Bad Girl (Delmar)/Chapter 8
Mrs. Eddie Collins née Haley gazed about her home on a late October day. Her housework was all done. Mrs. Harris, slim to the point of emaciation, had arrived a half hour before with a mop and broom and had done Mrs. Collins' housework. Mrs. Harris was Mrs. Collins' landlady. She had made the bed, mopped around the floor, and let the broom rest lightly for a moment in the middle of the rug. Then she had taken herself to other parts, murmuring vaguely about some one called Margaret who needed a real good lesson.
Mrs. Collins, left behind, surveyed her home. It was twelve by ten and had two windows. The bed hogged most of the space, but a few chairs, a table, a wardrobe, and a bureau did manage to squeeze in. There was a picture of a very nice young man necking a white horse, and another picture showed a bevy of cheerful Russians on the verge of sleigh-riding right into the middle of Eddie's new six-tube set.
A very nice home, no doubt. Mrs. Collins was well pleased with it. And her housework was done! The rest of the day belonged entirely to her to do with as she pleased. Strangely enough the thought gave Mrs. Collins a heavy feeling in the region of her heart. What did one do with unoccupied days that stretched along with tedious consistency? Business? No, Eddie had said that no wife of his was going to work while he had his health. Noble of him. Very.
He arose at eight every morning, and Dot went with him to the little dairy lunch room next to the bank. Breakfast. Then Dot walked with Eddie to the shop. Sometimes Mrs. Williams, the boss's wife, would be there, and she and Dot would hold the same conversation on each occasion. The weather was fine for the time of year. Yes, a little chill in the air. Indeed a heavy coat did feel good in the evening. The shops were showing the sweetest hats. Mrs. Williams preferred hats above everything else. Dot suspected that her generalization included Mr. Williams. Mrs. Williams was always on her way to do a little shopping if only Bill would give her that money and let her go. Bill would give her that money and away she would go with a last sweet, condescending smile at Dot and a low word to her husband accompanied by a sour expression.
Dot would leave the shop then, too. She would wait till Mrs. Williams was well out of sight, however. It would be terrible if she were to think that Dot was trying to attach herself.
It was very nice to walk slowly along the uptown thoroughfare admiring a dress here, a hat there; a particularly beautiful shade of stockings in a third place. Interesting to note the expressions carried by the women who allowed themselves no glances into the shops where clothing was not sold on credit. Very nice, indeed. That is, very nice while it lasted. But once Dot came to Bim's West End. Theater and walked back on the other side as far as the Drusilla Dress Shop, she had seen everything. Then perhaps her breakfast had digested enough to allow a chocolate malted. She drank a chocolate malted and then wondered what the devil she'd do with herself.
Of course Edna could be visited at any hour of the morning, afternoon, or night, but to keep visiting Edna might suggest that marriage seemed a little bit empty. Sue Cudahy worked. Maude McLaughlin couldn't be seen before 2 p.m. and then only by appointment. There simply wasn't anything to do. Mrs. Harris solved the housework problem; consequently lucky little Mrs. Collins had the whole day to herself.
Eddie had been so frighteningly emphatic on the subject of Dot's returning to work.
"No, God damn it. What the hell do you think I am that I can't support my wife? Go to the movies, visit your friends, do what you please, but you'll not go to work."
Dot didn't know that his loud and angry protest had been born in the brain of a five-year-old, scantily-clothed urchin who had trotted stolidly at his mother's side as she scrubbed floors in office buildings, stopping to rest only when that awful pain was giving her a "turn."
Dot never mentioned work again, but she envied Eddie who returned at night after a full and busy day. He didn't have to wonder what he'd do with himself. He ate his dinner ravenously and was ready to enjoy a movie. To Dot, the movies were becoming a deadly bore. The theaters were places where she had to go to keep from dying of loneliness.
Miss Howell, the school teacher who had a room on the same floor with Dot, asked her why she didn't read. Dot thanked her for the suggestion, but somehow the True Story Magazine didn't give a married woman the same kick it might have given a virgin. So after all Miss Howell's kindly suggestion was worthless. Dot couldn't read.
Twice Sue had stolen a day off and had spent it with Dot. It was on one of these days that Dot suffered a shock.
It seemed that Sue was out of favor with her mother. She chewed her gum with passionate intensity and still managed to say, "I told her I was out all night on a party at a friend who lives in Brooklyn's house, but she insists I was with Pat and she called me a terrible name."
Dot registered sympathy. "Why don't you get her to call up the friend and ask her and prove you're right?"
Sue looked surprised and contemptuous all at once. "There ain't no friend in Brooklyn," she said. "I was with Pat. His sister's away and he's alone in the apartment."
"Sue!" Dot was startled. "You don't mean that you slept in the same place alone with Pat!"
"Why not?"
"But didn't anything happen? Didn't he try to go pretty far with you?"
