THE TRAIN BRINGING Nectar Schmidt to Woodsmoke was half an hour late and Mopworth, down to meet her with the Volkswagen, killed the time in a bar across the street from the station. He had two beers and a thing called a meatball grinder, which some failure of the faculty of disgust enabled him to eat. It seemed to consist of two, or possibly three, boiled golfballs obscenely lurking in a loaf of bread longitudinally sawn. He doubted that Indelicato would have had it about, or that it was authentically Italian at all. It was to be numbered, in any case, among the hazards of life in contemporary America.
These were many, both physical and spiritual, but he liked to think he was doing as well as most of the natives with whom he found himself flying fraternally over the obstacle course, and possibly better than some. He was still married, though the institution was widely considered no longer to work. People continued to go in for it because there was nothing better, and besides one has invested all that pother in courtship, from which there is no place to go but forward. The whole thing was like one of those plays of which one has read bad reviews but to which one has already bought tickets. One goes anyway. One muddles through.
His marriage had more pluses than minuses. He had one fine boy and another on the way. At least Mrs. Punck said it would be a boy because Geneva was carrying it broad and flat rather than narrow and projecting. Of course the experts would have to be let make what they would of the overproduction. He could already hear Nectar, after learning that this pregnancy was the result of his impetuous wooing one night when Geneva was caught unprepared. He tried it on for size. “There are men who need to turn their wives into child-bearing slaves,” he said aloud. It did not really convince him and it only alarmed the bartender, who could not distinguish what he said but saw that he had a customer talking to himself. Talking and, what was worse, laughing. There was only one satisfactory refuge from all this theory about sex, and that was its practice. Too bad you had to climb out of the sack and face the whole damned business of getting on with women all over again. Did women suspect it was in the sheer need to get away from them that one buried one’s face in their bosoms, one’s self in them?
The train could be heard rumbling in, and Mopworth paid and hurried across the street, a fragment of paper napkin snagged in the vest over which he buttoned his coat as he trotted.
Nectar was standing on the platform looking around for a familiar face. Mopworth spied on her for a bit from behind a man with massive shoulders in a red lumberjack shirt. She was dressed in a spruce brown suit flecked with darker nubs, like flakes of tobacco that wanted brushing off. She had on her dark glasses, in which she looked a little furtive, like someone hoping to be mistaken for a celebrity. She had let her black hair grow and it hung to one side, that on which she inclined her head in that gaze of spurious sincerity, the list further emphasized by the weight of the grip in her hand. It looked very heavy, as though it contained enough clothing for a month’s stay. Mopworth gave another unstable cackle. The grip was new and of smart blue leather, not at all like the wicker satchels secured with twine with which he had been visualizing her walking the streets of the city in poverty. He watched her for a moment longer from behind the fat man, sagging at the knees a little to keep out of sight. Then he danced through the crowd sideways with one arm upraised, shrieking gaily: “Nectar!”
“Hello, Alvin.”
Gossip tides us over the first constraint of a reunion, and Mopworth used theirs to feed Nectar some straight lines he had prepared, to see how closely her answers would conform to those he had mentally predicted.
“Fine . . . Fine . . . Yes, she married Dr. Rappaport, and do you know what? Old Spofford keeps calling her Mrs. Punck.”
“It’s pry his way of denying it. I think he was interested, though they don’t speak the same language.”
But were not these victories Pyrrhic, in that the very game he played with her secretly proved her charge? How did his amusement differ from the glazed malice of those porcelain chaps who more honestly ran in packs? What at the first crack of hello was he erecting against her but that seething masculinity posed now also at times, and secretly, against Geneva? What was happening to marriage that each could now be but the other’s outer landscape? That during mealtimes and even bedtime each must vanish into a private country packed with emotional contraband? Where were the sweet participants of verse and song—gone with the “yesteryears” that drifted like whiffs of old sachet through the lines of Mrs. Punck’s “favorites.” Love itself was coming apart like the spines and covers of the crumbling heirlooms she got down from the shelf or took along on sitting jobs. What was behind the human botch of mating? Did it lie deep in some failure of animal nature, or was the culprit the squiggling ego, subtly dividing what flesh would join together? And how, even were he to find an answer to all these things, could he relate them to any comprehension of Gowan McGland? On what rock had he broken? Or had he simply hanged separately because we no longer hang together? And had he died—or lived, like all of us—with fragments of antique verse yet caught in his mind, like a kite in the branches of a tree? We long to “share” experience. Yet each of us lies in darkness with his few private scraps of treasure, like those Etruscan warriors of old who were said to be buried with their nostrils stuffed with precious stones.
