With my back to the wall, I shut my eyes and said through gritted teeth, “I’m going to become a father again.”
“Come and sit by me.”
I let her displace my hair and chafe my bones a bit, this being after all her house, then climbed down off her lap and said, “Nickie will be here any minute, and I guess Lila’s already gone down.”
Lila was nineteen now, and desperately worldly. If reminded she had once been a tease she would not have known what you were talking about, and I’m sure she was ashamed that her brother was the Lamplighter, though temporarily. Her attitudes derived from the cinema: expressive tics of lip and eyebrow, a way of looking at you out of eyes bisected by their lids, in the manner of Bankhead, or sitting with a cigarette held burning over one shoulder, with rather a play of the fingers, as who should be Claudette Colbert. Anybody would have recognized her sources—except Nickie. He never went to the movies. She thought the worst of everybody in order not to be considered naïve. She spoke with a nasal tone and a rational indifference. “What hempened?” she asked when Nickie arrived half an hour late, as though nothing could matter less. “The cab had a flat,” Nickie explained, bending down to kiss her, his lips reaching a little toward her as I had seen them reach toward the countless cups of coffee which we had drunk, in vain it seemed, at the Samothrace.
On straightening up, Nickie got an eyeful of the living room and glanced at me. Then he looked at Lila with enlarged eyes, and the two exchanged a charitable smile. “They’ve done the room over,” she said.
I moved in with a plate of small cheese dreams, carrot sticks and codfish balls on toothpicks; scalloped paper napkins reading Name your poison followed closely. Cocktails were tendered in glasses bearing the legend “You don’t have to be crazy to get along with us but it helps.” I saw Nickie take this in, and I read my own with a smile.
“I get a kick out of these,” I said, waggling a foot on which was a Congress slipper.
Crystal said, “Excuse me a sec, I’ve got to look at my meat,” and bustled off to the kitchen.
“Won’t we be eating awfully early?” Lila said.
“It’s not what time people eat that counts,” I said. “It’s what they are inside.”
Nickie wore the Brooks Brothers gray flannel, with a knit blue tie hitched between the easily flaring wings of a white button-down collar, and I thought as I watched him that if he could have been wedged without unreasonable pain and sacrifice into one of those time capsules, the future would have a good notion of our ideal of the fastidious offhand.
My conversation so far had been preparatory. I cleared my throat to get the main show under way.
“Chris had a little accident in the kitchen today,” I began. “She, uh, she was waxing the floor when she slipped and sat smack down in the polish. She said she didn’t mind the fall so much, but it put her behind in her work.”
“Who?” Nickie asked.
“Chris. Crystal.”
“Was she hurt bad?”
“No, I said she wasn’t hurt at all.… The thing—” I slid up in my chair and got a grip on my drink. “The thing she complained about mainly was that it put her behind in her work. Her behind.”
“Please don’t let her go to any trouble on our account.”
“No, it’s quite all right. Hell …” I turned and yelled to the kitchen, “Anything I can do to help, sweets?”
“No,” Crystal called back, “thanks just the same, darling. Everything is okie doke.”
I glared at Lila for not having offered to help out there, because after all she lived here, too. Of course she did work. She had a job as stenographer in a downtown office, and there was a mischievous story circulated there that on her first day the boss called her into his office and said, “Miss Swallow, take a letter,” and she answered, “Where to?”
Crystal came back and sat down and picked up her cocktail, smiling at us with a flushed expression as she smoothed back a damp strand of hair.
“Chick here tells us you had a nasty spill,” Nickie said to her.
“What?”
“I said,” I said, sliding up still higher in my chair, “that you slipped and sat down on the floor wax and that it put you behind in your work. Put your behind in—Oh, skip it.” The conversation was like some crazy folding chair I couldn’t get straight. And by now I didn’t give a good goddam who got what, and was ready to bail out. Then Crystal laughed heartily. She got the joke even in its mangled form, lacking, I suppose, the subtlety of mind that barred my guest from grasping it. At this point the parody began really to take hold.
