The MacGuffin (12 page)

Mrs. Post was standing over them.

“What,” Druff said, startled, “what?”

She laid one finger across the face of her wristwatch.

“Is it curfew? I’m sorry, I mustn’t have been paying attention. Is it curfew already?”

Though here and there there were people about, the room had begun to thin out. The bays and window seats were cleared, the piano bench. No one cuddled in the wing chairs, the sofas were all but vacant.

Rose Helen sat up and, to Druff’s chagrin, immediately began to lay into her housemother.

“How
dare
you?” she demanded. “He’s not the only one left.” Pointedly, she named names, not only indicating a few of her sorority sisters still lingering with their dates, but ticketing indiscretions, citing violations of dress codes, some general dishevelment of human decency.

“I’m sorry,” Druff mumbled, “I guess I must have lost track of the time.”

Rose Helen interrupted him. “You’ve nothing to apologize for, why are you apologizing?” And turned furiously to Mrs. Post. “Have you looked in the study rooms? Is everyone out of the study rooms?” She tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s just go see for ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Druff said, “I wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess. I just didn’t hear that bell you ring in here ten minutes before curfew.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry. No one else says that. Do you hear anyone else saying they’re sorry? It’s not your job to be sorry, it’s not your job to listen for the bell. It isn’t your job to have people set their watches by you.” She was furious with them both, Rose Helen. And though it was Rose Helen who did the shouting, it was Druff and Mrs. Post who got all the attention. The girls, their dates, looked from one to the other of them following their flabbergast silence. Druff felt an odd connivance with and sympathy for the housemother. It occurred to him that her heavy, almost powerful hair, its immaculate sheen, so at odds with her wan, brittle features, must have been a wig. “Well, come on,” Rose Helen said, “let’s just
see
what’s going on in those study rooms!”

“Most of those people are pinned,” Mrs. Post defended. “Many are already engaged.”

“So,” said Rose Helen, “they’re in there. They
haven’t
left! They’re in there, all right.”

“Please,” Druff said.

“No,” snapped Rose Helen, but not at Druff, at Mrs. Post, at her sorority sisters, at the fraternity boys, “I
won’t
please. Rules are rules. I’m going to empty out those study halls for you!” And then began exaggeratedly to limp about the now silent, curiously passionless passion pit, circling the big room and gathering, it seemed, a sort of momentum, and went out into the hall, going past the big staircase and continuing on toward the studies at the back of the sorority house.

He heard her roughly opening doors, heard her shout
“Curfew, curfew”
like a hysterical town crier.

“I’m going,” Druff called. “I’m leaving now, Rose Helen.”

“Curfew in there! Curfew!”

“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he called. “Would you tell her I’ll call her tomorrow?” he appealed to Mrs. Post.

But she called him. It was almost three in the morning. It was the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse who came to fetch him to the phone.

“It’s your girlfriend,” he said.

“So late?”

The waiter shrugged. “They ask for ketchup when it’s right out there on the table in front of them.”

“I hope nothing’s wrong,” he told the waiter.

“Sometimes, if it’s chicken cacciatore, or meat in a heavy gravy, they ask us to cut it up for them in the kitchen so they don’t dirty their hands or get grease on their clothes.”

“Rose Helen? Are you all right, Rose Helen?” He expected her to be crying. She wasn’t, though he could tell she seemed excited, even pleased. She didn’t scold him, didn’t even mention that he’d left without saying good night.

“I threatened to resign,” she said. He didn’t understand. “From the sorority, I threatened to resign from the sorority.”

“But why?” Druff said.

“Mrs. Post was there when I told them. Though you know, Robert,” she said, “I don’t blame Mrs. Post. She doesn’t make policy, she takes her signals from the girls.” Druff was uncomfortable. If any of this was on his behalf… “I’ve only just left them,” Rose Helen went on. “It could have been, I don’t know, a beauty parlor in there. You should have seen them. All those girls in their curlers and face goo…” He thought of her own soft, beautiful skin, oddly backlit, pearly from suffering, maybe from grudge. “Except for the few of us who were still in our clothes, it could have been a giant slumber party, all those girls in their shorty pajamas, some still clutching their teddies, the goofy, outsize turtles, froggies and stuffed kitty cats they take to bed with them. It was really rather touching.”

