John Passos - Big Money

“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 man 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.”