HARALD AND KAY WERE giving a party to celebrate Harald’s having sold an option on his play to a producer. It was Washington’s Birthday, and Kay had the day off from the store. The group had made a point of coming, in their nicest winter dresses and hats. Harald, poor fellow, had been out of work for months, it seemed, ever since September when, according to Polly Andrews, a director had molested him. They had not paid the rent for months either; the real-estate people were “carrying” them. When they got the check for the option ($500), the telephone was about to be shut off. It was a mystery what they had been living on, even with Kay’s salary. On faith, hope, and charity, Kay said, laughing: Harald’s faith in himself gave his creditors hope, which made them extend charity. And she told how Harald had proposed that they invite a select group of their creditors to the party: the man from the real-estate office, the man from the telephone company, Mr. Finn from the Internal Revenue, and their dentist, Dr. Mosenthal—wouldn’t that have been a howl?
Kay had been showing the apartment to everyone who hadn’t seen it. Two rooms, plus dinette and kitchen, plus a foyer, plus Kay’s pride and joy, a darling little dressing room, so compact, with closets and cupboards and bureau drawers built in. Pure white walls and woodwork and casement windows, a whole row of them, looking out on a sunny court with young trees and shrubs. The latest models of stove, sink, and icebox; built-in cupboards for dishes, broom closet, linen closet. Every stick of furniture was the latest thing: blond Swedish chairs and folding table (made of birch with natural finish) in the dinette, which was separated from the kitchen by a slatted folding door; in the living room, a bright-red modern couch and armchairs to match, a love seat covered in striped gray-and-white mattress ticking, steel standing lamps, a coffee table that was just a sheet of glass that Harald had had cut at the glazier’s and mounted on steel legs, built-in bookcases that Harald had painted canary yellow. There were no rugs yet and, instead of curtains, only white Venetian blinds at the windows. Instead of flowers, they had ivy growing in white pots. In the bedroom, instead of a bed, they had a big innerspring mattress with another mattress on top of it; Harald had nailed red pegs to the bottom one to keep it off the floor.
Instead of a dress, Kay was wearing a cherry-red velvet sleeveless hostess gown (Harald’s Christmas present) from Bendel’s; they had an old colored maid from Harlem passing canapés in a modern sectioned hors d’oeuvre tray. Instead of cocktails, they had had Fish House Punch, made from One Dagger Rum, in a punch bowl with twenty-four matching glass cups they had borrowed from Priss Hartshorn Crockett, who had got it for a wedding present when she was married in Oyster Bay in September.
On that occasion, only four of the group had been able to make it. Today, mirabile dictu, the only one missing was Lakey, who was now in Spain. Pokey Prothero had flown down from Cornell Agricultural in a helmet and goggles: Helena Davison, who had spent the summer and fall in Europe, was in town from Cleveland. Dottie Renfrew had come back from Arizona, where her family had sent her for her health, with a marvelous tan and an engagement ring—a diamond almost as big as her eyes; she was going to marry a mining man who owned half the state.
This was quite a change from Dottie’s modest plans for working in a settlement house and living at home in Boston. “You’ll miss the concerts and the theatre,” Helena had remarked dryly. But Dottie said that Arizona had a great deal to offer too. There were lots of interesting people who had gone there because of T.B. and fallen in love with the country—musicians and painters and architects, and there was the riding and the incredible wild flowers of the desert, not to mention the Indians and some fascinating archaeological digs that attracted scientists from Harvard.
The party was almost over; only one mink coat was left in the bedroom. At the high point, there had been five—Harald had counted them. Kay’s supervisor’s, Harald’s producer’s wife’s, Connie Storey’s, Dottie’s, and a mink-lined greatcoat belonging to Connie’s fiancé, that apple-cheeked boy who worked on Fortune. Now Dottie’s lay in solitary state, next to Helena’s ocelot and a peculiar garment made of old gray wolf that belonged to Norine Schmittlapp Blake, another member of the Vassar contingent. Harald’s producer had left after half an hour, with his wife (who had the money) and a star who had replaced Judith Anderson in As You Desire Me, but the Class of ’33 had practically held a reunion, there was so much news to keep up with: Libby MacAusland had sold a poem to Harper’s; Priss was pregnant; Helena had seen Lakey in Munich and met Miss Sandison in the British Museum; Norine Schmittlapp, who was there with her husband (the one in the black shirt), had been to the Scottsboro trial; Prexy (bless his heart!) had had lunch on a tray with Roosevelt in the White House. …Helena, who was Class Correspondent, took a few terse mental notes. “At Kay Strong Petersen’s,” she foresaw herself indicting for the next issue of the Alumnae Magazine, “I saw Dottie Renfrew, who is going to marry Brook Latham and live in Arizona. ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’—how about it, Dottie? Brook is a widower—see the Class Prophecy. Kay’s husband, Harald, has sold his play, Sheepskin, to the producer, Paul Bergler—watch out, Harald. The play is slated for fall production; Walter Huston is reading the script. Norine Schmittlapp’s husband, Putnam Blake (Williams ’30), has started an independent fund-raising organization for labor and left-wing causes. Volunteer workers take note. His partner is Bill Nickum (Yale ’29). Charles Dickens take note. Polly Andrews reports that Sis Farnsworth and Lely Baker have started a business called ‘Dog Walk.’ It keeps them outdoors, Polly says, and they’re swamped with applications from people who don’t have butlers any more to take their canines walking in the Park. …”
Helena puckered her little forehead. Had she mastered (mistressed?) the idiom of the Alumnae Magazine Class Notes? She and Dottie were in the living room, waiting tactfully to get their coats to leave. Harald and Kay were in the bedroom with the door closed, having “words,” she supposed. The party, to quote the host, had laid an egg. The main body of guests had decamped just as the old colored maid had appeared, all smiles, with a Washington’s Birthday cake she had brought for a present. Harald, reddening, had shooed her back to the kitchen, so as not to let people see, presumably, that they had been expected to stay longer. But Kay, who had always been a blurter, had let the cat out of the bag. “But Harald was going to read his play!” she cried sadly after the departing guests. The whole party had been planned around that, she confided. Now the maid had gone home with her satchel, and the only guests remaining, besides Helena herself and Dottie, were a radio actor, who was helping himself copiously at the punch bowl, the two Blakes, and a naval officer Harald had met in a bar, whose sister was married to a famous architect who used ramps instead of stairs. The actor, who had wavy hair in a pompadour, was arguing with Norine about Harald’s play. “The trouble is, Norine, the line of the play is sheer toboggan. I told Harald that when he read it to me. ‘It’s very interesting, the way you’ve done it, but I wonder: is it a play?’” He gestured, and some punch from his cup fell on his suit. “If the audience identifies with a character, they want to feel he has a chance to win. But Harald’s view of life is too blackly logical to give them that sop.” Across the room, Putnam Blake, a thin, white-faced young man with a close collegiate haircut, an unsmiling expression, and a low, tense voice, was explaining what he called his “Principle of Accumulated Guilt” to the naval officer.
