Answered Prayers

There was an uncharacteristic bite and leap to Ina's voice, as though she were speeding along helter-skelter to avoid confiding what it was she wanted, but didn't want, to confide. My eyes and ears were drifting elsewhere. The occupants of a table placed catty-corner to ours were two people I'd met together in Southampton last summer, though the meeting was not of such import that I expected them to recognize me-Gloria Vanderbilt de Cicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper and her childhood chum Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan (she married him twice) Matthau: women in their late thirties, but looking not much removed from those deb days when they were grabbing Lucky Balloons at the Stork Club.

"But what can you say," inquired Mrs. Matthau of Mrs. Cooper, "to someone who's lost a good lover, weighs two hundred pounds, and is in the dead center of a nervous collapse? I don't think she's been out of bed for a month. Or changed the sheets. 'Maureen'-this is what I did tell her-'Maureen, I've been in a lot worse condition than you. I remember once when I was going around stealing sleeping pills out of other people's medicine cabinets, saving up to bump myself off. I was in debt up to here, every pe

"Darling," Mrs. Cooper protested with a tiny stammer, "why didn't you come to me?"

"Because you're rich. It's much less difficult to borrow from the poor."

"But, darling…"

Mrs. Matthau proceeded. "So I said: 'Do you know what I did, Maureen? Broke as I was, I went out and hired myself a personal maid. My fortunes rose, my outlook changed completely, I felt loved and pampered. So if I were you, Maureen, I'd go into hock and hire some very expensive creature to run my bath and turn down the bed.' Incidentally, did you go to the Logans' party?"

"For an hour."

"How was it?"

"Marvelous. If you've never been to a party before."

"I wanted to go. But you know Walter. I never imagined I'd marry an actor. Well, marry perhaps. But not for love. Yet here I've been stuck with Walter all these years and it still makes me curdle if I see his eye stray a fraction. Have you seen this new Swedish cunt called Karen something?"

"Wasn't she in some spy picture?"

"Exactly. Lovely face. Divine photographed from the bazooms up. But the legs are strictly redwood forest. Absolute tree trunks. Anyway, we met her at the Widmarks' and she was moving her eyes around and making all these little noises for Walter's benefit, and I stood it as long as I could, but when I heard Walter say 'How old are you, Karen?' I said 'For God's sake, Walter, why don't you chop off her legs and read the rings?'"

"Carol! You didn't."

"You know you can always count on me."

"And she heard you?"

"It wouldn't have been very interesting if she hadn't."

Mrs. Matthau extracted a comb from her purse and began drawing it through her long albino hair: another leftover from her World War II debutante nights—an era when she and all her compères, Gloria and Honeychile and Oona and Jinx, slouched against El Morocco upholstery ceaselessly raking their Veronica Lake locks.

"I had a letter from Oona this morning," Mrs. Matthau said.

"So did I," Mrs. Cooper said.

"Then you know they're having another baby."

"Well, I assumed so. I always do."

"That Charlie is a lucky bastard," said Mrs. Matthau.

"Of course, Oona would have made any man a great wife."

"Nonsense. With Oona, only geniuses need apply. Before she met Charlie, she wanted to marry Orson Welles… and she wasn't even seventeen. It was Orson who introduced her to Charlie; he said: 'I know just the guy for you. He's rich, he's a genius, and there's nothing that he likes more than a dutiful young daughter.'"

Mrs. Cooper was thoughtful. "If Oona hadn't married Charlie, I don't suppose I would have married Leopold."

"And if Oona hadn't married Charlie, and you hadn't married Leopold, I wouldn't have married Bill Saroyan. Twice yet."

The two women laughed together, their laughter like a naughty but delightfully sung duet. Though they were not physically similar-Mrs. Matthau being blonder than Harlow and as lushly white as a gardenia, while the other had brandy eyes and a dark dimpled brilliance markedly present when her negroid lips flashed smiles-one sensed they were two of a kind: charmingly incompetent adventuresses.

Mrs. Matthau said: "Remember the Salinger thing?"

"Salinger?"

"A Perfect Day for Banana Fish. That Salinger."

"Fra

"Umn huh. You don't remember about him?"

Mrs. Cooper pondered, pouted; no, she didn't.

"It was while we were still at Brearley," said Mrs. Matthau. "Before Oona met Orson. She had a mysterious beau, this Jewish boy with a Park Avenue mother, Jerry Salinger. He wanted to be a writer, and he wrote Oona letters ten pages long while he was overseas in the army. Sort of love-letter essays, very tender, tenderer than God. Which is a bit too tender. Oona used to read them to me, and when she asked what I thought, I said it seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily; but what she wanted to know was whether I thought he was brilliant and talented or really just silly, and I said both, he's both, and years later when I read Catcber in the Rye and realized the author was Oona's Jerry, I was still inclined to that opinion."

"I never heard a strange story about Salinger," Mrs. Cooper confided.

"I've never heard anything about him that wasn't strange. He's certainly not your normal everyday Jewish boy from Park Avenue."

"Well, it isn't really about him, but about a friend of his who went to visit him in New Hampshire. He does live there, doesn't he? On some very remote farm? Well, it was February and terribly cold. One morning Salinger's friend was missing. He wasn't in his bedroom or anywhere around the house. They found him finally, deep in a snowy woods. He was lying in the snow wrapped in a blanket and holding an empty whiskey bottle. He'd killed himself by drinking the whiskey until he'd fallen asleep and frozen to death."

After a while Mrs. Matthau said: "That is a strange story. It must have been lovely, though-all warm with whiskey, drifting off into the cold starry air. Why did he do it?"

"All I know is what I told you," Mrs. Cooper said.

An exiting customer, a florid-at-theedges swarthy balding Charlie sort of fellow, stopped at their table. He fixed on Mrs. Cooper a gaze that was intrigued, amused and… a trifle grim. He said: "Hello, Gloria"; and she smiled: "Hello, darling"; but her eyelids twitched as she attempted to identify him; and then he said: "Hello, Carol. How are ya, doll?" and she knew who he was all right: "Hello, darling. Still living in Spain?" He nodded; his glance returned to Mrs. Cooper: "Gloria, you're as beautiful as ever. More beautiful. See ya…" He waved and walked away.

Mrs. Cooper stared after him, scowling.

Eventually Mrs. Matthau said: "You didn't recognize him, did you?"

"N-n-no."

"Life. Life. Really, it's too sad. There was nothing familiar about him at all?"

"Long ago. Something. A dream."

"It wasn't a dream."

"Carol. Stop that. Who is he?"

"Once upon a time you thought very highly of him. You cooked his meals and washed his socks" — Mrs. Cooper's eyes enlarged, shifted-"and when he was in the army you followed him from camp to camp, living in dreary furnished rooms—"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No."

"Yes, Gloria. Your first husband."

"That… man… was… Pat di Cicco?"

"Oh, darling. Let's not brood. After all, you haven't seen him in almost twenty years. You were only a child. Isn't that," said Mrs. Matthau, offering a diversion, "Jackie Ke

And I heard Lady Ina on the subject, too: "I'm almost blind with these specs, but just coming in there, isn't that Mrs. Ke