I smiled. “It’s not hard to see where your mind is. Do you wish you were back there now, in all that? We’ll go to Sardi’s, you and I, the minute all this is cleared up, and we’re squared away, the two of us. I can see us there now. Hot cannelloni, steak with sauce béarnaise, tossed salad and cherries jubilee. That about do it, sweets?”
“Well, we’ll see.”
“What are you typing?”
“Eulogies of your wife,” she said. “For the souvenir booklet. Was she really so patient and understanding?”
“We could all learn a lesson from her.”
Molly turned on the swivel chair to face me.
“There’s gossip going around about you. In fact, scandal.”
I stooped to pick up a match from the floor and drop it into a wastebasket. I hooked a rumpled rug to rights with my heel.
“Oh? Of what nature?” I asked. “What do they say about me?”
“That you were seen going into the Coker with a woman.”
“Who told you this?” I demanded.
“They didn’t tell me—they told Mother. One of those well-meaning friends who just hate to do this but feel it their Duty, you know? And Mother thought I should know.”
I crossed to the front window, out of which I stood gazing into the street.
“Did she say who the woman was that I was seen with? Do they tell that part of it?”
“Evidently not. Whoever it was saw you go in apparently knew you but not me.”
I asked the question that seemed to me logically next in line, at least from my point of view, and I made no effort to repress the rather sardonic smile that twisted across my lips as I did so. “And you, what are you saying in reply? Will you stick by me? Tell them you refuse to believe such a thing about me?”
“I told Mother that I was not interested in the talk of idle gossips.”
“Idle! They seem to be working twenty-four hours a day at it.”
Neither of us spoke for a few moments. Then I heaved a great sigh.
“Oh, if Ida May were only alive! She’d straighten this mess out in short order, believe you me.”
Molly nodded, glancing at her day’s chore, the mound of encomium still to be transcribed. “I can well believe it,” she said dryly. Then: “If she were alive there’d be nothing to straighten out. Maybe you wish that too.”
“What puzzles me is, how do they know about ‘us,’ that they feel there’s any occasion to protect you about me? I thought we’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping it under the bush.” Something in the way she averted her eyes made me ask: “Is it your mother maybe who’s talked? And the people she’d told have blabbed it around?”
“Oh, Andrew,” Molly answered restively, “what if she did? Isn’t Mother entitled to bosom friends just like the rest of us?”
It was soon enough that Tabitha Twitchet descended in person about this matter. She had often promised to call at the parsonage to pay her respects, and she called that very evening, if not especially to pay her respects. When she did, it was to find me—in words I would not have chosen to describe the circumstances under which I was next fated to be discovered, or dreamed would be applicable—“shaking a leg with a hot patootie.”
Chapter Eleven
AFTER dinner Hester pushed aside a few living-room chairs and rolled back the rug.
“Well, if you’re game to help me brush up, maybe I’ll reconsider about the date. What I was really afraid of was how I’d look out there on the floor after so long. Maybe we could both do with a little polishing up. What do you think?”
Mackerel did not know what to think. “You mean dance?”
“Yes. You’ll find me rusty, but if you insist …”
Mackerel’s own dancing could not be described as rusty so much as nonexistent. He watched Hester select and launch a phonograph record, and presently he was waltzing her around the room to the strains of “Jealousy,” which will be remembered as a well-known tango of its era. She had on a white polka dot blouse with a starched bow, whose corners scratched the base of his neck agreeably. Instead of wearing her hair in one knot in back, she wore it in two at the sides, like earphones, with bangs in front. She had a perfume rather subtler than the nasal flavors that had visited Mackerel hitherto, but which in the exertions of dancing soon suffused his brain in a delicate mist. When a tangle in their maneuvers sent them against a table edge they both laughed, and insisted on the blame. “My two left feet,” he said. “Think I’d better keep off the dance floor.”
Neither of us heard the doorbell. The first notice I had of a caller was a sharp rapping on the window, and when I disengaged Hester and parted the curtain, the shadowy figure of a woman on the porch, bent to the pane.
