Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Kit and Tom... he was silent. The silence between the two went on for a long time but Kit wasn’t impatient. This business of the young, among our American women, wanting the young among our American men. “God knows I’d like to get a mature one if I could, one who would mean something to me... not just what one like Gordon means by it.” There is no doubt that, from the first moment he laid eyes on her, Tom Halsey had a certain respect for something in Kit, as he had for something in the woman Kate.

  He wouldn’t have been thinking specially, “Will she do?” There would have been little or no doubt of a kind of firmness, of reality, in her. The nonsense, already in the man’s head, about his son... “Through him, or a grandson, I may get the Halseys established... big people, respectable people”... he was later to speak of this matter a good deal to Kit... it always went over her head...

  He must have accepted her from the start. They stood together by the fence on that night for a long time, darkness coming... the time may not have been as long as it seemed later to Kit... there might even have been a kind of bond growing between the two.

  There could have been something. They had both been born and had spent childhoods on poor mountain land and the land lying there before them that night, most of it embraced in the farm Tom had bought for Kate... it would have been good rich land.

  Forests covering it in an earlier day, in a day not so far away from the two, then settlers coming, trees hacked down, the generations following each other.

  Westward going, westward going, westward going.

  A kind of obsession in that, too. There was too much land left wasted and unused behind the generations.

  The coming of the machine, science, mechanical progress, the overbalance. They certainly were not aware. Kit thought she got a growing liking for Tom Halsey from the first. It would break down but slowly in her.

  She wasn’t bothered by his silence and just stood near him, they both looking off across the land toward the distant road, high up across the wide space, until he was ready to return to the house. They had got half way back, were again in the overgrown farm road that ran through the orchard, before he spoke. It was quite dark in there and from the house, all the shades being tightly drawn, no lights came. He touched her arm and she stopped. “I guess you and Gordon will go through with it.” It was dark and she didn’t look toward him but suddenly she knew that he was right. She would go through with it with Gordon, would have herself a swell fast car to drive, money to buy things she thought she wanted. His voice, as was usual with him, was very quiet. Something began. He afterwards talked to Kit more than to others. Something like feeling, exasperation, crept into the voice. “He won’t stick to you. He won’t stick to anything. You may be able to make him be something.”

  He walked on ahead of her and she followed. “You don’t need to come into the house. I’ll send him out to you. It may be we can do something together.” He didn’t say to her what was in his mind. Perhaps he had become again a mountain man and liked her being a mountain woman, one of his own people. “It may be we can do something together.” She found out later that he meant she might have a son by his son, one who would come close to his own wishes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KIT GOT HER automobile. She got a fast little roadster which Gordon bought for her. She thought sometimes of Sarah and her lover. After she left the place where she and Sarah had worked together she never heard from that particular attractive little female. Had Sarah’s racket worked? Did she hold on to her lawyer lover? Did the lawyer’s wife find him out and maybe wreck her husband’s little holiday? Sarah had talked very glowingly about the hotel room where she had stayed with her pickup that first night and now Kit lived in a hotel, the best in a town of perhaps 75,000 people. She had a suite there, with a bedroom of her own and also a living room. She could lie in bed in the morning, pick up the telephone beside her bed, order breakfast sent up. She had been married to Gordon Halsey some six or eight months and all of these wonders had happened.

  The rooms were fixed up to suit her own fancy. What dresses she bought, what furnishings for her bed, hangings for windows, couch covers, fur coats, shoes, how many pairs of shoes!

  One automobile? Why she could have any one of dozens. It was like being married to an automobile salesman. To be sure she couldn’t exactly own them. Tom Halsey had cars working out from a dozen centers of activity. There was liquor being run northward from a long seacoast, North Carolina, South Carolina, spots along the Gulf of Mexico. In a city like New Orleans there were many ways for small craft, from West Indies Islands, to dash in or creep in. Big towns of the North, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron, Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis... count them over on your fingers and toes... all the good stuff coming in didn’t come through Canada... there were all the rich and the well-to-do, wanting the best. For the poor the alki cookers among the foreign-born in industrial suburbs of cities. These under the thumb of the big shot in any one of the big towns. For the poor the alki cookers of such places and the mountain moonshiners. In the Southern cities they nearly all drank raw moon. They said they liked it. “Give me some good moon for mine.”

  “Good moon indeed.” Tom once explained it all, smiling in the soft way he had got into. “Yes, I dare say they did make some good moon in our hills once.” In Northern cities and towns they had a kind of illusion about the mountain moon and that helped make a market. They had read books and stories about mountain moonshiners, the gun-toting, hard-eyed mountain man. “Yes, sah, I’z sure proud of the liquor I make.”

  “Proud hell!” Tom knew. He rather enjoyed telling Kit, wising her up. He had accepted her. “If there is any one of the cars I own you think you’d enjoy driving for a time, let me know.” He had caught her love of driving, her passion for fast and powerful cars. “She’s a square shooter,” he thought. “She isn’t one of the gabby kind.” In the presence of her husband’s father Kit never did talk much. She sensed his desire to talk... to a woman... knew, in a way in which women do know such things, that he had chosen her to play a certain role in his own life. He came to the hotel where she and Gordon both lived... after the first two or three months they had got separate suites, a fact that Tom Halsey knew but didn’t want to let himself know. It might have been indicative of a breakup between his son and Kit and he didn’t want that.

