The Passionate Witch, page 17
“Young girls!” shouted Mr Wooly, beside himself. “Ha! Ha! You, you” — he sought for the name of something he despised thoroughly and found it — “you fat old bowl of custard,” he shouted. “And don’t show your teeth at me.” He had noticed that she had very white, large teeth — teeth she was proud of — so with the worst of his suppressed nature again rising to complete expression, he sneered: “Yellow teeth! Corncob teeth!”
You can tell a woman her virtue is imaginary, that her brains are soup, that the location of her hips is too near the ground, that her eyes are crossed or wall, that the gray is showing in her hair or even that she is in danger of growing bald, and all you may get is a superior, tolerant smile; but tell her that her teeth are yellow and you invite your own destruction; they cannot take it. Only dimly had Mr Wooly’s intuition seen this; he was surprised at the success of his terrible jibe; so was everybody else, including Alice, that attendant, who now came on the scene at a fast dogtrot. But Alice arrived only in time to see the fat black-haired woman charge the head of Mr Wooly. There was no battle, of course, not any more battle than there could have been between a nervous cabbage striving to keep its roots in the ground and a famished cow. She peeled Mr Wooly’s head with amazing speed. It was easier than pulling the outer leaves off the cabbage. One yank at the hat and it, the yellow wig, the black veil, all together, came instantly off, and there he was, Mr Wooly, or the pathetic, wild-eyed head of him, smudged with rouge and mascara, defenseless, foolish.
“A man!” howled some female ass.
“Mr Wooly,” screamed Betty.
The box had been opened, and from thence he was dragged, slapped, pushed, sent headlong toward his bedroom in his pathetic shorts, his fish-belly legs with their wiry décor of black hairs. What a sight! As if they were the myrmidons of the Ogpu and he the last of the Romanoffs caught adding arsenic to a commissar’s caviar, they flung him into his dungeon so that he fell upon the stone floor. Crash! His door closed behind him.
Chapter 19
The Trial before Judge Bert Gilead
Judge Bert Gilead knew, of course, before he left his residence that his first case this Tuesday morning would be that of Mr T. Wallace Wooly. He knew it but — and here he was in agreement with most of the population of Warburton — he found it difficult to believe that Mr T. Wallace Wooly had actually been arrested disguised as a woman in the Turkish bath of the Hotel Dearborn. Giving his iron-gray bifurcated beard a last combing before the mirror in the hall, Judge Gilead said as much to his wife. “Bertha,” he said, “Chief Williams says they say he did, but I don’t believe it. In the first place, our ideal citizen, our number-one civic inspiration, never even thought of an improper thing in his life and, in the second place, if he did he wouldn’t have the enterprise to put it into effect.”
His wife, who was in the living room, replied: “One might think from your tone of voice that not having indecent thoughts is something to be ashamed of. Enterprise, is it? It takes no enterprise to be bad, Bertie; the path of iniquity is broad and smooth: you just let go and slide.”
Judge Gilead let his thought briefly review his most recent iniquity — the good book, the flowers, the long, boring conversations on elevated topics, the fifty-mile drives to see double features that bored him until all the hairs on his head and chin seemed to be growing inward, the cautious hand holding, the kiss that had to be undertaken as if it were something else, the dinner with wine in Manhattan, the bracelet. And so to bed. Judge Gilead thought all this much more like climbing an Alp than descending a chute the chutes. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that she didn’t know what she was talking about, that successful sin, also, alas, took character, perseverance, strategy, but another thought crossed this one, and he said to his invisible wife: “How true, my dear! How well you put it!”
“And as for Mr Wooly,” she said, “how do we know he hasn’t been leading a double life for years? Instead of mourning his poor wife, what does he do? Carouses in public bars; that’s what he does. And look at that secretary of his, Betty What’s-her-name.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s too pretty to be just a secretary. Besides that, he’s just coming into the age.”
“What age?”
“Of peek, pinch and leer,” said his wife. “But the fifties are nastier.”
“Good God!” The judge was genuinely shocked. “Where do you get such ideas?”
