WHEN MIKE’S BROTHER, Amos, was born, Mopworth sent up to Geneva’s hospital room an enormous bouquet of carnations with a card on which was written a limerick in honor of the event. He often composed limericks for special occasions, some of them bawdy, but not all. It read:
I know it’s ungrateful to grouse
With such a remarkable spouse,
More room in your middle
There’s none left at all in the house.
Soon afterward they moved into a big Victorian place on the other side of town, far from Punch Bowl Hollow. Mopworth now broke down and took on some television acting, as the maniacal rental and other economic pressures compelled. He was promptly typed—the Silly Ass Englishman again—which always assured him a few roles but prevented his getting many. That suited him perfectly. He did not want to be commuting to New York while he wrote in his spare time, he wanted to write while he acted on the side.
This though Madder Music was getting to be a joke even to himself. How long had he been at it now? Over three years. However, he plunged back into long-suspended labors on it by abruptly making an appointment to have his teeth cleaned. He had put off calling Dr. Ormsby’s office all this time, but now he did it and went, and after the woman assistant had cleaned his teeth and taken the X-rays, he sat back in the chair with a magazine she gave him to wait for the doctor himself to come in and read the negatives. Five minutes later the plates were being held up and squinted at by a cherubic little man whom Mopworth now remembered having seen about town in tweed jackets with his tummy encased in a Tattersall vest. He clattered some tools lightly about in Mopworth’s mouth and said, “Only the one weeny cavity. Miss O’Connell will give you an appointment.”
“Just a moment.” Mopworth climbed out of the chair with the bib still around his neck, to check the doctor’s exit. He waited till the nurse had removed it and gone herself. “I’m a friend of Gowan McGland’s. In fact I’m writing a book about him. Does the name ring a bell?”
“‘Of course.”
“It seems he was in here the day before he died. You were one of the last people to see him alive. Can you tell me anything about that visit? How did he seem to you? Was there anything . . . ?”
Dr. Ormsby gave him a moment’s prolonged regard. Then he took him by the arm and through the door with such haste that Mopworth thought he was being given the bum’s rush. Instead he was steered into the consulting room and waved to a leather chair. Dr. Ormsby took the one behind the desk. He said:
“I’ve thought about McGland a lot and often wished I might have someone to compare notes with. To really talk to about him. But if it’s for publication it’s no go. I mean I couldn’t consent to be quoted.”
“Please put your mind at ease about that. I’ll be absolutely discreet. Look, let’s do this. Let’s say you tell me what you can, but I won’t say anything you don’t want. I’ll show you everything for your approval, and I’ll never quote you by name without your express permission. How’s that?”
“That seems safe enough.” Ormsby frowned out the window a few moments, as though collecting his thoughts. “What I had to tell McGland was that he was going to lose all his teeth. Now that’s a nasty shock to anybody, but especially to your—oh, I won’t use such a silly term as ladies’ man, though I gather that’s what he was. God knows—Well, let’s not get off into that. But what I want to say is, there is a kind of person to whom the very thought of toothlessness is so horrible as to be absolutely unbearable. I’ve had to break the bad news often enough to know the type. And it’s the type—man or woman—who don’t act up about it but sit there quietly. They’ve climbed into that hole and pulled the hole in after them. Despair. I can spot it every time. It’s the ego that won’t let you see itself naked. I’ve studied this and read about it. They usually manage to keep the whole thing a secret—that’s part of it. I’ll bet you never knew McGland suffered the agonies of hell over his teeth. That half his waking thoughts were, How long will this bridge hold out? Did you?”
“I never knew he wore a bridge.”
“You see. So closely he guarded his secret. And you can be sure he envied you that smile with the sickness unto death. There’s more to this than vanity. Psychiatrists tell us teeth are linked with virility in the masculine mind, that they stand for that in dreams too. The fear of losing them is like the fear of castration. In our journals nowadays we’re being gravely warned about pulling little boys’ teeth, I mean how we go about it. They seem to equate it with castration. I know there’s too many of these words around but sometimes they’re valid. This may be one of those times. I say may. The fact that he went home and killed himself after hearing the verdict and the sentence is suggestive, not conclusive. And it may have only been the occasion, or one of a number of causes. The roots of suicide aren’t clean-cut like the roots of a tooth, that you can see clearly on an X-ray. No. No, they’re deep and tangled, twisted and twined so hopelessly together you can never make head or tail of them.”
