Franz turned to Jack and said, “Perhaps you will give us your opinion on the American educational system. That is what we were discussing when you arrived.”
Before Jack could speak, one of the German guests opened an attack on the American educational system. The other Germans joined in, and went on from there to describe every vulgarity that had impressed them in American life and to contrast German and American culture generally. Where, they asked one another passionately, could you find in America anything like the Mitropa dining cars, the Black Forest, the pictures in Munich, the music in Bayreuth? Franz and his friends began speaking in German. Neither Jack nor his wife nor Joan could understand German, and the other American couple had not opened their mouths since they were introduced. Joan went happily around the room, filling everyone’s cup with coffee, as if the music of a foreign language were enough to make an evening for her.
Jack drank five cups of coffee. He was desperately uncomfortable. Joan went into the kitchen while the Germans were laughing at their German jokes, and he hoped she would return with some drinks, but when she came back, it was with a tray of ice cream and mulberries.
“Isn’t this pleasant?” Franz asked, speaking in English again.
Joan collected the coffee cups, and as she was about to take them back to the kitchen, Franz stopped her.
“Isn’t one of those cups chipped?”
“No, darling,” Joan said. “I never let the maid touch them. I wash them myself.”
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the rim of one of the cups.
“That’s the cup that’s always been chipped, darling. It was chipped when you unpacked it. You noticed it then.”
“These things were perfect when they arrived in this country,” he said.
Joan went into the kitchen and he followed her.
Jack tried to make conversation with the Germans. From the kitchen there was the sound of a blow and a cry. Franz returned and began to eat his mulberries greedily. Joan came back with her dish of ice cream. Her voice was gentle. Her tears, if she had been crying, had dried as quickly as the tears of a child. Jack and his wife finished their ice cream and made their escape. The wasted and unnerving evening enraged Jack’s wife, and he supposed that he would never see Joan again.
Jack’s wife got pregnant early in the fall, and she seized on all the prerogatives of an expectant mother. She took long naps, ate canned peaches in the middle of the night, and talked about the rudimentary kidney. She chose to see only other couples who were expecting children, and the parties that she and Jack gave were temperate. The baby, a boy, was born in May, and Jack was very proud and happy. The first party he and his wife went to after her convalescence was the wedding of a girl whose family Jack had known in Ohio.
The wedding was at St. James’s, and afterward there was a big reception at the River Club. There was an orchestra dressed like Hungarians, and a lot of champagne and Scotch. Toward the end of the afternoon, Jack was walking down a dim corridor when he heard Joan’s voice. “Please don’t, darling,” she was saying, “You’ll break my arm. Please don’t, darling.” She was being pressed against the wall by a man who seemed to be twisting her arm. As soon as they saw Jack, the struggle stopped. All three of them were intensely embarrassed. Joan’s face was wet and she made an effort to smile through her tears at Jack. He said hello and went on without stopping. When he returned, she and the man had disappeared.
When Jack’s son was less than two years old, his wife flew with the baby to Nevada to get a divorce. Jack gave her the apartment and all its furnishings and took a room in a hotel near Grand Central. His wife got her decree in due course, and the story was in the newspapers. Jack had a telephone call from Joan a few days later.
“I’m awfully sorry to hear about your divorce, Jack,” she said. “She seemed like such a nice girl. But that wasn’t what I called you about. I want your help, and I wondered if you could come down to my place tonight around six. It’s something I don’t want to talk about over the phone.”
He went obediently to the Village that night and climbed the stairs. Her apartment was a mess. The pictures and the curtains were down and the books were in boxes. “You moving, Joan?” he asked.
