“I don’t know if I could.”
He could see she was eager to accept, but holding back. Certainly she must know by now he wasn’t pulling her leg. He’d never been more sincere in his life than he was this minute. “You’d make me a very happy man, Gloria.”
“I’d have to ask the boss.”
“Do. Will you? Right now?”
“Yes.” She flushed, smiling. “Wait a sec, I’ll be right back.”
She left him and went to the rear of the room where the proprietor sat alone at a table reading the evening paper. As she bent over his shoulder and began speaking, he saw the man turn and look up at him with a puzzled frown on his forehead. He bent his attention on his own reflection in the mirror while Gloria continued to talk with the boss.
A wonderful idea—Wick would certainly approve of this! He couldn’t wait to tell Wick—Wick wouldn’t mind any of it in the least. He was doing the girl a kindness, being nice to someone else for a change. For once he wasn’t on the receiving end. He wanted genuinely to put himself in the role of benefactor and gentleman and give Gloria as good a time as he possibly could.
Apart from all that: what an experience it would be; almost a study. He was curious to know what the evening would be like, what kind of place she would want to go to, the things she would say, the things she would find pleasure in. He would try to fill all that Gloria longed for and looked up to in her idea of the ideal escort, which tonight would be him. Think what he himself might learn before the evening was out, about places he’d never seen the inside of (Danceland?), about young aspiring girls of her class to whom a date of this kind (and a gentleman at that) was as near to romance—so they thought, perhaps—as it would ever be given them to come. He would be careful and watchful to get the most out of it himself, to add to his own experience and knowledge—not drink too much, only enough to make the evening a pleasant social one for Gloria. He would be careful, too, to act the gentleman only insofar as Gloria understood the term. He must not embarrass her by ordering things she had never heard of, translating the French if there was any, taking a taxi when a bus or walking would do. With Gloria at his side he’d remember not to say “Please” and “Thank You” to the waiter; he’d join in the fun with people he didn’t know, if that was what she wanted; buy her a gardenia or an orchid, a lavender orchid of course, but not a camellia. Certainly he would not wear his dinner-jacket.… All this, Wick would understand. Wick wouldn’t mind his drinking at all, under these circumstances. He’d approve, even commend him for it. The evening promised to be a wonderful, a happy experience, something he would enjoy telling Wick all about later and hearing Wick’s approval of the whole thing.
Gloria was back at his elbow. “Is eight o’clock too late?” she said, almost under her breath. “I can go.”
“Gloria, that’s wonderful!”
“You don’t mind waiting till eight?”
“Hell no.”
Her face fell. “Now don’t talk like that, Mr. Birnam, or I don’t want to go.”
“Excuse me, Gloria, I’m just so glad, I guess. I forgot my manners. Where would you like to dine?”
She loved the word. Tentatively she suggested her idea. “Would—would The New Yorker roof be too much?”
“I think we could manage it very nicely. I’ll ’phone for a table.”
“They have a floor-show, you know. Ice and everything.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
“You’ve never been there?”
“Not yet. And you know? I’ve always wanted to go.”
“It’ll be the first time for you, too!”
“Let’s see.” He glanced at the clock. “Suppose I go home and take a tub and maybe get a bite to eat—”
“Don’t eat too much!”
“I won’t. Then call for you here at sharp eight.”
She touched his sleeve. “Listen. Do you care? I’ll have to wear this old thing I’ve got on.”
He glanced down at the brown satin dress. “Why, you look perfect!”
“There wouldn’t be time to go all the way home and change. Not when I don’t get off till eight.”
“What’s the matter with it? You look all dressed up, Gloria, just as you are. And I’ll buy you a flower and you’ll look even more so.”
“You’re awfully nice to me, Mr. Birnam. I told you you were a terribly nice person.”
“Now none of that or I won’t go. Sam, here!” He tossed a ten-dollar-bill on the bar and Sam made the change and counted it out to him. “Goodbye, Gloria. I’m so glad you’re going to do this for me.”
