Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know, sure—” she made a long arm and swept up little Chloe, who was just about to topple off the porch into the petunia patch. Held her up and pretended to inspect her, like a drummer with a sample. “They do have their appeal, can’t deny that. And the Lord in his mysterious ways means for some of us to see them through at least till they can start in with families of their own, of course. But that’s only for some of us, Lake. Others have other chores down here. Hell, I wanted to rob trains when I was a girl—more than wanted, I knew it was my destiny. Me and Phoebe Sloper, we’d go up back of that grade just over the river, put these big bandannas on our faces, and spend the day figuring how we’d do the deed. We had a sworn pact.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened?”

  SO IT STARTED as no more than one of those basic little chats about the married universe that couples were known to get into when they found a minute, which was seldom, and the subject this one almost immediately converged to for Lake and Deuce was having—actually, not having—children. In the past they had blamed it on outside crises or stresses—a gang committing depredations in the next county, accusations of malfeasance from Kansas City-style reform groups—when it did get more personal, and pleasantries like your dick is too short or maybe you picked up some bug when you were out trampin around were exchanged, the conferences always adjourned in somebody’s tears, with a resolution to keep on trying.

  Tonight she was careless enough to ask why he was so desperate about the whole thing, and he was unwise enough to blurt, “I just feel like it’s somethin maybe that we owe him.”

  For a second she couldn’t believe he meant Webb. “My father.”

  “That if we—”

  “A baby. We owe Webb Traverse, deceased, a baby. You think one’ll be enough, or should we throw a couple-three more in the deal just to make sure?”

  Deuce slowly grew wary. “I only meant—”

  “Just marrying me didn’t work, did it? Thought you’d give up that wonderful hired-killer freedom, and that would make all of it right. Now you’ve gone truly insane. You have drifted clear around that last bend of the river if you think having a child cancels out a murder. There’s a price to pay for certain, but more likely it’s no babies. Ever.”

  “Ain’t just me.” Something in his voice now warning her to step careful.

  She didn’t feel careful. “How’s that, Deuce?”

  “Them last days at the Torpedo, is all he talked about was you. He could’ve took all the rest leavin, but you, really, that was the last kick in the teeth. He was a dead carcass with a jackin hammer in his hand—the high-gradin, me and Sloat, just details, makin it official. You better think about that fore you start in on me.”

  She snorted, pretending to smile as if he was trying to embarrass her in public. “Easy story to tell, years later, no witnesses.”

  “He cried a lot, more’n you ever saw him do. Kept sayin ‘Child of the Storm.’ Guess it was somethin about you, you ever hear him say that? ‘Child of the Storm.’” Not just the phrase but an uncanny impersonation of Webb’s voice.

  Deuce being a little customer and not expecting the blow, no time to brace for it, in fact she knocked him over with it. And seeing ‘s how that was so clean and easy, figured she ought to get in a few more before he could get up to start hitting her back. Deuce kept his guns at the office, and Lake, like most women who lived in town, was limited for purposes of self-defense to items available in the home, such as the rolling pin, soup ladle, stove-lid lifter, and of course the very popular frying pan, which had figured in more than one assault complaint in Wall o’ Death County over the year preceding. Judges usually recognized a difference between a shorter spider type of handle and a longer fry-pan handle as indicating the degree of serious intent. Tonight Lake figured a twelve-inch Acme cast-iron fry pan would just do the trick, with both hands taking it off the hook on the kitchen wall and preparing to let Deuce have it. “Oh shit, Lake, no,” his voice too slow for anything that might happen now. He had hit his head on something. He was a sitting duck.

  She would wonder later if that was why she hesitated and looked around for some more merciful weapon. About the time Deuce was getting to his feet and looking over at the carving knife with some interest, Lake had about decided on the stove shovel. It worked pretty good, and it helped that by this time she had settled into a cooled and efficient rage. Back to horizontal went Deuce.

  Tace and Eugene showed up at the door, the Sheriff still half asleep and preoccupied with his galluses, Tace grim-lidded and carrying a Greener shotgun, loaded and unbroken.

