The Stancias' House

I had the car backed halfway down the drive, past the portulacas, when my father yelled, "Hoy!" from the side porch and then vaulted over the rail and held up both hands like an operetta policeman.

I put on the brakes. Everything was shining in the summer evening. There's a wild feeling in the air, those times, with the world flowering at its height; it looked to me that the grass leaped a special green, that the moon -- you could see just a happy edge of it in the sky -- would be a brute of an article, the best moon invented. Stars were coming out. I was thinking, Cleo Torfree, Cleo Torfree; what a girl, what a face, what intelligence, what a life.

My father, or Professor Stancia as about everybody calls him, was wearing the red fez he likes around the house; but he had on a shirt and tie, and real pants and not summer shorts, and even shoes. He plucked up the bicycle that'd been left in the drive and slung it onto the grass and came up to the car. He stood back and sighted at the car, critically.

"Thanks, Professor," I said.

"Uhhm. Robin, the car shines. It glitters. But -- " His nose wrinkled. It is a short nose; below it is a bandit's mustache. When he is teaching literature (which he does well) the nose and the mustache wriggle like a rabbit's face. " -- but what's that smell?"

I said, "Seaweed. I'm hoping Cleo won't notice it."

"Rather strong. Maybe her perfume will drown it out."

"Maybe," I said. "It's seaweed the twins dumped in the back of the car last Sunday when we were at the beach. I got it all cleaned out, but it still smells fishy."

"Uhhm. Sort of invigorating, though. Well -- " He put his hands on his hips and looked approvingly back at the house. "Your mother's all dressed up; the twins are in the library playing a decent, quiet game of ping-pong -- Alamana -- " Alamana is our maid; she often practices opera singing in the twilight. " -- is reading an instructive book. The house is in apple-pie shape and I can't find anything. We're set to receive your young lady, Robin."

"Yes sir," I said. "Thanks again for getting that bike in the nick of time." The bike was Morgan's; he is the taller twin. "I'm depending on the Stancias to put up a civilized front," I said. "It doesn't have to be for long. Just long enough to impress Cleo. Then we'll scoot along to the movies and you can all fall apart again."

My father the professor shook his head. "'Greater love hath no----'" he started to say; then he just nodded, and waved me on. I backed the rest of the way down the drive without hitting any obstructions. I headed the car toward the Torfrees' over on Murmuring Lane. Now and then I took a clear breath (with an iodine-and-fish scent in it) to steady myself, and smiled like a fool up at the strengthening moon.

• • •

Everything was perfect at the Torfree house. You couldn't help comparing it with the wild willy-nilly air our house usually had. The catalpa trees beside their front walk were clipped just so, like tractable poodles. The baby's-breath bushes were all shaped to a fare-you-well. There was soft music -- something by Johann Strauss -- going in the background. I lifted the knocker and let it fall with a polite sound. I said without saying it out loud, Cleo, I love you. Now you are going home with me and meet my family and we will tell them we are engaged. Then we will zip out before they can start celebrating this fact, and go sit in the back row of the Onyx Theater and neck gently. And later I will take us for a ride beside the lake and we will admire all the little fishes in the moonlight.

The door opened; Mrs. Torfree said, "Cleo will be right down, Robin."

"Thank you," I said. I stepped in. Mrs. Torfree had her pince-nez on, and she appeared very dignified in a gentle way. Mr. Torfree, who is in the Gear and Belting business -- or Belting and Gear, I never quite understood -- was even more dignified in a not-so-gentle way. He was sitting in the living room. He got up, shook hands with me in his iron grip (like Gears and Belts) and said, "There's something wrong with your tie."

I clutched my tie. "Look in the mirror," said Mr. Torfree.

I took a look in the Federal mirror over the side table. One of the twins -- it would be Mars, who was artistic by spasms -- had painted a design on it. The design was advanced and messy. The paint was luminous. It had naturally caught Mr. Torfree's attention in the modest gloom of the Torfree living room.

