Chapter 24

They fished again in the salt inlet, next day; they delightedly though erroneously believed that they saw a barracuda, a threatening moccasin; they felt valiant as only tourists can. They hired a Drive–Yourself car, put in bathing-suits and a bottle of cognac for emergencies, and cruised slowly down sandy roads among the yuccas.

In late afternoon they came to an inlet with a great wash of wet sand and a cluster of whitewashed shacks: over-night cabins and a restaurant for impecunious tourists—the eternal gipsy encampment, the wooden-tented caravan.

“Look! We can get away from the painted bridge-pads here! Here’s the place for thwarted hoboes!” said Cass. And Jinny noted that on their journey to China, they had come as far as Tahiti.

The restaurant walls were of upright bamboo, with palm thatch; the interior was cool and dim, with cement floor and loose-looking tables and black-and-white reed chairs. The pine bar was for drinking, not for the display of glassware. The bartender was a Minorcan, with a trim thread of mustache, the waitress was Mexican, and in the shadowed background, letting his planless harmonies drip from a guitar, was an old man in overalls, barefoot and masked with whiskers.

The troubadour waved his straw hat and the bartender greeted them, “H’ are you, folks.” They had two Daiquiris, cool and silken, and dined on fresh red snapper and a Cuban cocoa-nut ice cream.

Before dinner they had inspected the bare pine cottages, each with only a double bed, a chair, and a water-tap, yet far larger than the Inn cubicles, and voluptuously furnished altogether, for outside each door was the curving sand and the rolling Gulf of Mexico.

“I wish we were staying here, instead of at that knitting-works,” sighed Jinny.

The bar-restaurant half filled, after dinner, with Italian fishermen, Mexican truck-farmers, and such tourists as wandered by flivver and trailer, not to improve their minds or tans or social standing, but just to wander. Cass bought drinks for half a dozen new lifelong friends. Everybody beamed at him and Jinny, not titteringly, as at the Inn, but with an earthy love of lovers, and the troubadour played “La Paloma” at them.

“Let’s stay here tonight, in one of the cabins,” Cass blurted, astonished at himself.

“With no baggage?”

“We have ourselves.”

“Okay.”

When Cass paid for a cabin in advance, the bartender took it for granted that they were not married, and was delighted by the whole general idea. So were the eloping Cass and Jinny as, with no bags to unpack, they took possession of their first real home together.

There were no occupied shacks near them, no whispering lady guests, but only the sliding sea. They lay with the door half open to the night, and suddenly he was ruthless with love and she as fierce as he, nipping his ear with angry little teeth, and they fell asleep in the surprise of love.

At dawn, Cass woke her and they ran down the beach and bathed, unclad and laughing, and came back to new abandonment.

Jinny marveled, “We both seem to be great successes. It was a terrible shock at first, but now I do cleave to you and we are one flesh.”

“Forever?”

“Forever and ever, beloved!”

Sleeping and waking, waking and sleeping, their open door embracing the wash of the fertile tide, amazed by the curiousness of arms and legs and breasts, redeemed from civilization they lay about the tousled bed till noon, and dressed and ate fried corn-mush for breakfast, to the commendatory smiling of the waitress. They wanted to be dignified, as suited their unique position in the history of lovers, but they also wanted to guffaw when Jinny said, “Think of what the old ladies at the Bryn–Thistle must be saying— the painted old hussies!”

They were one flesh, truly, and ecstatic with life.

“‘Husband,’” she mused. “I used to think that word sounded funny, but now it seems such a sturdy old word. It takes me back, clear through Walter Scott to King Arthur, back to the Anglo–Saxons and the old woods of Wessex, and I feel as if you and I were in a bark hut, worshiping the old gods. My Druid! My husband!”

“My wife! Yes, there are words that even the radio can’t spoil.”

“Golly! Were the Druids Anglo–Saxon or Celtic or what?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said, in a blissfully shared community of ignorance.

There were no other guests at the tourist camp on this shining Sunday, and during the night Cass and Jinny had had no considerable sleep. Happily frowzy in the shade before their frowzy shack, lying on the long beach-grass with the sea-wind sweet about them, they slept through the afternoon.

