Reuben, Reuben, page 5
“I’ve never read him so why do I have to purge him from my system?”
“It’s proof of his grip on Western Man that he dominates the thinking of people who have never heard of him. So will you give But a hearing? You need it desperately, believe me. You won’t sell me fryers because I’m a commuter, when the fact is I haven’t been on a train in six months. Its my husband who commutes, and that only to Stamford as I’ve been trying to tell you. Secondly how do you know I haven’t given you blood or something in the past when you needed it most? Did you look on the bottle to see where it came from? Of course not. You don’t make distinctions. Blood is blood. And that’s all it is.”
“But you just said—”
“You’re in terrible shape, believe me. All this thinking with our glands.”
I put on my specs again and paged through the magazine for a while, reading snatches of this and that to please her. Finally I closed it and put the specs back in my pocket.
“Well I ain’t much for big words, like hypothesis and Wittgenstein—”
“Now you’re being the tiniest bit dishonest with me, admit it. Anyhow this looks deepish but it actually isn’t. It—”
The door of the slaughter room opened and Mare stood in her rubber apron and hip boots watching us. A wet cigarette end smoked in one corner of her mouth. It went out while we all stood there. She closed the door without taking her eyes off us, cutting off the sound of machinery and running water, and tramped forward, the boots going whuppery-whuppery on the linoleum.
“Yes?”
“Mare, this lady wants us to read this magazine that claims we shouldn’t be so positive. Lumping everything together. That theres good and bad in all classes and that we shouldn’t let our thinking get gummed up by letting words do it for us. That about it, Mrs. Beauseigneur?”
“Thats it exactly.”
Mare disposed of the cigarette butt by spitting it out on the floor. Sometimes I wished she would be more refined and gracious, not necessarily mincing and artificial like the women we were having the war on, but something in between. But no, none of her mother’s ways had rubbed off on her—she was herself. She didn’t come no closer to the counter or to us, pausing I’d say, oh about six feet from it. “We don’t need no magazines today.”
Mrs. Beauseigneur showed the wear and tear of having her identity narrowed down to a door-to-door pedler twice within five minutes and having to buck it twice. But only for a second. Because for the time being anyway she decided to abandon the missionary approach of bringing semantics to the heathen and take Mare on in terms of the technicality. She moved a step to the right, bringing herself at least in line with her opponent though no closer otherwise, and says again, “My husband gets off at Stamford.”
The seed fell on stonier ground than with me, but at least she was pleading her case—the battle was joined. She stood before Mare like all the ish women did through all that period of the quarantine on snobs, that is like a wretch before a stern tribunal, but she made her pitch. “And I’m sure you’ll agree you can’t call that commuting. I mean not really.”
“Occupation?”
“Investment adviser.”
“Firm?”
“He works for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner—”
“We haven’t got all day. Branch of the New York firm, isn’t it?”
“Why yes, but—”
“Place of residence.”
“Punch Bowl Hollow. We’re neighbors!” The woman realized her boner the minute she made it—New Yorkers crowding in on us was part of our animus (the word Flahive sprung on me and which I had of course looked up)—and added with an apologetic little laugh, “I know we’re making it a bit crampedish for you, but anyhoo . . .”
Mare shoved a pencil deeper into the knot of hair it was generally stuck in, like a bone in the bun of a savage in the National Geographic. I guessed she was debating with herself just how far to go toward admitting who the enemy was and naming them. But she wouldn’t, like me or maybe George, be lured into it—she would decide on that herself. But all this showed a change in the wind. The woman went on:
“You see Lester telephoned me just now to ask could he bring a friend, a classmate home for dinner.” She rolled her eyes and smiled at Mare as though to say we women know this habit of men. “I thought Gawd, the house is an absolute shambles, and I’m not a short order cook. But maybe if I could frickasee a few—As I say he works in the Stamford office, and if you ever need any advice on business matters—” She played one last card. “He’s thinking of driving in on the Thruway. Not taking the train at all!”
