Chapter 38

Through all of the lingering summer, Cass and she were together in a shadowed valley of tenderness.

She would see no one but him; she was uneasy even with Roy and Rose and Bradd. She stayed abed half the day, and followed her diabetic diet with such severity that Roy snorted, “Look here, young lady, don’t go getting monkish and neurotic on me. Don’t starve yourself. You’re having yourself a fine time playacting and being the perfect patient, but I’m not one bit impressed, because I know how easy you can slip and go just the other way.”

She was “playacting,” Cass knew, but her play was a propitiation of the gods who had so bruised her when she had tried to be grown-up and a normal mother.

Cass and she sat through the summer evenings in a mosquito-proof and canvas-roofed pavilion he had put up under the maples on their lawn. He did not know what she was thinking; she denied that she was thinking anything at all, and he did not press her. The tenderness between them was a language above the clumsiness of words.

She had no wishes of her own. If he wanted to stay home, if he wanted to drive out to the farther lakes, she was willing. He who had feared that ambition and careerishness might steal her from him began now to wish that she had more to do and more longing to do it. It seemed to him dismayingly that she had not grown at all since he had first seen her on the witness-stand.

“Jinny, how about trying an easy part-time job in the fall?”

“I don’t think I care to. Why? You’re not tired of having me around all the time, are you?”

“I just mean, to keep from brooding.”

“I don’t brood. I’m perfectly satisfied. I hate these strident, ambitious women who are always clawing at notoriety.”

—Did I unconsciously do this to her, to make her dependent on me? A horrible thing to do. I must coax her to see more people. But what if she likes them too much, again, and finally slips away from me? I must take the chance.

She did not like walking with him even so far as to the Country Club, where they would meet people. His sturdy legs needed use, but when he did leave her for a tramp, like a soldier’s route-marching, his companion was Cleo.

She was a mature and dignified young cat now, not without affairs of her own, but with Cass she would still condescend to being a kitten and a playmate. She fought beautifully, pretending to chew his finger when he whirled her around on her back. When she walked with him, she was more dog than cat, running through grasses taller than herself, making enormous leaps straight up from the covering jungle, to see where he had got to.

When he stopped to rest on a fallen willow by the lake shore, she came trotting up to entertain him, as of old, by chasing her tail. Her vaudeville repertoire was limited, but she always performed it with the most conscientious artistry.

Jinny herself broke her nervous calm. “Darling, I know you’re restless, hanging around the house with me all summer.”

He did not tell her what picnics he had planned for her and himself and the baby, with enchanting equipments of thermos bottles and rugs.

“I get restless, too, Cass. I go crazy when I listen to that dratted vacuum cleaner, and even your lawn-mower. I know you want me to see more people. I’m trying to get myself to, but they still make me jittery. Let me be a hermit for just a little while yet, won’t you. . . . Our baby! I know you wanted her so.”

They had driven out to a secret lake, like a highland tarn, hidden among white pines and balsam. It was dark, in late afternoon, and she seemed fragile among the dark pine trunks, beside the opaque waters.

“Chuck the whole bunch of ’em forever, if you want to,” he said, and she wriggled to be close to him, and safe.

Suddenly and surprisingly she laughed. “Why don’t you teach me golf? If I could be out on the course listening to Boone tell dirty stories, if I could get over being so damned refined and melancholy, maybe I’d be okay.”

“Fine!” he said, uneasily.

While Cass enjoyed striding the golf course, whooping in the great winds from the cornfields and manfully waving his clubs, she was bored by it and finicky—and showed at once that she could become a much better player. In a year, she would have beaten him, and Roy and Bradd would have made his life hellish. It was not without a guilty relief that he heard her give up golfing.

But at the clubhouse they did meet Jay and the new Pasadena Laverick, and it was the drinking and feverishness of this foolish pair, and their brassy ability to take a snub, that won Jinny and flushed her out of melancholy more than the welcomes of Rose and Bradd and Chris. With Grand Republic devotion to their friends, these more solid neighbors had not wanted to intrude, so long as Jinny desired the privacy of grief. But no such scruples were in Jay and Pas, and they yelled, “Come and have a gin-and-jitters, Jin!”

Cass was prepared to have her snub them, but she said “Swell!”

They shrieked, “Let’s all go get drunk with Sabine and the other bums,” and Jin answered affectionately, “I think you got something there. I dassn’t get drunk—I’m one of these awful creeping invalids—but I would like to hear some swing on the phonograph and see a few human people. Let’s go.”

Instantly, with no perceptible moment when she passed from timid refuge to clamorous publicity, apparently without reason or transition, in September, Jinny was wanting a party every evening, whether it was a Pruttish solemnity or a Sabine-and-Gillian debauch, and she was proclaiming again her extreme need of steaks and marzipan, and not all of Cass’s coaxing would keep her from having one light highball.

It was not Roy who rescued him, since she felt that it was practically a duty to disobey the doctor, but Bradd, the Husband’s Helper.

He barked at her, with Cass blissfully listening, “I’m no Puritan, baby. I can drink six Scotches to your one and not show it. But I know by experience what fools we charming people can make of ourselves, and I think it would be a fine idea for you to stay home and try to be nice to your husband at least one evening a year. Cass is too decent to bully you, but I’m not. If your sense of inferiority to him annoys you, as it often does me, I’ll try to lighten things by coming in and playing cards with you two, if you ask me nicely.”

“All right, I ask you nicely, you beast!”

She sailed into a haven between brooding and hysteria. There was again a household of three, gossiping, laughing familiarly, and Cass was very happy about it, until he noticed how often in arguments Jinny agreed with Bradd against him, how increasingly she rebuked him for daring to differ with the elegant-minded Bradd.

Then, coming as suddenly as her earlier moods of silent grief and relieving wildness and halcyon serenity, they were caught by an outbreak of quarrels, which are the wars of matrimony, more destructive and senseless than tanks and cannon, wars in which affection is the worst traitor and the most ignoble defeat is victory.

They were going, that October evening, to Madge Dedrick’s for dinner at eight, and Mrs. Dedrick was demanding about punctuality. She was not so fanatic as Cass, to whom 8:00 meant 7:58 1/2, but she did annoy society by insisting that 8:00 meant some time before 8:10.

Cass had explained all this to Jinny; oh, he had explained it!

She was well enough to return to Red Cross work. Indeed the only evidence of diabetes was a lightness and breathlessness in her, and a faintly sharpened face which gave her an eager maturity.

She had not yet come home when Cass started to dress. Madge Dedrick was so elevated a personality, so close in station to an archbishop or a woman-author-lecturer, that one dressed for dinner at her house without inquiring. At 7:01 he looked at his watch again, sighed, and took off his coat. At 7:02 he remarked to Cleo, “Now where is your lovely young mistress, cat?” At 7:04 he continued, “Curious that so clear-minded and competent a girl should be late so often,” and, after thirty more seconds of removing his vest and contemplatively scratching, “Do you suppose it’s just her way of trying to show that she’s still an independent human being?”

Cleo said she didn’t know.

At 7:07, in one sock and a bathrobe, he tried to telephone to Red Cross headquarters, raging that it was wicked of them to keep his sick wife there so long, but there was no answer.

At 7:26, bathed, shaved for the second time that day, completely dressed and quivering with worry, he heard Jinny bang into the downstairs hall, singing “Roll out the Barrel,” and skip joyfully and undiabetically upstairs.

“Oh, HEL-lo!” she said cheerfully, as he looked into the hall.

He did not say that she was late. Both their glances had already said it adequately. Cleo stalked downstairs as though she would have nothing to do with such a woman.

“Am I in the dog-house!” muttered Jinny, but with no evidence of repentance.

He stayed away from her and from the subject, then, till he had heard her shower-bath and the stillness that indicated she was making up. He ambled nervously into her room and sat down while she, a slightly absurd figure in bare shoulders above a gleamingly hideous satin girdle, was at her dressing-table, penciling entirely needless and imperceptible touches of blue on her eyelids, with as much tranquillity as though she had five hours instead of five minutes.

“Uh—” he said.

“I know I’m late. I’m hustling.”

“Not awful fast, dear; do hurry a little. Madge hates to have people late.”

“You mean—” In the most leisurely, comfortable way, Jinny inspected her eyebrows and removed one hair with the tweezers, after examining the instrument as though she was interested is the historic evolution of its design and its possible unexplored future uses. “You mean, sweetheart, that she’s also a fanatic about punctuality?”

“Well, I don’t know as I’d call her a FANATIC, but she doesn’t care much for having the fish-course spoiled.”

“You ought to have married her.”

“My dear Jinny, considering that she’s almost thirty years older than I am—”

“Okay, okay! Then married her daughter. Eve is such a lovely widow, and quite rich, and still punctual. Just the gal for you, my boy.”

“See here now! I know I’m probably a crank about punctuality—”

“How did you guess it?”

“But you go too far the other way. Unpunctual people betray the fact that they lack all consideration for other people’s rights and feelings.”

“Nuts!” She was less merry now. “I’m sick of always being on time myself, and then being kept waiting.”

“WHEN?”

“When?”

“Yes, when! When did you ever have to wait for other people?”

“Oh, lots of times. I do try to be on the dot, and usually I am, too, but this rigid punctuality—it’s like any other bankers-association virtue; it isn’t worth making everybody’s life miserable for.”

“We’re going to make Mrs. Dedrick miserable—”

“Not tonight, because prob’ly Bradd will be later than we are.”

“Bradd? What’s he got to do with it?”

“He’ll be there tonight.”

“But how do you know he’ll be late?”

“Because he just left me.”

“Oh.”

“And he has to do some phoning, as well as change, before he gets to Madge’s.”

“You, uh—You saw Bradd this afternoon . . . too?”

“Yes. I just told you. He dropped me here.”

“I thought you were at the Red Cross, and that closed two hours—”

“I was, but I got a headache, and I went out with him just to get some fresh air.”

“Did you phone him or did he just happen to drop in there?”

“I don’t even remember. Good Heavens, why all the fuss?”

“I’m not fussing. I was just wondering. Course I’m glad you went out and—Where did you go?”

“To the Unstable. Had a drink.”

“Or maybe two drinks?”

“Yes, maybe two! And why the cross-examination?”

“Bradd’s been an amazingly loyal friend, the way he’s backed me up in my effort to get you to take some rest, but somehow it does seem as though it’s always he who’s keeping you up late, or getting you to take a cocktail—or a walnut-mocha-frozen-cream-puff!”

“Cass! Are you criticizing Bradd Criley? Your closest, most devoted friend, the one man who most admires you as a person and as a lawyer?”

“No, no, good Lord no! I just meant—”

Empires have fallen from wars that began with “I just meant.”

She had to hurry now, and they said nothing more, on the way to Mrs. Dedrick’s, than that for a warm October evening, it was warm. They arrived fifteen minutes late, to find Mrs. Dedrick malignant— and to find Bradd, placid and smiling, looking as though he had been there for years.

Throughout the evening, Cass was rather dreary, but Jinny was full of lively points. She laughed with Bradd, but no more Cass noted, than with Harley Bozard or Old Mr. Avondene. He was in a small torment, but not of jealousy; it was a torment of self-castigation at finding himself back in her boarding-house, being schoolboyishly jealous of Eino Roskinen.

—You took away the poor girl’s job and her ambition, maybe took away her health, and now you resent her even having a few gay friends. Bradd and she are so open about liking to play around together that it would be obvious to anybody else that they’re entirely innocent in their liking.

—We were on the verge of a quarrel tonight. Be careful. Maybe it’s true, as you always claim, that you’re never the one that starts a quarrel, but you’re certainly the one that never lets it go once you get your teeth into it.

—I trust Bradd. Utterly.

—I just wish I hadn’t heard him tell once about his technique with young married women—easing their consciences by praising their husbands.

—He wouldn’t do that with me—with Jinny. Anyway, she’s too shrewd. Of course he is fond of her. Who wouldn’t be? Maybe unconsciously he even likes her TOO much. But never consciously. But maybe it would be a good idea to suggest to him that he ought not to get into a way of thinking he is in love with her.

—Yes? And how would you say a thing like that to as experienced an attorney as Mr. Criley, Judge?

In admission of the fact that Jinny was mildly ill, Cass always took her home at ten—when he could get her away at ten. Tonight, he was amiable and firm about it, and in the car he was unendurably bountiful. It was Jinny, usually an unretaliatory girl though impulsive, who was looking for trouble and ready to start a scene.

She jabbed, “You must have been absorbed in weighty thoughts tonight. You never even listened when Eve was telling us about the Riviera.”

“Heard it all before, I guess.”

—Careful now! She’s resentful over your lecture about punctuality. Be careful.

As they came into the house, he warned himself, “Don’t tease her about Bradd’s getting there before we did, after all.” So he looked affectionately at the heat-regulator, and said aloud, “Well, Bradd got there before we did, after all! We were the last arrivals.”

She stopped with her cape in folds about her arms, and launched her burning dart: “Yes, and he’d taken the trouble to put on a clean dinner-jacket, too!”

“Do—”

“Don’t you ever look at yourself in a mirror? Don’t you ever try to be neat?”

“Me?”

“You’ve had a spot on your lapel all evening.”

He craned at a white speck on the ribbed satin, not one of such dimensions or vile color as to constitute a crime. As he scratched at it with his thumbnail, impenitent, irritated, she laid her cape on a chair and turned on him again:

“Years ago, in Florida, I begged you not to slobber all over yourself. Especially lapels!”

“Yes, we’re right back there, Jinny, and you haven’t learned a thing.”

“What do you mean, I haven’t learned a thing? I’ve learned plenty! I’ve learned that the more you talk about wanting me to be free and individual, the more you always want me to do only what you want.”

“Dearest, I honestly don’t know why you started jumping on me.”

“You don’t? Complaining because I went out for a breath of fresh air with Bradd! Sulking and screaming!”

“My dear girl, you can’t sulk and scream at the same time. They’re mutually contradictory.”

“The judge-language! It’s as phony as preacher-language. By the way, poor Eino once asked me whether you would ever decide a case against a very rich man, a Wargate, and I said of course you would, but I begin to wonder.”

While he gaped at this slander, the astounding irrelevancy of this attack, she marched into the gray-and-mulberry effeminacy of their living-room. He did not want to follow her; he reminded himself again that he did not readily give up a war once it had started.

Then he did want to follow her; he did want to fight the good bad fight.

She was delicately taking a cigarette from a box of glass, lighting it with relish, staring at the maimed Isis on her pedestal for reassurance, then turning toward him with a cold unspoken query of “Yes, and who may you be?”

She added, aloud, “I’m sure you’d find plenty of excuses for any Wargate.”

He was shouting, shouting small but well into the quarrel.

“Yes, if you really want to know, I’m a complete crook on the bench. And have you noticed any other faults?”

She enjoyed it as a good household cat enjoys chewing the tail of a trapped barn-rat. “I don’t knew why you’re bellowing at me merely because I asked a civil question—one that I discussed with Judge Blackstaff.”

“And no doubt with Attorney Bradd Criley!”

“Naturally!”

“I suppose I ought to be glad, though, Jinny, that you take even this much interest in my work. You rarely do. You never even ask me, any longer, what cases I’ve had.”

“I know. Poor man. There seem to be two kinds of husbands: those that complain because their wives butt into their business and those that complain because they don’t—like you—and your energetic friend Vince Osprey!”

He bit hard on a non-existent gag while Jinny breezed on, “And if you really want to know about your other faults—I don’t understand why you were so rude to Old Mr. Avondene this evening—”

“Me?”

“—when he was trying to tell about the early days here, unless it is that you always have to be the center of attention, you always have to be The Judge, and expect obsequiousness from everybody.”

That there was five per cent of truth in this did not relieve his injury as she swept on, sweetly, lounging in a couch-corner, her gestures graceful and patronizing:

“You think that everything you say is of so much importance to everybody—not merely to poor untutored me, that you picked up out of the gutter and tried to educate—and you don’t even try to make your dictums—”

“Dicta!”

“—clear, and you talk with your mouth full, and then if it ever happens that people get sick of your egotism and turn their heads away from you for even one second, you’re furious with them—you’re mushy with self-pity because you can’t put your importance over!”

He was appalled at her injustice, at her so recent tenderness turning into this poison, yet he did have humor enough to see the comedy of her springing on him when he had been so full of information about HER faults of unpunctuality and skipping off with every man who asked her. He retreated from his high ground, and said civilly, “I swear, Jinny, I don’t know why you started this scene.”

“Why?”

“Yes, why?”

“Heaven’s sake, don’t echo me like a—like a—If you want to know why—I hesitate to tell you, but after the way you rode me tonight—”

“I did not!”

“—and yelled that I simply love to keep people waiting and their damn fish spoiling, I’ll tell you. Frankly, my friend, I don’t have much fun living with you.”

She said it with none of the joyful hysteria of a lovers’ quarrel, but so evenly that he believed her. He urged, slowly and miserably, “Jinny, I’ve given you everything I have, and in return, you are trying to destroy me.”

As she casually rose and turned to go upstairs, she answered with one infinitely contemptuous word:

“Piffle!”

That night they slept without having made it up, without having spoken again.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

VIRGA VAY & ALLAN CEDAR

Orlo Vay, the Chippewa Avenue Optician, Smart–Art Harlequin Tinted–Tortus Frames Our Specialty, was a public figure, as public as a cemetery. He was resentful that his profession, like that of an undertaker, a professor of art, or a Mormon missionary, was not appreciated for its patience and technical skill, as are the callings of wholesale grocer or mistress or radiosports-commentator, and he tried to make up for the professional injustice by developing his personal glamor.

He wanted to Belong. He was a speaker. He was hearty and public about the local baseball and hockey teams, about the Kiwanis Club, about the Mayflower Congregational Church, and about all war drives. At forty-five he was bald, but the nobly glistening egg of his face and forehead, whose arc was broken only by a pair of Vay Li–Hi-Bifocals, was an adornment to all fund-raising rallies.

He urged his wife, Virga, to co-operate in his spiritual efforts, but she was a small, scared, romantic woman, ten years his junior; an admirer of passion in technicolor, a clipper-out of newspaper lyrics about love and autumn smoke upon the hills. He vainly explained to her, “In these modern days, a woman can’t fritter away her time daydreaming. She has to push her own weight, and not hide it under a bushel.”

Her solace was in her lover, Dr. Allan Cedar, the dentist. Together, Virga and Allan would have been a most gentle pair, small, clinging, and credulous. But they could never be openly together. They were afraid of Mr. Vay and of Allan’s fat and vicious wife, Bertha, and they met at soda counters in outlying drug stores and lovingly drank black-and-whites together or Jumbo Malteds and, giggling, ate ferocious banana splits; or, till wartime gasoline-rationing prevented, they sped out in Allan’s coupe by twilight, and made shy, eager love in mossy pastures or, by the weak dashlight of the car, read aloud surprisingly good recent poets: Wallace Stevens, Sandburg, Robert Frost, Jeffers, T. S. Eliot, Lindsay.

Allan was one of the best actors in the Masquers, and though Virga could not act, she made costumes and hung about at rehearsals, and thus they were able to meet, and to stir the suspicions of Bertha Cedar.

Mrs. Cedar was a rare type of the vicious woman; she really hated her husband, though she did not so much scold him as mock him for his effeminate love of acting, for his verses, for his cherubic mustache, and even for his skill with golden bridgework. She jeered, in the soap-reeking presence of her seven sisters and sisters-inlaw, all chewing gum and adjusting their plates, that as a lover “Ally” had no staying-powers. That’s what SHE thought.

She said to her mother, “Ally is a bum dentist; he hasn’t got a single rich patient,” and when they were at an evening party, she communicated to the festal guests, “Ally can’t even pick out a necktie without asking my help,” and on everything her husband said she commented, “Oh, don’t be silly!”

She demanded, and received, large sympathy from all the females she knew, and as he was fond of golf and backgammon, she refused to learn either of them.

Whenever she had irritated him into jumpiness, she said judiciously, “You seem to be in a very nervous state.” She picked at him about his crossword puzzles, about his stamp-collection, until he screamed, invariably, “Oh, let me ALONE!” and then she was able to say smugly, “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, so touchy about every little thing. You better go to a mind-doctor and have your head examined.”

Then Bertha quite unexpectedly inherited seven thousand dollars and a house in San Jose, California, from a horrible aunt. She did not suggest to her husband but told him that they would move out to that paradise for chilled Minnesotans, and he would practise there.

It occurred to Allan to murder her, but not to refuse to go along. Many American males confuse their wives and the policeman on the beat.

But he knew that it would be death for him to leave Virga Vay, and that afternoon, when Virga slipped into his office at three o’clock in response to his code telephone call of “This is the Superba Market and we’re sending you three bunches of asparagus,” she begged, “Couldn’t we elope some place together? Maybe we could get a little farm.”

“She’d find us. She has a cousin who’s a private detective in Duluth.”

“Yes, I guess she would. Can’t we EVER be together always?”

“There is one way—if you wouldn’t be afraid.”

He explained the way.

“No, I wouldn’t be afraid, if you stayed right with me,” she said.

Dr. Allan Cedar was an excellent amateur machinist. On a Sunday afternoon when Bertha was visiting her mother, he cut a hole through the steel bottom of the luggage compartment of his small dark-gray coupe. This compartment opened into the body of the car. That same day he stole the hose of their vacuum-cleaner and concealed it up on the rafters of their galvanized-iron garage.

On Tuesday—this was in February—he bought a blue ready-made suit at Goldenkron Brothers’, on Ignatius Street. He was easy to fit, and no alterations were needed. They wanted to deliver the suit that afternoon, but he insisted, “No, hold it here for me and I’ll come in and put it on tomorrow morning. I want to surprise somebody.”

“Your Missus will love it, Doc,” said Monty Goldenkron.

“I hope she will—when she sees it!”

He also bought three white-linen shirts and a red bow-tie, and paid cash for the lot.

“Your credit is good here, Doc—none better,” protested Monty.

Allan puzzled him by the triumphant way in which he answered, “I want to keep it good, just now!”

From Goldenkrons’ he walked perkily to the Emporium, to the Golden Rule drug store, to the Co-operative Dairy, paying his bills in full at each. On his way he saw a distinguished fellow-townsman, Judge Timberlane, and his pretty wife. Allan had never said ten words to either of them, but he thought affectionately, “There’s a couple who are intelligent enough and warm-hearted enough to know what love is worth.”

That evening he said blandly to his wife, “Strangest thing happened today. The University school of dentistry telephoned me.”

“Long distance?”

“Surely.”

“Well!” Her tone was less of disbelief than of disgust.

“They’re having a special brush-up session for dentists and they want me to come down to Minneapolis first thing tomorrow morning to stay for three days and give instruction in bridge-work. And of course you must come along. It’s too bad I’ll have to work from nine in the morning till midnight—they do rush those special courses so—but you can go to the movies by yourself, or just sit comfortably in the hotel.”

“No—thank—YOU!” said Bertha. “I prefer to sit here at home. Why you couldn’t have been an M.D. doctor and take out gall-bladders and make some real money! And I’ll thank you to be home not later than Sunday morning. You know we have Sunday dinner with Mother.”

He knew.

“I hope that long before that I’ll be home,” he said.

He told her that he would be staying at the Flora Hotel, in Minneapolis. But on Wednesday morning, after putting on the new suit at Goldenkrons’, he drove to St. Paul, through light snowflakes which he thought of as fairies. “But I haven’t a bit of real poet in me. Just second-rate and banal,” he sighed. He tried to make a poem, and got no farther than:

It is snowing, The wind is blowing, But I am happy to be going.

In St. Paul he went to the small, clean Hotel Orkness, registered as “Mr. A. M. Romeo & wife,” asked for a room with a double bed, and explained to the clerk, “My wife is coming by train. She should be here in about seventeen minutes now, I figure it.”

He went unenthusiastically to the palsied elevator, up to their room. It was tidy, and on the wall was an Adolph Dehn lithograph instead of the fake English-hunting-print that he had dreaded. He kneaded the bed with his fist. He was pleased.

Virga Vay arrived nineteen minutes later, with a bellboy carrying her new imitation-leather bag.

“So you’re here, husband. Not a bad room,” she said indifferently.

The bellboy knew from her indifference and from her calling the man “husband” that she was not married to him, but unstintingly in love. Such paradoxes are so common in his subterranean business that he had forgotten about Virga by the time he reached his bench in the lobby. Six stories above him, Virga and Allan were lost and blind and quivering in their kiss.

Presently she said, “Oh, you have a new suit! Turn around. Why, it fits beautifully! And such a nice red tie. You do look so young and cute in a bow-tie. Did you get it for me?”

“Of course. And then—I kind of hate to speak of it now, but I want us to get so used to the idea that we can just forget it—I don’t want us to look frowsy when they find us. As if we hadn’t been happy. And we WILL be—we are!”

“Yes.”

“You’re still game for it?”

“With you? For anything.”

He was taking off the new suit; she was tenderly lifting from her bag a nightgown which she had made and embroidered this past week.

They had all their meals in the room; they did not leave it till afternoon of the next day. The air became a little close, thick from perfume and cigarette smoke and the bubble baths they took together.

Late the next afternoon they dressed and packed their bags, completely. He laid on the bureau two ten-dollar bills. They left the luggage at the foot of their bed, which she had made up. She took nothing from the room, and he nothing except a paper bag containing a bottle of Bourbon whisky, with the cork loosened, and a pocket anthology of new poetry. At the door she looked back, and said to him, “I shall remember this dear room as long as we live.”

“Yes. . . . As long as we live.”

He took his dark-gray coupe out of the hotel garage, tipping an amazed attendant one dollar, and they drove to Indian Mounds Park, overlooking the erratic Mississippi. He stopped in the park, at dusk, and said, “Think of the Indians that came along here, and Pike and Lewis Cass!”

“They were brave,” she mused.

“Brave, TOO!” They nervously laughed. Indeed, after a moment of solemnity when they had left the hotel, they had been constantly gay, laughing at everything, even when she sneezed and he piped, “No more worry about catching pneumonia!”

He drove into a small street near by and parked the car, distant from any house. Working in the half-darkness, leaving the engine running, he pushed the vacuum-cleaner hose through the hole in the bottom of the luggage compartment, wired it to the exhaust pipe, and hastily got back into the car. The windows were closed. Already the air in the car was sick-sweet with carbon monoxide.

He slipped the whisky bottle out of the paper bag and tenderly urged, “Take a swig of this. Keep your courage up.”

“Dearest, I don’t need anything to keep it up.”

“I do, by golly. I’m not a big he-man like you, Virg!”

They both laughed, and drank from the bottle, and kissed lingeringly.

“I wonder if I could smoke a cigarette. I don’t THINK C2O2 is explosive,” he speculated.

“Oh, sweet, be careful! It MIGHT explode!”

“Yes, it—” Then he shouted. “Listen at us! As if we cared if we got blown up now!”

“Oh, I am too brainless, Allan! I don’t know if you’ll be able to stand me much longer.”

“As long as we live, my darling, my very dear, oh, my dear love!”

“As long as we live. Together now. Together.”

His head aching, his throat sore, he forgot to light the cigarette. He switched on the tiny dashlight, he lifted up the book as though it were a bar of lead, and from Conrad Aiken’s “Sea Holly” he began to read to her:

It was for this Barren beauty, barrenness of rock that aches On the seaward path, seeing the fruitful sea, Hearing the lark of rock that sings—

He was too drowsy to read more than just the ending:

Stone pain in the stony heart, The rock loved and labored; and all is lost.

The book fell to the seat, his head drooped, and his arm groped drowsily about her. She rested contentedly, in vast dreams, her head secure upon his shoulder.

Harsh screaming snatched them back from paradise. The car windows were smashed, someone was dragging them out . . . and Bertha was slapping Virga’s face, while Bertha’s cousin, the detective, was beating Allan’s shoulders with a blackjack, to bring him to. In doing so, he broke Allan’s jaw. Bertha drove him back to Grand Republic and nursed him while he was in bed, jeering to the harpies whom she had invited in, “Ally tried to—you know—with a woman, but he was no good, and he was so ashamed he tried to kill himself.”

He kept muttering, “Please go away and don’t torture me.”

She laughed.

Later, Bertha was able to intercept every one of the letters that Virga sent to him from Des Moines, where she had gone to work in a five-and-ten-cent store after Orlo had virtuously divorced her.

“Love! Ally is learning what that kind of mush gets you,” Bertha explained to her attentive women friends.