The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  He was so driven for the next week that he worked automatically, and the successive downward plunges of stock-market prices instantly became part of the routine.

  He was checking up brokerage credits—It was fantastic, for at a given time the banks were all insolvent, but the momentum kept them going. It was all imaginary; so they continued on the assumption that the card castle was still standing at whatever height was requisite. Till they could build it up again. They did believe they could. . . . Bid for U. S. Steel at 225. Wasn't that how it was done in the first place? If it would work once, why not again? Cheers for the hero who made the bid; anyhow it was a good offer! . . . Jake muttered sardonically: "That bird isn't taking any chances; he can get all he wants at the price." The auditor who was checking with him looked at Jake blankly.

  At the end of the week Jake wasn't very tired, though it had been a long week of long days. He worked easily under pressure; and he had put in fifteen hours the day Aunt Hallie died... .

  He had breakfasted with the aunts that morning. Aunt Hallie passed the newspaper to Aunt Susan, and expressed admiration of the Bankers Consortium for saving the situation. Jake didn't say anything. Aunt Susan read aloud that conditions were basically sound and that the Rockefellers were buying good common stocks. "Your grandfather," Aunt Hallie remarked to Jake, "said that bonds were the only proper investment for ladies. For security."

  Aunt Hallie nibbled a piece of toast carefully; she had false teeth. Her thin hair was an off-color white, the same shade as her wrinkled skin. She wore half a dozen old-fashioned rings on her bony hands; for years she had been unable to remove the rings because of her swollen knuckles. Aunt Susan was stouter than Aunt Hallie, with a double chin and swollen ankles.

  "May I be excused?" Jake said, as he had been taught.

  In the subway, many people appeared rather sleepy, but everyone read newspapers, wedged in as they were. Nothing unusual. After ten o'clock, presumably the floor of the Exchange was bedlam, but Jake had no occasion to go there. He was working in the strained quiet of private offices. At noon, going down in the elevator, a man leaned against the side of the cage; when it stopped at the bottom he walked out groggily, sat down on the steps of the vast smooth indifferent building, and cried, with his head in his hands. He was quite conventional in appearance, well-tailored, with a neat clipped mustache. People walked by, glancing sideways at him in an embarrassed manner.

  Jake sent out for sandwiches at dinnertime, and remained till one o'clock in the morning. He took a cab home. Wall Street was empty and silent, but half the office windows were alight, a checkered pattern of small golden squares, up and up. It was a fine night.

  As he got out of the cab at Eighteenth Street he thought that the house also had something strange about it; he did not realize why until he was unlocking the door. A thin line of light glimmered under the parlor blinds and from the second floor windows. As he closed the door softly, Aunt Susan appeared at the head of the stairs, in a brown flannel dressing gown. "Oh," she said, "we tried to telephone you, but nobody knew the number."

  Jake said: "Is anything wrong?"

  "Your Aunt Hallie—" Aunt Susan made muffled sounds into a handkerchief. "She passed away this morning."

  It was an accident, with a gruesome touch of the absurd. Aunt Hallie had gone to the corner grocery, to do the day's marketing. A small boy on a "scooter" ran into her; she stumbled over the curb and fell, striking her head against a lamp post. She got to her feet, got home, and while explaining what had happened, she bent over to brush the dust from her skirt. That was all. She fell again. The doctor arrived too late.

  The rest of the night was rather grim. Jake sat up with Aunt Susan. And he had to see Aunt Hallie. She had the grey serenity of the dead. She was secure now.

  It was fairly awful till after the funeral. Jake had to go to that. More aunts appeared for the occasion, and a few cousins, all with that left-over air characteristic of a family in decline. Those of the Van Buren connection whose fortunes had risen instead of sinking were absent. The final formality was the reading of Aunt Hallie's will. Jake was completely surprised to learn that he was the sole heir.

