by John O'Hara
That Wednesday night after she went to bed she lay there trying, not very hard, to read, and thinking about her mother. Now there was a woman who had known (Gloria was sure) only one man in her entire life. Known meaning slept with. And that had not lasted very long. Yet after twenty years her mother was able to recall every detail of sleeping with a man, almost as though it had happened last night. She had not discussed it at any length with her mother, but now and then a thing would be said that showed how well her mother remembered. Think of living that way! Going to bed these nights, so many nights through so many years; some nights dropping off to sleep, but surely some nights lying there and saddened by the waste of shapely breasts and the excitement in oneself with a man, and the excitement of a man’s excitement. And then nothing to do about it but lie there, almost afraid to touch one’s breasts, probably, or anything else; and remembering one man long ago. There was only one possible explanation for being able to live in memory like that, and Gloria felt tears in her eyes at the thought of her father’s and mother’s love.
It showed, too. It showed in her mother’s face. It worried Gloria a little to come around again to a theory she sometimes had that a woman ought to have one man and quit. It made for a complete life no matter how short a time it lasted. Gloria resolved to be a better girl, and after a long but not unpleasant time she fell asleep, preferring her own face but thinking well of her mother’s.
She had breakfast in her room. It was too warm a day for breakfast in bed. To have breakfast in bed ought to be a luxury and not a nuisance, and it was a nuisance when covering over the legs was a nuisance, as it was this day. She drank the double orange juice and wanted more, but Elsie, the maid, had gone back to the kitchen out of call. Gloria drank her coffee and ate her toast and poured another cup of coffee. Then a cigarette. While having breakfast she was busy with her hands. With no one to look at her she swung her butter knife like a bandmaster’s baton, not humming or singing, but occasionally letting her throat release a note. She felt good.
What, if anything, she had decided the night before had not been changed by the morning and the good night’s sleep, principally because she had not fixed upon a new mode of life. The good night’s sleep she knew had a lot to do with the absence of her usual morning despair, but it wasn’t that she was happy, exactly. It came close to the feeling that she was ready for anything today, whereas if she had come to a solemn decision the night before to be an angel thenceforward, she would now be having a special kind of gayety—not removed from the despair—that was cap-over-the-windmill stuff. No; today she felt good. The big problem of Liggett would be settled somehow, not without an awful scene and maybe not right away, but it would probably be all right—and that concession was a step in the right direction, she thought. She felt good, and she felt strong.
She looked at the advertisements in the paper while smoking her second cigarette. She had a patronizing, superior feeling toward the advertisements: she had bought practically all the clothes she wanted and certainly all she would need. She had her usual quick visit to the bathroom, and then she had a lukewarm bath and she was dressing when her mother called to her that Ann Paul was on the phone and wanted to speak to her, and should she take the message? Yes, take the message, Gloria told her mother. The message was that Ann wanted to have lunch with her. Gloria said she would come to the phone. She didn’t want to have lunch with Ann, but she had known Ann in school and did want to see her, so she asked Ann to come downtown if she could, and Ann said she could.
Ann lived in Greenwich where she lived an athletic life; sailing her own Star, hunting and showing at the minor league horse shows and in such ways using up the energy which no man had seemed able to get to for his personal use. In school Ann, who was very tall for a girl, was suspect because of a couple of crushes which now, a few years later, her former schoolmates were too free about calling Lesbian, but Gloria did not think so, and Ann must have known that Gloria did not think so. She called Gloria every time she came to New York, which was about twice a month, and the last two times Gloria had not been home for the calls.
Ann came downtown, parked her Ford across the street from Gloria’s house, and went right upstairs to Gloria’s room. Ann was in the Social Register, which fact impressed Gloria’s mother as much as Gloria’s indifference to it. Ann was always made to feel at home in Gloria’s house.
“I had to see you,” said Ann. “I have big news.”
“Ah-hah.”
“What?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did you say ah-hah as if you knew it? Does it show?”
“No. I knew there was something. You’ve never looked better.”
“Look,” said Ann, and extended her left hand.
“Oh, you girl! Ann! Who is it? When? I mean do I know him or anything?”
“Tell you everything. His name is Bill Henderson and you don’t know him and he’s at P. and S. and gets out next year and he went to Dartmouth before that and he’s even taller than I am, and I haven’t the faintest idea when we’re going to be married.”
“How long have you known him? What’s he like?”