Mare glanced at the coolers herself now. I could feel hope rising in the other woman, that all them qualifications with which her own status was hedged around might entitle her to a few fryers just this once. But I knew better and felt sorry for her. I knew it was part of the pleasure Mare took in prolonging the torture of these women with their open Jags and their absolute shambles. It was a extra dividend. I figured maybe she was bleeding me a little too for suspicion of collaborating with the enemy (false as you know). At the same time I noticed how Mrs. Beauseigneur had been trapped into stating her case from presisely the premise she had a moment ago knocked me for and with which by implication she had no truck. She was O.K.’ing the block against commuters by the very act of pleading her case in terms of her husband not being one, even adding to the semantic mess we were all sinking deeper and deeper into by dragging in the mode of transportation used. It may of been this sense of her rapidly deteriorating position that brought tears to Mrs. Beauseigneur’s eyes as she whimpered when Mare finally didn’t relent, “Then can I have a dozen eggs?”
“Large or small?”
“Small.”
I was surprised to see Mare take a carton from the open cooler and slide it across the counter, not a giving in or concession but one them arbitrary acts of mercy by which the despotic sertify their power.
“There’s something sinister in this house,” the woman sniffled in between fishing in her purse for the dough. “Something spreading like a poison everywhere. It would be far, far better if you dropped the pretense and hypocrisy and just admitted you hate us as a class instead of all this fiddle faddle about the 38th Parallel.” I was grateful for the glance at me here as it told Mare, with whom I would be left in a minute to deal, that I hadn’t been collaborating as she suspected and wasn’t on the verge of treason when she come in at all. “That would be honest though still sick. For I do not hesitate to use the word. Sick do you hear! And so, so in need of therapy.”
“You really should go home and lie down,” Mare says. That made the women pull out another stop, one she probably never dreamed she would, as it put the one card on the table that was just too much and should never of been openly mentioned.
“I didn’t jilt your daughter. My husband didn’t jilt your daughter. Yet you make us drive clear to town for chickens and those only frozen because somebody else did.”
With that Mrs. Beauseigneur, looking as startled as us, grabbed the eggs which Mare made a move to snatch back, and skedaddled. She knew she better because she had blurted out more than she had intended, but in skedaddling emptied her gun. “Isn’t that sick? Isn’t that paranoid? Oh your in terrible shape. Talk about intensional orientation! Talk about guilt by identification! Talk about linguistic symbol-hash! Read all about it, right in there.”
Mare picked up the But and thrun it at the woman, who would of caught it square on the coco if she hadn’t closed the door on herself just in time so that it hit the framework next to the glass pane and fell to the floor. Mrs. Beauseigneur with eyes streaming opened the door again a second to say, “Believe me, Mrs. Spofford, I’m sorrier for you than for myself and the rest of this community. You need help. I just hope it isn’t too late. Because you’re a—dangerous woman!”
Mare looked ready to refute that charge with an egg she had in her hand from another carton, ammunition better than the magazine that missed, but the woman closed the door again and ran for the Jag and blew, scattering chickens before her, if you can call it before you when you are backing out the drive at high speed. She disappeared up Vineyard Road in a cloud of dust.
Mare stood at the cooler a minute, tidying up the stacks of eggs. I watched her broad back. Mrs. Beauseigneur had left us a pretty load of embarrassment to deal with indeed. I didn’t know whether to wade right in and have it over with or kind of sidle around it in hopes it would disperse of itself. I stalled by picking up the morning’s mail which was lying on the counter and shuffling through it. “Gynecocratic goddam community,” I said.
“You don’t have to swear to show how limited your vocabulary is.”
“Mare, your getting very bellicose lately.”
“I ain’t as young as I use to be and it stands to reason I can’t be as slim around the middle no more neither.”
Over her shoulder I could see a garden rake. Standing upside down in a corner, I wondered what it was doing here anyway. I dropped the mail and decided to wade in. I waited till she had her back turned, the point being a very ticklish one, and said: “Crazy woman, talking about jilted daughters. Why, I don’t believe for a minute that’s generally gossiped around here as our trouble, do you? Mare?”
