ONE AFTERNOON IN SEPTEMBER, Harald lost his new job. When he told the director, softly, where to get off, the nance gave him notice. If Kay could only write, she could have sold the story of it to the New Yorker, she thought. She was just back from work that day and tying on her apron when she heard his step on the stairs and wondered—they did not usually break for dinner till six-thirty or seven. He had a pint of gin from the cordial shop with him, and there was a glitter in his hollow, dark eyes. The minute she saw him, she guessed what had happened. “I’m aware,” he said to her stiffly, “of the bitter irony behind this. You seem to have picked a lemon.” “Why do you say that?” protested Kay, starting to cry because that was not at all what she was thinking. And yet it was ironical, you had to admit. October 1, their summer sublet was up, and they were due to move into an apartment of their own, in a new smart building made over from some old tenements, with a landscaped court and an inside doorman in a little booth, like a concierge. They had signed the lease and paid the first month’s rent—$102.50, including gas and electricity. This was more than Harald had ever dreamed of paying, but Kay had argued that economists said you were supposed to count one-fourth of your income for rent; she made $25 a week at Macy’s, and he would be making $75 when the show opened. This allowed them to pay $100 (or would have till this afternoon!), and they would really be paying less, when you subtracted the utilities. Manwise, Harald had pointed out that you weren’t obliged to pay a quarter of your income—a mere factual observation, he insisted, when Kay wanted to quote it to their friends to show how witty he could be. She loved Harald’s risus sardonicus, as Helena Davison’s mother called it.
Yet now, strange to tell, as she followed him into the living room and watched him coolly fit a cigarette into his holder with that enigmatic half-smile he had, she felt her furies rising. She was certain, just looking at him, that he was going to want to renege on the lease because of losing his job, and the evil thought flashed through her mind that he had lost it as a pretext for not moving into the apartment. “Slow there, Strong!” she warned herself (after three months, she still could not get used to “Petersen”). “Put on the brakes.” Tonight, of all nights, Harald needed her sympathy, though his pride would not let him show it.
Poor Harald, he had been unemployed nearly all summer. The play he was with had folded when the hot weather came; the Saturday after their wedding, the closing notices went up. By that time, it was too late to get anything in one of the summer theatres, though in his place Kay thought she might have tried. Harald did not have her perseverance; that was a thing about him she had discovered. Getting married, instead of spurring him on, seemed, she sometimes feared, to have produced almost the contrary effect. But finally, out of the blue, he had been sent for about this new job, the best he had had yet, being in charge of the book of a satiric revue on the depression called “Hail Columbia” which was going to open in October; officially, he was only the stage manager, but the producer told him he could have a crack at directing the sketches, since the over-all director, an old Shubert whore, was only used to doing girl shows. The producer, it turned out, had had his eye on Harald for quite a while and was giving him this chance to prove himself.
“Isn’t is almost too good to be true?” Kay had exulted; she could see Harald’s name on the program with a credit as assistant director. But in the second week of rehearsals came the rift in the lute. The producer did not make clear the different spheres of authority; the way Harald analyzed it, it was because of an inner conflict: he was undecided himself as to just what kind of show he wanted, a literature revue with some bright songs and really topical sketches or the usual stupid omnium-gatherum held together by a couple of stars. So he was using Harald as a sort of guinea pig. Harald would rehearse a scene, and as soon as he had it set, the director would come and change it—introduce a line of show girls into an unemployment march or gag up a sketch about the milk strike with some farmerettes in straw hats. The authors were a hundred per cent on Harald’s side, but the producer, when appealed to, would just vacillate, saying “Try it this way for a while” or “Wait!” Meanwhile, all through rehearsals, the director had been riding Harald every chance he got—if Harald was a few minutes late after the dinner break or missed a music cue—because Harald was loyal to the authors’ conception, till finally, this afternoon, Harald, very quietly, in front of the whole company, had told him that he was incompetent to direct a book with a mind behind it. Kay would have given anything to have seen that. The director, unable, naturally, to match wits with Harald, had started screaming at him to get out of the theatre. So, before the show had even opened, there he was, out on the street. When he went upstairs to the office to protest (Kay could have told him that it was a mistake to delude himself that he still had the producer’s ear), the producer, too ashamed to see him, sent word that at this stage he could not go over the director’s head; the treasurer paid him two weeks’ salary and offered him a drink, and that was that.
What Kay smelled was the prescription Scotch the treasurer had given him, to buck him up; for one awful moment, when she first opened the door for him and saw him standing there with the bottle of gin and alcohol on his breath, she was afraid that he might have been fired for drinking on the job. Once she had heard the story, she could see how unfair that was. Not only the treasurer, but the whole company had showed their sympathy for Harald. Most of the principals had made a point of stopping him, as he was leaving, to say they were sorry. The authors (one of them wrote regularly for Vanity Fair) had rushed up from their seats to argue with the director; one of the show girls had cried. …
Kay sat, nodding, in the cute red apron with white appliques her mother had sent her, while Harald paced the living room, re-creating the scene in the theatre. Every now and then, she interrupted to ask a searching question, which she tried to make sound casual. Before she wrote her parents, she wanted to be sure that he was telling her the whole truth and not just his own partial view of it. That was the big thing they taught you at Vassar: keep your mind open and always ask for the evidence, even from your own side.
