Big Money (62 page)

It was after one before the conference broke up. Everybody was congratulating Ed Griscolm on his layout. Dick heard his own voice saying it was wonderful but it needed a slightly different slant. “All right,” said J.W. “How about finding that slightly different slant over the weekend? That's the idea I want to leave with every man here. I'm lunching with Mr. Bingham Monday noon. I must have a perfected project to present.”

Dick Savage went back to his office and signed a pile of letters his secretary had left for him. Then he suddenly remembered he'd told Reggie Talbot he'd meet him for lunch at “63” to meet the girlfriend and ran out, adjusting his blue muffler as he went down in the elevator. He caught sight of them at a table with their heads leaning together in the crinkled cigarettesmoke in the back of the crowded Saturday-afternoon speakeasy. “Oh, Dick, hello,” said Reggie, jumping to his feet with his mild smile, grabbing Dick's hand and drawing him towards the table. “I didn't wait for you at the office because I had to meet this one. . . . Jo, this is Mr. Savage. The only man in New York who doesn't give a damn. . . . What'll you have to drink?” The girl certainly was a knockout. When Dick let himself drop on the redleather settee beside her, facing Reggie's slender ashblond head and his big inquiring lightbrown eyes, he felt boozy and tired.

“Oh, Mr. Savage, what's happened about the Bingham account? I'm so excited about it. Reggie can't talk about anything else. I know it's indiscreet to ask.” She looked earnestly in his face out of long-lashed black eyes. They certainly made a pretty couple.

“Telling tales out of school, eh?” said Dick, picking up a breadstick and snapping it into his mouth.

“But you know, Dick, Jo and me . . . we talk about everything . . . it never goes any further. . . . And honestly all the younger guys in the office think it's a damn shame J.W. didn't use your first layout. . . . Griscolm is going to lose the account for us if he isn't careful . . . it just don't click. . . . I think the old man's getting softening of the brain.”

“You know I've thought several times recently that J.W. wasn't in very good health. . . . Too bad. He's the most brilliant figure in the publicrelations field.” Dick heard an oily note come into his voice and felt ashamed in front of the youngsters and shut up suddenly. “Say, Tony,” he called peevishly to the waiter. “How about some cocktails? Give me a bacardi with a little absinthe in it, you know, my special. . . . Gosh, I feel a hundred years old.”

“Been burning the candle at both ends?” asked Reggie.

Dick twisted his face into a smirk. “Oh, that candle,” he said. “It gives me a lot of trouble.” They all blushed. Dick chuckled. “By God, I don't think there are three other people in the city that have a blush left in them.” They ordered more cocktails. While they were drinking Dick felt the girl's eyes serious and dark fixed on his face. She lifted her glass to him. “Reggie says you've been awfully sweet to him at the office. . . . He says he'd have been fired if it wasn't for you.” “Who could help being sweet to Reggie? Look at him.” Reggie got red as a beet. “The lad's got looks,” said the girl. “But has he any brains?”

Dick began to feel better with the onionsoup and the third cocktail. He began to tell them how he envied them being kids and getting married. He promised he'd be bestman. When they asked him why he didn't get married himself he confusedly had some more drinks and said his life was a shambles. He made fifteen thousand a year but he never had any money. He knew a dozen beautiful women but he never had a girl when he needed her. All the time he was talking he was planning in the back of his head a release on the need for freedom of selfmedication. He couldn't stop thinking about that damned Bingham account.

It was beginning to get dark when they came out of “63.” A feeling
of envy stung him as he put the young people into a taxi. He felt affectionate and amorous and nicely buoyed up by the radiating warmth of food and alcohol in his belly. He stood for a minute on the corner of Madison Avenue watching the lively beforechristmas crowd pour along the sidewalk against the bright showwindows, all kinds of faces flushed and healthylooking for once in the sharp cold evening in the slanting lights. Then he took a taxi down to Twelfth Street.

The colored maid who let him in was wearing a pretty lace apron. “Hello, Cynthia.” “How do you do, Mr. Dick.” Dick could feel the impatient blood pounding in his temples as he walked up and down the old uneven parquet floor waiting. Eveline was smiling when she came out from the back room. She'd put too much powder on her face in too much of a hurry and it brought out the drawn lines between her nostrils and her mouth and gave her nose a floury look. Her voice still had a lovely swing to it. “Dick, I thought you'd given me up.”

