I was writing to Iris every day, and she was writing back. Her mother was being difficult, feeling much grander than any of the other women at the hotel. As soon as she was quite recovered and had made some friends, Iris would leave her there and fly home, she said. I found one of her letters waiting for me at home one evening about a week later. I had been with Lottie and Brian to some party. I had drunk quite a bit and was, feeling no pain.
I took Iris’s letter to bed with me. In it, I read:
How are you getting along with your infant prodigy? Does she have a spaniel hairdo like George Eliot? I can imagine you sitting on studio couches in a smoke-filled attic, playing Dr. Sitwell on a phonograph you have to wind up with a handle. Go on with it, darling. It’ll do you good to get a little female companionship that isn’t Lottie. I have a wonderful British colonel with white mustaches down to his navel who shouts, ‘Good show, what?’ whenever I get a backhand over the tennis net…
I’m sure, if it hadn’t been for that letter and if I hadn’t been a little high, I would never have called Nanny Ordway. But I did. I reached over for the phone and dialed, feeling amused and paternal. It was late, but she answered almost at once.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Miss O’Dream. I’m just forging a link.”
“Oh, Mr. Du—Peter, hello.”
“It’s disgracefully late.”
“No, it isn’t. I’ve been sitting here writing.”
“Truman Capote or Somerset Maugham?”
“I don’t know. Both together again, I guess. It’s so nice of you to call. You didn’t have to.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, I’m alone. Sort of. My roommate’s asleep.”
I could picture her at the other end of the phone, curled up on one of the studio couches, her hair flopping over her face, her toe, maybe, kicking Santayana. Suddenly it all seemed so pleasant, so harmless—like Iris’s white-mustached colonel.
“Good show, what?” I said.
“What, Peter? What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just called.”
“I’m glad.”
I thought of the dreary little room, the lingering kitchen smells from supper. Suddenly my cosmic feeling of pity, a little maudlin from liquor, was back.
“How about dinner tomorrow? You showed me the Village. I’ll show you how the stinking rich live. Only fair, isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer for a while. I felt absurdly scared she would have a date.
At last she said, “Peter, do you really mean it?”
“Of course I mean it.”
“I don’t think you do. If you do, call me again in the morning.”
“Nanny—”
“Good night, Peter. Pleasant dreams.”
She hung up on me. I went to sleep. She was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning. I felt embarrassed. I’d been a bit high when I called her and she’d suspected it. She wasn’t going to believe in my dinner invitation unless I called again. In the matter-of-fact light of morning, my ignoble, patronizing impulse of the night before had vanished. I didn’t want to have dinner with her at all. But now if I didn’t call back, she would know I’d been tight and irresponsible. She’d be hurt. I lay in bed looking at the phone as if it were a dentist. Finally I called her and confirmed the date. She was to come to my place at seven.
I went upstairs then to have breakfast with Lottie and Brian. Breakfast had become a ritual. The daily woman served all three of us in the bedroom. I sat on the side of the bed while Lottie and Brian stayed put.
Lottie gave me one of her gimlet looks.
“Peter, darling, you didn’t drink too much last night, did you?”
“No, why?”
“You look funny.” She turned to her sleepy, tousled husband. “Doesn’t Peter look funny, Brian?”
I had some business to settle with the Guild that afternoon. It was six-fifteen before I realized I would be later than I thought. I called Nanny but there was no answer. I felt unreasonably anxious about it. It was almost seven-twenty when I got back to the apartment. Nanny Ordway was sitting cross-legged on the floor outside my front door. She had the old tweed coat over her arm but she was wearing an evening dress—a pale-blue strapless affair.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “I called to let you know I’d be late but you’d already left.”
She got up, smiling. “I imagined it was something like that.” She twisted around in front of me. “Will this do? I don’t own an evening dress. I borrowed it from my roommate. People do wear evening dresses, don’t they, when they go to grand places, or is it only in the movies?” The dress was all covered in little bows, the sort of thing a stuffy Boston debutante would have “come out” in several years ago at the Ritz. But she had a pretty neck and lovely shoulders. And somehow the wrongness of the dress touched me.
“You look fine,” I said.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, really.”
I was getting out my key when Brian came running down the stairs from the floor above. When he saw us, he stopped dead.
“Hello, Peter.” He glanced at Nanny. “Hello.”
He looked awkward as if he’d caught me out in something I wouldn’t want to be caught out in. “Lottie’s gone off to the theater. I just thought we might have a drink. That is, if you weren’t doing anything, I thought—but never mind.”
He started tactfully back up the stairs. I had a foolish impulse to call after him and ask him not to tell Lottie about Nanny. But I suppressed it. He’d tell Lottie anyway. He told her everything. If I asked him not to, it would just have been embarrassing for him and more compromising for me.
I let Nanny into the apartment. I was rather jittery and, forgetting she didn’t drink, offered her a Martini. She said no thank you, she’d take a lemonade. I fixed the lemonade, put the phonograph on for her, and excused myself to shower and change.
When I came back into the living-room, she was sitting by the window, gazing out over the Last River. She didn’t hear me. I went up to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She turned quickly. Her eyes were shining.
