Love Comes Calling

by Siri Mitchell

  “Jack!”

  I wasn’t strong enough to hold her up on my own. I tried to shake some sense into her, but she began to slip from my grasp. “Help me—somebody!”

  There was no pause in the drinking or the laughter or the music.

  “Jack!”

  Nobody came. Nobody even noticed.

  I pulled her to my chest, wrapped my arms around her, and just tried to hang on.

  “Ellis?”

  “It’s all right, Irene. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Always wished—always wished I were you.”

  At the moment I would have collapsed from her weight, Jack appeared and lifted her from my arms. I followed him out through the door and up the stairs.

  “We have to do something!”

  He set her down on the curb. “She probably drank some bad gin. Best thing to do is let her sleep it off.”

  “Irene?” I squatted next to her. As Jack let go of her, she slumped forward toward the street.

  I tried to push her back and prop her up, but she kept falling over. I looked up at Jack. “Do something!”

  “What do you want me to do?” Jack was backing away toward the speakeasy steps.

  “Call the police. Get an ambulance—” Something!

  “First of all, I am the police. Second, we can’t ask the ambulance to come here.”

  Irene’s eyes weren’t opening, she wasn’t talking. In fact, she hadn’t moved at all. “Jack, she’s not waking up!”

  “Oh, come on—” He took her by the shoulders, lifted her up, and shook her. The toe of one of her shoes got caught in a crack on the sidewalk and came off. “Hey—!” He gave her another shake. “What’s her name again?”

  “Irene.”

  “Hey—Irene! You got to wake up now.”

  Her head lolled to her chest.

  Jack bent and set her on the ground, letting her fall onto her side. Then he grabbed me by the arm and tried to haul me off down the street, but I wasn’t going anywhere. “We can’t just leave her here!”

  He kept walking, although he did slow down long enough to turn and talk to me. “If she’s really dead, she won’t care.”

  “Dead! What are you saying?”

  “She’s not breathing, baby.”

  “She’s just—she’s—she’s sleeping! She’s going to wake up; she just needs more time. And we can’t leave her, because when she wakes up, she’s bound to wonder how she got to the sidewalk, and if we aren’t here to explain, then—”

  “Trust me, eventually someone will call an ambulance, and you don’t want to be here when it comes. They’ll ask a whole bunch of questions you really won’t want to answer. And then the newspapers will catch wind of it, and then the reporters will come. . . .”

  “So you just—you’re just going to leave her here?”

  “Best thing to do. Only thing to do.”

  “Well, I’m not going. I’m staying right here!”

  “You can’t.”

  I sat down beside her. “Just watch me.”

  He swore and walked back to us. “Fine. But I’m warning you: If she’s found in front of the club, they’ll shut it down for sure.”

  “I don’t care what they do. I’m not leaving.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  “Then go.”

  As he walked off down the street, I sat next to Irene and cradled her head in my lap. She couldn’t be dead. She wasn’t. Any minute she was going to wake up and ask me where the party was. And then I’d tell her what I thought about places like that speakeasy, and she’d sigh with a frown and probably ask me to find her a cigarette. And sooner than you knew, next autumn we’d be back at the dormitory together, laughing about all of this, because she wasn’t going to be mean next year. We were going to be friends again. I smoothed the skirt of her dress down over her knees.

  That’s where the ambulance found us: sitting on a curb.

  Two men got out and took her from me, placing her on a stretcher.

  “Is she . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “She’s dead.”

  They pulled a blanket up over her face. Once they drove off, Jack came back and sat down beside me. He took my hand into his.

  Twisting away from him, I pulled it from his grasp.

  “I called the ambulance from a shop down the street.” He put a hand to my cheek. “Listen, baby, something I learned in the war: When someone throws a grenade into your trench, the best thing is not to be there when it explodes.”

  “I don’t think she was breathing.”

  “It happens sometimes. You drink too much. You get a bad batch. Something goes wrong.”

