Reuben, Reuben, page 30
Mare brought her two fists down on the back of the chair and became a Crazy Woman again. “Not now, Ma!” she said. “We can’t go into that now. Later maybe, when this other has all cleared up. But not now.”
Spofford found himself galloping toward town, with no clear idea why he was going there—except that he should do some thinking before talking to McGland. It would have been wrong to say he was depressed. His mind hummed. There was no doubt that calamity had a way of keying you up. It seemed always out of chaos that new order was brought. Chaos was not just something over which the spirit of God had once creatively brooded, and then no more. Oh, no. Chaos was here to stay, for us to brood over each time anew, with, and possibly even for, God; to bring to our lives and to life in general ever fresh forms out of that which was Without Form and Void. The very notion of their family being plowed over by a poet was as exhilarating as the circumstances themselves were unsettling. It was crazymaking. In a twinkling they had all been transformed into different people, all their molecules rearranged, like But said. Everything was relative. He should subscribe. He should even join the National Semantics Association. As recently as last spring he had been a man stagnating on the brink of senility. Now he was on fire. McGland had only one fault—he was worthless. How many pillars of society free of that particular flaw could hold a candle to him on other counts?
Once the charge sent through him by this course of thought had spent itself, however, the immediate facts again settled in the pit of his stomach. He would have to face McGland.
Finding a library book on the seat beside him, which he had meant to return the day before but neglected to, he decided to stop in and take it back now. Ella Shook got behind the desk when she saw him come in.
“Morning, Ella. Saw you at the Freud movie the other night. Like it?”
“Yes. Yes, I enjoyed it. It was very instructive.”
“I thought the wedding scene, where Freud got married, was especially interesting. You probably noticed that Old World custom he observed, where the groom steps on a wineglass and smashes it as part of the ceremony.”
“Yes, I remember that. It’s an old folk custom.”
“Course it’s a defloration symbol.”
“Out.”
“Freud himself probably didn’t realize the significance of it at the time. That was well before he—”
“Out I say.”
“Fine, and then I’ll go straight to the Board of Trustees and tell them intellectual discussions ain’t allowed in the libary no more.”
“You do that.” She sighed and dropped her hands on the desk. “Look, Frank Spofford. We’re all glad when people get a new lease on life and broaden their horizons with art and literature, but you’ve become an absolute pest. You’re driving everybody crazy ail over town, private citizens and public officials alike, while you live a little.”
“I aim to do all of that I can before I shovel off this mortal coil.”
“You do that, but not in here. Now I have the right to bar any person from this building whom I consider a public nuisance, and I hereby declare you a public nuisance. Effective this morning, you will be allowed in here to return books, draw new ones, and get out. Nothing more. You are to keep your mouth shut and your nose out of the better magazines. Is that quite clear? I should think you’d be a little less rambunctious this morning, considering your poet friend is dead.”
“What!”
“Hanged himself in the motel. It just came over the radio this morning.”
That was how Spofford learned about it. When Geneva did, she had a miscarriage. Nor was that all—for the death of a poet was not so ill a wind as to blow no more good than that. When Dr. Rappaport was telephoned he came running, and took care of matters with such a blend of skill, solicitude and discretion that no one among the Spoffords could now welcome him into the family with anything but open arms. He was a member of it well before he and Mrs. Punck were formally married—Spofford himself found him a member of it when he hurried into the house, half an hour later. He remained to become an ever more deeply rooted member of it in the course of the family conferences that followed the immediate resolution of that crisis, his opinion widely sought after and respected. Because the Spoffords were far from out of the McGland legend. Indeed, they had only begun to be stuck with it, judging from the descent on the farmhouse of journalists who had got wind of something they could hardly have been expected not to pursue. Mare took over now, and when she spoke they knew it was with the voice of authority.
“My girl’s been plucked from the burning—pulled back from the fire just in time, and I aim to keep it that way,” she said. “Pa done us no good, Ma done us no good. I’ll handle it from here on in, and the rest of you will keep in the background. I want Geneva’s name kept absolutely and positively out of this thing.”
“I’d keep it out,” said Spofford, who was itching to talk to the reporters.
“They got wind he had some connection with a woman member of this family,” she went on, ignoring him. “That much is clear from the reporters. I can tell they know, even the mealymouthed ones. They’re sniffing around and they’ll leave no store unturned. No use in our denying it. There was a woman—so a woman they’ll get. In other words, everything will proceed according to the plan we agreed on before the other blew over. That it was me he was mixed up with.”
“Oh, my God.”
Mare quietly brushed down some crumbs from the front of her dress, for they were all sitting around the big kitchen table having tea and some Banbury tarts Mrs. Punck had made. Mrs. Punck drank her tea with rather an air, as befitted a family with a literary side, not to mention a doctor about to come into it—and ignoring for the moment that one of them had a breaking and entering rap hanging over him.
“What you say sounds a little wild, Mary, but probably just wild enough to make sense in the circumstances,” Dr. Rappaport said. They knew he wasn’t through from the way he frowned into his cup with his gentle, burning eyes. He seemed to be admiring the old family china even as he put his mind to the more immediate problem. “Just what is it you object to about Emil?” Mrs. Punck had once asked Spofford, and he had answered, “If he just wouldn’t always look like Bernard Berenson appreciating something. There’s a famous picture of Berenson standing in an art gallery contemplating stuff. It’s a posed picture, so he knows he’s supposed to just stand there and appreciate away, while we appreciate how he does it. Rappaport has got something of that in him. Notice how he’s always admiring something around here? He admires everything we’ve got—the horsehair sofa, those old andirons, that Currier and Ives print. Your Banbury tarts.” “And me,” Mrs. Punck had said, and added, “And you too. He thinks you’re a scream.”
“McGland’s was a wild talent. He lived a wild life, had a wild death, and now I suppose keeping astride this rather wild tiger we’ve gotten aboard calls for wild measures. Mary, just who have been after you?”
“Well, besides the newspaper reporters, there’s Life Magazine going to do a spread of him, and I’m also granting Time a interview. They don’t want to overlook anyone whose beau he might have been, the way it looks. So instead of simmering down around here it looks as though they’ve only just begun to boil. And I repeat again, with me watching the pot this time. That a car outside?”
Mare herself rose and walked to the window to see what had drawn up in the driveway. There was a spring in her step familiar to Spofford as that of someone embarking on a new life. He had seen it in Mrs. Punck. Mare turned around after a glance outside.
“Reporter?” Mrs. Punck asked.
“No. It’s that young Englishman who’s writing a book about him. Who visited us that night. The one with the eyes like chocolate carmels. You go see if you can help George in the barn, Pa. I’ll go upstairs and change into something decent. Skedaddle, all. There’s a heap to do.”
“To do,” said Mrs. Punck, pushing back her chair with a will.
MOPWORTH
twenty-four
FOR AS FAR BACK AS he could remember, Alvin Mopworth had liked girls. He had liked them so much, from such an early age, that he soon earned for himself the expectedly derisive nicknames from more normal boys in the English schools among which he was successively shunted in the effort to cure him of his weakness. The taunts were whispered in the classroom and shouted at him from street corners where he could be seen passing in the company of some pretty little classmate, carrying her books. It all began in London.
His concerned mother, a designer for a fashionable milliner in the West End, sent him to a private school in Switzerland, in hopes of correcting his obsession in fresh surroundings and a healthy outdoor environment, but it did no good. He continued to seek out the company of little girls, again carrying their books when he was not strapping on their skis for them or buckling them into their iceskates. “He was always rather an odd boy,” said a motherly marquise who witnessed his removal from that school to still another, this time in Somerset.
There, one day, his mother took him out on a picnic, hoping to air her anxieties to him in a heart-to-heart talk.
“Why aren’t you romping about with the rest of the boys?” she asked.
“I’d rather the other,” he said.
His mother shut her eyes, as though flinching under strains of discordant music. “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” she said. “Pray God England hasn’t another war.”
“If she does I shall try for the Air Force.”
“To impress the girls with your uniform and brass buttons, no doubt.”
“I say, this ground’s a bit damp here, Mother. Why must we eat sandwiches in a field?”
“Because that’s what a picnic is,” his mother explained, closing her eyes again. “Eating sandwiches in a field.”
Why must we eat sandwiches in a field? Smiling a little to himself, Mopworth remembered the incident now as he crossed the Spoffords’ walk. Marching toward the house (with that brisk, erect stride he had indeed learned in a hitch in the R.A.F.), he had caught, between the barns and chickenhouses, a glimpse of pastureland behind the farm, and that had no doubt stirred the recollection. Perhaps the white paddock fence beyond it had something to do with it too, because they’d had to climb one to find a place on which to spread their picnic lunch. Hadn’t a bull hovered threateningly in the background, like a raincloud? And hadn’t he made a joke about the rather modish toreador slacks Mum had had on? They’d laughed heartily together at that, except for Mum.
It was at Somerset that he had in any case for the first time given Mum some reassurance. Instead of whacking about with girls that year he had joined the Dramatics Club and won a leading role in the class production of As You Like It, acquitting himself with such credit as Rosalind that Mum had gone both nights in a delirium of pride, pleased by this sign that he was participating in school activities and being one of the gang. This was in 1950. His mother, then long widowed, had suddenly married again, a retired manufacturer with whom she now lived in Mayfair. They and Mopworth rarely corresponded any more.
The bent for acting steered him into radio and television after his graduation from college. It was a good livelihood, but after the first excitement it settled down into merely that. He cast about for something more “emotionally rewarding,” while sensing vaguely that only something like writing or painting would genuinely suffice to that end. He wrote some light verse, selling a few pieces here and there. Nothing much. Meanwhile the occupational environment supplied unending rounds of pretty girls, whom he pursued on a scale rendering him, once again, suspect in the eyes of his contemporaries—this time on intellectual grounds.
