“The Triumph” was originally published in The New Yorker (February 1, 1941) and is described as Gill’s finest by the article on his fiction in Gale’s Contemporary Novelists. The story is set in Connecticut and is centered on an elderly woman and her daughter clinging to the mores and social distinctions of the Old World in a way that contrasts ironically with their present circumstances. “The Triumph” ends in a subtle revelation of character that exposes a layer to the story the reader may have missed and increases the title’s irony.
The Triumph
by Brendan Gill
To Mrs. Battle and her daughter Edith, the issuing of the invitations to the tea was in itself a considerable event. This annual party was the point on which their year and their world revolved. As soon as the forced gaiety of Christmas was over, they started looking forward to the great day. Edith was fifty, Mrs. Battle seventy-three. In the last ten years they had grown to look like sisters. Both had flat cheeks, large chins, and thin gray hair. And when either one of them spoke of the time of day or of the weather, it was in the same tones of courage and regret with which they spoke of their life in the city, so many years back now, or of the house they had later owned on the Torrington road, or the furniture and friends they had been forced to sacrifice.
Edith and Mrs. Battle always set aside one whole day of the first week of January to walk down to the drugstore in the village and buy paper, envelopes, and a fresh bottle of ink. It took an hour or more to make a choice among Mr. Crabtree’s sleazy samples of stationery. Edith and Mrs. Battle sat down on the high stools at the soda fountain and took off their gloves to rub each sheet between their fingers. “If you’d only told me we were out of paper, dear,” Mrs. Battle always said, “I could have written to Tiffany’s for the usual. The dies are there.” They tested two or three bottles of ink before they found the particular shade of light blue they wanted—the shade they never failed to purchase. By the end of the next week, when they could no longer bear to leave the paper untouched, Edith and Mrs. Battle would carry the telephone book up to their small, square room on the second floor of Mrs. O’Connor’s boarding house and copy from it a list of possible guests. This, together with a list of their friends outside the village, totaled nearly a hundred persons. After twenty years, the Battles knew perfectly well whom they intended to invite, but it was a sacred custom to savor and reject the remainder, name by name.
“What about Mrs. Roger Shipstead?” Mrs. Battle would ask on the first day, her finger happening to rest against that name in the book.
Edith would say, “We’ll write it down, in case.”
On the following day, when they began to prune their list of the more obviously distant acquaintances, Edith would say, “I’ve Mrs. Roger Shipstead here.” Mrs. Battle always pretended to waver—”Let’s wait and see.” On the third day, Mrs. Battle would cut Mrs. Shipstead from the list. “We’ve never had her, you know,” she would say, and Mrs. Shipstead would drop from their thoughts for another year.
The list took shape finally as the Battles had known it would. They were always careful that, of the twenty-five invitations they sent out, eighteen would be to those acquaintances in New Haven and New York and Philadelphia and Washington who were certain not to attend but who bore uniformly distinguished names. One was a former governor of Connecticut; one was the president of Yale whoever he happened to be—the Battles were an old Vole family); one an elderly gentleman who, in Hoover’s Ii111c, had been minister to one of the Scandinavian countries. The remaining invitations were always sent to a handful of friends in the village, who never thought of refusing them, and to perhaps one new friend, by way of adding a sense of risk to the occasion. The risk this year was Mrs. Paraday. She was a stout, red-cheeked widow, new to the town, whose vigor appalled and attracted Edith. She said whatever she pleased and gave the impression that all her life long she had done whatever she pleased. Mrs. Battle asked, “Who are her people?” and Edith answered, “None living, I believe.”
“That fails to answer my question.”
“New York,” Edith said, then risked adding, “Old New York.”
“I don’t believe it for a moment. What was her maiden name?”
“I can’t recall her having mentioned it.”
“And no wonder. Irish blood there, you mark my words.” Mrs. Battle had a low opinion of the Irish. There was some thing the matter with their blood. In that respect they were very like the Poles and the Spanish and the blacks. “People who touch pitch—” Mrs. Battle said. “I warn you not to go running after Mrs. Paraday.”
“I, who’ve never run after anyone!”
