The Golden Vanity (16 page)

The third floor back room had been given over to the one servant. From time to time one cook left and another came, but she was usually Irish, middle-aged, fat, and of uncertain temper. Jake kept on good terms with her by giving no trouble; he did not complain if his rooms were not dusted, and he tipped her frequently.

The second floor was sacred to the aunts. Two bedrooms, also equipped with gloomy walnut and marble, and faintly musty although aired and kept in rigid order. The aunts took their meals in the sunless half-basement dining room, and the rest of the day they sat in the parlor, by the front window. They were both rather stooped, with high noses, liver spots, and an indefinable expression of self-satisfaction. One might wonder whence they derived it from lives so negative, dull and narrow, but perhaps that was precisely the reason. They read the society pages in the newspapers and picked out names they knew, not exactly friends but names of families with whom the Van Burens had once associated, finding fewer each year. They did not read much else, nor do fancy work; they just sat.

The parlor contained a square piano, a cabinet of curios, various plush armchairs and hassocks, matched by plush curtains at the windows, and two bookcases with curtained glass fronts. The bookcases supported marble busts of Longfellow and Dante. Numerous steel engravings shared the walls with family photographs. There were two objects the like of which Jake had never beheld elsewhere: a patent rocker and a mantel drape or lambrequin of macramé cord lace.

The aunts had a formal, gelid yet doubtless real affection for Jake, as the man of the house. It embarrassed him slightly; but he was careful never to utter any disturbing sentiments in their hearing. Sometimes this was difficult. Their remarks were so shatteringly inept. Frequently Jake did not arise until noon, and the aunts assumed he devoted the midnight hours to intellectual pursuits. This was measurably true of many evenings; he did his writing in great discomfort with a bracket light glaring in his eyes and a litter of books and papers on the floor beside his chair; he made innumerable notes, and filed them, and couldn't find them again, and at intervals he spent whole nights going through the files. When he came downstairs in the morning, one or both of the aunts said: "Brain work is the most fatiguing." Therefore when, as occasionally happened, Jake had been out the night before and had come home solemnly pickled about four o'clock, creeping upstairs with bated breath, this statement threatened his equanimity. He didn't drink much nor often; but the cook was not deceived. She used to bring up his coffee, with a gleam of sour sympathy in her eye. ... Of course there were nights when he did not come home at all.

The aunts could not have been wholly unaware, but they belonged to an age when gentlemen had unwritten prerogatives, and ladies were not supposed to understand anything that could brush the bloom from their innocence. Even married women were not supposed to understand. Maybe they did not. A good many aspects of the matter were quite incomprehensible.

The break in the stock market was like a house of cards falling. It had been built up incredibly high and then a breath brought it down. It was a soundless catastrophe; it happened in the mind. Jake read the newspaper headlines with fatalistic indifference. Because he had, in his detachment, always known it was a house of cards. . . . That was why he had quit his job ten years ago. He had looked
through
the figures he used to deal in; he really knew how to read a balance sheet. He had perceived a curious fact that wasn't mentioned in his accountancy course: the difference between a modern balance sheet and an old-fashioned inventory. The inventory listed material things and obligations dischargeable in the same kind. It was realizable in physical terms. The balance sheet seemed to do the same, but it didn't. It was a reading taken at a given time from a dynamometer. Everything depended on the continuance of the flow. If that should stop, the debit and credit items would have to be transposed to arrive at the truth. The assets instantly became liabilities. A closed factory of the modern kind is not only a net loss but a devouring expense. The accountancy thus was an enormous joke, like the careful proceeding of those rustics who built a fence around a cuckoo. A hedge of figures circumscribing imponderables. The exquisite part of the joke was that the figures were often skillfully juggled, in a quite legal manner, with depreciation and reserves and goodwill. What an amusingly futile performance, when a few months or years might turn the trick even more handsomely, though unfortunately it was impossible to be sure which way. ... It interested Jake for awhile to see this, but he got tired of the motions, and quit. To earn enough for his own imponderables—his share of the upkeep of the house which was now a liability instead of the asset it had been in Grandfather Van Buren's time—Jake did emergency work for his old firm, when they were rushed with annual statements and income tax returns. The third day of the panic they called him in, and he went downtown.

He was so driven for the next week that he worked automatically, and the successive downward plunges of stock-market prices instantly became part of the routine.

