“But where has he gone, Kay?” said Norine. “He hasn’t got an overcoat.” “Downstairs probably,” replied Kay matter-of-factly. “To have a drink with Russell.” This was the publisher’s reader. “I guess you’d better go home,” Kay continued. “He won’t come back till you’re all gone. I always used to be scared when he disappeared like that. I thought he was going to throw himself in the river. Then I found out that he went to Russell’s. Or over to Norine and Put’s.” Putnam nodded. “But he can’t be there,” he said simply. “Because we’re here.” They were all putting on their coats. “And his manuscript, Kay?” said Dottie, venturing a discreet reminder. “Oh,” said Kay. “Don’t worry. Bergler has a copy. And Walter Huston has one. And there’re three on file with Harald’s agent.” Kay, reflected Helena for the second time, had always been a “blurter.”
In the taxi, Helena and Dottie held a post-mortem. “Were you scared or did you guess?” asked Dottie. “I was scared,” said Helena. “Everyone in that room was gulled good and proper.” She grinned. “Except Kay,” said Dottie. “That’s funny,” she added after a moment. “Harald must have known Kay knew. That he had other copies, I mean.” Helena nodded. “Did he count on her silence?” Dottie wondered, in a voice that still sounded impressed. “And she betrayed him!” “She’s not a gangster’s moll,” said Helena shortly. “Would you have exposed him like that, in her place?” persisted Dottie. “Yes,” said Helena.
She was dourly composing a new version of the Class Notes. “Washington’s Birthday Report. Yestreen I saw Kay Strong Petersen’s new husband in Norine Schmittlapp Blake’s arms. Both were looking well, and Kay is expecting a promotion at Macy’s. Later in the evening the guests were treated to a ceremonial manuscript-burning. Kay served Fish House Punch, from an old colonial recipe. Kay and Harald have an elegant apartment in the East Fifties, convenient to the river, where Harald will be able to throw himself when his marriage goes ‘on the rocks.’ Re this, Anthropology major Dottie Renfrew opines that the little things, like lying, become so important in marriage. If she married a man who was a born liar, she would conform to his tribal custom. How about this, ’33? Write me your ideas and let’s have a really stimulating discussion.”
Six
THE MORNING AFTER KAY’S party, Helena was planning to breakfast with her father, who had arrived on the sleeper from Cleveland; they were going to do the silversmiths together for her mother’s anniversary present. She was to meet him at the Savoy Plaza, where he kept a bedroom and sitting room for the times when he was in New York on business; they gave him a special rate. Helena herself usually stayed at the Vassar Club in the Hotel New Weston, where her mother sometimes joined her, finding the atmosphere “suitable.” Mrs. Davison had the heart of an alumna, and it was a cross to her not to be eligible for the Women’s University Club in Cleveland, in which so many of her acquaintances were active and where she often figured as a guest. “I am not a university woman myself,” she would begin when invited by the Chair to comment on a lecture that trenched on one of her fields of interest. “I am not a college woman myself,” Helena would overhear her telling the Vassar Club secretary or some Class of ’10 alumna in the lounge at teatime, laying aside the current issue of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine with the confidence of a born speaker. Simply by clearing her throat, her mother could command an audience, of which only Helena was an unwilling constituent. “We are taking out a five-year membership for Helena at the Vassar Club here,” Mrs. Davison’s measured tones continued, “so that she can always have a place to go, a pied-à-terre, like her father’s in New York. ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ dontcha know.” Her mother’s “decisions,” especially those pertaining to Helena, were not simply announced, but promulgated. For this very reason, Helena was uncomfortable at the Vassar Club, which had come to seem to her like one of her mother’s purlieus, yet she continued to stay there, whenever she was in New York, because, as Mrs. Davison said, it was central, convenient, economical, and she could meet her friends in the lounge.
