by John O'Hara
There could be a symbol of modern young womanhood, but the newspapers would not be likely to print her picture. She would have to be naked. The young girl who was about twenty years old in the latter half of the 1920’s did conform to a size. She was about five feet five, she weighed about 110. She had a good body. There must be a reason for the fact that so many girls fitted that description, without regard to her social classification. And the reason may well be that between 1905 and 1915 the medical profession used approximately the same system in treating pregnant women and in the feeding and care of infants. Even the children of Sicilian and Ghetto parentage suddenly grew taller, so the system must have been standard; there seems to be no other explanation for this uniformity. It is noticeable in large families: the younger children, born during and after the World War, are almost invariably tall and slender and healthier than their older brothers and sisters.
Gloria missed by ten years being a “flapper”; that is, if she had been born ten years sooner she might have qualified in 1921 as a flapper, being twenty-two years old, and physically attractive. One of the differences between Gloria as she was and as she might have been was that in 1921 she might have been “considered attractive by both sexes,” and in 1931 she was considered attractive by both sexes, but with a world of difference in the meaning and inner understanding of it.
It has been hinted before that there was a reason for the recurring mood of despair which afflicted Gloria. When Gloria was eleven years old she was corrupted by a man old enough to be her father. At that time Gloria and her mother and uncle were living in Pittsburgh. Her father, a chemist, had been one of the first people to die of radium poisoning. The word father, spoken with any tenderness or sentimental intent, always evoked a recollection of her father’s college class picture. It was the only picture her mother had of her father, as something had happened to their wedding pictures when they were moving from one house to another. The class picture was not much help to a child who wanted to be like other children; she saw her father as a man with a white circle around his head, in the second row of three rows of young men standing on the steps of a stone building. Through her childhood she could not see a haloed saint’s picture without thinking of the picture of her father, but she would wonder why the halo did not go around the front and under the chin of the saint, and why the white circle around her father’s head did not end at the shoulders the way it did with the saints; and thinking first one thing and then the other she never thought of her father as a saint, and never thought of the saints except as reminders of her father.
Her uncle, a man named William R. Vandamm (R for Robespierre), was the older brother of her mother. He, too, was a chemist and had been a classmate of Gloria’s father at Cornell. Vandamm and Gloria’s father had gone to Chile after college, and had stayed long enough to hate it jointly and break their contracts together. They came back together and Wandrous married Vandamm’s sister. There was a little money on all sides, and both bride and groom brought equal advantages to the union, and it was one of those obscure, respectable marriages that take place every Saturday. When Wandrous died it was Vandamm who went to the radium company and used his Masonic and professional and political connections to see to it that money was provided for the upbringing and education of Gloria. They wanted to give the widow stock in the radium company, but Vandamm was too smart for that and thereby lost close to a million dollars, as it later turned out, but Vandamm was the only one who noticed that, and he did not call his sister’s attention to it.
Vandamm was a good enough industrial chemist, and a very good uncle. He lived away most of the time while Gloria was a small child. He would take a job, hold it a year or so, and then take a better job, gaining in money and experience and acquaintance. He would live in men’s clubs and Y.M.C.A.’s all over the country, taking half of his annual vacation at Christmas so that he could spend the holidays with his sister and niece. He would bring home beautiful presents, usually picked by one of the succession of nice young women to whom he was attentive. In every town where he worked it was the same. He was clean and respectable and had a good job, and he was unmarried. So he would single out one of the young women he met, and he would be polite to her and take her to nice dances and send her flowers, and tell her all the time what a wonderful thing this friendship was. Each time he quit his job and moved to another town he would leave behind a bewildered young woman, who had had him to her house for Sunday dinner fifty times in a year, but had nothing to show for it, candy and flowers being the perishable things that they are. There were two exceptions: one was a young woman who fell in love with him and did not care how much she showed it. He had to depart from his Platonic policy in her case, because she was making what were then known as goo-goo eyes at him every time she saw him, at parties or alone. At the risk of not being permitted to finish, he told her that she had made him feel as no other girl had made him feel, and for that reason he was quitting his job at the factory. If he stayed on, he said, he would be tempted to ask her something he had no right to ask her. Why had he no right to ask her? she wanted to know. Because of his sister and his niece. They had only what money he could give them, and never would have more. For that reason he hated to quit this job; he had been able to do things for them that he never had been able to do before. “I will never marry,” he stated, as though it had national political significance. That fixed her. It also fixed him; instead of making him less attractive it made him look tall and husky, a philanthropist who gave millions in secret. It made her feel something she never had felt before. Before that she and all women like her were a little afraid that all bachelors were comparing all eligible women. But William, he wasn’t comparing. He had decided on her, even though he could not, because of his dependents, have her. It turned out to be only a question of time before he did have her. “Take me,” she said, one moonlight night, and she threw her arms back. He wasn’t quite ready to take her at that moment, but he was in a minute. For the rest of that year he would take her every Sunday night, after paying a visit to a drug store in another part of town every Saturday night. In nice weather they would wander casually in the backyard and dart suddenly into the carriage house. In bad weather they would have to wait until her father and mother had gone to bed, and then they would go down cellar. They would leave a scrub-bucket just inside the cellar door so that if anyone started to come down, whoever it was would knock the bucket down the steps with a warning racket. It was better in the carriage house, as she did not get her petticoat so dusty in a barouche as on the cellar floor.
