The Man Who Knew Coolidge/Part 3
—And I tell you, Walt, now we have a chance to sit down here by ourselves in your den and have a real chat—and say, from what I've seen, I don't believe there's a more elegant house for its size in Troy, and then of course you always were my favorite cousin, and one of the few people whose business judgment I'd trust and—
If you can see your way clear to making this loan, you'll never regret it. Business hasn't gone quite so good the last six months, as I admitted, but now I've got the exclusive Zenith agency for Zenith for these new cash registers—and say, what the cash register means, what it means to the modern and efficient conduct of business; it's almost, you might say, the symbol of modern industry, like the sword is of war—now I've got that, I can guarantee a big increase in turnover, taking one thing with another, and I want you to examine the analysis of my business with the greatest care.
And I certainly do admit all your criticisms, and I'm going to ponder on 'em and try to profit by 'em.
I'm afraid I do get too kind of talkee-talkee during business hours, and maybe waste time and money. And I admit what you said about my college course. It's perfectly true: I didn't quit Amherst because my Dad died—fact, he didn't die till nine months after I was fired, and it's true I was dropped for flunking all my college courses, as you said—though I thought you threw that up to me a little unnecessarily; almost hurt my feelings, in fact; don't know that I'd 've stood it from anybody but you, but of course you always were my favorite cousin—
You see, I don't go around telling everybody that version of the story, because what I figure is, what they don't know won't hurt 'em none, and it's none of their business.
But it's not true, as you kind of hinted and suggested, that I didn't know President Coolidge in college. It's a fact that for some years I did have him mixed up with another fellow in our class that looked something like him, but here some time ago I happened to run into this other fellow, and now I've got the two of 'em perfectly straight.
Why, I can remember just as if it was yesterday, Cal—as we used to call him—Cal and I were going into class together, and I says to him, "Cal, old boy," I said, "what's the Latin for 'battle'?" And he said—he said—well, he gave the word right out, without any hemming and hawing and beating around the bush.
But you're right, I do kind of get to talking too much. Henceforth I'm going to cut it short, and you'll never regret it if you put in that loan.
And I don't think that even you, with all the insight that you show into human nature, quite understand how and why it is that in certain moods I do run on a good deal. There's reasons for it. In the first place, I'm called on so constantly for speeches and oratory in Zenith—you've never been there and you couldn't understand, but—
Well, you take like this, for instance. I was attending a meeting of the Americanization Committee of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, and we were discussing birth control. Well, the chairman insisted I make 'em a long speech on the subject.
"Shucks, boys," I said, "you know just as much about it as I do," but they talked and they insisted, and they wouldn't let me go until I'd made a long spiel for 'em, summing up the arguments on both sides and, you might say, kind of clarifying it for 'em. See how I mean? But you, Walt, you just think of business night and day, and prob'ly that's a more practical way to think of it. But I get dragged into all these public and influential occasions and get kind of into a habit of oratory and philosophy, see how I mean?
And then—
I hate to say it, and there isn't another human being living, Walt, that I'd tell this to, and I want you to treat it as strictly confidential, but—
The fact is, what really cramps my style is my wife.
★
That girl—
And in many ways I've got nothing but praise for Mamie. She means well, and as far as her lights lead her, she does everything she can for me, but the fact is she don't quite understand me, and say, the way she drives me and makes demands on me and everything, why say, it just about drives me crazy.
And Delmerine same way. Thinking the Old Man's made of money!
And what I've done for Mamie—yes, and what modern American science has done! Think of the advantage of canned goods, of delicatessen shops with every delicacy from salads to cold turkey, all ready to serve without any preparation; of baker's bread without having to bake bread at home. Think of the electric dish-washing machine, reducing the work of dish-washing to, you might say, practically a minimum, and the vacuum cleaner, and what an invention that is!—no more sweeping, no more beating rugs—why say, the preachers can talk about these mysteries and all like that, but I guess in the vacuum cleaner America has added to the world its own mystery, that'll last when the columns of the Acropolis have crumbled to mere dust!
And then think of the modern laundries with their marvelous machinery.
It's true that they don't wash the clothes quite as good as my old mother used to—fact, they simply tear hell out of my handkerchiefs, and I always was a man to appreciate a high grade of fine linen handkerchief. But still, think of the labor-saving.
