The president of the fraternity gave a little speech on the meaning of Fraternity. He said it was a good thing. He said men were not meant to be alone.
Then, to applause, the professor rose, sipped water, and spoke of what it meant to him as an older man to have been a member of that fraternity. Good fellowship had seen him through many straits. He sat, to applause.
Now the candles were lighted, and the lights put out. The brothers stood and sang the fraternity song in practiced harmony; their heads were bowed a little, and at the finish they joined hands.
The candles were snuffed out, the lights turned on. Phil noted with amusement a few unashamed tears. He rose.
‘I’d like to say a few words myself,’ he remarked, and there was clapping.
‘Gentlemen,’ he began, and he raked the assemblage with those day-blue eyes of his. ‘I know, gentlemen, why you’ve asked me here. You’ve asked me here for my money. Why else would you want me, gentlemen? You don’t even know if I’ve a brain in my head. You don’t know one blasted thing about me, and yet you’ve asked me here.’
The attention, he said, that they’d shown him, he supposed they believed he took as a compliment. Actually, he took it for what it was. An insult.
There wasn’t a sound in the room but breathing.
‘And with that, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I take my leave.’
And he walked out of the dining room, out of the house.
Maybe that was why, two years later, George sat — a freshman now himself — waiting in his room for the fraternity men to call on him. He sat in his room with his feet planted square before him, sat at the study table looking at his square hands, ready to smile at whoever might knock and enter. His face was fixed in greeting. Already up and down the corridor he had heard other knocks and voices, boisterous laughter and then footsteps on the stairs.
Earlier that week he had observed the current fashions and gone at once to a clothing store and, perspiring, he bought clothes, went behind the curtains and changed into them. He emerged transformed.
And now he waited, his broad feet in new shoes planted firmly before him.
‘Probably,’ Phil told him later, ‘probably the trouble was they all remembered what I did. Probably it wasn’t your fault at all.’
But George never believed that, and never forgot the waiting in that room, a stocky young man, his wide feet planted before him. When the corridor was at last silent, he put on his new pajamas and got into bed; out the open window he heard voices and singing, and the California night was heavy not with sagebrush but with the odor of unfamiliar flowers.
The February sun was bright on the snow that covered the valley — blinding when it flashed against the flat windshield of the old Reo. George and Rose squinted against it, headed for Herndon and a bank meeting, George in his buffalo coat and gauntlets, earmuffs and his town hat; Rose wore a sealskin cape and hat to match pulled down over her ears, and heavy mittens; around her legs George had tucked a heavy blanket. The old car meandered along in the frozen ruts and when they exceeded twenty miles an hour the Weed chains went ka-bang-ka-bang; George squinted, watching the road and the Moto-Meter that replaced the radiator cap, the red column of alcohol nicely below Danger. People’s cars were forever boiling over, radiators freezing and then boiling over. Some said a mixture of honey and water was a good coolant and wouldn’t freeze; some used kerosene, but George knew kerosene rotted the hoses and leaked on the engine and you might explode. George had been trying wood alcohol with good results. ‘But they ought to make some kind of thing you could put in your radiator that wouldn’t boil away,’ George remarked. ‘Sometimes I think we ought to get a Franklin.’ The Franklin was a good car, and air-cooled, but George had heard they had their disadvantages, too. Because they didn’t use water, you couldn’t fill them with hot water to get them started, and you had to put them in gear and drag them around with a team of horses before they’d start. ‘So I don’t know,’ George admitted. ‘In a way it was easier when there weren’t cars because you didn’t have to have one because you couldn’t even if you wanted to.’
Rose laughed out loud.
‘What on earth are you laughing at?’ George asked.
‘At you. You’re a very funny person.’
George was pleased, and grinned. ‘What I’d really like,’
George said, ‘is a Pierce.’
‘Well, then.’
‘I always liked engines.’
‘Then get one.’
‘I’m afraid it would look sort of funny,’ said George.
A little time passed. ‘This looks like a good place,’ Rose said suddenly.
‘Good place? For what?’
‘For a picnic.’
