Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 3

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On Saturday nights they always went to the theater on passes, Alexandra and her mother never called it the theater; they spoke of it merely as “some show.” It usually was a show that was not successful; the passes were easily gotten then.

Alexandra’s mother, fat and soft and still pretty and confiding at fifty, would slip up to the box office at some quiet moment and murmur to the clerk, “What’s the chances, Lew?” And Lew either slapped down two torn checks instantly or murmured in return, “Come back in a little while, will you, Mrs. Trumbull?”

In the twenty-one years of her life Alexandra Trumbull had as little thought of paying for her theater seats as for the air she breathed. Movie seats were different. The audiences were different; they drifted in and out at all hours. There was never any papering of the movie houses. Alexandra and her mother did not care. They saw all the big films, anyway. Some man took Sandra and gallantly included her mother in the party; or Mrs. Trumbull and a woman friend went to the movies during the long dull empty afternoons when Sandra was at the office.

Sunday was the Trumbulls’ lazy day, their happy day, even though deep somewhere in Sandra’s being was a feeling that there was something all wrong about the way she and Flossy spent Sunday. She had always called her mother Flossy; had been indeed the “mother” of them both since her tenth or twelfth year. Mrs. Trumbull had been Flossy O’Brien Belleau, adored little singer of the cabarets and after-theater shows, only twenty-two years ago. She was shrewd, suspicious, shrill little Flossy still, in many moods. Her mind remained what it had been at fifteen, on that memorable occasion when she had come shyly forth to sing at “Amateur Night” at the Chutes, and men had thrown money at her before she finished “My Wild Irish Rose” and “When I Walks Dat Levee Roun’.”

Half Irish, half French, all San Franciscan Bohemian, Flossy loved idleness, gossip, loved lying abed for half of Sunday. But Sandra’s father had been English-born, and Sandra inherited some queer, uneasy Victorian instincts about order and thrift and energy. She was usually tired on Sunday after the workday week and the Saturday night’s dissipation, but still she sometimes wondered if she and Flossy ought not to be up early, and go to church somewhere, and come back to open windows and tear beds apart, wash shining dishes and put the apartment in order.

It was all vague. They belonged, mother and daughter, to no church. Flossy at the age of nine had attended a mission for married women, with her mother. But her mother had died after that, and some Roumanian acrobats had taken the little girl into their care, with scanty spiritual results. Sandra’s father had been a tall, lanky, fair man, who spoke with a crisp English accent, when he spoke at all. He had emigrated rather mysteriously from his native country at the age of forty-odd, had lived precariously on a quarterly remittance from home, and had affected a half-hearted interest in a small prune ranch near San José which he had bought, and for which he had partially paid. He had greeted his daughter’s arrival in this world with a pitying “Poor little devil; why not drown her?” and had presently died without ever having mentioned even to his plump, fussy, singing young wife his family connections, if he had any, or his personal history, of which obviously he had had much. If Rodney Trumbull had ever joined any church or attended one he never gave anyone a hint of it in his later years.

So Flossy and Sandra never went to church. As to housekeeping, the outlook was poor too. They had one large room at the back of a lodging house in the second block of Ellis Street, right in the very heart of the theater, hotel, restaurant, business district. Flossy, upon retiring perforce from the field of cabaret and vaudeville entertainments when Sandra was seven, had opened this house as a theatrical hotel. But this had not succeeded; now a Mr. and Mrs. Bevilaqua were lessees of the place, and Flossy, much of whose furniture they had taken over as a consideration, had to show for her adventure only the fact that she got her room rent-free.

With the best of intentions Sandra could not seem to see their one big room as a home. It did not encourage domestic effort. It was on the second floor, but the lower room was half a basement, and the Trumbulls’ room only some seven or eight feet higher than a cemented pit at the back. Great buildings, garages, the sides of a movie house, dark commercial hotels hemmed it in; there was no chance for sunshine, even in summer. Sometimes a pallied reflection of light flickered there when the sun, directly overhead, caught with a blaze on the opened skylight of the café next door. Down in the bricked and cemented pit there was one heavy basement door, usually barred, the gate to a narrow path that was wedged between the buildings leading to the street, and a great deal of rubbish—dead flowers, cigarette butts, browned drifting newspapers, flower pots holding the shriveled stalks of Easter lilies.

