by James Jones
“They couldn’t see us from that far away,” Frank said, as if he had already considered it. “All my life, I’ve been tryin to live that damned name down in this town. First the Old Man and then you. Right now everybody in this stinkin town is laughin up their sleeve at me.”
“Look. Let’s get something straight. I don’t give a damn about you. I used the name because it’s my legal name. I’m not ashamed of having it.”
“No!” Frank said explosively. “No, it isn’t your legal name, either. When I changed our name to Hirsh, you were my ward. Legally. That changed your name to Hirsh, too. Legally. Legally, your name is Hirsh, not Herschmidt.”
“Legal or not, it was the name I was born with,” Dave said, “and like I said I ain’t ashamed of it—like you are. Maybe I better go up to the county judge and get my name changed back.”
Frank did not say anything for a moment. “Yes, why don’t you?” he said thinly; “you could make it a lot worse by doin that than it already is. That’s what you ought to do.”
“Maybe I’ll just do that,” Dave said coldly.
“Why don’t you?” Frank continued to drive them on around the curving roads of the campus. “What did you want to do that to me for?” he said finally. It sounded almost pleading.
“I—” Dave said and stopped. Inwardly he blanched at ever attempting to explain to someone like Frank the value he had felt it would be to him as a writer to change his writing name. “I did it because my other two novels were published under the name of Hirsh and they were both poor. I wanted a different name, that’s all.”
“Then why didn’t you pick Jones? or Smith? or Epstein? Why did you have to pick Herschmidt?”
“Because it was my real name. I thought it might bring me luck. Or something.”
“Luck!” Frank almost yelled. “Yes, that’s a lucky name all right, Herschmidt is. A very lucky name.”
“Well, I’ve used it; and I mean to go right on using it. On everything I publish. And I don’t see that there’s a whole hell of a lot you can do about it,” Dave said.
“Why don’t you get out of this town and stay out?” Frank said almost hopefully. “What the hell do you want to live here for, anyway? You don’t like it. You never did. Why not just leave? If it’s money you need, I can help you out.”
“Because I’m not ready to leave. When I do leave, I’ll leave because I want to go. Not because anybody else tells me to.”
Frank shook his head and turned the car around and started back toward the tall brick fenceless gate. “What do you hate me so much for?” he said. “Seriously: What have I ever done to you to make you hate me as much as you do and always be tryin to make a laughingstock out of me?” He turned right at the gate, then left back down the sidestreet where they had left Dave’s car.
“Just run me off from home,” Dave said. “At the tender age of seventeen, and before I could even finish high school. And with five dollars in my pocket. Five dollars.”
“That was for your own good,” Frank said. “As for the five dollars, I didn’t have much money at the time.”
“You could have given me more than that. And there wasn’t any need to run me off.”
“Would you rather have stayed and married that farm girl?” Frank said. “Have you ever seen her since you got back? Big, fat, sloppy farm wife, with eight or nine kids? Would you rather done that?”
“We could have got me out of marrying her without having to run me off.”
Frank stopped beside Dave’s little Plymouth and rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay: I made a mistake. I was thinkin of the famly’s reputation. That was right when the Old Man had just got back, and the scandal was at its height again. But maybe I made a mistake. Okay. Is there any reason to hold that against me the rest of my life and hate me for it and try to hurt?”
“Damn you, I don’t hate you!” Dave almost shouted. “I don’t try to hurt you! I told you why I changed my name back and were so damned full of your own worries about your reputation that you didn’t ever hear me. Hell, I don’t hate you! I just think you’re so full of self-pity that it runs out of your ears, that’s all! You’re so goddamned worried about your goddamned reputation all the time that you can’t see nobody else in the world but you!”
“Well, it looks like somebody’s got to worry about it,” Frank said. “You sure don’t. And the Old Man don’t.” He rubbed his hand over his face again. “Go on, get out,” he said. “Go on back and see if you can’t think up somethin else to cause me trouble.”
