“Kitsch!” she flung at him. “Bad enough to dirty your own good ideas, but to steal and pervert the ideas of others—and when those others are the big men of the age!”
Oh, she was at least a big thief. We others stole from her; she stole from the source itself.
“Kitsch!” she flung at him one last time. Poor man, she had left him nothing but his wife, and she would not let him have even a belief in her.
I remembered the first time I saw him. We had left our car at the foot of the steep snow-covered drive, Janice and I. We had not walked far when up at the house a dog barked, and then piano music had started up and floated down to us on the still winter air. It accompanied us all the way, a passage from The Well-tempered Clavier, terribly difficult and very well done. After knocking at the door we had had to wait through half a dozen measures for the end. Then Robert, whom I actually did call Mr. Metsys and he did not correct me, greeted us in sneakers, faded corduroys and a tattered denim jumper, which, as he was well aware, made a striking contrast to the splendor behind him as he stood in the door.
I pointed to the piano and said, “Please go on.”
“He can’t.”
It was Victoria who had come gliding into the room unheard. “He can’t go on, that’s all he knows.”
Robert had smiled modestly, as though that was her way of bragging about him. As a matter of fact, it was true. Those thirty-odd measures of Bach were literally all the music he knew. Every time we went there the same passage began when our arrival at the foot of the hill was announced by the bark of the dog, and at the door each time we had to wait until it was finished in a final burst of triumphant virtuosity.
Robert knew music about as he knew sculpture. There was one promising carving in the hall off the drawing room which he modestly owned to. When I asked to see more I was told by Victoria that there weren’t any more, he had done that one and then given up. It was not the first such mistake I’d made in the course of our acquaintance, having asked why he never went on with playwriting or anthropology, so to Victoria it seemed time for a general explanation, though I tried desperately to suggest that I didn’t want one. Robert looked penitent while Victoria, in a tolerant scolding tone, a tolerant tone which was the most withering contempt I ever want to hear, explained that Robert’s weakness had always been a lack of persistence.
I myself had by this time watched him take up hand printing and fitfully resume the playwriting, and I had seen why he never got anywhere with anything. He was licked before he got a start, Victoria so minimized any effort he made—or, I ought to say, she hardly felt it necessary to minimize them now; his own memory of his past failures was enough to foredoom any new undertaking. Robert still cherished visions of himself succeeding at almost anything, but like those photographer’s proofs one takes home to choose among for the final print, they had faded and blurred from being kept too long.
“I’m just lazy,” he said.
Yet he worked around the house and grounds ten to twelve hours a day. They pretended their liberal politics as the reason for keeping no hired help, but actually they did not need any. “I’m just lazy”—I supposed he would rather feel he could blame some weakness of his own than admit the true reason for his failures.
I strolled over to talk to Hilda Matthews. Hilda was the woman at whose bidding the country’s skirts had once risen an incredible six inches, who had brought back the shingle bob, who had originated the horsetail hairdo. A part of me stood abashed before a woman who could change the look of a whole country like that.
We had talked a while when through the door across the room a new man entered and Hilda said, “Oh, it’s my husband. I must go over and say hello.”
“Has it been that long since you saw him?”
“I can still recognize him,” she said.
“Business, I suppose,” I said wisely.
“That’s the word we use for it,” said Hilda gaily. Whereupon I, who thought I’d been holding up my end of one of those knowing talks about the husband’s absences and his excuses, realized how very wrong I had been. It was she who had been too busy, or told her husband so, to get home nights. She had assumed I understood it that way.
And perhaps I should have. For the next moment I was joined by John Coefield, who said, “Charley, where’s your wife? I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Neither have I,” I said. “She isn’t here.”
“Not sick, I hope?”
“No,” I confessed, “she’s at work.”
“Work? Why, I never knew Janice did anything.”
“She didn’t ‘do’ anything until we came here,” I told him. “Now she leaves breakfast for me and takes the early train.” I found myself using the half-humorous tone for this which I’d observed in other men, and it irritated me.
