The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  The side door opened and old Mr. Folger came in very slowly. In one hand he carried four eggs. “Good morning,” Laskell said, very loud. The old man nodded two or three times and mumbled into his mustache. He went very slowly and carefully about the business of placing the eggs in a bowl. Laskell’s fear that he would have to eat his meals with the old man had proved groundless. The Folgers ate in the kitchen by themselves at a different hour, and Laskell’s meals were served by Mrs. Folger at a little table near the window in the dining-room. But now, after a week with the family, it would not have troubled Laskell to eat with old Mr. Folger. He was even gratified by the old man’s presence in the family on, as it were, equal terms. Old Mr. Folger was so on the edge of life that he was scarcely a person any longer, yet he was kept a person by his inclusion here, by the little duties he performed such as this one of fetching the eggs. It was impossible to believe that he had stood at Gettysburg, but he had indeed.

  “Would you like an egg this morning?” Mrs. Folger asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Go along then and I’ll have your coffee ready before you can say Jack Robinson.”

  “Jack Robinson,” Laskell said.

  She shooed this audacity out of the kitchen. He went and sat on the porch to wait for breakfast. The three hounds were lying on the grass and they rose lazily to see if they could get some affection. Laskell sat on the edge of the porch and pulled their long ears for them.

  There was no doubt about Laskell’s getting well. Twice a day he tested his urine as Dr. Graf had ordered, using the test tube that Dr. Graf had given him, heating it over a lamp and dropping in the acetic acid when it boiled. Each time the urine was clear and not cloudy, free of albumin. He went on fairly long walks without getting tired. His pallor was giving way to tan.

  The mornings were chilly, and when Laskell woke he would lie in bed with the illusion that it was winter or autumn or early spring, not those seasons as he knew them now but as he had known them as a boy. He remembered the seasonal procession as it had been celebrated at school, the marking of the vernal equinox, Arbor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. He remembered the ritual objects cut out of paper with which the schoolrooms were hung, and the appropriate poems. As he lay snug under the many thin blankets and patchwork quilts, dropping off to sleep and waking again, he would recall certain days with a peculiar intensity. There were emotions connected with the suburban field of snow over which a glittering crust had formed. The sky that day was absolutely blue. He had felt that it was making a conscious effort to be as blue as that, that it was alive and trying. And as he had walked across the field he had repeated over and over again part of a poem he had been made to memorize at school.

  Blue, blue, as if the sky let fall

  A flower from its cerulean wall.

  It was always of his childhood that Laskell thought as he lay in bed in the morning. He was surprised to discover that he had a fondness for himself as a boy. He forgave, as it were, the boy he had been. He exempted the young John Laskell from blame for all the dirty and embarrassing things that that child had done. He remembered quite nice things about him, such as his reciting the poem about the fringed gentian; or how, on one autumn morning that was robust and russet just as the books said autumn was, his mother had given him as the day’s clothes a khaki shirt and pants which seemed so precisely the outfit in which to meet life heroically that he had cried “Hurray!” and had kissed the shirt in affection and had been rebuked for excessive and eccentric feeling; or how large and metaphysical had been his sense of freedom when for the first time each year he was allowed to go out without his overcoat, with just a sweater beneath his jacket.

  It was true that here, at the Folgers’, as the exhilaration of the morning faded and before the evening closed comfortably in, there were certain hours, from noon on, when the sun was hot and high, in which Laskell lacked energy, or perhaps will. But the bad early afternoon hours were unimportant compared to the clear, beautiful morning hours. The way he felt in the morning seemed, somehow, to prevent him from being ashamed of his weak attachment to his illness or his foolish attachment to Paine. Now and then he had a vague personal sorrow for Gifford Maxim, but no more than that. He was neither angry at Maxim nor disgusted with him. That was in part because it was unreasonable to feel such things toward a man so little responsible as Maxim now was. But chiefly it was because in this simple life of sun, food, sleep, and trees the ideas that Maxim had once stood for and now had deserted did not seem as real as they once had. There was perhaps a kind of truth in the belief held by some people that the politics of the city and of the country must necessarily be different. Maxim—the old Maxim—had once explained why this was a shallow view of things, but Maxim was refuted by the happy blankness of Laskell’s mind.

