Bad Characters Read online

  Lottie gave me a nudge and said softly, “Go look at the envelopes. I want some rubber bands.”

  This counter was relatively uncrowded (the seasonal stationery supplies—the Christmas cards and wrapping paper and stickers—were at a separate counter), and I went around to examine some very beautiful letter paper; it was pale pink and it had a border of roses all around it. The clerk here was a cheerful middle-aged woman wearing an apron, and she was giving all her attention to a seedy old man who could not make up his mind between mucilage and paste. “Take your time, Dad,” she said. “Compared to the rest of the girls, I’m on my vacation.” The old man, holding a tube in one hand and a bottle in the other, looked at her vaguely and said, “I want it for stamps. Sometimes I write a letter and stamp it and then don’t mail it and steam the stamp off. Must have ninety cents’ worth of stamps like that.” The woman laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I get mad and write a letter and then I tear it up.” The old man gave her a condescending look and said, “That so? But I don’t suppose yours are of a political nature.” He bent his gaze again to the choice of adhesives.

  This first undertaking was duck soup for Lottie. I did not even have to exchange a word with the woman; I saw Miss Fagin lift up that hat and give me the high sign, and we moved away, she down one aisle and I down the other, now and again catching a glimpse of each other through the throngs. We met at the foot of the second counter, where notions were sold.

  “Fun, huh?” said Lottie, and I nodded, although I felt wholly dreary. “I want some crochet hooks,” she said. “Price the rickrack.”

  This time the clerk was adding up her receipts and did not even look at me or at a woman who was angrily and in vain trying to buy a paper of pins. Out went Lottie’s scrawny hand, up went her domed chimney. In this way for some time she bagged sitting birds: a tea strainer (there was no one at all at that counter), a box of Mrs. Carpenter’s All Purpose Nails, the rubber gloves I had said I wanted, and four packages of mixed seeds. Now you have some idea of the size of Lottie Jump’s hat.

  I was nervous, not from being her accomplice but from being in this crowd on an empty stomach, and I was getting tired—we had been in the store for at least an hour—and the whole enterprise seemed pointless. There wasn’t a thing in her hat I wanted—not even the rubber gloves. But in exact proportion as my spirits descended, Lottie’s rose; clearly she had only been target-practicing and now she was moving in for the kill.

  We met beside the books of paper dolls, for reconnaissance. “I’m gonna get me a pair of pearl beads,” said Lottie. “You go fuss with the hairpins, hear?”

  Luck, combined with her skill, would have stayed with Lottie, and her hat would have been a cornucopia by the end of the afternoon if, at the very moment her hand went out for the string of beads, that idiosyncrasy of mine had not struck me full force. I had never known it to come with so few preliminaries; probably this was so because I was oppressed by all the masses of bodies poking and pushing me, and all the open mouths breathing in my face. Anyhow, right then, at the crucial time, I had to be alone.

  I stood staring down at the bone hairpins for a moment, and when the girl behind the counter said, “What kind does Mother want, hon? What color is Mother’s hair?” I looked past her and across at Lottie and I said, “Your brother isn’t the only one in your family that doesn’t have any brains.” The clerk, astonished, turned to look where I was looking and caught Lottie in the act of lifting up her hat to put the pearls inside. She had unwisely chosen a long strand and was having a little trouble; I had the nasty thought that it looked as if her brains were leaking out.

  The clerk, not able to deal with this emergency herself, frantically punched her bell and cried, “Floorwalker! Mr. Bellamy! I’ve caught a thief!”

  Momentarily there was a violent hush—then such a clamor as you have never heard. Bells rang, babies howled, crockery crashed to the floor as people stumbled in their rush to the arena.

  Mr. Bellamy, nineteen years old but broad of shoulder and jaw, was instantly standing beside Lottie, holding her arm with one hand while with the other he removed her hat to reveal to the overjoyed audience that incredible array of merchandise. Her hair all wild, her face a mask of innocent bewilderment, Lottie Jump, the scurvy thing, pretended to be deaf and dumb. She pointed at the rubber gloves and then she pointed at me, and Mr. Bellamy, able at last to prove his mettle, said “Aha!” and, still holding Lottie, moved around the counter to me and grabbed my arm. He gave the hat to the clerk and asked her kindly to accompany him and his redhanded catch to the manager’s office.

