Chapter 49

From the heartiness with which it sought him out and welcomed him back, once she had gone, he ruefully knew how much Jinny had stood between him and his city. He was not at all certain that his hope that she would yet really discover and love his Grand Republic was not as great as his hope that she would again discover and love himself.

His acquaintances did not say much about the highly publicized secret of her absence. He would have liked it if they had said more. They forgot her too easily. He wondered, but dared not ask, whether even the intimates like Rose and Valerie, who had been so easy with her and so chatty, had ever been really fond of her.

Had they considered her too demanding and critical, or had they been afraid of some genuinely superior quality in her, or neither? It seemed to him that it was one of the most marked conditions of her youth that Jinny did not enough prize plain, human, neighborly love and desire to be loved; it seemed to him one of the faults of these same neighbors that they were not patient enough in waiting till Jinny should acquire this humble affection along with her more nimble virtues.

Slowly and shyly the neighbors let him know what they thought.

Judge Blackstaff expressed everything he had to say with a clasp of Cass’s hand and a stately, antique, “You look well, son; I’m glad of it”; and Madge Dedrick, Stella Avondene, the Marls and Wargates took imaginary occasion to telephone, “Won’t you drop in for a drink this evening?”

They were so kind, he reflected; all his life he wanted to be with them and ever nearer. This Grand Republic, neither too vast nor too rustic, too formal nor too frontierlike, was home.

As was natural for a brooder over betrayed love, at first he combined a resentment that nobody ever telephoned to him at all with resentment when they did telephone, which was continually. When he was invited to dinner, he said nervously, “No, no, I can’t— I’m tied up,” and the moment he had finished telephoning, he fretted, “Now why didn’t I promise to go? I would have enjoyed it.”

It was chess which became his surest refuge. The pure abstractness of the game was salvation from his thoughts as it once had been from the worries of his job. But he had few people with whom to play now. He was ashamed to turn again to Lucius Fliegend or the Reverend Dr. Gadd, after neglecting them so long. Every evening he worked out chess problems by himself.

Once, when Mrs. Higbee came in with firewood, he looked at her with an idea.

“How would you like to learn to play chess, Mrs. Higbee?”

“No, SIR! Too complicated for me.”

She fled. For a while he looked speculatively at Cleo, but shook his head.

Gradually he became easier, and in time he was seen about town as much as that popular young semi-bachelor, Judge Timberlane, had been before he met Jinny Marshland.

Boone and Queenie Havock, out of their fierce partisanship, were the only ones of his hosts who said what they thought. They had him in with Roy and Lillian Drover, and their attack was launched immediately after dinner.

They sat in the magnificent and oppressive Havock library, with its black-and-white marble floor, walls covered with dark-red satin damask, books including the entire library of Sir Ashley Ashelburton (except for such few books as Sir Ashley used to READ), and the elephantine automatic phonograph, on which a Mozart concerto was faintly purring.

“Judgey,” said Queenie, “why don’t we get everything out from under our belts? Personally, I think you’re lucky. I don’t know whether your wife left you cold or you kicked her out—wait, now!—and I don’t care, but either way, she’s no good. She’s pretty, if you like the skinny kind, and she’s smart—though not half as smart as Boone’s new secretary, that I think he’s trying to make, the old false-alarm! But she never appreciated you OR us. The only kind of guy she ever liked was some mattress-acrobat like Bradd or Jay, or some blues-singer like this awful jerk Nimbus.

“Now you’re beginning to get over your love-jag, maybe you can see that Jinny is as stuck-up and bossy and tricky and grabbing as a monkey. We only accepted her because she was your wife. She never had the brains to appreciate your goodness, and she never had the brains to see that a couple of two-fisted high-binders like Boone and me are twice as interesting as some little New York menu-expert. She thinks she knows all the answers because one time she read a book. All right, buddy. Now shoot!”

They looked at him with such affection that he could only say, “Queenie, I suppose you were always the meek little wife that never raised your voice!”

“He’s got something there,” approved Boone.

Cass said slowly, “All of you have to love her if you love me.”

Lillian, the rarely-speaking, exclaimed, “You see, Roy, as I told you, he doesn’t just play at loving.”

Roy snorted, “Okay, Cass. If she comes back, we’ll admit we’re wrong. I’ve done harder things than that for you. I’ve sat and listened to you trying to tell me that politicians ought to be a bunch of faith-healers.”

They all laughed, hastily, trying to sound comfortable.

“And, Cass, don’t get us wrong,” concluded Roy. “It ain’t that any of us think we’re superior to the girl. We’ll all admit that she plays mighty fast ball, and that she knows a lot—for a girl who doesn’t know anything. Say, for God’s sake, do we play bridge or don’t we play bridge, that’s what I want to know, because if things have got so now that when you go out for an evening to play bridge, then you never get around to playing bridge, then I’m going home and catch some sleep.”

From that best of mothers-inlaw, Mrs. Marshland, Cass received only a letter: “We are hoping with you, dear son, that Jinny will soon realize that candy does not make the best beefsteak.”

One man Cass rather admired, for his imbecile courage.

John William Prutt, who had never yet informed a widow that he was going to foreclose the mortgage without cordially shaking her hand, spoke to Cass nervously:

“Judge, I trust you will forgive me if I am intrusive and impertinent, but Mrs. Prutt and I have discussed it and we have come to the conclusion that you ought to know that the better element in the community are all in intense sympathy with you.”

—I appreciate his good intentions, and Queenie’s good intentions, and Jinny’s good intentions—I wish there weren’t so many good intentions around here. Thank God, Bradd at least has no good intentions.

He was vaguely ashamed, these days, to find out how willingly he, who had always praised Bradd, now listened to the familiar gossip about him as a trifler and a master of pleasing but shifty legal tactics. When Judge Flaaten observed, “I prefer an honest crook like Fishberg to a crooked man of virtue like your friend Criley,” Cass said only an impassive “Well—”

He had thought of his niece Valerie as a little girl. He was astonished when the child came calling in the uniform of the Women’s Army Corps, a soldier and a woman. (Though she must have lied about her age by a year or two, to get in.) She attacked martially:

“Uncle Judge, I’m off to camp, and I felt I had to come and tell you that you oughtn’t to let Aunt Jinny come back here at all.”

“M?”

“Now I’m in the Army, I got to thinking, and I thought: People keep saying there’s a new world coming, and women’s position will change entirely. Well, it’s come, and it HAS changed! But there’s still ten million dolls like Aunt Jinny, that haven’t got guts enough to hold down a job or enough patience to study, and they think that modernity for women is simply being free to skip around with any men they like, and get all the jewelry and embroidered linens.

“I was looking at some photographs of these French guerrilla women. They’re so self-reliant; they can sleep in caves and live on beans. Then I got to thinking about Jinny, and honestly, she makes me sick!”

“Private Pennloss! I admire your warrior women—though there’s nothing ‘modern’ about them; the ancient Teuton women were like that, too. But your Aunt Jinny—Do you remember, few years ago, people said our college students were effete—never walk anywhere? Those same boys are now fighting in hell. And if Jinny ever HAD to, she could put on breeches and swing a rifle over her shoulder and march all night as well as any of ’em. Better! She had the courage to know what she wanted to do, and to do it, and to do it openly!”

“Why, Uncle Judge, you do love her, don’t you! She’s lucky, and she’s an idiot. She hasn’t heard there’s a war on—that for women, there’s always a war on.”

“Private, I want to see you when you’re fifty, and your children are blaming your generation for the next war, as your generation blames mine.”

“Darling, you’re not that old. You’re not a generation, you’re a sweetie. Will you marry me if I come home a colonel?”

“Certainly not. You’re too efficient.”

“You wait and see now. These days, you never can tell.”

But with all these accusers of Jinny, there was one accuser of Cass—Christabel Grau.

She came to call on him at home, as informally as Valerie. At thirty-five, Chris looked fresh and kind, bright of eye, tender of mouth.

“Just came to see how you are,” she said blankly.

“This is magnificent, Chris! I was thinking about you last evening: what fun we used to have riding our bikes. You used to take me seriously. You’d accept all the fake names I used to give you for the wild flowers. Let’s go up and sit in my study. This living-room is too—it’s too formal.”

As they went up, he was thinking that he had been a fool not to have married Chris, the essential woman, the loving and loyal wife. Jinny and Blanche, who seemed as different as swallow and peacock, were both demanding, both civilly dictatorial, while the rich stream of Chris’s generosity wanted only to nourish the land. Could he ever escape his fatal pattern and be courageous enough, original enough, to allow himself to be unharassed?

He sat her in a red-leather chair facing his own, he gave her a cigarette and a drink, and prepared to be cozy. And then Chris attacked like a cobra.

“There’s something I have to get off my chest, Cass. I know a lot of people are giving you a hand, sympathizing with you because Jinny had the sense to up and leave you, but I want you to know that I don’t!”

“M?”

“When I first saw her, I was jealous. I used to be quite fond of you—in fact, I think I might have fallen in love with you, if you’d ever been able to make up your mind what you wanted.”

“M?”

“But then I came to love Jinny. She’s only a tiny bit younger than I am.”

—Eight years, and you know it!

“But I felt as though she were my baby sister. I was devoted to BOTH of you, and I did want you to make a go of this marriage. But, Cass, you were so selfish and inflexible with her.”

“M?”

“The way you used to ride her because she was a few minutes late, sometimes. And expecting her to be amused by old stuffs like Roy! Simply intolerable!”

“Chris! I haven’t defended myself much, but now I’m going to. I have been selfish to other people—to Blanche, to you—and when I think of how I’ve imposed on my brother judges to get off on trips with Jinny, I shudder. But Jinny I’ve loved completely. I’ve given her everything I had, and I don’t see how I could give her anything that I didn’t have and couldn’t get. And she knew the kind of smug citizen that she was marrying, and she’d met all his smug friends. Nobody fooled her.

“Since you blame me, let me suggest—this doesn’t affect my love for her, mind you—that SHE might also have tried to make the marriage succeed. She might have worked a little on her job as a wife. If she was bored by my friends, she might have worked a little harder at finding new ones and bringing them here. I’d ‘ve welcomed them! I married an angel, and I miss her grotesquely, but I did everything to hold her, short of clipping her wings, and you can’t do that to an angel!”

Chris had thrown her cigarette at the open fire and was sitting on the arm of his chair, stroking his hair. “I do know how you miss her, Cass. Maybe what I loved in her was YOU!”

He leaned his head against her side, and her stroking hand was still. She would love him so generously, now, without bars—

He stood up abruptly, breaking the petty enchantment, and said, “Let’s turn on the radio. Must be time for the Cleveland Orchestra.”

He knew what peace and certainty he was gambling away for the fantasy he called love.

That night he thought of Chris too warmly, and he petitioned the spirit of Jinny, “Hurry back to me. I don’t want to turn to Chris, but I could.”

He remembered that Cleo had made extravagant, rather immodest advances to Chris, though Cleo was no cat-by-night, depending on charm. She was now twice a mother, progressing toward being a grandmother. Her more regular husband was reputed to be the John William Prutts’ black and white Tom, a conservative cat if there ever was one, and Cleo had shown a growing conservatism in herself by having her two editions of kittens in the most traditional manner—in a bureau drawer. If Chris had been a cat, SHE would have had her kittens in a bureau drawer, preferably cedar-lined.

Till now, Cleo had obviously preferred the bodiless apparitions of Jinny to Chris or any other sensible visitor, but she was wavering. She allowed Chris to stroke her.

Did cats forget people? fretted Cass.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

NORTON TROCK

In so vast a city as Grand Republic, with so ancient a history— going clearly back 20,000 years to the first known traces of Indian occupation—there were too many varieties of marriage even to index. Stuart Vogel, the county agricultural agent, and his wife, a skillful high-school teacher, deserve a whole treatise. They met at night, courteous and cheerful, to share in cooking the dinner, in reading plays for the next Masquers production.

They had one sort of “modern marriage,” and Norton and Isabel Trock another, also modern.

Before her death, ten years ago, the elder Mrs. Trock often said to the other ladies in hotel lounges with tapestries that she had proved it was all nonsense, this offensive contemporary notion that it was bad for an only son to have a widow mother hovering over him. Look at her boy Norton, that neat and handsome young banker. He had been frail, as a boy, and had shown the sweetest old-fashioned manners, like a little prince, and so neat about hanging up his clothes, yet look at him now: he was a fine swimmer, a splendid boxer, a correct duck-shot—and all the girls were crazy about him.

Then she died.

After her death, it was obvious to her older friends that she had been right. At forty-eight, Norton was president of the Blue Ox National Bank, in which Mr. Boone Havock was chief stockholder. He had two bonny children, and his wife, Isabel, though not too bright and not especially pretty, had the same daintiness as Norton’s mother.

He had always, since the age of three, called his mother “Sweetheart,” so that it had become her pet name among the choice little set of the more fastidious matrons of Grand Republic, who embroidered altar cloths and explained that they were of pure English descent.

Sweetheart’s husband had not been popular with these ladies. He called himself a wholesale chemist, but as a matter of fact he was in the liquor business. He was a coarse, red, bristling man, without taste in altar cloths. Fortunately he died when Norty, as Sweetheart called him, was only five years old, and fortunately he left them almost six thousand dollars a year.

Sweetheart thought of moving to New England or France or Fiesole or the Monterey Peninsula, but she could not sell the house, like a dark stone prison, which her husband had inconsiderately built, and the “wholesale chemist business” needed her shrewd eye.

But Sweetheart and Norty did travel, always the two of them together and always first class. They were not lonely, for they had each other; they could sit talking, lightly laughing, about their fellow-travelers, possibly malicious but always well-bred, from after dinner till after midnight.

She sent Norty to school in Connecticut and to that small but thoroughly sound and Christian college, Toplady. She always rented a cottage for herself near the institution, and Norty lived with her and was spared the coarser associations with the rough male students. But she saw to it that he did not fail to become manly; she had private teachers for him in boxing, riding, swimming, tennis, and bridge; and though vulgar competitors hinted that he won by nasty little tricks, she crowed that he did win. He was also a pianist, and sang French lyrics over which his mother, a broad-minded woman, looked shocked but giggled in an advanced manner.

After his college, they had a leisurely two years abroad, during which they rode on camels and looked up at but did not climb the First Pyramid. For two months they stayed at the loveliest pension in Florence, filled with the most cultured in American and English womanhood. In Lausanne they met an earl. In Canterbury, England, Sweetheart bought a pair of lilac-colored kid slippers, with his help, as usual, and they had to laugh at the strange affection he had for these slippers. “Do put them on, Sweetheart dearest,” he begged, almost every evening. He preferred them even to her gold slippers.

He did have the best taste, pointed out Sweetheart.

For three months they had a flat on the Left Bank in Paris and Norty had a friendship with several exiled American poets and novelists that was surprisingly vivid, considering how shaggy their necks were and how many naughty words they used in the books they had published privately.

Sweetheart watched their capital deftly, and when it was diminished to the danger point, Norty and she reluctantly returned to Grand Republic, to the morose stone house, and he started as a clerk in the Blue Ox Bank. He was good. He liked figures. They were impersonal and dependable, they partook of the divine, and yet they could be mastered as the crude, inappreciative people about him could not be.

Naturally, his mother and he lived together, while he looked for a wife, with the assistance of the love, the industry, and the remarkable intuition of Sweetheart. Together they inspected every available girl in Radisson County and in the better (yet not too vulgarly rich) sections of St. Paul, Duluth, Winona, and Minneapolis.

He would go earnestly calling on these buds, he would play the piano and sing the French songs, and stay till ten, at which hour his mother would telephone him, even if it was long-distance, to remind him that he had had a headache that afternoon.

Sweetheart always had the girl candidates at the house, and was kind to them, and asked tactful questions about their stand on homemade puddings, Republicanism, and the reservation of the Host. She had one special test for the chicks. She showed them the bowl of shaving soap which she imported from St. James’s Street, London, for Norty, and if the girl laughed or looked puzzled, it was evident that she was a crude provincial.

The young ladies always failed to snare Prince Charming. Without his mother being so intrusive as to point it out, Norty saw for himself that they could never be counted on to warm his pajamas or scrape the mud off his shoes or go out in the kitchen and cook guinea hen or listen to his reading aloud of Ronald Firbank, as Sweetheart could.

Some dozens of girls proved unfit. Norty said, “Sweetheart, I think this whole country has become coarsened and vulgarized. Democracy is all right as an ideal, but why must all the young ladies today be so ribald and impertinent? There aren’t any more girls like you, dearest.”

“I’m afraid that’s true, but let’s not give up hope,” said Sweetheart.

“Oh, I just don’t care one bit about ANY of them!” Norty cried petulantly, and kissed her.

They remained together all evening, every evening. They were invited to dinner together. Norty grew—not older; he could never, in the lulling spell of Sweetheart’s tenderness, grow older, but he did grow less young. Sweetheart sometimes said (but laughingly) that he seemed a little bald, and his waistcoat (not his “vest”) was more robin-like. He chuckled once, and said that he was catching up to her in age. Some day he would be able to marry her.

Sweetheart thought that was sweet of him, but she worried over it for a couple of days, then hinted, Sorry, but wasn’t that remark possibly in bad taste?

He almost cried.

Each year he was neater. He trained Ed Oleson to cut his hair more precisely; his trousers hung even better; there was less danger of anyone finding a cigarette crumb on his sleeve; and to take care of the long-vexing, often-discussed question of how to keep shoelaces and black dress-ties really neat in his top highboy drawer, Sweetheart and he spent two week-ends building an intricate nest of tiny cardboard compartments, which she lined with gold tea-chest paper, kissing each one as she finished it.

“Imagine finding any YOUNG woman who would give such attention to my needs!” he shrieked.

“Oh, don’t say that!” she said, with satisfaction.

She was tireless in trying to coax him out of his moods of violent depression which seemed to increase every year.

She died quickly, of an embolism, in his arms.

It was thought by his friends—who happened, most of them, to be women of his mother’s age and understanding—that Norty would go mad.

Dr. Roy Drover coarsely advised him to “marry the first cutie that makes a grab at you when you tickle ’em.” Norty was not offended by Dr. Drover’s masculine brutality, as you might have expected. Indeed, he came into the doctor’s office frequently, and invited him to the house for a drink. The clumsy doctor was embarrassed by these offers of friendship, and growled, “Say, I’m not a nosy psychiatrist that wants to hang around his patients,” and the justly offended Norty cut him off. No, sir, Drover might beg all he wanted to, but he was finished with the dull oaf.

After some weeks Norty found an aide and companion: Larry Drome, a large young man who had been a truck-driver, policeman, soldier, sailor. He had once been imprisoned for burglary, but that had been a mistaken-identity case, explained Larry.

He became Norty’s chauffeur, valet, and companion at gin-rummy. Together they took motor trips into the Arrowhead forest, and shared a cottage. Someone said that he had seen them together in Los Angeles, and that Norty was introducing his handsome friend as “Major Drome,” but that was probably a lie. You know how small-city people talk.

But the talk spread, like honey on your wrist.

The directors of the Blue Ox National, particularly Mr. Havock, thought well of Norton Trock as a banker. He was first vice-president now, in charge of personnel and of loans. He picked careful assistants, and he could refuse a loan, or call one, with tact. They wanted to make him president, but they were perturbed by rumors, probably spread by his rivals.

Mr. Havock had never heard of Krafft–Ebing or Stekel, but he had run construction-camps filled with hoboes, ex-convicts, and mess boys. While he had never been educated into the history of Greek and Roman culture and morals, also he had never been educated out of a knowledge of hobo culture and morals. He had Norty for dinner, along with Isabel Avondene, cousin of Stella. He had noted that Isabel looked rather like Sweetheart. After dinner, when the two men were alone, with cigars and bootlegged white mule, which Boone preferred to brandy, as being stronger, Boone spoke:

“Nort, we want you to be president of the Blue Ox. But we have to have a man who is a church member and a family-man—you know, beyond criticism. Why don’t you marry Izzy Avondene?”

“I don’t know that I—”

“You heard me!”

Norty wanted to be a sound husband. He sent his chauffeur, Larry— a rough fellow who might have offended his virginal wife—off to live in a boarding-house. Isabel and he had bedrooms at opposite ends of a rather long corridor, but he did go in to see her, nervously but politely.

They acquired two children in four years, but after that Norty never again entered her bedroom, and he found it was “just too ghastly inconvenient for poor Larry to tramp through all that snow before he drives me to the bank in the morning.” He installed Larry again in an attic room of his large house, and again went off canoeing with him.

Isabel consulted Dr. Drover, who was cross.

“Doctor, I loathe talking about such intimate things, but I think I’m going a little crazy. I have such improper thoughts and I don’t seem to be able to control them, and I’ve tried to talk with our rector, but he isn’t of much help. My husband never—uh—he never comes near me any more—at night, I mean. He’s always so nice and pleasant and he seems quite fond of me, and he’s SO good about playing with the children and entertaining my relatives and so on, but—I do miss something.”

“Did you—uh—did you enjoy it when—when he used to come to you?”

“I was beginning to, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not a mental doc, Isabel. I much prefer what surgery I can get. But I can tell you this: Don’t worry. You women never understand how hard we husbands work, and it’s just that Nort gets all tired out, slaving away in that big bank, and so he hasn’t—he hasn’t much left for you. Uh. He’ll be all right again when the pressure lets up. Now skip along, and don’t be so impatient with the poor fellow.”

When she had gone, Dr. Drover thought, “Poor fellow, rats! Poor GIRL! Nothing I can do. Wonder if these Chicago sex-sharks do really know anything? I must ask some time, when I’m at a medical convention.”

Unlike Bernice Claypool, Isabel Trock could not frisk with Bradds and lusty farmhands. After all, she was an Avondene! Whenever she was distressed by lewd thoughts, she prayed. It did not seem to help. So, from having too little of natural human sinfulness, she became as pale and bewildered and hermit-like as the oracular doctor’s wife, Lillian, from having too much.

But Norty was blithe and rosy.