by James Jones
“If he is, I certainly didn’t notice it at the store this afternoon.”
“You!” Jane hooted. “You ain’t dry behind the ears yet. You wouldn’t recognize it if he was. And if you did, you wouldn’t admit it.”
“That’s right. I sure wouldn’t. But it just so happens there wasn’t anything to admit.”
“Then he don’t know about it yet, that’s all.”
“How did you think I found out about it?”
“You could of found out lots of places. The whole damn town’s buzzin with it. It’s better’n Virginia Stevens’s marriage. And you stand there and try to tell me that damned Frank Herschmidt don’t even care.”
“All I said was, if he was upset he didn’t show it at the store.”
“Course he wouldn’t show it at the store, you ninny.”
“You’d better watch the liver,” Edith said. “You’ll burn it. And I have to wash.” She went on in her room.
“Wait’ll next Friday,” Jane called after her. Friday was her day at the Hirshes’. “I’ll be able to give you the straight dope then. Agnes never can hide her upset.”
She turned back into the kitchen, still holding the fork, the pleased malice on her face replaced by disappointment. She had thought surely this time she could get her goat. Many more times than not Jane was convinced her granddaughter had no more emotions or sensibilities in her than her damned stupid father. And Jane was becoming increasingly convinced that Edith was going to turn out to be a cold-blooded old maid of a virgin. Disdainfully, she thrust the fork down in the skillet. She had a heavy date tonight, herself. Someday she’d get married again and let them see how good they got along without her around here.
In her room, Edith hung up her coat pleased she hadn’t gotten angry. She already knew him better, in less than one year, than Jane did in over twenty. But then it was Agnes Jane really worked for, wasn’t it? Edith stopped her mind. That wasn’t her department. She got out of the bra and panty girdle which had ridged her flesh, and massaged the welts with her palms. She didn’t look at her nude self in the dresser mirror, not so much because of modesty as because it didn’t occur to her to look. Having eased the itch of her armor, she put on a housecoat to wait for her father to be through in the bathroom.
Edith, contrary to her grandmother’s wishful thinking, was not only not a virgin, she was twice-removed. Her first affair, but you could hardly call it an affair, she thought, was with a boy in high school, rather like the scandal of Dave Hirsh, except that she and her high school boy did not get caught. She supposed it happened to practically everyone. This one was the result of two things—one, a deliberate rebellion against the persistent advice of her widowed father, who kept warning her to beware of boys; and two, a strong curiosity aroused by all sorts of half-allusions from all sorts of sources (movies, perfume ads, overheard conversations, conversations participated in) as if sex were one of those faint stars seen indistinctly from the corner of the eye but which when looked at straight, disappears.
Her second—this was an affair, and lasted several months—was with a wounded veteran returned from the European Theater, during the time she was working at the telephone company. The main reason for this one was that she was beginning to feel that reasonless loneliness which comes with adulthood, and also because she felt sorry for him, not because he was wounded, but because he was so desirous of that in her, which seemed so vastly overrated to herself. Magnanimous was perhaps a better word than sorry, for the way she felt. It was like giving old clothes to the Salvation Army; you lose nothing, and yet get to feel generous. She supposed she did like it, in a way, but it was mainly because she felt she was giving him pleasure. Feeling that way, she supposed, it might well have blossomed into something finer. But when the veteran tried to teach her some of the more unusual ways of making love, she realized all her sympathy had been misplaced. And that was when the affair began to teach her something, something curious. A woman should be careful who she has an affair with, because once she enters it, something strange happens to her and she will cling to it through hell and high water for some reason and put up with almost anything before she can bring herself to break it off. With her veteran, she found herself hanging on to an unhappy association, hoping and rationalizing for some months before she got up courage enough to finish it, when he would not change. Since then she had not had a lover, and did not feel the lack, except that sometimes that peculiar pointless loneliness overwhelmed her. But dates helped take care of that.
Sitting on the bed in her housecoat waiting for her father to finish his bath, she took up her earrings from the coverlet where she’d tossed them and carried them over to her jewel box on the dresser.
The moment she opened the lid, Edith saw Jane had been into her jewelry again. The earrings, which she kept separated in their pairs on the felt of the tray, had been taken out and cunningly replaced, but not quite perfectly enough. Jane had had it all out trying it on in front of the mirror again. Stung to tearful indignation, she seized the box and charged down on the kitchen.
She didn’t have much jewelry. She couldn’t afford much, on her pay. But what she had was hers. She had paid for it. Most of it was only costume jewelry, but she had selected it painstakingly. But more than that, it was the invasion of her privacy. She had no place in this house, which was hers and no one else’s. Not even her own jewelry box.
Jane looked up startled from the stove, but she recovered quickly when she saw the box, and her face set in iron defense.
“You’ve been in my room again!”
“I have not.”
“You have so, you have. You’ve been in my jewelry again.”
“No, I ain’t,” Jane said. Her guilt was spread all over her face. “I ain’t any such a thing.”
“You have! You’ve been in my room trying on my jewelry again. Damn you to hell,” she said. It was useless. She knew Jane would never admit it.
