by John O'Hara
He blew the horn at the garage door, and it was fully two minutes before Willie, who washed cars and was an apprentice mechanic, opened the door. Julian had left orders at least fifty times that no one was to be kept waiting at the door, and he was going to bawl Willie out, but Willie called out: “Merry Christmas, boss. How’d Santa Claus treat you?”
“Yah,” said Julian.
“Well, thanks for the Christmas present,” said Willie, who had received a week’s pay. “That fifteen bucks come in handy.” Willie was closing the door and talking above the sound of the idling motor and the sounds of the mechanics working upstairs. “I said to my girl, I said—”
“Cross-link busted on the right rear chain,” said Julian. “Fix it.”
“Huh? When’d it break?”
“Right now, at Twelfth Street.”
“Well, say, it held up pretty good. Better’n I thought. Remember, I told you Wensdee already, I said you better leave me fix them cross-links.”
“Uh-huh.” Julian had to admit that Willie had told him. He went to the office, which was in the rear of the big show room on the street floor. “Good morning, Mary,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Mary Klein, his secretary.
“What’s doing?”
“Pretty quiet,” she said, adjusting her spectacles.
“Have a nice Christmas?”
“Oh, it was all right I guess. My mother came downstairs in the afternoon, but I guess the excitement was too much for her. She had another spell around a quarter after five and we had to have Doctor Malloy out.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” said Julian.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Doctor Malloy said not, but those doctors, they don’t always tell you the truth. I want her to go to Philadelphia to see a specialist, but we’re afraid to tell Doctor Malloy. You know how he is. If we told him that he’d say all right, get another doctor, and we owe him so much already. We do the best we can, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of my brother getting a job yet, although it isn’t for the lack of trying. Dear knows he isn’t much of an expense and my mother, she has some money, but I have to keep up the building and loan and the insurance and food is so high again, my goodness.”
One nice thing about Mary’s morning recital of her woes was that usually you could stop her at any point and she would not be offended. “I guess we all have our troubles,” he said. He had said this at least three mornings a week since Mary had come to work for him, and always Mary responded as though it were a shining new idea.
“Yes, I guess so,” she said. “I was reading in the paper on the way to work about the man that used to write those comical articles in the Inquirer, Abe Martin, he died out west somewhere. I thought he was from Philadelphia but it said Indiana. Indianapolis, I think. Now there was a man—”
“Hello, Julian.” It was Lute Fliegler. Mary immediately ended her talk. She disliked Lute, because he had once called her the biggest little windbag this side of Akron, Ohio, and to her face, at that.
“Hello, Lute,” said Julian, who was reading a letter from a dealer in another part of the state, planning a gay party for the week of the Auto Show. “Want to go to this?” he said, throwing the letter to Lute.
Lute read it quickly. “Not me,” he said. He sat down and put his feet up on Julian’s desk. “Listen, we gotta make a squawk again about Mr. O’Buick.”
“Is he at it again?” said Julian. O’Buick was their name for Larry O’Dowd, one of the salesmen for the Gibbsville-Buick Company.
“Is he?” said Lute. “I tell you what happened this morning. I went out to see Pat Quilty the undertaker this morning. I had him out a couple times in the last month and he’s ready to go, or he was. He wants a seven-passenger sedan that he can use for funerals and for his family use. Or he did. Anyhow, I honestly figured, I said to myself, this is the one day the old man won’t be expecting me to come around, so maybe I’ll surprise him into signing today. And he’ll pay cash on the line, too, Julian. So I took a ride out to see him and I went in his office and started kidding around—he likes that. Makes him feel young. So I noticed I wasn’t getting a tumble from him, so finally I broke down and asked him, I said what was the matter, and he said to me in that brogue, he said: ‘Will now Oill till you, Meesturr Fliegler, the way I hear it the coompany you do be working for, I hear they don’t like people of my faith.’
