She looked from one to the other, taking in the mess on the floor, taking in Rose Helen’s Butler’s Principles of Basic Education, Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, and Druff’s Civics, taking in the big cellophane-wrapped dinner plate with Rose Helen’s supper on it that Edward still held.
“You kids aren’t students, are you? That one, he isn’t a waiter sneaking food in from some sorority he just stole it from where he sets table and serves the sisters their lunches and dinners, is he? Because I run a respectable house here with railroad workers, beauticians, cashiers, Air Force wives and food handlers. This isn’t any authorized university housing I do here to baby-sit for a bunch of all-grown-up kids on the excuse that they’re here for an education, while the truth is that the male grown-up kid is mostly just interested in finding some agreeable female grown-up kid who’s willing to take his pecker and hold it inside her for a while.”
“I don’t steal it,” Edward said.
“What’s that?” Mrs. Green said.
“The food,” he said. “I don’t steal it.”
“Well all right,” Mrs. Green said, “so you don’t steal it. That’s still no call to go shouting at each other at all hours of the day and night and make the kind of mess I see here on the fl—”
“They give it to me themselves. I’m no thief. I don’t steal it. They make up the plates themselves. For her, for Rose Helen. ‘Here,’ they tell me, ‘you’re friends with them, you know where she’s living, why don’t you go on and take these scraps to her? We won’t miss them, we’d only have to throw them out. Why should they go to waste? This way we’ll know that at least she’s eating well. She was one of us, after all. We took her in once and made her feel welcome. Just because she thinks she had a falling-out with us why should she go hungry? She’s had a hard enough life as it is.’ So I didn’t steal it. The Chi Phi Kappas give it to me for her themselves.”
“The hypocrites,” she shouted, “the hypocrites!” She started to cry.
Druff didn’t want to leave. Rose Helen said no, he had to. She said that once he picked everything up he’d tossed on the floor he could stay for a while but that she expected him to observe the usual curfew.
That night she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Green and one of the railroad workers saved her life. They called the authorities and, afterwards, Mrs. Green had the decency to call Druff at Mrs. Reese’s to tell him what happened.
She was still being held for observation when he proposed. Both of them understood that his proposal of marriage and her acceptance had nothing at all to do with forgiveness, or mercy, or their sorrows.
So they still didn’t know any couples, and now they no longer had even Ed with them, good old Edward R. Markey with his name like a clerk of the court or some high-up in the Motor Vehicles Bureau, their friend downtown, could be, and who may have been the real politico here, who knew where the bodies were buried, their whys and whats, their names and addresses, and whose own bodies, his, Rose Helen’s, he would keep in his files long after they ceased to bother with his.
So you can imagine how he felt.
Even after all his careful arrangements for the evening, making the reservations at the restaurant, withdrawing two hundred dollars at the automatic teller, sending the flowers, purchasing the condoms he knew he wouldn’t be using, evading Mrs. Norman, sidestepping Doug, Druff had still to call Rose Helen to explain why he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner that night. It was the thing he most dreaded, and he put it off till last — unless, as he feared, calling Margaret Glorio and canceling out altogether (a distinct possibility) were to be his final “arrangement,” allowing the flowers to stand as a sort of olive branch — because he didn’t have the slightest idea what he would tell her. He’d had few occasions to lie to Rose Helen, so few, in fact, that he was sure she’d catch him out the minute he opened his mouth. The times he had lied to her had always been in the line of gallantry, and even then never volunteering, only if she asked, insisted. (Even after almost forty years he was afraid of her because she wouldn’t be patronized, his proud, up-front, warts-and-all wife.) And then the furthest he’d go might be to tell her that he liked a dress he didn’t particularly care for, or approved a hairdo to which he’d not yet become accustomed, Rose Helen not only reading his reservations, reading his mind, reading his instincts, but putting her finger precisely where he’d have put it himself if he’d known enough about fashion or coiffure to be at all articulate about them.
So they didn’t lie to each other. They never made excuses for Mikey, or for each other. If anything, Rose Helen was even more honest with Druff than Druff was with Rose Helen. She told him, for example, that she’d rarely voted for him. Only in three of the elections in which he’d stood for office. She wasn’t even of Druff’s political persuasion. More than once, if she felt strongly enough about his opponent, she’d shown up at his rival’s campaign headquarters on election night to help him celebrate if he’d won, to console him if he hadn’t. And maybe it was something about their disparate franknesses — perhaps both were politicians finally, though of different orders; Rose Helen, at sixty, a Young Turk; Druff, two years her junior, this, well, pussy-whipped City Commissioner of Streets — which bleakened the prospects for the phone call he was so reluctant to make. She would see right through him. Even over the telephone she’d be able to tell he was blushing, hear his voice toeing in with lame excuse. He couldn’t think of a thing to tell his wife. Better forget it, he thought, he hadn’t a hope and, deciding to cancel, looked up Margaret Glorio’s number which he’d been at such pains to obtain only hours before. He slipped a coin into the slot — because she’d been right, he’d called from a pay phone the first time, too — and, looking at the number he’d so carefully copied down, he started to dial.
Rose Helen picked up on the second ring.
“Yes?”
“Howdy, Miss Kitty. I hope you haven’t gone to the trouble of baking my favorite pie or doing up some difficult recipe you’ve been meaning to try for years only the ingredients were always out of season when you finally found the time,” the commissioner said breezily.
“I thought we’d eat out,” Rose Helen said.
“Yeah, well,” Druff said, “that ain’t gonna happen.”
“What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
“Not a thing.”
“Your voice sounds funny.”
“I’m at the airport, I’m at a pay phone.”
“At the airport? What are you doing at the airport?”
“Well, I’m meeting a plane.”
“Who’s coming in?”
“Bert McIlvoy. Irwin Scouffas. But their plane was over an hour late getting out of Denver. It isn’t scheduled to arrive for another twenty minutes yet. I got here at four-thirty. Can you imagine holding a plane because the heating element in the galley isn’t working? Airlines, Jesus!”
“Who are Bert McIlvoy and Irwin Scouffas? I never heard of them.”
“They’re from the marathon. They reached me in the limo this morning. I finally actually got to take a long-distance call in the limo! They sounded like they were right next door.”
“Well, who are they? Why are you meeting their plane?”
“I told you. They’re from the marathon. You know how long I’ve been trying to get a marathon going in this town. Well, if they approve the routes I’ve marked out — it’s a big if — and if the city’s willing to meet their terms—another big if — these two guys can make it possible. I’m going over the routes with them tonight.”