Sandra and her mother were not concerned with the view; they rarely glanced out of their two tall windows, unless to see whether or not the rain was falling. There were long dangling Nottingham lace curtains at the windows, and over them other draped curtains of brown burlap stenciled in darker brown and red fleur-de-lis. This dashing note had been introduced by Flossy years ago; Sandra used to lie in bed wondering what to do about the curtains. If she took down the limp, dusty lace ones the brown ones would look unutterably dingy and forlorn. If she took away the brown ones the white ones alone would be worse. She solved the problem in the usual Trumbull fashion by doing nothing.

“Flossy, burlap curtains ought never be draped. They belong in studios or country cabins.”

“That’s right.”

“And as for the others, they ought to be in some elegant, old-fashioned place with a colored butler and a couple of rich old maids——”

“That’s right, too.” But Flossy’s tone would be a little less secure this time; she had not her daughter’s imagination. “I’ll tell you,” she had once volunteered. “Everyone was getting that stenciled burlap and Mission chairs when I took this house, and it sort of appealed to me.” And after long thought she had added, “What would you put at those windows, Sandra?”

Sandra had studied them awhile from her sodden heap of piled sofa and bed pillows. Her long body had been stretched in Sunday comfort under the limp quilts and blankets, her long arms locked behind her head, her long strange eyes narrowed.

“Well, I don’t know,” she had presently admitted with the rueful slow smile that lighted her face when she was amused at the general absurdity of life. “You’d have to do so much—to everything——

“Move out completely in the first place,” she sometimes thought. But of late years she had not said this often; it distressed Flossy. Nice little clean apartments with electric refrigeration and bay views did not appeal to Flossy. The smoky, sooty, shadowed downtown world in which they lived was the only possible world for her. The gossip of night clubs and vaudeville teams and cabaret entertainers was the breath of her body. She passionately clung to the neighborhood of Ellis Street, Powell and O’Farrell and Geary Streets. She did not want to become respectable and conventional and domestic.

Sandra made no issue of it; perhaps the situation was none too clear in her own mind. She would have to be different and Flossy different and the world different before they could take a bright, clean, open apartment on Sacramento Street, or move into a Spanish bungalow down the Peninsula.

The room in which they lived was large; it might have been a back room in a restaurant once or the back parlor of a pretentious residence. It was steam-heated, but there were besides a heavy black marble mantel and a grate where a coal fire was laid. It was never lighted; scraps of paper and hair, matches, dark brown frills from candy boxes, and pink string were thrown in on top of the dusty coal. An onyx clock, stopped, and a ticking alarm clock, two large imitation Sèvres vases, and a photograph of Flossy Belleau in a Dolly Varden dress shared the shelf with the litter of letters that were stuck behind the clock, a tiny pot of artificial pink flowers, a copper ash tray, and various other small articles picked up by Flossy or Sandra at café openings and amusement-park contests as souvenirs. To the left of the fireplace was the big brass bed upon which, when it was made, Flossy always put all the little lace pillows and the long-legged Spanish and Pierrette dolls.

Opposite the windows, across the dark room, were three doors. One led into the dark, carpet-scented hall, one opened upon the bathroom, with its tin tub, its old-fashioned, odorous plumbing, its eternal bead of gas which a jerked string brought to full light. The third door gave the suite a kitchen no larger than a large closet, dark, but complete with a tiny ice box, a sink, some shelves, an opening upon a fire escape for vegetable boxes and garbage pail, and a two-ring gas stove.

A closet had actually been sacrificed for this convenience, and Flossy and Sandra kept their clothes in an old-fashioned cumbrous wardrobe that absorbed the center of the third wall. Its great doors had originally been paneled with mirrors, only one of which remained. But with the looming mirror above the mantel, and the pier glass in maplewood that was her mother’s chief treasure, Sandra had sometimes been embarrassed in childhood to see so many angles of her little half-dressed self; she never regretted the empty wooden spaces where the wardrobe mirrors should have been. The sofa, the wardrobe, the pier glass, and one collapsed old Morris rocker on a stationary base filled this wall. The fourth wall was broken by the high windows; a sewing machine, a chair, and a radio were ranged in the spaces between windows and wall.

