by James Jones
“That’s all right, kid,” he said. “Run along home now.”
And he and his friend turned and went off up the street,
They were going in a direction entirely different from their original one, perhaps to the poolroom across the corner of the square, and I realized suddenly that it had meant nothing at all to him, what he had done. Startled for a moment, but forgetting it immediately in my happiness over my reprieve, I started for home holding the new, unbroken bottle carefully.
Long years afterwards, when I was a freshman in high school and quite grownup myself, I got involved with another boy in stealing cartons of cigarettes from that same grocery store, though under a different management by then. We would steal them in the early morning after completing our paper routes and before the store opened, when the butcher who opened up would let us in to buy cookies and we would hide them in our by-now-empty canvas paperbags. Then we would sell them for a dollar a carton to another man who ran a little lunch counter. We lived very high for a while. Naturally, we were caught eventually—and were very nearly sent to reform school. Luckily, my father had a little influence and the chief of police was a kind man. But I had to pay back my share of the theft, and out of my paper route. It took me almost a year, and I am sure the storekeeper cheated me about how much I truly had stolen. He was that kind of a storekeeper.
At any rate, that was the only time I ever had anything to do with, or even said a word to, Chet Poore, and now I came back from inside my childhood to find myself still standing on the courthouse steps in the spring sun with my friend who had just been convicted of reckless driving but had been fined for drunken driving. For a moment, just for a moment, the square of my home city appeared to me as it had once looked in my childhood. But then, when I finally had to blink my eyes, it shifted and changed back to the way it looks to me today at thirty-one: shrunken, much smaller, much less exciting and romantic and adventurous. The lawyer was just leaving us.
I would like to be able to say something about Justice, whose concrete statue still reposed above the lintel of the door behind us. But I don’t know what to say. I would like to be able to say Chet Poore and the episode of the bottle of cream changed my life in some way or another, but I do not honestly think it did. So I cannot say it. What did it do then? I don’t know. I don’t honestly think it did anything. And Chet Poore? What of him? I would like to know a great deal more about him. And about his life. But what is there to know? And if I knew it, what then? What would I do? I would continue to operate my tavern, that’s what; and perhaps if Chet Poore who must be nearly fifty now ever came into it from time to time I would offer to buy him a drink, except that now he is back in jail again.
At any rate, standing in the warm spring sun on the courthouse steps with my convicted friend, and as we shook hands and separated to go each to our different cars, me to open my tavern in a different town, him to his own business, I still carried with me that definite sharp mental picture: of Chet Poore, huge, tall, grownup to my small child’s eyes, standing over me and staring grinning down at me: as fresh, and clearcut, as on that day I had looked up at him through my tears.
And, today, now, as I operate my tavern in the middle of the twentieth century and try to keep my customers from drinking so much they get picked up for drunken driving (though I often don’t succeed), as I watch my wife getting older and my children growing up and away from me and stand helplessly as middle age rushes upon me faster and faster and faster as it comes, I still have it, that picture. And that feeling of intense smiling pleasure it always gives me. I still cannot help feeling that Chet Poore ought not be in jail. Just as I can’t help feeling that shopkeepers ought not to try and cheat on how much is stolen from them, and get off scot-free.
As it turned out, some time later the lawyer was in my place and informed me that Chet Poore was, after all, a three time loser. That means he is in for life.
Of course, in twenty years he can be paroled.
Sunday Allergy
Unpublished. Just what it is, a divertissement about New York girls and their lives, which ain’t all that romantic all the time. I think it’s kind of charming, cute, and rather poignant. But I’ve alway liked that kind of gals. Nobody ever wanted to buy it. One editor I showed it to said, “My God, Jim! We can’t go around publishing stories like that by you. You’re supposed to be a big tough he-man war-story writer. Send me a war story.” I took it and crept quietly away.
THIS PARTICULAR SATURDAY afternoon Sidney Greene had thought she would go shopping for a new dress. The fall sales had only just started at Saks and Milgrim’s, and if she bought it right away she could get several weeks’ wear out of a summer dress before putting it away for the year. But by mid-morning (which, on Saturdays, meant almost noon) Sidney’s first snifflings and sneezings had already begun to seize her, making it plain the shopping expedition was merely a hopeful essay into wishful thinking.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Cott,” she said in beginning misery around her handkerchief. “I really don’t.”
“You’re going to have to make up your mind that it’s all psychosomatic, that’s what,” Elena Cotrelli her roommate, who was a confirmed night owl and was just getting up, said crisply. “You know it is, and I know it is. Once you admit that to yourself, it’ll just simply go away,” she said positively.
Sidney stared at her fiercely, over her handkerchief. “I know it’s not any such a damn thing. And you know I’ve had an allergy to cats all my life. Even when we were in college I had it. And you know it, darling.” She sneezed, rendingly.
Cott tapped a long-nailed finger emphatically on the temple of her long flowing blonde hair, her fine-nosed handsome Italian face wrinkling with an almost motherly solicitude. “The mind,” she said, continuing on longleggedly in her robe to the bathroom beyond the miniature kitchenette. “All in the mind. Do you think I majored in psychology for four years and don’t know that? It’s a simple, easy, direct, uncomplicated, almost classic, case history. Any fool could diagnose it. If you’re allergic to cats, why don’t you get it week nights then?”
