Appointment in Samarra

by John O'Hara

“If you leave I’m going to call off the party and I’m going to stay here. Be reasonable, Julian. Tell me what happened.”

  “No. Come on home with me and I’ll tell you. Otherwise no. This is a pretty good time for you to stick by me.”

  “I can’t stick by you if you don’t tell me what for.”

  “Blind, without knowing, you could stick by me. That’s what you’d do if you were a real wife, but, what the hell.”

  “Where are you going? To get drunk I suppose.”

  “Very likely. Very likely.”

  “Julian, if you leave now it’s for good. Forever. I won’t ever come back to you, no matter what happens. I won’t ever sleep with you again or see you, not even see you.”

  “Oh, yes, you will. You will, all right.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself, but this time you’re wrong. It’s no go.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean I was sure of myself. What I meant was, you’d see me. You wouldn’t be able to help it.”

  “Why should I want to?”

  “To gloat, probably. Either you’d want to gloat, if you were absolutely out of love with me, or you’d want to see me if you still loved me.”

  “You’re so wrong it isn’t even funny.”

  “It isn’t even funny. Lord and Taylor! Wouldn’t that jar you? I’ll say. You tell ’em casket, I’m coffin. I’ll tell the world. Don’t take any wooden nickels…. I’m going.”

  “Oh, go ahead. But remember, I’m not going to be home tonight. Not me. I’m going to call off the party, unless you want to have it. Anyway, I won’t be there.”

  “That’s all right. It only makes it a different kind of a party.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to tell me that. But you’d better be careful with your torch singer. She knows how to handle people like you.”

  “You’re a dear. You’re a sweet girl. I knew you’d be a good sport about it. I knew all along you would be.”

  “Oh, go to hell, you and your cheap sarcasm.”

  “No wonder the chaps at the club say I’m hen-pecked,” said Julian. He regretted it the moment he said it; club was not a word he wanted to use now. “You’ll attend to the details about the party, calling people up and telling them I broke my leg and so on, will you?”

  “Of course, unless you want to have it yourself and say I have a broken leg.”

  “That’s better. I don’t mean about you having a broken leg. But it’s nicer for us to be agreeable and sort of phony about it. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re the authority on phony, of course, but, yes, I know what you mean. I know.”

  “All right, dear. Cheerio, I mean cheero. Stout fella.”

  “Funny boy. You’re a scream.”

  So he left.

  9

  Gibbsville moved up from the status of borough and became a third class city in 1911, but in 1930 the city still had less than 25,000 inhabitants (estimated 1930 population in the notebooks sent out by the Gibbsville banks to their depositors). In Gibbsville a party becomes an institution the moment the hostess tells her plans to one other person, and nothing short of a death or other act of God must postpone the party, once the invitations are given. To the persons who eventually had been invited and to those who wished they had, the English party got in the institution class a day or two after the Lafayette-Lehigh football weekend. On their way home from Easton Caroline and Julian decided to have a party “some time during the holidays.” They were riding in Whit Hofman’s car, with Whit and Kitty, and Kitty immediately said it would be a swell idea, and began to count off the nights when the party could not be given on account of conflicting parties. It couldn’t be given the night of any of the Gibbsville dances nor the afternoon of the tea dances. Kitty Hofman finally decided upon the date. “There’s the Junior League dance in Reading the night after Christmas Day,” she said, “but I’m sick of going to Reading. Let them come up here for a change. We go down there and spend our money on their lousy Junior League parties, but if we ever tried to have a Junior League in Gibbsville you know what support we’d get from Reading.”

  No argument.

  “So let them come to our parties this year,” Kitty continued. “The Assembly. That money goes to charity, doesn’t it, Whit?”

  “In theory it does,” said Whit.

  “It usually ends up with Whit paying for the Assembly,” said Julian.

  “Don’t forget, you pay your share,” said Whit. “We all do. But they do come to the Assembly sometimes. Sometimes they do.”

