Part 22 (2/2)

”Do you like her?” she suddenly asked.

”Who?”

”His girl. The one he just got engaged to.”

I faltered, ”I haven't met her.”

”Lucky you, what a crud. Came down here this afternoon with this whole pack of snots from Miss Putrid's-you know what that place is? A finis.h.i.+ng school, for G.o.d's sake! Pack of putrid snots, I'd finished them for free.”

”Maybe you'd better say I'm here.”

She hoisted the dipper over her shoulder like a rifle and saluted obligingly. ”Okay. I'll tell them,” and began pacing off. But in a moment she had to dart back: ”What am I supposed to say?”

”That there's someone here.”

”No, I mean what am I supposed to say? Miss What?” She plucked a squat flask from the cl.u.s.ter on the desk and clutched it in her armpit, and despite the enc.u.mbrances of bottle and dipper, which made her seem as many-armed as Vishnu, all at once turned aggressively businesslike: ”I didn't catch the name,” said she, a rather too positive imitation of a movie secretary. ”Miss Who?”

”I didn't give it,” I said, and gave it.

”Wow!” said she.

”Go ahead,” I urged.

”But she stood without moving and whistled instead. ”You're not the daughter?”

”No,” I said.

She had taken me, in the usual way, for Nanette.

”Go ahead,” I repeated, with a sigh. ”It's only a case of mistaken ident.i.ty.”

”Niece?” she insisted.

”No.”

She stared. ”But he's the Partner!”

”Right,” said I. ”That's the one I want to see.”

”You don't expect me to go right up to him? I don't even know what he looks like!” She took furtive steps away. ”I told you,” she reproved me, ”I'm in filing.” I had begun, she implied, with the wrong end of the hierarchy: a thing clearly as offensive as speaking deferentially to a servant in an English novel. The girl had a sense of fitness. She had, moreover, a sense of ”place,” and-s.h.i.+fting her accoutrements for comfort, the dipper hooked around her neck, the bottle grasped in front of her with both hands-she fled to occupy it.

Left to myself and unattended, I went peering after William on my own, but with a certain caution. Plainly I had turned up at the worst possible moment-a moment which, though vastly and ostensibly public (there might have been eighty or ninety guests), was nevertheless a private occasion. An engagement party, it did not matter who sponsored it, had the odor of a family event, an I believed that the sight of me, without warning, even in such a crush, could do no less than nettle William. Embarra.s.sment and a sort of angry shame would redden him acutely. In this kind of situation I could expect nothing of him: he wouldn't be likely to tell me, without resorting to the coa.r.s.eness of uttering it, that I had not been invited and had no business being there. He was severely conscious of protocol, but on my mother's account, as always, he would hold his reluctant peace. Under any condition he would have been sorry to receive me, but in the hour of his son's engagement I supposed he would be positively unwilling. He would regard me not so much as an intruder as a violator. It was an ugly notion-myself coming in the guise of an aggressor to disrupt the first unfolding of a filial joy. Anyhow William could never look at me, I imagined, without seeing me as an admonition. He would suspect in me nothing but bad omens. I represented for him a failed marriage-his own, undertaken with all the trust of youth. If I cared to do him a service I would go home immediately.

