Some Came Running

by James Jones

  “Gee, Dawnie!” he said. “You should have told me. I’d have dressed.”

  Dawn smiled at him, a feeling of great love welling up in her. “It’s all right, Shotridge. I just had to come in,” she said. She turned toward the wastebasket with the tissues, and smiled at Shotridge brimmingly.

  “Oh, Dawnie!” Shotridge cried, and made as if to throw his arms around her; but then he stopped. “Oh, Dawnie! I’m sorry!” He stared at her miserably.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Dawn said softly, and meant it. “I guess it’s as much my fault as it is yours. I’ll be all right in a while.

  “You get out of here now and let me have this place for a minute,” she said embarrassedly. “I’ll be all right in a little while. And don’t ever be sorry!” she said.

  Shotridge stared at her dumbly, his face filled with regret, and yet not without a certain triumph, underneath the look of love.

  “Now you go on,” Dawn said. And without a word, he went out and closed the door.

  She stayed in the bath quite a while and took a boiling hot shower and when she came out, he had the big light on and was fully dressed and had lit a cigarette and was sitting, kneading his knuckles together miserably.

  “I’m sorry I did it to you, Dawnie,” he said as soon as she came through the door. “I didn’t mean to do it. I—I don’t know what came over me. It must have been the liquor. I guess. I just want you to know that I would never have done something like that to you. I love and respect you.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Dawn said. “I’m not sorry, Shotridge. I guess in a way I’m even—glad.”

  “You are?” Shotridge said.

  “Well, now we—we belong to each other,” Dawn said, and could actually feel herself blushing. She smiled at him lovingly.

  “That’s true,” Shotridge said, his eyes wide with thought. “Well, I just want you to know I . . .” He went on, a long breathless stream of talking, and Dawn sat down across from him in a chair noting that even as he talked so anguishedly, his eyes were ogling her. Finally, he stopped, and just stared at her guiltily.

  “When are we going to be married?” Dawn said bashfully.

  “Whenever you want!” Shotridge said, his face lighting up. “Gee, you mean you’ll really marry me, Dawnie? We’ll tie the old knot whenever you say the word.”

  “Well,” she said, “let me think about it a minute.” She got up, arching her back in the thin slip. “Gee, but I’m sore! You must be a pretty virile man, Shotridge. Now you turn your back while I get dressed. Don’t look at me; please!” she said, and went over to her clothes.

  Dutifully, he turned his back; and while she dressed Dawn noted that, as she had expected, one of those two of her was gone. Where the two of her had stared at each other so intently, one was gone now. The other gradually moved across and took over the whole area. A tremendous, swelling, poignant love for Shotridge welled up inside of her until she thought she might have to cry. When she was dressed, she sat down in the chair again.

  “You can look now,” she said softly.

  Shotridge swung back around, his face anxious. “Gee, you’re beautiful, Dawnie. Dawnie,” he said, and took a deep breath, “you don’t hate me, do you?” he said anxiously.

  “You couldn’t help what you did,” Dawn smiled. “I understand about men. I know what it’s like with them.”

  “Do you?” Shotridge said. “Do you really?”

  She nodded, smiling maternally. “That’s why it’s the woman’s place to—to put on the brakes. But I was afraid you’d think I was—”

  “No!” Shotridge said quickly. “Oh no! I know you better than that. Why, what just happened with us proves it. Listen,” he said anguishedly; “I have a confession to make.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been out with other women before.”

  “You have? Where?”

  “Over at the whorehouses in Terre Haute,” Shotridge said, and stared at her anxiously.

  Dawn smiled, sadly. “Well, I suppose that’s just like most men,” she said. “But I guess I don’t really care. I love you anyway.”

  “You do? And you really don’t care?” Shotridge said.

  Dawn smiled and shook her head. “I guess I really don’t care about much of anything, Shotridge, wherever you’re concerned.”

  “Listen,” Shotridge said. “What were you going to say about getting married.”

  “Well,” Dawn said. “I think we should get married Easter.”

  “So soon?!” Shotridge said, his eyes bulging. “That’s an awful short engagement!”

  “Well, I’m a little afraid of something happening; you know?” She looked at him shyly, and she was not acting. “They say you never can be sure, even with those—those things you use. And that’s why I say Easter; I think it would be safer. It’s only a month away.”

  “Gee, I never thought of that,” Shotridge said, his eyes widening. “Well, it’s okay with me. But what about school?”

  “Well, here was what I figured,” Dawn said. “We get married at home, on Easter vacation. Everybody will know we’re married then and it will be all right then. Then we’ll both go back to school until after June finals. Then next year, I’ll transfer to Illinois so we can be together, and we’ll set up housekeeping there someplace. Lots of kids are doing that anymore. It’s not like before the war—when you had to wait till you were out of school for it to be proper. Why, they’re even having” —here she almost blushed— “babies, and still going on to school.”

  “Gee!” Shotridge said. “You suppose we’ll ever have any babies, Dawnie?”

  “I want lots of babies,” Dawn said. “Lots and lots of babies.”

  “Well, by God, we’ll have them then!” Shotridge said. “Gee, Dawnie! You don’t know how much I love you. I’ve loved you all my life.”

  “After the wedding, you can still keep on coming over here weekends whenever you want,” Dawn smiled. “Only then, it’ll be all right. Because we’ll be man and wife.”

  “Gee, Dawnie! Well, that sounds fine with me,” Shotridge said. “Gee, Dawnie!”

  “Of course,” she added blushing, “You can keep on coming over before the marriage, too. If you want to.”

  “If I want to!” Shotridge cried. “Gee, Dawnie, you don’t know how much I want to. And it—it feels so good,” he confessed embarrassedly. Suddenly, he got up and came over to her and put his arms around her tenderly, and Dawn put her arms around him, too, and it was this same story and this same plan that she told her parents when she went home the next weekend, the last weekend in March.

  “I love you so much, Dawnie,” Shotridge whispered, holding her. “I’ll always cherish you.”

  “I love you, too, Shotridge,” Dawn whispered back, and pressed his head against her. “Dear Shotridge. Dear, dear Shotridge.”

  After this tender scene of such powerful emotion that it very nearly made them both weep, they sat back up and discussed the wedding plans some more. This was on Friday, and the next day instead of going out pub crawling after dinner and a show, they went straight up to his room in the Hollenden to have several drinks and make love and afterwards talk about the marriage. By the time he left Sunday evening, they had everything pretty well worked out. Dawn would go home the next weekend to tell her folks. Shotridge was going to call his folks from Champaign and tell them the news. Dawn, in her turn, would have her mother call his parents from Parkman.

  Which was exactly what she did. After she and Agnes had sat at the secretary that Sunday morning in the last week of March working out a rough sketch of plans for over an hour, she had her call up Eleanor Shotridge. They, Eleanor and Harry, had already heard from Shotridge late last night, it turned out. At first, they hadn’t known whether to believe it or not, Eleanor said; not that they weren’t pleased. Then she feared to call Agnes about it, for fear she had not heard about it from Dawn yet.

  “She’s right here,” Agnes said. “Yes; we’ve been sitting here all mornin
g trying to work out some kind of plan. She only got home late last night,” she lied.

  Dawn, sitting beside her, nodded vigorously.

  “And we’ve been talking wedding plans ever since,” Agnes said, without mentioning the arguments. “What? Yes, it is. Awfully short. I wanted them to wait till June, too. But I guess nowadays, since the war, they do things differently than when you and I were young. They don’t want to wait.”

  There was a pause while she listened a moment.

  “What?” she said. “A party?”

  Dawn shook her head “no” vigorously.

  “No, I’m afraid we can’t. She has to be leaving right away to get back to school in time,” Agnes said. “She says Jimmy didn’t come home because he has so much studying. He’s been flying to Cleveland almost every weekend for the past two months. Yes; imagine that? No, they didn’t court us like that when I was in school, either!” She laughed into the phone. “Yes; I’ll bet you did wonder where his allowance was all going. Well, now you know. No,” she said wistfully, “it looks like we’ll have to do without a party entirely. But you and Harry and Frank and I will have our own little party. You’re hereby invited for tomorrow night. And tomorrow, I want you to come down here and spend the day with me, Eleanor. We’ve both got a lot to do, and only twenty-one days to do it in! And Frank says they’re going to have the best damned wedding Parkman’s ever seen!

  “Yes.

  “All right.

  “Tomorrow then. Goodby, Eleanor.”

  She hung up and Dawn, forgetting her newly acquired adult status, grabbed her around the neck. There obviously was not any need for her to worry about the wedding as long as Agnes was handling it. Suddenly, everything in the world seemed so safe now. This was the way a person’s life ought to be lived: reasonably, and safely, without suffering. A husband, and a home, and your own sweet darling little children, and a solid safe well-off family behind you you could always depend on.

  From the phone, after she had been hugged, Agnes looked at her, speculatively, and a thin film of censorship slid slowly down over Dawn’s mind. It kept nothing back she did not want kept back, and it allowed everything to come through. For a moment, Agnes appeared to be about to say something. Then she thought better of it and turned back to the secretary, and Dawn knew, suddenly, that from the date of the wedding on Agnes, in privacy, would be checking the calendar. To satisfy her own curiosity more than anything else. Well, that was all right. Let her check. Because there wasn’t anything to check.

  They turned back to the desk, both of them, suddenly close in their very apartness, closer by far, Dawn thought suddenly, than they had ever been before—and went over for a last time the list of notes Agnes had made. Of the six bridesmaids, all from Dawn’s class in high school, only one had stayed in Parkman to attend Parkman College. Agnes would call them all for her, and Dawn herself would write them from school. The maid of honor would be Shotridge’s older sister, Susan, a senior at Illinois and in Champaign also. Agnes would call her, too.

  “I’ve already talked to your father,” Agnes said, “and he’s going to buy all the bridesmaids’ outfits. That way, we’ll be sure they all can afford to come.”

  “Ohhh, Mother!” Dawn said, and clasped her hands between her breasts.

  Agnes smiled, her eyes still speculative, and laid down her pencil. “I just wish you could have waited till June. You’d have given me a lot more time,” she said. “And I just wish you could have picked somebody a little more in keeping with your own social status.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the Shotridges’ social status!” Dawn said fiercely. “They own the oldest and biggest real estate firm in Parkman.”

  Agnes smiled. “Well, it doesn’t matter, I guess, as long as you really love him. And apparently you do.” She picked up her pencil. “I guess I’ll have to get out my Emily Post,” she said smiling. “And check up on details.”

  As for the bridal dress, when she came to this item, Agnes checked it and said, “Your father and I talked about the wedding a long time last night, and I’m going to be flying to New York for the dresses.” Once again, Dawn was both surprised and thrilled and clasped her hands up against her breasts—and immediately afterwards was once again, as she had been the first time she slept with Shotridge, struck with a kind of dumb awe at her own sheer audacity. The talk of flying to New York brought home the reality of what she was doing more than anything had done before: It was all in action now; its own momentum would keep it going to the inevitable conclusion. It was no longer in her hands. For a moment, she thought she might cry, but underneath that sudden sense of fright was still that sure sense of safety, and of control, with Shotridge; and this sustained her. And a deep sense of love for Shotridge, and of responsibility for her power over him, gave her an almost holy feeling of sureness.

  “Being in love certainly has changed you a lot,” Agnes said, eyeing her.

  “I suppose being in love changes everyone a lot,” Dawn said, and made a mental note not to clasp her hands up against her breasts anymore.

  After they finished with their lists, they went back out to the kitchen where Frank and young Walter were playing checkers, Frank boisterously and with a pre-lunch drink beside him, young Walter gravely and in silence, speaking only when spoken to. He was a strange, reserved youngster, and Dawn had not got to know him at all the last two days. Watching Walter as he began to win again—without any help from Frank—Dawn had again the feeling that she had had a number of times yesterday: that Frank might be the child and Walter the aged parent. He was like a quiet, little old man. Agnes had written her back in February that less than a week after they had gotten him, even though there was a six-month probation period, Frank had had all the signs at the store changed to read Frank Hirsh & Son, Jewelry, instead of Frank Hirsh, Jeweler. Looking at him now, from her own vantage point of maturity and forcefulness and her new security, Dawn felt she could forgive him for always having wanted a son so badly. She looked down at her father, who would be spending this fabulous sum on her wedding, and smiled at him. Quite suddenly, for the first time in her life, she realized all at once why her mother had married him.

  Frank winked back at her and got up, conceding the checker game happily, and announced that they—the family—were going to drive her to Indianapolis this afternoon to catch a plane for Cleveland. If Jim Shotridge could fly to Cleveland all the time to see her, there wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t fly herself. And another thing, he announced: For a wedding gift, he was going to give them a car; he already had one in mind and picked out, down at the Dodge-Plymouth Sales where he was a silent partner—a last year’s model Dodge sedan. Just one more thing, he added: Since Dawnie was a grown-up woman now and getting married, she might as well have a couple drinks with them before lunch like any other grown-up married woman.

  So saying, he strode over to the cocktail stirrer while young Walter silently picked up the checkers and the board and put them away.

  So, while Agnes got them all out some inch-and-a-half-thick deep-freeze steaks and had her own drinks while she cooked them, Dawn had two manhattans with her parents in a kind of private little ceremony. Feeling the two drinks very definitely, and amidst all the laughter and talk and high spirits, Dawn felt once again that liquid smooth transparent membrane of censorship slide silently down over her mind, carefully filtering everything she said. Laughing, happy, the very picture of what a blushing eager very-much-in-love young bride should be, she could safely say anything that popped into her mind without worry.

  In the new Cadillac on the way to Indianapolis, sitting in the backseat with young Walter, she tried to get acquainted with her new foster brother. He was so damned quiet. And Dawnie wanted to know what made him tick, what he was really like.

  It was, as she discovered, a hard job to take on. Walter sat quietly in his corner and watched the drizzly March countryside interestedly. When she would ask him a question, he would turn and gaze at her with his little o
ld man’s face and answer it and then go back to his interested perusal of the landscape. He volunteered nothing himself.

  Agnes had told her what a wonderful little housekeeper he was. She had never been one. But he made his own bed every morning, cleaned and polished his own shoes, kept his clothes hung up neatly in his closet, and always put away afterwards any of his toys that he got out to play with. His room was always immaculate. And in addition to that, he cleaned up the dishes and the table after every meal all by himself. And the first thing he did every evening when he got home from school before he went outside to play was to empty and wash all the ashtrays in the house.

  Suddenly, Dawn was struck by the really odd strangeness of it all: Here was this little boy whom she knew almost nothing of, not his background, not his ambitions, nothing, and whom she would probably never get to know. And yet he was legally her little brother—or soon would be. In a way, though, of course, he couldn’t know it, he was partly responsible for her leaving, and getting married, and everything else.

  “How do you like it at school, Walter?” she asked, smiling.

  One hand still resting on the window ledge, he turned and gazed at her gravely. “I like it fine,” he said. “We have a real fine second-grade teacher.” He waited, politely, and when she did not say anything more, started to turn back to the window.

  “Well, I guess you’re not much used to going off on long rides like this,” Dawn smiled.

  “No, I’m not,” Walter said, turning back to face her.