by James Jones
Maybe he shouldn’t ever have gone and got the first job? But in some odd way, ever since they had been married, Ginnie had the Indian sign on him in a way she had never had before. She could always make him do what she wanted. In the beginning, she had wanted him to finish the book and make a lot of money; now she didn’t care if he finished it or not because she had lost faith in it. What she wanted now was for him to take the job. So he had taken it. Thank God, at least, they didn’t have to worry about having any damned kids, too; Ginnie’s gonorrhea when she was a kid had made her sterile. But Dave had—without realizing it—become afflicted with that odd pointless sense of panic that married men who are settled get whenever they think of being without their wives. Of course, he could see Ginnie’s side of it, too; and that very ability made him even more incapable of being able to defend his own. She had had such rosy dreams about what they were going to do when they sold the novel and got all that money. He had tried once or twice to delicately get across to her that if the novel did sell, it still wasn’t going to make anywhere near the kind of money she was dreaming of. But she didn’t even hear what he said. No wonder she became so bitter when it was turned down. So you couldn’t blame Ginnie really, and he knew it. And added to that was his own panic over the rejection. So, he had gone and got the job; and that was the third “factual-event.” The fourth was that he got promoted. And the fifth was that they, at Ginnie’s insistence, moved out of the cheap apartment and bought the house.
And that brought him up-to-date: a clean and bespectacled man who painted forty-millimeter shell casings with an automatic painting machine in a shell factory south of Terre Haute—near the federal prison. Strange? Yes, very strange.
And yet, there was much more to it than that, too. And that was where all those little nuances came in.
Almost from the first, not right away, but increasing gradually once it had got started, Ginnie came more and more to putting him off whenever he wanted to go to bed with her. You would think she, Ginnie Moorehead, who had slept with just about every man she could get her hands on for years, you would almost think she actually disliked sex. Actually, by the time the first rejection of the book came from NLL, in December, Dave was almost never sleeping with her more than twice a week. And after the rejection, that had dwindled down to no more than once a week, and during some weeks not at all. He would ask her, and try to play up to her; and Ginnie would irritably put him off.
“Is that all you ever think about?” she would say crossly. He could not understand it. He was not stepping out on her. And after he took the job, he wouldn’t even have had time to, what with trying to work the job and then work on the book in the evenings. But even that irritated her: They never went out evenings, like her friends did; all they did was sit at home while he worked on that damned old book that wouldn’t sell anyway. She had a really active resentment against the book itself now, as if she held the book itself responsible for not having sold itself. But she must know that he wasn’t stepping out on her. Then why had she taken such a dislike to sleeping with him?
And so here he was—a man who had married first for sex, and second for stability and peace; and third for someone to help him with his work—and he had none of them. And in addition, he was working as a paint foreman in a forty-millimeter shell factory—in order to keep all these things that he already didn’t have. And he knew she wasn’t stepping out on him; Ginnie had become very, very careful of her reputation since she had become a respectable married woman. Sometimes it made him blindly, furiously mad—but never quite furiously enough that he could bring himself to do anything—never quite furiously enough that it burned away that married man’s settled panic at the thought of being without his wife.
Marriage. It was really a funny thing. All it was actually was a piece of legal paper, that could be unlegalized almost about as easily as it had been done. And yet it was more than that; and its real power of holding people came from something else. Dave thought perhaps it lay in the mental acceptance of the otherwise meaningless legal fact: It was something you had bound yourself to, and this knowledge bound you to it more. That, and the fact that other people knew you had committed this legal act.
She became much better for a while, after they got the little house. Although it did not make her want to sleep with him any oftener. They had bought it right after he got promoted in May, and Ginnie immediately went to work to fix it all up the best they could afford. But then came the Korean War and Dave’s paychecks jumped as high as a 140 percent some weeks. But, of course, he was working all those extra hours. And the book he had had to finally put away entirely.
