by John O'Hara
“Daddy, this is Julie Rand; this is my father.”
“How do you do,” he said to the new girl, and then spoke to the girl in the middle: “Hello, Frances.”
“’Lomistliggett,” said Frances.
“Where’s Bar?” he said.
“She drove Mother over to the club. We’re all going there for lunch. Get in, we’re late.”
“No, we’re not. Mother knew I was coming out on this train.”
“Well, we’re late anyway,” said Ruth Liggett, the driver. “We’re always late. Like the late Jimmy Walker.”
“Oh, ho, ho.” Miss Rand laughing.
“Is that door closed, Daddy?” said Ruth.
“Think so. Yes,” he said.
“It rattles so. We ought to turn this in while we can still get something on it.”
“Uh-huh. We’ll turn this in and sell the house. Would that suit you?” he said.
“Oh. Always talking about how broke we are. And in front of strangers.”
“Who’s a stranger? Oh, Miss Rand. Well, she’s not exactly a stranger, is she? Aren’t you Henry Rand’s daughter?”
“No. I’m his niece. My father was David Rand. I’m visiting my Uncle Henry and Aunt Bess, though.”
“Well, then you’re not a stranger. You like this car, don’t you?”
“Don’t call it a car, Daddy,” said Ruth.
“I like it very much,” said Miss Rand. “It’s very nice, I think.”
“Ooh, what a prevaricator! She does not. She didn’t want to ride in it. You should have seen her. When she came out of the house she took one look and said, ‘Is this what we’re going in?’ Didn’t you? Own up.”
“Well, I never rode in a truck before.”
“A truck!” said Ruth.
“Aren’t there station wagons where you come from?”
“No. We just have regular cars.”
“She comes from—what’s the name of the place, Randy?”
“Wilkes-Barre, P A.”
“And a very nice town it is,” said Liggett. “I remember it very well. It’s near Scranton. I have a lot of very dear friends in Scranton.”
“Do you know anybody in Wilkes-Barre?” said Miss Rand.
“I don’t believe so—Ruth!”
“Well, he ought to stay on his own side of the road.”
“You can’t count on that. I don’t mind taking chances, but when there are other people in the car.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t have hit me.”
“That’s what you think. No wonder this car’s all shot.”
“Now you can’t blame that on me, Daddy. I don’t drive this car that much.”
“Well, I’ll admit you’re not responsible for this car, but the Chrysler, you are responsible for that. Clutch is slipping because you ride it all the time. Fenders wrinkled.”
“Who wrinkled it—not them. It. The left hind fender. That happened when someone else was driving, not me.”
“Well, let’s not talk about it.”
“No, of course not. I’m right. That’s why we won’t talk about it.”
“Is that fair? Do I change the subject when I’m in the wrong, Ruth? Do I?”
“No, darling. That wasn’t fair.” She reached her hand back to be held. He kissed it.
“Why, Daddy!” The others did not see.
“Shh,” he said and then was silent until they came to the club. “Here we are. I’ll go around and wash up. I’ll meet you in three minutes.”
In the locker room he rang for the steward and arranged to cash two checks. The club had a rule against cashing a check for more than twenty-five dollars on any single day, but he made them out as of two dates and the steward, who had done this many times before, gave him fifty dollars. The sixty dollars Liggett had left for Gloria and the other money he had spent on her had left him short, and he knew Emily would think it strange that he had spent so much in one night.
He had a highball, and as he prepared it and drank it he wondered what it was that made him feel so tender toward Emily, when he was sure that what he ought to be feeling was unwillingness to see her. Yet he wanted very much to see her. He wondered what had made him kiss Ruth’s hand. He hadn’t done that for a long time, and never had he done it quite so warmly and spontaneously. Always before this it had been a part of a game he played with Ruth in which Ruth played a flirtatious girl and he was a hick from the country. He joined the party in the grill.
He went straight to Emily and kissed her cheek.
“Oh-ho, somebody had a highball,” she said.
“Somebody needed a highball,” he said. “Somebody has a hangover and badly needed a drink. How about the rest of you? Cocktail, dear?”
“Not I, thanks,” said Emily, “and I don’t think the girls had better have anything if they’re going to play tennis. Let’s order, shall we?”
“Steak,” said Ruth. “How about you, Randy? Steak?”
“Yes, please.”
“We all want steak,” said Ruth. “You do, don’t you, Frannie?”
“I don’t,” said Barbara, the younger Liggett girl. “Not that it makes any difference to Miss Smarty Pants, but steak is exactly what I don’t want. Julie, if you’d rather not have steak just say so. You too, Frannie. Mother, do you want steak?”
“No, dear, I think I’d rather have just a chop. Will that take too long, Harry?”
“ ’Bout ten minutes, Mizz Liggett. Course you be having soup maybe, first, ’n’ by the time yole get finished with your soup chop’ll be ready.”
“Daddy, steak?” said Ruth.
“Right. Tomato juice cocktail first for me, if that’s all right, Ruth?”
“Absolutely. Have we decided? Chops for how many? Mother, chops. Miss Barbara, chops. Randy, chops. Daddy, steak. Frannie, steak, and me, steak. Have you got that, Harry?”
