The 42nd Parallel (28 page)

“Well, I might some day, when my ship comes in,” said Eleanor.

“Oh, well, I’ll never be rich,” said Eveline. “My father’s a clergyman

. . . Let’s go to Florence together, Eleanor, and call on your father. If we arrived there he couldn’t very well throw us out.”

“I’d love to take a trip some day.”

“It’s time I was home. By the way, where do you live? Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon and look at all the pictures together.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be busy tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you can come to supper some night. I’ll ask mother when I can have you. It’s so rare to meet a girl you can talk to. We live on Drexel Boulevard. Here’s my card. I’ll send you a postcard and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

“I’d love to, if it’s not earlier than seven . . . You see I have an occupation that keeps me busy every afternoon except Sunday, and Sundays I usually go out to see my relatives in . . .”

“In Lake Forest?”

“Yes . . . When I’m in town I live at a sort of Y.W.C.A. place, Moody House; it’s plebeian but convenient . . . I’ll write down the address on this card.” The card was of Mrs. Lang’s, “Imported Laces and Hand-Embroidered Fabrics.” She wrote her address on it, scratched out the other side and handed it to Eveline. “That’s lovely,” she said, “I’ll drop you a card this very night and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

Eleanor saw her onto the streetcar and started to walk slowly along the street. She had forgotten all about feeling sick, but now that the other girl had gone she felt let down and shabbily dressed and lonely picking her way through the windy evening bustle of the streets.

Eleanor made several friends through Eveline Hutchins. The first time she went to the Hutchinses she was too awed to notice much, but later she felt freer with them, particularly as she discovered that they all thought her an interesting girl and very refined. There were Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins and two daughters and a son away at college. Dr. Hutchins was a Unitarian minister and very broadminded and Mrs. Hutchins did watercolors of flowers that were declared to show great talent. The elder daughter, Grace, had been at school in the East, at Vassar, and was thought to have shown ability in a literary way, the son was taking postgraduate Greek at Harvard and Eveline was taking the most interesting courses right there at Northwestern. Dr. Hutchins was a softvoiced man with a large smooth pinkish face and large smooth white deadlooking hands. The Hutchinses were all planning to go abroad next year which would be Dr. Hutchins’ sabbatical. Eleanor had never heard talk like that before and it thrilled her.

Then one evening Eveline took her to Mrs. Shuster’s. “You mustn’t say anything about Mrs. Shuster at home, will you?” said Eveline as they were coming down from the Elevated. “Mr. Shuster is an art dealer and my father thinks they’re a little too Bohemian . . . It’s just because Annie Shuster came to our house one night and smoked all through dinner. . . . I said we’d go to the concert at the Auditorium.”

Eleanor had made herself a new dress, a very simple white dress, with a little green on it, not exactly an evening dress, but one she could wear any time, for the occasion, and when Annie Shuster, a dumpy little redhaired woman with a bouncy manner of walking and talking helped them off with their wraps in the hall she exclaimed how pretty it was. “Why, yes, it’s lovely,” said Eveline. “In fact, you’re looking pretty as a peach tonight, Eleanor.” “I bet that dress wasn’t made in this town . . . Looks like Paris to me,” said Mrs. Shuster. Eleanor smiled deprecatingly and blushed a little and looked handsomer than ever.

There were a great many people packed into two small rooms and cigarette smoke and coffeecups and smell of some kind of punch. Mr. Shuster was a whitehaired grayfaced man with a head too large for his body and a tired manner. He talked like an Englishman. There were several young men standing round him; one of them Eleanor had known casually when she had studied at the Art Institute. His name was Eric Egstrom and she had always liked him; he was tow-haired and blue-eyed and had a little blond mustache. She could see that Mr. Shuster thought a lot of him. Eveline took her around and introduced her to everybody and asked everybody questions that seemed sometimes disconcerting. Men and women both smoked and talked about books and pictures and about people Eleanor had never heard of. She looked around and didn’t say much and noticed the Greek silhouettes on the orange lampshades and the pictures on the walls which looked very odd indeed and the two rows of yellowbacked French books on the shelves and felt that she might learn a great deal there.

