by James Jones
“Oh now, Agnes, that’s not true,” Frank started. “And you—”
“What did Al Lowe think about it?” she interrupted.
“Al? Nothing. He was sorry, I guess.”
“Did you call his wife? Geneve’s a smart girl. Maybe she could help you?”
“Of course not,” Frank said. “Why should I call her?”
“Hasn’t she been in the store lately?” Agnes said.
“Who? Geneve Lowe?” Frank said. “I don’t think so. I haven’t paid any attention. Why should I pay any attention to whether—”
“Well, I’m not going to have that madman brother of yours in my house, and that’s final!” Agnes said. She bent back down to her mangle.
It was cruel, but she didn’t care. He had it coming. He shouldn’t act so much like a sheep-killing dog. She wasn’t that terrifying. The truth was, she didn’t care a fig about Dave one way or the other. When she heard of Dave’s arrival, she had immediately penetrated by inference to the dinner invitation, too, because that was what she would have done, it was the only thing to do. But she was not going to let him know it.
She did not like Dave, she thought him lazy and no-good, and felt he had proved conclusively by running off from the girl he had got pregnant that he was entirely lacking in moral fiber and responsibility; and after his living in Hollywood for years, she was quite sure he was some kind of a degenerate. But all of this was personal feeling, and had nothing to do with the situation he had created for them in the town, and she was as well aware as Frank what they had to do to rectify it. She was quite willing to have him for dinner. Or even as a house guest the rest of his stay, if she had to.
“Take him over to Al and Geneve’s for dinner,” she said, looking up for a moment. “He’d have a good time there.” If he acted like a frightened moron, he could expect to be treated like one.
“Oh, now look,” Frank said. “Don’t talk silly. This is an important decision.”
“You think I’m being silly?” she flared. “I meant just exactly what I said! Take him to Al and Geneve’s for his damned dinner.”
He apparently thought she was the world’s worst kind of a fool, and that was what she resented more than anything else. Did he think she didn’t know? A wife always knows. But if he thought he was going to make her give him the satisfaction of talking about it he was the fool, and had another think coming.
“What kind of a fool do you think I am!” she said shrilly, feeling it begin to take hold of her. “I know you didn’t think I was beautiful when you married me. But the store you got more than offset that. I knew that, but I never thought you’d think I was a fool!”
“Don’t say things like that, Agnes,” Frank said. “On the contrary, I don’t think you’re a fool. I know what all you’ve done for me and how much help you’ve been to me. I would never have been a success at all if it hadn’t been for you!”
He knew, too, what was coming and that there was no way of avoiding it. She wasn’t going to block him about having Dave, she was as smart about that as he was, but she would go on pretending that she would, and it would unnerve and mangle him mentally just as much as if he believed it.
So for the next hour, until he went to get Dave, with that singular and ferocious talent she alone had for separating him cell from cell and nerve from nerve, she assured Frank she would not allow Brother Dave on the premises for any reason, just on moral grounds alone, while at the same time she upbraided him sorely for not calling her first, and then went on to bring up also every single thing that he had ever done to her in their married life, over the whole twenty-some-odd years; and the real reason behind it all and all the previous reasons were not even mentioned at all, by either of them.
Frank was scattered all over the floor in small fragments and nearly in tears by the time she suddenly changed her mind, which was just a few minutes before five-thirty.
“And if you ever so much as let him set his foot on the driveway,” she wound up, “I’ll leave this place so quick it’ll make your head swim and I’ll never come back!”
Frank did not say anything. He was afraid she really might go. She had a sister out in Kansas City and she had gone before.
“Well?” she said matter of factly, “aren’t you going to go down and get him? It’s five-thirty now. You’re going to be late as it is. And he may not wait on you.”
“Yes,” he mumbled, “I’ll go get him.”
“By the way,” Agnes said, “I’ve invited Old Bob French and Gwen to come for dinner, too. They’re to come at seven-thirty.”
“But don’t you think that’s sort of—inadvisable?” Frank said weakly.
