Comfort Me with Apples Page 3

  “I think we can fairly say now that you’re a young man with a problem,” Chickering said. “And there are some folks who think that’s my field.”

  “There are? I mean I am? What’s my problem?”

  It was from her mother Crystal had got the liquid brown eyes (now obscured by tears?)—Chickering’s were green. He had been sun-bathing recently, except that his was the type of skin that never browns but only turns the pink of mouthwashes. I tried to nurse a part-skunk indifference to the whole family, a kind of moral coma which gave me for just a moment the clearest insight into that stupor into which the insane protectively slip.

  “Why, that you’re about to enter college without a clear idea what you want to be when you come out of it: butcher, baker or candlestick maker,” he said in the American grain. “Now wait a minute. I know education is for the mind. But at the same time, you want some general idea where you’re headed. I just want to leave this thought with you, for what it may be worth.”

  Chickering’s reputation for sagacity was based largely on a way of looking at you over the tops of his glasses. He fixed me over their rims now as he said: “Whatever your lot in life is, build something on it.”

  There are times when Fate seems to be heaping mockery on us with a trowel. Just then the Chickerings’ two collies, Amos ’n’ Andy, trotted in, like supers in the travesty gathering fast about me. As they circled and sniffed me to see whether I was a candidate for Sunday dumplings and hymns around the old piano, there was a footfall on the hallway stair and Chickering said, “We’ll talk about it later. Here’s Crystal. Isn’t she blooming tonight?”

  “More than ever,” I answered tonelessly.

  I had been reprieved and not pardoned, the more bitterly to taste my doom. Now it was sure. Now I would never bicycle down the Palatinate sampling wines; never sit at the captain’s table opposite a woman returning to the States after some years spent in a novel by Henry James. I would see Niagara Falls, possibly from the air, where it would look like the kitchen sink running over. I might at the end get to visit some land of amazing contrasts if, like the man of the elderly couple at ship’s rail in the annuity advertisements, I had invested wisely. Or there might be just the one in the picture—the widow who has been left so well off.

  Clapping a hand over my mouth I bolted for the bathroom. Nothing happened though, beyond an inconclusive wave or two of nausea, and after splashing cold water on my face I came out and assured them I was all right, and could go on with the evening. No priest, thanks. I’ll take the last mile alone.

  Crystal and I were to go to a party at the home of a girl friend of hers, a quarter of a mile away. The girl’s fiancé was a fellow named Pete Hart who had gained a vogue as a wit by greeting everyone as Frisbie. In order not to get there too early, I suggested we walk.

  As we strolled toward our destination, Crystal slipped a hand into mine, and from time to time turned to smile at me. “This night.” What I died to hear I feared to ask. There was a new likelihood of my sickening, but I fought that down again.

  At last she said: “I suppose you’re anxious to know.”

  “Know?” I said matter-of-factly, and put the lighted end of a cigarette in my mouth.

  Crystal stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and swung around to me. Amos ’n’ Andy had followed along, and now they stood still and watched, like alert shrubbery.

  “You must be out of your mind, like I’ve been, so I won’t keep you on pins and needles any longer, darling,” she said. “Anything is better than suspense.”

  That was a point that could have been argued, but I didn’t stop to do so. I said, “What’s the dope?”

  “Everything is all right.”

  Free! Free! The very word went winging and singing through my heart, like a bird sprung from a cage. I was a free man. The hours in purgatory were almost worth it, for the joy of this awakening in heaven. I that had been dead lived again, the master of my fate again—I was absolutely and completely FREE!

  I turned, seized her in my arms, and, in an ecstasy of gratitude, asked her to marry me.

  Three

  I could have kicked myself. Here I’d had freedom in my grasp and let it go, victim of my passions again. For I’d lost my head in a passion of thanks scarcely worthier than its more sensual counterpart of a few weeks ago, judged as a gauge of self-control. What a jackass! Now when I confronted myself in a glass it was to twirl a finger around my temple to indicate, “Nobody home.” Well, too late for regrets, especially with the girl telling her folks you were unofficially engaged; better jump on the bandwagon and tell your own parents as much before they heard it from idle gossips.

