Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

“Make a good marriage,” he advised. “Better yourself. Move up.”

Aunt Catherine had twice married well, first to an importer of wines and spirits, and then to a delicate scion. Her widow’s weeds were of the finest nankeen. She took her niece to the St. Regis for afternoon tea and was seated promptly. She showed how to use the mirror-lined entry of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Palm Garden to maximum effect without at the same time being seen to loiter. Discretion meant, equally, that custard be concealed under leaves of pastry and that the string quartet perform behind a lacquered screen.

“The elegancies of life,” Aunt Catherine explained, “when indulged to excess, cease to be elegant.”

Restraint was the method of gentility. No matter that Catherine thirty years ago would squat at the edge of a trash fire to pull hot mickeys out and pass them, split and steaming, to her brothers: The distance traveled might tempt one to put on airs, but you resisted, you smoothed over, and that was precisely the point.

The upper levels of the city were vigilant, alert to every signal. Catherine’s house, at its demure, almost reticent address west of Madison Avenue, was furnished modestly, for comfort rather than display. To maintain it required but one in service: Delia from County Cork, who had been with Mrs. Howe since 1896. Sometimes, when Mum entertained, Delia brought Rose, her sister, to assist, but it was never more than once a week, there were never more than eight at table, and the dishes were simple: consommé, poached fish, an apple tart. Catherine, in her choice of guests, did not favor those who were “interesting,” who would “make an impression.” She set her store in the even temperament, the conversational style that seldom surprised. After the meal there might be lotto or whist (but never charades) or someone might play the piano, Strauss, for example, perhaps Victor Herbert, and by ten o’clock at the latest, one had retired.

Olivia grew restless. Where were the young men, her introductions?

“It doesn’t pay to be eager,” Aunt Catherine admonished her niece. “Don’t rush.”

“Well, certainly, I wouldn’t want to reflect ill on you.”

Olivia sulked. She had expected something else. Restriction went with Buffalo, where the chophouses and oyster saloons were exclusively for men, where a woman with a cigarette disturbed the peace. But if New York society meant more dreary constraint — rules of speech and dress and deportment — then what difference did it make to have come?

SHE wrote in her diary: “I cannot please everyone, and so I shall please no one.” Then she let the nib rest on the paper so it would make a bloom of ink. Delia brought supper on a tray, macaroni in broth and an unbuttered roll.

“I made it so mild,” she explained, “as you’re still feeling poorly.”

“I’ll go to bed presently, Delia. I shan’t need you further.”

With the precision of some kind of woodcraft, Olivia shredded the roll, watched the shreds swell with broth and turn gray. Then she covered the tray with the blue linen towel and placed it outside the door.

She wrote: “Were I to die tomorrow, there would hardly be a dozen words to say about my life. This might be sad, but not, I think, so terrible.”

AUNT Catherine agreed that there was no breach of good conduct in attending unescorted the Cooper Union summer lecture series, held on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. Ladies of refinement gathered in the hall to learn, or at least to hear, about formal gardens or Chinese porcelain or the migration of butterflies, and Olivia could come to no harm in their covey. Only now she was faced with her artless inabilities, her deficient taste. Buffalo, of course, had ill served her formation, that railhead city with its beer-pail taverns and bargemen’s dance halls, its mills and waterworks and foundries, its pride in noise, raw power, machinery. Should she tell those fine ladies she saw twice a week that the Indian name of Lake Erie meant “Walk-in-the-Water”? That once, at the Pan-American Exposition, she had seen Elena Granelli sing an aria from La Traviata ? Well, it was better to say nothing at all. It was better not to be quaint.

At the end of July, Dr. Mylon Weems gave a talk on his journey by camel from Damascus to Tabriz. Arriving late, Olivia took a seat in the back row next to a clean-shaven man who made rapid notes on a pad. He smiled everywhere — at the high ceiling, at his shorthand, at the loquacious Weems, at her. And then afterward, finding her under the lobby skylight, he quite gracefully, by way of explaining his scribbles, presented his card.

WARD CHASE, ESQ.

Reporter & Columnist

for

TOWN TOPICS

“I’m afraid you came to the wrong place for an interesting story,” she said.

“My job often calls for invention.”

“I don’t know your publication,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t.”

Chase liked her blush very much, and the way she twisted the black strap of her purse around her white fingers.

There he was the following Wednesday (“Lives of the Avignon Popes”), but only, he said, as a disinterested spectator. When on Friday there was a postponement, Olivia circled the block three times, only to feign having newly arrived when at last she found him on the wide granite steps, expectantly poised in the sun.

Chase said: “I see how you are disappointed, but it’s such a lovely afternoon. Might I walk a little way with you? Perhaps to some café serving ice cream?”

The pavement felt like glass. Olivia could scarcely breathe.

But such drama, she discovered, did not have long to run. It was soon enough clear that Chase valued her innocence as a mentor, and not as a suitor.

“You interest me,” he assured her. “You interest me no end.”

She had never been flattered so before.

“In a thoughtful way. Usefully. As an equal, if you see.”

Olivia brought her hands up onto the marble counter, which was cool and slick, and said she did not know what to say.

“Just let me open your eyes,” he said. “It’s what I do best.”

And Olivia thought: If I hope seriously to attract a suitor, I first will need the guidance of a mentor.

She blushed again. “May I have another lemonade?”

Chase was a reporter. He made explicit the social dichotomy which Catherine but fussily implied — that between Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue and Rector’s on Broadway, between the carriage trade and the sporting crowd, between port and champagne, sole and lobster thermidor, reticence and ostentation, restraint and indulgence, careful decorum and opulent excess.

“What may be deplored cannot be ignored,” he said. “The drawing rooms and clubs are obsolete.”

They were riding in a hackney coach past Bustanoby’s, the Tivoli Palace theater, Murray’s Roman Gardens.

“The real, immense drama of this continent is just beginning now,” he said. “And this is where you’ll find the players, not in some complacent enclave of old money.”

They passed the Broadway Follies, Heffernan’s, the new Knickerbocker Hotel.

“Blue blood ebbs,” he said, “and red blood rushes in.”

THE fragrance of pomander balls, of lilac and clove, clung to Olivia’s nightdress. Avoiding the oval washstand mirror, she plaited her hair into one long braid. She thought of her mother, wasted with confusion, smelling of thirst. “Seclusion” was a word that went with the long blur of Buffalo winter. And poor mother, in her last season, would eat nothing but sliced raw potato with salt, chanting, “Tubers and roots, tubers and roots.” Olivia arranged herself under the bedding, knees bent to the wall, elbows pressing in. She heard clanking in the street, mutters, a hurt cat. And then everything was so still it felt as if she could blow out the windowpanes.