  He came to the door of her suite, usually in the late afternoon, and knocked on her door. Kit would be sitting and reading a book. There was a slant she had at that time. It might all have been due to the flood of possession that was coming her way at just that time. She tried to explain it afterwards but couldn’t, not very satisfactorily. There was a queer feeling, a kind of sense of obligation, money flowing freely to her, possessions flowing so freely. “There wasn’t a thing in the world I could think of I wanted, or thought I wanted, I couldn’t get.

  “I could go into a shoe store, not the kind of cheap-john place we girls in the factory or in the five-and-ten had to go to but one of these places where they sell only expensive shoes.

  “I could just go in and sit down.” The whole thing had fascinated her for a time. Clerks were bowing to her, kneeling at her feet. “Yes, Mrs. Halsey.”

  “Yessing me all over the damn place,” she said. She liked it for a time. I gathered she did not write to Sarah or to Agnes the revolutionist, did not go back to the five-and-ten where Gordon had found her. “What was the use? If I had gone in there the girls would only have thought I did it to rub it in.” Even if Sarah, for example, had won out in her racket, had been able to hold her lawyer, or some other who had money, she would have been feeling, in the presence of Kit... well, Kit was legitimately married, she had been made an honest woman.

  And there was her own family. There were other children in that family. It might be that her father, with his slovenly wife, was still living in the mountain cabin from which she had escaped, other children born, perhaps children wanting shoes, decent food, young girls, it might well be,
having happen to them what she thought had come so near to happening to her at the hands of her father.

  “You can’t. It’s no use.” Kit was meaning to say that if money, possessions, flow in to you as they did to her at that time, there isn’t anything you can do about it. She did not put it into words but had the conviction that, if you get into the stream of it... there is always unaccountable wealth lying about... people have never learned how to use land, houses, towns, clothes, possessions of any sort. You get caught as in a stream during a sudden flood. There you are. Better swim with the stream.

  If you go trying to help others you become, almost inevitably, patronizing. There might be a few people in the world who could do the thing. There was that woman Kit had met in the library, that time when she was in the town where shoes are made. “I don’t know. Maybe one like that could do it,” Kit said. “I knew I couldn’t.”

  You went into the shoe store, where they sold only the most expensive makes of shoes. Kit must always have known that she had very slender beautiful feet, slender graceful ankles. Shoe clerks never miss the chance to tell women customers such things. The clerks yessing her. They were kneeling at her feet. A kind of gaudy feeling came. It might well be that the shoe clerk was the son of some Southern so-called first family, the family having gone broke. “Why, my grandfather owned 600 slaves.”

  “Oh, yeah!” A kind of nice... for the time nice... inward laugh. “Gee, and to think I once, not so long before, worked in a shoe factory.” They hadn’t made any such shoes in that place. It was a place where they made cheap shoes, for working men and working women. They made thousands of pairs of shoes for one of the big mail-order houses.

  “Yes, I’ll take that pair. Send them over to the hotel.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Halsey. And will that be all today?” Such bowing, such politeness. “Boy, you’d better be polite to me.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Halsey, here is something, a sample pair, in a new style... there aren’t many women who could really wear them.

  “Do you mind... I’d love to see them on your feet.” She fell for it. She didn’t quite fall for it. There was, no doubt, during that period in her life, a something that did save her. It was a kind of basic common sense.

  Just the same you can ride high, ride fancy, for the time. There is always a fly in the ointment. It is the thing basically wrong with material wealth. It may be that wealth is at bottom no good. All people who have much material wealth must at times have a feeling that began to come to Kit. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all people should some day find out that there is, at bottom, no fun in being rich... rich in material possessions, money, land, things, while there is in the world one other human being who is in want? You go to the theatre, into what is called society, to the houses of others who are also rich, to an expensive restaurant. How nice! Who can doubt the joy to be got from the feel of warm well-made clothes, women being made beautiful by beautiful clothes... women should be beautified, it is the secret longing of all feminine hearts... joy of feeling with the fingers beautiful and costly fabrics?

  You come out of some such place. There are the poor or the hungry in the streets. Are you to become blind?

  Can you build up some feeling of being a specially deserving one in yourself or will you take the other road? “These people I see shuffling through the streets. They are of an inferior stock.” Surely in this notion the basis on which was built the idea of Southern aristocracy in America — something to put against the fact of chattel slavery while it existed. “I am brainier, wiser, shrewder.

  “I am an artist. I am a person of taste.”

  You go into a Southern city and see there, walking along, a very beautiful woman. You are with a Southerner. “Look,” you cry, “how beautiful she is.”

  “What, a nigger beautiful?”

  Or... “Can there be such a thing as a beautiful factory girl?”

