The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  20

  GERALDINE felt as if her mind had divided neatly into two compartments, one for thinking and one for receiving external impressions; and the connection between them had lapsed. Perhaps what she was hearing was luncheon conversation, peculiar to such occasions. Geraldine never went to formal lunches; they took all day, the hours she devoted to work. She had accepted Gina's invitation as a temporary relief from herself, from the apartment, from the inertia which slackened her hand, stopped her working—when it was imperative that she should work. Mysie would be there; that was an inducement. But Mysie was at the other end of the table. It was a hen party, a dozen women, expensively dressed, massaged, marceled, into a bright, earnest vacuity. They talked, in public voices, about parity and Hitler and subsistence farming. Geraldine found herself marooned between Mrs. Perry and a massive female in blue velvet and a lace tucker and Queen Mary hat, a museum piece, from Washington, who said we must stand behind the president. We must have confidence. Geraldine wondered, confidence in what? And how do you get it if you haven't any—order it in packages? The lunch progressed through soup, creamed eggs, sweetbreads and broiled squab. Geraldine had had no appetite for days, and the sight of so much food was repulsive to her. She waited for coffee . . . Gina, at the head of the table, in pansy-blue crêpe, addressed each guest in turn, with laborious tact. The white-paneled dining room was sterile and shut off, dedicated to this strange ritual.

  Mrs. Perry, as a delicate compliment to Geraldine, spoke of books. She named several which she said she had not read; she had heard they were clever.

  Geraldine said: "Very." This was her sole contribution to the feast of reason and flow of soul; she had tried in vain to produce some remark which would fit in.

  Mrs. Perry said: "But don't you think modern novels are terribly morbid? So much sex. After all, there is enough unpleasantness in the world without reading about it."

  Geraldine said: "I suppose so." The pistachio ice cream might be delicious, but if she ate it she would never be able to eat again. There was a weight at the pit of her stomach and her head felt tight. Coffee at last. She was smoking too much, but she couldn't quit—When Gina rose, Geraldine upset her empty coffee cup in her haste to follow; then she dropped her handbag, bumped her head on the edge of the table retrieving it, and emerged dizzy. She wasn't ill, she told herself; there was nothing the matter with her except nerves. She crossed over to Mysie, and they both experienced the relief of the rescued.

  Going out, they encountered Arthur in the hall. "Hello," he said, "if I'd known you were here, I'd have been here myself."

  "And if I'd known you wouldn't be, neither would I," Mysie replied. "But you'd have been torn limb from limb among so many women. G'by." ... On the steps outside, she added to Geraldine: "I can't figure why he isn't spoiled; but he's a darling. Let's walk down Fifth Avenue; can't you come home with me? What was that lunch for?"

  "It wasn't for anything. They read Walter Lippmann," Geraldine explained. "They have to fill in time. I'd like to walk." She felt light-footed as well as light-headed. Everything appeared sharp and clear and unstable as things do in a dream, as if the whole scene might shift and vanish without warning, giving place to something unpredictable and irrelevant and unaccountable, without rational sequence. It did not so change, but it might any moment; there might be no pavement when she put down her foot; or the wall of the building beside her might not be there if she stretched out her hand to touch it.

  They gazed in shop windows and commented at random. The sunshine was warm and runlets of water gurgled along the curb as last night's snowfall melted, in the February thaw. When they crossed into shadow Geraldine shivered and Mysie exclaimed: "Let's buy a taxi." They got in. . . . Mysie tried to put out of her mind a beggar who had asked her for a dime and Teddy McKee who had come to borrow ten dollars and the statement of a prominent banker that he had been forced to make foreign loans which would never be paid, but that the fingers of a new dawn were stretching their tips above the horizon. . . . She had given the beggar five dollars, buying herself off.

  "Aren't you thinner?" Mysie asked. Geraldine's black tailored suit and little black hat set off her pale red hair; she had no other color about her except her reddened lips.

  "Yes, quite a lot," Geraldine assented. If you don't sleep or eat, you get thinner.

