by John O'Hara
“I did go. Didn’t Mrs. Gorman tell you? I went to see him this afternoon and he wouldn’t see me.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t, eh? Well, the next time you see him tell him to go to hell.” He chuckled. “No. Don’t. I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience. A priest of God stirring up animosities and so forth and so on. I don’t know. You didn’t ask me for my advice anyways. But if you can forget for a minute that I’m a priest, and just between you and me, I think Harry Reilly is a horse’s ass.”
The old man and the young man laughed. “You do?” said Julian.
“I do. If you ever tell that I’ll fix your feet, young man. But that’s what I think.”
“So do I,” said Julian.
“We’re both right, son,” said Monsignor Creedon. “Harry is ambitious. Well, Caesar was ambitious. A lot of people are ambitious. I was ambitious myself, once, and I got a nice kick in the teeth for it. Ambition’s all right, if you know when to stop. As F.P.A. would say, I can take my ambition or leave it alone. Oh, yes, ambition is all right, just as long as you don’t get too ambitious.”
“Do you read F.P.A.?”
“My God, yes. I get the World every day. Of course I’m a Republican, but I have the World delivered with the Ledger. I miss Broun, though, since he isn’t with the World any more. Do you read the World? I didn’t know Cadillac dealers could read. I thought all they had to do was make an X mark on the back of a check.”
“I never was meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer, Father,” said Julian.
“That sounded to me as though—you’re not a frustrated literary man, by any chance, are you? God forbid.”
“Oh, no,” said Julian. “I’m not anything. I guess I should have been a doctor.”
“Well—” the priest stopped himself, but his tone made Julian curious.
“What, Father?”
“You won’t think this sounds awful? No, of course you won’t. You’re a Protestant. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve had my moments of wishing I’d taken some other life work. That doesn’t sound bad to you, because you weren’t brought up to believe in the true vocation. Well, I guess I better go inside. I keep forgetting I’m an old man.”
“How about a drink?” said Julian.
“I will if it isn’t too late. I’m fasting.” He looked at his big silver watch. “All right. I’ve time. I’ll have one with you.”
Surprisingly, no one had taken the bottle of Scotch off the table in Julian’s absence. The thieves, which was to say everyone, probably thought the owner of the bottle was in the toilet and was apt to surprise them in the act of stealing the liquor, a heinous offense.
“Oh, Scotch. Fine,” said the priest. “Do you like Irish whiskey?”
“I certainly do,” said Julian.
“I’ll send you a bottle of Bushmill’s. It isn’t the best Irish whiskey, but it’s good. And this stuff is real. Ed Charney sent me a case of it for a Christmas present, heaven only knows why. I’ll never do anything for that one. Well, your very good health and a happy New Year. Let’s see. Tomorrow’s St. Stephen’s Day. He was the first martyr. No, I guess we better stick to happy New Year.”
“Cheerio,” said Julian.
The old priest—Julian wondered exactly how old he was—drank his highball almost bottoms up. “Good whiskey,” he said.
“That came from Ed Charney, too,” said Julian.
“He has his uses,” said the priest. “Thank you, and good-bye. I’ll send you that Bushmills tomorrow or next day. ’Bye.” He left, a little stoop-shouldered but strong-looking and well-tailored. The talk had given Julian a lift, and the air had sobered him up. The tails hanging over his buttocks, the sleeves of his coat, the legs of his trousers were still cold, covered with cold, from his stand on the verandah, but he felt fine. He hurried out to dance with Caroline and others.
The orchestra was playing Three Little Words. He spotted Caroline, dancing with—it would be—Frank Gorman. Julian cut in, being no more polite about it than he had to.
“Have we met?” said Caroline.
“Ouimet. The name of a golfer. Francis Ouimet,” said Julian. “How did you ever remember the name?”
“Where have you been? I looked around for you after I came down from the johnny, but were you anywhere to be seen? Did you greet me at the foot of the stairs? Did you come dashing forth to claim the first dance? Did you? No. You did not. Then an hour passes. And so on.”
“I was having a very nice chat with Father Creedon.”
“Father Creedon? You were not. Not for long. He’s been sitting with Mrs. Gorman and her party most of the evening. You were getting drunk and you just happened to give him one drink so you could truthfully say you’d been with him. I know you, English.”
“You’re wrong as hell. He was with me for a long time. And I learned something.”
“What?”
“He thinks Harry Reilly is a horse’s ass,” said Julian.
She did not reply.
“What’s the matter with that? I think so too. I see eye to eye with Rome on that.”
“How did he happen to say that? What did you say that made him say that?”
“I didn’t say anything to make him say that. All I said was…I don’t remember how it started. Oh, yes. He asked me how I felt and I said fine, and then I said no, anything but fine. I was standing outside on the verandah, and he came out for a breath of air, and so we got to talking and I said I supposed he’d heard about my altercation with Harry and I told him I’d been around to apologize, and I said Harry had refused to see me, and then Creedon said he thought Harry was a horse’s ass.”
