Mr. And Mrs. Willoughby

by MARY ELIZABETH PLUMMER

1

THE JAMES PETER WILLOUGHBYS had no photograph album, but through the years they had acquired a sizable assortment of snapshots and small pictures of this and that. Mrs. Willoughby kept these in a shirt box in a drawer of a break-front bookcase.

About once a year, the children chanced to think of this treasure, and had a field day snickering over pictures of themselves as infants, and over the quaint clothes Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby wore when they were younger.

Joyce was particularly interested in some snapshots of Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby on their wedding trip in the Pyrenees.

“Where am I?” she always asked, looking for herself among the traveling bags.

Mrs. Willoughby explained to Joyce that she had not yet been born.

“Where are Jane and Peter?”

“They also came later,” Mrs. Willoughby said.

Joyce’s face always clouded. It was very selfish of her mother and father not to have had their children along on this trip.

“Where in the world did you get that hat?” Jane would shriek in horror, and Mrs. Willoughby would look, and say tranquilly, “It was the height of fashion. I bought it in Paris.”

One day Mrs. Willoughby decided to assemble all the snapshots in a more usable form, since the children liked them so much; so she obtained a large scrapbook with black pages, and started pasting them in.

Some of them were amusing, she had to admit. There were some pictures of her in the shapeless long dresses of the early 1920’s, and those hip-line belts were not flattering. The passport-style pictures which were on the Willoughbys’ New York World’s Fair identification cards made them look like a family in the rogues’ gallery; and there were some little dears which had been made of her and Jim and Lolly Winters in a shooting gallery on Broadway one night when they dropped in after the theater. Lolly had her chin down, and looked like Sarah Bernhardt sighting a tin duck.

There were a number of pictures of James Peter Willoughby at various stages of his life. Here was his baby picture — very pretty, with curls on his head and a mischievous gleam in his eye. Here was one as a young man, smoking a pipe and swaggering, and one as a gay blade with a lascivious-looking brunette. Here was a snapshot made on a recent evening when Jim covered the family with glory by winning sixty-four dollars and the jack pot on the “Take It or Leave It” quiz broadcast.

There was one which Mrs. Willoughby loved especially — of Jim as a small boy, with his hair brushed back and a rather lonely look on his face. He was wearing high laced shoes.

Mrs. Willoughby arranged the pictures of Jim in consecutive order and pasted them in, and then she started studying them. It was remarkable what a steady progression of development they showed; and still, Jim never had changed. In all the pictures, there was that clean-cut, open face. She thought of the splendid way that Jim, as a grown man, went around saying “Yes,” “No,” and “ The hell with it”; and it came to her with great force that here was the gifted member of the Willoughby family.

Not herself — James Peter Willoughby.

“O winner of the ‘Take It or Leave It’ jack pot,” she thought, “I salute you!” She thought of the small boy in the high laced shoes: how he had grown up, and trustingly committed his life into her keeping. What had she ever done to advance Jim’s position? Nothing. She had let him struggle along, all by himself. He had done very well, but there was no telling what heights Jim would rise to if she abandoned her own projects and devoted herself to his career.

“‘Every great man has a great woman behind him,’” thought Mrs. Willoughby. This would be her lifework: she would be a Woman Behind Her Man.

And now, looking over the pictures, Mrs. Willoughby reviewed her own activities, and brought her philosophy up to date.

Only a few days before, she had stepped on a scale in a corner drugstore. Her weight card came up — 120, which was what she had weighed for the last four years. She had punched the button which said, “What color is most becoming to you?” and the card replied, “Flesh color.”

Printed across the card was the sentence: “You are a person of great action and few words; your work speaks for itself.”

Mrs. Willoughby knew that this was not true. What, then, was true?

Well, for one thing, she was getting a little older. Not much older, but some. Recently she had been shocked to see in an antique shop a doll’s head like that of her old china doll. Ridiculous, of course, to have it there — her doll wasn’t an antique yet — but nevertheless it was a little sobering. And already some of the early episodes of her life in Mount Kisco, New York, seemed to have the quality of legend when she described them to Joyce and Peter.

