SINCE MY PROMISE to Mare had barred me from the Springers in any guise, menial or otherwise, I jumped at the chance to sit for the Hackneys, who were going socially, and whose acreage stood back to back with the Springers. The Hackney children—3 girls of assorted ages but so similar in size and appearance that they seemed a litter to which Mrs. Hackney had given birth at once—had not been 10 minutes asleep before your correspondent stole across the darkening slope of lawn through a woodlot where the property ended and that of the Springers began. Strains of music floating faintly through the evening air grew louder as I approached. The instrumentalists were a trio of sinister looking men wearing gold earrings and head scarfs. Their getup helped identify as Gypsy the melodies they produced. They stood with their backs to a grove of spruce in which I hid myself to watch. They were a fiddler, an accordionist and a cellist. The last-named spun his instrument by the neck once during an especially catchy passage, to presumably inject an American touch into the Transylvanian folk rhythms.
The party was in full swing. Several couples were dancing on the pavement around the pool, one or two on the grass around that. A woman kicked off her shoes and waltzed in stocking feet to fixed smiles of appreciation from the onlookers. A few who had acted on the invitation to bring bathing suits were in the pool. One of these was a fat man who stood waist-deep in the water holding a martini, not so much it seemed because he enjoyed doing this as to give formal expression to the principle of extreme Fun. Every one on dry land had a drink of some sort or size. I see Haxby the chunky dentist from Greenwich with whose wife McGland was trying to make time, according to the conversation I had accidentally overheard, holding a Sazarac in one hand as though it was McGland’s neck. I knew it was a Sazarac from his preference at the Beauseigneurs’ party, where he had showed me how to mix one. Most of the guests sat at tables over which were strung scores of Japanese lanterns, like at the Beauseigneurs, their festive serieses intermittently varied by tongues of sulphurous flame burning furiously on standards as deterrents to mosquitoes. Haxby’s normally flushed face and bullneck were caught in a hellish light cast by one of them, giving him the look of a demon in Hades. It crossed my mind that I would hate to be the butt of his vengeance—if that was in store for the poet. He wore a white linen coat, with a Madras bowtie and a bustin’-laughin’ cummerbund of the same material. Otherwise it was a divine evening, with a full moon beginning to clear the treetops.
I altered my station among the evergreens to case the crowd for more familiar faces—with a last look at the fat guy still allegorically representing Gaity, who seemed rather sad, standing sawed in half there holding the martini in this tablow nobody paid no attention to. The first one my eye lit on was Bobsy Springer. No anxious hostess given to pretty little sorties to keep things moving she; she sat at a table chatting and smoking like a guest herself. She was in a sheer black dress, leaning back with her legs crossed. But from time to time she did dart glances about—on the lookout for the same people as me? I think we both spotted McGland at the same time. He was strolling out the house with a pretty, somewhat stooped blonde woman in a green dress—Lucille Haxby, the sister-in-law Mrs. Springer had such a cow over. Though he strained the buttons of his white coat—or one of C.B.S.’s coats—like a business man in early middle age, his face looked younger than ever. It wore its boyish, up-to-no-good smile as he said something to the woman, or more likely asked her something, because she nodded once and walked away as though some kind of agreement had been reached. There is no mistaking that kind of exchange. The movie The Fallen Idol opens with Ralph Richardson and the woman he is having an affair with engaging in that kind of whispered conversation, of whose nature we are sure though the camera is behind them and a mile off. I shot a look at Haxby and then Mrs. Springer. Their expressions left no doubt we were all thinking the same thing.
We all now followed McGland’s passage through the crowd to a small group of young people on the opposite bank of the pool. There were five or six of them, and my heart jumped at the sight of Geneva. A shift in the ranks to make room for McGland suddenly brought her into view. She was a dream in a cloud of a white dress that set off her sun-ripened arms and shoulders, as well as her face with the big incandescent eyes that gave it that kind of goofy beauty. Now occurred one of them moments when a random scene conveys something to an onlooker unbeknownst to those taking part in it; when he seems in some queer, almost mystical, way to stand outside time and reality, like God himself—something piercing and special.