When I opened the door a familiar face appraised me between a fur cap and a muff held at chest level. It was Mrs. Tittlemouse come to tea—or Tabitha Twitchet, or whatever. The apparitions shifted and changed according to how the nose twitched or the mouth pursed at the moment, while also blending into one. I very nearly greeted her as Mrs. Tittlemouse before I caught myself and said, “Ah, Mrs. Calico! Do come in.”
She was already in. “Good evening, Mr. Mackerel,” she said. “What I have to say won’t take long.”
Her tone dispelled the image of any cozy tea, fostering instead that of a woolly one going about the business of maintaining standards among the forest people. I felt like a rabbit again, with the advance in illusion, this time, of having to reach up for the dooknob as I showed her into a small side room, where I received visitors come for religious instruction or to have their lives straightened out. She glanced back at Hester, who had shut off the phonograph and was replacing the record in its album sheath.
“I shall come straight to the point,” she said when we were settled behind closed doors. She occupied a tall wingback from which her toes barely grazed the rug. She declined the offer to remove her coat, as though fearing its theft, contenting herself with loosening its top button and laying her muff aside. “Mr. Mackerel, it has come to my attention that you are leading a double life. While courting my daughter you’ve been carrying on with another woman at a place which, out of delicacy, I shall simply call place X.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I answered.
“There’s no use denying it. You have definitely been seen going into hotels with other women.”
“Women?” I said, dismayed by the plural.
“Well, woman. The nature and number of your misdeeds are immaterial. One is as bad as a thousand. The fact that you could be guilty of such a thing puts you forever beyond the range of my hospitality. The point of my call is to say that you are no longer welcome at Toits Rouges, and to advise you never to try to set foot inside it again unless you are prepared to deal with the police.”
This was the first inkling I had of her house’s having a name, and the fact of a city street residence of normal size and circumstances possessing one was too much for me not to linger over.
“Toits Rouges?”
“My nest in Timble Street that you’ve abused, so named because of its red roofs. My second demand is the obvious one that you cease and desist from seeing my daughter, under pain of legal measures.”
“What hotel did you hear it’s rumored I’m alleged to have been seen going into?” I asked, piling on as many subjunctives as the sentence could hold without shattering its syntax. “Would you mind telling me that?”
Mrs. Calico shut her eyes and gripped the arm of a chair other than her own, as though she were careening steeply down a roller coaster and had become intoxicated with peril. “The Coker. I can scarcely say it.” She caught her breath, and then gave way to a curiosity she could not repress. “Do you care to tell me who the woman is?”
May I never be one to slight the ideal of gallantry, but I hoped this brought to an end the number of women on whose behalf I would be called upon to exercise it. Still, I found the moment too tantalizing not to explore a speculation or two.
“What if it were someone y
ou knew?” I put to her. “Knew very well.”
“What is the use of frittering our time over manifest folderol?”
“But what if you did? I mean the woman in a case like this is always the girl next door to somebody. What if it were the girl next door to you? To Toits Rouges?”
“I should move.”
“What if it were Molly?”
Mrs. Calico gave a cluck of impatience and tilted up her palms in a manner that would have enabled me to play pat-a-cake with her if I were so minded. “Mr. Mackerel, let’s not sit here bandying absurdities.”
“What if it were, though? I’m only trying to get your psychology.”
“It would kill me,” she answered primly, as though the fact were a basis for pride, which perhaps it was.
“Well, I can’t divulge who the woman is,” I responded at last. “You understand that.”
“Yes. You have at least that shred of decency. I suppose I wouldn’t want to know anyway.”
“No, you wouldn’t want to know.” I then asked, “Now, will you tell me something. Who is your informant?”
“I can’t divulge that. So we’re even,” she answered, a little illogically I felt.
I nodded on receipt of this thought, rolling my under-lip between thumb and forefinger. I took a turn about the room. We were silent, not because neither of us knew the point the discussion could be taken to have reached, but because we both knew very well.
“Suppose I don’t do as you demand?” I asked. “I mean apart from all this business about calling the police. Suppose I refuse to stop seeing your daughter but assume that she’s old enough to make up her own mind about this matter?”
