The Return of Service
Stories by
Jonathan Baumbach
To my daughter. Nina
A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
The Traditional Story Returns
Too many times you read a story nowadays and it’s not a story at all, not in the traditional sense. A traditional story has plot, character, and theme, to name three things it traditionally has. The following story, which contains a soupçon of mood in addition to the three major considerations named above, is intended as a modest “rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition.”
The plot is this: a woman of good family (we won’t say just how good the family is) marries a man of means. They live together in uneventful happiness for seven years until their love runs out. Then they split up but not before some bad times that leave scars of bitterness. Afterward, the bad times remain, particularly for the woman, and the good times are dashed on the rock of negligent memory, which is one of the themes of the story. Bad times in a marriage erase all memories of former happiness. The name of the woman of better than average family is Eve. What more is there to know of her? The answer to that question is the character part of the story.
Eve was born in Asheville, Ohio, to, as I said before, though it bears repeating, a good family. (On the night she and her husband, Fairlie, separated, the Yankees lost to the Milwaukee Brewers, ending a seven-game winning streak which had catapulted them to within eight games of first place.) She had a younger brother who died as an infant, Eve five at the time. After her brother Townsend’s death, she had her parents to herself, although they were by nature busy people, occupied by one remote grief or another — I’m speaking of the mother now. The father had his work. Eve was a shy, frail, long-legged girl skittery as a deer, with a hockey mistress manner and a fierce intelligence. When nervous she talked a streak, an articulate, charming prattle song, much admired by her teachers, which, if you listened to it wholeheartedly, had a desperate pleading note. Stay with me, it said, love me. There is a princess beneath the manner and I am smart as hell and loyal and passionate and brittle as kindling. She attended a girls’ school in the East — one of the seven sister colleges, Smith or Wellesley. Smith, I think, though it doesn’t matter to the story. Wellesley will do, or Holyoke. Not Vassar, of that I’m sure. In her second year she met the man she was going to marry, a pre-law student at Amherst or Yale. At the time she was in love with someone else or, which is almost the same thing, had given her heart away. Not much is known about it. She was given to self-conscious romantic poses during that period, took entranced walks in the woods, wrote obscure poems, would break off sometimes in the middle of her own chatter and get a misty, faraway look,
She thought Fairlie Robinson “a perfect bore” when she met him, which was what she told her roommate. Eve sometimes spoke with an English accent or used old-fashioned phrases to disguise her sense of the inadequacy of language to convey the ineffable. Her roommate, who tended to sensible questions, asked Eve how come she continued to see Fairlie if bored by his company. She knew what he was like, she said with affected cynicism as if she had practiced the answer to herself in anticipation of the question. Someone else might be worse.
When Fairlie Robinson first laid eyes on Eve he liked what he saw. He was a man, even then in his fourth year at Yale, who knew what he liked. She told him, to be honest and fair with him, that he was not her type. Nor could he ever hope to be, she said with sibyl’s tongue. Fairlie liked a girl with spirit.
Eve was surprised when on their second date Fairlie parked the car and grabbed at her.
I don’t do that kind of thing, Eve said. Fairlie thought that she might make an exception in his case, but Eve said exceptions were out of the question.
Nevertheless he continued to do what he was doing and seemed to have more hands, Eve told her roommate, than an octopus.
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, the roommate, who spoke from firsthand experience, said. And then what happened?
What did happen? I’ve heard several versions of the incident, all of them agreeing on certain details and disagreeing on others.
I let out a stream of vile invective, Eve told Allison, which I don’t wonder must have burned his ears. That’s what Eve says she said. Allison’s recollection was somewhat different. She became absolutely rigid, she told me, like an alabaster statue, which served its purpose.
What was the purpose it served?
To get him to stop, silly. What a question.
Eve loved college, though tended, her class correspondent reports, to seem unhappy, a flower pressed between pages before its time.
Sometimes it was hard not to want to scream. Although a grabber — with experience would come savoir faire — Fairlie had the reputation of being a brick. It was that she admired most in him, his brickness, no mean quality.
When he broke off with her she had a feeling of heartbreak from which she thought she would never recover.
One day they were married. The heartbreak continued, which had its reassuring aspect. It was no fly-by-night fatal wound. They had seven idyllically happy years of marriage, but afterward the bad times covered over the good like a fat kid sitting on top of a skinny and she could hardly remember one good time. He had when making love, she remembered, more fingers than a centipede.
Here the story takes a surprising turn.
The war was over. The returning soldiers lined the streets looking for work.
When Eve left her husband — truer to say they left each other — we lost sight of her.
Only scattered reports about Eve since her breakup with what’s his name. Fairlie A. Robinson, Jr.
Some notes about Fairlie’s character. It is true that in his younger days he had the habit of grabbing at women in parked cars. There was more to him than that; that wasn’t the whole story about him.
Before he met Eve, Fairlie used to ride around with a reckless friend. When in the course of their dalliance a woman (or women) crossed their reckless path, Fairlie would pull down his pants and show his bare behind. It was called mooning and had a brief vogue at eastern men’s colleges in the late fifties. Otherwise, he was kind, industrious, cheerful, thrifty, vaguely dishonest, and a moon among bricks.
During the second year of their marriage, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to their door, one a good-looking blond man in a sport coat and tie, the other a nondescript the blond introduced as his wife. They were very polite, asked if they might come in for a few minutes to share with the Robinsons a message of the utmost importance. They couldn’t have been nicer, but Fairlie sent them packing. “We have our own religion here,” he said.
“What religion do we have?” Eve asked later when there were no Witnesses. “What religion did you have in mind?”
Fairlie was watching (at the time of Eve’s question) the NBC Game of the Week. “Idol worshipping. How’s that?”
The next time the Jehovah’s Witnesses came by, Fairlie invited them in for “a little comparative religions talk,” slapping backs to show there were no hard feelings. The Witnesses, who were former thieves, reconverted after an hour’s dull debate, bound and gagged the Robinsons and robbed them blind.
That was how Fairlie and Eve got religion if the truth be known.
They went out together as a team a few times, proselytizing in strange neighborhoods, but it didn’t seem like much of a profession for college graduates. It was on the whole more satisfying to tell the story at parties, where everyone laughed fit to be tied.