Reuben, Reuben, page 8
Like a pale medicinal lozenge—
Enough. I cough
Like a sick sheep and wait for June, when all
These liquid lakes and brooks unlocked and chuckling in the sun
Will lure me out of doors, my singular and pleural woes put by,
Wool mitts and muffler sloughed like scabs in Tweedsmuir’s hell,
By blue Scamander wobbling thrice, then aw faw down . . .
A ram into her thicket gone will hymn my season’s favor in her arms
Where we together all the green-groined summer lie.
I felt my cod itch, and squirming noisily on the wicker chair wondered if this was now the accepted aim of poetry. More than that I wondered this: if, no longer able to shock us bourgeoisie, artists had nothing left but to befuddle us. In cases like this you seemed to been flung back into the raw materials of poetry and had to shift for yourself from there, like with the Jag. I tingled with vexation I could almost hear, like all my nerve-ends was rasping on one another like a chorus of katydids rubbing the undersides of their wings together in mating time. The very comparison seemed to me an act of poetry on my part, a notion I would like to air with His Nibs himself over a beer. He must like it, judging from the foaming stein he held in the picture.
Mrs. Beauseigneur stepped back through the French windows.
“Take that if you’d like. We’ve finished with it. Why, that was Pussy Wilcox again. Pussy sees you from the kitchen and just can’t get over you. Of course she’s absolutely green with envy. I mean trying to get anybody decent in Woodsmoke! Well I told her I couldn’t answer for you definitely, and I didn’t want to disturb you just now, but that she might make bold to give you a ring at home herself. Was that all right?” Mrs. Beau bit a nuckle in that imitation of a little girl who might of done something naughty.
Clutching my new reading matter I lit out for home. I had been gone all day! How would I explain my absence there? Then the usual head of resentment built up inside me at having to do so at my age, driving out the nervousness.
Mare and George were waiting for me in the kitchen all right. They had finished dinner and were just sitting there, two people sitting up for someone. They watched me, waiting for my explanation.
eight
“WHERE IN GOD’S NAME have you been all day?” Mare asked. “Dinner’s been ready an hour. Finally we didn’t wait. Not that we could eat much.”
“We were worried sick. For fear something happened to you,” George said.
Espionage was a development so new to me, by which I had been so taken by surprise myself, that instinct made me conceal the fact till I had more clearly studied out its nature, scope and purpose, as well as made some estimate of its dangers. Also I resented the fact that all that ever varied their attitude of toleration was anxiety: they worried about me in between hollering at me. So I said:
“Maybe I spent the day at Harry Pycraft’s.”
“You mean you walked all the way to the Post Road and back?” George said. “Your legs must be killing you.”
“My dogs are barking,” I agreed. I went to the icebox for a beer. “Well lets have a scuttle of suds. It looks like an absolutely ghastly summer.”
I could feel the tension generating behind me. I knew they were watching me—if not looking at each other. What I had said was not our talk, it was theirs. I had done it deliberately, on an impulse coming from I knew not where. I had been seized with a sudden desire to mock my own kind with sheepherder talk just as I mocked the sheepherders with our kind. It was the same drive, itch. Of course Mare thought the expression just slipped out by accident, betraying where I’d spent the day. “I don’t know what you two are so hairy about,” I said, watching them as I stood leaning against the sink after taking a pull of beer from the bottle. I let them have another, then another, a mad sort of thrill going up my spine as I baffled and unstrung those dear to me. I took another swig, and then watching them wilt under my eyes I said, “I don’t see why we eat at this grotesque hour anyways. I mean isn’t it sort of un-godlyish? I mean I couldn’t eat a bite now,” I said, and walked into the parlor with the beer. “I’ve got to unwind.”
