BUtterfield 8

by John O'Hara

  “Listen, Hoover’s all right.”

  “Will you look at that old fool. Can’t he see she’s making a fool out of him? I’m glad my father died before he was old enough—”

  “I’m sorry, Madame, the chef says—”

  “Look at him. Does he get any thrill out of that?”

  “It’s exactly like the old place. Exactly. The only difference is it’s on the uptown side now instead of the downtown side. It used to be on the downtown side but now it’s on the uptown. I think they were terribly smart to preserve the same atmosphere. I said to—”

  “Did you see that thing they had in The New Yorker I think it was the week before last?”

  Listening, Gloria and Liggett found themselves holding hands. On her part a tenderness had come over her; at first because she felt responsible for Liggett, and then because she liked him; he was better than these other people. “When the others come we can leave, if you want to,” she said.

  “Good. Perfect,” said Liggett. “Will it be all right with—”

  “She won’t mind. She just hates to be alone. Two people more or less won’t make any difference.”

  “Good. We’ll go some place and dance. I haven’t done any volunteer dancing for a long time. That’s a compliment, I hope you appreciate it. I haven’t done any volunteer dancing since I don’t know when. Of course I dance the Turkey Trot. You do the Turkey Trot, of course?”

  “Mm-hmm. And the Bunny Hug. And the Maxixe. And the Can-Can. By the way, what was the Can-Can? Was it worth all the excitement they made about it or that I suppose they made about it?”

  “Listen, beautiful Miss Wandrous, I am not old enough to remember the Can-Can. The Can-Can was popular around the turn of the century, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all popular at the turn of the century.”

  “I can hardly believe that. At least I can hardly believe my ears now, hearing you admit that you weren’t popular any time in your life.”

  “There have been lots of times when I wasn’t popular, and I’m beginning to think this is one of those times.”

  They went to a lot of speakeasies, especially to the then new kind, as it was the beginning of the elaborate era. From serving furtive drinks of bad liquor disguised as demi-tasse the speakeasy had progressed to whole town houses, with uniformed pages and cigarette girls, a string orchestra and a four- or five-piece Negro band for dancing, free hors d’oeuvres, four and five bartenders, silver-plated keys and other souvenir-admittance tokens to regular patrons, expensive entertainment, Cordon Bleu chefs, engraved announcements in pretty good taste, intricate accounting systems and business machinery—all a very good, and because of the competition, necessary front for the picturesque and deadly business of supplying liquor at huge financial profit—powerful radio stations, powerful speedboats and other craft not unlike the British “Q” ships, powerful weapons against highjackers, powerful connections in the right places. And often very good liquor and enough good wine to set in front of the people who knew good wine and still cared about it.

  Having got thoroughly drunk, picking up couples and dropping them, joining parties and deserting them, Gloria and Liggett went to his apartment as the last place to go. He had been wondering all night how he was going to suggest a hotel. He thought it over and thought it over, and kept putting it off. At the last place they went to, which they closed up, they took a taxi, Liggett gave his home address, and it was as easy as that. When Gloria heard the address she guessed it was no love nest she was going to, and when she saw the apartment she knew it wasn’t.

  FIVE

  On Monday afternoon an unidentified man jumped in front of a New Lots express in the Fourteenth Street subway station. Mr. Hoover was on time for the usual meeting of his Cabinet. Robert McDermott, a student at Fordham University, was complimented for his talk on the Blessed Virgin at the morning exercises in her honor. A woman named Plotkin, living in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, decided to leave her husband for good and all. William K. Fenstermacher, the East 149th Street repair man, went all the way to Tremont Avenue to fix a radio for a Mrs. Jones, but there was no Jones at the address given, so he had to go all the way back to the shop, wasting over an hour and a half. Babe Ruth hit a home run into the bleachers near the right field foul line. Grayce Johnson tried to get a job in the chorus of The Band Wagon, a new revue, but was told the show was already in rehearsal. Patrolman John J. Barry, Shield No. 17858, was still on sick call as a result of being kicked in the groin by a young woman Communist in the Union Square demonstration of the preceding Friday. Jerry, a drunk, did not wake up once during the entire afternoon, which he spent in a chair at a West 49th Street speakeasy. Identical twins were delivered to a Mrs. Lachase at the Lying-In Hospital. A Studebaker sedan bumped the spare tire of a Ford coupe at Broadway and Canal Street, and the man driving the Ford punched the Studebaker driver in the mouth. Both men were arrested. Joseph H. Dilwyn, forty-two years old, had all his teeth out by the same dentist he had gone to for twelve years. A woman who shall be nameless took the money her husband had given her to pay the electric light bill and bought one of the new Eugenie hats with it. Harry W. Blossom, visiting New York for the first time since the War, fell asleep in the Strand Theatre and missed half the picture. At 3:16 p.m. Mr. Francis F. Tearney, conductor on a Jackson Heights No. 15 Fifth Avenue bus, tipped his cap at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. James J. Walker, mayor of the City of New York, had a late lunch at the Hardware Club. A girl using an old curling iron caused a short circuit in the Pan-Hellenic Club. An unidentified man jumped in front of a Bronx Park express in the Mott Avenue subway station. After trying for three days Miss Helen Tate, a typist employed by the New York Life, was able to recall the name of a young man she had met two summers before at a party in Red Bank, N. J. Mr. and Mrs. Harvey L. Fox celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a luncheon in the Hotel Bossert, Brooklyn. Al Astor, an actor at liberty, woke up thinking it was Tuesday. John Lee, a colored boy, pulled the wings out of a fly in Public School 108. The Caswell Realty Company sold a row of taxpayers in Lexington Avenue to Jack W. Levine for a sum in the neighborhood of $125,000. Gloria Wandrous, after taking a warm bath at home, went to sleep while worrying over what she should do about Mrs. Liggett’s mink coat. Eddie Brunner spent the afternoon at Norma Day’s apartment, playing the phonograph, especially “The Wind in the Willows,” the Rudy Vallée record.

  Monday afternoon Emily Liggett and her daughters came home by train. They got out of their taxi, carrying their coats and leaving the few bags for the doorman to see to. Emily went straight to her room and of all the things that happened to all the people in New York that day, none was more shocking to any individual than Emily’s discovery that her mink coat was not in her closet.

  It had been such a good week-end; quiet and peaceful. Saturday was warm, Sunday morning was warm and in the afternoon it turned cool and made Emily think of the coat. It was time, really, to put it away, and she made a note of it as the first thing to do Tuesday morning. This year she would insure it for $3,000, half what it cost in 1928. She would insure it and hope something would happen to it so that she could get the money out of it. There were things she could do with $3,000, and she was getting tired of having a mink coat. She never had been happy with the actual possession of it. Something about the New England conscience; when you added up the maximum number of times you wore the coat in a season, multiplied that by three for three seasons, and divided that into $6,000 you got the cost of the coat each time you had worn it. And it was too much. It was a fair calculation, because she knew she could not get $3,000 for the coat now in any other way than insurance. As for getting $6,000 on it—ridiculous. Well, it had been a good week-end.

  She opened the closet door, and the closet might as well have been empty. The coat was not there. She called the cook and the maid and questioned them, but her questioning and her own and their search did not result in finding the coat. Her questio
ning did not bring about any of the disclosures which the maid was pondering—the inference the maid had taken from certain little things she had noticed about Mr. Liggett’s bedroom and bath.

  Emily telephoned Liggett, but he was not in the office and his secretary did not expect him back. Emily was going to call his two clubs and a speakeasy or two, because she thought the theft of the coat ought to be reported immediately; but she decided to wait and talk to Weston before notifying the police. When Liggett came home she told him about the coat. He was frightened; he was twice frightened, because he did not know it was gone, but when he learned it had disappeared he knew right away who had it. He told Emily it was best not to notify the police; that losses like that were immediately reported to the insurance company and that it was a bad thing to have to report to the insurance company. “All the insurance companies work together,” he said, “and they keep a sort of exchange blacklist. If your car is stolen all the other companies know about it in a week, and it affects your rating with the companies. It makes you a bad risk to lose a thing like that, and when you’re a bad risk it’s sometimes impossible to get insurance, and the least you get out of it is you have to pay a much higher preminum, not only on, for instance, the coat, if they get it back, but also anything else you decide to insure.” Liggett did not believe all this—in fact knew some of it to be inaccurate; but it covered up his confusion. That that girl, that swell kid, could be the same girl he had slept with last night, for whom he was feeling something he never had felt before, and all the time she was a common ordinary little thief—it was beyond him. It was more than beyond him. The more he thought of it the angrier he got, until he wanted to take her by the throat. He told Emily he would have a private detective agency look for the coat before reporting to the insurance company or the police. This was not the way Emily would have done it, and she said so. Why go to the expense of a private detective agency when the insurance company assumed that and would be glad to assume it rather than risk the loss of $3,000 for the coat? No, no, he insisted. Hadn’t she been listening to him? Didn’t she pay any attention? Hadn’t he just finished telling her that the insurance company kept blacklists, and the chances were the disappearance of the coat would have some simple explanation. The detective agency wouldn’t charge much—ten dollars, probably. And he would save that much in premiums by not reporting the loss to the insurance company. “Now please let me handle this,” he told Emily. Well, it seemed pretty irregular to her, and she didn’t like it. What if the private detectives didn’t find the coat? Wouldn’t the insurance company be very annoyed when he did finally report the theft of the coat? Wouldn’t they ask why he hadn’t immediately reported to the police? Wouldn’t it be better in the long run to do the regular thing? She thought it was always best to do the regular thing, the conventional thing. When someone dies, you get an undertaker; when something is stolen, you tell the police. Liggett almost said: “Who are you to talk about the conventional thing? You slept with me before you married me.” He was ashamed of that, of thinking it; but he guessed he always had thought it. It was just beginning to dawn on him that he never had loved Emily. He was so flattered by what she felt for him before they were married that he had been blinded to his true feeling about her. His true feeling was passion, and that had gone, and since then there had been nothing but the habit of marriage—he really loved Gloria.

  And then he remembered that he did not love Gloria. He could not love a common thief. She was a common thief, too. You could see that in her face. There was something in her face, some unconventional thing along with the rest of her beauty, her mouth and eyes and nose—somewhere around the eyes, perhaps, or was it the mouth?—she did not have the conventional look. Emily, yes. Emily had it. He could look at Emily dispassionately, impersonally, as though he did not know her—objectively? wasn’t it called? He could look at her and see how much she looked like dozens of girls who had been born and brought up as she had been. You saw them at the theater, at the best cabarets and speakeasies, at the good clubs on Long Island—and then you saw the same girls, the same women, dressed the same, differing only in the accent of their speech, at clubs in other cities, at horse shows and football games and dances, at Junior League conventions. Emily, he decided after eighteen years of marriage, was a type. And he knew why she was a type, or he knew the thing that made the difference in the look of a girl like Emily and the look of a girl like Gloria. Gloria led a certain kind of life, a sordid life; drinking and sleeping with men and God knows what all, and she had seen more of “life” than Emily ever possibly would see. Whereas Emily had been brought up a certain way, always accustomed to money and the good ways of spending it. In other words, all her life Emily had been looking at nice things, nice houses, cars, pictures, grounds, clothes, people. Things that were easy to look at, and people that were easy to look at; with healthy complexions and good teeth, people who had had pasteurized milk to drink and proper food all their lives from the time they were infants; people who lived in houses that were kept clean, and painted when paint was needed, who took care of their cars and their furniture and their bodies, and by so doing their minds were taken care of; and they got the look that Emily and girls—women—like her had. Whereas Gloria—well, take for instance the people she was with the night he saw her two nights ago, the first night he went out with her. The man that liked to eat, for instance. Where did he come from? He might have come from the Ghetto. Liggett happened to know that there were places in the slums where eighty families would use the same outside toilet. A little thing, but imagine what it must look like! Imagine having spent your formative years living like, well, somewhat the way you lived in the Army. Imagine what effect that would have on your mind. And of course a thing like that didn’t only affect your mind; it showed in your face, absolutely. Not that it was so obvious in Gloria’s case. She had good teeth and a good complexion and a healthy body, but there was something wrong somewhere. She had not gone to the very best schools, for instance. A little thing perhaps, but important. Her family—he didn’t know anything about them; just that she lived with her mother and her mother’s brother. Maybe she was a bastard. That was possible. She could be a bastard. That can happen in this country. Maybe her mother never was married. Sure, that could happen in this country. He never heard of it except among poor people, and Gloria’s family were not poor. But why couldn’t it happen in this country? The first time he and Emily ever stayed together they took a chance on having children, and in those days people didn’t know as much about not getting caught as they do today. Gloria was even older than Ruth, so maybe her mother had done just what Emily had done, with no luck. Maybe Gloria’s father was killed in a railroad accident or something, intending to marry Gloria’s mother, but on the night he first stayed with her, maybe on his way home he was killed by an automobile or a hold-up man or something. It could happen. There was a fellow at New Haven that was very mysterious about his family. His mother was on the stage, and nothing was ever said about his father. Liggett wished now that he had known the fellow better. Now he couldn’t remember the fellow’s name, but some of the fellows in Liggett’s crowd had wondered about this What’s-His-Name. He drew for the Record. An artist. Well, bastards were always talented people. Some of the most famous people in history were bastards. Not bastards in any derogatory sense of the word, but love children. (How awful to be a love child. It’d be better to be a bastard. “If I were a bastard I’d rather be called a bastard than a love child.”) Now Gloria, she drew or painted. She was interested in art. And she certainly knew a lot of funny people. She knew that bunch of kids from New Haven, young Billy and those kids. But anybody could meet them, and anybody could meet Gloria. God damn it! That was the worst of it. Anybody could meet Gloria. He thought that all through dinner, looking at his wife, his two daughters, seeing in their faces the thing he had been thinking about a proper upbringing and looking at nice things and what it does to your face. He saw them, and he thought of Gloria, and th
at anybody could meet Gloria, and Anybody, somebody she picked up in a speakeasy somewhere, probably was with her now, this minute.

  “I don’t think I’ll wait for dessert,” he said.

  “Strawberries? You won’t wait for strawberries?” said Emily.

  “Oh, good. Strawberries,” said Ruth. “Daddy, you’ll surely wait for strawberries. If you go I’ll have to eat yours and I’ll get strawberry rash.”

  “You won’t have to,” said Emily.

  “Gotta go. I just thought of a fellow. About the coat.”

  “Can’t you phone him? A detective agency, surely they’d have a phone.”

  “No. Not this fellow. He isn’t a private detective. He’s a regular city detective, and if I phoned him he’d have to make a report on it. If I went through the regular channels. I’ll get in touch with him through a friend of mine, Casey, down at Tammany Hall.”

  “Well, where? Can’t you phone this Casey and make an appointment?”

  “Emily, must I explain everything in detail? I just thought of something and I want to do it now. I don’t want any strawberries, or if they’re that good you can put them in the icebox till I get back.”

  “Well, all right. I hope this doesn’t mean one of your all-night binges with your Tammany Hall friends.”

  If the girls had not been there he would have given a more blistering answer than: “I should have been a doctor.”

  A taxi took him to a drug store in the Grand Central zone and he tried to get Gloria on the telephone. He tried her home, several speakeasies, and—he did not quite know why—had her paged at two of the Times Square hotels. A woman he guessed was her mother said Gloria was out for dinner and the evening. It sounded so respectable, the voice and the words, that he wanted to laugh in the mouthpiece. He could not tell (and he tried) whether he was now angry with Gloria for stealing Emily’s coat, or because he had her, in his mind, grappling with some young snot-nose from Princeton. He came out of the telephone booth sweating and uncomfortable, with his hat on the back of his head. He had a Coca-Cola standing up at the fountain, and when he set the glass down on the fountain it made the hollow cloup sound those glasses make, but this glass must have been imperfect because it cracked and broke and he cut his finger, ever so slightly, but enough to cause an industrial crisis in the store. The pharmacist and the soda jerker were so solicitous and made him so angry with it that he was rude to them, and away went his resolution not to drink. He had been feeling so respectable and superior up to then, but the cut on his finger, which was minutely painful but enormously annoying, and the store people with their attentions got him upset. “Jesus Christ, why don’t you send for a God damn ambulance,” he said, and went out in search of a drink.