Queenie (8 page)

Sam’s staring at her. “Well, if you ever hang here, Queenie, you’ll know who you—were.”

I get straight up from the chair. “The girls are still stunning, all of them.” Most. The ones who are not, are no longer one of the girls.

“‘Fear of fa-ding——’ Sam’s humming a song from his play, ‘keeps us from fa-ding, dear.’ Oh, they do very well. Your aunt of course is unique.”

“Most of them are lots younger than——” I flip out a hand. Handsome men, distinguished is more the word, but attractive enough you could still die for them, I suppose. If you’re in the right dress. “Lots younger than any of you.”

“Sadly true, Queenie love. Here, give me that glass.” He takes it. “But outside this…club…the girls are even younger than that.”

“Not for Oscar.”

“Oscar too is unique. Why, looky here.” He’s filling my glass from under the rows of pictures, where the bar is always stocked with the wine and seltzer, the whiskey and the beer. And tonight, the champagne. And the cigars. Sam takes one. “Cigarettes, you bring yourself. And no women. Oscar’s an easy host. Easy on us.” He lights up. “Nowadays, the orgy is only one of sentiment.”

What’s he trying to tell me, talking as usual like one of his plays?

“Ladies used to appear, at his evening suppers,” I say. Catered from the Stage Delly, consommé to nuts. “Oscar’s poorer these days.” But I’m suddenly remembering how it used to be when I sat on laps as well as knees here. Way back. And way, w-ay livelier.

Sam shakes his head. “Uh-uh, that’s vintage you’re drinking. Oscar never stints anybody except himself. No—the word went round—years ago.”

“No girls from the outside?”

He nods. We both look at the gentlemen chatterers, their familiar heads all down the length of the room, like those cartoons with numbers that tell you who. And beside each head, the invisible one of a girl who isn’t here? Because if she were, she’d be years younger than Aurine?

“I don’t believe it,” I say. Sam’s his kind of playwright; Sam likes things neat. Besides—Oscar would never do anything so vulgar. As pass the word around that Aurine couldn’t take it. But most of all—Aurine’s deeper than that. Or simpler. She could handle it. She’d love to.

“I don’t blame you,” Sam says. “No girls at
all
, you nit. Except you, you lucky creature. How many ten-year-olds have had a salon like us?”

I am too stunned to speak of course, for the moment. Because of me? They stinted themselves of social pleasures that weren’t yet right for me? Oscar
and
Aurine. Why have I never thought of their doing something together? For love—they did it for love. Because of me, they haven’t kept
themselves
up to the mark.

Can I believe it? Answer—once you’re in the play yourself, you almost always can.

“What’s this Lewis Carroll drag
you’re
in, by the way?” Sam says, lifting a lock of the hair down my back and twitching the collar of my slightly schoolgirl blue velvet. Aurine had a fit when I put it on instead of the nifty she’d bought me. Be yourself, she said—it’s time. And it is. But they’ll never learn that I can’t do it here.

“A tribute to your childhood?” Sam asks. “Or saving our feelings?”

“Smart, aren’t you.” It’s a tribute to them all. Be myself like we
are
on the outside? It would never go. They’d be shattered. But I know how they think I am—or hope. “In breastplates and a see-through, Sam? You think that would go, here?”

“We-ell, let’s not think how.”

The laughing begins with me, then seeps over to him. Someone passing—is it the Barrymore butler?—grins at us and pours us more.

“Queenie, tell your uncle Sam,” Sam says. “What’s a smart girl like you bothering with college for?”

Can I tell like him? Though he’s the man I once overheard Oscar say Aurine had no envy to, I have to be delicate. Sam’s had women, but somehow you never meet him except in the gloomy periods afterward. Somehow, I hadn’t ought to mention penises. “Sam—I have to learn—why I really want to be a man.”

After a while, he looks up, and says “Flatterer.” Sam’s smart.

So then I can say it to him, “Why do you all really come here?”

He jerks up a sleeve, toward the photos. Am I also supposed to see they don’t make dinner jackets like that anymore? “History…and a place to go.”

Oh Sam, if you would write plays like that!

I must have said it out loud, Father. I’d had a lot.

For suddenly, he’s moving the arm, waving it, to point, point, fifty feet and back, from the window where we are. A long perspective. “My God, my God, why bother staging it?” he’s saying. “When life will!”

