Chapter 14

When the party had meandered to its quiet ending, when the older pleasure-maddened citizens had gone home to bed and the stoutly drinking remnant had moved indoors to escape the chill, Chris gave up her impersonal rule as mistress of the revels and settled down at a table with Cass, Jinny, Tracy Oleson, the inebriated Hubbses and the soused Curtiss Havoc, and began to pay loving though discouraged attention to Cass.

He was alarmed. No more than any other man did he want to face the unwed lioness robbed of her wish-dream cubs, the chronic wife who resents the straying of her husband just as much when he is not yet her husband. He had hoped to slip away with Jinny, and perhaps be invited in for an incautious moment.

Curtiss belched. Hubbs said, “I agree.” “Then I’ll take you home,” said Mrs. Hubbs. Tracy rose. “Judge, I can save you a trip. I’ll drive Jinny back—I have my little bus here.”

Treacherous as all sweethearts, Jinny babbled, “Oh, thank you, Tracy. Judge, I did have such a good time. Thank you for inviting me. . . . Good night, Miss—uh—Miss Grau.”

Cass was alone with Chris.

“I think they all enjoyed it, don’t you, Chris?”

“Yes?”

“Due mostly to you, though. You were the perfect hostess. I was amused the way you kept steering Curtiss away from the bar.”

“Yes?”

“And I don’t know how you ever managed to coax such a beautiful supper out of the steward, and when you think—”

“Cass!”

“What is it, dear?”

“‘Dear’! Cass, have you fallen for that young female grasshopper, that Marshland girl, at your age?”

“What d’ you mean, ‘At my age’?”

“I mean at your age!”

“I’m the second youngest district judge in Minnesota!”

“And probably you’re THE youngest octogenarian. I know you can still play baseball and dance the tango, only you don’t. You like the fireside and your books and chess.”

“So I’m that picturesque figure, the venerable judge. Why don’t you put in slippers, along with the fireside and the books—you mean OLD books, that smell of leather!”

“Well, your books mostly do, don’t they? I just can’t see you with a gilt-and-satin copy of ‘Mademoiselle Fifi,’ or whatever it is your Virginia reads.”

“I’ll tell you what she reads! She reads Santayana and Willa Cather and, uh, and Proust! That’s what she reads!”

“Does she? I didn’t suppose she could read. She certainly doesn’t show any stains from it.”

“Just because she doesn’t go around showing off like a young highbrow—”

“Oh, Cassy—Cass, I mean—I’m sorry. I truly am. The last thing in the world I meant to do was to start scrapping with you.” They were on a couch in the club lounge. A bartender and four late bridge-players and the two female slot-machine addicts were still present, and he felt that otherwise Chris would crown her humility by kneeling before him, as she went on:

“It’s just that we started twenty years ago, when you were a veteran of twenty and I was a worshiping brat of ten, no, eleven, that could hide her reverence for you only by being saucy, and so I got the miserable habit of jabbing at you and—Cass! Do you take this little Marshland girl seriously? An exquisite little thing she is, too, I must say, and probably fairly intelligent and even virtuous, curse her! I mean, damn her! Do you think you’re a little in love with her?”

“I think I’m a good deal in love with her. I agree with you in saying ‘damn her’! I didn’t want to be in an earthquake. You’re dead right, my dear; I do prefer quiet. But I’m simply God-smitten.”

She sighed then, sighed and was silent, and at last she talked to herself aloud:

“If I had been more brazen, if I hadn’t been so scrupulous, I could have married you several years ago, my friend. Right after Blanche. I’m the only person you’ve ever really talked to about Blanche. Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose it is.”

“And how she made fun of you and hurt you? Maybe you like to get hurt. You’re going about getting hurt again in just the right way. Now don’t tell me that your Virginia wouldn’t want to hurt anybody! I’m sure she wouldn’t—intentionally. It’s just that all you overimaginative men, who try to combine fancifulness with being clock-watching executives, are fated to be hurt, unless you love some kind-hearted, sloppy, adoring woman like me—the born mistress! Well, as Dad always said, ‘Nun, so geht’s.’ Good night.”

He would not run after her, and before he had stalked out to the automobile entrance, she had driven away, in her fast, canary-colored coupe. He stood frozen, realizing that he was free of his past.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

DROVERS AND HAVOCKS

Roy Drover was born on a farm just at the edge of Grand Republic, and his father was at once a farmer and a veterinarian.

