by James Jones
“Well, a lot of discriminating young people are buyin modern nowadays,” Frank said.
“Yes, that’s true,” Mrs Stevens said, and smiled. “I guess it’s just we old dogs who can’t change our spots,” she laughed nervously.
“For one thing, the modern’s very easy to keep clean,” Frank said. “Will you excuse me a minute, Mrs Stevens? Virginia? I have to get that phone.”
Mrs Stevens smiled. “Why, of course, Frank. You go right ahead.”
He half-bowed to them and went out back, hoping the call wasn’t about Dave, but thinking more about Virginia Stevens and her Arkansas private. Whatever he had, it was evidently what Virginia liked and appreciated. He must have really satisfied her. She had sure peeled the old lady.
Frank suddenly felt kinglike; and there was a diffusion of excitement all through his stomach as he answered the phone.
The call was another friendly call congratulating him on Dave’s safe return. This caller did not conceal his malice, either. But Frank hardly noticed because he was preoccupied with a bewitching picture of Virginia Stevens being satisfied.
He was careful not to look at Edith Barclay when he hung up. He sometimes had the feeling she could read his mind. He went back out front. He could hardly wait to get back and start looking at Virginia again.
The two women, mother and daughter, were still at the counter and talking to each other animatedly. Then they shut up, as he came closer. Mrs Stevens turned to him charmingly.
“We really must run along,” she smiled. “Thanks so much, Frank. You’ve been very helpful and I know we’ve taken up your time.”
“Not at all,” Frank said, restraining himself from looking at Virginia more than casually. “Glad to be of service.”
“Thank you, Mr Hirsh,” Virginia said in that same defiant-eyed peculiar voice.
“You’re quite welcome, Virginia,” he said. “And I want to wish you the greatest happiness.”
He stood at the counter as they went to the door, feeling exultant, not only because of having handled them so well, but also because he was now free to look his fill at the Arkansas private’s conquest—at least until they had got into their coats and opened the door and gone.
Frank watched her struggling into the coat, and was filled with an almost uncontainable exuberance. She was living proof of a theory dear to his heart, and which he had been trying to convince himself of for years.
Women, Frank now believed, loved only one thing more than bed, and that was the fiction that they did not love it at all.
In a lot of ways, she made him think of Al Lowe’s wife. But then, he knew what Geneve was like. And besides, Geneve did it for what she could get out of it. Maybe she liked it, but basically she did it for what she could get out of it, and that disqualified her. And anyway he did not consider Geneve respectable. Virginia Stevens, he did. Frank suddenly wanted badly to go to bed with his wife.
When Virginia and her mother had left, he went to call the judge about his invitation to Dave. He felt so kinglike, he even believed he could handle that problem without too much undue publicity.
After the call, he hurried into his topcoat, and winked at Edith Barclay, and told her to take the rest of the afternoon off. He left the store to go home and brief his wife about tonight’s dinner for Dave. By the time he pulled the car into the drive, the passionate desire for her was no longer with him.
Chapter 7
EDITH BARCLAY DID NOT take the rest of the afternoon off. Instead she stayed in the office and worked on up to closing time.
There wasn’t really much work to do. But had she taken the afternoon she’d only have spent it loafing in McGee’s Pharmacy drinking Cokes by herself with no one to talk to; or else in a shopping expedition she didn’t need and could ill afford; or in going home. It was too late for the matinee, and anyway she had a date for that tonight and had planned to stay after work and redo her nails.
Besides, she was upset about the boss. She knew a lot more about her boss than he gave her credit for knowing. It hadn’t taken much accidental listening to the boss’s phone conversations today for her to know what had happened.
Edith knew all about Brother Dave’s scandal. Edith’s grandmother had been the Hirshes’ cleaning woman for years and hated Frank Hirsh (and his success) as only an unsuccessful old woman could; it was her favorite topic, and one of her two favorite stories (the other was how Frank married Agnes for her father’s variety store) was the story of Brother Dave’s youthful scandal.