“We’re going to the Dumbrowskis’ tonight, you know,” was one of Geneva’s first statements on their arrival home. Mopworth disliked his noting that though she spoke to him she said it for Nectar’s benefit, a girlish desire to show her old roommate how they lived, something of the gay tissue of their lives. “You’re coming along of course, Nectar. I just talked to Minnie on the phone, and it’s all set.”
Set, too, was Mopworth’s jaw as he thought again of the six solid hours of conversation to which we maniacally commit ourselves when we accept a dinner invitation. Who do we think we are? he thought as he carried Nectar’s luggage to the guest room, tramping on the carpet to suggest to himself the barren wastes of dialogue across which they must again slog side by side with Jack Dumbrowski. Why their two households had begun to exchange invitations was one of the mysteries of a social system administered by women, which Mopworth did not feel equipped to discuss. He secretly bewailed what he had quickly perceived to be one of the curses of the suburbs: the perfect negative correlation (as the statisticians called it) between friendship and social life. The two had nothing to do with one another, as they still might, say, in such benighted back reaches as Cedar Rapids or Stoke on Trent.
“I’ve never read any of his books,” Nectar was telling Geneva over their first drink when he returned.
“Of course you haven’t,” Mopworth said. “What you admit is that you have read Jack Dumbrowski. That’s a confession.”
“Why do you say that, Alvin?” Mopworth knew Geneva was trying to telegraph him a warning to shut up, but he perversely avoided her eye. Instead he watched Nectar, who was having a spot of sport with Mike. Sitting on the floor saying “Kitchy koo” through the slats of the playpen, she looked really quite absurd.
“They’re full of characters saying ‘You mean—?’ to one another,” he said. “And that junky lyrical ‘somewhere’ writers stick in for atmosphere. ‘Somewhere a bird sang,’ or ‘Somewhere a screen door twanged,’ or ‘Somewhere a woman’s laughter broke the stillness of the night.’ You know the sort of thing I mean, Nectar.”
Nectar gave him a laughing nod over her shoulder. A sense of complicity with her began to dissolve his dread of her visit. He might have an ally in the war with Geneva over Dumbrowski. A belief that it might all be yet all right leaped up within him. It was partly the drink he was himself putting down, partly hope springing eternal, and though it had involved for the moment nothing more than her single laugh and the lamplight sliding along the silk scarf at her throat, it seemed enough for an evening, and possibly a lifetime. His attempted rape, or murder, of her seemed never to have occurred. It was one with all the dust we collectively and willingly sweep under the rug. His spirits rose, he turned to face Geneva with a smile. “Come on now, ducks, you’re being much too polite. You don’t like his novels any more than I do. They’re not written. And of course I don’t mean Nectar won’t find nice people at their parties.”
Geneva laughed. “Well, that’s right. None of his readers.” Then they all laughed together, and Mopworth, proud of his wife’s pleasantry, went on: “He has these tens of thousands of readers, you see, Nectar, but nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s got no reputation.”
Geneva shook her head, deploring their amusement with a smile at the floor, then changed the subject while Mopworth took the glass out of her hand to refill it. They were all quite gay by the time the sitter arrived. This turned out to be no less than Spofford, bundled in a plaid overcoat and with the earflaps of his tweed cap down as far as he could get them.
“Hello, all,” he said. “Cold snap’s started. Had your car checked, Alvin? Well, well, Nectar.”
