Chapter 32

The Timberlanes followed the ancient line of provincial tourists going to the capitals: Boeotians to Athens, Tatar caravans to Tibet, Artie and Mrs. Beppin of the Five Towns to London: excited, credulous, terrified of the boorishness and cheating that they expected to encounter.

The question, ancient before the first woman from Petra went up to Jerusalem, of whether Jinny should have new dresses made at home or get them more splendidly in the metropolis, was as usual compromised. She bought a gray suit that Harley Bozard assured her was a “fast little number, just in from New York,” and left the rest for Babylon.

Their train from Chicago to New York was an arrow of light. They had a compartment, this time, and none of their honeymoon apprehension. The train was filled with the most beautiful people, lovely girls, saintly old ladies, smooth but stalwart men with clothes and shell-rimmed spectacles and wrist-watches right out of the magazine advertisements.

Cass let himself relax and enjoy it. In his days in Congress he had not gone to New York often enough to be weary of it, and he was all holiday. He spoke not only to the Pullman porter, to whom it was no novelty, but to a clergyman and a traveling-man, and when a man in herring-bone tweed invited him to play bridge, and chuckled, “I warn you, though, the wife and I are professional gamblers,” Cass answered, “My wife certainly is. She gambled on marrying me.”

The man thought that was a pretty good joke.

The man said to his wife, “Our new friend here has made a pretty good joke.”

She said, “Come on now—don’t be a tightwad—what’s his pretty good joke?”

“He said the little woman took a worse risk in getting hitched to him than she ever did in bridge.”

“Yes, and what a gamble HE took on getting YOU to handle the rights to his pretty good joke. Let’s go!”

They played bridge through sixteen counties and forty-two college towns of Ohio, and had four Scotch highballs and shook hands all round. Jinny had won sixty-two cents and a lipstick, and Cass had lost one dollar.

“I’m a little drunk,” he said with self-approval, as they wove into their compartment.

“You get younger every day. When I first met you, you were sixty-one. Now you’re a bright thirty-four,” she approved.

They were up early. People from Grand Republic do get up at the most surprising times and places. Along the Hudson, the river of Presidents, Jinny was thrilled by West Point, the Taj Mahal, and the leaves of Vallombrosa. Suddenly there was an apartment house twenty stories high, and he exulted, “This is it!” She held his hand softly, and whispered, “I love you!”

But the Grand Central Terminal was too much for her: an underground city in which all the inhabitants were going to a fire. She clung to her stalwart Cass, a fellow who could beat off these shoving maniacs, as they doubtfully gave their precious, so-neatly-packed bags over to a redcap, dotted up an incline, crossed through an incredible room a thousand feet tall, and took a taxicab, not in the wholesome fresh air but in a tunnel. In the taxi she still snuggled close to him for protection, and fluttered, “I’m going to have a magnificent time, but let me catch my breath. Does it get any worse?”

As they blessedly came out into the light, she found that part of the taxi roof was of glass, and she gazed up in beatific idiocy.

“Look! Up there! That must be the Empire State Building or the Wrigley Building or something! Oh, jiminy, they are high. You know—high! I never felt so small. Don’t you dare leave me one minute all the time we’re here!”

She was less exalted when the taxicab stopped meechingly at the Melchester Arms, which Bradd Criley, as an expert on New York, had recommended. “It’s smaller and less expensive, but it’s one of the smartest hotels in town,” he said. “That’s where the real New Yorkers go, say while they’re opening up their apartments in the fall.” (Actually, the only native New Yorkers who frequented the Melchester were clothes-pressers, jobbing barbers, and telegraph messengers.)

It was a smaller hotel and rather plainer than the Pineland, back home, and the lobby was a block of darkness surrounding a large oak table with piles of magazines about travel and the Y.M.C.A. upon it. The clerk was a short, scaly, ill-disposed man with that thin and revelatory hair which is balder than baldness. He looked up at them as though he was getting good and tired of having strangers come in and speak to him without an introduction.

“I, uh—we have a reservation for a two-room suite,” said Cass.

“What is the name?”

“Timberlane. Grand Republic. Minnesota.”

The clerk, after having looked painstakingly through a file of cards containing names beginning with I and E, sighed, “What was that name again?”

“Timberlane.”

“Oh. I see! With a T. Tamburlaine.”

