Chapter 34

The Timberlanes had been married for a year now, and they were fondly accustomed to the new house, to the gray furniture and mulberry carpets and curtains, the yellow leather pouf, the fireplace set flush in mirrors, in the pert living-room, as arranged by Jinny. Isis was presumably happy on a teakwood pedestal on a small glass shelf. The pictures were mostly nameless flower pieces; there were tall portfolios of Impressionist painters; and on a small flat desk were Jinny’s precious tooled-leather stamp-box and a useless yellow quill pen. It was all very gay and comfortable and contemporary, even if it was a little like a model room in an expensive furniture store.

Cass thought highly of the oil furnace and the electric washing-machine, though he was not altogether contented in his new study. It was a cigar-box of a room, handsomely paneled, with a small fireplace reluctantly let into the pine walls, but there was room for only a quarter of his books, and the rest were lost in dark hallway-bookcases and the pinched attic.

“Oh, well, most of ’em I only look at once in a while, anyway,” he sighed, as he lugged them to the attic. Strange that so few books can require so many staggering struggles up the ill-lighted stairs.

Jinny was joyfully busy. Now that she could organize her own house, and Mrs. Higbee could no longer hide spices and Canadian bacon and corn-flour from her in cavernous unknown cupboards, she was an exemplary housewife, busy with errands to the new Byzantine meat-market and the new Cordovan grocery-store, which made up the business-center of the Country Club District. She went on entertaining soldiers at the canteen, and once she stood on the running-board of a car on Chippewa Avenue and made a speech for the sale of war bonds.

“No,” said Cass, afterward, “no, you were a very good speaker. I wish most lawyers would sum up as clearly as you did. Sweetheart, you’re beating me at oratory as you do at everything else. Except maybe chess.”

She was unquestionably beating him at one thing. She was pregnant.

He was delighted.

It was she who insisted that they must be economical, after the New York journey and buying the new house, now that Owen or Emily was coming.

She had picked out this choice of names for the baby, without discussion. She explained it to Cass:

“I’m glad about the infant. I feel like looking up at you as languishingly as any Dickens heroine. This is real creation. I guess a baby is about the most modern and revolutionary thing a girl can do. I intend to be a wonderful mother. I know that if it’s a boy, he’ll be as sturdy and honest as you are, as your father must have been, so I want him to be ‘Owen,’ after your father. And if it’s a girl—I had an Aunt Emily—so gentle, but awful smart.

“I did think, ‘way back six months ago, when I was young, that I’d like to have a daughter named ‘Lark.’ I knew it was kind of a fancy name, but I want her to be what I always wanted to be and never could—swift and clean and belonging to the upper air, not touched with earth. Wait, wait now! Don’t tell me a lark has to come down and sleep on the earth after it’s got done soloing. I guess an expectant mother has a right to her own metaphor hasn’t she?

“But then I got to thinking about what her classmates would do to the kid, with a name like that, so I said to her, ‘All right, you’re going to be a sweet, simple Emily, and LIKE it!’

“Cass, I am going to adore that baby!”

Cass said to Roy Drover, “She’s so sort of serene and adjusted now.”

Roy Drover said to Cass, “You mean she’s got some of the damn nonsense knocked out of her by morning sickness.”

Bradd Criley said to Cass, in Jinny’s active presence, “Our girl is more lovely than ever now. How I envy you two!”

Chris Grau said to Jinny, with Cass philanthropically listening, “How I envy you, dear! Did you ever know that once I thought I was a little in love with your dear husband, myself? Oh, Jinny, you must give him a lovely baby.”

Mrs. John William Prutt said to Mr. John William Prutt who, in a gray flannel union-suit, was sitting on the floor, cutting his long pale toenails, “It is perhaps my imagination, but I cannot help feeling that it may have been our influence as their former neighbors that has changed Mrs. Timberlane from a really quite scatterbrained and, I might almost venture to suggest, flirtatious young woman into an apparently responsible young Grand Republic matron.”

Boone Havock, the distinguished ex-saloon-bouncer, said to Judge Blackstaff, at the Federal Club, “Cass must of gone plumb crazy. Probably from working too hard at loving that hot little wife of his. Not that it’s her fault, poor kid. I thought at first that she was from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, but she seems to have settled down to being a nice little lady and a good war worker. But Cass—why, I hear where, right in this classy new house of his, he entertained this flannel-mouthed Vogel, the county agricultural agent, that’s a Farmer–Laborite and practically an under-cover gumshoer for the co-operatives that want to ruin every decent business that we’ve given our lives to building up.”

“Oh, no, no, Boone,” insisted Judge Blackstaff. “I find Judge Timberlane a sound and loyal colleague. I think it’s just that his wife—after all, the is young, and she probably enjoys experimentation and wants to meet all these cranks and freaks and reds and fanatics, just to see what they’re like. Once she has had her baby, she’ll settle down and be just like your wife and mine.

“I certainly hope so,” said Boone.

For Eino Roskinen, who was serving somewhere in the Pacific, Cass and Jimmy packed a Christmas box: fruit cake, candy, cigarettes, and a thin-paper edition of Farewell to Arms.

“We do so little and he does so much. I feel we ought to both be out there with him,” fretted Cass. “I’m going to kiss you for HIM.” That kiss was strange and disembodied, as though it were indeed the caress of a spirit.

On this, their second Christmas together, everybody decided that the Little Mother—as they all called her, to Jinny’s fury—ought to stay home and be visited and relentlessly loved and cherished, and they all did it: the Drovers, Havocks, Blackstaffs, Flaatens, Gadds, and an alternately shrieking and hush-hushing gang of half a dozen more families, while for Christmas dinner, with much holly and silver, there were Bradd, Chris, Cleo, and the three Pennlosses. George Hame diffidently brought in a pair of woolly mittens, embroidered for Jinny by his daughter Betty, and a family whose son they believed Judge Timberlane to have saved from prison sent a goose from Four Mile Pine.

Jinny announced that she was now domesticated and contentedly settled for her whole future life.

Drowsy with Christmas turkey and claret, Cass and Jinny and Bradd, the others gone, hunched down in their deep chairs. Every five minutes one of them said, “We ought to take a good brisk walk.” Busy as a squirrel, Jinny ate a chocolate, sipped Benedictine, gulped a glass of water. She complained, “I have the most awful thirst.”

“Of course, you baby, eating all that sweet stuff,” yawned Bradd.

“Let’s see if we can catch the Philharmonic on the radio and then go out and take a good brisk walk,” said Cass.

But first on Station KICH came the war-news bulletins, to which they listened with the indifference into which civilians fall. But they sat up as they heard a bulletin:

“I have to announce the sad news that another of our boys has given his life that democracy may live. One of our fine young men, an expert on dairying processes, Eino Roskinen, was killed in an airplane crash somewhere in the Pacific on Christmas Eve.”

Bradd said quite cheerfully, “Didn’t you know him, Jin?”

She gasped, and they half heard her groan, “I hardly let him kiss me. I wish to God I had!”

Bradd stirred with electrified interest. Cass was filled with pity. He went over to touch her hair, muttering, “A brave boy.” He felt struggling far down in him the rebellious thought, “How do I know I wouldn’t have been just as brave, if it had been my job to fight?” But the thought never came to the surface, as she mourned, cheek against his sleeve:

“We never think that death can come near US. But I feel as if it were in the room now.”

In the silence, they breathed uncomfortably. They could hear the cat as it leaped from a cupboard toward the mantelpiece. It almost missed and, clawing, upset the bracket on which was Isis, who toppled from her little teak standard and fell to the tiled hearth, with a tiny noise of breaking. Jinny hastened across the room and picked up the crystal cat-goddess. One of its miniscule legs was broken clean off, and Jinny held it out for Cass to see, sobbing like a bewildered child.