I became gradually aware of these unpleasant certainties, moving from cubicle to cubicle, each rather spartan and prudently secretarial, though vaguely airless and perfumed, and I avoided the large noisy interior room where I would be liable to attract notice. Twice I pa.s.sed its door, and inside glimpsed a long wall of windows opening the glare of a dizzying daylight in giant patches to a mult.i.tude of blotter-brightened desks and torsos animated and stretched by the gestures of clever shouts and amused faces which the steady cooling of hidden machinery (now and then I encountered a vent overhead and felt a blast) had not kept from going generally pink with a more internal heat. The nearly hundred arms reached upward-a forest of paper cups-and, like a long birch in a pine-wood, a single aluminum dipper; someone was reciting a toast. Round plates of little colored cakes lay here and there on the desk-tops. There was a dish or two of thick cheese-yellow sandwiches. I was all at once sensible of being famished, and although I had already persuaded myself to start straightway for the door and down the elevator, I suddenly hesitated. I began to reconsider. If finding me there were to discomfit William, why should I care? I had after all not come to a party; I was after all not a deliberate invader; I had come solely for information and it was my last chance to get it. In two days I would be with Tilbeck. The day after tomorrow I would be with him; he would have me; it was frighteningly close. I thought of it and it seemed unreal; and then once again bitterly actual, bitterly imminent; and then again false, a fantasy. Nevertheless I would stay. I had come for William and I did not mean to go simply to oblige circ.u.mstance. I helped myself to a sandwich and a cake and stood devouring them both. The cheese had gone dry, but the cake was good and I took another, wandering at my ease through the crowd. There were a great many young people and I recognized some cla.s.smates of William's son: they were the dancing partners he had brought down with him from law school several weeks before, as a favor for my mother. A pair of them, walking together, pa.s.sed me with a faint acknowledgment, puzzled; but one in fact stopped and said, ”You're not still here! Smokestack have a hole in it?” A fourth was civil: ”That was a nice party. I don't usually like charity b.a.l.l.s but this one wasn't half bad.” ”What do you mean?” I asked in horror-”It wasn't a charity ball, it was for bon voyage.” He was a little drunk but his laugh was kind, even respectful. ”That's what you call it when they drag out the stags for an act of mercy. A charity ball,” he explained through a watery mouth; ”it's only an expression.” The rest did not know me, or if they did they concealed it. I was not distressed; I was not indifferent, but I was relieved; if they had spoken to me I would have felt ashamed, not for myself but for my mother. I had no doubt they thought of her as an admirable manager. Her champagne was undeniably decent though it had not inspired conviviality. Perhaps they said the same of me.

