But the Crooms were wonderful too. Any lingering tension, any repudiated vestige of reserve that Laskell may have felt after the episode at the station, quite vanished just before their first dinner together when Nancy asked him to step out of the cosmos. She was showing him her flower beds in the deepening twilight and suddenly she said, “I’ll thank you, John, to step out of the cosmos.” Unaware, he had put his foot into the bed of feathery cosmos shoots and had crushed several of them. Nancy stood bewildered while Arthur and John roared with laughter. This was just like Nancy. She was seldom consciously amusing but she was often amusing as an accident, so to speak, of her intense earnestness; and then, when the joke was greeted with laughter, she would look so bewildered, even a little apologetic. It was a manner that Laskell found very endearing. “I’ll thank you to step out of the cosmos” became a communal joke, their family witticism, the formula when any two of them met coming opposite ways through the kitchen door, or when there was any disagreement in discussion.
Laskell had never before fully known how much pleasure and confidence his affection for Nancy and Arthur could give him. Now, as they went about their daily vacation lives, the mere sight and sound of them was salutary to him. The certainty of their relation to each other was a tangible thing. When they differed about some trifle and got a little hot at each other, the sputter of their disagreement was but the underscoring of their connection. They lost their tempers but never their love. And Laskell, seeing them in their passion and their reason, felt that his two friends were really a justification of human existence. He could think of them in terms quite as large as that.
His sense of what they meant came to Laskell from small things. It might be suggested by Arthur leaving his writing to come down to work about the house or the lawn, moving with complete simplicity from the intellectual to the physical, from the theoretical to the most tangible practicality. Or it might be made clear by Nancy caring for Micky so firmly and simply, or directing Eunice in her tending of the child, ignoring so well the difference in education between herself and the girl, and this in the face of a certain reserve on Eunice’s part, or by Nancy sitting with her marketing list, muttering to herself in housewifely perplexity. This was the same girl who so passionately had at heart the injustices of the world, who spoke so spiritedly of oppression—of the Negroes and Jews at home, of the colonial peoples, of the imprisoned and tortured libertarians abroad.
Laskell, watching Nancy absorbed, say, in the planning of a meal, her pencil in her mouth to help her think, was inclined to believe that the middle class, for all its failures, so many and so apparent, could yet produce the models for the human virtue of the future. He even approached a theory of this, not taking it too seriously yet finding a kind of dialectical confirmation in it, that from a decaying class or culture would come the seeds of the future. Certainly he could want nothing better for the world than what the Crooms suggested. He could want nothing better than this much sturdiness and this much grace, this much passion and this much reason, this much personal concern and this much involvement in large affairs. Perhaps anything that attempted to be better than this would cease to be truly human.
The Crooms took Laskell in and cherished him. At times they no more noticed him than they noticed each other. They had their bursts of irritation before him and their casual matter-of-fact reconciliations. They took him shopping and gave him lists to fill to lighten their work. It was a matter of course that he should set the table when he came to dinner and that he would help with the dishes afterward. Once the thought came to him that an unmarried man in such a relation to married friends was in danger of becoming neuter and dull, a Hausfreund. But it was not possible to hold for long so conventional and damaging an idea, not under the liveliness of the Crooms’ interest and the constant excitement of their unremitting talk.
The three of them talked endlessly. They talked university matters and housing matters and the situation in Washington, they talked child-rearing and usually from there they went on to exchange anecdotes of their own childhoods, trying to explain how they had become the people they were today. Again and again they returned to politics, not so much its theory as its gossip. Yet often as they talked of their friends, Laskell did not tell the story of Gifford Maxim’s visit, which was surely a very special piece of political gossip. Several times Nancy referred to something that Maxim had said to her, speaking of him with the respect that Maxim was almost always given. Laskell could feel his heart quickening out of all proportion to the occasion. “Speaking of Maxim,” he could have said, or, “Since you mention Maxim.” But he rejected each of these occasions.
Sometimes he believed that he was not telling the story to the Crooms because he wanted to spare them the pain and confusion the story was likely to give them, or that he was sparing himself the story’s dark implications. But he knew that the real reason for his not telling the story was the other thing that they did not talk about. They did not talk about Laskell’s illness or about his having been so near death.
The Crooms were wonderful, but now and then Laskell did find himself regarding them with curiosity, even with resentment. He thought that he had settled with himself, the evening of his arrival, the matter of his impulse and his right to tell them about his illness. But he had not settled it. And as the days went by, he wondered why it should have to be settled. There was nothing wrong in having been sick, in nearly dying. It was an experience like any other. It could be talked about. Certainly among friends it could be talked about. But the Crooms would not talk about it. They withdrew themselves in a polite, intelligent, concerted way whenever Laskell mentioned it, as if they were the parents of a little boy and were following the line of giving no heed to the obscenities their son had picked up on the street and insisted on bringing to the dinner table. They did not scold, for that would have been to confirm him in his naughtiness, in what was presumably an effort to get attention. They simply, in a sensible modern way, paid no attention at all.
They might all three be walking in the dusk and Nancy might comment on the quiet of the countryside and Laskell would then speak of his sense of the quiet of the city at night as he had lain in bed. At that the whole subject of quiet would come to an end. At another time he tried to tell them something about Paine. They liked Paine—they said they made a point of calling his apartment in the evening because Paine was so much more satisfactory to talk to than that other nurse, that Miss Debry. But it was Paine they insisted on having in mind, not what Laskell had felt about Paine. Toward this they maintained the attitude that it was but a sick fancy of their friend, which, for his own sake, they preferred not to hear about. Or the matter of dogs once came up, whether or not Micky should have a dog in a year or two, and Laskell asked about Dr. Graf’s bulldog, which had so surprised him. In a precise way the Crooms gave what information they could about the bulldog and hurried on to keep Dr. Graf himself from becoming the subject of conversation.
As the days went on and this became unmistakably a settled policy of the Crooms, Laskell felt a clear and distinct annoyance.
It did not change all his other feelings toward the Crooms, and he did not cherish or nurse it, but whenever one of their stubborn disciplinary silences occurred he had a little flicker of anger. He was angry because they were forcing him to tell himself that there really had been nothing wrong in his having been sick and nearly dying. The Crooms, when the situation was present and critical, had taken care of everything. They had provided him with Dr. Graf and the two nurses, with sufficient sheets and pajamas and oranges. They had seen to every practical detail of his illness. But now, when he wanted to tell them just what it was that they had helped him go through and what it was that they had helped him escape, they did not want to hear. Nancy had handed him over like a sick boy to Mrs. Folger to take care of, to keep from being a nuisance. And there, she insisted, her relationship to his illness ended.
Laskell had to recognize that his not telling about Maxim had in it an element
of sulky revenge—if he might not tell about what he wanted to tell, he would not tell about what the Crooms would want to hear. But more decisive than this was his determination that the only way he could tell the story of Maxim was to make it part of the story of his illness. Without the account of what he had felt during those weeks in bed, the story of Maxim would lack the particular force it had in his mind.
But, after all, the Crooms’ strange refusal to listen to what he wanted to say modified very little Laskell’s sense of the Crooms’ wonderfulness. His feeling about it was isolated, encysted from the rest of his feelings, and he even came to regard it with what he thought was amusement. He was very happy in his long peaceful country days with his friends.
Early one evening, about a week after his arrival, Laskell was sitting on the lawn with the Crooms and he saw the same sight that had so enchanted him the day of his arrival. Emily Caldwell and her daughter came up the road for water. Emily stopped, seeing them on the lawn. She set the empty pails on the stone wall and leaned over them as if to achieve some intimacy. She said, “I’ll return the book tonight, if I may.”
She spoke the word “book” as though it were a secret and a bond between herself and the Crooms. Her voice was cultivated and even perhaps a little affected, with a rather pleasant hoarse note.
“Oh Lord!” Nancy said under her breath. And she said in a whisper to Laskell, “That’s so she can meet you.”