"Well, you damn little fool," said Sue. "Where have you been? Of course he tried to go pretty far with me and succeeded. He's succeeded every time he's tried since a year ago last March."
The room whirled before Dot's dizzy gaze. So Sue had let Pat go the limit, and no one had known it. Pat hadn't told any one. Maybe Eddie wouldn't have, either. Sue wasn't considered a bad girl. She hadn't a frightened, persecuted expression.
"Didn't you give in to Eddie before you married him?" asked Sue.
"Yes," said Dot, hesitantly. She had almost forgotten that she had. Two weeks of marriage does make one feel so settled and solvent.
"Well, what are you so shocked for?"
"I ain't shocked, only I didn't think you would."
"That's no compliment," said Sue, gravely. "A girl is a damn fool who holds back."
"Why do you think that?"
"Gee, Dot, you know yourself how you get loving. There's damn little a fellow don't know about you before you say yes. You'll let him get so far that it ain't decent anyhow, and then you stop him. And what for? So that you can tell your girl friends how scared you was on your wedding night."
"No, that ain't the reason," said Dot. "Look at the chance you take. Suppose he didn't marry you?"
"Then I'd marry somebody else and be spared the shame of having to admit that I fooled around with a fellow for two years and didn't have the guts to go further."
"Gee, I never talked to you, Sue, without hearing something I'd never have thought of."
Sue reached for her lipstick with a nonchalant gesture. "When you start cheating on Eddie," she said, "let me know. I'll be able to give you an argument in both directions."
Dot smiled. "I'm not going to cheat on Eddie," she said.
"Well, maybe not." Sue's brow wrinkled thoughtfully. "I remember reading of a case in the newspaper once where a woman was true to her husband for all their married life, but they lived on a farm and there wasn't any one else around."
"Sue! You're terrible."
"Well, maybe," said Sue, "but you know, Dot, I've watched people. You don't. You listen to them. Do you remember Mrs. Barns up on Cypress Avenue? She was getting a tooth filled for damn near a year. You believed her when she complained every day about having to go to the dentist's. Bunk! Doctor Walters was her sweetie. That's why you'd always find her in his office."
"But she said—" began Dot.
"There you are, 'she said.' Hell's bells, Dot, I'm a virgin. I was just kidding you about me and Pat. Believe that and I'll call the ambulance for you. I gotta run along now."
She ran along, and Dot, left alone in her room, wondered if after all Sue wouldn't be happier if she and Pat were respectably married. Later she decided that Sue would not be happier. Not if she had to spend her days wandering about Harlem looking for something to do.
Once Dot took a 'bus ride downtown, but she didn't like it very much. The mashers couldn't be handled like the ambitious youth of One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Up there a girl could always say, "Run along," or "Who are you talking to?" or something like that. In the days when she had gone to work, she had encountered practically no flirtatious gentlemen because there had not been the aimless, timefree air which had accompanied her on her one sally into the Fifth Avenue shopping district.
A man had spoken to her right outside of Russek's. A particularly gorgeous wrap was on display, and Dot had been picturing herself inside it when the man spoke.
"It is beautiful enough," he remarked, "for a bootlegger's mistress."
Dot turned her most crushing gaze upon him.
Undaunted, he continued, "You're not by any chance a bootlegger's mistress, are you?"
"No," replied Dot, "I'm not." And she moved down the street.
The man followed her. "Don't be angry," he pled, "some of our best people are."
"Are what?"
"Bootlegger's mistresses, of course."
"Run along," said Dot, using a bit of magic which she had brought from Harlem.
It failed. He did not vanish.
"I shall run along presently," he said. "I shall run home and write ten thousand words."
That, Dot considered, was a strange remark. That had to be investigated. "Ten thousand words about what?" she asked.
"Bootleggers' mistresses."
"You're crazy," said Dot.
North of Central Park it is permissible to deliver such ultimatums after having done hardly any research work on the subject.
Dot's self-elected companion seemed interested in her diagnosis.
"You're the second person who has told me that," he said. "The first one was a brain specialist. A great uncouth chap with a mustache."
"Say, are you trying to pick me up?" asked Dot.
"Not today," he responded. "I'm just after a little light conversation, but if you'll come around Thursday—"
"Don't flatter yourself," said Dot and walked swiftly southward with the gentleman at her elbow.
He kept to her stride and talked into her ear as they traveled. "If you're not a bootlegger's mistress," he said, "would you mind telling me whose mistress you are?"
Dot stopped short and faced him. There was no anger in her glance now. She put her question as though they had been conversing under the most pleasant circumstances for hours. "What does mistress mean?" she asked.
The man looked back at her without raillery in his eyes. He was tall and gray-eyed, and his amused grin died abashed.
"Why, mistress is the word for a woman who has illicit sex relations with a man," he said. "For instance, Du Barry was King Louis' mistress. Do you see?"