They went away early because Eveline had to go by the Auditorium to see what the program at the concert was for fear she might be asked about it, and Eric and another young man took them home. After they’d left Eveline at her house they asked Eleanor where she lived and she hated to say Moody House because it was in such a horridlooking street, so she made them walk with her to an Elevated station and ran up the steps quickly and wouldn’t let them come with her, although it scared her to go home alone as late as it was.

Many of Mrs. Lang’s customers thought Eleanor was French, on account of her dark hair, her thin oval face and her transparent skin. In fact, one day when a Mrs. McCormick that Mrs. Lang suspected might be one of “the” McCormicks asked after that lovely French girl who waited on her before, Mrs. Lang got an idea. Eleanor would have to be French from now on; so she bought her twenty tickets at the Berlitz School and said she could have the hour off in the morning between nine and ten if she would go and take French lessons there. So all through December and January Eleanor studied French three times a week with an old man in a smelly alpaca jacket and began to slip a phrase in now and then as unconcernedly as she could when she was talking to the customers, and when there was anybody in the shop Mrs. Lang always called her “Mademoiselle.”

She worked hard and borrowed yellowbacked books from the Shusters to read in the evenings with a dictionary and soon she knew more French than Eveline did who had had a French governess when she was little. One day at the Berlitz School she found she had a new teacher. The old man had pneumonia and she had a young Frenchman instead. He was a thin young man with a sharp blueshaved chin and large brown eyes with long lashes. Eleanor liked him at once, his thin aristocratic hands and his aloof manner. After half an hour they had forgotten all about the lesson and were talking English. He spoke English with a funny accent but fluently. She particularly liked the throaty way he pronounced “r.”

Next time she was all tingling going up the stairs to see if it would be the same young man. It was. He told her that the old man had died. She felt she ought to be sorry but she wasn’t. The young man noticed how she felt and screwed his face up into a funny half laughing, half crying expression and said, “Vae victis.” Then he told her about his home in France and how he hated the conventional bourgeois life there and how he’d come to America because it was the land of youth and the future and skyscrapers and the Twentieth Century Limited and how beautiful he thought Chicago was. Eleanor had never heard anyone talk like that and told him he must have gone through Ireland and kissed the blarney stone. Then he looked very aggrieved and said, “Mademoiselle, c’est la pure vérité,” and she said she believed him absolutely and how interesting it was to meet him and how she must introduce him to her friend Eveline Hutchins. Then he went on to tell her how he’d lived in New Orleans and how he’d come as a steward on a French Line boat and how he’d worked as dishwasher and busboy and played the piano in cabarets and worse places than that and how much he loved Negroes and how he was a painter and wanted so much to get a studio and paint but that he hadn’t the money yet. Eleanor was a little chilled by the part about dishwashing and cabarets and colored people, but when he said he was interested in art she felt she really would have to introduce him to Eveline and she felt very bold and unconventional when she asked him to meet them at the Art Institute Sunday afternoon. After all if they decided against it they wouldn’t have to go.

Eveline was thrilled to death but they got Eric Egstrom to come along too, on account of Frenchmen having such a bad reputation. The Frenchman was very late and they began to be afraid he wasn’t coming or that they’d missed him in the crowd but at last Eleanor saw him coming up the big staircase. His name was Maurice Millet—no, no relation of the painter’s—and he shocked them all very much by refusing to look at any paintings in the Art Institute and saying that he thought it ought to be burned down and used a lot of words like cubism and futurism that Eleanor had never heard before. But she could see at once that he had made a great hit with Eveline and Eric; in fact, they hung on his every word and all through tea neither of them paid any attention to Eleanor. Eveline invited Maurice to the house and they all went to supper to Drexel Boulevard where Maurice was very polite to Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins, and on to the Shusters afterwards. They left the Shusters together and Maurice said that the Shusters were impossible and had very bad paintings on their walls, “Tout ça c’est affreusement pompier,” he said. Eleanor was puzzled but Eveline and Eric said that they understood perfectly that he meant they knew as little about art as a firemen’s convention, and they laughed a great deal.

