The Loving Couple

by Patrick Dennis

  Randy spent five years in Mr. Bessamer's service; spent them in Europe and Palm Beach and Mexico City and in Mr. Bessamer's delicate apartment on Park Avenue. In that time Randy managed to acquire quite a lot of things. His accent vanished and a new, terribly refined one cropped up in its place. His eighth grade education was supplemented by a good deal of superficial knowledge of things fashionable—how to order dinner, what the better hotels were in London, what was being worn on the Côte d'Azure, how much to tip, important facts like that. His wardrobe expanded and grew, for Mr. Bessamer liked to see a well dressed man almost as much as a well undressed one. The only thing Randy did not manage to accumulate was money. Generous as he was, Mr. Bessamer was very close with a buck and the largest amount he ever gave Randy in cash was five dollars. So Randy's only recompense was excellent room and board, good clothes and stylish surroundings. That had seemed enough.

  However, Randy had one failing, hazardous to his position; Randy preferred women. In his years with Mr. Bessamer Randy had been cautious, crafty, furtive in his affairs with females. There had been quick encounters with chambermaids and hurried trips to bordellos coincidental with Mr. Bessamer's visits to the barber, the tailor, the podiatrist and they had been almost satisfactory to Randy until Mr. Bessamer placed true temptation in his way.

  Randy's downfall occurred during his fifth year as Mr. Bessamer's companion, concurrent with the visit of Mr, Bessamer's niece. Mr. Bessamer's niece was named Besame, a name which made Mr, Bessamer shudder and rail at Besame's vulgar mother. But otherwise Mr. Bessamer adored the girl. She was sixteen, precocious, sophisticated and perfectly beautiful. Miss Bessamer had descended on her uncle's unusual menage to spend her spring vacation from Miss Spaulding's School for Girls. Mr. Bessamer was delighted. Randy was delighted. The three of them spent a jolly week eating sumptuous meals, buying Besame pretty dresses, going to the theatre and attending night clubs appropriate to a subdebutante of sixteen, where Randy and Besame danced while Mr. Bessamer happily drummed a pudgy hand on the tablecloth in time to the music. Five idyllic evenings had been passed thus. But on the sixth night Mr. Bessamer really had to be excused. It was a board meeting of the boys' club and Mr. Bessamer was very interested in the boys.

  "Behave yourselves, you young people," Mr. Bessamer had said with a kittenish wag of the finger as he departed, "I'll be back at eleven and perhaps we can all run over to La Rue." Gaily whistling "Sheep May Safely Graze," Mr. Bessamer stepped into the elevator.

  Unfortunately, a severe twinge of heartburn overtook Mr. Bessamer during the meeting. At half-past-nine he stepped out of the elevator, quietly opened the apartment door to discover his niece and his protege behaving themselves most carnally on his brocade bedspread.

  Mr. Bessamer gasped. Mr. Bessamer shrieked. Mr. Bessamer screamed. Then Mr. Bessamer fell forward clutching at his heart. He writhed and wriggled and made terribly croaking, strangulated noises. By the time Randy and Besame had flung on their clothes and summoned the doctor, Mr. Bessamer was dead. Heart attack.

  A codicil in Mr. Bessamer's will left five thousand dollars to "my faithful companion, Randolph Carter Lee." All the rest went to "my beloved niece, Besame Bessamer of Milwaukee, Wisconsin." Mr. Bessamer's brother flew on from Milwaukee and got Randy out of the apartment so fast that Randy had hardly time to pack up his own belongings, let alone a few of his late patron's. Miss Besame Bessamer was hustled off to a school in Switzerland after a forced confession to her outraged father—and after making absolutely certain that she wasn't pregnant. The father had a number of home truths to deliver to Randy concerning his behavior with both his daughter and his late brother. Randy countered with a few home truths of his own and threatened to talk, but a tough family lawyer dissuaded him from any such action by describing, rather picturesquely, the penalty for blackmail. And so Randy went his own way with a measly five grand, Besame went to Switzerland with the swag and the surviving Bessamer brother started back for Milwaukee only to perish in an airplane crash over the Great Lakes. But Randy was so disgruntled that not even the headlines describing the Milwaukee brewer's tragic end managed to cheer him up.

