GEORGE AND MARE were in town, shopping and looking in at the bank about some business matter. Geneva was at the beach with her friends. I was once again minding the salesroom. It was pleasant. I sat on the high stool behind the counter reading a book.
After a bit I heard the door to the kitchen open and Mrs. Punck come down the two stairs into the salesroom. I grit my teeth. We had of course seen each other in the house that morning, so no greeting was necessary. I didn’t even look up from my book.
I sensed her circling behind me, pausing just long enough to glance down over my shoulder to see what I was reading—Vanity Fair by Thackeray. She didn’t speak but puttered helpfully about, which was even more of a cross, tidying the cartons of eggs, checking the paper bags on the counter and replenishing them from a supply in the back bin. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that she was wearing a blue and white polka dot dress. It looked freshly ironed. She spoke at last.
“I’m sorry Mare dropped all those hints about people getting fixed up,” she said. “They weren’t even sly. But Mare ain’t got it in her to be sly.”
“They were hardly on the subtle side, were they?” I said dryly. “Not as deep as a well or as wide as a church door, but you got the idea.”
“Church door, so that’s what’s on our mind this morning. Well.”
I closed the book and shoved it aside. The time had come to spell things out.
Spell them out I did, as bluntly as I could without being unkind. I said that I had nothing against her personally—indeed she was one of the most personable women I knew and a splendid catch for the right man—but I wasn’t that man. We simply lived in different worlds. We no longer spoke the same language. That, in a nutshell, there was no true rappaport between us, and the union would be a disaster within 6 mos.
“No true what?” she asked.
“Rappaport. You see? I would be explaining every other word I used. It just won’t wash.”
Mrs. Punck, who had hoisted herself onto the stool I had vacated to pace the floor, shook her head in a unhappy daze. “Those two for a quarter words. I thought you were talking about that new doctor that just moved into the Hollow. I believe he’s a Jew.”
“No, no. It’s something that exists between two people. Means the same as affinity. Or compatibility. Or being soul mates, if you understand that term better.”
“But Frank,” she protested, “don’t you think you may be exaggerating something two people can rise above if they really put their minds to it, and want to make a go of it? I think you are.”
Having been made somewhat self-conscious by the nature and importance of what we were discussing, Mrs. Punck left the stool herself, got a broom from the corner and began busily sweeping the floor. She worked at arm’s length so as not to soil her dress. “And you think you might find this companionship more with some—the time is past for mincing words—some woman of the sort you’ve been hobnobbing with? Are you getting notions, Frank?”
“It’s not a question of notions. Notions are what we’re trying to squelch. But I suppose you could say something has rubbed off on me, yes,” I said, walking to the window, where I stood looking out. “If it comes to that.”
“If I may say so, I don’t think that at your age you can afford to go on the idea that a rolling stone gathers no moss, Frank Spofford.” Using both names indicated a lecture. “Do you know people are talking about you?”
“Well like Oscar Wilde said, it’s not as bad as not being talked about.”
“Such a nut. Local man?”
“Hardly,” I says. “What do they say about me?”
“That you’ve changed. That you’ve become a snob and a caution. That you’ve kicked up your heels and lit over the hill like a colt in flytime.”
“It’s because I have that Geneva’s back in with the quality.”
“I doubt that was your aim, but we’ll grant it as a byproduct. Yes we’re all glad for her, but still sad for you, Frank. You ain’t let up now the aim’s realized. I hear you entered your Lizzie in the car show at the Country Club.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“They’re not our sort, Frank, the gazebos who go in for that,” said Mrs. Punck, using a term that rolled us back in time to about the year the Lizzie come out, 1926. “You’ll never more than half belong in that world, while losing your footing in the one you do. And that leads to the greatest heartache a person can have—not belonging. Geneva’ll belong, in the long run, I suppose, but leave it for her, Frank. Now that you’ve got her on the road, come back yourself. Come home to us. This trying to rise above our station.” I could imagine her sad headshake. “You remind me of a man with his feet on two cakes of ice to once, pulling farther and farther apart, till at last he splits down the middle like a wishbone and falls in the water and drowns.”
