“You’ll love this. The new caseworker’s name is Mrs. Mash!”
He crosses to left center stage and, his back to her, squashes out his cigarette in a soup ramekin.
“I’ll do all I can. You know that.”.
The huddle on the floor breaks up, putting to an end the intolerable scene.
“For this skit to get across,” Mills said as spokesman for the trio, “we see him as definitely a conventional middle-class husband. Practical but stodgy.”
“In that case, of course, I’m not suited to the part,” I said pleasantly, laying my script on a chair, and started to walk off.
“Well, now, not so fast,” Mills said. “Your build is O.K. Just boom the lines out—no muttering in your beard—and bang your fists and harrumph around. You can change the lines to suit the character later, but let’s just try him for size. You can do it; stuffy—as—the—devil.”
Coming on the heels of an afternoon in which Blair had praised me as good at routine details, a relief after all the creative-type editors, brilliant but erratic, who had preceded me in the job, this struck anything but a responsive chord, and I advised Mills quietly not to be optimistic; dryly adding that, as to the diction thing, he may have heard of something in the theater known as throwing your lines away. I didn’t catch his answer, but a local electrician who had been asked to handle the lighting, and was already clambering about back there like an eager beaver, audibly remarked that I should have thrown mine away as soon as I wrote them. He was not the worst of the Philistines I was up against. There was additional conferring on how the skit might better depict a recognizable family situation, and Connections had a suggestion. “Putsi, how about putting in a daughter?” she asked him.
“Make him a sort of Edward Arnold type,” he said.
“Edward Arnold!” I cried in a spasm of pain and bewilderment.
“The daughter’s extravagant, spends money right and left on clothes, phonograph records, runs up telephone bills,” Connections went on. “The father huffs and puffs and says, ‘Do you think I’m made of money?’”
This excited my tormentors further and they went into how they “saw” this girl as to age, etc. By an odd coincidence it turned out that Connections had a daughter just back from college, where she had studied dramatics. “I could have her here in five minutes,” Connections said. “She’s home, just up the road.”
That was all I needed. To be judged capable of delineating a stuffed shirt was unsettling enough; but the assumption that I could with no trouble suggest deciduous middle age was more than I could take in one night, and, wishing them luck in their plans for a new Ma and Pa Kettle, I turned and strode off the stage. As I did so, I caught my foot in a mess of the electric wire that lay everywhere like spaghetti and pitched into a crate of costumes. Mills sprang forward with the assurance that this sort of thing was the rule in the theater, where tempers were thin and plays not written but rewritten. The battering mine was taking was a measure of its resilience and potential. “This guy a pulp and paper magnate?” I said derisively, disengaging his fingers from my coat lapels. “Or do you see him as a big shot in the trucking game?” Mills and the chapter president, a bulldozer of a woman who stood solidly athwart my path, detained me long enough for Connections’ daughter to be fetched by car, an interval which they improved by assuring me that, as to the age matter, a ponytail haircut to peg the girl as a teen-ager, no more, and some cornstarch in my own thatch to grizzle me up a bit, and the same for Mrs. Poole, should do the trick. Isolde was asked if she’d mind, and she smiled through the wings with a shake of her head. I gave in for the sake of the show when I saw Connections’ daughter, who turned out to have been hewn by Rodin, and whose flesh tints were evocative of ripe fruit. I sat down right then and there and dashed off some lines to audition her with, in the frenetic tradition of the theater.
The first speech we gave the girl to try went, “If you don’t give me enough money to dress attractively, Pops, you may not find any boys around here to take me off your hands.” Mills told her to stand over me as I fumed at a table on which were strewn the monthly bills (wearing on my face that grimace that goes with the legend “Grr!” in comic strips) and also gave her some pointers on how to say the line. “O.K.,” he said, returning to his seat. “Go.”