  “I’ve fallen in love with a girl I rather like,” I announced to mine one evening.

  “Upstairs.”

  “I suppose I shall marry eventually. One does that, one drifts into stability.”

  “Upstairs, I say!”

  My mother clapped her hands. “But that’s wonderful!” she said. She was pleased as Punch when I reassured her it was the Chickering girl, whom she liked at least second to Jessie Smithers, and that I was informally engaged. The act showed pep, it showed downright spunk, especially when you had no prospects whatever and had to finish school first into the bargain before you could think of getting married. “Come and sit by me!”

  I jollied her by joining her on the sofa, where she straightway hauled my long legs up across hers so that I was halfway sitting on her lap, and rummaged in my hair for old times’ sake too.

  “I remember how when you were a little shaver you’d … you’d crawl across the floor to where we were talking on the phone and kink the cord,” she said. “As though you could stop the conversation coming through it the way you can the water in a hose. We never knew whether you were joking or serious. Did you really think that stopped the electricity in the wire?”

  “Doesn’t it?” I said with wide eyes, to give my mother that fun. She gave me a hug that squeezed a groan out of me, like a note out of an accordion.

  “We thought for a while you might be feeble-minded,” my father put in wistfully from the mantel, against which he had backed to scratch a perennially itching spot between his shoulder blades. “Well, all those things come back in a flood at a time like this, is what your mother means. I’ve done my best for you, I believe God will bear me out on that, but you cannot force values on one who will not have them.” He fingered an onion wisp of beard which together with his harried features and embedded eyes made him rather surprisingly resemble the illustrations of depleted sensibility in the very literature with which I had outraged him, the editions of Huysmans and Baudelaire and the rest whom he had read just enough of to be sent growling back to his burly Germans. “I had some standing in the community once, a fine figure of a man too. Why, when the Sunday-school children saw me go up the church walk they would say, ‘There goes Jesus.’” He drew a deep breath and resumed immediately, “And humor. Where is that? Where is it today? Paging humor, ahoy there, paging humor. Why, in my day we would get up to speak at Thanksgiving banquets, to give just one example, and begin, ‘A moment ago you could have said the sage was in the turkey. Now the turkey is in the sage.’ That was humor. Well, I’ve tried to do my best.”

  “And you have, Popper,” I said, looking over from my mother’s lap, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  “It’s a tradition I’ve tried to give you, not bread alone. The rest is up to you. You have imagination, brains, but these in themselves are not enough.” He squared himself a little and we understood more was coming. “Imagination without discipline,” he said, looking the aphorist straight in the eye, “is like a pillow without the ticking.”

  Cries of praise and thumps on the back declared he was a success. He pinched his nose and smiled shyly at the floor. “I only wish I had a financial heritage to leave you as well as a cultural. If certain usurpers of the editorial office … Ah, well, perhaps we can manage a wedding check of a thousand dollars when
the time comes.” More thumps and outcries attested to the tide of good feeling created by his knack for the right words, and my father opened a bottle of Madeira and toasted my eventual departure from his board in lambent words.

  Over at the Chickerings’, the feeling that they were gaining a son rather than losing a daughter generated a mood correspondingly sober. “I hope you find out what you want to become at Dartsmouth,” said Mrs. Chickering (who persisted in pronouncing the name of the college I went to that way).

  At “Dartsmouth,” I got letters daily from Crystal. I answered—oh, weekly. “I feel more than ever that one must burn with a hard gemlike flame, as good old Pater said,” I wrote in the winter of my sophomore year. Crystal wrote back, “I wish you wouldn’t call your father that. That’s high-school talk, Chick, and you’re in college now.”

  I must not marry this girl. I must absolutely not marry this girl. But how to break off the engagement? With chivalry and tact certainly.

