Reuben, Reuben, page 35
It was Geneva. “Get into the car,” she said. “Here’s your coat. I’ll go in and pay the bill. I’ll be right out.”
“But—”
“Do as I say,” she ordered through her teeth. She wheeled him about and gave him a start toward where the car was.
He climbed in, tossing his coat into the back seat. He waited for Geneva behind the wheel. She was no more than two minutes. “Can you drive?” He nodded, coughing. “Then hurry. Let’s get out of here. No, let me drive. You’re in no shape to.” She got out, came round the other side and got in behind the wheel as he shoved over.
She headed for the beach. After shutting off the engine, she took one look at him and said, “Give me your handkerchief.” She climbed out and walked to the shore. In the darkness he could see her stooping to dip the handkerchief in the water. She brought it back dripping, and, in the illumination from the dome light, wiped the grime from his face and tenderly dabbed a cut on his lip which was still trickling blood. “You—” she began. She did not finish, leaving unclear whether an epithet or an endearment had been intended. She completed her ministrations by suddenly dropping the handkerchief and taking his rumpled head in both her hands. She was sobbing.
Sympathetically, Mopworth reached into her blouse and drew forth a white breast. He kissed it reverently, putting his lips to its hard bud with a moan of joy. “How beautiful, how beautiful,” he said, babbling the word over and over.
“You poor, bumbling, blundering sap. What will ever happen to you?”
“Nothing if—What I mean is, something has, right now, if this can possibly mean as much to you as it does to me. Geneva, I need you. I feel as though I’ve been kicked by a mule into paradise. Don’t kick me out again.”
These were well-chosen words. She stroked his hair with an urgent, unaccustomed possessiveness. Mopworth knew it was not as simple as all this. The sudden turn in his fortune made him realize well enough the pivot on which Geneva’s own emotions revolved. More than he needed her, he clearly divined, did she need his need of her. He for his part no doubt needed her need of his need of—God, where would it all end! Now, at least, it was begun.
“Geneva, could it be you and me?”
“Oh, my God,” she sobbed tentatively.
They became formally engaged to be married toward the end of that winter. Nectar Schmidt got her announcement in the spring.
twenty-seven
“WHY DO PEOPLE EXPECT to be happily married when they are not individually happy? You go on so in America about marital contentment. Every magazine has an article with Nine Keys to it, or Seven Steps, as though the quest had any more sense to it, or any more hope of fulfillment, than the search for El Dorado. In no other country is this really juvenile ideal so naïvely held out—and with what failure! How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?”
So Gowan McGland had said in an interview in the New York Times and several other papers, as well as on a number of occasions from the lecture platform. Mopworth was now recording it once more in the manuscript of McGland in America.
The book was going poorly. Marital responsibilities and impediments were the least of the reasons. The women he interviewed remained stubbornly divided between the clams with secrets and chatterboxes wanting to get into the act. Mopworth now quite understood the nuisance regularly put up with by police trying to solve crimes, that of fake and crank confessions. He even had to pick his way with a skeptical eye among McGland’s own surviving statements about his exploits, though these, to do him justice, were never in the nature of braggadocio, but rather of comments, theories and obiter dicta concerning the opposite sex. (Mopworth had thought of entitling the work McGland on Women, but doubted it would get by the censors.) Nor was suspect garrulity confined to the Don Juan side of the legend. Harry Pycraft, that Post Road host, grew daily more glib in his claims of generosity toward penniless and early divined genius, which Mopworth knew very well to be false having stayed at the Dew Drop Inn when McGland did. He had overheard at least one brisk dun for the rent money.
Standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, Mopworth had a vision of the day when he would be interviewed by the press on the publication of his book. He had some mots all ready. “What I hate about writing is the paperwork.” And: “A writer is like the pencil he uses. He must be worn down to be kept sharp.” Suddenly he seized a magazine with a short story in it that he particularly admired and began beating it into insensibility against the edge of his desk. Tedium, funk and rage composed in equal parts the sum of his attitude toward what he was doing, taking the stage by turns. “Why did he go and kill himself?” He asked the question rhetorically, knowing too well the burden he must soon shoulder of undertaking to answer it seriously. No book on McGland with any pretense to respectability could duck it. It was the knowledge of his utter unfitness for that climactic task that made him pospone it by dawdling and puttering over the elements preliminary to it. Thus he would pop off here to check some fact, there to run down another clam (or talking machine), or bury himself for weeks at a time in the local library, reading up on the “contemporary literary scene” in the name of thoroughness! He was thoroughly bogged down—that was as far as thoroughness went. How could anybody cogently theorize about suicide anyway? Could McGland himself, were he to return to this earth for an hour, make the exact state of mind under which he had taken leave of it comprehensible to another man? He, Mopworth, could not now even clearly recall what had gone on inside his own head during his brief flurry as a sex maniac. He hadn’t the slightest idea what he had been thinking at the time. Not the slightest. It was all a blank.
