Chapter 46

“What we did last night—that REALLY seems to me immoral,” she said at breakfast.

“Now look, Jin. Spare me the subtleties. I’m trying to say a tender farewell to an erring daughter—and she IS erring beyond imagination—and that’s all I can manage. This whole business is plain imbecile.”

“You’ve got to admit we’ve both been honest.”

“When a mother loses her temper and beats her child and the child yells, I suppose they’re both HONEST enough! . . . Here. I went over to Harley’s, before you were up, and raised some cash. Here’s three hundred dollars.”

“Thank you.” Very non-committal.

“I’ll send you a check at—Your address will be care of Mrs. William Elderman, Darien? Of all the tragedies played to jazz, that’s the worst. Jinny! Won’t you wait and think about it?”

“Please, Cass, oh, please! For Heaven’s sake! Do we have to go over everything again? I just want to get started.”

She remained thus frozen until she had to turn over all her keys to Mrs. Higbee, to whom she hesitated, “You might use the vacuum-cleaner on the curtains in the living-room.”

“Yes?” How Mrs. Higbee knew that Jinny was quitting, they did not understand, but it was evident in her contempt.

“They’re very pretty curtains, you know.”

No answer.

“I picked them out.”

No answer.

Cass was deciding that he would discharge Mrs. Higbee tomorrow, then that he would never discharge her.

Jinny tried again. “And, uh, Mrs. Higbee?”

“Yes?”

“Remember to change the Judge’s bathroom mat as often as it needs it.”

“I always have, Mrs. Timberlane. Is there anything else?”

“No-o, I don’t think so.”

Mrs. Higbee clumped out, her back an exclamation-point, and Jinny peered, helpless and frightened, about the room that she had made and that Cass and Cleo and she had come to love.

It was time to go. “I don’t think I’ll say good-bye to Mrs. Higbee,” trembled Jinny. “But to Cleo!”

The little cat had retreated far under the couch, and would not come out to Jinny’s pleading. “Kitty, I just want to stroke you once more!” Jinny begged. “Please come out!”

Cass said evenly, “Sorry, Jin, but we’ll have to hurry.”

In the car, she sighed, “Nobody really cares one bit about me here. All right. The hell with ’em!”

“One person loves you.”

“I do love him, too.”

On the station platform they kissed and said good-bye, tightlipped. He recited, “I shall always be waiting for you.”

“Don’t wait.”

“How can I help it? Good-bye, my Jinny.”

Then, incredibly, she was in the train, gone from him, just two years and two months, to the hour, after their marriage. He saw her through a car window, so small, so helpless and defenseless, looking around for her seat, and the train had snarled and gone.

“Why did I let her go?” he marveled.

Then, first, he realized that he would have to explain her absence to practically everybody in Radisson County. He heard the whole male world of Grand Republic croaking, “Me, I’d of spanked the little fool and locked her up.”

It occurred to him as he stood on the platform, too confused to get into his car, that he could refuse ever to give her a divorce, that she had no grounds whatever.

—But I couldn’t do anything of the sort, and I don’t know whether I’m a hero or a coward.

—I’ll be alone tonight—tomorrow night—every night now, no sight of her reading in her chair, no sound of her voice, no good night to say to her—only loneliness and silence to say good night to.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

HELIXES & SILBERSEES

Dr. Sebastian Silbersee looked like a tall and wiry Scotch soldier, and his wife Helma like a slender Jewess. Actually, he was Jewish and she born an Austrian baroness of pure Gentile stock, both of which facts she concealed, in Grand Republic, to be the better identified with her husband.

Their closest acquaintances were Rice and Patty Helix, the managers of the Masquers. The doctor believed that they were all drawn together by his ‘cello and Rice’s ardent but stumble-footed piano-playing, or by their common zeal in pinochle, but, without the men’s knowing it, the families stuck together because the two wives were the little mothers of their husbands, and could keep their learned boys happier when they played together.

The four had pick-up suppers, and afterward the doctor and Rice went at their pinochle, feeling superior to the humble wives, who washed the dishes and talked about preserves.

After World War I, the Baron Steinehre, born in a castle, had been as poor and thin as a rabbit. He worked in a Vienna bank and gave elegant little teas with the cakes limited to two per guest. When his daughter Helma, in the clinic in which she was a volunteer nurse, met the ardent but diffident young Dr. Silbersee, she married him, chiefly because he was so gloomy about the future of the Jews, and of Austria, and of aural surgery.

Leaning on her nervous strength, he was a great researcher; without her, he was a cafe strategist. They fled from Vienna just ahead of the Nazis, almost starved in London and in New York, and then pushed out to the distant Grand Republic. The doctor gave up notions of aural surgery, and was competent and fairly prosperous as an eye, ear, nose, and throat factotum. If in Vienna he had drunk in the reassurance of Helma as he had his coffee with whipped cream, here on what he considered the frontier (even in the formal gardens of the Webb Wargates, he went on expecting to see grizzly bears), he was kept alive by her and his ‘cello and the Helixes.

Helma had to taste everything for him. She rather liked ice-cream soda, comic strips, griddle cakes, baseball, oil-burners, chummy medical salesmen, and the fact that everybody called him either “Sebastian” or “Doc” the second time.

She molded his private life, but publicly, in his office, he was still king, and there Helma revered him as much as the student-baroness had done.

It was the opposite with the Helixes. Publicly, in “show business,” he was not very competent, but in private life he was a bit too deft; he cheated at cards, he systematically failed to pay his bills, and he drew and sold astrological charts.

This crookedness his wife accepted, and merely sought to regulate. She tried to make him see that cheating and voodoo, lovely though they are, and exciting, don’t get you any farther on the way to the heavenly reward of a white cottage with green blinds in Wilmette, Illinois.

When they had met, she had been a run-of-the-mill touring-company actress and he the stage-manager, playing small roles and playing them drearily. She had married him because he was the first man who had asked her; he had married her because she had nice ankles and mended his socks, and because he owed her twenty-seven dollars and a half which he could never repay otherwise. It had been a tremendous success; they enjoyed both bed and breakfast together, and the talk about everybody whom they met.

He was not bad as a Little Theater director, because Patty told him whom to cast and, at rehearsals, how to teach the local girls not to walk across the stage as though they were going to the corner-grocer for dried codfish. And she kept their income adequate by doing all the housework, cooking the simpler vegetables so that they seemed edible, and doing odd histrionic jobs on the radio.

With both the Silbersees and the Helixes, husband and wife understood each other and, working hand in hand, they could defy the world. They could exchange opinions about strangers, signals that it was time to go home, or hints that here was a new patient, a new theater contributor, with just a sliding glance of the eye. At any party, Mrs. Silbersee accidentally let the heathen know what a great physician her husband was, and Rice Helix indifferently informed some merchant that if he could get Patty to broadcast on his local program, everybody concerned would immediately make inconceivable quantities of money.

After every party, walking home arm in arm, they would laugh together, little delighted people walking home through the twenty-below-zero Minnesota winter night.

No revolutionary cell, no laboratory team, was ever more secret and loyal and quietly unscrupulous than the Silbersees together or the Helixes together. Yet closer than either pair of lovers were the minds of Helma and Patty when they recognized the golden conspirator in each other, and saw that their two husbands could be coaxed to be allies in the ceaseless warfare between the world and couples who are so presumptuous as to want not wealth and publicity but only love and serenity and a sandwich.

So every night when Rice was not directing a play, the four of them met at the Silbersees’ house or the Helixes’ two-rooms-over-a-store, and the men made a little music and played a little pinochle, and the two wives gossiped in security.

It probably would not last. The Great World does not permit such unquestioning love and ill-paid truancy.