She couldn’t go back to the office. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing the boys and the people she knew, the people who had known them together. She called up and said she had a bad case of grippe and would have to stay in bed a couple of days. She stayed all day in the blank misery of the narrow rooms. Towards evening she dozed off to sleep on the couch. She woke up with a start thinking she heard a step in the hall outside. It wasn’t Don, the steps went on up the next flight. After that she didn’t sleep any more.
The next morning the phone woke her just when she settled herself in bed to drowse a little. It was Sylvia Goldstein saying she was sorry Mary had the grippe and asking if there was anything she could do. Oh, no, she was fine, she was just going to stay in bed all day, Mary answered in a dead voice. “Well, I suppose you knew all the time about Comrade Stevens and Comrade Lichfield… you two were always so close… they were married in Moscow… she’s an English comrade… she spoke at the big meeting at the Bronx Casino last night… she’s got a great shock of redhair… stunning but some of the girls think it’s dyed. Lots of the comrades didn’t know you and Comrade Stevens had brokenup… isn’t it sad things like that have to happen in the movement?” “Oh, that was a long time ago… Goodby, Sylvia,” said Mary harshly and hung up. She called up a bootlegger she knew and told him to send her up a bottle of gin.
The next afternoon there was a light rap on the door and when Mary opened it a crack there was Ada wreathed in silver fox and breathing out a great gust of Forêt Vierge. “Oh, Mary darling, I knew something was the matter… You know sometimes I’m quite psychic. And when you didn’t come to my concert, first I was mad but then I said to myself I know the poor darling’s sick. So I just went right down to your office. There was the handsomest boy there and I just made him tell me where you lived. He said you were sick with the grippe and so I came right over. My dear, why aren’t you in bed? You look a sight.”
“I’m all right,” mumbled Mary numbly, pushing the stringy hair off her face. “I been… making plans… about how we can handle this relief situation better.”
“Well, you’re just coming up right away to my spare bedroom and let me pet you up a little… I don’t believe it’s grippe, I think it’s overwork… If you’re not careful you’ll be having a nervous breakdown.” “Maybe sumpen like that.” Mary couldn’t articulate her words. She didn’t seem to have any will of her own any more; she did everything Ada told her. When she was settled in Ada’s clean lavendersmelling spare bed they sent out for some barbital and it put her to sleep. Mary stayed there several days eating the meals Ada’s maid brought her, drinking all the drinks Ada would give her, listening to the continual scrape of violin practice that came from the other room all morning. But at night she couldn’t sleep without filling herself up with dope. She didn’t seem to have any will left. It would take her a half an hour to decide to get up to go to the toilet.
After she’d been at Ada’s a week she began to feel she ought to go home. She began to be impatient of Ada’s sly references to unhappy loveaffairs and broken hearts and the beauty of abnegation and would snap Ada’s head off whenever she started it. “That’s fine,” Ada would say. “You are getting your meanness back.” For some time Ada had been bringing up the subject of somebody she knew who’d been crazy about Mary for years and who was dying to see her again. Finally Mary gave in and said she would go to a cocktail party at Eveline Johnson’s where Ada said she knew he’d be. “And Eveline gives the most wonderful parties. I don’t know how she does it because she never has any money, but all the most interesting people in New York will be there. They always are. Radicals too, you know. Eveline can’t live without her little group of reds.”
Mary wore one of Ada’s dresses that didn’t fit her very well and went out in the morning to have her hair curled at Saks’s where Ada always had hers curled. They had some cocktails at Ada’s place before they went. At the last minute Mary said she wouldn’t go because she’d finally got it out of Ada that it was George Barrow who was going to be at the party. Ada made Mary drink another cocktail and a reckless feeling came over her and she said all right, let’s get a move on.
There was a smiling colored maid in a fancy lace cap and apron at the door of the house who took them down the hall to a bedroom full of coats and furs where they were to take off their wraps. As Ada was doing her face at the dressingtable Mary whispered in her ear, “Just think what our reliefcommittee could do with the money that woman wastes on senseless entertaining.” “But she’s a darling,” Ada whispered back excitedly. “Honestly, you’ll like her.” The door had opened behind their backs letting in a racketing gust of voices, laughs, tinkle of glasses, a whiff of perfume and toast and cigarettesmoke and gin. “Oh, Ada,” came a ringing voice. “Eveline darling, how lovely you look… This is Mary French, you know I said I’d bring her… She’s my oldest friend.” Mary found herself shaking hands with a tall slender woman in a pearlgrey dress. Her face was very white and her lips were very red and her long large eyes were exaggerated with mascara. “So nice of you to come,” Eveline Johnson said and sat down suddenly among the furs and wraps on the bed. “It sounds like a lovely party,” cried Ada.
“I hate parties. I don’t know why I give them,” said Eveline Johnson. “Well, I guess I’ve got to go back to the menagerie… Oh, Ada, I’m so tired.”
Mary found herself studying the harsh desperate lines under the makeup round Mrs. Johnson’s mouth and the strained tenseness of the cords of her neck. Their silly life tells on them, she was saying to herself.
“What about the play?” Ada was asking. “I was so excited when I heard about it.”
“Oh, that’s ancient history now,” said Eveline Johnson sharply. “I’m working on a plan to bring over the ballet… turn it into something American… I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
“Oh, Eveline, did the screenstar come?” asked Ada, giggling.
“Oh, yes, they always come.” Eveline Johnson sighed. “She’s beautiful… You must meet her.”
“Of course anybody in the world would come to your parties, Eveline.”
“I don’t know why they should… they seem just too boring to me.” Eveline Johnson was ushering them through some sliding doors into a highceilinged room dusky from shaded lights and cigarettesmoke where they were swallowed up in a jam of welldressed people talking and making faces and tossing their heads over cocktail glasses. There seemed no place to stand so Mary sat down at the end of a couch beside a little marbletopped table. The other people on the couch were jabbering away among themselves and paid no attention to her. Ada and the hostess had disappeared behind a wall of men’s suits and afternoongowns.
Mary had had time to smoke an entire cigarette before Ada came back followed by George Barrow, whose thin face looked flushed and whose adamsapple stuck out further than ever over his collar. He had a cocktail in each hand. “Well well well, little Mary French, after all these years,” he was saying with a kind of forced jollity. “If you knew the trouble we’d had getting these through the crush.”