By the time we reached Stokewold we were halfway into a laughing jag. We always start laughing on the way to visit the Lennoxes. You think about their accidents and adventures building their house and you can't stop.... The three second-hand cars Gabby bargained for and bought which, one after the other, broke down as soon as she got them home, turning the place into a Used Car lot. The time Jake got arrested for trucking their nine-foot plate glass picture window on the express highway. The big July Fourth party weekend when the water system went haywire and Gabby tried to empty out a hundred gallon tank with a teacup. Privately, Robin and I call the house Hysteria Cottage.
Outside of Ned Bacon, Robin and I are the only people from the business who like to see the Lennoxes. The Rock's turned its back on them. But we love to come down to Cooper Union and help Gabby and Jake build their house. We hammer and saw and paint while Gabby lectures to us from Builder's Guides. Robin plants, mostly, and I'm the king of the concrete, I have a touch with a trowel that astonishes people ... including myself.
The reason the house is still building is that they blew all their money on the property. They have about a hundred acres of farmland, meadow, timber, and whatever else they call rural-type land. The house (what there is of it) is on a small hill shaded by elms. A hundred yards behind the house is a tiny extinct quarry which was flooded out by natural springs years ago. We swim there in summer and the water's glacial.
Gabby's pregnant. Gabby's the cute type. Her figure's exactly the same except she looks like she swallowed the head of a torpedo. Ned Bacon, who lets on to be a shingling expert, spends all his time finding out if it's going to be a boy or a girl. He makes her lie down, borrows a wedding ring (Gabby doesn't have one yet), and dangles it on a string over her stomach. The theory is, if it swings in circles it'll be a girl and if it swings back and forth in a straight line it'll be a boy. So far the odds are seven to three on a boy.
Gabby hasn't changed a bit. Robin and I were there in April when they held a town meeting and we drove in with them. There were about a hundred people sitting on camp chairs in the church basement, and half of them were glowering at the Lennoxes because of the way the unfinished house looks. They're all rich Squares who write stinging letters to the Stokewold Star Times beefing about the gutter-bred Lennoxes who are turning their township into a slum.
This didn't make any difference to Gabby. She was on her feet a dozen times, lecturing and admonishing the township on ethics, fair play and civic corruption. Lennox sat solemnly alongside her and nodded his head emphatically to her points. Once he caught my eye and winked, but the laugh was on him because Gabby got him elected chairman of the Garbage Committee.
Jake does a few scripts now and then, most of them under a pen name now that Macro and Audibon have had him blacklisted (not officially) for Communism, which is a laugh. He sells a few stories. They struggle along. It isn't easy with those two trips a week to the talk-doctor to pay for, but they don't complain. Gabby tells me that Jake is having a rough time getting straightened out, but he doesn't bleat. Both of them are so grateful for their fighting chance that they act as though they've won already. That's why we like to visit them.
We never bring our troubles out to Gabby and Jake. You can always find someone on The Rock who'll enjoy listening to your headaches. In fact most people get sore at you if you don't complain a little. Happiness is the problem. You have to share it with someone to get full enjoyment out of it, but there's no one you can do this with on The Rock. If you tell one of the tight rope walkers you've had a lucky break, he's so jealous he's ready to kill you. So we save the good luck stories for the Lennoxes.
Gabby and Jake are glad if anyone else gets a break. They beam and shake your hand and she delivers a ringing lecture on how creative you are and how much you've deserved success. And they write you follow-up letters to ask how your success is doing and they make you forget that they've got problems too. The result is, you can't wait to be invited down to break your back building their house.
So we drove up the little hill this Friday afternoon and honked the horn, Gabby and Jake came pouring out of the house followed by the Siamese who looked like amateur tigers. Gabby kissed me. Jake kissed Robin. I wasn't too jealous because I've got a kind of yen for Gabby.