  “You don’t think she . . . she’s not really dead, is she? I don’t think she is . . . I’m pretty certain . . . I mean . . .”

  He sighed, took my hand, and pulled me to standing. “Let’s get you home.”

  I pushed at him. “I don’t want to go home with you.” When he wouldn’t leave, I beat at him with my fists. “Go away!”

  He didn’t budge. “Someone’s got to take you home.”

  When I turned and started walking away down the street, I could hear him following me.

  Irene was dead. She really, truly was. She’d been alive just two hours ago and then she’d—she’d died. She’d practically died in my arms. No . . . not practically. That’s what she’d actually done. She’d died as I was holding on to her. I was the last person she’d ever talked to, the last person she’d ever seen. I was the person she’d wanted to be. She’d wanted to be me. But—but—why? I didn’t even want to be me. Especially not now. Not anymore.

  Jack slipped his suit jacket over my shoulders.

  In spite of the fact I didn’t want him anywhere near me, I nestled into the warmth of his jacket, drawing the sleeves up around me.

  “You’re shivering.”

  I was? But it was summer. I opened my mouth to try to deny it, but my teeth wouldn’t stop clattering together.

  “Here.” He came forward, wrapped one of his big, strong arms around my shoulders, and pulled me to his side. “Poor little bunny.”

  “She-she-she . . .” Why couldn’t I talk? Why was I crying? What was the matter with me?

  “She’s dead. She died, all right?”

  It wasn’t all right. It would never be all right. People didn’t just—just—die!

  “Sometimes things happen, and you can’t help it. You can’t do anything about it, and you can’t stop it. Sometimes people just die.”

  Not from drinking! “You’re a policeman. And you were there too, right along with them, breaking the law the whole time.” There ought to be something wrong with that.

  “It’s a law I don’t believe in.”

  “It shouldn’t matter! Because that’s your job: to make people obey the law.”

  “And how am I going to do that, baby? There’s one of me and there’s . . .” He craned his neck as he looked up and down the street. “There must have been a hundred people in the club. At least.”

  “You just . . .” I moved away from his embrace and looked down at his waist. “You take that gun and . . .”

  He put a hand on it as if fearing I might do that very thing. “No one but a gangster pulls a gun on anyone. Even in the war there were things you just didn’t do.”

  “There. See? Rules. And you obeyed them, right?”

  “Well . . . no. Not all of them. Because there were a lot of stupid generals in Washington and a brand-new Joe College in charge who didn’t know hooch from a haircut trying to tell us what to do. So we saluted, stepped lively, and did what we had to.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a trembling hand. “But you didn’t live very long if you didn’t look out for yourself.” He took a long draw on the cigarette and exhaled. “Who’s got the right to tell me what to do anyway? And what’s the harm in a drink or two? Why should I stop anyone from having a good time?”

  “A good time?”


  He took another draw as he looked around. “What would you have wanted me to say to all those people in there anyway? ‘Shame on you. You shouldn’t be drinking that stuff’?”

  I wasn’t quite sure what I would have wanted him to say. Or what I would have wanted him to have done. I’d never really thought about laws before. Not until Griff had started talking about his numbers. I’d always just . . . obeyed them.

  “Baby, they’d laugh right in my face. Half of them are older than I am. Besides, who am I to tell anyone else what to do?”

  “You’re the policeman!” And if he didn’t, then who would? “What about—what about all those people who get shot by gangsters? Like in—like in Chicago?”

  “What about them? Gotta hope they died happy, doing exactly what they wanted to do.”

  “Irene wasn’t.” She might have been doing what she’d wanted to do, but she hadn’t been happy.

  “You didn’t kill her.”

  “But I was there.”

  “And thank goodness. Did you ever think of that? Maybe that’s the best thing that could have happened. If you weren’t there, who would’ve been?”

  I thought about that for a minute, but then realized he was just trying to be nice. “She wanted to be me. Did you know that? That’s what she said.”

