They had passed into a little room at the back and as they sat, preparing to order a drink, two women came along a little hallway past the open door. There was a burlesque show playing on South State Street and the two women were from the show. They had dropped in between acts to get a drink.
One of them put her head in at the open door.
“Hello, boys,” she said to the two middle-aged men sitting at a little table.
Nothing more happened. One of the women looked at A. P. and laughed. A. P. had a perfectly bald head. The woman who had laughed spoke of it as a radish. She took a step into the room where the two men sat and put out a hand to A. P.
“Do you mind if I touch the radish?” she said. She started to approach A. P. who sat smiling at her, but the other woman grabbed her arm. “Oh, come on, Mag,” she said.
The incident may have been the cause of the drift taken by the conversation between the two men.
“A couple of hot babies, eh,” said A. P. “I’ll tell you how it is with me about women.” It was A. P. talking. “With me it is like this. . . . He hesitated and smiled. He sometimes felt a little awkward in the presence of John Wescott.
“I wonder how far you can go with this bird,” he thought.
“At any rate,” he thought, “he’ll never be an advertiser.” There was little danger that the man Wescott would ever become a client of his advertising agency. There was no need being too cautious.
“I wouldn’t want you to think,” A. P. said, “that I am a woman chaser.” John Wescott assured him that such a thought had never entered his head. “Why, what an idea,” he said.
A. P. spoke of his wife, now gone away to the country.
“I wouldn’t ever do the little woman any dirt, not really. I’ll tell you what, Wescott, I have always been faithful to her, that is to say . . . well you know.” He winked.
He was, however, mistaken. John Wescott didn’t know.
“I mean,” A. P. added. He hesitated. “To tell you the truth, Wescott, there have been times, three or four times, since I have been married. . . .
Again he hesitated.
“Oh, you know how it is. I dare say it has been the same with you. It has always happened when I have been a little high.”
John Wescott didn’t know what to say. For just a moment he half wished that he had himself been a more adventurous man. He kept nodding his head.
“This is what I mean,” A. P. said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. They could hear men’s voices at the bar outside the little room and a woman laughed. John Wescott felt that in being with A. P. in such a place, he was getting a peep into real life.
“I mean . . . to tell the truth . . . this is just between us two . . . I guess, in the real estate game, you fellows don’t have the temptations we advertising men have.”
He didn’t at the moment continue the explanation of what he had meant. He began speaking of John Wescott’s business, of the buying and selling of real estate, of houses and lots.
“You are in this real estate game. You sell some fellow a lot on which to build a house, like you did to me. He is going to build himself a house, a home. He is a bird who is going to build himself a nest.”
A. P. was often like that. He was inclined to slip off into something like poetry.
“You see the man is thinking of that, of the little woman, of his children. He is thinking of a happy home life, sitting by the fire on winter nights, eh . . . the little wife there beside him. She is knitting. The children are playing on the floor.”
John Wescott was thinking of what a wonderful advertising man A. P. must be.
“What marvelous copy he must write,” he thought.
His own firm, called Caldwell and Wescott, occasionally ran advertisements in the Chicago daily newspapers. Caldwell had been his wife’s father but now Caldwell was dead and he was himself in control of the firm. He had taken in a young assistant, having made up his mind that neither of his two sons would become a real estate man.
He didn’t really care about that, did not want them to be real estate men. He thought, he hoped sometime, that they might both become notable men in some other field, as scholars perhaps, or even as artists. It was something he felt his wife had wanted and that he also had come to want. He sat with his friend thinking.
“Here is A. P.” he thought. “He and I have become friends. We are chums, buddies. Now that my wife is dead and his wife has gone to the country with his children, we occasionally go about together like this.”
He was half wondering if he dare ask A. P. to do him a favor. It would be a rather delicate matter to bring up.
“Look here, A. P. . . . what you have just said . . . it would make wonderful advertising copy for my firm . . . would you mind writing it out for me? I could use it, you see, in an ad.”
He decided he couldn’t do it. It would be, he thought, too much like asking a doctor, who happened to be your friend . . . “Say Doc, what about it . . . look me over, eh?”
He couldn’t. He didn’t run many advertisements in the newspapers and they were usually small ones. He could not hope to become one of A. P.’s clients. It wouldn’t be worth A. P.’s time.
“I’ll tell you what, A. P. is a big man. He’s smart. He can make words fairly sing.”
John Wescott had often said something like that to his wife. As he was having this thought A. P. was still talking. He was still on the subject of house building, of nest building. He had got a little drunk with words.
“You take a fellow like that now . . . hell, of what is he thinking? He is thinking of what I just said. You Wescott, have sold him a lot, on which he is going to build a house, a little home, or you have sold him a house already built.
“So he is thinking of where, and how, he will have to change the house. You know how it is, Wescott, a new coat of paint, new wallpaper in the living room, eh. He may have to put in a new bathroom. There is one, but he wants two. He likes to sit in the morning having his morning cigarette and reading his morning paper. At my house every morning I demand a cup of coffee. I take it in there. I read the paper. I light a cigarette. I sip my coffee. The cup of coffee is perched on the edge of the bath tub. Mine has a flat edge.
