House Party

by Patrick Dennis

  As always, they would start out discussing jobs, children and the high cost of living. A little later they would begin to reminisce about parties and dances before the war, when they were younger and slimmer and filled with hope. Later there would be ribald stories, lusty jests and indiscriminate kissing. Still later there would be quarrels between husbands and wives and the Glorias and Barbaras and Patricias would drive silently back to their Christophers and Abigails and Deborahs and Michaels quartered with grandparents, while the Peters and Davids and Sandys dozed noisily in the back seat of Dad's car.

  Tomorrow there would be hangovers and grudging reconciliations and Peter and Gloria would ask one another how it was that David and Barbara and Sandy and Patricia managed to live so much better than they did on an even smaller income. Then, on the beach, they would discuss the best way to get Dad to increase their subsidy so that little Christopher or little Deborah could be enrolled in the same school for rich men's children where they had gone and thus keep their world safe from democracy for another generation.

  It was here, to the bar, that Kathy allowed herself to be led. She was relieved to see that Manning had followed. "Oh, Sandy, Peter!” she cried with a ridiculous twitch of the shoulders, "bringing me down to this hotbed of ma-ri-tal blisses and domesticity! I feel just like Jezebel dropping in on the Altar Guild!" They laughed appreciatively. Then she stuck her bottom out and they roared. If only I could stop doing this for a while, Kathy thought desperately. I'm running out of tricks. I'm not really a very funny girl in spite of what that ugly John Burgess says. Can't Manning see what I really want?

  Kathy was watching her drinks. Not only did she feel like not drinking, but she wanted to keep a clear head. Tonight was the night when Manning must make things quite clear; when things would have to be put on a proper footing. The boys picked her up and carried her in. "Hoop-la!" she screamed.

  The smoke looked blue and unreal in the orange light of the wagon wheel chandelier. What an un-imaginative room this was—plywood pine paneling, trite hunting prints in red frames, and the wagon-wheel fixture. It wasn't the sort of place where Manning Stone should be. Kathy felt it immediately. She also felt a marked hostility on the part of the young wives who sat disconsolately at the bar. Why? Kathy asked herself. What have I done? These girls are my friends. They're girls I grew up with. I was a bridesmaid at most of their weddings. I've gone out and bought crib sheets and silver cups for every one of their children. They've always asked me to their parties and given little dinners for me to meet their unattached men friends. Some of them have even asked me to take their husbands in hand during the summer. And now . . . "Put me down, you faaaascinating devils!" she screamed. She landed with a soft plop on one of the red leather bar stools.

  "What'll it be, Kathy?"

  "Absinthe," she said in her parody voice.

  "You know we don't have none of that stuff, Miss Kathy," the barman said, shocked.

  "Oh, very well, then, a little rye over ice." She wriggled exaggeratedly, with some pain, and considerable comic effect. The boys loved it.

  The room grew noisy again and she was relieved. The voices rose and fell around her.

  ". . . twelve hundred dollars a year it is now in the lower school at Miss Chapin's. Can you i-magine such a thing? And a waiting list, at that. When I took Abigail around I was absolutely . . ."

  ". . . three of us crammed into two rooms on Beekman Place. We've simply got to move, but the only places we could possibly afford are on the West Side or else in some dreary suburb like . . ."

  "More, more, more," Pinky Lawrence kept saying to the bartender. "I'll say when." Kathy noticed to her horror that her glass was being filled to the brim. Good Lord, Kathy thought, now I'm even a sensation with Elly's little friends. She could remember Pinky when he was still being diapered. But now he laid a moist hand on her bare back. "Drink up, old dear,” he whispered.

  "You drink it!" she cried. Snatching off her shoe, she filled it with the rye and two of the ice cubes and proffered it to him.

  Well, that was apparently so funny that the men at the bar were laid out cold. In the mirror she caught the stunned expression on Manning's face and watched him move a little closer to her.

  ". . . acting like a damned fool," she heard someone say. She winced when she realized that it was a girl whom she had once considered her best friend before marriage had separated them. Barbara, Kathy shouted silently, can't you see that this isn't really me? I'm not like this. You know I'm not. I'm not after your David—nice as he is. I only want a husband of my own, so I can be like you with children and problems and not enough money and . . .

