In his palmiest days as a picture extra, Bert never did such a take’m as he did at that moment, with the dough doing service as a pie. It caught him square in the face, hung there a moment, then parted to reveal tragic, injured dignity. But by the time it had cascaded in big blobs to the floor, dignity had given way to hot anger, and he began to talk. He said he had friends, he knew what was going on. He said she ought to know by now she couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. Then he had to go to the sink to wash his face, and while he clawed the dough away, she talked. She taunted him with not making a living for his family, with standing in her way every time she tried to make the living. He tried to get back to the subject of Wally, and she shrilled him down. He said O.K., but just let her try to bring Maggie Biederhof into it, and see what happened to her. He’d fix it so she’d never get a divorce, not in this state she wouldn’t. As she screamed once more that she would have a divorce, she didn’t care what he did, he said they’d see about that, and left.
Mrs. Gessler listened, sipped her tea, shook her head. “It’s the funniest thing, baby. Here you lived with Bert — how long was it? — ten or twelve years, and still you don’t understand him, do you?”
“He’s got that contrary streak in him.”
“No he hasn’t. Once you understand Bert, he’s not contrary at all. Bert’s like Veda. Unless he can do things in a grand way, he’s not living, that’s all.”
“What’s grand about the way he acted?”
“Look at it, for once, the way he looks at it. He doesn’t care about the church, or the law, or Wally. He just put all that in to sound big. What’s griping him is that he can’t do anything for the kids. If he has to stand up in court and admit he can’t pay one cent for them, he’d rather die.”
“Is he doing anything for them now?”
“Oh, but now is just a trifling detail, a temporary condition that he doesn’t count. When he puts over a deal—”
“That’ll be never.”
“Will you just let me talk for a while? It’s his fear of being a flat tire, I’m telling you, at one of those big dramatic moments of any man’s life, that’s making him dog it. But he can’t hold out very long. For one thing, there’s the Biederhof. She won’t like it when she finds out you asked for a divorce and he wouldn’t give it to you. She’s going to wonder if he really loves her — though how anybody could love her is beyond me. And all the time, he’s got it staring him in the face that the harder he makes it for you the harder he’s making it for the kids. And Bert, he loves those kids, too. Baby, Bert’s on the end of the plank, and there’s nowhere for him to jump but off.”
“Yes, but when?”
“When he gets the pie.”
“What pie?”
“The pie you’re going to send him. It’s going to be a very special pie. It doesn’t appeal to his stomach, except incidentally. It appeals to his higher nature, and in Bert, that means his vanity. It’s a pie you’ve been fooling around with, and you want his opinion on its commercial possibilities.”
“I don’t really mind making Bert a pie.”
“Then get at it.”
So Mildred made him a pie, a deep-dish creation, filled with crabapples cunningly candied with sugar so as to bring out the tart of the apples as well as the crystal sweetness of the sugar. It was about as commercial as a hand-whittled clothespin, but she wrote a little note, asking his opinion, and a little P.S., saying she had put his initials on it to see if she could still do monograms. She sent it by Letty, and sure enough, around the middle of the week, there came another invitation to the children, for Sunday dinner. That time she took care to have her pies out of the way early, and to make a cold lunch. It was Letty’s Sunday on, and Mildred had her serve the lunch in the den, preceding it with a cocktail. These attentions Bert accepted gravely, and discussed the pie at length, saying he thought it would be a knockout. There was a great field, he said, in ready pastries, since people no longer kept the servants they used to, and were often stumped for a company dessert. All this was what Mildred had been thinking for some time, but that didn’t occur to her particularly, and she was genuinely happy to hear such hopeful opinion. Then Bert said it all over again, and then a pause fell between them. Then he said: “Well Mildred, I told you I’d think that little matter over, and I have.”
“Well?”
“Of course any way you look at it, it’s unpleasant.”
“It certainly is for me.”
“It’s just one of those things that two people hate to think about. But we really got nothing to do with it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Bert.”
“I mean, whether it’s unpleasant for us, that’s not it. It’s what’s best for those kids that counts, and that’s what we got to think about. And talk about.”
“Did I ever have any other reason? It’s for them that I want to take advantage of this opportunity. If I can make a go of it, I can give them what I want them to have, and what you ought to want them to have, too.”
“I want to do my share.”
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything. I know that when you’re able, you’ll be only too glad to do anything you can. But now — did I say one word about it? Did I?”
“Mildred, there’s one thing I can do, and if you’re set on this, I want to do it. I can see that you have a place to sleep, and that the kids have, and that nobody can take it away from you. I want to give you the house.”
Mildred, caught wholly by surprise, wanted to laugh and wanted to cry. The house had long ceased to be a possession, so far as she was concerned. It was a place that she lived in, and that crushed her beneath interest, taxes, and upkeep. That Bert, with a straight face, should offer it to her at this time struck her as merely grotesque. And yet she remembered what Mrs. Gessler had said, and knew she was in the presence of a man and his pride. She got up suddenly, went over, and put her arms around him. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Mildred, I want to.”
“If you want to, there’s only one thing I can do, and that is, take it. But you don’t have to. I want you to know that.”
“All right, but you’ve got to take it.”
“I’m sorry I said what I did about Mrs. Biederhof.”
“I’ve been hating myself for what I said about Wally. Christ, I know there’d never be anything between you and that fat slob. But—”
“We keep saying things.”
“That’s it. That we don’t mean.”
“That we couldn’t mean, Bert. Don’t you think I hate this just as much as you do? But it’s got to be. For their sake.”
“Yeah, for their sake.”
They talked low and close for a long time, and then got to laughing over the way he looked when she hit him with the dough. Then they got to laughing over the charges she would have to bring, and the cruelties he had been guilty of. “I guess you’ll have to hit me, Bert. They all say the defendant hit her, and caused her great mental and physical anguish.”
“You talk like Veda. She’s always wanting to be hit.”
“I’m glad there’s a little of me in her.”
He doubled his fist, brushed her chin with it. Then they both burst into shaking, uncontrollable sobs.
“The gams, the gams! Your face ain’t news!”
It was a moment before Mildred quite knew what was meant, but then she gave her skirt a little hitch, and wasn’t exactly displeased when a photographer whistled.
Mrs. Gessler, having no gams to speak of, stood behind her, and the bulbs went off. Next thing she knew, she was in court, raising her hand, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, and giving her name, address, and occupation, which she described as “housewife.” Then she was answering questions put to her by a Wally she had never seen before, a solemn, sympathetic, red-haired man who gently urged her to tell an elderly judge the story of Bert’s unendurable cruelties: his silences, during which he wouldn’t speak to her for days on end; his absences from home, his striking her, “in an argument over money.” Then she was sitting beside Wally, and Mrs. Gessler was up there, corroborating everything she said, with just the right shade of repressed indignation. When Mrs. Gessler got to the blow, and Wally asked her sternly if she had actually seen it, she closed her eyes and whispered, “I did.”