THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
327
laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you
were had;
if
you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession
and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.
Protestants, like her father, were neutral; they lived in a gray world
beyond good and evil. But when as a homely high-school girl, she had
rejected the Church's filing system, together with her aunt's illiterate
morality, she had given away her sense of herself. For a while she had
believed that it was a matter of waiting until you grew older and your
character was formed; then you would he able to recognize it as easily
as a photograph. But she was now twenty-four, and had heard other peo–
ple say she had a strong personality; she herself however was still in the
dark. This hearty stranger in the green shirt-perhaps he could really
tell whether she was in love with her husband. It was like the puzzle
about the men with marks on their foreheads: A couldn't know whether
his own forehead was marked, hut B and C knew, of course, and he
could, if he were bright, deduce it from their behavior.
"Well," replied the man, "of all the fellows you've talked about,
Jim's the only one I get a picture of. Except your father-hut that's dif–
ferent; he's the kind of a man I know about."
The answer disappointed her. It was too plain and folksy to cover the
facts. It was true that she had loved her husband
personally,
for himself,
and this had never happened to her with any one. else. Nobody else's
idiosyncrasies had ever warmed her; nobody else had she ever watched
asleep. Yet that kind of love had, unfortunately, rendered her impotent
to love him in the ordinary way, had, in fact, made it necessary for her to
be unfaithful to him, and so, in the course of time, to leave him altogether.
Or could it not be put in another way? Could she not say that all that
conjugal tenderness had been a brightly packaged substitute for the Real
Thing, for the long carnal swoon she had never quite been able to execute
in the marriage bed? She had noticed that in those households where
domesticity burns brightest and the Little Attentions rain most prodigally,
the husband is seldom admitted to qis real conjugal rights.
But it was impossible to explain this to the man. Already the conver–
sation had dropped once or twice into ribaldry, but she was determined
to preserve the decorum of the occasion. It was dark outside now and the
waiter was hack again, serving little brook trout on plates that had the
Union Pacific's crest on them. Yet even as she warned herself how impos–
sible it was, she heard her voice rushing on in a torrent of explicitness.
(This had all happened so many times before, ever since, as a schoolgirl,
she had exchanged dirty jokes with the college boys from Eugene and seen
them stop the car and lunge at her across the gearshift. While all the time,
she commiserated with herself, she had merely been trying to be a good
fellow, to show that she was sophisticated and grown-up, and not to let
them suspect (oh, never!) that her father did not allow her to go out with
boys and that she was a neophyte, a helpless fledgling, with no small talk
and no coquetry at all. It had not been
fair
(she could still italicize it,
