“But those things don’t happen,” Audrey and I remonstrated with her, time and time again. “You’ve got to make your mind up to take-him back or that’s the end of it.”
Augie, meanwhile, lived unhappily at the Algonquin in New York City. His work went poorly. He got no new ideas. We gave him a steady part-time job at The Townsman, developing germinal ideas we had in the office, or ideas that were nebulous or imperfect; situations of the kind to which Blair always attached the memo, “Something here. Work on.” Augie was very creative on these. His “switches” were often completely new contributions, and he saved many a joke we had been ready to scrap. He worked on the captions of bought cartoons, too. He came in three days a week to the office. He languished. He loved Isolde—that was plain now. And he loved the child. There was no doubt he missed them more acutely every day.
“He’s dying to see you both,” I reported to Isolde. “Isn’t that worth something?”
She smoothed out a pleat in her skirt with a stiff hand and frowned. Pride held out. Augie had now been gone five weeks.
“What’ll I tell him?” I said. “I’m going to have dinner with him in town Thursday. Any message?”
No message. She needed time.
Thursday I quit work early and had several drinks at as many bars in restless preparation for meeting Augie at a bar we had designated. The higher I got the lower I got, as it were. When I turned up at the appointed place, which was my personal favorite, the curator looked at me narrowly.
“I see I got competition,” he said, wiping a glass. We were again momentarily alone.
“Give me a straight rye,” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on now. I’m a steady customer here.”
“You’re not very steady tonight.”
“Then give me a white wine and seltzer.”
Frank complied, but advised I make the drink last as it was all I was likely to get from him in the very immediate future. He went silently back to his work. I nursed the drink moodily, turning over something extra I had on my mind. Moot Point had fallen off.
All the grace and charm seemed to have vanished from that pleasure dome, now apparently past its modish peak and sloping into its long decline. The sequels to those delicate humoresques, each an étude illustrative of some aspect of the sexual harmonics, with which I had so often detained myself in times past, had become unremittingly banal and gross—mere carnal intervals, encounters with shopgirls whisked up there for the most elementary of purposes. Why? Was my fancy not what it used to be? Or were its latest products secretly willed, out of that hankering for the vulgar, that nostalgia for the loam of things, that haunts overspun man? In any case I was spared nothing. I visualized to the last detail the breakfasts which, once the last fine fillip of communions given and taken there, were now the penalties of its debauches. Indeed their horrors were often the whole of my scenarios. Thus I imagined myself, in trying to render somewhat more literate the conversation going on over bacon and eggs with one of these grisettes, as wondering aloud whether Proust would live, and her replying, “Is he sick?”
I slumped across the bar with my hands to my face.
“What’s the matter?” Frank asked.
“Unholy mess.”
He shook his head.
“What defeats me about you educated fellows is you have everything a fellow could ask for, well-spoken, good jobs, fine families, and you sit around here like the last rose of summer. I don’t know. It’s too many for me. Believe me if I had your job.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got everything.”
“Then get that mailbag off your lower lip.”
Frank turned and watched something on the sidewalk outside. I followed his gaze and saw a blonde six feet tall and wearing a mink stole, looking in.
“She meets a guy here once in a while,” Frank explained.
“I tell you what you do, Frank, if she comes in here. I’ll be sitting here like this, my tie straightened, new homburg on, a drink in front of me, my briefcase on the next stool—a fellow outwardly prosperous, you understand, and yet with a definite touch of something lost and lonely. Then you go over to where she’s sitting and say to her, like a bartender in a cartoon, you see—now, get this. You look over at me and say to her: ‘It’s a sort of Marquand story—a basically independent nature sacrificed to the externals of achievement.’ Have you got that?”
“Oh, go to hell,” Frank said. “Here she comes now.”
The woman went to the farthest stool and set a gold mesh evening bag on, the bar and drew off a pair of pink gloves, which she folded and laid as carefully on the evening bag as she had the bag on the bar. She was smooth-featured and clear-skinned, with durable Panelyte laminated plastic top designed to resist stains, scratches, heat and moisture. Finely crafted, meticulously detailed, legs tipped with satin brass ferrules. Complete with synchro-mesh, spatter shield and automatic three-heat timing switch. All this plus the wonderful economy of Frank’s budget-pleasing prices. Hurry! Hurry!
“C’est l’époque,” I said, lightly tapping the ashes from my cigarette.
“What did you say?” asked Frank, who was mixing her a whisky sour she had ordered.
“It’s the age we live in. A general, almost stylized, ennui has taken hold of us. Security, intellectual attainments, these mean nothing; subtlety is a hindrance to peace as often as its source.” I saw from the woman’s reflection in the bar mirror that the ripe mouth had fallen ajar. It closed, however, on a cigarette presently thrust into it. Every hair was in place. She had obviously never been hissed at by a lamb chop, or by anything else in a frying pan. I got her in trouble. O my God!
