Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “Look at my client,” said Nickie when my unilateral applause had died down. “Could anyone think him capable of philandering?” I buttoned my jacket and looked nonchalantly away. “Him?”

  “What made me suspect the thing,” Walnut contributed, “speaking openly of a case we can be reasonably sure will not come to trial now, what indicated to me that the diary was hogwash was the brand of ministration laid to the accused’s door. Would you just let me have a look at that again?”

  “Certainly,” said Nickie, handing up the diary.

  Walnut looked for a passage. “Oh, yes, here it is. It has to do with an early memory of the writer involving some misconduct of her father in a greenhouse with a woman assistant. She states that the accused analyzed this as equivalent to her father’s having gone to pieces in the tropics.”

  A round of laughter went up around the room, as Walnut himself smiled.

  “That must have been made up out of whole cloth because not even the most amateurish quack could think up anything so idiotic.”

  I spread my arms in a shrug and smiled charitably, as if to say, “We-ell, the poor girl, after all …”

  “Going to pieces in the tropics. Really!” Walnut put the diary down and his face became sober. He regarded Nickie with an odd, intent expression. It was that with which an ornithologist might contemplate a bird he had never seen before and hadn’t expected to. “I haven’t seen you in court before, to the best of my recollection, and I don’t know what you expect the future to hold for you. You’re young, and that future will be long. But I would be derelict not to warn you that life will not oblige you by imitating art to this extent, as a general rule.”

  “Thank you,” said Nickie. “But all the same, let’s not sell reality too short. Everything is, really, its own open book. I can relate Your Honor’s entire life from just this brief but happy association with him.”

  I tried to catch his eye but he sailed ahead. And Walnut grumbled, “Go on.”

  “I would say that your background is Middle Western but your training has taken place in Eastern schools. The Seaboard diction superimposed on the tight vowels characteristic of northern Michigan and Wisconsin, such as ‘meek’ for “make’—that’s important.”

  The judge was swinging from side to side in his high-backed leather chair, and his face was expressionless. His eyes were normally colorless like mica, except when some inner or outer light drew out hazel values, as now. I knew damn well that Nickie had looked him up in Who’s Who, dug him out of feature articles in the files of Bridgeport papers and what not, in preparation for this encounter. What judge will sit on a case can of course be found out in advance, and he may even have tailed Walnut for all I can say.

  “Isn’t cooking one of Your Honor’s hobbies?”

  “How do you know that?” the other inquired with some reluctance.

  “That rash on your hands which you keep scratching—I believe it’s ‘baker’s fungus.’ It comes from kneading dough a great deal, I understand, which would argue that your specialty is pastries. And perhaps selected breads.…”

  Here I began to tear hair which I could ill spare. I sat with my head down through most of the rest, and was glad to hear the gavel and the sheriff’s voice booming, into some laughter provoked at a reference I didn’t get because now I had my fingers in my ears, “Order! Order in the court!”

  “The court will now adjourn for lunch,” said Judge Waltnut, at this point, and rose.

  The rest of the morning passed without incident except for a brief episode outside the courthouse. Leaving Sipperly to fly off in a shaken state to other business, Crystal, Nickie and I went out chattering happily. As we descended the stairs to the street, I caught sight of Bloodstein on the bottom step, talking excitedly to someone on the sidewalk. A yellow hat was visible just above his left shoulder.

  “… realize I could be cited for malpractice, entering evidence like that? Do you know that? A forgery—”

  He heard us behind him and turned. We all stood stock-still a moment. I was too elated about the outcome to feel any ill toward anybody, but I couldn’t resist a stiff word to Sherry Budd.

  “Do you know what I ought to do to you?” I said. “I ought to take you over my knee and give you a good spanking—you little brat!”

  “Oh, shut your ignorant mouth,” she answered, turning her head away.

  It was here that the moment for which I had all along been toiling and struggling materialized. My wife came over to me. She not only stood at my side, but she took my arm in hers, and in a firm, clear voice for all to hear, said:

  “He doesn’t have to.”

  Twenty-One

  I sat in the deck chair and listened to the sheared water frothing away behind us. We were on a French liner bound for LeHavre, the four of us: Crystal and I, Nickie and Lila. It was the following summer. The children were all at the old house with my mother and a nurse hired for the six weeks of our holiday. Two days more at sea, and then a month in Europe before returning on the Queen Mary.

  My eyes closed. My three traveling companions were swimming in the ship’s pool and I was alone for an hour, and, alone, I dreamed. Everything was going beautifully. Aboard ship I was known as Beau Jest, at least to my own satisfaction, and my conversation had been tailored to that supposition. I reviewed my arrival in the bar the second day out, when I had joined a group of seasoned wanderers fingering stemware about a cocktail table—a parched company whom zephyrs of my wit revived.

