by Packer, Vin
He heard Tom Spencer reading the de la Mare poem now, imagined Maggie sitting back cupping the brandy snifter with that certain smug smile tipping her lips. Joseph’s eccentricities pleased Maggie more often than not; Joseph was her conversation piece.
HI!
HI! HANDSOME HUNTING MAN,
FIRE YOUR LITTLE GUN.
BANG! NOW THE ANIMAL
IS DEAD AND DUMB AND DONE,
NEVERMORE TO PEEP AGAIN,
CREEP AGAIN, LEAP AGAIN,
EAT OR DRINK OR SLEEP AGAIN —
OH, WHAT FUN!
Laughter and squeals and Maggie’s voice again above it all, “Isn’t it per-fect? Per-fect!”
“Per-fect!” Tom Spencer’s.
“Per-fect!” Miriam Spencer’s.
Joseph Meaker reached on the table beside him for the package of Flents. From it he took one of the pink wax plugs and popped it into his right ear, then another for the left. The noise became a humming, a buzzing; and he went back to what he was doing: reading over the letters, the poems, the notes — all that was in his Varda file.
“… and my dear, I love your soul — profound, sad, wise and exalted, like a symphony….”
2
“Don’t be silly! He has his Flents in his ears,” Maggie Meaker said. “Joseph shuts the world out with wax balls! Ah, but he’s sweet! God, but he’s sweet!” She was sitting crosslegged on the couch, wearing the new red gondolier’s pants from Bonwit’s, cradling her brandy in her palm, smoking the new brand of cigarette Albion & Frazier was launching. The confirmation that A. & F. had won the account had come through yesterday; Picks were unfiltered, regular-size cigarettes, and A. & F. was supposed to dream up a campaign which would emphasize the pleasures of the past, the old way of doing things. Tom Spencer and Maggie were to work on it together; Maggie, in charge, of course, because of seniority and experience.
“He really is sweet,” Miriam Spencer agreed.
“He must hate advertising people!” said Tom.
“I’m advertising people,” Maggie laughed. “No, Joseph’s just different. A loner, you know? Dreamer. He’d do the same if I had the Queen of England out for a weekend. That’s just Joseph.”
Maggie reached across for the bottle of Remy Martin and refilled everyone’s glass. Her own was full. She was two or three ahead. At A. & F. when men went to lunch with Maggie, they often did not appear in the office again until next day, Maggie always came back, no worse for three or four martinis and a brandy or two after the meal, but Maggie’s lunch dates (the men, not the women who never tried keeping up with her) faded off to steam rooms, early trains, or some movie to sleep through. Maggie held her liquor as well as she carried her age. At thirty-eight she had a full figure, not a thin girlish one by any means, but certainly not one that inspired her to read the Metrecal ads all the way to the end either. She was a 36-C with no sag, and a perfect size 14. Her skin was clear and softer than many women’s, and her features were good, strongly feminine, in the wide-mouthed, big-eyed, long-legged way, with large hands and feet, as some very beautiful women have, and coal black hair she wore in a semi-short, windblown fashion. If she was not exactly as beautiful as some of the classic examples of women with big feet, she was a very good-looking woman. She had style and confidence, and she was New York to her teeth.
And Joseph? Her opposite. If Joseph was anything to his teeth, he was Joseph. He was not handsome, and if someone who knew him well (whoever that would be) were asked if he were good-looking, that someone (Maggie) would most likely pause a moment and then answer, “Well, yes, I’d say he was.” There was room for doubt, in other words. He was extremely skinny and long-nosed, with sand-coloured hair that always seemed matted to his head, since he wore a cap most of the time, and he was nearsighted, though he seldom wore his glasses. The result was that Joseph squinted. One of the things about Joseph, one in a thousand, that Maggie never figured out, was the fact that vanity kept him from wearing his glasses. He would just as soon take Maggie out to dinner in a fine restaurant tieless, with egg on his shirt, but he would not appear in public wearing glasses. If he could help it, Joseph would not appear in public, period.
A lot of it Maggie crossed off as the predictable eccentricity of the scholar. A lot of it, as she always framed it in her thoughts, griped her soul! Before she had married Joseph three years ago, she had thought it would be fascinating to be a folklorist’s wife. She had imagined quiet evenings before some fireplace, sitting and listening to Joseph explain folk tales, discuss mores, and describe odd and enchanting peoples no one in the world had ever heard of but Joseph. As it turned out, Joseph never discussed his work and he did not enjoy sitting before fireplaces. He spent most of the time up in his study, and before they had moved to Bucks County, when they were still living in New York, he spent his evenings in the local library. Early in their marriage he had made an effort, but it was so obviously an effort — fidgeting at the table after dinner while Maggie had a second cup of coffee, falling asleep in front of guests — that Maggie finally encouraged him to do what he felt like doing, which was spending as much time as possible by himself. Bed was good, bed was very good, but whenever Maggie made a reference to her enjoyment, it seemed to embarrass Joseph. He never liked to talk about it.
