Love Among the Particles

It was the day of the boat races, and Stanley Marvel and his friend Rolly were there, sitting on a grassy bank overlooking the river. The river was brown. On it sped the thin, bright shells of the rowing teams. Red, blue, green, and yellow boats coasted over the river. In the stern of each boat, a coxswain rocked, urging his team on through a megaphone strapped to his head. Neither friend could hear what the coxswain said to inspire the oarsmen in their furious paces, but Stanley Marvel secretly believed it was dirty stories.

Stanley and Rolly were alumni of one of the colleges whose boat crew raced toward the yellow rope stretched between two boats downriver. They were members of the class of ’15. It was Skimmer, an annual college spectacle, which had brought them to sit on the grass.

Rolly wore a striped jacket, boiled white shirt and collar. His school tie waved in the breeze from the river. Stanley Marvel wore his varsity sweater, emblazoned with a capital P. Both men wore straw hats with round, flat brims, known as straw boaters or skimmers, white duck trousers, and pearl gray spats. Both sported pencil-thin mustaches and gold pocket watches fastened to their waists by fobs and chains. Both wore hair oil, which trickled down their collars in the summer heat.

From time to time, they took swigs from flat silver pocket flasks. Between races, they read newspaper accounts of the game played the day before between the New York Giants and the Boston Braves.

“That is a very accurate observation: There is certainly loveliness over there. And I think I shall go speak to it.”

“I was riding the trolley car on my way home from Gimbals. I’m a salesgirl there, in lingerie. Today was my Saturday to work. I sat on the river side like I always do to look at the boats. And it looked so cool there by the river. So when the trolley stopped to give the horses a drink, I thought I’d just get off and have a nice cold drink of water from the fountain by the horse trough and then go and have a look at the boats.”

Stanley looked up from the newspaper. A lovely girl leaned over the stone trough and filled a tin cup. She had removed her hat and with a dampened handkerchief was mopping her forehead and neck. Her forehead was high and wide, her eyes set rather far apart.

She said nothing, but instead looked away to where a shell from the Vesper Boat Club sliced through the river.

“Those boats there, with the crimson-and-blue bands slanting diagonally on their hulls, represent my alma mater.”

They bought lemonade and cakes in the basement of one of the boathouses. Then they went and strolled along the pavement that followed the river and looked at the boats sliding crisply through the dark river as the sun dropped behind the heroic statue of the Union soldier on horseback.

Suddenly fireworks. Over the black river. Showers of bright sparks. Pinwheels of flame. Whoosh. In the light of the fireworks, they could see boat crews putting their boats away in the boathouses. Bang. Claire Moon moved into Stanley Marvel’s arms and was enfolded there.

“I am a rising young man. I have my own business—the butter and egg business. I have a truck, and there are not many men in the butter and egg business who have a truck.

“Would you care to take a ride? I have a can of milk that should still be nice and cool. You could drink milk and ride in the truck. I’ll drive you home.”

Stanley Marvel guided his butter and egg truck through the park and into the street. On Dauphin Street, Negroes sat on steps, drinking and laughing. Under a streetlamp, a man was retching.

Stanley Marvel: “We have given them a part of the city in which to live. They should not soil it with the way they live.”

He scraped his cheeks with the Gillette and then swished it in the gray shaving water. The Gillette was heavy in his hand. Tiny whiskers marked where the shaving water lapped against the porcelain sink. They showed the high-water mark made each time the Gillette displaced its equal volume in water.

Bay rum on his cheeks, neck, the back of the neck, just where the hair begins, brushed into his hair with his fingers.

He brushed his hair with a pair of tortoiseshell military brushes. Hair oil. A rakish sweep of dark hair over his forehead achieved with a comb.

Rolly was downstairs. He wanted to take Stanley downtown to a taproom where he knew some girls, so he would forget all about this wedding business. But Stanley wouldn’t let him upstairs. Rolly left.

