"Listen," said the lady with Raymond Ford harshly. "I’m entitled to my galoshes."
Corinne saw with a start that the lady was not addressing Raymond Ford, but something in the doorway—a glowing cigar.
"I toldya," said the cigar. "The restront’s locked. And it’s gonna stay locked the whole time the boss is at his brudda’s funeral. Listen. You had all afternoona pick up ya galoshes."
"Yeah?" said the lady with Raymond Ford.
"Yeah," said the cigar, and got even redder. "You ain’t supposa leave no galoshes in no kitchen. You know that."
"Listen," said the lady with Raymond Ford. "I’m gonna stop at the damn pleece station on my way to the station, hear me? A person’s entitleda their property."
"Let’s go. Please," Raymond Ford said, taking the lady’s arm. "Please. He’s not gonna give ya the galoshes; can’tcha see?"
"Leggo, you. Don’t rush me," the lady said. "I’m not leavin’ the vicinity without them galoshes."
Something like laughter came from the doorway.
"If ya feet get cold, break open one of them bagsa yours," suggested the cigar. "You got plenty t’keep ya warm. You got plenty to keep you warm."
"Mother, c’mon. Please," Raymond Ford said. "Can’tcha see he’s not gonna give ‘em to ya."
"I want them galoshes."
A door banged. Frightened, Corinne looked and saw that the cigar was gone.
Raymond Ford’s mother ran a few wild steps on the ice, stopped perilously short, recovered her balance, and began to pound with her fist against the dark show window of the restaurant—at the place where normally the lobsters could be seen winking on cracked ice. She screamed as she pounded, articulating words that Corinne had nervously read from walls and fences. Corinne felt Mr. Miller’s grip tighten on her arm, but Corinne stayed where she was, because Raymond Ford was now standing before her.
He spoke to Corinne just loud enough to be heard over his mother’s activities directly behind her.
"I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party."
"That’s all right."
"How’s your dog?" said Raymond Ford.
"He’s fine."
"That’s good," said Raymond Ford, and went over to his mother and began to pull her by the arm. But she wrenched successfully away from him, scarcely losing the rhythm of her violence.
Mr. Miller came forward, cupping his cold ears with his hands. "I’d be glad to drive you people to the station if that’s where you’re going," he shouted.
Raymond Ford’s mother stopped pounding and shouting. She turned away from the show window, glanced briefly at Miller in the darkness, then at Corinne, then back at Miller. Raymond Ford indicated Corinne with his thumb. "She’s a friend of mine," he said.
"You got a car?" Mrs. Ford asked Miller.
"How could I take you to the station if I didn’t?"
"Where is it?"
Miller pointed. "Right there."
Mrs. Ford nodded, absently. She then turned around and, using an Anglo-Saxon verb, gave the dark show window a snort, obscene command. She turned back to Miller. "Let’s get otta here before I go mad," she told him. She sat beside Miller in the front seat, and the two children sat in the back with the suitcases. The car moved off on a slippery tangent, straightened out, and went on.
"He wasn’t the guy that engaged me for the position," Mrs. Ford announced suddenly. "The guy that engaged me was a gentleman." She was addressing Miller’s profile. "Hey, haven’t I seen you in the restront?"
"I don’t believe so," Miller said stiffly.
"Live in this lousy burg?"
"No, I do not."
"Just work here, ah?"
"Mother, don’t ask the man so many questions. Why do you wanna ask the man so many questions?"
She turned savagely around in her seat. "Listen, you. Stay otta the discussion," she ordered. "When I’m innarested in your two cents I’ll letcha—"
"I’m Baron von Nordhoffen’s secretary," Miller said quickly, to keep peace in the automobile.
"Yeah? The Heinie on the hill?" She sounded suspicious. "How come you’re ridin’ around in this lizzy tin? Where’s all the lemazeens?"
"This happens to my own car," Miller said coldly.
"That’s different. I wondered," Mrs. Ford seemed to reflect for a moment, then sharply and hostilely spoke to Miller’s profile. "Don’t you high-hat me, Charlie. I don’t feel like bein’ high-hatted, the mood I’m in."
Miller, a little frightened, cleared his throat. "I can assure you," he said, "nobody’s high- hatting anybody."
Mrs. Ford abruptly lowered her window, removed something from her mouth, and flicked it into the night. Closing the window, she said, "I come from a damn good family. I had everything. Money. Social position. Class." She looked at Miller. "You happen to have any cigarettes with ya, by any chance?"
"I’m afraid not."
She shrugged. "Listen, I could go home right now and say to Dad, ‘Dad, I’m tired of bein’ an adventuress. I wanna settle down and take it easy for a while.’ He’s be tickleda death. I’d make him the happiest dad in the world."
Raymond Ford’s mother was silent for a moment. When she spoke again her voice sounded more glum than inflamed.
"My trouble is, I married beneath me, I married a chap that was way beneath me, was my trouble. Every way you look at it."
Miller’s curiosity got the better of him. "Your husband dead?" he asked coldly.
"It was just a beautiful, dumb kid," Raymond Ford’s mother mused with affection.
