Kept Woman/Chapter 3

Five-thirty p.m. in the subway. Lillian Cory standing on the platform of a northbound train holding her elbow at just the right angle for stabbing a swarthy gentleman who had discovered that with every lurch of the train he could fall blissfully against Lillian's soft body. She was tightly wedged between him and a large fur-coated woman. The woman had been shopping. She had many packages and kept announcing that they would be crushed if "people" weren't careful. Lillian knew that she was the "people" to whom the woman had reference. It was clearly indicated that it would be greatly appreciated if Lillian would move closer to the swarthy gentleman.

"To hell with you, Kate," thought Lillian, eyeing the fur-coated woman. "Whatever you're getting crushed there can be replaced. It's different with me."

At Seventy-Second Street the fur coat and the packages left the train. There was a second's breathing-space before the crowds from the local came pushing into the Broadway express. Lillian found herself in the center of the car. Each new passenger had forced her a few steps farther from her original stand on the platform. In her new location Lillian arranged her cape and hat and looked about. Well, at least the swarthy gentleman had been left behind. There was now a fat, pompous fellow at her left holding his fist an inch away from ​her eye as he stood with his Evening World widespread. There ought to be a law against reading anything but tabloids in the subway during rush-hour. At her right was an unobtrusive little wisp of a man who was holding to a white enamel loop and chewing gum. Behind her was an elderly gentleman who leaned against her. He meant no harm. He was just resting.

At Ninety-Sixth Street there was a mild flutter in the car. Two ladies got out and four flappers sat down. Nothing occurred that changed Lillian Cory's position. She continued to hang on to her own particular enamel loop. Her hand looked strange and unrelated to her as it grasped the support. It looked small up there and whiter than it looked all day when it was searching through squares of linen, lawn, cambric, and silk for "something with a red border, did you say? But aren't these monograms sweet? Very new. Smart, you see, with just the edge showing above the pocket."

Lillian's eyes roved along the line of advertisements above her head. Gentlemen were invited to change to Reis underwear, wear Paris garters, and suck a Zymole Trokey after the football game. Ladies were charged to remember Pompeian Rouge and Powder brought instant beauty. Taste it, it's Ward's. Chesterfields—they satisfy. Because she likes nice things. It's smart to be thrifty. Maxwell House Coffee—good to the last drop. A skin you love to touch.

The sickening swaying of the train. The strained, yellow lights. The persistent, musty underground odor.

One Hundred and Third Street. Nobody moved. The passengers ignored One Hundred and Third ​Street. Lillian gloomily searched the faces of those lucky enough to be sitting down. She wondered if a fellow would be mean enough to ride past his station just to keep somebody else standing. Thoughts like that come to you during rush-hour in the subway.

A woman began to fuss with the two bushes of hair that showed beneath her hat. Perhaps she was preparing to get out at One Hundred and Tenth Street. If she did, the one standing nearest would get the vacant seat. Lillian nearly upset the little wisp of a man in her rush to get close to the woman who was now examining her face in a pocket mirror. The train drew in to One Hundred and Tenth Street and sped away from it. The woman remained seated and continued to study her face. She was still seated and busily regarding her nails when Lillian left the train at Dyckman Street.

The subway is an elevated at Dyckman Street. Lillian had to walk down to street level. She did it slowly and with a hint of condescension in her bearing. Once out of the subway crush, one can become a lady again.

A few doors off Dyckman Street on Nagel Avenue there was a florist's shop. The window drew Lillian's attention as she crossed the street. Chrysanthemums. Conventional yellows and tawny burnished shades. Lillian suddenly wanted a chrysanthemum. She wasn't particularly fond of flowers, but the chrysanthemums looked smug and expensive. She felt challenged. As though somebody had said, "You couldn't afford those."

Lillian opened her purse and gazed hopefully into the fold where she kept her money. One dollar and ​twelve cents. The chrysanthemums were probably fifty cents apiece. That would be all right.

