by Ann Petry
“She probably runs too fast, Mal. Just like you do. Probably works too hard. People got to give themselves a break, you know. Ain’t no rich bastards standin’ around handin’ out new tickers when the one you got quits on you.”
On the way back to the Hall, Al talked about cars, about heart trouble, about the Madam and how mean she was to Rita, about Mrs. Cameron and how mean she was to Rita.
Powther ignored Al’s conversation. He was trying to reorient himself to the atmosphere of the Hall, trying to forget about Mamie and Link Williams and Miss Camilo and a Tiffany cigarette case, with which Mamie was playing hide-and-seek, so that he could think about the tea, concentrate on the tea. If he didn’t, he might drop a tray, step on someone’s foot, do any of the hideous, awkward things a butler could do when he didn’t have his mind on his work.
He succeeded fairly well, too. By five o’clock, when the east drawing room was filled with young women, all wearing print dresses and little hats with flowers on them, some seated, some standing, all talking and laughing, drinking tea, eating, thoroughly enjoying themselves, he was able to admire the scene in front of him, to the exclusion of any private worries.
Mischoff, the pianist, had arrived on schedule and was now playing the Steinway grand, so that under the talk and the laughter there was music. There was a wonderful blend of smells: tea, faint smell of cedar from the fires where he’d sprinkled cedar chips, the girls’ perfume, the poets’ narcissi. As he looked about him, he thought, if you stood in the doorway of this white and gold room, and took just one hasty glance, at the lights over the oil paintings, at the flickering light from the candles, and from the open fires, listened to the sound of the piano, watched the constant movement of the girls, you would want to go inside and share the warmth, the gaiety, the hospitality.
The Madam belonged in this room. She looked like a grande dame because of the pearl choker around her neck, because of the soft smoky blue of the afternoon dress she was wearing. The girls’ faces lighted up, glowed, as she talked to them, and the glow lingered even after she’d moved away, to speak to someone else. Her hair was almost as pretty as Miss Camilo’s. From a distance she seemed to be a platinum blonde, but when you got close to her, you saw that it was because the pale blond hair was mixed with gray. She was as erect and as slender as Miss Camilo. They had the same deep blue eyes but there was a difference in the expression. Miss Camilo’s eyes were very young, very innocent. The Madam’s eyes were the eyes of a woman in her late fifties, a little tired, eyes of a woman who had played a man’s role for years. She actually managed the plant, and when you studied her eyes you saw that sometimes she had achieved the things she wanted, and sometimes she hadn’t; but you also saw determination in the eyes, and the face, and you knew why she was so successful.
As he was crossing the room, to pick up some empty teacups, she came up to him, put her hand on his arm. She said, “It’s perfect. Everything is perfect. Thank you, Powther.”
He was tremendously pleased. She paid him to see that everything was perfect, and it would have been understandable if she took perfection for granted. She never did. She was always thanking him for doing his job, as though he were an old friend who had done a favor for her.
There’s a glow in me now, he thought, just as there is in these girls. She has restored my confidence, made me believe in myself again. I can look at this room and feel sorry that the weather will soon be too warm for lighted candles, for fires in the fireplaces, and that we won’t be entertaining on a scale like this until next year.
There was the summer picnic though. But that was handled by an outside crew. He had nothing to do with it, and he disapproved of it, anyway. Every Fourth of July, the Madam invited workmen from the plant, and gave a kind of mass entertainment for them and their families. It was more like an invasion than a party. The men wore T-shirts and their fat wives came in shorts and slacks and bathing suits. The men and women and their stickyfingered, badly behaved children ate hot dogs and crackerjack and ice cream, drank Coca-Cola and beer and lemonade, and shot off fireworks. Even the children drank beer, so that he referred to all of them, contemptuously, in his mind, as the beer drinkers.
The Madam hired special guards for the occasion, but they didn’t have the family’s interest in mind, weren’t ever really on their toes. He was always afraid that some of these undesirable people would wander into the house, tracking it up, fingering the tapestries, smearing the upholstery.
