Root of His Evil (11 page)

It was Mr. Hunt who rescued me. He lifted me to my feet, patted my arm and drew me aside. Then for the first time Mrs. Harris became shrill. “But, Bernie, I’m wringing wet! Just look at my dress!”

“That’s what we have dry cleaners for.”

“And that’s what we have such dresses for.” It was Mrs. Hunt who said this, very grimly. “That’s the third cocktail that’s been spilled on it this year. Or was it a Tom Collins last time?”

Mrs. Harris’ answer to this was to make a speech in which she said she didn’t know what people were coming to, the ill-bred way they got drunk and spilled drinks all over her, but Mrs. Hunt took me to another part of the room and that seemed to be the end of it. She gave me a cocktail and mumbled: “Don’t worry about her dress. It’s last color, quick-drying crepe, bought especially to have cocktails spilled on it and get women down on their knees and make them feel foolish. You behaved very well and you needn’t give it a thought.”

The man who had been passing cocktails came up just then and said: “She’s here, Mrs. Hunt.”

“Oh. Then you’d better take out some of those glasses and tell her to wash them up as quickly as she can, but don’t wait for her to get through with them. You come back to keep things moving here, and have her bring them in as soon as they’re ready.”

“Yes, Mrs. Hunt.”

She turned to me. “I did something I rarely do. I borrowed a maid from Mrs. Norris, but of course the children had to be taken to the park as usual and she has only now arrived—when it’s almost all over.”

“It’s all been going beautifully.”

“It’s been going somehow, but I hate that clutter of used glasses at a cocktail party. The very idea that I might have been drinking out of somebody else’s glass makes
me
squirm, and I don’t see why my guests should feel differently.”

It seemed like a trifling thing at the time but only too often in the weeks that followed I wished bitterly that one of the children had got lost in the park so that maid never arrived.

Mr. Hunt had disappeared, and now came up from downstairs and hurried over to his wife. “What do we do now?”

“What is it, Bernie?”

“The reporters and photographers. They’re lined up outside of the house three deep trying to get in and Gus is having a hard time to keep them out.”

“You’d better call an officer.”

He thought a moment, then said: “I wonder...”

She looked at him very intently and he rubbed his chin and thought a few moments. Then he said: “If that angelic mother of yours could be induced to pose for a few pictures with Grant and Carrie I have an idea this thing could be washed up right now.”

“That’ll never work.”

“What the hell? Are you going to keep it up forever? She’s married to him, she’s been a perfectly delightful guest, she’s all right. The thing to do is to tap this newspaper stuff and let some of the pressure off. Having all three of their pictures taken will turn the trick and then these headlines will die off so fast it’ll amaze you.”

Mrs. Hunt rather absent-mindedly put her arm around me and shook her head. “I’m not thinking about her. She’s been fine, and I take back all I said about her and—” with a little pat to me—
“to
her. But you can’t trust mother. She’ll
pull
something—”

“What can she pull?”

“She can pull nonsense you and I could never think of, and I’m warning you, you may be starting something that’ll be dreadful before you get through with it.”

“In these things I have a gift.”

He went over to Mrs. Harris, who by now had decided to be in a gay mood again, and said something to her. She turned and came over to me, her arms outstretched, which seemed to be her regular way of approaching anybody. “But, darling, I’d simply
love
to. Why, of course—I had no idea the photographers were out there or I would have suggested it myself.”

So Mr. Hunt went downstairs and next thing the photographers and reporters were trooping in, all very noisy and impudent, and a buzz of excited talk was going around the room and Mr. Hunt was asking everybody to stand back a little to give the photographers a chance. So then Grant came over and put his arm around his mother and had tears in his eyes and I didn’t believe for a second that she was as sweet as she pretended to be, but I was like Mr. Hunt: even if she didn’t like me, having the picture taken would probably end all these terrible things in the newspapers, because if she accepted me, at any rate publicly, there couldn’t be much left for the newspapers to say.

