“Don’t be mad at me, Vernie. Please?”
“Oh, come on, let’s go eat and forget about it. It wouldn’t have done us any good anyway. You comin’, Allen?”
“Not this time. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Well, you asked for it, starting that extra class.”
“But she wanted it,” Mae Dell chimed in. “Didn’t you, Allie?”
“I wish he’d let me have something I wanted,” said Verna.
Allen said, “Maybe if you asked him—”
“Oh phoo. He doesn’t want anything practical.”
“Well, what’s practical,” said Mae Dell, “about a football team? Would somebody tell me that?”
“It brings in money,” said Gladys, “so they can raise our salaries.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. I just don’t understand—”
“Get your things and come on,” said Verna. “We’ll explain it. ’Night, Allen.”
“’Night,” she said and went home unregenerated.
Seven
It was terrible!” she said, giggling. “Pick turned purple.”
The three of them, bundled in sweaters and jackets, sat on the landing. Though official spring was only a day away, there was still a distinct chill in the twilight. Allen wore slacks. In the house it was warm, but outside, a planet as big and bright as a silver dollar hung in the cold blue sky.
George said, “He’s just mad because you won’t help him be the dean.”
“Wonder which one will win,” said Toby, “him or the Phud.”
“Probably neither.” Allen laughed again and bit into an apple.
“I’ll lay my nickel on the Phud.”
“Why?”
“Pick’s the militia. He’ll go into the army.” Toby always brought things around to talk of impending war.
“I don’t know why he’d do that. If he wants to be the dean, he’d better stick around.”
“He may not be able to,” Toby said
“Why not?”
“He’s national guard—they can call them into regular service.”
“For what?”
“The war, for chrissake. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“Not here,” she said, spitting a seed.
“So we’ll go there.” Toby assured her
“We will not. The president said no son of an American mother—”
“In a rat’s reticule,” said Toby. “We’ve got a draft, haven’t we?”
“It’s a peacetime draft.”
Toby snorted.
“Well, that’s what they call it, don’t they?”
“This isn’t peacetime,” said Toby.
“We are not at war!”
“Give us time.”
“Oh, shut up and eat your apple.” She slammed into the house, dropped her apple core in the garbage, and came back. “Honestly! You are the most pessimistic! You’d think you wanted a war.”
“Like hell I do,” said Toby.
“Then why are you always talking about it?”
“Because I’m scared.”
“Nonsense. You don’t have to be.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“You said that before. Oh dear. I don’t know who to believe.”
“Whom,” said George.
“Not in the vernacular.” She leaned back against the wall and, resorting to poetry as she always did, looked up and said, “‘In the high west there burns a furious star....’”
“Wonder what it’s so mad about,” said George. So much for Wallace Stevens. “Want to ride the bike?” They were giving her lessons on George’s old hand-me-down, which he now left in her apartment.
“Not much,” she said. “I fell off three times the other day. My knee’s still sore.”
“How come you never learned to ride a bike?”
“Bikes cost money. We rode plow horses.”
They leaned back comfortably and listened to the steeple chimes ring twelve times.
“Quarter hours are unresolved,” said George. “They leave you hanging.”
“Quarter hours,” Toby said, “are a warning.”
“How so?”
He said solemnly, “Your hour is coming.”
“Well, let’s improve it then.” Allen stood up. “Want to tackle Nietzsche again?”
“Nah, it’s Friday night,” said George.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Who wants to be deep on Friday night? I’d rather tackle Judy Garland. Let’s go up to the Osage and see her. I’ve got thirty-five cents. How much you got, Tobe?”
“Half a buck.”
“I’ve got some money,” Allen said. “Let me run in and get it.”
“We got enough for popcorn?” George said as they went down the steps.
“We’ll manage.”
They detoured across a lawn, and took a shortcut through a lot where a house had burned down long ago. Jumping onto the stone foundation, they followed-the-leader all the way around and back to the street, toward town. As they turned onto Center Street, George stopped in his tracks.
“Smell that!” The bakery was only two blocks away. “I’m starved.”
“You’re always starved,” said Allen. “Didn’t you have any supper?”
“We didn’t have any dessert. Let’s go get a pie.”
“Can’t,” said Toby. “Not if you want to popcorn with Judy Garland.”
“A pie—a big, sloppy goddam pie. Breathe in!”
The mingled odors of butter and yeast, cinnamon, warm sugar, lemon and clove. Judy Garland hadn’t a chance.
At the back door, which always stood open, the warmth from the bakery kitchen drifted into the alley. Inside, pastries fresh from the oven lay in rows on the long tables—cakes and sweet buns, thin brittle cookies, and muffins fat with raisins and nuts, cherries and apples steaming through lattice crusts, and cream pies hidden under gold-tipped meringue. The vote went for banana cream. Holding it carefully in a white paper sack, they carried it out to the curb.
“Let’s take it to the park,” said Allen.
