THE peak of Augie’s conventionalization took, in terms of outward symbols, the form of his joining us all for a church supper one evening. Seated on folding chairs in the church basement, we put our minds to cutting roast beef without dissecting the paper plates on which it was served; and this with meat only moderately amenable to surgery. A jab of particular force not only cut through my plate but made a slight incision in the trousers fabric of the knee I was holding my food on, and I felt a trickling warmth which gave new meaning to the term “lap supper.” This was in the early spring. I had on a white linen suit for the first time that season, and lifting my plate I saw a stain the color of hemoglobin spreading on the pants. My companions fared better, having asked for and gotten well-done meat instead of rare. My emotions remained pent up, as we were seated within earshot of the minister, a pale, seraphic man with eyes the color of lentils. Still, what words I would have cared to utter would have been unfit for a brothel, let alone a house of worship. To some profanity that did escape under my breath my wife said under hers, “Please. We’re in church.” To which I answered, “Only in the basement.” I looked around me, and wondered what their religion really meant to the commuters I saw on every hand. I have never heard of anything being converted in Connecticut but old barns.
Looking a little like an intern calling it a day, I rose and, with Augie, took all the empty plates back to the serving counter. There we got four dishes of ice cream and four cups of coffee, and joined our ladies with them. They were deep in a conversation during which Isolde, as we approached, cast an admiring glance at her husband in the course of something she said. Sitting down, we learned what they were talking about: the slowness of the agency in not having, even yet, come through. She was clearly chafing under the delay. Which the Crib explained by saying that at the moment the demand exceeded the supply, and anyhow they hadn’t had anything that seemed right for the Pooles—for, as they emphasized more than once, they made a point of matching the parents with the child as closely as possible. This concerned the latter’s extraction (what was known of it), color of hair and eyes, and other details of general appearance on which comparison might reasonably be made. Audrey was quick to corroborate this to Isolde, from her own experience with friends who had adopted, and so was Augie, out of what appeared to be widespread private researches of his own.
“Augie’s certainly gone out of his way to find all this out,” Isolde said. “So interested.” She blew him a kiss across me.
A moment later, as we were watching a diversion at the serving tables where somebody had dropped a loaded tray, Isolde suddenly set her dessert spoon down in her dish and said: “I know what we’ll do.”
“What?”
“Try again with Rock-a-Bye.”
Augie’s face turned the color of the ice cream he was raising to his own lips, which happened to be pistachio. “Why do that?” he asked.
“Why not? Lots of couples try more than one agency. Or even more than two, before they succeed. That right, Audrey?”
“Well, yes, that’s true. The Haleys tried I don’t know how many agencies before they got something.”
“Well then.” Isolde spread a hand as at something elementary. “Why should we stick with the Crib?”
“But would shopping around be fair to them?” Augie protested. He laid his ice cream aside.
“Yes, why hurt their feelings?” I chimed in.
“Feelings!” Isolde laughed. “What’s that got to do with it? I’ve got feelings too. Look how long they’re taking. They might keep us on the string indefinitely. What can we lose by getting our name on two lists? If the Crib has something for us first, fine. If Rock-a-Bye, fine too. There’s every reason to believe Rock-a-Bye should change its mind now. Augie’s changed. And so has his whole financial picture. We never did get a clear answer on why they turned us down the first time, but I think a lot of it was this stable breadwinner idea. Besides, I think we owe it to Augie himself to make them reverse their verdict. I’ll call them tomorrow.” She emphasized this with a “so there” nod of her head.
I started to protest again, but Augie warned me off with a shake of his head, for fear of arousing suspicion.
Some suspicion had been already aroused several weeks before, when Augie’s 1099 form arrived from The Townsman office—the statement for Federal income tax return, which specified how much he had earned from the magazine as a free-lance contributor the year before. Isolde had fished it out of the mailbox and opened it, to find that he had earned considerably more than he had declared to her. He explained the discrepancy by saying he had been putting money a little at a time into a separate savings account with which he had wanted to surprise her.
“It’s like flaws turning up in a perfect crime,” Augie’d said to me. “I sure as hell never thought of that. I wonder what next.” To cover his story, I arranged for another advance from the office, and he hurriedly put the money into a new savings account which he did thereupon start.
The next link in what Augie called the infamy of events was revealed at a folk dance in Bridgeport to which we and the Pooles went, separately, early that summer.
For a long time people in our crowd had been trying to get me to folk dances. One of the most persistent was Sid Walters, the clear poet. Sid’s obsession with things of that nature formed, as is often the case, part of a generally political concern with society, and, conversely, my indifference to them has been vaguely deplored as somehow indicative of scrawny thinking and bourgeois leanings. Just how my refusal to watch large numbers of strangers exert themselves rhythmically in upstairs rooms is evidence of how I vote has never been clear to me. My blind spot on the colloquial arises in part, I suppose, from folk singers I have heard in New York night clubs, where though the entertainment may be produced on a zither the charges are not necessarily computed on an abacus. But it also dates back to a milking certain Avalonians, myself included, received at the hands of a minstrel with a guitar, who wandered into town off of a freight car and thence into our hearts with the story that he was an ex-convict, a detail which gained for him an extra status among a small but discerning minority. A purse was gotten up for him to which I contributed twenty-five dollars. Intimations that Solitary, as he called himself, was better than any predecessors, including Lead Belly, were liberally nourished by himself and others, and he had acquired a substantial vogue among the intellectuals before he was exposed as an impostor who not only had no criminal record but possessed a background spotted with nothing more than a fear of work and a few jumped hotel bills. I always thought the bastard should have been arrested. However, he disappeared from local view and was never seen again. Uppermost in his repertoire was a number entitled “I was a stranger and you took me in,” a ditty that I always think would have a fine relevance if I ever met him long enough to sing it back to him.
Sid Walters and my wife, in the end, whisked me off to a dance by conspiracy. He broke into the house one night flourishing a mimeographed handbill for a Hungarian revel when I was asleep in an armchair. “It’s tonight! In Bridgeport! Let’s pile into my car and go,” he said. Audrey clapped her hands with what I was too dopey to see was a faked extemporaneity, my shoes were fetched, and before I knew what was happening, Mrs. Goodbread materialized and I was being led off between the two plotters to the waiting automobile. It was raining. “Some night to drag a man out to a recital,” I grumbled, climbing into the back seat behind my wife.
Studiously buttoning a glove, she said, “It’s not a recital, actually, but a real dance.”
I reached for the door handle but it was too late.
“This will be the real thing,” Sid said, shooting away in second. “Ah, those czardas rhythms. What they do to a man.”
“Czardas—didn’t Hoagy Carmichael write that?” I said, determined to be as much of a Philistine as possible.
Sid sketched in something of the history and background of Transylvanian forms, and as we headed up the Post Road toward Bridgeport, talked at length about ancient folkways. I have had enough about folkways, especially when dished up with psychiatric-anthropological analysis. I slumped down in the back seat and spent the remainder of the trip trying to think up some new folkways.
One folkway I thought of was an annual so-called Week of Good Report, during which people would go from door to door repeating nice things about their friends, to “atone” for the gossip spread the balance of the year. During this week the populace would eat nothing but tongue in penitential admission of the length of their own; thus they would “take everything back” for the twelvemonth by symbolically eating their words. Then I imagined an annual ceremony involving the hanging of an anthropologist. Another possible folk custom that occurred to me was something that would fall on a day known as Maybe Tuesday, a day nationally observed by building on the already emerging folklore of the quiz show. The quiz show would be reversed. Television crews in every city and town in the country would enter homes and instead of giving away money and gifts for questions answered correctly would take away some article of furniture or other possession for everyone that was not. This would be a long ceremony, lasting all day or till the family were completely stripped of their belongings. Neighbors would gather to watch. This is of course a modernization of the scapegoat ritual, and is called Maybe Tuesday because, as the expression would go, maybe next time it would happen to you.
The dance was held over a restaurant called the Romany Café. I knew from this that it was probably genuine, all right. All authentic folk affairs are held on the second floor. Anybody taking you to one that is on the first floor and representing it as the real thing is either lying or himself the victim of a misunderstanding.
The hall was large, and filling up as we arrived. We met a man in a pea-green jacket who was doing a thesis on some aspect of the dance for his master’s, a friend of Sid’s who showed my wife how to skip. “That’s damn well what I’d like to do,” I mumbled in an aside. My wife shot me a glance which enjoined me to either keep my mouth shut or stop acting like a peasant. “Get around and mix,” she said, and disappeared on one foot. I did, and presently found myself running into friends from Avalon. We stood out, not favorably, by contrast to the many Old World costumes of the neighborhood folk; in our herringbone and banker’s flannel we were dreary to a degree. One by one, or rather two by two, the suburbanites stepped out onto the floor, and were lost in the avenging swirl.
I drifted over to a table where a heady wine punch was being served, and had two or three. There I made the acquaintance of a girl of Slavic extraction named Anna, who spoke a patois derived from coast-to-coast hookups, Broadwayese, and official bebop. “That orchestra is cool,” she said, rocking her head. The band was playing a popular favorite at the moment, but she expressed appreciation of a polka that followed in the same terms, and belittled czardas with, “Why don’t they get it off the ground?” She taught me a few of the folk steps. The Tokay in the punch reached my head and my feet simultaneously, fostering an illusion of acquired skill; my fourth drink was soon my seventh; single sensations dissolved, over the flying hours, in a general haze of wine and rhythm. About eleven o’clock I happened to glance toward the main doorway and saw the Pooles arrive with another couple. Isolde said something in my wife’s ear and they embraced happily. I guessed what the good news was from Augie’s long face.
“We’ve been accepted by Rock-a-Bye,” he said, taking me to the sidelines.
“I see.”
“We got the report today.”
We sank together onto folding chairs which bore the name of a local mortician.
“Let me think,” I said.
I was in a mixed frame of mind. Only half of me seemed to sober up while the other half continued to revel, like a street shaded on one side and in sunlight on the other, or possibly moonlight.
“You couldn’t steer Isolde away from it?” I said.
“You know I couldn’t. It was for me she did it.”
“Then we’ve got to steer Cornelia away from it—if there’s still time.”
“Would you?”
I got to my feet. “I’ll call her right away,” I said, oblivious of the hour. I looked around for a phone booth.
“Are you sure you’re in shape to?” Augie assessed me worriedly. “You look three sheets to the wind again.”
“I’m all right. There’s no time to lose.”
I found the booth and put in my call. Hubert answered.
“Cornelia’s not here, old man,” he told me. “I just got back myself from a lecture tour. I can’t tell you where she is, but I expect to hear from her. I’m leaving again the first of the week.”
“Is Carveth there? Maybe he can tell me.”
“He’s up at a planning committee meeting for Tanglewood, old man.”
“How about Emory?”
“Popped off to Rome on a Fulbright. Got it all of a sudden and arranged for a year there, while his assistant takes over. He’s studying Papal history.”
“Well, when you say she’s not there do you mean she’s in New Haven?”
“Oh, yes. She’s packed up and gone.”
I sat a moment in the booth after hanging up, wondering what to tell Augie. I decided not to tell him anything that night, since he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I would take counsel with myself tomorrow, when I could think more clearly. He was waiting for me near the booth when I came out.
“Everything’s O.K. Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“You talked to her?”
“Yes. There’s time to work something else out. Come on, have a drink.”
I had three or four myself in an effort to recapture my earlier vinous mood. I danced a couple of polkas with my wife. Everybody was having a good time. I remembered nothing much from midnight until the next morning when eight o’clock struck, like a hammer on my head. I was reassembling the night’s impressions in the shower, later on, when I placed what was weighing on my mind—Augie. I spent the next two days mulling over whether to tell him the truth. After all, there was nothing he could do about it. But maybe there was and I couldn’t think of it. Or maybe he would want to know, or should. What a responsibility. I stepped over to a mirror to see what an effect this was all having on me. I looked very discouraged, and not a little bitter. No, it was too much to shoulder alone: I would tell him.
“I’ve been trying to decide whether to break this to you,” I said to him, “and I figure you probably should know. I didn’t talk to Cornelia. She’s already settled in.”
“God,” he said, clutching his head, as though he were a newel post about to come apart.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Now let’s take a good, hard and calm look at this thing. What are the chances of—well, the Sophoclean windup to it? I take it you understand what I mean—you’ve read Sophocles?”
“Easy does it.”
“To begin with, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that Rock-a-Bye will be the one to call you first. Right?”
“They said something about thinking they’ll have something for us soon,” he said in a dry falsetto.
“Secondly, even if you do draw Rock-a-Bye, the chances of Fate doing what we’re afraid of are mathematically so—”
“And the time’d be just about now . . .” he went on to himself. “And the way they make a special point of doing everything in their power to match . . . Christola.”
Here I began to rummage for the moral in Augie’s life. Did it lie in this burgeoning irony, that the very virtue he had come to present might at the last make him vulnerable to calamity? Was the point that he had not been a complete rogue, only half a one? That if he had really told everybody to go to hell he wouldn’t be behind the eight ball now? I had hoped it was the reverse: that it was in the fires of illicit fatherhood that he was to be shriven for the respectable. I had to believe that.
“Well, anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it,” I said. “There’s a kind of relief in that—in pure helplessness. Nothing to do now but wait and see.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “I guess you’re right. It’s in the lap of the gods.”