Reuben, Reuben, page 15
It was cool and pleasant outside the police station. I was for making the cops drive us back to Indelicato’s for my flivver but McGland said his friend, who was on his way over, would take us in his car. He laid down on the grass with a grateful groan to wait for him. I followed suit, asking him what this was all about. “There ain’t no Welsh Embassy, is there?” I said. “Ain’t it part of Great Britain?”
“Go to the head of the class,” McGland said. The lazy smile come into his face as he gazed up at the stars and wondered aloud when the police would tumble, if they ever did. “I thought I owed them that sporting chance to see through the hoax. I think that’s the trouble with most practical jokers, don’t you? I mean why they seem cruel? They seem cruel because they don’t give their victims that sporting chance, most cases.” He took out a tin of Between-the-Acts, offering me one. We both lit up. Then he filled me in on the guy we were waiting for. “This bloke I telephoned is English, with a really fruity accent, as well as an actor—I used to know him in the old B.B.C. days—and he’ll do a State Department attaché to a T. I let him in on the jape, so he’ll be breezing up presently with his bowler on, swinging a briefcase. Spats. The works. He’s a real jessie.”
“What’s he doing here in Woodsmoke? And how come you can rout him out of bed at half past twelve?” I asked. The courthouse clock had just struck that.
“He’s over here writing a book about the English artist in America and all that. Cultural cousins stuff. Why he’s chasing me around. He wants to pick my brains badly enough to do me a favor like this. Now I’m almost sorry we got sprung so easily. It would have been a joy to watch him strut his stuff. You’ll see what I mean.”
We didn’t have long to wait, but I filled the few minutes we did picking McGland’s brains myself a little—about his previous tours, where he’d read, articles that had been written about him that I might look up. It got a little deep for me, and I said so. “I don’t get it all but my daughter would.” I laughed at the blunder. “Granddaughter.”
Here McGland opened one eye. For a fleeting moment he resembled one them barnyard villains you see in movie cartoons, foxes and dogs that are always on the prowl and are always foiled by the smaller animals. There was something about him at once beastly and begiling, unscrupulous and devoted. I knew he liked me as he knew I liked him. But he was a rogue and we both knew that. Amoral is I guess the word for it. He closed both eyes again as though he didn’t want to think about anything and said, “When did you say she was expected home?”
“Any day.” I turned on one elbow and watched his face while I said, “I guess your pretty famous.” This was a ornery measure to make him simper and look silly. It’s how a compliment makes any of us look, of course, but McGland more than most. I didn’t have long to enjoy the results though. A black Volkswagen like a hurtling turtle turned into view off Main Street and came to a stop on the station-house drive in a spray of gravel. The most dapper figure I ever saw or hope to see popped from the door like a slice of bread from a toaster, slapped the door smartly shut behind him and strode toward the steps swinging a briefcase.
“Mopworth!” McGland called, getting up.
Swiveling on the sole of one foot the newcomer made a right turn, like a soldier in answer to a military command barked at him, and marched across the grass toward us. He wore a natty double-breasted seersucker, white shirt with a collar pin and a Navy blue tie. “I say, Gowan!”
He didn’t have spats on but he didn’t need them. He was so British I thought he was kidding. He was also almost ridiculously good-looking. I thought I saw the same look of suffering envy pass across McGland’s face at the sight of this sapling figure, brown eyes and gleaming smile as it did at the sight of Tad Springer’s athletic beauty. McGland spanked the dirt from his thick flanks and introduced us. “Delighted,” Mopworth said, with a bow from the waist that wasn’t a bow from the waist so much as a nod with the entire upper half of the body. He seemed to gesture with his body too, as though he had at one time taken ballet lessons and was using in real life all the techniques he learned there and paid good money for to express himself as a muscular whole. At the same time all this was mixed up with the peculiar impression you couldn’t get out of your mind, that the bird was engaging in a military drill. Maybe he had done a hitch in the armed forces and was using all that physical discipline too in real life. When McGland had told the story of the evening for about ten minutes, making no secret of how highly he appreciated the ingenuity that had enabled him to end it on the note he did, I broke in to remind them that my car was still at Indelicato’s to be picked up. Mopworth pivoted on one foot and pointed at his own with his head, to indicate it was at our disposal. McGland climbed in back, I beside Mopworth in front.
