Dawn Powell
Aileen had on a black chiffon frock that reached exactly to her knees. Every time she Charlestoned by with Dan Tracy, the chaperons, with one accord, lowered their eyes.
“The jeweled garters showing is bad enough,” gasped the oldest chaperon, “but, my dear, those ruffles! I saw them distinctly.”
“She’s not the sort of girl men marry,” said the second oldest chaperon, waggling a palm leaf fan. “You mark my words, she’ll be an old maid!”
With this satisfactory conclusion the four chaperons of the High Water Club adjourned for a little punch—properly stiffened with gin—and sixty couples disappeared from the veranda in sixty different directions.
Aileen Merrick, comfortably leaning on Dan Tracy’s shoulder in the Italian garden, would have shocked the chaperons far more if they could have heard her.
“This is all very pretty, Dan,” she observed, “but it doesn’t mean a darn thing. Why don’t you really fall in love with me? I’m awfully nice.”
Dan casually kissed her left eye.
“Very likely I might have made a fool of myself over you, Aileen,” he retorted amiably, “if you weren’t so damned modern.”
“You mean I don’t look like first mortgages and linen showers and Ludwig Baumann’s,” Aileen thoughtfully helped him out. “I’m your party gal.”
“Rhinestone heels and champagne and orchids,” Dan waved a cigarette, “and how. Awful good company but not a good wife.”
“If you’re looking for the marrying kind,” Aileen said demurely, “I’m surprised you haven’t picked on Joan Marble.”
“Thanks,” Tracy languidly replied. “I may do it yet. Let me give you a light.”
And two hours later Aileen, who had firmly decided to go home in Dan Tracy’s new sedan, experienced a faint shock. She saw Dan leading Joan Marble, cloaked and smiling, out to the carriage entrance. Very jauntily Aileen walked over to the Delfords’ car and announced that they were to have the pleasure of taking her home.
“My dear,” gurgled Freda Delford, upon whose lap she was very uncomfortably ensconced, “do you know what Tess told me as we were leaving? Dan Tracy and Joan went off together!”
“Shall it be a cut-glass punch bowl or sherbet glasses this time, darling?” chanted Jimmy Delford.
“Silly!” laughed Freda. “But you know it’s true that when you see Joan with a man it means something. Might as well pick their wedding present right away.”
Aileen forced a laugh. Her face looked a little pinched in the glare of the street lamps, but that may have been the cold night wind.
“You ran around a good deal with Dan this winter, didn’t you, Aileen?” asked Jimmy. “Seems to me I used to be forever bumping into you two holding hands out in my car between dances.”
“Very likely,” admitted Aileen. “Dan’s a swell hand-holder… Here we are at the old homestead, Jimmy, and if you knock that post over again the janitor will kill you.”
She wriggled past Freda’s very plump knees, jumped to the ground and caught her white Spanish shawl on the brakes. It ripped obligingly and Aileen muttered a very gentle “damn.”
“That’s all right, Aileen,” Freda giggled. “You’ll sell enough houses tomorrow to buy a new evening wrap. Night!”
“Don’t forget to razz Dan about Joan if you see him,” Jimmy called. “There’s sure to be something serious on.”
Aileen stumbled across the sidewalk, and up the front steps, the torn fringe trailing. The new maid let her in the front door, and looked at her in disapproval. Miss Merrick was certainly staggering, and moreover she was laughing to herself in the most grotesque fashion. The new maid concluded instantly that what the town people had told her was true—Miss Merrick drank… But it wasn’t the drink from Jimmy’s flask that made Aileen laugh. It had suddenly struck her as superbly amusing that she and Dan Tracy should play around all season without Glendale batting an eye; whereas he had only to take Joan Marble home once from a dance and the town was agog.
“Must be I’m an awfully harmless soul,” Aileen thought ruefully. “Ugh! How ghastly!”
Taking Joan home that night was a purely accidental gesture for Dan. His rooms were not far from the Marble residence, and when he saw Joan slipping out of the dressing room all alone there was only one thing to be done. They didn’t exchange a dozen words in the ride home, yet Dan found he had a date with Joan for the following Sunday, and an apparently permanent date for the Saturday afternoon concert series at Music Hall.
Dan really was puzzled as to how it had happened. Joan had certainly not been forward. He himself was such an informal soul—never called a girl up till the last minute, and usually he just dropped in. Yet here he was with a string of definite engagements with one girl.
