Edward brings Mary to meet his father

August 1928

Edward decides to take her to visit his father in Landsdowne, in Rhode Island.  Once they reach the nearly empty highway Mary lifts each foot in turn and with a suctiony thoomp removes each of her round black shoes.  There is no smell.  Edward notes however the brown human stain on the white lining that still faintly in gold reads Westerly as with two pinched fingers she sets both shoes on the floor of the car.  Now she maneuvers her white feet to rest on the dashboard.  The same pink crinkly pattern has been impressed on the top of each foot, in mirror image.  Her expression is difficult to read.  She is afraid, he guesses, but not confidently.

Out of the corner of his eye Edward studies her.  She is wearing a coral-orange scarf that was Isabel’s and which Mary has dug up from somewhere.  She has also put on the purple silk dress with a row of shining black beads across the front.  The beads gleam like caviar.  The collar is done in black velvet piping whose minute furze sends off a subtle rainbow of refracted light.  After Mary’s feet are up for a minute her purple skirt slides with a silky bunch into her lap.  Her pale legs above the rolled tops of her stockings are feathery with fine hair.  The lower hem of her underclothes reaches stiffly halfway down her thigh.  In an empty stretch when he cannot stand it any longer he reaches over between her legs and gives her a firm jostle.  She allows it for a few seconds, long enough for him to go hard in his pants.  Then she shoves him unhastily away.

His girl.

The Sunday farmyards stand empty.   A brown horse stands at a fence rail, considering the infrequent traffic.  A white drift of seagulls gleans a field.

“Say,” he says, when he can no longer stand it.

“Yes, Teddy?” she asks, pretending innocence.

This is all he needs.  At the next chance he turns off the highway.  He has found an empty farm track that passes between two hayfields.  A white farmhouse stands shuttered in the distance.  The track ends in a stand of green maples.  He presses the button to shut off the motor.  A shifting marine light enters the car.  Green-lit, her eyes shining, she is incandescently beautiful.  Burning with a green fire.

“Your father’s meeting us here, I guess,” she says.

Struck by her beauty – still, after all these months! – he loses his nerve.  He retrieves his hat from the seat beside him and balances it on the steering wheel.

“Well, you sure know how to treat a girl,” she sighs.  “Honestly, Teddy.”

“Mare,” he says.  He is faltering.  She has undone him.  He cannot speak.  He is full of grateful abandonment.

She says nothing, but her expression flashes once.  Seeing him this way she is no longer afraid.  He fumbles for the understanding that she has somehow directed him to this place.  “Gee,” she pouts, “but you have a funny idea about how I’m supposed to meet someone’s family.”

He adjusts the position of his hat on the steering wheel.

Without breaking her gaze she begins to unbutton the crotch of her underclothes.  “Really, you’d think I wanted it all the time!”

“You like it,” he says.

Her mouth comes open.  She shows him a row of white teeth and the red tip of her tongue.  He grapples with his jacket now then lowers his suspenders and frees himself from his shirttails.  His cock is short and thick and very dark and in the open air he observes its silky heft.  It seems his and not his, outdoors like this.  She leans against the door and with her eyes open she opens her legs.  She guides him in.  Mary has a deep-socketed heat that is unlike Isabel’s, as is everything about her.

“Come on, Teddy,” she whispers, a minute later.

Afterward the maple seeds come down tap-tapping on the canvas cartop.  He is collapsed across her, his face in the fabric of her dress in the region of her shoulder.  He sighs wetly.  His father is awaiting them and all this last week Fitz has been hounding him about the insurance, so this is a stolen day he cannot quite afford to lose, but the funny thing is, the funniest thing!  He just doesn’t give a damn.  Everything else can go to hell for all he cares.  He buttons up and thinks to put his hat on.  Just too tall it brushes the top of the car.  He removes it and sets it on the seat beside him.  He goes out to wind the crank, swings back in, and steers in reverse back down the rutted road.  It is much shorter than he remembers and it seems in full view of the highway.  Wrestling, he turns the car around and makes the highway.   Mary takes her own hat from her lap and settles it on her head. A pained and fascinated expression crosses her features.  She has paid too much for it, Edward guesses.  It is an expensive soft blue felt hat with a black ribbon, a knockoff Sou’wester of the sort Bishop is making now.  Maybe she is feeling remorse.  For the same money she could have had a Fuller or a Cimas.