“Well, they’re writers, aren’t they?” Agnes said. “At least, they’ll be able to talk to him. Maybe they even admire him, at least they won’t already have their minds made up against him like a normal person would.”
“All right,” Frank said.
“You’d better go,” she said.
Frank left visibly shaken. Driving downtown on the icing streets with both front windows rolled down in the cold air, he breathed great lung-freezing drafts of it and stared straight ahead vacantly, momentarily content with pure physical freedom.
He let his mind think about Geneve Lowe. It soothed him. He wondered when the hell she was going to call him about her next buying trip to Chicago, so he could arrange a business trip himself and meet her. He was getting damned impatient.
Geneve was a good girl, in a lot of ways. She liked (or pretended to like) the same things he liked. Drinking parties at the hotel, to eat in the big restaurants, to spend money, to go to ball games, and she was always careful never to let herself or him step over the fun line into anything like seriousness. Frank could hardly conceive of two women, members of the same sex, being so completely unlike.
As he pulled up the hill onto the courthouse square, he let his mind run over the last Chicago trip as a sort of palliative for his ego. If he paid for all this Chicago fun, Geneve was smart enough never to ask for more than she could equitably get. And she was sexy, or else made a damned good show at acting like she was. He knew she was an avaricious little flip, and that she led Al by the nose and dominated him completely, and that she was as cold-blooded a little tiger as existed anywhere. Everyone in Parkman knew it. But if Al Lowe couldn’t control his own wife enough to keep her from dominating him, that was his lookout the damned jerk. And if Geneve was ambitious, it was the long range ambition that would someday make her the respected owner of Dotty Callter’s Mode Shop and her husband the respected manager of Hirsh’s Jewelry Store. Her cold-bloodedness was the absolute variety that would never make an enemy of someone who could help her. Like Frank Hirsh. That kind of cold-bloodedness you could trust. And she was always careful. Sometimes he thought she was almost too careful.
The infuriating thing about Agnes, he thought, was that she never let logic or facts bother her a bit.
It made him feel some better thinking about Geneve but when he pulled up at the hotel and went inside he was still flat-eyed and dead-faced from the hiding he had taken. Staring straight ahead as he got out of the car, he did not see his brother jump back from the lighted corner window.
Upstairs, Dave Hirsh had shaved, and showered, anointed himself with lotion, and donned the clean, pressed OD pants and khaki shirt. He dressed carefully and fully. He even removed the set of everyday ribbons that were smudged and dingy and replaced them with the new set that he kept back for state occasions. As usual, he had hurried so as not to be late and had gotten done far too soon so that there was nothing left to do but wait. He mixed himself one more drink and sat down.
It was already dark outside. If there was anything he hated to do it was to wait. Waiting was always bad, especially waiting dressed and alone for it to be time to go to a party. He hoped suddenly that ’Bama had not been kidding him about that woman.
Feeling miserable and fearing for the crease in his pants, he got up and took his drink with him to the window.
The street lamps and the colored signs were on now all around the square, and he stood looking at them with that same melancholy feeling of the outsider who has tried to return to something he left too long ago. It was a silly damn thing to have done, he thought sadly.
Below him, a Buick sedan drove in diagonally to the curb and turned off its lights. Dave stepped back from the window quickly, cursing furiously.
When the phone rang, he was waiting for it. “Frank? Okay!” he said. “Be right down, boy!” He hung up and got his issue overcoat and turned off the lights, hoping his voice sounded carefree enough.
Frank was waiting at the desk. It had been nineteen years since they had seen each other, since they had spoken, since they had shaken hands. It had been a nineteen years of implacable and unrelenting warfare, a nineteen years of each trying to make the other admit he was the one who had been wrong, and of each nursing secretly the resentment that the other could treat him such a way. For nineteen years, there had been only the occasional word heard and then long periods of silence. And all that time, each had displayed publicly his violent and acid contempt for the other’s personality and way of life. A stranger might reasonably have expected them to fall upon each other with knives or clubs, right there in the lobby. Instead, both had trouble keeping the tears of affection out of their eyes.
