Six

Tillie Seltzer had ordered a reluctant and somewhat bewildered minister to pray for gaiety and the quiet mind at her son’s funeral, simply because the words graced her favorite prayer. Yet when she saw the boy’s father managing slowly to recover that ideal, she felt her heart harden.

Friends in time had coaxed them out to a party. She knew “periods of mourning” were a thing of the past, and often hypocritical enough formalities, but the evening was a trial. She found herself mentally talking to Charlie while trying to hold up her end of actual conversations. “Darling, the tree deserts the leaf, not the leaf the tree, I know, I know. But I’m here with you. A scar forms, they say, and the leaf is abandoned, left to flutter to the earth, and to winter. But I’ll never abandon you. I’m with you always. This means nothing to me.” She felt sorry for those who were stuck with her, and really tried to pull herself together and weave her thread into the evening’s fabric. Pete seemed to have no trouble doing so, especially after getting himself knit up with a redheaded woman in a corner, with whom at one point she overheard him exchanging a joke. The president of Anaconda Copper heard about Tijuana Brass and wanted to take it over. Why resist life’s remorseless resumptions, or begrudge another’s living as he must? Why doubt Pete was feeling the same pain as hers, since she presented the same exterior as his?

What went through his mind as he slipped into bed beside her that night? He saw that she was crying, and retreated. She was certainly far less to be wooed than comforted. Putting forth the claims of the flesh seemed to her that much more forgetful; making love the final betrayal of Charlie. She flinched at the thought, steeled herself against it, as against another kind of defloration. It would be letting the dead bury their dead, at last and in truth, something against which her whole being rebelled. But neither could one forever deny her husband.

Her dialogues with Pete were full of the futile “Why’s?” of parental sorrow. “Do you think there’s any point to the whole thing?” she would say, knowing she was boring everyone, almost bored herself. She hardly expected answers from Pete, knowing the absurdity of trying to make a philosopher of him. But he knew she was shopping for comfort, and did his best to deliver the merchandise.

“Of course there’s point. Look all around you, the patterns,” he said. “It’s the words we try to do the thinking with that gum the thinking up. Would you think whether life had any meaning if it wasn’t for the word meaning? It would never occur to anybody. So try to forget it. Think of other words. Any words. Make some up.”

“Then you’re an Existentialist,” she said, as though accusing him of intelligence heretofore kept concealed from her.

“Ah, I think it’s the name of an insurance company.”

“Promise me?” She smiled like a child, trying to recover some of their lost playfulness, even as she batted tearful eyes.

“Cross my heart.”

“Will I see Charlie again?”

“Of course you will. There’s a lot of new evidence about that. That the societies for psychical research and all are getting. You never know. We don’t know anything. I was reading the other day where astronomers have discovered some strange blue particles in the Milky Way they didn’t know were there. So cheer up.”

He yawned over his breakfast coffee, snapping his mouth shut with a groggy shake of his head.

“I mean if nothing is certain, then everything is possible,” he went on. “The whole universe is mysteries to be unlocked, if we can swing it, and I think we can. It’s like a great heartbeat, is the latest thinking on that. It expands and contracts at intervals of eighty-two billion years. Isn’t that terrific? So buck up. What the hell.”

He went to get his shoes out of the refrigerator. They were a new pair slightly too large, and he thought chilling them overnight made them fit a little more snugly.

“I expect I’ll be home late again tonight,” he said, bending over to tie them. “Some reports suddenly to rush through to some poop in South Jesus, Idaho, or somewhere. If we don’t get them to the firm by Friday, our names will be Rosenstern and Guildencrantz.”

“Stay in town all night if you want,” she said, looking at her fun-house reflection in the coffee pot. “I mean I don’t mind.” She poured herself some more coffee. “Even if you’ve got somebody. You’ve got to live, I know. I’ve no right to starve you just because I’ve lost my appetite.”

