Aurora Dawn (13 page)

The Club Ferrara, like the setting of the “Decameron,” was a pleasant retreat where aristocrats gathered to escape a spreading
epidemic–in the older instance, bubonic plague, in the present one, equality. The proprietor was a chevalier dauntless in
die tottering cause of privilege, and his prices formed a steep wall which only the stoutest purses could scale. Outside,
the throng sweated and pressed, and one or two of the hairy mob might even fight their way each evening inside the walls,
but always they were confronted in the outer hall by this Aramis, skilled in parrying the bludgeon of raw gold with the pliant
steel of insolence. It followed, naturally, that the Club Ferrara was considered the most desirable place in New York at which
to dine. The interior of the club was decorated with murals depicting the life of Lucrezia Borgia, but the research and toil
of the artist went for naught, since at the club the animal act of feeding was veiled in a fashionable gloom which obscured
his work and also, mercifully, the coloring of many of the patrons.

Andy’s offer to take the Marquis girl to the Ferrara had been an inspiration, for it was the very shrine of the Beautiful
Brahmins. A devotée who came here twice in one week acquired thereby an increase of caste and was distantly envied by her
sisters who could contrive to immerse themselves in this Ganges only once, limited as they were to collegian escorts of good
family whose weekly allowances were consumed like stubble by an evening at the Ferrara. Andrew was a familiar figure at the
club, for in the entertainment of clients his purse was the exchequer of the Republic Broadcasting Company itself. The proprietor
bowed and spoke pleasant words of greeting to the couple, and conducted them to a table directly beneath a panel depicting
Lucrezia and Pietro Bembo in a guilty kiss.

No reader under thirty-five will fail to agree that a thousand dinners at restaurants may go by, undistinguished one from
another, and then, suddenly, one will come that is fatefully perfect. The wine invigorates like Ponce de Leon’s fountain,
the roast chicken is a miracle of brown excellence, the asparagus is green as emeralds, the rolls are warm snowballs in a
crust of gold, and there never was such a swooning sweetness of ice cream; and all this, by the luckiest of coincidences,
happens on the very evening when one first dines with a young person who is destined stage–to become of Great Importance.
Andrew Reale had eaten such a magic dinner once before, six months earlier, when he had taken the pretty Dixie Cigarette Model-of-the-Month,
Honey Beaton, to dinner. It did not occur to him at all now–for he was, truthfully, in an unreflective stage–that there was
anything more than delight in the fact that tonight he was eating another one.

The note struck in the relationship between a young man and a young lady in the first hour of their acquaintance often persists
unchanged until stilled by separation or death. This dinner was the breakfast on the train all over again for Andrew and Carol,
with the added warmth of renewal, and a merriment engendered by their conspiracy to hide his folly from her father. The girl
archly threatened to expose him whenever, as she pretended, an item of the dinner displeased her, as, “This rice is cold.
I’m going to tell my father everything,” whereupon Andrew never failed to produce extravagant and ridiculous pleas for mercy.
This inexhaustible joke kept them gay, and Andy, feeling again the buoyancy that the girl inspired in him, proceeded to talk
about himself with abandon, and found the subject fruitful, with the youngster’s attentive dark eyes fixed on him. Again there
were the short, pertinent questions dropped into his pauses for breath, urging him on to further self-revelation; again there
was intense laughing appreciation of every point and sympathetic admiration of each opinion or plan. Once or twice, with a
vague sense of the lack of balance of the dialogue, he tried to shift the focus to her, but the girl impatiently dismissed
herself as “just a school kid,” and brought the conversation back to the topic on which he was never unable to resume his
eloquence.

The dinner vanished, together with two quarts of champagne. Carol’s laughter at Andy’s wit grew louder and more prolonged,
her threats to inform on him more frequent, his miming of a suppliant more absurd. Between bursts of mirth she told him that
she had decided to fix his fate by the quality of his rhumba dancing: if he proved the best with whom she had ever danced,
her lips were sealed, otherwise he must face Talmadge Marquis’s fury. Andy took up the challenge. He was accustomed to the
assurances of young ladies that he was, as they invariably put it, “a divine dancer.” Which member of the Trinity he was supposed
to resemble in this attribute had never been specified, to the knowledge of the recorder.

