Friday at six, as he rang the bell marked r. frazier in the East Eighty-eighth Street apartment building, he felt that his self-confidence was only a thin shell around him, no deeper than his freshly pressed suit. The first sight of Theodora, he thought, radiantly happy in her marriage to Robert Frazier II, would crumple him to that wretched image of the skunk which he still vividly remembered. Theodora answered the bell. Dr. Fenton had rather expected a maid.
“Welcome, Ed!” she said with an abandoned swing of her arm. “And Baldur! My, hasn’t he grown! Come in!”
The room was quite small and crowded with people, all noisily talking. Theodora took him directly to a gateleg table covered with bottles and glasses and soup bowls of ice cubes, and mixed a strong scotch and soda for him, saying that he probably didn’t know anybody here and could face it better with a glass of something. He realized then that she was a little high.
Suddenly a huge, shaggy Briard bounded out of nowhere and crashed against Dr. Fenton’s thighs, nearly knocking him down. His grip on Baldur’s short leash tightened, but there was no need, because Baldur stood quite still in the face of the Briard’s barking, which sounded like claps of thunder in the small room.
“Susie!—Susie, quiet!” Theodora was yelling, tugging at the dog’s collar, but Susie would not be silenced and her splayed legs made it impossible for Theodora to budge her. Susie crouched, barking, wagging her tail, inviting Baldur to romp, but Baldur only gazed at the dog with the smiling indulgence that an adult might show toward an unruly child.
“I suppose Susie’s just a pup!” Dr. Fenton shouted over the barking, smiling.
“A what?—Susie!” Theodora’s head snapped back alarmingly as Susie bolted free, and she caught herself against Dr. Fenton’s shoulder.
Susie had begun to run in a circle around Baldur. People shrank against the walls to get out of her way, jostling each other, spilling drinks. A small end table was knocked over.
“I shouldn’t have brought Baldur!” Dr. Fenton yelled apologetically. “I’m sorry! Shall I take him out?”
“Susie, stop!—Bob, lock her up in the bathroom!”
“Somebody’ll only let her out again!” shouted a plump, pink-faced man.
One of the male guests made a dive for Susie’s collar, hung on and stopped her, then tugged her into an adjacent hall.
“I suppose she’s just a pup,” Dr. Fenton said to Theodora, smiling.
“She’s four. She’s Bob’s dog. I can’t do anything with her and he won’t. Just look what she’s done to the sofa end.”
Dr. Fenton realized with a shock that was almost horror that the plump, pink-faced man in the armchair, whom Theodora had called Bob, must be Robert Frazier II. “He’s—your husband?” Dr. Fenton asked, still incredulous.
“Yes. Come and meet him. Bob? Want you to meet Ed Fenton, one of my former husband’s old friends,” Theodora said carelessly.
Robert Frazier II did not get up, only waved his glass and said, “Hi, Ed, make yourself at home. This is a housewarming, y’know, and we want it warm.”
“I didn’t know,” Dr. Fenton said, not knowing what to say. The man’s appearance still held him rigid with surprise. He looked about thirty-five, though his face was so soft and weak, he might have been older. And he was certainly drunk. “Where have you been living?”
“With his parents in Pennsylvania,” supplied the blond girl seated on an arm of Robert Frazier’s chair. “But they’ve thrown the honeymooners out now, and he’s going to make his own way in the world, isn’t he, Bobsie?” She kissed him on the cheek.
“She’s my cousin, y’know,” Robert Frazier said with a wink to nobody in particular.
“Kissing cousins! Ha! Ha! Ha!” somebody yelled.
Speechless with shock and embarrassment, Dr. Fenton moved away, looking for Theodora. She was standing by a window, gazing dreamily out. Once beside her, he did not know what to say. He had prepared himself to ask if she had gone to Europe since he had seen her, prepared even a congratulatory statement about her husband. The statement was quite impossible to make now. Dr. Fenton glanced around the room and his eye fell on a wide silver bowl that he recalled from the days when Theodora had been married to Alex Wilkes. It was a beautiful bowl, Grecian in spirit, and it had always held grapes or floating flowers of some kind at Alex and Theodora’s house. Someone had set a half-finished highball in it. The beauty of the silver bowl made him realize the ugliness and mediocrity of the rest of the furnishings—the varnished bookshelf, the busily patterned drapes, the clumsy armchair in which Robert Frazier II slumped. Dr. Fenton suddenly recalled the smell of lamb stew that had greeted him when he stepped out of the elevator a few minutes ago. And the people here—Dr. Fenton had expected the upper crust of international society, or at least of American society. It was almost funny. The people were about the caliber of the Kirsteins. He had no sooner thought that than the Kirsteins came in the door. One of the guests had opened the door for them.