McGland trained on Geneva his famous carnivorous stare while she regarded Tad Springer, who was on her left, and who was in turn talking to a girl on his left. Now get this. It was obvious Tad was speaking about Geneva, because after the remark he jerked his head toward her and she lowered her gaze. Then she decided to laugh and punched him on the arm for what must have been some kind of crack about her. Tad put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. I looked quickly back to Mrs. Springer. She was on her feet, watching the scene like a hawk like me.
What drove me crazy was that I couldn’t hear a word that was being said, but must take in the whole complex and spreading tissue of this thing by eye. The entire party including the damn pool stood between me and those I was most anxious to overhear—who most deserved the benefit of my eavesdropping too. Near the young people a large forsythia, which I had trimmed, offered itself as a handy cover from which to listen, but as I skirted the house in a wide arc designed to fetch me up just the far side of it, there was a pause in the music in which I could hear the tinkle of a distant telephone.
With a shock I remembered the Hackneys habit of checking in once or twice in the course of an evening to see how the children were, and veered off to their house as fast as my legs could carry me. Which wasn’t very fast, as it was all uphill this time. As I stumbled up the path I counted the rings, growing louder and more frightening with each peal: four, five, six—God knew how many before I started keeping track. Panic quickened my hammering pulse. By the time I gained the back terrace I thought my head would explode. I tore through the screen door into the kitchen where the nearest extension was, but even as I grasped it, still ringing, I caught myself. Rather than betray that I hadn’t been at my post by answering it, why not wait until it stopped and then resumed, on the ground that Mrs. Hackney would hang up and try again on the theory that she had dialed the wrong number. Quick thinking, whether good or bad. It was nerve-racking listening to it shrill on and on. But in a minute it did stop, leaving a silence that was equally shattering. It started up again instantly.
I gave it two rings and then said, “Good evening. Hackney residence.”
“Mr. Spofford?” said an anxious Mrs. Hackney.
“Oh hello Mrs. Hackney. Everything’s okie doke.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece between speeches to conceal my breathing.
“Have you been in the house all the time?”
“Of course. Why?”
“I just called and nobody answered. I must have dialed the wrong number.”
“That’s probably what happened. Everything’s shipshape here. All asleep. Have a good time.”
After looking in on the children to make sure my story was true, I sat on the terrace with a beer from the icebox. “I’ve got youngsters of my own to worry about, you know,” I said aloud to unseen witnesses, or accusers, or whatever. The music floated faintly on through the deepening night, and in its silences could be heard the drift of wealthy laughter. I dozed off and awoke and dozed off. After midnight there were audible splashes of water alternating with ripples of applause. The young people would be diving in the pool. Had our Geneva taken her swimming suit? She cut a pretty good figure on a springboard. I had a fancy of young bodies sailing forever in a summer dream through moonlit air, succeeding one another in an eternal, etherial circle, through space then water then back around through space again, to repeat itself in a never ending wheel, watched by aging faces wearing sad smiles, and by God Almighty.
At two A.M. the dark shapes of the Hackneys were seen toiling up the path, Mr. a little unsteady, Mrs. supporting him from time to time as they both laughed a little. They had stayed till the last dog was shot, he assured me in rather slurred tones as he fumbled for his wallet. It seemed to me I could still hear a few dogs being shot. “Marvelish evening,” he muttered happily swaying on rubber legs. “That poet didn’t read goddam thing.” That was his recipe for success! I watched him shuffle through lettuce in his wallet looking for the right denominations—I could have rolled him for the whole wad and he’d never known it. As I pocketed my pay and left, I debated the advisability of sneaking down for another look; but though Hackney was too boiled to put two and two together, Mrs. Hackney would have noticed my not leaving promptly in the Lizzie, so I climbed into that, started her up and headed reluctantly for home.
I couldn’t sleep. I tossed about in bed, waiting for the sound of Geneva’s return. Toward three o’clock I heard a car in the driveway below. McGland had called for her in a cab, but it was no cab that throbbed for 10–15 minutes under my window. It was an open Cadillac convertible. Its engine had such a quiet purr that I could hear Geneva say, “Well just a quick one,” as she walked down the porch steps and got back in and drove off to town with Tad Springer, their young hair blowing.
It was then that I snapped my teeth together, remembering something.
