Part 25 (2/2)
”You approve of her brother,” I interpreted.
”Well, why wouldn't I?” she wondered. ”Ask the Cabbages! They're all disgustingly in love with him. He's not even handsome, you know that?”
I wretchedly obliged her: ”You don't think so?”
”Oh, I think he's a brute, absolutely!” she flung at me with an enthusiasm so radiantly possessive it both puzzled and alarmed me. ”Everybody does; don't you?”
”I agree he's halfway human,” I echoed her.
She took this as she had given it-as the most sweeping praise imaginable. ”Oh, I know! I adore him!” she rejoiced, letting her magazine snap down like a sprung window-shade in plain celebration. ”Sometimes he can be pretty nasty, though-it might bother some people, but it doesn't bother me. You have to be that way if you're going into politics, like the Senate and the Board of Estimate and things. You know he might go into politics? William doesn't want him to-they never have in that family, except for one teeny alderman away back who doesn't count-but he'd be awfully good at it, he's got just the perfect voice for it, don't you think? And anyhow campaigning's terrific!”
And so was she; I drew back in awe. ”You shouldn't call his father 'William.' You keep saying that,” I objected with all the resentfulness of an outcast whose last feeble privilege has been violated by a parody.
She stared. ”What do you call him?”
”William,” I said weakly.
”There! And you're nothing to him!-Even though everybody thinks you are.”
”That doesn't justify you,” I said.
”Oh, don't be so strict-what do you expect?” she struck back. ”It's not as if he isn't practically my father-in-law already!” She indulged herself in a broad but modest preening; she peeped down the front of her dress, as though hunting for a dare. ”I can call him what I please. And if I want to I'll even call him Willie!”
So I was left, after the disclosure, after, rather, the trans.m.u.tation-it was quite like watching the cygnet turn into its true ident.i.ty of princess-with nothing to p.r.o.nounce but the blessing. ”You're not the Pettigrew he's marrying,” I p.r.o.nounced instead, half-m.u.f.fled by somber envy; ”you're not the fiancee?”-not sparing myself, though sparing her: what else could the descending language of my startled melancholy be if not: Is it you? Are you the one? Not you!-still, even in my milder spoken version, showing no more than delayed perception, I felt a bungler, and overwhelmed. She had in fact moved the mountain: she was a sprite, all in flowers, all unexpectedly loosing her not-to-be-guessed-at influences, and whatever those ma.s.sed circlets were in which she gleamed, lilies or pansies or some bland designer's abstract notion of a bloom, just the same she stood sheathed in them as if in instruments and magnets formidable, glancing out her fragile might.
”Well, who'd you think I was?” she demanded. ”Didn't I just tell you I was getting married?”
”I didn't know you meant immediately. -Then the party's really yours,” I concluded.
”Sure,” she said. ”It's t.i.t for tat. Last time it was yours.”
”This one seems more of a success,” I said ruefully.
”It's because of the Cabbages-they're a riot! A while ago a bunch of 'em was trying to empty the water cooler so's to fill it with gin, did you see?”
I acknowledged that I had unfortunately missed this.
”It didn't work, though-they only got the whole back part of the floor flooded; I nearly died laughing! Did you ever see this really antique Clark Gable movie where they fill a gin bottle with water from the water cooler? You ought to, honestly, it's a scream-it's where the Cabbages got the idea, only in reverse. In the movie Clark Gable gets drunk just from thinking it's gin!” she shot out gloriously, and then in a darker voice, which, it struck me after a moment, was fas.h.i.+oned to console, began again, ”Say, you want to know what was the matter with that bon voyage thing you had?”
”For one thing, there wasn't any voyage.”
”Well I heard you weren't going, but that's not what I mean. It was the creepy music, right out of the Dark Ages, you know? The band wasn't bad, just the music. n.o.body wants to dance to that stuff. That's how come it fizzled,” she earnestly advised.
”I'm sorry about that,” I said.
”Oh, I didn't mind, honestly! Because that's the night I found out,” she told me suspensefully, dangling the statement for me to probe.
I went right after it, just as she wished, though wearily. ”Found out what?”
”About getting married, silly! Till then I was just hoping. You saw how crazy he was about me, didn't you? I guess that nutty editor of your mother's, you know who, got him jealous, because driving home he all of a sudden said O.K., let's get married, for G.o.d's sake. And all I did was have one conversation with that Ed McGovern! I love to see boys get jealous,” she said contentedly. ”So for me that night wasn't really a fizzle, if that makes you feel any better about it. Oh come on, that's not being fair, don't look at my finger!” she cried, although I had all the while kept my eyes on my own sad wrists, one crossed over the other, ”-because I don't have the ring to show yet, it's still on order. But it's absolutely fantastic-it'll kill the Onions!”