There was a brief silence, during which Lila looked out of the window and said, “Getting dork.” I suggested to Crystal that we time dinner so we could hear Henry Aldrich, which I told Nickie was our favorite radio program. Throughout dinner, to which I invited Nickie to sit down with his coat off like I was and pitch in, I subjected them to the hail of corn I had prepared and whatever I could inject impromptu.
“Why,” I asked, ladling out gravy to all, “do we know that the Pilgrim women used make-up?” When they could not say, I reminded them of the compact on the Mayflower. I recalled the darky who thought that a fortification was two twentifications; asked what the one strawberry had said to the other strawberry. “Give up?” “I certainly do,” said Nickie, who was wilting nicely. “The one strawberry said to the other: ‘If we hadn’t been in that bed together, we wouldn’t be in this jam.’”
“Chick!” Crystal was choking with laughter. “You make me blush from top to bottom.”
“That’s only halfway.”
I gave them no quarter. I offered to use the word “miscellaneous” in a sentence, and though but scantily encouraged, went on, “Of the two Axis dictators in the last war, Hitler is still remembered but miscellaneous largely forgotten.” My electrician phoned during dinner about some imminent work, and on being asked as I returned to the table what that was all about, I answered: “We’re having extra sockets put in. My psychiatrist says I need more outlets.”
Crystal helped give our worldling a view of the mucilaginous whole that lay in wait for those who wed. There was an old family joke of the Chickerings’ to which I’d been subjected countless times when seated at their board, just as Nickie was now at mine, and which might have scared me off had not a stronger cable bound me. “Dear,” I remarked, buttering a roll, “I must say you don’t make the biscuits Mother used to.” Her answer came as expected, “No, and you don’t make the dough Father did.”
Nickie Sherman was visibly on the ropes—blanching at the vistas I had laid open. I gave him the coup de grâce over coffee.
We had that with dessert in the living room. Crystal had baked an apple pie instead of the pandowdy, and I had worked up a little dido for that. When she was in the kitchen getting it out of the oven, I glanced furtively back there and whispered with a chuckle to the others, “See this?” I was holding in my hand a splinter of wood about two inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. “When Chris answers a question I’m going to ask her about the dessert, watch what I do. This’ll be a good one on her. I hope you’ve left room for pie.”
I put the splinter back in my pocket and was whistling innocently when she returned with the pie. I cut everybody a slice, and when I came to Crystal I looked over questioningly at her. “How big a piece do you want?” She was watching her weight and I knew what she would say. “Oh, just give me a sliver.”
I reached into my pocket and handed her the splinter of wood.
Nickie smiled, but it was the kind of smile with which money is cheerfully refunded. Lila tossed a lock of hair out of her eye and said, “Mreally.”
I sat with my legs stretched out after coffee and loosened my belt and the top button of my pants. I patted my stomach contentedly. “There’s nothing like a pleasant evening with friends,” I said. “I suppose we’ll spend a lot of them together.”
After about another quarter of an hour of this, Nickie glanced covertly at his wrist
watch.
“Now for some games!” I said.
I sprang to my feet and shepherded them through a sequence of parlor pastimes which included something called “Going to Mr. Doodle’s,” and another named “Getting your partner’s goat,” of which I will forgo the details. At twenty minutes to eleven I looked at my own watch and observed unhappily that we had missed Henry Aldrich. “I get a kick out of that kid. He gets into more trouble.”
“Mreally.”
“Sis?”
No answer.
“Sis, be sure and lock all the doors before you come up, won’t you?” I said. “Chris and I had better get along to bed. Leave the dishes till tomorrow, dear,” I told Crystal.
Crystal rose and joined me, and as we paused to say our smiling good nights, our heads were in that juxtaposition which is favored in advertisements of male hair oil. I had done my best. The picture we made standing together capped the climax, a tableau of Domesticity beyond which Nickie’s own imagination must carry him; beyond which lay the changeless dramas of incarceration, the certain family reunions at Christmas time and the annual motor trips on which were acquired the mementos that encircled him, and the rumpus rooms finished in that wallboard that resembles Ry-Krisp.
