Love & Mrs. Sargent Read online

  “Well, if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s the professional proletarian writer!”

  “Very clever. Very pert. Just like your column, like your books, like your house, like you.”

  “You really do hate me, don’t you?” Sheila asked with a maddening calm.

  “No, God damn it! I don’t hate you,” Johnson roared. “But I hate the idea of you. You’re all alike. A bunch of rich dames with time on your hands. You’re bored at home tending to your kids and so you use your old dinner partners to take the express elevator right up to the top. Messing around with other people’s lives is just a lark for you, isn’t it?”

  “No, you arrogant young puppy, it isn’t a lark. Do you think I’d be writing this column for ten minutes if I didn’t have to?”

  “Have to?”

  “Yes, have to. How do you think I’d be able to keep all this if I didn’t work?” Sheila gestured around the room.

  “Is all this so important?’’

  “It is to me. All I ever was or wanted to be was Dick Sargent’s wife and the mother of his children. I didn’t know shorthand or typing or accounting or one other useful thing. And I never wanted to. When Dick was killed I was left with two babies and enough money to last us for two—maybe three—years. That’s why I became a career woman, Mr. Johnson, I went to work because I had to, in spite of what you think. And now you’re angry because I’ve been a success. Would you rather have another Flood?”

  “Another what?”

  “Another Flood. My incapable secretary, Imogene Flood. She’s a perfect example of the indigent gentlewoman earning her bread and butter. She’s ‘Society’ too, Mr. Johnson, and she’s got all the faults and foibles you despise. But she’s also got guts. Her husband jumped out of a window in the depression. He left her with two hands, no brains and thousands of dollars worth of debts. She did all the things a woman in her position can do—little jobs in shops, even selling door-to-door in a coat you’d be ashamed to give to the Goodwill Industries. Now she’s here running another woman’s house, answering another woman’s letters, living on another woman’s bounty. She has nothing to look forward to but a pay check and her silly television programs. Is that the sort of thing you had in mind as suitable for me?

  “Well, if you did, I’m happy to disappoint you. Without a little talent and a lot of luck, I could be my own Mrs. Flood—scrimping and saving to buy Allison a dress in the budget department, living on macaroni to put Dicky through school. Eighty per cent of the working women in this country work because they have to—not because they want to. And I’m one of that majority. But if I had to scrub floors, I’d do it to make Dick Sargent’s children the kind of lives he intended them to have.” With blazing eyes she stood up and faced him. “And now, Mr. Johnson, you can take out your poison pen and write anything you damned please for your trashy little magazine. I think that just about winds up our interview.” With a swish of her skirts she marched to the door. But he was there first. Before she knew what was happening, she found herself in his arms. She felt her face, her throat, her lips being devoured by him. She struggled furiously. “Let go of me, you. . . .” Then she said no more.

  XVI.

  The night had been a disappointment for Mrs. Flood. Her favorite television program, Late Love, had been preempted by a presidential address dealing with one of the country’s knottier problems, Mrs. Flood did not care to listen. She was a Republican and she intended to remain a Republican, as all Nice People were. No one on either side of the political fence was likely to sway her in her opinions so she saw no point in wasting time listening.

  Nor was the sequin machine any solace. Having run out of jets, all work on the new little cocktail veil she was running up for some indefinite engagement would have to be postponed until she could get around to the notions department at Field’s.

  She had taken a long time preparing for bed, bathing in a hot tub with two extra dollops of Smootholine (’For Skin No Longer Young”); creaming her face, her elbows, her hands, her heels. She had put her hair up and wound her skull with lavender gauze, put on the chin strap and drawn it a notch tighter.

  Then she got in bed with her favorite book. Mrs. Flood was not much of a reader. Her favorite book—in fact, the only book she possessed—was an out-of-date copy of the Chicago Social Register. She never tired of it. As was her custom, she looked first at her own name, just to see that it was still there. It was:

  Flood Mrs. Thos C (Imogene Otis) Jl.

  The “Jl” made her a little nervous. She had gone inactive at the Junior League before she was forty and hadn’t sent them a penny since then. She lived in constant terror that the treasurer of the Junior League would run across her name in the book, say: “Why, we haven’t had a check from Imogene Flood for almost thirty years!” and then create An Incident. But Mrs. Flood liked to have at least one club after her name. It lent such an air—just as Mrs. Sargent’s address and telephone number lent an air.

  It was an exciting contest Mrs. Flood had with the Social Register Association. She liked to see how many years she could go on being listed without having to fork over money for a new issue of the book. The longest she had ever dared to go was three years. She had been awfully worried that they might drop her, but this year, regular as rain, a new blank had come in. She had filled it out, parted regretfully with a check and wondered now if she might not just push her luck over four years before she ordered again next time.

  Having caressed her own page, she turned next to the S’s to make sure that Sheila and Dicky and Allison were still safe and sound. They were. Assured that her own brood was all right, she thought of Emily Porter. Poor Emily. With trembling hands she searched for “Porter Mrs. Stacy de V.” Alas, Emily—either through indifference or indigence—had flown. So, too, a glance at “Married Maidens” told her, had Emily’s daughter and the insurance adjuster in Detroit. It was a cruel world of change and strife, Mrs. Flood decided. But, after all, it was probably for the best. Why would a practical nurse want to be in the Social Register at all? Wasn’t the nurses’ registry enough?

  For another hour Mrs. Flood cheerfully looked up old friends to see who was still in, who had been dropped, who had died, who had married into or out of the book. But this book was three years old and she’d been over the same territory a thousand times. It held no surprises. She couldn’t wait until next month when the new book would arrive. Mrs. Flood quivered in anticipation of the beautiful nights in bed with a brand new Social Register to thumb. Finally, after having looked up the names, addresses and officers of all the better clubs, she snapped the book shut and called it a day.

  She hammered at her pillow, set her alarm for eight and turned out the light. But Café Dormé or no Café Dormé, Mrs. Flood could not get to sleep. She lay there for, well, goodness, she didn’t know how long, trying to induce drowsiness and then, just as she had planned the last sequin on Allison’s Christmas Juliet cap and felt slumber coming on, she was rudely awakened by a light suddenly flashed in her eyes.

  Mrs. Flood sat up. The light was coming from Mrs. Sargent’s bedroom in another wing of the house. Really, Mrs. Flood thought indignantly, she’d have to speak to Bertha about lowering the upstairs blinds in the evenings. She got out of bed and went to the window to lower her own and then, staring across at the three lighted windows in Mrs. Sargent’s bedroom, Mrs. Flood gasped. Mrs. Sargent was in her room with that reporter man. The man had taken off his jacket and now he was closing Mrs. Sargent’s blinds.

  “Well,” Mrs. Flood said, feeling her face flush in the cool darkness. ‘Well, I never!”

  WEDNESDAY

  I.

  Sheila put out her hand and felt that the place next to her in the bed was empty. She sat bolt upright. “Peter,” she whispered. Then she heard the sound of water running into the basin in her bathroom. She lay back again. It was six o’clock, the sun was beginning to pierce the blinds.

  She smiled as she remembered the terrible shock she’d had y
esterday to wake up and find a naked man in her bedroom. Too stunned even to cry out, she had tried feverishly to collect her thoughts and then they had all come tumbling down upon her and fallen more or less into place—the brandy, the furious quarrel, the wordless, violent grappling down in her office and then her submission, her allowing Peter to lead her to her bedroom. No, that wasn’t quite true. She had led him to her bedroom. On Monday Peter hadn’t even known where her bedroom was.

  “Well, he certainly knows now,” she said aloud.

  At this time yesterday morning she had been in a perfect frenzy of embarrassment and fear. She had been just smart enough to keep her mouth shut, her eyes half shut. Through her lashes she had observed Peter getting hastily, shakily into his rumpled clothes and tiptoeing out. Come to think of it, he’d looked rather shattered, too.

  Yesterday had been perfect hell. The only thing good about it was that it had been a Tuesday and the work had been especially heavy. She had gone into her office at ten, lunched there on a tray and hadn’t left it until six, Peter, in the service of Worldwide Weekly, had sat in the office all day long, maddeningly silent, not looking at her, just listening, listening, listening and making occasional notes.