“Block that metaphor!”
“What?”
Personal as the discussion had been so far, it now become even more so. It become intimate. I could sense Mrs. Punck herself turn away as she sent it along in that direction, so that we were probably now standing back to back as she said: “I think that when all is said and done, your hankering is mainly that of a man without a woman.”
“The world is full of women and of hankering. They rouse more of it than they could possibly satisfy, and that’s the godawful and everlasting Nature’s truth of it. But I guess we’re meant to hanker. Without it there wouldn’t be no art or poetry or music. No nothing. I sometimes think it’s all one great mating cry, mostly out of season.”
“You know what, Frank? It’s when you lapse into your real self, your old-fashioned self, talking the way we talk, giving that self a chance, that you make sense. That you say noteworthy little things. When you put on airs and try to talk like them is when you say things nobody will remember tomorrow, or even wants to listen to today.”
“Let’s not be chintzy, darling.”
“You just dropped ten feet in talk level, Frank Spofford.” I could hear her tug her pretty dress to rights and give the sniff that accompanied pithy summings up.
There was a short silence. Then she pushed the conversation forward, with the critical turn I had been steeling myself for.
“I’m not blaming you for the other night. For what happened in the bedroom. It was as much my fault as yours. Or say it was nobody’s fault—it just happened. My point is that it proved the hankering in both parties.”
“And mine is that those two parties lack what I said, to make what one of them calls a ‘go’ of it.”
I spoke with such finality, turning around as I did so, that Mrs. Punck reached for the broom which she had propped against the counter and resumed sweeping the floor, this time more briskly. She had no intention of relinquishing the subject however. After a few minutes she paused again and, leaning a forearm on the broomstick while holding it with the other hand, said, “Do you know what I’d like, that I think might be helpful? I’d like to hear you talk to some of these people. That you claim you’ve got this rappaport with. I’d just like very, very much to get an earful of that brittle talk once. Just to know what I’m up against.”
“You’ve heard me talk it.”
“To us, but not to them.”
“You heard me with McGland and Mopworth the other night. That ought to give you a rough idea what you’re up against.”
“You didn’t have much of a chance to get a word in, besides I want to hear you talk it with a woman. This other language you keep harping on. Then I might pick up some pointers, and know more what you’re looking for in a mate.”
“I doubt whether it would do any good. It’s too late.”
“It wasn’t for you. You learned. And I do appreciate some aspects of what you’ve become—I don’t want to be misunderstood on that point. Your enlarged vocabulary as such, the way you dress. That dogtooth jacket is very becoming.”
“Houndstooth! You see? I need someone who speaks the English language with a little precision. It’s all I ask, but I do ask that.”
We had been discussing matters in this vein for several minutes when an open blue Jaguar swept into the driveway and came to a stop. It was Mrs. Beauseigneur herself behind the wheel.
“There’s one of them now!” Mrs. Punck spoke rapidly, suddenly quite agitated. “Now look, why don’t I hide in here somewhere and listen? Right here under the counter would be perfect. I could hear everything.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Why not? There’s plenty room, and I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Besides you owe it to me. To both of us. To all of us. We’ve been going through a lot with you, Frank, and—”
“Oh well, all right,” I said at last, figuring what could I lose.
I shoved Mrs. Punck hurriedly under the counter as Mrs. Beau sprang out of the car and came toward the salesroom door. I should say that there had been a slight thaw in the cold war with the suburbanites in the past few days, thanks to the turn matters had taken. Mare had agreed to accept a limited number of them to do business with, and these were added to another, considerably smaller, quota on which I had insisted as part of my terms for taking her mother in the house to live with us, once I had pulled myself together after recovering from the humiliation of getting caught stealing my own chickens and drawn myself up to my full height on all that matter. These were a handful of close friends and employers, people who had a drag with me. Mrs. Beau was definitely one. Hence her blithely coming in here expecting to be waited on no matter who was on duty. Still she was glad it was me, I could tell from her expression, when I had straightened up again after stowing Mrs. Punck under the counter. Well under, I saw to that. I shoved her as far back as I could into a corner against the wall, where she settled herself as comfortably as she could on all fours. I may have handled her a bit roughly as the haste and other circumstances required, because she stuck her head out one last time and said, “You usen’t to be so uppity when—”
“Under! Under and quiet.”
