The 42nd Parallel (25 page)

One Saturday afternoon he sat reading the paper in the lobby of the Ocean House. There was no one else there, most of the guests had left. The hotel would close the fifteenth. Suddenly he found himself listening to a conversation. The two bellhops had come in and were talking in low voices on the bench against the wall.

“Well, I got mahn awright this summer, damned if I didn’t, Joe.”

“I would of too if I hadn’t gotten sick.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to monkey round with that Lizzie? Man, I b’lieve every sonofabitch in town slep’ with that jane, not excludin’ niggers.”

“Say, did you . . . You know the blackeyed one? You said you would.”

Johnny froze. He held the paper rigid in front of him.

The bellhop gave out a low whistle. “Hotstuff,” he said. “Jeez, what these society dames gits away with’s got me beat.”

“Didye, honest?”

“Well, not exactly . . .’Fraid I might ketch somethin’. But that Frenchman did . . . Jeez, he was in her room all the time.”

“I know he was. I caught him onct.” They laughed. “They’d forgot to lock the door.”

“Was she all neked?”

“I guess she was . . . under her kimono . . . He’s cool as a cucumber and orders icewater.”

“Whah didn’t ye send up Mr. Greeley?”

“Hell, why should I? Frenchman wasn’t a bad scout. He gave me five bucks.”

“I guess she can do what she goddam pleases. Her dad about owns this dump, they tell me, him an ole Colonel Wedgewood.”

“I guess that young guy in the realestate office is gettin’ it now . . . looks like he’d marry her.”

“Hell, I’d marry her maself if a girl had that much kale.”

Johnny was in a cold sweat. He wanted to get out of the lobby without their seeing him. A bell rang and one of the boys ran off. He heard the other one settling himself on the bench. Maybe he was reading a magazine or something. Johnny folded up the paper quietly and walked out onto the porch. He walked down the street without seeing anything. For a while he thought he’d go down to the station and take the first train out and throw the whole business to ballyhack, but there was the booklet to get out, and there was a chance that if the boom did come he might get in on the ground floor, and this connection with money and the Strangs; opportunity knocks but once at a young man’s door. He went back to his cottage and locked himself in his bedroom. He stood a minute looking at himself in the glass of the bureau. The neatly parted light hair, the cleancut nose and chin; the image blurred. He found he was crying. He threw himself face down on the bed and sobbed.

When he went up to Philadelphia the next time to read proof on the booklet:

OCEAN CITY (Maryland)

VACATIONLAND SUPREME

He also took up a draft of the wedding invitations to be engraved:

Dr. Alonso B. Strang
announces the marriage of his daughter
Annabelle Marie
to Mr. J. Ward Moorehouse
at Saint Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church,
Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November fifteenth
nineteen hundred and nine at twelve noon

Then there was an invitation to the reception to be sent to a special list. It was to be a big wedding because Dr. Strang had so many social obligations. Annabelle decided on J. Ward Moorehouse as more distinguished than John W. and began to call him Ward. When they asked him about inviting his family he said his mother and father were both invalids and his brothers and sisters too little to enjoy it. He wrote his mother that he was sure she’d understand, but that as things were and with Dad the way he was . . . he was sure she’d understand. Then one evening Annabelle told him she was going to have a baby.

“I thought maybe that was it.”

Her eyes were suddenly scaringly cold black in his. He hated her at that minute, then he smiled blue-eyed and boyish. “I mean you being so nervous and everything.” He laughed and took her hand. “Well, I’m goin’ to make you an honest woman, ain’t I?” He had the drop on her now. He kissed her.

She burst out crying.

“Oh, Ward, I wish you wouldn’t say ‘ain’t.’”

“I was just teasing, dear . . . But isn’t there some way?”

“I’ve tried everything . . . Dad would know, but I don’t dare tell him. He knows I’m pretty independent . . . but . . .”

“We’ll have to stay away for a year after we’re married . . . It’s rotten for me. I was just offered a job on
The Public Ledger
.”

“We’ll go to Europe . . . Dad’ll fix us up for our honeymoon . . . He’s glad to get me off his hands and I’ve got money in my own right, mother’s money.”

