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We know that she had a gift for cooking that amounted almost to culinary inspiration. Pardee's dinners became an institution in Okoochee. Mrs. Pardee cooked. Maxine served. And not even the great new stucco palaces on the Edgecombe Road boasted finer silver, more exquisite napery.
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.
Got to have, in my business. Let's see, that town was " "Okoochee," faintly. "Okoochee! That's it! It's a small world after all, isn't it? Okoochee. Why, I'm on my way to Oklahoma now. I'm going to spend two months or more there, taking pictures of the vast oil fields, the oil wells. A new country.
He lived in the house next door, which he owned, renting it to an Okoochee family and retaining the upstairs front bedroom for himself. A tall, thin, eye-glassed young man who worked in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company, believed in Okoochee, and wanted to marry Maxine. He had twice kissed her.
That left a bare thousand to pay. There were three good meals a day. Milly Pardee belonged to the Okoochee Woman's Thursday Club. All the women in Okoochee seemed to have come from St. Louis, Columbus, Omaha, Cleveland, Kansas City, and they spoke of these as Back East. When they came calling they left cards, punctiliously.
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.
"And settle down in Okoochee! Never see anything! Stuck in this God-forsaken hole! This drab, dull, oil-soaked village! When there are wonderful people, wonderful places, colour, romance, beauty! Damascus! Mandalay! Singapore! Hongkong!... Hongkong! It sounds like a temple bell. It thrills me." "Over in Hongkong," said Arnold Hatch, "I expect some Chinese Maxine Pardee would say, Okoochee!
Sam Pardee had once taken his wife to see a performance of The Man From Home when that comedy was at the height of its popularity. A line from this play flashed into Mrs. Pardee's mind now, and she paraphrased it deftly. "There are just as many kinds of people in Okoochee as there are in Zanzibar." "I don't believe it." "Well, it's so. And I'm thankful we've got the comforts of home."
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.
In sudden fright and resolve Milly Pardee sold the furnishings of the four-room flat, packed the peripatetic linen and silver, and joined a surprised and rather markedly unenthusiastic husband in Okoochee, Oklahoma. A wife and a fifteen-year-old daughter take a good deal of explaining on the part of one who has posed for three years as a bachelor.
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