Once they had got the little house—a prefab, but very nice—Ginnie began to entertain her friends more. They almost never went out to Ciro’s or Smitty’s anymore. They did all their partying at home, or at the little homes of one of Ginnie’s friends. Mildred Bell (née Pierce) and her husband were two of their most frequent guests. And Lois Wallup who had married a man named Wills and finally got that home for her two kids. But gradually, Ginnie began to draw away from these. Several times she invited Doris Fredric down for dinner, and Doris always came—though she never returned the invitation to her parents’ big home on East Wernz. Doris, in that same still-virginal way of hers, looked at Dave as though he were a man she had never even known before at all. Dave never had liked her, and still didn’t. But even worse than Doris Fredric, Ginnie started taking up with his mother: inviting her frequently to the house for dinner and forcing Dave to go with her up to the old gal’s apartment to eat that horrible food with her. His mom and Ginnie would sit around and watch the television all evening, while Dave, deathly bored, would sit out in the kitchen by himself and try to read.
Not long after she started inviting his mom to dinner, Ginnie had suddenly decided to join her church, the Church of Christ, Saved; and had insisted on Dave attending Sunday morning with her. That was one place where he flatly set his foot down and refused. He was not going to spend his Sunday mornings being bored in some damned church.
But Ginnie’s interest in the Church of Christ, Saved, did not last long. Less than a month, in fact. This was because she decided that the Methodist Church was the one she wanted to belong to, and there was an elderly lady down the street who was still a member of it. This elderly lady had once been rather influential in the town—before her husband died—and now she was all alone, but she still belonged to the Methodist. She liked to spend afternoons sitting with Ginnie, telling Ginnie stories of the old days, before her husband died. And she was quite willing to take them along to the Methodist Church and introduce them to the minister. Once again, Dave flatly refused, but this time Ginnie wasn’t taking no for answer and they went to the mat with it—their first real fight. Dave refused to go, and Ginnie insisted that he must. Belonging to the Methodist Church was one of the most important things in the whole town of Parkman, she said; even Frank and Agnes with all their money belonged to it; and she couldn’t go alone, without her husband, could she? Dave, in his turn, said that if she went it would certainly be with out her husband. It turned into a very recriminatory verbal match before it was over, but in the end Dave won. Probably, Dave thought afterwards, the reason he was able to win, this once, was because all he had to do was just sit, and stay sat. Whereas Ginnie had to move him. Inertia was on his side. The victory, however, did not give him much confidence, or satisfaction.
The pattern was beginning to emerge, and he could see it. The truth was, it was just about exactly what Old ’Bama had said at the house that last time, when they had argued over him marrying her: Ginnie wanted more than anything else in the world to be respectable. Neither he nor ’Bama had been able to foresee just what the pattern would be that this desire of hers would take. But Dave could see it now. And, in fact, once it began to be clear to him, he could understand for the first time why it was that Ginnie now appeared to almost dislike sex: It wasn’t, to Ginnie’s mind, ladylike to like sex. And being a lady now, by God,
she just wasn’t going to be unladylike. Old ’Bama, the son of a bitch, Dave thought sourly, ’Bama had been right all along. But who could have foreseen it that it would take this course?
Dave didn’t see his old gambling buddy much anymore. He was too busy working and staying home to help Ginnie entertain her newer, slightly higher up, friends. Once or twice downtown, Dave saw him close enough to speak to—which they both did, and then rather embarrassedly went their separate ways; and once Dave had passed by the Ath Club poolroom and seen through the window the tall Southerner engaged in beating a bunch of the local sharpies at fourteen ball. Dave had intended to go in. But after seeing ’Bama he just didn’t have the heart. Not only because of the past, but also because he heard from guys at the plant who sometimes played poker with him that ’Bama had gone downhill badly in the last year. He still drank his fifth of whiskey a day, and half the time when he played poker he actually seemed to be deliberately throwing his money away, the guys said. Also, a thing which all of them had noticed, ’Bama was wearing gauze and elastic bandages on both legs up to the knees. The gauze was for the open sores that had started breaking out on his legs, and the elastic bandages were to try and keep new sores from breaking out. And he still would not give up his heavy drinking or his unhealthy night life. It was almost frightening, the guys said. Knowing all of this, that day he saw him at the Ath Club, Dave had turned and sorrowfully gone away. He saw him a few times after that in town.
