Chapter 29

He was not unduly intrusive on the other rehearsals, but merely looked on a moment when he called to drive her home. He was pleased to see how patiently Jinny was working; her part letter-perfect after two weeks, taking direction, merely arguing a little with Rice Helix when he insisted that a Perfect Lady expressed her emotions by showing all her teeth and wriggling her fingers as though a bug was crawling over them. He was even more pleased that she was seeing new friends here: Letty Vogel—who, as she could not play the lead, earnestly built the scenery, Bernice Claywheel, wife of the Superintendent of Schools, Dick and Francia Wolke, the young rabbi, Ned Sarouk, and his wife Nelly, and Jay Laverick, the flour-miller, the only member of the Federal Club besides Frank Brightwing who recognized the Masquers.

Cass was puzzled by Fred Nimbus’s intentions. Now, whenever it was Fred’s appalling duty to embrace Jinny, he did so lightly, with tapping fingers. But a sour thought occurred to Cass: that Fred might be taking advantage of that most sound and ancient technique of the child—knowing that the safest time to steal the jam is when the family is ashamed of itself for having yelled at it for having stolen the jam. It had never quite come to Judge Timberlane that there are men outside jail who make it a careful and well-funded business to seduce all the pretty women in sight, and that against their expert business-methods, an innocent householder is helpless.

“Oh, quit being so ingeniously jealous and let the girl have a good time,” the ardent husband rebuked himself.

He noticed then that it was not the pulpy Nimbus but the gallant Mr. Jay Laverick with whom Jinny laughed in corners and, between scenes, danced the rhumba.

Jay Laverick was the town drunk, the town clown, the town tragedy. He was a widower of forty, and he had inherited the Laverick Flour Mills. He was always polite when he was drunk, but unfortunately he was almost always drunk when he was polite. No dance at the Heather Country Club was canonical without the presence of Jay Laverick, emitting the rebel yell and saying to some aged (and delighted) matron, “Madame, does my reason totter on her throne, or are you actually Queen Elizabeth the First?” When people said, as people immensely did say, “Poor Jay is drinking himself to death,” it was not irritably but with affection.

In person he was not the round and beloved comic Irishman but the sallow and villainous baronet, with a thin dark face and a long black mustache. It was to be credited to his inherited Irish constitution that, against the normal rule, excess of alcohol had not impaired his powers of love-making.

He was the best flour-salesman north of Minneapolis, and usually sober in the office.

Not till the rehearsals had Jay and Jinny met, except in crowds. She liked his bitter capering, his tragic flourishes, his lightly touching hands, professional touch of the surgeon, the pianist, the healing saint, or the satyr.

Cass was uncomfortable again—and tired of it.

He told himself: here is this poor girl, business-like in sweater and slacks, sexless as a nurse, working hard to produce something beautiful in a blacked-out world. No gauds and gimcracks; just a sweater and gray manly trousers. But—Did Jinny know how fetching, how conspicuously womanly, she was in a tight sweater?

—Of course she knows it! All women know things like that. Their capital is modesty, but how they do squander it.

—Of course she never even thinks of such a thing, you Pharisee. You love her, don’t you? Well, then! How can you insult her with such suspicions?

—Oh, nuts! Whoever said there wasn’t a lot of wanton in every good woman?

—Well, I don’t like your using the word “wanton” and thinking evil of—

—Look here! The monarch who sniffed “Honi soit qui mal y pense” was not of a notably moral character. There’s nothing shameful about suspecting that a girl is not displeased when she knows that she’s stirring up a few normal biological reactions by all her beauties lily-white. You wouldn’t want her to be unworldly to a point of imbecility, would you?

—Sure! I wouldn’t mind a bit! Friend, my worship of her IS unworldly, it has a little of the divine; to me, she is all womanhood, out of every time and place.

—Yes, yes. As you say. But I do wish she wouldn’t so perpetually get herself ambushed by Nimbus and Jay. Why can’t she talk to a really nice fellow, like Frank Brightwing?

Though Cass saw less of Frank Brightwing than of Roy Drover or Bradd Criley, there was no one in Grand Republic whom he more warmly liked. At thirty-eight, Frank was what is known as a successful real-estate man; he dealt not in harp-playing and the design of angels’ pinions, as was his nature and as his name quaintly hinted, but in Lot 13, Block 7; in 2-c garg., r.w., h & c; in abutments and amortizations and easements. He had a plush wife and three medium-grade children, but his excitement was in the Masquers, and if a play ran for two weeks, then for twelve nights he went on believing that the hero was as courageous and the heroine as voluptuous and the comic maid as funny as they said they were.

Being the worst of actors, as is likely with such a worshiper of acting, Frank had to be ticket-seller, stage-carpenter, and assistant electrician, and he was content with life when they let him hold the book at rehearsals.

