Chocolates for Breakfast Page 22

  “Miss Courtney—”

  Courtney turned, startled. “Yes, Marie. What is it?” she said crossly.

  “Mr. Neville again. Shall I tell him you’re not in?”

  “No,” Courtney said suddenly. “No, I’ll answer it this time.”

  “Hello, angel,” said the low, familiar voice. “You’ve been avoiding me so.”

  “Hello, Anthony.”

  “Are you coming out of retirement, darling? I so want to see you. I knew how upset you must be—”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “Could you see me this evening, angel?”

  Suddenly Courtney was a little afraid. She was afraid that if she saw Anthony again, they would make love again, the old power that they held over one another would take over again. She didn’t know if she would be strong enough. Then she knew what she would do. She would see Anthony but make a date with someone else, someone convenient like Charles, to have dinner with her parents. She would guard against herself. She would not make love again like that, she would wait until it was decent and sanctioned.

  “I have a dinner date, darling,” she said. “But I’ll be able to see you for cocktails.”

  “Perhaps I can persuade you to break your date. It’s been three weeks, you know, a wretchedly long time.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’ll meet you at the Plaza, then, in the bar.”

  “All right, Anthony. At five.”

  “Goodbye, angel.”

  “Goodbye, Anthony.”

  Charles would be at work now, Courtney thought as she hung up. Well, even if he weren’t free, she could go to dinner with her parents. She looked up the number. She would be safe from herself with Charles; there was a strength and decency to him.

  “Charles Cunningham, please.”

  “Thank you. Who is calling?”

  “Courtney Farrell.”

  “Hello, Courtney?” That familiar, self-assured voice.

  “Hello, Charles.”

  “I suppose you know I’ve been trying to get you ever since I heard about Janet’s death.”

  “Yes,” she said. She ran her tongue between her lips. Why did everyone have to talk about it? “I wondered, Charles, if you could have dinner with the parents and me this evening. Mummy just got this part, and we must celebrate—”

  “Well, I have a date, Courtney, but I can cancel it. It’s just with a couple of Harvard Law friends, and they won’t mind. I’d really love to see you; I’ve been worrying about you.”

  How strange, Courtney thought.

  “Shall I meet you at your apartment?” he asked.

  “No,” Courtney said. “I have an appointment before, so why don’t you meet us at the restaurant? At Sardi’s, at seven.”

  “Wonderful, darling.”

  “Goodbye, Charles.”

  Well, that was done. Now, Courtney thought, it was all up to her. She would meet the test now, and if she came through it, she knew she would be able to trust herself.

  As Courtney came into the bar, she saw Anthony sitting at a table against the wall. He was staring into space, deep in thoughts of his own, and did not see her. How striking he was, she thought, what a really beautiful young man, standing apart from the other people in the room, making them look somehow prosaic as he stared into his own world. She could not feel harsh toward him, seeing him again, watching him as he did not realize he was being watched. The decision that she had made, the resolves, the clarity of view that she had had away from him blurred as she saw him again.

  “Hello, Anthony,” she smiled.

  “Darling.” He stood up and pushed the table out. She sat beside him. “What will you have to drink?”

  “A martini.”

  He looked at her.

  “Won’t you have some wine with me?”

  “All right,” she smiled. “I’ll have some wine with you.”

  He gave the order to the waiter. When the waiter had gone, he turned to her. “I’ve missed you, angel,” he said. “You know that.”

  She studied his face.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He put his hand over hers on the table.

  “And now, everything can be as it was before,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He watched her a moment in silence.

  “What a waste that was,” he said finally, voicing what was in both their minds. “Not a tragedy, poor Janet—she never could know tragedy, only a sad and futile waste. I watched it coming, we all did. But there was nothing we could do.”

  “No,” she said. “There never is anything anyone else can do. Everyone must save themselves, no one can help them.”

  “You have a dinner date,” he said in his low, quiet voice. “But after dinner, you’ll come back to Tony?”

  She looked at him, startled.

  “No,” she said, almost without thinking. “No, never again. I have to have a different life now, as though to make Janet’s senseless sacrifice have some meaning. Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

  He stared into space.

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew that. I knew when I talked to you on the phone. I knew before that, after Janet’s death, when you didn’t call me. You didn’t turn to me, but I knew you wanted to turn to someone. You knew I wasn’t capable of helping you. You turned to yourself. I began to realize it then. When you sat down beside me, I was certain of it.”

  There was a silence. The quiet days before reality, the days of the enchanted garden, of the castle of sand, were gone, and they both knew it. The days before reality, on the threshold of reality.

  “Anthony—”

  He turned to her, his glass of wine poised above the table.

  “I wonder where it went,” she said.

  He set down his glass.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Our castle of sand. Battered by the waves of reality. It finally dissolved, didn’t it?”

  “I know,” he said, rubbing the glass with his finger. “It happened while we weren’t looking.”

