Scalpel, p.11
Scalpel, page 11
It was a small table at which eight persons were sitting, with a spread of red roses covering the base of a candelabra, and from which six waiters at that moment were removing the demitasse service, Capo-di-Monte. The woman at the head of the table, who could only be the remarkable Mrs. Nelson, was wearing a black velvet dress with a thin black velvet choker, her almost white hair brushed straight back and her face full of good color. The dress was low-cut, very low-cut, and it was impossible to believe that what was revealed belonged to a woman of sixty-nine. A butler, a big man, was removing her demitasse, and from the sureness and the closeness with which he worked, I felt sure that he was her butler, brought along for the occasion.
“...present Colonel Owen?” the General was saying.
“Good evening, Mrs. Nelson,” I said, bowing.
“Good evening, Colonel,” she said in a firm voice.
“Mr. Hyronemus, Mr. Messenger, Mrs. Kinkaid, Dr. Kinkaid, Mrs. Gleeson, Mrs. Ritter, Mrs. Messenger, Dr. Gleeson—” the General said.
They nodded; and Helen moved around to embrace Mrs. Nelson who, at the same time, was gesturing for the butler to bring additional chairs. “How are you, dear?” Helen said.
“I’m fine now that the band has been toned down,” Mrs. Nelson said. “I sent Charles to the leader and asked him to be quiet, did he think he was John Philip Sousa—”
“It dated me, my darling—” Charles said. “For nobody else would I permit myself to be dated.” Charles was Mr. Hyronemus. With his dinner jacket he wore a black Windsor tie. He was chubby, with thick lips and a Negroid nose and his hair was marcelled. Mr. Hyronemus was a flaming faggot: he made no effort to hide it. This surprised me; to find a faggot in company like this, sitting at the elbow of Mrs. Nelson. I glanced at Helen. She told me with her eyes to skip it.
“...sit down—both of you,” Mrs. Nelson said to Helen and me.
The butler slipped a chair under Helen, between Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Ritter, and he moved the other one to me, at the foot of the table, between Dr. Kinkaid and Mrs. Gleeson.
“Wanted you to meet the Colonel—” General Ritter was saying.
“Bring them a drink, Whitfield,” Mrs. Nelson said.
Whitfield looked at Helen. “Vodka—large glass, two lumps of ice,” she said.
Whitfield looked down at me. “The same,” I said.
“I think I’d like a Scotch and water,” the General said, sitting down beside Mrs. Nelson. Nobody else ordered. Whitfield moved away. To Mrs. Ritter, the General said: “This is the Doctor, dear. Hadn’t been for him I’d be walking around on a stump.”
The General and Mrs. Ritter smiled at me gracefully. “Came out all right, did it?” I asked.
“Came out all right?” the General said. He got up from the table and backed slightly away and stomped the floor hard with his left foot, then held it out straight (supporting himself against the wall with his shoulders) and twisted the ankle once or twice to prove how it had come out. This routine resembled the ceremony the Sumo wrestlers go through before the wrestling match starts; and everybody in the ballroom was looking. Odd thing about the people on this social level: they live such formalized lives that anything out of the ordinary causes them to look. They are starved for looking...Mrs. Nelson smiled slightly, and her guests took their cue from this and smiled too. But the General was deadly serious. He stomped his foot again a couple of times and looked at me. “Came out all right, did you say? Behold your masterpiece—good as new, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, I would, General. That I would say,” I said.
Dr. Kinkaid said: “As the General’s doctor, Colonel, my belated congratulations.”
Mrs. Ritter nodded. “The General’s spoken of you often, Colonel. And in the most glowing terms.”
“With very good reason, I might add,” Dr. Kinkaid said. “It was a beautiful operation.”
“Thank you, sir—” I said.
Helen Curtis was looking at me, her eyes a little wide. This pleased her very much. This was something she had not anticipated. There was the suggestion of a provocative smile on her face and her nostrils were distended a little. I felt my eyes narrow, thinking the same thing she was thinking, and for the next second or two the most important thing in the world for me was to keep my breathing from being audible.