  The member of the circle for whom I had conceived a special inclination was a passenger named Beryl Hoyt. Middle-aged, handsome, she represented a class distinct in our culture: women who get about. Without being millionaires they have money, which they have but to marry to appear to have had it all their lives. They are between marriages or married, and are often encountered without their husbands, a factor that never in itself gives them an air of being between divorces. They have, two children or none, and they can talk about the best schools as well as they can about the best watering places. They have nephews of marriageable age who rise up on the balls of their feet when they walk, and they can shop for men as unerringly as they do for themselves. Beryl Hoyt was known as Googoo to her friends, of whom one or two were on hand to indicate this. She had been telling about a young cousin studying at Boston University, and as the waiter brought my drink I heard her say, “He’s writing his doctor’s thesis.”

  “Why can’t his doctor write his own thesis?” I said.

  Here some slight movement about the table afforded the first sign that the group were stirring from their slump. Mrs. Hoyt continued her story, which next touched on the cousin’s father, a broker who found that he had so completely devoted his life to giving his children everything that he had nothing for himself, not even, now at the age of sixty, enough cash on hand to swing that trip around the world he had always promised himself.

  “What does he do but up and borrow enough on the first thing he lays his hands on,” she related. “Some debentures or something.”

  “Debentures?” I said. “He must have wanted to go pretty bad to hock his teeth for it.”

  The grim faces which greeted this reply told me how badly the comedy relief was needed here, and I redoubled my efforts.

  “No more than boarded ship yesterday,” I related, crossing my legs, “when a total stranger came up to me. Well, he was almost total. He had three fingers missing on one hand and a cropped left ear. Anyway, I was sitting at the bar—that stool right there, as a matter of fact—and after a few drinks he began spilling his troubles. He was worried because his daughter had just left her husband of a month. I cheered him up by promising him they’d be back together again before he knew it. Because before marriage a girl makes up and kisses, but after marriage, you know, it’s generally the other way around.”

  By now my hearers were so far delivéred from the palsy in which I had found them as to be able to rise and make off for other parts of the ship, some quite briskly. I wav
ed farewell as they took their leave, with every assurance that we would meet again.

  Left behind with only the cherishable Googoo Hoyt, at last, I was pleased with how things were going. I had hacked out a conversational compromise which utilized, quite successfully in the main, the very materials of my workaday and of necessity less rarified side—as my last remark had exemplified. Yes, it could be done. For as the delicate crouton is made from stale bread, the humble potato transmuted into Vichyssoise, so even the lowliest Pepigram could be elevated into dialogue of considerably greater merit than might at first have been supposed possible.

  At last even the gregarious Googoo excused herself with the reminder of imminent dinner, and departed for her stateroom, leaving me to muse pleasantly on how matters were turning out—as I was doing now, again, on the deck chair.

  My wife has blossomed into quite a woman of the world herself. Her belief in my pat moralities has all but vanished, thanks to the private example I set, and a markedly more cosmopolitan outlook has supplanted it. I am to that extent a much less severely divided man. She gets off more and more bright asperities of her own, too. Her remark that you need two years of medical school to be a patient these days had vastly amused the tweeded youths seen tramping about deck with her. My own comparison of an affair to a cup of Turkish coffee—“The trick is to stop before you reach the grounds”—had met with studious frowns, due no doubt to the unexpected weight of truth in the statement. Another gauge of her progress into a more companionable modernity lies in her use, now, of the word “wonderful,” for something quaint appreciated on another level. This means we have come full-circle from the days of our first acquaintance when I had thought her father wonderful but had not dared to say so, or at least to explain how I meant it. Not that Crystal Chickering would have understood, back then in that far-off time.

  Nickie bloomed under his success in Bridgeport, when he showed what a fine lawyer he would have made. News of it had been telephoned home, and he perfectly recognized, on his return to the apartment, the flattering, fluttering wife who was waiting for him there. He remembers everything again, or almost everything. Lila’s share in the conversation that night at the country-club dance still seems rather a blur in his mind. He took his old job back again with every implied hope of going on from there. He got the “scholarship” to the Police Academy run by the F.B.I. in Washington, and had the six weeks’ special training course they give promising police there. He elected detective work, of the several categories offered. It’s hard to say how he’ll end up, though we know he wants to practice privately. I suppose a free-lance status is the one in which he could best pursue that dream of princely skill in which, for him, the ideal resides. That is the yeast that worked in all three of us; him, Cheshire, myself; the link we had in common. You could call it the romantic ideal, the idea that life can have style. Nickie will lack no challenge for his wits, even in Decency, for Cheshire will certainly try to add new laurels to the nickname he’s earned for himself, when he gets out of jail two years from now. I can’t wait for that day. For each of them is useless without the other, like halves of a pair of cymbals. I hope Nickie goes on to more definitive glory than he won in my cause. As for me, that his friend will find the Golden Fleece is all that can be hoped by a man who must, himself, milk what éclat he can from being Lamplighter.