“Mr. Blake,” said Dottie with a twinkle, “has a system for finding rich people to give money to Labor. He was telling about it earlier. It sounds terribly interesting,” she added warmly. Glancing at their watches, at Norine and the actor, and at the closed bedroom door, the two girls drew near to listen. Putnam ignored them, dividing his attention between his pipe and the naval officer. Using Gustavus Myers’ Great American Fortunes, Poor’s Register of Directors, and Mendel’s Law, he was able to predict, he said, when a wealthy family was “due.” As a rule, this occurred in the third generation. “What I’ve done,” he said, “is take the element of chance out of fund-raising and put it on a scientific basis. I’m simplifying, of course, but roughly speaking the money guilt has a tendency to skip a generation. Or if it crops out in the second generation, as with the Lamont family, you will find it in a younger son rather than in the firstborn. And it may be transmitted to the females while remaining dormant in the males. This means that the guilt tends to separate from the chief property holdings, which are usually transmitted from first-born male to first-born male. Thus the guilt, being a recessive character, like blue eyes, may be bred out of a family without any profit to the Left.” A ghostly quiver, the phantom of a smile, passed across his lips; he appeared eager to take the naval officer into his confidence, like some crazy inventor, thought Helena, with a patent, and it was as if some bashful ectoplasmic joke hovered in the neighborhood of his Principle. “I’m working now,” he continued, “on the relation between mental deficiency and money guilt in rich families. Your ideal contributor (the Communists have found this), scion of a fortune, has a mental age of twelve.” Without altering his expression, he gave a quick parenthetic little laugh.
Helena quirked her sandy eyebrows, thinking of the Rich Young Man in the Bible and idly imagining a series of camels with humps of accumulated guilt lining up to pass through the eye of a needle. The conversation at this party struck her as passing strange. “Read the Communist Manifesto—for its style,” she had heard Harald telling Kay’s supervisor (Wellesley ’28). She grinned. “Take her,” said Putnam suddenly to the naval officer, indicating Helena with a jab of his pipe. “Her people live on the income of their income. Father is first vice-president of Oneida Steel. Self-made man—first generation. Bright girl, the daughter—only child. Does not respond to fund-raising appeals for labor victims. Charities confined, probably, to Red Cross and tuberculosis stamps. But if she has four children, you can expect that at least one of them will evince guilt characteristics. …”
Impressed despite herself, Helena lit a cigarette. She had met Mr. Blake for the first time this afternoon and for a moment she felt he must have clairvoyance, like a mind reader in a movie house or, more accurately, a fortune teller. His confederate, of course, was Kay, drat her. She rued the day she had told her, as a curious fact, that her parents lived “on the income of their income”—i.e., plainly. But Kay had had to turn it into a boast. Already this afternoon Helena had heard her telling Harald’s producer that “Helena’s parents have never felt the depression.” “What was the name?” inquired the producer, turning to examine Helena, as they always did. Kay supplied the name of Helena’s father. “Never heard of him,” said the producer. “Neither have most people,” said Kay. “But they know him down in Wall Street. And he’s crazy about the theatre. Ask Harald. He saw a lot of the Davisons when his show was playing Cleveland last year. Her mother is president of one of the women’s clubs there, quite a remarkable woman, always organizing classes and lectures for working-class girls; she scorns groups like the Junior League that don’t mean business. …”
Helena blew smoke rings—an art she had perfected as an aid against self-consciousness; all her life, she had submitted to being talked about, first and foremost by her mother. She was a short, sandy-haired girl with an appealing snub nose and an air of being sturdy though she was really thin and slight. She very much resembled her father, a short, sandy Scot who had made a pile of money in steel through knowing about alloys; he had been born in a little town called Iron Mountain, Michigan. Helena was regarded as the droll member of the group, having a puckish sense of humor, a slow, drawling way of talking, and a habit of walking around nude that had startled the others at first. Her figure was almost undeveloped, and when you saw her from a distance, hiking down a corridor to the shower with a towel around her neck, you might have thought she was a freckled little boy on his way to a swimming hole in the woods somewhere; her legs were slightly bowed, and her little patch of hair down there was a bright pinky red. She and Kay, when they first knew each other freshman year, used to climb trees together on Sunset Hill, back of the lake, and perform strange experiments in the Chem Lab, nearly blowing each other up. Yet Helena was intelligent, the group discovered, and in some ways very mature for her age. She had read a tremendous lot, particularly in modern literature, and listened to modern music, which was way over most of the group’s heads; she collected limited editions of verse and rare phonograph records of prepolyphonic church music. The group considered her quite an asset, almost a little mascot, in her neat Shetland sweater and skirt, riding across the campus on her bicycle or chasing butterflies with a net in the Shakespeare Garden.