Dot nodded. When she looked around again, her masher was hopping in a cab. Dot resolved never to go window shopping downtown again. These guys were too hard to handle.
Well, all right, stay in Harlem. Walk from Bim's West End. Theater to the Drusilla Dress Shop. Many a girl would give her right arm for a husband like Eddie. Walk, drink chocolate malteds, visit friends, go to the movies, and when these things can be borne no longer, cry for loneliness and boredom.
Edna Driggs, walking unceremoniously into the room occupied by Dot and Eddie, found Dot face downward on the bed crying for her loneliness and boredom.
"What's the matter? Have a fight?" asked Edna.
"No." Dot sat up and sniffled.
"Gee, you cry easy," said Edna. "What is it, a gift? Who's dead?"
"No one," Dot answered as miserably as though she were sorry to say that such was the case. "I'm glad to see you, Edna."
A sob.
"I'm glad you told me," said Edna. "I'd never have guessed it."
Dot smiled crookedly. She walked to the bureau and powdered her nose with unnecessary carefulness. Edna watched attentively as the lipstick moved across Dot's lips with deft little strokes. Edna watched more attentively but said nothing when Dot lighted a cigarette and began to puff heroically.
"I'm trying to get so that I like to smoke," Dot explained. "They say it's company when you're alone a lot."
Tears rushed readily to Dot's eyes.
"My, my," said Edna, "don't we just feel awfully sorry for ourself?"
"Well, it's no fun," Dot said hotly. "I'm all alone all day without a thing to do, I almost go crazy."
"I'm alone too," said Edna, "and nobody comes home to me at six o'clock."
Dot wasn't to be shamed out of her misery. "You got Floyd to fuss over, and you got your apartment."
"How would you like to have an apartment?"
"I'd love it, but Eddie's got queer ideas. He'd rather save five dollars a week for two years and pay cash for furniture than get it on time."
"That would be Eddie," said Edna. "But listen, I came to tell you about this today, though I didn't intend to spring it before I was half inside the door. I got a lot of furniture, you know. When Marty was alive his younger brother and his mother lived with us; so we had more rooms. It's down the cellar in my house, and it wouldn't cost you a cent. There's beds and chairs and bureaus and tables and everything. I can even fix you on sheets and other household stuff."
Dot's eyes shone. A home of her own. A real home to settle and to re-settle, to clean and mind and in which to put up cretonne curtains.
"Oh, Edna, you darling!"
Dot made an impetuous rush, but Edna held her off with a cautioning hand. "Hold on, Kid, don't holler yet. Remember you got Eddie to convince."
"Oh, he'll do it. He must do it when I tell him how unhappy I've been."
Edna considered Dot's chances. "Well, he might," she said, "but don't die if he says no."
"Three rooms would be plenty," said Dot. "A bedroom, living-room, and kitchen. I couldn't go over fifty a month though. Where would you look if you were me? I don't want to get anywheres near Jim and my father."
Edna said not a word. She knew it wasn't important to Dot whether or not she was answered. She saw that Dot was already laying the linoleum in the most perfectly white kitchen that had ever existed outside of a Saturday Evening Post advertisement. But she was wrong. Dot was only down to the shelving—it would be white and shiny with pictures of little blue coffee grinders on it. Edna was far more troubled than Dot about Eddie's reaction to the idea. He would say no unless his humor was better than Edna had ever seen it.
"How much are electric bills a month?" Dot asked.
"About two dollars too much," said Edna.
"No kidding, I want to know." Dot's tone suggested that she was working on a problem of which Edna could have no possible inkling.
"About two dollars," said Edna.
"And gas?"
"Oh, anywhere from a dollar up."
"Gee, that's cheap enough," said Dot. "I could do my own wash—"
"Hold the fire, Kid. Did you ever wring out a blanket?"
"No. Did you?"
"Yep."
"Then so could I, and look at the money I'd save if I did my own laundry."
"And look at how you'd get to hate housework."
Dot smiled loftily. Poor Edna, she didn't know that no one would ever tire of working in the prettiest, coziest little apartment that ever was.
Edna sat for another ten minutes, then made signs of moving on. "I want to buy a hat," she said. "If you're not too tired from hanging the pictures and unpacking the barrels, maybe you'd like to come along."
Dot closed the door on her little be-cretonned love nest and vigorously tried it; then she got her hat and coat and walked out of the furnished room.
"I bet I'd learn to cook right away," she said as she followed Edna to the street.
"Sure you would," Edna agreed. "All any bride needs is a can opener."
"Oh, I mean really cook, pot roasts and things."
There was something very touching in the way she said pot roasts and things. Edna patted her tenderly on the shoulder as they walked down Madison Avenue.
"Ask Eddie," she said, "and if he says you can take the furniture I'll show you how to cook pot roasts and soups and puddings and everything."