Mrs. Beau was bright as a poppy in a red silk blouse and beige slacks, and as usual give her charming impression of one shattered by reality as she poked strands of hair under her headscarf and fought the door. “Disintegrating,” she laughed. “Well, Frank, I see you’re at the old stand again.”
“For my sins. The whole famn damily’s out. You look more than usually charming today.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Beau saw the book open on the counter and swung it around to read the title. “Vanity Fair. How are you liking it?”
“All right. I thought it sort of drug in the middle, like the Old Testament.”
We chatted a few minutes more in the vein that the unseen listener wanted to hear. Then Mrs. Beau looked at me and said: “Frank, I hear you talked to the Golden Age Club on Gowan McGland the other day.”
I threw up my hands, regretting Mrs. Punck couldn’t see, because the gestures and mannerisms are all part of how this sort of thing is done. “Bad news travels fast. How do they say I was? Show me no mercy.”
“They say you were fine. You read some of his current things? Which is more than I have. That’ll learn me to give you magazines. Do you like him?”
“Very much. Some of the lines take a little doing—sort of Ambiguitysville—but then that’s par for the course. In fairness to myself I did try to get Gowan on the blower first—their speaker got sick you know—but I couldn’t. Oh you mean how do I like Gowan personally? Very much. I mean he wears well.”
“Where did you meet him?” she asked me, curious.
“At the Springers. He’s staying there of course.”
“Yes I know. I haven’t met him but I hope to Saturday.”
“Ah,” I said, “you’re going to the big do for him.”
“Yes. Will you be on deck?”
“Now, Mrs. Beau,” I said, “some of us have to stay home so the rest of you can be exclusive.”
She laughed and said, “Frank, you’re impossible. Look, I’ve been meaning to thank you for helping Bobsy Springer out with her roses. I heard you went. It was sweet of you. I didn’t get a chance to tell you at the Bronsons party. You didn’t seem very happy there that night.”
“Well I’ll tell you. I have no objections to serving American wines. But those bottles with the caps on instead of corks, that you screw off? I mean handling the account is no excuse.”
“Now Frank, you’re getting to be a terrible snob. But leave us not talk about it. They don’t care about wines. But the food there is always superb. You must have tucked in your share of stew.”
“Better than you did. Don’t tell me you’re dieting again. Look, here’s my rule about that. A woman doesn’t have to watch her figure as long as the men still do. That’s Spofford’s Law. We don’t want the ladies walking around like scarecrows you know.”
“Well you’re very sweet. But the fact is I’m getting in shape for all that food on the Flandre. We’re sailing for Europe the last of September. Did you know?”
“No, I didn’t know. That’s wonderful. And going sort of out of season. That’s playing smart. How long will you be gone?”
“Well Lester’s taking a month, which will give us a good three weeks, because we’re flying back. Time to take in the whole Continent.”
“In one swell foop.” I climped up on top of the counter and sat on it with my back to the wall and hugging my knees. “Tell me, you going to tuck in Spain?”
“I think so.”
“Because otherwise Mrs. Wilcox will ploy you out of town.”
“We may even take in Athens. That’ll larn her.”
“But get her to tell you about the cathedral in Zamora with the obscene carvings on the choir seats, if she already hasn’t. Terribly amusing to hear her go on about it. Anyhow, you’re smart to go out of season.”
“We’ve no chers, actually. Lester has to take his vacation then. Look, I hope we can bank on you to keep an eye on the house while we’re away?”
“Don’t give it a thought.”
Mrs. Punck had kept very quiet up to now. But here her cramped position, or probably the strain on her sacroiliac, must have had gotten so that she had to move. So she shifted slightly, and in so doing made a little rustling sound. It was quite audible in a lull in the conversation. “What was that?” said Mrs. Beau.