Hats.  Well!  There is good money in hats.  They are cheap to make and the risk turns out to be getting the fashion right.  This is unsettling to think of as how can anyone know?  It is not like looking at a boy and seeing the fight in his eye.  You can tell the good ones right away, and some of the good ones become great.  But hats?  Naturally with Isabel having left him for Hardeur Edward knows all this guff.   Sure, he is sort of a chump, all right.  The former Rhode Island heavyweight champeen and second runner-up in the Southern New England Boxing Championship of 1906 is more or less against his will now a connoisseur of ladies’ hats.

Oh but now with Mary see if he cares, though, just see!

Landsdowne, where Edward is from, is south of Kingston and north of Perryville.  It is just too far inland to be really a maritime town but close enough that on a warm day you can smell the salt water.  The high road approaches from the northeast.  The first landmark after the little airstrip at the edge of town is the new high school.  When it opens this fall it will draw students from Wakefield and Tuckertown and Peace Dale.  It is built out of modern yellow brick.  It resembles a TB hospital with its small metal windows and its clean, parsimonious entryway, as though it has been designed to quarantine the infections of adolescence.  He is leaning forward pointing it out when Mary says, more tenderly than he is used to from her, “You like it here, Teddy.”

This is obscurely wounding and he fends it off.  “Aw, Mare, it’s just a town.”  He lifts his hands from the wheel, drops them again.  “I come back to see the old man.”

They pass along the main street.  The barber, the little park, the library.  “Anyhow, you look different here,” she tells him.  She has reverted now and is examining him now in the ruthless, evaluative way all girls seem to have now.  “Like a kid, Teddy.”

In response he gestures with his chin at the pond.  He risks a glance at her.  She has him fixed.  Embarrassed he sends out a cuffing fist and socks her shoulder gently.  She is right, as always.  He has done his earliest fighting here in a dusty ring marked off behind the Bowers’ pigeon coop.  He broke Freddy Martin’s nose with a clean snap in the Martins’ front yard.  Freddy reached up to cover the center of his face and his cupped hands overflowed immediately with blood.  It is a good memory.  Well, and he loves his father, sure.  But just as much he feels it important to return, for example, to his childhood basement with its magnificent dark smell of old soil and the potatoes alive in their barrels.  There is also the stepladder attic and its dusty tin trucks and abandoned furniture and the hot leathery air that gathers under the roof beams, and the boxes of books from the days when he wanted to be, serially, a pirate, a cowboy, an Indian, a Chinaman, a Pony Express rider, Alexander the Great, Ahab, Phineas Fogg, Nemo, the owner of the Nebuly Coat, the man in the iron mask, and the innkeeper at the Dragon Volant.  Now, bringing Mary here, he feels a little purl of danger.  She is so young.  Beside her he sees how his affection for the place had a soft, unserious flavor to it.  If he gives into it entirely it will be fatal to his life with Mary.  Like any other girl she wants a man with some vigor.

His father’s little house sits above the street and looks down with its four front windows onto a lawn already brown with summer.  With its measured Yankee solidity and maritime angles it is a house that would look fitting by the sea.  “There,” he says.  He stops the car at the curb.

She peers at it, adjusts her hat.

“He’s all right,” he assures her.

She sends him a complicated look made up equally of sympathy and reproach.  “You sure have no idea about things, Teddy.”  She leans across to kiss him.  “But you’re not so bad.”

Mr. Howe is a burly old country lawyer.  Seventy years old and still well-kept, he is only a little weedy around the ears and nostrils but with a punctilious manner that encourages you to overlook such things.  He shares his son’s square, heavy torso.  The son’s version has been augmented by some contribution from his long-dead mother, of whom Edward has no memory.  On the narrow porch Edward’s father turns to Mary.  He is genial, as he is to nearly everyone, especially to very pretty girls.  “Miss Hempstead.”

“Mr. Howe.”

“Nice of you to come see an old man like me.  You’ve brought someone with you.”

“Oh, this old thing,” she sighs.

“Looks vaguely familiar.  Salesman of some kind.  Scarred in an interesting manner, like he went through an adding machine with his face on.  Do I know you, sir?”

“It’s been a while.”

