One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  Jerry listens to him, bored. The carefulness, the hedging, the doubts. This is not the way to be in these times. The way to be is extended, fast-hearted, ready to go all in. If he knows anything, Jerry knows that.

  The Iversons’ oldest girl, the sixteen-year-old, comes in. She and two of her friends have housekeeping jobs at the Sullivan.

  She is a tall, gawky girl with eyeglasses and a beautiful rare smile. She hunches. She’s “broody,” her mother says, but she seems to like the hotel job even though she protested so much at first.

  The girl, Charmaine—all the Iverson children have exotic names—eats her pie slowly, says she’s fine and the hotel is jammed as ever. Then she lifts her head and addresses them as if she just woke up. “That Standard man, the field geologist? That one with the high leather boots and the cane? And the little terrier?” They all nod.

  “He wears silk pajamas. Embroidered silk pajamas. And he leaves them on the floor. Two pair. Sometimes red ones and sometimes, um, purple. Or kind of a dark bluish purple. Like blueberries. With sewing all over them.”

  They all digest this information.

  “What are you doing bothering with the man’s pajamas?” Walter finally remarks grumpily.

  They all chew their pie.

  “On the floor?” Ann asks.

  Most of a full moon is rising, a melon-colored disc with a rough bite off one edge. It is a warm night. They will drive home to Cut Bank, they decide. Clearly their friends have no space, and clearly there are no rooms to be had in town. They will make a lark of it. Mrs. Callan and the children don’t expect them until tomorrow, so a late-night arrival won’t worry anyone. It seems like the perfect day, the perfect time, to do it.

  They start out, taking the southerly road, which doesn’t have to climb the rim, though there will be a few wide gullies to contend with. They point the auto toward the red seam at the far edge of the earth.

  To the north, they see the winking of dozens of autos making their way back to Shelby from the field. And then, when they are farther west, the darkness arrives and they are alone with just their own headlights arrowing narrowly onto the track. One other car on the road and then nothing.

  Sometimes the road runs close to the railroad tracks. They hear low thundering over the industrious yammer of their auto, and it grows upon them, the blaze of the engine lamp, pounding steam, and the white of it lighting the sky. Then it flies past, all the cars sealed and dark and faster than anything else that moves on the ground. The silk train from the coast. Sixty, seventy miles an hour, and it has a deadly mysterious look that, with its speed, draws people in the scattered towns just to watch. Loaded with bolts of silk from the Orient, bound for the factories in the East. Sometimes a stop for water or coal at Cut Bank, and then children and their parents will gather around it, dart forward to touch its windowless cars, listen to it breathe, and even its breath sounds as if it comes from another part of the world. The men in the small engine window do not step down or even wave. They are ghosts! a little kid shouted once, and no one laughed. They are the headless horseman! he shrieked, calling upon more of the ghouls in his arsenal, and still no one laughed, and his mother grabbed him and took him home because he’d been like that all day.

  It roars past Jerry and Vivian in their secondhand flivver, and its red taillight rocks and then it is gone and they are alone and sputtering along.

  It takes them an hour to fix the first flat tire because one of the tools seems the wrong size and won’t do the job. And it is dark. When they finish—both of them with black hands—they steer the auto off the track, the frail little road, and they retrieve blankets from the back and simply camp out there on the ground.

  Why? Because they are sleepy and it has been such a good day. And they are also thinking, both of them, about the couple high on the derrick, their faint voices calling down their vows. And so they don’t want to go home yet.

  “I may quit my job and go into the oil game full-bore,” Jerry says lightly. “Move us to Shelby.” They spread the canvas and the blankets on a patch of spongy long grass. Vivian holds the lantern. She knows he is saying it just to test the sounds of the words, see how easily they form themselves, how casual or desperate or decided they sounded.

  He likes the sound of them. They seem springy, hopeful. He can’t really read Vivian’s face to see whether she thinks so too. But she doesn’t take exception, either, or say that’s too rash or that he is too caught up in all this. She seems to know that he is testing the sound of the words and that no response is called for.

