The Company She Keeps (9 page)

“Yes.” Her reply had more simplicity in it than she would have thought she could achieve. “It isn’t out yet. This is an advance copy.”

“I’ve read something else by this fellow. He’s good.”

“You have?” cried the girl in a sharp, suspicious voice. It was incredible that this well-barbered citizen should not only be familiar with but have a taste for the work of an obscure revolutionary novelist. On the other hand, it was incredible that he should be lying. The artless and offhand manner in which he pronounced the novelist’s name indicated no desire to shine, indicated in fact that he placed no value on that name, that it was to him a name like Hervey Allen or Arthur Brisbane or Westbrook Pegler or any other. Two alternatives presented themselves: either the man belonged to that extraordinary class of readers who have perfect literary digestions, who can devour anything printed, retaining what suits them, eliminating what does not, and liking all impartially, because, since they take what they want from each, they are always actually reading the same book (she had had a cousin who was like that about the theater, and she remembered how her aunt used to complain, saying, “It’s no use asking Cousin Florence whether the show at the stock company is any good this week; Cousin Florence has never seen a bad play”)—either that, or else the man had got the name confused and was really thinking of some popular writer all the time.

Still, the assertion, shaky as it was, had given him status with her. It was as if he had spoken a password, and with a greater sense of assurance and propriety, she went on listening to his talk. His voice was rather rich and dark; the accent was Middle Western, but underneath the nasalities there was something soft and furry that came from the South. He lived in Cleveland, he told her, but his business kept him on the go a good deal; he spent nearly half his time in New York.

“You do?” she exclaimed, her spirits rising. “What
is
your business?” Her original view of him had already begun to dissolve, and it now seemed to her that the instant he had entered the club car she had sensed that he was no ordinary provincial entrepreneur.

“I’m a traveling salesman,” he replied genially.

In a moment she recognized that this was a joke, but not before he had caught her look of absolute dismay and panic. He leaned toward her and laughed. “If it sounds any better to you,” he said, “I’m in the steel business.”

“It doesn’t,” she replied, recovering herself, making her words prim with political disapproval. But he
knew;
she had given herself away; he had trapped her features in an expression of utter snobbery.

“You’re a pink, I suppose,” he said, as if he had noticed nothing. “It’d sound better to you if I said I was a burglar.”

“Yes,” she acknowledged, with a comic air of frankness, and they both laughed. Much later, he gave her a business card that said he was an executive in Little Steel, but he persisted in describing himself as a traveling salesman, and she saw at last that it was an accident that the joke had turned on her: the joke was a wry, humble, clownish one that he habitually turned on himself.

When he asked if she would join him in a drink before lunch, she accepted readily. “Let’s go into the diner, though. It may be cooler.”

“I’ve got a bottle of whisky in my compartment. I
know
it’s cool there.”

Her face stiffened. A compartment was something she had not counted on. But she did not know (she never had known) how to refuse. She felt bitterly angry with the man for having exposed her—so early—to this supreme test of femininity, a test she was bound to fail, since she would either go into the compartment, not wanting to (and he would know this and feel contempt for her malleability), or she would stay out of the compartment, wanting to have gone in (and he would know this, too, and feel contempt for her timidity).

The man looked at her face.

“Don’t worry,” he said in a kind, almost fatherly voice. “It’ll be perfectly proper. I promise to leave the door open.” He took her arm and gave it a slight, reassuring squeeze, and she laughed out loud, delighted with him for having, as she thought, once again understood and spared her.

In the compartment, which was off the club car, it
was
cooler. The highballs, gold in the glasses, tasted, as her own never did, the way they looked in the White Rock advertisements. There was something about the efficiency with which his luggage, in brown calf, was disposed in that small space, about the white coat of the black waiter who kept coming in with fresh ice and soda, about the chicken sandwiches they finally ordered for lunch, that gave her that sense of ritualistic “rightness” that the Best People are supposed to bask in. The open door contributed to this sense: it was exactly as if they were drinking in a show window, for nobody went by who did not peer in, and she felt that she could discern envy, admiration, and censure in the quick looks that were shot at her. The man sat at ease, unconscious of these attentions, but she kept her back straight, her shoulders high with decorum, and let her bare arms rise and fall now and then in short parabolas of gesture.