“The human mechanism,” I continued, “has become too finely tuned. We are shattered by vibrations from which denser natures were exempt. The path to death and decay is not an easy one, and to presume to untangle the skein of things is worse than in vain. It is vain.”
“I thought you di’n’t feel good,” Frank said, serving the new-comer her libation. Watching him strike a match for her cigarette, I thought to whet her interest with something in a lighter vein, something from my store of incidental quips and sallies.
“You change that bar rag about once a year, Frank?” I twitted. “He changes that bar rag once a year—on New Year’s Eve. Every New Year’s Eve he wrings out the old, wrings in the new.”
The woman took a sip from her sour and scratched an instep. I tried a fresh tittup.
“Man in a small Southern town killed his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, two cousins and an uncle. He took the bodies down into the basement, boiled them in washtubs, and puréed the remains through a sieve. What was the upshot?” I twisted my cigarette out in an ashtray. “Strained relations.”
The woman presented a face wreathed in smiles. I was about to smile back when a pair of masculine shoulders three feet wide brushed past mine from behind and the woman was joined by a new arrival. A better example of the “denser natures” to which I had just alluded could scarcely be imagined. I’m not saying his eyebrows and hairline merged, but the image will be metaphorically helpful. He was dark, and weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He patted the woman’s head with a little endearment, from which she drew back. “Can’t a fellow touch the girl he’s in love with’s hair?” he said.
“Get me all mussed up.”
“I like those eyes even when you’re sore,” was his rejoinder. “You hypmatize me.”
I beamed benevolently on the scene and winked at Frank. “Let us all be terribly Spanish, for there is not enough time to be Greek,” I said.
The primate who had just come in stepped over to me.
“What was that crack, Bud?” he said.
“That was no crack,” I said. “I was just—”
“I can hear. I got ears. I don’t like remarks passed about nobody’s nationality. See?” the primate replied, helping himself to a handful of my lapels. “In this country we don’t care where people came from.
This is a democracy.”
“It was in the spirit of that assumption that I—”
“And talk English.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, siree.”
“O.K.”
He released me and went back to his hypmatist. The bartender scowled at me and I scowled back. I would take my custom elsewhere were it not for the appointment I had in this dump—that was what my glare said. Finally the door opened again and Augie hurried in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “But I just had a phone call from Isolde at the hotel.”
I was instantly tense. “What about?” I asked.
He gave a nervous shrug. “You got me. She just said for me to come out, she wants to see me. Something’s up.”
“Wants to see you when? Tonight?” I said apprehensively.
“Tonight. Give me some Bourbon and water, will you?” Augie turned to me. “‘Had to see me’ was the way she put it—not wanted to see me. What could that mean?”
“God, I don’t know. I hope the agency isn’t on the warpath.”
“Don’t even say it.” Augie glanced over his shoulder at a wall clock. “It’s seven-thirty now. The next train isn’t till eight ten. Time enough for a couple. I sure need ‘em.”
“I told you not to stir this up.”
“Cut it out. Mean only a storm could clear so foul a sky.”
Augie had a couple, in the course of which I phoned Audrey and told her I’d be on the eight ten with Augie instead of on a later train for which we had made arrangements that morning. “Isolde wants to see him. Something seems to be up. What’s going on?” I asked.
“You’ll find out when you get here,” she said. “I can’t talk about it over the telephone.”
“Well, what is it?”
“You hurry home.”
Augie and I walked the three blocks to the station. On the train we buried ourselves behind magazines—not that we read them. We were both on tenterhooks. The train was a local and the trip an eternity. But at last we arrived at Avalon, and there were Isolde and Audrey both waiting for us on the platform. Their eyes were red. They had clearly both been crying.
We got into our separate cars and started for home. I could see the Pooles’ car tailing us in the rearview mirror. We had gone a short distance from the station when Audrey burst out with:
“You’ll never guess what’s happened.”
“What?” I said. “What the devil’s going on out here? Is it something about the agency?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Isolde’s going to have a baby.”
As everyone knows, childless women often become pregnant after adopting an infant. The experience of maternity itself supposedly thaws out the fears and self-doubts that had previously thwarted its accomplishment. That had happened to Isolde, in only the few months’ time in which she had been a practicing mother. She had always wanted a child at the same time that she’d feared it, and naturally the swell of emotion released by the realization of her long-hungered-for condition swept her back into a tide of feeling for her husband. She had suspected her condition for a couple of weeks, but only today had medical reports proved it beyond a doubt.
I don’t know what reconciliation scene was enacted in the Poole home that night. I can only imagine it—the tears, laughter, protestations, embraces.
