XXXIII
What with a legal conference and then a correspondents’ dinner in the evening, after returning from Chicago, I had not been able to get out to Savin Hill since that Washington broadcast, so there was a great deal I had to tell Helen about Gilbert Frary and the new arrangements when I finally did get home on Friday. Although Helen in her Fortuny gown and the living room with its log fire looked very natural, I felt as though I had returned from overseas and that there should be a lot of unpacked foot lockers and B-4 bags in the hall. I was feeling tired and it did not rest me to answer Helen’s questions, but it was reassuring to remember that there would be no broadcast on Saturday or Sunday. I needed time to think.
Helen wanted to know, of course, just what I had done in Chicago and what I had said to Gilbert.
“But I still don’t see,” she said, “why you had to fly down again to Washington.”
It was very hard to explain everything in order to Helen, who had been there quietly in the country.
“I went down to Washington again because Melville Goodwin’s going to leave the service and marry Dottie Peale,” I said.
After I had explained all about Gilbert Frary and the palace revolution, it did not seem fair to expect me to elaborate on Melville Goodwin. I was tired, but Helen was completely rested.
“Oh dear,” she said, “oh dear.”
“Let’s not discuss it now,” I said. “Let’s wait until tomorrow morning, Helen. I can do it a whole lot better after I’ve had some sleep.”
“Oh dear,” Helen said again. “What about Muriel Goodwin?”
I told her that she did not know it yet, or at least I did not think she did.
“That’s so dull of you,” Helen said. “Of course she must know something.”
Perhaps she might know something, but I did not want to discuss it then.
“Listen, Helen,” I said. “Why don’t we let this thing go for a little while? Tell me about Camilla. How is she doing at school?” but of course Helen did not want to let it go.
“Sid,” she said, “look … Dottie Peale called up this afternoon.”
“She did?” I answered. “What did she want?”
“She invited herself out here for lunch tomorrow,” Helen said. “There must be some connection.”
“I hope you told her she couldn’t come,” I said.
“Sid,” she answered, “I couldn’t do that—but the funny thing was, she never said a word about any of this. She didn’t even sound excited—but then, that’s like her, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s like her.”
Of course Dottie had to talk to someone, and I could think of us listening to the details blow by blow. Of course I would have had to see her eventually, but I had hoped to have a day or two or three completely free of Melville Goodwin.
“Poor Muriel,” Helen said. “After everything she’s done for him, and she’s just the right wife for him, too. She understands all the queer things that people like him have to do, and it is a queer existence, spending all your life learning how to kill people wholesale, when you think of it. After all the years she’s spent, making both ends meet and working her fingers to the bone”—it always turned out that the wronged wife had been working her fingers to the bone—“it isn’t fair. Somebody ought to tell her.”
“All right,” I said, “when he gets around to it, maybe Mel Goodwin will tell her.”
Helen clasped her hands tightly and stared fixedly at the fire, and her Fortuny dress made me think of the figure of Justice in some late Victorian mural.
“Do you know what I’d do if I were Muriel Goodwin?”
“Listen, Helen,” I said, “let’s not get theoretical.”
“I think I’d kill Dottie.”
“Now, Helen,” I said, “don’t be so conventional.”
“When I think of her sitting right here, so contented, crocheting those poor little washcloths for the new place where she was going to live,” Helen said, and I found her looking at me indignantly instead of at the fire, “well, if it were I, I’d step out with somebody else and find a new life for myself so fast you wouldn’t know it.”
“I don’t know why you bring us into it,” I said, “and besides, don’t you think that Mrs. Goodwin is too far along in years to start a new life?”
“Well, I’m not too far along,” Helen said. “You’d be surprised if I told you of all the chances I had when you were overseas. Yes, you’d be surprised.”
Our discussion had broken into fragments. We were no longer pinned down to anything definite, but then there was always a species of logic in Helen’s indefiniteness.
“Listen,” I said, “are we talking about you and me or about the Goodwins?”
“Darling,” Helen said, “I just want to talk. Here you’ve been, having an interesting time, and here I’ve been, shut up here with nobody to talk to except Camilla and Miss Otts.”
“But I thought you wanted to live here,” I told her, “and what about all the interesting people? What about our new friends, Mr. and Mrs. Tom and Maida Brickley?”
I congratulated myself on remembering the Brickleys’ names on top of everything else, and now they were stirred indiscriminately with the other personalities we were discussing.
“Darling,” Helen said, “I never said I didn’t like it here, and that reminds me that the Brickleys have asked us to dinner tomorrow night.” I did not answer. There seemed to be no peace or continuity. It would be quite a day tomorrow, what with Dottie Peale for lunch, and dinner with the Brickleys.
“Darling,” Helen said, “I suppose I’m provincial and old-fashioned, and that’s why I usually can’t seem to get into the spirit of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, but she’s a bitch. I’ve always tried to be nice about her, but she really is a bitch.”
“Who?” I asked. “Mrs. Brickley or Miss Otts?”
“Don’t try to be amusing,” she said. “There’s only one good thing about this, if you want to call it a good thing. It might have been you, if she hadn’t got all mixed up with the army.”
“Me?” I repeated after her, and I felt righteously indignant. “You know everything about Dottie and me.”
