She thought there was something in him that knew when she was, as she said, rigged out top notch. When he had been with her and he had gone she took a look, in the chair or couch where he had been sitting. He always left it, tucked in somewhere, not to be too easily missed. There would be three hundred, a thousand, sometimes as much as fifteen hundred or two thousand. “I never would say he wasn’t a pretty swell guy,” she said when she was explaining all this.
But there was something peculiar, to the outsider very interesting. Tom Halsey must always have had to fix a good many men. There would have been county officials, federal men to be seen. For a time, at least for several years after prohibition came, there was more money to be made, less risk to be run, in being an enforcement officer than in being in the racket itself.
Tom had got a notion in his head. Money must never be directly passed. Why? More than once the same thing has popped up in the dealings had with politicians by big industrialists. Old stories of little black bags, the box of cigars left in a hotel room. There is a thin layer of cigars at the top of the box and below, hidden away under the cigars, so and so many bills. You go into Senator Strathaway’s room. It is well to take some one with you, say a clerk. “Why the senator isn’t here. He told me to meet him here. I brought him this box of cigars.” You open the box, let the clerk see the cigars neatly laid there in the box and at that moment in comes the senator. There is a little casual conversation and out you go. You make a motion with your hand. “Senator, I brought you some of my own imported cigars. I thought you would like them.”
It makes it all so very nice afterwards. There is an investigation. The senator has suddenly too much money. You are on the witness stand. “Did you or did you not, on a certain occasion, go to the senator’s room? Did you leave something there?”
“Yes, I did. It happens I took with me my secretary. I took the senator a box of cigars. It just happens that I opened it in the presence of my secretary.
“And it happens also, sir, that there was in the room at the time another. It was a hotel bell boy. He came in with a telegram and just then the senator came in. They all heard everything that was said. They all saw me leave. They saw the cigars. I have always admired the senator. It is a habit of mine to leave cigars with men I admire.”
It was amusing to Kit. Afterwards she saw and heard a good deal of it. “Of course he had to pay his way.” She even thought that, in Tom’s mind, the fact of not actually passing the money in some way cleared him. It was as though he had said even to himself, “You see, I have not paid the man any money.
“It happens that I was out driving in my car and I met him, a federal man or a county official. He was in his car and we both stopped. We had a conversation but nothing was said of money. He may have said something like this... ‘well, I expect you to take care of me,’ but what of that? He did not mention money nor did I. It happens that we were standing and talking at the side of the road, near a grassy bank, and I suddenly had the impulse to go and lay some money on the bank. I did not see him pick it up.
“It is obvious, is it not, that I never gave him a cent? I could go into any court in the land and swear to that.”
Kit had got money, an expensive mink coat, another of squirrel... it always reminded her — a little guilty feeling in her — of the squirrels chattering at evening and in the early morning in the woods near her father’s mountain cabin when she was a child... gowns and more gowns... two or three evening gowns, rarely used... her husband wanted her to put one on when she went with him to prize fights or to a wrestling match but she refused... expensive shoes a plenty.
Oh, what beautiful shoes are made for our American women! Where in the world can they be equalled for beauty? They are so trim — trim as were the clipper ships Americans once built to race through the seven seas. Go forth American Women. Sail blithely the seven seas.
Kit did most of her fast sailing in a trim little sports model car. From the first that was the best thing she got from her marriage, the car of her own. It took her away from marriage, let her at times forget. All day and every day she kept the car parked in the street before the hotel. She got the hotel doorman to keep a place for her, not directly in front of the hotel but across the street, where she could see it from a window of her suite. Her husband did not like driving with her. “She drives too fast.” He said it made him nervous.
Effort to have and keep a feeling of loyalty to him. It must have gone on for some time. “I would like to give him a fair break. He has taken me out of the five-and-ten, out of the factories.” When she was alone in their common suite, this before she told him bluntly to get one of his own... “If you want to get one next to mine O.K.... only we will keep the door between the two closed.” When she was alone in the hotel suite she liked the feeling that she could look out of the window and see the car parked in the street below. She went and looked at the mink coat hanging in a closet, ran her hand over the soft fur, saw the gowns she had bought hanging there, the expensive shoes in a shoe bag hanging on the closet door, opened drawers to look at soft costly lingerie.
Then to the window to look at the car in the street below. She laughed. “It isn’t so bad to live like this — on the trigger as it were.” She had picked up on the floor of the bathroom of the suite, when she still shared it with her husband, a letter. “Well, well!”
But after all it wasn’t unexpected and in any event she had never been very warm to him. It happened that, on the day she found the letter... it was late morning and he was up and gone... he had gone into the bathroom before leaving to arrange his tie... quietly, quietly, not to awaken her... she was awake all the time... she was always pretending to be asleep when he was about...
.. At night saying... “but I am so tired. I am so sleepy, Gordon.”
