1
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didnât know what I was doing in New York. Iâm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and thatâs all there was to read about in the papersâgoggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldnât help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldnât get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the cadaverâs headâor what there was left of itâfloated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaverâs head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
(I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid Iâd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes Iâd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.)
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes Iâd bought in Bloomingdaleâs one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match. And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working onâdrinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamĂ© bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasionâeverybody would think I must be having a real whirl.
Look what can happen in this country, theyâd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she canât afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.
Only I wasnât steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldnât get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)
There were twelve of us at the hotel.
We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with our particular complexions.
I still have the makeup kit they gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eyeshadow just big enough to dab the tip of your finger in, and three lipsticks ranging from red to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one side. I also have a white plastic sunglasses case with colored shells and sequins and a green plastic starfish sewed onto it.
I realized we kept piling up these presents because it was as good as free advertising for the firms involved, but I couldnât be cynical. I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.
So there were twelve of us at the hotel, in the same wing on the same floor in single rooms, one after the other, and it reminded me of my dormitory at college. It wasnât a proper hotelâI mean a hotel where there are both men and women mixed about here and there on the same floor.
This hotelâthe Amazonâwas for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldnât get at them and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.
These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.
Girls like that make me sick. Iâm so jealous I canât speak. Nineteen years, and I hadnât been out of New England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
I guess one of my troubles was Doreen.
Iâd never known a girl like Doreen before. Doreen came from a society girlsâ college down South and had bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about indestructible, and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I donât mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.
Doreen singled me out right away. She made me feel I was that much sharper than the others, and she really was wonderfully funny. She used to sit next to me at the conference table, and when the visiting celebrities were talking sheâd whisper witty sarcastic remarks to me under her breath.
Her college was so fashion conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocketbook covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocketbook. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.
The only thing Doreen ever bawled me out about was bothering to get my assignments in by a deadline.
âWhat are you sweating over that for?â Doreen lounged on my bed in a peach silk dressing gown, filing her long, nicotine-yellow nails with an emery board, while I typed up the draft of an interview with a best-selling novelist.
That was another thingâthe rest of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe terry-cloth robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing gowns the color of skin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity. She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.
âYou know old Jay Cee wonât give a damn if that storyâs in tomorrow or Monday.â Doreen lit a cigarette and let the smoke flare slowly from her nostrils so her eyes were veiled. âJay Ceeâs ugly as sin,â Doreen went on coolly. âI bet that old husband of hers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or heâd puke otherwise.â
Jay Cee was my boss, and I liked her a lot, in spite of what Doreen said. She wasnât one of the fashion magazine gushers with fake eyelashes and giddy jewelry. Jay Cee had brains, so her plug-ugly looks didnât seem to matter. She read a couple of languages and knew all the quality writers in the business.
I tried to imagine Jay Cee out of her strict office suit and luncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat husband, but I just couldnât do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.
Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didnât think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut.
Doreen grinned. âSmart girl.â
Somebody tapped at the door.
âWho is it?â I didnât bother to get up.
âItâs me, Betsy. Are you coming to the party?â
âI guess so.â I still didnât go to the door.
They imported Betsy straight from Kansas with her bouncing blonde ponytail and Sweetheart-of-Sigma-Chi smile. I remember once the two of us were called over to the office of some blue-chinned TV producer in a pinstripe suit to see if we had any angles he could build up for a program, and Betsy started to tell about the male and female corn in Kansas. She got so excited about that damn corn even the producer had tears in his eyes, only he couldnât use any of it, unfortunately, he said.
Later on, the Beauty Editor persuaded Betsy to cut her hair and made a cover girl out of her, and I still see her face now and then, smiling out of those âP.Q.âs wife wears B.H. Wraggeâ ads.
Betsy was always asking me to do things with her and the other girls as if she were trying to save me in some way. She never asked Doreen. In private, Doreen called her Pollyanna Cowgirl.
âDo you want to come in our cab?â Betsy said through the door.
Doreen shook her head.
âThatâs all right, Betsy,â I said. âIâm going with Doreen.â
âOkay.â I could hear Betsy padding off down the hall.
âWeâll just go till we get sick of it,â Doreen told me, stubbing out her cigarette in the base of my bedside reading lamp, âthen weâll go out on the town. Those parties they stage here remind me of the old dances in the school gym. Why do they always round up Yalies? Theyâre so stoopit!â
Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, heâd managed to get good marks all right, and to have an affair with some awful waitress on the Cape by the name of Gladys, but he didnât have one speck of intuition. Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.
We were stuck in the theater-hour rush. Our cab sat wedged in back of Betsyâs cab and in front of a cab with four of the other girls, and nothing moved.
Doreen looked terrific. She was wearing a strapless white lace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair that curved her in at the middle and bulged her out again spectacularly above and below, and her skin had a bronzy polish under the pale dusting powder. She smelled strong as a whole perfume store.
I wore a black shantung sheath that cost me forty dollars. It was part of a buying spree I had with some of my scholarship money when I heard I was one of the lucky ones going to New York. This dress was cut so queerly I couldnât wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didnât matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.
The city had faded my tan, though. I looked yellow as a Chinaman. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress and my odd color, but being with Doreen made me forget my worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
When the man in the blue lumber shirt and black chinos and tooled leather cowboy boots started to stroll over to us from under the striped awning of the bar where heâd been eyeing our cab, I couldnât have any illusions. I knew perfectly well heâd come for Doreen. He threaded his way out between the stopped cars and leaned engagingly on the sill of our open window.
âAnd what, may I ask, are two nice girls like you doing all alone in a cab on a nice night like this?â
He had a big, wide, white toothpaste-ad smile.
âWeâre on our way to a party,â I blurted, since Doreen had gone suddenly dumb as a post and was fiddling in a blasĂ© way with her white lace pocketbook cover.
âThat sounds boring,â the man said. âWhynât you both join me for a couple of drinks in that bar over there? Iâve some friends waiting as well.â
He nodded in the direction of several informally dressed men slouching around under the awning. They had been following him with their eyes, and when he glanced back at them, they burst out laughing.
The laughter should have warned me. It was a kind of low, know-it-all snicker, but the traffic showed signs of moving again, and I knew that if I sat tight, in two seconds Iâd be wishing Iâd taken this gift of a chance to see something of New York besides what the people on the magazine had planned out for us so carefully.
âHow about it, Doreen?â I said.
âHow about it, Doreen?â the man said, smiling his big smile. To this day I canât remember what he looked like when he wasnât smiling. I think he must have been smiling the whole time. It must have been natural for him, smiling like that.
âWell, all right,â Doreen said to me. I opened the door, and we stepped out of the cab just as it was edging ahead again and started to walk over to the bar.
There was a terrible shriek of brakes followed by a dull thump-thump.
âHey you!â Our cabby was craning out of his window with a furious, purple expression. âWaddaya think youâre doinâ?â
He had stopped the cab so abruptly that the cab behind bumped smack into him, and we could see the four girls inside waving and struggling and scrambling up off the floor.
The man laughed and left us on the curb and went back and handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.
âCome on, Frankie,â the man said to one of his friends in the group, and a short, scrunty fellow detached himself and came into the bar with us.
He was the type of fellow I canât stand. Iâm five feet ten in my stocking feet, and when I am with little men I stoop over a bit and slouch my hips, one up and one down, so Iâll look shorter, a...