“Darling,” Helen said, “don’t you think I had a right to be worried when I heard that you and Dottie were on that trip to Paris? You know, she never wants to let go of anything. You were a piece of personal property, and she was simply furious when we got married.”
“Why, no,” I said, “she wasn’t. She was awfully nice about it. She said how glad she was for me. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “don’t you know anything about bitches? It would have been you if it hadn’t been poor old Mel Goodwin, and she would have said it was all your fault basically. She’s always been furious at me, and we hate each other’s guts. I really don’t see how I can be nice to her tomorrow.”
Perhaps nothing was ever over, even when you thought it was. I remembered that long flight over the ocean in the darkened plane. I remembered that rococo sitting room in the Ritz in Paris and Dottie whistling in the bedroom. She always whistled when she fixed her face and hair. If Major General Goodwin had not been there, Dottie and I would have been a long way from home. Then I remembered those adjoining bedrooms in that bleak hotel in northern France when Dottie had asked me to kiss her in a friendly way. It was a long way from anywhere.
I pulled myself back into the present. Farouche had dropped his rubber ring on my foot and his doing so relieved the tension. He wagged his beautifully brushed tail expectantly, and Helen looked benign. When I played with Farouche, it meant that I was getting used to everything.
“Darling,” Helen said, “we really ought to think about having another baby.”
I knew exactly why the idea had occurred to her at that moment. She was not thinking of the nursery and the bassinet and the good life as much as she was thinking of Dottie Peale.
There always came a time when you wearied of listening to the fallacies of self-justification because you learned finally the basic truth that no one in a jam was in a position to give you anything back. Such people were too busy with their own vagaries even for true gratitude. In the end they always did what they desired, and they might as well have done it from the first instead of making it a problem. This was the way I felt about Dottie Peale. I had studied a great many of her problems, including that of Henry Peale, whom she had not married for money or position—although she knew that everyone had thought she had—and possibly not for love either, in any accepted sense. She had married Henry Peale because she simply had to do something for someone—and there was Henry. This was what she said and what she may even have believed. Then there had been the problem of Dottie’s childhood background, which I had studied with her also—why she had not been able to adjust herself to it, and why she had left home and could not possibly go back and marry a boy who, for reasons entirely his own, thought that they were engaged and wrote her letter after letter and even followed her to New York. If Dottie had returned home, as I had once pointed out to her, she could have done a great deal for other people in a selfless way, including her parents, who, though I had never seen them, struck me as having many generous and agreeable traits, in spite of what Dottie said about their narrow-mindedness and mediocrity. Dottie could not help it if she always reached for something more than what had been given her and if she was always in revolt. At least this is what she said, and she could illustrate these points by telling many stories about herself in a very interesting way.
Dottie was always shuffling the cards of her past and dealing them out in a sort of intricate solitaire, only for me, as she always said, because I always understood her, and not for anybody else. She was very tired of having herself on her mind, but if you thought of the past, you could understand the present. There was the little private school in that small town—where her dresses had been too plain and the girls had never asked her to their parties—and there had been the birthday party that her mother had made her give. Then came the state college, a dreadful place, and the cousins who had lived on a Midwestern farm, and that column in the local paper about New York by O. O. McIntyre, and the poems of Emily Dickinson and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. I knew about her course in typing and shorthand. I knew how she had watched the trains go east and how she had come to New York herself one summer, thin, aloof and eager, with her overnight case and a dress she had cut from a Butterick pattern, and ten dollars in her purse. I probably knew her as well as anyone, but a time had come when Dottie Peale and I had lived through too many stories.
In the morning I remembered immediately that Dottie had invited herself to lunch. Ever since we had bought the place in Connecticut, she had been saying that she must drop in to see us. Helen had always begged her to wait until everything was decorated, and Dottie had always understood perfectly. She would not drop in suddenly, she said, although she could not wait to see Helen in her new setting. I wished that I did not know so well what Dottie would say and think. I knew she would make me think things that were disloyal to Helen, but this would not be the real reason for her coming. The reason would be to review the pros and cons of her new-found happiness.
Ever since I had worked on the night shift of the newspaper, I had been able to sleep through a morning, and it was after eleven when I awoke. It took me an instant to recollect where I was, something that still happened to me quite frequently at Savin Hill, and then I saw that it was raining and that the bare trees were dripping coldly and moistly against a grim gray sky. I saw that Helen’s bed was empty, and then I saw that Camilla was standing beside me. It must have been Camilla’s concentrated attention that had finally disturbed my sleep. She had not moved or spoken as I had been pulling my wits together, but suddenly she giggled in the thoughtless, rudimentary manner of childhood.
“Daddy,” she said, “you look so funny waking up.”
For that matter, Camilla looked pretty funny herself. She was wearing her jodhpurs and her tiny tweed coat and little stock and a gold horseshoe pin. Her hair was in a single braid, clubbed and tied with a black ribbon. She reminded me of an eighteenth-century picture of a child dressed like an adult.
“Hello,” I said, “are you going riding?”
Camilla giggled again and nodded.
“You can’t,” I said, “it’s raining.”
