Family Feud by Rita Durrett
recent dance partner.
We all three got out of our cars and greeted each other. I started to tell them why I was there, but they interrupted to explain about the breakdown of Mr. H.'s van and how fortunate it was that the new Mrs. M. happened by. They explained it all quite eagerly, and at the time I didn't understand why they were so anxious to tell me what an innocent happenstance their meeting had been. As we talked we walked up on the porch of the McCoy house, and since it now was her home, the new Mrs. M. just opened the front door. She opened it all the way because there were three people who would be entering through it. But what we saw in the McCoy living room meant I wasn't going to be entering that house. Not at that time, at any rate.
Through the opened front door we all three got a perfect view of the living room sofa. Apparently our talking had been heard by a couple who had been on the sofa engaging in what in pidgin Latin I would call coitus flagrante. The sound of our talking had turned the act into a case of coitus interruptus. Now the couple were in a panicky struggle to get dressed. The woman was stretched out on the sofa excitedly pulling up her panties, and the man was standing by the sofa pulling on his pants with equal dispatch. The interrupted parties were Mr. McCoy and Mrs. Hatfield, the lady who until a few months earlier had been Mrs. McCoy. With both their new spouses out of town for the day, these two apparently were overcome by the same kind of old habits that had overtaken each of their new spouses out in the woods. As I said, old habits are hard to break. But it looked like old habits were about to break up these new couples.
I've never been so embarrassed in my life. I didn't know what to do or say. As soon as I got my wits back together I made up a flimsy excuse and got the hell out of there.
VII
I don't embarrass easily, but that incident got to me. I wanted to get that title business settled, but I wasn't about to go back out to either the McCoy or the Hatfield place to do it. How could I have looked any of the four in the face knowing what I knew and them knowing I knew what I knew? Instead I sent the respective new couples their respective new half-lot titles by registered mail.
For a few days I thought there had been only one case of what might be called new infidelity with an old spouse, the McCoy sofa incident I had been an unwitting party in disrupting. But after my practice hunting friend told me what he had seen, I knew the whole situation out there had blown up.
Then I started hearing that neither Mrs. H., new or old, nor Mrs. M., new or old, had been seen since I last saw them. I was about ready to go to the sheriff and get him to go out there and look for wife bodies buried somewhere on those half-acre lots when I got a letter from a lady lawyer in the big city. It advised me that Mrs. McCoy (nee Hatfield) had appointed this lawyer as her legal agent and that in future, all matters concerning Mrs. M. should be directed to her through this lawyer. The letter included a signed and notarized directive from the new Mrs. M. to this effect. A couple days later I got a similar letter from a different big city lady lawyer containing a similar directive signed by the new Mrs. H. These letters showed that both wives were alive. They also showed that neither woman intended for anyone in Hometown to know where she was nor what her marital status was. Such anonymity is perfectly legal and is the customary reason for assigning an attorney intermediary as each woman had done.
A few days later I got phone calls from both husbands, first from Hatfield, than a day later from McCoy. Each told me to put his half-acre place up for sale. I guess they called instead of driving to my office because they were embarrassed to see me face to face, knowing I had seen what I had seen. But since I'm the only real estate broker in Hometown they had no alternative but to have me list their places. Neither man told me anything but his asking price, nary a word nor a hint about his marital situation. Though I asked each his reason for selling, neither would say anything more than that the sale was not motivated by any problem with his half-acre lot nor with the improvements thereupon. That there was an entirely different reason I could easily believe.
We handled everything about the property sales either over the phone or by mail. After each sale was made but before it was formally completed each husband left town without informing anyone where he was headed. This was surprising since, as you probably well know, the last act of every real estate sale is the closing, where all the parties assemble together to sign and exchange all the relevant papers and funds. But I received a letter from yet two more different big city attorneys, each one advising me he had been appointed as agent for one of the husbands.
I never saw nor heard from any of the four parties again. The closings and all other pending matters with the four parties were all handled through the four attorney agents they had appointed. And these agents never gave me a hint nor a clue about how the Hatfields and McCoys eventually handled their convoluted marriages. But I never expected anything else. Confidentiality is the purpose served by appointing an attorney intermediary, and none of these lawyers ever in the slightest way deviated from his/her professional duty.
I know I'll never find out how the Hatfield and McCoy marital matter was resolved, if, indeed, it ever has been resolved. But I can't stop wondering about it. Although I am under no professional obligation to keep mum about what I saw happening on the McCoy sofa nor about what I learned had happened in the woods outside of town, I do not intend to ever reveal these pieces of information to anyone. After all, I'm a good conservative American as proud as any Hometown citizen of Hometown's good conservative American reputation. And I don't want to damage it.
