SEPTEMBER slipped into October, summer into fall, and still no Mrs. Mash—except at the Pooles’ where she called for repeated interviews. She preferred to go slowly, letting her impressions steep and simmer. “It takes nine months this way too,” said Augie, who chafed under what he called the woman’s X-ray eyes. The exhilaration of the turning year was felt in the city’s quickened tempo. Autumn is the spring of the spirit, when the sap flows once again in wilted urban man. Also in wilted urban man who lives in the country. Audrey and I went for Sunday drives with the Pooles, improvising rides along the blazing back roads and through little towns whose names we didn’t catch and to which we fled without the aid of maps. There was an epidemic of some respiratory nuisance which all the children caught. Phoebe got it first, and she was pumped so full of penicillin that the fumes from her cured a cold I had. The others followed, and in addition to the miracle drugs, electrically driven croup kettles were set going in various corners of the house. There were so many hissing plumes of steam on all sides that the place looked like a roundhouse. We had no fears about leaving the children with Mrs. Goodbread, a skillful mechanic, who watched the croup kettles with all the care with which in the old country, she said, she had tended smudge pots to guard the orchard fruit from frost. You have an instinctive faith in anyone who has sat up all night with trees. Dr. Vancouver was all right in there too. He carried a supply of surgical masks which he put on the patients, when examining them with stethoscopes, explaining that this was indeed an epidemic and his first duty was to the community, for whom he must keep himself in fettle. Setting out on one of our foursome jaunts, we saw him parked beside the road in his car, taking his temperature. He waved as we went by, the thermometer sticking up out of his smile.
It was on that trip that I first began to notice Augie wasn’t himself. He sat slumped in the back seat beside Audrey, managing to look glum even in the yellow tartan cap and houndstooth jacket which comprised his plangent motoring gear. Cornelia Bly was in Florida for a month. Did he then miss her that much? Isolde said the picking, poking painstakingness of the agency was wearing his nerves down, as it was hers. It was an awful mental hazard. Augie, who had claimed such attunement to the autumn season that he could smell the leaves turning in their faint combustion, “exactly like something burning,” and held reveling in her melancholy to be the highest joy open to man, didn’t feel like reveling in the melancholy now. He was too miserable. “Wenn du fehlen willst, fehle gut,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Isolde said. “What does that mean—something about not feeling good?”
“No, it’s from one of the great Germans. ‘If you’re going to be a failure, be a good one,’” Augie said. In the rearview mirror in which I could see him as I drove, he seemed to be disappearing into his getup, like a turtle into its shell.
We were to lunch that Wednesday and discuss his latest try—a drunk lying in the gutter of a bowling alley—but there wasn’t much to say about it. “Make him look dreamy and happy there, and you might put in a spectator—someone looking over and doing a ‘take’ on it,” I suggested. He nodded vaguely. Our food came—a sandwich and a bottle of ale apiece. Pouring myself a glass, I asked: “Heard from Cornelia Bly lately?”
“I got a letter Friday,” he said.
“You get letters from her at home?” I asked.
“No, I pick them up at general delivery, Norwalk.”
“How’s she doing? Still down in Florida?” I was sure from his expression that she’d given him the air, but I sensed that he wanted to talk about it and was doing my best to prime him past his reluctance.
He brought the letter abruptly out of his pocket.
“You might as well know the whole story,” he said. “It’s all in this. First she tells some gossip about where she’s staying, local history and one thing and another. How we’re still technically at war with the Seminole Indians.” He poured himself some ale. “The tribe was originally formed by splitting with the Creek Indians. The name means ‘seceders.’ They fought the United States bitterly in 1817-1818, and later under Osceola. Toward the middle of the century that was. There aren’t but three hundred Seminoles left in Florida. It seems a treaty was never signed with them.”
“But that’s not what’s eating you.”
“No.” He bent his head again over the letter. “I told you Cornelia went down there to paint, but that’s not the whole story. She went down there to think things through. Come to some conclusion about ‘us.’ That’s all right, ours is a special relation, outside the pale. She felt she had to go over the whole thing objectively and without any emotional kibitzing from me. And now she’s come to a conclusion about ‘us.’ Only down here she explains what she never told me before she left. It seems ‘us’ will soon be three.”
It was a moment after his words reached me that his meaning did. There was an interval of dreamy disbelief during which the meaning floated dreamily toward me, like a shuttlecock over a badminton net well after the drive that sent it there is finished.
“I see,” I said. “And?”
“And she wants to have the child and keep it.”
“I see,” I could only unresourcefully repeat. Then I asked: “How do you feel about that? Don’t you stand on the right to live your own life, outside the pale as you say?”
“What is the matter with you?” he reproved. “A child . . .” He raked his hair and wet his lips. He shook his head distractedly. “I blame myself. . . . What’s so funny?”
“Blaming yourself. I’m sorry.”