“I have a lever.” Mrs. Calico raised her hand in a gesture as if implying a literal implement which she was prepared to bring down on my head. “Molly defends you now but that’s natural. She’s partial and run down. Mr. Todarescu defends you too, to his credit.”
“That type would. He’s Bohemian, Mrs. Calico. I suppose you knew that.”
“People can’t help their nationality.”
“That is true, but we must draw the line somewhere. Condoning hotel assignations indeed! It’s part of the whole decay of moral standards that goes back to—Teddy Roosevelt would you say? We must have tea and chat of all these things. I didn’t do it, so that’s that, and now we must talk of what concerns us so much more deeply. Countenancing assignations, dear me, what are we coming to. Cream or lemon?”
“Neither, for I do not wish tea, nor, Mr. Mackerel, do I intend to be led astray by such hanky-panky.”
“But if he justifies my conduct then I am shocked. It was Todarescu who told tales, I’ll bet that’s it! Ah, I can put it all together now. He saw me at the Coker—or saw somebody he mistook for me, rather—which isn’t surprising because that is a natural kind of environment for him, since he’s Bohemian, as I say. Or maybe one of his friends saw this person who looked like me. Then he reports it but only as a humorous story. He doesn’t condemn it in the least! Will we talk about him!”
“Forget about Todarescu, and please stop trying to confuse me with this fiddle-faddle, now there’s an end of it!” Mrs. Calico said. “Where were we? I was saying Molly defends you, as a woman would, for her taste is on trial. But I shan’t sit idly by and see her ruin her life by an alliance with a—socialist! Scandal doesn’t blow over like a storm, it blows up like a fire. And, sir, if necessary, I shall be among those passing it on.”
For the moment I was flabbergasted. Then I understood. “Is that your lever?” I asked, genuinely aghast.
“She’ll give up when it gets bad enough. If the only way I can save my daughter is to hurry matters along to that point, then so be it. I am fighting for my girl’s life.”
The woman’s logic induced in me a feeling of nausea. At the same time I couldn’t help admiring her strategy, and ironically appreciating her position. She could queer me in my own Ladies Aid. There was a petard on which I could be hoisted sky-high in my own congregation. Events made me remember Molly’s visits to Mrs. Balsam and the premise that an astral hand was presiding over their crystallization. I shook off this tenth-rate speculation with a violent snort and returned to the main track of the discussion.
“But don’t you see, Mrs. Calico, that adding to the scandal about me will only tar her with the same brush,” I said.
Here Mrs. Calico paused and seemed to assess her man with a canny little smile that was not unkindly. “Well, you won’t sit idly by and watch that happen. Not if I know you. You’ll give her up yourself first. That shred of decency I mentioned a moment ago. Libertines are often not without it.”
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked, dabbing my brow with a handkerchief and casting a wistful eye at the door beyond which my bottled supplies lay, and beyond which I could also hear a telephone dimly jangling and Hester’s footsteps going to answer it.
“Drink, that’s another habit you managed to keep from me. I’m sure you have pleasures enough to console you for the loss of my daughter.” Mrs. Calico glanced meaningly at the door. “I didn’t realize you danced. You like to shake a leg with a hot patootie now and then, do you?”
“Well, not very good at it, actually,” I answered idiotically.
“No, thank you, no drink.” That arrested my passage to the door. When I turned back, it was to discern in Mrs. Calico’s mien a sudden radical change. She sat with head bowed, as under the weight of turpitudes now revealed. She shook her head and moaned softly. “Oh, what a blow,” she said, weeping into a square of cambric. “What a blow I have received to my pride, my vanity, my very self-respect. To think my Molly could become a victim of a thing like this.”
I recalled that one of the Beatrix Potter illustrations had been of Tabitha Twitchet, the cat neighbor, lamenting to Mrs. Tiggy-winkle the disappearance of her son Thomas. He had been missing for some days. Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, the kindly aproned porcupine, was trying to comfort her. I began a consolatory gesture here, but it was not one I could bring to intelligent fruition and it died in midair as I heard a rap on the door.
