“I have no paper plates,” Miss Snell said. “And will you kindly inform Mrs. Cleary that this class is in session?”
“All right,” Grace took another bite of her cake and turned to leave. Her eyes caught the pile of gifts and she paused to look at them, clearly unimpressed.
“You’re holding up the class,” Miss Snell said. Grace moved on. At the door she gave the class a sly glance and a quick, silent giggle full of cake crumbs, and then slipped out.
The minute hand crept down to two-thirty, passed it, and inched toward two-forty-five. Finally, at five minutes of three, Miss Snell laid down her book. “All right,” she said, “I think we may all put our books away now. This is the last day of school before the holidays, and I’ve prepared a—little surprise for you.” She smiled again. “Now, I think it would be best if you all stay in your places, and I’ll just pass these around. Alice Johnson, will you please come and help me? The rest of you stay seated.” Alice went forward, and Miss Snell divided the little packages into two heaps, using two pieces of drawing paper as trays. Alice took one paperful, cradling it carefully, and Miss Snell the other. Before they started around the room Miss Snell said, “Now, I think the most courteous thing would be for each of you to wait until everyone is served, and then we’ll all open the packages together. All right, Alice.”
They started down the aisle, reading the labels and passing out the gifts. The labels were the familiar Woolworth kind with a picture of Santa Claus and “Merry Christmas” printed on them, and Miss Snell had filled them out in her neat blackboard lettering. John Gerhardt’s read: “To John G., From Miss Snell.” He picked it up, but the moment he felt the package he knew, with a little shock, exactly what it was. There was no surprise left by the time Miss Snell returned to the head of the class and said, “All right.”
He peeled off the paper and laid the gift on his desk. It was an eraser, the serviceable ten-cent kind, half white for pencil and half gray for ink. From the corner of his eye he saw that Howard White, beside him, was unwrapping an identical one, and a furtive glance around the room confirmed that all the gifts had been the same. Nobody knew what to do, and for what seemed a full minute the room was silent except for the dwindling rustle of tissue paper. Miss Snell stood at the head of the class, her clasped fingers writhing like dry worms at her waist, her face melted into the soft, tremulous smile of a giver. She looked completely helpless.
At last one of the girls said, “Thank you, Miss Snell,” and then the rest of the class said it in ragged unison: “Thank you, Miss Snell.”
“You’re all very welcome,” she said, composing herself, “and I hope you all have a pleasant holiday.”
Mercifully, the bell rang then, and in the jostling clamor of retreat to the cloakroom it was no longer necessary to look at Miss Snell. Her voice rose above the noise: “Will you all please dispose of your paper and ribbons in the basket before you leave?”
John Gerhardt yanked on his rubbers, grabbed his raincoat, and elbowed his way out of the cloakroom, out of the classroom and down the noisy corridor. “Hey, Howard, wait up!” he yelled to Howard White, and finally both of them were free of school, running, splashing through puddles on the playground. Miss Snell was left behind now, farther behind with every step; if they ran fast enough they could even avoid the Taylor twins, and then there would be no need to think about any of it anymore. Legs pounding, raincoats streaming, they ran with the exhilaration of escape.
The B.A.R. Man
UNTIL HE GOT his name on the police blotter, and in the papers, nobody had ever thought much about John Fallon. He was employed as a clerk in a big insurance company, where he hulked among the file cabinets with a conscientious frown, his white shirt cuffs turned back to expose a tight gold watch on one wrist and a loose serviceman’s identification bracelet, the relic of a braver and more careless time, on the other. He was twenty-nine years old, big and burly, with neatly combed brown hair and a heavy white face. His eyes were kindly except when he widened them in bewilderment or narrowed them in menace, and his mouth was childishly slack except when he tightened it to say something tough. For street wear, he preferred slick, gas-blue suits with stiff shoulders and very low-set buttons, and he walked with the hard, ringing cadence of steel-capped heels. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens, and had been married for ten years to a very thin girl named Rose who suffered from sinus headaches, couldn’t have children, and earned more money than he did by typing eighty-seven words a minute without missing a beat on her chewing gum.