“That’s what I wanted to see you about, Jack. First, I’ll give you a drink.” She made two Old-Fashioneds. “I’m being evicted, Jack,” she said. “I’m being evicted because I’m an immoral woman. The couple who have the apartment downstairsthey’re charming people, I’ve always thoughthave told the real-estate agent that I’m a drunk and a prostitute and all kinds of things. Isn’t that fantastic? This real-estate agent has always been so nice to me that I didn’t think he’d believe them, but he’s canceled my lease, and if I make any trouble, he’s threatened to take the matter up with the store, and I don’t want to lose my job. This nice real-estate agent won’t even talk with me any more. When I go over to the office, the receptionist leers at me as if I were some kind of dreadful woman. Of course, there have been a lot of men here and we sometimes are noisy, but I can’t be expected to go to bed at ten every night. Can I? Well, the agent who manages this building has apparently told all the other agents in the neighborhood that I’m an immoral and drunken woman, and none of them will give me an apartment. I went in to talk with one manhe seemed to be such a nice old gentlemanand he made me an indecent proposal. Isn’t it fantastic? I have to be out of here on Thursday and I’m literally being turned out into the street.”
Joan seemed as serene and innocent as ever while she described this scourge of agents and neighbors. Jack listened carefully for some sign of indignation or bitterness or even urgency in her recital, but there was none. He was reminded of a torch song, of one of those forlorn and touching ballads that had been sung neither for him nor for her but for their older brothers and sisters by Marion Harris. Joan seemed to be singing her wrongs.
“They’ve made my life miserable,” she went on quietly. “If I keep the radio on after ten o’clock, they telephone the agent in the morning and tell him I had some kind of orgy here. One night when PhilipI don’t think you’ve met Philip; he’s in the Royal Air Force; he’s gone back to Englandone night when Philip and some other people were here, they called the police. The police came bursting in the door and talked to me as if I were I don’t know what and then looked in the bedroom. If they think there’s a man up here after midnight, they call me on the telephone and say all kinds of disgusting things. Of course, I can put my furniture into storage and go to a hotel, I guess. I guess a hotel will take a woman with my kind of reputation, but I thought perhaps you might know of an apartment. I thought”
It angered Jack to think of this big, splendid girl’s being persecuted by her neighbors, and he said he would do what he could. He asked her to have dinner with him, but she said she was busy.
Having nothing better to do, Jack decided to walk uptown to his hotel. It was a hot night. The sky was overcast. On his way, he saw a parade in a dark side street off Broadway near Madison Square. All the buildings in the neighborhood were dark. It was so dark that he could not see the placards the marchers carried until he came to a street light. Their signs urged the entry of the United States into the war, and each platoon represented a nation that had been subjugated by the Axis powers. They marched up Broadway, as he watched, to no music, to no sound but their own steps on the rough cobbles. It was for the most part an army of elderly men and womenPoles, Norwegians, Danes, Jews, Chinese. A few idle people like himself lined the sidewalks, and the marchers passed between them with all the self-consciousness of enemy prisoners. There were children among them dressed in the costumes in which they had, for the newsreels, presented the Mayor with a package of tea, a petition, a protest, a constitution, a check, or a pair of tickets. They hobbled through the darkness of the loft neighborhood like a mortified and destroyed people, toward Greeley Square.
In the morning, Jack put the problem of finding an apartment for Joan up to his secretary. She st
arted phoning real-estate agents, and by afternoon she had found a couple of available apartments in the West Twenties. Joan called Jack the next day to say that she had taken one of the apartments and to thank him.
Jack didn’t see Joan again until the following summer. It was a Sunday evening; he had left a cocktail party in a Washington Square apartment and had decided to walk a few blocks up Fifth Avenue before he took a bus. As he was passing the Brevoort, Joan called to him. She was with a man at one of the tables on the sidewalk. She looked cool and fresh, and the man appeared to be respectable. His name, it turned out, was Pete Bristol. He invited Jack to sit down and join in a celebration. Germany had invaded Russia that weekend, and Joan and Pete were drinking champagne to celebrate Russia’s changed position in the war. The three of them drank champagne until it got dark. They had dinner and drank champagne with their dinner. They drank more champagne afterward and then went over to the Lafayette and then to two or three other places. Joan had always been tireless in her gentle way. She hated to see the night end, and it was after three o’clock when Jack stumbled into his apartment. The following morning he woke up haggard and sick, and with no recollection of the last hour or so of the previous evening. His suit was soiled and he had lost his hat. He didn’t get to his office until eleven. Joan had already called him twice, and she called him again soon after he got in. There was no hoarseness at all in her voice. She said that she had to see him, and he agreed to meet her for lunch in a seafood restaurant in the Fifties.
