Idiots First Read online

  Cronin had made friends with a painter, George Getz, an assistant professor in the art department, an active, prematurely bald man, with whom he went on sketching trips, usually on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. George sketched or did water colors as Cronin looked on or sat against a tree, smoking. Sometimes he wandered along streams and in the woods. When the painter, married from youth and the father of three girls, was tied down during the weekend, Cronin drove off by himself or tried walking alone, though generally he cared little for walking in town, and wasn’t sure which direction to go next. One fine Sunday in April, when George was busy with his family, Cronin started on a walk but it soon began to seem like work so he returned to his apartment and sat on the bed. Wanting company he searched in his mind for who, and after some doubts looked up Mary Lou Miller’s number and dialed it. He wasn’t sure why he had, though he knew it bothered him a little. “Hello there,” she said. She had hesitated on hearing his voice but seemed cordial enough. Cronin wondered about a drive and she said she wouldn’t mind. He called for her in his car. She looked a little distant when she came out and he was surprised at how attractive. He noticed she seemed to be prettier on warm days.

  “How are things with you?” Cronin asked as he held the door open for her.

  “All right, I guess. How are they with you?”

  “Fine,” Cronin said.

  “How’s the teaching?”

  “Fine. I’m enjoying it more than I was.”

  Not much more but it was too much trouble to explain why.

  She seemed at ease. They drove towards the mountains along some of the side roads he had explored with George, until they came to a long blue lake shaped like a bird in flight. Cronin parked the car and they went through a scattering of pine trees, down to the water. At his suggestion they walked part of the way around the lake, and back. It took more than an hour and Mary Lou said she hadn’t walked that much in years.

  “Life’s pleasures are cheap,” Cronin said.

  “No, they’re not,” said Mary Lou.

  He let it pass. They had said nothing about last time, there was nothing to say really. The beauty of the day had lightened Cronin’s mood—he remembered having dreamed of Marge last night and had awakened uneasy. But Mary Lou’s company, he admitted to himself, had made the walk around the lake enjoyable. She was wearing a yellow cotton dress that showed her figure off, and her hair, to the large thick knot on her neck, was for once neatly arranged. She was rather quiet, as though a word too much might defeat her, but once she loosened up they talked amiably. She seemed to Cronin, as he sat by her side gazing at the lake, no more nor less than any woman he had known. The way he presently saw it was that she was entitled to her mistakes. He was to his. Yet though he tried to forget what she had told him, the fact that she had been a whore kept nagging him. She had known many men, how large a crowd they would make following her now, he was afraid to guess. He had never known anyone like her, and that he was with her now struck him as somewhat strange. But Cronin thought what an unusual thing present time was. In the present a person is what she is becoming and not what she was. She was this heavy-but-shapely-legged girl in a yellow dress, sitting by his side as though she belonged there. Cronin thought this was an interesting lesson for him. The past interfered if you let it. People feared it because they thought it predicted the future. It didn’t if you realized how much life changed, and concentrated on what it had changed to, and lived that. He began again to think of the possibility of friendship with Mary Lou.

  She got up, brushing pine needles off her dress. “It’s hot,” she said. “Would you mind if I peeled and went in for a dip?”

  “Go ahead,” said Cronin.

  “Why don’t you come in yourself?” she asked. “You could keep your shorts on and later get dry in the sun.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, “I’m not much of a swimmer.”

  “Neither am I,” Mary Lou said, “but I like the water.”

  She unzipped her dress and pulled it over her head. Then she kicked off her shoes, stepped out of a half slip and removed her white underwear. He enjoyed the fullness of her form, the beauty of her breasts. Mary Lou walked into the water, shivered, and began to swim. Cronin sat watching her, one arm around his knees as he smoked. After swimming a while, Mary Lou, her flesh lit in the sunlight, came out of the water, drew on her underpants, then let the sun dry her as she redid her damp hair. He was moved by her wet body after bathing.

  When she had dressed, Cronin suggested they have dinner together and Mary Lou agreed. “But first you come up to my joint for a drink. I want to show you how I fixed it up.”

  He said he would like to.

  On their ride back she was talkative. She told Cronin about her life as a child. Her father had been a small wheat farmer in Idaho. She had one married sister and two married brothers. She said the oldest brother was a big bastard.

  “He’s pretty rich by now,” she said, “and he talks a lot about God’s grace but in his heart he is a bastard. When I was thirteen one day he grabbed me in the barn and laid me though I didn’t want to.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Cronin. “You committed incest?”

  “It all happened when I was a kid.”

  “Why don’t you keep these things to yourself?” Cronin said. “What makes you think I want to hear them?”

  “I guess I felt I trusted you.”

  “Well, don’t trust me,” he shouted.

  He drove to her house and let her off at the curb. Then he drove away.

  The next morning Mary Lou did not appear in Cronin’s class, and a few days later her drop-slip came through.

  3.

