Chapter 9

That was how Hattie treated it. Especially during those placid years of the phenomenal New York run of "Love Me Long." The outer edge of her reality. The heart of her reality? Why, the heart of it was the long morning hours in her own fragrant kitchen over doughnuts boiled in oil and snowed under in powdered sugar! Cookies that bit with a snap. Filet of sole boned with fingers deft at it and served with a merest fluff of tartar sauce. Marcia ate like that. Preciously. Pecksniffily. An egg at breakfast a gag to the sensibilities! So Hattie ate hers in the kitchen, standing, and tucked the shell out of sight, wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Beefsteak, for instance, sickened Marcia, because there was blood in the ooze of its juices. But Hattie had a sly way of camouflage. Filet mignon (so strengthening, you see) crushed under a little millinery of mushrooms and served under glass. Then when Marcia's neat little row of neat little teeth bit in and the munch began behind clean and careful lips, Hattie's heart, a regular old bandit for cunning, beat hoppity, skippity, jump!

Those were her realities. Home. The new sandwich cutters. Heart shape. Diamond shape. Spade. The strip of hall carpet newly discovered to scour like new with brush and soap and warm water. Epstein's meat market throws in free suet. The lamp with the opal-silk shade for Marcia's piano. White oilcloth is cleaner than shelf paper. Dotted Swiss curtains, the ones in Marcia's room looped back with pink bows. Old sashes, pressed out and fringed at the edges.

And if you think that Hattie's six rooms and bath and sunny, full-sized kitchen, on Morningside Heights, were trumped-up ones of the press agent for the Sunday Supplement, look in.

Any afternoon. Tuesday, say, and Marcia just home from school. On Tuesday afternoon of every other week Hattie made her cream, in a large copper pot that hung under the sink. Six dozen half-pint jars waiting to be filled with Brown Cold Cream. One hundred and forty-four jars a month. Guaranteed Color-fast. Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate. Labeled. Sealed. Sold. And demand exceeding the supply. An ingratiating, expert cream, known the black-faced world over. It slid into the skin, not sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper. For instance, Hattie's make-up cream for Linda in "Love Me Long" was labeled "Chocolate." But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.

Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds, white wax--But never mind. Hattie's dark secret was her own.

Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway's maid _de luxe_ had been her laboratory. It was almost her boast now--remember the sunken headstones--that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the theaters' last ten years.

It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a month. She enjoyed making it. Singing as she stirred or rather stirring as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.

Often Marcia, home from day school, watched. Propped up in the window frame with her pet cat, a Persian, with eyes like swimming pools with painted green bottoms, seated in a perfect circle in her quiet lap, for all the world in the attitude of a sardel except for the toothpick through.

Sometimes it almost seemed as if Marcia did the purring. She could sit like that, motionless, her very stare seeming to sleep. To Hattie that stare was beautiful, and in a way it was. As if two blue little suns were having their high noon.

Sometimes Marcia offered to help, because toward the end, Hattie's back could ache at this process, terribly, the pain knotting itself into her face when the rotary movement of her stirring arm began to yank at her nerves.

"Momie, I'll stir for a while."

Marcia's voice was day-schooled. As clipped, as boxed, and as precise as a hedge. Neat, too, as neat as the way her clear lips met, and her teeth, which had a little mannerism of coming down after each word, biting them off like threads. They were appealing teeth that had never grown big or square. Very young corn. To Hattie there was something about them that reminded her of a tiny set of Marcia's doll dishes that she had saved. Little innocences.

"I don't mind stirring, dear. I'm not tired."

"But your face is all twisted."

Hattie's twisted face could induce in Marcia the same gagged pallor that the egg in the morning or the red in the beefsteak juices brought there.

"Go in and play the piano awhile, Marcy, I'll be finished soon."

"Sh-h-h! No. Pussy-kitty's asleep."

As the cream grew heavier and its swirl in the pot slower, Hattie could keep the twist out of her face only by biting her tongue. She did, and a little arch of sweat came out in a mustache.