“That doesn’t sound much like him.”
“That’s what I thought, but he explained it beforehand. He said he wasn’t talking as a priest, but just as man to man. After all, darling, there’s no law that says he has to dearly love all the people who go to his church, is there?”
“No. Well, I’m just sorry you talked to him about it. Even if he doesn’t go right back and tell—”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You were never so wrong in your whole life. Father Creedon’s a swell guy.”
“Yes, but he’s a Catholic, and they stick together.”
“Oh, nuts. You’re trying to build this up into a world catastrophe.”
“Oh, yeah? And what are you doing? You’re trying to pass it off as though it were the least important thing in the world, just a little exchange of pleasantries. Well, you’re wrong, Julian.”
“Aw-haw. Now we’re getting to the Julian stage. I get it.”
“Will you listen? This thing isn’t going to blow over and be forgotten, and I wish you’d stop thinking it is. I’ve tried to tell you what you should have known yourself, that Harry Reilly is a bad enemy.”
“How do you know? How do you know so much about Harry Reilly’s characteristics or avenging moods or what-have-you? If you don’t mind my saying so, you give me a pain in the ass.”
“Okay,” said Caroline.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Believe me? I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” He held her closer. “Have we still got a date for midnight?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Just because I said that?”
“Oh, I think you’re unfair. I think it’s a dirty trick, and you always do it. You make me very angry about something and then you refuse to go on with the discussion, but instead you blithely talk about love and going to bed. It’s a dirty trick, because if I refuse to talk about loving you, you become the injured party and so on. It’s a lousy trick and you do it all the time.”
The music stopped but almost immediately resumed with Can This Be Love? The orchestra was not doing so well with the back-time, and that disturbed Julian, whose ear for jazz was superb.
“See?” said Caroline.
“What?”
“I was right. You’re sulking.”
“For God’s sweet sake, I’m not sulking. Do you want to know what I was thinking?
”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, this’ll make you mad, I have no doubt, but I was thinking what a lousy band this is. Does that make you sore?”
“In a way, yes,” said Caroline.
“I was thinking what a foolish economy it is to save money on an orchestra. After all, the most important thing at a dance is the music, isn’t it?”
“Must I talk about that?”
“Without the music there would be no dance. It’s like playing golf with cheap clubs, or playing tennis with a dollar racket, or bad food. It’s like anything cheap.” He drew his head back, away from her so he could observe the effect of his words. “Now you take a Cadillac—”
“Oh, cut it out, Ju. Please.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to. Because you ought to.”
“What’s the matter? My God, you’re a sourball tonight. You ask me not to drink, and I don’t drink. You—”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, you asked me not to get tight, and I’m not a bit tight. You said I could drink. Let’s go outside. I want to talk to you.”
“No. I don’t want to go out.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too cold, for one thing. And I don’t feel like it.”
“Well, that’s the best reason. Does that mean you’re not going to keep our date at intermission?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She spoke slowly.
He said nothing. Then presently she spoke. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go out with you.”
They danced to the foyer, broke, and ran to the anonymous sedan nearest the verandah. They got in and she sat with her arms drawn close to her ribs. He lit a cigarette for her.
“What is the matter, darling?” he said.
“God, I’m cold.”
“Do you want to talk, or are you going to just say how cold you are?”
“What do you want to talk about?” she said.
“About you. Your attitude. I want to try to find out what’s eating you. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done tonight that you can find fault with.”
“Except calling me a horse’s ass.”
“You’re crazy! I didn’t call you that. That was what old What’s Iss called Harry Reilly. I said you gave me a pain in the ass, which isn’t quite the same.”
“All right.”
“And I said I was sorry, and I am sorry. But that’s not the point. We’re just quibbling—”
“You mean I am.”
“Yes, frankly. I do mean that. Oh, Christ! What the hell is it? Please say something. Tell me what’s the matter. Bawl me out or do anything you like, but don’t sit there freezing like a martyr. Like some kind of a St. Stephen.”
“What?”
“St. Stephen was the first martyr. Father Creedon told me that.”
“My, you kept the talk on a high plane, didn’t you?”
“Will you for the last time, will you tell me why you have a fig—what’s the matter?”
“I’m freezing, Julian. I’ve got to go in. I shouldn’t have come out without a coat.”
“I’ll look around in the other cars and borrow a robe, if you’ll stay.”
“No, I don’t think we’d better,” she said. “I’m going in. This was a mistake, coming out here.”
“You had no intention of talking when you came out.”
“No. I don’t suppose I did, but I didn’t want to have a scene on the dance floor.”
“Have a scene on the dance floor! All right. You can go. I won’t keep you. Just one question. Is there something I’ve done? Any one thing that you’re sore about?”
“No. Not exactly. No. There isn’t.”
“One more question. Maybe I’d better not ask it.”
“Go ahead,” she said, with her hand on the door of the sedan.
“All right: Is there something you’ve done? Have you done anything? Have you fallen in love with someone else?”