  Mrs. Folger stood at the screen door and said, “Well, do you want your breakfast to get cold after I’ve been to all the trouble?”

  There were three prunes, a large bowl of oatmeal, a pitcher of milk, some cool toast, and a large pot of hot weak coffee. Except for the quality of the coffee, it was not a bad breakfast. Nor, on the other hand, was it a very good one. Like the rest of Mrs. Folger’s meals, it was plentiful but dim. Nancy’s estimate of Mrs. Folger’s cooking had been borne out only by Mrs. Folger’s cakes, which, to be sure, were good and frequent. But Laskell was not particular about his meals. He had been forbidden albuminous foods and this made a bond between him and Mrs. Folger, a fine relaxation about eggs. At his first breakfast, Mrs. Folger had approached him to open negotiations in the matter of eggs—her anxiety suggested a business no less large than that. When Laskell was able to say what was no more than the truth, that he was permitted to eat no eggs at all, Mrs. Folger twinkled at him with a deep appreciation of his moral fineness. He was better able to understand this when he learned that the money from the sale of eggs went into Mrs. Folger’s own particular fund. It was a large consideration to her that he was not going to sequester and consume a dozen eggs a week. She offered Laskell eggs every morning and every morning Laskell affirmed his moral stature by refusing.

  On the whole, Laskell liked Mrs. Folger very well. She was a gossip and a snob and she had a quick mind. She set a high value on intellectual prestige, having once in her girlhood taught school. Her relation to Laskell’s intellectual life was continuous and strange. She often asked him about his work and his training for it, and once she asked him if he owned many books, but always in any such conversation she would interrupt in the midst of his reply and vanish with some remark about a household duty; and Laskell, who always entered these conversations with pleasure, happy to see how small, really, were the separations between the educated and the uneducated, had the impression that she was gratified by her ability to be heedless of this educated man. He disliked himself for having this idea. If he turned on the radio, she was pretty sure to say with sympathy and approval, “You do enjoy that good music, don’t you?” and then with a casual word of apology she would turn the dial “to get the weather report,” listening on the way to bits and snatches of other programs.

  Within her question, “You do enjoy that good music, don’t you?” there was concealed another question: “Do you really?” Laskell, who never had anything to say to Mrs. Folger when she turned the dial, had the less to say when it occurred to him that Mrs. Folger, all unknown to herself, resented his absorption in “that good music.” He did not know whether she was jealous of the music or of him—whether her self-esteem was injured by the absorption that drew his attention so far from her, or whether she resented his ability to be interested in something to which she was indifferent. He found it painful to reflect that in our day intellect and sensibility, thought and art, had been made to confer status and to generate snobbery.

  There was no way for Laskell to express the irritation he had begun to feel at Mrs. Folger’s interference when he listened to the radio. But one day the situation was strangely cleared between them. Laskell had made a stab a
t a station he could not usually get and by some luck of atmospheric condition he broke into the recorded Glyndebourne performance of The Marriage of Figaro. It was in full flight and nearing its end in the magical last scene where farce moves to regions higher than tragedy can reach. He saw the cloaked figures searching with lanterns in the dark shrubbery, the plots and disguises of the garden, everyone deceiving, no one being the person he or she is taken for, and then all the discoveries—

  “Il paggio!

  “Mia figlia!

  “Mia madre!

  “Madama!”

  the recognitions coming with burlesque excess. The Countess knelt to the Count to win pardon for all the miscreants and then the Count understood that it was he who must ask pardon of her, and asked it in the unimaginable gravity and grace of the aria Contessa perdona, and then was seconded in his plea by the swelling cathedral chorus of all the raffish, disguised characters, in which supplication was made the lovelier by the certainty of its acceptance. Laskell was listening to this, waiting for the chorus to rise to the height from which the Countess would begin her reply, she soaring higher still, almost beyond reach, to say that she was too fond to do anything else than say yes; the Countess had just begun her reply, raining down influence, when Mrs. Folger, who had been standing in the doorway, went to the radio and turned the dial.

