“Did you never hear the old verse? “Three months and all is well, three months more she begins to swell—’“
“Sure,” Reinhart interrupted. As he remembered, its ending lines were indecent, and he was puzzled at Fedder’s loose attitude towards maternity.
“Don’t you feel different?” Fedder asked impatiently. “Just a fellow one day, next a father?”
He was some sort of schizophrenic, Reinhart decided, now in one mood, now another.
“You seem to take it lightly enough,” he said.
“Me? You see, for you it’s the first. That’s the difference. Me? When I was in your shoes I suffered torments for every day of the nine months, and when the time for Bee’s confinement approached, I went to sick bay, at the base, with total nervous collapse. That’s how I feel things.” He resented the attribution of nonchalance.
They were out of refreshments again, but Reinhart was damned if he’d toast more bread. In fact he felt very logy and got up from his chair, plunged to the floor and began to do pushups, an exercise he disliked because the obstacle there is your own weight: lifting a barbell, you could contrive extra strength by hating cold iron and thrusting it from you in repugnance; to do so with your own body was somehow self-defeating.
Therefore when he finished he was rather dejected, as well as out of breath. He rolled supine, leaned back on his arms, and looked up at Fedder.
“You know the idea I’ve had for quite some time?” he asked. “That I should go back and start everything over. That is, everything that’s happened since leaving the Army. I should go back to the separation center, turn, and walk into civilian life again, this time through the gate of horn.”
“Pardon?” asked Fedder.
“I read the Aeneid not long ago,” Reinhart explained, and then because Fedder still looked blank, he said: “You know, the two gates of Hades, one of ivory, one of horn. Through the ivory gate ‘the powers send false dreams to the world above,’ but the horn gate provides ‘a ready exit for the true spirits.’ Oh well, it’s not important.”
“Carl,” said Fedder, who from Reinhart’s perspective seemed to have grotesquely large knees. “Carl,” he repeated, looking down at his host with three parts seriousness and one of amusement, “I know you won’t be offended if I ask: On thinking it over, don’t you find your attitude towards marriage is a bit, well, somewhat on the sophomoric side?”
Reinhart got heavily to his feet. “That seems to be Gen’s position on the issue, and it’s pretty wild when you realize that all I’ve done for the past three months is work, whereas all I ever did before getting married was loaf. That reminds me of the favorite principle of psychiatry: that the truth is always the reverse of appearance; the kind man is really a sadist, and so on. I believe it, but the trouble is that once knowing about it, you are corrupted. Wanting to do your friend a favor, you must punch him in the face to make sure he knows you don’t hate him secretly.”
Fedder by now was smiling broadly, and Reinhart realized that his neighbor had applied these remarks to explain the kick he had received the day before.
“Listen, Carl,” Fedder said, leaving his chair. “Let Dr. Niles prescribe. Forget your troubles for an afternoon, hey old boy? You’re going on a picnic with the Fedder Family. Now we won’t take your No. We’ve got more than enough food for all and sundry. We insist.”
His use of the first person plural disturbed Reinhart, who said: “Hadn’t you better check first with your wife?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Fedder boasted, sticking out his belly and hitching up his shorts. “When you’ve been married for six and a half years, you know the other partner. Most of these uncertainties are the product of the early months, old fellow. You’ll see. It’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, enjoy an afternoon with your neighbors. And don’t worry about wives. Yours will come back, and mine will love you.”
It was an odd thing to hear, but Reinhart managed to combine the relief of his own embarrassment with the suppression of any element that might give his neighbor pain, by uttering a laconic: “No doubt.” Furthermore, upon the instant he resolved upon his honor that never would he succumb to Mrs. Fedder’s attractions. This oath was necessitated by his having seen, at Fedder’s first mention of “picnic,” a terrible image of himself and Bee making mad love amid the crushed fruit in a wild-blackberry bramble, while Fedder fed peanut-butter sandwiches to his children just over the next rise. Some people, like Maw, suffered vision of bloodletting, illness, and death. With Reinhart it had always been sex, and nowadays the fantasy was horrible which in his bachelorhood had been a real joy of life. And he detested picnics.