The effort had left me spent. Upstairs in our bedroom, I sat slumped in an armchair, breathing heavily, like an actor after a taxing performance. But I was happy. Everything had gone off beautifully. Now surely I could get that sonofabitch off my doorstep, and for good. I glowed with inner satisfaction. The seed had been sown. There remained only to gather in the harvest.
The harvest was not long in coming, and it was two-fold.
Before undressing, I went back downstairs for a book I was reading, which I’d left on a table there. The living room was empty. A murmur of voices from the back porch indicated that the lovers had slipped out to where it was “dork.” Perhaps a critical meeting? Nickie breaking it off without losing any time? Nickie explaining that marriage wasn’t for him? Ha! More than likely, that. I chortled to myself as I stole eagerly into the kitchen, a maneuver lubricated by the fact that I was in stocking feet, and stood in the shadows by the open door to listen.
“He’s oaful,” Lila was saying. “Just oaful.”
“I know.” (Pause.) “You hear of people getting stodgy after marriage, but my Christ, I never dreamed it could happen this fast.”
Perfect. I chuckled to myself, there in the dark, imagining the pained frown on our hero’s face as he groped for a way of leading up to the break. Get you back where you belong to the fictive halls of Wise Acres, I thought, not without sympathy. Of course I was doing him a favor too; and Lila. All of us.
“Is he that bad all the time?” Nickie’s voice came next.
“All the time.”
It was a lie, but why mind her adding a few strokes of her own to the caricature? It was the cream of the jest. The whole thing was rich. I held my sides with laughter.
“And, Nickums, it’s getting worse every day. Oh, Nickie, there are times when I think I’ll go crazy in this house.”
“It just didn’t seem him I saw in there tonight. I mean what it can do to a man.”
Swell. All beautifully according to plan. I had done what I’d set out to: given him a glimpse of convention as that omelette from which the egg of Individuality can never again be retrieved. Well, we wouldn’t be seeing much of our Individual around here after tonight, I’d be bound. But let’s hurry this thing along; I was getting tired, standing there, and a little cold.
“I understood it could be deadly—marriage I mean. But to become fossilized so soon …”
“It isn’t just that. He acts like—like such an American!” Lila brought out in a sudden burst of emotion. Rare for her, all this. The dam had broken. “Oh, Nickie, I can’t stand it here another day!”
Here a slight irregularity in the sequence as I had foreseen it began to creep in. There was a sudden soft rustle on the porch, as of head taken to breast, of Youth caught up. “You won’t have to. I’ll take you out of ail this, Liebchen—NOW,” said my hero.
“Oh, sweetest Nickie, right away?”
An affirmation softly gasped. Then another rustle with its sense of increasing voltage, out there.
“Nickie, lamb … But—Nickie, how’ll we—I mean what would you …?”
An interesting question and I’m glad you asked it, thought I, clenching my fists. One fist rather, for I had the book tightly clutched in the other.
“I don’t know, but we’ll manage.”
“Of course I have my job, which I can keep—for a while.”
“We’ll work it out. But I know one thing: I’ll see you die in the cold before I let you rot in this drizzle.”
I drew back my arm and hurled the book down the length of the corridor into the dining room, where it hit the wall with a splat and dropped to the floor, causing a window shade to fly up. I had the feeling of having had my head bashed in with bad Scott Fitzgerald.
“It’ll never happen to us, will it, Nickie?”
“What we saw tonight? Never!”
Feeling my vascular condition to be such that I probably glowed in the dark, I turned on my stockinged heel and strode out of there. Leaving the book where it lay, neatly halved, on the floor, I padded through the vestibule and on upstairs.
Halfway up, I paused to consult at a wall mirror hanging there. I was arrested by the face which confronted me. Only yesterday it had belonged to a youth who never doubted he would tour the pines of Rome and the Swiss Alps, up which last he would go in the spirit of the real Scott Fitzgerald, piling into a funicular with a gay party carrying bottles of Neuchâtel to settle a bet whether the wine had more spritz on the mountaintops. Now it was that of a community figure who pointed the stem of his pipe at people and made them define their terms, and who would eventually lead motorcades to the state capital on behalf of much-needed legislation.
