by Kerr, Jean;
She is, as I say, exceptional. I was all the more surprised, then, to meet her in Schumacher’s last week on what was her seventh visit to that establishment for the purpose of selecting an upholstery fabric for one wing chair. Gone was that brave air of decision and dispatch. Before me, adrift in a sea of samples, sat a broken figure pathetically waving swatches of damask and asking advice from total strangers.
To avoid this sort of thing it is helpful to get the advice of a decorator. There is, in fact, nothing in the world like a good, first-rate professional decorator to convince a normal woman that she knows exactly what she wants to do with her own living room. The decorator invariably arrives with a notebook and an air of chilly preoccupation. He tiptoes cautiously around That Tragic Error, your living room, and finally flashes a sudden, sympathetic smile that seems to say, “Thank God you called me. Another month and it might have been too late.”
Then he speaks: “My dear, you have a small, dark room with very poor fenestration. I see pale, silver ash.” And you say, “What do you mean, pale, silver ash—gray? It is gray. It’s been gray for fifteen years.” You nerve yourself. “I thought turquoise—with maybe a touch of pink.”
At the mention of the word “turquoise” a look of such pain washes over his face as to suggest that he is suffering a sudden gall-bladder attack. When he has pulled himself together he speaks quietly and with great patience: “But my dear lady, you do want a room that is outgoing?” “Yes, yes,” you say, “of course—naturally—I want a room that’s outgoing, but couldn’t it also be something—well, different?”
He dismisses this question with the contempt it deserves and marches over to your small, charming fireplace. He taps it with his pencil. “Victorian, of course.” “Oh, yes,” you burble helpfully, “it is perfect Victorian. That fireplace is really the reason we bought this house in the first place.” “Well”—his manner is now brisk and to the point—“we won’t have any trouble with that. We can just rip it out and put in sheetrock.” And it’s right here you decide that what’s going to be outgoing in this room is that decorator.
At this juncture you may be tempted to ask your husband for advice. Don’t. Husbands as a class have two different approaches to home decoration. First, there is the constructive but useless attitude: “Blue is such a pretty color, why don’t you make everything blue?” Then there is the destructive but useless attitude: “Oh, do what you want, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t have a lot of bloodshot petunias hanging all over the place like your sister Helen.”
With such a man there is no point in explaining that those petunias are, in fact, carnations and that they repose on a hand-screened English linen that costs $18.75 a yard.
You might look for help in the tonier magazines, although the pretty people in those four-color layouts don’t seem to live like the rest of us. In the first place, they apparently spend all their time out on terraces or patios where they are photographed reclining in redwood chairs or chastely broiling filets over expensive braziers. This outdoor life is undoubtedly sensible. How else would they get the strength and vigor necessary for springing out of that curious low furniture they keep in the living room?
I do realize that most people nowadays—certainly all people of taste and distinction—live in ranch-type houses with three glass walls and one brick wall and a huge green plant where the fireplace should be. But wouldn’t you think that some adventurous magazine would give an occasional nod to the few stragglers in every community who still live in ordinary houses with porches and pillars and dining rooms and things like that?
Once in a while you do see a picture of an attractive traditional room. Just last month I came across a room done entirely in sea-foam green and chalk white. The only color accents were one red apple and a bright red magazine on the coffee table. It was lovely. Of course, you would have to be continually replacing that apple, and down through the years somebody would be bound to inquire why you were still hanging onto that 1935 copy of Charm. Then there are those “How To” pieces. I read a splendid one some time ago entitled “There Are Treasures in Your Attic.” It was accompanied by a tantalizing series of pictures which demonstrated how a number of enterprising women had transformed forgotten monstrosities—dilapidated furniture, old nail kegs, that sort of thing—into “Conversation Pieces.”
One canny lady rescued a battered dresser belonging to her great-grandfather and hacked it into three sections. The bottom section she covered with plywood and parchment paper to make a very quaint coffee table (“quaint” was the word they used). The middle piece, after it had been sanded and pickled and equipped with cunning little brass handles, became a night table. And the top section, a drawer with a mirror over it, was sanded and stained and hung in the entrance hall.