So we all lined up. At first the photographers wanted me in the middle, then they changed their minds and put Mrs. Harris in the middle, and then finally they decided it would be better with Grant in the middle, his arm around each of us. So then they told us to smile and yelled “hold it,” and I was standing there with the grin pasted patiently on my face, when all of a sudden there was the most awful crash and everybody jumped and looked around.

It seemed a year before my mind could comprehend that who I was looking at was Lula Schultz, the girl who had shared the room with me at the Hotel Hutton and who had disappeared after we had the big quarrel over my staying out with Grant. She was the maid who had arrived late, and I found out later that after she quit her job at Karb’s she had taken a place as a servant with Mrs. Norris. However, I didn’t know any of that then, and all I was aware of was the mess on the floor and Lula staring at me and all the rest of them staring at the two of us. Then a reporter seemed to sense something, for he held up his hand to the photographers and for a moment there was absolute silence. Then Lula contributed her brilliant remark: “Well, for crying out loud, Carrie, where did you come from?”

Then the photographers woke up and for a minute or more it was like a madhouse, with the cameras clicking first at Lula, standing there with the tray, the glasses all over the floor in front of her, then at me, then at Mrs. Harris and Grant, and it later turned out that one or two of them had got over into a corner to shoot the whole scene. All while they were taking pictures they were yelling at us in the most disrespectful way. Then Mr. Humt tried to take command and get Lula out of there and the mess cleared away, but all she would do was stand and gape and gabble at me that she seen all about it in the papers but she hoped she’d drop dead if she had any idea it was the same party she had been sent over to work at. She spoke terrible grammar, which is something I have always tried to avoid.

I was furious enough to break the tray over her head, but there was only one thing for me to do and I gritted my teeth and did it. I went over and shook hands with her as calmly as though it were nothing at all. That was when Mrs. Harris screeched: “Isn’t she simply a
dear!
And mustn’t she be thrilled! Imagine—an old friend from the slums and meeting her here! It’s such a small world!”

Somehow, by asking a number of his friends to help and practically using main force, Mr. Hunt got the photographers and reporters out and Mrs. Hunt must have dealt with Lula for she wasn’t there any more, and then for fifteen or twenty minutes everybody stood around and talked about it, except that when I approached they hurriedly began to talk about something else. Then they all went, shaking hands with me very hurriedly, and then I found myself alone in the living room, as Grant, his three sisters and his mother having gone somewhere else. But in a moment Mr. Hunt came in, made two highballs and said: “Let’s go in here—it’s not so public.”

He took me into a small library and closed the door. We sat down and sipped our drinks and he kept rubbing the moisture on his glass with his thumb. Then he said: “I’m not sure, but I think that sinks you.”

“You mean Lula?”

“Couldn’t you have pretended it was a case of mistaken identity or something?”

“If I were sick or needed somebody she’s the one person on earth that I could call on.”

“I suppose there was nothing else you could do, but if you think the noble Grant is going to take a broad attitude toward it, you’re very optimistic.”

“Grant is not a complete fool.”

“No, but he’s a complete snob, and that’s serious.”

“I haven’t seen any signs of it.”

“Did you ever hear of the silver cord?”

“What’s that?”

“An intangible but terrible bond, that sometimes exists between mother and son, and invariably spells trouble for them both. Not one thing about Grant is on the up-and-up except his interest in Indians. His phony radicalism, his rebellion against Uncle George, his nutty talk about breaking the system, and all the rest of it merely represent his feeble effort to break the silver cord, and whether he can do it I wouldn’t like to say. But I know this much: Lula will give Mama a club over him that he’ll feel from morning to night. And don’t make any mistake about it: Grant is the worst snob of the lot.”

“He married me. That doesn’t look much like a snob.”

“Masochism.”

“...
What
did you say?”

“Torturing himself, going out in the back yard and eating worms so Mama will feel ashamed of herself, for trying to make him marry Muriel.”

“Why, by the way,
did
she try to make him do that?”

“Money, partly. With those two fortunes blended many things would be possible. But mainly because Muriel is a dull cluck of a girl that Mama wouldn’t have to be jealous of that Grant hates. The silver cord binds two ways.”