“You can’t eat a thing?” he said gently, holding up his coat and using the other hand as a whisk broom to brush it with. “Well, not that it’s my night to howl, or anything, but it might be best to stay in rather than take the milk train. That wakes you up too.”

He stayed in three or four times, and then came home one night to say he’d heard of a two-room apartment they could sublet from an office colleague bound for a temporary post abroad. “I think you should get out of here and into town more again. We’ll see some shows. Or just shop. But get out of here.”

They took it, and she joined him a few times. But as she lay in bed listening to the traffic in the streets she was haunted by the thought of her empty house, no one in it at all now, none there to hear the laughter and the footsteps echoing through it that she could, or the child’s voice crying to be remembered. Pete would find her weeping silently into her pillow, but there was nothing he could do. His hand on her shoulder meant nothing, save as a touch subtly threatening a caress, a caress an overture. Grief was indivisible. It could not be shared. She had nothing to say. Fairly, she did not complain when he returned late even to that bed. She never asked for an explanation. She went back to the country, leaving him his pied-à-terre.

It was when she was finally alone, not just alone in the house, but alone, that she discovered the ability of grief to accommodate gaiety, or at least to alternate with it, a contradiction that distinguishes it from depression. Merely gloomy people don’t laugh, but sorrowing ones can, and often do. Depression is not an emotion, grief is, and one that can sting all the rest into new life. Tillie would drink to numb her mind a little, then suddenly find her spirits rising as she resumed the conversation with Charlie, often with her favorite symphonies going full-blast on the phonograph.

“The first time I laid eyes on your father I knew he was something,” she told him aloud as she went about her chores, “but what, remained to be seen. He’s probably a bastard with a heart of gold, may be as good a way of putting it as any. You remember what I said about the way he ridicules everything, and nobody. Here’s another case in point. One evening when Reverend Pangborn called on Grandma when she was sick, you may remember it, we sat in the parlor where we could overhear the conversation between them in the bedroom. They were talking about the mice we had, and after a few minutes it penetrated us that Grandma was saying something that could only mean she thought mice were baby rats. I can still see the look that came into Pete’s eye as he put the newspaper down. It meant that he hoped it was so. And it was. We talked about it. But amused as he was, he didn’t laugh at her. He simply relished another of the absurdities in which life happily abounds, and of which it may in fact be made. To be enjoyed. He sort of pans the river of life for such nuggets. He would tell them on himself too. There was this secretary he had who called him Pete. Then suddenly after a couple of lunches she began calling him Mr. Seltzer. He said, ‘But you used to call me Pete.’ And she said, ‘That was before I got to know you.’”

It would be wrong to say she was depressed at such times. Her spirit was never more in flight. She would turn off the phonograph, lock up the house and set out for dinner in some restaurant where she could sit alone in a corner and watch the others as she nursed a drink and dawdled over her food. She was particularly aware of the tone set by any family party. Parents bored or impatient with their children made her want to go over and shake them by the shoulders, and ask them how long they thought they had together. She could imagine what she’d say. “We’re all on loan to one another, you know, the whole thing can be foreclosed without a moment’s notice.” Yet once when she saw a family happy with an idiot in its midst, her feelings suddenly reversed themselves—she wanted to rebuke their seemingly mindless oblivion to the outrage perpetrated upon them. But when she walked out she gave the poor thing a smile and a pat on the head, receiving a smile from the parents in return. What a mysterious gift was life in any form, even that lashed by loss into new intensities. When, however, she heard sentimentalists talking about “the precious gift of life” she wanted to say, “This life is no gift. It is a purchase, paid for as we go, at prices often scandalous.” Perhaps her dissatisfaction with the banality of the words drove her thoughts back out of the Yea column into the Nay. She usually found herself better at saying Nay: “Don’t try to buy me off with spring flowers, or falling snow, or young May moons. I want to stay mad.”

It was Gertrude Wilson who got her out of the dumps and the clouds between which she knew she rather precariously alternated, and back onto something like solid ground. She did so by reinvolving her in the petty nuisances of everyday life. Good old Gertrude! There are things for which the cares that infest the day are better than nights filled with music.

