Some Came Running

by James Jones

  Wally snorted, a kind of nervous laugh. “Well—if you call what I do writing,” he said. “Yes. Yes, I guess you could say.” He had stopped the car, pulling it off in a wide spot on the road, and turned to face her.

  “But would you go anyway?” Dawn said. She herself was still facing front, through the windshield. “I mean, because I asked you?”

  “No,” he said; “no, I don’t think I would, Dawnie.”

  “Would you marry me, though? If we stayed here?” she said.

  “I— Well—sure. Yes,” he said. “I guess.” He looked puzzled. “But you yourself just said—”

  “But you wouldn’t want to.”

  “No, that’s not it at all,” he said. “But what would happen? Would you want to move in our house with me and my mom? Would you want us to move in with your folks? Your dad would want me to go to work for him in his damned store the minute we got hitched. Is that what you want?”

  “Good God, no!” Dawn said.

  “Well, you see? You got to think of those things.”

  “It’s just that it’s all rather hard for me to understand, you see,” she said. “Then, the truth is, you never have really loved me at all, have you? You’ve just been—uh—you’ve just been ‘trifling’ with me, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s a pretty harsh thing to say,” Wally said, his face breaking upward into little curves of unhappiness.

  “But it’s true, though, isn’t it?” she said, surprised to find what a real icy coldness there was down inside of her someplace, to draw on. She turned then, finally, to face him.

  “Well—no,” Wally said. “No, it isn’t. Dawnie, you don’t know how many times I’ve suffered and felt all empty inside, just because I knew you’d be going off to school this fall.”

  “But not enough to go to New York with me. Or to keep me here with you. Oh, don’t be hurt. I’m just trying to figure it all out.”

  “What can I say?” he said simply. “I guess not. If you insist on putting it that way.”

  “And you’ve never really loved me at all. The way I’ve loved you.”

  “Well, I don’t know how you’ve loved me,” he said. He seemed to be getting more and more self-confident. “If you mean have I worshipped you like a goddess, and blindly done whatever you bid me to—then I guess I haven’t. Is that the way you’ve loved me? If so, I notice you haven’t mentioned anything about you just staying in Parkman just so you could be my mistress.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Dawn said coldly. “Is that what you want me to do?”

  “Well—no; I didn’t say that. I just wanted to point out that you never even thought of that side of it. I—”

  “That’s just what you’d like, wouldn’t it be?” Dawn said. “Then you could have me right there at your beck and call anytime. The truth is, you’ve got yourself a real good setup there with your mom and you don’t want to take any chances on anything busting it up for you.

  “The only thing you really lacked in that setup is that you didn’t have any regular sex that way,” she added. “And that was where I came in, I guess.” She knew it wasn’t the truth, but it was near enough the truth to make him uncomfortable, which was what she wanted.

  “Well,” Wally said, in a kind of veiled magnanimous tone meant to display that he really did not believe himself what he was saying, “maybe that’s right.” She had never realized before, Dawn thought, what a really pompous person he was.

  And she wanted to kick herself. She was giving him all the advantage. Just playing right into his smug, complacent hand.

  “Maybe you’d better take me home,” she said.

  “Okay,” Wally said. “If that’s what you say.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  In silence, they started on back up the long steep curving gravel road. At the clubhouse on the top, several foursomes were arranging themselves to go out, and young high school kids and college kids splashed and shouted in the pool; the same pool where they themselves had swum so many times this summer. She watched them, hardly even seeing them and thinking about the sense of power that she had had that first time they had slept together, and subsequently, all the other times. Hell, it was nothing but an illusion, a huge self-conceited illusion she had perpetrated upon herself. She had had no power over him at all. Suddenly, she began to talk.