“You do not take the saucer in there. You spill a little coffee in the saucer and what have you? When you take a sip, after a puff of your cigarette, it drips down on you. The coffee sets you up for the day. I have the maid get up early at my house and bring it to me. Sometimes my wife calls to me.
“‘Well, A. P., are you going to stay all day? It is much better to have two bathrooms.”
A. P. paused.
“And so,” he said, “such a man comes to you, a man who is going to build a home. His mind is full of things, such as I have described. But with me now. . . . The two were interrupted by the two burlesque women who had come back along the hallway from the bar. One of the women again put her head in at the door of the room. To John Wescott there was something a little odd, and even thrilling, that two men, such as himself and A. P. had got into that sort of bar in that part of the town. It was a kind of adventure that, when his wife was alive, he wouldn’t have dared tell her about. There had never been many things he could tell his wife. He had got into a little habit. He imagined a kind of warm intimacy existing between himself and his wife that never had been a reality. As he seldom conversed with her he imagined conversations. He was doing it as he sat in the room with A. P.
“I must tell you about it, my dear,” he imagined himself saying, not to his wife, now dead, but to an imagined wife, he had himself now created.
“You see we were in there, my dear, having a drink, A. P. and myself, and this woman kept putting her head in at the door. She was all painted. To tell you the truth, my dear, she looked to me like a regular huzzy.”
“Huzzy” was a word that John Wescott would never have thought of using in a conversation with his wife Clara. It was, however, he imagined, the sort of thing A. P. might have been able to do. A.
P. was the kind of man you couldn’t upset.
“Hello, baby,” he now said to the woman who had put her head in at the door. A. P. was like that, quick on the trigger. The woman laughed and went on her way.
A. P. continued his talk.
“Now, with me,” he said, “when it comes to one of my clients. . . .”
He hesitated. He lit a cigar. He seemed lost in thought. There was a look of something like sadness on his face.
“Often,” he said, “I begin thinking, I began life as a poor boy . . . I was a farm boy and then I was a clerk in a small store in a small town.
“I came away from there. I came here to the city.”
A. P. began relating to John Wescott his early experiences in the city. He had, he said, traveled a rough road. He was a big man, now grown fat and soft, but John Wescott could see that he had once been strong. He had been a common laborer, a soldier, a traveling salesman. He began writing advertisements for a firm he was with, doing it at first for fun, but right away it developed that he had a talent.
“It was a thing,” he said, “he never even suspected in himself.” Sometimes he regretted that he had not become a writer. In the advertising business he had gone straight up but, sometimes, when he was a little tired, or when one of his clients, now that he was at the head of a big advertising agency, became what he might call a little ugly or disagreeable, he often wished . . . he broke off again.
“I might have become a writer or a newspaper reporter, or, better yet, I might have stayed at home. I might have been just a farmer . . . you know, Wescott, tilling my own field, milking my own cows, hoeing my own corn, watching the wind, on a June morning, as it played in my ripe wheat.
“You have seen the wind, on a June morning playing in the ripe wheat, haven’t you, Wescott?”
John Wescott said he had.
“A free man,” said A. P. Again he began to throw words about and John Wescott was filled with admiration.
“So you see,” he said, “I am on my own land. It is not a big farm. It is a small one.
“There is a creek running through my farm,” he said. “At night I lie in my bed. I can hear the purling of the creek. I am tired, from honest labor in my own fields, and I am lying with my wife. She is a sturdy country girl, the daughter of a neighbor. I am a man who makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before.
“So, you see, Wescott, I am lying there. I am an honest man. I am upright. I reach out my hand and touch the body of my wife. I have the right, as you will understand, Wescott, to think of myself as one of God’s true men, one of God’s real men. There is my wife, lying now quietly asleep beside me in the bed and she is mine as the earth is mine.”
It was evident that A. P. was deeply touched by his own words. He became silent and sat fingering his drink. He and John Wescott were having an “old fashioned.” John Wescott was so touched that he felt like crying.
“It is so beautiful to hear him talk,” he thought.
He had often tried to say something of the kind to his wife when she was alive. He began speaking to her in his half-frightened, stuttering way.
“I was out again with A. P.”
He did not tell his wife of the drinking the two men did.
“When I go out with him there is always something said that I remember. He talks so beautifully.”
He thought sometimes that A. P.’s talk gave him at least a hint of what he wanted for his two sons, that they be, at least in ability to express themselves, like A. P., not like himself. It was A. P. who had given him an inkling of what his wife had meant when she spoke of culture, and sometimes, when he was speaking of his friend to his wife, she questioned him.
“Well, what is it he says? You say he has these wonderful ideas, that he says these wonderful things. What are they?”
It had been a kind of tragedy in John Wescott’s life that he had been unable to tell her.
“It is because I am so dumb. It is because I have no ability in words, no education, that I cannot make her understand how marvelous he sometimes is.”
It was the source of never-ending wonder that A. P. kept on wanting to have him as friend. In the little room at the back of the saloon A. P. got up from the table and put his head out at the door. He called to the bartender.
