Textures of Life

For Bennet and Peter

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About the Author

“T
O THE HAPPY COUPLE!”

The toast was acknowledged with faintly disowning smiles from both family sides of the twenty-five people at table—as coming merely from a Chicago aunt-of-the-bride’s second husband, whom nobody had ever seen before and was the only one of the party who was getting drunk.

The couple themselves did not appear to notice him at all. The bride was the thin girl with stork neck and messily naiad hair, her dress no more than the shift in which they all slouched about the streets these days as if proclaiming that to be nineteen was chic enough. Beside heir, the stolid, blond boy, nice-looking enough behind thick lenses, wore his unmatched jacket and trousers with the same arrogance. Confronting the garb of the guests, theirs had the value of an affectation. The two of them stood ready to go now, outside the celebration as they had been from its beginning.

The girl’s mother, a widow, had pleaded for it, carefully not for herself but for the boy’s father who, alone like herself, but with only a year or two to spare now, was said to be dying. The father headed the table, that dark-eyed, still quick-moving man whose features, though tanned, were—even to the casual eye—of a certain saintly tightness, phosphorescence, whose deft fingers, if one knew their sentence as they played with a heart-shaped box in front of him, seemed already ringed with St. Elmo’s fire. The widow was at his side, a sleek woman, still pretty, only fortyish, turned out in those subtle tonalities, stolen from modern art, which one could pick up now in the department stores. Through those there came nevertheless a certain Jenny Wren-ness, ingenuous plumpness of the girlhood one would still be able to see in her face if raised—but she too had her eyes lowered to her white, silver-stamped, frilled heart-box.

“Good champagne!” said the flushed uncle-by-marriage, then glanced apologetically at his wife, the widow’s sister. A shrewd, good fellow, he hadn’t meant to sound surprised, to press in any way what must be known to all here: that he was worth enough (when he let himself think of how near a half-million it was, his pulse nearly stopped in awe of what had happened to him, a half
-million
) to buy and sell everybody here, singly or together—certainly at least those on his wife’s and the bride’s side of the family, on the New York side. There was no telling for sure about Pagani, the groom’s father and almost sole representative, for if there was any special way of rating Italians from California, it hadn’t yet reached Winnetka, but fashionable photographers made a mint these days, and this one (like his own father, the Pagani before him, it was even said) was the best children’s one in a town where even the toys were gold-plated. The boy’s dead mother had been Jewish, just like Jacobson, the girl’s dead father. Not that Jews or any other kind meant anything for sure one way or the other these days. The uncle himself was probably the only full Protestant in the room, not that he wished to make anything of that either, live and let live; his own wife was a Catholic—lapsed. All it meant was that the happy couple were about even on the racial mixture, just as well matched there as they seemed on everything else. It made him uncomfortable just to look at them, that girl who hadn’t been to a hairdresser even on her wedding day, the boy neat enough, with a build that could even have been football, but with something indoors about him, not four-square—the thing, whatever it was, that let him stand there so coolly united with her, letting the way she looked speak for him, that had made him choose this girl.

Glancing aside, the uncle saw that his wife’s glass, next to his, was still full. He drained it. No surprise that it should be good; though Margot Jacobson, the widow, and his wife were no longer close, he’d seen at once how like the sisters still were—thrifty, spendthrifty New York-bred women who knew how to cut a thousand corners—not too fine. The scene was good enough, too—private dining room of a small hotel on the Square (one he’d never heard of but might be no worse for that), with only as seedy-velvet a look to it as all such rooms, and on the embroidered tablecloth, at each place set with the silver that must be Margot’s own, there was a natty roses-and-violets nosegay. The guests, the usual lot, were nice and chatty enough, or had begun so. Then why was this the chilliest damned wedding lunch they had any of them—he could see that—ever been to in their lives?

It had nothing to do with the recognizable chill of generation that came over the older guests even at the high jinks of the weddings he was used to—four hundred strong at the country club in a hot, yellow June—as they waved off the clear-eyed pairs, the Easter-in-Nassau tanned girls risen for a day like Venuses on their scallops, the boys with that short-lived glow to the flesh, like a stallion’s nostril—waved them off, off, ruddy in their white, to fecundity. That sort of qualm came from knowing the score too absolutely ever to want to go through it again—and from being left behind, never to go through it again. The chill in this room came from the couple themselves, fragile with youth as they still were, that city-rat pair. From the lack of awkwardness between them, he suspected that they already knew the score in one way. But, leaning together, their attitude suggested that they knew it in all, by prevision if not experience—and it was the success of this that made older eyes in the room glide sideways, genial voices die. The vibrance that joined this pair, looked at him out of their eyes, was contempt—not for his half-million, which he could have understood—but for any such sentiments as he, the room, was prepared to offer them. The two didn’t make him feel old, but rather: angrily, clumsily young. It was the girl Elizabeth, really; either she led, or the boy showed it less; he had left her for the moment, going down the line to say good-bye affectionately enough to his father. The girl remained where she was, her gaze lowered on one of the nosegays. One of her ears shone through hair, poodled at the front, that straggled down her back like a guttersnipe Alice’s. The earlobe, pierced with a tiny earring, like an immigrant baby’s, looked as young—but he would not dare pity it. He thought he had never seen anybody stare so venomously at a rose. Shocked, he drained the next nearest full glass, and heard himself say, with the same loose surprise, “Good champagne.”