Last summer, an unshaven young man who smelt of beer and sweat, actually got as far as the front door. When Powther opened the door, the young man said, in a loud, truculent voice, “Just wanted to see if the inside of the palace stinks like the plant.”
Fortunately, one of the hired guards came up just then and led the young man away. That beer-soaked young man would always epitomize the summer picnic in Powther’s mind, just as these attractive, perfumed girls in their spring dresses epitomized this late-winter tea.
Ah, well, he thought, as he crossed the room to tell Jenkins to collect the empty teacups piled up on one of the mantels, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. He paused, just behind the sofa, in front of the fireplace, to admire two girls who were sitting close together on it, watching the fire. The mandarin red silk of the sofa formed a striking background for the yelloworange tones in the print dresses they wore.
One of the girls sitting on the sofa said, in an undertone, “Don’t you know who she is?”
“No.” The other voice went down, lower. “Who?”
He started to move away, and the prettier of the two girls said, “Mrs. Treadway’s daughter. Camilla Sheffield.”
His attention was caught, held.
“I didn’t know she had a daughter.”
“Sure. Mrs. William R. Sheffield is Mrs. Treadway’s only child. Camilla Treadway Sheffield. Now isn’t that something?” The voice went up.
“How did you know?”
“I heard my boss say so. I heard him talking to somebody about it just this morning, over the telephone.”
“Mrs. Treadway’s daughter? What was she doing in The Narrows at that hour?”
“That’s what he said, too. My boss, I mean. He said, ‘What was she doing on the dock with a nigger at that time of night?’”
“She wasn’t really on the dock with him, was she? I mean it didn’t say that in the paper. Wait a minute,” relish in the voice, curiosity, “do you mean she was—”
“Shhh!”
The Madam was coming toward them, and both girls turned toward her, smiling, faces glowing, and then stood up, to talk to her.
Powther thought incredulously, That fast! By night, all Monmouth would be asking the same question. Now he looked around the room with distaste. These girls smelt of perfume, their hair was curled, they were wearing their new spring dresses, but they were exactly like the sweaty, beer-drinking workers who invaded the park in July. They, too, resented the fact that the Madam belonged to the millionaire class.
The beer drinkers expressed their hostility in vandalism. Rogers said that every year, after the picnic, it took a crew of men a whole month to put the park back in shape, what with the mutilation of trees and shrubs, and the empty beer bottles and crackerjack boxes, and Coca-Cola bottles, and exploded firecrackers, thrown into the lake, despite the fact that he put the biggest refuse cans he could find less than ten feet apart all through the grounds.
“I finally got smart,” Rogers said. “It took me three years to get smart. I move the swans back in a place where they can’t find ’em. I made another little lake for ’em. For three years I found my swans with their necks wrung, or their crops so bloated up they died two or three days later. And I string an electric wire all around the rose gardens. Used to be I’d go out there and find it stripped, and some of the bushes dug up. But I got it fixed now so they can’t get at it.”
The beer drinkers wrecked the g
rounds, or tried to. And the tea drinkers, as he now called these girls from the office, were just as hostile. They welcomed the fact that the Madam’s daughter was mixed up in a scandalous situation. By the time this tea was over, they would have reduced Miss Camilo to the level of a prostitute, simply because her mother was a millionaire. They couldn’t take the Madam’s wealth away from her, but they could destroy her daughter, just by whispering about her, while they drank a smoky dark tea, out of the Madam’s best teacups, while they clinked the Madam’s Versailles spoons against the saucers.
20
* * *
PETER BULLOCK, editor, owner, publisher of the Monmouth Chronicle, was drinking a glass of milk, in The Swiss Steak, a small restaurant on Centre Street. He watched Rutledge, head of Monmouth’s police department, who sat across the table from him, as he worked his way slowly, steadily, through a steak, French fried potatoes, Parker House rolls; watched him wash his food down his throat with beer, big drafts of beer.