And so I've provided Mame with every device to save her labor, so whether it's a question of her telling the maid what to do, or during those comparatively rare intervals when we haven't got a hired girl and she has to do some of the work herself, she can get it all done in a jiffy, you might say, and be free for all the pleasures and self-improvement of leisure. She's free to play bridge nearly every afternoon, and also to give a lot of attention to her literary club, the William Lyon Phelps Ladies' Book and Literary Society, and get a lot of culture.
Now myself, I've always given a lot of attention to intellectual matters. Of course I'm right up on history—I've read clear through both Wells' "Outline of History," or practically clear through it, and also Van Lear's "Story of Mankind," especially studying the illustrations. And of course—maybe I'm a little rusty on it now, but as a boy I used to be able to chatter German like a native, you might say, as my father often talked it to us at home. And now I'm kind of specializing on philosophy. I've read a lot of this "Story of Philosophy" by—I can't at the moment exactly remember the professor's name, but it gives you the whole contents of all philosophy in one book; and while these business cares have for the moment interrupted my reading the book, I expect to go right on and finish it.
But Mame, she has the opportunity to go ahead and knock all my culture into a cocked hat. Here recently her club had a very fine lecture about the excavation of King Tut's tomb, from a gentleman that had been right there on the ground—of course he couldn't go into the tomb, because nobody's allowed inside it except the excavating staff, but he saw the place at first hand, and my wife learned a lot about Egyptology from him.
And they've had a whole course in dietetics, She learned, for example, that the ordinary housewife uses more butter in cooking than is at all necessary—that while maybe butter may make grub taste a little better, it doesn't add proportionately to the calories or whatever they are, and so she learned one way in which to economize. And my God, these days, what with the cost of gasoline and golf balls, a fellow has to economize on something.
So as I say, she has a chance to lead a free life and have a lot of dandy times, because I've provided her with all the household conveniences. But who paid for 'em? Where did the money to pay for 'em come from? From my toil and efforts, that's where it came from, and do you think I can get her to appreciate that? Not for one moment!
All day long I slave and work to keep her in luxury, and then when I come home at night all tired out, do I find her ready to comfort me? I do not!
I might as well not have a wife at all. And then when I try to make her understand what I've been doing—like telling her how hard I've worked to sell a new adding-machine to some fellow that didn't want it and maybe didn't need it, do you think she appreciates it? She does not!
Why, she always makes out like she wishes I was a doctor, or one of these he-lecturers that goes around spieling to women's clubs, or some darn' arty thing like that, and sometimes she practically up and says she wishes I could make love like one of these Wop counts, or a movie actor!
She says I just think of business and not of her. But I notice she's good and plenty glad to grab all the money I bring home from that business, all right!
It was—
Now I wouldn't say this to anybody else on God's green earth, and for heaven's sake don't you ever breathe a syllable of it, even to your wife, but I've been beginning to think here lately that it was all wrong with Mame and me right from the beginning!
Not that I'd ever do anything about it, you understand—even though I have got a lady friend in New York, simply a little darling and at least twelve years younger than Mame, too—but I don't believe in divorce, and then there's the children to think of. But it was all wrong—
I've learned a lot here lately. I've been studying and delving into psychoanalysis. Know anything about psychoanalysis?
Well, I do, and say, it certainly is a revelation. I've read almost clear through a manual on it—a very authoritative book written by a lady, Miss Alexandrine Applebaugh, that's a great authority on the subject, because she studied with a man that was a pupil of one of the biggest pupils of old Freud, and it was Freud that invented psychoanalysis.
Well, now I'll explain what psychoanalysis is. It's like this:
Everybody ought to have a rich, full sex-life, and all human activities are directed toward that. Whenever a guy is doing something, it's directed toward making himself attractive sexually, especially if it's something big and important—no matter whether it's painting a picture or putting over a big deal in Florida town-lots or discovering a new eclipse or pitching in a World Series game or preaching a funeral sermon or writing a big advertisement or any of them things. On the other hand, when fellows like us do put over something, we want to be appreciated, and we got a right to expect it, and if we don't get appreciated at home, we ought to find new mates, see how I mean?
Only you get into so doggone many complications and trouble and all that maybe it ain't practical, even with a cute girl like this one in New York I was speaking about— Ain't really worth it.
And then there's a lot in psychoanalysis about dreams. All dreams mean you ought to have a different kind of a wife—oh, they're mighty important!
And so now you'll understand psychoanalysis—as well as anybody does, anyway.
★
Well, as I say, now that I've mastered psychoanalysis, I can see things was all wrong with Mame and me from the beginning.