  And the letters! It had seemed that every one of Sheila’s millions of readers was conspiring against her. “Dear Mrs. Sargent, I have been living with a man who is not my husband. . . .” “Dear Sheila, For the past two years I have been having an affair with a married man. .. .” “Dear Sheila, Two weeks ago I allowed myself to be seduced by a strange man and now. . . .”

  Nor had Mrs. Flood been any help at all. In fact, Floodie had nearly driven Sheila insane what with gibbering like a chimpanzee at one moment—”This heavenly orchid evening dress at Martha Weathered’s in 1926. . . my late husband and I gave this beautiful party at the Villa Venice . . . as John Alden Carpenter once said . . . the old Crane house on . . . my Auburn runabout. . . not the Pump Room, but the old Venetian Room”—and then falling into ghastly, strangulated silences, deeply flushed and clearing her throat five, ten, fifteen times a minute.

  “Troubled by catarrh today, Floodie?” Sheila had asked acidly.

  “I? Oh goodness no, Mrs. Sargent. Heavens, I’ll never forget that one Silver Tassel Day at the North Shore Club. My late husband was a great golfer, Mr. Johnson. Now let me see, it was either in 1928 or ‘29. No, it was ‘29 because that was the year Pansy Walker had this stunning dinner dress with the whole back cut out. Well, my late husband had just bought this robin’s-egg blue Wills-St Clare phaeton and I was driving out to. . . .”

  “Floodie,” Sheila had said pointedly, “we have a great deal of mail to get through today. Would you mind reading the next letter?”

  “Oh, goodness, no. Let’s see.” Mrs. Flood had put on her great black spectacles which she wore like an albatross around her neck, cleared her throat nervously and dived in. “This one is from Port Huron, Michigan. It says: ‘Dear Mrs. Sargent, I am a widow in my forties and I have fallen in love with a man who is my son’s age. . . .’” It had proven too much for Mrs. Flood. With a terrible paroxysm of coughing she had fled the room. It had been pretty much of a much for Sheila, too. Could Mrs. Flood have guessed anything? Impossible, she had told herself. Floodie slept at the other end of the house, nowhere near her room or Peter’s room. Besides, Floodie was so stupid that she couldn’t guess her own age.

  With remarkable stage presence, Sheila had said, “Floodie seems a little hors de combat today. If you don’t mind, uh, Mr. Johnson, I’ll fetch the portable typewriter and answer some of these myself. You get the general drift, anyhow.”

  The rest of the afternoon had been less painful. Sheila could type twice as fast and three times as accurately as her secretary and yesterday she had really put her mind to her task. Mrs. Flood, however, had seemed too undone for words. Every few minutes she had cried, “Oh, fudge!” yanked the paper out of her machine and crumpled it into an untidy ball. Six o’clock, with the work finally signed and sealed, had found the office wastebasket full to overflowing.

  And had Sheila’s own household come to her rescue? Indeed it had not. It hadn’t even come to cocktails! Mrs. Flood, the pleased recipient of a last-minute summons to fill in at a dinner party, had hustled upstairs to get into one of many sequin-trimmed evening blouses, her home-made felt skirt and Sheila’s old mink, Allison, who had spent the livelong day in her room painting or else just mooning, had dusted out at five with the announcement that she was going into town for spaghetti and dago red with a young art student of whom Sheila tacitly disapproved. Even anti-social Dicky, muttering something about a reunion at the Academy, had deserted her. Sheila could have killed him. Dicky’d always despised Lake Forest Academy and had begged to leave it just prior to the headmaster’s suggesting much the same thing. That had left Sheila with Peter and no one else.

  The very notion of having drinks alone with him, of dining in anguished silence at the enormous table, of making empty conversation about every subject in the world except the one that was on both their minds had been enough to drive Sheila mad. And so she had grasped at the only possible way out.