Some hours later, as a member of a little group of bucolics that ringed an outdoor oven in the county park, Reinhart had nothing to reproach himself for but egomania. The happy truth was that Beatrice Fedder had no discernible interest in Reinhart. Indeed, she seemed to find him barely tolerable, and when by chance they stood briefly side by side, was first to move away, her thin nostrils finely drawn in what, he told himself delightedly, could not be other than dislike.
“How do you want your hamburger, Carl?” asked Niles, squatting before the oven, poking into its fire with a long green stick.
His middle daughter (whose name Reinhart had naturally forgotten), swinging from foot to foot, struck up a silly chant: “Hamburgers, hotdogs, hamburgers, hotdogs …”
“Ah,” said Reinhart, remembering Fedder’s attitude in his kitchen, “so you do the cooking?”
Fedder turned up a soot-stained face. “Only outdoors.” He curled his lips in good humor and said to his wife, who stood behind the chimney, which cut off much of her slender body from Reinhart’s gaze, which seemed to be her point: “Golly, Bee, I can’t get a fire going when I’m watched. Why don’t you take Carl for a walk?”
Both principals recoiled from the suggestion so vehemently that even Fedder would have noticed had his head been up, but it wasn’t, and he was also distracted by his little daughters, who were continually delivering their minuscule idea of fuel: ice-cream sticks, discarded soda straws, half-burnt matches, and dry grass: it was plain they loved him dearly.
“Go ahead,” said Fedder, peering into the grate. “Carl doesn’t know this park, Bee.”
“Why,” cried Reinhart, who was a native of these parts, to which the Fedders had moved only since the war, “I’ve been coming here since I was as old as—” he pointed at one of the little girls but was halted by the nonrecall of her name, which he knew was hardly the kind of failure to demonstrate before her parents, and was mumbling certain guesses—“Bainbridge,” “Crowley,” etc. (what ever had become of “Jane” and “Ruth” and “Betty”?)—when a cloud of yellow smoke drove them all from the oven.
“Wood too green,” Fedder shouted merrily, and flapped a large, dirty handkerchief to open a channel through the cloud. How gay he was, surrounded by his little girls chirping like wrens, and his stately wife—for so she was, with somewhat elongated features, clean jaw, prominent cheekbones, and suntan. Taller than Fedder, she wore yellow shorts above exceptionally long thighs. Her shirt was the puffy kind that needed the help of the wind to reveal vital upper data, but they were not likely to be voluptuous. Here and there—neck, forearm, etc.—Reinhart saw bones and tendons. She faintly favored the male members of the House of Windsor, except as to eyes; and also an underweight motion-picture actress who always played newspaperwomen.
“Be friends,” Fedder adjured his wife and his neighbor, and dropping his handkerchief, harassed them in the style of a dog herding farm animals.
“Niles!” his wife remonstrated in a whiny alto that showed her dignity in another light. Now that was one for the book: she was scared of good old Reinhart!—who at last decided that the evidence of the previous night would never stand in court: he must have heard wrong. It had of course been she and Fedder, who then popped out for a midnight stroll, returning from which he had been detected by Reinhart. No other explanation was possible, now th
at Reinhart had seen her. Why, she was so shy that, as Fedder pushed them together like a procurer, her eyes closed in shame and were it not for the tan she would have turned crimson.
“Niles,” she whined again, and while Reinhart had begun to find her modesty winning, her voice irritated him.
“Go on,” said Fedder, patting both her and Reinhart on their respective behinds. “Run along, and remember what I told you.”
“What?” asked Reinhart.
“No, I mean Bee. Bee?”
“All right,” she murmured.
“A good half hour before I’ll get a decent bed of embers,” her husband stated significantly. He gathered to him all three children and returned to the oven.
Reinhart sensed that he was supposed to hear Beatrice Fedder’s advice on how to regain and keep his wife; and he regretted more than ever having told his troubles to Niles, who had turned out to be that most terrifying of men: the fellow who is really interested.
