Bagombo Snuff Box (36 page)

About a week later I took the copy of Woman, the Wasted Sex,
or, The Swindle of Housewifery to a luncheon meeting of LA at the drugstore. I
was through with the thing, and I passed it around.

“You didn’t let your wife read this, did you?” Hay Boyden
asked.

“Certainly,” I said.

“She’ll walk out on you and the kids,” said Hay, “and become
a rear admiral.”

“Nope,” I said.

“You give a woman a book like this,” said Al Tedler, “and
you’re gonna have a restless woman on your hands.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “When I gave my wife this book I
gave her a magic bookmark to go with it.” I nodded. “That magic bookmark kept
her under control all the way through.”

Everybody wanted to know what the bookmark was.

“One of her old report cards,” I said.

Hal Irwin built his magic lamp in his basement in
Indianapolis, in the summer of 1929. It was supposed to look like Aladdin’s
lamp. It was an old tin teapot with a piece of cotton stuck in the spout for a
wick. Hal bored a hole in it for a doorbell button, which he hooked up to two
flashlight batteries and a buzzer inside. Like many husbands back then, he had
a workshop in the basement.

The idea was, it was a cute way to call servants. You’d rub
the teapot as if it were a magic lamp, and you’d push the button on the side.
The buzzer’d go off, and a servant, if you had one, would come and ask you what
you wished.

Hal didn’t have a servant, but he was going to borrow one
from a friend. Hal was a customers’ man in a brokerage house, and he knew his business
inside out. He’d made half a million dollars on the stock market, and nobody
knew it. Not even his wife.

He made the magic lamp as a surprise for his wife. He was going
to tell her it was a magic lamp. And then he was going to rub it and wish for a
big new house. And then he was going to prove to her that it really was a magic
lamp, because every wish was going to come true.

When he made the lamp, the interior decorator was finishing
up the insides of a big new French chateau Hal had ordered built out on North
Meridian Street.

When Hal made that lamp, he and Mary were living in a shotgun
house down in all the soot at Seventeenth and Illinois Street. They’d been
married two years, and Hal hadn’t had her out more than five or six times. He
wasn’t being stingy. He was saving up to buy her all the happiness a girl could
ever ask for, and he was going to hand it to her in one fell swoop.

Hal was ten years older than Mary, so it was easy for him to
buffalo her about a lot of things, and one of the things was money. He wouldn’t
talk money with her, never let her see a bill or a bank statement, never told
her how much he made or what he was doing with it. All Mary had to go by was
the piddling allowance he gave her to run the house, so she guessed they were
poor as Job’s turkey.

Mary didn’t mind that. That girl was as wholesome as a peach
and a glass of milk. Being poor gave her room to swing her religion around.
When the end of the month came, and they’d eaten pretty well, and she hadn’t
asked Hal for an extra dime, she felt like a little white lamb. And she thought
Hal was happy, even though he was broke, because she was giving him a hundred
million dollars’ worth of love.

There was only one thing about being poor that really
bothered Mary, and that was the way Hal always seemed to think she wanted to be
rich. She did her best to convince him that wasn’t true.

When Hal would carry on about how well other folks were doing—
about the high life at the country clubs and the lakes—Mary’d talk about the
millions of folks in China who didn’t have a roof over their heads or a’nything
to eat.

“Me doing velly well for Chinaman,” Hal said one night.

“You’re doing very well for an American or for an anything!”
Mary said. She hugged him, so he’d be proud and strong and happy.

“Well, your successful Chinaman’s got a piece of news for
you,” Hal said. “Tomorrow you’re gonna get a cook. I told an employment agency
to send one out.”

Actually, the person arriving the next day, whose name was
Ella Rice, wouldn’t be coming to cook, and wasn’t from an employment agency.
She already had a job with a friend of Hal’s whom Mary didn’t know. The friend
would give her the day off so she could play the part of a jinni.

Hal had rehearsed her at the friend’s house, and he would
pay her well. She needed the extra money. She was going to have a baby in about
six weeks, she thought. All she had to do was put on a turban when the time
came, when Hal showed Mary his magic lamp, and rubbed it and rang its buzzer.
Then she would say, “I am the jinni. What do you want?”