George chuckled and looked out across the snow and the brown sides of somebody’s far-off haystacks, little dots, and cattle huddled close to one of them, the amorphous shape of the herd shifting and changing as they crowded around. The fresh tracks of a jackrabbit beside the road led nowhere. The sagebrush looked faded and brittle, each twig and leaf stiff with cold.
‘No, there’s a nice view out there,’ Rose said. ‘The mountains. Just pull over here and stop.’ He looked at her, watched her turn and reach back under a pile of blankets. She brought out a sack and a thermos bottle. ‘Hot coffee and sandwiches.’
‘Well, I’m dogged,’ George said. ‘But it’s not even noon! I’ve never eaten a thing except at the proper time in my whole life, don’t you know.’
The coffee was good and hot, too. George thought it made a cigarette taste good afterwards. ‘I don’t suppose,’ George remarked, ‘that anybody in this whole country ever had a picnic in a car before.’ He could hardly wait to get to the bank meeting to tell what they’d done. He could see the look on old Foster’s face. ‘I used to hate these trips,’ he said. ‘After the meetings first one fellow and then another would ask me over to his place for supper. They sort of farmed me out, don’t you know, and their wives didn’t know what to do with me. There’s not much place for a loner. I never was good at talking. Phil’s the talker. Lots of times, I’d tell them I had something else to do, and either I’d drive home, or go over to the Herndon House and have supper.’ He paused. ‘Rose?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, nothing.’ He had been about to make an appalling confession, was about to tell her when he went for supper at the Herndon House he took a booth and pulled the curtains so no one would see he was alone. ‘I was just going to say, how nice it is not to be alone.’
‘We’ll never be alone again, George.’
‘You know, I’d like to ask people up, sometimes, to the ranch for a meal. Only, I don’t know who to start with, they’ve all been so fine and neighborly. I guess sometimes I’d just like to have somebody there, our own friends, you know. We could get a hired girl, like we used to have, and she could wait on table, like when my mother was here. There’s a bell somewhere around, and you ring it, and the girl comes in. That’s the way it was.’
‘Do you really think we need a girl to come in?’
‘I don’t suppose we need her. But I’d like to have a hired girl, or whatever you want.’
‘I guess it would be nice.’
‘Then you see, you wouldn’t even have to think about the table, and we could come in from the table and talk, and if you didn’t mind, why you could play the piano, if we had a piano. My, I certainly do like it, when you play the piano. That’s something my mother could never do. We listened to the Victrola.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘Am I talking too much?’
‘I love your talk.’
‘I wouldn’t want to get in the habit of talking too much, don’t you know,’ and then he saw the reflection of her quick smile in the windshield; staring straight ahead, he reached out and took her hand, overcome by a shocking tenderness. For a moment he was struck dumb at a habit of hers he saw now for the first time, how whenever she looked up from whatever she was doing, even unwrapping a sandwich in the front seat of a car, she
always looked up smiling. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed it before.
The first you saw of Herndon was the grain elevator, the peaked metal roof flashing in the sun; then the coal chute by the tracks, black and hulking, reminding children of a huge animal. Then came the brick Gothic pile of a teachers college that gave the town a sort of tone, for neat young men and women from all over the state studied there and could be seen in the ice cream parlor sitting on stools with legs of heavy, twisted wire talking of their books, or holding hands. Rose and George drove past the brick hospital and the wind brought them the odor of boiled potatoes and roasting meat and chloroform. Ka-bang ka-bang, went the Weed chains. What Rose felt was common enough among all the ranchers who drove into town — an alien feeling of purpose and excitement heightened by the sight of the store windows, the rough-looking men who stared out the windows of the pool halls, the huge clock over the door of the jeweler’s, the snowy expanse beside the depot where dogs cavorted, the concrete fountain, dry now in winter, where in summer the head of a lion in bas-relief squirted water through its lips into a scallop-shaped basin where horses — few these days — might drink.
