I sidled into the first booth I saw empty, hoping Terry wouldn’t recognize me even if she saw me. I couldn’t pull the brim of the hat down over one eye as it was a homburg. There was little danger of her spotting me immediately in the confusion; a mauve nose and generally glacéed features kept me incognito for a good ten minutes. But then, as I was raising a cup of hot chocolate to my lips, I happened to glance into a booth in which Terry was looking over, her elbows cocked up on the table and a cup in both her hands, studying me. Her mouth opened in an inaudible cry of recognition. She excused herself to some companions I couldn’t see, rose, and carried her chocolate over. Dressed in a buttoned coonskin coat, she slid in across from me.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said. “How’ve you been?”
“I tried to get you, I tried every which way,” I said, looking her steadily in the eye. “How are you?”
I’m fine.”
“Let’s go over where we can talk,” I said, pointing to where a group of teen-agers were making enough noise around a jukebox so no one could have overheard us. But just then the jukebox started up, and it seemed all right to stay where we were. A loud vocal streamed across the huge premises:
The way you bugged my heart
You snowed me from the start,
I was a cornball and a cow;
But now I’m in a puff
Over one who’s got the stuff
And everything is Roger now.
So don’t try to bug me back
Or wig me when it’s slack
’Cause everything is Roger now.
“I tried to phone you, oh, many times. Your phone is disconnected. You—came out here?”
“Yes. I have a room at the McBains’ now. That’s them right over—there.” She pointed at a middle-aged couple gotten up largely in leather. “I earn my sort of keep around the house a little, sit for them et cetera—and scribble a few hours each day.”
She bent her head to sip from her chocolate. Raising her head, she parted the hair away from her right eye and made a study of me. “You’re blue.”
“Just what did you expect of me?” I asked.
She watched me, drinking.
I slid down as far as I could in the booth, till my chin was almost on a level with the table-top. “How many months are you gone?” I asked in a hollow voice.
‘What are you talking about?”
“The child.”
“Child? What child? What in God’s name are you talking about?”
I slid up again in the booth. “Isn’t there a child?”
“Where did you get such an idea?”
“What was all the—what was it you called me in such a state about?”
She opened her mouth on an unuttered laugh, then put her hand to her forehead. Then she said, “I thought you understood what I was talking about. That was about the article. My Most Unforgettable Character?” I nodded impatiently. “Father threatened to sue.”
“Sue you?”
“Well, The Reader’s Digest, actually. He wasn’t going to be anybody’s Most Unforgettable Character. Soo, they sent the article back.” She spooned up the frothy chocolate. “I was sorry I bothered you about it, but I felt so low I just had to tell you.”
My mind flew back over the telephone conversation. “Have you guessed? The inevitable. The thing is, I’ve told Father. I’m so embarrassed—so ashamed. I might have known. . . .”
I asked her, “What are you writing about now?”
“Mother.” Her face lit up and she leaned across the table. “Mother was always trying to outwit pests in the house. Like the other night, when the McBains found one of Ned’s suits all chewed up by moths, I remembered how Mother would always throw an old piece of flannel on the floor of the closet, so the moths would eat that instead?”
I laughed heartily. “That’s rich,” I said.
“Mother won’t think being somebody’s Most Unforgettable Character is a disgrace to the family. I’ve already cleared it with her. So when I’m finished, if you could find a minute. . . .”
The jukebox boomed out across the room’s expanding hubbub:
You played me for a schnook,
You’re blotsky in my book,
You never built a bonfire in my hall.
You’re soggy and you snowed me
And he’s the one who showed me,
I know that he will fizz me with his call.
Now that I really dig you
Don’t wait for me to wig you,
’Cause everything is Roger after all.
Members of both sleigh parties rose and began to draw on mittens and mufflers. “Right home for me,” somebody said.
“What’s the matter?” I called, hysterical. “We soft?”
I got home about a quarter to twelve, to find my wife reading in bed.
“What kind of a time did you have?” she asked, looking up from her book.
“Terrific.” I took a hot bath, drew on flannel pajamas I’d set to warm on the bathroom radiator, and returned to the bedroom.
My wife set her book aside. “Did you really?” she asked me, interested. “Because, you know, I didn’t actually have a sick headache or anything. I got cold feet at the last minute.”
And none too soon, old girl, I thought as I pulled the covers back and popped blissfully in between the sheets.
Eighteen
THE peak of Augie’s conventionalization took, in terms of outward symbols, the form of his joining us all for a church supper one evening. Seated on folding chairs in the church basement, we put our minds to cutting roast beef without dissecting the paper plates on which it was served; and this with meat only moderately amenable to surgery. A jab of particular force not only cut through my plate but made a slight incision in the trousers fabric of the knee I was holding my food on, and I felt a trickling warmth which gave new meaning to the term “lap supper.” This was in the early spring. I had on a white linen suit for the first time that season, and lifting my plate I saw a stain the color of hemoglobin spreading on the pants. My companions fared better, having asked for and gotten well-done meat instead of rare. My emotions remained pent up, as we were seated within earshot of the minister, a pale, seraphic man with eyes the color of lentils. Still, what words I would have cared to utter would have been unfit for a brothel, let alone a house of worship. To some profanity that did escape under my breath my wife said under hers, “Please. We’re in church.” To which I answered, “Only in the basement.” I looked around me, and wondered what their religion really meant to the commuters I saw on every hand. I have never heard of anything being converted in Connecticut but old barns.
