Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  A few weeks after Cathy’s marriage Nancy said to him, “When are you going to change the name?”

  “Change the name of what?”

  “Of your agency. You can’t call it Lord and Lord anymore, can you? Shouldn’t it be Lord and Bailey now?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “We’re just beginning to get the Lord and Lord name established. We’d confuse everybody if we changed it at this point.”

  “But she’s not Miss Lord anymore. She’s Mrs. Bailey.”

  “Cathy still uses the Lord name in the office.”

  “She does? Why?”

  “A lot of women do that—use their maiden names for business.”

  “But what for?”

  “I don’t know—it’s simpler, I guess. People don’t have to worry whether a woman is Miss or Mrs. if she stays Miss.”

  “You mean Cathy is going to go on calling herself Miss Cathy Lord?”

  “In the office, yes.”

  “Does Reggie mind?”

  “I don’t think Reggie gives a damn,” Charlie said. “But we’ve got a little joke going with Madeline, our secretary. Whenever Reggie calls Cathy at the office he always asks to speak to Mrs. Bailey. Whenever Cathy calls Reggie Madeline says, ‘Miss Lord calling.’”

  “Do you do that just to tease him?”

  “It’s just a little office joke,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of them.”

  Nancy smiled distantly. “Well, I still think you should change the name,” she said.

  Toward the end of that year a young reporter from a magazine called Western Advertising had called them and asked if he could interview them. His editor wanted to do a feature story on Lord & Lord. “You two are getting to be the talk of the business,” the reporter said.

  It was fun being interviewed and to think that they were getting to be the talk of the business. And the magazine had also sent a photographer, who took many pictures of them at work. When the story appeared it was headlined, “Lively Pair Turns Out Liveliest Ads in Town,” and it continued in that vein. It was almost entirely flattering—about how they had started on a shoestring, “with nothing but imagination, taste, and spunk,” and had become “hot” and in demand. Charlie and Cathy had been delighted with it, and the minute it appeared their telephones began to ring. The story had contained one glaring error, though, and at first he and Cathy merely laughed at it. The story had called them a “husband-and-wife team.” They blamed the mistake on their own inexperience with talking to reporters. Obviously they had not made it clear to the man that they were brother and sister, and he had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  But Nancy had not been amused by the mistake and had talked of demanding that the magazine print a correction. “Do you act like a husband-and-wife team in the office?” she asked him.

  “Look, it’s great publicity for us,” he explained. “What difference does it make what kind of a team they call us? We’ve already picked up four new accounts because of that story. Why should we sour it by making them run a correction?”

  “What are our neighbors going to think? That you have two wives?”

  “It’s just a trade magazine, Nancy. It doesn’t reach the general public.”

  “I still don’t see why you’re not upset about this thing,” she said.

  “I’m sorry it happened. It’s a mistake, and it was Cathy’s and my fault that it happened. But it doesn’t seem worth getting upset about,” he said.

  “Well, I’m sure Reggie Bailey will be upset about it,” she said. “I’m certain he’ll be furious.”

  He had never known exactly how Reggie Bailey had felt about the article. Charlie and Cathy had agreed to ignore the whole thing, to forget about it. He never asked her how Reggie had felt about it, and she had never mentioned it to him, and that had seemed the best way to treat the whole thing. But Charlie did notice that after the article there seemed to be more—and longer telephone calls from Reggie to Cathy at the office. Sometimes he would overhear her saying, “Reggie, I know that.… I know it’s important for you to have lunch with these people. But do I have to be along?… Reggie, I honestly can’t.… I have so much to do today I’m going to work right through lunch.…”

  “Why don’t you go have lunch with him?” Charlie would suggest. “I can take care of things here for a while. That stuff you’re working on can wait.”

  But she would shake her head and return to her typewriter.

  Then she began closing her office door during Reggie’s calls, and Charlie could no longer overhear them. Once, after one of them, when she opened her door again he could tell that she had been weeping.

  He had said to her, “Why don’t you take a few days off, Cathy? You’ve been working so damned hard. Why don’t you go out to Malibu, lie on the beach—I can handle things here.”

  “No. Too much to do.”

  “How late did you work last night?”

  “Not too late.”

  “Tell me the truth. What time did you leave?”

  “Oh, around ten, I guess.”

  “You don’t let me work late. I’m not going to let you work late.”

  She said nothing.

  “You look tired. Why don’t you take a few days off?”

  But she just shook her head.

  Right after the Western Advertising story appeared they had had the pages mounted and framed and hung on the office wall. One day he noticed that the picture had been taken down. It never went up again. When, in the months that followed, from the new business they picked up as a result of that story, the misunderstanding continued—when someone said something to one of them about “your wife” or “your husband”—explaining the mistake had become more of a strain. The jokes they tried to make about it had become more of an effort to make, and lamer.