So I never let on to my practice hunting friend that I knew the real identity of the woman he had seen through his rifle scope doing an upside-down tap dance in the back of that SUV. He can go on thinking it was that tart from the bar out of town. It's not going to damage her reputation. If I ever allowed him or anybody else to learn that the Hatfields and McCoys had resumed their cross-coupling, the rumors about aphrodisiac water in the wells of their onetime properties would never stop. And the high school bus would have to detour through the next state to prevent Hometown's high school students' salacious snickering.
However, one night after a lodge meeting when I was having a cup of coffee with some of the town fathers, they got to asking me what I knew about why the Hatfields and McCoys had left town after going to the bother and expense of divorcing and remarrying. Since these men are town fathers and are as dedicated as I to preserving Hometown's reputation as a good conservative American community, I knew all of them could be implicitly trusted to keep everything I said strictly confidential. So I told them what I had seen on the McCoy sofa and what I had learned had gone on in the woods a few miles from town. But, of course, I didn't know what the eventual marital outcome these acts had led to, so I couldn't tell them that. However, each of us had his own guess.
One man said he thought the renewal of cross-coupling led the couples to divorce a second time, but this time to stay divorced. He thought they all could only have come to one conclusion: That they couldn't trust the sexual behavior of any of the others, nor of themselves when around any of the opposite sex others. Therefore, he reasoned, after re-divorcing they all went their separate ways, far away from each other. He based his guess on the fact that each of the four had appointed a different attorney agent. If a couple were going to stay together or get together, he reasoned, they would have used the same lawyer. That's a reasonable guess.
Another town father agreed that the couples had again divorced. But he thinks they then remarried their original spouses. He believes the sofa and woods events show that they really still love their original mates. However, he thinks that after remarrying their original spouses the couples then moved far away from each other in order to keep from the temptations of again cross-coupling, the immoral behavior that had originally upset the original marriages. He has the fact that the new couples had both resumed sexual relations with their original spouses as evidence to support his guess.
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nbsp; However, I disagreed with both these guesses because I had kept an eye on court dockets, and I knew no new divorces for these couples had ever either been granted or even filed for in our state. Of course, they could have gone to another state for their new divorces. But from my experience with the four when they were getting their divorces I was convinced that they sincerely and genuinely were in love with their new partners. So I think the new pairing survived the sofa and woods indiscretions. But obviously to avoid any more of that kind of thing, they all had to stay away from their ex's; far away. So my guess is that the new couples stayed married, but after selling their places in Hometown the two pairs moved to opposite sides of the country.
Finally, one crusty old town father said we all were being naive. The sofa and woods encounters which had blown up the couples' new marriages and driven them all out of town, he reasoned, had simply forced them to face the fact that their libidinal interests were not simply duplicitous, but essentially binary. Each of the four, he insisted, can't resist being sexually turned on by each of the other two opposite sex members of
We all three got out of our cars and greeted each other. I started to tell them why I was there, but they interrupted to explain about the breakdown of Mr. H.'s van and how fortunate it was that the new Mrs. M. happened by. They explained it all quite eagerly, and at the time I didn't understand why they were so anxious to tell me what an innocent happenstance their meeting had been. As we talked we walked up on the porch of the McCoy house, and since it now was her home, the new Mrs. M. just opened the front door. She opened it all the way because there were three people who would be entering through it. But what we saw in the McCoy living room meant I wasn't going to be entering that house. Not at that time, at any rate.
Through the opened front door we all three got a perfect view of the living room sofa. Apparently our talking had been heard by a couple who had been on the sofa engaging in what in pidgin Latin I would call coitus flagrante. The sound of our talking had turned the act into a case of coitus interruptus. Now the couple were in a panicky struggle to get dressed. The woman was stretched out on the sofa excitedly pulling up her panties, and the man was standing by the sofa pulling on his pants with equal dispatch. The interrupted parties were Mr. McCoy and Mrs. Hatfield, the lady who until a few months earlier had been Mrs. McCoy. With both their new spouses out of town for the day, these two apparently were overcome by the same kind of old habits that had overtaken each of their new spouses out in the woods. As I said, old habits are hard to break. But it looked like old habits were about to break up these new couples.
I've never been so embarrassed in my life. I didn't know what to do or say. As soon as I got my wits back together I made up a flimsy excuse and got the hell out of there.
VII
I don't embarrass easily, but that incident got to me. I wanted to get that title business settled, but I wasn't about to go back out to either the McCoy or the Hatfield place to do it. How could I have looked any of the four in the face knowing what I knew and them knowing I knew what I knew? Instead I sent the respective new couples their respective new half-lot titles by registered mail.
For a few days I thought there had been only one case of what might be called new infidelity with an old spouse, the McCoy sofa incident I had been an unwitting party in disrupting. But after my practice hunting friend told me what he had seen, I knew the whole situation out there had blown up.
