Page 1 of 9

Part 23

Lucia was sitting on the floor, surrounded by strapped trunks and bags, and a half-packed suitcase, reading. She looked up and smiled. “I have found a motto for you, Pat—the perfect motto for any young divorcée. Listen—

‘Live thou whom life shall cure Almost of Memory . . .’”

“Who wrote it?”

“Kipling.”

“I don’t think it is a perfect motto—the ‘almost’ ruins it—and why read poetry the day before your wedding anyway?”

“The ‘almost’ makes it accurate . . . Arch sent me this (it’s ‘The Years Between’) when he went to France. We were engaged then. I believe he thought he was going to die fast and heroically—and he marked those two lines in the book, to be consolation to me if he did die. Do you want the book—I am not taking it along to Sam’s house.”

“Thank you. . . . Where do you want to dine?”

“At the Waldorf—if you hadn’t planned anywhere else. We can get a table by the Fifth Avenue windows, and watch people go past. Sam wants to bring over some relatives at ten tonight, and I said he could, Pat, do you mind? I had planned to save this whole evening for you.”

“That’s all right. Kenneth may be turning up later anyway—he is dining with that mysterious friend of his on the ‘Times’—the man he doesn’t want me to meet—Noel Something-or-Other. You must have heard Ken talk about him.”

“Yes.” She got up and began to comb her hair.

“I’m going upstairs to dress, Lucia.”

“No, wait a minute. When is Ken going to California?”

“The first of next week.”

“He won’t be back, Pat, you know.”

“He knows that himself. But when the weather began to grow warm he developed a sudden ache to see the Pacific again before he died. I shall miss him. I shall have a dismal summer, without you, or him.”

“I’ll send you a postcard from every fjord in Norway, Pat. . . . Tell me something—were you ever in the least in love with Ken?”

“No, really.”

“That’s good—I wondered, because you have been seeing him so often.”

“He and Nat and Bill are the only men I know who want nothing of me but my waking hours.”

Lucia laughed, and I went to dress.

At the Waldorf, I wanted to tell her that I had loved sharing an apartment with her, and that I liked her better than any woman I had ever known—but Lucia and I were inarticulate with each other about things like that. So we talked of places Lucia and Sam would visit, and things I wanted her to get me in Paris, and ate tomato en gelée, and lobster, and alligator pears—the preposterous sort of meal women order when they are dining together. Warm summer dusk deepened along the Avenue outside.

Lucia began to talk again, of Kenneth. “Odd that one doesn’t feel very sorry for him. He has, so obviously, had his quota of golden moments.”

“Yet you wouldn’t say he had a happy life, precisely.”

“Well, who has? You? Or I?”

“Not happy, but certainly not boring. We have come a long way from a couple of simple New England girlhoods anyway—have seen so much more than if we had married stability when we were seventeen.”

“I told you that you’d become reconciled to being an ex-wife, Pat.”

“I am reconciled to it when I have a new dress, or am eating the kind of food I like, or dancing to good music. Let’s talk about something else. I’m reconciled only when I don’t think about whether I am or not.”

Lucia said: “Pat, how often do you think about Peter nowadays? You have stopped talking about him at last.”

“I think about him often—almost all the time when I am not occupied. But, I think of him as someone I used to know—not, any more, as a person of importance to me in the present. I don’t know what he is like now, really. Judith must know that much better. I know what he was like when he was younger. . . . It is a little as if he were dead. . . .”

“Well don’t try to manage a resurrection some time that you are bored.”

“No chance, Lucia. Even I can learn—”

We drank iced coffee and looked out at the Avenue.

“There’s Kenneth,” said Lucia. He was walking very slowly, with a man I did not know.

Lucia knocked on the windowpane with her ring. Ken saw us, seemed to hesitate, then waved his arms to indicate that he would join us.

After a minute, Kenneth and the other man came into the dining-room. As they crossed the room toward us, I said to Lucia,

“Isn’t he attractive?” meaning the other man, not Kenneth.

“All right if you like the red-haired type. I don’t, because I belong to it.”

Kenneth said something to Lucia, to the effect that she looked like a hybrid between a bride-to-be and a healthy angel, and introduced the man. It was Noel about whom I had been hearing for so long.

Lucia thanked Ken for the cigarette box he had sent her, and everyone began to talk about marriage and Norway and California and the Black Hills. The Black Hills were included because Noel was leaving to spend the summer there, reporting the summer holiday of Mr. Coolidge.

After five minutes, Noel and I began to talk to each other. I cannot remember at all what we talked about—I can only remember three things he said, and those were inconsequentialities.

The first was: “Marriage is like war—an experience that no adventurous man would evade, and no sensible man repeat.”

The second was: “Coolidge is the best living demonstration that, if you keep silent long enough, something fortunate may happen to you.”

The third was: “Your voice is like a ’cello.”

Those statements were not extraordinary—they were just the sort of thing men say. They had nothing to do with something that had happened when he sat down, and began to talk.

When he sat down and began to talk, I said to myself: “This is why I have powdered my face, and bought pretty clothes, and done calisthenics, all the long time since Peter stopped loving me. I always believed, in a corner of my head, that some day, somewhere, something lovely might happen to me yet. This is it.”

He had dark red hair and eyebrows. He had a warm gay voice. He had beautiful broad shoulders, and a strong chin with an incipient dimple in it. All that did not matter.

