Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Read online

  “So what did the doctor say?” he insisted.

  “I told you—he said ‘Hello!’ ”

  “Don’t be an ass—what else did he say?—We’ve got to know what he said.”

  “So then we’ll have the baby,” announced Alabama, proprietarily.

  David fumbled about his pockets. “I’m sorry—I must have left them at home.” He was thinking that then they’d be three.

  “What?”

  “The bromides.”

  “I said ‘Baby.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “We should ask somebody.”

  “Who’ll we ask?”

  Almost everybody had theories: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game, that Mr. Fish inhabited the aquarium, and that there were others besides the sergeant ensconced in the Central Park Police Station—but nobody knew how to have a baby.

  “I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David.

  “Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.”

  “Well,” he said tentatively, “I could ask my dealer—he knows where the subways go.”

  The city fluctuated in muffled roars like the dim applause rising to an actor on the stage of a vast theater. Two Little Girls in Blue and Sally from the New Amsterdam pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, addressed them as mammies and millionaires. The shopgirls were looking like Marilyn Miller. College boys said Marilyn Miller where they had said Rosie Quinn. Moving-picture actresses were famous. Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin. They were having the breadline at the Ritz that year. Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat—everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.

  “There they are, the Knights, dancing together,” they said, “isn’t it nice? There they go.”

  “Listen, Alabama, you’re not keeping time,” David was saying.

  “David, for God’s sake will you try to keep off of my feet?”

  “I never could waltz anyway.”

  There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses.

  “I’ll have to do lots of work,” said David. “Won’t it seem queer to be the center of the world for somebody else?”

  “Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”

  “How do you know you’ll get sick?”

  “I should.”

  “That’s no reason.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go someplace else.”

  Paul Whiteman played “Two Little Girls in Blue” at the Palais Royal; it was a big expensive number. Girls with piquant profiles were mistaken for Gloria Swanson. New York was more full of reflections than of itself—the only concrete things in town were the abstractions. Everybody wanted to pay the cabaret checks.

  “We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”

  All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged. It was always teatime or late at night.

  David and Alabama invited their friends to throw oranges into the drum at the Plantation and themselves into the fountain at Union Square. Up they went, humming the New Testament and Our Country’s Constitution, riding the tide like triumphant islanders on a surfboard. Nobody knew the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  In the city, old women with faces as soft and ill lit as the side streets of Central Europe offered their pansies; hats floated off the Fifth Avenue bus; the clouds sent out a prospectus over Central Park. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet like drippings from the mechanics of a metallic night-blooming garden. The intermittent odors, the people and the excitement, suctioned spasmodically up the side streets from the thoroughfares, rose in gusts on the beat of their personal tempo.

  Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.

  The clerk in the Manhattan thought they weren’t married but he gave them the room anyway.

  “What’s the matter?” David said from the twin bed under the cathedral print. “Can’t you make it?”

  “Sure. What time is the train?”

  “Now. I’ve got just two dollars to meet your family,” said David searching his clothes.

  “I wanted to buy them some flowers.”

  “Alabama,” said David sententiously, “that’s impractical. You’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory—a chemistry formula for the decorative.”

  “There’s nothing we can do with two dollars anyway,” she protested in a logical tone.

  “I s’pose not——”

  Attenuated odors from the hotel florist tapped the shell of the velvet vacuum like silver hammers.

  “Of course, if we have to pay the taxi——”

  “Daddy’ll have some money.”

  Puffs of white smoke aspired against the station skylight. Lights like unripe citrus fruits hung in the gray day from the steel rafters. Swarms and swarms of people passed each other coming up the stairway. The train clicked up with the noise of many keys turning in many rusty locks.

  “If I’d only known it would be like that at Atlantic City,” they said—or, “Could you believe it, we’re half hour late?”—or, “The town hasn’t changed much without us,” they said, rustling their packages and realizing their hats were all wrong for wear in the city.

  “There’s Mamma!” cried Alabama.

  “Well, how do ye do——”

  “Isn’t it a great city, Judge?”

  “I haven’t been here since 1882. There’s been considerable change since then,” said the Judge.

  “Did you have a nice trip?”

  “Where is your sister, Alabama?”

  “She couldn’t come down.”

  “She couldn’t come down,” corroborated David lamely.

  “You see,” went on Alabama at her mother’s look of surprise, “the last time Joan came she borrowed my best suitcase to carry away wet diapers and since then we’ve—well, we haven’t seen her so much.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?” the Judge demanded sternly.

  “It was my best suitcase,” explained Alabama patiently.

  “But the poor little baby,” sighed Miss Millie. “I suppose we can telephone them.”

