BUtterfield 8 (5 page)

But among Liggett’s friends there were men who, beginning their inventories with, “I have a wife and two children—” went through the list of their worldly goods and then came back to the first item: wife. Then they discovered that they could not really be sure they had their wives. The mortality rate for marriages in Liggett’s class is fairly close to 100%, but until the great depression there was no reason to find this out; most of these men believed that they were working for the happiness of their wives and children as well as for their own advancement, but an idle woman is an idle woman, whether her husband is downtown making millions or downtown trying to hold on to a $40-a-week job. Men like Liggett—in 1930 you would see them on the roads of Long Island and Westchester, in cap and windbreaker and sport shoes, taking walks on Sunday with their wives, trying to get to know their wives, because they wanted to believe that a wife was one thing they could count on. Of course there was nothing deliberately insulting in this attitude, and as often as not the wife was not conscious of insult, so it was all right. She knew that he always had taken her to football games and the theater, he paid her bills, he bought her Christmas presents, he was generous to her poor relations, he did not interfere with the education and rearing of the children. Sometimes she did not even ask why, when he became more curious, tried to become more companionable. She knew there was a depression, and she saw the magazine articles about the brave wives who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their husbands; she read the sermons in the Monday papers in which clergymen told their parishioners (and the press; always the press) that the depression was a good thing because it brought husbands and wives closer to each other.

Liggett was not quite one of these men; Emily certainly was not one of these women. For one thing, Liggett was a Pittsburgher and Emily a Bostonian. That was one thing, not two. Liggett was precisely the sort of person who, if he hadn’t married Emily, would be just the perfect person for Emily to snub. All her life she seemed to be saving up for one snub, which would have to be delivered to an upper-class American, since no foreigner and no lower-class American could possibly understand what she had that she felt entitled her to deliver a snub. What she had was a Colonial governor; an unbroken string of studious Harvard men; their women. Immediately and her own was, of course, the Winsor-Vincent Club-Sewing Circle background. She had a few family connections in New York, and they were unassailable socially; they never went out. It came as a surprise which he was a long time understanding for Liggett to learn, after he married Emily, that Emily never had stopped at a hotel in New York. She explained that the only possible reason you went to New York was to visit relations, and then you stopped with them, not at a hotel. Yes, that was true, he agreed—and never told her the fun he had had as a kid, stopping at New York hotels; the time he released a roll of toilet paper upon Fifth Avenue, the time he climbed along the ledge from one window to another. He was a little afraid of her.

But she was better off with him than she might have been with a Boston man. He was rich and handsome, a Yale athlete. Those qualifications were enough to explain his attraction for her. But he was more than that. She was handsome, she was healthy, and therefore she was passionate, and she wanted him from the moment she first met him. In the beginning Liggett himself was all mixed up about her; he was awed by her manner and her accent (he never got over the accent, and only got accustomed to the manner). She was less handsome than other girls he had known, but he had not known anyone like her, not so close. They met at a deb party, on one of her infrequent visits to New York—his last before beginning training for crew. He made a date with her for tea the following day, but had to break it, and thus began a correspondence which on his part was regulated by the necessity of staying in college and rowing at the same time, and on her part by a schedule: never answer more than one letter a week, and never until two days after the letter has been received. Because of her he decided to go to Harvard Business School. This pleased his father, who gave him a Fiat phaeton and anything else he asked for. There was one thing he could not ask his father for, and that was Emily’s fair white body. Emily gave that without being asked, one winter’s night in Boston. After waiting three miserable weeks to see if anything was going to happen, they decided to be engaged.

She was better off married to Liggett than she might have been with a Boston man because he never took her passion for granted. A Boston man might have, and might not be long looking around for more of the same from someone else. Liggett could not take her for granted. There is something about those good, good words of sleeping together, the language of sleeping together, when spoken in the tones of Commonwealth Avenue, that no man who has been brought up west of the Connecticut River can fail to notice. And when a man is listening for the words, when he teaches them to a woman, when he asks her to say them, he does not take everything all at once. He will want more.

