“Be good,” said Mama, kissing me goodnight.
Aunt Fran wet her finger in her mouth, and spun a wet curl into place over her ear. “I hear the taxi, Sara.…”
“Have a good time,” said Papa.
“We will,” said Mama, and I went out to help them to the village taxi driven by Old Man Duffy, who had driven the village arc light wagon in his youth … and my very early childhood. His job in those days was to lower the great carbon are lights from the poles in the streets, and replace the burned up carbon stick. The discarded stick we kids would fight over. It made a swell crayon to mark up streets and fences. In time, the electric light re- placed the carbon arc, and Old Man Duffy went into the taxi business.
“Hello, Mr. Duffy,” I said.
“Hello, Small Fry … say, don't the ladies look fancy tonight!”
Mama got in the taxi and Fran followed her, and Mama said, “To the Quackenbushes, please, and don't drive fast.”
Old Man Duffy threw in his gears. “House or hearse?”
Mama said, “We want the business address.”
Twenty minutes later Jed was at our house. “Well?”
Papa put on his best gloves and took his second-best cane from the chipped china umbrella stand. “Stevie, go to bed.”
“Can't I go?” I asked. “For the fun?”
“No, Stevie … go to bed.”
So I went to bed. But the next day Old Man Duffy told me what had taken place at “the private hanging.”
The way I heard it, the hanging was going very well, but the drinks were going a little slower, since Mrs. Quackenbush had mixed them, and there were some who did not think an undertaker's wife (even if she was having an affair with the prose of Alexandre Dumas) who helped her husband should mix drinks.…
The paintings were glowing from the walls, and only about six people in the room really knew what Paul was trying to do … which Mama said was “to take the best part of Renoir's color and love of flesh, and cross it with the form and content of Cezanne's cubes and cones.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Quackenbush to Old Man Duffy, who had been hired to help serve the drinks, “and I just love the covers on The Saturday Evening Post, too.”
At that moment Jed and Papa came in, and Aunt Fran, who had been hanging on Paul's arm, said, “Dear me, how nice, Jed.”
And Jed went over to Paul and held him by the tie and swung at his shaggy chin, yelling, “This will take care of you, you paint-splashing bum.”
But it didn't, for Paul ducked and swung a haymaker of his own, and Jed flew back against the punch bowl, spilling it, and came up shedding sliced lemon, and then Paul gave him a fast one-two on the chin. (“Better than I ever seen ol' John L. do it himself,” said Old Man Duffy. “Fast, like a Buick taking Lieberman Hill!”)
Poor Jed just fell asleep on the floor, and Aunt Fran said Paul was a low brute, and she and Papa took Jed out to Mr. Quackenbush's best slab and fed him chipped ice … but his jaw was all on one side, and a wonderful black eye was appearing over his worried nose.
That ended the art show. Mama's heart was broken for two days, and then she had to take time out and get ready for Fran's wedding (they had decided, why wait?). Paul packed his pictures and went back to Paris, where he started a new school so long ago that today it's new again, and called sur- realism, and someone else has taken most of Paul's best ideas and sold them by cheap press-agent tricks to the public.
Anyway, after Paul went, and after Fran and Jed were married, Mama sort of settled down. She had fought for so many causes from the lost side, she had sent out her little crusades so often and so long, that now she rested.
The platform, the stage, the newspaper columns, the protest groups did without her. In the late fall she would walk with the village leaves, all gold and brown, through the streets; in the spring, after a winter of reading and just keeping her journal, she would drive out into the country and watch the great green fields creep in the rains of April toward the woods for shelter; and in the summer, in those great, red- gold Indian summers of cut hay and cottonwood trees dropping their grasshopper seeds along the walks, she was always transplanting into many pots the green, growing things she loved.
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