I found it easiest to adopt her casual and speculative tone. “If she’d been making it out of affection she’d have found something else lying around to use, a saucepan with dimples, maybe. And why those white-hot titties? To emphasize femaleness in a dangerous, unpleasant way? Or those half-formed breasts that are like the scary outcrops on your adolescent child? And all those corrupt guts, and that window navel. Doesn’t that say, in the voice of a furious and suspicious mother, ‘I can see right through you?’”
“You’re free-associating,” Ruth said mildly. “After all, she started this a long time before.”
“Then it was prophecy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth said almost impatiently. “She wasn’t afraid of Julie as a girl. She was afraid she’d grow up beat, or a lady vet like Annie Williamson. She wanted a nice sweet feminine domestic girl in nicely pressed dresses who would be on the honor roll and play the piano and make little art things.”
“But virginal.”
“Oh yes. Maybe a little Pre-Raphaelite in a nice way.”
“And got this stormy creature she could neither understand nor approve.”
“Yes.”
“And that neither understood nor approved her, nor granted her authority.”
“Yes.”
“Like a lot of other parents,” I said. It was the point we had been circling for minutes, as her oblique look acknowledged.
“Why don’t you say all parents?”
“Because I don’t believe it,” I said. “There has to be an occasional parent-child relationship that works. When it doesn’t work, one side or the other is to blame.”
“And you think it’s usually the child.”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t even imply it. If I implied anything, it’s that people are too ready to assume that it’s the parent.”
A drift of wind moved in the empty, chilly patio. The air was soggy with unshed rain. The expanse of tiles gleamed like an abandoned Roman bath. It would have made a splendid place to open your veins.
I said, “Did you read about that fifteen-year-old who killed his parents the other night? The one that had taken the family car and wrecked it so they had his learner’s license pulled? So that night he went into their room and brained them both with an ax. Who’s to blame in that one?”
“A boy like that is obviously a psychopath.”
“And therefore all the more in need of control, isn’t he? They were doing the only possible thing when they grounded him. But there are millions of people who will sympathize with that murderous slob. He was frustrated in his normal desires. All his friends had cars. His society taught him to equate the driver’s license with the passage into manhood. And anyway we must feel sorry for wrongdoers, they’re unhappy people. Well the hell with it! I’m going to save my sympathy for that tormented pair trying to instill a sense of human responsibility into their brat, and getting their brains knocked out for their pains.”
“Oh, well, Julie didn’t murder Fran and Lucio, after all.”
“No, but how the blood flowed in fantasy! Why? Because her mother wouldn’t let her do everything her hormones and her teen-age rebellions suggested. Fran is a kind of fool, sure, but the kid is a monster. And don’t tell me consequences caught up with her. They caught up with a lot of other people too.”
“She isn’t that bad,” Ruth said, “and she may be one of the kind that never learns except by making mistakes.”
“So youth must be served,” I said. “They must be left free to work out their lives. You know what youth is? Youth is a pack of barbarians. That’s why I’ve resigned from the God-damned world, because it’s abdicated its authority, it’s abject before these underaged goons that think they know everything and know nothing at all, not one damned thing!”
Ruth’s lips were pursed, her eyebrows arched, rueful and dubious. I was aware of the sound of my voice dying out between the blank wings of the house. I had been shouting. Her hand came out and patted my forearm quickly, twice. “Yes,” she said on an indrawn breath like a sigh, and then, “It’s going to rain, we’d better get back. I wish they’d been home, it might have smoothed things out some if Lou could have shown off his finished patio.”
She stooped and laid our little offering between the screen and the massive homemade plank door. I have seen that thoughtful, relinquishing, regretful expression on people as they lay flowers on a grave. We had honestly liked the LoPrestis. It seemed to me, as I know it seemed to Ruth, that we would be better employed consoling one another than avoiding one another.
“I’ll bet you something,” I said. “I’ll bet you he liked it a hundred times better when it was a corporation yard as rough as a lava field, full of tools and people and noise.”