“Too far,” said George. “We could drop it.”
“Hey,” said Toby, “how we gonna eat this? We can’t cut a pie with our fingers.”
“Use your pocket knife,” said Allen.
“I lost it.”
“George?”
“I got a pocket comb.”
“We should have bought cookies. Maybe we can trade it in.”
“Over my dead body.”
“Then we’ll just have to go back to my place.”
“That’s too easy.”
Toby was scowling down the street. “Follow me.”
They followed him back downtown and into a side street. The lights of the bus station glimmered through the plate-glass windows. Leaving George with the pie—“And don’t eat it!”—Toby and Allen crossed the street to the lunchroom. The waiter sat at one end of the counter, reading a newspaper. He rose as they came in. “Hy’re you folks tonight?”
They said they were fine and slid onto the stools.
“Yawl want to see a menu?” he said, filling water glasses.
Toby said they did. They studied them as they drank the water.
“Yawl from around here?”
“Just passin’ through,” said Toby. “How’s the trout tonight?”
“We don’t have no trout tonight.”
“No trout?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Doggone. I’d heard you could get real good trout in this town.”
“Maybe you can some places. We don’t ordinarily have it here. Have catfeesh sometimes. Don’t have none tonight.”
“Well, golly. I’d been looking forward to some good trout. Hadn’t you?” He turned to Allen.
“Had my mouth all set.”
The waiter grinned. “You kids serious about this?”
“No hay!” said Toby. “We come from over in Kansas where there’s
not such good fishin’. Maybe we could get some trout on down at Neosho.”
“Ever’thang’ll be closed down there, time you get there.”
“Guess we’ll take our chances.”
The waiter said, “If yawl expectin’ to catch a bus, it don’t go there.”
“Nah, we’re drivin’,” Toby said. “Left the car around the corner. You ready?” he said to Allen. “Guess we’ll be on our way then. Thanks for your trouble.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she said.
They sauntered out, taking their time till they were well beyond the light. There they broke into a run. George caught up with them in the next block, and they ran out of breath in front of the Scottish Rite Temple.
“Did you get it?”
Toby shook a fork out of his sleeve. “If they’d a-had trout, we’d a-been up a creek.”
They sat on the steps between two sphinxes that supported the clustered lamps. In the dim yellow glow they finished off the pie with the relish of lucky thieves. George scraped the plate clean with his finger.
Leaning back on their elbows, they listened to the bleating of frogs somewhere in a grassy ditch.
“‘Last night we sat beside a pool of pink,’” said Allen, letting the rest go unspoken. Stevens’s bright chromes and booming frog were familiar enough; they could finish the lines for themselves. “What are you reading?” she said, pulling a book out of Toby’s pocket. “Oh, that again.”
Toby had borrowed her copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and never given it back.
George said, “How many times have your read it, for crine in the bucket?”
“Four, more or less, since we read it for the class.”
They laughed.
“Well, I like it,” he said. “There’s always something I didn’t get before, something you can sink your teeth into. Listen to this.” He flipped through the pages and began to read from the fifth chapter.
—Look at that basket—he said.
—I see it—said Lynch.
—In order to see that basket—said Stephen—your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket.
He read on through the passage on perception, apprehension, and esthetic image; the three forms—lyrical, epical, dramatic—into which art divides itself; and Stephen’s questions on the theory of the esthetic: Was a finely made chair tragic or comic? If a man carves an image of a cow, is the image a work of art, and if not, why not?
“Is a sonata pathetic?” said George.
“‘That’s a lovely one,’” Toby said, reading. “‘That has the true scholastic stink.’”
“Never mind him,” said Allen. “Go on, Toby.”
—The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.—
—Trying to refine them also out of existence—said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came.
He closed the book, and they sat for a moment, thoughtfully hugging their knees, lost in the Joycean weather—mist, fog, rain, and evening.
“I don’t get it,” George said.
Toby beat him over the head with the book and they laughed, relieved of a tension congenial but not to be held too long.
“Now,” said Toby, taking up the paper plate that had held the pie, “regard this plate. In order to see this plate, the mind separates the plate from the rest of the universe. Which is not the plate. Observe it luminously. Is this finely made object tragic or comic?”
“Tragic,” George said promptly. “It’s empty.”
“Bull’s-eye!” said Toby, and sent the plate spinning into the street.
“Pick it up,” said Allen. “Only white trash leaves white trash in the street.”
Toby dutifully trotted across and retrieved the plate.
When he returned, he offered Allen a hand, pulled her up. “Regard this sphinx,” he said. “Is it animal, mineral, or vegetable?”
“Two of the three,” said George. “Mineral in the immaculate form of a lion and a woman, both animal.”
“Head on,” said Allen, “it looks something like Mrs. Medgar.”
Having thus disposed of the riddle, they descended the steps and wandered on.
“They used to have a tiger out at the park,” said Toby.
