“It’s due out tomorrow, yes.”
“If I were you, I’d take it in person.”
“And have it out with her? Why?”
“At least you’ll know where you stand.”
Chapter 18
So I went over there, around 9:30 the next morning, first stopping by the office, where Helen Musick drew the check, and when I’d signed it, put it in an envelope for me, marked “Mrs. Sibert.” I parked out front, went up on the porch, and rang.
Almost at once came her voice: “Who is it?”
Thinking fast I decided to stall, because if I said my name, she might decide not to come to the door, and just leave me standing there. So, raising my voice to change it, I called: “Special Delivery!”
She answered: “Just a moment, please,” and I heard movement inside. Then the chain bolt rattled and she opened the door, but when she saw who it was, tried to close it. But I was ready for that, and shoved my foot inside the jamb, so she couldn’t. She tried to kick my shin, but had on tennis shoes, and hurt herself, so she winced. But it took long enough for me to take note of her changed appearance.
She had on a blue gingham dress I’d seen a hundred times, white socks, and the white sneakers. Her top two buttons were open, to show quite a bit of cleavage, and her hair had a ribbon on it, a new frill for her. And if it was the ribbon, the buttons, or what, I can’t rightly say, but there was something gamy about her that wasn’t like her at all.
After a moment she snapped: “What are you doing here at this hour? Pretending to be the postman?”
I told her, “I said ‘Special Delivery’ and very special it is — I brought you your check.”
“Then, I’ll take it.”
“You will when you’ve asked me in.”
“Very well. But give me a moment, please.”
She disappeared, and I heard her going upstairs. Then she was back, holding the door wide, and I went into a place I knew like the palm of my hand, and yet never got used to. I mean, it was more like a gag, a museum someone thought up, a stage set to play a comedy in, than a sure-enough, actual house.
In the hall was a cozy-corner, in under the turn of the stairs, consisting of built-in seat, with Navajo blanket on it, and leather cushions with Indian heads burned on. Over the seat were pipe racks, and over the pipes, college pennants, mostly M.A.C., for Maryland Agricultural College, which was what the university was called before they bigged it up. Facing the stairs was a hat rack, and on the floor was a hooked rug. There wasn’t any living room, of the kind a modern house had, but instead there was a “parlor,” and beyond that a “library.” In the parlor were horsehair sofas, marbletop tables, wax flowers under glass, vases of gilded cattails, a bookcase with a ship model on it, and steel engravings of the Three Graces, Paolo and Francesca, and Grover Cleveland. On the floor was an Axminster rug, and in a corner a square piano. Everything was just as it had been, except for the smell of bacon frying, which had a meaning, as I realized later, though when I first went in I paid no attention to it.
She led me into the parlor, drew herself up, and said: “You may sit down if you wish.”
“Well I damn well wish.”
“Don’t you dare swear at me!”
“Hey, hey, hey, come off it, this is me — and anything short of poking you one in the jaw comes under the head of gentle, considerate kindness. What was the big idea, hanging up on me?”
“What was the big idea, playing that trick on me?”
“And what trick did I play on you?”
She had left me an opening, I thought, and I was ready to let her have it at one word about my marriage. But she crossed me up. Pointing to a chair and waiting until I took it, she came over, looked down at me, and whispered: “Leading me on as you did! Play acting at being a man, and all the time not being one. Being nothing but a vegetable in human form!”
“You mean, like a potato?”
“More like an onion, slippery inside.”
“How does an onion lead a girl on?”
“With all those flowers and music and wine.”
“Thought you liked flowers and music and wine.”
“Oh I do, any woman does. But for what they pledge, not for what they are. And in your case, they were just a false front, a way of imitating masculinity while lacking the thing itself.”
“You sure?”
“Well I certainly am now!”
“Now? What’s now?”
“Since the truth was revealed unto me.”
“Yeah? By whom?”
Of course, by now I knew by whom, but wanted to make her name him. However, once more she crossed me up.
“By you!” she quavered, almost in tears. “Oh you made it plain, that I have to say — with no beating around the bush, in any way, shape or form. ‘Jane, I got married’ — if that didn’t say it, it can’t be said in words.”
“That I’m an onion.”
“If not, why did you marry this girl?”
“I wanted to — that’s why.”
“You had to! She’s pregnant by your brother!”
“Was pregnant by my brother.”
“She still is! What kind of cock-and-bull story was that? You take her to the beach, and — lo and behold — she aborts. Could anyone, any grown-up, adult person, actually believe that?”
“God could — He did it.”
“Ah, God. God!” And then: “You should be asking for God’s forgiveness, that you would pretend He’s responsible. Of course, I find it in me, even so, to pity this poor girl, the life you’ve invited her to — having all a woman’s desires, and none of her satisfactions.”
“She gets satisfied every night.”
“I never got satisfied!”
“You know why?”
“Tell me why!”
My mouth was primed to let her have it, to tell her she was too old for such satisfactions, at least as supplied by me, but somehow the words didn’t come. I heard myself say, in a moment, “You’re so beautiful I didn’t have the heart.”
Her answer to that was to sneer, and then, sitting primly on the edge of a chair, she proceeded to tell me off, speaking slow and going into details — how my whole life had been a pretense of being something which I was not, of desperate playacting, with my athletic career at Yale, my jumping my arm muscles up, when we’d go swimming at Chesapeake Beach, my picking brawls with people, “though sometimes you meet your match.” She pointed to my hand, which was still scabbed up, and went on and on and on. It was all part of the same old record I’d heard a few times before, so it was no trouble to know where it came from, or why it appealed to her: It put a totally different light on those years of not being passed-at by me.
So sometimes my attention wandered, and I had a chance to think. One of those times I woke up to the bacon smell in the air, and the thing of it was what I hadn’t remembered before: She didn’t like bacon, so who’d she been cooking it for? Why did she duck upstairs before bringing me in?
“Okay,” I said, “if that’s how I prove masculinity, what are we waiting for? Why not prove it here and now, by beating you up, Mrs. Sibert? You have a pretty cute backside — come on, I’ll blister it for you!” With that I grabbed her hand and yanked her out of her chair. “No!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”
Vloomp, vloomp, vloomp!
When I looked he was on the stairs, piling down fast, a hammer in his hand, one she kept on her dressing table, don’t ask me why. “Why!” I said. “Burl! I thought that would smoke you out!”
“Gramie, leave her alone.”
“Hand me the hammer or I’m taking it off you.”