IT WAS AN ILL wind that blew nobody good. Had Gus not decided to go back to Esther (and he did, the following week), Polly would have had to turn her father away. In fact, if the letter had arrived on Saturday, instead of Monday, she would have been in a terrible quandary. On Saturday there was still Gus. What could she have done? Probably she would have telephoned her mother and begged her to keep her father on the farm—not to rush into a divorce. Or she might have suggested mental treatment. The irony of this was not lost on her from the very first minute. She took cold comfort from the thought that, thanks to Gus, she could wire her father to come ahead. On hearing the news, everyone took for granted that her parents’ separation must have been a dreadful shock to her, but the sad truth was that all Polly felt then was a wan gratitude that her father was coming. It was with a start finally that she remembered her mother and wondered how she was taking it.
Long afterward, Polly admitted that it had all worked out for the best. She was happy, living with her father, far happier than she had been with Gus. They suited each other. And his arrival, three days after his letter, was occupational therapy for her—just what a doctor would have prescribed.
Mr. Andrews himself, when he got off the train, was in fine fettle—a small white-haired old man with a goblin head and bright blue eyes; he was carrying a case of fresh farm eggs, which he would not entrust to the redcap, and a bouquet of jonquils. He had not been so well in years, he declared, and Kate was well too, never better. He attributed it all to divorce—a splendid institution. Everyone should get a divorce. Kate already looked ten years younger. “But won’t it take a long time, Father?” said Polly. “All the legal side. Even if Mother consents.” But Mr. Andrews was sanguine. “Kate’s already filed the papers and served me. The process server came to tea. I’ve given her grounds, the best grounds there are.” Polly was slightly shocked at the notion that her father, at his age, had been committing adultery. But he meant insanity. He was delighted with himself for having had the foresight to be loony and to have the papers to prove it.
Low-spirited as she was during the first days, Polly was amused by her father. She was startled to hear herself laugh aloud the night he came; it was as if the sound had come from someone else. She told herself that she was going through the motions of living, now that she had someone to live for, but before long she found she was looking forward to coming home from work, wondering what they would have for dinner and what her father had been up to in her absence. He was immensely proud of the divorce and talked about it to everyone, as if it were some new process he had discovered, all by himself. For the time being, Polly had taken for him a room on the third floor; on weekends, they were going to look for an apartment. But then Mr. Andrews had a better idea. Having made friends with the landlady, he persuaded her to turn the top-floor rooms into an apartment for him and Polly—the lodger in the one that was rented could move downstairs to Polly’s place. He designed the new apartment himself, using the hall to gain space and to make a little kitchen, long and narrow, like a ship’s galley. All spring and early summer he and Polly were busy with the remodeling, which did not cost the landlady very much since Mr. Andrews gave his services free, did some of the carpentry himself (he had learned at the workshop in the sanatorium), and found a secondhand sink and plumbing fixtures in the junk yards he haunted, looking for treasure. Polly learned to paint, well enough to do the bookshelves and cupboards; she sewed curtains from old sheets, with a blue and red border, the colors of the French flag, and she got to work with upholstery tacks and recovered two of the landlady’s Victorian chairs.
The apartment, when it was finished, was delightful, with its old marble fireplaces and inside shutters; if Mr. Andrews and Polly were ever to leave it, the landlady could rent it for much more than she was charging them. Carried away with his success, Mr. Andrews wanted to redo the whole house into apartments and make the landlady’s fortune—a project Polly vetoed, thinking of Mr. Schneider and Mr. Scherbatyeff, who could not afford apartment rentals and would have had to move. Mr. Andrews had to content himself with the plan of making Polly a little winter garden or greenhouse for her plants, outside the back windows, which had a southern exposure; he wanted this to be Polly’s Christmas present and spent a good deal of his time at the glazier’s.
The change in Mr. Andrews amazed everyone who knew him. It could not be just the divorce, his sister Julia said, nor dear Polly’s good heart and youthful spirits. Something else must have happened to Henry. It was Polly’s mother who provided the information, during a visit she made to New York, where she stayed with her ex-sister-in-law on Park Avenue. “They changed the name of his illness, did you know that, Polly? They don’t call it melancholia any more. They call it manic-depressive psychosis. When Henry heard that, he felt as if he’d been cheated all these years. He’d only had the ‘depressed’ phase, you see. He cheered up extraordinarily and began to make all these projects. Beginning with the crazy notion that we ought to get a divorce. At first I went along with it just to humor him. You know, the way I did when he insisted on being baptized into the Roman faith by the village curé and then baptized all you children himself. I knew those baptisms were otiose, since you’d all been christened as infants in the Episcopal church. Well, I assumed the divorce bug would pass, like the Romanism bug. But he got more and more set on it and on coming to New York. So I finally said to myself, ‘Why not? Henry may have a good idea, after all. At our time of life, there’s no earthly reason to stay together if we don’t feel like it.’ And I’ve been a new woman myself ever since.” Polly looked at her mother, pouring tea at Aunt Julia’s table. It was true; she was blooming, like an expansive widow, and she had had a new permanent wave. “Excuse me, madam,” said Ross, who was passing biscuits, “but why couldn’t you and Mr. Henry just live apart, the way so many couples do?” “Henry said that wouldn’t be respectable,” replied Mrs. Andrews. “It would be like living together without marriage—living apart without a divorce.” “I see,” said Ross. “I never thought of it that way.” She gave Polly a wink. “I can run the farm much better myself,” Mrs. Andrews went on to Polly, lighting a cigarette and oblivious of Polly’s blush. “With just your brothers’ help. Henry was always interfering, and he’s never cared for domestic animals. He was only interested in his pot herbs and his kitchen garden. Now that he’s gone, we’ve bought some Black Angus and I’m going to try turkeys for the Thanksgiving market—I’ve been to see Charles & Company and they took an order. If Henry were there, he’d insist on Chinese pheasants or peacocks. And peacocks are such an unpleasant bird! Quarrelsome and shrill.”
“Do you mean that Father is in a ‘manic’ state?” “I suppose so, my dear,” Mrs. Andrews answered comfortably. “Let’s only hope it lasts. He’s not giving you any trouble, is he?” “No,” said Polly, but the next day she had a talk with the second psychiatrist-in-charge at the Payne Whitney Clinic, whom she had known as a young resident. She often had to give metabolism tests to manic-depressive patients, but she had not known that her father’s “melancholia”—which she connected with “Il Penseroso” and with Dürer’s engraving—was part of the same syndrome. In her experience, the manic patients were frequently under restraint, in straitjackets, and she was amazed at her mother’s unconcern.
