Appointment in Samarra (12 page)

Tonight’s dinner, as almost every guest was able to tell at a glance, was the club’s two-fifty dinner. This was a club dinner dance, and all members were invited. At a dinner such as the Ammermanns’, the hostess could arrange with the steward for the dollar-fifty (roast chicken), the two-dollar (roast turkey), or the two-fifty (filet mignon), and this had been the filet mignon dinner. The Ammermanns had just that much money, and their position in Gibbsville was just that certain and insecure, that they had to give the best of everything. Conforming to custom, the Ammermanns did not supply drinks, nor did they pay the dance subscriptions. A man on accepting an invitation to the dinner was paired off with a woman or girl. The custom for unmarried, unengaged men was to accept the dinner invitation with his card, and then to telephone the hostess and ask if she wanted him to escort someone to the dinner. All this was arranged beforehand, much more subtly than might be supposed. There were certain sad birds among the girls who had to be invited to many dinners, and it was understood by the hostess that certain men would make themselves available to take these sad birds to the dinner. But it was also understood by every hostess that a popular, attractive young man should not be designated the escort of any but popular, attractive girls. Then there was another group of girls, to which Mill Ammermann herself belonged, who got to the dance somehow, usually with a married couple who were friends of hers,
or as extra girl on a party of four or six. Mill, and girls like her, could tell almost to the foot how far they would dance, and if they danced more than that distance they could inquire of themselves what was wrong. Usually the answer, to girls like Mill, was that some young husband was sore at his wife and wanted to tell Mill all about it because Mill was such a pal. So understanding. And didn’t misunderstand when you gave her what amounted to a rush. Sometimes, of course, Mill and the girls like her would get a real rush—by a man who had drunk more than usual. Whatever was cruel about the system, there were some things to be said for it; for one thing, by the time a girl was twenty-five she usually was prepared, knew precisely what to expect, of every dance that she went to. Only a very few girls of Mill’s type went to a dance with sadly foolish hopes that this dance would be different from any other. And there was one other unwritten, unspoken agreement among the dancing men: if a Gibbsville girl of doubtful popularity inveigled an out-of-town man to come to a club dance, the Gibbsville men did go a little bit out of their way to see that she made a good showing. They danced with her twice instead of once in a night; with the result that all but the saddest of the sad birds married themselves off to out-of-town men. Of course when they once married their ugly duckling days were forgiven and forgotten; such girls took their places with the most popular girls. But it had to be marriage, not merely an engagement, but the man could be the worst heel, stupid, badly dressed—anything, so long as he was not a Jew. Not that any Gibbsville girl of the country club–Lantenengo Street set ever married a Jew. She wouldn’t have dared.

By the time a man reached junior year in college he knew how he was situated in the country club social life. Julian, for instance, had known for years that what had happened tonight would always happen: that he would sit at a table between one attractive girl and one sad bird. Always the attractive men, or those who were accepted as attractive in Gibbsville, were given a sad bird as a duty and an attractive girl as a reward. The attractive girls far outnumbered the sad birds. On Julian’s right sat Jean Ogden; on his left was Constance Walker, who
danced as though her sex life depended on it. Constance was a distant cousin of Caroline’s.

All during dinner Julian’s thoughts kept returning to Caroline. Constance, prolonging what had long since ceased to be a slightly amusing tradition, always called Julian Cousin Julian, or plain Cousin. He danced once with Constance between courses, and he found himself incredulous all over again at her physical resemblance to Caroline. The two girls were almost exactly the same height and weight, and there was no denying that Constance had a lovely figure. Yes, she had it a little on Caroline, or at least he thought she had; she was fresher than Caroline—to him. He knew that under a bright light the small of Caroline’s back showed an unmistakable patch of down. He knew where the cicatrix of Caroline’s vaccination stood out on her left thigh; but though he had seen Constance many times in a bathing suit, he wasn’t sure that she had been vaccinated at all. He was thinking of this as he danced with Constance, and he was on the verge of asking her whether she was vaccinated when he became aware that he was holding her tight and she was holding him just as tight and for good reason. He felt ashamed of himself and sorry for Constance. It was a dirty trick to get this kid excited. It was a low trick to be excited himself. He slowly relaxed his hold.

