You’d Better Come Quietly – Three Sketches, Some Outlines And Additional Notes

I

On every big trans-Atlantic liner sailing from Europe to New York — save perhaps in the dead slough of the winter season — you will find a group of what are best designated “healthy, wealthy Americans.” Where this inexhaustible supply of star-spangled-bannered folk who are both financial and fit comes from, and how they manage to be returning from Europe so frequently, I do not know. But there is a generous collection of them on every ship.

They usually travel in full or partial families: a father, mother, two daughters and a son; a mother, daughter and two sons; a father, son and daughter; occasionally a lone daughter or a lone son affiliated with some friends. The first thing one notices about these healthy, wealthy Americans is their indescribable sameness. They are so stereotyped in kind one could almost write a formula for them. I should like to undertake such a formula for the father in a family of four, which includes a vivacious, gaunt, over-painted mother; a rather handsome college-boy son (probably Princeton); and an athletic daughter who has been completely finished at a finishing school. Father’s official title among his dear ones is Dad.

Dad: a moderately tall, smooth shaven, slightly bald banking or business man, between fifty and sixty; well tanned, white-trousered, fond of a cigar; with a full-toned, monotonously masculine voice, and a self-contented, deliberately sustained smile; whose main chore at sea is to point out things; to ask the family if they have seen this or that, report on the ship’s log, sight objects on the horizon, whales, other boats, etc., and point them out.

Dad is always the first of his party to rise in the morning, usually eats breakfast alone, and never gets seasick. He reads through three books while crossing: the best-selling novel of the year; a detective story, and a popular book about sociology or finance. Of the first two books he invariably reports, “a darn good story”; of the third, “some interesting things in it, but I don’t quite agree with him.”

When the ship docks, Dad is the first to spy friends or relatives standing on the pier, shouting “There’s Laura waving to us!”; and then “Come on, Ida. Come on, children. Has everyone got everything? Son, have you got the keys to the trunks?”, etc., etc.

Dad is intensely preoccupied with trying to keep fit, with keeping young. Whenever he meets a stranger, the very first thing he wants to discover is the stranger’s age, and even when not bold enough to ask it, is always sizing it up, arriving at some secret, plausible figure.

Dad likes nothing better than to be handled as though he were a youngster, relishes nothing better than a good slap on the back. He loves to be asked to go golfing, and always has an imminent fishing trip memorandumed in the back of his mind. He dances too, and is equally at home with young or old ladies; dances well, indeed, but would dance much better if he didn’t try to be so “young” at it. For the past fifteen years, while being perfunctorily kissed, hand-shaken or back-slapped on his birthday, he has never failed to say, “I feel as young as a colt.”

Dad is a persistent taker of Turkish baths, devotes hours weekly to being shaved, rubbed, manicured, pomaded, etc.; has spent a small fortune on hair remedies, treatments, etc. (some of them really gruesome). He gargles and tooth-brushes faithfully, and washes religiously once an hour. Towels, other than being slightly rumpled, look as clean after he has used them as before. About a hundred times a day he flexes his muscles to see if they are still working.

Dad is constantly on the point of “cutting down” on things, on eating, smoking, drinking, and is capable in short spells of acute acts of self-denial. He has read uncountable health books, and is forever giving his family little therapeutic exhortations, such as “Come on now, let’s all get to bed!” — a remark in which he is seldom if ever noticed; “Come on now, let’s all get some fresh air!” At table his almost perpetual incantation into the ears of his daughter is “Eat slowly, darling!” “Darling” looks at him alternately pityingly or annoyed, seems momentarily protected against the ravages of indigestion, or else irritated at the thought of its possibility, and then goes on eating about as before. Yet, in this phrase, “Eat slowly, darling!” Dad’s features assume for one flashing instant a benevolence, innocence, lovability. The maid who serves them dinner at home has often noticed this.

Barbershop, brokerage and bridge: these are pretty nearly the high spots in Dad’s life: sticking-plaster and stock-market reports, interspersed with a trip to Europe. In Europe, as in America, Dad is greatly annoyed at the slum areas in the large cities, at the faces of the underpaid and the undernourished. “Can’t the Government do something for these people?” he always remarks in a sudden burst of charity. “Haven’t they got any public welfare organizations?” Twice a year his conscience troubles him in these matters and drives him to his pocketbook. He never fails to contribute a generous cheque annually to the Red Cross and the Community Chest drives. Dad always purrs contentedly at dinner on the days of these donations, always sleeps better within the octave.