  Aunt Susan was severely annoyed by a misprint in Aunt Hallie's ten-line obituary notice. "Widow of the late Daniel Blakeny"—it was spelled Blackney. Aunt Susan clipped the item to keep. "Your uncle Daniel," she said, "was a brilliant young lawyer. It was thought he would go far in his profession." A faded photograph of the long-deceased Daniel, in a black frame, hung in the parlor. He had a lean hatchet face and sideburns. Aunt Susan said: "It was I who met him first, at Narragansett. He asked permission to call on me. He died of the Spanish influenza, in 1889; he had a weak chest, and did not take sufficient care of himself."

  For some obscure reason Jake did not really hear what she said until the next day; then the words came back to him irrelevantly. And he thought: Aunt Hallie stole Aunt Susan's beau! And Aunt Susan never forgave her, all these years; she probably believes he wouldn't have died if he had married her instead of Aunt Hallie. She'd have taken care of him.

  Yet he understood that Aunt Susan mourned for Aunt Hallie. Like the majority of people, who remain within the restricted circle to which chance allots them, lacking initiative or desire to go beyond it, Aunt Susan had whatever emotions are prescribed for a given situation. She mourned for a sister, just as she had mourned, as long as the newspapers indicated, for President Harding, or as she admired the Bankers Consortium, or believed that prohibition was a noble experiment, or that Mr. Coolidge was a silent man even while she was reading his speeches.

  Jake thought, it's incredible that Uncle Daniel and Aunt Hallie were once alive. They were young and perhaps Aunt Hallie was pretty. Aunt Susan too. And innumerable millions of people, famous or unknown; some were very much alive and the rest at least had blood and breath they might have put to use. You won't live forever either. More than half your life is gone ...

  A few of the female relatives hovered about for the next two or three days, and Jake went back to work the day after the funeral. He had to escape from the house. In the evening he telephoned to Aunt Susan that he was detained downtown, and went to the theater. On Sunday he telephoned to Mysie to ask her to dine with him. He hadn't seen Mysie for weeks.

  Mysie said: "You'd better have dinner here, since we'll be going on to that party." Jake had forgotten there was a party. Mysie had no means of knowing about Aunt Hallie. So he said thanks, he would. He smuggled his dinner clothes out and dressed at a hotel. Maybe a party would do him good.

  15

  THE party was large and expensive. Neither Mysie nor Jake knew their host very well; they had got on his invitation list in some casual manner and came when asked. Jake wasn't quite sure how he made his money, but thought it was either a hotel or a taxicab company. People made huge incomes in New York in so many ways. It didn't matter. Apparently he had plenty. He gave his parties with indifferent good nature, not expecting any chop-for-chop return, presumably deriving a sense of prestige from them. Though half his guests were no more than casual acquaintances, there were no hard feelings. Nobody cared. Sometimes they were fun. The apartment was immense and somber, decorated in pseudo-Spanish style, with iron lanterns for lighting, and galleries and balconies. It didn't make sense, high up over Park Avenue, but what of it?

  Jake said misanthropically: "This is going to be dumb. Too many celebrities. They always blight a party." There was a jazz orchestra to dance by, but not enough room. Jake was soon lost in the shuffle of guests circulating in and out of the pantry bar. Mysie had intended to go home early, but stayed out of inertia. Some people were getting squiffy, and she usually left before the maudlin stage. She was to remember the occasion afterward as the last of the drunken parties that marked the boom years; at least, it was the last she happened to attend.

  Before supper, the floor was cleared for entertainers. Someone did imitations first; Mysie couldn't see, being penned in a corner. She edged her way out, and then wished mil
dly that she hadn't. The next turn was a girl dancer, attired in a fringe of beads and with bells on her ankles. She was young and her pretty face had nothing coarse or hard in expression; the dance left very little to the imagination. A man breathed heavily into Mysie's hair; and a stout middle-aged woman said bravely: "How artistic." Mysie reflected irreverently: I suppose this is an orgy. As near as honest folks can manage. But we ought to be lolling on Roman couches. . . . The chairs were all taken; Mysie perched on the arm of a sofa, and by degrees was shoved over onto the knee of a strange man. The dancer was succeeded by a limp youth who gave an interminable pianologue.