The brown mud of the cream began to fluff. Hattie rubbed a fleck of it into her freckled forearm. Yes, Hattie's arm was freckled, and so was the bridge of her nose, in a little saddle. Once there had been a prettiness to the freckles because they whitened the skin they sprinkled and were little stars to the moon reddiness of Hattie's hair. But the red of the moon had set coldly in Hattie's hair now, and the stars were just freckles, and there was the dreaded ridge of flesh showing above the ridge of her corsets, and when she leaned forward to stir her cheeks hung forward like a spaniel's, not of fat, but heaviness. Hattie's arms and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales. Kindly freckled granite. She weighed almost twice what she looked. Marcia, whose hips were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged it. Mab smacking the Himalayas.

After a while, there in the window frame, Marcia closed her eyes. There was still the illusion of a purr about her. Probably because, as her kitten warmed in its circle, its coziness began to whir mountingly. The September afternoon was full of drone. The roofs of the city from Hattie's kitchen window, which overlooked Morningside Heights, lay flat as slaps. Tranced, indoor quiet. Presently Hattie began to tiptoe. The seventy-two jars were untopped now, in a row on a board over the built-in washtub. Seventy-two yawning for content. Squnch! Her enormous spoon into the copper kettle and flop, gurgle, gooze, softly into the jars. One--two--three--At the sixty-eighth, Marcia, without stirring or lifting her lids, spoke into the sucky silence.

"Momie?"

"Yes, Marcy."

"You'll be glad."

Hattie, pausing at the sixty-eighth, "Why, dear?"

"I came home in Nonie Grosbeck's automobile. I'm invited to a dinner dance October the seventeenth. At their house in Gramercy Park."

The words must have gone to Hattie's knees, because, dropping a spat of mulatto cold cream on the linoleum, she sat down weakly on the kitchen chair that she had painted blue and white to match the china cereal set on the shelf above it.

"Marcy!"

"And she likes me better than any girl in school, momie, and I'm to be her chum from to-day on, and not another girl in school is invited except Edwina Nelson, because her father's on nearly all the same boards of directors with Mr. Grosbeck, and--"

"Marcia! Marcia! and you came home from school just as if nothing had happened! Child, sometimes I think you're made of ice."

"Why, I'm glad, momie."

But that's what there were, little ice glints of congealed satisfaction in Marcia's eyes.

"Glad," said Hattie, the word full of tears. "Why, honey, you don't realize it, but this is the beginning! This is the meaning of my struggle to get you into Miss Harperly's school. It wasn't easy. I've never told you the--strings I had to pull. Conservative people, you see. That's what the Grosbecks are, too. Home people. The kind who can afford to wear dowdy hats and who have lived in the same house for thirty years."

"Nome's mother was born in the house they live in."

"Substantial people, who half-sole their shoes and endow colleges. Taxpayers. Policyholders. Church members. Oh, Marcia, those are the safe people!"

"There's a Grosbeck memorial window in the Rock Church."

"I used to be so afraid for you, Marcy. Afraid you would take to the make-believe folks. The play people. The theater. I used to fear for you! The Pullman car. The furnished room. That going to the hotel room, alone, nights after the show. You laugh at me sometimes for just throwing a veil over my face and coming home black-face. It's because I'm too tired, Marcy. Too lonesome for home. On the road I always used to think of all the families in the audience. The husbands and wives. Brides and grooms. Sweethearts. After the performance they all went to homes. To brownstone fronts like the Grosbecks'. To cottages. To flats. With a snack to eat in the refrigerator or laid out on the dining-room table. Lamps burning and waiting. Nighties laid out and bedcovers turned back. And then--me. Second-rate hotels. That walk through the dark downtown streets. Passing men who address you through closed lips. The dingy lobby. There's no applause lasts long enough, Marcia, to reach over that moment when you unlock your hotel room and the smell of disinfectant and unturned mattress comes out to you."

"Ugh!"

