Reuben, Reuben, page 36
The single side curtain, which had been flapping ever more ominously in the wind finally tore free of its moorings altogether and vanished in a gust behind them. Spofford jammed on the brake and they got out to search for it. They finally located it beside the road some fifty yards back. Spofford stowed it in the rear compartment for possible repairs, and they continued on.
Hitchhikers were a common sight along the road, and they thought nothing of the short figure, buttoned up tight in a dark overcoat, whom they saw flagging a ride when they were about halfway home. Spofford very nearly did not recognize Dr. Rappaport, but he spotted the black bag just as they flashed by, and slammed to a stop again. Dr. Rappaport climbed in between them with expressions of gratitude, clapping his mittened hands together after he had settled his bag on his knees.
“What brings you out this way, Emil?” Spofford asked.
“I had a consultation out of town.” Rappaport did not specify what town, and Spofford wondered if it were New Haven, and why Mrs. Punck hadn’t mentioned it. “I was called in by a doctor friend of mine on a case that rather puzzled him. He wanted a second opinion. So I went up early this morning. It’s nothing serious, I’m glad to say. Well! This is a lucky break for me.” He looked from one to the other of his companions with his pleasant smile.
Mopworth had sprung out to give him the middle seat, not to retain the outer for himself, which would have been an advantage only in a closed automobile, but courteously to yield what, in this case, was the warmer position. They were all a good deal snugger now. Dr. Rappaport had earlier in the day been dosing a patient with muscle spasm, and he smelled agreeably of wintergreen. Mopworth slumped down and listened to the older men discuss something Rappaport and Mrs. Punck were particularly interested in—the formation of a local chapter of the Council of Christians and Jews. Spofford was rather acid in his opinion of a woman named Mrs. Stern, who was being considered for president.
“She’s not the right sort for a ticklish position, take it from me,” he said. “She has this strong prejudice against anti-Semites, and this ain’t a case where you fight fire with fire.”
Rappaport was so delighted with this that he sat shaking with laughter. He even nudged Mopworth with an elbow as he said, “Prejudiced against anti-Semites, I like that, Frank,” he said. “That’s wonderful.” Spofford pulled the gas lever down all the way, till the car was wide open. One of the curious things about Rappaport was the complete unpredictability of his laughter. You never knew when he was going to be amused, or what would amuse him, and his covert chuckles were more disconcerting than his open outbursts. “Yes, I can see Mrs. Stern’s vibrations are all wrong. She’ll have to go.”
It had turned quite cold when they reached Woodsmoke, and Dr. Rappaport surmised they would all be glad to get home to their respective kitchens. “They’re the thing, as I’m glad to see modern architects getting back to realizing. Frank, I believe Eunice has a stew going, you’re more than welcome to take a bite with us. There’ll be plenty, and I have a bottle of good Burgundy I want to open. Wine is one of the things Eunice and I don’t have in common, and I don’t like to drink a whole bottle myself. How about it?”
“Well, all right,” Spofford said, after a hypocritical hesitation. “We’ll drop Alvin off first then, and I can phone from your place that I shan’t be home.”
The scene that greeted Mopworth when he got home himself was one of harried domesticity indeed.
It was being enacted in the kitchen by which he entered, Rappaport’s notions about the revival of traditional cheer there notwithstanding. Geneva stood in a central serving “island,” as architects call them, trying out a new beef casserole for which she was reading from not one but three cookbooks, all spread out open before her on a sort of prop shelf, like a speaker’s lectern. Her hair was disordered and her apron, a short-length tunic ending in a horizontal row of pockets like a carpenter’s apron, was smudged with flour and other foodstuffs, as well as crammed with an extraordinary number of implements—perhaps even a small hammer for pounding flour into the strips of flesh disposed about her for convenience in a half-circle. Mike was crying in his pen in one corner of the room; he had apparently just pitched one of his playing blocks into the hooded fireplace. There was no fire going, and the block lay among the gray ashes. Geneva was drinking from an Old-Fashioned as he entered, her head bent over one of the cookbooks. The general picture would have been a perfect illustration for one of those magazine articles dealing with the Ordeal of the American Woman, bearing a caption like “The Hoax of the Feminine Mystique” or “Educated—for What?” This was so hilariously the case that Mopworth could not resist a smile, which he tried to pass off as one of pleasure at being home again. The serving island was so circular and centered so exactly in the kitchen as to resemble the Information Desk in Grand Central Station. Mopworth walked up to it like a passenger with a question to ask.
