Midsummer 1947: recalled from England by the Sennett wire, the author passes a fortnight in Lake Forest between errands and gives one number, this one, to the marriage as it stood. He entered it among his acquisitions; the reader is invited to audit the entry, and to keep count of who reads whom. —Ed.
Sennett's wire had said COME HOME, NEW BUSINESS CHICAGO, and I obeyed it by way of two days in New York that appear in no ledger but this one; the particulars of those days come presently. Thursday I took the Century west. Friday evening the Packard stood at the Lake Forest station, back from the shop and gleaming, and Bunny was on the platform in a summer coat. She kissed my cheek and looked me over in her unhurried way, the same survey she had run through the veil at the altar rail in 1945. "You've gone thin," she said. "Daddy says England can't feed itself. Dinner's at seven." That was the whole of the homecoming; and I rode up Green Bay Road through the copper end of the light to a house in my wife's name, feeling what I always feel on that shore, like a guest with excellent references.
The house ran as her father's plants ran, three shifts and no seconds. By the time I had bathed, my cases had gone upstairs, been emptied, and ceased to exist; and next morning the little eagle-stamped gyroscope, my private skim off a certain railhead, sat dead center on my study blotter in its grey sock, dusted. Bunny calls it my paperweight. I have let her.
It was over Saturday's marmalade that I remembered what else had crossed the ocean in my kit, and I went up the stairs at the gait of a man wanting his pipe; a man of my training does not run indoors. The duffel was open on the bed, Nora the laundress lifting shirts out of it in tidy stacks, and folded into the third shirt from the bottom was the card, the reader knows the card, the plain one with the Berlin address I have been meaning to burn since New Mexico — and I had the bag off the bed and a joke going about Army habits, a soldier packs his own kit out, before she had straightened up. She laughed and went. I stood with my back damp through my shirt, holding two years of unstruck matches, and when I turned, Bunny was in the doorway with my coffee, asking whether I meant to sleep up there with the luggage. How long she had been standing there I could not have told a court under oath. That afternoon I locked the card in my desk, to burn in the first fire of autumn, and the reader who has come this far knows what my promises to stoves are worth.
Now the books of the establishment, since this number is my marriage and the reader has earned a look. My salary came from Halsted Instrument & Export and was reviewed annually by a board of one, her father, in four minutes, most of them spent on his cigar. The house, the cars, the pew, the club subscription: hers, or the trust's. Bunny kept the household accounts herself, an hour every morning at her desk in the morning room, columns straight as rail, and I put it down to a rich girl's economy, needlepoint done with numbers; she was a Northwestern girl, after all, and I assumed the sums were small.
Now New York, as promised, set down in my own hand, nobody else ever being permitted one. There is a lady in Murray Hill I will call Mrs. Considine, having renamed all my life everyone I meant to keep: a commander's widow with a flat off Park and the great gift of asking nothing. I had called there eastbound and westbound since the spring of '46, whenever Sennett's business allowed, and I'll not pretend it was anything nobler than appetite. The craft I give the married apprentice free, since I'll be dead when he reads it, and it is my office craft entire: nothing in writing, no letters, no cards, no accounts; cash across every counter; never the same restaurant twice in a season; and flowers sent without a card, paid in bills, from a shop chosen because nobody who knows you has ever heard of it. Mine was Kestner's, on Madison. Mrs. Considine favored peonies.1 If it occurs to the reader that I sailed home from those attentions to brood over one line about a man driving my wife to the club, I can only say it never occurred to me; that incapacity is the whole secret of a contented marriage.
The line in question, the fourth in letters rationed at three since 1945, had found me in England the same week an Englishman who says only what he means was running rings around me in a royal park, and I have never decided whether my wife has luck or sources. At Saturday's breakfast I did my fishing, and it was professionally done. "The Packard's back, I see," I said. "A month now," said Bunny, buttering toast. "But Harry's been faithful about his Fridays, and it seems unkind to stop him. You'll meet him tonight; the club has its dance."
