We Can't Have Everything Part 23

"I haven't time to figure it out," he fretted. "I get twenty-five dollars a week--darling. That's a hundred a month--dear." His pet names came afterward, mere trailers. "Out of that we've got to get something to eat and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to pay and--tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater tickets, and--" He was aghast; at the mult.i.tude of things married people need. He added, "And we ought to save a little, I suppose."

"I suppose so," said Kedzie, who was as much taken aback by the mention of economy at such a time as he was by the mention of expenditure. But she rose bravely to the responsibility: "I'll do the best I can, and we'll be so cozy--ooh!"

Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her hand all the cash he had with him, which was all he had on earth--forty-two dollars. He borrowed back the two dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about forty more dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed big; enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at the Grand Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony.

She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture-stores. She bought a _Herald_ and read the numberless advertis.e.m.e.nts. Something was the matter everywhere. She had gone far and found nothing but discouragement when the luncheon hour arrived.

Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she and her bridegroom would have to accept for their home. She had always dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with a million dollars and a steam yacht. She was to have been married by a swagger parson, in a swagger church, and to have gone on a long voyage somewhere, and come back at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost the parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the castle was not even in the air.

She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just to see what real apartments could be like. They stunned her with their splendors, their liveried outguards, their elevators clanking like caparisoned chariot-horses, their conveniences, their rentals--six or eight thousand dollars a year, unfurnished!--six or seven times her husband's whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of a dream.

She would have to be content with what one could rent furnished for twenty-five dollars a month. She would have to be her own hired girl.

She would have to toil in a few cells of a beehive on a side-street. She would be chauffeuse to a gas-stove only.

She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of forebodings, but Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her name paged by a corridor-crier and was called to the telephone, where her husband's voice told her that there was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave. He forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot to explain to her that he was talking in a crowded office with an impatient boss waiting for him and a telephone-girl probably listening in.

Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife.

She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in desperation, took the furnished flat she happened to be in when she could go no farther.

She had to sign a year's lease, and pay twenty-five dollars in advance.

They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall was shared with another family. The secrets were also to be shared, evidently, for Kedzie could hear all that went on in the other home--all, all!

But by this time she was so tired that any cranny would have been welcome. She was even wearier than she had been when she occupied the outdoor apartment under the park bench where she spent her second night in New York. She called that an "aparkment" and liked the pun so well that she longed to tell her husband. But that would have compelled the telling of her real name, and she did not know him well enough for that yet. She found that she did not know him well enough yet for an increasing number of things. She began to be afraid to have him come home. What would he be like as a husband? What would she be like as a wife? Those are all-important facts that one is permitted to learn after the vows of perfection are sealed.

When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and lonelier. She would welcome almost any husband for companions.h.i.+p's sake. She resolved to have Tom's dinner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and bought the raw material for dinner and breakfast.

She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the address and invited him to dine with "Mrs. Gilfoyle." She chuckled over the romance of it, but he was harrowed with office troubles. Her ardor was a trifle dampened by his voice, but she found new thrills in the gas-stove, a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened her with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles and got bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned her fingers and the chops.

She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and then marched her weary feet down the stairs again and up the hill again to a delicatessen shop. She had previously learned the fatal ease of the ready-made meals they vend at such places, and she compiled her first menu there.

When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps into his new home and into her arms he tried to lay off care for a while. But he could not hide his anxiety--and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy of dread.

He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord had selected.

But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He had not imagined Kedzie so scholarly a cook. She dared not tell him that she had cheated. He found her wonderfully refres.h.i.+ng after a day of office toil and told her how happy they would be, and she said, "You bet." Kedzie cleared the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping them into a big pan and turning the hot water into it with a cake of soap. Then she retreated to the wabbly divan in the living-room.

Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and she laced still tighter the arms that encircled her. They told each other that they were all they had in the world, and they forgot the outside world for the world within themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan would hardly support two, and there was no comfort in sitting close; it merely added two furnaces together.

Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neighbors had children, and the children did not want to go to bed. The parents nagged the children and each other. The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea came to Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, now, as well as of the world. If only they had not been in such haste to be married! If only they could recall those hasty words!

Gilfoyle put out the lights--"because they draw the insects," he said, but Kedzie thought that he was beginning to economize. He was. Across the street they could see other heat-victims miserably preparing for the night. They were careless of appearances.

In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a narrow air-shaft.

The one bedroom's one window opened on the same cleft. If the curtain were not kept down the neighbors across the area could see and be seen.

If the window were left open they could be heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nimrim, Mo.

Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what might have made a longsh.o.r.eman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the paper and rose with a yawn.

"Well, this is one h.e.l.luva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into the oven and fry."

Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now. She had danced Greek dances in public, but she blushed in the dark as she loitered over her shoelaces. She was so forlorn and so disappointed with life that tears would have been bliss.

Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept a parrot. It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with thick-tongued idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly? Polly?"

Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to keep such a pest. She wanted to kill it. She leaned out of the window and stared up. Somewhere above the fire-escape rungs she could see the bottom of its cage. If only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown Polly to bits.

She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another window and yelling at the parrot. She drew her head in hastily.

The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day illumined him to his disadvantage. His head was far back, his jaw down, his mouth agape.

During the night a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was startlingly unattractive.

Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, in a fascination of disgust. This was the being she had selected from all mankind for her companion through the long, long years to come. This was her playmate, partner, hero, master, financier, bedfellow, lifefellow. For him she had given up her rights to freedom, to praise, to chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury, flattery.

She glanced about the room--the pine bureau with its imitation stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the ugly chairs, the gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that other wretches had occupied. She wondered who they were and where they were.

She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She tried to picture a bedroom there. She saw a palace of the best moving-picture period.

She remembered the first moving picture she had seen in New York, and contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the Anita Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her door against the swell husband, and the poor but honest lover with the revolver.

Kedzie wished she had locked her own door--only there was no door, merely a shoddy portiere, for there was not room to open a door. Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him.

She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the mirror, and she sneered at it. "You darn fool--oh, you darn fool!"

At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his fists into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at the unusual furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared again, grinned, said:

"Why, h.e.l.lo, Anita!"

He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he followed. She slid to the floor and gasped:

"Don't touch me!"

"Why, what's the matter, honey?"

"Huh! What isn't the matter?"

He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, yawned:

"Lord, it's only five o'clock. Good _night_!" He disposed himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in another horrible Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. "I'd like to murder the beast."

"Don't! I'm much obliged to it."

"Obliged to it? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear it scream."

"Well, ain't life a scream?"

Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He forgot that he was a bridegroom.

He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow and pulled the cover over the other and almost instantly slept. His head on the pillow looked like some ugly, s.h.a.ggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to uproot the object and throw it out of the window, out of her life. That was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her dreams!