The October Country

After three minutes of unblinking quiet, Mr. Garvey leaned forward. “Eh,” he said, “what’s your business. Mr… . ?”

“Crabtree. The poet.”

Garvey mused over this.

“How’s,” he said, “business?”

Not a sound.

Here lay a typical Garvey silence. Here sat the largest manufacturer and deliverer of silences in the world; name one, he could provide it packaged and tied with throat-clearings and whispers. Embarrassed, pained, calm, serene, indifferent, blessed, golden, or nervous silences; Garvey was in there.

Well, The Cellar Septet simply wallowed in this particular evening’s silence. Later, in their cold-water flat, over a bottle of “adequate little red wine” (they were experiencing a phase which led them to contact real reality) they tore this silence to bits and worried it.

“Did you see how he fingered his collar! Ho!”

“By God, though, I must admit he’s almost ‘cool.’ Mention Muggsy Spanier and Bix Beiderbecke. Notice his expression. Very cool. I wish I could look so uncaring, so unemotional.”

Ready for bed, George Garvey, reflecting upon this extraordinary evening, realized that when situations got out of hand, when strange books or music were discussed, he panicked, he froze.

This hadn’t seemed to cause undue concern among his rather oblique guests. In fact, on the way out, they had shaken his hand vigorously, thanked him for a splendid time!

“What a really expert A-number-1 bore!” cried Alexander Pape, across town.

“Perhaps he’s secretly laughing at us,” said Smith, the minor poet, who never agreed with Pape if he was awake.

“Let’s fetch Minnie and Tom ; they’d love Garvey. A rare night. We’ll talk of it for months!”

“Did you notice?” asked Smith, the minor poet, eyes closed smugly. “When you turn the taps in their bathroom?” He paused dramatically. “Hot water.”

Everyone stared irritably at Smith.

They hadn’t thought to try.

The clique, an incredible yeast, soon burst doors and windows, growing.

“You haven’t met the Garveys? My God! lie back down in your coffin! Garvey must rehearse. No one’s that boorish without Stanislavsky!” Here the speaker, Alexander Pape, who depressed the entire group because he did perfect imitations, now aped Garvey’s slow, self-conscious delivery:

“‘Ulysses? Wasn’t that the book about the Greek, the ship, and the one-eyed monster! Beg pardon?’” A pause. “‘Oh.’” Another pause. “‘I see.’” A sitting back. “‘Ulysses was written by James Joyce? Odd. I could swear I remember, years ago, in school …’”

In spite of everyone hating Alexander Pape for his brilliant imitations, they roared as he went on:

“‘Tennessee Williams? Is he the man who wrote that hillbilly “Waltz?”’”

“Quick! What’s Garvey’s home address?” everyone cried.

“My,” observed Mr. Garvey to his wife, “life is fun these days.”

“It’s you,” replied his wife. “Notice, they hang on your every word.”

“Their attention is rapt,” said Mr. Garvey, “to the point of hysteria. The least thing I say absolutely explodes them. Odd. My jokes at the office always met a stony wall. Tonight, for instance, I wasn’t trying to be funny at all. I suppose it’s an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say. Nice to know I have it in reserve. Ah, there’s the bell. Here we go!”

“He’s especially rare if you get him out of bed at four A.M.,” said Alexander Pape. “The combination of exhaustion and fin de siècle morality is a regular salad!”

Everyone was pretty miffed at Pape for being first to think of seeing Garvey at dawn. Nevertheless, interest ran high after midnight in late October.

Mr. Garvey’s subconscious told him in utmost secrecy that he was the opener of a theatrical season, his success dependent upon the staying power of the ennui he inspired in others. Enjoying himself, he nevertheless guessed why these lemmings thronged to his private sea. Underneath, Garvey was a surprisingly brilliant man, but his unimaginative parents had crushed him in the Terribly Strange Bed of their environment. From there he had been thrown to a larger lemon-squeezer: his Office, his Factory, his Wife. The result: a man whose potentialities were a time bomb in his own parlor. The Garveys’ repressed subconscious half recognized that the avant-gardists had never met anyone like him, or rather had met millions like him but had never considered studying one before.