"Sorry," I said, swallowing a few times. "Imagine I spilled soup on it at dinner. I have other ties," I explained.

"Should hope so," said Mr. Torfree, sitting down again and rattling his newspaper. He'd been reading the financial section. "Strong soup," he added.

I sat down, and went to sweating softly. After a while Mrs. Torfree said in a kind of sweet whisper, "How's your mother, Robin?"

"She's dandy, thank you," I said. I didn't say that she was sculpting a figure of Hercules to go in the back garden. That summer she'd already sculpted the figures of Hermes, Diana, Thor and Minerva. They stood around our back garden like giants, really something to look at if you cared for that stuff. The summer before she'd bred hamsters in the shed behind the garage. We'd had something like 800 hamsters before the hobby stopped. She'd sold them all to a pet shop and had about broken even.

"Your father," said Mr. Torfree. He was looking around his newspaper. "Is he still riding his scooter to the university?"

The sweat was collecting behind my ears. I said, "No sir. He doesn't have any summer classes."

Mr. Torfree frowned a bit. "All right, I'll rephrase it. Is he still riding that thing?"

"No sir," I said. "He gave it up." I didn't say that he'd given it up because he'd had an accident with it which demolished the thing. It had been a pretty noble scooter, man-size, with special rubber tires and a sort of cachebox on the front where he could keep a lot of books and papers in transit. He'd never learned to drive a car and wouldn't ride in one. If he hadn't been about the best teacher the university had, I suppose somebody there'd have stopped him riding it before the accident.

"Wise move," said Mr. Torfree, and settled back to reading again.

Then Cleo came down the stairs and into the room and the room came alive like it was lighted. She was wearing a lilac dress with a white scarf, and the dress skirt belled out from her waist just so, and so, and I stood up and said without saying it, Cleo, I love you and I want to be a responsible, quiet citizen and not just a crazy member of the crazy Stancia family, and I hope this is clear.

Then we were outside. The moon was higher, and bigger, and I kissed her a little in the catalpas' shadows. She kissed me a little, too.

Then we were in the car, and pulling away. And I kept near the curb in the deeper shadows and kissed her a lot. Then she was kissing me a lot, and she was all fine knees and cool-warm body and good lips and silk and fire, until all at once she said, "What have you been carrying in this car?"

"Seaweed."

"Oh," she said.

"It'll blow away," I said. "In a month you won't notice it. Did you tell your mother and father about our engagement?"

"No," Cleo said. She was leaning a little out of the window. "I tried to, but I couldn't. They seem to expect so much."

"Indeed," I said. "Will you stop leaning away from me and come in here where I can see you?"

"There's air out here," Cleo said. "I can't help it if I'm sensitive about things like this. I was raised a sensitive girl. Are you sure you weren't carrying a sulphur-bottom whale or something?"

"How irrelevant can you get?" I said. "I love you. Love laughs at those trifles."

"Not my love, Robin," she said. "I want everything to be smooth as silk in our world. I'm not critical, I just have to know what I'm getting into. I know your father is famous and great, and I know your mother is beautiful and dashing, and I know you're going to be a terrific poet -- in addition to your job with the Watchatooly Insurance Company -- but I also have to know our home will be a solid, nice one and not crazy as a bedbug all the time."

"Oh, boy," I said. "You haven't even seen our home close up. We're about the most solid, nicest people you ever saw. Everything else is a lot of silly rumors and the rumors happen because nobody else in town has the gumption to----" I stopped, swallowed, and said, "I mean because there isn't anything else for anybody to talk about in this town."

We'd been talking pretty loudly. I swung the car up the drive of our house. I stopped it. I listened. Everything was quiet and pleasing, with the crickets singing in the grass and the peepers sounding from the willows in the garden. Cleo had already gotten out. She was taking deep, clear breaths.

