"I said, it hurts so terribly when people ask me about you," she said, "and I have to say-Oh, never mind. Never mind. How are you, dear? Tell me how you are."
"Oh, pretty good," he said. "Tired as the devil. You all right?"
"Jack, I-that"s what I wanted to tell you," she said. "I"m terribly worried. I"m nearly out of my mind. Oh, what will I do, dear, what are we going to do? Oh, Jack, Jack, darling!"
"Hey, how can I hear you when you mumble like that?" he said. "Can"t you talk louder? Talk right into the what-you-call-it."
"I can"t scream it over the telephone!" she said. "Haven"t you any sense? Don"t you know what I"m telling you? Don"t you know? Don"t you know?"
"I give up," he said. "First you mumble, and then you yell. Look, this doesn"t make sense. I can"t hear anything, with this rotten connection. Why don"t you write me a letter, in the morning? Do that, why don"t you? And I"ll write you one. See?"
"Jack, listen, listen!" she said. "You listen to me! I"ve got to talk to you. I tell you I"m nearly crazy. Please, dearest, hear what I"m saying. Jack, I--"
"Just a minute," he said. "Someone"s knocking at the door. Come in. Well, for cryin" out loud! Come on in, b.u.ms. Hang your coats up on the floor, and sit down. The Scotch is in the closet, and there"s ice in that pitcher. Make yourselves at home-act like you were in a regular bar. Be with you right away. Hey, listen, there"s a lot of crazy Indians just come in here, and I can"t hear myself think. You go ahead and write me a letter tomorrow. Will you?"
"Write you a letter!" she said. "Oh, G.o.d, don"t you think I"d have written you before, if I"d known where to reach you? I didn"t even know that, till they told me at your office today. I got so--"
"Oh, yeah, did they?" he said. "I thought I-Ah, pipe down, will you? Give a guy a chance. This is an expensive talk going on here. Say, look, this must be costing you a million dollars. You oughtn"t to do this."
"What do you think I care about that?" she said. "I"ll die if I don"t talk to you. I tell you I"ll die, Jack. Sweetheart, what is it? Don"t you want to talk to me? Tell me what makes you this way. Is it-don"t you really like me any more? Is that it? Don"t you, Jack?"
"h.e.l.l, I can"t hear," he said. "Don"t what?"
"Please," she said. "Please, please. Please, Jack, listen. When are you coming back, darling? I need you so. I need you so terribly. When are you coming back?"
"Why, that"s the thing," he said. "That"s what I was going to write you about tomorrow. Come on, now, how about shutting up just for a minute? A joke"s a joke. h.e.l.lo. Hear me all right? Why, you see, the way things came out today, it looks a little bit like I"d have to go on to Chicago for a while. Looks like a pretty big thing, and it won"t mean a very long time, I don"t believe. Looks as if I"d be going out there next week, I guess."
"Jack, no!" she said. "Oh, don"t do that! You can"t do that. You can"t leave me alone like this. I"ve got to see you, dearest. I"ve got to. You"ve got to come back, or I"ve got to come there to you. I can"t go through this. Jack, I can"t, I--"
"Look, we better say good-night now," he said. "No use trying to make out what you say, when you talk all over yourself like that. And there"s so much racket here-Hey, can the harmony, will you? G.o.d, it"s terrible. Want me to be thrown out of here? You go get a good night"s sleep, and I"ll write you all about it tomorrow."
"Listen!" she said. "Jack, don"t go "way! Help me, darling. Say something to help me through tonight. Say you love me, for G.o.d"s sake say you still love me. Say it. Say it."
"Ah, I can"t talk," he said. "This is fierce. I"ll write you first thing in the morning. "By. Thanks for calling up."
"Jack!" she said. "Jack, don"t go. Jack, wait a minute. I"ve got to talk to you. I"ll talk quietly. I won"t cry. I"ll talk so you can hear me. Please, dear, please--"
"All through with Detroit?" said the operator.
"No!" she said. "No, no, no! Get him, get him back again right away! Get him back. No, never mind. Never mind it now. Never--"
Vanity Fair, October 1928.
Big Blonde.
I.
Hazel Morse was a large, fair woman of the type that incites some men when they use the word "blonde" to click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly. She prided herself upon her small feet and suffered for her vanity, boxing them in snub-toed, high-heeled slippers of the shortest bearable size. The curious things about her were her hands, strange terminations to the flabby white arms splattered with pale tan spots-long, quivering hands with deep and convex nails. She should not have disfigured them with little jewels.
She was not a woman given to recollections. At her middle thirties, her old days were a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers.