“We were holed up at Thionville when Von Rundstedt broke through into the Ardennes,” the General said. “We raced hard to reach St. Vith to block the panzers that were heading for Liége. That’s when I got hit. The afternoon of December twenty-second.”
“Actually, of course,” I said, “the General had no business being so far forward. It was practically hand-to-hand fighting.” This was true; during the war I had seen many similar cases of high-ranking officers, general officers, who served at the front: this is something the madmen who beat on drums do not seem to understand, that these soft civilians whose only exercise is getting in and out of a soft-bottomed chair in an exclusive club, turn up in wartime at the front and make the toughest soldiers of them all. They not only have the will to fight; they have a sense of national responsibility. General Ritter, for example; a tender aristocrat that any good flyweight probably could put away in a round and a half—but when the chips go down again (and it won’t be long now) and the Tiger tanks of the Soviet come rumbling down through Canada he’ll be out there giving ’em hell. It’ll be the likes of General Ritter who’ll be fighting for the likes of Mr. Charles Hyronemus.
“...ah-h-h-h-h,” the General said. “Were you a Colonel then?”
“No, sir. Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Major surgery in the front lines?” Dr. Gleeson asked.
“For him there was, thank God—” the General said reverently.
Janet and Jack Messenger stepped inside to the table. The men started to rise, but she waved for them to keep their seats. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“This is the nondrinkingest group in town,” Jack Messenger said.
“We’re listening, not drinking,” Mrs. Nelson said.
“Leave it to Mother,” Janet said. “She always ends up with the celebrities.”
“What do all those ribbons mean?” Mrs. Nelson asked. I glanced down at the ribbons, thinking: I mustn’t get into that. We’ll be here all night. Mrs. Nelson misinterpreted my hesitancy. “Or is that an embarrassing question?” she asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just a little early in the evening for me to talk about my ribbons. Modest as my exploits are, I make them sound much more picturesque when I’m not quite so sober.”
“Do you have to be drunk to talk about them?” she asked in a somewhat acrid tone.
At once all the faces around me but one registered mild shock, the kind of mild shock that generally precedes embarrassment. The one face that didn’t register shock belonged to Mr. Hyronemus. His face registered glee. He was almost drooling with the prospect of what he hoped would happen. They had caught the same sharpness in Mrs. Nelson’s tone that I had; it could hardly be missed, and neither could it be missed that this remarkable lady was spoiling for a fight. I had seen women of this type in action before. Her presence here was merely a matter of protocol: all these people she knew—every thought they thought, every thought they ever would think—and for her they existed only as objects which had lost their dimensions. This had nothing to do with her affection for them, or with her own character. But it did make for a deadly dull evening. She was merely trying to enliven things: with the sharp point of her jeweled poniard she was poking for a soft spot in my hide.
I looked at Helen. There was a glitter of encouragement in her eyes. She was trying, as subtly as possible, without revealing her intent to the others, to egg me on. I needed no egging on. This was precisely the kind of circumstance that brought into full blossom some of my less obscure complexes. Always when a situation like this happens or is manufactured, I invariably say to myself that I will keep my big mouth shut, and be graceful and indifferent—but I never am. This time with Mr. Hyronemus in her corner, looking at me the way he was, as if I already had been quartered, I could hardly wait. “...not drunk,” I said; “just not quite so sober. There is a fine difference. When I am not quite so sober, I lie a little, in ever so small a degree—” with my fingers in the air I groped for the illustration, looking at Mr. Hyronemus “—how do you say in English, Mister Hyronemus?—tant soit peu—yes—” I measured infinitesimally with my thumb and forefinger “—like that. A point of philosophical information, Mister Hyronemus,” I said: “do you not think drunks are then more picturesque?”
Mr. Hyronemus took some of the lazy anticipation out of his face, making it as tense as his obesity would permit. “I am not an authority on drunkards,” he said stiffly.
“Do you have to be, sir?” I asked. “The best critics seldom are the best playwrights.”
Nobody said anything. Mrs. Nelson was gazing at me, her head down slightly, tilted a little to one side. Whitfield placed the drinks in front of Helen and the General and me. I picked mine up and toasted her. “To your good health, milady—” I said, and we drank.