  “All right. Let them come again. Let’s not go to their Junior League dance. Let them help our charity. Caroline, you have your party that night. The twenty-sixth.”

  “How about it, Ju? That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “You’re God damn right. I won a hundred dollars on the game. No, two hundred. But anyway, a hundred that I’ll get. Bobby Herrmann will owe me his hundred.”

  “Well then, that’s settled. The twenty-sixth we’ll have our party. Our own crowd and some of the school kids, the ones that can drink. Not Johnny Dibble and kids that age, but a little older,” said Caroline.

  “Oh, dear me,” said Julian. “My goodness sakes alive. Oh, my. We have to have Johnny. We must have Johnny Dibble. Why, he’s practically a Deke. No matter where he goes to college, he’s going to be a Deke.”

  “Not if he goes to State,” said Whit.

  “Right. Not if he goes to State. No Dekes at State. How’d you know that, Whit? You know more about D. K. E. than I do. Why can’t we have Johnny, Caroline? He’s a nice kid…. Well, kind of nice.”

  “All right, we’ll have him, if you insist. He drinks as well as you do, for that matter. He’ll make a good Deke. Who else shall we blackball?” Caroline and Kitty worked on the list, and the next week it was in Gwen Gibbs’ column on the society page of the Standard. Gwen Gibbs’ column was a dumping ground for all society gossip on the Standard. There was no Miss Gibbs, of course. There was an Alice Cartwright, graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and daughter of the current Baptist minister. Miss Cartwright knew very few of the Lantenengo Street crowd and except for the Purim Ball and K. of C. Promenade she was not on any of the invitation lists. She certainly never for a second expected to be on the list of the invited guests for the English party. And she wasn’t. Yet the night of the party she was the only one who arrived at the attractive home of that leading young business man and that charming leader of the younger married set; in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Julian M. English.

  * * *

  Julian got afraid of something the moment he walked away from Caroline and climbed in his own car. He never looked her way again after he left her. He treated his car more considerately. He moved along, approaching the business district at a moderate rate of speed, extra-careful of the rights of other motorists and of pedestrians, and resolved that since he was already a quarter of an hour late for his date with Lute Fliegler, he would break the date entirely and without explanation. He did that with a clear conscience because he effected an exchange in himself: in exchange for accepting in advance the hell and the fury of what he was going to have to face with his father and Harry Reilly and the lesser stockholders in the company, who were going to have to save him from bankruptcy—he paid himself off by keeping the rest of this day to himself. If ever there was a man in a jam, he was it, he was sure. It was no more difficult to face a fist or to enter the front-line trenches than it was going to be to meet these people, especially his father. Nobody would have the crust to tell his father about the Stage Coach episode, because his father was a kind of man who would have the Stage Coach raided for less reason than that his son had been a fool there. But someone was sure to tell him about throwing a drink in Harry Reilly’s puss. It was the sort of thing Gibbsville men, their identities masked by hot towels, would be hearing often in the hotel barber shop for the next couple of weeks. And yet it was not so bad as the mess at the Gibbsville Club. The Polack lawyers
would tell every—“Good Christ! Polacks are Roman Catholics!” Julian thought of that for the first time. And now he remembered seeing the emblem of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in the lapel of the man he had knocked down. “Is there anything I haven’t done? Anyone I haven’t insulted, at least indirectly?”…He tried to be honest and to figure out every possible bad angle to the last few days’ work, in order that he could go back and find something comforting. He thought of the bad way he had treated Caroline, the many bad ways; doing something that permitted her to accept disgrace, as with the drink thrown at Harry Reilly; doing something that publicly and unequivocally and personally humiliated her, which was going out with Helene Holman. His manner toward Mrs. Grady this morning—a thing Caroline especially (and, sometimes, a little unreasonably) campaigned against. And then, a little before he was ready for it, he thought of the thing that in its way was more important than anything between himself and Caroline; that thing was the never-to-be-buried discovery that all this time Froggy Ogden had been his enemy. That was worse than anything he could do to Caroline, because it was something that did something to him. It made a change in himself, and we must not change ourselves much. We can stand only so many—so few—changes. To know that there were people who he thought were his friends, his good friends, but who were his enemies—that was going to make a change, he knew. When was the last time there had been a change in himself? He thought and thought, rejecting items that were not change but only removal or adornment. He thought and thought, and the last time there had been a change in himself was when he discovered that he, Julian English, whom he had gone on thinking of as a child with a child’s renewable integrity and curiosity and fears and all, suddenly had the power of his own passion; that he could control himself and use this control to give pleasure and a joyous hiatus of weakness to a woman. He could not remember which girl it had been; to forget her had been a simple manifestation of his ego; the important part of the discovery, the change, had been a thing for himself, his own moment. But he saw how deep and permanent the discovery, the change, became. It was almost as important, and no doubt precisely as permanent, as the simplest discovery of physical manhood. And there again it was the change and not the act that had been lasting and great; for he could not recall with accuracy the circumstances of that discovery.

