That his neighbor wore antlers was not, however, amusing to Reinhart, who reflected again on how his own attitudes had changed since marriage: he was now quite the prude and proud of it. He might even have helped stone the woman taken in adultery. He rejected the theory that desire must lead to disorder, never since his nuptial vows having undergone so much as a dream concerning another woman than his wife. What was the point when you had all you wanted at home?, was the coarse but sensible maxim into which his point of view might be condensed. Its only weakness lay in its narrowness of application. What if you weren’t married? Well, have the strength to wait; deprivation is good for the soul.
Bluenose Reinhart, contrary to his usual custom, slept very late next morning, which was Sunday, in his chaste bed. Ironies abounded. When he had Gen to snuggle with, he had always risen early, eaten a big breakfast, and got to schoolwork; Sunday afternoons were of course assigned to real-estate clients. Now, however, he had appetite for nothing but coffee, and was torpidly looking forward to a scandalous waste of the whole day, which already stood at the meridian.
A neighbor dog had conveniently destroyed the news section of the Sunday paper, which Reinhart never read anyway: some of the fragments still blew among the nearby hut-tops, like the leaves on which the Cumaean Sibyl wrote her futile data. Safe from news of the world at large, he read the funnies and This Week, and the rotogravure section showing, in sepia, local personalities at bay: philanthropist breaking ground for new hospital; coeds repainting interior of Chi Omega house, and so on—it was Sunday, this is what normal human beings did, read the paper and drank coffee while still in their pajamas. He rebuttoned the fly of his, which as always had come open during the night, and had another cup of instant G. Washington, made with condensed syrup from a little tube bearing the signature of the statesman in question. He scratched himself on the right shoulder blade. The weather was sullenly hot, and the iron shell of his residence exaggerated it further. However he bore up admirably under the disaster, and thought of buying a dog or parakeet so as to have someone around the house.
That is, Reinhart’s morning-after feeling was one of defiant independence: he would survive even though he might perish. It may have been contradictory nonsense, but a style was established, and when of all people Fedder yelled through the screen door and then entered without permission, Reinhart stayed tough. Where at another juncture he might have been persuaded by the fellow’s cuckoldry to be sympathetic, he was now indignant. Where he might have, as an acknowledgment of having yesterday kicked Fedder’s ass unjustly, showed a certain restraint in addressing him, he was now rather brassy.
“Fedder! How’s your hammer hanging?” was what he said, and thrust his head back into the funny paper.
“Hi neighbor!” Fedder had the same old shameless ebullience. Today he wore only a pair of khaki shorts and lowcut Keds without socks; for a shirt he sported his own hairy breasts and soft stomach; his shoulders were narrow and slanting, his legs skinny as straws. Aesthetically speaking, he was a criminal. “Hi!” he repeated, flopping onto the couch above Reinhart, who was lying on a scatter rug. “If you have reached the comics, that means you’ve already read about the predicted tax rise. What’s your position on that?”
“Frankly,” said Reinhart, “I don’t think I make enough beyond the GI Bill money to pay an income tax.” He petulantly hurled the paper away from him, and it fell like a wind-torn tent near the door to the toilet.
Fedder’s stomach rolled over his belt. His canvas shoes were near enough to Reinhart’s prone body to have dealt it a return for yesterday’s assault, but no doubt it was characteristic of Fedder never even to have such a thought; he had already forgotten that kick by the time he hit the ground. Had Reinhart wished to apologize, he would first have had to explain what for. Never had he encountered such a nonaggressive person. Suddenly he felt a great warmth for Fedder and wished to give him a trust.
“I mean,” said Fedder, earnestly baring his lower teeth, “the village tax, which of course applies only to property owners—so you say Why? Well sure, but if we get home rule for Vetsville, we’ll all be property owners!” Guilelessly he passed a hand over his weak features and dried it on his shorts.
Reinhart rose from the floor. Before he spoke to Fedder, he couldn’t resist—looking at the mess his neighbor was from the physical point of view—tensing his upper musculature in the manner of Blaine Raven. However, it did no harm: if you can’t damage a man by kicking his ass, you can hardly do it by inflating your chest—or can you? Reinhart had lost faith in his judgment of people, and entertained the idea that far from being his forte, as he had always assumed, it might well be his tragic flaw. For Fedder did seem, all at once, to be a bit leery of him; at once got up from the sofa as Reinhart approached it, and dived into a chair that had its back against the wall.
