Reuben, Reuben, page 16
“Freshen that for you?” I said taking his glass. “I didn’t know we were going to entertain no angels or I’d gotten some decent bourbon. This is just everyday stuff.”
“It’s the only time I drink.”
We got on other aspects of this culture including why young girls take up horseback in such quantity, ever try to figure that one out? Someone give the psychological explanation, that they subconsciously admire their father through the stallion principle. So I says no, I think they are riding their mother, who was a nag, but I was a voice crying in the wilderness.
The jessie frowned at what he had wrote in his notebook, which seemed to be what Mrs. Punck said last, in a version he would probably never know whether he got right. He held his knees very tight together and he sat very erect in his chair. “How do you find journalistic standards here? Mary McCarthy said that writing about mass culture for a mass audience is the mirror on the whorehouse ceiling. What do you think of that?”
“I think that’s quite a reflection,” McGland says.
“Things are looking up anyways,” I says, “since the face on the barroom floor.”
But at last there was enough culture for one night and the guests got up to leave. At the door McGland said to Geneva, “I hope I’ll see you before I go. Look, my hostess is giving a sort of do Saturday night. Why don’t you come?”
“That’s sweet of you, but if you’re a house guest . . .”
“It’s me the party’s for. She’s asked if there was anybody in particular I’d like to have. And there’ll be so many people there nobody’ll know the difference anyway. I’ve already asked five others.” McGland laughed at this, deploring hisself as one deplores faults you’re still trying to keep some tolerance and sense of perspective about. Charm plus irresponsibility won the day as ever.
“Well all right. Where are you staying by the way? I thought you were both at the motel.”
“No, just Mopworth. I’m staying with the Springers.”
Geneva flushed a deep red and dropped her eyes. “Oh. Well in that . . .” She clasped her hands behind her back like a child embarrassed at a social function, or stuck in the middle of a recitation. “I mean I’ll have to see. I’m not quite sure about the date.”
“I’ll give you a ring.”
When I had seen the callers out I turned from the shut door to see Mare standing alone in the parlor. George had run upstairs, Geneva into the kitchen to help Mrs. Punck with the cleaning up. The clock behind Mare said twenty minutes after two. She was watching me with an air of stem thought.
“Well! Wasn’t that nice?” I says queasily. “Two English gentlemen, well one of them’s Scotch, that I brought home for her to meet the first shot out of the box when she gets home! Hah?”
“I see your little game,” she said, ignoring the testimonial to my own prowess as a social bushwhacker. “I see now what you had up your sleeve all along.”
“What?”
“You want to get her back up there with the quality. For another chance.”
“I’m glad to see you’re getting around to looking at things my way,” I says, and I was—glad that what had all along been bucked in theory was freely accepted now that it had begun to pay off in actual fact. It was a sweeter moment for Mare than for me, even, the knowledge that her snubbed daughter would return to the wrong doers in triumph on the arm of their guest of honor. “I’d like to see their faces,” I said, reading her thoughts.
“Well you won’t,” she said, reading mine. “In case you’ve got any notions of being there in the garden passing out or dervs or what not. This one you’ll keep out of sight. You’ve done your bit. You’ve paved the way for her, if that really was your bounden aim. Now you’ll keep out of sight, mister man.”
“Oh all right,” I said, pleased enough to be justified at last in my own home again. It was reward enough. I turned to the hum of voices in the kitchen. “What if she won’t go?”
“Leave that part of it to me.”
By the time Geneva joined us in the parlor she had learned from Mrs. Punck what she hadn’t earlier in the evening, about her grandfather’s summer’s didoes. She seemed to admire the aparent ease with which I moved in these new circles, but doubted that she could carry the day herself at the Springers. She didn’t want no return match. She would not go.
Here Mare stepped in. Planting herself squarely in front of the seated girl, she laid down the law to her like I never heard the law laid down to anybody in that house before. The contest of wills was not a long one. The same timidity that had made Geneva lose heart at the prospect of going to the party caused her to crumble under the mother’s determination that she damn well was going there. She was going to rub it in, but that wasn’t all. There was a more positive, more constructive side. “You’ll meet lots of nice boys there,” Mare said to the girl, who sat with her great eyes lowered and wearing the shy and hostile look. “And I don’t mean Tad Springer, nor Mr. McGland either for that matter. Just boys. Lots of them. Learn to mix more!”
“Oh well, I guess I have nothing to lose,” Geneva said. The rebellion in her nature made her try to state as her own the decision into which she had been cowed. She rolled her eyes up. “And maybe Grandpa’ll be there?”
“He will not.”
“Mother, you act as though I should be ashamed of all of you.”
Here Mare became actually menacing as she made a bludgeon of the But. She stood there tapping it in her palm like a billy.
“Now look here. We’re scraping good money together to send you to college, penny by penny and dollar by dollar, and we aim to get our money’s worth. What do you think we’re educating you for if not that you should wind up above us? What good have all our sacrifices been if you can’t manage to look down on us at least a little? Yes—feel ashamed of us!”
“Mother, there are times when you’re positively schizoid.”