“Yes, Miss Liggett. What about vege’ables?”
“Just bring in a lot of vegetables,” said Ruth.
All through the ordering Liggett watched Ruth and thought of Emily. Emily—and he did not remember this at the moment—who retained the mouth, nose, chin, bone structure and, to some extent, the complexion Emily had had and that made her handsome; but she was handsome no longer. What Emily retained only made you ask what had happened that left her a plain woman with good features. The eyes, of course they made the difference. They looked nowadays like the eyes of someone who has many headaches, although this did not happen to be the case. Emily was apparently very healthy.
Now he watched her busying herself with her hands; unfolding her napkin, touching without changing the position of the silverware, folding her hands. She had a way of watching her hands when she was using them. He wondered about that, noticing it for the first time. He could not recall ever having seen her watching her hands when they were resting and still, the way she would have if she were conscious of them in the sense of being vain. What she did was to watch them as though she were checking up on their efficiency, their neatness. It was just another part of the way she lived. Her life was like that.
Often she would sit at home with a book of poems in her hand and she would be looking in the direction of the window, a dreamy look in her eyes. He would look again and again at her, wondering what pretty thoughts had been started by what line in what poem. Then she would say suddenly something like: “Do you think I ought to ask the Hobsons for Thursday night? You like her, don’t you?” Liggett supposed a lot of husbands were like him; two or three, at least, of his own generation had confided to him that they didn’t know their own wives. They had been married, some of them, as much as twenty years; reasonably if not strictly faithful, good providers, good fathers, hard workers, and temperate. Then after a year or so of the depression, when they saw it was not a little thing that was going to pass, these men began taking stock of w
hat life had given them or they had taken. Usually men of this kind began counting with, “I have a wife and two children . . . ” and go on from there to their “investments,” cash, job, houses, cars, boats, horses, clothes, furniture, trust fund, pair of binoculars, club bonds, and so on. They were—these men—able to see right away that the tangible assets in the Spring of 1931 were worth on the whole about a quarter of what they had cost originally, and in some cases less than that. And in some cases, nothing. By the time the depression had reached that point such men accepted as fact the fact that nothing that you could buy or sell was worth what it once had been worth. At least it worked out that way. Then a few men, a few million men, asked themselves whether the things they had bought ever had been worth what had been paid for them. Ah! That was worth thinking about, worth buying heavy and expensive books to find out about. Some of the keenest practical jokers on the floor of the Stock Exchange went home nights to see what the hell John Stuart Mill said—to find out who the hell John Stuart Mill was.
But among Liggett’s friends there were men who, beginning their inventories with, “I have a wife and two children—” went through the list of their worldly goods and then came back to the first item: wife. Then they discovered that they could not really be sure they had their wives. The mortality rate for marriages in Liggett’s class is fairly close to 100%, but until the great depression there was no reason to find this out; most of these men believed that they were working for the happiness of their wives and children as well as for their own advancement, but an idle woman is an idle woman, whether her husband is downtown making millions or downtown trying to hold on to a $40-a-week job. Men like Liggett—in 1930 you would see them on the roads of Long Island and Westchester, in cap and windbreaker and sport shoes, taking walks on Sunday with their wives, trying to get to know their wives, because they wanted to believe that a wife was one thing they could count on. Of course there was nothing deliberately insulting in this attitude, and as often as not the wife was not conscious of insult, so it was all right. She knew that he always had taken her to football games and the theater, he paid her bills, he bought her Christmas presents, he was generous to her poor relations, he did not interfere with the education and rearing of the children. Sometimes she did not even ask why, when he became more curious, tried to become more companionable. She knew there was a depression, and she saw the magazine articles about the brave wives who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their husbands; she read the sermons in the Monday papers in which clergymen told their parishioners (and the press; always the press) that the depression was a good thing because it brought husbands and wives closer to each other.
Liggett was not quite one of these men; Emily certainly was not one of these women. For one thing, Liggett was a Pittsburgher and Emily a Bostonian. That was one thing, not two. Liggett was precisely the sort of person who, if he hadn’t married Emily, would be just the perfect person for Emily to snub. All her life she seemed to be saving up for one snub, which would have to be delivered to an upper-class American, since no foreigner and no lower-class American could possibly understand what she had that she felt entitled her to deliver a snub. What she had was a Colonial governor; an unbroken string of studious Harvard men; their women. Immediately and her own was, of course, the Winsor-Vincent Club-Sewing Circle background. She had a few family connections in New York, and they were unassailable socially; they never went out. It came as a surprise which he was a long time understanding for Liggett to learn, after he married Emily, that Emily never had stopped at a hotel in New York. She explained that the only possible reason you went to New York was to visit relations, and then you stopped with them, not at a hotel. Yes, that was true, he agreed—and never told her the fun he had had as a kid, stopping at New York hotels; the time he released a roll of toilet paper upon Fifth Avenue, the time he climbed along the ledge from one window to another. He was a little afraid of her.