Yes, said the young doctor, Mr. Andrews’ behavior did indeed reveal some of the typical manic symptoms, but in a mild form. It was possible that a trough of depression would follow, but, given the mildness of the manic elation, it need not be severe. At her father’s age, the cycle often lengthened or abated altogether. “How old is he?” “About sixty.” The doctor nodded. “After the climacteric, many manic-depressive patients spontaneously recover.” Polly told him her mother’s idea: that her father had changed his symptoms when he learned the new name of his disease. The doctor laughed. “That isn’t possible, is it?” said Polly. “With these nuts anything is possible, Polly,” he declared. “Insanity is a funny thing. We don’t really understand anything about it. Why they get sick, why they get well. Changing the name may make a difference. We’ve noticed that now that we no longer speak of dementia praecox, we get fewer dementia-praecox patients. It tempts you to think sometimes that all mental illness has an hysterical origin, that they’re all copying the latest textbooks. Even the illiterate patients. Could your father be hysterical?” “I don’t think so,” said Polly. “Though he used to cry a lot. But very quietly.” “Would you like me to see him?” Polly hesitated; she was feeling greatly relieved, without knowing why. “You might come for sherry some afternoon. Or for Sunday lunch, if you’re off duty. Very informal. Father’s a good cook and he loves to entertain.”
This was true. Polly’s social life had become much more active since her father had been sharing an apartment with her. The chief problem was restraining his expenditures. He had discovered the new A & P self-service market and was an enthusiastic patron, confident that he was saving money with every purchase he made. He shopped in quantity, saying that it saved time; the big economy-size package appealed to him; he took advantage of “special offers” and never missed a sale. He was also fond of the Italian fish and vegetable markets on lower Second Avenue, where he bought all manner of strange sea creatures and vegetables Polly had never seen before. Every Sunday at lunch they entertained, using chafing dishes Aunt Julia had put away as old-fashioned, and the guests sometimes stayed the whole afternoon, playing games or listening to the phonograph. Polly now had great trouble finding time to do her laundry and wash her hair.
Shortly after his arrival, Mr. Andrews had taken up ping-pong; as a young man, he had played tennis very well, and now he had found a bar on First Avenue with a long back room where there was a ping-pong table. Every day he played with the “regulars” and on Saturday afternoons he would take part in tournaments, in which he insisted that Polly play too. In this way, she met a number of young men, some of whom would turn up for Sunday lunch or for her father’s Friday-night bouillabaisse. The guests often brought a bottle of wine. When Mr. Schneider came, he brought his violin. Or there would be a chess tournament, which Mr. Scherbatyeff presided over. “I hear you have a salon,” Libby said enviously on the telephone. “Why don’t you invite me? Kay says Norine Blake says you and your father are the succès fou of the year.”
But the red-letter day in Mr. Andrews’ life was the day he became a Trotskyite. Not just a sympathizer, but an organizational Trotskyite! It was Mr. Schneider, of course, who was responsible. Once the apartment was finished, Mr. Andrews had time to kill while Polly was at the hospital, and behind her back Mr. Schneider had been supplying him with reams of books and pamphlets about the Moscow trials. At first her father had found them heavy going; he had never taken much interest in politics, being a pessimist in the tradition of Henry Adams. But his attention was slowly fixed by the element of mystery in these trials—her father had a passion for puzzles, rebuses, mazes, conundrums. He concluded that Trotsky was innocent. The figure of the whiskered war commissar wearing a white uniform and riding in his armored train or reading French novels during Politburo meetings captured his imagination. He demanded that Mr. Schneider recruit him to the Trotskyite group. And unlike the village curé in France, who had required him to take instruction before being “received,” the Trotskyites, apparently, had accepted him as he was. He never understood the “dialectic” and was lax in attendance at meetings, but he made up for this by the zeal with which, wearing a red necktie and an ancient pair of spats, he sold the Socialist Appeal on the street outside Stalinist rallies. He proselytized at Aunt Julia’s tea table and at his ping-pong bar.
Polly was embarrassed by her father’s behavior; she felt that his style of dress and upper-class accent were giving the Trotskyites a bad name: the Stalinists would laugh at this “typical convert” to the doctrine of permanent revolution. And just as Gus had not made a Stalinist of her, her father could not make her a Trotskyite. She felt that neither Mr. Schneider nor her father would be so enthusiastic about the Old Man, as they called him, if he were actually in power. She did not approve of revolutions, unless they were absolutely necessary, and she thought it peculiar, to say the least, that her father and his friends were eager to make revolutions in democratic countries like France and the United States instead of concentrating on Hitler and Mussolini, who ought to be overthrown. Of course, as her father said, it was pretty hopeless to make a revolution against Hitler for the time being, since the workers’ parties had all been suppressed; still, it seemed rather unfair to penalize Roosevelt and Blum for not being Hitler. Fair play, replied her father, was a bourgeois concept and did not apply against the class enemy. Polly would have been horrified to hear her parent talk this way if she had thought he believed what he was saying. But she was sure that he did not, and furthermore the idea of his “seizing power” made her smile, it was so unlikely. She wondered whether the Trotskyites were not all a little touched. “Do you belong to a cell, Father?” she asked him, but he would not say, claiming that he was under discipline. It struck her that becoming a Trotskyite had merely given him one more thing to be snobbish about. He now looked down his nose at Stalinists, progressives, and New Dealers, as well as on the middle class and the “moneyed elements,” whom he had always derided. Some of his worst prejudices, she told him, scolding, were being reinforced by his new adherence. For example, coming from Massachusetts, he had a plaintive aversion to the Irish, and he was elated to hear that Marx had called the Irish the bribed tools of imperialism. “Look at that bribed tool of imperialism!” he would whisper, of the poor policeman on the beat.
Eventually, of course, he learned about Gus (“That Stalinist,” he called him), from Mr. Schneider or Mr. Scherbatyeff or the landlady—Polly never knew exactly. The people in the house believed that Polly had sent Gus away when she knew her father was coming, but Polly was too honest to let her father think that she had sacrificed love to family duty, and one night she told him the true story. The fact that Gus had been unequal to getting a divorce increased Mr. Andrews’ contempt for him. “Are you still pining for that Stalinist publisher?” he asked, if Polly was quiet.
Polly no longer pined, but she felt that her fate was sealed the night she got her father’s letter. Fate had sent her father as a sign that it would be kind to her so long as she did not think of men or marriage. Gus had called her, as he promised, at the end of that first week; when the buzzer had rung, Mr. Andrews had gone to the telephone. “A man wants to talk to you,” he reported, and Polly, feeling weak, went to the phone on the landing. “Who was that?” said Gus. “That was my father,” said Polly. “He’s come to stay with me.” There was a long silence. “Does he know?” said Gus. “No.” “Oh, good. Then I guess I’d better stay away.” Polly said nothing. “I’ll call you again next week,” he said. He called, to say that he was moving back to his apartment. “Is your father still there?” “Yes.” “I’d like to meet him some time.” “Yes,” said Polly. “Later.” After he had hung up, she remembered that she ought to have asked him if he had “unblocked.”
