GENEVA WAS ALWAYS a quiet girl, who like most quiet people could periodically come out of her shell to raise worse hell than you get from people who make a general practise of asserting themself, like me. (I’m tall and angular as a carpenter’s rule, with a lantern jaw and eyes the color of grass stains. Well thats over with.) Geneva was always strong and sturdy, with hips that swayed like a bell when she walked, and big round eyes the color of butterscotch. Her gold hair fell to her shoulders, when it wasn’t tucked up inside one of her father’s cloth caps, because she could not abide braiding it or her mother bear to have it cut. When Geneva was twelve her mother did agree to having it cut off, first braiding it into one thick plait which now hangs framed behind glass in her mother’s bedroom between the picture of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple and the famous photograph of Teddy Roosevelt where the light is bouncing off his glasses?
Geneva was looked down on by her peers as they call them now, but not then, the other farm folk and grocers wives and daughters, for wearing dungarees. Till the New Yorkers began moving in and dungarees become shiek. It was the ish women I first see come into the salesroom for chickens wearing pants, sometimes with a mink coat on too. I never stood in aw of them no matter how they showed their superiority, upside down or right side up. One of them, admiring the look of the farm one fine spring morning, started quoting Tennyson at me. Which got my goat, as I knew she thought she was talking down to a clodhopper. “Reading Tennyson,” I says with a air of aphorism, “is like drinking liqueur. Your likelier to get sick on it than drunk.” Then I stuck my tongue out at her, just before she turned around from the window out of which she had been gazing. She started to chat about her daughter Lila, only yesterday a waif in pigtails bicycling up to the farm to fetch the week end’s order, now a graduate of Carnegie and through acting school and working in a famous Broadway producer’s office. “She’ll be directly under Mr. Slatkin,” the woman said. “Most of the time anyway,” I thought to myself, knowing them New York producers all right. This mother likes to brag how helpless the girl is, she’s so artistic. “She can’t cook, she can’t sew, she can’t type, she can’t nothing,” the woman says, and I says, “Well that’s talent.”
Geneva always pitched in with the chores, even the slaughtering. My wife and I use to kill only once a week in the old days, when we had a small trade. (I lost my wife very quickly, through the medium of ruptured appendix. I don’t glorify the old days blindly—the fact that there were no antibiotics then ain’t one of the things that make me hanker for them.) With Woodsmoke solidly a suburb of New York, business tripled and now George and Mare kill twice a week. While we disliked on sight the new element that could make a curio out of a 1st family like us, we knew that to expect Geneva to be unaffected by what was now her environment would be folly and bucking progress. So I said nothing. But I sure thought a heap when the girl I only yesterday dandled on my knee come home from high school one afternoon when I was stretched out on the parlor sofa taking a snooze and sat down on my stomach. It was the new sophistication. She had so much makeup on her eyes she could hardly keep them open. Which no doubt give her the sleepy siren look no doubt intended by all the calcimine.
“Tad Springer and I have got charge of panel discussion in Social Slops tomorrow,” she said, in between eating an apple. “The subject is ‘Preparation for a World of Strife.’”
“What will you do?” I asked as well as I could with the weight on my middle. “How will you handle the meeting?”
“Probably throw hot tar on the kids. That ought to prepare ’em.”
My heart went out to her. I knew she was playing a role, trying the new sophistication on for size. That it didn’t fit by a mile only added to her appeal—which I hoped in the end the right man would see behind all the camoflage. She kind of rolled those butterscotch eyes away, using the bored manner to cover up the embarrassment she was really feeling at the way she was acting. Our Geneva was as ripe and yellow as the Grimes Golden she was sinking her teeth into. I thought to myself, You’ll go far baby, provided you just stay where you are. This brittle stuff ain’t for you. It ain’t your speed. The squeeze on my gut finally made my nose bleed, bringing the discussion to an end.
But I remember something odd. I remember a sensation I had then, of wanting to know more about the tendencies that were infecting our Geneva. It come from nowhere, as those inspirations often do. According to a story I read in a newspaper column, Thornton Wilder claims he got the idea for The Skin of Our Teeth while watching Hellzapoppin, a show I never saw but which apparently had a lot of shenanigans with the audience. Anyhow when somebody come down the aisle and laid a chicken in his lap he said to hisself, “Wilder, your going to write a play.” When Geneva sat on my stomach eating an apple and talking about throwing hot tar on the kids in Social Slops I says to myself, “Spofford, your going to write a book. Your going to take a closer look at this society that made you a D.P. in your own back yard. You may even get mixed up in it. Your going to eat of the fleshpots of Egypt.” Which struck me as odd, as I have always believed in plain dealing.
The name of Tad Springer come up next when Geneva arrived home from school the middle of that December to announce that she was going to the Senior Dance at the country club with him. Our sensation was definitely in the sweet-and-sour category. It give us a turn as well as a thrill, because the natural pleasure of having a daughter asked to the big Holiday do by a boy whose family belonged to the country club was tempered by doubts how she would fit in with that society, which in turn remember we took a dim view of. You could pick no better example of the culture that made us D.P.’s in our home town than the Springers.
“Well well,” Geneva’s mother says on hearing the news. “We’ve never met Tad of course, but I know his mother very well. She patronizes us.”
“You can say that again,” I says.
No cigar. What burns me is the way George and Mare never read a book, never watch anything on television except junk, never look up a new word when they come across it, let alone make a point of learning one new one a day as I have now for thirty years or more. Thus they never get fine points. Subtleties go by them like the Jags past the farm. Bad habits are nothing but quicksand in slow motion, and George’s and Mare’s is to let what brains they have rot. George has one virtue, he’s modest, and the edge is taken off that by the fact that theres no point in his being anything else. I couldn’t even get him to high school—he preferred to quit school and settle down to work on the farm, where he’s been content ever since. As for Mare, if she ever reads anything besides the local newspaper its a True Confessions magazine. I told her once in a fit of peak that she was bovine, and she only give the grateful grunt she always does when acknowledging a compliment crouched in big words. She automatically thinks a big word is flattering. I tried once to see just how far I could go with this game that I played with her, and with her mother too, Mrs. Punck. One day when “execrable” was my new word I says to her at dinner, “Your cooking is always execrable but tonight you’ve outdid yourself.” She give the grateful grunt, looking away, and George nods too, turning the pages of a bowling catalogue. Of course I wouldn’t of said that if her cooking was that, not being a monster, but I think I have the right to chastise rotting minds when I have to live with them. The amusement I got out of these games is bitter.
Anyhow Geneva give me a smile for my quip, but when I developed the point, airing some anxieties about crossing social lines, she said, “Oh Gramps, don’t be absurd. That kind of Is she our sort? business went out with Marquand.”
“Did it?” I says, not knowing whether Marquand was a man or a substance but making a mental note to look it up in the dictionary, and if it turned out to be a man feeling reasonably certain I didn’t need him to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of human nature, which I can study for myself where I have always found it, right under my nose.
Well Tad Springer called again after the ball, as I was positive he might, picking Geneva up in a blue Fiat convertible which we caught glimpses of only from the upstairs bedrooms to which Mare shooed all of us, herself included, so Geneva’s suitor wouldn’t have to meet us. Mare was grooming the girl to be ashamed of us—her test for the education we scrimped and saved to give her, which next consisted of Wycliffe College for women, up in Massachusetts. Tad Springer, a handsome beanpole over six feet tall, went to a college in London. He stayed abroad the next summer too, so the romance died down, but the summer after their sophomore year they both spent hacking around Woodsmoke, and it all flared up into something serious. Geneva was a radiant creature now, her fair skin glowing with that light that seems to shine from inside healthy young girls, her butterscotch eyes giving her face the kind of goofy beauty it has always had. When a set of white teeth adds its wattage in a burst of laughter the general effect is almost too much, as she seems to sense herself, because she has a habit of closing her eyes when she laughs, and of looking away from you when she isn’t. There is something at once shy and hostile about her. When she was home, that summer of swimming and speedboats and what not with Tad Springer, she generally kept to her room, hiding her bliss. Then suddenly she kept to it to hide something else. Because the bottom fell out of the affair—or rather was knocked out of it by the Springer clan, as we later heard. It was quite a crisis I can tell you. They called in the local minister to talk to her, some stroke of diplomacy! It’s been my experience that most ministers aint as bad as they sound but since all you can do is listen to them what the hell good does that do you? Lucky for Geneva she soon had Wycliffe and another college year to distract her, and I think she got over it in time.
No so her mother.
Mare had always been a hostile woman. Now she was one mass of grievance. You may of observed to yourself that sour people often are not selfish, while “nice” ones are often the most egotistical? I give you a moment to go down your list of friends and acquaintances . . . Through? Now back to our story. Well Mare would give you the shirt off her back but never a kind word. Not caring a fig for herself, she was a Tartar for her daughter—and now the Tartar burst into full bloom. She had enough family pride to be poisoned to her roots for the rest of her life by a snub like that. She now lived for one thing—to see Mrs. Springer come in that salesroom door in her superbly tailored dungarees and ask for a couple fryers. Just once. Mrs. Springer would of gotten a earful that would of scorched her to a cinder where she stood. But Mrs. Springer didn’t come back and she didn’t come back, clearing up any remaining doubts who put the kibosh on the romance. I often wished she’d show up one last time and give Mare the chance to get out of her system in one big scene what was poisoning her very blood. But summer passed into fall and fall into winter and no Mrs. Springer, only the wound festering deeper and deeper inside my daughter-in-law.
The only way she had of venting her spleen was to take it out on the commuters who did continue to show up. She identified them as a class; they stood for the Springers and the Springers stood for them. She was curt with them, disobliging, finally making plain to them what she was frustrated from making plain to Bobsy Springer, that they could take their custom elsewhere. The cold war on the class that had wounded one of us Spoffords became a hot war—she refused point-blank to sell chickens to commuters and advised George and me that that had better be our policy too. We were suddenly up to our ears in a Grade-A feud. By this time Geneva had probably forgotten her jilting, but her mother was just hitting her stride in a way that began to alarm me.
“In other words,” says George one evening after we heard Mare tell an ish woman we were fresh out of something the cooler was full of, “we don’t sell to commuters period. That the size of it?”
“That’s the size of it. Leastways in any house I’m intended to stay a working member of.”
“What about eggs?”
“Eggs neither.”
The woman was sick. Or it was a case of saying more, or going further, in a passion than you really meant to and being stuck with what you blurted. You know the experience. Maybe it was a combination of the two, complicated by her time of life. I don’t know. I wouldn’t care to say. We all see to it that out troubles are shared, and Mare in this case got to treat me as a member of the family before I could think fast enough to treat her as one, and made it clear that she was laying down the law to me as well. I would see to it that the embargo against the snobs was enforced while I was on duty too if I expected to find any dinner on my table at night. The point was not negotiable, as they say in diplomacy these days. Her scalded pride wouldn’t let her back down, or us off the hook. We were all stuck with this blockade of the enemy and the war was total. George give me a combination shrug and look of holy terror that was a sight to behold as he up and beat it to his haven of refuge—the bowling alley.
That was how matters stood when I gathered together what I have written so far and showed it to Flahive.