“What are you doing, darling?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Geneva said. “Waiting for a streetcar. Where have you been?”
“Well, actually I’m home early, rather, if you remember my saying we might stay for the matinee. Gramps was in great form, he—”
“Oh, Christ, pick that child up before I pound some flour into both of you.”
“Right you are!”
Mopworth made one of his observations about married life. Marriage was the fabulous invalid the theater had once been. The same doom was continually predicted for it, while it continued miraculously to survive. One got into the habit of introspection about one’s own. One started and ended each day appraising it in terms of the experts’ diagnoses; one assessed the shared moments of it like one taking a patient’s pulse. The conclusion Mopworth now drew about it was based on a sizable span of daily experience, now for the first time recognized in terms of a general principle. It was that the woman determined the weather in the house. From her came permission to laugh, instruction to brood, the cue for fun or woe. As he stepped in the door Mopworth realized that the first thing he did was, not greet Geneva, but read her face to determine how she should be greeted. He consulted her face like this many times a day, as one consults a barometer, to see what kind of day or evening it will be. He had done this now, he remarked to himself for the first time, for well over a year.
Was it true of all marriages, or only marriages like his, in which the man is the acquiescent type wanting only peace in the house? Was it more true now than it had once been? Or more true in America than elsewhere? That woman calls the ever-changing emotional tunes to which one dances, was that a universal fact accepted abroad without fuss and only exaggerated in a country where emancipation was bearing its first disillusioning fruits, like early returns in a doubtful election? Mopworth understood that theirs was a pivotal generation. With them the institution of marriage might stand or fall. Quick divorces and as speedy remarriages were bringing about a way of life for which the anthropologists already had a name: serial polygamy. Several wives or husbands, only in succession rather than simultaneously. There was a bloke in town who had already had five wives, whom they had discussed at a family Thanksgiving dinner at the farmhouse. Most of them marveled that a man could have that many mates. Mrs. Punck had made the most notable comment (which had made Rappaport nearly choke on his turkey with laughter). She had said: “He’s just not the marrying kind.”
The needle tonight seemed to waver between Stormy and Change. On the far side of Change was, in any case, that portion of the barometer devoted to Fair. He knew that the slightest shift in circumstance—success with the casserole, a bit of bracing gossip—might save the evening. He swooped Mike up and disappeared to change him. The end of Mike’s caterwauling, then gurgling contentment after his bottle, went far toward composing the house. The casserole safely in the oven, Mopworth fixed them both drinks, giving Geneva a fresh glass for hers. Glutted with milk, Mike rolled over and went to sleep in his crib. Returning to the living room, Mopworth remembered the Burgundy Rappaport had invited Spofford to share with him, and he decided to open the last bottle of a case of Musigny he had extravagantly bought. It was the wine Miles Schmidt had put him onto, and he groaned at the memory of that evening as he hurried downstairs to fetch it. “This dinner is going to deserve the best,” he said as he opened it, a good hour before dinner, to let it “expand” as the experts urged. Watching him from the living room couch with her drink, Geneva seemed to brighten. He was setting the table with their good silver when she suddenly sprang to her feet and said, “Oh, I want to show you the door prizes I got for Wednesday. My turn to have the bridge bunch in.” She pulled a self-deprecating mouth when she said this. Geneva liked to play bridge, but Mopworth was a dolt at the game and so evenings of it with other couples were out: she had to resort to afternoons with the ladies.
“Swell!”
The purchases Geneva opened for display on one end of the dining table were two. They were a small ceramic dish with a humorous inscription giving rise to the belief that it was a coaster, and a poodle dog in low relief with a hole in its head indicating him to be a wall plaque. “We keep giving a booby prize as well as a main prize,” she said. “Custom and superstition.”
Mopworth admired them companionably a moment. They stood side by side, holding their drinks. He fingered the prizes with his free hand. “Very nice. Quite cute really, both of them.” He gazed at them a moment longer, smiling and nodding. Then he asked: “Which is which?”
The evening lay in tatters at their feet. He knew that the instant the words were out of his mouth. He deserved the booby prize himself! Geneva turned in silence and walked into the kitchen.
He stood in the doorway watching as she looked into the oven to see how the casserole was coming. He had his work cut out for him, all right. Over his shoulder he glanced back into the dining room at the objects still lying in their wrappings on the table. He stole hurriedly back while she was gone and reinspected them, in hopes of discerning some clue to their relative worth, perhaps price tags on their undersides. But there were none. “Damn,” he said under his breath. He overturned the boxes in which they still reposed. No price markings on the bottom of them either. He muttered an even stronger oath. Hearing the oven door close he shot on tiptoe into the living room (marked off from this by a five-foot combination fernery and bookcase which served as a “room divider”), where he was to be seen lighting a cigarette and gazing out the picture window, which gave on one identical to it across the road. By now he had some rough kind of plan hammered out in his head.
“Sorry my little joke misfired.” He drew the draperies, having seen the head of the house appear in the other window, a chap named Dumbrowski whom he couldn’t stand. Dumbrowski was the author of a succession of widely read (but unreadable) novels that were said to make pots. The closing swirl of fabric cut short an intended greeting over there.
“Joke?” Geneva seemed to want to believe it.
“Of course joke.” He simulated surprise. “You mean you thought I was serious? Come now, ducks.” He drifted toward the dining table, where he fingered again the awards. “It’s actually an old gag. Didn’t we see a sketch based on that on television once?” he said, fabricating. “Or maybe I was alone that night. You were pregnant. Mike all right?” An urgent appraisal of the materials of which the objects were constructed told him nothing. Both seemed earthenware, enameled in bright colors.
“Is this cloisonné?” he asked rather fulsomely, hefting one in either hand in a manner intended to confuse her as to which was meant.
“The dog?” The stress of the word, as if in surprise, suggested it must be the meaner of the two items, and he tacked for harbor accordingly.
“No, silly, this one. The coaster.”
“Coaster! Is that all it looks like to you? Something to set a glass of beer on?”
“What is it then? Is it a tray for pins? Is it one of these things women burn perfume in? Is it—” he raised his eyes, like one taking stabs in a guessing game—“a kind of trivet?”
“If you can’t tell it’s an ashtray maybe it had better go back. I mean that should be just too simple.” Her anger seemed to have shifted from him to her purchase, or rather to have broadened out to include it—small progress in either case.
“Of course. An ashtray. How stupid of me.” Mopworth recovered on the word something of his now slightly eroded British accent, saying “schewpid” with an exaggerated richness that seemed to restore to the object some of its lost prestige.
“Maybe you don’t think it’s good enough to put ashes in.”
“Of course I think it’s good enough to put ashes in.” What a quagmire all this was! What he had said was “And I said you were fit to sleep with pigs.” He brought the rout of meaning to a conclusion by executing a sort of caper and saying self-deprecatingly:
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated to a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
Mopworth was glad now that he had gone at the guessing game at the rate he had. It made it harder for her to doubt that he had been kidding all along. Everything pointed to her wanting to believe that, at least on the surface. Perhaps in that case she would pursue the matter no further, preserving her doubt in order to save her pride. “Another drink?”
“Which is which?”
“What?”
“Which is the main prize and which is the booby, if it was all only a joke?” She sat down and crossed her legs. “Well? I realize women take everything personally, especially insults, so make it good.”
