The Long-Winded Lady Read online

  I think he must have had dinner alone tonight before I came in, and after dinner moved over to join Mees Katie and her acquaintance, the elderly painted lady. There was nothing, not even a glass of water, in front of Mees Katie and nothing in front of Michel, but the elderly lady’s part of the tablecloth looked as though it had been thoroughly occupied by several different dishes before her pears in wine were brought. Mees Katie looked very tired. She has a lot of acquaintances, most of them inherited from her mother, and I suppose the elderly lady was one of them. Mees Katie has an attitude she falls into when she is being officially companionable. She sits with both elbows on the table, with her right hand placed flat against the side of her head and her left hand, with the fingers curled under, and turned down, supporting her chin. The right hand always holds her head up, while the left hand is ready to rise against her mouth, as though the polite attention she wants to give people calls for modesty from her, and for as complete a concealment of her own personality as she can manage. Tonight, as she listened wearily to Michel, her hand hid her mouth and her eyes were fixed on Michel’s face. She is often bored, but as a rule she can escape from her entanglements by jumping up to greet a customer or to give an order to the waiter. There was no easy escape for her tonight — the Étoile might as well have been snowbound for all the coming and going there was. It was very quiet. Three men sitting at the last table in the bar were talking quietly, but the only voice really to be heard belonged to Michel, and Mees Katie kept her eyes fixed on him as though she feared she might fall asleep if she stopped watching him. She has extraordinary eyes, small slanted brown eyes that are filled with light, brilliant eyes of a transparent brown in which the color recedes, not growing darker but growing more intense, so that the point of truest color, the source of all that light, seems very far away, and perhaps it is for that reason that Mees Katie’s expression always seems distant, no matter how close her face is as she bends down to answer a question or to whisper to some customer she knows well.

  Suddenly the elderly lady finished her pears, and she laid down her spoon and smiled, a small, mild, accustomed smile of pleasure, and she turned to look at Mees Katie, and Mees Katie yawned and was shocked at herself.

  “Oh, I am sorry, Michel!” she cried. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dolan, but I am so tired tonight.”

  Michel emerged from his monologue to see that he was in danger of losing his audience, and he looked over at Leo and called excitedly for cognac, cognac all round.

  “Oh, no no no, thank you, Michel,” Mees Katie said. “No cognac for me, thank you very much.”

  But Mrs. Dolan was delighted. She removed her lips from the edge of her coffee cup, which she was holding with both hands, and for a minute she looked like the perky little person she must once have been, who knew that at the mention of a drink a girl brightens up. “Well, thank you very much,” she said to Michel, who had begun to stare at her with alarm. “I believe I will.” She had a very loud, rusty voice, and after regarding Michel with approval she turned to Mees Katie. “Have a drink,” she said. “A little cognac will settle your stomach.”

  Mees Katie laughed in a horrified way. “Oh, my stomach is all right,” she cried, and she called to Leo, “M. Leo, deux cognacs, si’l vous plait.”

