The Tight White Collar

by Grace Metalious

  “Of course not,” said Doris, but her hands had begun to sweat. “Why do you ask that?”

  Dr. Gordon Cameron smiled. “There’s nothing unusual about that, is there?” he asked. “A lot of married women get pregnant. I just wondered if perhaps you had ever been so and then perhaps aborted.”

  “Not that I know of, I’m sure,” said Doris.

  Gordon Cameron sat still for a long time after Doris had gone. In the end, he made a note of what he had seen on Doris’s card.

  “You’re joking,” said Jess when his father showed him what he had written.

  “No, I’m not,” said Gordon. “Sometime, somewhere, Doris Delaney Palmer gave birth to a child.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Jess. “Adam never said anything about a child.”

  “I don’t think Adam knows,” said Gordon. “She’s had that scar a good long time. For much longer than she’s had Adam.”

  The next few weeks were hell for Doris. She was sure that Gordon Cameron knew something and that he would go to Adam Palmer with it. But the weeks drifted into months and Gordon treated her as he always had, with a sort of quiet courtesy, and Doris breathed easily again.

  He doesn’t know anything, thought Doris in relief. He never did. His question was one that he might ask any woman.

  No one ever mentioned anything even faintly connected with a child to Doris again until years later, during the Second World War. Doris was serving on the board of the Red Cross chapter in Cooper’s Mills when Lisa Pappas came to her one day to complain that her allotment checks were not arriving on time.

  “I’ve just got to have that money when I’m supposed to, Mrs. Palmer,” said Lisa. “I’ve got the baby to think of.”

  Afterwards, Doris could not remember if it was because she was tired or whether she had had an exceptionally trying day or if it was because she sometimes mourned the passing of her own youth that she spoke to Lisa as she did.

  “If you’d behaved yourself before you were married,” she said to Lisa, “you wouldn’t have to worry about a child now.”

  And Lisa Pappas, striking out with fear and hatred, gave out with the purest shot in the dark.

  “At least when I was in trouble,” she cried, “the man responsible married me.”

  Lisa turned and ran out of Doris’s office in the Red Cross building and Doris sat quite still until the trembling began.

  She knows, thought Doris in horror. Somehow, she knows.

  And no matter how often, after that, that Doris told herself it was impossible that a child like Lisa could know anything about her, Doris could never quite believe it. It seemed to her that whenever Lisa looked at her the knowledge stood out on her face.

  I know about you, said Lisa’s look. You’re not so much. If the truth were known, you’d have to leave town in a hurry.

  And now Lisa Pappas was going to move right into Cooper Station unless Doris prevented it. She’d be the wife of a schoolteacher and at every school function, Doris would have to watch Lisa looking at her with the look of knowledge in her eyes.

  Not that she really frightens me, Doris thought. She’s probably sleeping with Jim Sheppard. That’s probably how she got him to sponsor Chris Pappas.

  Doris had hated Jim Sheppard from the day he was elected to the Town Board of Guardians. Her best friend, Callie Webster, had run against Jim and practically everyone in town said that Jim hadn’t a prayer against Callie. But Callie was defeated for the same reason that many popular candidates for office are defeated. Overconfidence on the part of the constituents. People were so sure that Callie would be elected anyway that many of them didn’t even bother to attend the meeting, and when the ballots were counted, Jim Sheppard had won by two votes.

  “It’s impossible!” Doris Palmer had raged.

  But it had happened and from that day on, Jim Sheppard was Doris’s sworn enemy. He would not bow to her wishes and he would not be put under her thumb. On practically every issue, he sided with Nathaniel Cooper, and Doris’s rage grew.

  Doris began to circulate her petition. She spent all her evenings and most of her afternoons calling on people and by the time it was June, she had all but fifty names she needed signed up. She also saw to it that no one with a house for rent allowed the Pappases to even view the place and if it hadn’t been for Jess Cameron, Lisa and Chris would never have moved into Cooper Station at all.