After this outpouring Dr. Ormsby suddenly stopped and scrutinized the caller again. He seemed to have dropped the subject entirely when he said, “You say your name is Mopworth? That’s been ringing a bell too, and now I remember where I heard it mentioned. You know my daughter Marjorie. She married Tad Springer.”
“I do indeed. An enchanting girl. She must make you happy.”
“Yes. Or unhappy, leaving home. My wife is dead. I live alone.” Mopworth was trying to frame some adequate response to this when the doctor cut the need short by instantly resuming the conversation on its preceding track. “Marjorie’s young life hasn’t been all beer and skittles, as you English say. I guess you’re English.” Through Mopworth’s simpering admission of this the doctor drove on, “When she was fourteen she had a friend, a boy in her class, who went out in the barn and shot himself after—well, could you guess?”
“Of course not.”
“After working all evening on a model airplane with his father. He was the most brilliant boy in the class. I said along with everybody else, ‘The most brilliant boy in the class, all A’s, his future before him,’ et cetera, et cetera. Later I learned that’s statistically among the most common set of circumstances for a suicide—a brilliant male adolescent, one parent this, the other that, in the spring of the year when a man’s fancy and what have you.” Here Dr. Ormsby picked up a blotter and tapped the desk with its edge for emphasis. “Do you know what the most frequent cause of death is among adolescent boys? Suicide. Do you know why the rate is less for girls?”
“No, why?” Mopworth’s hand, closed round his notebook, itched in his pocket, but he wisely refrained from drawing it out for fear that the sight of it might abruptly stanch this monologue. He had struck oil here, all right, if he worked it properly. This clearly consisted in giving the good doctor his head and then sorting out what was relevant later. “Why is it less among girls?”
“They let off steam. Get it out of their system by throwing hysterical fits, getting up and stalking away from the dinner table. Our tantrums sometimes save us, you know. But boys tend more to keep things bottled up in their system, till kabloom.”
The voice of a woman could be heard in the outer reception room complaining about the length of her wait. Apparently missing the timely humor of this, Dr. Ormsby sprang to his tiny feet with a glance at the wall clock. “Well, Mrs. Halsey is grumbling away out there. Besides . . .” Here he turned and paced away from Mopworth, looking at the floor and pulling thoughtfully on his lower lip. “Besides if I chatter away to you much longer I might spill another angle on this that came up in the course of McGland’s visit, and that’s really none of my business any more than it is yours. It may have no bearing on the case at all, pure speculation, and putting it in a book might be what you British call a bit thick. Well, nice to meet you. Miss O’Connell will fix you up with that appointment on your way out.”
Mopworth hesitated for only an instant. He sensed clearly enough the eagerness to talk pulsing behind the prudence that restrained the doctor now, like floodwater threatening a levee. He said: “It might be interesting to continue our conversation over a drink sometime.”
“That might be nice. Lunch gets to be rushed around here, but if you’re ever free for dinner. As I say, I spend more evenings than I like to dining alone.”
“How about Indelicato’s tomorrow at eight?”
“That would be fine. I like Italian food.”
With a napkin tucked around his rosy chin Dr. Ormsby did his justice to a plate of lasagna and some red wine. After spumoni and coffee he pulled the napkin off and laughingly agreed to a brandy. He was wearing one of his gayer waistcoats, which he loosened with a groan of contentment. Mopworth decided now was the time to make his pitch for the information hitherto held to be top secret.
“What was it you meant when you spoke of something else coming up in the course of McGland’s visit? Even if it has no bearing on the subject, one likes to be thorough about his research. I mean just for the sake of checking it off.”
Dr. Ormsby’s eyes sparkled as he turned to watch two women enter and settle themselves at an adjoining table. He certainly seemed suitably glutted and demoralized to talk, and he did. But he frowned as he prefaced his words with a warning.
