Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

by Max Shulman

  “No, sir,” said Harry with a vehement shake of his head. “I’m not ready for the pipe and slippers yet. I’m a young man, still full of fire!”

  “Fireball,” said Grace, taking his hands in hers, “I love you. Right now, full of booze and nonsense as you are, I love you so much I can hardly stand it. You’re a romantic idiot and I love you for it. But I love you for other things—important things, like being chairman of the hospital fund drive last year, like building that bookshelf in the den, like teaching Dan how to ride his bike.”

  “Bookshelves and bikes!” he said bitterly. “The story of my life.”

  “I’ll tell you a much sadder story,” said Grace. “No bookshelves and no bikes. Just emptiness.”

  “Emptiness? When two people have each other?”

  “But that’s only a beginning,” Grace said. “What do you think love is—a sensitive plant you must nurture and protect all your life? Well, it isn’t. Not our kind. Ours is a rock to build on.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve built all over it,” he complained. “We can’t even see it any more.”

  “It’s there. If it wasn’t, everything would come tumbling down.” She looked at him searchingly. “Don’t you understand that?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yes, Grace, I understand it. Believe it or not, I understand everything you say. I always have … But there’s something you don’t understand: For me, romance has not retired to a back bedroom. It’s still in the front parlor and wide awake!”

  “I’ll remember,” said Grace.

  “See that you do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now kiss me.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She put up her lips, and he gave her a businesslike kiss, then worked his way across her cheek and under her ear. “We don’t really have to go to that town meeting tonight, do we?” he whispered, munching on her lobe.

  “Good Lord, we’re going to be late!” she cried. She pushed him away, started the car, and zoomed out from the curb.

  “How about next weekend?” asked Harry.

  “For what?”

  “For the Concord Hotel—just the two of us?”

  “Oh, sweetie, we can’t next weekend.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Randrigoraths are coming.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t you remember? It’s United Nations week. We invited that Hindu couple to stay with us.”

  “Perhaps we could double-date,” said Harry with a thin smile.

  “Oh, Harry, you’re a scream.”

  “I’m a regular Joe Penner.”

  She reached over and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry, darling. We’ll go away soon. I promise.”

  “When?” he asked. “After the children get married?”

  “That reminds me! I’ve got to pick up the sitter for tonight. Where’s Nutmeg Lane?”

  “First corner past the light. But that’s not where Mrs. Epperson lives.”

  “I know. It’s a new sitter. And much better.”

  “Who?”

  “Maggie Larkin.”

  “The sex fiend?” asked Harry.

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I might stay home myself tonight. This Larkin girl sounds pretty interesting.”

  Grace gave him the back of her hand smartly across the navel. “You just stow that kind of talk, mister,” she warned.

  “I’m only fooling,” Harry said, stroking her nylon knee. “I don’t want anybody but you.”

  “You better not,” she said menacingly.

  “I really don’t,” he assured her. “I don’t want anybody but you. And some day—some day when we don’t have to go to a meeting or a rally or a lecture or a caucus—some day when the lawn doesn’t need cutting and the trash doesn’t need burning and the hinges don’t need oiling and the stairs don’t need runners and the faucets don’t need washers and the weatherstrips don’t need tightening and the drawers don’t need loosening and the children don’t need bite-plates—some day, Grace, some day, mark my words, I’ll get you yet!”

  4

  Comfort Goodpasture sat at the desk in her father’s study with her homework in front of her. She was a large girl of sixteen years with creamy haunches and a fast-rising bosom. Occasionally one of her male colleagues at Webster High School, made reckless by desire, would undertake to lay hands on those haunches or that bosom. For his pains he would receive a clout that sometimes required stitches. Comfort, no matter how she jiggled and jutted, was still unawakened.

