Chapter 30

There was as yet no wartime gasoline rationing in the Middle-west, and they had driven, for the beginning of their summer vacation, north to Ely and the deep woods of the Arrowhead canoe country, up to Grand Portage, which in the 1790’s was the castle of the French and British fur traders. You can still see the ghosts of the voyageurs, in capotes and sashes, toting their canoes at twilight.

They drove back along the vast bright palisades of the North Shore of Lake Superior to Grand Marais, and up the Gunflint Trail to a dark lake curtained with pines, where they paddled under a great sunset that made their voices cleave together in fear of loneliness, beneath that threatening majesty.

They sat now in their car on the Skyline Boulevard, looking far down on the city of Duluth and the blue-and-silver vastness of Lake Superior, that blazing shield of inland ocean. Across this narrowed end of the lake, the Wisconsin shore rose into hills, and on the Minnesota side, to the eastward, the cliffs behind the smooth uplands of the Hollister Hills were cut by ravines meant for a western Rip van Winkle. The air was thinner and more resolute than the earthy odor of their own inland cornfields and valley thickets.

Jinny mused, “It’s so exciting and lovely, Duluth, between hills and the sea. I’ve loved the whole trip—Grand Marais—the Riviera towns must lie against the hills like that. And you’ve been so much fun, such a whale of a paddler and fly-caster. I’m much obliged to you, sir.”

“Best time since our honeymoon, I think. Look at that ship down there, headed east.”

An ore boat, huge as a liner, was hull-down on the milk-white eastern horizon; it flickered in straying sun and was presently out of sight, all but its trail of smoke.

Cass mused, “Tomorrow it will be at the Soo. I always think there’s a kind of sadness in the passing of ships that we might have taken to ports with domes and towers and bazaars—and Asian birds. But if I were here alone in Duluth, I’d be imagining that the steamer was sailing off with YOU, at sunset, and I not on it.”

“Look! Here I am. I’m not on it!”

“I’m glad.”

Silver flaws shivered across the lake, and now another great red ore ship, westward-bound, was coming into sight, with its high pilot’s deck and its coal-filled belly for the furnaces of Minneapolis and the Dakotas. Their pensiveness was gone in more prosaic cheerfulness.

“What a lot of coal there must be in that hold for somebody to shovel,” considered Cass.

“Look, pie. Let’s move to Duluth. More fun than Grand Republic.”

“Nope. It’s too large. Over a hundred thousand people. That’s terrible—bad as Chicago or London, almost. Even Grand Republic is too big. I like a place where you can know people.”

“And I like a place where there are some people you can know!”

“Now, now, you know plenty in G.R., and you know doggone well you know you know plenty. Now don’t you!”

“Oh, yes, some nice ones. Rose and Francia and Lyra and Valerie, my lively niece, and Nelly Sarouk and the Fliegends and Bradd and Frank and Rev Gadd and Tracy and Chris and the Blackstaffs.” She meditated, and added musingly, “And Jay Laverick.”

“I could do without quite so much of Jay.”

“Oh, do be fair to him, Of course he’s something of a pest, but he’s such a queer, lonely specimen—he needs sympathy—and I’m sure he admires you much more than he does me.”

“He must admire me a lot then. Oh, let’s forget Jay.”

“Let’s. . . . Poor Jay.”

The ore boat, thrice whistling, demanded that the Aerial Bridge be lifted for its entrance to St. Louis Bay. And that night they heard, from their hotel in Duluth, the fog horn—sounding first like a moaning calf, then like giants moving their giant furniture.

Fog and snorting tug-boats, thought Cass, and great ships upon the waters! Some day Jinny and he would know them in Sydney Harbor and Portsmouth and Rotterdam.

They took, for the rest of the hot summer, a lakeside cottage on the north shore of Dead Squaw Lake. It was seven hundred and fifty feet from the cottage shared by those professional bachelors, Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick.

This tiny summer colony on Dead Squaw derisively called itself Mushrat City. There were a dozen yellow or white shacks, running mostly to porches, bath-houses, boat-houses, and wooden-floored tents in which Junior and Sister slept.

Only one of them had a bar, and this was the Laverick–Criley establishment. Inside, there were four cots, and a room containing a divan-bed, ornamented with a silken coverlet and not visibly used.