There was that, and there was the secrecy. Their intimate moments were their own, so much so that Liggett did not once mention Emily’s pregnancy to anyone, not even to his own sister, while she was carrying their first child. It was nothing they agreed upon; Emily herself told Liggett’s sister. But it was part of the way he felt about Emily. Anything that had to do with their intimate life was not to be discussed with a third person, so far as he was concerned.

To a degree this was true of everything else in their relationship. Liggett’s impulse was always to talk about Emily, but he had gone that important step above vulgarity: he secretly recognized his own temptation to vulgarity. However valuable an asset this may be, it had one bad effect. A man ought to be able, when it becomes necessary, to discuss his wife with a third person, man or woman. Since it was impossible for him to bring himself to discuss Emily with another man he found himself in a spot where he had to talk to some woman. It had to be someone who knew Emily, someone close to her. He looked around and for the first time became aware that Emily in the years she had lived in New York—at that time, seven; it was in 1920—had not made a single close friend. Her best friend was a Boston girl, Martha Harvey. Martha was a divorcee. She had been married to a young millionaire who was practically illiterate, always drunk, was three inches shorter than she, and never had spoken an uncivil or impolite word to anyone in his life. Martha had grown up with Emily and they saw each other frequently, but when it came time to discuss Emily with her, Liggett saw how impossible it would be. Martha in a way was Emily over again.

The occasion, however, was urgent. Emily’s family’s money was mostly in cotton mills. Emily’s father was a doctor, a pleasant, unimaginative man who studied medicine in a day when surgeons still spoke of “laudable pus.” (He never quite got over the surprise of learning that Walter Reed was right.) In fact his presence in medicine is explained by a fondness for the dissection of cats. It was the only cerebral activity he ever had been interested in, so his father and mother steered him into medicine. A merit-badge boy scout would have been as useful in an emergency as Emily’s father, but a few friends went to him for colds and sore throat, and they constituted his practice. His practice was his excuse for neglecting his financial responsibilities, but every year or two he would have an idea, and at this time his idea was to get rid of all his cotton holdings and turn the cash into a vague something else. This time the vague something else was German marks. He just knew they were going to be worth something, and as he had traveled in Germany as a young man, he thought it would be pleasant, since his fortune would soon be doubled, to have a castle on the Rhine, where even at that moment you could have a castle, they said, fully staffed and equipped for $100 a month.

Liggett did not care a very great deal what the old man did with his own money, but that money, he felt, was not altogether the old man’s to fool with. The doctor had not earned it; he had inherited it, and since he had inherited it, it seemed to Liggett to be a kind of trust which the doctor had no right to violate. At least it was not to be squandered. If the doctor could go on year in, year out without assuming a permanent responsibility for the money, then he ought not to be permitted to risk losing all of it when he had a foolish hunch. Cotton was high that year, and while it was debatable whether it was the height of shrewdness to dump so much stock on a favorable market, Liggett at least conceded that there was a chance the market would absorb the doctor’s holdings without strong reaction. No, with the old gentleman’s decision to sell Liggett could not seriously quarrel (indeed, it would have been more like the old man to sell at the bottom of the market). But German marks, for Christ’s sake!

Liggett wished Emily had a brother, or even the kind of sister some people have. But Emily’s sister was a total stranger, and brother she had none. Next was friend, and friend was Martha. He rejected the plan of talking to Martha the moment her name conjured up a picture of her. But the more he thought the more he was convinced that he had to talk to somebody about the situation. Emily and the two little girls were in Hyannisport that summer, and he did not want to speak to Emily if he could help it. She was taking the children very seriously at the time and talk about her father would worry her.

