Scruples (17 page)

Cornelia made an understanding face. She’d heard the very same words.

“Aunt Cornelia, don’t you remember how you made me promise to go to Katie Gibbs when I got back from Paris?”

“But dear, I wouldn’t hold you to that now. I mean, you have so many more choices—so many nice boys calling you—”

“So many nice
kids
. I feel as if I’m ten years older than they are. I can’t just sit around, doing the proper charity work, living on you and Uncle George, and waiting to find someone to marry me who isn’t totally juvenile. Yet I’m good for nothing else
but
that, if you stop to think about it.”

“Well, my dear, that’s all most of us ever did.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I think you’re quite right, and much as I hate to see you leave, somehow I don’t quite see you at a Sewing Circle.” Cornelia felt a pang of loss, but she had never balked at accepting the self-evident. “So. Katie Gibbs it is!” She turned to the familiar consolation of organizing someone else’s life with her usual brisk efficiency. After all, the Katharine Gibbs School, which had been founded in 1911, was the only secretarial school in America that the families of young women of good social position found entirely acceptable. Hats and gloves were still mandatory for students, other “nice” girls went there, and its social credentials were equaled only by its reputation as a school that turned out first-class secretaries.

Within a week Cornelia had unearthed a suitable roommate for Billy. One of her old friends, from her own college days, had a daughter who was working in New York City and living at a most proper address. There was an extra bedroom in her apartment, which her mother was anxious to rent. Cornelia also went ahead and paid a year’s fees in advance at the school, working on the correct assumption that after her Paris purchases Billy would be short of money for both tuition and expenses. Under the guise of “taking advantage” of the August fur sales, she whisked Billy to Roberts-Neustadter on Newbury Street and presented her with an advance twentieth-birthday present: a slim-fitted coat of velvety black seal, belted at the back, flaring in the skirt and trimmed with a notched collar and cuffs of dark mink. “Keep the old one for rainy days,” she advised, waving away Billy’s hugs of appreciation. Cornelia’s generosity was boundless. It was having it acknowledged that she couldn’t bear.

Billy sat in her parlor-car seat, traveling from Back Bay Station to Grand Central Station, on a hot, sticky day during the first week of September 1962. Her stomach gave a sickening downward jerk every time she thought about the coming meeting with her future roommate, Jessica Thorpe. What a haughty name that seemed, so starchy, so dry and complete in itself. Even worse, she was twenty-three, a summa cum laude graduate of Vassar, and she had a job working for
McCall’s
in the editorial department. What a frightening paragon she must be, Billy thought. Even her background was impeccable. Her parents were both descended from the oldest families in Providence, Rhode Island. Not like being from Boston, Aunt Cornelia pointed out, but happily not as—ordinary—as being from New York. And her apartment was located on 82nd Street, between Park and Madison. These details alone convinced Billy that this inevitable, inescapable roommate was going to be sophisticated, full of herself, and a competent career girl in total charge of her life. Perhaps, oh horror, an intellectual.

Meanwhile, Jessica Thorpe was having a most unpleasant morning. It had started when Natalie Jenkins, the articles editor, had ripped to shreds Jessica’s last rewrite of the Sinatra profile. The article, originally tossed off by a well-known raconteur, had been turned over to Jessica to be “cleaned up,” and she had worked on it for weeks, trying to give its confused anecdotes and scrambled syntax the smooth touch suitable for a women’s magazine. Mrs. Jenkins, famous as the first woman in publishing to survive a daily four-martini lunch, had hated her first attempt, disliked her second attempt, and this very day she had taken the third attempt and done the rewrite herself in three quarters of an hour, eviscerating the guts of the piece and demolishing all the parts that meant anything. Now it was just another bit of Pablum, old-fashioned sob-sister stuff, but Mrs. Jenkins, sitting in triumph at her typewriter, was finally satisfied. She had proven, once again, that no one could really do any job around the office without her help.

