by John O'Hara
“There’s one thing you mustn’t let them do. You mustn’t let them make you think you made a mistake. Never let them do that. You made no mistake, girl. They made the mistake. Ah, what a mistake they made, and it’ll plague them.”
Before she could reply they heard the short whirl of a police siren and immediately there was a face under a Stetson at the left door of the car.
“Having trouble?” said the highway patrolman.
“Well, not your kind of trouble,” said Harry.
“Are you the owner of this car?”
“I work for the owner.”
“Me see your owner’s registration and your driver’s license.”
Harry handed them to him. The cop held onto them while he questioned Harry. “Do you think this is a safe place to park, right on a main highway?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Do you always stop on a main highway when you want to have a chat with your girl friend? I’ve been watching you for ten minutes.”
“We been here ten minutes?”
“More than ten minutes. I’ve been watching you for ten minutes.”
“And we didn’t break any law.”
“No, but if you want to park why don’t you get off the main highway? Who’re you, young lady? The maid?”
“She’s the maid.”
“Pretty soft for you. Go on, why don’t you roll?”
“All right,” said Harry.
The cop mounted his motorcycle and moved up to the door again. “Give him the air, baby. He’s too old for you.” He laughed, looked behind him, and deliberately backfired the machine and roared away.
The fresh cop changed the trip home into a cheerful journey.
• • •
Edith Chapin often wished that the family physician had not been so early in life and so permanently a man who was also a family friend. It was not so much that she felt embarrassment through the presence and the touch of Billy English; she had long ago accepted Billy in his impersonal, professional role; there was nothing more for him to see or to know. Except that there was more to know, that she never could let him know. She had no confidant as, for example, Ann had Harry Jackson as confidant. She had no woman friend to whom she would entrust a secret that was more her own than the more or less routine intimacies that she could tell another woman as another woman would confide in her. There were, so to speak, body secrets, functional secrets that finally were not secrets at all. They had, for instance, nothing to do with desire. She would not even go so far as to tell Josephine Laubach or Rose McHenry that she considered a man handsome. She seldom told any of the secrets of her mind, whether or not they were related to the actions or needs of her body. Even with Joe she had assumed and maintained an identity that went only as far as she wanted to go—and seemed to be as much as he wanted. They could revel in extremes of passionate experiment, but in the morning, after they had slept, they managed to make no reference, by word or by look, to the departure from conventional husband-and-wife that had occurred in the night. They would speak of each other as “my husband,” “my wife,” in such terms as to make the appellation seem to be a form of approval and applause, but at the same time a warning to the listener not to inquire into the subsurface relationship.
During the long convalescence Joe had not been in bed with her, and there was enough of drama and alarm about the accident to render them both impotent during the early stages. But when Joe went back to wanting her actively, the nature of his injury kept them apart. He had been warned of the serious consequences of a refracture, and when he was walking again and wanted to stay with her, she was still so fearful of his breaking his leg again that she could not want him. He would kiss her and touch her but the effect on her was no more exciting than a warm bath, and after his first attempts to force entrance into her, which were sufficient for him but inadequate for her, she would let him kiss her good night and no more. If he put a hand on her breast she would lift it away. “Wait till you’re all well again,” she would say.
“But I am all well,” he would say.
“Not till I hear it from Billy English,” she would say.
But Billy English neglected to volunteer the advice that they could resume their full marital relationship. (Joe was his friend, but not his whole practice.) And in just such matters Edith was unable to speak frankly with Billy. She could not say to him: “I want to sleep with somebody.” There was no one in the world to whom she could say that, although that was the truth: the truth was not only that she wanted to sleep with Joe; she wanted to be slept with, and it didn’t have to be with Joe.
