Comfort Me with Apples Page 4

  The fifty dollars a week I got as a start wasn’t enough to rent an apartment and live comfortably on too, so, on returning from a honeymoon in the Poconos, Crystal and I moved in with my family. This arrangement was understood to be temporary, like my job on the Pick. The house was, thank God, as large as I’ve made out, and we had what was practically a separate apartment in it, refrigerator and all. My mother offered to send up any meals we wanted but we usually did come down for dinner, which made, with my parents and my sister Lila, five of us around the table—and two objects for my father’s chivalry. For he accused me of being as oblivious of my wife’s want of intellect as I had been of my mother’s (leaving out my younger sister, who didn’t count in this connection). One evening at dinner, for instance, my mother and Crystal had a discussion about the inevitable early adjustments of marriage—very cozy, for the two got on fine.

  “Yes,” I remarked at length, “all couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Roebuck, the boy’s married now,” my mother broke in, “you can’t do that sort of thing any more.”

  She went on to say that though still at his table I was out of his jurisdiction, and that if exceptions were to be taken to my subtlety it was up to my wife to take them; she added that this was in any case the kind of marital problem that would have to be worked out with patience and understanding on both sides. But sending me up to my room was not the way.

  “I’ll go up,” Crystal unexpectedly said, dropping her fork, and flew away. I found her in our quarters in tears.

  “We’ve got to find a place of our own,” she said. “I like Lila, and your mother’s a lamb, and even your father means well, but this won’t work.”

  I agreed that we would look for an apartment immediately. That decided, she calmed down, and we settled ourselves for the evening. I read for an hour from an author of only middling literacy while Crystal sewed at a table runner she was getting ready for my mother’s birthday. At a quarter to ten, I stretched and said, “Let’s go to bed, darling.”

  “Oh, God, no,” she said. “I’m too tired.”

  The honeymoon was over.

  That winter we had a baby boy. He was named Mike, and he looked like Madame Ouspenskaya. I began to feel the pinch of my modest salary, and put my mind to the problem of supplementing my income. (There had been no wedding check from my father, who had sunk all his spare money in a Western mine devoid of metal.) Al Roquefort’s computations left me now only a 12 per cent equity in Wise Acres, which I knew would never be put on the boards anyway. I was racking my brain about how to get some extra money when my father-in-law came through with an unexpected suggestion:

  “Write some Pepigrams.”

  Now Chickering had been manufacturing these fibroid maxims for the better part of a decade. That he had a witty memory was evident from the familiar ring of many, such as “If you’re a self-starter your boss won’t have to be a crank,” but the bulk were his own and the name they bore was his own, and patented. He told me the Pick bought Peps from anyone who could deliver the goods, at twenty dollars per. He assured me he normally frowned on the practice but would make an exception in my case, in fact would do all in his power to help me break in—by which I understood that he was pumped dry and starting to suck air.

  “They should be a cinch for you,” he said. “You talk in epigrams. Pepigrams are simply epigrams of an inspirational nature. They should be on the theme of success—in its widest sense, that is, successful living—and be designed to spur and uplift.”

  I prided myself on thinking that I could not possibly write a Pepigram. But when Crystal told me one night that we had four dollars in the bank, I decided to try my hand at them, just for the money.

  But making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse isn’t any easier than the other way around, in case you think it is; and all I could evolve was the likes of “Woman is a door of which love is the hinge and flattery the latch,” and “Thoreau said he never saw a man 100% awake, just as Freud, fifty years later, was to find no one ever wholly asleep.”

  “No, no, no,” Chickering said when I showed him those, together with a few of the mots I’d had in Wise Acres. “They’re too … I don’t think you’re trying. These aren’t Pepigrams, and you know it.” I felt a little like the young advertising copywriter in the cartoon who is being told by his superior, “Oh, come now, surely you can write worse than this.”

  I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged. I was on the verge of giving up. Then I got a Pepigram by pure fluke.

  I was roosting over a cup of coffee at the Greek’s counter, one afternoon in the early fall, when Nachtgeborn reached up to turn off a radio he’d had going back there. The announcer was just saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” but was snapped off in the middle of the sentence, so what I heard was, “All work and no play makes Jack.” I straightened on the stool. If that wasn’t a Pepigram, what was? I jotted it on my note pad and hurried over to show it to my father-in-law, who was still in his Pick office. I had to hand it to him in writing as it would have broken every tooth in my head to say it. He read it, kept his head thoughtfully lowered a moment, then looked up at me.

  “You’ve just made yourself twenty dollars,” he said.