• • •
There was a plus side, of course, even omitting bed. Joseph was a real individual, not cut out of anyone else’s pattern, nor chipped off anyone’s block. He was a beautiful artist, whether he simply sketched Maggie while she was cooking dinner or reading, or whether he did a full-scale oil of the house or a view from his study window. Any other man Maggie knew, who had a talent like Joseph’s, would be stacking canvases for a show, or never mind that, off in some garret wearing a beret and waiting for the world to recognize him; but Joseph often painted over his very best work, and never dragged a canvas out for anyone to see. Sometimes when Maggie was cleaning up Joseph’s study, she would come across a poem scribbled on his yellow scratch pad. Once she had asked him if she could make a copy of one and send it to The Saturday Review. Joseph’s answer: “What for?”
Then there was the gentleness of Joseph, the nearly self-effacing modesty of her husband. She had never seen him lose his temper, nor make what even came near a harsh statement, and Maggie had often thrown the book at him. In contrast to Maggie’s first husband, who drank himself into Roselawn Cemetery before his thirty-third birthday, Joseph was a Ladies’ Home Journal dream partner.
“What is Joseph working on now?” brought Maggie back from her thoughts; Tom Spencer, apple-faced and boyish (“Gotta have a gimmick, Mag, gotta get a gimmick” — rushing around A. & F., pushing his way up the ladder with calculated sincerity, fighting the good fight for that plot of suburbia at the end of the rainbow), “Another book?”
“We don’t know whether it will be a book yet or not,” Maggie said. “The Pennsylvanian Society of Folk Mores has given him a grant to study hexerei.”
“What-er-eye?”
“You know, hex signs on barns and everything. A form of Pennsylvania-Dutch witchcraft.”
Miriam Spencer exclaimed, “I love hex signs on barns!”
The single word “dumb” came to Maggie’s mind, but she smiled sweetly at Tom’s wife, and for some reason, said she loved hex signs on barns too. Tom Spencer said he had always thought they were very interesting, that someone at the agency ought to work them into an ad some time. Well, Maggie thought as she sipped her brandy, you can take the Chinaman out of China, but you can’t take China out of the Chinaman.
“I mean,” said Tom Spencer, “I’ve never seen hex signs in an ad, and I think we could work up something damn good around them.”
“I love them on barns,” Miriam Spencer repeated. She was trying hard not to yawn.
3
Joseph had dozed off. In the dream Varda sat beside him on the steps of Jesse Hall, back at the University of Missouri, blonde hair spilling down her back with the sun on it, warm; she was reading the poem she
wrote. “It’s called Dear, Joseph” — smiling up at him on the steps of Jesse Hall, in the years back at the University.
Am I dear to you?
I wish I were.
Dear is the held in mind
in warm rooms of thought
Do I live there?
Do I live at the fireplace of your eyes?
Dear you call me
I wish I knew
Dear is the tear, the wind soft-voiced
the peaceful word
Is there peace in you?
Is there
Is there. Is there — is — and the buzzing seemed louder in his ears, slicing into his dream, waking him. He pulled the Flent out of his left ear.
“Is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”
It was Miriam Spencer’s voice outside the door of his study, in the hallway by the bathroom. Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Six-past-three now.
Tom Spencer was saying, “Keep your voice down, Miriam!”
“Well, is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”
“We’re having one last nightcap together, Miriam. Just one!”
“Every time I hear your steps come up the stairs I think you’re finally coming to bed, but oh, no, you’re just going to the bathroom, then back down to Maggie for another hour!”
“Go back to sleep, Miriam. I told you what it would be like this weekend. Didn’t I? We’ve got to work out this Picks deal.”
“All night?”
“Yes, all night, if it takes all night, dammit!”
There were angry mumblings then, and the sound of the bathroom door shutting, of feet shuffling down the hall towards the guest room. Joseph removed the other Flent and sat up on the studio couch. Ishmael was curled in a ball at the end of the couch, and scattered on the floor beside the couch were pieces from the Varda file. Joseph picked them up and put them back neatly in the Manila file folder.
Dear is the shadow, reflection of us
Ours in light, yet also in darkness
Are you going my way?
He heard the toilet gurgle, then the faucet running. Ishmael stirred, and he leaned across and petted the cat. One day soon he would get another cat, a companion for Ishmael. The name of the second cat was already picked, from another of Melville’s novels, Mardi. In that novel there was a golden-haired girl and her name was Yillah.
Joseph Meaker whispered to his cat, “Soon I’ll get you Yillah.”
In college he had memorized a part of that novel: “The thoughts of things broke over me like returning billows on a beach long bared. A rush, a foam of recollections! — Sweet Yillah gone, and I bereaved!”
He heard Tom Spencer stumble out of the bathroom and down the stairs to Maggie. In ten minutes he would go down to the kitchen on the pretence of being hungry. He felt sorry for Miriam Spencer sleeping fitfully in the doublebed in the guest room, waiting; he would do his best to break up Maggie’s and Tom’s talk, even though it meant he would have to sleep with Maggie and smell the brandy. He hated the smell of liquor on her breath; worse, she snored when she had a lot to drink. On the floor he saw a piece of the Varda file he had neglected to pick up. By sight he knew it was the letter from Gregging, Austria. He would never forget receiving that letter. It had arrived five years after his last letter from Varda. Five years he spent wondering about her: had she married; was she happy back home; and what was home like — Hungary? And he wrote her; but never received an answer for five years. It had arrived a day before he had married Maggie, forwarded from his old address in Washington Heights. Joseph bent over and picked the letter up. Didn’t he know it by heart? No, still he reread it.
