by John O'Hara
Martha was just going out when he telephoned, going out to dine alone, and she was not surprised or curious at his calling her for dinner. She said yes. He asked her if she would like a drink, and she said she would, very much, and he said he would bring a bottle of gin. He stopped at a place in Lexington Avenue, bought a bottle of the six-dollar gin, had a drink on Matt, the proprietor, and took a taxi, one of those small, low Philadelphia-made un-American-looking Yellows of that period.
Martha lived on Murray Hill between Park and Madison, in an automatic-elevator apartment. They had orange blossom cocktails, which Liggett liked. She asked once, and only once, about Emily. She said: “How’s Emily? She’s at Hyannisport, isn’t she?” He said she was fine, and was on the verge of correcting himself to say that whether she knew it or not she was not fine at all. Then later, when he saw Martha did not come back to Emily, he was in more real danger of talking about Emily; a girl who had what Martha had, the assurance and poise that gave her courage to accept his wanting to have dinner because she was herself and not merely a trusted friend of his wife’s—you could confide in that girl. But at the same time the thing he wanted to talk about began to recede. He began to enjoy himself because he was enjoying Martha’s company.
They had two cocktails, and then she told him to take off his coat. Next he thought she would offer him a cigar, because take his coat off was exactly what he wanted to do. It was so comfortable here. “Are you hungry?” he said.
“Not specially. Let’s wait. It’ll be cool around nine o’clock, if you’re in no hurry.”
“Gosh, I’m not in a hurry.”
“Have some more cocktails, shall we? You know, I like to drink. I never knew I did—gosh, I never even knew about drinking—till I married Tommy, and he used to try to get me drunk, but that was no good. I don’t like to have people try to get me drunk. If I want to get drunk. I’ll do it.”
He took the cocktail shaker to the kitchen and made very strong cocktails, not entirely on purpose, but not entirely accidentally, for what she had just been saying reminded him of a physical, biological, whatever-you-want-to-call-it fact: that Martha had been married and therefore had slept with a man. It meant no more to him for the time being. It was just strange that he had somehow ceased to think of her as a girl with a life of her own. Almost always he had thought of her as someone who, when he knew her better, would become finally a good sport, a sexless friend of Emily’s.
“Today is Bastille Day in Paris,” he said, when he returned with the cocktails. (It was also the day Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted.)
“So it is. I hope to be there next year on Bastille Day.”
“Oh, really?”
“I think so. I couldn’t go to the Cape this summer because Tommy finds out where I am and comes calling at all hours.”
“Isn’t there some way to put a stop to that?” he said.
“Oh, I suppose there is. People are always suggesting things like the police. But why do that? They don’t seem to remember that I like Tommy.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Very much. I’m not in love with him, but I like him.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, of course you couldn’t be expected to.”
“No, that’s true. I guess this is the first time you and I’ve really talked together.”
“It is.” She had her arm across the back of the sofa. She put down her cigarette and crushed it in the tray and picked up her cocktail. She looked away from him as she raised the glass. “As a matter of fact, I never thought we ever would be like this, the two of us, sitting, talking, having a cocktail together.”
“Why?”
“Do you want the truth?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Well, all right. The truth is I never liked you.”
“You didn’t.”
“No,” she said. “But I do now.”
Why? Why? Why? He wanted to ask. Why? Why do you like me now? I like you. How I like you! “But you do now,” he repeated.
“Yes. Aren’t you interested in knowing why I like you now after not liking you for such a long time?”
“Of course, but if you want to tell me you will and if you don’t there’s no use my asking.”
“Come here,” she said. He sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. “I like the way you smell.”
“Is that why you like me now and didn’t before?”
“Damn before!” She put her hand on his cheek. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t get up. I’ll do it.” She went to one of the two large windows and pulled down the shade. “People across the street.”
He had her with her clothes on. And from that moment on he never loved Emily again.
“Do you want to stay here tonight?” she said. “If I’m going to be with child for this we might as well be together all night. If you want to stay?”
“I do, I do.”
“Grand. I’ll have to phone the maid and tell her not to come in early tomorrow. You’ll be out of here before ten, tomorrow I mean, won’t you?”
They had a wildly passionate affair that summer. They would have dinner in little French restaurants, drinking bad whiskey out of small coffee cups. She was sailing in September and the night before she sailed she said to him: “I don’t care if I die now, do you?”
“No. Except I want to live.” All summer he had been doing arithmetic on scratch paper—financial arrangements for getting a divorce from Emily. “Once again, marry me.”
“No, darling. We’d be no good married to each other. Me especially. But this I know, that for the rest of our lives, whenever we see each other, if I look into your eyes and you look into mine, and we see the thing that we see now—nothing can stop us, can it?”
“No. Nothing.”
The next time he saw her was two years later in Paris. In the meantime he had met and lain with ten other women, and Martha was in the White Russian taxi-driver phase. They didn’t even have to give each other up, for there was scarcely recognition, let alone love, when again their eyes met.