I was a young fellow, just come to Zenith, then, working in a wholesale paper house and living in a boarding-house out in the Benner Park district, and in those days that district was just like a small town. I met a dandy crowd of young people at the church and so on, and we used to have dances and picnics and sleigh-rides and everything—rube stuff, but lots of fun.
Well, Mame—her father was in the roofing business, did a pretty good business, too, for them days—she was one of the jolliest girls in the bunch, but she was awful on the level. There was some of the girls in our crowd that you could get pretty fresh with—nothing wrong, you understand, or not hardly ever, but still when you was all cuddled down together in the hay on a sleigh-ride, you could hold their hands and maybe even pat their knees a little.
But Mame—never! No sir! Why say, she was so pure and religious that one time at a dance when I tried to kiss her, she slapped hell out of me!
So of course that just led me on. Made me think she was the living wonder.
Maybe if I'd known then as much as I know now, I'd 've known that it isn't so bad for a girl that you're going to spend your life with, intimate, you might say, to have a little of the Old Nick in her and not be so doggone adverse to a little scientific cuddling—within reason I mean, of course, you see how I mean?
Well, so we got married and she never did get so she liked—
I mean, she hints around sometimes and kind of hints that it's because I'm just a poor plain plug American business man that she's never warmed up. But my God, I've never had any encouragement! I don't expect I'd ever be any Valentino, anyway, but how can I even begin to learn to show her a good time when she's always acted like she was afraid I would try to kiss her?
I tell you, Walt, I'm kind of puzzled. Sometimes I almost kind of wonder (though I wouldn't want to be quoted) whether with all the great things we got in this greatest nation in the world, with more autos and radios and furnaces and suits of clothes and miles of cement pavements and skyscrapers than the rest of the world put together, and with more deep learning—hundreds of thousands of students studying Latin and bookkeeping and doctoring and domestic science and literature and banking and window-dressing—even with all of this, I wonder if we don't lack something in American life when you consider that you almost never see an American married couple that really like each other and like to be with each other?
I wonder. But I guess it's too much for me. I just don't understand—
★
But I'm getting away from my subject. To return to Mame:
Aside from her apparently not wanting me to be anything whatsomever around the house except the guy that pays the bills and carves the duck and fixes the furnace and drives her car out of the garage so she can go off to a hen bridge-party, here lately we've got into kind of a bad way of quarreling.
Well, here's an example:
We used to have dogs for quite a while after we were married, and I always did like to have a good dog around the house. Kind of gives you somebody to talk to when you come home and there ain't anybody around—just sits and listens while you explain things to him, and looks like he understood! But here about six years ago, just at a moment when we didn't happen to have a dog, somebody gave Mrs. Schmaltz—gave Mamie, I mean—a very fine expensive cat by the name Minnie—not exactly a full-bred Persian, I guess, but pretty full-bred at that.
But at the same time, even appreciating how much money she was worth, I never did like that damn' cat!
You see, we also had a canary, a very valuable little canary named Dicky, a real genuwine Hertz Mountains canary, and intelligent—say, there's those that say a canary isn't intelligent, but I want to tell you that that canary knew me, and when I'd stand near the cage he'd chirp just like he was talking to me.
He was a lot of comfort to me, not having a dog at that time—I was looking for a high-class English setter, and hadn't been able to find one at the price I felt justified in paying.
Well sir, here was a surprising thing. We fed that cat and fed her—I'd hate to tot up all the money we've paid out for milk and meat for that cat—but even so, she was bound and determined she was going to get at that poor little canary. She'd hang around underneath the cage and look up at Dicky, absolutely bloodthirsty, and one time when somebody (and I always thought it was Mame did it herself, too, and not the hired girl)—when somebody left a chair right practically under the cage, Minnie lep' up on the chair and absolutely did her best to leap up and get at the cage.
Of course Mame and I had words about that—
And then that damn' cat never would be friendly, at least not to me.
I used to say to Mame, "Well, what does the fool cat do for its living, anyway? Think we're sent into the world just to loaf around and enjoy ourselves and sponge on other people?" I says.
Wouldn't sit in my lap—no sir, not for a minute. I used to get so sore at that cat that I'd kick it good and plenty hard, when nobody was looking—I showed it its place, by God—and still I couldn't get it to be friendly.
And we talked a lot about it, about the cat and the canary, and one thing often led to another—
You know how it is.
