Chocolates for Breakfast (16 page)

“—you and your mother, and you drive her into a sanitarium with your promiscuous life. To see you a laughing-stock, someone mothers and teachers point to—was that what I worked my fingers to the bone for? Was that what I spent my life for, to give you enough money to sleep with college boys instead of poorer juvenile delinquents?”

“Who are you to criticize me, you, an alcoholic, a person I am embarrassed to have my friends meet. What kind of a father do you think you are? What do you think you have ever given me? Money. Hell, I can make money, I can marry money, I can get money in a thousand ways; it doesn't mean anything, if I live in a place I can't bring my friends to. I might just as well live in a tenement as Park Avenue.”

With dogged determination, Courtney finished her dinner. She wanted desperately to leave, to flee this scene as Mrs. Parker had, but her loyalty to Janet made her stay.

“Then get out. Then leave, if I embarrass you so!”

Janet looked at him, suddenly silent and thoughtful. Courtney wondered what she was going to say.

“No,” Janet said quietly. “No, I'm not going to leave. You owe me something as your daughter. You haven't given me anything but a family I'm ashamed of and a house I hate. I'm going to make you give me something. I'm not going to leave. That would be the easy way out for both of us. I'm going to stay, and you're going to support me until I'm through high school. I'm not going to let you off that easily.”

Mr. Parker lurched from his chair in fury. He gripped the glass in his hand and threw it at the girl. In his anger it missed her and hit above her head on the wall, shattering and spilling its contents on the thick carpet. He was defeated, out-bluffed, and he knew it. He knew that his impotent devotion to his daughter, so like him in her combativeness, unafraid of him or anyone else, and his own terrible loneliness would not permit him to drive her from his life. She had beaten him. He left, defeated, as she sat in triumphant silence watching him. He took the bottle of bourbon with him and a new glass, and walked out to the living room.

His wife was in the bedroom, undoubtedly in hysterics at this evidence of the dissolution of her family, and the fury of her husband and the daughter who was so like him. It was the fury and self-destruction in each of them that she could never understand, and it frightened her. She had locked the door to her bedroom, locked herself in as she had for so many years.

There was a silence over the whole apartment. The maid stood in a corner of the kitchen, and as she realized that the terrible fury had once more abated, she started to wash the dishes, humming tunelessly to herself because the sound reassured her.

It was Janet who spoke first.

“My dinner isn't cold, thank God.”

When they had finished dinner, Janet went into her room and put on her make-up while Courtney put on some lipstick. Janet put on some Kenton records and turned up the volume loud to fill the silence of the apartment. Then they left, carefully avoiding the living room. As they went out Janet tried her key in the front door.

“That's good,” she said. “He hasn't changed the lock again. Whenever Daddy is mad at me,” she explained, “he changes the lock so I will have to ring the bell to get in, and he can know what time I come home. Then I have to get a new one made. The locksmith around the corner and I are great buddies by now,” she grinned. “But I guess Daddy won't get a chance to change the lock until tomorrow.”

And they got in a cab and headed down Park Avenue to their cocktail party.

They were greeted at the door by a young man in Bermuda shorts and matching gray flannel jacket, and they walked into an enormous living room filled with young people. Drinks were thrust into their hands and, armed, they advanced into the center of the horde.

“Dapho,” shouted Janet as she rushed over to a young girl in black, “how great to see you. Did you and Al ever get back from that party on the Island last week? Someone said he found Al marooned in Oyster Bay—”

“Yes,” someone was saying at Courtney's elbow, “the Count lost his job on the Street; they got tired of his being either bombed or hung over—”

“He got out of the army because of cirrhosis of the liver,” a young man was saying. “The doctor really flipped, at the age of twenty.”

“And, my God, did they make out, right in the living room, which was all right except that the girl who used to be mad for him was right there, and here this was practically a
seduction
, she was really throwing the make on him—”

“She wouldn't let you go out for a week? Oh, is your mother a bitch, too?”

