FullReads

Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!

“Enjoying yourself, Milly?” he would say.

“Time of my life, father. ”

She had had her hair dressed in those geometrical, undulations without which no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less frequently as time went on and her feeling or responsibility lessened. Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster’s hat, slippers, gown and manner equalled in line, style, cut and texture those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she had talked to five or six of them.

She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes.

“Say, Milly,” he confided, “they’re all from Wisconsin—or approximately; Michigan and Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far’s I can make out there’s only one New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of ’em. ”

“Which one?”

“That kind of plain little one over there—sensible looking, with the blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York, but she doesn’t live here—that is, not in the city. Lives in some place in the country, in a house. ”

A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster’s eyes. “Is that so? I’d like to talk to her, Hosey. Take me over. ”

She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the quiet little woman said: “Oh, dear, yes!” She ignored her r’s fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do”. We live in Connecticut. You see, you Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space. Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say—live. And then the children—it’s no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love it—oh, yes indeed. I love it. But it’s too difficult. ”

Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. “But if you have just a tiny apartment, with a kitchenette—”

The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But she laughed. “I tried it. There’s one corner of my soul that’s still wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the slavery of it. That—that deceitful, lying kitchenette. ”

This was the first woman that Mrs. Brewster had talked to—really talked to—since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvelously coiffed and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a mysterious heady scent they were more like strange exotic birds than women.

The clerks in the shops, too—they were so remote, so contemptuous. When she went into Gerretson’s, back home Nellie Monahan was likely to say: “You’ve certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster. Let’s see, you’ve had it two—three years this spring? My land! Let me show you our new taupes. ”

Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey’s simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two—perhaps two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.

“I guess you ain’t a New Yorker, huh?” Mike said.

“Me? No. ”

“Th’ most of the folks in th’ buildin’ ain’t. ”

“Ain’t!” Hosea Brewster was startled into it. “They’re artists, aren’t they? Most of ’em?”

“No! Out-of-town folks, like you. West, East an’ Californy, an’ around there. Livin’ here, though. Seem t’ like it better’n where they come from. I dunno. ”

Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women. He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes, with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white linen collar. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn’t his square-toe shoes that made the difference, or his grey hat, or his baggy trousers. It was something inside him—something he lacked, he thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed that they did not.