The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Not until I stepped down from the trolley and began the three-block walk to my house was I able to begin thinking about my vacation. Arkansas, as I have already indicated, was repeatedly in my thoughts, although time and again I had told myself that like others who have left it forever I was never very happy there and would not enjoy living there again for long, and had remained away from it primarily in rebellion against its jejune simplicity, its insignificance. Again like most who have left it, however, I often fancied going back to stay, but knew that I couldn’t, although I had tried. Now again as I walked up Hammond Street in Chestnut Hill (between rows of houses which were utterly strange to me—regardless of my having passed them many times before—simply because it was Chestnut Hill and I by circumstance had been born and brought up in Little Rock) my mind started already to tease the possibility of the pending vacation as an opportunity for reappraising my old, comfortably familiar birthplace with a view toward resettling there, recapturing whatever stimulus the climate and physical environment had once given me, despite my failure to take advantage of it. I realized it was absurd even to wonder if Little Rock might have any need for a scholarly specialist in certain moribund aspects of American civilization. The University or the public schools could use me as a teacher of history, but I would not apply, firstly because I am shy of speaking to more than one person at a time, secondly because the kind of history which interested me would impart a warped view of our nation to the student. But, I wondered as I approached my house on Hammond Street in Chestnut Hill, would I necessarily have to be employed in something so closely related to my training? Couldn’t I perhaps forsake my absorbing interest during eight hours of the day in order to earn a living so that the other eight hours might serve that interest? Costs of living in Arkansas were, I realized, astonishingly lower than in New England; perhaps a simple clerk’s job in some Little Rock insurance office would provide a better sustenance than that which I eked out in Boston. And of course my wife might be thought of as independently wealthy. By golly, yes! She…

  Chapter three

  It was not until I had turned into our walk and placed my foot upon the first step to the door that I realized my wife might be thought of, no, should be thought of. By then it was too late to do much more thinking.

  She was sitting in the living room athwart the sofa, her feet tucked under one of the cushions, reading her quarterly copy of PMLA, which at one time I had thought was some sort of vowel-less abbreviation of her name, Pamela, but later learned stood for Publication of the Modern Language Association. As she often does not, she did not look up when I entered. This may or may not reflect scorn on her part. On the other hand it may or may not indicate oblivious absorption in what she is reading. Probably, that particular evening, it simply meant that because she had looked up on so many occasions when I had entered, she was tired of the monotony of having to look up on this occasion, and so did not. I hung up my overcoat in the closet, looked through the day’s mail, mostly junk and bills, poured myself two fingers of tepid bourbon in a tumbler that had clowns and blue elephants decalcomaniated on its sides along with the words EETSUM FLUFFY PEANUT BUTTER, sat down across the room from my wife and said, “Anything for supper?”

  Without looking up, she said, “Twocoldleftoverporkchopsintherefrigerator. Andcoldpotatoes. Helpyourself.”

  I decided that warming up and serving supper for myself would provide some time for further study of the problem of how best to broach the topic of the Little Rock vacation to my wife, who, I was aware, held my home town and hell in about equal esteem. So I withdrew to the kitchen, scraped a blanket of congealed grease from the pork chops and from one side of each sliver of sliced potato, slid them all onto a shelf of the oven, drank off the rest of my drink and refilled it with three fingers, then sat down at the kitchen table to devote my thoughts to Pamela Calvert Stone, an unusual wife, an uncommonly pretty blonde, intelligent and charming in a patrician sort of way, but, for the nonce, a woman who did not enjoy the responsibilities of wedlock, namely, cooking, housework, and particularly sex; a woman who, furthermore, was no longer able, or obliged, or simply disposed, to communicate with me.