Dear Joseph,
I know that if this letter reaches you it will be a real miracle, as I only have your address of several years ago, and so much could have happened to change it by now.
But I do feel the urge of letting you know that on December 30 my family and I escaped from Hungary and are now awaiting transportation to Venezuela, where my husband’s mother lives. Are you surprised, Joseph? My ideas have changed during the last few years. I have become so disillusioned with that thing falsely called Socialism which I found in Hungary, culminating in the brutal, beastly suppression of the People’s Revolution in 1956. I was tired of the whole thing a long time ago (neither my husband nor I ever became party members), but we simply couldn’t stand it any longer and didn’t want to see our children be brought up in that awful trap. Besides, George took part in the preparation of the revolution and would have been arrested. We crossed the frontier walking for four hours in deep snow, across fields and woods carrying nothing else than our small children in arms. (Aniko is two years old and Katricka is just eight months now) I met my husband at the end of 1953 and married him early next year, romantically, you might say, against my father’s will (he’s a Protestant). I wanted the children very badly and adore them. We are living 20 miles from Vienna in a Refugee Home maintained by the American Mennonites. They are such nice people! We have to wait about three more weeks before we’ll be taken to Italy and from there to Venezuela, by boat. (But my letters will be forwarded from here.)
Are you in Europe by any chance? Where are you? And what are you doing? You must be married with children of your own by now.
Can you send some money, a loan? We haven’t got a cent, and George has no friends outside of Hungary, other than his mother who will soon assume enough of a burden. I’ll give it back to you as soon as I start earning in Venezuela. I hope to teach there.
I thought of you a lot last week while reading an article on Tom Wolfe in an issue of Life. It was about his correspondence concerning Look Homeward, Angel. I knew you loved Wolfe and his books.
I think, too, of happy days back at the U. of Missouri, sitting on the steps of Jesse Hall, talking, talking, talking, and of things a happily married mother of two children should have long ago forgotten; but in reflection there is only innocence in youth when now, even in my situation, all is so much more glorious than I had imagined. You would like George, Joseph. He is serious like you, a professor of philosophy.
It is a grand feeling to be able to meet people again and to write to people freely again. I hope you will answer soon.
Love,
Varda
Joseph put the letter back in the Manila file with the rest.
After that letter there had been one thanking him for the loan; then one from Venezuela repaying the loan — then, two Christmas cards. On one, a photograph: Varda, the children, the man she had married. Joseph almost had not saved it. He did not like to see the faces of the intruders; what right had they to sit beside her — he, with his arm around her shoulder — claiming her?
Joseph sighed. He slipped the file back behind his books in the bookcase, where he always kept it, and he slid his stockinged feet into his loafers under the couch. Once during the first month of his marriage to Maggie, she had looked across the dinner table at him, an eyebrow raised, her mouth tipped with that quizzical smile.
“Were you ever in love?”
“Yes?”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
“A Hungarian girl.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Did you meet her abroad?”
“No. At the University.”
“Oh. Puppy love.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, did you go to bed with her?”
It had been the reason for their first fight, the fact that Joseph had not answered her.
From time to time Maggie would bring up the subject to irritate him. To keep peace, he had told Maggie her name, but he had not elaborated beyond that. It had nothing to do with Maggie and him, had it?
Joseph tiptoed down the hall outside his study, trying not to disturb Miriam Spencer. He could hear the drone of Maggie’s and Tom’s voices as he made his way down the stairs, and his hand was just reaching fo
r the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs when he realized Maggie was talking about him.
“… not like other people, but I knew when I married him he wasn’t.”
“But you are happy, Maggie, aren’t you?”
“Who’s happy? I’m cheerful, Tom.”
“I never thought of it that way. Sometimes I could break Miriam’s neck! She’s just not on the qui vive about some things! She doesn’t get some things! I tried to tell her about A. & F., deciding that most people are really nostalgic for the past, you know?”
“Well, Joseph is. He lives in the past,” Maggie said.
“You know what Miriam said to me? ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you wish you’d married Irene Littlefield?’ Now, honest to God! Irene Littlefield was some dame I was dating way back in second year at Cornell!”
“Joseph doesn’t talk very much about his past, but I know one thing!”
“She didn’t even get the point about A. & F. and market research — none of it. She just took it as a personal attack!”
“There’s this girl — Varnish or something. Joseph was in love with her.”
“I might just as well be an iceman for all Miriam knows about my work!”
“Dear old happy days with Varnish! He’s kept all her letters, every last one!”
“Lots of men are married to women who help them. Chris Planter’s wife goes to the goddam library and does research for him!”
“I’ve told him everything about my first husband, but do you think Joseph would tell me anything?”
“Then there’s goddam Amos Fenton. God, do I hate Amos Fenton!”