“You’re such an innocent, Bertie,” she said softly. “You’re so naïve.” She came to the door now, a medium-sized, middle-aged female in a gray tweed suit, brown hair braided and wreathed round her head, her thin face chilled by an expression of sardonic intellectuality. She directed shows at the Warburton Little Movement Theater, was secretary of the Dramatic Revolters, Inc., or, as the judge in secret called them, the revolting dramatists. She was (unknowingly) in this moment playing a role that is usually a forbidden expression in our American civilization — the role, that is, of a female pighead, an opinionated ass in petticoats, though God knows there are enough of her. The unwritten law, woven so pervasively in the fabric of our mœurs that we hardly realize it is there, is not that fair woman is good or pure or anything of the sort. You may impugn her character, even her appearance (except her teeth) — and that is passed by the invisible censor who holds final and absolute veto power in all publications, all theaters, all radio and picture studios — but you may not ever impugn her ‘intuition’, that is to say, her instinctive, natural, inalienable right to intellectual superiority. The American woman in American literature always knows more, is more cunning, more sophisticated, more subtle, than her husband — never mind who he is, what he does. . . .
Why Judge Gilead married Bertha, his wife, I do not know. I have not the least idea. To begin with, she had no bosom, and if I were given the choice of marrying either a — let me see — say a Peking duck or a woman without a bosom, I would plump for the duck, so to speak. Perhaps Judge Gilead himself did not know why he married his wife, that flat and bony creature with the slightly inflamed nostrils, the nervous brain. But then who, of observers, of participants, knows anything about matrimony’s motivations? For all we know marriage is indeed ordained in heaven — by a deity with one of those private, dead-pan senses of humor. . . .
It was Mrs Gilead’s fond illusion that her husband’s temperature reading hovered around that of a normal, medium-sized fish’s because of his attitude toward her. This, of course, is a perfect example of the working of female intuition. “He lusts not for me; therefore, he is indifferent to feminine charms, the worm,” as the Finnish folk poet has it.
Judge Gilead, as a matter of historic fact, used his position, his really fine mind, his money, whatever strength he could muster, in a constant hunt for young and bosomy companions. He got in beard and all where better-looking, wittier, more charming but less earnestly persevering and responsible hunters failed. It was not only that his approach was gradual and on an exalted plane — that he could, for instance, test the silkiness of silk and make this seem like a profound comment on the infinite, rather than a mere animal scrabbling about for an animal objective — no, it was that he took all responsibility. The absurdity, the humiliation, the moral guilt, was not merely shared by our Judge Gilead in his many peccadilloes; it was all his. All. His newest, youngest darling, abandoned to her reminiscent and solitary couch, was left not only content, so that her veins coursed gentle music, but was left also — a guiltless victim. What could be sweeter in this vale of cause and effect and inexorable time? Echoes answer what?
So Mrs Gilead, his wife of these twelve years, came out into the hall and smiled her superior, sardonic smile on the innocent, bearded child. There were times that she found it within herself to wish that he were more ardent, less a cool-blooded child, but after all, who had perfection in matrimony, anyway? She had, like Honey Pot, done, she admitted to herself, fairly well.
“You are so learned,” she said to her husband now. “And you know so little of the world: how charming.”
He brushed her brow lightly with his two-pointed beard, and now belatedly he noticed that she wore her hat — or rather her cap — a blue beret. Very aesthetic and intellectual. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“To court,” she said.
He looked his surprise.
“Do you think I would miss Mr Wooly’s hearing? How little you know of women!”
As has been said, Bertha Gilead was no heroine for a woman’s magazine or radio serial, either. She was a pig-head. She knew all. She knew she did. Thus her face, her walk, her tone of voice and choice of words.
“Very well,” said Judge Gilead, little knowing what that hearing held in store for him.