“Simply because I’m not here long enough for it to take effect,” Sidney said scornfully. “I’m working all day. But on the weekends …” She let it trail off, and sneezed.
“On the weekends,” Cott said, taking up the sentence crisply from beyond the open bathroom door, “on the weekends L. Carter Wright, the book reviewer, is off in the country with his three hundred pound wife and three kids, instead of in town. Really, Sidney.” She came back out.
Sidney merely stared at her. “We simply have to get rid of Frederick, Cott,” she said flatly, and looked accusingly over to the sideboard cabinet of the apartment’s little living room where Frederick the Cat, a darkfaced handsome seal-point Siamese, was cleaning himself unconcernedly. “Larry Wright has nothing to do with it.”
“You love Frederick as much as I do,” Cott said confidently and not without amusement. “And you know it. And anyway, we couldn’t kick Frederick out now, after we took his sex away from him when his children all died and it was discovered he had an Rh negative. That would be a dirty trick.”
“Of course I love him,” Sidney said, and sneezed. “Do you think I would have suffered this allergy all this time if I didn’t love him?”
“And that son of a bitch Manny!” Cott said fiercely, suddenly. She flounced down into the single armchair.
Once again Sidney stared at her over her handkerchief, as if she had no comprehension of what Cott had said, or else had not even heard it at all. “I’ve been over Manny a long, long time,” Sidney said coldly. “Months and months and months.”
“Sure,” Cott said. “Sure you are. But you’re not over being unmarried. And neither am I, damn it.”
“You,” Sidney said plaintively, but without the slightest trace of rancor. “You, who are so beautiful, and have so many men chasing you around. How could you be expected to know what I feel?”
Cott did not a
nswer her immediately. Indeed, there was no need to at all. Rooming together seven years in the city, and the last three years of college before that, Cott could always be expected to know what she felt, just as Sidney could always be expected to know what Cott felt. After such long-term intimate close living you could almost believe you actually lived inside the other person’s head as well as your own.
“Yes, and what kind of men are they?” Cott said in a voice of sudden thin, tired depression. “Never any kind that I can fall in love with.” She spoke this last more to herself than to Sidney, in a low voice that not only did not require an answer but actively requested none be made, and the two of them just sat, staring at each other, Cott slumped down in the deep armchair, Sidney sitting up with her feet tucked under her on the day couch, all the knowledge and events of the past eight or nine months churning slowly around in both their heads simultaneously since each knew fully as much about the other as she knew about herself, so that in effect each was living the lives of both, a sort of concerted double viewpoint.
When the news had come about Manny, all Sidney had done was to simply scream. It was the worst sound Cott thought she had ever heard in her life, and Sidney herself thought it was the worst sound she too had ever heard; but that was what she had done. She screamed for two days; she did not go to work; she ate nothing but a little Crosse & Blackwell Shrimp Bisque which Cott fixed for her and lost six pounds, which looked good on her, or, rather, looked good off of her. Manny was the fourth man to have jilted her in eighteen months.
Sidney did not actually scream the two whole entire days; she screamed sort of intermittently. She would sit silent for long hours on the day couch in the little living room of the tiny apartment, either completely silent or weeping quietly into a handkerchief, looking out at Cott from those large brown beautiful injured eyes behind her slightly overlarge nose with the cleft in the end, and then suddenly (when the enormity, the sheer electric shocking fact of it would strike, smite, stab her again) would just simply begin to scream again, a high piercing senseless whistling shriek, of rage, and of indignation, at life, death, birth, breath, and any of the other basic human abstractions.
Actually, the news about Manny had not just “come.” It was Sidney herself who had “brought” it. She had gone out alone to Idlewild in a cab, which she really could ill afford, in order to meet the plane bringing Manny back from his two weeks in Haiti. The irony of it, the terrible irony, was that it was Cott and herself who were responsible for Manny’s two weeks vacation in Haiti “with pay.” The two girls had vacationed there several times themselves—when they were flush from one of Cott’s movie-acting jobs. Their Haitian friends who ran the hotel where they stayed had a young daughter in need of psychiatric care, and Manny was a psychiatrist. They had put him onto the job. Now he was flying back via Pan American with, although Sidney did not know it yet, the news that he had met a beautiful young Haitian mulatto, a singer, and was ditching Sidney to whom he had been engaged for three months, to marry this other girl instead. When he got off the plane he gave her a beautiful watch, which he had saved a great deal on by buying it in a free port like Haiti, then looking at her sheepishly, he had told her. Sidney had thrown his watch on the ground, smashing it; hit him as hard as she was able, which was never much, and even less under the present circumstances of shock; and had run for a cab. She managed to make it home and up the three flights of stairs to their apartment and to Cott, whom she sent down to pay off the cab she had not had the money for, before she broke down and collapsed.