“Oh, Daddy,” Camilla said, “don’t be silly. Don’t you know that Mr. Delaney has his Saturday class in the indoor ring?”
It was still curious, at least to me, that Camilla should be obliged to learn to ride a horse. The idea was an anachronism. Horses were no longer a necessary means of locomotion. They were only social symbols. Camilla must ride because someday she might meet a nice boy upon another horse and marry him and live happily ever after. Fortunately she had another asset—her mother’s eyes and nose and hair, because there might not be any horses or jodhpurs or Mr. Delaneys, the way the world was going. Everyone clung blindly to the hope of eventual security, and the little girl dressed in jodhpurs was a pathetic symbol of that hope. What would happen to Camilla eventually and what could I do about it? I was sure I did not know. Would she be like her mother or would she be like Dottie Peale? The future lay somewhere within her, but I could not read it. There was no solid Victorian future any longer. There were no William Ernest Henleys any longer, making us the masters of our fates and the captains of our souls.
“Mummy told me to tell you to wake up,” Camilla said. “Oscar’s bringing up your breakfast.”
“Where’s your mother now?” I asked.
“She’s arranging things downstairs,” Camilla said. “She acts as if there’s going to be a luncheon party.”
“It isn’t a real party,” I told her, “just one lady.”
“Well,” Camilla said, “good-by, Daddy. Miss Otts is waiting for me, but I’ll be back for lunch.”
It seemed to me when she had gone that she had left me for good already and that I had never known her. Days were too full and time moved too rapidly. I would not know much about Camilla today because Dottie Peale was coming to lunch and we were going to the Brickleys’ to dinner. I remembered what old Mr. Goodwin had said to Melville in the drugstore in Hallowell. There had never been time for him to learn much about Melville Goodwin either. It seemed less and less possible to compress the details of life within the frame of time.
The wailing hum of a vacuum cleaner sounded in the living room as I came down the stairs. Mr. Brown had been brought in from outside to do the rugs, and next he would do the green carpet on the stairs. Mrs. Griscoe, the cleaning woman, was dusting the library. Oscar and Hilda were setting the dining room table, and Williams was waxing the hall floor. Helen was arranging flowers and supervising. The electric waxer and the vacuum cleaner made the house sound like an industrial plant. However, it was to have all the earmarks of a simple informal lunch—just the Skeltons at home.
Helen was wearing a whipcord suit that made her look as efficient as Dottie Peale.
“Everything looks all right, Helen,” I said. “Why don’t you leave it alone?” It was a useless remark, but the activity made me nervous.
“I don’t see how you can sleep in the morning,” Helen said. “I’ve been up since seven. You know how particular she is. She always sees everything.”
Helen did not realize that this abnormal neatness was as revealing as untidiness. Women were more vicious and more intolerant than men.
“All right,” I said, “but you’ll get it looking like a feature piece in House and Garden.”
Dottie had never let anyone forget that Helen had once worked on a similar magazine.
“You know what she used to say about Tenth Street,” Helen said. “I’m not going to have her saying …” She stopped and called to Mrs. Griscoe and told her not to forget the powder room.
“What aren’t you going to have her say?” I asked.
“I’m not going to have her say, ‘Poor Sidney.’ I heard her say it once.”
In some ways women were surprisingly obtuse. Helen should have known that nothing she could ever do would prevent Dottie from saying, “Poor Sidney.”
“Poor Sidney,” I could hear her saying as soon as she got back to town, “you should see what Helen’s done to him—even the dog with the rubber ring and the little girl like a picture in a Sunday supplement.”
“Well,” I said, “never mind it, Helen. You can say, ‘Poor Mel.’”
Poor Sidney and poor Mel. Both the girls would say it.
“Sidney,” Helen said, “I wish you would go upstairs and put on some older clothes so you won’t look self-conscious.”
“But aren’t we both?” I said. “Isn’t this whole effort self-conscious?”
“Oh, Sidney,” Helen said, “please go upstairs and read the papers. I’m busy and I’ve got a headache. I want you to mix the Martinis yourself instead of having Oscar bring them in. She won’t look natural until she has one in her hand. Dottie and her damn Martinis!”
As General Gooch had said, no one ever knew everything about anybody. I had never realized that Helen, who usually took a charitable view toward everyone, felt so strongly about Dottie Peale.
Upstairs I changed into a suit I had owned for years, before I had met Helen, in fact, which had been in moth balls during the war. It was a suit which I could never bring myself to throw away, because it reminded me of old times. Its knees and elbows were worn thin by old times, and I was reasonably sure that Dottie would remember it. If she did, I could imagine what she would say.
“Poor Sidney,” she would say, “in a state of absolute revolt, clinging to that old brown herringbone, the suit that I made him buy before he ever met her. It was pathetic. It made me want to cry.” Yet if I wore a new suit, nothing would be improved, because Dottie would say again, “Poor Sidney, completely regimented by that wife of his and overdressed as usual.” Nothing would be right for Dottie Peale and nothing would be right for Helen.