The court was at the back on the first floor of City Hall, the new brick colonial-style building in the Civic Center. It was new, but it was old, for all courtrooms are old. The grinning, crippled dwarf hobbles through them the first day and they are, presto change, old. She, the dwarf, is man’s justice. She carries with her a hand mirror so that she may gaze upon her own hideous features from time to time but never with understanding, only with self-satisfied smirks. Justice! But thou shalt not judge! The prohibition is laid down flatly, without equivocation. Thou shalt not. Yet here sits man judging between — between what? Between that which is not comparable. Comparing ostriches with minnows, blaming both for the lack of what the other has! “Thou, crocodile, why singest thou not? Observe the canary, with a mouth, so much smaller than thine, hear how he sings, how sweetly! And thou! Ten years in prison, crocodile!”
The courtroom had a municipal smell. This is also the smell of government in all parts of this planet, a smell commingled of the smells of cement, of chloride of lime, of human sweat, of dusty books, of an impersonal lassitude — the smell of life that has momentarily stopped. Twenty thousand learned volumes may be written to prove that to live governmentally, to give all choice and, in the name of its preservation, dear liberty herself, to government is the best, not to say the only way; and yet one good normal set of nostrils applied to the task of judging the municipal smell can report: “Rotten” and “Evil.”
To Judge Gilead his job was his job. Had he believed in justice he would long since have left his bench. But he was not a bad man. He did not hate his fellows. On the contrary. So he equated his own security with his instinctive, cynical desire to free every culprit brought before him, save only those caught in cruelties to children and animals — crimes which made him frantic. For the rest he only saw himself out of luck.
His desk was on a platform at one end of the courtroom. He came to it through his own door. His wife, he noted, was seated already in the middle of the front row. The people were already in place.
A policeman shouted something or other, and everybody stood up, then sat down again as Judge Gilead sat down. The judge read a paper laying before him. He looked at Chief Williams and said, “Well?”
“Charley White,” said Williams. Charley White, a dreary, lonesome drunk stood up and gazed at the judge, who mumbled something about vagrancy, resisting an officer, and so on. Guilty? “Guilty,” Charley White said. “Thirty days,” said Judge Gilead. “Suspended. Go on home, Charley. Your faithful wife awaits you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Judge,” Charley said. Charley was not new to this court. “Thanks, Judge,” he said.
“Go away,” Judge Gilead told him. “Next?”
There were some traffic cases; a couple of skinny boys, dazed from a night in the lockup, which was in the cellar of this building, contended that in borrowing the car of their neighbor they had meant no harm and were returning it when arrested.
They were lectured and released. Judge Gilead, so the clerk, the police, the hangers-on noticed, was not at his humorous best this morning. Maybe because Mrs Gilead was sitting there smack in front of him, keeping her eye peeled; maybe because in contrast with the Wooly case all else was small potatoes.
Mr Wooly sat in the front row, too, next to a policeman. From time to time Judge Gilead glanced at Mr Wooly with the expression of a man who is trying to believe his eyes. They had known each other for years. They belonged to the same organizations, including the fire department, but nothing the judge had known about Mr Wooly had prepared him for the scandal of the Turkish baths. Of course there was that rescue of the second Mrs Wooly, before she was the second Mrs Wooly, from the Hotel Monroe, and there was the now-current story of how tight Mr Wooly had got himself at the Marlborough, but as had so many others, the judge had thought Mr Wooly’s lifelong sobriety had cracked under the strain of sudden grief, and he had defended Mr Wooly against the sneers of his wife and other intolerant critics.
“Henry Tiddle,” said Judge Gilead, getting on with it. (Mr Wooly’s case would be next.)
Henry Tiddle stood up. He straightened out his various joints carefully, as if fearful that a more abrupt adjustment would result in serious dislocations. He started talking at once: “Judge,” he said, “I wasn’t doing more than forty miles an hour, and all at once this snot nose Ferdy Lyons — ”
“You mean Officer Lyons?” asked Judge Gilead.
“Now you know who I mean, Judge; we were all boys together,” Henry Tiddle said. “Ferdy Lyons. O.K., he comes up and says I am driving too fast. . . .”
“What’s the matter with your car?” Judge Gilead asked him mildly.
“Nothing,” Henry Tiddle said. “It’s practically brand new.”
“And you were doing seventy.”
“Well, I was doing maybe fifty-five.”
“Where were you going when Officer Lyons stopped you?”