  At twenty-one with looks, clothes, manners and a five-thousand-dollar sinking fund, Randy might have begun a new way of life, but he had had no business experience, other than two days in a bath house, little formal education and even less ambition. Nor did the money last long. After five years of the high life, he was unable to economize. Within six months he was back in the companion business again, devoting his talents almost exclusively to women. There had been a Mrs. Gilchrist who had pink-dyed hair and a house in Sutton Place. But she also had two stuffy, muscular sons who sent Randy packing within a year.

  His next stop was with a Mrs. Barrett, whom he picked up in the Barberry Room. She had brown-dyed hair and a penthouse and, it developed, a fearful temper when she caught him trying to seduce her married daughter. Then there was that attractive Mrs. Brewster for a whole summer, but her husband returned from duty at sea and that ended that.

  Randy had spent a season in Mexico with a perfect virago known locally as Señora Mulcahey. Then he was named as corespondent in a divorce case in Hollywood. Next came a very brief affair with a successful English dramatist whose play was packing them in at the Alvin Theatre, but the poor young man was deported for moral turpitude and Randy was once again at loose ends. A Mrs. Miller brought surcease, and a trip to Bermuda, for a while, but she, too, dropped Randy when she discovered him in an infidelity. Then there had been three lean months of living in a cheap rooming house that was so grim that only a dalliance with the pretty file clerk next door made life possible. But the file cleric got pregnant and there was perfect hell to pay. Then came a time of cruising the Bird Circuit and then finally Grace.

  Grace wasn't exactly what Randy was accustomed to. Grace was a broken-down actress of most minor sort, although she still considered herself somewhat greater than Eleanora Duse. Grace had given up acting—except around the apartment—and was married to a dolt named Herbert, who covered the New England territory for a hosier)' manufacturer. They had extremely limited means. Randy was now living with them as a "boarder" and as Grace's "promising young actor protege." But Herbert was getting less and less convinced that Randy was taking dramatic lessons from Grace. Every time Herbert came back from the road he was gruffer and gruffer with Randy and he had finally come right out and asked Randy to move on. And Randy was ready to move on, too. Grace was much too demanding. She was wearing him out. Randy had begun to long for dreary old Herbert to get back to town. And Grace was miserly, too. Ten bucks for a pair of shoes! And all of Grace's intellectual and artistic pretensions!

  No, Randy would have to find something new and he'd have to find it right away. If Fran Hollister wasn't going to be his next hostess, he'd try for her little friend. Maybe this girl didn't have Fran's millions, but from her dress, her hat, her furs, her jewelry there was something there. Didn't she live at Riveredge? And she was a looker, too. Whatever she was, she was about twice as rich as Grace, about half as old and about a thousand times as attractive. She liked him, too. He could tell. No, she'd do until something big came along.

  Running a hand over his hair, the Virginia gentleman unlocked the bathroom door and moved gracefully toward the living room to rejoin the party.

  Sitting alone in the parlor of Fletcher Mackenzie's suite, she tried to orient herself, to decide just what had happened to her during the day. First of all, she had lost a husband. He was gone forever and she was just as glad. At least she supposed she was. If she had ever cared for him—and, oh yes, she had when she was younger and more naive than she was today—she didn't any longer. As of today she was her own free agent. She could come and go as she pleased and with whom she pleased. She could even take a lover. She wondered what that would be like. She'd never had a lover. But it certainly sounded romantic. Romantic and practical. When they got sick of each other then they could just go their own ways. No lawyers or property settlements
or anything like that to worry about.

  Yes, she'd get a quiet divorce; take nothing from him; lease a little flat here in town; do it up in turquoise blue, she guessed, and probably Biedermeyer furniture; get a job or maybe even open a shop of her own; and have lots and lots of different beaux and, maybe eventually, a lover. She thought about Randolph Carter Lee and wondered if he'd be interested in her.

  There was a slight scuffling and a gasping sound from the pantry. Yes, now she was practically sure that Fran and Fletch were having an affair. Well, when she had her affair she certainly wasn't going to be groping around out in a pantry when there were guests in the house! Then she felt that she was being unbearably prim and laughed at herself.

