The Progress of Love

bunch of British soldiers and some Americansand native girls—nurses. No hanky-panky, though. All those girls did was sing hymns. They’d all been Christianized. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’! Anyway, they were in no condition to carry on. Sick and wounded, walking day after day in the terrible heat. Charged by wild elephants. He’s going to write a book about it. Mr. Cryderman is. They had to build their own rafts and float downriver. They had malaria. They walked over the Himalayas. They were heroes and nobody has even heard about it.”
    I thought that sounded fishy, too. Terrible heat in the Himalayas, which were known to be covered with eternal snow.
    “I said to Bunt, ‘Eric fought with the British in Burma,’ and Bunt said, ‘The British didn’t fight in Burma—the Japs wiped their ass on the British in Burma.’ People don’t know a damn thing. Bunt couldn’t walk to the top of Yonge Street.”
    Years later, maybe a quarter of a century later, I read about the walk that General Stilwell led out of Burma into India, through the pass above Tamu and down the Chindwin River. In the party were some British commandos, dirty and half starved. Eric Cryderman might have been one of them.
    The meeting of Mr. and Mrs. Cryderman took place when he showed up one day to sublet her apartment in Toronto. He was planning to work as a journalist in Canada. She was planning to drive to Mexico with friends. She never made it. As soon as she saw Mr. Cryderman, that was that. Her friends all told her not to marry him. Seven years younger than she was, divorced—with a wife and child somewhere in Australia—and he had no money. Everybody said he was an adventurer. But she was not daunted. She married him within six weeks and didn’t invite any of them to the wedding.
    I thought that I should contribute something to the conversation, so I said, “Why were they against him just because he was adventurous?”
    “Ha-ha!” said Mrs. Cryderman. “That wasn’t what they meant. They meant he was after my money. Which I can’t even persuade him to live on while he writes a book about his experiences. He has to be independent. He has to write about what the fool bridesmaidswore and the trousseau tea and all the blather at the town council, and it’s driving him crazy. He is the most talented man I ever met, and someday you’ll be bragging that you knew him!”
    As soon as we heard Mr. Cryderman at the door, I whisked the ironing basket away into the kitchen, as directed. Mrs. Cryderman would call out, in a new, silly-sweet, mocking, anxious voice, “Is that my honey-boy home? Is that Little Lord Fauntleroy? Is it the Mad Dingo?”
    Mr. Cryderman, taking off his boots in the hall, would reply that it was Dick Tracy, or Barnacle Bill the Sailor. Then he would come into the living room and go straight to the sofa, where she lay with arms outstretched. They did smacking kisses, while I beat an awkward retreat with the ironing board.
    “He married her for her money,” I said to MaryBeth.
    MaryBeth wanted to know what he looked like.
    “Like something dug up out of a bog,” I said. But that was Aunt Ena’s description after she first laid eyes on Mr. Cryderman. I repeated it because I liked the sound of it. I didn’t really find it apt. It was true that Mr. Cryderman was thin, tall and thin, and that he had a sallow complexion. But he didn’t have a moldy or sickly look. In fact, he had a kind of light-boned, sharp-featured, crisp good looks, a kind of looks very popular at the time. A pencil-line mustache, cool squinting eyes, a sarcastic half-smile.
    “Like a snake in the grass,” I amended. “But she is out of her mind in love with him.” I acted out their daily reunion, smacking my lips and flinging my arms about.
    Mrs. Cryderman told Mr. Cryderman that I read like a demon and was a genius at history. This was because I had straightened out some confusion of hers in connection with a historical novel she was trying to read. I had explained how Peter the Great was connected to Catherine the Great.
    “Is that so?” said Mr. Cryderman. His accent made him sound both softer and meaner than a Canadian. “Who is your favorite writer?”
    “Dostoyevsky,” I said, or thought I said.
    “Dostoy-vetsky,” said Mr. Cryderman thoughtfully. “What is your favorite book by him?”
    I was too flustered to notice the imitation.
    “ The Brothers Karamazov ,” I said. That was the only book by Dostoyevsky that I had