Elmer is so shy, so modest, it hurts to tell about it. I remember years ago at Boy Scout Camp he used to wait around until everyone else was finished before he would go in the latrine or the shower. Lord knows how he ever got along in the Army.
Elmer is an only child and lived for years with his widowed mother, now gone to glory. She gave up on trying to interest him in marrying some nice girl. She gave up on the rest of us too. Sat up bolt upright on her deathbed and cursed everybody and everything. Called the Methodist preacher, who had come to pray over her, “a sugarmouth old hypocrite,” swore she would lean down from the golden bar of heaven like Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s blessed damozel and watch many a one of us, some of the least suspected, fry and stew in our own juice in hell. Old Lady Adelot weighed about two-fifty if she weighed an ounce, and when they tried to bury her, the pallbearers slipped in the mud and dropped her, coffin and all. The top flew wide open and away she rolled to the edge of the grave in her white evening dress, wearing her string of pearls, poised for one precarious instant on that neat lip of earth, then rolled in, turning over like somebody asleep, while we all stood there aghast, openmouthed, and the choir tried to keep on singing “In the Sweet By and By.”
“Ain’t nobody going to push Old Lady Adelot into anything unless she wants to go,” somebody said.
“Amen!”
Is it any wonder Elmer has always been a little scared of women, considering his natural shyness and the way his mama was?
The kids at school will tell you about a different side of Elmer. They don’t think he’s so comical. Once he gets in behind the desk in the Science Room, he is a little tin god and everything has got to be just so.
“You don’t make mistakes in Science,” he keeps on telling them.
And if you don’t print your name neatly in the upper left-hand corner of your homework with the correct date on the line underneath, he is just liable to tear up the paper right in front of your face and give you a big fat zero for the day. He carries a yardstick around the room with him to point with, and if you don’t stand up quick and speak up loud and clear when he calls on you, he will bang you with that ruler across the knuckles or your behind. If you happen to be a boy, that is. It’s different if you are a girl. All the girls’ Science class say he is a perfect angel.
Elmer’s one great friend in the whole world is Johnny Sprattling, called Jack Spratt since almost the day he was born. Friendship is always a mysterious venture, but there couldn’t be two more different people than Jack Spratt and Elmer. Jack is a big, husky, gregarious guy who looks something like Jack Carson, the movie star, and works as a traveling salesman for an insurance company and couldn’t be better made for the job. He will stop you on the street corner any time of day and hold you up for half an hour while he tells you all the new jokes he heard on his latest trip. He was about the best fullback they ever had on the High School team and he might have been an All-American if he had gone on to college. The women are wild for him. He could, and probably did, have any of them he wanted to.
Which is what makes it hard to explain how he ever ended up marrying Mary West. Mary started out from the first being one of these dainty, prissy little girls. She grew up pretty enough and with a good figure, but still it looked like she was born to be an old maid. You would no more have thought of Mary West in a naughty way than you would write dirty words in a hymn book. She was one of the steady workers at the church. She taught Sunday school, sang in the choir, arranged altar flowers, and used to talk all the time about going to Africa and being a missionary. Still, she is the one he took for his wife. He courted and somehow convinced her. How I don’t know.
One thing I do know. At the stag party we had for Jack just before he got married he got pretty drunk. “You probably think I am out of my head,” he told us. “Well, I want something I can be sure is all mine. There’s a lot of no-good guys just like me running around loose. And I want to be sure, you know. That’s the important thing when you’re a traveling man.”
And that might be all there is to it. I don’t know.
After the wedding and the honeymoon trip to Biloxi, Mississippi, Jack and Mary came back and set up in an apartment right near the Adelot house. Just across the street from it in a brand-new subdivision with apartments and little candy-box houses. Since they lived so near to each other and since Jack and Elmer had been good friends for so long, they used to ask Elmer over a lot for supper or a card game or to watch TV. The Spratts seemed to be happy enough. They didn’t have any children, though, and they both wanted to have a family.
And everything goes along just fine until—
One hot Saturday evening Elmer calls Jack up on the telephone.
“Jack,” he says, “they’re working on the plumbing over here and the water is turned off. I’m just dying to take a cool shower. Could I come over and use yours?”
So Elmer gets his soap and a towel and even a bathrobe just in case he needs it and comes across the street. He finds Jack in the kitchen with his shirt off, all covered with grease, and he’s got the washing machine disemboweled and parts of it spread all over the floor.
“I tell you,” Jack says, “they just don’t make things like they used to. Look at that mess!”
“Mass production,” Elmer says. “That’s the whole trouble in a nutshell—mass production.”
“Mass production?” Jack guffaws. “I’m all for it. I believe in it. Why I guess I mass produced half the little ole gals in the county before I took on my ball and chain.”
“I don’t mean anything that way,” Elmer says.
“You want a can of beer?”
“No, thank you,” Elmer says. “I guess I’ll just get in the shower.”
He goes into the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. He is a little bit disturbed that the lock doesn’t work, but anyway it is his best friend’s house and Mary is uptown at the A & P. He hangs his clothes up neatly and climbs into the shower, making sure the curtain is pulled all the way across tight.
Meanwhile Jack is drinking a can of beer and looking sadly on the corpse and the scattered innards of the washer. It dawns on him that maybe he ought to run down to the appliance store before it closes up and ask Jack Smathers what to do next. He polishes off the can of beer in one gulp, grabs a shirt, and jumps in the car. Away he goes without a word of warning to Elmer Adelot.
Jack hasn’t been gone a full minute when Mary arrives back in her car. (Jack is using the company car.) She picks up her packages in both arms and comes around the back way, staggering up the steps. One look at the washing machine and she plumps down the packages on the kitchen table and throws up her hands in dismay.
“Isn’t that just like him?” she thinks out loud. “He tries to fix everything and he can’t fix a thing. Well, maybe, this time I’ll get a new machine out of him.”
Since it is such a hot day and since she couldn’t cook anyway even if she wanted to because of all the mess, she decides to prepare a cold supper. As she starts to set the dining-room table, she hears the shower running and, naturally, she thinks it is Jack, washing away the grease and the grime of his unfortunate mechanical adventure. On an impulse—a kind of bride’s impulse still—she tiptoes to the bathroom, opens the door without making a sound, and steals toward the shower curtain. Without pause or warning she thrusts her arm past the edge of the curtain, feels for and finds the unsuspecting flesh.
“Ding dong bell! The farmer’s in the dell!” she cries, emphasizing each word with the vigor of a drunken sexton. “Hurry up. Supper’s ready and waiting.”
Elmer Adelot freezes in a state of horror.
Smiling to herself, Mary goes back to the kitchen to get the cold cuts ready. And who should she meet, grinning, coming up the back steps to the kitchen with grease still on his face, but her husband.
There is a piercing shriek that can be heard for blocks around.
Shocked into action by the shriek—thoughtless instant action—Elmer Adelot bursts out of the
bathroom forgetting everything, his clothes, his bathrobe, his soap and towel and the shower still running, just in time to plunge headlong past the astonished two of them. And outside he goes running for all he is worth down the sidewalk.
Mrs. Otis Bolgin, who just happens to be driving by at this time, looks twice at this dripping, naked apparition and blithely drives her car into a telephone pole.
Two small boys fall out of their perch in a tree house and almost break their necks for laughing so hard when Elmer runs by.
Elmer has run two or three blocks down the street when it begins to occur to him what he is doing. Now he is running back the way he came even faster than before, and this time all the way back he has acquired an audience. People have come running out on front porches or pressed their faces against front windows. Traffic has stopped cold. Children cry out for joy at the speed of the lean naked runner and a couple of small mongrel dogs are running too, snapping at the bare, elusive heels until he gets back to the apartment, slams the front door to behind him, and leaps past Jack and Mary.
After that he is in the bathroom, fully dressed, but he won’t come out. He talks to them through the door while they beg, plead, and reassure him. He waits until after dark. They promise to turn their backs and close their eyes (since he still feels naked) and he sneaks out and across the street to his house.
He won’t come out for a couple of weeks until some other incident has become the talk of the town. And that might be the end of it.
Except, of course, it isn’t. Jack thought it was just about the funniest thing that ever happened since the world began. He told everybody about it endlessly, adding new imaginative details, sparing nothing. Now you might think that would be the end of the friendship between Jack and Elmer. Not so. After the initial shock was over, Elmer didn’t seem to mind. Neither did Mary, which is more than I can understand. The Spratts (Sprattlings, that is) kept right on inviting Elmer over to their house for dinner or cards or to watch TV. And Elmer kept right on going to see them. He was even kind enough to take Mary to church or the movies once in a while when Jack had to be out of town.
Going through that experience seems to have changed Elmer slightly. It isn’t anything definite, but there are some indefinable ways in which he seems to be a different person. More sure of himself, you might say.
Mary has changed too. She has taken to letting her hair grow long and full. She has changed her style of dress. The other day I ran into her at the drugstore. She was wearing maternity clothes.
“Mary,” I said, “I didn’t know you and Jack were expecting a baby. This is wonderful news.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful for us.”
“What do you want—a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t care, really.”
“Well, what do you think it will be?”
“There’s no way to tell for sure,” she says, smiling nicely. “Science hasn’t found the answer to that yet.”
MY PICTURE LEFT IN SCOTLAND
PROFESSOR DUDLEY STOOD UP and walked from his desk to the leaded window and looked out at the barbered green of the quadrangle, his fine profile outlined sharply against the glass. The student, sitting in front of the desk in a straight-backed chair, watched him out of the corner of his eye. The professor took a deep puff on his cigarette and blew a series of quick, admirable smoke rings. He was watching the brown squirrels on the lawn. Almost tame, they scurried about with plump devious energy and, somehow, reminded him of monks, the fat little ones carved in stone on the tower at Chartres. God, you almost had to be a mountain climber to see those monks.
“I suppose you want me to be completely honest with you.”
The boy opened his mouth to speak, but his throat was so tight and dry that no words came. He ended by nodding.