He tried to keep his eyes away from Rutledge’s plate, and couldn’t, any more than any other starving man could keep his eyes away from food. He told himself that this was unappetizing unhealthy fried food that Rutledge was stuffing in his mouth, and the beer he was pouring down his throat was little better than poison; and the smell of the steak, smell of the beer, the vast growling emptiness in his stomach made him feel as though his head were going around and around, revolving on a private Ferris wheel of its own.
“That Treadway girl sure messed herself up,” Rutledge said, chewing steak. “Couldn’t have done a better job if she’d been paid to do it. She was drunk when she accused Link Williams of attempted attack. Drunk again this afternoon when she ran that kid down.” He signaled the waiter with his fork.
There was a big piece of steak speared on the end of the fork, and Bullock wondered what Rutledge would do if he should lean forward, mouth open, and snatch the meat off with his teeth.
“Maybe she’s competing for the title,” Rutledge said.
“Title? What title?”
“The rich bitch title,” Rutledge said, grinning. He turned to the waiter, said, “Two pieces of apple pie. No, not for him. Just for me. And cover the whole thing over thick with ice cream. Put about a pint of vanilla on it.” He popped the hunk of steak in his mouth and grinned at Bullock, chewing and grinning, and talking, “Damn if I know why I eat so much. Maybe it’s because I was hungry when I was young. So hungry once that I stole a loaf of bread and—” he started in on the pie “—I’ve been filling my gut up ever since so I won’t ever be able to remember what it felt like when it was empty.”
Bullock grunted.
“She’ll be in to see you.”
“Who?” he asked, thinking, It’s easier to be hungry when you’re young. He was too old for it. Forty-nine and hungry all the time. Forty-nine and an emptiness in his stomach, a burning emptiness in his stomach, all the time.
“Mrs. Treadway. She came to see me, right after the accident. Funny thing. I felt kind of sorry for her. Imagine me feeling sorry for a billionaire. She wanted me to wipe the record off the blotter. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Hell, the girl was drunker’n a coot, passed a stop light, street crawling with witnesses—”
“What’d you say to her?” Bullock asked. He knew all the details of the accident, the story was already dummied in, already set up. Happened about five-fifteen, on Dock Street, child knocked down.
“I tried to sound as dispassionate as a judge. ‘Mrs. Treadway,’ I said, ‘the laws in Monmouth are all written down. There are no unwritten ones. These laws apply with equal force to every resident. This is a serious matter. The child was badly injured. There is always the possibility that the child may die. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can do about it.’” Rutledge paused, swallowed more beer. “She’ll be in to see you,” he repeated, maliciously.
“For what?”
“When the rich folks can’t fix the cops, they do the next best thing, they keep the details of the mess out of the public print. You’re the public print in this town, Bullock.”
He shrugged. “So what good would it do to keep it out of the paper?”
“The label of rich tramp wouldn’t be written down, permanently fixed on paper. It could stay where it is, up in the air, a matter of hearsay and rumor.” Rutledge lit a cigarette. “What’re you going to do when the old lady comes in to cop a plea?”
Casual question, he wondered. Hardly. Rutledge didn’t ask casual questions. He had the cold eyes of a cop, eyes the color of lead, had the professionally expressionless face of a cop, face like a mask, only Rutledge’s mask never slipped, so it was impossible to say where he stood on anything, how he felt about anything. But he didn’t ask idle, casual questions.
“I don’t know,” he said, and pushed his chair back from the table.
The smell of steak, of French fried potatoes, of beer, accompanied him as he walked along Centre Street. It went right into his office with him, he still hungry, and the good smell of food, moving on into his office with him, tantalizing, maddening, making his head reel.
His secretary said, “Mrs. Treadway is waiting for you. I told her that you’d be right back.”
