Evening Star Newspaper, March 16, 1930, Page 106

12 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHING e f e, e R = A Story Written by One of the Younger Generation of American Authors—But a Story Which Won Special Honor From N \ \ \ A I\ = A Jud ges Selecting the Outstanding Fiction of the Past Year. was not young. The things about her that had youth were the pur- chasable things; the gowns she wore, the slanted hats, the small tall slip- pers; the haircut and the glint of red in her hair. They didn't deceive you. She was 40-odd, despite them. And her eyes I’ their sticky starry frames were as old and as tired as the world. Mrs. Jenny Montgomery. She lived in New York. She belonged to New York so utterly, so unmistakably, that people from out of town stared f ated as she passed, and remembered her along with Ziegfeld’s new fheater, and the Pennsylvania roof, and Times Square jeweled for evening, when they went home. “Those New York women.” . Provincial matrons, observ- ing that her hose were sheer black chiffon, returned to report to their Saturday bridge clubs that sheer black chiffon hosiery was the thing now in New York, although the ratio of tan or black beheld by them might have been a thousand pairs to one. To see her was to wonder who she was. Were you provincial or Manhattan born? you wondered. She had an air of being some one not quite respectable, a lady a little declasse. ‘There were her eyes. There were her slanted hats. There was her mouth, done freshly in thick, wine-red salve upon a skin dead white as lily petals. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Jenny Montgom- ery conducted a speakeasy. De Luxe, I'r was on Riverside drive. The building was high and square, made of buff-colored stone, an apartment building. Couples with chil- dren dwelt in-it, and stiff gray spinsters dwelt in it, and a man named Wilkins who solicited funds for the cause of prohibition dwelt in it, happily unaware that in the bungalow on the roof Jenny Montgomery served champagne or whisky or absinthe or what-can-you-pay- for nightly, includings Sundays, from 7 on. A private elevator shot express to her door, propelled by a uniformed youth with a thin, tight mouth and a savings account. Jenny Montgomery called the bungalow Top o' the World. She had had cards engraved: “Top 0’ the World, Riverside Drive.” You had to pre- sent one to Wallace, the sepia houseman, who answered your ring. If your card bore Mrs. Montgomery’s round, rather schoolgirl signature you got in directly. If it didn’t, there was delay. But you got in. From the roof that ran around the bungalow like a brick lawn, you could see the river, and the toy boats on the river, and miles and miles and miles of the cluttered town; and at night there were stirs below you; brighter than higher stars, and the wheels and spires of Palisades Park made gilt geometrics on the sky. The bungalow itself had seven rooms, three baths. It was beautiful, exotic, shadowy, with purple curtains. Even in the daytime the lamps were lit, the curtains drawn across the doors and windows, that there might be no daytime ever. Sometimes, Saturdays and Sundays, a pianist was there, a pale, blond, dinner coated boy, with magic rh; Jhmic fingers. He played by ear Played anything you hummed or whistled him. Left to himself, he chose the “Rhapsody in Blue,” Whiteman’'s arrangement of the “Song of India”—things like that which break your heart. His name was Georgie. Sometimes he was asked to play the “Varsity Drag” or “Shakin’ the Blues Away.” And a girl would dance alone, her bobbed hair pranc- ing, her silver slippers stamping down the beat. Sometimes a man would lean mn the curve of the piano casually, his elbow backward on it and a tall glass in his hand, and sing a ballad or a mammy song. These performers were always professional; you could depend on that. Jenny Montgomery tactfully discouraged the occasional amateur, emboldened by wine, who wished to give impromptu exhibition. She was a tactful woman. She knew every- thing, told nothing. Her guests enjoyed an anonymity as complete as possible, “Who's who,” she said, “is nobody’s business.” If you attempted to learn from her anything sbout herself, she merely smiled. A mysterious woman. The establishment she ran had mystery; an atmosphere close mouthed, inscrutable. The servants, Wallace and Rulie, never spoke at all, except to say, “The same?” or “You may settle with Madame when you are Jeaving, if you