“I don’t know, Popper, I’ve never seen her enter a restaurant. I’m always the one who’s with her when she does.”
“That does it—upstairs. For myself I don’t care—paradox away. But I will not have you insulting your mother with language fit for nothing but a Mayfair drawing room. Upstairs!” he repeated with a flourish of his billy. That allusion to his neglect of my mother had gone home! I rose and, kissing her good night, went up to my room, glad to get away from the hurly-burly.
That Sunday evening at supper my mother remarked on the very trait in me that was unstringing my father, though touching on it obliquely in a reference to Nickie Sherman, whom we’d had to dinner the day before.
“He should learn that when you get too smart and clever, it isn’t much better than being what you boys call corny,” she said.
I nodded. “Excessive subtlety does negate itself. It is like being winked at with both eyes.”
“You’ll apologize to your mother for that last remark,” my father said, his face red from bad claret and a lifetime of plain damn exasperation.
“But I’m agreeing with her!” I protested.
“Yes, but she doesn’t know that. That poor woman doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. Agreeing with her is no excuse for talking over her head, sending her own words back over her head. I’ve warned you about this matter for the last time. Grieving her mother heart with words so elliptical—”
“What does elliptical mean?” my mother asked him.
“—so in excess of what she can comprehend—”
“Now who’s running her down?”
“Upstairs!”
“But I’ve got a date,” I objected.
“You should have thought of that sooner.”
Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my “sentence” without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox. It wasn’t till nine o’clock that I was let out tonight, after apologizing for the obscurity of my rejoinder, and promising never to do it again. By that time, of course, I was dressed. I was now half an hour late for my date with Crystal Chickering, toward whose house I legged it, as a consequence, with commendable pep.
Two
Crystal Chickering was a girl of my own age who lived on the other side of town. She was one of the milk-white daughters of the moon, but her father—and now we come to the last of the elements ranged against me—was a cracker-barrel philosopher. He dispensed homespun wisdom to readers of the Picayune Blade, our local evening paper, who wrote in asking for help on their everyday problems. He ran their letters together with his advice, usually packaged in maxims; of which he had volumes all (in notebooks of his own) cross-indexed under types of trouble. “I like to hit the nail on the head with a saw,” Chickering, who signed his column “The Lamplighter,” was fond of stating. He finished each column with an inspirational thought for the day which he called a Pepigram. That he was my favorite character went without saying, and I took care not to say it either to him or to his daughter. One had a lot of work to do on her yet before she would understand why her father was one’s favorite character. A lot of work. He was like those Currier and Ives prints which, having outgrown them, one then laps the field of Sensibility to approach again from behind and see as “wonderful.” She was often, not to make any bones about it, pretty wonderful herself. It was borne in on me, one evening when I was dropping allusions to Baudelaire, that she was under the impression it was the name of a refrigerator.
But I had jammed The Flowers of Evil through her by reading the bulk of it aloud, and tonight I brought over a new album of Boris Godunov.
Setting the records on the family phonograph, for we had the parlor to ourselves, I said, “Do you like Boris Godunov?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered from the sofa where she was settling herself. “Which composition of his is it?”
I heard the great ships baying at the harbor’s mouth, and chuckled, already aboard—clean out of this, escaped. I had that exhilarating sense of being a misfit that I could taste almost anywhere in Decency and that was, in a sense, my birthright.
Crystal closed her eyes and listened to the music. I stood over her, taking in the soft thighs and breasts, which together with the snowy arms and floral purity of the throat more than offset the normally discouraging upstate returns. She was wearing a shawl with a lunatic fringe, which I discreetly drew off her shoulders and spread across the grand piano where it belonged.
The music over, she expressed her pleasure in it. Then after a pause she said: “What is the purpose of marriage?”
“What?”
“That was our subject for discussion in Girls’ Club this afternoon.”
Crystal had, together with other girls at Biddle Junior College, been given a course in the social graces by a woman named Miss Bourdillon who told them that men liked women who could keep the conversational ball rolling. She was also faculty sponsor of the discussion club. The girls emerged from her tutelage using expressions like “not excluding” and “in which event,” which may have explained Miss Bourdillon’s own single status. The conversational ball here, at any rate, rolled briskly forward.
“What did you decide about marriage?” I asked.
“Its main purpose is the procreation and rearing of children. Everybody wants those. It would be terrible to go through life without them, don’t you agree?”
“Yes. There is only one thing worse than not having children, and that is having them.”
“Would you venture to say there are people who don’t know what they think about something until they’ve heard what they had to say?”
“I’d venture to say you can make anything dismal by finding reasons for it.”
“Just what does that mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to get married. I just—don’t—want to get married.”
“We’re having our first quarrel,” she said thoughtfully, as though noting a milestone in our progress.