Once he had moved, she lost hope of running into him on the street some morning or evening; his own apartment was on the other side of town, in Greenwich Village. Yet she wondered about this hope, for she remembered, quite clearly, the thrill of fear that had gone through her when her father had called her to the telephone. She had been afraid that Gus would tell her he wanted her back. If he had, what would she have done? At the same time, paradoxically, she still felt their love affair had not quite finished: it lived somewhere underground, between them, growing in the dark as people’s hair and fingernails grew after their death. She was sure she would meet him again somewhere, some day. This presentiment too was tainted with dread.
When her father became a Trotskyite, she took a defiant pleasure in the thought that the two might meet—on opposite sides of a picket line. And her father’s side would be the right side. She imagined her father trying to sell him a copy of the Socialist Appeal outside some rally for Spain. Gus would shake his head brusquely, and he would be wrong, because he was afraid to read what the other side said, and Mr. Schneider was not afraid to read the Daily Worker from cover to cover every day. If it came to the picket lines, she was a Trotskyite too.
But when the two did meet, it was not in the political arena. It was in the ping-pong bar one Saturday afternoon. Polly, luckily, had stayed home to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. “I met that Stalinist,” Mr. Andrews said, coming home with a shopping basket full of groceries. “LeRoy. Beat him two sets out of three.” Polly was pleased; she would have hated it if Gus had beaten her father. “What was he doing there?” “He came in with a chap called Jacoby, another Stalinist. A book designer. Your friend has taken up ping-pong to lose weight, he says. They’re probably infiltrating that bar.” “How did you know he was he?” said Polly. “I didn’t. He knew I was I.” He laughed gently. “I’m well known there. Eccentric Henry Andrews. Decayed gentleman. Used to play tennis with Borotra. Now lives with his beautiful daughter, Polly, on East Tenth Street. Trotskyist agent and saboteur.” “Oh, Father!” said Polly impatiently. “You think they came there because of you?” “Of course.” “Did you talk about politics?” “No. We talked about you.” “You didn’t—?” Mr. Andrews shook his head. “He brought you up. He asked if I had a daughter Polly. Then a great many other tiresome questions. How were you? What were you doing? Did you still have the same job? Were you still living in the same place? I told him your mother and I were divorced.” “What did he say?” “That it must have been a shock for you.” “What did you think of him?” “Ordinary,” said Mr. Andrews. “Sadly ordinary. A dull dog. Not a bad fellow, though, Polly. He took losing well, at any rate. I think he was in love with you. That makes him worse, of course. If he dropped you because he was tired of you or wasn’t really attracted, I could sympathize. But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic.”
Polly laughed. “So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal.” “It’s the same thing,” said her father, putting the groceries away. “All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can’t go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear. He probably knew that himself.”
“I can never marry,” said Polly. “Nonsense,” said Mr. Andrews. “I intend to find you a husband. For purely selfish reasons. I need a son-in-law to support me in my old age. I don’t want to crawl back to Kate.” “You’ll stay with me. I’ll take care of you.” “No, thank you, my dear. I don’t want to be the companion of an embittered old maid.” Polly was hurt. “If you sacrifice your youth to me, you’ll be embittered,” said Mr. Andrews. “Or you ought to be. But if I find you a nice husband, you’ll be grateful. Both of you. You’ll keep a spare room for me and take me as a tax deduction.”
Polly bit her lip. When her father used the word “selfish,” he was speaking the truth. He was selfish; both her parents were selfish. Loving him, she did not mind. Selfish people, she felt, were more fun to be with than unselfish people. If her father had been mild and self-effacing, she would have hated living with him. Instead, he was mild and self-willed. He liked contriving little surprises for her and doing her little courtesies, but it was he who planned their life, like a child playing house. He was hard to circumvent, once he had an idea in his head, and he was quite capable of gently forcing her to marry to provide a home for his old age. And in fact he had a point; she did not know how else she would be able to support him. She could not give him back to her mother—the divorce had taken care of that. It was not that she felt “saddled” with him; only she did not see how her salary would keep both of them in the style her father liked or how she would ever earn a great deal more than she did. Mrs. Andrews helped by sending eggs and poultry from the farm—“my alimony payments,” her father called them. Aunt Julia helped; she had given them bed linen and blankets and, as usual, she gave Polly clothes, which Polly and Ross fixed over. But with her father on the scene, Polly had less time for dressmaking and moreover she needed more dresses; if people were coming, he would not let her appear in just a blouse and skirt—“Put on something pretty,” he would say. That he was thinking of her and not of himself made his thoughtlessness harder to bear.
It was the same with the household money. Every week Polly gave him an allowance, and every week he overspent it and had to ask her for more. And again it was not for himself, but for treats for her and their friends. Knowing him, as the autumn days passed, Polly grew afraid of Christmas. She had decreed that all their presents had to be homemade, and by that she meant little things like penwipers. During her vacation, on the farm, she had made jellies out of crabapples and mint and thyme and rosemary, which she intended as presents for their friends and relations, and she was going to make her pomander balls again; at work, she was knitting a muffler for her father and for her mother she had bought a length of cerise jersey, on which she was sewing bows of colored velvet ribbon for an evening scarf—she had got the idea from Vogue. But to her father “homemade” meant that greenhouse, which he declared he was going to putty together with his own hands; he claimed at first that the sun would heat it, but lately he had been deep in conference with a plumber about how to maintain a temperature of fifty degrees, night and day. And of course he justified it all as an economy: Polly would have flowering plants from cuttings all winter long for the house, and they could force hyacinths and crocuses for Easter to give their friends. In the long run, it would “pay for itself,” an expression he had grown attached to.
Polly did not want that greenhouse, much as she loved flowers, any more than her mother would have wanted peacocks, and she was trying to divert Mr. Andrews’ inventive powers to making simply some glass shelves that he could run across the window like a plant cupboard. Mr. Andrews said that was a commonplace of modern design, and in the end, Polly supposed, she would have to ask the landlady to put her foot down. She hated to go behind her father’s back, but that was what young Dr. Ridgeley said she must do when it came to money matters.
They had talked again about her father, after Jim Ridgeley had come to lunch one Sunday, and he had asked her, straight off, whether Mr. Andrews had become very openhanded lately. This, it seemed, was one of the signs of the onset of a manic attack. It would be wise, he suggested, to close her charge accounts and to warn tradespeople against giving her father credit. Polly did not have any charge accounts—only a D.A. at Macy’s, and besides, she felt Jim Ridgeley was looking at her father too clinically. He did not understand that a person who had had an independent income for most of his life could not grasp, really, what being poor meant. Polly grasped it, because she was “a child of the depression,” but her father still felt that prosperity was just around the corner. That was why, to him, the “economies” he made were a kind of play—an adventure, like when the power failed in the country and you used candles and oil lamps and drew your water from the well. Her father, in financial matters, always expected the power to come on again. This was a delusion, but a delusion shared by many people, including, Polly noted, quite a few of her classmates.