“No, no. TIMBERLANE. Tamburlaine is from Marlowe.”

“Well, we get a lot of people from Marlowe, too. The Melchester is a great favorite with all you folks from the Middle-west.”

As he laboriously went at the cards again, Jinny muttered, Why don’t you tell him you’re a judge and an ex-congressman, and give him a good time? He needs one.”

“Kitten, in this town, everybody’s an ex-congressman. We’re just a couple of rural nobodies.”

“And how! This suit that Harley sold me—I’m beginning to find potato bugs and alfalfa seeds in it. But Aloysius here is no Vanderbilt. I suppose New York has the biggest everything—even the biggest hicks. Let me slap him, darling, just once.”

The clerk turned to them again and said accusingly, “TIMBERLANE, that’s the name!”

“That’s so,” admitted Cass.

“Front!” said the clerk, suspiciously.

The elderly bellboy awoke from his dreams of the Civil War, conducted them to their suite, and gloomily accepted fifty cents. He was barely gone when Jinny protested, “Four bits? For that jerk? I’d of brought the bags up for ten cents! There you go, being the typical tourist you read about, overtipping and hurling thousands of dollars around when you have a greedy wife that could use it for luncheon-sets. Okay. Bankrupt the firm and see if I care.”

They had recovered the gaiety which had been dimmed in the hotel lobby, and they went down, arm in arm, to ask of the clerk where they could get theater tickets for tonight.

Maybe there was a ticket agency, over on Sixth Avenue and down three blocks? How would he know? He was busy, and really it wasn’t his job—

They left him hastily and at the agency inquired benevolently, like people willing to spend their money and confer a favor, whether for tonight they could get superior seats for Life with Father or for Arsenic and Old Lace.

The agent said genially, “You folks from out of town?”

“How did you guess it?” Jinny said viciously.

He looked at her, unanswering, he winked at her husband, and he offered, “I can get you tickets for either show for about the middle of next November. What you want for tonight is Slips and Slippers.”

“Do we?” worried Cass.

“Maybe not. I wouldn’t know. All I’m telling you is that it’s the best musical in New York for ten years, and I happen to have two good seats, but if you don’t want ’em—”

The seats cost $6.60 each.

When they were outside, Jinny begged, “Have you any room in your vest-pocket, now you’ve taken out all that money?”

“Why?”

“That rat made me feel so small when he winked at you that I could fit right in alongside your watch now. Jinny isn’t up to this town. They got street-cars and everything. Could we go back to Grand Republic right after the show tonight? Slips and Slippers! Six-sixty! Look! He meant sixty-six cents, didn’t he?”

Their train had arrived in mid-morning. All day they viewed New York, by bus and elevated and taxicab. There was so fabulously much to master that they felt they would never master any of it. To them it was all a jungle-spawning of people and buildings, fierce and purposeless. The tempo of the city rattled them: the quick turn of everyone’s head, the hard glance, the high nasal intensity of the voices.

They came back to their hotel suite—correct enough in its white paneling, but inhuman—and fell desperately asleep and awakened almost too late for their musical show. Jinny insisted that it was Isis, continuing her education by staring out of the window at the Manhattan streets, who had aroused them.

They reasoned that it would be clever to have a sandwich within walking-distance of the theater, and dine sumptuously at some gaudy restaurant afterward. Cass told Jinny that he had been responsibly informed that in Madrid people dined as late as ten-thirty. Probably even eleven. She said brightly, Yes, she had heard so.

It made them feel that they were already in Europe.

They found a Broadway restaurant the size of Grand Republic, with lovely black and red signs announcing that here one might have sandwiches made of smoked turkey, caviar, deviled ham with chives, or sixteen other rich materials. Nothing like this at home! they rejoiced.

The farther hill-country of the interior of the restaurant was filled with daises, mezzanines, balconies, and quarter-decks, while the valley was jammed with circular bars, S-shaped lunch-counters, wall-seats, divans, and booths, and all of these filled, and twenty people herded at the door waiting, apologetic for wanting to eat during wartime, while the restaurant’s private supreme court looked at the trespassers punitively. With the other prisoners waited Judge and Mrs. Timberlane. They felt that there was something obscene about wanting to eat at all, in this choking atmosphere of corned beef and cabbage, among this queue of dehumanized serfs who had no longer any power of resentment.