She phoned to invite Tillie to lunch, after a long silence during which she had been vaguely reported as “away somewhere.” Even as Tillie caught sight of her across the restaurant she knew she’d had her face lifted. She certainly looked under forty now, though suspected to be past fifty. “How much?” Tillie wondered again, with a spasm of envy. No one knew. No one had ever been able to get to the bottom of Gertrude’s age. No catch questions, such as are craftily framed to make you spill the beans inadvertently, or extract the truth by indirection, ever tripped her up. She could smell a mile off those queries about the first President you voted for, or whether you were in school when so-and-so taught English there, or such-and-such a song was popular, and parried them with the most incredible ease and the nimblest footwork. She was a match for any woman Tillie knew, and Tillie had overheard and participated in some catty discussions on the subject. “I’m younger but I look older. Certainly now, God knows,” she thought.

It would in the circumstance have been indiscreet to comment too extravagantly on Gertrude’s appearance, so as she joined her at their table she merely remarked how well she looked, then, as if she didn’t know, asked: “What’s new?”

“That’s what I want to ask you,” Gertrude said. The point remained suspended until they had been brought drinks, when, frowning into hers, she said: “I’m sorry about you and Pete. What gives?”

Gertrude still favored her throat by not turning her head on it any more than necessary, thus stretching it into new lines to succeed these temporarily deleted, but twisting her whole body instead. You couldn’t say she was posing every minute, exactly, but you were always conscious of her awareness of being looked at, so strongly so that the question arose in your mind whether she mightn’t cease to exist when not seen, like the cows in philosophy class. That Tillie was a thief catching a thief hardly softened her censure in these matters. She made other envious notations, concerning particularly the baby-blonde Gertrude had had her cropped hair colored, and how gently it collaborated with her gray-blue eyes. And what a sweetly inquiring gaze the eyes could manage for a woman who wanted only the dirt. In her resentment -Tillie gave her more dirt than the facts themselves at the moment would have borne out.

“We’ll probably get a divorce,” she said.

No such thing had been decided on between her and Pete, or even seriously aired, but the old urge to penalize Gertrude had been too much.

“Yes, I know,” Gertrude replied. “Or rather assumed.”

This gave Tillie something of a turn, but she struggled successfully to suppress any sign of it. Indeed, she suddenly saw how she might recover the offensive.

“Then it’ll come as no surprise to you what I’m going to ask,” she said, acting instantly on the inspiration that seized her. “I was hoping you’d agree to testify at the trial. That we’re incompatible.”

Gertrude was, however, herself not so easily thrown, much less put to rout. Either missing the irony or concealing its effect on her, she as smoothly answered, “Oh, I sensed it about you and Pete from the first. That you wouldn’t hit it off. Not from the first, I shouldn’t say, but I knew you weren’t each other’s speed one night when I saw you together at a party, shortly after you were married. Something between you made me sense there was sand in your gears.”

The arrogance of the bitch, Tillie thought. I’ve a good mind to call it off. And after a few weeks of brooding on the superciliousness to which, she now saw, she’d been subjected over the years, the foil she’d been in another of those friendships with which Gertrude surrounded herself, lesser social lights over whom she could queen it, she did call it off. In her own mind, that is, where alone the project was afoot. Pete himself knew of no divorce plans, and there was as much reason to wait with them as to broach them now. He had no one he wanted to marry, judging from what she could gather in the course of their few telephone conversations. He talked mostly about the office, where everything was appaquimpy—the Frisbees climbing all over each other’s backs to get to the top in what was evidently a current shakeup. He seemed apprehensive, and her anxiety for him revived the habit she had developed during Charlie’s illness, that of eking out everything she could to his credit. His word game had been wonderful for them. All three of them would play it together. They would imagine themselves to be the first family, commissioned by the Almighty the great task of nomenclature. There were no names for anything yet, in Paradise. What would they call those things with spreading boughs? The creatures twittering among them? The beasts whose skins they wore and whose haunches they gnawed as they squatted around the first of human fires, in the semantic dawn? Their yard became full of quormels and sleeths and whappinstances, all flumping through the sweem, or manganating in the queeglestocks. She remembered all this as she wandered through the house one night rummaging among drawers and pausing before the pictures on the walls. There was a Roman coin he had given Charlie, bearing the date 339 B.C.—a novelty shop gag. Tacked up over a bureau were some other of the absurdities they had collected, like newspaper photographs with the wrong captions. One specified the foreman of a lumber yard accepting a retirement watch, under a melee of basketball players. There was a snapshot of Pete, wearing a striped blazer perilously close in spirit to those in which comedians blowing saxophones derisively evoke the twenties.

