The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,--but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!
--Millay.
If you've spent more than one day in Okoochee, Oklahoma, you've had
dinner at Pardee's. Someone--a business acquaintance, a friend, a
townsman--has said, "Oh, you stopping at the Okmulgee Hotel?
WON--derful, isn't it? Nothing finer here to the Coast. I bet you
thought you were coming to the wilderness, didn't you? You Easterners!
Think we live in tents and eat jerked venison and maize, huh? Never
expected, I bet, to see a twelve-story hotel with separate ice-water
faucet in every bathroom and a bath to every room. What'd you think of
the Peacock grill, h'm?"
"Well--uh"--hesitatingly--"very nice, but why don't you have something
native ... Decorations and ... Peacock grill is New York, not Okla----"
"Z'that so! Well, let me tell you you won't find any better food or
service in any restaurant, New York or I don't care where. But say,
hotel meals are hotel meals. You get tired of 'em. Ever eat at Pardee's,
up the street? Say, there's food! If you're going to be here in town any
time why'n't you call up there some evening before six--you have to
leave 'em know--and get one of Pardee's dinners? Thursday's chicken. And
when I say chicken I mean----Well, just try it, that's all.... And for
God's sake don't make a mistake and tip Maxine."
Pardee's you find to be a plain box-like two-story frame house in a
quiet and commonplace residential district. Plainly--almost
scantily--furnished as to living room and dining room. The dining room
comfortably seats just twenty, but the Pardees "take" eighteen
diners--no more. This because Mrs. Pardee has eighteen of everything in
silver. And that means eighteen of everything from grapefruit spoons to
cheese knives; and finger bowls before and after until you feel like an
early Roman. As for Maxine--the friendly warning is superfluous. You
would as soon have thought of slipping Hebe a quarter on Olympus--a
rather severe-featured Hebe in a white silk blouse ordered through
_Vogue_.
All this should have been told in the past tense, because Pardee's is no
more. But Okoochee, Oklahoma, is full of paradoxes like Pardee's. Before
you understand Maxine Pardee and her mother in the kitchen (dishing up)
you have to know Okoochee. And before you know Okoochee you have to
know Sam Pardee, missing.
There are all sorts of stories about Okoochee, Oklahoma--and almost
every one of them is true. Especially are the fantastic ones true--the
incredible ones. The truer they are the more do they make such Arabian
knights as Aladdin and Ali Baba appear dull and worthy gentlemen in the
retail lamp and oil business, respectively. Ali Baba's exploit in oil,
indeed, would have appeared too trivial for recounting if compared with
that of any one of a dozen Okoochee oil wizards.
Take the tale of the Barstows alone, though it hasn't the slightest
bearing on this story. Thirteen years ago the Barstows had a parched
little farm on the outskirts of what is now the near-metropolis of
Okoochee, but what was then a straggling village in the Indian
Territory. Ma Barstow was a woman of thirty-five who looked sixty;
withered by child-bearing; scorched by the sun; beaten by the wind;
gnarled with toil; gritty with dust. Ploughing the barren little farm
one day Clem Barstow had noticed a strange oily scum. It seeped up
through the soil and lay there, heavily. Oil! Weeks of suspense, weeks
of disappointment, weeks of hope. Through it all Ma Barstow had washed,
scrubbed, cooked as usual, and had looked after the welfare of the
Barstow litter. Seventeen years of drudgery dull the imagination. When
they struck the great gusher--it's still known as Barstow's Old
Faithful--they came running to her with the news. She had been washing a
great tubful of harsh greasy clothes--overalls, shirts, drawers. As the
men came, shouting, she appeared in the doorway of the crazy wooden
lean-to, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Oil!" they shouted, idiotically. "Millions! Biggest gusher yet! It'll
mean millions! You're a millionaire!" Then, as she looked at them,
dazedly, "What're you going to do, Mis' Barstow, huh? What're you going
to do with it?"
Ma Barstow had brought one hand up to push back a straggling wisp of
damp hair. Then she looked at that hand as she brought it down--looked
at it and it's mate, parboiled, shrunken, big-knuckled from toil. She
wiped them both on her apron again, bringing the palms down hard along
her flat thighs. "Do?" The miracles that millions might accomplish burst
full force on her work-numbed brain. "Do? First off I'm a-going to have
the washing done out."
Last week Mrs. Clement Barstow was runner-up in the women's amateur golf
tournament played on the Okoochee eighteen-hole course. She wore tweed
knickers. The Barstow place on the Edgecombe Road is so honeycombed with
sleeping porches, sun dials, swimming pools, bird baths, terraces,
sunken gardens, and Italian marble benches that the second assistant
Japanese gardener has to show you the way to the tennis courts.
That's Okoochee.
It was inevitable that Sam Pardee should hear of Okoochee; and, hearing
of it, drift there. Sam Pardee was drawn to a new town, a boom town, as
unerringly as a small boy scents a street fight. Born seventy-five years
earlier he would certainly have been one of those intrepid Forty-niners;
a fearless canvas-covered fleet crawling painfully across a continent,
conquering desert and plain and mountain; starving, thirsting, fighting
Indians, eating each other if necessity demanded, with equal dexterity
and dispatch. Perhaps a trip like this would have satisfied his
wanderlust. Probably not. He was like a child in a berry patch. The
fruit just beyond was always the ripest and reddest. The Klondike didn't
do it. He was one of the first up the Yukon in that mad rush. He
returned minus all the money and equipment with which he had started,
including the great toe of his right foot--tribute levied by the frozen
North. From boom town to boom town he went. The first stampede always
found him there, deep in blue-prints, engineering sheets, prospectuses.
