by James Jones
Once, for a short period, he had dealt blackjack in Kansas City while he and a buddy worked a short con game for a few damn few bucks on the side. But this did not last. He, who still had his morbid dislike of being disliked, came out of it with a hundred bucks cash clear, this ambition to be a big gambler as distinguished from con man, and his ex-buddy’s undying disdain.
With this hundred, and two suitcases full of the meaning of meaningless or should I say the meaninglessness of meaninglessness? all right, two suitcases full of clothes, he moved in on Sister Francine teaching high school English in Greater Los Angeles.
Ha wonder what ever happened to Sister Francine?
He had been there before. But this time, when he fell in love with an educated girl named Harriet Bowman who would not sleep with him, he moved there permanently.
All his life he had been horrified at the indifference the rest of the human race showed him. Even as a small boy, he was constantly shocked at the way people went about as if his existence meant nothing at all. Long before he ever fell in love, he would wake in terror in the middle of the night from the awareness that nobody loved him enough to sacrifice everything for him.
So when love came, man it was really something!
He did not know if he loved her because she was educated, or because she would not sleep with him; but he decided it was because she basically was such a wise, good, sweet, kind person. It was his first great love. He was deeply thrilled by the violence of his own emotions. He was also often discomfited. But he even enjoyed this, too. When he was drafted in 1943, nine years later, she still would not sleep with him.
She was, in fact, married, was she not? To a lawyer. A lawyer who did not belong to, and had not ever even been introduced to, Francine’s circle.
Because in order to be near her, he himself had had to associate with Francine’s circle of artist and intellectual friends, of which the educated girl Harriet Bowman was what you might say an inactive member. She was of the type who did not have to read, talk, or think, she just sat on her magnet and let it attract, knowing with a sure generations-old instinct that the world was full of iron filings, and that everyone admired her for her brains. This was what he fell in love with. He was an iron filing. Ergo.
So, he associated. That was how he met George Blanca. How he met Kenny McKeean. How he started writing. And how he met that other guy: I don’t remember, Wally French Dennis said, who was now dead in the war.
Why remember? Trees to you, Joyce Kilmer, trees! Alan Seeger dead behind some disputed barricade. Do you know what my dog’s favorite song is? He was getting bitter, really bitter. That was bad. Be glibly bitter, literarily bitter, bon motly bitter. Okay. But don’t be really bitter, don’t do your remembering really bitter. That’s no good. My, but the streets were deserted, weren’t they?
He remembered him as he was then. He believed her a virgin. And nothing would convince him otherwise, though no one had ever suggested she was not. But his ego just couldn’t stand the thought that she had been slept with before and could still resist him so stoutly. It really became a sort of polemic argument with the then him, he remembered. And as far as she was concerned, he never resolved it.
Francine, who had given up prose for poetry, helped him write several poems to her, one of which he even liked well enough to keep (still had it), which he read her. God, no one would ever know how he worked at that! It availed him nothing. She was as immovable as a rock. It was not as if she were uneducated. He just could not believe it. He began to lose his faith in education. Once, he so lost control of himself that he abruptly asked her to marry him. He returned the next day intensely relieved that she only had smiled sweetly and sadly, and shaken her head without speaking.
The more she refused it him, the more he respected her integrity—which while his nervous system screamed with a perpetual rage at her supreme self-confidence—that knew he would keep coming back.
Back up the street a car honked. A young girl squealed. And another young girl squealed back. High school must be out already.
He remembered it finally got to be a vague disquieting impression he carried with him all the time that nothing was what you could actually call real, neither Francine George Kenny and his death, none except himself and the educated girl Harriet Bowman, who would not sleep with him and sometimes even she was not real and only his love for her was real.
Everything else, including the buildings and sidewalks, was tenuous and unreal. It was as if people talked to him, he could see their mouths move, but the words had no meaning, when he reached out to touch them, his hand seemed to go through them like fog, but when he pulled it back, it was not bloody, he could not wake up, he tried and tried, sleep would not go away. He got really frightened. Then she got married and he did not see her anymore, except once downtown in LA with a tall dark man he assumed to be her husband, the promising young attorney. It was only a few years after that he was drafted.
It was the love of a lifetime, it. O A O
And, of course, all that time he was writing, wasn’t he? George Blanca helped him most, together with Francine, who was supporting all three of them but only sleeping with George. George also suffered from the fact that his existence meant nothing to people, and he had determined to avenge himself upon them by becoming a great writer. He had already published one novel, which received good reviews but did not sell enough to support him and was working hard on another between attempts to get into the movie studios as a script writer in order to be financially free to write seriously. They got to be best buddies, probably because George also had an unrequited love (in addition to Francine), a Japanese waitress in a cheap beer lunch joint downtown. Apparently, she would sleep with everybody but George, and he tried to explain to George that it was simply because George so obviously wanted her so badly, and all George had to do was act like he did not care. But George could not do this. In fact, he was no better at it than he himself was with the educated girl Harriet Bowman whom he unrequitedly loved, so he and George would go together to the proper places George knew and speak to the proper people, in order to get their discomfitures taken care of with Francine’s money, and afterwards they would go to a joint and drink beer with the remainder of Francine’s money while they consoled each other on their unrequitals in love.
And all the time, he was writing, writing, writing for dear life; he wrote a number of short stories and part of a novel and sold several of the stories usually for around ten dollars to small West Coast reviews. One of them was about a man in a circus in love with an elephant, but they would not let him marry her. It received such favorable comment around, it gave him new determination. William Saroyan was reputed to have said he thought it remarkable and showed great promise. George and Francine were both proud of him. So was the educated girl Harriet Bowman, but it did not change her indehiscence. Nevertheless he finished the first novel, which was published and died, and wrote more stories with a sense that they were changing somehow and started the second novel. This was about the time that George—his second novel about a Japanese girl in a cheap beer lunch joint out and not selling—got his first job with a major studio.
A strange man passed him on the wet street and said hello Dave. Hello, he said. Somebody’s tires swished on the wet brick rounding the corner.
That was really when it all started to go to hell. Kenny was dead, of course. The other one: I don’t remember, he had gone. Somewhere. Francine heard from him. And then the educated girl Harriet Bowman got married. And after a while, George had enough pull to get him a few jobs on westerns he had some dollars now he even helped Francine out with the bills some. He finished the second novel just sort of on impetus. There was no elephant in it. It was about a West Coast ball player who could field but would never hit good enough to make the big leagues and his girl who was a successful starlet in a studded sky wanted to go back to New York and try and make a real break there and she left him. It was published. When the Army took him, he was almost gra
teful.
and there it was
full circle
the meaning of the meaning
He went up to the Writers’ Building to say goodby to George. George looked very well since he had married his very beautiful, and very blonde, wife whose father owned about fifteen per cent of the smog down in Southgate. Just recently he had been working for De Mille since Young Jesse Lasky left him, on some of them Technicolor epics. Gee kid I’m sorry George said things are going all right with me though, but gee baby that’s tough wish you had time to come out the house baby see the wife and kid most beauti-kid in the world Davebaby the little blond bastard but gee kid I’m sorry to hear it you’ll look me up when you get back?
A cigar butt lay on the sidewalk in the wet just ahead of his moving feet. He kicked it into the gutter. It looked unpleasant laying there wet.
And Dave Hirsh, that’s me, was grateful the Army took him. Why? He was even grateful for getting to be in the Battle of the Bulge as Infantry—after it was over. And getting the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. But most of all, he was grateful for getting to be the adopted father of the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company. Pop Hirsh. And maybe that was why Dave Hirsh, cynical combat veteran being discharged in Chicago, after a no-longer-counted number of drinks, began to imagine he believed these young tough smooth faced boys drinking with him were them, those others, so that at six a.m. in the morning, carried on the shoulders of two of his stranger-friends and cheered on by the others, Dave Hirsh mounted his bus, slung his canvas furlough satchel up on the rack, and stepped to the open window to deliver them his farewell oration.
“Friends,” he yelled at them, some tears of genuine love carefully hidden behind the sly levity of his eyes, “brothers-in-arms, compatriots! We have just finished winning for our people the greatest war of world history, and now we are preparing to pay for it. Men do not win wars without having to pay for it. Don’t believe it! That’s propaganda! That’s indoctrination! . . . All I got to say to you, brothers, in this hour of great travail is—let us all go with God, to the arms of our loved ones and the beds of our sweethearts. And if they any 4-Fs in those beds, kick them the hell out!”
He sat down amid a volley of cheers from the small mob of uniforms on the pavement, while the laughing driver started the motor, and looking back down at them in the dimness of the station as the bus pulled out his throat choked on him, and he was doubly glad he had had the foresight to put his money into a bank draft, otherwise he would probly of made a full week of it and spent it all on them. God knew, they deserved it.
Was he back at the hotel already?
Chapter 5
FRANK HIRSH HAD had lunch with George Walters that day. George owned the men’s apparel next door to the jewelry store. Usually, they walked back from lunch together, but today George had an appointment and so he walked back by himself, feeling good, perhaps even a little complacent. Certainly social embarrassment and his kid brother, Dave, were the two furthest thoughts from his mind.
What he was thinking was that they had had with Doc Cost a late good lunch and that he had won the game of fourteen ball they’d played to see who’d pay, and that he did not have to be anywhere at any given time and did not even have to go back to the store at all if he didn’t want because it was his store and he was the boss.
Winning the pool game was a silly thing to be proud of. As a matter of fact, he usually won it. He was a good pool player, a damned good one, and he ought to win it more often than the other guys, although George was pretty good and getting better. But it always made him feel good when he won it.
Of course, when he lost it depressed him. Day before yesterday, one of the few days he lost, he had existed in a foul depression all afternoon, which he found himself trying to blame on the weather.
Frank knew what it was, of course. It wasn’t just pool. He just happened to have a stronger competitive instinct than the average man because he had been competing for things with people all his life. He had had to have it it was the only way he had of getting what he got. He was aware that certain people looked down their nose at Frank Hirsh’s strong sense of competition, but he noticed they were always successful people who had already got their heads in the trough. The others didn’t.