But the process of comparing the girl he was dancing with, eating with, with the girl he had married, who was her cousin, gave him something to enjoy in secret. Whenever he was on a party and did not drink too much he needed a secret game to play or a mental task to perform the while he apparently was observing the amenities. Caroline was thirty-one and Constance was still in college and probably about ten years younger than Caroline. The cousins were pretty good types of their respective colleges: Caroline had gone to Bryn Mawr, Constance was at Smith—the plain girl who goes to Smith and competes with the smart Jewesses for Phi Beta Kappa, as distinguished from the pretty girls who go to Smith and write to Yale. Caroline was the perfect small-town girl at Bryn Mawr; from private school in her home town, to a good prep school, to Bryn Mawr and the Bryn Mawr manner, which means quick
maturity and an everlasting tendency to enthusiasms. Constance knew everything but Caroline still was finding things out—the capital of South Dakota, the identity of Mike Pingatore, the location of Dalhousie, the handicap system in polo, the ingredients of a Side Car. He wondered why he put so much stress on the education of the two girls, and then he stumbled upon a truth: that Caroline was an educated girl whose education was behind her and for all time would be part of her background, whereas with Constance and girls like her—oh, what difference did it make? Constance was an unimportant little girl. But he was glad he discovered that about Caroline and her education. It was worth remembering, and as happened so often when he made a discovery about her, he wanted to tell Caroline about it, to try it out on her and see if she agreed with it. He knew what she would say. She would say—and it would be the truth—that she had been telling him practically that for years.

The dinner guests stood up and he looked for Caroline. He saw she was too far away to have it worth making a point of going to her. That turned out to be an error in judgment.

When the Ammermann dinner party rose, that did not mean all the people eating in the dining room rose too. The Ammermann party was the largest and therefore the most important, but there were many smaller parties of varying size and degrees of importance. One of these was a squat little dinner given by Mrs. Gorman, Harry Reilly’s sister. There were eight at her table: two Irish Catholic doctors and their wives; Monsignor Creedon, pastor of the Church of SS. Peter & Paul; and Mr. and Mrs. J. Frank Kirkpatrick, the Philadelphia criminal lawyer and his wife. They were having the two-fifty dinner, and champagne from a bucket under the table, in more or less open defiance of Sec. 7, Rule XI, House Rules & Regulations, Lantenengo Country Club. Mrs. Gorman always went to the big dances at the club, and always she was the hostess at a small dinner, like tonight’s. Her guests all took each other for granted after the first awkward politeness. They ate in silence and at the coffee, which was served at the table, the men would sit back and burn their cigars, and the men and
women would watch, completely unself-consciously, the gay folk at the largest dinner party. They would watch without staring—except Monsignor Creedon, who would sit with his hands folded somewhat ecclesiastically on the table in front of him, sometimes folding the tinfoil of his cigar, sometimes telling a story in a softly musical voice and a beautifully modulated brogue. He knew everyone in Gibbsville, and he was a member of the club; but he belonged to the club for the golf, and in the dining-room he never spoke to anyone unless he was first spoken to. It was a spurious display of dignity, but it had the right effect on his non-Catholic acquaintances, as well as on his parishioners. He had been made old and philosophical before his time, because Church politics had deprived him, his parish, and Gibbsville of the bishopric they all had been trying for years to get. The Cardinal hated his guts, everyone said, and fought against making SS. Peter & Paul’s a cathedral and Father Creedon a bishop. Instead he was elevated to the monsignori, made rural dean and irremovable rector of SS. Peter & Paul’s—and thereby tacitly informed that he was to discontinue all activity tending to make a cathedral out of SS. Peter & Paul’s. It was a sad blow for him as well as for the rich laymen of his parish, who loved Creedon, and for the more powerful Masons in the Coal & Iron Company, who respected this man whom they never could understand. “I’m a strong Presbyterian,” they would say, “but let me tell you, nobody says anything against Father Creedon in my hearing and gets away with it, Catholic or no Catholic.”

There were those among his parishioners who secretly resented Monsignor Creedon’s serving on nonsectarian committees in community activities, but this sort of criticism could be traced to disgruntled Knights of Columbus. The Coal & Iron was ruled by the Masons, who admired Monsignor Creedon, and who tolerated the Knights of Columbus. The latter felt that their pastor ought to use his influence more frequently in advancing “Knights.” He never did. He used his influence in coaxing better company houses for the miners’ families out of the directorate; or in wangling contributions for poorer parishes than his own. The U.M.W.A. organizers
and field workers hated Monsignor Creedon because he was so close to the bigwigs of the company.

On the other hand, he did sometimes use his influence to help a Protestant. He got them bail, helped them get jobs. He had bought a Cadillac from Julian, instead of a Lincoln from the Ford dealer, who was a Catholic. He bought three Fords for his curates to atone for patronizing Julian’s business. Three years ago he had driven his car, a Buick, to Julian’s garage and went in Julian’s office and said: “Good morning, son. Do you have any nice black Cadillac sedans today?” He bought a car right off the floor and paid cash for it. His curates’ cars went to the Ford dealer for repairs and service, but he always bought his tires and other needs at Julian’s garage.

