Without a stitch in time, p.29
Without a Stitch in Time, page 29
“It is a function to which nature has perhaps better suited the woman,” she answered fairly.
Two workmen carried into the house something in a cabinet of fumed oak, but the father averted his face as though they were rather bearing from it the corpse of literate dialogue.
“And so the coup de grâce to what remains of conversation in our time,” he said.
They spoke of this and that. Because of the door that was soon to close on civilized communion, and wishing to leave no residue of prior heat in their adjourning mood, the father strove to close the luncheon on a note of persiflage.
“Your mother does not understand me,” he chaffered with that levity which may be after all the soul of wit.
“Then suppose you do not talk with your mouth full,” the boy gave answer.
“Are you the father here?”
“No, sir.”
“Then stop chittering like a ninny.”
The father rose and led the way into the living room, where, disposed in their accustomed chairs, they witnessed the installation of the set. One workman had remained to effect it. Lengths of wire lay about like some degree of briar.
“So another trap is about to shut,” the father said.
“I thought we might not use the word in that sense,” the daughter said.
“Your father meant in the sense of snare,” the mother said, looking at her.
“Which is everywhere,” the father said, looking at the son as well.
The workman bolted on his knees about the polished floor. “By fall you will have an attachment for color,” he said.
“I shall feel none whatever for it,” the father interjected swiftly, as if mere moments remained for nuance.
“What does he feel?” the girl whispered.
“Nothing,” the boy said. “When I can talk, I shall call him Ice Cold Pop.”
“And when he is old, Epigrampa.”
“Now, now, your father is sound,” their mother said. “Sound as a nut.”
“You can say that again,” the girl retorted.
The father made a truncheon of his Harper’s. “There will be no needless repetition,” he said.
“It will distract you,” the workman said, in defense of the instrument it was his to install.
“No more than the prospect already has,” the father said.
“A living must be made,” the workman said.
“And a life unmade.”
“A way of life. And a new way born,” the workman said.
“By some not able to bear it.”
“We talk again of bearing,” the mother interposed, prising from her daughter’s grasp a cutting tool not meant for play.
“It is merely more surrender to material progress,” the father said. “We worship the Golden Calf.”
“It is not the calf that is worshipped on television,” the workman said. “Though that too is visible.”
The color drained from the father’s face leaving a pallor, which in turn gave the illusion of draining from it; as though they had already heard a fragment from the instrument.
“And for children? This imagery and this plane of reference?” he demanded.
“They must be torn away from the continuities which thrive at evening, and which magnetize them until then,” the workman said. He inserted an extremity of wire into the machine and secured it there. “Whether the innovation is therefore a blessing or a bane is moot in many households,” he said with a smile. Then he paused and rummaged in his hair. “Since setting foot in this house I speak increasingly in this way.”
“It is nothing but understatement,” the mother said.
“Restraint run wild, if I may say so, ma’am.” The workman rapped a knuckle on the cabinet. “But not here. In this medium, overstress.”
“And in the humor?”
“Muscularity. In a diversion last evening one comedian said, ‘My dog is sick, I should have given him asafetida.’ And another better known replied, ‘Asafetida made any difference.’”
The father nudged an ashtray a quarter of an inch to the left, illustrating the anguish of cerebral types. But there was a sense of swift recovery. He had been evaluating what the workman had said about the household young, which had seemed to lay bare implications he had not realized in his own strictures. Credits and debits had been toted up, a balance struck.
“You say the children must indeed be torn from the sets?” he said, bowing his head and joining together the fat of his thumbs.
“You don’t even know they’re in the house.” The workman plied a knob. “Ah, there we are. Puppets.”
As his wife went about drawing the shades, the father seemed to see the house in a new light. The children’s faces were already transfigured. The resulting glow of warmth in him was so great as to move him momentarily to hypocrisy.
“You were so good as to speak of the level of intercourse of all beneath this roof. Surely it’s nothing new, understatement,” he said modestly to the workman.
