Secret Ingredients (68 page)

Two thousand years of civilization lay in those remarks.

“And never be familiar.” Guiltily, he could imagine Lady Hackthorpe putting in her word. As the year passed, as his nourishment improved, the imaginary Lady Hackthorpe rather harped on the point.

There was no doubt about it, Plymbell admitted, he
had
been familiar. But only four times, he protested. And what is a kiss, in an office? At this he could almost hear Lady Hackthorpe laughing, in an insinuating way, that she hardly imagined there could be any question of his going any further.

Plymbell, now full of food, blew up into a temper with the accusing voices. He pitched into Miss Tell. He worked out a plan of timely dissatisfaction. His first attack upon her was made in the shop in the presence of one of the rare customers of those days.

“Why no extra liver this week, Miss Tell? My friend here has got some,” he said.

Miss Tell started, then blushed on the forehead. It was, he saw, a blush of pleasure. Public humiliation seemed to delight Miss Tell. He made it harder. “Why no eggs?” he shouted down the stairs, and on another day, as if he had a whip in his hand, “Anyone can get olive oil.” Miss Tell smiled and looked a little sideways at him.

Seeing he had not hurt her in public, Plymbell then made a false move. He called her to his room above the shop and decided to “blow her up” privately.

“I can’t
live
on fish,” he began. But whereas, delighted to be noticed, she listened to his public complaints in the shop, she did not listen in his room. By his second sentence, she had turned her back and wandered to the sofa. From there she went to his writing table, trailing a finger on it. She was certainly not listening. In the middle of his speech and as his astounded, colorless eyes followed her, she stopped and pointed through the double doors where his bedroom was and she pointed to the Hepplewhite bed.

“Is that Lady Hackthorpe’s, too?” she said.

“Yes,” said Plymbell, off his guard.

“Why do you have it up here?” she said rudely.

“Because I like it,” said Plymbell, snubbing her.

“I think four-posters are unhealthy,” said Miss Tell, and circled with meandering impertinence to the window and looked out onto the street. “That old man,” she said, admitting the vulgar world into the room, “is always going by.”

Plymbell raised his eyebrows; they would have gone higher only with difficulty.

Miss Tell shrugged at the window and considered the bed again across the space of two rooms. Then, impersonally, she made a speech. “I never married,” she said. “I have been friendly but not married. One great friend went away. There was no agreement, nothing said, he didn’t write and I didn’t write. In those cases I sympathize with the wife, but I wondered when he didn’t communicate. I didn’t know whether it was over or not over, and when you don’t know, it isn’t satisfactory. I don’t say it was anything, but I would have liked to know whether it was or not. I never mention it to anyone.”

“Oh,” said Plymbell.

“It upset Dad,” said Miss Tell, and of that she was proud.

“I don’t follow,” said Plymbell. He wanted to open the window and let Miss Tell’s private life out.

“It’s hard to describe something unsatisfactory,” said Miss Tell. And then “Dad was conventional.”

Mr. Plymbell shuddered.

“Are you interested?” asked Miss Tell.

“Please, please go on,” said Plymbell.

“I have been ‘the other woman’ three times,” said Miss Tell primly.

Plymbell put up his monocle, but as far as he could judge, all Miss Tell had done was make a public statement. He could think of no reply. His mind drifted. Suddenly he heard the voice of Miss Tell again, trembling, passionate, raging as it had been once before, at Polli’s, attacking him.

“She uses you,” Miss Tell was saying. “She puts all her rubbish into your shop, she fills up your flat. She won’t let you sell it. She hasn’t paid you. Storage is the dearest thing in London. You could make a profit, you would turn over your stock. Now is the time to buy, Dad said….”

Plymbell picked up his paper.

“Lady Hackthorpe,” explained Miss Tell, and he saw her face, small-mouthed and sick and shaking with jealousy.

“Lady Hackthorpe has gone to America,” Plymbell said in his snubbing voice.

Miss Tell’s rage had spent itself. “If you were not so horrible to me, I would tell you an idea,” she said.