  She opened her textbook in geometry, found a clean sheet of paper, uncapped her pen, furrowed her alabaster brow, and began to write. “Dear Elvis,” she wrote. “Well, I suppose you are wondering what happened at the last meeting. Elvis, it was the most! Betty Ann Steinberg had this absolute gasser of an idea. Instead of playing the whole album like we always do, we only played one song—Hound Dog, of course. We played it 38 times and I’m here to tell you everybody went ape! I mean it was Wigsville, USA, till my father came in and tore the arm off the phonograph. Man, was he p.o.’d! Well, afterwards something happened that was so beautiful that I still get misty when I think about it. This girl Gloria Coleman was at the meeting. I never wrote you about her before because this is the first meeting she ever came to. She hasn’t been a bit well. She ran into this lobster pot when she was water skiing last summer, and she had to have bone grafts and everything. She’s all right now, but she sure is a changed person. I mean, before her tragedy she was always hacking around and yocking up a storm, but now she’s very quiet and spiritual if you know what I mean. Well, anyhow, she said she wrote this poem which she wanted to read. Of course, everybody groaned and pretended they were shutting their ears, but she read it anyhow and, Elvis, I’m here to tell you when she finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. So we passed a resolution for me to send you the poem which hereinafter follows:

  I dreamt I saw James Dean last night

  A-sitting lonely on a cloud,

  And I said, ‘What are you doing?’

  And he said, ‘I watch the crowd.’

  ‘When I see them digging Elvis,

  When I hear that rocking strain,

  When I feel that rolling rhythm,

  I know my life was not in vain.’

  Well, Elvis, I know how you must feel after reading this, so I will close now. The girl who wrote the poem’s name is Gloria Coleman, and it would be very nice if your agent could send her a little note or something, because when a person has had bone grafts they can always use a little cheering up. I will write you again after our next meeting, and meanwhile the girls all join in wishing you many more golden platters, and may the Big Fellow in the Sky continue to watch over you and your meteoric career.

  Your Fan,

  Comfort Goodpasture”

  She addressed the letter, put it away, and turned with a martyr’s groan to her geometry book. At the end of a half-hour, with Pythagoras holding a commanding lead, the uneven match was interrupted by the entrance of her father. “Hi, Daddy-O,” she said, looking up at him in an unfrightened manner.

  Comfort was not intimidated by Isaac Goodpasture, but there were plenty who were. Isaac was a long, dark, craggy Yankee with eyebrows like hanging gardens. He had an abrasive wit and a place to exercise it: he was editor and owner of the Putnam’s Landing Gazette, a weekly newspaper which had belonged to his family since 1834.

  Isaac and Comfort lived in a tiny, tidy pre-Revolutionary clapboard house, located unfashionably near the center of town. There were just the two of them. Comfort, an only child, had been left motherless when she was twelve, and it had fallen to Isaac to guide her through puberty. He had, in his opinion, done a reasonably good job. True, her speech was an execrable mishmash of teenage patois, and the clothes she wore were sometimes grounds for arrest, and her marks in school took no prizes, and she thought Elvis Presley shaded Abe Lincoln as t
he greatest American of all time—but, on the other hand, he had successfully kept her out of the white slave trade. And that, in this rock-and-roll era, he regarded as no minor achievement.

  He stood now in his study and looked down at Comfort, incongruously pink and voluptuous behind his austere Early American desk. “Good evening, Comfort,” he said.

  “Daddy-O,” she said, pointing at her geometry text, “I don’t dig this Pythagoras cat.”

  “Try a little harder,” said he. “But try up in your own room, will you please? I need the study. Some people are coming in.”

  “All rootie,” she said agreeably. She picked up her book and papers and, humming the largo from Hound Dog, she started out of the study.

  “Comfort!” he called sharply.

  “Yeah?”

  “Must you walk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that!”

  “But, Daddy-O, that’s the way I walk,” she said innocently.

  “Nobody walks that way,” he declared. “Or, at least, nobody did before Marilyn Monroe invented it.”

  “Gee, I can’t help the way I walk.”

  “Yes, you can—and, as a matter of public safety, you better had,” he said grimly.

  Comfort broke into a delighted giggle. She came back to Isaac and planted an affectionate kiss on his cheek. “Daddy-O,” she said, “you’re square as a bear, but I dig you the most.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said drily. “Now get upstairs and do your homework … And do it right. One more report card like the last one, and I’m putting you to work in the steam laundry.”

