The Party at Jack's

by Thomas Wolfe

  Miss Heilprinn chuckled fruitily and her oil-smooth features widened in a grin of such proportions that her eyes contracted to closed slits.

  “Momma,” said old Jake solemnly as he continued gently to stroke the bare smooth arm of Mrs. Jack, “I’ve been die-et-ting—”

  The way he said this with all the connotations it evoked drew from her shaking figure another hysterical little shriek.

  “I’ve been die-etting ever since I went away”, said Jake. “I was sick when I went away—and I came back on an English boat,” the old man said with a kind of melancholy and significant leer that drew a scream of laughter from the two women.

  “Oh, Jake!” cried Mrs. Jack hilariously. “How you must have suffered! I know what you used to think of English food!”

  “Momma,” the old man said with a resigned sadness—

  “I think the same as I always did—only ten times more!”

  She faintly shrieked again, then gasped out, “Brussels sprouts?”

  “They still got ‘em,” said old Jake solemnly. “They still got the same ones they had ten years ago. I saw Brussels sprouts this last trip that ought to be sent to the British Museum—And they still got that good fish—” he went on with a suggestive leer and Mrs. Jack shrieked faintly again and Roberta Heilprinn, her bland features grinning like a Buddha, gurgled fruitily: “The Dead Sea fruit?”

  “No,” said old Jake sadly, “not the Dead Sea fruit—that ain’t dead enough. They got boiled flannel now,” said Jake, “and that good sauce, Momma, they used to make?”—He leered at Mrs. Jack with an air of such insinuation that she was again set off in a fit of shuddering hysteria:

  “You mean that awful—tasteless—pasty—goo—about the color of a dead lemon?”

  “You got it,” the old man nodded his wise and tired old head in weary agreement. “You got it—That’s it—They still make it. … So I’ve been die-etting all the way back!” For the first time his tired old voice showed a trace of energetic animation. “Carlsbad wasn’t in it compared to the die-etting I had to do on the English boat!” He paused, then with a glint of old cynic humor in his weary eyes, he said: “It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goys!”

  This reference to unchosen tribes, with the complete evocation of the humorous contempt, now really snapped a connection between these three people that nothing else had done. And suddenly one saw these three able and resourceful people in a new way. The old man smiling thinly, vulturesquely, with a cynical intelligence, the two women shaken suddenly and utterly by a helpless paroxysm of understanding mirth. And now one saw they really were together, able, ancient, and immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal, communitied in derision and contempt for the unhallowed, unsuspecting tribes of lesser men who were not party to their knowing, who were not folded to their seal. It passed—the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women smiled more quietly, they were citizens once again.