“Fedder,” said Reinhart, parking his own behind on the edge of the divan, “Fedder, I wonder whether it would embarrass you if I got serious for a minute.”
Fedder’s anxiety collapsed into relief. He had been hugging his naked trunk as if in a chill; now he went back to perspiring freely. Reinhart saw that his neighbor had been entertaining the idea that he might be attacked again; yet he had come here of his own volition. This indicated a certain strength, or a certain weakness in the man; only time would tell which. Meanwhile he was the only person available; and of course being privy to Mrs. Fedder’s infidelity did not hurt, either, as an aid to confidence. He felt sorry for Fedder and expected him to return the compliment. Yet Reinhart, by knowing everything, would keep the upper hand over Fedder, whose knowledge must always be partial. With everything thus worked out, Reinhart revealed his desolation.
“My wife left last night.”
“Oh,” Fedder asked gaily, misunderstanding. “Separate vacations?” Reinhart squelched instantaneous anger. “No, she walked out on me, Fedder.”
The neighbor scratched the instep of his foot, sinking a forefinger deep into a tennis shoe, and laughed briefly like Woody Woodpecker, a psychotic character from a popular animated cartoon. This, however, drew no inimical response from Reinhart, who saw it as sheer delicacy; indeed, to relieve his friend he joined him in synthetic amusement.
Fedder stopped abruptly and asked Reinhart to call him Niles.
Reinhart asked: “Tell me, Niles, you have children, haven’t you?”
“Several,” admitted Fedder, who was one of those people that have trouble sitting still; he kept moving his legs fitfully. “I have a year or two on you. Bea and I were married in ’40. And now we have three daughters: Sewell, Frazer, and Trowbridge.” He named them again chronologically, in diminutives. “Trow is five; Sewy, three; and Fray, two. Bea had a flat in San Diego, in case you wonder how we managed it in wartime.”
“No, I don’t wonder,” Reinhart said wistfully.
“Of course, Fray did look just like the grocer’s delivery boy!” Fedder laughed wildly again, and again he stopped short. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’ll happen. You are both young and healthy. I’ll ask Bee to send Jenny to her obstetrician. He’ll make her a personalized schedule of the days on which the ovum is fertile.”
At last he had showed his vanity. Reinhart was relieved to have drawn Fedder into the open, and he was happy for him in what was perhaps only a fantasy of potency—there might be a corresponding delivery boy to each daughter—but he saw no good reason to suppress his own data.
He shrugged. “Genevieve’s been pregnant for months, so it’s not that.”
Fedder frowned in a way that warped his upper lip and exposed one tooth. “Why didn’t you say so!” he blurted after a moment of thought. “They’re all like that.”
“Like what?”
“When they’re pregnant the first time. Quick to take offense. She’ll be back on the next train. Above all, don’t blame yourself.” Fedder threw his head back and looked at the ceiling.
Reinhart kept alternating in his judgment of Fedder; on the surface the man was 100 per cent fool and nothing he said ever went contrary to that appearance; but notwithstanding that his wife was a harlot, she stayed with him and they had three children besides. That is to say, as a home they were successful—this was something different from romance, sex, screwing, or even foolishness. It was, to be pompous, the continuation of the race. So had marriage, even one that failed, changed Reinhart in his idea of the good life.
“Is it so hard?” he asked.
Fedder took the question warily, bringing his head down between his shoulders; he still didn’t trust Reinhart completely.
“I mean,” Reinhart explained, “maintaining a home. Frankly, Niles, I haven’t done a very good job. I think I probably should blame myself. I don’t believe I ever understood Genevieve or even tried. You see, I found it difficult to readjust to civilian life, because contrary to everybody else I rather liked the Army. Does that shock you?”
“Not at all, Carl!” Fedder was quick to asseverate. “I think I can show you your error there, but please don’t take it as a moral criticism. No—”
“Above all, I got used to it,” Reinhart went on, here and there pulling his shirt away from his damp chest with an adhesive-tape sound. “There’s something to be said for that, isn’t it true?”
Bright with his own copious sweat, Fedder leaned forward and sought to interpose—
“Something you can rely on,” said Reinhart. “The messhall three times daily, rather than this goddam business of the grocery bills! Now there’s a strange effect for you: I always feel degraded when I have to pay for food—it seems like something you should have coming to you. But I didn’t mind at all giving money to Genevieve for a new dress. Though here’s what I don’t understand: she never wanted to take it.” He decided to let Fedder speak on that subject.
