B.F.’s Daughter

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  B.F.’s Daughter

  A Novel

  John P. Marquand

  Contents

  Foreword

  I All in Its Original Condition

  II It’s Up to the Boss

  III Encore les Martinis

  IV They All Turned Up There Sometime

  V Pass the Papers Clockwise

  VI They Still Have Talcum in the States

  VII Just Because He Sold the Factory …

  VIII Portrait of an Industrialist

  IX Dear Mildred …

  X Goodbye Girls I’m Through

  XI It Was Very Bad Weather in Washington

  XII Nobody Cares—If She’s on a Yacht

  XIII There Was a Little Girl …

  XIV She Had Everything Once

  XV Have You Seen the Fultons Lately?

  XVI We’ve Got to Stick Together

  XVII It Was Bound to Happen Sometime

  XVIII God Bless You, Joe

  XIX Not You, All Women

  XX It’s So Easy to Exaggerate

  XXI Nothing Keeps unless You’re Careful

  XXII She Really Thought She Meant It

  XXIII They’ve Got Everything at Macy’s

  XXIV Among the First to Know

  XXV He Had to Meet the Family

  XXVI Money Was No Problem

  XXVII A Quarter before One, Miss James

  XXVIII Take It All Away

  XXIX Dear, I’m Dying for a Drink

  XXX A Little off the Beam

  XXXI As Long As You Know What You’re Doing

  XXXII Farewell Address

  About the Author

  Foreword

  One purpose of this novel is to depict certain phases of American life during the last few years. To create an illusion of reality the names of a few nationally known characters have been mentioned, although none of these personages actually appears in any scene. The active characters and the scenes are, as they always must be, a sublimation of the writer’s own experience. If they are artistically successful, they must naturally also appeal to facets of the reader’s own experience. The persons depicted in these pages, however, are known to the author only in his creative mind. No one who exists here is intended to represent even remotely, either accurately or in caricature, any actual person either living or dead. If any character bears the name of a real person, this is a purely unintended coincidence, and one almost impossible to avoid considering the number of persons in the United States all of whom are identified by names.

  I

  All in Its Original Condition

  One noon in mid-December when Tom had been called suddenly to Washington, Polly took the train from New York to spend the night at their country place in Pyefield. She had not wanted to go particularly, but she believed that it would be a good idea to see how Mr. and Mrs. Brewis were getting on, and you never could tell what caretakers were really doing unless you dropped in on them without warning.

  It was always a long and tiresome train ride to the Berkshires. The single Pullman on the twelve o’clock, a car that must have been built near the turn of the century, was overheated and half empty. The porter remembered her and asked for Mr. Brett. Tom was always very good with porters. Polly said that Mr. Brett was down in Washington helping someone write a speech, and it occurred to her that this was what she was always saying about Tom lately. The porter said he could give her some beans and brown bread from the kitchenette, but Polly replied that she did not want any lunch, thank you. Polly had purchased the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New Republic, but the car swayed so that she did not want to read them. There was nothing to do but sit for hours and think.

  You always forgot, when you lived in New York, how much snow there was in the country, and when Polly realized that she was wearing open-toed shoes, she thought it might have been better after all if she had asked Mr. Brewis to get out the Packard and meet her at the junction. He would have had enough gas with his B card, but then if she had done that, there would have been no possibility of checking up on the Brewises. Now she could only hope that Mr. MacMahon and his taxicab would still be meeting trains there. Otherwise she would have to go to that little hotel near the station, and call up Mr. Brewis or some friend in Pyefield—but there would not be anyone in Pyefield, except perhaps the Ellises. Peggy and Arthur Ellis would be in the old tavern, war or no war, because Arthur made his living by doing etchings of birch trees on the mountains in winter.

  At any rate there was no use making plans until she reached the junction; so she had time to think about all sorts of other things. She thought about her father. He had been very busy lately, and her mother had said he was not sleeping well, but when Polly had asked him to come up with her to Pyefield, just to get away from things, he had only half listened because he had been trying to get a priority call through to San Francisco.

