Love & Mrs. Sargent Page 6

  In a glance Sheila took inventory—the pinched, hurt expression; the brave little hat; the old spring jacket hopefully perked up with a corsage of straw flowers and acorns; the clean, mended gloves. Here was one of the innocent victims of the most expensive and hopeless disease in the world—alcoholism. Sheila could spot the families of drunkards at a thousand yards.

  The poor thing, Sheila thought, saddled with some lush and too proud to admit it. “That’s quite a problem,” she said soberly. “Too big a problem to discuss right here. But I’ll tell you what,” She opened her bag and took out a card, “Have your friend write to me and I’ll try to. . . .”

  “Oh, I . . . I mean she wouldn’t want it to be in the papers.”

  “Not to the newspaper,” Sheila said smoothly. “But directly to me. Here, I’ll write the box number.” Sheila was too smart ever to give her address or telephone number to strangers. Offered too much encouragement, people with troubles could hang on like bloodsuckers, revel in their misery, even invent problems to play to a sympathetic audience. The anonymity of the Lake Forest post office was a lot better for all concerned. “This will reach me,” Sheila said. “And tell your friend that names and addresses are absolutely confidential. Good-by and good luck.” Sheila gave the woman’s shoulder a quick little squeeze and disappeared into her car. The door closed with an expensive-sounding click. Lady Rich Bitch, Sheila thought, sables and a limousine, while that wretched woman will walk home to find that her husband has hocked her rosary to buy California port. “Taylor,” she said, “when you get to Clark Street, turn.”

  “Yes, Miz Sargent.” It wasn’t the way Taylor would have chosen to drive back to Lake Forest, but he was accustomed to unorthodox instructions on the days when Sheila made public appearances.

  As the car turned off Orrington Avenue, Sheila lighted her first cigarette in more than three hours. She closed her eyes and inhaled ecstatically. When she opened them she cried, “Taylor! Stop!”

  “Yes, Miz Sargent?”

  “That little shop we just passed. I saw a dress in the window that would be perfect for Allison. Taylor, wait right here. I won’t be a minute. No, don’t bother. I can manage.” She snuffed out her cigarette and scrambled down from the car.

  X.

  “We’re not doing badly at all for time,” Mr. Malvern said as the car shot up Sheridan Road.

  “Really?” Johnson said.

  “No trick at all to get out to the North Shore now that they’ve extended the Drive all the way up to De-von.” In the manner peculiar only to Chicago, he pronounced Devon to rhyme with Yvonne.

  “Where?”

  “De-von. You know, like a county in England.”

  “Oh! Devon,” Peter said, pronouncing it to rhyme with Seven, as people in Devonshire and all other parts of the world pronounce it.

  Mr. Malvern worried for fear he was guilty of another gaffe. “Right you are,” he said with an unconvincing chuckle. “Funny about local customs. I mean the way people in New York pronounce Houston Street House-ton and in Atlanta they say Punsedlian for Ponce de Leon and as for the streets in London. . . .” He let it drop there. He didn’t want to appear to be flaunting his erudition.

  The very act of transporting this Johnson from Chicago to Lake Forest had caused Mr. Malvern several sleepless nights. As the representative of an important national magazine writing an important story on the most important of the Famous Features columnists, protocol might well have demanded that this Johnson be met at the airport by the Famous Features company Cadillac and chauffeur. Or it might have seemed more gracious for Sheila, as interviewee and hostess, to have sent her car and Taylor down to meet him. But Sheila had turned thumbs down on that. It was far too grande dame, she said, and besides she needed the car herself. The solution finally arrived at, with the help of his secretary, the redoubtable Miss Roseberry, was that Johnson could get into town on his own and then Mr. Malvern could drive him out in his car. Miss Roseberry had allowed—and Mr. Malvern was usually inclined to accept her advice on things social—that this arrangement would seem both casual and friendly, giving the men a chance for a Good Long Talk and yet not giving this Johnson the impression that Famous Features had been scared into treating him like a visiting potentate.

