Big Money

  “I just walked out. . . . What’s the use of arguing? They’re on one side of the barricades and I’m on the other.”

  Ada strode up and down the room. “Oh, I hate talk like that. . . . It makes me feel awful. . . . At least you’ll have a drink. . . . I’ve got to drink, I’ve been too nervous to practice all day.”

  Mary stayed all afternoon at Ada’s drinking ginrickeys and eating the sandwiches and little cakes that had been laid out in the kitchenette for the party and talking about old times and Ada’s unhappy loveaffair. Ada made Mary read all his letters and Mary said he was a damn fool and good riddance. Then Ada cried and Mary told her she ought to be ashamed of herself, she didn’t know what real misery was. Ada was very meek about it and went to her desk and wrote out a check in a shaky hand for a hundred dollars for the miners’ milkfund. Ada had some supper sent up for them from the uptown Longchamps and declared she’d spent the happiest afternoon in years. She made Mary promise to come to her concert in the small hall at the Aeolian the following week. When Mary was going Ada made her take a couple of dollars for a taxi. They were both reeling a little in the hall waiting for the elevator. “We’ve just gotten to be a pair of old topers,” said Ada gaily. It was a good thing Mary had decided to take a taxi because she found it hard to stand on her feet.

  That winter the situation of the miners in the Pittsburgh district got worse and worse. Evictions began. Families with little children were living in tents and in brokendown unheated tarpaper barracks. Mary lived in a feeling of nightmare, writing letters, mimeographing appeals, making speeches at meetings of clothing and fur workers, canvassing wealthy liberals. The money that came in was never enough. She took no salary for her work so she had to get Ada to lend her money to pay her rent. She was thin and haggard and coughed all the time. Too many cigarettes, she’d explain. Eddy Spellman and Rudy Goldfarb worried about her. She could see they’d decided she wasn’t eating enough because she was all the time finding on the corner of her desk a paper bag of sandwiches or a carton of coffee that one of them had brought in. Once Eddy brought her a big package of smearcase that his mother had made up home near Scranton. She couldn’t eat it; she felt guilty every time she saw it sprouting green mold in the icebox that had no ice in it because she’d given up cooking now that Don was away.

  One evening Rudy came into the office with smiles all over his face. Eddy was leaning over packing the old clothes into bales as usual for his next trip. Rudy gave him a light kick in the seat of the pants. “Hay you, Trotzkyite,” said Eddy, jumping at him and pulling out his necktie. “Smile when you say that,” said Rudy, pummeling him. They were all laughing. Mary felt like an oldmaid schoolteacher watching the boys roughhousing in front of her desk. “Meeting comes to order,” she said. “They tried to hang it on me but they couldn’t,” said Rudy, panting, straightening his necktie and his mussed hair. “But what I was going to say, Comrade French, was that I thought you might like to know that a certain comrade is getting in on the Aquitania tomorrow . . . touristclass.” “Rudy, are you sure?” “Saw the cable.”

  Mary got to the dock too early and had to wait two hours. She tried to read the afternoon papers but her eyes wouldn’t follow the print. It was too hot in the receptionroom and too cold outside. She fidgeted around miserably until at last she saw the enormous black sheetiron wall sliding with its rows of lighted portholes past the openings in the wharfbuilding. Her hands and feet were icy. Her whole body ached to feel his arms around her, for the rasp of his deep voice in her ears. All the time a vague worry flitted in the back of her head because she hadn’t had a letter from him while he’d been away.

  Suddenly there he was coming down the gangplank alone, with the old wicker suitcase in his hand. He had on a new belted German raincoat but the same checked cap. She was face to face with him. He gave her a little hug but he didn’t kiss her. There was something odd in his voice. “Hello, Mary . . . I didn’t expect to find you here. . . . I don’t want to be noticed, you know.” His voice had a low furtive sound in her ears. He was nervously changing his suitcase from one hand to the other. “See you in a few days . . . I’m going to be pretty busy.” She turned without a word and ran down the wharf. She hurried breathless along the crosstown street to the Ninth Avenue el. When she opened her door the new turkeyred curtains were like a blow from a whip in her face.

