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 songs 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?”
Helena felt herself color, remembering very well the quarrel with Norine over Cézanne’s still lifes of apples in the new Museum of Modern Art. “The smoking room of Cushing,” she admitted with a grimace. “When was that? Freshman year?” “Sophomore,” said Norine. “You and Kay had come to dinner with somebody. And Lakey was there. You two were playing bridge. And Lakey was playing solitaire, as usual, and smoking ivory-tipped cigarettes. It was the first time she ever spoke to me.” “Us too,” said Helena. “And it was the first time I remember seeing you, Norine.” “I was a mess,” said Norine. “I weighed a hundred and sixty, stripped. All soft blubber. And you stuck your harpoons into me, the three of you.” Helena raised her candid eyes from her coffee cup. “The ‘spirit of the apples,’” she quoted, “versus ‘significant form.’” She could not remember, exactly, what mushy thoughts Norine, sprawled on a sofa, had been expressing about the Cézannes to the smoking room at large, but she could see Lakey now, on whom she and Kay had had a distant crush, look up suddenly from her solitaire as she said coldly and distinctly that the point of the Cézannes was the formal arrangement of shapes. Norine had begun repeating that it was “the spirit of the apples” that counted; whereupon Kay, laying down her bridge hand and glancing toward Lakey for approval, had charged in with “significant form,” which she had learned about in Freshman English with Miss Kitchel, who had had them read Clive Bell and Croce and Tolstoy’s What is Art?. “You’re denying the spirit of the apples,” Norine had insisted, and Helena, laying down her bridge hand, had mildly cited T. S. Eliot: “The spirit killeth, and the letter giveth life.” With everybody watching, Norine had started to cry, and Lakey, who had no pity for weakness, had called her a “bovine sentimentalist.” Norine, yielding the field, had lumbered out of the smoking room, sobbing, and Lakey, uttering the single word “oaf,” had gone back to her solitaire. The bridge game had broken up. On the way home to their own dormitory, Helena had said that she thought that three against one had been a bit hard on poor Miss Schmittlapp, but Kay said that Schmittlapp was usually in the majority. “Do you think she’ll remember that we came to her rescue?” she demanded, meaning Lakey. “I doubt it,” said Helena, having sat next to Miss Eastlake (Davison being just ahead of her in the alphabet) for a full half-term in an art-history course without evoking a sign of notice. But Lakey had remembered Kay, when they were on the Daisy Chain together that spring, and talked to her about Clive Bell and Roger Fry, so that you might say, Helena reflected, that the argument with Norine had pointed the way that had led, in the end, to their grouping with Lakey and the others in the South Tower. Helena, who was as immune to social snobbery as she was to the “fond passion,” had not felt the charm of the South Tower group to the same extent as Kay, but she had raised no objections to the alliance, even though her teachers and her parents had worried a little, thinking, like Norine, that an “exclusive elite” was a dangerous set to play in, for a girl who had real stuff in her. Mrs. Davison’s comment, on first meeting the group, was that she hoped Helena was not going to become a “clothes rack.”
“I reacted against Lakey’s empty formalism,” Norine was saying. “I went up to my room that night and spewed out the window. That was Armageddon for me, though I didn’t see it yet. I didn’t discover socialism till junior year. All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn’t express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it—in other men’s words. Of course, I envied you that too. Let me show you something.” She rose from her chair, motioning Helena to follow, and flung open a door, disclosing the bedroom. Over the bed, which was made, hung a reproduction of a Cézanne still life of apples. “Well, well, the apples of discord!” remarked Helena in the doorway, striving for a sprightly note; she had stumbled over a dog’s bone in the matted fur of the polar bear; her ankle hurt; and she could not imagine what the apples were expected to prove. “Put had them in his college room,” Norine said. “He’d made them the basis for his credo too. For him, they stood for a radical simplification.” “Ummm,” said Helena, glancing about the room, which was clearly Putnam’s sphere. It contained steel filing cabinets, a Williams College pennant, an African mask, and a typewriter on a card table. It struck her that Norine’s apartment was all too populous with “significant form.” Every item in it seemed to be saying something, asserting something, pontificating; Norine and Put were surrounded by articles of belief, down to the last can of evaporated milk and the single, monastic pillow on the double bed. It was different from Kay’s apartment, where the furniture was only asking to be admired or talked about. But here, in this dogmatic lair, nothing had been admitted that did not make a “relevant statement,” though what the polar bear was saying Helena could not make out. The two girls returned to their seats. Norine lit a fresh cigarette. She stared meditatively at Helena. “Put is impotent,” she said. “Oh,” said Helena, slowly. “Oh, Norine, I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” said Norine hoarsely. Helena did not know what to say next. She could still smell Put’s tobacco and see his pipe in an unemptied ashtray. Despite the fact that she had had no sexual experience, she had a very clear idea of the male member, and she could not help forming a picture of Put’s as pale and lifeless, in the coffin of his trousers, a veritable nature morte. She was sorry that Norine, to excuse herself for last night, had felt it necessary to make her this confidence; she did not want to be privy to the poor man’s private parts. “We got married in June,” Norine enlarged. “A couple of weeks after Commencement. I was a raw virgin. I never had a date till I knew Put. So when we went to this hotel, in the Pennsylvania coal fields, I didn’t catch on right away. Especially since my mother, who hates sex like all her generation, told me that a gentleman never penetrated his bride on the first night. I thought that for once Mother must be right. We’d neck till we were both pretty excited, and then everything would stop, and he’d turn over and go to sleep.” “What were you doing in the coal fields?” inquired Helena, in hopes of a change of subject. “Put had a case he was working on—an organizer who’d been beaten up and jailed. In the daytime, I interviewed the women, the miners’ wives. Background stuff. Put said it was very useful. That way, he could write off our whole honeymoon on office expenses. And at night we were both pretty bushed. But when we came back to New York, it was the same thing. We’d neck in our pajamas and then go to sleep.” “What possessed him to want to get married?” “He didn’t know,” said Norine.