  “Well, it’s nice you want me,” he had said. “Yes, I’m waiting, operator.… The name is Fulton, Burton Fulton.… If he isn’t at his office, ask where I can reach him.… You go ahead by yourself and have a good time, Poll.”

  As far back as Polly could remember he had always been telling her to go somewhere and have a good time.

  “Polly, dear,” her mother had said, “if you’re going away up there, I wish you’d wear something warm underneath. When I was a girl at Willett, we all wore long woolens.”

  “A girl can go anywhere,” Polly had answered, “if she believes in herself and has a mink coat.”

  Her parents never seemed to realize that she had grown up, and this delusion of theirs became more and more of a problem as she got into her thirties. They never thought her brother Harry was grown up either, but then, neither did she. He had been at Biak, and now he was at Leyte, but she still thought of him as a sort of Eagle Scout—like the one Admiral Byrd once took with him to the South Pole. She had not been able to get time and values straight since the war started. A bland, impervious curtain was always drawn between her and all that was going on. She had never even heard a gun go off except in the newsreels. When a ship was sunk in the Pacific, she did not hear of it until weeks later, and when the sons of older friends, who had always seemed impossibly young, were killed or missing, she heard it mentioned at some dinner party as an event that had happened long before.

  It used to be wonderful to leave everything behind in New York and take the train to Pyefield. She and Tom used to love the quietness and isolation of a winter’s night in the Berkshires, and now they had not been there together for three years, in winter or in summer either. Tom was never able to come because it was too far away from Washington, and no matter how carefully they planned it something always came up. It had once been like going home whenever she went to Pyefield, but now it was like going back to some scene in one’s childhood, to some place that had only remote associations. She could even wonder what it was that Tom and she had ever seen in Pyefield, and why they had chosen to live anywhere that was so far away. The thought made Polly lonely and frightened. She seemed to have no more roots than a displaced person in Europe. She kept wandering among disconnected thoughts, telling herself it would surely be all right when she got off the train.

  It was dark when she reached the junction, but a rising moon made everything white and cold. The clean, dry air clutched at her throat for a moment, and then she saw the lights of a car at the place where Mr. MacMahon’s Buick always stood.

  “Mr. MacMahon,” she said. “Why, how are you? I began to be afraid you might have been drafted.”

  “Why, hello, Mrs. Brett,” Mr. MacMahon said. “No, the Board hasn’t got me yet.”

  It did not sound very patriotic, but then Tom always said people in the country did not know what the war was about.

  “Pyefield? It’s too tough on the car,” Mr. MacMahon said. “If you stopped at the hotel, you could get the bus in the morning, or maybe you could call up Brewis. If I’m to take you there now, I’ve got to get twenty dollars.”

  Mr. MacMahon implied that he was under a personal moral obligation to get twenty dollars, and she knew he would never have asked anyone else such a price.

  When Polly and Tom had first seen Pyefield, saplings had covered the hayfields, and the population had dropped to almost nothing, but there were still some beautiful deserted houses around the village green, and the church and the old tavern were still standing. The Ellises had bought the tavern for a song, and they had wanted to start a summer community of congenial people who did something. It had been like founding a colony when she and Tom, just after they were married, had bought the old parsonage. Half the roof had fallen in, but the timbers were sound, and the old woodwork was beautiful, and the only reason the Metropolitan Museum had not bought the staircase for the American Wing was because they had not seen it. It was just the sort of life that Tom had liked—getting friends of his to come to Pyefield and buy the other houses, and forming a co-operative association to maintain the church and the green. There it was, ten miles from anywhere, but not hard to reach before the gas rationing.

