Girl on the Best Seller List (4 page)

F
ERN FULTON
said, “Honestly Glo, you’ve got the whole town right on its ear!”

They were sipping Nescafé in the Fultons’ dinette, just off the kitchen.

Gloria Wealdon no longer thought Fern looked like Ida Lupino. It used to be that no matter how Fern was dressed, no matter how tired or hung-over Fern was, Gloria saw her through the spectacles of awe, glad and beholden to be her friend, convinced that Freddy Fulton’s wife was fabulous and exciting and tragically wasted on Cayuta. Part of it, Gloria supposed, was due to the fact Fern wasn’t a native of the small upstate New York town; she was a native New Yorker. Her father, William B, Everight, had been very rich once. Gloria remembered a time, during the early years of their friendship, when Fern told her: “Dad had a seat on the exchange, you know.”

“Oh?” Gloria answered, wondering what that meant, wondering why she should be so impressed. She knew she should be by the way Fern had said it.

“We began liquidating in 1930. Dad sold the seat then. We really needed the money.”

“I didn’t know you were ever that poor, Fern.” “Well, we weren’t really
poor.”

“We always were. Really poor. But even we never had to sell furniture.”

Gloria never forgot how Fern had laughed then. They were all sitting in the Fultons’ cream-colored living room — Freddy, Fern, Gloria and Milo. Even Freddy laughed, and Gloria, immediately aware that she had made another faux pas of some sort, forced laughter too, trying to pretend she had really meant it as a joke. But Milo had intensified the error. His ears were that red color. His tone of voice wallowed in protest at the Fultons’ unfairness. He was Christ on the cross again, martyr for the innocent and ignorant.

“Now just a minute,” he said, “just a minute. You can’t expect Glo to know anything about the New York Stock Exchange.” He turned to her, placatingly, his light blue eyes sorry for her again. “It’s not a real chair, Glo. A seat on the exchange is actually a position; it’s a profession. It’s worth thousands and thousands.”

Fern stopped laughing long enough to say, “Four hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”

• • •

There were so many times like that time.

Once, Fern had confided to Gloria that before she met Freddy her father used to have a “Proudfoot” done on any young man who dated her more than six times. She had laughed: “And look who I ended up marrying, the head of a pharmaceutical house in Cayuta, New York!”

“What’s a ‘Proudfoot’?” Gloria had asked.

“It’s a service that finds out exactly what a man is worth. A rich man. They wouldn’t even bother with someone like Freddy.”

Gloria had tried to commit the word to memory, to save it and use it sometime in the future. When the time came, during another of the Fultons’ dinner parties, Gloria had used it wrongly. Fleetfoot, she had said. More laughter, with Milo saving face for her again. “Look now,” he had said, “we’re just poor relations of you folks. You can’t expect the ordinary field daisy to know anything about the bouvardias.”

Field daisy, he had said; but bouvardias … not field
daisies
and bouvardias.

Driving home that night Gloria said, “And I suppose
you
knew it was Proudfoot and not Fleetfoot.”

“You try too hard,” he said. “You remind me of Timmy Boulton.”

“Is he a saint or a shrub?”

“He’s Ken Boulton’s teen-ager. He’s great at hockey, superb at tennis, and the best swimmer we have at Cayuta High. But his ambition is to be a basketball star. He’s five-foot-one.”

“You have to stick your neck out if you want to get anywhere, Milo.”

“Sure,” said Milo, “if you’re a turtle.”

• • •

In the garage, after he turned off the ignition key and the lights, he had tried to kiss her. “Glo, you’re crying!”

“You mean you can see me from all the way up there, Milo?”

“What do you mean, from all the way up there?”

“From your heights.”

“Wait a minute, Glo. Just a minute.”

“I don’t want to sit in the garage philosophizing at midnight, Milo. You better put the hoe back up against the wall, or you’ll run over it in the morning.”

“We’re going to leave everything at this point?”

“Yes, because that’s the point it’s at. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Milo,” she’d said, getting out of the car, “or a bouvardia out of a common field daisy.”