Though doctors have never been able to explain it, nor detect it in the prescribed six months’ physical examination, Dad makes his departure from this world by one of two routes: apoplexy, or coronary thrombosis. He had been feeling “as fit as a fiddle” just before dinner. Shortly after dinner he swooned in his chair. Son ran to his assistance. Daughter screamed, Mother became tearful through smelling salts.

“Good old Dad!”

“Oh, I can’t stand it. It’s perfectly horrible!”

“Be sure to get the very best doctors.”

The very best doctors come, three of them, so as to hold “a consultation.” Sufficient drugs are administered so as to keep Dad’s consciousness out of reach of all pain. It is invariably reported in the papers that he “died in a coma,” which is not true. He was put in a coma by variations of veronal, luminol and morphine, as the day and night nurses can testify. “The very best doctors” like an unconscious patient when they’re stumped, so that they can “consult” with greater professional quiet and report to the prospective widow unannoyed by the indecorous accompaniment of groans. A groaning man does somehow give the impression of not being properly attended to.

Son attends the funeral manfully, in dark clothes, with bowed head. A minister is resurrected for the occasion and reads a text that is more impressive than comforting. Son escorts Mother who could walk, but prefers to be carried mostly. She keeps pressing a handkerchief to her lips, and in the end all but swallows it. Something in her really wants to cry, if only to indicate that a vacuum of some sort has been arrived at; but she lacks any spiritual certitude toward the after-life capable of supporting tears. One can cry at a death, but not at an annihilation. One could rage; but there are sensible reasons for not becoming quite so forcible as that.

Daughter does not attend the funeral. Everyone agrees it is better for her not to. She spends a fortnight with friends at Greenwich or Darien, lives largely on stimulants and sedatives, and reads from end to end the year’s volumes of Liberty, Fortune, Time, Life and other magazines with transcendental names. In the end she gets coaxed into a recuperation by some vigorous sets of tennis and by some good sound plunges in a swimming pool.

(N. B.: A novelist, which I am not, and a Freudian, which I am neither, will complain that I have sent Dad to his grave without any mention of the complex determinants of his life, the chorus girl, manicurist, stenographer, who lurks in the background and in whose company the amorous deficiencies of his career were reconditioned and recompensed. I omit these ladies deliberately. First, because I do not think they were necessarily there; and second, because it would require little art and no imagination to describe them. I stand on Dad as sufficiently tragic as he is, without a single triangular movement in his affections, or a single blot against his moral integrity.)

II

But we have anticipated. Dad is not yet dead, and Mother is very much not yet a widow. You would not think so to see her prancing about the boat. I hesitate to call her Mother, not on my own score, but because Dad never does, though the children do, Son with some warmth, Daughter with none. However, she can be Mother to us, provided we remember that to Dad she is Ida (or Ada or Eva, as the case may be); is “my dear” when he wishes to be particularly instructive or sarcastic; and is sometimes not denominated at all, but only implicitly included in such exclamations as “For God’s sake!” or “What the devil did you say that for?”

Mother has interests much like a butterfly. She hovers here and there for instants, and likes nothing better than to alight on the coat-lapel of a celebrity. Meeting celebrities is part of the necessary business of her existence. Her social charms have in a single season been exercised on everything from a noted entomologist to a heavyweight wrestler, including, of course, the usual sprinkling of violinists, poets, novelists, actors, war generals and bankrupt British noblemen — at whose stories one is “thrilled,” at whose playing one is “entranced,” at whose exploits one is “terrified,” at whose verses one is “fascinated,” at whose manners one is “electrified.” Where perspective is lacking, Mother can supply it, and is known to have remembered a celebrated Russian cellist, at whose art the Tsar was wont to be moved to tears, by nothing more than “he had the most curious feet.”

In literature, fiction is Mother’s single fare, and the sum of culture enjoyed by Mr. Somerset Maugham and Miss Fanny Hurst conjointly would constitute for her a millennium. In the drama and cinema her preferences are all for actresses who play their parts in such a personal way as to extinguish entirely the character they are portraying. She enjoys seeing Lynn Fontanne as Lynn Fontanne in Lynn Fontanne, or Greta Garbo as Greta Garbo in Greta Garbo. As for her spiritual life, you would pity Mother in conflict with, let us say, an ethical principle from which she has chosen to vary. She has in reserve a much nicer God than the traditional one where sanctions for sin are discussed and where the indecency of Eternal Punishment is brought into question. This temporary Deity vanishes as soon as Mother’s conscience conflicts are over, nor does she ever pray to Him or thank Him, not even for His niceness in not having created Hell.