“‘What?’ I said. ‘Why the Cadillac car is named after a Catholic,’ I said. I said ‘Old Duke Cadillac, he was a Catholic.’
“‘I don’t mean Ginrul Mawtors, Mr. Fliegler,’ he said. ‘I mean Julian English, that’s who I mean.’
“‘Why, Mister Quilty,’ I said, ‘you’re all wrong about that,’ I said. I told him about Reverend Creedon, what a good friend of yours he is, and how you did this and that and the other for the sisters and so on, but he wouldn’t hear any of it. He said he didn’t always see eye to eye with Reverend Creedon, as far as that goes, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, he said, he’d been hearing some stuff about you and Harry Reilly having a fight. What the hell’s he talking about?”
“I threw a highball in his face the other night,” said Julian.
“Oh, that,” said Lute. “I heard about that. But you weren’t having a fight over religion, were you?”
“No. Certainly not. I was cockeyed and I just let go with the drink. What else? What about O’Buick?”
“Well, that’s the trouble. I can’t get anything on him,” said Lute. “Old Quilty, he wouldn’t tell me any more than what I told you, except to say he was going to take a little time to think it over before he bought anything off us. I’m afraid we’re not going to move that car unless you go out and talk to him yourself, Julian.”
“Do you think that would do any good?”
“To tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t know. I’m up a tree. When one of these Irish bastards gets the idea you’re against their church, you have your hands full bucking it. The only explanation for it in a case like this is young O’Dowd, the son of a bitch, he heard about you and Reilly having this fight or whatever it was, and he went right out and gave old Quilty this story. That’s my guess. I’d like to punch him one in the nose.”
“So would I.”
“Well, don’t you do it or we won’t be able to give the product away in 1931. I might as well tell you all the bad news while I’m at it.”
“You mean more bad news?” said Julian.
“That’s what I mean, nothing else but,” said Lute. “Julian, I don’t want—wait a minute. Miss Klein, would you mind going out on the floor a minute while I talk with Mr. English?”
“Not at all. The language you use.” Mary Klein left the office.
“Listen, Julian,” said Lute. “Your private affairs are your own business, and you’re boss here and all that. But I’m ten years older than you and you and I always hit it off pretty damned good, so do you mind if I give it to you straight from the shoulder?”
“No. Go ahead.”
“Well, I don’t want you to take offense at this, and you can fire me if you get sore, but you been making a fool of yourself, and last night up at the Stage Coach—Jesus, I don’t know what to say. But you oughn’t to done that, taking that dame out, that torch singer. You know whose girl she is? Ed Charney’s. One of the best friends we have, in a business way. There’s a guy, a lot of people don’t want to have anything to do with him, and I guess a lot of your friends think you contaminate yourself by selling him an automobile. But meanwhile Ludendorf is selling plenty of Packards to the same friends, so what they think don’t matter. Ed Charney is a right guy, a square shooter. He pays his bills regular, and they’re pretty big bills. He likes you personally. He told me that many’s the time. He says you’re the only one in the whole high-hat crowd that he considers on the up and up. Well, what’s the result? The result is, any time one of his bootlegger friends is in the market for a high-priced automobile, Ed sees to it that we make the sale. You don’
t see Ludendorf selling Packards to any of Ed Charney’s pals.
“So then what? So then you turn around and pay him back by giving his girl a lay and making a monkey out of him right in his own spot, not to mention making a fool of yourself with your own wife and friends right there. You know what’d happen to any of Ed’s own crowd that tried to pull a fast one like that, don’t you? Why it’d be suicide, and just because your father happens to be a big shot here, Julian, don’t think you’re in such a good spot yourself. I don’t mean Ed’s going to have his gorillas turn a Tommy gun on you or anything like that. But why can’t you be more careful? I happen to know Ed is plenty burned up, and, my God, I don’t blame him. He’s been keeping that dame for over two years now, and everybody says he’s nuts about her, and then you get cockeyed and take her out for a quick jump and ruin the whole works. My God, Julian.”