She opened the door of the florist's shop and walked in.

"I want a chrysanthemum," she said. "One of the reddish ones. How much are they?"

"A dollar."

"All right."

She went out wearing pinned upon the collar of her cape a chrysanthemum. There was more condescension in her bearing now as she walked up Dyckman Street. Girls who passed her gazed admiringly at the flower. It made Lillian chuckle silently. Nobody in the world except herself knew that she only had the chrysanthemum because she hadn't the nerve to retrench when the florist had named its price.

She crossed Post Avenue and continued on her way. At Sherman she paused to look in a milliner's window. Cute hat. Lillian squinted her eyes and examined the stitching around the quill. Cheap-looking. Oh, there was the tag. Three ninety-eight. No wonder. You couldn't get a really good hat under five. Lillian resumed her stroll up Dyckman Street. At Vermilyea Avenue she turned. There was only one way to turn. Like Post Avenue, Vermilyea begins at Dyckman Street.

A few doors from the fire-house Lillian paused and fumbled in her purse for the key. There were children jumping rope directly in front of the entrance of her house. Lillian wondered how she could get through. She wouldn't ask them to move. Lillian was afraid of children. If they became vexed they sometimes shouted ​things at you and made you conspicuous. She continued to sift the contents of her bag through her fingers even after she had found the key. Maybe one of the children would miss and the rope would be quiet while the jumper became a turner.

"Wait a minute. Let the lady pass."

The rope flopped helplessly on the ground and Lillian stepped across it, smiling sunnily at the children as she did so. She wasn't sure which child had pleaded her case, but she was grateful to them all.

In the foyer Lillian replaced the key in her purse and glanced into the third letter box in the lower row. It was marked with a slip of cardboard which bore two names. One was Cory. The other was Friedrich. Lillian herself had printed the names. She had torn the cover off a pack of paper matches and had taken care to print the names plainly. She wondered why she had put Friedrich above Cory.

There was no mail. There rarely was any mail. Of course on the first of the month there was the electric bill. The gas bills were delivered by gas company employees.

As she walked up the stairs Lillian cast disgusted glances at a chewing-gum wrapper, a banana skin, and several nondescript fragments of paper which lay about. Of course the janitress couldn't stand guard in the hall all day long, but still there was certainly some sort of provision that could be made for this sort of thing. The halls really were a disgrace. One would think that Rose Friedrich would have noticed that before renting the apartment.

​Lillian turned the knob of Apartment 3a. Third floor front. The door opened and she walked in. The Friedrich girls were already there. Lillian could hear them talking in the kitchen and the air was heavy with the odor of frying onions. That meant steak. Rose always fried onions to put over it. Lillian didn't like the flavor of onions but she hated to tell Rose that she didn't. There was a long hall off which lay the kitchen and one bedroom. That was Lillian's room. It was on a court. Never bright and not too airy. Facing the street were the living-room and another bedroom. Rose and Sylvia had the nicer bedroom. It was only fair. They did most of the housework, as they could leave later in the morning than she. Lillian looked in the kitchen as she passed. Rose was poking at the onions in the smoke-filled kitchen, and Sylvia was sitting on the table looking over the evening newspaper.

"'Lo," called Lillian. "How are all the little Friedrichs?" Her voice was full and mellowly husky. Her mode of speech was nearly always facetious. Earnest moments embarrassed her. When people told her of their troubles, it was only by an effort that she held back light words. She was not unfeeling, but serious conversation made her uncomfortable. It was like the subway crush. People were too close to her, too intimate, when they demanded grave attention and thoughtful replies.

In her room Lillian took off her cape and hat and changed her shoes. Her feet were tired. She sat on the bed and enjoyed her toes' new-found freedom. Her bed was a single bed. Metal with mahogany stain. A ​chest of bird's-eye maple drawers and a wicker chair made up the other furnishings in the room. There was a Crex rug on the floor. Lillian called her room the "lemon box," so the Friedrichs told people she wasn't satisfied with it.

