[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl

by Agata Stanford

  After the orchestra played “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” to the accompaniment of a hundred tweets and caws, I walked off by myself and settled in an Adirondack chair overlooking the beach and the dark waters beyond the quay. Woodrow lay in my lap, content with a bellyful of tenderloin and potato salad. Mr. Benchley was up on the terrace playing cards with some people he’d met, Bunny had retired to the bungalow we were sharing, and Tallulah was off in a sailboat with the boy named John. Out in the distance, where the Sound meets the Atlantic, I could see a lone ship neither advancing to shore nor retreating into that great ocean. It was a good night for the rumrunners to smuggle their cargo of liquor into the many coves that dotted the shoreline.

  Headlights blazed harshly along the west side of the house. Automobiles were recklessly maneuvering around, tearing up the lawn and crushing the flower borders edging the driveway, so that headlights could illuminate the lawn for the croquet players who had set up wickets but were a little too drunk to find them in the dark.

  It was nearly two in the morning and the orchestra was winding down for the night, playing mostly ballads as if to lull its audience to sleep. I closed my eyes when I heard the violins play the verse of “What’ll I Do?”

  Gone is the romance that was so divine,

  ‘Tis broken and cannot be mended.

  You must go your way and I must go mine.

  But now that our love dreams have ended . . .

  The melody, the sentiments, sent a painful longing through me—for a man, for a man who could love me.

  What’ll I do?

  When you are far away

  And I am blue,

  What’ll I do?

  What’ll I do?

  When I am wond’ring who

  Is kissing you,

  What’ll I do?

  What’ll I do with just a photograph

  To tell my troubles to?

  When I’m alone

  With only dreams of you

  That won’t come true,

  What’ll I do?

  Why had true love eluded me? Why did I always fall so hard? Did I expect too much from the man, and give too little in return? Why did it always seem like I was stumbling around in the dark, unable to find my way through love, when maybe all I had to do was open my eyes? Things were always so disappointing when I finally opened my eyes . . . .

  Woodrow licked my hand, which made me smile.

  By the time they were well into the waltz, “Always,” I was so melancholy and full of self-doubt that I figured if I gave up writing poetry now, I might have a great career writing sappy song lyrics.

  Just as I was considering a turn onto Tin Pan Alley, a girl on the beach, standing there alone, pulled my attention and my thoughts out from my own personal darkness.

  She struck a pose, the girl in lavender-blue, a rather contrived stance with an arm thrown up as if reaching for a star; then with bent elbow she tented her shingle-trimmed head. Her legs were apart, with one knee bent, foot arched and toes flirting with the sand, thereby allowing the sheer fabric of her kerchief-edged skirt to pick up the breeze for just the right amount of playful fluttering.

  Just a sliver of a girl gazing vacantly over the bay, not unlike the sliver of moon that hung in the sky this night. She, like that moon, would grow substantial someday, and I could imagine her rounded and mature body twenty years hence, as she might then stand considering the bay. If she grew to be wiser, I felt, her gaze would hold less vacancy.

  Could there be something more, some compelling thought beyond the obvious that generated that seemingly calculated pose? Perhaps there floated a genuine yearning within her soul. Maybe she knew there was something more beyond the high-life she lived on Saturday nights, when she and the other girls, carried along by young swells toting monogrammed flasks in the hip pockets of their white flannels, would pile into Simonized roadsters to speed over the Queensboro Bridge, past the grim factories of Long Island City, until at last the road gave way to the sandy-edged open parkway and the salty promise of champagne revelries.

  Eagerly, and without fear, these children were adept at crashing these celebrations of decadence, either claiming a mutual friendship with an acquaintance of the hostess or having once been, without question, a bona fide guest—the date of a Broadway star, perhaps, or more likely of a hoofer from the show at the Palace. No one really cared. The more the merrier. There was always an open door to the young and playful, whose antics only complemented the host’s determination for a roaring good time to be had by all. The success of any party seemed to be measured by the number of plastered guests found passed out and strewn about the house and grounds at seven o’clock the morning after, or by the cost of repairs from cigarettes stamped out in the carpet. Yes, perhaps there was more to be had than just a good time, but the girl on the beach wouldn’t be thinking about such things now—perhaps in five or ten years, when her laughter became a bit strident and her smile less quick to flash.

  On Monday, the girl could charm and disarm or shock and appall those whom she wished to with stories of that Saturday night, that weekend on the Island when she danced with the boys on the roof of the cabana, or waded into the fountain to the music of Buddy Ray and the Downtown Boys blasting out a perky, “Ain’t We Got Fun?” And when all this went out of fashion (as surely it would, for all things au courante become the tarnished fads of yesterday), the stories would remain to be told and retold again and again. There would be these memories in lonely years to come, when she was no longer a Bright Young Thing. She could reminisce, with embellishments if she so fancied, about these glory days to future generations so that they might know, and she might prove, that once upon a time she, too, had been young and carefree.