So here he was, the first of autumn’s celebrities. Next month it might be some abstractionist from Allentown who worked on a twelve-foot ladder shooting house-paint, in two colors only, blue and cloud-gray, from cake-decorators and insecticide-sprayers on canvas covered with layers of mucilage and coffee grounds, who simply needed appreciation to grow! or a Chicago tin-cutter of mobiles, aged fifteen, already ancient with knowledge. Mr. Garvey’s shrewd subconscious grew even more suspicious when he made the terrible mistake of reading the avant-garde’s favorite magazine, Nucleus.

“This article on Dante, now,” said Garvey. “Fascinating. Especially where it discusses the spatial metaphors conveyed in the foothills of the Antipurgatorio and the Paradiso Terrestre on top of the Mountain. The bit about Cantos XV-XVIII, the so-called ‘doctrinal cantos’ is brilliant!”

How did the Cellar Septet react?

Stunned, all of them!

There was a noticeable chill.

They departed in short order when instead of being a delightfully mass-minded, keep-up-with-the-Joneses, machine-dominated chap leading a wishy-washy life of quiet desperation, Garvey enraged them with opinions on Does Existentialism Still Exist, or Is Kraft-Ebbing? They didn’t want opinions on alchemy and symbolism given in a piccolo voice, Garvey’s subconscious warned him. They only wanted Garvey’s good old-fashioned plain white bread and churned country butter, to be chewed on later at a dim bar, exclaiming how priceless!

Garvey retreated.

Next night he was his old precious self. Dale Carnegie? Splendid religious leader! Hart Schaffner & Marx? Better than Bond Street! Member of the After-Shave Club? That was Garvey! Latest Book-of-the-Month? Here on the table! Had they ever tried Elinor Glyn?

The Cellar Septet was horrified, delighted. They let themselves be bludgeoned into watching Milton Berle. Garvey laughed at everything Berle said. It was arranged for neighbors to tape-record various daytime soap operas which Garvey replayed evenings with religious awe, while the Cellar Septet analyzed his face and his complete devotion to Ma Perkins and John’s Other Wife.

Oh, Garvey was getting sly. His inner self observed: You’re on top. Stay there! Please your public! Tomorrow, play the Two Black Crows records! Mind your step! Bonnie Baker, now … that’s it! They’ll shudder, incredulous that you really like her singing. What about Guy Lombardo? That’s the ticket!

The mob-mind, said his subconscious. You’re symbolic of the crowd. They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they’re fascinated with the snake-pit.

Guessing his thought, his wife objected. “They like you.”

“In a frightening sort of way,” he said. “I’ve lain awake figuring why they should come see me! Always hated and bored myself. Stupid, tattletale-gray man. Not an original thought in my mind. All I know now is: I love company. I’ve always wanted to be gregarious, never had the chance. It’s been a ball these last months! But their interest is dying. I want company forever! What shall I do?”

His subconscious provided shopping lists.

Beer. It’s unimaginative.

Pretzels. Delightfully “passè.”

Stop by Mother’s. Pick up Maxfield Parrish painting, the flyspecked, sunburnt one. Lecture on same tonight.

By December Mr. Garvey was really frightened.

The Cellar Septet was now quite accustomed to Milton Berle and Guy Lombardo. In fact, they had rationalized themselves into a position where they acclaimed Berle as really too rare for the American public, and Lombardo was twenty years ahead of his time; the nastiest people liked him for the commonest reasons.

Garvey’s empire trembled.

Suddenly he was just another person, no longer diverting the tastes of friends, but frantically pursuing them as they seized at Nora Bayes, the 1917 Knickerbocker Quartette, Al Jolson singing “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night,” and Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm. Maxfield Parrish’s rediscovery left Mr. Garvey in the north pasture. Overnight, everyone agreed, “Beer’s intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.”