“That’s very nice,” she said, and looked at Helen. “Where’d you find him?” she asked.
“In the lobby of the Schenley,” Helen said.
“Have you ever heard anything more indecent in your life?” I asked. Mrs. Nelson chuckled; the others laughed, I took another drink, looking over the rim of my glass at Mrs. Nelson. She was smiling, eyeing me steadily. The orchestra went into a fox trot. I took another gulp of the vodka and stood up. “I’ve been chasing this fox trot all evening, and I’ve finally got it hemmed up,” I said. “Would you excuse us?” I moved around the table and helped Helen out of her chair. “Nice to have met all of you—” I said.
All the men were on their feet by now. “What about lunch tomorrow?” the General asked.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” I said. “I’m leaving for Berlin tomorrow.”
“Berlin?” Mrs. Nelson said.
“Just to check in,” I said. “I spend most of my time in Paris.” I nodded to them again and moved into the dance space with Helen and began dancing, holding her close. She was just as good at fox trotting as she was at sambaing. She said: “Why’d you break it up? Just when it was getting good—”
“In self-defense,” I said. “I’m no match for her.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“I’m sure. She’s remarkable, all right. Truly remarkable. And you know something? She’s not a bad-looking woman. Sixty-nine, my eye. She’s not a day over fifty.—Who’s the character rigged out in the Oscar Wilde fashion?”
“Only the most powerful man in Pittsburgh,” she said.
I pulled my head back and looked at her. “He?” I said.
“He,” she said solemnly. “That’s Beau Pittsburgh. The society columnist.”
Well, I’ll be damned, I thought; and all of a sudden I felt somebody bump into me; it was the kind of a bump that could only be premeditated; and, of course, it was Huffy Sutton. He was with Julia; it had to be she, the resemblance to Mrs. Nelson and Janet was that definite—same cast of countenance, same air of aloofness, same bone structure. We all stopped dancing. “Hello, Tom—” she said warmly, shaking hands with me.
“Here she is,” Huffy said to me. “You like him?” he asked Julia.
Julia laughed. “Don’t rush me,” she said. She looked me over briefly, with mock criticalness. “I think I do—” she said.
“Then we’ll all go have a drink somewhere,” Huffy said.
“Good,” I said, and we all started for the entrance. As we passed Mrs. Nelson’s table she called to Helen to come over, and as we turned out of the ballroom into the hall I saw her whispering something into Helen’s ear.
Dodie, Ada, and Lucille Grellet stopped us as we were moving down the hall towards the rear. They wanted to talk. “Later, you can have the body,” Huffy told them. “Right now we’ve got some serious drinking to do.”
“You sound like Early O’Hara,” I said. “Whatever happened to O’Hara, by the way?”
“He’s coaching out West somewhere,” Huffy said. “Brigham Young or Idaho or some place.”
“That’s Hemingway,” I said.
Helen came up. She said to me, shaking her head: “My gravest suspicions have been corroborated.”
“How...?” I said.
She half-whispered to me: “Mrs. Nelson says it’s a shame there aren’t two of you.”
“That’s just plain silly,” I said. “If there were two of me it would cut my charm in half—Where’re we gonna do this drinking, Huffy? Standing here?”
“Special place,” he said. “Follow me. You follow me, too,” he said to a waiter. “You think one waiter’ll be enough?” he asked Julia.
“Let’s start with just one, darling,” Julia said...
The special place was down the hall, through a glassed-in sitting room that overlooked a lighted garden and pool, and across the terrace. Huffy opened a door. “The billiard room,” he said, and went in, and we stepped inside while he fumbled along the wall for the switch. He clicked it and the lights went on. “That takes care of the darkness,” he said, with some satisfaction. “Now, we’ll order. We got plenty of space to drink in.”