“I’m not going through with the divorce,” she told Gertrude when next they met.

There was certainly no chance of claiming prior divination in this case! Not that Gertrude wanted to. She had something else on her mind. Before getting to it, however, she professed admiration for Tillie’s charity in postponing action to which she had every right, and on grounds more stringent far than mere incompatibility. “You could get it on adultery, you know,” she said.

That made Tillie leap conclusively to Pete’s defense, going so far as to use words of Pete’s that had, at the time, struck her as sanctimonious to say the least.

“You can’t judge a man’s sexual conduct apart from the rest of him,” she said. “We all have different makeups and different needs. There are adulterers who are often good husbands and fathers, and mates loyal unto death who kill each other daily.”

Tillie tried to look Gertrude squarely in the eye as she said this but couldn’t, as Gertrude slid her glance away, curiously resembling, for the moment, Sneaky Pete himself. It did not occur to Tillie till later that she had whitewashed both their husbands. Rather evasively, then, she changed the subject herself, or rather shifted it onto less uncomfortable ground. She recalled what Pete had said about sex in marriage, at the outset of theirs. It was like a medicine. Three times a day for the first week, then once a day for another week, then once every three or four days until the condition has cleared up.

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” Gertrude said. “Now you may not like this, but I speak as a friend and won’t pull any punches. Some of us are getting a little worried about you. Hate me for it, but you can’t go on living like this. Shut up in that house by yourself, shut off from everybody and everything. I know what you’ve been through, but you can’t crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you. It’s a form of self-indulgence,” she added, with an air of complexity.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean the world’s full of the misery you got a healthy chunk of, so why not go out and try to alleviate a little of it. You’ve tasted it. Fine, so fight it.”

“How?”

“I’m taking on the Mental Health Ball again this year. You’ve given us money before. We could use your help now, as a volunteer.”

“What would you like me to do, Gertrude?”

“Anything. Head the raffle committee. At midnight we’re going to raffle off a trip to—an all-expense-paid trip to—guess where?”

Tillie knew. But she had “fined” Gertrude enough, she felt, and honestly hadn’t the heart to deprive her of the pleasure of “springing” this.

“Where?”

“Monaco.”

Tillie whistled, raising her eyebrows. Beginning to enjoy her own performance, she next asked Gertrude how she had ever swung it, though she knew that too.

“Jimmy Twitchell knows Princess Grace, and he’s gotten her to agree to receive the winning couple at the castle, after a flight on TWA, also donated. It’s going to be the best Mental Health Ball we’ve ever had, and I’d love it if you’d serve as head of the raffle committee.”

“I’d love to, but I’ll need some, you know, briefing. What do I do?”

“Build a pyramid. You at the top as committee chairman, sub-delegating absolutely everything. I’ll give you a list of potential willing workers. I’ll have Jimmy Twitchell give you a ring and fill you in on the whole Monaco business, so you’ll know what you’re asking your henchmen to ask people to plunk down twenty bucks a ticket for. We’re making it high so we can limit it to two hundred and fifty tickets, which will give us an almost clear profit of five thousand dollars just on the raffle alone. And, Tillie, I’m glad to see you back in circulation again.”