I did not see William. For some minutes I struggled through the mazy aisles among the changeable chattering groups, diligently watchful; and now and again I took to my toes to squint through the deepening smoke that swam in eddies from shoulder to shoulder. I did not see him. I felt as though I were pus.h.i.+ng my way through a busy school-yard: the room was overrun with girls in their teens, each one sailing an ice-cube in a paper cup and drawing on a short cigarette as if it were a soda-straw. They smoked their cigarettes to the b.u.t.t and at once lit fresh ones; they tapped their ashes to the floor with elegant little flicks, and drank roughly, in gulps. They wore their hair in extremes-either very, very short or very, very long, but in either case energetically burnished-and they all p.r.o.nounced ”o” as though it had an umlaut over it. Most of them were moderately tall-long, rather-with charming figures, though the mode just then was, I observed, the stringently flattened breast-and over this region of their anatomies they each had pinned a little typewritten card: GOOD LUCK FANNIE FROM FORM 7, MISS JEWETT'S. This interested me immensely; it was my mother's old school, a limited but reasonably venerable inst.i.tution, fas.h.i.+onably small, but so absolutely ”correct” that its reputation for getting its graduates into college was justifiably meagre. It was, moreover, a place I had clamored to be excused from attending after breaking my ankle as early as the first form. One did not usually break one's ankle until the third form (and then one spoke of it, airily, as only ”cracked”); my precocity shocked me into defection, and startled even my mother, who, though in theory she always applauded rebellion, did not question the necessity of going to Miss Jewett's. Going to Miss Jewett's was, in fact, a family convention- her mother had been tutored (in ice hockey) by the original Miss Jewett (not the mere pastel niece), the genuine Miss Jewett, the aged and astonis.h.i.+ngly agile Miss Jewett who was from the beginning Mistress of Fencing and whose second highest attribute appeared to have been simply that, in an adulatory era which celebrated anything even foggily English, she was a Londoner-what part of London remained a mystery. It was rumored that she was no more than an enterprising c.o.c.kney, a story which her muscular graduates, with unperturbed smiles, used neither to affirm nor deny. If Miss Jewett had been a c.o.c.kney, she had at any rate known the difference between a c.o.c.kney and a lady; and they were ladies. In my grandmother's time Miss Jewett, by then already very grand and elderly, had begun to walk with a cane, which she would raise without warning to bat a ball flying out of bounds. Her talent as a batter was exceeded only by her genius as a pitcher. She wore high collars of blue lace, culottes, and bifocals so strong they enlarged her eyes to the size of rather worn grey golf b.a.l.l.s. When she died she left behind her a flouris.h.i.+ng school. Her gymnasia had overflowed into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the neighboring Episcopal church, and she would have rented a nearby Presbyterian cellar as well, had the minister not been a Scotsman. Her library was poor, though perhaps merely eccentric: it was filled with old copies of The London Ill.u.s.trated News, to which she had never allowed her subscription to lapse, and seven complete, and completely uncut, sets of d.i.c.kens, but little else. Her gym closet held fifty-four volleyb.a.l.l.s. Her last lecture had been on the purity of the temple of the body, and against sweat. She had designed her educational philosophy to foster athletics and motherhood among her girls; and it did, in that order. She used to say that while her fencing stars had the healthiest babies of all her girls, the baseball players had the most intelligent. It all had to do with the tension of the pelvic structure and the stroke of the pectoral muscle. ”A Sound Mind in a Sound Body” was conspicuous on her letterhead, but if she was attracted to the first half of this slogan, it was only because of the sound. The motto she preferred was ”Play is Work.” For Miss Jewett's graduates a university was a vulgar place. To go to one was a confession of moral, social, and muscular defeat; it was a capitulation, and no one but the failures in volleyball ever committed themselves to this ignominy: Her most notorious case had been a girl who had made herself ridiculous by getting into Barnard, and afterward pa.s.sing; this creature as a consequence was regarded not only as contemptibly disloyal, but worse, as unwomanly. The girls of Miss Jewett's were trained for womanliness. They came out, as a rule, in the fifth form, were engaged in the seventh or shortly afterward (though ”shortly afterward” carried with it a certain mild disgrace), and married themselves directly into the Junior League, where for a few months they quibbled over dates for charitable theatre parties until the arrival of their predeterminedly vigorous first babies. My mother had gone to Miss Jewett's; William's present wife had gone to Miss Jewett's; and I thought it an orderly and proper thing that William's daughter-in-law should shortly be an alumna of the same school. It gave me, this propriety, nevertheless a moment's pity for William's son; he had so readily surrendered. He had chosen a schoolgirl; he had chosen womanliness; he had chosen the very right thing. I felt despairing: he had chosen only what his father might have chosen for him. Yet it seemed he might have wanted something other than the very right thing; it seemed he might have wanted talk and even bookishness and even character. Oh, it seemed he might have wanted-not me (not even my secret musings dared this direction), and not even someone very like me (though I had frequently, and not without smoldering irony, contemplated such a turn: it was a kind of self-indulgent daydream, half-vengeful, half-vicarious), but, at least, not one of Miss Jewett's girls! Not one of them! They were all of them replicas of Allegra Vand; and it was useless to suppose, just because it was inconceivable they should, like her, leap at working-cla.s.s causes, that they were not replicas. If it had been in the style of my mother's generation to have no ideals, to be sick of ideals, she would have had none, she would have been sick of them. If it had been in the style to go abroad not for world-improvement wobbly rallies but for self-improvement, she would have gone for that instead. Miss Jewett's girls were all alike, they were up-to-date; they were inhabited, though not inhibited, by the Zeitgeist. And if the Jewett-trained daughters quarreled with the Jewett-trained mothers, it was simply the Zeitgeist, and not Miss Jewett's muscular influences, which had altered. ”Woman's physiology stays the same,” Miss Jewett herself used to say; ”it's only the times which are different.” This was her argument, in my grandmother's day, against tobacco. It was the same argument which the girls of Miss Jewett's used to produce when my mother went there-only in favor. Now it is the young Miss Jewett, the original's seventy-year-old niece, they must answer to: but it is strange how they have come around to the old Miss Jewett's way of thinking. Today they do not much like tobacco. They smoke marijuana instead.