The letter had been kicked back under the edge of the bathtub. “Oh, my darling... I am so hungry to see you.” There was a good deal of that sort of thing in the letter. Kit stood naked reading it and presently, when the first queer little shock had passed... she knew instinctively, as women always know, what one of the women in the crowd she and Gordon were always being with it was. She thought of the factory girl Sarah. The little thing now after her Gordon was rather like Sarah.
A little shock and then a sense of relief, too. “Now I can have it out with him.” A certain pretense she didn’t much like could be dropped.
He wouldn’t dare venture an open break. He would be afraid of his father. She looked down at her own slender naked body and then reached for a towel. The letter... it had got wet from her wet fingers... the words in it were written in pencil... her wet fingers smeared the letters. She tore it up and sent it down the toilet. “I don’t want any evidence. At bottom he will be glad enough. I’ll give him a real break.”
He could go ahead, get him a little hot one like Sarah, come in when he wished at night. That day when she found the letter, when she had torn it to bits, sending it down the toilet, standing over the toilet to watch the little rushing cascade of water that carried it away, she had already bathed but she ran fresh water into the tub and took another bath. It wasn’t the touch of the letter. The woman who was now after her man, the one she had happened to marry, was like Sarah and she had rather admired Sarah. No doubt Gordon had said words to the woman. “My wife is a cold woman.” She had been cold. She dressed slowly, going now and then to a window to look down at the car parked in the street. She had already phoned to have it brought from the garage. She was alternately smiling and then frowning, hating as all people do the necessity for plain speaking, trying to think... “Will I put it on the grounds of finding this letter or will I be honest?” It might work better to be angry. She was for a moment sorry that she had destroyed the letter. It would have been more simple to thrust it at him. “Here. Take this. And now get out of here.” Although she had destroyed the letter it was the tone she finally adopted, thinking it would make it all somewhat easier for him. He could lie, as he did, say he knew nothing a
bout any letter, did not know who had written it, etc., etc. There was to be sure an angry scene but it turned out as Kit wished. She did not have to sleep with him, feel his arms about her at night, go with him to prize fights and wrestling matches, run about with his crowd.
There still remained the father, Tom Halsey. She had reckoned on Gordon’s not telling him, knew he wouldn’t, but there was something else. She felt, in fact knew, that Tom had hoped for a child from his son’s marriage. She was not pregnant. There were moments in the months after her separation from Gordon... before others they kept up the appearance of things being as they had been... in the month after the secret break Kit spent more and more time abroad in her car, sometimes driving all day alone, ranging far and wide... there were moments when she thought, “I could get me another man as he has got a woman.” She might become pregnant. There were opportunities offered. She had stopped her car, being alone, beside a road on the crest of a hill and a young man, no doubt a salesman, came along. He stopped his car and walked over to her car, saying he had lost his way.
It was a bluff, his wanting a close look. He hung about for a few minutes, trying to make conversation.
She could have had him. There were plenty of others. Often she stopped for lunch at some hotel in a strange town, men in the dining-rooms giving her the eye. “Shall I?” She wanted, or thought she wanted to hang onto the advantage she had got, keep the flow of money from Tom Halsey coming her way. “How easy it is for any woman to fool any man,” she thought.
She had it out with Tom one afternoon when they were alone together, when he had come to her rooms at the hotel. He drove her into a corner. “I have been here several times. You were not at home.”
“I see that you and Gordon have taken separate suites.” Should she tell him about the letter?
“No.” He would stick to Gordon.
“I know what he is like, but he is my son.
“There was an undertaking. When you married him you knew what he was like. You undertook to hold him. It was a job you tackled.”
Kit was sitting in her room looking at Tom who was looking sharply at her. She put her head down into her hands and her shoulders shook. “Now I will have to think fast.
“This is not a Gordon with whom I have to deal.” She began telling a long broken story of the efforts she and Gordon had made. They had been bitterly disappointed. She said she had been to a doctor but the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with her. She had even prayed, she said. She sat, not looking at him, and there was a long unbroken silence during which something came into her head.
It was an idea. It may have been that the idea had been in her, had been growing in her. It was that if she could not serve the man sitting there before her in one way there might be another. She did not look at him but still sat with her face in her hands. “What a bluffer I am.” She made her shoulders shake. “I am quite sure it is not going to happen. I have wanted it too.” She was remembering the long swift drives of the last few months over many roads, often until late at night, her husband abroad with his crowd, attending his prize fights and wrestling matches. He would be sleeping with that new little thing he had got. It may be that she had already got a feeling that was later to be so strong in her. It concerned the clothes she had got to wear. There was no place to wear them.
Money flowing in... nothing to do with it.
The queer loneliness of her position. “It might after all be better to be in the factory or in the five-and-ten. There would be people to talk with.” She had been having some such thoughts.
Thoughts also of Gordon and his crowd, his partner in the boxing and wrestling arena venture, a little sharp-faced man with watery eyes and a big nose. In the presence of women he was always putting a hand up over his mouth, whispering behind it. There was a finger missing from the hand. He would be whispering some sex story, giggling, the other women in the party protesting and also giggling. The man’s name was Harry... “Oh, you Harry, you dirty thing, Harry.” Well, the man was dirty — in some queer way all the men and women among Gordon’s friends and acquaintances were dirty.