The worst, from Helena’s point of view, was that she knew all this, knew, that is, about the mascot and the swimming hole and how she looked with the butterfly net; she had been watched and described too carefully by too many experts—all indulgent and smiling, like the group. She had been registered for Vassar at birth; her mother had had her tutored in every conceivable subject all through her childhood. Helena (as her mother said) could play the violin, the piano, the flute, and the trumpet; she had sung alto in the choir. She had been a camp counselor and had a senior lifesaving badge. She played a good game of tennis, golfed, skied, and figure skated; she rode, though she had never jumped or hunted. She had a real chemistry set, a little printing press, a set of tooling leather, a pottery wheel, a library of wild-flower, fern, and bird books, a butterfly collection mounted on pins in glass cases, collections of sea shells, agates, quartz, and carnelians; these educational souvenirs were still kept in cupboards in her little sitting room in Cleveland, which had formerly been the nursery—her doll’s house and toys had been given away. She could write a severe little essay, imitate birdcalls, ring chimes, and play lacrosse as well as chess, checkers, mah-jongg, parcheesi, anagrams, dominoes, slapjack, pounce, rummy, whist, bridge, and cribbage. She knew most of the hymns in the Episcopal and Presbyterian hymnbooks by heart. She had had dancing lessons, ballroom, classical, and tap. She had done field walks in Geology and visited the State Asylum for the Insane, bunked in the Outing Cabin, and looked over the printing presses of the Duchess County Sentinel in Poughkeepsie. She had swum in the waterfall near Washington’s Crossing and attended the annual Greek play at the Bennett School in Millbrook. She and Kay, in Freshman Hygiene, were just about the only members of the class who actually inspected the dairies where the college cows were kept; one of the workmen had shown Helena how to milk. She knew china and had a small collection of snuffboxes at home that her mother had started for her; she knew Greek and Latin and could translate the worst passages of Krafft-Ebing without a shadow of embarrassment. She knew medieval French and the lays of the trouvères, though her accent was poor because her mother disapproved of French governesses, having heard of cases where these women drugged children or put their heads in the gas oven to make them go to sleep. At camp, Helena had learned to sail and sing old catches and sea chanties, some of them rather off-color; she improvised on the mouth organ and was studying the recorder. She had had art lessons since she was six and showed quite a gift for drawing. When Kay, senior year, had the group making those lists of who liked whom best, Helena cannily said she couldn’t decide and instead drew a big colored cartoon which she called “The Judgment of Paris,” showing them all in the nude, like goddesses, and herself very small in a jerkin with a dunce’s cap on her head and a wormy apple in her hand. Tickled, they hung it in their common sitting room, and there was quite a controversy about whether they should take it down at Prom time when they had some of their beaux in to tea; the modest members of the group, like Dottie and Polly Andrews, were afraid of being considered fast because the likenesses were so realistic that somebody might have thought they had posed.
Having been Kay’s roommate (before they all grouped together) and had her to stay in Cleveland, Helena accepted her mother’s dictum, that Kay was her “best friend,” though they were no longer as close as they had been before sex entered Kay’s life. Helena had known about sex from a very early age but treated it as a joke, like what she called your plumbing. She was dry and distant toward the fond passion, as she called it, and was amused by Kay’s ardors for Harald, whom she coolly dubbed “Harald Handfast”—an allusion to the Old English custom of bedding before wedding. To her, men in general were a curious species, like the unicorn; for Harald in particular her feelings were circumspect and consisted chiefly of a mental protest against the way he spelled his name. Her parents, however, liked him and approved of Kay’s choice. When his play was in Cleveland last winter, Mr. Davison had offered him a card to his club, which he did not use much himself, he said, “being a plain fellow.”
Kay herself was a favorite with Helena’s mother, and, whenever she came to stay, Mrs. Davison, who was a great talker, liked to discuss Helena with her at breakfast, over her second cup of coffee in the handsome paneled breakfast room while Helena herself was still sleeping and only the toby jugs and Mr. Davison’s collection of English china stirrup cups made in the form of foxes’ heads were able (commented Helena) to listen. Knowing the two participants, Helena, in her sleep, could have told how the conversation would go. “She has had every opportunity,” emphasized Mrs. Davison, with an impressive look at Kay, who was respectfully drinking her orange juice, which was served in cracked ice. “Every opportunity.” This way of stressing and repeating her words would lead Kay to think that Mrs. Davison was implying, for Kay’s ears alone, that Helena had been a grave disappointment to her mother. But this was an error, as other chums of Helena’s had found. Accustomed to public speaking, Mrs. Davison always paused and intensified to let her words slowly sink in, even with an audience of one. Her real belief was that Helena was turning out extremely well, though she greatly wondered, she said to Kay, that Helena had not “seen fit” to go on with her art at college. “Davy Davison and I,” she explained, “would have had no objection at all to Helena’s becoming a painter. After she had finished her college work. Her teacher here considered that she had unusual promise, a decided bent, and so did Mr. Smart at the museum. We had talked of giving her a year or two at the Art Students League in New York and of letting her have a studio in Greenwich Village. But her interests have widened at Vassar, dontcha know.” Kay agreed. Mrs. Davison also wondered that Helena had failed to make Phi Beta Kappa. “I said” (Kay reported to Helena), “that only grinds made Phi Beta junior year.” “Just as I told Davy Davison!” exclaimed Mrs. Davison. “Girls who have been coached and crammed.” Mrs. Davison often spoke with detestation of “crammers.”