“Finally,” she continued hoarsely, “I faced the truth. I went to the Public Library. They’ve got a Viennese woman there in Information—very gemütlich. She drew me up a reading list on impotence, a lot of it in German; quite a bibliography. There are different types: organic and functional. Put’s is functional. He’s got a mother-tie; his mother’s a widow. Some men are incapable of erection altogether, and some are incapable except in certain circumstances. Put’s capable of full erection, but only with whores and fallen women.” She gave her short laugh. “But you didn’t find all that out in the library,” objected Helena; she had heard her mother declare that it was possible to get a “university education in our great public-library system,” but there was a limit to everything. “No,” said Norine. “Only the over-all picture. After I’d read up on the subject, Put and I were able to talk. He’d had all his early sex experience with whores and factory girls in Pittsfield, it turned out. They’d pull up their skirts, in an alley or a doorway, and he’d ejaculate, sometimes at the first contact, before he got his penis all the way in. He’d never made love to a good woman and never seen a woman naked. I’m a good woman; that’s why he can’t make it with me. He feels he’s fornicating with his mother. That’s what the Freudians think; the Behaviorists would claim that it was a conditioned reflex. But of course he couldn’t know any of that ahead of time. It’s been an awful blow to him. I excite him but I can’t satisfy him. His penis just wilts at the approach to intercourse. Lately, I’ve been bunking in the living room”—a jerk of her head indicated the couch—“because he has a horror of contact with a good woman’s crotch in his sleep. Though we both wore pajamas, he had insomnia. Now at least I can sleep raw.” She stretched.
“Have you tried a doctor?” Norine laughed darkly. “Two. Put wouldn’t go, so I went. The first one asked me whether I wanted to have children. He was an old-fashioned neurologist that my mother knew about. When I said no, I didn’t, he practically booted me out of the office. He told me I should consider myself lucky that my husband didn’t want intercourse. Sex wasn’t necessary for a woman, he said.” “Good Heavens!” said Helena. “Yes!” nodded Norine. “The second one was a G.P. with a few more modern ideas. Put’s partner, Bill Nickum, sent me to him. He was pretty much of a Behaviorist. When I explained Put’s sexual history, he advised me to buy some black chiffon underwear and long black silk stockings and some cheap perfume. So that Put would associate me with a whore. And to try to get him to take me that way, with all my clothes on, in the afternoon, when he got home from work.” “Mercy!” said Helena. “What happened?” “It was almost a success. I went to Bloomingdale’s and got the underwear and the stockings.” She pulled up her sweat shirt, and Helena had a glimpse of a black chiffon “shimmy” with lace inserts. “Then I thought of that polar-bear rug. My mother had it in storage; it used to belong to my grandmother Schmittlapp, who was a rich old aristocrat. ‘Venus in Furs’—Sacher-Masoch. I arranged so that Put would find me on the rug when he got home from the office.” Helena smiled and made a noise like a whistle. “Put ejaculated prematurely,” said Norine somberly. “Then we had a fight about how much I’d spent at Bloomingdale’s. Put’s an ascetic about money. That’s why he won’t consider psychoanalysis, though Bill Nickum thinks he should.” Helena’s eyebrows arched; she decided not to ask how “Bill Nickum” came to know of Put’s “trouble.” Instead, she put another question. “Are you very broke, Norine?” Norine shook her head. “Put has a trust fund, and my father gives me an allowance. But we put that into household expenses. Put and Bill sink most of their own dough in Common Causes.” “‘Common Causes’?” repeated Helena, mystified. “That’s the name of their outfit. Of course, they draw salaries, and the rest of the staff is volunteer. But their mailing and printing costs are pretty staggering. And then we have to entertain labor people and celebrities and rich do-gooders and some of the working press. We use this place as sort of a cross between a salon and a café.” Helena looked around her and said nothing.
“Bill says it would take the strain off our marriage if Put could go to a brothel. Or find a taxi-dance girl. Though they’re likely to be infected. But he could learn to use a prophylactic kit. Have you ever seen one? It’s as simple as brushing your teeth. Put’s offered me a divorce, but I don’t want that. That’s what the older generation would have done. The generation that ran away from everything. My mother and father are divorced. If Put were a drunkard or beat me up, that would be different. But sex isn’t the only thing in marriage. Take the average couple. They have intercourse once a week, on Saturday night. Let’s say that’s five minutes a week, not counting the preliminaries. Five minutes out of 10,080. I figured it out in percentages—less than .05 of one per cent. Supposing Put were to spend five minutes a week with a whore—the time it takes him to shave? Why should I mind? Especially when I knew it didn’t mean anything to him emotionally?” A dismayed expression had come over Helena’s face as Norine jerked out these figures; she was fighting off the certainty that she had to go to the toilet. She had traveled all over Europe scoffing at a fear of germs, drinking the water, making use of a Spanish peasant’s outhouse or of the simple drain in the floor provided as a urinal by an Italian osteria, but she shrank from the thought of Norine’s bathroom. The need to relieve her bladder heightened the sense of unreality produced by Norine’s statistical calculations and by the steady barking of the dog outside and the drip-drip of water in the sink; she felt she had slipped into eternity. Yet when she finally did ask for the john, it was a long time before she could urinate, though she put paper down on the toilet seat, which Put had left flipped up, like a morbid reminder of himself; in the end, she had to run the water in the basin to prime the pump.