  He had been working on Tessa Morgan’s portrait for nearly two weeks, though not at all regularly. She could not, he discovered, pose for much more than half an hour at a time. After half an hour she became restless, tired of sitting still, and impatient to do something else—play tennis, play gin rummy, or just talk. That made it slow going. And of course there were constant interruptions—telephones ringing, guests arriving, domestic problems requiring her attention. She had had her swimming pool cleaned and filled on the first of June, and on good days, because she liked to sit by the pool—she never swam in it to his knowledge—he often posed her there, stretched in the sun on one of the webbed-plastic chairs. He would set up his easel a little distance from her under an umbrella. This was where he was working now.

  “When are you going to let me see it?” she asked him, as she did at almost every session. It was a sign that the half hour was nearly up.

  “Oh, not for a long, long time,” he said.

  “Stinker.”

  When he looked across at her again he saw that she was busy with something on her lap. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m sketching you,” she said. “It will be a portrait of the artist painting his subject, painted by his subject. It will be worth a mint when you’re famous.”

  “Let me see it,” he said, starting to go toward her.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” she said, clasping the pad of paper to her bosom. “I won’t show you you until you show me me.”

  “All right,” he said with a grin, returning to his canvas.

  A few minutes later she said, “Let’s quit. Let’s do something else. Let’s play some gin.”

  “Just about—two minutes more, okay?”

  “Sadist.”

  “Is your name really Tessa?” he said to distract her from playing gin.

  “Honey, everything about me is real! Don’t you know that? Even my name. My daddy sneezed, and they named me—that’s what my mother used to say. Actually, it’s supposed to be an old Suth-run name. I was born, you know, in an old Suth-run town, in the Deep Sa-outh.”

  “What happened to the accent?”

  “Six weeks with a speech coach.”

  �
��Tell me about the old Southern town.…”

  If he could get her talking about herself, he could usually get her to sit still for a little while.

  He had, he thought, a good concept for this portrait. She had been painted and photographed so often as a distant, enameled beauty that he would paint her as she really most often seemed to be—rather tousled and disheveled. He would paint her as a beautiful urchin, and he even planned to paint a suggestion of dark streets around her, a mood of lostness. Disheveled certainly described the state of her life most of the time. Her days were a progression from one shambles to another, and for all the staff she had attending her, he had never encountered a more disorganized household. Perhaps she enjoyed chaos; he couldn’t tell. She had a habit of announcing, “Well, today I’m really going to get myself organized.” It was a signal, inevitably, that some new crisis was on its way. It was amusing and at the same time sad to watch and to wonder what would happen next.

  Richard suspected Bruno of having dates with other boys, and they quarreled about it openly in front of Tessa (“Did you hear what he called me?”) and forced Tessa to take sides. One of them was always threatening to leave, and Tessa was always having to call little peace conferences to try to patch things up. Her personal maid’s name was Minnie. Minnie was a round-faced, compact little Negro woman who, Charlie suspected, was actually extremely bright. Minnie was also, he was sure, responsible for a great deal of the dissension in the house, but since she was so clever at it, it was very hard to pinpoint Minnie as the villain. Minnie treated all the others with a kind of fawning, you-all servility that Charlie found very hard to take seriously. Whenever Charlie asked Minnie for anything—it might be a glass of water—she bowed and scraped excessively before hurrying off to fetch it. She also had a habit, whenever you spoke to her, of answering, “Yes! You are exactly right!” that Charlie found particularly annoying. It became perfectly clear to Charlie, as the days went by, that Minnie hated him—why, he couldn’t imagine, unless it was for the color of his skin.

  Charlie had overheard Minnie making oblique little hints to Richard that Bruno was being unfaithful to him. Bruno was in charge of Tessa’s checkbook, and to Tessa Minnie dropped hints that Bruno’s hand was deeply in the till and that Richard’s undoubtedly was in there with it. Minnie was also involved in a feud of, apparently, long standing with Tessa’s housekeeper-cook, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman called Juanita, whose name Minnie always affected to forget, or to call “Wondola” or “Winnetka.”

  Minnie would deliver Tessa’s lunch on a tray, wearing such an expression of queasy distaste as to imply that Juanita’s turkey sandwich was emitting noxious fumes. “Look what that Winnetka’s fixed you now!” she would wail, and then, while Tessa inspected the insides of the sandwich suspiciously, Minnie would say, “You are exactly right. You can’t eat that, Miss M. Why don’t you just let me go back and fix you somethin’ decent?”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Minnie.”

  Minnie was forever complaining about the quality of Juanita’s housework, and she frequently interrupted posing sessions to deliver to Tessa some new piece of news or evidence of disorderliness or damage.

  “Now, look where I found your new Dior suit,” she would say, bursting in with the suit bundled in her arms. “In a pile, on the closet floor.…”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Minnie.…”

  Once, when she hadn’t known that he was watching, Charlie saw Minnie take a pile of fresh ironing that had just come from Juanita’s board and twist it quickly and systematically in her strong little hands until it was thoroughly wrinkled. “Now, just look at how that Wondola irons!” she had said, bringing in the result to Tessa. “Look what she’s done to your pretty blouses!”