It’s the main house door he’s pointing at. A great carved-mahogany door, new when the old joint was, it’s high enough to carry a torch through. And Aurine is entering it. She’s standing there, filling it to the
n
th. History has to take a back seat.

Such entrances aren’t done anymore. Fifty feet of it, slow as royalty, through men who haven’t seen her for years, to their slow roar. She has on that dress in her picture. It doesn’t show much of her, by present standards. Except to me—what she’s done for the sake of it. One side of the dress is slashed to the hip. Her hips have that line she says has to be like the bottom of the fleur-de-lis. Like mine. Can’t be done after thirty, Queenie. She has. “It’s not only the weight, Queenie,” she’d said, “it’s what’s in the spine.” And in the heart. As she moves now, the rest of her—that smoky gauze, those tiger jewels, those shoulders—is a mist. Through which each of us can see clearly. One corner of her mouth is especially up.

Beside me I hear Sam say, “Fear of fading——” and choke on it. But being Sam, after we watch her disappear, allagazam! into the kisses, and rise again here and there like a ball of confetti on a champagne fountain, he’s able to turn to me and say, “Life’s done well.”

It’s what a man would say. I’m beginning to see it’s what a man must. But things are still tit-for-tat between them and me; I’m not my aunt yet. So I give it to him. “
And
Aurine.”

For I begin to see what makes my aunt tick.

At the height of the muddle—for me—and the romance—for them—is when I begin to. It’s when they’re taking her pic and mine. Oscar is. And is it only him she’s looking at when she spreads her arms wide—not from secondhand Hollywood but from the heart—and cries out, “I love you all. You’re all simply beautiful!”

No. For to me she whispers then, “Aren’t they! Must you really leave?”

Yes, Auntie. I must. Beautiful as
you
are, the romance here is so thick I can’t drink it. I’m my age; I can see the history of the men. I can see what
they’re
envying. They don’t envy us of course, her or me. Or even the girls on the outside. What is it then? What is it, with them? With Sam here? What gives all their noble pans that look of suffering? That Arctic explorer, like he wants the tundra again. Sam here, like he wants a new tux. Can it be they’re all envying their former, other, better days? Can it be a man spends most of his life envying
himself
?

And my aunt knows it. She hasn’t come here only to show them how well she’s lasted, but how well they have. She believes in them. Should I envy her for that?

I’ve an idea college won’t teach me it.

Just then, the old butler cries out, “And what about girlie there? Does she think we’re beautiful?” There’s a slide of laughter—and a hopeful hush. How romantic they are, the older ones! That butler. There must be a hundred-year age difference between him and me—ninety for him, and a hundred and ninety for me. I have this time lag. But Aurine’s waiting, her eyes shining. Oscar too. Even Sam. The picture we all make ought to be the one of the year any year.

“Oh I do, I do!” I cry. “You’re all so young.”

A Family Fuss

Pass on to the Family Affair, a low joke at which Oscar still laughs himself into hiccups. “Who starts all the dirty jokes anyway?” he’ll choke, his eyes streaming. “God.” Certainly some providence wants to keep my attention on penises, Father. And we can thank the Lord it wasn’t a public day at the restaurant.

We’re all there en famille, that Monday lunch, and as usual in some excitement over who the family will be today. The girls of course are the constants, barring long Indian engagements like Taffy’s with her rajah, or other road tours. Or new members of the sisterhood, which since the girls are now in their late thirties or early forties hasn’t happened for some time.

Now and then, there’s still a stray like Martyne’s “sister-in-law” from Chattanooga; Martyne isn’t married, but the boy friend who sent the girl up and away was, and has since got her back again, with a note from Martyne: “I took her to the track, hon, but all that wahoo-in’ bothers the horses. And the men up here like girls with more teeth.”

Or there was Alba’s real cousin from Italy, a lovely chick but not fitted for free lance, who takes one look at the girls and gets herself married hard and fast in that New Jersey nitespot advertises it has a “bride’s staircase.” You have to start being one of these girls early, I remind myself grimly, or it doesn’t take; sixteen is pretty late.

It’s the men who make our surprises, in the back of L’Alouette; Oscar says he wouldn’t go through his maiden voyage toward those banquettes again even for Aurine. Such a hemming and hawing as goes on among the gents, over the new member of the family, such peals of introduction from his lady sponsor, who is bound to make him look bigger in the world he’s big in than the other men are, and all this time the quiet assessment from the other girls, who are treating him like any family does a newborn: “Looks exactly like her old Mackenzie, regard the nose! Mack—remember him?” And how he didn’t pay her bills? Plus among the male regulars their own silent exchange, relieved or resigned. Well old boy—I see you’re still here. And so, you see, am I. We both can still afford the best.