Arthur Fergusson, who had come up in time to hear this last, said, “Oh-hoh. Becoming one of us, eh, Charley?”
“No,” said John Coefield. “That will be when he gets the breakfast and she takes the later train.”
This had an edge to it, and Arthur Fergusson smiled coldly.
Coefield wore such thick glasses that he seemed to be looking into them rather than through them, but even so he made me understand with a look that he had been trapped once already this afternoon by Arthur. Nothing would ever mean much to Arthur after wartime Washington, his captain’s uniform and his desk in the OSS—to say nothing of his African trip. At first, right after the war, while others talked of their experiences, he had made his impression, so I was told, by being silent. Now that that war was a good ways back and people spoke more often of the coming one, he talked incessantly of “his war.” He had tried every way in the world to go, had lied unsuccessfully about his age and suffered the humiliation of having a recruiting officer scan his employment record and ask what earthly use he thought he might be to a war effort. But it was one of the things in that record that got him in. He had worked once for an American advertising agency in Morocco, writing copy for soap in three native dialects. So he was sent to recruit natives for spying against the Germans.
Surely he remembered one or two of the many times he had told us about it.
His wife remembered not one or two but all the many times he had told everybody, so she came over soon to extricate us from him.
“You off on Morocco again?” she said, giving us an indulgent shake of the head over Arthur, and giving Arthur a less indulgent look.
Arthur drew himself up and it seemed for a moment he was going to answer back and cause a scene. Then he subsided and gave a sheepish grin.
Coefield said, “Go on, Arthur. You were about to say?”
I thought it was very considerate of Coefield to do that, and quite convincing the look of interest he put on. After a hesitant glance at his wife, Arthur smiled his appreciation.
“You are much too polite, John,” said Mary Fergusson.
John Coefield’s determined answer surprised me. “Not in the least,” he snapped. “Charley and I were absorbed in what Arthur was saying.”
Mary shrugged her shoulders and retreated.
A sigh escaped John Coefield as he settled down to Arthur’s war again.
We men had gradually drifted together in one corner, and whenever that happened the subject of gardening was bound to come up sooner or later.
One man was a recent convert to organic gardening and he was telling of the dangers to one’s health, to the soil, to the national economy, to the very rhythm of nature that came from using chemical fertilizers. They killed earthworms. Now earthworms, he said with much enjoyment of the words, dropped castings that were simply incredibly rich in trace elements, besides keeping the soil aerated by boring holes, networks of holes in it. The great thing about fertilizing with compost was that it was natural. This was admitted by all to be a weighty argument. The word natural was a magic word. Moreover, it was felt that the use of artificial fertilizers was not very sporting somehow.
All this made one man wh
o had been prodigal with superphosphate rather uncomfortable. “Well,” he demanded, “who had the biggest tomatoes last year, Tom, and the earliest? You or me?”
Bigger, Tom was willing to admit. A day or two earlier perhaps. But as nourishing? What chemical fertilizer did to a tomato was blow it up, force it. But the food value was nil.
Then there was the matter of insecticides. Who wanted to eat arsenic and lead and nicotine with his vegetables?
This man was fifty or so, rather fat, and proud of his callused hands. They showed honest toil and he enjoyed the way they fitted so ill with his job of producing radio programs at fifty thousand dollars a year. I got a vision of him out in his garden before going to the train in the morning raking Mexican beetles into a tin can full of kerosene with a little paddle.
It was growing dusky outside and Alice had turned on no lights but allowed the room to steep in soft grayness. But now it was time for the two groups, the women around one fireplace and the men around the other, to come together for a last exchange before breaking up to go home. To signal the arrival of that moment Alice switched on a lamp.
A change of mood had been coming over me which this sudden light and rustle of activity quickened. The amused, half-contemptuous detachment with which I had been listening to the men now struck me as false and I felt myself filled with a vague dissatisfaction. Suddenly I felt the emptiness of their lives and knew that my own life was no better, no more vigorous. I turned from them.
When I turned I saw Gavin standing in the farthest door, smilingly surveying the room. He had never looked so young, so gay and reckless. From the door he held open came a draft of cool air and to me at that moment he looked like a bringer of fresh air.
Some kind of look was passing between him and the ladies’ end of the room. I turned and saw responding to him, unnoticed by all but me, a woman whom I had often seen at Alice’s teas. Gavin caught sight of his brother-in-law and pursed his lips with disdain. Then he cast upon the men’s corner where I stood a look of utter contempt but reserved a smile for me, and for that I forgave him his insanity. I was glad to be his friend and I recalled with shame the times earlier that I had avoided him.
He strolled over and joined the women. He greeted each one smoothly, concentrating on each that smile of his and all his attention. But when he came to Leila Herschell he blushed, stammered, looked caught, and did a job which a ten-year-old could have bettered in covering up his slip. Now I knew where I had seen the woman before, in Gavin’s station wagon the night I got off the train at Webster’s Bridge. I looked at Alice. She was talking with somewhat hysterical unconcern to her brother-in-law. How she, Leila, was taking it, I couldn’t tell—I never got to know her very well—but it is possible that she was enjoying it.
The thing I couldn’t understand was why he had seemed so terribly put out at finding her there, when he had recognized and winked at her from all the way across the room.
By now the men had all gathered round and Gavin went to the portable bar and offered to mix drinks. I think they all sensed the possibility of a scene, for everyone accepted eagerly. He asked each of us—except his brother-in-law, and he pointedly asked Victoria how he wanted his—how each of us took it. But he did not ask Leila Herschell. Hers he mixed automatically. And it was a very personal kind of a drink with a rare combination of ingredients, which Gavin measured and mixed with an all-too-practiced hand. I was spellbound. It took him a long time and in the process he seemed to forget the existence of everyone in the room except her. By this time I was not the only one spellbound. In fact, the only one who was not was Alice, who was trying with desperate chit-chat—the only sound in the room now—to divert the bewitched attention of her neighbors. The last touch was Gavin’s tasting the drink himself very deliberately and smacking his lips judiciously, and, satisfied, handing it to Leila with a flourish, all of which seemed to declare an absolute identity of taste between them, developed over a long and intimate period. All this, plus the husky tone in which he spoke to her, was quite enough, but to add one final touch he straightened himself from bending close over her, and, as though sensing the quiet, the stares, suddenly coming to and discovering the enormity of his indiscretion, he hardened his neck and looked around at Alice in wide-eyed alarm. It was the best job of bad acting I ever hope to see, and I understood then that was what it was meant to be.
I realized that Gavin had never been trying to conceal his philanderings from Alice, but to make her take notice of them. How I must have wounded him that night when I said she was too wrapped up in her career to care what he did with himself!
I saw him suddenly as a kind of inverted sentimentalist, a believer in marriage—the old-fashioned kind—a man with pride enough left to care if his wife ignored him. He was out of place and out of time, with a pride not to be bent and pacified by the memory of one glamorous, martial, male moment of escape from his routine of meaningless work which any other man could do as well as he and any woman as well as any man, nor in finding something—like gardening—which he could do and his wife couldn’t. He took entirely too much pleasure in the mere fact of being unfaithful to his wife, though, who knows, I asked myself, but what in perverse times like ours, perhaps the only way left to honor a thing is in the breach rather than in the observance.
I went home and made my wife promise to give up her job.
V
The next day on the train Gavin and I began playing our game. I was his spy and on mornings after seeing Alice I reported her latest wiles to catch him. He knew it was pure invention and that his “slip” about his mistress had made Alice not a whit more interested, but this called forth our creative abilities and made the game all the more exciting. I quite outdid myself to help him feel hounded and harassed and to feel he was causing her acute distress. Times, I was in some peril of believing it myself.
I pointed out that she was beginning to show wear. She had grown dark circles under her eyes and become careless of her hair and there were days when she looked quite distraught. But the reason, I knew, was the continued failure of her work. She had brought herself at last to come to me for help and this necessity made her almost insulting before she was done. But it was not that which made me so halfhearted in pushing her work. The spectacle of middle-aged love had always appealed to my sentimentality, and though I don’t think I quite hoped to bring the Gavins to a state of belated bliss, still I certainly was not going to do anything to help things stay as they were between them, and if Alice were finally discouraged about that career of hers, why, who knew, perhaps she might return to him, become a wife. Stranger things had happened. The Gavins as they were now had happened.