The first flush of youth had passed; but, especially in the last two years, she sometimes felt a quiet, new thing which compensated for the exuberance she had felt at sixteen. A kind of wisdom. She thought of Henry Handel Richardson’s novel, The Getting of Wisdom. It was a very good title.

That reminded her of the New York novel, “Tamotua,” which she had intended to write long ago, and her large study of history, and the Mrs. Willoughby Plan for World Peace.

She had tried to do a lot of things, but the things which she had done best had to do with her own home. She was a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, a good interior decorator, a good cook, a good seamstress.

Suddenly it dawned on Mrs. Willoughby that what she really was was a housewife — and no more talented than any other housewife, except that, in twenty years’ residence in New York, she had come to know the location of all the better ladies’ rooms in the midtown section.

2

THAT evening, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby had a festive dinner at home, with duck, and vin rosé, and white lilacs in the Paul Revere bowl. Mrs. Willoughby wore her favorite cream-colored chiffon dinner dress.

They had a great discussion of flying schedules as they probably would be after the war: ten hours to London, fourteen to Moscow, sixteen to Cairo, fifteen to Rio, twenty from San Francisco to Chungking, twenty-four to Calcutta; and Mrs. Willoughby said that already Army people thought no more of going to Dakar, Cape Town, or Aden than the Willoughbys thought of going to Montclair, New Jersey. She said she sometimes had the urge to fly about now, the way a lot of people were doing, and that some mighty intelligence must come from all that traveling.

“I should like to see Foynes, Ireland, where the great pilots come in with the bombers,” she said rather wistfully. “But a person could zizz around the world all his life, and some day he would be a hundred years old, with a lot of new things happening for him to see.”

Jim listened attentively to this dissertation.

“After all,” continued Mrs. Willoughby, “any part of the world is the world in microcosm. A person can look at his own neighborhood and know the universe — as one can study a bit of tissue through a microscope and know the whole organism.”

“Is that thought your own?” asked Jim.

Mrs. Willoughby said with a gleam of mirth that she and Charles Darwin had thought this.

She started talking about her little world, the New York fifties, from Sutton Place South to Park Avenue. “If I had been off in Foynes,” she said, “I shouldn’t have known that Martin went into the Army.”

“Who’s Martin?”

“Martin Ulnick, the newsstand man at First Avenue. He closed his little kiosk and put up a sign saying, ‘ Good-bye to all,’ and some of the cold New Yorkers you’re always hearing about wrote notes on it saying, ‘Good luck to you, old pal,’ and ‘Thanks for your friendly smile.’”

She said her little world was full of interesting incidents which gave insight into human nature, and now that she knew what her lifework was to be she could carry on her work, and observe these incidents with great pleasure and profit.

“So you have decided on your lifework,” said Jim. “What is it to be?”

“Helping you,” said Mrs. Willoughby.

“What are you going to do?” asked Jim anxiously.

Mrs. Willoughby said, again with a twinkle, that the first thing she was going to do was to hire a paperhanger and have his office repapered; that the present paper didn’t show him off properly, and she was going to buy an attractive design — maybe something with large cabbage roses.

James Peter Willoughby looked alarmed. “You can’t do that!” he said.

Mrs. Willoughby said she didn’t see why not; that she wanted him to look pretty at his office, the way he did at home.

Leaving Jim in some doubt as to whether she really meant to do this or not, Mrs. Willoughby went off to tell Joyce and Peter a bedtime story. Peter said he was too old for bedtime stories, but he still hung around, although he sometimes pretended not to listen.

“Pretty Mummy,” said Joyce approvingly. She loved Mrs. Willoughby in chiffon. “Tell about the Frog Prince.”

“In the old days,” began Mrs. Willoughby, “when wishing was having, there lived a king who had three daughters. They were all very beautiful.”

“No,” said Joyce, changing her mind. “Tell about the peas in the pod.”