“Why you miserable dumb son of a bitch!” Dave yelled. “Sure I’ll get out. And I’ll be careful not to tell anybody you drove up here to meet me, you sniveling bastard. So it won’t hurt your reputation any.”
“Thanks,” Frank said thinly. “Just do me one favor, will you?” he said. “Just forget you ever had a brother named Frank Hirsh who raised you and took care of you and put you through school, will you? Maybe then you’ll stop tryin to think up new ways of causin me trouble.”
“Sure I will, you respectable son of a bitch!” Dave cried. “You’re so damned respectable you can’t even think something unless the damn board at the Country Club tells you it’s all right to think it! Sure I will! And you just forget what a hard time you had trying to raise your younger brother to be like you. You forget you got a younger brother.”
He got out and slammed the door. Frank sat behind the wheel looking through the closed window at him for a moment, and he stood staring back. Then Frank and the new pale blue Cadillac pulled away from in front of him slowly, leaving him still staring, but at his own little Plymouth now. And as he walked across the street and climbed into it, he could not escape the feeling that just there, as they had stared at each other for one timeless second, four eyes staring, without anger, without warmth, without sadness, without anything, just four eyes staring at each other through a window, that just there two meager souls of two meager men had met and recognized each other as both had always tried to do and failed, had recognized and understood each other for what they both were. And once again Dave had that strange dark feeling of impending Doom that had been engulfing him so much lately. The thought struck him that he might not ever see his brother again. It was unreasonable because he would surely see him, if only on the street. Furiously, he started the motor and threw the little Plymouth into gear and drove away.
Perhaps his run-in with Frank had a lot to do with his jumping onto Ginnie. Certainly, his brooding over this feeling of impending Doom did.
It started when he was driving her to the house from Smitty’s the next night after he had seen Frank. He was still brooding about his “interview” with Frank, and continued to for some time. Ginnie was excited about the appearance of “The Confederate,” too, but not exactly in the same way Frank was: Ginnie was proud of it. She had evidently in her slow dull way discovered that in a small way at least she was basking in reflected glory from it because she was—at least among the brassiere factory set—Dave’s “girlfriend.”
“Everybody’s been congratulatin me about your story,” she said, as he cut over from North Main to Plum to avoid the square. “Congratulating you!” Dave said.
“Yes,” Ginnie said. She had taken to saying yes lately, instead of yeah; that was the Doris Fredric influence. “You know. Because I’m sort of a friend of yours like.”
“Yeh?” Dave said. “Who?”
“Oh, all of the girls. They’ve all told me how much they liked it,” Ginnie said. “And a lot of the fellows, too.”
“Well, it’s the first I’ve heard about it. Nobody’s said anything to me,” Dave said. They were just passing the Hirsh Bros. Taxi Service on Plum, which was not closed yet. It was only ten o’clock. And he could look in and see Albie Shipe sitting at the old desk laboriously writing up his reports. The emotion of the taxi service during those early months when he had worked there leaped into him full-blown with all its many nuances, making him feel sad and even angrier. It had really been fun, and
nice, in a lot of ways. He ought to write something about that some day; maybe he could get rid of it that way. “Have you read it yet?” he said.
“Well, no. I ain’t,” Ginnie said. “I want to be able to sit down with it all alone so I can really concentrate. But I bought a copy. In fact, I bought nine copies.”
“Nine copies!” Dave said. He had reached the city hall at the end of the block—Sherm Ruedy’s stamping ground, he thought—and he turned west on Lincoln. “Why nine?”
“Well,” Ginnie said complacently, “I brought one for myself. The other eight I autographed and give to some of the girls out the factory.”
“You did what!!” Dave cried.
Ginnie’s complacent look faded, and was replaced by that dull-faced, nervous look she got whenever anybody took her to task for anything. “Well, yeh,” she said nervously; “what was wrong with that? Just to a few of the girls, you know; like Mildred Pierce—I mean Bell—and Lois and girls like that. I thought it would be good publicity for you.”
Dave groaned. “Look!” he said. “You just don’t go around autographing somebody else’s story to anybody you want to. If there’s any goddamned autographing to be done, the goddamned author himself does it. See? Can you get that through your thick head?”
Ginnie put her hand up to her mouth and rubbed the corner of her lip with her fingertips.
“And don’t do that, either!” Dave cried. “My goddamned idiot mother used to do that; when she was thinking—or thought she was thinking! Friends of authors just don’t go around autographing the author’s book to people.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to do nothing wrong,” Ginnie said, snatching her hand down. “I was just—and besides we use to sign books to people for Christmas.”
“That’s different. That was a Christmas gift, and you didn’t know the author. But when you’re a friend of an author and go around autographing his books to people, you make yourself and him and everybody else look like a damned ass.”
“I don’t see what’s so different,” Ginnie said, less nervously and more angrily.
“Maybe you’re not bright enough to see it. So just take my word for it. It’s my story: I wrote it: And if I want copies of it autographed to anybody. I’ll do it. And I don’t need any goddamned help from you, dummkopf!” For a moment, Dave thought his head would burst. It was a profound personal liberty she had taken, but she was too damned dumb to even know it! “Of all the damned gall!” he said. “You got no right to just go around appropriating my story and autographing it to your stupid friends. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m your girlfriend,” Ginnie said smolderingly.
“Yeah? Well, that’s something else we better get straight. You’re not my girlfriend. You’re a pig that I happen to be sleeping with. And if you don’t like that, you can take it or leave it.”
“Well, everybody thinks I am,” Ginnie said.
“I don’t give a damn what they think. I’m telling you you’re not. See? And if I ever even hear of you buying any more copies of that damned story and signing them to people, I’ll kick you out so quick it’ll make your thick head ring like a goddamned bell. Got it?”
Ginnie did not answer, merely sat, lumpishly pulling her chin in—her chins, rather. She had lost ten pounds in the last month, but nobody would know it to look at her. Gradually, with dull slowness, her back stiffened furiously. Dave watched her, suddenly almost beside himself with rage.
“Of all the damned, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches in the whole damned world, you take the cake. A fat pig of a one-nighter with just barely enough brains to come in out of the rain, if somebody leads you. And then you got to go and get literary pretensions! Autographing stories! My story! And you haven’t even got enough damned brains to even sit down and read the thing! The biggest, fattest, dumbest, laziest, most worthless, most stupid whore in Parkman! Didn’t even complete the seventh grade! Autographing stories! Jesus,’’ he said disgustedly. “Jesus Christ!”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” Ginnie said strangledly. It was as if her neck, stiff with rage now, had stiffened so much it had choked off her air.
“I’m doing it, ain’t I?” Dave said. “And what are you going to do about it?” In his blinding, infinite outrage, he had driven almost past the darkened house. He slammed on the brakes screeched into the driveway.
“You got no right to talk to me like that,” Ginnie said in a low, choked voice.
“I don’t, hunh? Well, you got no right to go around assuming possession of things that belong to me.” He rammed the car up the drive and stopped it jerkingly before the garage. “And, if you don’t like it, you know what the hell you can do, don’t you?” he said, and got out and slammed the door. He went on in the house.
’Bama was not there, of course, was off somewhere on some junket of his own. And neither was there anybody else there. He turned on the lights in the kitchen and flounced across it to the bar, the nerves in the inside of his elbows and knees quivering, got out ice, and rattlingly mixed himself a half a pitcher of martinis. Still swearing savagely, though at the moment he was so furiously mad he could not have said why and the rage had become an end in itself, he took the pitcher and a glass to the table and sat down and commenced to drink his way through them. Before he had drunk one cocktail glass of martini, he had begun to feel sick inside and ashamed of himself.
