Clair De Lune (8 page)

The meeting finally broke up for lack of consensus. Pickering packed up his petitions and stomped off, leaving the rest of them to straggle out and make their peace with each other.

Mae Dell hooked her arm through Allen's. “You sure got us in trouble!”

“Gladys and Vernie are mad at us, aren't you?”

Verna shrugged. “It's your business. You can do as you please.”

“I just didn't think it would be nice to do that to poor Mr. Frawley.”

“Look what he's doing to us,” Gladys said, grinning.

“What
is he
doing?” Mae Dell said. “I just don't understand all this.”

“Then you should have kept your mouth shut,” said Verna.

“Don't be mad at me, Vernie. Please?”

“Oh, come on, let's go eat and forget about it. It wouldn't have done us any good anyway. You comin', Allen?”

“Not this time. I've got a lot of work to do.”

“Well, you asked for it, starting that extra class.”

“But she
wanted
it,” Mae Dell chimed in. “Didn't you, Allie?”

“I wish he'd let me have something I wanted,” said Verna.

Allen said, “Maybe if you asked him—”

“Oh phoo. He doesn't want anything practical.”

“Well, what's practical,” said Mae Dell, “about a football team? Would somebody tell me that?”

“It brings in money,” said Gladys, “so they can raise our salaries.”

“I don't see what that's got to do with it. I just don't understand—”

“Get your things and come on,” said Verna. “We'll explain it. 'Night, Allen.”

“'Night,” she said and went home unregenerated.

Seven

I
t was terrible!” she said, giggling. “Pick turned purple.”

The three of them, bundled in sweaters and jackets, sat on the landing. Though official spring was only a day away, there was still a distinct chill in the twilight. Allen wore slacks. In the house it was warm, but outside, a planet as big and bright as a silver dollar hung in the cold blue sky.

George said, “He's just mad because you won't help him be the dean.”

“Wonder which one will win,” said Toby, “him or the Phud.”

“Probably neither.” Allen laughed again and bit into an apple.

“I'll lay my nickel on the Phud.”

“Why?”

“Pick's the militia. He'll go into the army.” Toby always brought things around to talk of impending war.

“I don't know why he'd do that. If he wants to be the dean, he'd better stick around.”

“He may not be able to,” Toby said

“Why not?”

“He's national guard—they can call them into regular service.”

“For what?”

“The war, for chrissake. Don't you know there's a war on?”

“Not here,” she said, spitting a seed.

“So we'll go there.” Toby assured her

“We will not. The president said no son of an American mother—”

“In a rat's reticule,” said Toby. “We've got a draft, haven't we?”

“It's a peacetime draft.”

Toby snorted.

“Well, that's what they call it, don't they?”

“This isn't peacetime,” said Toby.

“We are
not
at war!”

“Give us time.”

“Oh, shut up and eat your apple.” She slammed into the house, dropped her apple core in the garbage, and came back. “Honestly! You are the most pessimistic! You'd think you
wanted
a war.”

“Like hell I do,” said Toby.

“Then why are you always talking about it?”

“Because I'm scared.”

“Nonsense. You don't have to be.”

“Like hell I don't.”

“You said that before. Oh dear. I don't know who to believe.”

“Whom,” said George.

“Not in the vernacular.” She leaned back against the wall and, resorting to poetry as she always did, looked up and said, “‘In the high west there burns a furious star....'”

“Wonder what it's so mad about,” said George. So much for Wallace Stevens. “Want to ride the bike?” They were giving her lessons on George's old hand-me-down, which he now left in her apartment.

“Not much,” she said. “I fell off three times the other day. My knee's still sore.”

“How come you never learned to ride a bike?”

“Bikes cost money. We rode plow horses.”

They leaned back comfortably and listened to the steeple chimes ring twelve times.

“Quarter hours are unresolved,” said George. “They leave you hanging.”

“Quarter hours,” Toby said, “are a warning.”

“How so?”

He said solemnly, “Your hour is coming.”

“Well, let's improve it then.” Allen stood up. “Want to tackle Nietzsche again?”

“Nah, it's Friday night,” said George.

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Who wants to be deep on Friday night? I'd rather tackle Judy Garland. Let's go up to the Osage and see her. I've got thirty-five cents. How much you got, Tobe?”

“Half a buck.”

“I've got some money,” Allen said. “Let me run in and get it.”

“We got enough for popcorn?” George said as they went down the steps.

“We'll manage.”

They detoured across a lawn, and took a shortcut through a lot where a house had burned down long ago. Jumping onto the stone foundation, they followed-the-leader all the way around and back to the street, toward town. As they turned onto Center Street, George stopped in his tracks.

“Smell that!” The bakery was only two blocks away. “I'm starved.”

“You're always starved,” said Allen. “Didn't you have any supper?”

“We didn't have any dessert. Let's go get a pie.”

“Can't,” said Toby. “Not if you want to popcorn with Judy Garland.”