  Once in a while, when some chance sight or random notion rends me with a memory of Great Expectations, I have a wild dream of being sacked for paradox and starting fresh. But where would I come out anyway, other than where I already am? There is a bird we’ve all heard singing but none has ever seen; not even the completest apparent success fulfills the visions entertained for it. We return from journeys on which we have set out hunting unicorns, glad to have bagged a boar. I fold my hands and rest, content to let the dream dwindle away like my poor hair, now a countable residue which I valiantly organize into a herringbone down the middle of my head. So, enjoying ourselves as best we can—which is often enough quite considerably, if we would be honest about it—we spend what time we have of Time, that river down whose chuckling waters we are carried to the sea.

  The Greek awaits deliverance yet. But his hour will come, I know. A figurine factory is going up two blocks from the Samothrace, and I tell him to hold on till that begins to send its hundreds into the streets at lunchtime, and by his door twice else during the day. Of course the factory will spoil the neighborhood, but that is a consideration into which I cannot again be drawn. Mrs. Thicknesse I never see. I had cast about for some note on which to close the books on that account, and at last found one. Speaking of another woman altogether, I had assured Crystal that she was “all wool and a yard wide.” To which Crystal made unhesitating reply, “I don’t know about the all wool part of it, but she’s certainly a yard wide.” It was no trouble to graft this onto a continuity involving Mrs. Thicknesse as the butt, the curtain came down, and I could rest my mental bones.

  I have no idea even of Lammermoor’s whereabouts. Neither does Pete Cheshire, who writes me occasionally from prison and whom I answer not only with letters but with gifts of money, cigars and, of course, advice. His letters indicate a growing willingness to open a diner when he is released, but a diner of the better sort, to be known as a flyer. Of course it will only be a front for other things. I don’t know what’s become of Sherry Budd either. Maybe she and Lammermoor have settled down together in some other city. I think of them all now with affection: Bloodstein and Sipperly, too, the mildewed magistrate—all of them.

  Their faces mingled drowsily in my thoughts as I lay back, eyes closed, in the deck chair. I was utterly at peace. The voyage was a balm as well as an intoxicant The faint unending swish of water seemed the peacefullest I had ever heard. That the sun in whose warmth I basked was a ball of deliriously exploding gases was mildly interesting. As I sat there, I became aware of someone settling into the chair next mine. I knew who it was without opening my eyes. A thin, memorable musk had marked my hour with Googoo Hoyt at cocktails, and it was that perfume which unmistakably reached my nostrils now. I could hear her idly turning the pages of a magazine, and then that stopped. I smiled and prepared a few oral savories. She was going for a long stay in England, under whose disreputable skies we went for long walks in the bracken, and our lips soon met …

  I opened my eyes to find Mrs. Hoyt leaning forward in her chair in order to scrutinize my bosom. I was wearing a stiff white collar of the detachable kind coming back into vogue again, at least according to advices in a magazine advertisement I had read. The specimen around my neck had rounded points, and I had put it on with a shirt of thick blue stripes, another period revival stressed in my source as the mark of a well-dressed man. In the advertisement, both of these had been modeled in a picture of a young executive having his shoes shined while standing at his desk with a letter in his hand. That I had seen neither on another living soul meant that I was well in the van of fashion, unless the refreshed observer thought me to be that much in arrears of it.

  Mrs. Hoyt sat back.

  “Hello,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh, hello there,” I answered. “It’s you. Isn’t this a beautiful day?”

  “Magnificent. I have a special reason to be grateful, because do you know what I was just reminded of? It’s my birthday.”

  “No!”

  “Clean forgot it.”

  “Well, happy birthday! We must have a little celebration.”

  “Oh, no, please. Thank you though. But do you know how I found out? A present from my husband a while ago. He’d got it aboard before I sailed, with instructions to the steward to deliver it today. This ring—do you like it?” She extended a hand on which a fire opal burned.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, taking her fingers to inspect it. “It’s just exquisite. I love fire opals. I gave my wife one once.”

  “Did you really? How nice. I’m glad.” She folded her hands on her lap and closed her own eyes, sighing pleasurably. After a moment sh
e said, “My husband always gives me something to wear but not anything I need. That’s important Never give your wife anything she needs.”

  “Oh, indeed not. I never do that.”

  “Last year he gave me a belt.”

  “I hope you hit him back on his.”

  She threw her head back and laughed. “A gold leaf business that I’d admired in a shop window on Fifth Avenue. I love it so much I buy gowns to go with it.”

  We were hitting it off like this when a third presence materialized. Nickie sauntered into view from round a nearby funnel. He was dressed in tweeds up to and including his head, and swinging the blackthorn.

  “Ah, greetings, greetings,” he said, stopping by.

  I began the long process of climbing to my feet.

  “Through swimming?” I asked.

  “Yes. Lila thought she’d take a nap before dinner and Chris is in your stateroom too. She said to tell you she’d be there, in case I ran into you. I think she wants to have drinks with Chiffon Smith and those two boys from Walt-ham. Don’t get up.”

  “No, I must be getting along.” Pique at the intrusion was at least balanced by the wish to take care of something that could only be attended to in my stateroom. “Please take my chair,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Nickie said, easing himself into it.

  I said good-by and strolled away. The collar and shirt were now within five minutes of being removed and shoved through a porthole into the sea; but before that I had something else I wanted to do.