"Hey, Lillian, set the table, will you?"

That was Sylvia calling. It was the least Lillian could do. Setting the table was nothing.

"Yep. Just a minute. I'm giving my feet a vacation."

"Well, they haven't been here a year yet. Don't give them two weeks' vacation."

"All right."

Lillian had closed her door. She always closed the door when she went to her room.

"No kidding, Lillian, come on, will you? What are you doing?"

"Resting my tootsies."

Lillian got up reluctantly. She unpinned the flower from her cape and took it to the kitchen. She found a milk bottle and filled it with water, then after placing the flower in it went to the living-room to open the gate-leg table. Sylvia had already attended to the table. She looked wounded and mournful. Her large black eyes fixed themselves accusingly on Lillian.

"I'm so thin and delicate," Sylvia's expression said. "Don't you think you could spare me this?"

"Have a seat," Lillian invited. "You look too sad to be setting a table. You're liable to cry all over the butter."

Sylvia shook her head. She would help though it killed her. Lillian and Sylvia went about the business ​of bringing plates and knives and forks from the kitchen. Lillian was glad that Rose bought print butter. It came in little quarter-pound pieces and you could put a whole one on a plate. It was a nuisance when you had to slice off a chunk for the table. Lillian opened a can of evaporated milk and poured half of it into a pitcher.

"The steak's done," Rose announced.

"All right. Let's go." Lillian was hungry.

The Friedrich girls conversed mainly between themselves at the table. They had a lingerie and hosiery shop on Washington Heights. A small shop, but it kept them comfortably fixed. Lillian had rented a room in a Washington Heights apartment at one time. A tiny room. She had eaten her meals in a bakery. It had been a static, lonely existence. A frequent customer at the Syl-Rose Shop, she had fallen into the habit of chatting with the Friedrich girls over the purchase of sheer stockings, nude shade, size nine.

They "roomed" too and also found fault with that way of living. Rose had made the proposition to Lillian. She knew where she could get some furniture cheap. If she furnished an apartment would Lillian come live there and pay one-third of the rent and food and electricity and gas? Rose had found the apartment in Inwood. It was only ten minutes' ride to the shop, and the rent was cheap. Sixty dollars for four rooms. Lillian didn't buy her stockings at the Syl-Rose Shop any more. The Friedrich girls always wanted to sell them to her at cost.

"Listen, Sylvia, when you go back to the shop tonight watch that box of gun-metal dollar-eighty-nines. ​They're all defective. Don't give them to any steady customers."

"I won't. Don't worry."

Rose was the elder Friedrich. She gave the orders. She was a round-faced, stockily built girl with thick black brows. Sylvia was very thin but quite pretty. She wore her hair carefully waved and kept her nails brilliantly coated with deep-rose nail liquid. She had a boy friend. Rose had none.

Between five-thirty and seven the Syl-Rose Shop was in the hands of a sixteen-year-old cousin of the Friedrichs. It didn't matter so much. That was the slow part of the day. At seven each evening one Friedrich girl returned for two hours. It was Sylvia's chance tonight. Rose was remembering that Max would meet Sylvia and bring her home. Nobody ever brought Rose home on her working nights. The thought of Max suggested kindred subjects. Rose turned to Lillian.

"Who gave you your pretty flower?" she asked.

"I ketched him up at the flower-man's all by myself," said Lillian.

"Huh?" Sylvia stared at Lillian. "At a dollar a throw I'm not buying them myself."

"Oh, do you think a dollar is a lot for a large chrysanthemum?" Lillian's eyes said plainly that they were surprised. "Have you ever heard of chrysanthemums for less?"

"Sure I have." Sylvia pushed back her plate and left the room. There was more she wanted to say on the subject, but that could be done at a later date. She was pressed for time at the moment.

​Lillian and Rose cleared the table and began their dish-washing. Sylvia went out after charging Rose not to worry about her. She and Max might go on somewhere after the store was closed.