  Mees Katie is tall and slender, and she moves very easily and quickly. She went to the bar and took the little tray with the two cognacs from Leo and handed it to Robert, who had come running from the end of the bar. Then she walked quickly away, through the bar and through the dim dining room, and pushed open one of the doors leading to the kitchen and went in there and stayed a few minutes. When she returned she was very brisk in her beaver hat and her beaver-lined coat. She said goodnight to Michel, who had become very glum, and to Mrs. Dolan, and to the old Frenchman at the bar, and to me, and she motioned Leo to the end of the bar and spoke a few words privately to him as she pulled on her gloves, and off she went. As she talked with Leo she stood sideways to the bar, and looked through the window, and a minute later, watching through the window, I saw her go past, walking carefully on the dangerous sidewalk, with her hand up to hold her hat against the wind. She and her mother have an apartment where they have lived for many years, far over on the west side, near Tenth Avenue. Leo also watched her through the window, and when she disappeared he stayed where he was and continued to watch. There is a big open garage across the street that has pushed itself through the buildings and now is open at each end, making an arcade and therefore a vista — you can see a little section of the Forty-eighth Street scene from this window here, and the people walking along there, who almost never turn their heads to look over in this direction, seem very far away, and they seem to be walking faster and with more sense of direction than the passersby immediately outside the window. Tonight was so blurred and wild you could see nothing much except movements of struggle out there, but Leo continued to watch. The back of Leo’s head is perfectly flat, and his skin is putty-colored, but more white than gray or beige. His features are thick and fleshy and very clearly defined, the nose a wide triangle, the upper lip a sharp bow. His eyes are small and blue, and his half smile, for he never smiles right out, is always accompanied by a deliberate glance in which suspicion and interest are equally mixed. Sometimes the interest becomes dislike. He is vain. He is slow-witted and not handsome, and he is past sixty and a bit fat, and yet he wears the pleased, secretive expression of a man who has always gotten along very well with women. After a while he abandoned his survey of the window and moved along to speak with the old Frenchman. They spoke in French. The Frenchman objects to hearing English spoken at the Étoile, and he becomes very irritable when English-speaking strangers try to strike up an acquaintance with him. The three men at the end of the room left their table and moved across to that end of the bar and called for drinks. They were irresolute. They were marooned in the city for the night, and they had taken rooms at the Plymouth Hotel along the street, and they wanted to be entertained without becoming involved, and the evening was going flat on them. They had come to the Étoile for dinner because they often have lunch there and always imagined it to be a place where interesting people came at night — show people, artists and writers, people like that, or at least French people who would sit and stand around and talk excitedly as they did in the movies — but there was no one worth watching or listening to, and tomorrow night they drive home to Larchmont with a disappointed feeling that they will translate as knowledge — New York City is just as dull as anywhere else when you have nothing to do.

  Michel was still talking, but warily. The last thing he wanted was to be left alone with a strange woman, and he felt it was no compliment to him to be seen drinking with a Mrs. Dolan. He hadn’t touched his cognac. She took a businesslike sip from hers and set the glass back on the table. She had stopped listening to him, and now she was sizing him up. A smile kept coming and going on her face — it was her contribution to the conversation and her acknowledgment of it. But she was considering, or ruminating, and a little trick occurred to her. She smiled and put her finger against her lips as though Michel were a child who was talking too much. Michel stopped talking.

  “Do you come here much?” Mrs. Dolan asked him. It wasn’t much of a question but it was too personal for poor Michel. He began to answer her, and then instead he jumped up and clapped his hands to the sides of his head. It is the gesture he makes when he remembers an urgent phone call, or when he has to run out of the restaurant on an urgent errand. Mrs. Dolan stopped smiling, but she showed no surprise or embarrassment. She simply looked at him. He had to run out on an urgent errand, he said, but he would be back in ten minutes.

  He always returns to the Étoile after these errands, but Mrs. Dolan didn’t know that, and it was clear she didn’t believe him. She went on looking at him. In his excitement he knocked his chair back, and it fell against the edge of my table. He turned ungracefully and caught the chair and straightened it, using both his hands. “Pardon, Madame,” he said to me, g
aily. He looked me in the eye and smiled at me. He was triumphant, or at least relieved, because he was managing to break away from Mrs. Dolan, and he was glad of the diversion, of the fallen chair, because it made his getaway easier, but he would have smiled anyway, challenging me or challenging anyone to ignore him. When he smiles, his dark, even teeth remain tightly closed because he must always remain on guard and must always show that he does not fear the snub he watches for. I said quickly, “It doesn’t matter at all,” and I was glad I did because, although he had already begun speaking to Mrs. Dolan again, he turned and nodded to me, and I knew I was forgiven for the sin I had not committed, of not recognizing him.

  Then he bustled to the coatrack, beside where I was sitting, and began wrapping himself up in his warm clothes — his warm fur-collared overcoat and his fur hat and his big gloves. Mrs. Dolan watched him as indifferently as though he were a stranger who had chanced to share her table on a train journey, and, as she might in a train, she turned her head from him to look at the view, in this case the bar, Leo, the old Frenchman, and the three exiles from Larchmont. Leo had a dour expression on his face as he watched Michel, who looked happily back at him and then looked at Mrs. Dolan and saw he had lost her attention. He called to her, “You will wait? You will be here? You will not run away?”

