XV

July—The first heat wave of summer sent the store’s advertising manager to a sanitorium, with a thorough nervous breakdown. I inherited his problems and his secretary. Every day, all day, I planned pages of advertising of “Vacation Necessities” and “Week-end Accessories” and “Hot Weather Comforts.” Then I went home to swim with Helena in the pool at the Shelton, and dine with her, discussing “art moderne” languidly. Or else I drove out on Long Island with Nathaniel in a hopeless search for coolness, and discussed languidly over lobster and sauterne, his father’s lessening health. Occasionally, I went with Bill to a relatively cool roof garden and discussed liquor and women, of recent and other vintages.

I had a letter from Lucia:

“Pat Darling,

“I am happy or I am resigned or I am content. I have gained seven pounds. Sam is the most thoughtful man I ever knew. Paris is hot but exciting. Shortly I shall become one of those women, who, over multiple chins, emit ‘my husband, my husband, my husband,’ in doting accents, at five-minute intervals, as punctuation to all conversation.

“I plan to find you a banker, and convince you that the substance is more satisfactory than the shadow. (Bankers’ shadows, even, are substantial.) Meanwhile I have found you a heavenly gold-and-silver negligee. It will make you regret that you have gone in for celibacy. Or have you? Did the beautiful red-haired Noel really depart within a few hours of his first appearance? How are you and Helena getting on?

“Though the road may be long, we arrive at respectability in the end, my child. I now own a sable wrap.

“Love . . .”

August—The apartment downstairs was redolent of Helena’s paints and oils, instead of Lucia’s bath salts and perfume. In the evening, when I came home, I watched Helena decorating amazingly realistic masks, instead of watching Lucia decorate her own lovely face.

I had a letter and a package from Kenneth. I opened the letter first:

“Patricia, my dear—

“I’ve given instructions about having this mailed. By the time you read it, I shall have found out whether they keep Hungarian dancers in heaven. (If not, I plan to fling myself over the golden bar forthwith.)

“If you were fond of me, Patricia, as I have sometimes—conceitedly—thought you were, in memory of me drink no absinthe, any more, all the days of your giddy life. Do you mind?

“I may or may not have presented you with something, in flinging Noel into that life. Whether he turns out to be a present or not, I am sending you another—a string of amber beads, to warm the throat of a young woman who managed to warm my heart.

“Until we meet again, my dear—(that was a war song, or were you too young to remember)—

“Affectionately—”

September—Heat seemed to have lasted, immemorially.

I wore Kenneth’s golden amber beads over summer frocks that were, after an hour’s wearing, wilted as four day old roses. Helena took her painting to the Nova Scotian coast. I missed her cool comments on people as they passed.

I had a letter from Peter. For a minute, when I found it in my mail box, my heart beat faster than ordinarily. I bathed, and put on a cool negligee, and made myself iced tea; and then, when I felt very calm, opened the letter.

“My Already Some-time Legally Departed,

“Would you risk dining with me once more? Positively last appearance—genuine farewell tour and so on. I have something to tell you that I should prefer to tell you, rather than have you hear it, fourth-hand, in a speakeasy.

“How about telephoning me at the office? It would be pleasant to see you, Patricia.”

Two days later, I telephoned him, and arranged to dine with him on Sunday. Until then, I did not speculate about his “news.”

Sunday was the first cool day in weeks.

I dressed carefully, for the sake of years in which Peter’s opinion of my appearance had seemed important. I wore a dress with bright pink rosebuds printed on a deep blue background, and a deep blue velvet hat, and carried my beloved silver fox.

We met at the Brevoort; decided not to dine there, and went to Giacomo’s, because it was a restaurant with a garden. Peter was looking well, looking a little older, weighing a little more.

On the way to dinner, we talked about how hot summer had been.

I wondered what he was thinking, and I thought, “It is not true that, in time, one ‘gets over’ almost anything. In time, one survives almost anything. There is a distinction.”