  When they left the main highway and took the mountain road, she could see Pyefield in the moonlight, looking like an American primitive with its boxlike church and its bare trees and houses in cold black and white. It had never seemed so remote; it no longer seemed to be alive. It might have been better, sh
e was thinking, if Pyefield had simply been allowed to disappear when its usefulness was ended—if the houses had been allowed to fall as other houses had into the cellarholes of forgotten New England hill towns. It never helped, perhaps, to resurrect a past that had no connection with the present, and yet she and Tom and all the rest of them had once had a definite purpose in restoring the houses on the village green. They had done so as a revolt from other environments, so that they could live without the usual social pressures. But then, no one could be an individualist really. When Polly thought of it, they had all been like everyone else in a certain social group, the liberal intelligentsia, all wearing the same clothes and adopting the same manners, and all somewhat self-satisfied. It was remarkable how pleased they all used to be with themselves there in Pyefield.

  High banks of snow surrounded the green, but the driveway to the house was open, and she was pleased to see that Mr. Brewis had dug the paths, showing that it had paid to have them know she might arrive unexpectedly. The snow had even been cleared from around the four-car garage—an addition they had made in early 1941. The house looked in fine condition, as it should have, considering what she had spent on it. It was a good thing Tom had never seen the bills, because he would have objected. Tom was always telling her she must not throw her weight around simply because she was a rich girl. She had never wanted to be ostentatious either, but at least she had a good business head and wanted to have things right, the best material, the best paint, the best plumbing, and the best nursery stock. She could see the outlines of the sunken garden which had been built on the foundations of the old cowbarn, and the fence, with the pineapple posts that had been designed to follow the motif of the front door, looked very well, just as though it had been there always.

  Mr. Brewis had opened the kitchen door even before the car stopped, and he was standing there, in the cardigan jacket Polly had given him last Christmas, holding an electric flashlight. When you came to think of it, Mr. Brewis was really quite a treasure, and so was Mrs. Brewis. When Polly got them at that agency in New York, two nice, middle-aged people, they said they liked the country and never got lonely. Mr. Brewis said he never drank—all he did out of the ordinary was to smoke a pipe after supper—and he liked puttering around a place and keeping it shipshape. Mrs. Brewis came from a Vermont farm, and she said she liked nice things and liked to keep things nice. The beauty of it was that it had all turned out to be perfectly true.

  “It’s wonderful to be back,” Polly said. “Everything looks perfect.”

  “And you look well, too,” Mrs. Brewis said, “a little thin, but real well. I hope Mr. Brett is keeping well. He should get time to come up here. We surely do miss Mr. Brett.”

  “Everything looks perfect,” Polly said again. “Perhaps I could have supper in front of the living room fire, just a little something and some tea, and don’t bother about me at all. I’ll just walk around.”

  For a few minutes at least everything was secure, just as it should have been. The house and the Brewises seemed untouched by outside circumstance, perhaps because the Brewises had no contact with the war, no children, and no relatives as far as Polly knew—just two sweet old people with nothing to think of but keeping the house in order. They were not liberal or conservative, or anti-British or anti-Semitic. They cared nothing about the rights of labor or private enterprise, and they were not concerned with winning the peace after winning the war.

  The house was warmed and dusted and all ready to move into, just as though Polly and Tom had been there yesterday, and Polly had arranged it all by herself without anyone to help her—certainly not Tom. Tom was always completely useless when it came to selecting and placing furniture or pictures, and negotiating about pumps and septic tanks and copper roofing. He always said just to do it, for God’s sake, and for Polly to work it out herself with the septic tank man, as long as she kept it simple and as long as they did not have too many possessions. No children, no possessions. He wanted to be able to get up and turn the key in the lock and move away any time. That was what Tom had said, but of course it was a pose. No one made more of a row than Tom when his bed was not comfortable, or when the cooking was not right or when anybody misplaced things in his study. The house did look simple too, but thank heaven Tom did not know what it had all cost, or he would have been wild. Actually, he had no idea about values, and that was just as well, since this obliviousness of his made it possible for her to get him those shirts and socks and ties without his knowing they were expensive. Everyone said she managed Tom very well. It was not so difficult either if one was careful. It was all a matter of understanding.