After that, Hal would start wishing for expensive things he
already owned, which Mary hadn’t seen yet. His first wish would be for a Marmon
town car. It would already be parked out front. Every time he made a wish,
starting with that one, Ella Rice would say, “You got it.”

But that was tomorrow, and today was today, and Mary thought
Hal didn’t like her cooking. She was a wonderful cook. “Honey,” she said, “are
my meals that bad?”

“They’re great. I have no complaints whatsoever.”

“Then why should we get a cook?”

He looked at her as though she were deaf, dumb, and blind. “Don’t
you ever think of my pride?” he asked her. He put his hand over her mouth. “Honeybunch,
don’t tell me again about people dying like flies in China. I am who I am where
I am, and I’ve got pride.”

Mary wanted to cry. Here she thought she’d been making Hal
feel better, and she’d been making him feel worse instead.

“What do you think I think when I see Bea Muller or Nancy
Gossett downtown in their fur coats, buying out the department stores?” Hal
said. “I think about you, stuck in this house. I think, Well, for crying out
loud, I used to be president of their husbands’ fraternity house! For crying
out loud, me and Harve Muller and George Gossett used to be the Grand Triumvirate.
That’s what they used to call the three of us in college—the Grand Triumvirate!
We used to run the college, and I’m not kidding. We founded the Owl’s Club, and
I was president.

“Look where they live, and look where we live,” Hal went on.
“We oughta be right out there with ‘em at Fifty-seventh and North Meridian! We
oughta have a cottage right next to ‘em at Lake Maxinkuckee! Least I can do is
get my wife a cook.”

Ella Rice arrived at the house the next day at three o’clock
as planned. In a paper bag she had the turban Hal had given her. Hal wasn’t
home yet. Ella was supposed to pretend to be the new cook instead of a jinni
until Hal arrived at three-thirty. Which she did.

What Hal hadn’t counted on, though, was that Mary would find
Ella so likable, but so pitiful, not a cook, but a fellow human being in awful
trouble. He had expected them to go to the kitchen to talk about this and
that, what Hal liked to eat, and so on. But Mary asked Ella about her
pregnancy, which was obvious. Ella, who was no actress, and at the end of her
rope in any case, burst into tears. The two women, one white, one black, stayed
in the living room and talked about their lives instead.

Ella wasn’t married. The father of her child had beaten her
up when he found out she was pregnant, and then taken off for parts unknown.
She had aches and pains in many places, and no relatives, and didn’t know how
much longer she could do housework. She repeated what she had told Hal, that
her pregnancy still had six weeks to go, she thought. Mary said she wished she
could have a baby, but couldn’t. That didn’t help.

When Hal parked the new Marmon out front and entered the
house, neither woman was in any condition to enjoy the show he had planned.
They were a mess! But he imagined his magic lamp would cheer them up. He went
to get it from the closet where he had hidden it upstairs, then brought it into
the living room and said, “My goodness! Look what I just found. I do believe it’s
a magic lamp. Maybe if I rub it a jinni will appear, and she will make a wish
come true.” He hadn’t considered hiring a black man to play the jinni. He was
scared of black men.

Ella Rice recognized her cue, and got off the couch to do the
crazy thing the white man was going to pay for. Anything for money. It hurt her
a lot to stand, after sitting still for a half-hour. Even Hal could see that.

Hal wished for a Marmon, and the jinni said, “You got it.”
The three went out to the car, and Hal told them to get in, that it was his,
paid for in full. The women sat in the backseat, and Mary said to Ella, not to
Hal, “Thanks a lot. This is wonderful. I think I’m going nuts.”

Hal drove up North Meridian Street, pointing out grand
houses left and right. Every time he did that, Mary said that she wouldn’t want
it, that Hal could throw his magic lamp out the window, as far as she was concerned.
What she was really upset about was the humiliating use he was making of her
new friend Ella.

Hal stopped in front of a French chateau on which workmen
were putting finishing touches. He turned off the motor, rubbed the lamp,
buzzed the buzzer, and said, “Jinni, give me a new house at 5644 North Meridian
Street.”

Mary said to Ella, “You don’t have to do this. Don’t answer
him.”

Ella got mad at Mary now. “I’m getting paid!” Everything
Ella said was in a dialect typical of a person of her race and class and degree
of education back then. Now she groaned. She was going into labor.

They took Ella Rice to the city hospital, the only one that
admitted black people. She had a healthy boy baby, and Hal paid for it.

Hal and Mary brought her and the baby back to their new
house. The old house was on the market. And Mary, who couldn’t have a baby
herself, fixed up one of the seven bedrooms for mother and child, with cute
furniture and wallpaper and toys the baby wasn’t old enough to play with.
Mother and child had their own bathroom.

The baby was christened in a black church, and Mary was
there. Hal wasn’t. He and Mary were hardly speaking. Ella named the baby Irwin,
in honor of the people who were so good to her. His last name was the same as
hers. He was Irwin Rice.

Mary had never loved Hal, but had managed to like him. It
was a job. There weren’t many ways for women to earn their own money back then,
and she hadn’t inherited anything, and wouldn’t unless Hal died. Hal was no
dumber than most men she’d known. She certainly didn’t want to be alone. They
had a black yard man and a black laundress, and a white housemaid from Ireland,
who lived in the mansion. Mary insisted on doing the cooking. Ella Rice offered
to do it, at least for herself. But nobody except Mary was allowed to cook.

She hated the new house so much, and the gigantic car, which
embarrassed her, that she couldn’t even like Hal anymore. This was very tough
on Hal, extremely tough, as you can well imagine. Not only was he not getting
love, or what looked like love, from the woman he’d married, but she was giving
ten times more love than he’d ever gotten, and nonstop, to a baby as black as
the ace of spades!

Hal didn’t tell anybody at the office about the situation at
home, because it would have made him look like a weakling. The housemaid from
Ireland treated him like a weakling, as though Mary were the real power, and
crazy as a bedbug.

Ella Rice of course made her own bed, and kept her bedroom
and bathroom very neat. Things didn’t seem right to her, either, but what
could she do? Ella nursed the baby, so its food was all taken care of. Ella
didn’t eat downstairs with the Irwins. Not even Mary considered that a
possibility. Ella didn’t eat with the servants in the kitchen, either. She
brought upstairs whatever Mary had prepared especially for her, and ate it in
her bedroom.

At the office, anyway, Hal was making more money than ever,
trading stocks and bonds for others, but also investing heavily for himself in
stocks, never mind bonds, on margin. “On margin” meant he paid only a part of
the full price of a stock, and owed the rest to the brokerage where he worked.
And then the stock’s value would go up, because other people wanted it, and Hal
would sell it. He could then pay off his debt to the brokerage, and the rest
of the profit was his to keep.

So he could buy more stock on margin.

Three months after the magic-lamp episode, the stock market
crashed. The stocks Hal had bought on margin became worthless. All of a sudden,
everybody thought they were too expensive at any price. So what Hal Irwin owed
to his brokerage, and what his brokerage owed to a bank in turn, was more than
everything he owned—the new house, the unsold old house, the furniture, the
car, and on and on. You name it!

He wasn’t loved at home even in good times, so Hal went out
a seventh-story window without a parachute. All over the country, unloved men
in his line of work were going out windows without parachutes. The bank
foreclosed on both houses, and took the Marmon, too. Then the bank went bust,
and anybody with savings in it lost those savings.

Mary had another house to go to, which was her widowed father’s
farm outside the town of Crawfordsville. The only place Ella Rice could think
of to go with her baby was the black church where the baby had been baptized.
Mary went there with them. A lot of mothers with babies or children, and old
people, and cripples, and even perfectly healthy young people were sleeping
there. There was food. Mary didn’t ask where it came from. That was the last
Mary would see of Ella and Irwin Rice. Ella was eating, and then she would
nurse the baby.

When Mary got to her father’s farmhouse, the roof was
leaking and the electricity had been shut off. But her father took her in. How
could he not? She told him about the homeless people in the black church. She
asked him what he thought would become of them in such awful times.

“The poor take care of the poor,” he said.