I knew it was a tender spot I was probing—proud flesh is a good term for it as pride was the main element at stake here, family pride, which is keener than personal—but I didn’t realize how tender. Mare didn’t reveal so much as a flicker of emotion. Her face was blank as she hung another fag in it and set fire to it. She went around the counter, her boots making that awful whuppery-whuppery noise, to where the copy of But lay on the floor. After slapping it on her thigh to dust it off she come around behind the counter again reading it. She stood thumbing through the pages, her face slanted away from the smoke curling from her cigarette. Without a comment she dropped it into the trash bin under the counter. Then in an idle way, as though she was doing no more than remarking on the weather, she says, “If you let them have any they’ll only cook them in red wine.”
“Or sour cream.”
Though I meant what I said about mucking about with perfectly good food, at the same time I hated myself for the degree I was cozying along with Mare, as though I was too scared of her to make a stand at the point where I thought this thing should stop. I wasn’t scared of her—I just wanted to keep peace. But I resented the concessions I had to make to get that in what was damn well my own house. I had a chance to recover the offensive in it soon enough on another ground.
“You’ll be late for the Golden Age Club if you don’t get to washing up,” Mare says.
“I wasn’t aiming to go.”
The air began to tense with the threat of another storm. The probably unnecessary sharpness of my answer was intended merely to keep reminding her that I was my own boss and not to be ordered about, but Mare took it as a slight of her mother. She took my curt refusal to escort Mrs. Punck to the Golden Age meeting at the Y.M.C.A. as a slap at Mrs. Punck as such. No such slap was intended—only the reminder that the property was still in my name.
I watched Mare finish her cigarette and spit it on the floor as she had its predesessor, this time grinding it out underfoot. “Ma’s going and would appreciate a lift.”
Christ, we not only sold eggs around here, we spent 1/2 our time walking on them! But I met her gaze evenly a minute. That wild autumnal hope, mine intended to say, that wild autumnal hope that your mother and me might get fixed up and close ranks around here is all well and good, but let me think of the idea myself, maybe on windswept nights or so, not have it rammed down my throat by matchmakers. I says, treading the very narrow line between courtesy and independence that I had drawn for myself on this matter, “I can give her a lift to the Y and maybe I can fetch her back. But I don’t aim to stay for what’s in between.”
Mare reached under her leather apron and pulled out of a pocket of her jeans a partly eaten Oh Henry candy bar. She bit off an end of it, like a man biting off a chaw from a plug, and stuck it back in her pocket again. She bit it off with her side teeth, which worked mightily in me as a call to patience and compassion. “They get the most interesting speakers there,” she said.
“I’ve heard ’em. The last time I went it was a man discussing insects that benefit mankind.”
“There’s a famous woman traveller lecturing today.”
“What on?”
“Christmas in Many Lands.”
“I was thinking I might go set a spell with Harry Pycraft.”
“That won’t lift you up none.”
“It won’t let me down neither.”
While she watched me in silence I carried the aggressive one step farther. The last thing I wanted to do was read anything left behind by sheepherders, but neither did I want any inlaws fancying they were doing the censoring for me. So I stooped to fish the copy of But out of the trash basket, dusted it off against my leg and started for the door to the kitchen. There the pendulum swang back the other way, just a little. Feeling I had plenty balance in my favor as far as the independence was concerned, I paid back a little of it by one consession (which again really upped the independence a notch by showing it was mine to make). I turned at the door and says, “I’ll take your ma back here for supper if you’d like. We owe her a meal.”
She snapped up the puck and started skating back with it.
“I’m going to say something you may not like, Pa Spofford, and that you may think is none of my business. You’re not an old man. You’re vital. You could have another marriage yet, a married life of your own. Companionship for your declining years and all.”
“Your ma can be verbose in fewer words than anybody I ever see.” Mare give the grunt of thanks for the compliment on her mother’s be1/2. “She talks in nothing but platitudes exclusively,” I pushed on, only upping the gratitude. It was a losing game.