In her twenties, after the deferred death of a hazy widowed mother, she had been employed as a model in a wholesale dress establishment-it was still the day of the big woman, and she was then prettily colored and erect and high-breasted. Her job was not onerous, and she met numbers of men and spent numbers of evenings with them, laughing at their jokes and telling them she loved their neckties. Men liked her, and she took it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing. Popularity seemed to her to be worth all the work that had to be put into its achievement. Men liked you because you were fun, and when they liked you they took you out, and there you were. So, and successfully, she was fun. She was a good sport. Men like a good sport.
No other form of diversion, simpler or more complicated, drew her attention. She never pondered if she might not be better occupied doing something else. Her ideas, or, better, her acceptances, ran right along with those of the other substantially built blondes in whom she found her friends.
When she had been working in the dress establishment some years she met Herbie Morse. He was thin, quick, attractive, with shifting lines about his shiny, brown eyes and a habit of fiercely biting at the skin around his finger nails. He drank largely; she found that entertaining. Her habitual greeting to him was an allusion to his state of the previous night.
"Oh, what a peach you had," she used to say, through her easy laugh. "I thought I"d die, the way you kept asking the waiter to dance with you."
She liked him immediately upon their meeting. She was enormously amused at his fast, slurred sentences, his interpolations of apt phrases from vaudeville acts and comic strips; she thrilled at the feel of his lean arm tucked firm beneath the sleeve of her coat; she wanted to touch the wet, flat surface of his hair. He was as promptly drawn to her. They were married six weeks after they had met.
She was delighted at the idea of being a bride; coquetted with it, played upon it. Other offers of marriage she had had, and not a few of them, but it happened that they were all from stout, serious men who had visited the dress establishment as buyers; men from Des Moines and Houston and Chicago and, in her phrase, even funnier places. There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence.
She wanted to be married. She was nearing thirty now, and she did not take the years well. She spread and softened, and her darkening hair turned her to inexpert dabblings with peroxide. There were times when she had little flashes of fear about her job. And she had had a couple of thousand evenings of being a good sport among her male acquaintances. She had come to be more conscientious than spontaneous about it.
Herbie earned enough, and they took a little apartment far uptown. There was a Mission-furnished dining-room with a hanging central light globed in liver-colored gla.s.s; in the living-room were an "over-stuffed suite," a Boston fern, and a reproduction of the Henner "Magdalene" with the red hair and the blue draperies; the bedroom was in gray enamel and old rose, with Herbie"s photograph on Hazel"s dressing-table and Hazel"s likeness on Herbie"s chest of drawers.
She cooked-and she was a good cook-and marketed and chatted with the delivery boys and the colored laundress. She loved the flat, she loved her life, she loved Herbie. In the first months of their marriage, she gave him all the pa.s.sion she was ever to know.
She had not realized how tired she was. It was a delight, a new game, a holiday, to give up being a good sport. If her head ached or her arches throbbed, she complained piteously, babyishly. If her mood was quiet, she did not talk. If tears came to her eyes, she let them fall.
She fell readily into the habit of tears during the first year of her marriage. Even in her good sport days, she had been known to weep lavishly and disinterestedly on occasion. Her behavior at the theater was a standing joke. She could weep at anything in a play-tiny garments, love both unrequited and mutual, seduction, purity, faithful servitors, wedlock, the triangle.
"There goes Haze," her friends would say, watching her. "She"s off again."
Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears freely. To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious. All sorrows became her sorrows; she was Tenderness. She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnaped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs. Even when the paper was no longer before her, her mind revolved upon these things and the drops slipped rhythmically over her plump cheeks.
"Honestly," she would say to Herbie, "all the sadness there is in the world when you stop to think about it!"
"Yeah," Herbie would say.
She missed n.o.body. The old crowd, the people who had brought her and Herbie together, dropped from their lives, lingeringly at first. When she thought of this at all, it was only to consider it fitting. This was marriage. This was peace.
But the thing was that Herbie was not amused.
For a time, he had enjoyed being alone with her. He found the voluntary isolation novel and sweet. Then it palled with a ferocious suddenness. It was as if one night, sitting with her in the steam-heated living-room, he would ask no more; and the next night he was through and done with the whole thing.
He became annoyed by her misty melancholies. At first, when he came home to find her softly tired and moody, he kissed her neck and patted her shoulder and begged her to tell her Herbie what was wrong. She loved that. But time slid by, and he found that there was never anything really, personally, the matter.
"Ah, for G.o.d"s sake," he would say. "Crabbing again. All right, sit here and crab your head off. I"m going out."
And he would slam out of the flat and come back late and drunk.
She was completely bewildered by what happened to their marriage. First they were lovers; and then, it seemed without transition, they were enemies. She never understood it.
