Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (20 page)

It made her sad that he could sleep with her and not care for her, that this was the little that should be allowed her—she had thought life was more sensibly arranged than this.

“It’s all so laughable, life is, don’t you think?” she asked the boy.

“I don’t philosophize much,” he said.

“You’re young for your age,” she said.

He looked at his hands—they were large and very red—and at his shoelaces, as if checking his appearance to see if he was safe from being laughed at. He said, “I guess I wouldn’t know about that.” He spoke with implausible politeness.

She sometimes thought she would stop sleeping with him, but then the thought of the fineness of his politeness and of his person would summon up images of rest and refreshment as if he were a movie or a vacation.

It even occurred to Ann that she liked being hurt because she felt so terrible about Walter. She never named Walter to herself anymore; she referred to him to herself as
the other one.

She had trouble with her teeth. She went to the dentist—he said she was grinding her teeth, perhaps in her sleep. She took long walks alone through fields of crusty snow. She yearned to be moderate in her desires.

She did not care if she lived or died. She thought she might as well go home and see her parents during Easter vacation.

I
T WAS
funny when her mother said, “All my children are musical except Ann—she’s advanced.” It amused Ann in her dark, heavy, German mood to put on one of her dresses, a loose-fitting modernistic print, and to hang a long chain around her neck and go to a dance to watch the middle-class mating ritual. It amused her that many men flirted with her, an “advanced” girl (because—she thought—the way she was dressed raised their hopes, and because they or their fathers did business with her father). And then there were the dullards who were pressed into service as her dates; they spent most of their time trying to persuade her of Roosevelt’s villainy. It seemed to her for a while, that lilac-penetrated spring, that it was a terrible thing to be a woman.

She had in her face and carriage at all times something of the look of a torch singer—she looked emotional, melancholy, and proud in her lack of innocence.

At a country-club dance, a man she did not know stared at her from across the dance floor; he was a smallish, young-old man; he wore the only brown double-breasted suit—and a wrinkled one, at that—among the white dinner jackets. He approached her and tumbled out the words “Fe fi fo fum! I smell the blood of an iconoclast!” He introduced himself: “Joseph Lord Fennimore—my mother’s maiden name
was Lord”—nicknamed, he remarked with hopeful sullenness, Fennie, “an attorney at law and generally considered crazy as a loon because I go to a psychoanalyst that my so-called friends say I look on as God.”

“Well,” said Ann, with a sigh, “I guess that’s not much worse than thinking Alf Landon is.”

“Oh!
Touché,
” Fennie cried, and looked at her with gratitude.

They went out on the terrace, each holding a cup of what Fennie called “Depression punch—mostly rum and indigestion. The orange peels are made out of Kleenex.”

He said, “I’m not crazy; I’m what they call tied up inside.” He was eight years older than Ann; that’s why they had never met, he said; he had gone with “the older crowd.” He said, “I will tell you an absolutely typical story about me.”

When he was twenty, he said, he’d had a daydream about sex, “like most American boys” his daydream was that he would meet a woman whose desires matched his, “and everything would be simple—it’s a very typical daydream.” He had heard about a girl who was “a genuine nymphomaniac. I met her at a college football weekend. She encouraged me, and God, when I thought there I was, included in her nymphomania, well, I just about went out of my mind. There was this party at the frat house—I took her into the den—I locked the door.… Now, I want you to picture this. The den is covered with animal heads—water buffalo, moose, antelope: totems.… This story makes my analyst go out of his head, he thinks it’s so significant. I wanted this girl to think I was nonchalant—I was looped. I, ah, tossed her step-ins over the horns of the water buffalo. It was just Thorne Smith—you know—but she got on her high horse. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that. She was a nymphomaniac, but she wanted to be treated with respect. I’ve never been able to handle that kind of dishonesty. I’ve never been a true bourgeois. I’m kind of a radical, but I guess you can tell that from the way I’m dressed.… Do you dream much?” Fennie asked.

“No,” Ann said. A lopsided moon floated above the rolling slopes of the golf course.
“Au clair de la lune,
” she said. She was a little drunk. She started down the stone steps. “I want to walk on the grass,” she said.

When Fennie threw his arms about her near a grove of trees, Ann smiled gently.

