On Tuesday afternoon, just when Houston was getting tired of yet more wedding plans, Leora Vaughn and her fiancé, Jim Michaelson, stopped by the Chandler house on a tandem bicycle. They asked if Houston could possibly persuade Kane to rent another double bike and ride in the park with them.
After Houston had changed, borrowing Blair’s Turkish pants, she rode on the handlebars up the hill to Kane’s house.
“Goddamn Gould!” They could hear Kane’s shouts through the open window.
“I’ll ask him,” Houston said.
“Do you think he’d mind if we waited inside?” Leora asked, her eyes greedily roaming over the front of Kane’s house.
“I think he’d be pleased.”
Houston never knew how Kane was going to greet her, but this time he seemed glad of the diversion. He was a little hesitant about the bicycle, since he’d never ridden one before, but he mastered it in minutes—then began challenging the other men in the park to races.
By late afternoon, when they returned the rented bicycles, Kane was saying he was going to buy a bicycle manufacturing plant. “Maybe I’ll not make any money off it,” he said, “but sometimes I like to gamble. Like recently I bought stock in a company that makes a drink called Coca-Cola. I’ll probably lose ever’thing.” He shrugged. “You can’t always win.”
In the evening they went to a taffy pull at Sarah Oakley’s house.
Kane was the oldest person in the group, but all the games and diversions were new to him, and he seemed to have the most fun. He always seemed a little shocked that these young society people accepted him.
And it wasn’t because he was easy to accept. He was outspoken, intolerant of any ideas he didn’t agree with, and always aggressive. He told Jim Michaelson he was a fool to be content to run his father’s store, that he should expand, get some business down from Denver if he insisted on staying in Chandler. He told Sarah Oakley she ought to get Houston to help her buy dresses because the ones she wore weren’t as pretty as they should be. He got taffy on Mrs. Oakley’s draperies and the next day had delivered to her fifty yards of silk velvet from Denver. He bent a wheel of a rented bicycle, then yelled for twenty minutes at the owner for having inferior merchandise. He told Cordelia Farrell she could get a better man than John Silverman, and that all John wanted was somebody to take care of his three motherless children.
Houston prayed for the floor to open up and swallow her when Kane invited everyone to his house for dinner on Wednesday night. “I ain’t got any furniture downstairs,” he said, “so we’ll do it like Houston done for me one night—a rug, pillows to lay down on, candles, everything.”
When three women dissolved into giggles at the look of pain and disbelief on Houston’s red face, Kane said, “Did I miss somethin’?”
And Houston soon learned that everything connected with Kane involved an argument. He called it “discussin’” but it was more a verbal wrestle. On Tuesday evening, she asked him to sign some blank cards, beside her signature, which would be included in the little boxes of cake to be given away at the wedding.
“Like hell I will!” he said.
“I ain’t puttin’ my name on somethin’ blank. Somebody could write whatever they like above it.”
“It’s tradition,” Houston said, “everyone puts autographed cards in the boxes of cake that people take home.”
“They can eat cake at the weddin’. They don’t need little boxes of it. It’ll melt anyway.”
“It’s to dream on, to make wishes on, to—.”
“You want me to sign blank cards for a dumb idea like that?”
Houston lost that bout, but she won about hiring men to help the ladies from their carriages and women to turn Kane’s small drawing room into a cloakroom.
“How many people you plannin’ on havin’, anyway?”
She looked at her list. “At last count, 520. Most of Leander’s, relatives are travelling in from the East. Is there someone special you wanted to invite besides your uncles and cousins, the Taggerts?”
“My what?”
They were off again, and again Houston won. Kane said he’d never met his relatives and had no desire to meet them. Houston, who couldn’t tell him she knew Jean, or he’d no doubt ask how, said she was inviting them whether he knew them or not. For some reason, Kane didn’t want them there and, after several minutes of arguing, he said they’d show up in coal miner’s clothes.
Houston called him a snob. She thought she might die rather than tell him she’d already arranged for clothes to be made for his relatives—at his expense.
Before Kane could reply, Opal walked into the room, bade them good evening and sat dawn with her embroidery.
Kane appealed to Opal, who said, “Well then, you shall have to buy them new clothes, won’t you?”
By the time Kane left, Houston felt as if she’d survived a storm at sea, but Kane seemed unperturbed. He kissed her in the hallway and said he’d see her tomorrow.
“Will everything always be an argument?” she whispered, sitting down heavily beside her mother.