  “There wouldn’t have been anything we could have done to save it, even if we had known what was happening.”

  “That’s the hell of sand castles,” he smiled. “They are always doomed. That’s part of their beauty—their impermanence.”

  “Anthony darling. Darling.” She took his hand.

  “Don’t ever try to recreate it just as it was. You’ll never be able to and neither will I. Realize that.”

  “I do,” she said.

  He ran his hand along her cheek.

  “It isn’t a tragedy, angel. People like you, and me, and Janet—we’re not capable of tragedy. This was no epic play, with heroic characters and vast emotions. This was not a tragedy. It was a child’s game that came to an end.”

  “But I feel a little sad,” she said. “Now that it’s here, I realize that I didn’t want it to end.”

  “In a sense it doesn’t have to. You and I will end, of course. But the beauty of it never lay in the characters. It was the enchantment that made it precious.”

  He ran his thumb musingly across the back of her hand.

  “You never have to lose the enchantment,” he said. “You needn’t bother to remember me, I was unimportant. But do this for me, never let the enchantment go out of your life.”

  “I’ll try not to,” she said. “But it is so hard to keep the enchantment, the belief, after what’s happened.”

  As he looked at her, his face was mature, as she had never seen it in tenderness.

  “If I’ve given you the gift of enchantment,” he said, “I’ll have given someone something precious for the first time in my life.” He took a sip of his wine. “God knows,” he said with a slow smile, “it’s not much. It’s up to someone else to give you love. If I had it, I would have given it to you. But I couldn’t. This is the most I can give you. Keep it for me.”

  “It’s so hard,” she said again. “Everything turns into ugliness, everything s
eems so harsh and real. The dead leaves fall into the swimming pool, and all I want to do is escape them.” She turned to him. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You haven’t any choice, darling. You’ve outgrown this. I can’t, you see. I can’t go on, any more than Janet could. But you can.” She rose. “Have a good life, angel,” he said.

  She smiled. “How foolish you are.”

  “You’re going now?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to, but I am going. Like the little boy in that story you told me,” she smiled.

  “That’s as it should be,” he said softly.

  He watched her walk into the silent, crystal autumn evening that lay beyond the glass doors. He fingered his drink. Winter was coming; it would soon be time for him to go south, to his island. How quickly the summer had gone.

  P. S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Looking Back on Pamela Moore

  by Robert Nedelkoff

  An earlier version of this article appeared in the Baffler magazine in 1997

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1956, the hottest thing going in American (as well as western European) fiction was the slim oeuvre of a twenty-one-year-old Frenchwoman named Françoise Sagan. Her first book, Bonjour Tristesse, written at the age of eighteen, had caused a sensation in her native land in 1954 and had soon been translated into English, subsequently rocketing up the American and British bestseller lists the next year and settling in at number one. The title became such a catchphrase that not even Hollywood could bring itself to change the title of the 1958 film version, starring Jean Seberg, to Hello Sorrow.

  It fell to Rinehart and Company, the publisher of Norman Mailer’s first two books, to find the American Sagan. She turned out to be an obligatory adolescent—her book, in fact, was released three weeks before her nineteenth birthday. She was precocious in other ways as well, having begun college a month shy of sixteen and starting her senior year when her book came out. Her academic majors, rather than the expected English or creative writing, were ancient and medieval history (with an emphasis on military history) and, for her minors, Roman law and Greek—with straight A’s. She had acted in summer stock and, as the daughter of a magazine editor, could be expected to handle publicity with aplomb. Her alma mater, Barnard College, struck just the right note of cutting-edge elitism. Best of all, her book was set in the world of the rich, spoiled haute monde—what had been called “café society” in the 1930s and had only just acquired the handle “jet set.” Her name was Pamela Moore, and her book was Chocolates for Breakfast.

  Pamela was born on September 22, 1937, in New York, the daughter of two writers. Her parents, expressing what may have been an only partially facetious disappointment in the fact that the child was a girl, sent out a notice that read, “We wanted an editor, but we got a novelist.” Her father, Don Moore, was thirty-two at the time. He was the son of an Iowa newspaper publisher; in 1925, he had graduated second in his class at Dartmouth College. In the late 1920s, he edited Edgar Rice Burroughs and other pulp writers at Argosy All-Story Weekly, then signed on with Hearst’s King Features Syndicate as writer for a new comic strip drawn by Alex Raymond (who’d just finished doing a G-man strip written by Dashiell Hammett). The strip was Flash Gordon, and Moore wrote it, as well as Jungle Jim, until 1954, occasionally making trips to Hollywood to work on the serial versions of the two strips.

