Ladies Who Lunch

Just because Swan is a name that means heavy industry, tools and energy, Sarah finds herself on the checklist of dressy ladies who invite other ladies to lunch for charity.

In her early years Sarah worked as a volunteer in the Prophet’s Mission. It taught her something about charity, that often enough the giver’s motive is to benefit himself more than the receiver. And when she herself gave of her time, it was also with an ulterior motive. Mission work threw her father off the sex-scented trail of her sins.

She thinks, on the outside I’m the shadow of my husband, on the inside I am habituated by the ghost of my lover. Perhaps among the ladies who lunch I might find women like me, in the same dispirited position as I find myself: forced into marriage by social circumstances beyond our control, trapped for life with a man and nothing else, not even our names, to call our own, in charge of nothing but our vaginas.

She knows very well that, so long as she doesn’t let Harry have his way in the bedroom, there will be only one area where she can come out on top.

With high hopes of finding friends it is a cold Friday in the fall of nineteen thirty-two when Sarah accepts an invitation to lunch with the ladies at the Park Hotel. The women are all older than she, and she is a little taken aback when she sees that most of them are familiar. The irony is not lost on her. She has a lot more in common with four of the dainty-fingered half-dozen than she expected. It’s a small world after all, she thinks, as she shakes the manicured hands of Mrs Chandler, Mrs de Stijl, Mrs Lilywight, and Madame Doree. She’s posed for their husbands, and has known them in the Good Book sense.

Harry’s sister may have seen through her false front but these gentlewomen judge her by her style. Sarah, stiff and serious enough to be a matron three times her age, wearing glasses and smartly dressed in a wool suit in the fashion her marriage affords her, has no trouble passing for genuine in their circle. They applaud her taste in clothing, and, elegant to begin with, having lost some weight to her obsessions, Sarah looks like superfine china. Like Sarah, the ladies who lunch put on cool, superior airs that are not obvious ones. When they offer their hands in friendship, it is with an icy self-conscious reserve, fearing they might be found out for the insubstantiality of their disguises.

Charity is not the first thing on their agenda. Over the seafood bisque the ladies discuss how hard good help is to find. Sarah blesses her lucky stars for Miss Lord, but does not mention her by name. Not until the chicken salad comes do the ladies push the meat of their meeting around the table. They have modern, abstract ideas about charity. Unlike the stodgy fundamental Shibbolites who, at least in theory, held that charity meant feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these ladies are intent on providing visual abstractions for needy minds.

“Ladies,” says Mrs Chiswick, “as the chairwoman for the Metropolitan Association for the Advancement of Modern Art, I want to thank you all for your generous contributions. But we cannot do enough for the cause. We must draw in others to help finance our dream; a museum devoted entirely to contemporary art and design, a place where the man on the street can come in and, for a dollar or two, find color and form as they never were. Are there any suggestions on how we might raise money for MAAMA?”

Mrs Lilywight, the wife of the money magnet, careful to wipe the mayonnaise from her lips, says, “The sad fact is, ladies, not everyone in our society is as modern as we. Many members of our finest old families want no part of recent painting and sculpture and will not attend a fund-raiser unless there are men of words present to assure them that they are not being made fools of by the modern artists. I propose a series of hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners, using famous writers and their after-dinner testimonials about modern art as drawing cards.”

“A very good idea, indeed, Millicent,” says Mrs Albright agreeably. “We must enlist writers to help us explain what it is the viewer is looking at.”

Mrs Lilywight spouts, “Have I ever told you when I was a young girl William Budnik used to attend dinner parties at my house? As I remember, he was partial to veal stew.”

Now the hens get off tack and peck quietly away at what they know about the diets of the literati. Mrs Lilywight’s girlhood recollections of the great fish of New World literature remind Madame Doree of similar moments in her times past.

“Once as little girl, I had the opportunity to meet Louis Même himself … we were in the park … I was with Maman … he was eating ice cream … oh, how he glowed … like a saint …”

Each matron has her own patron saint. For one it is Nathan Langhorne, for another, Wilton Thorndike. No one talks with her mouth full, yet they all drop the names of substantial literary personalities onto the table. It is plain that they prefer short novels and long biographies, that they have shelves of books by authors they have never read. They are very careful, however, to keep up on what society what author keeps, and what he has for dinner, who goes for orange juice and who eats nothing but sardines. Sarah, on the contrary, has no idea, nor does she care, what her favorite author, the poet Clement Collier, eats. Always a voracious reader, she has a healthy helping of literary masterpieces under her belt, and now, with time and her own pubic essence on her hands, she continues exploring good books in light of her esoteric pursuits. In her opinion the secrets of great literature cannot be found in the details of the lives of the individuals behind it. For a work to be of merit, readers must be able to see their lives in it. Where the characters and situations are metaphors, the text is literally the body and mind of the muse.

