The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  THE GOLDEN VANITY

  ISABEL PATERSON

  NEW YORK 1934

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

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  27

  1

  WHEN the telephone rang, Gina Fuller was looking in the files for a copy of the appeal for funds for the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. Dean Hervey was looking at Gina. He was not aware that he was looking at her, nor why. It was for religious consolation. As she stood with her back to the window, the morning light defined three points of gold on the nape of her neck, at the edge of her hair. He had never noticed it before, because her hair was dark, bronze-black, but shading to chestnut when the sun struck through it. Her head was bent and her lowered lashes made inverted crescent shadows. The ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, he thought. The Dean believed in God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of Mrs. Jelliffe Pearson. He gave God tactful advice every Sunday, but he was perplexed how to turn aside the wrath of Mrs. Pearson. The lady had been invited to subscribe to the Chapel Building Fund. By return mail, Mrs. Pearson reminded the Dean bluntly that as a divorcée she had been refused the benediction of the church upon her second marriage. Also it had been intimated to her that her voluntary resignation from active direction of the Flower Guild of Saint Stephen's would relieve the Bishop of serious embarrassment. Mrs. Pearson could not suppose that her money would be welcome where her presence was not. She had no doubt that enough stones would be contributed by eminent Pharisees to complete the Chapel.

  Not a nice letter at all. The Dean was distressed. Ladies should be more—more—well, perhaps he meant less. They should not say such things.

  They should be like Miss Fuller: modest, attentive, pious, diligent and serene.

  Holding the letter as if he did not quite know where to put it down safely, he repeated: "Most unfortunate. The list—we must go over the list—" He started, and seized the telephone. It always made him jump. That was why Gina had muffled the bell down to a cicada's buzz. He wished she hadn't. It sounded more than ever like a rattlesnake.

  He preferred not to explain the association, being ashamed of it as cowardice. Some impressionable years of his blameless infancy had been spent in the Southwest, where his father was a missionary. The image of Satan in ophidian form was a very lively one to the Dean, and the Unpardonable Sin was mixed up in his mind with the worship of the brazen serpent by the Israelites, though of course he knew better. He was small in stature, and seemed to have shrunk inside his clerical collar; his round face, puckered with shallow wrinkles, was that of a good child grown old without growing up. He could be pettish but not quite angry. He liked Gina because she was so respectful to him, just as if he were a man. His cloth was his sole protection against a brutal competitive world.

  Without it, he would have been one of those conscientious hirelings who spend fifty years drudging obscurely for one firm, and are overwhelmed by the gift of an inscribed watch as a reward for fidelity on retirement.

  "Yes, yes, this is Dean Hervey. Oh, Mrs. Siddall, delighted, how do you . . ." Under the mysterious compulsion which forces bystanders to listen to the cryptic half of a telephone conversation, or watch the paying of a dinner check, Gina remained immobile. Her devotional attitude, her veiled expression, had the patient nobility of one waiting upon some immediate revelation of destiny. Boredom is a part of every destiny. . . . She thought, if the Dean's secretary was not recovered by next week, she must find him another substitute, and go back to her own work at the Settlement House; she had only been lent to the Dean. But then what? She had been at the Settlement House three years. Too long. She mustn't stay on with Geraldine either, a mistake altogether. . . .

  The Dean uttered sounds of ineffectual concern, slightly suggestive of a disturbed hen. "I cannot tell you how grieved.... If there is anything. ... I am sorry I did not catch the . . . You mean Miss Fuller?" He put his hand over the receiver. "Miss Fuller, Mrs. Siddall is asking if she may—ah—borrow you. Mrs. Benjamin Siddall." The name carried its own emphasis.

  Gina came out of her trance off-guard. "Mrs. Siddall— but she has never seen me."

  "Precisely. She will not be able to." The Dean beamed over his own humor, before the inappropriateness of the occasion struck him. He modulated into melancholy. "That is to say—I understand she has heard you. On the telephone. What she requires chiefly is a lectrice. Since it is impossible to operate for some months—"

  "Operate?" Gina echoed. The Dean frequently took for granted on Gina's part the extensive knowledge of his parishioners possessed by his absent secretary.