In this way she had three conversation pieces. She may even have gone too far. As I see it, when this giddy carpenter has guests to the house they never will get around to the important topics—like the weather or the Dodgers. They’ll spend the whole long night talking about the furniture.
Anyway, after I’d finished the article I was so filled with guilt at the thought of the marvels lying fallow above me that I sprained my ankle racing up to the attic. What I found there was one file cabinet and an infant’s crib. If I’d had two file cabinets I might have painted them with radiator paint, trimmed them with decals, placed them side by side and I’d have had a small but adorable breakfront. However, I defy House and Garden or anybody else to do anything with an infant’s crib except put an infant in it.
To get back to those old nail kegs. Did you know that, properly treated, they’d make a charming pair of end tables for a rumpus room? If, for one reason or another, you shouldn’t happen to have any old nail kegs in your attic, you can buy them—with the nails—for $19.50 apiece, which is only a little more than you’d pay for an ordinary end table and then, of course, you’ll have all those nails.
Unquestionably, some people do have more imagination than others. A friend of mine, for instance, owned an old bed with huge hand-carved posts. She sawed off one of the posts, had it wired, and bought an expensive raw silk lampshade for it. This was a conversation piece. All of her friends commented on it. They said, “Good Lord, Peggy, isn’t that a bedpost and aren’t you even going to paint it or something?”
It does no good, incidentally, to pour out your decorating problems to your friends. They always respond with some practical suggestion like “If I were you, Grace, I’d leave it just the way it is until the children are grown.”
As a matter of fact, a neighbor of mine took this piece of advice. She waited until the children were grown and married, and then she invested in her heart’s desire—a new white rug beneath salmon-pink hangings. I was over there the other day. On the new white rug beneath the salmon-pink hangings she was entertaining her five grandchildren, their boxer dog, and four turtles.
But we are digressing. Even if you are going to re-do your living room, you’ll probably have to put up with most of the furniture you already have, including that sturdy sofa you bought in 1923, the month after the twins were born. Therefore, it will be mostly a matter of slipcovers, drapes, and paint.
When you go to pick out fabrics, it is sometimes easier to go to a large department store where nobody will ever wait on you. This way you are left alone for hours to mull over rolls and rolls of fabric. In a regular fabric house you get such excellent and individual attention that it is practically impossible to make a selection.
Whereas you just want to prowl around and look and be left alone with your samples and your memories, they want to help you. By the time the salesman has graciously and tenderly arranged twenty-eight samples on the austere rack in front of your armchair, you begin to get a feeling of mounting panic that you are never going to like anything and that this lovely man is going to know you for the failure you are.
In this situation, I find it very helpful to divert the salesman. I usually say, “Yes, it’s lovely, lovely—but I have to
consider how it will go with my pink grand piano.”
The salesman is now definitely diverted. In fact, he is shaken to his foundations. In a moment or so he will be suggesting, in a strained voice, “Lady, the racks are over there—why don’t you just look?” And you do go look, while he takes up a watchful post near the telephone, ready to summon help at a moment’s notice.
In due time you will have selected material for your slipcovers, picked out a darker color for the drapes and a lighter color for the walls, and dropped the whole confusing assortment at an upholsterer’s. One day seven months later everything arrives, and it’s beautiful, beautiful—or maybe it isn’t. You can always do it over again in eighteen or nineteen years.
Dogs that have known me
I never meant to say anything about this, but the fact is that I have never met a dog that didn’t have it in for me. You take Kelly, for instance. He’s a wire-haired fox terrier and he’s had us for three years now. I wouldn’t say that he was terribly handsome but he does have a very nice smile. What he doesn’t have is any sense of fitness. All the other dogs in the neighborhood spend their afternoons yapping at each other’s heels or chasing cats. Kelly spends his whole day, every day, chasing swans on the millpond. I don’t actually worry because he will never catch one. For one thing, he can’t swim. Instead of settling for a simple dog-paddle like everybody else, he has to show off and try some complicated overhand stroke, with the result that he always sinks and has to be fished out. Naturally, people talk, and I never take him for a walk that somebody doesn’t point him out and say, “There’s that crazy dog that chases swans.”