“Straight home,” Henry said virtuously. “Like an arrow.”
Judge Gilead looked over at Officer Lyons. “What’s your version?” he asked confidently.
“He was tearing along at better than seventy-five miles an hour, your honor, and lit up like a sign. I ast him what the so-and-so was up; do you see? He answered fresh as paint that’s what he was going to find out. So when I ast him to esplain himself he wouldn’t. So I ast him was he going to a fire? He said that’s where he was going — to a fire. And she’s six feet tall,” he says.
Judge Gilead looked concerned. His eye ran along the front row, skimmed over the intent intellectual face of his wife, paused a moment when they met the large brown eyes belonging to Mr Wooly. Mr Wooly looked dazed. He was. His own thoughts would have been sufficient to fill his mind this morning, but he had also the thoughts of everyone within thought-shot of him all mixed up. He was mentally deafened, as one might auricularly be deafened in a boiler shop going full blast. His head felt like a telephone exchange with all messages mixed together into one set of earphones. . . . Nevertheless, his mind picked up and understood one thought, apparently originating in the mind of the judge himself, and this thought was: “Honey Pot is not six feet tall, not more than five ten. . . . Wonder where she is this minute. Probably in bed, thinking. . . . Imagine this odd specimen, this damp scarecrow, being her husband, sharing her. . . .” It faded out of Mr Wooly’s mind, and for a time there was only confusion there; then, glancing along that front row, meeting the eyes of Mrs Gilead, he received another fragment — hers: “Just like Bert’s innocence to let the man go with a mere reprimand. . . . Oh, Bert, be a man, be stern, be just. . . .”
Mr Wooly’s troubles were so many, so complicated, that for once in his timid spirit a low craftiness stirred. He remembered Honey Pot, that tall blonde, remembered her lewd and nefarious meditations as he had received them in his own mind while being cooked in that electric cabinet. He realized that Judge Gilead, this honored fellow citizen of his, was about to sentence the husband he’d outwitted and dishonored to a month in the jail so that he, the judge, might more conveniently continue his intrigue with the man’s wife. It came to Mr Wooly that Judge Gilead would want no part of this low conspiracy to be brought to the attention of the community, not to mention his wife and Honey Pot’s Henry. But what good would any of this do Mr Wooly himself unless Judge Gilead knew Mr Wooly knew all?
“Tiddle,” said Judge Gilead, leaning forward a little, using a solemn tone of voice, “Warburton has suffered too much of late from reckless drivers. You say you were speeding home — and at nine o’clock in the evening. If you had told me, Tiddle, that you were speeding away from home, say to some night spot to go on carousing, I would have been inclined to credit your story in this and all its other details, but as you have related it your story lacks credible motivation, Tiddle. First place, you were somewhat stimulated, to say the least. In the second place, it was early in the evening; in the third place, you were speeding homeward. “Why? To exhibit your deplorable condition to your wife as something of which to be proud, like an increase in salary or a wreath of laurel just awarded your laudable head by the sales manager? Come, Tiddle, why were you rushing homeward?”
Tiddle stood there silent, uncertain, burning up. Mr Wooly heard the busy Tiddle thought. “Why was I racing home like an arrow? Because I was two days ahead of time, and I meant to find out once and for all how she spends her evenings while I’m on the road working myself to death. . . . I was rushing to find out who in hell is this here Bertie she talks about in her sleep, but how can I say that out in court about my own wife?”
Meanwhile Judge Gilead, reflectively stroking that divided beard of his, thoughtfully shook his head. His eyes wandered from contemplation of his victim, met Mr Wooly’s, and the latter heard the judicial train of thought clearly for a minute or two: “Tiddle, my friend, it’s a shame to do it, but somehow in this world the only way to treat Tiddles is the way I’m going to treat you. . . . Because I’m the malefactor here I have less than no sympathy for you, Tiddle, much less. What a face, to be sure, what a face; like the south end of a picked chicken, Tiddle, except that hasn’t snaggleteeth. Out of my sight, thou cuckold. . . .” As he thought these criminal and heartless thoughts Judge Gilead looked the picture of virtue.