”Are any of them here?” I wondered.
”Any of who?”
”The Onions.”
”Gosh no! We don't go to theirs and they don't come to ours. Anyway,” she went on with a pleased sniff, ”we're three engagements ahead of them this term-mine's the third. Didn't you see the signs? They've got Form 7 on them; that includes the Onions, which practically peels them anyhow.”
”Those lapel things, do you mean? I did, but they all said Fannie, and I didn't think-”
”It's for short, like a nickname; we all have nicknames. I hate mine, but that's the idea, you're supposed to have a nickname that you hate. Fannie's not so bad really, it's only the end part of Stefanie. You know what the Onions call Beverly Snearles, even though she's an Onion?-They call her Reveille, isn't that wild? I mean the reason it's so funny is because she's always late in the morning, she can't get up. And you ”know poor Eleanor, who got kicked out of the a.s.semblies? They used to just call her El's Bells, but now since all the fuss they call her Little Knell-with a K, like for doom and all that!” she happily informed me.
”You all seem to have a sense of humor,” I essayed.
”I know, we're a howl sometimes. Especially the Cabbages. I mean some days we can laugh and laugh for hours.”
This took from me no more than a lugubrious nod. Here was fate arrayed and laughing, and here was fortune all smiling, quite as common speech depicts them: behold, in flutes and flowers, William's son's lissome lot. Of myself, meanwhile, what could I gloomily think but ”infelix Dido”?-out of that poet known as Virgin to Miss Jewett's unconscious mediaevalists. (For the Roman literati spelled it Vergil: wasn't it the cabalistic monks who, in pious deference to their Lady, echoed it into Virgil?) Oh, well, there-now parenthetically I've shown what Stefanie Pettigrew believed of me. Not that I stood mumbling to myself in a dead language! I only mean that I knew acutely what she saw, that blithe girl, and felt the soaring scorn of her half-justified a.s.sessment: myself a mopish moralist,' drab and yawning and pocked interiorly with the mold of pedantry-while she, in contrast, petalled all over like a paper flower-cart, or real daffodils in a trance, leaned against that dark legal wall and lit it. The more I suspected her of holding this shrivelled image of me, the more I pitied my standing there, starched by wonder, fixed on the single tea rose that sprang down to touch her flower-ear where William's son had kissed. I gave myself out, then, as futility coming before the judgment of a gleaming garden bent on no verdict but beauty and vitality, and let down in resignation the long, long vine of my self-grieving; I twined it all around me, sad because I had none of that life of chatter and charm and lyrical frivolity that splattered the corridor with ascending joyous shrieks. She was all undeliberate liquescence, a wind on a pond, Miss Jewett's pretty Artemis, her arrow-point nothing but the green stem of a water lily magicked into power. ”Well, if you want to hear about sense of humor,” she interposed, ”you ought to come and meet Mrs. Karp-she's a riot! I mean she writes the funniest poems-not anything like Ed McGovern's- you know, just funny, about people's being sick and things. I just can't be bothered with poems,” she brought out with the smile of a restless conquistador, ”unless they're weird: you want to see?”
I did not; I wanted, rather, to go, but the pa.s.sage was suddenly full of the flutter of the scroll's unfurling-the cover flashed by so quickly I could not tell whether it was Harper's, or Harper's Bazaar, or merely Harps, ”the magazine for angels,” the celestials being, of course, those glorious hosts of housewives who bought it. Whichever it was, the ill.u.s.trious Euphoria Karp wrote for it, and in a moment, while Stefanie simpered beside me, I was staring at the wit of the wife of the Professor of Copyright: OPERATION CYST.
A GYNECOLOGICAL GARLAND OF VISCERAL VERSES.
”Read it!” insisted Stefanie, and put the page firmly in my grasp. ”You'll absolutely die. All the Cabbages did,” and, so as not to survive alone in a Cabbageless world, I complied. The poem was in two parts. I read them both: I.
My life isn't as interesting as Madame Bovary's.
My trouble isn't lovers-just ovaries.
The Doctor said to Madame Bovary, ”I'll kiss and squeeze ya.”
The Doctor said to me, ”111 give ya anaesthesia.”
Madame Bovary had a lover's tryst.
But I only had a cyst.
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