The second exception was the girl in the next town he came to. He fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. She turned him down with such finality that she was sorry for him and suggested that they could still be friends. He snatched at this eagerly, and there was nothing he would not do for her. Years later he read about her. She and a married man, a doctor in the same “set,” died together in a Chicago hotel. The doctor shot her through the heart and then turned the revolver on himself. That, after all those years, made Vandamm understand why she would not have him; there was someone else.
The arrival of the World War was propitious for Vandamm, who was getting a little tired of all but the freedom part of his freedom. He was beginning to hate the visits to the drug stores on Saturday night; he hated not being able to go right to sleep; he hated keeping his mind active so that he would not be led into a proposal of marriage. He detested the little university clubs he lived in. He hated American accents. In no town that he ever lived in had he made an impression on the first three families. He could see, when he met them, how they regarded him: an Easterner who wasn’t good enough for the East and thought he would be a king among monkeys rather than a monkey among kings. He decided he had had enough experience, and from now on would make money.
He went to Pittsburgh and had no trouble getting a job. In the war years he made excellent salaries and he and his sister bought a house in the East End. It
turned out that he had to move again, this time to Wilmington, Delaware, but his visits home—and he thought of it as home—were more frequent than they had been. One of the results of these frequent visits was his discovering that he adored his niece. He never would have put it that way. Even love was a word he had schooled himself against using. But he began to look forward to seeing her every time she was out of his sight. Here was someone he could love without watching what he said and did. It was such a relief after the long cautious years. What started it was the child’s beauty, and he took pride in the relationship. She photographed well and he carried snapshots of her in his wallet. He was glad she was not his daughter, because he could love her more. Fathers have to love their daughters and sometimes there is nothing else, but an uncle can love his little niece, and they can be friends, and she will listen to him and he can be as extravagant with her as he pleases. His sister was in favor of this obvious enthusiasm on the part of her brother, although she was not unaware that her brother more and more gave to her the status of a privileged governess.
The war, his work, the money it brought him—they were half his life. Gloria was the other half, that he did not talk much about.
He took his sister’s money and doubled it for her, not really for her but for Gloria. Then when he saw what he had done, he had what he thought was a brilliant idea. For the first time in his life he indulged the dangerous thrill of planning someone else’s life. He wanted to get his sister married off. That would be all for the present. Get her married off, and then see what happened. But he could not stop thinking what might happen, and did not see why he should not enjoy his plans. His sister was young enough to have children, and if she had a child, a new baby, with a living husband, there was no telling what might happen. He reasoned that his sister ought to be glad to let him have Gloria. She would have a child of her own, and he would have Gloria. He would think later on about marriage for himself. If the right woman came along and Gloria liked her, and he liked her for Gloria, he might marry her. In the course of a few months of thinking along these lines Vandamm planned a whole new life for himself. He thought of it only as rearranging his own life, and never as deliberate, planned rearranging of the lives of anyone else, except little Gloria, who was after all, so young. . . .
In Wilmington he had met a man, a major in the Army Ordnance Department. Major Boam was not like most of the men who, without previous military experience, walked into captaincies and majorities in the Ordnance Department and Quartermaster and Medical Corps; he looked well in uniform. He looked fit, healthy, strong. This man worked out of Washington, and spent most of his time in Wilmington, Eddystone, Bethlehem, and Pittsburgh. Vandamm remained a civilian all through the war. He was nearsighted, underweight, flat-footed, and the Army didn’t want him. Not that they were rude about it; they wanted him to remain a civilian.
“Next time you’re in Pittsburgh stop in and see my sister,” Vandamm told Major Boam. The major said he would be glad to, and did, and when next he saw Vandamm he said he had stopped in and had dinner with Mrs. Wandrous, a very nice dinner. Vandamm wanted to know if he had seen Gloria, but the major said he had been so late that Gloria had been asleep, oh, hours, when he got there. To Vandamm that meant that Boam had arrived late and must have enjoyed himself if he stayed, and he found out that Boam had stayed until almost train-time.