He kept me posted daily, too, on his running skirmish with her, appearing on the train some mornings looking harried and hollow-eyed and hinting darkly how close upon him she was, then the next morning smiling and crafty and pleased with himself at the way he had outfoxed her this time.
He would get off the 6:36 at Webster’s Bridge and have dinner with his mistress. Then maybe he would stay, maybe he would go home to Cressett. When he went home he took one of about seven different roads, never allowing himself to decide which until the last moment. He changed cars often, buying each time a different make and color so that none should become familiar to the workers whose houses lay along the back edges of the towns, nor to their children who played in the streets until late at night. After leaving Webster’s Bridge all roads climbed above the long valley where in the distance the lights of Cressett lay like scattered coals, and Gavin tried to describe the pleasure it gave him in coming home from his rendezvous to look down on those lights, to glide powerfully through the night past darkened, unsuspecting farmhouses. He felt himself freed from all likeness to the people in those houses, and at the sight of a fox stealing across the road one night with a chicken in its mouth he had felt a thrill of fellowship.
It was clear to me that love was dead between him and Alice. I doubted that there had ever been any. It was not his hea
rt that was wounded by unrequited love, but his pride that was wounded by her ignoring him. I knew it was pride with him, and, if you take my meaning, male pride, when he told me that he made a point, even if “Webster’s Bridge” (the only name I ever heard him use for his mistress) bored him, of not getting home until after midnight, and that when he came in he made as much noise as possible, for unlike most men, who try to keep their wives from learning how late they’ve been, Gavin wanted to be sure Alice knew how late he was. There had been times, he told me somewhat shamefacedly, when he had sneaked in so she would not know how early he was.
He was proud of his record of never offering her any excuse for his nights away from home. She was too proud to ask, he said, so she just had to stew in silent fury. He had a variation on this of sometimes offering her an excuse so transparent it would have insulted the intelligence of a ten-year-old. Now that, I could imagine, would irritate Alice.
He told me of evenings he had spent away from home and not in Webster’s Bridge either, but wandering all night in New York. Once, around five in the morning, he had found himself near the Battery and he never forgot the sun coming up over the East River and the gulls rising out of the mist. He had stayed away from his mistress deliberately, so that his torture of Alice would be abstract, pure. I wondered whether, sitting there on the pier that dawn, he had been able to convince himself that Alice was lying awake in an agony of jealous suspicion. Or had he lost by that time all sense of the reason for his act?
He had his own doubts now, and wondered sometimes if all was right with him in the head. His memory was going bad, for example. Or rather, the worse it got for recent things, the more vividly he recalled things that had happened to him fifteen and twenty years ago. Things returned to him in dreams, painful scenes for the most part, in which he had played a foolish role or done something despicable. He was depressed often and he assured me solemnly that he was a much less happy man than I no doubt imagined. He was always restless and dissatisfied lately and had even caught himself asking himself such silly questions as whether he was a success in life. More and more he found himself, he said with self-contemptuous amazement, thinking all the time. He was dissatisfied with his mistress, for one thing, tired of her; she no longer excited him. Or rather, he added hastily and with a leer, other women excited him more. He told me one morning of having had a woman up at the Cressett house the night before, having got Alice away on an elaborate pretext (a simple one would not have satisfied that strong sense of drama which I was beginning to recognize as perhaps his main characteristic) and the delightful thing was that the woman was not his mistress. Oh, she had once been his mistress, but that was long ago, and, as he said, what woman hadn’t been his mistress one time or another? He laughed to fill the coach when he thought of not only Alice away on a wild-goose chase, but his regular mistress sitting at home in Webster’s Bridge, both being deceived at once. There he had had, I said to myself, two wives to be unfaithful to at the same time; was there ever such respect for marriage?
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 18