Rosie’s theology was hardbitten and oriented toward punishment rather than reward. In her world view, contented indolence was the worst abomination of all, and Rosie, whether the Lord did or not, knew that Aurora Greenway was about as contentedly indolent as anyone alive. Nothing brought out the vengeance-seeking streak in Rosie like watching her husband spill gumbo on his pants because he happened to be watching Aurora loaf around the kitchen watching TV and singing Italian songs.
She had told Royce many times precisely what she meant to do to him spiritually, financially, and anatomically if she ever caught him emerging from one of Aurora’s dressing gowns. As soon as the back door closed she marched over to the table and told him again.
“Whut?” Royce said. He was a large, indecisive man and looked aggrieved at his wife’s accusation. He offered to swear on the Bible that he had never in his life entertained the one thought that he had entertained almost constantly for two decades.
“I don’t know why a grown man would sit there an’ offer to swear to a lie,” Rosie said. “Then you got me and the Lord both against you, and havin’ me against you is bad enough. Aurora ain’t worth it, even if she was to cotton to you, which she don’t.”
“I ain’t said she did, Rosie,” Royce said with a pained look in his eye. He wished his wife wouldn’t so bluntly destroy his one remaining dream.
“Hell, we got seven kids,” he added. He always added it—it was his major defense. “Why don’t you look at it that way?”
“Because it don’t impress me no more than snappin’ peas,” Rosie said. She had gone back and perched herself on a stool by the sink and was at that moment snapping peas.
“Nice kids,” Royce added hopefully.
“I don’t know what makes you think so,” Rosie said. “You know how lowlife they are. We’re lucky they ain’t all in the pen, or reform school, or runnin’ whorehouses or something. Don’t stand there looking at me with your thumbs in your belt. If you got some time to spare you can help me snap these peas.”
“Seven kids ought to mean somethin’,” Royce insisted. He did take his thumbs out of his belt.
“Yeah, seven accidents,” Rosie said. “Means you can’t hold your liquor, or nothin’ else either. We’ve had seven car wrecks too—maybe more. An’ for the same reason.”
“Whut reason?” Royce inquired. He looked out at Aurora’s large sunny back yard and thought somberly of how nice it would be to be living in her house with her rather than in his house with Rosie. He and Rosie and the two kids that were still underfoot lived in a four-room frame crackerbox in the Denver Harbor area in North Houston, not far from the Ship Channel. Every morning, almost, the Ship Channel sent its terrible smells their way. It was a citybilly section, full of bars and liquor stores and dangerous alleys that were likely to come out in black neighborhoods or Mexican neighborhoods—places where tipsy rednecks were often deprived of their wallets and their consciousnesses, and sometimes deprived of their lives. It was a wonder to him that Rosie had escaped a tragic death as long as she had in such a neighborhood.
“For the reason that you ain’t got a precaution in you after eight or nine beers,” she went on, snapping vigorously.
“I guess you never wanted a one of ’em, did you?” Royce said. “I guess it’s ever’ bit been my fault.”
“Why no,” Rosie said. “I ain’t above enjoyin’ an accident now an’ then, specially if it happens after dark. Of course I wanted kids. You know how afraid I was of endin’ up an old maid. What I was pointin’ out to you, Royce, is that seven kids don’t mean we’re still sweethearts, like we was at first, and it sure don’t mean you wouldn’t take a little shine to Aurora if she was to get sweet on you.”
Royce Dunlup would have been the first to admit that he didn’t know much, but he did know that he couldn’t outtalk his wife.
“Ain’t nobody been sweet on me in a hunnert years,” he said gloomily, looking into Aurora’s refrigerator. He even liked her refrigerator better than any other refrigerator.
“Quit moonin’ an’ pay attention to me,” Rosie said. “I got my hair set this mornin’ and you never said a word.”
Royce looked, but it had been so long since he had noticed Rosie’s hair that he could not remember how it might have looked before she had it set. In any case he couldn’t think of a word to say about it.
“Well, I guess all this will keep till suppertime,” he said. “I got to get to Spring Branch.”
