Story of Lola Gregg

by Howard Fast

  Still he watched her, and she wondered what he saw. This day began and rushed on with the speed of an express train and with the implacable fury of an express train. She wanted a chance to get off, to look at herself and examine herself, to understand what and why and how.

  “You know what,” Schwartz said to her, bluntly and matter of factly, “when something like this happens, you got to accept the fact that it happens. That’s all. You can do that, and you’re all right.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Lola said.

  “Well, something happens. A bomb explodes. A house falls down. During the war, I got a bullet in my shoulder. It knocked me over, and I was flat on my back, looking at the sky, and I felt like a kid again and I wanted to cry. The whole world fell to pieces. But a few minutes later, I was able to tell myself what had happened. A bullet had gone through my shoulder. Once I did that and accepted it, well, I was all right. You got to do that.”

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  “You haven’t. But you can.”

  “Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I can’t,” Lola said.

  “You can. It ain’t like I don’t know you, Mrs. Gregg——”

  “Call me Lola,” she said slowly, spacing each word. “We’ve lived across the hall from each other three years. I need some help. I don’t know you, but I need help. My God, I need someone to pick up my little boy at school, and I don’t even know what to do about that.”

  “I’ll pick up your kid,” he replied gently, “but why don’t you know me?” Patty asked him to make her another hat, and he began to fold it, but watching Lola.

  “I can’t—don’t you know——”

  “I told you I knew,” he said. “Take it easy, Mrs. Gregg.”

  “Easy——” All day long, take it easy, take it easy, as if it were all that people like this had in life, the only slogan, the only reason.

  “That’s right. Easy does it. You’ve got friends—your husband has, why don’t you call them up and ask them to come over? That’s what trouble means; that’s what friends are for, right?”

  The first thing she thought, “What right has he to talk to me like that?” She felt he read her thoughts, and she said, “I don’t know—I guess I lost my head a little. Anyway, who’s going to come here? The house is watched. The phone is tapped.”

  “I came,” he shrugged. He put the paper hat on Patty, and she gurgled with delight and ran to the mirror again. “This time I make one,” she said.

  “You got nice kids,” Schwartz nodded.

  “You live across the hall.” She was sorry she had asked him to go for Roger. She didn’t need him. Why didn’t he leave her alone? Why didn’t they all leave her alone? But this very thought filled her with un-happiness and self-reproach—and she thrust it from her.

  “That’s nothing—the point is, this happened. All right, it happened. What do you do now, Mrs. Gregg? Suppose you were back yesterday, a month ago, and you knew this was going to happen? Look, I don’t agree with what you and your husband stand for. Maybe I think everything they say about you is true, and that you ought to be wiped out like a lot of rats. Maybe I don’t think that at all. The point is, what do you think, Lola? If you knew about this a month ago, would you crawl out?”

  “Damn you, I wouldn’t?”

  “Tell me to get out, but that won’t solve anything. This is trouble. Either you’re used to trouble or not. If not, you got to get used to it.”

  “Don’t you think I ever had trouble before?”

  “Not this kind of trouble.”

  Now she was going to cry, and she had made up her mind that she wouldn’t cry over this. She began to cry, and Patty ran over to her and asked if something hurt. She held Patty in her arms and the big man watched her. She tried to stop the tears and make Patty go into the bedroom and play, and when she came back, leaving the child there bewildered and shaken, Schwartz was still sitting where she had left him. She dried her eyes now.

  “Feel better?” Schwartz asked her.

  “A little better.”

  “You got a lawyer, Lola?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good one?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wants you to stay here and wait for your husband to call?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “It figures, don’t it. Look, Lola, you know, sometimes I’ve seen you in the kitchen, and I’m having it out with my wife. What the hell, we fight like cats and dogs a lot of the time. She’s a good kid, there’re some better, some worse, but I’m no bargain. She wants kids and we ain’t lucky, and when I get fed up with it all, all I know is to go out and get a load on. There’s lots like us. You take it easy, that’s all. You take what comes. What in hell else can you do?”

  “I don’t understand you,” Lola said. She wanted to now.