  Polly gave her coat to Mrs. Brewis and walked to the front of the house. As she went through the pantry with its Monel-metal sink she glanced at those lovely yellow plates that she had bought in China, at the set of Sandwich glass from the Halsey collection in New York, and at the pink luster tea set. The swinging door to the dining room had lost its squeak. The dining room was small for big dinners, but then she and Tom both hated big dinners, particularly Tom. The collection of glass bottles in the pine corner cupboard was all dusted, all ready to glow when you turned on the switch of the little inside light.

  “I do one room every day,” Mrs. Brewis said. “That’s my rule—and air everything every morning.” Polly made up her mind that she must really do something nice for the Brewises.

  The house looked almost alarmingly neat. In fact, it reminded her of one of those houses run by a historical society. Mrs. Brewis might have been a hostess at Williamsburg in a mobcap and possibly a bustle, opening the front door to visitors.

  “You are now about to go through the Brett House,” Mrs. Brewis would be saying, “all in its original condition, just as Mr. and Mrs. Brett left it. The articles which you see on the tables—and which visitors will kindly refrain from touching—were all the possessions of Mr. and Mrs. Brett, once used by them in their daily life when they resided in Pyefield and restored what is still known as the Pyefield Parsonage. The surprising perfection of all these objects, the lack of thumbprints and pencil marks upon the wallpapers, is due to the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Brett were fortunately childless. The clothing in the closets on the second floor, all in its original condition, and even the medicine in the cabinets of their individual bathrooms, was all used personally by Mr. and Mrs. Brett.

  “The ell to the right is not original. It was constructed by Mrs. Brett for a study. Here Mr. Brett once pursued his writing, assisted often by Mrs. Brett. Although new, it was designed carefully to conform to the older parts of the residence, and in it you will see the pens, stationery and typewriter used personally by Mr. Brett, placed on his long writing table exactly as he left them. The built-in bookcases, besides containing Mr. Brett’s personal casual library and volumes of reference, also hold the manuscript of his Ph.D. thesis on ‘American Criticism in the Nineteenth Century,’ and the manuscripts of his lectures delivered while an instructor at Columbia University … before he married Mrs. Brett, who was then Miss Polly Fulton, daughter of Burton Fulton the industrialist. His files also contain letters to the press and various half-finished, unpublished works, started while Mr. Brett was associated with members of the New Deal ‘brain trust’—so-called. On the wall you will see Mr. Brett’s diplomas, and a personally signed photograph as well as a personal letter of thanks from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Also upon the wall appear similar signed, framed photographs of Paul V. McNutt, Bernard M. Baruch, Harry Hopkins, Henry A. Wallace, Thomas Corcoran, Raymond Moley, A. A. Berle, and others.

  “The bookcase near the door contains a personal library collected by Mrs. Brett, begun during her days as a student at Bryn Mawr College, all in its original condition. On a lower shelf, you will note a set of scrapbooks, pasted and arranged by Mrs. Brett herself, one volume for each year, which Mrs. Brett kept in lieu of a diary, showing, in photographs, news clippings, and mementos, the activities of herself and friends before and after her marriage to Mr. Thomas Brett. Beneath this shelf of memorabilia, in the locked compartment, are certain personal letters of Mrs. Brett’s which she never made up her mind to throw away, including letters by Mr. Brett himself written during their brief courtship, and also some selected letters from her former fiancé, Mr. Robert Tasmin, who later married Miss Mildred Knowles and who now is an officer in the U. S. Army. The block-front desk in the living room contains Mrs. Brett’s personal ledgers of household expenses. The whole residence was completely restored before World War II; its heating is indirect, and it is air-conditioned. But in a tour of the house let us start with the fine front hall which runs from east to west …”