In the colony were the Pennlosses, the Drovers, the Brightwings, the Beecher Filligans, Vincent Osprey, that forward-looking young lawyer and his backward-looking wife Cerise, and Scott and Juliet Zago, and into it dipped scores of visitors from the nearby Yacht Club.

The true American is active even in his inactivities. The Mushrat City colonists did not lie indolent watching the slow tides of the water rise and merge with slow-revolving sky till heaven and earth were all one sun-hued dream. No, they swam, they dove, they sailed, they fished for bass, they drove into town for the movies, they played bridge, they cooked steak and fish at outdoor grills, they danced to the radio, they drank considerably and made love cautiously.

Grand Republic was not a singularly philanderous community, but at Mushrat City the more earnest strayers had classic surroundings: deep pine woods, skiffs filled with cushions, and long plank piers on which lounged the nymphs and fauns of Thessaly, with a few satyrs. Yet among them all, only Jay Laverick was ever assailed as an amorist, and his friend Bradd Criley defended him by insisting that Jay merely flirted a little to cover up his one passionate ideal, liquor.

At the neighboring Yacht Club, Dr. Roy Drover said to Bradd, fairly publicly, “So Jay isn’t a chaser, eh? I don’t suppose you are, either!”

“I certainly am not.”

“What about Gillian Brown and Sabine the Gold-digger?”

“Well, what about them?”

“Weren’t they seen leaving you two fellows’ shack at dawn on Wednesday?”

“Not by me they weren’t. Did you see them?”

“Not personally.”

“Then shut up about it, Roy. I can tell you confidentially, it’s a lie!”

“Okay by me, Bradd. It’s no skin off my neck, anyway.”

The Council of Elders, in the club bar, agreed that Dr. Drover had been neatly answered. They went so far as to declare that, whatever Jay did, Bradd was completely chaste: that is, naturally, he had a few lady friends in St. Paul or Chicago, but he was strictly—and in the long run profitably—pure and impersonal with his women clients, his stenographers, and his friends’ wives and daughters.

All day Mushrat City brawled with children dashing into the lake. Most of the men were in town, in their offices, except on Saturday and Sunday, and now, in wartime, many of the women joined them. Jinny and Rose Pennloss drove in every Wednesday and Friday, to serve as waitresses in the soldiers’ canteen or to take coffee and sandwiches to the troop-trains. Cass, with his court closed, went in thrice a week and served on the ration board and in bond drives. All of Mushrat City was busy, and the only menace to its morals was Jay Laverick.

It was unfortunate, thought Cass, that it was Jay whom Jinny found most entertaining.

But so aboveboard was her liking for Jay, for his dancing, his air of sardonic liveliness, and so frankly did she talk about him, that Cass could see it would be very wrong to suspect her. They could scarce avoid meeting, with the swimming, tennis, canoeing. Jinny was a clean diver, and all afternoon at the Yacht Club, her hands flashed like nimble daggers as she dealt at bridge, but in all of these diversions Jay was the champion, when he was partly sober. Cass assured himself that all this was desirable, and good fun for Jinny.

But when Pasadena Filligan, Mrs. Beecher Filligan, who herself liked Jay, gave to his favorite morning drink, gin and bitters, the nickname of Jin and Jay, and it became current, then Cass was vexed.

It was obvious that the one safe path for Jinny between empty boredom and emptier philandering was to have children. “Let’s drop all precautions now and start the family,” he blurted.

“Yes, let’s,” she said.

That was all.

They were having a decorous Sabbath-afternoon walk, Cass and Roy Drover ambling on ahead of Jinny and Jay. The Cass who three months ago would have looked back only to gladden his eye with the vision of his sweet fair one could not keep from turning his head for less tender spying.

He saw Jinny and Jay arm in arm. He saw Jay tuck her hand between his arm and his side. He saw Jinny snatch it away, but not too swiftly, after what seemed to be a laughing debate.

So Cass, the Better Sort of American Husband, unhearing Roy’s important remarks on wild rice as duck-feed, wanted to go back and beg Jay please not to seduce his wife—please not—it would be so much friendlier all round if Jay didn’t—and would Jinny please forgive him for mentioning it?