  “All right. I don’t have the brains to put it any better. All I mean is that you got two kids and yourself, and tomorrow’s coming and the day after that. I’ll help you all I can; so will my wife. She’s out shopping now, but she’ll come by later. Did the kid eat?”

  “My God,” Lola whispered. She had forgotten completely. She began to grin, for the first time that day, and Schwartz observed, “You’re a pretty girl when you smile, Lola,” but said it so easily that it was robbed of any intent. She opened a can of beer for him, and he sat in the kitchen drinking it while Patty ate. “Eat something yourself,” he urged her, but Lola had no appetite.

  The phone kept ringing, two minutes, five minutes; it rang and rang. Newspapermen, friends of herself and Gregg, more newspapermen, Feldberger, People offered to come, and she forced herself to say. “Yes, please come,” fighting down her desire to be alone and to remain alone.

  Schwartz went back to his apartment to put on a hat and coat to go out to get Roger, and his wife came in with a bag of groceries. She was a non-committal, a sour, unhappy woman, but nevertheless she came in to share and partake of trouble. I don’t like you or people like you, her look said, but nevertheless I am here; and her husband said:

  “Let me take the little girl with me. It’ll do her good to get some fresh air.” And Lola agreed. They left, and then two friends came and stayed a few minutes and left. Two women with children of their own, they appeared nervous and frightened in spite of their desire not to show this. They wanted to help and had no idea of how to help, and it was as new to them as to Lola. While they told her, with reluctant excitement, of the policemen stationed at either end of the block, the two cars of men across the street and of radio bulletins that they had listened to and she had not, Lola thought to herself.

  “It’s not your fault or my fault. We haven’t learned about things like this. It takes time.” She was relieved when they left, and Sam Feldberger called again.

  “You haven’t heard?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “All right. Stick it out. How do you feel?”

  “How should I feel?” Lola demanded. The sorrow and the fear were passing. Anger was beginning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CHASE

  LEFT alone, the silence was sudden and pervading land disturbing and comforting all at once, and Lola sank into a chair next to the telephone, lay back, and let her weariness press against half-closed lids. Until now, she had not really thought of Gregg in the circumstances that must surround him; she had resisted the thought and refused to dwell on it in much the same manner that a normal person resists the thought of death, knowing that for the luxury of contemplating the experience and enacting it with one’s imagination, a price must be paid.

  But now, in terms of Gregg, she had to pay the price. She had to go with him, because she was bound to him and all he meant and was and would be; and in her present, subdued and tired state, she let her thoughts race as they would. She watched him climb through the window of the men’s room, a small window, too small for the broad-shouldered, long-limbed man of one hundred and ninety pounds and six feet and two inches of height, who was he
r husband—but his strength pulled him through. He never moved fast until he knew where he was moving, and as close as the danger might be, he would pause there, think the thing out, make sure that he was not walking into a dead end or a trap. Then he would move quickly and surely, through a littered back yard, through the back door of one of those ancient, long-halled apartment houses. Her heart sank as she looked out with him to the street. What do you do, take a taxi? A bus? The subways? But the subway was out of the question; public, guarded, forbidden. Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to walk, make no contacts, see no one, be identified by no one. It would be dangerous for the first half-dozen blocks, but that would be the sort of a chance Gregg would take, and she walked with him, easily, unhurriedly, one block, two, three, four—he breathed more easily now—five, six, seven. Now he could relax, and now he would take a bus. Buy a paper first, she decided, buy a paper, Gregg, and I’ll sit in the bus and read it with you. Just read it, comfortably, easily, the way Schwartz had said, take it easy, easy, just a man going to work and reading his paper. The bus would go downtown, the logical direction for a man on his way to work, and that way the bus would be crowded. No one notices you on a crowded bus; everyone is as tired as you are. But how far? And when do we get out? When, Gregg? And when we get out, what do we do then? Walk again, blocks, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, walk and think, and on, my God Gregg, I don’t know what you’re thinking. It’s no use to plan this like a cheap movie, get rid of your work jacket, buy a sports jacket, buy a hat and shirt and tie—no use, ho use, because I don’t know what you’re thinking and why didn’t I ever know, and you’re my husband and I’m inside of you and you’re a stranger to me, so tell me, Gregg, tell me, please, please, please tell me, tell me, tell me——

  The telephone rang, and she thought strangely, “The telephone rang, and I am saved. It’s him and now he’ll tell me—you’ll tell me——”

  It was Mr. Cann. “How do you do, Mrs. Gregg; I’m sorry that I must continue to annoy you——”

  “I told you I wouldn’t talk with you.”