“Still, I need to know a girl like Joan Marble,” he finally reflected. “A real woman. Nothing flighty about Joan. Sweet, too. And old-fashioned. You don’t have the feeling that tomorrow night she’ll be kissing somebody else…”
Dan was close to thirty and had been perilously close to marrying Aileen. After all, he would soon be making enough for two, and an architect needn’t worry about getting on… that is, if he was the only one in town, as Dan was in Glendale. And a man needed someone… a little house, say, on the Club Boulevard… a couple of collies, and, oh, I don’t know, things of his own. Substantial, permanent things. The trouble was that women weren’t the right sort anymore. Aileen was a good pal, but she was entirely self-sufficient. If he chanced to be in a sentimental mood—and Dan admitted having sentimental moods—it was just like Aileen to get hilariously lit, or to ask his advice about some problem in her exceedingly successful real-estate business.
Somehow you couldn’t picture Aileen Merrick as the sweet, demure wife of a struggling young architect, acting as hostess to possible clients, helping him in the subtle fashion of old-fashioned wives to get ahead in his business. That was Joan Marble. Aileen, now… Dan’s mouth twisted in a grin. It would be more like Aileen to reveal complete and utter boredom to his precious clients and then to relieve that boredom by getting potted.
That was Aileen. And Dan had just about decided it was time to stop idling with these modern young women, time to take root, so to speak. He’d look around a while, first, of course, and when he’d made up his mind…
He sent Joan a dozen roses on Sunday. When he called he found Joan in soft blond lace thoughtfully arranging the flowers in a Chinese bowl. The wood fire was burning, as it did in the Marble living room almost every Sunday the year round, and it spread an inviting glow over the tea wagon, set with tea things. Dan’s grave face brightened at the picture. How much jollier than the chattering Sunday mob in Aileen’s living room!
“It wasn’t necessary to send the roses, Dan,” Joan said in her soft voice, coming up to take his hand. “And wasn’t it the least little bit extravagant for a young man who’s just bought a rather expensive car?”
“Flowers are necessities for beautiful ladies,” Dan protested, sinking into the grateful depths of the armchair. “I’ve given up candy as a tribute, now that all you girls are reducing. Anyway, those roses look slick the way you have them in that Chinese dingus.”
Joan sat down at the tea wagon.
“I’d rather not have the candy” she smiled. “It always seems a pity to me that these tributes as you call them should be perishable. For my part I can’t help thinking of the perfectly ravishing candlesticks that could be bought with that money, or the books, or—well, things that will last.”
“I’ll remember that, henceforth,” Dan answered.
Joan Marble was a wholesome girl contrasted with the usual type of modern young woman, Dan thought, as she poured the tea. She made up only a little, and she had preserved her long fair hair through the whole bobbing epidemic. It coiled on her graceful white neck and made a gleaming mellow line about her smooth white face.
Dan wondered why he had never noticed Joan before. She had gone to boarding school and the university with Aileen’s set, he knew, but she came only occasionally to their parties. She never drank nor smoked, and she seemed well liked in the town. He tried to remember what he had heard of her. She’d been engaged once or twice, but the affair had been broken off each time through no fault of Joan’s. Joan had been bewildered and dazed after each fiasco. Aileen had said something about her once. Dan tried to remember… Oh, yes…
“There’s something about Joan Marble. At the university, the rest of us girls used to wear a man’s fraternity pin for a year and never think it was anything serious. But the minute you’d see Joan walking across the campus with a man, everybody would start sewing doilies for Joan’s hope chest. Somehow she simply radiated marriage and dotted Swiss curtains and bungalow aprons and shopping for the nicest of fresh vegetables and no-babies-the-first-year-but-of-course-eventually—and that old substantial stuff… And even if it was a new man every year, you never thought of Joan as a flirt. You had only to look at that sweet, womanly face to know that it was really serious.”
Dan wondered a little why Joan had never married. You never wondered that about Aileen. They were the same age, too, around twenty-two or -three. But Joan was so obviously the marrying kind. She lived at home with her father and an aunt, and did nothing beyond a little welfare stuff out in the mill section. She expected to marry, of course. Aileen and Freda used to joke about Joan’s hope chest. At Christmas Joan always asked people not to give her perfumes and things like that, but spoons or linen or something for her hope chest… What had happened to the men she’d been engaged to, Dan wondered.
“Do you mind handing me that sewing bag?” Joan asked, pushing the wagon to one side and slipping into a low chair beside Dan. “I can work while you tell me all about yourself.”
“No time to be wasted in merely listening,” bantered Dan.