They might not have gone back to the Bryn–Thistle at all that night—the night of December 7, 1941—but they were not yet so saved from Pruttery that they could stay on without clean clothes.

They would come down here again, in a couple of days. Certainly.

With her arm injudiciously linked in his as he drove, they returned to the Bryn–Thistle at dusk, and from the porch a woman joyful at finding victims who had not heard the news screamed at them, in delighted horror, “Been away? Then you don’t know. We’re in the war! Japan attacked our ships at Pearl Harbor today!”

They said nothing till they were in their room. Then, staring at him as though she had found him treacherous, Jinny said sharply, “Oh, curse the luck! Why couldn’t I have known a few weeks ago? This time, they’ll take women in the army. I could have seen Hawaii—France—Russia! And all the boys will be going—Eino and Tracy and Abbott Hubbs and everybody! And I’ll be left home with the old women!”

“And with me, my dear.”

“Yes,” sardonically, “with you!”

Her tantrum—that was what they had come to call any of her not-too-frequent wild moods—was agallop. She moaned, “I hear they’ll make women captains and majors and everything now—in uniform and be saluted—and station ’em with the flyers—young and brave and good-looking!”

—I don’t blame her for being disappointed—greatest chance for adventure women ‘ve ever seen. But—It certainly does hurt to have her talk as though I were senile. Be careful now—be gentle.

“Jinny, I’m sure you can still get into the war, even if you are married.”

“Oh, no. You’ll complain about being left alone in your gloomy ole Bergheim.”

“We can do war-work—maybe together.”

“Aaaah! Rolling bandages with Mrs. Prutt, and you being obsequious to that old camel!”

“Jinny! Quit it! If you want to go off to war, you shall. But I’m not going to let you forget last night.”

She fled to him and kissed him. “Forgive me for carrying on so. I just meant—You ARE a darling, and I do love you so; I even love you passionately, now, as I never could any other man living.”

“More than the jittery Mr. Hubbs, even if he’s in uniform?”

“Oh, now YOU’RE being nasty. Much better than Mr. Jitters. Even more than my cute Eino. But you must admit that you’re not as awe-inspiring as a whole army marching together.”

“I certainly do. Jinny, shall I try to get into the Army, into uniform—maybe the Judge Advocate’s department?”

“No, I imagine they’ll tell you that you can do more good right where you are. And maybe me too, where I am. Yes—maybe.”

—Now shut up, Cass. She’ll get over her disappointment if you just keep still.

He did keep still, but he felt useless, he felt that she did not vastly appreciate his labors as a jurist and a defender of Democracy. He felt, in fact, sulky, and doubtless his sulkiness was visible to her. When he said, with what he considered admirable good nature, “How about our going fishing again tomorrow— haven’t tackled that tarpon yet,” and she echoed, “FISHING!” he yelped, “All right then, we won’t! Of course we do only what YOU want to, my dear Jinny!”

“And just what is there to do, in this dump?”

That was all of their quarrel.

They did go fishing next day, on a placid-colored inlet, and they were so fond of each other that they almost forgot the war, and everybody forgave everybody everything. But it HAD been a quarrel, and if possibly she had started it, he had been the guiltier in carrying it on. They had had differences before, but this had been their first quarrel, their first drink, their first murder, and so, inevitably, it was the beginning of a series of quarrels interspersed with frantic peace-proposals, while the little crystal Isis listened bleakly.

Their second quarrel rose from one of her “tantrums,” comprehensible but unexpected. In the midst of a poor little dance that the Bryn–Thistle was trying to give, with aged gentlewomen tottering around the dining-room dancing together, Jinny demanded, “Have we got to go on staying in this hencoop when people are having such a gorgeous time at Palm Beach? Aren’t we good enough to go there?”

“My dear child, we’ll go over there any time you want to. We’ll go tomorrow. We’ll hire a car and a driver.”

That was all, and after another dance, she apologized: “I’m sorry I flared up so. I’m sure the dear old things here mean well, but they get on my nerves.”

“We’ll go up and start packing now.”

“You’re wonderful, and I’m sorry I was noisy and spiteful—and come on, let’s get going! Palm Beach, here I come!”

—Do people who love each other always bicker and scratch and hurt? Must they?

