In the back of the car, the Matron of Honor sounded a voluminous little plaint of frustration and pique. And then there was silence. For the first time in several minutes, I glanced around at the tiny elderly man with the unlighted cigar. The delay didn’t seem to affect him. His standard of comportment for sitting in the rear seat of cars—cars in motion, cars stationary, and even, one couldn’t help imagining, cars that were driven off bridges into rivers—seemed to be fixed. It was wonderfully simple. You just sat very erect, maintaining a clearance of four or five inches between your top hat and the roof, and you stared ferociously ahead at the windshield. If Death—who was out there all the time, possibly sitting on the hood—if Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you, if it was a clear Havana.
“What are we going to do? Just sit here?” the Matron of Honor said. “I’m so hot I could die,” And Mrs. Silsburn and I turned around just in time to see her look at her husband directly for the first time since they’d got into the car. “Can’t you move over just a tiny little bit?” she said to him. “I’m so squashed in here I can hardly breathe.”
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The Lieutenant, chuckling, opened his hands expressively. “I’m practically sitting on the fender now, Bunny,” he said.
The Matron of Honor then looked over, with mixed curiosity and disapproval, at her other seatmate, who, as though unconsciously dedicated to cheering me up, was occupying far more space than he needed. There was a good two inches between his right hip and the base of the outside armrest. The Matron of Honor undoubtedly noticed it, too, but, for all her metal, she didn’t quite have what it would have taken to speak up to that formidable-looking little personage. She turned back to her husband. “Can you reach your cigarettes?” she said irritably. “I’ll never get mine out, the way we’re packed in here.” With the words “packed in,” she turned her head again to shoot a brief, all-implicit look at the tiny guilty party who had usurped the space she thought ought rightfully to be hers. He remained sublimely out of touch. He went on glaring straight ahead of him, toward the driver’s windshield. The Matron of Honor looked at Mrs. Silsburn, and raised her eyebrows expressively. Mrs. Silsburn responded with a countenance full of understanding and sympathy. The Lieutenant, meanwhile, had shifted his weight over to his left, or window-side, buttock, and from the right-hand pocket of his officer’s pinks had taken out a package of cigarettes and a folder of matches. His wife picked out a cigarette, and waited for a light, which was immediately forthcoming. Mrs. Silsburn and I watched the lighting of the cigarette as though it were a moderately bewitching novelty.
“Oh, pardon me,” the Lieutenant suddenly said, and extended his cigarette pack to Mrs. Silsburn.
“No, thank you. I don’t smoke,” Mrs. Silsburn said quickly—almost with regret.
“Soldier?” the Lieutenant said, extending the pack to me, after the most imperceptible of hesitations. In all truth, I rather liked him for putting through the offer, for the small victory of common courtesy over caste, but I declined the cigarette.
“May I see your matches?” Mrs. Silsburn said, in an exceedingly diffident, almost little-girlish voice.
“These?” said the Lieutenant. He handed his folder of matches readily over to Mrs. Silsburn.
While I looked on with an expression of absorption, Mrs. Silsburn examined the match folder. On its outside cover, in gold letters on a crimson background, were printed the words “These Matches Were Stolen from Bob and Edie Burwick’s House.” “Darling,” Mrs. Silsburn said, shaking her head. “Really darling.” I tried to show by my expression that I perhaps couldn’t read the inscription without eyeglasses; I squinted, neutrally. Mrs. Silsburn seemed reluctant to hand the folder back to its owner. When she had, and the Lieutenant had replaced the folder in the breast pocket of his tunic, she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.” Turned almost completely around, now, in her jump seat, she sat gazing rather fondly at the Lieutenant’s breast pocket.
“We had a whole bunch of them made up last year,” the Lieutenant said. “Be amazed, actually, how it keeps you from running out of matches.”
The Matron of Honor turned to him—or, rather, on him. “We didn’t do it for that,” she said. She gave Mrs. Silsburn a you-know-how-men-are look, and said to her, “I don’t know. I just thought it was cute. Corny, but sort of cute. You know.”