Leaving Spofford behind in the house made Mopworth rather uneasy, for he was by now able to surmise the manner in which Spofford had passed the time in the homes of others for whom he had sat. Mopworth had never expressed this misgiving to Geneva, as it would have meant betraying a confidence, so he bore the anxiety himself. He confined his objection to Spofford as a sitter to complaints that he could press no payment on him—disingenuously, because they were as glad to have the money as Spofford was of the chance to perform his great-grandparent’s role. Still, the thought of Spofford’s knowing as much about them as he did about the Wolmars and the Wilcoxes and whoever else’s premises he had scoured was a chilling thought. Therefore Mopworth kept all letters and private documents in a locked drawer, in a study itself locked (let the old poop make what he wanted of that if he tried the door). His mind was further relieved tonight by Spofford’s asking whether it was all right if he asked Emil Rappaport to drop in for a game of chess. “By all means, and help yourselves to the whiskey,” Mopworth said.
He put it out of his mind as he left the house and made for the one across the road, still filling Nectar in on their host as he bundled his two women along over the frozen ruts that lay between. “Richness of characterization is obtained by saying ‘part of her’ all the time. Part of her wanted so-and-so, while another part of her wanted such-and-such.” “Alvin!” Geneva scolded as they hurried up the walk. They were all laughing through chattering teeth when the door opened and Dumbrowski himself spread wide his arms for Geneva to run into.
“Come you in, one and all! Ah, and the extra dividend as promised,” he said, shaking Nectar’s hand in both of his. His green eyes darted from face to face like dragonflies over the surface of a pond. “Alvin. Glad to see you. Come join the throng.”
He was wearing a plaid jacket with black silk lapels, on one of which was a stain of grease which Mopworth found enormously encouraging. A sort of postscript to his reddish hair grew in a small bit of beard on the top of his chin, parted, its ends twisted into spears and possibly waxed. But that was the grooming normally given a mustache, was it not? Are we not correct in this assumption? Then why—?
“Minnie, some more guests! Minniehaha!”
Minnie was almost as tall as Jack, but a good deal thinner. Bent shoulders and a pale face consumed by the strain of getting a counterfeit passed in the world as a true coin made her seem half her size. They had no children, but she had that look characteristic of women burdened with husbands to whom they must play second fiddle, which sometimes curiously resembles that of women worn out with childbearing. She had to sustain a hoax that Jack was a “hell of a swell egg” as well as a good writer, twin delusions still dear to himself but through which she herself may have begun to see. For lately the strain was beginning to tell; she had taken to unburdening herself to Geneva, at whose round front she enviously glanced. All this in turn made Mopworth privy to Dumbrowski’s seamy side. Minniehaha still pretended to believe that he had his little amorous indulgences coming to him—might even require them for vigor and verisimilitude in his work—but made no bones about the wear and tear of being his wife. She admitted he was selfish. The discovery that he was an ass remained yet to be made—perhaps never would be made, in keeping with those protections to the ego all women must maintain in marriage. Mopworth was touched by her valor, which in his heart he knew all wives shared, to some degree at least. Most women do their best to help us pass for men in the world, he thought.
The living room into which their host bulldozed them with outspread arms was a cheerfully crackling congestion. Mopworth’s eye instantly picked out Tad Springer, who spotted them coming in at the same moment. He smiled uncertainly first, then waved them over to meet his girl.
She was a spruce little redhead named Marjorie Ormsby. The last name rang a bell for Mopworth. It was when memory had supplied the “Dr.” before it that he recalled the dentist bill that had come to McGland’s motel posthumously. Somewhere in Mopworth’s mass of notes was a reminder to pay a call on the sender. Whatever for? To leave no stone unturned. Dr. Ormsby was one of the last persons to see McGland alive, and while the advantage shed little light in Mopworth’s case it might be different in Ormsby’s. He might offer a clue to the mystery—or he might not. Perhaps nothing would, or there was no mystery. “Play the man, stand up and end you, when your sickness is your soul,” was Housman’s terse advice, on which McGland may as tersely have acted. Or the motive may have been closer to that fear of death that Byron ironically finds the more common one for suicide—a fear to which the deed certainly brings an end. Or maybe a combination of both. Or something else unsuspected, buried forever with the victim.