I dragged myself upstairs by hand as much as by foot, pulling myself along by the balustrade toward the bedroom, where I received the second reward of the evening.
Crystal was sitting at the dresser brushing her hair.
“You were wonderful tonight, darling,” she said. “Such a card, and so nice to me. I think we’ve finally got the house looking like a home, too, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, going into the closet to take off my clothes. I stayed in there quite a while, reflecting guiltily that of course the souvenirs would have to stay where they were: I couldn’t tell her that it had all been a burlesque. You couldn’t tell a pregnant woman that. I emerged at length in my nightie and bitterly adjusted a few windows. Crystal was already between the sheets. She was gold as midday, and when she stretched she suggested fruit about to burst its skin.
“I couldn’t be happier,” she said.
“Nor could I.”
I pulled out the light and skulked into bed beside her. I lay on my back with my hands laced under my head. She stirred against me with a contented sigh and said, “I must get out those cups and saucers from Lake Pontchartrain. Mother’s got them packed away in the attic somewhere and I know she’d love to have me use them. Still worrying about those two?”
“I most assuredly am,” I said.
“Not now…. Think they’re in love?”
“If they aren’t I’ll eat my hat.”
She lay a moment revolving the thought.
“Well, it’s a porkpie,” she said, and laughed indolently. When I did not join in, she poked me under the covers. “Your wit is infectious.”
Relax, I told myself, everything is hopeless.
Five
The autumn days closed down, driving the lovers into the parlor and me back up half a flight of stairs to do my listening. I would crouch, cold and miserable, near the second-floor landing and strain to catch the flushed exchanges below. One night about one A.M. (Crystal was long in bed, she knew nothing of these taxing vigils) I heard Nickie say in response to some contentedly droned query of my sister’s:
>
“Of course I want a home, children, all that sort of. thing. You know—the eternal severities.”
“Will you look at other women?”
“If you’ve seen them all, you’ve seen one.”
I thought, “Oh, my God,” and rocked my head in my hands. I rose from the step where I’d been sitting huddled in my nightgown and yelled down over the banister: “Doesn’t that young man have a home of his own?”
He left, but he was back the next night.
“Taste is the morality of the senses.”
“Why isn’t morality the décor of the soul? And go on home!” I barked.
They lowered their voices, making their words at last so indistinguishable that I had to steal down to the foot of the staircase to make them out. The pair were dimly visible through the vestibule doorway, lying back among the sofa cushions as in a drifting canoe. Standing there in my bare feet I heard Nickie remark that being creative and happy, both, was impossible—even undesirable. “It would be like a slice of bread buttered on both sides.”
I beat my head on the newel post. That all was not urbanity on the love front was hinted in certain wretched mails that came accidentally under my gaze, letters from Nickie in which, among other things, the recipient’s thighs were likened to warm snow and her bosom to a halved honeydew. Two things seemed urgent: they must not get married, and they must get married right away.
They ran away and got married. That much at least was considerate, as it spared the expense of a wedding which I would have had to foot. Lila would keep her job till Nickie’s plays were produced (a prospect which was perniciously anemic). “They can move in with us,” my mother said to me. This was arranged over my dead body, and with three provisos laid down by me as head of the house. One, it was temporary. Two, Nickie must get a job, part-time or full, while he worked at his plays. Three, no children. Crystal was in the hospital at the time giving birth to our second, another boy, who was named Fillmore (also over my dead body).
The newlyweds had a honeymoon of which the expenses were defrayed in part by the wealthy great-aunt who had seen Nickie through college and who fancied herself, in all this, as nourishing the arts. The trip took in the Tanglewood Music Festival, and they arrived home in glowing spirits and in time for dinner. Our opening table talk took, under Nickie’s example, a civilized and leisurely turn.
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