Miller repeated his question.
"I don’t know what the hell he is, dead or what," she said. Then, abruptly, she sat up straight in her seat and began to clear away frost from her window, using the heel of her hand. "We’re here," she announced dispassionately, and turned in her seat to address her son. "Now listen," she said to him. "I mean what I toleya. You let that bag flop open like last time, and I’ll break your back."
"The straps broke," Raymond Ford said.
"You heard me. I’ll break your back," said his mother, working the handle of the door. She turned to Miller, saying, "Thanks for the ride, snob," and got out of the car. Without another glance toward the car or her son or her luggage she began to walk toward the glowing station waiting room.
Raymond Ford opened his door and got out. He then lifted out the two suitcases, one at a time.
Corinne let down her window. "You want me to tell Miss Aigletinger you won’t be in school tomorrow?"
"You can if you want to, I guess."
"Where are you going?"
"I don’t know," Raymond Ford said. "Good-by."
He picked up the tow suitcases and began to walk after his mother, who had already disappeared. The suitcases were huge and looked dead weight. Corinne saw him fall once on the snow. Then he disappeared.
Corinne’s father died, with equal parts of courage and an alien’s confusion, when she was sixteen. When she was seventeen the Shoreview estate was sold, and Eric, the chauffeur, performed his last duty for the von Nordhoffen menage by driving Corinne to Wellesley.
At seventeen Corinne was nearly six feet tall with low heels. She walked rather like an umpire measuring out yards on a football field. You had to get right up close to her to see that she was a beauty. Actually, her long legs were very interesting-looking. But not only her legs; all of her.
Although her fair hair was just a little anemic—it would later call for tact on the part of her hairdresser, if Madame’s suggestions were a little too fashionable it didn’t really matter. It was the kind of hair that lets the ears be visible now and then, and Corinne’s ears happened to be extraordinary: delicate, almost sweet, in formation and position, with bladethin edges. Her nose was long, but very slender and very high-bridged, it looked lovely even on the coldest day. Her eyes were hazel and, though not enormous, enormously kind. When her lips were ajar—which was seldom, as her face was nearly always caught tight in some private insecurity—but when they
were ajar you saw that they were not thin at all; you saw that the middle of her lower lip was full and round. She was a wonderful-looking girl.
When she was seventeen, though, most boys she knew found her anything but wonderful. For one reason, her speech was rapid and uncloying to the point of being brusque, and to go with it, unfortunately, her conversation stuck very close to the facts. While some boy, for example, was giving her the exact figures on the number of highballs he had consumed just the other night, Corinne was entirely apt to break in with some terrible remark, like "If we hurry we can catch the twelve thirty-one instead of the twelve forty. Do you feel like running?"
There was something else. Young men sensed, or actually found out, that Corinne did not like to be touched unnecessarily. When she was, she either jumped or apologized. It was the sort of thing that can play hell with a man-going-to-Yale-next-year’s Saturday night. So Corinne went right on jumping or apologizing for a long time. Perhaps none of her young men could have helped her anyway. It takes a certain amount of genius to touch anybody properly, let alone a mixed-up young girl.
In college Corinne came out of herself a little bit. Not much, but a little bit. The girls discovered behind her diffidence a sense of humor, and they made her use it; but that wasn’t all. It gradually leaked out all over the dormitory that Corinne could keep a secret, and very early in her freshman year she was unofficially elected Dormitory Kid. On many a cold Massachusetts night, consequently, she was obliged to get out of a warm bed to put out somebody else’s cat of guilt or innocence. To some extent the functions of her office were good for her own well-being. Giving out midnight advice can be highly instructive after it comes poisonously home a few times. But if you’re kept at the job too long—straight through your senior year, say—all the knowledge you pick up finally turns academic and useless.
After graduating from Wellesley she went to Europe. She preferred doing that to going straight to Philadelphia to live with her maternal second cousin. Besides, she had an old, undisciplined urge to visit her dead father’s estate in Germany. She had a feeling that on arriving there she would respond more poignantly to the memory of things long over and ungracefully done with.
Although nothing daughter-sized turned up for her when she did finally see her father’s estate, she stayed on in Europe for three years. She studied and played, more or less after a fashion, in Paris, in Vienna, Rome, Berlin, St. Anton, Cannes, Lausanne. She prescribed for herself some of the usual American-in-Europe neurotic fun, plus some accessible exclusively to girls who happen to be millionairesses. Over a period of thirty-odd months she bought herself nine cars. Not all of them bored her. Some she gave away. Nobody, of course, can make the American rich feel quite as filthy as can a poor-but-clean European.
Corinne knew a great number of men and boys during her three years in Europe, but her only real friend was a young man from Detroit. His name was Pat, but I don’t know whether it stood for Patrick or Patterson. Anyway he was very probably the first young man who had ever successfully ordered Corinne to close her eyes while she was being kissed. He most certainly was the first person whom Corinne had ever allowed to pass vicariously along the streets of her childhood to see a small boy in a woolen aviator’s cap.