4
Which is the way it was when we looked into it on the Fourth from the lane of ragged oaks. We stood a minute under the last tree, two hundred feet from the bar. It was like looking in toward home plate from center field, with the crowd overflowing out of the stands into the infield. People saw us, heads turned, teeth glinted, hands waved. A police car with its radio turned on squawked out something from where it was parked off the comer of the eastern wing, and I thought perhaps we already had trouble until I saw the city manager of a town up the line, standing under the red umbrella with a big-time subdivider and builder, keeping his ear to the air, evidently combining pleasure with a proper Independence Day alertness. I saw Bill and Sue Casement, both brown with summer golf, and our resident All-American and his porcelain wife, who were by the bar with our resident dictator, the man in the white coat I had mistaken for a bartender. I should have known better. Lucio’s parties ran on a do-it-yourself basis.
Beyond the white coat I noted two incongruous dark ones, the only coats there besides the dictator’s. Strangers, and sticking together like nuns. Also I saw Annie Williamson, our lady vet, hunt-clubber, raiser of beagles and borzois and Tennessee walkers, judge at all the region horse shows and dog shows and gymkhanas, a woman with the wrists of a laborer, the shoulders of a bantamweight fighter, and a voice like the Hewgag of E Clampus Vitus.
Likewise college professors, gentleman-farmers, honest-to-god farmers (not Tom Weld, never Tom Weld in that patio, though he was represented by his Labrador’s by-blow), retired generals, airline pilots, advertising men, the widow of an internationally famous oil geologist, the wife (in the midst of divorce proceedings) of an internationally famous architect, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, and others unknown, a great swarm to the number I should say of three thousand six hundred and thirty-two, not counting the little children, who were all still up at the Casement pool.
Now here came Fran across the blazing patio to greet us. We waved her back, starting out of our own shade to prevent her exposing her susceptible skin, but she came on anyway, and we met by the cement mixer, which stood about where the shortstop would be playing with a man on first and a right-hander up. She was looking most Gretchen in a dirndl, and she had her fair hair in one thick braid that hung over her shoulder nearly to her waist. Her arms and neck were soft, white, palely freckled; her eyes were brown and moist like her cocker’s; her voice reached out like her hands to lay a caressing touch on us. For company she always put on what Ruth called her haut blancmange manner: you had the feeling that if a fly alighted on her it would sink and disappear without trace. And yet a warm sort of woman, almost tediously female, as affectionate as she was affected. She came lamenting the heat and hoping we were not simply dying of it, and she gave me a soft look of gratitude when I draped one of my stoles over her arms and shoulders. I meant it as a joke; she took it as a thoughtful acknowledgment of her actinic peril.
“Oh, I’m just sick about this weather!” she cried. “I wanted to have a really nice show, and now nobody can stand out in the sun long enough to look at things.”
I began badly. Turning to the cement mixer, fuming from its maw of ice, I said, “Ah, but this is one I’ve been admiring. No—don’t tell me what it means. Or isn?
??t it intended to mean anything? Do I have to think in the medium?”
“You come here with me, you scoundrel,” Fran said, and hooked her arm in mine. “There’s one over here I do want your opinion of.”
“I ought to get these ladies into the shade.”
“Just on your way past, it won’t take a minute. I want them to see it too.”
As we picked our way over rough concrete and across projecting headers, people in the shade cried Hi and Welcome, and My God, did you walk? You poor souls. What’s all the cold-weather gear, Joe? Man, you out of your mind? Hello, Ruth. Hello, Marian. Where’s your handsome husband? Still off with those lady seals?
We stopped before the figure in the skirt of tubular iron and I looked her in the teeth. I looked her through the navel. I inspected her rusted viscera. I observed the little flames of the nipples. Though we were under the red umbrella, it was almost as hot as in the open sun. I could see Marian wilting, I myself was oozing sweat, and it made me impatient to be trapped into a lot of dishonest art criticism the minute we arrived. I wanted my hand around a sweating glass, what is more. But with my forked tongue I said, “This is a real departure. This is something new.”
“What do you think?” Fran said, her braid in her hand. “Tell me honestly, now.”
“It’s different from anything of yours I’ve seen.”
