Reinhart in Love (41 page)

“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 that 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.

“Don't give me a bad time,” said Reinhart, throwing down his empty pop bottle. “Mrs. Fedder, this is my friend Splendor Mainwaring. Splendor, Mrs. Fedder.”

Splendor took off his white cap and nodded, staying on the bike seat.

Bee Fedder did a gracious thing: gave her slender hand to the Negro and said: “I'm glad to know you” without a trace of condescension.

He hardly touched it, but wryly called attention to their difficulty with the garbage. “Don't let the park police see that. You're supposed to use those litter baskets.”

“My friend is a writer,” Reinhart told Bee. “By the way,” he said to Splendor, “I still have a manuscript of yours.”

“Oh,” said Bee in that harsh, almost derisive tone a woman sometimes assumes to indicate she is intelligent. “Oh, is that true. I'd like to read it.”

Reinhart smiled evilly at his friend. “You must get the author's permission.”

Fedder came up at that moment and shamelessly confessed to Reinhart that now his daughters did want ice cream, now that the man was actually here.

He ordered three chocolate sandwiches from Splendor.

“Right away, boss,” cried Splendor and leaned around in his seat to open the caboose-like refrigerator. “Here you go. That will be twenty-eight cents.”

Reinhart wished them all in hell.

“Twenty-eight?”
Fedder complained, showing a new side of his character.

“Seven cents each.” Splendor shrugged. “I just work here.”

The children hung like dogs underneath Fedder's elbow, looking up at the sandwiches he held; one had begun to melt in a long trickle of brown milk down his pale forearm.

“Oh,” he grumbled, and with his free hand paid him.

Splendor took quick, insolent stock of Mrs. Fedder's perfect knees and rang his bell. “Eskimo Pies!” he suddenly bawled at the empty clearing.

“So long Splendor,” Reinhart said with no punctuation, as if it were the title of a musical comedy. “Keep up your writing!”

“Oh I will,” Splendor answered. He began slowly to pedal away.

“Huh?” asked Fedder, with a quizzical grin. “You know each other?”

Reinhart felt a strange pawing at his left leg. Looking down, he saw Fedder's two-year-old wiping chocolate ice cream on his khaki trousers.

“What's this about writing?” asked Fedder, sticking his wet muzzle in Reinhart's line of vision.

“I must borrow it from you,” said Beatrice.

Splendor kept going, his jacket-back stained with perspiration, but at twenty yards, he looked back and shouted: “You better get the garbage out of that oven!”

“No, no, honey,” Reinhart was busy telling the tiniest Fedder. But he should have heeded his friend's warning, for no sooner had Splendor vanished down the trail to the ball field than a surly park policeman came towards them on the same path. Having reached and inspected the clogged oven, he issued to Reinhart—to whom he went without hesitation—a summons which ordered its recipient to pay two dollars' fine or defend himself in court against a charge of littering public property.

“I say it was a stinking trick to pull on a friend,” Reinhart shouted into the telephone, his voice echoing through the iron house. “Or do you have the nerve to deny it?”

“Hold on, Carlo,” said Splendor at the other end of the line. “The juke box is so loud here I can't make out a word. Let me close the door of the booth. Ah. Now what were you asking?”