Julian wanted to go to the bathroom after the dinner party stood up, and on his way to the men’s locker-room he had to pass Mrs. Gorman’s table. He looked at Mrs. Gorman and she did not speak to him, but that was not unusual. But he felt the chill that passed between him and the men at the table. Kirkpatrick nodded politically and showed his teeth, but the doctors frankly snubbed him, and Monsignor Creedon, whose round, bluish face usually smiled sadly above that purple thing he wore under his Roman collar, nodded just once and did not smile. It took Julian a few seconds to figure it out, because in his dealings with Catholics he so often forgot to consider the Catholic point of view. But by the time he was alone in the men’s room he had it figured out: they all regarded his insulting Harry Reilly as an insult to themselves. There was no other reason why he should throw a drink at Reilly, so it must be because he was an unattractive Irish Catholic whom he could insult freely. He did not believe they were quite right. But one thing he knew; if the Catholics had declared war on him, he was in a tough spot. In the Smith-Hoover campaign two men, one a jeweler and the other a lime and cement dealer, had let it be known that they were members of the Ku Klux Klan and were outspokenly against Smith because he was a Catholic. Those two were the only Gibbsville business men who had come out in the open. And now both of them were bankrupt.

Drying his hands Julian thought it might be a good idea to
sound out Monsignor Creedon, and he sat down to wait for the priest to come back to the locker-room. He pushed the button and told William, the locker-room waiter, to get a bottle of Scotch out of his locker and put it with two glasses and ice and club soda on a small table near the locker. He poured himself a mild drink and lit a cigarette.

Men and boys wandered in, making cracks about his being exclusive. Bobby Herrmann came in and before he could say anything Julian told him to keep his trap shut. One or two of the younger kids showed by the expression of their faces when they saw the extra empty glass and the bottle of Scotch that they thought Julian was being ignored. It was pretty funny. They wanted to be nice, he could see, and they wanted to have a drink, but their wanting to be nice and their wanting a drink were not enough to make them associate with an outcast. What the hell had he done? he wondered. He had thrown a drink in a man’s face. An especially terrible guy who should have had a drink thrown in his face a long while ago. It wasn’t as if Harry Reilly were a popularity contest winner or something. If most people told the truth they would agree that Reilly was a terrible person, a climber, a nouveau riche even in Gibbsville where fifty thousand dollars was a sizable fortune. Julian thought back over some other terrible things, really terrible things, that people had done in the club without being made to feel they had committed sacrilege. There was the time Bobby Herrmann or Whit Hofman or Froggy Ogden—no one knew which—wanted to test a carboy of alcohol which Whit had bought. One of the three (they all were very drunk at the time) touched a match to the alcohol to see if it was genuine, and a table, chairs, a bench and part of a row of lockers were ruined or destroyed before the fire was extinguished. There was the time a member of a visiting golf team was swinging a mashie in the locker-room and Joe Schermerhorn walked into the swing and got a broken jaw, lost his beautiful teeth and went a little bit nuts so that two years later, when his car went off the Lincoln Street bridge, people said it was suicide. Did they hold that against the visiting golfer? Hardly. He still visited the club and got drunk with the boys. There was the time
Ed Klitsch wandered stark naked upstairs to the steward’s living quarters and presented himself, ready for action, to the steward’s wife. That was remembered as a good joke. There were innumerable vomitings, more or less disastrous. There was the hair-pulling, face-scratching episode between Kitty Hofman and Mary Lou Diefenderfer, after Kitty heard that Mary Lou had said Kitty ought to be suppressed by the vice squad. There was the time Elinor Holloway—heroine of many an interesting event in club history—shinnied half way up the flagpole while five young gentlemen, standing at the foot of the pole, verified the suspicion that Elinor, who had not always lived in Gibbsville, was not naturally, or at least not entirely, a blonde. There was the time, the morning after a small, informal party for a visiting women’s golf team, when a Mrs. Goldorf and a Mrs. Smith, and Tom Wilk, the Reverend Mr. Wilk’s son, and Sam Campbell, the caddymaster, all had to have the stomach pump. That was complicated by the fact that they were all together, in bed or on the floor, in Sam’s room upstairs in the caddyhouse. There was the time Whit Hofman and Carter Davis got so sore at a New York orchestra that wanted too much money to play overtime, that they broke all the instruments and pushed the bass drum all the way down the club hill to the state highway. The result of that was a nice suit, some Philadelphia publicity, and a temporary blacklisting of the club by the musicians’ union. There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on. Julian had another drink and a fresh cigarette.