Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  “Hey, Charley, what’s your name?” the saxophone-player called.

  “I’ll bite. What’s my name?”

  “No kidding, Society Girl wants to know.”

  The piano-player came to the edge of the stand and leaned down. “Why do you want to know my name? Have you got a subpeeny?”

  “First I want to know if you made the record of ‘Sweet and Lovely.’”

  “I plead guilty,” he said. “Did it meet with your approval?”

  “Yes, but I’m not asking for myself. My brother is an excellent pianist. He’s only fifteen, but he’s terribly good, really he is, and he thinks your playing is superb, really.”

  “Well, good for him.”

  “Well, what’s your name, so I can tell him?”

  “Charley Bongiorno.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “I’ll write it down for you. Sure you don’t want my telephone number? Do you live around here?”

  “Yes, I live around here. I hope you don’t think I came here to spend the summer.”

  “Here’s the name. I hope you can read my writing. How about a drink?”

  “Are you inviting us, or what?”

  “Inviting you. I have a pint,” said Bongiorno.

  “Okay,” said Ann. “We’ll meet you at intermission. We’ll be standing to the right of the exit.”

  “Don’t fail me.”

  The music resumed and Ann’s partner said, “I like that—I don’t think.”

  “Oh, don’t be a stuffed shirt. You haven’t got anything to drink, and I’d love one.”

  “Well, I’m not going to drink any of that fellow’s liquor.”

  “Well, isn’t that just too bad.”

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Picking up a bum out of an orchestra.”

  “He didn’t seem like a bum. He had nice manners and as far as being a bum, I’ll bet he makes more money than you’ll make when you’re thirty.”

  “I won’t be making it that way, you can be sure.”

  “I’ll say you won’t. You can’t play ‘Chopsticks.’”

  “Let’s go out in the car.”

  “No.”

  “Is that final?”

  “It’s as final as—the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Then excuse me. Go home with someone else. Your God damn piano-player, for all I care.”

  “Good night, chopsticks,” she said. He walked away from her and she had to wait fifteen minutes before Bongiorno met her.

  “Where’s your boy friend?”

  “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Is he sore on account of me?”

  “Yes, but don’t let that worry you.”

  “Okay, let’s get a couple bottles of ginger ale and go to work on this rat poison. Have you got a car?”

  “No, have you?”

  “No,” he said. “How are you going to get home if your boy friend took a run-out?”

  “Oh, I came with a crowd. I’ll get home.”

  They bought ginger ale and seated themselves in the back of an unoccupied Buick.

  “Straight with a chaser, or a highball?”

  “Highball, please.”

  He made highballs in paper cups and they drank them quickly. “Another?”

  “No thanks,” she said. “But you go ahead.”

  “Not right away, thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me,” she said.

  “I only need one or two at intermission. It keeps me going through intermission, otherwise I’d get tired. I don’t get tired as long as I’m playing, but when I stop I do. Where you from? And what’s your name? I told you my name, but I was too stupid to ask you yours.”

  “Ann Chapin. I’m from Gibbsville.”

  “Yeah, I played Gibbsville last winter, I mean the winter before last, not last winter. This is summer but it’s still last winter as far as I’m concerned. We got different suits and we’re working outdoors, but the only difference is the temperature. Otherwise it’s always the same. But I remember Gibbsville. That’s where you live, hey?”

  “All my life. Born there.”

  “I was born in Jersey City, N.J. We just call it Jersey, but people think we mean the whole state when we say Jersey.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Married? Not in this business. Are you?”

  “Lord, no. Will you have a cigarette?”

  “Thanks. I got a match. I wouldn’t get married if I was in this business. I seen too much of it.”

  “Where’d you learn to play the piano?”

  “Where’d I learn to play the piano? From the sisters. You know, the nuns? I’m Catholic. I went to Catholic parochial school and my old lady, my mother, she insisted on I take piano lessons and beat my ears if I din practice an hour a day. But she din have to beat my ears because after at first, you know, I liked it. Then I began making a dollar out of it, oh, then I was Vincent Lopez or somebody. Any piano-player she ever heard of, I was better. Well, she’s right I’m better than Vincent Lopez, I’ll say that much. ‘Nola.’ Jesus, if you only knew how that offended me. What’s the use of playing a piano if you can’t play it bettern that? And it’s just as much trouble to play bad as good, the way he plays. He moves his fingers as fast as anybody, and he hits the key all right. But Jesus. Your kid brother’s good, hey? Who does he like?”

  “You.”

  “Who else? Besides me.”

  “I’m not very good on their names.”

  “Well, if he knew I was good on ‘Sweet and Lovely’ he’s got some sense, I know that much. He ain’t a ‘Nola’ man if he liked what I did with my solo. He couldn’t be, that I’ll guarantee you. I love good piano. If it wasn’t for piano I coulda been a dead gangster by now. I knew a couple friends of mine that I grew up with, they end up on the Jersey Meadows and it coulda been me. You come from a well-to-do family, Ann?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would they say if they knew you were out here having a drink with me?”