  While Mysie paid the taxi, Geraldine dodged around a huge truck that blocked the pavement, directly in front of Mysie's door. After the dazzle of the sun, the hall was dark. She bumped her shins against some heavy object on the floor—a keg. "Oh," she said, and stumbled to her knees. Several men emerged from the gloom at the back of the hall. One, the tallest, picked her up easily.

  "I'm sorry," he said. He seemed very strong. "Get that stuff out of the way, Tony." Someone else rolled the keg back, under the stairs.

  "It's all right," Geraldine said. "I'm not hurt." The sense of being sustained, the muscular certainty of the man holding her, gave her an instantaneous comfort. She put up her hands and smoothed her hair.

  Mysie opened the street door wide as she let herself in, and daylight with her. "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing," said Geraldine. "Thank you," she disengaged herself from her supporter. "I tripped myself," she explained to Mysie. Another man, in the background, tipped his cap; Mysie acknowledged the salute with an inclination of her head. Geraldine and Mysie went on upstairs. Geraldine wasn't sure she could make it; her knees were unreliable; but she did.

  When they were out of earshot, Mysie said in a discreetly lowered voice: "You fell over a beer-keg, didn't you? About once a week they unload a truck. The one who nodded to me, did you notice him? I couldn't think where I'd seen him, but I believe he was that Wop chauffeur of Arthur's. I guess this is his day off and he drops in for a drink with his friends; it's none of my business."

  "I'd be afraid to live here," Geraldine said.

  "What of? All they want is to be let alone to pursue their nefarious occupation, same as me. Anything for a quiet life. I'll tell you what strikes my funnybone, though; I found out after living here ten years. This building belongs to Arthur. Or anyhow, to his grandmother, the Siddall estate. An agent collects the rent; that's why we didn't know. There's an estate corporation, not their name. Thea made them reduce the rent since the depression, cut Arthur out of twenty dollars a month; I hope he doesn't have to deprive himself of yachts or such necessities. I'm sure he hasn't the least idea I'm his tenant. Maybe he'd repaint the bathroom if I insisted. He supports a reform ticket with money from a speakeasy. . . . Hello, Jake, who let you in?"

  Jake was there ahead of them, waiting patiently, in the living-room. "Your trusty slave, Mirabelle, said she guessed you'd be home if you wasn't detained elsewhere. Sound deductive reasoning. So I've been improving my mind." He displayed Geraldine's latest novel, published the previous autumn.

  Geraldine regarded it with indifferent distaste. "It didn't sell," she said. "How can anyone write . . . Yesterday I managed to pull myself together and had just begun on a story, and a woman telephoned me to inform me she thought she was going mad."

  "Why can't she go mad quietly like the rest of us and say nothing about it?" said Mysie.

  "The things that happen every day now won't go in a novel," Geraldine said. "They're not plausible. And then the things that people say. One woman asked me what really happened in that book, you know, over the weekend. What did she imagine would happen, in the circumstances? Last week I went to East Orange to visit Effie. Effie's husband has a distant relative named Mrs. Hedrick. She was an old maid; she trained as a nurse forty years ago, but she had to give it up and stay at home to look after her aged parents, till they expired. Then she took care of another invalid, who also died, leaving a disconsolate widower, Mr. Hedrick, aged sixty-nine. By that time she was fifty-five. After a suitable interval Mr. Hedrick married the nurse. In about three years he died, and left her plenty of money. She is sixty now; she cherishes his memory as the one love of her life, and I guess he
was, as far as that goes. She is active in good works— but that isn't what I was leading up to; you see my brain won't stay on the track because there is no track and probably no brain. The point is, she asked me severely if I believe that people do go around breaking the commandments as if they were taking a cup of tea. I said I didn't think it was exactly like taking a cup of tea. . . . And Mrs. Perry, at lunch—she said sex is morbid. What did she mean?"

  "The trouble with you," said Jake, "is that you assume everyone has a low mind, like you and me. Many people, in fact, do not do that sort of thing at all. They take it out in talk. In these days, if you choose two persons of opposite sex, and lock them up together, and at the end of a week open the sealed compartment, it will be found that they have spent the entire time doing a jigsaw puzzle."

  "Would they?" said Geraldine. "I forgot the point after all. She, Mrs. Hedrick, said: My dear, believe me, it Doesn't Pay."

