Robert Coover - John's Wife

When Barnaby gave the bride away that day, he confusedly answered for the groom as well: “I do!” At the reception banquet later on, during one of the many rounds of toasts, his wife Audrey, now dead these seven-some years, recalled that at their own wedding back before the war, when asked by the preacher “Do you take this woman,” Barnaby had tipped his head forward and asked: “Do I take what—?” “Well,” she added when the laughter subsided, “at least he didn’t say ‘which’ or ask how much!” But even when the father of the groom put his own two bits in, asking around his dead cigar whether it was true that on their wedding night Barnaby had taken the bed apart to show her how it was made and couldn’t get it back together again for want of the proper tool, Barnaby smiled through it all, feeling good about himself and about his life’s work, which, he felt, had reached a new level of grace and maturity: he was at his peak and enjoying it. And he was pleased, too, with his handsome new son-in-law and junior partner in the expanding family construction business, in spite of the boy’s unearned cockiness and the irony that he was Mitch’s son. The war that Barnaby had served in had been like a wall that had fallen between then and now, dividing one world from another in time as it was now divided in space, such that few present that day remembered or chose to remember that Mitch and Barnaby had once been rivals for Audrey’s hand, a grasshopper-and-ant story with Mitch the gregarious wisecracking ladies’ man, Barnaby the quiet but manly fellow with his nose pressed dutifully to the grindstone. While Mitch was up at State, playing the field with aggressive gusto, learning the rhumba and the shag, tooling around in Packards and LaSalles (once, until with a toot on he tried to drive it up a tree, he and the bank owned a flashy Cord convertible with a powerful V-8 engine and front-wheel drive which would do well over a hundred on a straight stretch, his ever-ready makeout special), mixing football and beer blasts with fraternity bull sessions, high-stakes bridge, and blanket parties, and cracking his econ and history books only when he had to (not often, the fraternity was usually able to steal the exams in advance), self-taught Barnaby was back home in the middle of a lingering Depression, turning the struggling family lumberyard into a successful construction company and honing, in deadly seriousness, his builder’s skills and vision. Barnaby was already constructing solid family homes of indisputable quality, testing out his innovative marriage of streamlined neoclassical designs with traditional American values of comfort and space, while Mitch was still swallowing goldfish and beetles and fondling his way drunkenly through Sorority Row. Barnaby owned a used Model A (in decent condition, though on dirt roads it was an embarrassment) which he drove when taking Audrey out on a date on those rare occasions when she was in town, otherwise he got around in the old lumberyard truck. No one gave young Barnaby (he was already, not yet thirty, known around town as Barnaby the Builder) much of a shot with Audrey, they all figured she’d end up with Mitch sooner or later, or some well-heeled party guy like him, wild as she was back then. It was said that, on a dare during a weekend fraternity party up at State while she was still in high school, Audrey had danced a fan dance, stark staring, just like at the World’s Fair. Mitch was there. Barnaby wasn’t. She had an hourglass figure back then, wore skintight molded dresses, mostly black, with pointy uplift bras and lots of gaudy costume jewelry, painted her lips and nails in matching carmine red, told naughty jokes with a gravelly voice, chain-smoked with intentionally provocative gestures. She was the first girl in town to wear a strapless gown to the senior prom and was known as a hot smoocher, fast and dangerous. Yet this was the young woman who, on the eve of the war, against everyone’s expectations, put on a white Victorian bridal dress and married in solemn ceremony old-shoe-common Barnaby the Builder, and who became, after the war anyway when everything settled down, his steadfast companion and business manager and caring and committed mother of their beloved daughter. Women, people would say (some of them), who can figure them? Not that that ended the rivalry between Barnaby and Mitch; perhaps it had never ended, even after the marriage of their children. Barnaby had been an old-fashioned prairie isolationist before the war, Mitch an outspoken interventionist (after all, there was money to be made), but Barnaby served throughout its duration as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, often on the front line and in both theaters, while Mitch managed to be classified 4-F and, through defense contracts and speculation, became one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. Though he married, Mitch went on living the life he’d always lived, and so, some said, did Audrey, as though, snazzy in her narrow-waisted, wide-shouldered suits and her hair swept up in the latest fashion, rehearsing for war widowhood. But Barnaby, whatever he might have suspected was going on back home, never regretted his war years, and in fact it was while moving along just behind the front in the Old World, witnessing all those devastated villages and thinking about their reconstruction, what he would keep and what take down and what changes he would like to impose, that he came upon his concept of “town planning,” an utterly original thought that continued to excite him even after he discovered it had been thought of by others, centuries back — you could even get a degree in it up at the university. It didn’t matter, his mind was on fire with it, and when, as a lieutenant colonel soon to receive his final promotion (he would be the town’s most distinguished returning war hero), he was granted a six-week furlough before transfer to the Pacific theater, he spent most of it walking his little town, block by block, going over survey maps at the registrar’s office, plotting out his intended transformations once the war was over, even getting the city, through Mitch’s connections, to purchase some of the land he wanted, and, only incidentally, as it were, but as an immediate consequence of the powerful creative energies that possessed him, impregnating Audrey, who gave birth to their daughter about three months before his release and return.