“For you. What about me?”
“We’ll talk about you later. ’Bye. I’ll be here on the dot.”
When he walked out into the street, he realized he was suddenly very tight. Why wouldn’t he be? He’d had at least six or seven in Sam’s bar alone. He supposed the stimulus of conversation with Gloria had kept his wits in order, but now he felt everything beginning to sag and blur and drop. What he needed was a good drink, a stiff one, a straight one, to bring him around.
There was an empty bottle from yesterday on the living room table and a quart more than half full. He tossed the empty pint into the leather wastebasket. It landed in the bottom with a loud kunk. He poured half a glass of Scotch into the sticky tumbler that had been standing there since noon. He carried it to the big chair and settled himself for a comfortable slow drink. He shook out a cigarette and fished in his pockets for a match. He came up with a paper folder advertising “JACK’S—in Charles Street—WHERE GOOD FELLOWS GET TOGETHER. Close Cover Before Striking Match.” He drained the glass almost at a swallow and read the advertisement again.
If it wasn’t one thing it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you’d been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless.
Feel? Be.
He ought to stay away from the Village. Knew better, after what happened once in 10th Street. Ought to stay away from bars, for that matter, but certainly Village bars. A few years ago, when Rudolph’s was still a speakeasy, he had been drinking alone at the crowded bar one Saturday night. He wasn’t tight, not yet. He was saving that for later—had a quart of gin at home, looked forward to making a night of it in his chair, and that’s where he was headed for after a few preliminary drinks here. As he started to leave, someone touched him on the shoulder.
“Have one with me before you go.”
He turned. It was the fellow who had been standing next to him since he came in, but this was the first he had really noticed him. He was a young man about his own age and class, dressed very much the same as he was. Good suit; presentable; decent manners. He was shy, but friendly. He looked a little worried; also faintly belligerent; the frown challenged Don not to misunderstand the impulse which prompted the invitation. Don got it at once; and as he recognized, like a veteran before a neophyte, the stage of drinking the other had reached—the confidential, the confiding stage—he began to feel superior, amused, tolerant, generous, and warmly friendly himself. “Why, thank you very much,” he said with a smile. “And then perhaps you’ll have one with me.” They exchanged names and ordered drinks. Amid the babble of the bar Don missed the last name; but it didn’t matter, the first was Brad.
“You probably wonder why I did that,” Brad said.
“No I don’t, at all.” Don smiled to reassure him.
“I’m staying up late tonight and I feel like talking to somebody.”
“I understand.” Oh, he understood. How many times indeed, under just such circumstances, in just such places, had he been in on conversations of just this sort. That familiar opening line: it was the prelude to who knew what confidences—boring, very likely; nothing to confide about; intimate but unrevealing and finally elusive or even resentful. Oh well, he could afford to listen awhile and ask the necessary colorless questions to give the guy relief. On many an occasion h
e himself had wanted a stranger’s ear, and got it. Now he gave his own.
“I’ve got to ’phone Chicago at midnight and it’s rather on my mind.”
“Oh?” Don fiddled with his glass, knowing it would all come out in due time.
“My father had an operation in Chicago today. I can’t ’phone till twelve to find out how it went.” Brad addressed his highball. “I’m very fond of my Dad. He’s a minister.” He glanced sharply at Don. “But he’s a good guy!”
Don smiled to himself. God knows I can see how a man could be a minister and still be a good guy, if that’s what’s worrying you. “I’m sure he is,” he said. Then, in case Brad got the idea he was thinking different, he asked, to show his interest, “Does he have a church in Chicago?”
“No. Philadelphia.”
“Oh? I went to school in Philadelphia.”
“Did you,” Brad said. “So did I.”
“The U of P?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that funny. Because so did I.” Normally Don gave a wide berth to Pennsylvania guys, but tonight, somehow, it didn’t matter. This one was a little tight, and he could steer the conversation where and how he pleased, or, if things got close, pull out whenever he liked. For once, he was in the driver’s seat, because—as always happened when drinking with someone else—the tighter the other got, the soberer and clearer he became.
