Story of Lola Gregg Page 4

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE TWO MEN

  LOLA’S first reaction, after she had picked up Patty in Roger’s classroom and started down the stairs toward the exit, was one of intense dislike and contempt for both the teacher and the principal; but such emotions never lasted very long in her, and she was eager to find a way to live and let live. She was essentially a person without any deep hostility, and she was quick to put herself in the place of others—even so distasteful a person as Mr. Hammond. She was not so ready to understand and make allowances for Miss Cullen, whom she considered a meddling and stupid woman; but she was aware of the fact that this was only March, and that Roger would have to contend with Miss Cullen for almost four more months.

  Gregg would want to get Roger out of Miss Cullen’s class and into another, but Lola was not so certain of that as the best way. She had a habit, at moments like this, of trying to recollect what her mother would have done in the same situation, and that had started her thoughts back into the recollection of the composition; and with it came a certain wonderful nostalgia, a full sense of the warmth and the comfort of her mother’s home, the starched lace and organdie curtains hanging against the winter cold outside, the sense of order and security, the closeness of the family unit, the frustrated dreams and cynicism of her father balanced by the smooth, unperturbed strength of her mother. Time made the memory nice and orderly and patiently coloured, like a sentimental calendar painting; but Lola preferred it that way, her own time was so different. Not that she was regretful; she lived in a world that was of her making.

  It was too simple for Lola to decide that her mother would have turned Miss Cullen into either a friend or a dependent; Lola desired her in neither role—yet she couldn’t have Miss Cullen as an enemy. Roger had to live in a real world, and if it wasn’t Miss Cullen, it would be someone else.

  She looked at her watch, decided that she would stop by at the grocery store to get the things she needed for lunch and supper, clean the house, feed Patty, and then spend the two hours between the end of Roger’s lunch period and his release from school with Patty in the playground. A formal programme made her feel better, and as they walked along, she began to hum a little song with Patty, rocking Patty’s hand at the same time. Then, together, but very softly, so that they would not attract too much attention on the street, they sang:

  Van Amburgh is the man who goes to all the shows,

  He goes into the lion’s den, and tell you all he knows;

  He puts his head in the lion’s mouth and keeps it there awhile,

  And when he takes it out again, he greets you with a smile.

  “He greets you with a smile,” Lola sang, and Patty said gravely, “But one day the lion will go chomp and that will be the end of Mr. Van Amburgh.” Lola nodded. “I suppose so, but he’s been doing it a long time, you know.” Patty looked like her mother; she had the same long brown eyes, the same width in the mouth that just missed being too wide, too heavy, the same very straight brows. Her hair was lighter, but it was coloured unevenly, and it would darken just as Lola’s had. Her hair was done in short pigtails and she was a small child for her four years; but as she walked with Lola she mimicked her, and as they walked along the city street, between the shabby brownstones and old-law tenements, they looked strangely alike.

  As they turned into the avenue toward the Cream-queen Dairy, Lola saw Mrs. Hoffman coming toward them, walking her little black poodle, and Patty, who loved every type of dog, gurgled with delight and ran forward to pet it. Mrs. Hoffman, a stout middle-aged woman with twins in the sixth grade, was the head of the parents-teachers’ association at the school, and it suddenly occurred to Lola that it might be a good thing to tell her the whole story. But when they met, Mrs. Hoffman looked at Lola so strangely that Lola was completely nonplussed, and said only, “Good morning, Mrs. Hoffman.” Mrs. Hoffman returned the greeting automatically, but almost without recognition and real contact, and then said impatiently, addressing her dog, “Come along, Lucian, come along, come along.”

  “That is strange,” Lola said to Patty, and Patty explained that she wasn’t going to hurt the dog at all—she always was sweet and kind to Lucian. “Of course you are,” Lola agreed. “Mrs. Hoffman must have something on her mind. You never know.”