“I guess we have to take a walk,” he said to her, wryly throwing up his hands. But her head stayed down, and it was difficult for Reinhart to make a point when he couldn’t catch an auditor’s eye.
“Look!” he cried. “There goes a bluejay.”
She lifted her head in the wrong direction. In this attitude, however, her slender throat and narrow eye were seen to great advantage. Men, it occurred to Reinhart, pick wives who have what they themselves lack, so that if it is done well, the married pair is a single human unit in which all possibilities are represented. Thus Bee Fedder, in distinction to her husband, looked as though she never perspired. And Reinhart himself was the last person from whom to expect the decisiveness and efficiency that were, or had been, prime qualities of Genevieve nee Raven. Yet the use of those remarkable faculties were just what he denied her. Was he man enough to call Gen tomorrow and admit his mistakes?
“I guess,” he said to Bee, “that you’re supposed to be my marriage counselor. Well, tell me this: Is there a formula for keeping the right proportion? A man must be authoritative, or else a woman will have no respect for him. On the other hand, he must not be domineering. He must be attentive, for nothing kills the spirit sooner than indifference, but it is true that everyone, no matter how ardent, needs a rest from unvarying, uh—” he realized he was being a bit bold for their short acquaintance, but said it anyway—“passion.”
They had entered a trail leading from the clearing to a field where a host of men played softball with many hoots and catcalls, everybody short of wind and being mocked for it: some office picnic or Methodist outing. With her head down, Beatrice would have walked somnambulistically into center field, but Reinhart caught her bony elbow and steered back into the woods.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” he stated, “but I gathered from Niles’s attitude that—”
“That’s all right!” she cried, overloud. The sound flushed a blue-colored bird from the greenery above them: as it happened, another jay: scolding raucously, the little crank.
“I knew a flier once,” Beatrice suddenly asserted, turning a willowy ankle but gracefully gliding out of the warp. She was no longer shy but rather defiant. “Do you remember Colin Kelly, who in the early days of the war sank a Japanese warship by diving down the smokestack? My friend did the same thing without the publicity.”
Reinhart said: “Magnificent!”
Bee looked directly at him for the first time, paling a little in approval. They had come to a fork in the trail marked by rustic signposts with burned-in legends: LAMES to the left, MEN to the right. Again Reinhart steered to the rear.
“You do understand, don’t you?” she asked.
He smiled and lied: “Oh sure.” Geographically, they were getting nowhere; it was a typical public park, where all roads led to playfields or toilets.
“Ah to be a man!” said Mrs. Fedder, still looking aloft. “And soar through the wild blue yonder. Were you in the Air Corps?”
“No,” Reinhart answered vaguely, wondering whether Fedder would mind if they came back so soon; there just wasn’t any place to stroll unless they left the trail, and that, according to the little signs affixed to every other tree, would violate the law.
She asked desperately: “You were in the service?”
“Oh yes, I was … I was …” From the corner of his eye he saw certain indications that permitted no leeway: either he produced some claim to adventure or he was a humdrum clod whom she would scorn. The strange thing was why he should care, having no designs on her.
“I don’t know whether it’s too soon to tell. They warned us—” It was as easy as that, and he didn’t really have to prevaricate.
“Intelligence,” said Beatrice Fedder. “You were an operative.” She clapped her hands, sending more birds out of their treetop hiding places. When she spoke in approbation, her voice was not at all nasal.
“But you know,” Reinhart declared manfully, seeing her husband’s grimy back at the oven across the clearing, to the edge of which they had returned, “everybody did something adventurous. Some veterans just talk more than others. Anyway, just surviving the problems of normal life is romantic, if you want to see it that way.”
“Especially washing and cooking,” she answered in a voice so abrasive that it almost took the skin off his neck. “And living in a tin can. And having one kid after another. And talking about sewers. And sitting around the playground with the other hens, who all went to college.”