Acquainted now, with something found in common, Brad grew a little shyer. “What Class were you?”
“ ’24.”
“Well for God sake. So was I.”
Nothing so remarkable about that, to either of them. They merely exclaimed out of politeness. It had been a big class, of course. Couple of thousand. Not at all unusual that they’d never met or had been there at the same time. Don could and should have left it at that. Ordinarily would have. And knew that ordinarily he would have. But now he was engaged by the idea, interested, and tempted to go into it further. “I suppose, if we cast about long enough,” he said, “we’d turn up some mutual friend.”
“I suppose so.”
He named the first one that came into his head—and him because of who he was and what he had meant to him. “Ever know Johnny Barker?”
“Johnny Barker! Why, Johnny Barker was my best friend!”
Now wait a minute. This was going too fast and cockeyed. Take it easy here, don’t make any mistakes, somebody’s apparently made one already. For how could Johnny Barker have been his best friend when he was your best friend. But you couldn’t say that, of course. He said, “Now, that’s very odd. I knew Johnny very well. For a while, there, we were inseparable. And I knew all the fellows he knew, or—or thought I did. But I—I don’t remember you.”
“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you, as a matter of fact. Because Johnny and I were pals all through college. In fact we were fraternity brothers.”
“Johnny Barker?”
“Certainly.”
Don picked up his glass and looked at the whisky. “You mean you were Kappa U?”
“Johnny and I both. What were you?”
Cockeyed wasn’t the word. He felt he was being made an absolute fool of—by whom or what, he didn’t know. That was the trouble, he couldn’t tell. Not by Brad. Brad obviously meant what he said, thought he was speaking the truth. Not by the drink, either. He wasn’t tight. He had never been soberer in his life. But all this had no basis in reality whatever. Here were facts different from what he knew to be the facts. He knew this guy had no connection with Kappa U whatever, not the Chapter and house and gang he had known, not when he went to school. He could almost suspect a trick or a trap but for the fact that it was he himself who had first mentioned the U of P or brought up the name of Johnny Barker. It was dangerous ground, the more so because it didn’t make sense. The further into it he got, the more fantastic it became. Like when you first experience an earthquake and foundations cease to be foundations at all. Was he completely crazy? Was he hearing right? But he had to go on with it. Some devilish compulsion insisted that he find out and be put on the right track. Or the wrong track, even. But any track.
“Now listen, fella,” he said, very calmly. “I don’t doubt your word at all, so don’t get me wrong. But there’s something screwy about all this.”
“Why?”
“Well, now look. I knew all those boys very well, the Kappa U pledges. True, I was only there one year, but I knew the whole freshman crowd, all twelve of them. Joe Bruce, Hans von Wille, Arch Gilbert, Potter Smith—”
“Yes, and Shrimp Taylor, Russ Gerard—”
“That’s right,” Don said. “I knew all of them. I—I lunched at the house, often. But I don’t remember you in the outfit.”
“Oh, I get it. You only knew them as pledges, in freshman year. Well, I wasn’t taken in till May. They kicked a guy out just before Easter Week and that made a place for me.”
Like all other moments of crisis, of course, the incident had never ended. It sent its reverberations down to this very second, to this very place, and all but shook the glass from his hand. Was the incident finally closed? But in a sense, it was only happening now, for the first time. Out of the past, across miles and years, the accusing finger of the Senior Council pointed at him over the bar. He raised the highball and drank as calmly as if they had been talking about the weather. “Who was the guy,” he heard himself saying, “—and what did they kick him out for?”
