Without a stitch in time, p.24
Without a Stitch in Time, page 24
The early-bird and bibulous Joplins were comfortably installed with Old-Fashioneds when the Bickerstaffes trooped in. Miss Froehlich wasn’t with them — she was writing letters and would come along later — but Herman was, and he turned out to be all I could have wished. He disrupted the very introductions by bolting into the dining room to greet my oncoming brood and, in doing so, tracking mud across the parlor floor; it had been raining, and his rubbers, which he had neglected to remove, were luscious.
“Think nothing of it,” I said, grinning beside my stonyfaced wife. “Good for the rug. Sit you down, all.”
That was the keynote of the afternoon. There is no need to relate in detail the successive incidents. The Bickerstaffes had occasion to give Herman what-for several times, as my wife did to one or another of our four. Pressure was finally brought to shoo them all downstairs to the playroom, but I resisted this arrangement as one that would deprive me of my challenge. What apter test of one’s mettle is there than his handling of the children’s hour? “Now, now, let’s not let them get on our nerves so soon,” I chided good-humoredly.
But in deference to lower thresholds of impatience than mine I did settle the youngsters on the dining-room floor with magazines and scissors, suggesting that they cut out pictures. “Show your things and trade them around,” I said, “and play nice in other ways.”
I returned to my guests in the living room, where I stood at the mantel packing shag into a briar with that outward poise that comes from inner balance, as the cocktail talk rolled along to this and that. It centered presently on amusing delays people had experienced on railroads. Hal Bickerstaffe told of a trip he had once made to Chicago, in the course of which the train had been marooned in a blizzard for nine hours and he had frozen all night in an upper. Herman left the dining room and nipped in to his mother to inquire what the prospects were for something to eat.
“Lieber Gott, Herman!” she said, rolling an eye at her husband.
I beamed down at the scene.
“We were just talking about Chicago, Herman,” I said, to demonstrate how the two generations could be integrated into a conversation, given a little tact and understanding on the part of the so-called adults. “Know how to spell ‘Chicago,’ fellow? Chicken in the car and the car can’t go — Chi-ca-go.”
My peers were wilting nicely. A harried look passed between the Joplins. I was interested to see that Frieda Bickerstaffe (or Dr. Bickerstaffe, or whatever she called herself) gave evidence of being worn thinnest of all by the brouhaha. She had seemed, on arrival, even more statuesquely handsome than I had remembered her from the night before, but now her shoulders drooped with an end-of-the-day fatigue, and the aloof smile I’d recalled as characteristic was gone. I wondered whether she was an actual Freudian or a proponent of some other of the schools of psychiatry. Not that it made any difference; I must certainly have redeemed myself in her eyes by now, I thought as I chewed my pipe and was mature, or stood at the fireplace with my feet planted apart in a manner typifying fibre. Still, it seemed to me I could do with some final chance to prove my stability, some particular dramatic incident to cap the impression.
This was vouchsafed me.
“The sun’s out — let’s all go sit on the terrace,” I said, “and I’ll fix the kids some lemonade.” My own children had begun to propagandize for refreshments, and this offer was greeted with lusty cries of appreciation. We reorganized ourselves in the pleasant open air, and then I slipped back into the kitchen to make good my promise to the small fry.
“I wouldn’t mind these clammy summers if we only got a proper spring,” I chatted, calling through two open doorways from the sink, where I was conjuring the lemonade from that frozen preparation to which water is added. “The thermal belts are changing. Oh, well.”
The lemonade, with cookies, was soon in young hands, and fresh cocktails were in old. The elders broke up, conversationally, into pairs. I was sitting next to Frieda Bickerstaffe, and exchanging comments with her about American educational methods as against European, when there was a mishap. Two of my kids and Herman, scuffling about nearby on the lawn, stumbled against the table on which I had set the pitcher of lemonade and spilled the whole works, ice cubes and all, into my lap. “The drinks are on me,” I said with a laugh, and rose to mop myself.
