Some Came Running

by James Jones

  Chapter 9

  FRANK NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED about Agnes at all. She had bathed, fixed her hair, and dressed, and she looked fresh and happy and at least ten years younger. There were no signs whatever that less than an hour before she had been either exhausted or tearful, or furious. She led Dave inside with such honest welcome and charming grace that it appeared she had been waiting this whole nineteen years, just for him to return to Parkman.

  Not only that, little Dawn who had got home from the glee club rehearsal was right there with her, equally dressed up and part of the welcoming committee. Dawn was at that age where she felt it unworthy of her newfound intelligence to have anything to do with her parents except at mealtimes. So this could only, Frank knew, have been Agnes’s doing.

  The house looked lovely in the light of the lamps and the subdued indirect lighting he had had put in. The big table in the small dining room had been laid with full service for six, dazzling white and bright silver. The cocktail things were laid out invitingly on the buffet.

  It was a fine home Frank thought and went straight to the buffet and nervously poured himself a stiff shot of the rye for the manhattans. Then and only then, he followed them on out to the kitchen.

  Agnes was proudly showing Dave how the automatic dishwasher worked. Dawn had already gone back into the living room and gotten herself a book.

  “That’s all there is to it!” Agnes said. “When you take them out, they’re done. It’s one of the first ones in town.”

  “It’s amazing,” Dave said.

  In spite of his anger, which still hurt his ears and which the liquor had not helped yet, Frank decided that for a woman of her age his wife was a remarkably beautiful woman when she wanted, in spite of the thickening around her middle. He walked over to her from the door and draped his arm around her waist.

  “Maybe Dave’s not interested in our domesticity, Mama.” “Oh no!” Dave said. “I’m interested.” He was beginning to recover a little from his embarrassment at the effusive welcome he had not expected.

  “Of course, it probably doesn’t mean much to you men,” Agnes smiled, taking Frank’s hand into her own. “But it means an awful lot to a housewife.”

  “I’ll bet it does,” Dave nodded. He was determined to be a superlative guest, so that nobody especially Agnes could run him down afterwards.

  “You men would probably rather talk about some old car or a business deal,” Agnes said. “But I did want to show off my pretty house.” She gave Frank an open sidelong smile, her eyes alight with a great deal of love that had not been there earlier today before Dave came on the scene. And which, Frank thought matter of factly, would not be there after Dave left.

  “Well, we will certainly show it to him, Mama,” he said heartily. “All of it.”

  “I want to see it,” Dave said.

  “First we’d better get him a drink,” Agnes said turning her warm smile on Dave. “I ought to be ashamed, running him all over the house before he even gets a drink.”

  “A capital idea,” Frank said.

  “You didn’t run me all over the house,” Dave said.

  “Will you mix them, Poppy?” Agnes said.

  “Gladly,” Frank grinned, rubbing his hands together. “Are you goin to have one, Mama?”

  “Well, maybe just one,” Agnes said. “Since this is a special occasion.” She smiled at Dave with girlish excitement. “We’re manhattan drinkers. Poppy’s famous for his manhattans. Besides we’re too old to be changing back and forth from gin to whiskey, we’re exclusively whiskey.”

  “I’m an old whiskey drinker myself,” Dave said. He wondered would it be like this all evening?

  “Let’s go on in and watch him make them,” Agnes suggested. “It’s really a treat to see.”

  “Swell!” Frank said, leading the way and winking at Dave. “Mama knows I always do better when I’ve got an audience.”

  “Now, Poppy,” Agnes chided.

  Together, after Frank had mixed the drinks and handed them round, they showed Dave the rest of the house, explaining how they had redesigned, all of them carrying their drinks as they went. Then they came back to the dining room for another drink.

  Frank needed one badly. As he had moved around the house, he gradually descended into an acute depression. It was a good act they put on for guests, he and Agnes, and he was proud of it. What depressed him was not so much that they were dishonest—he had no moral qualms about lying to anybody when it was necessary, neither did Agnes. But he wished that sometime they could just continue to play the act for a little while when they were by themselves.

  “Are you goin to have another one with us, Mama?” he asked.

  Agnes was delicately inspecting the layout of the dinner table. She straightened a salad fork a sixteenth of an inch and turned back and smiled at Dave sweetly before she answered.

  “Well, do you really think it would be all right?” she said. “I might get giggly.”

  “Go right ahead!” Frank boomed, and winked at Dave. “Go right ahead! You’re among friends.”

  “Well, all right,” Agnes laughed. “Just one more then. I don’t ordinarily, but I will this once.”

  She turned back to the table. “We’re having a couple of other people in to dinner to meet you,” she said to Dave. “That’s why the six places.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “They’re Robert Ball French and his daughter, Gwen. You remember them, Dave?”

  Oh no, Dave thought, oh no. “Just barely,” he said. “I went to school to Bob French.”

  “They’re both writers,” Agnes said. “That’s why I asked them. I thought you’d have something in common to talk about that way. Bob French is really quite well known nationally as a poet.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard of him.” Oh no, he thought again, oh no.

