The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “My back is stiff as a board,” she said presently.

  “In through here?” I laid a hand on the small of mine.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s supposed to be stiff as a board there. That’s called the lumbar region.”

  The caprices devised for my marital hours had of course both the rewards and the risks of actual testing that could never affect those at Moot Point. At the same time, I was trying to garnish the passing years with some of the prepared glitter of Moot Point, and so my surprise can be imagined when she scowled at me from her bed and lowered her book to her stomach. “I wish you’d have just one of these cricks of mine. Like this afternoon when I sat down a minute to play the piano, all of a sudden I got a twinge down my whole back.”

  “Possibly you struck a spinal chord.”

  I bounced over on my side, away from her, and laughed till the bed shook. She would purchase my services dearly! Of course we had some of the stresses you will find in any normal household, and she elected to have no share in the scene, nicely as it was going. I sensed from her silence that she was looking over at me with a slow burn. Those were more or less our positions when the telephone rang.

  She was out of bed like a hound over a stile, no sore back now. I heard from her greeting that it was Isolde, and the two of them were soon dug in—something about babies but I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. I fetched her robe and mules to the telephone, also the brandy as requested, and then made a patrol check of the children’s two rooms.

  First that of the girls—Maude, aged twelve, who believed in a monarchical form of government, and Phoebe, four. Maude asked me about everlasting life, but Phoebe goaded me about her name, which was definitely in her craw. I feel rather touchy about the name, having argued for it against my wife when she was pregnant and too drained by the object of the dispute to wage it with much spirit; now here was the child itself carrying on the fight against me. Phoebe had early divined that her name had comic value, also that it had been my idea; so it was that I came home, evenings, to find libelous profiles of myself on the walls, salt to have been discerned in the sugar bowl, and my studs and cuff links wedged into pots of cold cream by a child with a knack for improvisation. “I’ll change it to Eleanor,” she said as I left the bedroom after turning out the light there the third time. “Go ahead—and be like everyone else,” I said.

  I crossed the corridor to the boys’ room. Something in the arrangement of details struck my eye as screwy. Ralph was standing in a corner trying, of all things, to fall asleep like a horse. I whisked him smartly out of his “stall” and back into bed. “I never heard of anything so asinine in my life,” I said. “Horses can sleep standing up because they have four legs.” I turned on Marco as a nine-year-old who should be more responsible in keeping his eye on a brother of five.

  “Maybe I’ve got other things to think about,” Marco said from his bed, his blue eyes bland in an oppressively circular face. “Whoever heard of a name like—?”

  “That’s enough of that,” I said with lethal moderation.

  “Well, whoever heard of anybody with a name like Marco?”

  “Your name is Marco and I’ve heard of you,” I said, borrowing a retort from a Two Black Crows routine of the twenties. I was sick and tired of the fuss about names around here. “Did you have anything else on your mind, that you couldn’t see your brother was standing in the corner like a horse without a blanket on?”

  “Yes. I was thinking about the arithmetic problem Maude told us. I bet you can’t do it. The poor mother has eight children and five and a half apples for supper. How does she divide them?”

  “That’s better. Don’t fuss about your name just because Phoebe does. That’s being a copy cat. Learn to have a mind of your own.”

  “I have. I’m going to change my name to Art as soon as I can.”

  “Learn independence now. Remember, the child is father of the man.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t chew my cabbage twice,” I said, wasting no urbanity on the likes of him.

  I settled myself in bed with a highball this time, and a book selected from the headboard behind me.

  As I was reading or drinking, I have forgotten which, something told me to move my eye and glance under a desk in the corner. I did. A rat, looking like Andy Gump, was watching me. He had an aspect of alert but forlorn protest, as though disclaiming the tradition against him. I drew back my book and let fly at him. He flowed along the wainscoting like a blob of rather dirty quicksilver and disappeared into the closet. I grabbed three or four more books from the headboard and hurled them into the closet, frightening myself half to death; then having given the rat ample time to clear out if he had an exit in there, I went after him. I scrabbled among shoes on the closet floor and found no rat but an arch-shaped hole in the far corner. I wedged the toe of a slipper well into it, retrieved and straightened the books, and hopped back into bed. I was glad when the bedroom door opened and Audrey reappeared, about ten minutes later.

  Her face wore the expression that goes with News—the smiling, briefly hoarded relish of the female courier.

  “Well?”

  “The Pooles want to adopt a baby.” She shook off her robe and got into bed. “What are you smiling about? I don’t think that’s very nice.”

  “Well, I mean they just moved out here and all,” I said, grinning uncontrollably.

  “That’s why they moved out to the country.” Then: “Isolde called to ask us a favor—or rather to tip us off. They gave our name as a reference to the agency.”

  I slid up to a sitting position. “But we hardly know them,” I said.

  “We’re practically the only people they do know out here. And getting a character reference won’t be the only thing the caseworker will come to see us for.”

  “What else will she want?”