Over the Martinis, I said to Peter, “I survived you, Peter. I never thought I could. It is surprising, isn’t it, that I did?”

He said, “You look as if nothing had ever happened to you in your life.”

“Nothing much has. I never swam the Channel or had twins or wrote a play or murdered a rival. I have just lived quietly, year after year, on Scotch and kisses.”

I thought that was entertaining—it was the best I could manage off-hand. His face continued to be grave, however, and so I tried again.

“Tell me your great news,” I said, “Have you found love at last, or have they made you an aviation expert, or have you a new bootlegger who sells nothing but genuine pre-war stock?”

I thought, “I used to ache when I looked at Peter, because I loved him so. Now I ache when I look at him, because nothing in me stirs at all. He is just a good-looking young man with whom I am dining. I wonder what he is like, really.”

He said: “The damndest thing about you is that you look so virginal. You don’t change at all.”

“Men think a woman is just as she was, until her face begins to sag, Peter. They judge by contours, not by character. I am twenty-six—I was twenty, or was it nineteen, when we met?”

“You were nineteen.”

“They say every bit of a person’s body changes in seven years. . . . Tell me, did you have an exciting time in Boston?”

He had been sent by his paper to report the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti, recently electrocuted. Throughout dinner, we discussed Sacco and Vanzetti, casually, as strangers meeting for the first time might discuss any piece of front-page news.

When we had reached coffee and liqueurs, Peter said: “Come sit in my back-yard garden and talk to me. It is pleasanter there than here.”

I said, “I don’t want to see Judith, particularly.”

“Oh, she has moved uptown. We found an amusing sort of place over by the East River. I’m moving there after Judith and I are married next week. . . . That was the news I had for you.”

I powdered my face and straightened my hat and put on my gloves.

“I hope that you both will be very happy, Peter.”

And some absurd remnant of belief in miracles curled up and died in me, almost painlessly.

“Must you be so damn formal, Patricia?”

I answered him quite earnestly. “Yes, Peter, I have to be formal. I don’t know you very well, nowadays, and I never knew Judith well.”

“Do you still know me well enough to visit my garden, and have a Tom Collins’ with me?”

“I think I know you well enough for that.”

We walked across Washington Square, and up Fifth Avenue, slowly, without talking, as he and I might walk with other people, when he and I grew old.

The garden had a diminutive fountain that tinkled pleasantly, and painted canvas chairs, and one of those trees of indeterminate species that should be called “New York Yard Tree.” I looked at the moon shining through its crooked branches, while Peter went to mix Tom Collins’, and I tried not to think about anything at all.

When Peter came back, I said, “Why are you marrying Judith?” I did not want to know why he was marrying Judith, but that would do as well, to make conversation, as any other subject.

“Oh, she’s a pleasant girl and I’m fond of her. I don’t want to talk about that, though. I thought we might spend an evening talking about you and me.”

I felt that I could not bear to talk with Peter about him and me. Feelings, hopes, even opinions as to Peter had gone from me so slowly, so very slowly, through months and years. I did not want them back. I did not want to be hurt any more.

“I don’t think there’s much to say, about you-and-me, Peter. Label us as just a couple of the minor tragedies of Prohibition, or examples of the Younger Generation on the wane, and let it go at that.”

“I don’t mean to go in for any lengthy analysis of who was to blame for what. But there are things I should like to tell you.”

He began to walk up and down, under the Yard Tree. When he spoke again, his voice was strained.

“Patricia, I loved you very much, and I treated you very badly.”

“No worse than I treated you, perhaps, Peter.”

He said, “I don’t remember very well what it was all about. We were young, and we loved each other, and we ‘wanted to be free.’ It doesn’t make much sense.”

“I never was able to draw any Great Moral Lesson from it, myself, Pete.”

“I shall make Judith a much better husband than I ever made you, Patricia.”

“No doubt. But am I expected to extract any great comfort from that? I am not old enough yet to be an altruist. Will you give me another drink?”

He filled my glass, and his own.