"No getting in at two in the morning, now," Rose ordered.

"How about three?" asked Sylvia. She shut the door before Rose could answer her.

Rose laughed a little. "Young girls are cute, aren't they?" she said to Lillian. "Especially when they're in love for the first time. They're so fresh and sure of themselves."

"Is Sylvia so terribly young?" Lillian asked.

"She's twenty-two."

"Oh," said Lillian. She was twenty-three.

Rose washed the pots and pans while Lillian was putting the dishes back in the cupboard. There was a silence between them for more than five minutes.

Then Rose said, "I'm going to the movies, I think. The Inwood has Milton Sills tonight. I like him."

"Going out for a wild time, huh? Don't get hurt."

Rose had intended to ask Lillian to go with her, but she changed her mind now. Lillian evidently looked upon the movies as a dull way to pass an evening. Rose ran the dish-cloth over the tub where the dishes had drained and hung it to dry on the edge of the sink.

"Finished?" asked Lillian

"Yes, we're finished." Lillian pulled the cord on the light and they left the kitchen. Rose went to the living-room, where she picked up the newspaper and became instantly engrossed in the daily true story. Lillian went ​to her own room. She liked it best in the evening. There was a yellow shade on her light and it gave the room a soft, warm radiance and transformed the slightly soiled, white net curtain into a golden mesh. Lillian went through her bureau, searching for handkerchiefs, stockings, and underwear that needed attention. This would be a good night to wash.

The telephone jangled irritably. It belonged to the house and was operated from a switchboard in the janitor's apartment. The bell had the same whining, put-upon tone as the janitress's voice. Rose answered it.

"It's for you, Lillian," she said, rattling the knob of Lillian's door.

"For me? My God, I'm popular. That's the second call within a month."

Lillian went to the phone. She supposed that it was Louise Casey or Anna Leitz. Both of them half-hour talkers, and just when she wanted to get her washing done, too.

"Hello."

"Hello, Lillian?"

"Yes. Who is it?"

"This is May."

"Who?"

"May. May McCloud."

"Oh, yes. How are you?"

"I'm fine. How are you?"

"Able to take nourishment. Say, I'm sorry I didn't recognize your voice. I don't know why I didn't."

"Oh, that's nothing. Say, Lillian, what are you doing tonight?"

​"Nothing in particular. Why?"

"Well, Carl has a very dear friend who wants to go out with us tonight and we think it would be nicer for him if there was another girl beside me in the party. I know a lot of girls I could ask, but I don't want to ask just any one. He's a peach of a fellow and I'm asking you because, really, I think it's mean to pick just any kind of a girl for a man. Even if it is only for the evening. I want him to have somebody nice. You know how it is, Lillian."

"Yeh."

"Can you come?"

"I guess so. Where are you going?"

"We have no plans. Why?"

"Nothing. I just asked. Well, you can pick me up here, can't you?"

"Sure. Around nine."

"All right."

Lillian hung up the receiver and started back to her room.

"Going out, Lillian?" Rose called.

"Yessum. Want anything?"

"No. I was just asking out of plain curiosity."

Lillian opened her closet door and stood leaning against the jamb gazing drearily at what she saw. Two hangers on the clothes-arm. One held a velvet dress. It had been a good dress, but it was worn now. Badly worn. Lillian yanked the other hanger down. There was a suit upon it. Could she wear the suit? Too cold out. How about the suit with the cape over it? Funny-looking.

​Lillian began pulling garments off the hooks and regarding them carefully. A silk dress. Torn in the sleeves. A tricotine. Stained beyond all imagining. A skirt. What could anybody do with a skirt? A nightgown. A coat from which Lillian had ripped the fur collar. Now where was the dress she had used that collar for? Maybe that—oh, there it was. No, that was stained, too. That was the dress she had worn to Louise Casey's birthday party and Billy Fisher had dropped his salad in her lap.

Lillian looked down at the dress she was wearing. It was after all the best she had. And why not? It was less than a week old. She'd wear that.

