1919 (17 page)

He ordered everything most expensive he could find on the bill of fare, and champagne. She had something in her throat that kept her from swallowing. She had to say it before he got too drunk.

“Dirk . . . this doesn't sound very ladylike, but like this it's too tiresome. . . . The way you acted last spring I thought you liked me . . . well, how much do you? I want to know?”

Dirk put his glass down and turned red. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Eveline, you know I'm not the marrying kind . . . love 'em and leave 'em's more like it. I can't help how I am.”

“I don't mean I want you to marry me,” her voice rose shrilly out of control. She began to giggle. “I don't mean I want to be made an honest woman. Anyway, there's no reason.” She was able to laugh more naturally. “Let's forget it. . . . I won't tease you anymore.”

“You're a good sport, Eveline. I always knew you were a good sport.”

Going down the aisle of the theatre he was so drunk she had to put her hand under his elbow to keep him from staggering. The music and cheap colors and jiggling bodies of the chorus girls all seemed to hit on some raw place inside her, so that everything she saw hurt like sweet on a jumpy tooth. Dirk kept talking all through, “See that girl . . . second from the left on the back row, that's Queenie Frothingham. . . . You understand, Eveline. But I'll tell you one thing, I never made a girl take the first misstep. . . . I haven't got that to reproach myself with.” The usher came down and asked him to quit talking so loud, he was spoiling others' enjoyment of the show. He gave her a dollar and said he'd be quiet as a mouse, as a little dumb mouse and suddenly went to sleep.

At the end of the first act Eveline said she had to go home, said the doctor had told her she'd have to have plenty of sleep. He insisted on taking her to her door in a taxicab and then went off to go back to the show and to Queenie. Eveline lay awake all night staring at her window. Next morning she was the first one down to breakfast. When Dad came down she told him she'd have to go to work and asked him to lend her a thousand dollars to start an interior decorating business.

 

The decorating business she started with Eleanor Stoddard in Chicago didn't make as much money as Eveline had hoped, and Eleanor was rather trying on the whole; but they met such interesting people and went to parties and first nights and openings of art exhibitions, and Sally Emerson saw to it that they were very much in the vanguard of things in Chicago socially. Eleanor kept complaining that the young men Eveline collected were all so poor and certainly more of a liability than an asset to the business. Eveline had great faith in their all making names for themselves, so that when Freddy Seargeant, who'd been such a nuisance and had had to be lent money various times, came through with an actual production of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
in New York, Eveline felt so triumphant she almost fell in love with him. Freddy was very much in love with her and Eveline couldn't decide what to do about him. He was a dear and she was very fond of him, but she couldn't imagine marrying him and this would be her first love affair and Freddy just didn't seem to carry her off her feet.

What she did like was sitting up late talking to him over Rhine wine and seltzer in the Brevoort café that was full of such interesting people. Eveline would sit there looking at him through the crinkling cigarettesmoke wondering whether she was going to have a love affair. He was a tall thin man of about thirty with some splashes of white in his thick black hair and a long pale face. He had a distinguished rather literary manner, used the broad “a” so that people often thought he was from Boston, one of the Back Bay Seargeants.

One night they got to making plans for themselves and the American theater. If they could get backing they'd start a repertory theatre and do real American plays. He'd be the American Stanislavsky and she'd be the American Lady Gregory, and maybe the American Bakst too. When the café closed she told him to go around by the other staircase and go up to her room. She was excited by the idea of being alone in a hotel room with a young man and thought how shocked Eleanor would be if she knew about it. They smoked cigarettes and talked about the theatre a little distractedly, and at last Freddy put his arm around her waist and kissed her and asked if he could stay all night. She let him kiss her but she could only think of Dirk and told him please not this time, and he was very contrite and begged her with tears in his eyes to forgive him for sullying a beautiful moment. She said she didn't mean that and to come back and have breakfast with her.