  “I dread to think.”

  “Well, you oughtna be here, either. I’m glad you are, but some guys with bands, they’d have half your clothes off by this time.”

  “I was taking a chance, wasn’t I? But I did.”

  “Why, I wonder?”

  “Who can tell?”

  “Well, to show you how much I respect you, I ain’t even gonna ask you for a kiss. And you’re pretty, too.” He looked at her face and her bosom. “Yeah, you’re pretty all right. There’s nothing wrong with you, baby. But now I get started thinking that way we better amscray. It-hay the oad-ray. Ann Chapin. I never heard that name before, Chapin. What nationality is that?”

  “American. I don’t know. English, I guess.”

  “Chopin, he was really a Polack, you know. He wasn’t French. Polack. But you’re Chapin. Ann, I know a lot of Annas, but no Ann. I knew an Irish girl named Anna, called herself Ann to put on the dog, but you were always Ann, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My old lady used to tell me, don’t say uh-huh, it ain’t polite. But it sounds all right. You want another drink, Ann? Highball out of warm ginger ale?”

  “No thanks. Let me see your hands.”

  “Three over an octave,” he said.

  She took one of his hands, and impulsively put it to her cheek.

  “Now you want me to kiss you, don’t you?” he said.

  “If you want to.”

  “If I want to? Do you know what, Ann? I love you.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I think I do, a little,” she said.

  “Ann?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  “Yes,” she sai
d.

  “Then let’s go back.”

  “All right, Charley,” she said. “But kiss me first.”

  “Not too much of a kiss, though. I ain’t responsible.”

  Two days later, in his hotel room, she ceased to be a virgin, and within a month she was pregnant. In September they were married in a small town in the northern part of the state, near the New York line. An incurious justice of the peace performed the ceremony and there was no vigilant newspaper space-writer to report the event to the Gibbsville papers. The new Mr. and Mrs. Charles V. Bongiorno drove the Chapin Buick to 10 North Frederick Street, and the process of nullifying the marriage was begun immediately. The abortion was performed in a private hospital near Media, Pennsylvania, and once again Mike Slattery was called upon for his unique services, which in this instance required the destruction of an official record of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But “Sweet and Lovely” became what is known in the musical trade as a standard, and indestructible, and with the power in just the first four notes to torture Ann Chapin for as long as she might live.

  • • •

  It had not been a good year for Joe Chapin. His trudging recovery from his accident had prevented his making any effort to try for the lieutenant governor nomination in the spring; and Ann’s disastrous romance had taken away some of the strength he had been able to gain during a lazy summer on the farm. Arthur had helped him to accept philosophically the financial defeat of his plan for Edith and the children: it was quite true that “we were all in that together.” Everybody wanted to talk about his losses, but no one wanted to listen. The potential listener either had his own losses, or if he had not been seriously affected by the market’s behavior, he felt declassé and even a bit of a chump not to have had a million or so on paper. Joe had not yet reached the age at which his own conversation, his half of a conversation, dominated his relationships with other people. He therefore did not inflict the story of his losses on his friends, and by the time most of them were finished with their own woeful accounting, his own losses were made to appear lighter.

  And so, for 1930, Joe Chapin had missed out on an opportunity to further his political ambition; he had lost the money that would have realized his financial ambition; and he had been a full partner in the decisions that introduced tragedy into the life of the one human being he loved without reservation, without limit.

  What Joe could not know was that after the first hatred of her parents, of the abortionist and his nurse, of Mike Slattery and Billy English and even Arthur McHenry—Ann began to feel pity for her father. The man who had given her understanding and support and secrecy during the Tommy Willis escapade was the same man who had grieved and been shocked and destructive in the Charley Bongiorno episode. As she watched him about the house, moving now with deliberate care where a few years earlier he had been quick and graceful, she was learning what happens to people, even to people whose love you can count on. This saddened man, whom she had once looked upon in what she was afraid was death, had banished her lover and ordered her to an operating table in a house that was disguised as a family home and once had been one. Her father was kind and solicitous when she came home. “We’re not going to talk about it, Ann,” he said. “Let’s consider it as—let’s try to think of it as something that didn’t happen to us.” To talk about it at length, with him, was exactly what she had wanted to do, but she knew he must be feeling guilty of disloyalty to her. He became awkward with her; he was overpolite and overcasual, where always in the past he had been casual and polite and sure. When she kissed him good night he would lay his fingers on her arm, where in the other days he had always given her a loving squeeze. He was not treating her as though she had become fragile, although the things he had been responsible for had made demands on her toughness. Well, maybe not toughness. Strength.

  She was around the house as a secret invalid, a girl who belonged back in boarding school, a full-fledged woman, a graduate of emotional torture, an only daughter, the equal of her parents, the sister of her not-much-younger brother, a person who was suddenly allowed to have a cocktail and a cigarette because to forbid her to have a cocktail and a cigarette after her recent ordeal would have been as silly as trying to force her to play with dolls in order to make her a girl again. The ambiguities of her position in the family were in evidence from one minute to another.