And when I talked about getting another dog, no sir, Mame wouldn't hear to it—said a dog would frighten her ittly, bittly, sweetsy, bitsy, high-hatting, canary-murdering damn' cat, by God!
Well, I made up my mind that I was going to be master in my own household, but— Oh well, things just kind of floated along for several months, and I didn't do anything special about buying a dog, and then one day—
I remember just like it was yesterday. I'd been out to the country club for a few holes of golf—I remember I was playing with Joe Minchin, the machinery king, Willis Ijams, our leading—or certainly one of the leading hardware dealers, and fellow named George Babbitt, the great real-estate dealer. But I was driving home alone, and I remember there was something wrong—car kept kind of bucking—couldn't exactly figure out what it was, so I stops the car right by the side of the road—it was late autumn—and I lifts the hood and I'm trying to figure out what's wrong when I hears a kind of a whining and a whimpering, and I looks down, and by golly there's a nice water spaniel—not very old, not more'n say two or maybe nearer two and a half years old, sitting there and looking up at me so pathetic—say, it was absolutely pathetic. And he held up his paw like it'd been hurt.
"Well, what's the trouble, old man?" I says to him.
And he looks up, so intelligent— By golly, I just loved that damn' tyke. Well, make a long story short, I looks at his paw, and way I figured it out, he'd cut it on some broken glass—but not bad. Fortunately I had some old but clean rags there in the door-pocket of the car, and so I sat down on the running-board and kind of bound up his paw, and meantime I noticed—and a good, high-grade dog he was, too—I noticed he didn't have any collar or license or anything. And when I'd finished, doggoned if he didn't jump up into my sedan like he belonged there.
"Well, who d'you think you are?" I says to him. "What are you trying to do, you old hijacker," I says to him. "Steal my car? Poor old Pop Schmaltz with his car stolen," I says.
And he just curls up on the back seat and wags his tail, much as to say, "You're a great little kidder, but I know which side my meat is buttered on."
Well, I looks up and down the road and there wasn't anybody in sight that looked like they were looking for a dog, and there was only a couple of houses in sight, and when I got the car to acting Christian again—seems the carburetor needed a little adjusting—I drives to both these houses, and they didn't know nothing about no lost dog, so I says, "Well, don't like to leave old Jackie here—"
That's what I named the pup, and that's what I call him to this very day.
"I'd better not leave him here to get run over," thinks I, "and when we get back home, I'll advertise and see if I can find his owner."
Well, when I got home, Robby—you remember my boy, Walt—Robby was just as crazy about having a dog as I was, but Mame gets sniffy about how the dog'd scare that damn' cat Minnie of hers. But she let me keep Jackie, that's the dog, out in the garage till I'd advertised.
Well, I advertised and I advertised—
No, come to think of it, I guess it was just one ad I put in, because I thinks to myself, "Jackie looks to me like a regular man's dog, and if his owner ain't keeping a look-out, can't expect me to do all the work!"
Anyway, never got an answer, and in 'long about a week, Mame wakes up and begins to realize, here I am with a dog that ain't going to be buddies with her cat—and say, was she right? Say, the first time Minnie comes pee-rading out on the lawn to see if she can't murder a few sparrows, Jackie, his paw was well enough for that, he takes one look at her, and say, honest, you'd 've laughed fit to bust; he chases her 'way clean up our elm tree, and keeps her there, too, by golly.
Well, after that, there was a hell of a powwow with Big Chief Wife, and no peace-pipe in sight. She gets me in the house, away from Robby, who'd 've backed me up, and she rides the wild mustango up and down the living-room, and throws her tomahawk into the tortured victims, meaning me, and she says:
"Lowell Schmaltz, I've told you, and if I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times, that Minnie is a very sensitive and high-bred cat, and I will not have her nerves all shattered by being annoyed by a lot of horrid dogs. I want you to find the rightful owner of this horrid dog and give him back."
"Give who back? The owner?" I says, just sitting down and lighting a cigar and trying to look like I was amused and there was nothing she could do or say that would get my goat. And of course I had her there: "Give who back? The owner?" I says.
"You know perfectly well and good what I mean," she says. "And I want you to find the horrid thing's owner at once!"
