Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  His car was a 1940 Buick four-door sedan, plain black and with a radio and a heater, but with no other optional equipment. The citizens had to know it was his car, and not guess it by any special license plate, by initials on the doors, or by official or other badges. The car was as carefully unpretentious as his clothes.

  “Hello, Tom. Keeping you busy?”

  “Pretty busy, Judge,” said the parking attendant. He did not offer to start the car or move it from its accustomed place to open the door for the judge. He knew better. The judge unparked his own car and drove it away.

  He carefully obeyed all ordinances. He was a good driver, considerate and well co-ordinated. At only one point did he depart from any rule or regulation involving courtesy or consideration: in the 1900-block on Market Street he sounded his horn: one long and two short. There was no apparent reason for blowing the horn.

  But he did it every afternoon, in the 1900-block on Market Street.

  • • •

  As a young man, as a law student, and as a young lawyer getting started, Lloyd Williams drank with the boys, whoever the boys of the moment might be. He was able to take in more alcohol with less inebriating effect than spirits had on his drinking companions, and he was respected for that ability. He did not have to drink every day to maintain his reputation as a drinking man, but the reputation followed him through life. In cigar-store discussions he was held up as the example of the brilliant lawyer who drank, just as a couple of doctors were cited as drinking surgeons. In Lloyd Williams’s case the drinking was a political asset; he was a man, not a hypocrite, and another part of the asset was his reputation for being quite a man with the women. In his youth the drinkers were the patrons of the better whorehouses, and Williams himself went along with the boys in that activity. In any single year he was likely to go to one of the better whorehouses often enough to be welcome and respected, but in no single year did his visits to whorehouses number more than fifteen. There were other men, less conspicuous men, who went to a whorehouse every Saturday night, or every payday, but Lloyd Williams was hardly ever an inconspicuous man, and whatever he did was magnified. He acquired his reputation for success with women on little more than a monthly visit to a whorehouse, but the reputation was not confined to association with whores. Men somehow believed that all women interested Williams, and many women joined the men in that belief.

  His reputation as a hellraiser flourished and was helped by the fact that he married rather late in life. And yet no one ever bothered to inquire too deeply into the renown as drinker or womanizer. Men assumed that because they got drunk with Williams, Williams had been drunk too; they assumed that because he went to bed with whores, he was going to bed with mysterious mistresses who were not being paid. In fact, in the presence of non-whores, Williams was the shyest of men, but even that characteristic was taken to be part of tactics and great discretion.

  When finally, at forty-one, he married, the choice he made did nothing to disillusion his friends. Lottie Williams was a childless widow of his own age, a Gibbsville girl whose first husband died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 while serving as a sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps, Frankford Arsenal. Lottie Danner and Jimmy Franklin had been a high school romance and an ideal one: Lottie, a girl with a startlingly flawless complexion, beautiful teeth, and wavy auburn hair, and somewhat on the stout side, had a contralto voice that kept all other girls out of singing competition for the four years she attended high school; Jimmy had the quick reflexes and spare build of the natural athlete and starred in baseball, basketball and sprint events and was good enough to win two letters in football. After high school and his failure to make big league baseball, he played town ball, semiprofessionally, but devoted himself chiefly to beer, drinking it and selling it. He attended all sports events in the area, and in the beginning his brewery employers encouraged his interest with an expense account. But his usefulness as a good-will representative came to an end with a succession of fistfights. He was partisan to a degree; he bet large sums and did not always pay off when he lost; he was suspected of bribing a participant in a high-stake pigeon-shooting match. By the time he joined the Army he had been a bartender, house man in a poolroom, auto salesman, political hustler, bill collector, insurance salesman, sewing-machine salesman, and private detective. Most of his jobs had been obtained through the intercession of Mike Slattery, who had admired his athletic ability in high school and who even then was building a personal political organization. During the years of unsteady employment Jimmy refused to permit Lottie to take a job, but within a month of his death she was at work as a millinery saleslady and within two years of it she had her own shop on Second Street, just outside the high-rent district. The Danners were solid, respectable people; Lottie’s father was a letter carrier, prominent in the anti-Catholic fraternal organizations. Lottie was called Lottie Danner for most of the years of her marriage to Jimmy Franklin; they were a small-town version of two theatrical celebrities who have married but retain their professional names, although Lottie called herself Lottie Franklin. Lottie lived at her parents’ home, as she had done throughout much of her married life. When her father and mother died she inherited the house on Locust Street, but instead of taking in roomers, she converted the house into apartments, retaining the first floor for her own use. With the success of her millinery and the renovation of her father’s house a new life began for Lottie.