I tried to concentrate on the morning news while I listened to the dripping of the rain, but instead I remembered how glad Dottie had seemed to be when Helen and I were married and all the kind things she always said about Helen, and I also recalled the kind things Helen had said about Dottie. At least my mind was off Melville Goodwin, now that I was the vertex of a triangle. It was not Dottie’s fault, I was thinking, that she was a girl who could never let anything go entirely. She was a perfect example of the type that could never get on with women, and also she was the type that never got on for long with men.
“Sid,” I heard Helen calling, “Sid, please come downstairs. She’s here.”
Helen had seen before I had that Dottie’s town car, driven by Bernard, that chauffeur of hers, was turning into the white-fenced drive. Dottie Peale and I had gone a long, long way since we were working on the paper, and were very young and were very merry. Though middle age had hardly touched me, I felt a twinge of senility as I saw Dottie in the car. We had traveled a long, long way, and only a very little of it together, but here we were.
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “not that suit,” and she could remember my clothes, too, but it was too late to change again, and the car was at the door. I held an umbrella for Dottie while Bernard helped her out, not that she ever needed to be helped. Helen had done right to wear something tailored. Dottie, too, was in a suit, cool and austere, with a topaz brooch at her throat, no noisy bangles—an honest, simple girl.
“Darling,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. How’s the country squire?”
Everything was as gay and rural as an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, in spite of the rain. “All the way up the road,” she went on, “I’ve been wondering which ancestral mansion could be yours. Bernard called up Williams for the directions, you know. I just couldn’t believe it was this one.”
“Well, well,” I said, “and how’s the little city mouse?”
Dottie glanced at me sideways.
“Darling,” she said, “I can’t wait until I see absolutely everything. It all looks so exactly like you.”
“That’s just what I’ve always felt about Seventy-second Street,” I said, “but I never could bring myself to tell you.”
Dottie gave my arm a savage pinch.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, “shut up. Let’s get in out of the rain.… Helen, darling, how beautiful this is!”
“Dottie, dear,” Helen said, “it’s so sweet of you to come out on such an awful day.”
Helen and Dottie Peale were being very civilized indeed. There was no rough stuff, scarcely an awkward moment. There were no roundhouse swings or smacks of gloves. There were no cuts from glancing blows. They were so glad to see each other, so fond of each other, so mutually admiring, that it was hard to believe what Helen had said about Dottie. A mutual bond had drawn them together, because they were both so fond of me—Dottie merely in her tender, maternal way. Occasionally they discussed me as though I were not present, but also they had so much to say to one another. Dottie could always see everything without appearing to notice, and I knew she was not missing anything.
“Darling,” I heard her say, as she and Helen walked arm and arm into the living room, and they seemed to have completely forgotten me in their joy in seeing each other, “no wonder they were sorry to lose you from that magazine. I had lunch with Diana Paul only last week, and Diana was saying that there was no one like you, with restraint and taste combined with so many new ideas. What fun you must have had fixing everything, and you’ve done it terribly quickly and it’s all so perfect. It’s—it’s like a stage set for that old play Berkeley Square, isn’t it? And yet it isn’t Berkeley Square, dear. It’s absolutely you, and you were so right in not consulting Sidney’s taste, because Sidney has no taste, has he? It’s you in your own setting. I don’t really see how you can do any more about anything.”
“If you say so,” Helen said, “everything must be all right, Dottie, dear. I’ve been on pins and needles to know what you would think of the house.”
Dottie laughed delightfully and affectionately.
“Darling,” she said, “you must really learn not to mind what other people think. Hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may, but then there isn’t a chip around here anywhere.”
“All in order because of you, dear,” Helen said. “Sidney doesn’t let me forget your love of order for a minute.” Then she, too, laughed affectionately. “But now we’re on quotations, there is a divinity that shapes our ends, isn’t there? Roughhew them how we may.”
“Did Sidney teach you that, dear?” Dottie asked. “Sidney’s a liberal education for poor girls like you and me, isn’t he? You can’t help learning from him, just by osmosis. Whose end, darling?”
“Yours,” Helen answered, “or mine. Anybody’s end.”
Dottie laughed and Helen laughed. They both seemed to be having a wonderful time.
“Now, Sidney,” Dottie said, and she smiled at me encouragingly, “Helen got that line from you, didn’t she? Darlings, I can’t tell you how I love being here. Where shall I sit so I won’t be roughhewn? I don’t want to perch on the wrong museum piece.”
“Darling,” Helen said, “I’ve never known a museum piece that didn’t suit you.”
“Now girls,” I said, “suppose you both relax and we’ll have a drink.”
It was about time under the circumstances, because everything was growing brittle.
“Helen, dear,” Dottie said, “Sidney’s beginning to look positively corn-fed, isn’t he? It’s wonderful what you’ve done to him, darling.”
Nothing that had been said would be forgotten, and furthermore it would probably grow to be all my fault when Helen took it up with me later.
“Now, girls,” I said, “let’s all take it easy, girls.”
The round was over when Oscar came in with the cocktail tray.
“Let’s have Martinis,” I said. “Why don’t you make them, Dottie?”
“Oh, no,” Dottie said, “let Helen. You make them, darling.”
“Sidney,” Helen said, “you make them, Sidney.”