"Gee, Edna, do you think we could get a place for fifty dollars?"
"Any amount of them," Edna assured her. "Nice ones, too."
Edna was troubled. She wished with all her heart that she had approached Eddie on the subject. The thought of Dot's disappointment if Eddie displayed his middle-class independence made Edna choose a green hat when she had come out with the sole idea of getting a tan one.
Dot found shop windows that she had never before noticed. Windows with chinaware and ice boxes, windows with garbage pails and mops.
Edna watched her pityingly. Some might think that envy would have been a more appropriate expression for a woman whose young enthusiasms were buried with a rollicking, mad Scotsman. Edna was acutely aware that if Dot had been able to think of anything but house furnishings, she, the poor old widow, would have received a bounteous share of pity. Edna chuckled silently. Nothing could hurt her. A man with a sulky face, sulkily telling her that he would have none of her friend's furniture in his sulky home, would have left her howling with mirth. Poor Dot. Eddie could hurt her dreadfully. Nothing could hurt Edna. Not even Jim Haley—oh, well, nothing could hurt her much.
"Look, Edna, you stick close to me when I approach Eddie on the subject."
"Yeh, sure, I'll be only a short car ride away."
"No, I mean it."
"So do I mean it. If I'm there how can Eddie call me an interfering, God damn pest?"
"Edna!"
"Yes, Edna! You tell him, Kid, all by yourself. If he isn't eager to take the stuff, my being there isn't going to throw him into an ecstasy of delight."
So Dot told him about it without Edna to back her up. It was after dinner in the Perfect Snack Lunch Room and Restaurant. Eddie was smoking thoughtfully. He was wondering why the hell the boss had put eight volts of grid bias in that neutrodyne. Grid bias was the works, all right, but why the hell eight—
"Eddie, wouldn't you just love a home of your own with home-cooked meals and all?"
Eddie's expression was one of supreme indifference. "Less trouble in a restaurant," he answered discouragingly.
"Yes, but you don't get the proper stuff in a place like this."
He forgot grid bias and brought his eyes to rest on Dot's face. "Sorry I can't afford the Astor," he said.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, Eddie. I mean you don't order right. You don't balance your diet. You don't eat spinach, for instance. Now in a home of your own you'd get spinach, for instance. Nice, well-cooked spinach with a hard-boiled egg on it."
"I hate spinach, for instance," said Eddie, hardly.
"Oh, well, not just spinach. In a home of your own—"
Eddie stuck the light of his cigarette in the coffee. There was no hint of indulgence in his invitation. He sounded like Eddie in still, white anger confronting an enemy. "Got something on your mind? Out with it."
Dot was frightened. Oh, he was going to be mad! If it was only Sue who had offered them furniture, or even Maude McLaughlin; but Edna— The first fight was coming. Maybe the last fight. Perhaps Eddie would leave her when he found that she was not satisfied with the home that he had been able to give her. She wanted to say, "No, honest, Eddie, I was only thinking," but she wanted those three little fifty-dollar rooms so badly, and maybe he Would say yes. He was waiting for her to speak. He was ready to oppose anything she suggested. She read that on his face. Oh, well, she couldn't sit there looking at him.
"Edna has some furniture that she has no use for. She thought it would be cheaper and more comfortable for us if we took it and got an apartment somewhere. I'd like to do it."
Eddie tipped his chair back a little from the table and surveyed Dot with a stern eye.
"She's sorry for you, eh? Too bad. We can't take charity, Dot. We'll have a home when I can afford it, see? Marriages that go right have one mess of brains running them, not three nor even two. I'll tell you when we're ready for an apartment. Did you get that?"
Eddie's severe glance showed nothing of what he was thinking. The cutting blue of his eyes did not carry to Dot the thoughts that were running in his mind.
First fight now. This'll be good. I can still hear the old lady yelling, "You make me sick." Husband and wife fights. Dot'll say she's sorry she married me and that I begrudge her a little happiness and that I'm a God damn fool.
"So I'll tell Edna no?" Her voice was very low and small.
"Use your own judgment. I said we couldn't take the stuff, didn't I?"
Dot arose from the table. Her nose was a little pink, and her eyes were not accessible.
"You know best, Eddie," she said, tremulously.
Jesus Christ! Nothing but "You know best, Eddie." Just like that.
His hand reached out for hers. He didn't see the diners, only Dot with her little pink nose and her loyal eyelids protecting her tears from staring strangers.
"Are you mad, Dot?"
"No, only I'm—so—disappointed."
She broke away from him and bolted for the door.
He followed and caught her by the arm. Jesus! She wasn't mad.
"Dottie, I was thinking of something else, and you made me sore. Go ahead, get the furniture if you want it. I—I'm crazy. Trying to show who's boss—"
"Oh, Eddie—"