She came down at eight in grey silk and her grandmother's pearls, surveyed me stud to shoe, and said, "You'll do. Mother still thinks it a pity about the uniform." The club had its season back from the war in full fig, lanterns on the veranda, a band up from town. On that shore they marry the way the fathers buy machinery, for the tolerances and the delivery date, love being an extra the salesman throws in or doesn't; and the floor that night carried a dozen such contracts turning to a two-step, the mothers keeping station along the wall.
Harry Aldrich proved to be six feet of open-faced Navy, no side to him anywhere. "You remember Harry," said Bunny, who knew perfectly well I had never seen him in my life, and went off to be admired. Harry had her lime and bitters standing at her place before she asked for it, which is a husband's knowledge; I can certify that, having acquired it in my day about several men's wives and never about my own. "Good of you to ferry Bunny about all spring," I said. "It wasn't good of me," he said. "I liked it. She's the best company on this shore." I tried him on flattery, then on soundings; both slid off. The man transmitted everything and concealed nothing, the Englishman's defect over again, and it defeats my instruments as armor plate never has. "I suppose she talks about me, on these drives," I said. "No," said Harry, and got me a chair.2
After dinner I watched them take one turn together, correct as a diagram, her hand at regulation height and daylight between them, and nothing in it anywhere; and from two handsome people of that age, nothing-in-it is either innocence or good staff work, and no instrument made will tell you which. Something turned over under my ribs that I want on the record as a novelty: in a life that had earned the feeling a hundred times over from the other side, I had never once had it, and I did not care for it. I set my glass on the rail because my hand had gone stupid, and stood on that veranda assembling reasons the turn meant nothing, which is not work a sane man does over his own wife at his own club.
Then the band went to a waltz, and I took my wife out and ran the full instrument over her at close range, as I had run it before six hundred witnesses in 1945: the hands, the breath, the small talk under load. I had read Oppenheimer inside a fortnight. Anton, shutting a door in your face, at least lets you hear the latch, and a latch is half a reading; the Englishman had beaten me that spring by having no doors at all. Bunny gave me what she has given me since a first afternoon in Chicago: flat calm to the horizon, and you may sail at that horizon all evening and raise nothing, no shutters, no latch.
"Your Harry seems a straightforward article," I said.
"He drives well and he doesn't chatter," she said. "And you needn't glower at him, darling; it isn't becoming in a decorated man."
"I never glower."
"No," she agreed, pleasantly, and let three bars go by. "The club's peonies were sad tonight, did you notice. They don't keep in this heat." Another bar, her cheek an inch from my shoulder. "If you ever want flowers done properly in New York, go to Voss, on Sixty-Second; Kestner's has gone off dreadfully since the war. Everyone says so."
My feet carried on with the waltz out of Army discipline while everything above the collar left the club. Follow the arithmetic as I had built it. That name had never been spoken in the state of Illinois. It lived in one shop on Madison Avenue, in one front room in Murray Hill, and in my head; no hand connected to mine had ever written it down, and I had seen to that with the care I gave the government's secrets and rather more affection. She had said it into my shoulder, apropos of the table flowers, in the voice she uses on the weather, and turned under my arm smooth as water. "Mind the turn, darling," said my wife. "You've been away so long, I expect you're out of practice."
I have been interrogating those two sentences for fifty years, and I set out that night's work honestly. Lying in the dark I ran every channel the name could have traveled. Sally Aldrich has a sister on the East Side; women trade shops the way the Loop trades tips; Kestner's may truly have gone off, and everyone may truly say so, and a wife may hand her husband a florist the way she hands him the salt. Or there was some errand of my own I had forgotten, some hotel concierge in '45 sending roses over my name unasked. And here I struck a difficulty of my own manufacture: I keep nothing in writing, on the doctrine that paper testifies for whoever holds it last, and that night I met the doctrine's one defect. When the man who needs your testimony is you, the files are ash. I could not reconstruct my own movements. I had covered my tracks from myself.
Toward three I stood at the window with a whiskey and considered the ways it read. That there was nothing in it: a girl passing along shop chatter to a husband too crooked to hear it straight. That there was something in it of her own, Harry or another, and the line was a shot laid across my bow by a ship in the same trade, showing her guns as a courtesy. Or the third reading, which I got as far as naming that night and no farther, and will get no farther now: that the flat calm was never weather but seamanship, and had been since Chicago. By four I had ruled. A man home fresh from his sins hears them read back in any small talk; the guilty ear does its own embroidery; she had made a remark about flowers. Coincidence, chatter, and nerves, the verdict delivered in my own court with no appeal taken.3 I chose the reading that let me sleep, and I have renewed the choice annually for fifty years, the way you renew an insurance you can't afford to test.
On Monday I lunched with Mr. Halsted downtown, among men who had fought the war to a standstill from those leather chairs at some cost to their digestions, and he gave me the new business between the soup and the chop. "Sennett's bought us a piece of a Chicago outfit. Calculating machinery, electrical; government custom coming. Front room's yours." He cut his meat. "Don't touch the machinery."4
I rode the local up the shore counting my establishment the way a man counts a hand he has already bet: a salary under review; a house in my wife's name; a card locked against a fire I kept not lighting; a wife whose weather had not changed since 1945; and one remark about a florist, ruled a coincidence by the only judge I could get. On top of the case lay Sennett's particulars, a photograph of half an acre of switchboard with two professors before it, and in the covering letter the word demonstration. I read it twice and my spirits came up like a cork. I cannot read my wife, and after that Saturday I left off pretending I ever would; but a demonstration is a thing a man can rig, and I went into the Loop on Tuesday whistling, to see about becoming a founder. How that went, newspapers and all, the reader shall have in its place.
The Sennett office vouchers for 1946 through 1948 show eleven two-day New York layovers billed to liaison, with no liaison named; the pattern ends in 1949. Kestner's, of Madison Avenue, was a florist of the first rank before the war and declined badly after it, closing in 1953; Voss, of East Sixty-Second Street, was by 1947 the fashion, exactly as Mrs. Klipspringer has it. The editor adds one fact and draws nothing from it: the household books, which are in Mrs. Klipspringer's hand, record no eastern travel between the wedding and the spring of 1949. By what road the comparative standing of two Manhattan florists reached Lake Forest, the record does not show. —Ed.
The club is easily identified, and the editor again sees no need. The Aldriches were lake-shore banking money, two generations quieter than the Halsteds'; Harold Aldrich Jr. served as a gunnery officer in the Pacific, was discharged a lieutenant in February 1946, and sat thereafter at the family's bank in the Loop. He married in 1951 and lived within four miles of the Klipspringers until his death in 1988. Of the Fridays the record holds exactly two witnesses, one line in Mrs. Klipspringer's hand and the account above; the two agree on every fact and on nothing else. —Ed.
Since the author gave his marriage no other number entire, the editor sets down in one place what the record shows of Mrs. Klipspringer. The settlement drafts of 1945 carry marginal queries in a hand the firm's memorandum calls "Miss H.'s," two correcting the trustees' arithmetic and one tightening the trust against a husband's creditors (No. 1, note 3). The household books are in her hand, to the penny, for fifty-two years. Probate, half a century on, discloses a brokerage account opened in her sole name at a LaSalle Street house in March 1948 and directed by her own letters, which outperformed every account her husband kept. Against this: no letter, diary, or witness attributes to her, at any date, knowledge of the author's conduct in New York or anywhere else, and nothing joins her name to Harry Aldrich's beyond the Fridays. Three readings are accordingly open: that she noticed nothing; that she kept arrangements of her own, with a discipline her husband was professionally equipped to appreciate; that she read him entire and managed what she read. The author, at the range of a waltz, could not choose among them in fifty years. The editor, with better files and no dance floor, does no better. —Ed.
The minute-book of Halsted Instrument & Export records the purchase, in the autumn of 1947, of an interest in a Chicago calculating-machinery concern, the government custom brokered through Mr. Sennett's Washington office. The export house had at that date existed four years and exported nothing, which the editor notes as bookkeeping, not metaphor. The demonstration promised in the particulars took the better part of a year to arrange and did not entirely work; what the newspapers made of the man standing nearest the machine is the business of the next number. —Ed.