  “Ann dear,” said her mother. “We thought you could wait awhile before going back to school. I’ll write and tell them you’ve been ill, but will be going back for the second fall term.”

  “But I’m not going back, Mother,” she said calmly.

  “You’re not?”

  “Oh, that would be ridiculous. A married woman living with a bunch of schoolgirls? Of course not.”

  “She’s right, Edith,” said Joe.

  “But you haven’t finished any school. You really ought to go somewhere and finish.”

  “I went to that hospital, that’s finishing enough for me. Don’t let’s talk about it, or I’ll go away. Mother—and you too, Father—I’m liable to go away anyhow. I’ll keep my word. I won’t see Charley. But that isn’t saying I won’t go away. And if I go, I’m not going to ask you if I can go. I’ll just go. I have three hundred dollars in the bank—”

  “I will put a thousand in the bank for you tomorrow,” said Joe. “If you can’t stand it here, tell us, but don’t think of us as using money as a hold over you. If a thousand isn’t enough, I’ll make it two. But we want you here because we love you, and maybe we can help you. If we can, we’ll try.”

  “We ought to have some excuse for your not going back to school. Everybody knows you have another year,” said Edith.

  “A lot of girls quit school at nineteen,” said Ann. “Say I’m thinking of taking a secretarial course in New York. And I am, as a matter of fact.”

  “People will believe that, Edith.”

  “All right, just so we agree on a story. That’s what I’ll tell them at Oak Hill, too,” said Edith.

  The people who knew the truth of her relationship with Charley Bongiorno—Dr. English, Uncle Arthur McHenry, Mr. Slattery, the abortionist, the nurse—had all been of her parents’ choosing. She realized one day that except for her mother and father, there was no one whom she had told by choice. And although the weeks were passing, the need to confide was not. It was not only a question of telling her side of it; it was a matter of telling the whole story. And there was only one person in the world for that.

  She said to her mother one morning: “Can Harry drive me to the club today?”

  “Why of course. I won’t need him, and your father’s been at the office for hours. Are you going to play golf?”

  “No. Just have lunch.”

  “Alone?”

  “There’s always somebody there.”

  Ann sat on the front seat of the Cadillac sedan.

  “The club?”

  “Philadelphia. I have a lot to tell you.”

  “Do you mean that, Philadelphia?”

  “Depends on how long it takes. Don’t drive fast.”

  She made him promise not to interrupt until she told him she was finished. They were not far from Philadelphia when she said, “And that’s all.”

  He turned the car to the side of the road and stopped. He bowed his head and wept. He kept his hands in his lap and then he put his hands on the steering wheel and rested his head on them and wept more wholly. At last he spoke as he took out a handkerchief.

  “I knew there was something,” he said. “They did a great job of camouflaging, but I knew you were in some kind of trouble. Where’s your husband now?”

  “I’m keeping my promise. I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to find him for you?”

  “No,” she said. “They’ll make trouble for him.”

  “Trouble? Trouble? What do you want to do? That’s all I want to know.�
��

  “Oh—whatever I am doing. Whatever that is. Just going on living and not shooting myself.”

  “Don’t say that! Jesus Christ, girl!” This time he cried out and the weeping began again, but now it was not wordless; it was full of mutterings and incoherent sentences, and she put his head on her shoulder and patted his face. But it always stops, and his weeping stopped with a deep sigh.

  “Harry. Dear sweet Harry,” she said.

  He smiled. “Dear sweet Harry, with a whole head full of salty tears and nothing else.”

  “That’s why you’re sweet and dear.”

  “I brung along me pipe and tobacco. I think I’ll have a smoke,” he said. The operation of filling and lighting his pipe, the something to do, brought him back from his misery.

  “Marian and I have over fourteen thousand dollars saved up, not including six thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds. You ought to go away.”

  “I may.”

  “We’ll give you the money. Don’t take it off of them.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If I go I might as well let them pay for it.”

  “No, that’ll let them salve their conscience. That’s letting them off too cheap. It isn’t money either one of them sweated over. All it is is writing a check. It’s time they realized writing a check doesn’t make up for things. I’d rather you took our money, good hard work and long years behind it.”

  “They wouldn’t like that if I did.”

  “Oh, I’m giving notice anyway, whether you take the money or don’t. I wouldn’t live in the same house with them any more.”

  “If you leave, I’ll leave.”

  “All right, that’s what I want you to do.”

  “No, Harry. I’m going to stay. At least for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh—it’s my home, and they’re my parents. I think there’s been enough harm done for one family, without my adding to it. If I leave, what good will that do anybody? Now I pity them. They’re beginning to realize they did something awful and they’re not sure what they ought to do to make up for it. And I’m just as well off there as I would be any place else. Maybe better.”