  It was easier to bear now, the discovery that it was possible that to him it might happen that there were people who bothered to hate him. Why did they bother, really? Yet they did. People also liked him. Still it was no shock to find out, for example, that a girl had been loving you for a long time before you found it out. Part of you expected people, girls especially, to like you, and there was no jolt but only a corroboratory pat on the back in the experience of hearing a girl say, “Darling, I’ve loved you so much longer than you have me.” Girls fitted easily into their own and your own picture of someone dying of unrequited love. If they slipped out of it before you were ready, that was all right too; their slipping out frequently was the necessary reminder that an affair had run its course. It also was the necessary reminder that the realist in a woman, the good appraiser, makes her want to take a loss and get out before she is—for the purposes of the analogy—ruined.

  Often Julian had faced this suspicion: the suspicion that a man who is good with women, as good as he had been, is not wholly trusted and liked by men. In the past he had thought of this many times, but he dodged the conclusion as applying to himself. Men liked to have him on poker parties, in golf foursomes, at luncheon (the Lions Club finally got him after he had squirmed away from Rotary and Kiwanis). But now he wondered if there was the slightest meaning to their including him in their gregariousness. No, there was no meaning more flattering than their habit. And as he drove the car in the garage at the side of his house he began to see things. Froggy Ogden, making a boastful confession of treachery and long hatred of him, had seemed proud of having done the job so well that Julian had not thought of him as anything but a friend. There must be others like him. Froggy had been one of his best friends. What about Carter? Whit? Bob Herrmann (who was a fool, but had a life and was leading it)? What about the wives of the men he liked? Those men, many of whom could have hated him and probably did hate him, must have told their wives. Jean Ogden, for instance. She’d known all along that Froggy hated him, but never gave any sign of warning. Did Kitty Hofman’s bad manners come from the assurance she got from knowing that Whit hated him?…And if it only was hate! It would be so much better hate than just being disliked and held in contempt. It came back again to women; the fellows, those who knew him best, had kidded him about his Polish friend. But all the time they had kidded him they were being moral, and all the time they were being moral, underneath that they were wishing they had Mary. But Mary had been his girl. He closed the door of the garage. Mary had been his girl and he got again the sensation of looking at her. Just for a second the sensation came back; the embarrassment he had felt so many times, with wanting to look at her beautiful body but with his eyes held by her quiet, shining smile until then she would look at her breasts and then look at him and the smile would be gone. And he was sure now of what he had not quite wanted to be sure of then: that Mary had loved him and never would love anyone else the same way. He put her out of his mind and went in the house and sat down and stretched out on the couch in front of the fireplace. Oh, he went to sleep, wishing he knew more things.