No such extremity, at any rate, would beset the dentist’s daughter. Her laughter bubbled like a spring, and on her finger sparkled a stone whose significance Tad happily confirmed. Then Geneva did one of those unpremeditated, uncharacteristic things that endeared her to Mopworth. She linked arms with both of them and brought them all three together in an impulsive congratulatory hug. They seemed so propitiously gay together, and Mopworth felt so good for them, and also for Minnie, who beamed on the scene. He was proud of the way Geneva looked. She wore a red wool dress that made no bones about her condition. Pregnancy can be sexually stirring, however disfiguring women may find it. He wanted to thrust his hand down her low neckline as though he had never seen her before. Sensing a vibration at his elbow, he turned and saw Dumbrowski’s eyes fixed on the same attraction. They were bright with lust, and there was a loose, lupine expression about the mouth. Dumbrowski jerked his glance away and heartily demanded orders for drinks. Minniehaha bustled off to fill them, leaving him to play host in the more creative sense.
Hearing that Tad had a job in a brokerage office and that the engaged pair planned to live in New York, Dumbrowski launched a ringing eulogy of that metropolis, which met his standards entirely and which he would never live far from. He spoke truculently, as though someone had expressed a contrary preference. He then made a typical gambit. “Speaking of backgrounds,” he said, “do you know that I was born and raised on a farm?”
Now, there was nothing Mopworth could more easily believe than that this man had rustic origins. But the information was offered with such implicit faith that his hearers would find it incredible that they automatically protested it as such, with assurances of their surprise at learning that anyone so citified as he had ever tilled the soil, let alone in Kansas, and so on. A murmur to that effect went round the group, to which Mopworth contributed a half-hearted mumble as courtesy required.
“Well, people who haven’t lived close to the elements, I mean in some form or other, be it land, sea or the deep woods or what have you, lack something,” he said, and whether intentionally or otherwise, his eye rested for an instant on Mopworth.
Mopworth reduced his income to a mere trickle, still coming in from paperback reprints of the good bad books, but the bad good ones he was trying to write while, let’s see, where were we, while Nectar brought in a few dollars selling baked goods from door to door, these got progressively worse. Mopworth moved to a chair when the group broke up, and did a little work on the chronicle. He had it that the two wrongdoers sat at their evening meal, and as they shared their humble repast Dumbrowski told her about his day in New York. He had been in to see his lawyers, Slewfox and Basketwhat, about collecting royalties from the Russian editions of his works, which was a laugh because the Russians had only published them to show what a cultural wasteland America was and had no intention of acknowledging the pirated versions, let alone pony over hard rubles for . . .
Mopworth was a little ashamed of himself when he saw the lavish buffet to which they were in due course herded. He ate his lap supper beside Marjorie Ormsby, with whom he then shot three games of pool in the game room downstairs before they relinquished the table to others. Then he found himself upstairs again, alone in his old chair. He sat there a moment taking the party in.
Through an open door he saw one of those gay little groups that for some reason always collect in the kitchen at large parties. At its center was Dumbrowski himself, one arm around Geneva, another around Nectar. One need not peer into windows in order to spy on people. Every moment of our lives is an unguarded one if there is someone watching of whom we are not aware. Then a gesture, a glance or a twist of expression may let slip a secret far more denuding to the spirit than the removal of a garment to the body. Dumbrowski now made one of his habitual motions. It was to raise one shoulder as he spoke, in the kind of semi-shrug by which detachment is affected, or notice given that one does not oneself take too seriously the matter about which one is talking. This was not the plowboy but the Easterner synthetically overlaid on it, through which the plowboy was all too transparently visible. It was a mannerism Dumbrowski had picked up east of Chicago, certainly. Another was that of lightly smoothing down his back hair with a hand in which a cigarette smoked, a gesture possibly acquired from playwrights he had seen dining at the Algonquin.
Mopworth sensed something on his left. Turning his head slightly he saw Minniehaha in a nearby chair, watching the same scene. Her shoulders drooped and the smile she had worn was gone from her face, like a mask dropped. One hand lay palm upward in her lap. She heaved a sigh, such as one might have thought an expression of contentment did one not know otherwise. Poor Minniehaha, sinking under burdens of which that spuriously affectionate nickname was the least. Yet perhaps she was at least momentarily content that the buffet she had fixed had been so heartily devoured and that the party was humming along as it was.
Mopworth returned his gaze to the kitchen, where Geneva had suddenly become the center of attention. She looked oddly unfamiliar, gesturing airily with a highball as she told a story.