The girl read the line approximately as directed. But she prefaced it with a full half minute of aphrodisiac breathing so intense and vehement that I could feel it in my hair and down the back of my neck. It was pointed out to her that the rendition would have been ideal if this were a drama dealing with incest, and she were called upon to sexually inflame her father. It was, however, a cozy domestic comedy aiming at lots of audience identification, so omit the palpitations—and forget about keeping her chest in profile. She caught on and we had little trouble with the remaining lines so far written for her. But she drowned the stage in a perfume so heady that I left the gymnasium with my senses reeling, and dropped into bed exhausted and wretched, and wondering how old the girl really was. Twentyone or -two probably, if she was just out of college. I was breaking my rule never to get my feathers fussed. And Augie—he was probably in his bed planning a campaign to get into Cornelia Bly’s. Some P.T.A.
The show was put on three weeks from that Saturday evening. My wife and kids saw it. My sketch went on between an original ballet and a humorous slide lecture. As finally played it was a satire about a tightwad with a brain like a steel trap, who couldn’t solve a simple riddle about a poor mother dividing her apples up. We made him a member of the Board of Finance. The next morning, Sunday, the following scene was enacted at my breakfast table:
MAUDE: (Studiously spooning her cereal about) Daddy, you were wonderful last night.
MOTHER: (Who has obviously been coaching the children and now shepherds them through their exclamations) Yes, wasn’t he! The whole program was wonderful, but his skit was the best of all. (Chorus of “Yes, yes!”)
MARCO: You could hear a pin drop.
FATHER: That’ll be all of that!
MOTHER: (In a tearful collapse of her brave front) The child did not know it was supposed to be a comedy.
FATHER: Who said it was?
For as the hour had approached, and it could be seen how matters might go, I had changed my tune. It was now my story that the skit was a bitter parable of misguided thrift rather than a comedy aiming at easy laughs. The switch was made just in time, for the result had been precisely as the boy had said—you could hear a pin drop. Our hopes had been briefly nourished when one of the flats wobbled and threatened to collapse on the stage, to resolve in that way the conflict with which the drama grappled; but someone back there (no doubt the electrician who’d had it in for me all along) righted it in time, and we’d had to play through to the end. In front of an audience, Connections’ daughter couldn’t resist the chance to show what she could really do with her teeth in a part, and returned to Cheyne-Stokes breathing, fluttering my hair and offering me advantageous views of her hocks, which I had already repeatedly and exhaustively ratified. She wore the subversive perfume again, and wherever I walked on the stage or sat, she had just been and left her spoor. In the demoralizing boredom, I had an impulse to seize her in an incestuous embrace and then maybe extemporize to some sort of O’Neill finish. But we finished as rehearsed, and the audience gave us a pretty good hand at that, no doubt in a flood of gratitude for their deliverance.
MOTHER: Why do you object to the child’s saying you could hear a pin drop? You’ve been claiming it’s a savage indictment.
FATHER: (Rising and leaving the dining room) Oh, what’s the use trying to talk to this family? (He slams the door behind him, starting the refrigerator.)
I was sitting in the living room when the dining-room door opened and Marco was gingerly piloted over to apologize. Which he did.
“That’s all right, Marco,” I said. “Forget it.”
He drew his mouth taut and said: “My name’s not Marco any longer. I’ve found the na
me I want to change to.”
“Oh?” I said, glancing at my wife. “What do you want us to call you from now on?”
“Alphonse.”
As the choice of one who had soured on his own name because people laughed at it this was a substitute for which we were hardly prepared.
“Alphonse!” I said. “Where did you ever get such an idea?”
“Your play.”
It was true; I had used it for the husband. The thing was, as the hour drew near and it was plain how things were going, every expedient for injecting comedy relief into the skit had been advised, including that of funny names for the characters.