As for the delusion that spending was saving, this too, Polly observed, was quite widespread; all the advertisements tried to make you feel that. Many people too, as they grew older, became obsessed, like her father, with bargains. No matter how much money they had. Aunt Julia had reached that stage and was always buying useless articles because she had seen them at a sale. Every January, for example, she “replenished” her linen closet at the white sales, even though the sheets and towels and pillow cases she had bought the previous January had never been used. Yet Aunt Julia was perfectly sane.
Except for a big item like the greenhouse, Polly excused her father. It was not his fault that two could not live as cheaply as one. Their problem, she decided, was to find another source of income. Last week, she had gone to the Morris Plan and borrowed some money on her salary, and the experience had frightened her. She felt as if she were taking the first step downward into vice or ruin. The interest rate shocked her and confirmed her instinct that there was something actually immoral about the transaction—a kind of blackmail; the interest, she sensed, was hush money. No questions asked. And in fact it was to avoid questions that she had gone to the Morris Plan people, whose ad she had seen on the bus. She could have asked Aunt Julia, but Aunt Julia would have exacted “a serious talk” from her, wanted to see her budget—where was the money going?—and would at once have started blaming her father. And supposing his carelessness about money were a part of his illness, he ought not to be reproached for it, Polly felt—only protected. She did not mention the loan to him.
But how was she going to pay it back? To pay it back, they would have to spend even less than they had been doing, but the reason for the loan was that already they were spending more than their income. Aunt Julia’s Christmas check would not make up the difference. There were so many little things that added up: when they had calculated the rent on the apartment, they had forgotten that, with an apartment, they would have to pay the gas and electricity too.
Polly had been casting about in her mind for ways of supplementing her pay. She thought of needlework or of marketing her herbal jellies and pomander balls through the Woman’s Exchange. She and her father could make plum puddings or fruit cakes. But when she figured out one day at lunch the profit on a jar of rosemary jelly that would retail, say, at twenty cents a jar, she saw that with the cost of the jars, the sugar, the labels, and the shipping, she would have to make five hundred jars to earn $25, and this on the assumption that the fruit and herbs and cooking gas were free. She tried the pomander balls. What could they retail for? Fifty cents? That was too high, but it took her an evening to make six of them, and there was the cost of the oranges and the orris root and the cloves and the ribbons, not to mention the sore thumb she got from pushing in the cloves. It would be the same with needlework. For the first time, she understood the charms of mass production. Her conclusion was that it was idle to think that a person could make money by using her hands in her spare time: you would have to be an invalid or blind to show a profit. She had a vision of herself and her father, both blind or bedridden, supported by a charity, happily weaving baskets and embroidering tablecloths. Useful members of society.
For weeks she had been preoccupied with money-making schemes. She sent in solutions to the contests in the Post. She asked her father whether he would like to dictate a cookbook to her, giving his favorite French recipes; Libby could market it for them. But the notion of sharing his receipts did not appeal to her father, and he did not like Libby. She wondered whether, if someone gave them the capital, she and her father could open a small restaurant. Or whether she could make a cucumber skin cream and sell the formula to Elizabeth Arden. She glanced through the alumnae notes of the Vassar magazine for inspiration, but most alumnae described themselves as happy with their “volunteer work” or heading a Girl Scout group; a few were doing part-time teaching, one was a cowgirl, and one was walking dogs. It occurred to her that her father might be called to do jury duty, which made her smile; he would be such an unusual juror. This led to the picture of him as a professional mourner—but did they have them in America?—or a member of an opera claque. He could sit in the evenings with children, for he was a very good storyteller: why had no one thought of that as an occupation? She could quit her job, and he and she could hire out as cook and chambermaid.
These visions, Polly recognized, were all Utopian, when not simply humorous. But when she tried to think more practically, she was appalled by the images that crept into her mind. Just now, on this Saturday afternoon, when her father had been talking to her about marriage, a picture of Aunt Julia’s will appeared before her. They were gathered together, the relations, in Aunt Julia’s library, the corpse was in the drawing room, and the lawyer was reading her will to them: Henry Andrews was the chief beneficiary.
“I wouldn’t count on Julia,” her father said quietly. Polly jumped. He had this uncanny faculty—which Polly had observed in some of the mental patients in the hospital—of sitting there silently, reading your thoughts. “Julia,” her father went on, “is a queer one. She’s likely to leave everything she’s got to a charity. With a pension to Ross. The Animal Protection Union. Or the Salvation Army. To be used for Santa Claus uniforms.” He gave his plaintive laugh. “In my opinion, Julia is senile.” Polly knew what her father was thinking of. His sister had always been a temperance woman, because of the history of alcoholism in the family; her uncles and all her brothers, except Henry, had succumbed to the malady. But until recent years she had served wine at her dinners, even during Prohibition, though she herself drank only ginger ale. The law, she said, did not extend to a gentleman’s private cellar. But since repeal, illustrating the Andrews’ perversity, she had banned wine from her table and served ginger ale, cider, grape juice, and various health drinks described by her brother as nauseous; he insisted that he had been served coconut milk. “Throughout the meal.” Her latest crime, however, was more serious. She had emptied the contents of her husband’s cellar down the sink in the butler’s pantry. “I might have sold it,” she said. “I had the man from Lehmann appraise the contents. It would have brought me a pretty penny. But my conscience forbade it. To have sold it would have been trafficking in death. Like these munitions-makers you read about—profiteers.” “You could have given it to me,” said Henry. “It wouldn’t be good for you, Henry. And anyway you have no place to keep it. You know yourself that fine wines deteriorate if kept in improper conditions.” In fact, Ross had saved a number of bottles of Mr. Andrews’ favorite claret and brought them down to Tenth Street, but Mr. Andrews was incensed. “It was typical of Julia,” he said now, “to have the cellar appraised before scuttling it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she had several different appraisers in. To enter her virtue in the ledger at the highest bid. It will be the same with her will. There’ll be a long preamble explaining what she intended originally to leave to her survivors and explaining that she finally decided that it would not be good for them to have it. ‘My husband’s money brought me a great deal of unhappiness. I do not wish to transmit this unhappiness to others.’”
Polly smiled. She hoped her father was right, for if he was, she would be able to forget about Aunt Julia’s will. Counting on it was close to wishing for her death. Not that Polly had done that, but she feared she might if things got very bad. Or even if she did not, it was still wrong to see the good side of the loss of a relation.
