“Visiting the Third World is so inspiring,” said Aunt Bobo.
Aunt Lila Willet showed up in Petrie with an armload of Mrs. Iris Domato roses. Vincent’s Aunt Marcia gave them a lavishly illustrated Passover Haggadah with a note that read: “It’s nice to have another Jew in the family.”
Finally, Vincent and Misty were allowed to go home while their parents made plans for their disposition during the major holidays.
“We can rotate Christmas and Thanksgiving,” said Adalaide Berkowitz.
“Or we can all be together,” said Dorothy Cardworthy.
On this note, Vincent and Misty fled. Now they were surrounded by the fruits of these journeys.
“Who’s Connie Georgianos?” said Vincent, reading a card.
“Plumbers union,” said Misty. “Daddy is their counsel. What did they send?”
“It looks like a glass pumpkin,” said Vincent. “Does sending a wedding present to your lawyer’s daughter amount to a kickback?”
“It’s not a kickback when it’s a glass cookie jar,” said Misty. “Unless there are a great many large bills stuffed inside. Who are the Spaacks?”
“Those awful little people who drank too much at my parents’ reception,” said Vincent. “I bet they sent something awful.”
“They did,” said Misty. “It’s a silver toast rack.”
“Plated,” said Vincent. “What a pair of creeps. This card says only four thirty-one. Who’s four thirty-one?”
“Electricians,” said Misty. “What did they send?”
“A toaster, naturally.”
“How nice that will look lined up next to our other two toasters,” said Misty.
As the afternoon progressed, the corners of the living room became stuffed with wrapping paper, excelsior, and tissue.
“Okay,” said Vincent. “Here’s what’s on my side. A wooden salad bowl. A glass salad bowl. A pottery salad bowl. A martini shaker. A set of demitasse—no, two sets of demitasse, one red and white one with little flowers. A fake Russian icon from one of your Commie uncles, a cut-glass ashtray, and two silver serving spoons. What have you got?”
“Three tablecloths, a covered vegetable dish, a family of charlotte molds,” Misty said, “an espresso pot, a covered basket, a silver toothpaste key, a carving knife, three silver candy dishes, a watercolor of a Cuban cane field from my other Commie uncle, and an unidentifiable object from some people called Aunt Betsy and Uncle Herbert. Who are they?”
“They weren’t there. They’re very small and elderly and live in Maine. Hand it over. Let’s have a look.”
The object in question was a carved wooden cylinder with a silver top.
“It’s not a flask,” said Vincent. “It isn’t really a container. Is it an objet d’art?”
“Let’s just put it on the shelf and forget it,” said Misty. “I’m a little sick of all this stuff, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Vincent. “I am a materialist and I feel we deserve every bit of this because of the spiritual nature of our great love. And there’s more to come. I have a whole list of people who haven’t coughed up yet.”
The two most prominent no-shows on Vincent’s list were Misty’s Uncle Bernie and Vincent’s cousin Hester Gallinule, a former soap-opera actress now turned Broadway theater producer. They showed up, one after the other.
One evening, Misty came home to find Vincent deep in conversation with someone embedded in the wing chair. All she could see was the tip of a cigar. It was Uncle Bernie without a doubt. No one else’s cigars smelled that good.
Uncle Bernie rose from his chair and engulfed his niece in a huge bear hug. He was a big man who wore a three-piece suit, a silk shirt, and a hand-painted tie. He and Vincent were chomping happily on Havana cigars and drinking whisky out of cut-glass tumblers sent by one of Vincent’s distant relatives.
Uncle Bernie was huge. He had big brown eyes, thatch-like eyebrows, and a shiny bald dome surrounded by a fringe of lush gray hair. Young men, Misty noted, never smelled like Uncle Bernie. He smelled of cigars, bay rum, and something unidentifiable that might have been leather and might have been some essence sprayed on people like Uncle Bernie by expensive barbers. Misty’s late Aunt Flo had claimed that Uncle Bernie smelled purely of ill-gotten money.