Bill Kirstein greeted Robert Frazier noisily, then saw Dr. Fenton and charged toward him. “Ed, you old jerk, where’ve you been hiding? I didn’t expect to see you here!” His hearty slam of Dr. Fenton’s shoulder brought a very low growl of warning from Baldur, which Dr. Fenton felt as a slight vibration of the leash. “Business still the same old grind? Still got that hound, I see.”
“Oh, I’ve been staying home quite a bit lately,” Dr. Fenton said with a smile. “How’ve you people been?”
Bill Kirstein looked at him suspiciously. “Say, what’re you getting so high-hat about? Snubbing all your old friends?”
“Not at all!” Dr. Fenton felt himself blushing a little. On the other hand, why should he feel apologetic? What had he done? He stood up still straighter and looked Bill right in the eye, pleasantly.
“Be seeing you.” Smiling in a slightly rattled way, Bill drifted off to Theodora. Dr. Fenton watched her come awake and kiss Bill on the cheek, and Bill circled her waist with his arm, familiarly. He never would have done that with Alex around, Dr. Fenton thought, and Theodora would not have permitted it, either. Alex and Theodora had known the Kirsteins slightly for several years, Dr. Fenton knew, but they had never been close friends and the Wilkeses had not invited them, he distinctly remembered, after one party at their house at which Bill had gotten obstreperously drunk.
Baldur stood by his side, gazing straight before him with a rather puzzled expression, Dr. Fenton thought, at a woman who was sitting on a man’s lap.
“Tell me about Baldur,” Theodora said suddenly, reaching down to pet the dog’s head. “Has he been a good companion for you?”
She evidently hadn’t read about Baldur saving his life, or was too drunk to remember it now, Dr. Fenton thought. “He’s been a wonderful companion,” he said, smiling. “Haven’t you, Baldur? Don’t you recognize Theodora?” he asked the dog, and the look in Baldur’s eyes as he glanced up at him made Dr. Fenton wish he hadn’t asked that question.
“Have you taught him any tricks?” Theodora asked, pushing back some straying hair with one of the long, limp hands that Dr. Fenton had once thought so exquisite.
“He doesn’t need to learn tricks. He understands everything that goes on, just like a human being,” Dr. Fenton replied.
Theodora’s face changed slowly. She tried to stand taller, swaying a bit. “You’re different, Ed.—You’ve changed a lot,” she said almost hostilely. Drunken tears suddenly poured into her eyes, making them glassier. “If you don’t like me anymore, why’d you come here?”
“But Theodora, I do like—”
“I may be living a lot more simply, but it’s my life, isn’t it? Who’re you to look down your nose?” Her voice rose and the hubbub in the room came to an abrupt halt.
“Siddown, hon, you’ve had enough!” yelled Robert Frazier II from the depths of his armchair.
Som
ebody laughed. Conversation started again.
“My apologies, Theodora, but I still don’t know what I’ve done,” Dr. Fenton said with a smile. “It’s a charming party and I’m very happy to see you.”
“I don’t believe you!” Theodora said with a persistent stare, and though her voice was loud, nobody paid any attention now.
“I think I should be going, Theodora. Thank you very much for asking me, and thanks from Baldur, too.” He turned and walked to Robert Frazier II. “Good-bye, Mr. Frazier. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”
“Glad you came. Don’t mind Theo, she gets like that.” Robert Frazier waved casually.
“And good riddance! Stuffed shirt!” Theodora’s voice yelled behind him as he opened the door.