  “Har-de-har-har,” said Comfort, vastly amused.

  “This is no laughing matter, my girl. You’re going to start tending to business and stop running around with those hot-rod Romeos. What in the world do you do with those boys anyhow?”

  “I cope,” she replied.

  “Successfully, one hopes?”

  “Are you kiddin’?” she snorted derisively. “Why, those little twerps at Webster—I can handle ’em with my pinkie!”

  “For this relief much thanks,” he murmured.

  She giggled again. “You stone me,” she said fondly. “I mean you drive me ape.”

  She gave him another kiss and went to her room. Isaac watched pensively as she ascended the stairs. “If she gets any rounder,” he thought, “I will have to post guards.”

  Nature had been more than normally whimsical to give a daughter like Comfort to Isaac. He was everything she was not—bony, dry, tough, unfrivolous. He had only one passion—the preservation of the status quo. In the Putnam’s Landing Gazette he stood foursquare and fearless against change of any kind. Each week, as the Yankees nodded approval and the commuters had conniption fits, he wielded his editorial axe against new schools, new roads, new sewers, new parks, and other such, as he had once called them, “toboggans into the murky valley of deficit financing.”

  Now, as Comfort sat upstairs making feckless lunges at Pythagoras, Isaac, in his study, broke out a bottle of blended whisky and a box of dime cigars. A few visitors were coming to help him shore up the status quo. Tonight was town meeting night in Putnam’s Landing, and Isaac was holding his usual small caucus at home before the meeting.

  The town meetings of New England, Isaac would agree in principle, were an excellent thing. Every voter could attend, could rise and be heard, could cast his ballot. It was democracy in the grand old Yankee tradition.

  But—and here, for Isaac, was the heart of the matter—it was a tradition that could work only for Yankees. Or, at any rate, only for adherents to the Yankee financial philosophy. Isaac had no prejudices of a religious or racial nature. When, for example, the Italians moved into Putnam’s Landing and he saw that underneath their swarthy volatility they had a healthy respect for the dollar, both private and public, Isaac was well pleased to have them. But the commuters were something else again. In this instance, too, he had no objections on grounds of prejudice; it made no difference that so many of them were Jews, copy-writers, Barnard alumnae, vodka drinkers, dextrose eaters, Kafka readers, Democrats, and other such exotics. But what he found utterly and totally unconscionable was that these people earned an average of ten to twenty thousand dollars a year and failed to live on it!

  And, instead of decently hiding their shame at home, they came pouring into the town meeting each month to make fervent speeches for more schools, more parks, more traffic lights, more everything—precisely the same kind of lunatic overextension they practiced in their homes!

  It was to save Putnam’s Landing from these fiscal idiots that Isaac held his caucus before every town meeting. He called together a few prominent citizens, Yankees all, men of his own sober political persuasion, and together they laid plans to meet the menace of the commuters.

  The members of the caucus arrived promptly at eight. They took seats in the study, accepted White Owls and 1¼ ounce shots of Three Feathers. (In point of fact, two of them did not smoke or drink, but as a matter of principle they never turned down anything free.) There were five of them in all. Reading from left to right, they were, first, George Melvin, a rosy, plausible real estate dealer who had gotten rich selling housing sites to commuters. George’s success was largely attributable to one fact: he had mastered the art of nomenclature. When, for instance, he bought the swamp behind the old Penniman place, he named it “Powderhorn Hill” and sold it off in a twinkling. Forty acres of salt meadow south of the tracks were re-christened “Flintlock Ridge” and sold with equal dispatch. Perhaps his boldest stroke was “Upper Meadow”—formerly a gravel pit. No pangs of conscience disturbed George’s peace. Maybe his cutomers’ cellars did leak a bit, but, by golly, when a fellow had been living, say, on 68th Street, it sure made him feel mighty proud when he could call his friends and say, “How’d you like to run up to Flintlock Ridge this weekend?”