“Maybe it’s all a mistake.”

“How can it be?”

“How long is it since you . . . noticed . . . ?”

Her eyes were suddenly black and searching in his again. They stared at each other and hated each other. “Quite long enough,” she said and pulled his ear as if he were a child, and went swishing upstairs to dress. The Colonel was tickled to death about the engagement and had invited them all to dinner to celebrate it.

The wedding came off in fine style and J. Ward Moorehouse found himself the center of all eyes in a wellfitting frock coat and a silk hat. People thought he was very handsome. His mother back in Wilmington let flatiron after flatiron cool while she pored over the account in the papers; finally she took off her spectacles and folded the papers carefully and laid them on the ironing board. She was very happy.

The young couple sailed the next day from New York on the
Teutonic.
The crossing was so rough that only the last two days was it possible to go out on deck. Ward was sick and was taken care of by a sympathetic cockney steward who spoke of Annabelle as the “Madam” and thought she was his mother. Annabelle was a good sailor but the baby made her feel miserable and whenever she looked at herself in her handmirror she was so haggard that she wouldn’t get out of her bunk. The stewardess suggested gin with a dash of bitters in it and it helped her over the last few days of the crossing. The night of the captain’s dinner she finally appeared in the diningroom in an evening gown of black valenciennes and everybody thought her the bestlooking woman on the boat. Ward was in a fever for fear she’d drink too much champagne as he had seen her put away four ponies of gin and bitters and a Martini cocktail while dressing. He had made friends with an elderly banker, Mr. Jarvis Oppenheimer and his wife, and he was afraid that Annabelle would seem a little fast to them. The captain’s dinner went off without a hitch, however, and Annabelle and Ward found that they made a good team. The captain, who had known Dr. Strang, came and sat with them in the smokingroom afterwards and had a glass of champagne with them and with Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer and they heard people asking each other who could that charming scintillating brilliant young couple be, somebody interesting surely, and when they went to bed after having seen the lighthouses in the Irish Sea, they felt that all the seasick days had been thoroughly worth while.

Annabelle didn’t like it in London where the dark streets were dismal in a continual drizzle of sleet, so they only stayed a week at the Cecil before crossing to Paris. Ward was sick again on the boat from Folkestone to Boulogne and couldn’t keep track of Annabelle whom he found in the dining saloon drinking brandy and soda with an English army officer when the boat reached the calm water between the long jetties of Boulogne harbor. It wasn’t so bad as he expected being in a country where he didn’t know the language and Annabelle spoke French very adequately and they had a firstclass compartment and a basket with a cold chicken and sandwiches in it and some sweet wine that Ward drank for the first time—when in Rome do as the Romans do—and they were quite the honeymoon couple on the train going down to Paris. They drove in a cab from the station to the Hotel Wagram, with only their handbaggage because the hotel porter took care of the rest, through streets shimmering with green gaslight on wet pavements. The horse’s hoofs rang sharp on the asphalt and the rubbertired wheels of the cab spun smoothly and the streets were crowded in spite of the fact that it was a rainy winter night and there were people sitting out at little marbletop tables round little stoves in front of cafés and there were smells in the air of coffee and wine and browning butter and baking bread. Annabelle’s eyes caught all the lights; she looked very pretty, kept nudging him to show him things and patting his thigh with one hand. Annabelle had written to the hotel, where she had stayed before with her father, and they found a white bedroom and parlor waiting for them and a roundfaced manager who was very elegant and very affable to bow them into it and a fire in the grate. They had a bottle of champagne and some paté de fois gras before going to bed and Ward felt like a king. She took off her traveling clothes and put on a negligee and he put on a smoking jacket that she had given him and that he hadn’t worn and all his bitter feelings of the last month melted away.

They sat a long time looking into the fire smoking Muratti cigarettes out of a tin box. She kept fondling his hair and rubbing her hand round his shoulders and neck. “Why aren’t you more affectionate, Ward?” she said in low gruff tones. “I’m the sort of woman likes to be carried off her feet . . . Take care . . . You may lose me . . . Over here the men know how to make love to a woman.”