There burst Reinhart’s bubble of happy domesticity. But Gen hadn’t had to do most of those things, and yet she was also dissatisfied. What did women want? To be men. But that was just impossible, and until they realized it was, he would be out of sympathy with them. They were just like Negroes, who refused to settle for less than being white. And Indians wanted to be Englishmen; Latins, gringos; midgets, giants; and dogs, persons. By this scheme of values Reinhart stood at the very apex of creation. Yet at any given time he was miserable. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gen, Bee, Splendor, Pandit Nehru, and Rin Tin Tin!
“I’m sorry,” he told Mrs. Fedder, “but there’s nothing I can do about it.” He regretted having expressed so much resentment in his tone; after all, he was in a way her guest. But when she replied, that kind of regret seemed a joke.
“You could,” she said, “if you wanted to.” Her head fell again, and by the time they reached her husband, her manner was as if they had never gone.
“Oh,” said Fedder, staring from kindly, smoke-reddened eyes, “back already? That didn’t take long.” His daughters rushed to him as soon as they saw Reinhart, who caught the largest in transit and offered to lift her way up into the sky, but she hid her face and shrank from him.
A breeze of displeasure wafted across Fedder’s honest face. “Trow gets dizzy easily,” he said, and with a protuberant belly forced Reinhart to fall back.
“Here,” said Reinhart, after the meal, “let me earn my keep. I’ll police up.” He reached first for Fedder’s cardboard plate, purposely ignoring Bee, who had finished long before. But she silently made herself his partner, gathering together the children’s trash and, though she climbed out of the picnic table more quickly than he, who always had trouble with those joined-bench things, waiting for him so that they could walk to the fire together.
“O.K.!” bellowed Fedder, the jolly pimp. “You make an attractive couple.”
Reinhart craftily changed his mind, announcing: “On the other hand, I’ll take the kids off your hands, Niles. I saw an Eskimo Pie man down by the ball field.” He had not yet got himself free of the stocks, having straddled a cross-member so as to sit far away from Beatrice, whom her husband had placed on his side.
“After all that water melon?” Fedder asked incredulously, showing the white rind of his. Sensibly enough: those tiny children had eaten like wolves.
And Trowbridge, age 5, who had chattered constantly during the meal but incomprehensibly to everyone except her Daddy, now asserted with great clarity of phrase that she hated ice
cream. The three-year-old said little, the smallest nothing at all, but they had managed throughout the meal to get across their dislike of Reinhart, as well as—could it be true?—a conspicuous lack of affection for their mother, who returned it, if her earlier comment was to be believed. And Fedder urged his wife on another man in that perverse way. How terrible! thought Reinhart, who had started on this outing with a desperate need to see a happy family in action. Instead he had got into a snakes’ nest. Perhaps fate had saved him from similar straits: if the baby was a boy, Gen would conspire with it against him; if a girl, he had an ally against his wife. Either way it was all bitter conflict, and where was love?
He and Bee stuffed the oven chimney full of trash, counting on the combustibles to incinerate the melon rinds and bun-ends, and he tossed a lighted match through the grill at the base. The fire caught on well in the bottom paper, but became clogged somewhere along the middle of the column: dense smoke gushed from the chimney mouth, smelling fearfully of hot garbage. This was an event that failed to touch the Fedders, but Reinhart felt it reflected unfavorably on his outdoorsmanship and began strenuously to poke a stick down the congested shaft in hopes he might clear it before the ice-cream man reached them—for that guy, who had pedaled his bicycle-cart up the trail from the ball field, approached them from across the clearing, his bell jingling; and furthermore, his skin was black wherever it emerged from his white uniform, a color combination Reinhart had honestly not noticed when he had seen him at a great distance.
The stickwork made the smoke worse, and Reinhart obviously couldn’t piss on the fire as he would have done as a boy, or even now in privacy, so he took a leftover Coke and poured it down the stack.
“Eskimo Pie, sir, madam? Cups? Raspberry, lemon sherbet. Ice-cream samwich?” announced the vendor, who for reasons of his own had chosen to apply first to Reinhart and Bee rather than the obvious choice of Fedder & kids still at table.