  When they came to the Creamqueen Dairy, the first thing Lola did was to take out of her purse four crisp ten-dollar bills and give them to Mr. Geller.

  “What’s this, Mrs. Gregg?” Mr. Geller wanted to know, and when Lola told him it was the first real payment on the bill, there appeared on his face a sad and tired and hopeless expression, something Lola had never seen there before, the misery and knowledge of ages and hopelessness too, as if he had miraculously transmitted to every muscle of his face a touch of corruption and death. Her first thought was of illness, and she asked him whether he was all right.

  “Nothing—I’m all right, Mrs. Gregg. But I wasn’t pushing for the money. Believe me. If you couldn’t pay me today, you could pay me tomorrow. You’re not moving or running away.”

  “It isn’t that at all, Mr. Geller,” Lola said. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the help, and you never made me feel that it was anything out of the ordinary. You know I had to stop working when Patty got sick, and then the three operations on her foot took a great deal of money. That’s the way of it. You save so carefully and think you have something, and then it all goes overnight.”

  “Don’t I know that?” He was pleading with her.

  “I’m sure you do, Mr. Geller. But never in all my life did I have a grocery bill of more than three hundred dollars. You may not believe me, but I couldn’t sleep easily. Now we’ll have it paid off in six months, I promise you.”

  “Why? Did I say you have to pay it off? Am I bothering you?”

  “I don’t understand,” Lola said. “Don’t you want me to pay it? You seem so troubled——”

  “I guess I’m troubled. Sure—sure I want you to pay it off, just when you can. I got too much on my mind.”

  “I need some things today,” Lola smiled, thinking: Poor old man—it’s no bed of roses for you either, twelve hours a day here and no way out. He was alone today, with only the boy to help him. Other times his wife was there, the two of them on their feet all day, bundled up in sweaters, their fingers blue with cold as the day wore on. Tired people with tired hands; the blood runs hard through them. “Mrs. Geller isn’t ill—I hope?” Lola asked.

  “She’s all right, tired. You get tired. She’ll be in. What can I give you, Mrs. Gregg?”

  “I’ll take six of your best eggs.”

  “Ninety-four cents today.”

  “Oh—I need them. I need a pound of butter too, and a loaf of Bond Bread.”

  “You think I enjoy selling eggs at ninety-four cents a dozen. I don’t. Take the brown eggs. They’re just as good and eight cents cheaper. We should both be rich, and if you have a heart, you should never own a store, and maybe if you have a heart, you should never live, I don’t know. To me it’s only yesterday that good tub butter, better than the stuff they sell now, was twenty-five, cents a pound. What else, Mrs. Gregg?”

  “Two containers of milk and a can of Campbells Beans. That’s all, I think.”

  “You want me to charge this?”

  “No,” Lola smiled. “I think we’re out from under now. No more bills except those I can’t help. I hate bills.”

  Mr. Geller nodded, and for a moment it seemed to Lola that he was going to break down completely. Even Patty noticed, for when they were outside of the store, she asked Lola:

  “What was wrong with Mr. Geller, Mummy?”

  “I don’t know, baby. He has his troubles, I suppose. A lot of people have troubles.”

  “We don’t, do we, Mummy?”

  “Not the worst troubles, honey. Some. But not the worst troubles. We’re very lucky people, Daddy and you and me and Roger.”

  Then they walked home. The morning continued as it had started, with that fi
ne dry quality that a day in March has sometimes. Lola had a feeling that the air was starched; it was so clear and crisp that the shadows seemed to be etched on to the pavement, and everyone they saw appeared to reflect and be gay with the heady tonic of the air. It was that time of mid-morning when few people are on the streets in the neighbourhood where they lived. The housewives were still at home doing their cleaning; the men were all off to work. The city was breathing, resting, relaxing.

  Lola held Patty’s hand as they climbed the three flights of stairs to the apartment, and then felt strangely relieved when they were inside the apartment with the door closed behind them. She was a sensitive person, and while nothing was wrong, something was wrong; nothing had happened but something had happened. She didn’t know, and yet she knew.

