Couples (16 page)

“With his bare hands?”

With your bare hands?

Sure. Why not? Why haven’t you done this yourselves?

We thought it served some purpose
.

It did, but winter’s over. Welcome to spring. Now. This should turn, with a little love. Ah, It does. Come on
.

Oh. I’ve hardly ever been on the porch. Are the screens still mendable?

He had taken a loose piece of rusted screening and crumpled it and showed her the orange dust like pollen in his palm.
New screens will be one of the least of your expenses. Alcoa makes nice big panels we can fit into runners along here. And here. Take them down in the fall. In summer this porch is the best room in the house. Grab the breeze
.

But it makes the living room so dark. I was thinking of having it torn away
.

Don’t tear away free space. You bought the view. Here’s where it is
.

Do you think we were silly? To buy it
.

Not at all. This could be a dandy house. You have the skeleton and the size. All it needs now is money
.

It was my husband who fell in love with it. I thought of us living nearer to Boston, in Lexington or Newton
.

You know
—Instead of finishing, he had jogged up and down on the boards, where the line of the porch sagged, testing.

Yes?

Your porch sill is missing a support. Don’t hold any square dances out here
.

You started to say something
.

Not really
.

She had waited.

I was going to say that your view makes me sad, because my wife loved it, and I didn’t have the courage to do what your husband has done, take this place on
.

Do you think courage is what it took? It may have been more a matter of self-esteem
.

Perhaps
.

Maybe it’s just not your kind of place
.

Thank you. I didn’t feel it was. I’m not a seaside type. I like to feel lots of land around me, in case of a flood
.

I suppose me too. I hate wet feet
.

But you’re happy here, aren’t you? Somebody told me you said you were. It’s none of my business, of course
.

He had seemed so courtly and embarrassed, so ready to put himself back into the hired-man role, that her tongue hastened to ease his presumption.
Yes, I’m happy enough. I’m a little bored. But I like the town and I like the people I’ve met
.

You do?

You say that with such surprise
.

Don’t mean to. I guess I’m past asking myself if I like them or not. They’re mine
.

And you’re theirs?

In a way. Watch out. It can happen to you
.

No, Ken and I have always been independent. We’ve never gotten involved with people. I suppose we’re both rather cold
.

He had taken out a knife and, having turned his back on her, was prying.
Your window sashes should all be replaced
.

Wouldn’t storm windows make that unnecessary?

Some of these frames are too rotten to screw a storm sash into
.

I hope—

You hope what?

I was going to say, I hope we can have your wife down, you and your wife, when the house is fixed up. Already I’m frightened she won’t approve of what we do to it
.

He had laughed—his laugh came from deeper within him than the laugh of most men, was warmer, a bit disconcerting, more invading.

She had tried to defend herself.
I don’t know why I should be worried about your wife’s approval. She’s a lovely person
.

His laugh repeated.
And your husband’s a lovely man
.

II.
APPLESMITHS AND OTHER GAMES

F
OXY
was both right and wrong about Janet. Janet had never actually slept with Freddy Thorne, though she and Freddy had held earnest discourse about it, and her affair with Harold little-Smith had proved to be unexpectedly difficult to untangle and end.

The Applebys and little-Smiths had moved to Tarbox in the middle Fifties, unknown to each other, though both men worked in securities on State Street, Harold as a broker, Frank as a trust officer in a bank. Frank had gone to Harvard, Harold to Princeton. They belonged to that segment of their generation of the upper middle class which mildly rebelled against the confinement and discipline whereby wealth maintained its manners during the upheavals of depression and world war. Raised secure amid these national trials and introduced as adults into an indulgent economy, into a business atmosphere strangely blended of crisp youthful imagery and underlying depersonalization, of successful small-scale gambles carried out against a background of rampant diversification
and the ultimate influence of a government whose taxes and commissions and appetite for armaments set limits everywhere, introduced into a nation whose leadership allowed a toothless moralism to dissemble a certain practiced cunning, into a culture where adolescent passions and homosexual philosophies were not quite yet triumphant, a climate still
furtively
hedonist, of a country still too overtly threatened from without to be ruthlessly self-abusive, a climate of time between, of standoff and day-by-day, wherein all generalizations, even negative ones, seemed unintelligent—to this new world the Applebys and little-Smiths brought a modest determination to be free, to be flexible and decent. Fenced off from their own parents by nursemaids and tutors and “help,” they would personally rear large intimate families; they changed diapers with their own hands, did their own housework and home repairs, gardened and shoveled snow with a sense of strengthened health. Chauffeured, as children, in black Packards and Chryslers, they drove second-hand cars in an assortment of candy colors. Exiled early to boarding schools, they resolved to use and improve the local public schools. Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games. They put behind them the stratified summer towns of their upbringings, with their restrictive distinctions, their tedious rounds of politeness, and settled the year round in unthought-of places, in pastoral mill towns like Tarbox, and tried to improvise here a fresh way of life. Duty and work yielded as ideals to truth and fun. Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home—one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.

In their first years in Tarbox, the social life of the Smiths and Applebys was passed among older men and women. Neighboring aunts dutifully called and were politely received and, in the end, resolutely snubbed. “How dreary,” Marcia would say, “these horsey people are,” and as she and Janet became intimate they coined a term, the “big H,” to signify all those people, hopefully put behind them and yet so persistently attentive, who did all the right things, a skein of acquaintance and cousinship that extended from Quogue to Bar Harbor. Discovering each other at a horsey party, in Millbrook or Scituate, that each with a great show of wifely resignation had agreed to attend, Janet and Marcia would, by way of greeting, neigh at one another. Janet’s delicate nostrilly snort, accompanied by a hoofing motion of one foot, was very piquant; she was slimmer then. In truth, they rarely declined these invitations, though as they failed to return them their number slowly diminished. For among these mocked people, however nasal and wooden-headed, the Applebys and Smiths were given presence on the strength of their names and parents’ names; it was years before Tarbox provided them with a society as flattering and nutritious as the scorned “big H.”