“Hey,” he called, “two more of the same.”
When the two drinks had come he began talking again. He spoke now of the clients of his advertising agency. They were for the most part, he explained, manufacturers.
Or there might be a patent medicine man. He came from some city, perhaps in the middle west.
“Let’s say Freeport, Illinois,” he said.
Such a fellow came into his office. A. P. began to expand again.
“It is in the early morning. These fellows always get up early. Perhaps he has come in on the night train.”
John Wescott felt a little guilty. He was himself a man, likely to get out of bed at six o’clock in the morning. When his wife was alive she stayed in her bed until ten. He got out of bed and walked about the garden surrounding his house. He sprinkled his lawn. He had always had a secret notion that people who could sleep until ten or eleven o’clock were sophisticated people. A. P. was explaining the relationship he had with his clients.
“So there the fellow is,” he said. “He is in the office early, sometimes even before the stenographers have come. Later he talks things over with the boys and then, of course, he wants to see and talk to the head of the house. There are advertisements that have been gone over and o.k.’d. When all is done, I say to him . . . it is necessary, you see . . . what about dinner with me?
“And well enough I know what it means,” said A. P. He sighed softly.
He went on with his explanation.
“We go out,” he said. “Let us say that the man is from Columbus, Ohio. He is, we’ll say, more or less, you understand, a big man out there.”
“I understand,” said John Wescott.
He wasn’t at all sure that he did understand as yet, just what A. P. was driving at.
“At home he is what he is. He goes regularly to church. He is a man with a wife and children. It may be that he sings in the choir in his church. Let us say that he manufactures and sells a cure for rheumatism. It is an ointment that you rub on. It is going all right.
“At home, you see, day after day it is the same.
“You see, Wescott, I know how he feels. In his office he has a lot of stenographers, young things you understand, some pretty good-lookers. We will say that his wife is getting a little fat.” A. P. was fingering his drink. He was in the act of creating an imaginary figure. He was pleased with himself.
“You understand, Wescott, that a man like that, no matter what thoughts may sometimes be in his mind, has to be careful. He is well-known in Columbus. He is a good business man and a good business man does not get gay with the help in his office.
“And now you see he is in Chicago. He is unknown here. He is dining with me. We go to a place where there are girls, to a cabaret. We have a few drinks and, with our dinner, a bottle of wine.
“He is feeling safe. He is excited. I know what he wants. Let’s say that the girls, in the cabaret, when they sing, come down and walk among the tables. I’ll tell you what, Wescott . . . you take one of that kind . . . she knows her biz.
“She can pick them out. You understand, she doesn’t get gay with me. ‘Hello, Columbus,’ she says to him. To tell the truth I have sent a note by a waiter. She sings to him. It may be that she leans over close. Her breath is on his cheek. ‘Ain’t it rotten I have to work,’ she says to him. Very likely she whispers something like that in his ear, giving him the impression, you see, that her heart, in a way of speaking, has been pierced by the arrow of love, that she would like to chuck her job and go with him. I’ll tell you what by this time” (A. P. winked at John Wescott).
“Boy, I’ll say he is pretty hot.”
The expression on A. P.’s face had changed. A shadow s
eemed to pass over his face.
“So,” he said, “I take him to a show, a musical show.”
A. P. leaned forward and lowered his voice.
“You can’t come right out with a fellow like that,” he explained. “What you say to him is that you know a couple of girls.
“But first, after the show you go and have a few more drinks. You make him feel, you understand, that whatever happens, it is o.k. with you.
“You have told him about the girls so you go and call one of them up. You tell him ‘they are something special.’ So you give him the guff. They have an apartment out south, not so far from the University. You tell him that they are university students.”
A. P. sighed.
“Well, there you are, Wescott. Of course, by this time, I am myself a little high. I want to make him feel it is all right. I’ll tell you, Wescott, there is something, however, I have never done.”
There was a look of sadness and resignation in the presence of fate, on A. P.’s face.
“Anyway, Wescott, no matter how far I may have gone with one of them, you understand, when I am a little drunk, I have never kissed one of them on the lips,” he said.
* * *
A. P. had finished his tale. To John Wescott it was a revelation. For the moment he was rather ashamed of the comparative purity of his own life. He felt he ought to say something, tell some story of his own adventure. He began to tell A. P. about his relations with his own wife.
“I have never,” he said hesitatingly, “that is to say, you understand, with any one but my wife.”
He hung his head. He did not look at A. P.
“It may be that I haven’t the nerve.”
He plunged rather desperately into the story of how his own marriage had come about.
“You see, A. P., there I was.”
He told how he had begun working in the real estate office of his father-in-law and how his employer’s daughter sometimes came in. He did not look at A. P. as he told his tale. It was, he felt, after all, something a little not so nice, to speak thus, to another man, of the woman he had married. He explained how when she came into the office, and he was alone in there, he got up out of his chair and they shook hands. And then, one evening . . . he said that it had been a thing, at the moment very difficult for him to believe . . . it had seemed to him that, for just a moment, her hand had clung to his.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 296