“Horrible? My dear Miss Tell,” said Mr. Plymbell, leaning back as far as he could in his chair.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Miss Tell, and she walked away. “When is Lady Hackthorpe coming back?” she said.

“After the war, I suppose,” said Plymbell.

“Oh,” said Miss Tell, without belief.

“What is your idea?”

“Oh no. It was about lunch. At Polli’s. It is nothing,” said Miss Tell.

“Lunch,” said Plymbell with a start, dropping his eyeglass. “What about lunch?” And his mouth stayed open.

Miss Tell turned about and approached him. “No, it’s unsatisfactory,” said Miss Tell. She gave a small laugh and then made the crumb movements with her chin.

“Come here,” commanded Plymbell. “What idea about lunch?”

Miss Tell did not move, and so he got up, in a panic now. A mad suspicion came to him that Polli’s had been bombed, that someone—perhaps Miss Tell herself—was going to take his lunch away from him. Miss Tell did it down again. Miss Tell came and sat on the arm of his chair.

“Nothing,” she said, looking into his eyes for a long time and then turning away. “You have been horrible to me for ten months and thirteen days. You know you have.” Her back was to him.

Slices of pork, he saw, mutton, beef. He went through a nightmare that he arrived at Polli’s late, all the customers were inside, and the glass doors were locked. The headwaiter was standing there refusing to open. Miss Tell’s unnourished back made him think of this. He did no more than put his hand on her shoulder, as slight as a chicken bone, and as he did so, he seemed to hear a sharp warning snap from Lady Hackthorpe. “Gus,” Lady Hackthorpe seemed to say, “what are you doing? Are you mad? Don’t you know why Miss Tell had to leave her last place?” But Lady Hackthorpe’s words were smothered. A mere touch—without intention on Plymbell’s part—had impelled Miss Tell to slide backward onto his lap.

“How have I been horrid to you?” said Plymbell, forgetting to put inverted commas round the word “horrid.”

“You know,” said Miss Tell.

“What was this idea of yours,” he said quietly, and he kissed her neck. “No, no,” she said, and moved her head to the other side of his neck. There was suddenly a sound that checked them both. Her shoe fell off. And then an extraordinary thing happened to Plymbell. The sight of Miss Tell’s foot without its shoe did it. At fifty, he felt the first indubitable symptom. A scream went off inside his head—Lady Hackthorpe nagging him about some man she had known who had gone to bed with his housekeeper. “Ruin,” Lady Hackthorpe was saying.

“About lunch—it was a good idea,” Miss Tell said tenderly into his collar.

But it was not until three in the morning that Miss Tell told Plymbell what the idea was.

And so, every weekday, there is the modest example of Mr. Plymbell’s daily luncheon. The waiter takes the empty soup plate away from Miss Tell and presently comes forward with the meat and vegetables. He scrapes them off his serving dish onto her plate. She keeps her head lowered for a while, and then, with a glance to see if other customers are looking, she lifts the plate over to Mr. Plymbell’s place. He, of course, does not notice. Then, absently, he settles down to eat her food. While he does this, he mutters, “What did you get?” She nods at her stuffed basket and answers. Mr. Plymbell eats two lunches. While this goes on, Miss Tell looks at him. She is in a strong position now. Hunger is the basis of life and, for her, a great change has taken place. The satisfactory has occurred.

For two or three years have passed. Letters from America have come to the shop. Lady Hackthorpe is talking about cutting her American losses and coming back. On the one hand (Plymbell clearly sees), there is civilization, there are all those sauces; on the other, there is a woman with those ration books, not merely a human being—in Plymbell’s sense of the word—but three human beings.

Miss Tell has put it plainly: “If that woman comes in here, out I go.”

It is bad enough when Lady Hackthorpe sends food parcels, but Plymbell has been able to hide two of them and eat the contents secretly. He has failed, though, to think of any way of hiding Lady Hackthorpe. Blatancy is her life. The only plan that has occurred to Plymbell is one he tries out on the occasional foreign customer.