  When Jess became aware of what Doris was doing, he went at once to Nathaniel Cooper.

  “That bitch is trying to keep Lisa and Chris from finding a place to live here in town,” said Jess angrily. “It’s about time that someone fought that woman.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” asked Nathaniel. “I can’t very well move them into my house, can I?”

  “No, but we can go to Anthony,” said Jess. “The gardener’s cottage behind his place has been sitting idle for years. The Pappases could live there.”

  “Good Lord, Jess,” said Nate. “You know how Anthony is. He’d never hear of it. He likes being alone too much.”

  “We could ask him,” countered Jess stubbornly.

  Nate shrugged. “They’re your eardrums. Remember that when my dear nephew blasts off.”

  But Anthony did not blast off. “Sure,” he said when Jess and Nate spoke to him. “I’ve always been a sucker for a lost cause. Just tell Mrs. Pappas to keep her kids away from me and we’ll get along fine.”

  Lisa threw her arms around Jess when he told her the news, and the very next day she drove to Cooper Station to begin the job of cleaning the long-empty cottage. Anthony Cooper watched her walk down the graveled drive that led to the little house.

  You can tell by the way she walks that she was made for loving, he thought. Then he smiled cynically. And you can also tell that she’s not getting enough of the right kind.

  He was still smiling when Lisa had rounded the curve and disappeared from view.

  Anthony dropped the curtain he had been holding aside to watch Lisa.

  Maybe this afternoon, if he felt up to it, he’d take a walk down that way and see if there was anything he could do.

  Chapter VII

  Smith Road, which crossed Benjamin Street at a point three blocks beyond the town’s business section, was a winding, tree-shaded road that looked more like a country lane than the best street in Cooper Station’s residential district. The two Cooper houses stood at the extreme western end of the road, where the paving ended and gave way to acres of rolling fields and picture-postcard views of forests and mountains. The one occupied by Nathaniel Cooper II was a square, brick colonial with white painted trim which stood on a slight rise of ground on the northern side of the road. At both ends of its curved, graveled driveway were wrought iron gates set into twin stone pillars and into each pillar had been set a polished brass plate about the size of a dollar bill on which the name Cooper had been lettered in script. Inside, the brick house was paneled in dark wood, its windows draped with maroon velvet and its floor covered with thick carpeting of the same color. The furniture was massive mahogany, almost as dark as the walls, and the upholstered pieces were covered in the same dark red as the draperies. This was the home that Nathaniel Cooper I had built for himself in 1861, the year after his factories at Cooper’s Mills had begun to make money and now, almost a hundred years later, with the house occupied by Old Nate’s grandson, almost nothing in it had been changed. Twelve years before, when Nathaniel had brought his bride home to Cooper Station, Margery had laughed and said, “Good Lord, Nate, how long do you think it will take us to turn this enormous velvet-lined coffin into a home?”

  Nate had squeezed her hand and said, “It’ll take us a year just to clear out the attics and get this furniture moved out. And all the while we’re doing that, the noise you’ll be hearing will be Grandpa whirling around in his grave. To him, all this was the epitome of plushness.”

&
nbsp; The first year of her marriage, Margery redecorated the master bedroom. She had the walls covered with a rose-printed white paper and the woodwork painted French gray. She sent to New York for an outsize bed and covered it with a white rose-printed spread and she had a rose chaise longue.

  “Good God,” said Nate. “You make me feel like I’m coming in to visit a French whore.”

  Margery assumed a heavy-lidded look and stretched out one languid arm from her position on the chaise.

  “Venez ici,” she said huskily.

  Nate bent down and scooped her up in his big arms.

  “Only French girl I ever met with a southern drawl,” he said.

  Margery ran the tip of her tongue over his top lip.

  “Y’all lay down on the bed, Massa, and Ah’ll show y’all a couple of little ole French tricks.”