The automobiles before the Herndon House were parked diagonally, and inside, sitting proud in the big green leather chairs, old retired ranchers stared out as if offended at both automobiles and pedestrians who loped along, shivering in the cold. Well, no wonder, the old ranchers told one another, shifting about in their chairs to rest their old bones. Town folk wore too few clothes. Among these old men there was much grunting and snorting, for they were often angry — angry with the government, with the times, with prices, and with their children and grandchildren, whom they loved. They were angry because their children and grandchildren didn’t come often enough with the great-grandchildren, and when they did, you ought to hear the excuses they made for getting away and about their own business, whatever that was! The old men seldom got a chance to ask the questions they wanted to ask, seldom got a chance to play host at dinner because the young people said they had to get right back to the ranch, seldom got a chance to take the children to the moving pictures and to walk the streets with them. Young people had to get right back to the ranch, or so they said. Serve the young people right if they got married again or changed their wills! That would make them sit up! And there were plenty of women in town to jump at the chance!
Ah, but then the young people would be angry, and the old people would be lonelier than ever. They’d never get the chance then to see their great-grandchildren.
In the Herndon House in an alcove off the entrance to the dining room, the public stenographer tapped out her briefs and her wills. The door of the men’s room opened and closed, the brass mechanical elbow hissing and sighing, opened and closed, offering the briefest glimpse of the same white tile that covered the floor of the lobby. There were smiles and greetings, and the people who were not used to the excitement of town smiled in an embarrassed way.
Today the Herndon House was even more charged than usual; the lobby buzzed and children deserted their parents and ran and stiffened their legs and slid across the tiles; time and again the clerk at the desk rushed out to stop them but he couldn’t so he huffed and glared.
‘Quite a crowd around here today,’ George remarked, slowing up the old Reo. ‘Somebody important around.’
And then they saw. Around the corner, at the side entrance, were two big black limousines, each with a chauffeur. ‘Oh yes,’ George said. ‘That’s the Governor’s outfit. Some shindig here at the hotel. I forgot about it.’
‘What did you forget?’
‘I forgot to answer him. I was supposed to be at this shindig and I forgot because I was thinking about you and about getting married and I didn’t answer him. Well, anyway, I had this bank meeting.’
‘Then you know him?’ Rose asked.
‘Oh, I met him a couple of times at the capital. The Old Gent knew him well. Sort of sidekicks.’
George got out before the red brick facade of the bank where, inside, the directors met in a room set apart and talked about money; then they all went to the Sugar Bowl Cafe for lunch because that’s where they had always gone, and they ordered either the fried halibut or the steak, and then they had the pie. ‘I’ll meet you at three at the hotel,’ George said. ‘And say hello to Peter for me, and ask if maybe there’s something or other he might like to have.’
Rose slid over behind the wheel. ‘I’m going to miss you,’ Rose said.
He looked at her. ‘Miss me? Will you, Rose?’ His face lit up. ‘Oh, that’s fine.’
She leaned over and kissed him, and he blushed. What a day, what a day it had been! A picnic, mind you, in the middle of winter, and then being kissed by a lovely woman in the middle of town, before a brick bank with assets of fifteen million dollars. What strange, what strange wonderful things could happen to a man if he had but a little patience. ‘And please miss me, too,’ Rose said.
‘I wanted to say something,’ he told her, ‘all the way driving here. I wanted to say, how proud I am of you, about how happy I am with you.’ Then he left her, and entered the bank before he said some unbearably delicate thing.
In the house where Peter roomed and boarded, the roomers wiped their feet, entered quietly and switched off the lights when they left the bathroom, as the neat little sign commanded. Speech was low-pitched and discreet, as in a hospital or mortuary. Not a cheerful house, but the silence and order suited Peter exactly; there he could think.