“There are times,” the speech runs, “when one is inclined to indite a brief but cogent epistle to any valued friend one may, hypothetically, have in lands less corrupted by necessity than one’s own, making the possibly disloyal suggestion that they postpone their return to their native hearth until what one can only call the war on the stomach has been, to use a vulgarism, mopped up. One is saddled with degradation; one hardly cares to be observed positively enjoying.”

Miss Tell has heard this speech once or twice. All she wants, she says, is to see the letter with her own eyes and post it herself. She wants to make sure, as well, that he has mentioned selling the furniture. It is the only unsatisfactory thing left.

1952

“I think I speak for my entire generation when I say, ‘Yes, I
will
have another drink.’”

THE SORROWS OF GIN

JOHN CHEEVER

I
t was a Sunday afternoon, and from her bedroom Amy could hear the Beardens coming in, followed a little while later by the Farquarsons and the Parminters. She went on reading
Black Beauty
until she felt in her bones that they might be eating something good. Then she closed her book and went down the stairs. The living-room door was shut, but through it she could hear the noise of loud talk and laughter. They must have been gossiping or worse, because they all stopped talking when she entered the room.

“Hi, Amy,” Mr. Farquarson said.

“Mr. Farquarson spoke to you, Amy,” her father said.

“Hello, Mr. Farquarson,” she said. By standing outside the group for a minute, until they had resumed their conversation, and then by slipping past Mrs. Farquarson, she was able to swoop down on the nut dish and take a handful.

“Amy!” Mr. Lawton said.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, retreating out of the circle, toward the piano.

“Put those nuts back,” he said.

“I’ve handled them, Daddy,” she said.

“Well, pass the nuts, dear,” her mother said sweetly. “Perhaps someone else would like nuts.”

Amy filled her mouth with the nuts she had taken, returned to the coffee table, and passed the nut dish.

“Thank you, Amy,” they said, taking a peanut or two.

“How do you like your new school, Amy?” Mrs. Bearden asked.

“I like it,” Amy said. “I like private schools better than public schools. It isn’t so much like a factory.”

“What grade are you in?” Mr. Bearden asked.

“Fourth,” she said.

Her father took Mr. Parminter’s glass and his own, and got up to go into the dining room and refill them. She fell into the chair he had left vacant.

“Don’t sit in your father’s chair, Amy,” her mother said, not realizing that Amy’s legs were worn out from riding a bicycle, while her father had done nothing but sit down all day.

As she walked toward the French doors, she heard her mother beginning to talk about the new cook. It was a good example of the interesting things they found to talk about.

“You’d better put your bicycle in the garage,” her father said, returning with the fresh drinks. “It looks like rain.”

Amy went out onto the terrace and looked at the sky, but it was not very cloudy, it wouldn’t rain, and his advice, like all the advice he gave her, was superfluous. They were always at her. “Put your bicycle away.” “Open the door for Grandmother, Amy.” “Feed the cat.” “Do your homework.” “Pass the nuts.” “Help Mrs. Bearden with her parcels.” “Amy, please try and take more pains with your appearance.” She looked at them through the glass doors. Her mother was wearing the red stole that matched the window curtains, but it didn’t conceal the fact that the zipper on her dress was broken. Her father was wearing the gray flannel suit that had belonged to Uncle Robert before he died. She could never understand how a man as rich and successful as her father—a vice-president in charge of distribution—could go around wearing the clothes of a dead man. It made her sick. Mrs. Farquarson had big, white, doughy legs, and she was wearing tennis shorts, so you could see how ugly her legs were.

They all stood, and her father came to the door and called her. “We’re going over to the Parminters’ for supper,” he said. “Cook’s here, so you won’t be alone. Be sure and go to bed at eight like a good girl. And come and kiss me good night.”