Five evenings a week, Sunday through Thursday, the Fallons sat at home playing cards or watching television, and sometimes she would send him out to buy sandwiches and potato salad for a light snack before they went to bed. Friday, being the end of the workweek and the night of the fights on television, was his night with the boys at the Island Bar and Grill, just off Queens Boulevard. The crowd there were friends of habit rather than of choice, and for the first half hour they would stand around self-consciously, insulting one another and jeering at each new arrival (“Oh Jesus, looka what just come in!”). But by the time the fights were over they would usually have joked and drunk themselves into a high good humor, and the evening would often end in song and staggering at two or three o’clock. Fallon’s Saturday, after a morning of sleep and an afternoon of helping with the housework, was devoted to the entertainment of his wife: they would catch the show at one of the neighborhood movies and go to an ice-cream parlor afterwards, and they were usually in bed by twelve. Then came the drowsy living-room clutter of newspapers on Sunday, and his week began again.
The trouble might never have happened if his wife had not insisted, that particular Friday, on breaking his routine: there was a Gregory Peck picture in its final showing that night, and she said she saw no reason why he couldn’t do without his prize fight, for once in his life. She told him this on Friday morning, and it was the first of many things that went wrong with his day.
At lunch—the special payday lunch that he always shared with three fellow clerks from his office, in a German tavern downtown—the others were all talking about the fights, and Fallon took little part in the conversation. Jack Kopeck, who knew nothing about boxing (he had called the previous week’s performance “a damn good bout” when in fact it had been fifteen rounds of clinches and cream-puff sparring, with the mockery of a decision at the end), told the party at some length that the best all-around bout he’d ever seen was in the Navy. And that led to a lot of Navy talk around the table, while Fallon squirmed in boredom.
“So here I was,” Kopeck was saying, jabbing his breastbone with a manicured thumb in the windup of his third long story, “my first day on a new ship, and nothing but these tailor-made dress blues to stand inspection in. Scared? Jesus, I was shakin’ like a leaf. Old man comes around, looks at me, says, ‘Where d’ya think you’re at, sailor? A fancy-dress ball?’”
“Talk about inspections,” Mike Boyle said, bugging his round comedian’s eyes. “Lemme tell ya, we had this commander, he’d take this white glove and wipe his finger down the bulkhead? And brother, if that glove came away with a specka dust on it, you were dead.”
Then they started getting sentimental. “Ah, it’s a good life, though, the Navy,” Kopeck said. “A clean life. The best part about the Navy is, you’re somebody, know what I mean? Every man’s got his own individual job to do. And I mean what the hell, in the Army all you do is walk around and look stupid like everybody else.”
“Brother,” said little George Walsh, wiping mustard on his knockwurst, “you can say that again. I had four years in the Army and, believe me, you can say that again.”
That was when John Fallon’s patience ran out. “Yeah?” he said “What parta the Army was that?”
“What part?” Walsh said, blinking. “Well, I was in the ordnance for a while, in Virginia, and then I was in Texas, and Georgia—how d’ya mean, what part?”
Fallon’s eyes narrowed and his lips curled tight. “You oughta tried an
infantry outfit, Mac,” he said.
“Oh, well,” Walsh deferred with a wavering smile.
But Kopeck and Boyle took up the challenge, grinning at him.
“The infantry?” Boyle said. “Whadda they got—specialists in the infantry?”
“You betcher ass they got specialists,” Fallon said. “Every son of a bitch in a rifle company’s a specialist, if you wanna know something. And I’ll tellya one thing, Mac—they don’t worry about no silk gloves and no tailor-made clothes, you can betcher ass on that.”
“Wait a second,” Kopeck said. “I wanna know one thing, John. What was your specialty?”
“I was a B.A.R. man,” Fallon said.
“What’s that?”
And this was the first time Fallon realized how much the crowd in the office had changed over the years. In the old days, back around ’forty-nine or ’fifty, with the old crowd, anyone who didn’t know what a B.A.R. was would almost certainly have kept his mouth shut.