  “Well. Now you boys just go on in the other room and sit down and have your drinks,” Agnes said. “I’m going out in the kitchen and get things started. You bring my drink out there for me, Poppy.”

  “Sure thing,” Frank said. He had just sneaked another shot of the straight rye.

  “That’s sure a beautiful table you’ve got laid there,” Dave said. He was in it now, all the way, might as well play it out to the bitter end. Even with the literary Frenches dragged into it, he was still determined to be a superlative guest.

  Agnes stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, Dawn and I didn’t have much time. We would have fixed a real dinner if we’d known you were coming.”

  “I tried to call her all afternoon, Dave,” Frank said, “but she was out gallivantin someplace.”

  “So you’ll just have to take potluck with us,” Agnes said demurely. She went on into the kitchen. Her dark eyes were bright with party-excitement. Nobody knew the initial energy that had been required of her to lift herself into this state. It had been tremendous, almost heart-bursting, and its expenditure would almost certainly show itself later. But right now, like a spaceship that had almost exploded itself to reach escape velocity, she could shut off and just coast the rest of the way on her own previously expended fuel.

  “Here, Dave,” Frank said, “you take this on in the other room and talk to little Dawn. I’ll join you in a minute, soon’s I fix Mama’s.”

  Dutifully, Dave wandered into the front room, holding his glass carefully. He was tiring fast from being a superlative guest. Everything had moved so fast. And now the damned Frenches, who wanted to do a book on lesser writers, such as D Hirsh, were being hauled into it. He might just as well have gone out with Wally Dennis. Dawn was curled up with her book in the big leather easy chair. He sat down in the lesser upholstered one.

  Dawn looked up briefly with wide eyes, smiled distantly, and then looked back down her hair falling about her young face and hiding its sternly adult expression.

  Dave cleared his throat and took a swallow of his drink. She had been his niece for more than seventeen years, he calculated, although he did not feel like an uncle. She was b
orn two years after he left and he had only seen pictures of her—as a fat baby, as a less fat little girl, as an extremely unfat big girl (as if the fat had all receded inward, gathering its forces for the onslaught of womanhood when it would suddenly swell out again at the particular right places), but since going overseas he hadn’t even seen pictures of her.

  In those two years, the transformation had taken place. Her breasts were not budding, but had budded; and her thighs were not swelling, but had swelled. And he knew that at this moment she was intensely aware of it and expected him to be aware of it, too. Dave shifted uneasily in his chair. He was aware of it, all right. She had the same short, stocky body all the Hirshes had only on her it looked good he thought, and everything about her shouted eloquently that she was just waiting, confidently and with supreme assurance, until somebody or other came along and adored her, as she knew was her inalienable right.

  He cleared his throat again.

  “I met a friend of yours uptown today,” he said.

  “Oh?” Dawn said, raising her head on her pretty neck. “Who was that?”

  “Boy named Wally Dennis,” Dave said.

  “Oh, Wally,” Dawn smiled. “Yes. I’ve had a few dates with him. He thinks he wants to become a writer, someday maybe. He’s a nice enough fellow.” She looked back down at her book.

  That seemed to have closed that subject. Dave cleared his throat again.

  “What’re you reading?” he asked.

  Dawn looked up without closing the book. “The Remembrance of Things Past,” she said, and looked back down.

  “Proust?” Dave said. “That’s kind of heavy reading for a high school girl.”

  Dawn smiled. “Oh, do you think so? I like him very much.”

  “He always seemed a little bit too sensitive for me,” Dave said.

  Dawn’s face took on a look of genuine horror. “Oh no! That’s the very thing that’s so wonderful about him! He has one of the most exquisite sensibilities of any man I’ve ever read.”

  “Yes, he certainly has a great sensibility,” Dave agreed. “Well. See, I knew so many third-rate intellectuals out in Hollywood, you see. Who made such a fetish of Proust. I guess it turned me against him.”

  “But do you think that’s fair? It’s hardly fair to blame Proust for that, is it?”

  “No. Of course it isn’t. That was just what I was going to say.” Dave took another tentative swallow of his drink, wondering what the hell was keeping Frank.

  As if mollified by his last remark, Dawn closed her book with finality, and turned upon Dave a brilliant smile, her eyes kindling with a half-bold, half-shy knowledge of her own attractiveness. It was at once innocently girlish and artfully womanish, and it made him mad.

  He was already half mad. What with the painful discussion of Proust, and the abortively affectionate turn the whole evening had taken. He tossed off the rest of his drink, and was not relieved.

  Dawn squirmed around in the chair facing him and settled herself to talk unaware she was exposing as she did so a portion of young thigh still faintly colored by summer tan.

  “You were a protégé of Saroyan, weren’t you?” she said, “out there.”

  Dave could not keep his eyes from looking covertly at the line of his niece’s skirt hiding the rest of her bare athletic thigh. Outwardly embarrassed, inwardly raging, he toyed with his empty glass and tried to stare at the cherry in it.

  “Lord no, I never met the man.”

  “I read your stories and the books. You know, the ones Aunt Francine sent us. They sounded a lot like Saroyan.”