When she returned to the living room, Norine suddenly came to the point. “I guess Harald had become a sort of male potency symbol for me,” she said in her uninflected voice, blowing smoke with a careless air, but behind the smoke screen her narrowed topaz eyes were watching Helena as if to measure her reaction. As Norine went on talking, in her rapid-fire, memo-pad style, Helena lit a cigarette herself and settled down to listen critically, taking mental notes and arranging them under headings, just as though she were at a lecture or a meeting.
The reasons, she noted, for Harald’s becoming “a male potency symbol” to the deprived Norine were as follows: (A) The Group. Norine had always envied them their “sexual superiority.” (B) Kay’s role as a neutral, “passing between both camps.” I.e., Norine had sat next to Kay senior year in Miss Washburn’s Abnormal Psychology and found her “a good scout.” (C) Envy of Kay for “having the best of both worlds.” I.e., she had lost her virginity and stayed at Harald’s place weekends without becoming “déclassée.” Norine’s situation was the obverse. (D) Proximity. Norine had met Kay on the street the day she and Put came back from their honeymoon. They found they were neighbors and the two couples had started playing bridge together in the evenings. (E) Harald was a better bridge player than Put. Ergo, Harald had come to figure in Norine’s mind as an “erect phallus” just out of her reach, like the Tower group. Which was why Helena had found the two of them kissing in the kitchen and why it did not “mean anything.”
Helena wrinkled her forehead. It seemed to her on the contrary that, if you accepted Norine’s chain of reasoning, it meant a great deal. If Harald was to be treated as a phallic symbol, instead of as Kay’s husband, it made their kisses “meaningful” in just the sense that would appeal to Norine. She had been yielding to the Force of Logic, which poor Kay herself had set in motion.
“If it didn’t mean anything, why dwell on it?” said Helena. “To make you understand,” replied Norine. “We both know you’re intelligent and we don’t want you to feel you have to tell Kay.” Something in Helena sat up at the sound of those “we”s, but she puffed at her cigarette nonchalantly. What made them think she would tell Kay? That embrace, in her books, did not amount to a row of pins, so long as things stopped there; Harald, after all, had been drinking, as Norine ought to know for herself.
“I wouldn’t want to wreck her marriage,” mused Norine. “Then don’t,” said Helena, in a voice that sounded like her father’s. “Forget about Harald. There’re other fish in the sea. Don’t feel you have to finish something just because you’ve started it.” She grinned candidly at her hostess, believing she had read her psychology.
Norine hesitated. Idly, she picked up the curling iron. “It’s not that simple,” she threw out. “Harald and I have been lovers quite a while.” Helena bit her lip; this was what, underneath, she had been afraid of hearing. She made a grimace. The simple word “lovers” had a terrible and unexpected effect on her.
Put was out all day, Norine went on to explain, and Kay was out all day too. “It undercuts Harald that she works to support him. He has to assert his masculinity. You saw what happened last night—when he burned his play. That was a sort of immolation rite, to propitiate her; he was making a burnt offering of his seed, the offspring of his mind and balls. …” At these words Helena’s normal droll self assumed command again. “Oh, Norine!” she protested. “Do come down to brass tacks.” “‘The Brass Tack,’” Norine said, frowning. “Wasn’t that your name for a literary magazine at college?” Helena agreed that it was. Norine flicked on the curling iron. “What is it,” she wondered, eying Helena, “that makes you want to puke at the imponderables? Do you mind if I curl my hair?” As the curling iron heated, she continued with her narrative. Harald, it seemed, left alone all day, had started dropping in, afternoons, for a cup of tea or a bottle of beer at Norine’s place. Sometimes, he brought a book and read aloud to her; his favorite poet was Robinson Jeffers. “Roan Stallion,” supplied Helena. Norine nodded. “How did you know?” “I guessed,” said Helena. She well remembered the fatal weekend that Harald had read Roan Stallion to Kay. “One day,” Norine said, “I told him about Put. …” “Enough said,” dryly remarked Helena. Norine flushed. “My first affaire—before Harald—started the same way,” she admitted. “It was a man I met in the Public Library, a progressive-school teacher with a wife and six children.” She gave an unwilling laugh. “He was curious about the stuff I was reading. We used to sit in Bryant Park, and I told him about Put. He took me to a hotel and deflowered me. But he was afraid his wife would find out.” “And Harald?” asked Helena. “Underneath his bravado, I guess he’s afraid too. Married men are funny; they all draw a line between the wife and the concubine.” She commenced to curl her hair. Soon the smell of singed hair was added to the smell of cigarette smoke, of dog, pipe tobacco, and of a soured dishcloth in the sink. Watching her, Helena granted Norine a certain animal vitality, and “earthiness” that was underscored, as if deliberately, by the dirt and squalor of the apartment. Bedding with her, Helena imagined, must be like rolling in a rich moldy compost of autumn leaves, crackling on the surface, like her voice, and underneath warm and sultry from the chemical processes of decay. It came back to her that Norine had written a famous rubbishy paper for Miss Beckwith’s Folk Lore, on Ge, the Earth Mother, and the steamy chthonian cults, that had been turned down by the Journal of Undergraduate Studies, on the ground of “fuzzy thinking,” a favorite faculty phrase. Helena chuckled inwardly. She felt she could write a fine paper herself this morning, in the manner of Miss Caroline Spurgeon, on the chthonic imagery of Norine’s apartment, which, if not exactly a cellar, as Kay insisted on calling it, was black as a coalhole and heated by the furnace of the hostess’ unslaked desires, burning like quicklime and giving off, Helena said to herself sharply, a good deal of hot air. Drolly, she considered the “bitch in heat upstairs,” surely a totem or familiar, the Fallopian tubes of the landlady (a root system?), the Cerberus in the back yard. “Oh queen of hell,” she said to herself, “where does your Corn Mother mourn?” On lower Park Avenue, she discovered, somewhat later in the conversation. Norine’s mother lived on alimony from her father, who had remarried; Norine went to dinner with her at Schrafft’s every other Wednesday.
