To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 14
"NOW, Joe, if you don't take your evening clothes to New York I think you'll be very foolish," Kate advised, making Joe, who had been wavering, decide not to take them. So when Bill Salisbury said, "You've got to come to dinner to-night. My cousin Evelyn Thorne's sailing on Thursday, and I'm giving a party for her," he had to answer, "I haven't any dinner coat."
"Doesn't matter; we're having dinner in a dirty. Russian place. Evelyn thinks it has atmosphere, or some such damn nonsense."
"I don't know how to talk to girls."
"Like hell you don't! Remember, my son, little William was with you in France. Hinky dinky parly voo! Anyway, we'll be dancing."
"Gosh, Bill—I can't dance the tango"
But here he was, late, because when he arrived at the address Bill had given him he had wandered about a long time before he found Katya's down in a basement under "The Kiddie's Korner. Juvenile Apparel Shoppe."
"Here's the boy! Joe Green himself, not a moving picture! Mrs. Ricardo. Take care of him, Susette, and tell him the worst about the rest of us."
They had begun dinner. Half-smoked cigarettes and bits of pickled fish lay on the oil-streaked plates, the wineglasses were blood-red bubbles. A snowdrift of ermine hung over a pushed-back chair.
"That belongs to the pot of orange marmalade prowling around out there with the boneless young man with black lacquer hair. Her name's Mrs. Milton Prather, and you mustn't laugh out loud when you meet her."
Joe looked at Mrs. Prather. Red good-natured face, waved orange hair, fat body in orange chiffon, ankles bulging from crossed gold ribbons, insteps bulging from tight gold slippers—one could imagine the cruel red lines when the slippers came off, the burst with which the stays popped open. She had sketched on black eyebrows and rubbed blue around her eyes, and a little gold case dangling from her finger held the scarlet for her large square mouth.
"The creature she's dancing with is named Harry Fisher. She takes him everywhere she goes, to dance with her and kiss her hand—wait till you see it! As if he were smelling something bad and throwing it away. Some people say he acts as a maid for her, but that's not true; she has another maid. She took dancing lessons from somebody—Maurice, wasn't it, Bill? At a million dollars a minute. She's not so bad if you don't look higher than the feet. Oh, my God, no! I take it all back! I've drunk too much already; I'm getting maudlinly kind and charitable."
Mrs. Prather came to the table, trailing almost overpowering billows of a perfume called La Tendresse, followed by Harry Fisher walking as if he were leaning back on the air, with lifted shoulders and hands dangling as limply as stuffed gloves sewn to the cuffs of swinging empty sleeves. Susette Ricardo jumped up.
"He really makes me feel too ill to stay at the table. Come on and dance, and I'll scream in your ear. The worst of this crazy place is that just as you get to bawling the music stops and you tell the world. Do you know Evelyn Thorne? Sitting with Ralph Levinson? He's mad about her, has been for ages. That's why he fools round with the rest of us, though he despises us. She'll marry him some day—he has millions, and Evelyn's a pussy cat who loves her cream. His father came over in the steerage, but his mother is the only woman in New York who goes in to dinner in gloves. Grand isn't the word for her—going around in a bottle-green motor, with a bottle-green chauffeur and footman with sable collars, leaving cards. You must have heard of him; he's the one who lends such large sums to royalty that it has to go to his London parties—you know! His sister Esther married Lord Waller, and Bernice married the Dugald of Clandugald, or one of those old Scotch ballads. Lord Waller's a very High Churchman—they have a private chapel with their portraits kneeling on each side of the altar—don't you love it? And he plays the organ and does petit point chair seats, and is also, if you'll believe me, a noted big-game hunter. As for the Clandugalds, hoot mon, and also oy oy! What did I tell you about the music stopping? Now Ralph knows I was talking about him."
Joe looked at Evelyn Thorne, sitting on the wall seat by Ralph Levinson, her beautiful painted mouth smiling at something he had just said to her. She was the only person in the hot noisy room who looked cool and relaxed, with her white skin, her blue eyes with shadows about them that gave her a deceptive air of delicacy, and that she slightly helped, and her silver dress like armor. Painted on the wall above their heads, a squat Oriental potentate in star-spattered turquoise robes and a towering feathered turban, raspberry-pink and wrapped in pearls, strolled under a blue-green palm tree, leading on a leash a snow-white damsel in chiffon trousers.
"Let's try eating, for a minute."
They sawed at sauce-smothered beefsteak.
"I don't seem to be making much of an impression on this. Are you?"
"You'd have to take a course under Lionel Strongfort."
"The music is the thing this place runs on. Stir the emotions, and let the tummys look out for themselves. I don't seem to be making any more of an impression on you than I am on the beefsteak. Stop looking at Evelyn for one minute, and look at me, or I shall bust into tears and stick a fork into you."
"Is she engaged to him?"
"Oh, Lord! Have you a few millions?"
"Not so you'd notice it."
"Then put Evelyn out of your little head. Anyway, she's being taken abroad in a few minutes by Mrs. Prather, so it's too late to get excited."
"Taken?"
"Yes, Marmalade travels with her little retinue—Harry and another maid, and Mrs. Thorne and Evelyn. She can afford them. Look at the diamonds! Like a frosty morning."
The dancing ended and Ralph brought Evelyn back to her place. Joe looked at her, slim in her silver sheath. She oughtn't to be going abroad with those people.
She smiled at him. She couldn't help it. There was something about him that enchanted her. A cold clear air from the forest and the sea blew into the hot exhausting room.
