Reuben, Reuben, page 29
“Don’t do all that,” he said when he heard the tinkle of hangers in the clothes closet. “Your grandmother will be turning up here if she finds you gone.”
“I thought you found my family quaint.”
“They think I’m a viper.”
“You are. And it’s not part of your charm. Why haven’t you telephoned? You haven’t called me since that evening. I should think you would after—what happened.”
“I promised not to. It’s a point of honor.”
“I appreciate your chivalry toward my grandmother,” she said dryly.
McGland turned over in his mind a piece of moral bookkeeping. Geneva had, in a rush of uncontrollable feminine emotion, given herself to him because she’d thought he had been trying to kill himself. In the confusion, he had lost his own head too, and taken something under false pretenses. Now, however, he had tried to kill himself, so didn’t that square him?
She sat down, after swinging the armchair about so she would face him directly, if not he her. She seemed to sense the wheels of self-justification turning in his mind, and to have resolved to have none of it.
“‘What happened a couple of weeks ago was a mistake. But that’s not the point—I mean regrets and all about what’s past. The point is you might have known I’d be worried sick . . .”
“Worried?” he said in a dry voice.
“Yes. That you might try to kill yourself again. Nobody at the Springers’ knew where you were, or at least they wouldn’t say.”
“Forget about me. I’m a dirty rotten worthless no-good lowdown swine.”
“Men can be so conceited. Anyhow, I found out where you were through overhearing Mrs. Punck. So Grandma’s the unsuspecting go-between.” Geneva paused, and shifted a little in the chair so that she did not face him quite as squarely. She sat sideways, her knees together and both feet to the left of the chair. “Gowan, have you ever been interested in a home? Or is that too hairy to ask?”
This girl had changed, McGland thought to himself. That first evening, she had talked with the kind of slang-slinging put-on worldliness that had made him want to say aloud, “Come now, that’s not your style.” She had obviously been trying it on for size. The vocabulary, half real life, half soaked up from the authors of the hour, was applied like a kind of verbal cosmetics. Once, he remembered, she had put two fingers to each temple, like a fake medium in a trance. That was all changed now—now she was herself with that simple combination of bashfulness and hostility that old Spofford had remarked about her. That habit of giving you what-for while looking at the floor. But then, he had only thought, “Why can’t American girls be themselves? Why can’t people be themselves?”
An involuntary belch escaped McGland now, which made him quickly recover his Falstaff-at-Elsinore pose. He did this by half-hooding his eyes and gazing just past her at the wall behind her. “I consider the home an invasion of privacy,” he said.
“Yes, I heard you say that once before. It was witty the first time, and probably witty now too, though I’m not exactly in the mood for quips.”
“You’ve been making them yourself. The way you say them they rhyme with whips.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.” She raised her eyes to look at him. He was turned half in profile, and the corner of his mouth was slightly raised up in a faint grin, which suggested that air of crooked and lazy wickedness that is seen in the side views of crocodiles. She said without further preliminary:
“Gowan, I’m worried about a friend of mine. She thinks she’s in trouble and doesn’t know what to do. I thought you might know something to take. She’s done everything. Jumped off tables, gone bowling, horseback riding and whatnot.”
“And all of these methods have proved abortive?”
“Gowan, you certainly have got some sense of humor.” Her eyes now met his squarely, in a faint smile. A deep, clear hazel in color, the largest, probably, that he had ever seen, they seemed to dilate even further as he looked into them, like bulbs lighting up, deepening the crazy beauty of that face. “Later I may laugh, but not now.”
“’Can’t the bloke marry her?”
“He’s married already. Not very securely, but there is a wife in the background.”
“Maybe he’ll get a divorce. Meanwhile she should go to a doctor. Any one. Even the family doctor is often able and willing to make the right connection. The profession is more flexible and—common-sensical about those things than people generally think.”