  Mysie murmured to her involuntary supporter: "Excuse it please." He replied: "But for my part I am delighted." He contrived to make her comfortable, on both his knees, holding her thoughtfully about the waist. Numerous couples were more closely entwined, kissing at intervals perfunctorily. In the penumbra of the spotlight, Mysie could see across the room that Jake was almost extinguished by a woman with taffy-colored hair, in a red chiffon frock that did not quite cover her knees. Holding a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other, she clasped Jake about the neck. Nevertheless, she looked like a suburban matron on her evening off. Probably she was. Jake blinked the smoke out of his eyes and listened to her with that intense simian melancholy which, to Mysie, indicated that he was rather bored. The lady was not his type.

  Mysie surveyed her own polite stranger. He was quite presentable and amiable. He spoke with a foreign correctness and a faint accent. French, she thought. She asked him. He said he was; she did not hear his name clearly, and was never to find out. She gleaned—their conversation was gravely formal—that he had something to do with metallurgy, and had come over to study American methods in structural steelwork and factory and foundry organization. She asked him if he would take back a skyscraper.

  He said: "They do not belong anywhere but in New York. In Europe they are a mistake. Perhaps even elsewhere in America?"

  Mysie agreed. "The skyscrapers don't pay, you know," she said.

  "They do not pay?"

  "No. Not in money, interest on the investment. Two or three per cent, I believe, on the older ones; so if they go on building them, with the costs increasing, they haven't a chance." An architect had told her so.

  "Then why do they build them?"

  "To the greater glory of God. Or because we're all crazy."

  "I believe you," he said, and asked her about herself. She said that she worked for her living.

  "Publicity, if you know what that is." Though she happened to be playing at the time; Corrigan had kept his word and given her a part; but she was always disinclined to say she was an actress, because it was a bore to have people try to remember whether they had seen her on the stage, when they hadn't. "In France," she said, "I guess there aren't so many of these odd-jobs. You have a profession, and can see your life ahead."

  "It appears so," he agreed, "but I am not sure. Perhaps that is an illusion. For example, my grandfather was a scientist, and he died at Sedan. My other grandfather was a physician, and he died of yellow fever at Panama, with de Lesseps. But my father was a soldier, in the engineering corps, and he served over thirty years and retired to a farm in Touraine, dying there peacefully in 1912, on the land of his ancestors. How should one know?"

  "You must have been in the war?"

  "I was fortunate, a liaison officer in the transport service. I had a dear friend, who was a poet—killed at Verdun. There is no sense in that."

  Mysie reached backward over his shoulder to set down her glass on the table. She had a dim recollection of Grandfather Brennan telling how he had seen machinery left by de Lesseps crumbling to rust in the jungles of Panama.

  "Would you like another drink?" the Frenchman suggested.

  She shook her head. "That was nothing but seltzer. I take it in self-defense, so nobody will pester me with cocktails. This bootleg stuff must taste poisonous to you."

  He smiled. "I hid mine behind that lamp; I have not touched it. But truly, in New York one does not need a stimulant."

  "I daresay New York strikes you as a madhouse?"

  "Not mad—but Atlantean. It confounds judgment. The spirit as much as the scale. All races and nations strive in turn to rebuild Olympus, reach the clouds. We French abandoned Versailles, our Olympian gesture, and asked only to be let alone to become good bourgeois. This is your venture. I cannot think what you will do after."

