Love & Mrs. Sargent Read online

  Sheila lived in the constant company of yet another Sheila Sargent. It was a kind of alter-ego, an inner voice that kept questioning the Actual Sheila as to the true reason behind every word, every action, every thought. The Other Sheila was generally an outspoken, hard-boiled cynic, but she could take on a number of distressing personalities. The Actual Sheila did not always care for the companionship of the Other Sheila, but she put up with her nagging presence because she liked to feel that she was completely honest with herself.

  Now a whole procession of Sheila Sargents spoke to her.

  “You know about the sixth commandment,” said Sheila-Never-Absent-or-Tardy-from-Sunday-School.

  “Well, it isn’t exactly adultery,” Sheila said. “I mean he’s single and I’m. . . .”

  “I, for one, would call it fornication,” said Sheila-First-CIass-Scout-and-Patrol Leader.

  “You always were a perfect prig—you with your merit badges and tatty green uniform,” Sheila said.

  “And in the very bed you shared with Dick,” said Sheila-Widow-in-Mourning, “you slut!”

  “I loved Dick,” Sheila said pathetically. “You know I did, I’m not a bad woman. There was no one for all the eighteen years before I married Dick, no one else during the years we were together and there hasn’t been anyone—not a soul, honestly—in the years and years and years since Dick died. I’m a normal, healthy woman and . . .”

  “You could have had Howard Malvern any time you wanted him,” said Sheila-Realistic-Thinker.

  “Oh, Howard!”

  “Or that bachelor in Barrington who breeds boxer bulldogs,” said Sheila-Widow-at-Large.

  “Snorting, slobbering, always licking at you—the dogs, I mean. The man was quite nice but he was getting to look like a boxer.”

  “Do you think this is quite playing the game, Sargent?” asked Sheila-Roycemore-School-Hockey-Captain.

  “It’s some game,” Sheila snickered.

  “And what of the children?” said Sheila-Mother-of-Two.

  “Oh, dear,” Sheila groaned. “Except that they don’t know and there’s no reason for them to find out. And, after all, they’re grown. Would they be so horrified if I were to fall in love? Even marry again?”

  “Marry again?” said Sheila-Woman-Past-Forty. “Marry Peter Johnson? And what are your plans for the Princeton prom this year, you old cradle snatcher? Just how old do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know,” Sheila said, “but I intend to find out. Old enough to be in World War II, at least. That scar on his rear end is from Anzio and that was in 1944. Thank God he didn’t turn around.”

  “You barely know this young man,” said Sheila-Social-Leader-and-Club Member. “I mean, darling, who are his people? His background?”

  “Oh, shut up, you bloody snob!”

  “He’s getting one hell of an interview, cookie,” said Sheila-Member-of-the-Press. “I can’t wait to read it, can you?”

  “You, too! He wouldn’t. Not Peter.”

  “Just what would you tell another, uh, older woman who found herself in the same position?” said Sheila-Advice-to-the-Lovelorn-Column.

  “Well, that would depend on . . . on. . . .”

  “On the position?” said Sheila-Ribald-Wit-and-Wag,

  “Sorry, but I do not happen to think that’s very funny—or—in every good taste.”

  “So what you’re doing is in such good taste?” asked Sheila-Arbiter-and-Pace-Setter.

  “That all depends. If a, uh, relationship is handled with discretion and intelligence. . . .”

  “Intelligence?” Sheila-Intellectual-Light sneered. “Just what do you think you do that some school girl or chamber maid or alley cat can’t do, only to be scolded in your column, Miss Roundheels, You chuckle-headed old hypocrite!”

  “Oh, please. Am I asking so terribly much? It’s only a couple of days more and then he’ll be back in New York and. . . .”

  “And you’ll be right after him,” said Sheila-Woman-of-Affairs. “Oh, there’s no end of reasons for you to go to New York—your publisher, the Book and Author Luncheon, that invitation to speak at the Colony Club—and a side trip to Peter’s flat.”

  “A certain amount of travel is necessary and it would only be friendly to call on him while I’m there.”

  “And run into a bit of fluff about half your age,” said Sheila-Jealous-Woman.

  “I’ll check on that immediately. I’ll simply ask him.”