“Please don’t think that,” begged Joan. “I do want to hear, but I listen so much better when my hands are busy. This is my twelfth. Isn’t that nice?”
“Twelfth what?” Dan asked blankly, and then saw that she meant her twelfth guest towel. He began to explain why he had happened to choose Glendale of all the little Westchester towns he might have picked. While he talked Joan sewed quietly. It was a very restful evening. Somehow Dan found he was expected every Sunday evening from now on for tea. Joan was awfully sweet. She seemed to absorb his words and muse vaguely over them as one, who, pathetically enough, has little to muse on beyond what thoughts are brought to her by her occasional men callers. When Dan had finished his last anecdote of the architectural business in Glendale, Joan looked up at him with a dreamy, far-away gaze.
“Hasn’t it been a lovely evening?” she exclaimed. “Just look! I’ve finished my dozen. Tomorrow I can start on pillow slips.”
Aileen told herself she didn’t care. Fancy eating one’s heart out for a man in this day and age! She’d just like to see the one who could put a crimp in her life!… Only it was sort of queer not seeing Dan Tracy around her apartment any more. Coming in from a gorgeous tiring day of selling lots—and she did sell ’em—in Beach Parkway, and finding old Dan making himself at home in her little place.
“Aileen,” he would say, “you ought to be spanked for leaving this place the way you do! Here I get so chesty to Bodley—he ran down today—”
“Not Bodley?” Aileen’s gray eyes widened in horror. “Don’t tell me you brought him up?”
“I did,” Dan declared virtuously. “You said you wanted to meet him—the famous Bodley—and I dragged him up here to meet the Fascinating Flapper Realtor of Westchester, and incidentally to have a nip from your cellarette.”
“And the maid’s gone,” Aileen gurgled, dropping on the sofa. “And the bed wasn’t made, and I’d left the glasses all over the way they were after the party! Oh, Dan! How killing! And he might even tell Aunt Bertha!”
At which Dan looked at her half-reproachfully and half-amused.
“I had to chase Bodley away… I wanted to clean up, but where do you keep your broom?”
“There isn’t any,” explained Aileen cheerfully. “I always forget to get one. I just sort of dust around. When I get a maid again, she’ll have to bring her own broom. Don’t look that way, Dan. I need a—a wife, I guess, to look after me. Or maybe I’d better have Aunt Bertha come out from town. How she’d love it!”
There never had been anyone like Dan Tracy, Aileen was sure. To begin with he was that dark, ugly, keen sort that women always found utterly irresistible. You felt the tremendous strength and paradoxical delicacy that was in him as soon as you looked into his dark eyes. A man who could make love as casually as any other young man in the Glendale younger set, but each time he lightly kissed her Aileen hungered to know what it would be like if he really loved one… Aileen didn’t intend to let her merry life be messed up by taking men and love too seriously, but if there ever should be a man, there was a tiny, irrepressible wish that it might be Dan Tracy.
And now he was probably going to marry Joan Marble. And that was that! Aileen took care to smile brilliantly at the two every time she saw them together—and Glendale saw them frequently together that spring.
“Aileen, you know Dan better than anyone else,” begged Freda Delford one afternoon—it was at Jen Terry’s bridge—“will he really marry Joan?”
“Does anyone ever marry Joan?” Aileen countered, with faint malice. She was not playing, but stood leaning against the porch pillar, her late pallor accentuated by the bright dabs of tangerine rouge in the hollows of her cheeks. Her pleated geranium silk hung on her a little limply… the girls said she was working too hard, but wasn’t it grand, though, to be so thin?
“That’s true,” said Freda thoughtfully. “We always say Joan is different—the marrying sort—but she never actually got to the altar, did she? Why, how many men did she get engaged to since freshman year at U? There was Arty Maxwell, first. We gave her the linen shower I remember. Only he didn’t come back to college the next year—”
“And Don Reed, and Mark Blaine, and Fred Wright,” contributed Marjorie Delford, Jimmy’s young sister.
“Joan was always constant,” Aileen commented. “It was only her fiancé who varied.”
“I don’t think Joan ever looked up from her embroidery long enough to know who the man was, anyway,” Marjorie burst out. “He was simply Husband to Joan. I don’t think she gave a whoop who he was or what. Just Mate—that was all.”
“She’s that kind that envelop men in marriage without ever doing a darn thing,” Freda reflected.
