The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  Of the other women, Mysie had counted most. And he had never had her, never would have her. The physical fact was immaterial. Now, after so long, when he kissed her cheek, he saw her face as he used to see it, half averted, her head bent; if he kissed her mouth, it would be fresh and cool. She slid out of his arm . .. The first time, when she said: Why not? his instant thought was that she must have had a lover already—why not? He knew better afterward, beyond question. The shock of it recurred to him each time, a sensation beyond sensuality. . . . He used to think, in straightforward vernacular, what if he got her in trouble? And he tried not to wish it. That would be a hell of a thing to do; though he would take care of her. He asked her sometimes, did she know . . . was she all right? . . . Looking away from him with stubborn shyness, she would answer almost inaudibly, Yes. But he didn't believe she knew anything; obviously not. Only it just did not happen.

  And then she left him, and now she had come back, exactly the same. It gave him pleasure to see her in this apartment, which belonged to him; he wasn't going to bother her. Maybe the twenty years between their ages had been impossible to span; and he had grown no younger. He wanted her still, but a desire of the mind more than the flesh—that she should be near him, and kind, and happy.

  Mysie realized that he alone regarded her as a girl, defenseless in her youth and ignorance, needing to be sheltered. Since she was past thirty, she felt the charm of that relationship, whether it is traditional or instinctive; for she too liked to think of him as a man, strong and able to be protective. There is, after all, an unarguable reason; for women are helpless when nature traps them.

  "Oh, no," she said, "women don't hate their homes. But we'd all like more than one life." He ought to understand; he had not been satisfied with one. Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be. Passion itself is intellectual, not to be quenched with a sop of transient sensation. It asks for everything . . . Mysie reckoned herself a fool in the main, and therefore did not see how she could have acted with wisdom; how would that have helped her? There were periods and places in time past when such as she might not rest in holy ground. Fair enough; indeed, she would rather not be so huddled up. How do they pass their time, I wonder, Nights and days in the narrow room, Six steps out of the chapel yonder ...

  "I'd better be going along to the hotel," she said.

  "You needn't unless you choose," said Michael; "there's the spare room." He wished to remember her here, a matter of sentiment. She was touched, unable to deny his offer.

  As she said good night, she was aware that a faint expectation lingered in his mind, and was instantly suppressed. "You'd better give me a call in the morning," she said. "I usually oversleep." In the cloudy borderland of oblivion, she was glad to be under his roof. Then she slept sound; it was past nine of a sunny new day when she woke. The particular quiet of emptiness told her that Michael must have gone out. A note slipped under her door confirmed it. Gone to the office for an hour; he'd be back before eleven with the car. If she called the neighboring restaurant, they would send up breakfast. While she drank her coffee, she decided to telephone Clara Carson. Clara's name was not in the directory; as she hunted through it, she heard Michael's key in the lock.

  "You got something to eat?" he said. "I didn't want to disturb you; I looked in on you and you were dead to the world."

  Yes, she was ready. But would he mind driving by Clara Carson's former address, to enquire?

  "Sure," he said. "Dexter Avenue?"

  "On Denny Park," she explained. They were stepping into the elevator; and she thought she must have misunderstood Michael's answer. He said:

  "Maybe the house is gone; they've torn down Denny Park."

  "Cut down the trees?"

  "The whole thing. Anyhow, we can take a look-see."

  How could a park be torn down? As Michael was starting the car, she postponed the question. What he had said made no specific impression. She was remembering Denny Park. She had loved it for its peace; nothing had ever happened to her in connection with it.

  That was where she used to leave tracks like green plush in white plush, on the rare winter mornings when the grass was rimed with frost. It was at the top of a hill; the hill rose sharply, a sudden angle of at least twenty degrees; a street went upward for a long block, with houses alongside set on slanted foundations, old homely frame houses with people living in them; and one reached the top unexpectedly and there was the park, a little park about a block in extent spread out level. The trees had attained the nobility of respected years, and the grass was not forbidden to wayfaring feet. It was all verdure; and it looked over the city, so that it was like hiding in the top of a tree, looking through the leaves. She used to run up the hill, for fun and to shake off melancholy; then she always loitered across the grass, and in summer rested awhile in the shade. It was so serene in the midst of the city, so lifted up, one cherished it as a secret happiness in the heart. It was high above the tops of the tall business buildings; one could see the harbor traffic, and barely hear the remote thunder of the cable cars on the stepped streets rising from the waterfront; distance and the soft air subdued the note of strident power to an almost musical murmur, like a grumbling bumblebee under a leaf.

  "I don't remember this part of town," Mysie remarked to Michael. The homesickness came over her acutely. "Where are we?"

  "We'll be there in a minute," Michael said. "I guess it's been graded down since you were here. You know, they washed down the grades with hydraulics ... Here's Dexter Avenue; what was the number? I'm afraid the house is gone."

  "No, it was facing the park," Mysie repeated.

  "This is Denny Park," Michael said.