“No,” said her father. “I must find you a husband. Invest my hopes in grandchildren—not in the death of an old woman. Though I still trust that I can get her to leave a small legacy to the Trotskyites.” “You’re crazy,” said Polly, laughing. “You can’t seem to get it through your head that Aunt Julia’s a Republican.” “I know that, my dear,” said Mr. Andrews. “But Julia has been convinced by what she reads in the papers that we Trotskyites are counter-revolutionary agents bent on destroying the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty and those fellows, you know, have made her believe in the trials. If what they write wasn’t true, she says, it wouldn’t be in the New York Times, would it? And of course I’ve added my bit. The Trotskyites, I’ve assured her, are the only effective force fighting Stalin. Roosevelt is playing right into his hands. And Hitler has his own ax to grind.” “You’re a crook, Father,” said Polly, kissing him. “Not at all,” said her father. “It’s true. And I’ve saved Julia from being a fascist.”
This conversation, by entertaining her, made Polly forget her worries for the moment. That was the trouble with her father. When she was with him, she could not remember to worry. And when she did remember, it was with a start of fear at the thought that she could have forgotten. At night she had terrible dreams about money, from which she would awake sweating. Once she dreamed that Christmas had come and the whole apartment had turned into a greenhouse as big as the Crystal Palace because she had forgotten to tell the landlady to countermand it. Another night she thought that she and her father had become nudists because he said they would economize that way on clothes, and an Irish policeman arrested them. But at the hospital one day she found a solution to their troubles. It was a solution she had never thought of because, like the purloined letter, it was staring her right in the face. She was taking blood for a transfusion from a professional donor, and the thought popped into her mind: “Why not I?” That week she sold a pint of her blood to the laboratory. The next week she did it again and the week after. She was sure it was not dangerous; professional donors did it all the time, and the internes sometimes did it. Besides, she was unusually healthy and well nourished this year because her father was an excellent dietitian—she was bursting with iron and vitamins, and if she looked anemic, it was only that she was naturally pale. Yet she told herself that it would be wiser, in the future, to make her donations at Bellevue or at another laboratory, where nobody knew her, so as not to cause talk among her colleagues. The next time, though, she was in a hurry, for it was the week before Christmas and she had used her lunch hour to buy candy canes and paper to make chains for Christmas-tree decorations—her mother had sent them a tree from the farm. So she went to her own laboratory as usual, saying that this would be the last time.
That day, as luck would have it, she was discovered by Dr. Ridgeley, who had come in to look at a patient’s blood sample. “What are you doing?” he wanted to know, though he could see quite clearly from the apparatus, which still hung beside the couch where she was resting, as you were made to do after giving blood. “Christmas money,” said Polly, smiling nervously and letting her clenched fist relax. His eyes got quite big and he turned and went out of the room. In a minute, he came back. He had been consulting the records. “This is your fourth donation, Polly,” he said sharply. “What’s the trouble?” “Christmas,” she repeated. But he thought it was her father. “Did you do what I told you?” he said. “Shut down your charge accounts? See that he doesn’t get credit?” “I don’t have any charge accounts. He doesn’t use credit.”
“That you know of,” said Dr. Ridgeley. “Look here, Polly. Allow me to put two and two together. If I see a manic patient and meet a member of his family selling her blood in a laboratory, I conclude that he’s been on a spending spree.” “No,” said Polly. “We’re just short of money over the holidays.” She got up. “Sit down,” he said. “Your father, my dear girl, is severely ill. Someone ought to see that he gets treatment.” “Goes to the hospital, you mean? No, Dr. Ridgeley.” She refused to call him “Jim” now. “He’s sane, I swear to you. His mind is completely clear. He’s just a little bit eccentric.” “These spending sprees, I told you,” he said impatiently, “are symptomatic. They indicate that the patient is way up on the manic curve. The next stage is often an outbreak of violence, with megalomania. Commonly with a sense of mission. Is your father interested in politics?” Polly paled; she was dizzy, which she tried to attribute to blood loss. “Everyone is interested in politics,” she muttered. “I’m not,” said Jim Ridgeley. “But I mean, does he have some special angle? Some pet formula to save the world? A discovery he’s made in recent months?” To Polly, this was magic. “He’s a Trotskyite,” she whispered. “What’s that?” he said. “Oh, don’t be so ignorant!” cried Polly. “Trotsky. Leon Trotsky. One of the makers of the Russian Revolution. Commander of the Red Army. Stalin’s arch-enemy. In exile in Mexico.” “I’ve heard of him, sure,” said Jim Ridgeley. “Didn’t he use to be a pants-presser in Brooklyn?” “No!” cried Polly. “That’s a legend!” A great gulf had opened between her and this young man, and she felt she was screaming across it. In fairness, she tried to remember that a year ago she too had probably thought that Trotsky had pressed pants in Brooklyn; a year ago, she had been almost as ignorant as this doctor. But this only made her realize how far she had traveled from her starting point, the normal educated center, where Jim Ridgeley doggedly stood in his white coat, and which now seemed to her subnormal and uneducated. Yet he had guessed her father was a Trotskyite without even knowing what one was. She began explaining to him that the Trotskyites were the only true Communists and that, right now, they were in the Socialist party. “You’ve heard of Norman Thomas, I hope.” “Sure thing,” replied the doctor. “He ran for President. I voted for him myself in ’32.” “Well,” said Polly, relieved, “the Trotskyites are part of his movement.” As she spoke, she was aware of a slight dishonesty. The Trotskyites, she knew from her father, had entered the Socialist party “as a tactic”; they were not really Socialists like Norman Thomas at all.
He sat down on the leather couch beside her. “Be that as it may,” he said, a phrase Polly disliked, “they’re a small sect with a mission. Is that right?” “In a way,” said Polly. “They believe in permanent revolution.” And in spite of herself, she smiled. The doctor nodded. “In other words, you think they’re nuts.” She tried to be honest. Forgetting about her father, did she think Mr. Schneider was a nut? “On many points, I think they’re right. But on that one point—permanent revolution—I can’t help feeling that they’re a bit out of touch with reality. But that’s just my idea. I may lack vision.” He smiled at her quizzingly. “You have wonderful eyes,” he said. He leaned forward. For a startled moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Then he jumped to his feet.
