Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(32)
I had pulled down the ladder so my guests could avail themselves of the stars and the streetlights and the breeze off the East River. Prohibition would end, finally, later that year, but that evening—just as anyone who enjoyed the night life had been doing since 1920—we were filtering the booze in through the loopholes.
My gentleman caller, for example—a square-faced man named Benjamin, who went by Bennie—had a physician’s prescription that permitted him to take a pint of liquor home from the pharmacy every ten days. He arrived with one tucked under each arm, each package labeled “Jim Beam: For Medicinal Purposes Only.”
I’d met him the week prior, while being interviewed by a society reporter about my ongoing reign as the highest-paid female advertising writer in the country, a story that journalists seemed never to tire of. Bennie had been the photographer.
I was happy to see Bennie’s liquor, if a bit disenchanted by its packaging. The prescription trick worked, but it always struck me as smug, inelegant, the wrong kind of clever. Most of us preferred to get our booze from honest crooks, who tended to be nicer and more interesting. It’s hard to deny that a willingness to risk prison imparts a certain magnetism in social settings.
Helen McGoldrick, ever golden, was in the kitchen, one of the thirty or so people who’d shown up to my flat. Though none of the guests was fat, they almost seemed so for being crammed into so small a space. I’d just taken a pass through the other rooms to encourage anyone whose dexterity and anxiety would allow them to pioneer the less populous territories of the fire escapes—mine and Hattie’s, as she didn’t mind.
As it was crowded, so was it convivial: friends and friends of friends gently embalming themselves in alcohol, curing themselves like wild game in cigarette smoke, being made astringent, citrused with grapefruit juice from cans—little fang marks on opposite sides to permit them to pour.
Helen’s husband stood beside her, can opener in hand to do the vampiric puncturing. Helen, using the gin they’d brought, doled out generous drinks.
“With oranges and lemons more expensive all the time,” she said, “there’s nothing to do but mix the cocktails stronger.”
She and Dwight Zweigert had gotten married in 1931, when she was thirty-one and he forty-seven. I liked him immensely, and I liked them together.
He had been married before, but his first wife had died. He had two daughters, seven and nine when he and Helen got hitched. Now eleven and thirteen, both girls were at the family abode that night, the Zweigert brownstone in the Village, babysitting one-year-old Merritt. Named for Helen’s Southern patrician father back in Birmingham, he was the first and only child Helen would ever have to have. She doted duly upon him, but had no desire to spring off any further offspring, nor did Dwight want her to; the family budget and his middle age made three the limit.
When they’d first gotten involved, or rather when they’d first gotten serious, Helen gave each of his daughters a tick in the “pro” column of the list she always totted up in her head. “One and I’m done!” she’d said the night she told me that he’d proposed and she’d accepted. “That’s all he’ll want. All we can afford. I can deliver that.”
Dwight was a left-winger of a committed, considered, not especially specific sort. He routinely broke bread with a hodgepodge of romantics, pacifists, communists, and Roosevelt liberals in an era—brief—when it seemed they all might find common cause. Such were the circles in which Dwight circulated. Such was the political butter of his daily bread. I found these pursuits silly, but harmless and not without charm. He worked as an art critic for The Nation and assorted little magazines. A still-sizeable though slightly melted berg of postcrash family money made the fees earned by his writing live-off-able, especially with Helen working, too.
R.H. Macy’s, like all employers, did not permit women time off to push the next generation of little workers and customers into the world. So now Helen freelanced, cartooning and illustrating for women’s magazines, many of them the same ones that published my verses.
A number of the writers and editors—and their dates—whom we knew from that world were in attendance that night, along with some of the snappier copywriters from R.H. Macy’s, newer girls who worked under me who grasped the effervescence of the in-house style, and who had the joie part of joie de vivre down pat.
Though not among their number, also present—owing to my having been mannerly—was Olive Dodd, hangdog and predictably unescorted.
Early on, before I realized how joyless and jealous she had it in her to be, I had invited Olive to such gatherings as these, thinking we might hit it off outside the confines of the office. She was young and reasonably pretty, and she’d read all the right books, so I thought, sure, let’s give this a go. She drank and she smoked.
But it turned out she was a narrow-minded prig. She decked herself in bohemian trappings because she felt she needed to; there was nothing genuine about it. As Gertrude Stein—whose writing Olive pretended to like—said of the city of Oakland, there was no there there.
I couldn’t very well exclude her, though—not without being more hurtful than I meant to. Plus I couldn’t very well go on decrying her affectations if I weren’t prepared to stand by my own notions of propriety, could I? So invite her I did.
And Olive, to be sure, could have mustered the finesse to simply say thanks and then not actually inflict herself on the party. But there she was, wearing an evening dress of periwinkle blue and sipping a ginger ale that must have been half gin.