by Purdy, James
“Can I retire now, ma’am?” he inquired in a voice she had once described as pure velvet.
“May I go?” she corrected him. “Of course, wonderful, wonderful Brady, you may.”
She had not released his hand.
“But my dear Brady, you’ve forgotten my medicine!” she cried. “How thoughtless of you to neglect me.”
“No, ma’am, I have not forgotten,” he contradicted her. “If you’ll let me, I have it over here for you…”
He motioned to a tray near them.
“Shall I hold the spoon for you, ma’am, as per usual?” he inquired.
He had managed at last to free his hand from hers.
“If you would be so very kind, my dear friend,” Gilda nodded in the general direction of her digitalis.
Brady poured the red heart medicine into a solid silver tablespoon, and held it out near her thin blue lips. Just as he removed the spoon from her mouth, she bit down, holding his wrist in her teeth, which were, as a matter of fact, still her own. He made no effort to withdraw from her pressure, but bending down, surrendered his face to the routine score of kisses. Her impassioned embrace of his face made him lose his balance slightly and he more or less fell at her feet, allowing her to deposit kiss after kiss on his crown, “the precious wool,” as she rhapsodized over it, finer, she assured him, than any vicuña.
“Be faithful,” she admonished him gently, “as I am faithful to you and yours. And remember, beautiful Arab, wonderful wonderful Brady, we both know Mr. Cabot Wright never paid us a call, or if he did, left without his dinner. There is no Cabot Wright. There’s only, where secrets are concerned, you and me. Shine on, Brady, shine.”
When Brady had risen from his kneeling posture and left the room, Gilda rose as limber as a 16-year-old, and gambolled the full length of the room to where Mr. Warburton lay in a sleep that looked as deep as eternity. He snored.
Kissing her spouse on the lips, she brought to an end his trying role as opossum. He looked at her. Only an old soldier could have been so calm, so silent. Yet she must have sensed something in his eyes. Perhaps they were too wide-awake for a man who had appeared to be in such deep slumber. “I want to talk to you, Gilda,” he said.
“Can’t it wait until the weekend, dear?” Gilda sat on a tiny footstool at his feet, looking small, blonde and filial. “This is my big TV night of the week, you know. It’s Tuesday—gaze-night, dear.”
“I’m afraid this is a matter of gravest importance, my pet.”
“You’re not going to give me bad news about your health, Warby!” she exclaimed in real displeasure. “I’m too weak to hear about it, my dearest. I can’t bear another cross!”
He was touched, in spite of himself, and almost thought of postponing their talk.
“No, my angel,” he replied to her question, “as to my health, outside of a touch of coronary, Dr. Bugleford is more than taking care of me.”
“Thank God, Warby, thank God,” Gilda said, but her attention had gone to the television screen.
“Can’t you turn the goddam box off for one ten-minute period?”
“I told you, dearest, it’s Tuesday, my gaze-night. You have your den for talks.”
“Gilda, this concerns our very future.”
“Don’t tell me there’s been another crash or panic. I told you in 1930, it was the last time I could live through watching you worry on that scale. I mean it, Warby. I’ll never go through 1930 again with you. I’ll jump this time.”
“It’s not 1930, God damn it to hell, but I don’t know if it isn’t something worse…”
“About our suspicion concerning Cabot Wright,” Gilda began sweetly. “I’ve hit on a plan to prove whether he insulted me or not. It’s fool-proof…”
“I see,” he stared at her with icy dissatisfaction.
“I’m going to have you arrange for Cabot Wright to call on Zenda Stuyvesant.”
“Why that old bag?” he exploded.
“She’ll know,” Gilda told him.
“Know what, for Christ’s sake?” he demanded.
“Whether he’d be capable of offending me or not.” She lowered her eyes, and looked so sad and sweet that he was again won to her.
“So old Zenda can read minds,” he commented.
“She’ll know, if you’ll only send him to her… Say yes, Warby. Say you’ll send him.”
He kissed her on the nose, meaning, she supposed, he would.
“Gilda, are you aware, my dearest, now let me try to put this as gently as I can, God damn it…” She waited and he said quickly: “The fact is, Gilda, you smell lately like a Negress.”