“There were five peas in one pod,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “They were green, and the pod was green, and so they believed that all the world was green.”

“No!” said Joyce. It was a familiar ruse, to get parts of several of her favorite stories.

“Well,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “I’ll make up your mind for you. I shall tell you about the Mouse-King.”

The story fell in with her present mood. Her voice rippled smoothly through the Hans Christian Andersen tale, which the children knew as well as she did. She told about the splendid banquets the Mouse-King had on moldy bread and tallow candles, but how he wanted soup made from a sausage stick. Whoever learned to make it would become his queen.

“The lady mice hesitated to go out to learn,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “ because they might come to hunger and starvation, or get eaten up by the cat. But a few went out. One went to sea in a ship bound for the north, into wild woods full of pines and birch trees. One tried to become a poet, because her grandmother had told her, ‘A poet can make soup out of a sausage stick.’”

“And how do you become a poet?” prompted Peter.

“‘Three things are necessary,’” quoted Mrs. Willoughby meditatively. “‘Understanding, fancy, and feeling.’”

She was sitting on a sofa in Joyce’s room, with Peter on one side and Joyce on the other. They leaned against her.

“And the third mouse stayed at home,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “and thought and thought, and finally told the Mouse-King he could have the soup he wanted, if he would simply dip his tail into the kettle of boiling water, and stir.”

Joyce and Peter made pleased exclamations over this resourceful idea, as if they never had heard the story before.

“The little mouse said, ‘I have not traveled. Everything good is to be got here. I have not gone about asking questions of supernatural powers, or eating up wisdom, or talking with owls. I have learned through silent communing with myself at home. Now will you have the goodness to put the kettle on?”’

When the story ended, Joyce and Peter speculated about how this soup would taste. Mrs. Willoughby continued to sit, with an arm around each, thinking about her own doings of the last few years.

Somewhere along the way there had come over her a great assurance of immortality. There would come a situation in which one handed over the record, with all its good intentions, and was received into a great radiance, like the woman clothed with the sun in the Book of Revelation.

She had known this. But she had had a small, sneaking wish for immortality in the temporal world as well. The latter, she now knew, she never would have. But it wasn’t strictly necessary.

Only the Sunday before, the rector at St. Thomas’s had asked the congregation, “‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'” and the words had fallen on Mrs. Willoughby’s ears like an aural balm.

“So I am a housewife,” she now thought. “There are thirty million of us in this country. We are a large and powerful bloc.”

She thought of the small things she could do to give pleasure. There was a red Irish setter in one of the cross streets, who put his forepaws up in the open window of a doctor’s office, and watched Mrs. Willoughby go by. She always paused, stroked his shining head, and told him carefully that he was a good dog. The dog appreciated it. She would go on doing that. And in the elevator at home she would talk with the elevator men, James Patrick Hanrahan and Michael Francis Walsh, about the great contributions of Yeats and Lady Gregory.

She saw the years ahead, and herself in them: the ornament of her household, the delight of her husband and children, in a world not much larger than a circle of lamplight.

After tucking the children in, she sat down at her desk in the living room and wrote some little household notes.

To the milkman: —

Please leave no cream tomorrow (Wednesday), but leave a dozen brown eggs when you can.

To the laundry: —

I am interested in knowing what in heaven’s name you do to the washcloths to make them so stiff.

To the dry cleaner: —

Could you see your way clear to returning the tie of my red blouse sometime this summer, at your convenience?

James Peter Willoughby was reading a newspaper. Suddenly he laid it aside and said, “Janie, I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier this evening. I don’t want you to be any different from the way you are.”

“Don’t you honestly?” asked Mrs. Willoughby. “I mean it.”

Mrs. Willoughby, with her head full of worthywifely enterprises, said, “We shall see.”

A breeze blew in off the East River and lightly billowed the satin draperies. The crystal pieces on the mantel girandoles came together and made small music — like a faint, far-off, but triumphal sound of bells and cymbals.