Mare gave the modest grunt, grateful for the compliment and for her flesh and blood talking over her head, but at the same time with her old implication that flattery would get you nowheres. She was still laying down the law when I went upstairs to bed. The last thing I heard, listening on the landing with my toothbrush in my hand, was Mrs. Punck saying, “And there’ll be Mr. Gland to make you feel to home, dear. You tell me he’s suppose to be such a goat, but I don’t know why you say that. He couldn’t have been nicer to you.”
fourteen
THE SEX LIFE AIN’T isolated any more than it is constant, but is so intimately bound and tangled up with other forces vying for the upper hand in the network of human emotions that elements remote from it may suddenly bring its sluggish stream to life, or reverse its course entirely, turning negative currents into positive, making a millrace of obstacles and grist of hostility. During the week in which Geneva’s approaching party date promised the climax to a summer already like none we’d ever had, an overstimulated Spofford drove Mrs. Punck to the Y.M.C.A. for her Golden Age Club meeting and found hisself kidding her in a totally unaccustomed manner.
“How would you like a mink coat?” I suppose the relief at being out of the doghouse and vindicated in my summer’s shenanigans snapped the windows of my spirit open, and flung my shutters wide.
“Goodness,” Mrs. Punck says straightening her bonnet. It was a straw rig with a single flower that swayed on its wire stem as we bounced over the road to town, like the geranium in the box behind the car. In her lap lay her coat, pocketbook and minutes of the last meeting, for she had been voted secretary-treasurer of the outfit. “How would I ever get one of those?”
“How do women usually get them?” I repeated a off-color story I had heard at one of the better class parties I’d been to, to illustrate the point. “There, that draw a picture for you, darling?”
“What will people say?” said Mrs. Punck with a giggle.
“We can find out.”
“Well I won’t sleep with you,” said Mrs. Punck who prided herself on her modernity where using expressions like that was concerned, and her ability to go along with japes and didoes that required broad-mindedness.
“Well then I’ll send you one if you don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“And jewelry and flowers and what not,” I improvised in a sudden turn of fancy. “So you’ll be compromised in the eyes of the world. I’ll pay your rent, I’ll be a sugar daddy in every manner possible. There’s only one way you can avoid all that.”
“How?”
“By living in sin.”
“I get it now. You’re switching it around to blackmail. You mean you’ll threaten to give my life the appearance of evil if I don’t commit it. In other words,” Mrs. Punck went on, revolving the notion in her own wooly noddle, “to save my reputation I have to take leave of my virtue.” This was pretty spry on the uptake for someone as rich in limitations as Mrs. Punck, and I made my appreciation known by answering smartly, “You got it, baby.”
“What if I don’t? What else will you do?” she says, wriggling with pleasure.
“I’ll leave everything to you in my will. You see how that would disgrace you for the rest of your life the minute it got out? you’d have to leave Woodsmoke. There’d be no place to hide from wagging tongues. So if you want to hold your head up, start hanging it in shame. I’ll give you a week to think it over. That’s my last offer.”
“You really are a devil, aren’t you?” Mrs. Punck laughed, shaking her head as she gathered up her junk to get out, for we had reached the Y. “Won’t you come to the meeting, Frank?”
“I’ve got something to tend to. If I’m not here when the orgy’s out, meet me in there,” I said, pointing across the street to the public libary.
“Its Reverend Biddle speaking on Self-Reliance.”
“God help you one and all.”
I hoped to find Ella Shook the libarian on duty alone when I arrived, as I was eager to maneuver her into a discussion of McGland if I could, and get her point of view. I happened to know that was what she dreaded most, being engaged in conversation with me alone. My widening intellectual horizons and ramifying interests made me “a pest and nuisance” she had said, according to reports that had reached me, but that was easy to see through. It was that my reading put her on her metal.
Luck was with me this time. Not only was her assistant still out to lunch and the time a good hour off when the highschool student who acted as busboy with the returned books was due; there wasn’t a soul using the libary. Ella stepped quickly behind her desk when she seen me enter, removing my tweed cap and walking with a brisk stride except for a slight limp in one knee. “Afternoon, Ella.”
“Hello, Frank.”
She drew up a chair and bent her head to her clerical tasks. I sauntered over to the magazine rack to look for a recent number of a literary review that McGland told me he had a group in. I found it and sat down at a reading table from where I could see Ella every time I looked up from the page and over my specs. I read the group through and then studied one the poems that particularly took my fancy. It was very quiet in the room except for when Ella cleared her throat, or I scraped my chair or turned a page. A fly buzzed against a window pane. I read for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I glanced up and found Ella watching me. I smiled and said:
“I see Gowan McGland has this new group in here. I wanted to catch it.”
“Oh yes,” said Ella. She continued her work, humming to herself.
“Have you read it?”
“No I haven’t.”
“He told me about it.” I hooked an arm over the back of my chair and crossed my legs into the aisle. “The other day.”
Ella rose and carried a book to a back shelf, walking up the aisle so that I had to move my feet out of the way. She looked down at them at first, and glanced at the magazine as she went by. I turned to watch her put the book on the shelf. She stayed there with her back to me, running a finger across other titles there at a length that didn’t seem entirely convincing. She turned her head slightly to look back at me over her shoulder. Seeing me watching her again she said, “You know him?”
