“Hello, darling,” Bea said. “Have you read any good books lately?”
“I’m trying to read one called Peace of Mind,” Charles said, “but I don’t seem to be getting very far with it.”
“My God,” Bea said, “you’re just like Tom. What do you need peace of mind for? Do you know what I’ve been thinking? I wish I were a Catholic. I wish that someone could tell me what to do.”
“That’s a great idea,” Charles said, “but then you wouldn’t do it.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t?” Bea asked, and then the music stopped. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go outside.”
This was not desirable because everyone always noticed who Bea’s partner was when she left the dance floor. True, it was too cool outside to sit down and besides there were other couples on the terrace, but when Bea took his arm he knew that everyone was looking.
“Where’s Tom tonight?” Charles asked.
“Where he usually is,” Bea said. “In the office, working late, darling.”
“I was late, too,” Charles said.
“Yes,” Bea said. “Well, here we are.” Charles did not answer. It was obvious that they were out on the terrace.
“Darling, are you bored?” Bea asked.
“Why, no,” Charles said, “of course I’m not.”
“Well, I am.”
“Never mind,” Charles said, and he laughed. “In just a minute or two the music will be going around again.”
“And it bores me to think of it,” Bea said. “Everything goes around, right back to the same thing. Why can’t you and I talk to each other like two sensible people? I don’t mean about sex. You don’t have that effect on me. To hell with sex.”
Her voice had a rasping quality that could carry into out-of-the-way corners and tomorrow they would be saying that he and Bea Merrill had been talking about sex while poor Tom was working late.
“All right, Bea,” he said, and he laughed. “Just remember I didn’t bring it up.”
Then Bea began to laugh.
“I don’t have to remember. Darling, I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen, the efforts I’ve made for years to make you bring it up.”
That was why it was an adventure to dance with Bea Merrill. He could not very well help thinking of Bea Merrill in the coupé on Labor Day and of Bea Merrill in the pool.
“Why, Bea,” he said, “don’t give up. Please try again sometime.”
“For years and years,” Bea said. “You’re completely unassailable, darling—but then it wouldn’t work anyway, would it? Our loving friends here surround us with chastity.”
“What?” Charles said. “How do you mean, with chastity?”
“You know what I mean,” Bea answered. Her voice carried perfectly and he noticed that couples around them had stopped to listen unobtrusively. “This is the chastest place I know, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.”
“Well, what are you talking about?” Charles asked.
“I’m talking about you and me. Do we really know each other? Answer me that—do we?”
It was one of those conversations to which Bea was growing addicted lately, and he wished that the music would start.
“Why, you and Tom and Nancy and I have seen quite a lot of each other,” he said.
“But do we know each other? Does anybody around here really know anybody else? We all call each other by our first names, we’re a big happy family doing parlor tricks, but do we know each other?—and I don’t mean getting into bed with someone, either.”
It seemed to Charles that there were no other voices on the terrace and that the waiting couples were drawing closer.
“Well, that would be a basis for acquaintance,” Charles said. “At least, that’s what I’ve always heard.”
“Well, it isn’t,” Bea said, and she gave his arm an impatient tug. “I don’t know Tom, I don’t know Tom at all.”
Charles began to feel very much like Tom.
“Listen, Bea,” he said, “perhaps you’re expecting too much, perhaps nobody does know anyone else so very well.”
“But, darling,” Bea said. “How well do you know Nancy? Didn’t there use to be a time—”
The music started and Charles was very glad of it, and he was glad, too, that Cliff Dunbarton had seen them and was hurrying toward them.
“Have you two about finished?” Cliff asked.
“Why, yes,” Charles said. “We were talking about knowing people, and chastity.”
“Well, let’s dance,” Cliff said, “in a chaste way.”
Charles watched them move toward the dance floor. It was true, what she had said, that they all knew a lot about each other yet very few of them really knew each other. He would have to dance at least once more. Considering everything, it would be advisable for business reasons to dance with Molly Blakesley. There were probably rumors already about himself and Roger and if he were not seen dancing with Molly someone would be bound to notice it. Still he did not want to, because there were things about Roger’s wife that made him very nervous, not the same things at all that stirred him when he danced with Bea Merrill. There would be no brisk innuendoes about sex when he danced with Molly, no disturbing mental pictures.
Roger had wooed and won Molly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he was a student at the Harvard School of Business Administration. She was the daughter of a Harvard Business School professor, had gone to a Cambridge progressive school, and was finishing her junior year at Radcliffe, where she was specializing in social science, when Roger had met her at her father’s house on Coolidge Hill Road. She had been interested in the New Deal in those days and was writing a thesis on the Tennessee Valley Authority, a preparation which did not help her at those parties at Oak Knoll. Charles had thought of her first only as a plump, earnest girl with glasses and once he had made a particular effort to be kind to her, but now kindness was no longer necessary. Instead it seemed to him that of late Molly was the one who was being kind to him. Molly had made what she herself would have called a beautiful adjustment. She had given up long ago going to Boston for her clothes, and Henri in New York looked after her hair, and she only wore her glasses now for reading. She specialized in Japanese iris and columbine in her little back garden at Sycamore Park, but she did not call them iris and columbine. To Molly they were I. Kaempferi and Aquilegia. Once after a visit to that garden, Charles had suggested to Nancy that she might do more with flowers herself—she had always been good with flowers—but Nancy had said there was no time for flowers with children. There was no doubt that children were hostages to fortune. The thought flitted across his mind as he saw Molly Blakesley dancing with Walter Crumm.
The trouble with dancing with Molly Blakesley was that since that situation had arisen at the bank they each knew too well what the other was thinking. He suspected that her dress must have come from Bergdorf’s and must have cost at least a hundred and fifty dollars, which Roger could afford because the Blakesleys did not have children. He wished that he did not keep putting their lives into terms of dollars and cents and that he did not always seem to be going over expenses whenever he danced with Molly Blakesley. It was necessary to be careful with her, too. She had a way of remembering everything one said, accurately and usefully. She was a very good wife to Roger.
“Well, well, Charley,” Walter Crumm said. “Who stole Bea away from you?”
“She said she was bored,” Charles told him. “She said I was unassailable.”
“Well, well,” Walter said. “He didn’t look unassailable, did he, Molly?”
“Oh, were you out there too?” Charles asked.
“We certainly were,” Walter said, “but we won’t tell Nancy, will we, Molly?”
It was all good clean fun, a part of the spirit of Oak Knoll, and you had to take it that way. Yet at the same time, Charles knew that Roger would hear of it, and it was the sort of thing that Roger might be able to use with Tony Burton—all in good cle
an fun.
“Poor Tom,” Molly said. “But it was awfully funny, Charley. You didn’t look like a banker.”
“Perhaps Roger won’t either,” Charles said, “if Bea gets him out there.”
“Roger wouldn’t let Bea get him out there. You know how Roger can side-step.” Molly laughed brightly.
“That must be the Harvard Business School training,” Charles said, and he smiled back at Molly.
“Charley,” Molly said, “seriously, do you know what Roger was saying the other night, when we were just alone in the kitchen having a drink of beer?”
It was a time to be careful, but Charles still smiled.
“We were talking about you and Nancy, and Roger was saying how fond everyone is of you at the bank, Roger particularly. You know how full he is of everything at the bank. And he was saying how wonderful it was that we were all such good friends and he hoped we always would stay friends, no matter what happens at the bank. You know what I mean. It’s so embarrassing, isn’t it?”
“It needn’t be embarrassing,” Charles said. “Roger and I are grown-up. We can handle anything that happens.”
“You know,” Molly spoke more quickly, “I think the war did you a lot of good, Charley. Roger thinks so, too.”
Charles did not answer. It was kind of her to say it, but he wished that he was not always searching for hidden meanings when he listened to Molly Blakesley.
“I think it was pretty splendid of you,” she was saying, “with a wife and two children, to give up everything and go to the war. Roger thinks so, too.”
He could not bring himself to care what Roger thought.
“It was a sort of compulsion,” he said. “It wasn’t wise, and I wasn’t much use when I got there.”
“How lovely Nancy looks,” Molly said. “She always looks lovely in the simplest dress. That’s what Roger always says. How are the children, Charley?”
“Why, they’re pretty well,” Charles answered, “except they keep turning on the radio.”
“Do you know what Roger said the other day? He’s so sentimental, sometimes. He said he wished they’d call him Uncle Roger.”
He was balancing Molly’s kindness against the possibility that she had heard something which he had not heard about the bank and Owen Martin cut in before he could answer. Neighbors always had to dance with neighbors’ wives.
“I’ll see you later, Charley,” Molly called. “Perhaps we can do something Sunday. Roger would love it if we could.”
Now that Charles had danced with Molly Blakesley, he felt that he had done enough, but it was still too early to be seen going home, even though he wanted to go home very much. His imagination was aroused by Molly Blakesley. Certainly Roger had thought it a fine thing that he had gone to the war. If he had not gone, if he had stayed put, there would have been no doubt about anything in the bank.
Out in the passageway that led to the men’s locker room, he glanced at the plaque which must have been placed there in the early days of the conflict—the club’s honor roll of members and employees, carefully differentiated, who had gone, as the plaque said, to serve their country. There were more employees than members, and three gold stars against employees’ names with only one in the members’ list. That was the Wilkes boy, Joe Wilkes’s son. Most of the other members had been overage. The plaque itself was in the shadows, a good place for it now that the war was over.
Nancy was always saying that it was a bad thing for him to drink after dinner and he had always found that alcohol only exaggerated malaise. Nevertheless, as long as he could not leave, he wanted to get away from the music. There were two bars in the club, the women’s bar, with new chromium furnishings and red leather-topped stools—he could hear the loud chatter from it as he passed—and the men’s bar behind the men’s locker room, a Teutonic looking place which had been built before prohibition and before women needed bars of their own.
Charles opened the locker room door and walked along the wood grating past the rows of green steel lockers. He was going to the men’s bar because, though it was open to all male members theoretically, it had a clannish atmosphere that discouraged certain members from entering. In fact, Charles had never entered it until Mr. Forbush, who was still president of Oak Knoll, had once asked him why he never joined the crowd there. You could either stand up at the bar, or carry your drink to one of the locker room benches if you’d been playing golf, or else sit at the single round table.
The individuals sitting at the table that night all were drawn together by the common guilty bond of having made an escape. They all knew implicitly that they should be dancing, and they weren’t. They all half apologized for being there, and they were just going to stay for a minute. They were hot and their feet were tired. Bill Forbush, who was sitting at the table, always said at every dance that he was only going to stay for a minute. He only wanted to drop in to see that everyone was behaving, and Joe Swiss was there, just for a minute, too, and Walter Crumm must have come in there after his dance with Nancy. And so had Christopher DeMille, just for a minute, and Roger Blakesley was there, just to take the weight off his feet for a minute. When they saw Charles they all greeted him heartily, as though his appearance salved their consciences for being there, just for a minute. Slim, the barkeeper, who was leaning over the bar listening and occasionally taking part in the conversation, also seemed glad to see him.
“What’s the matter, Charley,” Bill Forbush called, “are your arches falling?”
“Sit down and take your weight off your feet, Charley.”
“All right,” Charles said, “I will, for just a minute.”
“What did you do with Bea, Charley?” Christopher DeMille called.
He was already getting tired of hearing about Bea.
“She left me for a handsomer, richer man,” Charles said.
“Who’s handsomer?” Christopher asked. “You’re handsomer than Dunbarton. Look at him. Isn’t Charley handsomer than Dunbarton?”
“What were you and Bea talking about?” Roger Blakesley asked. “Investments, Charley?”
“Come on and tell us everything,” Joe Swiss said. “The rumor is that you were talking about chastity.”
Charles did not like to think he was growing angry. He preferred to think that only an academic question of taste made him feel alone and aloof from all the group. Their faces looked alike, stupid, overweight and middle-aged, but at the same time it was all good clean fun.
“Slim,” he said, “give me a double Scotch, please.”
Then he saw that Roger was drinking ginger ale. He remembered that Molly had said that Roger had learned never to drink after dinner.
“Charley,” Mr. Forbush said, “have you got your name down for a new car?”
Charles said that he and Nancy were worrying along with the old Buick and that he felt it had better stuff in it than most of the new cars, and Joe Swiss said he was absolutely right. Mr. Swiss had a close, personal friend from Detroit who had told him a thing or two about those new cars, a thing or two that Chris DeMille and these other word artists never wrote into their advertisements. The truth was that a lot of stuff that was going into those new cars was junk, pure junk, and it was not all labor cost, though a lot of the trouble was sloppy labor. No one wanted to do a day’s work any more, no matter what you paid him. Yet putting all that aside, look what was going into the new cars. All this rumor about plastics and new gadgets was turning out to be eyewash. Look at the paint jobs. Look at the so-called chromium finish that rusted overnight.
It was a conversation Charles had heard often before and everyone else must have heard it too, yet they all listened as if it were a new discovery. Charles himself sat listening without having to put his mind on it. Perhaps this was why so many people enjoyed these conversations. You knew what was coming next. It might be communism. It might be the advisability of pouring money down the European rat hole. At any rate, you did not have to think. All those ideas had worn comfortable grooves in yo
ur mind.
But then you had to buy a new car sometime, Mr. Forbush was saying, and what happened then? You went to a dealer, didn’t you, and could you get a new car at the list price?—not any more than you could get a piece of porterhouse steak. They made you buy accessories, extra bumpers, radios, heaters. Everyone was listening in silent agreement. Mr. Forbush was having a hell of a time with that new car dealer. Somehow it was agreeable to hear the details of Mr. Forbush’s suffering. It was a sort of universal cosmic grief and it was a long way from actual want—and in the end you did not really have to listen.
Charles found his mind moving off at a tangent. He saw Joe Swiss close his eyes and nod. He saw Chris DeMille making designs on the table with burned matches. They were all caught in a current that jostled them and interfered with normal existence. All anyone could do was to try to adjust his life within the limits of a constantly changing frame. That was the difficulty. Even the limits were continually changing.
The limits of happiness itself, Charles was thinking, were continually changing. You got somewhere and then you wanted to move somewhere else, to another, larger bar, to better, brighter company. Charles could still remember how pleased he had been when Mr. Forbush had asked him why he did not drop in sometimes and sit at the round table. It had meant that he had made good, that he was a part of a small group within a group. It had never occurred to him then that Mr. Forbush could be dull or Mr. Swiss either, or that they were older men whose thought processes had slowed until their minds ran in instinctive circles. He wondered if his own mind might be slowing also, because he did not give a continental damn what Mr. Forbush paid for a new car.
“Just wait, Bill,” Christopher DeMille was saying. “There’s a Ford in your future like the Ford in your past.”
“I don’t want a Ford,” Mr. Forbush was saying. “I’m not talking about a Ford.”
“It’s only a figure of speech, Bill,” Christopher was answering.
“You know,” Roger Blakesley said, “in one way this talk is mighty interesting to me.”
“In what way?” Christopher DeMille asked. “It doesn’t interest Joe Swiss.” Mr. Swiss was nodding, but he opened his eyes when his name was mentioned.
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