“If we invite your Mrs. Paraday, it must be with the clear understanding that she is very much on probation.”
“She’s not my Mrs. Paraday, and if you’re going to carry on like this, I’d a thousand times rather not have her at all.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Battle, her old heart afire with jealousy. “You’ve a crush on her, that’s all. The sooner you get over it, the better.”
Edith burst into tears, and for forty-eight hours, living in the same room, sleeping in the same bed, they spoke not a word to each other. The inconvenience of silence at such dose quarters and the need to get on with the preparations for the tea party caused them at last to come to terms; and by then each felt that she was forgiving the other.
As usual, the writing of the invitations took scarcely an afternoon. “Mrs. Robert Gardiner Battle and Miss Edith Nevins Battle,” Edith wrote down, again and again, in a straight, slender, unchanging script. “At home Monday, January twenty-seventh, four to six. R.S.V.P.” Then, with Mrs. Battle sitting on the bed and calling out names in a voice charged with excitement, Edith addressed the twenty-five envelopes. The next morning they walked down to the post office to buy the proper number of stamps from the post master. This made it possible to show him some of the letters addressed to New Haven and New York and Philadelphia and Washington, since they always affixed the stamps at his window and even asked him to weigh one of the letters to make sure that it had sufficient postage. Together they dropped the invitations, with slow caution, into the brass-plated slot in the wall.
All through the next week they received at least two letters of regret a day. “Isn’t it a shame?” Mrs. Battle said, reading one of them. “Mrs. Amory writes from Washington that she and the Senator have promised themselves for dinner on Monday.” In the end they received, as they did each year, eighteen letters of regret from New Haven and New York and Philadelphia and Washington, and seven letters of acceptance from their friends in the village.
On the morning of the tea, they dropped in at the bakery shop and purchased three dollars and fifty cents’ worth of sandwiches and cakes. Then they hurried back to the house to make ready the front parlor. At noon, Mr. Atwood, a middle-aged bachelor who worked at the Brown Lumber Company and was the most presentable of Mrs. O’Connor’s five other boarders, obligingly brought in wood for a fire and laid it with his own hands. Edith carried the canary down from upstairs to give the room a more homey look. They dared not remove Mrs. O’Connor’s portrait of the late Pope from its place of honor above the mantel, but, as former members, during their New York days, of the Brick Presbyterian Church, they diminished his presence by setting a bowl of bittersweet before the picture. They went without lunch in order to give themselves time to bathe and dress. Mrs. Battle always wore a lavender dress with long sleeves and a pleated skirt touching the floor. She had bought it at Altman’s fourteen or fifteen years before, but, as she often said, “The material’s so much better than what you can get nowadays, it would be criminal to think of giving it away.” Edith wore a dress she had bought in Winsted some years back. With the changes she had made in it this year, it looked almost like new. At four o’clock, with a card table crammed with plates, cups, and Mrs. O’Connor’s green porcelain teapot, and a cozy fire burning on the hearth, the Battles sat down and waited for their guests. They were so moved by the occasion that they could scarcely speak.
No one ever came before five.
——————-
The room clinked with china saucers and cups. The fire on the hearth cast skeins of smoke over the partly empty plates of sandwiches and cakes. Next to Mrs. Battle sat Miss Day. She, too, had lived in New York and knew many of the people Mrs. Battle had known in the old days. In spite of altered times, she still kept three servants in the green-and-lemon-colored house on the hill. Beyond Miss Day sat Mrs. Urbino, the nice Italian Dr. Urbino’s wife, who showed by her silence how grateful she was for being asked to the Battles’ tea. On the other side of the room, Edith, together with Mrs. Reuben Clark, who was eighty-four, and her granddaughter, and Edith’s friend Mrs. Paraday, kept up a drumfire of whispers and giggles. Mrs. Battle felt that the annual tea was a great success.
“My parents could remember Brooklyn,” Miss Day was saying, “before the Bridge. I hate to think what age that makes me, but they could. It was like the open country in those days, all woods and brooks and sandy shore. And the nicest people!”