But she was better off with him than she might have been with a Boston man. He was rich and handsome, a Yale athlete. Those qualifications were enough to explain his attraction for her. But he was more than that. She was handsome, she was healthy, and therefore she was passionate, and she wanted him from the moment she first met him. In the beginning Liggett himself was all mixed up about her; he was awed by her manner and her accent (he never got over the accent, and only got accustomed to the manner). She was less handsome than other girls he had known, but he had not known anyone like her, not so close. They met at a deb party, on one of her infrequent visits to New York—his last before beginning training for crew. He made a date with her for tea the following day, but had to break it, and thus began a correspondence which on his part was regulated by the necessity of staying in college and rowing at the same time, and on her part by a schedule: never answer more than one letter a week, and never until two days after the letter has been received. Because of her he decided to go to Harvard Business School. This pleased his father, who gave him a Fiat phaeton and anything else he asked for. There was one thing he could not ask his father for, and that was Emily’s fair white body. Emily gave that without being asked, one winter’s night in Boston. After waiting three miserable weeks to see if anything was going to happen, they decided to be engaged.
She was better off married to Liggett than she might have been with a Boston man because he never took her passion for granted. A Boston man might have, and might not be long looking around for more of the same from someone else. Liggett could not take her for granted. There is something about those good, good words of sleeping together, the language of sleeping together, when spoken in the tones of Commonwealth Avenue, that no man who has been brought up west of the Connecticut River can fail to notice. And when a man is listening for the words, when he teaches them to a woman, when he asks her to say them, he does not take everything all at once. He will want more.
There was that, and there was the secrecy. Their intimate moments were their own, so much so that Liggett did not once mention Emily’s pregnancy to anyone, not even to his own sister, while she was carrying their first child. It was nothing they agreed upon; Emily herself told Liggett’s sister. But it was part of the way he felt about Emily. Anything that had to do with their intimate life was not to be discussed with a third person, so far as he was concerned.
To a degree this was true of everything else in their relationship. Liggett’s impulse was always to talk about Emily, but he had gone that important step above vulgarity: he secretly recognized his own temptation to vulgarity. However valuable an asset this may be, it had one bad effect. A man ought to be able, when it becomes necessary, to discuss his wife with a third person, man or woman. Since it was impossible for him to bring himself to discuss Emily with another man he found himself in a spot where he had to talk to some woman. It had to be someone who knew Emily, someone close to her. He looked around and for the first time became aware that Emily in the years she had lived in New York—at that time, seven; it was in 1920—had not made a single close friend. Her best friend was a Boston girl, Martha Harvey. Martha was a divorcee. She had been married to a young millionaire who was practically illiterate, always drunk, was three inches shorter than she, and never had spoken an uncivil or impolite word to anyone in his life. Martha had grown up with Emily and they saw each other frequently, but when it came time to discuss Emily with her, Liggett saw how impossible it would be. Martha in a way was Emily over again.
The occasion, however, was urgent. Emily’s family’s money was mostly in cotton mills. Emily’s father was a doctor, a pleasant, unimaginative man who studied medicine in a day when surgeons still spoke of “laudable pus.” (He never quite got over the surprise of learning that Walter Reed was right.) In fact his presence in medicine is explained by a fondness for the dissection of cats. It was the only cerebral activity he ever had been interested in, so his father and mother steered him into medicine. A merit-badge boy scout would have been as useful in an emergency as Emily’s f
ather, but a few friends went to him for colds and sore throat, and they constituted his practice. His practice was his excuse for neglecting his financial responsibilities, but every year or two he would have an idea, and at this time his idea was to get rid of all his cotton holdings and turn the cash into a vague something else. This time the vague something else was German marks. He just knew they were going to be worth something, and as he had traveled in Germany as a young man, he thought it would be pleasant, since his fortune would soon be doubled, to have a castle on the Rhine, where even at that moment you could have a castle, they said, fully staffed and equipped for $100 a month.
Liggett did not care a very great deal what the old man did with his own money, but that money, he felt, was not altogether the old man’s to fool with. The doctor had not earned it; he had inherited it, and since he had inherited it, it seemed to Liggett to be a kind of trust which the doctor had no right to violate. At least it was not to be squandered. If the doctor could go on year in, year out without assuming a permanent responsibility for the money, then he ought not to be permitted to risk losing all of it when he had a foolish hunch. Cotton was high that year, and while it was debatable whether it was the height of shrewdness to dump so much stock on a favorable market, Liggett at least conceded that there was a chance the market would absorb the doctor’s holdings without strong reaction. No, with the old gentleman’s decision to sell Liggett could not seriously quarrel (indeed, it would have been more like the old man to sell at the bottom of the market). But German marks, for Christ’s sake!
Liggett wished Emily had a brother, or even the kind of sister some people have. But Emily’s sister was a total stranger, and brother she had none. Next was friend, and friend was Martha. He rejected the plan of talking to Martha the moment her name conjured up a picture of her. But the more he thought the more he was convinced that he had to talk to somebody about the situation. Emily and the two little girls were in Hyannisport that summer, and he did not want to speak to Emily if he could help it. She was taking the children very seriously at the time and talk about her father would worry her.