Dave also saw—just twice—Gwen French in Parkman during that summer of 1950. So, evidently, she had returned. Both times that he saw her, he suspected that she saw him, too. Anyway, both of them turned and went different ways so that they would not meet. Dave could stand meeting and speaking to ’Bama; Gwen, he could not.
Another thing that happened during that first year of his “marriage”—back in February this was—was that Ginnie’s Marine ex-husband showed up again in Parkman. Dave did not see him. But he heard about it afterwards. Not everybody in town knew about him; but some did. It was Gus Nernst, Dewey Cole’s old buddy, who told him. Gus worked at the shell plant, too, now. Evidently, Rick the ex-Marine had come in town on the bus pretty drunk. He had hung around Ciro’s and Smitty’s a couple of days, sullenly drinking himself drunker. Then he had just disappeared again. He had, Gus said, made a few threats about Dave. Gus thought Dave ought to know. Dave had to grin, remembering the wild night the ex-Marine had spent with Bob French. After that night, Dave could no longer take the guy seriously. If the guy was still wanting to look him up, it should have been easy enough for him to find out where they lived, shouldn’t it? Why hadn’t he done it? Apparently, he didn’t want to look him up, really. Maybe he only wanted to return to the scenes of his past “love,” poor guy. And he did not say anything about it to Ginnie: It would only have meant that she would have given him hell, out of her newfound respectability, for always throwing up her past to insult her. Dave was getting to know her pretty well now, after a year.
If Ginnie desired respectability so strongly, she also wanted to get ahead, too. This was another bone of contention between them. Even the money Dave was making with all the extra overtime was not enough. For the past month or two, Ginnie had begun twitting him about his brother Frank. Why couldn’t he be friends with Frank? Dave had always refused to shop out at the new shopping center, just because he might run into Frank. But Ginnie shopped there all the time. And now with the new motel and its ritzy modern restaurant going up out there, too, Ginnie’s recrimination with him about Frank got even more pointed. He could have been in on all of that. Frank was well on his way to being the most important and richest man in Parkman. Why couldn’t Dave make up with him? Then, someday, they might have a chance of joining the Country Club. Ginnie knew about Dave’s near 40-percent interest in the taxi service, and the money from it was still coming in every month; and she would not let up on that point, either. Why couldn’t he have gotten in on some of the other things, too? The bigger things? Why couldn’t he make up with Frank? Inadvertently, Dave had once told her—long before they were married—that Frank had once offered to take him in as a partner, and that he had refused. Now that statement returned to haunt him increasingly. If Frank had once offered him a partnership, what was to keep him from offering it again? Ginnie demanded. It was useless to try and tell her that things had changed since then; that now he and Frank both hated each other’s guts. She just simply refused to see it. Why weren’t they ever invited out to Frank and Agnes’s for dinner, like other people? Only because he bullheadedly refused to make up with Frank.
It became such an increasing theme whenever he was home that, in sheer desperation, Dave took to running out of the house and just walking up and down the streets. Alone, glad for the momentary peace, the temporary cessation of that noise. He no longer went to Smitty’s or Ciro’s; didn’t want to; and anyway Ginnie would have raised hell with him if he did. He was, in fact, drinking almost nothing anymore. Ginnie saw to that, too: a cocktail before dinner was all right, but any more than that was out. So he just walked the streets, thinking sadly of that novel lying back there that he did not know what to do with.