Despite their rivalry and the social distance they generally kept from one another, even after they became in-laws, Barnaby and Mitch enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that helped make both their dreams come true, Mitch enriching himself on investments without which Barnaby could not have realized his vision for the town. Mitch’s political influence helped, too: his uncle by marriage was the mayor when the war ended, and his wife’s brother in time succeeded him, and what her kin couldn’t manage, money usually could. Thus when Barnaby, home on leave, told Mitch about his plans to develop the town around a new city park, the old one being a mere square block in front of City Hall and surrounded by business, making expansion of it impractical, Mitch set about buying up some of the rundown properties Barnaby had pointed out to him, surprising the owners with his generous offers, but knowing full well that the city, through Opal’s relatives, would pay him twice that when the park was built. And did. And he even got the old park in a tradeoff when they ran out of money, the most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate in town, demonstrating his generosity and public spirit (for which he was widely applauded) by moving the bandstand, statue of the Old Pioneer, and historic flagpole to the new park at his own expense, setting the statue on a new rugged stone plinth. The reshaping of the town around the new park was a phenomenal achievement. Only a war hero could have pulled it off. The whole community was reoriented, away from the dwindling creek and long-gone early settlements (even the Old Pioneer’s gaze was turned), toward its slummier back side which was totally erased and refashioned in Barnaby’s image, upgraded almost overnight into the most desirable properties in town, though Barnaby, taking only his construction earnings, owned none of it. Which Mitch thought was, frankly, pretty stupid. Mitch’s personal ethic, which he shared with most in town, was that the world, the only one around, the one they all lived and competed in, was a business world where wealth was synonymous with virtue and poverty was either a case of genetic bad luck (which was what charity was for) or of criminal weakness of character (poorhouses and jails). Mitch knew how to read this business world at a glance and act without hesitation (wherein lay his virtue), and he knew that within his own environs and generation the true saints would be in real estate and banking, quick-witted speculators, alert and well-connected, having, as it were, God’s ear. Grandpop’s old hardware store may have suited his own times (though Grandpop himself was a wise investor), but was now a mere symbolic relic, a sentimental image of his family’s proud historic role in the settling of this great nation, often mentioned in Pioneers Day speeches and newspaper articles, and worth keeping for that reason alone. If Audrey confounded everyone by settling down and marrying Barnaby, however, it was nothing to the surprise the townsfolk experienced when, within a year, rakish Mitch took to wife his business partner Maynard’s younger sister, plain straitlaced Opal. Well, it just goes to show, people said, that being about all they could say in the face of such a marvel, most predicting that Mitch, having married on the rebound from Audrey, would soon be chafing at the bit. The truth was, though, that Opal suited Mitch just fine: seducing innocents always did give him a charge, and then, after the pleasures of the conquest and the birth of a worthy heir, he was left free to live his life as he wished to live it, no bit to chafe him. And was Audrey ever part of that unchafed life? Who could say? Just how far Mitch ever got with Audrey was anybody’s guess, Barnaby’s included, but that Audrey developed such an intense affection, evident to all, for Mitch’s dashing young son surprised no one. With her daughter’s engagement and marriage to this bold handsome boy, Audrey seemed literally to experience a second blossoming; she became once more the life of the party, bright-eyed and vivacious, recovering as if a wand had been waved her lost youth, until it vanished suddenly one year and she was gone like the smoke, so moodily glamorous in its day, that killed her.