“You’re so goddamn efficient,” he said, and let the dizziness, and the irritability born of hunger, turn into anger, and let the anger explode in the face of this old maid who was his secretary, watched her face crumple, redden. “I suppose you’ve got your headstone already marked, haven’t you? And the coffin picked out,” he said, glaring at her, and went in his office, and shook hands with Mrs. Treadway, acting as though he were pleased to see her, as though he thought this was an informal call she was paying him.
He was surprised at himself because he felt sorry for her, just as Rutledge had. She had grown older, more gray in her hair, new deep lines at the mouth, around the eyes. Not that he saw her very often. He and Lola dined with her at Treadway Hall, once a year, largely a matter of business courtesy on her part, though Lola always managed to create the impression that it was a social gesture, when she told her friends about it.
Mrs. Treadway said, “I have come to ask you not to print anything about this unfortunate accident of Camilo’s.”
“I can’t do that,” he said, just as bluntly, just as quickly. “It’s on the police blotter. The child is in the hospital. There were witnesses.”
“Camilo has been under a tremendous strain,” she said. “That’s why I am asking you not to print anything about this.”
“I will make it a small story, bury it on an inside page. But it has to go in.”
“There must be no story at all. On an inside page or an outside page,” she said insistently.
He could understand why, anybody could understand why. That case hadn’t come up yet, it had been less than a week ago, that Camilo Sheffield had charged a Negro with attempted attack. The Negro was out on bail, very low bail, and no date had been set for the trial. This accident wasn’t going to help Camilo’s reputation, would, in fact, polish off what was left of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, gently, and meant it. “But it will have to go in.”
She stood up, and so he stood up, too, trying to think of a way to express his regret, his sympathy.
“Mr. Bullock,” she said, the eyes no longer sad, the eyes determined, cold, the face grim, and the voice implacable. “If the story goes in, our advertising comes out. We have no contract with your paper.”
After she left, he kept pushing a blotter around on the top of his desk, thinking, Oh, damn the woman anyway. Why couldn’t she keep her tramp of a daughter under control? It was a nasty business. The girl was drunk, driving as though the devil was riding with her, sidesaddle on a fender, and she was trying to outride him, outrun him. She passed a red light. In Niggertown. On Dock Street. Why Dock Street? How did she come to be in that narrow, dingy, street composed of ware
houses and stinking little factories, and old frame buildings, street that ran parallel to the river, and smelt and looked like what it was—a waterfront street.
These things were always bad. The priests and the rabbis, the jackleg nigger preachers, the union leaders, the ward heelers would holler and scream about a bought press for months afterwards. You couldn’t prevent people from knowing about a thing just because you kept it out of a newspaper. It had happened shortly after five o’clock, and the streets were filled with dock workers and factory hands, going home. He had tried to tell Mrs. Treadway that, but oh, no, if the story went in, the advertising came out—permanently. And he couldn’t afford to lose it, and she knew it.
So he personally pulled the story, and even as he did it knew that word of what he’d done would be all through the building, five minutes after he left the pressroom.
Back in his office, he tried to shift the blame, the responsibility, for his action. Rutledge could have wiped the thing off the police blotter. Why did Rutledge have to be so goddamn moral, or rather, he thought, why should Monmouth’s leaden-eyed Chief of Police be in a position where he can afford to put his morality into practice, and the editor of the Chronicle shouldn’t be? Is it a matter of morality? No, it’s a matter of what will people say—what will people think—public opinion.
The original error stemmed from that numbskull who had picked up the story about young Mrs. Sheffield accusing a Negro of attack. He was one of those knowitalls from the Columbia School of Journalism, complete with crew haircut and more lip than John L. Lewis, and a sophomoric belief in his own judgment.
“So I didn’t know she was the Treadway girl,” he said, when Bullock got after him about it. “But any woman from Park Avenue on the loose in the Dumble Street area at midnight is news. Because of the sheer incongruity of her being there at all.”
“You’re supposed to know who people are. It’s part of your job. That’s what you’re paid for. Or don’t they teach that at—”