It got around that he was on the town, but if some kind friend ever told Emily she never let it make any difference. He was comparatively discreet in that he avoided schemers. Among the women he slept with was an Englishwoman, right out of Burke’s Peerage, who gave him gonorrhea, or stomach ulcers as it was then called. To Emily he confided that in addition to the ulcers he had a hernia, and she accepted that, not sure what a hernia was, but knowing that it was not a topic for dinner-table conversation. She was so incurious that he was able to keep at home the paraphernalia for the treatment of his disease.
Dr. Winchester, by the way, did not buy the marks. An honest broker dissuaded him.
• • •
Liggett addressed his wife: “Are you coming in town tonight or in the morning?”
“Not till Tuesday morning. The girls have a day off tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“One of the kids got diphtheria and they’re fumigating the school,” said Ruth. “Are you staying out?”
“I’d like to. I’d like to really get going on the boat. But I’ve got to go back to town tonight, so what about you and Bar and Frannie and Miss Rand all getting paint brushes and going to work tomorrow?”
“Pardon me while I die from laughing,” said Ruth.
“I will if the others do,” said Barbara.
“You’re safe and you know it,” said Ruth.
“Girls?” said Emily.
• • •
“Let’s save the Plaza?” said Isabel Stannard.
“Nope. I’m for blowing it up,” said Jimmy.
“What?”
“Let it go, dear. It wasn’t worth it.”
“What wasn’t worth what?” she said.
“Please, will you go back to whatever
it was you said first? Let’s save the Plaza. All right, let’s save it. Save it for what? Do you want to go some place else?”
“I think we ought to go there some time when we’re feeling more like it.”
“Well, I don’t exactly see what you mean. I feel like it. I felt like it before I saw you, I felt like it up at your apartment, and you did too—”
“No, not exactly. Remember I was dressed for the country. I thought we were going for a drive.”
“Mm. Well, where to, then?” he said.
“Let’s keep walking down Fifth—”
“Till we get to Childs Forty-eighth Street.”
“All right,” she said. “That’s all right with me.”
“I thought it would be.”
“We could go to Twenty-One.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Aren’t they open Sunday? I’m sure I’ve been there Sunday some time.”
“Oh, I know you have, some time. But not at this hour. It’s too early, dear. It’s too early. They don’t open till around five-thirty.”
“Are you sure that isn’t something new?”
“When the same people were at 42 West Forty-ninth they had the same rule about Sunday. Now that they’re at 21 West Fifty-second Street, damned if they haven’t the same rule they had at 42 West Forty-ninth. The same people, the same rule, different places.”
“Another one of those hats,” she said.
“Another one of what hats?”
“Didn’t you see it? I think they’re rather cute, but I don’t know whether to buy one or not. Those hats. Didn’t you notice that girl that went by with the foreign-looking man? She was smoking a cigarette.”
“She gets paid for that.”
“Paid for it?”
“Yes, paid for it. I read that in Winchell’s column—”
“The way you wander about from subject to subject, you’re like a mountain goat jumping from crag to crag—”
“From precipice to precipice, and back—”
“I know that one, don’t say it. Why does she get paid?”
“Why does who get paid, my lamb, my pet?”
“The woman. The one with the hat. The one I just commented on. You said Walter Winchell said she gets money.”
“Oh, yes. She gets paid for smoking a cigarette on Fifth Avenue. Winchell ran that in his column after the Easter parade. They’re trying to popularize street smoking for women—”
“It’ll never go.”
“It’ll never take the place of the old Welsbach burner, if—hello. Hello.” He spoke to two people, girl and man.
“Who are they? See, she has one of those Eugenie hats. She’s rather attractive. Who is she?”
“She’s a model at Bergdorf Goodman’s.”
“She’s French?”
“She’s about as French as you are—”
“That’s more French than you think.”
“Well, than I am. She’s—are you still interested?—a Jewess, and he’s a lawyer, a Broadway divorce lawyer. He’s the kind you see in the tabloids every Monday morning. He tips off the city editors of the News and Mirror and gets a free ad on page three. The story’s always about his client, of course, but he gets his name printed in the third paragraph, with his address. Winthrop S. Saltonstall, of Fourteen-Something Broadway.”
“Huh. Winthrop Saltonstall’s hardly a Jewish name.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Then I suppose she’s getting a divorce—although of course she may just know him anyway.”
“That’s right. You’re catching on.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to a service at St. Patrick’s. Will you take me some time?”
“What do you mean, a service? Do you mean Mass?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“All right, I’ll take you some time. We’ll get married in St. Pat’s.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
He stopped dead. “Listen, Isabel, will you do me a favor? A big favor?”
“Why, I don’t know. What is it?”
“Will you just go on being a Bryn Mawr girl, nice, attractive, worried about what Leuba taught you, polite, well-bred—”
“Yes, yes, and what?”
“And leave the vulgarities of the vernacular to me? When you want to be slangy, when you want to make a wisecrack, stifle the impulse.”
“But I didn’t make any wisecrack.”
