LETTER I
IN WHICH I JOIN THE HIGHER-UPS
Dear Mom:
You been complaining there ain’t enough news in my letters, well you sure will get a load of it this trip of the postman. Your Mame has been cast for little Cinderella in the big political show and the fairy-coach is waiting at the door.
This is how it come about, the place was busy and every girl had a customer but Florabelle and me, when a gentleman comes in, a top-notcher I can see and takes us in with a glance. He don’t need but one because Florabelle makes up her complexion in a dark room and ain’t got the sense to look it over by daylight. So he comes to my table and sits and says, “Go to it, lady.”
He has got good hands not soft nor flabby like many of the big fellows, but you can see he ain’t had to skin them with hard work. I starts to washing them and gets a look out of the corner of my eye and I see he’s somewhere in the forties and a bit of grey in his hair. His cuffs is new and clean and everything quiet and exactly right.
I says, “Fine weather we’re having,” and he makes the shortest kind of a noise that means yes and I see he’s thinking about something and would rather not be bothered—but what did he come into a manicure parlor for? So I looks sympathetic and says in a spiritual voice, “There’s sure a lot of troubles in the world ain’t there?”
They always shows their surprise in their fingers. He says, “How did you find that out?” Says I, “I got my own but you needn’t worry my business is to listen to the gentlemen’s.”
“Is that a part of the job?” says he and I tells him it’s the principal part. “They want to tell their troubles to some other woman;” and I looks up, and there is wrinkles of fun in the corner of his eyes.
But they don’t last long he looks serious again and says, “It may be some other woman could give me a little advice just now.” I says, “She can if she’s the right woman.” But still he’s kind of hesitating to take the plunge so I give him another push. “Is it some mystery of the female soul you can’t make out?”
“It is just that,” he says; and I asks, “She can’t make up her mind that she loves you?” He laughs and says, “No, it ain’t anything like that, you been reading novels. Iam a married man and got three children growing up,” he says. “Ah, me!” says I. “You should hear some of the stories about married gentlemen!”
I looks at him again and see he’s what they call a go-getter. First I think maybe he’s the secretary of the Hardware Dealers’ Association that’s in town but then I guess he’s a lawyer come to lobby here in our national capital. So I rubs away at his nails and says, “Is it the wife?” He thinks for a minute and then all of a sudden it busts out, “My God!” And then he waits again and says kind of solemn-like, “Tell me this do all women have to go crazy?”
I make a guess at his age and I says, “How old is your wife—if you know?” “She’s forty-two,” says he. “Oh, yes,” says I; and then, “She can’t make up her mind what she wants, and she can’t sit still in one room—”
“Good God,” says he, “it is worse than that, she is got the angina pectoris.”
“Oh, poor soul!” I says. I hadn’t never heard of it but it sounded serious.
“But it’s different from any sort of angina pectoris you ever heard of,” he goes on. “It’s a travelling angina pectoris. One week it’s in the shoulders and the next week it’s gone to the stomach and the week after that it’s in the knee.”
“I suppose you’ve took her to the doctors?” says I.
“Doctors?” says he. “I’ve worn out four sets of tires taking her to doctors. The ordinary doctors won’t do at all it has got to be a specialist of the knee, or the stomach or what you will. And he tells her there ain’t anything there but then she thinks maybe he didn’t look careful enough or maybe I called him on the phone and told him to spare her nervous system so she has to go to another one without telling me—but he always tells me with a bill!”
He says it without any smile and he sits there in the bottomest pit of the dumps so I says, “I suppose you know what is the matter with the poor soul at her time.” “They tell me it’s the change of life,” he says; and I says; “Some ladies in my profession have got a different name they call it the change of wife.”
Then again I feels the start in his fingers and I know he’s looking at my head bowed over his nails. “Is that an old gag,” says he, “or do you make them?”
“You just seen it come out of the mint?” says I.
“Well,” says he, “I’m sorry I don’t own a gold-mine.”