And if this wasn’t dismal enough, the Girl From Boston was arriving today. Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop. The very thought made Jessica’s clouds of Pre-Raphaelite baby hair droop. Jessica was much given to drooping regardless of circumstances. Her skirts always drooped because her hips were too slender to hold them up properly, and it never occurred to her to have the hems altered. Her blouses drooped because she forgot to tuck them in. Her body drooped because she was only five feet two inches tall and she never remembered to stand up straight. But even when her spirits drooped, as well as everything else, she was irresistible. Men, seeing the drooping of Jessica, found the idea of an upright woman downright masculine. She had a tiny little nose and a tiny little chin and enormous, sad, lavender eyes and a lovely wide brow. When her adorable little mouth drooped, men were overwhelmed by an urge to kiss her. When it didn’t droop, they felt precisely the same way.

Men were Jessica’s favorite thing. She thought that she had managed to hide this dangerous propensity from her mother, but obviously she hadn’t succeeded or otherwise her mother would not have forcibly insisted that she had to have a roommate or else move to the Barbizon Hotel for Women, that Devil’s Island of Chastity. Chastity was Jessica’s least favorite thing.

The Girl From Boston was certainly her mother’s spy, Jessica reflected, as she drooped ravishingly homeward, ruining the evening of at least a dozen men on the Madison Avenue bus by not even looking at them. In normal spirits, Jessica looked directly at every man she saw for a fraction of a second, rating him on a scale of one to ten, the only criterion being “How good would he be in bed?” A man had to be actively unattractive to get less than a four because Jessica was very nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses in public. The number of sixes and sevens reached into the dozens in the course of Jessica’s average week. She could never be positive about them because her eyes were so poor, but she gave generous marks, to be fair.

Billy had trouble getting a cab during the rush hour, and it was after six-thirty when she arrived, frozen with nerves, at Jessica’s apartment. The doorman rang up from the lobby to announce her just as Jessica had finished hiding five unmatched men’s sock’s, a Brooks Brothers belt, and, in a last-minute flurry, her douche bag. Would a girl use a douche bag if she was a virgin? Jessica was too terrified to think that one out. She stood at the open door of her apartment and watched a pile of impressively good luggage being wheeled toward her on a dolly. Behind the luggage was the second doorman and behind him strode, to Jessica’s nearsighted eyes, an Amazon. She exchanged flustered greetings with the tall blurred figure while the doorman disposed of the luggage, waiting unhappily for the moment when they would be alone together. The Amazon stood, silent and uncertain and voiceless, in the center of the living room. Although Billy had finally found herself relatively at ease, as long as she was speaking French, even when she was meeting strangers, the prospect of living in close association with a superior girl of her own background, a girl who was three years older than she was, brought back every one of the dozen of insecurities she had been tattooed with during her first eighteen years. And the sight of tiny Jessica, so slight, almost frail, had the strange effect of making Billy feel enormous again, just as if she were still fat.

The doorman left and Jessica remembered her manners. “Ah—why don’t we just sit down?” she fluttered timidly. “You must be absolutely exhausted—it’s so hot out there.” She waved hesitantly toward a chair and the tall figure sat down with a gasp of relief and fatigue. Jessica groped for some common ground, something to make the stranger speak. “I know,” she ventured, “why don’t we have a drink—I’m so nervous—” At these kind words the Amazon burst into tears. So, companionably, did Jessica. Bursting into tears was another of her favorite things, really more useful, she found, for difficult moments than anything else.

Within five minutes Jessica had put on her glasses and inspected Billy thoroughly. All her life she had wanted to look like Billy and she told her so. Billy answered that she had always dreamed of looking like Jessica. Both of them were telling the exact truth and they both realized it. Within two hours Billy had told her all about Edouard, and Jessica had told Billy all about the three number nines with whom she was currently having affairs. From there their friendship progressed in geometric proportions. Neither of them could imagine how there would ever be enough time to tell each other as much as they had to tell. Before they finally retired to their respective bedrooms—at 4:00
A.M
.—after ceremoniously retrieving Jessica’s douche bag from its hiding place, they had, with great gravity, made a pact never to tell anyone in Providence or New York or Boston anything more about the other than her name, followed by the sacred formula “a very nice girl.” They kept that pact all their lives.