There were sometimes wrestlers and fighters brought up into the Gordon suite. They had seemed cleaner.
There was a little cry in Kit that day she sat with Tom.
She managed to get a kind of broken half sob into her voice. “If you want Gordon to get another woman I’ll get out.
“I’d like to stick to you, though.”
She did not want him to question Gordon. “He has been hurt by it just as I have,” she said, meaning to make it seem a mutual sorrow.
She did not look up when she heard him get up from his chair and start toward the door and at the door he turned and came back to her. He touched her shoulders with his hand. “What do you want? What do you mean by sticking to me?” he asked, and in a broken voice she tried to tell him. She wanted him to let her become one of his drivers. “You have done so much for me.
“I would do anything to be of some use to you.”
She said the words and waited. It was odd. She had not thought definitely of what she wanted until she began speaking. To be sure she had heard, from Gordon and others... when he was with his own crowd Gordon was always speaking of the dangers in his father’s racket, always acting a bit mysterious, trying to give the impression that he also constantly plunged into danger. He did not speak of it as his father’s business. “In our business,” he said, “you never know from one day to another when you will be bumped off.”
“And you want that... you want to drive for me?” Tom said.
“Yes,” she said. Still she did not look at him. She heard him moving toward the door. “You know what risks you will run?”
“Yes,” she said again and, “I’ll see,” he said. She thought he would let her do it. He had agreed to the marriage between herself and Gordon, wanting to use her. That was his way of life, to use others. If he could not use her in one way he would in another. When he had gone she got to her feet and half danced about in her room. “I’m going to get a real chance now,” she thought. She looked forward with joy to the possibilities of a life of danger to be taken on in exchange for the queer half-dead false life she had been living since her marriage with Gordon.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KIT HAD BEGUN a new life. She quit being a wife. It is likely that Tom Halsey never discussed with his son the matter of what he thought was wrong between Kit and Gordon. His attitude toward the son may, from the first, have been mixed, elements of sincere hatred and contempt overlaid with hope. “Why don’t he? Why don’t he?”
Why don’t he what?
“Why don’t he be, or try to be, what I am not, what I want him to be?”
It may be that he had hoped, through his son’s new wife, to arrive at something deeply desired. It is unlikely that he had ever in his life thought much outside self. You can’t if you are out after success.
You have got to go get it, go get it, go get it.
He may have thought... “She has gone up-stage on me.” That night when Gordon brought Kit to Kate’s house and he walked with her he had accepted her.
“She is, on the whole, rather like me.
“She isn’t a softy. She knows what my son is.
“All right. I’ll take her on.”
Kit felt that, after the talk she had with her husband’s father... she had tried to work the feminine line on him... that business of putting her face in her hands, making her shoulders shake...
It hadn’t worked. She decided that was true after he left. It was all mixed, a puzzling mixture of thoughts and emotions in her, too. She had put up the bluff of crying while he was with her but after he left she did cry.
There were so many things to be decided. He hadn’t said whether or not her proposal that, if she couldn’t serve in one way, as a breeding animal to make new and nobler Halseys, she might serve in another, would be accepted.
And then, a day or two later, he did accept. He came again to her
room, stepped inside the door, smiled, a funny cold little smile, as though to say... “O. K. then... no more long intimate conversations between us... You want in on my racket. Very well... I’ll let you in.” The above words certainly not said. “You go to see Kate,” he said. “She’ll tell you what you are to do.
“Good-bye.”
He left as he had come and for a long time she saw no more of him and but little of her husband.
Her bills at the hotel... there was a garage connected... gas and repairs for her cars, meals charged to her room... she still occasionally bought gowns, shoes, etc.
.. these also charged... the bills were paid by some one, She thought it would not have been Gordon. “Not that tightwad,” she told herself. For a time she did not go to Kate and had the feeling, as regards Tom, that he was in some queer new way keeping an eye on her. As he had spies by whom he checked on others, so also on her. As he had disposed of one woman for the son’s sake, so now another.
He would be wanting to get something on her. There was in the man, as there is and must be in all men in any civilization founded on gain, man always trying to climb up over the shoulders of man, a part of the show of success in such a life so often centered upon some woman... women enough apparently eager for it... so often the successful man, big money maker, making of his woman... wife or mistress, a kind of clothes rack... there was hatred a-plenty. Kit knew it as regards Tom. The knowledge was down inside her, stirring down inside her as though he had impregnated her, not with the grandchild wanted from her but with an unspoken threat.
“If my son is not man enough to put you in your place, I am.”
It would have been the very foundation of Tom Halsey’s philosophy and no man has ever lived who did not have to form some kind of philosophy by which to keep on living, that life is a game, nothing more. If you can win, you win.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 195