We know today that everything is the opposite of what it seems. Thus lavish tipping conceals a niggardly nature, filial devotion the wish to do one’s parents in, and sexual athleticism a basic doubt of one’s masculinity. The shadow of overcompensation fell early across Mopworth’s youth, because of this great jolly keen yen for girls, but the really grave doubt of his sexual adequacy had its beginnings at a party in Chelsea where he found himself messing about with two women at once—or so nearly so as made no difference in the reckoning. It was the party where McGland had wound up the bender touched off by the discovery that he was to be dropped from the cast of the Tuttles. It all happened after McGland had left with the dark baggage he had picked up there. Much to Mopworth’s relief, for relations between them had been strained in those first days, not relaxed as they were to become later when Mopworth was no longer acting and McGland was riding high as a literary lion.
Mopworth had been in a canoodle with a tall brunette in a red dress, who was wearing a perfume so heady that when he went out onto the terrace for a breath of air later he carried her spoor with him. Because the girl with whom he started a canoodle out there drew back at one point and, sniffing, asked, “What’s that you’re wearing? Bellodgia?” Mopworth had had to admit that he didn’t know; that the fragrance adhering to him had been picked up in a previous canoodle, inside.
“Well, wear it in health,” the second girl said. “Because you’re not admitting—you’re bragging—and when a man does that it’s for a damn good reason.”
“What?”
“He’s got to prove something he isn’t.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I just want a spot of the old slap and tickle. No harm in that surely. Come on, give us a kiss.”
The girl’s name was Peggy Schotzinoff—there was no doubt about it—and she was a dancer in a ballet troupe. They were exponents, not of the classic ballet, but the more modern variety of which the dances, spastic, vital, often American-influenced, are concerned with the depiction of contemporary phenomena such as slum clearance or the installation of high tension wires through valleys in which people have hitherto lived in peace.
A gramophone had started up inside, and Mopworth said, “Then give us a dance.” After he had propelled her for half a chorus about the gravel floor of the terrace (enough for him to confirm privately the legend that ballet dancers are poor ballroom ones), Peggy Schotzinoff leaned back away from him a bit and said with a smile, “You’re very graceful,” adding suggestively to the onus under which Mopworth now already labored. He knew that she would blab about this. He shrugged and wagged his shoulders in an exaggerated, almost oafish, fashion, to indicate that her remark was not unqualifiedly true, or indicated at best a merely primitive zest for rhythm. He hadn’t really wanted to see this baggage again, or anyhow not much, but wishing to redeem himself he plowed ahead in the only manner open to him under the circumstances. “Are you free for tomorrow night? We can have dinner and then go up to my place for a spot of heavy breathing.”
“You do go at one.”
“Well then, later in the week.”
They did eventually dine, and afterward went to Mopworth’s flat for a brandy. There, after some strenuous importunities in shirtsleeves, he was forced back with an understanding laugh. “Don’t struggle so hard, Alvin.”
“It seems to me you’re the one who’s struggling.”
“No, I don’t mean that way. I mean don’t fight so hard to prove what you feel this need to. That you’re a man.”
“I don’t want to prove anything. I just want to go to bed with you.”
“You see?”
“You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”
Mopworth rang up the baggage of whose essence he had reeked in the first instance, when all this had gotten started, but by the time she could have dinner with him, which was a good month later, word had gotten around in this rather knowledgeable set that Mopworth was racing his motor, and why. In the cab after dinner, he seized her in a passionate embrace and began to devour her with kisses, gobbling her throat, her bare arms and shoulders hungrily. She wriggled free of his grasp after a moment and sat back in her corner to tidy herself.
“We all admire the way you’re fighting homosexuality, Alvin,” she said, drawing her lip down as she applied lipstick to it.
Mopworth nodded, looking out the window as he recovered his wind. “We’ll go up to my place and talk about it.”
Perception in these matters was, if anything, even further advanced in the United States, and, of course, most acute in that part of it to which his pursuit of McGland eventually took him. Thanks to some there who had known him in London, or had known of him through mutual friends, his reputation preceded him everywhere he went in the purlieus of literary New York and its environs—to be eventually watered by his own conduct. It was a vicious circle. It was to define and color his pursuit of Geneva Spofford. Before he could get to her, though, it appeared he must contend with the very formidable roadblock thrown in the way in the form of her mother, who received him when he called at the farm after McGland’s death. After a few preliminary words, he asked after Geneva.
“She don’t feel good,” Mrs. Spofford said, watching him pace.
“I know. Cut up after the news. It must have been a shock to her.”
“Why to her more than the rest of us?”
“Well, after all—” Flustered, Mopworth realized he had stumbled on a naturally sensitive point. “I mean we both saw him only the night before. It’s all so awful.”
“What’s all so awful?”
“Death and all that. So dashed absolute.”
“Were you all together?”
“Not actually,” Mopworth said, marking where his feet fell in the pattern of the rug he systematically traversed, as though its design were some sort of maze which if properly followed would bring him out to daylight. “We just happened to sort of converge, you see, at poor Gowan’s.”
“The motel?”
“Yes.” He made a vague gesture of belittlement of the fact, shrugging off what his very shrug caused to germinate the faster. Mrs. Spofford waited until his labyrinthine passages about the surface of the rug had him marching straight toward the chair in which she sat. She then said, as he swerved to avoid her:
