Tales From Gavagan's Bar (41 page)

             
"Dotty and I are always getting each other out of jams," said Keating. "She was at Mareeba in Australia when I was base adjutant and we had a private agreement to protect each other. Every time one of the fly-boys began to pitch woo, I was engaged to her, and every time one of those Aussie hostesses began to turn on the heat, she was engaged to me. Only I never could persuade her to make it real."

             
"You can be glad I didn't," said Dotty. "It's like being under a curse." She sipped her Alexander.

             
"What is, if I'm not too inquisitive?" said Willison.

             
"What's happened to me." She addressed Keating. "You remember the time they brought in that colonel?"

             
"The one with the queer name—Poselthwaite or Throg-morton or something like that?"

             
"That's right," said Dotty. "I've been working it out, and that's when it must have started. No, wait, it didn't either start then. It started way back when I was born, and my parents wanted a boy, so they took out their disappointment by trying to make me as much like one as possible. They never taught me to cook or sew or do anything girls do, and when it came time for me to go to college, they wanted me to take a course in engineering. But I just didn't have the aptitude for it; I couldn't remember the formulas or do the mathematics. All I liked to do
was tinker with the machines, so one day I just dropped out and enrolled in a motor mechanic's school. That was all right, too, because I was doing something a man ought to be."

             
Keating interrupted. "She was good at it, too. It got her a captaincy in the Wacs, and she was line chief at Mareeba."

             
"Well, anyway," Dotty said, "you see? I was glad to be doing something in the war, and everybody couldn't have been nicer to me, even if I was a woman over a group of men. And then that night they brought this colonel in."

             
"I remember his name now," said Keating. "It was Pender-matter."

             
"That's right, so it was," said Dotty. She turned to Willison. "I don't know whether you know how it was in Australia. Sometimes planes would get forced down in the desert, and unless the fliers were guided back to civilization pretty quickly they would die. Even when everything else was all right, they wouldn't know where the waterholes were. So the American and Aussie governments finally worked out a system of rewards with the bushmen for every flier they brought in alive. So much for a Jap, with the rewards for our people graduated according to their rank. The reward the bushman liked best was a button in the shape of a sunflower with 'Vote for Landon' written across it. It took a major for them to get one of those."

             
Keating interrupted again: "We ran out of Landon buttons, and the government had to have more made. The contractor must have thought we were crazy."

#
★
#

             
[Dotty finished her Alexander.] Those bushmen are pretty primitive, but they're smart. They can't count above seven, but they very soon got to recognize the different insignia; and if anyone tried to shortchange them with a Roosevelt button or a St.
Christopher medal, they'd blow up and threaten never to bring in any more, so we had to meet the going price. Then this night, one of them brought in this colonel—what was it? Pendermatter. He had started out for some sort of big civic do down in Adelaide and had his best Sunday uniform on with all sorts of decorations, so that he looked like a Christmas tree with the lights turned up.

             
I came out of the officers' club just as they brought him along. There was this little group, two or three Aussie interpreters and Pendermatter and a bushman. The Abo was bouncing up and down and arguing at the top of his voice. Of course I went over to see what was going on. One of the Aussies said the bushman thought that Pendermatter was just about the second son of God in the American army and was demanding a very special reward, something better than anyone ever got before for a downed flyer. "They've already offered the blighter two Landon buttons," he said, "but he won't have them. It has to be something new, and we can't get him to be specific."

             
The bushman let loose another flood of oratory. The Aussie said he was describing himself as a descendant of the great Bamapama, the greatest medicine man in Australian legend, and saying that only a man with his special powers could have found so high and beautiful an object as Pendermatter, and that was another reason why he was entitled to a special reward. Well, there had been a party at the officers' club and I was dressed up, and part of it was one of those little charm bracelets that wasn't worth very much, so I helped out by offering it to him. The minute I put it in his hand, his eyes bugged out and he began to chatter again, wagging his head. The interpreter said: "Thank you, captain. You appear to have solved our difficulty. Wait a bit, though."

             
The bushman was picking over the charms on the bracelet. He stopped at one that was a miniature of an old-fashioned cook-pot, looked at it and then at me, and began to jabber again. The interpreter said: "He says he's going to make a number one magic when he gets home, so that every time you touch a cookpot, your fingers will have virtue."

             
I giggled and said something about how I couldn't boil an egg without an assistant, and the interpreter said something about he wondered whether primitive peoples didn't have an order of knowledge that civilization had lost, but I recognized that as a buildup to asking for a date, and walked away and forgot about it. For then, anyway.

             
You know, Walter [she turned toward Keating] Tom's
family didn't care too much about his marrying me. Very sweet to him and all, but the idea of anyone in a Social Register family marrying a mechanic really got them down. I met him when he brought the car into my garage for a checkup on the lube system and took a chance on going to dinner with him that night. I just wasn't at home with his family, though. I don't mean I behaved like a social goon or anything like that—my parents weren't from the slums or anything, even if they did bring me up to be a mechanic. I knew it was all right when I went places with Tom by the way other people treated me, not Tom's family, but the others. That is, it was all right down to the time they'd find out I was making a living by being a mechanic in my own garage. Then they'd lower the boom.

