Stand By Your Man

Eleanor Vaughn  - the mayor's wife - appears across just two pages of the novel and remains nothing more than a voice at the end of the telephone line. We can picture her in the large Tudor style mansion that her husband's shady business dealings have bought her, sitting by the phone waiting for the police chief to return her call. Within a few sentences we learn that she is painfully shy and quite naive - two elements of her character that have made it very easy for her husband to keep her in the dark. Larry Vaughn has come home, shut himself up in his study and crawled inside a bottle of scotch. Eleanor clearly suspects something is wrong, but like the president's wife after whom she is most likely named, she is prepared to stand by her man. In a parallel scene two chapters later, Larry Vaughn will pay an unexpected visit on Ellen Brody and seek solace from her while raiding the liquor cabinet. So one woman's husband reassures another man's wife and one man's wife reassures another woman's husband - it's a small piece of narrative geometry that shows Benchley did not just throw the novel together.