After he'd gone she half wished she'd made him stay. Her body tingled all over the way it used to when Dirk put his arms around her and she wanted terribly to know what making love was like. She took a cold bath and went to bed. When she woke up and saw Freddy again she'd decide whether she was in love with him. But the next morning she got a telegram calling her home. Dad was seriously ill with diabetes. Freddy put her on the train. She'd expected that the parting would carry her off her feet, but it didn't somehow.

Dr. Hutchins got better and Eveline took him down to Santa Fé to recuperate. Her mother was sick most of the time too, and as Margaret and Adelaide were both married and George had gotten a job abroad with Hoover's Belgian Relief, it seemed to be up to her to take care of the old people. She spent a dreamy unhappy year in spite of the great skeleton landscape and horsebacktrips and working at watercolors of Mexicans and Indian penitentes. She went around the house ordering meals, attending to housekeeping, irritated by the stupidity of servantgirls, making out laundry lists.

The only man she met there who made her seem alive was José O'Riely. He was a Spaniard in spite of his Irish name, a slender young man with a tobaccocolored face and dark green eyes, who had somehow gotten married to a stout Mexican woman who brought out a new squalling brown infant every nine months. He was a painter and lived by doing odd carpenter jobs and sometimes posing as a model. Eveline got to talk to him one day when he was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for her. He kept looking at the pastel she was doing of him and telling her it was wretched, until she broke down and cried. He apologized in his stiff English and said she must not be upset, that she had talent and that he'd teach her to draw himself. He took her down to his house, an untidy little shack in the Mexican part of town, where he introduced her to Lola, his wife, who looked at her with scared suspicious black eyes, and showed her his paintings, big retablos painted on plaster that looked like Italian primitives. “You see I paint martires,” he said, “but not Christian. I paint the martires of the working class under exploitation. Lola does not understand. She want me to paint rich ladies like you and make plenty money. Which you think is best?” Eveline flushed; she didn't like being classed with the rich ladies. But the pictures thrilled her and she said she would advertise them among her friends; she decided she'd discovered a genius.

O'Riely was grateful and wouldn't take any money for posing or criticizing her paintings after that, instead he sometimes borrowed small sums as a friend. Even before he started making love to her, she decided that this time it must be a real affair. She'd go crazy if something didn't happen to her soon.

The main difficulty was finding somewhere they could go. Her studio was right back of the house and there was the danger that her father or mother or friends coming to call might break in on them any time. Then too Santa Fé was a small place and people were already noticing how often he went to her studio.

One night when the Hutchins' chauffeur was away, they climbed up to his room above the garage. It was pitch black there and smelled of old pipes and soiled clothes. Eveline was terrified to find she'd lost control of her own self; it was like going under ether. He was surprised to find she was a virgin and was very kind and gentle, almost apologetic. But she felt none of the ecstasy she had expected lying in his arms on the chauffeur's bed; it was almost as if it had all happened before. Afterwards they lay on the bed talking a long time in low intimate voices. His manner had changed; he treated her gravely and indulgently, like a child. He said he hated things to be secret and sordid like that, it was brutalizing to them both. He would find a place where they could meet in the open, in the sun and air, not like criminals this way. He wanted to draw her, the beautiful slenderness of her body would be the inspiration of his painting and her lovely little round breasts. Then he looked her over carefully to see if her dress looked mussed and told her to run over to the house and go to bed; and to take precautions if she didn't want to have a baby, though he would be proud to have her bear a child of his, particularly as she was rich enough to support it. The idea horrified her and she felt it was coarse and unfeeling of him to talk about it lightly that way.

They met all that winter a couple of times a week in a little deserted cabin that lay off the trail in the basin of a small stony cañon back of the town. She would ride over and he would walk by a different road. They called it their desert island. Then one day Lola looked in his portfolios and found hundreds of drawings of the same naked girl; she came up to the Hutchins' house shaking and screaming with the hair streaming down her face, looking for Eveline and crying that she was going to kill her. Dr. Hutchins was thunderstruck; but though she was terribly frightened inside, Eveline managed to keep cool and tell her father that she had let O'Riely do drawings of her but that there'd been nothing else between them, and that his wife was a stupid ignorant Mexican and couldn't imagine a man and a woman being alone in a studio together without thinking something disgusting. Although he scolded her for being so imprudent Dad believed her and they managed to keep the whole thing from Mother, but she only managed to see Pepe once more after that. He shrugged his shoulders and said what could he do, he couldn't abandon his wife and children to starve, poor as he was he had to live with them, and a man had to have a woman to work for him and cook; he couldn't live on romantic lifeclasses, he had to eat, and Lola was a good woman but stupid and untidy and had made him promise not to see Eveline again. Eveline turned on her heel and left him before he was through talking. She was glad she had a horse she could jump on and ride away.

a matrass covered with something from Vantine's makes a divan in the ladyphotographer's studio      we sit on the divan and on cushions on the floor and the longnecked English actor reads the Song of Songs in rhythms

and the ladyphotographer in breastplates and silk bloomers dances the Song of Songs in rhythms

the little girl in pink is a classical dancer with panpipes but the hennahaired ladyphotographer dances the Song of Songs in rhythms with winking bellybutton and clash of breastplates in more oriental style

stay muh with flahgons comfort muh with ahpples

for I am sick of loeuve

his left hand is under muh head and his rahght hand doth embrace muh

the semiretired actress who lived upstairs let out a yell and then another      Burglars secondstory men      Good god she's being attacked      we men run up the stairs poor woman she's in hysterics      Its the wrong flat      the stairs are full of dicks outside they're backing up the waggon      All right men on one side girls on the other what the hell kind of place is this anyway? Dicks coming in all the windows dicks coming out of the kitchenette

the hennahaired ladyphotographer holds them at bay draped in a portière waving the telephone      Is this Mr. Wickersham's office?      District Attorney      trying experience      a few friends      a little dance recital in the most brutal manner prominent actress upstairs in hysterics      allright officer talk to the District Attorney he'll tell you who I am who our friends are

Dicks slink away waggon jangles to another street the English actor is speaking      Only by the greatest control I kept muh temper the swine I'm terrible when I'm aroused terrible

and the Turkish consul and his friend who were there incog belligerent nation Department of Justice Espionage hunting radicals proGermans slipped quietly out and the two of us ran down the stairs      and walked fast downtown and crossed to Weehawken on the ferry

it was a night of enormous fog through which moved blunderingly the great blind shapes of steamboat sirens from the lower bay

in the bow of the ferry we breathed the rancid riverbreeze talking loud in a shouting laugh

out of the quiet streets of Weehawken incredible slanting viaducts lead up into the fog

She felt half crazy until she got on the train to go back east. Mother and Dad didn't want her to go, but she showed them a telegram she'd wired Eleanor to send her offering her a high salary in her decorating business. She said it was an opening that wouldn't come again and she had to take it, and anyway, as George was coming home for a vacation, they wouldn't be entirely alone. The night she left she lay awake in her lower berth tremendously happy in the roar of the air and the swift pound of the wheels on the rails. But after St. Louis she began to worry: she'd decided she was pregnant.

She was terribly frightened. The Grand Central Station seemed so immense, so full of blank faces staring at her as she passed following the redcap who carried her bag. She was afraid she'd faint before she got to the taxicab. All the way downtown the jolting of the cab and the jangling throb of the traffic in her ears made her head swim with nausea. At the Brevoort she had some coffee. Ruddy sunlight was coming in the tall windows, the place had a warm restaurant smell; she began to feel better. She went to the phone and called Eleanor. A French maid answered that Mademoiselle was still asleep, but that she would tell her who had called as soon as she woke up. The she called Freddy who sounded very much excited and said he'd be there as soon as he could get over from Brooklyn.