  It is necessary, almost imperative, to build something... “culture may be a way out, to make me feel more comfortable.” Oh, the American women, who have had a little luck, perhaps have got, through marriage, some man to devote his life to money making. Women in literary clubs, speakers brought in, a blindness got... oh, blessed blindness. Kit said that for a time she did it, tried to do what is called “improve the mind.” She said she took The New York Times, read the Sunday book supplement, went and bought books. She would be reading one of the books when Tom Halsey came to see her.

  This before there was a kind of break-up between them.

  This before they did really get at each other a little, come for a time to a kind of understanding.

  There was, at first, the question of money — how was it to be got from Tom to Kit? He made his son a generous, a more than generous, allowance, but there was in Gordon, as Kit soon found out, something not in his father. He was tight. When he had got hold of money he didn’t want to let go. Kit thought that from the beginning, after Tom Halsey began to clean up, rake it in, and after he began to pitch money into the lap of his son, Tom having, as Kit also found out, a romantic notion, hidden away somewhere at the back of his head, something about a family established... there was a kind of humbleness in him... although he tried hard to stay in the background, never to push himself forward, was very careful to avoid publicity, a thing bound to destroy any man in his racket... humbleness based on the fact that he was shrewd enough to know that his own past... he having served time in jail as a small bootlegger and rumrunner, that he had himself no chance to do what is called “make it.”...

  Respectability, standing, even at the last, perhaps in a grandson if not in his own son, the Halseys beginning to be established, looked up to by respectable people. “I don’t believe he ever asked himself the direct question,” Kit said... this when disillusionment had come to her, long after the time of which we are now speaking... Kit getting a kind of notion into her head that may possibly, in these days, be penetrating many American heads... “He was puzzled. I don’t think he ever thought about how some of the people he wanted secretly to be like, or to have perhaps a grandson to be like... you know,” she said, “people like bankers, cotton-mill owners... fellows like that, big-bugs who lived in grand houses... he never stopped to ask himself, ‘How did they get theirs?’”

  There was, as suggested, the question of the passage of money, from Tom to Kit. Tom, she said, didn’t want to come right out and ask her. Tom’s particular romantic slant so bound up in an odd way with the son could certainly not be fed in that way.

  “Say, Kit, what about it, does your husband, my son, loosen up?”

  Gordon didn’t. He paid his wife’s hotel bill. He wanted her to come and ask him for money. I gathered that he was one who likes, in the presence of other men, to appear generous and open-handed. “Come on, boys, have a drink. This one’s on me.” Kit... she certainly got wise faster and faster after marriage to Gordon... said he was a check grabber who always missed his grab. “I’d have seen him in hell before I’d ever have asked him for a red.”

  She said that Tom liked to come to her room to sit and talk. He told her a good deal about the organization he had managed to build up, what men in his organization had to be watched, who among the many men working for him and with him were anxious to replace him, become the big shot in his territory. She gathered that there were spies everywhere, men who came to him, told him what in secret was going on within his organization, the spies perhaps watched by other spies. In the tangled mess he had to try to keep a clear, cool head. “You try to let them, if they will, kill one another off. If they won’t do it, you take a hand yourself.”

  Kit said that Tom, the big shot, so-called, in the first few months after her marriage to the son, often sat with her for hours. He had decided to trust her. He wanted some one he could trust. He really wanted to ask her whether or not she had got pregnant by his son but there was in him a kind of delicacy about putting the question bluntly as there was about going into the matter of money. He sat with her and talked, very quietly, she
said, often smiling softly as he told of some man within his organization he had to get... she thought afterwards that there must always have been killing going on, he not taking a direct hand... she thought he didn’t take a direct hand for a long time. She said, “I was pretty green. I thought I understood a lot more than I did understand.”

  He sat and talked but he always left money with her. “He saw to it that I had plenty of money.”

  It was in a way amusing, Tom’s method of giving her the money. He never gave it to her directly. When he left her presence... she had got his number... he never spoke of money to her. He had been sitting on a chair or on a couch in her living room. It is likely that during this particular period of Kit Brandon’s life adventures, when she must have spent a great deal of money for clothes, for shoes and hats... she did not confine her purchases to the Southern industrial town but took several trips alone to New York... she took magazines like The New Yorker... went into select and expensive shops there.... She had read carefully some magazine... picture on an advertising page of some pretty hot baby, about her own age, perhaps stepping out of the door of an expensive-looking mansion, the woman she saw in the advertisement clad in a mink coat... an advertisement designed and written no doubt by some hack advertising writer, a fellow with his own ambitions... he no doubt figuring that if he could cut a bit deeper into the American advertising cake he could move say from Brooklyn to Bronxville... hot dog... getting a bit higher up in American life.

  Words in the advertisement like this... “Slim, straight swagger lines. A coat with casual informal elegance that appeals so definitely to smart women, $2650.”

  “Boy, that for me, I’ll take me a look into that.” There always remained in Kit a kind of sensible occasional going back to the living language’ she had acquired as cotton-mill girl, factory girl, five-and-tern clerk... taking, very sensibly, what she could get. The chances are that all through her flush period, being Gordon’s young wife, the father hoping for a son from her, she really dressed for the man, Tom Halsey.