“Gowan? Yeh, he’s in town for a while. Quite an amusing guy, and a hell of a swell egg. Like me to bring him in sometime?”
“Oh I think not. We don’t generally . . . I know he’s all the rage right now—”
“I like this group.” I picked up the magazine from the table. “Especially this one called River. Just let me read a few lines.”
“I’m really quite—”
“Goes:
How deep your warming stream my storkleg knows
Who measures true, a ruler in your bed,
Wherein the halfmoon rolls, traditional and wan,
Who recks the hospitable ease and ooze of love . . .”
“Stop, please!” said Ella, who had turned around and was looking at my legs, which were crossed even farther into the aisle than they were before. She had her back to the shelfs, as to a wall.
“Why?” I says. “We’re alone.”
“I know but someone may come in.”
I set the poem down and removed my glasses. “Then I guess you understand what the poem’s all about.”
“Of course.”
“What?”
“Wildlife.”
“You’re not kiddin’!”
She stared at my feet. She seemed to be weighing the alternatives of either leaping over them, to get back to the safety of her desk, or go out by the back door, around through a Chinese restaurant which ajoins the libary building, and come in again by the front. I put on my specs again to consult a line. “See, it’s one leg, not two. That makes his symbolism clear,” I says. “The ruler in the bed has this other meaning, of not only something to measure with, but who’s boss. King you might say. Them are all clearly phallic implications.” I pulled back my feet when she looked like she really was going to jump over them, and she scuttled on past me back to her desk. “How do you know?” she said, running.
“We realize those things today. We know more than we did a hundred years ago.”
She got behind her desk as though back into a stockade while I continued keeping the conversational ball rolling with my analysis of the poem. “Of course the halfmoon makes it clear that by bed he means not the riverbed but—”
“Get out of my libary,” she said, “you dirty old man.”
“What for?”
“Go on get out.”
“Now look.” I rose and stood leaning against the table with my arms folded. “Can I help it if he brings a whole Scotch village to life with double meaning? Can I?”
“Double meaning. Huh! That’s a good one.”
“And if your afraid of a little literary criticism, then all I can say is you belong in Mrs. Hooton’s dry goods store, not here.”
She stamped her foot and squealed, “You beast!”
“Listen, I’m a taxpaying citizen of this town, and I guess I can drop in here on a hot day if I want and discover the beauties of poetry. So don’t you beast me or I’ll report you to the town council for not being able to appreciate nothing since Longfellow.” Here there was a pause, and I picked up the magazine again to make another point. “Take like this passage here:
The ewe alone knows the ramifications of sex—”
“Out!”
At the height of this discussion the front door bust open and somebody did come in. It was Mrs. Punck, running at a trot and puffing like a steam engine.
“Reverend Biddle has been taken to the hospital with mononucleosis!” she said. “I’ve got forty-five people sitting there and no one to talk to them. Ella, could you?”
“Me? Oh no,” she said, shrinking away again. “I couldn’t. No public speaking for me.”
“Then read them something. Anything. Just grab a book and come.”
“No. I simply cannot go in front of an audience, Eunice.” She looked so terrified at the mere thought that Mrs. Punck knew it was no use. While she stood wringing her hands and Ella cringed against the wall, I walked past them both to a telephone on one end of Ella’s desk. I looked up a number in the book and dialed it.
“Who are you calling?” Mrs. Punck asked.
“McGland. I can have him down here in ten minutes if he’s home.”
But he wasn’t. The Springers maid had no idea where he was either. After hanging up I stood a moment in thought, taking in the joint spectacle the two women made. “I’ll do it,” I said.
“You mean speak?”
“Well, read a few of his poems and comment on them, like he does. It won’t be no formal speech but it’ll be better than leaving the poor old things sitting there in the lobby playing checkers. Come on, they’ve been waiting long enough.”
I picked up the magazine and went out. Mrs. Punck, looking if anything more frantic than when she come in, trotted in my wake.
“My fellow Americans,” I began, “this is unexpected, and only to fill in. All I claim to be is better than nothing. I see many familiar faces and a few snickers that seem to doubt even that, but anyhow. The question is what to talk about, and since I stand before you with no preparation, I’m just as eager as you to find out what I’m going to say. I have to take it potluck too. Well all joking aside, it seems to me that the most logical thing to talk about would be what I happened to be thinking about when the first notice of your predicament come to me about five minutes ago, over there in the libary. When Mrs. Punck found me there I was deep in poetry. The latest group by a Scotch poet who happens to be stopping here at the moment in our fair city. I tried to reach him before throwing myself into the breech, but no go. So the fact is I’m substituting for two people, a minister and a poet. Pretty good for one afternoon.”
There was a laugh, which gave me a moment to look my audience over. I recognized many familiar faces, of course, most of the men and women being old timers like myself, and even one or two cronies. I spotted Charlie Keeley, a retired truck gardener I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. I use to play checkers with him in front of the firehouse. One of the firemen too, retired Lou Haley. They were sitting side by side, leaning forward with an ear cupped. Mrs. Punck was less nervous, and smiling.
