“But you don’t mind eating food that they’ve prepared,” Sue said. “In fact you greatly enjoy the idea.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m Jewish,” Sue said. Her eyes were burning black. Her voice was hard. She was quite drunk. “So I have some faint idea of what it feels like to be a Negro. Other things being equal, I prefer Negroes to whites. Especially unreconstructed Southern whites.”
“Well!” said Mrs. Merriwell. The word made a rushing sound in her mouth. She stood up with her unfinished plate in one hand and her highball in the other. “You said you wanted to talk to me privately, Gene. Are you coming?”
Halford got up unwillingly, murmured his excuse, and went into the house at her angry clicking heels.
“That’s an insult she’ll never get over,” I said to Mary. “Who is she?”
“Secretary to one of the men at Hickam. She’s probably one of Halford’s sources.”
Eric’s angular face was very stiff, on the point of crumpling in anger or despair. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said to Sue. “She’ll tell everybody in town that you’re a nigger-lover.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she said in a high thin voice. “Maybe I am.”
His face reddened and grew pale in blotches. “Excuse me. How interesting.”
“And don’t try to snub me, either, my ambulating ego. Have you always confined yourself strictly to Mem Sahibs? Pray tell us about your amorous exploits, gentlemen.”
She was so evidently drunk that Eric decided he needn’t take her seriously. “You’re getting as tight as a tick, my girl. No more liquor for you. Can’t anyone, for God’s sake, think of an impersonal subject to talk about?”
“We were talking about love,” I said. “There’s nothing more impersonal than love. Everybody has it, shows the same symptoms, and does the same things about them.”
“Nonsense,” Mary said pleasantly. “Love is a highly individual art. A great many people aren’t even capable of it. From what you just said, I suspect you’re one of them.”
“From what you just said, I suspect you aren’t.”
An orchestra began to play in the ballroom. Sue told Eric that she would like to dance. They went away together in unconscious step, as if they knew each other very well and lived by the same fundamental rhythms. She was clinging a little blindly to his arm. As they passed through the door into the bright light, he looked down at her with anxious tenderness in the very set of his shoulders.
“Sue and Eric are old friends, aren’t they?” I said.
“For a year or so, I guess. He looks her up whenever he’s in port. She’s in love with him.”
“It’s funny he didn’t mention her to me before we got here.”
“No it isn’t. The affair isn’t going too well. Eric’s married, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I know his wife. She’s crazy about him. I think he’s gotten himself into a box.”
“Sue’s the one to be sorry for.” Her glance passed over my face swiftly. “Are you married?”
“No. It’d be quite safe to dance with me, I think.”
It was a six-piece scratch orchestra, but she danced so well that she made me feel expert and daring. Her high heels made her almost as tall as I was, and I had a chance to study her face. It was a Leonardo face, with full red lips, a straight and passionate nose, high delicate temples, and mutable eyes that altered with her mood in color, depth, and meaning. Her body was whalebone and plush. Her legs were a perfect rhyme.
After a couple of dances she said, “I have to go pretty soon.”
“Why?”
“I go on the air at nine-fifteen.”
“Say, you’re not the girl that announces the record programs?”
“Sue and I alternate. Have you heard us?”
“The last few nights I have, when we were coming in. No wonder I felt as if I’d known you before.”
“Don’t be irrelevant. I want to know what you think of the programs.”
“I liked them. I like your voice, too. It’s funny I didn’t recognize it.”
“It’s always different over the air.”
The music started again and we danced to it. I couldn’t see Sue and Eric on the floor.
“Any criticisms?” Mary said.
“No. Well, not enough Ellington. There’s never enough Ellington on any record program. Too much Don’t Fence Me In. I admire both Crosby and Cole Porter, but I can imagine a more fortunate marriage of their talents.”
“I know, but a lot of people like it. And the best Ellington aren’t so easy to get. I broke our Portrait of Bert Williams last week, and I almost sat right down and cried.”
“Pinch me somebody quick. The girl in the dream always liked Portrait of Bert Williams.”
“You wouldn’t like it if I pinched you. I’m a very intense pincher. What dream?”
“The dream I had. I’m a very intense dreamer. And it worked. The dream came real.”
She pulled back a little and looked levelly into my eyes. “You say it well. Have you been out a long time?”
“Just a year. It seemed like a long time. That’s why the dream was necessary.”
“Don’t make me feel like a necessity. Since I came out here I’ve learned how it feels to be something there’s a shortage of.”
“The last pack of cigarettes under the counter?”
“The scrap of meat thrown to the wolves. I’d rather feel like a human being.”
“There’s barely a trace of canine in my nature.”
She withdrew her eyes, and because I wanted them back I changed my tack:
“How long have you been out here?”
“Just a few months. Five and a half.”
“Are you from Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois?”
“Your ear’s pretty good. I lived in Cleveland. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“I’ll have to leave at the end of this dance.”
“Let me drive you over. I can borrow Eric’s jeep.”
“That would be nice. I haven’t seen Eric or Sue for quite a while, though. Maybe they’re out in the garden.”