  The second year, Margery began on the small southeast bedroom which she turned into a nursery for the baby who would be born in the fall.

  “Isn’t it perfect, Nate?” she asked when it was finished.

  Nate looked at the once dreary room which was now full of sunlight and air and soft baby colors.

  “Perfect,” he agreed. “Just like everything you are and do.”

  “Before I get done everything is going to be perfect. This house and the grounds and our first baby and all his brothers and sisters.”

  Nate kissed the back of her neck and put his arm around her so that his hand rested gently on the barely perceptible swelling of her abdomen.

  “How many is ‘All of them’?” he whispered.

  “Six,” said Margery decisively. “I can’t stand odd numbers. They make me nervous. Six is an absolutely round, perfect number.”

  It was not surprising that Margery took perfection for granted, for all her life she had known little else. She had been born Margery Stevenson in Charleston, South Carolina, the only child of a wealthy tobacco grower and his wife who, to the end of her day, referred to Northerners as carpetbaggers and barbarians. When Margery was little she had a colored Mammy for a nurse (just as her mother and grandmother before her), and she could remember little of her childhood that had not been covered and surrounded by softness and set solidly in a base of security. There was the gentleness of her mother’s Southern voice, the soft croon of her Mammy, the caress of expensive clothing next to her skin and later, the ease of an intelligent child in a private school run by old Southern gentlewomen, the safety of expensive, well-groomed horses and, most of all, the comfort of money that need never be thought of because it was there.

  Margery made her debut when she was eighteen years old and then she was allowed to go off to Smith College because, as her father put it, “After all, Mother, the North is there and Margery might just as well find it out now as later.”

  Margery whirled around to show off one of the new wool skirts that would go north to school with her. She kissed her mother and laughed.

  “Yes, darling,” she said, “the North is there, plain as the nose on your pretty face and I understand that they’re quite civilized up there these days. They even smoke cigarettes which makes it nice for Daddy. My going to Smith will be a sort of public relations job, and if I catch one single girl smoking anything that doesn’t have Daddy’s tobacco in it, why I’ll just snatch her bald-headed.”

  “My baby,” said Mrs. Stevenson and began to cry. “You’ll get up there in the North and those awful girls—why all those girls have legs like colts and simply horrible voices, and they’ll go to putting ideas in your head and introducing you to Northern boys and I don’t know what all.”

  “Don’t you worry, darling,” said Margery. “If I get tied up with a Northern boy, I’ll bring him right back here real quick and you can turn him into a Southerner and Daddy can make him into a tobacco expert.”

  Mrs. Stevenson sniffed wetly into her white linen handkerchief.

  “Southerners are like great geniuses,” she said. “They are born. Not made. And your Daddy practically cut his baby teeth on a tobacco leaf. There isn’t a man living in Massachusetts who can say the same.”

  Margery was a sophomore at Smith when she met Nathaniel Cooper, who was then a senior at Harvard. They were introduced at a football game and within three weeks of their meeting, Nate was cutting classes and spending every cent of his allowance on trips to Northampton while Margery was frightening her mother with letters about a Northerner with whom she declared herself madly in love.

  Ferguson Cooper was now deep in his seventies and Nate would be taking over the rule of the vast Cooper empire as soon as he graduated.

  Only rarely did Nate think of his old dream of being a botanist. The only person to whom he ever mentioned it was Margery Stevenson who held his hand and sympathized with him and respected him for doing his duty.

  “Why, Nate, honey,” she said, “lots of people don’t get to do what they want to do. I guess it’s just the way things happen. Look at me. Just suppose I’d been a boy instead of a girl. Why, I’d have to go and grub in some filthy tobacco place all day, just like daddy. And that’s not what I want to do at all.”

  Nathaniel ran his fingers softly up and down on the inside of her forearm.

  “What do you want to do, Margery?” he asked.

  They were sitting on a riverbank and a May breeze moved sweetly across the water. Margery lay flat on the ground, her head pillowed on Nathaniel’s sweater. She breathed deeply and sighed and stretched.

