As was his way at gatherings, Carl Robbins had abandoned his wife the moment they came in, and though the room was small he managed to keep a great deal of distance between them. She was pregnant with her third effort to keep Carl at home. The evening had turned off warm, the windows were up and Carl Robbins, like everyone else, was helping himself plentifully to the beer.
Despite himself, James felt beginning to steal over him a warm satisfaction at being a host, having people drink and laugh and enjoy themselves in his house. Rachel’s spicy little liver knishes were a great success, they brought tears to Max Aronson’s eyes and set him reminiscing over the famous cooks in his family, and when they were gone Rachel suggested games.
Games? Two or three of the guests exchanged significant glances. What were they in for now?
“Or, David,” Rachel said, “give some of your impersonations!”
Peterson flushed and looked sheepishly at his wife. Dolly had got him—how many years ago!—to give up making a fool of himself in public. He felt guilty also that it showed how long it was since he had been friendly with the Ruggles. No one had reminded him of his impersonations in years. And yet, he thought, with a look of some defiance at his wife, they were damned clever impersonations. Especially the one of Chaplin (but again, how long ago was Chaplin!) and he was pleased with Rachel for remembering them. All the same he demurred; he, too, thought that impersonations were no longer becoming to his dignity. Besides, no one was coaxing him but Rachel. And besides, Dolly’s look was quite threatening.
“Then let’s play games,” Rachel insisted. She supposed that games were no longer quite so popular at Redmond parties, but she wanted to revive some of the spirit of parties she remembered.
“What sort of games?” asked John Wooster.
“A community picture!” Rachel cried, and ran off to the studio where they heard her scrambling about.
How long was it since any of them had painted a community picture! In the old days it was a party stand-by. Now the ladies exchanged smiles of pity and condescension for poor Rachel. How long it must have been since she had given a party! How much longer even since she had been invited to one, not to know that community pictures were passé.
Rachel came back bearing the easel and on it was a large canvas. She made another trip for brushes and a palette and all was placed in the middle of the room.
No one would go first.
“Then I’ll choose,” said Rachel. “And David is it, since he wouldn’t give us any impersonations.”
She handed Peterson a fistful of brushes and led him to the easel. Everyone enjoyed his discomfort.
But Peterson was a good sport. He regarded the canvas, took a few tentative swipes at it, then began wielding the brush with dash, with obvious relish. Vague, but already recognizable and already funny forms began to take shape on the canvas. For everyone knew what he had to put there before he began. In painting a community picture each person contributed the little mark of his style, his petit sensation, the little mannerism or the subject by which his work was known. Soon it became apparent that David Peterson was doing one of those hollow-eyed, nebulous nudes for which he was famous, but one even more gaunt and soulful—a delightful self-parody. Peterson had been taken right back ten years and was having a marvelous time.
Peterson stepped back to regard his creation and everyone was hugely amused. There was no lack of volunteers for second; they fought to be next, and Rachel had to choose to keep order.
Max Aronson started in a little above and to the left of Peterson’s lady and from his first stroke everyone began laughing uncontrollably. In no time at all there took form one of those bleary-eyed, long-faced, ancient rabbis for which Max was known all over the world—only this rabbi, while looking just as burdened with Weltschmerz as ever, even more ludicrously so, was regarding Peterson’s lady with a sly and lecherous glint in his eye. Everyone held his sides laughing.
Then Carl Robbins and Martha Phillips took brushes and began painting at the same time, racing each other while everyone cheered them on.
At this point Mrs. Kunitz drained her beer glass and set it down, looked searchingly into every corner of the house, got up and peered around the studio screen, and still not finding what she wanted, came over and bent to Rachel’s ear.
“You’ll find it,” said James in a voice that made everyone hush and turn, “about thirty yards behind the house. Just follow your nose. Would you have believed it possible in this day and age?”
They were pressing Rachel to add her bit to the painting. “Get James,” she said, “get James.” The tone of his voice had alarmed her, and she breathed a sigh of relief for this distraction.
“Here, James,” said Carl Robbins, holding out a brush to him.
James made no move, but left Robbins standing, awkwardly holding out the brush. The others stirred uneasily. James raised his palm in a gesture of overwhelmed unworthiness. “Let me not bring laughter and ridicule and indignity to this work,” he said. A hush fell on them all.
But on her whole trip nothing had so delighted Mrs. Kunitz as the outhouse. “Well! That’s the first time I’ve seen one of those things in a while!” she said as she stepped in.
“Yes, we keep it for sentimental reasons,” said James. “Not to mention other reasons.” The prolonged, stunned silence of the guests made him more audacious. “We try to keep up the old traditions. People come expecting to see the real thing, the artist’s life, you know—and where else are they going to find it in Redmond? Though now,” and he gave a glance at Rachel, a deferential smile, “now I suppose we too will begin to slip and backslide and forget the simple life. In fact,” his voice rose to a shout, “in fact, we have already begun. Indeed yes!”
