“But the air pressure is too strong on the doors at that speed.”
“That’s right.”
“Whatever happened to her, do you know?”
“She married the cabby.”
“Oh,” she said.
9
We were on the road by nine-thirty, and had soon crossed the border into Indiana. It was a clear sunny day, with the kind of crisp air in which other cars’ chrome winks at you from half a mile off. The countryside was green and rolling farmland, with neither Pennsylvania’s tumbled mountains nor Ohio’s industrial slag. Clusters of red barns and herds of grazing cows in the long green folds were sunlit illustrations from a children’s book, serene and timeless. The cab rolled like a yellow marble through the landscape that seemed never to have known war, or want, or even winter.
Katharine was less tense this morning, did less brooding and more sightseeing, but remained silent. As for me, I stayed up front with my steering wheel and my thoughts, such as they were — mostly I thought about how nice it would be to have a radio. The two-way radio in the cab wasn’t the sort to pick up local AM or FM stations.
We reached Indianapolis around eleven-thirty, and picked our way through the tangle of bypass roads. Yesterday we’d done the same with Akron and Columbus, so now I noticed for the third time how the local traffic in and near the cities contains a much higher percentage of old and beat-up cars. And pick-up trucks; you get on a major highway through a large city, you’re going to see an awful lot of grungy pick-up trucks.
Indianapolis was the first place where I really began to attract the attention of the drivers around me. No, let me rephrase that: Indianapolis was the first place where the drivers around me began deliberately to attract my attention. Cars would pull up beside me and honk, and when I’d look over there the driver would be, expressing all kind of humorous astonishment: What on Earth is a New York City taxicab doing in Indianapolis? he would ask, by means of eyebrows, hand gestures, big grins, mouthed words, head shakings, and other expressions of bafflement. Beats me, I would answer, by grinning and shrugging and shaking my head. If the guy persisted — I mean, how was I to answer the question car-to-car at 60 miles an hour even if I wanted to? — I just kept shrugging, waved a friendly bye-bye, and gradually slackened speed until he gave up.
The major cities cut your time, even with the Interstates. Mostly you can do 70 or 80 through the countryside — except for those few states that take the 55-mile-an-hour limit seriously — but the traffic build-up in the cities slows you to 60 or even less. We were nearly half an hour circling Indianapolis, and as we were leaving the city behind — without actually having seen it at all — Katharine moved forward to the jump seat and said, “Is it all right if we talk for a while?”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“Marriage,” she said. I laughed, but she only grinned, and then she said, “Would you tell me about your marriage?”
“We had a wedding,” I said, “and then we had a divorce.”
“How much time in between?”
“Five years.”
Her forearms were spread across the top of the seat, right hand over left, chin resting on the back of her right hand. From what I could see of her face in the mirror, she was looking concerned for me. She said, “Is it painful to talk about?”
“No, it’s just I don’t have anything new to say. Everything everybody has ever said about marriage is true, and I don’t have anything to add.”
“Did you like being married?”
“Like it? You don’t like marriage, you love it and you hate it.” I moved my head to get her image clearly in the mirror. “You’ve never been married?”
“No,” she said.
“I hate to do oneupmanship,” I said, “but I think this really is one of those cases where you have to have been there.”
“Maybe if you just talked about your marriage,” she said, “just anything at all that occurs to you, it might start making sense to me.”
“Okay,” I said, and shifted to a more comfortable position. “Let’s see — I was twenty-two when we got married, and she was twenty. Her name was Lynn — well, it still is, isn’t it? That part doesn’t change. What’s Barry’s last name?”
“Gilbert.”
“Katharine Gilbert,” I said it slowly, savoring the syllables. “That’s not bad.”
“I’ve written it a thousand times,” she told me, “and it’s always looked perfectly fine. On the other hand, I’m so used to being Katharine Scott—” She sat up straighter, shaking her head. “I’ve been it all my life.” Then she shrugged, still looking dubious, and said, “I suppose you adjust.”
“You could do that hyphen thing,” I suggested. “Katharine Scott-Gilbert.”
“But what if I had a daughter? Say I named her — I don’t know — Jane. So she’d grow up Jane Scott-Gilbert, and then she marries a man named Jones, and she hyphenates, and she winds up Jane Scott-Gilbert-Jones.”
“Actually, it’s your granddaughter I feel sorry for,” I said. “Anita Scott-Gilbert-Jones-Marmaduke.”
She reared back to stare at me. “Marmaduke?”
“They make the best husbands.”
She grinned, then leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands again, saying, “And what sort of husband did you make?”
Persistent woman. “C minus,” I told her.
“What did you do wrong?”
“I adapted badly. Or maybe I grew up crooked, I’m still not sure.”
“Tell me about— What was it, Lynn?”
“Lynn Rushton Fletcher.”
“Did she hyphenate?”
“No,” I said. “But that could be another problem with the hyphen: divorce and marriage. By now, Lynn could be Lynn Rushton-Fletcher-Heffernan. And that’s with only one false start.”
“On that basis,” Katharine said, “I know women who’d take five minutes just to tell you who they were.”
“There aren’t enough hyphens in the whole world.”
“The great hyphen shortage.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Price going up, stock market going down.”
“If it doesn’t bother you to talk about your marriage,” she said, “why do you keep changing the subject?”
“Do I? I have a short attention span, that was one of our problems. How would you like it if the guy you’re married to wakes up every morning, looks at you, frowns, and then snaps his fingers and says, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember!’?”
She gave me a skeptical look and said, “Do you remember my question?”
“Okay, officer,” I said. “I’ll come quietly.”
“Tell me about Lynn.”
“I met her in college. She was a photography major. After I graduated and got the job with RDC, Lynn quit school in her third year and we got married.”
“Did she get a job?”
“No, she went on with the photography. She specialized in animal pictures; mostly horses and dogs. Domestic animals, not wild.”
“Was she good at it?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. She sold a lot of pictures. Calendars, greeting cards, a couple of magazine features. She even got some portrait commissions, people who had pedigree dogs or racehorses or whatever.”
“So it wasn’t just a hobby.”
“Not a bit of it. She bought a Ford Econoline van, strictly out of her own money, and fixed up the back as a combination bedroom-darkroom. Weekends, we used to drive all over the northeast; dog shows, horse shows, racetracks, things like that.”