My fascination with the enemy, especially their women, grew. Of course it was with the women that I spent most of my time. What a miraculous thing language is! I supposedly spoke the same one as the Pussies Beauseigneur and Wilcox, yet on their lips it was something to be learned all over again, a foreign tongue. How the most infinitesimal shift in tone or gesture sorts women into classes divided by the thinnest of membranes that are yet walls a 100 ft. thick. I played mental games. Putting a single word of Pussy Beau’s into Mrs. Punck’s mouth, like I done in fancy, was weird fun. I whiled away sleepless hours in bed imagining such switches, different scenes based on them. Like I made Mrs. Punck say into the telephone “My dear we must shove along. We’re frightfully late for dinner as it is,” and felt a shiver go through me. It was just as crazy to reverse it and imagine Pussy Beau saying what Mrs. Punck would, and did, “I’ve had a lot of troubles in my life but most of ‘em never happened.” It made my flesh creep even while I hugged myself with laughter, there in the dark. But all through the sport I realized the sober point of it. It was I who was being split down the middle.
While I befuddled and pained my kin with the new expressions I picked up in Punch Bowl Hollow, with the residents of the latter I continued to play the rube. I laid on with a trowel the rustic terms that I knew to be not native to these parts at all but they didn’t, or so it seemed. To Mrs. Wilcox—one of the 3 I decided to give a day a week the better to spy on them—I said one time, “I’ve got nowt left in the back to do, so if you haven’t summat that wants tending to in the front I think I’ll be moseying along.” Nothing in that sentence but mosey was even American, the rest was English north country talk that I gleaned from a novel I had salvaged from a pile of discarded paperbacks to which she had invited me to help myself. And so on.
Playing both ends to the middle in this way kept me in a state of moral and emotional balance—for the time being. Having made fools of my family I would set out to make fools of the fancy. And having spent the day doing that I would hurry home to make fools of my family again and whoever else I might find there—sometimes Mrs. Punck if I was lucky. She was often a dinner guest after a day spent with a real estate agent looking for a new place, and getting back too late to cook for herself. Sailing into the kitchen an hour late for supper one evening in June I found her and Mare and George at the table. In keeping with their policy to humor me “while I went through this phase” instead of laboring with me, they invited me into a conversation I knew damn well my arrival had just put a stop to. “We’re talking about the birthday party for Ma next week,” Mare said, “and were wondering whether we should invite Maggie Klumber.”
“Oh Gawd,” I said heading for the icebox and beer. “I mean her stories are longer than Lent.” I waved the suggestion away with a airy gesture copied from some very flossy guests Mrs. Wilcox had had on the terrace that day, a interior decorator and his wife whose talk I was also copying. Because all this was essentially my old nack for imitation put to new use. I had often regaled Mrs. Punck and them with my impersonations of local characters, like the minister and the First Selectman, backed up by what they now call total recall. I could reproduce whole conversations like a phonograph record. The different thing about the new development—that both tickled and frightened me like I say—was that I had the odd feeling of becoming what I was reproducing.
They set looking neither at me nor at one another. They had put down their forks and were staring into their plates. They were beaten animals.
“I mean this is sort of effing the ineffable,” I continued as I opened the bottle of beer at the sink, “but if Maggie Klumber wants to be the news behind the news she’s got to learn to stop being all exposition, for Christ’s sweet sake.” Mrs. Punck brushed a tear away. I pushed remorselessly on. “And the absolute end is those travelogues about members of her family. Gawd,” I says rolling my eyes up. “I mean if she wants to do the ill-met-in-Timbuktu sort of thing, she’ll need better than relatives who are always sort of being transferred to Cleveland or winning cruises on TV shows, for the living love of God.”
I leaned back against the sink, beer in hand, drinking them in. They were a sight, disintegrating there. In my other hand I held a slice of freely sweating Swiss cheese I also dug out of the icebox and on which I munched as I took them in. George had a hand on either side of his plate, into which he kept on staring. He wore an expression often seen on the faces of cattle that don’t understand what is happening to them. Mare pressed the oilcloth tablecloth outward from her plate with both palms. Mrs. Punck worried in her round little paw a handkerchief that she took from her dress pocket. Otherwise no one moved. I took a loud gulp from the beer bottle and walked on into the living room.
Coached by a frown from Mare into taking a firm line George called out. “Ain’t you going to eat, Pa?”
