Джон Макдональд: All These Condemned

Her vacillating earnestness so delighted me that I didn’t pay much attention to her lack of any vestige of a sense of humor. I can’t remember the name of that play by Old Whiskers where he takes a dumb girl and has the guy make her into a lady. There is some of that tendency in every man, I guess. Not that I wanted to make Mavis into a lady. She was ladylike enough. But I thought I could start with this big pretty sort of formless girl and marry her and she would learn what I liked and become what I liked.

It didn’t work that way. I married her and she stayed the same old Mavis. Take her to a movie and for the next two days she’d be Betty Grable until she saw the next movie. She kept changing her hair, her accent, her style of dress, even her responses to affection. You couldn’t call it shallowness. She just hadn’t solidified into any one special individual. And I began to accept the fact that she never would, and accepted her for herself. She amused me. She fed me well. She was warm in bed. And she was decorative. If that is what you get, you can make it do. Even if there is no intellectual stimulation. Almost, I used to think, like having a great big beautiful playful red setter in the house.

That’s the way she was. Until we fell into the orbit around Wilma Ferris. Wilma is the strongest woman I know. My God, she’s strong. She keeps pressure on you all the time. As they say about certain entertainers, she’s always on. There is never any directness or simplicity. Only the impression thereof. And my girl became like a big fluttery moth circling the hot flame. She dived in finally and came out and she wasn’t Mavis any more. She was another edition of Wilma. Not deep on the inside, where Wilma is like steel. But all the outward manifestations. Wilma seemed to polarize her. To line up all her molecules or something. So she thinks Wilma is the mostest woman that ever walked the earth, and each day there is less of Mavis and more of Wilma. And the hell of it is, perfecting the facsimile means getting as close to Wilma’s standard of living as we can.

That alone I could adjust to. But my Mavis was a good girl. I mean good in the old-fashioned sense. Where things are black and other things are white. Wilma operates in an even shade of gray. And I have sensed that Wilma is superimposing her own moral standards on my Mavis. That frightens me.

I think there was a time when I could have told Mavis a little story about Wilma. And the little story would have severed that umbilical cord through which she feeds Mavis. But I waited too long, and if I told her now she might look at me with that derision I saw that afternoon in Wilma’s eyes.

Wilma asked me to come up to her apartment. A chat about our tie-up with the advertising agency, Fern and Howey. But from the moment I walked in, I sensed how it was. She had set her de luxe stage, and all I had to do was reach out. I damn near did. I was very, very close. But I kept remembering Randy Hess, remembering that big ring she had put in his nose, and I didn’t want any such ring in my nose. A business relationship was entirely enough. I gingerly untangled myself and made it just obvious enough so that she could hint that I was scared. I said it wasn’t that, exactly, and was rewarded with her look of derision. From that afternoon on she started seeing even more of Mavis. It sounds a little crazy to say that because she batted zero with me, she would concentrate on making my wife emotionally dependent on her, but not when you know Wilma. She has to win, somehow. I think it was Steve Winsan who told me about the titled lady in Cuernavaca who consistently and politely declined all invitations to attend parties at Wilma’s place. Not long after that the Mexican authorities found an irregularity in the titled lady’s residence permit, and the lady had to go back from whence she came.

Wilma had been entertaining the Mexican official who was in charge of those permits.

She has to win, somehow.

I can understand some of it and I don’t blame her. She came from nothing. From a complete nothing. The lower East Side, they say, where you learn a hell of a lot about survival. Maybe it was there that she learned she had to win all the time. And maybe if she was still struggling, that desire to win would be channeled in the right direction. But she has won, and so it has been diverted to a lot of social and personal stuff, where it becomes just so much malicious mischief, and worse. Like those two husbands she took on. One ended up a hopeless alcoholic, and the first one shot himself. They were sort of unstable guys to start with. I sometimes think she is attracted to instability, that she sort of feeds on it. Randy Hess is a pretty good example of that.

I’ve made her sound like a mess. Actually she is a hell of a lot of woman. You’ve got to admire her. But sort of in the way you admire a parade going by. With a lot of drums.

We got in the car and started up the parkway and you could feel what kind of day it was going to be in the city. A bake job. One of those Dutch-oven days followed by a night when all that stone would be radiating heat until dawn.

Mavis said, “Dahling, it would have been a dreadful day to stay in town.” Accent, intonation, huskiness — all a lovely imitation of Wilma Ferris. And she was drenched with that damn stuff Wilma uses. Blue Neon, it’s called. Twenty bucks an ounce, and our chemists say it’s one of the heaviest in the Ferris line. I wished Wilma Ferris would be suddenly taken dead. It wouldn’t affect my job. And it might give me my wife back.

Once we got far enough north so that we had a reasonable assurance of keeping moving, I pulled over on the grass and put the top down. I’d needed the new car like a second head, but once Wilma had casually mentioned that she thought closed cars were terribly dull, I knew that sooner or later I would have to trade.

We had the big fight before we got to Albany. I guess I started it. It was some damn thing she said that parroted an opinion of Wilma’s. And I asked her if she would please, for God’s sake, start being herself and stop being a cheap imitation of Wilma. And she told me that Wilma was the finest woman she had ever met, and Wilma was doing so much for her, and I ought to be grateful instead of stinking about it, and it was any wife’s job to improve herself and she wanted to be a credit to me, and it helped me for her to be so close to Wilma, her best friend practically, and I wanted to shut her up in a jail or something so she couldn’t have any friends, make a nun out of her or something. And then she got as far away from me as she could and she cried in a way that was entirely alien to her. An aloof weeping, full of pain and dignity. I just wished she would cry the way she used to. A lusty, puff-eyed yowling, full of snorts and wet noises.

“It’s going to be a dandy week end, isn’t it?” I said.

“Divine,” she said remotely.

Traffic was heavy, but out of annoyance with her and with myself I drove too fast, so we got to Lake Vale a little before five. I looked at the marked map. Her place was on the opposite side of the lake from the village. Mavis sat forward, obviously excited at seeing the place. She was the one who spotted the sign. A varnished plaque swinging from wrought iron, with the name written on it in brass in flowing script with no capital letter, the same as on the trade-mark: ferris . I turned left down the narrow gravel road toward the lake.

Except for the obvious fact of a power line and a phone line going in, the winding rutted road would make you think you were heading for a beat-up cabin. We went through over a thousand feet of woods, a thick stand of birch and pine and maple, all downhill, then we saw the blue gleam of the lake through the trees and saw the house itself. It would take your breath away, that house by the lake. Not just because it was so damn big. I’d heard she brought up some kid architect from Miami on the assumption that at least he’d do something different. He’d done it, all right. Stone and wood and a lot of glass, but none of that business about looking as though it grew out of the rock ledge on which it stood. That place looked as if it had glided in and was ready to take off across the lake as soon as you fired the rockets. Mavis looked at it in a glaze of ecstasy, lips parted, fingers wound in knots.