You Can't Go Home Again (25 page)

She stared at him wonderingly, her face bent towards him in an expression of startled and protesting concern, but at the same moment she was feeling, as she had often felt; that there was something obscure and strange in life which she had never been able to find out about or to express. For she knew that this unexpected and reasonless display of strong feeling in her husband bore no relation whatever to the review in the paper. His chagrin at having the reviewer refer to her as “Miss” was nothing more than a playful and jocular pretence. She knew that he was really bursting with elation because of her success.

With a sudden poignant and wordless pity—for whom, for what, she could not say—she had an instant picture of the great chasms downtown where he would spend his day, and where, in the furious drive and turmoil of his business, excited, prosperous-looking men would seize his arm or clap him on the back and shout:

“Say, have you seen to-day’s
Herald-Tribune
? Did you read what it had to say about your wife? Aren’t you proud of her? Congratulations!”

She could also see his ruddy face beginning to blush and burn brick-red with pleasure as he received these tributes, and as he tried to answer them with an amused and tolerant smile, and a few casual words of acknowledgment as if to say:

“Yes, I think I did see some mention of her. But of course you can hardly expect me to be excited by a thing like that. That’s an old story to us now. They’ve said that kind of thing so often that we’re used to it.”

When he came home that night he would repeat all that had been said to him, and although he would do it with an air of faintly cynical amusement, she knew that his satisfaction would be immense and solid. She knew, too, that his pride would be enhanced by the knowledge that the wives of these rich men—handsome Jewesses most of them, as material-minded in their quest for what was fashionable in the world of art as were their husbands for what was profitable in the world of business—would also read of her success, would straightway go to witness it themselves, and then would speak of it in brilliant chambers of the night, where the glowing air would take on an added spice of something exciting and erotic from their handsome and sensual-looking faces.

All this she thought of instantly as she stared at this plump, grey-haired, and faultlessly groomed man whose eyes had suddenly, and for no reason that she knew, filled with tears, and whose mouth now had the pouting, wounded look of a hurt child. And her heart was filled with a nameless and undefinable sense of compassion as she cried warmly, in a protesting voice:

“But, Fritz! You know I never felt like that! You know I never said a thing like that to you! You know I love it when you like anything I do! I’d rather have your opinion ten times over than that of these newspaper fellows! What do they know anyway?” she muttered scornfully.

Mr. Jack, having taken off his glasses and polished them, having blown his nose vigorously and put his glasses on again, now lowered his head, braced his thumb stiffly on his temple and put four plump fingers across his eyes in a comical shielding position, saying rapidly in a muffled, apologetic voice:

“I know! I know! It’s all right! I was only joking,” he said with an embarrassed smile. Then he blew his nose vigorously again, his face lost its expression of wounded feeling, and he began to talk in a completely natural, matter-of-fact tone, as if nothing he had done or said had been at all unusual. “Well,” he said, “how do you feel? Are you pleased with the way things went last night?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” she answered dubiously, feeling all at once the vague discontent that was customary with her when her work was finished and the almost hysterical tension of the last days before a theatrical opening was at an end. Then she continued: “I think it went off pretty well, don’t you? I thought my sets were sort of good—or did you think so?” she asked eagerly. “No,” she went on in the disparaging tone of a child talking to itself, “I guess they were just ordinary. A long way from my best—hah?” she demanded.

“You know what I think,” he said. “I’ve told you. There’s no one who can touch you. The best thing in the show!” he said strongly. “They were by far the best thing in the show—by far! by
far!
” Then, quietly, he added: “Well, I suppose you’re glad it’s over. That’s the end of it for this season, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, “except for some costumes that I promised Irene Morgenstein I’d do for one of her ballets. And I’ve got to meet some of the Arlington company for fittings again this morning,” she concluded in a dispirited tone.

“What, again! Weren’t you satisfied with the way they looked last night? What’s the trouble?”