I joined her. "That's better," she said. She kissed me, a lot and hard. I did the same. Disengaging herself, she said, "You're probably right. It's just that my father seems to be a little disturbed about our going steady so long."

"Your father," I said, "is a -- " Cleo's dark blue eyes were shining with the reflections of moon and stars. " -- a careful man," I went on, walking Cleo across the grass. "And rightly so. But there's no need at all for any hesitancy. Look at the house," I said, stopping again. I waved a hand. "Charming. French provincial. Plenty of space. Nice, well-clipped lawn." I had finished mowing it three hours before; it had been high enough for small children and fair-sized burros to lose themselves in. My father the professor does not think outward appearances are essential. It was just sheer parental fondness on his part that'd urged him into helping me set everything up inside the house for this meeting-and-inspection tour.

Cleo squeezed my arm. "All right," (continued on page 96)Stancias' House (continuted from page 96) she said. "Say, your tie lights up."

"I know," I said. "I'll change it."

• • •

Then everything was perfect; my father the professor had even taken his fez off (a thing he seldom does, even when bathing) and he sat under the lamplight reading The Birds by Aristophanes (Dudley Fitts' translation) and laughing from time to time because he always laughs when he reads it. My mother was wearing a gold-and-silver gown which she once wore to a meeting of the Root Culturists in New York -- that was the year she raised roots in the bathtub and the sinks, and fried them and baked them and had us eat them for health, which of course we did to please her, and they hadn't tasted bad.

I breathed out, calmly. I breathed in, proudly.

"Mother," I said. "And Professor. I'd like you to meet the girl I'm going to marry, Cleo Torfree."

My mother got up, my father got up, and a more dignified couple you never saw. My mother kissed Cleo, and said, "Oh, Robin, she's ravishing, you're lovely, dear," and several other good things, and my father bent and kissed Cleo's fingers and said, "We welcome you, and we sincerely congratulate our oldest son."

Somebody, I saw, had even taken down the moose head from over the piano -- my father the professor loved the moose head, he'd won it on a punchboard years before, and my heart was touched that he'd let it be taken down from where it had been for all those years.

"Do sit down," said my mother. She tinkled a little bell; an old and very small ship's bell from a very small French ship. It was the bell we usually kept around the neck of the moose. "Alamana will bring us tea," she said.

Tea? Tea at this hour? I raised my eyebrows at my mother, but she looked the other way, and my father the professor coughed slightly behind his mustache.

My mother tinkled the bell again, and Alamana came in. She is quite tall for a woman, almost 5 feet 10, and she was wearing the uniform my mother got for her 10 years ago, which she'd never liked; she was wheeling a tea cart. She kept her face straight forward and didn't even wall her eyes at me or at Cleo; she started filling cups, and slicing cake, and my mother helped her, and my father said, "Beautiful hair; hair like the wing of a golden plover," to Cleo. Cleo smiled.

I mean, it was probably a delectable family moment; and then it fell apart like a cardhouse falling. The first thing that made it tumble was Mars; he stuck his red head in from the library, and I could see he'd come that way from the kitchen, because he was carrying a large paper-wrapped bundle of garbage. He winked at me, and put a finger on his lips, and started to tiptoe out the side door. He'd have made it if Morgan, the other twin, hadn't showed up right that second in the door from the side hall. They looked all right; they even had their hair brushed. But that wasn't the point -- the point was that Morgan, sighting Mars, made a wiggling motion with his fingers for Mars to sling him the garbage in a pass, and Mars couldn't resist it.

Even through the despair that shot up into me as I saw this, I couldn't blame Mars or Morgan. I'd have done the same thing at their age. Just because it was Mars' turn to tote out the garbage, and because he'd happened to postpone it this long, wasn't anybody's fault. Fate, yes, fault, no.