The comedy did not bother her, the laboriousness of the joke. She
wasn’t after sex. She thought it would be nice to make Fennie’s dream come true.

Fennie said, “Thank you for Paradise.”

“Oh,” Ann said sophisticatedly, maternally. “You’ve never done it outdoors?”

A
NN THOUGHT
that for Fennie the other night had not yet finished happening. He wanted sometimes to talk about it with her, but she refused. Fennie said, “You have such a sense of how to live!” He told her that he was known for his gloomy temper. “But that’s because I’m a very dissatisfied person
au fond,
” he told Ann. His father had been a judge. “I’m not an outcast,” Fennie said. “I get asked to the larger parties.… I like people too much or too little, and show it. I’m not considered reliable.” He went on at length; he disliked Milwaukee; he apologized to Ann: “I’m not romantic. Am I a great disappointment to you?”

“I’m not romantic, either,” Ann said. “I loved a man once—I don’t want to go through
that
again.”

“Yes, me too!” Fennie said. “I’ve had enough
Sturm und Drang
with my mother.”

They were very relaxed lovers.

Fennie said, “I’ve been thinking: after you go back to college, I could drive up and see you weekends—sometimes.”

Ann’s eyes went blank. “Fennie, there’s someone else.” She was slightly cross; it was all so difficult and complicated.

“Someone you love?” Fennie asked, breathing like a startled horse.

“No, no. I told you I don’t love anyone.”

“Does he love you?”

“No, no, no, no!”

“Ah,” said Fennie. With his eyes cast down, he said, “I suppose there’s an—an electricity between you.”

“I don’t know what there is between us,” Ann said, concentrating.

Fennie was humble. “I’m jealous,” he said.

Ann said casually, “You come see me if you want. Just don’t make scenes.”

Fennie visited her at college every other weekend. Ann admired his stubbornness; it seemed to her he was an undersized football player who knew he might be hurt but who kept on going anyway.

He thought her very knowledgeable, and he followed her lead and obeyed her hints about the best way to make love. He was in awe of her moods; he was admiring.

She was taken by a sense of poetry—the approaching summer was, she thought toughly, a time of violence; the yellow sun struck the brown, plowed farmland and left a green bruise: she was afloat on a rhetorical poetry of the senses.

It suited Fennie, who had paid thirty-five dollars for a copy of
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover,
to try to be a simple, uncomplicated man; he complicatedly mimicked the simplicity of such a man. Of a workman, Ann would have said. Of a gamekeeper, Fennie would have said.

Ann took Fennie one warm afternoon to a meadow outside the college town; the meadow was ringed with birches and oaks and had a dead oak in its center, and Ann and Fennie agreed the meadow looked like nature’s imitation of photographs of the Place Vendôme. Ann and Fennie walked in the meadow, and the weeds and clover they crushed beneath their feet gave off a sweet, vegetable fragrance. Fennie said he was so happy that he wouldn’t mind dying then and there. Then added, with surprise, “I mean it.”

Ann had not stopped sleeping with the boy from the boardinghouse and in a mindless way preferred him to Fennie because she had known him longer; he had precedence. But that day in the meadow, rising from their afternoon’s rest, Fennie said bitterly as he brushed off Ann’s back and picked bits of grass out of her hair, “There, you look as if nothing’s happened.” Ann suddenly heard the truth of the terrible complaint in his voice; she had been immune to Fennie. She shivered, and broke and ran like a frightened colt toward the road.

She couldn’t bear it—making a simple, uncomplicated man who admired her unhappy.… Fennie was pleased to see that he had that power over her. He had no other power over her at all—only this, of his unhappiness.

Fennie took Ann to a hotel one night; their room had immense red roses on the carpet. Ann lay on the bed, her shoes off, an electric fan blowing on her shoulder. Fennie, making drinks, his back to her, said jocularly, “Ann, you’re the cat’s pajamas, I’ll tell the world.” Then, with his back to her, he said he wanted to ask her a question. “The question is,” he said, his back to her, “concerned with marriage.”

“Oh!” Ann cried.

Fennie’s confidence rose in proportion to Ann’s dismay, as if any
intimation of weakness in her strengthened him. He said, almost deliriously, “Why shouldn’t we get married? Don’t worry about my mother or my analyst!” he said, keeping his back to her the entire time. “I can take care of
them.”