  She put her package down in the kitchen. She had left the window open because the morning was so clean and fresh, and now she wished that she hadn’t, because across the narrow airshaft the Schwartzs were fighting again. Schwartz worked the night shift as an oiler in one of the power houses on the East River, and he had no peace with his wife before he went to sleep in the daytime or afterwards either. A big, broad-shouldered man, he sat in his kitchen eating a sandwich and reading a book, and his wife was saying to him:

  “Goddamnit, books, books! Why don’t you buy a television? There isn’t a family on the block ain’t got a television, but not us, no, not us!”

  “Leave me alone,” he said. He hardly ever said anything else.

  “How in hell a man like you can sit and read books, I don’t know! You ought to be ashamed.”

  “All right, I’m ashamed. Leave me alone.”

  “I spend a nickel and you shove it down my throat. But every Goddamned day you buy one of those books.”

  “Lousy books cost two bits. Leave me alone,” he said.

  “Sure they’re lousy books. Tit books. Anything’s got a pair of them on the cover, you’re a sucker for it.”

  Lola closed the window, washed the breakfast dishes, dried them and put them away. Patty began to whimper, and came in holding out one hand, explaining through her tears that she had a splinter in her finger. Lola sterilized a needle with a match and removed the splinter, while Patty rocked her head and moaned with pain. Then, as a reward, Patty asked if she could play the gramophone.

  “All right,” Lola agreed, “but be careful the way you change the records.” Patty agreed to be careful, and Lola began to make the beds to the tune of the fireman—fire, fire, fire, everywhere about; here comes the fireman to put the fire out. It occurred to her that this was her day to change sheets, and then she felt foolish because she couldn’t remember whether this was Tuesday or Wednesday. “Patty, is this Tuesday or Wednesday?” she called, and Patty skipped into the bedroom laughing at her question.

  Another day won’t hurt, Lola decided. She finished her bed and went into the children’s room, Patty trailing behind her. “Don’t you want to change the record?” It was playing a second time. “I like it,” Patty said. “How many times can I play it?” As many times as she wanted, Lola told her, recalling the time she herself, as a child, read The Little Lame Prince, and how for three weeks she read it over and over.

  The telephone rang. Lola went to answer it, but when she picked it up and said, “Hello? Hello?” there was no answer, and then suddenly a dial tone.

  She returned to the children’s room and finished the beds, but nervous now, upset and uneasy—and afterwards she remembered how suddenly desolate she felt when the doorbell rang. It was a long, hard and certain ring. It lasted almost until she opened the door, and when she opened it, two men stood there. One of them was a young man, a little past thirty, with a college haircut and small, regular commonplace features. The other was older, shorter, plumper, and he wore gold-rimmed glasses. He carried a leather portfolio, and both of them held their hats in their hands with stiff politeness. The older man asked her whether she was Lola Gregg.

  “That’s right.”

  “And your husband’s name is Roger Gregg?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d like to talk to you if you don’t mind,” he said. He nodded at her, politely, deferentially—reminding Lola of an insurance agent or of Percy Liggett, who had been vice-president of the First National Bank at Hagertown, when Lola was a child; and the other, strangely enough, was not unlike Mr. Liggett’s son, who went to Princeton and who had tried, unsuccessfully, to date Lola once.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE

  AT the age of thirty-two, Lola Gregg retained a good deal of innocence and a certain simplicity that would remain with her even if the innocence departed. In that, she resembled a great many American women whose lives are not uneventful, but woven out of a fabric of events of particular interest only to themselves and to their intimate friends and family. Certainly up to the time when she married, her life was of that pattern, and since she had married, the difference between her way of life and the way of life practiced by so many others she knew did not seem remarkable. That she and her husband cherished certain thoughts that led to certain actions did not seem to her to be very strange; for this difference had been part of her life for so long that she accepted it just as she accepted everything else about her development.

