Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  “I don’t think he minds the money so much, but it’s a good idea to remind him of what he would have spent. And I never even asked him for carfare to give that marriage record the tear-up.”

  • • •

  A brief telephone call from Slattery to Bob Hooker disposed finally of any further local publicity regarding Joe Chapin. At Mike’s suggestion Joe issued a single statement concerning his candidacy, which ran in the Standard and in some other newspapers in the county, but nowhere else in the state. “Upon the advice of my physician, who informs me that the rigors of a strenuous statewide campaign could lead to serious complications of the recent accident to my leg, I have asked the members of the State Republican Committee to withdraw my name from consideration in shaping up the ticket for the coming elections. In doing so, I have assured the Committee that I shall continue to lend my wholehearted support to all Republican candidates in the forthcoming campaign, short of public appearances involving extensive travel. I wish to thank my friends, who have so loyally rallied to my support, for their good wishes and offers of assistance. I know that they, like me, will now direct their energies toward the only satisfactory conclusion of the campaign; a sweeping Republican victory in November!”

  Joe saw Billy English at the club the day after the announcement appeared.

  “Joe, I’m sorry to learn you have a new doctor.”

  “A new doctor? Oh, the statement.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve always warned you that the leg could give you trouble, so I didn’t mind. Is that why you withdrew, or did a little taste of politics turn your stomach?”

  “Well, between you and me, a little of both. My leg and my stomach were involved. But I’m not going to admit that to people.”

  “For people who don’t need it in their business, the best publicity is no publicity. The biggest men I’ve ever known have stayed out of the newspapers as much as possible. When Julian died I developed such a hatred for notoriety that I told Bob Hooker I never wanted my name in his paper again. Well, I knew that couldn’t be. The hospital, and the Medical Society, they come in for a certain amount of publicity, and my name gets printed in those connections. But articles about me or my family, even squibs on the society page, I don’t want them. You wouldn’t have liked it after a while, Joe. I saw one article in one of the Philadelphia papers, I guess you saw it too. I wanted to horsewhip the fellow that wrote it, and I was thinking about it last night after I read your statement. You’re well out of the whole thing. I’m all for helping the party, but I’ll do it with money, as long as I can afford it, and whatever my opinion is worth to the people I come in contact with. There’s Arthur.”

  “Where?”

  “Isn’t that Arthur at the bar?”

  “No, Arthur’s still in the dining room. I don’t know who that is. A guest, I imagine.”

  “Oh. I thought it was Arthur, but on second look I can see it isn’t. Well, glad you haven’t changed doctors, Joe. Wouldn’t like to have to change lawyers.”

  Some men at the club commented on Joe’s withdrawal from politics, and others ignored it. Partly on Mike’s advice, and partly on Arthur’s, Joe was making himself visible at all of his usual places—the club, the courthouse, Main Street, the country club—for the first few days after the statement. In a little while, probably as little as a week, people would accept him as a non-candidate, and in only a little more time they would forget he had ever been considered a possibility. After that Joe and Edith were to visit the Dave Harrisons at their new house in a place called Hobe Sound, Florida. They had not at first intended to accept the Harrisons’ invitation, but as Edith said, “This would be a very good time to remind Gibbsville, and Pennsylvania, that one of your best friends is a Morgan partner. It won’t do any harm, just in case there’s any talk about your not getting the nomination.”

  The Harrisons had the Alec Weekses and the Paul Donaldsons from Scranton as their other guests with the Chapins. The men fished and played golf and drank large quantities of whiskey and nursed their grudge against their friend in the White House. The women swam and played bridge and went to Palm Beach to shop or to the nearby St. Onge’s for Kodak film. Hobe Sound was less than an hour’s drive from Palm Beach, and was only just becoming known. It was a resort that was in effect a private club, and the theme of it was the new simplicity: houses that could be run with staffs of a minimum of servants; multimillionaires driving inconspicuous Plymouths instead of Rolls-Royces; a place where the powerful could relax unobserved by the trippers from West Palm Beach, and yet could tie up their Diesel yachts. A visitor could be made a member of the Jupiter Island Club for ten dollars, but he could then find himself in a dollar-a-point bridge game every afternoon and night. The man in the old Groton School blazer might be a Morgan partner, and the man in the shredded khaki pants might be the brains of the motorcar industry.