Lillian never used cold cream. Just had never gotten in the habit of it. She went to the bathroom and washed her face in hot water and then in cold. She squeezed a blackhead and put a drop of peroxide upon it. She sighed as she remembered that she would have to put on the tight shoes again. It wasn't so much that they were tight. They really were her size. But the short vamp was so uncomfortable. Oh, well.

She went back to her room and changed her stockings. A change of stockings is always soothing to hot, tired feet. She really would have to do some washing tomorrow night. This was her last clean pair. The shoes now. Maybe they were too small. Jesus, how they hurt. Worse now than all through the day

Lillian fussed quite a bit with her hair. It was beautiful hair. Dark, warm red with a wide, rolling natural wave. It was bobbed. Billy Fisher had cut it one night when everybody was drunk. Lillian had awakened the ​next morning amazed and grief-stricken. She had had to go at once to the hairdresser's to have it evened. The hairdresser had assured Lillian that the bob was becoming; so it had remained short for over a year now. There had been a time though when Lillian had said, "What! Cut my hair? I should say not. It's the only first-class feature God gave me."

Lillian always used a great deal of make-up. It went on thick now. Pink cheeks, red lips, black brows and lashes. There was little of the real Lillian Cory left when she was finished. A mask surmounted by a crown of gorgeous hair, and that so perfect that it too looked unreal. She leaned across the bureau to look closely at herself in the mirror. Her short upper lip kept her mouth perpetually parted and her teeth showing. They were good teeth. Strong and white. Her nose was too small for beauty but it was straight, and the tiny nose conspired with extremely large gray eyes to give an elfin quality, a whimsical expression to the face of Lillian Cory.

She opened a diminutive bottle of Coty's L'Origan and laid the glass stopper first against one ear lobe and then against the other. Her hat was a black felt with green roses worked upon it in worsted. She pulled it down over her full head of hair. It covered her brows, and the narrow peak of the hat gave a faint military smartness to the outline of her head.

She drew her cape over her shoulders. It was black broadcloth and there was a collar of so-called fox. It looked well and didn't shed. Lillian asked no more than that of a fur collar.

​She went to the kitchen and rescued her chrysanthemum from the milk bottle. She pinned it upon her collar. On the left side. Then slowly she walked to the living-room.

Rose had straightened the room and rearranged her hair. She had the center light switched off and was trying to read the paper by the light that filtered through the floor lamp's pink shade.

"No movies?" asked Lillian.

"Oh, I changed my mind."

Lillian got a Camel out of the cigarette box that was standing now on the gate-leg table. The box was disturbed only at meal-times and then with reluctance. It had cost nine dollars wholesale. Max had given it to Sylvia when the apartment was furnished. Lillian lit the cigarette and stood smoking thoughtfully. She did not enjoy the tobacco. After one puff it already tasted of lipstick. She knew why Rose had not gone to the movies. Rose wanted to see who was coming for her. Lillian preferred it otherwise. It gave her a sense of power to know that the Friedrichs were completely unaware of her life and actions outside that apartment. A sight of Lillian's friends would give Rose a foundation to build her guesswork upon. Lillian wanted a cloak of mystery drawn close about her activities. It made her feel important.

And here was Rose ready to play hostess to May and Carl and the other man. Staying home from the movies to see them. To see what they were like.

A car stopped in front of the house. Lillian looked out the window. She saw May McCloud.

​"Well, good night, Rose," Lillian said, crushing out her cigarette. "I hope Milton Sills didn't miss you."

"Why don't you let your friends come up and get you?" asked Rose.

"Why should they bother you?"

"Oh, they wouldn't bother me."

"Apple sauce. See you tomorrow."

Lillian ran down the hall and out of the apartment. Rose sat for a minute in the pink lamplight. She felt cheated and annoyed. She looked out of the window in time to see a Packard glide away from her front door. Then she got up and went to Lillian's room. She wanted to see if Lillian had taken a nightgown.