Ann began to cry. She thought, It didn’t matter what I did; this was the one I was bound to end up with. This one will marry me.

S
HE AND
F
ENNIE
went before a justice of the peace seven days later. Ann had been determined to have a civil ceremony, with no family present; indeed, neither family knew of the marriage yet. “I don’t want
their
emotions,” Ann said. “This is private, Fennie. It’s embarrassing enough as it is.”

After the ceremony, she and Fennie sat in the used 1932 Plymouth he had bought to have his own car to come up and see her on weekends. Her hands were shaking and so were his. The early-morning heat and sun and the Sunday stillness enclosed the car in a fragile envelope. The heat, the stillness held an unfocused and shaming memory; Ann stared palely out the window—perhaps she was listening for an approaching train. Suddenly Fennie leaned forward and put his head in her lap. “You make me so happy,” he said, as if apologizing for having married her.

Ann kissed the back of his head with straightforward tenderness: “I’ll be a good wife to you, Fennie.” She thought, June 16, 1935, and I’m married.

Ann walked into her family’s house in Milwaukee while Fennie waited in the car. Ann’s mother exclaimed, “I said to your brother at Easter—‛That girl’s ready to get married’!”

Then Ann called Fennie inside. She thought he would be put off by her mother’s air of triumph, but later, when they were driving toward his house, he told Ann he liked her mother very much. Ann said, “Maybe you just like mothers—period.”

At Fennie’s house, a maid let them in; Fennie’s mother was sitting in the upstairs parlor. Fennie said from the doorway of the room, “Mother, this is Ann Kampfei Fennimore. I married her this morning. You may have lost the battle but you’ve won a wonderful daughter.”

Fennie’s mother, a large, plain woman, said, “Oh, Fennie! Can’t we talk this over?”

Ann covered her face with her hands.

She meant to protect Fennie from his mother, take care of him, but he did not let her; he was very busy over the next few weeks; he was in a very trance of warfare, fighting with his mother, with his analyst—“I’ve outgrown analysis, Ann. You’ve given me maturity”—and baby-talking with Ann, calling her “wifey-ifey” and getting hurt when she forgot her name was Mrs. Fennimore. Fennie would say, “My mother is a hysterical old
bitch!
I have a headache.” His mother would telephone late at night—hoping, Fennie claimed, to interrupt his and Ann’s love-making—to say she heard prowlers and wished she had a loyal watchdog; to say she had forgotten to ask Fennie about her rental property in Waukegan; or simply to say good night. She was polite. She said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t phone so late, but I don’t sleep much.” Ann thought Fennie was neurotic about his mother. Ann and Fennie would quarrel; Fennie would shout, “All I’m asking is that you stroke my forehead!” Ann would shout, “You stroke my forehead! I have a headache, too.” Ann’s mother compounded the strain by telling Ann, “That dreadful woman has been saying dreadful things about you all over town.” Ann, who did not mean to be upset, burst into tears when she told Fennie. (And Ann’s brother’s wife was difficult; and Fennie’s cousins and the young women who gave teas were envious: now that he was married, Fennie was a catch; and inquisitive: how had Ann caught him; and pushy, pushy, pushy.) Fennie said, “That woman will stop at nothing to get her own way.” “Which woman?” Ann asked tearfully. “Fennie, which woman?”

Fennie had dragged her into this world; Ann sometimes woke up from strangely anonymous daydreams, in which a man had a rendezvous with her in a woods, in the country, to find that Fennie was staring at her. “Ann,” he said, “I think the sex you and I have is very interesting. Do you think it’s good?”

One evening, when the windows in her apartment were open and electric fans whirred, blurring the wine-colored twilight outside, Ann contemplated suicide or divorce. She struggled with her mood. Finally, she said, “Fennie, I think we should leave Milwaukee.”

Fennie, wet, wrapped partially in a towel, appeared in the door of the room. “What did you say?” She repeated it. Fennie caught his breath. The difficulties were immense, he pointed out; there were any number
of things to be afraid of, such as being disinherited. He paused. “I’ve always wanted to leave Milwaukee,” he said. “I never had the nerve.” He said, “I’ll be grateful to you for this, I think, for the rest of my life.”

Fennie found a job through a college classmate. He would work for the government in Washington.