He was standing at the bar when she breezed in, looking as though she had taken no part in that calamitous night. The advice she wanted concerned selling her jewelry. Her grandmother had left her some jewelry, and she wanted to raise money on it but didn’t know where to go. She took some rings and bracelets out of her purse and showed them to Jack. He said that he didn’t know anything about jewelry but that he could lend her some money. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow money from you, Jack,” she said. “You see, I want to get the money for Pete. I want to help him. He wants to open an advertising agency, and he needs quite a lot to begin with.” Jack didn’t press her to accept his offer of a loan after that, and the project wasn’t mentioned again during lunch.
He next heard about Joan from a young doctor who was a friend of theirs. “Have you seen Joan recently?” the doctor asked Jack one evening when they were having dinner together. He said no. “I gave her a checkup last week,” the doctor said, “and while she’s been through enough to kill the average mortaland you’ll never know what she’s been throughshe still has the constitution of a virtuous and healthy woman. Did you hear about the last one? She sold her jewelry to put him into some kind of business, and as soon as he got the money, he left her for another girl, who had a cara convertible.”
Jack was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1942. He was kept at Fort Dix for nearly a month, and during this time he came to New York in the evening whenever he could get permission. Those nights had for him the intense keenness of a reprieve, a sensation that was heightened by the fact that on the train in from Trenton women would often press upon him dog-eared copies of Life and half-eaten boxes of candy, as though the brown clothes he wore were surely cerements. He telephoned Joan from Pennsylvania Station one night. “Come right over, Jack,” she said. “Come right over. I want you to meet Ralph.”
She was living in that place in the West Twenties that Jack had found for her. The neighborhood was a slum. Ash cans stood in front of her house, and an old woman was there picking out bits of refuse and garbage and stuffing them into a perambulator. The house in which Joan’s apartment was located was shabby, but the apartment itself seemed familiar. The furniture was the same. Joan was the same big, easygoing girl. “I’m so glad you called me,” she said. “It’s so good to see you. I’ll make you a drink. I was having one myself. Ralph ought to be here by now. He promised to take me to dinner.” Jack offered to take her to Cavanagh’s, but she said that Ralph might come while she was out. “If he doesn’t come by nine, I’m going to make myself a sandwich. I’m not really hungry.”
Jack talked about the Army. She talked about the store. She had been working in the same place forhow long was it? He didn’t know. He had never seen her at her desk and he couldn’t imagine what she did. “I’m terribly sorry Ralph isn’t here,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like him. He’s not a young man. He’s a heart specialist who loves to play the viola.” She turned on some lights, for the summer sky had got dark. “He has this dreadful wife on Riverside Drive and four ungrateful children. He”
The noise of an air-raid siren, lugubrious and seeming to spring from pain, as if all the misery and indecision in the city had been given a voice, cut her off. Other sirens, in distant neighborhoods, sounded, until the dark air was full of their noise. “Let me fix you another drink before I have to turn out the lights,” Joan said, and took his glass. She brought the drink back to him and snapped off the lights. They went to the windows, and, as children watch a thunderstorm, they watched the city darken. All the lights nearby went out but one. Air-raid wardens had begun to sound their whistles in the street. From a distant yard came a hoarse shriek of anger. “Put out your lights, you Fascists!” a woman screamed. “Put out your lights, you Nazi Fascist Germans. Turn out your lights. Turn out your lights.” The last light went off. They went away from the window and sat in the lightless room.