  Possibly it is her own fault that she is so pretty and that she hates domestic responsibilities, but it is my fault that she won’t talk to me. It is mine because in the fragile months of our courtship and in the first fresh days of our marriage I fell victim to that heedless mistake, that étourderie, which dooms so many contemporary marriages through the indiscretion of verbal intimacy. In the early days of the Vanished American Past young couples maintained a proper timidity and taciturnity toward each other. But not any more. Today the intelligent young couple, recognizing in each other potential life partners, rushes headlong into the mutual exchange of their most secret thoughts and feelings, as if to say, My love, I honor you with these gifts of my private soul. Indeed, such exhibitionism of the interior landscape is a prerequisite to exposure of the exterior flesh. The admission fee to bed is long and honest confession, wherein the route to the mattress is lubricated with fluent words. Next morning’s (or next year’s) hangover is a nervous recognition of the extent to which the limits of tact have been violated. But too late. Darling Pamela sees through me as through fragile, transparent glass, satisfying herself that my slightest thought or deed can be interpreted by something I told her during one of those lingering, languorous hours of tender talk. A dominant man needs a certain mystery, a mantle of enigma, which he can wrap like a dark burnoose around his body, concealing the pusillanimous frame beneath, but I have none. At least not for my wife. If for example I am a day late in paying the Boston Edison bill, she understands it as a symptom of my rebellion against the rich little Miss Kilmansegg she is, because I unburdened myself of such a feeling during one of those unguarded moments of conversation which I thought at the time were purely objective and even intellectual, little realizing that one day they might subjectively be turned against me. If I procrastinate the disposal of the daily bag of garbage, her mind automatically returns to an occasion when I confided to her one of my pet Theories of the Leisure Class, whereby honest and dedicated scholars should ideally enjoy an existence unhampered by picayune chores. If I swear vociferously, profanely and menacingly at some taxi driver who without compunction blocks the path of our car, Pamela knows that my bark is worse than my bite because in one of our intimate moments I discoursed at length on the Roots, Nature and Effect of Base Funk in the Human Spirit, confessing bravely several of my own weaknesses (such as a lack of Charles Atlasian “dynamic tension”) as examples anent the subject. In fact, my imprecations to the taxi driver have a certain ludicrous aspect, bereft of authority, because it is always my wife who sits behind the wheel of our Buick Skylark, a circumstance which is itself the outcome of gracious confession (once, clinched together in the deep pile of a cabin’s rug, our hands stuck in each other’s crotches, we spoke of that subject most relevant to the business at hand, and I, rambling onward expertly in my thorough analysis of matters which I considered myself an authority on, let fall some innocent, well-meant affirmation of my belief in the Automobile as Sex Symbol—which amused and edified her thoroughly at the time, but ultimately deprived me of the use of the family car). No matter that I was Featherweight Champion in the Mid-South Golden Gloves tournament of 1953, and have scattered around the bedroom of our Chestnut Hill house several trophies attesting to the pugilistic prowess of my youth. Pamela dusts these trophies periodically, perfunctorily when she is cleaning up, but she does not see them. All she knows is what I revealed of myself one chill autumn night in the first year of our marriage, when we sat side by side on the sofa before the season’s first snug fire, in sweet rapport, congenially swirling brandy in the bottoms of our snifters, while I ruminated, aloud but softly, articulately, on the kaleidoscope of fears which dwell in the boxer’s breast during those brief but endless moments when he comports himself against his adversary.

  Lord, Lord! I cried after another heavy drag on
the bourbon. Let us forget that poisonous aphorism of Ovid’s: Si qua voles apte nubere nube pari: If you wish to marry well, marry an equal. He lied! Or else he thought of Julia, the poor little licentious daughter of old Emperor Augustus, as his equal, which was socially pretentious of him, or else, because we may assume that her small, warped intellect was no match for his genius, he was being maliciously sarcastic. Marriage of equals means conflict of equals and, like our perpetual struggle with the Soviets, nobody wins. A marriage of equals is like a demoniac chess game in which the king may be checked and checked again but never checkmated. Ovid, you old bastard, say what you really meant: If you wish to marry well, marry disparately.

  Once I wrote at great length of my marital troubles to an old and valued friend in Little Rock, Dall Hawkins, now a benevolent young policeman, and Dall returned simply a nine-word postcard: You don’t have to put up with that crap. I suppose he was right, but it was kind of late. I’ll say this: Had I been warned, had I but divined the doorless labyrinth which marriage to someone of Pamela’s intelligence would become, I would have pulled up short, turned my back on Mt. Holyoke and all its sister institutions, and chosen some unspoiled even if witless heifer from the most remote wilds of the Ozarks.

  But never mind. The pork chops burned. Gazing into my fingers of whiskey while negative thoughts of Pamela and positive thoughts of Little Rock waged war in my mind, I was unaware that in shoving the chops and chips into the oven I had turned the dial beyond bake to broil, until there was considerable smoke in the kitchen and Pamela came stomping into the room, her magazine parted around one finger, and an expression on her face as of Ino rushing to the rescue of Ulysses’ wrecked raft.

  “Merciful heavens, Cliff! Can’t you do anything right?” Whereupon she snatched my sad scorched supper out of its crematorium, deftly flipped the helpless potatoes into the garbage pail, scraped the black bark from the surface of the two pork chops and placed them before me on the table without ceremony, returning at once to the living room. The air in the kitchen, as of the air anywhere when she has passed through it on one of her reluctant errands, was abruptly cooler, as of a winter door suddenly swung open and held too long, despite the layers of smoke which still drifted through it.

  Ah, I thought as I hacked away at the inelastic meat, she treats me like this miserable meal: leaves me entirely alone, to my own devices, until I am spoiled or damaged, and then scrapes my surfaces until I am usable again. For it is true that Pamela took little interest in my work; her own field in college had been French literature of the late nineteenth century, and American culture was of no concern to her, but still I was disappointed that my occupation was to her no more noble than that of any other white-collar Bostonian, and that the only time she had acknowledged my career at all was when, for example, she sought a detailed description of the appearance and personality of Clara Ovett.