“Mark Blaine stuck nearly a year,” Aileen said, staring absently across the lawn. She knew that presently Dan would drive past on his way home from his Saturday trip to New York. “They say he really loved Joan, only he got the idea she was merely in love with the matrimonial system and not with Mark Blaine at all. He ran off to South America, don’t you remember? Joan couldn’t understand it at all. But in a month or two she was working monograms on the sheets for her hope chest just because Shorty Briggs had asked her to go to the movies.”
“Sh—sh—there goes Dan’s car!” hissed Freda.
Aileen strained her eyes. Dan waved to the group on the porch and Aileen waved languidly back. Nothing in her young life if a man wanted to be the dummy in some eager bride’s hope chest. She could have a good time without Dan.
Old Mrs. Terry waddled out on the porch. She, too, wanted to talk about dear Mr. Tracy and sweet little Joan.
“A splendid wife for Dan Tracy,” she exclaimed.
“Dan’s too poor to marry,” Aileen said abruptly. “At least for a while.”
“Never mind,” breathed Mrs. Terry amiably. “Joan is a fine little manager. She’s just the kind to manage well. There’s no nonsense to Joan… not like the rest of you girls, let me tell you!”
“Now, grandma!” protested Jen, but the old lady paid no heed.
“You don’t see Joan going to offices and running around in these knickers and trying to act like a man,” Mrs. Terry’s head wagged significantly toward Aileen. “Dresses up to her knees and no petticoats—no indeed, not Joan. Joan’s the kind of girl I used to be when I was young—and your grandma, Freda, was just the same. Girls had no thought then but to make some man a good wife.”
“Some man—you mean any man,” impudently retorted her granddaughter.
“Joan’s all right,” Freda soothed the old lady. “It isn’t her fault if she missed her entrance by about eighty years.”
“A dear sweet girl.” muttered Mrs. Terry, and sank into a wicker chair with a sigh. “And just the wife for that nice young man.”
Aileen snatched her hat and walked down to her waiting roadster. She couldn’t stand the talk any longer. Why in the name of mercy couldn’t she get Dan Tracy out of her head? If she had to be worrying about something, she ought to worry about how to sell the old Riggs estate, instead of some other girl’s man… A few kisses after a dance—leaning against his shoulder one night faint with the pain of a twisted ankle—the memories of his dark, brooding eyes… Aileen yanked the door of the car shut.
“What the hot place!” she said defiantly, and stepped on the gas.
Dan was slightly dazed on finding himself just five weeks from his wedding day. He didn’t remember how the thing had happened. He knew it was a frightfully good thing—oh, an excellent thing for a young architect to be married—and he knew that Joan Marble would make any man a splendid wife. But the exact connection between these two facts somehow escaped his memory. He only knew now that he and Joan spent their evenings going over house plans and making budgets and things.
After the first shock had worn off Dan began to feel rather pleased with this painless settling of his future. It seemed such a wise and sensible thing to do. Exactly what he had thought of only last year as the ideal step for a man just thirty.
“I don’t think we ought to wait till fall, dear,” Joan said one evening, as she bent over the intricate embroidery pattern of a table cloth. “I thought the tenth of July.”
Dan brought himself up with a start. The tenth of July? Somehow July seemed perilously near. He hadn’t thought of the affair as quite so imminent. It was only a month off. Good Heavens!
“But, Joan!” he exclaimed in a panic. “I don’t think you understand. I’m really frightfully poor. I only made three thousand last year, and while I have the church contract, I won’t get the money till next January. Honestly, Joan—”
“I can manage,” Joan said tranquilly, snipping a thread with her teeth. Dan experienced a sudden annoyance with her eternal embroidering and snipping. You talked to Joan’s hair all the time.
What had started their engagement in the first place? There had been no actual proposal. They had drifted into talking about marriage in the abstract—there seemed nothing else to talk about to Joan—and quite suddenly it began to be their marriage and not the institution. The naturalness of it bothered Dan a little. He felt rather cheated—slipping into matrimony almost without any choice on his part. He gazed soberly down at Joan’s smooth fair hair.
“But, Joan, you don’t understand,” he repeated patiently. “I’m sure you could manage on a small income. But you see I won’t have a cent till November. I’d have to borrow to furnish our apartment”
“I know, dear,” said Joan, and this time she looked up into his eyes. “But I have my hope chest.”
“Hope chest?” repeated Dan stupidly.
Joan’s eyes began to shine. A smile played about her lips.