“Since Christmas. He’s from Seattle and he spent Christmas with friends of mine in Greenwich which is how I happened to meet him. I sat next to him at dinner the night after Christmas, and he was the quiet type, I thought. He looked to be the quiet type. So I found out what he did and I began talking about gastroenterostomies and stuff and he just sat there and I thought, What is this man? He just sat there and nodded all the time I was talking. You know, when I was going to be a nurse year before last. Finally I said something to him. I asked him if by any chance he was listening to what I was saying, or bored, or what? ‘No, not bored,’ he said. ‘Just cockeyed.’ And he was. Cockeyed. It seems so long ago and so hard to believe we were ever strangers like that, but that’s how I met him, or my first conversation with him. Actually he’s very good. His family have loads of money from the lumber business and I’ve never seen anything like the way he spends money. But only when it doesn’t interfere with his work at P. and S. He has a Packard that he keeps in Greenwich and hardly ever uses except when he comes to see me. He was a marvelous basketball player at Dartmouth and two weeks ago when he came up to our house he hadn’t had a golf stick in his hands since last summer and he went out and shot an eighty-seven. He’s very homely, but he has this dry sense of humor that at first you don’t quite know whether he’s even listening to you, but the things he says. Sometimes I think—oh, not really, but a stranger overhearing him might suggest sending him to an alienist.”
“He sounds wonderful! Oh, I’m so glad, darling. When did he go for the ring and all?”
“Well—New Year’s Eve he asked me to marry him. If you could call it that. Sometimes even now I can’t always tell when he’s tight. New Year’s Eve he was dancing with me and he stopped right in the middle of the floor, stopped dancing and stood away from me and said: ‘Remind me to marry you this summer.’”
“I like that. This summer.”
“No, I guess not this summer. But I don’t know. Oh, all I care about is I guess this is it, I hope.”
“It sounds like it to me. The real McCoy, whatever that is. So what are you going to do this summer? Where is—what’s his name? Bill?”
“Bill Henderson. Well, he wants to go home for a little while just to see his family and then come back. I—I’m sort of embarrassed, Gloria. I don’t really know. When he gets ready to tell me something, he tells me, and I never ask him. But what I wanted to see you about, can you come up for the week-end tomorrow? Bill’s coming, and I forget whether he’s just getting ready for examinations or just finishing them. See? I don’t know anything. I just sit and wait.”
“That’s good preparation for a doctor’s wife.”
“So everyone tells me. But what about it, can you come?”
“I’d love to,” said Gloria. T
hen, thinking of Liggett: “I have a half date for the week-end, but I think I can get out of it. Anyway, can I take a rain check if I can’t make it this week?”
“Of course. Do try to get out of the other thing. Is this other thing—would you like me to invite someone for you? I mean is there someone that—I could ask your other date.”
“No. It was a big party, a lot of people, not anyone in particular.”
“Then I won’t ask anyone for you till I hear from you. Will you call me? Call me tomorrow at home, or else call this afternoon and leave word. Just say you’re coming. And of course if you think you can’t come and then change your mind at the last minute and decide you can, that’s all right too.”
“All right. I’ll most likely call you tonight.” Gloria noticed that Ann seemed to have something else to say. “What, Ann? What are you thinking?”
“I can tell you, Gloria,” said Ann. “Darling, I’ve had an affair. Bill and I. We’ve had an affair. Almost from the very beginning. Do you think any the less of me?”
“Oh, certainly not, darling. Me?”
“I never knew about you. I’ve always thought you had, but I could never be sure. It’s only in the last six months I found out why you can’t be sure. It doesn’t show on you. You know? You think the next day you’re going to be a marked woman and everybody on the street will know. But they don’t. And men. Men are so funny. Mothers tell us all our lives that boys lose respect for girls that they go all the way with. But they must have changed a lot since my mother was our age. At first I was so frightened, and then I saw that Bill was the one that really was frightened, not I. I don’t mean about children only. But they’re so helpless. When we’re with people I’m quiet as a mouse and sit there listening to the great man, or when we’re dancing I think how marvelously witty he is, with his sense of humor. But when we’re really alone it all changes. He’s entirely different. At first I used to think he was so gentle, terribly gentle, and it almost killed me. But then I realized something—and this isn’t taking anything away from him. He is gentle, but the things about him that I used to think were gentle, they aren’t gentle. The really gentle things he does aren’t the same things I thought were. What I mistook for being gentle was his own helplessness, or practically helplessness. Yes, helplessness. He knows everything, being a medical student, and I don’t suppose I’m the first for him, but—Lord! I don’t know how to explain it. Do you see what I mean at all?”
“I think so. I think something else, too. I think you two ought to get married, right away. Don’t lose any of the fun. Right away, Ann. He has his own money, and you have some I know. There’s no reason why you should miss anything. Get married.”
“I want to, and he’s crazy to, but I’m afraid of interfering with his studies.”
“It won’t interfere with his studies. He might have to neglect you a little, but he’ll be able to study much better with you than he would being in New York and wishing you were here or he was in Greenwich. No, by all means get married. Just look at all the young marriages there are today. People getting married as soon as the boy gets out of college. The hell with the depression. Not that that’s a factor in your getting married, but look at all the young couples, read the society pages and see, and there must be a lot of them that are really poor and without jobs. If you got married now and he goes back to P. and S. next year you’d have the fun of living together and all that, and then he’ll probably want to go abroad to Vienna or some place to continue his studies, and that will be like a honeymoon. Your family aren’t going to insist on a big wedding, are they?”