He was checking up brokerage credits—It was fantastic, for at a given time the banks were all insolvent, but the momentum kept them going. It was all imaginary; so they continued on the assumption that the card castle was still standing at whatever height was requisite. Till they could build it up again. They did believe they could. . . . Bid for U. S. Steel at 225. Wasn't that how it was done in the first place? If it would work once, why not again? Cheers for the hero who made the bid; anyhow it was a good offer! . . . Jake muttered sardonically: "That bird isn't taking any chances; he can get all he wants at the price." The auditor who was checking with him looked at Jake blankly.

At the end of the week Jake wasn't very tired, though it had been a long week of long days. He worked easily under pressure; and he had put in fifteen hours the day Aunt Hallie died... .

He had breakfasted with the aunts that morning. Aunt Hallie passed the newspaper to Aunt Susan, and expressed admiration of the Bankers Consortium for saving the situation. Jake didn't say anything. Aunt Susan read aloud that conditions were basically sound and that the Rockefellers were buying good common stocks. "Your grandfather," Aunt Hallie remarked to Jake, "said that bonds were the only proper investment for ladies. For security."

Aunt Hallie nibbled a piece of toast carefully; she had false teeth. Her thin hair was an off-color white, the same shade as her wrinkled skin. She wore half a dozen old-fashioned rings on her bony hands; for years she had been unable to remove the rings because of her swollen knuckles. Aunt Susan was stouter than Aunt Hallie, with a double chin and swollen ankles.

"May I be excused?" Jake said, as he had been taught.

In the subway, many people appeared rather sleepy, but everyone read newspapers, wedged in as they were. Nothing unusual. After ten o'clock, presumably the floor of the Exchange was bedlam, but Jake had no occasion to go there. He was working in the strained quiet of private offices. At noon, going down in the elevator, a man leaned against the side of the cage; when it stopped at the bottom he walked out groggily, sat down on the steps of the vast smooth indifferent building, and cried, with his head in his hands. He was quite conventional in appearance, well-tailored, with a neat clipped mustache. People walked by, glancing sideways at him in an embarrassed manner.

Jake sent out for sandwiches at dinnertime, and remained till one o'clock in the morning. He took a cab home. Wall Street was empty and silent, but half the office windows were alight, a checkered pattern of small golden squares, up and up. It was a fine night.

As he got out of the cab at Eighteenth Street he thought that the house also had something strange about it; he did not realize why until he was unlocking the door. A thin line of light glimmered under the parlor blinds and from the second floor windows. As he closed the door softly, Aunt Susan appeared at the head of the stairs, in a brown flannel dressing gown. "Oh," she said, "we tried to telephone you, but nobody knew the number."

Jake said: "Is anything wrong?"

"Your Aunt Hallie—" Aunt Susan made muffled sounds into a handkerchief. "She passed away this morning."

It was an accident, with a gruesome touch of the absurd. Aunt Hallie had gone to the corner grocery, to do the day's marketing. A small boy on a "scooter" ran into her; she stumbled over the curb and fell, striking her head against a lamp post. She got to her feet, got home, and while explaining what had happened, she bent over to brush the dust from her skirt. That was all. She fell again. The doctor arrived too late.

The rest of the night was rather grim. Jake sat up with Aunt Susan. And he had to see Aunt Hallie. She had the grey serenity of the dead. She was secure now.

It was fairly awful till after the funeral. Jake had to go to that. More aunts appeared for the occasion, and a few cousins, all with that left-over air characteristic of a family in decline. Those of the Van Buren connection whose fortunes had risen instead of sinking were absent. The final formality was the reading of Aunt Hallie's will. Jake was completely surprised to learn that he was the sole heir.

Aunt Susan was severely annoyed by a misprint in Aunt Hallie's ten-line obituary notice. "Widow of the late Daniel Blakeny"—it was spelled Blackney. Aunt Susan clipped the item to keep. "Your uncle Daniel," she said, "was a brilliant young lawyer. It was thought he would go far in his profession." A faded photograph of the long-deceased Daniel, in a black frame, hung in the parlor. He had a lean hatchet face and sideburns. Aunt Susan said: "It was I who met him first, at Narragansett. He asked permission to call on me. He died of the Spanish influenza, in 1889; he had a weak chest, and did not take sufficient care of himself."