“Yes, I think I ...”
“You didn’t just throw it together, either,” I said. “This was created. It will stand a lot of looking.”
“You just look all you want to!”
“It’s ominous, though,” I said. “Is it meant to be a little frightening? Because that’s the way it strikes me.”
“Well, yes, I guess it is meant to be a little frightening. It sort of took hold of me as I worked on it....”
I saw Lucio coming, his dark face shining with heat, his shirt mooned. Fran was saying happily, “And if you don’t think that was a perfect stinker to weld, with that old torch! I ought to get a new one, Lou keeps telling me. But I sort of like doing it the hard way.”
“Every woman I know is a masochist, apparently,” I said. “But I know a couple who have suffered all they should, for now. Excuse me, Fran, will you? Marian ought to sit down. I’ll study this some more and talk to you later. You should feel very good about it, I think.”
I escaped, carrying with me her soft, radiant smile and her expression—arch would be the name for it—that said Don’t you forget, now! We’ve got a date, remember!.
“I damn near called you this morning to come over and earn your supper by helping me dig the hole to roast the beef in,” Lucio said, “but then I remembered you’re an old retired bird and probably couldn’t take it. What were you doing about nine or ten? Lying in the shade?”
“Digging,” I said, remembering the king snake.
“Brother, I wish I’d known that.”
“So do I,” I said.
I got the ladies gin and tonic, I poured a good one for myself, and I led them into the shaded angle looking for chairs. The dictator did credit to his upbringing by rising promptly for Marian, and a man I did not know got up rather less willingly for Ruth. Sue Casement came over just as I was tucking the sweater and stoles under a chair and telling Marian, “Now that the pain is over, try cultivating comfort for contrast.”
“Pain?” Sue said, with concern in her rosy face. “Is something ... ?”
“Joe is being a mother hen,” Marian said.
“Run along and play,” Ruth said. “Sue and I will look after her.” So I talked with Sue a minute and then wandered off, dangerously unattended, into the party.
It was quite a party. In the heat everybody gulped and everybody got quickly tight, and not the least swift of foot among those who ran with the god was Joseph Allston, who had started the day crooked and had been itching to set it straight. The old Dutchman was right, we get too soon oldt and too late schmardt.
I talked with acquaintances, I heard a few stories. Then I discovered that the two dark suits were Russian “students,” men of forty or so, with hard Party faces, whom Fran had met on some committee and captured for the day. She wanted them to see an American neighborhood gathering, and what better time than Independence Day?
I am as willing to wag my tail at foreigners as any other old dog, but these people were hard to wag at. Mostly our talk was about vodka. It turned out that American vodka was less potent than Russian vodka. But also we spoke of languages. I discovered that all Russians spoke English, German, and French at least, but that few Americans knew anything but English and none knew Russian. After a few minutes of this I excused myself and drifted back to the bar for a second inferior American gin and tonic. Looking toward Ruth and Marian, I saw them in a conversational ring with several other women. Marian’s brown legs were stretched out, her head back. She listened peacefully, as if half-asleep.
Four two, said the police car in right field. Four two. Accident at Squawk and Squawk-Squawk. The city manager, who had suspended his conversation to listen, once again turned his ironical attention to the Russians. The developer, leaning his weight on two women who screamed with laughter, was demonstrating how he could drink from the glass held between his teeth.
Hilarity recollected in tranquillity can be depressing. With respect to this particular hilarity I am like Don Marquis’s party guest recalling his last-evening’s conviction that Mrs. Simpkins’s face was a slot machine, and that the macaroons were pennies. It seems to me that on the Fourth I took several Mrs. Simpkinses by the ears and tried to shake chewing gum or stamps out of their double chins. Get old Joe Allston high and he kills you. What a comical old rooster. A prince—and spell it the way we used to spell it in my youth when we applied the term to someone we especially admired. P-r-i-c-k, prince.
Let me get it over. Father, I have sinned. I have put an enemy in my mouth to steal away my brains. I have shamed my gray hairs. I have mocked a friend in such a way that she will never like or trust me again. I have waggled my ass’s ears among the foolish and the drunken.