The door closed behind him, but did not quite shut out a horselaugh from Bill Kirstein. Dr. Fenton caught the elevator down and started walking the twenty-odd blocks to his apartment, conjugating French subjunctives to relax his taut nerves. After several blocks he began to feel better, and he remarked to Baldur that it was only two more weeks until summer vacation. Dr. Fenton was taking a month off and going to a hotel in the Adirondacks where Baldur, he had learned, would be welcome.
Baldur looked up at him with a smiling adoration and with understanding. Dr. Fenton winked at him. Never again would he see Theodora Frazier on an unapproachable pedestal, never again envy the man whose wife she was, never again see a golden aura around Robert Frazier II. Dr. Fenton began to whistle like a schoolboy. Life, his very own life, which he had thought so humdrum and hopeless, seemed a blessed and happy thing, full of promise and full of joy. His eyes lingered on a pretty woman who approached him and went by.
“I’ve walked up an appetite, Baldur. What do you say we find a restaurant and share a nice steak right now?”
Baldur looked up at the word “steak,” and pulled a trifle more eagerly on his leash, turning at the next corner toward the restaurant between Madison and Park which he knew his master favored when it came to steaks.
BORN FAILURE
Some men are born to success as the sparks fly upward. Some men start making a profit on penny lemonades at the age of five, gather a little backlog swapping old cars at fifteen, and by fifty the thousands are gushing in from oil, cotton, babies’ didy services, frozen cheese blintzes, or whatever else they have applied, however casually, their golden-touched brains to.
Such was not Winthrop Hazlewood. Winnie was a born failure. He looked like a failure even at the age of five, sitting with his big brother (who looked like a success at the age of ten) in a goat-cart photograph that still stands on the piano in Winnie’s house in Bingley, Vermont. There is another picture on the piano showing Winnie at twenty-one with his college mates on graduation day, Winnie fifth from the left in the back row, hangdog and unobtrusive, as if he were actually ashamed of the occasion that caused him to be photographed that day.
But Winnie had an aspiration, even at twenty-one. He wanted to open a general store. It was characteristic of Winnie that he never spoke of it as a “department store” but as a “general store.” Winnie wanted to live in a small town. His idea was to learn the business by clerking in a department store in Bennington, his hometown, and then open a store for himself. In his seventh year of clerking, his fiancée, Rose Adams, got tired of waiting for him to learn the business and yanked him from the job and from Bennington to Bingley-on-the-Dardle, where Winnie had always said he wanted to live. Winnie had a little money saved up, and Rose’s father gave her a thousand dollars as a dowry, plus another thousand exclusively for the new store. It took Winnie over five years to pay the thousand dollars back to Mr. Adams with interest. By that time, Winnie’s first and last child, Mary, had been born and had died in the second month of its life. The doctor said that Rose should never try to have another. Winnie was deeply disappointed, because he loved children, but he never showed his disappointment to Rose. Winnie was a man of resignation.
Winnie had wanted a store that specialized in men’s clothing, especially workingmen’s clothing, because Bingley was a farm community, and in such things as ribbons, buttons, nails, and hammers—the kind of things people needed every day, Winnie said. It didn’t take Rose a minute to see that two other stores took care of Bingley’s needs in these lines, but that what the town lacked was a good dry goods store. So Winnie took her advice and concentrated on dry goods, from cottons up to heavy woolens. He also sold some haberdashery, soaps, stationery, toys, overshoes, percolators, and floor wax. These last stocks varied, because Winnie was a great one for buying a bargain in any line of goods when a salesman offered it to him. And the stocks moved very slowly for the reason, as Rose always pointed out, that people never knew what he had at any certain time. If they came back to buy a second box of soap, for instance, there wouldn’t be any more in stock, no soap at all, which didn’t make for steady customers. The women of Bingley all sewed, but there just weren’t enough of them to make Winnie rich. Winnie was fifty-two, and a tired, skinny old man, before he paid off his two-story house on Independence Street.