They both felt guilty when all the guests at the Bryn–Thistle came out on the porch to cry, “It’s been so nice to meet you both. We just loved knowing you, Judge, and your dear little bride.”

It was a hundred miles across the Everglades to Palm Beach, and they sang all the way, hand in hand, behind their sedate colored driver. She was radiant then, a joyous peasant with a red kerchief round her dark hair, and when they came into the American Cannes, where all the people are beautiful, the houses all carven of gold, and the ocean water especially imported from the Riviera daily, by airplane, she was impressed to a blissful awe.

The season was early; they were able to get a suite at the Royal Crown: two rooms filled with white-fur rugs and glass tables and chairs so modern that you sat in them as in a bucket; and Jinny squealed continuously in the high religious passion of absolute luxury, and he ordered up a bottle of Johannisberger Cabinet, in the slow drinking of which they enjoyed everything but the taste.

He telephoned to Berthold Eisenherz, now head of the very richest family in Grand Republic, who came down to his villa at Palm Beach every winter. Eisenherz was cordial, which exiled Grand Republicans are not always to their fellow refugees, and urged them to come over to the villa for dinner and dancing, that evening.

So for five hours the Timberlanes lived in a Hollywood motion picture: a marble terrace on the starry ocean, a Cuban orchestra, champagne from a portable silver-striped bar, roses on a December night, and young Navy officers who danced with Jinny. The war seemed only fictional. She exulted, “Cass, this is the night I’ve lived for—this and our night at the gipsy camp. I’m intolerably happy! I’m sorry if I was ever cross. Because I love you!”

“More even than that lieutenant s.g.?”

“More even than that lieutenant j.g.!”

“Champagne, madame?” said the footman, who was a deacon in the Swedish Baptist Church, back home in Minneapolis.

Jinny’s husband was so relaxed that for the five enchanted hours he actually let her enjoy what he had so anxiously wanted to have her enjoy. And through the net of Jinny’s black evening bag Isis peered out with a benignity that knew not good or evil.

The Honorable Mr. Hudbury, United States Senator Hudbury, should have been in Washington, lighting the war, but as he was a very thick, round, stupid man, it may have been as well that he was taking a week off from statesmanship to repose his limbs, which looked like four fingers of an enormous pale-white glove, as they were displayed upon the sands of Palm Beach. As an ex-representative, Cass recognized the Senator even in the improbable disguise of a bloated violet bathing-suit, with a belt patriotically symbolizing the American flag encircling the globe. Mr. Hudbury’s belly being the globe.

Now Cass did not care for Mr. Hudbury, not as a pal. Mr. Hudbury started every sentence with “In my opinion,” and he spent week-ends with lobbyists. Cass would not have collected Honorable Mr. Hudbury, or any other accidental celebrity, except to give him to Jinny, but since he had not given her any presents now since ten o’clock this morning—the present then had been a coral necklace which looked like the devil on her—he now picked up the Senator’s halo and handed it to her.

Fortunately Hudbury remembered him, and fortunately he did not remember that he had hated Congressman Timberlane after a party caucus at which the fellow had suggested that even Republicans ought to know that there was a new invention called labor unions.

They were a musical-comedy group upon these tropic sands: the Senator tubby and half naked, the Judge stalwart and three-quarters naked, and Jinny, like all the other respectable women at that time and place, almost entirely naked, charmingly naked, with white midriff turning coffee-color. With difficulty could you have found three people more nude or more piously against “this crank theory of Nudism.”

“Senator, I don’t know whether you’ll recall me—Cass Timberlane, formerly in Congress from Minnesota.”

“Why, yes, yes, my boy, how could I forget a wheelhorse who has rendered such sterling services to the Party! Sure. You had that house on H Street, and the cocktails made with Swedish aquavit. Perfectly.”

“This is my wife.”

“Oh, yes, and of course I remember you, too, and the name—ah, ah now, wait, don’t tell me—BLANCHE!” The Senator looked confused, but he was used to it. For years and years he had been confused over something or other, and he would continue to be confused until someone in his State discovered that he was their Senator, and had him defeated.