What was Tad Springer going to Dr. Wolmar for? Damn! I thought as I twisted in my nightshirt again, chicken on a spit, why had I gone soft and put the dossier away before finishing it that night I sat for the Wolmars? Going to a analyst in this part the country didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it might. The trouble could be trivial or it could be serious, some variation of the hereditary blight that in his mother’s case took the form of round heels, in the father’s drink. So might our Geneva be taking up again with Tad after it developed that the Springers were bad stock, not the Spoffords, for God’s sweet sake? Go to sleep I told myself, think about it tomorrow in the cold light of day. Mark Twain says we’re all a little insane at night. O.K. but what did Geneva mean by just a quick one? Just a quick what? Not hamburger for God’s sake, or milkshake. Hell, we’d gloated over the triumphal return as one that would open other doors to Geneva, not get her in solid again with a family that, it turned out now, hadn’t been worth regretting the loss of. That the way it was all going to backfire? Go to sleep. The chicken revolved on the spit.
I could hardly share with the rest of my family the dilemma on which I was now what-do-you-call-it. Impaled. And impaled the more during the next week when Tad took her out again. Of course McGland called too, as did one or two other boys in the local set, boys she mightn’t seen since high school and who now had a close look at what she was blossoming into. Even Mopworth the English jessie came to pick her up in his Volkswagen. That was the evening Mare sent me to answer the door, when she was in too much of a stew over her mother and Dr. Rappaport to take any more. Because it never rains but it pours—we had the two crises building up together. Still Tad seemed the favorite, and I cursed again the ill-timed compassion that had made me put the casebook away because another little boy had softened my heart. Just one more what? Was the drink that afflicted his father getting its hooks into the kid already, and the challenge posed that of a “troubled” young man getting his emotional hooks into a young girl whose own trouble might be an insecurity that left her wide open for someone who needed her, a sucker for the maternal role? Go to sleep. You’re an old man blown into a corner like a dry leave. You’re just mulch now for the next generation. The sap runs in other roots now. Go to sleep.
I decided I owed it to all of us to go see Dr. Wolmar and ask if he could offer an enlightening word, to whatever extent professional ethics allowed of course. But when I telephoned I was told by the answering service that the Wolmars were away on vacation and would not be back for two weeks. Which was when I got the idea of making my way into the house and having a look for myself.
After all this was only an extension of my making my way from the house into the basement while sitting for them, which I had already done, and added nothing to that act as far as irregularity was concerned. I would not be stealing anything, only availing myself of information to which I was morally entitled, and that not for myself anyway. I cooked up this plan of action when mentally distracted by a distinct warming up in the Rappaport-Punck mess. Mrs. Punck was home again, and still being called on by Dr. Rappaport when there was no longer any medical need. He would sit in the parlor and relate the latest wonders of science or analyze for our benefit the finely shaded distinctions of organized Jewry, of which he was an objective observer, always at some point lighting a Havana cigar, often a defective one from a box he said had proved on opening to be worm-eaten but not therefore harmed in quality, putting his fingers on the holes so it would draw as on the stops of a flute, so that we would watch fascinated as he puffed, 1/2 expecting melodies to issue from it, while Rappaport himself would from time to time look at me as though he might be going to offer me two bits to disappear, like some kid brother. How did all this get started? There must be some rational explanation for it. The entire trend of things was getting on my nerves, undermining my judgement.
I did have second thoughts about breaking into Wolmar’s in the cold light of breakfast. But that night Tad appeared in a condition open to suspicion (what did he do, build himself up during the day in order to dissipate at night?) and my gumption was revived again by something I seen going by the r.r. station. It was one them Reader’s Digest billboards which advertise the current issue of the magazine by a summary of one of its articles? The ad read: “How often have you missed out on an excellent opportunity because you failed to act on some ‘inner flash’ before it cooled off? Read why ‘thinking it through’ may be the wrong thing to do . . . and how you can easily develop the do-it-now technique of successful executives.”
