Reuben, Reuben, page 13
“Fine!” I said. “Who is she?”
He told them not to despair, it was just a phase lots of people went through and come out O.K. on the other side without permanent harm. I had stood at the head of the stairs listening to them whisper together in the front hall when he left. He said a young divinity school graduate was coming as his assistant, who had training in psychological counseling they were giving theological students these days, and that he would send him over the minute he arrived. Or he might call the local rabbi in for consultation. He was very good at these things. “But we’re not Jewish,” Mare said. “I know,” he said. “It’s very hard.”
As I started away again with the closed suitcase, this time carrying it by the handle, Mare detained me with a hand on my arm. I instantly sensed some more of her strategy, her trick of wringing another concession from me when she had me deep in the doghouse, like the time I was caught red-handed stealing chickens (my own!) which she had used as a lever to get my permission to move her mother in.
“What are you doing tomorrow, Pa Spofford? George has to go to Bridgeport and can’t take Ma to the Golden Age Club. We were hoping this time you’d stay for the meeting. Meet some real people.”
“Oh, not that!” I says, and give my “rotten” laugh.
The instant I set the grip down in Mrs. Punck’s room I shot back downstairs on tiptoe to hear some more criticism. I stood on the second step from the bottom, just around the corner, and listened. They were talking in whispers.
“It isn’t just the fast crowd he’s got mixed up with,” Mare was saying. “It’s everything. The way he acts and talks. Like what he said just now about real people. I think his mind is effected.”
“I don’t think he hears very well,” Mrs. Punck whispered back. “He couldn’t have understood what you said, because his answer just didn’t make any sense. Have you had his ears examined lately? I find he has trouble understanding the simplest things, like proverbs and sayings.”
“No, it’s not that. He knew what we said, and he was being—what’s that word I’m thinking of? Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. It starts with a ‘d’. You know. For this type of wickedness among the high-muckamucks.”
Mrs. Punck didn’t seem to know the word, but I did, and I wanted her to hear it. I wanted this criticism very much. So much so that I was willing to pay the price for it, namely admit that I had been eavesdropping.
“Deckadent?” I says, coming into the kitchen.
“If the shoe fits,” says Mare.
I made for the next suitcase.
“We were just talking about the kind of people you get thrown in with to do the jobs you seem to like now, Frank,” Mrs. Punck took up, with that patient reasonableness that was one of her more disturbing attractions. I had to harden my heart against her again. “Well money makes them that way I guess. Success. It’s an attitude toward life human nature seems to get into when it develops in a certain direction. I think it’s behind all the loose morals and the divorces too. The more you get the more you want.”
“Want,” Mare chimed in. What an echo chamber the place was going to be with two women in it! “Want,” I threw in for good measure, striding between them with a grip in either hand. “Yes, scratch a commuter,” I says disappearing, “and the dollars will take care of themselves.” Garbling proverbs was a special form of befuddling them that I had been refining. I left them sitting there, with their cattle patience.
After smashing the last of Mrs. Punck’s baggage I stayed upstairs to take a shower. I rummaged around in Geneva’s phonograph records, but though there was some poetry in it there was no McGland that I could find. I wrote a few pages of this Journal, then dressed and went down. Mrs. Punck had tied on an apron and was baking a cake to show how she was going to pitch in around here and be far from a burden. I put up my guard.
“Got your glad rags on, eh Frank?” she greeted me cheerfully over her shoulder from the sink. “When are you going to meet this Mr. Gland?”
“Sevenish.”
She mixed the cake batter standing at the kitchen table, and I sat a minute to watch. I felt a flicker of corruption in the light I now viewed Mrs. Punck in—like something in a Currier and Ives print, which I now took in on another level. I had come to see her as I was myself once seen, a bit of human bric-a-brac. Yet as she bent over the table I could note the straight line of scalp down the middle of her parted hair, a clean scalp, always smelling of soap, as I knew from coming near her accidentally or otherwise, like at teatime at my table or hers. I pursued a parallel between Mrs. Punck and her cozy domestic wares. Not only was she round and plump as her favorite teapot—now visible on my own shelf—with eyes as blue as its glaze, but there was about her a general ora testifying to a lifetime of propinquity to herbs. A woman like that around the house was a pleasure well remembered. I jerked up my guard again, giving myself a fresh reminder of the gulf widening between us daily, a sort of booster shot on that.