“It’s lovely—the room, the window. And the phonograph—it’s wonderful. What nonsense I talked about being poor. If I lived here, I’d sit here by the window all day and I’d write. I’d write—”
“Like Truman Capote and Somerset Maugham.”
“Oh, no. Not here. Here I could be myself. It’s only that sometimes down in the Village, when you start to write, you feel you have to make everything more glamorous, somehow—quite different—to counterbalance things. It wouldn’t be like that. Not here.”
I made myself a Martini. She walked around the room, examining everything, her long blue skirt rustling clumsily.
“That was Charlotte Marin’s husband, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“Did he mind?”
“Mind?”
“About me. She—Charlotte Marin—minded at the party.”
“There’s nothing to mind about, anyway.”
“Of course there isn’t. It’s just that people—Are we really going somewhere expensive and glittering for dinner?”
“Anywhere you like.”
She came toward me, holding out her hand solemnly. “Then I think I will have a cocktail, please.”
We went to Voisin, which I don’t normally do and can’t normally afford. But now the evening had happened, I figured I might as well do it in style. She didn’t seem to like it much although she was careful to praise everything. I think she had started to worry about her dress. I made her drink some wine and it did wonders. She got a little high, only a little, enough to stop feeling awed. She was really very intelligent. She missed nothing. It was extraordinary what good company she was. We lingered over dinner and then we went to the Ruban Bleu. We left quite early—about one-thirty and we were near home. It seemed quite natural to ask her home for a nightcap. She said yes, she’d come if we could play Welitch’s Salomé. I had
it, she knew. She’d seen it on the shelf. Her roommate’s phonograph was being repaired and she’d missed it so much.
We played the Welitch Salomé. I didn’t want to give it much volume because it was late. But the jangled, disturbing music filled the apartment. She listened, rapt, the way she had done in her own apartment.
When it was over, she said, “That’s the way I would like to write. Just like that. That sort of mood.” She paused and then quoted softly, “‘Das Geheimnis der Liebe ist groesser als das Geheimnis des Todes.’ It’s corny, maybe, but if you could do it right in a story!”
“Translate.”
“The secret of love,” she said, “is greater than the secret of death.”
She looked so young and solemn that I grinned. “Treated à la Somerset Capote.”
“Don’t!” Her voice was suddenly fierce. “Don’t kid me all the time. Don’t!”
She got up and went to the window. She sat there on the window seat with her back to me, looking out across the East River. I crossed to her and for the second time put my hand on her shoulder. It was stiff, unwelcoming. “I’m sorry.”
“You laugh at me all the time. It isn’t fair.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“It isn’t a joke, my writing. Some day I’ll be good.”
“I know you will.”
She turned to me and put out her hand impulsively. “Oh, Peter, I’m such a pig. And you’re so—so good to me. And for me,” she added slowly. “It was only seeing your beautiful place, and the thought of it just being there all day, with nobody in it, nobody using it. If only”—and now the words came out in a rush—“if only I could use it for a few hours. I couldn’t disturb anybody. I could let myself in and be gone long before you got home.”
“Let yourself in?” I said slowly, and the reluctance in my voice took all the light out of her face. She sat down, drooping.
I thought of her as she had been earlier that evening, sitting right there where she was sitting now, looking up at me enraptured, by the beauty of the view, the apartment, the phonograph—everything. I felt a heel that I should have the place and hardly ever use it except to sleep, while she, with her determination to be a Great Writer, had to work jammed in a single room with another girl. I felt a heel for more reasons than that. I’d only invited her out because I’d got myself stuck with her. Now, I’d poked fun at her and she was young enough to be sensitive. I wanted to make amends. At least that’s how I thought I was feeling.
I said, “Why don’t you bring your work up here in the mornings? You’re right, it wouldn’t interfere with me. I’m always out by ten.”
She swung around. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Why not?” I went to the desk and brought out a duplicate key. “Here. Let yourself in. I’ll explain to the maid. She gets down every morning from Lottie’s around ten-thirty or eleven.”
She looked at the key as if it were a pigeon-blood ruby. Her hand went out to it, went back, and then out again, taking it from me. Tears started to form in her eyes.
“I didn’t think—I never really dreamed—”
“Forget it. Play the phonograph. Do anything you like to get in the mood.”
She got up, still clutching the key. “I’ll never be able—” The words choked up into a sob. She ran out of the apartment and closed the door behind her. I didn’t follow to say good night.
I knew she didn’t want me to see her crying.
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER SHE HAD LEFT, I felt relaxed and contented as if I had been one hell of a generous guy. Soon I sat down at the desk and started my nightly letter to Iris. I had planned to tell her all about Nanny and the key but somehow it didn’t come out right in words. Finally I made no mention of it at all.
Next morning at breakfast Lottie was silent and portentous. I suspected that Brian had told her about meeting Nanny and me outside the front door, and the fact that she didn’t accuse me of moral depravity right there and then meant that she was taking it very heavily and was Waiting for the Right Moment. It was obvious that I would have to have things out with her sooner or later but I, too, decided to wait for the right moment. I slipped out into the kitchen and told Lucia, the daily woman, about Nanny. Lucia was fond of me and had Lottie’s number. I gave her ten dollars, saying it would cover any extra work Nanny might cause and asked her not to mention it all to Lottie. She understood right away and grinned. I left for the office at quarter of ten. When I got back that evening, everything was neat as a nun but, propped up against the pile of Iris’s letters from Jamaica on the desk by the window I found a little kid’s drawing in ink. This time it was of a girl with hair tumbling over her face, sitting at a desk typing. Under it was typed:
Truman Capote thanks you;
Somerset Maugham thanks you;
I thank you.
The next day Miss Mills brought me a script that had come through the mail from an English professor in Ann Arbor. The moment I’d read it, I knew it was what I had been looking for. Let Live was its title. It was amusing and professional and inexpensive to produce with only one set and a cast of six. From then on, the office was geared up for an immediate production. I started working like a dog and coming home late. I never saw Nanny for a week or ten days, but every evening on my return there’d be a little picture. Once it was a girl listening to a phonograph with notes coming out of it; once it was a girl with two heads, one marked T. C., the other S. M.; once it was a girl bowed in despair (Genius flagged today.); once it was just a great jagged flame with burning, pure white typed under it.
They always gave me a kick. They kept Nanny in my mind, but she was never in the apartment when I got home.
Lottie, inevitably, was wildly curious and enthusiastic about Let Live and had a field day with casting suggestions, ideas for sets, and general interferences. In fact, it was all I could do to keep her from producing it, directing it, sticking together the costumes for it, and acting all the parts herself. She seemed to have forgotten about Nanny, and I forgot that I had decided to let her know what an innocent relationship it was.
One evening around six-thirty as I came home from the office, I ran into Lottie and Brian in the apartment-house foyer. Without thinking, I invited them in for a drink. As I let them in the front door, I suddenly thought: Nanny! But it was all right. She had left.
There was a rather bad moment, however, when Lottie, always on the prowl, stopped at the desk and picked something up.
“Whatever is this meant to be?”
I took her a highball. She was studying Nanny’s daily drawing. This time it was of a girl dancing with wild abandon. Under it was typed: Triumphant Dance of Female Genius.
I said, probably with a great deal too much nonchalance, “Oh, one of the stenographers from the office was here this afternoon doing the household checks. I guess she got carried away.”
The gimlet gaze bored into me as Lottie dropped the drawing back on the desk.
“Well!” she said.
But she left it at that.
Iris wrote, excited and pleased that I had found a play. Her mother had completely convalesced and met a widow from California of whom she almost approved. With any luck, she said, she could leave her soon. I was enjoying myself. I always do in the first stages of a production.
And then, about a week later, I went home early from the office—around six. There was an opening, and I had two tickets. I had been planning to take Alec Ryder, but he had flown to Chicago to check up on the touring company of one of his plays. When I let myself into the apartment, I heard the phonograph. I went into the living-room and there was Nanny sitting at the desk by the window, tapping away on a beat-up old typewriter that she must have brought with her.
When she saw me, she got up almost guiltily.
“Mercy, I lost all track of time. I’m sorry. I—”
I was delighted to see her. “Hi,” I said, “how about coming to the theater tonight? I have an extra seat.”
Sh
e was worried about her clothes. She was wearing an old dirndl and a blouse with a scarlet chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. It was all wrong for an opening. That was the first time I realized she was about the same size as Iris. I went into the bedroom and picked out one of my wife’s evening dresses. It was one she’d never liked very much, but I thought it would look good on Nanny. I gave it to her. She stayed in the bedroom quite a long time; then she called me in.
She was standing under the rather too splendid chandelier which Iris and I had fallen for one year in Italy and lugged home. In its sparkling illumination, Nanny was quite transformed. She’d fixed her face. It was the first time I’d seen her with make-up. The difference was remarkable. She still wasn’t pretty, but she was intriguing-looking with that kind of suppressed sensuality which a lot of men go mad for. It wasn’t the type of allure for me. But I was very aware of it, which was more than Nanny seemed to be. She acted as if there were no change in her appearance at all.
“It’s been wonderful working here. I can’t tell you.”
“I’m glad.”
“I’ve started my new story. From Salomé. ‘The Secret of Love.’”
“Is it greater than the secret of death?”
“That’s what it’s meant to be about. I haven’t been a nuisance, have I?”
“On the contrary, you’ve been a comfort.”
“That’s silly.”
“No. Those drawings—they’re a comfort to a busy, wifeless guy.”
“Oh, I just feel like doing them. That’s all. Did Charlotte Marin and her husband mind—I mean, about last time?”
“For heaven’s sake, still harping on that! Of course not.”
That night, for the first time, Bill, the night elevator man, looked at Nanny with interest and even winked at me.
We went to Sardi’s for dinner because I figured her stomach wasn’t used to the theater habit of eating after the show. Then we went to the play. It wasn’t much—one of those comedies about how a wise wife clings on to her intemperate husband against high odds. There was a party afterward for the company but I didn’t feel like going. Since Nanny had to change into her own clothes, we went back to the apartment.
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