  Charlie tried to remain aloof from these household battles and conspiracies and plots. But that time he had spoken to Minnie. Finding her alone a little later, he asked her, “Why did you do that, Minnie?”

  Minnie rolled her eyes innocently. “Do what, Mr. Lord?”

  “What you did to the ironing?”

  Minnie looked at him quickly with complete contempt. Then, lowering her eyes, bowing, scraping, groveling again, she said, “Oh, you are exactly right. I shouldn’t have done that, Mr. Lord.”

  And the next day, when Charlie arrived at Tessa’s house, Minnie met him at the door and said, “Gosh, I’m sorry, Mr. Lord, but Miss M. she just won’t be able to pose for you today. In fact she say she thinking of canceling the whole portrait, Mr. Lord. I’m sorry!”

  He had tried, throughout the day, to telephone her to see whether this was true. But with Minnie filtering all the calls he could not get through to Tessa. “She just all tied up right now,” Minnie kept saying, and when he asked for Bruno, Bruno seemed to have disappeared.

  He had just begun to think that Minnie had won when, that evening, his telephone rang and it was Tessa. “Where were you?” she wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but Minnie told me—”

  “Oh, don’t pay any attention to Minnie! I never do.”

  But he knew, at that point, that he had let himself become entangled in the intrigue and infighting that went on around her and that Minnie was someone he would have to reckon with.

  “By the way, Carla,” he said to her that evening at the dinner table, “when are they going to run that story in The Chatterbox about me?”

  “Oh, that barfy Rita Melnick!” Carla said. “She says there’s no room for it in this issue. She says this is the annual year-end issue, with what everybody’s summer plans are in it. She says she hasn’t got room for the ‘Let’s Know Our Parents’ column in this issue, and she’ll have to postpone it to the first issue in the fall. That Rita Melnick is such a barf!”

  “Well,” Charlie said, trying to conceal his disappointment, “we’ll just have to wait for the first issue in the fall, then. But I thought you liked Rita Melnick.”

  “I’ve decided she’s kind of barfy. I’m not sure I’m even going to work for her old Chatterbox.”

  “Speaking of summer plans,” he said, “what are our summer plans?” He turned to Harold. “Harold, what are your summer plans?”

  “Oh, just hack around, I guess, Dad,” Harold said.

  “Hack around?” Charlie studied his son’s face. “Incidentally, how was the prom?” he asked him.

  “Oh—just a prom, Dad.”

  “You never showed us how you looked in your tuxedo,” Charlie said.

  “Didn’t I? Oh, well, I dressed over at Buck’s house, Dad.”

  “How did it fit?”

  “It fit okay—considering it was a rented deal.”

  “I suppose it’s foolish to ask if there was any change left over from the fifty,” Charlie said.

  “Gee, Dad, the fifty just about covered everything,” Harold said.

  “What kind of flowers did you get your girl?”

  “Flowers? Oh, they were some pink kind.”

  “In my day, if you really were crazy about the girl, you got her an orchid,” Charlie said. “That was the big deal. A big purple orchid. That really meant something.”

  “Yeah. Well, these were just flowers. Daffodils.”

  “Pink daffodils?”

  “I don’t know anything about flowers,” Harold said, reaching for a roll. “They were just some pink kind. I don’t know what they were. What do you keep bugging me about the flowers for?”

  “I’m not bugging you, Harold. I just—”

  Nancy was looking at Harold too, but in a different way. “Harold,” she said sharply, “where did you get that sweater?”

  “Hm? What sweater, Mom?”

  “The sweater you’re wearing, of course!”

  “I bought it,” he said.

  “With what?”

  “With my allowance,” he said. “Saved it up.”

  “That’s an expensive cashmere sweater! How did you save up that much from your allowance?”

  “Look, Nancy—” Charlie began.
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br />   “Oh, so I borrowed it,” Harold said with a shrug.

  “Borrowed the sweater or the money?”

  “The money—some of it. From Buck Holzer. Why is everybody bugging me?”

  “Borrowed it how?”

  “I just told you, Mom! From Buck Holzer.”

  “Borrowed it how!”

  “Don’t be so rough on him,” Charlie said. “Look, Harold, it’s always a bad practice to borrow money. You shouldn’t let—”

  “What do you mean you borrowed some of it?” Nancy said.

  “Lay off him, honey,” Charlie said gently.

  “Quiet! I want to know!”

  There was a pause, and then Harold said, “Gosh, Mom,” in a pained, almost whining voice. “Can’t I even borrow a little money for a sweater? Gosh, you always talk about all the nice things you had when you were a kid—and all the fun you used to have. Why can’t I have, any fun, Mom? Why can’t I have any nice things?”

  “My father happened to have a lot of money! Your father doesn’t!” she said.

  Charlie looked at Nancy, but her eyes were still fixed on Harold. Charlie sat there bewildered, dismayed, feeling stunned, at a loss—not just hurt, but dazed—to think that his wife could ever say a thing like that to his son in front of him.

  Nancy jumped up and left the table.

  “Gosh, Dad,” Harold said after a moment. “What do you suppose is bugging her?”