“Oh, my date passed out, as usual, so they won't let him in any more—you know, some gun-happy cop pulled a gun on him once when he tried to slug the cop, that sobered up Davidow, thank God, so—”

Through the milling conversations Courtney, seeing that Janet was occupied, made her way to the kitchen to put a little water in her Scotch. After all, this was going to he a long party.

The only other person in the kitchen was a tall young man in gray flannels, wearing a somewhat detached air, who was fixing himself a martini.

“Hello,” he said, “we haven't met, but as you're the only other sober person I've seen, I think we should make each other's acquaintance. I'm Charles. Cunningham.”

“Courtney Farrell,” she said. “Everyone else seems to have arrived before us and gotten an edge.”

“Us?” he said, gently stirring the martini. “Did your date get lost in the throng?”

“No,” she reassured him. “I came with Janet Parker.”

“Oh. Yes, Janet.”

“You know her?”

“Who doesn't?” he said with a quick smile. “I see you have some of that abominable Scotch they are serving. Some remote brand that they forced on me when I came in. I couldn't stomach it, so I'm making a martini. If you'd prefer one, there are about four in this shaker.”

“Yes,” she said, “perhaps I shall. I usually drink Scotch out of habit. A martini would be nice for a change.”

“Just leave your drink on the counter,” he said. “Someone will take it.”

Courtney made the quick appraisal of the young man that she always made of cocktail party acquaintances. He was tall and self-assured, and seemed somehow older than the others at the party. His hair was brown, lightened by the sun, his skin was tan, making his quick, easy smile more noticeable by contrast. His eyes were blue and direct, with the disconcerting quality of never leaving his companion's face. He had a slightly critical and self-contained air, the air of the observer. She decided that he was worth staying with, and accepted the martini that he handed her.

“You in school?” he said.

“Yes. And you? Yale, I suppose. Most of the people here are.”

“I went to Yale,” he said. “That's where I met our host. I'm just finished with Harvard Law.”

“Oh,” she said. He was older, then. Probably about twenty-five. She liked that. “You're not a member of the Crew, I see.”

“No,” he said with the smile which relieved the direct intensity of his expression. “No,” he repeated. “I like to drink, but I find no charm in passing out and getting sick all over my dates. The routine doesn't appeal to me. I'm afraid I find being sober a little more enjoyable. I may be lost, but I refuse to be so blatantly lost.”

Supercilious, she thought. Although she agreed with what he was saying, she felt in his words a criticism of herself for being with these people. She didn't say anything.

“Is Janet a good friend of yours?” he asked.

“Yes,” Courtney answered. “Since we were in Scaisbrooke together.” She was aware that whenever she said she was a good friend of Janet's there was always a slight reaction, a sidelong glance, but she refused to deny Janet because of her notoriety.

“She's a very game girl,” he said. “But game girls become tiresome. There are so many of them.”

“Say, you're awfully critical, aren't you?” said Courtney finally. “I might make a similar remark about youthful cynics.”

“All right,” he smiled. “Touché. How is the martini?”

“Excellent. And I am a harsh judge.”

“So am I. Of martinis and people.”

“I gathered that.”

“Well, it's not that I'm cynical,” he said. “I am probably too much of a perfectionist. I set high standards, for myself, and the people around me. It doesn't endear me to people,” he smiled. “But there's really nothing I can do about it. Say, what about going into another room? It's awfully hot in here.”

“It's hotter in the living room,” Courtney said.

“I know. Let's go into the library. It's quiet there, and we can talk.”

Although it was against all her principles of coktail party behavior to confine herself to one person, Courtney agreed. The young man, for all his critical airs, interested her. The defense of cynicism was one she often applied when she felt ill at ease, or when she was meeting someone. She ignored it and sensed that, at least, Charles was more intelligent than most of the boys at the party.

There were two other couples in the library, and the quiet conversation was a relief from the noise and congestion of the living room. Charles brought the shaker of martinis with him.

