“Who? Who is the guy?”
“Well, it’s not just one person. There is a man—”
“Who? Do I know him?”
“I don’t know. Julian English. He’s coming, and some people named Ogden. I think you know them.”
“Froggy? Sure. I’ve met English a couple of times, too. He’s a college boy, isn’t he?”
“No. He’s out.”
“Are you in love with him? I hope not. He isn’t so hot. He cheats at cards. He takes dope.”
“He does not!” she exclaimed. “He doesn’t do any such thing. He drinks too much, maybe.”
“Oh, darling, don’t you know when I’m fooling? I don’t know anything about him. I’m not even sure I’d know him if I saw him. Yes, I would. But you’re not in love with him, are you?”
“I’m in love with you. Oh, I do love you. And that’s what makes it worse. I wish you could come along tomorrow night, my last night before I sail. But I don’t think that’d be so good.”
“Oh, no. Mr. English wouldn’t like it.”
“It isn’t that. I’m not only thinking of him. But Jean and Froggy are coming all the way from Gibbsville just to see me off and we planned a big bender in New York tomorrow night. I’m not a bit pleased about it now, but there’s nothing I can do at this late date.”
“No, I guess you’re right, damn it. You certainly are the will o’ the wisp if I ever saw it.”
“Are you going to write to me, a lot?”
“Fourteen Place Vendôme, every day.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, you’re a Morgan, Harjes girl, as distinguished from an American Express girl. I’ll write every day and cable every weekend. And what will I get for it? A postcard that I’d be ashamed to show to my own mother and a scarf from Liberty’s and maybe a Dunhill lighter.”
They stopped and bought a comb at a drug store before she would go in the Commodore, where she and Lib McCreery and Is Stannard, Bryn Mawr classmates who were going abroad with her, were stopping. The breeze ended when they stopped the car, and the heat came back and everything began to get a little unsatisfactory and she wanted to go to her room and lie in the water. Their farewell was hurried and she was too conscious of looking like the wrath of God to enjoy any minute of it.
That was one of the things he commented on in his first letters. He had to stay in New York, in the heat, while she was cooling off and feeling like a human being on shipboard. Her letters were ardent and pleasant and pleased, full of new and sudden love. Nicholas Murray Butler and Anne Morgan and Eddie Cantor and Genevieve Tobin and Joseph E. Widener were on board. “I wonder if I love him” became a song the way she said it, and she would sing over and over to herself: “I won-der, I won-der.”
“Who? Joe Widener?” said Lib.
“The Joe part is right.”
“Joe English, the boy that came down to the boat?”
“His name is Ju, j u for Julian.”
“Well, who is it, then?”
“You wouldn’t know,” said Caroline.
“Oh, I know. The man who brought you back to the hotel in that awful condition.”
“That’s the one.”
But when his letters came they did not match her mood. Discontent and some petulance, and though she snatched at the love passages, she had to be honest with herself and admit that they read more like postscript material. She blamed the heat of New York and Reading and felt sorry for him and said so in her replies. He was the man all during her first trip to Europe whom she missed, with whom she wanted to share the fun of her discovery of foreign lands. And she missed him very much. Then she got a letter from him that soured her trip, or at least divided it into two phases. He wrote and wrote, for pages, but it all boiled down to one thing, which in subsequent days she recognized to be true: “…The truth is, darling, some kind of fate threw us together, but the same fate kept us apart the night before you sailed. Those people were fated to come and take you away from me that night. I have a feeling that if they hadn’t, you would have put into practice that theory that you spoke of the night we went swimming. But they did come, didn’t they? That being the case, you went away without putting your theory into practice and since then I have spoiled it as far as we’re concerned with another girl. So I suppose this ought to be quits. I feel like the devil…”
She didn’t believe the words, and then she wanted to cable him that another girl couldn’t make a difference. She loved him, and she regretted as much as he did that she had not spent her last night in New York with him. If only she could have talked to him. But that was impossible, and letters or cables were no good. Late in the afternoon of the day she got the letter she groped through to an explanation for the shock of his letter (which, however, did not make her any less unhappy): he had jolted her by being, so far as she knew, the first man who had tried to be honest with her. Reason did that for her, and then for the first time in her life she made up her mind to get drunk. And that night she did get drunk, with a handsome young Harvard Jew, who turned out to be something fancy in her sex life; he took her by easy stages down the scale of Paris entertainment, ending with a “circus.” She didn’t remember about that until the next afternoon, when the memory, which she knew she could not have dreamt, came through her hangover. Then and there she wanted to pack and go home, but Is Stannard saved her sanity. When Lib McCreery had gone out to do some shopping Is came in and sat on Caroline’s bed. “Where did Henry take you last night?”
“Oh, God. If I only knew.”
“Were you that blotto?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Caroline.
“Don’t you remember anything?”
“Very little.”
“Did he—do you remember going to a place where a man and a woman—you know?”
“I think so. I’m afraid so.”
“That’s where he took me, too. I thought I’d die when I went with him. I don’t understand him. I wasn’t nearly so drunk as you were. I remember. Every detail. But I can’t understand Henry. He never touched me. All he did was to keep watching me. He didn’t watch them, just me. I think he must have got pleasure out of the effect it had on me, those people. I don’t think we’d better see that crowd again, that he goes around with. He wants me to go again and he wants you to come.”
“God, I feel so terrible. Do you think he did anything to me?” said Caroline.
“Oh, no. I’m sure he didn’t. He gets some kind of pleasure out of watching us. There are people like that. You never went the limit, did you, Callie?”
“No.”
“Neither did I, and I think someone like Henry can tell that just by looking at you. I really do.”
“Then why does he—oh, I wish I were home.”
“Don’t worry. You notice he didn’t ask Lib. I’ve thought for years that Lib had an affair, probably more than one. So you and I are together on this. Just don’t say anything about it to Lib, and if Henry becomes too insistent we can leave Paris. Can I get you some aspirin or something?”
Caroline had had her scare, and she got drunk no more. For the rest of her trip she traded nothing but her dancing ability for the attentions of the English-speaking young men who were attracted to her; and for a year after that the frightening experience with Henry What’s His Name, and the disillusioning and humiliating experience with Joe Montgomery dictated her preference in men: they had to be clean, preferably blond, and not in the least glamorous or unusually attractive.
Back home, she had nothing to do in Gibbsville except to play bridge with the girls in the afternoon bridge clubs, and the mixed clubs in the evening; to take a course in shorthand and typewriting at the Gibbsville Business College, with vague notions of a winter in New York in the front of her mind; to turn out for the Tuesday women’s golf tournament-and-luncheon; to wheedle contributions on the various tag days; to act as chauffeuse for her mother, who could not learn to drive a combustion-engine car; to give her share of parties. She kept her weight under 115 pounds. She bobbed her hair. She drank a little more than the sociable amount, and she grew mildly profane. She came to know herself to be the most attractive of the Lantenengo Street girls. Without getting the rush that the girls still in school would get at dances, she still was more universally popular; the boys in the school crowd danced with her and so did the males of all ages up to forty, and a few did who were more than forty. She never had to pretend that she was having a better time sitting with a highball than she did on the dance floor. The girls she knew liked her without calling her a good sport or trusting her too far with their husbands or fiancés. They really did trust her, but they did not trust their men.