Page 92 - tender-is-the-night

equipment for what she had to do. She drank it quickly,
choked and then said, ‘Besides, yesterday was my birth-
day—I was eighteen.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ they said indignantly.
‘I knew you’d make a fuss over it and go to a lot of trouble.’
She finished the champagne. ‘So this is the celebration.’
‘It most certainly is not,’ Dick assured her. ‘The dinner
tomorrow night is your birthday party and don’t forget it.
Eighteen—why that’s a terribly important age.’
‘I used to think until you’re eighteen nothing matters,’
said Mary.
‘That’s right,’ Abe agreed. ‘And afterward it’s the same
way.’
‘Abe feels that nothing matters till he gets on the boat,’
said Mary. ‘This time he really has got everything planned
out when he gets to New York.’ She spoke as though she were
tired of saying things that no longer had a meaning for her,
as if in reality the course that she and her husband followed,
or failed to follow, had become merely an intention.
‘He’ll be writing music in America and I’ll be working at
singing in Munich, so when we get together again there’ll be
nothing we can’t do.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ agreed Rosemary, feeling the cham-
pagne.
‘Meanwhile, another touch of champagne for Rosemary.
Then she’ll be more able to rationalize the acts of her lym-
phatic glands. They only begin to function at eighteen.’
Dick laughed indulgently at Abe, whom he loved, and in
whom he had long lost hope: ‘That’s medically incorrect and

92 Tender is the Night