  "Excuse me," she heard another voice say, "I think I'm going to be sick!" It was Felicia, who got up from the table where she was sitting with John Burgess and swept out of the room. As she passed Kathy, she gave her such a look of fury and contempt that Kathy felt rather sick herself. How like Felicia to try to hurt her just a little more when she was hurting so terribly much already!

  Almost automatically Kathy stuck her tongue out at Felicia's retreating back. That really did lay 'em in the aisles. Even the women joined in the general uproar. Well, nobody at the club had ever liked Felicia. Kathy shook hands with herself above her head and spun around on her bar stool. General applause! The only person who didn't seem to be amused was John Burgess. As Kathy's eyes reached his she saw the hurt look on his face. It made her feel terrible. They looked at each other for a second and then he glanced away. I wish I were dead, Kathy told herself. I wish I were dead . . . and buried . . . and rotted away. Manning, what's the matter with you? Don't you see now that I'm really your kind of girl?

  Manning felt acutely uncomfortable. To begin with, he didn't understand this Kathy. All day she'd really had him swinging. In the past he had been the one to call the turns and she had willingly acquiesced. Tonight, however, he was seeing Kathy in a different light. She didn't seem quite the cinch she had before; not this capering femme fatale. He didn't like this club or this room. Manning hated crowds and he hated crowds like this one—all these hearty, proper young men. They were out of the top drawer, no doubt about that, and square as window panes, every one of them. Not very bright, either.

  But among them Manning felt out of things—and he felt somehow suspect. They were on different wave lengths. He knew it and he knew that they knew it.

  Kathy's satin slipper, still half-filled with cold whiskey came his way. It was supposed to be a colossal joke. All the men at the bar were drinking from her slipper. Now he was expected to. Somehow he felt that the joke was on him. He saw Kathy looking at him and laughing with artistic abandon.

  Gazing steadily at her, he lifted the slipper and emptied it. He hated rye. It recalled those poor early days in the chorus when the Equity minimum was forty dollars and you could get a fair brand of blend for two bucks, but he downed it bravely. Then he went to Kathy and worked the wet slipper onto her foot. "Shall we get out of here, darling?" he asked suavely. Again he felt little and obscure and detestable among these men.

  "Yes," she whimpered hoarsely. "Yes. Now!"

  "Hey, Kathy! Come back!" one of the men shouted. "Kathy!” Then the chorus began. "We want Kathy! We want Kathy! We want Kathy!"

  At the door she turned and waved gaily. She didn't want to at all, but now that her big act was going to pay off, it was the least she could do for her invaluable audience. As she blew a burlesque kiss to the men at the bar, she saw John Burgess rise. Then he sat down again. Kathy felt Manning pulling her from the room and she followed him. This has got to be it, she kept saying to herself. I can’t keep this up much longer!

  19: Daybreak

  "Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine," Mrs. Ames counted aloud. She put down her brush to survey her gray hair hanging thickly over her shoulders and, recalling its ebony wonder of some years past, wondered if she might not follow Violet's lead and have it dyed. "No! One hundred." She dropped the brush wearily to the dressing table and climbed into bed.

>   It was half past two if the little crystal clock on her night table could be believed and Mrs. Ames was exhausted. Too exhausted to hang up her dress and her cape. Exhausted and not very happy. She supposed the party had gone well enough. Everyone—that is when everyone had finally been rounded up—had thanked her profusely. Betty Cannon had been especially polite and the general . . .

  "Good heavens!" Mrs. Ames said aloud. "

  The general." She got out of bed and scurried across the room to where her cape lay. In her exhaustion she'd forgotten entirely about the note he had pressed into her hand as he kissed it. There. Now she had it. It was scrawled on the back of a receipt from the local liquor store. Taking it back to bed, she squinted at the ill-formed writing. It read:

  Lovely lady,

  I’ll be waiting in your rose garden (in mufti) at four o'clock (sharp) this morning. I'll whistle for you.