To kiss into silence the lips from which such bromides fell, and turn them to the laughter and sighs for which they were intended, seemed precisely that formula for tinkling pleasures, for caught felicities, for which we are so sumptuously cued by nature. Especially charming, I thought, was Crystal’s habit of getting clichés just wrong. The first inkling I’d had of this amusing grace note in her was when she’d said, “I was mad as a March hare at you for not phoning.” Another time I’d been cool as a cucumber toward some proposal or other of hers. Sauces were rich as Croesus. And so on. When I fell down the cellar stairs and broke my arm, and damn near my neck, she said, “It couldn’t happen to a better guy.” I folded her in my arms, arm rather, and was the soul of forbearance while she told me that I had the most magnetic personality of any fellow she’d ever met.
One evening in midsummer I was early for a date we were to spend with nobody home at all, even upstairs. Her folks were at a testimonial dinner for the editor of the Pick, as her father the Lamplighter called the Picayune Blade. There was no answer when I rang the doorbell as George Jean Nathan, and, following the strains of the Love Duet from Tristan which seemed to be coming from somewhere in back, I walked through the empty house and found Crystal in the yard, with a portable phonograph spinning away on an inverted apple-crate. She herself was stretched out on a hammock with her eyes closed and one hand outflung above her head. I had a feeling she had seen me coming, quickly set the record going and hurried back to the hammock in time for me to see her lying on it in a trance of appreciation.
She was wearing yellow shorts and a red halter, the evening being warm. Her hair was gathered into a pony-tail knotted with a red silk ribbon. On the grass beneath her was an empty Coke bottle with a bent straw in it. She appeared at length to become aware of me standing there and she rolled her head toward me, her eyes fluttering open. “Oh, hello, Chick.”
I snapped a burning cigarette into the grass and walked up to her. She extended a white hand which I too
k in both mine and ate like cake. She rolled her head away again with a sigh.
“This music. Lawrence Melchior.”
On persuasions from myself, she rolled out of the hammock and onto a blanket lying on the ground nearby. She pulled the grass and, as one who knew good music, my hair. “This night.” It was darkening, the air wreathed with musks of summer, as if crushed from the grape of Dusk. A moon hung like a gong above the regiment of birches behind the house. We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel. It all happened more quickly than it takes to tell. Now I have only a few minutes of freedom … I thought in my throes … now a few seconds, now none.
I lay back like a clinker thinking, Oh, my God. Crystal moaned, “What have we done?”
I spent the next days scorching myself with the question, What if …? The sight of perambulators sent galvanic shocks through me. I would wheel one through an eternity of ridicule because I had succumbed to a single folly and that to the music of a composer whose work I had termed mucilaginous. Oh, my God. The great ships bayed at the harbor’s mouth—nevermore for me. For me nevermore those storied seas, those ports whose names toll in the heart like bells. I heard instead voices, local in origin and of an almost hallucinatory force: “Shotgun wedding, you know.” “You mean Chick Swallow? The one who was always …?” “Yes, the old flaneur himself.” (Flaneur: One who strolls aimlessly; hence, an intellectual trifler.) Think of a boulevardier pushing a baby carriage!
I hid in my room with the door locked most of the time. Once I stood at my dresser mirror and looked at myself. My face was tortured on one side, like a good actor’s. I contorted it into deliberately gruesome expressions of woe so as to give everything an exaggerated and theatrical cast, and, by this means, make what I was worrying about seem to have no basis in fact. My plowed hair, rolling eyes and dying-fish mouth did create an atmosphere of relative absurdity, and I smiled: of course all this would blow over. Six months from now I would be laughing at it. I had just about convinced myself of that when the idea of tallied months struck me with fresh horror and I was back where I started.
There were the voices again. I tried at first to drown them out with a phonograph I had in my own room, but there were no compositions which could not, by deplorable associations, return me to my crise. And the voices continued: “You mean that guy who was always knocking conventions?” The same. “He seemed to be that type that they call the carriage trade. Well, I guess now …” No! Never! I would go to Lethe first, I would twist wolfsbane. Oh, I would pay the last farthing, but I would go hence. I would slip into the hospitable earth, and among her dumb roots and unscandalizing boulders make my bed.
All this distraction threw into illumination again what I had felt that other evening earlier in the year: that Crystal Chickering was not for me. I must under no condition marry this girl.
I was walking down the street one afternoon during the cooling-off period when I saw a sight that gave the winch of agony an extra turn. Nickie Sherman was approaching. He had our Zeitgeist well at heel, for, one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other swinging a blackthorn stick he was affecting those days, he drifted up and said in his most somnambulistic manner, “Hi.”
Stark, staring mad, I answered, “Hi.”
“What cooketh?”
Suddenly, instead of regretting the encounter, I saw a way of turning it to advantage. I would remove the sting from having to get married (if such was the pass things would come to) by taking the line that that was what I wanted. This would need a little groundwork, and to lay it I suggested we drop in at the Greek’s, which was a block from there, for some coffee. We did. The tables at which it was our wont to dally in the cool of the evening were in their accustomed places outside, but this was the heat of the day and we went in. Several women gabbled at a table about a movie they had been to. “Matinee idle,” I murmured to Nickie as we drew our chairs to sit down at ours.
We ordered coffee. Then Nickie, who had laid the blackthorn across an empty chair, asked again, “Was ist los?”