She rose and walked to the desk in the corner, where there was a fresh bottle of whiskey. She screwed the cap off and looked around for something in which to pour a drink. “You’ll find a clean glass in the bathroom I think,” he said. “Wrapped in one of those sanitary wrappers.”
He could hear her tear the sterilized casing from it, pour whiskey in, and run some tap water. She walked back into the room and stood drinking. She rolled an eye at him as she gulped. Still holding the glass, she walked to the back, raised the Venetian blind and slid the window up. The sound of swimmers splashing in the pool behind the motel could be heard. She bent to look out, accentuating the full, strong sweep of her loins, those thighs like the pillars of a temple. He felt a spurt of rage at the thought of that primordial innocence on which evil is so often visited. He felt quite sincere in this, thinking them both alike victims of some eternal mischance. He experienced one vast, last plummet of yearning, the desire to reach out and take her yet. Resisting it was perhaps the single act of self-mastery he had ever performed in his life.
“It may be a false alarm,” he said.
“I keep telling her that.”
“Is she in school with you?”
“Yes. Due to go back in a few weeks.”
“Don’t they have those nonresident terms, where you stay out for a semester and do what you want? What do they call them?”
“Service quarters.”
“Well, it’s something to think about.”
“It certainly is.”
McGland doffed the icebag, as though he were yet tipping his hat in some ornate, chivalric homage to courageous womanhood, and got up. “It’ll all come out all right I know. You tell her that. Now look, I’ve got a wad of cash I wish you’d take and keep for me. Three or four hundred it must be.” He got his wallet from his coat and began to empty it into her bag. She turned from the window and said rather sharply, “Don’t be silly. I don’t want this.”
“Well, I do. And I’ll lose it or go through the whole wad in a day or two if I keep on at this rate. You mind it for me. If I hide it in a corner somewhere I’ll forget where it is. It’s some royalty money, and I don’t want to blow it on another bender. We’ll go have dinner. I’ll keep in touch.”
When she had gone, the bills safe in her bag, he stood a moment on the porch watching her drive off. As she drew out onto the Post Road, she turned to see if he were there, saw him and waved. He waved back. The other physical distractions having subsided, he could feel the pain in his jaw again, tolling his knell. He said softly to himself, “Christ, if my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.” The car was out of sight.
Inside, with the door shut and the blinds drawn again, he reviewed once more his moral bookkeeping with this new entry in it, and closed that ledger for good. There was more reason for his departure now, not less. His remaining would serve Geneva more poorly than his going. That would be even truer if matters did not clear up for her. No father at all was better than a father drunken and broken. He would give the child a heritage, provided he were not around to soil it. Better a dead poet than a live dog.
That thought through, he walked the room a bit, reflecting one last time on his conclusion. He paused in his wanderings among the furniture to turn the television set on. He might wait for a sign. Like most unbelievers he was very superstitious, and often interpreted trivial coincidences as calls to act, or rather, waited for trivial coincidences to propel him on a predetermined course of action. He could wait for a sign.
Seated in the armchair he watched a Western, an episode in a family serial, a late movie. Midway that his head began to nod. He was startled from a doze by an advertisement. It was a dentifrice commercial of which the scene was a gay public waterside with a diving board, where, against a spoken liturgy of reassurance, only the young and beautiful, their smiles flashing like wielded knives, tumbled divinely through the summer air.
He got the orthopedic harness off the closet shelf and detached from it the rope part. He made a check of the door and the draperies to make sure they were fully shut. In the middle of the room was a chandelier, which he now appraised. Evidently this part of the motel had been built around an old inn of which they had preserved as many features as possible, and the stout chandelier was one. At least it looked stout. It was not lit; the only illumination in the room now came from the television set. He turned that off. The room was not quite in darkness; sufficient light seeped in around the door and through the draperies from the front porch for McGland to see what he was doing. He got the straightback chair from the desk and set it under the chandelier. He climbed up on it with the rope in his hand. He tied one end of the rope around the sturdy main trunk of the light fixture and knotted it tightly three times. He gave a few tugs to test it. It seemed solid enough.
As he knotted the bottom end of the rope into a noose, he found himself remembering the story of the amaranth flower. He was not thinking of the real life plant—of which he had often picked a variant called love-lies-bleeding—but the mythical bloom of the poets, which according to legend never fades. That was because, in the belief of the ancients, the flower sprang from the seed of a hanged man. Did one really experience such a paroxysm in his final throes? It was a pretty story anyway.
He drew the loop snug and, almost curious, kicked the chair out from under him.
twenty-three
“YOU SAY AN OUNCE of prevention is worth a pound of what?”
The mirth had gone out of these routines for Spofford. But his sarcasm as such had become more open now, like a lanced wound, and there was no teasing in it, not even of Mrs. Punck herself—only a dense, diffuse resentment of everything and everybody. Things had backfired in a way and to an extent that he had hardly envisioned and certainly not deserved.
“What did you say it’s worth a pound of? I didn’t quite catch that.”
Mrs. Punck did not raise her eyes from what she was crocheting, in a parlor chair past which Spofford paced. “Never mind that,” she replied. “I know you’ve been mocking me. I’m on to that. I’m not going to repeat it.”
“Don’t you think we have enough doilies for this house?”
“This one isn’t for this house.”
Spofford stood with his back to Mrs. Punck before a framed photograph on the parlor wall at which he had once often gazed, but not in some time recently. It was a picture of his Uncle Emanuel’s football team, one of the first seriously organized outfits of that kind in this part of the country. It was the 1881 squad of a state agricultural college to which he had gone—the only member of his family who had been educated, up till Geneva. The figures, somewhat ferociously lined up in their formal positions, were yellow and faded now, but he could make out his Uncle Emanuel, grimacing as he had done in real life when Spofford was a boy, his dense shock of black hair as Spofford remembered it too. He resembled Spofford’s father. Though temperamentally quite different—Emanuel had been run over by a train when he was fifty—the two shared the Spofford damn-the-torpedoes attitude. Here he was savagely exemplifying the role of quarterback as it was then understood, in a getup that had not been any longer in serious use since practically the date of the picture.
He wore a uniform to the sides of the pants of which were sewn leather handles, by means of which his teammates had picked him up and hurled him bodily over the scrimmage line to the other side, often for gains of several yards. Those were the days before there were any rules. People had been regularly killed in football games until, apparently, Teddy Roosevelt had got mad and threatened to put a stop to the whole thing unless some control was exercised by means of rules imposed on the sport from within. Rules were what had been sorely needed; there was no doubt about that. Yet in the images inherent in that picture—the fierce bearded athletes, his uncle hurtling forever through space into enemy territory—resided, for Spofford, the principle of a lost hardihood. Something had gone out of people, that was certain. So why, if that were his mood, did he take it out on Mrs. Punck, who typified in her vestigial way some of the principles mourned? Because his emotions were scrambled, that’s why, and his thoughts in a state of continual scrimmage themselves, and he could not control them. He glared at her hostilely. He thought of his far, forlorn bond with the commuters, tenuous at best, now broken forever.
Mare came in and sat down, going quietly toward a chair like someone in charge of a meeting about to start and that had been waiting for her. Spofford began to leave the room but she detained him by putting out a foot over which he would have tripped had he continued his attempted exit.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” she said, opening what was clearly to be another grim family conference.
“Oh, let’s not open that can of peas again. I’ll go talk to McGland. I’m going to talk to that guy. I tried to reach him a pile of times. I’ll see you all later, but I mean don’t sort of all sit there dying at me. I know we’re in a pool of blood, but at least don’t make things any worse than they are.”
“Wait a minute. What are you going to tell him?”
“A thing or two. Why, that he’s got to do right by her, some way, somehow. We don’t know exactly how, but right. What else?”
“Up the social ladder means down the moral one,” said Mrs. Punck with unabating acumen. “I’ve always said it.” She spoke without interrupting her crocheting; indeed, it had speeded up. “It’s this culture. Meet the right people and you’re bound to do the wrong things. I’ve always said it.”
“So don’t say it no more,” Spofford retorted. He wondered to himself how Rappaport stood it. But he knew perfectly well how Rappaport stood it. A kind, affectionate wink at Spofford, in the course of Mrs. Punck’s cozy philosophizing, said it clearly enough: we take people as they are, with charity and if necessary amused affection; we ride the punches; we enjoy what we have in the best and most human way we should. The knowledge that Rappaport was getting the good out of everything along those lines in the sunset of his life irritated the hell out of Spofford—an irritation with himself. Had he let something slip through his fingers? His vexation was not lessened by the sight of the chairman of the meeting walking and yelling around the room now—a Crazy Woman. “We should of stuck to what we decided first! No chickens to commuters. But none!”
“Oh, let’s not have the Ride of the Valkyries this time, shall we, darling? Let’s not stand there shrieking like Brünnhilde. I mean McGland’s marriage doesn’t mean anything. He as much as told me he was getting a divorce. I didn’t realize what he meant at the time because I didn’t know he was married, but looking back on it now I realize that’s what he meant. So for all intents and purposes we can consider him a single man. A little old for Geneva, in his thirties, but single. The only question is, where do we go from there? Let’s decide on a course of action. Geneva must like him or she wouldn’t have had that much to do with him.”
“Well, I don’t,” Mare said, suddenly stopping behind a chair and gripping its top. “And I don’t want any part of him.”
Mrs. Punck stopped her crocheting to look at her, and Spofford came a step back into the room from the doorway where he had been hovering with his hat in his hand. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Just that. I won’t have my daughter marrying somebody who’d get her in trouble.”
Spofford spun away, clapping a hand to his head. “Oh, my God!” he said. “Are we going crackers on top of it here, so we can’t think straight about—I mean is this hysteria, or what? He’s responsible.”
“No he ain’t responsible, is just what I’m trying to say. A girl deserves better than a man who’d get her into trouble.”
“Oh, my God! What sort of Alice in Wonderland logic is this?” Spofford turned to appeal to Mrs. Punck, who only answered, crocheting again, “My daughter can make fine points.” As though an unsuspected subtlety had been found lurking in a family thought to be elementary.
“A man who’d get a girl in the family way ain’t husband material,” Mare went on, “and I don’t want him for no son-in-law.”
Mrs. Punck’s needle flew while Spofford now began to nod to himself, as though trying to pump from his inner self the understanding necessary for the grasp of these nuances. “What about the child then?” he asked.
“I’ll have it,” said Mare, lighting a cigarette.
He nodded again, or yet, in a finality of befuddlement, of sheer bottomless uncomprehension of women and their ways, hoping that by pretending to understand it he would understand it. Mrs. Punck, hooking up a strand of thread with her pinkie, understood. But then she had probably had a glass of sherry. She seemed uncommonly flushed.
“We’ll go away in the winter and live in Florida, for my health we will say first, or for a much-needed vacation. Geneva can take her off-campus semester—they all have to have one of those learning-through-living semesters. While we’re there, I’ll have the child, which we’ll all then come back with. I’m not too old.”
“That will be the story we’ll give out,” Spofford told Mrs. Punck, taking hold. “Next point, the matter of who’ll take care of the chicken farm while they’re away.”
“You and Ma,” Mare said. “George will be here some of the time, but for some of it he’ll be in Florida with me. When he is, you two’ll hold the fort.”
“Won’t people talk about that?” Spofford said, trying to wink at Mrs. Punck. She refused to have her attention distracted, however. “Two unmarried people under the same roof alone?”
“I may be married by that time,” Mrs. Punck said, without raising her head. “And out of the house. So you’ll be under the roof alone. And while you are, you might fix it. It leaks like a sieve.”