“Thanks for taking my stuff up. Its just that I mustn’t do too much lifting on account of my back. Don’t want my disc slipping out again, do we? Look,” she says, lifting out a glop of the batter to test it for consistency, “don’t feel too badly about Mare. She tends to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
“Out of a what?”
“Molehill. Mole-hill,” Mrs. Punck repeated, shaping the syllables exaggeratedly for my benefit.
“That’s neatly put, Mrs. Punck.”
“Call me Eunice. You mean you’ve never heard that expression before?”
“No, I can’t rightly say I have.”
“Well its very common.” She went to the icebox for a drop more milk. From there she continued cheerfully, “But at the same time, watch out about getting in too deep where you don’t belong. That leads to heartache. Getting in a rut is bad, but far worse is landing in the ditch because you swerved out too far too suddenly. I needn’t say any more than that to Frank Spofford. He’s an intelligent man and knows that a stitch in time saves nine.”
“Saves what?” I said, wondering in my own mind just how far this pastime could be legitimately carried.
“Nine, nine.” She held up that many fingers.
I watched her pick up the wooden spoon set down in order to do this, and then beat a little more milk into the batter. After a minute I says, “Nine what?”
She dropped everything and heaved a sigh. “Stitches of course! What else? Are you deef? Don’t you think you should see a doctor and have your ears examined?”
“Oh I see. Your using the term in a figurative sense.”
Just then the banjo clock on the wall struck seven and I rose and got under way.
Galloping back to the Springers to pick up McGland I toyed with the notion of showing him what I’d written so far, and promptly vetoed it. I now looked on my Journal less as something to be published (either now or fifty years hence when all concerned are dead) than as a means of getting something out of my system for its own sake. Thats the purpose of all art anyway, we now know—to exercise the ghost of something. Be it an unhappy childhood, a tyranical father or a dominating mother—the artist is always exercising its ghost. Like there’s a Broadway playwright who is suppose to always portray women as awful bitches and battleaxes because with each such characterization he gets to exercise his mother. My ghost was the need to belong, somewhere, somehow, with something, and since I was exercising it daily with what I slapped down on paper, sometimes at white heat, why, publication was not of the essence. That being the case why the hell revise? Why the hell bother about consistency in spelling, use and construction, and all the other things Flahive had had kittens about at Indelicato’s that time? Of course I spell words differently at different times, sure I write a number out in letters one time and dash it down as a numeral or a fraction the next, depending on the heat of the composition. Generally I say “would of”, though I realize “would have” is the preferred usage. Grammarians say a double negative makes a positive, yet if I want to be extra positive by using two negatives are they with me as having achieved that end? In any case the whole thing will have to stand as it is, to the point where I bring it, which God alone knows. The very thought of writing a whole nother draft gives me a headache.
I thought McGland would be curled up like a dead rhododendron leave with a book or a drink at the back of the house, but he was waiting and watching for me on the road in front. He had the usual cigarillo smoking in a corner of his mouth. He pitched it away before climbing into the Ford.
“Is that all they have to do around here is devote themselves to getting brown?” was one of the first things he said.
“I haven’t seen a white woman in six months,” I said.