Jinny looked irritated, then winked at Cass, yet she viewed Hudbury not without respect. After all, a United States Senator is a United States Senator, even when he is a hoot-owl. (She still held that innocent theory. She had never lived in Washington.)

The Senator went on making sounds like an empty barrel. “How could I forget anything so charming as your lady, Cass? Ravished to see you again, Blanche.”

“Oh, don’t be ravished, Senator.”

“Yes, yes, I will! I can’t help it. Now, folks, I’m about to assume the normal habiliments of a gentleman, and what-say you join me for a cocktail on the terrace of the Choiseul in half an hour?”

Cass looked to Jinny for permission, and said, “Fine.”

The truth is that over the cocktails, and how many of them there were, Jinny was proud of being intimate with this aged poop, and if he did reveal himself by saying that “American Business stands wholeheartedly back of the war effort, ready to pledge every dollar to encourage Our Boys,” yet he also revealed the senatorial magic by having somehow discovered, while he was dressing, that Blanche’s name was now Virginia. It is probable that while he was under the shower he had been speaking to the Federal Bureau of Inquiry by vest-pocket radio.

Calling her “Jinny,” pouring his black-molasses charm all over her, he first told her that as a boy he had sold newspapers. That was for him an obligatory introduction to anything he had to say, whether in the Senate, a grocery store, or a parlor house. Then he took them right into the heart of world affairs by confiding that on the very day after Pearl Harbor, he had been summoned to the White House for a small conference of the leaders of both parties. (That the President had noticed that Senator Hudbury was there or, if so, that he had said anything to him beyond “Got a cigarette?” Cass and Jinny never could find out.)

After cocktails the Senator took them on to the roulette club where, but under strictly honest, home-made American conditions, none of your foreign shenanigans, Jinny lost forty dollars.

Here, they were in a spotlight of international chic. The Senator’s secretary, a pale young man with constant reservations, who was the Senator’s eyes and his ideology, had come with them, and he pointed out, at the gaming tables, the third-greatest radio crooner in America, the fourth-greatest New York banker, the fifth-most-beautiful woman from Alabama, a colonel who was going to be a major general, a major general who was going to be a retired major general, and a gentleman, with a beard, who had been a German manufacturer but was now an exiled French patriot.

Through all of this global low-down, Cass was as grateful as little Jinny, and said as they parted—he did not sound like Judge Timberlane of the Twenty–Second Judicial District—“It was extremely kind of you, Senator, to give us such a good time. I appreciate it.”

At dinner, the two of them at their hotel, Jinny pounced:

“Have a good time, Cass?”

“Splendid. How did you like the Senator?”

“He’s a fool.”

“Yes, he does rather bear that reputation. But he’s always been clever at picking useful brothers-inlaw.”

“Why were you so excited by having the old pot condescend to you?”

“M?”

“He doesn’t even know anything about politics, only about politicians. He doesn’t know half as much as Tracy Oleson or Mr. Hubbs.” Then, clearly as an afterthought, “Or as you. Why did you ever drag in the old idiot?”

“Because I thought he would amuse you.”

“Dullness doesn’t amuse me.”

“I picked him out for you the way I did your coral necklace. I wouldn’t want to rub my face against the coral, either. Don’t be so youthfully censorious. If you don’t care to have Hudbury for your collection, if you don’t want me to shoot him and stuff him for you, we’ll throw him out. . . . Jinny! . . . Sweet!”

“I know, darling! I AM censorious. AND young. And I do try to show off my superiority. I’m sorry. Some day, I’ll grow up.”

And of that quarrel there was nothing more. But Cass was thinking nervously that for years yet she would be impulsive, hasty to judge him, aggressively independent, like the other children of her Positively Final New Modern Revolutionary Age which by 1970 would have come to seem such a naive Old-fashioned Age.

—Like all these girls, she feels—and how can you blame her—that she must have her own life. Besides that, I’m no longer the family priest to her or a guide or a refuge; I’m just A Husband. And I don’t even care much, so long as she’ll let me go on being THAT!

There was nothing in the Specimen Hudbury that Jinny had not been able to identify from her Pioneer Falls collecting. In fact he looked like the local pre-motor livery-stable keeper who was still sitting in front of his empty barn, still covered with hay-dust, waiting for this automobile craze to pass.