“At such times it was your idea, no?” Fedder asked. “Ah, there you have it, there it is. And if I am right, though it may be difficult for you to admit, you offered it with the conscious idea that you were doing her a favor.”
“I might have,” Reinhart cautiously admitted. “How should I have acted—as if it were really hostility?”
“Of course it was. Does Proctor give Gamble money for a suit? You and Jenny are in this thing together—incorporated, as it were. Remember, that’s also legally true. That money you gave her was hers to begin with.” Fedder threw himself back into the chair, his chest vibrating flabbily.
“And the thought behind it?” asked Reinhart in his wounded way.
Fedder said bluntly: “That is worthless.”
“You mean to tell me one can’t give his wife a present?”
Fedder sat up and laid his right index finger into the palm of his left hand. “Why sure. But an authentic one and not a fake. And certainly never in the spirit of an Oriental potentate distributing largesse to his lackeys.”
The example showed that for all his common sense, Fedder had a romantic streak: Reinhart as Genghis Khan was pretty far-fetched.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Niles?”
Fedder said yes, he might have one if the pot was already made, and trailed his host to the kitchen area. Not a whisper of air came through the little window over the sink, and the view from there was particularly disheartening: a field of tawny, chest-high weeds that marked the southeastern boundary of Vetsville; above, a pitiless sky, so hot its blue had faded.
“Oh,” said Reinhart. “No worry about that. This is instant. Isn’t it warm today!” His motive in belaboring the obvious was to distract Fedder for a moment from the analytic mood. No doubt Fedder was right, but it did hurt Reinhart’s pride to be lectured on marriage by a fellow whose own wife slept with other men.
“Instant,” said Fedder, smiling in the guilty, self-derisive manner that some men affect on approaching an area where food is prepared. “You can sure see you are alone.”
“No,” Reinhart elucidated, running water into the kettle. “I always used this when Gen was here.” His ready use of the past tense made him feel awful.
“You used it?” Fedder asked with terrible urgency. “You … didn’t … do … the … cooking?”
Reinhart quailed a bit. “I’m afraid so.”
“Oh gosh. Well. I see.” Fedder snickered nervously.
Swelling back again, Reinhart said: “Now look, Niles, you know I’m not effeminate. It’s just—hell, I don’t like to be a housewife, but how can you ask a girl to work when she’s going to have a baby?”
“Uh-huh,” Fedder answered, thinking. He tore a paper towel from the dispenser alongside the sink and patted his wet neck.
“I felt rather guilty, I suppose,” Reinhart went on. “Women are so little! And what a hell of a big job having a baby is. On the other hand, come to think of it, I seemed more worried than she.” He fitted the whistle-gadget to the spout and placed the kettle upon the back burner. “You want a doughnut, Niles?” He grasped the bag that lay on top of the breadbox (not within, where baked goods sweat and grow soggy in warm weather; outside, they merely grow stale). Having opened the bag and withdrawn a sinker and found it hard, however, he suggested toast.
It appeared that Fedder, like so many flabby people, was not interested in food. He neither accepted nor declined, but when the coffee had been poured and they sat at the card table, he ate three of the four pieces of bread that Reinhart had toasted, heaped them with butter and jam, and yet could not be said to have paid them any real attention. But he was profoundly concerned with the love-problems of his neighbor, who on the other hand now regretted having made the disclosure and was chewing his own toast with the greatest care.
“You see, Carl,” said Fedder. “Doesn’t it occur to you: there may not have been enough sharing in your marriage. From what you say about guilt, and from this thing about your doing the cooking”—he stopped to wipe his bejellied hands upon a paper napkin, then balled the napkin and left it sitting redly, stickily before him—“I just wonder what you left to Jenny. What was her role? You see, washing the dishes is all right for a husband to do, some drudgery like that to relieve the wife of. But cooking is creative. Deprive a woman of this function and—Well, in my opinion the unhappy marriage occurs when everything interesting is done by only one of the team.”
Reinhart went to make more toast, as much from curiosity as to how many pieces Fedder would absent-mindedly stow away, as from hospitality. “Genevieve doesn’t care at all for the kitchen,” he said en route. “If it was up to her, she would live on soda crackers and rattrap cheese. And that’s just fine with me. Who wants a wife to have an enormous appetite? I don’t think I could get sexually interested in the most beautiful girl who gorged.”