  “Oh, we all copied him,” Dave said, “during the thirties. Him or Steinbeck, if you lived in California. In the East, it was Thomas Wolfe. They were the only ones that sold.” Ought to make a recording.

  He had not had a woman since a week before he was discharged. He wished now he had thought of that before coming down here where there weren’t any whorehouses. There used to be some down in Terre Haute when he was a kid. But doubtless the war had closed all those.

  He sure hoped ’Bama wasn’t kidding about that woman.

  “What’s it really like,” Dawn asked, “out there? Is it really as fabulous as they say it is?”

  Her face eager, Dawn shifted her bottom in the chair and pulled her skirt down, instinctively, without even looking down or realizing it had been up. In spite of the relief he felt Dave suffered a tender regret, it was like watching the curtain come down on a play you had enjoyed.

  “I don’t know what it’s like if you’ve got money. Without money, it’s just like everyplace else.”

  “But you’re going back out there, though. Aren’t you?” Dawn said, smiling that brilliant seductive smile. All her former reserve seemed suddenly to have evaporated, as if she’d forgotten.

  “Only because I’ve got a job waitin for me,” Dave lied, rolling the cherry around in the glass.

  “At the studios?”

  Dave nodded. If he had of had one, he’d be damned if he’d take it.

  “Which studio did you work for?”

  “Universal, mostly. RKO, a little.” It sounded almost good, when you said it that way. Seven class-Z westerns was what it really was, as a junior writer, and then they had never used a single line he had written.

  “Oh, sometimes I wish I were a man!” Dawn said. “Men get to do so many more things than women do. I don’t think it’s fair.”

  “Well, women can do lots of things men can’t, too,” Dave said. “I’ve often wished I was a woman.”

  “What,” Dawn demanded. “Name one.”

  He realized he’d dug himself into a hole. “Oh, lots of things,” he said vaguely.

  “If you’re referring to sex,” his seventeen-year-old niece said without embarrassment, “even that isn’t true. Men get to go out and sleep with all kinds of women whenever they want, and nobody but their wives thinks a thing about it. But women can’t do that.”

  “I guess that’s right,” Dave said, “except that some of them do.” He wished to hell Frank would come back.

  “Oh well! That kind,” Dawn said, and shifted her woman’s bottom girlishly in the chair again, and went back to her point.

  “Men get to do all kinds of things women don’t. You left home when you were my age and bummed around the country and lived your own life and had experiences. That’s what made you an artist. But what if I wanted to write? You think I’d ever get a chance to do that? Even if Frank and Agnes would let me, which they wouldn’t, I still couldn’t do it because I’m a female.”

  “Are you writing?” Dave said, with relief.

  “Oh no. Acting is my field. Didn’t Wally tell you?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. Movies?”

  “Heavens, no! I don’t want to go to Hollywood,” Dawn said. “I want to really act.”

  Dave nodded. “New York, then.”

  “From what I understand,” Dawn said, “the only way to go to Hollywood is to go there direct from New York, anyway. With a name.”

  “I guess it helps,” Dave said. He was suddenly aware that he was being complimented—complimented?—with the bestowal of confidences the rest of the family probably never had heard.

  “I’ve made plans,” Dawn said. “I may not even go to college.”

  “College never helped any kind of an artist,” Dave said.

  “There, you just proved my point. That’s why I mean to go to New York and make my own break. But don’t tell the folks.”

  “Well now, wait a minute,” Dave hedged. “That’s a pretty tough row to hoe in New York. There’s lots of competition.”

  “Not if you’ve got what it takes,” Dawn said.

  “Well, a little college training wouldn’t hurt you there,” he hedged. He suddenly felt very inadequate to advise anybody, especially a seventeen-year-old niece with such a passion for acting it would allow her to tear up roots like a man furiously clearing a pasture.

  “Well, if a person wan
ts to do a thing,” Dawn said, looking pleased that she had frightened him, “he or she ought to do it, without trying to hedge or be safe.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Dave saw Frank come into the dining room still holding his drink. Dawn heard him, and rearranged her face. Frank’s face looked congested Dave noticed, as if there must have been quite a scene in the kitchen. Probably over himself. Frank gulped off part of his drink and came into the living room smiling.

  The scene in the kitchen had not been over Dave. It had been over the fact that Agnes had caught him sneaking drinks of the straight rye and had taken him to task for it with a whip-tongued vengeance. The result, of course, was, he wanted to drink more.

  “What’re you two gabbin about?” he said cheerfully, taking Dave’s glass.

  “We’ve been discussing Marcel Proust,” Dawn said.

  “Who’s he?” Frank said.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Dawn said, flushing.

  “What’s the matter? Did I say the wrong thing?”

  “You do know who Proust is,” Dawn said. “The writer. I was just talking to you about him the other night.” She hadn’t been. She had never read him.

  “I don’t remember it.” Frank’s hearty laugh was a little too hearty, especially for a man with his embarrassed face. “My God, child. I can’t remember all the writers you talk to me about. I got to make a livin for this family.”