  She couldn’t go back to the office. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing the boys and the people she knew, the people who had known them together. She called up and said she had a bad case of grippe and would have to stay in bed a couple of days. She stayed all day in the blank misery of the narrow rooms. Towards evening she dozed off to sleep on the couch. She woke up with a start thinking she heard a step in the hall outside. It wasn’t Don, the steps went on up the next flight. After that she didn’t sleep any more.

  The next morning the phone woke her just when she settled herself in bed to drowse a little. It was Sylvia Goldstein saying she was sorry Mary had the grippe and asking if there was anything she could do. Oh, no, she was fine, she was just going to stay in bed all day, Mary answered in a dead voice. “Well, I suppose you knew all the time about Comrade Stevens and Comrade Lichfield . . . you two were always so close . . . they were married in Moscow . . . she’s an English comrade . . . she spoke at the big meeting at the Bronx Casino last night . . . she’s got a great shock of redhair . . . stunning but some of the girls think it’s dyed. Lots of the comrades didn’t know you and Comrade Stevens had brokenup . . . isn’t it sad things like that have to happen in the movement?” “Oh, that was a long time ago. . . . Goodby, Sylvia,” said Mary harshly and hung up. She called up a bootlegger she knew and told him to send her up a bottle of gin.

  The next afternoon there was a light rap on the door and when Mary opened it a crack there was Ada wreathed in silver fox and breathing out a great gust of Forêt Vierge. “Oh, Mary darling, I knew something was the matter. . . . You know sometimes I’m quite psychic. And when you didn’t come to my concert, first I was mad but then I said to myself I know the poor darling’s sick. So I just went right down to your office. There was the handsomest boy there and I just made him tell me where you lived. He said you were sick with the grippe and so I came right over. My dear, why aren’t you in bed? You look a sight.”

  “I’m all right,” mumbled Mary numbly, pushing the stringy hair off her face. “I been . . . making plans . . . about how we can handle this relief situation better.”

  “Well, you’re just coming up right away to my spare bedroom and let me pet you up a little. . . . I don’t believe it’s grippe, I think it’s overwork. . . . If you’re not careful you’ll be having a nervous breakdown.” “Maybe sumpen like that.” Mary couldn’t articulate her words. She didn’t seem to have any will of her own any more; she did everything Ada told her. When she was settled in Ada’s clean lavendersmelling spare bed they sent out for some barbital and it put her to sleep. Mary stayed there several days eating the meals Ada’s maid brought her, drinking all the drinks Ada would give her, listening to the continual scrape of violin practice that came from the other room all morning. But at night she couldn’t sleep without filling herself up with dope. She didn’t seem to have any will left. It would take her a half an hour to decide to get up to go to the toilet.

  After she’d been at Ada’s a week she began to feel she ought to go home. She began to be impatient of Ada’s sly references to unhappy loveaffairs and broken hearts and the beauty of abnegation and would snap Ada’s head off whenever she started it. “That’s fine,” Ada would say. “You are getting your meanness back.” For some time Ada had been bringing up the subject of somebody she knew who’d been crazy about Mary for years and who was dying to see her again. Finally Mary gave in and said she would go to a cocktail party at Eveline Johnson’s where Ada said she knew he’d be. “And Eveline gives the most wonderful parties. I don’t know how she does it because she never has any money, but all the most interesting people in New York w
ill be there. They always are. Radicals too, you know. Eveline can’t live without her little group of reds.”

  Mary wore one of Ada’s dresses that didn’t fit her very well and went out in the morning to have her hair curled at Saks’s where Ada always had hers curled. They had some cocktails at Ada’s place before they went. At the last minute Mary said she wouldn’t go because she’d finally got it out of Ada that it was George Barrow who was going to be at the party. Ada made Mary drink another cocktail and a reckless feeling came over her and she said all right, let’s get a move on.