  Dave Harrison and Alec Weeks went fishing one day and left the Pennsylvanians, Chapin and Donaldson, to play golf. But the rain fell heavily and the Pennsylvanians decided to do some rainy-day drinking together while the women visited the shops of Worth Avenue.

  “Joe, I understand they gave you a real royal screwing a month or so ago.”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  “Well, what would you call it?”

  “Oh, a real royal screwing,” said Joe.

  “Is what I heard true? A hundred and fifty thousand smackers?”

  “No, not that much, but it was a large sum. But I see their point.”

  “I wish you’d talked to me,” said Paul Donaldson from Scranton.

  “What would you have done?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’d have done. I’d have got together about a half a dozen fellows and said, ‘It’s Joe Chapin or else.’”

  “Well, thanks, Paul. But I think it worked out all right. I’m here in Hobe Sound with my friends, instead of dragging my tail around Pennsylvania.”

  “Balls to that, Joe. If you thought enough of it to give them a wad of money, you wanted the job. Lieutenant governor is what you were after, that right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s any consolation to you, but according to my sources of information, we’re going to have to take a little punishment in the fall.”

  “So I gather. Oh, hell, Paul. Water under the bridge.”

  “Does that finish you with politics for good?”

  “I’m inclined to think so.”

  “But you’re going to keep on living in Gibbsville.”

  “Christ, yes.”

  “Is your leg all right again?”

  “Well, I took forty dollars away from you yesterday, and twenty the day before.”

  “The way we go around that golf course, Dave could play,” said Donaldson. “What are your plans? I know of a few things in New York that might interest you.”

  “Law business?”

  “No, not exactly. Investment trusts. This is the bottom, this is the time to get in. There’s going to be a war in Europe.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That fellow with the Charlie Chaplin mustache. You won’t read about it in Bob Hooker’s rag, but that crazy bastard is going to take over the whole Continent of Europe before he gets his ass in a sling. And we’re going to get rich.”

  “Oh, come on, Paul.”

  “Well, how long since you talked to anybody that really knows what’s going on over there?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I have. You ask Dave. He’ll be cagey, but just ask him if I don’t get some pretty good information.”

  “I don’t doubt that, but this Hitler, he’s a God damn freak.”

  “Well, if you’re not interested in money, what are you interested in? You don’t want to just vegetate in Gibbsville the rest of your life. Have you got a girl friend?”

 
“Nope.”

  “You ought to come to New York with me sometime and I’ll fix you up with a little group I know. They aren’t hookers. Most of them are getting alimony from some poor sucker, and all they want is somebody to take them to El Morocco so they can doll up. A couple of them even live with their husbands, but the husbands don’t give a damn either. They’ve got girls of their own. I saw one of them in Palm Beach the other day. In fact I almost went down there this afternoon and got myself a good piece of tail. They aren’t kids, but who wants kids? The only trouble I ever got into was those young kids that think all they have to do is holler and you’ll shell out. No, these dames I’m talking about, they’re all in their thirties or more, but there isn’t a thing they don’t know, and you don’t have to go to Paris. New York is overrun with the most perverted, fanciest, good-looking dames in the history of the world. And all they want out of you is take them out to a good dinner and a show and a night club.”

  “How do you get time to make all your millions?”

  “Listen,” said Paul. “I’m downtown by ten o’clock, just after the bell rings. A good piece of tail and a good seven hours’ sleep, and I think more clearly than if I was some guy that tossed and turned wishing he had what I had. A lot of our friends go to a gym. I get in bed with a woman and I sleep better. I’m a great believer in sleep. Not ten hours, not twelve hours. Six or seven or eight hours of sound sleep.”