But she was impressed and a little confused when they went to lunch at Berthold Eisenherz’s villa, and so was Cass. At the villa dance they had met Berthold only as a sort of private head-waiter. Now, they collided with him as a personality.

The only thing about him to hint that he was not a gentleman was that he too consistently looked too much like a gentleman. He had devoted the voluminous money that his grandfather had made, as a Minnesota pioneer, by skinning beaver and redskins, to Harvard and Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and a black-eyed, red-tempered Latvian girl who spoke all languages, in and out of bed, and so had qualified himself for the American diplomatic corps, in which, before he got tired, he had risen to first secretary in a minor legation.

He looked like a German who was trying to look like an Englishman. He had been married, now and then, to the daughters of German–American millionaires, who played pianos and barons. At fifty, he was bald and not officially married; he was bald and erect and soft-spoken. In Palm Beach he wore the monocle that even he did not dare to display back home in Grand Republic, where Swedish and Finnish urchins and Roy Drover and Boone Havock would have made exactly the same rather Freudian comments upon it.

He had the Timberlanes for one of his better Grade-B luncheons, with one actress, one lady pianist, one viscountess, a Swiss violinist, and an economist from New Zealand. At the flower-strewn, yellow-damask covered table, on the terrace looking to the Southern sea, the Timberlanes listened while the viscountess tried to talk faster than the pianist.

Berthold himself talked only to Jinny, asking her questions in a manner that made her feel solid and original. Afterward, Jinny confided to Cass, “That was fun. The visvy-whateveritis-countess was silly, but I think your friend Berthold is wonderful. I always heard so much about him in Grand Republic, but I never saw him before. Will we see him when he goes back in the spring?”

“I guess so. If we want to.”

“Isn’t he hard to know?”

“‘Hard to know’? Why should he be? Just because he’s rich? Back home, we’re not as naive as Palm Beach. We know where his money came from!”

“No, I don’t mean ‘because he’s rich’! Because he’s wise and charming, and he treats a colt like me as though I were a—you know—a countess, too. And the way he can speak French! And knows all about Bessarabia! And kiss the hand! My hand’s still tingling from it. Oh, boy!”

“If you’re going out for international society, along with Excellency Bertie, you can’t mix your dialects, and say ‘Oh, boy’!”

“Okay. But don’t you like Bertie?”

“Would you be surprised if I said he’s even phonier than Senator Hudbury?”

“I certainly would. And I would be fairly sure—fairly sure that you were going jealous on me again.”

He gaped. It was true; he was jealous; jealous of Eisenherz, not because he owned a palace but because with it he had been able to impress Jinny; not that he knew the Deauville patter but that he could make Jinny admire it.

He was quick about getting the proper forgiveness, so THAT could not be called a quarrel.

There came a hot and humid evening, and Aucassin and Nicolette acted like Auggie and Nig. For two days they had been idle, soaked in sun, confidently making love, and that sensible uselessness had been too much for two people so perpetually active.

They drove over to West Palm Beach to see a super and maddening movie, and they were unhappy and nervous. He tried to hold her hand, and she drew hers away. She said it was too damp.

He watched her anxiously, and so she watched him protestingly, and when they had worked up a fine, thick, hateful tension, he wanted to cough.

He felt that she was just waiting for him to do something objectionable like that, cough and whoop and spatter in a public place—and so he couldn’t do it, and so he wanted all the more to cough, until the entire subsolar world was one horror of suppressed coughing, and he let go in one gargantuan throaty bellow, and, beside him, she gave off electric sparks of rage. Then, in ostentatious indifference, he crossed his legs, and his garter came loose, and he had to make a public presentation of stooping down to fasten it.

He insisted on a sundae after the movie and naturally, being normally a tidy man, he now dropped chocolate sauce on his white shirt.

“Disgusting!” she muttered.

She sadistically scrubbed it into a worse mess with her handkerchief, and they drove back to the hotel in a great hot silence. So when he was brushing his teeth, he dropped a white spot of toothpaste on his slipper, and she saw it, oh, she saw it, and she said:

“Disgusting!”