“I’ve been having an affair,” I said, glancing matter-of-factly around.
“And?”
I shrugged. “It gets to be rather a nuisance. We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother. It’s six of one and a half dozen of the other, really.” I shifted some condiments about on the tabletop. “Shaw makes matrimony sound rather attractive with that Puritanical description he has of it somewhere. I’m sure you remember it.”
Nickie watched the Greek shamble up with our coffee. When Nachtgeborn had set the cups down and waddled off on his duck feet, Nickie said, “Shaw is great up to a point, and then one thinks, ‘Oh, Pshaw!’”
“I believe it’s he who describes marriage as combining a maximum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity. He’s quite right—it is a sensual institution. I’ve half a notion to get married myself,” I added vagrantly, stirring my coffee.
Nickie’s problem was to get back in the conversation. I could sense him mulling my gambit as he sipped, keeping his lean, handsome face averted. At last he appeared to have something worked out, and I knew that what he said next would determine whether I would have to blow my brains out or not.
“Yes. The logistics of adultery are awful. Matrimony is a garrison, but one that has its appeal to a man out bivouacking every night,” said that probable virgin.
Freeze it there, I told myself. I knew that if a neat way of putting a rebuttal had occurred to him first, instead of a concurrence, he would have taken that; but it hadn’t and I was to that extent in luck. My object was to get Nickie into a good frame of mind for my armed nuptials, if any—a viewpoint from which he could see me, not as ridiculous and bourgeois going down the aisle, but heathen to the end. I had to come out of this making sense as a boulevardier who had said “I do.” So I let him pick up the marbles.
“That’s neat, Nickie. By God that’s neat. Put it in the play. By the way, how did you make out in New York?” I asked him. Nickie had decided to become a playwright and had spent the summer revising Wise Acres (and running into New York to see producers).
Instead of showing pleasure he looked at me peevishly and sucked at his coffee. “You’ve been to see my old man again. That’s how you know I’ve been in New York.”
“No, I haven’t, Nickie,” I lied, for I had been back to see his father in response to another SOS (Save Our Son). “You told me you planned to go—remember?”
“I can tell by your pants you’ve been there. He’s got this crotchet of pressing pleats out, because he hates them so. It’s his trade-mark. Yours are pressed out.”
“Sweet jumping Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Why don’t you get a job as a detective? You don’t miss much, do you?”
“So what did he want this time?”
“He’s worried about what’s going to become of you. I told him not to—you’d come out all right. This running off to New York all the time shows initiative. So what’s happened so far on the drama?”
Nickie crossed his legs and turned away from me, a sure sign that something intimate was coming.
“I gave Wise Acres to an agent. His name is Al Roquefort, and he’s very acute. He’s already sent it back for revisions. Evidently you do have to compromise with popular tastes—put in movement, plot and that sort of thing. It needs a lot of work. Are you game for it?”
“That depends. I’m going to Dartmouth next year after all.” I could have kicked myself, for I had to add mentally, through mentally clenched teeth, “If I don’t have to get married.”
Nickie nodded. “Well, we’ll see what we’ll see. Meanwhile if you don’t want to fuss with it any more I’m sure it’s O.K. with you if I go ahead on my own? Roquefort tells me royalties are amicably worked out between collaborators on the basis of how much each has done.”
So I was able to purchase further tolerance from Nickie by permitting the shrinkage of my already dwindled equity in th
e play. I didn’t care if I ever saw the script again but I didn’t let him know that. Instead I answered handsomely, “You go right ahead, Nickie. And as you say, we’ll see what we’ll see. I’ve got to toddle.”
As to my sex life, I was to see what I was to see that evening, the interval of suspense being then, calculably, over. I had a date with Crystal at seven-thirty. As I left the Greek’s, a clock in a nearby church steeple struck four. In three and a half hours I would know what I was leaving purgatory for—heaven or hell.
Crystal was upstairs dressing when I arrived, so I sat down alone in the living room to wait. I twiddled my thumbs at a rate not normally associated with that act. Nobody came. I rose and walked to the window, from where I could look into the back yard. The hammock was occupied by a saucepan half full of string beans; another Coke bottle lay on its side on the grass. A woodpecker drilled into my head from a maple outside, pausing every now and then to spit wood over his shoulder. A door opened behind me and Crystal’s father, the shirtsleeve philosopher, entered from his study. He was in shirtsleeves.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said after a greeting, and made for a chair.
“Yes, sir.”
Chickering was a red-haired man of medium height, with horn-rimmed glasses and a forelock derived from Sandburg. He took a Cogswell chair facing the one into which I sank, frowned, and revolved in his fingers a cockleshell ash tray on a table beside him. It was, like the resort pillows and wall thermometers in the shape of keys to cities which also garnished the living room, a souvenir of some past family holiday; together they left me ill with premonition.
“What do you want to talk to me about, Mr. Chickering?” I asked.
“I think you know.”
I met this with a gulp and the word “What?” brought out in a dry treble. I heard the ceiling creak under a footstep overhead. That foolish girl had confessed her condition to her parents! Even now she and her mother were together up there, hysterically promenading.
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