The Friend of Women and Other Stories Read Free Page B

whom she could work on, but as time went by and no offspring appeared, I began to wonder if they ever would.
Les petits dues se font un peu attendre,
as my beloved Dumas
fils
wrote of the barren marriage of the due and duchesse de Septmonts in a late play.
2.
    I have followed Alfreda’s life up to marriage, and I shall do the same with Cora King and Letty Bernard before enlarging upon the bitter crises that awaited all three in the early years of wedlock. Because I have always emphasized the great things that women can do without the assistance or even the presence of men, I do not wish to be taken as downgrading my own sex or exaggerating the problems of finding a worthy husband. All of my girls might easily have made happier matches. The only thing wrong with Tommy Newbold was that he wasn’t the right man for Alfreda. Luck plays a major role in matrimony.
    Cora King was something of a lost soul when she graduated from Miss Dickerman’s Classes. She should, of course, have gone to college, but she stubbornly refused to take the exams. I suspect this was because she feared failing all but English lit and dreaded the humiliation. It was certainly true that her grades in history and mathematics were dismal—only in my course did she excel. Like Alfreda and Letty she was an avid reader of fiction and poetry. She had even struck me at moments as being almost frantic to escape from a world in which she felt somehow inadequate to the world of her imagination.
    When I urged her to at least take a course at Columbia, she demurred, telling me that she wanted all her time for the composition of a novel. And indeed she wrote one, the dreary tale of a jaded debutante who has a tumultuous affair with a gangster, modeled no doubt on her adored Heathcliff. Of course she gave it to me to read, and of course I had to tell her, as gently as I could, that it wouldn’t do.
    Her reaction was violent. Instead of working on the drastic revisions that I had suggested, she burned the manuscript and vowed to write never again.
    â€œI suppose it’s just as well I found out young that I was no good,” she moaned. “Otherwise I might have wasted my whole life trying.”
    I was very much afraid that she was headed toward the wasting of her life in any case. She saw less of Alfreda now that the latter was married and absorbed in what Cora rather scornfully referred to as her “neat little housekeeping,” and Letty, though always friendly and hospitable, was now very taken up with her studies at Barnard. Cora was the financially unendowed only child of a second marriage; unlike her older and richer half-sisters, she was entirely dependent on her mother and lived at home. She did have a couple of love affairs, not as usual before World War II as now, but hardly surprising in view of her loneliness and stunning appearance. Neither, however, worked out. One was with an older married man, a painter whom she met at one of her mother’s gatherings, and who broke it off roughly when a former mistress wanted him back. It simply confirmed her idea that her mother’s guests found her good for only one thing. The other was a homosexual poet who was trying to persuade himself that he not what he manifestly was, and poor Cora insisted, typically, that her own ineptitude as a lover was the real cause of the tepidity of his performance. I began to think of her as a splendid but lonely lioness deprived of her pride—a word I use in two senses.
    I think I was close enough to Cora, whom I loved the most of my three, to continue my version of her story as though I were writing a novel. I am bold enough to hope that my reconstruction of conversations that I did not hear bears a sufficient resemblance to what may have actually been said.
    Cora always felt that her particular stumbling block in life had been that she had been brought up not in a home but in a salon. Her father, like his predecessor, had been divorced when