Once he had been filled in on the events of the night Mopworth made no secret of his relief at not being called on to impersonate a chap from the Embassy after all. “I mean you put it to me out of a sound sleep, Gowan. Tooling down the Post Road I got to waking up and thinking isn’t this a bit sticky? What if they ask for my credentials?”
“You could say you left them in London,” McGland mumbled from the back seat. His voice had that low buzz into which it dropped whenever he was about to settle into hibernation, but he did say something about a nightcap. To which the jessie echoed “Rather!”
Indelicate was just closing up when we got there. Through the locked door I could see him inside tidying up for the night. I had gone over myself to try the door. Now I heard the jessie behind me.
“See here,” he said in a whisper, “I’d like to know more about what this fracas was all about tonight. Gowan may have told you I’m doing this book. More than a bit of Boswelling about Gowan, mind you, but in any case he may clam up or have forgotten most of it by morning. So I’d like to talk to you if I may, so if you know somewhere else where we could have that nightcap. I mean I don’t want to be an albatross, but I did roll out for you chaps.”
I laughed nervously, not understanding much of what was said but sensing this was literary history in the making and glad to be in some way mixed up in it. I could hardly breathe, the credit this give me. There was also just a dash of justifying yourself to the family along with surprising your family when I said, “Let’s go to my place. It’s only down the road. You follow me.” The jessie turned on his heel and marched back to his own car. “There shall be cakes and ale, yes, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth,” he promised as he tramped toward the Volkswagen and I made for the flivver.
I chuckled nervously to myself as I led them down the backroads, but as we approached the farmhouse I began to have actual qualms. There wasn’t just the usual kitchen light left on: the whole house blazed with them. Were they waiting up for me on that scale? Was something wrong? Was someone sick?
I took my friends in the side door, which is really the front door as it leads directly into the parlor. We always let company in that way. Through the lace curtains behind the oval pane in the door I could see Mare and Mrs. Punck and George, all of them, sitting there. They seemed in good spirits. At least their faces didn’t suggest trouble. The reason was soon evident. A fourth person walked into the parlor, laughing. Our girl was home!
“Geneva!” I said, leaving the two standing out on the porch.
“Grandpa!” She ran into my arms.
“We didn’t expect you till next week.”
“I cancelled my steamship passage at the last minute and flew home. I telephoned from New York—I figured that was enough of a surprise. I took the ten thirty home. I only just got here myself. Oh, it’s good to see you, Grandpa.”
She drew back, seeing the two figures outside. They were both grinning and waving their arms in a cloud of moth millers swirling around them in the porch light and flitting into the house through the screen door one of them, the good-looking one, was holding open.
“I want you to meet two of my very good friends,” I said. “Mr. Gowan McGland—you’ve probably heard of him—and Mr. Alvin Mopworth of London. Gentlemen, my granddaughter, Geneva Spofford. Come in and meet the rest of the family.”
thirteen
THERE WAS A couple of reasons why Geneva may not immediately of noticed the change in her grandfather. The first was that the change was only one side of a split personality that still had its other old side, between the two of which he constantly shuttled back and forth. But mainly Geneva had been undergoing transformations of her own. She was my granddaughter more than she was either of her parents’ daughter. At Wycliffe she had met girls from Ohio and Chicago and even farther west who were more “eastern” than she, and had surrendered willingly to their influence. Uppermost among the girls whose spell she was under was this Pennsylvania classmate named Nectar Schmidt, who had been with her on the Latin American exchange fellowship. Later when I met Nectar I realized how much Geneva was modeling her speech and manner on Nectar’s, in one them copying crushes young females of that age have. The fact was that I first noticed the change in her.
