“What makes Mrs. Fedder think that Seymour’s a latent homosexual and schizoid personality?”
The Matron of Honor stared at me, then gave an eloquent snort. She turned and appealed to Mrs. Silsburn with a maximum of irony. “Would you say that somebody’s normal that pulled a stunt like the one today?” She raised her eyebrows, and waited. “Would you?” she asked quietly-quietly. “Be honest. I’m just asking. For this gentleman’s benefit.”
Mrs. Silsburn’s answer was gentleness itself, fairness itself. “No, I certainly would not,” she said.
I had a sudden, violent impulse to jump out of the car and break into a sprint, in any direction at all. As I remember, though, I was still in my jump seat when the Matron of Honor addressed me again. “Look,” she said, in the spuriously patient tone of voice that a teacher might take with a child who is not only retarded but whose nose is forever running unattractively. “I don’t know how much you know about people. But what man in his right mind, the night before he’s supposed to get married, keeps his fiancé up all night blabbing to her all about how he’s too happy to get married and that she’ll have to postpone the wedding till he feels steadier or he won’t be able to come to it? Then, when his fiancée explains to him like achild that everything’s been arranged and planned out for months, and that her father’s gone to incredible expense and trouble and all to have a reception and everything like that, and that her relatives and friends are coming from all over the country—then, after she explains all that, he says to her he’s terribly sorry but he can’t get married till he feels less happy or some crazy thing! Use your head, now, if you don’t mind. Does that sound like somebody normal? Does that sound like somebody in their right mind?” Her voice was now shrill. “Or does that sound like somebody that should be stuck in some booby hatch?” She looked at me very severely, and when I didn’t immediately speak up in either defense or surrender, she sat heavily back in her seat, and said to her husband, “Give me another cigarette, please. This thing’s gonna burn me.” She handed him her burning stub, and he extinguished it for her. He then took out his cigarette package again. “You light it,” she said. “I haven’t got the energy.”
Mrs. Silsburn cleared her throat. “It sounds to me,” she said, “like a blessing in disguise that everything’s turned—”
“I ask you,” the Matron of Honor said to her with a fresh impetus, at the same time accepting a freshly lighted cigarette from her husband. “Does that sound like a normal person—a normal man—to you? Or does it sound like somebody that’s either never grown up or is just an absolute raving maniac of some crazy kind?”
“Goodness. I don’t know what to say, really. It just sounds to me like a blessing in disguise that every—”
The Matron of Honor sat forward suddenly, alertly, exhaling smoke through her nostrils. “All right, never mind that, drop that for a minute—I don’t need that,” she said. She was addressing Mrs. Silsburn, but in actuality she was addressing me through Mrs. Silsburn’s face, so to speak.
“Did you ever see —— ——, in the movies?” she demanded.
The name she mentioned was the professional name of a then fairly well-known—and now, in 1955, a quite famous—actress-singer.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Silsburn quickly and interestedly, and waited.
The Matron of Honor nodded. “All right,” she said. “Did you ever notice, by any chance, how she smiles sort of crooked? Only on one side of her face, sort of? It’s very noticeable if you—”
“Yes—yes, I have!” Mrs. Silsburn said.
The Matron of Honor dragged on her cigarette, and glanced over—just perceptibly—at me. “Well, that happens to be a partial paralysis of some kind,” she said, exhaling a little gust of smoke with each word. “And do you know how she got it? This normal Seymour person apparently hit her and she had nine stitches taken in her face.” She reached over (in lieu, possibly, of a better stage direction) and flicked her ashes again.
“May I ask where you heard that?” I said. My lips were quivering slightly, like two fools.
“You may,” she said, looking at Mrs. Silsburn instead of me. “Muriel’s mother happened to mention it about two hours ago, while Muriel was sobbing her eyes out.” She looked at me. “Does that answer your question?” She suddenly shifted her bouquet of gardenias from her right to her left hand. It was the nearest thing to a fairly commonplace nervous gesture that I’d seen her make. “Just for your information, incidentally,” she said, looking at me, “do you know who I think you are? I think you’re this Seymour’s brother.” She waited, very briefly, and, when I didn’t say anything: “You look like him, from his crazy picture, and I happen to know that he was supposed to come to the wedding. His sister or somebody told Muriel.” Her look was fixed unwaveringly on my face. “Are you?” she asked bluntly.
My voice must have sounded a trifle rented when I answered. “Yes,” I said. My face was burning. In a way, though, I felt an infinitely less furry sense of self-identification than I had since I’d got off the train earlier in the afternoon.
“I knew you were,” the Matron of Honor said. “I’m not stupid, you know. I knew who you were the minute you got in this car.” She turned to her husband. “Didn’t I say he was his brother the minute he got in this car? Didn’t I?”
The Lieutenant altered his sitting position a trifle. “Well, you said he probably—yes, you did,” he said. “You did. Yes.”
One didn’t have to look over at Mrs. Silsburn to perceive how attentively she had taken in this latest development. I glanced past and behind her, furtively, at the fifth passenger—the tiny elderly man—to see if his insularity was still intact. It was. No one’s indifference has ever been such a comfort to me.
The Matron of Honor came back to me. “For your information, I also know that your brother’s no chiropodist. So don’t be so funny. I happen to know he was Billy Black on ‘It’s a Wise Child’ for about fifty years or something.”
Mrs. Silsburn abruptly took a more active part in the conversation. “The radio program?” she inquired, and I felt her looking at me with a fresh, keener, interest.
The Matron of Honor didn’t answer her. “Which one were you?” she said to me. “Georgie Black?” The mixture of rudeness and curiosity in her voice was interesting, if not quite disarming.
“Georgie Black was my brother Walt,” I said, answering only her second question.
She turned to Mrs. Silsburn. “It’s supposed to be some kind of asecret or something, but this man and his brother Seymour were on this radio program under fake names or something. The Black children.”
“Take it easy, honey, take it easy,” the Lieutenant suggested, rather nervously.
His wife turned to him. “I will not take it easy,” she said—and again, contrary to my every conscious inclination, I felt a little pinch of something close to admiration for her metal, solid brass or no. “His brother’s supposed to be so intelligent, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “In college when he was fourteen or something, and all like that. If what he did to that kid today is intelligent, then I’m Mahatma Gandhi! I don’t care. It just makes me sick!”
Just then, I felt a minute extra added discomfort. Someone was very closely examining the left, or weaker, side of my face. It was Mrs. Silsburn. She started a bit as I turned abruptly toward her. “May I ask if you were Buddy Black?” she said, and a certain deferential note in her voice rather made me think, for a fractional moment, that she was about to present me with a fountain pen and a small, morocco-bound autograph album. The passing thought made me distinctly uneasy—considering, if nothing else, the fact that it was 1942 and some nine or ten years past my commercial bloom. “The reason I ask,” she said, “my husband used to listen to that program without fail every single—”
“If you’re interested,” the Matron of Honor interrupted her, looking at me, “that was the one program on the air I always absolutely loathed. I loathe precocious children. If I ever had a child that—”
The end of her sentence was lost to us. She was interrupted, suddenly and unequivocally, by the most piercing, most deafening, most impure E-flat blast I’ve ever heard. All of us in the car, I’m sure, literally jumped. At that moment, a drum-and-bugle corps, composed of what seemed to be a hundred or more tone-deaf Sea Scouts, was passing. With what seemed to be almost delinquent abandon, the boys had just rammed into the sides of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Mrs. Silsburn, very sensibly, clapped her hands over her ears.