The young man from Detroit was no fool. When he found out just how regularly Corinne was making private trips back to her childhood, he tried to do something about it. With the best intentions he tried to set up some kind of detour in Corinne’s mind. But he never really got a chance. He fell off the running board of Corinne’s ninth car, in his swimming trunks, and was killed.
Corinne went back to America after his death. She went to Philadelphia, to her cousin’s house, where she had spent all her college vacations. But she stayed only a month. A girl from Wellesley told her over the telephone about a darling, oversized, overpriced apartment in the East Sixties in New York. The girl said it was just perfect for Corinne.
Corinne took the apartment in New York and sat in it for nearly six months. She read a great deal. The young man from Detroit had first approached her on a like-me-like-the-books-I- read basis, and she was now a heavy reader. She met-a few ex-Wellesley girls for lunch or theater. She signed a few papers when her late father’s lawyer asked her to. But she had been a New Yorker almost seven months before anything significant happened to her.
She was having a few dates with the brother of her last roommate in college. The young man was one of the most successful tomcats in town, and Corinne was young enough to inform him one evening that he had a simply terrible Oedipus complex. Displeased with the information, the young gentleman threw his highball at her, catching her in the right eye with a fresh ice cube. The shiner that developed started Corinne off as a career girl, because when it disappeared she felt she ought to do something constructive by way of celebration. So she telephoned Robert Waner, had lunch with him, and asked him if he could get her a job on the newsmagazine he was working for.
I think I’ll say here, and then let it go, that I am Robert Waner. I don’t really have a good reason for taking myself out of the third person.
Corinne had not seen Waner in nearly four years. During her college years she had seen more of him than any other boy. She had thought he was funny. When Waner had finally found that out, of course, he had begun to get even funnier. He’d got so funny at Senior Prom at Wellesley that Corinne had broken into tears and asked him to please go back to his own college. Waner, in love with Corinne, had left Wellesley immediately. He had written to her while she had been in Europe, sending her as many letters as he could salvage from his wastebasket.
Waner’s boss at the magazine liked Corinne immediately and gave her a job pinning news items together for a rewrite man. Corinne did that for about a year. Then, when the rewrite man wrote a hot novel and went to Hollywood, she took over his job stringing adjectives: tall, gaunt, left-handed Anthony Creep, accompanied by his wife-ninety-three-year-old, web-footed, ex-manicurist, etc. Thereafter, Corinne’s name began to move up the masthead quite steadily until, in another four years, it was on a line with only four other names. Which meant, roughly, that less than forty people on the magazine had a right to push her copy around.
Her career was entirely remarkable. She had started out on it unable to understand just what she had to lose were she to fail as a career girl. In consequence, she was so cool about the whole setup that, in an office full of tense, ambitious people, she was taken at face value for efficient. It wasn’t hard for her later to live up to her own reputation. She happened to be a really good magazine woman. She was not only a competent all-round reporter and editor, but she developed also into a good, if not brilliant, drama critic.
As for Corinne’s personal life during the first five years she worked for the magazine, I guess it could be recorded on a single sheet of any interoffice memo pad:
Her wire-haired terrier, Malcolm, isn’t properly housebroken and probably never will be.
She is an easy, anonymous touch for any institution or individual depending upon charity.
She likes cherrystone clams and usually takes a double order.
She does not lie.
She is very likely to turn around in a taxicab to watch a child cross a street. She will not discuss the idiosyncrasy.
She regularly renews her subscription to Psychoanalytic Quarterly, a publication she barely glances through. She herself has never been psychoanalyzed.
Her legs grow lovelier each year.
Robert Waner bought two things to give to Corinne on her thirtieth birthday. One of them, an engagement ring, Corinne retreated from, and Waner (still the funnyman) tried to drop it into the fare box of a Madison Avenue bus. The other gift—a book of poems, called, The Cowardly Morning—Waner put on Corinne’s desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more." Corinne took the book home with her in a taxi and tossed it on her bedspread.
She didn’t pick up the book again until she was in b
ed, late that night. Then she glanced at the cover and opened the book with a dim impression that she was about to read some poems by someone who was not T. S. Eliot or Marianne Moore; someone named Fane or Flood or Wilson.
She raced through the first two poems in the book, both of which happened to be cerebral enough to require the reader’s co-operation, and started emptily on the third poem. But she suddenly felt sorry for the poet for having her as a reader, and she politely turned back to the first poem. She had once done the same thing to Marianne Moore.
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn’t hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest/with all foliage underground.
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated. Then she glanced at the cover of the book. She began to stare at it. Then suddenly she got out of bed and dialed Robert Waner’s number on the telephone.
"Bobby?" she said. "Corinne."
"It’s all right. I wasn’t asleep. It isn’t even four o’clock."
"Bobby, who is this Ray Ford?"
"Who?"
"Ray Ford. The man who wrote the poems you gave me."
"Lemme sleep over it awhile. I’ll see ya at the office."
"Bobby, please. I think I know him. I may know him. I knew someone named Ray Ford—Raymond Ford. Really."
"Good. I’ll wait for you at the office. Good ni---"
"Bobby, wake up. Please. This is terribly important. Don’t you know anything about him?"
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 19