  “You will feel differently about things like that after you have children of your own,” said the Judge.

  Alabama wondered suspiciously if her figure showed.

  “But I can see how she felt about the suitcase,” continued Millie magnanimously. “Even as a baby, Alabama was particular like that about her own things—never wanted to share them, even then.”

  The taxi steamed up the vaporous chute of the station runway.

  Alabama didn’t know how to go about asking the Judge to pay the taxi—she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction. She didn’t know what to say when girls postured in front of David hoping to have him sketch them on his shirtfront, or what to do when David raved and ranted and swore that it ruined his talent to have his buttons torn off in the laundry.

  “If you children will get these suitcases into the train, I’ll pay the taxi,” said the Judge.

  The green hills of Connecticut preached a sedativ
e sermon after the rocking of the gritty train. The gaunt, disciplined smells of New England lawn, the scent of invisible truck gardens bound the air in tight bouquets. Apologetic trees swept the porch, insects creaked in the baking meadows widowed of their crops. There didn’t seem room in the cultivated landscape for the unexpected. If you wanted to hang anybody, reflected Alabama, you’d have to do it in your own backyard. Butterflies opened and shut along the roads like the flash of white in a camera lens. “You couldn’t be a butterfly,” they said. They were silly butterflies, flying about that way and arguing with people about their potentialities.

  “We meant to get the grass cut,” began Alabama—“but——”

  “It’s much better this way,” finished David. “It’s more picturesque.”

  “Well, I like the weeds,” the Judge said amiably.

  “They make it smell so sweet in the country,” Miss Millie added. “But aren’t you lonely out here at night?”

  “Oh, David’s friends from college come out occasionally and sometimes we go into town.”

  Alabama didn’t add how often they went in to New York to waste the extra afternoons sloshing orange juice through bachelor sanctuaries, droning the words to summer behind insoluble locks. They went there ahead, awaiting the passage of that progressive celebration that a few years later followed the boom about New York like the Salvation Army follows Christmas, to absolve themselves in the waters of each other’s unrest.

  “Mister,” Tanka greeted them from the steps, “and Missy.”

  Tanka was the Japanese butler. They couldn’t have afforded him without borrowing from David’s dealer. He cost money; that was because he constructed botanical gardens out of cucumbers and floral displays with the butter and made up the money for his flute lessons from the grocery bills. They had tried to do without him till Alabama cut her hand on a can of baked beans and David sprained his painting wrist on the lawn mower.

  The Oriental swept the floor in an inclusive rotation of his body, indicating himself as the axis of the earth. Bursting suddenly into a roar of disquieting laughter, he turned to Alabama.

  “Missy, kin see you jessy minute—jessy minute, this way, please.”

  “He’s going to ask for change,” thought Alabama, uneasily following him to the side porch.

  “Look!” said Tanka. With a gesture of negation, he indicated the hammock swung between the columns of the house where two young men lay uproariously asleep with a bottle of gin by their sides.

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’d better tell Mister—but not in front of the family, Tanka.”

  “Velly careful,” nodded the Jap, making a shushing sound and barring his lips with his fingers.

  “Listen, Mamma, I think you’d better come upstairs and rest before dinner,” suggested Alabama. “You must be tired after your trip.”

  From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room, David knew that something was wrong.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Matter! There are drunks in the hammock. If Daddy sees that there’ll be hell to pay!”

  “Send them away.”

  “They can’t move.”

  “My God! Tanka’ll just have to see that they stay outside until after dinner.”

  “Do you think the Judge would understand?”

  “I’m afraid so——”

  Alabama stared about disconsolately.

  “Well—I suppose there comes a moment when people must choose between their contemporaries and their families.”

  “Are they in very bad shape?”

  “Pretty hopeless. If we send for the ambulance, it would just make a scene,” she said tentatively.

  The moiré sheen of the afternoon polished the sterility of the rooms’ colonial picturesqueness and scratched itself on the yellow flowers that trailed the mantel like featherstitching. It was a priestly light curving in the dips and hollows of a melancholic waltz.

  “I don’t see what we can do about it,” they agreed.

  Alabama and David stood there anxiously in the quiet till the clang of a spoon on a tin waiter summoned them to dinner.

  “I’m glad to see,” said Austin over the beets like roses, “that you have succeeded in taming Alabama a little. She seems to have become a very good housekeeper since her marriage.” The Judge was impressed with the beets.

  David thought of his buttons upstairs. They were all off.

  “Yes,” he said vaguely.

  “David has been working very well out here,” Alabama broke in nervously.