Crying hard with frustration and outrage because she could not at least make her admit it, Edith shook the box at her inarticulately, unable to think of anything strong enough, hurtful enough, to say to her. “You old whore, you,” she said, and stormed back to her room, still clutching the precious box, and slammed the door as hard as she could fling it. It rattled in its frame, drowning Jane’s answer: “Honestly, Edith. You must have moved them yourself, and then forgot about it.”
John Barclay chose this moment to emerge from the bathroom, his face shining and the smell of chemicals gone. He had expected to be complimented.
“What’s the matter with her?” he said.
Jane shrugged. “Oh, she thinks I been in her jewelry.”
She wasn’t hurt—or even angry, really—at being called an old whore. Just melancholy. Gradually, during the past eight or ten years, she had, with great guilt and unhappiness, been forced to come to about that same conclusion herself. But if that was what she was, that was what she was and she might as well enjoy it where she could, by God. Besides, Edith was upset.
“Well, did you?” John said, after he had digested what she said.
“Course I didn’t,” Jane said. But she’d be damned if she’d admit it to anybody else. Trying on her damned old jewelry, just to see for a minute how it looked on you in the mirror, didn’t hurt it any. Calling her own grandmother an old whore!
“Well, even so, you ought to be more careful how you handle the girl,” John Barclay said, after considerable deep thought. “I know she gets on your nerves. But she’s a bright girl. And bright people like that are extra sensitive. She ain’t rough like you and me, and you can’t treat her like she was.”
What a hell of a smart man to have for a son-in-law, Jane thought disgustedly. You could tell him jam was polish, and he’d rub it on his shoes. She said shortly: “What she needs is to get married.” Then some malicious devil in her made her add: “Or at least, a man.”
John looked shocked. “When she needs a man, she’ll find one for herself. And she’ll marry him, I
warrant.”
Jane snorted. “Supper’s about ready,” she said.
“The girl ain’t had her bath yet,” John Barclay said. “You’ll have to put it back awhile.” He trod across the room in his sock feet and sat down at the kitchen table to wait for supper.
In her room, the object of this discussion had put the box back on the dresser and flung herself facedown on the bed. Gradually, in direct ratio to the cessation of her angry crying—which was swift now she was alone—the old hopelessness settled over her like a falling tent. The slamming of the door had helped a little. But not much. Whoever said a man’s home was his castle must surely have lived without his relatives. Otherwise, he would have said instead that a man’s home was his fishbowl. Or his prison.
She wished she hadn’t called Jane an old whore, even if it was true. Besides Jane wasn’t actually a whore. She didn’t take money.
Using considerable more energy than she believed she possessed, she made herself get up off the bed, and went to the dresser to examine her jewelry to see if any of it was scratched by the violent shaking. Quietly as possible, she went out through her door and down the tiny hall to the bathroom.
That was the trouble. If she just didn’t like them, if she only just hated them, it wouldn’t be such a terrible, painful thing. But damned family loyalty had to come into it.
The bathroom was at the very back of the house. After she shut the door, Edith went to the window and looked out across the fence across the deep side lawn of the Frederic place. The big, old, ugly three-story house was ablaze with light, and the lights were on in Doris’s room. For a moment she debated calling her. She badly needed somebody to talk to. But she had this damned date tonight.
Edith grinned ruefully and came down from the window. She and Doris had been chums sort of all through school, used to bring each other all their more emotional problems, Doris in a sort of magnanimous older person’s way after all she was two years older, Edith more as a satellite seeking advice. Even after Doris had gone away to college. During her college summers home Doris would come over and read her the letters and tell her the troubles of her various heavy love affairs. She still did. They hadn’t grown apart, they still called each other, though perhaps not as often now because their lives had taken different paths was all.
She turned away from the window and looked at herself in the medicine chest mirror. Her face was a sight. And her with a date tonight. She wet a cloth with cold water and bathed her eyes. Harold would want to stop for a beer after the show, and that would mean they might run into Jane with one—or several—of her boyfriends.
It was embarrassing not to be able to go into one of Parkman’s three bars for a beer without running into your own grandmother with some of her decrepit lovers. Edith giggled. They didn’t any of them look like they could do any good.
She put the cloth away and commenced to wash out the tub, which, as usual, John had forgotten to clean. Harold, the poor dope, thought he was in love with her and wanted to marry her because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Why did it always have to be the dopes who fell in love with her?
She drew the water, wishing there was some way to get out of eating supper without hurting them. Supper would be strained and unpleasant, with everybody trying to pretend nothing had happened, Jane forcing food on her in a pathetic effort to be friendly, and herself unable to digest it from trying so hard to show them she was no longer angry.
She tested the water with one foot, wishing now she’d never brought it out in the open. All she wanted was a normal home and family, and a husband who would love her forsaking all others as much as she felt she ought to be loved.
Gingerly, she shed the housecoat and stepped into the scalding hot water and let herself down into it gracefully, a very nubile female who would make some man a fine wife someday, provided she could only find the kind of man she was looking for, which was one who would dominate her; and whom, if she ever did find him, she would immediately begin to fight to the last breath, to keep him from doing it.