–Murals depicting the life of Lucrezia Borgia–

They proceeded, accordingly, to the Krypton Room on the roof of the skyscraping Hotel Saint James, where brown South Americans
played the music of their continent, to which, at that time, citizens of the land of the free took pleasure in agitating their
bodies. Andrew and Carol were soon weaving happily under the strange whitish light of the fluorescent tubes filled with krypton
gas, which gave the room its name. (The title was first selected by the hotel manager under the impression that Krypton was
a metal with which the walls could be decorated: the mistake was discovered only subsequent to an extensive publicizing effort,
and the krypton-light tubes were ordered at great expense, as the name was considered most smart and modern. The lights had
the effect of making anyone who stood directly under them look extraordinarily ill, and feminine habitués like Carol exhibited
much ingenuity in maneuvering, outside their scope.)

Since the dance called the rhumba resembled nothing so much as a stylized fertility rite, and since the music to which it
was danced was in a congruent mode, our hero soon found himself regarding his partner with sentiments that did him little
credit. If the large quantities of wine which he shared with her were intended to quench these feelings, they were unsuccessful.
Carol Marquis did not become giddy, but her eyes took on sparkle, her cheeks reddened and she danced in a manner that might
have won applause from the Indians among whom the inflammatory rhythms were born. Andrew was swept up in the flood of her
energy. Higher and higher rose their spirits. During a break in the music they walked into the foyer to enjoy the view of
New York for which the Krypton Room was known, and, as they gazed out on the splendid panorama of the towers of light, a snow
cloud rolled in from the sea, and all vanished except an electric glow, rose-within-white. Clouds of such appearance must
float around the near approaches of Heaven. Huge flakes began to hurl themselves against the window and cling there. “Oh,
Lord, look at the snow now!” cried Carol, and grasped Andrew’s hand impulsively with warm, tense little white fingers that
scratched a bit, so long and sharp were the nails. “Let’s go out and roll in it!”

To fetch their coats, to drop seven hundred feet, to rush out into the storm and feel the tiny stabs of snowflakes on their
faces, was the work of a minute. Holding hands, laughing, shouting, and singing, they ran the two blocks that separated them
from the lawns of the park, where snowdrifts were already beginning to pile. The many people walking along the cold street
with their faces buried miserably to the eyes, people unwarmed by wine and the rhumba, wondered who these noisy fools might
be, and passed on. No sooner had Andrew and Carol gone by the stone wall that divided the snarl of city traffic from the dark
stillness of the park, than the girl, true to her word, threw herself on the ground and rolled around in the snow like an
animal. Andrew regarded this spectacle with astonishment for a moment, then flung aside his hat and imitated her, finding
the crunch of the snow under his chest and shoulders a very exhilarating sensation. A few moments of this, and the girl jumped
up, shaking the snow from her hair and her furs. “This is wonderful. I want to ride in a hansom cab. Come on, there’s a dozen
at the plaza.” She gave a sharp little tug at his hand to help him up, and they ran along the path to the plaza through the
thickening storm.

