If Death Ever Slept

I CAN’T UNDERTAKE TO make you feel at home in that Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse because I never completely got the hang of it myself. By the third day I decided that two different architects had worked on it simultaneously and hadn’t been on speaking terms. Jarrell had said it had twenty rooms, but I think it had seventeen or nineteen or twenty-one or twenty-three. I never made it twenty. And it wasn’t duplex, it was triplex. The butler, Steck, the housekeeper, Mrs. Latham, and the two maids, Rose and Freda, slept on the floor below, which didn’t count. The cook and the chauffeur slept out.

Having got it in my notebook, along with ten pages of other items, that Wyman, the son, and Lois, the daughter, were Jarrell’s children by his first wife, who had died long ago, I had supposed that there were so many variations in taste among the rooms because Jarrell and the first wife and the current marital affliction, Trella, had all had a hand at it, but was set right on that the second day by Roger Foote, Trella’s brother. It was decorators. At least eight decorators had been involved. Whenever Jarrell decided he didn’t like the way a room looked he called in a decorator, never one he had used before, to try something else. That added to the confusion the architects had contributed. The living room, about the right size for badminton, which they called the lounge because some decorator had told them to, was blacksmith modern-black iron frames for chairs and sofas and mirrors, black iron and white tile around the fireplace, black iron and glass tables; and the dining room, on the other side of an arch, was Moorish or something. The arch itself was in a hell of a fix, a very bad case of split personality. The side terrace outside the dining room was also Moorish, I guess, with mosaic tubs and boxes and table tops. It was on the first floor, which was ten stories up. The big front terrace, with access from both the reception hall and the lounge, was Du Pont frontier. The tables were redwood slabs and the chairs were chromium with webbed plastic seats. A dozen pink dogwoods in bloom, in big wooden tubs, were scattered around on Monday, the day I arrived, but when I went to the lounge at cocktail time on Wednesday they had disappeared and been replaced by rhododendrons covered with buds. I was reminded of the crack George Kaufman made once to Moss Hart-“That just shows what God could do if only he had money.”