The Golden Vanity (18 page)

The reformers got us, tried to legislate us into righteousness, a concrete-walled sanitary plan. At the same time a flood of money seeped in and loosened the foundations they were building on. And everything floated in an indiscriminate welter, with the advanced thinkers paddling about on their separate chips like water-beetles, telling us we must all be alike but quite different from what we used to be.

But we were like that because that is what people are like. To produce only one kind of people you must have a way of life so hard and exigeant that it kills off automatically every variation from type. There were never vast numbers of Indians. Those who weren't born good Indians died very young. Sparta perished of uniformity. The Peruvians were dead long before the Spaniards came.

And if, whether by accident or force, you lift a man out of a mental horizon that agrees with his capacity for vision, he remains the same person but becomes more so . . . Henry Ford belonged in a small town. The old small town was illiterate, gossipy, petty and busy, with a comfortable slack for minor eccentricities because nobody had much of an edge over his neighbors. Henry Ford would have been thoroughly in place running the local hardware store. He might have been the village atheist, or a Fundamentalist deacon. Or the only Socialist in the community, and no harm done. He could have got on happily with a limited stock of borrowed ideas that he did not comprehend and was not required to connect with reality. He was rather appalling when fortuitously hooked to a conveyor belt, a stream of power. Being what he was, he had no use for money except to buy little red school houses and old grindstones for a museum; and no use for leisure except to pry into the private conduct of his workmen, or advise the young to dance the polka on the village green of Detroit. No capacity for magnificence or ease.

Most of those people at the party—it suits them to have a neat house in the suburbs, with shrubbery and two cars and three children, one of them called Junior. Why shouldn't they? Very decent people, monogamous, with twin beds of maple, and a guest room, and all opinions ready made. It doesn't bore them. . . . But they've been nagged into believing they've got to drink too much and change partners, with the agreement that it doesn't matter as long as they Tell Each Other Frankly. ... If it doesn't matter, then why go to the trouble? You might as well sleep at home. Respectability, the domestic virtues, are genuine accomplishments. If you want anything more, then it must matter a great deal. More than an easy conscience or convenient physical satisfaction. It must have a special value.

It
does
matter, Mysie thought obstinately.

You can't have it both ways. . . . On the terrace—he understood. I won't see him again; he isn't the one, but he knows that even a kiss is important. He was nice.

But if only that burning core in the very center of your being would cease sometimes, not be there forever while you have to keep on cutting bread and butter or brushing your teeth or checking the laundry list—Mysie thought, that is the reason for sleep. We have to die every night to enable us to live through the day.

16

A
FTERWARD
Geraldine was ashamed that it had taken her a month to discover how much Leonard had lost in the stock market. Of course he had lost every cent, not only his winnings but his original small savings. Some of hers too. And of course she had guessed accurately enough to refrain from questions. She was kind, passed it over tactfully. That was why she was ashamed.

She was so busy, and she had to keep her mind on her work. It astonished her when she reflected how strictly she stuck to routine. Nothing could have been more alien to her secret self. She had effected a compromise by the simple device of living in an apartment. In the nature of things, an apartment is a temporary expedient.

She could at least have bought a cottage in the country. She had not even considered doing so. If she owned a house, she would be trapped, would never get away.

Her reluctance must be a memory of the house in Hoboken. Not that she had been unhappy there. Though it was shabby and ugly, it was home, and had the comfortable atmosphere of long use; and she had a room to herself, a room not much bigger than a closet, warmed by the kitchen stovepipe; even in winter she could go up there and be herself and look out of the window at the river and write stories. In summer there was a hammock on the porch and a tree in the garden; she and her two sisters played at camping out under the lilac bushes. Her sisters had a larger room together, but Geraldine preferred her own refuge.

