Love & Mrs. Sargent Read online

  “The club?”

  “How’s Monday, Imogene? I’m free Mondays.”

  “Why, Monday would be lovely, Emily,” Mrs. Flood had said, thanking an R.C. God rather than her customary C. of E. Maker, that her employer would be lecturing to a club of Catholic women in Evanston that day.

  “I’ll meet you at the Inn. Twelve-thirty. And I mean twelve twenty-nine sharp. I’ve got to get back to the old pismire by three. ‘By.”

  Mrs. Flood had giggled shrilly, deliciously shocked by the same old profane, raffish, devil-may-care Emily, Today she had dressed with special care, twice lacquering her long gray nails, daubing blue onto her pleated gray eyelids, purple into her sparse gray hair. She had put her big, fake topaz ring on her right hand and her small, real engagement ring—recently redeemed from the First State Pawners—on the left. (Mrs. Flood dimly recalled that Emily, hefting two armloads of bracelets, had once described it as “cute.”)

  Emily had arrived fifteen minutes late. Once the darling of the Michigan Avenue dressmakers, the fabled beauty who “never shopped below the Bridge” wore a dirty raincoat and again the dowdy white dress and shoes.

  “Sorry I’m late, Imogene. Just as I was about to dress I had to put the old bastard on the bedpan again. I’m a sight I know.”

  “Is Stacy ill, Emily?” Mrs. Flood had asked, her brows rising beneath her bangs.

  “Come to the party, Imogene. Stacy’s been dead for six years.”

  “Dead, darling? Your husband?” Mrs. Flood’s eyebrows formed a huge circumflex above her pert little nose. “B-but how?”

  “Bottle,” Mrs. Porter said calmly. “Stacy always drank like a fish. That reminds me, why don’t we order something?”

  “Oh, certainly, darling. But who is it that’s ill?”

  “Just an old bitch up in Lake Bluff. Stroke. Partial. Unfortunately it hasn’t affected her speech centers, and she’s got bowels like a goose. Didn’t you know, dearie? I’m an impractical practical nurse.”

  Over a bottle of domestic rose—the Inn primly served only beer and light wines—Mrs. Porter poured out the story of her last quarter century: the spoiled husband who hadn’t been able to surmount the depression and died after sixteen years in a public institution; the son killed in Korea; the daughter—recalled by Mrs. Flood as a golden princess with a genuine French mademoiselle—married to an insurance adjuster in Detroit; the foreclosures and evictions and auctions and pawnings; and now her career as—well—really a menial. Mrs. Porter told her story forthrightly and wittily with wry asides. Indeed the tragedy seemed to hit Mrs. Flood far harder than it did its heroine. With little gasps and moans, with eyebrows shooting upward and lips thrust outward, with hands fluttering to her sternum, her throat, her cheeks, Mrs. Flood was a study in audience participation. “But Emily, how awful. . . ! Oh, not your sable coat . . . ? You mean the vi-o-lent ward at Dun-ning . . . ? How ghastly . . .! Those beautiful pearls, too . . . ? Oh, Em-i-ly!”

  “So, that brings me up to date,” Mrs. Porter said, spreading her large, worn hands—innocent of rings—on the table, “I’ve got a little car of my own, a tiny dump down in Rogers Park near enough to the lake to go swimming. And you know what? I like it. Well, I’ve talked enough. Now it’s your turn, Imogene.”

  Mrs. Flood’s hands had strayed to her gold-plated cigarette case, her gold-plated lighter, her gold-plated holder. She had told a carefully cut and edited story of her life so many times that she herself no longer knew just what was true, what was false, what was wishful thinking and what was merely indistinct because it was viewed from such a long distance. This was the first time she had told the tale to an old, rich acquaintance who was now worse off than she was. She would have liked, now, to have been a little franker with Emily, but the force of habit was too strong. She began her string of euphemisms:

  “Well,” Mrs. Flood began, “after poor Tom passed away. . . .” The late Tom Flood had actually passed out—out of a window at Number One North LaSalle Street in 1932, leaving behind a widow, twenty-odd thousands of dollars’ worth of debts and a mysterious bastardy suit brought by an unknown young woman who was not one of Mrs. Flood’s social circle. “Of course that enormous apartment on Dearborn was much more than I wanted. . . .” Actually, the apartment had been four boxy rooms in the unfashionable tier of a moderately stylish building. What Mrs. Flood had really wanted was just twice as much space on Lake Shore Drive or, at the very least, North State Parkway. “I mean rooms and rooms and rooms of lovely antique furniture; the silver, the china. . . .” The “lovely antique” furniture had been bought, fresh from Grand Rapids, at Sholle’s in 1921. The silver and china had been rather good. But it had all been junk to the bailiff who impounded it. “It was so boring sitting around a hotel room all day. . . .” Even though blessed with the most convenient memory, Mrs. Flood was still able to recall squalid places with romantic names—La Vista, Le Marquis, Leicester Court—where her view of the airshaft was blocked by a pint of milk, a sliver of butter set out to cool on the window ledge; where she stayed in her room for days, fearing to pass the manager’s desk and call attention to her unpaid presence. If terror was ever dull, then Mrs. Flood had been truly bored. “So I thought it might be fun to take some little job somewhere. Of course I’d had no experience. . . .” How often harassed personnel managers, each scared for his own job, had told her just that. Mrs. Flood had, in a ladylike way, hit the labor market at a time when fourteen million people, each more competent than she, were battling for jobs. And the few openings she had found had certainly been little ones—selling cosmetics door to door, Weiboldt’s and bedspreads in the holiday rush, peddling Christmas cards, soliciting subscriptions by telephone, a cheap dress shop on Wilson Avenue.

  But Mrs. Flood was an experienced autobiographer, “So I knocked about—the better shops, a little decorating . . . that sort of thing. But it was just too hectic for an old homebody like me. So for the past couple of years I’ve been—uh—assisting my cousin, Mrs. Richard Sargent, in her little project.”

  “You mean Sheila Sargent, the lonely hearts dame?”

  “Well, yes, but of course she does so many other interesting things, too. Her books, her lectures, the television program she’s considering. It’s stimulating, Emily, and Cousin Sheila’s a darling.”

  Mrs. Sargent may have been a darling, but she was no kin of Mrs. Flood’s. Their late husbands had been distantly related and Mrs. Sargent, who was known for kindness, patience and tact, had met Mrs. Flood at one of the enormous cocktail parties at a propitious time in both their lives. It was a time when Mrs. Sargent was frankly weary of losing giddy young secretaries to the altar and when Mrs. Flood, whose feet had all but given out in the marts of commerce, was puzzling her way through the last lap of a Speedwriting course. One look at Mrs. Flood and Mrs. Sargent sensed that suitors would give her little trouble. One look at Mrs. Sargent—at Mrs. Sargent’s house and the quarters that went with the secretarial post, at the cars and the furs and the furniture and the aura of well-being—and Mrs. Flood knew that she would be safe and protected for as long as she could still totter. So far the arrangement had worked out satisfactorily for both.

  “And so here I am, Emily,” Mrs. Flood had said, with just a tiny hint of patronage.

  “Jesus!” Mrs. Porter had said, “quarter of three and the old bitch will be bawling for her back rub. Let’s get the check.”

  “No, Emily,” Mrs. Flood had murmured, laying a tender hand on the slimy nylon of her friend’s sleeve. “This is to be my party. I in-sist.”

  Mrs. Flood stopped the Anglia at the intersection, squinted to left and right and then ventured southward. She deplored what had happened to the old Lake Forest, for Mrs. Flood hailed from a day when the name on every gate summoned forth impressive, associations with bathtubs and tractors, pure lard and chewing gum, chain stores and ham. The old aristocracy was on the wane and in the parks of their great estates had sprung up new, modern houses crowded in as many as one to an acre. “Ta
cky,” Mrs. Flood snorted, heedless that each of the buildings she deplored cost just ten years of her full salary.

  Nor was Mrs. Flood’s salary anything to sneeze at. She was paid about ten dollars more than a competent young woman who could take shorthand and type with eight fingers and one thumb would be getting in a real office downtown. In addition Mrs. Flood had her own room and bath, her meals at the family table, plenty of free time and first grab at Mrs. Sargent’s hand-me-downs. Her expenses were nil. But Mrs. Flood was cautious with every dollar, content to do without in order to watch the little nest egg in the Continental Illinois Bank grow and grow and grow. Every week fifty good dollars were banked against the day when Mrs. Flood would be too old to work. And the day was not far off. Mrs. Flood claimed fifty-seven. Actually she was sixty-two. With any luck she could last here until seventy. Plus; the little retirement gift Mrs. Sargent would undoubtedly give her that would be . . . hmmmm. Mrs. Flood had no head for figures, but it would be quite a lot. Enough so that she’d never again be hungry or poor or frightened.

  Mrs. Flood thought of Emily Porter again and shuddered. . . Poor, dear Emily. Such a plucky little thing! So brave and gay in the face of. . . . She wondered if she just shouldn’t have used one of the crisp five-dollar bills in her bag to send Emily a little remembrance from the florist. “No,” she said firmly, “no sense my sending Emily flowers. What would she do with them?”

  Mrs. Flood slowed down to a crawl. On her left—on the lakeside—was a sign reading ‘’Private Road,” Beneath it, a sign reading “Sargent.” Not one of the Great Estates, perhaps, but, today, one of the very largest. With a frantic flapping of her hand and a blinking of lights, Mrs. Flood announced to the deserted road that she was going to turn. Swinging her little car inexpertly to the left, Mrs. Flood heaved a sigh of relief. Here was the nest, the cave, the den, the womb, Mrs. Flood was Home.

  III.

  “My reply to this young bride was: ‘Go right ahead and have the baby early. The friends who count don’t count.’ “

  The ballroom of the Orrington Hotel reverberated with laughter and applause. Sheila was sweltering in her sables, not that she’d have taken them off in the lowest chamber of Hell. And speaking of Hell, Sheila thought, I’d love a cigarette. The air was thick with smoke. Sheila felt for a moment that if she took just one deep, deep breath it would be almost as good as a cigarette all her very own.

  She held up a hand for silence. “Well, I didn’t come here to talk at you. I came here today to talk with you. And so, if there are any questions please ask them and I’ll do my level best to answer them—really I will.”

  There was a pause. There was always a pause while the girls got up their courage. Someone always had to be first and no one was ever willing to be. Sheila smiled encouragingly. She knew that it would be nearly a minute before one of the leading lights in the organization would ask the first question—just to Get Things Going.

  The shill raised her hand. Just as Sheila suspected, she was sitting at one of the front tables and wore a committee badge.

  “You!” Sheila said. “First your name. I always like to know who I’m chatting with, don’t you?”

  “Mrs. Shaun O’Brien. Florence O’Brien.”

  “Good! I’ll call you Florence and you must call we Sheila. Now! The question?”

  “W-well, uh, Sheila, suppose you got a letter from a middle-aged woman who still loved her husband but who found that romance had gone out of her life. What would you tell her?”

  “That’s a very good question, Florence. Here’s what I’d suggest. . . .”

  IV.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like a brandy, a stinger, something like that, Johnson?” Mr. Malvern asked.

  “No thanks,” Peter Johnson said flatly. “It’s nearly three. How far is this Forest Lawn place and how do I get there?”

  “Where? Oh. Ohohohoho. Lake Forest. Long way. Good twenty, twenty-five miles. But I’m going to drive you out there myself—pay a little surprise call on Sheila. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Johnson said in the same flat, noncommittal tone of voice.

  If Peter Johnson was not worried, Howard Malvern was. Mr. Malvern was a born worrier. He worried about trouble that had happened, trouble that was happening, trouble that would happen. When there was absolutely nothing to worry about, Mr. Malvern worried about things that just might happen.

  Now he signed “J. Howard Malvern” on the luncheon check and worried again as to whether the Tavern Club had been the right club for entertaining a reporter from Worldwide Weekly. He had been worrying about the suitable place to lunch for some days now. He had never met this Peter Johnson before and he didn’t like to take a chance on entering the Chicago Club with—well—with a Pig in a Poke. After all, Mr. Malvern hadn’t been a member there for any too long himself and it worried him to appear with someone—well—with someone Funny. Then again if this Johnson should have turned out to be esthetic or very intellectual, the Athletic Club would have been just too hearty. The Key Club and the Barclay had a certain furtive glamor reminiscent of the speakeasy days but they weren’t very exclusive—oh no, you could never call them exclusive—and if this Johnson should have turned out to have been notably dark and—well-Semitic looking, some drunk at the bar might have made a crack. No, perhaps after all the Tavern had been the best choice; fair food, good drinks, light, bright and uncrowded.