In the darkness, Joan began to talk about her departed lovers, and from what she said Jack gathered that they had all had a hard time. Nils, the suspect count, was dead. Hugh Bascomb, the drunk, had joined the Merchant Marine and was missing in the North Atlantic. Franz, the German, had taken poison the night the Nazis bombed Warsaw. “We listened to the news on the radio,” Joan said, “and then he went back to his hotel and took poison. The maid found him dead in the bathroom the next morning.” When Jack asked her about the one who was going to open an advertising agency, she seemed at first to have forgotten him. “Oh, Pete,” she said after a pause. “Well, he was always very sick, you know. He was supposed to go to Saranac, but he kept putting it off and putting it off and” She stopped talking when she heard steps on the stairs, hoping, he supposed, that it was Ralph, but whoever it was turned at the landing and continued to the top of the house. “I wish Ralph would come,” she said, with a sigh. “I want you to meet him.” Jack asked her again to go out, but she refused, and when the all-clear sounded, he said goodbye.
Jack was shipped from Dix to an infantry training camp in the Carolinas and from there to an infantry division stationed in Georgia. He had been in Georgia three months when he married a girl from the Augusta boarding-house aristocracy. A year or so later, he crossed the continent in a day coach and thought sententiously that the last he might see of the country he loved was the desert towns like Barstow, that the last he might hear of it was the ringing of the trolleys on the Bay Bridge. He was sent into the Pacific and returned to the United States twenty months later, uninjured and apparently unchanged. As soon as he received his furlough, he went to Augusta. He presented his wife with the souvenirs he had brought from the islands, quarreled violently with her and all her family, and, after making arrangements for her to get an Arkansas divorce, left for New York.
Jack was discharged from the Army at a camp in the East a few months later. He took a vacation and then went back to the job he had left in 1942. He seemed to have picked up his life at approximately the moment when it had been interrupted by the war. In time, everything came to look and feel the same. He saw most of his old friends. Only two of the men he knew had been killed in the war. He didn’t call Joan, but he met her one winter afternoon on a cross-town bus.
Her fresh face, her black clothes, and her soft voice instantly destroyed the senseif he had ever had such a sensethat anything had changed or intervened since their last meeting, three or four years ago. She asked him up for cocktails and he went to her apartment the next Saturday afternoon. Her room and her guests reminded him of the p
arties she had given when she had first come to New York. There was a woman with a fancy hat, an elderly doctor, and a man who stayed close to the radio, listening for news from the Balkans. Jack wondered which of the men belonged to Joan and decided on an Englishman who kept coughing into a handkerchief that he pulled out of his sleeve. Jack was right. “Isn’t Stephen brilliant?” Joan asked him a little later, when they were alone in a corner. “He knows more about the Polynesians than anyone else in the world.”
Jack had returned not only to his old job but to his old salary. Since living costs had doubled and since he was paying alimony to two wives, he had to draw on his savings. He took another job, which promised more money, but it didn’t last long and he found himself out of work. This didn’t bother him at all. He still had money in the bank, and anyhow it was easy to borrow from friends. His indifference was the consequence not of lassitude or despair but rather of an excess of hope. He had the feeling that he had only recently come to New York from Ohio. The sense that he was very young and that the best years of his life still lay before him was an illusion that he could not seem to escape. There was all the time in the world. He was living in hotels then, moving from one to another every five days.
In the spring, Jack moved to a furnished room in the badlands west of Central Park. He was running out of money. Then, when he began to feel that a job was a desperate necessity, he got sick. At first, he seemed to have only a bad cold, but he was unable to shake it and he began to run a fever and to cough blood. The fever kept him drowsy most of the time, but he roused himself occasionally and went out to a cafeteria for a meal. He felt sure that none of his friends knew where he was, and he was glad of this. He hadn’t counted on Joan.
Late one morning, he heard her speaking in the hall with his landlady. A few moments later, she knocked on his door. He was lying on the bed in a pair of pants and a soiled pajama top, and he didn’t answer. She knocked again and walked in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Jack,” she said. She spoke softly. “When I found out that you were in a place like this I thought you must be broke or sick. I stopped at the bank and got some money, in case you’re broke. I’ve brought you some Scotch. I thought a little drink wouldn’t do you any harm. Want a little drink?”