While Mary went upstairs to get her coat, I searched the first floor for Eric and Sue. They weren’t on the dance-floor, they weren’t in the darkened dining-room, though other couples were. I walked clear around the house on the verandah, but I couldn’t find them. The night was very dark. There was a full moon, but almost opaque clouds showed where it was only by a faint glow. Cascades of lights were twinkling far up the hills, but the dark clouds which squatted heavily and eternally on Oahu’s peaks loomed against the sky like a dismal fate.
I decided against searching the garden, because it would be embarrassing. There were soft voices among the flowers, and shadowy double shapes both vertical and horizontal.
When I found Eric eventually, he was by himself. He was sitting on an upturned wastebasket in a corner of the men’s head, nursing a dying bottle of bourbon. The damp glitter in his eyes had frozen into glassiness. His thin lips were loose and purplish. His torso was lax and wavering. There were individual drops of sweat oozing from his hairline onto his blank forehead. Once or twice I had seen men drunker, but they were not able to sit up.
“Sue’s gone away and left me,” he said in a muffled singsong. “She went away and left me all alone. She’s a hellish woman, Sam. Don’t ever get mixed up with those little dark babies. They’re deadly nightshade. You can’t get over ’em.”
I wasn’t enjoying the conversation, and didn’t want to keep Mary waiting. “Will you lend me your jeep? I should be back in an hour.”
He found the key after a laborious exploration of his clothes. “Take it away, Sam. I don’t know where you’re going and I don’t care.”
“You’d better go upstairs and lie down.”
“Don’t want to lie down. Sit here until the cows come home. Here with the writing on the wall. Lovely writing on the wall, expresses my sentiments.” He chante
d several four-letter words. “There’s my sentiments. Bloody but unbowed. A jug of wine and thou beside me singing in the urinal.” He giggled.
I went away from his unhappy nonsense and got to the lobby in time to be waiting when Mary came downstairs. She looked a little pale and tense.
“Is Sue up there?”
“No. I thought she might be lying down in the powder-room. She drank too much before supper. But there’s nobody there.”
“She probably went home. Eric’s in bad condition. I found him in the john.”
“Perhaps she did. I’ll call from the studio.”
It was a five-minute drive to the broadcasting station. When we got there Mary left me on a folding chair in the darkened audience room, and went to phone. She came back in a minute and said in a worried voice:
“She isn’t at home, at least not yet. I hope she didn’t pass out somewhere.”
“She’ll turn up,” I said.
“I still have a few minutes before the broadcast. Would you like to look at the record library? Or would you rather stay and listen to them?”
She moved her head towards the glassed-in broadcasting room. Five or six Hawaiians wearing rather dirty leis were playing ukuleles, steel guitars, and a bull fiddle. The current tune was Blue Hawaii.
I said: “I think I can tear myself away from all this exotic glamor.”
She led me down a dark passageway to a door which she unlocked. She found the switch and turned on the lights in the record library. It was a high-ceilinged narrow room completely lined with shelves which were filled with records. She showed me the various sections: the classics, the semi-classics, the new popular hits, the stand-bys which never grow old, the transcribed programs from the big American chains, and a set of big discs on which complete Armed Services programs were recorded.
I saw a record I knew, took it off the shelf and handed it to her. “Play this.”
She put the record on a turntable. It was Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, the organ version. We stood together and listened to the lilting melancholy music which Waller had squeezed out of an organ in Paris years ago. I half-turned toward her, impelled by the powerful sexuality of the music. Perhaps she recognized my intention. She said in a brisk technical way:
“Any questions?”
When the record was finished, I said: “I did a little broadcasting when I was in college. They used to be pretty strict about timing our scripts. How do you time record programs?”
“It’s easy enough with the one-disc programs. They’re already timed when we get them. And some of the ninety-sixes and hundred-and-twelves are standardized.”
“Ninety-sixes?”
“Ninety-six turns to a record. They go around ninety-six times. The ones that are specially made for broadcasting are standardized so that you can measure the time right on the record. They send us a little ruler with them, laid out in units of time instead of inches.”
“That means that the speed of the turntable must be standardized too.”
“That’s right. But the ordinary platters which Sue and I mostly use aren’t standardized. The grooving may even vary from one side to the other, depending on the kind of music.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Whether the music is high or low. It’d take too long to explain. You can always time a record by playing it ahead of time, of course. But often we just trust to luck. If we have to fill in at the end we can always let the theme-song run through twice instead of once. It isn’t as if we were on a national hookup.”
She glanced at an electric clock in a corner of the room. It was ten minutes after nine. “I’ve got to leave you now.”
“Can I help you carry the records, or anything?”
“Oh, no thanks. They’re already in by the mike. We’ve got a boy, a little Chinese, who takes them in in a cart.”
She turned out the lights, locked the door, and left me at the entrance to the soundproof room. I listened to the broadcast through the loudspeaker in the audience room. Her voice was deep for a woman, and steady, the only kind of female speaking voice that sounds well over the air. She went in for quietly kidding her audience, more by inflecting her voice than by what she said.
I gathered that she had fan-mail. Most of the records she played were requests. I began to compose a fan-letter to her in my head. Though her low voice flooded the room when she spoke, vibrating in every corner, she seemed very remote behind the plate-glass partition. Very remote and desirable. Before I had put into the letter all the things I wanted to say, the broadcast was over.