“Well I’ll go wash up then,” I says and hurried upstairs, not quite sure now where we stood or just exactly how the balance of power shaped up. But I did do one thing before I cleaned up. I went into my bedroom and chucked the copy of But in my own wastebasket.
six
AFTER DROPPING Mrs. Punck off at the Y for her meeting I turned around and galloped back toward Harry Pycraft’s motel—gallop being the illusion the old Lizzie and bad roads between them could impart. Probably another reason why I kept the Ford was it reminded me of the chestnut mare, Nellie, I used to ride through this countryside, of which I again now took angry inventory. For every subdivision my memory supplied the ghost of some birch grove or cornfield cut down to make room for it. All that remained of the landscape was the old Ponderosa vineyard, and now by God if that wasn’t threatened.
Mrs. Punck had just broken the news that Harry Pycraft, who owned the cottage she rented, had notified her to vacate as it had been sold. Who to? The contractors known to of been lusting after the Ponderosa acreage? Was the last idyllic spot left in Woodsmoke (outside the chicken farm) then doomed for another subdivision? No builder would of bought the cottage property without at long last having wangled from old Mrs. Ponderosa the vineyard it stood behind. Between the two parcels there was land enough for another score of split levels—and another hundred sheepherders.
In spite of myself I fancied that term of Flahive’s for commuters, with which the cowboys had expressed their contempt for the intruders of yesteryear. By an odd twist of the facts the term applied literally to a family whose house I just tooled past. The Dalrymples kept sheep, or at least a sheep, which a collie nipped into line along the property edge. There was the sheep as I shot past, looking as usual not all wool at all but 40% orlon, dacron and other sinthetic fibers. Dalrymple was one the leather handbag toting boys in gabardine. I see him often strolling through town on Saturday morning, trying to look peerless.
This what-do-you-call-it, nostalgia for the bygone and the earthy on the part of people at the farthest pole from it fascinated me—as it fascinated other old timers that it also riled. Old timers who came out of the past the commuters now collect—coffee grinders, pewter and wagon wheels. The people who settled this land had hearts of oak. Leaving myself out of it, there is Ned Bradshaw, who broke this soil from dawn to dusk behind a blind plowhorse; Ebenezer Jennings, who once kept a lighthouse and who singlehanded rescued three men from drowning in a howling storm off the Cape; and Mrs. Punck, who takes a few drops of iodine every time she feels a cold coming on.
Harry Pycraft I had my reservations about. As I galloped toward his motel I reflected on what a lot of loyalty he took. The motel would of forfitted any claim to my friendship whatever had it not been on the Post Road, a total loss anyway. Nothing you built there could spoil it any more. Besides, the motel was an expansion of an old inn Pycraft had tried to preserve the spirit of in the motor courts he built around it. Neon signs blinked out its name, but the name remained the same—Dew Drop Inn. Eggs Benedict and lobster thermopane appeared on the menu, but that was in chalk on old Puritan slates—in this case legitimately as Pycraft is not a professional New Englander. He is a New Englander. I know some people think he’s crooked as a ram’s horn, but I have never found any evidence of that. He’s just a slippery and rather lewd tightwad sonofabitch who happens to be the last drinking crony I have left. Harry will do anything for you except a favor. I know. But he does read. Lately he’s been reading the modern nihilistic philosophers who consider life meaningless, writers who knock the universe without having no alternative to offer.
I found Pycraft in the Period Room as he called it. I once asked him what period and he gave me a blank look. The subject had never come up before. “Why I don’t know,” he said. “Just period.” It was a bar and adjoining restaurant with heavy panelled walls, mirrors in fancy gilt frames and bowlegged tables and chairs, also fancily carved. He was consulting with an electrician over some repairs and eating a peach. He generally kept a little fruit around to put in the rooms of celebrities, which he often got from the local theatre, a former summer playhouse which now runs 8 mos. of the year.