McGland gave the mirthless snort I remembered about him. He never patronized anybody. He never called anybody or anything wonderful, and he didn’t the flivver either as he turned his attention to it, asking about its vintage, model and condition. He had on unpressed green slacks and the brown tweed coat between the lapels of which hung a stained tie, that he presently clawed loose from the shirt collar. He quizzed me about American life, asking me how long people here had been wearing plastic clothes, and whether they were really spun out of soybeans and flu germs; whether it was true that flowers bought at the supermarket were guaranteed; whether he had heard correct that we had developed supersonic dry cleaning, where you bombed the dirt from clothes by vibration, and that we had a vacuum cleaner nobody had to operate—you just set it in the middle of the room and it drew dust from the remotest corners by electronic suction. I said I hadn’t heard of some of those things but I shouldn’t put it past us. He turned the vacuum cleaner idea over in his mind with a kind of lazy amusement. Mightn’t it suck the bobby pins and small change off the bureau top and little Dresden figurines off the whatnot? Then he became serious again and asked whether all American couples slept in twin beds. I said I couldn’t answer that but they all seemed to in the ads, when they weren’t laying wide awake in them.
Suddenly he fell silent and took something from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Curiosity got the better of me and I turned my eyes without turning my head. He was holding a jackknife with more attachments than I had ever seen before, all of which McGland picked open. It really bristled with gadgets when they were all unfolded. He held it out and contemplated it. “Is crime in this country really as bad as people say? Juvenile delinquency and gang wars and all that?”
“You’re not likely to run into that much out here, but I guess it’s bad enough in the big cities. Isn’t that a Boy Scout knife?”
“Yes.” He held it toward me so I could see it better. The attachments included a nail file, fork, spoon, bottle opener, corkscrew and screw driver, besides, of course, the knife blades. He closed them all again one by one, being very careful not to injure his hand, and pocketed the knife.
“Are you carrying that around for protection?” I asked. “Because of what you’ve heard about this country?”
“Well it isn’t only this country of course.”
McGland liked Indelicato’s even before we got inside. I took him directly into the downstairs bar by the back door. It had the pleasant quality of a root cellar McGland liked a bar to be, intimately cool and humid he said, condusive to quickly sprouting friendships and dankly flowering thoughts. He breathed a grateful “Ah!” as we entered. I introduced him to Indelicato who happened to be there at the moment and not upstairs. He had to look at me twice, or pretended to, making off he didn’t recognize me all spruced up. And indeed McGland the cultural star looked more at home in this joint than me the chicken farmer. Evidently this business of crossing class lines was trickier than you thought—or easier than you imagined. But pouring us our martinis I could see Indelicato was waiting for McGland to come to focus too. He didn’t have him quite. I think he put him temporarily in the Miscellaneous pigeonhole reserved for strangers who were neither Italians from the riverfront or Bridgeport Hungarians on the one hand, or commuters slumming on the other. Upstairs in the main restaurant it was more conventional; here in the bar (with its 1/2 dozen dinner tables too) the mixture was complicated. He watched McGland view with approval the single couple eating spaghetti by candlelight, then walk with his martini to an electric bowling game standing in one corner.
“This place reminds me of my favorite pub in Glasgow,” McGland said. “Stone foundations four feet thick and that damp, damp smell. Gives you the feeling a drinker wants.”
“What’s that?” Indelicato asked, who after twenty years tending bar didn’t know.
“That he’s a mushroom.” McGland abandoned the bowling machine and came over and patted a stool preparatory to sitting on it. “Ever notice how barstools are unconsciously made in the image of a mushroom? The drinking soul is that, sensing itself sprout deliciously and damply within itself.” I watched Indelicate for the effect of this, identifying myself with it. “Those of us who drink seriously belong to this class of thallophytes: mushrooms, molds, mildews, rusts and smuts, characterized chiefly by absence of chlorophyll (no sun, just electric light) and by subsisting on living or dead organic matter.” He laid a hand on my shoulder with unexpected joviality. “How’s that? You tell me about roses, I’ll tell you about mushrooms.” But he didn’t give anybody much chance to tell him anything that night, or ever, once he was under sail, as I was about to learn to my regret. “Fungus: a spongy morbid growth, as proud flesh formed in a wound. Poetry: same thing.”