“The B.A.R.,” Fallon said, laying down his fork, “is the Browning Automatic Rifle. It’s a thirty-caliber, magazine-fed, fully-automatic piece that provides the major firepower of a twelve-man rifle squad. That answer your question?”
“How d’ya mean?” Boyle inquired. “Like a tommy gun?”
And Fallon had to explain, as if he were talking to children or girls, that it was nothing at all like a tommy gun and that its tactical function was entirely different; finally he had to take out his mechanical pencil and draw, from memory and love, a silhouette of the weapon on the back of his weekly pay envelope.
“So okay,” Kopeck said, “tell me one thing, John. Whaddya have to know to shoot this gun? You gotta have special training, or what?”
Fallon’s eyes were angry slits as he crammed the pencil and envelope back into his coat. “Try it sometime,” he said. “Try walkin’ twenty miles on an empty stomach with that B.A.R. and a full ammo belt on your back, and then lay down in some swamp with the water up over your ass, and you’re pinned down by machine-gun and mortar fire and your squad leader starts yellin’, ‘Get that B.A.R. up!’ and you gotta cover the withdrawal of the whole platoon or the whole damn company. Try it sometime, Mac—you’ll find out whatcha gotta have.” And he took too deep a drink of his beer, which made him cough and sputter into his big freckled fist.
“Easy, easy,” Boyle said, smiling. “Don’t bust a gut, boy.”
But Fallon only wiped his mouth and glared at them, breathing hard.
“Okay, so you’re a hero,” Kopeck said lightly. “You’re a fighting man. Tell me one thing, though, John. Did you personally shoot this gun in combat?”
“Whadda you think?” Fallon said through thin, unmoving lips.
“How many times?”
The fact of the matter was that Fallon, as a husky and competent soldier of nineteen, many times pronounced “a damn good B.A.R. man” by the others in his squad, had carried his weapon on blistered feet over miles of road and field and forest in the last two months of the war, had lain with it under many artillery and mortar barrages and jabbed it at the chests of many freshly taken German prisoners; but he’d had occasion to fire it only twice, at vague areas rather than men, had brought down nothing either time, and had been mildly reprimanded the second time for wasting ammunition.
“Nunnya goddamn business how many!” he said, and the others looked down at their plates with ill-concealed smiles. He glared at them, defying anyone to make a crack, but the worst part of it was that none of them said anything. They ate or drank their beer in silence, and after a while they changed the subject.
Fallon did not smile all afternoon, and he was still sullen when he met his wife at the supermarket, near home, for their weekend shopping. She looked tired, the way she always did when her sinus trouble was about to get worse, and while he ponderously wheeled the wire-mesh cart behind her he kept turning his head to follow the churning hips and full breasts of other young women in the store.
“Ow!” she cried once, and dropped a box of Ritz crackers to rub her heel in pain. “Can’t you watch where you’re going with that thing? You better let me push it.”
“You shouldn’t of stopped so sudden,” he told her. “I didn’t know you were gonna stop.”
And thereafter, to make sure he didn’t run the cart into her again, he had to give his full attention to her own narrow body and stick-thin legs. From the side view, Rose Fallon seemed always to be leaning slightly forward; walking, her buttocks seemed to float as an ungraceful separate entity in her wake. Some years ago, a doctor had explained her sterility with the fact that her womb was tipped, and told her it might be corrected by a course of exercises; she had done the exercises halfheartedly for a while and gradually given them up. Fallon could never remember whether her odd posture was supposed to be the cause or the result of the inner condition, but he did know for certain that, like her sinus trouble, it had grown worse in the years since their marriage; he could have sworn she stood straight when he met her.
“You want Rice Krispies or Post Toasties, John?” she asked him.
“Rice Krispies.”
“Well, but we just had that last week. Aren’t you tired of it?”
“Okay, the other, then.”
“What are you mumbling for? I can’t hear you.”
“Post Toasties, I said!”
Walking home, he was puffing more than usual under the double armload of groceries. “What’s the matter?” she asked, when he stopped to change his grip on the bags.
“Guess I’m outa shape,” he said. “I oughta get out and play some handball.”
“Oh, honestly,” she said. “You’re always saying that, and all you ever do is lie around and read the papers.”