  “But Jake! You poor fellow!” Mrs. Jack said sympathetically. “You must have hated it! But oh Jake!” she cried suddenly and enthusiastically as she remembered—“Isn’t Carlsbad just too beautiful? … Did you know that Bert and I were there one time?” she cried rapidly and eagerly with the animation that was characteristic of her when she was remembering something or telling someone a story—and as she uttered these words she slipped her hand affectionately through the arm of her blandly smiling friend, then went on vigorously, with a jolly laugh and a merry face: “Didn’t I ever tell you about that time?—Really, it was the most wonderful experience!—But God!” she laughed suddenly and almost explosively and her face flushed almost crimson—“Will you ever forget the first three or four days, Bert?” she appealed rosily to her smiling friend—“Do you remember how hungry we got? How we thought we couldn’t possibly hold out?—Wasn’t it dreadful?” she said frankly and then went on with a serious rather puzzled air as she tried to explain it:—“But then—I don’t know—it’s funny—but somehow you get used to it, don’t you, Bert? The first few days are pretty awful, but after that you didn’t seem to mind. I don’t know.” Again her low brow furrowed with a puzzled air, and she spoke with a shade of difficulty—“I guess you get too weak, or something—I know Bert and I stayed in bed three weeks—and really it wasn’t bad after the first few days.” She laughed suddenly, richly. “We used to try to torture each other by making up enormous menus of the most delicious food we could think of—We had it all planned out to go to a swell restaurant the moment our cure was over and order the biggest meal we could think of!—Well!” she laughed. “Would you believe it—the day the cure was finished and the doctor told us it would be all right for us to get up and eat—I know we both lay there for hours thinking of all the things we were going to have. It was simply wonderful!” she said, flushing with laughter and making a fine little movement with her finger and her thumb to indicate great delicacy, her voice squeaking like a child’s and her eyes wrinkling up to dancing points—“In all your life you never heard of such delicious food as Bert and I were going to devour. We resolved to do everything in the greatest style!—Well, all I can tell you is,” she went on humorously, “the very best of everything was just about half good enough for us—that’s the way we felt! … Well, at last we got up and dressed. And God!” she cried with her jolly crimson face and twinkling eyes, “you’d have thought we’d been invited to meet the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. We were so weak we could hardly stand up but we wore the prettiest clothes we had and we had chartered a Rolls Royce for the occasion and a chauffeur in livery.—In all your days,” she cried with her twinkling little face,—“you’ve never seen such swank. We got into the car and were driven away like a couple of queens. We told the man to drive us to the swellest, most expensive restaurant he knew. He drove us to a beautiful place outside of town. It looked like a chateau!”—she beamed rosily around her—“and when they saw us coming they must have thought that we were royalty from the way they acted. The flunkies were lined up, bowing and scraping for half a block—Oh, it was thrilling! Everything we’d gone through and endured in taking the cure seemed worth it—Well!” she looked around her and the breath left her body audibly in a sigh of complete frustration—“would you believe it? When we got in there and tried to eat we could hardly swallow a bite! We had looked forward to it so long—we had planned it all so carefully—and well! all I can say is, it was a bitter disappointment—” she said humorously. “Would you believe it—all we could eat was a soft boiled egg—and we couldn’t even finish that! It filled us up right to here—” she put a small hand level with her chin—“It was so tragic that we almost wept!—I don’t know,” she went on turning her eyes away in a glance of serious and rather puzzled reflection—“but isn’t it a strange thing? I guess it must be that your stomach shrinks up and gets little while you’re on the diet. You lie there day after day and think of the enormous meal you are going to devour just as soon as you get up—and then when you try it you’re not even able to finish a soft boiled egg—but is that life, or isn’t it? I ask you—” She shrugged her shoulders, and lifted her hands questioningly, with such a comical look on her face that everybody laughed.

  Even the weary jaded old man, Jake Abramson, who had been regarding her fixedly with a vulpine smile during the whole course of her animated monologue, now smiled a little more warmly as he turned away to speak to other friends. He had really paid no attention to what she was saying, but Mrs. Jack’s way of telling a story was so pleasant, her rosy face and twinkling eyes were so full of life and eagerness, she spoke with such excitement, with such gusto, with such ready humor, that everything she said was interesting. And, in a tired and jaded world, people could just look at her animated little face and figure, her eager and excited voice for hours at a time, without growing tired.

  The two women—Miss Heilprinn and Mrs. Jack who were now left standing together in the centre of the big room, offered a remarkable and instructive comparison in the capacities of their sex. Mi
ss Heilprinn was in appearance as in face a very distinguished woman. The thing that one noticed about her immediately was her bland and smiling pallor. She suggested oil—smooth oil, oil of tremendous driving power and generating force. And although no one would ever have called her a beautiful woman, no discerning eye could fail to see instantly that she was a very handsome one.

  She was a woman perhaps of middling height, perhaps a little under it: at any rate she was a little taller than Mrs. Jack. Her smooth and smiling face, her plump figure, hips and ankles, were inclined to heaviness and corpulence. Her face was almost impossibly bland. It was a blandness without unction, a blandness without hypocrisy. On first sight the smooth, plump, smiling features had a look of almost Buddhistic quality and the fruity tones, the infectious chuckle, the eyes that narrowed into jolly slits whenever the lady laughed or even smiled, contributed to a first impression of imperturbable and unquenchable good nature.