The house owned mother. Leaving it even for an afternoon was an onerous undertaking. The children couldn't be left unguarded in it. Father came home for dinner at noon sharp as well as supper at seven in the evening. If mother were to absent herself, father had to be told in advance to get his midday meal at the hotel, and he made a small grievance of it. Very rarely mother went over to New York by ferry to shop. She always returned out of breath, whisked off her hat and changed her dress immediately, and put on an apron as if she were afraid of being caught without it . . . Geraldine and her sisters had far more freedom. What Geraldine liked most was to go by the docks and look at the ships. When she grew up, she resolved, she would go aboard a liner and sail around the world. Perhaps she would never come back. . . . Mother had come from the Pacific Coast, when she married. And she had never gone back. That seemed unreal and sad, especially because mother hadn't come by boat, but by train.

Geraldine hadn't gone around the world. But as long as she didn't have a house, she still felt that she could if she chose. A flat was not the same. Even furniture did not grow into a flat as it did into a house. A flat could be stripped in a few hours, leaving nothing but so much impersonal space. A house became desolate and the furniture itself died, became mere sticks and rags, if the owners moved out. Geraldine had lived in four apartments successively since her marriage. She hardly recalled the earlier ones. This latest apartment was unusually pleasant, with its spacious high-ceiled rooms and tall windows. But its chief charm was that it was not a house. One could walk out and shut the door and think no more of it. The routine was bearable because each story she wrote was a job and could be got through with, finished. The children would grow up and she could live with Leonard anywhere. Sometimes she felt guilty; perhaps she ought to have a house for the children to remember as home. Still, they didn't seem to miss it. In summer she rented a flimsy bungalow on some Jersey beach, and they ran on the sands and swam like mermaids and were healthy and good and merry. In winter it was necessary to live in New York because of Leonard's work.

Geraldine always rose at seven. She had been obliged to when the babies were small; now it was habit, and it gave her almost an hour for her bath and coffee, a breathing space. Then she woke Judy and Dina and dressed them and served everybody at breakfast and kissed Leonard absent-mindedly and bundled the children into hats and coats and took them to school. When she returned it was nine o'clock and the apartment was beautifully empty. Geraldine wrote in the living-room. She ought to have a study, but it wouldn't have made much difference; she had to submit to a certain number of interruptions. She wrote with her eyes and hands and lent her ears to external affairs. If asked a question, she answered without turning her head. If called to the telephone, or to the kitchen to give instructions to the cook, she left a part of her mind at her desk. The household ran smoothly because Geraldine was quite competent to do the actual work herself, so she could command it intelligently. But she knew she was extravagant; she couldn't have said just how the money went. Her two sisters were married and not well off; she enjoyed giving them small luxuries, paying their expenses to the beach, or in town for a winter holiday, theaters and restaurant dinners. One sister lived in East Orange and one at Hartford.... It was marvellous not to have to think about money. Geraldine had made seven thousand dollars in the past twelve months, with short stories and a serial.

She sat at her desk faithfully till mid-afternoon. There were hours when her pen ran, and unaccountable intervals when she twined her hands in her hair and frowned at the wall, wishing she had gone around the world. . . . Soon after three o'clock the part-time nursemaid brought the children home from school. The rest of the day belonged to them and to Leonard, with a slight margin for friends and parties. There was no time that belonged wholly to herself.

And yet all the time her life fitted into its domestic setting only at the edges, like a cog. She never felt like a wife and mother. . . . She had an uncanny suspicion that maybe she didn't exist at all. Not here and now. When she thought of
herself,
she saw a little girl looking out of a window. . . . The branch of a maple tree, just the leafy tip, extended across the lower panes, cutting the blue of the river down below in the distance. . .. She could think of herself at nineteen also, very unhappy and yet glad to be alive. And very real. When she used to cry. . . . Over a silly love-affair, a quarrel and an estrangement; she didn't think now that she had cared so much for the man she had been engaged to, but she had gone about with him one summer, and been light-hearted and young; and then it ended suddenly, and he went away, and she couldn't go away because her mother was not very well and they were poor and anxious. . . . Leonard had never made her cry.