“You know,” he said as they sat down, “there's something about this crowd that always puts me in a sort of cynical mood. I knew Peter would be upset if I didn't accept his invitation, though.”

“You probably feel a little ill at ease with them,” Courtney commented.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I really don't think that's it. For my first two years at Yale I was very much a part of the Crew, as you put it. Then I looked at my marks, and I looked at my friends, and I suddenly asked myself, why this self-destruction? Why this drinking to get drunk? We're not middle-aged and beaten; there really isn't any reason for it. So I stopped seeing them and set myself to the task of becoming a lawyer. There's something about the conviction that they're lost, and the self-pity, that makes me angry whenever I'm with these people. It's not that I don't like them. If I disliked them, I wouldn't be here. But they're wasting so much by being angry with the world. That's what makes me mad.”

“Yes,” Courtney said. “You have a point. I've felt a little the same way myself.”

“I hope you don't think I'm being supercilious when I say all this,” he said with a smile.

“Only a little,” she said.

“Well, it's just such a damned waste. There isn't any reason for it; they just lack courage. They criticize their parents, and blame them for their own drinking and sleeping around, and still they allow themselves to be supported by the parents they despise.”

Courtney thought of Janet. “Well, there might be a little more to it than that.”

“Not if they have any real self-respect,” he said. “After I got in trouble with the deans at Yale, when I got in with this crowd, the parents sent me a long letter telling me that as long as they were paying the bills I was there for an education, and I'd better mend my ways or they'd withdraw their support. My father is a very conservative Boston lawyer,” he added, “with all sorts of ideas on the importance of education and the fact that education has to be earned, and he wasn't going to put up for a moment with high bar bills and low marks. So I told him to go to hell,” he smiled, “and continued my pattern of life, putting myself through by writing papers and tutoring other students.”

Courtney looked at Charles with a new interest. He was not as she had first thought a “straight arrow,” a supercilious prig. He had simply refused to compromise. Courage was something she had always admired, and she liked his reaction to the situation which all Janet's friends had met and had answered simply by getting themselves kicked out of college.

“You know,” she said, “it's a funny thing, but the fact that you continued living it up makes me respect you more than if you had gone straight-arrow.”

He studied her for a moment. “Yes, I suppose that is what would appeal to you. Not that I earned my own way, but that I continued to be an alkie. I suppose you measure a man by his fondness for alcohol.”

“No,” she said hastily. That wasn't the impression she had meant to give at all. Now he was classifying her as one of the Crew he despised. “That isn't what I meant.”

“Well, I had thought somehow that you weren't one of the group. I suppose I was wrong. That's the trouble with young girls, they think the measure of a man is the measure of alcohol in his blood.”

Courtney stood up, angry.

“The martini was delightful,” she said, “but the criticism I can do without.”

“And now you're going to leave,” he said. “I didn't mean that as a criticism, really. I'm always putting my foot in my mouth.”

“Yes, I'm going to leave.”

“Well, there's nothing I can do about it,” he sighed. “Women always take things personally. But I do wish you wouldn't go.

Courtney shrugged and went with her martini into the living room. She had enjoyed talking to Charles, his sanity and his ability to hold an intelligent conversation were refreshing to her. She felt that she would have liked to get to know him better. He was very attractive, too. But she didn't need criticism from anyone; there was no necessity to take that, and certainly not at a cocktail party. For the first time since she had walked into the kitchen, she missed Anthony. She wished he were here. There was no criticism from Anthony.

“Yes, Cynthia is coming out at the Cotillion. Well, face it, all it takes to come out at the Cotillion is money, and that's about all she has—”

“Look, darling, I promise I won't pass out on you, really. We'll just go up to the apartment and have a couple of drinks—”

“The Stork. Oh, God, no, I'm getting so sick of the Bird; it's just filled with a lot of prep-school kids these days. What about going to P. J. Clarke's?”