“I am not a college woman myself,” Mrs. Davison continued, “and it’s a thing I’ve bitterly regretted. I shall blame Davy Davison for it till they put pennies on my eyes.” This remark remained partly cryptic, like many of Mrs. Davison’s utterances, in which learned allusions—like this one to Roman burial customs—mingled with obscure personal reminiscence. Kay took her to mean that Mr. Davison had married her (in Mrs. Davison’s own parlance) “untimely,” which she found hard to imagine because, much as she liked her, she could not imagine Mrs. Davison young. Helena’s mother was a tall fat woman with piles of grey hair done in unfashionable puffs on either side of her ears and large, pensive, lustrous dark eyes that seemed misplaced in her big, doughy, plain countenance, which was white and shapeless, like bread punched down and set to rise again in a crock. She was a Canadian, from the province of Saskatchewan, and spoke in somewhat breathy tones.
In point of fact, she had been a country schoolteacher and well along in life, rising thirty, when Mr. Davison had met her, at the home of a metallurgist. If she could not write “B.A.” after her name, it had been by her own choice: in the annus mirabilis (1901) when the university had opened at Saskatoon—a story she was fond of telling—she had gone to inspect the professors and found she knew more than they did. “Like the Child Jesus in the temple, toute proportion gardée,” she avowed. Nevertheless, she harbored a mysterious grievance against Mr. Davison for not having been permitted to finish, as she put it, her education. “We’ll have to buy Mother an honorary degree for her golden wedding anniversary,” Helena’s father sometimes remarked.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Davison had an emphatic distaste for show. Mrs. Davison wore no jewelry, except for her wedding and engagement rings and occasional Victorian brooches set with garnets, her birthstone, fastened to the bosom of her coin-print or polka-dot dresses. Helena had a set of moonstones, a cat’s-eye brooch, an amethyst pin, and an Add-a-Pearl necklace that had been completed on her eighteenth birthday, when she was presented to society (that is, to the family’s old friends) at a small tea given by her mother in their house, which was called “The Cottage” and had a walled garden and English wallflowers.
The Davison house—Kay had told the group—was almost magical, like a house you found in a fairy tale, though it was right in the heart of Cleveland, only two blocks from a streetcar stop but hidden by tall privet hedges and the garden wall. It was small, compact, and silent, with chintz-cushioned window seats and rocking chairs and cupboards and shelves and “dressers” full of fragile, precious things that were used for everyday, like instructive toys you could play with—milk glass, Sandwich glass, Wedgwood, Staffordshire, Lowestoft, Crown Derby. A table seemed almost always to be set, for breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner, with toast racks, muffin warmers, a Lazy Susan (Kay had never heard the name before, even), muffineers full of powdered sugar, finger bowls in which flowers floated. Yet there were no butlers or footmen darting around to make you nervous for fear of using the wrong utensils. When Helena, who was always the last down, had finished her breakfast, the colored maid would bring in a big china basin with pretty pink roses on it and a pitcher full of hot water, and Mrs. Davison would wash the breakfast cups and saucers at the table (an old pioneer custom, she said) and dry them on an embroidered tea towel. At dinner, after the main course, the maid would bring in a salad bowl of Chinese porcelain, red and green, and an old cruet stand with olive oil, a mustard pot, and vials of different kinds of vinegar, and Mr. Davison, standing up, would make the salad dressing himself and mix the salad, which was always sprinkled with fresh herbs. They did not entertain very often; most of the family friends, Kay said, were rather old, bachelors or widows, and neither Mr. Davison (whose real name was Edward) nor Mrs. Davison was enthusiastic about what they humorously called “followers,” though Helena, being an only child, had been given every opportunity at her progressive day school to meet boys and girls of her own age. Not to mention dancing school and Sunday school; neither Mr. Davison nor Mrs. Davison was a regular churchgoer (although Mrs. Davison was a sharp judge of a sermon), but they felt it only right that Helena should know the Bible and the beliefs of the principal Christian creeds, so that she could make up her own mind.
After day school, she had gone to a sound boarding school in New England with a well-rounded curriculum but no frills. In the summers, they had taken cottages at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, at Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, and at Biddeford Pool in Maine, and Helena had always had her friends come to visit her there and, after she was eighteen and had had driving lessons, the use of a small Ford runabout, as Mrs. Davison described it, which Mr. Davison had bought for a second car.
For the summer of 1930, after freshman year, they had planned a trip through the Lake District (Mrs. Davison was a great admirer of Dorothy Wordsworth), but with business conditions what they were, they had concluded that it was best to stay home, where Mr. Davison could keep an eye on developments. None of the other girls from Vassar was going, as Mrs. Davison had ascertained.
This last June, it was Mr. Davison who had suddenly declared that Helena needed a change. At Commencement, he had thought she looked peaked and had told her mother so. She had better go to Europe and look around for a few months by herself, before going to work at that nursery school, which was dang-fool nonsense anyway. With all Helena’s education, she had elected to play the piano and teach Dalcroze and finger painting at an experimental school in Cleveland—to a darned lot of kikes’ children, from what Mr. Davison had heard. Where was the sense in that, he had asked Kay angrily at lunch after Commencement, while Mrs. Davison said “Now, Daddy!” and Kay and Helena exchanged looks. “All right, Mother.” Mr. Davison had subsided momentarily. Kay suspected that he was angry because Helena had failed to get magna cum laude, when a lot of the Jewish girls had. Mrs. Davison evidently had the same thought, because she now cleared her throat and remarked that the simple cum laude, Helena’s meed, was the sign of a real student as opposed to what, in her day, had been called “a greasy grind.” “I watched those magnas go up for their diplomas,” she announced, “and I didn’t like the look of them at all; they smelled of the lamp, as I told Davy Davison. The midnight oil, dontcha know.” “Oh, Mother!” said Helena and raised her eyebrows in distress. Mr. Davison would not be diverted. “Why should Helena take a job away from some girl who really needs it? Can you tell me that?” he demanded, pushing his fried chicken away. His small round cheeks had turned red. Kay started to answer, but Mrs. Davison intervened. “Now, Daddy,” she said placidly, “do you mean to assert that a girl in Helena’s position doesn’t have the same rights as other girls?”