“Not on an empty stomach,” I says and laughed out loud.
I would clip and mow near terraces or around swimming pools where guests were gathered and conversations going on, every chance I had, picking up something new in the way of a word or a inflection almost every day. It showed again how fast people can learn if they have to or want to. I would pause ostensubly to mop my brow or adjust the mower, my ear cocked and my brain a sponge. Or pruning shears in hand I would eavesdrop at open windows on those long telephone monologues from which I learned even more, practising in the privacy of my room or my automobile what I picked up, sometimes standing in front of my bureau mirror to rehearse gestures and stuff in mocking, yet magnetized, detail. Was an infection getting into the farmer’s bloodstream or were the farmer’s horizons being legitimately widened? Well may you ask.
Early one afternoon, as I was trimming privet for Pussy Beauseigneur with an electric clipper she bought me, I heard a cry from the garage. I dropped the clipper and hurried over.
She was standing in the middle of the garage pointing to a great big copper kettle on the floor. In it was a white semi-liquid concoction I didn’t recognize. It was bubbling faintly. “It’s a fish stew I fixed last night so I wouldn’t be rushed today. I’m having a dinner party tonight,” she wailed. “It’s sort of a bouillabaisse. I didn’t know it would turn this hot. Look at it. Just look at it.”
As we watched, the contents of the pot seemed to be slowly boiling, or as we both knew very well, fermenting. “It’s spoiled all right,” I said.
“And I have ten people coming. What’ll I do? I can’t take a chance. Probably poison them all.”
Mrs. Beauseigneur moaned and flung an arm upward into the air and gave a half-spin of despair without actually leaving my side, or turning away from me. I shifted from one foot to the other watching the bubbles rising lazily to the surface of the stew. It looked like lava. “What’ll I do, Frank?”
Now she did move away, walking out of the garage onto the driveway. When I joined her there she was standing forlornly on the gravel, looking off vaguely into the distance, but unmistakably in the direction of the farmhouse. The second story was just visible above the line of willows marking the edge of the Hollow. I stood by her side, my hands sunk to their thumbs in my hind pockets, saying nothing.
“If I had just half a dozen, say, fryers. Or even broilers. Harriet could manage it in time I think. But I’d have to have them right away.”
I pulled out my watch and glared at it. Two fifteen. I climbed into the Ford—I generally took it to work now—and drove slowly home. I muttered inarticulately under my breath that I hoped nobody would be in the salesroom.
The quarantine on snobs was still in affect you realize. I simply had no stomach for taking Mare on where that subject was concerned, no less touchy for Geneva’s spending the summer in Brazil as a cultural exchange student. In fact there were people who said she couldn’t bear to be in Woodsmoke with her broken heart, not convinced that she had won a scholarship and was living happily with a South American family, in keeping with the purpose of those international educational swaps. Mare herself suspected that Geneva had applied for the scholarship for the above romantic reasons. Anyway the war was still raging.
My heart sank when I pulled into the driveway. There were four cars lined up in it, including an MG and a Mercury station wagon. That many to once probably meant an indignation committee of women come to slug it out with Mare.
I recognized them instantly when I walked into the salesroom. They were a rather pathetic little splinter group whose point was that their husbands commuted the other way, away from New York and toward New Haven, where (except for one who worked at a silver factory in Wallingford) their connections with Yale University and its adjunks give them a status in direct opposition to the New York advertising crowd under blockade.
“My husband is engaged in research at the laboratory there,” a woman in a dirndl was telling Mare across the counter. “Not just medical, but general scientific research. How do you know efforts of his haven’t resulted in improved laying mash for your hens?”
“Next?”
A back door opened. Not the one to the slaughter room but one leading downstairs to the cellar, where George had spent the morning mending the sump pump. His fleshy face, acquired from his bygone mother and fattened up by 20 yrs. of married cooking, appeared in this doorway at floor level, as though washed up from the basement by rising flood waters.
“Mare?”
“Yes?” without turning around.
“Could you come down a sec when you’re finished waiting on trade? I want to show you something.”
