by James Jones
“You can’t get blood out of turnips,” Dave said. “Or pump it into them, either.”
“It’s sad,” Bob French said, “but it’s true. I might also say I’ve read all of your work, but I won’t. Although I have.”
Dave said nothing.
“How do you do?” Gwen French said. Her voice was low and very quiet, with a kind of quivering quality like a softly tapped drumhead stretched to the splitting point. She had much assurance. Self-contained. She hardly seemed to be looking at him at all, not out of shyness, out of assurance, but he knew she was carefully studying him.
For the book no doubt, Dave thought. Hirsh the goldfish.
“I understand you teach creative writing,” he said to her.
She smiled, the slightly belligerent dig not lost on her, and did not answer. There was no need to. Her father laughed delightedly.
“Maybe you would teach me,” Dave persisted. He knew it was bullish, but her father laughed again.
“She needs that,” he said. “Give her more.”
“I’m afraid my courses are all filled for the rest of the semester,” Gwen French said. “Maybe next year?”
“Manhattans?” Frank called in a clear voice from the buffet where he stood swaying very slightly.
The tableau broke up then and they all moved out into the dining room, Dave following the wide but boyish hips and long-boned thighs of Gwen French in the tailored suit.
“A manhattan will be fine, Frank,” she said in that voice. Self-contained. Assurance.
“Well, I want a martini,” Bob French said delightedly. “And don’t tell me you haven’t got the stuff.”
“You!” Frank said, grinning. “You would,” and bent down to the buffet door. “You’re too old to drink martinis, Bob, you know that.”
“Of course!” Bob French said. “That’s why I drink them! They give me a distinct illusion of youth.”
His daughter smiled at him tolerantly.
“It’s quite true, Guinevere,” he said. “Don’t grin.”
He was, Dave thought, the youngest one in the room.
He hoped dinner would sober him up a little.
Chapter 10
THE FRENCHES DID NOT actually live in Parkman at all, but in the little town of Israel five miles east on the banks of the river. When Robert Ball French retired from teaching two years before, he had astounded everyone by buying in Israel this big, old, square three-story mansion built during the last days of the river trade, and had proceeded to move himself and his daughter into it lock, stock, and barrel and live there. The house itself, as he described it for Dave at dinner, was down on the main street of the town the business street with its back to the river, set off from the two small blocks of businesses by a yard full of huge black oaks and sycamores. The “last retreat,” Bob French had called it jokingly, and having called it that to everyone for so long, finally named it that officially: Last Retreat, and had a sign with that name made of wrought iron and mounted it over the gate.
“Guinevere didn’t much like the idea at first,” he smiled. “Especially the name, she didn’t like the name.”
“I still don’t,” Gwen French said. “I think it’s mawkish sentimentality.”
“Well, you must allow an old man his little foibles, my dear,” Bob French said. “I think the name is very apropos, both for Israel and myself.”
Dave, whom the shrimp cocktail and chopped salad and now the deliciously rare steak he was still working on had sobered up considerably, watched them both affectionately. He remembered the town. Big, old trees, a single dusty weathering business street of one-story buildings, a number of big old Southern colonial houses left over from the riverboat days, and from the high bank back of the business street the river, the Wabash, curving away into the east. Bob French’s house would have that same view, situated as it was.
Even before Dave’s time the Parkman DARs had bought up the ancient courthouse left over from the old days when Israel was the county seat before it was moved to Parkman, and had converted it into a museum which almost no one ever bothered to visit. The Parkman DARs sort of claimed squatters’ rights on Israel. As the third or fourth oldest town in the state.
Apparently, now, it had become little more than a suburb of Parkman. Over half its people now drove the five miles into Parkman to work at Sternutol Chemical or the brassiere factory, shuttling their way in and out among the heavy diesels that never ceased spluttering through along Route 40. And even the rest of them who didn’t work there did most of their shopping there, even the farmers.
“Doesn’t the DAR ever bother you?” he said.
Bob French’s eyes glinted. “No. I bought a shotgun. I am not quite that old yet.
“Guinevere really wanted to live here in town,” he went on. “But she also wanted to keep a weather eye on me, so I was able to outbluff her. Quite honestly, I think it was mainly because she was afraid I might walk off the bank in a brown study and fall in the river, if she wasn’t there.”
“I never know what you’re liable to do,” his daughter said.
“I still think you’re both crazy,” Frank said. He was sobered some, too. “You have to drive over here every day to get somethin. It’s impractical. But then you’re a poet.”
“Quite true,” Bob French said. “I am allowed to do things sane citizens cannot.” Then he grinned.
“Oh, Daddy!” Dawn said from her end of the table. “Haven’t you got any feeling for beauty at all? If Professor French wants to live by the river, he has a perfect right to.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Bob French said to her. “I’m glad to see I have some support here. If you ever want to come live with me when you get out of school, you’ll be most welcome. Beauty should only be for those who appreciate it.”
“Thank you, Professor French,” Dawn said with great dignity. “I may avail myself of your kindness someday,” she said with a look at her father.
“You could live a lot worse places,” Frank said.