  "Even if you could get it to do," Mysie quoted.

  Thea had come in. "But it's true," she said suddenly. "What Jake said. They don't go through with it and they don't pay for it. Not even three dollars. It's very bad for them. For men."

  "What an immoral statement," said Mysie. "Thea, I'm surprised at you."

  "You'd be surprised," said Thea grimly, "at what I think."

  "All action is highly immoral," said Jake. "Morality is order. Action produces incalculable consequences and thereby disturbs order. Hence it is immoral."

  "Does that mean anything?" Mysie demanded.

  "Nothing whatever," Jake replied cheerily.

  Jake had come to tell Mysie that his second play, Jack and Jill, had at last been revamped sufficiently, and Corrigan promised a production next month. Mysie remained cautiously skeptical. Geraldine was wondering how she should summon energy to go home. When Jake said: "I must be going, I have a heavy date. Exit, pursued by a bear," Geraldine accepted his offer to take her uptown. She talked all the way in the taxi, though not quite certain that the words made sentences or the sentences made sense. She was resolutely not thinking of a great many things.

  Jake was going to tea with Gina. He had not mentioned his destination because he had a rule never to do so. There was nothing clandestine about the engagement. He had fallen into the habit of calling on Gina occasionally at tea-time because she had invited him to dinner and to her At Homes repeatedly, and as he hated formal affairs, a compromise was effected. He had to be polite to her. Besides, she interested him mildly. What did she get out of her youth and beauty and wealth and great house and position? He did not harbor any coxcombical delusions; he knew she merely added him to her list of acquaintances because his play had succeeded moderately, given him a certain rating. She wanted everything desperately, but she had no use for anything. No use for men, as either friends or lovers; no use for the material elegancies money afforded, since she was devoid of coquetry; no use for him, indeed, since she had neither wit nor gayety. She liked to hear gossip about well-known names. Jake found that rather pathetic. It placed her with the great majority of the deprived. Readers of movie magazines, or the paying guests who attend public dinners, or the gazers who march in line at official functions. There was a wistful quality in her arriviste attitude. She did not have any fun. An hour or two of her company did not bore him; he had sufficient aesthetic detachment to appreciate the sight of a pretty woman in a luxurious setting. That was why Mysie said he wasn't human; his various tastes were so separate. His friendships were intellectual. When he fell in love, as he did at intervals, it was with some stormy melodramatic fickle creature who made scenes and tore his quiet existence to tatters for a month or two or three, with violent delights that came to a violent end.

  But he had also an aloof general sympathy which enabled him to detect that Geraldine was in distress. He got out of the taxi with her, accompanied her to her own apartment door, and there left her unobtrusively. He knew she didn't want him to come in; she was in flight.

  In the living-room, Judy was reading, with her silky dark hair falling over her serene brow. Dina was dressing a doll. Geraldine stood a moment looking at them. Their perfect, unconscious trust finished her.

  Geraldine took off her hat and sat down on the sofa. Then she couldn't get up again. She could not stand on her feet.

  The fact was blankly appalling. For a moment she could not speak either. With an immense effort, she controlled her mind, answered the children's greetings. "Darlings, one of you please hand me the telephone."

  What was the matter with her? She waited five minutes. The weakness did not pass. She must not frighten the children. "I've turned my ankle," she said. That might have been true, though it wasn't. "No, Judy lamb, don't touch it; I'll call the doctor. It's not serious." She called the doctor and told him the same lie, because the children could hear. It didn't hurt, she assured them truthfully. She was in no pain. That might be all the worse, she reflected.

  Dr. Jamieson arrived promptly. He was sixty, a deep-chested sanguine man with thick white hair. Third of an honorable line, he had the kind and assuring presence of the born physician. Geraldine had confidence in him; he had seen her through with both the babies. "Let's have a look at the ankle."

  Geraldine made a slight sign, indicating the children. "Could you help me to my room first, doctor? It would be more convenient."

  "Nothing easier." He lifted her deftly and carried her in his arms, laid her on her bed and shut the door. Again she felt a personal gratitude for a man's strength. "Now, what's this?" he enquired.

