Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [50]
They stopped and bought a comb at a drug store before she would go in the Commodore, where she and Lib McCreery and Is Stannard, Bryn Mawr classmates who were going abroad with her, were stopping. The breeze ended when they stopped the car, and the heat came back and everything began to get a little unsatisfactory and she wanted to go to her room and lie in the water. Their farewell was hurried and she was too conscious of looking like the wrath of God to enjoy any minute of it. That was one of the things he commented on in his first letters. He had to stay in New York, in the heat, while she was cooling off and feeling like a human being on shipboard. Her letters were ardent and pleasant and pleased, full of new and sudden love. Nicholas Murray Butler and Anne Morgan and Eddie Cantor and Genevieve Tobin and Joseph E. Widener were on board. I wonder if I love him became a song the way she said it, and she would sing over and over to herself: I won-der, I won-der.
Who? Joe Widener? said Lib. The Joe part is right.
Joe English, the boy that came down to the boat?
His name is Ju, j u for Julian.
Well, who is it, then?
You wouldn’t know, said Caroline. Oh, I know. The man who brought you back to the hotel in that awful condition.
That s the one.
But when his letters came they did not match her mood. Discontent and some petulance, and though she snatched at the love passages, she had to be honest with herself and admit that they read more like postscript material. She blamed the heat of New York and Reading and felt sorry for him and said so in her replies. He was the man all during her first trip to Europe whom she missed, with whom she wanted to share the fun of her discovery of foreign lands. And she missed him very much. Then she got a letter from him that soured her trip, or at least divided it into two phases. He wrote and wrote, for pages, but it all boiled down to one thing, which in subsequent days she recognized to be true: ... The truth is, darling, some kind of fate threw us together, but the same fate kept us apart the night before you sailed. Those people were fated to come and take you away from me that night. I have a feeling that if they hadn t, you would have put into practice that theory that you spoke of the night we went swimming. But they did come, didn’t they? That being the case, you went away without putting your theory into practice and since then I have spoiled it as far as we re concerned with another girl. So I suppose this ought to be quits. I feel like the devil ...
She didn’t believe the words, and then she wanted to cable him that another girl couldn’t make a difference. She loved him, and she regretted as much as he did that she had not spent her last night in New York with him. If only she could have talked to him. But that was impossible, and letters or cables were no good. Late in the afternoon of the day she got the letter she groped through to an explanation for the shock of his letter (which, however, did not make her any less unhappy): he had jolted her by being, so far as she knew, the first man who had tried to be honest with her. Reason did that for her, and then for the first time in her life she made up her mind to get drunk. And that night she did get drunk, with a handsome young Harvard Jew, who turned out to be something fancy in her sex life; he took her by easy stages down the scale of Paris entertainment, ending with a circus. She didn’t remember about that until the next afternoon, when the memory, which she knew she could not have dreamt, came through her hangover. Then and there she wanted to pack and go home, but Is Stannard saved her sanity. When Lib McCreery had gone out to do some shopping Is came in and sat on Caroline s bed. Where did Henry take you last night?
Oh, God. If I only knew.
Were you that blotto?
Oh, Lord, said Caroline. Don t you