“But Alphonse is a humorous name—” I began to explain to the boy, but that avenue was forever closed to me; the tribe of Digger Indians to whom we had apparently been playing had greeted the principals’ open-armed exchange of “Ermingarde!” “Alphonse!” with such gloom that the watchful Marco had decided that here, certainly, was a name void of comic implications, and it had winged its way straight to his heart. I held my breath all morning, fearing a similar announcement from the dissatisfied Phoebe—we had called the daughter in the skit Melba. But that at least was spared me.
“So from now on, you might as well call me Alphonse,” Marco said levelly. “Because I won’t answer to any other.”
That alone would have been a disastrous enough result of the Avalon First Annual P.T.A. Supper and Jamboree. But there were grimmer dividends to be reaped.
Eight
ON a day otherwise unmarked except for Phoebe’s circulating a report among the neighbors that I was dead, I saw Augie lunching in a New York chophouse with someone who looked familiar: it was the conjunction of the heads. He had spotted me too, and the next time we met he spoke of her.
“She’s got something I can’t put my finger on—at least not yet,” he said.
“Everything takes time,” I said dryly.
It wasn’t long before he had progress to narrate. Two weeks later I ran across them in a midtown restaurant called the Somerset, and this time I got caught in a traffic jam beside where they were sitting and had to stop.
The Somerset was a packed grotto among whose tables, which were the size of throat lozenges, the waiters flowed by some kind of osmosis, and the celebrities, wearing dark glasses in an already crepuscular gloom, picked their way by a power presumably like that of the bats they must be blind as. Some illumination was afforded by the incendiary dishes that were eaten there, but that was fitful. The customers were about equally divided between celebrities and people wearing dark glasses in the hope of being mistaken for one; but they must all have by now developed that eerie dexterity by which bats are said to “feel” things just short of touching them, because they never bumped into anything, except occasionally one another. It was a new, contemporary habitat in which I was less adept with the naked eye. Add to the perils of darkness those of wires getting underfoot from telephones being plugged in at tables, as well as the flaming skewers borne aloft in the general press, and it was worth your life to go in there. Only the wonderful food drew me. I never saw menus squinted at from so many angles—because while the celebrities removed their glasses to consult them, the third-string columnists and unemployed bit players kept them on so as not to be unmasked in the interval as nobodies. There was an incessant waving from table to table, though I don’t know what anybody thought he saw, or whether it made any difference. Unless it was owls they resembled after all.
I didn’t immediately recognize Augie, because he was behind a pair of smoked goggles himself—he had just sold us a twoinch spot page decoration of a cornucopia full of frozen foods, which we might find a place for next Thanksgiving. He affected instability, throwing his charcoal down and grinding it underfoot when the cornucopia wouldn’t come right, in repairs to it at the office.
“Hello, hello,” a familiar voice said. “Setzen sie sich.” And there he was, looking like a hunted gambler. “Sore eyes,” he said, a little self-consciously, and lifted the cheaters to rub them. “You remember Cornelia Bly.” I congratulated her on the party murals, as I already had Augie.
“Thank you,” she said. “How did your skit go? I couldn’t make it that night.”
“You could hear a pin drop,” I said. It got a laugh. She invited me to sit down, though God knew where I would have, unless in one of their laps. I said I had to get back to the office.
“Your artists have it easier than you do,” she smilingly suggested.
Augie said: “We must all have lunch together sometime. And I want you to see Cornelia’s paintings. She might do a cover for us.”
“Love to,” I said, taking my leave, and inside of ten minutes had gained the street.
Cornelia Bly was on the short side, shorter than I had remembered her, with her hair done—or I should say left undone—in one of those tossed salad sort of close crops. Her smile was a pink and white semicircle of short teeth and bright gums, which rather put me in mind of a slice of watermelon. She had a habit of ducking her head when she laughed. She wore no make-up and her finger-ends were square. She was dressed in snuff-colored tweeds, and a brick-red porkpie, which I took to be hers, hung on a peg over Augie’s head.
“She doesn’t have your obvious kind of attractiveness,” Augie said to me later. “A woman like that totally escapes your callow romanticist. They wouldn’t look at her twice.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, picking up my beer, for we were at a bar.