“I mean exactly that,” Mr. Davison retorted. “You’ve hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position”—he turned to Kay—“have ‘privilege.’ That’s what I read in the Nation and the New Republic.” Mrs. Davison nodded. “Good,” said Mr. Davison. “Now listen. The fellow who’s got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.” “I’m not sure I understand,” said Kay. “Sure you do,” said Mr. Davison. “So do Mother and Helena.” “Let’s choose another example,” said Mrs. Davison thoughtfully. “If Helena, say, were to paint a picture. Would she not have the right to sell it because other artists are impecunious?” “A painting isn’t a service, Mother,” said Mr. Davison. “Helena’s offering a service that a hundred other girls in Cleveland could do as well.” At this point, the discussion broke off; the waiter presented the check, which Mr. Davison paid. Helena herself had hardly said a word.
Afterward, Kay declared that Mr. Davison’s ideas were surprisingly unfair and that the trip to Europe was a bribe that would corrupt Helena’s integrity. She was amazed (and she repeated it today, right to Helena’s face) that Helena had gone meekly off to Europe with her tail between her legs and stayed till just before Christmas. And now that she was back she was making no effort to get a job but talking of studying dry point in Cleveland and taking a course in acrobatic dancing at the Y.W.C.A., of all places. Nor was it a question of just marking time till she got married, like some other girls; Helena, Kay said, would never get married—she was a neuter, like a little mule. Therefore it was up to her to realize her potentialities. She and Kay were just the opposite of each other, Kay had been telling Mr. Bergler this afternoon.
“Really?” said Mr. Bergler. “How?” “In college I wanted to be a director,” Kay replied. “Come here, Helena,” she called loudly. “We’re talking about you.” Unwillingly, Helena approached; she was wearing a skullcap hat and a black velvet dress, with buttons straight down the front and a little old-lace collar with her cat’s-eye brooch. “I was saying I always wanted to be a director,” Kay continued. “Well!” said the producer, an unassuming grey-haired Jewish man with white soft skin and flat grey fish eyes. “So that’s what you and Hal have in common.” Kay nodded. “I directed one of the Hall Plays at college. That’s different from DP—Dramatic Production, which Hallie teaches—Hallie Flanagan, have you heard of her? Anyway, the Hall Plays are part of Philaletheis, which is just a student thing. It sounds like stamp collecting. But it means something different—loving the theatre. In DP, Hallie would never let me direct. I worked on the lighting with Lester—Lester Lang, her assistant; you probably haven’t heard of him. And I built scenery.” “And now?” “I gave it up,” said Kay with a sigh. “Now I work at Mr. Macy’s, in the training squad. I have the drive but not the talent. That’s what Harald said when he saw the Hall Play I directed. It was The Winter’s Tale—in the Outdoor Theatre. Helena played Autolycus.”
The producer turned his eyes to Helena. “That’s what I started to say,” Kay went on, remembering. “I lost the thread for a minute. I have the drive but not the talent, and Helena has the talents but not the drive.” “You’re interested in a stage career?” inquired the producer curiously, bending down to Helena. “Oh no,” Kay answered for Helena. “Helena’s a mime but not an actress. That’s what Harald thinks. No. But Helena has so many other talents that she can’t choose between them—canalize. She writes and sings and paints and dances and plays I don’t know how many instruments. The compleat girl. I was telling Mr. Bergler about your parents, Helena. She has the most remarkable parents. How many magazines does your mother ‘take in’? Her mother is a Canadian,” she added while Helena stood pondering with a fresh cup of punch in her hand. She was being called upon, she recognized, to perform for Mr. Bergler, and she was going to do it, just as she used to recite or play under her mother’s eye, feeling like a conscientious wind-up toy. She had a “searching” anxious little gaze, which she now directed upward at Mr. Bergler from under the reddish eaves of her brows.
“Well,” she began, grimacing and drawling her words, “there’s the National Geographic, Christian Century, the Churchman, Theatre Arts Monthly, the Stage, the Nation, the New Republic, Scribner’s, Harper’s, the Bookman, the Forum, the London Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, the Spectator, Blackwood’s, Life and Letters Today, the Nineteenth Century and After, Punch, L’Illustration, Connaissance des Arts, Antiques, Country Life, Isis, the PMLA, the Lancet, the American Scholar, the annual report of the College Boards, Vanity Fair, the American Mercury, the New Yorker, and Fortune (those four are for Daddy, but Mother ‘glances them over’).”
“You’re forgetting some,” said Kay. Mr. Bergler smiled; he was supposed to be rather a Communist. “The Atlantic Monthly, surely,” he suggested. Helena shook her head. “No. Mother is having a ‘feud’ with the Atlantic Monthly. She disapproved of something in the Jalna series and canceled her subscription. Mother dearly loves canceling her subscriptions—as a painful duty. Her feud with the Saturday Review of Literature has been very hard on her, because of the ‘Double-Crostic.’ She’s thought of resubscribing in our maid’s name, but she fears they might recognize the address.” “She sounds a most awesome lady,” said Mr. Bergler, responding to Helena’s faint grin. “Tell me, what does she find objectionable in the Saturday Review of Literature? Has sex reared its head there?” “Oh,” said Helena. “You misjudge my mother. She’s impervious to sex.” A publisher’s reader who lived in the apartment downstairs had come up to listen; he gave Libby MacAusland’s arm a little squeeze. “I love that, don’t you?” he said. “Mother’s shock area,” continued Helena imperturbably, “is confined to the higher brain centers; the ‘bump’ of grammar and usage is highly developed. She’s morally offended by impure English.” “Like what?” encouraged Kay. “Dangling modifiers. Improper prepositions. ‘Aggravating’ to mean ‘annoying,’ ‘demean’ to mean ‘lower,’ ‘sinister.’” “‘Sinister’?” echoed the publisher’s reader. “Mother says it only means left-handed or done with the left hand. If you tell her a person is sinister, all she will infer, she says, is that he’s left-handed. A deed, she allows, may be sinister, if it’s done sidewise or ‘under the robe’ or ‘on the wrong side of the blanket.’” “I never heard that!” cried Pokey, as if indignant. The group around Helena had grown larger and was forming into a circle. “‘Infer,’ ‘imply,’” prompted Libby, eager to be heard. “Ummhum,” said Helena. “But that’s too commonplace to be under Mother’s special protection. ‘Meticulous,’ which is not a synonym for ‘neat.’ She sets great store by Latin roots, you notice, but she frowns on the ablative absolute as a construction in English.” “Yow!” said Harald’s friend, Mr. Sisson, the one who had taken pictures at the wedding. “Oh, and ‘I cannot help but feel.’” “What’s wrong with that?” asked several voices. “‘I cannot help feeling’ or ‘I cannot but feel.’” “More!” said the publisher’s reader. Helena demurred. “I cannot help feeling,” she said, “that that is enough of Mother’s ‘pet peeves.’”
Her mother’s habit of stressing and underlining her words had undergone an odd mutation in being transmitted to Helena. Where Mrs. Davison stressed and emphasized, Helena inserted her words carefully between inverted commas, so that clauses, phrases, and even proper names, inflected, by her light voice, had the sound of being ironical quotations. While everything Mrs. Davison said seemed to carry with it a guarantee of authority, everything Helena said seemed subject to the profoundest doubt. “I saw ‘Miss Sandison,’” she had been telling Kay and Dottie, “in the ‘British Museum,’” signifying by the lifting of her brows and the rolling about of the names on her slow, dry tongue that “Miss Sandison” was an alias of some wondrous sort and the “British Museum” a front or imposture. This wry changing of pitch had become mechanical with her, like a slide inserted in a trombone. In fact, she had a great respect for her former Shakespeare teacher and for the British Museum. She had had a library card virtually from the time she could walk and was as much at home with the various systems of cataloguing as she was with the Furness Variorum. At college she had excelled at the “note topic”—a favorite with Miss Sandison too—and had many wooden boxes full of neatly classified cards on her desk beside the portable typewriter she had got for Christmas junior year—Mrs. Davison had not wished her to take up typing till her handwriting was formed; for a period in Cleveland she had had a calligraphy lesson every other day between her music lesson and her riding lesson and she had learned to cut her own quills from feathers. Nothing, moreover, was more natural than that she should find her teacher, an Elizabethan specialist, in the British Museum, yet Helena had gone on to explain methodically, as though it required accounting for, the circumstances that had brought this about: how Miss Sandison was doing a paper, in her sabbatical leave, on a little-known Elizabethan, “Arthur Gorges,” and Helena was looking up an early publication of “Dorothy Richardson” and had stopped to see the “Elgin Marbles.” In relating such “true particulars,” Helena lowered her voice and gravely puckered her forehead, with a confidential air like her mother’s, as though giving privileged news from a sickroom in which lay a common friend.
“A cute kid, that,” the producer told Harald, when he was leaving. “Reminds me of the young Hepburn—before they glamorized her. Clubwoman mother there too.” Helena found nothing to object to in the last part of this “tribute.” “Mother is a clubwoman,” she pointed out mildly to Kay, who felt that Mrs. Davison had been disparaged. “And I don’t like Katharine Hepburn.” She wished people would stop making this comparison. Mrs. Davison had been the first to notice a resemblance. “She was a Bryn Mawr girl, Helena. Class of ’29. Davy Davison and I saw her with Jane Cowl. She wore her hair short like yours.”
Wearily, Helena eyed the bedroom door. She wanted to go home or, rather, to go have dinner with Dottie at the Forty-ninth Street Longchamps, across from the Vassar Club. She knew that when she got back to Cleveland, she would be bound to report to her mother how she had “found” Kay and Harald, what their new apartment was like, and how Harald was making out in his career. “I have always been partial to Kay,” Mrs. Davison would state, satisfied, when Helena had finished her narration. It was one of Mrs. Davison’s peculiarities, well known to Helena, that, like royalty, she insisted that all news be favorable and reflect a steady advance of human affairs.
It was wonderful news, of course, that Harald’s play was going to be produced, yet neither Kay nor Harald seemed very happy. Possibly, as Dottie suggested, success had been too slow in coming. Dottie had heard a painful story: that Harald had been helping a puppeteer who gave shows at vulgar rich people’s parties; someone had seen him behind the scenes working the lights in the little portable puppet theater—he was not allowed to mingle with the guests. Kay had never mentioned this to a soul. Today, she looked strained and tired, and Harald was drinking too much. He was right; the party had not “jelled.” The producer and his wife had seemed mystified by so much Vassar; Helena feared Harald’s stock had gone down. Kay craved the limelight for the group, but the limelight did not become them. As Harald said, they did not know how to “project.” Of all the girls here this afternoon, only Kay, in his and Helena’s opinion—they had agreed on this, by the punch bowl—was a genuine beauty. Yet she was losing her vivid coloring, which would distress Mrs. Davison, who admired the “roses” in Kay’s cheeks.
The bedroom door opened. The love birds had made it up. Kay was smiling dewily, and Harald’s cigarette holder was cocked at a jaunty angle. He had a big bowl of chile con carne, Kay announced, that he had fixed this morning, and everyone was to stay and eat. Afterward, if the guests were agreeable, he was going to read aloud an act from his play. There was no help for it, Helena and Dottie were bound to stay; Kay was counting on them. Harald went out to the kitchen, refilling his punch glass en route; he would not let Kay help him—she was tired, and this was her holiday. “Isn’t that touching?” murmured Dottie. Helena was not touched. Harald, she presumed, knew Kay as well as she did, and if there was anything Kay hated, it was being left out; she was a glutton for making herself useful. They heard Harald moving about in the kitchen, the rattle of plates, the creak of drawers opening. Kay could not contain herself. “Can’t I make the coffee?” she called out. “No!” Harald’s voice retorted. “Entertain your guests.” Kay looked around the circle with a defeated, anxious smile. “I’ll help him,” volunteered Dottie as the rattle of crockery continued. “No,” said Norine. “I’ll do it. I know the kitchen.” With a purposeful stride, she went out; the shuttered door trembled as she pulled it shut. “She’ll make the coffee too weak,” Kay said sadly to Helena. “And she’ll want to use paper napkins.” “Forget about it,” advised Helena.
The radio actor turned to Kay. He was more than a little drunk; the cigarette in his hand wavered. “Give me a light, will you?” Kay looked around; there were no matches; all the little booklets were empty. Putnam silently proffered his burning pipe. As the actor stabbed his cigarette into the bowl, some coals fell on the newly waxed floor. “Oh, dear!” cried Kay, stamping them out. “I’ll get some matches from the kitchen.” “I’ll do it,” said Helena.
In the small kitchen, behind the slatted door, she found Norine and Harald locked in an embrace. Her classmate’s tall, rangy figure, like that of a big lynx or bobcat, was bent back as Harald kissed her, pressing forward in a sort of feral lunge. The scene reminded Helena, for some reason, of German silent films. Norine’s tawny eyes were closed, and an Oriental turban she wore—her own millinery achievement—had come partly unwound. A dish towel was lying on the floor. Their wet mouths drew apart as Helena entered, and their heads turned to look at her. Then they heard Kay call. “Did you find them? Harald, give her the kitchen matches, will you?” Helena saw the box of matches on the stove. Norine and Harald backed away from each other, and she hurriedly dodged between them. “Gangway,” she said. She picked up the towel and tossed it to Harald. Then she seized the matches and made for the living room. Her small hand shook with borrowed guilt as she struck the big sulphur match and held it for the actor to take a light from. It went out. She lit another. The room, she noted, was full of the smell of brimstone.
In a few minutes Norine strode in with a tray of plates and a box of paper napkins, and Harald followed with his chile. Everyone ate. The radio actor resumed his critique of Sheepskin. “The fall of a just man is precipitous,” replied Harald, with a side glance at Helena. He set his plate down with a slight lurch. “Excuse me while I go to the toilet.” “The fall of a just man,” repeated the actor. “How well Harald puts it. The college president starts at the top, politicians put the skids under him, and he shoots right down to the bottom. It’s a bold conception, no doubt, but not an actor’s conception.” “Wasn’t Shakespeare an actor?” suddenly spoke up the naval officer. “What’s that got to do with my point?” said the actor. “Well, I mean, King Lear,” said the officer. “Doesn’t he start at the top?” “King Lear,” remarked Helena, “was hardly a just man.” They heard the closet flush. “And there’s relief in Lear,” said the actor. “Cordelia. Kent. The fool. In Harald’s play there’s no relief. Harald claims that would be fakery.” “Clara’s cake!” cried Kay, as coffee was being served. “Harald! We’ve got to serve Clara’s cake. I promised her. I’m afraid her feelings were hurt when we wouldn’t let her pass it with the punch.” “When I wouldn’t let her pass it,” corrected Harald with a melancholy air. “Why don’t you say what you mean, Kay?” Kay turned to the others. “Wait till you see it. She made it for our party and brought it down from Harlem on a paper lace doily. Clara’s a wonderful character. She runs a high-class funeral parlor. Tiger Flowers was buried from it. You ought to hear her description of him ‘laying in state.’ And I love it when she talks about her competitors. ‘Those fly-by-night undertakers are takin’ our business away.’” “Get the cake,” said Harald. “Your darky imitation is terrible.” “You imitate her, Harald!” “Get the cake,” he repeated. They waited for Kay to come back. They could hear her washing up. The cat seemed to have got Norine’s tongue, and “Putnam Blake” was no conversationalist. Dottie passed the coffee again. When it was his turn to be served, he nudged Helena. “Look, real cream!” he said, his peculiar eyes aglow. Helena could see that this excited him more than anything that had happened at the party.
Kay came in with fresh plates and a cake on a doily on a pink glass platter. The frosting was decorated with a maraschino cherry tree and a chocolate hatchet. “Oh, bless her heart!” said Dottie. “Her old black heart,” said Harald, eying the cake askance. “Straight from a Harlem bakery,” he pronounced. Kay put a hand to her cheek. “Oh, no!” she said. “Clara wouldn’t tell me a lie.” Harald smiled darkly. “A most villainous cake. ‘Let them eat bread.’ Don’t you agree, my friend?” He turned to the naval officer. “Look at the frosting,” said the actor. “It’s pure Lavoris.”
