The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  "Mist' Siddall said to wait and take you wherever you wanna go," Dominic explained.

  "Oh—why—thank you. I guess I'll go home—do you want to come along and have a cold drink?" she asked Jake.

  "I might have known," said Jake, still amenable to orders, stepping into the car after Mysie. "Even if I did write a play, and it was accepted, it would go flooey at the last minute."

  Mysie replied irrelevantly: "I don't see how that egg could lose his roll on the stock market now, with everything on the up and up. It's crazy, but what stock could he pick for the express purpose of losing?"

  "It can be done," said Jake. "Internal Combustion Engine, I think. It combusted yesterday. It would."

  "Good heavens," Mysie exclaimed, "I forgot to tell Dominic where to go." Dominic had started without instructions. She leaned forward and slid the glass. "Dominic, please drive to—"

  "Yeah, I know where you live," said Dominic.

  "You know where I live? Where?"

  "You live over Gus Silver's place."

  "For heaven's sake," Mysie said at random, "do I? What an elegant address. It must be the speakeasy downstairs. Or whatever it is—they call it a club. They have a chain on the door, and peepholes; and there's usually a car or two standing outside. At all hours of the day and night."

  Jake said, as if he hadn't heard her, which was the case: "Maybe Morris can find another backer."

  Mysie decided that a pretense of optimism would be false kindness. It was her own mental habit to expect the worst; and then when it came, it was all over. She worried a good deal in anticipation; or rather, she made every effort to exterminate each budding hope; but she seldom repined. Hardly anything ever came out right; that seemed to be the nature of things. What she found hardest to accept was the fact that so many events were negative; if one looked back, life consisted largely of things not happening. Looking ahead, one was sustained by the conviction that something must happen. And it did, but not ever quite what one wished or planned; so that the total effect was of a continuous double disaster. Yet, given a choice, she would have crammed every minute with events at the expense of time, though she thought that probably she was wrong. Many things need the fullness of time. The impulse toward speed, by no means peculiar to this age, is half suicidal, a desire for a short cut to experience. It drives men to war, among other follies; they feel they may for once be fully alive, if only at the moment before death. And they would be spared the great pain of thinking. Mysie sighed again and returned from this irrelevant mental excursion.

  "Maybe," she said. "But I guess it's a thin chance. I'll tell you, Neale Corrigan was out in front at yesterday's rehearsal. Nobody knew it but Morris, only Corrigan told me afterward. You know he owns the Franklin Theater, and the show there will close in a couple of weeks, so he wants something to fill it. If he had seen a good bet in Third String, he'd have bought an interest; Morris was trying to get him to bite. Corrigan sized it up as a ten-to-one shot, and nothing in it for movie rights either; not enough plot."

  Corrigan had also intimated that she could have her job back, and probably a part in a show he intended to try out next month. She omitted that item, because it wouldn't help Jake.

  Jake said: "If the whole world is resolved that I shall die in the gutter, who am I to object?"

  "Corrigan said the dialogue was brilliant, but that you ought to get a practical hack playwright to put in action."

  "It wouldn't matter, I suppose," Jake enquired with dangerous calm, "if the action had nothing to do with the dialogue?"

  "That is an idea," said Mysie. "I mean, if the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin spoke the lines of Lady Windermere's Fan." Completely aware of the futility of advice, she was nevertheless unable to prevent herself continuing: "Still, why don't you—"

  "Why don't I write a play with more action?" Jake supplied, sweetly reasonable. "I will explain why I do not do various things you might proceed to enumerate, any of which would be highly lucrative. Why, in short, I do not write a play that will run for two years, or a best selling novel, or even toss off a few short stories. It is because I am too dumb. This statement applies to the human race in general and in all its undertakings. You, for instance, are said to be almost as bright as the average; why don't you write a play yourself?"

  "That might be the reason," Mysie agreed.