"Oh, keep to the safe people, Marcia! The unexciting people, maybe, but the safe home-building ones with old ideals and old hearthstones."

"Nonie says they have one in their library that comes from Italy."

"Hitch your ideal to a hearthstone like that, Marcia."

"Nonie goes to riding academy."

"So shall you."

"It's six dollars an hour."

"I don't care."

"Her father's retired except for being director in banks. And, momie--they don't mind, dear--about us. Nonie knows that my--father is--is separated and never lived at home with us. She's broad-minded. She says just so there's no scandal, a divorce, or anything like that. She said it's vulgar to cultivate only rich friends. She says she'd go with me even if she's forbidden to."

"Why, Marcy darling, why should she be forbidden?"

"Oh, Nonie's broadminded. She says if two people are unsuited they should separate, quietly, like you and my father. She knows we're one of the first old Southern families on my father's side. I--I'm not trying to make you talk about it, dear, but--but we are--aren't we?"

"Yes, Marcy."

"He--he was just--irresponsible. That's not being--not nice people, is it?"

"No, Marcy."

"Nonie's not forbidden. She just meant in case, momie. You see, with some old families like hers--the stage--but Nonie says her father couldn't even say anything to that if he wanted to. His own sister went on the stage once, and they had to hush it up in the papers."

"Did you explain to her, Marcy, that stage life at its best can be full of fine ideals and truth? Did you make her see how regular your own little life has been? How little you know about--my work? How away I've kept you? How I won't even play out-of-town engagements so we can always be together in our little home? You must explain all those things to your friends at Miss Harperly's. It helps--with steady people."

"I have, momie, and she's going to bring me home every afternoon in their automobile after we've called for her brother Archie at Columbia Law School."

"Marcy! the Grosbeck automobile bringing you home every day!"

"And it's going to call for me the night of the party. Nonie's getting a lemon taffeta."

"I'll get you ivory, with a bit of real lace!"

"Oh, momie, momie, I can scarcely wait!"

"What did she say, Marcy, when she asked--invited you?"

"She?"

"Nonie."

"Why--she--didn't invite me, momie."

"But you just said--"

"It was her brother Archie invited me. We called for him at Columbia Law School, you see. It was he invited me. Of course Nonie wants me and said 'Yes' right after him--but it's he--who wants Nonie and me to be chums. I--He--I thought--I--told--you--momie."

Suddenly Marcia's eyes, almost with the perpendicular slits of her kitten's in them, seemed to swish together like portières, shutting Hattie behind them with her.

"Oh--my Marcy!" said Hattie, dimly, after a while, as if from their depths. "Marcy, dearest!"

"At--at Harperly's, momie, almost all the popular upper-class girls wear--a--a boy's fraternity pin."

"Fraternity pin?"

"It's the--the beginning of being engaged."

"But, Marcy--"

"Archie's a Pi Phi!"

"A--what?"

"A Pi Phi."

"Phi--pie--Marcy--dear--"

* * * * *

On October 17th "Love Me Long" celebrated its two-hundredth performance. Souvenir programs. A few appropriate words by the management. A flashlight of the cast. A round of wine passed in the after-the-performance gloom of the wings. Aqueous figures fading off in the orderly back-stage fashion of a well-established success.

Hattie kissed the star. They liked each other with the unenvy of their divergent roles. Miss Robinson even humored some of Hattie's laughs. She liked to feel the flame of her own fairness as she stood there waiting for the audience to guffaw its fill of Hattie's drolleries; a narcissus swaying reedily beside a black crocodile.

She was a new star and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran. So they could kiss in the key of a cat cannot unseat a king.

But, just the same, Miss Robinson's hand flew up automatically against the dark of Hattie's lips.

"I don't fade off, dearie. Your own natural skin is no more color-fast. I handled Elaine Doremus in 'The Snowdrop' for three seasons. Never so much as a speck or a spot on her. My cream don't fade."

"Of course not, dear! How silly of me! Kiss me again."

That was kind enough of her. Oh yes, they got on. But sometimes Hattie, seated among her sagging headstones, would ache with the dry sob of the black crocodile who yearned toward the narcissus....

Quite without precedent, there was a man waiting for her in the wings.

The gloom of back-stage was as high as trees and Hattie had not seen him in sixteen years. But she knew. With the stunned consciousness of a stabbed person that glinting instant before the blood begins to flow.

It was Morton Sebree--Marcia's father.

"Morton!"

"Hattie."

"Come up to my dressing room," she said, as matter-of-factly as if her brain were a clock ticking off the words.

They walked up an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton was back.

His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister. It could have been picked off, finger by finger. It was that kind of a hand. But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again. Morton's hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque show.

Face to face. The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a wire like a baseball mask. A burning prison of light. Fat sticks of grease paint with the grain of Hattie's flesh printed on the daub end. Furiously brown cheesecloth. An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie _au natural_ left around her lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises were in their pools, inviolate.

"Well, Hattie, I reckon I'd have known you even under black."

"I thought you were in Rio."

"Got to hankering after the States, Hattie."

"I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil. Sometimes I used to think maybe it might have been a misprint--and--that--you--were--the--one."

"No, no. 'Live and kickin'. Been up around here a good while."

"Where?"

"Home. N'Orleans. M' mother died, Hattie, God rest her bones. Know it?"

"No."

"Cancer."

It was a peculiar silence. A terrible word like that was almost slowly soluble in it. Gurgling down.

"O-oh!"

"Sort of gives a fellow the shivers, Hattie, seeing you kinda hidin' behind yourself like this. But I saw you come in the theater to-night. You looked right natural. Little heavier."

"What do you want?"

"Why, I guess a good many things in general and nothing in particular, as the sayin' goes. You don't seem right glad to see me, honey."

"Glad!" said Hattie, and laughed as if her mirth were a dice shaking in a box of echoes.

"Your hair's right red yet. Looked mighty natural walkin' into the theater to-night. Take off those kinks, honey."

She reached for her cleansing cream, then stopped, her eyes full of the foment of torture.

"What's my looks to you?"

"You've filled out."

"You haven't," she said, putting down the cold-cream jar. "You haven't aged an hour. Your kind lies on life like it was a wall in the sun. A wall that somebody else has built for you stone by stone."

"I reckon you're right in some ways, Hattie. There's been a meanderin' streak in me somewheres. You and m' mother, God rest her bones, had a different way of scoldin' me for the same thing. Lot o' Huck Finn in me."

"Don't use bad-boy words for vicious, bad-man deeds!"

"But you liked me. Both of you liked me, honey. Only two women I ever really cared for, too. You and m' mother."

Her face might have been burning paper, curling her scorn for him.

"Don't try that, Morton. It won't work any more. What used to infatuate me only disgusts me now. The things I thought I--loved--in you, I loathe now. The kind of cancer that killed your mother is the kind that eats out the heart. I never knew her, never even saw her except from a distance, but I know, just as well as if I'd lived in that fine big house with her all those years in New Orleans, that you were the sickness that ailed her--lying, squandering, gambling, no-'count son! If she and I are the only women you ever cared for, thank God that there aren't any more of us to suffer from you. Morton, when I read that a Morris Sebree had died in Brazil, I hoped it was you! You're no good! You're no good!"

She was thumping now with the sobs she kept under her voice.

"Why, Hattie," he said, his drawl not quickened, "you don't mean that!"

"I do! You're a ruiner of lives! Her life! Mine! You're a rotten apple that can speck every one it touches."

"That's hard, Hattie, but I reckon you're not all wrong."

"Oh, that softy Southern talk won't get us anywhere, Morton. The very sound of it sickens me now. You're like a terrible sickness I once had. I'm cured now. I don't know what you want here, but whatever it is you might as well go. I'm cured!"

He sat forward in his chair, still twirling the soft brown hat. He was dressed like that. Softly. Good-quality loosely woven stuffs. There was still a tan down of persistent youth on the back of his neck. But his hands were old, the veins twisted wiring, and his third finger yellowly stained, like meerschaum darkening.