“Well, so the minute Alvin got home I hauled them out, you see, both of them, and showed them to him—anxious for the master’s opinion, you see.” She sipped at her glass while the others waited, a circle of expectant grins. “He looked at them a second, nodded. ‘Mm hm,’ he said, ‘very nice.’ Pause. Then he said: ‘Which is the main prize and which is the booby?’”
A burst of laughter greeted the finish, causing her to flush with pleasure like a young girl who has just given a fine account of herself in a schoolroom recitation. Dumbrowski laid his head back and guffawed, at the same time giving the girls an extra squeeze. Perhaps he had a third arm lurking somewhere in the melee, for Kitty Sweeney threw him an odd glance. Mopworth turned to see Minnie smiling. Feeling a feverish glow, he rose and went over. “Freshen your drink?” he asked.
Minnie looked down at her glass, seemingly surprised not so much that it was empty as by the fact she was holding one at all. “I guess not now . . . Well, gee.” She reconsidered. “Well, all right, maybe I’ll have another. It’s rye and water.”
“Swell.”
Mopworth marched through the company toward the kitchen sink, disorganizing its ranks somewhat. All the bottles were on a counter there. He mixed the highball slowly, so as to eavesdrop a moment on Dumbrowski, who was holding forth on anti-American sentiment as he had encountered it abroad. How the subject had so quickly gotten round to that was impossible to say; but it was one of those switches Dumbrowski could manage in a twinkling toward topics on which he was informed.
“The British hate us for obvious reasons. England has sunk to a second-rate power and she can’t stand it. Oh, sorry, Alvin. But, you know, I always think of you as an American.”
“That’s how I think of you, too, Jack.”
When Mopworth turned from the tap after drawing water for Minnie’s highball, a corner of Dumbrowski’s mouth was hooked up into a taut grin, and there was a curl to one nostril. Nectar said quickly, “I hear you made a very mean crack to Geneva about her bridge prizes, Alvin.”
“Guilty,” Mopworth said. “I don’t see how they stand us, Jack.”
Now Mopworth did something else foolhardy. He stepped once more into their midst, as one walking deliberately into a thorny hedge, and kissed Geneva on the cheek, pausing to murmur into her ear, “I think you’re wonderful.” Her eyes shone, and she smelled like a hot flower. She was riding the crest of one of those waves of pure joy in which she was as anxious to please as, in their troughs, she was powerless to do so. She glanced from one to the other of the two men in a mute plea for them to make peace. Mopworth did not stop to note the results in Dumbrowski’s case. As he carried the highball to Minnie, still sitting alone in her chair like a neglected guest, he heard Geneva say behind him, “When are you going to read us that chapter of the new book you promised, Jack?”
Mopworth wanted to wring her neck. He would have groaned openly had he not been bearing down on Minniehaha with the highball. Geneva was not engaging in peacemaking, but in capitulation. Indeed, in betrayal. Or had she forgotten that the favor she was asking her host was something her husband found, of all bores on earth, the most galling? At any rate, thanks to her overflowing heart they were in all likelihood about to be subjected to another chapter of the dreaded Work in Progress. The evening began its precipitate descent. Dumbrowski modestly refused, and what with one thing and another the chairs were presently being pushed into a circle and the congregation formed.
Mopworth fortified himself as he had done against Nectar’s arrival: by drafting a hasty checklist of the clichés to be expected in order to keep a sort of box score on his predictions. Thus a rapid mental review of Dumbrowski’s literary offenses would include those already noted together with comparable effects. There would be the innumerable “You mean—?s,” the junky atmospheric “somewhere,” that “part of her” business, plus the host of descriptive stencils like “a thickset man with beetling brows” and “a small birdlike woman.” Oh, and that “as if in a dream” locution which appeared on every page, alternating with the likes of “his senses swam in a mist.” Such lyric touches were intended to relieve a style obviously regarded as earthy, as typifying the school of brutal realism. Thus the general narrative itself abounded in sentences like “With a bellow of mingled rage and pain Dumbrowski came at him,” and “Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing,” and “A savage grin contorted Dumbrowski’s simian features.” Mopworth always dubbed in the author’s name as he rehearsed his literary offenses.