“Polly, you ought to commit your father.” “Never.” He took her hand. “Maybe I feel strongly because I’m falling in love with you,” he said. Polly pulled her hand away. She was not as surprised as she ought to have been. In the back of her mind, she feared, she had been angling to make Dr. Ridgeley fall in love with her; that was why she had consulted him about her father! Just like other women, she had had her eye on him, having guessed that he liked her quite a bit. Sensing nothing but that about him (she now admitted), she had “thrown herself in his way.” But now that she had heard what she had been hoping to hear, she was scared. She wished he could have said something different; he sounded like the hero of a woman’s magazine story. The idea too that she had probably been using her poor father as a pawn to lure this young man forward made her smile disgustedly at herself. At the same time, inside her, an exultant voice was crowing, “He loves me!” But then another voice said who was Jim Ridgeley after all, what did she know about him? Her father might say that he was sadly ordinary—another Gus. The proof of this was that he could talk of love and of putting her father in an asylum in one and the same breath. She gave him an icy look. “If you won’t do it,” he said in a different tone, “your mother should.” “She can’t,” Polly answered triumphantly. “You forget. They’re divorced.” “Then the nearest of kin.” “His sister,” said Polly. “My Aunt Julia.” He nodded. “She’s senile,” said Polly, in that same tone of childish triumph. She did not know what had got into her, some mischievous demon that was prompting her to lie. “And your brothers?” “They’d never do it. Any more than I would. You’ll have to give up, Dr. Ridgeley.” “Stop playing,” he said. “It’s a dangerous game.” “My father is not dangerous,” said Polly. “You leave him alone.” “He’s dangerous to you now,” he said gently. “You shouldn’t be giving your life blood for him.” “I suppose you think I have a father complex,” she answered coldly. He shook his head. “I’m not a Freudian. You feel protective toward him. As if he were your child. This may be because you haven’t yet had any children.”
Suddenly Polly began to cry. He put his arms around her, and she pressed her wet cheek against his stiff white coat. She felt completely disconsolate. Nothing lasted. First, Gus, and then on top of that her father. She had been so happy with him and she would be still, if only they had some money or if he were just a little different. But it was true, he was like a child, and gradually she had got to know that, just as gradually she had got to know that Gus would never marry her. But she ought to have faced facts in both cases from the beginning. She had welcomed her father because she needed him and had deliberately not noticed his frailties, just as she had done with Gus. And with her father, there was probably a little element of trying to be superior to her mother: she could make him happy, if her mother couldn’t. This meant she had given in to him, where her mother had had the strength not to. They should never have taken the apartment, her mother could have told her that; that was the beginning of the folie de grandeur. She could not control her father; she was inert. The same with Gus. If she had given him a strong lead, he would have married her.
“I had an awful love affair,” she said, still weeping. “The man threw me over. I wanted to die, and then my father came. I thought finally I had a purpose in life, that I could take care of him. And now I can’t seem to do it. It’s not his fault; I just don’t earn enough for the two of us. And I can’t ship him back to my mother. And I won’t put him in an asylum. He really and truly isn’t certifiable. You said yourself he might ‘spontaneously recover.’ Of course, I could go to my aunt. I guess that’s what I’d better do.”
“Go to your aunt?” “Ask her for money. She isn’t senile. That was a lie. And she’s very rich, or used to be—nobody really knows how much she has left. But you know how funny rich people are about money.” “That might solve your problem temporarily,” he said, sounding like a psychiatrist. “But you must face the fact that your father may get worse. What will you do with him when you marry, Polly?” “I can’t marry,” she said. “You know that. At least, I can’t have children, with my heredity. I’ve come to terms with that finally. It would be selfish to have children—wicked.”
“Was it wicked to have you?” he said smiling. Polly rushed to her parents’ defense. “They didn’t know, then, about my father’s melancholia. That happened later.” He still smiled, and Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been alive. Nobody alive could do that. “What strange set ideas you have!” he said. “And you a medical technician. It isn’t as if you had a family history of idiocy. Or hereditary syphilis.” “I always thought,” said Polly, “that from a scientific point of view I ought to be sterilized.” “Good God!” he replied. “What bunkum! Where did you learn that?” “At college,” said Polly. “I don’t mean the professors taught it in class, but it was sort of in the atmosphere. Eugenics. That certain people ought to be prevented from breeding. Not Vassar women of course”—she smiled—“but the others. I always felt like one of the others. There was a lot of inbreeding in my family—people marrying their cousins. The Andrews’ blood has run thin.” “‘The blood of the Andrews,’” he said, glancing at Polly’s arm, where a pad of cotton still lay at the point the vein had been opened. “I’ll prove to you that I have confidence in the blood of the Andrews. Will you marry me?” “But we’ve never even had a date,” protested Polly rather speciously. “You don’t know me. We’ve never—” She stopped herself. “Been to bed,” he finished.
“All right, let’s go to a hotel. You call your father and tell him you won’t be home. I’ve got my car outside. We’ll have dinner first and a dance. Are you a good dancer?” Polly feared this was a “line” he used with all the young nurses and technicians, and yet if he asked them all to marry him, how did he edge out of it afterward? He was quite good-looking, tall and curly-haired, and that in itself suddenly made her suspicious. In real life, it was only homely men who fell in love with a bang and did not leave you to guess about their intentions. He had a breezy manner of talking that she was at a loss to interpret; it might come, she told herself, from dealing with sick people. “Are you always such a ‘fast worker’?” she asked teasingly, taking the tone she took with her father in his headstrong moments. “No,” he said. “Not with women. Believe it or not, I’ve never told a woman I loved her before. Or signed ‘Love’ to a letter, except to my folks. And I’m thirty years old. Naturally, now that it seems to have hit me, I don’t want to waste time.” Polly’s misgivings lessened. But she laughed gently. “‘Waste time,’” she chided. “How long do you imagine you’ve been in love with me?” He looked at his watch. “About half an hour,” he said matter-of-factly. “But I’ve always liked you. I picked you out when you first came to the hospital.” So she had been right, Polly said to herself. Her confidence increased. But she was frightened now in a new way. He was different from Gus, straightforward, and she liked that, yet she found herself wanting to parry his onslaught. He was all too eager to commit himself, which meant he was committing her. But at the same time his hurry made this whole conversation seem unreal to her, like a daydream. “But we have nothing in common,” she started to object, but this sounded rude, she decided. Instead she said, “Even if I were to marry, I could never marry a psychiatrist.” To her surprise, she discovered she meant this, from the bottom of her heart. Looking for what was wrong with Jim Ridgeley, she found it, alas. A psychiatrist would have a desk side even more wooden than Gus’s; indeed, she had already noticed signs of it. “Good,” Jim Ridgeley said promptly. “I’m going to get out. It was a mistake I made in medical school. I thought it was a science. It ain’t. I’m leaving here the first of the year.” “But what will you do then?” said Polly, thinking that if he left at the first of the year, she would miss him. One side of her was resolutely ignoring his intention of marrying her. “General medicine? But you’d have to start all over again, with your interneship.” “No. Research. There are discoveries to be made in treating mental illness, but they won’t be made in the consulting room. They’ll come from the laboratory. Brain chemistry. I have a job lined up with a research team; I share an apartment with one of them. You can work with us too—as a technician. There’s no future for you here.” “I know that,” said Polly. “But what attracts you about mental illness, Jim?” “The waste,” he said emphatically. “Of human resources. I’m impatient.” “I can see that,” she murmured. “Then I suppose I have a bit of the do-gooder in me. Came by it naturally. My father’s a minister. Presbyterian.” “Oh?” This news was pleasing to Polly; it would be nice, she reflected, to have a minister in the family. “If you like, he can marry us. Or we can go down to City Hall.”
The more serious he sounded, the more Polly tried to joke. “And what about my father?” she said lightly. “You can use him as a guinea pig, I suppose. To test out your brilliant discoveries. He could be my dowry.” He frowned. Already, she said to herself sadly, he was starting to disapprove of her. “He can live with us and keep house,” he said shortly. “Do you mean that?” “I wouldn’t say it otherwise,” he answered. “And after we’re married, I can keep an eye on him. To tell the truth, Polly, I think most of our patients would be better off at home. The Victorian system was better, with mad Auntie upstairs. More human. The fault lies mostly with the families. They want to get their mad relation out of the house and into what’s known as ‘the hands of competent professionals.’ I.e., sadistic nurses and orderlies. The same with old people; nobody wants old people around any more.” “Oh, I agree!” exclaimed Polly. “I like old people. It’s awful, the way they’re junked, like old cars. But if that’s the way you think, why did you say he should be committed?” “The difference between theory and practice. I didn’t like the idea of your being alone with him.” “He’s not dangerous,” repeated Polly. “They would never have sent him home from Riggs if he were dangerous.” “Nonsense,” he said. “Most homicidal lunatics who go berserk and murder ten people are found to have been just released from a mental hospital. Your father was let out of Riggs because you had no money to keep him there. If you had, he might be there still.” “You’re very cynical,” said Polly. “You get that way in psychiatry,” he answered. “But let’s grant that your father isn’t dangerous; you probably know more about it than a doctor. He may still be dangerous to himself. If he dips into a depressed phase. He was suicidal at one time, wasn’t he?” “I’m not sure. He talked about it, and Mother was afraid.” “Well.” He looked at her; his eyes were like him—a light brown, with surprising green flecks. “Maybe,” he said, “I told you to commit him partly to see what you’d say.” “Oh!” exclaimed Polly. “You were testing me! Like a fairy tale.” She was disillusioned. “Maybe,” he repeated. “It’s a habit you fall into as a doctor. Watching for the reflexes. But I already knew what you’d answer. I knew you’d say no. I think what I wanted to see was whether I could scare you.” “You did,” said Polly. “No, I didn’t. Not fundamentally. Nothing could persuade you to distrust your father. You’re not a distrustful girl.” “Oh, but I am!” said Polly, thinking of how she had been with Gus. “I know my father, that’s all.”
Polly found she had agreed to marry Jim without ever being aware of saying Yes. That night they had dinner and danced, and he took her home. They kissed a long time in his car in front of her apartment. When she went upstairs, finally, she still did not know whether she loved him or not. It had all happened too quickly. But she was relieved that she was going to marry him, and she wondered whether this was immoral. In the old days, people used to say that gratitude could turn to love—could that be true? She had liked kissing him, but that might be just sex. Sex, Polly had concluded, was not a reliable test of love. What bothered her most was the thought that she and Jim had so little in common—a phrase she kept repeating anxiously to herself. Outside the hospital, they had not a single common acquaintance. And as for those old friends, the characters in books—King Arthur and Sir Lancelot and Mr. Micawber and Mr. Collins and Vronsky and darling Prince Andrei, who were like members of the family—why, Jim seemed hardly to recall them. When she mentioned Dr. Lydgate tonight, he confessed he had never read Middlemarch—only Silas Marner in school, which he hated. He could not read novels, he said, and he had no preference between Hector and Achilles. At least both Jim and she knew the Bible and they both had been science majors, but was that enough? He was more intelligent than she was, but he had not had a Vassar education. And she was insular, like all the Andrews. Why else would they have kept marrying their cousins if not to share the same jokes, the same memories, the same grandparents or great-grandparents even? What would Jim talk about with her brothers, who were only interested in farming now and either discussed feeds and beef-cattle prices or swapped lines from Virgil’s Georgics, the way other bumpkins swapped dirty stories? They would have bored Polly stiff if she had not known them all her life. And then there were all the old cousins and second cousins who would come out of their holes for her wedding at the smell of champagne. Not that she would have champagne; Aunt Julia’s greatest “sacrifice” had been dumping the champagne she had been saving for Polly’s wedding. What would a psychiatrist make of the whole Andrews clan? Polly’s mother still described her feelings on meeting them as a young bride from New York. “Your father and I,” she now said, “have never been compatible. I was too normal for Henry.” But no one would guess that, seeing her on the farm dressed in overalls with a finger wave in her majestic coiffure. These thoughts had never troubled Polly when she had dreamed of marriage with Gus, which proved, perhaps, she decided, that she had never believed in that marriage. This time, she was trying to be realistic.
When she came in, her father, who was a night owl, was still awake. She felt sure he would notice the change in her, though she had combed her hair and put on lipstick in the car, and she was reluctant to confess to him that she had got engaged in a single night. Luckily, his mind was elsewhere. He had been waiting for her to come home to tell her, as he said, an important piece of news. “He’s going to get married,” she exclaimed to herself. But no; he had got a job. In a thrift shop on Lexington Avenue, where he was going to be assistant to the manageress, who ran it for a charity. The pay was not much, but he had only to sit in the shop afternoons and talk to customers; he would have his mornings to himself.
“Why, that’s wonderful, Father!” said Polly. “How did you ever get it?” “Julia arranged it,” he said. “Julia’s on the board. The position’s usually kept for ‘reduced gentlewomen,’ but she lobbied me through. I believe I’m being exchanged for a club membership. ‘Henry knows wood’ was her slogan.” “That’s wonderful,” Polly repeated. “When do you start?” “Tomorrow. This afternoon the manageress explained my duties to me and itemized the stock. A preponderance of white elephants. The stuff is all donated.” “Is it all bric-a-brac?” said Polly. “By no means. We have second-hand furs, children’s clothes, old dinner jackets, maids’ and butlers’ uniforms. A great many of those, thanks to the late unpleasantness.” This was his name for the depression. Polly frowned; she did not like the thought of her father selling old clothes. “They come from the best houses,” he said. “And there are amusing French dolls and music boxes. Armoires, étagères, jardinieres. Whatnots, umbrella stands, marble-topped commodes. Gilt chairs for musicales. Gold-headed canes, fawn gloves, opera hats, fans, Spanish combs, mantillas, a harp. Horsehair sofas. An instructive inventory of the passé.”