She thought it over, with all of a good woman’s earnestness, and spoke as to a seven-year-old brat whom even his grandmothers had agreed to murder:

“Cass, can’t you ever pay the least bit of attention to your personal habits?”

“Whaaaat?”

“I know you’ve lived alone so much, but still you’re supposed to be an intelligent man, and why you don’t even notice it when you act like a pig—your sloppy table-manners and yanking your garter around right out in front of people—why do you deliberately go and pick out garters that are guaranteed to come loose? And dribbling spots on your vest and your dressing-gown, and as for your LAPELS—”

“I deny all of that.”

“Dribbling. Constantly.”

“I do not dribble! You found one spot on my lapel, a month ago . . . before we’d gone and got married. But if it were true, and I slopped around like a half-wit, I’d expect you to shut up about it. I’m neither a New England housewife nor a pansy. I want your love, but not because of my exterior decoration. If you’re going to go on watching me, expecting me to act like an ordinary vulgar Middlewestern male—well, that’s what I am. I haven’t one single extraordinary virtue except my devotion to you. If you want to take advantage of that, I’m helpless. But beloved, my beloved, don’t YOU lose something when you make me into a swine?”

She ran to him, and she was crying, lovely in repentance.

“I didn’t realize I was picking on you. I was just letting my big mouth run on, as Eino used to say. It didn’t really mean anything more than all the silly kidding that Lyra and Tracy and I used to do. I forgot you’re so touchy.”

“Am I very touchy?”

“Like a racehorse. But that’s why I love you. Oh, my dearest, I’ll never let you go into politics or be a judge or anything like that. Your hide is about as thick as tissue paper. Kiss me.” Her kiss was that of a naughty child distraught to find that she has hurt her friend. “I truly think you’re the greatest man living. That’s why I was cross with you about Senator Hudbury: that you didn’t realize how much bigger you are than him—than he?— whichever it is. You know, I’m not really ungrateful. I know I’m lucky to—”

“Sweet, don’t go on. You’re making me feel like a lug for even spitting back at you. . . . I do love you so!”

“Identical, pal.” But her effort to be funny was pathetic, and she looked so forlorn.

It was after half an hour of tenderness that Cass said, “I’m sure now we’ll never have another quarrel.”

“Never!”

“And so I’m going to risk my life and criticize you for over-dressing.”

“M?”

“At lunch at Bertie’s, didn’t you notice the rigid millionaire simplicity of that blasted countess? But you had on a boutonniere AND a necklace AND two bracelets AND a comic-dog breast-pin AND a rhinestone buckle on your hat. Too much.”

“Too Pioneer Falls, eh?”

“Still, why shouldn’t you be?”

“Because I am the wife of a judge that ought to be on the Supreme Court bench right now, and I mean it!”

She must have slipped down to the lobby while he was bathing, while he was feeling proud of himself for having asserted his power and ashamed of himself for having so priggishly bullied so defenseless a little criminal. For there she was, shyly holding out a small Modern Library edition of South Wind, and begging, “It’s a repentance present.”

He almost wept then, while Isis, on the bureau, stretched herself with ancient despair.

There could never be any more quarrels or jealousy. Never.

On the bathing-beach, when numerous men were attentive to the pleasant sight of her straight smooth legs, and got acquainted with her apropos of a dog, a daughter, a cigarette-light, or the quick sketches of the bathers that Jinny sometimes made in charcoal, then Cass was proud that he felt no jealousy.

—Might as well get used to it. When we get back, probably every friend I have—Roy, Bradd, Jay, Harley, Frank, Greg—the whole bunch of ’em will try to make her. Not a chance, gentlemen. There’s no malice, no treachery, no intrigue in my Jinny. Going to be none of this “modern, civilized, urbane” sleeping around and getting complicated in OUR house.

Their first Christmas dinner together was at Eisenherz’s villa. It was a Grand Republic dinner and full of the double joy of loving the home town and of being able to get away from it in winter. Webb and Louise Wargate were there, just come in, and Madge Dedrick. There was apprehensive talk about the war, and the Wargates expected to rush home early, but there were also hot rum punch and tangoing and holly and kisses as harmless as 1890—though not more so—and Bertie and Madge said that Jinny was going to be their dearest friend for life, starting about March 20th, on their annual bird-flight back to Grand Republic.

