“By God, you’re absolutely right.”
“You had a watch on a chain, and you kept taking it out of your pocket, and putting it back.”
“I don’t remember that, but probably. The girl I was meeting was pretty late. Incidentally, went to Farmington with you. Laura Pratt.”
“Oh, goodness. Laura. If she’d been on time you never would have seen the long-lost-brother-and-sister act. She hated me at Farmington, but I see her once in a while now. She lives in Litchfield, as I suppose you know. But have I convinced you that I remembered you as well as you remembered me?”
“It’s the greatest compliment I ever had in my life.”
“No. You were good-looking and still are, but what I chiefly remembered was that I was hoping you’d try to pick me up. Then I was just a little bit annoyed that you didn’t try. God, that was forever ago, wasn’t it?”
“Just about,” I said. “How come you didn’t say anything at dinner the other night?”
“I’m not sure. Selfish, I guess. That was my evening. I wanted you to do all the remembering, and I guess I wanted to hear you talk about Johnny.”
“He drowned,” I said. “In Michigan.”
“Yes, but I didn’t tell you that. How did you know?”
“I saw it in the paper at the time.”
“Rebecca told me you were getting a divorce. Does that upset you? Not her telling me, but breaking up with your wife.”
“It isn’t the pleasantest experience in the world,” I said.
“I suppose not. It never is. I was married before I married my present husband, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“It lasted a year. He was Johnny’s best friend, but other than that we had nothing in common. Not that a married couple have to have too much in common, but they ought to have something else besides loving the same person, in this case my brother. Hugh, my first husband, was what Johnny used to call one of his stooges, just like me. But somehow it isn’t very attractive for a man to be another man’s stooge. It’s all right for a sister to be a stooge, but not another man, and almost the minute Johnny died I suddenly realized that without Johnny, Hugh was nothing. As a threesome we had a lot of fun together, really a lot of fun. And with Hugh I could have sex. I don’t think there was any of that in my feeling for Johnny, although there may have been. If there was, I certainly managed to keep it under control and never even thought about it. I didn’t know much about those things, but once or twice I vaguely suspected that if either of us had any of that feeling for Johnny, it was Hugh. But I’m sure he didn’t know it either.”
“So you divorced Hugh and married Tatnall.”
“Divorced Hugh and married Bill Tatnall. All because you were afraid to pick me up and ditch Laura Pratt.”
“But I could have become one of Johnny’s stooges, too,” I said. “I probably would have.”
“No. Johnny’s stooges all had to be people he’d known all his life, like me or Hugh, or Jim Danzig.”
“Who is Jim Danzig?”
“Jim Danzig was the boy in the canoe with Johnny when it overturned. I don’t like to talk about poor Jim. He blamed himself for the accident and he’s become a hopeless alcoholic, at thirty-two, mind you.”
“Why did he blame himself? Did he have any reason to?”
“Well—he was in the canoe, and they were both a little tight. It was at night and they’d been to a party at the Danzigs’ cabin and decided to row across the lake to our cabin, instead of driving eight or nine miles. A mile across the lake, eight and a half miles by car. One of those crazy ideas you get when you’re tight. Johnny would have been home in fifteen minutes by car, but they started out in the canoe, heading for the lights on our landing. I guess there was some kind of horseplay and the canoe overturned, and Jim couldn’t find Johnny. He kept calling him but he didn’t get any answer, and he couldn’t right the canoe, although Jim was almost as good a boatman as Johnny—when sober. But they’d had an awful lot to drink, and it was pitch dark. No moon. And finally Jim floated and swam ashore and then for a while was lost in the woods. It was after Labor Day and most of the cabins were boarded up for the winter, and Jim in his bare feet, all cut and bleeding by the time he got to the Danzigs’ cabin, and a little out of his head in addition to all he’d had to drink. I think they had to dynamite to recover Johnny’s body. I wasn’t there and I’m glad I wasn’t. From the reports it must have been pretty horrible, and even now I’d rather not think about it.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“No, let’s change the subject,” she said.
“All right. Then you married Tatnall.”
“Married Bill Tatnall a year and a half after Hugh and I were divorced. Two children. Betty, and Johnny, ages six and four. You haven’t mentioned any children. Did you have any?”
“No.”
“Children hold so many marriages together,” she said.
“Yours?”
“Of course mine. I wouldn’t have said that otherwise, would I? How often do you see the Randalls?”
“Oh, maybe once or twice a year.”
“Did they know you were coming here for lunch?”
“No,” I said. “They left very early this morning, before I was up.”
“That explains it, why you don’t know about Bill and me. Well, when you tell them you were here today, don’t be surprised if they give you that tut-tut look. Naughty-naughty. Bill and I raise a lot of eyebrows hereabouts. Next year it’ll be some other couple, but at the moment it’s Bill and I.”
“Who’s the transgressor? You, or your husband?”
“It’s the marriage, more so than Bill or I individually. In a community like this, or maybe any suburban or small-town community, they don’t seem to mind adultery if they can blame one person or the other. The husband or the wife has to be the guilty party, but not both.”