What the boys noticed was a strapping girl with hair like ripe wheat and rousing breasts, standing in sawed-off denim slacks and bare feet at which they must of promptly in spirit knelt, moaning her name whilst their arms in fancy encircled thighs that were like the pillars of a temple. There is after all no aphrodisiac like innocence. The southern sun had baked her arms to the color of peaches, and to sink your teeth into that flesh must be, you thought, to taste the juice of bleeding fruit. She had one defect, if in the long run it can be called that. (Stendhal reminds us that a flaw may multiply a virtue by ten, like a zero behind a integer.) The slight pop to her brown eyes give her that look of just having swallowed her gum, but they also light her face up with that staring, rather goofy beauty. I think it was the knowledge that her eyes bulged that made her constantly lower them, especially on meeting men, in a gaze at once bashful and hostile. Now to this may of been added a slight touch of self-consciousness with which she used the still unfamiliar vocabulary soaked up from the likes of Nectar Schmidt and a host of other ventriloquists lurcking in the background.
“There you were,” she said, smiling at the floor as she recalled for McGland the time she had seen him pacing the railroad station at Wycliffe, “with a worried look on your face like those men—those men in ads, you know, who sort of wonder if they’ve invested wisely? Or think to themselves if I’d only had a checkup six months sooner? And this is not good.”
“I was afraid the train would never come, and I’d have to go back to that inn you have there.”
“The Ethan Allen!” I says. I had stayed there. “They have a rope hanging out the window for a fire escape!” I cried to all collectively, even George and Mrs. Punck, not to mock and pain them so much now as to invite them to learn this light sophisticated talk, show the hang of it. “Talk about professional New Englanders!”
“And the menus on slates,” said Geneva. “And that fussy cooking, sort of like bride’s cooking? It’s a place where they serve you portions?”
McGland was wide awake again. He took both the highball I gave him and the chocolate cake Mrs. Punck handed around, coffee to follow presently. Mopworth sat notebook on knee firing questions at McGland about the night’s events. He was a shrewd cookie who knew that when McGland had a girl for an audience was the time to put him on. Mare wandered from room to room stalking the moth millers that had got into the house with a upraised copy of But. She had that look of udder indifference to the conversation that meant acute attention to every word of it. Mrs. Punck sat on the settle with her lap spread much too wide for this part the country, nodding and smiling at what was said and occasionally contributing a maxim of her own or a bit of vital statistics. She knew all the Indelicatos and when they had been born. George sat in the adjoining “small” parlor with a bottle of beer, bored enough for a man with degrees from 7 colleges. We all had our coats off. It was so muggy the potato chips made no noise when eaten.
“There I was, you see, with the three of them having at me, and only this knife.” McGland, who had risen to act out the scene, exhibited the Boy Scout knife.
“I didn’t even have that,” I said, putting my beer down after a gulp.
“He didn’t even have that. So there I was . . .”
McGland began to weave about the room in a humorous portrayal of combat, impersonating his assailant with swipes of his thumb across his mouth, to which the assailant had not been given but which muggs do in American movies, of which McGland was an addict. He danced around the parlor lightly on the balls of his feet. The jessie’s pencil flew, taking down not only what McGland said but what he done. “Suddenly he reached toward his pocket for something, and I pulled out my knife and opened it—to this.” Geneva laughed as the spoon came out, and McGland laid a hand on her shoulder as he wove on by. “The payoff, you see, was that I didn’t know. I thought I was armed.”
“What was the argument all about?” Mopworth asked.
McGland looked at me and I at him. I got to my feet, picking up my glass of beer. “Oh, those hoods were talking about some woman or other. We didn’t even get who. But it makes no difference.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” McGland said. “No man is going to sit idly by while someone, no matter who, is publicly called a tramp.”