“When?” said Allen.
“Twenty, thirty years ago. Before my time.”
“Where’d they keep it?”
George said, “There’s a cave out there. We’ve passed it a thousand times. Didn’t you ever notice it?”
“It’s always dark.”
“I’d have thought you could smell it.”
“Does it smell?”
“It ought to, it had a tiger in it.”
“Do tigers smell?”
“Of course they do.”
“Why?”
“They just do, that’s all.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. He died or something. Maybe ran away with the circus.”
It was necessary then to go investigate the cave, and presently they were crossing the high bridge over the ravine that bounded one side of the park.
“Down this walk,” said Toby, “and over there to the right.”
A high fence guarded a sort of cave hollowed out of the limestone strata. They considered scaling the fence but gave up the notion and, after sniffing and snuffling along the bars, soon lost interest.
Cutting across to the swings, they pumped themselves into the air a few times and from there wandered on past the lake and down a long, easy incline at the far end of the park. At the bottom of the slope a footbridge led across the creek at a narrow point and on to the country-club grounds. The evening was young yet, by their time, and they lingered on the bridge discussing tigers and zoos and whether they were or were not ethical or esthetic and if not why not, until the moon, rising behind the trees, prompted George to sing.
Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot…
Miss Boatwright had chosen the song for the chorus, and the boys had learned it there. Toby picked up the harmony, more or less:
Prete-moi la plume
Pour ecrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte
Je n’a plus de feu…
The sound of their voices pleased them almost as much as they pleased Allen. They sang it all the way through. Then they worked out the words in English. A boy pretends to be the god of love and gains admission to a brunette’s room, and they look for the pen, and for fire. “I don’t know what was found,” the song ends coyly, and closes the door on them.
“Ol’ Miss Maxie has us singing a dirty song.” George whooped with delight.
Toby smirked. “She probably has no idea what the words mean.”
Allen was unsure, and their speculations about why Maxine had assigned that song, none too innocent, occupied them for some minutes as they strolled on across the bridge into country-club territory.
It was the very extent of the grounds that drew them on. Acres of lovely greensward—open, inviting, and forbidden. (After all, they were not members.) They stood on a low rise now, taking it in. The ground was mossy with moonlight, the gentle swells billowing off into the distance. In the tree-lined borders of the course, the light picked out the white trunks of sycamores, Every limestone outcrop had turned to rough silver.
“Listen!” Allen said. From the top of the hill, where the clubhouse glittered among the trees, came the faint sound of the band playing “All the Things You Are.”
“They’re having a party!”
George said, “Let’s go up and crash it. Wouldn’t that rattle their bones!”
“And get the dogs sicced on us too. Like Cathy and Heathcliff.”
“We’d get Murdstone,” Toby said. “My
folks are up there.”
That tickled them so—Mr. Murdstone, nose to the ground, sniffing though the underbrush; Mr. Murdstone barking up a tree.
But the moonlight and the music in the distance overcame their hilarity. They could just make out the band playing “Fools Rush In.” “May I have this dance, Miss Allen?” George asked with a debonair bow, and Allen moved into his arms and he began leading her gracefully around and around the lawn. George was a fine dancer—she remembered that from times he’d cut in on her at the college dances she’d chaperoned in the fall. Toby looked on until the song ended and George and Allen separated. Next the band struck up “Thanks for the Memories.” Toby bowed gallantly and said, “Then I believe this dance is mine, mademoiselle.”
And halfway through, George joined them and the three of them danced around in a circle twirling in and out of one another. They were out of breath when the music ended, and stood, almost shyly, giggling. The band did not strike up another song. Finally, Toby said, “I better get going now, before Murdstone beats me home.”
Eight
In the faculty ladies’ lounge something was going on. It was noon, just after the last morning class, when the Ladies always met in a rush, with much hair combing and toilet flushing and soaping and rinsing of hands. For the last few weeks the petition had been the main topic of conversation; there were rumors that Mr. Pickering had some new scheme up his sleeve. But this noon there was none of that.
Allen had come in late (waylaid in the hall by Pickering himself, who wanted to twist her arm) and found them hived by the window with Maxine, of all people, in their buzzing midst. Maxine usually met Max for lunch or went home. She sat on the edge of the table, smiling, blotting her eyes with an absurd lace hanky, and looking happier than any girl had a right to look. The room was awash in sweetness. It was like walking into warm tapioca.
“Come in, Allie, wait’ll you hear!” Mae Dell pulled her into the circle. “Show her, Maxine.”
Maxine held out her left hand. There on the fourth finger was the diamond, big as a doorknob and flashing blue and gold like a soap bubble in the sun. The engagement, which surprised no one except, apparently, Maxine, was official.
Allen admired the ring. “When did it happen?” she asked.
“I can hardly believe it—I’ve been engaged for almost four weeks!”
Clair De Lune Page 6