 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
III
There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes
when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that
comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the
quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully
articulate conviction that somehow the existence one
is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related
to life only as a moving picture or a mirror—that the
people, and streets, and houses are only projections
from a very dim and chaotic past. It was in such a
state that Roxanne found herself during the first months
of Jeffrey's illness. She slept only when she was utterly
exhausted; she awoke under a cloud. The long,
sober-voiced consultations, the faint aura of medicine
echoed to many cheerful footsteps, and, most of all,
Jeffrey's white face amid the pillows of the bed they
had shared—these things subdued her and made her indelibly
older. The doctors held out hope, but that was
all. A long rest, they said, and quiet. So responsibility
came to Roxanne. It was she who paid the bills,
pored over his bank-book, corresponded with his publishers.
She was in the kitchen constantly. She learned
from the nurse how to prepare his meals and after the
first month took complete charge of the sick-room.
She had had to let the nurse go for reasons of economy.
One of the two colored girls left at the same time.
Roxanne was realizing that they had been living from
short story to short story.
The most frequent visitor was Harry Cormwell. He
had been shocked and depressed by the news, and though
his wife was now living with him in Chicago he found
time to come out several times a month. Roxanne found
his sympathy welcome—there was some quality of suffering
in the man, some inherent pitifulness that made
her comfortable when he was near. Roxanne's nature
had suddenly deepened. She felt sometimes that with
Jeffrey she was losing her children also, those children
that now most of all she needed and should have had.
It was six months after Jeffrey's collapse and when the
nightmare had faded, leaving not the old world but a
new one, grayer and colder, that she went to see Harry's
wife. Finding herself in Chicago with an extra hour
before train time, she decided out of courtesy to call.
As she stepped inside the door she had an immediate
impression that the apartment was very like some
place she had seen before—and almost instantly she
remembered a round-the-corner bakery of her childhood,
a bakery full of rows and rows of pink frosted
vulgar, and odious.
And this apartment was like that. It was pink. It
smelled pink!
Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black,
opened the door. Her hair was yellow, heightened,
Roxanne imagined, by a dash of peroxide in the rinsing
water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen blue
—she was pretty and too consciously graceful. Her
cordiality was strident and intimate, hostility melted
so quickly to hospitality that it seemed they were both
merely in the face and voice—never touching nor
touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.
But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her
eyes were caught and held in uncanny fascination by
the wrapper. It was vilely unclean. From its lowest
hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue
dust of the floor; for the next three inches it was gray—
then it shaded off into its natural color, which was—
pink. It was dirty at the sleeves, too, and at the collar—and
when the woman turned to lead the way into
the parlor, Roxanne was sure that her neck was dirty.
A one-sided rattle of conversation began. Mrs.
Cromwell became explicit about her likes and dislikes,
her head, her stomach, her teeth, her apartment—avoiding
with a sort of insolent meticulousness any inclusion
of Roxanne with life, as if presuming that Roxanne,
having been dealt a blow, wished life to be carefully
skirted.
Roxanne smiled. That kimono! That neck!
After five minutes a little boy toddled into the parlor—a
dirty little boy clad in dirty pink rompers. His
face was smudgy—Roxanne wanted to take him into
her lap and wipe his nose; other parts in the vicinity of
his head needed attention, his tiny shoes were kicked
out at the toes. Unspeakable!
"What a darling little boy!" exclaimed Roxanne,
smiling radiantly. "Come here to me."
Mrs. Cromwell looked coldly at her son.
"He will get dirty. Look at that face!" She held her
head on one side and regarded it critically.
"Isn't he a darling?" repeated Roxanne.
"Look at his rompers," frowned Mrs. Cromwell.
"He needs a change, don't you, George?"
George stared at her curiously. To his mind the word
rompers connotated a garment extraneously smeared,
as this one.
"I tried to make him look respectable this morning,"
complained Mrs. Cromwell as one whose patience had
been sorely tried, "and I found he didn't have any
more rompers—so rather than have him go round without
any I put him back in those—and his face—"
"How many pairs has he?" Roxanne's voice was
pleasantly curious. "How many feather fans have
you?" she might have asked.
"Oh,—" Mrs. Cromwell considered, wrinkling her
pretty brow. "Five, I think. Plenty, I know."
"You can get them for fifty cents a pair."
Mrs. Cromwell's eyes showed surprise—and the faintest
superiority. The price of rompers!
"Can you really? I had no idea. He ought to have
plenty, but I haven't had a minute all week to send the
laundry out." Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant—"I
must show you some things—"
They rose and Roxanne followed her past an open
bathroom door whose garment-littered floor showed indeed
that the laundry hadn't been sent out for some
time, into another room that was, so to speak, the
quintessence of pinkness. This was Mrs. Cromwell's
room.
Here the hostess opened a closet door and displayed
before Roxanne's eyes an amazing collection of lingerie.
clean, unruffled, seemingly not yet touched. On hangers
beside them were three new evening dresses.
"I have some beautiful things," said Mrs. Cromwell,
"but not much of a chance to wear them. Harry doesn't
care about going out." Spite crept into her voice.
"He's perfectly content to let me play nursemaid and
housekeeper all day and loving wife in the evening."
Roxanne smiled again.
"You've got some beautiful clothes here."
"Yes, I have. Let me show you—"
"Beautiful," repeated Roxanne, interrupting, "but
I'll have to run if I'm going to catch my train."
She felt that her hands were trembling. She wanted
to put them on this woman and shake her—shake her.
She wanted her locked up somewhere and set to scrubbing
floors.
"Beautiful," she repeated, "and I just came in for a
moment."
"Well, I'm sorry Harry isn't here."
They moved toward the door.
"—and, oh," said Roxanne with an effort—yet her
voice was still gentle and her lips were smiling—"I
think it's Argile's where you can get those rompers.
Good-by."
It was not until she had reached the station and bought
her ticket to Marlowe that Roxanne realized it was the
first five minutes in six months that her mind had been
off Jeffrey.
| Tales of the jazz age | |