The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  "Marriage blunts the finer feelings," said Jake.

  "How do you figure that? I am sure you can, but your logical processes fascinate me, even after all these years."

  "The very idea of going to bed night after night with someone you're living in the same house with—it's incestuous!"

  "What would be your idea? Total strangers?" So we were, Mysie thought.

  "Well, someone you meet on a moonlight night. For what is called romantic love, enormous obstacles are helpful."

  "That's simple; if obstacles don't exist, you invent them. But there are so many strangers, how would you pick out one from another? I guess there's no real solution." She brooded.

  Jake is cuckoo, she thought. He must be a genius, and a genius isn't human. I should have known at sight. However, there's no harm done, because if I don't make one mistake I make another .. . Oh, that was Teddy McKee! On the steps . . .

  She felt a genuine horror and a great dismay. Reverse English, she thought; if your whole life should flash before your eyes, you'd go and drown yourself. . . . She had simply forgotten about Teddy McKee. Didn't even remember when she saw him. . . .

  But she had forgotten deliberately, meant to wash it out. . . . The street lights slid by the taxi. They were dodging about under the Sixth Avenue Elevated, with intermittent maddening thunder overhead, trucks and street cars looming monstrous in the path; the taxi nosed through imminent destruction with fantastic insouciance. Had to go on, go through; there would be no point in stopping, either, in that spate of power pouring between artificial cliffs. There was nothing else to do, once started. And how even avoid starting? Mysie strained her eyes to catch a street number, and desisted. It didn't matter. She had looked automatically, on the instinct that you ought to know where you are and your direction and destination. But something happened to your sense of direction in New York. It had no relation to the sky and sun.

  I am a lost soul, she thought. Not damned, just lost. But when did it really happen? When I was a child? ... You find yourself when you find what belongs to you, your own people. Where are mine? Jake isn't exactly; he's a fellow traveler. I don't know about Michael Busch, either—yes, somehow we belonged. But anyhow, Johnny Disston was a stranger, one of those strangers Jake means. Of course Jake is a stranger to everybody on this earth.

  But it seems as if I got turned around, she thought, with Johnny. Until then I felt as if I were going somewhere definite, I didn't know exactly where, but there seemed to be a road and it seemed as if it would come out right, as if it must be my road.

  While the street lights went spinning by, she thought back, with idle clarity. Beginning with Johnny Disston. She was barely eighteen, and working in the mill office, the summer Johnny came to Sequitlam. Could that be only a little over ten years ago? Johnny had come up on business, a projected farm land development, buying and clearing cut-over timber tracts, that kept him all summer but didn't keep him very busy. ... He was at least, she thought in self-justification, uncommonly good looking. Like Baldur the Beautiful; his face was broad across the cheekbones, slightly Scandinavian, and his hair was bright gold; he kept it clipped close to prevent it curling; he didn't exploit his good looks. And he had that exceptional vitality, an easy strength that is a kind of physical genius. When he moved, his coat moulded to the muscles of his shoulders. Both men and women liked him. Mysie had met him several times before the day he came into her office when she was reaching for something on top of the high old-fashioned safe. She was alone. The first thing she knew, she was swung into the air; he took her by the waist with his two hands and lifted her off her feet. Don't mention it, he said... . After that, whenever she saw him she had a sensation of lightness and helplessness.

  There was, actually, nothing to the affair. A brief flirtation. First love, or infatuation, is usually an accident of circumstance; the vague, enormous, dynamic potentialities of youth fix themselves upon any convenient object. Johnny had no idea of hurting her, no intentions of any kind. Men don't go around seducing girls. They don't want the responsibility. He meant nothing in particular even when he told her he was going away, kissed her good-by, and said: You'd better come along; how about it? She didn't say anything. She would have gone with him, though she couldn't say so, though she shook her head. She knew he didn't mean it. She could have made him mean it, if she had been older; but she didn't want to either, if he didn't want to himself. He went away, and for a long time afterward something of herself was gone too. She liked to talk to Michael Busch, didn't care what anyone thought, if they knew, because Michael was solid and centered, something to hold by. He was all there. She got from Michael some idea of people, of the world, and perhaps a valuation of herself. Michael valued her. Yes, she had treated him rather badly, through ignorance and inexperience. . . . The ache of loss persisted, even after she came to New York.

  Everyone went rather mad in those years. She had thought, men don't let themselves go on caring when it is no use, or asking for what doesn't exist. They take whatever they can get, and seem well enough satisfied. I'll try it. ... But Teddy McKee was just nothing. Teddy was puzzled; he never understood why she began or why she broke it off. A woman, she found, cannot live by the senses like a man—if a man can. Because her senses turn against her, are subject to her imagination. She should have realized that if it was no good with Michael Busch, it wouldn't be with a harmless amiable nonentity like Teddy McKee. She decided to wash it out. If there was nothing for her there was nothing, and no need to go through the motions.

  Jake told her in a baffled moment: You'll die an old maid, no matter what...

  Maybe he was right. For she did not believe it was Johnny Disston himself who counted; only he confused her, perhaps because she was too young. But how desperate a chance, if happiness is balanced upon so fine a point of sensibility that all one's life might go for one kiss, for a word or a glance occurring just so or so, at such a moment and no other . . . I've never met my man, she thought.

  No, that must be wrong. One must make a life, out of the lump of raw commonplace, content with a kind of average return. Or fix upon some definite, tangible objective, and convince yourself that it's worth your whole effort. Men did that too, accumulated money and possessions and strove for importance. Mysie thought, at least Gina is successful; a great match is the legitimate traditional ambition for a woman, as much as place or power for a man. And Geraldine is successful, not because she has written a best seller, nor because she had got a husband; Leonard isn't much; but she has made something out of their relation, out of her marriage and her children; they belong to her.

  For herself, Mysie had decided some years ago, she would have to work. Work was all right of itself. It wouldn't get you anywhere; she saw that. Presumably a career was as good for a woman as for a man, if no better; but she knew it would never be enough for her. After all, a man who has only a public life, even if he is a Napoleon, is somehow a poor creature, posturing and pathetic; and furthermore, Mysie had an inexplicable conviction that those apparently solid rewards were growing hollow, being eaten away by some spirit of the times, perhaps through being sought as an end in themselves. Everybody played the stock market for easy money; everything was flashy and tipsy and swift. And yet nobody really had any fun; there was always an aftertaste of bad gin in the pleasure. She did not like the way things were, the stupid drinking and promiscuous pawing and meaningless familiarity, in which all personal values went by the board and people seemed to derive an imbecile gratification from cheapening themselves. Work was better than that. Abstinence and virtue became attractive.

  I suppose I'm a failure, Mysie thought. The simplest, most ordinary fool, crying for the moon. . . . But isn't there something? I wonder what Gina has got out of her success?

  The taxi turned, in the West Seventies, and stopped. Geraldine had moved to an apartment near the park, on account of the children.

  8

  GERALDINE was almost ready; it is impossible to be quite ready in the bosom
of one's family. She needn't hurry, said Mysie inconsistently, and laid off her wrap for a few minutes' grace. "I like this apartment; it suits you, Geraldine." The square old-fashioned heavy-corniced rooms were restful. "You know the Bible says Judas died and went to his own place—such a tactful way of putting it— I guess we all do here and now. Gina was bound to arrive on Fifth Avenue, and I have to live down town; and you can't escape from the West Side."

  Geraldine reflected on the suggestion. She was sometimes surprised to find herself living on a scale which included a cook, a housemaid and a nurse. It happened gradually; after her novel established her reputation, her short stories began to sell, the money came in, and she spent it. "Grandmother lived in this part of town," she said. "Father's mother. We used to come over from Hoboken for Sunday dinner. Roast beef at two o'clock, and a coal-gas smell from those stingy black marble fireplaces. It was a brownstone house, of course. I always went into a coma on the stamped brown velvet sofa after dinner, with some deadly book. The Pansy Books. I liked Hoboken better."

  "You didn't really," said Mysie, "live in Hoboken. Nobody could have. There is no such place."

  "Maybe there isn't now," Geraldine conceded. "But there was. It must have disappeared, though; everything disappeared." There had been a small green-shuttered frame house in a slanting hillside garden; and father had a ship-chandler's shop near the docks; also a half interest in a cheap old hotel. Nothing was said about the hotel, especially before "company," because of the bar. Mother and the children never went near it. When father died there was trouble and delay realizing anything from the shop or the hotel; in effect, they disappeared. It was necessary for Geraldine to go to work when she finished high-school, any kind of work she could find, because she hadn't been brought up with the idea of working. She hadn't, so far as she could recall, been brought up with any idea at all. Mother and the children existed in relation to father. Perhaps they were a belated example of the traditional family, in which boys were expected to get jobs and girls to marry. There were no boys in the family, but Geraldine had two sisters; all three found husbands without effort. Geraldine was unable to account for her persistent impulse to write. She had gone about it unobtrusively, with no special hopes; and she used to wonder what a writer was like, never having seen one.

  "I can't imagine your early life," Mysie said.

  "I can't imagine yours," said Geraldine. "The West. It's a movie. But you talk about logbooms and sawmills and the sea. Besides, where did Gina come in?"

  "Gina," said Mysie, "is from a small town. Her mother had white lace curtains and geraniums. Gina is one of those people that if anyone asks, do you know her? aren't you from the same place? you say, yes, I've met her. But Jake is a New Yorker; and you never even met him."

  "If it was Murray Hill, that was another New York," Geraldine explained.

  Jake said: "Well, my great-aunt Eugenia lived on Murray Hill. But the fact is, father owned a livery stable over on Third Avenue, and we lived on Eighteenth Street. The livery stable became extinct by degrees. Father had inherited it from the distaff side; you see my grandfather Van Buren married beneath him. Of course grandmother also married beneath her, because grandfather was the black sheep of his family as a young man, but he reformed later and became miserly after he inherited a bit of money and the house from his own father. Great-aunt Eugenia never married because it would have been beneath her, she being a Van Buren. I told you not to get me started."

  "Goodness, Judy," Geraldine exclaimed, "haven't you gone to bed yet? Run along, darling." Nine-year-old Judy had been allowed to sit up to see her mother dressed for a party, and had lurked unobserved in a corner. She was a lovely child, with smooth dark hair, and eyebrows drawn in a delicate new moon curve, like Mysie's. Geraldine bundled her off and returned smiling. "She asked me: Why don't you have more people like Jake and Mysie come to see us?"

  "The compliment of a lifetime," Mysie said. "Tell her there aren't any more; we're all the traffic will bear. Geraldine, for the sake of your innocent children you ought to reduce twenty pounds. Prosperity is ruining you. With your pink hair you could be very smart; you're really pretty."

  "No, I couldn't," said Geraldine meekly. "I have no taste." She was getting fat, but her dimpled chin saved her; even the slight suggestion of bursting out of her clothes was endearing. "Do you think this frock will do?" she asked, brushing a sprinkle of powder from her black velvet bodice. "Your dress is stunning, Mysie."

  "I bought it out of the wardrobe of a show that died unborn," Mysie said. "Thirty dollars for a two-hundred-dollar model." She reflected that she got a great many little luxuries and privileges through belonging to that esoteric fraternity of deadheads who frequently refuse as a gift what the rich stand in line to pay for. . . .

  Leonard Wiekes, Geraldine's husband, appeared, slightly worn from the struggle with shirt-studs and collar buttons; he began mixing cocktails dutifully, though nobody wanted any. He was a mild, slender, dark, youngish man. "You should have got a new dress," he said to Geraldine. He was worried too because he couldn't drive them to the Siddalls' in his new car; he ought to have a chauffeur. He began to talk to Jake about the stock market. The enormous chemical corporation for which he worked, at seventy-five dollars a week, had made stock allotments to its employees. This paternal action had set them all speculating. Leonard had run up a shoestring to thirty thousand dollars, which was still spread out on margins. He expected to increase it to a hundred thousand and then invest it safely, for a life income. So he didn't mind Geraldine paying most of the household expenses out of her writing, temporarily. He thought of her writing as an interesting accomplishment, bringing her pin money. He honestly thought of it that way. He admired Geraldine, and never looked at any other woman.

  Jake said: "All I know about the stock market is that if you buy a stock it goes down, and if you sell, it goes up."

  "I thought you were an accountant," Leonard said.

  "I am," said Jake. "That is how I discovered the fact I have just stated."

  "Are you really?" Geraldine enquired. "I thought you were writing plays."

  Mysie explained that Jake really was an accountant, rather mysteriously, since he refused even to keep a checking account for his own private finances, whatever they were, and existed on a cash or nothing basis. In a peculiar abstract way he had a good head for figures, and had been pitchforked into an accounting firm by a friend of the family when he left college. After a few years of routine employment, he decided, with immovable vagueness, not to hold a regular job; but he took on special work when his old firm was rushed. He had, of course, been writing a play for years; that was another matter. "How did we all commence telling the story of our lives?" Mysie broke off. "We're just typical New Yorkers, from Hoboken and points West. Listen, Geraldine, I was going to tell you our nefarious object in crashing Gina's party to-night. You know Arthur has bought a little magazine?" Mysie had heard so through professional sources.

  "Why?" asked Geraldine.

  Mysie waved her hands. "I ask you! If I had two hundred and fifty dollars what the hell would I want with a sawmill? It's an orphan magazine. The man who had been supporting it went crazy; I mean they finally took him to an asylum; and someone wished the magazine on Arthur. Jake desires to become its dramatic critic. They haven't had one, but they might as well have a dramatic critic as what they've got—cock-eyed drawings by Picasso and photographs of steampipes, and shredded modern verse without capital letters. Jake is qualified; he was dramatic critic for three months on the Wall Street Journal."

  "The Wall Street Journal?" Geraldine repeated.

  "Yes," said Mysie, for it was true.

  "I have a theory," Jake propounded, "that if I could see enough plays, I might discover what a play is, and thus be enabled to write one. It is a distinct handicap not to know. My dialogue is said to be too good; but I am informed that a plot is indispensable, I don't know why. It seems to me there should be a place for the pure dialogue play."


  "There is," said Mysie brutally. "Cain's storehouse." Jake gave her a wounded look, and she was sorry, not for him but because she would hear about that for weeks and months, maybe years.

  "What is the name of Arthur's magazine?" Geraldine naturally was most interested in gossip of her own shop.

  "The Candle," said Mysie.

  "Why, I sold them a short story last year," said Geraldine thoughtfully. "And you say the editor was crazy?"

  "He might have had a lucid interval," Mysie became tactfully evasive. "Let's go and get this over with." She hated wirepulling, but as this was not for her own benefit, she lumped it with her publicity work, which she didn't mind because it was a job. "You've got Gina's address— didn't you say she has a house of her own now?" Geraldine had the address.

  Gina's house was on the side street, and joined by a party wall and a connecting door to the Siddall mansion, which occupied a Fifth Avenue corner. Mrs. Siddall had purchased the new house and presented it to Arthur and Gina as a birthday gift on the arrival of a grandson. The baby was now nearly two years old; Geraldine said he was a duck, and resembled Arthur.

  There was a red carpet and awning out for the party, and the requisite number of men-servants, but Arthur, catching sight of Geraldine, came into the hall, with a quick instinctive wish to give a special welcome to Gina's kin. "I'm so glad you could come." With her hand in his, Mysie thought: He means it. He really is sweet. . . . While they laid off their wraps, Mysie reflected that the house was like Gina, furnished with all the expected objects. Consoles and vases and the indicated panel of tapestry to go with the gilt-framed Louis XIV sofas. Gina herself was part of the scheme, the high note, in a gold lamé gown. The Siddall pearls had descended upon her, and the exquisite texture of her skin sustained the comparison. Her eyes wandered, while she kept her fixed smile turned upon the immediate arrivals. Arthur presented Mysie and Geraldine and Leonard and Jake to Mrs. Siddall, with his special air.