“I’m not the first,” Norine jerked out now, while the curling iron sizzled. “Harald tells me stuff he doesn’t tell Kay. He had a long affaire with a show girl he met last fall; she wanted to marry him. She had a rich husband and a house in Connecticut, where he and Kay still go sometimes for weekends. But Harald won’t sleep with her any more, though she begs him to. He has a horror of messy relationships. Before he and I went to bed, for instance, we both had to agree that we wouldn’t let it affect our marriages.”
“Isn’t that easier said than done?” demanded Helena. “Not for Harald,” said Norine. “He’s a very disciplined person. And I’m fond of Put. Sometimes I get a bit jealous of Kay since I know Harald sleeps with her sometimes, though he doesn’t talk about it. But I tell myself that every experience is unique; what he does with her can’t alter what he does with me. And vice versa. I’m not taking anything away from her. Most married men perform better with their wives if they have a mistress. In other societies, that’s taken for granted.”
“Still,” said Helena, “you’d rather Kay didn’t find out. Or Put, I gather. And you must admit, you had a close call last night. What if Kay had marched in, instead of me?” Norine nodded somberly. “Check,” she said. Then she laughed. “God!” she confided, “we had another close call the other day. …” Helena raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to hear?” said Norine. “All right,” said Helena. “It happened right here,” said Norine. “One afternoon. About ten days ago. We were fornicating there”—she indicated the couch—“when there was an awful banging on the door and a voice yelled, ‘Open up there!’”
Helena shuddered. As she listened to her classmate, her imagination soberly reconstructed the scene, disrobing Norine and Harald and placing them, affrighted in the midst of their ‘transports,’ on the couch. What could the knocking mean? Harald, it seemed, did not wait to find out; he seized his trousers from the collapsible chair she was now sitting on and raced into the bedroom. Norine sat up and wrapped herself in the couch cover as the banging continued. She was sure it was the police—the Red Squad—after Putnam’s files. It sounded as though they would break the door down any minute; they must have heard her and Harald whispering. “Answer it!” hissed Harald from the bedroom. Clutching the black couch cover around her, in her bare feet, Norine opened the door a crack. Two men in plain clothes and a woman burst into the room. “That’s her!” cried the strange woman, a middle-aged type, in jewels and a fur coat, pointing to Norine. “Where’s my husband?” Before Norine could stop them, the plain-clothes men pushed open the door into the bedroom, where they found Harald buttoning his fly. “Here he is, ma’am!” they yelled. “Partially disrobed. In his undershirt. Trousers unbuttoned.” The woman went in to see too. “But that’s not my husband,” she exclaimed. “I never saw this man before. Who is he?” And she turned angrily to Norine.
At this point in Norine’s narrative, Helena laughed. “The secretary upstairs?” she surmised. “How did you guess?” said Norine. Helena had grasped the situation. The plain-clothes men were private detectives, matrimonial specialists, and they had picked the wrong apartment. All the time, the woman’s husband was upstairs with “Grace,” the secretary, waiting to be caught by his wife and the detectives; it was an “arranged” divorce case. “And of course,” Norine continued, “they weren’t really supposed to be fornicating—just to have their clothes ‘disarrayed.’ And they were supposed to open the door right away and let the detectives in quietly; otherwise John makes a stink. He keeps telling Margaret they’re running a ‘disorderly house.’” “‘John’ is the landlord?” said Helena. Norine nodded. “Actually, he can’t say much, because Margaret caught him with the previous tenant and threw her out. But he’s pretty stuffy about Grace sometimes—the profit motive, as usual. He used the house as a sort of showroom for his decorating clients and he’s afraid the address will get in the paper in some divorce case. This time, it was all the stupidity of those detectives; they’d been clearly told to raid the top-floor apartment and instead they came to the ground floor. When we didn’t open the door and they could hear us inside, they decided there was some funny business, that the husband was reneging on the deal. So, instead of calling up the lawyer, as they should have done, for instructions, they straight-armed their way in here. The wife didn’t know what was up when she found me in the coverlet and her husband, she thought, hiding. She’d been told to expect a blonde (it has to be a blonde), so naturally she assumed I was Grace. Probably she figured her husband had decided to suit the action to the word.” She laughed.
Harald had been “magnificent.” Very quietly, he had elicited all the facts from the detectives and then given them a tongue-lashing. He had told them they were a pair of stupid goons who had got their training in violence on the New York police force and been “broken” for extortion or sheer witlessness. He dared them to deny it. They ought to have learned that they could not enter a private residence without a policeman and a search warrant, and in Norine’s place, he said, he would bring suit against them for housebreaking, which was a felony, and send them and their lady-client to jail. “You were hardly in a position to carry out that threat,” commented Helena. “The detectives must have seen that.” Norine shook her head, which was now frizzed all around in a pompadour. “They were livid with fear,” she declared.
