The Cocktail Waitress

by James M. Cain

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t notice.”

  “Well, he sure did. That boy liked you.”

  “They make us wear those things, you know.”

  “I imagine it helps with tips, from male customers anyway.”

  “It seems to.”

  She looked down at her own torso and shook her head. “And I’m working here. If I had what you have …”

  I left her a dollar as tip. It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t fill out a blouse the way Liz and I could.

  Back in the house I looked up Elizabeth Baumgarten in the phone book and dialed her number. When she answered I said: “Liz, this is Joan. I got my phone turned on, and in celebration thereof, called you first of all.” She took it big and flung off a couple of gags, then said she’d stop by around 3:30 and run me down to work. I told her: “Make it three, so we can visit a little while,” and she said she would. Then I set the alarm and lay down for a little nap, to let the breakfast digest. I got up just after two, put on light tan pantyhose, the trunks, flat-heel comfortable shoes, and a peasant blouse of my own, as the other wasn’t fresh anymore, and needed a dunk in the basin. I was hanging it up on the shower rail when the doorbell clicked, with a knock following, and I skipped down the hall to answer. But instead of Liz it was Ethel. Her eyes opened wide at my costume. “Oh,” I said. “Hello, Ethel.”

  “I’m here for Tad’s things,” she told me.

  “Well come in, why don’t you? Act sociable.”

  “… If he has any things, that is.”

  I didn’t appreciate this crack, but I still played it friendly and took no notice. “Of course he has things,” I assured her, motioning her inside.

  “I only say so because you seemed to have so little, when I first came here on Sunday. It was truly a shock.”

  “So you said at the time.”

  She continued to speak, not bothering to face me, as she walked past me to the living room: “I mean, not even electricity, Joan! I don’t see how you could live that way, how you could raise a child that way.”

  Before I followed I glanced at her car, which she’d put in the drive, to make sure Tad wasn’t in it, locked up to bake in the sun. He wasn’t, and I went in the living room. By then she’d taken a seat, but resumed her stare at my outfit, especially my trunks. “I see you’ve noticed my uniform,” I said. “I’ve taken a job. I work in a cocktail bar—the Garden of Roses, down the street.”

  “… Joan, I’d be ashamed!”

  “Of what? Working for a living?”

  “There are livings that don’t require you to dress like… a tramp.”

  “Find me one that’ll have me and I’ll apply. In the meantime, I’m earning good money and all I’m doing for it is bringing people drinks and a bit of food, and a smile to go with them.”

  “Might as well have nothing on but that smile.”

  “The more they admire what they see, Ethel, the more they tip— and tips are the object of the game. They have to be, when you have a little boy and have to pay board for him.”

  “You don’t have to pay board, I’ve told you.”

  “Oh, but Ethel, I do. I can’t be beholden to you.”

  She stared some more, then broke out: “Joan, don’t you have any pride? If not for your own sake, Joan, you could think of Tad.”

  “You mean, to be a fit mother for him?”

  “… Yes! That’s what I mean, exactly!”

  “And you’re not the only one, Ethel. Would you believe it, some woman called up the police about it, talked to the officers who handled Ron’s case, trying to get them to move, to have me declared an unfit mother. Can you imagine something like that? This woman even mentioned Joe Pennington—you know, that boy you spread rumors about, as being something more to me than just an acquaintance. Who do you suppose would have done a thing like that?”

  She didn’t answer, and I sat there kicking my foot. Then the doorbell spoke again, and when I opened the door Liz was there. She came in and I presented her: “Ethel, Miss Baumgarten, my very good friend. Liz, my sister-in-law, Mrs. Lucas.”

  Liz waved her hand, and as Ethel nodded her head, threw off the spring coat she had on, standing forth in her cocktail-bar outfit, which of course was identical with mine, except for the blouse not quite the same. Seeing Ethel’s expression she said: “If the clothes kind of startle a little, Mrs. Lucas, they’re O.K., we work in a ginmill, Joanie and I. We serve drinks in a cocktail bar, and our bunch, they kind of like legs. They shouldn’t but they do. Mine aren’t terrific, like Joanie’s, but for an old lady, they’ll do. At least, so I’ve been told.”

  “They’re—quite striking,” said Ethel.

  “I’ll get Tad’s things,” I said, “and then we can have some coffee.”

  I went back to the kitchen, started water in the chafing dish, then went in the little room that I had used as a nursery and got Tad’s things from the chiffonier drawer. Most of them were clean, but in one corner were the things he’d had on since the day Ron got killed, and those I had in my hand when I took the clean ones, which I put in a grocery bag, back to the living room. I handed the bag to Ethel, waved the others, and told her: “These aren’t clean, I’ll wash them out and bring them Sunday, when I go over to visit my child—if I’m invited, that is.”

  “I’ll wash them,” said Ethel, reaching for them.

  “No, I’ll do it, of course.”

  “I’ll wash them!” she snapped, and took them from me. “And how about his medicine, for the pain …?”

  “All gone,” I said. “Used up in the first two weeks.”

  “But Ron said the doctor gave you a month’s worth!”

  “It might have been a month’s worth,” I said, “if Ron hadn’t continually aggravated things by pulling Tad around by the arm, or slapping him when he got mad.”

  “And you didn’t buy more?”

  “With what money?”

  By that time Liz was camped down by the sofa, having a look at the broken leg. “I don’t get this,” she announced. “It’s not any bust-off, Joan—it’s a pull-off, has to be, as all the pins are here, and nothing’s really been broken. Only time I’ve seen the like was in the bar when a drunk got to rolling around one night and gave a yank to a table leg.”

  “Oh, those things happen,” I said.

  Ethel said nothing, as of course Liz was so close to the true explanation, involving Ethel’s brother, my husband, that it wasn’t at all funny. I said: “I’ll see if the coffee’s coming on for ready,” and went back to the kitchen. I made the coffee, put it in the pot, put sugar lumps in a bowl, and opened the last tin of condensed milk. But when I got back to the living room with it, Ethel was ready to go, and did, shaking hands with me, and bowing coldly to Liz. Liz was still in front of the sofa, sitting tailor-fashion on the floor, and when Ethel had gone, said: “I’ll bring my do-it-yourself kit over and fix this thing—it’ll be no trouble at all, just a glue job, with twenty-four hours in a clamp—I have the glue, I have the clamp, I have the book of instructions. The kit was a gift from my boyfriend, my regular boyfriend, that is, the one who comes on Sundays and pays my rent, kind of. At least most of the time. And if you think it funny he’d give me such a kit, so do I—but the real funny part is that he’d give me anything, so I’m thankful for small things.” She saw me about to say something and interrupted before I could. “… And if you think it funny that I have a regular boyfriend when I told you I sometimes go with other men, too, picked up in the bar, well—so do I. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I keep doing it, and I won’t tell you it’s just for the extra money.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Their asking, I guess,” she said. “They’re so eager sometimes. It takes the curse off gray hair. You know what I mean, Joanie? At a certain age, we need assurances.”

  I set down the coffee things. “At any age, Liz.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She poured herself a cup, and I was glad to see her do it, since
I hated for the milk to go to waste.

  “Joanie, explain something to me, please.”

  “If I can. What?”

  “It’s about your sister-in-law.”

  “She’s not too friendly, Liz. She blames me for what happened to her brother—my husband, Ron. And then there’s my son. She’s taking care of him now, supposedly to help me, but what she really would like is to keep him.”

  Joan nodded as though I’d just confirmed something she’d been thinking. “She didn’t think I could see her, but I could, out of one side of my eye. And that bundle of soiled clothes, the ones you were going to wash that she grabbed out of your hand, she was holding them to her face, burying her nose in them, and smelling them, Joan, I’d swear that’s what she was doing—I can’t be mistaken about it. She was smelling your little boy’s clothes, not the clean ones, the dirty ones.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “Well, what would make her do that?”

  “She’s hipped on him, Liz. She always was, but even more since Ron’s death. I’m telling you, she’s trying to steal him off me.” I explained about Ethel’s surgery, the hysterectomy I suppose it was, and she sat thinking that over. Then: “Are you willing, Joan? You want to give the boy up? Is that how you want it to be?”

  “I’m here to tell you it’s not.”

  “Then you got a thing on your hands.”

  “I know I have, but as of now I’m helpless to move in and block it.”

  “Why’d you let her take him in the first place?”

  “She forced it,” I said, “made it clear I could go along willingly or she’d call the state and have him taken away from me permanent, by showing them how we were living. Never mind that it was Ron that reduced us to it. She’d just show them we had no gas, no electric, no money in the bank, that I had no income and no prospect of earning any …”

  “Well, she’d have been wrong about that.”

  “That’s so,” I said, “but now that I’m working, it means I couldn’t take Tad back even if Liz were willing. Not while I’m out eight or nine hours a day, six days out of seven, and Tad still so young. He needs care and attention, and if I’m not around—I have to leave him with her, whether I like it or not.”

  “She’s got it bad, Joanie.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  *

  Liz had a second cup while I finished my first, and when I’d washed up she said we should be getting started, “so you get there by four o’clock. Jake’s particular about his set-ups.”

  “O.K., but there’s something I have to do first.”

  What I had to do was look up Earl K. White III in the phone book. I did, and he was listed, at least his residence was, on one of the streets of College Heights Estates, the swank part of University Park, but no phone. I looked in the District book, and sure enough he was there, in boldface type, with “Investment Secs” after his name. What that meant I didn’t quite know, but I looked under that head in the yellow book, and lo and behold there was a big ad that went something like this:

  Earl K White III

  Investment Securities

  Successor to Earl K. White, Jr.,

  And Earl K. White—

  Three Generations of Financial Stewardship

  Since 1913

  MEMBER, NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE

  That seemed to cover everything. At last, I knew who Earl K. White III was. I rejoined Liz, telling her: “O.K., let’s not keep Jake waiting.”

  7

  Mr. White came in at five on the dot, and Mrs. Rossi, or Bianca, as she now told me to call her, brought him directly to my station, giving him the same table as he’d had the day before. He ordered tonic as before, and of course Jake had the bottle open and was pouring by the time I got to the bar. I took it to the table, served it, disposed of the bottle, and took my place by the men’s room, all in just a few seconds. But he beckoned me over, telling me: “If you tried, you could be more sociable, Joan.”

  “I come when called,” I answered.

  But we both laughed, and knew we’d been playing games. “I thought about you,” he remarked. “All during the night.”

  “And perhaps I thought about you.”

  “How long have you been widowed, Joan?”

  “… Four days.”

  “Four—what did you say?”

  “Days—since late Saturday night. Sunday morning, really.”

  He stared, and I thought I’d better tell him a bit more, at least enough to avoid making a mystery out of it, which I saw no need to do. I went on: “I’m the Joan Medford you probably read about in the papers, who put her husband out of the house, and then was told next day he’d driven off in a borrowed car and crashed it on a culvert —or culvert headwall, I guess it was.”

  “Why—yes, I did read about it. I’m sorry.” And then, as he seemed to remember more: “The police figured in the item I read about it— facing them isn’t so good.”

  “You could say that, Mr. White.”

  And then, since I’d got that far, I went on: “We’d had an argument before I put him out, and I knew nothing about the car, the one a friend had lent him before going off for the weekend, that he drove off in. He was in pajamas, so he had no driver’s license on him, or anything to identify him. So the police, after checking out the car plates, assumed he was Leland Brooks, the owner. But then, when Leland was finally found, at Annapolis where he was spending the weekend, and he came in to the undertaker shop where Ron was, and made identification, it was Sunday afternoon. Then they got me down there, and for two hours I had to face them, answering all sorts of questions. Did I know about the car? Why did I let him drive away? Didn’t I know he’d been drinking?” I shook my head. “Did I know. He announced it at top volume when he walked through the front door and wouldn’t stop announcing it until I brought him a beer, even after it woke our son and started him bawling. And then he was ready to take a belt to him, not just for this crying but for breaking a jar the week before, which he’d done by accident, and anyway it wasn’t a special jar, we just used it to store change, back when we had enough change to be worth storing.”

  “… And you told all this to the police?”

  “All of it, three or four times over. It was a young private and a sergeant, and I could see they weren’t bad people, but they had a bad job to do, and they did it.”

  “You have my sympathy, Joan. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

  “Oh, I can—and you could too if you’d ever been hungry, ever had to stretch a dollar to feed three people. The worst was that I couldn’t possibly bury him, and had to ask help of his family. And on top of that was my little boy, and what to do about him. My sister-in-law took him, and to have any chance of getting him back I had to find work, at once. My coming here was accident—the police suggested this place, and from the bottom of my heart I thank them. It may seem queer to you, but to me it’s been a godsend. I don’t even mind these clothes.”

  “You shouldn’t. They’re very becoming.”

  “At least they fit.”

  “And rather well.”

  We both laughed again, but then he sat shaking his head, his face becoming quite solemn. “Bereavement’s a terrible thing,” he said, in a low, faraway voice, as though meaning it double extra. “It’s not so bad in itself—a black shadow at the time, but it lifts, give it time, and becomes a memory. But always it has its after effects, which can be very ugly. Joan, my wife died five, almost six years ago, a blow I still haven’t recovered from. But the worst of it wasn’t her, losing her I mean, it was the effect her passing had on her children, my stepchildren, to transform them from a seemingly loving son and daughters into three vultures, who think nothing but money, money, money. Morning, noon, and night, they and the lawyers they have do nothing but hound me ragged, for their shares of their mother’s estate. Joan, my wife left a will, leaving a fourth to me, and a fourth to each of them, but we had everything together and to divide it woul
d mean the liquidation of my business, my property, my holdings of various kinds—it would take a year to do it and would leave me completely disorganized, so I’d have to start in business all over again—I’m simply not going to do it. They can wait till I die.” And then, in a very dark and mysterious way: “Joan, there are things about me that you don’t know, that perhaps you’ll never find out. But I have to suspect, that the badgering these three have given me could well be the reason I’m in the condition I face for the rest of my life.”

  He was making me somewhat uncomfortable, talking that way of his stepchildren, and perhaps to change the subject I heard myself say: “Oh you don’t have to tell me. Because the bereavement, the hours with police, even asking for help with the funeral were nothing to what came later.” I then told about Ethel and her schemes to steal Tad from me, ending with how she’d acted that very afternoon. “I suppose I can understand it,” I said. “My child is a joy to be with, and he is her flesh and blood, and all she has left of her brother. Just the same, allowing for everything, I’m sick at the idea she wants him, wants to steal him off me, I mean—and still don’t know what to do. Just for now, I have to let her keep him, as without money I can’t get him back and couldn’t keep him myself if I did. Not without savings to fall back on, and with a mortgage hanging over me for good measure, which is how my loving husband left me. But—be thankful for little things. For the time being I have a job, and believe it or not, it pays. Not many treat me as you do, or did yesterday, I mean—but I’m not doing too badly. Compared with other things, other kinds of work, I mean, even allowing for this outfit I have to wear, I’m better off than I thought I was going to be.”

  I may have said more, especially about Ethel, all the time wishing I hadn’t, as I wished he hadn’t said what he did about his stepchildren and what rats they were—one of the first things I had learned at home was: Don’t wash family linen in public, or with anyone except family. And I wish I could say I got to talking that way because of the way I felt, the way Ethel was bugging me, but it wouldn’t be true. I did it because I knew without being told, from the way he was lining it out, it was the kind of talk that he liked. So, from the beginning, I knew there was something about him I didn’t accept. But I also knew, would have been dumb not to know, that he was falling for me—that he was interested in more than just talk, and that I was playing for very big stakes. And for a stake like that you close your eyes to things—or at least a woman does. I was playing up to him, with whatever kind of talk it took. So when he paid his check with another $20, and waved the change at me, I said: “You don’t have to do that. I’m doing all right, Mr. White. And I’d like to feel you’re my friend—”