"Fine!" I says. "Sure! Of course all I've done is to advertise extensively in the Advocate-Times, which only has more circulation than any other two papers in this territory put together—or so they claim, and I've looked into it and I'm disposed to accept their figures," I says. "But of course that isn't enough. All right, I'll just tuck Jackie under my arm, and start right out— Let's see," I says, "there's only about six hundred thousand people in Zenith and the neighboring towns, within perhaps a twenty-eight or thirty mile radius of City Hall, and all I'll have to do will be to run around to each of 'em and say, 'Hey, mister, lost a dog?' That's all I'll have to do."
"Well, then, you can take the horrid beast out where you found him and leave him there," she says.
"I can, and I ain't going to," I says—flat. "I'm not going to have him run over by some damn' fool careless motorist," I says. "He's a valuable dog," I says.
"He's horrid—and he's terribly dirty. I never did see such a terribly dirty dog," she says.
"Oh, sure," I says. "Of course aside from the notorious fact that he's a water spaniel—and water spaniels' being, even if they ain't at present as fashionable as cocker spaniels or wire-haired terriers or Airedales, merely notoriously the cleanest dogs that exist," I says, "aside from that, you're dead right."
"But we don't need a dog anyway," she says.
Well say, that kind of got my goat.
"No," I says, "sure we don't. I don't, anyway. Think what I've got here to be chummy with in the evening. Elegant! This nice, fluffy, expensive feline cat, that hates me like hell, that won't sit in my lap, that cottons to you because you got nothing to do all day but stay home and pet it, while I have to be in my store, working my head off—to support a damn' cat! Fine!" I says.
But then I got serious, and after some remarks back and forth about how she did have things to do, like running the house and looking after my clothes and Robby and Delmerine—you know how any woman can make out like she works like a slave—after that I got serious, and I says:
"But seriously," I says, "when you come to look at it in a serious manner, what is a dog? What is a dog? What is he but man's greatest friend! Who so unselfish as a dog? Who so welcomes the weary man—yes, or woman, for that matter, if she treats 'em right!—when they come home weary from the day's labor? To say nothing of their being in many lands also useful in a practical way in helping to haul carts, also as watchmen.
"You forget," I told her, "all the wonderful things we've seen Rin Tin Tin do in the movies. Why say, I'll bet that dog's salary is higher than that of any film-author or even camera-man. But aside from that, think of some of the dogs of history. Think of those brave Saint Bernard dogs, going out with little barrels of brandy under their chins to rescue belated travelers in that pass in Germany, or wherever it was—though I never could understand," I admits, "why there were so many travelers that kept taking a chance and getting belated in the snow that they had to keep a whole corps of dogs running to rescue them all the time. But still, that was in old historic times, and maybe things were different from now, and of course no railroads—
"But in modern times," I told her, "I've heard an anecdote, and I got it mighty straight, from a fellow who knew the fellow who was in the story, and it seems this fellow was a trapper or a miner or a prospector or something like that, anyway he had a cabin 'way off in the Sierras or some place like that—high mountains, anyway—and seems it was the depth of winter, and this fellow's cabin was all snowed in, also the tracks and trails and all were deep buried in the snow.
"Well, seems this fellow had an accident, slipped down a crevasse or something like that, and busted his leg, seriously, but he managed to make his way with great difficulty back to his cabin where his faithful dog, I never did learn the name of the dog, was waiting for him, and then as a result of the accident, he fell into a kind of fever, I suppose it was, and he lay there simply shot to pieces, and in great suffering, and attended only by this faithful dog, who couldn't, of course, do much to help him, but he did his best, and he was a mighty smart, clever dog, and the trapper, or whatever this fellow was, he trained this dog so's he'd bring a match or a drink of water or whatever it was the poor devil needed.
"But there wasn't any way of cooking any food—it goes without saying that that was something the dog couldn't help him with—and the trapper got worse and worse, and he was in great pain, and you could see the dog was worried about what to do, and then all of a sudden, one day by golly the dog gives a kind of a short quick yelp, and he dives right through the cabin window, head on, and he's gone—not one sound from him.
"Well, of course, the poor devil of a trapper, he thought his only friend had deserted him, and he gave himself up to die, and it was almost as bitter as the pain itself to think that he'd been deserted by the only friend he had.
"But all this time, the dog was not idle. He goes lickety-split, following the snow-obliterated trails as if by instinct, 'way down and down and down to the far-distant nearest village, and comes up to the doctor's house, where he'd been once several years before with his master.
"Well, the door is slightly ajar, and the dog busts in and whines at the feet of the doc, who was at dinner.
