Gretchen’s fecundity amazed the town. A patriarchal future was not the vision most had had, lacking Pauline’s privy knowledge, when autographing little Corny’s high school yearbook. Maybe Gretchen’s myopia helped, some said, to find what others could not see or even say for sure was there. Or was it, others asked, that trip to Paris with Yale’s old flame that made the child child-maker? Drew him out, in a manner of speaking? They say the toilet was in the living room of that strange bohemian garret, and the bathtub was the artist’s sofa, naughtily aimed mirrors everywhere, where could innocence hide in a place like that? Maybe Corny learned a little French after all, in other words, before the lights went out. It was possible, but if so, there was little sign of it on his return, his heart-shaped face with its gaping stare and unwiped mucus streaks reminding some of crackled porcelain, others of a dead child, too long unburied. An odd boy, made odder still, that was the judgment, so when the babies started to drop by twos and threes, it caught the whole town by surprise (old Stu, elbow sliding on the country club bar, said he’d asked the lady druggist if she got three every time, and what she’d said, he said, was, “Oh no, sometimes we don’t get none at all!”), not least his family, though they soon got used to it. For all her minute playroom examinations and later health ed and anatomy courses and her career in a doctor’s office, after all, Columbia never had figured out exactly how males worked (Gretchen promised to show her), and as for Oxford, that reasonable man, he had been wrong about so many things it did not surprise him to be wrong about another. Columbia, being a nurse, or nearly, to a sometimes gynecologist, was a great help through all the pregnancies, giving Gretchen her shots and sometimes a back massage, even once an enema, and accompanying her, since she worked there, through all her visits to the doctor and often to the lab for her scans and blood tests. During the backrubs, Gretchen would tell her about all the problems she was having with her wacky husband, how sometimes he was all over her like a rabbit and other times she couldn’t get near him, he’d hide under the bed or in the closet, or else out in the alley behind the drugstore, prowling around like he was looking for his lost wits. Corny seemed to get it in his head from time to time that he wasn’t really married to Gretchen, that it was all a trick of some kind, or else he’d fallen asleep and couldn’t wake up, he was a real lunatic. Columbia of course was always very sympathetic, having had to put up with her demented little brother all her life, and she said she thought it all had something to do with that crazy trip to Paris, and Gretchen agreed. Gretchen said sometimes it was like there were two Cornys. And neither of them worth a bent penny, Lumby would add, and they’d both giggle, and sometimes hold hands.
Cornell’s hostess in Paris, on a high school graduation trip arranged by his father, was his big brother Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire, penpal of John’s wife and bridesmaid at her wedding, the one Daphne thought seducing Bruce. Had the horny maid of honor had her eyes on anyone all that day but the best man, however, she would have seen the gazes Yale and Marie-Claire were exchanging during rehearsal and at the dinner after, would have noticed that they’d stayed behind while the others drifted toward the bar, Yale there more as the bride’s pal than the groom’s and so easily forgotten when it came time to play stags and hens. Yale was the serious one in that family, both parents’ admitted favorite — but no hard feelings, he was also Harvie’s favorite and the younger kids’, too, a boy born to love and be loved as well. Greatest thing, as is often said, Yale had it. Daphne’s classmates had voted him both Most Popular Boy and Most Likely to Succeed, two accolades rarely paired, not even John in his day had been so honored. By the time he met Marie-Claire — and forget the bridal bouquet and the garter next day, this was that wedding’s one true (to quote one of their love letters later on) full-blown romance — Yale was halfway through Princeton, majoring then in chemistry and what was coming to be known as computer science, but soon to switch to French, foreseeing a life that would take him far from these parts forever, correct in this, as it turned out, though not in the way he had imagined. The plan, elaborated in their long weekly, sometimes daily, love letters, which each wrote in the other’s tongue, delightfully cross-pollinating and scrambling their endearments, double entendres’ meanings doubly doubled, was for Yale to finish his degree and then find a teaching or translating job in Paris where they could live together, which folks back home, lovingly envious, thought of as the French way of doing things. With the diploma in his hands, he already had the airline ticket in his pocket, a graduation gift from his family, sent him in a packet from the drugstore Oxford labeled a “prescription for peace and joy,” to which his mother Kate appended one of her succinct aphorisms: “Love is the source code!”—but before he could join Marie-Claire he got drafted, was made an officer, went off to a war that was not a war, and loved by those he led with love, got shot on patrol in that part of him that had once memorized the conjugations of être and foutre and devised on the computer a pioneer on-line concordance for the collected works of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, who, the shocked and grieving community learned from The Town Crier, were French literary personages, known best as poets, contemporaries of this town’s early settlers, few of whom by contrast could even write.
It was during a routine business call home while on his second honeymoon in Paris that John learned of Yale’s fall on the field of battle, so it fell to him to break the tragic news to their hostess Marie-Claire, an awkward situation, made worse by hainqui-dainqui’s recent mischief, but John handled it with his usual panache, as the natives there would say, and proved that he was a man, as his mother Opal often asserted, not without compassion. Although, true, few who knew him would have described John so, in this matter John himself would have agreed with his mother: he was, he had no doubt of it, a compassionate man. Except when he was in a tough ballgame. Which of course was just about all the time, since that was mainly how he defined life. Compassion was the most natural thing in the world but you could rarely get down to it, that’s how he felt. Too much of life’s rough-and-tumble in the way most of the time, and a good thing, too, else he’d be bored silly. Compassion, in effect, was what was left over when the game was easy: a generous party, a timely job or a business tip, a tax-deductible gift. It was a bonus at Christmastime for his employees, even if he planned to fire them. A visit to the bedside of a guy you’d hit, flowers for the wedding of a rejected lover. Sometimes just a thoughtful phonecall, or a slap on the butt. Three rooms and bath in a retirement community was what stricken Barnaby got, Oxford an offer to save his pharmacy which he foolishly rejected, Lenny a piano for the church basement that Beatrice had asked for, Snuffy new team uniforms, then an airport job, and later, in politics, John’s endorsement. Waldo got business trips when Lollie was too hard on him, Lollie the chance to partner John sometimes in mixed-doubles foursomes. He suffered nights of bridge with his hardware man and his simple wife, even to Mad Marge threw a cookie now and then, though usually by way of her husband’s insurance business, and to Harvie he once sent a marabou stole to show he cared and understood, compassionate man that he was.