please.” LAST year Jenny Montgomery had made, over and above her considerable running expenses, thirty-two thousand, nine hundred and fifty dollars. She lived at night. Mornings did not exist for her, and lunch was just a word. She woke in midafternoon to three hours or less of day- light and of privacy. They were busy hours always, moving on schedule. Coffee. in bed, then telephone calls, then conferences Wallace and with Eulie. Ten minutes at fac check book, sixty in her dressing room. On Mondays and Thursdays Eulie, who had once worked in a beauty parlor, marcelled her mis- tress’ hair. On other days at this same time the tiny wrinkles were massaged, the brows were plucked, the elongated Chinese nails were manicured and lacquered red. By about four- thirty Mrs. Montgomery was ready to go out. She always went out, rain or shine. Wallace and Eulie never knew exactly where. “Out,” was all she told them. On a blustery day in early March she woke at half-past two and lay a minute listening to the wind. She lay very still and listened. Sad wind. Sobbing wind. It beat against her small high house with savage desperation; wind lost and lonesome, striving to get in. “I like it,” she thought. “I love it.” It made her feel warm, secure. It was making her feel drowsy, she found, after a moment, so she jerked herself upright and determinedly, calling “Eulie!” She had things to do today. Eulie appeared and brought a negligee and mules. Jenny Montgomery shuffied to her shower. She exchanged the pink net for a rubber bathing cap, then thrust her head around the frame of the door to say to Eulie, who was selecting lacy lingerie from wardrobe shelves, “Did you go to the bank?” “Yes, madame. An hour ago.” “Three hundred and eighty-some, wasn’t it?” “Three hundred eighty-four, sixty-three,” said Eulie, the precise. Mrs. Montgomery nodded in a satisfied way. “That game helped,” she remarked. And with- drew her head, and turned the shower on. This day she was hatted and furred for the street as early as quarter of four. “Back by six,” she told Eulie. Going down in the ele- vator, she hummed a little tune. She was hap- py. “Surely today!” sang her heart. “Today there will be one!” On the sidewalk she hailed a taxicab. It was too windy and too cold to walk. She gave an address fifteen blocks away and up & side street. “Hurry,” she urged. “I've got to be there in two minutes.” Which was net true at all. She had the right change ready when the taxi stopped, with a quarter for a tip. She ran across the pavement, up the steps. They were brownstone steps, with a glass door at the top that swung into a tiny vestibule. As she ascended fleetly her lifted eager eyes looked through the glass to the double row of mail boxes! Yes! The second left-hand slit showed white. It would be dark, opaque, if there was nothing. She knew. It had been dark often enough. WITH a key in fingers not quite steady she unlocked the box and took the letter out. A letter postmarked Canada. Addressed to “Mrs. Jenny Miller.” That name, too, was on the box. “Long one!” Jenny Montgomery sighed ecstatically, pinching. She locked the box again and found an- other, larger key, with which she let herself into the house. Inside there was & small hall with carpeted stairs climbing from it. Jenny Montgomery mounted the stairs. She mounted four flights of them, slapping her letter lightly against the banisters all the way. The door at the top of the fourth flight opened to her key direct into a living room so0 colorful, so sunny, that it was mental tonic just to enter. A living room all yellow walls and deeper yellow woodwork, and tiny gay canaries perching in the cretonne curtains here and there amid the green-blue-orange-black design. A small room crowded cheerfully with painted furniture, and fat low chairs slip- covered in bright linens in plain hues. A room, you felt quite sure, where smiling people lived, and wore their bed room slippers if they wanted to, and. sometimes in the evenings said, “Oh, listen, this is good!” and read a chosen para- graph aloud. It was warm in the room. Beautifully warm. A radiator sizzled somewhere. Nice to know that it made that sound when she was not here; keeping the place alive, though it was empty. She threw hMer coat off. With thumb and forefinger she dragged her small smart hat off by its brim and tossed it with the coat upon a couch. She ruffied her hair with both hands, ran all her slim spread fingers through' and through it. Eulie