The girls make every effort to convince them of it. Today, not even Indian summer yet, “not even Jewish New Year” murmurs Oscar, and only the washday beginning of the week, there’s as much fur at this little Ninth Avenue affair of forty tables, as there is at Christmas, he says, at St. Moritz.

First, Dulcy, always our trenchcoat girl, strolls in from Washington in her new one of shaved seal, that costs twice as much as mink—nobody here bothers with that old stuff. No ruffles for Dulcy, except her eyelashes. She’s on the arm of Potto Brown, who the girls say is the sweetest of all her rotations, and is called “the Commander” here, because he’s an Admiral of the Fleet.

Next in comes Rudolph, ninety-year-old charter member of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, on the arm of Martyne, who is in yards of fox, and sighs contentedly, after the compliments, “I just can’t give up the baby-doll stuff!” Rudolph hasn’t been a regular for years, but she’s brought him, instead of her Man from Dixie, on the chance that Tekla, wrestler-in-residence to the UN Secretariat, might be bringing one of her blacks.

She has, swinging in with that nice turbaned one from Sierra Leone, where those new diamond strikes are. Careless Swede that she is, she’s wearing an old evening ermine, cut shorter. “White,” she says, shrugging. “For summer. And goes well with black.”

Alba’s late again; she’s always in church, making novenas for some wife. Today she’s wearing a little nothing made of what she says is vicuña—it always infuriates the girls when she has to tell them. She never wears fur. Everything on her gets plainer, as she gets richer.

“Your clothes are like higher metaphysics, Alba,” says Oscar. “Sooner or later, they’ll disappear.”

Not Alba though, she’ll be there, with a neck like a Brancusi, and a long bod like two of them. Feet? You’re surprised she has them. Married keep-the-faith bankers go for her—the kind always interested in winged creatures. “Did you confess me?” she says to them. “Don’t forget to.”

She never brings them here. Like always, she’s with Candido, a package-size panther with double eyebrows and hips like fists, who she claims is homosexual
and
her brother. We pretend like anyway we believe this last. She keeps showing us his birth certificate. Like Oscar says, “Alba is extra-cautious. Candido is a forgery
twice
.”

Candido is wearing mink.

Meanwhile, Aurine has got herself and me neatly out of this competition. I, the guest of honor, am allowed a sleeveless sportdress, as a gone chick anyway, on my way to being a college girl. “To dress for the weather——” says Aurine, rolling her eyes as she greets the others, “the last privilege of youth!” I know what she hopes for me, by next summer maybe, if I come to my senses. Suffocation—by sable.

She herself is radiant, in white organdie, and ownership. Yards of both surround her. Who can suspect that the year-long feud in the kitchen has only been settled for the day? Or worse, has come to a head?

“Marcel will cook,
grâce à Dieu
,” she’s whispered to me, meaning “young Marcel,” chef fresh last year from Paris, only learning the ropes here en route to a Beverly Hills offer—but if she lets him “marry” me, which he can’t credit isn’t in her power, he will stay. And if my dowry is half the restaurant.

I’m intrigued by this; no one’s ever wanted me for anything except my looks before. Or for something that serious. I’ve already obeyed instructions to go in the kitchen and sweeten him a little. “No more than a kiss, Queenie, and don’t mention college.” He thinks this is my birthday fete.

To Oscar, she’s just sighed, “Thanks be to God, Marcel will after all serve.”

This is “old Marcel,” maître d’ from before her time, and present figurehead. Until today, many have half believed that he may be the owner here, and he has never contradicted it. He’s standing now at the service door, watching us darkly, not a twitch on his bloodhound chops, his artisan fingers stiff at his side. His boast is that he has never shaken hands in his life.

He is also possibly the only male-male in our world who doesn’t want to sleep with Aurine. Though a
crime passionnel
might interest him. She’s given him the cut direct, by hiring a chef of his same name. Out of dozens of suitable Jacques’s and Georges’s in the Paris Register, she’s maliciously picked the one to make him “old” Marcel. Out with that one, of course, when he himself buys the place; a son of the Massif Central, and of the greatest food in France, knows how to bide his time. Until today—and that dress—she’s led him to believe she will sell.