Part 12 (1/2)

”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 s.h.i.+fting lines about his s.h.i.+ny, 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.