Luckily, she went on, more prosaically, the house had been empty that afternoon, except for Grace and the man with her on the top floor; otherwise, the banging and shouting would have brought everyone running. “Where was Nietzsche, by the way?” inquired Helena. “I should have thought he would have added his voice.” Nietzsche had gone to the country for the day with the landlord and his wife; it was Lincoln’s Birthday, which was why Grace had the afternoon off; normally she was raided at night, unless John and Margaret had a dinner party. “And Kay?” said Helena. “Kay was working,” said Norine. “The stores don’t observe Lincoln’s Birthday. They cash in on the fact that the other wage slaves get the day off. It’s a big white-collar shopping spree. When do you think a forty-eight-hour-week stenographer gets a chance to buy herself a dress? Unless she goes without her lunch? Probably you’ve never thought.” She stared at Helena and lit a cigarette, holding the burning match for a moment, as though to lighten the darkness of Helena’s mind.
Helena got up; she was resolved to speak her piece. The careless, cursory tone of “Kay was working” had made her lips tighten. “I’m not a socialist, Norine,” she said evenly. “But if I were one, I would try to be a good person. Norman Thomas is a good person, I think.” “Norman used to be a minister,” put in Norine. “That’s his big handicap. He doesn’t appeal to the modern worker. They smell the do-gooder in him. He’s been helpful to Put, but Put thinks the time has come when he’s got to break with him. There’s a new group of Congressmen in Washington—Farmer-Laborites and Progressives—that Put feels he can work with more effectively. They’re closer to the realities of power. A couple of them are coming this afternoon for drinks; probably we’ll go to the Village with them afterward, to a night club—one of them likes to dance. Put and Bill—did he tell you?—want to start a newspaper syndicate and get out of fund-raising, where the Communists have a pretty formidable edge. Now these Congressmen have a lot of small-town newspapers behind them, in the farm states, that are hungry for real, uncensored labor news and the latest on co-operatives and profit sharing. I’ve asked Harald and Kay too this afternoon, because Harald has his roots in Veblen—” “Norine,” interrupted Helena. “I said if I were a socialist, I would try to be a good person.” Her voice, though she strove to maintain its careful drawl, began to tremble. Norine, staring, slowing put out her cigarette. “You say your husband can’t sleep with you because you’re a ‘good woman.’ I suggest you enlighten him. Tell him what you do with Harald. And about the progressive-school teacher with the wife and six children. That ought to get his pecker up. And have him take a look at this apartment. And at the ring around your neck. If a man slept with you, you’d leave a ring around him. Like your bathtub.” Norine sat staring up at her, perfectly impassive. Helena gulped; she had not spoken so fiercely since she was a spunky child and angry with her mother. She hardly recognized some of the language she was using, and her voice was doing curious slides. In her dry constricted throat, a crowd of disconnected sentences seemed to be milling, like a mob she was trying to moderate. “Get some ammonia,” she heard herself declare all of a sudden, “and wash out your brush and comb!” She stopped with a gasp, afraid that she might cry from sheer temper, as used to happen with her mother. Swiftly, she walked to the French windows and stood looking out into the garden, endeavoring to frame an apology. Behind her, Norine spoke. “You’re right,” she said. “Dead right.” She picked up the hand mirror and examined her neck. “Thanks for telling me the truth. Nobody ever does.”
At these gruff words, Helena jumped. She turned around slowly in her brown lizard pumps. Gratitude was the last thing she had expected from Norine. Helena was no reformer; she had “reacted,” as Norine would say, against her mother’s measured and stately meliorism and bridled at the very notion of changing people, as much as at the notion of being changed. She did not know, now, what had possessed her to fly off the handle—a defensive loyalty to Kay or to a canon of honesty or simply the desire to show Norine that she could not fool all of the people all the time. But to find Norine receptive was quite a responsibility to shoulder. “Go on. Tell me more,” she was urging. “Tell me what I need to do to change my life.” Helena sighed inwardly and sat down opposite Norine at the table, thinking of her appointment with her father and of how much she would rather be looking at old silver than playing the new broom to Norine’s life. But she supposed that at least the Congressmen and perhaps Putnam would thank her if she advised her to begin by cleaning up the apartment.
“Well, she said diffidently, “I’d start with a little ‘elbow grease.’” Norine looked absently around her. “Scrub the floor, you mean? O.K. Then what?” Despite herself, Helena warmed to the opportunity. “Well then,” she proceeded, “I’d get some toilet paper. There isn’t any in the bathroom. And some Clorox for the garbage pail and the toilet bowl. And boil out that dishcloth or get a new one.” She listened. “I’d unchain the dog and take him for a walk. And while I was at it, I’d change his name.” “You don’t like Nietzsche?” “No,” said Helena, dryly. “I’d call him something like Rover.” Norine gave her terse laugh. “I get it,” she said appreciatively. “God, Helena, you’re wonderful! Go on. Should I give him a bath to christen him?” Helena considered. “Not in this weather. He might catch cold. Take a bath yourself, instead, and wash your hair in the shower.” “But I just curled it.” “All right, wash it tomorrow. Then get some new clothes and charge them to Putnam. When he makes a fuss over the bill, tear up the budget. And buy some real food—not in cans. If it’s only hamburger and fresh vegetables and oranges.” Norine nodded. “Fine. But now tell me something more basic.”