“I've been working like a dog. . . . I've gotten so my brain won't work. I thought it would do me good to see you.” She handed him a Chinese porcelain box with cigarettes in it. They sat down side by side on a rickety oldfashioned horsehair sofa. “How's Jeremy?” asked Dick in a cheerful tone.

Her voice went flat. “He's gone out west with Paul for Christmas.”

“You must miss him . . . I'm disappointed myself. I love the brat.”

“Paul and I have finally decided to get a divorce . . . in a friendly way.”

“Eveline, I'm sorry.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. . . . It does seem silly. . . . But I always liked Paul.”

“It all got just too tiresome. . . . This way it'll be much better for him.”

There was something coolly bitter about her as she sat beside him in her a little too frizzy afternoondress. He felt as if he was meeting her for the first time. He picked up her long blueveined hand and put it on the little table in front of them and patted it. “I like you better . . . anyway.” It sounded phony in his ears, like something he'd say to a client. He jumped to his feet. “Say, Eveline, suppose I call up Settignano and get some gin around? I've got to have a drink. . . . I can't get the office out of my head.”

“If you go back to the icebox you'll find some perfectly lovely cock
tails all mixed. I just made them. There are some people coming in later.” “How much later?” “About seven o'clock . . . why?” Her eyes followed him teasingly as he went back through the glass doors.

In the pantry the colored girl was putting on her hat. “Cynthia, Mrs. Johnson alleges there are cocktails out here.” “Yes, Mr. Dick, I'll get you some glasses.” “Is this your afternoon out?” “Yessir, I'm goin' to church.” “On Saturday afternoon?” “Yessir, our church we have services every Saturday afternoon . . . lots of folks don't get Sunday off nowadays.” “It's gotten so I don't get any day off at all.” “It shoa is too bad, Mr. Dick.”

He went back into the front room shakily, carrying the tray with the shaker jiggling on it. The two glasses clinked. “Oh, Dick, I'm going to have to reform you. Your hands are shaking like an old greybeard's.” “Well, I am an old greybeard. I'm worrying myself to death about whether that bastardly patentmedicine king will sign on the dotted line Monday.”

“Don't talk about it. . . . It sounds just too awful. I've been working hard myself . . . I'm trying to put on a play.”

“Eveline, that's swell! Who's it by?”

“Charles Edward Holden. . . . It's a magnificent piece of work. I'm terribly excited about it. I think I know how to do it. . . . I don't suppose you want to put a couple of thousand dollars in, do you, Dick?”

“Eveline, I'm flat broke. . . . They've got my salary garnisheed and Mother has to be supported in the style to which she is accustomed and then there's Brother Henry's ranch in Arizona . . . he's all balled up with a mortgage. . . . I thought Charles Edward Holden was just a columnist.”

“This is a side of him that's never come out. . . . I think he's the real poet of modern New York . . . you wait and see.”

Dick poured himself another cocktail. “Let's talk about just us for a minute. . . . I feel so frazzled. . . . Oh, Eveline, you know what I mean. . . . We've been pretty good friends.” She let him hold her hand but she did not return the squeeze he gave it. “You know we always said we were just physically attractive to each other . . . why isn't that the swellest thing in the world?” He moved up close to her on the couch, gave her a little kiss on the cheek, tried to twist her face around. “Don't you like this miserable sinner a little bit?”

“Dick, I can't.” She got to her feet. Her lips were twitching and she
looked as if she was going to burst into tears. “There's somebody I like very much . . . very, very much. I've decided to make some sense out of my life.”

“Who? That damn columnist?”

“Never mind who.”

Dick buried his face in his hands. When he took his hands away he was laughing. “Well, if that isn't just my luck. . . . Just Johnny on the spot and me full of speakeasy Saturday-afternoon amorosity.”

“Well, Dick, I'm sure you won't lack for partners.”

“I do today. . . . I feel lonely and hellish. My life is a shambles.”

“What a literary phrase.”

“I thought it was pretty good myself but honestly I feel every whichway. . . . Something funny happened to me last night. I'll tell you about it someday when you like me better.”

“Dick, why don't you go to Eleanor's? She's giving a party for all the boyars.”