Spofford went home and put together a kit of burglary tools: a flashlight, hammer, chisel etc., before he should lose the spontaneity of successful executives. It was dark when I approached the Wolmars house in its dead-end lane of Punch Bowl Hollow, on foot, and with these implements distributed in discreet bulges about my person, rather than the single more noticeable kit which I had at 1st assembled and then discarded. Burning somewhere in the house was of course that single bulb that so pathetically tips off prospective thieves theres nobody home. Nobody home is right when you leave that one on! I entered the basement office through the window at the rear with little more trouble than I had descended into it the time before from the parlor. I just rapped out a pane of glass, which tinkled merrily to the floor, reached a hand in, unlatched the window, slid it up and climbed in over the sill.
The gray-green metal desk in a deep lower drawer of which the good doctor kept his notebooks was locked. Setting the flashlight on a drawn-up chair so that its beam was trained on that side of the desk, I inserted the chisel in the crack above the drawer, where the locking bar was, and began to hammer.
This mechanism proved more sturdy than expected. I banged away at the chisel for several minutes, then changed to a stout screw driver I had added to my tools at the last minute, and which I could pry farther into the slit. Suddenly I remembered something that made me slap my brow. Desks are often locked up completely when the top center drawer is merely shut tight. I slid that one open a little and found that it released all the rest too. I was pulling the drawer I wanted open when I sensed a unexplained increase in the amount of illumination I was working at. Turning I saw a beam of light coming in the window, apparently from a flashlight stronger than my own. Unable to see what was behind it, I picked up my own and trained it back. In the light of these mingled beams I could dimly discern the figure of a policeman. It was the fair young sergeant named Lawson, who had accosted me at the Beauseigneurs party, who had booked McGland and me the night of the fracas at Indelicato’s, and who had probably heard about my speech at the Golden Age Club. Because he said rather pleasantly after flicking on a wall switch, “You certainly get around, don’t you Pop? What are you doing now?”
“I don’t see that that’s any of your business,” I says. “You get around yourself pretty well. What brings you here?”
“Spot checking empty houses. Always remember to give us your name when you go out of town. Its a service your entitled to as a citizen.”
As he went on in this tone he examined the desk I had been jimmying. Nearby was a file of which one section was a safe, which obviously hadn’t been tampered with. He shook his head, whether despairing of his ability to grasp the motivation here or in simple wonder at the range and variety of one man’s activities. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, but there was a touch of aw in his voice. “Well come on. Let’s go down and book you on a charge of breaking and entering. I’ll take those tools.”
Lawson was alone on his round of spot checks. On the way to the station our headlights picked out the figure of an elderly man in a neat summer suit on the road, carrying a black bag and thumbing a ride. It was Dr. Rappaport out on calls. I doubted whether Rappaport recognized me as we went by in the patrol car, but we met soon enough that night. When the family finally came down to headquarters to bail me out, following a short hearing in which bond was set at $500, he was with them. In fact he took charge. Geneva being out with the family Buick when the call came in from headquarters, Rappaport, who was setting a spell with Mrs. Punck, summoned a cab and inside 15 minutes had them all at the station, where he very solicitously settled Mare and Mrs. Punck on a bench and went over to a desk with George to sign the necessary papers. He was no less sympathetic to me, who he perfectly believed when I finally decided the best way was to come clean and let them in on the whole story. This in another cab heading for home, around midnight. I sat on a jump seat, filling them in on the essentials. I couldn’t quite figure Rappaport. He was either “being reasonable” to impress Mrs. Punck with his tolerance and charity toward the only possible rival in view for her interest, or he really meant it when he said my course of action seemed to him a reasonable one under the circumstances in which everything had gotten so entangled. He was one of those composed men who don’t seem amazed by anything in the way of human life and conduct.
My own family were not so easy on me. They lost no time in informing me what they had just that day learned on their own: that it wasn’t Tad Springer who must be worried about after all, but McGland. Geneva was apparently seeing him secretly while the others turned up openly. Four days after the “farewell” party (one of many that were being constantly given for McGland and that didn’t take) he was still in the Springers guest cottage, reputedly working at white heat on some new poems, but meeting Geneva on the sly. She doing the driving because he didn’t have a car of course. God alone knew where they were tonight in the family Buick.
Mrs. Punck threw in the bombshell. “Did you know that your Mr. Gland was married, Frank Spofford?” she said. “That he has a wife tucked away in London or somewhere, your fine-feathered friend?”