Sarah makes sure she has swallowed her chicken when she clears her throat to offer her opinions. “I think it goes without saying that more than charity begins at home. I don’t know any writers, but I’ve met quite a few artists and I presume it’s the same way with writers. One way or the other a mother has to give them their start and steer them on their course. Writers probably more so. It’s a mother’s attention that gives the creative mind a sense of wonder. I’m certain that many of the things that come to an author’s attention were first pointed out to him by his mother. Surely Budnik’s giant whale symbolizes bigness, the whole of nature as well as the mammal, the sea, which he, and we all, came from. And after all what are the Reminiscences of Times Past but odes to Même’s mother? In the imaginations of little boys it is not a far cry from wanting the attention of one’s own mother to seeking the good graces of the great goddesses, the muses, who have the power to scuttle an author’s craft or tuck him into sleep, blow him off course or send him sailing on smooth seas home, a safe harbor from which to tell his adventures.”

The ladies nod their heads and look pleased. This newcomer is not only attractive and well-tailored, but she sounds wonderfully educated in a classical way. That Harry Swan surely knows how to pick them!

The rag doll from Zion may look like a classic but in her heart she is no lady who lunches. She looks around the table and becomes horrified. Will she become like them, thin, shallow, shadows of their husbands, women who cultivate an interest in art as part of their style, another accessory, like the best clothes, perfect cosmetics, and expensive jewelry, who take literature as a delicate side dish to nibble on with their toast, chicken salad, and tea? Contempt for them is the same as contempt for herself. She recoils from her own presence at the table, for it is predicated on nothing more than being Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior. The Swans are counted on to make a large tax-deductible contribution to MAAMA. She feels an urge to expose herself.

“Ladies,” she says, “I’m sure you all remember the episode in Même’s masterpiece Les Rues des Mementos in which the sensitive young Louis is permitted to sit at tea with his mother and her fashionable friend Laudette. Louis is in ecstacy to be out with his Maman and the lovely Laudette, listening to their grown-up conversation. Laudette, you do remember her, don’t you?”

All of them, including Madame Doree, whose patron saint is Même, nod their heads and look nostalgic. Of course there is no such book as Les Rues des Mementos in the series of Même’s famous memoirs. This scene is faked from Sarah’s freewheeling imagination. But she has not taken the name of Miss Lord in vain; she uses it to make her point.

“If you recall,” she continues, “Laudette was previously a courtesan, and hardly cares that the boy is listening when she expresses the opinion that the goddess of love despises professional men and graces professional women. She tells Madame Meme what a poor lover her new, rich husband is and insists that what makes her man so dreary is his occupation. He is some sort of petty, but well-paid, bureaucrat, I think. Remember? Anyway, she says there is hardly a man worth seducing in all the cream of business and government society, that where physical love, the adoration a woman wants is concerned, the artist comes naturally to it. Laudette should know because she has had them all. Now Louis’ mother, not to be outdone, remarks that Louis’ own dear papa is often rough and clumsy with her, and doesn’t care at all whether she’s satisfied. Is it an indiscretion or is she trying to seduce the frail boy? In any case the revelation means that there is a chance for him with his mother after all. It’s enough to knock the wind out of little Louis. The mere idea of replacing his father sparks a full-blown asthma attack. Already as delicate as a cream puff pastry shell, he develops an even more fragile character, with a frail sensibility which shies away from men and prefers the company and approval of women.”

Self-educated Sarah is the only one in the group to have ever actually read the long-winded series. She presently has succeeded in giving them a memory of something past that never happened. “Why, Mrs Swan,” says Mrs de Stijl, “you’re a gold mine of information. Isn’t she, ladies? What a lovely little refresher she’s given us!”

The split pea alternates between keeping herself secret and being too revealing. Once more, as it did when she, giddy in love, told her father about her brave lover, the demon comes forward in the good girl. “Ladies, if you remember Laudette talking to the cream in Même’s memoirs you must come to lunch at my house and see her in the flesh. Now let me let you in on a little secret of mine. Before I married Harry I worked as a free lance artist’s model. Men paid to study my figure while I posed in ways that appealed to their fancies. Mrs Lilywight, Madame Doree, Mrs Chandler, Mrs de Stijl, your husbands have booked me themselves. And so I know first hand that they are no artists in the bedroom. But you know what they say about good turns? Since you ladies seem to find my husband so charming, if any of you would like to take a crack at him, he’s all yours. You’re all invited, next Friday. Like your own better halves, he’s quite desperate for sex ever since we’ve been married.”

Thus Sarah vandalizes the institution of lunch. She ends their discussion of artists and writers and charity. Mrs Lilywight and Madame Doree shift in their seats, obviously uncomfortable with embarrassment. Mrs de Stijl and Mrs Chandler drink up the wine, choking with indignation over their husbands’ infidelities. Mrs Chiswick and Mrs Albright, shocked at having such unpleasantness on the table, not wanting to offend, sip and nibble quietly. As soon after the apple pie, ice cream, and coffee as the etiquette books will allow, they get their hats and coats, and dissolve their meeting in silence, each swearing under her breath that she will certainly not accept the invitation or ever have the dreadful Mrs Swan for lunch again.