It appeared to me that that ought to do it — get me in the clear. How could you be more mature than this? I rested my case.
Frieda Bickerstaffe was dressing Herman down in the shrill tones of one who has cracked. My wife was diplomatically trying to acknowledge our share in the blame. Hal Bickerstaffe gabbled apology and reprimand in the appropriate directions as he passed me dry handkerchiefs from his own person and others’. I wiped at my sopping flanks and chaffered, “Now, let’s not give the poor creatures Sunday-afternoon syndrome before they’re out of knee pants.” And when the hubbub had abated, I went on, “Wouldn’t you say that the family constellation, as I believe you call it in your profession, Frieda — wouldn’t you say that’s the root of most adult difficulties? I mean, don’t you find your patients are more apt to remember what their families did to them than what they did for them?”
“My what?” she asked.
“Your patients.”
“You must have me confused wiz my sister,” Frieda said. “It’s she who’s the psychoanalyst. I’m just a housewife wizout enough time to read. Elsa should be along any minute,” she added, glancing at her wristwatch.
“I see.” I wiped myself a while longer. Then I said, “Excuse me while I put on some dry pants.”
In a smoldering rage, I went into the bedroom and changed. When I had finished, I marched into the kitchen, where I found my wife slicing cheese.
“Well!” I said. “If you don’t take the cake!”
“What now?” she asked.
“Telling me she’s a psychoanalyst — Mrs. Bindlestiff, or whatever her name is,” I snarled in a low voice, jerking my head toward the terrace. “You’ve got a nerve complaining I never listen or get things right. What the hell kind of information do you call that?”
“I only told you what Harriet Quayle said. So she got it twisted. So what? Why make all this of it?”
The sudden realization of the afternoon of wasted quality, sustained with such natural ease and effortless grace, was too much to ask me to take in stride, let alone elucidate. “Give me that knife,” I said. “Suppose you try civilizing those brats for a change. Listen to them out there. They ought to have their heads knocked together.”
“I simply don’t understand you,” she said. “One minute you’re the soul of —”
“Give me that knife!” I repeated, reaching to take it from her.
Just then, a female voice behind me sang, “Hello, hello!” Pausing in the act of trying to wrest the knife from my wife’s upheld hand, I looked over my shoulder and saw the beaming face of Miss Froehlich pressed against the screen door, peering in. “Sorry I couldn’t come any sooner zan zis, but it’s so nice of you to ask me.” She paused herself, to take in the tableau in which my wife and I stood momentarily frozen. “Is there anysink I can do?”
The rest of the afternoon passed without event, except for my overhearing the syllables “essive” cross Miss Froehlich’s lips as she sat in murmured conversation with someone, I don’t even remember who. I wondered what the word might be of which they formed the suffix. Many possibilities come to mind. She may have been commenting on how oppressive the heat had been lately. Or she may have been using, in some connection or other, the term “regressive” or “aggressive” or “obsessive,” or another of the clinical sibilants. I have no idea which of these it could have been, or whether it was something else altogether, and frankly I don’t give a damn.
THE IRONY OF IT ALL
THIS WAS a dinner party I faced with more than the usual reluctance. Besides girding my loins for the five or six hours of continuous conversation to which custom maniacally commits us, I had to steel myself to spend them with a man I couldn’t abide — the host. (Why our two households had kept exchanging invitations is one of the mysteries of a social system administered by women, and I do not feel equipped to discuss it.) An added hazard in all my meetings with this egg had arisen from his being an author, and one who could buy and sell me and everybody I know. I bristle each time I see, on my way to my office job in the city, a fellow-commuter reading one of his novels.
They are no good, those books. But they sell. They have the disproportionate quantities of seaminess that gain authors reputations as realists, and their style is no tax on the brain. They abound in lines like “Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing” and “With a bellow of mingled rage and pain he came at him.” There are more descriptive stencils like “a thickset man with beetling brows” and “a small birdlike woman” than you can shake a stick at, and the frequency of “You mean — ?” in his dialogue indicates that he is no pathfinder there, either. Triter still is the lyric strain with which the brutal realism is relieved, being marked by an almost unlimited use of the atmospheric “somewhere”: “Somewhere a bird sang,” “Somewhere a woman’s laughter broke the stillness of the night,” and so on. Complexity of characterization is achieved by the sedulous repetition of “part of him.” “Part of him wanted to so-and-so, while another part of him wanted to such-and-such.” It goes without saying that the “as if in a dream” locution appears on every fourth page. As befits the work of a fearless realist, the aspect of life most abundantly dealt with is sex.
It was this particular exaggeration I was reflecting on as my wife and I drove over to the party at the home of the man in question, whom I will call Dumbrowski because it’s so typical of the names he gives his characters. I groped for some thought on which to impale this latter-day obsession with the frequent and physical depiction of passion — an ironic phrase for it, which I felt to be teasing the edge of my mind if not the very tip of my tongue. “Why does he lay sex on so thick?” I finally asked my wife, who was driving the car. I thought a little conversation on the subject might help me snare that elusive conceit. “He and realists of that ilk? They have people in and out of bed like seals in and out of water — affairs right and left, sex day and night. Why is that?”
“Maybe they just don’t know the facts of life,” she said.
I lapsed into silence, staring ahead through the windshield. We must have gone a mile or more before I turned irritably to her and said, “What the hell are we going there for? You don’t like him any better than I do.”
She shrugged. “They owed us an invitation.”
We slowed and entered the front gate of the house in which we were to spend the evening. I climbed out of the car and made my way unwillingly up the gravel drive to the door.
The house was jammed with guests. Dumbrowski, however, stood out in his pink shirt and black tie, which, in turn, stood out under his light-gray cashmere jacket. He was too tall and too broad-shouldered, I noted, and his hair needed some heavy pruning, like his books. I managed to steer clear of him during the cocktail period and even through dinner, for which the more than thirty guests were distributed among several small tables. After dinner, though, the whole party formed a unified group to which mine host held forth in typical fashion — by which I mean his way of aiming the stem of his pipe at you when making a point, or (another favorite piece of business) swirling his brandy around in a snifter. A man has a perfect right to gaze into a brandy inhaler and swirl the contents around when making an observation, but in that case he ought to get off something better than “I’m sure our ways must seem as odd to them as theirs do to us,” and “The burdens of the Presidency are enormous.”
I had eaten and drunk heavily, as an alternative to hanging myself from the nearest chandelier, and as a result had the hiccups so badly that for a while I sounded like an outboard motor. Luckily, I found a chair in a remote corner of the living room, and went for the most part unnoticed. At about half past ten, some cretin, a woman who had just moved to Westport and was socially on the make, asked Dumbrowski to read us a chapter of his work in progress. He modestly refused, and, what with one thing and another, was soon installed with a sheaf of manuscript in his hand and a circle of prisoners around him.
This was a story, he told us as he stoked his pipe preparatory to the reading, about a burnt-out prizefighter who signs for one last fight in an attempt to get enough money to marry a woman he is in love with. He is not only badly beaten but gravely injured, and is taken to the hospital immediately following the bout.
“‘Stramaglia knew that he lay dying,’” Dumbrowski read, in a voice that was low and modulated, yet vibrant with respect for the material. “Part of him wanted to die.’” See? “‘Part of him wanted desperately to live. A great weariness assailed him. Somewhere a cart rattled in the corridor. Then he was dimly aware that the door of his room had opened and someone was sitting in the chair beside his bed. He knew without opening his eyes that it was Constanza.’”
A hush fell across the room as, in a pregnant pause of more than usual duration, Dumbrowski took a last suck on his pipe before setting it down in an ashtray at his elbow. There was no denying the emotion generated among his listeners — a tension that made even me momentarily leave off tallying the clichés as they fell from his lips. He continued reading: “‘“Constanza, I have a request to make that may seem strange to you,” Stramaglia whispered thickly, “but would you get me my gloves? I’d like to go out with them on.”’”
A snicker escaped me at the same time that a sob caught in my throat. In addition, I wasn’t quite over the hiccups, so the resulting moment was one of great confusion indeed. Everyone turned to look at me. Dumbrowski himself raised his head and glanced in my direction, but he resumed reading almost immediately, in an effort to recover what he could of the spell he had been weaving. Fortunately, he was near the end of the chapter, or of the section he had chosen to read, and presently he was putting his manuscript aside, to a ripple of compliments and hand clapping. He acknowledged the applause smilingly, then rose with a brisk “Well so!” and set to work freshening up people’s drinks.
I knew that I had got his goat. And I knew, as I’m sure he did, too, that the undercurrent of animosity between us, so long concealed, must break through into open hostility very soon. Dumbrowski, at any rate, took his revenge in short order. A girl of about twenty-five launched a long and detailed account of the trouble she was having finding a job in New York. In the course of it, she asked three or four of the men present, including me, if they couldn’t help. I promised to see if there were any openings in my office. “Oh, openings!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “I’m talking about somebody just plain getting me in.”
Here Dumbrowski slipped in his stiletto. “You mustn’t give the poor chap such a time, Nancy,” he said. “He doesn’t have any of the kind of influence you’re talking about — the kind that cuts corners for people. He only just works there himself.”
I spent the remainder of the evening spoiling for a fight. I prowled the living room with highball after highball, glaring either at Dumbrowski, who went from strength to strength with one group after another, or at my wife, whom I saw in gay communion with a succession of attentive males. “It’s no wonder,” I snapped elliptically from behind her as she sat on a sofa waiting for an admirer to trot back with a drink for her. “Next time you go out with me, you’ll wear a dress with a top. I mean that.” Before she could turn and ask for an exegesis, I was making for a piano, at which I sat for some time picking out chords of an angry and atonal nature. I eased my feelings by reviewing some of my adversary’s more blatant shortcomings as an artist, mentally repeating a few of his characteristic effects. “Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing,” I reiterated amusedly to myself, and “You mean — ?”
It was toward midnight, when the party was boiling noisily through its climax, that he gave me what I took to be casus belli. He was standing nearby with a dapper but gloomy-looking man of about forty, whose name I hadn’t caught. As I watched them, it was borne in on me that they were discussing my wife, who was chattering away to several people in the vicinity. The two men nodded and smiled appreciatively. Then Dumbrowski said something that I got only imperfectly but that — under the din, at least — seemed to have something to do with someone’s being “picked up without any trouble.”
I took a long pull on my drink, rose from the piano bench, and strode over, just as the other man made off. “All right, Dumbrowski,” I said. “I heard that.”
“Heard what?” he asked.
“Whatever you said. Shall we step outside?”
He glanced into my glass. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough, old boy?” he asked.
“More than enough. Just slip out through the terrace, shall we?” I suggested, nodding toward a pair of French doors, closed against the autumn night.
“I’m sure I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.”
“I think you know what I’m talking about, Dumbrowski,” I said, fixing him with narrowed eyes.
He paused and took me in speculatively. “You hate my guts, don’t you?” he said at last, in low tones.
“I would if you had any. You get ‘em, I’ll hate ‘em.”
“Why, you — !” His fists opened and shut at his sides. “I’ve got guests to think about, but you come back here any time you wish, and by God —”
“How’s tomorrow morning?”
“That’s fine with me.”
“I’ll be here with bells on,” I said. “That’s a promise.”
I awoke the next morning, Sunday, at eleven o’clock. My head felt swollen to twice its size, and as though it had been filled with concrete. When I tried to move it, the room swam in a steady circle from floor to ceiling, like the picture on a television set when it is in need of vertical tuning. The condition cleared up after a bit, and I got up and doused myself with cold water, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where my wife was sitting over a cup of coffee and the Times.
