Love & Mrs. Sargent Page 4

  “Oh, stimulating,” Allison said, removing the little mink jacket her mother had just given her. “I drove into town and bought a red dress. This one.”

  “Hmm,” Mrs. Flood murmured. “Very pretty. Didn’t they have it in another color?”

  “Mother told me to buy a gay red dress. Now I have. Please don’t tell me it’s becoming, because it isn’t.”

  Oh, dear, Mrs. Flood thought. The wall that girl builds between herself and the rest of the world. Tactfully she said, “Why, it’s not bad, Allison. The Twenty-Eight Shop?”

  “Of course the Twenty-Eight Shop,” Allison said. “Then I went to Mother’s gifted, gifted little French woman for still another fitting on my beautiful, beautiful ball gown for my lovely, lovely coming out party.”

  Mrs. Flood’s forehead creased. She did not care to have Important Things like expensive dresses and private debuts treated lightly. However, she was pleased to notice that Allison’s face was suddenly softening, that her eyes were almost beginning to sparkle.

  “And then, Floodie, I went to the Art Institute to see the new loan exhibit,” Allison said rapidly. “And it was so wonderful, Floodie, that I just stayed and stayed. I didn’t even have lunch. Come to think of it, I’m as hungry as a. . . .”

  “Oh, that’s nice, dear,” Mrs. Flood said loudly. Society People were supposed to have an interest in art and Mrs. Flood approved whenever Allison displayed a Correct reaction. “I haven’t been inside the Art Institute since. . . .” Then Mrs. Flood’s face went ashen. Her jaw sagged. “Didn’t have lunch! Allison Sargent! This was the day when the girls in the Debutante Cotillion were supposed to meet at. . . .”

  For a moment the two stared at one another aghast. “Oh, Floodie!” Allison said. “Isn’t that dreadful? I got in there with all those fantastic pictures and I forgot about the luncheon entirely. Don’t tell Mother. Please, Floodie.”

  “Allison Sargent, you simply amaze me. Here your mother breaks her neck to get you into the Cotillion. She plans this huge party for you—new dresses, that lovely little mink jacket. And all you do is get lost in some old art gallery and forget to show up for the debutante luncheon! Why, when I came out. . . .” Mrs. Flood had come out at a tea party held in the front and rear parlors of the Drexel Boulevard house of her father, a comfortably well-off wholesale grocer. The debutante had been presented to Mumsie’s old friends and to her classmates at the Stefan School, all of whom had known her for some years. Twining’s Lapsang Souchong, watercress sandwiches, little iced cakes and marzipan from Kranz’s had been served. But, owing to Mrs. Flood’s rather myopic hindsight, this event, like many another in her past, had taken on the luster of a court ball. Mrs. Flood was even now about to expound upon the wines, the dresses, the crowded dance programs of her Season. She did not. Once more she sensed the wall Allison had erected between them.

  “When you came out, you cared. I just don’t,” Allison said matter-of-factly. “Where’s Dicky?”

  “Dicky?” Mrs. Flood said blankly. Her mind was not attuned to rapid changes of topic. “Oh, Dicky, Why he’s in his studio. Writing of course.”

  “You mean in the tool shed?”

  “Allison! What is the matter with you? Your mother put I-don’t-know-how-much time and money into doing it over for him. Goodness, dear, I wouldn’t mind living in such a shed: kitchenette, bathroom, darling little bar. After all, your brother’s got to have some place to write his books. I mean, a creative young novelist like. . . .”

  “Just what did you think of Dicky’s novel, Floodie?”

  “What? Dicky’s novel?” Mrs. Flood’s mind once more shifted gears. She really liked to get on a subject and stay on it. “Why . . . well, I mean . . . why, I thought it was splendid. Perfectly splendid.”

  “You didn’t even read it,” Allison said.

  “Now see here, young lady,” Mrs. Flood said indignantly, “I typed it. But that was nearly a year ago and having it handed to me in little dribs and drabs and Dicky’s penmanship so difficult. . . . And I’m busy, Allison. Busy with your mother’s work. I don’t have time to read.”

  “What you mean is, you haven’t read it. Have you?”

  “Well, no. But I intend to and I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely.”

