Ex Parte

Most always when a man leaves his wife, there’s no excuse in the world for him. She may have made whoop-whoop-whoopee with the whole ten commandments, but if he shows his disapproval to the extent of walking out on her, he will thereafter be a total stranger to all his friends excepting the two or three bums who will tour the night clubs with him so long as he sticks to his habits of paying for everything.

When a woman leaves her husband, she must have good and sufficient reasons. He drinks all the time, or he runs around, or he doesn’t give her any money, or he uses her as the heavy bag in his home gymnasium work. No more is he invited to his former playmates’ houses for dinner and bridge. He is an outcast just the same as if he had done the deserting. Whichever way it happens, it’s his fault. He can state his side of the case if he wants to, but there is nobody around listening.

Now I claim to have a little chivalry in me, as well as a little pride. So in spite of the fact that Florence has broadcast her grievances over the red and blue network both, I intend to keep mine to myself till death do me part.

But after I’m gone, I want some of my old pals to know that this thing wasn’t as lopsided as she has made out, so I will write the true story, put it in an envelope with my will and appoint Ed Osborne executor. He used to be my best friend and would be yet if his wife would let him. He’ll have to read all my papers, including this, and he’ll tell everybody else about it and maybe they’ll be a little sorry that they treated me like an open manhole.

(Ed, please don’t consider this an attempt to be literary. You know I haven’t written for publication since our days on The Crimson and White, and I wasn’t so hot then. Just look on it as a statement of facts. If I were still alive, I’d take a bible oath that nothing herein is exaggerated. And whatever else may have been my imperfections, I never lied save to shield a woman or myself.)

Well, a year ago last May I had to go to New York. I called up Joe Paxton and he asked me out to dinner. I went, and met Florence. She and Marjorie Paxton had been at school together and she was there for a visit. We fell in love with each other and got engaged. I stopped off in Chicago on the way home, to see her people. They liked me all right, but they hated to have Florence marry a man who lived so far away. They wanted to postpone her leaving home as long as possible and they made us wait till April this year.

I had a room at the Belden and Florence and I agreed that when we were married, we would stay there awhile and take our time about picking out a house. But the last day of March, two weeks before the date of our wedding, I ran into Jeff Cooper and he told me his news, that the Standard Oil was sending him to China in some big job that looked permanent.

“I’m perfectly willing to go,” he said. “So is Bess. It’s a lot more money and we think it will be an interesting experience. But here I am with a brand-new place on my hands that cost me $45,000, including the furniture, and no chance to sell it in a hurry except at a loss. We were just beginning to feel settled. Otherwise we would have no regrets about leaving this town. Bess hasn’t any real friends here and you’re the only one I can claim.”

“How much would you take for your house, furniture and all?” I asked him.

“I’d take a loss of $5,000,” he said. “I’d take $40,000 with the buyer assuming my mortgage of $15,000, held by the Phillips Trust and Mortgage Company in Seattle.”

I asked him if he would show me the place. They had only been living there a month and I hadn’t had time to call. He said, what did I want to look at it for and I told him I would buy it if it looked OK. Then I confessed that I was going to be married; you know I had kept it a secret around here.

Well, he took me home with him and he and Bess showed me everything, all new and shiny and a bargain if you ever saw one. In the first place, there’s the location, on the best residential street in town, handy to my office and yet with a whole acre of ground, and a bed of cannas coming up in the front yard that Bess had planted when they bought the property last fall. As for the house, I always liked stucco, and this one is built! You could depend on old Jeff to see to that.

But the furniture was what decided me. Jeff had done the smart thing and ordered the whole works from Wolfe Brothers, taking their advice on most of the stuff, as neither he nor Bess knew much about it. Their total bill, furnishing the entire place, rugs, beds, tables, chairs, everything, was only $8,500, including a mahogany upright player-piano that they ordered from Seattle. I had my mother’s old mahogany piano in storage and I kind of hoped Jeff wouldn’t want me to buy this, but it was all or nothing, and with a bargain like that staring me in the face, I didn’t stop to argue, not when I looked over the rest of the furniture and saw what I was getting.

The living-room had, and still has, three big easy chairs and a couch, all overstuffed, as they call it, to say nothing of an Oriental rug that alone had cost $500. There was a long mahogany table behind the couch, with lamps at both ends in case you wanted to lie down and read. The dining-room set was solid mahogany⁠—a table and eight chairs that had separated Jeff from $1,000.

The floors downstairs were all oak parquet. Also he had blown himself to an oak mantelpiece and oak woodwork that must have run into heavy dough. Jeff told me what it cost him extra, but I don’t recall the amount.