He realized that Jay saw his spying. Deserting the girl, Jay galloped up and cried unctuously, “Boys, did you ever have a wild cat bawl you out? That’s what I’ve been getting. Jinny has been giving me hell for trying to make Pasadena Filligan. Depict that, will you? And me never so much as wondering whether Pas would or wouldn’t. All I know is, she’s a good tennis partner. I should chase her, or any other woman in G.R., when I already got a girl in Fergus. You know I have a branch office there. Oh, damn all women, even your brainy wife, Cass. Say, uh, Roy, is the health commissioner going to get after the sewers down by my mill?”

But Jinny was walking airily, heel and toe, with a small smug smile as the jaunty banner of her thoughts. She looked so gay! Cass ached with the sense of all the monsters that might be coiling around her recklessness.

—I’d hate to have her get involved, and go the smeary way of all loose women. For my own honor, if there is such a thing, but more for HER honor and contentment. It would kill me to see that secure smiling of hers turn diffident and scared and appealing. Dear Jinny, don’t be a fool. And that’s the one thing I can’t ask you not to be.

So these provincial and middle-class and uncomplex Sunday-afternoon strollers, a rural magistrate and his bourgeois friends and his little country wife, obviously ungifted for the passions and spiritual tortures of Bohemia or Mayfair or the boulevards, straggled through the humble, sun-quivering balsam aisles, and up to the Timberlane summer-cottage on the weedy lake-shore.

The cottage, of pine clapboards apparently once painted green, was airy as a birdcage. The roof sloped out over the screened porch, which made up half the house and served as lounge, dining-room, observation-post for recording the doings of the Filligans and the Ospreys, on either side, and as Cass’s bedroom, with a frame and mattress swinging from four steel chains. Inside the house were only a squat living-room, with a preposterous granite fireplace, Jinny’s narrow bedroom, the kitchen, with a kerosene stove, and a toilet with a homemade shower-bath. Mrs. Higbee and Cleo had a one-room tarpaper shack to themselves, behind the main house. Cleo had become a sinister young huntress, a chipmunk-stalker and a dabbler after fish.

The whole establishment was more camp than residence, and it caught the scent of pines, the breezes that were always fleeing in pretended panic from the lively colored, fresh-smelling lake.

Ah let us to the country hie, and seek an humble home, we little care for marble halls and the woes of Tyre and Rome. Here peacefulness and fruitfulness and family concord glow, and hearts of happy harvesters with simple joys o’erflow. Ah, well we wot, we city slaves, we pay a bitter scot for our tempestuous tragedies: thank God, THEY know them not! Ibid.

When they came up to the cottage, Cass looked beseechingly at Jay, hoping that he would have the sense to go home. This was no Fred Nimbus whom he could bully. Jay had enough skill in his trade of village gallant to be able to answer, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do I understand you to mean that your wife, whom I had supposed you to respect and honor as I do, is an unchaste woman, or such a fool that any passer-by can mislead her?”

Oh, yes, he could kill Laverick, but he could never shame him, never frighten him.

“How about a little bridge, the four of us?” Jay said sunnily.

“Not for me. I don’t feel like it. I just want to sit and chew the rag with Roy,” said Cass.

“Fine. Jinny, here’s your chance to teach me some chess. You must have learned enough from ole Cass by now to be fairly good. We’ll go up on the porch, like little mice, and not disturb the Big Boys.”

“Wonderful!” chirruped Jinny.

Cass and Roy sat sourly out under the trees, on a sawbuck and a wheelbarrow.

Roy grumbled, “It’s none of my business, but don’t you know that Jay isn’t the kind of buzzsaw for little ladies to monkey with?”

“Jay has a good line; he amuses her. But he’s perfectly harmless.”

“Oh, yeah? Better make sure he doesn’t amuse her too much. Now don’t get sore. I’m not going to butt in any farther. But just ask Pas Filligan—or better yet, ask her husband—just how harmless Jay is. Well, here’s where I go over and turn in and get a nap. So long. . . . Bye, Jinny! . . . She never heard me.”