  The pump was primed. I got the hang of it, and was off. A few of my early Peps were: “If you keep your sleeves rolled up you won’t get so much on the cuff”; “To turn stumbling blocks into steppingstones—pick up your feet”; and “If your wife is a crab maybe it’s because you’re a jellyfish.” The last was a free adaptation of the self-starter-and-crank one, and introduced the idea of private initiative into the home. It was on that ground that it was ruled a Pepigram, even though not strictly on the theme of getting ahead. My personal favorite drew a rejection. It grew out of a story I covered which involved a report of a Peeping Tom from a home in the suburbs where a party was in progress at which, it turned out, the guests had been playing strip poker. I distilled a drop of wisdom out of the incident which ran, “People who play strip poker shouldn’t report Peeping Toms.” It was ruled not strictly a Pepigram.

  Everybody was gratified with me. The publisher of the paper, Harry Clammidge, a stout man whose belt creaked every time he drew a breath, had the elder Chickerings and Crystal and me up to dinner. He opened a bottle of champagne and toasted my emergence as the new Pepigrammatist and white hope of shirtsleeve philosophy. “To the new Abe Martin,” he said, and they all drank and looked at me as I lowered my own eyes. Later we played games and were given a liqueur that tasted like nose-drops.

  Well, I got my Peps by hard work, not by sitting around the Samothrace waiting for the Greek to turn the radio off. I stole here and there, sure; I’m perfectly honest. I admit it. But I did it knowing my hands were in the pockets of thieves and that others were picking mine. I was still also a reporter—but that was all changed suddenly, and Destiny gave me another shove forward in the direction I was being hustled, when Chickering died.

  For as long as anyone could remember, he had played in an annual benefit softball game for a welfare organization known as “the Big Brothers.” It was a worthy social service kind of cause, and he was president of it, but each summer he played in the face of his wife’s reminders of the thousands of middle-aged snow shovelers and imprudent athletes who keel over annually from such exertions. This year the fate befell Chickering as he was running out a home run. The excitement itself was probably a contributing factor. He died on third. I feel a little foolish putting it that way, but those are the facts. Clammidge called me into his office the day after the funeral.

  “I just can’t imagine it,” he said, shaking his head. “The place will never be the same again. It seems funny around here without him cracking his jokes.”

  “I believe it,” I said.

  Clammidge heaved a long
sigh, as though the past were something to be realistically exhaled; then after a short pause, broken only by the steady creak of his belt, like ship’s rigging, he said abruptly: “What I called you in for was the question of the column. Of course ‘The Lamplighter’ must go on. It will go on. In fact, this comes just at a time when there’s talk of syndication, There’s only one man I know of who can fill his shoes. You.”

  “I can no such thing!” I answered resentfully. “Why, I could never turn out that column.”

  “I know better.” Clammidge looked at me shrewdly, as a man who could judge talent. “Anybody who can write the Pepigrams can write the column, because the Pepigrams are the heart of it.”

  I declined vigorously but he told me to sleep on it. “Give it hard, clear, sober thought,” he said.

  Crystal gave it that for me, twisting a damp handkerchief and interrupting herself with frequent and copious tears. “Oh, it would be so wonderful, you stepping into Daddy’s shoes, carrying on his work,” she said. “It’s this sense of continuity that, I suppose, a woman feels more strongly about than a man. But there’s also the fact that it’s your big chance. Chick, there’s no telling where you might end up.”

  Well, all this was temporary—had been from the start—and meanwhile a steady job, with enough salary to relieve me of financial worries as father as well as husband, would give me a secure footing from which to look around with intelligent leisure for something more up my alley.

  So I became the Lamplighter.

  The job, as I found on diving into the mass of correspondence accumulated since Chickering’s death, was just a job; but it did afford that sense of human perpetuity Crystal had stressed, and which I had further reason to appreciate with the passing, that spring, of my own father.

  He had written a beautiful will leaving us everything: the blue sky, the sun, moon and stars, the Mind. In addition, I was to have one advantage he himself had been denied: the opportunity to develop character and fiber through hardship and having to work for a living. Thank God the house was free and clear, though in need of repairs. I had become overnight a young man of proliferating responsibilities. The insurance did leave enough money, not only to repair the house, but to remodel it, a move on which we decided when Crystal agreed to stay provided absolute privacy could be devised for both households. My mother insisted the roles be reversed: that the main house was Crystal’s and mine, and that she and Lila were regarded as living with us rather than the other way around.

  That was another responsibility. For Lila was of age now and, instead of in my hair, under my wing—for who was head of the house if not I? I tried to be relaxed and tolerant in this matter, but such proved impossible. It was out of her affairs that our next crisis brewed.

  I was in bed early one evening on the third day of a bout of stomach flu. The doctor had ordered me to stay there but the mail hadn’t heard I was sick, and so I’d had a stack of accumulated letters from my readers sent over from the office and, propped up against two pillows, was composing replies into a bedside dictaphone. I had on a flannel nightgown (I had come not to like pajamas, no freedom of movement) and I guess a green eyeshade—for the glare from my bedside lamp. “Dear Lamplighter,” one reader had written: “My husband and I have a perennial argument about vacations. I like to get away to as distant a place as possible, but he doesn’t like trips and isn’t very keen on vacations anyway, so each year he has argued us into making less and less of a trip. This summer he says he wants to stay home altogether. Isn’t that going too far?”