We ordered—and that took care of the space, too; because in one’s and two’s and three’s the guests began to drift back to the billiard room and within an hour or two there was nobody left in the main house except probably Mrs. Nelson and her guests, but not even that could be, I noticed, for Beau Pittsburgh was back here and surely he would not be back here unless the Dowager Empress had been safely sent on her way. A bar had been improvised on top of the billiard table, looking like the baggage car of a football special, and it was just as noisy. The orchestra long since had called it a night, but the clarinet player had stayed behind, and from the top of the billiard table, where he was trying to stay out of the way of the waiters, he led the crowd through the fight songs of most of the eastern universities; and the girl whose name was Miss Dangermond stood this as long as she could, that strange Texas pride straining and straining at her gusset until she finally had to break out with “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” to which everybody sang the lyrics of “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad”; and although she was across the room from me, and although I had a glow on and could not focus my eyes very well, I could tell from her behavior that she had a pretty poor opinion of Pennsylvanians, because to a Texan it is avid heresy when the lyrics of those songs are confused. The clarinet player felt so sorry for her he stopped blowing and began to help her sing the correct lyrics; but this might not have been wholly compassionate on his part because from the way he was looking down into the front of her dress and the way he was poised on top of the billiard table, I expected any minute to see him do a half-Gainer into her neckline...
I had a glow on that was beginning to be something more than just a glow. Whenever I can roll my eyes backwards far enough to look down my throat and can see that the glow is beginning to sprout tiny blue-greenish flames, then I know I’m getting drunk. Sometimes this cannot be done and then I have another way by which I can tell I am getting drunk (I suppose the ways by which people can tell when they are getting drunk are like fingerprints—no two are alike): I thought of Utrillo, Maurice Utrillo V. This sounds nonsensical, I know; but it is true. I thought of Utrillo. Why Utrillo should haunt me in this glorious moment between high sensation and low stupidity, I do not know. Because he was a hardened drunkard? I do not think so. Like Jourdain, I have a horror of drunkards. Like Jourdain, I detest them; they are a profanity and a sacrilege. Then why? I could only guess (as intelligent people do when they fear to have these things expertly explored): he painted walls, roofs, chimneys, houses, shutters, streets; these mediocrities, this ugliness he painted and covered all of it with the magic of dreams, with a haze of mysticism, and this was a world in which I was made to feel welcome, but never forgetting, as he did (as he perhaps wanted to), that the penalty for lingering too long in such enchantment was in concise ratio to the degree of forgetfulness attained. Now I thought of Utrillo: BerliozHouseParisSeenfromtheSquareSaint-PierreRueduChevalierdelaBarrePorteSaint-DenisRueMontignyLesUsinesLeLapinAgileL’ÉglisedeClichyLeThéatre Montmartre...and I found Helen. “I’d like to go,” I said.
“The party dies when you go,” she said.
“I must go,” I said. “I cannot get my eyes around sufficiently far to see the blue-greenish flames sprouting from this definite glow, but I am thinking of Utrillo, and therefore it is time for me to go.”
She nodded. She thought I was drunk. “Then we’ll go,” she said.
“Spare me the good nights,” I said. “You make them for me. I’ll sneak out, quiet as a little creep mouse—”
I sneaked out, quiet as a little creep mouse.
“...so soon, sir?” Malcolm was saying.
“So soon, Malcolm?” I said. “I arrived here on a sad March night in the year eleven hundred a dee. So soon, indeed!” He got my trench coat and cap. “I dislike good nights and good-bys.” He opened the coat for me to back into. “I’ll just carry it, and thank you very much. Will you tell Mrs. Curtis I’ll be waiting on the veranda—”
“Certainly, sir,” he said, opening the door. He thought I was drunk too. I went out. “Good night, sir.”
There was a knot of persons at the foot of the steps as I went out, and two figures soon materialized as individuals: Frederick, the uniformed doorman, now wearing his service overcoat, and James, Mrs. Curtis’ chauffeur. I shook my hand at them, meaning not right now, and walked down towards the end of the veranda where the poplars were thickest, sucking tubs of the chill air into my lungs, feeling good, feeling the way a doughboy feels when his buddy beside him gets knocked off by a sniper, thankfully thinking: that could have been me. One more drink and it could have been me. One more whiff and it could have been me. “Tom!” I heard Helen call, and I thought: Twenty-four hours ago or thereabouts I didn’t know this woman and now I couldn’t recognize her voice any better if I had been hearing it since 1100 A.D. (which I had; and what was I talking about?), and I turned around and walked back to her.