He relished their embarrassment for a moment, then said, “I’m sure you’re all dying to know what’s been done with the money. Well, let me just show you. None of you is quite as, ah, thin, as you once were. But just draw in a breath and perhaps we can all squeeze into the, ah, the bedroom.”
He strode over and folded back the bedroom screen with a flourish.
“There!” he exclaimed. “Our prize money bedroom suite!”
The little room looked positively embarrassed. In it stood a huge highboy, a vanity with an oval mirror tinted blue, a padded vanity seat covered with glossy satin and a bed with a gleaming headboard, covered with a bright blue chenille spread.
The silence was broken by the ladies’ exclamations. “Lovely. Charming. How nice.” The men assented in embarrassed grunts.
Rachel had seen it yesterday in the window of a shop in Redmond, where she had gone to get away from James and to look for something to get rid of the money on. Her mother had had one very like it. Rachel thought it was beautiful.
How was it, then, that otherwise the house was so tasteful? Was that all James’s doing? Far from it. In fact, aside from his contribution of a few heirlooms—some of them among the few ugly things in the house—he had no part in it. He was indifferent to his surroundings. So long as they could not come up to his notions of what they should be, he preferred to go to the opposite extreme; it would have given him pleasure to live off orange crates and hang dime-store chromos on the walls. No, the charm of the place was Rachel’s doing. But Rachel had taste only so long as she had no money. When her resourcefulness was demanded, when she had to make shift, she made beauty. When she had money she bought the things she thought other people bought with money, the things she remembered money as being for.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” James demanded of Mrs. Wooster.
“Yes—yes, lovely!” and she cringed against her husband.
“Isn’t it lovely?” he shouted at Edith Morris.
“It certainly is,” said Edith. She meant it.
James included them both in his look of utter contempt. “Maple, you know,” he said, looking at the furniture with nausea. “That is, pine with a coat of maple syrup.”
Those who were not too embarrassed for Rachel even to l
ook at her sent her looks of sympathy and support. John Wooster said, “We had better go.”
James was taken aback. “Go?” he said. He had humiliated himself for them. Weren’t they enjoying it?
The Woosters began moving toward the door; others followed. James saw all his crafty plans collapsing. He grew panicky to keep them there. His urgency gave a repulsive oiliness to his smile and the affability of his tone was repellent as he said, “Come now. You’re all used to staying up later than this. The evening’s young.” He realized he was saying the wrong thing. This pleased him and goaded him on. “Why, there’s no telling what may happen yet,” he said.
He stood in the middle of the room and watched them leave. He half-expected them to return, to slap him on the back and say that he was better than all of them put together. He could think of nothing startling to say, no show to make which would detain them. He wanted to say something disdainful, something contemptible even, yet have them admire him all the more for it.
The last ones were stepping out. James thought how as they walked down the road Sam Morris would take it upon himself to explain him to the rest. “It’s James’s nature,” he would say knowingly, “to be volatile and impulsive, always to be different and conspicuous.” Sam was certain he understood James. How James hated that kind of understanding! For if he acted extravagantly, made himself conspicuous, it was all because he had such a great wish to do just the opposite, because he had such great respect for convention and the proper form.
Rachel stepped outside and detained the last few. “James doesn’t mean anything by it when he goes off like that,” she said in an intimate tone. “You needn’t feel sorry for me, because he is always terribly sorry afterwards. It’s only his own unhappiness.”
They gaped at her. Was she then as bad as he? Had she no more sense of privacy than he had? It was shameless, such confiding eagerness.
Not all the prize money was spent on the bedroom suite. Thirty-six dollars went for the suit in which James stood admiring himself on a morning two weeks after the party. It was the first one the clerk had shown him, and he had liked it right off. When he tried it on at home he found the pinstripe too broad and too light in color, but that no longer bothered him. He stroked the lapel lovingly.
Another seven dollars went for the shoes.
James turned and looked at himself from the back, particularly at his haircut. Then he faced himself once more and looked at his mustache. His mustache had been clipped and trimmed and his curls lopped off so that now his hair lay in tight kinks against his skull.
He wore a white shirt with a starched collar so cruelly buttoned that his great red neck hung over it in a roll, and after swallowing he had to duck his head to get his Adam’s apple up again.
Every few seconds he was worried that the suit was not what it should be. It had been so long since he had bought one. Then he would again decide that it was grand.
The thing which amazed and delighted him most was that he looked just like anybody else. He might be in advertising or the law.
Rachel came in rubbing the crown of a new brown hat with her elbow. But when he put it on it fell down over his ears. He had bought it before Rachel cut his hair. She took the blame for that, but said that a little tissue paper in the sweatband would fix it.
While she went to get some, James polished the emblem in his lapel and pictured himself at the fraternity house tomorrow evening after the Reunion Dinner. He was amazed that he had gone so many years without attending Reunion Day. He saw himself sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, sipping Benedictine while he talked with Pee-wee Moore, now Charles Moore of Ohio, Michigan, Ltd. or with Walter Beck of U. S. Steel.
Men like Moore and Beck would, of course, know nothing of the art world. But they would simply assume that he had done well. Especially when they saw him in this suit. He looked at it again to be sure, and he decided once and for all that it was not so much what the suit did for him, as what he did for the suit.