  There was a smiling colored maid in a fancy lace cap and apron at the door of the house who took them down the hall to a bedroom full of coats and furs where they were to take off their wraps. As Ada was doing her face at the dressingtable Mary whispered in her ear, “Just think what our reliefcommittee could do with the money that woman wastes on senseless entertaining.” “But she’s a darling,” Ada whispered back excitedly. “Honestly, you’ll like her.” The door had opened behind their backs letting in a racketing gust of voices, laughs, tinkle of glasses, a whiff of perfume and toast and cigarettesmoke and gin. “Oh, Ada,” came a ringing voice. “Eveline darling, how lovely you look. . . . This is Mary French, you know I said I’d bring her. . . . She’s my oldest friend.” Mary found herself shaking hands with a tall slender woman in a pearlgrey dress. Her face was very white and her lips were very red and her long large eyes were exaggerated with mascara. “So nice of you to come,” Eveline Johnson said and sat down suddenly among the furs and wraps on the bed. “It sounds like a lovely party,” cried Ada.

  “I hate parties. I don’t know why I give them,” said Eveline Johnson. “Well, I guess I’ve got to go back to the menagerie. . . . Oh, Ada, I’m so tired.”

  Mary found herself studying the harsh desperate lines under the makeup round Mrs. Johnson’s mouth and the strained tenseness of the cords of her neck. Their silly life tells on them, she was saying to herself.

  “What about the play?” Ada was asking. “I was so excited when I heard about it.”

  “Oh, that’s ancient history now,” said Eveline Johnson sharply. “I’m working on a plan to bring over the ballet . . . turn it into something American. . . . I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

  “Oh, Eveline, did the screenstar come?” asked Ada, giggling.

  “Oh, yes, they always come.” Eveline Johnson sighed. “She’s beautiful. . . . You must meet her.”

  “Of course anybody in the world would come to your parties, Eveline.”

  “I don’t know why they should . . . they seem just too boring to me.” Eveline Johnson was ushering them through some sliding doors into a highceilinged room dusky from shaded lights and cigarettesmoke where they were swallowed up in a jam of welldressed people talking and making faces and tossing their heads over cocktail glasses. There seemed no place to stand so Mary sat down at the end of a couch beside a little marbletopped table. The other people on the couch were jabbering away among themselves and paid no attention to her. Ada and the hostess had disappeared behind a wall of men’s suits and afternoongowns.

  Mary had had time to smoke an entire cigarette before Ada came back followed by George Barrow, whose thin face looked flushed and whose adamsapple stuck out further than ever over his collar. He had a cocktail in each hand. “Well well well, little Mary French, after all these years,” he was saying with a kind of forced jollity. “If you knew the trouble we’d had getting these through the crush.”

  “Hello, George,” said Mary casually. She took the cocktail he handed her and drank it off. After the other drinks she’d had it made her head spin. Somehow George and Ada managed to squeeze themselves in on the couch on either side of Mary. “I want to hear all about the coalstrike,” George was saying, knitting his brows. “Too bad the insurgent locals had to choose a moment when a strike played right into the operators’ hands.” Mary got angry. “That’s just the sort of remark I’d expect from a man of your sort. If we waited for a favorable moment there wouldn’t be any strikes. . . . There never is any favorable moment for the workers.”

  “What sort of a man is a man of my sort?” said George Barrow with fake humility, so Mary thought. “That’s what I often ask myself.” “Oh, I don’t want to argue . . . I’m sick and tired of arguing. . . . Get me another cocktail, George.”

  He got up obediently and started threading his way across the room. “Now, Mary, don’t row with poor George. . . . He’s so sweet. . . . Do you know, Margo Dowling really is here . . . and her husband and Rodney Cathcart . . . they’re always together. They’re on their way to the Riviera,” Ada talked into her ear in a loud stage whisper. “I’m sick of seeing movie actors on the screen,” said Mary, “I don’t want to see them in real life.”

  Ada had slipped away. George was back with two more cocktails and a plate of cold salmon and cucumbers. She wouldn’t eat anything. “Don’t you think you’d better, with all the drinks?” She shook her head. “Well, I’ll eat it myself. . . . You know, Mary,” he went on, “I often wonder these days if I wouldn’t have been a happier man if I’d just stayed all my life an expressagent in South Chicago and married some nice workinggirl and had a flock of kids. . . . I’d be a wealthier and a happier man today if I’d gone into business even.” “Well, you don’t look so badly off,” said Mary. “You know it hurts me to be attacked as a labor faker by you reds. . . . I may believe in compromise but I’ve gained some very substantial dollarsandcents victories. . . . What you communists won’t see is that there are sometimes two sides to a case.”