Absorbing the nourishment of the hot bath, she wondered how the boss was making out with his dinner for Brother Dave.
Chapter 8
AS HE SAT IN HIS CAR in the driveway, after the trip home from the store, Frank turned off the ignition and sat watching the fading afternoon light. He had no desire, absolutely none, to go into the house.
The human mind was a funny thing, he thought. He was no longer the crisp decisive businessman who had left the store. His mind seemed to freeze up into a complete blank of nervous anxiety before the prospect of getting Agnes to cook a steak dinner for Brother Dave.
At the store, he had seen fit to ignore the problem of Agnes and had pretended she would do whatever he told her to. Now, he could not. Agnes was known on several occasions to have made the remark publicly that she would not even allow Dave Hirsh in her house. Obviously, if he could not get Dave into the house he could not very well feed him a steak dinner to show the town how happy they were to see him. But he had not thought about this then, and now it was too late, he had to ask her, and his mind was completely bereft of inspiration.
It wouldn’t be so bad if she were just logical. And she was going to be doubly angry when she found out he had invited him without consulting her first. If there was anything Agnes didn’t take to, it was not being consulted. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that if he had just asked her first she would have cheerfully agreed to having Dave instead of flatly refusing. It was all his fault for not giving her credit for any understanding.
Reluctantly, he got out and walked toward the porch. What he expected, what he feared, was that shortly he would find himself calling Dave to tell him the dinner was off because Agnes unbeknownst to him made another date for them tonight. And then the fat would be in the fire and the town could all look wise and snicker.
It didn’t turn out that way, though. The way it turned out was that, at five-thirty, Frank, in a state of near nervous collapse and feeling beaten about the head but full of gratitude for his wife’s immense understanding, drove down to the hotel to pick Dave up. And Agnes, equally nervously exhausted, went into their room and lay down for about one minute wondering irately why he wanted to make her say such terrible things, before she got up to lay the steaks out to thaw and hurried to bathe and dress in order to look fresh and happy when Dave arrived.
She thought she never in her life had seen such a selfish, inconsiderate person as Frank Hirsh. Frank on his way downtown was thinking the same thing about Frank, in a more affectionate way.
She had been in the utility room (reconverted for her from a former extra guest room when they remodeled) ironing sheets on the beautiful big mangle he had bought her, when he came in the front door treading nervously past the concert grand he had bought for little Dawn’s piano lessons, him glad when he saw it that little Dawn was at the high school practicing for a Senior Class Glee Club Festival and wasn’t home to witness this.
“Frank?” the voice said. It had the shrill but plaintive note of a bent saw struck with a hammer.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve just had four phone calls,” she said. “All from friends of mine.”
“I’ve had a few myself,” he said.
“Then you know about it!”
“Yes.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
He went on into the kitchen he had bought for her when they remodeled, the best in Parkman with its combination disposal-sink-and-automatic-dishwasher, its six-burnered double-ovened glass-doored stove, its six-foot compartment-doored refrigeratorits big bin-type deep-freeze, its airy breakfast nook, its tiled serving peninsula built out into the room, and the complete list of Sunbeam electric accessories no wife should be without, but which most are.
“Well, I don’t know exactly, yet,” he said. “I’m workin on it. I—”
“You’d better get him out of this town and get him out QUICK. That’s all I’ve got to
say.”
He did not go on into the utility room, but instead stopped at the icebox and got out a Coke and opened it.
“I can’t do that. I have to handle it my own way,” he said, then he took a deep breath. “I’ve invited him out the house for dinner tonight.”
“You’ve what!” the voice cracked.
“I’ve invited him to dinner,” he repeated. “I—”
“I’ll not have that Hollywood degenerate coming into my house! I won’t have it!”
“Now you just shut up a minute!” Frank half yelled, “—and let me talk a minute?”
A stony silence met his ear.
“I’m workin on it,” he said. “Do you trust my judgment or not? I’ve got to make it look friendly. That’s the only way.”
“It’s your brother,” the voice said like a frozen knife blade. “Just don’t expect me to be here when you bring him.”
Feeling panic although his mind was sure she didn’t mean it, Frank set the untouched Coke on the counter and charged the utility room door. “Now look!” he protested. “Be reasonable!”
She was sitting there, an attractive woman still although thickening considerably, angry faced, with that intangible heavy-armored look of a wife and matron on her face, where once there had been the eager look of a young girl.
“Reasonable!” she said.
“Yes, reasonable!” Frank said. “You know we can’t keep him from comin into town if he wants to. And you know we can’t make him leave if he don’t.”
“Did I say we could? You think I’m dumb?”
“No. But you—”
“You ask me to be reasonable!” Agnes said. “Why didn’t you call me from the store?”
Frank wanted to say because I didn’t want a scene over the phone, but he had enough control left to know better. “Why didn’t you call me?” he countered.
“Because I’ve been let know often enough, in enough subtle ways, that I’m not welcome to call the store in business hours,” Agnes said. It was an allusive remark, and there was that slapped-face look in her eyes behind the matronness.