He was now almost eager for the reading to begin so as to get his box score under way. “We’re all crazy to listen to you, Jack,” he said as he hurried for the best chair in the room. This was one at the very back of the group, behind a split-leaf rhododendron which concealed the paper and pencil in his lap, with which he could make his tallies unobserved. He saw Geneva and Nectar take seats near the front. He was dismayed by one thing. He had the hiccups, as he often did after eating and drinking heavily. A bout of them was usually of short duration, and if this threatened to become a source of embarrassment there was an exit through which he could conveniently slip. As an extra precautionary measure he had ready a wadded handkerchief. Dumbrowski had returned from his study and was frowning into a sheaf of manuscrift through his reading glasses.
Dumbrowski was certainly a big bruiser, Mopworth noted as the former got himself set in the armchair in which he faced the expectant audience. His shoulders were too broad, his arms too long, and his hair needed some judicious cutting, like his books. As he frowned at the pages he chewed on a pipe, about which there was still some doubt whether he would keep it lit or let it go out. He prefaced the reading by telling them something about the theme of the book and giving, also, a synopsis of the action preceding the excerpt chosen. This was a story, he said, about a burned-out boxer who signs up for one last fight in an attempt to get enough money to marry a woman he is in love with, who has three children by a former husband. He is not only badly beaten but critically injured, so that he is rushed to the hospital immediately following the bout.
“‘Stramaglia knew that he lay dying,’” Dumbrowski read, in a voice that was low and modulated, yet vibrant with respect for the material. “‘Part of him wanted to die. Part of him wanted to live—desperately. A grimace of pain contorted his handsomely rough-hewn face, the features of which were touched with something at once brute and tender.’”
The “at once” thing—he had forgotten that one, Mopworth thought as his pencil flew in its tally of the bromides, now falling thick and fast. He made merely a single stroke for each, but even so it was a job keeping up—and then the damned hiccups, which he had thought about to subside, suddenly resumed. A woman in the row ahead of him turned around and glared. Mopworth dropped the pencil for the handkerchief, stuffing it into his mouth like a gag. It muffled the sounds slightly, but that was all.
“‘A great weariness assailed him,’” Dumbrowski was continuing. “‘Somewhere a car backfired, and then he heard children calling in the street below his window. A cart rattled distantly in the corridor. Then he was dimly aware that the door of his room had opened and someone was sitting in the chair beside his bed. He knew without opening his eyes that it was Constanza. He smiled drowsily and put out his hand.’”
A hush had fallen across the room as, in a pregnant pause of more than usual duration, Dumbrowski took a last suck on his cold pipe and set it aside in order to give full attention to his reading, which was gripping his hearers. One thing he did have, or rather two. He had a resonant voice and a certain knack for giving his own lines the expression exactly suited to them. Mopworth himself had to hand it to him. He admitted to himself that, on television say, the story might be done with a good deal of dramatic tension, hammy of course, but effective nonetheless. He found himself caught up in the emotion generated among the audience, and forgot his pencil and paper. As the reading continued he became genuinely affected.
“‘“Constanza, I have a request to make that may seem strange to you,” Stramaglia whispered thickly from the pillow, “but would you . . . would you bring me my gloves? I’d like to die with them on.”’”
A snicker escaped Mopworth at the same time that a sob caught in his throat. In addition, he still wasn’t over the hiccups, so that the resulting eructation, and the moment to which it led, was one of great confusion indeed. Everyone turned to look at him. Dumbrowski himself raised his head, in time to see Mopworth slide down out of sight behind the rhododendron. Dumbrowski resumed reading quickly, in an effort to recover what he could of the spell that he had been weaving. Fortunately, he was near the end of the chapter, or of the section he had chosen to read, for things were never quite the same after that.
Presently he was putting the pages of the manuscript together and then to one side on a table, to a ripple of compliments and handclapping. Mopworth joined in, applauding more vigorously than the rest and mumbling sounds that were unintelligible but vigorously favorable in tone, and which he supplemented by appreciative nods and glances around that nobody saw. By the time his facial play had run out, people were getting up and glaring at him. Dumbrowski rose too, smiling gratefully, and said, “Well so! Thanks for listening, and now on with the dance!” He set briskly to work replenishing drinks.