Somewhere about that time she had stopped being annoyed at Milo’s imperturbable calm, stopped exaggerating every unintentional affront of his and stopped enjoying his desperate, guilt-worn attempts to get off the hook once she did exaggerate one. She reached that stage in her loveless marriage where it was no longer satisfying to punish him for having been the only man who would marry her. She passed to an intermediary stage in which her aim became to make his best friends like her better than they liked him.

Milo was extremely popular, so the task she set herself was not easy. She could never accomplish it by tearing him down. Her mode of attack was to do it by playing on his friends’ sympathies, by making her own life seem so much more heartbreaking and pathetic than his (which had been about as exciting as a glass of warm water) that everyone would suddenly see them in contrast — Milo, easy-going, puttering, patience-suffering, dull; herself, ingenuous at times (all right!), but impulsive, Bohemian, anxious, sensitive.

She had made several tries in the beginning. There was that hot Fourth of July when they were all at the Cayuta Country Club for the golfing tournament. Somehow, ever since Gloria Wealdon had met Min Stewart, she had thought of her as being absolutely like Ethel Barrymore. Milo used to complain: “How can you keep on saying people are like this movie star and that one? You don’t even know what those people in Hollywood are like!” He could never understand that it wasn’t the star really, but the composite picture of the star from every role she or he had ever played. A Bette Davis was always nervous and lighting cigarettes and pacing around dark rooms; a Clark Gable was bare-chested, uncombed, laughing and swilling whiskey, and hiding his heart-tearing sincerity. A Rita Hayworth had a past, but she was trying to live it down, if smart-alec men would only let her. And an Ethel Barrymore? An Ethel Barrymore oozed dignity, poise; dripped with family trees and crystal chandeliers; but underneath, an Ethel Barrymore admired plain, old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps individuality. That was why Min Stewart reminded Gloria of Ethel Barrymore. Why else would Min have married a war hero who could have had any job he wanted in 1918 and came back to Cayuta to run his drug store, because he liked being a druggist? Min Stewart had a fortune, by Cayuta’s standards, and she was a Genesee County Wadsworth, but she married for love, and love was neither rich nor high-born.

• • •

So that afternoon in July at the country club, when Min bent down to pick up her glove, Gloria Wealdon gave her fanny a little pinch. It seemed a fun thing to do, a little crazy gesture to make Min laugh and like her. Instead, Min froze, and even Milo could not think of anything to say to come to his wife’s defense. It had been a simple impulse; it had become another horrible, horrible mistake.

“Whatever made you do it, Glo?” Milo had asked. “My God, I hope you don’t think Ethel Barrymore would have taken it any better?”

“Ethel Barrymore would have laughed,” said Gloria Wealdon, knowing full well, finally, that she wouldn’t have.

• • •

Then there was Gloria’s try with Fern Fulton. This time she decided to tell Fern a little about her childhood. She was not going to tell her anything that was not true. She was going to tell her how her mother always tore out the pictures of food in the old magazines neighbors gave them, because Gloria and her brothers were always nearly starving, the family was so poor. She was going to describe how she had found one of the pictures in the wastebasket one day, a picture of angel food cake. She had looked at it, and then she had eaten the paper it was printed on. She was going to tell her that, and countless other incidents like that.

The afternoon she chose to do it was in December. Freddy was at work, as Milo was, and Fern’s daughter was in school. They were having coffee and cake in the Fultons’ living room and Fern was standing on a ladder, pinning the gold star on top of the Christmas tree. Under the tree there were countless gifts wrapped grandly in silver and green and gold-flecked paper and tied elegantly with expensive ribbons. Everything about the room spelled splendor, extravagance. Fern was dressed in one of her long, lush dressing gowns, with lace peeking out of the sleeves and fine silk snuggled in the lining. Gloria wore a pair of old blue jeans and a red wool shirt darned at the elbows. Her storm boots were in the hall and she sat in her tired black wool socks that had a hole in the left toe. She had dressed purposely for this moment. No stage seemed better set. At a point when Fern was fixing the star on the evergreen point and complaining about the fact that the caterer for her Saturday evening party had sent her round butter balls instead of butter triangles, Gloria interrupted her.

