Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

The rest of the town was suspicious of Lutherans, anyway, and would have been more so if Gladstone Gander — not his real name — hadn’t been president of the bank that was the only lending institution in town, and if his wife had not been the recognized power behind the throne. Mary Elizabeth was a depositor at the bank and would have enjoyed modest deference on that basis, but everything changed when she eloped with Arnold, the son and only child of the banker and his wife, whose actual names were Paul and Meredith Tanner.

Since it was a small town, and functioned reliably as a Greek chorus, the Tanners had never been free of the pressure of being the parents of Arnold, a gay man. Now that Arnold had married, appearances were much improved, or would be once time had burnished Mary Elizabeth’s history. In town, there were two explanations for the marriage. The first held that Mary Elizabeth Foley had converted Arnold by using tricks she had learned at the Butt Hut. The second was that she intended to take over the bank. Only the second was true, and the poor Tanners never saw it coming. But it wouldn’t have worked if Arnold and Mary Elizabeth hadn’t been in love.

Mary Elizabeth was an ambitious woman, but she was not cynical. In Arnold she saw an educated lost soul. She had great sympathy for lost souls, since she thought of herself as one, too. She lacked Arnold’s fatalism, however, and briefly thought that she could bring him around with her many skills. Once she realized the futility of that, she found new ways to love him and was uplifted to discover their power. She delighted in watching him arrange the clothes hanging in his closet and guessing at his system. He had ways with soft-boiled eggs, picture hanging, checkbook balancing, and envelope slitting that she found adorable. She could watch him stalking around the house with his fly-swatter in a state of absorbed rapture. He brushed her hair every morning and played intelligent music on the radio. He had the better newspapers mailed in. Mary Elizabeth was not a social climber, but she did appreciate her ascent from vulgarity and survival. They slept together like two spoons in a drawer, and if she put her hands on him suggestively and he seemed to like it, she didn’t care what he was imagining. She had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world.

When they returned from their elopement, in Searchlight, Nevada, the Tanners welcomed them warmly. After a preamble of Polonian blather, Paul Tanner said, “Mrs. Tanner and I are both pleased and cautiously optimistic going forward. But, Mary, wouldn’t your father have preferred to give you a big, beautiful wedding?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t mean to pry, but who, exactly, is your father?”

“What business is it of yours?”

This could have been a nasty moment, but the Tanners’ eagerness to sweep Junior’s proclivities under the rug resulted in their pulling their punches, which was much harder on Mrs. Tanner, who was bellicose by nature, than on her husband. At times like this, she gave out a look that suggested that she was simply awaiting a better day.

The luxury of sleeping with someone threatened Arnold’s punctilious habits. It was his first experience of sustained intimacy, and it had its consequences, which weren’t necessarily bad but were quite disruptive. Arnold was a homely man, and one local view had it that his homeliness was what had driven him into the arms of men. He had big ears and curly hair that seemed to gather at the very top of his head. He had rather darty eyes except when he was with Mary Elizabeth or when he was issuing instructions at the bank. His previous love had been the only lawyer in town who had much of a standing outside of town, and whatever went on between them did so with fastidious discretion. Their circumstances made it certain that they would never have any fun.

“Where is he now?” Mary asked.

“San Juan Capistrano.”

“And that was the end of your affair?”

“Here.”

“You know I don’t mind.” And she didn’t. The sea of predators who had rolled through the Butt Hut had seen to that.

“I’d like to be a good husband.”

Arnold was the vice president of the family bank and dressed like a city banker, in dark suits, rep ties, and cordovan wing tips. He had a severe, businesslike demeanor at work that put all communications, with staff and customers alike, on a formal basis. He and Mary Elizabeth lived thirteen blocks from the bank, and Arnold walked to work, rain or shine. If the former, he carried an umbrella, which was an extremely unusual object in town. Everyone knew what an umbrella was, of course, but it seemed so remarkable in this context that, on rainy days, it was as though the umbrella, not Arnold, was the one going to work. In any case, what anyone might have had to say about Arnold in town, no one said to his face. People were confused, too, by the motorcycle he rode on weekends. He did a fifty-yard wheelie down Main Street on a Saturday night that really had them scratching their heads. When Mary asked him to wear a helmet, he replied, “But then they won’t know who it is.”

The last thing Paul Tanner did before he died was send Mary off to be trained in banking skills. She’d told him that she wanted to work. She went to a loan-officer and mortgage-broker boot camp and returned to town well versed in the differences between F.H.A., V.A., and conventional forward mortgages, as well as reverse mortgages and loan models. And she was going to have a baby. Arnold said, “I hope he’s a nice fellow.”

“We don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl!”

“I mean, the father.”

“Sweetheart, that was a joke.”

“Okay, but who is he?”

Mary said, “What business is it of yours?” But she quickly softened and said, “You, Arnold, don’t you see?”

Paul Tanner died in his sleep, of an embolism — or something like that. Arnold wasn’t sure. He and his father had never been close and had viewed each other with detachment since Arnold was in kindergarten. Paul had been so anxious to see Mary’s baby that Arnold concluded that his father’s hopes were skipping a generation and was more pissed off than ever. But now Arnold was president of the bank, which was merely a titular change, as he had run the place for years and run it well, with a caution that allowed it to avoid some of the ruinous expansions that had recently swept the banking community. With Paul gone, Mrs. Tanner was slap in the middle of their lives, and Mary knew from the beginning that Mama was going to need a major tune-up if they were to live in peace.

It happened when Mary’s water broke and labor commenced. Arnold promptly took her to the hospital and sat by her bed, grimacing at every contraction. His mother arrived in a rush and with a bustle and consumption of space that indicated that she intended to be in charge. After she had removed her coat and scarf, tossed them over the back of a chair, and bent to pull the rubbers from her red shoes, she made a point of seeming to discover Mary and said, “Breathe.”

“I’ll breathe when I want to breathe.”

“Of course you will, and no one is at their best going into labor.” Mrs. Tanner went to the window and raised her arms above her head. “I’m about to become a grandma!”

Arnold and Mary glanced at each other: it was ambiguous. Was Mrs. Tanner happy to become a grandmother? Hard to say. Mary groaned through another contraction unnoticed by Mrs. Tanner, who was still at the window, craning around and forecasting the weather. Arnold was keeping track of the contractions with his wristwatch while Mary dutifully gave a passing thought to the stranger at the loan-officer school who was about to become a father. She hoped that Arnold was having a fond thought for his friend in San Juan Capistrano and that the arriving child would help to sort out all these disparate threads. Family-wise, Mrs. Tanner already stood for the past, and it was urgent that she bugger off ASAP. Arnold knew of Mary’s aversion to his mother and had survived several of Mary’s attempts to bar her from their home. “We can’t just throw her under the bus,” he said. This was an early use of the expression, and Mary took it too literally, encouraged that Arnold thought such an option was in play.