Mopworth ducked into the kitchen ahead of him and poured a great dollop of whiskey into the first glass he saw and ran out the back door with it. The “breezeway” was a bit of architectural bastardy whose very name he loathed, but he was thankful for the garage to which this one led. He stood in its cool, oil-smelling darkness, just the right compromise between the flushed heat of the congested house and the cold outdoors. He waited there looking through the side window to his own house, where he could see the comfortable figures of Spofford and Rappaport bent over a chessboard. They looked very happy there, under a cloud of tobacco smoke. The two old fellows seemed to have found a lot in common. Mopworth wished he were with them, sipping whiskey and watching the game, with Ravel going softly on the gramophone.
Taking a drink from his glass here he found it to be Scotch, rather than the bourbon he had thought he was pouring. He knew that he had made rather a mess of things. He had got Dumbrowski’s goat, but good. Now it was only a question of time till the undercurrent of animosity between them, so long implied or concealed, must break through into open hostility. Yet though he and he alone had mucked matters up tonight, it would only be to Minniehaha that he would ever, ever, ever apologize—and hadn’t she been the one to throw him a tiny taut smile of sympathy and understanding at his embarrassment? A smile, even, of sly complicity?
When he girded himself and went back into the house, Dumbrowski initiated his revenge before he could get a word out.
“Well, Alvin, how is your book coming? Going to read us a chapter of it? Turn about’s fair play, you know,” he boomed jovially above the crowd.
Mopworth knew that to be derisive. Oh, how he knew it! Dumbrowski was quite aware that the book was getting nowhere, and recalling the fact to mind was his way of expressing contempt both for the projected work and for the pretensions to a more “literary” realm than that exemplified by his own popular, never well reviewed novels. He never missed a chance to take a dig at either the book or Mopworth’s friend McGland, whose poetry he enjoyed deflating by the simple expedient of taking it down from the shelf and reading it aloud. Behind all this was the natural resentment of the provincial for the intellectual. He got in his most telling thrusts by those references which emphasized best the shakiness of Mopworth’s claim to the latter life.
Feeling increasingly isolated by all this, Mopworth circled about, drinking and spoiling for a fight. He avoided Geneva’s glances, by midnight more anxious than reproachful. Once, out of the tail of his eye, he saw, or thought he saw, Dumbrowski smiling in his direction as he whispered something to Marjorie Ormsby. What was he telling her? How far out of bounds had whatever rot was going around about him become? “Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing,” he whispered derisively to himself in retaliation. “Somewhere a loon called. You mean—?”
It was toward one o’clock, when the party was boiling noisily toward its climax, that Dumbrowski gave him what he took to be casus belli, and on what could not have been more cleancut grounds.
He found himself standing behind Dumbrowski and a dapper but gloomy-looking man from Greenwich, whose name he hadn’t caught. As he paused there, it was borne in on Mopworth that they were discussing Geneva, whom they were watching as she chatted away to several people in the vicinity. Her naked shoulders caught the lamplight, and her bosom heaved with laughter under the deep-cut dress. The two men nodded and smiled appreciatively. Then Dumbrowski said something Mopworth caught only fragmentarily but that, under the din, seemed to have something to do with someone’s being “picked up without any trouble.”
Mopworth took a long pull on his drink and pushed his way over just as the other man made off. “All right, Dumbrowski,” he said, “I heard that.”
“Heard what? What? Heard what?”
“What you just said. Shall we step outside?”
Dumbrowski coughed in a rather flustered fashion, and looked down at Mopworth’s glass. “Don’t you think you’ve had about enough, old boy?” he asked.
“More than enough. Just slip out through the terrace, shall we? Don’t want to create a scene in here, you know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.”
“I think you know what I’m talking about, Dumbrowski.”
Dumbrowski paused and returned the other’s narrowed gaze. “You hate my guts, don’t you?”
“I would if you had any. You get ‘em, I’ll hate ‘em.”
“Why you—” Dumbrowski’s fists opened and shut at his sides, and he spoke through clenched teeth. He managed to control himself. “Look, I’ve got guests to think about, and besides you’re too drunk for the code to let a guy haul off on you. But you come back here tomorrow any time you wish, and by God—”
“How’s first thing in the morning?”
“That’s fine with me.”
“I’ll be here with bells on,” Mopworth said. “That’s a promise.”