Ten North Frederick (6 page)

“Mike, it sounds to me as though you were thinking a lot of these things for the first time,” said Donaldson.

“Paul, you are absolutely right,” said Slattery.

“Well, here we are,” said Whit Hofman.

“I want to add one thing,” said Slattery.

“What's that?” said Donaldson.

“I may have been stupid about Joe, and he's dead. But I won't be stupid about Edith.”

Donaldson was using the hand loop to pull himself out of his seat. He paused. “You sound as though you might have plans for Edith?”

“It's too early to say,” said Slattery. “Or is it?”

“Keep in touch with me, Mike. I'll be interested to see what develops.” He patted Slattery's knee. “You know, you're the most stimulating Irishman I know.”

“If I am, why limit it to Irishmen? We're a very stimulating race of people. So much so that the rest of you can only take us in small doses. Or so it would appear.”

“You're an arrogant old son of a bitch, too,” said Donaldson.

“Now that's more like it. There we meet on equal terms.”

“You see why I love this fellow?” said Donaldson to Hofman.

“I sure do,” said Hofman.

“Let's save the rest of the compliments for the deceased,” said Slattery. “With my swelled head and your big bottom we're having a hard time getting out of this chariot.”

They descended from the limousine and the chauffeur addressed Mike Slattery. “About what time will I be back for you, sir?”

“An hour and a half,” said Slattery. “No, I'll tell you, Ed. Be back at four. That'll be soon enough.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ed.

“I hope you notice I'm using my own car, Paul,” said Slattery. “The Commonwealth doesn't pay for this ride.”

“Senator, your concern for the economy touches me,” said Donaldson. “Whit, you know this house. If I don't empty my bladder this minute I'm going to have a childish accident.”

“Then let's head for the garage. There's a can back there,” said Hofman. “Mike?”

“Everything under control. See you inside,” said Mike Slattery. One of Mike Slattery's gifts was that he knew when to leave, and he knew that Paul Donaldson had had a pleasant time with him. The moment to separate had come and he was glad that Donaldson had supplied the excuse.

 • • • 

The Chapin house was the only one on Frederick Street that had a stoop of three chaste brownstone steps. The other houses of equal age and proportion had marble stoops, originally chaste but soiled by time and traffic. The front door was a massive fixture, four inches in thickness, with a brass plate the size of a playing card, in which had been cut the name Benjamin Chapin. The patina from years of polish and rubbing left the name barely distinguishable. The plate was screwed into the door at a point sixty-eight inches from the bottom, or eyes' height as measured to the full height of Benjamin Chapin. Beneath the name plate, exactly halfway from top to bottom of the door, was a letter-slot of brass bearing the word Letters. (It had not been used in many years, a fact known to the regular letter carriers, but confusing to the occasional extra carrier, who did not know that the slot was permanently closed to keep out draught and dust.) Above the door was a fan light into which was etched the number
10
. The outer side of the light had not been washed—“hopeless,” was Edith's word for the task of keeping it clean—but the inside was comparatively free of dust. The doorknob and the bell-button assembly were of figured bronze, the latter a later copy of the design for the knob, made by hand at the time of the substitution of the electric bell for the bronze pull. The knob of the bronze pull still served as a paperweight in Joe Chapin's study, mounted on mahogany in which had been picked out the date of the installation of electricity in the Chapin house.

The entrance was in the center of the street floor. On each side of the entrance, on the western elevation, was a pair of windows, plate glass, separate but twins. The window sills were high enough above the street level to make it impossible for the nosy to peer in, and in any event there usually was nothing to see but furniture, since the rooms were seldom used in the daytime and the shades lowered, the curtains drawn, every night.