“That word is no longer in vogue, my innocent. Sweety, you’re so out of touch. If you spent more time with your little wife, you’d be more in the swim.”
“I’ll make my point, love, if we sit here through tomorrow.”
“Make your point, dearest, for I’m attending to the screen now and not you.”
“You smell like a Negro lately, and I wonder why.”
This time she paused, briefly, but came up with an answer. “I’ve been using a lotion made from tropical plants, if you please, and I’m really not paying any attention to your question because I know it’s an excuse for some other kind of unpleasantness.”
“Gilda, aren’t you overdoing your attentions to Brady… and to Anna, of course.”
“You know I am! I have nobody else to shower my affection on!”
“Don’t bawl now,” he implored, for she was weeping hard.
“Gilda,” he proceeded, “have you been intimate with Brady even in a minor way? For Christ’s sakes, tell me… I’m not going to take action if you have. I’m too old to divorce you no matter what you have done, or are planning to do. I’m too old and too busy to make any change in my domestic arrangements. I regard this as my hotel, in point of fact, and a damned good one it is, too.”
“Thank you, Warby, for the additional black eye.”
“To go back to my original question, I’d like to know why you smell the way you do lately?”
She gave him one of her more terrible looks, and then said, “I look upon Brady as an adopted son, though a servant.”
“And your relationship stops there?” he wondered.
“It does. We go to Harlem, but then I’m studying Harlem. You have no idea how empty my hours are, Warby. You’ve brought more vacuum into my life even than money, and you’ve made me feel vacuum in places I had no idea existed. Why begrudge me a bit of color?”
Mr. Warburton rose and began to leave the room.
“Warby, come back here,” she called to him. “You aren’t going to do anything desperate now?”
“I’m going to the liquor cabinet. Bring you anything?”
She shook her head.
When he returned with his bottle of rye, she took his hand, and said: “I haven’t done a thing wrong, Warby, and you know it. I never smell anything different about Brady and Anna, and my sense of smell is superlative. Still, who am I with all day? Negroes. I have to pay to have people with me, you said that long ago, and the Europeans couldn’t stand me. How long the Negroes will is anybody’s guess, now they’re revolting, of course. But if I smell, Warby, that’s part of your bad bargain in marrying me. And you don’t begrudge me, dearest, a little mental romance with African beauty?”
His head was in her lap, for they had changed positions, and he was sitting on the footstool, and she was in the large chair, the better to see the screen with.
“And promise me you’ll send Cabot Wright to see Zenda Stuyvesant. She’ll know if he did anything wrong or improper while he was having that sympathy-luncheon.”
She patted Warby’s head, who grinned contentedly.
“Zenda’s alive with occult perceptions, dearest,” she was watching the screen hard now, and her wrinkles of care relaxed, and her blond curls fell back softly on her head. She continued to pat Warby.
“You’ll be sure to send Cabot to Zenda then, my dear, first thin
g in the morning.”
He grunted his assent.
ALTHOUGH MR. WARBURTON was expected at the dedication of the Professional Football Hall of Fame, taking place somewhere in the hinterland of Ohio, and should have departed hours ago, he postponed his flight to call Zenda Stuyvesant and arrange Cabot Wright’s coming visit to her home (Cabot had been more than pleased to go), and in view of feeling “awful letdown” over everything, he decided that a few hours with his physician would put him in better physical shape to meet all the decent, wholesome people at the Roller Bearing Axle Empire party in Ohio, where the Professional Football Hall of Fame inauguration was to be held.
Forgetting the doctor’s iron-clad rule that nobody visit his office without an appointment, Mr. Warburton opened the doctor’s door without so much as pressing the buzzer. The receptionist informed him that the Marriage-or-Death Clinic, a special psychotherapy group, was in session, and he could not see the doctor.
Fearing a long wait might be in store for him, but loath to leave without his needed “tune-up,” Mr. Warburton irritably picked up a brochure that explained to the layman the philosophy of the doctor’s marriage-or-death philosophy, and what it promised mankind. The brochure pointed out that Man requires Marriage, One Marriage. Any other form of existence for him is impossible, leading to dissent and noxious activity. Then followed Dr. Bugleford’s prayer—though as the physician took pains to make clear his Marriage-Totality program did not pretend in any way to replace Jehovah or God. (The doctor had written in one of his best-sellers that there is no First Cause, just as there is no individual man or human personality: marriage is the sole reality and marriage’s giant counterpart, Society or the State.) Mr. Warburton then read the Prayer:
Sole institution of wedded bliss, heterosexual union, the fount and meaning of all human endeavor, the only human destiny, where alone riches lie, Cradle of commerce! Progress! Sole reality! Step in and heal this misdirected son or daughter, or misdirected individual of anomalous sex: join him and or her in the sole human reality, Marriage and Society, and make him, make her, MISTER AND MRS. Amen.
The brochure followed with a resume of the doctor’s stirring career, against impossible odds, setbacks, and calumny:
“A GREAT JEW FOR GENTILES”
Dr. Bugleford, in addition to being the founder of Marriage-the-Sole-Reality Clinic, has spent much of his youth and mature life in combating deviation, especially of the male sex and, if necessary, tracking down the deviate. A serious deviate himself at the age of 13, he effected a self-cure by joining the Y.M.C.A. (prior to his membership he was known as a snowball addict, and threw hard-packed balls at elderly check-room women and sodomites), and after only 6 months of group activity, decided to run his own program with affiliated agency for the “tracking down” and cure of deviates, with his world-wide detective agency, eventually to be located overlooking Central Park and the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights.
Dr. Bugleford’s cure is simple and permanent: the deviate marries; he has, if possible, 6 or more children, or adopts this number; he joins the Y, country club, church, temple, synagogue or tent of detective-sponsor’s choice; when cured, he begins to run his own detective agency for 1) detecting other deviates (in the bud if possible), and 2) either having them detained or leading and directing them to marry, have 6 or more children, or adopt same, join the Y, country club, church, etc. (as above).
Unregenerate deviates such as lyric poets, star-watchers, coffee-drinkers, or Bhang-eaters are arrested and sent to the Hoover grottoes, or “disappear.” Cure or liquidation is Dr. Bugleord’s motto.
Gentiles describe the doctor as a bearded ghetto-like mole; Jews describe him as a broken-down German athlete of strong body-alcohol tendencies; Negroes think of him as a hooded rope-expert from Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Puerto Ricans claim he is a Moslem acid-thrower with a long axe-murder career behind him. The doctor naturally pooh-poohs all these descriptions as the work of his deviate-enemies. He himself thinks of himself as akin to the God force but societized in marriage. He objects to the concept of a personal God and / or Jehovah, since he maintains God has often behaved as a deviate in history, and Jesus, although once a great Jew for Gentiles, does not fill modern needs, even Gentile modern.
PLAY SAFE = OBEY
The goal and purpose of the doctor’s program is simple:
1. Alert and apprehend every individual before he (and/or she) is different.
2. A strong-arm Man for every 3 weaker-armed men (i.e. deviates).
3. World-wide radio system of “hearing” (which would be applied to the rectum ((by tiny wires)) of all newly-born infants) so that the least indication of their becoming deviate (lyric poet, coffee-drinker, Bhang-eater) would be detected from birth on. Cure or liquidations measures then are taken.
Hearing loud choral shouts from a nearby room, Mr. Warburton laid aside the brochure, hastened over to the door, carefully opened it a crack, and saw a group of men and women, with a sprinkling of children, kneeling before folding chairs, intoning before the huge cranium of Dr. Bugleford:
“I will marry, marry, marry & will play safe play safe and obey. We’ll be Mister and Mrs. O.K. O.K. Thanks to that institution that makes me go & society hum. Over-all institution! Heterosex fount of progress and fun! Marriage! Marriage! Marriage! Marriage can be fun! Marriage can be fun! I will marry marry marry! Heterosex! Fun! Money, money heterosex fun! I will marry! Marry! Marry! I will stay married married married! And obey! Obey! Obey! Fun! Heterosex! Life insurance! Life! Heterosex! Marriage! Insurance!”
“For good Jesus Christ’s sake,” Mr. Warburton said, and closed the door. He picked up his hat, and after a moment to slow his speeding heart and get some wind back into his lungs, he hurried on out, just in time to hail a cabby with the words, “Get me out of this goddam city.”