After their cars had driven off, Amy wandered through the kitchen to the cook’s bedroom beyond it and knocked on the door. “Come in,” a voice said, and when Amy entered, she found the cook, whose name was Rosemary, in her bathrobe, reading the Bible. Rosemary smiled at Amy. Her smile was sweet and her old eyes were blue. “Your parents have gone out again?” she asked. Amy said that they had, and the old woman invited her to sit down. “They do seem to enjoy themselves, don’t they? During the four days I’ve been here, they’ve been out every night, or had people in.” She put the Bible face down on her lap and smiled, but not at Amy. “Of course, the drinking that goes on here is all sociable, and what your parents do is none of my business, is it? I worry about drink more than most people, because of my poor sister. My poor sister drank too much. For ten years, I went to visit her on Sunday afternoons, and most of the time she was non compos mentis. Sometimes I’d find her huddled up on the floor with one or two sherry bottles empty beside her. Sometimes she’d seem sober enough to a stranger, but I could tell in a second by the way she spoke her words that she’d drunk enough not to be herself any more. Now my poor sister is gone, I don’t have anyone to visit at all.”

“What happened to your sister?” Amy asked.

“She was a lovely person, with a peaches-and-cream complexion and fair hair,” Rosemary said. “Gin makes some people gay—it makes them laugh and cry—but with my sister it only made her sullen and withdrawn. When she was drinking, she would retreat into herself. Drink made her contrary. If I’d say the weather was fine, she’d tell me I was wrong. If I’d say it was raining, she’d say it was clearing. She’d correct me about everything I said, however small it was. She died in Bellevue Hospital one summer when I was working in Maine. She was the only family I had.”

The directness with which Rosemary spoke had the effect on Amy of making her feel grown, and for once politeness came to her easily. “You must miss your sister a great deal,” she said.

“I was just sitting here now thinking about her. She was in service, like me, and it’s lonely work. You’re always surrounded by a family, and yet you’re never a part of it. Your pride is often hurt. The Madams seem condescending and inconsiderate. I’m not blaming the ladies I’ve worked for. It’s just in the nature of the relationship. They order chicken salad, and you get up before dawn to get ahead of yourself, and just as you’ve finished the chicken salad, they change their minds and want crabmeat soup.”

“My mother changes her mind all the time,” Amy said.

“Sometimes you’re in a country place with nobody else in help. You’re tired, but not too tired to feel lonely. You go out onto the servants’ porch when the pots and pans are done, planning to enjoy God’s creation, and although the front of the house may have a fine view of the lake or the mountains, the view from the back is never much. But there is the sky and the trees and the stars and the birds singing and the pleasure of resting your feet. But then you hear them in the front of the house, laughing and talking with their guests and their sons and daughters. If you’re new and they whisper, you can be sure they’re talking about you. That takes all the pleasure out of the evening.”

“Oh,” Amy said.

“I’ve worked in all kinds of places—places where there were eight or nine in help and places where I was expected to burn the rubbish myself, on winter nights, and shovel the snow. In a house where there’s a lot in help, there’s usually some devil among them—some old butler or parlor maid—who tries to make your life miserable from the beginning. ‘The Madam doesn’t like it this way,’ and ‘The Madam doesn’t like it that way,’ and ‘I’ve been with the Madam for twenty years,’ they tell you. It takes a diplomat to get along. Then there is the rooms they give you, and every one of them I’ve ever seen is cheerless. If you have a bottle in your suitcase, it’s a terrible temptation in the beginning not to take a drink to raise your spirits. But I have a strong character. It was different with my poor sister. She used to complain about nervousness, but, sitting here thinking about her tonight, I wonder if she suffered from nervousness at all. I wonder if she didn’t make it all up. I wonder if she just wasn’t meant to be in service. Toward the end, the only work she could get was out in the country, where nobody else would go, and she never lasted much more than a week or two. She’d take a little gin for her nervousness, then a little for her tiredness, and when she’d drunk her own bottle and everything she could steal, they’d hear about it in the front part of the house. There was usually a scene, and my poor sister always liked to have the last word. Oh, if I had had my way, they’d be a law against it! It’s not my business to advise you to take anything from your father, but I’d be proud of you if you’d empty his gin bottle into the sink now and then—the filthy stuff! But it’s made me feel better to talk with you, sweetheart. It’s made me not miss my poor sister so much. Now I’ll read a little more in my Bible, and then I’ll get you some supper.”