But if for the people outside she was playing the great lady, for the man across the table she was the Bohemian Girl. It was plain that she was a revelation to him, that he had never under the sun seen anyone like her. And he was quizzing her about her way of life with the intense, unashamed, wondering curiosity of a provincial seeing for the first time the sights of a great but slightly decadent city. Answering his questions she was able to see herself through his eyes (brown eyes, which were his only good feature, but which somehow matched his voice and thus enhanced the effect, already striking, of his having been put together by a good tailor). What she got from his view of her was a feeling of uniqueness and identity, a feeling she had once had when, at twenty, she had come to New York and had her first article accepted by a liberal weekly, but which had slowly been rubbed away by four years of being on the inside of the world that had looked magic from Portland, Oregon. Gradually, now, she was becoming very happy, for she knew for sure in this compartment that she was beautiful and gay and clever, and worldly and innocent, serious and frivolous, capricious and trustworthy, witty and sad, bad and really good, all mixed up together, all at the same time. She could feel the power running in her, like a medium on a particularly good night.

As these multiple personalities bloomed on the single stalk of her ego, a great glow of charity, like the flush of life, suffused her. This man, too, must be admitted into the mystery; this stranger must be made to open and disclose himself like a Japanese water flower. With a messianic earnestness she began to ask him questions, and though at first his answers displayed a sort of mulish shyness (“I’m just a traveling salesman,” “I’m a suburban businessman,” “I’m an economic royalist”), she knew that sooner or later he would tell her the truth, the rock-bottom truth, and was patient with him. It was not the first time she had “drawn a man out”—the phrase puckered her mouth, for it had never seemed like that to her. Certain evenings spent in bars with men she had known for half an hour came back to her; she remembered the beautiful frankness with which the cards on each side were laid on the table till love became a wonderful slow game of double solitaire and nothing that happened afterwards counted for anything beside those first few hours of self-revelation. Now as she put question after question she felt once more like a happy burglar twirling the dial of a well-constructed safe, listening for the locks to click and reveal the combination. When she asked him what the emblem on his shirt stood for, unexpectedly the door flew open.

“It was a little officer’s club we had in the war,” he said. “The four deuces, we called ourselves.” He paused, and then went on irrelevantly, “I get these shirts at Brooks Brothers. They’ll put the emblem on free if you order the shirts custom-made. I always order a dozen at a time. I get everything at Brooks Brothers except ties and shoes. Leonie thinks it’s stodgy of me.”

Leonie was his wife. They had a daughter, little Angela, and two sons, little Frank and little Joe, and they lived in a fourteen-room house in the Gates Mills section of Cleveland. Leonie was a home girl, quite different from Eleanor, who had been his first big love and was now a decorator in New York. Leonie loved her house and children. Of course, she was interested in culture, too, particularly the theater, and there were always a lot of young men from the Cleveland Playhouse hanging around her; but then she was a Vassar girl, and you had to expect a woman to have different interests from a man.

Leonie was a Book-of-the-Month Club member and she also subscribed to the two liberal weeklies. “She’ll certainly be excited,” the man said, grinning with pleasure, “when she hears I met somebody from the
Liberal
on this trip. But she’ll never be able to understand why you wasted your time talking to poor old Bill.”

The girl smiled at him.

“I
like
to talk to you,” she said, suppressing the fact that nothing on earth would have induced her to talk to Leonie.

“I read an article in those magazines once in a while,” he continued dreamily. “Once in a while they have something good, but on the whole they’re too wishy-washy for me. Now that I’ve had this visit with you, though, I’ll read your magazine every week, trying to guess which of those things in the front you wrote.”

“I’m
never
wishy-washy,” said the girl, laughing. “But is your wife radical?”

“Good Lord, no! She calls herself a liberal, but actually I’m more of a radical than Leonie is.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, take the election. I’m going to vote for Landon because it’s expected of me, and my vote won’t put him in.”

“But you’re really for Roosevelt?”

