Love & Mrs. Sargent by Patrick Dennis Read Free Book Online Page A

Sargent was in dead earnest about her son’s writing career, the architect had pushed his luck even further. With a lot of talk about “spatial concepts,” he had installed a small bath in buff tile, complete with dolphin faucets, big brown towels, and a combination shower stall and steam room. One never knew when an author, deep in the throes of creation, would need a quick Turkish. And, as the tool shed was located nearly fifty paces from Bertha’s kitchen, the architect had installed behind sliding jalousies a trim little galley and bar with stove, refrigerator, copper sink, Waring Blendor and Italian earthenware and Danish silver for six. Again, wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world for a male novelist to break off in mid- chapter and run up frozen daiquiris and a puffy soufflé? It had cost Sheila a pretty penny but she had considered it a sound investment for now Dicky lacked nothing to speed him on his way as a major writer of our times.
    In his eighteen months of occupancy, Dicky had never availed himself of the shower or the steam room. The manly brown towels were changed weekly only because a certain amount of dust settled upon their voluptuous folds. Dicky had never sat at his father’s desk, never used the electric typewriter or the electric pencil sharpener, although he had once wondered idly if such a gadget might not be used for shorter arid snappier circumcision rites among savages during the twenty-first century. An unusual idea, he admitted, but there was hardly a book in it. What writing he did was done sprawled out on the sofa with a twelve-cent ball-point pen and a pad of lined yellow paper. The encyclopedia, the atlas, the Fowler, had never been opened. The toilet was used mostly for emptying ashtrays and the stove had never been used at all. The bar facilities, however, had been called into play more and more over the past several weeks. An empty vodka bottle lay in the copper waste basket in the kitchenette and three other empties were hidden in the bottom drawer of the desk. Dicky rationed his throwing out of bottles to one bottle every other day. Two or three times a week Dicky dirtied up some extra glasses with tomato juice and left them around the room so that it would look to Bertha as though friends had dropped in for Bloody Marys. Actually Dicky had no friends and the only people who had ever visited the tool shed in its present guise were Sheila, Allison and Mrs. Flood. Sheila’s daily visits were limited strictly to business and she discouraged her daughter and her secretary from doing anything to disrupt Dicky’s creative flow. What flowed the most was vodka.
    Dicky lived on a weekly stipend of one hundred dollars which Mrs. Flood paid over on Wednesdays. His mother had been very brisk and business-like about the money, “This is not an allowance, dear,” she had explained, “It is a writer’s subsidy to keep you going until your royalties start rolling in. You know I don’t begrudge you the money, but now that you’ve—now that you’re not in Yale any longer—well, I mean a boy of twenty ought to think about earning his own living. Your father wasonly eighteen when he started working summers for the old Evanston News-Index. It hardly kept him in cigarettes but the experience was invaluable—invaluable toward becoming both a newspaper man and a man. Floodie will keep careful track of what’s been paid out and I expect it to be paid back out of your earnings. Oh, and if it isn’t enough, Dicky, let me know.”
    It was enough. Dicky was a creature of habit because Sheila encouraged routine. Into the tool shed every morning at ten; luncheon on a tray at one; call it a day at five; shower and change; cocktails at six. Every Wednesday Dicky drove to the bank to cash his check. Then he drove to the barber shop for a haircut and a shine. (Sheila disliked shaggy necks and Dicky’s father before him had always had his hair cut on Wednesdays.) Then he drove west—pitching