She took a bath before fixing the dinner, and then ate with a bulky housecoat roped around her in her usual state of post-bath dishevelment: hair damp, skin dry and porous, no lipstick and a smiling spoor of milk around the upper borders of her unsmiling mouth. ‘Where do you think you’re going?” she said, when he had pushed his plate away and stood up. “Look at that—a full glass of milk on the table. Honestly, John, you’re the one that makes me buy milk and then when I buy it you go and leave a full glass on the table. Now come back here and drink that up.”
He went back and gulped the milk, which made him feel ill.
When her meal was over she began her careful preparations for the evening out; long after he had washed and dried the dishes she was still at the ironing board, pressing the skirt and blouse she planned to wear to the movies. He sat down to wait for her. “Be late to the show if you don’t get a move on,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be silly. We’ve got practically a whole hour. What’s the matter with you tonight, anyway?”
Her spike-heeled street shoes looked absurd under the ankle-length wrapper, particularly when she stooped over, splay-toed, to pull out the wall plug of the ironing cord.
“How come you quit those exercises?” he asked her.
“What exercises? What are you talking about?”
“You know,” he said. “You know. Those exercises for your tipped utiyus.”
“Uterus,” she said. “You always say ‘utiyus.’ It’s uterus.”
“So what the hell’s the difference? Why’d ya quit ’em?”
“Oh, honestly, John,” she said, folding up the ironing board. “Why bring that up now, for heaven’s sake?”
“So whaddya wanna do? Walk around with a tipped utiyus the resta ya life, or what?”
“Well,” she said, “I certainly don’t wanna get pregnant, if that’s what you mean. May I ask where we’d be if I had to quit my job?”
He got up and began to stalk around the living room, glaring fiercely at the lamp shades, the watercolor flower paintings, and the small china figure of a seated, sleeping Mexican at whose back bloomed a dry cactus plant. He went to the bedroom, where her fresh underwear was laid out for the evening, and picked up a white brassiere containing the foam-rubber cups wit
hout which her chest was as meager as a boy’s. When she came in he turned on her, waving it in her startled face, and said, “Why d’ya wear these goddamn things?”
She snatched the brassiere from him and backed against the door-jamb, her eyes raking him up and down. “Now, look,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this. Are you gonna start acting decent, or not? Are we going to the movies, or not?”
And suddenly she looked so pathetic that he couldn’t stand it. He grabbed his coat and pushed past her. “Do whatcha like,” he said. “I’m goin’ out.” And he slammed out of the apartment.
It wasn’t until he swung onto Queens Boulevard that his muscles began to relax and his breathing to slow down. He didn’t stop at the Island Bar and Grill—it was too early for the fights anyway, and he was too upset to enjoy them. Instead, he clattered down the stairs to the subway and whipped through the turnstile, headed for Manhattan.
He had set a vague course for Times Square, but thirst overcame him at Third Avenue; he went up to the street and had two shots with a beer chaser in the first bar he came to, a bleak place with stamped-tin walls and a urine smell. On his right, at the bar, an old woman was waving her cigarette like a baton and singing “Peg o’ My Heart,” and on his left one middle-aged man was saying to another, “Well, my point of view is this: maybe you can argue with McCarthy’s methods, but son of a bitch, you can’t argue with him on principle. Am I right?”
Fallon left the place and went to another near Lexington, a chrome-and-leather place where everyone looked bluish green in the subtle light. There he stood at the bar beside two young soldiers with divisional patches on their sleeves and infantry braid on the PX caps that lay folded under their shoulder tabs. They wore no ribbons—they were only kids—but Fallon could tell they were no recruits: they knew how to wear their Eisenhower jackets, for one thing, short and skintight, and their combat boots were soft and almost black with polish. Both their heads suddenly turned to look past him, and Fallon, turning too, joined them in watching a girl in a tight tan skirt detach herself from a party at one of the tables in a shadowy corner. She brushed past them, murmuring, “Excuse me,” and all three of their heads were drawn to watch her buttocks shift and settle, shift and settle until she disappeared into the ladies’ room.
The Collected Stories Page 12