“Just what do you call right?” I said. “And how do you propose I go about announcing myself as not eligible?”
“That’s your problem. But put your cards on the table and make her do the same with hers. Smoke her out somehow, bring it all out in the open, and for the love of God, put an end to this mare’s nest!”
She turned away. She looked nowhere, and sliced the air with a sigh.
“I’m sorry, but you know how I feel,” she said apologetically. “Oh, Andy, I want to get married.”
It was a protest, not an amorous cry, and I wisely did not try to turn it to amorous account. I watched unhappily as she turned and went to her own desk and drew the hood from her typewriter. The war of nerves was on.
“Well, all right,” I said, “I’ll take another crack at it on that basis. But I’ll say one thing. I hope you know what I’m doing.”
Chapter Ten
MOLLY’S theory could have been right or wrong, but right or wrong, there was nothing to lose by giving it a try. If her hunch was correct, then Hester’s removal as an obstacle to our plans could be achieved in a much subtler fashion than “throwing her out of the house” or “making her lay her cards on the table”: namely, by the elimination of myself as an object of desire. It suddenly came to me as being that simple. With that end in view, therefore, I set about the systematic depreciation of myself as a catch.
I addressed myself first to the important and most obvious sphere, the domestic, by lapsing in matters of tidiness. I left my clothes lying about; I put things where they didn’t belong; I was unpunctual for meals and irregular in my habits generally. I did all this gradually but nonetheless firmly, with marked changes in that previously well-run household. There was always something for Hester to pick up or to straighten out or to overlook. I left the knots in my ties and hung them on doorknobs and drawer handles, and I set wet towels on chairs in rooms into which I wandered with them. Smoking gave me a chance to be slovenly where there had been no contrary precedent of neatness, since I had just acquired the habit, and I made the most of it. I spilled ashes on the rugs and on myself, and doused cigarette ends in my coffee dregs in the manner of a man who is no bargain. The same with drink, another indulgence into which the strain of accumulating events had driven me. I never became a heavy drinker, but I was by now a daily one; cocktails after a hard day at the office being a sine qua non. I would come home—at whatever hour caprice dictated and without reference to pre-arrangement—and immediately clatter up an Old-fashioned. I could overturn a kitchen foraging for incidentals, and moist paper napkins adhered like stamps to half the furniture when I was through. Dinner could wait even if it meant burnt dishes—for me to complain of when I finally did sit down.
While I thus added ill temper to bad habits in the all-out drive to lose ground with Hester, her own mood of undamaged good spirits in the early weeks of the experiment was a source of surprise, and made me wonder if it wasn’t going to take longer than I had anticipated. She would pick up my shirts and remove the knots from my neckties with no expression but a smile af infinite understanding. Her table talk displayed no visible discouragement with my own.
“How do you like the spaghetti?” she asked at dinner one evening when we were having that.
“Stringy.”
She held up a bottle of Chianti in pleasant inquiry whether I would like more. I grunted affirmatively and extended my glass. I would have to pull out another stop.
Feeding habits offered a particularly rich area in which to be deplorable, and I left no stone unturned there. I developed a disquieting procedure—at least to me. I would consume the contents of one plate at a time, shove it aside and attack the next, and so on, downing large quantities of wine or beer the while. Sometimes I carried whiskey to the table. When I had finished the spaghetti that evening, I broke off a crust of bread and swabbed my plate.
“I thought you didn’t like it,” Hester said, tossing a green salad.
“My parents always taught us to clean our plate, no matter what, and they were right.” This was a point on which I did feel strongly, and so my rejoinder rang true. “The waste in this country is appalling. It’s worse than the overeating.”
“I agree with you. I never throw anything out if I can help it. To me the test of a good cook is what she can do with leftovers. Look, I know you prefer romaine, Andrew, but the only lettuce I could get today was the iceberg. I hope you don’t mind?” She passed me a plate of greens. “And I hope the dressing is O.K.”
I cleaned that dish as well, and praised the dessert, a fresh fruit cup doused with kirsch—a specialty of hers. I even took a small second helping.
“Fruit isn’t fattening,” she said, spooning it up. “This hatred of yours of fat in any form,” she went on after we had munched in unison a moment, “I wonder how many people realize that’s behind the quality in your sermons. That lean, athletic style. Do you mind if I call you the Ernest Hemingway of the pulpit?”
“No, I don’t care,” I grumbled indifferently.
“I mean how many people realize you slave to keep them to ten minutes. I had to defend you to Mrs. Sponsible about that at the committee meeting last night. She said she didn’t want to be bored by hour-long sermons either, but ten minutes.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her the story of the man who had to write a long speech because he didn’t have time to write a short one.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said that was a speech, not a sermon.”
“And what did you say?” I fished a pip from between my teeth and laid it on my saucer.
“I reminded her of the Sermon on the Mount,” said Hester, who, gazing between the candlesticks that bathed her cheeks in rose and gold, looked like the meek who shall inherit the earth. “What would you have said?”