  But let the ingenuous spirit be not too easily deceived: a closer examination of this lady would have revealed a pair of twinkling eyes that missed nothing and that were as hard as agate. Her distinguished looking grey hair was combed back in a pompadour and she was splendidly gowned with a suavity that was perfectly adapted to the bland and imperturbable assurance of her worldliness. She would, and could, if occasion or necessity had demanded it, have taken the gold fillings out of her best friend’s teeth and never for a moment lost the oily blandness of her smiling face, the infectious chuckle of her throaty voice, as she did so.

  To say merely that she was “as hard as nails” would be to put an unfair strain upon the durability of common iron. In the theatrical profession, and along Broadway, where she had reigned for years as the governing brain and directive force behind a celebrated art theatre she was known familiarly as “the Duchess.” And the business acuity which had wrung this homage from the hard lips of that milling street was fully deserving of all the tributes, all the oaths, that had been heaped upon it.

  As the two ladies, both of whom were warm old friends, stood looking at each other affectionately in the act of greeting, a very instructive performance in worldly shrewdness was being quietly unfolded between them for the enlightenment or amusement of one privileged to see. Each woman was perfectly cast in her own role. Each had found the perfect adaptive means by which she could utilize her full talents with the least waste and friction and with the greatest smooth persuasiveness.

  Miss Heilprinn’s role in life had been essentially a practical and not a romantic one. It had been her function to promote, to direct, to govern, and in the tenuous and uncertain speculations of the theatre to take care not to be fleeced by the wolves of Broadway. The brilliance of her success, the power of her will, and the superior quality of her mettle, was written plain upon her. It took no very experienced observer to see instantly that in the unequal contest between the Duchess and the wolves of Broadway it had been the wolves who had been fleeced. Lucky, indeed, was the wolf who could escape an encounter with the Duchess with a portion of his native hide intact.

  And in that savage unremitting warfare, when bitter passions had been aroused, when undying hatreds had been awakened, when eyes had been jaundiced and when lips had been so bitterly twisted that they had never regained their rosy pristine innocence and now lay written on haggard faces like a yellowed scar, had the face of the Duchess grown hard and bitter? Had her mouth contracted to a grim and bitter line? Had her jaw out-jutted like a granite crag? Were the marks of the wars visible anywhere upon her? By no means.

  The more murderous the fight, the blander her face. The more treacherous and guileful the strategy in its snaky intrigues, the more cheerful and good-natured the fruity lilt of her good-humored chuckle. She had actually thriven on it. She seemed to blossom like a flower beneath the dead and barren glare of Broadway lights. And she never seemed to be so happily and unconsciously herself as when playing about ingenuously in a nest of rattlesnakes.

  The other lady presented a tactical problem of quite another sort. Mrs. Jack’s career had been romantic rather than executive. Yet, in a strange, hard way, each woman was completely worldly, each woman was wholly practical, each woman was fundamentally concerned with her own interests, her own success.

  In a curious way, Mrs. Jack’s strategy was more guileful and complex than that of her smooth companion. Mrs. Jack’s strategy was that of the child: she had early learned the advantages of possessing the rosy, jolly little face of flowerlike loveliness. She had early learned the advantages of a manner of slightly bewildered surprise, naive innocence, of smiling doubtfully and inquiringly yet good-naturedly at her laughing friends, as if to say: “Now, I know you’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done or said now. Of course, I know I’m not clever the way you are—all of you are so frightfully smart—but anyway I have a good time, and I like you all—Hah?”