Staring down at the sheet of paper in the typewriter over which he stood, hands in pockets again, he toyed with the idea of opening dramatically with Gowan’s end in the motel room, then switching back to his boyhood in Scotland and thence steadily forward to the tragedy again, in an attempt to explain it in terms of what lay between. Instead an idea for a couplet began to form in his mind:
The minute I find something’s done in flashback
I want to rush right out and demand my cashback.
He typed it straight off and sent it to the Saturday Review.
His English and American advances were both about run out, as well as what he’d socked away from those few lucrative years in London when he’d been in such great demand as a Silly Ass type on the telly, and kept dashing from studio to studio; and being now a father as well as a husband, he needed other sources of income while he finished the book. Turning out light verse brought in precious little, God knew, and Mopworth faced a decision: whether to go back to television acting. Which would make him a commuter, for he and Geneva had settled in Woodsmoke.
They lived in a rented house in Punch Bowl Hollow, and to get the couplet in the day’s post he trotted through a light snow between picture windows to Vineyard Road, where all the subdivision’s mailboxes stood in a long row. He slipped the letter into theirs, between the Beauseigneurs’ and the Wolmars’, clapped the lid shut and raised the flag.
As he started up the private road again he heard a loud backfire followed by an insistent honking, and, turning, saw Spofford leaning out of his flivver squeezing the bulb of the horn with a gauntleted hand. In place of his familiar duster he wore today a more rational topcoat, but he did have on the goggles, which he pushed up onto his forehead. “Hop in and ride along to New Haven,” he said. “I have to see my lawyer.”
“Jolly idea, but this snow . . .”
“Won’t amount to anything. I can smell real snow. This is just dandruff. So O.K., I’ll drive you home first to tell Geneva you’ll be gone for the afternoon. If I get through in time maybe we can get tickets to that new musical. Mrs. Punck won’t go. She has this thing about appearances.”
What tempted Mopworth was the interviewing he might get in on the way. The old man had more under his bonnet about McGland than anyone else around, at least about the crucial Connecticut days, but he doled it out the merest scrap at a time, to conserve his importance to the legend and also, Mopworth liked to think, to protract the hours of comradely drinking now apparently central to Spofford’s conception of the literary life. He talked just enough to make you come back for more—not that he wasn’t welcome on his own any time he wanted to visit his granddaughter and, now, great-grandson, Mike Mopworth.
Curiosity about Spofford, in fact, had grown until it sometimes eclipsed Mopworth’s interest in McGland. The man was a puzzle in as many ways as he was a pest. Why, for one thing, did he continue to call the woman Mrs. Punck long after she had become Mrs. Rappaport? Let alone imagine she would pop off to the theater with him under the circumstances. Perhaps merely the gesture of asking her sufficed to express the idea of casual living which had somehow gotten lodged in his head. How, for another thing, had he managed to beat the breaking and entering rap? After two continuances in the town court, the indictment had been quashed and the whole case suddenly and mysteriously dropped. What had happened? From vague hints dropped by Spofford it was to be suspected that he had managed it himself by some twist more devious than any lawyer had at his disposal. Blackmail even? That possibility was not to be ruled out. The man knew more about everybody in Woodsmoke than, often, their own intimates did. Mopworth was banking on his itch to brag as a means of worming the facts out of him at last. Maybe today would be the day.
They were soon sailing down the Merritt Parkway at thirty miles an hour (Spofford having refused to hear of their taking Mopworth’s Volkswagen) while Spofford went on about how his old lawyer had died and his son had moved to New Haven. Spofford had preferred leaving his business with the son to finding another attorney in Woodsmoke. “Mrs. Punck keeps after me to switch to hers, but I don’t like him,” he said.
“Why do you keep calling her Mrs. Punck?” Mopworth asked.
“For old times’ sake. We all like to think back on the days that are no more, when we were single. That’s married life.”
A rather fuzzy and elliptical answer at best, the analysis of which Mopworth presently abandoned. His most ticklish question was delayed to coincide with their leaving the Parkway, when the complications of navigating a dense flow of traffic into New Haven might suddenly throw Spofford off his mental guard. It squandered what could be Mopworth’s last chance for a confidence on this outing, on something really having nothing to do with literary research, but his curiosity had got the better of him. “It’s none of my business, really, I know. But if you don’t mind saying, how did you ever get those charges dropped?”
“What charges?” Spofford asked with an innocence that made Mopworth roll his eyes toward the side curtain with the torn isinglass that offered their sole protection from the cold. Its mate was either gone or in hopeless tatters, for there was none on Spofford’s side, and they shouted to one another above the wind. Though the snow had stopped the wind was rising. Mopworth had brought no gloves and sat hunched down with his hands in his topcoat pockets. “You know—that bloke whose window you broke. Dr. Wolmar.”