  “This has got to stop,” she began, then saw it was Deuce down bleeding all over the patterned oilcloth. “Oh, my.” She lit up a cigarette and started smoking in front of her husband, who pretended not to notice.

  Later, after the boys had gone off in search of medicinal whiskey, Lake remarked, “Well at least it wasn’t fatal.”

  “Fatal? What’s wrong with fatal? Only reason it wasn’t is you girlied out with that tin shovel. Has the little bastard redeemed himself? When was that?”

  Tace stalked back and forth.

  “You could make a case,” she said after a while, not at all reluctant but as if allowing herself a long-withheld treat, “that you are every bit as bad as your li’l wedded husband there. That you’ve both been all along in some unholy cahoots, your own job being to do what you have to to clean up after him and see he gets and stays clear of anybody’s payback, including your own brothers.”

  Lake didn’t answer, and after that nobody talked to anybody for a while unless they had to.

  Yes well perhaps you did, but I saw the left one, didn’t I,” declared Neville.

  “I’m sure you did,” smirked Nigel. “Now, was that stage left or audience left?”

  Nigel looked down. “This one.” He pointed at one nipple. “Correct?”

  The two youngsters were in the Great Court baths, discussing Miss Half-court, their desolate sighs merging into the hiss of the steam.

  “Now it’s rumored she’s taken up with some sort of embryo Apostlet named Cyprian Latewood.”

  “As in Latewood’s Patent Wallpapers? Surely not.”

  “The very feckless scion.”

  “These Mahommedan lasses do love a sod,” Neville was of the opinion. “It’s that harem mentality, being sweet on the eunuchs sort of thing. As long as it’s always someone that impossible.”

  “But surely she’s not . . . Mahommedan?” protested Nigel.

  “Well some sort of Eastern wog Nigel.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh dear chap,” Neville oozed, “you still can’t be taking it personally.”

  “Better than taking it publicly, i’n’t it.” Referring to Neville’s own extended period of tearful soliloquy at The German Sea as well as licensed premises further afield, after Yashmeen had returned a sub-Clerkenwell trinket in actually quite horrible taste, obtained by the temporarily deranged youngster at great effort and expense.

  They lounged, steamed as puddings, each regarding the other’s penis with lethargic annoyance. Their discussion of Miss Halfcourt’s own nude person was owing to a stealthy excursion the night before. At the disconsolate hour when no one is awake but gyps and working mathematicians, there had arisen a tradition among the bolder girls of creeping to the river, up above Byron’s Pool, the brighter the moon the bolder the company, to bathe. Word somehow always got to a group of lads, who were apt to show up as much from curiosity as from lust. And there in the moonglow would be Yashmeen, among her handmaidens. Eliciting a range of remarks, from catchphrases of the day such as “Div!” “Whizzo!” or “That is that of which I speak!” to all-night rhapsodizing in the rooms of friends, or sonnets written down later when the madness had receded enough to allow at least the grasping of a pen, or simply an abrupt passage into paralyzed dummyishness upon having spied her, or someone who might be she, in Cloisters Cou
rt.

  In so much public attention, the two N’s—ostensibly at King’s reading philosophy and classics, now given the additional remit to keep an eye on Yashmeen, not only for the T.W.I.T. but for certain Desks in Queen Anne’s Gate as well—found peculiar inconvenience. At Newnham and Girton, one expected Wrangleresses on the legendary order of Phillippa Fawcett, even romances with one’s tutors á la Grace Chisholm and Will Young, which with luck might develop into some married collaboration—but certainly not this nautch-girl extravagance of looks and self-possession that Yashmeen presented. This was shocking the bourgeoisie, not to mention the mathematical persuasion, out of all known scale. And now there was this Latewood person, his family only a generation on from socio-acrobatic aggrandizement, himself assumed to be a sod and, less explicably, the object of Yashmeen’s interest.

  “Discovered the most frightfully promising recipe for opium beer the other day Nigel. One ferments opium with brewer’s yeast, quite as if it were malt or barley or something. Adding enough sugar of course.”