  “I’m not what you want,” I said one evening during the holidays. But we weren’t having any of that. Another time I told her marriage was a corral for a man but a tether for a woman—a real trap—and I couldn’t bear the thought of that April heart caged in a kitchen and dressed in defamatory aprons. “I will not do that to you,” I said. Her eyes were heated rivets securing me to the basic social structure. There was the delicately planted idea that her parents knew how far we had gone, and they would help see to it that I wasn’t going to return any unused portion. I had on occasion expressed a vague interest in journalism, and this was presumed to be crystallizing, at Dartsmouth, into fixed purpose. Chickering had a plan of his own all worked out. Failing any successful descents of my own on the New York dailies, after graduation, he would use his influence to get me something on the Decency Pick.

  After graduation I spent two years trying, by correspondence and trips to New York, to get something on a daily there, without success, and, to be truthful about it, any real stomach for the thought. I was also presumed to be “finding myself.” I saw a lot of Nickie, who had gone through Cornell on scholarships and some help from a grandaunt of means. He kept sending repaired versions of Wise Acres to Al Roquefort, the agent, who kept sending them back. The dialogue in it was now too recherché even for me. “There’s Ronnie Ten Eyck,” someone remarked in one scene. “He’s living with his mother.” “Oh, really? I thought that was all over.” A little later on there was a joke about a masochist who gave up tight shoes for Lent. “All work and no play,” was Nickie’s account of his time, and, brother, he could have said that again! Meanwhile he worked on shorter things. The Salome legend attracted him as it had so many artists before, but he sensed the importance of exploring fresh facets of the theme rather than pursuing those exhausted by Strauss and Wilde. His dramatic version dealt with what happened to the rest of John the Baptist. “Swell,” I said when he told me about it, glad to hear of someone bent on projects even more idiotic than my own.

  Uppermost was still the attempt to get out of the engagement. That was growing harder and harder, as it had run almost six years now. We celebrated its anniversaries as other couples did that of their weddings.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you two got married?” Chickering put to me one evening when we were alone in their living room.

  “Oh, no! There’s Crystal’s future to think of,” I answered with a winning laugh. Which provoked its usual dark glare.

  The Lamplighter had evidently been working in his study, as he fixed me under a green eyeshade he had on, askew at an angle which diluted the severity of his gaze. “What this country needs is more wise men and less wise guys,” he said flintily. He shuffled through some papers he had in his lap, and then cleared his throat and revealed what he had on his mind.

  “I’m going to be given a trial on the radio—a weekly half hour over WCBR, just to see how it goes—and I was wondering if”—he bent over to pick up a dropped pencil—“if you’d be willing to let me do you.”

  I rose and danced, beside myself. “You mean on the air?”

  “The fact is good cases are hard to find, cases that will air well I mean. The thing would come in the form of a letter from you, though naturally I know what your problem is and I’ve made some suggestions how it might be put to me. After all, it’s my problem too, you know,” he added pointedly.

  “What is my problem?”

  “You’re like the Butterscotchman in the story. He couldn’t run till he got warm and he couldn’t get warm till he ran,” he said keenly.

  “And you really think I would write you a letter addressing you as Dear Lamplighter and ask your advice and all that?”

  Chickering became testy and injured.

  “Haven’t we always done the right thing by you? I don’t see why you’re so proud. You wouldn’t have to sign your name. At the mike—”

  “You’d expect me to be there?”

  “An interview, naturally. We could call you ‘Upset’ or something of the sort.”

  “But I’m not upset!”

  “Well, I am, goddam it!” he returned, tugging the visor to rights. “We all are. Me, Mrs. Lamp—I mean Mrs. Chickering—Crystal. What’s to become of you and Crystal, will you tell me that?”

  “What would you have suggested?” I asked, curious.

  He became himself again as he went through some notes he had made on my “case.” To consult them he replaced his regular glasses with reading ones. To be fixed not only over spectacles but under an eyeshade was an experience even for a man prepared to find the speaker graphic. But such was the gaze fastened on me as Chickering, after reading aloud some preliminary material, finished by saying: “There’s no substitute for Push—not even Pull.”

  “I’m glad to see so many of the old Pepigrams still holding up,” I said. “Ars longa.”

  “I’ll thank you to watch your language. We don’t hold with smut in this house.” Chickering crossly pocketed his notes and cleared his head of props. “You know I can wangle you a job on the Pick any time you want. But you can’t help someone who won’t be helped, and that’s the truth.”