  “Yes, Mrs. M., that is going too far. But you must remember that marriage is a give and …” I had begun to dictate in answer, when the bedroom door opened and Crystal came in, looking as though something were up.

  “Well, you’ve done a lot of grumbling about the beaux Lila has hanging around her,” she said, “but wait till you get a load of who’s down there picking her up now.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Nickie Sherman.”

  “What?”

  Crystal nodded. “He’s taking her to this supper dance somewhere. Nobody here knew it but they seem to have been seeing a lot of one another secretly. It looks pretty thick, too, the way they’re smooching down there.”

  I threw the covers back and sprang out of bed.

  “Get me some clothes,” I said, unbuttoning the nightgown and doffing the eyeshade. I flung the latter off like a catcher throwing off his mask to go after a high one. “Then go downstairs and head them off in case they start to leave. Don’t let them go till I get there. A stitch in time sometimes saves nine.”

  I was breathing heavily from this little exertion, for after all I’d had a fever of over a hundred. Crystal hurried into the closet and dug about for some duds. Dear God, I said within me, must there always be something?

  “Do you suppose there’s anything between them?” Crystal asked from the door, presently, as she started out of the room.

  “You’re damn right there is,” I said, drawing on trousers. “Me!”

  The Lamplighter could spot a risk when he saw one, all right.

  Four

  Love’s blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in not seeing what is. Anglo-Saxon to his finger tips (though of mixed Latin, Celtic and Semitic strains), Nickie liked undercommunicativeness in women, not realizing that Lila had nothing to communicate. A nose coming down from her forehead in a straight line was enough to make our nonesuch speak of her Grecian profile—and her walk! She was a goddess, he said, a veritable Diana. I never noticed any arrows myself, but he must have liked her quiver.

  Lila saw in Nickie the last word in sophistication and a future in the theater, surrounded by stars who Luxed their things and would call her “Darling” from the start. What I saw was an improvident brother-in-law on my doorstep if not at my board. This was a full-time vexation, coming when I already had saddle sores from overwork in the editorial chair. I tried first to queer the union in a nice way. I took Nickie aside and reviewed the incompatibilities. He was an egghead and she had a soufflé for a brain, and I put to him whether that was enough to base a relationship on. He smiled and replied that no marriage could be gone into with open eyes: it was quite precisely the plunge we proverbially called it, and every diver always instinctively shut his eyes just before he hit the water.

  “That’s a lot of crap,” I told him, “and besides I said it first. It was so long ago I’d forgotten it, but I put that line in Wise Acres.”

  “I took it out,” he answered dryly. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date to do the same with your sister.”

  And this was the kind of dialogue on which their future security must rest!

  More drastic sabotage was clearly called for.

  To oppose the match would be useless and it might be disastrous. I had a better plan. I would invite Nickie to dinner and give that bastard, in one evening, such a dose, such a caricature of married life that he would take to the woods and never be heard from again.

  I lost no time in getting to my preparations.

  First, I told Crystal to get out the resort pennants and souvenir pillows at which I had first boggled, on our setting up housekeeping, and distribute them as she wished—the more heavily the better. “Not in our living room up here—the one downstairs that Mother wants us to have from now on,” I said. Crystal fell gratefully to the mementos, which included not only the handful she had collected on our honeymoon and one vacation, but the masses her family had accumulated over twenty years of hackneyed holidays and to which her mother had invited her to help herself.

  The parlor was a horror when she finished with it-There were tasseled cushions from the Wisconsin Dells, representations of regional sunsets off which I could not take my eyes, paint-dipped encomiums of the biggest little town in every state in the Union and bunting with humorous legends from as far south as Texas and as far west as Seattle. “This is sweet of you, Chick,” she said as she screwed a bulb into the jaws of a plaster
alligator from Florida, the other end of which was plugged into a socket of my brain, such suffering. “It makes the place more homey.”

  The setting ready, there remained the farce to be enacted against it.

  I suggested to Crystal we play games the night we were going to have the sophisticate in, and she got a book from the local branch library entitled “Fun in the House.” I myself confected a batch of japes that would set us back at least fifty years. Even the dinner dishes were chosen with a view to their very names striking terror in the heart of a boulevardier: beef stew with dumplings, peas and carrots, cottage-fried potatoes; and for dessert, I thought, a nice apple pandowdy. Crystal agreed to everything.

  Before our guests arrived, I took a tray up to my mother’s room. She had caught a heavy cold in a movie air-conditioned for her comfort, and preferred to dine apart. Crystal had recently disclosed to me that she was going to have another child, and I took the chance to break the news to my mother when we were alone, knowing full well the scene that would ensue. I did so after setting the tray down on a table drawn up to a small settee on which she was seated, reading.