“What?”
“A noise. Under there.”
“Oh, mice probably. But don’t mind them. Well what can I do you for today? We’ve got practically everything on hand.”
“Just a dozen eggs today, Frank, thanks. I thought I’d fix an omelette tonight. More training for the trip.”
When she had bought her eggs and gone I said, “All right,” and Mrs. Punck crawled out from under the counter.
“Whew! . . . So that’s the way it goes.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know whether you got anything out of it or not,” I said. “But there it is.”
“I don’t get what’s so fancy about it half the time. She said ‘larn her.’ Even I with my little education know better than that. And ‘leave us not talk about it,’ and ‘chers’ and I don’t know what all.”
I stamped my foot, beside myself. “Because she knows enough not to. She’s doing it on another level. God!” I was being worn thin by all this. It all seemed so futile. We had lost more ground, if anything.
I noticed at this point that Mrs. Punck was not getting up but was remaining on all fours on the floor. She had crawled out to the middle of the room but that was all. “Why don’t you get up?” I said. “She’s gone.”
“I can’t.”
Propping herself carefully on one forepaw, Mrs. Punck gingerly raised herself a little and felt her back with the other hand. Instantly a grimace of pain crossed her face and she dropped back to her former position. I became apprehensive, remembering her sacroiliac had periodically given her trouble and once caused her to be hospitalized. Slowly, carefully, she tried again to straighten, with no more luck. The effort ended in another twinge.
“Frank,” she said, “I think it’s out again.”
“Oh, Lord.”
I got down on the linoleum beside her and tried to help her up, but my ministrations only made it worse. “It’s no use,” she said. “It has to be done exactly right, by someone who knows. You’d better call the doctor.”
“Right.” I rose and started at a gallop for the kitchen telephone, automatically intending to call Dr. Kershaw, our family physician. In the doorway I turned to ask whether it was hers too. “Yes but come to think of it he’s been on vacation,” she said. “I’m not sure whether he’s back yet. They’ll tell you at the office or the answering service who’s covering for him if he isn’t. Hurry!”
I hoped the fellow covering for him wouldn’t be Northrup. Doctors and cops shouldn’t be younger than you are—it gives you that uneasy feeling. This kid looked so young I figured he might be working his way through medical school by practising—an impression the advice itself didn’t do much to offset. From the kitchen phone I could look through the open door and watch Mrs. Punck shift experimentally around on the linoleum, there on all fours, trying to ease her discomfort by slight changes in position. Without much success. But my conversation on the phone soon gave me something else to think about. There was a kind of peculiar development, though one I was in a way prepared for by a reference Mrs. Punck had made a while before, when all the confusion and misunderstanding had been at its height between us. Dr. Kershaw was still away, and the man covering him was this Dr. Rappaport she had mentioned.
“Well that’s an odd coincidence,” I said, when I came back to report to her, somewhat sobered.
“It’s a sign,” she said, watching me from the floor like a reproachful animal.
I had reached the doctor’s office direct, and since he was just finishing up with a patient and had no others waiting for him in the reception room he arrived in less than fifteen minutes, an interval I spent trying to comfort and soothe Mrs. Punck and feed her brandy, from more or less the same quadruped position as hers. Not neglecting to take a much needed nip from the bottle myself. The doctor didn’t drive but came crosslots from his house in Punch Bowl Hollow, where he had his office, scrambling over the stone wall with his black bag, so we weren’t alerted by the sound of any car turning in and were unprepared for the sight of the sharp bearded face at the window of the door and then coming in. I had told him to go straight to the salesroom, not fancying Mrs. Punck crawling up the stairs into the house like a dog. He was a short dark man in a tight seersucker suit and a big flowered tie which hung out of it in a disheveled way. He was breathing heavily. He had burning brown eyes, with which he took in the sight of Mrs. Punck only a second before getting down on his knees beside her.
He was both gentle and amazingly skilful, manipulating Mrs. Punck’s back with a competence that suggested some shady background in osteopathy rather than a standard medical one to me. Inside of five minutes he had her straightened up on her knees, in two more on her feet. He walked her around the room like an animal trainer walking some afflicted horse, and she looked at him with a kind of dumb, grateful trust. All the while he murmured words of assurance to her in a tender, almost cooing voice.
Things weren’t as good as they seemed at first blush though; the least wrong move brought on a fresh wrench, and Dr. Rappaport didn’t seem satisfied with what his probing finger felt. “We’d best take you to the hospital for an X-Ray. Then we’ll know what’s what,” he said. He looked at me with his sort of gentle glare. “Can you drive us?”
“I’m minding the salesroom now. Can’t you take her in your car?”
“I have no car,” he said. “I don’t drive.”
“How do you get to your calls?”
“Oh, people generally give me a lift along the road, and one thing and another. And I like to walk when it’s possible. I mean if you don’t wish to close up the store for our Mrs. Punck . . .”
“Of course I will.”
I put a Back in An Hour sign on the door and locked it. I knew Mare and George would be back before then. We all squeezed into the Ford, Mrs. Punck between us. Dr. Rappaport, who took up very little room, patted her arm when we went over bumps, and when not murmuring the dove-like words of encouragement was asking me to drive more carefully if at all possible. I was turning over in my own mind something else that continued to eat me with curiosity.
“You mean you hitchhike to your patients?” I said.
“That is correct. I have not driven since 1954, when I lost my wife in an automobile accident. We lived in New Haven then. I’ve come to Woodsmoke to retire. I take very few calls, and fill in for other doctors now and then. People are very kind. They’ll always pick up a doctor thumbing a ride. Sometimes my patients themselves come to fetch me, if it’s urgent.”
He stayed to read the X-rays, by which time he already had Mrs. Punck in bed, being prepared for traction. The plates only confirmed what he already suspected from what she’d told him of her history and his own preliminary diagnosis—that she had both the nerve pinch that usually constitutes your sacroiliac, and a disc out. She lay under sedation, happily tucked in the sheets with the good doctor sitting in the chair beside her. Talk about your bedside manner! He was the epitomy of it. He had nothing else to do he said, and would be glad to stay till he was sure she was comfortable. He said that doctors were beginning to eliminate traction, relying simply on a hard bedboard arrangement for a short period of complete rest, but he still held with the traction system as contributing something to the treatment. Of which the main thing was complete rest so the spinal muscles and nerves concerned could relax. Most such spasms came from tension he told us. He asked Mrs. Punck whether she had been going through a period of strain lately, and she said “Yes, I guess you could call it that,” giving me a look. But she did it with eyes already growing heavy from the sedative. Dr. Rappaport picked up a magazine when she dropped off, and began to read.
“You going to stick around?” I says.
“That is correct. I want to make sure she’s O.K. You run along if you’d like. You probably have things to do.”
I beat it home to report to Mare and George, who were pacing the floor in the stew that could well be imagined. I gave them as coherent an account as I could of what had happened in their absence. Then after a hasty supper I drove Mare to the hospital.
We were quiet the first part of the trip. I knew what was on her mind. She had been thinking over something in my story that I had tried to skim, but that I knew would have to be dealt with in detail sooner or later. Now she wanted to know more about that.
“You say my mother was under the counter,” she said. “What exactly was she doing there?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said. “It was where she wanted to be. You see, she was hiding there so she could listen to me and Mrs. Beauseigneur talk. It was her idea, Mare, not mine. I swear it.”
“To listen to you talk funny?”
“That is correct. She wanted to get some pointers.” I was beginning to wish I had skipped that whole can of peas and let Mrs. Punck open it if she wanted later, because it only revived Mare’s confusion and along with it her hostility. I was now completely on the defensive again if not on the run, after the slight progress I had made getting back into everybody’s graces. “Was it my fault? Was it?” She didn’t answer.