It was a silly scandal, Edith thought, one that could have happened to any two high school kids who didn’t know how to take care of themselves, but it could cause the boss a lot of embarrassment, especially if you took things like that hard, the way the boss did.
At five-thirty, Al Lowe came back to the office with the cash to lock up in the big square floor safe they both had access to. Edith heard him coming. She started filing some colored ad circulars.
“You staying late again?” Al said as he closed the safe.
“I have a few little things I want to get finished up before I leave,” she said without looking up.
“Well,” Al said, rising and leaning on the safe. “See you then, Edith.”
“See you tomorrow,” Edith said and continued filing.
Another of the things she knew about her boss that he did not guess she knew was that in her year there the boss had been carrying on a sporadic affair with Al Lowe’s wife. This had the effect of always making her dislike Al and feel irritated with him. She also knew (this from her grandmother, whose purpose in life was the acquisition of such things) that the affair had been going on since 1942, Al’s first year in the Army, and was the reason for Al’s job with Frank Herschmidt—a kind of sop, her grandmother said, a herring (her grandmother always insisted vehemently that Frank Herschmidt was Jewish, although the whole town knew for a fact the family was German) to draw Al’s big fat nose off the trail. But Edith had to admit to herself that as to facts this time, wherever it was Jane her grandmother got her information, for once the old bag was right. They were having an affair, all right. Just where Al figured in it Edith wasn’t sure. If he didn’t know about it, he was just plain dumb. If he did know, he was pretty smart and quite an opportunist. Whichever the case, she certainly had no intention of ever giving Al Lowe any opportunities for considering her as a possible consolation prize.
Self-conscious and angry, she went on with her filing (Al was already gone) filled with a disgust for him which wasn’t really disgust but her own fear that she might someday marry a man who would love and appreciate her so little he would allow her to step out on him if she wanted to or worse yet, would not even know about it.
Up front, the oblivious Al finished locking up. There was the mild confusion as he and the repairman and the country girl (Edith, too, always thought of her as the country girl) left, and then she was alone in the darkened store lit only by the fluorescent night-light up front and the two display windows that the night cop would switch off from outside at ten o’clock all around the square.
In the silence, Edith finished filing the circulars without haste. She leaned back and lit a cigarette, sprawling in the spring-backed chair in a very female way that would have been very attractive to a man, had one been there to see it.
Edith knew a lot of other things about her boss, too. She knew all about Old Man Herschmidt, about Frank’s numerous affairs through the years since he married Agnes, and she knew all about Agnes herself. She couldn’t very well help knowing, living day in day out in the same house with Jane her grandmother. There wasn’t much she could do to help about Brother Dave, but she did wish she could get the boss out of the clutches of that gold digger Geneve Lowe. He was such an easy mark, even if he did think he knew it all. Edith was new to the chronic disease of boss-fever, the occupational hazard of unmarried office girls, and sometimes the loyalties that possessed her concerning the boss got so violent they surprised her.
It wasn’t
only that he had hired her to replace the girl who married, at a time when she thought she’d have to go back to her old job at the telephone company. That was only part of it, and largely because he had this positive phobia about being disliked. He had a driving need to feel he was a benevolent employer. That was why that lecherous old bastard of a watch repairman could get his goat so easily. Edith understood all that. But it was a lot more than that. She felt protective. He was so incredibly, unbelievably innocent. Anybody could hurt him. Even though he thought he could hide it. And even though he thought he was cynically impervious to hurt.
Actually, of course, all the boss’s trouble lay at home, and that wasn’t her department. But a smart businessman like the boss should know better than to fool around with a she-tiger like Geneve Lowe. Edith had seen her often enough in the store, and taken enough sweet voiced arrogant phone calls, to get her number. Always that exquisite, greedy-bright, acquisitive look in the dark eyes in the thin face. Edith’s sympathy was all with the boss instead of Al. Al was lucky. Lucky somebody, anybody, had taken her off his hands for a while.
Sitting sprawled in the tailored suit, Edith smoked and let the feel of the silent store seep over her, soothe her. This was the time of the day she liked best. She stayed after work a couple of evenings every week, doing a lot of her real work then, completely alone for an hour, a thing which because of her grandmother who kept house for her father she could never accomplish at home. She would have stayed a lot oftener, but she didn’t want to give the impression she had to stay to keep her work up.
Anyway, if she stayed late every night the treasure of it would soon pall probably.
She snuffed out the cigarette and got out her drawstring-top sewing bag and worked on a blouse she had bought on sale her last trip to Terre Haute and was altering. By staying late, she had missed her regular ride home and would have to walk it. She didn’t mind.
Edith’s home was in the east end of town near the Sternutol plant where her father worked, in a section that had been just outside the city limits up to 1943 when Parkman had extended its boundaries to accommodate the war boom. Two short streets of identical bungalows at right angles to the highway-main street, a former adventure in real estate development by Mr Anton Wernz III. Edith, whose father had bought one on time and was still paying for it out of his salary, had lived there since she was six and could never get used to not seeing the white city limits sign as she crossed on the sidewalk the line where the mainstreet brick pavement ended and the highway slab began. There were no railroads in the east end of town so there couldn’t very well be a wrong side of the tracks, but the old city limits line served the same purpose and all her life Edith had lived about twenty-five yards on the wrong side of it.
Outside, it had turned colder. The drizzle of snow had stopped. The sidewalks gleamed wet under the street lamps. There were no stars. Winter was moving in.
Edith checked the locked door after her, and then stopped on the sidewalk and looked back at the store. She stood maybe thirty seconds, looking it right square in its display windows.
It represented a triumph, and her trick of staying late was partly a habit left over from her first months there, months of doubtful worry working always with the uncertainty hanging over her whether she would make the grade or be let go tomorrow. She had had to straighten out the mess left by the girl who had quit to get married she had done it in those evenings, working alone, without telling anyone, because she was afraid if she did they’d find out how little she knew and can her and as the months of uncertainty gave way slowly to the months of competence when she knew she’d made the grade and wouldn’t be let go she began to look back on those evenings of struggle and worry as the happiest time of her life though she knew they weren’t were probably the worst but the feeling persisted and so did the staying late habit.
The face of the store always said all this to her. And having looked at it, she turned and started home with a glance up at the lighted courthouse clock, which was never right, to get some vague approximate idea of the time, and feeling one word in her mind. History.
The courthouse of Parkman had been built upon this small eminence, which rose up out of the flat river prairie, so that the town flowed back down to the prairie away from it in all directions as if reluctant to leave it there, the town that had been laid out by some unsung Greek scholar come overland with his lexicon and Homer in his pack who probably would have preferred a real hill but did the best he could with what he had.
Edith walked down the gentle slope to the prairie on East Wernz Avenue, the main street, which became the highway at the end of the brick and had all the best homes on it. Parkman was a moneyed town. Oil as well as farming. And East Wernz Avenue proved it.
At the corner where she turned on Roosevelt, she could see down the line to the house and the lights were on in it, and when she came in the door, it was the same as if a day had not passed and her father was sitting with his shoes off, still in his work clothes, reading the Parkman evening paper.
John Barclay did not look up. The hard, brassy smell of chemicals—which was the trademark of the Sternutol plant throughout town when the wind was right—hung faintly in the room.
“Daddy, go take your bath,” Edith said as she took her coat off.
“Aw now, Edith honey,” John Barclay said. “I just wanted to read the paper.”
“You can read the paper after your bath,” Edith said, sitting down to take off the white rubbers.
John Barclay folded the paper and put it on the footstool where his feet had been.
“All right, Edith honey.”