“You realize what a fraud the whole sexual paraphernalia is, your Hollywood sexless cakes and pies. How much more mature the French are—throwing a disheveled heroine at you on the screen. A man is like a moth driven insane by indirect lighting, by the interfering fixtures of glamour. Then he finds that bright light that’s shed best by the naked bulb.”
There was a little more to it than that. Cornelia had a glamour that wasn’t alone anti-glamour. She had at the moment a kind of prominence. She had leapt into vogue on the crest of publicity springing from legal action she was bringing against a firm for one of whose advertisements she had done a semiabstract portrait which, she claimed, they had changed without her consent. She charged that the face had been mutilated by the addition of a second eye. The case had gained wide newspaper attention, and one news magazine had run a picture she had drawn over, showing the face as she had orginally done it with its single eye, side by side with the mutilated version containing the two. “The Eye for an Eye Girl” she was called, and was pointed out in restaurants and theater lobbies. So Augie liked to be seen lunching with her and strolling through art galleries.
When it reached the point of my trying to phone the boulevardier at home and being told by his wife that he was staying in town that night, where he had business, and would I like the number of the hotel where he was staying, I laid the cards on the table.
“Look here,” I said, after a few pre-lunch drinks had loosened me up, “I’ve got something on my mind. Let me begin by saying that my personal opinion has nothing to do with this. I don’t care who you play house with, but circumstances have made it my business and I can’t beg off or back out. To beg off would in itself be an answer to the people I’m accountable to, and one not in your favor. You must know by now what I’m talking about. Have you forgotten that you gave me for a reference?”
He frowned into his cocktail. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said. “Putting you on the spot is the last thing in the world I want to do. It was of course Isolde who gave you two for a reference.”
“I assumed as much. Also that it’s mostly Isolde who wants a child?”
“Not at all,” he said with an injured air. “I want one just as much as she does.”
I’d like to have seen the expression on my face as I answered, “You act like it. Do you know why you flunked out at Rock-a-Bye?”
“They knew I was an artist with no regular income. They think it’s too risky to put a child into a home with a financial picture like m
ine.”
“Does Isolde know how much trouble you go to to keep contrite?”
“Did you ask me to lunch or was I subpoenaed? Isolde is broad-minded.”
“Isolde is not a caseworker,” I answered. “I’m broad-minded too. But the Crib isn’t. The Crib is just folks, the same as Rock-a-Bye. If they hear about the husband sleeping with other women, they don’t understand that he’s doing that to keep his guilt feelings tuned up. And I don’t want to be the one to explain it to them, though I’d like to be around when somebody eise does. Neither do I want to have to explain to them the tradition that the artist is part son of a bitch. Agencies size a couple up by asking, for one thing, if the husband is a good provider—yes, granted. But they also ask themselves if a child they give them might one day be the victim of a broken home. Lots of children are, you know.”
“Yes, I know. And when I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.” He had me there, and I was grateful he didn’t pause for an answer but went right on, with some heat, “I don’t see what the hell my sex life has to do with whether I’ll make a good father. If Isolde and I have an understanding about these things why isn’t that enough for the rest of the world? Why must people go around looking for fleas in one another’s hide, like monkeys? Our marriage works as good as anybody’s we know with natural children. Look at the Arkwrights with their three, and the Johnsons with their six. I wouldn’t give ten cents for either of those homes. Let welfare workers go to homes like that and make them deserve their own children or give them up. Why don’t they give all couples tests before they let them have children, or stop trying to find flaws in marriages that don’t exist? Western culture! The way it mauls and mangles the individual to save him for society. It’s time we turned it around and organized society to let the individual live—yes, let him indulge impulses that don’t hurt anybody. Soon enough we’ll all be dead, or what’s worse, old. When are we going to get civilized and let the whole man live? The French—”
The Tunnel of Love Page 8