  “It’s perfectly lousy, Floodie. Poor Dick.”

  “Allison Sar-gent!” Mrs. Flood gasped. “You should really have. . . .” Mrs. Flood’s tirade was halted by Bertha, who entered the room again to place a tray of decanters on the coffee table. A Lady did not have Scenes before servants. “Bertha, just look,” Mrs. Flood said effusively. “Miss Allison has a new red dress! I was just saying to her that she really should have her picture taken just this way—in color of course. Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t think the shade suits her,” Bertha said. “Good evening, Miss Allison.”

  “Neither do I. Good evening, Bertha.”

  Mrs. Flood waited patiently while Bertha left the room. Then, lowering her voice ominously, she returned to Allison. “Now you just listen to me, Allison Sargent,” she said dangerously, “if you had any notion of what your poor mother had to go through with Dicky and his book—helping him, encouraging him whenever he thought he couldn’t write another line. . . .”

  “If you’d ever read some of Dicky’s lines, instead of just pounding them out on the typewriter, you’d have discouraged him,” Allison said. “He didn’t want to write that novel, Floodie, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort, Allison Sargent,” Mrs. Flood hissed indignantly. “But I do know that you’re just about the worst little ingrate I’ve ever seen! When I think of the sacrifices your poor mother has made so that you and Dicky. . . . Oh!” Too outraged to go on, Mrs. Flood made a great show of snatching a cigarette from her case, jamming it into her holder and flicking her lighter. Then, through the smoke, she noticed that Allison was almost in tears. Mrs. Flood was not an unkind woman. “Allison, darling,” she said. “You’re young. Oh, I know. I was, too—about a million years ago. Coming out can be very nerve-racking and you always were shy. I was, myself. Now do run upstairs and get ready for this magazine reporter. And, Allison, dear? Why don’t you try a really bright lipstick and perhaps a bit of blue on your eyes—just to please your mother?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! What’s the use?” Allison said and slammed out of the room.

  Exhausted, Mrs. Flood sank into a chair and pondered the ways of the young.

  VII.

  The express elevator reserved just for Sheila and a sort of bodyguard composed of two ladies wearing committee badges was a nicety which Sheila appreciated. Now all she would have to do would be to get down to the ground floor, make her good-bys to the committee girls, move graciously through the little throng of women who “just had to have a word in private” and sink into the back of the car.

  “The most successful luncheon meeting we’ve had since Bishop Sheen addressed us,” one of the women was saying,

  “Why, thank you,” Sheila said. “The bishop is a hard act to follow.”

  “He was only a monsignor then,” the other woman said.

  “Well, I certainly am honored,” Sheila said. “But I’m glad you didn’t tell me until after the meeting. I’d have been much too frightened to have opened my mouth.”

  “You? Oh, never!” The ladies laughed delightedly.

  “Bishop Sheen comes from Peoria,” the woman Sheila remembered as Mrs. McCarthy said. “My own people are from there.”

  “Is that so?” Sheila said, all alert interest.

  “Ground floor.”

  “Oh, dear,” Sheila said. “So soon. Well do let me thank you again for a delicious luncheon and I really have enjoyed meeting you and talking to all of you. It’s been a real pleasure.”

  “Oh, can’t we. . . .”

  “I won’t let you take me another step,” Sheila said. “The two of you must be exhausted organizing this big luncheon—all those details. I can’t think how you do it all. Well, g
ood-by again and—again—thank you.”

  With long, rapid strides, Sheila was halfway to the front door before they could protest.

  “Isn’t she a darling,” Mrs. McCarthy said to her friend. “Such a lady and so utterly, utterly sincere.”

  “Just between you and I, Maureen,” her companion said, “I think she was better than Bishop Sheen.”

  VIII.