“Ah yes,” cried Fedder, “but make her cook for you, boy. Don’t you see it gives her the upper hand to control your sustenance?”
Reinhart noticed an island of green mold in the center of the bread slice he took from the wrapper. He tore the paper and thumbed through the rest of the loaf; the mold was a vein running through to the heel—which meant that Fedder’s three pieces and his own one, now in their respective stomachs, had probably also been contaminated, and that Fedder might be poisoned unless the toasting had counteracted the properties of the fungus that were unfriendly to man. For himself he had no worries; he currently doubted his powers only in the matter of a wife.
He cut the center from each slice before dropping it into the toaster, and said to Fedder: “When all is said and done, wouldn’t you call intercourse an act of aggression?”
Fedder looked uneasy and drank what would have been the grounds, had it been real coffee, from his cup. “I see it as a mutual endeavor, Carl. I don’t understand this strain of bad feeling that is so important for you.”
“You don’t think there is an underlying strife?”
“I can’t see it.” Fedder had his index finger on the blade of the butter knife.
“Don’t we resent those we love?” asked Reinhart.
Fedder smiled and asked why.
“I don’t know, I’m just trying to get to general principles.” He returned to the table with the new toast, which Fedder soon seized. “Because everything I did with Gen, I did sincerely. I never contrived anything. I felt she needed to be taken care of, though it is true that before we were married I thought of her as efficiency personified. But she is so young. You know there are some girls whom the physical side of marriage frightens. Have you ever read any of those articles in the women’s magazines? At one time, in the Victorian era, it was far worse. Certain young ladies, having led protected lives up to then, were driven insane on their wedding night when their husband dropped his pants.”
“Go on,” said Fedder, waving a crust at him, “you exaggerate.”
“And this tie with their fathers. What about that?”
“Bee,” Fedder said, “happened to be raised as an orphan, so I can’t speak from personal experience. … I don’t want to sound smug, Carl, but she and I just haven’t had any troubles at all in six years. And as it happens, she isn’t a college girl.” Reinhart started to speak but waited while Fedder said: “Six and a half, really.”
That was surely one way, then, to preserve the home: share your wife with other men. Reinhart kept reminding himself of the shameful data he had on Fedder, yet he got great comfort from talking to him and still respected his counsel.
“But tell me,” Fedder went on, masticating the crust he had been waving, “tell me about this coming child.”
It struck Reinhart as a foolish comment coming from a three-time father. “What is there to tell? Gen has been pregnant since May.”
“Ah then,” said Fedder, wiping his mouth with the whiskbroom of his fingers, “she’ll be getting big soon.” He pushed his chair away from the card table, and lifted one hairy haunch across the other.
“So soon?” asked Reinhart, with a pinched feeling in his bowels. How humiliating! Gen enlarging in her parents’ house, he shriveling up in Vetsville.
“Did you never hear the old verse? “Three months and all is well, three months more she begins to swell—’“
“Sure,” Reinhart interrupted. As he remembered, its ending lines were indecent, and he was puzzled at Fedder’s loose attitude towards maternity.
“Don’t you feel different?” Fedder asked impatiently. “Just a fellow one day, next a father?”
He was some sort of schizophrenic, Reinhart decided, now in one mood, now another.
“You seem to take it lightly enough,” he said.
“Me? You see, for you it’s the first. That’s the difference. Me? When I was in your shoes I suffered torments for every day of the nine months, and when the time for Bee’s confinement approached, I went to sick bay, at the base, with total nervous collapse. That’s how I feel things.” He resented the attribution of nonchalance.
They were out of refreshments again, but Reinhart was damned if he’d toast more bread. In fact he felt very logy and got up from his chair, plunged to the floor and began to do pushups, an exercise he disliked because the obstacle there is your own weight: lifting a barbell, you could contrive extra strength by hating cold iron and thrusting it from you in repugnance; to do so with your own body was somehow self-defeating.
Therefore when he finished he was rather dejected, as well as out of breath. He rolled supine, leaned back on his arms, and looked up at Fedder.
“You know the idea I’ve had for quite some time?” he asked. “That I should go back and start everything over. That is, everything that’s happened since leaving the Army. I should go back to the separation center, turn, and walk into civilian life again, this time through the gate of horn.”