The next time she saw Eveline, Eveline confessed that she was madly in love with Maurice and they both cried a good deal and decided that after all their beautiful friendship could stand even that. It was up in Eveline’s room at Drexel Boulevard. On the mantel was a portrait Eveline was trying to do of him in pastels from memory. They sat side by side on the bed, very close, with their arms round each other and talked solemnly about each other and Eleanor told about how she felt about men; Eveline didn’t feel quite that way but nothing could ever break up their beautiful friendship and they’d always tell each other everything.

About that time Eric Egstrom got a job in the interior decorating department at Marshall Field’s that paid him fifty a week. He got a fine studio with a northlight in an alley off North Clark Street and Maurice went to live with him there. The girls were there a great deal and they had many friends in and tea in glasses Russian style and sometimes a little Virginia Dare wine, so they didn’t have to go to the Shusters any more. Eleanor was always trying to get in a word alone with Eveline; and the fact that Maurice didn’t like Eveline the way Eveline liked him made Eveline very unhappy, but Maurice and Eric seemed to be thoroughly happy. They slept in the same bed and were always together. Eleanor used to wonder about them sometimes but it was so nice to know boys who weren’t horrid about women. They all went to the opera together and to concerts and art exhibitions—it was Eveline or Eric who usually bought the tickets and paid when they ate in restaurants—and Eleanor had a better time those few months than she’d ever had in her life before. She never went out to Pullman any more and she and Eveline talked about getting a studio together when the Hutchinses came back from their trip abroad. The thought that every day brought June nearer and that then she would lose Eveline and have to face the horrid gritty dusty sweaty Chicago Summer alone made Eleanor a little miserable sometimes, but Eric was trying to get her a job in his department at Marshall Field’s, and she and Eveline were following a course of lectures on interior decorating at the University evenings, and that gave her something to look forward to.

Maurice painted the loveliest pictures in pale buffs and violets of longfaced boys with big luminous eyes and long lashes, and longfaced girls that looked like boys, and Russian wolfhounds with big luminous eyes, and always in the back there were a few girders or a white skyscraper and a big puff of white clouds and Eveline and Eleanor thought it was such a shame that he had to go on teaching at the Berlitz School.

The day before Eveline sailed for Europe they had a little party at Egstrom’s place. Maurice’s pictures were around the walls and they were all glad and sorry and excited and tittered a great deal. Then Egstrom came in with the news that he had told his boss about Eleanor and how she knew French and had studied art and was so goodlooking and everything and Mr. Spotmann had said to bring her around at noon tomorrow, and that the job, if she could hold it down, would pay at least twentyfive a week. There had been an old lady in to see Maurice’s paintings and she was thinking of buying one; they all felt very gay and drank quite a lot of wine, so that in the end when it was time for goodbyes it was Eveline who felt lonesome at going away from them all, instead of Eleanor feeling lonesome at being left behind as she had expected.

When Eleanor walked back along the platform from seeing the Hutchinses all off for New York the next evening, and their bags all labelled for the steamship
Baltic
and their eyes all bright with the excitement of going East and going abroad and the smell of coalsmoke and the clang of engine bells and scurry of feet, she walked with her fists clenched and her sharppointed nails dug into the palms of her hands, saying to herself over and over again: “I’ll be going, too; it’s only a question of time; I’ll be going, too.”

she was a very fashionable lady and adored bullterriers and had a gentleman friend who was famous for his resemblance to King Edward

she was a very fashionable lady and there were white lilies in the hall No my dear I can’t bear the scent of them in the room and the bullterriers bit the tradespeople and the little newsy No my dear they never bit nice people and they’re quite topping with Billy and his friends

we all went coaching in a fourinhand and the man in the back blew a long horn and that’s where Dick Whittington stood with his cat and the bells      there were hampers full of luncheon and she had gray eyes and was very kind to her friend’s little boy though she loathed simply loathed most children and her gentleman friend who was famous for his resemblance to King Edward couldn’t bear them or the bullterriers and she kept asking Why do you call him that?