Arthur, with a warning glance to Nancy, said aloud, “Did you like it?”
“Simply wonderful!” Emily Caldwell said. “Just wonderful.” Then she went on her way up the hill with her daughter.
“That’s Emily Caldwell,” Arthur explained. “Duck’s wife.”
“He knows,” Nancy said.
“Yes,” said Laskell. “Nancy told me.”
“Our Little Emily,” said Nancy. “Our Emily Dickinson Caldwell. Our Emily Brontë Caldwell. Above all our Emily Bovary Caldwell.”
“Isn’t it Emma Bovary, not Emily?” Arthur asked.
“Yes, dear—Emma, not Emily,” said Nancy with an irony appropriate to such dull literalness in a husband. “She’s such a bore.”
“She’s good-looking, isn’t she?” Laskell said. For some reason he felt sorry and deprived. The woman no longer had the mythological glow she had had when, in the confusion of his arrival, he had first seen her. But she still had the charm of a woman seen at a distance. “Where does she go for her water?” he said.
“Up the road to the Polish family, the Korzinskis,” Nancy said.
“For heaven’s sake, why doesn’t she get her water here?”
“Habit,” Nancy replied tersely.
Arthur laughed. “And not a habit our Nancy is going to help her break.” He looked at his wife affectionately. Then he said to Laskell in a reasonable voice, “Actually she’s quite sweet. Emily, I mean. She’s a little silly and pretentious—”
But Nancy was in a most absolute mood. “A little!” she said. “She’s so unreal. She’s as unreal—as—as—” But there was no measure that Nancy could find for Emily Caldwell’s unreality, not until she said, “She’s as unreal as Duck is real.”
“Granting that Duck is worth six Emilys,” said Arthur.
“Six!” said Nancy, astonished at Arthur’s conservative estimate.
Laskell wanted to say that Duck might be very real, but that in point of fact he had not materialized when he had been most wanted. Now he could say it humorously. But Nancy was continuing and the moment for the remark passed.
“She’s cheap Village, cheap Provincetown, quaint tearoom. She did run a tearoom once, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s not exactly a penitentiary offense, Nan.” But Arthur liked to see his wife pitched high and angry.
“Yes, it is! At least she ought to be penitent. I suppose I’m silly, but sometimes it does get me mad, in a world like this, to see that foolish display of temperament. I suppose she’d call it individualism. She was born in 1912—spiritually I mean—and she died in 1930, and she doesn’t know it yet.”
“That’s true,” said Arthur with the cheerful dogged resistance of one who knows the world and understands that it cannot be just as one would like. “That’s all true. But then why can’t you think of her as I do?—as an historical monument, like a castle overgrown by time? Going on about her the way you do is like getting into a passion against feudalism.”
“I suppose so,” Nancy said. She sat there, gloomily considering her lack of historical perspective. Then she declared a feminine independence of such high considerations. “But I can’t help it. She affronts something in me. Don’t you feel the same way, John?”
“You’d better, John,” said Arthur. “Or else you’ll just have to step out of the cosmos. Nancy will have no two ways about this matter.” He rumpled his wife’s hair. “Will you, Nan?”
“You’ll agree when you meet her,” Nancy said and took her head from under Arthur’s hand.
And Nancy was right. By the time Emily Caldwell had ended her visit that evening Laskell was permitted to step back into the cosmos. Emily came with the book—that precious book—and Laskell saw her with a simple and objective eye, as Nancy saw her. In that view she was not so handsome as she had first seemed in the golden dust of the road, nor did she have anything like the significance that distance and confusion had lent her. And there was no doubt that she was, as Nancy had said, affected and foolish.
Emily Caldwell took the cigarette Arthur politely offered her and awkwardly accepted a light. She held the cigarette with a certain conscious delicacy, as if she attached importance to smoking but was not used to it. She was not at ease, yet she seemed glad to be there. She held the borrowed book on her lap, the explanation and talisman of her visit. It was one of the two volumes of Spengler’s Decline of the West. The evening was cool and there was a fire in the new fireplace. For a moment she watched it with a critical gaze, protecting her shyness by an act of intelligence.