“Well, Father thinks it’s a good thing to keep up appearances. Mother doesn’t like the idea as much as she used to. She’d rather use the money for charity, but Father says he’s giving more to charity than ever before and with less money to do it on. He’s very serious about it. You see he knows Mr. Coolidge, and I think he thinks if we invited Mr. Coolidge to the wedding he’d come, and that would do a lot toward sort of taking people’s minds off the depression.”
“I don’t agree with your father.”
“Neither do I. Of course I wouldn’t dare say so, but I think Coolidge got us into this depression and he ought to keep out of the papers.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Well, you’ve given me something to think about. Not that I hadn’t thought of it myself, but whenever I broach the subject people say oh, there’s plenty of time. But you’re the only one that knows we’re practically married right now.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” said Gloria. “Where do you go?”
“Usually to an apartment of a friend of Bill’s.”
“Well, then you’ve—have you ever spent the whole night?”
“Once.”
“That’s not enough. You’re not practically married.”
“How do you know so much? Gloria, don’t tell me you’re married?”
“No, but I know how it is to wake up with a man you love and have breakfast and all that. It takes time before you get accustomed to each other. Who’s going to use the bathroom first, and things like that. Intimacies. Ann, I can tell you a lot.”
“I wish you would.”
“I will. God! I know everything!”
“Why, Gloria.”
“Yes, everything. I know how good it can be and how awful, and you’re lucky. You marry Bill right away and hold on to him.”
“I’ve never seen you like this. Why does it mean so much to you? Is the man you love married?”
“You’ve guessed it.”
“And his wife won’t give him a divorce?”
“Yes,” said Gloria. “That’s it.”
“But couldn’t you both go to her and tell her you love each other? Is she a nice woman? How old is she?”
“Oh, we’ve had it out. Not she and I, but Jack and I.”
“Jack. Do I know him?”
“No.” She was on the verge of confessing that his name was not Jack, but she did not want to tell Ann too much. “Look, darling, I’ll call you tonight for sure and if you’re not there I’ll leave word that I’m coming or not.”
“All right, my pet,” said Ann, getting up. She kissed Gloria’s cheek. “Good luck, and I’ll see you, if not this week, perhaps a week from tomorrow.”
“Mm-hmm. And thanks loads.”
“Oh, I’m the one to thank you,” said Ann, and left.
Gloria thought a long time about how uncontagious love was. According to the book she ought to be wanting to telephone Liggett, and she did want to telephone Liggett in a way, but talking to Ann, virginal Ann with her one man and her happiness and innocence and her awkward love affair (she was sure Bill Henderson wore glasses and had to take them off and put them in a metal case before necking Ann)—it all made her angry with love, which struck in the strangest places. It didn’t seem to be any part of her own experience with love, and it depressed her. What possible problems could they have, Ann and Bill? A man from the Pacific Coast, comes all the way from the Pacific Coast and finds right here in the East the perfect girl for him. What possible problems could they have? What made them hesitate about getting married? She felt like pushing them, and pushing them roughly and impatiently. They would get married and after a couple of years Bill would have an affair with a nurse or somebody, and for him the excitement would die down. But by that time Ann would have had children, beautiful children with brown bodies in skimpy bathing suits. Ann would sit on the beach with them, looking up now and then from her magazine and calling them by name and answering their foolish questions and teaching them to swim. She would have enormous breasts but she would not get very fat. Her arms would fill out and look fine and brown in evening dress. And, Gloria knew, Ann would slowly get to disliking her. No; that wouldn’t be like Ann. But Gloria would be the only person like herself whom Ann could tolerate. Every Ann probably has one Gloria t
o whom she is loyal. And the girls they had gone to school with, who had made the cracks about Ann’s being Lesbian—they would turn out to be her friends, and she would ride with them and play bridge and go to the club dances. They would meet sometimes in the afternoons, parked in their station wagons, waiting for their husbands, and their husbands would get off the train, all wearing blue or gray flannel suits and club or fraternity hatbands on their stiff straw hats, with their newspapers folded the same way all of them. And she, Gloria, would visit Ann and Bill once each summer for the first few summers, and the men with the hatbands would make dates for New York. Oh, she knew it all.
She tried to laugh it off when she thought of the motion picture she had thought up for Ann’s future, but laughing it off was not easy. It was unsuccessful. Laughing it off was unsuccessful because the picture was accurate, and she knew it. Well, every Gloria, she reminded herself, also had an Ann whom she tolerated and to whom she was loyal. Ann’s was not her way of living, but it was all right for Ann. The only possible way for Ann, or rather the only good way. Hell, here she was in a bad humor, and for no apparent reason. You couldn’t call Ann’s happiness a reason.
• • •
In the rear of the second floor of the house in which Gloria lived there was a room which Mrs. Wandrous and the rest of the household called Mrs. Wandrous’ sewing-room. It was small and none of the furniture made you want to stay in it very long. Mrs. Wandrous kept needles and spools of thread and darning paraphernalia and sewing baskets in the room, but she did her sewing elsewhere. Occasionally Gloria went to that room to look out the window, and for no other reason.