It was now possible to see human beings moving about in those rooms; the shades were raised, the curtains tied up. The crape of mourning had been removed from the front door and a curious passerby might have imagined that he was having a glimpse of a reception—which, in a manner of speaking, was the case. The front door was slightly ajar, intentionally, so that the invited would enter without ringing the bell, and the vestibule door was fully open and held open by a carpet-covered brick. There was a quite level tone of conversational exchange, animated enough by the animation and relief of the living who have just been burying the dead, but still suitably subdued for the occasion and by the fact that the company did not include enough of the very young to make a substantial difference. This was an older crowd, recessing now from a duty that was more frequently repeated every year. Joe Chapin, not the oldest of this group, was gone and most of the men and women present had good reason to expect that he or she would be the next, and soon. A month? Too soon. Ten years? Too much to expect. Five years? Three years? It got closer when you thought about it, and the best thing now was not to think about it. One knew, or could guess, the principal complaint or weakness of one's friends and contemporaries. This man, one knew, had a sixteen-inch-long scar on his belly. That woman was under the x-ray three times a week. That man would never smoke another cigar; that woman was never more than an hour away from her next whiskey. You bought a suit of clothes, knowing it would outlast you. You kept clean wherever soap and water could reach. You controlled the growth of hair on your face and head. You had the small grime removed from the settings of your diamonds and the lenses changed in your spectacles. You remembered everything you had ever known about your acquaintances, but sometimes you put a true sin or a true scandal in your record of the wrong person. Friends were beginning to bore you as much as enemies, and the one quickly became the other over nothing more important than a near-sighted revoke at bridge. But a gathering of this kind briefly took on a party atmosphere because there were so many like you present. No matter how truly you believed that you wanted to be alone, a gathering of this kind did stay off loneliness.

The front room at the right as you entered the Chapin house was the dining room, connected through a swinging door with the butler's pantry and the kitchen. Off the hall, on that side of the house, was also a lavatory, and in the hall was the front stairway. The front room at the left of the hall was the sitting room and beyond it a room that Edith Chapin called the library or den but that before her marriage had been called the back sitting room (and which was so indicated on the signal box in the pantry, with the letters BSR). As the invited entered the house they were greeted by Mary the maid. “Gentlemen will put their hat and coats upstairs and to the right. Ladies upstairs and to the left.” It was a chant. The invited did as instructed, delaying upstairs for the bathrooms to be unoccupied and their turns to come. Otto, the steward, and two waiters from the Gibbsville Club took care of the drink needs expeditiously, asking the preferences of some, knowing from experience the tastes of others. For all to see, in the dining room on the large table—all extra leaves in place—was food, kept hot over alcohol burners, and on the sideboard a club coffee urn and china. The drink ingredients were not in evidence; they were in the kitchen. The largest call, as Otto had anticipated, was for bourbon-on-the-rocks, with the ladies who drank favoring slightly the dry martini. The admiral asked for, and got, brandy and ginger ale; Alec Weeks required Scotch and Saratoga vichy, without ice, and it was supplied. Otherwise the company taste was simple and predictable, as the excellent Otto was sure it would be.

The early arrivals accepted their drinks and sat down to rest, staying out of the dining room to make polite, irrelevant conversation, and greeting each other (whom they had last seen less than thirty minutes ago at the graveside) with a reunion heartiness, nicely modulated. No one wanted to be the first to attack the food; consequently, when the greater number were arrived, there was a sudden crowding of the dining room and some well-behaved confusion. The gentlemen soon gave up their attempts to serve the ladies first, and the ladies then forthrightly helped themselves and were fed first anyway. Some few more than sixty persons had been invited back to the house, and provision had been made for eighty. At the high point of the luncheon seventy-one men and women were served, including those who asked only for a plate of saltines and a glass of milk. Twenty or more of the company took pills before eating; a smaller number took pills after eating. It was not a group (nor was it an occasion) for sitting on the floor, a condition that resulted in half the men remaining on their feet. Cigars were not passed, but they came out before most of the ladies and gentlemen had finished their food. The time elapsed between the serving of the very first morsel and the last was under an hour; dessert, apple pie or ice cream or both, was generally declined, and a remarkable number of persons went without coffee because it was not Sanka, a detail that had been overlooked by the embarrassed Otto and the unaware Edith.