“A pie—a big, sloppy goddam pie. Breathe in!”

The mingled odors of butter and yeast, cinnamon, warm sugar, lemon and clove. Judy Garland hadn't a chance.

At the back door, which always stood open, the warmth from the bakery kitchen drifted into the alley. Inside, pastries fresh from the oven lay in rows on the long tables—cakes and sweet buns, thin brittle cookies, and muffins fat with raisins and nuts, cherries and apples steaming through lattice crusts, and cream pies hidden under gold-tipped meringue. The vote went for banana cream. Holding it carefully in a white paper sack, they carried it out to the curb.

“Let's take it to the park,” said Allen.

“Too far,” said George. “We could drop it.”

“Hey,” said Toby, “how we gonna eat this? We can't cut a pie with our fingers.”

“Use your pocket knife,” said Allen.

“I lost it.”

“George?”

“I got a pocket comb.”

“We should have bought cookies. Maybe we can trade it in.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Then we'll just have to go back to my place.”

“That's too easy.”

Toby was scowling down the street. “Follow me.”

They followed him back downtown and into a side street. The lights of the bus station glimmered through the plate-glass windows. Leaving George with the pie—“And don't eat it!”—Toby and Allen crossed the street to the lunchroom. The waiter sat at one end of the counter, reading a newspaper. He rose as they came in. “Hy're you folks tonight?”

They said they were fine and slid onto the stools.

“Yawl want to see a menu?” he said, filling water glasses.

Toby said they did. They studied them as they drank the water.

“Yawl from around here?”

“Just passin' through,” said Toby. “How's the trout tonight?”

“We don't have no trout tonight.”

“No trout?”

“'Fraid not.”

“Doggone. I'd heard you could get real good trout in this town.”

“Maybe you can some places. We don't ordinarily have it here. Have catfeesh sometimes. Don't have none tonight.”

“Well, golly. I'd been looking forward to some good trout. Hadn't you?” He turned to Allen.

“Had my mouth all set.”

The waiter grinned. “You kids serious about this?”

“No hay!” said Toby. “We come from over in Kansas where there's not such good fishin'. Maybe we could get some trout on down at Neosho.”

“Ever'thang'll be closed down there, time you get there.”

“Guess we'll take our chances.”

The waiter said, “If yawl expectin' to catch a bus, it don't go there.”

“Nah, we're drivin',” Toby said. “Left the car around the corner. You ready?” he said to Allen. “Guess we'll be on our way then. Thanks for your trouble.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she said.

They sauntered out, taking their time till they were well beyond the light. There they broke into a run. George caught up with them in the next block, and they ran out of breath in front of the Scottish Rite Temple.

“Did you get it?”

Toby shook a fork out of his sleeve. “If they'd a-had trout, we'd a-been up a creek.”

They sat on the steps between two sphinxes that supported the clustered lamps. In the dim yellow glow they finished off the pie with the relish of lucky thieves. George scraped the plate clean with his finger.

Leaning back on their elbows, they listened to the bleating of frogs somewhere in a grassy ditch.

“‘Last night we sat beside a pool of pink,'” said Allen, letting the rest go unspoken. Stevens's bright chromes and booming frog were familiar enough; they could finish the lines for themselves. “What are you reading?” she said, pulling a book out of Toby's pocket. “Oh, that again.”

Toby had borrowed her copy of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and never given it back.

George said, “How many times have your read it, for crine in the bucket?”

“Four, more or less, since we read it for the class.”

They laughed.

“Well, I like it,” he said. “There's always something I didn't get before, something you can sink your teeth into. Listen to this.” He flipped through the pages and began to read from the fifth chapter.

—Look at that basket—he said.

—I see it—said Lynch.

—In order to see that basket—said Stephen—your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket.

He read on through the passage on perception, apprehension, and esthetic image; the three forms—lyrical, epical, dramatic—into which art divides itself; and Stephen's questions on the theory of the esthetic: Was a finely made chair tragic or comic? If a man carves an image of a cow, is the image a work of art, and if not, why not?

“Is a sonata pathetic?” said George.

“‘That's a lovely one,'” Toby said, reading. “‘That has the true scholastic stink.'”

“Never mind him,” said Allen. “Go on, Toby.”

—The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.—

—Trying to refine them also out of existence—said Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke's lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came.

He closed the book, and they sat for a moment, thoughtfully hugging their knees, lost in the Joycean weather—mist, fog, rain, and evening.

“I don't get it,” George said.

Toby beat him over the head with the book and they laughed, relieved of a tension congenial but not to be held too long.

“Now,” said Toby, taking up the paper plate that had held the pie, “regard this plate. In order to see this plate, the mind separates the plate from the rest of the universe. Which is not the plate. Observe it luminously. Is this finely made object tragic or comic?”

“Tragic,” George said promptly. “It's empty.”

“Bull's-eye!” said Toby, and sent the plate spinning into the street.

“Pick it up,” said Allen. “Only white trash leaves white trash in the street.”