For some obscure reason Jake did not really hear what she said until the next day; then the words came back to him irrelevantly. And he thought: Aunt Hallie stole Aunt Susan's beau! And Aunt Susan never forgave her, all these years; she probably believes he wouldn't have died if he had married her instead of Aunt Hallie. She'd have taken care of him.

Yet he understood that Aunt Susan mourned for Aunt Hallie. Like the majority of people, who remain within the restricted circle to which chance allots them, lacking initiative or desire to go beyond it, Aunt Susan had whatever emotions are prescribed for a given situation. She mourned for a sister, just as she had mourned, as long as the newspapers indicated, for President Harding, or as she admired the Bankers Consortium, or believed that prohibition was a noble experiment, or that Mr. Coolidge was a silent man even while she was reading his speeches.

Jake thought, it's incredible that Uncle Daniel and Aunt Hallie were once alive. They were young and perhaps Aunt Hallie was pretty. Aunt Susan too. And innumerable millions of people, famous or unknown; some were very much alive and the rest at least had blood and breath they might have put to use. You won't live forever either. More than half your life is gone ...

A few of the female relatives hovered about for the next two or three days, and Jake went back to work the day after the funeral. He had to escape from the house. In the evening he telephoned to Aunt Susan that he was detained downtown, and went to the theater. On Sunday he telephoned to Mysie to ask her to dine with him. He hadn't seen Mysie for weeks.

Mysie said: "You'd better have dinner here, since we'll be going on to that party." Jake had forgotten there was a party. Mysie had no means of knowing about Aunt Hallie. So he said thanks, he would. He smuggled his dinner clothes out and dressed at a hotel. Maybe a party would do him good.

15

T
HE
party was large and expensive. Neither Mysie nor Jake knew their host very well; they had got on his invitation list in some casual manner and came when asked. Jake wasn't quite sure how he made his money, but thought it was either a hotel or a taxicab company. People made huge incomes in New York in so many ways. It didn't matter. Apparently he had plenty. He gave his parties with indifferent good nature, not expecting any chop-for-chop return, presumably deriving a sense of prestige from them. Though half his guests were no more than casual acquaintances, there were no hard feelings. Nobody cared. Sometimes they were fun. The apartment was immense and somber, decorated in pseudo-Spanish style, with iron lanterns for lighting, and galleries and balconies. It didn't make sense, high up over Park Avenue, but what of it?

Jake said misanthropically: "This is going to be dumb. Too many celebrities. They always blight a party." There was a jazz orchestra to dance by, but not enough room. Jake was soon lost in the shuffle of guests circulating in and out of the pantry bar. Mysie had intended to go home early, but stayed out of inertia. Some people were getting squiffy, and she usually left before the maudlin stage. She was to remember the occasion afterward as the last of the drunken parties that marked the boom years; at least, it was the last she happened to attend.

Before supper, the floor was cleared for entertainers. Someone did imitations first; Mysie couldn't see, being penned in a corner. She edged her way out, and then wished mildly that she hadn't. The next turn was a girl dancer, attired in a fringe of beads and with bells on her ankles. She was young and her pretty face had nothing coarse or hard in expression; the dance left very little to the imagination. A man breathed heavily into Mysie's hair; and a stout middle-aged woman said bravely: "How artistic." Mysie reflected irreverently: I suppose this is an orgy. As near as honest folks can manage. But we ought to be lolling on Roman couches. . . . The chairs were all taken; Mysie perched on the arm of a sofa, and by degrees was shoved over onto the knee of a strange man. The dancer was succeeded by a limp youth who gave an interminable pianologue.

Mysie murmured to her involuntary supporter: "Excuse it please." He replied: "But for my part I am delighted." He contrived to make her comfortable, on both his knees, holding her thoughtfully about the waist. Numerous couples were more closely entwined, kissing at intervals perfunctorily. In the penumbra of the spotlight, Mysie could see across the room that Jake was almost extinguished by a woman with taffy-colored hair, in a red chiffon frock that did not quite cover her knees. Holding a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other, she clasped Jake about the neck. Nevertheless, she looked like a suburban matron on her evening off. Probably she was. Jake blinked the smoke out of his eyes and listened to her with that intense simian melancholy which, to Mysie, indicated that he was rather bored. The lady was not his type.