  Yr. slave, Walter

  "Drunk!" Mrs. Ames said aloud. "Drunk or crazy, or both." She got back into bed. Well, Hell-for-Leather—Walter, of course, that really was his name—could whistle his lungs out for all she'd hear at four o'clock. He could even blow a siren without its disturbing her. But then he was obviously too drunk to remember. Mrs. Ames put the note onto her night table and wearily picked up her book.

  Mrs. Ames wanted passionately to turn off her lamp and go to sleep, but she had promised herself to read at least two pages of French every night and Mrs. Ames's promises—even those made to herself—were sacred things. Now she opened Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs and resumed the story which she did not altogether understand but felt certain that she disapproved of. At one time or another, Mrs, Ames had been able to keep the characters straight in her mind, but tonight Edouard and Laura and Vincent and Bernard and Olivier and Boris and Rachel and Alexandre and Sarah and Pauline and Georges were idiomatically allied against her.

  Tonight the weight of this house—its rooms and ornaments and grounds and eternal decay—oppressed her more than ever. She allowed her eyes to close and dreamed once again of that snug little apartment in town, just a bedroom and living room and kitchenette and a place to keep Nanny. Mrs. Ames would paint the walls Wedgwood blue and there would be this bed and the Adam table and the Sheraton sofa and the Dresden clock and . . . The book fell from her hands and she was asleep.

  It was almost three when she awoke with a start. "Yes?" she said.

  "It's Kathy," her daughter whispered from the hall. "May I come in?"

  "Yes, dear. What's the matter?"

  “Well," Kathy began, "what did you think?" She curled up on the bed beside her mother.

  "What did I think, dear?" Mrs. Ames said, patting Kathy's head. "Darling, don't put your shoes on the blanket cover. And those heels are much too high and . . . Heavens, darling, one of your slippers is sopping wet!"

  "Mother don't worry about things like that! What did you think of Manning? Mother, he wants to marry me. He sort of hinted at it once or twice before, but tonight—at the club—he came right out and asked me. He said he wanted to have a talk with you."

  "Oh dear," Mrs. Ames breathed.

  "But, Mother, you do like him, don't you?"

  "Like him? I hardly know him. He's very good looking, Kathy—handsome really—and awfully, well, awfully worldly."

  “Yes, he is, Mother. He's the most polished man I've ever met."

  "And, and, Kathy, do you feel that you are polished enough to . . ."

  "Mother!"

  "Well, Kath, I must say that your behavior so far this weekend hasn't encouraged me to think that you're quite ready to tussle with life as it's lived in the fleshpots of the French Riviera. Although I've never troubled to keep up much with the International Set except through Uncle Ned."

  "Now Mother, please don't start that."

  "Start what, darling?"

  "Start treating me like a great big girl scout."

  "Sometimes, Kathy, I wish you'd act a bit more like my great big girl scout—Daddy was so proud of all your merit badges—instead of carrying on like an outsized juvenile delinquent."

  "There you go, the eternal parent! I suppose you'd like me to be some goody-goody little suburban frump. What you really want is a little slavey, always sweet and kind and thoughtful and at your beck and call. You'd like me to be . . . to be another Betty Cannon!"

  "Well, Kath, you could do a lot worse. Betty Cannon is an exceptionally nice girl in spite of that horrid old father," Mrs. Ames carefully laid her book down over the general's note. "You've never been a little slavey and you've never been at my beck and call, but you always have been sweet and kind and thoughtful. In fact I suspect you still are—really."

  "Oh, Mother, that sort of thing is all so passé. Manning says . . ."

  "Kathy, at the risk of sounding like a book of maxims, I'd like to say that those more or less homely virtues aren't quite as old hat as, say, the performance you've been putting on lately. There are still a lot of Betty Cannons in this world and there's nothing so terribly wrong with being one. I was a Betty Cannon myself and I still am. Even Elly is a kind of disheveled Betty Cannon; a helter-skelter Betty Cannon. But the Manning Stones aren't always the best partners for the Betty Cannons . . ."

  "But I . . .”

  "After all, you've known one another for only a month or so. What do you really know about Manning Stone?"

  "Here we go!" Kathy snapped. "Here it comes. All that snobbish drivel about Ameses and Pruitts and distinguished old families and young, slippery fortune-hunters!"