For the rest there was a crowded center table on which Sandra and her mother cleared casual spaces for their informal meals; there were a few mismated chairs; there were one or two small stands from which sewing, playing cards, theater programmes, sheet music were in a continual state of sliding. Flossy’s ukulele, the slippers she was gilding, her camera, her strip of tapestry work, her book from the circulating library at the corner never had appointed or regular places. Sandra used to wonder sometimes how she and her mother accumulated so many things they did not want. They were not acquisitive folk, but Flossy would never throw anything away if she thought she might ever use it, or if it was “cute.” Of plaster Kewpies, dressed in feathers, of red glass diminutive steins lettered in white, of paper dolls made in the likeness of Norma Talmadge or Ann Pennington, Flossy said with equal fondness that they were “cute.” Flossy bought all the theatrical and movie magazines every month, and they took up room, too, especially as she kept them for months. And if any generous friend, departing after a vaudeville engagement, offered Flossy a garment—a maribou-trimmed wrap in blue satin or a pair of gaudy hunting breeches in red and black—she always accepted it enthusiastically, with the intention of “making it into something.” She ripped long strips of fur from old coats; she carefully cut brown and creamy lace from outworn nightgowns; she saved remnants of silk. These she rolled into balls and put into large cardboard boxes and shoved them under the sofa. Inasmuch as neither she nor Sandra was clever about making garments, the boxes were rarely disturbed.

More than this, out of the goodness of her heart Flossy often offered to store the possessions of her friends for various periods ranging from days to years. Roped boxes and leather trunks stenciled with the names of theatrical teams accumulated dust in corners; “May’s box”—“Lil’s things”—“all that stuff of Frank’s”—helped to complicate Sandra’s domestic problem.

“God knows I never threw down a friend!” Flossy would state, tears of emotion in her eyes, when the talk lingered on over some dinner at Solari’s or La Favorite. Sandra had felt very proud of such a mother when she was quite small.

“Does anyone ever throw down a friend, Flossy?”

Flossy would glance lovingly at the child, glance significantly at the group.

“Hear her! You wait until you’re older and you’ll know.”

The path of mother and daughter had diverged somewhere back in Alexandra’s youthful days. Neither had known it. Flossy had sunk comfortably deeper into her lazy life, “working” the men she knew for dinners and little presents of stockings and hats, but giving generously, too, of her company and her friendship. She was all affection. Sandra had withdrawn, even in grammar-school days, further and further away from it all. As Flossy grew soft and fat, Sandra had grown tall and firm and slender, a quiet, proud, self-contained child whose love was shyly, rarely given, whose affection, as deep as her mother’s, was confined almost exclusively to that same mother. Sandra loved little cats, excitedly adored all dogs, was marvelously tender and motherly and murmuring with babies. But except for these she had few affiliations.

Flossy had wanted her splendid Juno of a daughter to go on the stage; Sandra shook her fair head. Completely puzzled by her child’s decision to go to a secretarial school, her choice of plain dark clothes, her finicky passion for hot water and unscented powders and soaps, Flossy gave her her way. The theater to Sandra was a place of simple amusement; she did not want to play with grease paint and wigs even as a child; she smiled absently at managers who threw out hints of schools of the drama; she never wanted to go back-stage and talk to performers. Her first job was with an advertising firm; her second and present one was with Cavendish & Bartlett, successors to the Polk, Cavendish Company of San Francisco, investment bankers, who did at the same time a large business financing other concerns and individuals. Sandra worked hard, held herself somewhat aloof from the other clerks in the office, and at twenty-one was paid a round hundred a month.

This was incomprehensible to Flossy. Sandra could have had the run of all the theaters, the greenrooms, the movie houses. She could have had walking-on parts by this time, could have been immersed in the delicious intimacies, the gossip and exchange of the theatrical world.

But Flossy loved her too much to criticize her; she even stood faintly and secretly in awe of this superb, tall, full-breasted creature who was so inexplicably her child.

“Sandra and me’s different—but she’s all right, at that!” Flossy told her friends.

Flossy awakened first in the dark back bedroom on a certain October Sunday. Sandra, twisting the long roll that was herself under the covers, blinking, dragging another pillow or two under the tousled mass of her chestnut hair, lay staring at her mother for a moment or two, yawning and smiling. Coffee scented the air; Flossy had a coat on—she had been to the bakery.

“I woke you,” Flossy stated, regretfully.

“No, I think it was the bells. It isn’t—” said Alexandra—“it isn’t noon?”

The bells had stopped, but the sparse Sunday whistles were proclaiming it.

“Yep,” the older woman confirmed them. “You had a good sleep,” she added, in satisfaction.