Being, remarkably, also the worst of critics, he believed and he told Cass that they were lucky to have Jinny playing Mrs. Kenyon instead of Letty Vogel.

“But I thought Mrs. Vogel showed a lot of talent.”

“Oh, no, Cass. You laymen don’t understand these technical problems. Letty is what we in the theatrical world call ‘fuzzy,’ while Jinny is sure of herself—a real type. Oh, she’s out of this world, Cass.”

Over morning coffee, Cass said cheerfully, “Well, Jinny, I guess our friend Nimbus has laid off you.”

“Oh, absolutely. Sweet Freddy, he’s such an obvious lug that he never gets far.”

“You kind of liked him.”

“Sure I did. I like all rats. They usually know how to kid like nobody’s business, and they have a line. It’s their job.”

In English, she meant, “Certainly. I like all scoundrels. They are full of amiable banter.” Her normal use of the swing-age argot had been increased by association with the violently artistic Masquers, but Judge Timberlane understood much of her dialect, and love enlightened where understanding staggered, and increasingly he used the dialect himself.

“Anyway, I wouldn’t ever be half so jealous of Nimbus as of Jay Laverick. I imagine you women find him a dashingly tragic figure.”

“I’ll say! And how! And has he fallen for me!”

“Don’t take it too seriously. Jay is a decent fellow with men, but his record of falling for every female from six to ninety-six is rather extensive.”

“Now don’t go and tell me you’re going to be really jealous even of your old friend Jay!”

“How could I be? Ho, ho!”

“Sweetie pie, that’s the falsest-sounding stage-laugh I ever heard. Now quit it!”

—I told you so! What did you ever bring it up for? You knew just how far you’d get, didn’t you?

—I couldn’t help it.

Rice and Patty Helix knew their strange art of coaxing people to give up being themselves and become someone else, not so pleasant. The play, when it was presented at the high-school auditorium, actually was a play and not an amateur reading. Cass found himself for moments believing that Jinny was this flashing wife of an acrobatic advertising man and not his own simple girl.

At the opening-night party afterward, at Della Lent’s, Cass noted the following expert dramatic criticisms:

Bradd Criley, lawyer: “Honest, boy, she was wonderful. Even I didn’t know there was so much fire in her.”

Frank Brightwing, real estate & loans: “She was ten times better than Gertrude Lawrence in the role. I never saw Miss Lawrence in it, but I know.”

Mrs. Gerald Lent, husband-supporter: “She wasn’t bad at all, Cass. But was that Nimbus lousy! AND Jay!”

Mrs. John William Prutt, spiritual, social and domestic adviser in banking: “Mr. Prutt and I thought she was very fine, Judge. I do hope her playacting and the practising don’t interfere with her war-work and the home.”

Roy Drover, physician & surgeon: “It wasn’t a bad show, and I thought Jinny was as good as any of ’em.”

Norton Trock, banker: “Why, Cass, she was simply too, too divine. She was all right.”

Fred Nimbus, radio artist: “Honestly, Judge, I never could of put it over like I did if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Timberlane’s loyal support.”

Jay Laverick kept sober through the rehearsals, the six performances of the play, and Della’s first-night party. He did not break down and become natural man till the party at the end of the run, a gaudy one at Madge Dedrick’s. Champagne. Though not imported. But that night he whooped and held Jinny’s hands and fulsomely kissed her.

Cass was near enough to hear her say “You quit that!” in a manner so vicious that Jay released her. She walked over to Cass and groaned, “Sweet darling, if you ever catch me seeming to encourage any man again, you beat me.”

“I don’t think I’ll need to.”

She was of a forgiving nature, for before the party was over, she was dancing with Jay, and painlessly.

Bradd Criley muttered to Cass, “For a nice fella, Jay can be such a jackass. It takes Jinny to handle him. What a girl!”

When Cass and Jinny came home at three, she kissed him boldly. He was glad that, no matter how other men might flatter her, it was to him that she turned for true affection.

At dawn, he heard Cleo crying. When he left the sleeping Jinny and went down to the little cat, she shivered and nestled against him and seemed afraid.

The Banner’s strictly favorable review of Skylark, written by Pandora Avondene, admitted that each actor was either Compelling, Professional, Brilliant, or at least Satisfying. A second account in the paper on Sunday reviewed the play as a Social Event and, whether by accident or through the malice of Abbott Hubbs, wound up with a gasping announcement.

It revealed that Mr. Fred Nimbus, who had shown such Sterling Qualities in Skylark, and who had been writing and playing in a series of radio stories about the Marines, over Station KICH, which had been so powerful that he was credited with having gained many recruits, now felt that he did not desire to wait and be drafted, and he was going to enlist in the Marines himself.

The town cheered. But Mr. Fred Nimbus did not cheer. This was all news to him.