“You’re wrong about one thing,” said Julian.
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t lay that girl.”
Lute hesitated before answering. “Well, maybe you didn’t, but everybody thought you did and that amounts to the same thing. She was out in the car with you long enough, and when she came back she didn’t look as if you’d been sitting there listening to Father Coughlin on the radio. What surprised me was that you’d have anything to do with her at all. Not that it’s for me to say, but you always struck me as the ideal married couple, you and Caroline, Mrs. English. That’s what Irma said too. I know it’s the first time I ever knew of you going on the make for some dame. Honest, Julian, I don’t want to talk out of turn, but if you and your wife are having family troubles, you ought to do your best to fix it up. You have the nicest, the swellest girl in the whole God damn Lantenengo Street crowd, and everybody in town thinks so, and if you take it from me—and mind, I’m ten years older’n you—you do the wise thing and patch it up. Irma and I, we have our troubles, but she knows how it is between she and I, and I think you feel the same way about Mrs. English.
“There. I’ve shot off my face more than I intended to, but I’m glad I got it off my chest. If you want to give me the air, that’s your business, but everything I told you is the truth and down in your heart you know it, pal. I can get another job, or if I can’t, I’ll get by somehow. If you’re the kind of a guy that’d fire me for what I been telling you, then you’re not the kind of a guy I always took you for, and I don’t want to work for you. So that’s that.” Lute stood up slowly.
“Sit down, Lute.” Julian was unable to say more than that. The two men sat opposite each other for a few minutes. Lute offered Julian a cigarette and Julian took it, and Julian gave Lute a light. Presently Julian said: “What do you think I ought to do, Lute?”
“Gee, I wish I knew. I guess let it ride for the time being. You were cockeyed, and that’s one consolation. Maybe Charney will take that into consideration. Aw, what the hell. We’ll get by. Don’t take it to heart too much. I’ll see you this afternoon around quitting time. I have to go to Collieryville now, but it’ll work out one way or another. Shake?”
“Shake,” said Julian. They shook hands and smiled, and Lute left, and Julian heard him telling Mary Klein that everything had been decided; they weren’t going to handle automobiles any more; just airplanes.
“It isn’t true, is it, Mr. English? What Luther Fliegler just told me?”
“What did he tell you?”
“That we were going to stop selling cars and sell airplanes instead. I don’t think there’s any market for airplanes around here.”
“Don’t let it worry you for a couple of years, Mary,” said Julian. “You know Lute.”
“And how!” said Mary Klein.
It was one of those mornings when he could tell himself that he was up to his ears in work or that he had nothing to do, and either with equal honesty. His hangover did not bother him inordinately; he knew he could work in spite of whatever effect the night before still maintained. He wanted to work; the difficulty was in getting started. He wanted to work to put things out of his mind, and he tried to the extent of getting out some scratch paper and pencils with the idea of working out some sort of summary or recapitulation of the year’s business of the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company. This was a good time to do that; when no salesmen would disturb him, and when there was nothing much else he could do. But the words, summary, recapitulation—they made him think of Lute and how he had recapitulated and summarized his performance of the night before, including the consequences. The Quilty business—well, he thought he knew what to expect there: O’Dowd probably hadn’t said a word to old Quilty, but when O’Dowd did hear about Julian’s throwing the highball at Harry Reilly, he would hot-foot out to Quilty and make the sale. O’Dowd was a good salesman, and he knew how to handle a situation like this. Julian hated to lose that sale, too, because no matter how people joke about it, when you place a car with an undertaker, you have a pretty good advertisement. Undertakers keep their cars in the best of shape, black and gleaming and polished and clean. Julian knew this from his own reaction; he often had thought that if you had to die, it wouldn’t be so bad to ride to the cemetery in Quilty’s luxurious hearse, followed by Quilty’s well-kept Studebaker sedans. Whenever he heard the tune Saint James’ Infirmary, he always thought of old Quilty. And the sale would be for cash. That wouldn’t be hard to take. It certainly made it hard to lose. He wondered if Harry Reilly had gone to work already. Harry was a very rich man and handling his investments and holdings was a full-time job, but he also managed to know what was going on in other people’s businesses, and it would be just like him to know that old Quilty was thinking of buying a Cadillac. It was just the kind of thing he would know. After all, why shouldn’t he know it? He had lent Julian twenty thousand dollars last summer, and that was a nice piece of change no matter how much Harry might be worth. It was enough to excuse any extraordinary interest Harry might be taking in Julian’s business.