Both girls were sitting up straight with hands folded in their laps and ankles crossed, like girls in dancing school waiting for a partner. They both looked austerely charming and very pretty, but I thought that Dottie’s face looked drawn. The gray light from the north windows was not flattering, and she did not look as happy as she should have, considering everything. I was tempted to cut roughly through her talk and ask her what the news was, as I would have if we had been alone, but then there was Helen, and the amenities. Just as I started with the cocktails, Farouche came in. He was brushed and he had a new bowknot on the top of his cranium, but like Dottie he seemed worried and distrait.
“Oh,” Dottie said, “where did you ever come from, you lovely handsome man? Oh, woozums, woozums, woozums!” And she sank down on her knees and threw her arms around Farouche.
Though Farouche submitted to Dottie’s embrace like a gentleman, he knew instinctively that her behavior was not genuine, and so did I. Dottie would not have gone overboard in such a manner if she had not been under some sort of tension. I was growing very tired of the feminine character, and I was thinking how many valid reasons there were for men’s bars and men’s clubs. Helen and I looked at each other, and she raised her eyebrows slightly. Some impulse made me take her hand, and we stood for a moment watching this erratic exhibition between Dottie and Farouche.
“Sid,” she said, “hurry with those cocktails. I think we’d all better have a drink.”
Such anxiety was not like Helen, who never did approve of cocktails in the middle of the day.
“All right,” I said, “all right,” and somehow everything was all right. It was as if I had been telling her that I liked everything she had done and that she was not like Dottie Peale. Helen was a neater, sweeter maiden from a cleaner, greener land.
The embrace was over. Dottie was back in her chair again and “Woozums” was wandering about the room distractedly, like an old man looking for his glasses.
“What is he doing?” Dottie asked. “Does he want to go out, Sidney?”
“I think he’s looking for his rubber ring,” I said.
“Oh, God,” Dottie said, “I wish everyone weren’t always looking for something. Is he happy when he gets it?”
“Yes,” I said, “he seems to be.”
“Oh, God,” Dottie said, “I wish I could settle for a rubber ring.”
For the first time since Dottie’s appearance her voice was kind and natural, but her remark was surprising, because it seemed to me that she had finally settled for a rubber ring herself.
“Sid,” Helen said, “don’t keep stirring. They’re cold enough.”
I had been exposed to all of Dottie’s moods. I could even classify them cold-bloodedly, and she knew I could, and perhaps she both disliked and liked me for it. As I watched her now, she was looking coyly into her Martini. She could hold a glass as carelessly and gracefully as one of those improbable girls in a Sargent portrait handled a handkerchief or fan. I do not mean by this that she drank too much. She despised people who could not manage liquor, especially women. She was just posing as The Girl with the Martini.
“Sid,” she said, “did you tell Helen about Gilbert Frary?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I won’t forget what you did for me, Dot.”
“Darling,” Dottie said, “anything I did was for Helen, too. It wasn’t much—just calling up some people. There’s so little anyone can do for anyone else basically.… And Helen … in case you don’t know it, Sid’s a very good guy.”
“I always had the same idea,” Helen answered, “but it’s nice to have it confirmed.”
The shift in conversation made me wince.
“I’m wonderful,” I said, “but don’t be so patronizing about it.”
Dottie took a delicate sip of her Martini.
“I knew you’d have the subtlety but I didn’t know you’d have the guts to do what you did with Frary,” she said.
“I couldn’t let the home team down,” I told her. “If you want to know, I’ve learned a lot about guts from General Goodwin.”
This seemed like a graceful way of bringing Melville Goodwin into the conversation. Even if I did not approve of what had happened, I wanted Dottie to know that my loyalty lay with her and Mel if the chips were down.
“I kept thinking of Mel,” I went on, “when I was slugging it out with Gilbert and the boys. You know the way Mel puts it.” I was an old friend of Melville Goodwin’s now that I had swallowed a Martini. I had almost been with him in the Silver Leaf Armored—almost. “You estimate the situation and then you act.” I filled Dottie’s glass and filled my own again. “Well, here’s to Mel.”
It seemed a very handsome thing to say, but Dottie looked at me as though I had been crudely clumsy, and then she blushed. I had not seen Dottie blush for years.
“No, no,” she said, “never mind about Mel now. Helen, darling, here’s to Sid. I’m awfully glad you’ve done so much for Sid.”
I always disliked sentiment, and the whole thing seemed to be getting out of hand. I saw Helen’s eyes open wide in her astonishment.
“God damn it,” Dottie said chokingly, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“Oh, Dottie,” I heard Helen say.
First there had been that scene with Farouche, and now Dottie was dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said again. “God damn it, don’t say anything.”
Fortunately I knew exactly what to say.
“Come on,” I said, “and pull your socks up, Dot.”
“God damn it,” Dottie said, “I’m all right now. Give me another drink, Sid.”
Her teeth glittered in her most impeccable smile. “Don’t look so worried,” she said. “It’s not alcohol—just nerves, combined with all this sanitary Chippendale. Excuse me, Helen darling.”
It was like pulling a rabbit from a hat. It was hard to believe that anything had upset Dottie.
“Why, here’s Camilla,” I heard Helen saying. “Come in, dear, and shake hands with Mrs. Peale and don’t forget to curtsy.”