This morning the phone rang while she was still in the shower. It was not her father; it was Norine, calling from a pay station in a drugstore and declaring that she had to see Helena right away, as soon as Putnam had gone out. He was in the bathroom now, shaving. All Norine wanted from her, plainly, was the assurance that she was not going to tell anybody, but since Norine did not say this on the telephone, Helena could not say, either, that Norine did not have to worry. Instead, she found herself agreeing philosophically to come to Norine’s place and canceling her date with her father, who was quite put out; he could not see what was so urgent that it could not wait till afternoon. Helena did not specify; she never lied to her parents. She was unable to see, herself, to come down to brass tacks, why Norine couldn’t have met her for tea or a cocktail or lunch tomorrow. But when Helena had proposed this in her driest tones, there had been a silence on the other end of the wire, and then Norine’s clipped voice had said dully, “Never mind; forget it. I should have guessed you wouldn’t want to see me,” which had made Helena deny this and promise to come at once.
She did not look forward to the interview. Her light, mildly aseptic irony was wasted on Norine, who was unaware of irony and humorous vocal shadings; she listened only to the overt content of what was said and drew her own blunt inferences, as she had just now on the telephone. Under normal circumstances, Helena would have been interested to see Norine’s apartment, which Kay had described as a “sketch,” but right now she would have preferred to meet Norine in more impersonal surroundings—the Vassar Club lounge, for instance. She had no curiosity to hear whatever explanation or extenuation Norine, she supposed, was going to offer her, and it struck her as unjust that she should be haled to Norine’s place just because, through no fault of her own, she had witnessed something that was plainly none of her business. It was like the time her father had been haled into court because he had innocently witnessed a traffic accident; when those darned lawyers got through with him, he declared he had no character left.
Norine, at any rate, did not live in some remote part of Greenwich Village, as might have been expected. Her apartment was quite near the New Weston Hotel, on a pretty street a block east of the Lexington Avenue subway stop that had trees and private houses with window boxes, a block just as good as Kay’s block, if not somewhat better. This surprised Helena. She found Norine, dressed in an old pair of ski pants, a sweat shirt, and a man’s leather jacket, sitting on the front stoop of a yellow stucco house and anxiously scanning the street; her hand shaded her eyes. “Sister Ann, Sister Ann,” Helena, who knew most of the fairy tales in Grimm and Perrault by heart, muttered to herself, “do you see anyone coming?” Putnam’s bluish beard, a razored shadow on his white face, had caught her notice the night before. Sighting Helena, in her ocelot coat and bobbing Robin Hood cap with a feather, Norine waved and beckoned. “Put has just gone,” she reported. “You can come in.” She led Helena through an arched doorway into the ground floor of the house and past the open door of what appeared to be an office. The house, she explained, interrupting herself to call a greeting to someone unseen in the office, belonged to a firm of modern decorators, husband and wife, who had been hit by the depression; they lived on two floors upstairs and rented the garden apartment, which had formerly been a showroom, to Norine and Put; the top floor was rented to a secretary who worked for a law firm in Wall Street and doubled as a paid correspondent in divorce cases—“the Woman Taken in Adultery,” Norine appended with a terse laugh.
Norine had a husky, throaty, cigarette voice and talked continuously, emitting a jerky flow of information, like an outboard motor. She had been regarded as “nervous” by the medical staff senior year at college, and her abrupt, elliptical way of speaking, as if through a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke, had been developed at that time. When not leading a parade or working on the college newspaper or the literary magazine, she could be found off campus drinking Coca-Cola or coffee and baying out college song
s at a table at Cary’s with her cronies, all of whom had deep hoarse voices too. “Here’s to Nellie, she’s true blue; she’s a rounder through and through; she’s a drunkard, so they say; wants to go to Heav’n, but she’s going the other way.” Helena’s musically trained ear, unfortunately, could still hear those choruses and the thump of glasses that accompanied them after 3.2 beer was made legal; and she could remember seeing Kay, now and then, sitting with those gruff Huskies and adding her true voice, harmonizing, to their ensemble, putting ashes into her coffee, as they did, to see if it would give them a “lift” and playing a game they had invented of who could think of the worst thing to order: two cold fried eggs with chocolate sauce. Norine’s chief interest at college had been journalism; her favorite course had been Miss Lockwood’s Contemporary Press; her favorite book had been The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens; her favorite art had been photography, and her favorite painter, Georgia O’Keeffe. Up until senior year, she had been one of the overweight girls, given to Vassar “Devils,” a black fudgey mixture that Helena had never so much as tasted, and to trips to the Cider Mill, where doughnuts were served with cider; Helena and her friends bicycled to the Silver Swan, because the name reminded them of madrigals, or dined with a faculty member at the Vassar Inn, where they always ordered the same thing: artichokes and mushrooms under glass. But now Norine, like Kay, had grown thin and tense. Her eyes, which were a light golden brown, were habitually narrowed, and her handsome, blowzy face had a plethoric look, as though darkened by clots of thought. She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention. All her statements, cursory and abbreviated, had a topical resonance, even when she touched on the intimate; today she made Helena think of the old riddle of the newspaper—black and white and red all over. She spoke absently and with an air of preoccupation, as though conducting a briefing session from memorized notes.