"'You get to hell out of here—how'd you ever get in here anyway?' the doctor says, naturally not understanding the situation, and he chases the dog out and closes the door, but the dog stands there on the door-step, whining and otherwise trying to draw the attention of the doctor, till the doctor's wife begins to think something is wrong, and they cautiously let the dog in again and try to feed it, but it keeps tugging at the doc's pants-legs and refuses to eat a single morsel, till at last the doc says, 'Maybe I'm needed somewhere, and come to think of it, this dog looks like the dog that that trapper had back in the mountains when he came here one time.'
"So anyway, he takes a chance on it—of course he hasn't got any more idea than the man in the moon where this fellow lives, but he hitches up his cutter, and the dog runs along in front of them, picking out the best road, and they come to this cabin, hours and hours from anywhere, and the doc goes in, and here's this fellow with the fever and busted leg in dire need. Well, he tends to him and gets him some chow and is all ready to move him to civilization when he thinks of this poor dog that's saved him, and he turns to find him, and the poor little tyke has crawled into a corner and fallen dead, exhausted by his terrible race for life!
"That's what dogs can do," I tell her, and then I tells her some other absolutely authentic anecdotes about dogs and we pass a lot of remarks back and forth, and final result is, she says all right; she'll stand my keeping the dog, but he's got to stay out of the house, and I can build him a dog-kennel out beside the garage.
★
But you know how things go. One morning I gets up early and has breakfast by myself, and there's Jackie whining outside, and I takes a chance and lets him in and feeds him, and that cat comes marching into the room like a Episcopalopian rector leading a procession, and Jackie gets one squint at her and chases her up on the buffet, and just then Mamie comes in and—
Say, I didn't stop with no buffet; I didn't stop till I'd reached the top of the Second National Bank Tower. But seriously, though, she certainly give Jackie and me such an earful that—
Well, Joe Minchin had planned a poker party for that evening and I hadn't kind of intended to go, but Mame bawled hell out of me so at breakfast that later in the day I said I'd go, and I went, and I got lit to the eyebrows, if the truth be known—say, I was simply ossified.
So I comes home late, thinking I was both the King and Queen of Sheba, and then I got dizzy and just about the time Mame'd thought up her adjectives and was ready to describe me for the catalogue of domestic sons of guns, I couldn't tarry, oh, no longer—I had to be wending my way into the bathroom P.D.Q., and there, say, I lost everything but my tonsils. Wow!
Well, Mame was awful' nice to me. She helped me back into bed, and she bathed my forehead, and she got some black coffee for me—only what I wanted was a good cyanide of potassium cocktail—and when I woke up in the morning she just kind of laughed, and I thought I was going to get by without the matrimonial cat-o'-nine-tails—I actually thought that, and me married over twenty years to her!
So when my head gets itself reduced to not more'n six or seven normal times its ordinary or wearing size, and I gets up for breakfast, not more'n twenty or twenty-two hours late, and she's still bright and—oh God, what a blessing!—still keeping her trap shut and not telling me about salvation, why, I thinks I'm safe, and then just when I stagger up from breakfast and thinks I'll go down to my store, if I can remember where I left my garage last night, why, she smiles brighter'n ever, and says in a nice, sweet, cool, Frigidaire voice:
"Sit down a moment, will you please, Low. There's something I want to say to you."
Well—
Oh, I died with my face to the foemen. I tried to take the barricades in one gallant dash, like Douglas Fairbanks. I says briefly, "I know what you want to say," I says. "You want to say I was lit, last night. Say, that isn't any news. By this time it's so old and well known that you can find it among the problems in the sixth-grade arithmetic book," I says. "Look here," I says, "it wasn't entirely my fault. It was that God-awful bootleg hootch I got at Joe's. It'd been all right if it'd been honest liquor."
"You were disgusting," she says. "If my poor father and mother hadn't passed away, and if my sister Edna wasn't such a crank about theosophy that nobody could live with her, I'd 've left you before dawn, let me tell you that."
Well, I got sore. I'm not a very bad-tempered cuss, as you know, but after along about twenty years, this threatening-to-leave-you business gets a little tiresome.
"Fine," I says. "You're always blowing about how much you know about clothes. I'll be glad to give you a knock-down to some of the big guys at Benson, Hanley and Koch's," I says, "and probably they'll make you buyer in the ladies' garments department," I says, "and you won't have to go on standing for a gorilla of a husband like me."
And she says all right, by God she'II do it!