Though she believed Harald’s version, because all the evidence she had supported it, she could see that an outside person, like her Dads, might think that Harald might have been wiser to tend to his knitting—see to the cues and the props and the prompt book and not give the director any excuse for picking on him. Like being late. But who was to blame for that? The producer or whoever was responsible for the awful hours they rehearsed. “Take an hour for dinner”! How did they expect Harald to get home, with those slow crosstown buses, eat, and go back again, all in sixty minutes? Most of the company, according to Harald, caught a bite in a drugstore or a speak-easy, next door to the theatre. But Harald was newly married, though nobody seemed to care or take that into consideration. Yet they knew he was married, because he had let her come once to a rehearsal and the star had caught sight of her in the house and made a rumpus, stopping right in the middle of a song and pointing to Kay and demanding to know what she was doing there; when she found it was Harald’s bride, she said, “I’m so sorry, darling,” and asked them both to her apartment for a drink. But the director had told Harald never to bring her again; it upset the principals, he said, to have strangers watching them rehearse, as Harald ought to know. It was the first time she had seen Harald eat humble pie, and it had given her the most dismal feeling, as if she were a sort of encumbrance; when they went to the star’s apartment (a penthouse on Central Park South), she was conscious of her heavy legs and the hairs scattered on them and it was no consolation to remember that she had directed a Hall Play and been on the Daisy Chain at Vassar.
She thought that Actors Equity ought to do something about rehearsal hours, which Priss Hartshorn agreed were absolutely medieval and would not be tolerated in a substandard factory. She and Harald had hardly had intercourse since he got this job—how could they? The company did not break at night till one or two in the morning, and by that time she was asleep; when she left for work the next morning, Harald was still snoozing. One night, he did not get home till four, after a conference in the producer’s office, yet he had to be back for rehearsal the next day at ten, even though it was a Sunday and the two of them might have had a leisurely breakfast together for once. And after rehearsals the show was going out of town to open, so that she would be alone for two weeks while Harald kept company with the dancers and the show girls—one of them was quite intelligent (Harald had found her backstage reading Katherine Mansfield) and had a house in Connecticut. So, naturally, Kay was glad when Harald tooled home (that was one of his favorite expressions) for dinner, instead of eating with the others in that speak-easy. Once he had brought one of the authors, and Kay had made salmon loaf with cream pickle sauce. That would have to be the night they broke for dinner early, and there was quite a wait (“Bake 1 hour,” the recipe went, and Kay usually added fifteen minutes to what the cookbook said), which they had to gloss over with cocktails. Harald did not realize what a rush it was for her, every day now, coming home from work at Mr. Macy’s and having to stop at Gristede’s for the groceries; Harald never had time any more to do the marketing in the morning. And, strange to say, ever since she had started doing it, it had been a bone of contention between them. He liked the A & P because it was cheaper, and she liked Gristede’s because they delivered and had fancy vegetables—the Sutton Place trade, Harald called it. Then Harald liked to cook the same old stand-bys (like his spaghetti with dried mushrooms and tomato paste), and she liked to read the cookbook and the food columns and always be trying something new. He said she had no imagination, following recipes with her glasses on and measuring the seasonings and timing everything: cooking was a lively art and she made it academic and lifeless. It was funny, the little differences that had developed between them, in the course of three months; at first, she had just been Harald’s echo. But now if he said why not be sensible and open a can (this was another night when dinner was not ready), she would scream that she could not do that, it might be all right for him, but she could not live that way, week in, week out, eating like an animal, just to keep alive. Afterward, when he had left, she was sorry and made a resolution to be a better planner and budget her preparation time, the way the food columns said. But when she did manage to have dinner waiting in the oven, having fixed a casserole the night before, he would get irritated if she tried to hurry him to the table by reminding him what time it was. “Less wifely concern, please,” he would say, waving his forefinger at her in the owly way he had, and deliberately shake up another cocktail before he would consent to eat.
This made her feel a bit guilty; he had never had the cocktail habit until he knew her. “Your class rite,” he called it, and she was not sure whether he meant Class of ’33 or social class; back in Salt Lake City, her parents never dreamed of having liquor even when they entertained, despite the fact that Dads could get prescription whisky. But in the East, it was the social thing to do, for older people too, as she knew from staying with Pokey Prothero and Priss and Polly. In Cleveland, as Harald had seen himself, Helena Davison’s family had sherry. So, to please her, they had started having cocktails every night in the aluminum cocktail shaker. The difference between them was that what she liked was the little formality and what Harald liked was the liquor. One or two cocktails, of course, could never hurt anybody; still, during rehearsals, they should probably have done without, for Harald’s sake. Yet it would have seemed such a comedown to just put the food on and sit down and eat, like her parents.
