I'll Call Every Monday

by Orrie Hitt

  I took the Dolan check over to Erie Street. There was an aerial up there on the roof, shining bright in the sun. More than likely that would be the only monument that would ever be erected to the memory of a girl who had chosen to die so young.

  “Now it’s going to cost me ten cents to get the thing cashed,” Mrs. Dolan complained.

  I reached in my pocket and handed her a dime.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking it. “I suppose I’ve got to go up to the bank with it.”

  “Well, I’m drawing the line on that,” I said. “You can pay your own bus fare or walk.”

  “I’ll get a cab,” she said.

  I went back and got in the car. When I drove away she was sitting on the top step, busily rubbing the brown mud off her shoes with a dirty cloth.

  The Walters home was a small place on a quiet side street. Big maples hung over the carefully tended lawn and the picket fence around the place was trim and white. Mrs. Walters was out in the back yard putting some curtains on stretchers.

  “Hello, Mr. Weaver!”

  “Hello,” I said, and handed her the check.

  She regarded it briefly, then folded it slowly.

  “I wanted them to hold it at interest for me,” she said. “But they wouldn’t do that.”

  “Not with group,” I said. “Unless the insured elects to have it that way.”

  She folded the check neatly and put it in the pocket of her apron.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I can buy some government bonds with it. I — of course, I could use it, but there was more from the other companies than I thought. I want to keep this as sort of a nest-egg.”

  “For the lake?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you been out there, Mr. Weaver?”

  “Sunday.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  The clean, young lines in her face sagged, and I knew that she was seeing it out there again with Dell, just as they had seen it together many times. She sighed and smiled a little wistfully.

  “I’m afraid it would cost an awful lot, Mr. Weaver. But it’s something to think about and hope for.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You’d have to clear off some land for a clubhouse and cottages.”

  “And a tennis court.”

  “Sure.”

  “There’d have to be a parking place for cars.”

  “You’d have to cut down plenty of trees to do all those things,” I said. “They look like good pines and they could be sawed into lumber. That would be a big saving right there. And some of the work could be done with stone. There’s plenty of stones around there for foundations and fireplaces and even buildings.”

  I watched her as she went about fastening the curtains on the stretcher.

  “I guess you did like it out there, Mr. Weaver.”

  “It would be a good life,” I said. “It would be a lot of work, no matter how it was done, but it would be something to put your teeth into.”

  She let go of the curtain and turned to me quickly. All of the hope in her heart leaped up into her eyes and crept into her voice.

  “Oh, will you? Will you, Mr. Weaver?”

  Right at that moment I felt like the lowest form of life.

  “I can’t right now,” I said. “It might be six months or a year.”

  She could never look more hurt or disappointed, so I let her have the rest of it.

  “Maybe I can’t ever do it,” I said. “There’s a lot to consider. A step like that means a step for the rest of my life. I hope you can understand how it is with me.”

  “I couldn’t expect you to feel about it as I do,” she said, fiddling with the curtain again.

  “But it isn’t a question of feeling. It’s a question of what’s possible. And other things. I know how I feel. So do you. I’ve told you that.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to look into this more — with your permission.” Her look was a trifle sharp.

  I caught the ends of one of the curtains and held it for her while she pressed the hem deftly over the sharp nails.

  “There’s the question of water,” I said. “How much would water cost out there? I mean, drinking water — not something to swim in, because there’s plenty of that. And the lumber. How much lumber could we get off the land that’s cleared? And how much would it cost to saw? And electricity. And telephone. Those services you’d have to have. There’s plenty to think about.”

  “We never went into it that far, Mr. Weaver.”

  “Well, you’d have to.”

  She finished the curtain and straightened. Without the children around, putting the age on her, she looked pretty good. Her body was trim even in the old house dress she was wearing and she had a clear face that glowed with a natural health and brightness. For the first time I noticed that her eyes were brown — brown eyes that were soft and kind.

  “Dell and I just dreamed about it,” she said. “And, like a lot of dreams, maybe it wasn’t any good. We never thought of all those things that you just mentioned. It’s funny, too. We talked about the money it would cost, just guessing, not trying to find out how much it might be. I think your way would be the right one.”

  I offered her a cigarette and she shook her head. I lit one and watched the smoke fade away into a rose bush. “I can’t promise you anything, Mrs. Walters.”

  “You’re just looking.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll help you in any way that I can,” she said. “I don’t want you to do anything that’s wrong.”

  “No.”

  “I ought to hate you,” she said, laughing. “You might take my dream away.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s the only way to find out.”

  “Yes.”

  A corner of one of the curtains was loose and I went over and fixed that.

  “You might have to go out there with me a couple of times,” I said. “I don’t know where the property lines are, and things like that.”

  “It would have to be some morning or on a week end,” she said. “I go to work at four in the afternoon.” She glanced at her watch anxiously. “Oh, I’ve got to hurry. Or I’ll miss the bus.”