As he walked along, luxuriously aware of the raglan-shouldered camel’s hair top coat and dark Dobbs winter hat he was wearing, several people spoke to him, and in his complacent mood he took their perfunctory greetings as recognition of the universal respect he Frank Hirsh enjoyed in Parkman.
And when he did that, a sudden strong emotional apprehension of the town hit him hard with the things he saw. The familiarity of the old brick courthouse in the treeless square, the look of the wet, dirty, old hand-laid brick streets badly in need of repairs since before the war, the for him peculiarly unique street lamps like no others in the world. He looked at the blocks of storefronts each with its date of erection and the erector’s name. PARKER BLOCK—1907 and MCGEE BLOCK—1904 and WAYNE BLOCK—1899 and WERNZ BLOCK—1900, and on and on, not forgetting Anton III’s WERNZ BLOCK—1925, he thought with a smug grin. The Second National Bank.
It was his town, and he loved it. He knew every street of it. And every house on those streets and usually the antecedents of most of the occupants. He had lived in it all his life, and he wouldn’t live anywhere else. He didn’t even enjoy a vacation particularly, except to come back.
And he still had to have it, he thought suddenly, the competitive sense. Unless he meant to stop his life with one jewelry store, and then just sit there in it till he died.
Well, there was no Hirsh Block, was there? If he had the money he would like to buy one of these already too old business blocks and tear it down and build a new modernistic one and so inscribe it. It was one of Frank’s dreams. The HIRSH BLOCK—1949 or 1950 named for the boy who had worked nights in a poolroom all four years of high school, and paid for his single year of college by playing pea pool.
He didn’t have that kind of money, yet. The war had been good to him, as it had to most businessmen, and it had raised him from a simple owner of a jewelry store to where he owned investments in more than one money making local thing, but it still hadn’t given him that kind of money. It had given him the means to get it, though.
Short, blocky, neckless, and ball-headed like his brothers, all of them plainly German Dutchmen, and all built exactly alike, so that anyone in Parkman could tell him as one of the five Hirsh boys, he strolled along back to his store, thinking of his dream.
There were several customers in the store and Frank nodded to them benignly, feeling a sort of paternal warmth for them shopping in his store. Al Lowe was already back from lunch and helping the new girl clerk wait on them.
Since hiring Al six months ago and breaking him in Frank had almost ceased waiting on customers except on rare occasions when he just felt like it. It gave him a good feeling not to. Al was going to make a good manager for this store someday; young, personable, willing, still inexperienced but learning fast, almost too eager, but time would fix that.
The girl, of course, was green, thick-waisted and unable to talk like all girls from the country, she would never be any more than just a clerk, but she would make him a good one of those in time—unless her boyfriend came home from Japan and married her out from under him.
He had a good crew, all three of them, Frank thought as he went on through the showroom and started across the long storeroom behind it to the little half-glassed half-paneled office at the very back where his office girl sat working at her desk.
Al Lowe caught him half way across the storeroom.
“Frank, Tom Alexander’s wife is here for that new watch we ordered for her.”
“What’s the matter, ain’t it come in yet?” He walked toward the office, Al following, shame-faced.
“Well, that’s it. There’s been a mixup on that, Frank. I knew it ought to be in by now, so I checked on it thinking somebody might of put it away. There’s no record on it being
ordered, Frank.”
“Oh-oh. That’s bad.”
“I know it,” Al said dismally. “I made the sale myself. I know I made out an order slip on it.” He went on talking as they reached the office door.
The girl looked up from her desk smiling, then saw Frank was busy and went back to work without speaking. Usually she would say something friendly when he came from lunch and then ask him how the pool game had gone, all sort of half bantering and friendly. But respectful. And Frank found he sort of looked forward to the exchange.
He listened to Al politely as he hung up the camel’s hair coat and Dobbs hat. It was not a major crisis. On the other hand, it wasn’t good policy to go around losing orders, either. Made the store look bad. But it irritated him that Al hadn’t handled it by himself, without mentioning it to his boss. That was what a smart man would have done. That was what he Frank would have done. What the boss didn’t know never hurt him. Over his rising irritation, Frank kept his voice patient.
“Al, you know a business can’t be run sloppy, not and have customers. That’s one of the main things I’ve tried to—” he hunted for the right word.
“Instill?” Al suggested.
Frank nodded. “Instill in everybody in this store. Efficiency,” he said. “Service.”
Al nodded.
“Well, make out another order slip in duplicate and date it back and show her the carbon of it. That’ll prove you’re not lyin when you tell her you don’t know what’s holdin it up, but that we’ll put a letter on it today. That ought to fix it.”
Al looked at him admiringly. “I thought of that,” he said; “but I wasn’t sure I ought to do that.”
“What else could you do?” Frank said. “Tell her the truth? that we lost it? You want people to think we run our store sloppy that way?” Sometimes he despaired of Al ever learning anything about business. “Now you go get that duplicate fixed up. And remember that, if the same thing ever comes up again.”