Helena’s green eyes looked around thoughtfully. “I’d paint this room another color.” Norine’s face was dubious. “Is that what you’d call basic?” she demanded. “Certainly,” said Helena. “You don’t want people to think you’re a fascist, do you?” she added, with guile. “God, you’re dead right,” said Norine. “I guess I’m too close to these things. I never thought of that. And you can’t be too careful. The Communists are completely unscrupulous. One day they’re your bedfellow and the next day they’re calling you a fascist. They even call Norman a social fascist. O.K. Go ahead.” “I’d get rid of that polar bear,” said Helena mildly. “It’s just a dust-catcher, and it seems to have outlived its usefulness.” Norine agreed. “I think Put’s allergic to it, anyway. Next?” “I’d take some real books out of the library.” “What do you mean, ‘real books’?” said Norine, with a wary glance at her shelves. “Literature,” retorted Helena, “Jane Austen. George Eliot. Flaubert. Lady Murasaki. Dickens. Shakespeare. Sophocles. Aristophanes. Swift.” “But those aren’t seminal,” said Norine, frowning. “So much the better,” said Helena. There was a pause. “Is that all?” said Norine. Helena shook her head. Her eyes met Norine’s. “I’d stop seeing Harald,” she said.
“Oh,” murmured Norine. “Fill up your time some other way,” Helena went on briskly. “Register for a course at Columbia. Or write up what you saw in the coal mines. Get a job, even a volunteer one. But, Norine, don’t see Harald. Not even socially. Cut it clean.” With this plea, her voice had grown earnest; she resumed in a lighter key. “In your place, I’d get a divorce or an annulment. But that’s something you have to determine—you and Putnam. It’s nothing you should discuss with anyone else. If you want to stay with him, then I think you should decide to do without sex. Don’t try to have it both ways. Make up your mind which you want: sex or Putnam. Lots of women can live without sex and thrive on it. Look at our teachers at college; they weren’t dried up or sour. And lots of women,” she added, “can live without Putnam.”
“You’re right,” said Norine dully. “Yes, of course you’re right. It’s a choice I have to make.” But her tone was flaccid. Helena had the feeling that some time back Norine had ceased to listen to the program she had been outlining or was only listening mechanically and making noises of assent. “The subject,” she concluded, “is no longer fully co-operative.” And despite herself, she was vexed and disappointed. Why should she care, she asked herself, whether Norine heeded her advice or not? Except on Kay’s account, but it was not only, she admitted, on Kay’s account that she minded. She had got carried away by a vision of a better life for Norine. And now, inflamed by her own missionary zeal, she did not want to give that vision up. “Whatever choice you make, Norine,” she said firmly, “don’t talk about it. That’s my principal advice to you. Don’t talk about yourself or Putnam to anyone but a lawyer. Not even another doctor. If anybody talks to a doctor, it ought to be Putnam, not you. And as long as you’re married to him, resolve not to mention sex. In any form—animal, vegetable, or mineral. No Fallopian tubes.” “O.K.,” said Norine, sighing, as if this would be the most difficult part.
A weighty silence followed; the dog resumed its barking; the Elevated rumbled on its trestle. In this Homeric contest, Zeus, opined Helena, was taking out his golden scales. Norine coughed and stretched. “You’re a precocious kid,” she said, yawning. “But you’re still in short pants, emotionally. Si jeunesse savait …!” She yawned again. “Seriously, I’m grateful to you for trying to help me. You’ve told me the truth, according to your lights. And you’ve given me a few damn good ideas. Like having to make a choice between sex and Put. Commit myself one way or the other. Instead of straddling the issue, the way I’ve been doing. What are you smiling at?” “Your choice of words.” Norine gave a brief guffaw. Then she frowned. “That’s an example,” she said, “of what I’d call the limitations of your approach. You’re hipped on forms, while I’m concerned with meanings. Do you mind if I tell you that most of your advice is superficial?” “Such as?” said Helena, nettled. “Cleaning up the apartment,” replied Norine. “As if that were primary. Buying toilet paper, buying Clorox, buying a new dress. Notice your stress on bourgeois acquisition. On mere things. I ask for bread and you offer me a stone. I grant you we ought to have toilet paper in the bathroom; Put bawled me out for that this morning. But that won’t solve the important questions. Poor people don’t have toilet paper.” “Still,” suggested Helena, “I should have thought that one of your aims was to see that they did have toilet paper.” Norine shook her head. “You’re dodging my point,” she said. “Your obsession with appearances. You don’t touch on the basic things. The intangibles.” “The ‘spirit of the apples,’” remarked Helena. “Yes,” said Norine. “It seems to me your ‘central problem’ is rather tangible,” Helena drawled. She perceived that Norine did not intend to follow any of her prescriptions, unless perhaps she would change the dog’s name to Rover—as a conversation-maker. “No,” Norine replied thoughtfully. “There’s an underlying spiritual malaise. Put’s impotence is a sign of a Promethean loneliness.”
Helena picked up her ocelot coat from the studio couch. After her last remark, Norine had sunk into meditation, her chin cupped in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that Helena was there. “Do you have to go?” she said absently. “If you stick around, I’ll give you some lunch.” Helena refused. “I have to meet my father.” She slipped her coat on. “Well, thanks,” said Norine. “Thanks a lot. Drop in this afternoon if you’re free.” She put out her big hand with its bitten, dirty fingernails. “Harald and Kay will be here, if you want to see them again.” Her memory appeared to jog her, and she reddened, meeting Helena’s eye. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Put and I can’t just drop them. I have to see Harald socially. He and Put have a lot in common—in their thinking. Probably they mean more to each other than I mean to either of them. And Harald depends on us for intellectual stimulation. I told you—we run sort of a salon. We’re being written up this month in Mademoiselle. ‘Put and Norine Blake, he Williams ’31, she Vassar ’33, keep open house for the conscience of young America.’ With pictures.” Her laugh jerked out. Then she frowned and ran a hand through her hair. “That’s the element you miss in your analysis. The vital center of my marriage with Put. We’ve come to stand for something meaningful to other people, and when that happens you’re no longer a free agent. From your perspective, you can’t see that. And that leads you to overemphasize sex.” Norine’s tone had grown instructive and kindly as she stood looking down on her little visitor. “You won’t repeat what I’ve told you?” she added, on a sudden note of anxiety. “No,” said Helena, adjusting her jaunty hat. “But you will.” Norine followed her to the door. “You’re a peach,” she declared.