  Audrey sipped from her brandy, which she had carried from the phone, and set it down on her nightstand. “Since we’re friends as well as neighbors of the Pooles, with children of our own which theirs will probably play with and all, why, we’re part of the applicants’ environmental picture. The welfare agency will want a look at us.”

  “I see,” I said, glancing into the closet. I didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking, and gave it one of my own. “The main thing the agency will want to find out from us is, do we think the Pooles would make good parents? Just offhand, what would your opinion be?”

  She pored over her nails, as she habitually does in a state of thought. I asked presently:

  “Are you of two minds about them?”

  “Yes and no.”

  I asked her to explain what that meant, and she said she meant yes for one of the aspirant parents, no as regarded the other.

  “Exactly my opinion!” I said. I was eager to compare notes. “I wonder if we’ve passed and flunked the same people.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Audrey said.

  It’s not a point on which anyone has been successfully sententious, to my knowledge, but I think women’s reputation for intuition is based on the speed of their judgments rather than their accuracy. They’re no more acute than men in their evaluations but neither are they any less so, which leaves them with some balance in their favor. Penetrating façades gives them more pleasure than seeing frailty in perspective, hence their “I told you I was right about him” is more familiar after someone has discredited himself than after he has brought himself distinction. Women, to their credit, never spare themselves in reversing their own appraisals, under fresh evidence, and their verdicts, if my wife is any gauge, can be astonishing. I remember an epithet with which she officially changed her mind about an acquaintance who fancied herself a sensitive aesthetic type far above distaff chores. Audrey had gone along with this slant, but after disillusionment had crept in, her revised estimate ran: “She’s a bitch and a sadist and a good housekeeper.”

  Well, it turned out we differed about the Pooles righ
t off. I spotted Isolde for “nice, but probably not very practical,” and Augie as having “a lot more to him,” despite his kinks and quirks, his slightly jazzed-up literacy. “It’s just the other way around,” Audrey said. “She’s basically a sound girl, with all that actress fluff on top. She’s serious about canning things this summer. In the short time they’ve been here she’s gotten a line on the best adopting agencies—made work of it. No, that girl’s O.K. Augie now. He’s got something wrong with him that I can’t put my finger on. Something in his, well, beams and timbers. It’s as if I can hear termites in there that I can’t see. It’s very frustrating.”

  “You’ve got to admit Augie knows more. Has a lot more depth.”

  “Only on the surface. Deep down, he’s shallow.”

  “Deep down he’s shallow!” I exclaimed, scarcely able to conceal my delight. These are the word sequences for which I live. I liked a man being shallow at bottom even better than I had her recent “Winter sports leave me cold,” and “Penicillin is a drug on the market.” Such effects are a kind of specialty of hers, effortlessly come by you might say, which I had detected early in our union. The first, “When I woke up and found I had the flu, I was sick,” I had pricked up my ears at on our honeymoon. Topsoil in Connecticut is far from dirt cheap. There is literally no end to them. She was surely the first to feel that anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. I don’t think she suspects how dear these convolutions are to me, nor that I keep a mental file or “collection” of them. Well, anyhow, to get back to the argument. Her last words were: “Watch.”

  That was the long-range program; the immediate order of business was to get to sleep. An hour later, I was lying in the dark with my hands laced under my head, thinking about what the caseworker might be told. Audrey’s bed gave a sharp creak as she raised her head alertly. “Do I hear a mouse?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, my lips curled in a faintly ironic smile, which of course she could not see for it was pitch dark. And which was not of long duration, for I thought: How will I handle that problem? Could Nebuchadnezzar be banked on to any extent? He had a terrier ingredient in him, to judge from the zeal with which he worried slippers through the house, but the question remained whether the instinct could be brought to bear on a more cunning adversary.

  I was about to drop off when something popped Marco’s arithmetic problem into my head. What was it the poor mother had had? Eight children and five and a half apples. Well, let’s see, eight times five would be forty, so if she cut the apples into eighths she would have forty slices to divide, or five slices for each child. But what about the half left over? She could divide that into eight pieces, of course, but that sounded too simple; the problem must be to find a way of cutting the apples into slices of equal size—otherwise what would be the sense of putting it in an arithmetic book? Let’s see now, how did the poor mother work it out? Oh, the hell with it, I told myself—go to sleep.

  I settled resolutely on one side, kneading the pillow under my head. I tried to get my mind on the rat again, but the way back wasn’t easy. Problems and puzzles have a way of getting their hooks into me. Give me farmers with acreage to parcel among their sons and canoes with distances to travel upstream and I am soon out of my wits. I lay stark awake. What composer was it—was it Mozart—who as a small child would torment his father by stealing downstairs at night, striking an unresolved chord on the clavichord, and sneaking back up to bed again, leaving the old man to toss and turn till he had left his own bed and gone down and resolved it? No connection. Yes, there is. The raveled sleeve of sleep. He who has children gives hostages to fortune. The Pooles want children and this is very laudable of them, for could they not just as easily go on spending all their money selfishly on themselves? Isolde’s grandmother’s money, rather. Would the agency ask me about Augie’s finances? Would he ever be self-supporting? It was tough for the head of a family to make both ends meet. The poor mother has eight children—

  I threw the covers back and got out of bed. I turned the light on over the desk. I sat down, drew pencil and paper to me, and started in. Now, the thing I must do is find a common denominator for eight and five and a half. Of course. Then I’d as good as have it. I was scratching away when Audrey stirred sleepily. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Going over some figures.”