  "I don't know," she gave him a brief explanation. "Am I paralyzed?"

  He laughed heartily. "No chance." A rapid examination sufficed. "You've been worrying, haven't you? Yes, of course. Rest is what you need; I'd suggest a sanatorium, away from the family. Nice family, but you need absolute quiet, peace of mind."

  "If I could afford a sanatorium, what would I be worrying about?" Geraldine exclaimed furiously.

  Not thinking of it meant thinking of nothing else but how not to think of it. Every moment, waking and sleeping. . . . She had not sold a story for five months. Leonard's salary had been cut, and then he was put on part time. Twenty dollars a week was all he got now. One might live on twenty dollars a week, but not in an apartment that cost two hundred dollars a month rent, a month overdue, and with two months miscellaneous unpaid bills stacked up. The apartment lease had a year to run and the landlord refused to cancel it. Magazines were not buying stories. Besides, she couldn't write. And Leonard might be let out of employment altogether for the summer, with only a hope of being taken on again later . . . The debts crushed her. They had accumulated from day to day, from month to month, because she could not imagine nothing would sell. Not after years of prompt acceptances.

  "I've dreamed this sometimes," she said. "Some awful danger and I couldn't run away; my feet wouldn't move. Exactly like this. What is it?"

  "Nerves. Nothing organically wrong."

  "How long will it last?"

  "That depends. You should rest for three months."

  "Three months." It was her turn to laugh. She sat up against the pillows; it was only her legs that refused to obey her. She could move them, but they refused to carry weight. "Don't be silly, doctor. You've got to give me something this minute to cure it. I can't lie here. I won't."

  "I see." He was too intelligent to destroy her courage. She might break the deadlock by main strength of will against the subconscious surrender. "You can have a sedative to-night, and if you sleep, you can have a tonic tomorrow. It won't cure you; it will only whip you up temporarily. Can't you possibly manage at least a change of scene?"

  "I will," she said fiercely. "Put me on my feet, and I'll take a boat for somewhere. Anywhere. I'll borrow the money. This is—ridiculous." She could get the money from Mysie.

  Having reprieved herself for a short term, the tension relaxed. She realized with astonishment the conditions of her existence. She had gone on like a primitive savage woman with her children at her heels, picking u
p a precarious livelihood from day to day, sleeping at night under whatever shelter was at hand, owning nothing and with no provision for the morrow. For children one ought, after all, to own a roof tree, keep a store of food. She had refused the responsibility. She had been wrong.

  "But where did the time go?" she demanded of Mysie. "Only a minute ago I was young. And now I'm thirty-eight. There didn't seem to be anything in between."

  "You don't look thirty-eight," said Mysie. The outline of Geraldine's face was fined down and her collarbones showed faintly; she did look younger.

  "But I am thirty-eight," said Geraldine.

  A week later she lay in a steamer chair, rolled in a rug, watching the fluid semicircle of sea and sky, chill blue against blue, swelling and sinking slowly, rhythmically, past the rail.

  Going aboard had been the last of the nightmare. Still not quite sure that she could stand, she walked aboard, with Leonard holding her by one elbow and Jake Van Buren the other. Mysie had brought Jake. One wouldn't expect it of him, until it became obvious that he could be counted upon in any such capacity.

  Her sister Effie was staying with the children. They had promised to be happy in Geraldine's absence. She could count on them too; they had character and intelligence. She mustn't think about them while she was away, so they could be happy; it was a tacit bargain. She mustn't think about Leonard either; it would not be fair. Humiliation breaks a man. It isn't the same for a woman, because women know anyhow that life can strip them, bring them to their knees, as the price of life. . . .

  A long white-crested wave rushed down the slope of the curving sea. Hold your breath, keep your head down; you have to go under the breakers. ...

  21

  THE reflected sunlight flickered between Geraldine's lashes; and passengers pacing the deck went by as shadows. She wasn't quite dozing; she was aware of a substantial shadow passing, hesitating and returning. A man sat down in the adjoining steamer chair. Geraldine paid no attention; she felt extinct and invisible. This was the second day out. The first day, she had remained in her stateroom, sodden with sadness.