They shook hands awkwardly, and looked each other over eagerly for the changes nineteen years had effected, saying the usual awkward words of greeting to cover the inspection. Then they went out the door talking friendlily and grinning, each on his guard now that the moment of emotion had been successfully weathered.
If any of the people sitting in the lobby had hoped to see a scene, they were badly disappointed.
As they walked to the door, Dave’s ego bloomed. He had come off best by far in the mutual inspection, and both knew it. Frank, who had still been young enough to look like an ex-athlete when Dave left, and whom Dave had seen no pictures of since then, had at forty-five thickened considerably, and simultaneously seemed to have grown smaller in shoulders and legs. He had also acquired that sanguine complexion and slightly self-satisfied air of a successful businessman, and in the acquiring of it had lost a good bit of hair. On the other hand, the Army had toughened Dave considerably and Frank, who had seen pictures of him in Hollywood, was unprepared for it. The result was that Dave felt elatedly magnanimous.
Outside they stopped on the steps in the cold air and lit cigarettes.
“It’s a shame you had to come down and pick me up like this,” Dave said.
“Hell, it’s a privilege,” Frank said. “Don’t even mention it. The Army’s been good for you.”
“Yeh. You’d think this town’d be big enough to support a taxi service, wouldn’t you?” Dave said, looking all around disdainfully. “Then you wouldn’t’ve had to come get me.”
Frank felt suddenly as if somebody had exploded a bomb inside of him. He didn’t answer immediately. Why the hell hadn’t he ever thought about a taxi service in this town? Why hell that might be the very investment he’d been looking for to get Dave into. It would be one hell of a fine investment in this town, growing like it was.
“Yes, you’d think it’d be big enough,” he said cautiously. “And we need one, too. Come on, let’s go,” he said and started down the steps.
They climbed into the dimly lit front seat of last year’s Buick and Frank drove west away from the hotel and from town although he had meant to turn east toward home, running down the slope of the wet brick street for several blocks before he spoke. He was still thinking about that taxi service. An idea like that ought to be taken advantage of right away, before somebody else beat you to it.
Dave didn’t speak, either. Aware that he had come off best in the inspection and ready to utilize his advantage as soon as he got the chance, he had slid into the front seat of the car to find his nose suddenly assailed by an olfactory memory so strong it threatened to completely suspend his time-sense and make nonexistent everything that had happened to him since he was seventeen. Sniffing the odor of the car—composed of equal parts dusty upholstery, stale cigar smoke, barber’s witch hazel, old raincoats, and spilled powder from Agnes’s compact, the same smell in this ’46 Buick as in Frank’s old ’26 Studebaker sedan—he felt again the luxurious sense of security he had always felt with his older brother, and had not felt anywhere else in the world since. He was suddenly hit with a jaw tightening, almost eye moistening emotion. Even at twenty-six, Frank had smoked those cigars. Wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, he sat back grimly and said nothing and looked out at the town which had changed so incredibly little, still determined to use his advantage as soon as he got the chance. You can’t let your damned emotions run away with you, by God. Quite suddenly, he hated Frank.
“I didn’t know you lived out in this end of town now?” he said finally.
“No. No,” Frank said, putting the taxi service out of his mind, “as a matter of fact, we live back east. I just thought I’d drive around a little bit so we’d sort of get used to each other a little before we went back to the house. You haven’t seen our new house, have you?”
“No,” Dave said. “Nor the last two. What’s to get used to?”
“Oh,” Frank grinned, “I guess we’ve both changed a little, since we saw each other. A little older. A little smarter.”
Dave laughed. “We’re both older all right. Especially you. And you may be smarter. I don’t guess I am. In fact, I know I’m not.”
“Maybe you don’t want to be,” Frank said. “Anyway, you’re lookin awful good.”
“Yeah, that’s the Army,” Dave grinned. “I feel in better shape than I’ve felt in years.”
Frank cleared his throat. “I didn’t know you were in the Infantry?” he said, nodding at the combat badge.
“I wasn’t. I was in the QM. My outfit was awarded the badge for voluntarily fighting as Infantry during the Bulge.”