The Coopers were strong for mahogany and wanted another set for their bedroom, but Jake Wolfe told them it would get monotonous if there was too much of it. So he sold them five pieces⁠—a bed, two chairs, a chiffonier and a dresser⁠—of some kind of wood tinted green, with flowers painted on it. This was $1,000 more, but it certainly was worth it. You never saw anything prettier than that bed when the lace spreads were on.

Well, we closed the deal and at first I thought I wouldn’t tell Florence, but would let her believe we were going to live at the Belden and then give her a surprise by taking her right from the train to our own home. When I got to Chicago, though, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I gave it away and it was I, not she, that had the surprise.

Instead of acting tickled to death, as I figured she would, she just looked kind of funny and said she hoped I had as good taste in houses as I had in clothes. She tried to make me describe the house and the furniture to her, but I wouldn’t do it. To appreciate a layout like that, you have to see it for yourself.

We were married and stopped in Yellowstone for a week on our way here. That was the only really happy week we had together. From the minute we arrived home till she left for good, she was a different woman than the one I thought I knew. She never smiled and several times I caught her crying. She wouldn’t tell me what ailed her and when I asked if she was just homesick, she said no and choked up and cried some more.

You can imagine that things were not as I expected they would be. In New York and in Chicago and Yellowstone, she had had more life than any girl I ever met. Now she acted all the while as if she were playing the title role at a funeral.

One night late in May the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Dwan and she wanted Florence. If I had known what this was going to mean, I would have slapped the receiver back on the hook and let her keep on wanting.

I had met Dwan a couple of times and had heard about their place out on the Turnpike. But I had never seen it or his wife either.

Well, it developed that Mildred Dwan had gone to school with Florence and Marjorie Paxton, and she had just learned from Marjorie that Florence was my wife and living here. She said she and her husband would be in town and call on us the next Sunday afternoon.

Florence didn’t seem to like the idea and kind of discouraged it. She said we would drive out and call on them instead. Mrs. Dwan said no, that Florence was the newcomer and it was her (Mrs. Dwan’s) first move. So Florence gave in.

They came and they hadn’t been in the house more than a minute when Florence began to cry. Mrs. Dwan cried, too, and Dwan and I stood there first on one foot and then the other, trying to pretend we didn’t know the girls were crying. Finally, to relieve the tension, I invited him to come and see the rest of the place. I showed him all over and he was quite enthusiastic. When we returned to the living-room, the girls had dried their eyes and were back in school together.

Florence accepted an invitation for one-o’clock dinner a week from that day. I told her, after they had left, that I would go along only on condition that she and our hostess would both control their tear-ducts. I was so accustomed to solo sobbing that I didn’t mind it anymore, but I couldn’t stand a duet of it either in harmony or unison.

Well, when we got out there and had driven down their private lane through the trees and caught a glimpse of their house, which people around town had been talking about as something wonderful, I laughed harder than any time since I was single. It looked just like what it was, a reorganized barn. Florence asked me what was funny, and when I told her, she pulled even a longer face than usual.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she said.

Tie that!

I insisted on her going up the steps alone. I was afraid if the two of us stood on the porch at once, we’d fall through and maybe founder before help came. I warned her not to smack the knocker too hard or the door might crash in and frighten the horses.

“If you make jokes like that in front of the Dwans,” she said, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

“I’d forgotten you ever did,” said I.

I was expecting a hostler to let us in, but Mrs. Dwan came in person.

“Are we late?” said Florence.

“A little,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but so is dinner. Helga didn’t get home from church till half past twelve.”

“I’m glad of it,” said Florence. “I want you to take me all through this beautiful, beautiful house right this minute.”

Mrs. Dwan called her husband and insisted that he stop in the middle of mixing a cocktail so he could join us in a tour of the beautiful, beautiful house.

“You wouldn’t guess it,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but it used to be a barn.”

I was going to say I had guessed it. Florence gave me a look that changed my mind.

“When Jim and I first came here,” said Mrs. Dwan, “we lived in an ugly little rented house on Oliver Street. It was only temporary, of course; we were just waiting till we found what we really wanted. We used to drive around the country Saturday afternoons and Sundays, hoping we would run across the right sort of thing. It was in the late fall when we first saw this place. The leaves were off the trees and it was visible from the Turnpike.

“ ‘Oh, Jim!’ I exclaimed. ‘Look at that simply gorgeous old barn! With those wide shingles! And I’ll bet you it’s got hand-hewn beams in that middle, main section.’ Jim bet me I was wrong, so we left the car, walked up the driveway, found the door open and came brazenly in. I won my bet as you can see.”

She pointed to some dirty old rotten beams that ran across the living-room ceiling and looked as if five or six generations of rats had used them for gnawing practise.

“They’re beautiful!” said Florence.