I shoved my empty dish aside and tilted my chair back. I opened my mouth and pried a shred of pineapple from between my teeth with a finger. “That hit the spot,” I said.
I was not losing ground, or not enough. I sensed that. I could see it. Each turn of the screw but gave her the more opportunity to show her own style. The only weapon in the war of nerves was calm. Still there was nothing for me to do but give the screw another turn. How? Having lapsed in matters physical, there was nothing left to lapse in but the mental. My conversation became untoward. I told off-color stories.
“It seems there was this parlormaid,” I said, as we sat in the living room with our after-dinner coffee one evening, “this maid who kept bumping into everybody. Running upstairs with a stack of linen she collided with the husband. The next day she stumbled into the son who was coming out of the closet she was on her way into. Then into the grandfather going down cellar, and so on. So finally she said to the lady of the house, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave, Mrs. Brompton.’ The woman said, ‘Why?’ The maid said, ‘Well, I seem to be in the family way.’ ‘Good heavens,’ the woman said, ‘the family way, what do you mean?’ And the maid said, ‘Well, first with your husband on the stairs, then with your son in the closet, and now with grandfather in the basement.’”
This disgusted nobody but myself. Hester was on her knees, poking the fire, and a small crash of settling logs made her recoil with a laugh and rub the smoke from her eyes. She set the poker on its stand and walked back to her chair.
“Why, I guess everybody wonders where all these stories come from that you hear,” she observed, reverting to the thread from which we had digressed. “A lot of them originate in vaudeville and burlesque, and of course bawdy houses, but that can’t account for all of them. Do you know an interesting explanation I’ve heard about who make a lot of the darn things up? Prisoners. They’ve got nothing to do all day and can’t live a normal sex life so that energy gets turned inward. Does that make sense to you?”
“It certainly does,” I said emphatically. I took a sip of coffee, then picked up a glass of brandy I had poured myself, which instead of drinking I swi
rled pensively in my hand. I was thinking of something. I remembered the story of the convicts who numbered their stories, and how I had failed to get much of a rise out of Molly with it. I remembered humor as the mind’s magnetic needle, and its fame as a test of kinship.
Across the room, Hester’s head was bowed as she stirred her coffee. I took a sip of brandy and set the glass aside.
“Have you ever heard the one about the convicts who were so used to one another’s stories that they just gave them numbers?” I asked.
“No, I haven’t,” she said, detecting a subtle shift in mood. “Tell me.” She smiled expectantly.
I told the story, drawing it out. I watched her as it neared its conclusion. “‘What’s the matter, isn’t that a funny story?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ said the cellmate. ‘But he don’t tell it right.’”
Hester set her cup down on the end table beside her chair. Then she laid her head back and laughed. She brought a hand down on her knee in delight. She was naked except for skirt, blouse, underthings, stockings and shoes.
“Well, I think it’s funny too,” I said, gazing into the flames. “I don’t know whether it’s that funny.”
Hester smiled into the fire. After a moment she cleared her throat and said:
“Now tell me something. Is that a shaggy dog story, Andy? Maybe I’m dumb, but I can never get it straight. Can you explain to me about that?”
“I wouldn’t say that’s one, no. The basic thing shaggy dog stories have in common, I’d say, is the kind of logical let-down ending—the reverse of the explosion produced by the conventional story through surprise and so on. A sort of calculated deflation that sets you down in the middle of nowhere, and that may be related to angst in the distance you find yourself from home. I preached a sermon about it a while back.”
“I guess I missed that. Could you dig it out for me?”
“I think so. But I wouldn’t call that a true shaggy dog, no. That’s just offbeat.”
I felt that I had to get hold of myself. I was being bought off. I lit a cigarette and pitched the match in the direction of the hearth. A length of ash ripened and broke down the front of my vest.
“The rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity,” I observed after a silence. “That’s why offbeat stories, to which intellectuals’ tastes so often run, are in a sense quite literally ‘crazy.’”
“This has nothing to do with wit though—right?”
“Oh, no. Humor has its marshy edges, but wit must be clear as a bell. Abraham Lincoln has been made by legend into a sweet old codger, but actually he was an intellectually arrogant man. Jesus is presented by the evangelists as a bleeding heart, but he had a wit like a razor. Nine-tenths of what he said was repartee. Read the Gospels. You find him flashing ripostes at the Pharisees and dishing out aphorisms to his disciples one a minute. Of course he was an obvious neurotic.”
“That’s a very interesting slant. You ought to do a sermon on it sometime.”
I slid up in my chair and took a firm grip on the conversation.
“We have insanity in our family,” I told her, “speaking of that. I had an aunt who was quite wacky all her days, and an uncle who was actually put away. Our uncle twice removed we called him—once for good.”
“Well, everybody has some of that.”
“Not as much as we,” I answered. “I mean really locked-up crazy. This uncle used to urinate in his shoe and pour it out of the second-floor window, and one day he went out and came home leading a donkey he’d bought, and they said, ‘What did you buy a donkey for?’ and he said, ‘Because they’re cheaper than cows.’”