  The mood the exchange left Chickering in gave me an idea. I had been going about it all wrong, in trying to extricate myself from the engagement chivalrously and graciously. It would be much easier for me to break it off—the family might even try to get Crystal to do it—if they thought less of me than they did. So I set about trying to lower myself in their esteem. I sat with my arms hung down over the sides of my chair to suggest an informed satiety, an implication that the species was exhausted and had only been an experiment in any case, and a refusal to pin my faith on technological progress. This evoked nothing to them but a lack of get-up-and-go. I cursed and swore, took snuff, professed atheism. Waiting for Crystal one Sunday evening, I remarked to her parents apropos of some worshipers hurrying by the house on their way to church: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” No cigar—too nuancy. The ring of the cliché meant to them only some latent piety in the lad after all, just as the snuff had a certain down-to-earthness which might save him yet. I hinted at insanity in my family. They praised my frankness. I planned one last stratagem. I would turn up stewed to the gills.

  I drank heavily at a party Crystal and I went to, one evening. She stiffly ignored my behavior, and on the way home spoke instead of what a wonderful conversation she’d had with a forty-year-old man who was a house guest of the host.

  “I hope you had as good a time there with Shirley Bates. Why, he’s a hotel manager in Toledo. He was very amusing about the kinds of people you meet in that business,” she said, ignoring the fact that I was pacing off the footage of the city with heel-to-toe steps. “He’s very scornful of conventions.”

  “You mean he hates gatherings or he lets people up he knows aren’t married?”

  “Take me home.”

  “I am!”

  “Then walk faster. I never want to see you again.”

  “Why not? What have I done?”
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br />   “You make a joke out of everything. And shall I tell you something? That’s a sign of immaturity.”

  “Maybe you’d better marry an older man.”

  “I will at the rate you’re getting yourself organized!”

  I did not dignify this with a reply. When we reached her house I headed straight for the liquor cabinet and poured myself a stiff nightcap. Crystal laid me out with such eloquence as to fetch her parents down in bathrobes. Mrs. Chickering stood on the bottom step and wept.

  I wove my way over to her.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, and bowed gallantly from the waist. Only the bow got lower and lower, till finally I lay curled up on the floor—out cold.

  I awoke in a bed in the Chickerings’ guest room, with. Chickering bending over me and Mrs. Chickering looking over his shoulder, a wadded handkerchief in her hand. Sliced sunlight lay across the counterpane. When I blinked, Chickering stepped over to the window and twitched shut a Venetian blind.

  “It’s morning,” he explained. “We’ve given some story to your folks, so at least they’ll be spared this. But that isn’t the important thing. What is our daughter, to you?”

  “A dish who can cook.” I was trying to lose ground with them to the end, but my tongue was a piece of bent tin and it was doubtful whether they understood, or even heard. And I was stung with remorse as I spoke. More elements were at war within me than I could have sorted out on the soberest day of my life.

  “She has more than looks,” said Mrs. Chickering, who had apparently heard but not understood. What cut me to the quick was the fact that she had been sunburned through a straw basket she had covered her face with while lying on the sand, and looked as though she had the measles. I knew then that I would marry into this family.

  “You’re a human being,” Chickering was saying. “And the question to be settled right now, in this room, is what are you going to become. A decent self-respecting member of society, or a hopeless, useless, penniless sot?”

  Obviously a multitude of alternatives lay between these extremes, but at the moment his words had a frightening cogency, especially since the sound of each one was like a hammerblow threatening to divide my head into segments, like those chocolate apples which you sunder with the tap of a spoon. “Which of the two will it be?” Chickering repeated. Then he blew his nose imprecisely into a checked handkerchief, in a moment that seemed somehow to signify the end of my youth. I decided for the more savory of the two prospects. “I’ll wend my maze,” the piece of bent tin brought out as best it could. A promise was a promise. I went with him down to the Picayune Blade as soon as I could be washed, fed and deodorized back into shape, which was about quitting time. I took a job as cub reporter and married Crystal Chickering, in that order. (I remained adamant about the invitation to appear on the radio version of “The Lamplighter,” which went off the air at the end of the month.)