But the real Christmas was later that night, when Cass and Jinny stood on the balcony of their suite, looking at the tranquil glow of Lake Worth, and she sighed, “I’ll never forget today. Especially, I won’t forget our standing here, us two. And I’m glad we’re going back home—us two! I don’t really fall too much for this Palm Beach glamor. I know it’s just gambling with counterfeit money.”

“I’m glad. I was afraid maybe I’m too rustic for all the nobility.”

“No, you’re too independent. Cass, I’m very happy. I’ll always be very happy with you.”

They came into the station at Grand Republic in a snowstorm.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

GEORGE HAME & FRIENDS

The return of Judge Timberlane to his court room was marked by an impassive “Glad to see you back, Judge” from Humbert Bellile, the bailiff, a hand-shake from the clerk of court, and “Now we can get going—nice trip, Chief?” from George Hame, the court reporter.

They were quiet and competent men, though bored, and it appeared evident from seeing them run the court machinery that they had nothing so disturbing in their lives as wives to hate or trust, daughters to be worried about, ambitions to be defended; nothing more complex than the conduct of dull agricultural arson cases.

Hame and Bellile went, after court, to the Cockrobin Bar, and had comforting conversation with Ed Oleson, the barber, and Leo Jensing, the electrician.

“See your boss is back from his honeymoon, George,” said Oleson.

“Looks fit’s a fiddle. Incidentally, the best judge in the State. Born professional.”

“What kind of a girl he marry?”

“Cute little trick, bright ‘s a dollar. Hope she appreciates him.”

Jensing yawned, “Those rich guys that belong to the Federal Club certainly do marry the swellest dames. Well, they can have ’em. I’ll bet they’re all a bunch of headaches. My old woman and I—I always tell her she looks like a constipated chicken, and she says I look like a stubble field—she’s dumb and she was brought up a Seventh Day Adventist, but we get along like nobody’s business. I cuff the kids and send ’em off to bed and then I get a can of beer and we strip down to our undershirts and sit around and tell lies and yap about what rats our neighbors are and generally enjoy life. The Judge can keep his cutie, and that goes for all the fat boys in the Federal Club. Say, ever been in that club, George? What kind of a dump is it?”

Mr. Hame explained, “I often take papers to the Judge there. It’s a pretty swell joint, at that! All wood paneling and the bar’s like a chapel, stone arches and floor. But you know what you can do with the whole club! Lot of landlords telling each other Roosevelt is a Communist, like it was a piece they learned at school.”

Ed Oleson was eager. “You ask ME about the Federal Club! I go there all the time, to shave the upper-bracket crooks when they got too big a hang-over to walk. Oh, a lot of ’em are okay; Webb Wargate is a real constructive citizen, and Judge Blackstaff—he’s just as good a judge as your boss, George, and tips you four bits, like a gentleman. But Prutt, the banker, he never gives you a cent—explains they don’t tip, in a club. Hell, I ain’t a club servant; I got my own independent business and I don’t have to shave any cactus-faced old gentleman-virgin unless I feel like it.

“But the worst guy there is that Boone Havock. Say, why decent people ever let him in their houses is beyond me. I’ve been called in to shave that cut-throat when he was so drunk he couldn’t go home and had to take a room at the club, and he told and volunteered and told me that he’d spent the night with a tart in a shack down in the South End and then got her cockeyed and cheated her out of her five bucks, and he boasted about it.

“My son Tracy, that works for Wargate, has got more brains and financial savvy than the whole club put together. By the way, Tracy knows Judge Timberlane’s bride; says she’s a high-class girl. And talking of wives, I’m like Leo here: my old girl and I have a swell time, especially now the kids are grown up. We go out hunting and canoeing like a couple of Indians. That’s the kind of a wife I like.”

George Hame rose, jeering, “Glad to hear there’s so many square-shooting wives around this burg. I congratulate you boys.”

The bailiff, also rising: “Same here. Fellows that ‘re out from behind the matrimonial eight-ball like you two must have money to spare. We’ll allow you to pay for the drinks.”

Jensing crowed, “Just to prove it, I WILL buy ’em!”