Twenty thousand dollars! Why in God’s name had he ever asked for that much? He knew perfectly well why he had asked for that much: at the time he needed ten thousand, but he figured he might as well get a good hunk while he was at it. Ten thousand had gone in no time: it cost, even with the cheap labor and construction costs of last summer, about eight thousand to build the inclined driveway inside the building, which he had calculated would mean eventually a great saving in electric power bills through decreased use of the elevator. So far it hadn’t made much difference, if any. In fact, Julian would not have argued very long if someone suggested that the driveway was an ill-advised project. Then what else was there? Well, there were those two three-wheel motorcycles. The idea of them was a mechanic would ride the motorcycle to, say, the Davis’ garage, hook some kind of gadget on the Davis’ Cadillac, and drive the car, with the motorcycle trailing along behind, back to the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company for servicing or repairs. That was another idea that was going to make a saving, but the saving, Julian was sure, had failed to make a showing on the books. And why two motorcycles? One was enough. More than enough. Then there were the trees, those beautiful, slender trees. Julian had conditioned himself against ever seeing them when he passed them, but now he made himself think of them. There they were out there in the little strip of grass along the curb. Seven-hundred and sixty-six dollars and forty-five cents’ worth of them, including freight and planting. Julian knew to the penny what they cost, but he still was not sure of the name of them. They had been purchased while he was in a fine, naturalistic mood as an aftermath of a City Beautiful luncheon. There had been trees a long time ago where the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company now stood, and there had been trees along the curb, but they had been chopped down. Then one day Julian went to a City Beautiful luncheon and everybody got up and said a few words about trees and what they did for a residential section—Julian’s garage was in a residential section—and by the oddest coincidence there chanced to be a man from a nursery at the luncheon, and Julian signed. And that about took care
of the extra ten thousand dollars.
The other ten thousand had gone for expenses, real ones, like payments on notes, payroll, and so on.
Lute was right on another score: Ed Charney was a good customer. “I’m a good customer of Ed’s,” Julian reminded himself, “but he’s a better one of mine.” Something ought to be done about Ed, but he supposed the best thing to do for the present was to lay off trying to fix it up. Yes, he certainly had loused things up last night: Ed Charney sore at him, Caroline—well, he wouldn’t think of that now; he was at work, and he would try to think of things only in so far as they affected his business. If Ed Charney got really sore—but he wouldn’t do that; he wouldn’t throw a pineapple at the garage. This was Gibbsville, not Chicago. And after all, the English name meant something around here. “No thanks to me, however,” Julian said under his breath.
“Darn his buttons anyhow,” said Mary Klein.
“What is it, Mary?” said Julian.
“Luther Fliegler,” she said. “He makes out these slips when he gets gas, but you never can tell whether he means ten gallons or seventy gallons, the way he makes figures.”
“Well, I don’t think he’d be making out a slip for seventy gallons. A car doesn’t hold that much gas,” said Julian. “Besides, that’s not your headache. Let Bruce worry about it.”
Mary turned to look at him. “Sure, but you forget. You told Bruce he could go to Lebanon over the weekend.” She spoke as a woman who was carrying on in spite of all injustice. Bruce Reichelderfer was the bookkeeper, and Julian had given him the week-end.