There wasn't time to yell or squeak. The pass went zinging along and Morgan took a yeoman jump for it, but it was too high and the garbage bag shattered on the wall above him. Eggshells and coffee grounds came spraying out into the room, and Morgan stood there looking down at them with something a little horrified and a little like terrible laughter working in his throat, his eyes. Then he lifted his head and sighted over at Mars.

They have 12 dozen routines, all awful, all the reason vaudeville died. Morgan shouted suddenly, "What's your name?"

Mars shouted, "Mars Stancia!"

Morgan yelled, "Your rank?"

Mars yelled, "So're you!" Then followed the business of both of them doubling up, going, "Har, har, har" in unison, and straightening like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes.

Mars' turn, then. He said, "We got a goat over at our house. Hasn't got any nose."

Morgan: "How does he smell?"

Mars: "Terrible!"

Again the business of doubling over, and the "Har, har, hars."

Then Morgan: "Say, go run up the curtain!"

Mars: "Whattaya think I am, a monkey? Har, har, har."

And, finally, Morgan, with some degree of inspiration at this point, "Hey, whattaya do with the garbage at your house?"

And Mars, triumphantly, "We kick it around till it gets lost!"

At this, they both rolled on the floor. Alamana had glared at them as they started, but now she was laughing. She has a rich laugh that shakes roof beams. She sagged back to the piano bench, her uniform cap falling off, and then she swung around and struck the first bars of the Toreador's Song, which she dotes on. My mother started singing along with her, companionably, and my father the professor looked at me and shrugged gently. The moose head rolled out from behind the piano because the piano was shaking, and it looked up at Cleo with its yellow eyes.

Cleo was staring at me. Above the music, I said, "All right! I tried to pretend things weren't what they are! I love my family -- " I'd thrown back my coat, stuck out my chest, and I was beating a fist into the air the way I do when exercised. "They're a family, not a bunch of stuffed penguins. But I love you, too, and what're you going to do about it?"

Cleo's blue eyes were wide as big violets, but you wouldn't think such eyes could also look like those of a Bengal tigress.

"Do? I -- am -- going -- home -- and ----" She was trying to get her ring off. She kept trying, all the way to the door. She was still trying, on the steps. For a second I was glad her parents hadn't noticed the ring, because it would save them a lot of trouble. It was fairly small, which was I guess the reason they hadn't seen it. But through all this, I was in anguish and getting madder by the second. "-- and I never want to see you -- again ----"

She was out and zipping along the walk. I boiled out after her, and jumped in the car. My mother came and jumped in beside me. Alamana swarmed in beside my mother. Morgan and Mars got on board just as we were curving out into the street. My father the good Professor Stancia had found his fez, clapped it on, and he was following Cleo at a distance of about 10 feet, trying to reason with her in his fine, free, positive manner.

I snaked the car along the curb and leaned toward Cleo.

"You can keep the ring! I wouldn't want anybody else to have it!" I had to holler above her voice and my father's reasonable voice. "I never want to look at anybody else! Every time I even think about anything, write a poem, try to draw up a policy, you're in it. That's love! You're a spoiled, sheltered brat but you'll grow out of it and I'm still and always willing to take the chance you will."

Alamana boomed, " 'At ring won't come off, honey, less'n you use soap!"

My father said, "My dear, exterior appearances are very deceptive. Instinct, warmth, understanding -- these are values far above the appearances the world offers us----" He was trotting closer (continued on page 111) Stancias' House (continued from page 96) behind her.

Mars said, "She's stuck-up, whattaya want to waste your time for, Rob?"

And Morgan said, "She isn't crying, though. Maybe she might turn out all right."

My mother said, "It's a simply lovely evening. I think I may be able to finish Hercules' nose, the moon's so bright."

Cleo didn't say another thing then. She just walked faster. She was really sailing -- maybe five miles an hour. Things went like this all the way to Murmuring Lane.