“No,” said the man, a little impatiently, “I don’t like Roosevelt either. I don’t like a man that’s always hedging his bets. Roosevelt’s an old woman. Look at the way he’s handling these CIO strikes. He doesn’t have the guts to stick up for Lewis, and he doesn’t have the sense to stay out of the whole business.” He leaned across the table and added, almost in a whisper, “You know who I’d like to vote for?”

The girl shook her head.

“Norman Thomas!”

“But you’re a steel man!” said the girl.

The man nodded.

“Nobody knows how I feel, not even Leonie.” He paused to think. “I was in the last war,” he said finally, “and I had a grand time. I was in the cavalry and there weren’t any horses. But they made me a captain and decorated me. After the armistice we were stationed in Cologne, and we got hold of a Renault and every week end we’d drive all night so we could have a day on the Riviera.” He chuckled to himself. “But the way I look at it, there’s a new war coming and it isn’t going to be like that. God Almighty, we didn’t hate the Germans!”

“And now?”

“You wait,” he said. “Last time it was supposed to be what you people call an ideological war—for democracy and all that. But it wasn’t. That was just advertising. You liberals have all of a sudden found out that it was Mr. Morgan’s war. You think that’s terrible. But let me tell you that Mr. Morgan’s war was a hell of a lot nicer to fight than this new one will be. Because this one will be ideological, and it’ll be too damned serious. You’ll wish that you had the international bankers and munitions men to stop the fight when things get too rough. I’d like to see this country stay out of it. That’s why I’m for Thomas.”

“You’re a very interesting man,” said the girl, tears coming to her eyes, perhaps because of the whisky. “I’ve never known anyone like you. You’re not the kind of businessman I write editorials against.”

“You people are crazy, though,” he said genially. “You’re never going to get anywhere in America with that proletariat stuff. Every workingman wants to live the way I do. He doesn’t want me to live the way he does. You people go at it from the wrong end. I remember a Socialist organizer came down fifteen years ago into Southern Illinois. I was in the coal business then, working for my first girl’s father. This Socialist was a nice fellow….”

His voice was dreamy again, but there was an undercurrent of excitement in it. It was as if he were reviving some buried love affair, or, rather, some wispy young
tendresse
that had never come to anything. The Socialist organizer had been a distant connection of his first girl’s, the two men had met and had some talks; later the Socialist had been run out of town; the man had stood aloof, neither helping nor hindering.

“I wonder what’s become of him,” he said finally. “In jail somewhere, I guess.”

“Oh no,” said the girl. “You don’t understand modern life. He’s a big bureaucrat in the CIO. Just like a businessman, only not so well paid.”

The man looked puzzled and vaguely sad. “He had a lot of nerve,” he murmured, then added quickly, in a loud, bumptious tone, “But you’re all nuts!”

The girl bit her lips. The man’s vulgarity was undeniable. For some time now she had been attempting (for her own sake) to whitewash him, but the crude raw material would shine through in spite of her. It had been possible for her to remain so long in the compartment only on the basis of one of two assumptions, both of them literary (
a
) that the man was a frustrated socialist, (
b
) that he was a frustrated man of sensibility, a kind of Sherwood Anderson character. But the man’s own personality kept popping up, perversely, like a jack-in-the-box, to confound these theories. The most one could say was that the man was frustrated. She had hoped to “give him back to himself,” but these fits of self-assertion on his part discouraged her by making her feel that there was nothing very good to give. She had, moreover, a suspicion that his lapses were deliberate, even malicious, that the man knew what she was about and why she was about it, and had made up his mind to thwart her. She felt a Take-me-as-I-am, an I’ll-drag-you-down-to-my-level challenge behind his last words. It was like the resistance of the patient to the psychoanalyst, of the worker to the Marxist: she was offering to release him from the chains of habit, and he was standing up and clanking those chains comfortably and impudently in her face. On the other hand, she
knew,
just as the analyst knows, just as the Marxist knows, that somewhere in his character there was the need of release and the humility that would accept aid—and there was, furthermore, a kindness and a general co-operativeness which would make him pretend to be a little better than he was, if that would help her to think better of herself.