would have been appalled. “Your wave, madame!” Umm—but the com- fort! Heavenly, She sat down with her letter. Her eyes were excited, glistening. Her fingers stripped a side edge of the envelope. She drew the pages out, unfolded them. A snapshot fell to her lap. A slender, hand- some boy, dark eyed. A boy about 16, In corduroy knickers, a sweater marked E, a little knitted cap worn jauntily, one ear exposed, he stood at ease on skates upon a spreading sheet of ice, a hockey stick held horizontally across Williams straightened and wheeled, erying boisterously, “Hullo, Monty! How'’s the girl?” his thighs. He looked like an advertisement for a Winter resort. He looked like an illustration from the catalogue of a Northern preparatory school. He looked, in the set of his eyes, in the shape of his face, like Jenny Montgomery. Strikingly and unmsitakably. Sitting quite still, she gazed long at the snapshot. Once she made a strange small sound in her throat, half whimper, half croon. Once she laughed outright, tenderly. “Getting so tall—I can’t——" When she put it aside, propping it up en the table at her elbow, her eyes went with it, reluctant to drop away. She nodded her head to the tiny picture figure. “Was a good hockey player,” she assured it solemnly, in baby talk. “Was the great big captain of the team!” Eulie and Wallace would have thought that Madame had gone suddenly mad. Or that they had. She took up the pages. Snuggled her shoul- ders deep in the upholstery of her chair. Prop- ped her elbows on the arms, and tilted her head. The letter began, “Dearest,” and it five inky pages long. “I guess you think I died or something, but the fact is I have so busy,” etc. A page of that. A paragraph thanks for “the check, also the cake. It got & little mashed coming but tasted great” An- other paragraph, much underlined, about “the food they give us,” which, it appeared, was “fierce.” An addendum to this, scrawled on the margin: “How about some fudge next time and maybe a roast chicken?” Then there were two pages of hockey, and & page-long complaint of one “Itchy” Flanders, the Latin instructor, who had “sprung a quiz” EMLH 1 : g = n § g = Y let him come, knowing all the time, full well, that he was coming. They had not been together, she and Roger, since September. Before that, not since Feb- ruary. “Twice a year,” she said slowly, aloud. “Two weeks out of 52" Her voice caught, and she RULLT - = o~ \ = n /// \ clcsed her eyes. It sounded like so little to be all the joy she had. But he was coming! Soon! That was the thing to think about. Her eyes flew open and were lit again. he is great, and his biog- raphy is written, writer may add, “of poor but honest parents.” Certainly Harry Miller and his young wife Jenny were poor. Certainly they were honest. A tired little couple with rough, deft hands and minds full of little, little things, who loved each other, ,uarreled and forgot it, struggled grimly for existence and on Sundays thanked God, and were more wretched —and much happier—than they knew. ‘They had a wee shabby house that would be paid for in six years, and they breakfasted by lamplight every morning. Harry Miller, blond, huge, looked like a Viking and was a street car motorman. Passengers liked to ride with him on the front platform. A sign read, “Don‘t Talk to the Motorman.” But Harry talked to you. He gossiped cheerily; he philosophized; he prophesied. He had two concurrent opinions to offer on any given topic. One began, “The way I see it is——" The other, “My old lady ” 73 HE had been born in the Summer of 1911; and if some day the His old lady was 22 years old; a brown-eyed, brown-haired pretty little thing. Nobody knew who her parents were. Harry Miller had mar- ried her out of the home of the Widow Peters, who, in turn, had procured her, to act as daugh- ter, companion and “help,” from an orphanage. 1 tifully, scrubbed end- faithful to him, even with her This man i H E ¥ EREy it his father. Roger—well, his mother why quite. She only knew that ” had a sound that pleased her. it over variously herself. “Roger cler.” “Dr. Roger Miller.” “An of paintings by Roger Miller.” “Mr. Mrs. Somebody Grand request the honor of Mr. Roger Miller's company . . .” At the Widow Peter's, before she was so busy, she had read every book she could lay hands on. Roger was a merry baby, plump, with blue eyes turning brown, and pink petal hands, strong. “Look, Harry! How he grabs Harry said he was going to run a P | i i §