“Oh”—she said with disgust—“what do you think’s the trouble, Fritz? There’s only one trouble! It never changes! It’s always the same! The trouble is that there are so many half-baked fools in the world who’ll never do the thing you tell them to do! That’s the trouble! God!” she said frankly, “I’m too good for it! I never should have given up my painting. It makes me sick sometimes!” she burst out with warm indignation. “Isn’t it a shame that everything I do has to be wasted on those people?”

“What people?”

“Oh, you know,” she muttered, “the kind of people that you get in the theatre. Of course there are some good ones—but God!” she exclaimed, “most of them are such trash! Did you see me in this, and did you read what they said about me in that, and wasn’t I a knockout in the other thing?” she muttered resentfully. “God, Fritz, to listen to the way they talk you’d think the only reason a play ever gets produced is to give them a chance to strut around and show themselves off upon a stage! When it ought to be the most wonderful thing in the world! Oh, the magic you can make, the things you can do with people if you want to! It’s like nothing else on earth!” she cried. “Isn’t it a shame no more is done with it?”

She was silent for a moment; sunk in her own thoughts, then she said wearily:

“Well, I’m glad this job’s at an end. I wish there was something else I could do. If I only knew how to do something else, I’d do it. Really, I would,” she said earnestly. “I’m tired of it. I’m too good for it,” she said simply, and for a moment she stared moodily into space.

Then, frowning in a sombre and perturbed way, she fumbled in a wooden box upon the desk, took from it a cigarette, and lighted it. She got up nervously and began to walk about the room with short steps, frowning intently while she puffed at the cigarette, and holding it in the rather clumsy but charming manner of a woman who rarely smokes.

“I wonder if I’ll get any more shows to do next season,” she muttered half to herself, as if scarcely aware of her husband’s presence. “I wonder if there’ll be anything more for me. No one has spoken to me yet,” she said gloomily.

“Well, if you’re so tired of it, I shouldn’t think you’d care,” he said ironically, and then added: “Why worry about it till the time comes?”

With that he stooped and planted another friendly and perfunctory kiss on her cheek, gave her shoulder a gentle little pat, and turned and left the room.

12. Downtown

Mr. Jack had listened to his wife’s complaint with the serious attention which stories of her labours, trials, and adventures in the theatre always aroused in him. For, in addition to the immense pride which he took in his wife’s talent and success, he was like most rich men of his race, and particularly those who were living every day, as he was, in the glamorous, unreal, and fantastic world of speculation, strongly attracted by the glitter of the theatre.

The progress of his career during the forty years since he first came to New York had been away from the quieter, more traditional, and, as it now seemed to him, duller forms of social and domestic life, to those forms which were more brilliant and gay, filled with the constant excitement of new pleasures and sensations, and touched with a spice of uncertainty and menace. The life of his boyhood—that of his family, who for a hundred years had carried on a private banking business in a little town—now seemed to him impossibly stodgy. Not only its domestic and social activities, which went on as steadily and predictably as a clock from year to year, marked at punctual intervals by a ritual of dutiful visits and countervisits among relatives, but its business enterprise also, with its small and cautious transactions, now seemed paltry and uninteresting.

In New York he had moved on from speed to speed and from height to height, keeping pace with all the most magnificent developments in the furious city that roared in constantly increasing crescendo about him. Now, even in the world in which he lived by day, the feverish air of which he breathed into his lungs exultantly, there was a glittering, inflamed quality that was not unlike that of the night-time world of the theatre in which the actors lived.

At nine o’clock in the morning of every working day, Mr. Jack was hurled downtown to his office in a shining projectile of machinery, driven by a chauffeur who was a literal embodiment of New York in one of its most familiar aspects. As the driver prowled above his wheel, his dark and sallow face twisted bitterly by the sneer of his thin mouth, his dark eyes shining with an unnatural lustre like those of a man who is under the stimulation of a powerful drug, he seemed to be—and was—a creature which this furious city had created for its special uses. His tallowy flesh seemed to have been compacted, like that of millions of other men who wore grey hats and had faces of the same lifeless hue, out of a common city-substance—the universal grey stuff of pavements, buildings, towers, tunnels, and bridges. In his veins there seemed to flow and throb, instead of blood, the crackling electric current by which the whole city moved. It was legible in every act and gesture the man made. As his sinister figure prowled above the wheel, his eyes darting right and left, his hands guiding the powerful machine with skill and precision, grazing, cutting, flanking, shifting, insinuating, sneaking, and shooting the great car through all but impossible channels with murderous recklessness, it was evident that the unwholesome chemistry that raced in him was consonant with the great energy that was pulsing through all the arteries of the city.