"Aren't you going to dance with me at all?"
He gazed back at her with round blue eyes, adoring, but necessarily silent, for he was eating watercress, and the stems were unexpectedly long and intertwined. He was like a marble statue in a Southern garden, sprouting with maidenhair. She began to laugh.
"Come along! Come along!"
Through the music wild flowers bloomed under the bitter sky of a Russian spring. We have found each other, their bodies sang together.
"Why are you going away?"
Mrs. Prather danced past them violently, singing at the top of her lungs, waving a glittering hand and shouting, "Hello, Sweetheart!" to Joe. Susette Ricardo drifted by, a black butterfly. Her white hand dripped a lighted cigarette over Bill Salisbury's shoulder; her face, haggard near to, was childish at a distance, framed in short ash-blond hair. Under the painted palm tree Ralph Levinson sat watching.
The music stopped. Joe and Evelyn stood close together, waiting, silent, until it began again and she came into his arms as if she were coming home.
"Evelyn! Joe! We're going!"
"Where do we go from here, boys? It's too late for a show."
"Let's go somewhere and dance."
"The Ritz?"
"Can't; the Joe-person isn't dressed. Let's go to Arcadia. Anything goes there," suggested Mrs. Prather, wrapping herself in ermine. "She ought to be shot for her fur," Susette mocked, half aloud.
"Who told you I was going away, Joe? I can't say Mr. Green; it's so long and so hard to pronounce," Evelyn said as they waited, shivering, for taxis.
"Mrs. Ricardo."
"She told you other things, too. Poor Susette, she doesn't care what she says or does to-night. She's terribly in love with her husband still, and he's getting married to-day to the Yardley girl."
The band was blaring slowly in Arcadia; the floor was crowded with undersized boys with belted coats: and shaved necks, and girls with big pearl bead necklaces and flat curls stuck to their cheeks. With fixed eyes and steadily moving jaws they went through their elaborate steps. Here and there a couple spun with the tranced faces of dervishes. The women of Bill Salisbury's party looked about them, smiling and starry-eyed, pretending not to know they were being noticed.
Joe and Evelyn were together again, speaking to each other without sound or words, together for dance after dance, keeping away from the others.
The lights went down, the orchestra played a waltz, quietly and slowly, and the dancers sang as they danced. Lost children, singing in the dark, happy and gentle and good, forgetting for a little while that they were lost. Then the lights glared; the tribal drums began to beat; saxophones moaned and laughed.
"I want to go home. Will you take me?"
Colored fire poured and cascaded over Broadway, streaming trembling lines of lilac and rose, chartreuse color, moonlight green, a pure and innocent blue. Messages of fire were written in the sky, seen through a veil of lightly falling snow. The subway lamps were blue night sky, worn thin, so that heaven shone through. A river of people flowed around Joe and Evelyn; fat couples hurrying to catch the last train home to New Jersey suburbs; middle-aged quartettes from Riverside Drive, Lucille being conscientiously girlish with Ada's husband, Ada with Lucille's; exquisite silly débutantes dancing up and down as they waited for their motor cars; smooth young men; prostitutes; visitors from points West. All caught up together in the shimmering web of life, excitement, pain, laughter, bright threads, dark threads, tangled in the wild weaving.
In the taxi her lips blossomed under his. The street flowed by so fast, as they held each other in their fragile and immortal moment.
"Evelyn! We love each other!"
"I know! I know!"
"You're trembling so"
She stirred, lifting her faintly gleaming face. Her wrists ached when he touched her. Pleasure or pain? She hardly knew. Only a feeling so intense that she could barely live.
"I never knew anything could happen like this!"
The taxi stopped, and they said good night in front of a sleepy doorman.
"I'll come to-morrow."
"When?"
"About four? I'll get through somehow."
"Get through what?"
"I'm here on business—didn't I tell you? Vacuum cleaners. What's so funny about that?"
"Oh, Joe! As long as I've known you, you still have the power to surprise me!"
He wanted to slap the doorman on the back so hard that he would knock the stuffing out of him; he wanted to run, tossing his arms, shouting. He paid the taxi driver, seventy-five cents, with a dollar for a tip, and swung off through the snow.
To have found her—to have found the answer to life's question!
How did he know it was true? That she was a living girl who loved him? Only by this tide of feeling that surged through him. He had to stand still, caught breathless in the flood of his love for her.
A small cold wave of sorrow crept through. She was going away, and he must let her go, because he was too poor to take care of her yet, and take care of his mother, too. People no longer gave Kate orders, as they had when they were sorry for her after her husband died, when she had Jodie and Charlotte to bring up; and everything was so much more expensive now; her little amount went almost no distance.
I'll work twice as hard, Joe thought. I'll get extra work to do at night. I'll manage somehow, because if I should lose you, my darling
He remembered Susette Ricardo's face; he understood her anguish.
But they could never lose each other now, no matter what happened. If we never saw each other again, we would belong to each other forever. The two broken pieces have been found, have been fitted together into the perfect whole.
Evelyn, Evelyn, what is this love you have brought me? Higher than happiness, deeper than peace.
The streets ran by him. The houses were dark, except for a lighted window here and there where life or death could not wait until morning.
He never knew where he walked that night, lost in thoughts of her, lost in feeling that welled up, drowning thought. At last, far up on Riverside Drive, he realized that he was hollow with hunger, that a dull pain was throbbing in his bad leg. Snow no longer fell; the river gleamed faintly lead color. He was the only living being in a world drowned in the cold sad light of dawn.