A week later, in Cleveland, Mrs. Davison looked up from yesterday’s New York Times. She was sitting in her morning room, in the corner she called the ingle, to which she always repaired with the mail after the postman’s visit. The Times came a day late, but Mrs. Davison did not mind this, since she only read it for “background.” The room was done in blue and violet and white chintzes and English furniture; it had a small-paned Tudor bow window of the kind that had made Helena, as a schoolgirl, imagine Sir Walter Raleigh writing on it with a diamond. There was a handsome Queen Anne secretary, with pigeonholes and a secret drawer, where Mrs. Davison tended to her correspondence; her collection of patch boxes held stamps of various denominations, like colored treasures; on a sturdy Jacobean table stood the month’s periodicals, arranged in stacks, as in a school library. On the paneled wall above the secretary hung Mrs. Davison’s “lares and penates”—faded late-Victorian photographs of the family seat in Somerset, “a plain gentleman’s manor” which her ancestor, a clergyman, had left for Canada. The fireplace was tiled in a pretty blue-and-white heraldic pattern, and next to it sat Mrs. Davison in her easy chair, glancing over the newspaper, her porcelain-handled letter opener in her large polka-dotted lap. “Helena!” she called in her sonorous windy voice, like the foghorn of a majestic Cunarder. Helena appeared in the doorway. “Harald has been arrested!” “My stars!” said Helena. “For fighting with some private detectives, it appears,” continued her mother, rapping on the paper with the letter opener. “He and a man named Putnam Blake. Do you know who that would be?”
Helena blanched. “Let me see it, Mother!” she implored, bolting across the room as though to wrench the newspaper and the awful information it contained from her mother’s custody. Harald and Norine must have been surprised again in their illicit embraces, and the prospect of submitting to her mother’s cross-examination on the subject made her gold freckles stand out dark on her cheekbones. Her mother, always tantalizing, fended her off. “You’ll muss it, Helena!” she chided, slowly folding the paper. In the midst of her concern, it struck Helena as peculiar that Mrs. Davison did not appear to be as shocked as she should have been; rather, her attitude was, if that were possible, one of comfortable and dignified alarm. “I’ll read it out to you,” Mrs. Davison said. “Here it is, on page five. And there’s a picture too. These newspaper photographs are so blurry.” Helena put her small sandy head next to her mother’s large grey one, her cheek grazing the hairnet that restrained Mrs. Davison’s “puffs.” “I don’t see where you mean,” she said, her eye running apprehensively down the headlines, which all concerned labor disputes. “There!” said her mother. “‘Guests Walk Out in Waiters’ Strike, Two Held.’” Helena’s teeth caught her lip; she gulped down her astonishment and sank onto a footstool, prepared to listen to her mother’s reading. “I don’t know, Helena, whether you’re aware that a group of waiters has been striking in some of the leading New York hotels. Daddy and I have been interested because of the Savoy Plaza. Daddy’s breakfast waiter told him, only last week—” “Please, Mother,” Helena interrupted. “Let’s hear about Harald.” Thereupon, Mrs. Davison commenced to read, with her customary stresses and pauses:
“The striking waiters at the Hotel Carlton Cavendish received support last night from an unexpected quarter. A sympathy strike of guests led by Putman Blake, publicist, 24, was staged in the candlelit Rose Room while the band played. The striking guests wore evening dress and included, besides Mr. Blake, who was taken to the East 51st Street station house, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and other literary celebrities. The signal for the walkout was a speech by Mr. Blake, urging the seated guests to demonstrate in sympathy with the waiters, whose union was picketing outside the hotel. Service was disrupted for three-quarters of an hour. Mr. Blake was charged with disorderly conduct on a complaint by Frank Hart, assistant manager of the Carlton Cavendish; also held on disorderly conduct charges was Harald Petersen, 27, a playwright. Both men, appearing in night court, were released in temporary bail of $25 each. Mr. Blake told reporters that he and Mr. Petersen intended to prefer charges against Mr. Hart and two house detectives employed by the Carlton Cavendish Corporation, who, he said, had ‘roughed them up’ and attempted to hold them prisoners in the hotel basement. Mr. Petersen charged that brass knuckles were used. Mr. Blake asserted that he and his party were exercising their rights in leaving the Rose Room when they discovered that they were to be served by non-union waiters, and that Mr. Hart and the two detectives had acted to restrain them from leaving peaceably. Mr. Hart stated that the ‘group of troublemakers’ had ordered drinks and other refreshments and left without paying. Mr. Blake and Mr. Petersen denied this; all their party, they said, which consisted of about thirty persons, scattered at individual tables in the luxurious, newly decorated Rose Room, had left ‘adequate compensation’ for the beverages they had consumed before embarking on the walkout; they had, however, refrained from tipping. It was possible, Mr. Blake added, that other guests had quitted the dining room without paying, in the confusion that ensued when he and Mr. Petersen were allegedly attacked by a ‘flying squad’ of non-union waiters and detectives. In night court, Mr. Blake and Mr. Petersen were accompanied by their wives, smartly dressed in evening gowns, and by a group of friends in silk hats and tail coats. Their trial will be held March 23. The ‘strikers,’ it was said, included a number of Vassar girls. A similar walkout was staged a few weeks ago at the lunch hour in the Hotel Algonquin, led by Heywood Broun, newspaper columnist. On that occasion, no arrests were made.”