Jinny answered something that Cass hadn’t yet even said with, “You’re telling ME you like Grand Republic better!”

When they were finally herded to a table for two, they found that by merely cutting off one arm and one leg each, and balancing the glass of water on the sandwich plate which rested on the unordered and unwanted plate of shredded cabbage under which were tucked the knives and forks and the paper napkins, they could manage very well.

Their sandwiches were called Oaxaca Specials, and among other ores they recognized bacon, peanut butter, currant jelly, chicken feet and iodine. It cost one dollar.

EACH of the sandwiches cost one dollar.

Jinny whimpered, “About that Grand Republic now. I shall never leave it again. Oh, that beautiful, beautiful hash we used to have, back in civilization!”

On the Street again, she speculated, “Couldn’t we give our tickets to one of these pencil-sellers and magic ourselves back to—Let’s go over to the Zagos and have some rummy. I never realized what a wide-browed genius Juliet Zago is. Wouldn’t I like to see her and Scott right this minute! Pal, could I please kick the next couple that crowd me into the gutter? I guess maybe it would be wonderful to be in New York, if all seven million of ’em didn’t want to occupy the same spot we’re walking over, all at the same time.”

They arrived in the theater as in a calm haven, but that was the last calm they felt till they were back in their hotel, with Jinny trying to explain it all to Isis.

They never did discover what the musical play was about. From having attended the more salacious burlesque shows in Minneapolis, when he was a student, Cass had a few notions, but Jinny was entirely bewildered. There was, in the plot, a young lieutenant who was serving in Tahiti, but as he was simultaneously rowing on the Vassar crew and selling paper drinking-cups to a Turkish harem, it was hard to follow his stream of consciousness. There was also a pair of funny fellows with jokes about the less attractive vices.

Cass and Jinny sat with hand tight in hand, unsmiling, uncomfortable, wondering what the laughter was about. At intermission, Jinny said only “Six-sixty!” but after the show, as they hobbled away through the funereally festive crowd, “I’m old-fashioned and I like it! Honey, if we got a plane, a very fast plane, maybe we could see Cleo before dawn—and find out if that beast of an upholsterer at Tarr’s has the curtains up in the new house yet. You know, they always advertise how fast you can fly to New York, but what would inspire deep public confidence would be to tell how fast and far you can get away from New York. Oh, my sweet, you’ve got poor Jinny caught and happy in a sun-trap at home for the rest of her life!”

They had read, in the syndicated gossip columns devoted to the gracious doings of cafe society, about the Marmoset Club, that debonair night restaurant, that Bowery saloon in a velvet evening-cloak, where cigarette-bejittered heiresses are photographed with flyers, and cinema press-agents exchange copyrighted wisecracks with abortionists, but after the Broadway sandwich-abbatoir, they were ready to be disappointed. Yet the Marmoset was even more select, smart, exclusive, fashionable, knowing, chic, gracious, elegant, decorative, glamorous, glittering, glistening, shimmering, witty, sophisticated, mundane, gay, international, deft, urbane, and generally expensive than had been proclaimed by the columnists.

The very small lobby was a jewel-box in which stood a young gentleman with the clothes of a whisky advertisement, the eyes of a detective, the gentle effrontery of a diplomat, and the accent of the Bronx.

“Uh—” said Cass, and again, “Uh—can we get a table?”

“Have you a reservation?”

“N-no.”

Jinny said in perfectly clear, sweet, womanly tones, “Let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t like him.”

The palace eunuch instantly recognized her then as a distinguished movie actress, and he said almost humbly, “I’ll see what I can do. I’m sure I can find you something, madame.”

He did quite well for them, too. He found a table in the Que–Voulez-Vous Room, the largest of the five that made up the Marmoset, despite the fact that it was almost half full.

Well, and it was a beautiful room, and Cass and Jinny had to admit it; better even than the Fiesole Room at the Hotel Pineland, back home. The walls were lined with gray silk, tucked and flaring; under the crimson ceiling were constellations of crystal; and there was a delicate, rustling quiet except at a center table where a male clothes-designer was breaking a rather elderly lady’s heart and in a corner where an authoress was breaking her contract.