“I’m sure you would be a most gratifying guest to have,” Bob French said to her. “Anyway, I think Guinevere is pretty much inured to it now,” he continued to Dave. He grinned at his daughter. “In fact, I think she has become so inured that I’m really afraid she’s going to try and move me out and take over herself. Any time.”
“It’s really a lovely place to live,” Gwen French said to Dave, ignoring her father. “Peaceful and quiet. I’m really glad we moved there, now. Though my vanity hates to admit he was right. It’s just far enough back from the street that people going by on the sidewalk don’t bother you unless you want them to. And there’s always the river. It’s very good for his work. That’s what’s important. Even if there are cracks in all the walls and the wind does blow through,” she said with that small smile.
“Nonsense!” Bob French exclaimed. “Fresh air! We none of us get enough fresh air! I don’t mind living in a dressing robe and wool scarf. Why should you?”
It was comical, not only the picture he evoked, but also especially the explosive way he said it, and Dave laughed. Now he turned to Gwen. She rankled him, with that apparently unpuncturable armor of serenity and self-contained assurance.
“What about your work?” he asked her. “Isn’t it good for your work, too?”
“Oh, I can do my kind of writing anywhere,” Gwen French said.
“She does all her writing when she’s in charge of study hall at the college in the afternoon,” Bob French smiled—an obviously outlandish lie.
“I suppose you can do that,” Dave grinned at Gwen. “Since you’re a critic.”
“It keeps me from being bored,” Gwen countered, smiling that small tolerant smile. “Who told you I was a critic?”
“You mean your writing keeps you from being bored by the students?” Dave grinned at her. “Or is it the students keep you from being bored by your writing? Oh, I just heard that you were.”
He was hoping she would ask again so he could string her alon
g. Just enough to see if he couldn’t make her mad, enough at least to see if there wasn’t somewhere some real blood of feeling in this smug self-confidence. But she didn’t ask. She looked at him levelly and then smiled again, as if she saw through him as clear as glass and, worse yet, did not hold it against him.
“Students never bore me,” she said. “Especially those who really want to learn. That’s my job, you know. To teach them.”
“I suppose somebody has to teach them,” Dave said.
“Yes. If I had your talent, I wouldn’t have to be a teacher,” Gwen French said, gazing at him levelly.
“My talent!” Dave exploded, and then laughed. Here we go with that let me help you to help yourself woman crap again— She wasn’t going to get at him that way. “You mean it’s really the writing that bores you, then?” he grinned. “If it’s not the students?”
Gwen French looked down at the table and traced her finger on the cloth. “No-o. The writing doesn’t bore me, either.” She looked up at him. “But I sometimes think one of my troubles is that it isn’t painful enough for me, doesn’t really cause me enough real agony.”
Irritation surged up in Dave. It was an unusually perceptive statement, one that showed a pretty thorough knowledge of the workings of the creative mind—at least, as he had come to understand it. He hated to think she knew that much, was that smart.
“It would, if you were writing a novel,” he said shortly.
“I expect,” she smiled. “Anyway, I think that that’s an important factor to all good writing.”
“Maybe you don’t want to feel agony?”
“Probably, I don’t,” she said. “But I think that the agony that goes before, in living, is what is later transmuted into the agony of trying to express, get it down on paper. Human beings were not originally constructed to think. If you don’t have the first agony, you won’t have the second. That’s why I said I lacked your talent. I don’t have the first. I lack your talent for misery.”
“You ought to try falling in love sometime,” Dave said sourly.
Instead of being irked or embarrassed as he had expected—expected? hoped? Gwen French’s eyes lit up and she leaned forward in her chair (twisting her bottom, he noticed, a little eager squirming motion).
“That’s exactly the same theory I’ve been working along,” she said. “I just completed a paper on it not too long ago. I’m glad to hear you say that. My thesis was that it’s this abnormally high potential for falling in love, the really abnormal need for it and the inability to escape it, that largely both makes and destroys the creative personality in any given individual.”
“That’s a large mouthful,” Dave said. Here was all that old literary crap again, he thought, that he’d promised himself to avoid, and yet he couldn’t even feel disgusted. It was impossible, when she looked like this, her face alive and vibrant. It was impossible not to like her—impossible not to be in love with her, really. Oh hell, he thought, here we go. But he still had a sudden vision of them lying together in a bed and her telling all this there, talking excitedly—instead of here across a dinner table. The thought he had been trying to put down all afternoon rose up irresistibly now: that this woman could understand him, could love him. He wanted to clutch at her. And yet how? But how? Tell her that.
For some reason, this rankled him still more, that he should feel all this. He had known all along what would happen when he met her, he could smell it, from the moment Wally Dennis and ’Bama started talking about her, that was why he’d refused to meet her with Wally, he had known he would want to make her—make her? no, more than that. Have a love affair with her. A long, rich, reaching out, and perhaps even sometimes touching love affair. But why? Irritation washed up in him even higher. Who the hell was she, anyway? Who is Sylvia? What is she-ee?
All right, he’d settle for one good romp with her, he told himself, before he went back to California. If he could make it. In a week. And if he couldn’t the hell with it.