  “I’m not a partymember,” said Mary.

  “I know . . . but you work with them. . . . Why should you think you know better what’s good for the miners than their own tried and true leaders?” “If the miners ever had a chance to vote in their unions you’d find out how much they trust your sellout crowd.”

  George Barrow shook his head. “Mary, Mary . . . just the same headstrong warmhearted girl.”

  “Rubbish, I haven’t any feelings at all any more. I’ve seen how it works in the field. . . . It doesn’t take a good heart to know which end of a riotgun’s pointed at you.”

  “Mary, I’m a very unhappy man.”

  “Get me another cocktail, George.”

  Mary had time to smoke two cigarettes before George came back. The nodding jabbering faces, the dresses, the gestures with hands floated in a smoky haze before her eyes. The crowd was beginning to thin a little when George came back all flushed and smiling. “Well, I had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with Miss Dowling, she was most charming. . . . But do you know what Red Haines tells me? I wonder if it’s true. . . . It seems she’s through; it seems that she’s no good for talkingpictures . . . voice sounds like the croaking of an old crow over the loudspeaker,” he giggled a little drunkenly. “There she is now, she’s just leaving.”

  A hush had fallen over the room. Through the dizzy swirl of cigarettesmoke Mary saw a small woman with blue eyelids and features regular as those of a porcelain doll under a mass of paleblond hair turn for a second to smile at somebody before she went out through the sliding doors. She had on a yellow dress and a lot of big sapphires. A tall bronzefaced actor and a bowlegged sallowfaced little man followed her out, and Eveline Johnson talking and talking in her breathless hectic way swept after them.

  Mary was looking at it all through a humming haze like seeing a play from way up in a smoky balcony. Ada came and stood in front of her rolling her eyes and opening her mouth wide when she talked. “Oh, isn’t it a wonderful party. . . . I met her. She had the loveliest manners . . . I don’t know why, I expected her to be kinda tough. They say she came from the gutter.”

  “Not at all,” said George. “Her people were Spaniards of noble birth who lived in Cuba.”

  “Ada, I want to go home,” said Mary.

  “Just a minute . . . I haven’t had a chance to talk to dear Eveline. . . . She looks awfully tired and nervous today, poor dear.” A lilypale young ma
n brushed past them laughing over his shoulder at an older woman covered with silver lamé who followed him, her scrawny neck, wattled under the powder, thrust out and her hooknose quivering and eyes bulging over illconcealed pouches.

  “Ada, I want to go home.”

  “I thought you and I and George might have dinner together.” Mary was seeing blurred faces getting big as they came towards her, changing shape as they went past, fading into the gloom like fish opening and closing their mouths in an aquarium.

  “How about it? Miss Cohn, have you seen Charles Edward Holden around? He’s usually quite a feature of Eveline’s parties.” Mary hated George Barrow’s doggy popeyed look when he talked. “Now there’s a sound intelligent fellow for you. I can talk to him all night.”

  Ada narrowed her eyes as she leaned over and whispered shrilly in George Barrow’s ear. “He’s engaged to be married to somebody else. Eveline’s cut up about it. She’s just living on her nerve.”

  “George, if we’ve got to stay . . .” Mary said, “get me another cocktail.”

  A broadfaced woman in spangles with very red cheeks who was sitting on the couch beside Mary leaned across and said in a stage whisper, “Isn’t it dreadful? . . . You know I think it’s most ungrateful of Holdy after all Eveline’s done for him . . . in a social way . . . since she took him up . . . now he’s accepted everywhere. I know the girl . . . a little bitch if there ever was one . . . not even wealthy.”

  “Shush,” said Ada. “Here’s Eveline now. . . . Well, Eveline dear, the captains and the kings depart. Soon there’ll be nothing but us smallfry left.”

  “She didn’t seem awful bright to me,” said Eveline, dropping into a chair beside them. “Let me get you a drink, Eveline dear,” said Ada. Eveline shook her head. “What you need, Eveline, my dear,” said the broadfaced woman, leaning across the couch again, “. . . is a good trip abroad. New York’s impossible after January . . . I shan’t attempt to stay. . . . It would just mean a nervous breakdown if I did.”