  Sometime in the 1930s, Don Moore married a young woman named Isabel Walsh. She already had a daughter, Elaine, who took her stepfather’s name. Isabel was a writer as well, specializing in sensationalist stories and advice-filled articles for women’s magazines, among them Redbook and Cosmopolitan. She also wrote three novels in the early 1940s for Rinehart, her daughter’s future publisher, with titles like The Other Woman and I’ll Never Let You Go. Just after World War II, Don and Isabel Moore split up. (In later years, Isabel devoted herself to supervising the show-horse riding career of her daughter Elaine, who won a number of championships in the 1940s before retiring to raise a family and run a horse farm in Cooperstown, New York.) Pamela shuttled back and forth between parents during this time: her mother’s, in New York, where Isabel edited Photoplay for some years; her father’s, mostly in Hollywood, where he supplemented his King Features earnings by working as a story editor for RKO and Warner Bros. Both of Pamela’s parents moved in a world defined by columnists: Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen on one coast, and Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons on the other. It was a world where childhood had to be cultivated like an orchid in a greenhouse, if it were to happen at all. For Pamela Moore the situation was a tragic one: childhood succeeded maturity rather than preceding it. One of the most poignant aspects of her first novel is the curious perspective of age with which the narrator describes her protagonist: “Years later, when Courtney heard that music . . .” or “As a grown woman, Courtney would realize . . .” When Pamela wrote these words she was seventeen; the character ages from fifteen to sixteen in the course of the book. Through the fictive and narrative personas of Chocolates, its author essentially pleads, over and over: I don’t understand how one endures these things now, but someday, when I’m older and wiser . . .

  Rinehart, as noted, snapped up Chocolates for Breakfast and, following a careful publicity campaign, unleashed it on the world in September 1956. It attracted attention at once, and no wonder: The first chapter depicts Janet Parker, heroine Courtney Farrell’s best friend, “lying with her clothes off” (as the book’s second paragraph pointedly informs the reader) in their prep-school dorm, while arguing over whether Courtney is stumbling into a lesbian relationship with her English teacher. Before many pages have passed, Courtney is attempting to lose her virginity to a pretty-boy acquaintance of her fading movie-star mother at the Garden of Allah in Hollywood—the onetime home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as the author notes. True, Pamela does prudently postpone the deflowering until Courtney has safely reached sixteen, but the book’s impact was still enormous, given the moral climate of 1956.

  “[N]ot very long ago, it would have been regarded as shocking to find girls in their teens reading the kind of books they’re now writing,” observed Robert Clurman in the New York Times Book Review’s literary-news column—and that was before publication. Newsweek’s reviewer presciently observed: “[Moore] may well be also a part of a trend among publishers to start a new cycle of youth problem novels, as told by the young—a kind of literary parallel to the more overt delinquencies of the switch-blade hoodlums.”

  The novel went through two printings before publication and scraped onto the bottom of some hardcover bestseller lists for a few weeks in September and October 1956. The comparisons to Françoise Sagan continued, though William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle noted that the book “dabbles in sex, if not so blatantly” as the French writer’s. He also remarked: “It would appear that Miss Moore had hoped . . . to become the female J. D. Salinger.” This was one of the very first instances of a comparison made countless times since for a number of writers.

  In the weeks prior to the appearance of her book, Pamela had, in fortuitously Salingerian fashion, traveled to Paris for her senior year of study and made herself unavailable for interviews with the American press. Instead, she busied herself studying the strategy and tactics of European warfare in a tour of battlefields, which struck the journalists of that time as an entertaining eccentricity in a young woman. But after publication, she juggled her studies with being, in her words, “caught between the American public and journalists who wanted to know about my love life, and my college friends studying creative writing who condemned me as ‘commercial.’ ”

  Publishers were deluged by manuscripts by young women seeking to imitate her, as she had been thought to be imitating Sagan (though Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise was more likely the model she had in mind). Even in the 1980s, she was as much a star as her best-known counterparts. And all over the country young mothers and fathers beg
an naming their daughters Courtney. (It seems worthwhile to note here that Pamela Moore’s one permanent contribution to American culture was in the area of nomenclature. In all the baby-name books published before 1960 that I’ve seen, Courtney appears exclusively as a male name of French or Norman origin; prior to 1956, it was a common Christian name for men in England and the southern United States. But every female Courtney that this writer has known or heard of, in fact, was born in 1958 or afterward—that is, during or immediately after the period that Chocolates began to sell in paperback. In high school and college I encountered a number of Courtneys born between 1958 and 1960; thereafter, for four years—a time when the book was out of print—the name seemed to drop off in frequency, then reappeared, with a vengeance, in 1964 when a new printing of Chocolates arrived. The name has maintained its popularity since then, as Courteney Cox, Kourtney Kardashian, and Courtney Love can all attest. In fact, Courtney Love has stated in interviews that her mother named her specifically after the heroine of Chocolates, and that she read the book while staying in the same room as Courtney Farrell had at the Garden of Allah. The Guinness Book of Names includes a survey showing that through the 1990s Courtney has consistently ranked among the twenty names most frequently given to female infants in America.)