  She was not a sophisticated person, not very resentful. Her unfulfilled dreams had changed with her development, but she had never been very ambitious. Her desire to be rich—a very fleeting desire—had been tempered by the knowledge that she would never be rich, and the New Jersey College for Women had not lessened her pleasure in the small town where she grew up. The meanness, smallness, and hypocrisy of the place, which ate into her father’s soul like acid, had never soured her, perhaps because he forced her to acknowledge the other side of the coin or be absorbed by his passions.

  She was not talented enough to delude herself into one or another of the arts, and not selfish enough to persuade Doc Fremont to undertake supporting her while she became a woman doctor. She became a very good nurse, but was rather pleased that taking care of a small apartment and two children furnished her with a valid reason to give up nursing. The truth was that she wanted a family of her own—and wanted it desperately. She would have been happy to attempt to repeat the experience of her own life in a small town with her children, but she was not terribly unhappy at having to live in the city. From the first day she moved to New York, she had regarded the streets and buildings around her with the wide-eyed interest of a small town girl, and this interest had flagged only a little.

  She had fallen in love first at the age of fourteen, and at least five different times thereafter before she met Roger Gregg, but it had never troubled her greatly. Whereupon, it might be said that she was a serene person, were not the word so pompous and important. Her great virtue was that she had never truly in all her life dwelt particularly on her importance, and thereby even when unusual things happened to her, they became a part of the usual.

  This quality of hers was not insensitivity, nor was it any stolidity on her part that made her slow to panic; the truth of the matter was that she was fairly secure in a world where she was deeply rooted, and thereby not easily shaken. On this one day of her life when all things changed and became different, she had been aware from her moment of awakening of qualities, subtleties, gestures and motions that were different; but she was not looking for difference. It is a knowledge shared by all that all things terminate, but not everyone is robbed of the reality by that knowledge. Of the two men who stood at her door now, she had various impressions, but only a little fear. One of them reminded her of the principal of the school. He was the smaller one, the one who wore the gold-rimmed glasses and carried the leather portfolio. His character was contradictory and multiple as well; and strangely enough, like herself, he was rooted in the same world that she had recognized from childhood; and if her immediate, unorganized thoughts had been recorded, she might have said to herself:

  “He is as much a fraud as the o
ther. There is nothing even mildly heroic about him. He hates so many people because he is afraid of all people. He is like a cousin of mine whom I remember only vaguely, but most of all because his sister married a Jew and my cousin thereafter gained a reputation for anti-Semitism. He always was that way, and now he could justify it. It was like an award he had won, a sort of gold-plated Anglo-Saxon good conduct badge that was brought into focus because now he had received from God a dispensation to hate Jews. This man has his own dispensation, and before he received it, he must have been the ultimate quality of nothing. I think that if I didn’t dislike him so, I might pity him for the fate of being nothing for so long.”

  Thinking thoughts like these, Lola stood at the half-open door looking at them, but she did not ask them who they were. When they began to explain, she said:

  “I know who you are.”

  “Would you like to see our credentials?”

  “I don’t care,” Lola said.

  “May we come in and talk to you, Mrs. Gregg?”

  “No, I don’t want you in my house,” she said, trying to conceal the distaste she felt. She was a polite woman. It was in the mores of her mother’s life and her’s too, politeness doth but little cost, without it much is often lost. With all the things she wanted for Patty and Roger, all the brave new world, all the opportunities for them to grow into tall, strong and beautiful human beings, she also wanted them to be nice people, because in her growing up nice had determined so many things. When she said, That is not nice, Patty, it had a deep and special significance. Gregg could never understand that and he never would; but she also did not feel that there was no justification for the way she felt simply because Gregg did not understand it. There were too many things Gregg justified which she understood as little.

  So she said, “No, I don’t want you in my house, and I have nothing to say to you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  It made them uneasy. With other kinds of people they could deal better. The younger one looked at the older one, and the older one said: