by James Jones
He began to see clearly a whole new town tacked onto Parkman. There was a strip of land out there that would, depending on the position of the bypass, be anywhere from half to three quarters of a mile wide, and long enough to support five factories—all big ones. Part of that strip was already on his little farm, and he wanted the rest of it. In his mind’s eye he could visualize them: five big, shining, modernistic factories—all in a row—and all built on land owned by Frank Hirsh. From there, it was only a small jump to a subdivision clustering around them. What could be more natural than for people to want to live near where they work? And then the crowning glory: a huge, new ten- or twelve-unit shopping center like they were beginning to build all over the country now: built western style, in a long L, with a tremendous blacktop-marked-off-in-yellow-paint 150-car parking space in the angle, built right at the junction of northbound State Route 1 and the new bypass—and above it, in yellow brick set into red he could see it now the five-foot high legend, Hirsh Block.
Hirsh Block!
Why, not only his subdivision, but everybody in town would end up doing all their buying in a modern place like that.
In the car, driving almost seventy, his hands tightened exultantly on the wheel and swerved him clear over to the black line. He pulled it back. The shopping center would be a goldmine, just in itself! He had thought it all over very carefully, and the only thing he was not absolutely 100 percent sure of—outside of Clark Hibbard—was all the capital. He had already begun converting his other holdings, and he had two or three rental houses scattered around town, he could float a loan on them. And he had fifteen thousand dollars stashed away in war bonds. He could not borrow on his holdings at the bank and the Building & Loan on account of the judge—at least not until the news was out. Frank calculated—again—feeling like a parrot he had done it so many times: He was worth just a little bit over seventy-five thousand dollars. And he could probably stretch it to twenty-five thousand dollars more. He probably had enough for the land—if they could get most of it before the price started rising. But projects like the shopping center were going to take more, a lot more, than he could put up alone. But once the thing was under way he was sure he could get all the capital he wanted, even if he had to go outside town, or even the state, to get it. There was Fred Benson, in Indianapolis, always ready to invest in a good thing.
He didn’t care. One way or another it would come to him. He would get what he needed. This was the chance of a lifetime, and he was going to throw everything into it that he could scrape up. It was a gamble, sure. He loved to gamble.
He had put off approaching Clark about it until he had it worked out in his head, and on the theory that the less people who knew about a thing the more likely it was to be kept a secret. But now with Dave coming into the picture, and things beginning to develop—plus the strange way the judge had acted—he was beginning to feel it was about time. He didn’t want to put it off so long that somebody else got the idea, too.
That Dave. He could do a lot for that boy if he would only play ball and work a little. That boy would make him the best partner he could have. That the boy had changed his mind like he did about the taxi service was in itself a good sign. He was, at last, getting some gumption and some common sense.
But—the truth was—what Frank really wanted was a son. Taking Dave was only a substitute for a son, and a poor substitute at that because if he did build a dynasty there wouldn’t be anyone to take over and handle it when he died.
It was not that he didn’t love Dawn. Quite the contrary. Well, who knew, if the thing came off, maybe they might even adopt a son? It was not the first time he had thought of this, but he had never mentioned it to Agnes.
This bypass deal was his first real venture, big venture, away from the judge, and he wanted it to come off. It had to come off. Because if it didn’t, the judge would see to it that he never got an opportunity at another dollar outside his own store the rest of his life.
He thought about it all the way to Chicago, feeling high and exultant. The more he thought about it, the better he felt. About everything.
Only once, going through Monee, did he have a moment of panic, when he remembered he had told Edith one thing and Agnes another—Edith that the meeting was in Indianapolis, Agnes that it was in Hammond—and wondered if Agnes mightn’t call Edith and find out the discrepancy accidentally. But he put it down by telling himself that that Edith was a smart one, she never said anything that she didn’t absolutely have to. And anyway, Agnes knew he was staying in Chicago, and would probably think Edith had got her towns wrong—or else would think Edith didn’t actually know the details, which was even better. So it was all right, after all.
He did not go into it further than that and did not question himself as to why he should panic over Agnes finding this out when he already knew that she knew about Geneve anyway, and when he drove up in front of the hotel on Michigan after dark and turned the car over to the doorman, he was feeling in fine fettle and very high, and looking forward to a three- or four-day idyll with his mistress.
However, that was not what he found.
Chapter 18
SHE WAS WAITING for him in her room—they always took separate rooms—and as soon as he deposited his bag in his and got rid of the bellboy, he called her and went up there. She was waiting for him all dressed to go out except for her dress, which was laid out carefully to keep it from wrinkling on one of the twin double beds. The door was not quite latched and he went on in, and she was standing across near the corner by the desk-table waiting, just in her slip and stockings and shoes and under it you could see the raised ridges of the garter belt and her panty legs and that brassiere. Armor, he thought, the armor of women, my clasp and my helm, in which they gird themselves to go forth and do battle with the males, and which becomes armorplate whenever they need it. He knew she had posed so for him to see her when he came in and admire her. So he stopped for a moment by the door and did so. Then he sat down in a chair by the door.
“Come here,” he said, his hat still on his head forgotten, and his face and ears and other parts of him beginning to burn with excess blood. “Take off your clothes and walk across the room to me.” It had become almost a ritual with them.
This time, she hesitated. For a moment, there was a look of quite something else on her face, certainly not sex, but then she evidently thought better of it and put it down and began to comply, coolly smiling at him for admiration. Very slowly and gracefully, she slid her slip up and off over her head, revealing that thin small almost child’s body, smiling that smile which expected and required admiration; and which made him feel that if he didn’t show enough of it to satisfy her she would suddenly go into reverse gear and begin putting everything back on in the exact same way, like a movie sequence run backwards, and he himself would get back up helplessly and walk backwards out of the door.
She’s a real whore, he thought suddenly.
“Come here,” he said thickly, “let me do somethin to you,” and then became aware of his hat still on his head and flung it to the floor. He was aware of the look on her face, a look that was always on her face in sex, which was a look not only of physical pleasure but also of something else, another pleasure, as if she closed her mind to everything except a slit-eyed smug awareness of her power here, a passive domination, and he liked it, and he lifted her to him.
Once again, he thought of the time his mother had almost caught him, and had tried to make him admit it, and he had wound up on the kitchen floor where she had jabbed and poked and tried to hit at him with the broom handle her face red and her eyes blooded, until he finally admitted it, and she had whipped him, and momentarily, he had hated her, had hated his own mother.
Finally, when all the thunders and lightnings and A-bombs were all over, they were lying side by side on the other bed where her dress wasn’t, his clothes scattered all over the floor, and after a minute he got up dazedly and began to pick them up and straighten them out, so th
at they wouldn’t be more wrinkled than they already were if they were going to go out for dinner.
But they didn’t go out to dinner. Geneve lay on the bed and leaned on her elbow and watched him pick up the clothes. She had bought him two fifths of whiskey, which he saw sitting on the dresser, and when he heard what she was saying as she began to talk he wanted a drink so bad he did not even bother to pick up the rest of the clothes but went and got one and opened it without bothering to get a glass either and sat down with it, realizing now why it was she had hesitated so when he first came in.
“I’ve got some pretty serious news for you,” Geneve said by way of preamble. “Agnes has been talking about me.”
The upshot of what she had to say, while he drank, and then drank again, and then continued drinking, was that she had learned through several sources—one a young-married-couple friend of hers and Al’s, another Dotty Callter her boss—that Agnes had been talking lately to her friends about her husband having an affair with Geneve Lowe and what should she do about it? When she had left this time to come to Chicago, Dotty had laughingly asked her if there were any jewelry conventions on now in Chicago. Dotty was a good girl, and she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. And just before they left, Dotty had warned her, seriously this time, that she had better be careful, because several people—among them, Dotty had said, one who shall remain nameless except for the initial A—had it in for her. It was all right with Dotty what she did on her own time, but the store could not stand that kind of publicity and, Dotty laughed, neither could Dotty. And if it ever broke out in the open, Dotty wanted her to know ahead of time she would have to let her go—even though she was her assistant manager, and she was coming to depend on her more and more, and they had become such close friends.
Lying nude on the bed and talking seriously, she looked very sweet. She was the most beautiful woman, Frank thought as he drank, that he had ever slept with. And as a mistress, she was just about as perfect, both in practicality and as a display piece, as a man could hope to run onto. And now Agnes and her goddamned gossiping friends were going to ruin it for him.
The other one, Geneve said, was the young married woman friend of hers, who merely told her she had heard it—about Agnes—and wasn’t it ridiculous: She must really be deluding herself about her husband if she thought somebody as young and attractive as Geneve would go out with him. To which, of course, Geneve agreed with her, and they laughed together over it, because Geneve didn’t know whether she really meant it, or was just trying to find out what kind of a reaction she would get.
In spite of a slight pique to his vanity, Frank was forced to agree she had been smart and done right. She was going to be a pretty powerful element in Parkman, he thought, someday, if she kept on going as sharply as she was now.
But the point was, Geneve went on, that it should not have ever even gotten around to this woman. She was not usually in the know. That in itself showed it was already getting around too much. What she would like to know was how Agnes had ever found out about it in the first place?
“It wouldn’t be too hard. The whole town knows about it. Probably one of her friends told her,” Frank said bitterly, and had another drink.
“Well, something’s got to be done about it,” Geneve said coldly. “I can’t take a chance on losing out with Dotty. Not after all these years I’ve put in there.”
“What the hell am I goin to do about it?” Frank said angrily.
“Find some way to make her stop,” Geneve said. “Or else it’s going to keep on until it breaks us up. Neither one of us can stand a scandal like that, and you know it. And I don’t want us broken up,” she added like an afterthought and smiled at him.
“If she was any normal wife like she ought to be,” she said coldly, “she wouldn’t pull something like that. She’d keep her mouth shut and let her husband have his affairs and be satisfied she was his wife, and have an affair herself now and then if she felt like it.”