“Oh-ho-ho, you’re telling me.”
“But I still don’t see what you mean, Jimmy.”
“They ought to take those fences down and let the people see what they’re doing. I am an old construction-watcher, and I think I will take it up with Ivy Lee.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was just thinking as we passed where they’re building Radio City, if they took the fences away I’d be able to check up on the progress and report back to the Rockefellers. Ivy Lee is their public relations counsel.”
“Ivy Lee. It sounds like a girl’s name.”
“You ought to hear the whole name.”
“What is it?”
“Ivy Ledbetter Lee. He gets $250,000 a year. Here we are, and we probably won’t be able to get a table.”
They got a table. They knew exactly what they wanted, including all the coffee you could drink for the price of one cup. On the dinner you could even have all the food you wanted for the prix fixe.
“What are we up to this afternoon?”
“Oh, whatever you like,” she said.
“I want to see ‘The Public Enemy.’ ”
“Oh, divine. James Cagney.”
“Oh, you like Cagney?”
“Adore him.”
“Why?” he said.
“Oh, he’s so attractive. So tough. Why—I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“He’s—I hope you don’t mind this—but he’s a little like you.”
“Uh. Well, I’ll phone and see what time the main picture goes on.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’ve seen it and you haven’t, and I don’t want you to see the ending first.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
“I’ll remind you of that after you’ve seen the picture. I’ll go downstairs and phone. If King Prajadhipok comes in and tries to pick you up it won’t be a compliment, so have him put out.”
“Oh, on account of his eyes. See, I got it.”
• • •
Will you try that number again, please?” said the old man. He held the telephone in a way that was a protest against the hand-set type of phone, a routine protest against something new. He held it with two hands, the one hand where it should be, the other hand cupped under the part he spoke into. “It’s Stuyvesant, operator. Are you dialing S, T, U? . . . Well, I thought perhaps you were dialing S, T, Y.”
He waited, but after more than five minutes he gave up again.
Joab Ellery Reddington, A.B. (Wesleyan), M.A. (Harvard), Ph.D. (Wesleyan), had come to New York for a special purpose, but the success of his mission depended upon his first completing the telephone call. Without making that connection the trip was futile. Well enough, too well, he knew the address, and the too many taxicabs, the bus systems, the subway and elevated, the street car lines all helped to annihilate space and time for anyone who wanted to present himself in person at the door of the home of Gloria Wandrous. But one of the last things in the world Dr. Reddington wanted to do was to be found in the neighborhood of the home of Gloria Wandrous. The very last thing he wanted to do was to be seen with her, and it went back from there to the other extreme: the thing he wanted most, eventually, was to be so far removed from the company of Gloria Wandrous, from any association with her, that, as he once heard a Mist’ Bones s
ay to a Mist’ Interlocutor, it would cost twenty dollars to send her a postcard. No, he definitely did not want to go near her home. But he did want to get in touch with her, just this one more time. He wanted to talk with her, he wanted to reason with her, make a deal with her. Failing in making a deal with her, he—he was not prepared to say, even to himself.
But no one answered the telephone. What was the matter with her mother, her uncle? It was no surprise to Dr. Reddington to learn that Gloria was not at home. She was seldom home. But he often had called at her home and been given a number to call. Full well he knew that whether her mother and uncle knew it or not, the number they gave was a speakeasy or a bachelor’s apartment; a Harlem beer flat was one number Dr. Reddington had called on occasion (he hated to think of that now, the way those Negroes were not surprised or shocked by the appearance of his kind of man, Phi Beta Kappa key and severely conservative clothes and all, at a beer flat one Saturday noon, calling for a drunken girl who greeted him on terms that too plainly indicated that he was not a stern parent coming to fetch a recalcitrant daughter, but—just what he was).
Dr. Reddington sat on the edge of the bed and (as he expressed it to himself) cursed himself for a blithering idiot for never having written down the numbers he had called. No, that was being unjust to himself. The reason he had not written down those numbers was a good one; he didn’t want to be found dead with those numbers on him. He sat on the bed and his finger searched the soft, faintly damp, white skin of his jowls for a hair that had escaped his razor that morning. There was none. There never was. Only when the barber shaved him. He sat in an attitude that is classically pensive, but he could not think. God, wasn’t there one name that would come to him? One name in the numbers that he had called?
It was useless to try to think of the names of speakeasies. His personal experience with speakeasies was slight, as he never drank; but he knew from going to them with Gloria that a place would be known familiarly as Jack’s or Giuseppe’s—and then when the proprietor gave you a card to the place (which you threw away the moment you were safe outside), it would be called Club Aristocrat or something of the sort. So it was no use trying to think of the names of the places, and too much trouble, practically a life work, to try to find them from memory. No telling what a taxi driver would think if you told him to drive up and down all the streets from Sheridan Square to Fourteenth Street in the hope of recognizing a basement entrance through which you had passed one night long ago. No, the thing to do was to recall a name, a person’s name, the name of someone Gloria knew.