“That offbeat logic again.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s always been there as far as I can make out, going back a bit. Of course it sometimes skips a generation but then there it is again. Tainted stock. Anybody who doesn’t like that had better look elsewhere.” I tilted back my brandy and finished it off.
“I understand,” Hester said, nodding and smiling at me with the same look of infinite comprehension.
I was now at my wit’s end—no closer to knowing whether I was barking up the right tree than when I had started this. There was only one way to find out for certain, and I took it.
“Hester, have you got a date for the Kickoff Ball?” I asked.
The event in question was to mark the eve of actual ground-breaking for the Mackerel Plaza, early in March. So far municipal matters had come without my making an inch of private progress! I had been promised another fresh spade by Centapong’s Hardware to turn over the first shovelful of earth.
Hester shook her head over the needle-point she had taken up in her favorite chair in the bay window that gave the living room its spacious charm. “No, I haven’t. Too busy preparing for it to think about it, I guess,” she answered with a laugh.
I stood at the piano ticking off a few bass notes with one finger. “Would you care to go with me?”
Hester looked up from her sampler, which was a representation of Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, shown leaning from the gold bar of Heaven with three lillies in her hand and seven stars in her hair.
“Aren’t you going with Molly?”
“Oh, now, Hester, stop this foolishness. You know damn well I can’t be seen in public with another woman until this blows over.”
“What am I?”
“That’s different. You’re the housekeeper.”
It may have been the wrong thing to say to make the test acid, or the right. I would know in a second. Hester bent over her hoop again and for a time there was no sound except that of punctured cloth and the dry rasp, curiously agreeable, of yarn being drawn through it.
“No, Andrew, I don’t think so,” she said at last.
“Why not?”
“The circumstances. It would be awkward, as you say. Even this way. Thank you just the same though. It was sweet of you.”
I was waiting for Molly when she arrived for work the next morning. I was sweeping paper clips from the front office desk into my palm, like bread crumbs, and dropping them into their proper tray.
“How’s Todarescu’s Weltschmerz?” I asked.
“All right I guess. I don’t know.”
“I’ve had it myself lately. All in through here.”
“Well, what is it? I can always tell when you’ve got something to fire. You wait a minute before letting go—like hug it a minute. It’s a female trait, so don’t be proud of it,” she said. “O.K., let’s have it.”
“Well,” I said, wheeling around, “I took your advice, and I hope you enjoy hearing how far off the mark you were.”
“What advice?”
“I acted on your theory. That Hester’s got her cap set for me. I asked her for a date and she turned me down.”
Molly turned from the rack on which she was hanging her hat. “Date for what?” she asked.
“The Kickoff Ball.”
“Well, I like that,” she said rather crisply.
“What difference would it have made? I’m not going with you,” I answered in kind, nettled by the shift in grievance from myself to her. “Does that side of it mean more to you than the fact that I’ve made a horse’s ass out of myself?”
In the strain and confusion of leading a double life I sometimes forgot where I was trying to tear myself down and where build myself up, and now I had blurted out in Molly’s presence an expression I had been trying to get up the courage to use in Hester’s.
“Well!” she said, shocked. “I must say that’s a fine way to greet me.”
“I’m sorry.” I circled the room, grinding a fist into my palm. “She’s winning. She’s dividing and conquering. She’s winning.”
“Oh, stop chittering like a ninny and tell me what happened. I forgive you. But don’t ever use that expression to me again. I hate it.”
“So do I!” I said, spreading my hands at the wonder of it. “Happened? I’ve told you what happened. I asked to take her to the Plaza Ball an
d she turned me down. Cold. So much for your hypothesis.”
Molly pondered intently the blotter pad on her desk.
“So she’s trying to keep you guessing.”
“You mean women are complicated? Yeah, splain dat to me, Kingfish, splain dat to me.”
“You needn’t get sarcastic. What’s more natural, after she’s been wearing her heart on her sleeve, than quickly to cover it up?”
“Nolo contendere,” I said, throwing up my hands, and walked into my office. “I do not contend.” I had my hand on the doorknob when she said:
“Wait. There’s something a lot more serious than this.”
“What?”
She seemed suddenly to change her mind with a vague sign of dread. “Not now. I’m hoping it’s a false alarm. I won’t burden you with it till I’m sure it isn’t.”
I went to work, or tried to. I was doing a series of sermons based on the seven letters which the Voice instructed the author of Revelation to write to the seven churches in Asia Minor, each dealing with one of the faults or virtues common to human nature, then as now. I had preached four and just finished the one on Sardis, with Philadelphia and Laodicea still to come. “And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write … I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.” Sardis represented defection from an ideal, wilted spirit. I was reading over what I had written when I was struck by something peculiar in the spelling of Sardis. I went up to Molly’s desk.
“I notice you keep spelling this ‘Sardi’s,’” I said, showing her a passage where she had written, “Thou hast a few names even in Sardi’s which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white.’ I don’t care so much about the sermon script, but I hope you didn’t give the text to the printer that way? You might as well say Toots Shor’s.”
“I’ll phone him and catch it,” she said.
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