He looked as if he found women interesting, but not a bit as if women were the major pursuit of his life. I began to wish that I had behaved better, in the last years. Then I remembered that he was going to the Black Hills next day, and knew that it was unlikely that I should ever see him again. I decided that would not have happened to me if I had behaved better.

He said that he had known Kenneth since the war, and I asked him if he had been in the Twenty-Sixth Division, too; and when he said that he had, I asked him if he had paraded in Boston with the Division in the Springtime of 1919.

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “But I saw that parade. I watched it from the front row of a grand stand on Commonwealth Avenue. I was seventeen years old.” I was thinking, “Why could I not have met him then?”

He seemed to understand the implications. “I rode on a white horse,” he said helpfully.

Then we laughed.

I remembered for a minute that we were being extremely rude to Kenneth and Lucia. She was gathering up her gloves and things. Apparently they were talking about Life.

(Life had suddenly a warmth, a feeling of importance, significance again that evening.)

“It’s a gorgeous procession to watch from a decent seat in the shade,” Lucia was saying. “But such a tiring parade for the marchers.”

“But marriage does not mean retirement, Lucia,” Kenneth said.

“In certain cases it may be considered as securing a very advantageous grand stand seat,” Lucia said; smiled, and stood up to go.

“Stay here, Pat. I have to meet Sam and I’ll see you later tonight.”

She said to Noel, gravely, “Patricia is a very lovely girl. Good-bye.”

She said to Kenneth, “I shan’t be seeing you again, my dear. No, don’t come to the door with me. I have a desire to walk home alone and contemplate—whatever I happen to contemplate.

“Kenneth, it has been so nice to know you. Whenever I see a portrait of any of the younger, more-reckless-and-braver-looking Cavaliers, I shall be reminded of you. Good-bye.”

He said, “Thank you. Have a happy life, Lucia.”

She smiled at us, and walked out alone, between the rows of tables, a slender, red-haired girl, in a yellow-flowered dress. I thought, “There goes my dearest friend.” I thought, “I wonder what Lucia thinks about, really.” I thought, “I shall miss her acutely.”

And I turned back to Kenneth and Noel.

Noel and I talked, and Kenneth listened, and looked amused.

After some time Kenneth said something about “seeing them off,” and I realized that Noel and Kenneth were both going to Chicago the next day.

It developed that Kenneth had decided to start to California a week earlier than he had planned, so they might make that part of the journey together.

“Oh dear,” I said, “This is just my evening for bowing people out of my life for ever,” and then realized that was a tactless thing to say to Kenneth; and, to compensate, I devoted myself to him as we all walked uptown together.

Noel left us, on the corner of Forty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. He had to go to the “Times.”

He said, “Will you be seeing Kenneth off?”

I said, “I can’t. I have to go to Lucia’s wedding.”

Kenneth waited, politely.

Noel said, “May I telephone you when I get back to New York this Fall?”

(I thought, “I shall never see him again; he won’t remember my name.”)

I said, “Do, by all means. I am in the telephone book. Have a nice summer with Mr. Coolidge.”

Kenneth and I walked on uptown. After two or three blocks he said, “Let’s go to Harlem. I should like to see the lights swing ’round at Small’s. Or do you think it is too warm a night?”

“No, let’s go . . . it might be fun.”

We danced a little, and sat down and drank cold drinks. We did not talk much. I wanted to say something that would make Kenneth feel happy—but there is very little to be said to a young man going to California to die, very swiftly, of lungs and complications.

After a rather long silence, he said, “Noel will telephone you when he gets back.”

“Why should he, Kenneth?”

He ignored that. “I never meant him to meet you, Pat.”

“I know, Ken. . . . But I don’t know why.”

“Because you have had your major catastrophe, and what you need now is a little tranquillity.”

“He made me feel nineteen years old, and as if nothing had ever happened to me, but as if all sorts of marvellous things were going to happen, instantly.”

“I noticed,” said Kenneth.

We had some of our drinks. Then Kenneth went on talking.

“He is a grand person. I always had an idea that he and you were made to finish each other’s sentences.”

“Well, then—why didn’t you have us meet last year?”

Kenneth had some more of his drink.

“You needn’t tell me, if you don’t want to, Kenneth.”

“Oh, he will tell you himself, but his version will damn him too much. You may as well hear the by-stander’s account.”

“Forget about it, Ken. Let’s talk about you.”

“Thank you, no. I’ll make Noel’s story as brief as possible though. It won’t amuse you.

“He made one of those just-before-the-battle marriages, before he sailed for France. His wife was a delectable young blonde thing, with no more sense than a kitten. Naturally, while he was gone she fell in love with someone else. When Noel came back, she wanted a divorce.

“Naturally, also, he was somewhat disturbed. They discussed the situation over a good many highballs. He started to drive her home. It was a rainy night and he was fairly drunk. He ran the car into a tree, or perhaps it was a telegraph pole. I don’t remember.”

“Was she killed, Kenneth?”

“No. The whole left side of her face was smashed in, and she lost the sight of one eye. I believe she wears some sort of black patch over it, on the rare occasions when she comes to New York. She had been a very lovely-looking young person. She was twenty, when that happened to her. They say she is a shrew, now, and her main interest in life is reminding Noel of what he did to her.”

Part 23

Comments (0)