  Now Mr. Malvern wondered if it might not have been wiser to have sent this Johnson out to Lake Forest quite alone in the company car. It would have been easier on both of them—especially on Mr. Malvern. The Good Long Talk had been going on since one o’clock in the Tavern Club bar. It was now just after four and the conversation had run rather thin. Howard Malvern only liked to talk business and business was one topic to steer clear of with a reporter from Worldwide Weekly, His fund of small talk was indeed small and whenever he did pass an innocent remark he worried it into a mortal insult.

  There was this car, for example. It was a black Imperial convertible—his first sporty gesture after a long series of Buick sedans. Until today he had been inordinately proud of it and had rather planned to woo Sheila with it over a series of bucolic jaunts. But when Johnson had asked what kind of a car it was, Mr. Malvern had said “An Imperial—Chrysler, you know—next year’s model.”

  “Nice,” Johnson had said.

  Leaping at the bait, Mr. Malvern had envisaged a lengthy interchange devoted to carburetors and transmissions, fuel consumption and trade-in values. “What kind of car do you drive?”

  “None. You couldn’t give me one,” Johnson had said. “Not in New York.”

  Now Mr. Malvern wondered whether his talk about next year’s model hadn’t seemed woefully ostentatious, whether Johnson, the big New York wheel, considered him a small town sport or, worse, an elderly playboy.

  When Malvern had pointed out the apartment hotel where he lived, Johnson had said “Very elegant.” Then, just to prove that he wasn’t ostentatious at all, Malvern had said, “It’s not really elegant. I just live in a bachelor apartment with Duke.”

  “Duke?” Johnson had asked,

  “My doberman. You see I’m divorced.”

  “I see,” the inscrutable Mr. Johnson had muttered.

  Now just what could he have meant by that? Could this Johnson have suspected that there could have been, well, an unnatural relationship between Malvern and Duke? That is, could he have thought that they were more to one another than simply owner and pet? By having mentioned divorce so close on the heels, as it were, of Duke, could this Johnson have imagined that Alice Malvern—now a Mrs. Livingston residing in San Francisco—had named Duke as a rival for her affections in the divorce suit? Why, that was all more than twenty years ago. Alice’s mother, Queenie, hadn’t even been born then. Alice had divorced him for mental cruelty and a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement and then married Mr. Livingston that very afternoon. Malvern wondered if he shouldn’t explain all this to Johnson. But he’d probably just make things look worse. Poor old Duke!

  For a while conversation had been sparse at best, but by the time they had reached Wilmette, Johnson had brought up the subject of the late Richard Sargent. He had seemed truly respectful, well informed and curious to know more. Here was a topic where Malvern was considered something of an authority. He had even been cited as a prime source of information on the acknowledgments page of The Dick Sargent Story by the grateful biographer, for it was Malvern who had given Sargent his first job as a boy out of Yale. And for quite a time Malvern had spoken of Sargent warmly and naturally—until, that is, he had said, “I was best man at Sheila’s and Dick’s wedding.”

  At that he clammed up in an agony of embarrassment. Now he had given this Johnson a chance to think that he was a social climber. True, Malvern had been older than Sargent. True, he had been Sargent’s employer with the power to hire or fire him, make or break him. But Malvern had begun life as a poor boy from Berwyn, gone straight from high school to the lowliest of jobs at Famous Features, Whereas the Sargent family—well, anybody who was anybody in Chicago could tell you who the Sargents were. Mr. Malvern’s marriage t
o the daughter of a podiatrist in Oak Park, had seemed to him a dizzying ascent on the social ladder. But when Dick Sargent had asked him to be best man at a genuine Society wedding, Mr. Malvern had been too stunned even to answer. Subsequent honors such as dinners for famous people at Sheila’s famous table, weekend invitations to Lake Forest, standing godfather at Allison’s christening, serving as honorary pall bearer, as executor of Sargent’s estate and—over the past fifteen years—indulging himself in a pleasant and profitable business relationship with Sargent’s widow, had more or less put Mr. Malvern at his ease with the Sargent family. More at ease than he was, say, in some of his clubs, at the smarter Chicago restaurants and private parties. But he was still very conscious of the differences between the West Side and the North Shore. The conversation stopped dead.

