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

Simons and Dr. Terry Gould⁠—the young smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice:

“Well, this is so nice to have you here. We’ll have some good parties⁠—dances and everything. You’ll have to join the Jolly Seventeen. We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?”

“N-no, I don’t.”

“Really? In St. Paul?”

“I’ve always been such a bookworm.”

“We’ll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life.” Juanita had become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol’s golden sash, which she had previously admired.

Harry Haydock said politely, “How do you think you’re going to like the old burg?”

“I’m sure I shall like it tremendously.”

“Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I’ve had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?”

Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed:

“I’ll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can’t we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?”

“Now you’re talking!” Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. “Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I’ll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?”

“I used to be rather good at bezique.”

She knew that bezique was a game of cards⁠—or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita’s handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, “Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn’t it?”

While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott:

“These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that’s what I’m going out for. I’ll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma’ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and⁠—You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B.V.D.’s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook.”

She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on:

“I’m sure I’m going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner⁠—Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?”

Kennicott’s rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. “I’ll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott.” He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare. “There’s some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin’ diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you⁠—but for heaven’s sake don’t tell him I said so⁠—don’t you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph.”

No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark’s party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them:

“But I know whom I wouldn’t have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I’m sure he’s a regular heartbreaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully.”

“Haw! Haw! Haw!” The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things⁠—loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot⁠—but he had never before been called a flirt.

“He is wicked, isn’t he, Mrs. Dawson? Don’t you have to lock him up?”

“Oh no, but maybe I better,” attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face.

For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred café parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark’s bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused.

Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.

Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock’s grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink.

Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He interrupted himself, “Must stir ’em up.” He worried at his wife, “Don’t you