“There are two ways a teacher can handle something like this,” Professor Dudley said. “You can be tactfully honest. That is, more or less noncommittal. Search out whatever virtues there are and hold them up for inspection and praise. And try to ignore the naked, glaring faults. That’s for the tender egos. On the other hand, if one mingles a little honey with the gall, one can say more or less exactly what one really thinks.”
“Just tell me what you think, sir,” the boy said. “I just want to know the truth.”
“Good.”
The professor grinned and sat down again behind his desk and picked up the manuscript. The title of this work was “The Signal Elm,” which probably explained, he thought, why the student had sent it to him in the first place. He had received the manuscript, bulky and badly typed, in the campus mail a couple of weeks before, accompanied by a reticent, expectant note asking, if he had the time, would he mind reading it. The professor at once sent a note in reply saying that it would be a pleasure to read the novel and setting a date and an hour when they could meet in his office and discuss the manuscript. He added that it was always a pleasure to have the opportunity to look at the creative work of students.
“It’s probably a confession of galloping senility, Mr. Grubb,” the professor said, “but I don’t recall ever seeing your name on any of my class lists.”
“I never was able to take your course officially, sir,” Grubb said. “I’m an engineer. But I come every year to audit your lectures on Matthew Arnold.”
“Then you must have noticed,” the professor said, smiling gently, “that from time to time I am guilty of repeating myself.”
“The way I look at it,” Grubb said, “is once you’ve really done the job on somebody like Arnold, you can’t help repeating yourself.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Are you a senior, Mr. Grubb?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Isn’t it odd that we’ve never met before now?”
The boy smiled for the first time and shrugged.
Of all the sad and inarticulate gestures of mankind, the shrug was among the least appealing to the professor. Grubb could not have offended him more by picking his nose. The boy sat awkward and attentive in his chair, still bearing, after four years, the definable stamp of a metropolitan high school. There was something about all of them, the professor thought, something of the clumsy ponderous solemnity of the self-educated man. It must take some doing, a dark and vegetable tenacity like the potato’s, to rise to the top in classes, each of thirty or forty, in public high schools of thousands, and at last to be accepted by good private colleges with the highest admission standards. In its own way it stirred one’s admiration.
“It’s a big school,” Grubb was saying, apparently to break the silence.
“And getting bigger all the time, I’m afraid,” the professor said. “Where did you prep?”
“I didn’t exactly ‘prep,’ sir. I came here from high school.”
“Did you? One of those that has a number for a name—PHS 53, like the one in your novel?”
“Yes, sir. More or less.”
“Then it’s an autobiographical novel?”
“No, sir, not really,” Grubb said. “I mean it’s somewhat autobiographical. But not completely.”
“I suspected as much,” the professor said. “Well, it’s a wonderful thing.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“I say I think it’s a wonderful thing for a second-generation boy, like the hero of your novel, the son of immigrant parents, to come up from the city streets like that. To fight and claw his way up from the anonymity of a big city high school and to end up in a place like this. It takes something. It takes persistence, patience, tenacity— Are you comfortable? Would you care for a cigarette? They’re Italian—Nazionales.”
“Thanks just the same,” Grubb said. “I don’t smoke.”
“I have to admit something,” the professor said, lighting his cigarette. “I have a confession to make before I can say anything at all about your manuscript. Years ago, already more years than I care to count, I aspired to be a novelist myself. After I graduated here and spent my tour at Oxford on a Rhodes, I chucked the whole t
hing and spent a year on the Left Bank just writing.”
“Did you run into Fitzgerald? F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
“He died about the time I was in high school,” the professor said glancing at his wristwatch.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Time,” the professor said, “time like distance blurs things. A few years ago and I’d probably have been flattered to be thought to be a contemporary of the Lost Generation.”
Mr. Grubb cleared his throat and looked down at the scuffed surface of his desert boots.
“Even after that,” the professor continued, “when the cruel world had caught up with me at last and I was just another poor instructor on the treadmill, I kept at it for a while. Mea culpa! I have three unpublished novels in my desk at home.”
“Gee, I never knew that,” Grubb said. “That’s really interesting.”
“Not really ‘interesting,’ but the sad truth,” the professor said. “Anyhow I’ve given you fair warning. Consider yourself well warned. Take any criticism I may offer with a large grain of salt.”
“The way I look at it, sir,” the boy said, “is if you’ve given it a good try yourself, you ought to be able to help me even more. I’ll take my chances.”
“Maybe so. Unpublished novels, though. Never forget that. Never forget I’m just a frustrated writer myself.”
“Like I said, I’ll take my chances.”
Professor Dudley opened the manuscript and looked at it for a moment. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, tall, slender, immaculately casual. A crew cut shot with gray, fine features, clear blue eyes. As he studied the manuscript the cigarette between his fingers burned and the ash grew long. His fingers were stained from smoking. The boy looked away, staring at the bookshelves that ringed the room.
“All right,” the professor said abruptly with his smile. “I’ll tell you what. Since we’ve both come out in the open against sin and in favor of honesty, suppose I just read you the notes I made for myself when I finished reading the manuscript? I don’t see how we can get a more direct, uncomplicated reaction than that, do you?”
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