“Do you know, Danny,” she said in a soft elation, “I have eight dozen tablecloths, twelve dozen napkins, eleven pairs of blankets, nine dozen pillow slips, five dozen sherbet glasses, six mayonnaise bowls, four dozen dessert spoons, twenty-three dresser scarfs—”
“But, good Lord, Joan,” Dan cried, his jaw dropping, “we’ve only been engaged since May!”
“I know, dear,” Joan said triumphantly. “But you see I started this chest when I was ten, thirteen years ago, so that I would always be ready for my wedding.”
She stood there glowing at him, but Dan’s face was heavy. He felt hopeless. He was a mere atom in a vast system. He had been fated to inherit that hope chest all of his life. When he had been a blithe child, innocently unsuspecting, strands of blue silk were being woven into dresser scarves against his coming. When he had started gaily off to college, wondering what the years would hold for him, Joan was sitting at home, her head bent, patiently weaving—weaving his future into her embroidery pattern. While he was idly speculating as to whether or not he should marry someone, Joan was waiting with tranquil, certain eyes.
“I was caught before I had even begun to run,” Dan groaned inwardly. “Good Heavens, I can’t marry someone just because she’s got her hope chest full. Hang it all, I want the woman to be in love with me. I’m damned if I’ll be the abstract man for which her hope chest stands. I can’t. I won’t.”
The thing obsessed him so, that he got up and reached for his hat. It enraged him to see Joan sitting there, her head bent over the latest item for the chest.
“I’m going, Joan,” he said slowly. “I…”
Joan looked up at him, puzzled by the significance of his tone.
“Oh, dear,” she breathed, her blue eyes moistening, “what have I done now? What have I done?”
She looked with grieved surprise as he went out.
“What have I done?” she repeated worriedly. “I wonder—”
She retrieved her embroidery silk from the floor.
“I wonder—one, two, three—I wonder—one, two, three—”
The luncheon set was almost finished.
Jimmy Delford was driving past as Dan emerged from the Marble home. His car slid to the curb.
“Out my way?” he invited.
Tracy stepped into the car. Jimmy shot a sidelong glance at his haggard face.
“Jimmy,” Dan said in a tense, choked voice, “help me, for heaven’s sake. I tell you I’m scared.”
“You need air, old man,” Jimmy recommended. “You look all ashy. I’ll spin you around a little bit.”
“Jimmy, you’re married—” Dan leaned toward him earnestly—“do all women have these hope chest things?”
Jimmy laughed shortly.
“Not a chance, old fellow, not a chance. Girls nowadays have too many other things to think about. Hope chests and marriage are about as important to them as a dinner date.”
“Marriage isn’t the goal of their lives, then?”
“From hearing Freda’s crowd talk I should say not,” laughed Jimmy. “I gather they want all out of life they can get, and from the way they pity ‘poor Freda’ I judge marriage doesn’t fill the bill. Why, I had to argue Freda out of a grand interior decorating business in New York before she could see marriage.”
“And when she finally took you instead of the job, I suppose you felt pretty set up,” Dan continued thoughtfully.
“I’ll say so,” Jimmy nodded. “I knew it was me she really wanted, then, you see, not marriage or just a man—but me! I had a time selling her the idea, too. A man’s job.”
Dan’s head began to feel clearer. That weight—that ghastly hope chest off his heart! Joan would have to understand it couldn’t go on. She could find someone else who answered her purpose. For himself it was marvelous to feel free again, to feel himself once more the man who chose his destiny rather than one who was caught in it.
“Come up to the house,” urged Jimmy, slowing up in front of the Delford bungalow.
Dan followed him up the graveled path and into the house, eager to reestablish his old bachelor footing. Jimmy ran upstairs in search of Freda and the key to the cellar. Dan stood for a thoughtful moment in the doorway of the living room…
Aileen Merrick, in tweed knickers, her dark bobbed hair curled about her face, was curled up in a chair busy with a fountain pen and a black notebook. There was a smudge on her nose, and a faint frown on her forehead as she figured intently. Presently she looked up. Her faintly shadowed eyes widened a little.
“Hello,” she said, with an effort at casualness. “Come on in… By the way, I sold the Riggs’ place today, Dan.”
“Good!” He sat down in the chair opposite. She went on with her figures, and in the relief of her cool, casual silence, Dan breathed a great sigh of freedom.
“Gee, Aileen, I’m glad to see you!” he said. “When you finish let’s drive over to the Club. Got any cigarettes?”
Aileen tossed him a pack without looking up.
She was afraid that if she did, he would see the preposterous tears in her eyes.