Another thing about that dog is that he absolutely refuses to put himself in the other fellow’s position. We have a pencil sharpener in the kitchen and Kelly used to enjoy having an occasional munch on the plastic cover. As long as it was just a nip now and then, I didn’t mind. But one day he simply lost his head and ate the whole thing. Then I had to buy a new one and of course I put it up high out of Kelly’s reach. Well, the scenes we were treated to—and the sulking! In fact, ever since he has been eating things I know he doesn’t like just to get even. I don’t mean things like socks and mittens and paper napkins, which of course are delicious. Lately he’s been eating plastic airplanes, suede brushes, and light bulbs. Well, if he wants to sit under the piano and make low and loving growls over a suede brush just to show me, okay. But frankly I think he’s lowering himself.
Time and again I have pointed out to Kelly that with discriminating dogs, dogs who are looking for a finer, lighter chew—it’s bedroom slippers two to one. I have even dropped old, dilapidated bedroom slippers here and there behind the furniture, hoping to tempt him. But the fact is, that dog wouldn’t touch a bedroom slipper if he was starving.
Although we knew that, as a gourmet, he was a washout, we did keep saying one thing about Kelly. We kept saying, “He’s a good little old watchdog.” Heaven knows why we thought so, except that he barks at the drop of a soufflé. In fact, when he’s in the basement a stiff toothbrush on the third floor is enough to set him off into a concerto of deep, murderous growls followed by loud hysterical yappings. I used to take real pleasure in imagining the chagrin of some poor intruder who’d bring that cacophony upon himself. Last month we had an intruder. He got in the porch window and took twenty-two dollars and my wrist watch while Kelly, that good little old watchdog, was as silent as a cathedral. But that’s the way it’s been.
The first dog I remember well was a large black and white mutt that was part German shepherd, part English sheep dog, and part collie—the wrong part in each case. With what strikes me now as unforgivable whimsey, we called him Ladadog from the title by Albert Payson Terhune. He was a splendid dog in many respects but, in the last analysis, I’m afraid he was a bit of a social climber. He used to pretend that he was just crazy about us. I mean, if you just left the room to comb your hair he would greet you on your return with passionate lickings, pawings, and convulsive tail-waggings. And a longer separation—let’s say you had to go out on the front porch to pick up the mail—would set Ladadog off into such a demonstration of rapture and thanksgiving that we used to worry for his heart.
However, all this mawkish, slobbering sentiment disappeared the moment he stepped over the threshold. I remember we kids used to spot him on our way home from school, chasing around the Parkers’ lawn with a cocker friend of his, and we’d rush over to him with happy squeals of “Laddy, oleboy, oleboy, oleboy,” and Ladadog would just stand there looking slightly pained and distinctly cool. It wasn’t that he cut us dead. He nodded, but it was with the remote air of a celebrity at a cocktail party saying, “Of course I remember you, and how’s Ed?”
We kept making excuses for him and even worked out an elaborate explanation for his behavior. We decided that Ladadog didn’t see very well, that he could only recognize us by smell and that he couldn’t smell very well in the open air. However, the day came when my mother met Ladadog in front of the A & P. She was wearing her new brown coat with the beaver collar, and, lo and behold, Ladadog greeted her with joy and rapture. After that we just had to face the truth—that dog was a snob.
He also had other peculiarities. For instance, he saved lettuce. He used to beg for lettuce and then he would store it away in the cellar behind the coalbin. I don’t know whether he was saving up to make a salad or what, but every so often we’d have to clean away a small, soggy lump of decayed vegetation.
And every time the phone rang he would run from wherever he was and sit there beside the phone chair, his tail thumping and his ears bristling, until you’d make some sort of an announcement like “It’s just the Hoover man” or “Eileen, it’s for you.” Then he would immediately disappear. Clearly, this dog had put a call in to someone, but we never did figure out who.
