Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade Page B

might be construed as an indication of her ambivalence toward this disloyalty. She made no effort to turn the flat into a home because once Eddie returned they would be moving anyway. Her suits hanging next to his civilian clothes in the closet, the kitchen bare of food and drink, she took her meals in restaurants and continued to live in much the same transient fashion as she had at the rooming house.
    Although she would not admit it, she had an acute aversion toward homemaking. Granted, she had not been brought up to concern herself with such matters, but most women in 1918, even those raised with servants, were nonetheless able to care for themselves in an emergency. Dorothy was not. So phobic was her reaction to domesticity that she would have starved before boiling herself an egg. Throughout her life, she would eat bacon raw claiming she had no idea how to cook it. The mechanics of laundry would be equally mysterious—when she removed her underwear, she threw the soiled lingerie back into the drawer with the clean and let a maid, if there was one, figure it out.
    These days, hungry for company, she took to dropping in on her sister, who recently had given birth to a second child, a daughter also named Helen, nicknamed Lel. Helen Droste’s marriage show signs of erosion. Dorothy had never been crazy about her brother-in-law, but now it seemed clear that Helen was far from contented with the party-loving George. Dorothy, playing with her niece, would talk of having a baby when the war ended, when her husband returned.
    Eddie’s company remained in the States. It moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, then south to North Carolina before shifting to Jersey again. Dorothy wrote him nearly every day, but she never felt satisfied with her letters. Had she been able to express herself fully she would have poured out her loneliness, but she knew that Eddie, with his low tolerance for teary confidences, would not appreciate gloomy mail. To cheer him up, she related amusing incidents that had taken place at the office and sometimes enclosed copies of her verses, which had begun appearing regularly in the magazine. She yearned to receive love letters but had to content herself with his postcards, usually addressed to “Mrs. Edwin P. Parker, 2nd,” in care of Vanity Fair . His messages were marvels of brevity that began “Dear” and ended abruptly “Ed,” while sandwiched in between were one or two lines that might have been written to anyone.
    Several times when he was based near New York, she rushed to visit him, but their reunions were not particularly successful. The shyness they showed toward each other dismayed her. In fact, Eddie seemed so distant that she felt as if they were not married at all, which made her cry. The sight of her woebegone face had the effect of deflating Eddie further, first making him impatient and then angry. She saw him as unreasonable, and there were fearful quarrels in hotel rooms.
    Eddie’s drinking must have contributed to the instability of their relationship, although it was an issue that Dorothy found impossible to address because Eddie refused to admit he had a problem. In his company, he was considered a hard drinker, and after the morning when he had appeared at reveille white-faced, hung over, and looking as if he had arisen from the grave, his friends began to call him Spook, a nickname that stuck. One weekend when the company was based at Syracuse, he received a furlough and boarded the night train to New York. Eager to begin celebrating, he finished a pint of whiskey and promptly passed out. When he came to at Grand Central the next morning, he staggered off the train and bought another bottle, then drank in earnest for the remainder of his leave. Some of Eddie’s friends felt sorry for his wife.
    In May 1918, his division crossed to France on an Australian troop carrier and was rushed to the British front for additional training. In July, when the long-awaited counteroffensive