  * * *

  I don’t know where Lottie is now—whether she is on the stage or in jail. If her performance after our arrest meant anything, the first is quite as likely as the second. (I never saw her again, and for all I know she lit out of town that night on a freight train. Or perhaps her whole family decamped as suddenly as they had arrived; ours was a most transient population. You can be sure I made no attempt to find her again, and for months I avoided going anywhere near Arapahoe Creek or North Hill.) She never said a word but kept making signs with her fingers, adlibbing the whole thing. They tested her hearing by shooting off a popgun right in her ear and she never batted an eyelid.

  They called up my father, and he came over from the Safeway on the double. I heard very little of what he said because I was crying so hard, but one thing I did hear him say was “Well young lady, I guess you’ve seen to it that I’ll have to part company with my good friend Judge Bay.” I tried to defend myself, but it was useless. The manager, Mr. Bellamy, the clerk, and my father patted Lottie on the shoulder, and the clerk said, “Poor, afflicted child.” For being a poor, afflicted child, they gave her a bag of hard candy, and she gave them the most fraudulent smile of gratitude, and slobbered a little, and shuffled out, holding her empty hat in front of her like a beggar-man. I hate Lottie Jump to this day, but I have to hand it to her—she was a genius.

  The floorwalker would have liked to see me sentenced to the reform school for life, I am sure, but the manager said that considering this was my first offense, he would let my father attend to my punishment. The old-maid clerk, who looked precisely like Emmy Schmalz, clucked her tongue and shook her head at me. My father hustled me out of the office and out of the store and into the car and home, muttering the entire time; now and again I’d hear the words “morals” and “nowadays.”

  What’s the use of telling the rest? You know what happened. Daddy on second thoughts decided not to hang his head in front of Judge Bay but to make use of his friendship in this time of need, and he took me to see the scary old curmudgeon at his house. All I remember of that long declamation, during which the Judge sat behind his desk never taking his eyes off me, was the warning “I want you to give this a great deal of thought, Miss. I want you to search and seek in the innermost corners of your conscience and root out every bit of badness.” Oh, him! Why, listen, if I’d rooted out all the badness in me, there wouldn’t have been anything left of me. My mother cried for days because she had nurtured an outlaw and was ashamed to show her face at the neighborhood store; my father was silent, and he often looked at me. Stella, who was a prig, said, “And to think you did it at Christmastime!” As for Jack—well, Jack a couple of times did not know how close he came to seeing glory when I had a butcher knife in my hand. It was Polecat this and Polecat that until I nearly went off my rocker. Tess, of course, didn’t know what was going on, and asked so many questions that finally I told her to go to Helen Hunt Jackson in a savage tone of voice.

  Good old Muff.

  It is not true that you don’t learn by experience. At any rate, I did that time. I began immediately to have two or three friends at a time—to be sure, because of the stigma on me, they were by no means the élite of Carlyle Hill Grade—and never again when that terrible need to be alone arose did I let fly. I would say, instead, “I’ve got a headache. I’ll have to go home and take an aspirin,” or “Gosh all hemlocks
, I forgot—I’ve got to go to the dentist.”

  After the scandal died down, I got into the Campfire Girls. It was through pull, of course, since Stella had been a respected member for two years and my mother was a friend of the leader. But it turned out all right. Even Muff did not miss our periods of companionship, because about that time she grew up and started having literally millions of kittens.

  The End of a Career

  By those of Angelica Early’s friends who were given to hyperbole, she was called, throughout her life, one of the most beautiful women in the world’s history. And those of more restraint left history out of their appraisal but said that Mrs. Early was certainly one of the most beautiful of living women. She had been, the legend was, a nymph in her cradle (a doting, bibulous aunt was fond, over cocktails, of describing the queenly baby’s pretty bed—gilded and swan-shaped, lined with China silk of a blue that matched the infant eyes, and festooned with Mechlin caught into loops with rosettes), and in her silvery coffin she was a goddess. At her funeral, her friends mourned with as much bitterness as sorrow that such a treasure should be consigned to the eyeless and impartial earth; they felt robbed; they felt as if one of the wonders of the world had been demolished by wanton marauders. “It’s wrong of God to bury His own masterpiece,” said the tipsy aunt, “and if that’s blasphemy, I’ll take the consequences, for I’m not at all sure I want to go on living in a world that doesn’t contain Angelica.”