  She was about to paint a picture of their domestic perfections when a loud groan from the hammock warned her. Staggering through the dining room door with a visionary air, the young man eyed the gathering. On the whole he was all there; just a little awry—his shirttail was out.

  “Good evening,” he said formally.

  “I think your friend had better have some dinner,” suggested the baffled Austin.

  The friend exploded in foolish laughter.

  Miss Millie confusedly inspected Tanka’s flowery architecture. Of course, she wanted Alabama to have friends. She had always brought up her children with that in mind, but circumstances were, at times, dubious.

  A second disheveled phantom groped through the door; the silence was broken only by squeaky grunts of suppressed hysteria.

  “He does that way because he’s been operated on,” said David hastily. The Judge bristled.

  “They took out his larynx,” David added in alarm. His eyes wildly sought the protoplasmic face. Luckily, the fellows seemed to be listening to what he was saying.

  “One’s mute,” Alabama explained with inspiration.

  “Well, I’m glad of that,” answered the Judge enigmatically. His tone was not without hostility. He seemed chiefly relieved that any further conversation was precluded.

  “I can’t speak a word,” burst from the ghost unexpectedly. “I’m mute.”

  “Well,” thought Alabama, “this is the end. Now what can we say?”

  Miss Millie was saying that salt air spoiled the table silver. The Judge faced his daughter implacable and reproving. The necessity for saying anything was dispelled by a weird and self-explanatory carmagnole about the table. It was not exactly a dance; it was an interpretive protest against the vertebrate state punctuated by glorious ecstatic paeans of rhythmic backslappings and loud invitations to the Knights to join the party. The Judge and Miss Millie were generously included in the invitation.

  “It’s like a frieze, a Greek frieze,” commented Miss Millie distractedly.

  “It’s not very edifying,” supplemented the Judge.

  Exhausted, the two men wobbled unsteadily to the floor.

  “If David could lend us twenty dollars,” gasped the mass, “we were just going on to the roadhouse. Of course, if he can’t we’ll stay a little longer, maybe.”

  “Oh,” said David, spellbound.

  “Mamma,” said Alabama, “can’t you let us have twenty dollars till we can get to the bank tomorrow?”

  “Certainly, my dear—upstairs in my bureau drawer. It’s a pity your friends have to leave; they seem to be having such a good time,” she continued vaguely.

  The house settled. The cool chirp of the crickets like the crunching of fresh lettuce purged the living room of dissonance. Frogs wheezed in the meadow where the goldenrod would bloom. The family group yielded itself to the straining of the night lullaby through the boughs of the oak.

  “Escaped,” sighed Alabama as they snuggled together in the exotic bed.

  “Yes,” said David, “it’s all right.”

  There were people in automobiles all along the Boston Post Road thinking everything was going to be all right while they got drunk and ran into fireplugs and trucks and old stone walls. Policemen were too busy thinking everything was going to be all right to arrest them.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when the Kni
ghts were awakened by a stentorian whispering on the lawn.

  An hour passed after David dressed and went down. The noise rose in increasingly uproarious muffles.

  “Well, then, I’ll take a drink with you if you’ll try to make a little less noise,” Alabama heard David say as she meticulously put on her clothes. Something was sure to happen; it was better to be looking your best when the authorities arrived. They must be in the kitchen. She stuck her head truculently through the swinging door.

  “Now, Alabama,” David greeted her, “I would advise you to keep your nose out of this.” In a husky melodramatic aside he continued confidentially, “This is the most expedient way I could think of——”

  Alabama stared, infuriated over the carnage of the kitchen.

  “Oh, shut up!” she yelled.

  “Now listen, Alabama,” began David.

  “It was you who said all the time that we should be so respectable and now look at you!” she accused.

  “He’s all right. David’s perfectly all right,” the prostrate men muttered feebly.

  “And what if my father comes down now? What’ll he have to say about this being all right?” Alabama indicated the wreckage. “What are all those old cans?” she demanded contemptuously.

  “Tomato juice. It sobers you up. I’ve just been giving some to the guests,” explained David. “First I give them tomato juice and then I give them gin.”

  Alabama snatched at the bottle in David’s hand. “Give me that bottle.” As he fended her off, she slid against the door. To save the noise of a crash in the hall, she precipitated her body heavily into the jamb. The swinging door caught her full in the face. Her nose bled jubilantly as a newly discovered oil well down the front of her dress.

  “I’ll see if there’s a beefsteak in the icebox,” proffered David. “Stick it under the sink, Alabama. How long can you hold your breath?”

  By the time the kitchen was in some kind of order, the Connecticut dawn drenched the countryside like a firehose. The two men staggered off to sleep at the inn. Alabama and David surveyed her black eyes disconsolately.