  “This is important. Believe me, no questions now, but we’re not beasts and I can save you some heartache. A man was just shot dead on the corner of One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Street. No, it was not your husband. That is the point. That is why I am calling you, Mrs. Gregg. He was about your husband’s height and he held up the owner of a liquor store. A policeman intercepted him and they exchanged shots. The policeman killed him, and before I was able to get there, word went out that he was Roger Gregg. It’s on the radio already.”

  “What are you doing to me?” Lola cried. “Was it Gregg? Did you kill him? Tell me!”

  “I am telling you, Mrs. Gregg. It was not your husband. I’m calling from a drug store next door. I made the identification myself. I have seen your husband and a hundred pictures of him as well. This is a young man of twenty-three or four, with blue eyes and a scar across his face. It is not Gregg.”

  “Then why did you call?” Lola whispered.

  “I told you why I called—an errand of mercy, so to speak. If you haven’t heard it on the radio yet, you will hear it from friends. We don’t want you to go through any more than you have to, Mrs. Gregg.”

  “Don’t talk like that to me!” she cried. “Damn you—you did this! I didn’t—Gregg didn’t!”

  “The man was not your husband,” Mr. Cann said evenly. “There is no need to be upset about it.”

  Her hand was trembling as she replaced the phone, and it was no sooner down than it rang again. She picked it up. “My darling Lola—poor Lola, I just heard. Poor Gregg——”

  She was now in Cann’s place, arguing and at the same time sick with fear and doubt inside of herself. She put down the phone, and it rang again, and she found herself screaming inside of herself, “Don’t they have anything to do but listen to their damned radios!” And then saying, “No, no—Gregg is not dead.” “Lola, it’s on the air. You have to face it.” “No—please, Gregg isn’t dead.”

  But how do I know, she was asking herself? It has to come to an end. He is still walking. “Gregg, let me walk with you.” Three blocks, four, fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four. I’m tired. I’m tired, and you’re dead—poor, poor Gregg.

  The phone rang, and she was afraid to answer it. Twice, three times, and you must answer it, you must, you must—no one is strong enough, wilful enough not to answer it. She picked it up. “Yes—yes, it’s good of you to call. But it’s a mistake. It was not Gregg. It was someone else. No—I’m not sick. I tell you it was someone else!”

  They all thought the same. Her husband was dead and she could not face it, and now she was cold and covered all over on her face and arms with a film of sweat, but cold and contained and telling herself that she could face it—I can, I can—and then you’ve grown up and you’re standing on your own two feet, and you can face death or anything else, and good-bye to all the hopes and dreams and fancies, but you could face it, and you didn’t crack like a thin shell of glass——

  The telephone rang. She picked it up and said evenly, “This is Lola Gregg.”

  “Lola, this is Sam Feldberger. Listen now. Gregg is not dead!”

  “Thank you, Sam,” she whispered.

  “You heard it, then?”

  “I didn’t know until Cann called me up.”

  “He called you?”

  “He called me and told me that a man who held up a liquor store had been shot,” she said wearily. “He told me it was not Gregg. I guess it was thoughtful of him, but—I don’t know. People have been calling me up to tell me that I must be strong because Gregg is dead——”

  “He isn’t dead.”

  “—but why don’t I have to be just as strong now?”

  “And it wasn’t thoughtful of Cann. I wouldn’t put it past those bastards to plant the story themselves, just to explode things a little or pull Gregg out of wherever he is. Has he called?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to believe——”

  “Lola, look—I’m calling you from a drugstore next to the liquor store. I got there before they took the body away. I looked at the man. It was not Gregg, and he doesn’t look like Gregg, and he’s ten years younger than Gregg. Do you hear me? Do you understand me? I want you to snap out of this!”