“Or necked someone else?” she said. “Or laid someone else while you were sneaking your drinks in the locker-room? No. My attitude, as you call it, comes from something much more subtle than that, Julian, but we won’t go into it now.”
He took her in his arms. “Oh, I love you so much. I always will. I always have and I always will. Don’t do this.” She held up her chin while he kissed her neck and rubbed his mouth and nose against her breast, but when he cupped his left hand over her right breast she said, “No. No. I don’t want you to do that. Let me go, please.”
“Have you got the curse?”
“Please don’t talk that way, say things like that. You know perfectly well I haven’t.”
“That’s right. I do. I thought you might have got it suddenly.”
“You think that’s the only possible explanation for the way I feel?”
“At least there is some explanation, or there ought to be. You won’t tell me what it is?”
“It’d take too long. And now I am going. It isn’t like you to keep me waiting out here with the temperature near zero.”
“Mm. Giving me a break. Okay. Let’s go.” He got out of the car and made one last effort to take her in his arms by carrying her to the verandah, but she was on the steps without even seeming to spurn his gesture. She went inside and immediately went up the stairs to the ladies’ quarters. He knew she did not expect him to be waiting when she came down, so he went out and joined the stag line. He saw Mill Ammermann and he was waiting for her to dance or be danced close enough to the stag line and he was going to cut in on her, when suddenly something happened that was like migraine: he did not see anyone in the room nor anything, yet the people and the lights and the things hurt his eyes. And the reason for it was that in one and the same instant he remembered that he had not asked Caroline to say yes or no about the date at intermission—and he realized that he did not need to ask her.
He recovered a sense which may not have been sight, but whatever it was it enabled him to find his way back to the locker-room, where there was enough liquor for anyone in the world to get drunk.
5
When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness. She was four years out of college then, and she was twenty-seven years old, which is as old as anyone ever gets, or at least she thought so at the time. She found herself thinking more and more and less and less of men. That is the way she put it, and she knew it to be sure and right, but she did not bother to expand the -ism. “I think of them oftener, and I think of them less often.” She had attained varying degrees of love, requited and unrequited—but seldom the latter. Men, and damn good men, fell in love with her with comforting regularity, and she had enough trouble with them, in one way or another, to make it impossible for her to tell herself honestly that she was unattractive. She was sorry she was not beautiful—until a nice old gentleman, a Philadelphian who painted society women’s portraits, told her that he never had seen a beautiful woman.
That summer she thought of her life after college in three ways: she thought of it as unicellular, but a life that reversed the amoeba’s performance. The days got together and formed one life, losing their separate identities. Again, she thought of those four years as calendar years, broken formally by the Assembly (New Year’s Eve), the July 3 Assembly, Easter, Hallowe’en, Labor Day. Put together they made four years, the length of time she had passed at Bryn Mawr, and like the years of college in that they seemed so long a time and so short a time, but also not at all like the college years, because she felt she had got something out of college. These four years had not had the compactness of college, and they seemed wasted.
They were wasted. She took her turn teaching the Italian and Negro children at the Gibbsville Mission, which is what passes for the Junior League in Gibbsville. But she didn’t like it.
She had no poise or assurance with those children, or any group of children, and she knew she was not a teacher. She almost loved two or three of the children, but somewhere in the back of her mind she recognized the reason: the Mission children that she liked best were the ones who were least like the other Mission children and more like Lantenengo Street children, the children of her friends. There was one exception: a red-headed Irish brat who she was certain had let the air out of her tires and hid her hat. He never called her Miss Walker or Miss Car’line, as the other little sycophants did. He was about eleven years old—the limit of Mission children was twelve years of age—and he had a face that it would take him at least twenty more years to grow up to. She liked him but she hated him; she was afraid of him and the way he sometimes would stare at her when he wasn’t making trouble. At home when she thought of him she would tell herself that he was a child whose great energy could and ought to be directed into useful channels. He was just a mischievous kid, and he could be “saved.”…Thus practically her entire sociological knowledge at the time. She was to learn a little more.
The Gibbsville Mission was an old, three-story brick house in the very dingiest part of Gibbsville, and was supported by Lantenengo Street contributions. Babies were brought there to be cared for through the day by girls like Caroline, and a professional nurse. Then in the afternoon, after the parochial and public schools closed for the day, the children up to twelve came to play and be read to until six o’clock, when they were sent home, their supper appetites spoiled by a pint of milk.
One afternoon in the spring of 1926 Caroline had said good-bye to the children and had gone around, tried doors, getting ready to close the Mission for the day. She was putting on her hat, standing in front of the mirror in the office, when she heard a footstep. Before she could see who it was—she saw it was a child—two arms went around her legs and two hands slid up under her skirt, and a red little head was burrowing into her stomach. She slapped down at him and tried to push him away, and finally succeeded, but he had touched her where he wanted to with his vile little fingers, and she went insane and struck him many times, knocking him to the floor and kicking him until he crawled and ran away, out of the office, crying.