“It’s darling. I don’t think I’ve ever—”
“Actually, it isn’t original or anything like that. Everybody’s got them now,” the Matron of Honor said. “Where I got the idea originally, as a matter of fact, was from Muriel’s mother and dad. They always had them around the house.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, and as she went on talking, she released the smoke in little syllabic drafts. “Golly, they’re terrific people. That’s what kills me about this whole business. I mean why doesn’t something like this happen to all the stinkers in the world, instead of the nice ones? That’s what I can’t understand.” She looked to Mrs. Silsburn for an answer.
Mrs. Silsburn smiled a smile that was at once worldly, wan, and enigmatic—the smile, as I remember, of a sort of jump-seat Mona Lisa. “I’ve often wondered,” she mused softly. She then mentioned, rather ambiguously, “Muriel’s mother is my late husband’s baby sister, you know.”
“Oh!” the Matron of Honor said with interest. “Well, then, you know.” She reached out an extraordinarily long left arm, and flicked her cigarette ashes into the ashtray near her husband’s window. “I honestly think she’s one of the few really brilliant people I’ve met in my entire life. I mean she’s read just about everything that’s ever been printed. My gosh, if I’d just read about one-tenth of what that woman’s read and forgotten, I’d be happy. I mean she’s taught, she’s worked on a newspaper, she designs her own clothes, she does every single bit of her own housework. Her cooking’s out of this world. Golly! I honestly think she’s the most wonder—”
“Did she approve of the marriage?” Mrs. Silsburn interrupted. “I mean the reason I ask, I’ve been in Detroit for weeks and weeks. My sister-in-law suddenly passed away, and I’ve—”
“She’s too nice to say,” the Matron of Honor said flatly. She shook her head. “I mean she’s too—you know—discreet and all.” She reflected. “As a matter of fact, this morning’s about the only time I ever heard her say boo on the subject, really. And then it was only just because she was so upset about poor Muriel.” She reached out an arm and tipped her cigarette ashes again.
“What’d she say this morning?” Mrs. Silsburn asked avidly.
The Matron of Honor seemed to reflect for a moment. “Well, nothing very much, really,” she said. “I mean nothing small or really derogatory or anything like that. All she said, really, was that this Seymour, in her opinion, was a latent homosexual and that he was basically afraid of marriage. I mean she didn’t say it nasty or anything. She just said it—you know—intelligently. I mean she was psychoanalyzed herself for years and years.” The Matron of Honor looked at Mrs. Silsburn. “That’s no secret or anything. I mean Mrs. Fedder’ll tell you that herself, so I’m not giving away any secret or anything.”
“I know that,” Mrs. Silsburn said quickly. “She’s the last person in the—”
“I mean the point is,” the Matron of Honor said, “she isn’t the kind of person that comes right out and says something like that unless she knows what she’s talking about. And she never, never would’ve said it in the first place if poor Muriel hadn’t been so—you know—so prostrate and everything.” She shook her head grimly. “Golly, you should’ve seen that poor kid.”
I should, no doubt, break in here to describe my general reaction to the main import of what the Matron of Honor was saying. I’d just as soon let it go, though, for the moment, if the reader will bear with me.
“What else did she say?” Mrs. Silsburn asked. “Rhea, I mean. Did she say anything else?” I didn’t look at her—I couldn’t take my eyes off the Matron of Honor’s face—but I had a passing, wild impression that Mrs. Silsburn was all but sitting in the main speaker’s lap.
“No. Not really. Hardly anything.” The Matron of Honor, reflecting, shook her head. “I mean, as I say, she wouldn’t have said anything—with people standing around and all—if poor Muriel hadn’t been so crazy upset.” She flicked her cigarette ashes again. “About the only other thing she said was that this Seymour was a really schizoid personality and that, if you really looked at it the right way, it was really better for Muriel that things turned out the way they did. Which makes sense to me, but I’m not so sure it does to Muriel. He’s got her so buffaloed that she doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. That’s what makes me so—”
She was interrupted at that point. By me. As I remember, my voice was unsteady, as it invariably is when I’m vastly upset.
“What brought Mrs. Fedder to the conclusion that Seymour is a latent homosexual and a schizoid personality?”
All eyes—all searchlights, it seemed—the Matron of Honor’s, Mrs. Silsburn’s, even the Lieutenant’s, were abruptly trained on me. “What?” the Mat
ron of Honor said to me, sharply, faintly hostilely. And again I had a passing, abrasive notion that she knew I was Seymour’s brother.