“Well gee that’s great.”
“It’s going to mean giving up — everything. And it’s going to mean work, just slaving drudgery from morning to night — I only pray that God will give me strength to do all that I’ll have to do.”
“I guess singing’s no cinch at that.”
“But... something has to be done.”
“Yeah? Done about what?”
“About everything. We can’t go on like this, Leonard. Don’t you see? I know you do the best you can, and that you can’t get work when there is no work. But something has to be done. If you can’t earn a living, then I’ll have to.”
Now to you, maybe that sounds like a game little wife stepping up beside her husband to help him fight when the fighting was tough. It wasn’t that at all. In the first place, Doris had high-hatted me ever since we had been married, on account of my family, on account of my being a low-brow that couldn’t understand all this refined stuff she went in for, on account of everything she could think of. But one thing she hadn’t been able to take away from me. I was the one that went out and got the dough, and plenty of it, which was what her fine family didn’t seem to have so much of any more. And this meant that at last she had found a way to high-hat me, even on that. Why she was going back to singing was that she wanted to go back to singing, but she wasn’t satisfied just to do that. She had to harpoon me with it, and harpoon me where it hurt. And in the second place, all we had between us and starvation was the dough I had salted away in a good bank, enough to last at least three more years, and after that the house, and after that my share of the Craig-Borland Building, and after that a couple of other pieces of property the firm had, if things got that bad, and I had never asked Doris to cut down by one cent on the household expenses, or live any different than we had always lived, or give up anything at all. I mean, it was a lot of hooey, and I began to get sore. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. The sight of her lying there like the dying swan, with this noble look on her face, and just working at the job of making me look like a heel, kind of got my goat.
“So. We’re just starving to death, are we?”
“Well? Aren’t we?”
“Just practically in the poorhouse.”
“I worry about it so much that sometimes I’m afraid I’ll have a breakdown or something. I don’t bother you about it, and I don’t ever intend to. There’s no use of your knowing what I go through. But... something has to be done. If something isn’t done, Leonard, what are we going to come to?”
“So you’re going out and have a career, all for the husband and the kiddies, so they can eat, and have peppermint sticks on the Christmas tree, and won’t have to bunk in Central Park when the big blizzard comes.”
“I even think of that.”
“Doris, be your age.”
“I’m only trying to—”
“You’re only trying to make a bum out of me, and I’m not going to buy it.”
“You have to thwart me, don’t you Leonard? Always.”
“There it goes. I knew it. So I thwart you.”
“You’ve thwarted me ever since I’ve known you, Leonard. I don’t know what there is about you that has to make a woman a drudge, that seems incapable of realizing that she might have aspirations too. I suppose I ought to make allowance—”
“For the pig-sty I was raised in, is that it?”
“Well Leonard, there’s something about you.”
“How long have you had this idea?”
“I’ve been thinking about it quite some time.”
“About two months, hey?”
“Two months? Why two months?”
“It seems funny that this egg comes back from Europe and right away you decide to resume your career.”
“How wrong you are. Oh, how wrong you are.”
“And by the time he gets his forty a week, or whatever he takes, and his commission on the music you buy, and all the rest of his cuts, you’ll be taken for a swell ride. There won’t be much left for the husband and kiddies.”
“I’m not being taken for a ride.”
“No?”
“I’m not paying Lorentz anything.”
“... What?”
“I’ve explained to him. About our — circumstances.”
I hit the roof then. I wanted to know what business she had telling him about our circumstances or anything else. I said I wouldn’t be under obligations to him, and that if she was going to have him she had to pay him. She lay there shaking her head, like the pity of it was that I couldn’t understand, and never could understand. “Leonard, I couldn’t pay Hugo, even if I wanted to — not now.”
“Why not now?”
“When he knows — how hard it is for us. And it’s not important.”
“It’s plenty important — to me.”
“Hugo is that strange being that you don’t seem to understand, that you even deny exists — but he exists, just the same. Hugo is an artist. He believes in my voice. That’s all. The rest is irrelevant. Money, time, work, everything.”
That gave me the colic so bad I had to stop, count ten, and begin all over again. “... Listen, Doris. To hell with all this. Nobody’s opposing your career. I’m all for your career, and I don’t care what it costs, and I don’t care whether it ever brings in a dime. But why the big act? Why do you have to go through all this stuff that I’m thwarting you, and we’re starving, and all that? Why can’t you just study, and shut up about it?”
“Do we have to go back over all that?”
“And if that’s how you feel about it, what the hell did you ever marry me for, anyway?”
That slipped out on me. She didn’t say anything, and I took it back. Oh yes, I took it back, because down deep inside of me I knew why she had married me, and I had spent seven years with my ears stopped up, so she’d never have the chance to tell the truth about it. She had married me for the dough I brought in, and that was all she had married me for. For the rest, I just bored her, except for that streak in her that had to torture everybody that came within five feet of her. The whole thing was that I was nuts about her and she didn’t give a damn about me, and don’t ask me why I was nuts about her. I don’t know why I was nuts about her. She was a phoney, she had the face of a saint and the soul of a snake, she treated me like a dog, and still I was nuts about her. So I took it back. I apologized for it. I backed down like I always did, and lost the fight, and wished I had whatever it would take to stand up against her, but I didn’t.
“Time to dress, Leonard.”
When we got home that night, she undressed in the dressing room, and when she came out she had on one of the Chinese kimonos, and went to the door of the nursery, where the kids had slept before they got old enough to have a room... “I’ve decided to sleep in here for a while, Leonard. I’ve got exercises to do when I get up, and — all sorts of things. There’s no reason why you should be disturbed.”
“Any way you like.”
“Or — perhaps you would be more comfortable in there.”
Yes, I even did that. I slept that night in the nursery, and took up my abode there from then on. What I ought to do was go in and sock her in the jaw, I knew that. But I just looked at Peter Rabbit, where he was skipping across the wall in the moonlight, and thought to myself: “Yeah, Borland, that’s you all right.”
2
So for the next three months there was nothing but vocalizing all over the place, and then it turned out she was ready for a recital in Town Hall. For the month after that we got ready for the recital, and the less said about it the better. Never mind what Town Hall cost, and the advertising cost, and that part. What I hated was drumming up the crowd. I don’t know if you know how a high-toned Social Registerite like Doris does when she gets ready to give a recital to show off her technique. She calls up all her friends, and sandbags them to buy tickets. Not just to come, you understand, on free tickets, though to me that would be bad enough. To buy tickets, at $2 a ticket. And not only does she call up her friends, but her husband calls up his friends, and all her sisters and her cousins and her aunts call up their friends, and those friends have to come through, else it’s an unfriendly act. I got so I hated to go in the River Club, for fear I’d run into somebody that was on the list, and that I hadn’t buttonholed, and if I let him get out of there without buttonholing him, and Doris found out about it, there’d be so much fuss that I’d buttonhole him, just to save trouble. Oh yes, culture has its practical side when you start up Park Avenue with it. It’s not just that I’m a roughneck that I hate it. There are other reasons too.