“Is she really going to marry that horrid little prince?” Eveline nodded with that same cold bitter look in her eyes. “I suppose a title is the last word in the decorating business. . . . Why won't Eleanor put up some money?” “I don't want to ask her. She's filthy with money, though, she's had a very successful fall. I guess we're all getting grasping in our old age. . . . What does poor Moorehouse think about the prince?”

“I wish I knew what he thought about anything. I've been working for him for years now and I don't know whether he's a genius or a stuffed shirt. . . . I wonder if he's going to beat Eleanor's. I want to get hold of him this evening for a moment. . . . That's a very good idea. . . . Eveline, you always do me good one way or another.”

“You'd better not go without phoning. . . . She's perfectly capable of not letting you in if you come uninvited and particularly with a houseful of émigrée Russians in tiaras.”

Dick went to the phone and called up. He had to wait a long time for Eleanor to come. Her voice sounded shrill and rasping. At first she said why didn't he come to dinner next week instead. Dick's voice got very coaxing. “Please let me see the famous prince, Eleanor. . . . And I've got something very important to ask you about. . . . After all you've always been my guardian angel, Eleanor. If I can't come to you when I'm in trouble, who can I come to?” At last she loosened up and
said he could come but he mustn't stay long. “You can talk to poor J. Ward . . . he looks a little forlorn.” Her voice ended in a screechy laugh that made the receiver jangle and hurt his ear.

When he went back to the sofa Eveline was lying back against the pillows soundlessly laughing. “Dick,” she said, “you're a master of blarney.” Dick made a face at her, kissed her on the forehead and left the house.

 

Eleanor's place was glittering with chandeliers and cutglass. When she met him at the drawingroom door her small narrow face looked smooth and breakable as a piece of porcelain under her carefully-curled hair and above a big rhinestone brooch that held a lace collar together. From behind her came the boom and the high piping of Russian men's and women's voices and a smell of tea and charcoal. “Well, Richard, here you are,” she said in a rapid hissing whisper. “Don't forget to kiss the grandduchess's hand . . . she's had such a dreadful life. You'd like to do any little thing that would please her, wouldn't you? . . . And, Richard, I'm worried about Ward . . . he looks so terribly tired . . . I hope he isn't beginning to break up. He's the type you know that goes off like that. . . . You know these big shortnecked blonds.”

There was a tall silver samovar on the Buhl table in front of the marble fireplace and beside it sat a large oldish woman in a tinsel shawl with her hair in a pompadour and the powder flaking off a tired blotchy face. She was very gracious and had quite a twinkle in her eye and she was piling caviar out of a heaped cutglass bowl onto a slice of blackbread and laughing with her mouth full. Around her were grouped Russians in all stages of age and decay, some in tunics and some in cheap business suits and some frowstylooking young women and a pair of young men with slick hair and choirboy faces. They were all drinking tea or little glasses of vodka. Everybody was ladling out caviar. Dick was introduced to the prince who was an olivefaced young man with black brows and a little pointed black mustache who wore a black tunic and black soft leather boots and had a prodigiously small waist. They were all merry as crickets chirping and roaring in Russian, French and English. Eleanor sure is putting out, Dick caught himself thinking as he dug into the mass of big greygrained caviar.

J.W. looking pale and fagged was standing in the corner of the room with his back to an icon that had three candles burning in front of it. Dick distinctly remembered having seen the icon in Eleanor's window some weeks before, against a piece of purple brocade. J.W. was talking to an ecclesiastic in a black cassock with purple trimmings who when Dick went up to them turned out to have a rich Irish brogue. “Meet the Archimandrite O'Donnell, Dick,” said J.W. “Did I get it right?” The Archimandrite grinned and nodded. “He's been telling me about the monasteries in Greece.” “You mean where they haul you up in a basket?” said Dick. The Archimandrite jiggled his grinning, looselipped face up and down. “I'm goin' to have the honorr and pleasurr of introducin' dear Eleanor into the mysteries of the true church. I was tellin' Mr. Moorehouse the story of my conversion.” Dick found an impudent rolling eye looking him over. “Perhaps you'd be carin' to come someday, Mr. Savage, to hear our choir. Unbelief dissolves in music like a lump of sugar in a glass of hot tay.” “Yes, I like the Russian choir,” said J.W.