The Lawtons had had a bad year with cooks—there had been five of them. The arrival of Rosemary had made Marcia Lawton think back to a vague theory of dispensations; she had suffered, and now she was being rewarded. Rosemary was clean, industrious, and cheerful, and her table—as the Lawtons said—was just like the Chambord. On Wednesday night after dinner, she took the train to New York, promising to return on the evening train Thursday. Thursday morning, Marcia went into the cook’s room. It was a distasteful but a habitual precaution. The absence of anything personal in the room—a package of cigarettes, a fountain pen, an alarm clock, a radio, or anything else that could tie the old woman to the place—gave her the uneasy feeling that she was being deceived, as she had so often been deceived by cooks in the past. She opened the closet door and saw a single uniform hanging there and, on the closet floor, Rosemary’s old suitcase and the white shoes she wore in the kitchen. The suitcase was locked, but when Marcia lifted it, it seemed to be nearly empty.

Mr. Lawton and Amy drove to the station after dinner on Thursday to meet the 8:16 train. The top of the car was down, and the brisk air, the starlight, and the company of her father made the little girl feel kindly toward the world. The railroad station in Shady Hill resembled the railroad stations in old movies she had seen on television, where detectives and spies, bluebeards and their trusting victims, were met to be driven off to remote country estates. Amy liked the station, particularly toward dark. She imagined that the people who traveled on the locals were engaged on errands that were more urgent and sinister than commuting. Except when there was a heavy fog or a snowstorm, the club car that her father traveled on seemed to have the gloss and the monotony of the rest of his life. The locals that ran at odd hours belonged to a world of deeper contrasts, where she would like to live.

They were a few minutes early, and Amy got out of the car and stood on the platform. She wondered what the fringe of string that hung above the tracks at either end of the station was for, but she knew enough not to ask her father, because he wouldn’t be able to tell her. She could hear the train before it came into view, and the noise excited her and made her happy. When the train drew in to the station and stopped, she looked in the lighted windows for Rosemary and didn’t see her. Mr. Lawton got out of the car and joined Amy on the platform. They could see the conductor bending over someone in a seat, and finally the cook rose. She clung to the conductor as he led her out to the platform of the car, and she was crying. “Like peaches and cream,” Amy heard her sob. “A lovely, lovely person.” The conductor spoke to her kindly, put his arm around her shoulders, and eased her down the steps. Then the train pulled out, and she stood there drying her tears. “Don’t say a word, Mr. Lawton,” she said, “and I won’t say anything.” She held out a small paper bag. “Here’s a present for you, little girl.”

“Thank you, Rosemary,” Amy said. She looked into the paper bag and saw that it contained several packets of Japanese water flowers.

Rosemary walked toward the car with the caution of someone who can hardly find the way in the dim light. A sour smell came from her. Her best coat was spotted with mud and ripped in the back. Mr. Lawton told Amy to get in the back seat of the car, and made the cook sit in front, beside him. He slammed the car door shut after her angrily, and then went around to the driver’s seat and drove home. Rosemary reached into her handbag and took out a Coca-Cola bottle with a cork stopper and took a drink. Amy could tell by the smell that the Coca-Cola bottle was filled with gin.

“Rosemary!” Mr. Lawton said.

“I’m lonely,” the cook said. “I’m lonely, and I’m afraid, and it’s all I’ve got.”

He said nothing more until he had turned in to their drive and brought the car around to the back door. “Go and get your suitcase, Rosemary,” he said. “I’ll wait here in the car.”

As soon as the cook had staggered into the house, he told Amy to go in by the front door. “Go upstairs to your room and get ready for bed.”

Her mother called down the stairs when Amy came in, to ask if Rosemary had returned. Amy didn’t answer. She went to the bar, took an open gin bottle, and emptied it into the pantry sink. She was nearly crying when she encountered her mother in the living room, and told her that her father was taking the cook back to the station.

When Amy came home from school the next day, she found a heavy, black-haired woman cleaning the living room. The car Mr. Lawton usually drove to the station was at the garage for a checkup, and Amy drove to the station with her mother to meet him. As he came across the station platform, she could tell, by the lack of color in his face, that he had had a hard day. He kissed her mother, touched Amy on the head, and got behind the wheel.