There were longer and longer intervals between his leaving his office and his arrival at the apartment. She went through agonies of picturing him run over and bleeding, dead and covered with a sheet. Then she lost her fears for his safety and grew sullen and wounded. When a person wanted to be with a person, he came as soon as possible. She desperately wanted him to want to be with her; her own hours only marked the time till he would come. It was often nearly nine o"clock before he came home to dinner. Always he had had many drinks, and their effect would die in him, leaving him loud and querulous and bristling for affronts.
He was too nervous, he said, to sit and do nothing for an evening. He boasted, probably not in all truth, that he had never read a book in his life.
"What am I expected to do-sit around this dump on my tail all night?" he would ask, rhetorically. And again he would slam out.
She did not know what to do. She could not manage him. She could not meet him.
She fought him furiously. A terrific domesticity had come upon her, and she would bite and scratch to guard it. She wanted what she called "a nice home." She wanted a sober, tender husband, prompt at dinner, punctual at work. She wanted sweet, comforting evenings. The idea of intimacy with other men was terrible to her; the thought that Herbie might be seeking entertainment in other women set her frantic.
It seemed to her that almost everything she read-novels from the drug-store lending library, magazine stories, women"s pages in the papers-dealt with wives who lost their husbands" love. She could bear those, at that, better than accounts of neat, companionable marriage and living happily ever after.
She was frightened. Several times when Herbie came home in the evening, he found her determinedly dressed-she had had to alter those of her clothes that were not new, to make them fasten-and rouged.
"Let"s go wild tonight, what do you say?" she would hail him. "A person"s got lots of time to hang around and do nothing when they"re dead."
So they would go out, to chop houses and the less expensive cabarets. But it turned out badly. She could no longer find amus.e.m.e.nt in watching Herbie drink. She could not laugh at his whimsicalities, she was so tensely counting his indulgences. And she was unable to keep back her remonstrances-"Ah, come on, Herb, you"ve had enough, haven"t you? You"ll feel something terrible in the morning."
He would be immediately enraged. All right, crab; crab, crab, crab, crab, that was all she ever did. What a lousy sport she was! There would be scenes, and one or the other of them would rise and stalk out in fury.
She could not recall the definite day that she started drinking, herself. There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops upon a window-pane, they ran together and trickled away. She had been married six months; then a year; then three years.
She had never needed to drink, formerly. She could sit for most of a night at a table where the others were imbibing earnestly and never droop in looks or spirits, nor be bored by the doings of those about her. If she took a c.o.c.ktail, it was so unusual as to cause twenty minutes or so of jocular comment. But now anguish was in her. Frequently, after a quarrel, Herbie would stay out for the night, and she could not learn from him where the time had been spent. Her heart felt tight and sore in her breast, and her mind turned like an electric fan.
She hated the taste of liquor. Gin, plain or in mixtures, made her promptly sick. After experiment, she found that Scotch whisky was best for her. She took it without water, because that was the quickest way to its effect.
Herbie pressed it on her. He was glad to see her drink. They both felt it might restore her high spirits, and their good times together might again be possible.
" "Atta girl," he would approve her. "Let"s see you get boiled, baby."
But it brought them no nearer. When she drank with him, there would be a little while of gaiety and then, strangely without beginning, they would be in a wild quarrel. They would wake in the morning not sure what it had all been about, foggy as to what had been said and done, but each deeply injured and bitterly resentful. There would be days of vengeful silence.
There had been a time when they had made up their quarrels, usually in bed. There would be kisses and little names and a.s.surances of fresh starts. . . . "Oh, it"s going to be great now, Herb. We"ll have swell times. I was a crab. I guess I must have been tired. But everything"s going to be swell. You"ll see."
Now there were no gentle reconciliations. They resumed friendly relations only in the brief magnanimity caused by liquor, before more liquor drew them into new battles. The scenes became more violent. There were shouted invectives and pushes, and sometimes sharp slaps. Once she had a black eye. Herbie was horrified next day at sight of it. He did not go to work; he followed her about, suggesting remedies and heaping dark blame on himself. But after they had had a few drinks-"to pull themselves together"-she made so many wistful references to her bruise that he shouted at her and rushed out and was gone for two days.
Each time he left the place in a rage, he threatened never to come back. She did not believe him, nor did she consider separation. Somewhere in her head or her heart was the lazy, nebulous hope that things would change and she and Herbie settle suddenly into soothing married life. Here were her home, her furniture, her husband, her station. She summoned no alternatives.
She could no longer bustle and potter. She had no more vicarious tears; the hot drops she shed were for herself. She walked ceaselessly about the rooms, her thoughts running mechanically round and round Herbie. In those days began the hatred of being alone that she was never to overcome. You could be by yourself when things were all right, but when you were blue you got the howling horrors.