And we seesaw back and forth, and I kind of apologizes, and she says she didn't mean it, and then we really gets down to business.
"But just the same," she says, "I'm not going to have that dog in the house again! You've not got the least consideration for my feelings. You talk so much about your dear old friends, like this horrible Joe Minchin, but you never give one moment's thought to what I need or like. You don't know what the word 'thoughtfulness' means."
"All right, I'll look it up in the dictionary," I says. "And speaking of thoughtfulness," I says, "when I was going out last night, I found you'd been using my safety razor and hadn't cleaned it, and I was in a hurry and you'd neglected— By God," I says, "when I was a boy, a man had his sweaters to himself, without his wife or sister calmly up and using 'em, and he had his razor to himself, and he had his barber-shop to himself—"
"Yes, and he had his saloons to himself, and still has," she comes back at me. "And you talk about neglect! It isn't only me you neglect," she says, "when you go and get full of liquor, and it isn't simply the example you set the children, but it's the way you neglect the church and religion," she says.
"And of course I'm only a deacon in the church," I says. You know—sarcastic.
"Yes, and you know mighty good and well you only took the job because it'd give you a stand-in with the religious folks, and every Sunday you can, you sneak off and play golf instead of going to church. And that morning when Dr. Hickenlooper came in from Central Methodist and preached for us—that time when poor Dr. Edwards was sick and couldn't preach himself—"
"Sick? He was sick like a fox," I told her. "He just had a sore throat because he'd been off on a lecture trip, shooting his mouth off before a lot of women's clubs to rake in some extra dough, when he ought to stayed home here and tended to his job."
"That's entirely aside from the question," she says, "and anyway, instead of listening to Dr. Hickenlooper like you ought to, you and a couple other deacons stayed out in the lobby of the church."
"Yuh, there's something to what you say," I told her. "Hickenlooper is a fine man. He's all for charity—providing some rich man provides the money for the charity. I don't believe he's ever smoked a cigar or had a nip of liquor in his life. He's a credit to the Methodist clergy. It's true he does bawl out his wife and his kids all the time, and it's true he nags his secretary all day long, but you can't blame a man that's busy with the Lord's work for being maybe a little irritable. In fact there's only one trouble with the holy man—he's the worst and most consistent liar in seven counties!
"I've heard him tell as his own experience things I know he read in books, because I've seen the books. And here's a story that our own pastor, Edwards, told us. Seems Hickenlooper met him in front of our church one Monday morning, and Hickenlooper says, 'Well, Dr. Edwards, my brother-in-law heard you preach yesterday, and he said it was the best sermon he ever heard in his life.'
"'Well, that's nice,' Dr. Edwards says, 'but it just happens that I didn't preach yesterday.'
"I guess I'm a kind of a blowhard," I says to Mamie, "and in general I'm just a plug business man, while Hickenlooper addresses Chautauquas and addresses colleges and addresses Methodist conferences and writes articles for the magazines and writes lovely books about how chummy he and God and the sunsets are, but say, if that holy liar knew what even poor, ordinary business men like me really thought about him and what they said privately, he'd sneak off to a desert and never open his mouth again!"
★
Well say, that had Mamie wild—and don't you think for one moment, Walt, that she let me get by without a few interruptions that I haven't put into the story. And what I've just told you about this Hickenlooper bird—he looks like a prize-fighter and talks like a glad-hand circus ballyhooer, and he lies like a politician—was all straight, and she knew it. I've done a little lying myself, but I've never made a three-ring circus of it like him. But Mamie had a sneaking kind of admiration for him, I guess because he's big and strong and a great baby-kisser and girl-jollier. And she let loose on me, and what she said— Whee!
She said I encouraged Robby to smoke. She said I never used an ash-tray—always scattered my ashes around the house—and I'm afraid she had me there. And she said she was sick of having my friends around the house all the time, and I bawled her out for high-hattin' 'em, and she said something about my driving too fast, and I come back with a few short sweet words about back-seat driving—she's the best single-handed non-participating Major Seagrove of the entire inhabited world. And—
And so on.
And that's just typical of a few home Board of Directors conferences we been having, and I'm pretty sick of it.
Not but what I'm just as mean as she is, at that, I suppose.
But I did by God keep old Jackie!