  Next was Waldo Pike, a direct beneficiary of the leaky cellars spawned by George Melvin. Waldo owned the local hardware store and did a booming business in wall sealers. And when, after hideous expense, the cellars were finally snug and dry, Waldo promptly persuaded the homesteaders to fill them with work benches, power saws, jigs, lathes, drills, sanders, and a huge, gleaming variety of tools. This took no great persuasion, for, as Waldo gleefully knew, the average commuter was queer for tools. After dealing exclusively with abstractions from Monday to Friday at CBS, BBD&O, or Doubleday, he felt a frantic compulsion to restore the balance by working with his hands on weekends.

  Which redounded directly to the enrichment of the third member of Isaac’s caucus, Dr. Emmett Magruder, who could always count on a brisk trade with needle and suture on Saturdays and Sundays. And, to his great surprise, he was busy all the rest of the week too. Doc, now nearing seventy, had received his M.D. from a Boston diploma mill in 1909 and had successfully avoided learning any medicine since. The Yankees of Putnam’s Landing knew the extent of Doc’s training and never troubled him with anything a talented Boy Scout could not fix. But the commuters flocked to his office in droves. After New York with its high-pressure doctors and their high-gloss equipment, they found it downright refreshing to come to a twinkly old man in a tacky old office with a battered old desk and a creaky old swivel chair. Like a Norman Rockwell painting it was—good; simple; American! They were further gratified to learn that Doc was not given to glib diagnoses. Unlike his arrogant Manhattan colleagues who would never admit themselves at a loss, Doc would more often than not make a frank, cheerful confession that he hadn’t a clue as to what ailed them, but whatever it was, it would probably go away. “What a fine, honest old gent!” they would say about him later, those who lived.

  The fourth member of the caucus was Minton Evans, landscaper, from whom never was heard a discouraging word. Was Minton called to make a lawn where the soil was too sandy? Too silty? Too sour? Did the land lie in the path of every spring freshet? Was the sun blocked off from seven A.M. to nightfall? Were the moles holding a track meet underneat
h? Was the forest nibbling on the edges? … Well, never mind. Minton would do the job, no matter how much muscle, manure, and money were required. And when the job had to be done again, Minton was available again. And again. And again. “One good thing about Minton,” the commuters told each other. “You can always get him.”

  Manning Thaw completed the caucus. Manning was the first selectman of Putnam’s Landing. The office was equivalent to mayor, and, in fact, Manning had long wanted the name changed officially to mayor. But George Melvin, the expert on nomenclature, had argued strenuously that “first selectman” had just the kind of quaint, cottage-cheesy quality that kept New Yorkers moving to Putnam’s Landing, and so the name was retained.

  Manning was a drab, sallow little man, sixty years old and precisely five feet tall. He was about as unlike a politician as a politician can be. He shook no hands, clapped no backs, kissed no babies, granted no interview, made no public speeches. No private speeches either; he was as thrifty with words as with money, and that was thrifty indeed. On his selectman’s salary of $4200 a year, he supported himself, kept an aged mother in St. Petersburg, operated a 1951 Chevrolet, gave a tithe to the Congregational Church, paid his taxes, and bought three shares of AT&T each year. He was a bachelor and lived in a furnished room over Da Costa’s drug store. His objets d’art were two—a framed sampler over his bed which said:

  MAKE IT DO,

  WEAR IT OUT,

  USE IT UP,

  DO WITHOUT.

  and a framed sampler over his desk at Town Hall which said the same thing.

  Isaac Goodpasture, having fulfilled his obligations as host, capped the Three Feathers, closed the White Owls, and began the business of the evening. “Boys,” he said to all assembled, “we’ve had some tough town meetings before, but tonight’s is going to be a bitch-kitty. First of all, that demented O’Sheel woman is coming in with a recommendation for a garbage disposal plant. She says we can’t keep dumping in Haskins Hollow and covering it with gravel.

  “Why the hell not?” demanded Minton Evans, the landscaper, who sold the town five yards of gravel each day to cover the garbage.