The Golden Vanity (4 page)

"Yes," he said to Gina, "it really is." Her startled gaze induced him to amplify. "My name—Jakobus. We hold a theory of patroon ancestry. Also President Van Buren. He can't argue about it now."

"Wasn't he the bachelor president?" Mysie interjected.

"He was a widower president," Mr. Van Buren explained. "That is immaterial; we claim only collateral descent. It's the Jukeses you mean; if you're going into that I'll be moving along. Lookit, I'll drop in on Lanty." He retrieved a hat and stick.

Gina could make nothing of the conversation. By the rules she understood, one must say certain things, indicated by the given occasion, to which the other person replied by certain other remarks according to suit; in short, the things that everyone said, current for the season. To Mr. Van Buren's suggested departure, she protested:

"Oh, not on my account."

"It is better so," he assured her earnestly. "But we shall meet again. I often meet people again. It is fate, don't you think? The mad Van Burens! They pop out at you. Why, I met Mysie once in the City Hall."

"Get out, you ijit," said Mysie. Mr. Van Buren obeyed; he even knew how to take leave gracefully.

Gina's curiosity followed him. Why did he put up with Mysie's rudeness? Gina was reasonably sure she was prettier than Mysie, better dressed, better mannered. But Mysie got on with men. Of course she cheapened herself, Gina thought; at home, Mysie had been "talked about." With Michael Busch, especially. And not so cheap, in one sense; Michael Busch had risked something; he had a good deal to risk. Still, it had done Mysie no good.

Was it—? They said you couldn't hold a man that way. ... Gina observed now that Mysie was wearing a negligee of Swiss muslin, an irrational costume, since it was neither formal nor yet suggestive of the arts of a siren. White muslin, freshly laundered. Mysie was not made up, either. Gina could not account for Mr. Van Buren.

"Who is he?" Gina ventured.

"Jake? Nobody in particular; yes, he's a very rare bird, a native New Yorker. And an expert accountant, but he doesn't work at it all the time. Writes a little. He's threatening to do a play. His principal talent is fitting into any environment. That's why you nearly sat down on him. Protective coloration, like a zebra. You know, people often sit down on zebras, in mistake for tigers or something. Do you mind, darling, if I begin putting on my warpaint? I was asleep when Jake came; we had a rehearsal after the show last night." The darling was nothing but the habit of the theater.

"I see," Gina assented to the explanation about Mr. Van Buren's occupation. If he was writing a play, that would account for him. She surveyed the apartment. Without a single article of value except a grand piano, it was neat and comfortable. Being on the top floor, some conscientious Bohemian had torn out the ceiling to expose the beams and let in a skylight. Besides the large living-room, there were two small slant-roofed bedrooms, a kitchen and bath. The furniture looked as if it belonged to somebody, as if it had been chosen or inherited, not purchased hurriedly. Mysie shared the apartment with another woman, Theodora Ludlow, whom Gina had never met. Probably a chorus girl, Gina thought . . . The guess was fantastically wide of the mark. Theodora was middle-aged and taught music in a girls' school... Mysie's dress, which she fetched from her bedroom, needed a few stitches in the hem; she put on horn-rimmed glasses, and as she had taken off her muslin wrapper, she looked as unromantic in her petticoat, sewing, as a Degas ballet girl. . . . She had none of Gina's virginal hardness of expression; in repose, her face was faintly melancholy in a contradictory way, for the corner of her mouth turned upward. It changed extraordinarily with a flicker of amusement. She was thinking, of course Gina would arrive at the right moment to be scared into fits by Lanty Webb and his probably mythical rat. Gina would forever retain the conviction that Mysie inhabited a rat-ridden shooting-gallery. Actually the apartment house was very quiet, and respectable enough. The ambiguous club on the ground floor rear might be a speakeasy; but where wasn't there a speakeasy? Mysie liked peace and to pass unnoticed. She liked Thea Ludlow's orderly habits and reserve. The room was very tidy. A back window overlooked the top of an ailanthus tree.

Gina uttered insincere regrets that she had not seen Mysie for so long.

Mysie said: " 'Sall right. I haven't been here much. The last show I had in New York ran for one consecutive week; then I had to go on the road. Got back about Christmas; and this show I'm in now, I took over a part from Violet Warner, it's been running all winter and is likely to close soon." Gina reflected that Mysie obviously was not on the direct route to stardom. Mysie continued: "How's the whiteheaded boy?"