Lloyd Williams was getting to be somebody in the county, no longer the nobody of the affair of ten years ago. He was getting to be so much of a somebody that he could, almost, safely boast about it if she slept with him again. She knew that as a nobody he had been astute enough to realize that to boast about the single night in Philadelphia would have been dangerous to his career; might even have been dangerous to his life. Ten years ago Joe might conceivably have shot him, Arthur McHenry would have beaten him, her own brother Carter might have defended her honor. And any or all of them would have hurt him professionally in the ways at their command, from political preferment to bank credit. Now if she were to use him and he were to brag about it, now that he was the district attorney and on his way up, he could blab it in any saloon in the county and be believed and remain unharmed. And now she would have another woman to contend with, for Williams had married Lottie, and Edith was one of the women who had always looked right through Lottie without seeing her.
Among her friends and acquaintances in Gibbsville there were women who had looked at her with expressions of bold curiosity. There were women who Edith was sure had had other men, and there were the others who had not had other women but were wondering whether she might not be the first. Sometimes she would be at the club, sitting on the terrace, and she would turn to discover a woman staring at her with such open, relaxed inquisitiveness that the woman was caught off guard, revealing more of herself than had ever been actively suspected of Edith. And Edith would smile politely, for the woman was always someone she knew, and say to herself: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” The truth was that Edith had a great deal of contempt for members of her own sex. They could not lead the life of idleness without playing bridge or getting into some kind of trouble, spending too much money or incurring imaginary ailments, taking to the bottle or pretending to be unaware of their husband’s whores.
Ann’s elopement was a frightening experience for Edith, and she was thankful that her own circumspection had kept her from being in the midst of some kind of extramarital affair to match her daughter’s rashly romantic impulse. An affair of her own would not have made her tolerant of Ann’s, but she would not have been secure in her position of stern but kindly parent. Besides being a frightening experience it was an alarming one, alarming because of the detail of Ann’s pregnancy; for Edith, who had not been bothered much by the candles on her birthday cakes (everyone in Gibbsville knew how old everyone else was), now realized that for a few months Ann had carried in her belly the first Chapin grandchild. Edith was forty-four, but it was not the number of years that mattered so much as the status of grandmother. As a mother only, a woman indulging in misconduct can have romantically forgivable excuses, but the same behavior in a grandmother becomes foolishness that is hard to forgive, even by other foolish grandmothers. For the moment, and possibly for the last time, Edith had been granted a respite. And for the moment she was not sure what she wanted to do with it. But she was having the respite.
• • •
A new and distinct kind of impoverished aristocracy was in the making during 1930 and 1931. Its members were those men, and their families, who had made money in the stock market or through the general prosperity of the country in the latter half of the Twenties. They were quick aristocrats in the sense that their standing was based
on recent dollars, but they were also quick to copy the spending habits (not yet the thrifty habits) of those families that had had money for more generations than could be measured by the new-rich in years. Moreover, the rich of the latter Twenties had so easily accustomed themselves to the tokens of wealth and, when possible, the company of older money that they also learned how to spend with the same free gallantry, if not quite the grace, that had been acquired by the old-rich through several generations. And when the stock-market ticker refused to answer their prayers they continued to spend and speculate until they had nothing left but their vote. With some misgiving, but hopefully, they gave or loaned their vote to the newer Mr. Roosevelt.
Joe Chapin had not been sufficiently impoverished to impel him to cast his vote for a Democrat, and the lasting impression made by the 1932 Democratic candidate as a Harvard undergraduate gave Joe Chapin a special reason for remaining a Republican. It was not feasible or desirable for Joe Chapin to stump the county and the state and tell the voters he had not liked Franklin D. Roosevelt at New York debutante parties. In the national mood of that moment such talk would have been paid for gladly by the Democratic National Committee. But Joe expressed himself at the Gibbsville Club and elsewhere, and since a lost cause makes aristocrats rather more attractive, and since Joe Chapin was already well thought of, his support of Mr. Hoover hurt him personally not at all; and actually was of some value in later years when he claimed the distinction of uninterrupted party conformism. He never had to make that hackneyed, apologetic admission that he had “voted for him in ’32, but once was enough.”