“My word!” said Helena. “Do you suppose Kay’s in the picture? Let’s see!” The photograph showed a milling scene in the hotel dining room; a table and some chairs had been overturned. But unfortunately, as Mrs. Davison said, it was blurry. They could not find Kay, but they thought they spotted Harald, pale and shadowy in a dinner jacket, an arm raised aloft as a corps of waiters bore down on him. While her mother searched for Dorothy Parker (“She was convent-bred, Helena; did you know that?”), Helena identified Norine, in the center of the picture, facing the camera, wearing what appeared to be a low white satin evening dress and a jeweled tiara, as though she were in a box at the opera; she had on long white gloves, presumably glacé kid, with the hands rolled back over her wrists. A small inset showed Putnam as he was arraigned in night court; it was hard to tell whether the print was smudged or whether he had a black eye; he was dressed in a tail coat, apparently, but his white tie was missing.
Mrs. Davison laid down the paper. “That big photo shows you, Helena,” she observed trenchantly, “that the whole affair was staged.” “Of course it was staged, Mother,” retorted Helena impatiently. “That was the point. To get publicity for the waiters’ grievances.” “It was engineered, Helena,” said her mother. “They must have tipped off the newspaper to send a camera-man. Yet that Putnam Blake says in his statement that they left ‘when they discovered that they were to be served by non-union waiters.’ Notice the inconsistency.” “That’s only pro forma, Mother. Probably his lawyers advised him to say that. Otherwise, he might be charged with conspiracy or something. It’s not meant, really, to fool anybody.” “I’m going to call Daddy at the office,” said Mrs. Davison. “He may have missed the story. It’s just as his breakfast waiter at the Savoy Plaza told him; outside elements have got hold of the waiters and are manipulating them. I’m afraid Harald may be in for some very serious trouble. Letting himself be a party to a charade like that. Do you think you should put in a call for Kay?” Helena shook her head. She did not want to talk to Kay with her mother standing by. “Not now,” she said. “She’ll be at work, Mother.” “Well, at least,” returned Mrs. Davison, “they didn’t put her in the paper. And Petersen is a common name. It’s a wonder to me, by the bye, that the Times spelled it correctly. We can only hope that Macy’s doesn’t find out about this; I should hate to have Kay lose her position.”
She rose to go to the telephone, which was on a table in the corner. “Run along now,” she said, “while I talk to Daddy.” Mrs. Davison’s communications with Davy Davison, even on the most trivial matters, always took place in camera. In a little while, Helena was summoned back. “Daddy knows about it already. He’s sent out for today’s edition. If it’s come yet. And for yesterday’s Tribune and the yellow press. Daddy wonders whether the New York office could help Harald out of this scrape. Find him a reputable lawyer. Who is this Putnam Blake? I never heard Harald speak of him. Neither has Daddy.” She spoke in tones of mild affront; Helena did not remind her that she had not seen Harald for many months. “He went to Williams,” she said patiently. “He and another boy run an organization called Common Causes—to help raise money for the ‘forgotten man’ in labor cases. He’s married to Norine Schmittlapp, in our class. She’s the one in the tiara and long gloves. She was always leading demonstrations at college.” “Exactly,” said Mrs. Davison. “I knew it! ‘Cherchez la femme,’ I said to Davy Davison. ‘You mark my words; you’ll find there’s a woman behind this.’” Helena was taken aback by her mother’s astuteness. “What do you mean, exactly, Mother?” she inquired cautiously.
Mrs. Davison patted her hairnet. “I said to your father that what this fracas reminded me of was the old suffragette demonstrations. Chaining themselves to lampposts, and that young woman, Inez Something Something, Vassar she was too, who rode a white horse down Fifth Avenue to demonstrate for the vote. Dressed to kill. It was all in the papers then, when you were a baby. They were very fond of getting themselves arrested. Your father would never let me take part in those shenanigans. Though there were many fine women—Mrs. McConnaughey and Mrs. Perkin, right here in Cleveland—who were active in the movement.” These two friends of Mrs. Davison’s, one a Smith woman, the other a Wellesley woman, figured frequently in her conversation and had loomed over Helena’s childhood like secular patron saints. Mrs. Davison sighed. “But those suffragette shindigs were all staged too,” she added in a more vigorous and cheerful voice, as though mastering her regrets. “With the press invited ahead of time. No, as soon as I saw that article”—she picked up the Times and tapped it significantly—“I said to myself: ‘No man ever planned this.’” “But why?” asked Helena. “No grown-up man,” said her mother, “will ever put on a tuxedo unless a woman makes him. No man, whatever his politics, Helena, is going to put on a tuxedo to go out and sympathy-strike, or whatever they call it, unless some artful woman is egging him on. To get her picture in the paper. Don’t tell me Harald did this for Putnam Blake’s blue eyes. No; she’s probably got Putnam Blake and Harald wound round her little finger. That tiara now—probably she wanted to wear that. And those gloves. It’s a marvel to me she didn’t have an ostrich-feather fan.” Helena laughed and patted her mother’s plump arm. “Why, you’d think, Helena,” Mrs. Davison continued umbrageously but clearly feeling herself to be in “good vein,” “she was in the receiving line at some charity ball. I’ll wager she bought the whole outfit for the occasion. Or did she find it in her grandmother’s trunk?” Helena laughed again; she could not help marveling at her mother’s inductive powers. “A publicity hound,” said Mrs. Davison, administering a final tap to the paper. “What was her field at college?” “English,” said Helena. “She did her main work for Miss Lockwood. Contemporary Press.” Mrs. Davison smote her forehead. “Oh, my prophetic soul!” she said, nodding.