Cott, of course, had stood by her, as she had stood by Cott’s tragedies, as they both of them had always done for each other since they had become friends at Cornell and started rooming together their second year. Sidney had sent her over to his apartment in the middle of the night with all of Manny’s shirts and underwear and ties he had kept in the apartment. Manny had been tearing his hair with distress, he didn’t want to hurt Sidney he told Cott, but he didn’t love her, had never loved her, and he did love this other girl. What was he to do. Cott had felt sorry for him but it was a dirty, stinking, cheap, gutless trick Manny had pulled, any way you looked at it, Cott had said. At least he could have written her a preparatory letter, couldn’t he?
Sidney who thought as much herself, even if she couldn’t bring herself to feel so much sympathy for him, and resented it in Cott, had spend most of the night walking around and around the block, making up and rehearsing her speech she was going to deliver to Manny. The total import of it was that she hated to see him ruin his life and career by marrying a girl he hardly knew, an honest-to-God real peasant, and a Haitian one at that, a schvartsa yet, but that if that was what he wanted, was what he had to do, she understood and would step down and he would not have to worry about her giving him any “trouble.” She thought it a rather good speech, and early in the morning called him up and made him come over and spent an hour downstairs sitting with him in his car out in front of the apartment, delivering her oration. And finally, after that, and after those two days of intermittent screaming, she had been able to pull herself together and go back to work. Back to her familiar old job at Celebrities, Incorporated, Advertising Agency (on 49th just off Madison), which she had thought she would soon be giving up forever.
It had been just about a month after that that the first of her really serious attacks of allergy had hit her.
Sidney had had allergies before, of course—mild ones—and back in college she had suffered from asthma and hay fever especially around exam time it seemed. But never had she suffered anything of the magnitude of what hit her this time. This first attack, this first really bad one, had come on a Saturday night when Cott was going out for the evening with Eddie Maynar, the TV and short story writer. It started early in the day around noon and got progressively worse until by the time Eddie Maynar came for his date with Cott, it was already out of the question that Cott could go.
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie Maynar said disgruntledly and with chagrin. At least you could have called me. Can’t you get a doctor or something?” He had at himself down, still in his topcoat, in the single armchair across from the day ouch where Sidney lay gasping for breath, her nose and eyes streaming.
“Well, I can’t just go out and leave her here alone like this!” Cott said heatedly. Do you think I’m some land of insensitive animal?” And Cott, the beautiful Cott, lad swept across the room indignantly to sit down by Sidney and feel her forehead for temperature. There wasn’t any, but at midnight, long after Eddie Maynar had given up in disgust and disgruntledly gone off alone dateless, Sidney had reached such a state that she was actually turning slowly blue, slowly strangling before Cott’s very eyes. And in the end there was no choice, even as late as the hour was, but to ring up their doctor and have him come over.
Big, shambling, perpetually rumpled looking, and elderly, a professional and cute psychologist as well as an expert diagnostician, a sort of combination spiritual father and nurse to both girls as well as their doctor, he came ambling disgustedly over carting his black satchel. He had been at a theatrical party given by another of his actress patients and had had to leave it. And after giving Sidney a shot of adrenalin that quieted her down and relaxed her enough so she could start breathing again, Doc Bernstein and Cott talked about it.
“But has she ever had anything like this before?” he wanted to know.
“I told you, no!” Cott said. “In school she used to get asthma around examination time. But never anything as bad as this! I’m sure it’s all in her mind and he’s making it up.”
“Sure,” Doc Bernstein said disgustedly. “Sure, it’s all in her head and she’s making it up. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t kill her just as easy as if it was real. And I told her that. I told her if she doesn’t stop playing these silly damned games with herself she’s going to wake up someday and find it’s for real and find herself dead. I’ve about run out of patience with her, Cott.”
“Well, she just i
sn’t happy,” Cott said, and told him all about Manny’s defection.
“Christ, can’t you find her a husband around somewhere?” Doc Bernstein said disgustedly.
“Find her one! I can’t even find myself one.”
“There must be somebody around somewhere that the two of you could get married to.”
“There is. Gobs of them. But what good is that? We’ve both of us turned down more chances to get married than you ever did when you were single, I’ll bet. Would you have us just marry any damned body?”
“Well, it might be better than slowly choking to death,” Doc Bernstein said hourly. “I get awful tired of hysterical women in my business. How far’s a doctor supposed to go? Does he have to find husbands for his patients, too?”
“We’re neither one of us getting any younger, Doc,” Cott grinned at him. “I’m nearly twenty-nine, and Sidney’s almost thirty.” She paused. “They’re either a slobs or else they’re already married,” she said thoughtfully. “And wanton lovers.”
“There’re only about ten thousand girls like you two in this town,” Doc Bern stein said. “And I guess every damned one of them is my patient. Why the he don’t you all go back to the Middle-west where you came from?”
“What? and marry one of the stupid middle-class slobs we all came to the city to get away from marrying?” Cott said. “Anyway, what would all the married men in New York do for lovers if we all went home? The business of the whole city would disintegrate. And with it, the nation.”
