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An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

DROVERS AND HAVOCKS

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Roy Drover was born on a farm just at the edge of Grand Republic, and his father was at once a farmer and a veterinarian.

When Roy was a medical student at the University of Minnesota, a beer-drinker and a roarer by night but by day a promising dissecter, he met the tall and swaying Lillian Smith, daughter of a stationer who was refined, tubercular, and poor. He saw that here was the finest flower he was likely ever to acquire for the decoration of a successful doctor’s drawing-room. Also, it tickled his broad fancy to think of seducing (even if he could do it only legally) anything so frail and sweet as Lillian.

She was overwhelmed by him, though she did break off the engagement once when he used a certain four-letter word. He reasonably pointed out, however, that either she did not know what the word meant, in which case she could not be shocked, or else she did know, in which case she must have got over being shocked some time ago. She was conquered, though for years afterward she worried about that logic.

By the time they had been married for five years and Roy had practised for seven, Lillian’s father was bankrupt, and Roy had the daily pleasure of telling her that, though her “old man might be so cultured and polite, he was mighty glad to get eighty bucks a month from his roughneck son-in-law.” That pleasure continued for years after her father had died. At medical conventions or among strangers in a West Coast Florida hotel, Roy would jovially shout, “My ancestors were Vermont hill-billies, but my ball-and-chain comes from the best stock in Massachusetts—such a good stock that it’s got pernicious anemia, and I’ve always had to give it a few injections of gold.”

He continued to feel physical passion for Lillian—as well as for every gum-chewing hoyden that he picked up on his trips to Chicago, and for a number of his chattier women patients. Perhaps his continued zest came from the fact that it amused him to watch his wife shiver and reluctantly be conquered. To her, the whole business of sex had become a horror related to dark bedrooms and loud breathing. Sometimes in the afternoon, when Lillian was giving coffee to quiet women like the Avondene girls or the Methodist minister’s wife, Roy would come rampaging in, glare at her possessively, growl “H’ are yuh” at the guests in a way which said he wished they would get out of this, and as soon as they had twittered away, he would rip down the zipper of her dress.

She often thought about suicide, but she was too blank of mind. She was always reading the pink-bound books of New Thought leaders, those thick-haired and bass-voiced prophets who produce theatrical church-services in New York theaters, and tell their trembling female parishioners that they can accomplish anything they wish if they Develop the Divine Will Power and Inner Gifts.... Sometimes Roy threw these books into the furnace.

Lillian never contradicted him. She was mute even when he teased her about her dislike for having dead mallards or pheasants drip blood on her dress when she went hunting with him.

At the beginning of our history, the Drovers had been married for thirteen years. They had two sons, William Mayo and John Erdmann Drover, aged eleven and nine. Lillian was devoted to them, often looked at them sadly, as though they were doomed. She begged them to listen while she read aloud from Kenneth Grahame and her own girlhood copy of “The Birds’ Christmas Carol,” but the boys protested, “Aw, can that old-fashioned junk, Mum. Pop says it’s panty-waist. Read us the funnies in the paper, Mum.”

Like their father, the boys enjoyed killing things—killing snakes, frogs, ducks, rats, sparrows, feeble old neighborhood cats.

When Roy and the boys were away, she stayed alone in a shuttered room, in a house that rustled with hate, in a silence that screamed, alone with a sullen cook and a defiant maid. She did not read much, but she did read that all women are “emancipated” and can readily become “economically independent.” She was glad to learn that.

Roy and Lillian were often cited by Diantha Marl as “one of the happiest couples, the most successful marriages, in Grand Republic; just as affectionate as the Zagos, but not so showy about it.”

The same authority, Diantha, publicly wondered whether Boone and Queenie Havock, though by 1941 they had been married for thirty-five years, would not “bust up,” as the technical phrase was. When, at their rich parties, Queenie got high and screamed that Boone was a “chippie-chasing, widow-robbing old buzzard,” he frequently slapped her. She was almost as large as he and even louder, and she retorted spiritedly by spitting at him, and sometimes when he was entertaining Eastern Financiers or other visiting royalty, she yelled at him, “Oh, shutzen Sie die mouth,” which she believed to be German.

But in private, with their great arms about each other, these shaggy gods sat up all night making fun of their neat neighbors, drinking and shouting and cackling like pirates. When Boone was almost indicted for stealing one hundred thousand acres of Eastern Montana prairie, Queenie joyfully announced, “I’ll come cook for you in jail, you cut-throat!”

He answered admiringly, “You probably will, too, you catamaran, but if you get any more finger-marks on my César Franck symphony records, I’ll bust your ole head open.”

Dr. Roy Drover often said, “My experience is that it’s all nonsense to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated modern life on top of the fundamental clashes between the sexes. Yessir! It’s all perfectly easy, if the husband just understands women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles. You bet!”