The Tight White Collar

by Grace Metalious

  Jess’s first year at Harvard brought him in contact for the first time with people who came from places in the world other than Cooper Station and northern New England, and at first he yearned for home with a yearning that was almost a sickness. Then he took up pipe smoking and learned that the drink for a man to order was Scotch with plain water on the side and he went into Boston with a gang of his classmates and was introduced to the Old Howard. He began to think that at twenty-one years of age it was about time some of what he termed his hickish rough edges began to smooth themselves out and he would not admit even to himself that pipe tobacco burned his tongue nor that he preferred mixing drinks nor that the strippers at the Old Howard were a bore with their flabby bellies and their dirty net bras. Finally, he met a girl.

  “Lorraine,” he repeated to himself when he was introduced to her. He rolled the name around on his tongue and liked the feel of it.

  “Lorraine,” he said to her. “It’s a lovely name.”

  She was small, with masses of red hair and an upturned nose which Jess found fascinating. She had small pointed breasts and a tiny waist and her hips flared smoothly. She giggled. She adored things: Clark Gable, fried shrimp, musky perfumes, high-heeled shoes. She was a sales girl at Jordan-Marsh and she lived in a three-room apartment which she shared with two other girls on Beacon Street.

  “Beacon Street,” said Lorraine. “Sounds elegant, doesn’t it, Jess? You should see the place. A real dump.”

  “I’d like very much to see it,” said Jess.

  Lorraine giggled. “Not tonight,” she said. “Kit and Eloise are double dating with a couple of guys from B.U. and they’re using the living room.”

  In the weeks that followed Jess spent every moment he could spare away from classes with Lorraine. They went to the movies and ate at the Union Oyster House and walked in the Common. Jess took her to all the Harvard football games and his friends began to plague him with questions.

  “Have you got to her yet, Jess?”

  “Listen, Harkinson,” replied Jess angrily, “I think you have a mind like a sewer. She’s not that kind of girl.”

  “The hell she isn’t,” said Harkinson. “A tart if I ever saw one.”

  “You go to hell.”

  “A pleasure, dear boy. A pleasure.” Harkinson lifted his drink. “Here’s to hell. May the stay there be as pleasant as the way there. Seriously, Jess, have you tried getting to her?”

  “Seriously and for the last time, Harkinson, shut your goddamned mouth. I’m in love with her.”

  Harkinson nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “A good, hot love affair will round out your first year at Harvard very nicely.”

  “I’m going to ask her to marry me,” cried Jess who, until that moment, had never had any such intention.

  Harkinson had been sitting in a tilted-back chair with his feet up on the table in front of him. The chair and Harkinson’s feet hit the floor at the same moment.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, Jess! Listen here, old man, a little poontang is one thing, but marriage—”

  Jess stamped out of the room and the last thing he would have admitted to anyone was that there were times when Lorraine bored him to death. She chattered on and on about things that did not interest him, but he found that when he was away from her he missed her constant talk. Boston seemed an enormous place to him and he was lonely when he walked the streets by himself. All his friends had girls and being with Lorraine was far better than being alone.

  It was winter. Jess and Lorraine sat in movie theaters and held hands, then they sat in restaurants where they drank hot chocolate and held hands. They walked in the snowy, deserted Common, shivering, and held hands.

  “Of all the goddamned foolishness!” said Harkinson. “Look, I’ll fix you up with a hotel room. Then at least you’ll be off the goddamned streets.”

  As for Lorraine, Jess was a novelty to her. As she told her roommates, he was the first man she had ever gone out with who hadn’t tried to get his hand down the front of her blouse on the very first date, but as the weeks passed and still Jess kept his distance from her, Lorraine began to wonder if she left him cold, and in the end her curiosity became almost an obsession.

  “Listen,” she told Jess. “It’s too cold to keep walking. I’ve got something at home that would keep us both warm. Brandy. Let’s go to my place for a while. We could have a drink and sit where it’s warm. Would you like to?”

  “I’d like to very much,” said Jess. “But won’t your roommates mind?”

  “Kit and Eloise have gone skiing up to New Hampshire with their boyfriends from B. U.”

  At the apartment, she took his coat and hung it up in the closet with her own and for some reason this gave Jess a warm feeling of belonging there, alone with Lorraine. They sat on her studio couch and drank brandy out of jelly glasses. The apartment was warm and quiet and suddenly there was nothing to talk about.

  Jess could imagine Harkinson saying, “First of all, children, you must have the proper setting. Any deserted nook or cranny will do: parked car, graveyard, et cetera, but the most desirable is a quiet room, preferably one furnished with a comfortable bed or couch. Floors are hell on a bare behind.” He was suddenly afraid for Lorraine. Suppose she were in a situation like this with a man like Harkinson.

  “Lorraine, don’t you have any parents to look after you?” he asked.

  “They’re dead,” she said. “I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “They both drank and fought like cats and dogs. I’m better off this way.”

  Jess had never felt so sorry for anyone in his life. He put his empty glass down on the cluttered end table and Lorraine set hers down on the floor. Then she sat still, gazing into his eyes until finally he took her in his arms. A throat-closing desire to protect her overcame him so that he tightened his arms around her and felt hot tears behind his eyelids.

  “I don’t like the idea of you living alone like this,” he said. “It could be dangerous, a young girl like you—”

  “Crazy,” she whispered against his lips. “My crazy, crazy Jess.”

  Her mouth was warm and very soft and her body was small and pliant against him. She let him press her down on the couch and her mouth opened under his insistent lips. Suddenly he wanted to crush her, cover her, smother her, and he made himself draw away, afraid of this strange desire to hurt and destroy.

  “Don’t pull away from me,” she whispered. “Please, Jess, don’t pull away from me.”

  And then it was everything, he thought. Everything.

  The feel of her rigid nipple against his palm, the whisper of her clothes as she let them slide to the floor, the slim whiteness of her thighs and the way she moaned.

  “Darling, darling, darling.” Everything.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  Instead of words she answered him by pressing her mouth against his shoulder and moving her legs against his and when she twisted her head from side to side and cried, “No. No, no, no,” Jess clenched his teeth and hated himself for not sparing her this pain and then he thought of nothing and felt only the majestic thrill of taking this woman for his own.

  Afterwards, she lay in his arms, shivering and weeping.

  “Darling, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Darling, don’t cry. Please, darling. I love you. We’ll be married.”

  Lorraine stopped crying at once and lit a cigarette.

  “All right, Jess,” she said calmly.

  She got up to pour more brandy and as she walked across the room, still naked, to Jess she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She came back to him and they leaned back side by side on the couch and shared one lumpy pillow.

  “Of course,” said Jess, “it’ll be a long time before I can support a wife. After I finish at Harvard I’
ll have to intern for two years.”

  “Then that makes five years in all, doesn’t it?” asked Lorraine. “After this year, I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Jess, frightened at the thought of so much time. He turned and put his lips against her throat. “But we can wait, can’t we, darling?” he asked.

  “But Jess,” she said. “Suppose after tonight I found that I was going to have a baby?”

  A baby. He could almost hear the sound of his hopes for the future shattering against a cold wall of fact. A baby!

  He studied the pattern of white roses against the green background of the studio couch slipcover. He reached out a finger and traced the outline of one fat, full-blown flower.

  “Then I should have to give up the idea of finishing school,” he said at last. “I’d have to get a job.”

  “But what about your father?” asked Lorraine. “Wouldn’t he take care of us?”

  He turned and looked at her, astonished.

  “I’d never ask him to do that,” he said.

  “Darling!” Her laughter rang out in the small room. “I adore you when you look so tragic.” She stretched slowly, until her body formed an arc of whiteness. “You big silly. I won’t have a baby. I was only teasing you.”

  “How do you know you won’t?” asked Jess.

  She stopped stretching and let herself relax with a sigh.

  “Jess, darling, for a medical student you’re awfully dumb,” she said. “It’s the wrong time of the month for me to get that way.”

  “Oh,” said Jess stupidly.

  He left her just as daylight began to show over the housetops and for some reason he felt rather like a character in a novel as he watched the roofs of Boston turn pink.

  “Goodbye, darling,” he said. “I love you. Sleep now, and I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  He felt strong and powerful enough to walk all the way to Cambridge. He strode down Beacon Street, smiling, thinking of how wonderful it was to have a girl like Lorraine who adored him, who had given herself to him and who would marry him in five years.

  Spring came too quickly. Jess was with Lorraine every day now, but he hated the thought of the approaching summer that would take him away from her. His grades began to suffer and he grew thin from lack of sleep.

  “I never thought I’d actually live through a cliché,” Harkinson said. “But here I am, watching you, Jess, dig yourself into a sweet little mess. And with a girl like Lorraine Jennings. Why, she’s laid half of Harvard and all of B.D. and M.I.T.”

  Jess struck him on the mouth but Harkinson only shook his head sorrowfully.

  “You poor bastard,” he said.

  Jess and Lorraine still sat in movie theaters and restaurants and held hands and once Jess took her to hear the Boston Symphony but she was bored before the program was half over so they left and she took him to a place on Scollay Square where a stripper did tricks with tassels. Occasionally they went to her apartment.

  “I adore you,” said Lorraine.

  “And I love you, darling,” said Jess. “I love you enough to wait until after we’re married. That first time was a mistake.”

  “Are you crazy?” she demanded, and then her voice softened when she saw his shocked expression. “Darling,” she said, “I love you and I want you. I have to have you touch me, I love you so much. Listen, we’ll be careful. It’ll be all right.”

  Jess held her and kissed her until they were both breathless and he was sure that no one had ever felt as he did when he carried her to the couch and undressed her, when he made her pant and moan and cry out. He never realized how like clockwork were these exciting little tricks of Lorraine’s, and he never tired of the things she said, time after time after time.

  “I adore you,” she said.

  And, “Take me, darling. I belong to you.”

  And, “Darling, darling, darling.”

  “Won’t it be wonderful when you’re a doctor?” asked Lorraine. “Then you can set up an office in New York and we’ll find a gorgeous apartment and go to nightclubs every night.”

  Jess laughed and rubbed her neck. “Doctors don’t go to nightclubs every night,” he said. “They go to bed early and sleep with one eye and both ears on the telephone. And I’d be out of place in New York. No, no big cities for me. I’m going in with my father.”

  “But, darling,” she protested. “What would we do in that tiny little town of yours?”

  She pouted in a fashion that Jesse found adorable and he reached out a finger and touched her bottom lip.

  “Do I have to tell you?” he grinned.

  Suddenly it was June, and without warning Jess first, Lorraine quit her job at Jordan’s and decided to go to Cape Cod to work at a summer hotel.

  “I’ll never get through the summer without you,” said Jess.

  “Well, you told me yourself that there was always plenty to do in that little old town of yours.”

  “Nothing is going to be any good without you,” he said. “Will you write to me? Every single day?”

  “Well, as often as I can,” said Lorraine. “Waiting on tables is no picnic, you know.”

  “I know, darling,” said Jess. “But it won’t be much longer. After we’re married you’ll never have to work again.”

  “Five years,” said Lorraine crossly. “By that time I’ll be old and have wrinkles.”

  Sick with the prospect of loneliness and with a sense of foreboding, Jess boarded the train at North Station and went home. He looked around Cooper Station and thought, Damn, damn, damn.

  The town seemed to have shrunk and everyone he saw seemed narrow and provincial and uninteresting, and worst of all, his father seemed very old and very tired.

  Gordon Cameron grunted in earnest now when he sat down and Jess remembered sadly how he had used to be just a short while ago, when Amy Cameron had been alive.

  Amy had laughed at Gordon’s groaning. “I swear,” she used to say, “you sound like an elephant every time you sit down.”

  “It’ll be good to have you back when you finish your schooling,” said Gordon to his son. “Not only to take the load off me, but this is one big house for a man alone.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Dad,” said Jess. “What would you think of my setting up an office of my own when I get through? I mean, an office away from here.”

  Gordon Cameron kept his voice carefully casual.

  “Got any special place in mind, Jess?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t really know. I thought Boston, maybe. Or New York.”

  “Well, son, that’s up to you,” said Gordon. “You have a few more years to go before you have to decide. Personally, I can’t see practicing in the city. Patients are just sick bodies to a big-city doctor. Up here, they’re people. People I know by name and background. People whose fathers I’ve known and whose kids I know.”

  “Besides,” said Jess, arguing with himself. “There’s no money in being a general practitioner up around here.”

  “Jess,” said Gordon, “this is going to sound hickish as hell to you, but believe me, boy, there’s a lot more to doctoring than the money you get.”

  “The money you more often don’t get,” said Jess. “Why, if everybody who owed you money paid up tomorrow you’d be richer than the Coopers.”

  Gordon smiled. “Well, we never starved, you and your mother and I,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s not just the money,” said Jess. “A man is so limited here. I’ll bet there isn’t a bigger group of narrow-minded people anywhere in the world than the one we have right here in Cooper Station.”

  “What do you mean, ‘narrow minded’?” asked Gordon.

  It was a question that always induced a long-winded tirade and now Gordon Cameron only half listened to his son. The boy would not say anything that the doctor had not heard
many times before from every townsman who had lived away from Cooper Station for a little while. Gordon worked hard to keep the worry from showing in his face, for he had been watching his son. He had seen him mooning around the house, kicking at the furniture for no reason at all and haunting the area around the mailbox twice a day. Gordon Cameron was afraid.

  “. . . and another thing,” Jess was saying. “Of course this is just an example, but just supposing I got friendly with a girl here in Cooper Station—”

  Gordon Cameron sat up a little straighter.

  “Here in Cooper Station,” said Jess, “if a man dates a girl more than three times it follows that he’s sleeping with her and people talk about him over every supper table in town. And when you come right down to it, it’s only natural, isn’t it? I mean, the natural step after falling in love is for a man to want the girl physically.”

  Jess had been speaking very rapidly and now he paused for breath. Gordon made a superhuman effort to keep his face empty of amazement, amusement and pity.

  “I think you’ve got things a little twisted there, Jess,” said Gordon. “Most often what a man feels for a woman is physical first and then later, sometimes, it turns to love.”

  “If that’s true,” said Jess angrily, “then men are no better than animals.”

  “What’s the matter, son?” Gordon Cameron asked gently. “You suffering from an attack of conscience?”

  “Oh, Dad,” said Jess miserably and began to tell his father.

  Gordon listened intently to his son’s low voice.

  So we failed after all, Amy and I, thought Gordon. We kept him sheltered and happy and close to us and this is the result. We told ourselves that he was the only child we had so it wasn’t wrong to keep him so close and to enjoy his growing up. Now Jess is paying for all our years of enjoyment, because I forgot what it was like to be young and away from home and lonely. Oh, Christ.

  “She said she’d wait until I was through school and that we’d be married,” Jess was saying.