Boam was a widower with a grown daughter. Must have married very young, Vandamm decided, to have had a daughter old enough to be married. The daughter lived in Trenton, but Boam never saw her. “She has her own household to look after now,” Boam said. “I don’t like to go there as a father-in-law.” It sounded a little as though Boam were lonely, and that fitted in with Vandamm’s plans. A lonely widower, young-middle-aged, well set up, good job probably if they gave him a major’s commission right off the bat. “How’d you like Major Boam?” Vandamm asked his sister. She liked him, she said. She judged men by their size. She liked a tall man better than a short man, and a tall husky man better than a tall thin man.
The Armistice interfered with Vandamm’s plans. Major Boam took off his Sam Browne belt, his boots and spurs, his uniform with its two silver chevrons on the left sleeve. He stopped in to see Vandamm in Wilmington on his last trip around his circuit, and for the first time in the friendship he relaxed. Leading up to it in the most roundabout way, he finally said to Vandamm: “Well, it’s time I went out looking for a job.” It developed that Boam was not going back to some highly paid position. He was not going back to anything. He told Vandamm that when the United States entered the war he wanted to be a dollar-a-year man, but that he couldn’t afford it. He had had expenses in connection with his daughter’s marriage, and a lot of other things. The only way he could serve his country was to get a commission. Working for a major’s pay was a financial loss, he said, and as much as he could do for his country. And now there was no job waiting for him.
This suited Vandamm. He told the major he would see to it that he got a job. The major thanked him and said he would try to use his own connections first, and if nothing came of them Vandamm was not to be surprised if one fine day Boam turned up in Pittsburgh or Wilmington.
He turned up in 1921, not to ask for a job, but just to pay a social call. He had found a vague job with the political end of the chemical game, he said. The vague job was lobbying. Peace with Germany was about to be signed, and it was his job to see to it that when the German dye factories reopened they did not wreck the American dye industry, such as it was. This was difficult, he pointed out, because many of the German factories were American-owned, or had been until war was declared, and Americans had to move carefully. There were some Americans who wanted their plants back nearly intact, and it was going to be a risky business if the Germans saw that the German dye industry was going to be discriminated against. Official Germany would not dare do anything, but the workers in the German dye factories could not be counted on to keep their sabotaging hands off the factories if they heard that their means of livelihood was being cut off in the American Congress. In other words there were two camps in America; one camp, those who had owned factories in Germany, didn’t want Congress to take any tariff action until after they saw what was going to happen about the plants. The other camp consisted of the Americans who had more or less entered the dye industry for the first time when the British navy bottled up German maritime activity. These Americans had spent a lot of money building up our dye industry (under the tremendous handicap that the trade secrets of dye manufacture were kept in Germany), and they didn’t want to see their money go to waste just because Germany was licked. What was the use of winning the God damn war if we couldn’t get something out of it?
And so Major Boam—who retained his military title partly because the hotel and restaurant people in Washington knew him as Major Boam, and partly because he thought it gave him standing with members of Congress—had been staying in Washington ever since the Harding Administration moved in. He spoke fraternally of Congress: “We’re getting a lot of work done down there. You wouldn’t believe it the amount of work we’re getting done—why, who is this?”
“This is Gloria. Say how do you do to Major Boam,” said Mrs. Wandrous.
“How do you do,” said Gloria.
“Come here till I have a look at you,” said the major. He held out his hands, his big brown fat hands. “Say, this is quite a young lady. How old is she? How old are you, Gloria?”
“I’m almost twelve,” she said.
“Come up here,” he said. “Sit on my lap.”
“Oh, now, Major, she’ll be a nuisance,” said Mrs. Wandrous.
“Well, if the Major wants her,” said Vandamm. “Go on, Gloria, be sociable.”
“Shooooor she will,” said Major Boam. “Ups!” He picked her up and sat her down on his left leg. He held his left hand on her back and went on talking. As he talked his hands moved, now he would pat and squeeze her bare thighs, now he w
ould pat her little behind. She looked up at him as he did these things, and he went on talking so interestedly and in such a strong easy voice that she relaxed and laid her head on his shoulder. She liked the pressure of his hands, which did not hurt her the way some people’s did. She liked the rumble of his voice and the smell of his clean white shirt and the feel of his soft flannel suit.
“Look,” said Vandamm, interrupting and indicating with a nod how relaxed Gloria was.
Boam nodded and smiled and continued what he was saying. In a little while Gloria fell asleep—it was past her bedtime. Her mother picked her up off Boam’s lap, and Boam immediately jumped up.
He tried to stay away from the Wandrous-Vandamm home after that, but the harder he tried, the more excuses he invented. He would plan to go there after he was sure Gloria would be asleep; but then he would be saying: “How’s little Gloria?” and Vandamm would immediately say: “Come up and see her when she’s asleep.” Boam had business in Pittsburgh that was supposed to keep him there three or four days. He stayed a fortnight. All that time he knew what was happening to him. He did not know what he wanted to do with the child. He did know that he wanted to take her away, be alone with her.