“You remember the contessa-or-whatever-she-was, in Italy?” Gwen French said. “It was in Milan, and Stendhal lived there with her for two years. She wouldn’t have an affair with him and she wouldn’t marry him. She even thought him something of a buffoon. He kept himself celibate for her for two years, until he left.”
“Then she was right,” Dave said. “He was a buffoon.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not any more than all writers are buffoons,” Gwen French smiled.
“Hear, hear!” her father said. “Poets are writers!”
“The statement still stands,” Gwen French grinned at him.
Someone set Dave’s dessert in front of him. It was Agnes. He looked up at her for a moment, almost not recognizing who she was from the force of his absorption with the other woman, with Gwen French. It was all only light dinner conversation really, deliberately meaningless, he told himself, to go with the meal. But all the unspoken undercurrents were there, too, just the same. Irritation surged up in him again.
It wasn’t what she said so much as the way she said it that made him mad. That infuriating quality of complete self-containment, that would not allow you to get inside. It was like she was some kind of hermetically sealed capsule full of powerful vitamins that she was aware of but would not allow anybody to digest. Because she didn’t need to. Because she didn’t need someone. Anyone. That was Gwen French, the woman.
And he was Dave Hirsh, the man, who all his life had always needed more someones than he happened to have—
And all the time in her this other thing, that half-frightened, half-eager look, which ’Bama had been irked by, too, peeping out of the very bottom depths of the eyes, giving the lie to everything else. But how to reach it? You might almost think she was a damned virgin if you didn’t already know better.
A great situation.
He always picked them.
He swallowed the ice cream, his jaws taut and the palms of his hands dampening. Something in her made him want to take hold of her and lay her back across a bed, or a couch, or a chair arm, or the backseat of a car. That was what she wanted, and what she most certainly would fight.
But that would take a lot of arrogance to do, a lot more than he had—except in certain moods, like now. The trouble with him was his vanity made him afraid of being rebuffed. And he could hear her laughing answer as clearly as if she were speaking it right now:
Yes, you men. Whenever you can’t dominate a woman any other way, you want to throw them back on a bed and pretend that you’re a great big male and that they the poor little women need what you’ve got, and then you can swell your chest and drum the Tarzan call on it, sweet music to no one’s ears except your own.
And maybe she was right? Agnes was getting the coffee. He had not said a word for some minutes. The conversation had gone on without him well enough, he noticed. Without turning his head, he turned his gaze back covertly to Gwen French. With surprise, he found she was looking at him. His heart leaped. Hopefully. For a moment their eyes met and locked, his slitted and angry, hers widened with concern, and held. Then her father said something to her. She turned to smile at him and laughed at his joke.
In spite of his anger, the very real and very deep affection between father and daughter came through to Dave strongly. And because of that—if not quite only for that, eh?—he couldn’t help liking both of them. He was quite sure that Bob French had dug the whole situation. Christ, he thought, you’re getting to sound like Wally Dennis. He looked up angrily as Agnes set his coffee in front of him.
And yet Bob French had said or done nothing, had passed no judgment, no apparent judgment; even if it was his own daughter.
During dinner, Dave had gotten another, and entirely different picture of Robert French.
The older man had gotten his martini when they first entered, in spite of Frank’s demurrings, then he had had two more, which Frank obligingly mixed for him. The effect of three martinis, instead of exhilarating him, was to slow him down visibly. The youthful
exuberance with which he’d entered was gradually replaced by a deep and abiding gentleness which exuded from him in an aura so unobtrusive as to make you suddenly aware that you had been for some time without knowing it in the presence of a true gentlemanliness such as was rarely found anywhere anymore. Not in our generation, Dave thought. He realized now that this was probably Bob’s more nearly natural state, and the childish exuberance only a protective party attitude. Of the old school, truly. A by-product of a world that had died just a little bit too long ago, serving to remind today of some of yesterday’s important luxuries which today’s forces had caused to be destroyed. In spite of the excitement and the three martinis, Dave noticed, he ate sparingly and very slow.
There was some quality about him that made you know he was an entity, complete in himself in a way perhaps that his daughter wanted to be but probably never would be. And perhaps that was why, or partly why Dave was drawn more and more to her, as they finished up and all moved into the living room where they would not have to look at the congealing dirty plates of their own surfeited appetites. So that in the end, he and she, Gwen, wound up sitting by themselves off in the corner on Agnes’s antique loveseat while the others talked amongst themselves across the room.
The dinner had been heavy, the typical Midwestern party meal, and everyone with the exception of Bob French, and perhaps his daughter who nevertheless seemed to put away an awful lot, had eaten far too much, and Dave felt uncomfortable. He had to sit up straight to breathe easily, and the tight uniform bound him. He was sweating, and from time to time he wiped his palm across his forehead. And beside him sat Gwen, looking cool and comfortable and as unladen in the belly as if she hadn’t eaten anything.
Finally, he got around to asking. He had hoped she would volunteer it. She hadn’t.
“I understand you’re doing a book on writers now?” he said.
“Well,” Gwen said, “yes, I am. It’s really only an extension of that paper I told you about earlier.”
“I understand I’m in it,” Dave said, “more or less.”