“I was going to wash my hair this morning.”

“It’s terribly cloudy. The paper says rain.”

Sandra lay still. After almost twelve hours of sleep she felt exquisitely rested, at peace with the world. What if her holiday were half gone, there remained this best part of Sunday, this lazy hour with Floss and breakfast and the newspapers. The rest was apt to be duller to Sandra than any office day.

“Where’d you go, darling?”

“Butter——” Floss answered briefly from the kitchen.

“Foggy?”

“No. But I think it rained in the night.”

Sandra dragged herself up, disappeared into the bathroom for casual ablutions, came back to establish herself again in bed with the bulk of two great newspapers beside her.

“You don’t have to do that,” she protested absently, as her mother brought her a black tin tray.

“I love to!” the older woman asserted, also without much feeling. They understood each other; they were always waiting on each other.

Now Mrs. Trumbull pushed a light table to the bed and brought her own toast and coffee to it, sitting so near that Sandra could move her own paraphernalia to the table, drop the tray on the floor between wall and bed on the other side, and comfortably rustle the sheets of the paper.

“Ted Hovey’s act is called off on account of his illness,” Floss announced, reading.

“Oh, too bad.”

“You know just about how ill he was!”

“You mean he wasn’t?”

“Of course not. That new girl he got in poor Ethyl’s place just ran away with the act.”

A long wordless space, when the papers crackled and the toast was broken and the hot coffee lowered in the cups. Mist filled the dreary shaft outside the windows, but the room was pleasantly warm. Sandra’s droplight made a gold aureole of the hair that tumbled about her face. Flossy dragged a tall lamp behind her own chair and sat in her own pool of light.

Suddenly the girl sprang out of the free side of the bed and was in the kitchen.

“Oh, darling, why didn’t you let me——”

“It’s nothing—I’m not going to toast it.” Sandra came back with the coffee pot and the sliced French bread and a little wooden basket with figs and tomatoes and one banana in it.

“Have an egg, darling?”

“Oh, heavens, no! This is all I want.”

The reading, the rustling went on in the crowded dusty room with its staring Kewpies and manikins, its ukulele and unlighted, littered coal fire.

“There—that’s Carter Cavendish,” Sandra presently said, in an odd, quiet voice.

Her mother looked up alertly and took the sheet of brown rotogravure that the girl extended.

“Which one?”

“The one in the circle with the horse.”

Mrs. Trumbull, chewing a scrap of toast, considered him. She set down her cup without glancing away from the picture.

“Look like that?”

“Well, yes; only of course—in office clothes——”

“He’s handsome,” the older woman observed, after further study. “Is he the president, Sandra?”

“No; his older brother, Peter Cavendish, is. I don’t see him very much. His office is upstairs. He doesn’t play polo.”

“This is the one that plays it, hey?”

“Marvelously.” Sandra’s voice dropped from enthusiasm to flatness. “They say,” she added. “I’ve never seen him play.”

“You’re just as good-looking as you can be,” Mrs. Trumbull told the paper portrait.

“Are you in his office, dearie?” she presently asked.

“No. I’m in what they call the main office, but I go into his sometimes. But Miss Curtis is his regular secretary; she was with the firm before he went to college even. They say she knows more about the business than anyone else.”

“I’ll bet,” Floss ruminated aloud—“I’ll bet she’s in love with him.”

Alexandra laughed shortly.

“Oh, is she?” she echoed ruefully.

“No, is she, Sandra?”

“Why, of course she is, Flossy!”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do mean it. Everyone knows it.”

“Isn’t that awful?” Mrs. Trumbull said idly, handing back the paper.

Sandra, a smile twitching at the corners of her wide, well-molded mouth, returned her eyes to the picture and shrugged faintly.

“He’s thirty-two, say,” she offered, noncommittally. “Miss Curtis is about—oh, thirty-five or six. She knows he’s married.”

“She tell you she liked him?”

“She didn’t have to. No; she never says anything about it—it’s one of the unwritten—well, facts in the office. We all know poor Gertie is languishing in secret. The way she looks at him! The way she answers him!”

“Well, that’s too bad. That’s hard on her,” the older woman commented.

“I suppose it is. But she gets a lot out of it, Flossy,” the girl observed, flinging the paper away. “She sees him every day, she knows all his affairs, what he allows his wife, and who writes to him—everything. If he has a cold she mixes him things to take, and if anyone annoys him she has the pleasure of saying that Mr. Cavendish is out just at present.”