Gina failed to identify Arthur immediately by the description; and when she did, she was glad she had her back to the window. Mysie added: "It must be interesting, living with the wealthy rich for awhile. Of course they're petrifying bores, mostly; but seeing how the other half lives. What to do till the butler leaves. Geraldine told me about your job." She wondered what Gina wanted. Something—Gina never went out of her way without an ulterior motive. Funny how Jake knew that by instinct, at sight; he had an uncanny social perception. So he vanished —he would reappear with the same tact.

Gina replied noncommittally: "Yes," and scrutinized a photograph on the mantel. A substantial, prosperous man, in his forties. "Isn't that Michael Busch?" Gina's mother had retailed, by letter, further talk about him. His wife had begun suit for divorce, and then dropped it, nobody knew why; rumor was vague and contradictory.

"Uh-huh," Mysie bit off a thread.

"Does he ever come to New York?" Gina asked cautiously.

"Not that I know of," said Mysie. Her glasses masked her, but she grinned. Had Gina some remote design on Michael Busch? Gina had never met him, though she must have seen him. . . .

Gina thought, it's broken off, ended. To do that—for nothing. . . . Michael Busch was rich, not on the Siddall scale, but rich enough. He used to come up to their little town on Puget Sound, because the first source of his money was timber tracts, and he owned the sawmill which was, in effect, the town. Everyone knew him by sight. . . .

Mysie was then in the mill office, assistant bookkeeper. Five years ago. . . .

A picture formed in Gina's mind, against a black background. A starless night, with a smell of fresh-cut pine in the air, after rain; and flakes of light on the black water, where a motor launch rocked lazily against the float. Michael Busch was handing Mysie ashore. He was saying something in a low voice, and Mysie answered: No, better not. Mysie left him, running up the path in her white canvas shoes. Michael Busch stood gazing after her, bareheaded. He was visible only as mass and outline, yet his identity was unmistakable. He looked powerful, and helpless. He lit a cigarette and then threw it into the water, and still stood there, with his hands in his pockets.

Gina witnessed the scene by accident. She was going home from a church "social," by a short cut past the mill dock, with a youth she might have married, if it hadn't been for that. His father was the local banker. He was only an embarrassing memory now: a serious narrow-chested young man with a knobbly larynx, who read Bruce Barton for self-improvement. From that evening, Gina never wished to see him again. She was shocked at Mysie, and at the same time ashamed of her own suitor compared to Michael Busch. That was what decided her to go east and finish at one of the famous women's colleges, where she might make the right kind of friends. . . . But even assuming the worst, how did Mysie get Michael Busch, who could have had all the women he wanted? It was bad business for him, there where he was known, where everything became known sooner or later. . . . Gina had no mind to take Mysie's way; only if she knew what it was, she'd know why you couldn't hold a man that way. . . .

Mysie finished her sewing and slipped on the dress. "Were you going out?" Gina asked.

"No, I've been doing chores all day," Mysie assured her. "You don't have to hurry back, do you?"

But Gina said she had to, and went. Too much might happen in her absence, and the least chance might shut the doors against her. . . .

Left alone, Mysie gazed reflectively at the photograph of Michael Busch. I ought to write to him, she thought; but how can I tell him why I'm going back? I'm such a fool. . . .

Ten minutes later, a tap at the door announced the reappearance of Mr. Van Buren. "You must come and see
us
some time," was his cryptic greeting to Mysie. They disposed themselves at opposite ends of the sofa. Mr. Van Buren regarded his hat solemnly.

"Is that the cousin who came from the same town as you, with the unpronounceable name?" he asked.