  It does no harm for the words to hang there. They might wink out. Or they might stay and become something to look at, like all the icy lights spread across the sky for them tonight, the solitary glittery ones, and the filmy veil of the Milky Way.

  14

  311 W. 88th St.

  New York, N.Y.

  June 19, 1922

  Dear Jerry, Vivian and kiddies,

  Well, that is wonderful news about the big oil strike and the boom. And since you have bought some of those relinquishments, perhaps the “black gold” is beneath your land and someone will discover it and you will be a big oil tycoon.

  You and Carlton have the right attitude about boldness and taking the main chance. I find I am getting braver every day, but it has been a long struggle. Now I am using Coué, New Thot and common sense. So I ought to get a break, had I not?

  Monsieur Coué you no doubt know about, he has been in the newspaper in all parts of the country and no doubt even in Montana. He is a Frenchman, a pharmacist and a philosopher of the common man, and he spoke last week here in New York and I went to his lecture. Oh! he is the most wonderful man, a mixture of common sense and higher thot such as I have never before heard of. And I think you should try to find out as much as possible about him for your efforts out there and your self-confidence and the chances you ask yourself to take. He is a big help.

  The basic message is that we cannot try to do something, such as sing a concert without stagefright, etc., because our subconscious which is the Imagination is what controls us. And it fights the Will. So if I say I must go to sleep, well then I will not because my subconscious is saying Perhaps I Will Not Go To Sleep. And the subconscious always wins the battles with the Will. Now the point is to learn how to control this subconscious, this Imagination, and to substitute new ideas for the old ones. And it is so easy! This is what you do. Every morning before rising and every night before bed, you shut your eyes and repeat twenty times in a monotone, “Every day and in every way I am getting better and better.” And you do not think of the words, you keep track by tying twenty knots in a string and just moving your fingers along the string. You speak like a child and do not think about the words. That way, they will slip past your Will and settle straight on your Imagination and then you have planted the Idea that improvement is happening at all times and then it becomes a Reality.

  And of course this applies to all things, such as stagefright and tightening of the throat when singing. My throat is loose! you say. I can sing as I should! And then, there you are, singing away!

  And do you know, this wise wise French man reminded me of old Silas Tooey back home, he is that humble looking, rather short and thickly built with white hair and beard.

  Lelia went to the lecture with me and she said, My, he doesn’t sound as smart as I heard he was, he is so much like a child, and I said, Lelia, that is exactly the point. His philosophy is simple, so simple, so it is only right that he is too! And I said, Lelia, you might try it with your whistling before you scoff too much. Because Lelia has the thought when she is whistling sometimes that she will burst into a laugh or even a smile, which makes it of course impossible to whistle, and she has done this in a recording situation. And of course the more she thinks, I must not laugh while I whistle, well that’s what she does! And this problem is exactly what Mr. Coué addresses.

  Well, I must stop for now. Oh! I must tell you another thing. I have been praying for one fr
iend, a real spiritual friend to come into my life. I feel that I have had marvelous spiritual experiences myself during the years since Mother took ill, have perfected my spirit in a number of ways, but I seem to find no one who speaks that language with me and who is congenial. Certainly Lelia is not. So of course I have slipped and fallen a number of times and gone way out of tune. Well, just a week ago, I met a woman at a meeting of the Theosophical Society. I knew at once we were kindred spirits and we are. Her name is Mrs. Wexner and she is independently wealthy but very idealistic and not worldly at all. She says I have a truly rare voice that should be cultivated like a hot house plant.

  What about the OIL!!!

  Lots of love,

  Daisy Lou

  They met in a large room of the Genealogical Hall on West Fifty-Eighth Street, where Dr. Hereward Barrington was scheduled to discuss “Latest Developments in Psychical Research.” It was a dim room that looked, before the people arrived, like a sepia-tinted photograph of itself. Twenty rows of folding wooden chairs and a wooden podium and glossy wooden floors lit here and there by dull light from the tall windows. Then the audience arrived in twos and threes, talking, stirring the air, the lazy dust motes. Someone pulled back a curtain, and all the shadows ran away.

  One of the arrivals is Daisy Lou Malone—she has come alone—and another is a tall, broad-shouldered woman wearing the newest style of Egyptian dress. She takes a seat just ahead of Daisy’s. She is a woman in her early thirties perhaps, with a strong, almost sphinxlike profile that is reinforced by flared straight-bottomed hair and the dress. Her voice is deep. She smells faintly of something like sandalwood.

  Daisy studies this woman while she waits, and it occurs to her that style, real style, is not the dress, the makeup, the expensive bob, even the odd bold touch, like this woman’s hatpin, an alligator with stunned emerald eyes. No, it is the ability to trust in your accoutrements, whatever they are. The insight makes her feel she has moved the last small piece of a Chinese puzzle box so that the lid opens. Remember that small truth, Daisy instructs herself as she relaxes into a slightly more insouciant posture.

  The lecture, it turns out, is a virtual repetition of one Daisy attended two weeks earlier, but, unlike the other, there is an intermission during which punch is served in an anteroom and some mingling goes on. Daisy is introduced to the tall woman with the alligator pin—her name is given as Mrs. Penelope Wexner—by a polite, forgettable man who says he met Daisy at another talk on the psychical phenomena. Here is a little veering of fortune, Daisy thinks as she shakes Penelope Wexner’s hand for the first time.

  Daisy considers herself a spiritual explorer. She has gone to rallies by Miss Aimee Semple McPherson, she has read the Book of Mormon, but she is particularly interested, recently, in clairvoyance and precognition. Trance states of various kinds interest her, as do theories about the seven astral planes. It seems to her that Theosophy has enlightening things to say about the various spiritual dimensions and an enlightened and searching attitude toward the mysteries.

  Daisy continues to attend the Presbyterian church, to sing the songs Presbyterians expect her to sing at their churches, and she sees no essential conflict between that allegiance and her explorations. As someone said at a lecture on the topic of religious tolerance, “It discredits the Creator to say he belongs in one jar with one label.”

  She also likes the aura given off by the people who attend spiritist gatherings. Well, some of them. Often there will be a person in the front row, absolutely grim-faced, who asks too many questions in a voice too desperate. Or an audience member or two who keeps blinking back tears. But on the whole, she feels a sense of imagination and exploration that she likes. She feels that, if she knew some of the people in these audiences, she would find them highly congenial and would perhaps make some spiritual friends.

  Daisy and Mrs. Wexner stand for a moment without much to say. Then Mrs. Wexner says, very calmly, “Would you mind removing your hat?” She seems to have her eyes fixed on Daisy’s forehead, as if a spot or a stain has appeared there and she is trying to determine its nature. Startled, Daisy obeys. Mrs. Wexner pushes back the loose curls that frame Daisy’s face, pushes them off her forehead, and continues to study the same spot. Her fingers are long and cool. She wears a square onyx ring on her right hand, an oval opal on her left. (“The light, the shade, without which the other does not exist,” she would proclaim to Daisy once, holding the ringed fingers aloft.)

  She places the first and second fingertips of both hands at a spot in the center of Daisy’s forehead, then slowly moves them apart, tracing a circle around her head and moving back again to the middle. Daisy’s eyes are level with Mrs. Wexner’s chin. She glances to the side and sees, to her surprise, that no one is regarding them with any special interest. The others are in small clumps, absorbed in their own conversations.

  “You have,” says Mrs. Wexner, “a somewhat unique cranial topography.” She drops her hands to her sides but tips her head to look once more at a spot in the area of Daisy’s ear. “You have extraordinarily well-pronounced areas here…” She taps a point above Daisy’s left temple. “And here.” She taps the right. “This indicates well-developed brain organs of Ideality, Wit, and Tune.” She places Daisy’s hat back on her head.

  “What caught my eye first, however, was the bumps on your forehead. Feel them?” Daisy runs her own fingers across them. She has never thought them more pronounced than anyone else’s. “They, of course, indicate an ability to detect causality in human affairs,” Mrs. Wexner says. “The silver ribbon that links cause and effect.

  “Well!” she adds brightly. “Shall we go hear what else the wise man has to say?”

  They began to meet on Thursday afternoons for tea at Mrs. Wexner’s flat on West Eighty-Third Street. It was a rather opulent suite of rooms, in which Mrs. Wexner lived alone. She had a husband, Mr. Theodore Wexner, who was her second cousin and some twenty years older than Penelope. He was in stocks and bonds and lived two blocks from his wife in rooms that looked like a club—all leather wingbacks and decanters and manly silence. They went to social affairs together and were on the best of terms, the best, said Mrs. Wexner, that they could hope to be, given the disparity in ages and interests. Separate residences, she insisted to Daisy, were the only way for married people, with the means to do so, to preserve a shred of what she called “the necessary mystery.” In another year, Fannie Hurst, the novelist, will be putting forth the same argument in the pages of the New York Times—what a furor!—and Mrs. Wexner will say that Fannie, whom she’d met a time or two, got the idea from her.

  On a rainy Sabbath in April, Daisy returns from a singing engagement at a Congregational church in Queens, to find Mrs. Wexner disembarking from a Packard at the steps of Daisy’s building. She wears fawn-colored stockings and thin, fawn-colored shoes, and that’s what comes out of the auto first, long fawn-colored limbs and then the ducked Egyptian head and a green umbrella whipping into full sail.

  They shake hands as they always do, smiling at their synchronicity, pleased but not surprised.

  Daisy is tired and a little light-headed because she is trying to save money and has not eaten. This is the first time Mrs. Wexner has come to her flat, which Lelia has abandoned because she has gone to be a singer or hostess in a summer resort in the Adirondacks. Daisy doesn’t believe for a second that Lelia is coming back, and the prospect of finding another person to share the rent makes her more exhausted. She realizes she does not have any friends except Penelope Wexner. She has many acquaintances, some lovely people among them, but she does not have the faintest idea what the living situations of her single acquaintances are.

  Both women are in rather pensive moods. The rain is relentless, saturating. The trolleys and wagons and automobiles move through it like specters. Veils of rain whip down the canyons of the city, bend the trees of the park. A drenched terrier, trailing a leash, trots through it at an angle.

  They make a fire in the stove. Mrs. Wexner look
s quickly around the spartan room, imperiously draws the curtains and lights candles. It is, she says, a candle sort of day.

  They are both drifty. Perhaps it is the rain, the way it seems to engulf, seems to want to obliterate, the world. They sit with each other in the dimness, listening.

  Mrs. Wexner, rather out of the blue, tells Daisy that phrenology, the science of the brain and skull, has been unfairly tainted by money-grubbing charlatans, the ones who charge money to read your skull. They say anything they want; they don’t know the demarcations. But a student of the science finds it to be uncannily accurate, she says. A real student does.

  “My own skull, for instance,” she says, shaking her full bobbed hair so that it falls over the top of her bent head, revealing a long naked neck. “You see these,” she says from under the curtain of hair, her fingers placed at protuberances at the base of her skull. She throws her hair back.

  “Amativeness,” she says wearily. “And these.” She takes Daisy’s hand and touches it to a spot high on the crown. “Ideality. Like you.” She looks at Daisy as if the implications should be clear. Daisy smiles tentatively.

  “Amativeness.” Mrs. Wexner sighs. “It has taken me into the furthest reaches of the spirit and flesh.” Daisy thinks of Mr. Wexner, a vested, corpulent, white-haired man she met once when he came for his wife after a Theosophy meeting.

  “He was a soldier in the Great War,” her friend says, “A man ten years younger than myself, a boy actually, but our spirits were the two halves of a whole. He did not return and he was not on the list of the dead. It was as if he had been plucked into the ether.” Her long fingers twisted upward in the motion of smoke. “You cannot imagine the anguish.

  “Ideality made me believe he continued to live. Months, and then a year, and no word—his people had given him up for dead, conducted a service with an empty casket—and still I believed. I believed because I felt his presence. You will understand what I mean, dear Daisy Lou. But did that presence lay tracks upon this earth? This is what I didn’t know. How here was he? Had he lost his memory in the shellings and did he wander Europe like the wounded knight of the Grail? Had he been captured and had he refused to identify himself and then, at the end, been kept by evil people—a faceless damaged servant of the Hun? I did not know.