  “I say. Sounds ever so degenerate, Neville.”

  “Actually it is, Nigel, having been invented by the duc de Richelieu himself.”

  “Not the Spanish-fly bloke.”

  “The same.”

  Which was enough to rouse them from their watery lassitude and return to the important educational task of obtaining enough drugs to get them through term.

  “LINE AND STAFF,” Cyprian Latewood recalled having heard his father instructing the children, “headquarters and field commands, and the enemy everywhere you can think of.”

  “Are we at war, Father?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Are you a general?”

  “More like a colonel. Yes, for the moment, at least, all quite regimental.”

  “Have you uniforms, you and your men?”

  “Come down to the City someday, and you shall see our uniforms.”

  “And the enemy—”

  “The enemy, sad to say, is too often found wearing the same uniform as we.”

  “So that you can’t always tell—”

  “You can’t ever tell. One of many cruel aspects of a cruel world, but better you have it now, from me, than have to learn it through some possibly damaging experience.”

  “And you meekly accepted all that, of course,” nodded an annoyed though sympathetic Reginald “Ratty” McHugh, fifteen years or so later.

  “I did,” supposed Cyprian, “and I didn’t. What I was left with was the distinct sense of one more flag it was now possible to dishonor.”

  The boys were lounging about Ratty’s rooms drinking ale, smoking Balkan Sobranies, and trying without notable success to mope themselves back into the lilies-and-lassitude humor of the ‘90s.

  When, with the ineluctability of certain mathematical convergences, the topic of Yashmeen Halfcourt came up, everyone had something to say, until Cyprian blurted, “I think I’m in love with her.”

  “As gently as I can, Latewood . . . You. Sodding. Idiot. She, prefers, her, own, sex.”

  “Gosh, then I know I’m in love with her.”

  “How pathetically desperate, Cyps.”

  “When did I ever have a choice? There just have to be fellows like us, that’s all, the old table d’hôte wouldn’t be complete without us.”

  “Not an easy path, my son. ‘Limited’ scarcely begins to describe the degree of success one might expect with the type of woman—”

  “Yes, well, ‘the type,’ that’s just it, if it were only ‘the type,’ why, I’d be out there taking my chances, wouldn’t I, be the pickings ever so slim. And feeling perhaps not quite as disgruntled as I do.”

  “So then it’s old Yashmeen—”

  “It’s Miss Halfcourt, in particular.”

  “But Latewood, you’re a sod. Aren’t you. Unless you’ve been only pretending all this time, the way one must around this place?”

  “Of course of course, but I’m also in . . . in love,” as if this were a foreign idiom he had to keep looking up in a phrase book, “with her. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”

  “And all very jolly too, if one happens to be divine Walt, whom the world allows a bit more in the way of antinomy, I shouldn’t wonder, than depressingly prosaic you. How exactly would you plan, let’s say physically, to express your desire? Unless—oh, dear—you seek, somehow, to pass, perhaps, as one of her little Girtonian admirers, some swooning xanthocroid in a cricketing frock?”

  “Confiding the deepest secrets of my heart to you, Capsheaf, and what do I get in return but a damned full-bore viva.”

  “Oh now see what we’ve done to him. You may use my handkerchief, if—”

  “Perhaps not after what you’ve been using it for, Capsheaf, thanks.”

  “There’s a good fellow, remember it could always be worse, you might have ended up like old Crayke, rather more fond than has proved wise, of, ehrm, that is . . .” Attempting to slide toward the egress.

  “Fond of . . .?”

  “Well I’d assumed you knew, everyone else does. Here—spot of audit, perhaps—”

  “Capsheaf?”

  A sigh. “Shetland . . . I say how does one . . . well, actually, Shetland ponies. D’accord? now you’re all up to date.”

  “Crayke and . . .”

  “Oh, and female as well, so it seems.”

  “Hasn’t the breed a certain . . . reputation for viciousness?”