“Pardon?” asked Fedder.
“I read the Aeneid not long ago,” Reinhart explained, and then because Fedder still looked blank, he said: “You know, the two gates of Hades, one of ivory, one of horn. Through the ivory gate ‘the powers send false dreams to the world above,’ but the horn gate provides ‘a ready exit for the true spirits.’ Oh well, it’s not important.”
“Carl,” said Fedder, who from Reinhart’s perspective seemed to have grotesquely large knees. “Carl,” he repeated, looking down at his host with three parts seriousness and one of amusement, “I know you won’t be offended if I ask: On thinking it over, don’t you find your attitude towards marriage is a bit, well, somewhat on the sophomoric side?”
Reinhart got heavily to his feet. “That seems to be Gen’s position on the issue, and it’s pretty wild when you realize that all I’ve done for the past three months is work, whereas all I ever did before getting married was loaf. That reminds me of the favorite principle of psychiatry: that the truth is always the reverse of appearance; the kind man is really a sadist, and so on. I believe it, but the trouble is that once knowing about it, you are corrupted. Wanting to do your friend a favor, you must punch him in the face to make sure he knows you don’t hate him secretly.”
Fedder by now was smiling broadly, and Reinhart realized that his neighbor had applied these remarks to explain the kick he had received the day before.
“Listen, Carl,” Fedder said, leaving his chair. “Let Dr. Niles prescribe. Forget your troubles for an afternoon, hey old boy? You’re going on a picnic with the Fedder Family. Now we won’t take your No. We’ve got more than enough food for all and sundry. We insist.”
His use of the first person plural disturbed Reinhart, who said: “Hadn’t you better check first with your wife?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Fedder boasted, sticking out his belly and hitching up his shorts. “When you’ve been married for six and a half years, you know the other partner. Most of these uncertainties are the product of the early months, old fellow. You’ll see. It’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, enjoy an afternoon with your neighbors. And don’t worry about wives. Yours will come back, and mine will love you.”
It was an odd thing to hear, but Reinhart managed to combine the relief of his own embarrassment with the suppression of any element that might give his neighbor pain, by uttering a laconic: “No doubt.” Furthermore, upon the instant he resolved upon his honor that never would he succumb to Mrs. Fedder’s attractions. This oath was necessitated by his having seen, at Fedder’s first mention of “picnic,” a terrible image of himself and Bee making mad love amid the crushed fruit in a wild-blackberry bramble, while Fedder fed peanut-butter sandwiches to his children just over the next rise. Some people, like Maw, suffered vision of bloodletting, illness, and death. With Reinhart it had always been sex, and nowadays the fantasy was horrible which in his bachelorhood had been a real joy of life. And he detested picnics.
Some hours later, as a member of a little group of bucolics that ringed an outdoor oven in the county park, Reinhart had nothing to reproach himself for but egomania. The happy truth was that Beatrice Fedder had no discernible interest in Reinhart. Indeed, she seemed to find him barely tolerable, and when by chance they stood briefly side by side, was first to move away, her thin nostrils finely drawn in what, he told himself delightedly, could not be other than dislike.
“How do you want your hamburger, Carl?” asked Niles, squatting before the oven, poking into its fire with a long green stick.
His middle daughter (whose name Reinhart had naturally forgotten), swinging from foot to foot, struck up a silly chant: “Hamburgers, hotdogs, hamburgers, hotdogs …”
“Ah,” said Reinhart, remembering Fedder’s attitude in his kitchen, “so you do the cooking?”
Fedder turned up a soot-stained face. “Only outdoors.” He curled his lips in good humor and said to his wife, who stood behind the chimney, which cut off much of her slender body from Reinhart’s gaze, which seemed to be her point: “Golly, Bee, I can’t get a fire going when I’m watched. Why don’t you take Carl for a walk?”
Both principals recoiled from the suggestion so vehemently that even Fedder would have noticed had his head been up, but it wasn’t, and he was also distracted by his little daughters, who were continually delivering their minuscule idea of fuel: ice-cream sticks, discarded soda straws, half-burnt matches, and dry grass: it was plain they loved him dearly.
“Go ahead,” said Fedder, peering into the grate. “Carl doesn’t know this park, Bee.”