Rose knocked before she entered and Peter himself, formal as a host, let her in and kissed her. His face was shining from soap and water, his shirt was stiff with starch, his shoes gleamed. He led her up to his room where she felt a stranger. It had obviously been a room set aside for infrequent guests, furnished with pieces too good to throw out and not good enough to live with. It was more a living room than a bedroom. The ornate brass bed might have been the setting for an Edwardian accouchement. In one corner was a table whose base was a bundle of bamboo sticks tied in the middle with a band of rattan and splayed out to support the top that held a painted vase of gilded cattails; the wallpaper was the color of dried blood and two walls displayed pictures, Christ as the Light of the World looking hurt and quizzical. Opposite hung a long narrow plaque, the top of which was a bad print of the Laughing Cavalier; below it was a printed text difficult to reconcile with the subject:
Sleep sweetly in this pleasant room,
Oh thou, who’ere thou art …
‘Are you very happy here?’ Rose asked. It seemed a reasonable question, and she asked it sitting in the straight chair by the table he used for studying. There each pencil was lined up straight, not a paper, not a book was out of line with another. Peter never misplaced anything, never lost anything, never was late, never forgot.
‘I couldn’t be happier,’ he told her. ‘And I’ve got a new friend.’
‘Tell me about him.’ What a warmth she felt!
‘His father teaches at school. He thinks he wants to be a professor. He’s taught me chess, and we play a lot. There’s no luck to chess, it’s all skill.’
‘I expect you’re good at it.’
‘I will be.’
‘And school?’
‘It’s great.’
She wondered if he had ever expressed a stronger emotion.
Each time she had suggested he come for a weekend at the ranch he excused himself — studying to do, reading, had made other plans, plans she did not inquire into. She was certain it was Phil who made him avoid the ranch, but she could not bring Phil’s name into the open.
‘And are you happy?’ he now asked her.
She was not prepared for the question; she spoke stiffly. ‘George is very good to me, you know. Oh, we had such fun driving down today — stopped for a picnic, looked out at the mountains. My, but there’s a lot of snow. I’d fixed some sandwiches, and we had a thermos of hot coffee, and we talked there, eating. You know, he’s the sort of person you can do things with.’ But
she had not answered the question. She felt Peter’s eyes. ‘You know, I’d forgot all about gilded cattails!’ Her sudden laughter in the room was strange, and she wondered suddenly what she was doing there. What was Peter doing there in that unlikely room? Would he remain there all summer with one excuse and then another until at last the problem of Phil was dragged out into the open? What had that room to do with her and Peter? In only one way was the room a part of them, of her and Peter and John, and that was John’s medical books neat in a glass-front sectional bookcase that must once have displayed sets of Dickens and Scott. And the skull.
‘Your father’s books,’ she said. ‘Will you bring them with you to the ranch when school’s out?’
‘All of them. And I’ll take the skull.’ Only the skull remained of the skeleton Johnny had been proud of, proof that he was a doctor, for only a doctor could get a skeleton, only a doctor had the ghastly privilege. The bones Peter had buried in Beech, in a sack. She had hoped never to know where.
The French doors of the dining room in the Herndon House had already opened and beyond them waitresses whipped around rattling silver and clanging the heavy hotel china, cleaning up the Governor’s leavings. One waitress, eyes innocent, plotted the theft of the Governor’s plate, something beyond the teaspoon she had already popped into the pocket of her uniform; she would give it to her grandson. It might one day be valuable. She would say that the Governor, pleased at her service, had given it to her.
And out drifted the men, talking, making points with their good cigars; these who had been asked to represent the City of Herndon, to swell the progress, were local Society. They were not bright people; as such, they would not have settled in Herndon, but they were the best Herndon had, the storekeepers, the undertaker, the doctors, the dentists; the more ambitious of them had had at least a brush with the state university and were now hot after their first fifty or one hundred thousand dollars. At the moment — now that greatness walked among them — their purpose was clearer: Except for their money, would they have been summoned to share with the Governor his peas and creamed chicken and the Neapolitan ice? They would not. Indeed, they would not! Their leader, the richest man in town, was president of the bank with many irons in the fire, but like George Burbank, he had had that meeting. Leaderless, the rest hesitated to approach the Governor — could only surround him, awed by tales they’d heard of the Governor’s traveling with the richest man in the state by private railroad car to Washington, a car with a bathtub, among other luxuries. En route, terrapin had been served, champagne had flowed; fresh-cut flowers had been taken on at certain stops.
The Power of the Dog Page 10