“You woke them? You got them out of bed?” (He thought of the ketchup right out there on the table in front of them, of the cut-up chicken cacciatore and of the meat in heavy gravy.)

“I called a special meeting,” Rose Helen said. “I had charges, I had witnesses. You can call a special meeting when you have charges and witnesses.”

“Charges against who? Mrs. Post doesn’t make policy. She takes her signals from the girls, you said.”

“ ‘If I resign,’ I told them, ‘your room and board goes up. You’ve already lost Jan and Eileen this semester. Rachel’s on academic probation and may flunk out.’ ”

Druff thought of the furniture, of the grand piano, the Oriental rugs. He couldn’t imagine that whatever few dollars Rose Helen’s leaving might cost them could make a difference. He thought them rich enough to take up the slack by themselves. He didn’t want her to resign. He’d grown quite too accustomed to the furniture. Besides, even after he heard her speech, the good arguments she’d presented to get them to keep her from resigning (the money it could cost them if she quit; the straight-A average she maintained and which—“A rising tide raises all boats“—helped keep the Chi Phi G.P.A. just about where it needed to be in order to remain competitive and continue to attract prospective pledges—“Because supposing,” she argued, “Rachel
doesn’t
flunk out, supposing she just manages to keep her head above water and drags along with a D-plus or even a C-minus average, then losing all those A’s would
really
mean something”—throwing even her deformity into the argument, that limp that made her look so bad and them so good), he was still uncertain about her reasons. If this had anything to do with Druff… And what
about
Mrs. Post, who
didn’t
make policy, who took her signals from the girls? And what about the girls with their stuffed animals and face goo, and who were really rather touching?

“Charges?” Druff said. “Witnesses? Has this anything to do with me? Am I at fault here?”

“Why, against the girls in the studies, silly. And my witnesses against them were those boys I rousted.”

“Was Rachel there when you said these things? Were her feelings hurt? Did she cry?” he wanted to know.

Now she was more interesting than Druff.

She was political, certainly. It was those two years of seniority she had on him, had on most of them, plus all those other years of pure physical outrage, the one or two before they actually knew that anything was wrong, then the fifteen or so when she had to wear the successively larger braces to make the correction in her spine, to bring it to the point where it was barely noticeable, except possibly to Rose Helen, and which left scarcely a trace, unless it was to those who picked up on the tiny shelf she had made for it above her left hip where she could rest her palm. Because all that kicked into the seniority, too. Plus things he could have only a guesswork knowledge of. (Prosthetic bathing suits perhaps, prosthetic evening gowns.)

There were more meetings. Nothing, of course, was done to the girls Rose Helen had brought her charges against. She was political, perhaps she didn’t intend anything to come of them more than the apologies—which she got—and pleas to stay with the sorority, which she got.

In the end, however, she determined to resign from the sorority.

She told him she didn’t even want to live in a dorm, the fine new women’s residence hall the university had put up, that she’d prefer a room in a boardinghouse.

“A boardinghouse,” Druff said. “What’s so great about a boardinghouse? You live in a boardinghouse, you have a landlady. I’ve told you what mine is like, Rose Helen. They’re all like that.”

“It just seems,” she said, “I don’t know, romantic. You know what I really think? I think they won’t be around much longer. Those big old wood houses. They’re a piece of Americana. All those old landladies and landlords will die out one day. Their kids won’t take them over. One by one they’ll burn down, or the university will start buying them up and turn them into queer little departments—meteorology, Asian studies. Or they’ll just raze them altogether and put up big new buildings. You’re lucky. You already live in one. You know what it’s like. I want to live somewhere they put your whole supper down on the table in big serving dishes and you have to ask someone to pass the mashed potatoes, pass the string beans, the water pitcher, the rolls and bread. It’s like missing out on vaudeville. Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor. All those people I know only from listening to on the radio who lived in boardinghouses and used to be on the ‘circuit.’ No,” she said, “when I resign from Chi Phi Kappa I’m definitely going into one.”

Because she was definitely more interesting than Druff. Falling for her now at second-per-second rates. As stones fall.

But who tried still to talk her out of the boardinghouse. Uncertain whether he’d be welcome once she moved. Knowing there’d be no more study rooms, no passion pit worthy of the name (not, as it were, after you’d seen Paree), forced again to think of those long lines at the movies, big public rooms in the Student Union, even of the classrooms and lecture halls where they’d spent the early weeks of their courtship.

They didn’t quarrel exactly—she was too high-strung, he was a little afraid of her—but he took the position that it was mostly their own fault.

“I was woolgathering,” he told her, “lollygagging. You know what the first thing was I thought to tell her when she caught us stretched out there on that carpet and I saw her standing over us? The very first thing? ‘Both my feet are on the floor, Mrs. Post.’ That’s how out of it I was. ‘Both my feet are on the floor.’ No wonder she wanted to throw me out.” (And would have added, if she’d been less high-strung, that it was probably Rose Helen’s squirming when he nibbled her ear that called Mrs. Post’s attention to them in the first place.)

“She had no right,” Rose Helen said. “She was out of line.”

She refused to hear anything more about it, declared the subject closed and even stopped talking about her plans to resign from her sorority. (She told him she was still looking, however, though she thought it unlikely she’d find anything suitable until after midterms and the students who were failing saw the handwriting on the wall and pulled out.) Meanwhile she denied him access to the sorority house, insisting it would be too humiliating for them (who, for his part, was hard to humiliate, who was perfectly content to accept serenades at face value, content to have watches set by him, to be the first out the door, content to eat shit, Mrs. Post’s, Rose Helen’s) to be seen there together.

He asked the waiter from his boardinghouse to keep his eyes open, to tell him if anything was going on.

“You want me to spy on her?”

“No, of course not. Look,” he said, and took the waiter into his confidence, told him the story till now. “I’m not asking you to spy, I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not already doing. Just keep an eye out. If they’re still talking about what happened, if there’s any more discussion about her giving up the sorority—if she’s seeing someone else. Edward, I think I’m getting the runaround.” (Because he was in love now, because she was more interesting than he was, because he thought they thought his lapse, his failure to leave on time, was a violation, like the nibbled ear Rose Helen forbade him, of the conditions of his probation.
Because he was in love now
—the girls were touching, she’d said; she didn’t blame Mrs. Post; he recalled her talent for mimicry—
and couldn’t trust her.)
And revealed all the intimate details and actual physical logistics of the complicated, astonishing foreplay they practiced in the study. He made mention of her hip.

Druff didn’t regard any of this as a reward or payment for information, or even as bragging, but as simple, heartfelt confidence, one heartfelt guy in a boardinghouse to another. All that detail, are you kidding, if anything, it was as if he were the waiter’s spy and not the other way around.

“Well?” Druff said when Edward returned one evening.

“She didn’t take the soup, she refused dessert. I think she’s on a diet.”

“So,” Druff said the next night, “what do you think?”

“I was the one who said about the boardinghouses. This was before you were in the picture.”

Rose Helen called on him at the house. She was standing outside. It was Edward who came to his room to tell him she was there. (If we ever get married I’m going to have to ask him to be my best man, Druff thought, then felt misgivings go through him like a bullet. For all he’d made him his confidant, Druff didn’t like the waiter very much, regretted his soiled, spilled beans.)

His landlady climbed the stairs and was waiting for him on the landing. She turned and went down beside him. With Edward, there were three of them on the steps now. Druff had a ludicrous sense of convoy, of imposed escort, a vague impression he was being handed over into another jurisdiction.

“That’s your girlfriend out there, the one you used to go see, the one who calls at all hours?”

“She called at all hours only once,” Druff said. “She’s a nice person, Mrs. Reese.”

“I have keys to all the rooms,” his landlady said darkly. “I know who is and who isn’t a nice person.”

Then they were standing at the screen door. It was already spring. The weather had been mild for two weeks now. The rooming houses up and down Druff’s street all had gardens—glowing, spontaneous flowers, grass the bleached, light green of Coca-Cola glass, parrot feathers. But here there were no crocuses, no daffodils, no hyacinths, no tulips, no forsythia. There were no trees or ornaments at all. Mrs. Reese’s scant, grudging yard was all surface, a kind of scrubbed earth. It seemed tracked, neutral as a path. It wasn’t even scuffed. There were no chairs, no porch swing on the crabbed front porch, no place to sit, not even steps, a proper stoop.