“Why,” cried Reinhart, who was a native of these parts, to which the Fedders had moved only since the war, “I’ve been coming here since I was as old as—” he pointed at one of the little girls but was halted by the nonrecall of her name, which he knew was hardly the kind of failure to demonstrate before her parents, and was mumbling certain guesses—“Bainbridge,” “Crowley,” etc. (what ever had become of “Jane” and “Ruth” and “Betty”?)—when a cloud of yellow smoke drove them all from the oven.
“Wood too green,” Fedder shouted merrily, and flapped a large, dirty handkerchief to open a channel through the cloud. How gay he was, surrounded by his little girls chirping like wrens, and his stately wife—for so she was, with somewhat elongated features, clean jaw, prominent cheekbones, and suntan. Taller than Fedder, she wore yellow shorts above exceptionally long thighs. Her shirt was the puffy kind that needed the help of the wind to reveal vital upper data, but they were not likely to be voluptuous. Here and there—neck, forearm, etc.—Reinhart saw bones and tendons. She faintly favored the male members of the House of Windsor, except as to eyes; and also an underweight motion-picture actress who always played newspaperwomen.
“Be friends,” Fedder adjured his wife and his neighbor, and dropping his handkerchief, harassed them in the style of a dog herding farm animals.
“Niles!” his wife remonstrated in a whiny alto that showed her dignity in another light. Now that was one for the book: she was scared of good old Reinhart!—who at last decided that the evidence of the previous night would never stand in court: he must have heard wrong. It had of course been she and Fedder, who then popped out for a midnight stroll, returning from which he had been detected by Reinhart. No other explanation was possible, now that Reinhart had seen her. Why, she was so shy that, as Fedder pushed them together like a procurer, her eyes closed in shame and were it not for the tan she would have turned crimson.
“Niles,” she whined again, and while Reinhart had begun to find her modesty winning, her voice irritated him.
“Go on,” said Fedder, patting both her and Reinhart on their respective behinds. “Run along, and remember what I told you.”
“What?” asked Reinhart.
“No, I mean Bee. Bee?”
“All right,” she murmured.
“A good half hour before I’ll get a decent bed of embers,” her husband stated significantly. He gathered to him all three children and returned to the oven.
Reinhart sensed that he was supposed to hear Beatrice Fedder’s advice on how to regain and keep his wife; and he regretted more than ever having told his troubles to Niles, who had turned out to be that most terrifying of men: the fellow who is really interested.
“I guess we have to take a walk,” he said to her, wryly throwing up his hands. But her head stayed down, and it was difficult for Reinhart to make a point when he couldn’t catch an auditor’s eye.
“Look!” he cried. “There goes a bluejay.”
She lifted her head in the wrong direction. In this attitude, however, her slender throat and narrow eye were seen to great advantage. Men, it occurred to Reinhart, pick wives who have what they themselves lack, so that if it is done well, the married pair is a single human unit in which all possibilities are represented. Thus Bee Fedder, in distinction to her husband, looked as though she never perspired. And Reinhart himself was the last person from whom to expect the decisiveness and efficiency that were, or had been, prime qualities of Genevieve nee Raven. Yet the use of those remarkable faculties were just what he denied her. Was he man enough to call Gen tomorrow and admit his mistakes?
“I guess,” he said to Bee, “that you’re supposed to be my marriage counselor. Well, tell me this: Is there a formula for keeping the right proportion? A man must be authoritative, or else a woman will have no respect for him. On the other hand, he must not be domineering. He must be attentive, for nothing kills the spirit sooner than indifference, but it is true that everyone, no matter how ardent, needs a rest from unvarying, uh—” he realized he was being a bit bold for their short acquaintance, but said it anyway—“passion.”
They had entered a trail leading from the clearing to a field where a host of men played softball with many hoots and catcalls, everybody short of wind and being mocked for it: some office picnic or Methodist outing. With her head down, Beatrice would have walked somnambulistically into center field, but Reinhart caught her bony elbow and steered back into the woods.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” he stated, “but I gathered from Niles’s attitude that—”
“That’s all right!” she cried, overloud. The sound flushed a blue-colored bird from the greenery above them: as it happened, another jay: scolding raucously, the little crank.
“I knew a flier once,” Beatrice suddenly asserted, turning a willowy ankle but gracefully gliding out of the warp. She was no longer shy but rather defiant. “Do you remember Colin Kelly, who in the early days of the war sank a Japanese warship by diving down the smokestack? My friend did the same thing without the publicity.”
Reinhart said: “Magnificent!”