Perhaps if ’Bama had been there—or Dewey and Hubie—or even that bitch Doris Fredric—
Well, what the hell was she doing out there? He hadn’t heard any door slam. For a moment, he had a blind unreasonable panic when he thought she might have slipped out quietly and gone back to town. Guilt, it was more, instead of panic. He hadn’t meant to hurt poor old Ginnie. He looked down at his own fat belly; and felt his own double chin. He was damn near as fat as she was, as far as that went. Poor damned thing, he thought sickly. She hadn’t really meant to appropriate and move herself in, hadn’t really meant to assume possession of anything; it was just that she was dumb. And she wasn’t really so dumb, at that, exactly; she was just uneducated. How could you expect her to know what kind of a huge faux pas she had committed? In a way, she was sort of a female symbol of the failure of all of us, just as Raymond Cole was a male symbol of the failure of all of us. What the hell else could you expect her to be, except just what she was? A sudden warmth and pity and a willingness to overlook, bred of guilt and shame at the things he’d said to her, and coupled with a vague desire to teach her some of the civilized things somebody should have taught her long ago—as Sister Francine, luckily, had taught him—rose up in Dave. Hell, who knew what she might turn into eventually, if somebody would only teach her a few things? Well, what the hell was she doing out there? Dave gulped off the rest of his second martini and feeling very ashamed of himself, he went to the back door and walked out into the freezing cold night and over to the car. Ginnie was still sitting just as he had left her, except that her back was not as stiff as it had been then. He put his face up against the steamed-up window glass and stared in at her, and Ginnie slowly turned her head to look at him. What the hell? it was way below freezing, only eight or ten degrees above. And here she was just sitting out here. He opened the door.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” he said.
Ginnie continued to stare at him, her features almost indistinguishable in the darkness and her eyes only two dark pools of accusation in the shadow. “I ain’t doing nothing,” she said. “I’m just sittin.”
“Well, come on in the house,” he said. “Do you want to freeze?” He almost added: you damned fool. Not as an insult but only as a natural phrase; but he carefully refrained.
“You sure you want me to come in?” Ginnie said with great dignity.
“Hell, yes. You can’t just sit out here, can you?”
He stepped back from the door, still holding it open, and without a word, Ginnie climbed out and walked to the house.
“You want a drink?” he said afte
r they were inside.
“I guess,” she said. “Jack Daniels and 7-Up, I guess.” The Doris Fredric influence again. He mixed her one and set it down before her and sat back down with his pitcher of martini. Ginnie curled her hand around the glass but did not raise it and stared back at him, her eyes large and round and bright, her eyebrows arched and quivering.
“Look,” he said; “I’m sorry for what I said to you. I apologize.”
“You got no right to talk to me like that,” Ginnie said. “Nobody does. You got no right to treat me like you did.”
“You’re quite right,” Dave said.
“I’m human,” Ginnie said. “I got just as much feelings as anybody else. Nobody’s got the right to talk to me like that. Maybe I’m dumb, and ignorant, and uneducated, and maybe I don’t look like much. Maybe I’ve done a lot of wrong things. But I’m a human bein, nobody’s got the right to treat me like that.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Dave said, feeling deeply ashamed before her dignity, a little sick at his stomach. He could not help but remember that time when he and ’Bama had sat in his room at the old Douglas Hotel and he had suggested taking her and one of the other brassiere factory girls with them to Florida, and what ’Bama had said in return: about her being a pig, and about feeling sorry for “hawgs” too without wanting to carry them around in his car. He himself had been outraged at ’Bama’s cynical cold-bloodedness at the time. And now here he was, looking at the unflattering mirror of himself in Ginnie’s eyes after having done the same damned thing. Not only did it make him sick with shame and dislike of himself, but it threatened to choke him up with tears of regret and sorrow for what he had done. Ego! Dave thought; ego! Every human being had certain rights: to life, and limb, and dignity and respect; but how easily our ego could sometimes make us forget it. “You’re absolutely right,” he said again. “And I apologize.”
“It’s all right,” Ginnie said awkwardly. “I guess I don’t really care. But I wanted you to know how it was I feel.”