“All set to go back?” I said when she rejoined me. “It’s only half an hour till curfew.”
“I have a curfew pass, on account of the midnight broadcasts. I don’t want to go home till I make sure Sue is all right.”
“She’ll be all right. I may have to carry Eric up the gangplank, though.”
When we got back to Honolulu House the party was at its climax. One of the officers had joined the orchestra and was tearing off hot licks on a clarinet as high as a kite. A fat jiggling woman was dancing in the middle of the floor, snapping her fingers and letting out periodic squeals. A weaving ring of men and women, which included Halford and Mrs. Merriwell, was dancing around and around her. Two or three indefatigable couples were jitterbugging at their own end of the room, leaping and whirling in mad silent ecstasy. Other couples were leaving.
We found Eric lying stone cold, but snoring passionately, on a settee in the dining-room. The big Negro steward whom he had called Hector Land was hovering over him as if he thought something should be done but didn’t know what.
“Just leave him for now,” I said. “If he doesn’t come out of it in the next few minutes I’ll take him back to the ship.”
“Yessir. I just wanted to ask him if we could get any more ice. We’re all out of ice.”
“It doesn’t make any difference now, anyway. Have you seen Miss Sholto? The young lady who was with Mr. Swann at supper?”
“No, sir. I haven’t seen her all night. Maybe she’s out in the garden.”
“Shall we try the garden?” Mary said.
We went out the back door and stood on the verandah for a minute, letting our eyes get used to the darkness. I put my hand on her waist but she turned away out of my grasp.
“Don’t be premature,” she said seriously. “I came to this party to drink and dance, not to be made love to.”
“Premature is a good word. There’s a future in it.”
“Is there? You talk ahead of yourself. I like the way you talk, though.”
“Words used to be my business.”
“That’s the trouble. I don’t know whether there’s much connection between what you say and what you are. A lot of servicemen away from home have lost track of themselves. God, am I talking like a Sunday School teacher?”
“Go right ahead. A woman’s softening influence is just what I need.”
“It’s true of all of us, I guess. Not just servicemen. There aren’t many people I know that haven’t lost track of themselves.”
It was queer to be talked at that way by a blonde I was trying to make, but what she said struck home. Ever since I left Detroit I had felt dislocated, and after my ship went down it was worse. Sometimes I felt that all of us were adrift on a starless night, singing in the dark, full of fears and laughing them off with laughter which didn’t fool anyone.
On this side of the house the verandah was roofless. I looked up at the night sky hanging huge over the mountains. The somber clouds on the peaks parted for a moment and let the moon sail through, trailing a single bright star like a target sleeve.
“I think that’s what must have happened to Eric and Sue,” I said. “They thought it didn’t matter, and it turned into very bad medicine for both of them.”
“I wonder if she’ll ever be happy again,” Mary said.
I wasn’t listening. Something against the wall of the house had caught my eye, and I looked up and found Sue Sholt
o in the moonlight. Her head was cocked birdlike on one side as if she was waiting for the answer to a question, and her tongue protruded roguishly. Under her dangling feet were three yards of empty air. Her whole slight weight was supported by a yellow rope knotted under her ear. Her eyes were larger and blacker than they had been in life.
2
THE clouds came together again, blotting out the moon, like shadowy giants huddled in a conference of evil. But not before Mary had followed my look and seen what I saw.
“She’s killed herself,” she said in a high unnatural voice. “I was afraid something had happened to her.” She beat her clenched fists together with a dull futile sound. “I should have stayed with her.”
“Do you know what room that is? Nobody could reach her from here.” I gestured upward and my hand flew higher than I intended, out of my control. We looked up again. With the moon gone Sue Sholto was an obscure shadow hanging over us. Only her feet were visible in the light from below, stirring almost imperceptibly with the twist in the hemp. There was a hole in the toe of one of her stockings, and I could see the red polish shining on a toenail.
“I think it’s the ladies’ room, but I can’t be sure. It looks out the back.”
“Stay downstairs with the people,” I said. “I’ll go up.”
I found Lieutenant Savo, the ship’s doctor, on the dance floor. When I told him what I had seen his Vandyke wobbled once and set firmly. He was up the stairs ahead of me.
The ladies’ room was actually three rooms with interconnecting doors: a well-lighted dressing-room with mirrors and a dressing table, a washroom on one side of it, and on the other a dark little room containing nothing more than a few armchairs and a couch. Dr. Savo had attended a girl at a previous party in this room, and he explained that it was used only in case of sickness or alcoholic coma.
I found the light switch and saw that the room had been used for something else. The couch, wide, lumpy and chintz-covered, was jammed against the wall under the sill of the single window. Tied around its bowed walnut legs was the other end of the yellow rope which supported Sue Sholto. We drew her up through the open window and found that she was easy to lift. But in the harsh light cast by the obsolete ceiling chandelier she was not easy to look at. The noose under her ear was clumsily knotted but it had served its purpose. There was nothing left in her face which Eric Swann could have loved.
Trouble Follows Me Page 2