And even that was at the expense of not getting his store painted, or reroofed, or the cellar waterproofed, or anything else that a respectable emporium needs. Like Winnie, the old middle-sized cracker box of a store on the river side of Main Street looked a lot older than it was. The reddish paint had weathered to a mottled brown, and nearly all the gilt letters on the sign in front that said hazlewood’s general merchandise had chipped off so that you couldn’t read them unless you knew what they were supposed to say. Yet the store had become a fixture in the town, and most Bingley women wouldn’t buy their materials anywhere else, even in Bennington. As low as Winnie’s cash reserves got sometimes, they never quite went down to zero, and he and Rose managed to eat, though not much by the looks of Winnie. He was about the size of a skinny fourteen-year-old boy, not very tall and inclined to stoop. He had a clean-shaven, completely forgettable face—a nose that was just a nose, a mouth as gentle as a sheep’s, and steady but tired gray eyes that looked out from under very ordinary brown eyebrows. His father had grown bald early, but Winnie’s straight brown-and-gray hair grew tenaciously, as thick as it had ever been, parted on the left and hanging over his forehead a little, as it had since he was a small boy. In a bigger town, few people would ever have noticed Winnie, but in Bingley everybody knew him and spoke to him on the street, as if in a town of Bingley’s smallness Winnie had become distinctive just for ordinariness. His bookkeeping kept him at the store until nine o’clock and after in the evenings, about the time when Bingley’s young men were walking their girls home from the seven o’clock movie at the Orpheus. All of them said hello to Winnie if they passed him, or if the light was still on in the back room of the store they would say, “I guess Winnie’s still at it, poor old guy.” And if they didn’t see him, and saw no light, they would remark that Winnie must be home early for a change. In short, Winnie was not really a forgotten man in Bingley, not a cog in a machine the way a lot of big-city dwellers are. But Winnie was very much aware that he hadn’t gotten half as far as most men in Bingley, though he worked twice as hard as most.
Besides having a streak of middling to bad luck for years and years, Winnie had a few misfortunes that were plain unusual. Like the time his older brother turned up in Bingley, fifty years old and flat broke. The last Winnie had heard of Richard, he had made a quarter of a million dollars on the stock market playing Mexican mines. Richard had written him a triumphant letter about that, and had said he was off to Mexico to buy himself a village to retire in. But the Richard that turned up in Bingley was a shadow of his old self. He had put all his money into a silver mine that never produced, had sold at a loss, and then lost that money at a gambling casino in Mexico City. Richard asked Winnie for a job in his store. Winnie said he could put him up at the house all right, but he couldn’t possibly take him on at the store. There wasn’t enough work, and there wasn’t enough
money coming in to pay a salary with. But Richard pled with him.
“Can you do bookkeeping?” Winnie asked.
“Anything! Sure I can do bookkeeping, Winnie. Figures were always my specialty, don’t you remember?” Richard made wavy gestures with his hands, and a ghost of his jaunty smile came back.
“I sure do need a bookkeeper,” Winnie said. “But I couldn’t pay you more than . . . say, twenty-five dollars a week.”
Richard said that was fine. “I’ll help you out with the clerking, too,” Richard said.
Rose was furious with Winnie. “Richard, who’s never given you a cent!” Rose said.
“Well, I never asked him for any,” Winnie replied.
“I bet he can’t add six and four! He never could do anything but sport around and blow his own horn!” And Rose would have said a lot more, if she hadn’t been glad, in a way, that Winnie was taking on a bookkeeper, even a bad one. It hurt Rose that everybody in Bingley talked about Winnie’s not having a single clerk in the store, and coming home late at night summer and winter because he had to stay late totaling up his own accounts. Rose had had high aspirations when they first came to Bingley. Gradually she had turned loose of most of them, but she still longed for a refrigerator and a new sewing machine that worked by electricity. Now, what with paying Richard twenty-five dollars in cash every week, it was hopeless to dream of a refrigerator and a sewing machine anyways soon.
Richard had no knack at all for bookkeeping, or even arithmetic. He would sit bent over his desk in the back corner of the store all day, apparently working with his pen, but actually just doodling in the margins, and scheming up ways to make another pot of easy money and move on to a gayer place than Bingley. Far from helping Winnie with the clerking, on the rare occasions when there was more than one person in the store, Richard would choose these times to disappear entirely, sometimes into the bathroom, sometimes out the back door for a walk. He was trying to build up some social contacts in Bingley, and he did not want everybody in town to know that he was working for his brother. If Richard ever approached a counter, it was to pick out a new tie for himself, or to get himself a clean pair of socks.
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