  But the thoughts that were dancing around in this girl’s head were merely the fancies of my own imagination. I really knew nothing more of what went on in her little brain than I understood of what was going on in mine! Whether she was expressing genuine yearning for self-discovery or had simply planted herself in a premeditated tableau designed to take away the breath of an admiring suitor was a mystery. She needn’t have bothered to do anything at all to draw attention to herself, what with her slim and boyish figure. And, for all of the artifice applied with the defiant hand of youthful rebellion, the charm of her face remained in spite of her efforts to rouge her cheeks and darken her eyes. She possessed that contradiction most attractive to men—a combination of loose morals and childlike naïveté. When a lanky youth sidled up and awkwardly threw a bare arm around her shoulder, as if to tell her that he was the answer to her dreams, I imagined her wary assessment: He’ll do for tonight.

  I hadn’t heard Mr. Benchley’s approach, but when I looked over to the chair next to mine he was there, watching me watching the girl and her beau.

  “Those kids think they’re having fun, but they are disillusioned and don’t know it,” I said, seeing things a whole lot more clearly now.

  “Unlike us grownups,” replied my friend. “We’re certainly disillusioned, too, my dear, but we know it.”

  “Is that why we’re always so determined to have fun, Fred?”

  We looked at each other, and we didn’t need automobile headlights illuminating our thoughts to see the disillusionment that clung to us, that we just couldn’t seem to shake from the War, from the execution, from so many things happening in the world in this year of 1927. And in spite of the great cleansing elixir of liquor and laughter, and without bothering with words, we arrived at a new, more profound understanding: Having a good time isn’t always that much fun, is it?

  Chapter Seven

  We went in search of our hosts to bid them good-night, but we were told that Mr. and Mrs. Mellon had left for their apartment in Manhattan a little after midnight. Well, it was nearly three o’clock and, aside from a few diehards and insomniacs lounging on the plush furniture in the public rooms, the house was quiet, the overnight guests asleep in their rooms or in the family-sized bungalows assigned upon arrival. The lanterns stil
l glowed along the grounds, illuminating the abandoned tables, which were a shambles with dirty dishes and wilted tablecloths drooping in the morning dew that clung to everything. A couple of waiters were stacking the remains of the night on trays and picking up from the pristine lawn the litter left by careless guests. Mr. Benchley and I walked across the grass toward a stand of birches, alongside which stood our two-bedroom cottage. As we entered the sitting room, the snores of Bunny Wilson drifted out through the door of the bedroom that Mr. Benchley would be sharing with Bunny for the next several hours.

  “Sounds like a mastodon is snoozing in there,” said Mr. Benchley in a resigned tone.

  “You are old, but I had no idea you roamed the boulevards during the Stone Age.”

  “The Tertiary period, I believe . . . . ”

  “Smartypants.”

  “Perhaps a deckchair or hammock outside?” he said.

  “You’ll get eaten alive out there. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “It’s a matter of life and death!”

  “How’s that?” I asked, walking into the bathroom to check out the amenities.

  “If I stay, and he keeps that racket up, I will surely kill the man.”

  “Sleep in here on the couch and stuff your ears with cottonballs, for God’s sake. There’s a jar of them here in the bathroom.”

  I closed my bedroom door against the noise, leaving it unlocked for when, or if, Tallulah returned. I turned on the bedside lamp and then crossed to open the windows, hoping for a breeze. The window screens made opaque the view. Woodrow took his usual place on my right side at the foot of the bed, as I stripped off my dress, got in, and reached over to shut the lamp. I was too tired even to be annoyed by the incessant barrage of chirping insects that always took getting used to when a City Girl slept in the country: crickets, frogs, moths beating themselves to death against the screens . . . .

  I was lying there, trying to get comfortable, the sheets damp from seaside humidity that permeated everything it touched. A welcome breeze wafted in through the window and suddenly I shivered through my sweat. I drew the counterpane over me. I was listening to the racket of wildlife outside and thinking I should have grabbed a bunch of cottonballs from the bathroom to stuff in my ears, as I had suggested to Mr. Benchley, but was too tired to get up and fetch them. Drifting off, I was startled awake by the cooing of intimate laughter outside my window. Tallulah had another think coming, I thought, if she wanted to have a fling in here tonight!

  But it wasn’t Tallulah; the female’s voice was too feminine, too high-pitched to be the Broadway star’s.

  “Get a goddamn room!” I shouted into the darkness, causing all God’s creatures, great and small, to suddenly stop their racket. Woodrow’s head popped up to look at his mad mistress. It was quiet for a long moment and I lay very still. And then, human noises—giggles and scurrying through the bushes surrounding the bungalow—could be heard as the lovers skulked away like skunks through the underbrush.

  I was beginning to doze off again when I heard voices—men speaking in raised whispers—close by. My first thought was that Mr. Benchley had confronted our Bunny. My vision focused on the view out of the screened window. With the interior light off, the opaque effect of the screen melted away to present a new clarity, and there were revealed figures of people standing silhouetted against the dim light from the big house. Bushes rustled, there was grunting, and the crush of pebbles underfoot suggested a sexual encounter. I threw off the covers and knelt down to peer out the window to better see what was going on. After a moment or two, I heard a short cry and more rustling noises in the dark, but I saw no one, now. Well, I thought, if they weren’t lovers, then it must have been a couple of drunks tripping over tree roots and wildlife while trying to find their bungalow in the dark.