He called up Cass, along with other local rulers, and cried that he was being railroaded into the service; that Cass must do something about it; that while he was zealous to go as soon as his number came up, he had first to settle his affairs. He did not exactly have a mother to support, but he did have a maiden aunt.

“They say that if I don’t go in voluntarily, the Marines will force me to. That’s outrageous and undemocratic!” whimpered Fred.

“Nonsense. Who says they will?” growled Cass.

“Oh, everybody does.”

In a way, everybody did. There was very little masculine tenderness in town for Mr. Nimbus. But a number of maidens who had thrilled to Fred’s manly crooning of his own poetic prose came to serenade him at his boarding-house. There was no balcony for Fred to come out on, like Juliet or a young Mussolini, but he mounted a folding stepladder-chair on the front stoop, and addressed them:

“Dear girls, you move me more than I can attempt to say. It is to defend the virtue and happiness of girls like you that I want to enlist, and I have arranged to do so tomorrow morning, Room 307, the County Court House, and any of you who care to come, be sure and be there before ten. I don’t know why you should care for my poor autograph, but if you’ll bring your little books, I’ll be glad to do what I can. I am so happy that at last I have been able to arrange my affairs, and I can now rush where the fighting is thickest.”

Next morning one hundred and sixteen females, mostly under nineteen, filled the corridor and cheered and wept when Fred appeared at the door of Room 307, looking scared, with a marine sergeant, looking derisive.

He later denied the sergeant’s canard that he had applied for office work at Marine Headquarters.

Jinny came giggling in to inform Cass that Fred had telephoned wanting to say good-bye to her privately.

“I’m going to stay right with you all the time he’s here! I won’t have him bothering you!”

“Don’t worry, darling. He’s not coming. I told him to go jump in the lake,” said Jinny, in a refined manner.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

BENJAMIN & PETAL HEARTH

As a member of that earnest sect, the Cross and Crown Covenanters, Benjamin Hearth had read numerous tracts about wives with quarter-loaves and half-candles and starving children who waited shivering at home for drunken husbands, usually coachmen; helpful tracts written in England in 1880 and still circulated in forward-looking America in the 1940’s. Benjamin loved to read and to distribute such tracts, and it never occurred to him that in these liberal days, the sexes of the drunks could be switched.

He was the junior partner in Hearth & Hearth, the Friendly Morticians, once doing the finest and most sympathetic undertaking-business in Grand Republic but of late eclipsed by that less artistic outfit, the Larson Funeral Home and Byzantine Interdenominational Chapel with the Revolving Cross. He was fat, and fond of beer and sauerkraut, which afterward he repented, in fits of indigestion and remembered piety.

His wife, Petal, was a slight, spectacled, prim-looking woman. She was also a dipsomaniac, a drunk and a dirty drunk, but to the end Benjamin never acknowledged this.

He loved her and she him. Each orgy he accepted as something that had never occurred before and certainly never could occur again, and, after hearing her regrets and wails and audible hair-tearing, he felt himself a sneak to have believed that it had really occurred this time. Probably her stomach. Or her laudable grief over the sickness of the second child of Cousin Mary, who lived in Indiana.

Benjamin was, in a genteel and Covenanter way, convivial; he loved society dinners at six o’clock, with pickled peaches, and grace said, and a game of mahjong afterwards—but never the immoral cards, which lead to atheism and vice. When Petal married him—she had been substitute telephone girl for the legal firm of Beehouse, Criley and Anderson, and later a clerk in the linen department of Tarr’s Emporium—she had stepped into a degree of social prestige beyond her experience.

She had always liked hot gin better than Benjamin could have guessed, but economy and the necessity of working all day had prevented her specializing in it. All of Benjamin’s snobbish friends—most of them had detached houses, and one was a professional man, Orlo Vay the optician—said that Petal was quite the lady, with an inspiration in trimming hats.

They did not know her peculiar gift and betrayal: when she was drunk, she could still sound sober on the telephone.

Not much was suspected till, a couple of years after her marriage, within one fortnight she had begged off from three different suppers to which Benjamin and she had been invited, and one that they were giving, always on the grounds that “Some close relatives of mine have just arrived unexpectedly from Indiana, this afternoon.”

Her circle felt that that was too many Indiana relatives too unexpectedly. George Hame, the court attache, an enterprising and agnostic fellow, went creeping up to the Hearth nest after one of these disconcerting refusals and, peeping under a curtain, saw Petal not entertaining anybody at all, from Indiana or elsewhere, but flopped on a couch, apparently snoring, while Benjamin sat by in distress, smoothing his chin.

George reported that to him it looked as though she had “passed out cold.”

Benjamin knew that she had had a drink, “for a bad cold or maybe it’s intestinal flu,” but in a blindness of prospering love he had been fooled by the sobriety with which she had told him that she had not felt well enough to go out, and had invented the Indiana kin to save people’s feelings.