  “You know, I really depended on you a lot, Wally,” she said, carefully keeping her voice very calm now, as they drove on down the far side of the hill toward the main road. “I guess I’d never really loved anybody, until you. But then, of course, I’d never slept with anybody else. I even used to believe I never would, except for you.” His face screwed itself up, at that, and she laughed a little. “You were like a rock, right there behind me all the time. I had given you my virginity, and I knew that no matter what happened, what bad thing or terrible thing, I could always go to Wally. If I could just get to Wally, I would think. Wally’ll fix it. He’ll make it right.”

  “Arghhh, Dawnie!” Wally said from his crumpled face.

  “That was the way I felt when we were coming home from Indianapolis yesterday. All I could think of was to get home to Wally. I was terrified; we’d bought all the clothes, school was suddenly upon me, and I hadn’t done anything about going to New York. I didn’t have the courage, you see— I had failed myself. But I knew Wally would save me. You’d fix it.”

  “Unhhhh!” Wally said in a deep baritone nasal cry. “Listen, Dawnie! If you want me to go, I’ll go! It isn’t sensible. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll go.”

  “No, it was just a wild idea,” Dawn said. “I was just panicky, and I got scared. I think I was just trying to test how much you really loved me.” She gave a wistful little laugh. “So you see, if you had agreed to go, probably nothing would have ever happened anyway, and you wouldn’t have had to go after all, and everything would have been all right.”

  “Oh, Dawnie!” he said. “Please don’t say things like that to me.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said sincerely. “I was only just trying to explain how I’ve always felt about you.

  “Of course, nothing will ever really be the same again now,” she said. “Even if we went. I suppose in her life every woman has one first lover that she heroizes, and who must, of course, let her down some way. It’s really just as well it’s happened like it has,” she said.

  “Oh, Dawnie!” Wally said sort of hopelessly.

  “You have your work,” she said; “and I have mine. I suppose school is what I really need anyway, before I try to make a break. I know that.”

  Wally did not say anything, and they rode along a little way in silence, back toward town.

  “Maybe in a year or two,” Wally said suddenly with a kind of eager hopefulness. “Maybe then, when I got my book done, you see. Then we could go in together.”

  “Oh, sure,” Dawn smiled sorrowfully, “Of course. Well, we can always talk about that later, can’t we? But right now, Wally, I just want to go home. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Oh!” he said. “No, no. I’ll take you right there.”

  “And you just keep on thinking that,” she said. She shrugged, “I’ll be all right tomorrow.”

  Wally did not answer this. His face was still contorted, and now his mouth was drawn into a thin tight line. Getting a little mad, was he?

  “Dawnie, I never meant to let you down,” he said after a minute.

  “Oh, I know that,” she said. She didn’t hold it against him, she said. She understood. He had to think of himself and his work. Women were just different than men. They had all been trained to think that when they gave themselves, they were giving something really important. Men just didn’t feel that. Especially the first time, she added, if the woman happened still to be a virgin. Two or three times she mentioned her former virginity, matter-of-factly, in an effort to get at what she meant. Each time she mentioned it, he winced visibly. She watched his suffering coolly, wishing in a way that sh
e could spare him, and tears welled up behind her eyes, tears of loss, and sympathy both for his suffering and her own.

  “Will I get to see you again before you leave, Dawnie?” he said when he drove up in front of the house.

  “Why, yes,” she said; “if you want to. You call me up.”

  His face was still contorted, and the thin, rigid line of his mouth under the old baseball cap was still as tight as ever, and as she stood on the porch and watched him drive away she looked after him cold-eyed, a self-cognizant hollow shell of steel. He would never marry anybody. He just wasn’t that kind. Unless he happened to find one someday who played it exactly as he wanted, and never argued, some meek little mouse of a girl that he could order around like he did his mom, and otherwise he just, by God, wouldn’t marry. He’d sit in jail first, by God. Because nobody was ever going to make him do anything. In short, Dawn thought coldly, he was a total waste of time. For any woman.