The widow's representatives among the invited callers were her son Joby and her brother, Carter Stokes Junior, who was four years younger than she and therefore closer in age to most of the company. Carter Stokes was a not unpleasant little man, a bachelor who lived at the Y.M.C.A. because it was cheap and respectable and offered the facilities of the swimming pool, the cafeteria, the barber shop, the New York and Philadelphia newspapers, and all of the standard American and English magazines. He was a member of the Gibbsville Club (an annual Christmas present from Edith) but he seldom went near it for club life. The drinking and gambling at the Gibbsville Club were, he declared, too rich for his blood. At the “Y” he enjoyed the status of a full-fledged but democratic member of Gibbsville society, who preferred the company of a good bunch of fellows like the ones that lived at the “Y.” He made $
7
,
500
a year as assistant cashier at the bank, which enabled him to buy his clothes at Jacob Reed's in Philadelphia and maintain a Plymouth automobile and give one small party a year at the Gibbsville Club to repay hostesses for the free dinners he earned as extra man. It was generally agreed among his friends of both strata that he was not a homosexual, although no proof could be offered by those who brought up the question or those who defended against the suspicion. Men liked old Carter, who was called old before he was out of his forties, and hostesses found him useful at quarter-a-corner and twentieth-of-a-cent bridge parties, on which a large part of Gibbsville social life was based. As an alumnus of Haverford College he qualified as an educated man; in his case the college education figured in his past and his present in much the same way as the straightening of his teeth; in youth the teeth had been straightened, the education provided, and for the rest of his life he was a college man and straight-toothed.

Carter was not exactly a snob. He really had more fun with the fellows at the “Y” and his associates at the bank, and it was not because they were so different that he enjoyed their company. They put no great demands on his intellect and they even gave him a snobbish respect for his social standing. But he was not by any means ill at ease among the callers at his sister's house. He was impressed by the Governor's governorship and the admiral's admiralcy (Carter had been an ensign in World War I), and as a man in banking he was conscious of the Morgan partnership of David L. Harrison. He was not hurt when Paul Donaldson of Scranton did not remember him, although this made their fifteenth, possibly their twentieth, meeting. Carter had nice manners and a friendly attitude, which made him just right for his duty as Edith's representative, and the old, old fact that Joe Chapin could not stand him made no difference now. He had come to this house a hundred times, for Christmas dinner, Thanksgiving, Sunday suppers, and almost without fail his brother-in-law would say to Carter: “Well, Carter, what have you been doing?” And the tone of the question implied that the answer would be so awful or so dull that it was not to be waited for, so the question seldom got an uninterrupted answer. For years he had known that Joe despised him, and in his quiet way he hated Joe too. None of that showed as he went around seeing that people were eating, drinking, and comfortable. “I was afraid we'd have snow . . . Edith's taking it very well . . . Let me get you another cup of coffee.” He was much more helpful to his absent sister than her only son.

Joe Chapin Junior was making mistake after mistake—the same mistake over and over again. He would go up to one of the sixtyish ladies, asking her if he could get her anything, and then allow himself to be held on to so long that his boredom would show and the lady would be antagonized. Then he would repeat the ordeal with another lady. His cousin Whit Hofman was the only person in the crowd he wanted to talk to. Knowing Whit, an affable, kind man who liked women, whiskey, and golf, Joby was sure that his cousin would have liked to join him in the pantry over a bottle of Scotch. Joby had no illusions of the esteem in which his cousin held him, but cousins they were, without any history of unkindness or quarrel. But a quiet drink with Whit was not possible now; Joby had his chores to perform, and Whit seemed to be having a good time. Whit had the social graces.

Joby excused himself from Mrs. Henry Laubach and made his way to the pantry and his second drink of the day, a straight Scotch with a water chaser. It had no immediate effect, but he knew it would do him some good in a few minutes, and he returned to the spot beside the newel-post which he had been using as his headquarters. There he was approached by Paul Donaldson from Scranton.