  Peter Johnson squirmed in the deafening silence that followed Mr. Malvern’s announcement that he had been Dick Sargent’s best man. “I was best man at Sheila’s and Dick’s wedding.” He had said it just like that and then stopped. Not another mumbling word. Nothing about the weather that day, the wedding cake, the quality of the champagne. Just a flat statement and that was that. God-damned society snob, Peter fumed, probably considers the sacrament too exquisite and exclusive to confide to a rube reporter like me. Peter had met these fine old society types before. They were all alike. All charm and courtly manners, ask you right into the vestibule and then slam the door in your face and send you around to the service entrance with a simple statement of fact. “Chauncey and I were roommates at Groton.” “Nicky was on our polo team.” “I got crabs from Schuyler’s great aunt.” And when you got right down to it, American society men were even bitchier than the women. They stuck together like dikes in the WACs—affable up to a point but then all firm-jawed and silent and noble about experiences that were too beautiful to be shared with anyone else.

  In a vicious fantasy Peter pictured J. Howard Malvern—J. Howard indeed!—as a sniveling little boy with sausage curls and Lord Fauntleroy suit kissing Mrs. Potter Palmer’s diamond encrusted hand. He could see him as a Yank at Eton with Colonel McCormick. He pictured him as a young Arrow Collar ad saying, “No, Governor, I don’t want to go into the family business. Let my brother, Q. Horace, do that. I want to go into journalism—like Bertie and Randy Hearst,” He probably lived with his damned doberman pinscher because the dog was the last living creature in Chicago well bred enough to share J. Howard Malvern’s bachelor flat.

  “Some lovely homes out here,” Malvern said inanely. Anything to end the silence. Then he realized that Nice People didn’t say Lovely Homes, they said Nice Houses.

  “Mm-hmm,” Peter said. I suppose that J. Howard is going to point to that limestone palace and tell me that he only uses it for weekends.

  Again they rode in silence, each growing angrier and more miserable. Why the hell did Worldwide have to send me out to write up this broad, Peter wondered. No room at the Neatsfoot Inn, or whatever the hell the Lake Forest hotel was called. “Mrs. Sargent would be delighted to have your reporter stay with her.” Sure, so he can make a damned fool of himself with the wrong fork and wash his socks in the finger bowl. Why me? Why couldn’t Worldwide have sent that fair-haired boy from Princeton who talked as though he were having a hard movement?

  The stillness became unbearable. Desperately Peter said, “Read any good books lately?”

  “Well, uh, I love books and I have an awful lot of them,” Malvern said, “but I don’t get. much chance to read.”

  “That must be tough,” Peter said, visualizing Malvern’s great, bleak, galleried library with its rows of first editions.

  What Mr. Malvern said was perfectly true. He had The Syntopicon and the six volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs. He had never opened one of them but he meant to. More than a little conscious of the lapses in his formal education, Malvern had instructed the editor of The Weekend Bookworm at Famous Features to make up a regular reading list for him. The editor had not failed. He covered the best seller list and tossed in—with unerring accuracy—whatever titles he felt would be fashionable or discussed in Mr. Malvern’s social circles. Kroch’s & Brentano’s delivered the goods every Friday, along with a brief critique from the Bookworm editor on the last seven days’ contributions to belles lettres. Mr. Malvern read the critique, the jacket blurbs, and even began some of the books. He hadn’t finished a book since The Caine Mutiny and he hadn’t much liked the ending of that. But, if one didn’t plumb too deeply, J. Howard Malvern gave the impression of being quite well read.

  “Are you fond of Ivy Compton-Burnett?” Malvern asked.

  “Not especially.”

  Neither was Mr. Malvern. “Bernard Malamud? James Purdy? Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Joyce?” There, that was a showy collection—and a catholic one.

  “I don’t have much time for reading either,” Peter said bitterly. So this Malvern was an intellectual snob, too.

  “What has interested you lately?” Malvern asked with what he hoped was suavity.

  “Well, coming out on the plane I commenced Bitter Laughter, by Richard Sargent, junior.”

  “Oh?” Malvern said. “Quite a boy, Dicky. I plan to get around to that this week. Sheila’s been very concerned, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Peter said. “My God, couldn’t she have stopped him?”