Then I started hearing that neither Mrs. H., new or old, nor Mrs. M., new or old, had been seen since I last saw them. I was about ready to go to the sheriff and get him to go out there and look for wife bodies buried somewhere on those half-acre lots when I got a letter from a lady lawyer in the big city. It advised me that Mrs. McCoy (nee Hatfield) had appointed this lawyer as her legal agent and that in future, all matters concerning Mrs. M. should be directed to her through this lawyer. The letter included a signed and notarized directive from the new Mrs. M. to this effect. A couple days later I got a similar letter from a different big city lady lawyer containing a similar directive signed by the new Mrs. H. These letters showed that both wives were alive. They also showed that neither woman intended for anyone in Hometown to know where she was nor what her marital status was. Such anonymity is perfectly legal and is the customary reason for assigning an attorney intermediary as each woman had done.
A few days later I got phone calls from both husbands, first from Hatfield, than a day later from McCoy. Each told me to put his half-acre place up for sale. I guess they called instead of driving to my office because they were embarrassed to see me face to face, knowing I had seen what I had seen. But since I'm the only real estate broker in Hometown they had no alternative but to have me list their places. Neither man told me anything but his asking price, nary a word nor a hint about his marital situation. Though I asked each his reason for selling, neither would say anything more than that the sale was not motivated by any problem with his half-acre lot nor with the improvements thereupon. That there was an entirely different reason I could easily believe.
We handled everything about the property sales either over the phone or by mail. After each sale was made but before it was formally completed each husband left town without informing anyone where he was headed. This was surprising since, as you probably well know, the last act of every real estate sale is the closing, where all the parties assemble together to sign and exchange all the relevant papers and funds. But I received a letter from yet two more different big city attorneys, each one advising me he had been appointed as agent for one of the husbands.
I never saw nor heard from any of the four parties again. The closings and all other pending matters with the four parties were all handled through the four attorney agents they had appointed. And these agents never gave me a hint nor a clue about how the Hatfields and McCoys eventually handled their convoluted marriages. But I never expected anything else. Confidentiality is the purpose served by appointing an attorney intermediary, and none of these lawyers ever in the slightest way deviated from his/her professional duty.
I know I'll never find out how the Hatfield and McCoy marital matter was resolved, if, indeed, it ever has been resolved. But I can't stop wondering about it. Although I am under no professional obligation to keep mum about what I saw happening on the McCoy sofa nor about what I learned had happened in the woods outside of town, I do not intend to ever reveal these pieces of information to anyone. After all, I'm a good conservative American as proud as any Hometown citizen of Hometown's good conservative American reputation. And I don't want to damage it.
So I never let on to my practice hunting friend that I knew the real identity of the woman he had seen through his rifle scope doing an upside-down tap dance in the back of that SUV. He can go on thinking it was that tart from the bar out of town. It's not going to damage her reputation. If I ever allowed him or anybody else to learn that the Hatfields and McCoys had resumed their cross-coupling, the rumors about aphrodisiac water in the wells of their onetime properties would never stop. And the high school bus would have to detour through the next state to prevent Hometown's high school students' salacious snickering.
However, one night after a lodge meeting when I was having a cup of coffee with some of the town fathers, they got to asking me what I knew about why the Hatfields and McCoys had left town after going to the bother and expense of divorcing and remarrying. Since these men are town fathers and are as dedicated as I to preserving Hometown's reputation as a good conservative American community, I knew all of them could be implicitly trusted to keep everything I said strictly confidential. So I told them what I had seen on the McCoy sofa and what I had learned had gone on in the woods a few miles from town. But, of course, I didn't know what the eventual marital outcome these acts had led to, so I couldn't tell them that. However, each of us had his own guess.
One man said he thought the renewal of cross-coupling led the couples to divorce a second time, but this time to stay divorced. He thought they all could only have come to one conclusion: That they couldn't trust the sexual behavior of any of the others, nor of themselves when around any of the opposite sex others. Therefore, he reasoned, after re-divorcing they all went their separate ways, far away from each other. He based his guess on the fact that each of the four had appointed a different attorney agent. If a couple were going to stay together or get together, he reasoned, they would have used the same lawyer. That's a reasonable guess.
Another town father agreed that the couples had again divorced. But he thinks they then remarried their original spouses. He believes the sofa and woods events show that they really still love their original mates. However, he thinks that after remarrying their original spouses the couples then moved far away from each other in order to keep from the temptations of again cross-coupling, the immoral behavior that had originally upset the original marriages. He has the fact that the new couples had both resumed sexual relations with their original spouses as evidence to support his guess.
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Finally, one crusty old town father said we all were being naive. The sofa and woods encounters which had blown up the couples' new marriages and driven them all out of town, he reasoned, had simply forced them to face the fact that their libidinal interests were not simply duplicitous, but essentially binary. Each of the four, he insisted, can't resist being sexually turned on by each of the other two opposite sex members of