I was singularly moved by the sight of Camilla, out of her riding clothes and all prepared by Helen, like the house, for the visitation of Dottie Peale. She looked so very shy and so small in her patent-leather slippers and her smocked dress of Liberty silk, that for once I seriously felt that I was responsible for her. What might happen to me did not have much value as long as I had done something for Camilla. It was like arriving somewhere safely.
“Why, darling,” Dottie Peale said, “how sweet you look. Won’t you give me a big kiss, darling?”
Dottie had often told me that she did not like small children and she knew even less than I about how to get along with them. I felt acutely embarrassed, both for her and Camilla, because I was afraid we were going to have a repetition of that exhibition with Farouche. Of course Camilla did not want to give her a big kiss, but I was proud of Camilla and of all the teachings of Helen and Miss Otts. She complied politely and restrainedly and then with the unerring instinct of a child she firmly disengaged herself from Dottie Peale.
“Oh, Helen,” Dottie was saying, “she is so sweet, just a pocket edition of you, dear.”
Then Camilla moved to where I was sitting and stood leaning lightly against me. I had never thought that she would want to be near me at such a time. I put my arm around her and held her tight.
“Yes,” I said, “Camilla does look quite a lot like Helen.”
I have often wondered what we all were thinking. I am sure we were all thinking of ourselves in our different ways, because of Camilla.
“I’ve always wanted to have a little girl,” Dottie said.
She always wanted something, but it was not like her to drop all barriers in this way. I had never seen her so insecure, and I could think of nothing to say to fill the embarrassed gap of silence. No one spoke until Dottie spoke again.
“And I don’t suppose I ever will,” she said, “but then, maybe I wouldn’t be very good at it.”
By now there was no doubt that Dottie was deeply worried about something, and obviously it was something which she did not wish to discuss in front of Helen. She ate very little all through luncheon, although she said several times how delicious everything tasted. In the living room afterwards she did not touch her coffee, though she had been careful to ask if she could have some saccharine instead of sugar. And I remember her saying how strange it was—once she was always hungry and once she could eat and eat without gaining a single pound, but it was different now. She seemed to be putting off an inevitable moment, while Helen and I both waited. It was like the old story of the man who had dropped one shoe noisily and the man in the room below sending up word to him for heaven’s sake to drop the other.
“Helen, dear,” she said at last, “would you mind if I took Sid away somewhere for a little while? I don’t mind his repeating everything I say, but I don’t seem to be able to say it to you both at once.”
From the bright way Helen answered, I knew that she was as glad as I that the suspense was over. Why didn’t we go into the library, she suggested. She seemed to be turning me over to Dottie very willingly.
“And keep him as long as you like,” she said, “and we can all have tea later.”
I listened very carefully, but I could find no sharpness in Helen’s words, and I had a sense that this disappointed Dottie.
As soon as we reached the library, I knew exactly what Dottie thought of the whole layout, and it placed an undue strain on my loyalty to see her gazing superciliously at the English gentleman’s books. All at once she put her arm through mine as though we both were lonely.
“Oh, my God,” she said, “poor Sid.”
I could not think of an appropriate answer. I wanted to be loyal to Helen, who had tried so hard with that library, but I felt my own self-pity.
“Poor Sid,” she said again. “This isn’t what you ever wanted, is it, darling?”
“Not exactly,” I answered, “but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a minor detail, Dot.”
I might not have had everything, but I had more than she would ever have, and at least I knew that you had to give up some part of yourself to get anything you wanted.
“I know it is,” she said. “Sid, I’m awfully glad for you, I really am.… And the patter of little feet. This won’t be such a bad place for the children’s hour.”
I wished she did not see everything and know everything. There was never any intellectual privacy when I was with her.
“All right,” I said, “that’s one way to put it, Dot.”
“Damn you,” she said, “don’t try to be slick about it. All right, I’m jealous of you. God, all this burns me up. I hate you and still I’m glad for you. How the hell did it ever work this way? Oh, God, I’m so unhappy, darling.”
Then she threw her arms around me and pressed her head against my shoulder—but not the way she had with Farouche. It was an excellent thing that Helen was not there.
“Oh, Sid,” she sobbed, “oh, God!”
“Don’t,” I said, “don’t, Dot.”
It was useless to say “don’t.” There was that destructive driving force inside her. No man, nothing, would ever answer her desire, and unfortunately we both knew it.
“Sid,” she said, “please hold me for just a minute. You’ve got to help me, Sid.”
“Help you about what, Dot?” I asked.
She pushed herself away from me, but she continued to hold my hand.
“All right,” she said, “all right. Of course you know what.… That God-damned brass-hat general of yours, Major General Melville A. Goodwin, and to hell with him! Do you know what he wants? He wants me to marry him and now the whole damned Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington are beginning to expect me to. Oh, Sidney, I can’t. You’ve got to help me, Sid.”