And then Stanley rode to the grocer’s and bought two wooden boxes of big strawberries. He put these in the icebox of their new house. He also put a bottle of champagne on ice.

Stanley Marvel: “It was over before I knew what happened. The organist played the Purcell thing, and then next thing I knew I was knocking rice out of my hat. I wanted to walk out with Claire on my arm with a certain . . . dignity, like I was used to all the fanfare; but I forgot all about it. I may have shuffled out.”

Leaving the church, Stanley noticed his friend Rolly at the back. He was standing with some colored people. They were dressed flamboyantly. They each had one of the woven straw (rattan?) fans that had been donated to the church by a neighborhood funeral parlor. It was hot. Rolly and the colored people stole the fans.

Rolly had tied the butter and egg truck to an orange fireplug. When Stanley and Claire pulled away from the church, waving to family and friends, the truck yanked the hydrant out of the pavement like a tooth. Water burst from the stump and fountained into the blue air.

Several well-wishers were soaked through to the skin. Stanley Marvel’s mother dropped her flowers onto the pavement. They lay there, pink and white carnations, in a puddle.

They drove to their new house and parked the butter and egg truck outside. Stanley carried Claire inside and kissed her. They sat in the kitchen, eating strawberries and drinking champagne. Then they went upstairs and changed from their wedding clothes into their traveling clothes.

Stanley read Claire a poem through the bathroom door. The poem was called “A Vow,” by Edgar Guest. It goes like this:

I might not ever scale the mountain heights
Where all the great men stand in glory now;
I may not ever gain the world’s delights
Or win a wreath of laurel for my brow;
I may not gain the victories that men
Are fighting for, nor do a thing to boast of;
I may not get a fortune here, but then,
The little that I have I’ll make the most of.

They stopped at Haddon Hall in Atlantic City. There was a white bar of Clover Leaf soap in the soap dish on the Belgian marble-topped sink. There was a clean water tumbler. There was a small brownish bouquet of roses with a little card: From the Management.

She went into the bathroom to change. She wore a robe that reached to the floor. She wore underpants with lace edging for her bridal night. She sat before the mirror and combed her hair one hundred times. Stanley marveled at its length and shininess. He bent and sniffed it.

Claire smiled secretly. Then she unstoppered the bottle of Thelma, “Queen of Perfumes,” her sister had given her for a wedding present. Claire moistened the heel of her hand with Thelma and dabbed the sweet fragrance onto her neck and temples.

She left school after the tenth grade. She worked for a while as a filing clerk in the Contagious Hospital. In those days, there were lepers behind high stone walls. She worked next in a downtown department store as a salesgirl.

Occasionally, she bought fancy underdrawers. She was a virgin until her wedding night, although she once permitted John Grabowski, an orderly in the Contagious Hospital, to put his hand under her shimmy.

They went to the Air Circus outside Atlantic City. They drank a mixture of lemonade and beer and ate hot dogs while they looked at the sky. It was a cloudless day. Red, blue, green, and yellow biplanes purred and putted above them. The airplanes banked and turned and dived at the grandstand and buzzed the fairgrounds. Clowns rode on the bottom wings, holding on to the struts.

Claire admired the dashing aviators. They had little mustaches, leather jackets and helmets, and long white scarves, which snapped behind them as they bounced down the field and took off.

After the show, Stanley Marvel gave one of the aviators two dollars to take Claire and him up. They rode in a big circle. At one point, they could see Haddon Hall Hotel with its red tile roofs and green awnings and, behind it, the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean looked blue and flat. As the aviator turned his airplane toward the field, Stanley looked at the people milling about below him. From where he sat, all the derbies looked like periods.

When the plane went up, I felt this feeling between my legs; it tickled me and made me want to wet, like on the roller coaster. Suddenly, we were in the air, and I had another peculiar sensation. I was excited. My nipples got hard and the rough cotton of my shimmy rubbed against them. In the wind, I felt like I was tugged at. I turned around, and the pilot winked at me—I’m sure he did. His mustache was blond. His eyes were blue as the ocean. When we turned around to land, I felt like all the men on the ground were looking up my dress.

Claire Moon’s Portrait (II)

1. There is always the possibility that everything in her first portrait is false.

2. This possibility may mean Claire is more complex than we at first thought.

Stanley and Claire went downstairs to breakfast. Breakfast at Haddon Hall was a high-class affair. A waiter with black morning coat and velvet collar, waxed mustaches, and hair oiled to the top of his head showed them to their table. On the table were a white linen cloth, two white linen napkins rolled inside rings, a bowl of fruit, a cut-glass vase of pinks, and a card. On the card someone had written in calligraphy with India ink: Mr. & Mrs. Stanley Marvel.

From where Stanley and Claire sat, they could see the ocean. Bright parasols paraded on the yellow boardwalk, escorted by bobbing skimmers. Prams and bicycles rattled over the boards. Kites with rag tails flew from the beach over the ocean; and just beyond the white-edged surf, small boats drifted at anchor while men in derbies and skimmers and ladies with parasols fished for the delicate white-fleshed weakfish.

orange juice
buttered toast
eggs (shirred, fried or scrambled)
bacon
sausage
or Philadelphia scrapple
baked scrod
fried potatoes

& coffee or tea

As they ate, they listened to the string quartet; admired the quiet precision of the black-coated and oiled waiters moving among the tables with deference and the assuredness of people who know how to behave in opulent surroundings; watched the men and women promenade on the boardwalk; watched the boats at anchor lift and settle on the ocean’s heave, the sudden bounding of a sailboat; and caught the occasional flash of sun against a fish’s belly as it was reeled in and netted.

Stanley Marvel looked up from his eggs and started. Rolly stood over them, tall and blond, elegant in white linen suit and pink tie.

Stanley Marvel was not pleased to see his friend Rolly, who dragged a chair over to the table and sat without waiting to be asked.

1. He hadn’t forgiven him for tying his Ford truck to the fireplug.

2. He resented his attempts to lure him to a taproom and an easy girl on his wedding day.

3. He was shocked that Rolly had brought colored people to the Presbyterian church and had stolen the fans.

4. He wanted to be alone with Claire.

5. He secretly feared Rolly’s power over women.

6. He hated Rolly’s pink tie.

Rolly drew on the white linen cloth with a fingernail, looking all the while at Claire. Claire blushed deeply at the throat and looked at Stanley. Rolly pushed back his chair and stood up.

“All right. But I promise you this: I will take Claire one of these days, and I’ll kill you, Stanley Marvel, if you try to stop me.”

Rolly came from a big stone house. There was a gravel drive in the shape of a half-moon in front of the house, and automobiles were always parked there. Not black Fords, but red Double Berlines, cream Renault Petit Ducs with green trim, yellow Rolland-Pilains, and white Peugeot Double Phaetons with red leather seats.

He loved to hunt. He and his father had gone shooting out west with Teddy Roosevelt when Rolly was a boy. He liked the company of violent men. He boxed and fenced at the university. He flew his own airplane. His father had taught him to shoot a dueling pistol with deadly skill. His father had killed two men. Rolly loved his father.

Rolly was cruel to women: He had beaten a girl in his rooms, but his father prevented the incident from becoming a scandal by making a large endowment to the university. The Modern Language Building bears his name.

Rolly dressed in flashy clothes, enjoyed appearing in bad taste. He wore French cologne. His underwear was monogrammed, and women loved him.

Luckily for Stanley, there was a war. Rolly enlisted in the Army Air Corps. A few months later, Stanley Marvel was drafted into the Signal Corps. He trained at Fort Lee, Virginia, and was sent from there directly to France without leave and without a great coat. He received his great coat when he disembarked from the troopship, in New York City, in 1918.

Dear Claire,

We are in the Argonne Forest. I am in a rest area, so do not worry. The sergeant says there’s nothing to it, and we’ll be home by Christmas. I saw some very fine French cows this morning on a little farm. It made me think of the butter and egg business. I hope you are well and getting out once in a while with friends. I miss you.

Love,
Your husband Stanley

Stanley Marvel was over six feet tall. His father was an ingot straightener in a steel town, and Stanley had won a scholarship because of the things he could do with basketballs. He liked to be cheered by the crowd more than he liked basketball.

He was someone who needed to be liked. He hated unpleasantness. He didn’t understand why Rolly was making things unpleasant for him.

He didn’t know how to fight and, if left to himself, would have guided the enemy’s bayonet for him into his own vitals. Luckily for him, he never got near a German.

He loved girls and still believed a beautiful girl was the source of all art and was the song of the world. He would have groveled at Claire’s feet to have something to worship and to prove that she, as a woman, was worthy of adoration.

Stanley Marvel sat in a trench, quaking. He sat on a board to keep the seat of his pants dry. His feet were in the mud. It was raining. His shoes were wet. His puttees were wet and unraveled. The blanket he had around him was wet. It smelled like a wet blanket. Stanley hadn’t had a change of clothes for three weeks and so his clothes smelled, too.

He was quaking because he was wet and cold and because of the aerial bombardment. The aerial bombardment had been going on for three days without stop. It had finally gotten on Stanley’s nerves. Bad nerves made him quake with each concussion. He could feel each concussion in his ears. They hurt him, but he let them hurt. He could not keep his ears covered anymore. His nerves were bad, and he just sat there on his piece of board, in the mud, wet and quaking.

He thought the sight of the aerial bombardment was very pretty. He thought it looked just like the fireworks over the river the night he had met Claire Moon.

While Stanley Marvel sat in his trench and quaked, Claire was at a party. She wore a pink summer dress and low white shoes. Her strawberry-blond hair was unraveling from its knot on her head. She looked very pretty. Her white gloves were in her purse; and she was drinking champagne cocktails, one after another. She scandalized her friends by coming to the party in a motorcar with a handsome slacker, who was a floorwalker in a furniture department.

While Stanley Marvel sat in his trench and quaked and Claire was at a party with a slacker, having fun, Rolly was in a Jenny going loop-the-loop to escape the German triwing on his tail. There was very little night flying done then, but Rolly was doing it.

I will get Claire as soon as I get home, he thought. I will spread her delicious white limbs on my bed and get her.

Stanley Marvel was put in a troopship and sent home. After crossing the Atlantic in eight days, he was put off the ship at New York Harbor. The ship bumped against the dock. They gave him a great coat. It was brand-new. He wore his great coat as he marched to the Armory. It was summer. Then he was mustered out.

Stanley Marvel went home to Philadelphia. He came by train and walked along Broad Street in his uniform and great coat. People were sick of seeing soldiers.

Claire was at the movies with the handsome slacker, who was no longer a slacker now that the war was over. He was manager of the furniture department.

Several weeks later, Rolly forced his way into Stanley Marvel’s house and shot Stanley in the knee with an army pistol.

He took Claire outside and pushed her into a motorcar driven by a confederate he had engaged while in the army hospital. The confederate had his right arm pinned up, and together they drove the motorcar to the airfield.

August 29. One of the strangest accidents known to aviation caused the deaths of Rolly Wincapaw, well-known playboy and flying ace, and Claire Moon Marvel of Philadelphia. Wincapaw was piloting his Fokker T-2 over Lake George when a gust of wind wrapped the lady’s skirt around the “joystick,” or control column. Frantic efforts to disentangle it failed, and in a wild swoop the airplane struck the water with terrific impulse. A sliver from a wing strut pierced the pilot’s skull, and the unconscious Mrs. Marvel was drowned.

Claire made heroic resistance against her abductor and entangled the joystick with her dress rather than dishonor her husband.