“The instant I saw them,” said Mrs. Dwan, “I knew this was going to be our home!”

“I can imagine!” said Florence.

“We made inquiries and learned that the place belonged to a family named Taylor,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The house had burned down and they had moved away. It was suspected that they had started the fire themselves, as they were terribly hard up and it was insured. Jim wrote to old Mr. Taylor in Seattle and asked him to set a price on the barn and the land, which is about four acres. They exchanged several letters and finally Mr. Taylor accepted Jim’s offer. We got it for a song.”

“Wonderful!” said Florence.

“And then, of course,” Mrs. Dwan continued, “we engaged a house-wrecking company to tear down the other four sections of the barn⁠—the stalls, the cowshed, the tool-shed, and so forth⁠—and take them away, leaving us just this one room. We had a man from Seattle come and put in these old pine walls and the flooring, and plaster the ceiling. He was recommended by a friend of Jim’s and he certainly knew his business.”

“I can see he did,” said Florence.

“He made the hayloft over for us, too, and we got the wings built by day-labor, with Jim and me supervising. It was so much fun that I was honestly sorry when it was finished.”

“I can imagine!” said Florence.

Well, I am not very well up in Early American, which was the name they had for pretty nearly everything in the place, but for the benefit of those who are not on terms with the Dwans I will try and describe from memory the objets d’art they bragged of the most and which brought forth the loudest squeals from Florence.

The living-room walls were brown bare boards without a picture or scrap of wallpaper. On the floor were two or three “hooked rugs,” whatever that means, but they needed five or six more of them, or one big carpet, to cover up all the knots in the wood. There was a maple “lowboy”; a “dough-trough” table they didn’t have space for in the kitchen; a pine “stretcher” table with sticks connecting the four legs near the bottom so you couldn’t put your feet anywhere; a “Dutch” chest that looked as if it had been ordered from the undertaker by one of Singer’s Midgets, but he got well; and some “Windsor” chairs in which the only position you could get comfortable was to stand up behind them and lean your elbows on their back.

Not one piece that matched another, and not one piece of mahogany anywhere. And the ceiling, between the beams, had apparently been plastered by a workman who was that way, too.

“Some day soon I hope to have a piano,” said Mrs. Dwan. “I can’t live much longer without one. But so far I haven’t been able to find one that would fit in.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a piano in storage that belonged to my mother. It’s a mahogany upright and not so big that it wouldn’t fit in this room, especially when you get that ‘trough’ table out. It isn’t doing me any good and I’ll sell it to you for $250. Mother paid $1,250 for it new.”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of taking it!” said Mrs. Dwan.

“I’ll make it $200 even just because you’re a friend of Florence’s,” I said.

“Really, I couldn’t!” said Mrs. Dwan.

“You wouldn’t have to pay for it all at once,” I said.

“Don’t you see,” said Florence, “that a mahogany upright piano would be a perfect horror in here? Mildred wouldn’t have it as a gift, let alone buy it. It isn’t in the period.”

“She could get it tuned,” I said.

The answer to this was, “I’ll show you the upstairs now and we can look at the dining-room later on.”

We were led to the guest-chamber. The bed was a maple four-poster, with pineapple posts, and a “tester” running from pillar to post. You would think a “tester” might be a man that went around trying out beds, but it’s really a kind of frame that holds a canopy over the bed in case it rains and the roof leaks. There was a quilt made by Mrs. Dwan’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Anthony Adams, in 1859, at Lowell, Mass. How is that for a memory?

“This used to be the hayloft,” said Mrs. Dwan.

“You ought to have left some of the hay so the guests could hit it,” I said.

The dressers, or chests of drawers, and the chairs were all made of maple. And the same in the Dwans’ own room; everything maple.

“If you had maple in one room and mahogany in the other,” I said, “people wouldn’t get confused when you told them that so-and-so was up in Maple’s room.”

Dwan laughed, but the women didn’t.

The maid hollered up that dinner was ready.

“The cocktails aren’t ready,” said Dwan.

“You will have to go without them,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The soup will be cold.”

This put me in a great mood to admire the “sawbuck” table and the “slat back” chairs, which were evidently the chef d’oeuvre and the pièce de résistance of the chez Dwan.

“It came all the way from Pennsylvania,” said Mildred, when Florence’s outcries, brought on by her first look at the table, had died down. “Mother picked it up at a little place near Stroudsburg and sent it to me. It only cost $550, and the chairs were $45 apiece.”

“How reasonable!” exclaimed Florence.

