Main Street - Sinclair Lewis (little red riding hood ebook .txt) 📗

possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life⁠—there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison.

She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten.

V

Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, “and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through⁠—spent pretty near a week there⁠—but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some seafood.” He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his “getting away from home-base for very long this year⁠—and no sense going till we can do it right.”

The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson’s manse, bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, “S’pose you’d like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don’t see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you.” Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan’s disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, “I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!” his only reaction was “Golly, don’t know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don’t get in a trip next year.”

Toward the end of July he proposed, “Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I’d like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree.”

Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie.

Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen’s throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train’s slowness. She was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in the sun.

She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making.

Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, “Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees’. I phoned the doctor from G.P. that we’d be here. ‘We’ll catch the freight that gets in before twelve,’ I told him. He said he’d meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree is a good man, and you’ll find his wife is a mighty brainy little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is.”

Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with eyeglasses for windshield. “Want you to meet my wife, doctor⁠—Carrie, make you ’quainted with Dr. Calibree,” said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was concentrating upon Kennicott with, “Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don’t let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter case⁠—that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan.”

The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses⁠ ⁠… drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots.

Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called her “dearie,” and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for conversation, produced, “Let’s see, you and the doctor have a Little One, haven’t you?” At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, “Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the legs before childbirth?”

Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But