For instance. The developer, who for quite a while had been feeling no pain, had been feeling other things, including several bottoms. The city manager and I, squatting to examine Fran’s old relic of a blowtorch, observed his wandering hand. The manager looked at me and pulled his deadpan joker’s face down. I was equal to the occasion. Showing him how the torch worked, I dropped some carbide into the tank and added the ice cubes from my glass. When I closed the tank and opened the valve and struck a match, I just happened to be holding the thing close to the developer’s rear end, and the pop of blue flame from the nozzle set his shirttails afire. His friend the manager put him out with a flat-handed slap that moved him six feet.
Later, Lucio and I made an acetylene cannon out of a length of soil pipe, and shortly Lucio, the city manager, the Nobel Prize winner, the All-American, Bill Casement, and a half dozen more of us were happily blowing tin cans and plugs of wood fifty feet down into the gully. I heard Fran explaining to the two Russians that fireworks were traditional on Independence Day, though for safety reasons—and Americans were much more careful in that way than world opinion credited them with being, look at the comparative statistics on traffic accidents in Europe and America—they could be fired off only under permit, The city manager’s presence made us sort of legal, though he wasn’t our manager.
I didn’t hear the Russians’ reply, but I thought I could paraphrase their response: Warlike, barbarous, technically advanced, the Americans demonstrate even in their toys and playthings a martial and destructive spirit, though their improvised ordnance seems definitely inferior to the Russian....
Coming up past them after we had exhausted Fran’s supply of carbide, I gave them a cheery greeting in Italian, but they only stared.
The intolerable day was cooling toward evening; the daylight-saving sunshine lay like custard on the oaks and mistletoe, the patio was three-quarters in shade. Carrying my empty glass, or somebody’s empty glass
, I made my way back to my women, to whom I had paid no attention for an hour. But someone had kept their glasses full, or else they had nursed their first ones, and their circle was still deep in the sort of talk that women get into-about clothes, children, P.T.A., local politics, conservation, world affairs, art, music, books, that sort of thing—and they looked at me with some amusement and waved me away. So I refilled my glass and turned to see what further entertainment the party offered.
The first thing I saw was Annie Williamson burrowing into the cement mixer, evidently in search of a beer. Even on tiptoe, with her arm in to the shoulder, she could not reach the bottom, and in exasperation she hopped up and put head and shoulders inside. Right then, behind her, I became aware of the city manager with the mixer’s power cord in his hand. Following his wildly pointing finger, I saw an outlet in the wall. He flung me the cord across twenty feet of patio and I plugged it promptly in.
The mixer grated and started to turn, Annie’s tiptoeing feet left the ground, her rump reared up. There were muffled sounds of bears attacking bulls and dinosaurs being gelded, and then Annie’s feet found pavement and her head popped out, red, wet, and roaring.
The city manager liked the deadpan pose, but he was definitely breaking up.
“Laugh!” Annie roared at him. “Honest to John!”
I handed Annie my handkerchief, saying, “That was a kid trick if I ever saw one. It’s a pity people drink when they don’t know how to hold it. Public officials at that. What will our Russian friends think?”
They were standing together with their impassive lumpy faces and their stony Party eyes, and I read their minds. Among the overprivileged Americans drunkenness may be called the standard. Weak as their liquor is, they do not carry it well. Far from creating the happiness that they say they are in pursuit of, their capitalist system encourages self-indulgence and alcoholic deviation....
The police car squawked. Wet-eyed, shaken with seismic rumblings and convulsions, the city manager lifted his head to listen. He hopped across the headers and leaned in and took a microphone from the dash and talked into it. The squawk box replied unintelligibly. The manager slid inside and slammed the door. The motor caught, the turret light began to revolve. He shouted something, still laughing; gave us a sassy twirl of the siren, skidded his wheels on the slippery oak leaves, and bolted out the drive between the parked cars. There he went, a boy on a man’s errand, accident or fire or gang fight or something. Shoulder to shoulder the Russians watched. Pravda reports law in America enforced by alcoholics.