It was a Saturday on which Yale had a home game, and to the sound of the motor as well as the gusts above which conversation had to be conducted was added that of streams of stadium-bound cars honking impatiently at the obstruction in the road. Their occupants streaked past, when oncoming traffic permitted, with glances either annoyed or amused. There were no connoisseurs out today. Mopworth frequently closed his eyes, or averted them to the isinglass, in which the gash was widening noticeably. One corner of the side curtain had become unhooked and was flapping in the breeze.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody else,” Spofford said when they had turned off onto a less traveled thoroughfare. It was a side street, indeed almost deserted. Spofford either knew his way around New Haven very well or they were lost. “I’ve kept my ears open in the years I’ve lived in Woodsmoke. Note that I say ears, not eyes, because I’m not one of your voyeurs they call them now days. You’ve overheard conversations you felt no guilt about overhearing? Embarrassed or uneasy maybe, yes, but not guilt.”
“Constantly,” Mopworth said, to encourage him.
“The open windows where I sometimes stood, it was to listen, not look. I only say this to nip any misunderstanding in the bud. You’ve got a good, fair mind, without no murky corners or damp subcellars, one thing and another, so far as a man can figure out, and besides,” Spofford said, loudly and after clearing his throat with what seemed a fit of irritation, fidgeting behind the wheel, “I want to reveal a confidence to you to show that I like you in the family.”
“Why, that’s one of the nicest—”
“Oh, the hell with that. The thing is, I am not a Paul Pry and I do not deal in gossip. But I do think that people are entitled to my undivided attention.”
“I understand you perfectly.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Here’s what I’m trying to say. When you have enough on people to hang them is when mercy sets in, and you want to give them another chance. But what they tell you won’t clear them—only what you overhear. Unguarded moments. We owe each other that curiosity. All right then. So once, when I was on my way home from the Wolmars’ after sitting for them, I passed their bedroom window and heard a conversation going on between those two that only a man dead in his heart, with no more interest in his own kind, could not stop to listen to. It was a argument, never mind what about. At the height of it, Dr. Wolmar, who up to then hadn’t seemed mad at all, at least not crazy mad, took off his pants and flung them in his wife’s face. There was nothing mean or vicious in it, nothing worse than what people constantly do to one another, in fact a lot milder than some of the tales I could unfold. It was more like emphasizing a point that hadn’t ought to been emphasized quite that much. I don’t judge the man. How does that famous remark of Spinoza’s go?”
“Neither to weep nor to laugh, but to understand,” said Mopworth, who was wondering how Spofford understood that the trousers had been pitched if he’d only been listening and not looking. Perhaps in these vigils he had from time to time glanced in the window to clarify to himself some point in the colloquy?
“That’s right. Well, you’re a writer, is another reason I tell you these things. You should be interested in human nature. It’s all grist for the mill.”
“I appreciate that,” Mopworth said. “But what has this to do with your trial? Indictment rather. That got quashed.” The Spoffords themselves all said “squashed.”
“I’m coming to that now. You see, the whole point in legal proceedings is that people have something ‘on’ you. Society has something on you and feels it should do something about it. Well, I had something on my accuser that was a damn sight worse than what he had on me. Worse than breaking and entering—at least my breaking and entering. Because that had a moral purpose. It wasn’t to steal anything at all, but to find out something in his notes about a patient of his that I had a moral right to know about. Don’t ask me who, because that part I won’t tell you. But I know you believe me just as Wolmar believed me though I refused to tell him who the patient was—because by that time I didn’t need the information no more. Things had changed. It was none of his goddam business but these psychiatrists can’t help prying I guess. So he wouldn’t bring his weight to bear to get the case squashed. So I had to play my trump card. I had to use my club. I took him aside one day and says, ‘If you don’t use your influence to get this thing squashed I’ll tell everybody somebody threw their britches in somebody’s face. Again we don’t mention no names.’ That did it.” Spofford removed his hands from the wheel to execute a gesture at some fool motorist in traffic again so dense that Mopworth chose to close his eyes once more. Through some apparent shortcut they were back on the main drag—they were being passed by the same cars all over again, the occupants glaring a second time as they disappeared at speeds not to be gainsaid.
Mopworth asked: “But how could a private citizen get the authorities to drop what was a criminal and not a civil charge? He wasn’t the plaintiff. Did he have you—?” Mopworth did not know what folly had brought him to the brink of the word “certified.” at which, of course, he shied. “Did he have some such right in the eyes of the law?”
“No. Just as a local pillar he had the case thrun out. A few wires pulled behind the scenes can do this where the defendant is himself not a real criminal but a person of standing. Status I guess is the word for that now days. Well, here we are. I hope I won’t be too long.”
Spofford was a good forty-five minutes talking to his lawyer. While waiting in the car Mopworth worked out a quatrain inspired by Spofford’s pronunciation of “status,” with the long “a,” which struck him as itself suggesting one of the two groups into which the very word could be taken as a shibboleth dividing people:
None will ever dare high-hat us
If we but pronounce it status;
But they’ll be bound to underrate us
If we persist in saying status.
Without the poem, which didn’t seem to him very good after he had jotted it down, to occupy him, Mopworth felt the cold in the open flivver, and spent the rest of his wait in a nearby bar from a window of which Spofford’s return could be noted. When he saw him emerge from the office building he ran out and beckoned him across the street for a drink. It was now too late to think about a matinee, and after a quick whiskey they set out on their homeward journey. This was marked by two incidents.