“It’s Mrs. Comstock calling for a committee of church women,” Hester said. “She says they want to see you as a delegation on something urgent. They’d like to come immediately if it’s convenient. How’s nine o’clock?”
I would throw them out on their ears on what Yeats has called “the pavements gray,” following which there would be an impossible situation ending in a period of total amnesia, after which I would be found in like Nashville or Albuquerque, cadging nickels to put into the slot machine. I would be penniless, underweight, and suffering from consumption. It would serve them right.
“Tell them to come ahead,” I said. “That will be all right.”
I wound up my interview with Mrs. Calico, who rose, tucked her able hands into her muff and, her ultimatum quite deposited, took her leave with great dignity. Fifteen minutes later the other women arrived.
I fully expected to be cooked in more of the same and I was not disappointed, but I was not prepared for the direction from which the women who came at nine approached the matter. They were supposedly just members of People’s Liberal, but I noticed that they were all also members of the Women’s Plaza Committee, and they lost no time in saying they had come to speak frankly of something that was embarrassing both to them and to the men who had their shoulders to the wheel on the riverfront project, namely the fact that I had, among a few chosen intimates and then more publicly, been “running down” the Mackerel Plaza. This was about to become a critical bone of contention, but Mackerel would not be less than honest. He told them candidly that his objections were not to the memorial as such but to the commercial hay being made of it. “It’s no longer a monument, it’s a lot of contracts!” I cried. “Fat ones!”
This was hardly the tone to take to the delegation’s spokeswoman, Mrs. Sponsible. She was normally a nice enough sort, but she was also wife of the owner of the excavating firm whose bulldozers stood ready to carry on from Mac
kerel’s inaugural ceremonial shovelful. Neither was it the thing to say to Mrs. Cool-Paintey, the mayor’s sister. (Here I saw that the callers were all also the wives of interested businessmen.) She had means, of course, being old Meesum’s daughter. She had been educated in the best schools and as a result now said “Chewsday” for Tuesday and “jew” for due. Mrs. Sponsible had for years tried to copy her but it was no use; she still said “Tuesday” and “due” hopelessly clearly.
“If your husbands have a bone to pick with me, why don’t they call on me in person?” I said. “Or do they feel they can catch more flies with honey? I must say I’ve seldom seen a better turned out group of ladies. Heh-heh-heh.”
“We’re here for other reasons than your knocking the Plaza,” said a woman named Mrs. Comstock, Charlie Comstock’s wife.
“Now, now, Lily,” said a woman named Mrs. Krakauer.
“Yes, let’s get the first point cleared up first—his criticisms of the Plaza,” said Mrs. Sponsible with flustered haste. There was a sense of something they dreaded getting to in the same degree that they itched to do so.
“All right.” Mrs. Cool-Paintey screwed about in her chair the more directly to face me. “We feel an explanation is jew us.”
“It is jew you and it has been given you, in a nutshell,” I replied. “What began as a well-meaning gesture on Mr. Turnbull’s part has been parlayed into a gravy train of the most blatant sort by a pack of businessmen.”
“Are you against business then, Mr. Mackerel?”
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Cool-Paintey.”
Mrs. Sponsible entered the discussion.
“The thing we feel,” she said, pondering the toe of a waggled foot with that studious attention women can give their shoes under apparently any circumstances, “is that you might desist, if only for your wife’s sake.”
“She would have gone into the city hall and turned out the money changers long ago,” I said, and she would. I know that woman.
Watch it, Hester’s warning glance told me from the corner chair. The women had asked her to stay and sit in as an advisory member of the Plaza Committee, and I had certainly not demurred. Something warned me from another quarter too. I had recently written in a chapter of Maturity Comes of Age, “He who flies in the face of a myth does so at his peril. The tribe will give him short shrift, especially after the myth has got its roots deep in the cash fabric of society.” And sure enough, Mrs. Comstock was saying, “Well, somebody has to get the contracts to build the monuments. And anyhow, Ida May deserves a whole big civic thing like this. I don’t care. She was a saint.”
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