  She dropped off again. But presently the same inquiry was mumbled. “Just something I want to do before I forget,” I answered. “You go to sleep.”

  Then for the third time: “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was true enough. Even finding a common denominator and letting the poor mother divide accordingly would not, I guessed, be the answer; for the suspicion now began to gnaw me that the whole thing was a riddle, with a pun or something for an answer. A hell of a thing to get into in the dead of night. I might lie here fussing till daybreak, unless I “gave up.” I gave up.

  I snapped the light off and picked my way down the hall, flicking on a succession of others, to the boys’ room. I shook Marco awake.

  “In that problem, you remember, what did the poor mother do?” I asked him.

  He uttered a startled cry.

  “Shh!” I said. “You’ll wake the others. It’s just Daddy. You forgot to tell me the answer—you know, about the five apples and eight and a half children. I mean the eight children and five and a half farmers,” I whispered in his ear. “Daddy gives up.”

  “Leave me alone,” he said.

  I saw that he would be no good to me. I recalled it was Maude he’d gotten the problem from, so I went into the girls’ room and shook her awake. “That problem about the mother and the apples,” I said. “You remember. What did the poor mother do?” She muttered something in protest and turned away on her side. I shook her by both shoulders. “What did the poor mother do?” I demanded.

  “Made applesauce.”

  Climbing back into my bed—for what I trusted would be the last time that night—I wondered how Augie would have done as paterfamilias, given tonight as a sample, say. Then the reverse suggested itself: what would the agency have thought of me? A heavy drowsiness began to overtake me. That, I mused, was one of the fortunate advantages of having children the normal way—nobody was around to say whether you should. With such comfort as I could extract from that thought, I fell asleep.

  Five

  WHEN the caseworker arrived I was making faces at my children to show that I ought to have them. Funny faces, eyes crossed, cheeks squished in, that were great sport. I had been watching for the caseworker from the picture window, and managed to time a tableau of sorts for her benefit on the above lines, when her car turned off the road and came up the gravel drive to the house.

  It was now some five weeks since Isolde’s call forewarning us of her and three since the caseworker herself had called to make this appointment. This wasn’t the Mrs. Mash before whom I was stricken dumb but a predecessor back in the relatively azure days when I didn’t know anything much about Augie. It was two o’clock of a Saturday afternoon in mid-April. The children had been bathed, brushed and scrubbed till they looked sullen but simonized, for was it not avowedly among our objects to pass muster with the welfare people ourselves? There was not a member of the family who wasn’t dressed in his best from the hide out.

  It had not been easy. The day had begun portentously, with a contagious crossness among the children building by noon to that kind of uproar that sometimes seizes pet shops. Phoebe had awoken in a vile humor; she was going to kill Ralph, cut the fringes off the rugs, go to Egypt. She and her mother were at the breakfast table together when I sat down there. I flapped out my napkin and said brightly to Phoebe, “Eating your breakfast?” No answer, and I picked up my orange juice. My wife checked me with a shake of her head. “Phoebe, your father asked you something,” she said. Continued silence. The girl’s no good till she’s had her milk, and then is nothing to brag about. “Maybe you didn’t hear him
. He will say it again.” She gave me a sign to repeat.

  “Eating your breakfast?” I said, with somewhat synthetic spirit. Still no reply. I lifted my orange juice and again my hand was stayed with a look. “Phoebe, your father asked you a question,” my wife said sternly now. “Must everything stop till you’re civil?”

  “Forget it,” I said, anxious to get on to my breakfast. “It’s a rhetorical question, just a remark really. I don’t mind.”

  “But I do,” my wife said, with a look which said she was surprised that I could not see when an issue should be made of a thing. “Now, Phoebe,” she continued to the girl, “we’ll give you one more chance to be polite. If you aren’t, I’m afraid we’ll have to do something about it.” She cued me with another nod. I took it from where I’d sat down. Flapping my napkin out once more, I said with a threadbare smile, “Eating your breakfast are you, Phoebe?”

  We both watched her. There was a short silence. Then, somewhat darkly into her cereal, she said, “Yes.”

  I fell to, and my wife returned to the paper she’d been reading. The next order of business made more sense.

  “You’re not eating your breakfast!” we both observed to the tot, who was shoving her cereal about in its bowl. At that moment Ralph came in clutching a stuffed horse and revealed plans to spend the day in the MacPhersons’ barn, which were promptly countered with the reminder that we had an important visitor coming today, and that cleanliness was of the essence. I dilated on the prevalence of this theme in nature. “Look at the cat,” I said, pointing to one of the Pooles’ eunuchs, which we had on loan to see if it could help eradicate the rats. “Cats are the healthiest animals in the world. And why? Have you ever noticed how they’re always licking themselves?”