Part 23 (2/2)
”William doesn't run after my mother!” I cried, tantalized.
”Do you think it's necessary for him to deliver her installment by hand? The firm could just as easily deposit it in her account and leave it at that. It's the routine thing.”
”Then I suppose he likes to avoid the routine thing. He has a ceremonious nature.”
”Exactly. And in ordinary matters it's the ceremony of the routine thing that he lives by.”
”Then he does it as a simple courtesy.”
”A courtesy, but his motives aren't simple.-Oh, I don't deny he's gallant!” he conceded.
I said severely, ”There's nothing improper in being gallant.”
”I told you you're a prude.”
”I'm only precise.”
”Precision isn't the same as truth. The truth is he's never attached himself to anyone else. He does his duty, but it's not duty that brings him out to look at your mother every other month.”
”He likes to hear her talk,” I admitted. Then I had a thought which made me lower my head before I could dare to speak it out. ”But when you think of you and Nanette and Jack and w.i.l.l.y-and, well, Cletis is only two-” But my intrepidness embarra.s.sed me; worse, it scared me. I felt as though I probed a sanctuary with a vulgar and broken broom. ”I mean it wasn't duty which brought you all into the world,” I threw out.
”Oh, what you don't know about family unity!” said William's son.
This high and prescient a.s.sertion, delivered with a not unfriendly insolence-and prescient because it seemed to point to a vision of my interlocutor's own marital future, as orderly is his father's-provoked me to surpa.s.s myself in pluck. 'Don't you want to get married?” I neatly wondered.
He remembered to resume his patronizing smile just in time. ”What kind of comment is that?”
”It's not a comment It's a question.”
”Prig,” he observed. ”What do you think I bothered to get engaged for? You wouldn't expect me to cohabit without”-up went his mocking chin-”the sanction of the law?”
”No,” I confessed. ”It's only that you seem so cross about it.”
”I'm mad as hops,” he agreed. ”I could wring her neck. I could hang her from the yardarm.”
”A declaration of pa.s.sion,” I concluded.
He looked at me with a certain surprise. ”You're a satirist, aren't you?”
”No,” I said. ”I'm a prude and a prig.”
”I know. But besides that.”
”What has she done?” I prodded.
”Oh G.o.d, plenty. Look at this.” He spread open the pages of The Good Sport. ”It's this d.a.m.ned ad. She badgered me into giving it to her under the firm's name. I didn't wait a minute before I suggested 'Best Wishes from a Friend,' something in that line, but no, it wouldn't do. It isn't professional enough-everyone's nasty uncle takes an ad in just those words. -Believe it or not, she's the business manager of this sheet. She multiplies on her fingers, so they elected her business manager!” he crowed-it was difficult to tell whether with affectionate pride (multiplying on the fingers being merely an adorable crotchet) or with clean contempt (the conforming masculine att.i.tude toward the weaknesses of s.h.i.+ning womanliness). ”She was afraid 'Best Wishes from a Friend' could make them look tacky-as though they didn't have any friends. Amateurs hate to be taken for what they are, you know. It was the firm she wanted.” His steady mutter dissolved into a confidential sigh. ”Like a d.a.m.ned fool I gave it to her, and now my father's down on me,” he complained.
The criminality in this exposition was lost on me; it had, in fact, the whimsicality of a joyously trivial, though conventionally impenetrable, mystery. Still, I was glad William's son thought me a worthy receptacle for these minutiae. It gave me a narrow opportunity to fasten on an image, theoretical though it might be, of his fiancee. The more I heard, the more I thought her unworthy.
”He's not down on you just for giving an ad?” I said, implying there was better reason: let him look to the girl for it.
”Isn't he though.”
”Well, it isn't as if you'd gone and violated the Ten Commandments,” I consoled, pleasurably detached.
”No-only Canon 27.”
”I see”-though I did not.
”Of the Canons of Professional Ethics,” he groaned. ”My father's afraid the Bar People will be down on him.”
”Is there something the matter with the ad? It only says Compliments Of.”
”Nothing at all the matter. It's perfectly all right. There's nothing wrong with it,” he disclosed with something like a wince, ”except that it's a total scandal.” He gave the ceiling a glance of direct and unpretentious comrades.h.i.+p. ”It's unethical for a law firm to advertise at all,” he supplied ruefully.
”In a school paper? It's only a school paper.”
”My calculation exactly. That's why I took the chance of doing it. She kept at me and kept at me and, well, finally I gave in because I never thought my father would get to see it in a hundred years. It's not as though I put it in The Wall Street Journal, after all. And I paid for it myself, so Connelly wouldn't list it.”
At the mention of Connelly-the meticulous accountant-this innocuously detailed history suddenly blossomed with importance. What had to be kept from Connelly had also to be kept from William. And what was kept from William, shrine of innocence, was undoubtedly not innocent. ”Then William got to see the ad. He got to see it anyway,” I hazarded.
”He wouldn't have if not for this stupid story about a tennis-player at Miss Jewett's”-belligerently William's son snapped his fingers against the guilty Sport.
”Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love,” I recited. ”Is it trUe about the marijuana?”
”What do you think? They all do it down there, for kicks. Anyhow it was partly Nanette's fault. She's been friendly all term with one of these girls from Miss Jewett's-”
”But Nanette goes to the Academy,” I interrupted.
”-the one who wrote the story. Eleanor Bell,” he pushed on aloofly. ”They're going to be in the Junior a.s.semblies together next spring. At least Nanette will. The other girl was supposed to be in it, but she won't be eligible if she's expelled. G.o.d, I hate this gossip.”
”My,” said I, vaguely spiteful, ”it sounds like Lowood, in Jane Eyre.”
He stopped long enough to rebuke me with a stare. ”You have a literary reference for everything”-as- if he expected me to apologize for it. ”It's proof you don't listen.”
”I am listening. I really am,” I said quickly, afraid he would go away. ”Are they expelling her?” I inquired, as a token of my attentiveness.
But he was moving energetically onward. ”You bet they are. Not that those girls haven't been smoking it down there for the last seven months. Especially during the summer make-up term. Everybody knows it. It isn't a crime to know about it or to do it-it's only a crime if you print it. Anyhow”-he took a breath, and I somehow wondered whether he did hate gossip after all-”the girl's father-that's Bell, the broker-intends to sue the school for breaching its contract to educate his daughter, the tuition having been the consideration, although ... It's a long story.” He maundered off into meditation and when he came back to me again it was with an explosion. ”Well, look! The upshot of it is he got my father to handle the thing. Legally it's pretty tricky. My father didn't want to touch it. He was horrified.”
”It's a difficult case?”
”Not on account of the law! He's not afraid of the law. It was on account of Nanette-her being chummy with this Bell girl, though he wouldn't stoop to mentioning her by name. He didn't even have the decency to say 'addict,' which would have been silly enough. He simply came out and called the girl a dope fiend.”
”Not to her poor father's face!” I exclaimed.
”I haven't any idea of what he said to Bell. I just know what he said afterward, to Nanette. She cried and cried-but she always does that, she likes to cry. And in the end he had to agree to his taking the case anyhow-because of me really.”
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