Tears appeared in Kay’s eyes. Defiantly, she began to cut the cake. “Kay loves to be a gull,” said Harald. “In the simplicity of her heart, she imagines that old coon happily baking for ‘Miss Kay’ and ‘Mister Man.’” “I think it’s touching,” said Dottie quickly. “And I’ll bet it tastes delicious.” She accepted a piece and began to eat it. The others followed suit, except for Harald, who shook his head when the platter was passed to him. “Down the incinerator with it!” he declared with a flourish of his coffee spoon. There was a laugh and a silence. It appeared that Harald had been right. “It’s like eating frosted absorbent cotton,” murmured the actor to Helena. Helena set her plate aside. In Kay’s place, she would not have served the cake—from a purely practical motive: so that the maid would not be encouraged to waste her money again. But she did not find Harald’s “antic hay” very amusing, all things considered. He had put on the motley, she felt, for her special benefit to tell her that he was a Man of Sorrows. Was he afraid she would give him away, poor devil? Helena would have been glad to reassure him. “I shall listen to no tales, Helena,” her mother had always admonished her if she came to report on a playmate. Helena did not “care for” what she had seen, but she assumed the bottle was responsible and felt a certain sympathy for Harald’s present discomfort. He was being bad to Kay, she supposed, because if he were amiable, Helena would consider him a whited sepulcher.
Across the room Kay was talking—rather boisterously, Helena felt—about wedding presents. Helena’s pity for her had taken the form of acute embarrassment. Kay was on a stage without knowing it. Three ironic spectators, counting Helena, were watching her and listening. The strangest objects, she was saying, were still arriving by parcel post—right in a class with Clara’s cake. “Look at these, for instance.” She brought out an ugly red glass decanter and six little cordial glasses that had come (she could hardly believe it) from one of her childhood friends in Salt Lake City. “What can we do with them? Send them to the Salvation Army?” “Give them to Clara,” said the actor. Nearly everyone laughed. “Down the incinerator with them!” said Harald suddenly.
They were examining the decanter, holding it up to the light, arguing about workmanship and mass production, when they heard the front door close. The pink glass platter with the remains of the cake on it was gone. Harald was gone too. “Where did he disappear to?” said the naval officer. “I thought he was in the kitchen,” said Norine. Then the doorbell rang. Harald had locked himself out. “Where have you been?” they demanded. “Giving the cake a Viking’s funeral. A beau geste, was it not?” He saluted the group. “Oh, Harald,” said Kay sadly. “That was Clara’s cake plate.” The actor giggled. With an air of decision, Harald began to collect the little red cordial glasses. “You take the decanter, my friend,” he said to the actor. The actor obeyed and followed him, humming the Dead March from Saul. “Are they spiffed?” whispered Dottie. Helena nodded. This time Harald left the door open, and the group in the living room could hear a distant crash of glass breaking as the set went down the incinerator in the hall. “Next?” said Harald, returning. “What next, my dear?” Kay tried to laugh. “I’d better stop him,” she said to the others, “or he’ll make a general holocaust of all our goods and chattels.” “Yes, stop him,” urged Putnam. “This is serious.” “Don’t be a wet blanket,” said the actor. “Let’s make a game of it. Everybody choose his candidate for the incinerator.” Kay jumped up. “Harald,” she said, coaxing. “Why don’t you read us your play instead? You promised.” “Ah yes,” said Harald. “And it’s getting late. And you have to work tomorrow. But you give me an idea.” He went into the dinette and took a manuscript in a gray folder from a cupboard.
“Down the incinerator with it!” His tall, lean, sinewy figure paused a moment by the bookcase, then began to skirt the furniture: Norine’s voice was heard ordering someone to stop him, and Putnam and the naval officer moved to block his way to the door. The actor leaped for the manuscript, and there was a sound of tearing paper as Harald wrenched it away. Holding it tight to his chest, with his free hand he pushed off his pursuers, like somebody racing for a touchdown. At the door, there was a scuffle, but Harald managed to open it, and it slammed behind him. He did not return. “Oh, well,” said Kay. “Could he have thrown himself down the incinerator?” whispered Dottie. “No,” said the actor. “I thought of that. It’s too small for a man’s body.” For a moment no one spoke.
“But where has he gone, Kay?” said Norine. “He hasn’t got an overcoat.” “Downstairs probably,” replied Kay matter-of-factly. “To have a drink with Russell.” This was the publisher’s reader. “I guess you’d better go home,” Kay continued. “He won’t come back till you’re all gone. I always used to be scared when he disappeared like that. I thought he was going to throw himself in the river. Then I found out that he went to Russell’s. Or over to Norine and Put’s.” Putnam nodded. “But he can’t be there,” he said simply. “Because we’re here.” They were all putting on their coats. “And his manuscript, Kay?” said Dottie, venturing a discreet reminder. “Oh,” said Kay. “Don’t worry. Bergler has a copy. And Walter Huston has one. And there’re three on file with Harald’s agent.” Kay, reflected Helena for the second time, had always been a “blurter.”
In the taxi, Helena and Dottie held a post-mortem. “Were you scared or did you guess?” asked Dottie. “I was scared,” said Helena. “Everyone in that room was gulled good and proper.” She grinned. “Except Kay,” said Dottie. “That’s funny,” she added after a moment. “Harald must have known Kay knew. That he had other copies, I mean.” Helena nodded. “Did he count on her silence?” Dottie wondered, in a voice that still sounded impressed. “And she betrayed him!” “She’s not a gangster’s moll,” said Helena shortly. “Would you have exposed him like that, in her place?” persisted Dottie. “Yes,” said Helena.
She was dourly composing a new version of the Class Notes. “Washington’s Birthday Report. Yestreen I saw Kay Strong Petersen’s new husband in Norine Schmittlapp Blake’s arms. Both were looking well, and Kay is expecting a promotion at Macy’s. Later in the evening the guests were treated to a ceremonial manuscript-burning. Kay served Fish House Punch, from an old colonial recipe. Kay and Harald have an elegant apartment in the East Fifties, convenient to the river, where Harald will be able to throw himself when his marriage goes ‘on the rocks.’ Re this, Anthropology major Dottie Renfrew opines that the little things, like lying, become so important in marriage. If she married a man who was a born liar, she would conform to his tribal custom. How about this, ’33? Write me your ideas and let’s have a really stimulating discussion.”