“Your loyalties lie with her; I know it,” she threw out over her shoulder as they came into the apartment. The barking of a dog in the garden rerouted the train of her ideas. “There’s a bitch in heat upstairs,” she said with a jerk of her head, “and we keep Nietzsche chained to prevent miscegenation.” Her short, monosyllabic laugh came out like a bark. This laugh, of the type called “mirthless,” was only a sort of punctuation mark, Helena decided—an asterisk indicating that Norine’s attention had been flagged by one of her own remarks. Norine went on now, like some gruff veterinarian, to narrate the mating history of the dog upstairs, shunting off, via a parenthesis, to the mating history of its owners. Norine’s language had roughened since she had been married; it was not clear to Helena whether the poodle or the wife of the landlord was the “bitch upstairs” who was going to have an operation on her Fallopian tubes. “Both,” said Norine shortly. “Margaret’s tubes are obstructed. That’s why she can’t conceive. She’s going to have them blown out. Insufflation. Liza’s tubes are going to be tied up. They do it now instead of spaying. That way, she can still enjoy sex. Have some coffee.”
Helena looked around the apartment. It was painted black, so as not to show the dirt, she would have presumed if Norine had been practical. But doubtless the color was a banner or slogan of some kind, as in Putnam’s shirt, though a puzzling one to Helena, since black, she had always understood, was the color of reaction, of clerical parties and fascists. The kitchen was part of the living room, and the sink was full of unwashed dishes. Above it was a long shelf with cottage-cheese glasses, jelly glasses, plates, and cans of food, chiefly soups and evaporated milk. French doors tacked with orange theatrical gauze led to the garden. Along one wall, on either side of a white brick fireplace, were bookcases made of orange crates lined with folded black oilcloth and containing pamphlets, small magazines, and thin volumes of poetry. There were few full-size books, except for Marx’s Capital, Pareto, Spengler, Ten Days That Shook the World, Axel’s Castle, and Lincoln Steffens. Across the room, a big lumpy studio bed was covered with a black velveteen spread and piled with orange oilcloth cushions rudely stitched on a sewing machine and coming apart at the corners. On the black-and-white linoleum floor was a very dirty polar-bear rug. Below the sink stood a dog’s dish with some half-eaten food. On the walls were framed reproductions of Georgia O’Keeffe’s vulval flowers and of details from murals by Diego Rivera and Orozco and framed Stieglitz photographs of New York City slum scenes. There were two steel lamps with improvised shades made of typewriter paper, a card table, and four collapsible bridge chairs. On the card table were a toaster, a jar of peanut butter, an electric curling iron, and a hand mirror; Norine had evidently begun to curl her fine blond hair and stopped midway through, for the hair on one side of her head was frizzed in a sort of pompadour and on the other hung loose. This sense of an operation begun and suspended midway was the keynote, Helena decided, of the apartment. Someone, probably Norine’s husband, had tried to introduce method and order into their housekeeping: beside the icebox, on a screen, was an old-fashioned store calendar with the days crossed off in red pencil; next to the calendar was a penciled chart or graph, with figures, which, Norine explained, was their weekly budget. On a spike driven into the wall by the stove were their grocery slips and other receipts; on the drain-board, a milk bottle was half full of pennies, which Norine said were for postage.
