Main Street & Babbitt. Sinclair Lewis
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minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don't know whether I'm going to dress or NOT” in a manner which showed that he was going to dress, the discussion moved on.
“Now, George, you mustn't forget to call in at Vecchia's on the way home and get the ice cream. Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don't want to trust them to send it by — ”
“All right! You told me that before breakfast!”
“Well, I don't want you to forget. I'll be working my head off all day long, training the girl that's to help with the dinner — ”
“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed. Matilda could perfectly well — ”
“ — and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and arrange for the children to have their supper upstairs and — And I simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia's for the ice cream.”
“All riiiiiight! Gosh, I'm going to get it!”
“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs. Babbitt ordered yesterday by 'phone, and it will be all ready for you.”
At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from Vecchia's.
He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for cocktails.
Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of righteousness and prohibition:
He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business center into the tangled byways of Old Town — jagged blocks filled with sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force, and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from Healey Hanson's saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me, they'd think I was here on business.”
He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days, with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind, a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I'd, uh — Friend of Hanson's sent me here. Like to get some gin.”
The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop. “I guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft drinks here.” He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.
The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar, listen.”
Oscar did not listen.
“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!”
The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as delicately as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”
“Whajuh wanta see him for?”
“I just want to talk to him. Here's my card.”
It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates, Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds, and read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I'll see if he's around.”
From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and burning brown trousers — Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?” but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt's soul, and he seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.
“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson. Say, uh — I'm George Babbitt of the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. I'm a great friend of Jake Offutt's.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Say, uh, I'm going to have a party, and Jake told me you'd be able to fix me up with a little gin.” In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson's eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”
Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back room, and strolled away. Babbitt melodramatically crept into an apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.
By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won't pay one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.” On Hanson's next weary entrance he besought “Could you fix that up?” Hanson scowled, and grated, “Just a minute — Pete's sake — just a min-ute!” In growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared with a quart of gin — what is euphemistically known as a quart — in his disdainful long white hands.
“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.
“Say, uh, but say, cap'n, Jake thought you'd be able to fix me up for eight or nine a bottle.”
“Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada. This is none o' your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest merchant said virtuously. “Twelve bones — if you want it. Course y' understand I'm just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake's.”
“Sure! Sure! I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars. He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.
He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All afternoon he snorted and chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in the arm to-night.” He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia's. He explained, “Well, darn it — ” and drove back.
Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith. Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream in one of the three reliable molds — the melon mold, the round mold like a layer cake, and the long brick.
Vecchia's shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses, attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the refinement that inheres in whites of eggs. Babbitt felt heavy and thick amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer was giggling at him. He went home in a touchy temper. The first thing he heard was his wife's agitated:
“George! DID you remember to go to Vecchia's and get the ice cream?”
“Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?”
“Yes! Often!”
“Well now, it's darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia's and having to stand around looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs — ”
“Oh,