  She wished everybody would come back. She hated being alone. She wanted to be with people tonight and be very, very gay.

  She looked around the room. There were three photographs on the desk in slightly tarnished silver frames. One, the largest, looked like Fletch wearing a frightful wig and a diamond tiara. His mother, undoubtedly. The second portrayed two little girls who looked disastrously like Fletch. They were the daughters by his first marriage. The third was a boxer bulldog that looked exactly like Fletch. That was the dog by his second marriage.

  My, Mary thought, how lucky that my baby was never born. But she didn't really mean it. Now I'm getting morose, she thought. She took a sip of her brandy and let it trickle hotly and slowly down her throat. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up and there was the Virginia gentleman smiling down at her.

  "Hello,” she said, and she trembled very slightly.

  "Hello," Randy said. "Mind if I sit down?"

  "Please do," she said, moving over just enough so that he would have to sit very close to her.

  He sat down next to her and without a word lighted two cigarettes and gave her one. She didn't much feel like smoking a cigarette but the gesture was so lovely—she halfway remembered having seen somebody do it in a movie years ago—that she took it. Wordlessly she smiled at him and he took her hand in his. She wondered what she should do next, if anything. She did nothing.

  There was the sound of a glass crashing in the pantry. "Jesus, Fletch," Fran snapped, "don't do that when I've got my back turned!"

  In a minute Fran and Fletch were back in the room. Fletch looked very red and very flustered. "Oh, ah, um, ahem," he said.

  "Come on," Fran said. "I'm sick of sitting around this dump. Let's all drink up and get the hell over to the Chandelier."

  "Oh, yes," she echoed, with a stab at gaiety. "Let's all do drink up and get the hell over to the Chandelier!"

  Seven

  As nightclubs went, Chandelier was as firmly established as the Metropolitan Museum. Housed in a large, lofty old building which had once served as a showroom for tombstones and rather elaborate funerary statuary, it had been Chandelier for twenty-five years. Through long endurance and careful press agentry, the Chandelier had become synonymous with Elegance, Money and Taste, although the Chandelier management lacked all three attributes. The place had become an institution. (Happily the unfortunate shooting that took place there in 1936 had been largely forgotten). New York mothers would allow their subdebutante daughters to go to Chandelier, whereas they vetoed the Stork Club or El Morocco. Fairfield, Westchester and Suffolk Counties attended regularly. The place had developed such a reputation for catering to quiet New York Society, rather than free-spending out-of-town buyers, that Chandelier had been forced to develop its own quota system—one socialite (or someone who looked like a socialite) for every three butter and egg men admitted.

  The place was named for a large central fixture of crystal and ormolu, said to have come from a Hapsburg palace, but actually purchased cheap from the wreckers of an old theatre in Schenectady. The exterior was painted an uncompromising black with a highly compromising white trim. The inside was done up with midnight blue walls, red plush divans and a carpet with an interesting all-over pattern of cigarette burns. It hadn't been painted, cleaned or properly aired since V-J day. Every year the room grew dingier, the chandelier dimmer until now a Seeing-Eye dog and a Braille edition of the menu were almost essential. But that's the way the steady customers liked it. Chandelier was a home away from home.

  Although management served food of sorts, trundled through an underground tunnel from the medium-priced restaurant next door and dished up at five-hundred-percent increase, few meals were ordered and the lazy waiters looked askance—and rather hurt—if anyone called for dinner or even supper. Deserted at seven, sparsely settled at eight, active at nine and teeming by ten, the Chandelier depended almost exclusively on the proceeds of its bar to pay the staff salaries and the overpriced, over-rated entertainers for which the place was famous.

  It was just nine when Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Marshall entered with their party. Things were going perfectly according to the long-established Saturday night schedule. An unfashionable family from Jackson Heights were overspending their annual reunion at a table for twelve—and a very bad table it was, adorned with wilting ferns and silverware engraved with the names of defunct restaurants. An equally dowdy birthday party was going on at an equally undesirable table and a supercilious waiter had just carried in a large birthday cake, wincing at the half-hearted chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" sung a cappella by the embarrassed revelers. Two college kids, obviously watching their pennies, sat at a minuscule divan table making desultory conversation and trying to nurse their drinks until the floor show and a pair of honeymooners from Scranton, self-conscious of the newness of their clothes, were being served an inferior bottle of domestic champagne on the house.