“Oh, no,” the other answered, refining a nebulous image. “But not everyone can lay it on with a trowel.”
FOREVER PANTING
STILL, I have a certain ramshackle charm. So that when I took her young hands in mine across the restaurant table she did not immediately withdraw from my grasp, nor from the larger, bolder plan of action, which I now proceeded to sketch out for her benefit.
“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to declare moral bankruptcy,” I said. “I mean, we keep using the term in that sense, why not follow it through? When a man can no longer discharge his financial obligations, we let him off the hook. Why not when he can no longer meet his ethical ones? I have too many emotional creditors hounding me, I tell you! That’s all there is to it. A man simply cannot meet all the demands made on his resources, simply cannot be expected to keep his books balanced. It’s too much. Everybody keeps talking about moral bankruptcy but nobody does anything about it. Well, I’m going to. I’m going to declare it. I’m going into receivership. I’m going to pay everybody so much on the dollar.”
“In other words, Duxbury,” she said, calling me by my last name as people affectionately do, “you want to tell your wife about us.”
“I do,” I said, “and I’ve spoken those words only once before in my life.”
She gazed thoughtfully into her post-luncheon mint, stirring the icy sludge around a bit with her straw.
“How will you go about it?” she asked, at length. “I mean, how much will you pay everybody on the dollar, as you put it?”
I frowned into my third brandy as I mentally reviewed the scale of figures I had already more or less worked out. Proclaiming to the world that one is materially insolvent is a serious enough step; posting notice that one is no longer ethically liquid is an even graver one, especially if, as appeared to be true here, one is the first man in history to be doing so in a formal sense. The case would be precedent-setting. It might even become a cause célèbre, with all the attendant widespread publicity that I must be prepared to shoulder and to shoulder alone. I therefore weighed my words carefully.
“I figure I can pay fifty cents on the dollar,” I said at last. “That will be all told and across the board. It will be divided up as fairly as I know how among the claimants. That is to say, half of what is expected of this man on all fronts is really all there is of him to go around. That’s all there is, there ain’t no more.” Here I paused to ask, “You understand that I am talking about the moral equivalent of money, in the mart of human relationships.” She nodded, sucking up the bright-green cordial with lips pursed into a scarlet bud. “All right, then,” I went on. “I shall continue to make my disbursements — of loyalty, cooperation, et cetera — at that level; I mean, I intend to stay in business as a human being. There will never be any question about that, nor that my wife and family will come first, my friends next, and then such things as obligation to community and whatnot, in the ever-widening circles of responsibilities as one sees them — and prorated as I say.”
“What about your parents, Duxbury?” she asked, looking up. “You admitted you haven’t been back home to see them in over a year. I don’t like that in a man. A man should be thoughtful and considerate about things like that.”
“All right, I’ll throw in another nickel for them, so to speak. I mean, I’ll stretch a point in what I’ll give, so the others concerned won’t get less of my time and devotion. But that’s my top figure. More than that can simply not be squeezed out of the orange.”
“What about me? What do I get?”
“You get me. A man out from under at last, ready to make a fresh start free and clear. How’s that? Ah, macushla . . .”
There was a silence, broken only by the hydraulic sounds of the last of the mint going up the translucent straw, which was finally put by with a dainty crimson stain on its tip. “Well, all right,” she said. “I expect you’ll want to get home early tonight and have it out. I’m glad I won’t have to be there,” she added with a little shudder. “I just hope it won’t be like the sordid blowups you can hear through the walls of apartments. The couple next door to mine actually throw crockery at each other.”
“Love is a many-splintered thing. Heh-heh-heh. Ah, baby, the fun we’ll —”
“So why don’t you call for the check?”
I flagged the waiter, still brooding over the various aspects of this thorny problem, which I am sure vexes every man from time to time — just how much of him there is to go around. “As for one’s country,” I said, “that’s all well and good, but I doubt whether in peacetime a man owes it any more than is extorted from him in taxes to maintain God knows what proliferating bureaus and agencies going to make up what is still essentially an eleemosynary goddam government.”