“Working with Jimmy ought to be fun in itself.”

“Yes, but a word to the wise. Be careful of him. He’s a bitch, and that’s bad in a man.”

It was a point well taken. Gertrude was herself in Jimmy’s bad books at the moment, having had somebody else recently redo her house for her. “Just for a change,” she said, but that did not placate Jimmy. He was all Gertrude, and terribly acid about it, when he bustled into Tillie’s house for tea again. Princess Grace could wait.

“Getting somebody new for a change is one thing, but Cato Spellman!” he said. “I told her, ‘Well, darling, if you want to rough it.’ He made a mess of the Jamberson place, as you probably know, that I had to pull him out of. He asked me to, it was that bad. He had used, of all things, chartreuse and red in the drawing room. One at one end, and the other at the other. Do you know how I got him out of it?”

“No. How did you?” Tillie asked, feeling glad to be back in circulation again herself.

“Mocha.” He let this sink in a moment. “You wouldn’t believe it, but it somehow brought them together. A big. Long. Solid thing of mocha. A settee running practically the length of the room. Somehow it brought them in balance. Of course Cato never forgave me. He hasn’t spoken to me since. Not that I mind. He’s so full of booze, poor thing, he doesn’t do much any more but grow redder in the nose himself. Every time I see him I want to say, ‘Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?’ Well, we shall see what he does for poor Gertrude. How old is she, by the way?”

“I have no idea. How can we find out?” she laughed.

He was really awful, bringing out the worst in everybody, but, Tillie again reminded herself, of more value to the community than most men—certainly than most of the husbands of the women he spent his time with. None of them ever raised a finger for any of the charities to which he gave his time unstintingly. He never refused a request, whether it was to “do” a hall being used for a benefit, or to mince up Main Street scrounging ads out of local merchants for the souvenir program, or donations to be raffled off. He emceed countless fashion shows for worthy causes, having also his background as a clothes designer. True, it was all good business, he adored the limelight, and shared the insatiable thirst of his kind for bashes and whingdings, but even after subtracting all that for cynicism, Jimmy Twitchell remained a pillar of the community. Most husbands were worthless to it.

“There are ways,” he said now, to answer her question. “You may have noticed that the ages of all drivers in traffic violations or accidents, however slight, are given in local newspaper accounts. Even those of the innocent. Area wives, as the horrid Blade calls you, are constantly being unmasked in this fashion. I never miss their Traffic Column. Women parading as thirty-five are suddenly revealed to be forty-eight. So if there’s somebody you want to get the goods on, just ram her in the fender somewhere about town, or as she’s pulling out of her driveway, nothing much, just enough for a police report, and wham! Her age is out in the next edition. Of course the price is giving your own. But enough of this idle chatter. To the business at hand.”

Jimmy explained just what had been agreed on between himself and the Princess in his most recent telephone call, one of several he’d made at his own expense. “She’s been worn to a frazzle by these charities, but I’ve done her a couple of favors over there, and told her she owed me one.” The arch glitter came to his eye. “Call it Grace under pressure.”

Tillie laughed, reaching for her teacup. “Will she receive the winning couple for lunch, is that the arrangement?”

“Yes, and then a tour of the castle.” Jimmy stiffened in his chair, as though racked by a shudder. “I’m sure the same thing went through your mind. The creatures that might win? It’s a chance any charity takes in a case like this—not knowing but what a pair of goons might represent them. Well, we won’t think about that.”

He drew a small black notebook from his pocket and flipped through it.

“Now, you’ll need eight or ten good strong ladies of the parish to get those tickets distributed and kept after. The italics are mine, darling, because it’s absolutely essential that workers be pushed or they won’t sell anything. You’ll get eight or nine tickets back out of books of ten. Gertrude suggests Molly Webster for your second in command, but I think she should be in charge of tables for the ball instead of Laura Colton. Laura’s a dear soul but lacking completely in the tact necessary for anything so touchy as tables.”