  "Kathy! Don't put words in my mouth! I know some very nice Stones. Boston is full of them. And there was Bishop Manning. He's undoubtedly related—not that that would make the slightest difference to me. As for being a fortune-hunter—there's no longer any fortune to hunt for. I simply wonder if you know this man well enough to be certain that he's right for you."

  "But, Mother, I know Manning is. I'm not like Paul."

  "How odd, darling. I always thought you were."

  "Oh, you know what I mean, poor Paul so blinded by that flashy Devine girl that he . . ."

  "I don't know why you say that, Kathy. I thought she was very attractive and had lovely manners. I think your Mr. Stone is very attractive and has lovely manners, too."

  "It's not the same thing at all. Really, I don't know how you can be so simple. You're a woman! Can't you see that Claire is just after Paul because he's—well because he's an Ames and a Pruitt and social and our name means . . ."

  "Nothing snobbish about you, is there, Kath?"

  "Well, that's how you'd put it!" Kathy snapped.

  "How I'd put it? I haven't said one word, Kathy, and I do wish you'd stop this running free translation of what you think I'm thinking."

  "I don't suppose you've noticed that she's wearing Paul's ring,"

  "Yes, Kathy, your mother's eyes—except for needlework—are still fairly sharp. I noticed."

  "Well . . ."

  "It's an incredibly ugly ring. I remember when dear Papa had it. I suppose I'll have to go to the vault and get out something a little nicer for Paul. He certainly can't afford . . ."

  "Mother! Are you so stupid that . . ."

  "Lets try not to be too rude this evening, Kathy.”

  "I'm sorry. But anyway, Claire is pretty obvious—at least to me. She's nothing but a greedy little opportunist with a slick paint job and a lot of stylish clothes, who sees a way to get ahead with Paul. And she's inveigled him into falling in love with her so that she can further her own ends and . . ."

  "Whereas Manning Stone?"

  "Whereas Manning Stone loves me and wants to marry me!" Kathy shouted.

  "Not quite so loud please, dear. Then, as I see it, Kathy, you—of all my unexceptional children—are the one gifted with occult vision. Paul is wrong. Bryan and Elly don't even count. And you refuse to wait."

  "But Mother, don't you see that I'm tired of waiting."

  "I waited through a whole World War for your father."

  "That's different. Daddy w
as worth waiting for."

  "I thought so. Isn't Manning Stone?"

  "Yes. Yes, he is. I've never met a man quite like Manning."

  Tm sure of that."

  "But, Mother, I'll be thirty my next birthday. I'm getting old . . "

  "Old! At thirty?'

  "It's the beginning of being an old maid. Just like your Betty Cannon."

  "Kathy! Betty Cannon is barely twenty-five, and if it weren't for that wretched father of hers, she'd be . . ."

  "Mother, the point is this: I want my chance for happiness, too. I don't want to go through life as everybody's good old pal. I want to marry a man I love and one who loves me. I want to settle down and have babies—just as you did. But you won't listen to me! You make fun of me . . ."

  "Make fun of you, Kathy?"

  Kathy got off the bed, her eyes blazing. "You treat me like a baby. My happiness means nothing to you. You won't talk seriously to me and you'll refuse to talk to Manning. You're so unreasonable, so suspicious. As far as you're concerned I can just go on being . . ."

  "Kath-er-ine Ames! What have I to thank for this frontal attack? I sit here in the small hours reading this un-nat-u-ral book, wishing I could go to sleep when you come in and carry on like Ophelia I've said none of these things. You're saying them, darling. I simply introduced the not-very-astonishing statement that three weeks do not constitute a lifetime acquaintance and . . ."

  "And you said that I was just a little Elsie Dinsmore about to be seduced by a . . ."

  "The word 'seduce' never crossed my lips. I should certainly hope that you could take better care of yourself than that. Now stop forcing me into the role of heavy parent. If your Mr. Stone wishes to speak to me, of course he may. I should like to know him better before I give my blessing to your marriage, but even if I should forbid it and flounce out of the room—as you seem to think I shall—what possible difference could it make? As you point out, Kathy, you're very nearly thirty. You can do exactly as you please. Only, darling, I do want you to be happy. I want you to be sure, I don't want you to make a mistake."