  “How do you get away with it?”

  “You mean Betty?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s just it, my boy. If I came home looking debauched. But I don’t. I don’t drink too much. I drank more in the time we’ve been here than I ever do in New York.”

  “But doesn’t Betty wonder what you do at night?”

  “She’s in Scranton, most of the time. She knows I’m not going to stay in the hotel and have dinner in my room every night. She knows I go out.”

  “I know, but when you’re gone all night.”

  “No calls between midnight and eight-thirty.”

  “And you’ve never been caught.”

  “Never been caught. Why should I be? Listen, boy, I don’t want you to think I get laid every night. I don’t. But every time I go to New York, yes. You know man is naturally polygamous, Joe. You know that. A stallion always has as many as forty or fifty mares. I’ve got a girl in Boston and one in Chicago and two or three in Philadelphia. And if Betty weren’t along on this trip I’d be kept busy in Palm Beach.”

  “Paul, you amaze me.”

  “Yes, I imagine I do. The one big trouble with living in a small town, the best people haven’t got the facilities for high-class adultery. Automobiles. Country roads. Sneaking off to camps in the woods. In New York nobody gives a damn. And I don’t live there. I’m home every week-end, unless I’m out on Long Island or up in Connecticut. I’m a visitor. So my wife doesn’t have to run across the dames I go to bed with. Not that they’d ever run across each other anyway. These dames are not exactly the Bryn Mawr type, but they’re a damned sight better-looking because they haven’t got a worry in the world except looking their best after six o’clock.”

  “What would Betty do if she did find out?”

  “Betty is very careful not to find out.”

  “Oh, then she knows.”

  “No, she doesn’t know. But she doesn’t try to know. And I don’t want her to know. Listen, boy, I’m not a damn fool. I believe in our marriage. You don’t think I’d ever marry one of these dames? I wouldn’t leave Betty for anything. And don’t forget, it’s often harder to keep a marriage going than it is to break it up.”

  Joe looked at him and said nothing.

  “You’re too much of a gentleman to ask me what’s on your mind,” said Paul. “Yes, Betty and I sleep together. If I had to give up the other women, I would, if it meant breaking up with Betty.”

  “Well, you have a daughter coming out next year.”

  “Oh, not only that, Joe.”

  “I must say you make it all sound like the only way to live.”

  “Not for everybody. But for me.”

  “No, I think you’re a fucking hypocrite. And that’s a good use of both words.”

  “Well, and I think guys like you are the real hypocrites. You want it, but you’re afraid to go after it.”

  “It isn’t always a question of being afraid. But I don’t think you’d understand what I believe. It’d sound too sanctimonious.”

  “I’ll bet it would.”

  “Oh, but I’ll say it anyway. There’s such a thing as respect. Giving up those other dames because you respect the woman you’re married to.”

  “You think I don’t respect Betty?”

  “I know damn well those dames don’t think you do, and that’s what matters, whether Betty ever knows about it or not.”

  “You are a little Lord Fauntleroy. Tell me the truth, Joe. Did you ever stay with anybody but Edith?”

  “Yes. But not since we’ve been married.”

  “You know, you’re almost due for some middle-aged wild oats, and then we’ll see who’s the hypocrite.”

  “Oh, I’m probably a hypocrite, too, but in different ways. I don’t think I could ever have an affair with a woman and then try to kid myself that I was having it because I liked to get eight hours’ sleep. I don’t say that I’m better than you are, but I believe my imperfections are less harmful than your imperfections.”

  “Let’s go up to the pool and have a look at the girls in their bathing suits.”

  “They won’t be there. It’s raining.”

  “So it is. Well, let’s tie one on. I was thinking of asking you to go to Palm Beach, but you’re too damn sanctimonious.”

  “And I’m a very sound sleeper.”