“Speaking of tramps,” said Mrs. Punck, returning from the kitchen just then with the pot of coffee, “we rarely see those around here any more, though last year we had one going from door to door asking for handouts. I hadn’t seen one for years. Hung about town for quite some time too. He probably got off a boxcar. But he did not, contrary to the popular notion, put a mark on the gate for other hoboes. Coffee, Mr. Gland?”
Most everybody had coffee, which we watched Mrs. Punck go around pouring. It was Mopworth who spoke up. “By the bye, Gowan, I don’t want to switch the subject, but before we disband I do want to hear you out about this whole commuting business. Mrs. Punck speaking of the boxcars brings it to mind and I don’t want to forget. I mean we don’t in England have all this hoopla about a special cultural class, all those anthropological treatises and one thing and another. What say about the commuters? Any special thoughts on them, Gowan?”
There was another of the many reports from the small parlor. The copy of But came down on another moth miller, the mashed remains of which Mare flicked daintily from the magazine with her finger.
“Why, I read a rather interesting comment the other day,” Geneva said. She fixed her butterscotch eyes on the floor at the first sign that she was again the center of attention. “That men commuting really enjoy the hardships they have to put up with on the New Haven railroad because it appeases their sense of guilt. They’d really like to ride in boxcars if they could.”
“Guilt about what?” said McGland, stranded in the middle of the room with the knife in his hand and his story dangling unfinished.
“About leaving their wives home with a pack of kids and a sinkful of dirty dishes while they sit in air-conditioned offices and take clients out to three-hour lunches on expense accounts. Late trains and sitting in the broiling sun or freezing coaches with bedbugs in the seats gives them back the sense of being men again. Sort of the last pioneers?”
McGland nodded, absorbing this with a kind of rooful boredom. Then he looked down at the knife he was still clutching. “Well, there I was . . .”
“Gowan.” The jessie took a swallow of his coffee, frowning. McGland was not sintillating on the subject of commuters. He must try another. He put him on with something related but different. “Gowan, do you find the home the American commuter—or subway rider for that matter—rides back to any different from the British? Let’s talk about the home and what’s happening to it.”
“I’m not interested in the home,” McGland said, closing and pocketing the knife as he sat down again. That kind of naughty-boy smile came to his lips. “I consider the home an invasion of privacy.”
McGland showed off in this fashion for a good 1/2 hr. or more. But as he expanded under everyone’s laughter, especially I suppose Geneva’s, I began to notice a subtle change in Mopworth’s attitude. I think that after so much of the star hogging the limelight it began to get to him. Of course I am only speculating, but there was a sudden shift in the kind of questions he asked. Those up to now had been of a kind that gave an intelligent fellow a chance to be witty. Now he seemed to feed him questions so hairy they could only elicit hairy answers. Like “Gowan, what’s your opinion of the American woman?” or “Would you say that as a civilization we are getting soft?” I heard McGland murmur “Jesus” at the last one as he sank back in his chair and returned the jessie’s look. But why would masculine jealousy over a woman enter into it if he was a jessie, as McGland gave me to believe? I didn’t know. Maybe professional jealousy was at work here. Maybe the need to take McGland down a peg had suddenly become more important than an evening’s harvest of quotable stuff for the book. McGland was a sight to behold as, crossing his legs and puffing at a cheroot with his eye on the ceiling, he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and tried to maintain the pose of a wit and deep thinker after Mopworth’s hack-kneed question were we getting soft as a civilization. It hung in the air like a Damoclean sword as we watched and waited. He now looked like the man in the ad reading, “Are you sick of batteries that don’t last?” Mrs. Punck’s voice was the next one heard.
“People who have everything lack something,” she said.
McGland shot his shirtsleeves back and wiped his brow with his fist, moving it across it once from left to right. He shifted his gaze from the ceiling to Mrs. Punck, who he scrutinized with prolonged interest, as though to say he had partisipated in conversations in the best New York and London drawing rooms but he had never heard the beat of this. He watched again as though hypmatized while Mrs. Punck rose and went to the sideboard where the chocolate cake was, cut him a second slice and laid it on his plate while he downed the last of his highball.