He stood up, and the nose-numbing, penny-in-the-mouth taste of chemicals eddied about the room like a visible blood-colored wind. A big balding meaty man, his chest still well-muscled beneath the undershirt that hung on him loosely, he picked up his denim shirt off the floor and went off walking stiff-jointedly to the bathroom in his stocking feet.
Edith went around the room after him, straightening it up. From the kitchen came the smell of liver and onions frying.
“Edith? Is that you, Edith?” her grandmother called, pretending she did not know who it was.
The voice was a very paean of querulosity, floating mournfully out of the kitchen on the hot cooking smell.
“Yes, Jane.” She collected her own things to take to her room. “What’s for supper?”
“I tried to git him to take his bath,” her grandmother hollered, “but he won’t pay any attention to whatever I tell him.”
It was a shameless lie. The huge figure—whom no one on earth ever would dare not pay attention to, if she demanded it—came slowly into eye range through the kitchen door, clad in the habitual faded-but-flowered wrapper which covered but could not contain her bulk.
“You ought to dust in here,” Edith said.
“I been meanin to,” Jane said, “but I been too tired. I didn’t know if you was comin home for supper or not,” she said. “You’re so late gettin home.”
Edith, who never failed to call home when she stayed downtown for supper, refused to be taken in. She said only: “I stayed after work to fix my nails.”
“Well, I didn’t know whether to fix you any food or not,” Jane said.
“I’m not very hungry. I’ll fix myself something.”
“Well, maybe there’ll be enough,” Jane said. “You say you got a date tonight?”
“Yes.”
“So have I,” Jane said brightly.
Edith wanted to swear. She was always a little disconcerted by her sixty-two-year-old grandmother’s dates, though she tried hard to hide it. It was dismaying to go into a local pub with a date and find Jane installed in a corner booth with a couple of old lechers, coyly egging them on in a loud contest for her affections. “Who with this time?” she said.
“Ohhh—a feller,” Jane said. She grinned and put her gnarled hand on her great hip. “Maybe two fellers.”
“Well, have a good time.” It wouldn’t be so bad if s
he weren’t so big and fat, with those huge breasts and buttocks. Jane’s breasts bulged forth from the neck of her dress like some sort of fleshly muffler on an old woman with a bad cold. The sight always embarrassed Edith.
“I aim to,” Jane said, and the grin faded into a look of worn pain. “You want to finish gettin supper for me? My feet’re killin me.”
“I would, but I haven’t washed yet,” Edith said.
“My kidneys are goin bad on me, too, again I think,” Jane said. “I believe I’m gettin the gravels again.”
“Have you been taking your medicine?”
Jane snarled, suddenly, like a voracious wolf. “Ahh, that crap! That bastard is only bleedin me for my money I have to work so goddam hard to earn.”
Edith remained unworried. “Then you ought to go to somebody else.”
“They’re all alike,” Jane snarled. Her voice got muted. “They’s nothin wrong with me a little rest wouldn’t cure.”
“And rest is what you never get.”
“That’s right,” Jane said. “And you know it’s the truth, too.” She went back into the kitchen to stir the mess of calf’s liver and browning onions with her weaponlike fork. Always sick, forever in pain, at sixty-two she had more energy than ten men, and spent all her cleaning money that she didn’t spend on beer, on doctoring, in much the same way that some ladies have their breasts or organs removed in order to get a little attention. Edith understood all that; the only times she was ever really ashamed of her was when she came in the store, to buy some worthless trinket and haggle over the price. Jane came back to the door of the kitchen, still holding the fork, as Edith was about to go into her room. Her face had lighted up with happy malice, the intensity of her pain since it was obviously doing her no material good, forgotten. Whatever else she might be, Jane was a realist.
“Have you heard the latest big news?”
Edith stopped in the doorway. “You mean about Frank Hirsh’s brother coming home?”
“Haw!” Jane cried. “That son of a bitch! I bet he’s sweatin blood right now!”