“You don’t have to swear to show how limited your vocabulary is,” she said, reaching for her gloves and bag with a hauteur well supported by the patrician profile that had from the very first struck me to the heart. She is a tawny girl with long legs and hair like poured honey. In her brown eyes is a vacancy as divine as that left in the last motel available to the desperate wayfarer. My knees turned to rubber as I read the check and produced the forty clams necessary to discharge my immediate obligations. “Keep the change,” I told the waiter in a voice hoarse with passion.
“If you do have it out at home, then you’ll be able to make it for dinner tomorrow instead of lunch, I expect?” she said, rising as the waiter swung the table aside for her exit.
“Name the place,” I said, trailing in her wake.
“The Four Seasons is nice.”
When I got home, after the usual grimy and spasmodic ride on that awful railroad, my family were already at meat. My wife looked up from a gardening magazine she was reading as she ate, and waved cheerfully. Our sixteen-year-old son was paging through a motorcycle pamphlet over his own heaped plate, while his ten-year-old brother pored, fork in hand, over a comic book. The latter wore a switchman’s cap with the visor behind. Dented beer cans were clamped to the heels of his shoes, and his bubble gum was on his wrist. It seemed as good a time as any to make my declaration. My eighteen-year-old daughter, a free spirit now apparently touring Europe or something, would, I knew, heartily applaud my action, if I could only locate her.
I helped myself to some food from a casserole keeping warm in the oven and joined them at the table. But I could not eat. Finally, I shoved my plate aside and said, “I have an announcement to make.”
There was a rustle of turned pages and a nod or two.
“You have all no doubt read Ibsen’s The Wild Duck,” I said. “That anti-morality play, perhaps his best, in which he makes the point that we cannot always be pressed with the claims of the ideal. That we should not be forever dunned,” I went on, consulting a frayed cuff on which I had jotted what I could remember of Relling’s crucial speeches in that drama, “forever dunned for debts we cannot pay. Isn’t that fine? Doesn’t that make reasonable sense? All right, then. I take this to mean, therefore, that a person who has reached a certain point in the general drain on his resources may with impunity say, ‘I herewith formally declare myself bankrupt. I am going into moral receivership. Creditors, take note — you will henceforth get so much on the dollar,’ said creditors to include all those reasonably embraced by that corporate term ‘society,’ on whose Accounts Receivable we are all permanently enrolled: family, friends, community, and so on. Now then for the figure I am prepared to give you. The absolute maximum disbursement I can manage is, roughly, fifty cents on the dollar. Put in plain English, this means that in future I shall be half the husband I was, half the father, half the friend, and so on down the line. Well, there it is. What have you to say?”
My wife dropped her magazine and passed a plate of homemade rolls around the table.
“Why, if she’s what you want, go to her,” she said. “Go away with her even, for a while, if it will help get her out of your system.”
I rose and shoved my chair back with a force that sent it clattering to the floor behind me.
“I wish you’d stop treating me as an individual in my own right,” I exclaimed. “All of you! Nothing is more irritating than that, or more demoralizing. As though a man has to be humored like some damn kid!” With that I flung out of the room, slamming the door after me.
My resolve to leave was by now quite firm. I marched to my bedroom and, pausing only long enough to stand modestly before a wall glass and say, “You ain’t nuttin’ but a hound-dog,” I packed three bags, which I carried, forever panting, along the corridor and down the stairs to the vestibule. There I momentarily dropped my luggage to recover my wind.
As I stood there, I sensed a footfall in the passage along which I had just come. Looking up the stairs, I saw my mother-in-law approaching, in velvet slippers and with the aid of her stout cane. Slightly indisposed, she had had a tray in her room, the door of which she had left open, as is her wont, so as not to isolate herself entirely from the life of the house. She paused at the head of the stairs and from under her white lace mobcap fixed me with a bright eye.