Was he one them lushes, off and galloping on one? An academic question, because the first martini was followed by a steady parade, so that by eight thirty he had had six or seven to my own slowly nursed two. A kind of lazy, loitering smile, as though some secret humor was playing inside him, became fixed on his lips; his black eyes seemed to recede, but back in their depths, under the bulging brow, they glittered watchfully, alert to every woman in the place. His speech, which God knows was burred enough to begin with, slowed and thickened some more as though his tongue was collecting a nap of some sort, maybe that thallophyte spoor itself. What worried me most was the watchful eye on other pastures behind all that Scotch gemütlichkeit. “Let’s eat,” I said nervously.
McGland didn’t eat his spaghetti exactly—he inhaled it. Forkfuls of it vanished like objects into that electronic vacuum cleaner we were just talking about. Meatballs disappeared intact, interrupted by swallows of Chianti or pauses to use a napkin in which often as not his necktie was entangled. I had purposely ordered a small bottle of wine, soon gone. When the waitress brought over another I said, “We didn’t order that.” She said, “Compliments of the next table.”
There were four people at it. One man was a handsome Sicilian bandit type with a blonde girl, the other a young priest escorting what looked like his sister. The priest smiled and raised his glass to us. McGland rose and went over to their table where he stood a minute or two in a hum of flattery. Admirers. The priest was a teacher at a nearby Catholic college who had recognized him and said he looked forward to hearing him read on the campus in the fall. He did the introducing, courteously twisting in his chair to include me but I turned it off with a that’s all-right shake of my head. McGland wore his flustered boy’s smile, while gazing down at the sister in a manner that caused her to draw her stole around her shoulders.
One by one I noticed the drinkers at the bar begin to take the scene in, till almost everyone in the small taproom was listening. Through this gawking I sensed a faint undercurrent of hostility from the three punks who had taken positions at the end spot vacated by McGland and me when we went to our table. They were obvious regulars here, young lugs probably fresh off trucks or construction gangs or factory lines, scrubbed and dressed for the night with clean sport shirts of which they wore the collars spread out over their coats. Once I thought I heard them mutter the word “commuters” in resentment, as they glared at us.
You’ve often read in fiction passages beginning “Desmond had no idea how he got to a telephone,” or “Carruthers could never afterward reconstruct the events of that night.” That’s bunk, the fakery of authors shirking their obligation in a pinch. Desmond knew perfectly well and Carruthers would never forget. I could always afterwards recall the chain of events climaxing that crazy night with McGland despite the semi-fog I was now beginning to share with him. Because I took advantage of his absence to quickly send down my own gullet most of the complimentary bottle of Chianti to keep it from going down McGland’s. So I was in a fair way to get as fuzzy as him, hardly a solution to the problem. But we were sobered up quite abruptly.
“Tell me,” the blonde woman was asking, her hand at her own neckline in loo of a shawl, using the excuse of toying with some beads, “how long are you going to be around?”
“I don’t know yet,” McGland said. “No definite plans after September. It depends. I’ll see what I’ll see.”
“Tell me, where are you staying?” the other girl asked, a short dark girl who bore an unmistakeable family resemblance to the priest. The tallest of the three lugs at the bar was heard to mutter “Tell me, tell me,” in a comical aping of this upperclass speech. His friends laughed. I hadn’t realized how nasty waiting for a place at what was probably an old hangout of theirs had made them. With a few under their belt they were prepared to be ugly.
“I’m staying at the Springers.”
“Oh yes, Bobsy. I know her well,” said the blonde.
Here a definite snicker was heard from the card at the bar, followed by “Who doesn’t?” McGland and his fans didn’t hear it but I did, and I turned and glared at the guy, who acknowledged hisself author of the remark by returning my gaze with cool insolence. There was no mistaking its gist. It was suggestive and he meant it to be.
I got up and walked the eight feet or so to the bar, trying not to be conspicuous. But Indelicato noticed the menace sprouting there and leaned over the bar and said to the trouble-maker, “What’s the matter, Joe? Had one too many already?” When Joe said nothing Indelicato looked at me. I said, “Some of us here would thank him to keep his voice down, or better yet watch his tongue.”