  Living nearby in a hideous pink cantilevered house was a couple named Mill, the man a balding, colorless millionaire with bad breath and a guilt complex, his wife a loud, brassy macaw of a woman who, it was rumored, had once been a model at Saks and/or an Oak Street call girl. (Sheila had known the first Mrs. Mill—a woman wronged if ever there was one.) At any rate, Mrs. Mill II, culminating a five-year campaign to rise socially in the Lake Forest Jet Set and to lionize Mrs. Sargent, had blanketed the community with invitations to cocktails on Tuesday. In desperation, Sheila had put in a call and, after being patronized by a Chinese houseman, had got through to old cockatoo herself. . . . “So terribly afraid I wouldn’t be able to come to your nice party. . . . Wonder if I could ask an enormous favor. . . . House guest from New York—another writer. . . . Could I bring him?”

  Mrs. Mill had screeched her surprise and delight. “Sweetie! Surest thing you know. Come early and stay late—the both of you. G’by now.”

  They had done just that. Sheila, anticipating what Mrs. Mill and her coterie would be wearing, had put on black, a large hat and no jewelry. Driving Peter to the party she had chattered too brightly about the ordeal and what might be expected, feeling sure that he would hate it even more than she. “Rather garish woman but so good hearted.” Mrs. Mill had all the kindly instincts of a chicken hawk. “Awfully interesting modern house. . . .” The place combined the worst features of a Sears, Roebuck pre-fab and the Guggenheim Museum, and Sheila had never been in it. “Fairly amusing crowd.” A crowd, indeed—all the people who would never be asked to any of the better Lake Forest houses—people who were dull and common when sober, loud and impossible when drunk.

  The house, the party, the flowers, the get-ups, had been a nightmare of vulgarity. There had been flaming canapés, two bars, a deafening trio and a trampish blonde suffering a bout of projectile vomiting in the hostess’s escalette marble bathroom. Naturally Sheila, combining in one both Celebrity and Society, had not lacked for admirers. Nor had Peter. Mrs. Mill, in a flurry of gold lace and emeralds, had whisked him off at the beginning of the evening. Smiling mechanically, Sheila had stood miserably, the center of attention, with the noise bellying and swelling around her, the trio thumping old show tunes in her ear.

  You bump-um-bump are bump-bump the promised kiss of springtime bump.

  That makes the lonely win-terrr bump seem lo-o-o-ng.

  “Betchou could give me a few good names and addresses from some of those lovesick babes. Hell, what mostovem need is a good. . . .”

  “Muss be simply fascinating. All those problems. Like I was saying to Ralph, one never knows when you’re well off, do they?”

  “No but, sincerely, Mrs. Sargent—mind if I call you Sheila?—I would like to have a talk with you sometime. You know, ontray noo.”

  “Nu? That reminds me . . . kinda cute story . . . it seems t
his old Jewish rabbi is on a bus, see, and. . . .”

  Hell. All of it the sheerest hell, just as Sheila had expected. The event had held only one surprise and that was when Sheila, after untold hours of boredom with the Lake Forest Jet Set had glanced across the room to see Peter deep in conversation with Mrs. Mill. A wave of something alien and mysterious had passed over her. And then she had recognized what it was—jealousy, the blackest most murderous jealousy imaginable. “Drunk. That’s it. I’m just plain drunk,” but she had known at the time that that wasn’t the reason.

  It had been after ten when she had driven him home in silence, parked the car expertly and entered the house with him by the kitchen door.

  “Hungry?” Sheila had asked. “There may be something in the ice box. I’m not sure.” She had known damned well there was—the rock cornish hens for their uneaten dinner, not to mention a dozen other things.

  “No thanks, I ate a lot at the party.”

  “Well, then,” she had said, snapping off the kitchen light. And again, there in the dark kitchen, she had felt his arms around her, his lips hungrily on hers. Half an hour later had found them right back in Sheila’s bedroom. That had been yesterday.

  Sheila sat up again, put on a bed sacque to cover her nakedness. “Well,” she said. Then, having nothing better to say, she said again, “Well!” She knew she should be ashamed of herself but she couldn’t help being a little proud. “This is dreadful,” she said, and she giggled.