“That’s fine, Royce,” Rosie said. “I just got one thing to say to you, and that’s if you see any Cadillacs with flats with fat women sittin’ in them, just play like you got a gnat in your eye and keep on truckin’, okay? You owe me that.”
“Why?” Royce asked. Rosie was always suddenly calling in debts he didn’t know he had accumulated.
Rosie didn’t answer. The only sound in the kitchen was the sound of peas snapping.
“Rosie, I swear,” Royce said. “You just make me feel at a total loss.” He made the mistake of looking for about one second into two steely gray East Texas eyes—they were squinting slightly, and they held no mercy.
“Gotta go,” he said faintly, quelled, as usual, before he had done anything to be quelled for.
Rosie stopped squinting, confident, for the afternoon at least, that she had him. She left off snapping for a minute and made a nice kissing sound for her bewildered spouse. “Bye-bye, honey,” she said. “That’s sweet, you droppin’ in for lunch.”
3.
MR. EDWARD JOHNSON, first vice-president of the most tasteful little bank in River Oaks, was trying to think of some way to keep from looking at his watch so often. It was not really seemly for a bank officer to look at his watch every thirty seconds, particularly not when he was standing in the foyer of the most exclusive French restaurant in Houston, but that was what he had been doing for almost forty minutes. It was only a matter of time, and not much of it, before he would start looking at his watch every fifteen seconds, or even every ten seconds; the people coming in would see his wrist keep jerking up and would probably think he had some kind of muscular disorder. That was not good at all. No one wanted a banker to seem spastic. He kept telling himself he ought to contain himself, but he couldn’t contain himself.
He had spoken to Aurora that morning and she had seemed almost affectionate. Her tone at times had been a tone to stir hopes, but of course that had been three hours ago, and Aurora had always felt free to change her plans as abruptly as a cricket, though of course in all other respects she was nothing like a cricket at all. Still, Edward Johnson knew there was absolutely no reason to assume that she hadn’t suddenly had a change of heart. She might, that very morning, have decided to marry any one of his rivals. She might have eloped with the old general, or the rich yachtsman, or one of the oil men, or even the completely disreputable old singer who continued to tag her around. It was conceivable that some of her suitors had dropped out without his knowledge, but then it was just as likely that new ones had already been added to replace them.
Such thoughts were not easy to live with in the foyer of an exclusive restaurant, under the annoyed eye of a maitre d’ who had been grimly holding a table for forty minutes. The only way Edward Johnson could have kept his wrist from jerking up would have been to clench it between his legs, which struck him as being even less seemly than having it jerk. It was not a happy position to be in, and the moment came when he could bear it no longer. He waited until the maitre d’ was busy with the wine steward and quickly stepped outside, hoping against hope to spot Aurora.
To his immense relief he did just that. The first thing he saw was her familiar black Cadillac, parked well away from the curb in the nearest bus zone. His heart swelled—for once his timing had been superb. Aurora loved little attentions, like having her car door held for her.
All cares forgotten, Edward Johnson rushed to hold it for her. He ran into the street, yanked the door open, and looked down on the object of his fondest hopes and strongest desire
s—only to note, too late, that she was in the process of putting on her stockings. One was on and the other one was halfway up her leg. “Aurora, you look lovely,” he said, a second before he realized he was looking down upon her partially naked lap—more naked lap, at least, than he had so far been allowed to see. The blood that had been rushing to his head at the prospect of pleasing her made a sudden U-turn and vanished completely.
To make matters worse, a very large bus bore down upon him, honking furiously. The Cadillac, of course, was parked in its zone. When the bus driver saw that he couldn’t dislodge the Cadillac he pulled up adjacent to it and stopped barely eighteen inches away. Edward Johnson, thinking for a moment that he was about to be crushed, tried desperately to crowd closer to the car without actually falling into the lap of his date. The front door of the bus whooshed open, and two hefty Negro women managed to squeeze their way between the two vehicles and onto the bus. The driver, a lanky white boy, looked down at Edward Johnson with dull, passionless annoyance. “You-all got your fuckin’ nerve,” he said. “Whyn’t you get a motel room or somethin’?” Then the door whooshed shut and the bus roared away, filling the air with brown exhaust.