On shipboard it cannot be denied that Mother has one marvelous moment in the day. It is on the way down to dinner in the evening. Unsuccessfully juvenile in her mornings and afternoons — sweatered, scarfed, short-stockinged, all out of proportion with her age; overemphasized in her wrinkles, her yawns, her efforts to jack herself up by constitutional walks, facial treatments (in the manner of the Swedes), and even little divertissements in the gymnasium — there is one golden hour when Mother overcomes these handicaps and emerges like a queen. Promptly at five o’clock she goes to her stateroom to dress for dinner. It takes a long time. It takes nearly two hours. It never terminates until her door has been knocked upon, pounded upon, banged upon by Dad with successively firmer implementalizations of his fist. A kick on the door is sometimes added for good measure, and Daughter’s voice is enlisted to implore through the keyhole: “Mother, will you please hurry?”

But Mother cannot hurry. Why should she? Dinner is the one affair of the day when that inherent quality of good-taste, which is hidden in every lady and never dies, induces her to assert her feminine charm in the manner of the matron which she is, rather than in the manner of the manikin which she is not. Whatever else Mother does to disconcert her husband, she marches down to dinner as his wife, not as his stenographer.

After a nearly two hours’ bout with powder, cream, rouge, perfume, pins, things dropped and picked up again, things mislaid and recovered, much marveling in the mirror, surveillance in all attitudes, selection of gown, slippers, flowers, adjustment of jewelry, Mother throws a silk shawl over her shoulders, puts a final crimp in her hair, slips the lock in the stateroom door and steps daintily into the corridor, so resplendent that even Dad forgets his temper and must momentarily acknowledge her beauty. Daughter — too athletic for aesthetic decoration — is a perfect slattern beside her. Daughter looks like something picked up on the beach and embellished with a temporary ruffle.

Mother, on the other hand, seems to have out-flowered from fairyland. And all the way down the aisles, smiling and sparkling to everyone including the sailors, she proceeds to her nocturnal conquest of the dining hall. Son joins them in the foyer. There may or may not be cocktails, depending on the gentlemen’s endurance without them up to this point. The main stairway is reached. The descent is made royally down the plushy steps. And into the lights, the tinkles, the music, the murmurings of the grand refectory, Mother floats. Heads turn. Eyes enlarge. Little gurgles of appreciation follow her on all sides. The waiter adjusts her in her chair. And then follows, with excited delight, the matter of the menu.

But alas for the briefness of this triumph!

Men grow handsomer as a dinner progresses. Women decline. If they are young, their charms can be revived later in the ballroom. Not so if they are middle-aged. Mother’s fascination manages to survive the appetizer and the soup, and stands up fairly well through the entrée. But it begins to wilt at the roast, and is all but exhausted at the salad. Coffee in the lounge after dinner is for Mother not a stimulation but a restorative.

At eight o’clock Mother’s hour is definitely over. At eight-fifteen there appears the first fatal yawn. At eight-thirty she is more yawn than not. At nine she must leave the company and go into the open air. This she usually does alone, humming a little ancient tune, that sounds very intimate, small and discordant beside the strains of the orchestra blaring through the dance-hall window. After this airing there can be a restful talk with some quiet person, if such can be found. And it is noticed that Mother’s efforts at being fascinating definitely cease before ten o’clock. And just about this hour she begins to take a decided interest in people older than herself. She will possibly like to slip over to some elderly group and say:

“Good evening! I’ve really been anxious to meet you ever since we got on the boat!”

At ten o’clock Daughter and Son are whirling in the dance hail. Dad is at his bridge, or in the bar. And here is Mother all alone in the moonlight talking to strangers. Her shawl is wrapped tightly around her, for the breeze is strong. At ten-thirty more yawns begin, despite such interests as dyspepsia, diabetes and the Civil War. Mother is solicitous, kindly, sympathetic, but the yawns persist. Eventually they become violent. It is so nice to be, in these late-night seizures, in the company of people whom one is not trying to impress. The bell tolls forward which announces that the waves are high and the boat pitching. It is time for Mother to go to bed. “Good night! Good night! Oh, yes indeed! Good night!”

Mother stumbles into her stateroom and quickly locks the door. Clothes come off much quicker than they went on. There is some ritual with face preparations to be undergone, but it is unenthusiastically fulfilled. Close to eleven she slips into bed having been preceded by a hot-water bottle. Mother seems very shriveled and small and cold as she slides under the coverlet and stretches out for the night. She takes up a novel and makes believe to read it for ten minutes or more. Then she switches off the light. Some memories of her dazzlingness in the early evening come back to her, but most of the relish in it is gone. For a long time after this she makes believe that she cannot go to sleep. But finally does. And the little purr of her breathing is soon lost in the thunderous susurration of the ship’s motors.