Bee looked directly at him for the first time, paling a little in approval. They had come to a fork in the trail marked by rustic signposts with burned-in legends: LAMES to the left, MEN to the right. Again Reinhart steered to the rear.
“You do understand, don’t you?” she asked.
He smiled and lied: “Oh sure.” Geographically, they were getting nowhere; it was a typical public park, where all roads led to playfields or toilets.
“Ah to be a man!” said Mrs. Fedder, still looking aloft. “And soar through the wild blue yonder. Were you in the Air Corps?”
“No,” Reinhart answered vaguely, wondering whether Fedder would mind if they came back so soon; there just wasn’t any place to stroll unless they left the trail, and that, according to the little signs affixed to every other tree, would violate the law.
She asked desperately: “You were in the service?”
“Oh yes, I was … I was …” From the corner of his eye he saw certain indications that permitted no leeway: either he produced some claim to adventure or he was a humdrum clod whom she would scorn. The strange thing was why he should care, having no designs on her.
“I don’t know whether it’s too soon to tell. They warned us—” It was as easy as that, and he didn’t really have to prevaricate.
“Intelligence,” said Beatrice Fedder. “You were an operative.” She clapped her hands, sending more birds out of their treetop hiding places. When she spoke in approbation, her voice was not at all nasal.
“But you know,” Reinhart declared manfully, seeing her husband’s grimy back at the oven across the clearing, to the edge of which they had returned, “everybody did something adventurous. Some veterans just talk more than others. Anyway, just surviving the problems of normal life is romantic, if you want to see it that way.”
“Especially washing and cooking,” she answered in a voice so abrasive that it almost took the skin off his neck. “And living in a tin can. And having one kid after another. And talking about sewers. And sitting around the playground with the other hens, who all went to college.”
There burst Reinhart’s bubble of happy domesticity. But Gen hadn’t had to do most of those things, and yet she was also dissatisfied. What did women want? To be men. But that was just impossible, and until they realized it was, he would be out of sympathy with them. They were just like Negroes, who refused to settle for less than being white. And Indians wanted to be Englishmen; Latins, gringos; midgets, giants; and dogs, persons. By this scheme of values Reinhart stood at the very apex of creation. Yet at any given time he was miserable. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gen, Bee, Splendor, Pandit Nehru, and Rin Tin Tin!
“I’m sorry,” he told Mrs. Fedder, “but there’s nothing I can do about it.” He regretted having expressed so much resentment in his tone; after all, he was in a way her guest. But when she replied, that kind of regret seemed a joke.
“You could,” she said, “if you wanted to.” Her head fell again, and by the time they reached her husband, her manner was as if they had never gone.
“Oh,” said Fedder, staring from kindly, smoke-reddened eyes, “back already? That didn’t take long.” His daughters rushed to him as soon as they saw Reinhart, who caught the largest in transit and offered to lift her way up into the sky, but she hid her face and shrank from him.
A breeze of displeasure wafted across Fedder’s honest face. “Trow gets dizzy easily,” he said, and with a protuberant belly forced Reinhart to fall back.
“Here,” said Reinhart, after the meal, “let me earn my keep. I’ll police up.” He reached first for Fedder’s cardboard plate, purposely ignoring Bee, who had finished long before. But she silently made herself his partner, gathering together the children’s trash and, though she climbed out of the picnic table more quickly than he, who always had trouble with those joined-bench things, waiting for him so that they could walk to the fire together.
“O.K.!” bellowed Fedder, the jolly pimp. “You make an attractive couple.”
Reinhart craftily changed his mind, announcing: “On the other hand, I’ll take the kids off your hands, Niles. I saw an Eskimo Pie man down by the ball field.” He had not yet got himself free of the stocks, having straddled a cross-member so as to sit far away from Beatrice, whom her husband had placed on his side.
“After all that water melon?” Fedder asked incredulously, showing the white rind of his. Sensibly enough: those tiny children had eaten like wolves.
And Trowbridge, age 5, who had chattered constantly during the meal but incomprehensibly to everyone except her Daddy, now asserted with great clarity of phrase that she hated ice cream. The three-year-old said little, the smallest nothing at all, but they had managed throughout the meal to get across their dislike of Reinhart, as well as—could it be true?—a conspicuous lack of affection for their mother, who returned it, if her earlier comment was to be believed. And Fedder urged his wife on another man in that perverse way. How terrible! thought Reinhart, who had started on this outing with a desperate need to see a happy family in action. Instead he had got into a snakes’ nest. Perhaps fate had saved him from similar straits: if the baby was a boy, Gen would conspire with it against him; if a girl, he had an ally against his wife. Either way it was all bitter conflict, and where was love?
