To Sail Beyond the Sunset (21 page)

They were gone three hours. I could have walked to the post office and back in less time. But, following a corollary in my expanded Ten Commandments, I said nothing and did not mention my frets about accidents. I smiled and said happily, “Welcome home, gentlemen! Lunch will be ready in twenty minutes.”

Briney said, “Mo’, meet our new partner! Nel is going to justify our letterhead. He’s going to teach me farms and ranches and which end of a cow the milk comes out of…and I’m going to teach him how to tell fool’s gold from fools.”

“Oh, wonderful!” (One fifth of zero is zero; one sixth of zero is still zero—but it’s what Brian wants.) I gave Nelson a quick peck. “Welcome to the firm!”

“Thank you, Maureen. It should be a good team,” Nelson said solemnly. “Brian tells me he is too lazy to swing a pick, and you know I’m too lazy to pitch manure…so we’ll both be gentlemen and tell other people how to do it.”

“Logical,” I agreed.

“Besides, I don’t own a farm and I haven’t been able to find a job as a county agent—or even as the boy who opens the mail for a county agent. I’m looking for a job to let me support a wife. Brian’s offer is heaven sent.”

“Brian is paying you enough to support a wife?” (Oh, Briney!)

“That’s just it,” Brian answered. “I’m not paying him anything. That’s why we can afford to hire him.”

“Oh.” I nodded agreement. “Seems a fair arrangement. Nelson, after a year, if your performance is still satisfactory, I’ll recommend to Brian that we double your wages.”

“Maureen, you always were a dead game sport.”

I did not ask him what he meant by that. I had a bottle of muscatel tucked away, bought by Briney for Thanksgiving. It was full, save for a little used for one toast. I fetched it for that purpose. “Gentlemen, let us toast the new partnership.”

“Hear, hear!”

So we did and the gentlemen drank and I touched my lips to mine, then Nelson offered another toast: “‘Life is short.’”

I looked at him, kept surprise out of my face, but answered, “‘But the years are long.’”

He answered, just as Judge Sperling had given it to us: “Not ‘While the evil days come not.’”

“Oh, Nelson!” I spilled my glass. Then I threw myself on him and kissed him properly.

There was no mystery, truly. Nelson was of course eligible on one side of his family; we shared Johnson grandparents (and great-grandparents, although three of four were dead now—all at past a hundred). My father had written to Judge Sperling (I learned later) and said that it had come to his attention that his sister-in-law, Mrs. James Ewing Johnson of Thebes, nee Carole Yvonne Pelletier of New Orleans, had living parents; therefore his nephew Nelson Johnson might be eligible for Howard Foundation benefits, stipulating that he married an eligible.

It took them awhile, as they check health and other things, and in particular in Nelson’s case that his father actually had died by mischance (drowning) and not through other cause.

Nelson was in Kansas City because Thebes and its environs had no Howard-listed young females. So he was given a list for Kansas City—both Kansas Cities, Missouri and Kansas.

And that’s how we met Betty Lou—Miss Elizabeth Louise Barstow. Nelson did his final courting—got her pregnant, I mean—under our roof, while Maureen played shut-eye chaperon, a role I would fill repeatedly for my own girls in future years.

This protected me from my own folly—and I felt rather grumpy about it. Nelson had been my personal property before Betty Lou ever set eyes on him. But Betty Lou is a darling; I couldn’t stay grumpy. Eventually I had no need to feel grumpy.

Betty Lou was from Massachusetts. She had been attending KU, God knows why—Massachusetts has some adequate schools. But it worked out that we stood in for her parents as they could not come out for her wedding; they were taking care of their parents. Theoretically Nelson and Betty Lou should have gone back to Boston to be married. But they did not want to spend the money. The Gold Panic was getting under way, and, while that would make a boom in Brian’s business, as yet it just meant that money was tight.

Her wedding took place in our parlor on February fourteenth, a blustery cold day. Our new pastor, Dr. Draper, tied the knot, I presided over the reception, with too much help from Random Numbers, who was convinced that the party was in his honor.

Then, when Dr. and Mrs. Draper had left, I went slowly upstairs, with Brian and Dr. Rumsey helping me…the first time and almost the last time that I waited long enough for my doctor to arrive.

George Edward weighed seven pounds three ounces.

Random Numbers

Pixel went away, wherever it is that he goes, with my first attempt to call for help. Now I can only keep my fingers crossed—

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My beloved friend and shared husband Dr. Jubal Harshaw I once heard define happiness. “Happiness,” Jubal stated, “lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.

“One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result.

“Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.”

For the decade 1907-1917 I was privileged to enjoy perfect happiness by Jubal’s definition. By 1916 I had borne eight children. During those years I worked harder and for longer hours than I ever have before or since, and I was bubbling with happiness the whole time save for the fact that my husband was away oftener than I liked. Even that had its compensations, as it made our marriage a series of honeymoons. We prospered, and the fact that Briney was oftenest away when business was best resulted in our never experiencing what the Bard called so aptly: “—the tired marriage sheets.”

Briney always tried to telephone to let me know exactly when he would be home…and then he would tell me: “B.i.b.a.w.y.l.o and I w.w.y.t.b.w.” Day or night I would do my best to follow his instructions exactly; I would be in bed asleep with my legs open and wait for him to wake me the best way, but I always took the precaution of bathing first and my sleep might be only that I closed my eyes and held still when I heard him unlock the front door. Then as he got into bed with me he might call me by some outlandish name, “Mrs. Krausemeyer,” or “Battleship Kate,” or “Lady Plushbottom”—and I would pretend to wake up, and call him anything but Brian—“Hubert” or “Giovanni” or “Fritz”—and perhaps inquire, still with my eyes closed, whether or not he had placed five dollars on the dresser…whereupon he would scold me for trying to run up the price of tail in Missouri and I would get busier than ever, trying to prove that I was so worth five dollars.

Then, sated but still coupled, we would argue over whether or not I had put on a five-dollar performance. Which could result in tickling, biting, wrestling, spanking, laughing, and another go at it, with much bawdy joking throughout. I delighted in trying to be that duchess in the drawing room, economist in the kitchen, and whore in the bedroom that is the classic definition of the ideal wife. Perhaps I was never perfect at it, but I was happiest working hard at all three aspects of that trinity.

Brian also enjoyed singing bawdy songs while coupling, songs with plenty of rhythm to them, a beat that could be matched to the tempo of coition and speeded up or slowed down at will, songs like:

Then endless verses, each bawdier than the last:

Until at last Briney couldn’t stretch it out any longer and had to spend.

While he was resting and recovering, he might demand of me a bedtime story, wanting to know how I had improved each shining hour with a little creative adultery.

He didn’t mean what I might have done with Nelson and/or Betty Lou; that was all in the family and didn’t count. “What’s new, Mo’? Are you getting to be a dead arse in your old age? You, the Scandal of Thebes County? Tell me it’s not true!”

Now believe me, friends, between dishes and diapers, cooking and cleaning, sewing and darning, wiping noses and soothing children’s tragedies, I didn’t have time to commit enough adultery to interest even a young priest. After that ridiculous and embarrassing contretemps with Reverend Zeke I can’t recall any illicit bed bouncing Maureen did between 1906 and 1918 that my husband did not initiate and condone in advance…and not much of that as Briney was if anything even busier than I.

I must have been a great disappointment to Mrs. Grundy (several of her lived in our block, many of her went to our church) as, during those ten years leading up to the war that eventually was called “World War I” or “War of the Collapse, First Phase”—during that decade I not only tried to simulate the perfect, conservative, Bible-Belt lady and housewife, I actually was that sexless, modest, church-oriented creature—except in bed with the door locked, alone or with my husband or, on rare and utterly safe occasions, in bed with someone else but with my husband’s permission and approval and usually with his chaperonage.

Besides which, only a robot can stay coupled enough hours out of the year to matter. Even Galahad, tireless as he is, spends most of his time being the leader of Ishtar’s best surgical team. (Galahad—Galahad reminds me of Nelson. Not just in appearance; the two are twins in temperament and attitudes—even in body odor now that I think of it. When I get home, I must ask Ishtar and Justin how much of Galahad derives from Nelson. Since we Howards started with a limited gene pool, convergence, along with probability and chance, often comes close to physically reincarnating a remote ancestor in some descendant on Tertius or Secundus.)

Which reminds me of what I did with part of my time and how Random Numbers got his name.

I don’t think there was ever a month in the first half of the twentieth century but what both Briney and I were studying something…and usually studying a language besides, which hardly counts; we had to stay ahead of our children. We usually did not study the same thing—Briney did not study shorthand or ballet; I did not study petroleum extraction methods or evaporation control in irrigation. But study we did. I studied because I had been left with a horrid feeling of intellectual coitus interruptus through not being able to go on to college at least through a bachelor’s degree, and Brian studied because, well, because he was a Renaissance man with all knowledge his field. According to the Archives my first husband lasted 119 years. It is a cinch bet that he was studying some subject new to him the last few weeks of his life.

Sometimes we studied together. In 1906 he started in on statistics, probability, and chance by mail, the ICS school—and here were the books and the lessons in our house, so Maureen did them too, all but mailing my work in. So we both were immersed in this most fascinating field of mathematics when our kitten, Random Numbers, joined our lives, courtesy of Mr. Renwick, driver salesman for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

The kitten was an adorable mass of silver-gray fluff and was at first named Fluffy Ruffles through an error in sex; she was a he. But he demonstrated such lightning changes in mood, direction, speed, and action that Brian remarked, “That kitten doesn’t have a brain; he just has a skull full of random numbers, and whenever he bangs his head into a chair or ricochets off a wall, it shakes up the random numbers and causes him to do something else.”

So “Fluffy Ruffles” became “Random Numbers” or “Random” or “Randie.”

As soon as the snow was gone in the spring of ’07 we installed a croquet court in our back yard. At first it was played by us four adults. (Over the years it was played by everyone.) Then it was four adults and Random Numbers. Every time a ball was hit that kitten would draw his sword and CHARGE! He would overtake the ball and throw himself on it, grabbing it, all four limbs. Imagine, please, a grown man stopping a rolling hogshead by throwing himself around it. Better imagine football pads and a helmet for him.

Random wore no pads; he went into action wearing nothing but fluff and his do-or-die attitude. That ball must be stopped, and it was up to him to do it—
Allah il Allah Akbar!

Only one solution—Lock up the cat while playing croquet. But Betty Lou would not permit that.

Very well, add to the rules this special ground rule: Anything done to a croquet ball by a cat, good or bad, was part of the natural hazards; you played it that way.

I remember one day when Nelson picked up the cat and cradled it in his left arm, then used his mallet with one hand. Not only did it not help him—Random jumped out of his arm and landed ahead of the ball, causing Nelson to accomplish nothing—but also we convened a special session of the Supreme Croquet Court and ruled that picking up a cat in an attempt to influence the odds was unfair to cats and an offense against nature and must be punished by flogging the villain around the regimental square.

Nelson pleaded youth and inexperience and long and faithful service and got off with a suspended sentence, although a minority opinion (from Betty Lou) called for Nelson to drive to a drugstore and fetch back six ice cream cones. Somehow the minority opinion prevailed, although Nelson complained that fifteen cents was too heavy a fine for what he had done and the cat should pay part of it.

Eventually Random Numbers grew up, became sedate, and lost his enthusiasm for croquet. But the cat rule remained and was adjudged to apply to any cat, be he resident or traveling salesman, and to puppies, birds, and children under the age of two. At a later time I introduced this rule onto the planet Tertius.