  “Lovely view from here,” Malvern said, rising. “That’s the Wrigley building there, just over the bridge. And down there is Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive and. . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” Johnson said. “I’ve been here before.”

  Mr. Malvern began to worry again. Did this Johnson mean he’d been to Chicago before or did he mean he’d been here in the Tavern Club before? And, if so, did he mean that he didn’t like the Tavern Club? Had he, Howard Malvern, insulted his guest by bringing him here?

  “Like to wash up—or anything?” Mr. Malvern asked.

  “No thanks,” Johnson said.

  Now did he think that I meant that I thought that he was unclean? Mr. Malvern started worrying all over. He was having a perfectly miserable time. Actually Mr. Malvern wanted to go to the bathroom quite badly himself. He knew he could never manage to drive out to Sheila Sargent’s place in Lake Forest without relieving himself here and now. “Well, if you’ll excuse me?” he said tentatively at the door of the men’s room, “Like to sit in the lounge? Read a magazine?”

  “I’ll manage, somehow. Thank you,” Johnson said.

  Alone in the men’s room, Mr. Malvern was in a perfect panic for fear that he had offended this important guest—this alien man who had come out to Chicago to do a cover story on Sheila Sargent for that snide and unfriendly magazine, Worldwide Weekly. His hands trembled fumbling with the zipper of his excellent flannel trousers.

  When Howard Malvern was not too busy worrying about something, when he’d had about two-and-a-half bourbons—just enough so that he wouldn’t worry about drinking too much—he sometimes grew calm and reflective, lighting one of his good Upmann cigars and thinking with satisfaction just where his forty years of worrying had put Famous Features and J. Howard Malvern.

  Famous Features, as the most casual reader could tell you, was a vast and successful organization supplying syndicated columns, cartoons and comic strips to newspapers all over the world. And Howard Malvern, starting as a most unpromising office boy, was now its president. He had fussed and fidgeted and fumed until Famous Features had grown from a weekly household pets column, a boozy sports writer and a totally unread comic strip involving a hen named Chickie Chuckles into something of an empire. Famous Features now boasted three boozy sports columnists, three syndicated political columnists—one who worried Mr. Malvern because he was so far to the left, another who worried Mr. Malvern because he was so far to the right, and a middle-of-the-road man who worried Mr. Malvern because he was so dull. Famous Features offered two different peddlers of cafe society gossip, a
fantastically popular character assassin in the Hollywood office whose inaccuracies and innuendoes about film stars caused Mr. Malvern many a sleepless night. The Famous Features Weekend Bookworm was second only to the Saturday Review Syndicate. Chickie Chuckles had been plucked and replaced by ten big comic strips, four daily cartoons, Kute Kids’ Komments and the ghost-written rantings of a senile elder statesman whose daily cries of woe were often relegated to the comic page by mistake. Famous Features had the usual complement of cracker barrel philosophers, medical advice, puzzles, fashion and beauty news, television criticism, the solacing words of a famous minister, tips on etiquette, a daily horoscope, answers to idiotic questions, stamp and coin news, household hints, travel tips—more than a hundred in all. But the uncontested star in Famous Features’ firmament was Sheila Sargent whose five-times-a-week column of advice to people in trouble (mostly to women with man trouble) was read by uncounted millions including, it was said, Sir Winston Churchill and Bernard Baruch. Fifteen years ago she had burst onto the newspaper scene as temporary replacement for one of the old sweetness-and-light lovelorn ladies. Her advice had been so cool, so intelligent, so witty and so wise that Sheila Sargent had become as familiar a household name as Betty Crocker or Emily Post. Hers was the most popular single column in America and Howard Malvern worried most about Sheila Sargent. Because for the past fifteen years he had been hopelessly in love with her.

  Hurriedly—but very carefully—Mr. Malvern washed his hands first in warm water and then in cold, pushing back all ten cuticles. He would have liked to have gargled and brushed his teeth, for he worried about Offending.

  Meanwhile Peter Johnson was a trifle worried himself. He rather prided himself on being a Man of the People. He hated being taken to places like this and he hated himself for hating it. He liked to feel that he was at ease with all mankind and it made him uncomfortable to be uncomfortable with the rich. Howard Malvern was certainly rich and so was Sheila Sargent. For that reason, he caught himself being a little tougher and more petulant than he really intended to be.