  There was a squawk and without thought Laskell cried, “Mrs. Folger! Leave it alone!” His voice was so fierce that Mrs. Folger quite started. She turned back the dial, but she missed the exact point, and Laskell had to make the adjustment. By then the Countess had finished her great flight, and the orchestra and the chorus were launched on the carnival march which winds up with a bang the whole absurd business of the opera, brushing aside all questions of guilt, rushing off to heedless life now that forgiveness had come.

  Mrs. Folger was looking at him strangely, entirely without resentment of his burst of temper.

  “I’m sorry I snapped that way,” he said. “It’s just that I’m particularly fond of that piece of music.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. No offense whatever,” said Mrs. Folger. Her eyes seemed mild and satisfied. “If you like something, you don’t want anybody to interfere with it.” She seemed content and Laskell dated from this moment of sudden thoughtless anger a new ease in his relation to Mrs. Folger. She seemed much more pleased with him and trusted him more.

  The question of intellectual standing interested Mrs. Folger very much, and more than once she turned the talk to Arthur Croom. Laskell found in the Folger parlor a copy of Arthur’s book on business cycles with a warm inscription to the Folgers on the flyleaf, and Mrs. Folger moved about and about the question of whether or not it was a good book. She wanted to know what an Assistant Professor was. Did Arthur Croom, as an Assistant Professor, the status the title page announced, assist some “big” professor in his work? She was interested in the rewards of the intellectual life. Did Assistant Professors earn much money or little?—she had heard two accounts of the matter. She wanted to know if Nancy was an educated woman and if she worked or had ever worked. She made infinitely subtle appraisals of Laskell’s feelings about the Crooms, probing with softest pressure of gentlest fingers for where the weak spot in the connection might be.

  She could be forthright too, and she flounced and bridled and was charmingly animated when she gave him information about Emily Caldwell, whom he had seen on the road before the Crooms’ but whom he had not yet met. Emily Caldwell’s intellectual pretensions were the first matter of comment and then, what seemed connected, her manner of dress. Close upon these came Emily’s self-indulgence, a certain affair of strawberry jam bought with relief money. It was an indiscretion made more culpable by Emily’s remark when the question had come up. Emily had said, “Man cannot live by bread alone,” a statement which seemed to claim scriptural authority for strawberry jam.

  And all this was made the worse by other elements of Emily’s questionable conduct. There was her openly expressed belief, for instance, that little boys and girls would do well to run around together with no clothes on at all. And then there was the statement she had made a few years back to Scott Tilden when he was still a boy in high school. She had said, and in front of listeners, “You have a beautiful body, Scott.” And Scott had never been able to live that down. It was still a good way of getting him angry to remind him of it.

  Mrs. Folger said she was willing to grant, as many people did, that Duck Caldwell was not all he might be, yet she wondered what he would have been like if he had had a different kind of wife to steady him up.

  Laskell at first liked Mr. Folger rather less well than his wife, but then he knew Mr. Folger less well. There was a good deal of the bore about Mr. Folger, but he was an interesting bore. He had much eccentric dignity and a high manner. He carried irony very far, so far that he almost never communicated directly. When he talked, he sent his voice in some other direction than toward his listener, as if he intended it to reach its destination by ricochet. He liked to talk about the injustice that prevailed in the world. He read an odd little paper got out by an isolated socialist group in Hartford. When Laskell read the paper, he saw in his mind’s eye pictures not of “workers” but of “workingmen.” They wore square paper caps and aprons and carried hammers—honest workingmen they were. He had a kind of admiration and affection for the little group with its insistence on the honesty of the workingman and its flavor of William Morris and of meetings held on Sunday afternoons, its appearance of having discovered socialism for the first time and its implied refusal to mix itself up with extravagant foreigners, the red-revolutionaries of Paris and the Second International. He wondered in how many little communities throughout the state solitary men entrenched themselves in its doctrine and felt that they were holding the outworks.