  She looked at him stupidly, and I was surprised when she answered him. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said in her dreadful voice.

  Leo spoke up. “It is snowing out, Michel,” he said.

  Michel grinned at him. “Ten minutes!” he cried, and vanished.

  “That Michel is a great joker, he thinks,” Leo said.

  “You call him a joker?” Mrs. Dolan said loudly. “Some joker, I’ll say.” But Leo ignored her, and she began rummaging in the huge leather handbag that was on the table beside her, propped against the wall. She took out a mirror and moved it about while she examined herself, her eyes, her mouth, and her earrings, and then she took out a dark red lipstick and smeared it thickly back and forth on her mouth, and afterward, while she was putting the lipstick away, she pressed her lips closely together. With her little finger, she rubbed the lipstick smooth, and tidied the corners of her mouth, and when she had finished she cleaned the color from her finger with her dinner napkin and took a tiny sip of her brandy, and glanced at Michel’s brandy, which he had not touched. After that she sat gazing at the stained tablecloth, and from time to time she pursed her lips thoughtfully at something she saw there.

  THERE are three young girls who have been coming to the Étoile for their Sunday dinner the last few months. They share an apartment on Forty-seventh, and they all work as secretaries. Lately one of them, Betty, has been dropping in alone, early in the evening, before ten o’clock. She never comes for dinner, and she never stays after Mees Katie has gone home. Betty is about five foot two, a brown-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced girl with a pretty figure and a pretty smile, who obviously enjoys being a friendly little child among the grownups. Her winter coat is dark green imitation fur, and she wears sweaters and skirts most of the time, schoolgirl clothes. She walks in timidly, as though she is not quite sure of her welcome, and then she sits up at the end of the bar and asks for a Perrier water and drinks it very slowly, making it last. She dreams of being an actress, but I think the part she dreams of playing is the part she plays as she sits up at the bar of the Étoile and sips her Perrier and stares wonderingly all about her. The Étoile reminds her of a waterfront café she saw once in a movie that starred Jean Gabin and that I think has now been remade to include a very young unknown actress named Betty who sits at the bar with a Perrier stealing the show, although she has nothing to say and nothing to do except be herself, poor and alone and very young. She always puts down a dollar to pay for her Perrier, but Leo seldom takes the money, and if he does take it he gives her another Perrier on the house. Once or twice Betty has sat at Mees Katie’s table and helped her listen to Michel. She finds Michel very entertaining. Tonight she walked in shortly after Michel ran out. She came in expectantly, almost laughing, walking out of the snowstorm as though she were walking into a party. She pulled off her scarf, shaking the snow from it, and as she began to unbutton her coat she looked around for Mees Katie. Leo had come to the end of the bar and was watching her, smiling.

  “Where is everybody?” she cried. “Where’s Mees Katie?” She sat up at the bar and Leo poured a Perrier for her.

  “I’m celebrating, Leo,” she said. “This is my very first snowstorm. The office let us off at three o’clock, and I walked round and round and round, all by myself, celebrating all by myself, and then I went home and made dinner, but I got so excited thinking about the snow I just had to come out again and thought I’d come here and see Mees Katie. I thought there’d be thousands of people here. Oh, I wish it would snow for weeks and weeks. I just can’t bear for it to end. But after today I’m beginning to think New Yorkers never really enjoy themselves. Nobody seemed to be really enjoying the snow. I never saw such people. All they could think about was getting home. Wouldn’t you think a storm like this would wake everybody up? But all it does is put them to sleep. Such people.”

  “It does not put me to sleep, Betty,” Leo said in his deliberate way.

  “I wish it would snow for a year,” Betty said.

  “It will take something warmer than a snowstorm to put me to sleep, Betty,” Leo said.

  Betty laughed self-consciously and looked at Mrs. Dolan.

  “Michel is a bad boy tonight, Betty,” Leo said, and he also looked at Mrs. Dolan. “He told this lady he’d be back in ten minutes and it has been twenty.”

  “Nearly half an hour,” Mrs. Dolan said disgustedly. “Nearly half an hour.”