He and Bee stuffed the oven chimney full of trash, counting on the combustibles to incinerate the melon rinds and bun-ends, and he tossed a lighted match through the grill at the base. The fire caught on well in the bottom paper, but became clogged somewhere along the middle of the column: dense smoke gushed from the chimney mouth, smelling fearfully of hot garbage. This was an event that failed to touch the Fedders, but Reinhart felt it reflected unfavorably on his outdoorsmanship and began strenuously to poke a stick down the congested shaft in hopes he might clear it before the ice-cream man reached them—for that guy, who had pedaled his bicycle-cart up the trail from the ball field, approached them from across the clearing, his bell jingling; and furthermore, his skin was black wherever it emerged from his white uniform, a color combination Reinhart had honestly not noticed when he had seen him at a great distance.
The stickwork made the smoke worse, and Reinhart obviously couldn’t piss on the fire as he would have done as a boy, or even now in privacy, so he took a leftover Coke and poured it down the stack.
“Eskimo Pie, sir, madam? Cups? Raspberry, lemon sherbet. Ice-cream samwich?” announced the vendor, who for reasons of his own had chosen to apply first to Reinhart and Bee rather than the obvious choice of Fedder & kids still at table.
“Don’t give me a bad time,” said Reinhart, throwing down his empty pop bottle. “Mrs. Fedder, this is my friend Splendor Mainwaring. Splendor, Mrs. Fedder.”
Splendor took off his white cap and nodded, staying on the bike seat.
Bee Fedder did a gracious thing: gave her slender hand to the Negro and said: “I’m glad to know you” without a trace of condescension.
He hardly touched it, but wryly called attention to their difficulty with the garbage. “Don’t let the park police see that. You’re supposed to use those litter baskets.”
“My friend is a writer,” Reinhart told Bee. “By the way,” he said to Splendor, “I still have a manuscript of yours.”
“Oh,” said Bee in that harsh, almost derisive tone a woman sometimes assumes to indicate she is intelligent. “Oh, is that true. I’d like to read it.”
Reinhart smiled evilly at his friend. “You must get the author’s permission.”
Fedder came up at that moment and shamelessly confessed to Reinhart that now his daughters did want ice cream, now that the man was actually here.
He ordered three chocolate sandwiches from Splendor.
“Right away, boss,” cried Splendor and leaned around in his seat to open the caboose-like refrigerator. “Here you go. That will be twenty-eight cents.”
Reinhart wished them all in hell.
“Twenty-eight?” Fedder complained, showing a new side of his character.
“Seven cents each.” Splendor shrugged. “I just work here.”
The children hung like dogs underneath Fedder’s elbow, looking up at the sandwiches he held; one had begun to melt in a long trickle of brown milk down his pale forearm.
“Oh,” he grumbled, and with his free hand paid him.
Splendor took quick, insolent stock of Mrs. Fedder’s perfect knees and rang his bell. “Eskimo Pies!” he suddenly bawled at the empty clearing.
“So long Splendor,” Reinhart said with no punctuation, as if it were the title of a musical comedy. “Keep up your writing!”
“Oh I will,” Splendor answered. He began slowly to pedal away.
“Huh?” asked Fedder, with a quizzical grin. “You know each other?”
Reinhart felt a strange pawing at his left leg. Looking down, he saw Fedder’s two-year-old wiping chocolate ice cream on his khaki trousers.
“What’s this about writing?” asked Fedder, sticking his wet muzzle in Reinhart’s line of vision.
“I must borrow it from you,” said Beatrice.
Splendor kept going, his jacket-back stained with perspiration, but at twenty yards, he looked back and shouted: “You better get the garbage out of that oven!”
“No, no, honey,” Reinhart was busy telling the tiniest Fedder. But he should have heeded his friend’s warning, for no sooner had Splendor vanished down the trail to the ball field than a surly park policeman came towards them on the same path. Having reached and inspected the clogged oven, he issued to Reinhart—to whom he went without hesitation—a summons which ordered its recipient to pay two dollars’ fine or defend himself in court against a charge of littering public property.