“It’s strange, Fern.”

“What darling, that caterer? Well, what do you expect in Cayuta? I should have known better. It isn’t that there’s anything wrong with round butter balls. I usually prefer them. But last Saturday I wanted — ” “I don’t mean about the butter.”

• • •

“There! The finishing touch! A lovely gold star! What
do
you mean then, honey?”

“I mean, it’s strange, for me, anyway, when I look at all this opulence — those gifts and the tree.”

“I love Christmas! Even in July I start thinking about what color lights to have. We used green on green last year, with tinsel the only contrast. Do you remember?”

“Yes…. What I mean, though, is the splendor of everything. I guess you’ve never been without it.”

“You call this splendor, honey? I have to laugh sometimes! When I was a kid, and we were living at 420 Park, my father used to buy a tree six times this size. I guess I got my Christmas-bug from him.”

“We had many Christmases without any tree,” said Glo.

“Oh, I know. Freddy always says, let’s not get a big tree. Ginny’s all grown up and everything, we don’t need a big tree. But I say, listen, that’s one thing I insist on, Freddy!”

“We couldn’t afford one lots of times.”

“Well you have a diller now, don’t you, honey? Milo really did a job on those pines in front of your place. If there was a committee in this town that awarded outdoor decoration prizes, why you know who’d win first prize!”

Gloria decided to change her attack, to be direct. “Fern,” she said somewhat sharply, “I want to ask you something!”

Fern turned around on the ladder’s step. “What?” “Fern, were you ever
hungry?”

Fern’s face broke into a big smile. “Honey,” she said, “I’m starving right this deadly minute. Hand me up some cake, would you, Glo? I want to fix this peppermint stick.”

It was always like that with Fern. Gloria got nowhere….

• • •

Now as Gloria sat in the dinette with her that morning in May, she noticed for the first time that Fern’s ears were pitifully gigantic, that her long face, which had never seemed
that
long, could not bear the burden of the youthful pony-tail style which Fern inflicted on it. Her hair itself was also different somehow. It suffered too obviously the abuse of once-a-week bad rinses, which Fern administered herself rather than go to a beauty parlor and admit it was dyed. Everything about Fern was different in Gloria Wealdon’s eyes.

“Honestly!” Fern said again, and her voice no longer seemed husky and theatrical (it was raucous and “upstate”), “you’ve got the whole
country
on its ear! Right on its ear, honey! My gawd, I suppose I ought to be serving you coffee in there!” She waved a long, red-nailed hand toward the large dining room around the corner from the dinette.

Gloria could remember when she had no other wish than to live like the Fultons, cushioned in luxurious comfort, wallowing in wall-to-wall, all-wool rugs, warming your brandy with palms cupped around crystal snifters after dinner, talking of trading in last year’s Lincoln for the new model.

Now she thought of the simple, elegant modern furniture in her agent’s duplex, of the chic parquet floors which Pitts would not let even a scatter rug violate, of the three kinds of wine he invariably served at dinner, and of his small, low-hung Sunbeam Talbot in which they had raced back and forth to Greenwich for “bites to eat” on star-splashed spring nights.

She said, “A lot of people are angry about my book, aren’t they?” glancing out of the window to the yard, where Freddy Fulton was fussing with the hedges. Beside him, following him around the way she followed him everywhere — just as Gloria had described it in her novel — was Virginia, the Fultons’ ugly teen-age daughter.

“Freddy thinks you’ve made Ginny’s complex worse, that’s all,” Fern said, toying with her coffee spoon. “I’m sorry he was rude, but he’s so damnably over-protective! Glo, you hit the nail right on the head! It’s as though we were supposed to do penance or something because Ginny’s eyes are slightly crossed.”

Slightly!
Glo winced. In the novel, Glo had made Ginny lisp instead.

That morning when she had arrived at the Fultons’, neither Freddy nor Virginia had spoken.

“And of course,” Fern Fulton said, “Freddy imagines himself as something of a Lothario. I suppose his ego was hurt because you showed how uxorious he is. That’s a divine word, darling — uxorious! I had to look it up in the dictionary.”