Once, in a sheer wild hope born of desperation, he went to the post office during his lunch hour and tried to enlist back in the Army. He was, of course, refused: Forty years old, and fat as a butterball, and with weak eyes—what else could he expect? Anyway, he was told, he was more important to the war effort in his job of painting shells at the defense plant. Driving back out to the plant after his rejection, Dave asked himself why he didn’t just up and leave? Let her have the house? Why not? If he was willing to go back in the Army to get away from it? But he couldn’t face the prospect: In the Army, there was at least the companionship of other men and similar interests. Going off alone, not even knowing where to go, and with very little money—it was a different thing. And he just couldn’t face that loneliness. And the married man’s panic rose up in him again, at the thought of the loss of his wife. Was this why most marriages remained intact maybe?
Actually, that was really how she kept the upper hand over him—that settled, married man’s panic. But why didn’t she have some female equivalent of it? Apparently, she never worried that he might leave her, that he might just suddenly decide to up and take off. Why didn’t she?
The only possible escape, in any way, seemed to be to get that damned novel back out again and try to fix it up. Hell, if he could only sell the book, maybe she would stop. And so, in spite of the extra hours he was already working at the shell plant, he pulled the novel down off its shelf in the closet and in desperation locked himself away in the one little room in the house where he could work, and started in to revise it—some way, some how. Night after night, he would sit up with it, and many times would fall asleep right there in the chair and not wake up until it was nearly dawn and almost time to go back to work at the plant. Ginnie bitched about this, too; but he stuck with it. He had to. He knew, of course, that the caliber of the work was not up to the caliber of the work he used to turn out. But it was his only out. If he gave that up, there was nothing left.
God! It was a far cry from the marriage he had once envisioned for himself, wasn’t it? He couldn’t blame Ginnie really, and maybe that was the very source of his lack of strength. He could do an awful lot with that “sad pathetic little love affair” now, he thought sourly. God, what an ass he had been. No wonder Bob French was so emphatic about it ruining the book! Leaving the combat stuff strictly alone, he started working—on those late nights—on the love affair, having in mind to change the peasant girl. His new little peasant girl was going to be more like women really were—was going to take up with her little private to get food for the rest of her family. And from her little private, she was going to move up, whenever she got the chance: first to a corporal, then a sergeant, then finally even to a major. He worked at rewriting it doggedly, and he was able to relieve himself of a great deal of the vindictiveness and malice and dislike that he felt for G
innie in the doing of it. Even though he felt guilty, too. But when he was done, it would be about as devastating as the combat stuff, by God!
Marriage. Happy marriage. Why did his marriage have to be so different from other peoples’? Frank and Agnes were happily married—even though Frank did—or at least used to—step out on his wife. What the hell was wrong with him?
Why, for Christ’s sake, even little Dawnie, who was just a green kid, and whom he had not even seen since almost a year before her marriage, even she had a happy marriage. She and Jim Shotridge were still living up there in Champaign, still going to college, and apparently they were still completely happy. Why couldn’t he be? And now he’d heard they’d had a baby.
Marriage. Happy marriage. He would sit up at night, dog-tired from the shell factory—while Ginnie went to the movies by herself, or went to visit people, or even had people in to visit her and he could hear them in the other room—and he would drive himself to work on the book. Because it was his only hope. Without that, there was—nothing.
Marriage. Happy marriage. And even little Dawnie had a baby—those damned green kids had a baby.
Chapter 73
THEY HAD. And it was the sweetest, cuddliest, most beautiful baby that had ever been born on the face of the earth. Both Mrs Dawn Hirsh Shotridge and her husband, James H Shotridge, were thoroughly agreed on that (and thoroughly agreed on everything else, too), but most of all they were agreed on Miss Diana Sue Shotridge, age six months. And on that afternoon in late August of 1950 when Dave Hirsh had thought of them briefly, but bitterly, while résuméing his own troubles, they were both showing Diana Sue off to an interviewer from Weight Inc. and having their pictures taken by the photographer who accompanied him, for an article on young married college students.