“Gimme a chance, won’t you? . . . First thing I’m going to get a job with some American firm or other. I think Mr. Oppenheimer’ll help me do that. I’ll start in taking French lessons right away. This’ll be a great opportunity for me.” “You funny boy.” “You don’t think I’m going to run after you like a poodledog, do you, without making any money of my own? . . . Nosiree, bobby.” He got up and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go to bed.”

Ward went regularly to the Berlitz school for his French lessons and went round to see Notre Dame and Napoleon’s tomb and the Louvre with old Mr. Oppenheimer and his wife. Annabelle, who said that museums gave her a headache, spent her days shopping and having fittings with dressmakers. There were not many American firms in Paris so the only job Ward could get, even with the help of Mr. Oppenheimer who knew everyone, was on Gordon Bennett’s newspaper, the Paris edition of
The New York Herald.
The job consisted of keeping track of arriving American business men, interviewing them on the beauties of Paris and on international relations. This was his meat and enabled him to make many valuable contacts. Annabelle thought it was all too boring and refused to be told anything about it. She made him put on a dress suit every evening and take her to the opera and theatres. This he was quite willing to do as it was good for his French.

She went to a very famous specialist for women’s diseases who agreed that on no account should she have a baby at this time. An immediate operation was necessary and would be a little dangerous as the baby was so far along. She didn’t tell Ward and only sent word from the hospital when it was over. It was Christmas day. He went immediately to see her. He heard the details in chilly horror. He’d gotten used to the idea of having a baby and thought it would have a steadying effect on Annabelle. She lay looking very pale in the bed in the private sanatorium and he stood beside the bed with his fists clenched without saying anything. At length the nurse said to him that he was tiring madame and he went away. When Annabelle came back from the hospital after four or five days announcing gaily that she was fit as a fiddle and was going to the south of France, he said nothing. She got ready to go, taking it for granted that he was coming, but the day she left on the train to Nice he told her that he was going to stay on in Paris. She looked at him sharply and then said with a laugh, “You’re turning me loose, are you?” “I have my business and you have your pleasure,” he said. “All right, young man, it’s a go.” He took her to the station and put her on the train, gave the conductor five francs to take care of her and came away from the station on foot. He’d had enough of the smell of musk and perfume for a while.

Paris was better than Wilmington but Ward didn’t like it. So much leisure and the sight of so many people sitting round eating and drinking got on his nerves. He felt very homesick the day the Ocean City booklet arrived inclosed with an enthusiastic letter from Colonel Wedgewood. Things were moving at last, the Colonel said; as for himself he was putting every cent he could scrape up, beg or borrow, into options. He even suggested that Ward send him a little money to invest for him, now that he was in a position to risk a stake on the surety of a big turnover; risk wasn’t the word because the whole situation was sewed up in a bag; nothing to do but shake the tree and let the fruit fall into their mouths. Ward went down the steps from the office of Morgan Harjes where he got his mail and out onto Boulevard Haussmann. The heavy coated paper felt good to his fingers. He put the letter in his pocket and walked down the boulevard with the honk of horns and the ring of horse’s hoofs and the shuffle of steps in his ears, now and then reading a phrase. Why, it almost made him want to go back to Ocean City (Maryland) himself. A little ruddy sunlight was warming the winter gray of the streets. A smell of roasting coffee came from somewhere; Ward thought of the white crackling sunlight of windswept days at home; days that lashed you full of energy and hope; the Strenuous Life. He had a date to lunch with Mr. Oppenheimer at a very select little restaurant down in the slums somewhere called the Tour d’Argent. When he got into a red-wheeled taximeter cab it made him feel good again that the driver understood his directions. After all it was educational, made up for those years of college he had missed. He had read through the booklet for the third time when he reached the restaurant.

He got out at the restaurant and was just paying the taxi when he saw Mr. Oppenheimer and another man arriving down the quai on foot. Mr. Oppenheimer wore a gray overcoat and a gray derby of the same pearly color as his moustaches; the other man was a steelgray individual with a thin nose and chin. When he saw them Ward decided that he must be more careful about his clothes in the future.