Frank did not think so much of this idea. “She’s a good bit older than you,” he said, and took another big drink of whiskey. It was beginning to hit him pretty hard. He discovered with surprise that he had drunk almost half of the bottle. “Her generation was brought up different than yours.”
“Her generation, hell,” Geneve said. “I know lots of women her age who’ve lived like that for years. And they seem to make a pretty good life of it.”
“I guess she just loves me,” Frank said, and took another drink.
“Loves you, hell,” Geneve said. “So do those other women love their husbands. I love my husband. That doesn’t have a thing to do with it. She’s just not normal. Going around weeping on all her friends’ shoulders,” she said. “You’d think she’d have some pride.”
“Now, listen,” Frank protested, and had himself another drink. “She’s a good wife. As good as any man ever had. Don’t talk about her.” He looked at the bottle, wanting suddenly to throw his head back and drain it all. In the last minute and a half, he had become drunk. Quite suddenly. And he could tell he was going to become drunker. A lot drunker. Whether he drank any more of the bottle or not. “Why can’t you women ever get along?” he said. He took another drink. “I’m sleepy.”
He did not know or remember what happened to Geneve after that. He woke up the next morning suddenly at ten o’clock and found himself in the bed they had partied in, still feeling drunk, and with a splitting head, and feeling as if all the water in his system had evaporated. Geneve was not there, she had gone out on one of her buying expeditions for Dotty. He did not know whether she had gone out for dinner last night by herself or not. There were no dirty dishes in the room. He had vague memories of her going on talking about Agnes to him after she had helped him to bed. It was as if a curtain had come down in his mind in the middle of the second act. The other bed had been slept in, and the party dress was hanging meticulously in the closet. It did not look wrinkled. The opened bottle sitting on the dresser was only a tiny fraction from being empty, and he wondered if he could have drunk all that? Christ, that was nearly a whole fifth, he thought, frightened. He went into her bathroom and drank large quantities of water, which helped neither his stomach nor his head. Then he got dressed and went back down to his own room, feeling wrinkled and crummy, and had a shower, which did not help him much, either, and made himself hang up his suits and dressed in a fresh one and sent the other one out, and then went downstairs to the cocktail lounge to get a martini. He had found by experience that a martini was the best thing for you when you felt this bad. They eased you off gently, and stopped the headache, and also helped your digestion to where you could eat lunch. But he never drank them at home in Parkman—only manhattans—as if in some way he could keep separated his two separate lives. It was as if the martinis themselves were, in Parkman, both an unfair advantage and slap in the face to Agnes, and marks of guilty evidence which she might be able to read.
He had three of them, sitting at the bar, although he had only meant to have one, and then got several good cigars—H Upmann Churchills—at the drugstore across the foyer, and went for a walk up Michigan Avenue. It was a cold, dry, sun-bright early-winter day, and he walked as far as the old waterworks, which looked like a castle, and then walked all the way back, looking in the store windows as he walked, had another martini and ate lunch, and went upstairs to take a nap and wait for Geneve, feeling much less guilty and frightened now that he had exercised himself.
But he could not sleep. So he wound up back down at the bar, there being nothing else to do, and when Geneve found him after having found the note he’d left for her, he was already pretty well loaded. Well, what the hell? he thought wildly, this was a vacation wasn’t it?
That night, they did go out to dinner. Geneve had two cocktails in the lounge (she always drank martinis) and he had two more martinis with her, and then went upstairs with her while she dressed. He sat in the chair and watched her, and when she was naked, he suddenly and without pre-intention g
ot up and began to take his own clothes off, and they went to bed again, but this time—although he was pretty excited, and pretty drunk, too—he laid his clothes out neatly beforehand, and there was that strange look of smug power on her face again that he liked, and then they showered and got dressed and went out, and he made a mental note that he would have to do something about Agnes in order not to lose such a wonderful mistress. They went to the Pump Room at the Ambassador East, for dinner.
They went there because Geneve always liked to go there. They had such wonderful service, she said. And those uniforms. And the little Negro boys with the turbans and long feathers. He also suspected she liked to go there because it was expensive. But that didn’t matter. Because she belonged there, he thought, looking at her. In fact, when she made herself up, with the lipstick, and the lines of eye pencil at the corners of her eyes, and the darkened brows, and did her hair in that short tousled way, she looked exotic. Exotically beautiful; and enough like all these other women he saw in here to be one of them. In fact, he thought drunkenly and happily, it looked as though all the models of Vogue magazine had conspired to bring their escorts to the Pump Room on this one particular night. That was one of the reasons he liked to go out with her. She was a real display piece, and it made him proud, that she made them look like they belonged here. He wondered how many of them were wives and how many mistresses?
Geneve ordered for both of them, some French dish (men don’t have to order for women anymore, she always said, that’s old-fashioned today), and while they were having their drinks, looked over at a corner table where a rather large dark woman in a gold dress and big gold hat was seated with a number of men congregated around her and an unusual number of waiters hovering near. Geneve looked back at him, her eyes bright.
“I think that’s Dorothy Lamour over there,” she said excitedly in a low voice. “The movie star. See the one with all the men and all the waiters?”