  * * *

  It was dark and one hand of the clock was on ten, but Julian could not be sure that it was the big hand or the little hand and he was too comfortable to move so he could see his watch. Then he knew why he was awake. The doorbell was ringing. He got up and ran his fingers through his hair and pulled his vest and coat around and fixed his tie. It could have been Caroline at the door. The girl was about the same height. But when he got closer he saw she was wearing glasses. He opened the door and the air was good.

  “Oh, good evening, Mr. English. I’m Miss Cartwright from the Standard. I’m sorry to disturb you. I thought you were having a party.”

  “It’s been postponed. Won’t you come in?”

  “Well, I don’t think I ought to really. But that’s news.” She was confused by Julian’s smile. “I don’t mean it’s news when I don’t come in.”

  “Well, come on in and have a drink,” he said. God knows why he wanted to talk to her, but she was somebody.

  “Well, for a minute. I meant to say it’s news if you’re not going to have the party. Is it postponed? Sickness in the family? Is Mrs. English not feeling well, or what?”

  “No. I think you’d better call Mrs. English at Mrs. Walker’s. She’ll tell you about it.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Miss Cartwright, lighting a Spud. “Now that means I have to get something to fill the column. I don’t suppose I could run it and say the following will attend—when is the party postponed to, Mr. English, or is it indefinitely?”

  “Indefinitely, I think. Do you like Scotch or rye? Or would you rather have a Benedictine or something like that?”

  “Rye and ginger ale, if you have it,” she said.

  “Is that your car outside?” he said.

  “My brother’s. That is, it belongs to him and another boy. It’s just an old flivver, on its last legs, but it saves me a lot of steps and trolley fares when he comes home. He always lends it to me when he’s home, but he takes it to college with him. He goes to Brown.”

  “Oh, Brown.”

  “Yes. Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “Yes, I’ve been there.”

  “Oh, did you go to Brown, Mr. English? There aren’t many from around here go to Brown.”

  “No. I went to Lafayette, but I’ve been to Brown, just to visit.”

  “Aren’t you going to have one?”

  “Yes, I think I will.”

  “I hate to drink by myself. They say that’s the sign of an insane person, when they drink alone.”

  “That’s probably one of those things started by the sal
oonkeepers. You know, like three on a match was started by the match trust in Sweden.”

  “Oh, that’s very interesting. I never heard that. Yes, I did. Come to think of it.”

  “Won’t you take off your coat?”

  “I really shouldn’t. I can only stay a minute and get the story. Uh. Postponed. Would you care to tell me why you’re postponing it, Mr. English?”

  “Mrs. English would be able to tell you better. I think you ought to ask her, because it’s really her party. I’d rather not talk to the press, because after all it is her party.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Cartwright. “Oh, don’t hang it up. Just put it on the chair or some place. This is awfully strong. I’m not used to drinking. I don’t suppose I average more than a drink a week, all year round.”

  “I’ll give you some more ginger ale.”

  “This is an awfully attractive house. Did Mrs. English do it herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “She has terribly good taste. Oh! Foujita! I love Foujita! Is it a real Foujita or a copy? I mean—”

  “It’s a print. You look quite different without glasses.”

  “I have to wear them when I’m driving or walking. I couldn’t get a license unless I wore them and if I drive without them I’m liable to be fined or have my license taken away. Why don’t you try a Spud?”

  “No, thanks. I can’t get used to them.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I did finally, and now I can’t smoke any other kind. I hope I’m not keeping you from anything, Mr. English.”

  “Far from it. I’m glad you came.”

  “I shouldn’t have come, but I did want to get the list of guests right. People are so touchy. Not that Mrs. English is. She’s very considerate, and believe me, that’s a lot. But I’ve made some mistakes lately about who was at whose party and so on, and some of the Gibbsville matrons have raised the devil down at the office. So I only have this list we printed in Gwen Gibbs a month ago and I wanted to be sure if there were any changes. Additions and so on, to the original list.”