  "What do you mean?" Mysie was unable to connect his words with the visible facts. She was gazing at an open square of naked and infertile sand, with not a stick nor a stone nor a blade of herbage on its arid surface. A new concrete pavement bounded it rectangularly, one city block in an extensive grid of dismal blocks, of which the others were meagerly built over with new bleak small buildings and gas stations; nowhere a tree nor an inch of sod. It was uniformly flat; it resembled the squalid portion of Long Island which she loathed to the point of nausea, beyond the Queensboro Bridge.

  "Here," Michael reiterated, pointing to the blasted spot. He had stopped the car.

  Mysie said, in a daze: "Denny Park was on top of a hill."

  "They washed it down," Michael said once more. Mysie thought she must be going mad.

  "But it was quite a high hill, very steep. It was lovely. How could—what for—?" She put her hands to her head. "I used to walk across it every morning. There were big trees. And the grass was green all winter."

  And it was gone. It no longer existed. Wiped out, trampled flat, by a herd of Gadarene swine. Where it had been was this desolation.

  "Why did they?" she said.

  "Well, they were planning an industrial development further out, factories; and they wanted a level road, a main artery, straight through. Of course, the grades all over town have been washed down as much as possible, and the tide-flats filled in; so the business center has gradually moved over toward the filled ground, because it's level. I guess the town has changed a lot. . . . Would you like to look anywhere else for your friend?"

  "No, for God's sake, let's get out of here," Mysie said. Michael drove on. She asked: "Are there any factories?"

  "Nothing much," said Michael. "The depression hit the project."

  "The grading must have cost enormous sums," she reflected. "And loaded the city with taxes."

  "Sure," said Michael.

  "I'm glad," said Mysie vindictively. "Whoever was responsible, I hope they're dead broke. That's what the planners are going to do for us everywhere. I hope they rot in hell. A flat hell, that goes on forever and ever." They didn't care about anything but money. And the money had gone back on them. Men had built the city for pride; and those who came later had destroyed it for profit. But there was no profit, only futility and fear. . . . Every c
ycle has its representative figures; do they make it or are they made by it? Ours are masks and puppets of fear, jerky little dictators, with trick mustaches, staring white blank eyes, stage frowns and vacuous smiles, the blaring mechanical voice of the radio switched on and off. They move stiffly, collapsing from one expedient to another; they have no private lives; they are impotent— men without women. They occupy a meaningless mindless interval in history.

  "Nothing goes on forever," said Michael.

  The car crossed a high viaduct by the inlet. Two airplanes, on divergent courses, giant dragonflies, hummed across the blueness of the sky. "Are those navy planes?" Mysie asked. "Passenger planes; there's a regular service, every half hour," Michael said. "Every half hour?" That destruction of beauty had been altogether unnecessary; there was not even a temporary financial gain to be had from the spoliation. This had been the last built of the old cities, and it might be the first of the new. They could just as well have let it alone. . . .

  The future is unmanageable because it is formed by desire and not by will alone. Men wanted to fly. Not for any use, or even for knowledge: just to fly. Knowledge was painfully won to enable them to satisfy their longing, and use was found afterward. Sometimes nations and races grow weary, cease to want to do anything new, and then they don't. They stop, fall back slowly, for centuries. They are tired. The planes, the motors, operate by mechanical laws, but they are driven by a force in the men who invented and built them. They won't go of themselves. And you can't gear everybody to the machines for efficiency; nothing would get done. Michael drove his car easily. If he were told he mustn't on any account stop, he would drive into a smash through boredom. We're smashed now, she thought dreamily. And they talk about strapping us to the wheel as a remedy. It won't go.

  "What beats me," she said, "is that your prominent citizen last night seemed to think he's staving off revolution —by borrowing money for relief, and speculating for profit. He's scared. To start a revolution in this country now—even if anyone knew which way to revolve—you'd have to drag most of the able-bodied men out from under the bed by the feet. You're not scared, are you?"

  "Not much," said Michael. "The next time I cross the street, a truck might hit me. What of it? If the whole set-up goes bust, I'll be on the Skidroad with the rest of the lumberjacks out of a job. I'll roll my blankets and go up in the woods and build a shack where there's some fishing. And the government can take over my sons-in-law." They expected places to be made for them. He had nothing against them. White collar boys, very pleasant; they'd gone to college on allowances and graduated to jobs ready-made by family influence. The way they talked, he was out of date. No use arguing with them. They had read a book.

  "Well, if there aren't going to be any more men," said Mysie, "I don't care what happens either."

  "Fine," said Michael, "you can come along with me." She smiled at him. He continued: "Anyhow, I've had mine. All you get in this world is the side-bets. With wars and governments—what I mean is, you've got to live around them somehow."

  Gulls floated and skimmed over the inlet. . . . Every single gull had to be able to fly. Every soul got to get saved by itself. You can touch hands with another, borrow a little comfort and instruction, stand by or step into the breach at the worst; that is all. You've got to make-do. You are given an impermanent physical body to do with, and it goes to pieces by inevitable degrees. When she was tired, sometimes she had a singular vision of life itself, its brevity, its certain end. So many years, more or less, inexorably allotted; and nothing would stay. Yet it was not a vision of despair but of consolation. What was it could mark the changes? Something permanent, else one would be unaware of impermanence, for all things are distinguishable by their opposites.