"Sequitlam," said Mysie. "It's quite easy, if you work on it; not as if it were Puyallup or Snohomish. But you wouldn't understand." Merely a sleepy little town, thirty or forty frame houses climbing up the hill from the Sound. Like anybody's home town, the place you went away from. To see it, Jake would have had to see Gina as a little girl in a smocked frock and blue ribbon bows and Mysie in a middy blouse and her hair in a braid. "Sundays I used to practice walking over the logbooms down at the mill while the watchman was at dinner," she said, aware that it wouldn't convey anything to her auditor. The loggers in their spiked boots balanced by weight and muscular control; but if you were small and light and barefoot you had to do it with the tips of your fingers and the top of your head. Like a bird in the air. Sometimes a gull perched on the piling would watch intently as if it understood; and the water was deep green between the logs. Mysie had never been happier than when, at seventeen, she got a job in the mill office. She knew all the men by their first names, which Gina disapproved, as making herself common. But there wasn't anything else to call them; those were their names. They called her Mysie, with no familiarity, rather respectfully, because she was so young. She used to laugh a great deal . . . Gina's mother disapproved of Mysie; but Gina sometimes approached with cautious curiosity. It amused Mysie to evade the oblique inquisition. There wasn't anyone there Mysie could really talk to—except Michael Busch ... She thought, perhaps she hadn't given Michael a square deal. A singular reflection, considering that she had been nineteen and Michael forty . . .

"But how did you get there?" Mr. Van Buren cogitated. To Sequitlam, he meant.

"By being born," said Mysie. "Grandpa Brennan went out to the West Coast by the Panama route in 1859, or 69, I forget which. I don't know why he didn't stop in California, but he went on up to Oregon and then Washington. Not many of the old-timers made money; they ended in the backwoods, same as grandpa. He married twice, so Gina is only my half-cousin."

"Who did he find to marry?"

"His first wife was a school teacher. And his second a hurdy-girl—a dance hall girl. One of his daughters married the supercargo on a freighter, and came back around the Horn and settled in Hoboken. That's Geraldine's branch of the family tree. The prettiest daughter was Gina's mother; she married a young lawyer in Seattle. I don't think he amounted to much, but anyhow he died, and she had to come home and live with Grandpa Brennan, and when Grandpa died, he left her the house; it was all he had. My father was her half-brother, Grandpa Brennan's youngest son; he died too, when I was six. I've got a stepfather, you know. Gina's mother and mine are only sisters-in-law, very distant relations. Don't try to keep track of it; the complications are very complicated."

"It sounds just like the Van Burens," said Mr. Van Buren. "Except that we seem to have petered out in aunts. Did I ever enumerate all my aunts to you? No?—well you're in luck; stop me if I ever begin." He lapsed into silence for a minute, and then said abruptly: "You've decided to go through with it?"

"Wouldn't it be best to do it now?" Mysie asked with an impartial air. Mr. Van Buren shrugged. "It would take only six months," Mysie explained. "And I ought to visit my mother this year; she isn't well."

"How much will it cost?" Mr. Van Buren asked.

"Not a great deal. If you can manage to go fifty-fifty— that's fair enough, isn't it? I expect I can find a job while I'm there; I don't know if there's a local stock company now or not; there used to be. But I'd just as soon take an office job."

"When would you be leaving?"

"As soon as possible. Then I'd have the summer away from New York."

"My mother sent you her love," said Mr. Van Buren. "She'd be glad to see you before you go."

"I don't know," said Mysie. "I like her."

"She likes you."

"But it isn't any use," said Mysie.

"I suppose not . . . Would you care to dine with me to-night?"

"Thea and I were getting dinner at home. Stick around if you want to."

Mr. Van Buren strolled over to the piano. Mysie took up her sewing basket again and darned a stocking. Mr. Van Buren hummed to his own accompaniment, in a mild tenor.
It was not like that in the olden days, that are gone beyond recall; In the rare old, fair old golden days. It was not that way at all
. . .
Mysie observed his profile against the pale buff wall. He always had a very close haircut, because his mouse-colored hair was turning prematurely grey at the temples and he hated to see it. An intellectual head. If one wished to draw the line that separates man from the brute kind, it would be the curve of a human head from the eyebrows to the back of the neck.

There was something uncanny about Jake, unclassifiable; he simply did not obey any of the rules; he seemed to but he didn't; so it was quite impossible either to judge or to predict him. He was neither wrong nor right, by any set standard; he managed to walk around the rules. So did Michael, but Michael would have admitted that probably he was doing wrong, and gone ahead just the same. . . .

It was going to be difficult, being in the same town with Michael again for six months. He wouldn't make difficulties; he never did; only the situation was impossible to resolve.

Though she hadn't mentioned it to Gina, she had seen Michael six months ago, in Chicago, while she was on tour. He asked: Do you like New York? She said: Nobody does. He said: You won't ever come back? She said: What would I do back there? He said: I guess that's right.