  The car swerved wildly. “What?”’ Mr. Malvern said.

  “Well, I mean I started reading it only out of duty to Worldwide Weekly. But after ten pages or so I was so fascinated that . . .”

  “You mean it’s got the old Sargent touch?”

  “I mean it’s the worst tripe I ever picked up in my life. Dull, pedantic, pedestrian and derivative of every other book about a prep school ever written. But why his mother couldn’t have. . . .”

  “Well, after all, Dicky’s only twenty.”

  “That’s no excuse. He should have waited until he had something to say.”

  “Well, it takes all sorts of opinions. Perhaps some people will like it as much as you dislike it. Mind you, I haven’t read it myself. But a lot of novels are controversial. That makes for reader interest.”

  “There’s nothing in this book to be controversial about. It’s just a badly written bore.”

  “Hmmm,” Mr. Malvern said. Then, on a cheerier note, he added, “Well, here we are!”

  XI.

  Sheila stepped out of the shop laden with parcels. Having found one dress for Allison, she found another and then another. Then she’d been entranced by a belt and two blouses and a cardigan and a suede coat. She’d held them all up to herself and was pleased with the general effect. Sheila felt that what was good on her would be just fine on her daughter.

  The car was gone and Sheila was fit to be tied before it appeared.

  “I thought I asked you to wait, Taylor,” she said evenly.

  “Cop wouldn’t let me wait any more, Miz Sargent,” he said, piling the parcels onto the front seat. “I driven around the block ten, twelve times.”

  “Dear, it is late,” Sheila said. “Here, Taylor. You get in back. I’ll drive. You’re always afraid of getting a ticket.” She threw her sables into the rear with Taylor and took the wheel. “We’ll be home by five. I’ll bet you anything.”

  XII.

  Mrs. Flood was in a perfect pet. It had been more than an hour since Miss Roseberry had called to announce Mr. Malvern’s imminent arrival and there wasn’t a soul here yet. No Mr. Malvern, no reporter and—even worse—no Mrs. Sargent.

  Mrs. Flood had scampered around the office lighting lamps and plumping pillows, moving ashtrays an inch this way and an inch that way. She had drawn the curtains and then decided that the setting sun was too pretty to hide. So she had opened the curtains once more and extinguished all the lights, plumped the cushions again, tidied the desk and then—deciding that it looked too tidy to be real—messed it up a bit.

  In her nervousness she had smoked half a dozen cigarettes, spilling ashes onto the carpet and then trying to erase
their traces with ineffectual shufflings of her pseudo-alligator pumps. She had pulled her girdle down so many times that her stockings had begun to droop, calling for immediate repair work with the garters. Now she could hardly walk for the discomfort.

  She had fluffed her bangs until she looked like an old sheep dog and chewed off two coats of lipstick. Still she held the fort alone. It was now twenty minutes past four, if her wristwatch, the cartel clock on the wall, the mantel clock in the drawing room, the case clock in the hall, the carriage clock in the library, the bracket clock in the dining room, the electric clock in the kitchen and the telephone company—all of which Mrs. Flood had consulted—could be believed, and still no sign of Mr. Malvern or Mrs. Sargent. She considered calling the police to report two ghastly automobile accidents but thought better of it, not knowing the exact location of either wreckage.

  “My heart just can’t stand this sort of suspense,” Mrs. Flood whimpered. Actually, she had the constitution of an ox, but Mrs. Flood harked back to a period when good health was considered vulgar, a delicate constitution patrician. “I’ll simply have to calm myself.” Stealthily, she reached out through the gloom for the brandy decanter. (That pretty setting sun had now disappeared entirely, leaving the office as dark as a cave, but Mrs. Flood was too distraught to notice.) Just as her hand found the faceted stopper the doorbell rang. With a clanging of Waterford glass Mrs. Flood jumped to her feet.

  “Bertha! Bertha’” she cawed. “The doorbell.”

  “I hear it, Mrs. Flood,” Bertha said, walking down the hall.

  Cowering in the office, Mrs. Flood could hear J. Howard Malvern being unconvincingly hearty. “Well, here we are, Johnson. Good evening, Bertha.”