Love & Mrs. Sargent Read Free Page A

dearie? I’m an impractical practical nurse.”
    Over a bottle of domestic rose—the Inn primly served only beer and light wines—Mrs. Porter poured out the story of her last quarter century: the spoiled husband who hadn’t been able to surmount the depression and died after sixteen years in a public institution; the son killed in Korea; the daughter—recalled by Mrs. Flood as a golden princess with a genuine French mademoiselle—married to an insurance adjuster in Detroit; the foreclosures and evictions and auctions and pawnings; and now her career as—well—really a menial. Mrs. Porter told her story forthrightly and wittily with wry asides. Indeed thetragedy seemed to hit Mrs. Flood far harder than it did its hero ine. With little gasps and moans, with eyebrows shooting upward and lips thrust outward, with hands fluttering to her sternum, her throat, her cheeks, Mrs. Flood was a study in audience participation. “But Emily, how awful. . . ! Oh, not your sable coat . . . ? You mean the vi-o-lent ward at Dun -ning . . . ? How ghastly . . .! Those beautiful pearls, too . . . ? Oh, Em -i-ly!”
    “So, that brings me up to date,” Mrs. Porter said, spreading her large, worn hands—innocent of rings—on the table, “I’ve got a little car of my own, a tiny dump down in Rogers Park near enough to the lake to go swimming. And you know what? I like it. Well, I’ve talked enough. Now it’s your turn, Imogene.”
    Mrs. Flood’s hands had strayed to her gold-plated cigarette case, her gold-plated lighter, her gold-plated holder. She had told a carefully cut and edited story of her life so many times that she herself no longer knew just what was true, what was false, what was wishful thinking and what was merely indistinct because it was viewed from such a long distance. This was the first time she had told the tale to an old, rich acquaintance who was now worse off than she was. She would have liked, now, to have been a little franker with Emily, but the force of habit was too strong. She began her string of euphemisms:
    “Well,” Mrs. Flood began, “after poor Tom passed away. . . .” The late Tom Flood had actually passed out— out of a window at Number One North LaSalle Street in 1932, leaving behind a widow, twenty-odd thousands of dollars’ worth of debts and a mysterious bastardy suit brought by an unknown young woman who was not one of Mrs. Flood’s social circle. “Of course that enor mous apartment on Dearborn was much more than I wanted. . . .” Actually, the apartment had been four boxy rooms in the unfashionable tier of a moderately stylish building. What Mrs.Flood had really wanted was just twice as much space on Lake Shore Drive or, at the very least, North State Parkway. “I mean rooms and rooms and rooms of lovely antique furniture; the silver, the china. . . .” The “lovely antique” furniture had been bought, fresh from Grand Rapids, at Sholle’s in 1921. The silver and china had been rather good. But it had all been junk to the bailiff who impounded it. “It was so boring sitting around a hotel room all day. . . .” Even though blessed with the most convenient memory, Mrs. Flood was still able to recall squalid places with romantic names—La Vista, Le Marquis, Leicester Court—where her view of the airshaft was blocked by a pint of milk, a sliver of butter set out to cool on the window ledge; where she stayed in her room for days, fearing to pass the manager’s desk and call attention to her unpaid presence. If terror was ever dull, then Mrs. Flood had been truly bored. “So I thought it might be fun to take some little job somewhere. Of course I’d had no experience. . . .” How often harassed personnel managers, each scared for his own job, had told her just that. Mrs. Flood had, in a ladylike way, hit the labor market at a time when fourteen million people, each more competent than she, were battling for jobs. And the few openings she had found had certainly been little