He was baffled by the famine of social invitations which now set in.

Petal had enough of the sot’s admirable caution to arrange her best escapes at times when Benjamin was off on funeral duty. But with the splendid new friends whom she met in bar-rooms, now that she had the leisure and the funds, she became less cautious and more thirsty. Once, when she had got home safely from a cocktail-joint in time to get Benjamin’s supper and found a note saying that he would be on duty out on a farm all evening, she felt unusually free and happy. She laughed and put on a negligee. She took out her private gin bottle, finished the gin, hid the bottle again, felt dizzy, again found the bottle, and was amazed that it was empty.

In fluttering negligee, she ran out of the house, across the street through traffic, past two red lights, and into a liquor store.

On her way home, with bottle, a policeman stopped her. He hinted that he thought she might have escaped from an asylum, and such was the shock to her that she screamed and sat on the curb, weeping. A young man who had been following her came up to say suavely, “It’s my sister, Officer. She’s had a kind of delirious fever. I’ll get her home.”

The crowd laughed at the spectacle of the drunken woman being half carried by the young man, while she wept all over him in gratitude. He did get her into her house, into bed. What could she do then in gratitude but throw her arms about him and kiss him?

The patient Benjamin, at his labors in a windy farm-house, knew nothing of this, ever.

His first enlightenment was later, when he came home from what he felt to have been a “real beautiful funeral,” and found water soaking through the dining-room ceiling. Above, in the bathtub, naked and entirely drunk, singing “The Red Light Rag,” was his Petal.

The severest thing he said to her afterward was “Dearie, promise me you won’t let anybody tempt you to take a drink again. You’re such an unsuspicious little silly, sweetheart, that you don’t realize what this horrid liquor can do. Promise Benny you’ll never touch it again, dearie.”

“Oh, I promise, I promise—oh, God, my head!” sobbed the damp Petal.

In sobriety, Petal was a woman most ladylike in her syntax, one who knew that you must never call perspiration sweat and that to refer to a pregnancy by any verbal gesture less refined than “the coming happy event” was a coarse and whorish thing, not to be permitted in Evangelical circles. Yet a week after the bathtub, when George Hame had with some curiosity invited them in for chicken a la king, she slipped out to the garage with George, had five amazingly quick drinks, and went back to turn upon Benjamin and pronounce in a cool, amiable, very sober and interested voice, “Jesus, what a fat —— you are. The trouble with you is, your mother took in washing, and the way the cop on the beat used to pay her for it was—So don’t ever try and pull any of your Sunday-school stuff on me.”

Benjamin was very sorry when she spoke thus. He explained to everybody that she didn’t mean it at all. She was just nervous.

He knew now. Yet such was his love for this woman, who was so refined and superior, that he would not permit himself to know what he knew.

Once it was clear that he understood, she became more careless, and he tended her like a nurse in a private mad house. He cleaned the vomit from her shoes, he changed the sheets when she had fouled their bed, and when she struck him, though he was a massive man, he wailed, “Oh, don’t do that, dearie! I didn’t mean to make you cross.”

She had developed this new and fascinating trait of hitting people, hitting them quietly and very painfully. She did it once at their pastor’s house, and that ended any possible resurrection of the Hearths’ social career.

She blamed Benjamin; she said that people could not endure his vulgar belching. On that theme she shouted for an hour. When he tried to stop her, she shut herself in the locked guest-room, where she had stored half a case of gin. Sometimes she screamed at him through the door, sometimes out of the window at awed neighborhood children.

Benjamin took to staying away from the business, to guard her. They became hermits, the lonelier in sitting together spying on each other. He knew that she was thinking how she could kill him.

His older brother, Robert, head of the firm, told him that he would have to have Petal locked up in an institution, or quit the business.

He quit.

He went to work in the Wargate plant, on war materials, satisfied with the job of running a band-saw all day, except when he thought of Petal’s misfortunes. People did not understand her.

For two days, at home, she could get no liquor at all, because he had given her no money and the stores did not trust her. Then she found an old bachelor who was amenable.

When she set fire to their house, Benjamin did have to send her to a private sanitarium. He lives now in a hall-room and cooks his own meals on a kerosene stove, because it takes most of what he earns to keep her in the sanitarium. In his room there is but one ornament: the bridal picture of Petal, in white satin, unstained and lovely. Benjamin sits and looks at the picture or at a newspaper all evening.

The landlady lends him the newspaper. He feels that he cannot afford to buy one.

He says that when his dear wife recovers from her mental shock, which she sustained upon the death of a beloved relative, they are going out into the country to rent a farm and grow flowers. Benjamin particularly loves all flowers that look like white satin, lovely and unstained.