He started to withdraw, or I should say recoil from the solid falanx of assembled females, a little like one cancelling an agreement to let balls be thrun at his head in a circus sideshow after a glimpse of the customers out front there. “Come here young man!” says one of the appelants, a tall woman with bobbed hair who was next in line. She stepped closer to the counter with an air of importance.
“I’m entertaining U.N. Personnel.” By means of a sign over her shoulder she drew from the other women a kind of insurrectionary scuffle, so that they closed ranks behind her as their spokesman for issues larger than the mere purchase of poultry. “They are members of a delegation from one of the still uncommitted nations, but how long my brother, who works for the U.N., my husband and I can guarantee their neutrality let alone hope to gain their loyalty for the Western camp I just don’t know, once they get wind of how minorities are discriminated against in a so-called democracy. Time is running out. I warn you.” She emphasized the point by rapping the counter with her nuckles. “Here is the question. Are we or are we not going to show at least some intelligent grasp of the challenges posed by the world in which we live, and live by our reason instead of our prejudices?”
“Hear! Hear!” someone behind her mumbled, and the rest of the women took the mumble up too.
There being no answer from the high tribunal but the deep, satisfied drags taken on the cigarette burning steadily toward Mare’s lips, the woman spoke more directly to George, whose head had remained obediently on the threshold wearing a pretty wretched expression you may be sure.
“Would you come up here please?”
The woman crooked a finger at him, as though luring him into some rite that didn’t have anything to do with pure logic at all. The head floated up off the floor to reveal a body after all, and he shuffled in, overalls caked with grease, and stood beside Mare to form the meeker 1/2 of the high tribunal.
“Sometimes men are more independent in their thinking than we women,” she says to what I knew to be a hundred and eighty pounds of good natured pulp. I myself remained in the background, wishing they would go away so I could begin my raid on the icebox for a woman in so much direr straights than them. I had come to appreciate George’s dread of these women, still I wished the boy had more grit. But seeing how miserable he was, and for my other reasons, I shouldered my way in behind the counter to put an end to the episode that wasn’t going to net nobody nothing anyway, with a vigor that I knew would please Mare. Frankly I was nervous about the way she was holding her fire where my consorting with the enemy was conserned. I wondered what her game was. I suspected, on the basis of past experience, that she was waiting for some chance to turn my guilt to real account—to catch me in some direct treason which she would then use to get a favor out of me. Up to now she had no grounds for saying my gardening jobs were anything but what I said, spying on the enemy.
“Look,” I says, facing the women, “there’s no stronger supporters of the U.N. than us, or stronger believers in the value of scientific research, but that don’t put no chickens in the icebox. Now We’ve heard your case and we’ll take it up as a family, which is how we decide who is justly entitled to the limited quantity of chickens we can butcher, pluck and dress here for sale on these premises. Now will you please trust us to do that? You will have our decision in due course. Thank you one and all. And now good afternoon.”
That was how I shooed them all out the door and into their cars. George went back downstairs, followed after a few minutes by Mare.
Spofford flew to work like a thief. Jerking a cooler door noiselessly open I was greeted by a substantial stock inside, but all wrapped in brown paper sacks with the names of customers for whom they were reserved written on them in black crayon. I closed that door and opened another. Luck. A jumble of fryers met my eye, freshly dressed but unwrapped—all open stock. I looked hurriedly around for a carton in which to put 6 or 7 but there wasn’t any. I could hear Mare downstairs consulting with George about the sump pump, or whatever it was he had wanted to show her. Then saying something about calling the plumber, in a way that suggested she might be on her way back up any second. I reached in and begun to load fryers on my arm like kindling wood. When I had several I shoved the icebox door shut with my knee and shot away on tiptoe, hearing Mare’s tread on the stairs. As I plowed through the swinging gate in the counter on my way to the door a couple of the chickens fell off my arms. I snatched them up off the floor by the necks. Just as I rose again and was turning the knob of the door I heard Mare’s voice behind me. “Have you got a minute to spare, Pa Spofford?”