  "On the other hand," Jake continued inexorably, "Miss Sarnoff asks me why I do not write like Ray Lynch. For that I am not dumb enough. She also commends the method of our literary editor to my attention; she thinks I should acquire the proletarian point of view. I don't know where he picked it up; maybe at Harvard; and besides, the only proletarians I know read Zane Grey; but I admit our reviewer finds common ground. Every time literature raises its ugly head, he is there to knock it for a loop. All he asks is that a book shall be so boring that you'd sooner be shot than read it, and he announces that it is a masterpiece. However, Miss Sarnoff does her best. She edits my stuff, eliminating the point of each paragraph, or whatever portions seem to contain an idea."

  "Do you mean that she cuts out the jokes?"

  "She does when she sees them."

  "The prosecution rests," said Mysie. "Probably she thinks you don't really mean it. I guess humor worries those owlish people. If you show them one of Rube Goldberg's contraptions for swatting a fly by means of an alarm clock, a trained elephant, a springboard and a piece of cheese, they examine it carefully and arrive at the conclusion that it is not efficient."

  "They want to get to the bottom of it," said Jake.

  "They are very worthy people," said Mysie. "And so prolific. They run the world, and that's where we get off. Do you mind if I put an icepack on my head as soon as I get home?"

  "Not in the least," said Jake. "It is your head. Do you suppose Arthur would care to rescue the American drama from commercialism?"

  "What?" said Mysie.

  "I just wondered if Arthur could be induced to back the play. If he puts up for that magazine—"

  "No!" Mysie exclaimed violently. "If you even suggest it to him, I'll never speak to you again. Can't you see—"

  She could see luminously the reason why not, but was unable to express it in words. She was shocked and startled, and had a confused impression that what startled her was the fact that she was shocked. "It's absolutely out of the question. On account of your job and—and everything. You must not."

  "Well," said Jake. "They are your relatives."

  "I wouldn't give a damn if you got Gina to back it," said Mysie.

  Jake said: "I haven't come to that yet. The intellectual gigolo. Supported by kind rich ladies."

  "Oh, anyone who got a cent from Gina would earn it— and I don't mean what you mean."

  "Neither do I," said Jake. "Our kept thinkers couldn't earn their cigarette money that way."

  They had reached Mysie's address and went upstairs laughing.

  Dominic drove away with a casual conviction that Mysie was Arthur's sweetie, and that she was two-timing him with Jake. He did not know that Mysie was Gina's cousin, and he did know that she was on the stage, concerning which he had old-fashioned conventional ideas. His own cousin Tony belonged to the push that supplied Gus Silver's place with liquor. On his free evenings Dominic had occasionally gone around with Tony on the truck, so he had seen Mysie several times, once or twice with Jake. When old Dean Hervey went abroad for a sabbatical year, Dominic had got his new job with the Siddalls through the head chauffeur; he wouldn't have asked Gina, and did not suppose that she would recognize him, in which he was right. Natural tact suggested to him that the reminder of her briefly held position at the Dean's would have no interest for her. But he remembered driving her down to the Siddalls' the first time, and had known that she married Arthur Siddall, because the Dean officiated at the wedding.

  In crediting Arthur with a mistress, Dominic merely assumed that a man with so much money knew what to do with it. He took for granted that Arthur was in the habit of leaving the car
at Mysie's disposal. He had never driven Arthur before, and Raymond, Arthur's regular chauffeur, was uncommunicative. The last thing Dominic would have suspected was that there was nothing for Raymond to reveal.

  Dominic was a realist. He left moral judgment to the priest, who was paid for it.

  He drove to the public garage, to wait for further orders. Half a dozen chauffeurs were waiting, talking to the mechanics or shooting craps quietly. One, whose uniform was rather soiled and shabby, said: "Hello, Nick. How's the new job?" That was Chet Brody, a fresh guy. Dominic said: "Awri'."

  Brody said: "They don't want another man, do they?"

  Dominic evaded a blunt negative with a counter query: "You lose your job?"

  "Had to quit," Brody explained. "I don't mind sleeping with the boss's wife, but when her sister came to live with them, there was too much overtime."

  Dominic said noncommittally: "Sure, sure." That was an old gag. Brody never held a job long; he was a reckless driver and picked up too many tickets. He don't kid nobody but himself, Dominic thought. . . . My boss's wife, she's a better looker than this Brennan dame, but that's a funny business, a man gets tired of going home every night the same . . .