That was before she had sat in one of them. Only one thing was more unreasonable than the chairs, and that was the table itself, consisting of big planks nailed together and laid onto a railroad tie, supported underneath by a whole forest of crosspieces and beams. The surface was as smooth on top as the trip to Catalina Island and all around the edges, great big divots had been taken out with some blunt instrument, probably a bayonet. There were stains and scorch marks that Florence fairly crowed over, but when I tried to add to the general ensemble by laying a lighted cigarette right down beside my soup-plate, she and both the Dwans yelled murder and made me take it off.

They planted me in an end seat, a location just right for a man who had stretched himself across a railway track and had both legs cut off at the abdomen. Not being that kind of man, I had to sit so far back that very few of my comestibles carried more than halfway to their target.

After dinner I was all ready to go home and get something to eat, but it had been darkening up outdoors for half an hour and now such a storm broke that I knew it was useless trying to persuade Florence to make a start.

“We’ll play some bridge,” said Dwan, and to my surprise he produced a card-table that was nowhere near “in the period.”

At my house there was a big center chandelier that lighted up a bridge game no matter in what part of the room the table was put. But here we had to waste forty minutes moving lamps and wires and stands and when they were all fixed, you could tell a red suit from a black suit, but not a spade from a club. Aside from that and the granite-bottomed “Windsor” chairs and the fact that we played “families” for a cent a point and Florence and I won $12 and didn’t get paid, it was one of the pleasantest afternoons I ever spent gambling.

The rain stopped at five o’clock and as we splashed through the puddles of Dwan’s driveway, I remarked to Florence that I had never known she was such a kidder.

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“Why, your pretending to admire all that junk,” I said.

“Junk!” said Florence. “That is one of the most beautifully furnished homes I have ever seen!”

And so far as I can recall, that was her last utterance in my presence for six nights and five days.

At lunch on Saturday I said: “You know I like the silent drama one evening a week, but not twenty-four hours a day every day. What’s the matter with you? If it’s laryngitis, you might write me notes.”

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter!” she burst out. “I hate this house and everything in it! It’s too new! Everything shines! I loathe new things! I want a home like Mildred’s, with things in it that I can look at without blushing for shame. I can’t invite anyone here. It’s too hideous. And I’ll never be happy here a single minute as long as I live!”

Well, I don’t mind telling that this kind of got under my skin. As if I hadn’t intended to give her a pleasant surprise! As if Wolfe Brothers, in business thirty years, didn’t know how to furnish a home complete! I was pretty badly hurt, but I choked it down and said, as calmly as I could:

“If you’ll be a little patient, I’ll try to sell this house and its contents for what I paid for it and them. It oughtn’t to be much trouble; there are plenty of people around who know a bargain. But it’s too bad you didn’t confess your barn complex to me long ago. Only last February, old Ken Garrett had to sell his establishment and the men who bought it turned it into a garage. It was a livery-stable which I could have got for the introduction of a song, or maybe just the vamp. And we wouldn’t have had to spend a nickel to make it as nice and comfortable and homey as your friend Mildred’s dump.”

Florence was on her way upstairs before I had finished my speech.

I went down to Earl Benham’s to see if my new suit was ready. It was and I put it on and left the old one to be cleaned and pressed.

On the street I met Harry Cross.

“Come up to my office,” he said. “There’s something in my desk that may interest you.”

I accepted his invitation and from three different drawers he pulled out three different quart bottles of Early American rye.

Just before six o’clock I dropped in Kane’s store and bought myself a pair of shears, a blow torch and an ax. I started home, but stopped among the trees inside my front gate and cut big holes in my coat and trousers. Alongside the path to the house was a sizable mud puddle. I waded in it. And I bathed my gray felt hat.

Florence was sitting on the floor of the living-room, reading. She seemed a little upset by my appearance.

“Good heavens! What’s happened?”

“Nothing much,” said I. “I just didn’t want to look too new.”

“What are those things you’re carrying?”

“Just a pair of shears, a blow torch and an ax. I’m going to try and antique this place and I think I’ll begin on the dining-room table.”

Florence went into her scream, dashed upstairs and locked herself in. I went about my work and had the dinner-table looking pretty Early when the maid smelled fire and rushed in. She rushed out again and came back with a pitcher of water. But using my vest as a snuffer, I had had the flames under control all the while and there was nothing for her to do.

“I’ll just nick it up a little with this ax,” I told her, “and by the time I’m through, dinner ought to be ready.”

“It will never be ready as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “I’m leaving just as soon as I can pack.”

And Florence had the same idea⁠—vindicating the old adage about great minds.

I heard the front door slam and the back door slam, and I felt kind of tired and sleepy, so I knocked off work and went up to bed.

That’s my side of the story, Eddie, and it’s true so help me my bootlegger. Which reminds me that the man who sold Harry the rye makes this town once a week, or did when this was written. He’s at the Belden every Tuesday from nine to six and his name is Mike Farrell.