“Put makes us keep a record of every two-cent stamp we buy. He got me a little pocket notebook, like his, for my birthday, to write down items like subway fares so I can transfer them at night to the budget. We do the accounts every night, before we go to bed. That way, we know where we are every day, and if we spend too much one day, we can economize on the next. All I have to do is look at the graph. Put’s very visual. Tonight I’ll be short a nickel—the one I used to call you. He’ll take me back, step by step, over my day and say, ‘Visualize what you did next,’ till he can locate that nickel. He’s nuts about accuracy.” A brief sigh followed this eulogy, which had caused Helena’s eyebrows to rise in disapproval; she had been given her own bank account at the age of ten and taught to keep her own check stubs. “Let me supply the nickel,” she said, opening her pocketbook. “Why don’t you make him give you an allowance?” Norine ignored the question. “Thanks. I’ll take a dime if you don’t mind. I forgot. I called Harald first to find out where you were staying.” The click of the dime on the card table underscored the silence that fell. The two girls looked each other in the eyes. They listened to the dog bark.
“You never liked me at college,” Norine said, pouring coffee and offering sugar and evaporated milk. “None of your crowd did.” She sank into a bridge chair opposite Helena and inhaled deeply from her cigarette. Knowing Norine and feeling this to be a lead sentence, Helena did not contradict. In reality, she did not “mind” Norine, even now; ever since she had heard about the bookkeeping, she felt a kind of sympathy for the big frowsy girl, who reminded her of a tired lioness caged in this den of an apartment, with that other animal chained in the garden and the flattened polar bear on the linoleum. And at college she and Norine had worked together quite amicably on the literary magazine. “You people were the aesthetes. We were the politicals,” Norine continued. “We eyed each other from across the barricades.” This description appeared to Helena fantastic; the scholar in her could not allow it to pass. “Isn’t that a rather ‘sweeping statement,’ Norine?” she suggested with a “considering” little frown shirring and ruching her forehead in the style of the Vassar faculty. “Would you call Pokey an aesthete? Or Dottie? Or Priss?” She would have added “Kay” but for an unwillingness to name her casually this morning or to seem to discuss her with Norine. “They didn’t count,” replied Norine. “The ones who counted were you and Lakey and Libby and Kay.” Norine had always been an expert on who “counted” and who did not. “You were Sandison. We were Lockwood,” pursued Norine somberly. “You were Morgan. We were Marx.” “Oh, pooh!” cried Helena, almost angry. “Who was ‘Morgan’?” In her cool character the only passion yet
awakened was the passion for truth. “The whole group was for Roosevelt in the college poll! Except Pokey, who forgot to vote.” “One less for Hoover, then,” remarked Norine. “Wrong!” said Helena, grinning. “She was for Norman Thomas. Because he breeds dogs.” Norine nodded. “Cocker spaniels,” she said. “What a classy reason!” Helena agreed that this was so. “All right,” Norine conceded after a thoughtful pause. “Kay was Flanagan, if you want. Priss was Newcomer. Lakey was Rindge. I may have been oversimplifying. Libby was M.A.P. Smith, would you say?” “I guess so,” said Helena, yawning slightly and glancing at her watch; this kind of analysis, which had been popular at Vassar, bored her.
“Anyway,” Norine said, “your crowd was sterile. Lockwood taught me that. But, God, I used to envy you!” This confession embarrassed Helena. “Dear me, why?” she inquired. “Poise. Social savvy. Looks. Success with men. Proms. Football games. Junior Assemblies. We called you the Ivory Tower group. Aloof from the battle.” Helena opened her mouth and closed it; this view of the group was so far from the facts that she could not begin to correct it; she herself, for instance, had no particular looks and had never been to a college football game (Mrs. Davison despised “spectator” sports) or a prom, except at Vassar, where she had had to make do with Priss Hartshorn’s brother for a “man.” But she was not going to be drawn by Norine into a counter-confession; she supposed, moreover, that if you rolled the whole group into one girl, she would be what Norine said—a rich, assured, beautiful bluestocking. “You mean Lakey,” she said seriously. “She summed up the group. Or what Miss Lockwood would call its ‘stereotype.’ But nobody was really like her. We were her satellites. Old Miss Fiske used to say that we ‘shone in her reflected light.’” “Lakey had no warmth,” asserted Norine. “She was inhuman, like the moon. Do you remember the apples?”
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