She commenced drinking alone, little, short drinks all through the day. It was only with Herbie that alcohol made her nervous and quick in offense. Alone, it blurred sharp things for her. She lived in a haze of it. Her life took on a dream-like quality. Nothing was astonishing.
A Mrs. Martin moved into the flat across the hall. She was a great blonde woman of forty, a promise in looks of what Mrs. Morse was to be. They made acquaintance, quickly became inseparable. Mrs. Morse spent her days in the opposite apartment. They drank together, to brace themselves after the drinks of the nights before.
She never confided her troubles about Herbie to Mrs. Martin. The subject was too bewildering to her to find comfort in talk. She let it be a.s.sumed that her husband"s business kept him much away. It was not regarded as important; husbands, as such, played but shadowy parts in Mrs. Martin"s circle.
Mrs. Martin had no visible spouse; you were left to decide for yourself whether he was or was not dead. She had an admirer, Joe, who came to see her almost nightly. Often he brought several friends with him-"The Boys," they were called. The Boys were big, red, good-humored men, perhaps forty-five, perhaps fifty. Mrs. Morse was glad of invitations to join the parties-Herbie was scarcely ever at home at night now. If he did come home, she did not visit Mrs. Martin. An evening alone with Herbie meant inevitably a quarrel, yet she would stay with him. There was always her thin and wordless idea that, maybe, this night, things would begin to be all right.
The Boys brought plenty of liquor along with them whenever they came to Mrs. Martin"s. Drinking with them, Mrs. Morse became lively and good-natured and audacious. She was quickly popular. When she had drunk enough to cloud her most recent battle with Herbie, she was excited by their approbation. Crab, was she? Rotten sport, was she? Well, there were some that thought different.
Ed was one of The Boys. He lived in Utica-had "his own business" there, was the awed report-but he came to New York almost every week. He was married. He showed Mrs. Morse the then current photographs of Junior and Sister, and she praised them abundantly and sincerely. Soon it was accepted by the others that Ed was her particular friend.
He staked her when they all played poker; sat next her and occasionally rubbed his knee against hers during the game. She was rather lucky. Frequently she went home with a twenty-dollar bill or a ten-dollar bill or a handful of crumpled dollars. She was glad of them. Herbie was getting, in her words, something awful about money. To ask him for it brought an instant row.
"What the h.e.l.l do you do with it?" he would say. "Shoot it all on Scotch?"
"I try to run this house half-way decent," she would retort. "Never thought of that, did you? Oh, no, his lordship couldn"t be bothered with that."
Again, she could not find a definite day, to fix the beginning of Ed"s proprietorship. It became his custom to kiss her on the mouth when he came in, as well as for farewell, and he gave her little quick kisses of approval all through the evening. She liked this rather more than she disliked it. She never thought of his kisses when she was not with him.
He would run his hand lingeringly over her back and shoulders.
"Some dizzy blonde, eh?" he would say. "Some doll."
One afternoon she came home from Mrs. Martin"s to find Herbie in the bedroom. He had been away for several nights, evidently on a prolonged drinking bout. His face was gray, his hands jerked as if they were on wires. On the bed were two old suitcases, packed high. Only her photograph remained on his bureau, and the wide doors of his closet disclosed nothing but coat-hangers.
"I"m blowing," he said. "I"m through with the whole works. I got a job in Detroit."
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She had drunk much the night before, and the four Scotches she had had with Mrs. Martin had only increased her fogginess.
"Good job?" she said.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "Looks all right."
He closed a suitcase with difficulty, swearing at it in whispers.
"There"s some dough in the bank," he said. "The bank book"s in your top drawer. You can have the furniture and stuff."
He looked at her, and his forehead twitched.
"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, I"m through, I"m telling you," he cried. "I"m through."
"All right, all right," she said. "I heard you, didn"t I?"
She saw him as if he were at one end of a cannon and she at the other. Her head was beginning to ache b.u.mpingly, and her voice had a dreary, tiresome tone. She could not have raised it.
"Like a drink before you go?" she asked.
Again he looked at her, and a corner of his mouth jerked up.
"c.o.c.keyed again for a change, aren"t you?" he said. "That"s nice. Sure, get a couple of shots, will you?"
She went to the pantry, mixed him a stiff highball, poured herself a couple of inches of whisky and drank it. Then she gave herself another portion and brought the gla.s.ses into the bedroom. He had strapped both suitcases and had put on his hat and overcoat.
He took his highball.
"Well," he said, and he gave a sudden, uncertain laugh. "Here"s mud in your eye."