  What did she want? What does she want, of me, of herself, of life? God knows. But I knew, that night I swallowed the humble chops and the humble pie of her treatment of me and the meal both, that what she most needed was to get out of Boston pro tempore, and I was prepared, as a well-practiced swallower, to swallow my bile for a while, long enough to attempt communication with her once more. Boston, for all its early charm, its evocation of the VAP, can be a depressing place at any time of the year, because of its decadence, its disuse and misuse, the feeling of a gray old lady slightly demented, living on the thin thread of memories, forced to wear last year’s tattered dress, taken advantage of by corrupt Machiavellian politicians, suffering a climate which is never exactly right, and fatally jealous of her cousin cities, all of whom somehow are her betters. But that time in April was the worst time of all. Then the place was well-nigh unhabitable: the welcome pink blossoms of the saucer magnolia had not yet appeared, the workmen of the Public Garden sharpened their tools and cast anxious glances at the sky but did not commence their mass implantation of jonquils and tulips and pansies, the streets were still gray; the M.T.A. was prone to breakdowns, and the tempers of Boston’s Finest shrank to a new shortness; impatient spring-seekers, egged on by the over-optimism of the Globe and Herald, trekked out to the Arnold Arboretum but found there only skunk cabbage; the fish did not bite in the Charles; ferns did not fungate in the Fens; the sailors of Scollay Square, bored and disenchanted, went back to sea.

  “Pam,” I said, standing above her, holding my glass of bourbon casually in one hand, “let’s get out of this place.” But try as I might to make my voice relaxed and natural, to give my seven-word sentence an easy, ordinary prosaism, I sounded to myself like one total stranger making some absurd suggestion to another total stranger. Lord, how effortless it used to be to say whatever happened to pop into my mind!

  She looked up, marking her interrupted place with a polished fingernail, honored my eyes with her glance for two seconds, the glass in my hand for one, and then returned to her magazine. “You’re drunk,” she said. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “No, I mean it,” I protested. “Let’s take a vacation. Go South. Sunshine. Fresh air, flowers and all. Recreation. Recreation.”

  She chose to look up at me again. “Where South?” she asked.

  “Uh, Ah was thinkin of maybe, well, Little Rock.”

  She returned to her magazine again. I waited.

  After a while I said, “Well?” but she didn’t respond.

  I wanted to sit down, beside her perhaps, so her eyes would be on a level with mine, so I could see into them, but I knew she wouldn’t want that. Pam?” I said. She did not look up. “Say something,” I said.

  “I did: go to bed,” she said.

  “No, really,” I said. “I’m not going to work tomorrow. Clara knows, I told her. She says that’s okay, for me to take a vacation, stay away as long as I like.”

  Pamela looked up at last. “Really?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Well go to Rutland.”

  “I don’t want to go to Rutland. It’s frigid.” Like you, I started to add, but dared not. But I had a point. Going from the chill of Boston to the cold of Rutland would not help me. In summer and fall the place is wonderful, and we usually go up several weekends a month during those seasons, but I could not abide living under the noses of her parents for more than two days at a time. The Calverts are pleasant people, sound Congregationalist gentility, arbitri elegantiae, and they know enough about early New England history and culture to make conversation with them educational, but they had never quite forgiven me for not being a Saltonstall or a Lowell. In late April their beautiful old Lavius Fillmore house on Highland Avenue would be a musty ossuary wherein, imprisoned by the bars of fluted pilasters, I would strive for sleep against the sounds of ancestral bones stirring in the long corridors.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “I am going home.”

  Home! she called it, as if there were no other, as if our house in Chestnut Hill were a hole to which I had shanghaied her for the duration of our marriage. Would she if she saw Little Rock in the full flowering of its spring like it better than she had that one week in hot July she had been there after our wedding? “I don’t suppose you’d consider going to Arkansas with me, then?”

  “Of course not,” she said. It was beyond discussion.

  “I suppose you’ll be taking the car with you to Rutland?”

  “Of course,” she said. That, too, was beyond discussion. I hated to go to Little Rock and, worse, be in Little Rock without that beautiful Skylark. Perhaps the automobile is a sex symbol.

  Her smug righteousness emboldened me. Upon my mettle I said, putting my glass down with a bang on the coffee table, “Goddammit. Pam! Don’t be so obstinate!”

  “I?” she said. Again: “I?” She laughed, a false crepitant ha.

  “All right,” I said. “I think I will go to bed.”

  But the last word, as I marched away, was hers: “Good.”

  Undressing in the bathroom, removing my trousers an
d hanging them carefully in the closet, I extracted from the right rear pocket my notebook and sat down with it on the john. My notebook is a very small, three-inch by five-inch spiral-bound pad with brown covers, called a Ring-Master. Unlike most such memo books, it opens from the side rather than from the end. I bought mine in a drugstore across the Common on Boylston Street. I would not have been without it, and during my three years in Boston I filled thirty-four of these books with notes written in a small, cramped, page-filling hand; these will form the core of my opus on American civilization, should I ever get around to writing it. They slip easily into my hip pocket, and I am fast on the draw, having once timed myself, with the aid of one of those fast-draw clocks in an Arkansas sportsmen’s club, at .09 seconds. On the john I opened book number 34, which was crumpled and sweat-stained, the first clean page, and at the top wrote in heavy capitals: