16: Mr. Beaker insisted . . .
Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” Chapter 5 begins
5
MR. BEAKER INSISTED on walking home alone through the rain that had begun to fall. At the door, he fumbled with the latch for a moment and then stepped into the night.
That was a Friday night. I didn’t see him again until the following Sunday, and only years later did I persuade him and Eliza to give me an account of what had happened in the meantime.
We sat in their living room. Mr. Beaker was wearing a cardigan sweater with suede patches on the elbows. Eliza was wearing a gray silk suit. While we talked, Mr. Beaker smoked his pipe, and Eliza smoked several cigarettes. Mr. Beaker drank half a tumbler of Scotch. Eliza drank two martinis.
“It was raining when I left the bar—Whitey’s,” said Mr. Beaker. “I welcomed the rain; it was cold, but it refreshed me. I didn’t walk directly home, but wandered, and while I walked, I thought about Jack Simpson, about how Simpson had nearly felled me in our epistolary jousting, and I plotted—plotted ways to parry and thrust. As I walked, I grew fonder of Jack Simpson, as combatants can grow fond of worthy adversaries. I let myself project our correspondence into the future, imagining the pleasure of turning from answering the letters of Mary’s other correspondents, who were, already, beginning to sound much alike, to dueling with Jack Simpson, as I might turn to a game of chess to clear and stimulate my mind. I was so pleased with the prospect of this long and intriguing combat that I found myself chuckling as I walked, and smiling. So agitated was I that I walked for hours, stopping from time to time, for shelter from the rain, at several of the bars along the winding route that I took from Whitey’s to No Bridge Road.
“In some of these, while I sipped a warming Scotch, I felt the urge to talk, and found myself muttering, ‘If only Jack were here now!’
“At the last bar I visited, this muttering attracted the attention of another patron, who thought me an unfortunate figure, a lonely drinker with no one but himself to talk to. This fellow tried to strike up a conversation, and his attempt made me think that he was a lonely fellow with a need to talk. I found myself going on for hours with a perfect stranger about things I really knew nothing about: the ancient struggle to wrest the clam from the bottom of the bay, brother pitted against brother in the competition for choice beds, the best ways of hiding tough old chowder clams in sacks of tender cherrystones.
“When the bar closed, I slapped this new friend on the back, shook hands heartily, and walked home. I was a little drunk, I think. All the way home, I berated myself for not having had the nerve to ask the fellow the one question I had about clams: do they bite? I intended to slip inside the house quietly, but each of my limbs seemed to have a mind of its own, and I stumbled on the steps and then threw the screen door open with such force that it slammed against the side of the house.”
“I remember that,” I said. “It woke me, and I stood up in my crib, rubbing my eyes. I watched lights turn on and off, and then your house was quiet again, and I went back to sleep. Early in the morning, I heard whistling, and when I looked out I saw you closing your garage door, your Studebaker idling in the driveway. You got into the car and drove off.”
“Meanwhile,” said Eliza, “I was at my wit’s end. The night before, I had let myself be lured to the apartment of the fellow who had been the inspiration for Jack Simpson. I had, naively, thought him a dashing and clever guy, and he had, I admit, set my heart aflutter when he asked me to have dinner alone with him in his apartment instead of in a restaurant, because his apartment was so much cozier and we would be able to talk together quietly (and of course it would also be much cheaper for him, and he had to consider that since he was on a tight budget). Well, there we were in his apartment, and we hadn’t been alone for five minutes when all of a sudden his hands developed a mind of their own! One minute he was a nice guy with a boyish smile and a nice conversation, even if he really didn’t have much to say except about how he was sure to be district manager pretty soon and how much money he would make, and a few nice things about how pretty my hair looked when it was down and how long my legs were, and then a few minutes later he was all over me and tearing at my things with the hands of a forceful brute. I kept saying ‘no, no,’ in a strong voice even if I couldn’t really yell because it might have disturbed the neighbors who didn’t know what was going on and might have caused a lot of trouble, and I said ‘no,’ but the more I said it the more he thought I was turning on a green light, and I said ‘no, no’ but he kept right on going and even kept right on going faster, and ‘no’ I said, ‘no,’ and when to my surprise a little sound like a squeal jumped out of my mouth he said, ‘Jesus, Honey, the neighbors,’ which is not a very romantic thing to say, and ‘no’ I said, ‘no,’ and then before I knew it, it was all over and it was a big disappointment, let me tell you.”
She stopped and lit a cigarette. She threw her head back and blew a long column of smoke toward the ceiling. She threw her arm along the back of the couch and crossed her legs, making the silk suit whisper. She turned toward me again and pursed her lips. “I got a little carried away. Let me see. He fell asleep. I let myself out and walked home. The next day, I felt pretty good, and I looked at myself in the mirror and my cheeks were bright and I had a little spring in my step, so I didn’t put my hair up. When I got to the bus stop, there he was, and did he ever look different. He was wearing a jacket that looked as if he had borrowed it from a gorilla or made it himself in his spare time, and I realized that he’d been wearing that jacket for months. He gave me a little wave and said ‘Good morning,’ and that was all, and I had been expecting some little secret smile because even though I didn’t have such a great time, he seemed to enjoy himself plenty, so something came over me and I walked right up to him and stood on my toes and whispered in his ear as if I were whispering some sweet nothings, and he was looking around to see who noticed, and of course everybody did, and very sweetly I said, ‘You need practice,’ and right then I could have knocked him over with a feather. I could see the blood drain from his face, and I could tell that his knees got weak and rubbery because he shrank about an inch, and I sashayed over to the bench and took off my coat and crossed my legs and grinned.
Next episode:
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
Have you missed an episode or two or several? You can catch up by visiting the archive.