Most of the cabmen had abandoned their posts in the face of the snowfall and had sheltered their ageing steeds in the warmth
of stables; but a few necessitous or inert drivers still sat on their high seats, huddled in blankets to the armpits, wrapped
in shawls the rest of the way, shrinking from the snow under their ancient top hats, and exhibiting out of all this protection
a minimum of red nose, as a sort of shingle to indicate that, weather or no, they were open for business. Dashing up to the
reddest of these, Carol shouted, “How much to ride around the park?” A pair of eyes only slightly less red than the nose appeared
dimly from under the brim of the top hat, and gazed at the girl with filmy wonder. “What, in this storm?” spoke a voice, its
indignant overtones somewhat lost in traversing two layers of thick wool. “Yes, in this storm. How much?” said the girl impatiently.
The eyes vanished for a moment while the driver looked into his soul, then reappeared: “It’s cruelty to the poor horse. I
was just fixing to take her to the stable. I couldn’t do it for less than twenty dollars.” Carol whirled on Andrew. “You’ve
got twenty dollars, haven’t you?” she said, but the green bill was already whipping in the cold wind on its brief journey
from Andrew’s wallet to the cabman’s pocket. The girl leaped into the rickety vehicle, her escort followed, and the equipage
moved off into the white curtain that was masking the world. Scarcely had the carriage passed from the cloudy brilliance of
the street lamps into the gloom of the park, when Carol and Andrew moved into each other’s arms without a word. Mouth found
mouth; and thus they remained, with few perceptible changes, until the moment that opens this chapter, when the unhappy author
was forced to intrude upon this desperate scene, in order to move his story along.

These events will inevitably recall to many readers, I am certain, Immanuel Kant’s important distinction between
arbitrium sensitivum
and
arbitrium brutum
in his inquiry into the possibility of free will and moral responsibility. This philosopher’s belief that the human will,
while influenced by sensuous circumstance, is not coerced by it, places the blame for what is happening squarely on our hero.
Determinists, however, would hold that Andrew Reale was but a helpless tennis ball, batted out of moral bounds by the racket
of Causality. The essence of Determinism in the field of morality is contained in the phrase, “I’m only human, after all.”
Readers who have availed themselves of the maxim will be pleased to know that, like the Bourgeois Gentleman, they have been
speaking philosophy all their lives without knowing it. But neither Determinists nor Kantians, surely, can be quite comfortable
about leaving Andrew forever in Carol Marquis’s arms. Back to our tale.

The hansom cab and the old horse were now making no sound at all, so thick was the snow on the road, and the strange carriage
glided slowly like a black ghost through the white night. At last, the diffused radiance of Columbus Circle could be dimly
seen through the cloud of snowflakes, heralding the end of the circuit, and the driver rapped twice, discreetly, on the roof
of the cab. Carol opened her eyes and looked over Andrew’s shoulder out of the window; then she loosened her arms, leaned
back, and regarded him quizzically.

“This has been very crazy,” she said softly.

“It has,” agreed Andrew.

“But fun,” said the girl, with a small laugh.

“Yes,” said our hero.

“I won’t tell Honey Beaton on you,” Carol promised, and, disengaging herself, she produced a cosmetic kit and proceeded to
restore the ravaged paint on her face with remarkable speed and deftness, while Andrew removed remnants of her earlier effort
from his ears, nose, cheeks, mouth, collar, and shoulders as best he could.

Thus it was that, a half hour later, they presented a reasonable similitude of casual innocence when they spun through the
revolving door of the Café Armand, near the park, in search of drinks to warm them, and ran head-on into Laura Beaton and
Stephen English, just gathering their coats to leave. Really, Andy’s demeanor was especially decorous, and should have deceived
any eyes, even those of a fiancée.

Readers must now contemplate a picture that will strain credulity, particularly if the readers are modern young ladies. It
is Laura, our heroine, having just said good-by to Stephen English in the hallway of her apartment house, riding up in the
elevator with a fixed expression, and, as soon as she steps inside her door, bursting into violent sobs and flinging herself
on the living-room couch face downward, in an attitude of entire misery. I say that the celebrated Honey Beaton, the transcendentally
gorgeous model, is crying bitterly and muffling her cries in a cushion to avoid waking her mother, for all the world like
any plain, fat girl who grieves her unlucky fate; as though she had never come to New York, as though she did not make two
hundred dollars a week, as though her face and form did not bloom on paper from one end of the land to the other like a pretty,
rampant weed, and, most improbable of all, as though she had not just returned from a date with a handsome millionaire who
was in love with her. Where is happiness, where is fulfillment if not with Honey Beaton? What mean these tears?