  Women, Lantenengo Street women, often dropped in at Lottie’s shop merely to smoke a cigarette. The shop, in fact, became the younger women’s idling place that corresponded to their husbands’ cigar store. Only the oldest women of Lantenengo Street withheld their patronage from Lottie, and their absence was helpful. Lottie not only had the youngest hats; she had the young for customers. The men of Gibbsville, Lantenengo Street or not, remained totally unaware of the noncommercial aspects of Lottie’s shop. All they knew was that their wives had dropped in at Lottie’s and had, or had not, bought a hat. Whether they bought or not, Lottie made them feel welcome. She supplied cigarettes; she had a clean toilet; a box of aspirin and a carton of sanitary napkins; a telephone in her small office. And Lottie did not mind if a young woman closed the door of the office.

  Lottie’s first love affair as a widow was with a doctor, a newcomer to Gibbsville and a bachelor, who was six years younger than she. George Ingram was a University of Pennsylvania M.D., a native of Trenton who had heard that doctors prospered in Gibbsville, in spite of the seemingly large number of doctors in proportion to the population of the town. He was sponsored by Dr. English, who sent him patients and helped him socially, but George Ingram was not quite so ready to marry as the available young women of Lantenengo Street had hoped. He was twenty-nine years old and determined to repay the aunt who had helped finance his education. When Lottie Williams came to him with a torn fingernail and in pain, she was a patient and no more, but she knew a good deal about him through the talk at her shop. On her third, and what was to have been her final office call, she made sure to be the last patient of the evening.

  “Won’t need another dressing,” he said. “You can stop at the drug store and tell them to give you a rubber finger to wear at work, but I wouldn’t even wear that all the time.”

  “Fine,” said Lottie. She smiled at him and made no move to go. She continued to smile at him, and he smiled back.

  “You make me feel as if I forgot something. Did I forget anything?”

  “No,” she said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Why, yes,” he said.

  “Let’s you and I smoke a cigarette then,” said Lottie.

  “Okay, let’s. Do you smoke these?” He offered her a Fatima.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said.

  “What is your regular brand?”

  “Lord Salisburys,” she said.

  “Sorry I can’t oblige,” he said. “I’ll have some the next time.”

 
; “That’s good news,” said Lottie.

  “Oh, I take good care of my patients.”

  “So’s that, good news,” said Lottie.

  “What made you think anything different?”

  “I didn’t think anything different, Doctor. I meant it was good news there’s going to be a next time, and good news you take good care of your patients. I guess you’re pretty lonely in town.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “All the young Lantenengo Street girls after you, but you’re giving them the cold shoulder.”

  “Well, I don’t want to get serious.”

  “I don’t either,” said Lottie. She smiled at him and said no more while she inhaled her cigarette. He smiled back uncertainly.

  “Does that door lock?” she said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Would you care to kiss me? And lock the door first?”

  He got up and turned the key.

  “Do you want me to take everything off?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You don’t say much, do you?”

  “We understand each other,” he said.

  She stood up and they kissed each other.

  “Turn your back,” she said.

  “All right,” he said.

  “I wish you could outen the big light.”

  “I will,” he said. He snapped the ceiling light. “I’d better leave the other one on.”

  “I don’t mind the other one. It’s the big one,” she said. In a few minutes she spoke again. She was lying on his sofa, the front of her body draped with her petticoat, but she was wearing nothing. “You take everything off too.”

  “I intend to,” he said.

  Their love-making lasted not very long and she said only one thing, when he was inside her for the first time: “God, I needed this.”

  “So did I,” he said.

  When they had finished she said: “Will you let me have one of those Fatimas?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Where do you live? Do you still live at the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “Do you ever go away? Philly or New York City?”

  “Only once since I came here.”

  “I’d like to be in a real bed with you and we wouldn’t have to be in such a hurry.”

  “But you’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. You could tell. You’re a doctor.”

  “Sometimes I’m not.”

  “I’m glad of that. What if I get in the family way?”

  “Well, let’s hope you don’t.”

  “Let’s hope I don’t is right. Did you like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Enough to have another date sometime?”

  “Sure.”

  “When?”

  “Well—I don’t exactly. You decide.”

  “A week from tonight?”

  “That’s a Monday? Fine.”

  “Will I come here with my sore finger, or what?”

  “Get here a little later, after eight-thirty.”

  “Any time you say. Listen, I don’t want anybody seeing me any more than you do. I’m a respectable widow and business woman. I don’t want any talk either.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And you’re younger than I am. I always used to think a woman that—well, I guess it doesn’t make much difference, does it?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Give me another kiss and then I guess I’ll get started on my way home.”

  He kissed her briefly on the mouth.

  “It makes you feel how much you’ve been missing over two years. It isn’t that long for you, though.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Men are lucky,” she said. “If you have to go out on a call next Monday, will the Monday after be all right?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “For sure?”

  “Well, unless there’s some accident or something on that order.”