“Do people really care that much about the tables they’re put at?”

Jimmy leaned intimately across the one at which they sat, an almost pitying smile on his lips. “Darling, our job is not to decide whether the human race should survive, only to see to it that it does. I. Have seen. Two women. Pull each other’s hair out over precisely this. It was at the Epilepsy do.”

“Tell me about it,” Tillie said, curling up in her chair for one of Jimmy’s stories.

“Well, it was a few days after Christmas, which was wrong in itself because by then people have had so much of their families they’re at the end of their tether. But anyhoo, the chairman of the whole shebang saw that the table chairman had put her at table number two, below the salt from all the ‘honorary’ people at the head table, none of whom had done a lick of work for the ball but whose names are important and doll up the stationery. You know those pictures of Gertrude addressing invitations the grinds have already addressed? Well, what did shebang chairman do when she got a load of the setup but pick up all the place cards and proceed to switch them. This was twenty minutes before the Grand Procession,” Jimmy said with some satisfaction. “Then table chairman saw what had been wrought, and started to switch tables. Shebang chairman no like, and tried to stop her. And first thing you knew there was a tug of war going on between them, each trying to pull a table in another direction. All this grunting and heaving while calling each other all the names under the sun, because there were a lot of old scores being settled, a long feud. Finally one blurted out something that was too much for the other, who thereupon went for her. I mean literally. It was a cat fight such as you’ve never seen. They had to be pulled apart and driven home.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Tillie said, though believing it completely. One of her most vivid childhood memories was of two girls clawing each other to bits in the schoolyard.

“It’s true. I saw it. It doesn’t happen often,” Jimmy added, with a touch of wistfulness, “but it happens. And of course it’s always there underneath, is what I’m trying to say. The lava’s there, and so the volcano can erupt.”

Tillie shook her head. “But to be so petty over something that’s supposed to be a humanitarian cause.”

“It’s charity that suffereth long and is kind, darling, not charities. You never saw the like of them for bringing out the worst in petty jealousies and egotisms. These benefit balls are in their very nature social functions, and a woman instinctively puts her best foot forward, even if it’s only to trip another one up. Would you believe that on a garden tour for Birth Defects one hostess said she wouldn’t throw her place open again because of what another said about her herbaceous borders?”

“Who was it?”

“Oh, well. Mrs. Lamont. Past whom nothing can be put, as you know. So be careful. I guess I keep telling you that because you’re such an innocent.”

“Nonsense. I’m just as much of a bitch as the next.”

“Matinees we say witch, darling.” He paused to consult his notes again. “Ah, one more thing.”

Jimmy took time out to finish his cake and then his tea. She noticed his eyes watching her with what seemed a special interest as he drank off what remained in his cup. He set the cup down, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and resumed.

“Now this is important. Every lottery must be registered with the police. It’s a state law. It’s gambling, after all, and must be strictly regulated. Now listen very carefully, because if this procedure isn’t followed to the letter, you can’t hold the raffle no matter how many tickets have been sold. Two of you must go down to the police station and fill out certain forms, and in a very few days, because there’s a time limit. You fill out forms, swearing to this and that and the other. Who’s in charge, where the drawing will be and when, et cetera, et cetera. You’ll have to identify yourselves, of course, with all that that implies. That includes giving your age.”

“Well, it won’t bother me none,” Tillie laughed, striving to make it true. “I’m forty-five.”

“Yes, I know. Why should you care, since you don’t look it.”

“No, I know. I look forty-four. Who told you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Gertrude may have mentioned it in an unguarded moment. I may have said, in an unguarded moment of my own, that I thought you a fine figure of a woman, and asked the natural question.”

No woman who fancies she has a good figure likes to hear she’s a fine figure of a woman. The two aren’t the same at all. Tillie let that pass, being grateful in any case for the smaller favor. “Then I should take somebody to the police station with me who doesn’t give a damn either.”

“Or somebody you want to get the goods on.”

He spoke with such convincing indifference that one unfamiliar with him would have thought he couldn’t have cared less about the subject, at least at that moment. Tillie, however, sat staring pensively out the window for some time after he had gone.

Jimmy Twitchell in the role of Iago was something she had not visualized before. Sensing his conspiracy now, she said, “No,” aloud. She would not be the instrument of his vengeance. But she forgave herself for imagining, with a sly smile, the scene that might result were she to ask an unsuspecting Gertrude to accompany her to the police station to register the lottery. Did she know the trap it was? To find out, and to measure the scope of her decency, she telephoned to chat about it.

“Look, would you come along with me if I can’t get anybody else?” she asked. “It has to be two officers of the organization, or at least committee members, I gather.”

“If you can’t get anybody else, sure, I don’t mind.”

So at last she had Gertrude in the palm of her hand. But she would not close it. No. She’d ask dear beat-up old Laura Colton. Everyone knew she was sixty-five, and poor Laura no longer cared.

Two days before the deadline set for the registration of the raffle, Jimmy telephoned. His tone was very solicitous, even sympathetic.

“Hello, Tillie. Jimmy here. Look, it’s nothing really. It’s just that I heard you’ve been terribly upset by what Gertrude has been saying. You mustn’t mind her really, she means no harm. And of course you mustn’t discuss your private affairs with anyone so freely.”

“Gertrude—?”

“The nonsense she’s been spreading about your marriage going on the rocks because you spent it trying to make an intellectual out of Pete. Isn’t that his name?” He laughed encouragingly. “You really mustn’t pay any attention to her. She has talent, but she needs an editor. And look. If you haven’t an escort for the ball, maybe you’d care to go with me. I dance rather well, you know.”

“That would be nice, Jimmy. Sure, I’d love to. Thanks.”

“Done and done.”

She had no more than hung up than she called Gertrude, to say she would take her up on her offer to join her at the police station. Laura Colton was a bit under the weather.

Gertrude looked very spruce in a blue suit of nubbed tweed and a matching pillbox hat. Prudent makeup had erased even the few lines remaining from the recent facial. She had clearly expected a newspaper photographer, and she was not disappointed. He snapped them entering headquarters, and then they went in. Tillie looked her age and more, she knew, thanks to a nagging conscience and a poor night’s sleep. It was too late now, though. They lined up at the tribunal.

“Organization?” the bored desk sergeant asked, pulling a form toward him and reaching for a pen.

“Mental Health,” Gertrude said.

“Prize?”

“An all-expense trip to Monaco, and a day’s hospitality with Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace. The round-trip fares for the winning couple are contributed by TWA.”

“Total monetary value?”

The women exchanged shrugs.

“Approximately then. I just have to put something down here.”

“Maybe a thousand dollars.”

“Price per ticket?”

“Twenty dollars. We’re selling two hundred and fifty tickets.”

Having noted this data on the sheet, the sergeant said: “Now I must ask for personal identification, beginning with fingerprinting. I usually say,” he added with a faint grin, “that this can be done in private. Separately? If you know what I mean?”

Gertrude, not sensing disaster, smiled and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

She had a moment of gratification when, after rolling her fingertips on the ink pad and pressing them on the document, the officer said, “Hm. You could lead a life of crime. No ridges, that they need for identification. Very smooth skin. Now I’ve got to ask you to swear to all this identification with the necessary vital statistics.”

Tillie glanced wildly at the door, but it was too late.

“Your name?”

“Mrs. Burt Wilson.”

“Address?”

“Two ten Chestnut Drive.”

“Age?”

The shocked hush that followed was like the silence that succeeds a detonation the source and nature of which are not quite comprehended by those stunned by it. Even Tillie was dazed. Then Gertrude seemed to pitch forward, clutching at the edge of the desk that interrupted her fall. She was white as a sheet.

“Fuh—fuh—fuh—”

“Take your time,” the sergeant said. “We get this all the time, but it can’t be helped. You want to try again to state your age?”