Looking a little like an intern calling it a day, I rose and, with Augie, took all the empty plates back to the serving counter. There we got four dishes of ice cream and four cups of coffee, and joined our ladies with them. They were deep in a conversation during which Isolde, as we approached, cast an admiring glance at her husband in the course of something she said. Sitting down, we learned what they were talking about: the slowness of the agency in not having, even yet, come through. She was clearly chafing under the delay. Which the Crib explained by saying that at the moment the demand exceeded the supply, and anyhow they hadn’t had anything that seemed right for the Pooles—for, as they emphasized more than once, they made a point of matching the parents with the child as closely as possible. This concerned the latter’s extraction (what was known of it), color of hair and eyes, and other details of general appearance on which comparison might reasonably be made. Audrey was quick to corroborate this to Isolde, from her own experience with friends who had adopted, and so was Augie, out of what appeared to be widespread private researches of his own.
“Augie’s certainly gone out of his way to find all this out,” Isolde said. “So interested.” She blew him a kiss across me.
A moment later, as we were watching a diversion at the serving tables where somebody had dropped a loaded tray, Isolde suddenly set her desse
rt spoon down in her dish and said: “I know what we’ll do.”
“What?”
“Try again with Rock-a-Bye.”
Augie’s face turned the color of the ice cream he was raising to his own lips, which happened to be pistachio. “Why do that?” he asked.
“Why not? Lots of couples try more than one agency. Or even more than two, before they succeed. That right, Audrey?”
“Well, yes, that’s true. The Haleys tried I don’t know how many agencies before they got something.”
“Well then.” Isolde spread a hand as at something elementary. “Why should we stick with the Crib?”
“But would shopping around be fair to them?” Augie protested. He laid his ice cream aside.
“Yes, why hurt their feelings?” I chimed in.
“Feelings!” Isolde laughed. “What’s that got to do with it? I’ve got feelings too. Look how long they’re taking. They might keep us on the string indefinitely. What can we lose by getting our name on two lists? If the Crib has something for us first, fine. If Rock-a-Bye, fine too. There’s every reason to believe Rock-a-Bye should change its mind now. Augie’s changed. And so has his whole financial picture. We never did get a clear answer on why they turned us down the first time, but I think a lot of it was this stable breadwinner idea. Besides, I think we owe it to Augie himself to make them reverse their verdict. I’ll call them tomorrow.” She emphasized this with a “so there” nod of her head.
I started to protest again, but Augie warned me off with a shake of his head, for fear of arousing suspicion.
Some suspicion had been already aroused several weeks before, when Augie’s 1099 form arrived from The Townsman office—the statement for Federal income tax return, which specified how much he had earned from the magazine as a free-lance contributor the year before. Isolde had fished it out of the mailbox and opened it, to find that he had earned considerably more than he had declared to her. He explained the discrepancy by saying he had been putting money a little at a time into a separate savings account with which he had wanted to surprise her.
“It’s like flaws turning up in a perfect crime,” Augie’d said to me. “I sure as hell never thought of that. I wonder what next.” To cover his story, I arranged for another advance from the office, and he hurriedly put the money into a new savings account which he did thereupon start.
The next link in what Augie called the infamy of events was revealed at a folk dance in Bridgeport to which we and the Pooles went, separately, early that summer.
For a long time people in our crowd had been trying to get me to folk dances. One of the most persistent was Sid Walters, the clear poet. Sid’s obsession with things of that nature formed, as is often the case, part of a generally political concern with society, and, conversely, my indifference to them has been vaguely deplored as somehow indicative of scrawny thinking and bourgeois leanings. Just how my refusal to watch large numbers of strangers exert themselves rhythmically in upstairs rooms is evidence of how I vote has never been clear to me. My blind spot on the colloquial arises in part, I suppose, from folk singers I have heard in New York night clubs, where though the entertainment may be produced on a zither the charges are not necessarily computed on an abacus. But it also dates back to a milking certain Avalonians, myself included, received at the hands of a minstrel with a guitar, who wandered into town off of a freight car and thence into our hearts with the story that he was an ex-convict, a detail which gained for him an extra status among a small but discerning minority. A purse was gotten up for him to which I contributed twenty-five dollars. Intimations that Solitary, as he called himself, was better than any predecessors, including Lead Belly, were liberally nourished by himself and others, and he had acquired a substantial vogue among the intellectuals before he was exposed as an impostor who not only had no criminal record but possessed a background spotted with nothing more than a fear of work and a few jumped hotel bills. I always thought the bastard should have been arrested. However, he disappeared from local view and was never seen again. Uppermost in his repertoire was a number entitled “I was a stranger and you took me in,” a ditty that I always think would have a fine relevance if I ever met him long enough to sing it back to him.