“I could not help overhearing,” she said, “and with all due apologies, I should like to remind you of one person you have overlooked in your list of creditors, as you put it. Someone to whom you also owe something.”
“Who might that be, Mother Bunshaft?” I asked.
“Yourself,” she answered, smiling.
“Ah, Mother Bunshaft,” I said, “the longer you live with us the more your wisdom —”
“Correction — I think you mean the longer you live with me.” The house is in her name for legal reasons (she owns it). “The longer you live with me, the more I find I have to tell you, it seems. Now I suggest you owe it to yourself to pause a moment and count the cost. Of a second establishment, which I assume is in your mind — especially if we increase the cost of this one by starting to ask for rent again. The upkeep of two cars, the many other possessions bought on time. I expect we’re quite the ticket out there in the big city” — here she humorously cocked the tip of her stick at me and sighted along its length as along the barrel of a rifle, at the same time making that chucking noise out of the side of her mouth that once was used to make horses giddyap but now conveys the idea of hot stuff — “but it might just pay us to take a good hard look at our bank balance, if any, our arrears with the loan company — Just a minute, I’m not finished,” she called as I hurried out the front door without the bags.
Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles. It took very little probing to make clear the scale of living the other woman had in mind — a single phone call from a public booth, in fact. Her response to my suggestion that we meet at some convenient Schrafft’s or Stouffer’s, instead of the Four Seasons, with all that nonsense about flaming skewers and telephones brought to the tables, alone did the trick.
So that seems to be the point of this whole incident in a nutshell, its moral, you might say, which I pass along to any man contemplating the same course of action I was. Before you start declaring moral bankruptcy, make damn sure you’re in good shape financially.
JAMES THURBER: THE COMIC PRUFROCK
IT WAS on an evening in the late spring of 1938, at a banquet at the University of Chicago, while crawling around on my hands and knees under the speakers’ table looking for Ford Madox Ford’s glasses, that I first knew I was going to write an article on Thurber. It was a moment of murk and strain: I remember the women just standing there, and getting in my hair, most of which hung over one eye. I suppose there have been occasions when I looked even more like a Thurber drawing; but there has been none when I felt more like one. I have had this queer feeling of looking like a Thurber drawing on four distinct occasions in my life, counting the evening I failed to find Ford Madox Ford’s glasses — or “glosses” as he said when he promptly singled me out from among the group of intellectuals as probably the ideal man to whom to report the loss of spectacles. The other times were: once when turning around to glare at a woman talking behind me at a concert; once while crawling around on the floor of a cold garage looking for a cotter pin while the neighbor lady whose car I was presumably going to fix, when I found it, hung around; and once reciting “No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist wolf’sbane” in a drug store to a girl who I found had turned to the menu.
I am not sure what poetic sensitivity is, but I am practically certain Thurber has got it. Though artists work in different forms there is a contemporary tissue which connects them, and the things they have in common spiritually are greater than the differences among them technically. Thurber has more in common with modern poets than, for instance, he has with any other present-day humorist you might mention.
I do not know whether the critical landlords of Axel’s Castle — our customary symbol for Symbolism — list him among the occupants or not, or whether they are aware he is on the premises. It is that house (to call a partial roll) through whose silences can be heard the interminable scratching of the pen of Proust, and the sad sound of his cough. Here Prufrock, lost in the fumes of introspection, lay damned in the late afternoon. From its window Yeats saw the centaur stamp in the black wood, and Joyce labored mightily in its towers. If fancy and the imagination and “subjective” as opposed to “objective” reality is the emphasis we are talking about, then Thurber can certainly be included. The filaments of individual sensibility are seldom more sharply wrought, or more constantly manifest, than in his work. The psychological nuance is rarely more intricately drawn, even in those tidy sketches in which he is reducing it to absurdity. His inner states and private convolutions are, if not as profound, as skillfully projected as any. He may be least of the family — indeed perhaps just a quizzical lodger cutting up in some remote corner of the premises — but this is the address all right.