“But what made Aunt Julia think of finding you a job?” “I asked her for money. This spurred her to find work for me so that, as she nicely phrased it, I ‘would not have to beg.’ Had I asked her to look out for a job for me, she would have told me I was too old.” “Was this one of your deep-laid plots?” “Quite the reverse. But now that it’s happened, I find myself pleased to be a breadwinner. I’ve joined the working class. And of course Julia plans to exploit me.” “How?” “Well, ‘Henry knows wood.’ I’m to keep a sharp eye out in the event that a bit of Sheraton or Hepplewhite pops in from an attic. Then I’m to set it aside for her quietly.” “You can’t do that!” said Polly firmly. “That would be cheating the charity.” “Exactly my sister’s design. As she confided to me, ‘Some of our younger members have no notion of the value of old furniture.’ Through another of her charities, she says, she picked up a rare Aubusson for a song.” Polly made a shocked noise. “But where is it?” Mr. Andrews laughed. “In her storeroom. She’s waiting for its former owner to die. It might be embarrassing for Julia if the lady dropped in to call and found the rug underfoot.” “But why would anyone give a rare Aubusson away?” “The revolution in taste,” said Mr. Andrews. “It’s the only revolution they’re aware of, these ladies. Their daughters persuade them that they must do the house over in the modern manner. Or they say, ‘Mother, why don’t you buy a flat in River House and get rid of some of this junk? I warn you, John and I won’t take a stick of it when you die.’”
It occurred to Polly while he was talking that if she had known this afternoon that he had found work, she might not have sold her blood at the hospital, and in that case she would not be engaged at this moment. It was another of those kinks in time or failures to overlap, like the one that was responsible for her father’s being here now. The idea that she had nearly missed being engaged terrified her, as though that, not this, were her real fate, which she had circumvented by accident, like those people who ought to have gone down on the Titanic and for some reason at the last minute did not sail. This fear showed her that already she must be in love.
The announcement of Polly’s engagement did not surprise any of her friends. They had always known, they said, that there was “somebody” at the hospital. It was only logical that Polly should marry one of the young doctors. “We were counting on it for you, my dear,” said Libby. “We all had our fingers crossed.” It was as if her friends wanted to rob her of the extraordinariness of her love. The implication was that, if it had not been Jim, it would have been Dr. X in obstetrics or Dr. Y in general surgery. And it could never have been anybody else. She had made the great discovery that Jim was good, and this filled her with wonder—most good people were rather elderly. Yet when she tried to communicate this to others, they seemed bewildered, as if she were talking a foreign language. Even her mother did not appear to understand. “Why, yes, Polly, he’s very attractive. And intelligent, I expect. You’re very well suited to each other.” “That’s not what I mean, Mother.” “I suppose you mean he’s a bit of an idealist. But you were bound to marry someone like that. A worldly man wouldn’t have attracted you.”
Only Mr. Schneider and the iceman seemed to feel as she did. The iceman wanted to be assured that her fidanzato was “a good man.” Mr. Schneider went further. “I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
What did surprise Polly’s friends—though not Mr. Schneider—was that Mr. Andrews was going to live with the young couple. One by one, her group mates appeared to advise her against this—Pokey Beauchamp made a special trip by plane up from Princeton. Dottie, who was in town with her husband for the theatres and staying at the Plaza, went so far as to talk to Polly’s mother. Even Helena Davison drawled a warning over cocktails in the Vassar Club lounge. Priss Crockett came to lunch in the coffee shop at the hospital. As a pediatrician, Sloan, she said, was terribly opposed. “When you have children, you will have to think of them. Supposing your f-father—?” “Goes mad again,” said Polly. “Would that be so terrible for them, Priss? He was mad off and on when we were children, my brothers and I.” That was different, Priss allowed; in those days, people did not know any better than to expose young children to mental illness—Polly and her brothers had been lucky, that was all. But even if Mr. Andrews were normal, Polly’s friends thought she would be making a terrible mistake—a mistake that this generation, at least, had learned to avoid. You did not have your relations to live with you if you wanted your marriage to succeed; it was the one thing on which you put your foot down. Opinion was unanimous on the point. If Polly wanted to fly in the face of experience, she was practically dooming her marriage from the start.
“And you mean to say your doctor accepts it?” the young matrons of Polly’s circle cried, shocked. “Yes,” said Polly. This astonishing news planted a grave doubt in her friends’ minds. “If he really loves you,” argued Kay, “I should think he would want to be alone with you. Wild horses wouldn’t have persuaded Harald to share me.” Polly did not reply that rumor had it that she and Harald were on the verge of breaking up. “What would you suggest I do with my father?” she demanded quietly instead. “Why can’t he live with your aunt Julia?” “He doesn’t like her,” said Polly. “But she has a huge apartment,” said Kay. “He could have his own quarters. And servants to look after him. He’d be much better off than crowded in with you. What are you going to do with him when you entertain? At your aunt’s he could have a tray.” In her ignorance, Polly had thought that you “lived happily ever after,” unless your husband was unfaithful, but the Class of ’33 seemed to feel that you could not relax for a minute in your drive to make your marriage “go.” Polly was quite willing to make sacrifices, having learned to do so in a big family, but that was not what her classmates meant. It was very important, they thought, for a woman to preserve her individuality; otherwise she might not hold her husband. “At least,” remarked Libby, “you’re not going to take him with you on your honeymoon?” “Of course not,” said Polly impatiently. But soon Polly’s mother wrote, anxiously, wanting to know whether it was true that Henry was going to accompany them on the honeymoon—Louisa Hartshorn had heard it at the Cosmopolitan Club.
The only person who was deaf to the general concern was Mr. Andrews, who had taken it for granted from the outset that he would live with the newlyweds. For him, the problem was architectural: finding an apartment that would house the three of them and not cost too much to fix over. He was looking at railroad apartments on the upper East Side, near Jim’s laboratory; he had seen one on the top floor of an old-law tenement where it would be possible to make skylights to introduce light into the inner rooms. They were going to be married in the spring—on the farm, the plan was; Jim’s parents would come from Ohio, and his father would perform the ceremony. It was Dottie’s hope that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews might be reconciled by the occasion and make it a double wedding. “Your father could be Jim’s best man, and your mother could be your matron of honor. And then vice versa. Terribly original.” She twinkled. “Don’t you love the thought, Polly?”
When Jim heard this, he told Polly that they had better be married right away at City Hall and get it over with. Polly agreed. So as not to hurt anybody’s feelings, they did not even take her father as a witness. They were married by a magistrate, and that night they went to Key West for their honeymoon, sharing a lower berth. From the station they sent telegrams announcing what they had done. Polly’s friends were greatly disappointed that they had not had a chance to give her a shower or any kind of send-off. But they understood that a gay wedding, under the circumstances, would have been more than she could bear. The group was awfully sorry for Polly and would have sent her a floral tribute by telegram if only they had known her address. But naturally she and Jim were lying low, enjoying the last days the two of them would have alone together ever, probably, in their lives. In Dottie’s suite at the Plaza, a few of the girls and their husbands drank a toast to her in absentia. “To her happiness!” they said loyally, clicking glasses. She deserved it if anyone did, the girls affirmed. The men’s sympathies went to Jim Ridgeley, whom they did not know, but as Brook, Dottie’s husband, continued to refill the champagne glasses, they concurred among themselves that he must be an odd gent to take a situation like that lying down.