Harald had gone to the kitchen and fixed himself a gin and bitters; this was a bad sign—he knew Kay hated the taste of straight liquor and did not like to see him drink it. Now he put tobacco in his pipe, lit it, and poured a second. “What can I fix you?” he said. “A silver fizz?” Kay frowned; she was wounded by the mocking courtesy of his manner. “I don’t think I’ll have anything,” she replied thoughtfully. Harald’s dark, wiry eyebrows shot up. “Why this departure?” he said. Kay had suddenly determined to turn over a new leaf, but she felt this was not quite the right moment to announce it; you never knew how Harald would take things when he had been drinking. “I just don’t feel like it,” she said. “I’m going to start dinner.” She rose from her chair. Harald stared at her, with his hands on his hips and pursed lips. “My God!” he said. “You are the most tactless, blundering fool that ever lived.” “But what have I said?” cried Kay, too astonished, even, to be hurt. “‘I don’t think I’ll have anything,’” he quoted, imitating her voice and adding a smug note that she could swear had not been there when she spoke. If he only knew, she was dying for a silver fizz and was doing without because she blamed herself, more than a little, for the trouble during rehearsals. What would happen if she went to work at Macy’s after having two cocktails before breakfast? It was the same thing, no? You could learn a lot, she always found, if you transferred your behavior to a different context and looked at it there, objectively. Had she just been fired, for instance, she would want to sit right down and trace the contributory causes, no matter how small. But maybe Harald was doing that and not letting on? “‘I just don’t feel like it,’” he went on. “Don’t take that tone. It doesn’t suit you. You’re a terrible actress, you know.” “Oh, can it!” Kay said abruptly and walked out to the kitchen. Then she listened to hear if Harald would go out, slamming the door, as he had the other night when she brought home from the store the Continental String Bean Slicer that did not work. But he was still there.
She opened a can of beans and dumped them into a baking dish; on top she put strips of bacon. On the way home on the El she had decided to make Welsh rabbit with beer, to surprise Harald, but now she was afraid to, in case it should curdle and give Harald a chance to lecture her. She pulled apart a head of lettuce and started her salad dressing. All at once, thinking of the Welsh rabbit that they were not going to have tonight just because Harald had lost his job, she gave a loud sob. Everything now was going to be changed, she knew it. By this, she really meant the Apartment; she was living for the moment they could move. Their present place belonged to the widow of an etcher who was now in Cornish, New Hampshire, and it was full of antiques and reproductions—Spanish chests and Oriental rugs and piecrust tables and Hepplewhite-style chairs and brass and copper that had to be polished. Kay could hardly wait to get out of this museum and move in with their own things. Harald knew this, yet so far he had not said a word about the Apartment, which he must have guessed was the thing uppermost in her mind from the moment she opened the door and saw him: what were they going to do? Hadn’t this thought occurred to him too?
In her pocketbook on the lowboy in the living room were samples of upholstery material she had brought home to show him; she had spent her whole lunch hour in Macy’s Forward House choosing a modern couch and two side chairs in muslin. And she had priced draperies just for fun, to show Harald how much they were saving thanks to the fact that the management gave you Venetian blinds free, the way they did in most of the smart new buildings. With the Venetian blinds you would not need draperies. To have had them made, she had found out today, even at Mr. Macy’s with the discount, would have run to $100 or $120, so you could treat that amount as a reduction of the first year’s rent. And that was unlined; lined would be even more.
She glanced at her beans in the oven—not yet brown. In the living room, she opened the drop-leaf table and set two places, meanwhile stealing a look at Harald, who was reading the New Yorker. He raised his eyes. “How would you like,” he said, “to ask the Blakes in for bridge after dinner?” His negligent tone did not fool her; this, from Harald, was an apology. He was trying to make it up to her for nearly ruining their evening. “I’d love it!” Kay was delighted; it was a long time since they had had a foursome of bridge. “Shall I call them or will you?” “I will,” he said, and, pulling Kay down to him, he kissed her hard. She released herself and hurried to the kitchen. “I’ve got three bottles of beer in the icebox!” she called out. “Tell them that!”
But in the kitchen her face fell. It struck her, all at once, that there was method in Harald’s madness. Why the Blakes, of all people? Norine Blake, her classmate, was very left wing; at college she was always leading Socialist rallies and demonstrations, and her husband, Putnam, was a registered Socialist. And both of them had a complex about economy and living within a budget, though Putnam had a private income and came from a very good family. Kay could foresee what was coming. The Blakes, when they heard about Harald losing his job, would immediately start worrying the subject of the Apartment. Kay was already sick of hearing that Norine and Put had found a nice basement with a real garden for only $40 a month—why couldn’t she and Harald? She wouldn’t live in a basement; it was unhealthy. She glanced at her beans again and slammed the oven door. Put would argue (she could hear him!) that Harald was perfectly justified in going back on his legal obligation, which was what a lease was, because a lease was a form of exploitation and rent was unearned increment—something like that. And Norine would talk about carfares. She was hipped on the subject. The last time the four of them had played bridge, she had cross-questioned Kay about how she got to work. “You take the crosstown bus?” she asked, looking at her husband as if the crosstown bus were the most unheard-of luxury. “And the Sixth Avenue El?” Then she looked at her husband again, nodding. “That makes two fares,” she relentlessly concluded. Norine’s idée fixe was that all young couples should live near a subway stop. And she thought that Harald, because he worked in the Times Square area, should live on the West Side, not more than two blocks from an express stop. Kay and Harald had laughed at Norine’s transportation obsession, but just the same it had put a bee in Harald’s bonnet. And that very night, when Kay had served coffee and toasted cheese sandwiches after bridge, Norine had cried out, “What, real cream?” Apparently anybody but a millionaire was expected to live on evaporated. All these months Kay had been telling Harald that everybody bought cream as a matter of course (he wanted to use the top of the bottle), and she had turned red as a beet with confusion, as though Norine had exposed her in a lie. Yet Harald, strange to relate, instead of taking this amiss, had only teased Kay about it. “What, real cream!” he had murmured, afterward, squeezing her breasts.
Harald was always saying that she was transparent. Sometimes, like tonight, he meant it as a criticism, but sometimes he seemed to love her for being easy to see through, though what he saw or thought he saw she could not exactly make out. This reminded her of the funny letter she had found, night before last, when she was straightening up his papers to get ready for their move. It was a letter from Harald to his father and must have been written, she had figured out, the Saturday before she and Harald were married. She could not resist reading it when she saw her own name in the middle of the first page.
“Kay is not afraid of life, Anders”—that was what he called his father. “You and Mother and I are, all of us, a little. We know that life can hurt us. Kay has never found that out. That, I think, is why I’ve decided finally to marry her, though the cynics advise me to wait for a rich girl, who could buy me a piece of a show. Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. Between ourselves—this isn’t for Mother’s eyes—I’ve known a few such, in the Biblical sense. I’ve made love to them in their roadsters and raided their fathers’ liquor cabinets and let them pay for me at the speak-easies where they have charge accounts. So I speak from experience. They’re afraid of life too, have the death urge of their class in them; they want to annihilate experience in a wild moment of pleasure. They’re like the Maenads who destroyed Orpheus—do you remember the old Greek myth? In the last analysis, they’re afraid of the future, just like the Petersen family. You and Mother worry about your losing your job again or reaching retirement age; ever since the crash, the gilded girls worry that Papa might lose his money or have a revolution take it away from him. Kay is different; she comes from the secure class you never quite made, the upper professional class. Her father is a big orthopedist in Salt Lake City; look him up in Who’s Who (if you haven’t done so already!). That class still believes in its future and in its ability to survive and govern, and quite rightly too, as we see from the Soviet Union, where the services of doctors and scientists, no matter what their ‘bourgeois’ background, are at a premium, like the services of film directors and literary men. I see that belief, that pioneer confidence, in Kay, though she’s unconscious of it herself; it’s written all over her, the ‘outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual grace,’ as the Episcopal prayer book says. Not that she is graceful, except in outdoor sports, riding and swimming and hockey too, she tells me. Speaking of the prayer book (read it some time for its style), Kay wants us to be married in J. P. Morgan’s church; I’m agreeing, in a spirit of irony, and consoling myself with the thought that Senator Cutting (Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, one of my minor heroes—have I mentioned this?—a fighting gentleman progressive) worships there too when he’s in town. (His sister has something to do with the Social Register.)
“I don’t know how you feel out in Boise, but there’s a big change here in the East since Roosevelt came in., Probably, as an old Townley man, you distrust him; frankly, I don’t. You’ve read about the influx of professors into government; that is the key to the change, which may mean a bloodless revolution in our own time, with brain replacing finance capital in the management of our untapped resources. The Marxist boys here in New York make a mistake when they expect a final struggle between capital and labor; both capital and labor in their present morphology can be expected to dissolve. The fact that Roosevelt is a patrician is significant, and Kay tells me, by the way, proudly, that he was a trustee of Vassar. I’m wandering a little from the point, but I guess you see the bearing: I feel that my marriage to Kay is a pledge to the future. That sounds rather mystical, but I do have a mystical feeling about her, a sense of ‘rightness’ or destiny, call it what you will. Don’t ask whether I love her; love, apart from chemical attraction, is still an unknown quantity to me. Which you may have divined. She’s a very strong young woman with a radiant, still-undisciplined vitality. You and Mother may not like her at first, but that vitality of hers is necessary to me; it wants form and direction, which I think I can give her.
“By the way, would Mother mind asking Kay to call her Judith when she writes? Like all modern girls, she has a horror of calling a mother-in-law ‘Mother,’ and ‘Mrs. Petersen’ sounds so formal. Make Mother understand. Kay already thinks of you as Anders and is moved by the quality of our relationship—yours and mine, I mean. I’ve been trying to put the story of your life into a play, but Kay, who has studied theatre at Vassar under a funny, electric little woman, says I have no knack yet for dramatic construction; she may be right, I fear. Oh, Anders …”
Here the letter broke off; it had never been finished, and Kay wondered what he had said in the letter he finally wrote. There were other unfinished letters too in his rickety suitcase, some to her at Vassar, and several beginnings of a short story or novel, so old that the paper was turning yellow, and the first two acts of his play. The letter, Kay thought, was awfully well written, like everything Harald did, yet reading it had left her with the queerest, stricken feeling. There was nothing in it that she did not already know in a sense, but to know in a sense, apparently, was not the same as knowing. Harald, she had had to admit, had never concealed from her that he had had relations with other women and had even toyed with the idea of marrying them or being married by them. And she had heard all that about her social class (though, when he talked to her, he usually said it was finished) and Roosevelt and his not feeling sure that he loved her and “in a spirit of irony.” Maybe it was just that that made reading the letter so disappointing. It was finding that Harald was just the same all through, which in a funny way made him different. Curiosity was a terrible thing; she had started reading the letter, knowing she shouldn’t, with the thought that she might learn more about him and about herself too. But instead of telling her more about him, the letter was almost a revelation of the limitations of Harald. Or was it only that she did not like to see him “baring his soul” to his father?
Yet the letter had told her something, she reflected now as she listened to Harald on the telephone (the Blakes evidently were coming) and methodically tossed her salad. The letter explained, in so many words, what her attraction was—something she had never been clear about. When she had first met him in the summer theatre he had treated her like one of the hoi polloi, ordering her around, criticizing the way she hammered flats, sending her on errands to the hardware store. “You’ve got paint in your hair,” he told her one night when the company was having a party and he had asked her to dance; he had just had a fight with the leading lady, a married woman, with whom he was sleeping—her husband was a lawyer in New York. Another time, when they were all having beer in a roadhouse, he had strolled over to her table, where she was sitting with some of the other apprentices, to say—guess what—that her shoulder straps showed. Kay could hardly believe it when he promised to write to her after she went back to Vassar, but he had—a short, casual note—and she had answered, and he had come up for a weekend to see the Hall Play she directed, and now here they were, married. Yet she had never felt sure of him; up to the last minute, she had feared he might be using her as a pawn in a game he was playing with some other woman. Even in bed, he kept his sang-froid; he did the multiplication tables to postpone ejaculating—an old Arab recipe he had learned from an Englishman. Kay dished up her beans. She was “not afraid of life,” she repeated to herself; she had “a radiant vitality.” Their marriage was “a pledge to the future.” Instead of feeling chagrined by this and wishing he had said something more romantic, she should realize that this was her strong suit and play it; never mind those Blakes—a lease was a pledge to the future. No matter what people said, she would not give up the Apartment. She did not know why it meant so much to her—whether it was the Venetian blinds or the concierge or the darling little dressing room or what. She felt she would die if they lost it. And what would they do instead—go back to that sordid Village room across the hall from Dick Brown till Harald’s plans were more “settled”? No! Kay set her jaw. “There are other apartments, dear,” she could hear her mother say. She did not want another apartment; she wanted this one. It was the same as when she had wanted Harald and feared she was going to lose him every time she did not get a letter. She had not given up and said “There are other men,” the way a lot of girls would; she had held on. And it was not only her; for Harald it would be an awful disaster psychologically to relinquish his Life plan and go backward after a single defeat—not to mention losing the deposit, a whole month’s rent.
They sat down to the meal. The Blakes were coming at 8:30. Kay kept glancing at the lowboy, just behind Harald, where her pocketbook was lying stuffed with upholstery samples. She wondered whether she should not get it over with and show them to Harald before Norine and Putnam came. After bridge, it would be late, and Harald, she suspected, would be wanting to have intercourse; on a night like this she could hardly say no, even though it meant that after her douche, it would be one o’clock before she closed her eyes (thanks to those multiplication tables), and tomorrow morning before going to work would be no time to show him the samples; he would be snappish if she woke him up for that. Yet they would have to decide soon; two weeks on upholstery was the rule at Macy’s. The beds and pots and pans and lamps and a table and all that would have to be ordered too, but at least they were there in the warehouse and you only needed two days for delivery. She thought they should have hair mattresses, which were more expensive but healthier; Consumers’ Research admitted that. Her confidence fled as she passed the butter to Harald; only the other night, they had had quite a debate, ending in tears on her part, about margarine vs. butter—margarine, Harald maintained, was just as tasty and nourishing, but the butter interests had conspired to keep the margarine people from coloring their product; he was right, yet she could not bear to have that oily white stuff on her table, even if her reaction to the whiteness was a conditioned reflex based on class prejudice. Now he speared a piece of butter with a bitter smile, which Kay tried not to notice. Maybe she was not afraid of life, but she was certainly afraid of Harald.
She decided to edge in to the topic of the samples by a little light chatter about her day in the store; she was worried that if she did not talk Harald might sink into one of his Scandinavian glooms. “You know what?” she said gaily. “I think I was ‘shopped’ today.” That was like having a sprung test in college: a professional Macy shopper, pretending to be a customer, was assigned to evaluate every trainee at one time during his or her six months’ training. The bosses did not tell you this would happen, but of course the word leaked out. “I’m in ‘Better Suits’ this week, did I tell you?” Harald knew that Kay would be shifted around so that she would learn every aspect of merchandising, besides listening to lectures from the executives of the different departments. “Well, this afternoon I had this customer who insisted on trying on every suit on the floor and was dissatisfied with just about everything. It got to be almost closing time, and she couldn’t make up her mind between a black wool with caracul trim and a blue severe tweed, fitted, with a dark-blue velvet collar. So she wanted me to send for the fitter, to get her opinion, and the fitter said she should take both and winked at me, to give me a tip, I guess. They grade you on politeness, good humor, general personality, but the main point is whether you can sell. You flunk if the shopper goes away without buying anything. And, what do you think, thanks to the fitter, this woman in the end bought both suits. Not really ‘bought’ of course; instead of going down to the workrooms, the suits are returned to stock if the customer is a Macy shopper. That way you can tell. But on the other hand if a real customer buys something and returns it, that counts as a mark against you; it means you oversold. …”
Harald sat chewing in silence; finally, he laid down his fork. In the face of this coldness, Kay could not continue. “Go on, my dear,” he said, as her voice flagged and halted. “This is highly interesting. From what you say, I expect you’ll be valedictorian of your Macy class. You may even find me a job in the rug department or selling refrigerators—isn’t that considered a man’s sphere?” “Yes,” replied Kay, mechanically responding to a request for information. “Only they never start a man in those departments; you have to have other experience in selling first.” Then she dropped her fork and buried her curly head in her hands. “Oh, Harald! Why do you hate me?”
“Because you ask tedious questions like that,” he retorted. Kay’s face flamed; she did not want to cry, because the Blakes were coming. Harald must have thought of the same thing, for when he spoke again it was in a different tone. “I don’t blame you, dear Kay,” he said gravely, “for comparing yourself to me as a breadwinner. God knows you have a right to.” “But I wasn’t comparing myself to you!” Kay raised her head in outrage. “I was just making conversation.” Harald smiled sadly. “I was not blaming you,” he repeated. “Harald! Please believe me!” She seized his hand. “The thought of a comparison never entered my mind! It couldn’t. I know that you’re a genius and that I’m just a B-average person. That’s why I can coast along in life and you can’t. And I haven’t helped you enough; I know it. I shouldn’t have let you come home to dinner while you were rehearsing; I shouldn’t have made us have cocktails. I should have thought of the strain you were under. …” She felt his hand go flaccid in hers and realized she was blundering again; at least she had avoided naming his lateness at the theatre, which was the real thought that kept preying on her conscience.
He flung her hand aside. “Kay,” he said. “How many times have I pointed out to you that you’re an unconscionable egotist? Observe how you’ve shifted the center of the drama to yourself. It was I who was fired today, not you. You had nothing to do with it. Being late”—he smiled cruelly—“had nothing to do with it, despite what you’ve been insinuating in your clumsy way for the last two weeks. You’ve developed a time-clock mentality. Nobody takes that ‘hour for dinner’ seriously in the theatre—except you. You saw the night you were there; nothing started for half an hour after we pulled in. Everybody sits around playing pinochle. …” Kay nodded. “All right, Harald. Forgive me.” But he was still angry. “I’ll thank you,” he said, “for keeping your petty-bourgeois conscience out of my affairs. It’s your way of cutting me down to size. You pretend to accuse yourself, but it’s me you’re accusing.” Kay shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “Never.” Harald raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You protest too much,” he remarked, in a lighter tone; she could see that his mood was changing again. “In any case,” he continued, “all that had nothing to do with it. You are on the wrong track, my girl. The nance hates me; that’s all.” “Because you’re superior,” murmured Kay.
“That, yes,” said Harald. “Doubtless, there was that.” “‘Doubtless’?” cried Kay, affronted by the judicious, qualifying note in his voice. “Why, of course that was it.” It would be just like Harald to start hairsplitting now, when they were both agreed that the basic motivations were as clear as noonday. “What do you mean, ‘doubtless’?” He shook his head and smiled. “Oh, Harald, please tell me!” “Go and make us some coffee, like a good girl.” “No. Harald, tell me!” Harald lit his pipe. “Do you know the story of Hippolytus?” he said finally. “Why, naturally,” protested Kay. “Don’t you remember, we did it at college in Greek, with Prexy playing Theseus? I wrote you, I built the scenery—the big statues of Artemis and Aphrodite. Golly, that was fun. And Prexy forgot his lines and adlibbed ‘To be or not to be’ in Greek, and only old Miss MacCurdy, the head of the Greek department, knew the difference. She’s deaf but she spotted it even with her ear trumpet.” Harald waited, drumming his fingers. “Well?” said Kay. “Well,” said Harald, “if you change the sex of Phaedra …” “I don’t understand. What would happen if you changed the sex of Phaedra?” “You would have the inside story of my getting the ax. Now, make us the coffee.” Kay stared, nonplused. She could not see the connection.
“Buggery,” said Harald. “I, though not a virgin, am the chaste Hippolytus of the farce, which the play, incidentally, is. A male defending his virtue is always a farcical figure.” Kay’s jaw dropped. “You mean somebody wanted to bugger you? Who? The director?” she gasped. “The other way round, I believe. He assured me that he had a luscious ass.” “When? This afternoon?” Kay was torn between horror and curiosity. “Flits have always been attracted to me”—he had told her that last summer (there had been two who were like that in the company), and then it had made her excited and sort of envious. “No, no. Some weeks ago,” said Harald. “The first time, that is.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” The thought that he had kept such a thing from her cut her to the heart. “There was no reason for you to know.” “But how did it happen? What did he say to you? Where were you?” “In Shubert Alley,” he said. “I was a little liquored up that evening, and in my mood of geniality, I may have given him what he took for signs of encouragement. He suggested that we repair to his apartment later.” “Oh, God!” cried Kay. “Oh, Harald, you didn’t—?” “No, no,” he replied soothingly. “It was an uninviting prospect. The old fruit must be forty.” For a second, Kay was relieved and, at the same time (wasn’t that queer?), almost let down; then a fresh suspicion attacked her. “Harald! Do you mean you would have done it with someone younger? A chorus boy?” She felt sick thinking of the nights he had worked late, and yet there was this funny itch to know. “I can’t answer hypothetical questions,” Harald said, rather impatiently. “The problem hasn’t come up.” “Oh,” said Kay, dissatisfied. “But the director—did he try again?” Harald admitted that he had. One night late, he had reached for Harald’s crotch. “And what happened?” Harald shrugged. “Erection is fairly automatic in the normal male, you know.” Kay turned pale. “Oh, Harald! You encouraged him!” All at once, she was frenzied with jealousy; it took Harald some time to calm her. In her heart was the horrible certainty that erection would not have been so automatic if she had not always been asleep when Harald tiptoed into their bedroom. And how did she know he tiptoed? Because (did he ever suspect this?) she was not always really asleep. Tonight, she decided, they would have intercourse no matter how tired she was when the Blakes left.
Kay yawned and slipped off Harald’s lap, where he had taken her to comfort her (“I like your freckles,” he had whispered. “And your wild black gipsy hair”). “I’ll make the coffee,” she said. As she turned to go, he reached out and patted her behind, which made her think, distrustfully, of the director. What had got into her, recently, that prompted her to distrust Harald and to always think there was something more than he was telling her behind every little incident he related? To tell the truth, she had wondered sometimes if there could not be some other explanation of the director’s persecution, and now that she knew what it was (“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), she still wondered whether there was not more to that than Harald said. How far had he let the “nance” go? She could not help remembering a story he had told her, while she was still in college, about undressing an older actress in her apartment and then just leaving her up in the air on her blue percale sheets with scalloped borders.
Kay believed in Harald completely; she had no doubt he was bound to be famous, sooner or later, in whatever field he chose. But believing in him was different from believing him. In fact, the more impressed she was by him intellectually (his I.Q. must be in the genius percentile), the more she noticed his little lapses. And why was it that, with all his talent, he was still a stage manager when other people of his own age, people not nearly as bright, had forged ahead of him? Was there something wrong with him that was evident to producers and directors and not to her? She wished he would let her give him the Binet and some of the personality tests she had tried on the group at Vassar.
Once, during exam week (and nobody knew this but her), he had tried to commit suicide by driving somebody’s car off a cliff. The car had rolled over without hurting him, and he had climbed out and walked back to the place where he was staying. The next day the couple he was visiting had sent for a tow truck to pull the car up and the only damage was that acid from the battery had dripped over the upholstery, making holes in it, and ruined Harald’s English hat, which had fallen off his head when the car turned over. This suicide attempt had impressed her terrifically, and she treasured the letter in which he described it; she could not imagine having the coolness to do such a thing herself and certainly not in someone else’s car. He had done it, he said, on a sudden impulse, because he saw his future laid out for him and he did not want to be a tame husband, not even hers. When the attempt failed so miraculously, he had taken it as a sign, he wrote her, that Heaven had decreed their union. Now, however, that she knew Harald better, she wondered whether he had not driven off the cliff by accident; admittedly, he had been drinking applejack at the time. She hated having these suspicions of Harald and she did not know which was worse: to be scared that your husband might kill himself if the slightest little thing went wrong or to be guessing that it was all a cover-up for something commonplace like driving-under-the-influence.
Harald was histrionic; Lakey had found the right word for him. Yet that was why, with his intellect and learning, he would make such a marvelous director. Kay had been giving a lot of thought to Harald’s problems during her lonely evenings while he was at the theatre, and she had decided that the main thing that acted as a drag on him was his strong identification with his father. He was still fighting his father’s battles; any psychologist could see that. No wonder, then, that Kay felt impatient with that relation. “Anders” and “Judith”!—she had come to loathe the very names of the old pair, if Harald only knew it. She would almost rather commit suicide herself than make Judith’s “quick-and-easy meat loaf.” The sight of her mother-in-law’s labored pencil recipes, enclosed in letters from “Anders,” made her cold and hard as nails. Ever since she had seen “Judith’s” handwriting, she could not abide Harald’s chile con carne, though it was still a big success with company, who did not know the source and thought it was something glamorous he had learned in the theatre. She had no doubt that “Judith” used oleomargarine; she could see a white slab of it on their humble oilcloth with a cheap plated-silver butter knife (the kind you sent in coupons for) lying by its moist side!
Turning off the coffee (Maxwell House), Kay made a face. She had a ruthless hatred of poor people, which not even Harald suspected and which sometimes scared her by its violence, as when she was waiting on some indigent in the store. Objectively, of course, she ought to pity old Anders, a poor Norwegian immigrant who had taught manual training in the Idaho public-school system and then had studied nights to become an algebra teacher and finally risen to be principal of a high school in Boise, where he made an enemy of the vice-principal, who brought about his dismissal. Harald’s play told the story of that. In the play, he had made his father a college president and put him at odds with the state legislature. To her mind, that was very unconvincing and accounted for the weakness of the play. If Harald wanted to write about his father, why glorify him? Why not simply tell the truth?
According to Harald, his father, in real life, had been framed and railroaded out of his position because (shades of Ibsen!) he had discovered some funny business about the high-school bookkeeping. But if he had really been as innocent as Harald claimed, it was peculiar that all through Harald’s adolescence he could not get reinstated in the school system and had to support the family doing odd jobs of carpentry, non-union, while Harald went to work as a newsboy. Harald said it was all part of a conspiracy in which some crooked city officials had been involved too, and that they had to crucify his father to keep the real facts from being known. But then a reform party got elected (Harald’s father was a sort of populist radical whose god was some man called Townley), and he was taken on again, as a substitute teacher; meanwhile, in high school Harald had made a big name for himself, being quarterback of the football team and star of the dramatic society and editor of the school paper. A group of Boise ladies had raised a scholarship fund to send him to Reed College, in Oregon, and then to Yale Drama School, and he could still have a job, any time he wanted, running their Little Theatre for them—you should see the silver water pitcher they had sent from Gump’s in San Francisco for a wedding present. But Harald would not go back to Boise till his father’s name had been vindicated. He meant till his play had been produced; he expected all of Boise to read about it in the papers and recognize poor old Anders, who was now a regular teacher again (half-time algebra and half-time manual training), in the wronged president of a big state university. The play was called Sheepskin, and Harald had merged in it the story of his father’s life with some of the story of Alexander Meiklejohn at Wisconsin, not admitting to himself that his father and Meiklejohn were horses of a different color.
What worried Kay most, though, was that Harald was identifying with failure. One of her first thoughts, when she heard the news this afternoon, was that Harald might be repeating his father’s pattern. She wondered how many people who knew Harald, besides herself, would think of this. This made it important to get the true facts into circulation, for it would hurt Harald’s career if he got the name of a troublemaker, of a person who went around wanting to be fired, needing to fail. She did not think Harald should be soft about telling what the director had tried to do to him; knowing the director’s proclivities, everyone would realize how he had been subtly provoking Harald to finally give him a piece of his mind; if it had not happened today, he would have goaded him till it did.
The doorbell rang just as they were finishing their coffee. Listening to the Blakes on the stairs (Norine had a heavy walk), Kay thought fast. Whatever was said about the Apartment, she was going to keep mum; let the others talk. And tomorrow morning, first thing, she would slip down to Forward House and order the upholstery job. She could always pretend that she had done it today, before she heard the news, and had not mentioned it on purpose, seeing how upset Harald was. She could even make up a story of trying desperately to cancel the order (that would be tomorrow morning) and being told it was too late—the material had already been cut. And it could have happened that way; it was just chance that she had decided to take the samples home to show Harald, instead of settling on the one she wanted—the Fireman Red—herself. If she had, it would be too late.
Kay opened the door. “Hi!” she said. “Greetings!” She spoke in a low, muffled voice, to prepare them, as though Harald, just behind her, lighting his pipe again, were sick or a specter or something—how were you supposed to act when your husband had joined the ranks of the unemployed right in the middle of the depression? For a moment, thinking of it that way, she felt a wild surge of fear, like what she had felt that first instant when she heard Harald’s key scratching at the lock and knew what he was going to tell her. But something inside her hardened immediately and she had a new idea: now Harald would be able to work on his play and get that out of his system; the dinette would be perfect for a study for him, and he could build in shelves for his papers below the china cabinet. There was no reason, now, that he could not do all the carpentry and build in the bed too, the way they had once planned, and make a bookcase for the living room. Behind her, Harald spoke. “Morituri te salutamus. I’ve got the sack,” he said. “Oh, Harald,” said Kay eagerly. “Wait till they’ve got their things off. And tell it the way you told me. Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”