Aurora, aside from pulling her skirt down and tightening her lips slightly, made no movement at all. She did not look at Edward Johnson, she did not look at the bus driver, and she did not so much as frown. She gazed ahead with a pleasant but slightly aloof expression and allowed a small silence to grow. She was adept at small silences, and knew it. Silences were the equivalent, in her repertoire, of the Chinese water torture—they fell, second by second, upon the most sensitive nerves of whoever had been so foolish as to occasion them.
The man who had occasioned this one was not, as Aurora knew, any sort of stoic. Five seconds were quite enough to break him.
“What did he say?” he asked witlessly.
Aurora smiled. Life, she knew, was something one had to make the most of, but there were certainly times when it was difficult to know how to go about it.
“The young man’s remarks were quite distinctly put,” she said. “I don’t think I care to repeat them. I have a date with a gentleman inside a nearby restaurant, I believe. I have never yet made a date that required anyone to wait on a curb, that I can recall. Late as I usually am, one of my escorts might grow dizzy from hunger and fall in front of a bus if I did that. Given a choice, I’d far rather my escorts applied their time to seeing that we get a good table.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” Edward Johnson said. “You take your time. I’ll just run back in and see about ours right now.”
Ten minutes later Aurora stepped into the restaurant and smiled at him as if she had not seen him in weeks. “Why there you are, Edward, as usual,” she said. Thanks to nervousness his kiss landed somewhere between her cheek and her ear, but she seemed not to notice. Her stockings were on, but the backdraft from another passing bus had blown her abundant hair into a wild upward shape, and she paused a moment to comb it down.
Aurora never allowed herself to take the slightest notice of the reputation of restaurants—not in America, at any rate—and in her view it was quite obvious that no self-respecting French restaurant would have allowed itself to be in Houston anyway. She soon swept on toward the dining room, trailing Edward Johnson behind her. The maitre d’ saw them coming and rushed to confront them—Aurora had always unnerved him, and she did it again. He saw her patting a few vagrant locks into place and failed to realize that in her view her appearance was quite as it should be. He himself was fond of mirrors and at once suggested one.
“Bonjour, madame,” he said. “Madame would like the ladies’ room?”
“Thank you, no, and it’s not quite your place to raise such topics, monsieur,” Aurora said, walking right past him. “I hope we’re going to be seated well, Edward. You know how I adore watching people come in. I’ve been rushing, as you can see. Probably you’re very annoyed with me for being so tardy.”
“No, of course not, Aurora,” Mr. Johnson said. “Are you feeling well?”
Aurora nodded, glancing around the restaurant with happy disdain. “Why yes,” she said. “I hope we’re having pompano, and as soon as it’s practicable. You know I love it above all fish. If you had a bit more initiative you might have ordered it in advance, Edward. You are rather passive, you know. If you had ordered it in advance we could be eating it now. There was little enough likelihood that I would have wanted anything else.”
“Certainly, Aurora,” he said.
“Uh, pompano,” he said to the first passing busboy, who looked at him blankly.
“That’s a busboy, Edward,” Aurora said. “Busboys do not take orders. The waiters are the ones in the dinner jackets. I do think a man in your position ought to keep these distinctions a little more clearly in mind.”
Edward Johnson could have bitten his tongue off. Almost always Aurora’s mere presence was enough to cause him to say things that made him want to bite his tongue off. It was absolutely inexplicable. He had known the difference between waiters and busboys for at least thirty years. He had even been a busboy himself once, as a teenager in Southampton. Yet the minute he sat down beside Aurora Greenway foolish remarks of a sort he would never otherwise have made seemed to pop out of his mouth with no warning. It was some sort of vicious circle. Aurora was not one to let foolish remarks pass, and the more she didn’t let them pass the more he seemed compelled to make them. He had been courting her for three years and could not remember a single foolish remark that she had ever let pass.
“I’m sorry,” he said humbly.