  “I didn’t know that you were working,” I said. She hadn’t wasted any time, sitting around and mourning over something that couldn’t be changed.

  “They put on some extra girls on the night shift in the cologne factory,” she said. “I was lucky enough to be called the day after I put my name in.”

  I thought of Sammy, the night foreman, and the way he yelled at the girls.

  “That’s no bargain,” I said.

  “Oh, I got on a good line,” she said. “I made seventy-one dollars last week.”

  “You’re doing all right.”

  “It’s the only hours I can work,” she said. “My mother works days and she comes down and stays with the children at night. If I had to pay a woman to come in I’d just be working for the fun of it.”

  She started walking over toward the house, glancing at her watch again.

  I was in a hurry, too. Every day at four I called Irene on the phone.

  “You’ll hear from me in a few days,” I told her. “I’ll get out to the lake and get some ideas and we can talk them over.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “But I can’t promise anything, Mrs. Walters.” She paused by the back door.

  “No, I know that. We’ll just have to wait and see how it works out.”

  Her legs flashed long and straight as she went in and closed the screen door. Then the door opened again and she poked her head out.

  “Thanks for bringing the check, Mr. Weaver.”

  I nodded and walked out toward the car. I couldn’t help thinking about what a chump Dell had been.

  It was almost four, so I drove over to the corner of Main and Sullivan and found a stool at the bar in the tavern. The Yanks and Red Sox were on televisio
n and DiMaggio had just struck out. The star of Manhattan walked toward the dugout, the roar of the crowd swirling around him.

  “I don’t know what they see in that guy,” the bartender complained. “He couldn’t hit a cow in the rear end with a bass fiddle.”

  “I suppose Williams is so good!” a guy at the end of the bar sneered. “Just wait!”

  The bartender finished pouring my rye and tore off down there.

  “Listen, you!” he told the guy. “When the house buys, you don’t do no arguin’ with the house.”

  “You been taking my money all afternoon,” the guy said.

  The bartender reached back and got a bottle of Three Feathers. He poured one of those forty-to-a-bottle shots.

  “There,” he said. “You’ve got it. Shut up!”

  They were arguing again when I went back to the phone booth. I donated a nickel to the Bell estate and spun the dial around.

  “Hello, baby!” I said.

  “Nicky!”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Six.”

  “All right. Maybe we can go up to the lake.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “I was talking with Mrs. Walters and I want to do some figuring on that place. We’ll have some daylight and maybe you can help.”

  “That would be fun.”

  “Not that,” I said. “That’ll be work. Later, we can have fun.”

  She laughed. She knew what I meant.

  “Pick me up at the house,” she said.

  “What’s the matter with the brook?”

  “He’s down there, painting.”

  “With Sally?” I wanted to know.

  “Yes. Sally — again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll drop over to the house.”

  After I hung up I went out to the bar and ordered a double shot.

  “You don’t look so good,” the bartender said.

  “I’m not.”

  And that was the truth.

  CHAPTER XIV

  SATURDAY NIGHT IRENE AND I DROVE to Port Jervis and had dinner at the Colony Inn. The Inn was one of those old places that dated back to the days of the D and H Canal, but it had a good dining room and the German food was excellent.

  “I used to live in this town,” I told her, over coffee. “I wondered why we drove so far.”

  “Seven years since I’ve been here.”

  It all came back then, the good parts of it, flooding around me. The days of fishing in the Delaware, of climbing the mountains, of my mother and the way she used to make sure that I was all right to go to school.

  “You said your father lived here.”

  “Yes.”

  She toyed with her cigarette.

  “Aren’t you going to see him?”

  “No. On Saturday night he’d be drunk anyway.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  We laughed over that and ordered a drink. The waitress locked the door to the dining room and started setting up the tables for morning. I paid the bill and we finished the drinks while the girl was making change. I left her two singles and she called something polite to us as we went out the side door.

  I drove down to the corner of Kingston and Fowler and swung the Buick onto Route 6.

  “Mrs. Walters is going out to the lake with us tomorrow,” I said. “She found a map of the place and we can use that.”

  That first night Irene and I had gone up there to look things over we hadn’t accomplished very much — except in the back seat of the car. But the other two times we’d gone up there we’d made some plans as to where the clubhouse would be and the best location for the well. That was all. There’d been some more work to do in the back seat of the car and on the grass by the edge of the water. One time we’d been fooling out in the woods, teasing each other, and we hadn’t been able to wait. It hadn’t been any good. Those red ants bite like hell.

  “I can’t go out with you tomorrow,” Irene said.

  I managed to keep the car on the road.

  “I don’t know why not.”

  “He — Shep wants me to pose for him. He’ll get sore if I don’t.” The pink sky ahead turned into a red haze. “The son-of-a-bitch!” I said. “Why doesn’t he leave you alone!”

  “You know why.”

  We drove along a short distance in silence. “How’s he feeling?” I wanted to know.

  “Not so good. He sits up a lot at night. Says he has trouble breathing.”

  I thought about those pictures. “That’s tough,” I said.

  She came over against me, holding my hand down there, and I knew she was mine.

  “He’s got it coming,” she said. “But it’s awful. He coughs so. And he’s losing weight fast.”

  “One of these days he’ll go to a doctor.

  “I don’t think so, Nicky. His brother told him it was his nerves, and he had all kinds of faith in his brother. He thinks it’s his nerves. He buys lots of medicine in town, and New York, but none of it does him any good.”

  “He’ll do something about it when he starts to get the pain.”

  A truck shot by us, lugging coal, the water dripping down through the tail-gate all over the road.

  “His brother told me that people like Shep don’t have any pain. I mean, with a cancer like that. It makes them nervous and they think they’re nervous and they keep getting worse. But they always think they’re improving. Sometimes they have to go to a hospital, towards the end, because they can’t swallow even liquids. And sometimes the disease hits the lungs, filling them up, and that’s the end of it.”

  We reached the four corners at Wurtsboro and we turned off onto Route 17.

  “I guess it must be pretty bad, watching a guy die like that.”

  “It’s awful,” she said. Then she added, with just a little shudder, “Even though I hate him.”

  Saturday night traffic was pretty heavy and for a while it kept me busy just keeping us alive on that racetrack. But then it thinned out and she crept over against me again and I got one arm around her.

  “I guess Sally poses for him right along.”

  “Every day.”

  The question reeled in my mind and formed into words. “I wonder if she does it stripped.”

  “I don’t know. Why worry about it?”

  “I was just wondering.” Irene looked at me closely.

  “You seem to be wondering a lot about her lately.”

  “Just curious. She comes from Port, too.”

  “Oh. Looking out for the old home town?”

  “Sort of.”

  The shadows of the evening crawled across the road. Neon lights burned brightly beside the highway advertising restaurants and bars and tourist courts. Bugs spattered and died against the windshield, forming a gray film that hung like a transparent curtain against the glare of oncoming lights.

  “Business must be good for him,” I said. “He must be selling a lot of those pictures.”

  She made no reply and her silence pulled at me.

  “How the hell can you do it, Irene?” I demanded, sorry that I had to go at her like this. “You know what he’s doing with the pictures. How can you keep on doing it?”

  “I’ve told you why, Nicky.”

  “Because he’s dying? Because it can’t last much longer?”

  “Partly.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I said. “Supposing he was arrested for those pictures? They’d find you, wouldn’t they? It’s hard to tell what he’d say to them.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” she admitted.

  “Well, you’d better. Once you get caught at it, they don’t care if you wanted to or you didn’t. They get their hooks into you for stuff of that kind, and you’ve had it.”

  I turned off of 17 and hit the high road across the mountain.

  “We can’t throw fifty thousand dollars away,” she said. “That would be stupid.”

  I let that one turn over in my mind.

  “Yeah,” I said,
finally. “I guess you’re right. We’ve got to let it go as it is. But it makes me want to kill him every time I think about it. I wish to God that I didn’t feel like that.”

  The road was now narrow with sharp curves and I had to drive rather slow. She took my right hand and held it, squeezing my fingers. Then she bent and kissed each one of them.

  “You love me, Nicky. That’s why you talk like that.”

  I got my foot on the brake and stopped that car right in the middle of the road. She still hung onto my right hand but I got my left arm around her and pulled her to me. Her lips were eager and warm and waiting.

  “You’re damned right I love you!” I said. “You can say that over and over and be right every time.”

  She freed my hand and put her fingers in my hair, rumpling it.

  “Prove it!” she whispered.

  “We’re in the middle of the road, Irene.”

  “I don’t care where we are!”

  “We can’t do it here.”

  She kissed me, long and hard.

  “Then find some place where we can. We’re almost home.”

  I brushed my lips across her cheek and let the car crawl forward. We passed a couple of farm houses and a tent that someone had put up in the middle of a field. I kept slowing up, braking the car every now and then, looking with the frantic urgency of a high school senior for a place to park with my date.

  “Jesus!” I said. “They’ve only got woods here.”

  Irene laughed and lit a cigarette.

  An old gravel pit yawned back off to the right and I pulled the car in there. The cut ran far back into a field, down deep, and I drove to the end of that. I switched out the lights and the darkness closed in.

  “I’ll be glad when it’s over with,” she said. “I’ll be glad when we don’t have to sneak around doing things this way.”

  “So will I.”

  She lit a cigarette for me. I could taste the lipstick as I drew the smoke into my lungs. Now that we were there, together, we could afford to wait. The waiting always made it better.

  “Is it so wrong for people to love the way we do, Nicky?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We can’t help it.”

  “No.”