“YOU SAY AN OUNCE of prevention is worth a pound of what?”
The mirth had gone out of these routines for Spofford. But his sarcasm as such had become more open now, like a lanced wound, and there was no teasing in it, not even of Mrs. Punck herself—only a dense, diffuse resentment of everything and everybody. Things had backfired in a way and to an extent that he had hardly envisioned and certainly not deserved.
“What did you say it’s worth a pound of? I didn’t quite catch that.”
Mrs. Punck did not raise her eyes from what she was crocheting, in a parlor chair past which Spofford paced. “Never mind that,” she replied. “I know you’ve been mocking me. I’m on to that. I’m not going to repeat it.”
“Don’t you think we have enough doilies for this house?”
“This one isn’t for this house.”
Spofford stood with his back to Mrs. Punck before a framed photograph on the parlor wall at which he had once often gazed, but not in some time recently. It was a picture of his Uncle Emanuel’s football team, one of the first seriously organized outfits of that kind in this part of the country. It was the 1881 squad of a state agricultural college to which he had gone—the only member of his family who had been educated, up till Geneva. The figures, somewhat ferociously lined up in their formal positions, were yellow and faded now, but he could make out his Uncle Emanuel, grimacing as he had done in real life when Spofford was a boy, his dense shock of black hair as Spofford remembered it too. He resembled Spofford’s father. Though temperamentally quite different—Emanuel had been run over by a train when he was fifty—the two shared the Spofford damn-the-torpedoes attitude. Here he was savagely exemplifying the role of quarterback as it was then understood, in a getup that had not been any longer in serious use since practically the date of the picture.
He wore a uniform to the sides of the pants of which were sewn leather handles, by means of which his teammates had picked him up and hurled him bodily over the scrimmage line to the other side, often for gains of several yards. Those were the days before there were any rules. People had been regularly killed in football games until, apparently, Teddy Roosevelt had got mad and threatened to put a stop to the whole thing unless some control was exercised by means of rules imposed on the sport from within. Rules were what had been sorely needed; there was no doubt about that. Yet in the images inherent in that picture—the fierce bearded athletes, his uncle hurtling forever through space into enemy territory—resided, for Spofford, the principle of a lost hardihood. Something had gone out of people, that was certain. So why, if that were his mood, did he take it out on Mrs. Punck, who typified in her vestigial way some of the principles mourned? Because his emotions were scrambled, that’s why, and his thoughts in a state of continual scrimmage themselves, and he could not control them. He glared at her hostilely. He thought of his far, forlorn bond with the commuters, tenuous at best, now broken forever.
Mare came in and sat down, going quietly toward a chair like someone in charge of a meeting about to start and that had been waiting for her. Spofford began to leave the room but she detained him by putting out a foot over which he would have tripped had he continued his attempted exit.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” she said, opening what was clearly to be another grim family conference.
“Oh, let’s not open that can of peas again. I’ll go talk to McGland. I’m going to talk to that guy. I tried to reach him a pile of times. I’ll see you all later, but I mean don’t sort of all sit there dying at me. I know we’re in a pool of blood, but at least don’t make things any worse than they are.”
“Wait a minute. What are you going to tell him?”
“A thing or two. Why, that he’s got to do right by her, some way, somehow. We don’t know exactly how, but right. What else?”
“Up the social ladder means down the moral one,” said Mrs. Punck with unabating acumen. “I’ve always said it.” She spoke without interrupting her crocheting; indeed, it had speeded up. “It’s this culture. Meet the right people and you’re bound to do the wrong things. I’ve always said it.”
“So don’t say it no more,” Spofford retorted. He wondered to himself how Rappaport stood it. But he knew perfectly well how Rappaport stood it. A kind, affectionate wink at Spofford, in the course of Mrs. Punck’s cozy philosophizing, said it clearly enough: we take people as they are, with charity and if necessary amused affection; we ride the punches; we enjoy what we have in the best and most human way we should. The knowledge that Rappaport was getting the good out of everything along those lines in the sunset of his life irritated the hell out of Spofford—an irritation with himself. Had he let something slip through his fingers? His vexation was not lessened by the sight of the chairman of the meeting walking and yelling around the room now—a Crazy Woman. “We should of stuck to what we decided first! No chickens to commuters. But none!”
“Oh, let’s not have the Ride of the Valkyries this time, shall we, darling? Let’s not stand there shrieking like Brünnhilde. I mean McGland’s marriage doesn’t mean anything. He as much as told me he was getting a divorce. I didn’t realize what he meant at the time because I didn’t know he was married, but looking back on it now I realize that’s what he meant. So for all intents and purposes we can consider him a single man. A little old for Geneva, in his thirties, but single. The only question is, where do we go from there? Let’s decide on a course of action. Geneva must like him or she wouldn’t have had that much to do with him.”
“Well, I don’t,” Mare said, suddenly stopping behind a chair and gripping its top. “And I don’t want any part of him.”
Mrs. Punck stopped her crocheting to look at her, and Spofford came a step back into the room from the doorway where he had been hovering with his hat in his hand. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Just that. I won’t have my daughter marrying somebody who’d get her in trouble.”
Spofford spun away, clapping a hand to his head. “Oh, my God!” he said. “Are we going crackers on top of it here, so we can’t think straight about—I mean is this hysteria, or what? He’s responsible.”
“No he ain’t responsible, is just what I’m trying to say. A girl deserves better than a man who’d get her into trouble.”
“Oh, my God! What sort of Alice in Wonderland logic is this?” Spofford turned to appeal to Mrs. Punck, who only answered, crocheting again, “My daughter can make fine points.” As though an unsuspected subtlety had been found lurking in a family thought to be elementary.
“A man who’d get a girl in the family way ain’t husband material,” Mare went on, “and I don’t want him for no son-in-law.”
Mrs. Punck’s needle flew while Spofford now began to nod to himself, as though trying to pump from his inner self the understanding necessary for the grasp of these nuances. “What about the child then?” he asked.
“I’ll have it,” said Mare, lighting a cigarette.
He nodded again, or yet, in a finality of befuddlement, of sheer bottomless uncomprehension of women and their ways, hoping that by pretending to understand it he would understand it. Mrs. Punck, hooking up a strand of thread with her pinkie, understood. But then she had probably had a glass of sherry. She seemed uncommonly flushed.
“We’ll go away in the winter and live in Florida, for my health we will say first, or for a much-needed vacation. Geneva can take her off-campus semester—they all have to have one of those learning-through-living semesters. While we’re there, I’ll have the child, which we’ll all then come back with. I’m not too old.”
“That will be the story we’ll give out,” Spofford told Mrs. Punck, taking hold. “Next point, the matter of who’ll take care of the chicken farm while they’re away.”
“You and Ma,” Mare said. “George will be here some of the time, but for some of it he’ll be in Florida with me. When he is, you two’ll hold the fort.”
“Won’t people talk about that?” Spofford said, trying to wink at Mrs. Punck. She refused to have her attention distracted, however. “Two unmarried people under the same roof alone?”
“I may be married by that time,” Mrs. Punck said, without raising her head. “And out of the house. So you’ll be under the roof alone. And while you are, you might fix it. It leaks like a sieve.”
Mare brought her two fists down on the back of the chair and became a Crazy Woman again. “Not now, Ma!” she said. “We can’t go into that now. Later maybe, when this other has all cleared up. But not now.”
Spofford found himself galloping toward town, with no clear idea why he was going there—except that he should do some thinking before talking to McGland. It would have been wrong to say he was depressed. His mind hummed. There was no doubt that calamity had a way of keying you up. It seemed always out of chaos that new order was brought. Chaos was not just something over which the spirit of God had once creatively brooded, and then no more. Oh, no. Chaos was here to stay, for us to brood over each time anew, with, and possibly even for, God; to bring to our lives and to life in general ever fresh forms out of that which was Without Form and Void. The very notion of their family being plowed over by a poet was as exhilarating as the circumstances themselves were unsettling. It was crazymaking. In a twinkling they had all been transformed into different people, all their molecules rearranged, like But said. Everything was relative. He should subscribe. He should even join the National Semantics Association. As recently as last spring he had been a man stagnating on the brink of senility. Now he was on fire. McGland had only one fault—he was worthless. How many pillars of society free of that particular flaw could hold a candle to him on other counts?
Once the charge sent through him by this course of thought had spent itself, however, the immediate facts again settled in the pit of his stomach. He would have to face McGland.
Finding a library book on the seat beside him, which he had meant to return the day before but neglected to, he decided to stop in and take it back now. Ella Shook got behind the desk when she saw him come in.
“Morning, Ella. Saw you at the Freud movie the other night. Like it?”
“Yes. Yes, I enjoyed it. It was very instructive.”
“I thought the wedding scene, where Freud got married, was especially interesting. You probably noticed that Old World custom he observed, where the groom steps on a wineglass and smashes it as part of the ceremony.”
“Yes, I remember that. It’s an old folk custom.”
“Course it’s a defloration symbol.”
“Out.”
“Freud himself probably didn’t realize the significance of it at the time. That was well before he—”
“Out I say.”
“Fine, and then I’ll go straight to the Board of Trustees and tell them intellectual discussions ain’t allowed in the libary no more.”
“You do that.” She sighed and dropped her hands on the desk. “Look, Frank Spofford. We’re all glad when people get a new lease on life and broaden their horizons with art and literature, but you’ve become an absolute pest. You’re driving everybody crazy ail over town, private citizens and public officials alike, while you live a little.”
“I aim to do all of that I can before I shovel off this mortal coil.”
“You do that, but not in here. Now I have the right to bar any person from this building whom I consider a public nuisance, and I hereby declare you a public nuisance. Effective this morning, you will be allowed in here to return books, draw new ones, and get out. Nothing more. You are to keep your mouth shut and your nose out of the better magazines. Is that quite clear? I should think you’d be a little less rambunctious this morning, considering your poet friend is dead.”
“What!”
“Hanged himself in the motel. It just came over the radio this morning.”
That was how Spofford learned about it. When Geneva did, she had a miscarriage. Nor was that all—for the death of a poet was not so ill a wind as to blow no more good than that. When Dr. Rappaport was telephoned he came running, and took care of matters with such a blend of skill, solicitude and discretion that no one among the Spoffords could now welcome him into the family with anything but open arms. He was a member of it well before he and Mrs. Punck were formally married—Spofford himself found him a member of it when he hurried into the house, half an hour later. He remained to become an ever more deeply rooted member of it in the course of the family conferences that followed the immediate resolution of that crisis, his opinion widely sought after and respected. Because the Spoffords were far from out of the McGland legend. Indeed, they had only begun to be stuck with it, judging from the descent on the farmhouse of journalists who had got wind of something they could hardly have been expected not to pursue. Mare took over now, and when she spoke they knew it was with the voice of authority.
“My girl’s been plucked from the burning—pulled back from the fire just in time, and I aim to keep it that way,” she said. “Pa done us no good, Ma done us no good. I’ll handle it from here on in, and the rest of you will keep in the background. I want Geneva’s name kept absolutely and positively out of this thing.”
“I’d keep it out,” said Spofford, who was itching to talk to the reporters.
“They got wind he had some connection with a woman member of this family,” she went on, ignoring him. “That much is clear from the reporters. I can tell they know, even the mealymouthed ones. They’re sniffing around and they’ll leave no store unturned. No use in our denying it. There was a woman—so a woman they’ll get. In other words, everything will proceed according to the plan we agreed on before the other blew over. That it was me he was mixed up with.”
“Oh, my God.”
Mare quietly brushed down some crumbs from the front of her dress, for they were all sitting around the big kitchen table having tea and some Banbury tarts Mrs. Punck had made. Mrs. Punck drank her tea with rather an air, as befitted a family with a literary side, not to mention a doctor about to come into it—and ignoring for the moment that one of them had a breaking and entering rap hanging over him.
“What you say sounds a little wild, Mary, but probably just wild enough to make sense in the circumstances,” Dr. Rappaport said. They knew he wasn’t through from the way he frowned into his cup with his gentle, burning eyes. He seemed to be admiring the old family china even as he put his mind to the more immediate problem. “Just what is it you object to about Emil?” Mrs. Punck had once asked Spofford, and he had answered, “If he just wouldn’t always look like Bernard Berenson appreciating something. There’s a famous picture of Berenson standing in an art gallery contemplating stuff. It’s a posed picture, so he knows he’s supposed to just stand there and appreciate away, while we appreciate how he does it. Rappaport has got something of that in him. Notice how he’s always admiring something around here? He admires everything we’ve got—the horsehair sofa, those old andirons, that Currier and Ives print. Your Banbury tarts.” “And me,” Mrs. Punck had said, and added, “And you too. He thinks you’re a scream.”
“McGland’s was a wild talent. He lived a wild life, had a wild death, and now I suppose keeping astride this rather wild tiger we’ve gotten aboard calls for wild measures. Mary, just who have been after you?”
“Well, besides the newspaper reporters, there’s Life Magazine going to do a spread of him, and I’m also granting Time a interview. They don’t want to overlook anyone whose beau he might have been, the way it looks. So instead of simmering down around here it looks as though they’ve only just begun to boil. And I repeat again, with me watching the pot this time. That a car outside?”
Mare herself rose and walked to the window to see what had drawn up in the driveway. There was a spring in her step familiar to Spofford as that of someone embarking on a new life. He had seen it in Mrs. Punck. Mare turned around after a glance outside.
“Reporter?” Mrs. Punck asked.
“No. It’s that young Englishman who’s writing a book about him. Who visited us that night. The one with the eyes like chocolate carmels. You go see if you can help George in the barn, Pa. I’ll go upstairs and change into something decent. Skedaddle, all. There’s a heap to do.”
“To do,” said Mrs. Punck, pushing back her chair with a will.