I wanted to go home. Peter made me feel old.

“People have no second chance with each other, really,” he said. “If I were fool enough to ask you to marry me again, and you were fool enough to do it, I should strangle you within three months afterward. Whenever I came home, and found you serving some man tea, I’d take it for granted that you had spent the afternoon in bed with him.”

“I know. I should never see you pick up a book, without expecting you to fling it at my head. I suppose that is funny.”

“I suppose so. . . . But, Patricia, do you remember—”

“Peter, stop. I probably do remember, whatever you were going to ask, but I don’t want to remember. I wish you would begin to be disagreeable. That makes it easier for me.”

He laughed. “Darling, I know exactly how you feel. If you stamped your feet at this moment, and cursed me in Bowery accents, I could watch you walk out of my life and be glad to see you vanish. But you sit there looking lovely. . . . Curious, how distressing it is to be anything but flippant. If I said, brokenly, ‘Good-bye for ever, my dear young love,’ I should feel like an imbecile. Yet I want to say something nice to you.”

We both laughed—and Peter came across the garden, and put his head against my knees, and his arms around them.

“Patricia, I am glad I married you when I was young. I wouldn’t have missed it.”

I said, “Peter, my darling, damn you for making me cry. I am glad I married you when I was young, too. And I’m sorry for every stupid thing I ever did that hurt you.” Tears spilt down my face, and dripped on the back of his neck, absurdly. He gave me a handkerchief, and a cigarette, and asked if I wanted another drink.

“No, I think I want to go home, Peter; and by myself.”

“All right. Would you believe that I’m not trying to be disagreeable, if I tell you that I hope I never see you again?”

I could understand about that. I said, “You will like me pretty well, if you never see me for five minutes.”

“That’s it. . . . Will you kiss me, nonchalantly, Patricia, before you go?”

I kissed him nonchalantly. He bent his head, and put his cheek against mine, gently. It was a gesture of his that once was familiar to me. It hurt. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in years, to find words to tell Peter how much I had loved him once, and how sorry I was that I did not love him now.

He kissed my eyelids and my mouth and my throat. He lighted a cigarette, and walked once up and down the garden. Then he said, “Patricia, will you stay here with me tonight?”

I wanted so much—to want to stay. I wanted to feel for an hour, that I loved Peter. I could not feel anything at all.

I said, “It just would be pretending; and I should cry, probably, because it was not real any more; and that would make you cross.”

“Yes, and I’d treat you as outrageously as possible in the morning, I suppose. I couldn’t help it.”

“I know. Better find me a taxi, Peter. I am going home.”

He went to find a taxi. When he came back, he said, “For God’s sake, think of something flippant for your parting speech, darling. I have thought of mine.”

I powdered my face, by moonlight. “All right. Tell me yours first, Peter.”

“I left you. Now you’re leaving me. So you win the last battle.”

“That’s not very amusing, Peter.”

“Probably not.”

We walked from the garden through his darkened apartment to the street door. Before he opened it, he said, “What is your exit line?”

I said, “And now Lord Thou lettest Thy servant depart in peace.”

“That’s no better than mine,” he said.

“I know. It’s the best I can manage, though, Pete.”

The taxi was waiting outside. He gave my address to the driver.

He said, “Well, Patricia, thank you for dining with me.”

“I enjoyed it,” I said.

Next day Helena came back from Canada, and she and I shopped for Fall clothes together. The advertising manager returned from his breakdown and I had a vacation.

On the first evening after I came back to New York, I was sitting alone, reading an accumulation of letters from Lucia, when the telephone rang.

A voice said, “After I left the Black Hills I had to fill in at our Washington Bureau. I got back to New York twenty minutes ago. Is it too late in the evening to ask you to go somewhere to dance? I’ve spent the entire trip from Washington discussing the Republicans who want to run against Smith next year, and I want to hear music.”

I said, “Hello, Noel. Of course I’ll go dancing. How soon will you call for me?”

“Half an hour,” he said.