  Only when he was out of sight, did the panic and terror hit her again. She turned around and went inside and went up to her room and lay down on her bed, as cold as a statue, while every muscle and nerve inside her quivered in sheer panic and terror. It looked like it was school for her, and no other way out, and once again bourgeois society had triumphed. It seemed nobody in the world ever loved you enough to give up something for you. They loved you, of course, but not quite that much. And finally, she found herself thinking unaccountably of Shotridge.

  Wally, on the other hand, felt only a vast sense of relief.

  His face was stiff from the tension it had been subjected to, and every muscle in his belly was jumping uncontrollably. Panic and terror at his own spinelessness and lack of integrity assailed him. But as soon as he got away from her, it began to wane, leaving him only with a great sense of relief. Limp, weak, sweating profusely, he drove slowly away, in a fog of emptiness.

  She was right, of course. He had done everything she said. Still, all he felt was only a great sense of relief, relief not to hear her plaguing voice anymore. And that made him feel even more guilty. What the hell? He had never told her he would go to New York with her. Or that he’d marry her, either.

  It was only ten or ten-thirty. But he couldn’t work today. Goddam women anyway, he thought and turned north down the hill out toward Smitty’s Bar. What he needed was a drink, or several drinks.

  Goddam it all! he thought, the whole damned thing was crazy. Insane! The wild hysterical plotting of a damned teenage ex-virgin! Completely irrational!

  But he still could not escape a gnawing feeling that he had, in fact, let her down. And he could not get away from a sick feeling in his stomach when he thought of their woods up by West Lancaster, and of those lovely breasts of hers, and that mellow little body. And when he thought of her going off to school and maybe sleeping with some other guy, it was unbearable.

  But if it was the end, then it was the end. Kismet! And down deep inside him some solid dependable rockhard something told him that it did not really matter anyway.

  And after he had sat in Smitty’s and cooled himself down a little, he was even more sure of it. In the end, all that mattered was a man’s work, by God. What he produced. What he created. And not who the hell he was married to, or how many damned offspring he produced. Hell, any damned dog or cat could do that—and have more of them at one sitting than any damned human female.

  They saw each other twice more, after that, before Dawn left. And both times, they went up to “their woods.” Dawn had made up her mind that she would not call him up, but finally—just four days before she and Agnes were to leave—he had called. And asked her if she wanted to go out that night. And then he had called again, the next night.

  The first night, she would not let him sleep with her, and she hadn’t meant to any other time. Not that he had asked. He hadn’t. But, without saying anything, he had made it plain when they were at Glen and Gertrude’s, that he was available. She had chosen to ignore it.

  But the second night, and she did not know just why, when he had again made it plain that he was still available, she had made it equally plain that she was amenable. And so, as they had the first night, they wound up driving to “their woods.” But the first night, they had only sat and talked.

  Dawn did not really know why she changed her mind. Perhaps, in a way, it was because she felt that it was farewell—as Wally apparently also saw it. Though the fact didn’t seem to disturb him any.

  But mostly, it was really a sort of experiment on her part. What she really wanted to find out was whether she still liked sex. After all, he was still the only man she had ever been to bed with.

  What she found out was that she didn’t like it; and she didn’t dislike it. It just seemed to be sort of nothing, really. And in some way, what had once been in it before seemed now to have gone out of it entirely.

  Of course, it still felt good physically. But that was to be expected. She could not help wondering, at the time, what it would be like sleeping with Shotridge also. Probably miserable, she thought. He was such an awkward, guilty, dumb jerk, Shotridge. He certainly would probably never be much like Wally, she thought looking up at him. Wally, she noted, had not had much to say.

  Two days later, she left driving with Agnes to Cleveland.

  Chapter 50

  DAVE SUSPECTED SOMETHING of all this between his niece and Wally. Sitting as it were at his pinnacle of observation in the house—writing hard every day and engrossed in his novel and his people to the point where he himself seemed hardly to live at all except in them, he was able to just sit back and watch what happened in everybody’s lives with a detachment he had always envied, and without ever becoming involved himself. And consequently, he was able to observe with more objectivity than he had ever achieved in anything before. He did not even have to go out, it appeared; everything came to him, at the house. All he had to do was sit—and work—and eventually reel after spliced reel of everybody’s life was delivered to him. Naturally, for Dave, it was a very salubrious setup.