His father looks out at him from beneath his white eyebrows.  “Ah ha,” he concludes, “it’s you.  I was hoping you might be the man come to clean out the drain trap.  But I suppose you want a drink.  The previous number never used to drink,” he informs Mary, “but I hope you don’t follow suit.”

“Try and stop me,” she answers.

“Attagirl.”  Mr. Howe shows them into the house.  Edward, entering the hall with its oriental runner and polished cherry side table, breathes in the old, perilous air of home.  His father, slightly ahead of him, extends a hand back and finds, without looking, Edward’s elbow.  Just a touch.  Still Edward finds himself saying, very quietly, “Oh,” as though he has been delivered a sudden blow to the heart.

Edward’s father is the lawyer in Landsdowne.  He has lived alone since the death of his second wife, the second Mrs. Howe, a year ago.  The house smells of a chicken dinner that Dora has prepared before leaving for the afternoon.  In the small front sitting room beneath the mounted deer heads his father distributes portions of Irish in cut glass tumblers.  He raises his glass to Edward and to Mary, separately, without a word.  He drinks.  He is wearing old dungarees and a worn white shirt ironed ten thousand times.  He puts his brown shoes on the ottoman and considers his audience.  His son is attentive with his face full of goony sentiment.  The girl is a glory, green-eyed and smooth-skinned.  She is what the female is supposed to be.

Mr. Howe too is susceptible to things like this.

Finding his voice, Mr. Howe tips his head back and begins to fill the air.  With a barrister’s serene marshalling of argument he relates the news of the town.  Martha Hale is dying of cancer of the uterus.  Paul Luce has bought the Divine farm for cash and having knocked it down with a sledgehammer has sold the Divine house for firewood.  And Hazel Montgomery, nearly seventy, the woman who for years appeared at the doorstep with her basket of onions tied together with string asking if you wanted them, as she had too many even to pickle, she was in jail –

“Jail!”
Jail, because it turns out she has stolen more than three thousand dollars over the years from the till she kept at Tutter’s Fashions and Hose.  “And nobody noticed.”

As his father talks Edward watches Mary.  She draws her lips between her teeth and tips her head this way and that.  She displays the slope of her neck.  Edward notices his father observing her, and with his father’s touch still alive on his elbow, and perhaps under the influence of the Irish, he feels a superb proud satisfaction.  His father stands, a little unsteadily, and goes out to get the dinner.

This sort of emotion tends to get Edward in trouble, as he knows.  He had been known for his steady right jab and mountainous endurance, but like any fighter who is not quite first-rate he had a fatal flaw.  When angry or frightened, as he sometimes was, or when any sort of emotion got the best of him, he tended to overswing.  Trying to win the fight with one punch, he got into trouble.  He would open up with a roundhouse and leave his right side open.  Any fighter who knew the book on him would be waiting for it.  If he could have stopped doing it he would have, but he couldn’t.  He understood it to be a flaw in his character.  And moreover it always seemed to make sense at the time.

“You ever consider we could get married?” he asks now.

Mary produces a soft guffaw.  She looks around the curtained room as if in search of the joke.  She has these mannerisms – they are from the movies, mostly, he thinks – that mark her as younger than he.  “Teddy, honey,” she reminds him, “you’re already married.”

“I’ll get it out of her,” he promises, whispering.  The divorce, he means.

“Oh, Teddy.”  An uncertain look has entered her eyes.  “You don’t want to marry me.  You really don’t.”

“I do,” he swears.

She shakes her head once, hard.  A pure negation.  “Of all the worn-out stunts you could have pulled, to have fallen in love with your secretary is just about the most worn-out stunt in the book.  If you try to marry me, sweetheart, people start to talk.”  She shudders.  “People start to look at me.”

But who wouldn’t want to be looked at, if you look like Mary does?

Then his father returns, leaning politely into the room with his expression carefully blank, though he could not have avoided hearing them, to tell them the food is ready.  You see, Mary’s expression seems to ask.  And behind this is something else whose meaning Edward does not quite catch.  She is disgusted by him, possibly.  But also – there it is again – she is afraid.  But of what?  He will love her forever, if she will only have him.  Rising there in the light of the mullioned windows she reaches up to adjust her hair, her expression full of dreadful fascination, and passes with him beneath the mounted head.