“This is strictly confidential, at least as of now, you understand.” Mopworth repeated his promise to publish nothing without permission. “All right then,” Dr. Ormsby said, wadding in his fingers the wrapper of a cigar he had lighted, and fixing his eyes on that. “It was just that a few days before he came to me, someone had pulled a tooth next to the one I said was a goner, and on which a bridge might have been hung for a while at least. There was something odd about the whole thing. I know dentists are notorious for criticizing their predecessors’ work, so you can take what I say with a grain of salt, but it seems to me it was pulling that one that rendered our lion toothless. I don’t see how the other man could not have known that. McGland’s story was that the man had realized it was perfectly sound, but pulled it because its position jeopardized the one I said had to go. Now, we sometimes give up one tooth to save another, but not a sound one to save one that anybody with a diploma could see was on its last legs. Only the grossest incompetent could make a blunder like that.” Dr. Ormsby’s manner sharpened after this prolonged recitation of the facts, and he now looked attentively at Mopworth. “Do you by any chance know who his dentist was?”
A thought had struck Mopworth that sent an odd chill up his spine. He said, “No, I don’t. If he had any regular one. He was on the move a great deal of course in his last years. I know he was socially acquainted with a man who practices in New York. Lives in Greenwich. He’s called Dr. Haxby.”
Ormsby waved the suggestion aside. “No, Haxby’s one of the most brilliant men in the field. He would never make a boner like that.”
The chill went up Mopworth’s spine again. It was the turn of his own head in the direction of the two women that touched off the connection in his mind. Instinct was doing his thinking for him, for one of the women looked a little like Lucille Haxby—ash blonde and willowy, just slightly stooped, sadly pretty with narrow gray eyes. Other associations flew into place among the shuttles whirring away in his brain: how one had always heard Haxby referred to as “insanely jealous,” how one guessed from bits and pieces put together that McGland’s affair with Lucille had flamed up to its full height just before his end—some full-time romanticists even rumoring it to be its cause—and how firmly Lucille had refused to talk.
Mopworth slept very little that night. His mind lashed about in ceaseless speculation. Could the term insanely jealous be taken quite literally? Could such a temperament, inflamed by the humiliation that is really central to jealousy, prompt such a man to take the vengeance open to him when he found his rival at his mercy in that chair? It was hard to believe. Yet why any harder than that your next-door neighbor had shot his rival with a gun, or his wife, or both, as good folk wake up daily to discover? Those clenching fists of Haxby’s which Mopworth now remembered, those grinding jaws and cold blue eyes, they might not be capable of sighting down a gun barrel and pulling a trigger, but they might of a subtler, less detectable crime. If you read about such a thing happening in a small town in South America you could believe it. Why not here?
He said nothing to Geneva that night about what he had learned. But about two o’clock the next afternoon, fortified by a few stiff drinks and wondering whether he were going mad himself, he got up enough nerve to telephone Haxby’s New York office and ask for someone in charge of appointments. He was turned over to a Miss Woolsey. He asked her whether she could tell him if McGland had received dental attention there at any time during the two-week period which he specified. She said just a moment, she would have to dig out the appointment book in question. He heard a drawer slide open and some pages turned. Then after about five minutes’ wait her voice again.
“Yes. One visit, on the sixteenth.”
The next question up to Mopworth was crucial. He pondered it pacing the floor of his study with another stiff drink in his hand. Had he the gall to get Haxby on the line and query him personally? Gall or not, he would have to. He plucked the phone from its cradle and this time put in a person-to-person call.
“Oh, Mopworth, yes, of course,” came that wiry nasal voice, exaggerated by the electrical connection. “You’re doing that book on McGland. How’s it coming?”
“Nothing to brag about. But that’s what I was calling in reference to. I was just checking a few facts, routine things that have no real bearing on anything, but that the biographer has to take up anyway. People like to read these ‘human’ touches, you know, like those trivial things Jefferson listed in his ledger and what Disraeli ate for breakfast. You know the sort of thing I mean. I believe McGland went to you and the thing I was wondering whether you’d confirm—Uh, well, this is a bit sticky, so feel free to refuse if you want. But there is this notion that McGland never paid his bills. Was that your experience?”
“Oh, I never charged him for what I did. I was glad to do it. I wouldn’t have dreamed of sending him anything for that.”
“I see. Well, thank you very much. That answers my question as far as you’re concerned.” Mopworth calculated his next words to a hair’s-breadth. Very casually, as though he were about to ring off and the question were a mere afterthought, he asked, “I don’t suppose he had much of anything done? Or do you recall?”