But I'm getting sick of the whole business—
Not, you understand, but what Mame is just as nice a pal as you'd want to find, in between tantrums. That time we were here and saw you and then went on and had our long talk with Coolidge in Washington, she was jolly the whole time. But more and more—
★
Say, I don't know as I ought to tell you about this, hardly, but this girl I was speaking of in New York—well, she isn't exactly a girl any more, but she's only thirty-eight and that's seventeen years younger'n I am—Erica, her name is, and say, she's one of the most talented little women I ever met.
By rights, she ought to be a world-renowned portrait-painter, but she's always run into the damnedest hard luck, and just now for a few years she's been working for the Pillstein and Lipshutz Christmas and Easter Greeting Card Company, where I always get my greeting cards. Of course by rights I'm not a stationer but stick right to office supplies, but same time, along at these holiday times, I feel it does kind of brighten up the business to stock a few handsome cards, and pay—say, it brings me in hundreds a year.
Well, Erica designs a lot of cards—darn' smart intelligent girl—does the drawings and the poems and the whole thing. Say, you've probably seen some of her cards. It was her that wrote that famous one that had such a big sale—the one with the two kids shaking hands in front of an old schoolhouse, and then a lot of holly and so on, and the poem:
Does not make love the colder grow,
But on contrary pries apart
Wider the cockles of the heart.
In jolly winter and summer weather,
'Tis years indeed since we have met,
But our old friendship I'll ne'er forget.
Say, it'd surprise you how many of those cards a lot of hard-boiled old business men buy to send to fellows they haven't seen for years. I tell you, that fellow Manny Pillstein is a genius. Of course there've been greeting cards for years, but he was the first one to put the business on a scientific, nationally advertised basis, and really standardize and Fordize all this Holiday Good Will so it'd amount to something. They say he's increased the business 10,000 per cent.—made it as practical as chain grocery stores or even Mother's Day.
Well, I met Erica there at his place, and I was alone in New York, and I invited her to dinner, and I blew her to a nice little feed with a bottle of real domestic Chianti. Well, we got to talking and telling our ideas and so on, and come to find out, poor kid, she was pretty near as lonely in New York as I was.
And then every time I blew into the Big Burg—alone—I'd see her, and—
Now say, her relations and mine was just as pure as the driven snow. Maybe I'd kiss her in a taxicab, or something like that, and tell the truth I don't know how far I'd 've gone if I'd got her off to Atlantic City or something like that, but my God, with my position and my responsibilities, both financial and social, I didn't want to get into no complications. To tell the truth (and I'd never tell another living soul but you), one evening I did go up to her flat— But only that once! And I got scared, and just used to see her at restaurants.
But be the cause what it may, our relations were entirely and absolutely friendly and intellectual, and know what she told me?
When I told her what I thought of her work—and to me, and I told her so, she's the best greeting-card artist in the country—she told me my appreciation was the greatest encouragement and the greatest incentive to go onward and upward to finer and better art that she'd ever received! And let me tell you, I've never had anything buck me up, in turn, like her appreciation of my appreciation. Whereas at home—
If I try to tell Mame that she plays a good mitt of bridge, or that I think she's got on an elegant new dress, or she sang some song at some church affair real pretty, or like that, she just looks like she was saying, "Who the hell ever told you you was a connooser?"
Oh God, I suppose we'll always go on, just about the same way, but if I was younger—
Well, I ain't!
★
Well, Walt, I guess it's getting late and about time for us to turn in—you'll have to be in your office tomorrow, and I think I'll take that 12:18 for home, if I can get a Pullman.
It's been a mighty great privilege to have this frank talk with you. I certainly will take your advice. I'll try to keep from talking and running on so much—you noticed this evening at supper I hardly said a word, but just listened to your good wife. You bet. I've learned my lesson. I'm going to concentrate on selling the goods, and not discuss subjects and topics all the time.
And I hope you'll give my schedule a mighty close once-over and see your way to advance me the loan.
You remember how I've always turned to you. Remember that month I spent with you boys on your granddad's farm when we were 'long about twelve?
God, what fun that was! Regular idyl, you might say, like a fellow can't touch again in these later care-ridden and less poetic years. Remember how we stole those mushmelons from that old farmer, and when he got sassy about it we went back and smashed all the rest of 'em? Remember how we hid the alarm-clock in the church so it went off during the sermon? Remember how we greased the springboard so's that Irish kid slipped on it and almost busted his back? Gosh, I had to laugh!
Oh, those were great days, and you and me always did understand each other, Walt, and don't forget that there's no firm in the world could give you better security for the loan.