Actually, one was a cable, an extravagant two-pager from Lucy in Paris: Safely here stop horrid voyage as daddy forgot dinner suit and we forced to stay evenings in cabin stop airmail dinner suit at once stop also send my hair switch stop put out the lights stop don’t smoke in bed stop am seeing man tomorrow about your dress stop will send samples stop are you all right query tell Hermione Bensusan to mail me your horoscope for July and August stop am worried about you stop love mother. Grady creased the cable with a groan; did her mother really believe she was going to get her involved again with Hermione Bensusan? Miss Bensusan was an astrologist Lucy doted on.
“Hey, hurry up with those waffles. There’s a ball-game on the radio.”
“There’s a radio in the cupboard,” she said, not looking up from the peculiar message of her second telegram. “Turn it on if you want.”
He touched her hand softly. “What’s the matter: bad news?”
“Oh no,” she said, laughing. “Just something rather silly.” And she read aloud: “My nightly mirror says you are divine and the daily mirror says you are mine.”
“Who sent it?”
“Walt Whitman the Second.”
Clyde was fiddling with the radio. “Don’t you know the guy?” he said, between scraps of broadcast.
“In a way.”
“Must be a joker: or is he nuts?”
“A bit,” she said, meaning it: once, during the time he was in the navy, and when his ship had touched at some Far East port, Peter had mailed her an opium pipe and fifteen silk kimonos. She had given all but one of the kimonos to a charity auction, a generosity that backfired when someone discovered the simple designs that patterned them were an illusionary trick: held in certain lights they revealed dreadful obscenities. Mr. McNeil, caught dead-center in the ensuing ruckus, had said, nonsense, obviously the value of the kimonos should increase: he hadn’t objected at all to Grady’s wearing one. In fact, she was wearing it now, though the cumbersome sleeves had a nasty habit of drooping into the bowl as she stood whipping up her waffle-batter.
She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she’d forgotten to grease, and said, “Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way. And I’ve been thinking—if you’re going to listen to a ball-game, why, I might bake a chocolate cake: would you like that?” Presently, with a gust of smoke, the waffle-iron indicated a charred content; twenty minutes later, having scraped the iron, she announced cheerfully, and not without pride: “Breakfast ready.”
Clyde sat down and surveyed his plate with a smile so wan that she said, “What is it, darling? Couldn’t you find your ball-game on the radio?” Hmm, he’d found the right station, but the game hadn’t started yet: and would she mind heating up the coffee again? “Peter loathes baseball,” she said, for no reason other than that it was a detail she’d just remembered: as an opposition to Clyde, who appeared so to guard his own talk, she’d begun saying whatever came into her head, regardless of how irrelevant.
“Be careful,” she said, carrying the percolator from the stove and pouring him more coffee, “you’ll burn your tongue this time.” As she passed he caught her hand, swinging it a little to and fro. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Why?” he said. “Because I’m happy,” she answered, and swung her hand free of his. “That’s funny,” he said, “it’s funny you’re not happy all the time,” and his arm swept outward in a gesture she instantly regretted, for it indicated, indeed proved, how aware he was of her advantages: absurdly, she’d not thought him resentful.
“Happiness is relative,” she said: it was the easiest reply.
“Relative to what: money?” This retort seemed to give his spirits a lift. He stretched, yawned, told her to light him a cigarette.
“After this, you’ll light your own,” she said, “because I’m going to be very busy with a chocolate cake. You can get some ice-cream from Schrafft’s: won’t that be heaven?” She propped a cookbook in front of her. “Lots of wonderful recipes in here: listen to this—”
Interrupting, he said, “It just came to me: did you mean that when you told Winifred she could have a party here? She’s the kind of girl that’ll think you meant it.”
This derailed her own train of thought: what party? And then, in a rainfall of memory that left her quite drenched, she remembered that Winifred was the dark, hefty, huge girl Mink had brought to the picnic in the Catskills: a picnic to which Winifred had contributed, in addition to a pound of salami, something near to two hundred pounds of giggling fat and muscle. Rhinoceros into wood-nymph, and clad in a pair of gym-bloomers, these a hold-over from athletic days at Lincoln High, she’d romped with nature all the afternoon, never letting go the clutch she kept on a sweaty bunch of daisies: there were some people who just thought it was funny the way she loved flowers, she said, but honestly there was nothing she loved better than flowers because that was the kind of person she was.
And yet, in an ill-defined way, she was admirable, Winifred. Like her spaniel eyes, there was a tender good kind of warmth in her unrestraint; and she so adored Mink, was so proud and solicitous of him. Grady knew no one she thought less attractive than Mink, or more preposterous than Winifred: yet together and around them they made a clear lovely light: it was as if, out of their ordinary stone, their massive unshaped selves, something precious had been set free, a figure musical and pure: she could not but pay it homage.
Clyde, who, it would seem, had presented them as a warning that what was his would not suit her, appeared surprised that she liked them. But when the tire blew, and while the men were fixing it, Grady had been left alone in the car with Winifred; and Winifred, luring her into a cave of feminine confidence, quickly brought about one of the few times Grady had ever felt close to another girl.
They each told a story. Winifred’s was sad: she was a telephone operator, and that she liked, but her life at home was misery because, determined to marry Mink, she wanted to have an engagement party, and her family, who thought Mink worthless, would not allow it in the house: what oh what was she to do? Grady had said, well, if it was only a party, why she could use the McNeils’ apartment. Promptly Winifred had burst into fat tears: it was the nicest thing, she said.
“Even if you did mean it,” Clyde continued, “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea: if your family ever heard about it I’ll bet there’d be hell to pay.”
“Isn’t it rather incongruous, your worrying about my family?” she said; and it flashed upon her that he was jealous; not of her, but of Mink and Winifred, for it was as if he believed she had bribed them away from him. “If you don’t want the party, very well: I couldn’t care less. I only offered to because I thought it would please you: after all, they’re your friends, not mine.”
“Look, kid—you know what it is between us. So don’t go getting it mixed up with a whole lot of other things.”
She smarted under this: it made her feel quite ugly; and, maintaining silence at a cost, she hid herself behind the cookbook. Most of all, she wanted to say to him that he was a coward: only a coward, she knew, would revert to such tactics; and she was tired, too, of the quiet he imposed upon her: he seemed so familiar with quiet, and to accept it so easily, that perhaps he did not understand guilt was something she herself, at least in relation to him, was far from feeling. Irritably, and with her recipe a blur on the page, she listened to the rustle of his paper. He was leaning back in a chair, and it came forward with a thud.
“Christ!” he said, “here’s your picture,” and twisted around so that she could see over his shoulder. A fuzzy, flyspecked image of her and Peter, both resembling embalmed frogs, stared from the paper. Clyde, following the print with his finger, read: “Grady McNeil, debutante daughter of financier Lamont McNeil, and her fiancé, Walt Whitman the Second, in private conversation at the Atrium Club. Whitman is a grandson of the famed poet.”
It was outrageous, she could hear Apple telling her so: all the same, it took a stony comment from Clyde to stop her laughter: “Let somebody else in on the joke.”
“Oh darling, it’s so complicated,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And anyway, it’s nothing.”
Tapping the picture, he said, “Isn’t this the guy that sent the telegram?”
“Yes and no,” she said, and despaired of explaining. But Clyde did not seem to care. With his eyes pinched and far-looking, he