“I pulled a tooth for him. Checked over the rest.”
“Oh, yes. Remember what was wrong with it? I know it’s the hell of a bore, but it’s these little touches—I hope you don’t mind?”
“Not at all. It was abscessed.”
“Did you try to save it? I mean I have one myself that seems to be tuning up,” Mopworth threw in with a laugh, “and I hope I can bank on what I hear, that you chaps can do wonders these days—”
“Oh, yes. I did all I could. Treated it for some time, but it was no use. Too much gum decline there anyway as I remember.”
“Several visits I suppose?”
“Yes, or a few. I don’t recall exactly. But it was clearly hopeless, so I pulled it.”
“I see.” Mopworth, who had been standing all this time, and who now felt beads of perspiration beginning to form on his brow, turned to look out the window as he said: “You don’t normally pull teeth, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t dentists of your, well, standing usually turn that over to extractionists?”
“Normally, yes, but once in a while we make an exception. If there’s reason to do it right away, or the patient wants it over with. I was perfectly willing to do it.”
“Thank you. That’s all I need to know. Please give my best to Mrs. Haxby. Goodbye.”
Mopworth stood at the window for half an hour or more, feeling as though the top of his head were about to blow off. Haxby had killed McGland. That was the simple sum of matters. The few lies in his account clinched it. The deed may have been aimed only at maiming the lion, but it had led to his end, and in any case had been done with murder in the doer’s heart, so he was guilty of murder, if not in the first degree then in the second or third, or of manslaughter; or if of nothing legally definable as such then of its moral equivalent. The fact remained: Haxby was a killer. There he was in his New York office with his fancy practice and his national reputation, filling cavities and fitting inlays with a hand as red as Macbeth’s.
These thoughts brought in their train one scarcely less appalling. Now that he, Mopworth, had the solution to the mystery of McGland, what could he do with it? Nothing. He could not so much as hint at it in the book without all hell breaking loose around his head. The first thing a publisher would do with a charge or an insinuation so sensational would be to check the facts, and their trail would lead first of all straight to Dr. Ormsby, whose confidence had been solemnly guaranteed, then on to Haxby, who would sue to a fare-thee-well. The discrepancy about the number of visits could be taken care of by destroying the back appointment calendar, leaving only Mopworth’s word about the telephone conversation, which was next to worthless. The girl who had found a record of only the one visit would probably not recall the conversation clearly enough for her testimony to cut any ice. For the rest there was not a shred of evidence—the urnful of ashes reposing in the little Scottish village “between the snarling river and the mumbling sea,” all that remained of McGland, would tell no tales. The end result would be a whopping libel suit, even if Mopworth used fictitious names to protect the guilty.
Having pursued these facts to their grim conclusion, Mopworth went downstairs to tell his wife. He found her ironing in the basement.
“My God,” she said, “are you sure?”
She set the iron on its metal trivet and pulled the plug out. They went upstairs and had a drink while Mopworth paced the living room floor. He took Amos for a ride over his shoulder, so it shouldn’t be a total loss.
“I can’t believe it any more than you can, but there it is. I thought I was at work on a biography, but it turns out to be a murder mystery. Which now I can’t write. I’ve uncovered the perfect crime.” He stopped to evaluate a light in Geneva’s eye which he thought he recognized. “Now look,” he said sharply. “You’re not to breathe a word of this to a soul. Not to a soul.”
“Oh, I won’t. But why . . . ?”
“Because we can’t talk about it any more than I can write about it, that’s why. Now, Geneva, don’t make me regret I let you in on this. Gossip would be worse than a book, because in that case I’d be sued rather than the publisher.”
“Well, you’re not in England now, you know, where I understand people sue at the drop of a hat. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll not talk.” Her expression turned from sobriety to alarm. “What did you mean you can’t write it now?”
“Because that’s the heart of it, and not to be able to write it would break my heart.” He gave her Amos and flung himself into a chair, wondering if his dramatics weren’t a bit excessive; partly the overflow of an inner relief at being free of a long oppressive burden, one whose size—or rather the degree to which he’d fallen short of it—had been long demoralizing. Equally demoralizing was the look that came into Geneva’s eyes, with its hint that she was reading his mind.