Arthur McHenry confessed that right up to the very last minute, even as he entered the voting booth, he had not decided not to vote for the Democrat. “But then I thought of who my friends are, and I voted right,” he said. There was enough of Arthur’s and Joe’s kind of thinking to carry the state for Mr. Hoover, but there were not enough of them in the country as a whole, and Mike Slattery and a thousand men like him took a hard look at the figures and knew they had their work cut out for them. In Mike’s case the test would be in ’34, when the voters would elect a governor and a United States senator. “Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself,” said Peg Slattery, of the new President.
“Ah, now, but will he?” said Mike. “You won’t listen to him on the radio, but you ought to, Peg. Know your opposition is one of the first rules of this nefarious profession of mine. Know your opposition, and take stock of what you’ve got to buck up against it with. Three things licked Hoover. The Depression, the fellow they elected, and Hoover himself. Say a few Hail Marys we’ll develop a spellbinder by 1936, nationally.”
“Put up Graham McNamee,” said Peg.
“A funny remark, but closer to the truth than you realize. Say another few Hail Marys he stays out of the governor and senator campaign in ’34. Which he won’t, of that you may be sure. He wants Pennsylvania. He has to have Pennsylvania if he wants to win again.”
“Win again, Mike? He’s hardly in the White House.”
“It’ll take dynamite to get him out. Do you think that fellow’s going to be satisfied with the one term? The campaign he ran? The wanting to show his fifth cousins? He’ll run in ’36 and he’s going to make a fight for this state the likes of which you never saw. We haven’t put in a Democrat for governor since 1890, and if it wasn’t for somebody named Gill that ran on the Prohibition ticket we’d have won then, but that was 1890. This’ll be 1934 and there won’t be enough Prohibitionists to cut any ice one way or the other. We’re not going to be running against the fellow that gets the Democratic nomination, either for governor or senator. We’re going to be running against the fellow they just elected President. He’ll see to that.”
At 10 North Frederick Street there was another conversation of a political nature.
“Well, our friend had his parade,” said Joe.
“Our friend? What parade?”
“You know our friend, the friend of the common people. The Harvard snob.”
“Oh, of course,” said Edith. “He had a parade?”
“Didn’t you know about the parade? The N.I.R.A. parade, the Blue Eagle. What fools these mortals be. Every day I pick up the paper and it’s getting so that if there isn’t some new socialistic scheme, I’m surprised. Arthur thinks the N.I.R.A. may be unconstitutional, even though he’s rather sympathetic toward some of our friend’s wild schemes. I don’t know whether it’s unconstitutional or not. I haven’t examined it that carefully, but I’m damned sure it’s dictatorial.”
“Well, if it’s dictatorial isn’t it unconstitutional?”
“That will have to be decided in court and it’ll take some time.”
“When does he get out?”
“When the people get some sense and vote him out, in 1936.”
“How old will you be then? Let me think,” said Edith.
“In 1936 I’ll be fifty-four.”
“And in 1934 is when—”
“Yes. Is when we go to the polls to elect a new governor. And lieutenant governor.”
“You’re going to run, aren’t you? You still plan to?” said Edith.
“As fast as my legs can carry me,” said Joe. “A rather appropriate remark, considering the shape of my legs, or one of them. Feeling the way I do about our friend, I have to run. It isn’t only the honor any more. It’s something I feel inside me, a matter of conscience, not to be too high-sounding about it, but that’s what it is. Anything I can do to shorten his stay in the White House or to make it unpleasant, I’m duty bound to do. I’ll campaign, I’ll spend as much money as I can afford without endangering your financial security. I’ll run as fast as my legs can carry me. And that’s appropriate, too. You know our friend is worse off than I am, much worse. I can walk. He can’t.”
“Yes, you told me that,” said Edith.