  Farthest flung of the buildings on the Sargent place was the tool shed. Seventy or eighty years ago, when the place was new and run as a very small and by no means self-sustaining farm, the tool shed had housed garden tools. When Sheila had taken over the place, a large window had been cut into the shed’s south wall and Sheila had entertained a wan hope of raising there a few orchids and gardenias with, perhaps, a camellia tree or so. The notion had been a fetching one, but Sheila had had no knack with flowers and, before too many hundred of dollars’ worth of plants had been killed by her loving ministrations, the project was abandoned. After the children were born, the tool shed became a play house where, it was fondly hoped, Dicky and Allison would hold sedate nursery teas for their little friends and thus spare the main house. That idea died a-borning when Bertha, paying a surprise visit with Ovaltine and ginger snaps, had interrupted a game of strip poker involving the children of some of the finest families in Lake Forest. The place was then fitted up as a workshop when Dicky had been interested in building things. And, after he had built a smallish snipe, the tool shed functioned as a boat house until Dicky and the craft capsized in a sudden storm on Lake Michigan. Only Mrs. Flood, who spoke of the place now as “Dicky’s Studio,” had ever called it anything except the tool shed and it had never been markedly successful in sheltering much more than a few hoes and rakes.

  But now that Dicky was home from college, now that he had published a novel and had a career, the tool shed had undergone its most rigorous renovation.

  Advised by the young architect who had erected the breeze-ways, Sheila had done over the tool shed as a surprise for her son when it had been fairly definitely decided that he would become a writer like his father before him. The walls had been refinished in a soft blue (”for tranquility”), with a large expanse of platinum walnut paneling (”for warmth”). Dicky’s father’s old desk—smartly bleached—and his grandfather’s Sheffield inkstand—lacquered against tarnish—lent, as the architect said, “tradition.” An old Worcester mug—”amusing and colorful”—was filled with freshly sharpened pencils.

  The paneled wall was nicely tricked out with shelves to hold the tools of a writers trade—The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fowlers Modern English Usage, a Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary, a Cosmopolitan World Atlas, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the complete works of Sheila Sargent bound in blue suede and the works of Richard Sargent pere in pale calf. Quite a lot of shelf space had been left bare for the coming works of Richard Sargent, junior. An impressive series of panels also burst open to reveal an electric typewriter (blue), an electric pencil sharpener, hi-fi and concealed television, for the architect also considered himself something of a specialist in “the economy of space.”

  On the cork floor (”for quiet”) was a sculptured beige rug (”for area interest”), surrounded by some comfortable chairs upholstered in tortoise shell leather and a blue tweed convertible sofa, matching exactly the blue of the walls and the Roman blinds. The place, finished off with some Regency lamps, a few modern tables, an antique map of the Bahamas and some prints of Napoleonic guardsmen in tortoise shell mats, was finally pronounced a “fine, masculine workroom for a writer” by the architect who knew nothing of writing and even less of masculinity.

  Sensing that Mrs. Sargent was in dead earnest about her son’s writing career, the architect had pushed his luck even further. With a lot of talk about “spatial concepts,” he had installed a small bath in buff tile, complete with dolphin faucets, big brown towels, and a combination shower stall and steam room. One never knew when an author, deep in the throes of creation, would need a quick Turkish. And, as the tool shed was located nearly fifty paces from Bertha’s kitchen, the architect had installed behind sliding jalousies a trim little galley and bar with stove, refrigerator, copper sink, Waring Blendor and Italian earthenware and Danish silver for six. Again, wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world for a male novelist to break off in mid-chapter and run up frozen daiquiris and a puffy soufflé? It had cost Sheila a pretty penny but she had considered it a sound investment for now Dicky lacked nothing to speed him on his way as a major writer of our times.

  In his eighteen months of occupancy, Dicky had never availed himself of the shower or the steam room. The manly brown towels were changed weekly only because a certain amount of dust settled upon their voluptuous folds. Dicky had never sat at his father’s desk, never used the electric typewriter or the electric pencil sharpener, although he had once wondered idly if such a gadget might not be used for shorter arid snappier circumcision rites among savages during the twenty-first century. An unusual idea, he admitted, but there was hardly a book in it. What writing he did was done sprawled out on the sofa with a twelve-cent ball-point pen and a pad of lined yellow paper. The encyclopedia, the atlas, the Fowler, had never been opened. The toilet was used mostly for emptying ashtrays and the stove had never been used at all. The bar facilities, however, had been called into play more and more over the past several weeks. An empty vodka bottle lay in the copper waste basket in the kitchenette and three other empties were hidden in the bottom drawer of the desk. Dicky rationed his throwing out of bottles to one bottle every other day. Two or three times a week Dicky dirtied up some extra glasses with tomato juice and left them around the room so that it would look to Bertha as though friends had dropped in for Bloody Marys. Actually Dicky had no friends and the only people who had ever visited the tool shed in its present guise were Sheila, Allison and Mrs. Flood. Sheila’s daily visits were limited strictly to business and she discouraged her daughter and her secretary from doing anything to disrupt Dicky’s creative flow. What flowed the most was vodka.