As Billy stepped off the elevator into the entrance of the Katharine Gibbs School, the first thing that met her eyes was the gaze of the late Mrs. Gibbs, preserved with all its stern, implacable presence in the portrait that hung over the receptionist’s desk. She did not look mean, thought Billy, only as if she knew all about you and had not decided whether to actively disapprove—yet. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware that someone was stationed by the elevator door checking out each girl for gloves, hat, dress, and makeup, of which there must not be much. That, at least, was not a problem for a girl who remembered only too well the folkways of Boston.

Gregg, on the other hand, was. Billy cursed Gregg and Pitman, whoever they were. Why had people been so cruel as to invent shorthand, she wondered, as the infernal, eternal hourly buzzers went off and she moved hurriedly, but with the required precision, from the steno room to the typing room and then back to the steno room again. Many of her classmates had some knowledge of typing before they entered Katie Gibbs, but even those who thought they had a leg up on the system were swiftly disillusioned about their skills. Being “Gibbs Material” meant that you were expected to reach certain degrees of proficiency that struck Billy as outrageous. Were they seriously expecting her to be able to take one hundred words a minute in shorthand and type faultlessly at a minimum of sixty words a minute by the time she had completed her course? They were indeed.

Within a week Billy decided it was a waste of time to revile Gregg and Pitman. Like the laws of gravity, they were not about to go away. It was the same as losing weight. She had suffered, almost more than she could remember, but it had been worth it in the end. Everyone at school had her own talisman story of a Gibbs graduate who had started as secretary to an important senator or well-known businessman and then gone on to more important jobs. Billy could feel her strong obsessive drives finally coming to her aid, helping her to bite into the work with the confidence that she would master it, make it her own.

Jessica, on the other hand, was worried about Billy’s lack of what she euphemistically termed “beaus.”

“But, Jessie, I don’t know a soul in New York and I came here to work. You know how I feel about becoming independent and making some money of my own.”

“How many men did you look at today, Billy?” Jessica asked, brushing aside her friend’s ambitions.

“How do I know? Maybe ten or fifteen—something like that.”

“What numbers were they?”

“Well really! I wasn’t playing the game; that’s your department.”

“I thought so. If you don’t look and give them numbers how are you ever going to have any basis for knowing when you meet an eight or even a nine?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Billy, I’ve been thinking about you. You’re a cliche, like a rider who falls off a horse and doesn’t get right back on. You’re plain afraid of men because of what happened, aren’t you?” Jessica murmured all this in her tiny voice, but Billy knew her well enough to realize that under that adorable whimper there lurked a ferocious intelligence that it was useless to contradict. Jessica saw through walls and around corners.

“You’re probably right,” she admitted wearily. “But even if I wanted to meet a man, look at the realities. I simply can’t pick up some number nine on the street, now can I? No, Jessie, don’t give me that eye—even you wouldn’t do that I think. Now, the alternative is to scribble a note to Aunt Cornelia and let her loose among her New York friends. She’d dig up some ‘nice boy’ here who is connected by a wire through his belly button to Boston. Whatever happened between us would be all over the Vincent dub in a week. You don’t know how they gossip! I simply will not let anyone there know what I’m doing with my life. I’m going to graduate from Gibbs, get a terrific job, and work my way up until I’m a big success, and I’m never going back to Boston again!”

“Well, who ever said anything about getting involved with someone from your own circle, silly?” Jessica said with indignation. “I’d never, ever, do it myself. All my lovely nines haven’t the faintest idea who my family is. They don’t even care where I come from. I wouldn’t dream of having a thing with someone who might know the man I’ll eventually marry, whoever that lucky fool may be. The trick is to go outside.”