“Why, in those days,” Mrs. Battle said, sitting as straight and motionless on her little wooden chair as a queen on a velvet throne, “in those days, you know, Westchester and outer Long Island hadn’t been dreamed of. They didn’t exist. If anyone had dared to live in a village like this, a hundred miles from New York, they’d’ve been thought quite mad.” Mrs. Battle lifted her teacup lightly in her mottled hands. The canary fluttered and scolded in a cage above her shoulder as she talked. “My mother was a Nevins—one of the oldest of the old Brooklyn families. When I was a little girl, we lived on Washington Park South, in the loveliest home, with a long green garden that I always think of as full of pompons and cosmos and nettles. We had a coach house covered with lattices at the end of the garden, and I remember the horses my father kept there—two black ones with white feet and white stars on their foreheads. He called them Gog and Magog.”
“What a marvelous memory!” Mrs. Urbino said. It was almost the only remark she had made all afternoon.
“Later, the financial troubles came—I was much too young to know what it was about; money was as much a mystery to me then as it is today—and my father had to surrender everything he owned, but he refused to give up his horses.” Mrs. Battle drew a slow breath, building a stage of silence under her voice. Each year she enjoyed this moment more. For this was how to live: tea, cakes, friends, a fire, a story. “He went down to the coach house the morning we had to move away. He said good-bye to the horses and lifted a pistol out of his pocket and shot them dead, just where they stood in their stalls. My mother and I were waiting for him on the front stoop and we heard the shots. He couldn’t bear to do anything else.”
“Imagine living in Brooklyn today and having such a memory! It would be horrible,” Mrs. Paraday said, and burst into prolonged laughter. Wave on wave, the sound rose in the crowded room. The canary flattened his wings on the wire walls of his cage. Mrs. Battle lifted the lid of the teapot, studied the black tea, and replaced the lid. In all the times she had told that story of her father’s horses no one had ever followed it with a less appropriate remark. She smiled, all courtesy. “Do have another cup of tea, Mrs. Paraday,” she said. “Such a cold day.”
Mrs. Battle pressed her hands to her eyes for a moment. The last of the guests had gone. Edith and she had repeated for the last time the words “Do drop in again very soon,” which everyone knew better than to believe. They lifted the plates from the table and carried them down the dark hall to the kitchen. Mrs. O’Connor was there, preparing supper. “How was the party?” she asked. “Were you both the pride and joy of the day?”
“Everything was just as it should have been,” Mrs. Battle said. It was best to keep the Mrs. O’Connors of this world at a distance. The Irish were nothing if not pushy. Nevertheless, today she could afford to unbend a little. “We have to thank you for the use of the room. And for your plates.” “Why shouldn’t you have the use of the room whenever you want it?” Mrs. O’Connor asked. “The rest of the boarders only use it at night, the big tramps in their dirty shoes!”
Edith and her mother found the stairs exhausting. Mrs. Battle lay down on the big double bed. She did not wish to hear Edith launch out on a long chatter of distress over Mrs. Paraday. Edith could be remarkably obtuse at times. ln ordinary circumstances, apologies would certainly have been called for and, after due consideration, accepted, but these were far from ordinary circumstances. Mrs. Paraday’s gaucherie had made any further relationship between Edith and her an impossibility. She had proved herself, and not alone in the Battles’ eyes, a total outsider. Word of the incident, Mrs. Battle thought with satisfaction, would be all over the village by nightfall: the clumsy grossness of the guest, the unfaltering magnanimity of the hostess. Surely Edith ought to see that apologies would open the door to discussions that no longer needed to take place. Mrs. Battle had played her trumps superbly. She had taken every trick. She was still a match for any of them. She heaved an artificially loud sigh, as a signal that she was falling asleep. That would keep Edith from bothering her. She lay there listening to her daughter as she fluttered nervously about the room. After so many years, the least sounds were easy to identify. A faint chck! was Edith hanging the canary’s cage back on its accustomed hook. After a minute or two, finding himself at home between wardrobe and shoe rack, the bird would start singing. Just so, just so. Wrapped in glory, Mrs. Battle, pretending to fall asleep, fell asleep, and so never saw her daughter’s tears.