I had never seen her look so empty or defeated. Her words had all her old speciousness, but they had taken a lot out of her. She turned away from me and took a few unsteady steps toward the armchair by the library fireplace, and curiously enough it was the chair that Melville Goodwin had always used. She slumped into it heavily, with none of her beguiling schoolgirl manner. There was no swift moving of the skirt, no crossing of the ankles. Her jacket, so carefully cut to show the arrogant boyish slimness of her figure, was a mass of untidy wrinkles. Her skirt had ridden up above one knee, showing the edge of her slip with its meticulously embroidered border, and nothing could have confirmed her wretchedness more eloquently. For once in her life for a few moments Dottie did not care how she looked. I might have been alone there, surrounded by an aura of Chanel Five and my own disordered thoughts. It was strange how trivial some of them were. Really, I was thinking, Dottie should pull down her dress. She had beautiful legs, but now they were sprawling and inartistic. Really, I was thinking, she ought to sit up, and I sounded aloof and unsympathetic when I answered her, although I did not intend to be.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you,” I said, “that he might have honorable intentions?”
I should have been beside her with my arm around her, consoling poor Dottie, whom I had known so long, but I did not seem able to throw myself into it.
“Oh, Sid,” she said, “please don’t. Please say you’re fond of me.”
“All right,” I said, “I’m fond of you, but stop showing your slip.”
She arranged things in a single indescribable motion. Suddenly the wrinkles of the jacket were gone and the slip was gone and the skirt and the nylon stockings were all synchronized again.
“For God’s sake, sit down yourself,” she said.
I thought I had built up a perfect tolerance to Dottie Peale. I should not have cared personally that she could not bring herself to marry a major general in the United States Army with whom I was acquainted. The step had nothing whatsoever to do with my life theoretically, and yet I cared. She had no right to ask for my sympathy, but still she had it.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s such an awful mess. You are always so right about everything.”
“So right about what?” I asked her.
“Oh, about the whole business,” she said. “You never did approve of it, did you? Not even back in Paris.”
“No,” I said, “of course I didn’t.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have told me more about him,” she said. “I never knew he would take everything so seriously. I honestly don’t see how I could have known it would go as far as this.”
Somehow it was getting to be my fault. Poor Mel Goodwin, I was thinking, who had laid everything he had at her feet. He was worth a thousand of her, but worth did not tip the scale. In the end, when he had given everything, she did not want what he had to offer. It was absolutely like her to draw back in the end. Instinct for survival was working, and Melville Goodwin could go overboard. In any shipwreck it was always women first.
“Didn’t you want him to be serious?” I asked.
“Sid, don’t you see how I feel?” she asked. “And won’t you please sit down and listen? I want to be fair, darling, absolutely fair. Of course I didn’t know it would come to this, and he was so unhappy and so completely maladjusted. Sid, I only wanted to make him happy.”
I sat down in the other armchair opposite her.
“And so you made him still more maladjusted,” I said.
“Darling,” she answered, “I wish you’d try to pull yourself together and understand. Of course I know he loves me, but I didn’t know he would love me in this way. He’s so undeviating, darling. Do you remember that poem he keeps reciting? ‘Push off and sitting well in order smite …’ I’ll scream if I hear it again. When the brass wears off there’s still more brass.” She stopped and looked at me sharply. “And did you ever see those damn clothes of his—that tweed coat and his double-breasted suit?”
I did not answer, but they mattered. Disillusion always came from details.
“I don’t mean to be unkind,” she said, “and I know part of this is my fault, and I know men always blame women in the end. Of course I was carried away. I’ve been so lonely, Sid, and well, damn it, he’s a man.”
“I’ve heard you say that before,” I said.
“Sid,” she said, “I know that what I’m saying sounds awful. I still love him—in theory, but it’s all too much for me to manage. Sidney, please be kind.”
“All right,” I said, “I’m being kind.”
I could not unsnarl the raveled ends of her meaning. Her love was always limited, and perhaps she recognized this as she sat there wretchedly, twisting her hands nervously, pulling at the loose edges of her life.
“Darling,” she said, “it did seem possible at first. I want you please to believe that. I don’t suppose I ever thought things out clearly. I didn’t want to think, because I was happy. Everything would have been possible if he’d only been a little more like other people, more like you and me, but he’s so damned—so damned honest, darling.”
There was truth in all her sophistry, and her saving grace was that she could see it occasionally. Melville Goodwin was more honest than either of us could ever be.
“Darling,” she said, “I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming. Of course we did make plans, but I didn’t think he believed them any more than I did. Do you know what he actually wants now? He wants to retire from the service and for us to go away somewhere alone together. He wants us to take a little bungalow or something and live—in Carmel, California, darling.” Her voice ended on a higher note.
It was not the incongruity of Carmel, California, that had torn it—this was exactly the place that Melville Goodwin would want to live—and it was not the bungalow. It was the facing of a definite fact and all its implications, including the character of Mel Goodwin himself, in the cold north light.
“And that isn’t all,” she went on. “Darling, do you know what happened yesterday?” She did not expect me to answer, and it was doing her good to tell someone everything. “Darling, yesterday another general came, an old one. God, he was polite—something like a priest. Damn it, give me a cigarette.”
She was feeling better, or she would not have asked for one, but her hands were shaking.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Oh, he was someone Mel always talks about,” she said. “Grimshaw, Foghorn Grimshaw. Why does everyone have some damned nickname in the army?”
I had often wondered myself, but her words were moving faster.