The Thornes and the Guerins were in Tarbox already, but there was something uncomfortable about both couples, something unexplained and embarrassed about the men—one a dentist, and the other seemingly not employed at all, though frequently in Boston. Both wives were shy; Bea did not drink so much then, and would sit quiet and tensely smiling for an entire evening. When Roger glared, she would freeze like a rabbit. Harold called them
Barbe Bleue et Fatime
. They all found Freddy Thorne’s smirking pretensions and coziness ridiculous. In those days he still had some hair—wavy fine flax grown long and combed across a bald spot. Georgene was plainly another well-trained, well-groomed
filly from the Big H, Philadelphia branch. The couples entertained each other with infrequent stiff dinners, and exchanged maternity clothes—except that Bea was never pregnant.

The people who did throw parties were a decade older and seemed rather coarse and blatant—Dan Mills, the bronzed, limping, and alcoholic owner of the abortive Tarbox boatyard; Eddie Warner, the supervisor of a Mather paint plant, a bullet-headed ex-athlete who could still at beery beach picnics float the ball a mile in the gull-gray dusk; Doc Allen; good old Ed Byrd; a few male teachers in the Tarbox schools, defensive plodders; and their wives, twitchy women full of vicarious sex and rock-and-roll lyrics, their children being adolescent. To Janet they seemed desperate people, ignorant and provincial and loud. Their rumored infidelities struck her as pathetic; their evident heavy drinking disgusted her. She herself had just produced a baby, Franklin, Jr.—eight pounds, six ounces. The skin of his temples exquisitely pulsed as he sucked her breasts, so that not only the hoarsely joshing voices and unsweet breaths but the imperfect complexions of the “boatyard crowd,” as she and Marcia had christened it, offended her; lepers should not insist on dancing. The boatyard crowd, a postwar squirearchy of combat veterans, locally employed and uncollegiate, knew that it was patronized by these younger cooler couples and suffered no regrets when they chose to form a separate set and to leave them alone with their liquor and bridge games and noisy reminiscences of Anzio and Guadalcanal.

Had they been less uncongenial, Janet would hardly have made social overtures to the Saltzes and the Ongs, who moved to opposite ends of the town in 1957 and who at least were college graduates. John Ong, indeed, was supposedly very brilliant. He worked in Cambridge, mathematically deciphering
matter, in a program underwritten by the government. He should have been fascinating but his English was impossible to understand. His wife, Bernadette, was a broad-shouldered half-Japanese from Baltimore, her father an immigrant Portugese. She was exotic and boistrous and warm and exhausting, as if she were trying to supply by herself enough gregariousness for two. The Saltzes were killingly earnest but Irene could be fun after the third martini, when she did imitations of all the selectmen and town officials her crusading spirit brought her up against. Ben had only one imitation, which he did unconsciously—a rabbi, with scruffy beard and bent stoop, hands clasped behind him, and an air of sorrowing endurance. But it was not until, in 1958, Hanema and Gallagher set up their office on Hope Street that the final ecology of the couples was established. With these two men, the Irishman and Dutchman, shaped together like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, began the round of sports—touch football, skiing, basketball, sailing, tennis, touch football again—that gave the couples an inexhaustible excuse for gathering: a calendrical wheel of unions to anticipate and remember, of excuses for unplanned parties. And the two new women, Terry and Angela, brought a style with them, an absent-minded amiability from which the other women were able to imitate the only tone, casual and amused, that could make bearable such a burden of hospitality and intermingling. In 1960 the Constantines moved into their sinister big house on the green; Carol painted, and Eddie flew. As a couple, they had an appealingly dangerous air. And now, in 1963, the Whitmans had moved into the old Robinson place.

These years had seen the boatyard crowd go from decay to disintegration. Two couples had been divorced, the schoolteachers had failed to get tenure and had quit or been dismissed, poor alcoholic Danny Mills had lost his boatyard to
the bank and gone to Florida without his wife, whose hard stringy legs had been so quick to master the newest dance step. The only remaining contact with the boatyard crowd was by phone, when one called to ask one of their teen-age daughters to babysit. Their existence, which might have been forgotten entirely, was memorialized by a strange vestige, irksome to Harold and Marcia, within the younger group of couples. There had been, in those first Tarbox years, another couple called Smith, a pair of big-headed, ruddy, humorless social pushers who had since moved to Newton but who were, for a year, present at the same parties the smaller Smiths were invited to. So the modifiers had been coined as a conversational convenience and had outlived the need for any distinction, and become part of Harold and Marcia, though by now few of their friends knew who the big-Smiths had been, or could envision their ponderous, flushed, doll-like faces, always eagerly nodding, like floats in a Shriners parade. It was an annual cause for hilarity when, with that inexorable plodding friendliness that had been their method of attack, the Smiths from faraway Newton Centre favored the Thornes, the Guerins, the Applebys, and their name-twins with a hectographed Christmas letter. In the salutation to Harold and Marcia they unfailingly put “little” in quotes
—to our Tarbox doppelgängers the “little” Smiths
.