  “I’m started wishing it was Monday already, and it’s still this Monday. I wish I could go to the hotel with you.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “With my mother and father. They’re both ready to go any minute. They have a trained nurse.”

  For nearly a year Lottie and Ingram took care of their need of someone, with no one in Gibbsville the wiser. He was the first and for a long time the only man to come to her apartment, but she never had him present at the small parties she gave, poker parties with whiskey and beer. Love never happened to Lottie and Ingram and when he told her he was planning to marry a Lantenengo Street girl she was secretly relieved; his love-making had become routine, as had her own, and besides she was beginning to like to listen to Lloyd Williams, who was getting to be a frequent member of the poker sessions.

  She was forty-one when she married Lloyd Williams, a man her own age, and it was a great surprise on their wedding night to discover how little Lloyd knew about making love. Indeed it was weeks before she finally and fully realized that with Lloyd she could never expect to have anything but the embellishments of love-making and never the ultimate love-making itself. She had known there were men like that, and she now had married one. For two years she submitted to his technique, which excited her but gave her no relief. “What’s the matter with you?” he would say. “You like it, every woman does. Most women would rather.” He would become angry and frustrated by her own frustration. Time was getting short for her, she knew, and she thought of leaving him, of reopening her shop, but she would have no explanation to satisfy public or even private curiosity; he was not a drunkard, he did not beat her, he gave her a home, he was—publicly—a much better man than Jimmy Franklin had been. Then accidentally, during one of his angriest outbursts, she learned something about him that was something of a comfort without being satisfaction.

  “Didn’t you ever have real intercourse with a woman?”

  “Sure I did,” he said.

  “Those whores?”

  “Yes, those whores.”

  “Then what’s the matter with me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I’m built the same way.”

  “I never liked it with them.”

  “What didn’t you like?”

  “The way I did it with them.”

  “The regular way?”

  “Yes, the regular way.”

  “Then why did you do anything? Why did you do it at all?”

  “I had to. A man has—desires. When I had mine I went to a whore. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I do with you was always what I wanted to do.”

  “Why can’t you do the same thing with me that you did with the whores? It’s what I want.”

  “I can’t help it what you want. All I can do is what I do. Once a month I’d go to a whore and get satisfaction, quick. With you I don’t want to have satisfaction, not the same kind. I want you to have satisfaction. Why don’t you? You won’t let yourself.”

  “Didn’t you do the same thing with the whores?”

  “No, I tell you. I hated them. I respect you.”

  “Is that what it is? Respect?”

  “You’d never find me doing that to a whore. Never.”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “Can you understand this? You and the whores are the only women I ever knew. And what I always wanted to do I do with you.”

  “That’s almost as if you only knew two women in your whole life.”

  “That’s what it is. I only knew two women. The other woman was all the whores, and I hated them. And I don’t hate you. I love you.”

  “My God,” she said.

  “Listen, I’m not half as queer as some people. You ought to hear some
of the things in court.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Well, then you’d know.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “You ought to hear some of those things.”

  “Why don’t you change? Why should I be the one?”

  “Listen, I’ll give you some books to read. Havelock Ellis.”

  “Aw, books. I never read a—”

  “Not novels. Scientific.”

  “Doctor books. I don’t want doctor books. I know what I am: a woman. And you’re supposed to be a man. Are you a fairy, too?”

  “Like hell I am. I wouldn’t be in love with you.”

  “What kind of love do you call this?”

  “It’s a kind. There’s all kinds.”

  “Huh. Well, I’m going to sleep.”

  “All right.”

  “You were supposed to have—you were supposed to be Rudolph Valentino and Wallace Reid rolled into one.”

  “If you knew more you’d understand better,” he said.

  “I understand enough.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  “There’s one thing I understand and that’s there’s some things I don’t care if I don’t ever understand.”

  So—he loved her; he used the word. What he meant by love was not what she had always meant by love, which was simple, irresistible, and satisfactory. At forty-three she was having to learn about a kind of love that was as distant as death without death’s inevitability. Death was acceptable and postponable; this kind of love was not within her imaginable experience. And yet she was experiencing it. She made some compromises; her secret reading of Havelock Ellis was some help, and so was a furtive, embarrassed consultation with George Ingram, who was not a mental healer but who reassured her by telling her that she was not the only woman in the world, or in Gibbsville, who was experiencing dissatisfaction. What he told her was hardly more than what she would have discovered by listening to the court cases Lloyd had spoken of, but the difference was that coming from George it had greater value; George had been her lover; George was a medical man. The compromise she made was a difficult one and long in the making, but it was achieved. It was simple. She learned to be Lloyd’s wife on his terms. And at precisely that moment she began to lose him. For a year they were happy. He had converted her, and she was a convert. Moreover their differentness gave her a hidden sense of superiority over other women. But he had won, and she was losing, and then there began to be nothing.