“I didn’t know you were in the Battle of the Bulge.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “I was there.”
Frank drove on another block.
“I see you’ve got the Presidential Citation ribbon, too.”
“Yeah. Got that for the same deal.”
Frank nodded. “Did you know that I bought more war bonds than any other man in Cray County?”
“No!” Dave said. “Is that right?”
Frank gave him a sidelong glance. He drove on another block or so. “Weren’t you scared of gettin killed all the time?” he asked.
“Sure but once you get used to it, that’s not so bad,” Dave said. “It’s kind of fun. After you get used to the idea of people dying, of you dying, and realize it’s nothing abnormal or supernatural under the circumstances,” he explained. “The only hard thing is right at first while you’re getting accustomed to this idea that a person dying is normal, and not something weird.” He grinned at Frank. He had once thought about writing a novel on this theme, in France.
Frank didn’t say anything, but his distaste showed on his face.
“It’s just a simple problem in adjustment,” Dave said. “If you’re an integrated personality, you adjust.”
Frank nodded. He had driven to within a block of the railroad and the end of the brick without knowing it. He went around the block back east toward town. “We better get on home,” he said. “I guess you’d rather not talk about it anyway.”
Over here off the main street, Wernz Avenue, the houses were smaller and there were no rows of street lamps, only bare bulbs in reflectors hung over the center of the street at corners, and the light would come and then be gone, come and then be gone, on their faces through the windshield.
“No,” Dave said somberly, “as a matter of fact I wouldn’t. I want to forget all that.”
Frank nodded and drove on a piece. “I guess you think I did wrong,” he said suddenly, “makin you leave town that time?”
“Why no,” Dave said. “As matter of fact, I’ve always felt you did me a fa
vor. Otherwise I’d probly still be here, married to that little gal, or some other little gal, workin in some office, goin home to the same house every night, payin the electric bill every month.”
“There are a lot of worse ways of spendin your life than that,” Frank said.
“Not for me there ain’t.”
“I guess you were right a while ago,” Frank said. “I guess you haven’t got any smarter.”
“I guess not,” Dave said. Then suddenly he couldn’t go on with it anymore. Maybe it was too easy. “I didn’t mean to go casting aspersions on your way of life,” he said.
You’re a chameleon, he told himself, feeling in him the liquor he had drunk back at the hotel. An emotional chameleon, that’s what you are. You become somebody else with everyone you’re with. That may be a good thing in a writer, but it’s a damn poor trait in a human being.
“Oh, sure,” Frank said. “I know that.”
“What we need is a drink,” Dave suggested.
“That’s a damn good suggestion,” Frank said, and suddenly remembered Agnes was waiting for them at home. His nervous anxiety was at once restored full-blown. He had forgotten all about Agnes in his guilty talk of war. It was like sex. It seemed to him suddenly that he never felt anything but anxiety or guilt or fear anymore. Even when he was with Geneve in Chicago, fear of meeting someone who knew them was what dictated most of his movements.
But, of course, that wasn’t true, either. He felt all kinds of happy things. All the time. Didn’t he.
“This is our street,” he said cheerfully, turning the corner. “It’s only a few blocks from here. Then we’ll get that drink.”
“Great,” Dave said, but already beginning to be mad at himself for chickening out.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, Frank worrying about the reception Agnes would give Dave, Dave worrying because he had chickened out on his advantage over Frank. Neither of them, at this long postponed moment of meeting, was even considering how strange it was that of all the men in the world, they two should be brothers; or gave the slightest thought to the two persons responsible for this, namely their parents, who—with complete lack of forethought, perhaps even with indifference, driven by that biological characteristic of the Mammalia as a man is driven into shelter by the weather—had engaged in an attempt (largely unsuccessful) to relieve themselves of loneliness and labeled it virtue after the fashion of their species, but which actually resulted mainly only in the making of their offspring relatives; and who were the most nearly responsible for having made them the singular, and largely unhappy individuals, that they were. Neither of them thought of this. But when the car pulled in the driveway and stopped, they both thought that it had been a nice ride together, a fine way to meet after nineteen years.