When Uncle Bernie had come to Chicago while Misty was growing up, he used to take her off for the day with him. Their first stop was the Palmer House barbershop, where Uncle Bernie went to be shaved. Misty sat entranced while Uncle Bernie was wrapped in hot towels. She was enthralled when the barber approached with a mug of soap and a badger brush and painted Uncle Bernie’s face with soap. After he was shaved, Uncle Bernie’s fringe was carefully cut while a silent manicurist buffed his fingernails. When Uncle Bernie had been brushed off and had his jacket held out to him, he overtipped and then took Misty out to lunch at the Blackhawk Restaurant. Then he and Misty went to Soldier’s Field, where Uncle Bernie watched the Catholic League football games and Misty hid herself in Uncle Bernie’s coat to keep warm. In one rush, her childhood was brought back to her, and it felt odd to see her Uncle Bernie talking to the man who was now her husband.
“Great fellow you married, Misto,” said Uncle Bernie. “Vincent here has been going on at great length about you. Brings a tear to this old eye to hear a fellow going on like that about his wife. I’ve been married a few times myself, Vincent. Have another cigar. In fact, have a box of ’em. I brought you kids some loot but it’s still at the hotel. Married. Just think. It seems like yesterday that you and I were sitting in Soldier’s Field, Misto.”
“We used to go to the Palmer House first,” said Misty.
“Ah, the Palmer House. Your father never approved. He used to get shaved in Hyde Park. He said: ‘Bernie, can you tell me why you are exposing my little daughter, your niece, to the sight of money so badly spent?’ I said to him: ‘Fritz, the girl has to learn what real perfection looks like.’ Well, kiddos, are you going to feed me, or am I going to feed you?”
“Uncle Bernie,” said Misty, “are you coming out of hiding?”
“Oh, that,” said Uncle Bernie. “Your pious family has that all blown out of proportion. I was never very crooked, Misto. Just a little crooked and it all had to do with taxes, anyway. A long time ago, my lawyers said to lie low, so I lay low in the Bahamas. Such a pleasant place I decided to stay, and it keeps me out of trouble. No, I’m here to see my platoon of lawyers and my squadron of accountants, and then I intend to go with your parents out to Medicine Stone and see the old place and the cousins. And, of course, I came to see you and this fellow you married. You turned out gorgeous, kid. Haven’t seen you since your last year in college. That was at somebody’s funeral. Whose funeral was it?”
“Aunt Flo,” said Misty.
“Aunt Flo,” said Uncle Bernie. “What a terrible pain she was. Let’s say I take you out for supper. What’ll it be? Small, intime, and expensive or small and full of gangsters?”
“Small and full of gangsters,” said Vincent.
“That’s the ticket, Vincent my boy,” said Uncle Bernie.
Uncle Bernie took them to a hangout from his song-plugging days, a former speakeasy called the Firenze. The walls were decorated with shabby murals whose lurid colors had faded considerably. It was not, however, full of recognizable gangsters. It was filled with night watchmen, students, well-dressed couples, neighborhood locals, families feeding zuppa inglese to sleepy children, and young lovers drinking wine out of beer pitchers. During a lull, a prizefighter with a large entourage walked in and was immediately seated.
At dinner, Vincent ate himself into a state of bliss. At home, he threw off his clothes and flopped into bed. He kissed Misty. He said: “Uncle Bernie is a top,” and passed out.
Misty considered her sleeping husband. Living with Vincent, she thought, was often like living in a playhouse in which all the dolls and toys got along famously together. In the real world, Misty knew, people like Walter Cardworthy and Fritz Berkowitz waged social w
arfare. In the real world, when people like Misty and Vincent got married their parents were horrified and tried to stop the wedding. Or if that did not happen, the parents were icily polite but the newly wedded couple could not find a decent apartment, or one of them got sick, or the blood tests got scrambled. Living with Vincent made Misty realize that she had spent a good deal of her life ready to ward off some terrible low blow. She did not believe that most people were decent or kind. She had never believed that life went along smoothly. She did not believe that life left you alone to be happy in this world.
Vincent believed all these things. He thought that his happy vistas and Misty’s grim vision fused into one full-balanced picture of the world.
The fact was that, while Misty was moral, Vincent was good. Watching him sleep it was revealed to Misty that the good do not necessarily have to maintain morality: they are born with it, while people like Misty, who were not good, had to strive mightily for goodness. That was what a moral system was: it helped you be good when you weren’t very nice. From Vincent, Misty learned that goodness and stupidity were not necessarily linked. You could be good and smart.
Vincent did not judge: Vincent enjoyed. He enjoyed Uncle Bernie because Uncle Bernie was full of beans—because Uncle Bernie was there to be liked. Life was not as complicated as Misty had thought. With Vincent by her side, it was often as simple as Vincent thought.
Misty turned off the night-table lamp. With a little sigh, she turned over on her side, nestled against her husband, and went to sleep.
The next day, she sat at her desk musing on the subject of married life. Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events. For example, this morning Vincent had put on his best tie and gone off to give a paper at the National Conservation and Technology Society. He was presenting the refined and streamlined plans for the small, compact machine that turned all household waste into mulch, sludge, or methane gas in quantities sufficient to power small machines, such as power mowers. This small system, he felt, could be expanded for use by a city: a multipurpose system that would turn refuse into a source of energy and municipal revenue.
When he came home tonight, he would be high and triumphant, as he always was when he delivered a paper.
Tonight was also to be the first meeting of Misty and Vincent’s cousin Hester Gallinule, the soap-opera actress turned Broadway producer. Uncle Bernie was meeting with his lawyers and had promised to stop by after dinner with his wedding present.
“Why do we have to have all these relatives crawling around?” said Misty.
“Uncle Bernie isn’t a relative,” said Vincent. “Uncle Bernie is a divine emanation. And I promised that we would have cousin Hester for dinner.”
“Will cousin Hester and Uncle Bernie get along?”
“Will they ever,” said Vincent. “You just wait and see. Hester’s crazy. She thinks if you have five small-time love affairs, it adds up to one big one. She’s very gabby. You’ll love her.”
To Misty she sounded like a candidate for instant hatred, but she was Vincent’s cousin. That was married life. Dishes were washed, laundry was done. You got up in the morning and went to work.
At work, you finished the Hispanic language project, delivered your research, and wrote an article that was scheduled to appear in American Speech. Then you were assigned to something called the Church in Life study, in which you measured the effects of foreign-language churches on the lives of their parishioners.
Married life had to do with getting used to being married. Vincent’s advice was: “Just be married. That’s how you get used to it. Where on earth did you get this sense of profound gloom from, anyway?”
“Life is never smooth to the great-granddaughter of tin peddlers who were kicked out of Russia,” said Misty. “It’s no accident that all my family is in one embattled profession or another. We’re just waiting for the Cossacks to come back. When the Cossacks come to Connecticut, you’ll understand.”
Meanwhile, it was hard to feel much gloom at all, although to keep her balance, Misty clung to it wherever she found it. The Cossacks appeared at her office in the form of Denton McKay, whom she had never forgiven and watched with the wariness she felt she was the just inheritor of.
He sauntered into her office for a chat, propped himself on the corner of her desk, snooped at the grocery list she had on her blotter, and began to rearrange all her papers and paperclips.
“I hear you got married,” said Denton. “Just got here and got married.”
“Who says I got married?” said Misty.
“It’s all over the office,” said Denton. “One of the girls told me. There’s an awful lot of girls here. Have you noticed? Lots and lots of them. What are they doing here, do you suppose?”
“You hired them to be paid saboteurs,” said Misty.
“I did? No, I didn’t. But that’s not a bad idea. The co-opted saboteur. You hire ’em and they keep you alert. So. Who’d you marry?”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” said Misty.
“Aw, come on. You married Vincent Cardworthy, right? I didn’t even know you knew him. Are you that interested in garbage? You must be, if you married him. Brilliant fellow. Do you suppose there’s a rule against married couples working here? I’ll have to check. Anyway, I think it’s wonderful. I like a tight ship. I guess we ought to give you something. What would you like?”
“A raise.”
“No, no,” said Denton. “Something for the two of you, like a martini pitcher.”
“We have a martini pitcher. In fact, we have several.”
“Well, then, something along the lines of a toaster,” said Denton.
“We have three toasters,” said Misty. “Why don’t you think along the line of a priceless work of art?”
“Get serious,” said Denton. “How about a silver candy dish? I have to get you something.”
“I’ll tell you what you can get,” said Misty.
“What?”
“You can collect all those paperclips you’ve just arranged to form your initials and get out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” said Denton. “But I think a martini pitcher is just the thing.”
That night, before his cousin Hester turned up, Vincent stood in the kitchen discussing his genius.
“I was brilliant,” he said. “They loved me. I got three laughs, but most of the time they were sitting on the edge of their chairs.”
“You are a disgusting ham,” said Misty.
“That’s only because I have true fervor. I am an apostle of thrift. A mulch machine in every home! Use your sewage to fuel your power mower! Heat your home with your own sludge!” He grabbed Misty. “One of these days, we’re going to be very rich.”
“Baste the duck,” said Misty.
“Duck? What duck?”
“While you were off being a genius, I was buying a duck for dinner.”
“And I have another idea,” said Vincent. “After you finish the Church in Life study, we’re going to collaborate on a garbage study. An ethnic study. We’ll travel. We’ll go to India and Africa. We will set out to discover how other cultures deal with refuse. We will analyze the implications of the language used to describe this problem.” He bent down and poured orange juice over the duck. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re still making your speech,” said Misty.
“I am a genius,” said Vincent. “Now, please get out of here while I make one of my brilliant salads. And, as you will see, I am not only a genius. I am also thoughtful and kind. There is a cake box over there inside of which is the perfect dessert your astonishing husband has brought home.”
Hester Gallinule was a tall, freckled forty-year-old woman with fuzzy hair and tinted glasses. She took off her coat as if revealing a monument. She wore a pink sweater, pink skirt, and boots so tight you could almost see her veins. She accepted a glass of white wine and collapsed against the sofa cushions.
“What a day,” she said. “Sheer hell, except for
tonight, of course. How divine to meet Vincent’s wife.” Hester had a wonderful, husky voice. “My voice,” she explained, “has been feathered by my adenoids and tarred by my cigarettes.” She smoked her cigarettes through a black holder.
“I don’t have a present for you yet, darlings,” she said. “I was out of the country when I got the announcement and I’ve been breaking my back to mount a new show. I simply can’t get everything done.”
Misty sat back on the couch enraptured. She had never had an older sister but Hester was like the older sister of every friend Misty had ever had. Those older sisters had gone to nightclubs. They wore pleated skirts, strapless evening dresses, and smelled of Shalimar. They carried in their handbags leather cases containing eyelash curlers, tubes of Persian Melon lipstick, and little pots of something that looked like Vaseline to rub on their eyebrows. They wore scanty underwear, Capri pants, and used ballet slippers as bedroom slippers. They had paid off Misty and her friends not to tell their mothers that they snuck cigarettes in the bathroom. Misty mentioned this to Hester.
“Darling, I am simply embedded in my generation,” said Hester. “I feel so sorry for you young things. Think of what you’ve missed. Wrist corsages. Strapless bras. Garter belts. Every time I think about my adolescence I smell nail polish remover. We used to spend hours doing our nails. I still keep scrapbooks. I have all my old corsages and by now, of course, they’re almost antiques. I even have one of my old strapless dresses. I’ve lugged it around all these years. You have to wear about ten petticoats with it. Of course, the petticoats disintegrated but the dress still stands. I used to wear it to masquerade balls. Jacques—that’s my ex-husband—thought I was simply crazy but of course he was born all grown up. It’s heaven to be a divorcee, depending of course on who you married. As Vincent will tell you, my ex-husband was a real son of a bitch.”
“I liked him,” said Vincent.
“You were a mere child at the time. A gawky teenager. Jacques probably looked like an adult to you. He was extremely dull and stupid and mulish. The worst type of French person,” she said. “The sort that admires the English. French parsimony and English stuffiness. Too dreadful. When I was on “Dangers of Midnight”—that was my soap opera, did Vincent tell you?—Jacques never watched it. He hated it. It shamed him in front of his stuffy friends. I, of course, loved it. It ran for years and years until I got bored and they killed me. I played Emma Jacklin, wife of Steve Jacklin, the young attorney. By the time I got killed, he was a middle-aged attorney. Anyway, he was cheating on me with a woman named Melba Patterson, who had an illegitimate son whose father was a complete mystery. Around the time I wanted to quit, they wrote in that the father was Steve Jacklin’s father and the shock caused me to have a fatal car crash. Isn’t that heavenly and retrogressive? By that time, Jacques was long gone and I went on tour with a play called Very Fancy. An appalling turkey. You’ve probably never heard of it. So, I figured enough was enough and that instead of acting I would take a little flyer and I invested in a musical about the occult called Hocus Pocus, which ran for seven years off-Broadway and made us all rich, rich, rich. Now I’m a pillar of the theatrical community and Jacques can go to hell.”
Happy All the Time Page 14