  Between her alpha and omega, a span of fifty years, Mrs. Early enjoyed a shimmering international fame that derived almost entirely from the inspired and faultless esprit de corps of her flesh and her bones and her blood; never were the features and the colors of a face in such serene and unassailable agreement, never had a skeleton been more singularly honored by the integument it wore. And Angelica, aware of her responsibility to her beholders, dedicated herself to the cultivation of her gift and the maintenance of her role in life with the same chastity and discipline that guide a girl who has been called to the service of God.

  Angelica’s marriage, entered upon when she was twenty-two and her husband was ten years older, puzzled everyone, for Major Clayton Early was not a connoisseur of the complex civilization that had produced his wife’s sterling beauty but was, instead, concerned with low forms of plant life, with primitive societies, and with big game. He was an accomplished huntsman—alarming heads and horns and hides covered the walls of his den, together with enlarged photographs of himself standing with his right foot planted firmly upon the neck of a dead beast—and an uneducated but passionate explorer, and he was away most of the time, shooting cats in Africa or making and recording observations in the miasmas of Matto Grosso and the mephitic verdure of the Malay Peninsula. While he was away, Angelica, too, was away a good deal of the time—on islands, in Europe, upstate, down South—and for only a few months of the year were they simultaneously in residence in a professionally and pompously decorated maisonette that overlooked Central Park. When Major Early was in town, he enjoyed being host to large dinner parties, at which, more often than not, he ran off reels on reels of crepuscular and agitated movies that showed savages eating from communal pots, savages dancing and drumming, savages in council, savages accepting the white man’s offerings of chewing gum and mechanical toys; there were, as well, many feet of film devoted to tarantulas, apes, termite mounds, and orchidaceous plants. His commentary was obscure, for his vocabulary was bestrewn with crossword-puzzle words. Those evenings were so awful that no one would have come to them if it had not been for Angelica; the eye could stray from a loathsome witch doctor on the screen and rest in comfort and joy on her.

  Some people said that Early was a cynic and some said that he was a fool to leave Angelica unguarded, without children and without responsibility, and they all said it would serve him right if he returned from one of his safaris to find himself replaced. Why did a man so antisocial marry at all, or, if he must marry, why not take as his wife some stalwart and thick-legged woman who would share his pedantic adventures—a champion skeet shooter, perhaps, or a descendant of Western pioneers? But then, on the other hand, why had Angelica married him? She never spoke of him, never quoted from his letters—if there were any letters—and if she was asked where he was currently travelling, she often could not answer. The speculation upon this vacant alliance ceased as soon as Early had left town to go and join his guides, for once he was out of sight, no one could remember much about him beyond a Gallic mustache and his ponderous jokes as his movies jerked on. Indeed, so completely was his existence forgotten that matchmakers set to work as if Angelica were a widow.

  They did not get far, the matchmakers, because, apart from her beauty, there was not a good deal to be said about Angelica. She had some money—her parents had left her ample provision, and Early’s money came from a reliable soap—but it was not enough to be of interest to the extremely rich people whose yachts and châteaux and boxes at the opera she embellished. She dressed well, but she lacked the exclusive chic, the unique fillip, that would have caused her style in clothes to be called sui generis and, as such, to be mentioned by the press. Angelica was hardly literate; the impressions her girlish mind had received at Miss Hewitt’s classes had been sketched rather than etched, but she was not stupid and she had an appealing, if small and intermittent, humor. She was not wanting in heart and she was quick to commiserate and give alms to the halt and the lame and the poor, and if ugliness had been a disease or a social evil, she would, counting her blessings, have lent herself to its extirpation. She wasn’t a cat, she wasn’t a flirt or a cheat, wasn’t an imbecile, didn’t make gaffes; neither, however, alas, was she a wit, or a catalyst, or a transgressor to be scolded and punished and then forgiven and loved afresh. She was simply and solely a beautiful woman.