“I don’t agree with you,” I said. “I think that when a marriage is in trouble people take sides, one side or the other, and they mind a great deal.”
“Yes, they want the marriage to break up and they want to be able to blame one or the other. But when the marriage doesn’t break up, when people can’t fix the blame on one person, they’re deprived of their scandal. They feel cheated out of something, and they’re outraged, horrified, that people like Bill and I go on living together. They really hate me for putting up with Bill’s chasing, and they hate Bill for letting me get away with whatever I get away with. Bill and I ought to be in the divorce courts, fighting like cats and dogs. Custody fights, fights about alimony.”
“But you and your husband have what is commonly called an arrangement?” I said.
“It would seem that way, although actually we haven’t. At least not a spoken one. You see, we don’t even care that much about each other. He just goes his way, and I go mine.”
“You mean to say you never had a discussion about it? The first time he found out you were unfaithful to him, or he was unfaithful to you? You didn’t have any discussion at all?”
“Why is that so incredible?” she said. “Let’s have our coffee out on the porch.”
I followed her out to the flagstone terrace and its iron-and-glass furniture. She poured the coffee and resumed speaking. “I guessed that Bill had another girl. It wasn’t hard to guess. He left me severely alone. Then I guessed he had another, and since I hadn’t made a fuss about the first one I certainly wasn’t going to make a fuss about the second. Or the third.”
“Then I gather you began to have gentlemen friends of your own.”
“I did. And I guess Bill thought I’d been so nice about his peccadillos that he decided to be just as nice about mine.”
“But without any discussion. You simply tacitly agreed not to live together as man and wife?”
“You’re trying to make me say what you want me t
o say, that somehow we did have a discussion, a quarrel, a fight ending in an arrangement. Well, I won’t say it.”
“Then there’s something a lot deeper that I guess I’d better not go into.”
“I won’t deny that, not for a minute.”
“Was it sexual incompatibility?”
“You can call it that. But that isn’t as deep as you seem to think it was. A lot of men and women, husbands and wives, are sexually incompatible. This was deeper, and worse. Worse because Bill is a yellow coward. He never dared come out and say what he was thinking.”
“Which was?”
“He got angry with me one time and said that my brother Johnny’d been a sinister influence. That’s as much as he’d actually say. That Johnny’d been a sinister influence. He didn’t dare accuse me—and Johnny—of what he really meant. Why didn’t he dare? Because he didn’t want to admit that his wife had been guilty of incest. It wasn’t really so much that incest was bad as that it had happened to his own wife. Someone, one of Bill’s lady friends, had planted that little idea in his thick skull, and he believed it. Now he fully believes it, but I don’t care.”
“A question that naturally comes to my mind,” I said, “is why are you telling me all this?”
“Because you saw us together without knowing us. You saw Johnny and me doing the long-lost-brother act. How did we seem to you?”
“I thought you were genuine. I fell for it.”
“But then Laura Pratt told you it was an act. What did you think then?”
“I thought you were charming. Fun.”
“That’s what I hoped you thought. That’s what we thought we were, Johnny and I. We thought we were absolutely charming—and fun. Maybe we weren’t charming, but we were fun. And that’s all we were. And now people have ruined that for us. For me, at least. Johnny never knew people thought he had a sinister influence over me. Or me over him, for that matter. But aren’t people darling? Aren’t they lovely? They’ve managed to ruin all the fun Johnny and I had together all those years. Just think, I was married twice and had two children before I began to grow up. I didn’t really start to grow up till my own husband made me realize what people had been thinking, and saying, about Johnny and me. If that’s growing up, you can have it.”
“Not everybody thought that about you and Johnny.”
“It’s enough that anybody did. And it’s foolish to think that only one or two thought it,” she said. “We did so many things for fun, Johnny and I. Harmless jokes that hurt nobody and that we thought were uproariously funny. Some of them I don’t ever think of any more because of the interpretation people put on them . . . We had one that was the opposite of the long-lost-brother. The newlyweds. Did you ever hear of our newlyweds?”
“No,” I said.
“It came about by accident. We were driving East and had to spend the night in some little town in Pennsylvania. The car broke down and we went to the local hotel and when we went to register the clerk just took it for granted that we were husband and wife. Johnny caught on right away and he whispered to the clerk, loud enough for me to hear, that we were newlyweds but that I was shy and wanted separate rooms. So we got our separate rooms, and you should have seen the hotel people stare at us that night in the dining room and the next morning at breakfast. We laughed for a whole day about that and then we used to do the same trick every time we had to drive anywhere overnight. Didn’t hurt anybody.”
“What else did you do?”
“Oh, lots of things. And not only tricks. We both adored Fred and Adele Astaire, and we copied their dancing. Not as good, of course, but everybody always guessed who we were imitating. We won a couple of prizes at parties. Johnny was really quite good. ‘I lahv, yourfah, neeface. Your fah, neefah, neeface.’” She suddenly began to cry and I sat still.
That was twenty years ago. I don’t believe that anything that happened to her since then made much difference to Sallie, but even if it did, that’s the way I remember her and always will.
(1962)
John O'Hara, The New York Stories
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