  The car left the city; in half an hour they were in the country, on the peninsular highway. Sleepy shabby small towns, then farms with orchards and pasture fields; and then long stretches of wilderness, cut-over timberland, stumps and deadwood and second growth. Some of it had been burned last year, but already summer had clothed the waste with bracken and blackberry vines. There were shacks in small clearings by the roadside, built of raw boards, with stovepipes projecting from lean-to kitchens, and flowers blooming at random in the unfenced front yards, flourishing in that soft air and clean soil. The shacks were not sordid but absurdly cheerful habitations.

  They had the validity of primitive necessity: shelter and fire and bread.

  Mysie thought, Mike would be all right in the backwoods. He'd keep the woodbox and waterpail filled, and manage to bring in food as long as earth or stream would yield; and he would be even-tempered as competent men are. Mike is a good provider. Whatever else he might do, he wouldn't run out on any responsibility. He was permanent.

  At home, that evening, Mysie helped her mother wash the supper dishes. Whenever she came home she went through an indescribable Alice-in-Wonderland reversal of experience; time turned backward in a loop. For half an hour the little old house was shrunken and alien; and then by some instantaneous adjustment it became familiar and natural as no other place could ever be. And she herself became a daughter again, existing as it were solely in that relationship. She felt as if she had actually grown smaller, resumed the unimportance of childhood. This emotion was unaffected by the fact that she was inches taller than her mother, standing beside her at the sink. Her mother was a small woman, and had been very pretty as a girl, with delicate features, a trim slender figure, and thick dark hair a yard long. Now she was slightly stooped, an old woman; only her hair, turned to a soft grey, was still abundant enough to twist into a double knot; and her brookwater-brown eyes were bright and gentle. She moved about the housework quickly and quietly, preferring occupation to idleness, and when she rested she sat still in a low rocker, with her hands folded in her lap. She was noticeably frailer and older since Mysie had seen her last. She was sixty-three. Perhaps five years more. . . . She didn't even want to be young again. Her work was done, and she was ready to fold her hands.

  Her husband, Fred Kennedy, Mysie's stepfather, was the same age as his wife and looked ten years younger. A stout, rather handsome man, he tried to be genial to Mysie and she answered with indifferent brevity. She could just about stand him for the two weeks she would be staying. He'd keep out of the house most of the time to avoid her. He had gone uptown immediately after supper. Mysie's eldest brother, Joe Brennan, and his wife, had been over for the afternoon. Joe was forty-two, tall and large-boned and red-haired; his long jaw and straight nose reminded Mysie of the sculptured effigies of Norman knights she had seen in pictures of ancient churches, a singular throwback, not in the Brennan blood. It was Grandpa Brennan's first wife who had brought the red hair into the line, for Joe and Geraldine. Joe had a farm not far from town; he was quiet and hardworking, and said he guessed they'd get along somehow. Mysie's eldest sister, Kate, was married and lived in California; the next girl, Nellie, was also married and lived in Idaho. Johnny and Charlie, the two youngest boys, Mysie's half-brothers, were Kennedys; Johnny was working half-time in a garage in Aberdeen, and Charlie had a summertime job on a coasting steamer that touched at Sequitlam, so he was home Sundays. Mysie scarcely knew them, as they were small boys when she left home fifteen years ago. And the three older than herself were equally removed from her by the fact that they had grown up and married while she was still a child. Kate and Nellie were only two years apart; they had been playmates; Mysie was the odd one, a reserved and solitary child. She did not know what the others thought of her; no doubt they seldom thought of her at all, for there is a natural statute of limitations which acts through distance as well as time, exempting her from judgment. They all came home at intervals to see their mother; as long as she lived they would remain a family.

  Mysie emptied the dishpan, hung it on its accustomed nail, and put her arm about her mother's shoulders. Mrs. Kennedy answered with a hug and a smile. What grief there is in loving, Mysie thought. Especially children, who grow up and go away. . . . "Let's sit out
side awhile, mamma. For goodness sake, what's become of the old pear-tree?"

  Mrs. Kennedy said: "The fruit didn't set last spring; so Fred chopped it down; he was going to plant potatoes there."

  Mysie had a simple healthy impulse toward homicide. Not murder, merely the removal of Fred Kennedy as a detrimental object. He hadn't even planted the potatoes . . . He used to have a habit of walking across the newly scrubbed kitchen floor with muddy boots, grinning as if it were a joke. It would have been a keen pleasure to hit him with an ax.

  Unfortunately, such direct measures are too idealistic; the intricate knot of human relationships cannot be resolved at a stroke. Mysie said, nothing goes on forever; no, and yet perhaps nothing ever ends, either. Time supersedes old problems with new ones growing out of the old . . . At supper, Kennedy had been vocal about the hard times, declaring the government ought to Do Something. With J. P. Morgan at the head of the breadline and Fred Kennedy at the foot, both asking for handouts, it was tough on Joe and Mike, who had to get along somehow and carry the others, good times or bad.