  * * *

  Women, on first confronting Angelica Early, took a backward step in alarm and instinctively diverted the attention of their husbands or lovers to something at the opposite end of the room. But their first impression was false, for Angelica’s beauty was an end in itself and she was the least predatory of women. The consequence of this was that she had many women friends, or at any rate she had many hostesses, for there was no more splendid and no safer ornament for a dinner table than Angelica. The appointments of these tables were often planned round her, the cynosure, and women lunching together had been known to debate (with their practical tongues in their cheeks but without malice) whether Waterford or Venetian glass went better with her and whether white roses or red were more appropriate in juxtaposition to her creamy skin and her luminous ash-blond hair. She was forever in demand; for weeks before parties and benefit balls hostesses contended for her presence; her status—next to the host—in protocol was permanent; little zephyrs of excitement and small calms of awe followed her entrance into a drawing room. She was like royalty, she was a public personage, or she was, as the aunt was to observe at her funeral, like the masterpiece of a great master. Queens and pictures may not, in the ordinary sense, have friends, but if they live up to their reputations, they will not want for an entourage, and only the cranks and the sightless will be their foes. There were some skeptics in Angelica’s circle, but there were no cranks, and in speaking of her, using the superlatives that composed their native tongue, they called her adorable and indispensable, and they said that when she left them, the sun went down.

  Men, on first gazing into those fabulous eyes, whose whites had retained the pale, melting blue of infancy, were dizzied, and sometimes they saw stars. But their vertigo passed soon, often immediately, although sometimes not until after a second encounter, planned in palpitations and bouts of fever, had proved flat and inconsequential. For a tête-à-tête with Angelica was marked by immediacy; she did not half disclose a sweet and sad and twilit history, did not make half promises about a future, implied the barest minimum of flattery and none at all of amorousness, and spoke factually, in a pleasant voice, without nuance and within the present tense. Someone had said that
she was sec—a quality praiseworthy in certain wines but distinctly not delicious in so beautiful a woman. All the same, just as she had many hostesses, so she had many escorts, for her presence at a man’s side gave him a feeling of achievement.

  Angelica was not, that is, all façade—her eyes themselves testified to the existence of airy apartments and charming gardens behind them—but she was consecrated to her vocation and she had been obliged to pass up much of the miscellany of life that irritates but also brings about the evolution of personality; the unmolested oyster creates no pearl. Her heart might be shivered, she might be inwardly scorched with desire or mangled with jealousy and greed, she might be be-numbed by loneliness and doubt, but she was so unswerving in her trusteeship of her perfection that she could not allow anxiety to pleat her immaculate brow or anger to discolor her damask cheeks or tears to deflower her eyes. Perhaps, like an artist, she was not always grateful for this talent of beauty that destiny had imposed upon her without asking leave, but, like the artist, she knew where her duty lay; the languishing and death of her genius would be the languishing and death of herself, and suicide, though it is often understandable, is almost never moral.

  The world kindly imagined that Mrs. Early’s beauty was deathless and that it lived its charmed life without support. If the world could have seen the contents of her dressing table and her bathroom shelves! If the world could have known the hours devoured by the mututinal ritual! Angelica and her reverent English maid, Dora, were dressed like surgeons in those morning hours, and they worked painstakingly, talking little, under lights whose purpose was to cast on the mirrors an image of ruthless veracity. The slightest alteration in the color of a strand of hair caused Angelica to cancel all engagements for a day or two, during which time a hairdresser was in attendance, treating the lady with dyes and allaying her fears. A Finn daily belabored her with bundles of birch fagots to enliven her circulation; at night she wore mud on her face and creamed gloves on her hands; her hair was treated with olive oil, lemon juice, egg white, and beer; she was massaged, she was vibrated, she was steamed into lassitude and then stung back to life by astringents; she was brushed and creamed and salted and powdered. All this took time, and, more than time, it took undying patience. So what the world did not know but what Angelica and her maid and her curators knew was that the blood that ever so subtly clouded her cheeks with pink and lay pale green in that admirable vein in her throat was kept in motion by a rapid pulse whose author was a fearful heart: If my talent goes, I’m done for, says the artist, and Angelica said, If I lose my looks, I’m lost.