  “And of course he’ll tell you the truth,” Sheila-Hardened-Cynic said derisively.

  “Oh, go to hell—all of you,” Sheila said. “All I know is that I love him and I’m happy and. . . .”

  “What?” Peter said. He emerged from the bathroom, tying his robe around him. The robe was rather shabby. Sheila decided that she might get him a new one—Sulka or VL & A, perhaps.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Sheila said. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning. I hope I didn’t wake you. Well.. . . .”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought I’d better get back to my room before. . . .”

  “Oh, don’t go yet. It’s early. Only six. Here,” she said, patting the bed. “Sit down. I . . . I want to talk to you.” He sat on the edge of her bed, not looking at her.

  “I suppose you think I’m an awful heel,” he said. “Or is ‘cad’ the word I want?”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort, Peter. But I’d be interested in your opinion of a woman who . . . well, I mean a woman tries to be all calm and collected and cool as a . . . you know, a woman who sets herself up as a dispassionate authority on, well, on love and then on the very first night. . . . Well, I mean do you think I’m a tramp?”

  He took her hand and pressed it hard. “Sheila. I don’t think anything. It happened. That’s all. It just happened. I guess we just couldn’t help ourselves. At least I couldn’t.”

  “Nor could I. I only hope that you don’t think this sort of thing ‘happens’ to me very often.”

  “Please, Sheila, I don’t want to hear about the others.”

  “The . . . the others! Oh, Peter!” She burst out laughing and threw her arms around his neck, stifling her guffaws against his chest.

  “I don’t think that kind of thing is very funny,” he said petulantly.

  “Funny? It’s a real thigh-slapper. If you only knew,” Sheila said, wiping tears of mirth away. “But it just so happens that there aren’t any others. Isn’t any other. I’m humiliated to say so, but you’re the first man I’ve . . . well, you know . . . since Dick died. Fifteen long years. I . . . I didn’t think that this sort of thing was anything I’d ever need again and then you came blustering into the house and. . . . Well, look at me now—a shameless, wanton, fallen woman. Madam Pushover.”

  “Sheila,” he groaned, embracing her fiercely. She held onto him hard, digging her nails into his back. Then she thrust him away.

  “Now this is no time for anything like that,” she said. “I mean I’d simply adore to but. . . well, I mean it’s morning. The sun’s up and pretty soon the whole family will begin marching up and down the halls like the army on maneuvers. I mean let’s not start something we can’t finish.”

  “What makes you so sure we can’t finish it?”

  “No, Peter. Really no. Now don’t go tempting me. I mean I’ve been so confused for the last couple of days—all hell breaking loose on Monday and then going through that ghastly day yesterday not knowing what you could be thinking of me, and that hideous party with you making such a play for Rowena Mill.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Mill, our gracious hostess. You know, that picked chicken in the gold lace and all the eye make-up.”

  “Oh, her. I thought she was kind of a tart and dull as. . . .”

  “Don’t you think I’m kind of a tart, too?”

  “Oh, God, Sheila.” Once again he was in her arms.

  “Down Fang! No, really, Peter, stop it. I’ll bet I look a mess and . . . Peter! Le
t me go. I mean we’ve got to keep up some kind of appearances and. . .”

  “Oh, I’ve been keeping up appearances all right. I go back to my room and sort of roll through the bed and toss the pillows out. I don’t sleep with a pillow.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “And I make a lot of noise taking a shower so that maybe your son can hear me and sort of mess up the room for the benefit of the help. It’s a damned comfortable room.”

  “You haven’t been in it much,” Sheila said, stroking the back of his neck.

  “All right, Theda Bara, hands off, please.”

  “’Kiss me, my fool.”’

  “Now listen, if you don’t want to start anything, you’re not going about it in. . . . Hell, I’d better be getting back to my room. In that way we can’t get into any. . . .”

  “No, Peter, please don’t go. It’s still early. No one will be up for hours except for Taylor and Bertha and they live over the garage. Stay here and we’ll just talk. I mean I haven’t had a man in my room for so long and . . . I promise.’ No hanky-panky, just bright, hearty conversation, light classics, the correct time and weather reports—like those frightful sunrise broadcasts. Ready?’

  “Sheila, how much will power do you think I’ve got?”

  “Enough. Behave yourself for now and later on today. . . . Just what day is this?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Oh, dear. That means I have a sitting for that damned Mother of the Year portrait. Then about seventy letters. . . .”

  “Then a speech to the A.S.P.C.A. and a dedication ceremony at the Church of Sweet Daddy Grace and a cornerstone to lay at the Home for the Criminally Insane and a cocktail party at A.A. . . .”

  “Peter, I’ll let the mail wait and we’ll go off some place together. I promise.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, the beach house, maybe. I’ll think of something. Now for the talking. Do you realize that I know absolutely nothing about you?”

  “I’d say that you had the most intimate working knowledge of. . . .”

  “I don’t mean that, I mean vital statistics. I want to know what you’re like, what you do with yourself, what kind of a little boy you were. I don’t even know how old you are.”

  “It’s no secret, I’m. . . .”

  “Peter, wait. Promise me one thing. Promise that you won’t go all chivalrous and claim that you’re fifty just so I won’t feel like such an old hag. I know you’re younger than I am.”

  “Not much. I was born of poor but honest farm stock in Purviance, Kansas, thirty-six years ago. I’ve got papers to prove it.”

  “That’s about what I guessed. Very well. Continue. You live in New York, I believe, Mr. Johnson, Right in town or in some sordid banlieu?”

  “Right in town, ma’am. In a place called London Terrace.”

  “That sounds very grand.”

  “It’s not a bit grand. It’s full of secretaries and bookkeepers and assistant office managers. I have a room and a half with two Murphy beds that come down out of the wall.”

  “Two? Who sleeps in the other one?”

  “I live alone.”

  “But not always, I’ll bet. Don’t you have a girl? Go on, you can tell me. I’m supposed to be the big authority on sex, I won’t be shocked. In fact I’d be rather surprised if you didn’t have someone.”

  “It isn’t exactly a girl.”

  “Now don’t tell me it’s a boy. My, you are versatile!”

  “It’s just a babe I met at a party. She’s a dancer. Modern. You know—a lot of slobs in long underwear and dirty feet doing something asinine up on a stage and calling it Two Souls in Juxtaposition. Rae—that’s her name—takes it hard. She takes everything hard—modem dancing, philosophy, politics, art, music, sex. . .”

  “Indeed?” Sheila asked coolly. “Is she pretty?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. Kind of messy hair, big bust, thick black stockings. You know the type. She’s a good cook, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s got a lot of Kosher recipes from someplace—blintzes, chopped chicken livers, knishes, stuff like that.”

  “It sounds like Two for the Seesaw—starring Brigitte Bar-mitzvah.” And you, you old fool, Sheila thought, sound like Sappho and Chéri and Sweet Bird of Youth written, directed and produced by Sheila Sargent. “And I suppose you and this Mae. . . .”

  “Rae.”

  “Oh, yes, forgive me. I suppose you and this Rae will soon be slipping off to City Hall and. . . .”

  “Not a chance. Neither one of us is interested in that kind of thing. She’s always talking about status symbols and bourgeois affectations and how she only comes to my place every week or so to satisfy her psycho-sexual cravings. You know, crap like that. And it’s a good thing. She’d drive me nuts with her high-falutin’ chatter and her beat friends. She really comes to my place because she thinks it’s worldly to be having an affair with a man and because none of the boys in her dance group seems likely to make much of a play for her or any other female. Otherwise she doesn’t even like me. Thinks I’m a hopeless square. Oh, she’ll turn out all right eventually.”

  “Really?” Sheila said. She had begun to detest this girl.

  “Sure. She’ll shake all this nonsense. Marry a nice conservative Jewish lawyer in the suburbs and end up directing the little theater group at a nice, conservative temple. That is, if she doesn’t commit suicide first or get bumped off or die of exposure in her cold water flat.”

  “Mmmm,” Sheila said. At the moment she could think of nothing she’d rather have happen to this Rae creature. “And this little dancer, she seems to be entirely adequate for your, uh, demands?”

  “I can’t complain. I’m out of town a lot on assignments.”

  “And I suppose it’s not impossible to find some willing girl to make the lonely wanderer feel right at home—a sort of one-woman Traveler’s Aid.” Why do I torture myself this way? Sheila wondered. We never laid eyes on one another before Monday and would I have wanted a callow, inexperienced youngster whimpering that he’d been Saving Himself for me? “And you’ve never considered settling down? Marriage? The little cottage for two—or more?” Why am I getting onto this? Sheila wondered. Why can’t I just accept things as they are?

  Peter’s answer, whatever it might have been, was never made. The telephone next to Sheila’s bed rang.

  “Who could be calling at this hour?” Sheila said. She picked up the receiver and said “Hello?”

  “Sheila, my dear,” Howard Malvern said, “I hate to call you so early, but I think there’s something you ought to know.”

  II.

  During his forty years at Famous Features, J. Howard Malvern had made many, many contacts in the press. While he was too busy, too worried, too nervous or too shy to follow up many of them, he was widely respected and feared—if not especially well known or well liked—by his colleagues. On the rare occasions when the czar of Famous Features wanted a bit of information or wanted a favor done, no one was likely to hold out on him.

  On Monday night, alarmed by what Peter Johnson had told him, Mr. Malvern had read Dicky Sargent’s novel. While he did not care for Peter Johnson, Malvern had not been able to disagree in any way with Johnson’s appraisal of Bitter Laughter. It was, as Johnson had said, long, dull, derivative and very badly written. At the bottom of every page, Mr. Malvern—unable to believe his own eyes—had moaned and asked his doberman pinscher how Sheila could have been so blind. The dog had not deigned to reply.

  Most of Mr. Malvern’s Tuesday had been devoted to Bitter Laughter, An advance copy of next Sundays New York Times Book Review had reflected his worst fears. A vicious lady novelist, long disappointed by the sales of her own acerb outpourings, had let Bitter Laughter and Dicky have it, so to speak, right between the eyes. With unerring instinct she had quoted some of the most memorably bad passages and had wound it all up by saying that Dicky was hopeless. The advance Herald Tribune Book Review had been ki
nder and briefer, but it, too, allowed that Bitter Laughter was a book one could put down.

  Long distance calls to various inside contacts at Time, Newsweek, Worldwide Weekly, The Saturday Review, and The New Yorker, with Miss Roseberry and her shorthand pad at a nearby extension had proven equally depressing. Time had compared Dicky’s book unfavorably to Tom Brown’s School Days and every other book ever written about a prep school. “Only surprise,” Time concluded, “is that the son of Richard Sargent could have so little promise.” Newsweek felt that Dicky should have turned to his mother, like so many millions of others, for a bit of advice and that Sheila’s advice should have been “Stop!” The New Yorker polished off the book in four disparaging lines and The Saturday Review, lumping Dicky’s book with nine other first novels of the season, took Boysen Berdell Associates sharply to task, claiming that if Dicky’s name had been Smith or Jones the book would never have been published in the first place. Of all the weeklies, Worldwide had been the most vituperative, a fact that made Mr. Malvern fear for Sheila’s fate as a cover girl in the following issue.

  Nor was the news from the monthlies—Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire—any more encouraging, although these magazines were less imminent.

  “Well, Sheila,” Mr. Malvern said, “I thought you’d better hear the bad news from me first off. And since most of those magazines hit the stands today and tomorrow, I thought you might like to know in advance so that you can get to the mail first and, uh, remove anything you might prefer that Dicky not see. Worldwide came out yesterday, but I know you don’t subscribe to that anyway. . . . How’d the interview go . . . ? That’s good. . . . Not bored with our Mr. Johnson . . . ? Splendid, my dear. Well, I hope I didn’t get you up, but I thought you’d want to know. . . . I’ll keep in touch. Good-by, my dear.”

  Mr. Malvern hung up the receiver and looked across to the other twin bed. “Duke,” he said, “stop licking yourself.”

  III.

  It was just a quarter of nine when the wetter chords of George Frederick Handel’s “Water Music,” emanating from station WFMT in Chicago, awakened Allison. She listened for a moment, decided that years of The Messiah had put her off Handel forever, turned off the clock-radio and got out of bed.