“Alvin, you aren’t rationalizing a secret wish to drop it?”
“Really!” he said, twice as vexed by this as he would have been had there been no foundation for it. He flung his legs out farther and rolled his head about. “That’s the hell of a thing to chuck at a chap at a time like this. Just when the bottom falls out of everything, I mean then to insinuate that a bloke wants the excuse to bail out. Shouldn’t he get a little more understanding from his wife than that?”
“I suppose.” She sighed humorously at him across Amos’s back and said, “Men want their wives to be understanding. That’s not the same as being understood, is it? In fact if you understand a person is when it sometimes gets hard to be understanding.”
“That’s fine, keep spinning fine distinctions. Keep flinging nuances at a chap as he disappears into the Pit.”
“I’m sorry.” Across Amos’s back she continued to regard him, if not more sympathetically, at least with increasing alarm. But he had to twitch about and bring a fist into a palm to keep it that way. Why? Why in God’s name had he to behave like a man in a crisis when a crisis was what he was in? Why did you have to act out what you were going through, in order to be believed?
Marriage is corrupting. It is based on the most ticklishly maintained emotional advantages themselves dependent on the eternal practice of diplomacy, which is more than half chicanery. Anyhow, here he was having to fake the truth. He had to chew the scenery, as it were, to get a rise out of his wife. Presently his resentment at having to twitch about had him twitching about quite naturally. In part, he felt his over-all resentment justified by the fact that he didn’t really know himself whether he wanted to drop Madder Music, or how badly. And if he didn’t know, how could Geneva? The thing needed a Nectar Schmidt. She could have pointed out that he had pry bitten off more than he could, with professional ease, chew. That much had to be admitted. It did not mean that he would have chickened out had this upheaval not occurred, or that he was using it as a ruse for doing so.
The paralysis into which Mopworth was thrown by the development continued for weeks. Never had he known such a profound and immobilizing funk.
He paced the floor of his study, chewing on a succession of pipes, of which he had accumulated quite a rack in the process of trying to effect a transition in his smoking habit from cigarettes, pausing briefly to fling a dart at a board he had nailed up on one wall, or to scratch off a few lines of light verse that came to nothing. There were times he wished he drank on something more than the modest scale he did. Good binges must at least have the merit of temporarily ventilating those prone to them, of, so to speak, emotionally worming you. His mood spread through the house, infecting Geneva, whose temper shortened until there was very little left of that indeed. She finally burst out with the suggestion that he go rent a study outside somewhere if that was the way he was going to act—a proposal at which he gave an odd laugh in view of the trouble they had meeting expenses as it was. When they were put to it to scrape together the rent money the first of the month, she sometimes wondered if they oughtn’t buy. It was in the midst of this trying period that they received an unexpected telephone call from Minnie, who had fresh domestic developments of her own to report.
The Dumbrowskis had been divorced and Jack had promptly married Nectar Schmidt. No more promptly, however, than Minnie had a widower from her home town, into whom she had run in New York one day when he happened to be there for a business convention. No greater change from Jack could have been imagined, or wished, for her (the Mopworths had indirectly heard) than this hardware salesman, kind as a woodcutter in a fairy tale and utterly devoted to Minnie, whom he had borne in triumph back to their native Detroit. Now the two were in New York again for a few days, this time for a lodge convention. She was dying to bring him out to Woodsmoke for a visit. The women arranged one for the next afternoon.
The transformation in Minnie took the Mopworths so unawares that they had to get acquainted with her all over again before they could possibly begin to absorb her husband. She was twenty pounds heavier, her voice an octave higher, and her hair a bright yellow. An armful of bracelets tinkled merrily as she gestured away, smoking cigarettes in a holder and picking bits of lint from her husband’s coatsleeve. Some finally released individuality, or independence, some long-suppressed feminine essence seemed literally to squirt from her in every direction, like juice from a bitten apple. The same gossip that had once consisted in bills of particulars about Jack was now devoted to praise of Harry, and the intimacy of her revelations made the Mopworths quail.