“Any time you’re in for rape, Leo, just remind me that I used to know you, and I’ll get the Judge to let you off with life,” said Hame. “Good night.”

Bailiff Bellile, as he entered his brown Cape Cod cottage, waited for his wife to say, “Have you wiped your feet? I try so hard to keep things nice here, and then you come home drunk and get everything all dirty.”

She said it.

She waited for him to say, in echo of his days as a lumber-camp teamster, “I wish to God I WERE drunk, and maybe it wouldn’t make me so sick to look at you.”

He said it.

Ed Oleson went noisily into his upstairs half of a two-family house, and his aging wife chirped, “It’s the old master himself. Have a good time with the boys?”

“I’ll say! Wish you’d been along.”

“Whyntcha invite me?”

“Juvecome?”

“Try it and see! Bet I would. Smell something nice?”

“And how! What is it?”

“Real Hunky goulash.”

“Now you don’t tell me.” He kissed her.

“Nice time in the shop today?”

“Fellow here from Rochester, New York, he told me all about how we’ll lick the Japs with a secret weapon we got. Say, I’ll bet Tracy ‘ll be in the war, and be a major.”

“If his lungs are all healed up. Golly, Ed, aren’t you proud of that boy!”

“Say, don’t you quote me and don’t let the newspapers get hold of it, but I’m nuts about him. The damn little hick—think of him— headed for the top of the Wargate Corporation some day!”

“And let me tell you, Mr. Ed Oleson, they’ll be lucky to get him!”

“I’ll say. How about lassoing that goulash now?”

“I think you got something there, Mister. Let’s go!”

There was no ugly noise between George Hame and his wife, Ethel, when he came coldly into their freight-car of a house, but only an uglier silence. That was agreeable to him, because there was for him a poisonous boredom in what he considered her spiritless and hopeless fussing, her whimpering demands for money.

He looked at her over the Dumas he was always reading. She was hemming a pot-holder made of red calico.

“Much too bright for her,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing . . . You certainly will drive me nuts.”

“What say?”

“Nothing.”

Then another baby yelled. They had five of them, and all unwanted. But there was also their fifteen-year-old daughter, Betty, whom he loved.

He said placidly, “All I exist for is to supply you with brats and lactation.”

“And whose fault—”

“Yours. If you’d take a little care of yourself—As Montaigne observes, this place is always obscene with new dripping babies, and smells like wet death.”

She knew enough then not to speak. When he mentioned Montaigne— pronounced Montaigny—he was likely to hit her with his seal ring.

Betty came in, round and pert as a bouncing tennis ball.

“Hello, Daddy,” she said, as she raced for the stairs, and “Hello, sweetheart” he answered, looking up after her new nylon stockings and old shoes.

His wife was afraid not to speak now. “George! I will not have you looking at Betty that way!”

“So you will not have it! So what?”

He returned to Dumas.

Some day, he thought, Betty and he would run off together to France, to the shrine of Dumas. She looked much older than fifteen, didn’t she? He dreamed about this always, and always knew that he would never do it. He knew that he would hold to his wife. She irritated him, but he was lonely without her on the evenings when she was visiting her incessantly sick relatives and Betty was out with one of the neighborhood boys whom he hated. He was lonely not because he had no treasures in himself, for he could renew them out of Dumas or Scott or Washington Irving, nor because he could not take comfort in solitude, but because he was afraid that when Betty discovered how he felt toward her and vituperatively left him forever, then no one in the world but Ethel would stay by him, no one else would blame it on Betty.

He guessed that Judge Timberlane would kick him out, if the Judge discovered his thoughts about Betty, and he was sorry, because, though he considered the Judge a little too naive, he also believed him to be the Archangel Michael.

With the firmness of the will to death, he waited for Betty to come down and pass through the room again. The other children panted in and out, but their noise was so blurred that it was to him like an absolute silence.

“Don’t you want any supper?” grated his wife.

“What? I suppose so. I never thought about it . . . Oh, Betty, going out? Get home early now, sweetheart I’ll sit up for you.”

“Swell, Daddy,” she condescended.

Then he felt gay, and he looked amiably at his wife. When he saw her expression, he froze and returned to Dumas.