Besides Beck and Moore there were men like Joseph Caspar and William Malcolm Cooper in the class of ’26. That was his class. Or rather, the class he would have been in if he had stayed another year.
“Rachel,” he said, “these men I’m going to be with the next couple of days are my kind of people. They come from the best families. They were brought up to respect ceremony and tradition. They know what culture is. And don’t think they won’t remember me. They know what the name Ruggles means.”
The taxi that was to take him to the train pulled up outside the door and honked.
Rachel carried out his grip and the bundle of paintings. He had decided first to take five, then eight; now there were eleven of them and it was arranged that Rachel was to send ten more tomorrow by express.
He looked at them and smiled shrewdly.
“I can ask any price from men like those,” he said. “What’s money to them?”
In Sickness and Health
MR. GROGAN’S bald head broke through the covers. He experimented with his nose; it rattled like steampipes warming up. He was so stiff he felt that all the veins in his body must have froze and busted. He opened his eyes and wriggled painfully upwards, feeling, after only one day in bed, stiff and strange as an old snake crawling out of hibernation. Now, if only he had stayed on his feet, as he had insisted, he would have been feeling hearty again this morning.
He could hear his wife down below walloping up his breakfast, doubtless assuring herself that he was so near dead he would never hear her, murmuring soft little Viennese curses whenever her big hulk smacked into the cabinet corner. Mr. Grogan licked a fingertip and scrubbed the corners of his eyes. When she came up he would look long awake, though he had not been able to get up.
Mr. Grogan was an early riser. You couldn’t tell her otherwise, and his wife had the notion he did it to make her look lazy. He just wanted to get out of a morning without the sight of her. Maybe she was brighter than he took her for, and just as spiteful as he knew she was, and wanted to rob him of that pleasure. One reason or another, she was to be heard scrambling and puffing in the mornings, trying to get down before he did, and now he could just imagine how pleased with herself she was today.
He knew just how her mind was working. Had she stopped to consider that he just might be better this morning? Not for an instant. She was too cheerful down there now for such a shadow to have passed even momentarily across her mind. An hour at least she must have lolled abed this morning, thinking to herself how, even after time for the alarm, she might go right on lying there as long as she pleased, and still be the first down in the kitchen. No racing down this morning, no colliding in the hall, no frowzy hair nor unlaced shoes, all to see which one—and he it was just about always—could be sitting there already polishing off his coffee with a distant, foregone glance for the stay-a-bed. Yes, she had that kind of a nasty mind.
The breakfast she came up with would have winded a slender woman.
“Ah, liebchen, no better, hah?” she grinned, and when he opened his mouth to remonstrate, she drew a concealed thermometer and poked it in him.
Mr. Grogan lay there with it poked out defiantly at her, making it seem there was so much of her that he had to look first around one side of it, then around the other, to take her all in. She stood over him regally; she did every chance she got. Mrs. Grogan carried her head with great pride of ownership, as though she had shot it in Ceylon and had it mounted on a plaque.
She must have thought that the longer she left the thermometer in, the higher it would go. He started to take it out, but she beat him to it.
“Ah!” she sighed, regarding it with deep satisfaction. “Ah-hah!”
Nothing could have made Mr. Grogan ask her what it said. Not even if he had believed she knew how to read the thing.
“That’s what you need,” she said. “Plenty sleep and decent food,” and the way she said it you would think she had found him in a doorway in the Bowery and given him the only home he had ever know
n.
“Well, you don’t,” he replied, but she was gone. Amazing, truly, how fast she could move that great body of hers when it meant getting out in time to have the last word herself.
He could hear her vast sigh as she stood at the head of the basement steps. He could hear her settle slowly down the steps, then scrape her way over to the coalbin. There was no subtlety in her, and that was what he resented most. There she went now, rattling the furnace. She might be Mrs. Beelzebub opening shop. Soon she would come up to demonstrate her pains, complaining of the heat, the dirt, the waste of coal. Were he to dare remind her that he, certainly, required no fire, why, she would burst. What would she have done for heat if he hadn’t come down like this? Last winter she had practically turned blue before she would ask him to build a fire. But that had not taught her, and this time she would have moved out sooner than admit she was cold—though how she could get cold through all her insulation was more than he could guess. But cold she was, stiff as untried lard, while here was himself with his hundred and twenty pounds, and that old and ailing, and all along he might have been a teapot in a cozy, he told himself—while the yellowed old teeth danced in his mouth like popcorn in a pan.
She stood at the door, grateful for having made the stairs once again. She had been sure to get good and smeared with soot and coal dust, and not stop to wash any of it. Mr. Grogan had thrown back two of his blankets and was smoking the pipe she had forbidden him, though he did not dare inhale for fear of a coughing spell. So smug she looked, turning up his radiator, her sleeves rolled back, just stifling for the sake of his health. He could not resist asking, “Would you mind just raising up that window there while you’re close by?” She turned on him such a smile as she might have given a child she was holding for ransom.
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 14