  Paul Donaldson from Scranton held his glass at arm’s length and stared at it. “You know, I don’t know but what you may be right. But I won’t admit it. If I had to do over again there isn’t a single piece of tail I’d want to give up. So I guess I consider myself a happy man. God knows I don’t consider you a happy man. You go ahead and consider me a fucking hypocrite, but I consider you a miserable, unhappy bastard. You never got anything out of life and, boy, you wouldn’t know how to start now.”

  “But that’s assuming I’d want to start now,” said Joe.

  • • •

  Ann was one of a thousand, and many more than a thousand, girls of good family who were living in New York, working in New York, getting from their jobs some sense of belonging to something besides the Junior League and the country club, which were the community in which they would have lived back home in Dayton, in Charlotte, in Kansas City, in Gibbsville. Each girl thought she was living according to her own plan, but there were so many like her that a pattern had developed. They would go to New York, stay at one of the women’s residential hotels until the search for a job, any respectable job, was successfully ended. “I thought I’d go to secretarial school and do some modeling.” The job found, the next move was to find an apartment with a girl of similar background and tastes and not much more and not much less money at her disposal. Sometimes the apartment would start with three girls instead of two, but a three-girl arrangement almost never worked out. In the first year or two the girl would be invited to dinner at the homes of Mother’s and Dad’s New York friends, and then the Friends of the Family would forget all about the girl from Dayton and Charlotte and Kansas City and Gibbsville, and she would begin to make her own life with office friends and friends of office friends and young men who had grown up in Kansas City or Gibbsville, attended Choate and Williams, had jobs in New York and, usually, considerably less money to spend than the girls. The Kansas City girl and the Choate-Williams boy might become fond of each other, fond enough to go to bed together, but there was little talk of love. The boy was not really interesting, not as interesting as The Boss. The girl was not
really desirable to the boy, who was busy using Squadron A as the first step toward the Racquet Club and with an eye on the richer and just as pretty girls on the North Shore of Long Island. The boy would practice economies by buying his suits at Broadstreet’s or Roger Kent while still going to Brooks for the right shirt. He also would economize by taking the Kansas City girl to the Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street, so that he could swing a dinner at “21” for a girl he had met through the Squadron. The boy would learn the language of his type: “I went to a place called Choate,” he would say to the sister of a Grottie. “I come from a place you probably never heard of—Indianapolis.”

  The outlander boy and the outlander girl stayed away from their Bohemian fellow-townsmen who lived in the less expensive sections of Greenwich Village. “Carol? Yes, I saw her last fall, at the theatre. Yes, she still keeps up with her painting. At least she was then. I think she was going to marry a Jap, but it fell through.”

  Ann’s first job was found for her. “I’ll find a job for her, Joe,” said Alec Weeks. “It probably won’t be anything very interesting or exciting, but it’ll give her something to do and pay her a small salary.” The job, paying twenty-five dollars a week, was in the library of the firm of Stackhouse, Robbins, Naismith, Cooley & Brill, the successor to Wardlaw, Wardlaw, Somerfield, Cooley & Van Eps. The lawyers at Stackhouse et al. liked to look things up themselves, but when only a certain book or two were needed they would telephone their library, give the titles of the books, and Ann would carry them to the lawyers making the requests. Her other duties consisted of seeing to it that the yellow paper and sharpened pencils were on the refectory tables, and that the lights were turned off after the lawyers left the library, and that no cigarettes were left burning in the glass ash trays or on the shelves of the stacks. She also saw to it that the room temperature was kept fairly uniform and that there were extra packages of Zymole Trokies for Mr. Meade, the firm’s librarian, an elderly gentleman who had once done a-year-and-a-day in Atlanta but preferred not to talk about it.

  Ann grew weary of the subway trips between her apartment and Cedar Street, and the unstimulating work, and Mr. Meade’s throat-clearing and spitting. She heard about, and took, a job in a bookstore on Madison Avenue, where she could walk to work and have her opinion sought and make five dollars a week more than Stackhouse, Robbins, Naismith, Cooley & Brill had been paying her. It was 1935 and she was twenty-four years old.