  Three weeks later Mysie had a note from Arthur. When did her play open? He had been watching for the announcement and was afraid he might miss it. That's nice of him, Mysie thought. I believe he would have backed it. That's just why I couldn't let Jake. . . . Even if it wasn't a predestined flop, yes, if she had been sure it would go over, she thought obscurely, there was all the more reason. ... It was because Arthur had so much money. Too much. Nothing else but . . .

  She answered promptly: the play was postponed. She'd let him know when. It mightn't be till next season. She hesitated before addressing the envelope. He doesn't know that Gina detests me, she thought. But I don't suppose Gina opens his mail—She sent it to his club.

  14

  JAKE VAN BUREN'S Aunt Hallie died the week of the stock-market crash. Both events seemed unreal. Jake had always been singularly detached from the visible world. He had been born in that old house on East Eighteenth Street; he had lived there all his life—and he was now nearing forty, though he did not look it—but in spirit he had always been a lodger. He was used to the house; he was equally used to his Aunt Hallie and his Aunt Susan.

  The house was an authentic brownstone front, narrow and ugly, four stories with a half-basement. It had belonged to Grandfather Van Buren. There was a muddy oil-painting of the old gentleman in the parlor, with beetling brows and a cast-iron mouth and Horace Greeley whiskers. Grandfather had left the house in trust in a rather complicated manner. It was, Jake irreverently said, a Van Buren Sanctuary. Any or all of Grandfather's immediate offspring, or their widows, were bequeathed the right or residence so long as they should survive. The estate could not be finally settled until the last son or daughter expired. Jake had forgotten the original number of Grandfather's viable progeny. There had been an elder son, Uncle Martin, who took precedence of Jake's father in the line of inheritance. Uncle Martin died soon after Grandfather, but as he had had a son, who also died years ago, the house would ultimately go through that line to Katryn Wiggins. Or so Jake understood; the will was slightly ambiguous on such remote contingencies, having been drawn by lawyers. Grandfather Van Buren had tried to outwit time, and failed as men usually do. The house could have been sold profitably on several occasions, if it hadn't been so thoughtfully tied up. Those occasions had passed; it was now wedged in between two apartment houses, and probably unsalable. Grandfather and Uncle Martin and Father and the will had become history, something that ended before the present began, and had no connection with it. The house was in statu quo. Jake lived in it as we do live among historic scenes, never quite identifying them with our own affairs.

  Aunt Susan was a spinster and Aunt Hallie a widow. Aunt Hallie's matrimonial term had been brief, and she returned to the house immediately after her bereavement, which was before Jake was born. It was impossible to imagine her as a young bride, or to conjure up even a hypothetical bridegroom. She was the type of widow to whom marriage is only a necessary formality precedent to her natural condition of widowhood. She and Aunt Susan invariably wore black in winter and grey in summer. Both of them, it seemed to Jake, had been the same age ever since he could remember. This could not be true, but reason availed naught against his impression. He didn't know just how old they were.

  Though he saw his aunts every day, he spent very little time in their company. They existed on the lower floors. To Jake the house was an arrangement of layers. He always thought of it vertically, with himself going up or downstairs. He had contrived to secure for himself the fourth storey, under the roof. It was hot up there in summer, and cold in winter, and altogether inconvenient, having been intended for the servants. There was a front room and a back room, with a dark bathroom and closet in between. The bath-tub was of tin, and the water was never quite hot. The bedroom contained a hideous wooden bedstead with a high solid headboard "grained" in brown varnish, and a marble-topped bureau, and this and that. The front room had a Brussels carpet firmly tacked down, a small carved sofa apparently upholstered in concrete, two chairs with the backs curved in precisely the wrong places, a marble-topped table with scroll-sawed underpinnings, three framed mottoes on the walls, a filing cabinet, and a pretty little rosewood stand with a green silk pocket underneath, a sewing table. This last had belonged to Jake's mother, and he carried it upstairs from the room which had been hers, on the third floor. Nothing else had seemed to belong to her specifically; the house was furnished and the aunts in occupation when her husband brought her home, and she must have perceived at a glance the futility of attempting to change it. Her room was now called the guest room, though there were never any guests. The door was always shut.

  The third floor back room had been given over to the one servant. From time to time one cook left and another came, but she was usually Irish, middle-aged, fat, and of uncertain temper. Jake kept on good terms with her by giving no trouble; he did not complain if his rooms were not dusted, and he tipped her frequently.

  The second floor was sacred to the aunts. Two bedrooms, also equipped with gloomy walnut and marble, and faintly musty although aired and kept in rigid order. The aunts took their meals in the sunless half-basement dining room, and the rest of the day they sat in the parlor, by the front window. They were both rather stooped, with high noses, liver spots, and an indefinable expression of self-satisfaction. One might wonder whence they derived it from lives so negative, dull and narrow, but perhaps that was precisely the reason. They read the society pages in the newspapers and picked out names they knew, not exactly friends but names of families with whom the Van Burens had once associated, finding fewer each year. They did not read much else, nor do fancy work; they just sat.

  The parlor contained a square piano, a cabinet of curios, various plush armchairs and hassocks, matched by plush curtains at the windows, and two bookcases with curtained glass fronts. The bookcases supported marble busts of Longfellow and Dante. Numerous steel engravings shared the walls with family photographs. There were two objects the like of which Jake had never beheld elsewhere: a patent rocker and a mantel drape or lambrequin of macramé cord lace.

  The aunts had a formal, gelid yet doubtless real affection for Jake, as the man of the house. It embarrassed him slightly; but he was careful never to utter any disturbing sentiments in their hearing. Sometimes this was difficult. Their remarks were so shatteringly inept. Frequently Jake did not arise until noon, and the aunts assumed he devoted the midnight hours to intellectual pursuits. This was measurably true of many evenings; he did his writing in great discomfort with a bracket light glaring in his eyes and a litter of books and papers on the floor beside his chair; he made innumerable notes, and filed them, and couldn't find them again, and at intervals he spent whole nights going through the files. When he came downstairs in the morning, one or both of the aunts said: "Brain work is the most fatigui
ng." Therefore when, as occasionally happened, Jake had been out the night before and had come home solemnly pickled about four o'clock, creeping upstairs with bated breath, this statement threatened his equanimity. He didn't drink much nor often; but the cook was not deceived. She used to bring up his coffee, with a gleam of sour sympathy in her eye. ... Of course there were nights when he did not come home at all.

  The aunts could not have been wholly unaware, but they belonged to an age when gentlemen had unwritten prerogatives, and ladies were not supposed to understand anything that could brush the bloom from their innocence. Even married women were not supposed to understand. Maybe they did not. A good many aspects of the matter were quite incomprehensible.

  The break in the stock market was like a house of cards falling. It had been built up incredibly high and then a breath brought it down. It was a soundless catastrophe; it happened in the mind. Jake read the newspaper headlines with fatalistic indifference. Because he had, in his detachment, always known it was a house of cards. . . . That was why he had quit his job ten years ago. He had looked through the figures he used to deal in; he really knew how to read a balance sheet. He had perceived a curious fact that wasn't mentioned in his accountancy course: the difference between a modern balance sheet and an old-fashioned inventory. The inventory listed material things and obligations dischargeable in the same kind. It was realizable in physical terms. The balance sheet seemed to do the same, but it didn't. It was a reading taken at a given time from a dynamometer. Everything depended on the continuance of the flow. If that should stop, the debit and credit items would have to be transposed to arrive at the truth. The assets instantly became liabilities. A closed factory of the modern kind is not only a net loss but a devouring expense. The accountancy thus was an enormous joke, like the careful proceeding of those rustics who built a fence around a cuckoo. A hedge of figures circumscribing imponderables. The exquisite part of the joke was that the figures were often skillfully juggled, in a quite legal manner, with depreciation and reserves and goodwill. What an amusingly futile performance, when a few months or years might turn the trick even more handsomely, though unfortunately it was impossible to be sure which way. ... It interested Jake for awhile to see this, but he got tired of the motions, and quit. To earn enough for his own imponderables—his share of the upkeep of the house which was now a liability instead of the asset it had been in Grandfather Van Buren's time—Jake did emergency work for his old firm, when they were rushed with annual statements and income tax returns. The third day of the panic they called him in, and he went downtown.