I learned this not-as it might be presumed-long afterward, but then and there, from The Good Sport. This-it turned out to be the school newspaper-had been left lying on one of the desks in that wide bright desk-huddled room, and when I flurried it open a photograph of a girl in a tennis costume jumped out at me, side by side with a half-page advertis.e.m.e.nt taken (I guessed in resignation) by William's firm: ”Compliments Of” set in a sea of white margin like a craft fit for darker waters. ”Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love,” said the caption in twelve-point Bodoni Bold, ”Wins Match.” A tragically romantic notice: and here is Beverly in her white shorts and white thighs, laughing into the saucy camera and measuring her racket like an oversized salmon. ”I've been smoking the weed for relaxation,” she explains, ”and it's definitely improved my serve.” ”Do you recommend it for other sports?” inquires the interviewer, identified in the by-line as Eleanor Bell. ”I don't know about other sports,” says Beverly to Eleanor; ”tennis is my game. But for tennis I definitely recommend Mary-Jane.” Mary-Jane-the sweet weed itself-at Miss Jewett's! Still, I had seen pictures of my mother in this very pose, and if experimentation with the slow taste of Mary-Jane had replaced experimentation with the cla.s.s-structure, the essentials were the same: the throbbing bosom, the clear chin-line, and an overwhelming belief in the omnipotence of the present over the future. Oh, the girls of Miss Jewett's! They had, if nothing else, a perfect self-possession; and this-not talk, not bookishness, least of all character-drew William's son. He wanted the womanly child, the childlike woman-in short, exactly what his father had married in my mother.

This perception entered me like a cloud; and under the weight and flavor of it I suddenly spied William himself, although I had already given up looking for him. His hands were hooked by their thumbs across his grey back, and his big waxy distinguished skull, disconcertingly like the heavy-chinned head of Henry James or. Edmund Wilson (without their aura, which illuminates even the solemn photographs, of amazement at the world's incongruities-for William was too pious for wonder), cautiously wheeled toward his two companions. I was left with a quick vision of that broad serious middle-aged brow, obscured now half by the shadow of his retreat, an out-of-the-way corner, and half by the flourished arm of the taller of the attendant pair, a narrow dark man with unhurrying eyes close to the surface of a rather Tartarish face (though grossly and even mediaevally lidded and lashed), Wherein courtesy hid covetousness. The shorter and squarer one was plainly an Irishman, but not the ebullient sort; he was more pale than any monk, though he seemed as silently self-absorbed as a Trappist. Neither man had the proper look or tone which might be construed as habitually environmental for William, he was not casual with them, and I supposed they had not emerged from the special air of his clubs, or, going back still farther, of his cla.s.s. It was not only that they had the wrong faces. Even from a distance I could tell they had the wrong point of view. The Irishman was too detached, and the other, with his hand nervously slapping at his thick-haired temples to emphasize a phrase, was too actively attached: he had a rapid joyless smile which, with no warning of expression, he uncovered now as weapon and now as semicolon. The Irishman merely listened-but dependably. It seemed a conference of elders, dense as a thicket, and I might have taken one or the other of them for the bride's father had either remotely struck me as Protestant.

While I stood considering, The Good Sport was s.n.a.t.c.hed from my hand.

”Here, I've been looking for that, d.a.m.n it.”

The rough grab startled me. I turned, and subsided into a gradual absorption of a subdued artistocratic sneer, as certain and imperious as a head on a coin; a diminutive cigar, grandly squeezed; and the proud breast of an arrogant buffalo: it was William's son.

Without pleasure he took in the fact of my presence.

”This is a surprise.”

”Your engagement?” I said. ”Yes, it is. I hadn't heard anything about it. I really am surprised.”

He rewarded me with a quick impatient artificial scowl. ”I meant finding you here.”

”I came to see your father.”

”On business?”

”My mother's,” I said facilely.

”I'm afraid business is suspended for the rest of the day.”

He brought this out so gloomily that I was constrained to remark politely, ”Of course. It's an extraordinary occasion.”

”Well, it was a surprise to me too.”

”Your engagement?” I said again.

He looked at me with open annoyance. ”This party. It was sprung on me. I had no idea.” But he gathered himself up, recovered, and gently lowered The Good Sport. ”I hope you don't mind not being asked,” he pursued, all at once summoning up an exquisite courtesy which, if it had been less acid and had more successfully concealed a contrary inspiration, might have resembled his father's. ”Of course there'll be the official engagement thing later on, and of course we'll expect you and Mr. and Mrs. Vand. I'm told it'll be a supper party at the Burgundy. Mother was very careful to put you at the top of the list.”

I hid my skepticism and thanked him.

But he had not finished. ”I imagine you were simply overlooked, for today.”

”Look, I didn't come for the party,” I said, feeling warm. ”You don't have to apologize.”

”The boys here simply got together about it behind my back. Naturally they'd ask just who was most obvious. I mean they wouldn't think of you.”

”I'm anything but obvious,” I conceded.

”If I'd known about it I would have thought of you myself.”

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