Why did she feel so far-off and helpless while Leonard was hard hit? The first day of the panic he was dazed; he couldn't believe it. The next day, he was in such obvious distress, Geraldine urged him to stay at home, send word to his office that he was ill, which was true enough. He had a cold anyhow. For herself, when she was depressed, solitude was the best remedy, to wear it out. . . . Leonard said, with pathetic irritation, that he had to be downtown, "in touch with his brokers." He added that he "didn't know whether to hold on or not." He couldn't admit even to himself, so soon, that everything was gone. Geraldine said that it must be difficult to decide. Leonard rejoined that he would have to put up more margin—and he didn't see how. . . .

Geraldine knew that margin meant money. She had over a thousand dollars in her bank account. She wrote a check instantly. Leonard said: "There's bound to be a rally soon—the big men like Mitchell say that prices are below the true values." Geraldine was glad to hear it. She had the more faith in the big men because she had never heard of them before.

A few days later Geraldine was giving an impromptu cocktail party when Leonard came home half an hour early. A few of her friends had come unexpectedly; they were gay and noisy, telling how much they had lost in the stock market. Leonard glanced into the room, hesitating as if he would rather not join them; but Geraldine called to him. He took a drink; only Geraldine noticed his silence. Then she was busy for awhile, mixing more drinks. When she turned to him again she saw. Leonard looked so—so thin and empty. It was terrifying.

She thought her guests would never go. When at last they trailed out, they left an utter vacuum. . . . The nurse brought in Judy and Dina from a walk in the park. Geraldine exclaimed: "Doesn't this room look horrid? Children, when you grow up, don't ever put cocktail glasses on the piano. It's low." She began emptying ashtrays. She was not perturbed by the children seeing her smoke or drink a cocktail. They had a great deal of common sense. They were real. .. . The maid announced dinner; Geraldine knew the cook must be cross, as they were late.

"I don't think I want any dinner," Leonard said. "I have a headache."

There was nothing Geraldine could do but offer aspirin and coffee . . .

No doubt she should have persuaded him to tell her he was broke. She couldn't. He was stripped and disarmed. For the next month, they avoided the dangerous ground. It made a distance between them.

Against her will, Geraldine read the newspapers every day . . . She thought, things happen to us now at a distance. Of course they always did, but now we see them happening far away, and feel them quite awhile later. Like the Red Queen, shrieking because presently she would cut her finger. Perhaps it was better to live in a world where one didn't know in advance. We have to go through everything twice. Even the weather—we read that there is a low pressure area in Kansas and we shall have rain in New York as a result ...

The stock market plunged and paused and plunged again; and every day some prominent banker or politician assured her that to-morrow, or next week, or next month, all would be as it had been.

Their assurances were shocking. They are fools, Geraldine thought, with sick dismay. Telling us it isn't so, when it is before our eyes. These are the men we depend upon. . . . Sometimes their pictures were printed. Foolish fat faces. . . . What has happened to men? Every loss can be made good except that. They are not grown up; they are pretending. They won't admit anything.

But she had her own work to do. After all, she had lived through the war, the dollar-a-year men and Victory loans and Liberty cabbage. Probably the sum total of fools was constant; only under stress it became visible, finding a common denominator. They were funny, too, in a desperate way, like the comedy which invariably creeps in at a funeral. Possibly her apprehensions were exaggerated by the measure of Leonard's personal bad luck. . .. She remembered her father and mother telling about the hard times of the Nineties, which had passed. . .. Fear was the worst thing; all that imbecile optimism was the meanest kind of fear.

Six weeks later Mysie sent tickets for the first night of Jake's play. Geraldine thought, things do go on just the same. She was amused to find herself mildly thrilled by the occasion; she had never been to a first night. She might have easily enough; tickets could be bought. Living in New York, one never did anything that the name of the city connoted.

Dressing for the evening, Geraldine found that her evening frock, two years old, had grown perilously tight, strained at the seams. I'm matronly, she thought; can such things be? Thirteen years of matrimony had had an opposite effect on Leonard; he was rather thinner. As she straightened the bow of his tie, she had a fleeting recollection of going to the theater with him before they became engaged, herself in a high-waisted blue frock with a ruffle at the neck and her hair done in a top-knot like Billie Burke. And she had been pleased by his recklessness in getting the best seats and taking a taxi.