Cass sat alone on the sawbuck, a seat too narrow for comfort but surrounded by spruce chips and sawdust with a friendly smell. He wanted some such small homeliness, for he was picturing a menacing procession.

—Tracy Olesen, Eino Roskinen, Abbott Hubbs, Bertie Eisenherz, Fred Nimbus, Jay Laverick. None of them dangerous, but I wish she weren’t quite so enthusiastic about the virtues of quite so many nonentities.

When Jay was gone, Cass and Jinny swam out to the farther float. He had a crawl-stroke, steady and uninspired as the pounding of a freight-steamer, untiring and faster than it looked. She flirted with the water like a sail boat. They sat then on the narrow sand-beach, baking. She was tanned a soft brown; he, in his trunks, chest hard and arching, was of a coppery red-Indian hue. Relaxed thus, it was easier for him to blurt it all out:

“Sweet, I’m not jealous of Jay, but he’s around here too much. A bold desperado, that fellow. He always keeps it up till somebody slaps him down. Won’t you do it for me?”

“Oh, good Heavens, just because I enjoy playing tennis with him, and he talks amusingly—”

“Quit that!”

“WHAT?”

“I know all his virtues better than you do. He’s been conspicuously displaying them for a long time now. But you know and I know that he’s on the make, and what’s worse, he knows perfectly well that we know it, and if we allow him around here at all, we practically confirm his ethics. I wish you’d tell him yourself to quit acting the up-creek Casanova.”

“Why, dearest, of course I will, if you want me to, though I honestly don’t think he has any yen for me whatever. He’s far too much interested in Pas Filligan.” Her eyes were suddenly fixed and angry. “Blast her!”

“Why, Jinny, you aren’t THAT much taken with him? You aren’t jealous of Pas?”

“What? How? Of Pas? Heavens, no! I just meant I was irritated by the whole gang of them—the Filligans and Jay and the whole bunch. Aah! They’re so sloppy. You’re right. You’re single-minded and good.”

That night he lay relaxed and secure, listening to the wind in the pines, far in the north beside the lonely lake.

She chastened the petitionary Mr. Laverick simply and with dreadful effectiveness. At a Yacht Club dance; the next Saturday, when Jay was being especially attentive, she yelled publicly, “Why, Mr. La-ver-ick, are you trying to flirt with me? Back to your Irish bogs, ye little black divvle.”

She knew that the one thing about which Jay was sensitive was the extreme boggishness of his swarthy paternal grandfather, who had been born between nothing and an east wind. When he had migrated to America, he had worked on a railroad section-gang, and had died in a kennel called The Pipes of Erin, which was a Swedish-owned German saloon and Chinese chop-suey joint on Washington Avenue, in Minneapolis.

Jay left her flat, and went to the bar. The good Judge was surprised to find how pleased he was by her rudeness.

He spoke to Bradd Criley.

“I wish you’d have a talk with your friend Jay. He buzzes around Jinny entirely too much.”

“I certainly will. I’m fond of Jay, and he isn’t as bad as he acts but he is a crazy fool. I won’t tell him you spoke to me, Cass. I’ll just say I admire Jinny, and will he lay off, or else.”

“Thank you, Bradd.”

“And of course it’s true. I’ve always loved Jinny like an uncle, and I want to protect her almost as much as you do.”

“I’m sure of it, and I’m mighty grateful.”

So the truce of God was proclaimed, and Cass and Jinny were trusting lovers again, sitting in the northern twilight, with Cleo slipping ghost-like among the trees.

They settled to village peace by the lake, content with humbler establishments than the summer estates of the Wargates or Bertie Eisenherz, who had a small lake of his own. With Bertie, Jinny had learned what trans-Atlantic passengers learn: that you never see vacation-time intimates except on the street.

When she gave up the ways of dalliance, she went out for swimming so powerfully that she became a threat to the lady Olympic champions—for two weeks.

At all sports she was more deft and quick-learning and natural than Cass. She dived, played tennis and golf, rode, paddled, with joy and style and innate talent, and with innate sloppiness Cass was awkward at learning, and he gave no signs of particularly enjoying these games, but he mastered them better than Jinny, and he wanted to keep on picking away at them long after she was bored.

But all such competition vanished in the problems of comparative wealth. Cass had become rich—for Cass.