  She had even learned in recent years that deafness itself might have its compensations in furthering this illusion of her happy, somewhat bewildered innocence. She had early learned as well the value of tears in a woman’s life and what an effective weapon tears may be. She had learned the supreme value of romantic emotion as a triumphant answer-all to reasoned thought or to the objections of fair play and a sense of justice. She knew better than most women that if any act of hers was ever called in question, if any act of hers which she was trying to conceal was ever discovered, and she was confronted with it, there was no answer so effective, so annihilating as tempestuous tears—romantic and irrational declaration:

  “All right. All right—I’m through!—She’s finished!—She’s no good anymore!—Throw her out—Let her go!—She’s tried to do the best she could but you’ve thrown her out now—You’ve told her she wasn’t any good anymore—All right, then—” Here she would smile a pathetic twisted smile as she squeaked these touching little words, move aimlessly toward the door in a pathetic gesture of departure, smile a pathetic twisted little smile again and wave her hand childishly in farewell as she squeaked pathetically—“All over—Finished—Done for—She’s no good—Goodbye, Goodbye—” After which, of course, there was nothing but embarrassed, half amused, half angry, half disgusted surrender.

  She had her faults, no doubt—she was “romantic.” Most people, even those who knew her well considered her affectionately to be a “most romantic person—” “a very romantic woman.” For this reason she had triumphantly escaped censure for many acts that would have brought down upon many another less privileged, less gifted and less favored person a heavy punishment. She was essentially not less shrewd, not less accomplished, not less subtle and not less hardly determined to have her own way, to secure her own ends in the hard world than was the blandly, suavely smiling Roberta Heilprinn—But oh! As her friends said she was “so beautiful,” she was “such a child,” she was so “good”—and everybody loved her!

  Not everyone, however, was so easily deceived by Mrs. Jack’s deceptive innocence. The bland lady who now confronted her in greeting was one of these: hence the instructive quality of the moment. Miss Roberta Heilprinn’s hard and merry eye, indeed, missed no artifice of that rosy, innocently surprised, small person. And hence perhaps the twinkle in her eye as she greeted her old friend was a little harder, brighter and more lively than it usually was, the bland, Buddhistic smile, a little smoother in its oily suavity, and the fruity tones, the engaging yolky chuckle, a trifle more infectious, and on all of these accounts, perhaps more full of genuine affection as she bent and kissed the rosy, glowing little cheek.

  And she, the blooming object of this affectionate caress, although she never changed the expression of surprised delighted innocence on her rosy face, knew full well all that was going on in the other woman’s mind. For a moment, so quickly imperceptibly, that no one save Olympian Mercury could have followed that swift glance, the eyes of the two women, stripped bare of all concealing artifice, met each other nakedly. And in that moment there was matter for Olympi
an laughter. But no one of these gifted worldlings saw it.

  * * * * *

  “I mean!—You know!—” At the words, eager, rapid, uttered in a rather hoarse, yet strangely seductive tone of voice, Mrs. Jack smiled and turned: “There’s Amy!”

  Then, as she saw the angelic head, with its unbelievable harvest of golden curls, the snub nose and the little freckles, and the lovely face so radiant with an almost boyish quality of eagerness, of animation, of enthusiasm, she thought; “Isn’t she beautiful! And—and—there is something so sweet, so lovely, so—so good about her!”

  She did not know why or how this was true. Indeed, as she well knew, from any worldly point of view it would have been hard to prove. If Amy Van Leer was not “a notorious woman” the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limit of notoriety, even for New York, years before. She had a reputation that stank even in the more decadent groups of the great capitols on the Continent.

  By the time she was nineteen years old she had been married and divorced and had a child. And even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her first husband, a member of one of the most powerful of the American plutocracies, had had no difficulty in getting a divorce and in demonstrating her unfitness for the custody of her own child. There had been a sensational case which fairly reeked. Since that time, seven years before, it would have been impossible to define or chronicle her career in any terms measurable to time or to chronology. Although the girl was now only twenty-six years old, her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity, through centuries of vice and dissipation, through a Sargassic seadepth of depravity.

  Thus, one might remember one of the innumerable scandals connected to her name and that it had happened only three short years before, and then check oneself suddenly with a feeling of stunned disbelief, a feeling that time had suddenly turned phantom, that one had dreamed it all, that it had happened in a kind of outrageous night-mare. “Oh no! It can’t be!—That happened only three short years ago and since then she’s—why she’s—”