“Yes.”
“All right, then, shoot.”
“Grant, I’m calm too — if you’ll overlook that little outbreak just now — and I’m not trying to stir up a fight either. This is what lies back of it. You think you’re objecting to Lula. That’s not it. You’re really objecting to me.”
“Why, that’s ridiculous.”
“You think it is, but it isn’t. Grant, Lula is my friend. She’s almost the only friend I’ve got. I admit she’s not much of a friend. I wish she was different. I bitterly wish she was different. But she’s not different. Lula is the world I came from. Perhaps it’s not much of a world, I don’t know. But it was my world and I can’t change it. The trouble with you is, you’re trying to pretend I was not part of that world at all. You’re trying to convince yourself that in some ways I was an exception, that I didn’t really belong in that world. Well, I’m an exception. I’ve got more gump than most girls in that world have got and I’ve found out by now that I’ve got more brains. I do better than they do. I make more money and I have more ambition. But whether I’m an exception or not, I was a part of that world and I’m still part of it. If it wasn’t for you, money would take care of Lula’s case, and I have money, anyhow a little bit, and I would be willing to take care of it. But I can’t keep you out of it. As you say, there you are, and if you don’t accept Lula you don’t accept me. I have done my best to accept your friends, to say nothing of your family. I have conquered my pride, eaten their bread and drunk their liquor, even when they told me I wasn’t welcome. You are going to do the same. When you sit down to the table and eat dinner with me and Lula Schultz, then I’ll know that it’s not true, some of the things that people say about you.”
“What do people say about me?”
“...That was a slip. I shouldn’t mention things that have been said about you, and I’m sorry.”
“I asked what they say about me.”
“They say you’re a snob.”
“All right. Perhaps I am.”
“I don’t really care what you are, Grant. I’m a snob, too, in a way. I’m terribly conceited and always thinking I’m more capable than other people and — I don’t care about that either. You can be what you are and I’ll not complain. But — you’ll have to accept me. I’ll take no less.”
“I accept you but I will not accept this — Lula. Whatever her name is.”
“Grant, whenever I have something difficult I always try to think it over a little before I come to a decision. Will you do that much for me?”
He came over, put his arms around me again and stood with me a long time, giving me little pats on the arm. “I’ll think it over, Carrie. But I know in advance the decision I’ll come to. I’ll not accept Lula.”
So he didn’t accept her, and she stayed on and on and on. Every afternoon she would go out on the pretense of seeking work but would be back by five-thirty, in time for dinner, for she always seemed to have a big appetite. But Grant hardly ever saw her. He left the apartment long before she got up, around nine o’clock most mornings, and didn’t come home until eleven or twelve at night.
Two or three days of this was bad enough, but when the story of my life began to run in one of the tabloids it was even worse. They had everything in there, from the orphan asylum to my girlhood on the farm, to my job as a waitress in Nyack, but they had it all garbled up, and although it was written in such a way as to seem friendly to me, it made your skin crawl, the things they put in. It was not signed, so it was impossible to tell who was writing it. The night after it started when Grant came home, I tried to get him to do something about it as it seemed to me they had no right to print my life story unless I gave my consent. But he merely shrugged his shoulders and said it didn’t make any difference. Next day I called Mr. Hunt and he said he would consult a lawyer. But the next morning when he called me back, he said the lawyer had told him they did have the right, provided the story was not malicious, and that while I could seek an injunction, if I wanted to, the probability was that I wouldn’t be successful.
I told him never mind, and the horrible story kept running and running, and when it got to the point of my marriage with Grant it revealed shockingly intimate details of our life together, until I thought I would go insane from reading it. Yet all I could do was sit every morning and every evening with Lula and listen to her gabble about how badly Grant treated me and what she would do if she were in my place.
One day around lunch time Grant came in with his mother. She made herself very agreeable, and I said nothing to indicate there had been any unpleasantness between us. I remembered that she liked an old-fashioned with Scotch, got out the tray and made her one, gave Grant a rye highball, and waited for her to say what she wanted. She came to the point very quickly. Smiling at me so that her eyes didn’t look like glass at all, she said: “I hear a little situation has developed in connection with the young lady who is staying here.”
My first impulse was to look surprised and act as though I couldn’t imagine what situation she meant, but on second thought I decided that frankness would probably be the better policy. So I said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s true.”
“You feel some sense of loyalty to the girl, Grant tells me.”
“I feel some sense of that, and I also feel that she represents something I have to make an issue over with Grant. If I back down on Lula I’ve lost everything. I’ve renounced what I was, I can’t change myself into something else, and that will leave me being exactly nothing at all. I won’t be that.”
“In your place I wouldn’t either.”
She smiled then and turned to Waldo. “It’s just as I told you — a question of pride. Not stubbornness, not stupidity, not capriciousness. It’s pride, pure and simple, and you have to respect it.”
“I respect it, but I don’t respect Lula.”
She sipped her cocktail, smiled at me again and, although I knew I couldn’t for a second trust her, I felt myself yielding to the charm she could turn on when she wanted. “May I call you Carrie?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Harris.”
“Then, Carrie, why don’t you let me step in with a plan that might relieve the whole difficulty?”
“I would be delighted if you could.”
“The girl, as I understand it, is out of work. Very well, then I’ll give her a job.”
I didn’t know what to say about this. It didn’t meet the issue I had spoken of, and yet I was so sick of Lula and so miserable about the point I had come to with Grant, that I only wished to wash my hands of the whole mess and start over again, if that was possible. She must have sensed what was in my mind, because she quickly went on to admit that it didn’t quite settle anything, but pointed out that it wasn’t exactly a clear issue since Grant’s objections to the girl were more personal than social, and that the main thing was that he and his family see my point of view, and that this was what she was trying to do. So then I weakly sidestepped the whole thing by saying it wasn’t really up to me at all, it was up to Lula. So then they both looked at each other and she said of course that was it, and there was nothing I could do but call Lula. She came out, and I had one crumb of satisfaction, that she didn’t even try to sit down in the presence of Mrs. Harris, but stood there, first on one foot and then on the other, saying yes ma’am and no ma’am in a frightened way that showed her up for the servant girl she really was.