“How do you know?”
“The notes on contributors in those magazines you bring home. I can’t read the poems, most cases, but those back sections have some interesting items in them. Well here we are home with no Buick still in the garage. Well so we have a girl mixed up with a married man. How modern!”
As we piled into the house, Mare went on to Rappaport with her gibble gabble about geriatrics, still thinking this was a complaint of senior citizens instead of a method of extending their productive years and giving them a new lease on life. She seemed to have the idea it referred to the mental instability, or “going off on a tangent”, that sometimes strikes those of riper years. Not understanding this, Rappaport didn’t answer her at all about what “could be done about it,” but went on instead about the great future for it.
I headed for the icebox and got beers for all the men. “I’ll talk to McGland,” I told them. “I’ll go over first thing in the morning and have it out with him.”
“No you won’t,” said Mare. “You got us into this trouble. We’ll let one of the rest of us see what they can do about getting us out of it. Someone else will take over now, and try to do the unravelling, Pa Spofford. We’ll decide tomorrow who. We’re all too tired tonight.”
They settled on Mrs. Punck. This because she was the most diplomatic, the most level-headed and even-tempered, the least likely to antagonize McGland by either harsh words or making a scene. The only possible exception where that list of qualifications was concerned was Dr. Rappaport, but he was not yet an official member of the family—though he obviously soon would be—and would not carry the weight of a blood kin. Also, she liked poetry, and quickly and without hesitation selected some verses to read to McGland that covered the situation, from the anthology of Poems for All Occasions that she owned. It had always been one of her treasures, and had seen her through many a trying situation.
She spent much of the next afternoon in Geneva’s room with her. The girl refused flatly to discuss the crisis with any of us, and whether she opened up to Mrs. Punck was a moot point. I still don’t know, and probably never will. Because Mrs. Punck herself clammed up. She declined to reveal the gist of their conversation on the grounds that that would be a betrayal of the girl’s confidence, and if that was lost the talks would break down, but assuring us with a smile that some progress had been made in them. Then she dressed to make her call on McGland, after telephoning to forewarn him of her arrival. She came downstairs in a bright cotton print with a striped parasol. She also had with her the anthology that had been in her family for years. She was sweating bullets.
“How do I look?” she asked, striking an attitude with the parasol.
“Most charming, my dear,” said Rappaport, beaming at her. To do this, he had to turn from the mantel, where he had been again contemplating an old heirloom of ours that he admired. It was an enormous clock, the face of which was completely encircled in a wood carving of two male elks, both near exhaustion, fighting with interlocked horns over a mate.
“I’ll drive you over,” I says.
“No!” came a chorus.
Mrs. Punck said: “I’d rather walk anyway. It’s not far, and it will give me time to collect my thoughts and rehearse again what I’ve prepared to say to our Mr. Gland.”
We all trooped out to the front porch to see her off. She went down the road with the late sun slanting against her parasol, turning it into a sort of halo, behind which she was herself invisible except for her swaying skirts and buckled shoes, and the anthology clutched in one hand, that she was evidently going to read to McGland out of! And I thought as I watched her go This is the end of my story. This concludes my part in this. It may go on, it probably will go on, but with other principals. I slip into the shadows, there to remain a minor character in action I have presipitated. Others will come after me, in this unending rigamarole which is Life anyway, but I remain alone and to one side in—where? No place. For now I am displaced indeed, belonging neither to that world I stole briefly out of to explore another, nor in that other I slipped out to explore. A foot in each. Even Mrs. Punck is probably lost to me, in case I might decide to reach out and take her after all, a companion to spend the cool of the evening with, suddenly desirable now that she may no longer be available. The voyage is over, but it might of been pleasant to bob at anchor on the tide for a little yet, with the likes of . . . Oh well. Neither I suppose will I try to get any more of this down on paper, since from here on it looks to be somebody else’s story. Well good luck to them. More power to them. In a way it’s a relief on both counts. Never again will I be found in the throws of composition or romance. Which has something to be said for it. Well so be it . . .
There went Mrs. Punck in the last of the evening light, twirling her silk parasol on her shoulder now and again, a new Mrs. Punck, setting forth on a new life.