“I don’t remember his name. Not sure that I ever heard it, because the fellows didn’t talk about it much. But it seems he had a crush on Tracey Burke and Tracey got fed up. He showed the Senior Council a letter the kid wrote. Hero-worship stuff, but pretty passionate. Well, they couldn’t have that sort of thing in a fraternity, so they kicked him out. Lucky for me, of course. I’d always wanted to be a Kappa U but they were full up, till this happened. Remember Tracey Burke? Upperclassman.”
It was outrageous. Outrageous. (Was there a stronger word? Were words ever strong enough?) Oh, not the story, not the incident itself. He had been over that so many times it had ceased to be anything but inane. But outrageous that this should and could happen tonight, or ever. Out of all the how many millions of people in the world, outrageous that this one should have come here, to this bar, at this time, and engaged him in conversation. What could he do about it? Tell Brad I’m the guy who made the place for you—which was one way of putting it? No, he couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair to scare him half to death; Brad wasn’t to blame. What he could do and did do was go home and drink himself blind in five minutes, just as he was going to do now. He could and did (but he’d never do that again) ring up the Kappa U house in the middle of the night and ask some sleepy freshman if anybody knew where Johnny Barker ’24 could be located. Why? Because he had to know if Johnny ever believed the story and what he thought about it now after all these years. But as far as Johnny was concerned, when he finally did get hold of him, it was just some drunk calling up from New York; and he said, bored and sleepy as the sleepy freshman: “Write me about it sometime.”
He got up from the big chair and filled the glass half full again and then half again. Remember Tracey Burke? Thank God he was drunk now and one more would finish the job. He went back to the chair, determined this time to drink more slowly and feel himself go and appreciate the going. “Outrageous.” Ridiculous word. But some words were strong enough. One was. Tracey’s word and the way he had said it. He swallowed some of the Scotch. But the raw stuff, hot and cutting, would gag him if he lingered over it. Not daring to taste or pause, he finished the rest at a gulp. He let the glass fall to the carpet and lay back in the chair, in sudden sleep.
Somewhile later (he did not know what time and was too foggy to think or look) he awoke. For a moment he sat staring at the brightly lighted room. Every lamp in the place was on. He got up, shaking with chill and cold, and turned them all off but one. He was so tired he could gladly die. All he thought of and longed for was a sleep forever. He emptied the bo
ttle into the sticky glass, filling it almost to the top. He shut his eyes and drank it down, leaning against the table for support; then, coughing and sputtering, his throat and stomach afire, he staggered over to the couch and fell at once into sound sleep again.
PART THREE
The Joke
A telephone was ringing somewhere. He opened his eyes. Where was he. Home? His mother’s? Oh. Here.
He listened to the ’phone. It rang six or seven times and then stopped. He closed his eyes, relieved.
It began to ring again. It rang out from the bedroom, stinging him like some nasty metallic kind of gnat, impossible to fight off. Whoever it was had thought maybe they’d got the wrong number, maybe, and tried again. He had no intention of answering it so that didn’t matter, but he was fully awake now and that did.
The telephone finally stopped ringing and then didn’t ring any more. He looked at the clock. It was half-past nine. The room was filled with light, a kind of glare reflected from the bright sun on the back of the apartment building across the garden. He turned his head on the pillow and looked around to see where the bottle was and found it. Oh there it was, all right. On the table. A great big quart. Large as life and twice as empty.
Was he ever going to learn? Ever be wise and smart and sober enough one night, or one day, to see that he had something put by for tomorrow? Did he always have to drink it all up? Was he going to keep on forever and ever being trapped for a fool, by no one but himself?
He got up to see if it was really empty but really empty, he meant of the last little sip. It was. Trust him. Trust the drunken hog of the night before. And the stupid fool. Never put off till tomorrow what you can drink today, that’s me. As he stood at the table, he realized how weak he was. This was hangover. But the real thing. Thank God he was dressed, he wouldn’t have the dressing to go through, the fumbling with buttons, the insoluble puzzle that would be the shoelaces. He trembled like a high-strung terrier—shook all over with little fine tremors, a minute palsy. Not so damned minute, either. Now what was he going to do?
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