Queenie Read Free Page B

on about. We live on the West Side, and on Seventh and Fifty-Seventh, because as the daughter of the mistress of a certain restaurateur of the 1930s, what better way can Aurine show Fifty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue and that same restaurant, how far she’s come? Only a few blocks away, she still has her village, which she goes to by choice on her own well-shod feet, never by cab. But in every other way, it is made to know.
    Once a week, we dine at the restaurant en famille , and once a month or more with all the beauties and their men. Long before Granny, who was Aurine’s and my mother’s mother, died, the place has a new management, but Oscar and I’ve begun to think Aurine has a piece of it. We see more than village respect for her life with Oscar, or even for the jewels she shows there and in the French Church at Christmas, in the way the staff says “Madame.”
    They say it even more so at the yearly party Madame gives them in her house, built on top of the old joint by a gambler of the twenties, whose aging girl sold it to Aurine. Thereby, Oscar says, keeping up the traditions of the original building, which belongs to the belle epoque.
    And we sit on it, he adds, like the cream puff on the dowager. And on a lot of the tenants as well, for the newer they are, the more respectable. The rest of us are in the tradition; we might be anything and usually are.
    Meanwhile, the weekly offers treble—to which Aurine says sweetly loud on the phone, “Our fun-nee ramshackle house, Mr. Mavrodopoulos, why it wouldn’t be near enough good for you,” then hisses over her shoulder, “They’re trying to get together a package for an office tower, you can be sure of it!” Even when that time comes, she mayn’t be on the selling side, for a reason I don’t like to think about. And if I leave, won’t have to. Girls like me don’t get dowries; we are them. So call it professional backing for the pretty package that will be me. A family estate. Meanwhile all Aurine’s satisfactions work out with hurt to nobody. And we adore her for it. Truly. I just don’t want to be one of them.
    Oscar’s case is different. Though he was around Aurine before I was—from before my mother, her twin, died of me—there was of course a time in Aurine’s youth when he wasn’t around her exclusively and other men were; now and then he’s made to remember it. Among the girls, this is called “keeping them up to the mark” and with either a weak protector or a strong one, I myself can see it has to be done. Their recipes for living the life of love have been dinned into my ears since forever; this is the basic one. And the main way it’s done is the simplest. Oscar doesn’t live here. You never really go to live with them. But if you are Aurine, you keep them a few flights down.
    His flat’s much larger than our house—nine rooms for a single man through thick and thin, and he’s had a lot of thin lately. But Aurine won’t hear of his changing; he doesn’t know she’s keeping up his dignity for him. When she goes in for doing that, she does it all the way.
    “Never do like the wives do, Queenie, bolstering up a man for worldly purposes, and slapping him down for their own!”
    She’s been keeping up his dignity for years now. And hers as well. Not ever letting yourself fall in love with them, that’s keeping yourself up to the mark. How much love is involved in this house is something I try not to think about! There’s more than enough virtue around here as it is, to keep me from getting out.
    At Oscar’s, I’ve learned a lot of it. “Over at Oscar’s,” the most comforting words always. To be sent there on an errand when I was six, to run in to tell how I’d been kept at school, or still later to study in his huge library; it’s been a second home. Which means the place that teaches you all your apples don’t have to be in number one.
    In the days when Oscar is a full-time impresario, the one that people think of