When Roy was a medical student at the University of Minnesota, a beer-drinker and a roarer by night but by day a promising dissecter, he met the tall and swaying Lillian Smith, daughter of a stationer who was refined, tubercular, and poor. He saw that here was the finest flower he was likely ever to acquire for the decoration of a successful doctor’s drawing-room. Also, it tickled his broad fancy to think of seducing (even if he could do it only legally) anything so frail and sweet as Lillian.

She was overwhelmed by him, though she did break off the engagement once when he used a certain four-letter word. He reasonably pointed out, however, that either she did not know what the word meant, in which case she could not be shocked, or else she did know, in which case she must have got over being shocked some time ago. She was conquered, though for years afterward she worried about that logic.

By the time they had been married for five years and Roy had practised for seven, Lillian’s father was bankrupt, and Roy had the daily pleasure of telling her that, though her “old man might be so cultured and polite, he was mighty glad to get eighty bucks a month from his roughneck son-inlaw.” That pleasure continued for years after her father had died. At medical conventions or among strangers in a West Coast Florida hotel, Roy would jovially shout, “My ancestors were Vermont hill-billies, but my ball-and-chain comes from the best stock in Massachusetts—such a good stock that it’s got pernicious anemia, and I’ve always had to give it a few injections of gold.”

He continued to feel physical passion for Lillian—as well as for every gum-chewing hoyden that he picked up on his trips to Chicago, and for a number of his chattier women patients. Perhaps his continued zest came from the fact that it amused him to watch his wife shiver and reluctantly be conquered. To her, the whole business of sex had become a horror related to dark bedrooms and loud breathing. Sometimes in the afternoon, when Lillian was giving coffee to quiet women like the Avondene girls or the Methodist minister’s wife, Roy would come rampaging in, glare at her possessively, growl “H’are yuh” at the guests in a way which said he wished they would get out of this, and as soon as they had twittered away, he would rip down the zipper of her dress.

She often thought about suicide, but she was too blank of mind. She was always reading the pink-bound books of New Thought leaders, those thick-haired and bass-voiced prophets who produce theatrical church-services in New York theaters, and tell their trembling female parishioners that they can accomplish anything they wish if they Develop the Divine Will Power and Inner Gifts. . . . Sometimes Roy threw these books into the furnace.

Lillian never contradicted him. She was mute even when he teased her about her dislike for having dead mallards or pheasants drip blood on her dress when she went hunting with him.

At the beginning of our history, the Drovers had been married for thirteen years. They had two sons, William Mayo and John Erdmann Drover, aged eleven and nine. Lillian was devoted to them, often looked at them sadly, as though they were doomed. She begged them to listen while she read aloud from Kenneth Grahame and her own girlhood copy of “The Birds’ Christmas Carol,” but the boys protested, “Aw, can that old-fashioned junk, Mum. Pop says it’s panty-waist. Read us the funnies in the paper, Mum.”

Like their father, the boys enjoyed killing things—killing snakes, frogs, ducks, rats, sparrows, feeble old neighborhood cats.

When Roy and the boys were away, she stayed alone in a shuttered room, in a house that rustled with hate, in a silence that screamed, alone with a sullen cook and a defiant maid. She did not read much, but she did read that all women are “emancipated” and can readily become “economically independent.” She was glad to learn that.

Roy and Lillian were often cited by Diantha Marl as “one of the happiest couples, the most successful marriages, in Grand Republic; just as affectionate as the Zagos, but not so showy about it.”

The same authority, Diantha, publicly wondered whether Boone and Queenie Havock, though by 1941 they had been married for thirty-five years, would not “bust up,” as the technical phrase was. When, at their rich parties, Queenie got high and screamed that Boone was a “chippie-chasing, widow-robbing old buzzard,” he frequently slapped her. She was almost as large as he and even louder, and she retorted spiritedly by spitting at him, and sometimes when he was entertaining Eastern Financiers or other visiting royalty, she yelled at him, “Oh, shutzen Sie die mouth,” which she believed to be German.

But in private, with their great arms about each other, these shaggy gods sat up all night making fun of their neat neighbors, drinking and shouting and cackling like pirates. When Boone was almost indicted for stealing one hundred thousand acres of Eastern Montana prairie, Queenie joyfully announced, “I’ll come cook for you in jail, you cutthroat!”

He answered admiringly, “You probably will, too, you catamaran, but if you get any more finger-marks on my Cesar Franck symphony records, I’ll bust your ole head open.”

Dr. Roy Drover often said, “My experience is that it’s all nonsense to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated modern life on top of the fundamental clashes between the sexes. Yessir! It’s all perfectly easy, if the husband just understands women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles. You bet!”