Come to think of it, the dog that gave us the most trouble was a beagle named Murphy. As far as I’m concerned, the first thing he did wrong was to turn into a beagle. I had seen him bouncing around in the excelsior of a pet-shop window, and I went in and asked the man, “How much is that adorable fox terrier in the window?” Did he say, “That adorable fox terrier is a beagle”? No, he said, “Ten dollars, lady.” Now, I don’t mean to say one word against beagles. They have rights just like other people. But it is a bit of a shock when you bring home a small ball of fluff in a shoe-box, and three weeks later it’s as long as the sofa.
Murphy was the first dog I ever trained personally, and I was delighted at the alacrity with which he took to the newspaper. It was sometime later that we discovered, to our horror, that—like so many dogs—he had grasped the letter but not the spirit of the thing. Until the very end of his days he felt a real sense of obligation whenever he saw a newspaper—any newspaper—and it didn’t matter where it was. I can’t bring myself to go into the sordid details, except to mention that we were finally compelled to keep all the papers in the bottom of the icebox.
He had another habit that used to leave us open to a certain amount of criticism from our friends, who were not dogophiles. He never climbed up on beds or chairs or sofas. But he always sat on top of the piano. In the beginning we used to try to pull him off of there. But after a few noisy scuffles in which he knocked a picture off the wall, scratched the piano, and smashed a lamp, we just gave in—only to discover that, left to his own devices, he hopped up and down as delicately as a ballet dancer. We became quite accustomed to it, but at parties at our house it was not unusual to hear a guest remark, “I don’t know what I’m drinking but I think I see a big dog on the piano.”
It’s not just our own dogs that bother me. The dogs I meet at parties are even worse. I don’t know what I’ve got that attracts them; it just doesn’t bear thought. My husband swears I rub chopped meat on my ankles. But at every party it’s the same thing. I am sitting in happy conviviality with a group in front of the fire when all of a sudden the large mutt of mine host appears in the archway. Then, without a single bark of warning, he hurls himself upon me. It
always makes me think of that line from A Streetcar Named Desire—“Baby, we’ve had this date right from the beginning.” My martini flies into space and my stockings are torn before he finally settles down peacefully in the lap of my new black faille. I blow out such quantities of hair as I haven’t swallowed and glance at my host, expecting to be rescued. He murmurs, “Isn’t that wonderful? You know, Brucie is usually so distant with strangers.”
At a dinner party in Long Island last week, after I had been mugged by a large sheep dog, I announced quite piteously, “Oh dear, he seems to have swallowed one of my earrings.” The hostess looked really distressed for a moment, until she examined the remaining earring. Then she said, “Oh, I think it will be all right. It’s small and it’s round.”
Nowadays if I go anywhere I just ask if they have a dog. If they do, I say, “Maybe I’d better keep away from him—I have this bad allergy.” This does not tend to endear me to my hostess. In fact, she behaves rather as though she’d just discovered that I was listed in “Red Channels.” But it is safer. It really is.
The Kerr-Hilton
Ever since Gilbert was born we had been looking for a larger house, and we knew what we wanted. I wanted a house that would have four bedrooms for the boys, all of them located some distance from the living room—say in the next county somewhere.
I also yearned for space near the kitchen for a washer, a dishwasher, a freezer, a dryer, and a large couch where I could lie on sunny days and listen to them all vibrate.
Walter, on the other hand, was looking for a place where the eggs would be near the range and the range would be near the telephone so that he could fry his eggs and perhaps even eat them while he answered the thirty-eight phone calls he always gets during breakfast. The calls are never important, but they make up in quantity what they lack in quality. Mostly, it’s somebody from one of the broadcasting companies who wants him to appear on a television show at five-thirty in the morning or it’s a young man named Eugene Klepman who wants Walter’s advice about making a musical based on the first three books of the Old Testament. One way or another he hasn’t had breakfast in seven years. This might have had the salutary effect of causing him to lose weight, except that he munches peanut brittle all morning in an effort—he says—to gain enough strength to cope with the people who will call while he’s eating lunch.