  “He’ll be back,” Betty said. “Michel always comes back, doesn’t he, Leo?”

  “Oh, yes, Michel comes back,” Leo said, and he put his hand on Betty’s arm and leaned far across the bar and began whispering in her ear, or tried to begin whispering in her ear, because at the touch of his face against her hair she pulled roughly away and looked at him with such distaste that he stepped back. Then he went to the cash register and opened the drawer and began looking in at the money and pretending to count it. He was furious. If she had spent ten years pondering a way to express disgust, she could not have found a better way. Even if they had been alone, Leo would never have forgiven her, but the three lingering men were watching, and so was Mrs. Dolan.

  Betty sat alone for a minute and then she took her Perrier and slipped down from her stool and walked over to Mrs. Dolan. Betty looked flustered, but she was smiling.

  “May I sit down?” she asked Mrs. Dolan.

  “Oh, please do,” Mrs. Dolan said.

  Betty sat down in Michel’s chair, diagonally across from Mrs. Dolan. “Michel will be back soon,” she said. “He always comes back.”

  “He left me sitting here like this,” Mrs. Dolan said.

  “Michel is really a sweet kind person when you get to know him,” Betty said. “He’s a darling, really.”

  Leo called out, “Miss Betty, you owe me sixty cents.”

  Betty looked over at him in surprise.

  “You forgot to pay for your drink, little girl,” he said, smiling, and he waved at Robert the waiter. Robert took Betty’s dollar to the bar and brought her back her change. She had gotten very red.

  “He needn’t have shouted at me,” she said to Mrs. Dolan. Mrs. Dolan said nothing.

  Betty began talking. “This is the first big snow I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I thought it would be like New Year’s Eve here tonight, or something. When they first told us we were getting off early from the office I felt it was like a party or something, but then after I walked around a bit it seemed more like a disaster, and I kept wanting to get into the spirit of the thing. I felt very left out all day. I kept walking around.”

  When she fell silent, Mrs. Dolan still continued to watch her, but she said nothing. She had nothing to say, and nothing to give except her silen
ce, and so she said nothing, and made no reply, and they sat without speaking until the silence they shared strengthened and expanded to enclose them both.

  Not long ago I saw a photograph in the evening paper of a crowd of circus elephants gathered around a dying elephant, Flora, who had fallen and was lying on her side on the ground. The elephant closest to Flora was trying to revive her by blowing air into her open mouth with his trunk. The newspaper story said that all the elephants in the troupe took turns trying to save their dying comrade, and the story finished by saying, “This practice is instinctive among pachyderms.”

  But that practice, instinctive among pachyderms, that determination to win even a respite from death, is no more instinctive than the silence was that grew and turned into a lifeline between Betty and Mrs. Dolan, because their silence arose from a shame so deep that it was peace for them to sit in its silence, and to listen to this silence, which was only the silence of their own nature, of all they had in common. Mrs. Dolan’s face grew ruminative, and Betty’s profile suggested she was lost in recollections that were not unhappy.

  Michel walked in, a snowman. He must have been standing out in the open, or walking, ever since he left the restaurant. He stood still just inside the door and banged the palms of his gloves together and sent a fond glance at Mrs. Dolan and at Betty, who had turned to watch him. Michel was very pleased with the entrance he had made, and he looked as though he would like to go out and come back in again.

  “Don Juan, he thinks he is,” Mrs. Dolan growled.

  Michel moved to the coatrack and began unwrapping himself. He was very slow about it, and all the time he was pulling off his gloves, and unwinding his scarf, and shaking his fur hat, he faced the room as though he faced a full-length mirror, and he smiled, watching all of us, but not as he would watch the mirror. At last he stood revealed in his navy-blue-and-brown-striped suit and his rings and his crinkly black hair and his bow tie, and he strolled back to his table and sat down beside Mrs. Dolan, and smiled sweetly at Betty, and picked up the cognac that had been waiting for him. When I left they were all ordering more drinks, and Mrs. Dolan had decided to switch to crème de menthe. The old Frenchman came out of his reverie and began looking unpleasantly at the three men who were chattering in English at the end of the bar, and I knew he was becoming happier. I paid my bill and left.