“He’s given me a sex life of my own for a change,” she said, clattering back on high heels from the kitchen, where she had gone herself to add a little more water to her highball. “He’s the first man I’ve ever had a you-know-what with. I don’t care who knows.” Mopworth thought she was having a nervous breakdown, or had gone off her chump, but it was only sudden happiness. Still it was a lowering business. He himself laughed nervously from time to time even while appalled. “A man should know how to play tunes on a woman. Draw melodies from her, like a musician playing a harp. That’s a good lover, giving not just taking. Oh, he’s one in a million.”
The object of this eulogy sat with his big pink head on the back of the couch on which he comfortably slumped, smiling sleepily, his eyes closed, as though life were not a rat race at all but some wearing jollification from which he was snatching a few minutes’ respite preparatory to its resumption, of which he also lazily dreamed. A large convention badge, evidently affixed to his lapel for the duration of the sessions, had his name, Harry Plewes, on a card attached to it. The badge itself was a white button decorated with the mystic sign of his fraternity, from which hung a blue silk ribbon, as though he had just won first prize in a hog contest and were resting from the strain of being exhibited. He and Minnie kept nudging one another at things that were said, as though everything were related to some complex network of private jokes between them. A reference Mopworth made to the town’s recent purchase of the local country club, aimed at changing the subject from that of Plewes’s virtues as a husband, brought a skirmish of elbows and an exchange of smiles between them, perhaps pertaining to some jointly relished goings-on at their own country club back home. “I used to tell Effie Sticky—” Plewes began, and choked half to death with laughter as a shove from Minnie cut the allusion short, as perhaps too ribald even for this conversation. Some minutes later, when the talk had again briefly undergone a change of theme, Plewes said suddenly into a pause, “Effie won’t be free on Saturday, but she’ll be reasonable,” and opened his eyes long enough to wink at Mopworth.
Mopworth got up and ran into the kitchen, remaining there for some time. He fixed a mess of crackers and cheese while he tried to sort out his impressions, which had been coming too fast and too vividly for ready absorption. What it came down to was staying there alone for a bit to think about Plewes. He thought Plewes might be brought into focus better without the physical distraction of his actual presence. Perhaps brought into focus as a type? He saw that the hog comparison would not do. Plewes was himself more like a great piece of human fruit about to burst with good will, or a bomb about to explode with it, leaving everything within a certain radius a shambles. Mopworth had never before met anyone who was all heart, though he knew such people existed. Heart burst from Plewes’s shirt collar, from his vest buttons and even from the seat of his trousers. As Mopworth was running through this course of thought, the kitchen door swung open and Plewes himself sailed in. Highball in hand, he came smiling to Mopworth’s side and laid an arm on his shoulder. He stood there watching him spread cheese on crackers, so that they resembled a pair of conventioneers in a hotel room, out for a good time and a few laughs.
“Ever hear the one about the bwah hee her and the hee haw bwah?” he seemed to say, giving off an alarming vibration. Mopworth shook with laughter, but it was not his own. It was Plewes’s laughter, for Plewes had him firmly in his clutch. Mopworth was himself solemn as a judge. “No, I don’t believe I have.” The fear struck Mopworth like an icy current that the other might have no intention of catching the early evening train back as originally planned at all, but would stay the night. What if Plewes wanted to get drunk, expanding his present sociability in proportion? They would have stewed heart for dinner and grilled heart for breakfast if their guests ever took such a thing into their heads.
“There was this egg salesman . . .”
Mopworth stopped what he was doing and, remaining bent over, the knife with which he was spreading a cracker frozen in its position, looked in desperation to the side of him away from Plewes. He fixed his eye on something bright lying on a chair. There was no rescue there, however. It was a phonograph record on the envelope of which was a picture of Fritz Reiner, the conductor, sitting inexplicably alone with his baton in a field of knee-high grass.
Midway the story, Minnie clattered in to remind Plewes that they had a banquet to get back to and that they would have to dash for the train as it was. In his ecstatic relief Mop worth flung an arm around Plewes and implored him to stay, but they could not, they had to make this train. He sustained this spasm of camaraderie as he raced them to the station in the Volkswagen, shouting into the back seat where Plewes sat his hope that they would call again next time they came East.
Minnie wondered aloud whether they should look up Jack and Nectar while they were in New York, to show there were no hard feelings, and to trot out Plewes. Mopworth now became hysterical. The idea of such a confrontation was so exhilarating that he spent the rest of the trip doing all he could to insure it. “They’re in the Village, now if you can’t find them in the book you phone Geneva for their number and address, do you hear? Oh, that’s a wonderful idea! You must by all means do it.”