Sid Walters and my wife, in the end, whisked me off to a dance by conspiracy. He broke into the house one night flourishing a mimeographed handbill for a Hungarian revel when I was asleep in an armchair. “It’s tonight! In Bridgeport! Let’s pile into my car and go,” he said. Audrey clapped her hands with what I was too dopey to see was a faked extemporaneity, my shoes were fetched, and before I knew what was happening, Mrs. Goodbread materialized and I was being led off between the two plotters to the waiting automobile. It was raining. “Some night to drag a man out to a recital,” I grumbled, climbing into the back seat behind my wife.
Studiously buttoning a glove, she said, “It’s not a recital, actually, but a real dance.”
I reached for the door handle but it was too late.
“This will be the real thing,” Sid said, shooting away in second. “Ah, those czardas rhythms. What they do to a man.”
“Czardas—didn’t Hoagy Carmichael write that?” I said, determined to be as much of a Philistine as possible.
Sid sketched in something of the history and background of Transylvanian forms, and as we headed up the Post Road toward Bridgeport, talked at length about ancient folkways. I have had enough about folkways, especially when dished up with psychiatric-anthropological analysis. I slumped down in the back seat and spent the remainder of the trip trying to think up some new folkways.
One folkway I thought of was an annual so-called Week of Good Report, during which people would go from door to door repeating nice things about their friends, to “atone” for the gossip spread the balance of the year. During this week the populace would eat nothing but tongue in penitential admission of the length of their own; thus they would “take everything back” for the twelvemonth by symbolically eating their words. Then I imagined an annual ceremony involving the hanging of an anthropologist. Another possible folk custom that occurred to me was something that would fall on a day known as Maybe Tuesday, a day nationally observed by building on the already emerging folklore of the quiz show. The quiz show would be reversed. Television crews in every city and town in the country would enter homes and instead of giving away money and gifts for questions answered correctly would take away some article of furniture or other possession for everyone that was not. This would be a long ceremony, lasting all day or till the family were completely stripped of their belongings. Neighbors would gather to watch. This is of course a modernization of the scapegoat ritual, and is called Maybe Tuesday because, as the expression would go, maybe next time it would happen to you.
The dance was held over a restaurant called the Romany Café. I knew from this that it was probably genuine, all right. All authentic folk affairs are held on the second floor. Anybody taking you to one that is on the first floor and representing it as the real thing is either lying or himself the victim of a misunderstanding.
The hall was large, and filling up as we arrived. We met a man in a pea-green jacket who was doing a thesis on some aspect of the dance for his master’s, a friend of Sid’s who showed my wife how to skip. “That’s damn well what I’d like to do,” I mumbled in an aside. My wife shot me a glance which enjoined me to either keep my mouth shut or stop acting like a peasant. “Get around and mix,” she said, and disappeared on one foot. I did, and presently found myself running into friends from Avalon. We stood out, not favorably, by contrast to the many Old World costumes of the neighborhood folk; in our herringbone and banker’s flannel we were dreary to a degree. One by one, or rather two by two, the suburbanites stepped out onto the floor, and were lost in the avenging swirl.
I drifted over to a table where a heady wine punch was being served, and had two or three. There I made the acquaintance of a girl of Slavic extraction named Anna, who spoke a patois derived from coast-to-coas
t hookups, Broadwayese, and official bebop. “That orchestra is cool,” she said, rocking her head. The band was playing a popular favorite at the moment, but she expressed appreciation of a polka that followed in the same terms, and belittled czardas with, “Why don’t they get it off the ground?” She taught me a few of the folk steps. The Tokay in the punch reached my head and my feet simultaneously, fostering an illusion of acquired skill; my fourth drink was soon my seventh; single sensations dissolved, over the flying hours, in a general haze of wine and rhythm. About eleven o’clock I happened to glance toward the main doorway and saw the Pooles arrive with another couple. Isolde said something in my wife’s ear and they embraced happily. I guessed what the good news was from Augie’s long face.
“We’ve been accepted by Rock-a-Bye,” he said, taking me to the sidelines.
“I see.”
“We got the report today.”
We sank together onto folding chairs which bore the name of a local mortician.
“Let me think,” I said.
I was in a mixed frame of mind. Only half of me seemed to sober up while the other half continued to revel, like a street shaded on one side and in sunlight on the other, or possibly moonlight.
“You couldn’t steer Isolde away from it?” I said.
“You know I couldn’t. It was for me she did it.”
“Then we’ve got to steer Cornelia away from it—if there’s still time.”
“Would you?”
I got to my feet. “I’ll call her right away,” I said, oblivious of the hour. I looked around for a phone booth.
“Are you sure you’re in shape to?” Augie assessed me worriedly. “You look three sheets to the wind again.”
“I’m all right. There’s no time to lose.”
I found the booth and put in my call. Hubert answered.
The Tunnel of Love Page 19