  "Her eyes—an impending cataract," the Dean elucidated. "She liked your voice. 'An excellent thing in woman'—very true. But the point is, will you? I need hardly say that Mrs. Siddall is—"

  He need not. Gina said: "Of course."

  The Dean lifted his hand from the receiver. "Miss Fuller will be glad to—" He found himself addressing vacancy; the invisible Mrs. Siddall had concluded the negotiations with six words.

  Gina enquired: "When would she want me?"

  "At once, if possible. I think you will find," he ventured again the note of deprecating humor, "that whatever Mrs. Siddall wants, she wants immediately."

  "Is she—difficult?"

  "No, no. Decisive. With a broad grasp of affairs—but a heart of gold." The Dean's avocation committed him to clichés. "I am sure you will find the association most interesting. We shall miss you." He sighed. His regular secretary, a devout spinster of fifty, had been selected by his wife. He was inevitably henpecked. A sucking dove would have pecked him. "Take the car—tell Dominic I shall not need him until four o'clock."

  Gina accepted gratefully. There is strong moral support in a limousine. She placed his appointment calendar before the Dean, left her desk neat; the car came around in five minutes.

  As he leaned into the tonneau to unfold the rug, Dominic's liquid dark gaze slid down the chaste line of her throat. Swell dame, he thought, with a masculinity so direct that it became poetic: simple, sensuous and passionate. I lie to get me one like that. Awri' for you, Nick; she don't even see you. Goddam uniform. S'pose I go in with Tony in the booze racket, big money, but my mamma she cry. Lookit Pete, she say; they take him for a ride, and Benny gets sent up two years. Wasmatter, you gotta good job, she say. Yeah, and maybe if I stick around some more first thing you know I marry Carmella, have nine-ten bambinos—watta hell. . . .

  He touched his cap. Gina said thank you, with the sickening sweetness of a lady being gracious to servants. She did not relax against the cushions; her appreciation of luxury was abstract, unrelated to comfort. She took out her vanity case and then forgot it for a few minutes, her face turned toward the window. Under the bland enchantment of October, the splendid materialism of Fifth Avenue became ethereal, rebuking the vulgarity of covetousness; this was the city of a dream. Gina ignored the spectacle. She looked beyond that even. . . . She was trying to assemble the fragments of her information about Mrs. Siddall. An immense, almost legendary fortune, one of the famous fortunes. . . .

  Gina's reverence for wealth was mystical, partaking of the quality of veneration of the two extremes of pious minds, the childlike and the erudite. While aware of the physical substance, they conceive it to be transfused by a divine essence, which it imparts inexhaus
tibly by contact. So its possessors acquire merit, are superior beings, vessels of election. In her yearning toward them, Gina was not a simple mercenary snob, but a novice seeking admission to a difficult way of perfection. She intended to be rich. But she never thought of making money. Salvation was by grace; works would not avail.

  She consulted her tiny mirror with austere impartiality. She was rather tall and slender, with pretty ankles and long fine fingers. Her face was a narrow oval, the profile delicately deflected; she wore her hair parted and brought down smoothly over her ears, giving a suggestion of a lady from a Book of Beauty. Her eyes were light brown, several tones lighter than her hair. The rose color of her lips was natural; they were shaped to an unchanging smile. She took some pleasure in the clear texture of her complexion, and rewarded it with a dusting of powder. Adjusting her smart little hat, she thought that the simplicity of her expensive blue frock was worth what she had paid for it. There was no complacency in the appraisal. Passably pretty, she knew, but somehow it was not enough. Men looked at her speculatively and kept a respectful distance; she didn't know why. And she told herself she didn't care, a kind of honest lie. In one way, she didn't, if they were the wrong men. (That, could she have understood it, was why; for they knew it.) In college, she cultivated the dowdy daughters of the rich, girls who quieted their feminine misgivings with vague aspirations toward good work's or a career. The Settlement House had seemed the surest means of maintaining such connections. Now Gina wasn't so sure. It was suddenly become old-fashioned, and if it did not lead to meeting the right men. . . . For, after all, marriage was the only answer to her ambition. The endless stream of limousines gliding past were filled with women in Parisian frocks, in sable and silver fox and chinchilla, discreet strings of pearls and table-cut diamonds; but plain women, middle-aged, stout and dull. Wives.