“And do you know what he wanted? He wanted to tell me all about Mel and he wanted to congratulate me, darling … but they don’t want Mel to leave the service. They want us to wait until everything can be arranged properly. Time, he kept saying, time.… But Mel wants to go to Carmel, or else he wants to be somewhere with troops. Oh, God, I’m ashamed.”
“Well,” I said, “you ought to be. You haven’t any right to ruin Goodwin’s life.”
“Darling,” she said, “I don’t want to ruin his life. I’d much rather have ruined yours. We could have gone to hell together, and we would have had a lot of the same ideas.” Her face brightened. “Would you like to go to hell with me?”
“No,” I said, “not right at the moment, Dot.”
“I thought of it when we were on that plane. If Mel hadn’t been in Paris …” She was retreating from fact again. “All right,” she said, “but don’t say you never have thought of it.… Sid, aren’t you going to help me?”
I was thinking of Mel Goodwin and I felt a sudden surge of revolt.
“No,” I said. “Damn it, Dottie, if you feel that way, hurry up and tell him so.”
“But I don’t want to tell him,” she said. “There must be some other way. I don’t want to hurt him.… He believes in me.… No one’s ever believed in me the way he does.”
“He’d better stop,” I said.
It was exactly like her, I was thinking, not to be able to say yes and not to be able to say no, and to try to put the burden on someone else.
“Sid,” she said, “will you tell him?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “Dot, you ought to be ashamed.”
“Damn you,” Dottie said, “I told you I was ashamed. Can’t you be kind to me, Sidney?”
“No,” I said.
She was struggling like a struck fish.
“Sid,” she said, “suppose I went to see her and just told her everything. Suppose I told her how terrible it is, and it’s all a big mistake. I’d rather do that than tell him.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Oh, hell!” Dottie said. “Mrs. Goodwin, that dreadful wife of his—Muriel.”
“If you do that, he’ll lose Muriel, too,” I said.
I had never suspected that she would arrive at the old chestnut of the confrontation of the wife and mistress, but as I considered it, I realized that Dottie enjoyed dramatic scenes. Her mind was still vacillating like a needle, between degrees of reason. She was too egocentric to realize that by trying to let herself out the easy way, she might create a situation with Muriel that was irreparable. I could not see Muriel accepting this sort of annunciation.
“Sid,” she said, “suppose you tell her.”
“Dottie,” I said, “I’m not in this, and Mrs. Goodwin isn’t either, unless she refuses to take him back. You’ll have to take it up with Mel Goodwin, Dot. He’s the one you’re letting down.”
There was not much need for retribution in the life hereafter. You usually paid for the party while you were still on earth.
“Why not face it?” I told her. “You’ve been through this with other men.”
“Darling,” Dottie said, “that isn’t fair. It wasn’t the same with you and me. We had other things on our minds.”
We must have both thought about this through a second or two of painful silence. You always had to pay for every party.
“I wasn’t referring to you and me,” I said. “Let’s forget it, Dot.”
“Oh, hell,” Dottie said. “You didn’t believe in Santa Claus.… Darling, no one else I’ve ever known ever threw in everything the way he has. Darling, he must fight like he can love.”
I thought of the young Melville Goodwin, just married, just out of the Point, just before he went overseas, walking down Sixth Avenue with Muriel and hearing that old song.
Dottie was sitting up straight. She had picked up all her frankness and confusion and had packed it away. She might have been talking to her lawyer about business matters.
“Sid,” she said, “are you going to let me down?”
“No one’s letting you down, Dot,” I said. “I can’t pick up the check.”
“By God,” Dottie said, “I’ll never trust you or anyone again.”
She had twisted everything around, as she always could.
“You never have, Dot,” I said.
She stood up and I stood up.
“God,” she said, “I hate your guts. I guess I’d better be leaving now, but I do want to say good-by to poor Helen. Will you have someone call Bernard, please?”
I opened the library door, and she walked past me. She hated my guts, but then, she had hated them a good many times before and again I was thinking “If you can fight like you can love, good night, Germany.”
“Helen darling,” I heard her saying, “I’m terribly sorry I kept Sidney so long. I had no idea it was so late, and I have to be back in time for dinner. Sidney’s calling Bernard.”
I was glad to be able to tell Helen about it all, instead of keeping it to myself. At least there was a chance now of bringing some order into Melville Goodwin’s problem. The worst of it was that I had once been almost like Melville Goodwin. Thank God Dottie was gone, I kept thinking.
“You ought not to be so hard on her,” Helen said. “She can’t help it, Sid.”
It all went to show that no one should risk interfering with other people’s lives. Dottie and the Goodwins could work it out themselves from now on.
“Don’t say you don’t care,” Helen said. “Of course you care what’s going to happen to him and poor Muriel. She certainly must know everything by now.”
Helen and I were like good little children who had behaved themselves. We were safe at Savin Hill.
“Why are you so sure she knows?” I asked her.
“Any woman can tell,” Helen answered. “It’s just a matter of how she’s going to take it.”
Things never seemed to settle down, there in the country. I never suspected that Muriel Goodwin would be with us all by herself spending Monday night, but then perhaps this was inevitable, since I was growing to be the greatest living authority on Dottie Peale.