• • •

I stopped the car in front of the Torfrees', and I was just hopping out -- Mother and Alamana and Mars and Morgan on my heels, my father puffing up the walk behind Cleo -- when the first fire truck came. It zoomed around the corner on three wheels (it has six) and stopped; and at the same second, Mrs. Torfree burst out of the front door. Behind her, slower, came Mr. Torfree; his eyebrows were a little singed and his shirt was blackened, and he was wearing some sort of chemical apparatus around his neck.

The fire siren died away, and men began streaming from the truck. They jumped over the oleander bushes and sailed along through the bridal wreath and the baby's breath; in the distance another siren was wailing. Neighbors were erupting from front doors, coming along in a galloping hurry, a little pleased and friendly, and pretty excited. Cleo had stopped cold on the walk. She was looking at her mother and father. They came toward her. I stood beside her.

Her mother nodded, at something Cleo'd asked with her eyes.

"Oh yes," her mother said. "It's happened again. He said he'd just go down and play with his chemicals for a moment or two ----" She swayed slightly, a hand to her forehead, and my good gallant father caught her and propped her up. Mars and Morgan propped up my father up a little, in turn. Mr. Torfree looked to me the one who most needed propping, so I said with sympathy, "Sir. What happened?"

"You got some biggety burns," Alamana said, peering at him. She clucked gently. "Not so biggety they can't be treated, but we knows what to do. You come along to our house, easy now."

My mother said eagerly, "Page one hundred seven, in the Home Nursing course; we'll be happy to see you're made comfortable. Come along ----" She was steering Mrs. Torfree along, too, by now; we all lumped ourselves toward the car.

"Happened?" said Mr. Torfree. "It was simply an experiment. Professor Stancia!" Mr. Torfree drew himself up, and for the first time I liked him. He had what appeared to be powder burns over his left eye, but he wasn't a remote man any longer, he was something that breathed and jumped and lived. "Professor," he said to my father, "isn't a man's home his castle? Isn't it one of his sacred rights to do with that home and in that home what he wishes? Of course I didn't want to endanger others -- it was purely accident. I must've got the wrong bottle. It's a hobby of mine, this experimenting -- keeps my spirit fresh ----"

"Ah," said my father. "Of course, of course. A hobby ----"

I said, also gently, under the hubbub around us, "Like your scooter, Professor. Like your fez. Like the moose head, and Mother's sculpting and root-raising and hamstering and all the rest. Like --" and by now I was stopping on the walk, and breathing in Cleo's perfume, and looking straight in her eyes, "-- Mars and Morgan's fooling around; which didn't mean a thing except that they're themselves."

My father looked back. Smoke was coming out of the basement windows of the Torfrees', and the firemen were breaking glass with a jolly sound. It looked like they'd save the house all right.

"Like Alamana's opera," he said to us. He was helping Mr. Torfree along now, and Mother had charge of Mrs. T. They were getting in the car. "Or seaweed --" His nose and mustache made their rabbit-wrinkle, "-- or anything at all which stems from human nature in the pursuit of its joy."

Mr. Torfree wheeled around a little, grunted, and said, "You go ahead and marry this boy, Cleo. Don't stand on ceremony. Don't get to be a stuffed shirtess. Keep that ring on your finger where it belongs!"

They were all in the car, Mother driving and Mars and Morgan helping her drive -- they like to shift.

They pulled away. Firemen were bawling orders; two more trucks had arrived. Cleo stopped fiddling with the ring and walked along at my side. There was the smell of wild beauty and quick-growing things in the darkness under the catalpas, and it was even better under the oaks farther along, and we couldn't hear much after a while but the sounds of our own feet.

"OK?" I said then when we stopped walking.

"Well," she said soft into my neck.

"Your hair is like the wing of a golden plover," I said. "Professor's right. I love you."

"Well, I love you," she said into my ear.

We kissed each other a lot, a great deal, then, and she said, "Keep that tie. I like it to light up. I want all our children to have neckties just like it." And then she looked up with her hands on my face and said, "Har, har," and we both said, "Har."