  Mr. Folger liked to talk against the interests, the gas and electric and water companies, which he thought should be owned by the public. When Laskell responded with the situation in housing, Mr. Folger seemed to prefer not to listen.

  Although Mr. Folger put some of his time into a small truck patch and drove his three cows to pasture and milked them, his chief work was in connection with the big black limousine in which he drove Miss Walker, the elderly lady from Boston. Often Laskell overheard Mr. Folger talking to Miss Walker on the telephone and his attention was much engaged by the mixture of subservience and dominance that he heard in the voice of this big grave man. The irony was then all withdrawn, or perhaps it was operating at some deeper remove. Mrs. Folger showed Laskell the plans for the house that Miss Walker was to erect for the Folgers on her property, a modern, ugly, disguised house, with plumbing and all the kitchen conveniences. It was to bring Mr. Folger within easier reach, permitting him to look after Miss Walker’s little estate.

  When Nancy Croom said of the Folgers, “Aren’t they wonderful?” Laskell could say yes. But his Folgers were not precisely the Folgers of Nancy’s representation, and when he tried to suggest that there was a difference in their agreement, by inquiring about the relation to Miss Walker, Nancy drew back a little.

  “Miss Walker is an old terror,” she said. “A tyrannical old terror, and she exploits Mr. Folger dreadfully. He’s at her beck and call. But they do need the money. They’re not young any more. And for people like that to put a son through Harvard—”

  It was the first Laskell had heard of that educational venture or indeed of that member of the Folger family. He could not help wondering what reticence had operated in so much talk of education.

  And the exigencies of advancing age or the son at Harvard did not wholly explain the tone that Laskell heard, the quiet masculine voice of Mr. Folger talking to Miss Walker on the phone, the brilliantly subtle compound of humility and command, spiced with what was surely the special irony of the absence of Mr. Folger’s characteristic irony. And when Mr. Folger turned from the phone after giving Miss Walker his advice about how to deal with a remiss contractor, his face would have the high, dignified impas
sivity of a great minister of state who gives to an aged queen not only his counsel and support but a supply of energy, even a touch of danger in her isolate life.

  And in the supplying of Miss Walker with whatever it was that was supplied, Mrs. Folger had her own part. Her tone on the telephone made the offer of Mr. Folger to Miss Walker and yet kept the gift valuable by never relinquishing her hold upon it or diminishing its worth by any relaxation of admiration. Few husbands of Mr. Folger’s age could have had the satisfaction of so much wifely regard as could be heard in the tone Mrs. Folger used when it was she who answered Miss Walker’s call, the tenderness for his effort when she said that he was out in the barn but would call back presently, the adoration of certainty with which she could say, “Oh, yes, Miss Walker, he’ll know just what to do about that.” And the tender valuation was the same whether Mr. Folger was really out of the house or sitting there listening to the conversation.

  It was not a duchy that was to be their reward, but they moved as gracefully and precisely as if it were. After all, in the proportion of the matter, something very like a duchy was at stake—there was the new house with its ugly saddle roof, its veranda and all modern conveniences, that Miss Walker was to build. Mrs. Folger spent much time choosing among the low-cost ingenuities suggested by the Department of Agriculture pamphlet. She and her husband preferred not to recognize that Laskell had any special knowledge about the planning of houses. The house was the crown of their life, the haven of their approaching old age. It was peculiarly theirs, its shape chosen by themselves from the offerings of an architectural catalogue, and they glazed over in polite inattention whenever Laskell, before he understood their feelings, made any comments save those of approval. The house, after all, was indeed their duchy, a thing of fairy tale, plucked from the unlikely chances of life. And the liveliness of their sense of the reward, their innocent, gentle skill in the affairs of court, made for Laskell a warm and interesting surrounding. The Folgers, he was always glad to say in answer to Nancy’s question, were wonderful indeed.