“So I said, I only married you to get a passport, and he said, Well, I only married you for your—”
She widens her eyes in mock horror and peers down at her bust, as if noticing for the first time how smooth and well-looking it is.
Now there’s a body to contend with.
Refusing another round of dancing, I rise and make for the empty chair beside her. But Jenny, who must have been watching too, is faster. She slips through the band of men and takes Dmitrieff’s hand.
“If none of these men are brave enough to ask you up, then you shall have to make do with me.”
Dmitrieff laughs. “Oh, Mrs. Marx, I thought you would never ask!”
The two skip to the floor, and the men look after them, murmuring and scratching and wondering why all women aren’t like them.
Stranded now on a bit of empty carpet, I hasten to the nearest free seat. I watch the array over the lip of my glass: Jenny and Dmitrieff, Karl and Goegg, Frederick and Janey, Tussy and Dalby, Tomanowski and Lessner, Jaclard and Eccarius, Dr. Allen and his wife, the Lormiers, and maybe ten others, swaying and reeling. The number dawns on me: thirty or more altogether. A good way to clear off those who are due a visit, but the expense must be—well, it must be effin’ mighty.
Of course, it’s easy to spend when you haven’t done a tap to have it. Three hundred and fifty pounds a year, in three installments, straight from Frederick’s accounts, that’s what they get. I’m sure they think it’s a secret; I’m sure they think I’m oblivious because I’m unable to make out what Frederick writes in the books. But in our house, having keen ears is just as good as having snooping eyes of your own, for half of the time he’s forgetting to speak in the German; half of the time he’s shouting through the walls instead of keeping his talk to a whisper; and the other half of the time he’s at the street door barking orders to messengers and letter carriers; it was never going to be long before I caught wind. Three hundred and fifty pounds is the digit, and that’s before the gifts and the sneaky envelopes; that’s before he sweeps in to level the bills and promises-to-pay that they leave to pile up on their desks and dressers and drawers (and not, where they ought be, on their memory and their morals).
Careless charity is what the world would call it, if it knew. Helping those who beg and not those who really need the help. And who needs the help more—can someone please tell me?—than Nim’s son? Lord knows what condition of roof that boy is living under, and yet I don’t see a single tormented penny leaving the house in his direction. Would Frederick even know where to send it? One day justice will have to be done the poor lad; one day he’ll have to be cut his sliver.
“You know, there’s a story told about them,” I says, turning to the man sat beside me.
“About whom, madam?” he says, his breath wafting through his moustache.
“The Marxes.”
“Ah, yes. Such a remarkable family. Stories are bound to be told about them.”
By the fireplace, Karl has taken up the fire blower and is making smutty jokes with it. Watching him brings a smile—like a secret understanding—to the man’s face.
“You one of the Party?” I says.
His smile drops. “The Party?”
“You know, the International.”
“Madam, the International is not a party. It is an association. A free association of workingmen.”
I make a face to say I stand humble and corrected. He accepts it with a nod. Brings his glass under the hair of his lip to suck from it.
“Well, sir, the story I’m thinking about—”
“Is almost certainly just that, a story. Tittle-tattle from the bread queue.”
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
“I don’t need to hear it to know that it’s false.”
“If it’s false I tell it, it’s false I got it.”
“Precisely.”
I take a sup and ponder this a moment. “Only I don’t believe this one is false. And if you only listened a minute, I’m sure you’d find you agree.”
He shakes his head and groans.
“The way it goes is, her mother, I mean Jenny’s mother, gave them some money for their honeymoon, and they took it with them in a chest.”
“Please, madam, must we do this?”
“And what they did was, they left the chest open on the table in the different hotel rooms they stayed in, so that any old body who visited them could take as much as he pleased from it. As you can imagine, empty the chest soon was!”
The man stares at me. He joins his brows together and frowns. “That’s it?” he says. “That’s your story?”
I push a finger into the soft bit of his arm and whisper into the black of his ear: “But don’t you see, this is the root of it! One generous thing done a lifetime ago and they think the world is in debt to them since. There’s no fairness in it. In the first place, I don’t think you can call giving your parents’ good money away generous. If you can call it anything, it’s—”
The blood now comes beating to his face. An angry flush overspreads his features. He shifts his chair so he can face away from me. I take my hand back and sigh. These foreigners have no notion of the banter. The Irish, there’s not much I can say in their favor, but at least they allow for a woman’s words when she’s lushed; they know it’s only the drop talking.
The music stops and the remaining dancers bow and clap, and now make their way back to the chairs and sofas. A woman rushes in from the hall, as if summoned by the new quiet.
“Where’ve you been?” rasps her redheaded friend, just two paces from me. “All this time, I’ve not seen you.”
“I was in the kitchen playing cards with the hired men. What a lark! I won this.” She opens her palm to show a threepenny bit.
Jenny walks into the center of the room and calls for a final applause for the musicians, then orders us up the stairs to the parlor for the performance.
“The moment we’ve been waiting for!” someone shouts.
Frederick comes to take me up. “Are you safe?” he says when my foot squeaks on the carpet of the stairs and I have a little wobble.
“Go to blazes, Frederick,” I says.
In the parlor we get seats, but the men have to stay on their feet. Jenny comes to stand in front of a counterpane held up as a curtain by two menservants. She gives a little speech about the effort she and Karl have made towards the Girls’ education, and how unfortunate it is they couldn’t do so much for them in music as they’d have hoped. “In any case,” she says, “their real strength is drama and elocution. And tonight my youngest daughter, Eleanor, whom many of you know as Tussy, shall be playing Hamlet. This is apt, for her father used to always say she was more like a boy than a girl.”
A chuckle goes round.
“Good old Tussy!” someone calls out.
“My eldest daughter, Janey, shall be playing Gertrude, and although she knows not yet the joys and pain of motherhood for herself, I think you shall find she does the role full justice.”
Cheers and claps.
“The Girls would like to dedicate their performance to their sister Laura and her husband Paul, who are now safe in Bordeaux, thank heavens, and expecting a child.”
Applause.
Jenny bows and the servants let drop the curtain. One of the men has given