  A week had gone by when Cronin one day saw her walking with George Getz, and his heart was flooded with jealous misery. He thought he was rid of his desire for the girl; but seeing her walking at the painter’s side, talking animatedly, George interested, Mary Lou good to look at in a white summer dress and doing very well, thanks, without Cronin, awoke in him a sense of loss and jealousy. He thought he might be in love with her. Cronin watched them go up the stairs of the art building, and though he had no good reason to, pictured them in each other’s arms, naked on George’s studio couch. The effect was frightening.

  My God, thought Cronin, here I am thinking of her with the same miserable feelings I had about Marge. I can’t go through that again.

  He fought to put her out of his mind—the insistent suspicion of an affair between her and the painter—but his memory of her body at the lake, and imagining the experience she had had with men, what she would do with George, for instance, and might have done with Cronin if they had become lovers, made things worse. Thinking of her experiences was like trying to stop the pain of a particular wound by stabbing yourself elsewhere. His only relief was to get drunk but when that wore off the anguish was worse.

  One morning he was so desperately jealous—the most useless of emotions, and especially useless in a situation where the girl really meant little to him, almost nothing, and the past, despite all his theorizing and good intentions, much too much—that he waited for them for hours, in the foyer of the school of architecture across the street from the art building. Cronin did not at first know why he was waiting but that he had to, perhaps to satisfy himself they were or weren’t having an affair. He saw neither of them then, but on the next afternoon he followed the painter at a distance to Mary Lou’s apartment. Cronin saw him go in shortly before five p.m., and was still unhappily waiting under a tree across the street, several houses down, when George came out at half-past ten. Cronin was wakeful all night.

  Terrified that this should mean so much to him, he tried to work out some means of relief. Should he telephone the girl and ask her back into his class so that they could once more be on good terms? Or if that meant trouble with the registrar’s office, couldn’t he just call and apologize for acting as he had, then offer to resume their friendship? Or could he scare George away by telling him about her past? />
  The painter was a family man, a careful sort, and Cronin felt sure he would end it with Mary Lou if he thought anyone suspected he was involved with her; he wanted to go on feeding his three girls. But telling him about her seemed such a stinking thing to do that Cronin couldn’t face it. Still, things were so bad he finally decided to speak to George. He felt that if he could be sure the painter wasn’t being intimate with her, his jealousy would die out and the girl fade in his thoughts.

  He waited till George invited him on another sketching afternoon, and was glad to have the chance to bring it up then, rather than to have to seek the painter out in his office or studio. They were at the edge of the woods, George at work on a water color, when Cronin spoke of the girl and asked whether George knew that Mary Lou had once been a prostitute in San Francisco for a couple of years.

  George wiped his brush with a rag, then asked Cronin where he had got his information.

  Cronin said he had got it from her. “She was married to someone who set her up professionally and cut in on the take. After he left her she quit.”

  “What a son of a bitch,” said George. He worked for a while, then turned to Cronin and asked, “Why do you tell me about it?”

  “I thought you ought to know.”

  “Why ought I?”

  “Isn’t she a student of yours?”

  “No, she isn’t. She came to my office and offered to model for me. It’s hard to get girls to pose in the nude around here so I said yes. That’s all there is between us.”

  He seemed embarrassed.

  Cronin looked away. “I didn’t think there was anything between you. I just thought you would want to know, if she was your student. I didn’t know she wasn’t.”

  “Well,” said George, “I know now, but I still intend to use her as a model.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Thanks for telling me, though,” George said. “I’ve sometimes felt there’s a bit of the slut in her. It wouldn’t pay to get involved.”

  Cronin, feeling some repulsion for himself, then said, “To tell the truth, George, I’m not entirely innocent in this. I’ve wanted to take the girl to bed.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “I almost did,” George said.

  Though Cronin wasn’t sure the painter had or hadn’t, he was certain he wouldn’t dare be intimate with her now. When he got home he felt relief, mingled with shame that had him talking to himself, but he slept better that night.

  4.

  A few nights later Mary Lou rang Cronin’s door bell, walked up the stairs, and when she was admitted into his apartment, said she wanted to talk to him. Cronin, reading in pajamas and robe, offered her a scotch but she refused. Her face was pale, her expression embittered. She was wearing levis and a baggy sweater; the hair spilled out of her bun.

  “Look,” Mary Lou said to Cronin, “I didn’t come here for any favors, but did you say anything to Professor Getz about me? I mean what I told you about San Francisco?”

  “Did he say I had?” Cronin asked.

  “No, but we were being friendly and then he changed to me. I figure somebody must have told him something, and I thought nobody knew anything but you, so you must’ve told him.”

  Cronin admitted it. “I thought he ought to know, considering the circumstances.”

  “Such as what?” she asked sullenly.

  He hesitated. “He’s a married man with three kids. There could be serious trouble.”

  “That’s his goddamn business.”

  He admitted that too. “I’m sorry, Mary Lou. All I can say is that my life has been confused and complicated lately.”

  “What about mine?” She was sitting in a chair, then turned her head and wept.

  Cronin poured her a drink but Mary Lou wouldn’t take it.

  “The reason I told you those things is because I thought you were a guy I could trust and be friends with. Instead it was the opposite. I’m sorry what I told you got you so bothered, but there’s a lot worse than that, and one thing I want you to know is it doesn’t bother me any more. I made my peace with my life.”

