then what?”
Stanton straightened up in his chair and applied his fork to the chipped beef. “I was thinking about something I seem to have lost, and wondering where I lost it. The beef is very good, Betsy. Thank you.”
“Something you lost? What was it?”
He looked at her levelly, and after an instant her eyes wandered to some distant spot on the landscape beyond the vast windows of the breakfast room.
“I’m not sure that I know,” he said. “Perhaps it never existed. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Really, Stan!” Betsy exclaimed. From Jeremy came a sound which might have been a suppressed snicker. Stanton glanced at him, but Jeremy had a napkin spread over most of his face, and bent his head.
They proceeded with their separate breakfasts in silence. Then Betsy said, “Oh, by the way, Stan . . . uh . . . what time are you getting back?”
“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “It depends on how late the banquet goes on and whether I can get a plane afterward. There was some talk about a get-together with the committee after the banquet. An informal celebration, or something. If all goes well, I’ll be here for late breakfast Sunday morning.”
“Oh.” Betsy sipped her coffee demurely. “I thought you said you were going to stay over and spend Sunday in Winnetka with your mother?”
“Yes, I was planning on that, but Mother’s busy all day Sunday, so what’s the point? Anyway—” he looked at her in surprise—“how did you remember that? I only mentioned it once, and that must have been two weeks ago.”
“Why, I don’t know. I have a reasonably good memory, Stan.”
“No, I’m coming back just as soon as I can. Let’s make Sunday a real day, Betsy—go off somewhere together, what do you say? You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to put the car on the Bridgeport ferry and go over to Long Island. We could drive out to Montauk and take a look at the ocean. I haven’t seen any real ocean for months. Then we could have a big shore dinner on the way back. What do you say to that?”
Jeremy and Betsy exchanged glances.
“It sounds lovely, Stan, but we can’t do it this Sunday.”
“Why not? What’s to stop us?”
“Well, Jerry’s got a date to go riding with the Johnson boys in the morning, and then in the afternoon there’s the Hopkins’ cocktail party.”
“Oh, Lord! You didn’t accept, did you?”
“Certainly I did. They always give wonderful parties.”
“As far as I’m concerned, no suburban cocktail party is wonderful, or anything like it.”
“Well, I enjoy them,” she said, again with the pettish tone in her voice. “Just because you can’t drink is no reason why I shouldn’t see my friends.”
“There’s no need to be so tart,” Stanton said. “Especially in front of Jerry.”
“Well, I think you’re unreasonable. I really do. You never want to go anywhere.”
“I beg your pardon. I just got through suggesting a trip to Montauk Sunday. Every week end it’s the same routine—cocktail party Friday afternoon as soon as I get off the train; dinner party Friday night; Saturday, two or three cocktail parties in the afternoon, dinner dance at the club and a few nightcaps at somebody’s house afterward so that we don’t get in until four or five; Sunday, the same thing—buffet luncheon, drink, drink, drink all afternoon until time for another cocktail party. It seems to me that once in a while we might do something different.”
Being a nondrinker put Stanton at a painful disadvantage in Fairfield County, where social life is fueled almost exclusively by alcohol. He would wander miserably through these affairs, with a celery stalk in one hand and a glass of ice water or ginger ale in the other, maintaining a fixed smile as long as he could and wishing that he was back in his library or out in his workshop. Meanwhile the air grew thicker, the martinis warmer and more potent; the canapes dried out and began to curl at the edges; the voices became louder and shriller, and the talk less and less coherent. Someone invariably let a cigarette burn out on the living-room rug, and someone else invariably spilled a drink on an antique table and forgot to wipe it up. The hostess would bite her nails and scream that it didn’t make a bit of difference, honestly! Hurry up and get a rag, John! Don’t just stand there.
But what Stanton mostly objected to was the behavior—after a certain point—of the women. He doubted whether the fine old Eskimo custom of wife trading was quite as widely established in Fairfield County as some of the talk he had heard would indicate, but is the later stages of the cocktail parties a goodly proportion of the wives seemed to be doing their best to make it universal. There was a certain type of woman in the station-wagon set—usually a woman in her middle or late thirties, with two or three children—who by day shot golf in the eighties or showed prize setters or served as expert crew on her husband’s International Class boat in the Saturday afternoon races, and who looked wholesome and healthy and chaste as a statue. By night, after eight or ten drinks, the same woman would begin to lurch and slobber, repeat unspeakable limericks and locker-room stories to the party at large and twine her pudgy arms around the neck of the nearest male. As often as not she would disappear with him and come back looking smeary and disheveled—and then disappear with somebody else. All of which seemed to be taken for granted by everyone but Stanton, who stood by and watched and listened with a mixture of amazement and disgust. Looking at these women, he always had the feeling that they probably were leaking from every aperture.
Whenever they stayed late at a party—and Betsy rarely wanted to leave early—Stanton endured assaults by one or several of them. They would lurch up and lean against him heavily, spilling part of their drinks on his sleeve, and saying something like: “H’lo, big boy, let’s play house, just you and me. . . .” He would never forget the night when he had been quietly reading on a sofa and the drunken wife of one of his neighbors first planted herself in his lap, then swiveled around, lay down across him, pulled her knees up until they nearly touched his face, and spread them apart. . . . He saw her on the station platform the next morning, prim and pure as a daisy. She and her husband waved to him cheerfully, as though nothing whatever had happened. Betsy of course knew about the incident and thought it was funny. That Stanton couldn’t understand.
Of course Betsy had nothing in common with these women. Her conduct was above reproach. But she never expressed any protest against the conduct of the others. And Stanton did, at least to himself.
“Stan, I’m not trying to drag you out against your will, just for my own entertainment,” Betsy said. “It’s for your sake, too.”
“For my sake, too. I see. Or, rather, I don’t see.”
“Look, Stan, you know the Hopkinses. Everybody will be at the party.”
“Yes. Including the usual contingent of bright young admen.”
“Exactly. And why not? That’s the point. You’re famous now. They’ll——”
“They’ll all want to meet me, is that it? And now they’ll want to commission me to design new labels for their canned tomatoes or whatever it is? Why, do you know that Bill Smith asked me to