“Fuh—fluh—flug—”

It was no good. Gertrude seemed to be strangling, or drowning. Her voice, normally high-pitched, now trailed upward into a pititful squeal. Then her grip on the desk-edge relaxed, and she dropped to the floor in a heap.

The sergeant bustled around from behind the desk, at the same time calling for help into an adjacent room, perhaps a lounge, judging from the sound of a television set issuing from it. Another officer appeared, and together they carried Gertrude to a bench and laid her on it.

“She’s dead,” said the second cop. “I always knew this would happen.”

The sergeant was not so pessimistic, or at least not as melodramatic. “She’s just in shock,” he said. “She went into shock.” He began to slap Gertrude’s cheeks with both hands, not hard, but briskly. The other cop dashed a paper cup of cold water in her face. Finally her eyes fluttered open, and she asked weakly, “Where am I?”

“In hell, I guess,” said the sergeant, already beginning to recover some of his boredom. He rose from the kneeling position in which he had been conducting his ministrations. “You’ll be all right. Give her some water to drink, and send in a substitute. Or a couple of them. Because I think you’ll have to see her home, lady,” he added to Tillie.

The two women left after a few minutes, walking stiffly side by side toward Tillie’s car, in which they had come. It was parked about a block away.

“You did this deliberately,” Gertrude said, through clenched teeth. “You planned it deliberately.”

“I’ll never forgive you for that.”

“Go right ahead. But it’s true. You’re a bitch.”

They passed somebody they knew, or at least Tillie knew, and she nodded in greeting. Then they resumed their dialogue.

“Who’s a bitch?”

“You.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to prove it. Everybody knows it. It’s like two times two are four. You don’t have to prove it, everyone knows it. You’re a bitch.”

“I won’t have that.”

They had reached a white cottage in the gravel driveway of which smoldered a small heap of autumn leaves, momentarily untended. Beside it lay a bamboo rake and a garden hose, left running against the fire’s possibly getting out of hand, for a faint breeze was blowing. A puff of wind blew smoke into their faces, causing them both to pause, coughing, there on the sidewalk. When it cleared, Tillie saw that Gertrude’s face had lost its pallor, and a dangerous flush suffused her cheeks. “Well, have it or not, you are,” Gertrude said. Then suddenly she swung her pocketbook by the strap and smacked Tillie square on the jaw with the flat of it. Tillie drew back her arm and did the same.

What followed was an exchange of blows, curiously dreamlike in the regularity of their alternations, like the stylized, almost ceremonial retaliations of comics that critics of low humor call reciprocal destruction. It was especially odd since they were both by now Crazy Women. Gertrude bent to pick up the bamboo rake to beat Tillie with, then dropped it in favor of a better idea. She seized the hose and trained it straight on her adversary, playing it across her and up and down till she was drenched from head to foot. Both pocketbooks lay on the sidewalk.

“No wonder your husband left you, you dried up old hag,” Gertrude said, catching Tillie full in the face with the stream of water. She adjusted the nozzle to give it greater force. Tillie brought both arms up to fend off the jet, a thrashing motion which she suddenly converted into a counter-attack. Lunging forward through the spray, she caught hold of the nozzle, by the motivation intrinsic to the nightmare in which they were unfolded, and wrested it from Gertrude’s grasp with a violence that sent them both pitching to the ground. Tillie recovered her balance first, at least enough to rise to her knees, and in this position proceeded to turn the tables and douse Gertrude. They were now both sopping wet. Their hair was plastered to their heads. With Gertrude still down, Tillie managed to climb to her feet. Which was a mistake, because Gertrude got to her own knees and tackled Tillie about the legs, bringing her down like a football player. The two were wrestling in the puddles, pulling each other’s hair and clawing at each other’s mud-spattered faces, when a whistle sounded and two cops came galloping up the street and pulled them apart.

Neither woman ever got to the ball. Tillie entered a local sanatarium, while Gertrude was flown for a much-needed rest to an institution in the Bahamas.