On that night, which now seemed so long ago, when Isolde had called Audrey and told her of their wish to adopt, Audrey and I had been lying in bed unretired, in the way we have—she reading a book, I smoking and musing and listening to sounds in the plaster. Neither of us was reading this night. We nursed a drink apiece and talked long past midnight about the Pooles. I thought I heard a faint rustle in the wall and remembered the rat that had visited me the other time. We had no more rats now—they were gone. No thanks to either Nebuchadnezzar (who had died a few months before) or the cat the Pooles had loaned us; thanks only to a terrier we had acquired. Jake was his name. Perhaps it was only Jake, scooting and scrabbling about in the basement, who had made the noise. Our four children were of course long asleep, dreaming their peculiar dreams. Phoebe (now firmly representing herself as Alice) often dreamed of letters of the alphabet, or so she told us at breakfast.
The phone rang. Audrey bolted out of bed and got it on the third ring—par for that distance. It was Isolde. They talked for half an hour or more, and when Audrey returned she said: “They want to celebrate. All of us together.”
Celebrate we did. We made a night of it in New York. Our old foursome. Happy once again, with a difference perhaps—but happy. The Pooles carted Augie, Junior over to our place in a carrying basket and Mrs. Goodbread sat with all the children there. We dressed. The girls were visions in new frocks; the men, in tuxedos now slightly tight for them, looked like exploded baked potatoes. We had dinner and then went to a night club. We drank champagne. We raised our glasses.
“Here’s how,” Augie said.
The child was born in the early fall and was a girl. Anita is her name.
That was only a few years ago and yet the children seem to be already growing up—the Pooles’ and, certainly, ours. Mrs. Goodbread sits regularly with the Pooles’ two, but our Maude is now old enough to leave with the rest. Old enough also, though, to be going out on her own now and then. Mr. Good-bread still mows lawns for several of us and detains us widely as a raconteur. Dr. Vancouver has left general medicine and settled in pediatrics; there is still a lack of baby doctors in growing Avalon and he has made a good thing of it. Isolde takes her kids to him and reports he is O.K., but still a good deal of a hypochondriac—though less apprehensive about catching things from babies than he’d been from adults. Terry I never saw again. The McBains moved West, and they and she have dropped from sight. Now and then I pick up a copy of The Reader’s Digest and look for the article about her mother, but I never see it.
So Augie was gathered into the orbit that claims us all at last. So the damnation is that there is no damnation; the peal of doom is a penny whistle, the Good Humor bell calling the children at evening. So the years glide along. I never go to Moot Point any more. There is nothing doing there. A new six-lane highway goes by the door, and Moot Point is a silent ruin. It would have been much better had the state survey hit it directly—then it would have been condemned by eminent domain and torn down, with reasonable remuneration at market value. But the government does not recognize near misses or what they call consequential damage to property deflated by scenic blights. So my old haunt stands, throttled by the encroaching forests, choked with bushes filled with guzzling bees or tufts of winter snow. Cars and fume-dispensing trailers bowl past the front all day; the Maine waters murmur everlastingly behind. I hardly think about it any more—I can’t stand to. But sometimes I’m reminded of it, and then my heart breaks. As a valley dweller drinks from streams which bear rumors of the cold purity of mountaintops, so I can in chance moments of daily life catch echoes and glimpses, intimations of that ideal typified by Moot Point at its best. A woman’s wit and animal ease, splinters of hotel gaiety, these quicken memories of that lost Babylonian grace, that quicksilver common to all those who were seen there in the old days.
I’ve been looking for another site; or I should say we are—because my wife has taken the initiative in our search for a summer cottage. We’ve had our eye for a long time on a lakeside plot up in New Hampshire, and it looks as though we’re going to buy and build on it. Nothing pretentious, you understand, nothing fancy, just a little place we can call our own. It won’t be named Moot Point, by a long chalk, but probably something like Pines and Needles, or even Drowsy Dell. Because instead of the suave adulteries and worldly company for which Moot Point was famous in its heyday, this will be strictly a family affair, with youngsters romping on the lawn and splashing in the water. We’ll have the Pooles up a good deal, I expect, for long week ends and summer holidays with all the children, of whom ours are approaching the age when they’ll have friends and schoolmates of their
own to ask up. Maude already has a boy with a popping car, which leaves half its organs in my drive. Incidentally, I often come upon Maude making entries in a book which she refuses to let me see, and keeps locked in a drawer. She says it’s a diary, but I don’t know—it looks more like a notebook to me. Could that, then, be the end? “Father always started the oil furnace when he stamped his foot. . . . Father would make Mother presents of his favorite wines and of the books he wanted to read. . . .”
“Everybody has to get away,” Mother remarked over her needlepoint one evening, as plans for the summer cottage were being completed. “And don’t you think it’ll be a real retreat for both of us?”
“I don’t know about you,” Father said, pouring himself a glass of ale as he settled back with a sigh in his easy chair, “but it’s certainly a retreat for me.”
The Tunnel of Love Page 22