13
FROM GENERAL PARTNER TO GOD
Gilda knew she must find out two things in order to remain, as she said, a functioning plant (she had given up her attempt of a few years ago to be a functioning animal): she must know once and for all if Cabot Wright had raped her, and if, as a consequence, she had crossed the color line with Brady. She didn’t care, she comforted herself, if either event was true. America was coming to an end, she had read in some distinguished intellectual periodical, and what happened to her, she supposed, could not be too crucial. Yet she had curiosity, if nothing else. She must know. If neither young male, the white or the black, had touched her, then she reckoned she could go back to being sick and miserable in her own plant-like way, imbibing certain liquids, and crying most of the time over the way life and time had treated her.
But she must find out: “Was I or weren’t I?”
Fortunately, she knew that Warby, before going off to the Football jamboree in Ohio, had telephoned to Zenda Stuyvesant about Cabot Wright’s impending visit. Gilda now telephoned Zenda herself. Though unusually cold and formal, Zenda promised Gilda she would see the young man, and give her “professional” opinion as to whether he was capable of an act of violence.
Zenda, who had been a former silent screen star, still had mother-of-pearl skin and lovely big eyes. Not content with yesterday’s glory, she had penned the best-selling Building Baby’s Wardrobe, “ghosted” by Princeton Keith (4 million copies in hard-cover; 39 million in paper). Under the tutelage of old Warby, Zenda had become a top-notch real estate woman in New York and for this reason, if for no other, Gilda could always expect some little “half-favor” from Zenda in a pinch.
Zenda, it was perfectly clear, did not wish to do this one little favor for Gilda, seeing a young man who had, improbably, offended Warby’s old girl. What did “offend” mean? Furthermore, Zenda had troubles of her own these days. Family troubles. Wealth, fame, best-sellerdom at the ghost hands of Princeton Keith, none of these had brought Miss Stuyvesant happiness, as she confessed in that brilliant midnight radio show over the tinkle of wine glasses and clatter of Chicken Tetrazzini casseroles.
Zenda’s cr
oss was a daughter by the former matinee idol, Horace Ross. Everyone knew the girl as Goldie Thomas, for Thomas had been Zenda’s fourth husband, a noted Boston attorney, and Zenda had chosen the name Thomas because she felt it would do her daughter the most good. Besides, oddly enough, Goldie resembled Mr. Thomas more than she did Horace Ross.
Goldie had become a top-notch model, the highest paid in her field, and the money was rolling in. She was making damn near more than her little Mother had back in the Grand Old ’Twenties. Yet what Zenda wanted for her daughter was marriage and a family. The right young man had come along, a fine upstanding fellow from Madison Avenue, who had wanted to marry Goldie right away. Wilson Cramer was his name. Yet Goldie, rather than fill her leisure hours with young men like Wilson, preferred to be alone, to listen to her FM radio run by reds and degenerates, and go out to dinner with her agent, an elderly man of 44.
At first, Goldie had welcomed the attentions of young Wilson. He had, after all not been connected with the entertainment world and this made him a kind of rarity. He was considerate and thoughtful and often accompanied her when she was to be photographed: in front of the Plaza Hotel, in front of the Cloisters, in front of the UN, in front of St. Patrick’s. Wilson’s reassuring smile and the look of adoration in his eyes helped her at those trying moments before the camera to make completely successful advertisement photos. Her agent had been ecstatic.
But when the money started coming in, so much of it, and her assurance was at its height, Goldie began to see flaws in him. Wilson’s love making—never permitted by her to be brought to fruition—began to tire her. Even without yielding to his restrained, if passionate, importunities she found, though still a virgin, that she looked less and less like what she desired to be in front of the camera. Her skin, after his embraces, seemed less fresh, and there was an expression about her eyes that she did not like. Finally, she summarily told Wilson not to come back. He had done, then, “mad” things, like climbing up on her fire-escape and threatening to jump. These new worries she was certain had aged her beyond her 18 years (in the advertisements she posed as 16). Goldie sent Wilson a frantic night-telegram: “YOUR ACTIONS ARE DESTROYING MY LOOKS. HAVE SOME CONSIDERATION MY CAREER. STOP. I HAVE TWO NEW WRINKLES SINCE LAST WEEK. STOP. FRIENDSHIP MUST END. REGRETFULLY BUT POSITIVELY. GOLDIE.”