  “I haven’t,” said Cronin.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” said Mary Lou, and though he asked her to stay she left.

  Afterwards he thought, She has learned something from her experience that I haven’t learned from mine. And he felt sorry for Mary Lou, for the way he had treated her. It’s not easy to be moral, Cronin thought. He decided, before he went to bed, not to come back to this college in the fall, to quit teaching.

  On Commencement Day, Cronin met Mary Lou in the street, in her yellow dress, and they stopped to talk. She had put on weight but wasn’t looking well, and as they talked her stomach rumbled. In embarrassment she covered her abdomen.

  “It’s from studying,” she said. “I got awfully worried about my finals. The doctor in the infirmary said to watch out or I might wind up with an ulcer.”

  Cronin also advised her to take care. “Your health comes first.”

  They said goodby. He never saw her again but a year later, in Chicago, he had a card from her. She wrote she was still at college, majoring in education, and hoped someday to teach.

  LIFE IS BETTER THAN DEATH

  She seemed to remember the man from the same day last year. He was standing at a nearby grave, occasionally turning to look around, while Etta, a rosary in her hand, prayed for the repose of the soul of her husband Armando. Sometimes she prayed he would move over and let her lie down with him so that her heart might be eased. It was the second of November, All Soul’s Day in the cimitero Campo Verano, in Rome, and it had begun to drizzle after she had laid down the bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums on the grave Armando wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for a generous uncle, a doctor in Perugia. Without this uncle Etta had no idea where Armando would be buried, certainly in a much less attractive grave, though she would have resisted his often expressed desire to be cremated.

  Etta worked for meager wages in a draper’s shop and Armando had left no insurance. The bright large yellow flowers, glowing in November gloom on the faded grass, moved her and tears gushed forth. Although she felt uncomfortably feverish when she cried like that, Etta was glad she had, because crying seemed to be the only thing that relieved her. She was thirty, dressed in full mourning. Her figure was slim, her moist brown eyes red-rimmed and darkly ringed, the skin pale and her features grown thin. Since the accidental death of Armando, a few months more than a year ago, she came almost daily during the long Roman afternoon rest time to pray at his grave. She was devoted to his memory, ravaged within. Etta went to confession twice a week and took communion every Sunday. She lit candles for Armando at La Madonna Addolorata, and had a mass offered once a month, more often when she had a little extra money. Whenever she returned to the cold inexpensive flat she still lived in and could not give up because it had once also been his, Etta thought of Armando, recalling him as he had looked ten years ago, not as when he had died. Invariably she felt an oppressive pang and ate very little.

  It was raining quietly when she finished her rosary. Etta dropped the beads into her purse and opened a black umbrella. The man from the other grave, wearing a darkish green hat and a tight black overcoat, had stopped a few feet behind her, cupping his small hands over a cigarette as he lit it. Seeing her turn from the grave he touched his hat. He was a short man with dark eyes and a barely visible mustache. He had meaty ears but was handsome.

  “Your husband?” he asked respectfully, letting the smoke flow out as he spoke, holding his cigarette cupped in his palm to keep it from getting wet.

  She was momentarily nervous, undecided whether to do anything more than nod, then go her way, but the thought that he too was bereaved restrained her.

  She said it was.

  He nodded in the direction of the grave where he had stood. “My wife. One day while I was on my job she was hurrying to meet a lover and was killed in a minute by a taxi in the Piazza Bo
logna.” He spoke without bitterness, without apparent emotion, but his eyes were restless.

  She noticed that he had put up his coat collar and was getting wet. Hesitantly she offered to share her umbrella with him on the way to the bus stop.

  “Cesare Montaldo,” he murmured, gravely accepting the umbrella and holding it high enough for both of them.

  “Etta Oliva.” She was, in her high heels, almost a head taller than he.

  They walked slowly along an avenue of damp cypresses to the gates of the cemetery, Etta keeping from him that she had been so stricken by his story she could not get out even a sympathetic comment.

  “Mourning is a hard business,” Cesare said. “If people knew there’d be less death.”

  She sighed with a slight smile.

  Across the street from the bus stop was a “bar” with tables under a drawn awning. Cesare suggested coffee or perhaps an ice.

  She thanked him and was about to refuse but his sad serious expression changed her mind and she went with him across the street. He guided her gently by the elbow, the other hand firmly holding the umbrella over them. She said she felt cold and they went inside.

  He ordered an espresso but Etta settled for a piece of pastry which she politely picked at with her fork. Between puffs of a cigarette he talked about himself. His voice was low and he spoke well. He was a free-lance journalist, he said. Formerly he had worked in a government office but the work was boring so he had quit in disgust although he was in line for the directorship. “I would have directed the boredom.” Now he was toying with the idea of going to America. He had a brother in Boston who wanted him to visit for several months and then decide whether he would emigrate permanently. The brother thought they could arrange that Cesare might come in through Canada. He had considered the idea but could not bring himself to break his ties with this kind of life for that. He seemed also to think that he would find it hard not to be able to go to his dead wife’s grave when he was moved to do so. “You know how it is,” he said, “with somebody you have once loved.”