But no sooner did the town install a water-works and the First National
Bank house itself in a Portland-cement Greek temple with Roman pillars
and a mosaic floor than he grew restless and was on the move.
A swashbuckler, Sam Pardee, in tan shoes and a brown derby. An 1890
Villon handicapped by a home-loving wife; an incurable romantic married
to a woman who judged as shiftless any housewife possessed of less than
two dozen bath towels, twelve tablecloths, eighteen wash cloths, and at
least three dozen dish towels, hand-hemmed. Milly Pardee's idea of
adventure was testing the recipes illustrated in the How To Use The
Cheaper Cuts page in the back of the woman's magazines.
Perversely enough, they had been drawn together by the very attraction
of dissimilarity. He had found her feminine home-loving qualities most
appealing. His manner of wearing an invisible cloak, sword and buckler,
though actually garbed in ready-mades, thrilled her. She had come of a
good family; he of, seemingly, no family at all. When the two married,
Milly's people went through that ablutionary process known as washing
their hands of her. Thus ideally mismated they tried to make the best of
it--and failed. At least, Sam Pardee failed. Milly Pardee said,
"Goodness knows I tried to be a good wife to him." The plaint of all
unappreciated wives since Griselda.
Theirs was a feast-and-famine existence. Sometimes Sam Pardee made
sudden thousands. Mrs. Pardee would buy silver, linen, and other
household furnishings ranging all the way from a grand piano to a patent
washing machine. The piano and the washing machine usually were whisked
away within a few weeks or months, at the longest. But she cannily had
the linen and silver stamped--stamped unmistakably and irrevocably with
a large, flourishing capital P, embellished with floral wreaths.
Eventually some of the silver went the way of the piano and washing
machine. But Milly Pardee clung stubbornly to a dozen and a half of
everything. She seemed to feel that if once she had less than eighteen
fish forks the last of the solid ground of family respectability would
sink under her feet. For years she carried that silver about wrapped in
trunks full of the precious linen, and in old underwear and cotton
flannel kimonos and Sam's silk socks and Maxine's discarded
baby-clothes. She clung to it desperately, as other women cling to
jewels, knowing that when this is gone no more will follow.
When the child was born Milly Pardee wanted to name her Myrtle but her
husband had said, suddenly, "No, call her Maxine."
"After whom?" In Mrs. Pardee's code you named a child "after" someone.
He had seen Maxine Elliott in the heyday of her cold, clear, brainless
beauty, with her great, slightly protuberant eyes set so far apart, her
exquisitely chiselled white nose, and her black black hair. She had
thrilled him.
"After my Uncle Max that lives in--uh--Australia."
"I've never heard you talk of any Uncle Max," said Mrs. Pardee, coldly.
But the name had won. How could they know that Maxine would grow up to
be a rather bony young woman who preferred these high-collared white
silk blouses; and said "eyether."
Maxine had been about twelve when Okoochee beckoned Sam Pardee. They
were living in Chicago at the time; had been there for almost three
years--that is, Mrs. Pardee and Maxine had been there. Sam was in and
out on some mysterious business of his own. His affairs were always
spoken of as "deals" or "propositions." And they always, seemingly,
required his presence in a city other than that in which they were
living--if living can be said to describe the exceedingly impermanent
perch to which they clung. They had a four-room flat. Maxine was
attending a good school. Mrs. Pardee was using the linen and silver
daily. There was a linen closet down the hall, just off the dining room.
You could open the door and feast your eyes on orderly piles of neatly
laundered towels, sheets, tablecloths, napkins, tea towels. Mrs. Pardee
marketed and cooked, contentedly. She was more than a merely good cook;
she was an alchemist in food stuffs. Given such raw ingredients as
butter, sugar, flour, eggs, she could evolve a structure of pure gold
that melted on the tongue. She could take an ocherous old hen, dredge
its parts in flour, brown it in fat sizzling with onion at the bottom of
an iron kettle, add water, a splash of tomato and a pinch of seasoning,
and bear triumphantly to the table a platter heaped with tender
fricassee over which a smooth, saddle-brown gravy simmered fragrantly.
She ate little herself, as do most expert cooks, and found her reward
when Sam or Maxine uttered a choked and appreciative "Mmm!"
In the midst of creature comforts such as these Sam Pardee said, one
evening, "Oil."
Mrs. Pardee passed it, but not without remonstrance. "It's the same
identical French dressing you had last night, Sam. I mixed enough for
twice. And you didn't add any oil last night."
Sam Pardee came out of his abstraction long enough to emit a roar of
laughter and an unsatisfactory explanation. "I was thinking of oil in
wells, not in cruets. Millions of barrels of oil, not a spoonful. Crude,
not olive."
She saw her child, her peace, her linen closet threatened. "Sam Pardee,
you don't mean----"
"Oklahoma. That's what I meant by oil. It's oozing with it."
Real terror leaped into Milly Pardee's eyes. "Not Oklahoma. Sam, I
couldn't stand----" Suddenly she stiffened with resolve. Maxine's report
card had boasted three stars that week. Oklahoma! Why, there probably
were no schools at all in Oklahoma. "I won't bring my child up in
Oklahoma. Indians, that's what! Scalped in our beds."
Above Sam Pardee's roar sounded Maxine's excited treble. "Oo, Oklahoma!
I'd love it."