  “Who was it?”

  “Lola, I don’t know who it was. Some hoodlum or some kid with the habit who needed some dough. It was not Gregg.”

  “Thank you, Sam.”

  “Want me to come up and tell you personally?”

  “No, it’s all right, Sam. Thank you for calling.”

  “All right. I would come up, but I got to go downtown on the others. I’ve been playing footsie with the F.B.I, so much today I’m beginning to feel like part of the organization—and that’s one dream I never wanted. Take it easy.”

  “Easy,” she smiled. “Bye now, Sam.”

  “Bye now,” he said.

  So Gregg was alive and someone else was dead. Who was he? Who was weeping for him, she wondered? Did he have a wife, a father, a mother? Properly, it was her concern only in terms of who it was not. Who it was meant nothing, a life meant nothing. “You live in a strange world, Lola,” she told herself. “A man is killed, but he’s nobody, no face, no name, no soul—just a hoodlum who had the habit. We speak the same slang, Sam and me, commonplace. We excuse things easily, as everyone does. Dope—who doesn’t take it, one kind or another; and when your lies begin to fade, you take a gun to renew it. What do they call it—what do they call it? A fix. You become an addict and your body begins to fall apart, and it needs a fix—a shot of heroin or a war or an atomic bomb. It fixes, but what does it fix, Lola, what does it fix?”

  Now she was crying for a nameless man who lay dead in a liquor store or in a mortuary, nameless, hated, feared, sick, shot down like a dog. Cure all by shooting it down. Roger knew already—he wasn’t quite seven years old, but he knew, bang bang—he knew, he knew.

  Did he also know
about the chase, and his father was the hunted. All over the city, a thousand men are seeking him, to find him and shoot him down like a dog, because he’s dangerous——

  Not because he needs a fix.

  Lola stopped weeping and went into the bathroom and washed her face and powdered herself, thinking:

  “The children will be back soon.”

  Not because he needs a fix.

  “I guess he peddles what’s worse than dope. He peddles hope,” she said aloud.

  “It rhymes,” she thought. “Some peddle dope, he peddles hope——” She wondered what had happened to all the poetry she wrote once. Her father had warned her. “It’s worse than drink,” old Doc Fremont had said.

  Again, she sat down next to the telephone, realizing that Roger was just enough older than Patty to have a need to know and understand. To know and understand at that age! What do you say, she wondered? How do you say anything at all?

  The telephone rang, and she picked it up and said, “No, it was a mistake. It wasn’t Gregg. It was someone else.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE CHILD

  THE house was full. There were three friends who had come to mourn for Gregg, and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz and the two children and Mr. Kimberly, the undertaker who had his place down the avenue, and felt that the least he could do would be to take the funeral arrangements off Lola’s hands. It did no good for Lola to explain to him that her husband was not dead. “She’s shaken,” Mr. Kimberly said to Schwartz. “Worst of all when they won’t believe it.” He was a small, very fat man, dressed in a morning coat and striped pants. “Known cases that wouldn’t believe it for a month.” Roger heard him and began to whimper, and Lola cried:

  “You old fool—my husband’s alive! Now get out of here!” Schwartz was like a bouncer, and in spite of her anger and frustration, Lola was amused at the way he took the undertaker by the arm and steered him out of the door. But Roger continued to sniffle, and Lola felt that she had to talk to him, now and definitely, but somewhere alone. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she pleaded. Mrs. Schwartz, her pinched, disapproving face no different, herded her into the bedroom, and said that she would make coffee and take care of Patty and everything else. The phone rang and Hester Cole, a Negro woman who knew Lola from the P.T.A., and who had expressed something Lola only sensed, by walking through the police and into the house, her arms filled with food and her face with an understanding of sorrow, reached for the telephone; but Lola cried out and ran to it. It was only Mr. Geller, the grocerman, who asked in a quavering voice whether Lola needed food, and it would be a gift from him and he would send it over if she needed it.