  Dicky lived on a weekly stipend of one hundred dollars which Mrs. Flood paid over on Wednesdays. His mother had been very brisk and business-like about the money, “This is not an allowance, dear,” she had explained, “It is a writer’s subsidy to keep you going until your royalties start rolling in. You know I don’t begrudge you the money, but now that you’ve—now that you’re not in Yale any longer—well, I mean a boy of twenty ought to think about earning his own living. Your father was only eighteen when he started working summers for the old Evanston News-Index. It hardly kept him in cigarettes but the experience was invaluable—invaluable toward becoming both a newspaper man and a man. Floodie will keep careful track of what’s been paid out and I expect it to be paid back out of your earnings. Oh, and if it isn’t enough, Dicky, let me know.”

  It was enough. Dicky was a creature of habit because Sheila encouraged routine. Into the tool shed every morning at ten; luncheon on a tray at one; call it a day at five; shower and change; cocktails at six. Every Wednesday Dicky drove to the bank to cash his check. Then he drove to the barber shop for a haircut and a shine. (Sheila disliked shaggy necks and Dicky’s father before him had always had his hair cut on Wednesdays.) Then he drove west—pitching one of the accumulated empty bottles out of the car every half mile or so—to a cut-rate liquor store on the Skokie Highway for seven more quarts of Smirnoff’s hundred proof. Dicky realized that he could have effected a considerable saving by getting it in case lots, but he didn’t trust himself with that much vodka on hand. One bottle a day kept him going until the cocktail hour, when he openly downed two scotch mists, and nobody suspected anything.

  His vodka ration locked into the trunk, Dicky would drive north to Waukegan where he paid a weekly visit to two torpid whores who worked in a large trailer hitched to a small Chevrolet. The girls claimed to be sisters. One was named Shirley, the other Almeda, They depended mostly on the Gre
at Lakes Naval Station for their clientele and then only in the evenings and on Sundays. Therefore they welcomed Dicky’s Wednesday afternoon calls. He was known to them as Royal Stewart. One called him Roy-boy, the other Honeybunch. They had no idea that he was Richard Sargent, junior, but they were bright enough to sense that he was a rich kid from Lake Forest and they charged accordingly. After some dispirited badinage concerning Dicky’s astonishing proportions, his formidable prowess as a lover—neither of which, as Dicky knew, happened to be in the least noteworthy—Dicky would take into a curtained alcove whichever sister happened to be operant that week and perform quickly and joylessly that rite, the very notion of which was said to drive other men to madness. He considered the experience, when he thought of it at all, to be something a man Simply Does, like shaving every morning or acquiring regular toilet habits. He was always home by sundown, stretched out on the blue sofa, his pen, his pad and his vodka at hand.

  The ladies of the household joked among themselves over what they called Dicky’s Afternoon Off. They were a little mystified, a little curious, but they chose not to pry. Dicky, after all, was the Man of the Family.

  But today was Monday. Dicky lay on the blue sofa, his shirt open, his belt loosened, his moccasins kicked off. On the table next to him were the squat glass of ice and vodka, his cigarettes, the ball-point pen and the yellow pad. At the top of the pad were written, in Dicky’s cramped hand, thirteen words:

  Chapter Three

  PARIS

  Paris lay before them like an oasis in the desert.

  These thirteen words—one for every half hour—represented his literary output for the day. All the lights were off, save for a dim one shining through the shutters of the bar. A honey blonde gazed at him from beneath impossible eyelashes, her breasts rose and fell, a tear coursed down one cheek. Finally she spoke in husky, breathless tones. “But don’t you see, darling,” she said, “you’ve got to marry me. I . . . I’m going to have a baby—our baby.”