“That’s good, because come summer I’m going to put you to work.”
“Work?”
“In the store.”
“Oh!” He didn’t seem too enthusiastic.
Ellen gave an opening gasp but when she had our attention she didn’t say anything. Mary repeated the eighty-five things the children were to do and not to do while we were gone and I went upstairs for my tub.
I was tying my dear blue polka-dot, my only blue polka-dot tie when Ellen leaned in against the door. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you were younger,” she said with dreadful femininity.
“You’re going to give some happy husband a rough time, my dear.”
“Even the seniors in high school wouldn’t wear it.”
“Prime Minister Macmillan[44] does.”
“That’s different. Daddy, is it cheating to copy something out of a book?”
“Explain!”
“Well, if a person, if I was writing my essay and I took stuff out of a book—how about that?”
“It would depend on how you did it.”
“Like you said—explain.”
“Don’t you mean ‘as I said’?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you put quotation marks around it and a footnote telling who wrote it, it could add dignity and authority. I guess half the writing in America is quotations if it isn’t anthologies. Now do you like my tie?”
“S’pose you didn’t put those marks....”
“Then it would be stealing like any other kind of stealing. You didn’t do that, did you?”
“No.”
“Then what is your problem?”
“Could they put you in jail?”
“Might—if you got money for it. Don’t do it, my girl. Now what do you think about my tie?”
“I guess you’re just impossible,” she said.
“If you plan to join the others, you might tell your blinking brother that I brought him his bleeding Mickey Mouse mask and shame on him.”
“You never listen, really listen.”
“I do too.”
“No, you don’t. You’ll be sorry.”
“Good-by, Leda. Say hello to the swan.”[45]
She lounged away, a baby-fatted volupt. Girls kill me. They turn out to be girls.
My Mary was just beautiful, just beautiful and shining. A light from inside her oozed out of her pores. She took my arm as we walked down Elm Street under the arching trees with the street lights playing on us and I swear our legs moved with the proud and tender steps of thoroughbreds coming to the barrier.
“You must come to Rome! Egypt isn’t big enough for you. The great world calls.”
She giggled. I swear she giggled as would have done honor to our daughter.
“We’re going to go out more often, my darling.”
“When?”
“When we are rich.”
“When is that?”
“Soon. I’m going to teach you to wear shoes.”
“Will you light your cigars with ten-dollar bills?”
“Twenties.”
“I like you.”
“Shucks, ma’am. You oughten to say that. You plumb embarrass me.”
Not long ago the owners of the Foremaster installed bow windows on the street, with small square panes of bottle glass, designed to make the place look old and authentic—and it did so look—but people sitting inside at the tables had their faces altered by the warping glass. One face would be all jaw, another one big vacant eye, but it all added to the age and the authenticity of the old Foremaster and so did the geraniums and lobelias in the window boxes.
Margie was waiting for us, hostess to her fingertips. She introduced her companion, a Mr. Hartog of New York, sun-lamp tanned and set with teeth like an ear of Country Gentleman. Mr. Hartog looked wrapped and shellacked, but he answered all sentences with an appreciative laugh. That was his contribution and it wasn’t a bad one.
“How d’you do?” said Mary.
Mr. Hartog laughed.
I said, “I hope you know your companion is a witch.”
Mr. Hartog laughed. We all felt good.
Margie said, “I’ve asked for a table by the window. That one there.”
“You also had them put special flowers, Margie.”
“Mary, I have to do something to repay all your kindness.”
They went on like this during and after Margie had seated us, and Mr. Hartog laughed at every period, clearly a brilliant man. I made a plan to get a word from him, but later.
The set table seemed fine and very white and the silver which wasn’t silver looked extra silvery.
Margie said, “I’m the hostess and that means I’m the boss and I say martinis whether you want them or not.” Mr. Hartog laughed.
The martinis came, not in little glasses but big as bird baths with twists of lemon peel. The first taste bit like a vampire bat, made its little anesthesia, and after that the drink mellowed and toward the bottom turned downright good.
“We’re going to have two,” said Margie. “The food’s pretty good here but not that good.”
Then I told how I had always planned to open a bar where you could only get your second martini. I would make a fortune.
Mr. Hartog laughed and four more bird baths appeared at our table while I was still chewing the first lemon peel.
With the first taste of his second drink, Mr. Hartog developed the power of speech. He had a low, vibrant voice, like that of an actor or a singer or a salesman of some product people don’t want. You might even call it a bedside voice.
“Mrs. Young-Hunt tells me you’re in business here,” he said. “It’s a fascinating town—unspoiled.”
I was about to tell him exactly what my business consisted in when Margie took the ball. “Mr. Hawley is the coming power of this county,” she said.
“So? What line are you in, Mr. Hawley?”
“Everything,” said Margie. “Absolutely everything, but not openly, you understand.” Her eyes had a liquor shine. I looked at Mary’s eyes and they were just beginning to surface, so I judged the others had had a couple before we came, or at least Margie had.
“Well, that saves me from denying it,” I said.
Mr. Hartog came back to his laugh. “You have a lovely wife. That’s half the battle.”
“That’s the whole battle.”
“Ethan, you’ll make him think we fight.”
“Oh, we do!” I gulped half the glass and felt the warmth spring up behind my eyes. And I was looking at the bottle end of one of the tiny window panes. It caught the candlelight and seemed to revolve slowly. Maybe it was self-hypnosis, for I heard my own voice go on, listened to myself from outside myself. “Mrs. Margie is the Witch of the East.[46] A martini is not a drink. It’s a potion.” The gleaming glass still held me.
“Oh, dear! I always thought of myself as Ozma. Wasn’t the Witch of the East a wicked witch?”
“She was indeed.”
“And didn’t she melt?”
Through the crooked glass I saw a man’s figure walking past on the sidewalk. He was all misshaped by the distortion, but he carried his head a little to the left and walked curiously on the outsides of his feet. Danny did that. I saw myself leap up and run after him. I saw myself run to the corner of Elm Street but he had disappeared, perhaps in the back garden of the second house. I called, “Danny! Danny! Give me back the money. Please, Danny, give it to me. Don’t take it. It’s poisoned. I poisoned it!”
I heard a laugh. It was Mr. Hartog’s laugh. Margie said, “Well, I would rather be Ozma.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes with my napkin and explained, “I should drink it, not bathe my eyes in it. It burns.”
“Your eyes are all red,” Mary said.
I couldn’t get back to the party but I heard myself talk and tell stories and I heard my Mary laugh like golden glory so I guess I was funny, and even charming, but I couldn’t ever get back to the table. And I think Margie knew it. She kept looking at me with a concealed question, damn her. She was a witch.
44
Prime Minister Macmillan: Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was prime minister of England from 1957 to 1963.
45
Leda… swan: In Greek mythology, Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, is seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan.
46
Witch of the East… Ozma: In