  And in the case of Wally, it was more than clear that something had happened. It was impossible to know just what. Except that it must have been something to do with Dawnie. Not that Wally ever said anything about her. He didn’t. But the mere fact that he never mentioned her indicated something; before, up until she had left for school, he had talked about her incessantly. But after she had left, he never spoke of her at all. He hung out at the house more and more, drinking more than he had ever drunk before and playing Ping-Pong avidly with everyone and anyone who would play with him. He still wrote in the mornings, of course. And he still attended his few classes at the college. But all the rest of his time, he was at the house until he became almost as much of a fixture there as the two owners themselves.

  Dave knew from Gwen that Wally had come to her earlier in the summer with a fairly elaborate plan for revising his book. A plan which, in essence at least, Gwen had agreed with. It had to do with a new viewpoint about sex and love, Gwen had said without smiling in the least. That was all Dave knew. All he wanted to know, since he agreed with Gwen that her writers should not talk to each other, and that she should not talk to any, about each other’s books.

  “Keep them writing,” she smiled. “Just keep them writing. Time, the great healer—and peeler—takes care of everything else.”

  With Wally, it was clear that his new viewpoint about sex and love had come before whatever it was that had happened between him and Dawnie. And whether this more new development had further evolved his ideas about sex and love, Dave had not yet learned. But Wally was apparently learning—painfully—something about the vagaries of women. And the more caustic and cynical his new knowledge made him, the more Dave found he liked him. He had lost none of his brash self-absorbed confidence that was often a hard trait to get along with, so apparently Dawn had not clawed his soul too very deeply. By the first week of November—which celebrated Dave’s first year of return to Parkman—Wally had done something which, since Dave had k
nown him at least, he had never done before. He had taken to going out with the brassiere factory girls and finally formed a more or less halfway alliance with the titian-haired Rosalie Sansome.

  Dave could not help thinking a little wistfully of Dawnie, whose lush woman’s body he had often looked at covetously, and—always provided he had not been her uncle, of course—would have so liked to seduce; and whatever their trouble, he could fully empathize with Wally.

  Anyway Dave was having his own minor troubles, and was still wishing he could get Gwen to love him just enough to go to bed with him.

  And in spite of the fact that he was more or less resigned to it, and even actively enjoyed their “platonic” relationship, there were still times when frustration would rage through him at being apparently so near and yet at the same time so far, and make him want to do something desperate.

  Why did women always have to be so damned “spiritual”? he wondered. Why did they always feel it was their duty to be “spiritual” and worry about a man’s goddamned soul? They couldn’t just sleep with you and love you, no. Why the hell couldn’t there be women who thought like men thought?

  On the anniversary of his first year in Parkman, ’Bama, conspiring with Wally and Dewey and Hubie, threw a first year party for him. It was a surprise party—but Dave could tell there was something up somewhere. Nevertheless, when he came home to find the surprise party waiting on him, he dutifully pretended to be surprised. Nearly all the gang from Smitty’s were there, as well as other more or less indiscriminately invited guests. The house apparently was becoming quite celebrated in Parkman, and just about everybody—saving only Frank and the positively respectable element—wanted to get in on the act. For the first time Doris Fredric attended, moving about familiarly as if she had lived there since the place was leased. Just about the only people Dave had had any associations with since he came to Parkman who were not there—saving only Frank and the positively respectable element, of course—were the Frenches, and Wally told him later that he had wanted to invite them but that ’Bama had demurred on the grounds that it would be too lowdown a brawl for highclass college people. Dave, thinking of Gwen and Bob, could only laugh. Both of them, he was quite sure, would have loved it.