  The orchestra was playing gems from The Boys from Syracuse with the same, relentless beat-beat-beat they had used the season when The Boys from Syracuse opened. The waiters had just stopped examining their cuticles and gossiping in Greek and now began fluttering around their stations. Nine o'clock was the witching hour, the time when Chandelier came to life.

  The headwaiter guided the Marshalls and their guests to three different tables before Alice found the one she liked. He privately considered them as frumpy looking a foursome as he'd seen in some years, yet he knew that it was on just solid, genteel people that Chandelier built its reputation, if not its fortune. He also knew that Whitney and Beth Martin were sufficiently prominent to rate a ringside table, even if she looked like a sad, brown cow in her maternity evening dress and even if the overbearing woman with her looked like a comic valentine.

  As Alice had an instinct for what was appropriate to the country, she also knew what was appropriate to town. Alice felt, perhaps incorrectly, that her height and weight, her large head and imperious beak of a nose were best set off by rich fabrics and long, sweeping skirts. One dressed for town, Alice said. No Theatre Guild Subscription Thursday, no trip to a mediocre French restaurant with Fred's clients, no little dinner in Gramercy Park with Dr. Needles and his mistress was complete without long gloves, long skirts, Granny's garnets and a towering structure which Alice called a Dinner Hat. Alice in brocade and osprey—shrouded in a mackintosh, with hei glasses on the end of her nose and her fur cape on the seat beside her—racing to the New York-bound train in the Jeepster was a familiar twilight sight in Riveredge. At the same time, Fred would be furtively changing into dinner clothes behind the glass walls of his office, sick with apprehension at every distant rattle of the cleaning woman's pail, dropping his studs and twisting his suspensory. But the Marshalls made an awe-inspiring sight when they swept forth in full evening regalia.

  Tonight Alice was resplendent in her old black maternity evening skirt with a new smocked jacket of electric blue satin and a feathered helmet to match. She sat down grandly and noted for the third time that Beth Martin looked rather dumpy and very pregnant in her brown silk. "How badly dressed most women in New York are," Alice said loudly, surveying the uniform black and pearls of the other women in the room. She positively sneered at a golden blonde in golden sable. "So few women re
ally know how to wear furs nowadays," Alice said, patting the chain of crushed animals that lay across her shoulders. The gesture unsettled her fur piece and it slithered to the floor with a sad little plop.

  "Oh, listen, Whit," Beth Martin said, "there's our song!" The orchestra was bouncing out "Night and Day" in its set of gems from The Gay Divorcee, "Whit and I got engaged here. Didn't we, dear?" Beth asked with a sweet, shy smile.

  “Yes, dear," Whitney Martin said with a dazzling array of teeth.

  "How nice," Alice said and condemned them silently for nawkish sentimentality, even though Beth and Whit Martin were the right sort.

  Alice was more than a little put out this evening. She had telephoned her sister time and time again, letting the phone jangle for ten, twenty, thirty rings. She'd called Central and complained and had learned—although she didn't quite believe it—that the telephone was in perfect order. Then she'd driven over to her sister's house and rung the bell for, it seemed, hours. There was no sign of life. She'd tried the back door with equal lack of success.

  Then Alice had decided that the poor girl had Done Something Drastic. She'd put in a call to the gate keeper and forced him to force an entrance into the house. He'd put up a lot of resistance to this suggestion, but no one could hold out long against Alice—not if he knew what was good for him. So they had burst in through the cellar door. Alice had examined the house from the bottom up and then down again. There was no odor of gas, no limp body swinging from the rafters, no faint scent of bitter almonds.

  Alice was, if anything, a little disappointed to have found that her sister was simply and undramatically not at home. In her embarrassment she gave the man a quarter for his pains and resolved to have words with her sister for causing so much trouble.

  "Would you care to dance, Alice . . . dear?" Fred Marshall interrupted her thoughts. He didn't like dancing, but he knew that he'd have to ask her.