  “Yes well you’d be bitter too wouldn’t you,” put in Ratty McHugh. “Dreaming of attention from some Arab or Thoroughbred, and getting old Crayke instead? Really.”

  “He’s still . . . here at Cambridge?”

  “Retired up north, actually, he and his companion, to a quite pleasant little croft, been in the family apparently for centuries, up on Mainland, near Mavis Grind . . . both of them written up, with some regularity, in the orthopædic journals . . . spending hugely on solicitors of course—even assuming they could find a registrar who’d even think about legitimizing—well I mean, it wouldn’t be cheap, would it.”

  “He—wants to . . . marry . . .”

  “It might seem odd I suppose . . . unless of course one has actually met Dymphna, and understands how charming, at least most of the time, she can—”

  “Excuse me, Capsheaf, but will this be at all typical of the sympathy I can expect around here?”

  “Quite so. Listen to me, Cyps. In the brief time she’s been here, this Half-court person has broken simply decks full of hearts. Your best course, in the brief time you’ll be here, is to find a wholesome pursuit that will require all your attention, such as, oh, say, academic study? One might start by looking into Thucydides, actually.”

  “No use. Something in there is sure to remind me of Her.”

  Capsheaf threw up his hands and left the rooms, muttering, “And look here I say McHugh, why are you wearing that beastly shade of heliotrope?”

  MEANWHILE . . .

  “Ewh I say gehls, look it’s Peeng-kyeah!”

  “Halleewh, Peeng-kyeah!”

  “See heah, we’re off to an alfresceehwh in Honeys’ckle Walk, wewhn’t you join us!”

  “Yes, yes do, Peeng-kyeah!”

  “Tell us, Peengkyeh—are you a nice mathematician?”

  “Or a naughty one?”

  Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun—all blonde, of course, blondeness at Newnham and Girton having at that era grown beyond simple matters of pigment into a fully equipped idéologie. Hatlessness was likewise important, as was being photographed, as often as possible and by any and all processes that might offer themselves. “You are the girls of High Albedo,” they were instructed, “the girls of silver darkness on the negative, golden brightness in the print. . . .”

  The blondeness of this place was threatening to drive Yashmeen mental. An admirer of poetical inclination called her “the dark rock on our northern shore, against whose sleek indifference a turbulence of girls, blonde girls in their white veils, dash themselves with
out hope, again and again.”

  “Am I so—”

  “Can’t think of the word, Pinky? Try ‘cruel.’”

  “Try ‘self-involved.’”

  “Try ‘sans merci.’”

  “Try everyone’s patience,” muttered Neville and Nigel, who, not exactly out spying, happened to overhear the exchange.

  CYPRIAN WAS CAPTIVATED by eyes, but only by those that looked away, with either indifference or active distaste. It was not enough for her to return his gaze. She must then direct her own to other matters. It sent him into a swoon. It got him through that day and part of the next sometimes. Whatever she felt, it was not fascination, but presently they would find themselves chatting, usually while walking from one University obligation to another.

  “I say, but really, Pinky—”

  “Can’t you even see how thoroughly I dislike that name? I shall begin to think you are another of these silly girls.”

  The look he turned his face to her with then might have been one of hopefulness too imperfectly concealed. She did not laugh, at least—though she could, it would seem to Cyprian later, have managed a smile less, somehow, bleak.

  “You burn incense at the wrong altar,” she whispered, aware of the effect her voice, when whispering, had on him. “Idiots, all of you.”

  He would not have believed that any girl’s voice, a voice alone, saying anything, could produce an erection. Yet there it was, incontestably. “Oh dear . . .” But she had turned and vanished toward the Girton Gatehouse, and he was left with an inelastic embarrassment which showed little sign of resolving itself. Not even conjugating Greek verbs to himself in obscure gnomic tenses, effective in other circs, seemed to work.

  “WHAT. HE DOESN’T DANCE?”

  “Not a step.”

  “Dump him,” advised Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun in unison.

  “I honestly can’t imagine what Pinky sees in him,” protested Faun, “can you, Lorelei?”