Mopworth drew a deep breath. Then with that now familiar sensation of taking a corner on two wheels he said, “The poodle.”
“The poodle is what?”
“The booby.”
She took a cigarette from a box on the table. He extended a flame. “Well?” he said.
“You’ll never know.”
Then that was to be his punishment—never to know. He was to be consigned to a kind of hell such as might be devised by an existentialist writer of adroit stage comedies, in which the characters, unworthy of any profounder doom, are left to dangle in one another’s presence in a petty but eternal uncertainty.
He fixed them both fresh drinks and brought them to the cocktail table. Now he began that peculiar, measured sort of pacing that was so characteristic of him, that McGland had noticed in the Chelsea flat where they had first met, when the Tuttles had gone telly. It was not quite marching, neither was it quite anything else, as though he had been told a long time ago as a child to pick up his feet and had done so ever since. Even his normal walk had a faint touch of this prancing to it. He paced to the far end of the room, turned on the sole of one foot and came back again. Sometimes he went off at a slight angle to alter the regularity of this repetition. His hands were in his pants pockets, and he looked at the carpet as he walked. At last his pacing became more measured.
“I just want to throw this thought out to you,” he said. “My original question—what started all this brouhaha—might be regarded as implying not that you can’t tell the main prize from the booby, but that you can’t tell the booby from the main. A different kettle of fish altogether. The booby’s too good, is the idea. I just want to throw that thought out to you for what it’s worth. Now how do you feel about it, ducks?”
“Let’s have dinner. And don’t open the wine. It’s much too good a bottle to waste on a night like this.”
But he had already opened it, of course, so he poured it while Geneva dished the dinner. The casserole was superb, and he said so. Geneva said as she watched him pour her second glass of Burgundy, “I paid four dollars and fifty cents for that prize, and our rule is never to go over two.”
“Oh, really?” Mopworth marched back to his end of the table with the bottle. “And what’s your minimum on the booby? Have a floor on that, do you, sweets, just as you have a ceiling on the main?”
“Oh, stop jabbering like an idiot.”
“Right!”
Mopworth wanted only peace. To pursue that he sought, only and always, to please. He cleared the table and washed the dishes, according to a now fairly established pattern, this time finishing what remained of the wine and even having a little brandy before pitching in, however. He was a cotquean, like every up-to-date husband, especially among the more well-to-do, or at least sophisticated, levels, where the passing of the servant might be more readily mourned than among the working classes. He had stumbled on the word in the dictionary while looking up something else entirely. “A man who busies himself with affairs properly feminine,” was the definition of a cotquean. He had never heard of the word before. But every husband was one now, apparently. Mopworth did not necessarily resent the fact, or begrudge the time and effort devoted to this estate; it was after all a dreary nuisance and why should a woman be expected to put up with it without protest? He did feel a faint sense of demoralization, however. But it was a price he was willing to pay for that domestic stability in which alone the pleasures and satisfactions of married life might be pursued.
He went upstairs to the bedroom when he had finished tidying up, to assess the possibility of cultivating some of those.
Geneva lay in bed with a book spreadeagled on her stomach, staring across her feet toward the opposite wall. He got into pajamas and struck the same attitude, so that they resembled in their formal positions two supine caryatids supporting together the solemn and ponderous entablature of matrimony. He knew that she was planning to cry. Unless before that happened her emotions found an alternative relief—say, airing them to another woman. The exchanges of wedded conferences among housewives, at once cozy and bloodcurdling, represented a sorority Mopworth could neither fathom nor buck, and more than vaguely feared. Men had their trade unionism, God knew, their club ancedotes and their bar-car camaraderie, but its lore concerned women to whom they were not married. They did not sit and over their whiskies deplore the wives of their bosoms, as the ladies apparently did the husbands of theirs, sometimes humorously, sometimes damn well not. Mopworth prayed God the phone would not ring, or that if it did it would not be Minnie Dumbrowski across the way. Geneva owed her something in return for Minnie’s account of Jack’s interlude with a girl who popped out of smoker cakes.