A subtle irony in her smile, the big even teeth faintly biting her full lower lip, she lay back in her pillows, long arms locked behind her head.

“Do you suppose he knows it?” Flossy presently asked, from a brown study.

“Knows what?”

“Suppose Carter Cavendish knows that his secretary is crazy about him?”

“He must. But he’s always very nice and simple and businesslike in the office, and you can’t tell.... It’s very hard for a girl to see a man every day, if he’s attractive and she’s attractive,” Sandra went on, presently, “without some sort of feeling developing.”

“You see him every day,” her mother observed.

“Yes, I know. But I only go in and out once or twice. She sits right beside him—they have jokes about the bores that come in, signals—things nobody else knows.”

“Do you think him so attractive, Sandra?”

Sandra was dreaming. She brought her eyes to earth with a start.

“What did you say, darling?”

“Do you think he’s so attractive?”

“Mr. Cavendish?”

“Yep.”

“I can imagine,” Sandra answered, in a carefully impersonal tone—“I can imagine that in his own home—playing polo, I mean, tennis, swimming pools—all that—he might be very—nice.”

There was a silence. Then the older woman said:

“You didn’t ever get a crush on anyone in the office, did you, Sandra?”

“You would have known it if I had, Floss.”

“I mean—comparing your looks to Miss Curtis——” Flossy began and floundered.

“Well, you see, the main office is a great big loft, with thirty or forty desks, out in the open,” Sandra explained. “Miss Curtis and the other private stenographers are—slightly different. We don’t have much chance for—affairs.”

Her mother’s attention had already wandered. She was deep in the paper again. Sandra presently got up and began preparations for Sunday’s luxurious leisurely bath. She wandered to and fro in her faded shabby pajamas, gathering the few dishes in the kitchen sink, cold-creaming her face.

“Didn’t hear you, Floss.”

“I asked if he wasn’t married, Sandra.”

“Who, darling?”

“Cavendish.”

“Oh? Oh, yes; certainly he is. His wife was—it was before I went into the office—his wife was an Eastern girl, Betty Finchley. He’s got a little girl named Patsy. Patricia, probably. The little girl telephones to him, Miss Curtis says.”

Sandra was balancing on the edge of the tin tub, bent sidewise to test the water with a long, slender hand. She had abandoned the pajamas and was wrapped only in a scanty Japanese crêpe jacket of deep blue dragons on a white ground. Her long slim legs, her long slim arms were bare, her head was strained back on the slender column of her neck. The sharp firm curve of her breasts lifted the cheap cotton fabric into a line of beauty.

“I wonder,” her mother, herself in a wrapper and wandering aimlessly about as the girl had been, came to the bathroom doorway to say—“I wonder if you’re ever going to fall in love, Sandra? It seems to me that at your age I had had half a dozen beaus.”

“You’re different, Flossy. You have them now.”

“Because they buy me dinners!” Flossy agreed, and laughed suddenly and apologetically.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself—you with a grown daughter?”

The smile died from the fat, soft, childish little face.

“No, I’m not, Sandra. A lot of these boys,” her mother began earnestly, “come to town on business for a few days. They’re lonely—they have no friends here. They want to talk to someone and go to a show, and they know they’re safe with me.”

There was much more of this, Flossy arguing away seriously and with feeling. Sandra only laughed as she slipped into the hot water. There was small danger of her misunderstanding her warm-hearted, limited, good little mother.

“I think you’re straight, Floss,” she told her mother.

Their conversation diverged; Mrs. Trumbull did not think of Carter Cavendish again until the next day, when in the endless stretches of a Monday afternoon she and a neighbor were getting ready to go to a movie. Mrs. Booley, who had been one of the Whirling Waynes a few years ago, happened to ask where Sandra worked, anyway.

“Wait a minute,” Flossy answered. “I’ve got a picture of her boss here—Carter Cavendish.”

She ruffled through the mass of newspapers that were piled on the lower shelf of the center table and heaped in a corner on the kitchen floor.

“It’s funny, it doesn’t matter, but he’s a handsome feller, and I would like to have you see what he looks like,” Floss had finally to apologize. “I can find everything else but that sheet. It must be here—but I can’t lay my hand on it now. No matter. Only it’s funny, for nobody’s taken anything away to-day.”

They went out of the dark room together, talking of the movies.