jack,” said Janie, and departed. And Mrs. Jack, after another quick look about the kitchen, another smile of thanks and approbation for Cookie and her arts, followed her.
It was Mr. Logan. Mrs. Jack encountered him right away in the entrance hall where he had just paused to set down two enormous black suit cases each of which, from the bulging look of them, carried enough weight to make strong muscles ache. This impression was justified by Mr. Logan’s own appearance at the moment. He had seized the biceps of one muscular looking arm with the fingers of another, and with a rueful look upon his face was engaged in flexing and bending the aching member up and down. As Mrs. Jack approached he turned, a thickset, rather burly looking young man of about thirty years, with bushy eyebrows of coarse black, a round and heavy face smudged darkly with the shaven grain of a heavy beard, a low corrugated forehead and close cropped hair of stiff black bristles mounting to a little brush-like pompadour in front.
“Gosh!” said Mr. Piggy Logan, for by such affectionate title was he known to his more intimate acquaintance—“Gosh!”—the expletive came out somewhat windily, a steamy expiration of relief. At the same moment he released his aching arm and shook hands firmly with his hostess with a muscular and stubby hand, haired thickly on the back up to the very fingertips with fuzzy black.