"Grantin' everything you say, Hattie--and I'm holdin' no brief for myself--_I've_ been the sick one, not you. Twenty years I've been down sick with hookworm."

"With devilishness."

"No, Hattie. It's the government's diagnosis. Hookworm. Been a sick man all my life with it. Funny thing, though, all those years in Rio knocked it out of me."

"Faugh!"

"I'm a new man since I'm well of it."

"Hookworm! That's an easy word for ingrained no-'countness, deviltry, and deceit. It wasn't hookworm came into the New Orleans stock company where I was understudying leads and getting my chance to play big things. It wasn't hookworm put me in a position where I had to take anything I could get! So that instead of finding me playing leads you find me here--black-face! It was a devil! A liar! A spendthrift, no-'count son out of a family that deserved better. I've cried more tears over you than I ever thought any woman ever had it in her to cry. Those months in that boarding house in Peach Tree Street down in New Orleans! Peach Tree Street! I remember how beautiful even the name of it was when you took me there--lying--and how horrible it became to me. Those months when I used to see your mother's carriage drive by the house twice a day and me crying my eyes out behind the curtains. That's what I've never forgiven myself for. She was a woman who stood for fine things in New Orleans. A good woman whom the whole town pitied! A no-'count son squandering her fortune and dragging down the family name. If only I had known all that then! She would have helped me if I had appealed to her. She wouldn't have let things turn out secretly--the way they did. She would have helped me. I--You--Why have you come here to jerk knives out of my heart after it's got healed with the points sticking in? You're nothing to me. You're skulking for a reason. You've been hanging around, getting pointers about me. My life is my own! You get out!"

"The girl. She well?"

It was a quiet question, spoken in the key of being casual, and Hattie, whose heart skipped a beat, tried to corral the fear in her eyes to take it casually, except that her eyelids seemed to grow old even as they drooped. Squeezed grape skins.

"You get out, Morton," she said. "You've got to get out."

He made a cigarette in an old, indolent way he had of wetting it with his smile. He was handsome enough after his fashion, for those who like the rather tropical combination of dark-ivory skin, and hair a lighter shade of tan. It did a curious thing to his eyes. Behind their allotment of tan lashes they became neutralized. Straw colored.

"She's about sixteen now. Little over, I reckon."

"What's that to you?"

"Blood, Hattie. Thick."

"What thickened it, Morton--after sixteen years?"

"Used to be an artist chap down in Rio. On his uppers. One night, according to my description of what I imagined she looked like, he drew her. Yellow hair, I reckoned, and sure enough--"

"You're not worthy of the resemblance. It wouldn't be there if I had the saying."

"You haven't," he said, suddenly, his teeth snapping together as if biting off a thread.

"Nor you!" something that was the whiteness of fear lightening behind her mask. She rose then, lifting her chair out of the path toward the door and flinging her arm out toward it, very much after the manner of Miss Robinson in Act II.

"You get out, Morton," she said, "before I have you put out. They're closing the theater now. Get out!"

"Hattie," his calm enormous, "don't be hasty. A man that has come to his senses has come back to you humble and sincere. A man that's been sick. Take me back, Hattie, and see if--"

"Back!" she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the word. "You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street when I prayed on my knees and kissed--your--shoes and crawled for your mercy to stay for Marcia to be born? Well, if you were to lie on this floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I'd walk out on you the way you walked out on me. If you don't go, I'll call a stage hand and make you go. There's one coming down the corridor now and locking the house. You go--or I'll call!"

His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme, seemed all tan.

"I'll go," he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever so slightly unfrocked--"I'll go, but you're making a mistake, Hattie."

Fear kept clanging in her. Fire bells of it.

"Oh, but that's like you, Morton! Threats! But, thank God, nothing you can do can harm me any more."

"I reckon she's considerable over sixteen now. Let's see--"

Fire bells. Fire bells.