Says I, “There is a plenty of gold-diggers in the manicure profession, and you might of had some of them trimmingyour cuticle right now if you had of went to some other table. But I am one that makes it plain to a customer that he is the butter.”
“Butter?” says he, and I give him a flash out of the corner of my eye. “Nine hours every day I earns my daily bread in the Elite Beauty Parlors; and then if in the evening some gentleman invites me to dinner, he’s the butter.” So then I seen that we was friends, and I knew I would like that dairy.
But still he was kind of shy and it wasn’t till I was done that he come right down to it, he was lonesome and would like to have me go to dinner with him the next evening but the trouble was he couldn’t afford to go to no swell place on account of having so many people in this town that knew him. But I tells him that two is a company for me and we’ll go to any quiet place that he likes. “You got to be extra careful,” I says, “because Washington is an awful place for gossip.”
“Yes,” says he, “and the truth is I hold an especially prominent position. And so—you see—”
“Yes, I see perfectly,” I says, “I know a gentleman when I meet one and I hope I know how to be a lady. You may count on me to play the game square.”
But even that don’t satisfy him he kind of hems around and he says, “You must understand, I am in a position where you will be sure to find out who I am right away.”
“I see,” says I, “and so you’ll have to give me your real name? You may trust me, Mr.—er—”
“Er-Edgerton,” says he, not more than one-third sure that he wants to.
“Mr. Edgerton,” says I and he see’s I’m thinking it over. “No,” he says, “you never heard it before, it ain’t a name that is advertised on toilet soap, nor on the silver screen. In fact I think just now it’s the least advertised name in the whole U. S. A.”
“In the secret service?” says I for I admit I was intreeged though I ain’t sure how to spell it. “The most secret of all services,” says he. “I’m the Secretary to the Spokesman.”
And there is where your Mame proved herself the prize dumbbell. “The Spokesman?” says I. “Who is he?”
He laughs as if I had said something specially funny. “What do you read in the newspapers?”
“Well,” says I, “I read the divorce news of course because that is what the customers want to talk about. AndI read the murders because I like them. And I read Mme. Prinker’s beauty hints, and how to grow lean by rolling.”
“But you don’t read what the Spokesman has to say?”
“No,” says I. “What paper does he write for?”
He laughs again, like that was an awful boner. “It’s on the front page of all the papers,” he says. “But you haven’t missed much. The Spokesman is a Man who lives in a great white house and He is a Strong Silent Man and it appears that all Strong Silent Men have to talk a great deal and this One has got no idea what to say. So I am the man who tells Him what to say. And twice every week the reporters for all the newspapers of the whole world gather in a room and listen to Him say what I have told Him to say and a couple of thousand newspapers all over the world pay a couple of hundred thousand dollars to have it telegraphed to them and they print it and I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of people read it and they all have to think that it is the Spokesman who spoke it, so you see how important it is that I should keep hid.”
Well, Mom, by that time I seen what had come to me, and I sat hardly able to lift my eyelids, to say nothing of my tongue.
“I have got to have a session the day after tomorrow,” the gentleman goes on, “and I have no idea what I am going to say. How can I pay any compliments to American institutions that I haven’t paid them twenty times before? So I’ll give you an address of a little Greek restaurant that I know and if you’ll meet me there at seven-thirty tomorrow evening you may be able to give me a few ideas of what the whole world would like to have said to it the next morning.”
And so then he went out, Mom; and here is your baby Mame sitting in her six by eight bedroom with the smoke of her pork-chop still in the air writing to ask you if you have any ideas of what to tell the world for God’s sake send them quick for I have got my foot on the ladder and it’s the high altitudes for me. And Mom you dunno how grateful I am to you for the wise training you give me, I felt his eyes running over me but I never trembled for I had remembered what you taught me, always to keep my dressing table by the window and put it on by daylight and never to use no peroxide at all unless I was going to use it every night.
Your loving
Mame.