Word had been carried by the restaurant’s efficient O.G.P.U. that the pretty girl with the white mantle was somebody important in Hollywood and the man with her either a doctor or a major in mufti. This was no sensation at the Marmoset. That new Monte Carlo could really have been stirred only by the appearance of the President with Queen Nefertiti. But it did insure a captain of waiters coming to take their order without disciplining them by making them wait.

However, by the ease with which he sold them a bottle of Peruvian champagne and mushrooms a noisette under glass, he could see that here was only another dull pair of uncelebrities. He passed the word, and Cass and Jinny went back into the refrigerator. No one even glanced at them, except the male designer, who looked designing.

Cass saw Jinny’s spirit paling in her, and he urged abruptly, “Well, you’re the prettiest girl here. There isn’t one that has your fire or your eyes or a clear skin like yours.”

“And you’re the only man here that looks as if he could fight a battle or build a town.”

More silence, out of which she burst, “If I saw Boone and Queenie Havock over at a table there, I’d go over and I’d kiss both of ’em. Twice. And I would request Boone, but very nicely, to stand up and holler, ‘Do you clams know who this is? This is Judge Timberlane and his young wife, d’ you hear me?’”

“And Boone would probably do it.”

“And Boone would certainly do it. That’s why I adore him—now.”

That was Monday evening, the end of Jinny’s first day among the revelries of New York.

Comfortingly close to each other, they slept in one of the twin beds, for shelter against the bleak wind of urban indifference, while all night the little crystal cat looked out on the prison wall of the New York street. It seemed very small on the broad white sill.

There is a Grand Republic colony in New York, as there is a Smyrna colony, a Benares colony, a Reykjavik colony, and it is the duty of that colony to be gleeful at the arrival of all visitors from the home town, and to take them to that restaurant at which the ordeal of being cordial can be most quickly got over most inexpensively. Equally, it is the duty of the visitors to telephone to all members of the colony upon arrival and to allow themselves to be becordialed. (There are also cases in which the two parties to the social contract really want to see each other.)

With a notion of being thoughtful and not binding them, Cass had not written of his coming to any of the colonists, nor to Dennis Thane, the only one of his classmates in the University of Minnesota law school whom he knew to be in New York. The stuttering task of finding his old acquaintances he took up on Tuesday morning, while Jinny, cocking her bare toes, commented with ribaldry from the rumpled bed.

Mrs. Byron Grannick? She was still at Stockbridge.

Dr. Cope Anderson, the chemist? He was still at his laboratory on Cape Cod.

Mr. and Mrs. Kenny Wargate? They were still at Easthampton.

By now Cass felt empty and unwanted.

He reached only Dennis Thane (of the law-firm of Crossbow, Murphy, and Thane), who invited them for lunch tomorrow, and Bradd Criley’s sister, Mrs. William Elderman, Avis Criley Elderman, who forebodingly insisted on coming into town from her suburban home in Darien, Connecticut, and on performing the rite of taking them to dinner on Thursday evening.

“Anyway, we have two friends in the world, Dennis and Avis, except for Avis,” sighed the lonely Judge Timberlane.

He had not quite dared telephone to one former Grand Republican, the only person from their section of Minnesota, aside from Salem Volk the veteran liberal politician, who was famous to the whole world: Berg Nord, the actor-director-producer-dramatist, who had been born on a farm in Radisson County. In fact Nord was so distinguished that every citizen back home was under a compulsion to inform strangers, “Oh, we don’t take Berg seriously. We still call him ‘Ice Berg.’ He don’t try to pull anything on us, like maybe he does on you folks. We know him too well.”

Nord’s latest play, Feast of Reason, of which he was author and star, had just re-opened for the second year of its run. Back home, Cass had airily thought of telephoning to Nord about tickets— though he would insist on paying for them, of course—but now, with the baby-tiger purr of New York outside his window, he dared not telephone to Nord at all, but after breakfast trotted meekly to the ticket agency, where the learned vendor condescendingly let him have two seats. Cass held them with pride. . . . He had never seen Berg on the stage, but as a child of three, he had ridden pickaback on the shoulders of the twenty-three-year-old Cousin Berg Nord. Now he asked of the omniscience, “Nord is considered a fine actor in New York, isn’t he?”

“Oh, merely the best, after Lunt, that’s all!”

Cass had lost another inch of stature by the time he had regained the safety of their hotel and Jinny’s presence.