  Mysie laughed at the fantastic turn of the encounter. The enforced proximity enabled her to observe the undertone of his olive complexion, the flecks of brown in his grey eyes, a nick he must have given himself while shaving. He was fortyish, reasonably good-looking, a sound physical specimen; also he kept his hands to himself. . . . They were insulating themselves by this conversation. .. . She would have disengaged herself, only he must be sufficiently bewildered by the customs of the country, so that it might seem she had taken offense when he was so scrupulously giving none. Or perhaps he was at a loss how to extricate himself from the situation without rudeness. She said hastily: "The Olympian attitude is beyond the individual, isn't it? Take off the wig and the high heels, and nobody is any taller. And we cannot reach the top of our skyscrapers without elevators. One has to scramble for a living just the same, or snuffle with a cold in one's head. The undignified details persist. Look at these people; I suspect they are entirely respectable. They are trying to be something more, but it's no use. The drinking and— and the rest—it just doesn't mean anything. They remain ordinary. Pathetically innocent."

  "You don't drink?" he said.

  "Not as an Olympian effort."

  "But you are not ordinary."

  "Oh, yes," said Mysie. She was not sure if there was a further implication in his remark.

  The entertainers ceased and the orchestra resumed. Would she care to dance? Mysie accepted, as an admirable solution of the situation. "That is a good tune," he said. You Saint Louis woman with your diamond rings . . . Mysie acquiesced. "It is good. And quite apropos. The Beale Street Blues." The graveyard is a nasty old place; They lay you in the ground and throw dirt in your face . . The floor was overcrowded; another couple cannoned into them, and everybody apologized. The other girl was a statuesque beauty, with her left arm covered with bracelets from wrist to elbow. Her voice blurred, and she broke off in the middle of a sentence to affirm: "It's too hot."

  Mysie said: "It is hot." Her partner suggested: "There is a balcony." That seemed a good idea. It was an outside terrace, a narrow ledge protected by a coping. He shut the door after them.

  The night air was soft and mild, with a thin mist in which the multitudinous street lights were diffused; the sky was a strange color, grey-lavender above the yellow glow.

  He put his arms about her gently. "May I see you again?"

  "I don't know," Mysie said. She had half a mind to tell him she appreciated his courtesy. Whatever his intentions, he had given them value by consciousness and privacy... . She thought, we are looking at the sack of a city. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady. . . . She gave him back his kiss. The world seemed to rock a little, a ground swell of the force that made it. All passionate endeavor flowed from this. ... He said again: "When shall I see you?"

  She didn't know what she would have answered; they heard the door opening, and she stepped out of his arms. Some more people came. The tune was going on. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; If my singing don't get you, my shimmy must. She shivered and he said: "Are you cold?" She laughed and went inside. They were elbowed by the crowd again; she caught sight of Jake Van Buren. He had detached himself from his clinging vine. She signaled him by lifting her eyebrows and he obeyed promptly, asking her to dance; they had a system of communications. She turned back just long enough to say to the Frenchman: "Call me up if you like. In the telephone book . . ." She was certain he had not got her name correctly, and their host wouldn't be able to identify her if asked who she was —one stray guest out of so many. It was better not.
Meeting again might prove to be just an assignation. Quite ordinary. They mightn't even like each other.

  "I don't want to dance," said Mysie, half-way around the floor. "I'm going home. But you don't need to."

  "You women," said Jake, "think a man is made of iron."

  Mysie said: "Then let's duck."

  In the taxi, Jake remarked: "I'd have gone an hour ago, but I didn't wish to tear you from your paramour."

  "And who was the lady I seen you with?" Mysie rejoined, yawning.

  "I haven't the slightest idea," Jake said veraciously. "She told me her husband was a fine steady man, and she was so tired of him she could scream; and ought she to get a divorce? I advised her to do so. It would be a break for him. When she wandered away in the supper room an egg named George Gish or something confided to me that he was an old college chum of mine and that he had lost his shirt on I. T. & T. He seemed to think that was news. What worried him most was that he meant to sell a month ago, right at the peak, but he didn't because Professor Irving Fisher said there was no possibility of a crash. He was brooding over the Professor."