Martha was just going out when he telephoned, going out to dine alone, and she was not surprised or curious at his calling her for dinner. She said yes. He asked her if she would like a drink, and she said she would, very much, and he said he would bring a bottle of gin. He stopped at a place in Lexington Avenue, bought a bottle of the six-dollar gin, had a drink on Matt, the proprietor, and took a taxi, one of those small, low Philadelphia-made un-American-looking Yellows of that period.

Martha lived on Murray Hill between Park and Madison, in an automatic-elevator apartment. They had orange blossom cocktails, which Liggett liked. She asked once, and only once, about Emily. She said: “How’s Emily? She’s at Hyannisport, isn’t she?” He said she was fine, and was on the verge of correcting himself to say that whether she knew it or not she was not fine at all. Then later, when he saw Martha did not come back to Emily, he was in more real danger of talking about Emily; a girl who had what Martha had, the assurance and poise that gave her courage to accept his wanting to have dinner because she was herself and not merely a trusted friend of his wife’s—you could confide in that girl. But at the same time the thing he wanted to talk about began to recede. He began to enjoy himself because he was enjoying Martha’s company.

They had two cocktails, and then she told him to take off his coat. Next he thought she would offer him a cigar, because take his coat off was exactly what he wanted to do. It was so comfortable here. “Are you hungry?” he said.

“Not specially. Let’s wait. It’ll be cool around nine o’clock, if you’re in no hurry.”

“Gosh, I’m not in a hurry.”

“Have some more cocktails, shall we? You know, I like to drink. I never knew I did—gosh, I never even knew about drinking—till I married Tommy, and he used to try to get me drunk, but that was no good. I don’t like to have people try to get me drunk. If I want to get drunk. I’ll do it.”

He took the cocktail shaker to the kitchen and made very strong cocktails, not entirely on purpose, but not entirely accidentally, for what she had just been saying reminded him of a physical, biological, whatever-you-want-to-call-it fact: that Martha had been married and therefore had slept with a man. It meant no more to him for the time being. It was just strange that he had somehow ceased to think of her as a girl with a life of her own. Almost always he had thought of her as someone who, when he knew her better, would become finally a good sport, a sexless friend of Emily’s.

“Today is Bastille Day in Paris,” he said, when he returned with the cocktails. (It was also the day Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted.)

“So it is. I hope to be there next year on Bastille Day.”

“Oh, really?”

“I think so. I couldn’t go to the Cape this summer because Tommy finds out where I am and comes calling at all hours.”

“Isn’t there some way to put a stop to that?” he said.

“Oh, I suppose there is. People are always suggesting things like the police. But why do that? They don’t seem to remember that I like Tommy.”

“Oh, do you?”

“Very much. I’m not in love with him, but I like him.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, of course you couldn’t be expected to.”

“No, that’s true. I guess this is the first time you and I’ve really talked together.”

“It is.” She had her arm across the back of the sofa. She put down her cigarette and crushed it in the tray and picked up her cocktail. She looked away from him as she raised the glass. “As a matter of fact, I never thought we ever would be like this, the two of us, sitting, talking, having a cocktail together.”

“Why?”

“Do you want the truth?” she said.

“Of course.”

“Well, all right. The truth is I never liked you.”

“You didn’t.”

“No,” she said. “But I do now.”

Why? Why? Why? He wanted to ask. Why? Why do you like me now? I like you. How I like you! “But you do now,” he repeated.

“Yes. Aren’t you interested in knowing why I like you now after not liking you for such a long time?”

“Of course, but if you want to tell me you will and if you don’t there’s no use my asking.”

“Come here,” she said. He sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. “I like the way you smell.”

“Is that why you like me now and didn’t before?”

“Damn before!” She put her hand on his cheek. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t get up. I’ll do it.” She went to one of the two large windows and pulled down the shade. “People across the street.”

He had her with her clothes on. And from that moment on he never loved Emily again.

“Do you want to stay here tonight?” she said. “If I’m going to be with child for this we might as well be together all night. If you want to stay?”