“I’m struck by the points of similarity between us. First, the kind of background he had, not too much unlike mine, although he’s trying to destroy people like us. Second, this isn’t a point of similarity, but I did know him slightly and couldn’t stand him, and the point of similarity is that he didn’t like me either. Third, remember when I told you how he’d run for vice-president without any political experience?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And then there’s the similarity of handicaps. Mine isn’t serious, but his is. He contracted infantile paralysis, and I broke my leg. I think it’s fascinating. I could probably think of a better word than fascinating, but fascinating will do.”
“And of course Arthur thinks you look a little like him.”
“Arthur also used to think I looked like Woodrow Wilson. Arthur would like me to be a Democrat so that he could be one too.”
“Not really,” said Edith.
“No, not really, but it does irritate me,” said Joe. “Oh, he told me a rather amusing thing that happened at The Second Thursdays. Last week it was unanimously agreed to stop drinking the customary toast to the President of the United States.”
“Well, I should hope so,” said Edith.
Joe smiled. “They couldn’t wait till next winter. Henry Laubach polled the members and they all agreed.”
“Didn’t he call you?” said Edith.
“He didn’t have to. Arthur said he felt sure he could speak for me, and he was right,” said Joe. “It’s interesting, you know. Woodrow Wilson wasn’t the most popular man with the Second Thursdays, but they kept on drinking the toast.”
“We were at war,” said Edith.
“Yes, so we were. Well, I’d have felt like a damned hypocrite toasting Roosevelt, and now we won’t have to.”
“In 1936 you’ll be fifty-four,” said Edith.
“What made you come back to that?”
“Thinking ahead,” said Edith. “Suppose you were elected lieutenant governor next year. Does the lieutenant governor get to be so wid
ely known that they’ll consider him for President?”
“Frankly, no,” said Joe. “It would be an accident, politically. But I’m afraid 1936 isn’t the year I’ll try for. Nineteen-forty’s the year now.”
“In 1940, you’ll be fifty-eight,” said Edith.
“Yes. Still in my fifties.”
“Your late fifties, though,” said Edith.
He smiled. “Well, I hope by that time our friend will be forgotten and I won’t have to campaign so hard. Is that what you were wondering about?”
“No, just getting the dates arranged in my mind,” said Edith.
“I’ve decided not to spend much time thinking about the presidency. Our friend is a good man to oppose, and if I run for lieutenant governor, I’ll start right out opposing Roosevelt and everything he stands for. I’m not going to bother my head about the other candidate for lieutenant governor. I’m going to campaign against their top man, because they’re going to try to make the short-sighted voters believe that Roosevelt is thinking of them night and day, every step of the way. Preposterous, of course, but that’s what they’ll try to argue. And I’ll bang away at Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt in every speech I make.”
“Are you sure that’s the best idea?”
“Because it might hurt me? Edith, if I campaign against Roosevelt and lose, at least I’ll have campaigned against Roosevelt, not against whoever the Democrats put up for lieutenant governor. And even if I lose the election, it can still be a successful campaign as far as I personally am concerned. There are some fellows at the club that say we have nothing to worry about. Just sit tight and let him ruin himself. I don’t agree with that. In the first place, he’s going to have to be ousted, kicked out. If we just let him hang himself, he’s going to take his own good time doing it. In the second place, I’m not going to pass up a glorious opportunity to say what I think about him, and simultaneously prove that I can be a good campaigner, a fighter. I’ve never had that opportunity because I didn’t want to take it and waste it on a campaign for Common Pleas. When Mike offered me that job, Judge of Common Pleas, he and I both knew that all I had to do was say yes, and go get measured for my robe. I wouldn’t have had to make any speeches. I could have gone to Atlantic City for the whole campaign. But if I want to be elected to anything next year, anything at all, I’ll have to campaign. All Republicans will, because we’re out to beat Roosevelt. It will be a great pleasure.”