“I’m so glad you decided to have a fireplace,” she said. “It finishes the room so well. There really isn’t anything like a good fire!”
She caught herself, for even before the phrase was fully out she was making a quick satirical flourish with her hand, as if to put quotation marks around her sad, worn cliché. But the gesture was too late and the self-protection was so transparent that Laskell felt embarrassed for her.
Between the remark and the gesture there lay a whole cultural generation, that is, a full decade. Emily Caldwell had come to her freedom and maturity when that remark about fires was good current coin. Laskell could see her in shabby Greenwich Village rooms which were made desirable by nothing save their cheapness and a fireplace. He could hear her saying, just before a new lover took her hand preparatory to kissing her, “There really isn’t anything like a good fire!” The absurd little sentence would be assurance, the sign of a kindred spirit, an invitation to comradeship. And the fire itself would be a symbol of revolt and of purification, of comfort and asceticism, to those who watched it and warmed themselves by it, not the less because it meant escape from the life of steam-heat and from the shape of cast-iron radiators.
Emily Caldwell then said in a brisk, practical way, “It does draw well, doesn’t it? I think Duck did a very nice job on it.” She cocked her head and looked at the fireplace severely.
Nancy and Arthur hastened to agree with her. “It’s a grand job,” Arthur said. “There’s nothing harder to build than a good flue.”
“Oh, Duck does a good job with everything,” Emily said. Her voice had pride in it, yet it was judicious. Her statement limited itself precisely. It did not go an inch beyond approval of Duck’s craftsmanship. Yet there was no vulgar hint of an intended disapproval of her husband. There might even have been a depreciation in it that came from great pride. But perhaps that was not it, for she said to Laskell, “I’m sorry Duck missed you when he was supposed to call for you.”
Laskell had the sense of Nancy’s tightened attention. He s
aid, “Not at all, it was nothing.”
Arthur said, “The station man told Duck that the train would be half an hour late.”
“Oh, Duck!” said Emily Caldwell. She moved her hand in tolerant dismissal. “Duck can get himself told anything he wants to be told.”
The sentence was difficult to deal with. They could not say, “Duck cannot get himself told anything he wants to be told.” So Arthur contented himself with saying with some stubbornness, “Duck’s all right.” And so as not to seem contentious, he smiled at her to show that he knew that that was her opinion too.
But Emily Caldwell was no longer interested in her husband. She had taken out of her large raffia bag a painted wooden bowl which she held out to Nancy. “Do you like this?” she asked. “I’m making several for the Bazaar.”
Nancy held the bowl at arm’s length and examined it with appropriate gravity and for a sufficient time. It was a chopping bowl, small and sturdy, and on its inner surface had been painted a bold “unconventional” design in strong red and blue. “It’s very nice,” Nancy said. “What’s it supposed to be for?”
“Oh—walnuts. Or fruit. Anything you want. Decoration mostly.” Mrs. Caldwell waved aside the question of function with an airy indifference. “It’s just a bowl,” she said, as though she had just this moment discovered its principle. “I’m doing three of these small ones and one large one.” She said to Laskell, “You must come to the Bazaar, Mr. Laskell. It’s our summer Church Bazaar.” Her tone was that of a person offering a visitor an interesting and significant sight, an opportunity to observe the local habits.
Nancy was still trying to be pleasant about the bowl. She was studying it as though searching out the true quality of its design. Actually the design, for all its boldness, was a dull one, and whatever aesthetic value it had came from the memory of the time when the designs of Leon Bakst were startling. Laskell knew that Nancy was comparing the painted bowl with what it had looked like before Emily Caldwell had got to work on it, seeing the plain wood before the sticky color had been applied, remembering the bowl when it had existed only for its function and not as a mere ornament or as the ground for the display of Emily Caldwell’s creativity, as doubtless she called it.
The Middle of the Journey Page 12