  “I want to get married,” she said at last. “I want to live in a big house and send down to Charleston for Virgie to look after me and I want to have a whole bunch of children and a horse for everybody and two cars of my own and the prettiest clothes and a set of silver hairbrushes with my initials on the back.”

  “Well,” said Nathaniel slowly, “we’ve got a big house up home.”

  He looked down into the incredible blue of her eyes and felt the quivering that went through him every time, just before he kissed her.

  “I thought that it was only in books that a girl’s eyelashes made shadows on her cheeks,” he said against her mouth. And in the same whisper, without moving his lips away, he said, “In fact, we not only have a big house, we’ve got two whole towns. And a stable that my grandfather used to use that’s big enough for a dozen horses. And I’m crazy about kids and silver hairbrushes.”

  “I know it,” said Margery. “What did you think I meant when I said that I wanted to send down to Charleston for Virgie?” She traced the outline of his lower lip with her finger. “Oh, Nate, honey. It took you so long to say it that I thought you were never going to speak up at all.”

  He held her tightly against him. “When?” he asked, over and over again between kisses.

  “In the fall,” she said. “You’ll be through school then and we’ll have the whole summer to get ready. I want to buy the prettiest hats and dresses and shoes and nightgowns ever made, and I want Mama to have the house all fixed beautifully so that every single thing about getting married will be perfect. Oh, Nate, honey. Hold me. Kiss me some more.”

  That summer, in July, Ferguson Cooper died and some said that it was just as if the old man had been waiting for Nathaniel to get through school and get married.

  “I don’t want you to wait if anything happens to me, Nathaniel,” Ferguson had told his son. “Don’t you worry none about what folks’ll say. You belong here in this house and this house is no place for a man alone.”

  “Pa, don’t talk like that. You’re going to be up and on your feet before Labor Day. You wait and see.”

  “Well, if I’m not I don’t want you fiddling around waiting to get married. Margery’s a nice girl and a good girl, even if she doesn’t come from around here, and girls like that aren’t easy to find. Also, she reminds me of your mother, and your mother was never one to wait for anybody.”

  Margery and Nathaniel were married in
September in the garden of her parents’ home in Charleston. Margery wore her great-grandmother’s wedding dress and she had eight bridesmaids and a huge three-tiered cake. Margery’s father had checked Nathaniel through Dun and Bradstreet and was satisfied with what he had learned, and even Margery’s mother allowed that Nathaniel was not bad at all, for a Northerner, and really quite presentable when you came right down to it. But mostly the Stevensons were happy because Margery was happy, and now they could lean back, content with the thought that their only child had never lacked for one single thing that she had ever wanted.

  That night, in the living room of a New York penthouse apartment which Nathaniel had borrowed from a friend, Margery sipped champagne and admired the way her legs looked through the thin silk of her negligee.

  “Wasn’t it perfect, Nate?” she sighed.

  “Yes, darling,” replied Nathaniel. “Absolutely two thousand percent beautiful, wonderful and perfect.”

  He walked slowly around the room, turning off lights, and when the room was dark he opened the double doors that led onto the terrace. Immediately, the room was filled with the warmth of the September night and the only sound was the distant murmur of traffic on the street twenty floors below.

  “Oh, how beautiful!” cried Margery and went to stand at the terrace’s parapet.

  Nathaniel stood behind her and together they watched the lights of the city until, in both of them, there was an almost simultaneous breath quickening, and still they stood, not touching one another, waiting. Gently, Nathaniel lifted her heavy hair to one side and put his lips softly on the back of her neck and when his arms finally encircled her, Margery felt a silent gasp within her that hurt her chest and made her want to cry out, but her throat felt locked and no sound came. It was only when he had slipped off her negligee and she felt the palms of his hands against her nipples that she could whisper, “Oh, Nate, Nate, darling.”