Yet, to be driven downtown by this creature in this way seemed to increase Mr. Jack’s anticipation and pleasure in the day’s work that lay before him. He liked to sit beside his driver and watch him. The fellow’s eyes were now sly and cunning as a cat’s, now hard and black as basalt. His thin face pivoted swiftly right and left, now leering with crafty triumph as he snaked his car ahead round some cursing rival, now from the twisted corner of his mouth snarling out his hate loudly at other drivers or at careless pedestrians: “Guh-wan, ya screwy bast-ed! Guh-wan!” He would growl more softly at the menacing figure of some hated policeman, or would speak to his master out of the corner of his bitter mouth, saying a few words of grudging praise for some policeman who had granted him privileges:

“Some of dem are all right,” he would say. “You know!”—with a constricted accent of his high, strained voice. “Dey’re not all basteds. Dis guy”—with a jerk of his head towards the policeman who had nodded and let him pass—“dis guy’s all right. I know him—sure! sure!—he’s a bruddeh of me sisteh-in-law!”

The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver evoked in his master’s mind an image of the world he lived in that was theatrical and phantasmal. Instead of seeing himself as one man going to his work like countless others in the practical and homely light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of its traffic, the web of the streets swarming with people, became for him nothing more than a tremendous backdrop for his own activities. All of this—the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, power, stealth, and victory, and, above everything else, the sense of privilege—added to Mr. Jack’s pleasure, and even gave him a heady joy as he rode downtown to work.

And the feverish world of speculation in which he worked, and which had now come to have this theatrical cast and colour, was everywhere sustained by this same sense of privilege. It was the privilege of men selected from the common run because of some mysterious intuition they were supposed to have—selected to live gloriously without labour or production, their profits mounting incredibly with every ticking of the clock, their wealth increased fabulously by a mere nod of the head or the shifting of a finger. This being so, it seemed to Mr. Jack, and, indeed, to many others at the time—for many who were not themselves members of this fortunate class envied those who were—it seemed, then, not only entirely reasonable but even natural that the whole structure of society from top to bottom should be honeycombed with privilege and dishonesty.

Mr. Jack knew, for example, that one of his chauffeurs swindled him constantly. He knew that every bill for petrol, oil, tyres, and overhauling was padded, that the chauffeur was in collusion with the garage owner for this purpose, and that he received a handsome percentage from him as a reward. Yet this knowledge did not disturb Mr. Jack. He actually got from it a degree of cynical amusement. Well aware of what was going on, he also knew that he could afford it, and somehow this gave him a sense of power and security. If he ever entertained any other attitude, it was to shrug his shoulders indifferently as he thought:

“Well, what of it? There’s nothing to be done about it. They all do it. If it wasn’t this fellow, it would be someone else.”

Similarly, he knew that some of the maids in his household were not above “borrowing” things and “forgetting” to return them. He was aware that various members of the police force as well as several red-necked firemen spent most of their hours of ease in his kitchen or in the maids’ sitting-room. He also knew that these guardians of the public peace and safety ate royally every night of the choicest dishes of his own table, and that their wants were cared for even before his family and his guests were served, and that his best whisky and his rarest wines were theirs for the taking.

But beyond an occasional burst of annoyance when he discovered that a case of real Irish whisky (with rusty sea-stained markings on the bottles to prove genuineness) had melted away almost overnight, a loss which roused his temper only because of the rareness of the thing lost, he said very little. When his wife spoke to him about such matters, as she occasionally did, in a tone of vague protest, saying: “Fritz, I’m sure those girls are taking things they have no right to. I think it’s perfectly dreadful, don’t you? What do you think we ought to do about it?”—his usual answer was to smile tolerantly, shrug, and show his palms.