When we walked into the hospital room Dr. Rappaport was still there, or rather there again after a bite of supper downstairs in the hospital cafeteria. He was smoking a pipe in the easy chair beside the bed, whereon Mrs. Punck now slumbered dreamily among an assortment of weights and pulleys. “We’ll have her out in a week or two,” he assured Mare, who of course he sprang out of his chair to give it to. “But I think a bit of traction is indicated. These backs are very tricky. Half of us have cricks coming and going and things popping in and out it seems. Look, I wonder if I might trouble you for a lift. I’ll just wait down in the lobby while you have your visit. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Spofford.” He tiptoed out, Mrs. Punck being very deep in what she herself would of called sleepsin-bye.
Rappaport was generally there whenever I visited Mrs. Punck, which was often out of curiosity as much as conscientiousness. “He’s most nice,” she told me once when we were alone together. She directed my gaze toward a basket of flowers enormously dwarfing my own dozen carnations. “He’s the gentlest man I ever met.” She added, smoothing the bedclothes on either side away from her, “And one of the few Christians.”
Once I seen Rappaport draw a rose from a vase with deadly suavity and hold it down for her to smell, his cheeks crinkling as he smiled and his teeth, brilliant for a man in his sixties, glittering like a knife. Or he would compliment her on her bed jacket. Or he would stand with an arm outstretched along the head of the bed, the other in a pocket of his trousers where he would gather up all his loose change and let it slide in a cataract off his palm while he spoke of the years in New Haven, where he had lost his wife in that traffic mishap. When Dr. Kershaw got back from his vacation we told Mrs. Punck about it, assuming she would want him to take over. But no. She wanted to keep Dr. Rappaport. There was no mistaking developments. I went home one night to lay it on the line to Mare.
“Your mother is emotionally involved with a Jew,” I says.
“Jew A is not Jew B,” she says, turning the pages of a newspaper spread out as usual on the kitchen table. “That what it says in them magazines you been reading? That what you been preaching to us around here?”
“That isn’t the side of it I mean. I mean the religious. Your mother’s religious.”
“But he ain’t, so there’s no conflict there. He wouldn’t be trying to drag her to the temple while she tried to drag him to church. He even says he wouldn’t mind going to church with her once in a while. He’s a wonderful man without no standards getting in the way. He never misses Handel’s Messiah at Christmas time. They’ve gone into all that, so they must be serious.” Here Mare’s calm front suddenly cracked. She brought both fists down on the table and rose shouting, “They’re serious do you hear! They’re talking about getting married! Married do you hear! And all because of you! It’s all your fault. You’re to blame for the whole thing, for everything that’s come over us.”
“Now wait a minute, darling,” I said, trying to recover the old manner, that is the new one. “I mean if you’re going to stand there shrieking like Tosca.” I tried to say it in the drawl but it come out in a dry falsetto, as I found myself backing away. “Why is it my fault?” Of course it was like asking a question in a catechism to which there were fixed answers. She lost no time in opening up that can of peas again.
“Because it all started with your gallivanting around. We were eternally gratefully to you for a few days there—all too few. Now we’re back where we were, thanks to you. Everything that happened is a direct result of your shenanigans. Why shouldn’t she get married, to a member of her faith? She’s got vital years left, so have you. Why couldn’t you get fixed up? That would of solved everything. But no, you had to branch out in new ways. You had to have fresh feathers. If you hadn’t started that it wouldn’t be ending this way now. Not that the end is in sight, the way it seems.”
“What do you mean, Mare?” I asked in the falsetto, further unnerved by something in her manner.
“Geneva. All this seems to’ve taken your mind off the big party and what happened there, I see, but do you know what did happen there? Or since then? Do you know who she’s taken up with? Because I don’t know from one day to the next where she is or who she’s with or what she’s up to, now she’s become a social butterfly. Things are worse than they ever were. There’s the doorbell now again. Why don’t you go see who’s picking her up this time? Because I don’t dare look.”
The above rough sketching in of the Rappaport-Punck thing gets us a little ahead of our story, of course. Now I must go back and take up the main thread of that again where it was left off.