The train was standing in the station when he shot to a stop and rushed round to help pull Plewes out of the back seat, into which he had with difficulty been wedged. By the time he had bundled them onto the platform the train was starting up. Plewes pushed Minnie onto the last coach but one, still trying through clouds of steam to get in what he had “told Effie Sticky.” Mopworth did not hear. He was too busy pushing Plewes on in turn, like a furniture mover shoving a piano up a flight of stairs single-handed. Minnie stood in the coach vestibule calling down some last-minute remark Mopworth couldn’t make out. He responded by shouting, “They live on Bleecker Street, that’s it!” He galloped alongside for nearly the length of the platform. “Don’t you forget to go look them up now!”
Driving back, his breathing gradually subsiding to normal and his composure returning, Mopworth tried to reconstruct from memory the events he had just been through, and could not. He felt that he had never been through anything quite like it, in the sense of its being simultaneously shattering and bracing. The change in Minnie could be simply enough explained by the principle of reaction, which understandably enough drives divorced parties toward mates as unlike their predecessors as possible, and changes them commensurately in the process, but Plewes! It was amazing how a man could be both a grotesque and a type. He couldn’t wait to get home and compare notes with Geneva.
When he walked into the house, however, he saw that the prospects for any such cheerful exchange of impressions were not good. His heart fell at the sight of her sitting by the window, drink in hand, wearing that brooding, excluding expression he had come to know and fear, a sign that something unhappy and turbid had unexpectedly been stirred up from the depths of her spirit. The obvious comments on what they had just seen were passed, while he waited for her to reveal what was on her mind.
“Maybe we ought to move to the city,” she said, at last.
“Why? So we can come out to the suburbs and see people like us?” He smiled at Amos, whom he had scooped from his pen and now held by his chubby trunk in midair till he had provoked a wet grin.
“They have fun.”
“They seemed to have it popping out here to the country. And they must live in the suburbs themselves if they belong to a country club. I finally figured out that what he probably told Effie Sticky—”
“Why do you always change the subject when I bring up things like this? I’m sure it’s a husband’s cross to have to hear his wife dish up her gripes, but what have I got out here? Just stop and think about it a minute, Alvin. What, really? Except a house and family.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“You have your work.” Mopworth let this go, aside from a glance he exchanged with himself in a wall glass in passing. “You see, that’s all the difference. And when a woman—anyhow an educated woman of today—doesn’t have that, or some equivalent outlet, or life like it with which to be somebody, she doesn’t have enough. I mean fatally not enough. There isn’t even any social life worth the name. Tad and Marjorie, yes, but that’s only partial. She and I aren’t friends, we’re not wired for each other. I can’t sit with her over drinks or lunch and feel that kindred spirit thing that’s so desperately important with someone. And with Nectar gone, I mean in the sense of being out of one another’s life, and now even Minnie, who do I have? Nobody. It’s one of those inventory times when a woman wants to cut her throat.”
“Well, let’s move to the city,” he said, depositing Amos back in the pen. “By all means. We’ve got two kids, just what drives people out of New York to the suburbs, but what the hell. I mean I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“Well, I am,” she said, walking to the bar to refill her glass. “If there’s anything you can know with certainty, you can know that. Oh, Christ! And all I can think of is those lines from the poets like ‘Men must work and women must weep.’ And then you do want to cut your throat.”
Mopworth had found it not in the nature of marriage for the one to be able to cheer the other when it was needed. High spirits are not infectious, only low. She would make him miserable, he could not make her happy. Married life is always lived on the lower of two emotional levels, as it is on the lesser of two intellectual ones. There was only one small consolation open to him when she lay resolutely with her back turned, as he had known she would when he slipped into her bed to offer what balm he could. He could then put an arm around her and fall asleep, as he liked, with a breast in his hand.
But he could not sleep, and about one o’clock he extricated himself carefully from the bed, slipped on a robe and went down to the kitchen, where he fixed himself a grilled cheese sandwich by warming it between two flatirons, as Geneva had once hilariously told him she and Nectar had used to do when they were roommates back at school.