  Gina, though she did not look it, was twenty-six. She had not too much time.

  She was aware that the Dean regarded her as a pattern of all the feminine virtues. The knowledge filled her with dismay. In due course, those virtues would render her indistinguishable from all the mouldy virgins and impoverished widows, handmaids of the Lord, who clustered about the higher clergy, exhaling the odor of sanctity and camphor....

  The sculptured beasts, who probably believed themselves to be lions, couchant beside the steps of the Siddall mansion, were absolutely right with the square greystone front. An advance post thirty years earlier, in the Nineties, when Mrs. Siddall had forced the rival leaders of New York society to concede her equal rank in a triumvirate, it was now a fortress of conservatism. It occupied a corner on the Avenue, and the porte-cochère on the side street marked its period. Carriages, the pre-motor age. . . . Gina told Dominic to wait. The butler was English, and professionally decrepit, as became an old family retainer. Gina waited in the high gloomy hall, which exhibited baronial delusions of grandeur in the form of black walnut balustrades, a checkered marble floor, Italian dower chests and a Tudor court cupboard.

  An uneasy sense of not being alone came over Gina. Of course, that was Sargent's portrait of the late Senator Siddall, above the mantel. An elderly gentleman with a neat grey beard; the features were impressive at first glance, but a second impression was shaded with doubt. All the dignity was in the whiskers; there was no force in the lofty forehead; the eyes looked away, but as Gina mounted the stairs she felt that they followed her—when she was not looking.

  Of three people in the long drawing-room, there was no mistaking which was Mrs. Siddall. A pug-faced secretary hovered with a notebook. An oldish woman wore black and the indescribable gentility of a housekeeper.

  Mrs. Siddall rose from a Louis XV sofa. She suggested a Chinese idol, short and solid, the same size all the way down. Nodding backward, she extended two fingers, a caste gesture, acquired with an opera box in the Nineties. "Yes," she said. "Very good of you to come. Sit down." The secretary diverted Gina from a chair which had attained its genuine antiquity by a complete inadaptability to the human form. Gina learned the chairs later: which were to be sat in, which were strictly objects of art. The secretary receded; the housekeeper presented some domestic requisition. Gina took her bearings cautiously.

  The room expressed Mrs. Siddall's Victorian passion for superfluity, mainly in gilt, needle-point, and tightly stuffed satin. She was rich enough to defy interior decorators. Most of the paintings recalled that. Corot stood for thirty thousand dollars a generation ago. And there was another Sargent, a plump young matron in a tight basque and a Langtry fringe. Mrs. Siddall herself.

  The sun filtered through three layers of draperies at the windows: net glass curtains, filet lace, and rose plush. A mirror opposite betrayed a tall young man half hidden by the voluminous folds, at the far end of the room. His fair head made a spot of light. He couldn't get out of the room without passing the others.

  "Very well, I think that is all," Mrs. Siddall concluded with the housekeeper. "Miss—" She deciphered Gina's card through a reading glass. "Miss Fuller—by the way, do your people live in New York?"

  "No; in Washington." She forgot Geraldine and Mysie; cousins don't count.

  "Indeed?" The word evoked gratifying memories to Mrs. Siddall, of herself as, in her own estimation, a great political hostess. "Any relation to the late Justice Fuller?"

  "No, I meant Washington State." Gina added confusedly: "My father was in the law, though."