             
One night when we were out in the car, he parked it and said: "Dotty, I've been coaxing you to marry me, and I want you to more than ever. But there's a string to it now. There won't be any money."

             
It didn't even annoy me. I simply said: "What of it? If I marry you, it won't be for money."

             
"I'll have to go to work," he said. "The mater had laid the law down. If I marry I'll have to earn my own living, and I've been looking around and the best I can get is in an advertising agency at fifty a week."

             
What could you do with a man like that? I kissed him and said the garage was doing all right, and we'd have to be pretty slow not to get along on what I was making out of it. Then I said yes, I'd be glad to marry him.

             
You might think that would make him happy. Not at all. He told me I'd have to give up the garage if we were married. He started in with his mother about how she was old and not very well, and she'd just about die if her daughter-in-law was working in a garage and her name came out of the Social Register. Well, I got rid of that line by asking him whether he wanted to marry me or stay married to his family, but he only started in on another one, and this one was hard to beat. He said that he'd never really had to work, and now he couldn't let me be the support of the family tree and feel he
was doing his part. He wanted it to be an honest marriage, and wanted me to stay home and have children and take care of the house like a normal wife. Well, we argued over it for hours. I remember the roofs of those factories out along the boulevard line were getting green with the light before the sun comes up before he started the car again. But I loved the big ape—I still do—and I ended up by giving in to him. So I sold the garage and put part of the money into furniture for the apartment—he let me do that—and part of it into a hospital fund to pay for a baby if we ever have one, and I took the rest and invested it in a course at the Eclat School of Cookery.

             
I wanted my cooking to be a surprise to him, so I went to the Eclat in the afternoons while he was at work, and didn't say a word about it to him. Maybe that was a mistake. Anyway, we kept on eating out, and I began to notice what he ate. I hadn't before; food was just food and good or punk to me. You find things out about the people you marry, and what I found out was that Tom liked the plainest kind of food; just a piece of roast beef, or some spaghetti with tomato sauce, or baked beans, or a lamb stew in a casserole. He always took me to places where they served that sort of thing. I thought at first it was because we didn't have much money, and once in a while I'd suggest going to a nice place, just to celebrate, but when we did, he'd order the same things. He just likes that kind of food.

             
At the Eclat they teach the most elaborate French dishes and sauces, and I did pretty well with them, and I thought if I could get away with that kind of cookery, the things Tom liked would be easy. So I got a Fanny Farmer cookbook and left it around the house and told Tom I was reading it and learning to cook. That made it all right, so I got some beans and the other things and told Tom I was going to give him a dish of home-baked beans for dinner the next night. The big lug got so excited he took part of the afternoon off and brought home a bottle to celebrate the occasion, and I guess we both got a little bit high. I thought it was because of not quite knowing what I was putting in the beanpot that the
beans came out the way they did, not looking quite right.

             
They tasted all right to me, but Tom took a couple of forkfuls, then stopped, with a kind of funny look on his face.

             
"What's the matter, don't you like them?" I asked, and I was afraid I knew the answer already.

             
I did. He put the fork down and sort of smiled and said: "They're wonderful, darling. Only I guess I had a little bit too much to drink to be eating such rich food."

             
Well, I took some of the baked beans to the Eclat next day to find out what I'd done wrong. Pierre looked at them suspiciously, put in a fork and tasted, and his eyebrows went up. "In what week of the course are you, madame?" he said.

             
"The fourth," I told him.

             
"Of the advanced course, without doubt?"

             
"No. The elementary."

             
He yelled for Marcel, who came over and tasted the baked beans, then pinched his thumb and finger together beside his nose. Pierre said: "I have already discerned in madame the evidence of a talent that may some day rival that of the sacred Escoffier. Imagine, only four weeks, and she has already produced a perfect
cassoulet de Midi!
Madame, go home; tell your dolt of a husband that it has been his misfortune to refuse a dish of a rare excellence, and if he has no more appreciation of your artistry, I will marry you myself."

             
Of course a compliment like that from Pierre was dandy, but I didn't want to marry him; all I wanted to do was please Tom. So I tried again, and kept it real plain. I just fried some pork chops in a skillet and had some boiled potatoes and a salad. He ate it, but he didn't seem very enthusiastic, and I don't blame him; that's not the way to treat pork chops. So I tried the kind of lamb stew he likes in a casserole, and it was worse than the baked beans. He wouldn't eat it, but when I took it to the Eclat, Pierre said it was
mouton rouennaise
and a masterpiece.

             
It kept on like that. I couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason to it. Tom liked the steaks and chops I cooked, but we can't afford them very often, and every time I cooked
something in a casserole, he wouldn't eat it. And then tonight he invited his parents over for dinner and they accepted. It was supposed to be a sort of peace offering, and I thought maybe if I fixed a good dinner, we'd get along.