“Why does she oppose the Indians?”

“Sadism.”

“You’re using words I’m not familiar with.”

“She also likes to torture him, and she’s not done yet.”

“What else can she do?”

“One thing she can do is begin trotting around with some man. That’s what she usually does, and when she starts it this time I predict Grant will go simply insane. I don’t think you quite understand this yet. It’s not pretty. It’s unnatural, unhealthy and tragic. But it’s what you’re up against.”

“You mean—she wants to make him jealous as though she were some girl he was in love with—or that was in love with him?”

“Exactly. Except that it’s a love that can never get anywhere. If you ask me, Mama has some strange youth complex. I think she resents Grant—why Grant and not the other three I can’t explain, except that he came first—because he compelled her to become a woman instead of the seventeen-year-old girl that she instinctively wants to be. When he arrived, that was the end of her youth. But it doesn’t help any that her youth is still with her, so far as her appearance goes, and so is a habitual interest in men and a trained technique at getting them. As to her morals, I prefer not to speak. Grant had the misfortune to be born to a woman who could still be his sweetheart, and it’s the blight of his life.”

I didn’t feel depressed or hysterical as I had felt before in these last few days. I merely felt cold and weak from encountering things that I didn’t understand. Still, I heard myself say: “Well—what am I going to do about it?”

“Perhaps there’s nothing you can do about it. Reckoning condition of the track, form of the starters and confidential information from the paddock, I would rate your chances at about one to ninety-nine. If it were myself, I think I’d scratch my entry and be done with it. Of course you may feel differently.”

To that I made no reply. He sipped his drink, then came over to me, sat on the arm of my chair and turned my face up to him. “I like you, for some reason. I could see your head working in there this afternoon. You played your cards well and if there’s one thing I enjoy it’s seeing somebody lead into dummy, finesse through trouble and win through a grand slam. But you haven’t got the cards, that’s all. I’m on your side, and if there’s anything I can do you can call on me. But what I really think is: You’re sunk.”

When we went back in the living room everybody except Grant had gone and he had his hat and stick and was waiting for me. I thanked Mrs. Hunt and she said it had been a pleasure, but her eyes had the same glassy look I had seen in her mother’s and I knew that her little flurry of friendliness was over and that so far as she was concerned the whole thing had been a fiasco that would not be repeated.

Grant and I walked down Madison a few blocks, then crossed over and had dinner at a place on Fifty-fifth Street. There would be long silences and then he would talk feverishly about things like the Army Air Force and the new planes they were building. It was well after eight when we left the Hunts and it must have been ten o’clock when we got through dinner. We walked down Fifth Avenue to Fifty-fourth Street, then over toward the apartment. As we crossed Third Avenue a truck was unloading tabloids at a newsstand. I stopped and bought one and there, sure enough, was the first of those terrible pictures that came out showing Lula at the cocktail party with numbers all over it and down at the bottom the names, corresponding to the numbers, of all the prominent-people who were present. We started along again but as we went I was looking at the paper. Suddenly he stopped, snatched the paper out of my hand and threw it down on the pavement. He ran toward it and kicked it, then kicked it again and again until it was just a litter of pages flying all over the street. Then he stood there panting, and I knew that everything Mr. Hunt had said was true. He hated that picture, hated Lula and I think at that moment hated me. In spite of all his fine talk he was really what money, education and family had made him, a snob who had no respect for what my life had made me. A terrible sense of helpless pain swept over me, of being hurt more than I knew I could be hurt, and it was then that I knew how much I loved him and how desperately I had to fight, even if the chances were one to ninety-nine against me.

F
ROM THEN ON GRANT
and I were almost strangers to each other. There were times when we forgot everything else and were terribly close, but they were merely occasional interludes in what was beginning to feel like the unreal dreams one has in a fever. The newspapers were only incidental so far as I was concerned. What made it so terrible was Grant and the grim, hunted look he had all the time, and especially when he came back to the apartment after going out for a little while, and I knew he had seen his family or his friends or somebody and had felt compromised and embarrassed in talking with them.