  "Oh, the Far West." Mrs. Siddall's tone as much as the adjective indicated immeasurable distance. It put Gina outside of social classifications, a negative asset, like being an American in England. In Mrs. Siddall's girlhood, Chicago was the barbarous end of the world, and San Francisco belonged on another sphere. The tide of fashion flowed eastward across the Atlantic. She herself was neither east, west, nor midland. She was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is no mean city in the eyes of its honest burghers. The Siddall fortune had a double origin in the deep fertile earth thriftily cultivated by careful farmers, tenacious Pennsylvania Dutch blood; and the New England trading instinct. She was the great heiress, Charlotte Crane; her father, Heber Crane, from North of Boston, had married a Lancaster girl. Iron, coal and oil had turned to gold in the hands of Heber Crane. In her heart, Mrs. Siddall cherished a certain contempt for New York, as a congregation of the ungodly. She had cast her shoe over Edom; Moab was her washpot. The money drawn from the earth went back into it; the Siddall fortune was based on ground rents. Holdings of bank stock and trust companies were the natural outgrowth.

  "I have never been to the Pacific Coast," said Mrs. Siddall, her manner allowing its existence nevertheless. "Senator Siddall used to say— Arthur!"

  The image in the mirror had moved out of Gina's view. Caught escaping, the young man came forward. As a small boy he would have been called a towhead. An aspect of candor goes with that flaxen fairness, an effect of always facing the light. Blue eyes, inevitably. There was distinction in the shape of his head, the sincerity of his diffident bow. "My grandson, Miss Fuller . . . Are you going out, Arthur?"

  "Lunching at the Caxton Club. If you don't mind."

  "Shall I see you at dinner?"

  "Yes, grandmother." He showed no resentment at the catechism, and took his dismissal from her approving expression.

  Mrs. Siddall resumed to Gina: "You might run over the news." She became slightly pathetic, staring about for the paper; a white film already clouded the iris of her eyes. "The president's message, and the leading editorial, or if there is anything new in the Stillman case." After fifteen minutes, she broke into the reading: "The Caxton Club! I must say, young men have changed—however, old books are a harmless hobby." She rang and the butler appeared. "Arkright, show Miss Fuller to her room."

  Her room ... Gina said tentatively: "I came without— I'd have to go and pack."

  By all means, Mrs. Siddall agreed benevolently; one could not depend upon maids.

  Especially if there were no maids, Gina reflected, as Dominic drove her uptown again. Her cousin, Geraldi
ne Wiekes, lived in a featureless slab of an apartment house on Morningside Heights. Geraldine's husband, Leonard Wiekes, was an instructor at the University. By abstruse juggling with a budget that never came out quite even, Geraldine contrived to pay for a cleaning woman once a week.

  As Gina let herself in, Geraldine sat at an inconvenient little desk, writing steadily. There was something touching in the rapid obedient motion of her lovely feminine hands. Her hair, of an unusual pale red, was cut to a straight bob; she had a dimple in her chin, and a splash of coppery freckles across the bridge of her pointed nose. A little girl, about four years old, played with blocks on a cotton rug in a patch of sunshine. Geraldine paused, biting her pencil. It's getting away from me, she thought helplessly. There must be a happy ending. If I could only sell one story. Then Leonard needn't take that job with the drug company; he could go on with his chemistry research—The little girl gravely said hello to Gina, and Geraldine turned her head. In spite of the difference in coloring and features, there was an indefinable family resemblance to Gina.

  "Oh, Gina—is anything wrong?" Geraldine rose; she was heavy with child, a fact which her unbecoming blue linen overall had concealed until she stood up. How could she, Gina thought, on eighteen hundred a year and an instructor's prospects.

  Gina explained hurriedly what had brought her home in the middle of the day.

  Geraldine exclaimed: "Mrs. Siddall! You don't mean—" She paused, her mouth slightly open, as if overcome by awe. Gina knew Geraldine to be incapable of that emotion, and said shortly: "Yes." Geraldine recovered from the impact: "The last of the dowagers! I saw her, when I was at the Thompsons', but I don't believe it. She actually did wear point lace and diamonds."