“Well, I don’t think I want to hear about it,” Aurora said, looking him in the eye. “I’ve always thought that people who are too quick with their apologies can’t have a very healthy attitude.”
She took off a few of her rings and began to shine them up with her napkin. Napkins seemed to work better on rings than anything else, and as far as she could see, the fact that the restaurant had nice napkins was about the only justification for having lunch with Edward Johnson. A man who would order pompano from a busboy was hardly inspiring. On the whole, men who stood in awe of her were even worse than men who didn’t, and Edward Johnson seemed mired at least hip deep in awe. He had lapsed into nervous silence and was munching a piece of celery that seemed to her much too wet.
“You had better put a napkin in your lap if you intend to keep eating that celery, Edward,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s dripping on you. On the whole you don’t seem quite attentive to things today. I hope you haven’t had setbacks at the bank.”
“Oh, no,” Edward Johnson said. “Everything’s going just fine, Aurora.” He wished some real food would come. If there was some real food on the table to talk about he might stand a chance of saying something sensible; there would be less risk that ridiculous remarks would pop out of his mouth to embarrass him.
Aurora quickly found herself driven to the wall with boredom, as was usually the case when she lunched with Edward Johnson. He was so afraid of making a fool of himself that he said nothing at all; the best he could offer in the way of conversation was to munch his celery as loudly as possible. She took refuge, as was her custom, in a minute examination of everyone in the restaurant—an examination that was hardly reassuring. A number of well-dressed and obviously influential men were lunching with women much too young for them. Most of the women were young enough to be their escorts’ daughters, but Aurora doubted very much that that was the case.
“Humph,” she said, offended by the sight. “All is not well in the land.”
“Where?” Edward Johnson said, jumping a little. He assumed that he had spilled something on himself, but he couldn’t imagine what, since he had stopped eating celery and was sitting with both hands in his lap. Perhaps the busboy had spilled something on him in revenge.
“Well, I must say the evidence is all around us, Edward, if you’d only open your eyes and look,” Aurora said. “I distinctly dislike seeing young women debauched. A great many o
f them are probably secretaries, and I doubt they can have had much experience of the world. I suppose when I am not able to lunch with you you resort to younger women, don’t you, Edward?”
The accusation left Edward Johnson momentarily speechless. It was, in fact, true, and he hadn’t the slightest notion how Aurora had found it out, or any hint of how much she knew, not that there was much to know. In the four years since his wife’s death he had wined and dined at least thirty of the youngest and most inexperienced secretaries he could find, hoping that some one of them would be impressed enough with his rank or his table manners to sleep with him, but it had been a forlorn effort. Even the greenest little eighteen-year-olds, out of Conroe or Nacogdoches, had no trouble finding ways around him. Scores of fancy meals and hours of his suavest conversation had not so far swayed any of them even to the point of holding hands with him. In truth, he was not far from despair with it all, and his most cherished dream was that maybe someday Aurora Greenway, through some whimsy of the heart, would suddenly decide to marry him and save him from such punishing pursuits.
“You don’t seem to be speaking up, Edward,” Aurora said, looking at him closely. She had not really meant anything by her accusation—it was her habit, on occasion, to toss out nets of accusation just to see what she could drag in. Those with any sense denied everything at once. The denials might fall on deaf ears; but more often the ears they fell on were just disinterested, Aurora’s thoughts having wandered away in the time it took the accused to frame his denial.
The only thoroughly stupid tactic possible when faced with one of Aurora’s accusations was to confess; it was the tactic Edward Johnson immediately took. He had meant to lie—he almost always lied to Aurora about everything—but when he looked up and attempted to face her she seemed so convinced that he faltered. She was the only woman he knew who could look absent-minded—distracted, even—and yet seem utterly convinced of the truth of whatever lay uppermost in her mind. She was continuing to inspect the restaurant’s clientele, continuing to polish her rings, all with a happy hauteur, but she shot him a look out of the corner of her eye that said plainly enough, he was sure, that she knew all about his secretaries. Confession seemed his only hope, so he blurted one out.