  Woodrow wasn’t alarmed: He knew about sex and what it sounded like, and as for drunks stumbling about at all hours, well, he lived with me, after all, so he just laid there on the bed, on his back, legs up in the air and looking shamelessly comfortable. I fell back into bed and awoke with the sun and the smell of frying bacon drifting in through the window.

  “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks—”

  “Oh, for cryin’outloud, Bob!” whined Bunny.

  “—Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

  Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic—”

  “Haven’t we heard enough of ‘Robert’s recitation of all the poems he had to memorize in High School’?” I said.

  “When I asked Teacher why I had to put these ‘odes’ to memory,” said Mr. Benchley, interrupting himself, “Teacher said that, like memorizing my multiplication tables, they would come in handy one day, and they have for times like these. Now, where was I?”

  Bunny moaned and with resignation said, “Pick it up at, Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers—”

  “Yes, that’s it! Thanks for the cue, Bunny: Where is the thatched-roofed village—the home of—”

  What was the point of fighting it, Bunny’s expression seemed to say when he turned around to look at me from the passenger seat of the car. He rolled his eyes upon glancing at the sleeping Tallulah, and then offered me a cigarette from his case.

  “Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands—”

  We’d endured an hour of recital and thought that the program had come to an end with Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus. We soon discovered that Mr. Benchley could be as longwinded as Longfellow himself, when he began his dramatic recitation of the first two cantos of part one of Evangeline. Happily, he hadn’t put to memory the eight remaining cantos, and when he had finally run out of steam, Mr. Benchley noticed that the car was running out of gas. We drove off the highway past a peeling and punched-out billboard on which remained the depiction of huge, disembodied lips setting off a toothy smile, advertising the “expert dentistry” of Dr. Heckleman, D.D.S. Where the paper had peeled away it left gaps in what was once a perfect smile. And it looked like the work of a bunch of kids out one night with a can of black paint, a brush, and mischief in their hearts that took out a couple more teeth as well. It was funny, as most vandalism is not.

  Mr. Benchley stopped at a railroad crossing and then continued on, following the dusty side road that ran parallel to the railroad track. On the other side of the road there wasn’t much more than the occasional wood-framed house gone to seed—mostly ramshackle little buildings, with paint worn down to rotting gray clapboards, given over to hardware supplies, a variety store, a locksmith, and a seedy luncheonette. The landscape was bare and sandy with patches of grass struggling to hold onto the earth. Our car kicked up dust and obscured the road behind us like a past we wanted to forget.

  A crosshatch pattern of telephone poles lining the tracks up ahead looked like the grim remains of foliage-ridden trees after a fire. And sitting defiantly in this sad little world was a little pink house that came into view as we rounded the bend, all the more vibrant in this spitefully gray place, its ultimate destiny doomed.

  It was a little bakery done up in rosy paint and with flowered curtains that brightened the windows, its sign reading, JENNY’S CAKES AND PIES. Someone, probably Jenny, had tried to grow flowers in the windowboxes, but this attempt at beautification was beaten to dust by the merciless sun and the fetid smell of tar pitch that had settled on the place. Here, it seemed that all of the rich soil that once supported lush meadows and woods had been stripped away with the carving out of the rails and of the highway, the staking of the billboards, and the ground-driven poles on which were strung the electric, telephone, and telegraph wires that connected our thoughts, our voices, and our future. Nothing vital was left from the past; it had all been shoved aside and then trucked away to fill in the wetlands to the east where flower gardens mattered.

  A kid with a stick rolled a rusty barrel hoop along the side of the road, his old hound following and no
sing at the debris. An ancient and miserable picket fence leaned arthritically; a rusty tin can was stuck on one of the pickets like a mottled wart on the place, a final, painful rebuke.

  This decayed junction was a testament to oxidation, for beneath the rusted-out metal roof of a garage was a rusty old red gasoline pump. In the bay of the filling station was an old car, a relic from earlier in the century, encrusted at its joints and propped up on blocks. Above it all was a pitted and faded metal sign, its worn red letters telling us we had arrived at WILSON’S GARAGE. As we pulled in and stopped in front of an incongruously bright and shiny new blue gas pump, I glimpsed the eager face of a young woman peeking out through the curtains of a room on the second floor of the shack. The desperate look of the girl stirred in me the image of a small trapped creature ready to forfeit a leg to save itself.

  A young man in stained overalls squeezed lubricant from an oilcan along the hinges of the old heap’s passenger door. He looked over at us, his demeanor as devoid of enthusiasm as the surrounding landscape. But then, with rising, if measured, interest he put down the can, wiped his hands on a rag, which he tucked in his hip pocket, and sauntered out toward our car, coolly appraising the graceful lines of molded metal. Funny, I thought, how easy it is for those who struggle and know they can never afford such luxury to turn a critically envious eye on things of beauty and extravagance.