“Who else is there to blame? I don’t know what’s the matter with you sometimes. Put yourself in my shoes.”
I kept a straight face by pretending to probe a molar with my tongue. I said:
“It seems to me this is her own affair. She’s sort of tricked you, hasn’t she?”
He seemed not to have heard me. “My old will to fail,” he said.
“How many months is she pregnant?” I asked, smiling helplessly now.
He held up three fingers, as though he could not utter the word. “Too late to do anything now but see it through.”
“She knows you’re married of course?”
“Of course. But that has nothing to do with it in her view. She feels she has a perfect right to be a miss mother if she wants.”
I asked: “Can she afford a child?”
“She’s banking on the ten thousand dollars she’s suing that flour company for. Her lawyer says it’s a sure thing. He’s got a critic who’ll testify that there’s been damage to her reputation. Thousands of people who never heard of her before have read about the case. So she figures the ten thousand she’s asking will see her through the first few years, and by that time she expects she’ll be making enough on her paintings to support the child. And of course she’s hoping to get more advertising commissions as a result of the publicity.”
The case was by this time already on the circuit court docket in New York. It came up very soon—in fact Cornelia’s lawyer called her back from Florida by wire.
We all followed it with great interest. It was a libel suit, that being the category under which damage to professional reputation comes. The trial consumed two full days of expert testimony, disputed opinion, and legal and aesthetic wrangling. The pictures were of course placed in exhibit, and a long argument raged as to which looked more mutilated, with distinctions drawn between literal and artistic mutilation. The audience was all ears. The critic who testified in Cornelia’s behalf was the editor of a surrealist quarterly called Bloodshot. I was in court with Augie the afternoon of the second day, and also two afternoons later when the judge rendered his verdict. He awarded damages to the plaintiff in the amount of twenty-five cents—in other words, Cornelia had lost the case. Augie gripped my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said.
“How the hell is she going to support that child now?” he said, in the bar to which we hurriedly repaired. “In France she’d have gotten a judgment. The artist has some rights there—what they call moral droit. Not here. I tell you, this country is a nest of Philistines.”
“Won’t she get more work, as you said?” I asked.
Augie shook his head. “Not a chance. The advertising agencies are laughing up their sleeves.” He took a long pull on his beer and lowered the stein to the table. “She’s got to give the child up now.”
“Would she lay it at your door?”
Augie gave me a slow burn; and when my face began to get out of control I hid it with my hands and said, “Oh, God,” holding them there till I had steadied myself enough to remove them and ask: “She has no other moneys?”
“Not enough. She lives with her brothers in a sort of homestead they inherited from their parents, who are dead. In Norwalk. She comes from a fine family,” he added a trifle smugly. “I’ve never been there—we only met in New York. And where would I get any extra dough?” We glanced simultaneously at an envelope full of rejections in the pocket of his topcoat, which hung on the wall, the week’s rejections which he had picked up from the office that morning. I remembered what I’d told him that night in his studio, about all the potential cash there was in his files, if he ever needed any. The same thought must have crossed his own mind because he brought his fist down and said, “She’s got to give it up.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said, “tell her.”
He did, the next night. His report was that she tended to agree, but he didn’t trust her. Women were too emotional. “Look at the cold, calculating way she sat down and figured this thing out from beginning to end—about having a child,” he said. She needed further persuasion, he was sure, pressure perhaps from another source. “I mustn’t run the risk of being seen with her from now on,” he told me across the table at which we were again lunching. “I’m being watched closely—very closely—by the agency at this stage. So I’ve got to keep my nose clean, as you say. I don’t suppose you’d talk to her?”
He had another guess coming if he thought I was averse. “I’ll be glad to,” I said, emptying a bottle of ale into my glass. He turned on me a look of canine gratitude, which I must say ill became a stormy petrel. “You’re a brick,” he said.
That was only part of it. What appealed to me was the opportunity of acting as proxy for a rogue. It was not only a role to which I was temperamentally drawn and by nature inclined, but one in which I was thoroughly grounded and even finely trained by the practice in which this picaresque side of me had been developed: I mean the hours spent at Moot Point honing my wits on just such romantic imbroglios as this. They had been literally without number, as I have perhaps adequately suggested. I had been embroiled there with women of all ages and from clinging vines to flinty intellectuals like Cornelia Bly, with no demonstrable damage. With this one a summer’s dalliance, through a squall of passion with that, and out of it all had come a fund of dexterities and attitudes, aphorisms and ripostes all ready and waiting in a reservoir of dialogue at which I was letter perfect. Put myself in his shoes indeed! When was the week in which I had not? Lucky for the collapsed rebel that there was someone available to step into his role who had been thoroughly rehearsed.
Sympathetic as I was and ready with my good offices, however, I could not forego one final, somewhat reproachful remark as I rose from the table at which my deflated radical yet tarried.
“I guess you realize now,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder, “that you’ve been living in a dream world.”