“Chateau D’ay, Ayala. Really remarkably good for the price. Sherry’s stock it.” This was from Margot, the girl’s mother. Acquaintances cherished her as one of those animated little women who, not too obtrusively, always knew a “little” place to find anything from amethysts to eggs, but today the tip came automatically, like the cardboard ticket from the set smile of a glass-enclosed Princess Fatima at a fair. Only Ernest, her recently dead husband, would have known that she felt like crying, and why. In a dim way not quite apart from intelligences she had been given in the municipal college twenty-odd years ago, and had drunk in renewed, through the modern private school for which they had sacrificed to send their only child, she understood that her daughter’s animosity toward her—against the way they’d brought her up, against this very occasion—was connected with her own very blamable dependence on nice things. “Things!” Elizabeth called them simply, and sullenly. For if, at nineteen, she could see any of her mother’s needs with clarity, this lay in her awareness, scornful as it was, that “things” were not merely a taste or a boastfulness in her mother’s life—or even a love—they were her gravitation.

“I can’t help it,” Margot had replied once, during the short week finally granted her for wedding fuss, “I was brought up that way,” and her voice, wavering toward excuse, had resolved, as it so often did, on pride. Her family, first established here uptown in Yorkville by her grandfather, a young chiropodist trained in Vienna, had brought with them the finest merchant-fingered sense of their own small dynasty, as real to them as that of the monarchs of the empire from which they had come, and based like it on the clearest image of a certain standard of noblesse from which, even in a cellar, they must not fall. Naturally, they, not being monarchs, must try rather harder to keep out of cellars, and had—this was part of it. Theirs was that lower-middle-class noblesse which had had to build not on lineage, but on the living itself—on a cookery never below butter, linens fit enough for any Hapsburg injured on their doorstep, and on a fanatically embroidered cleanliness—below which combined surfaces lay always the dark turds of shame. Yes, there’d been that too, of course, in the stony tone of her grandmother’s “
Schmutzig!
”, in her whisper to the five-year-old Margot’s mother, when the little girl had wet herself publicly, “Meta, the child has shamed herself!”, in her own mother’s hiss to the short skirts of sixteen, “Knees together, you shame!”—below that moral surface, poverty, dirt and what went on between the legs were all somehow tangled together. Above it were the nice and their “things,” objects which in time acquired their own minor heraldry, if as nothing more than as tokens of safety. Such a family, never risen to
rentiers
, never dropped into poverty, had known only the middle-class terror. Even now, if Margot chanced on the catchword “security” in a newspaper, what she thought of at once, before thinking, was a large pseudo-Sèvres candy dish always reared on its ugly pedestal in the bay of her grandmother’s parlor-floor-front, the dominant center—below a dado of beer steins and grotesques from the Tyrol—of a room in which even the shadows were scrubbed, and always (even on the day of her grandmother’s funeral) filled.

Through three generations it had remained so, down the dark days of her father’s failure in the wholesale bakery business, through all Ernest’s ups and downs as a manufacturers’ agent, when the household had often fattened on every sample of his trade except money—for Ernest, son of a German-Jewish auctioneer on University Place, had been even closer to her, in their mutual faith in things, than many a couple of the same religion. She would have brought the dish here today, to be set out for the family td recognize, if he had only been with her to dare Elizabeth’s scorn.

“Candy!” Elizabeth had said, looking down on it—just refilled with the bright pastilles Mrs. Jacobson always kept there—on that day, not a week ago, when she had come in from life-class to report that she and David would be getting married next week, now that they had found the very loft to live in. “Candy! I’ll smash that thing for you yet.” As she turned to survey the whole overscrupulous room, the great swinging book-bag that was her reticule, purse and home had almost done so. Eyes hard on her own dreams, she had shrugged and gone out again—now she didn’t need to. As it was, Margot, reminding herself that lofts could be chic now, grateful that celebration was to be allowed at all—even if an impending death had had to be invoked to alter her daughter’s stark plans—had consoled herself with her own last-minute hunt, almost hysterical at the end, as real pre-bridal days should be, for the object she now held in her hand.

It had taken all her ingenuity to find it, and when it had been passed to her over the Armenian caterer’s zinc counter, she had not known, in her grim-soft mood, whether to weep or laugh. It was exactly like the one at her own wedding, the one from her mother’s for that matter—in her childhood always kept in a drawer of the sideboard, together with the 1910 caterer’s bill for that wedding in the parlor-floor-front—a bill which she still had.
Louis Mazzetti, Cordon Bleu.
Then the menu, for forty guests,
complete service, 2 Candelabras, 2 Waiters, 1 assistant, 36 Camp Chairs, 6 Round Tables,
and down at the bottom,
Extra
—
40 Wedding Cakes in boxes Heart Shape, “M.C.” in Silver and Gold.
In her mother’s saved one, sometimes opened for her to see, the cake had been black as lava; she had therefore not kept her own. Except for the initials, the box she now held was the same as the other two, but if Elizabeth had noticed its resemblance to the often described others, she had not said, and now that she was leaving without having done so, her mother was glad. She saw that her daughter, well-mannered enough in some things, was now making her adieux, coming toward her down the far line of relatives, inclining an ear, a cheek, with a reserve that Margot knew to be as hard as the dried-clay busts Elizabeth was leaving behind in her bedroom, but hoped that relatives would mistake for poise merely—on Elizabeth’s lips the small smile that even they must see to be a mocking one.