  “People say lots of things when they’re dying and—”

  “Don’t you dare say they don’t mean them! If you only had a few words left to say, why wouldn’t you want them to be the truth?” Why wouldn’t you? “But . . . why would she want to be me?”

  “Living up there on Beacon Hill with all those rich people? Who wouldn’t want to be you?”

  Me, that’s who!

  “People always want what they don’t have.”

  Irene had wanted to be me, and I wanted to be a Hollywood movie star.

  “Listen, baby, it’s tough luck—but if people make choices, then they have to live with the consequences.” He flicked the cigarette away and then held out his hand toward me.

  “But what about me?” I couldn’t stop my chin from trembling. “How do I live with the consequences?” I didn’t drink and I obeyed the law, but it hadn’t stopped Irene from dying in my arms.

  He took me by the hand, but I pulled it from his grasp. “Don’t touch me.”

  He held up his hands. “Fine. I won’t touch you. But you can’t blame me for any of this. She knew what she was doing.”

  Had she, though? Had she really known it would end like this? “You didn’t even know her.”

  He shrugged, then stuffed his hands into his pockets. “If a bullet’s got your name on it, no use trying to dodge it.”

  “This is not the war! She didn’t have to die.” There were no bullets and no trenches and no stupid generals. There was just . . . jazz music and cigarette smoke and crowds of laughing people. And none of those were supposed to get you killed.

  “Listen. You’re in a war, you survive, you come back, and you figure you got to take whatever you can get, whatever way you can get it. Life’s a gamble. One day you’re here and the next? . . . you’re gone.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  “This is not about you or your wars or your—your dumb luck! It’s about Irene and how she still ought to be alive.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “Or maybe it is about you and how you’re supposed to be this great cop, this hero, and you know what? You’re not! You’re just a—just a man who doesn’t have the courage to do what’s right. So I don’t want you, Jack Feeney. I don’t want to speak to you, I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you to take me anywhere ever again.”

  “All right. Fine. Just keep your nose out of my business, and it’s been good talking to you.”

  I tossed his jacket back at him.

  He caught it. “Just—take care of yourself.”

  Take care of myself. I guess I’d have to if the police department was filled with cops like him. It was every man—and woman and child—for himself. Or herself. I was on my own.

  22

  When I got home, I put “That Old Gang of Mine” on the phonograph. For a long time I sat there in the dark, trying not to remember the way Irene’s hair had felt beneath my palm, or the way she’d looked at me just before she’d collapsed in my arms.

  But closing my eyes just made it all worse, and leaving them open meant it was all real.

  I pulled out my Hollywood scrapbook, but this time the pictures of Mary Pickford’s mansion and palm trees and swimming pools didn’t transport me anywhere. And visions of sharing a marquee with Douglas Fairbanks or Rudolph Valentino didn’t make me want to climb out my window and hop a train to California. Life wasn’t Through the Dark or Mabel’s New Hero or even The Ninety and Nine. I lived in a place where the good guys had become bad guys and the bad guys had turned into good guys. There weren’t any Keystone Cops, and I wasn’t Mabel. There were just people like Jack and people like me. People who had sat around and watched while a girl like Irene had drunk herself to death. I needed to talk to someone, and there was only one person I could think of who would understand.

  Though it was after nine o’clock, the butler let me in when I knocked at the Phillipses’ door. A few moments later Griff greeted me from the parlor. He gestured toward the table. “I’m still working on the books. There’s lots of different accounts to go through, so it’s slow going.” He glanced over at me, but I still didn’t quite know what to say, so I sat down on the divan and did nothing at all.

  He worked for a while, making notes on a sheet of paper, and then he put down his pencil. “What is it, Ellis?”

  “What is what?”

  “Whatever it is that’s on your mind. You’ve been sitting there for a full quarter of an hour.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’re never tired. You’re always doing something. And right now, you’re not even fidgeting.”

  “Can I . . . ask you a question?”

  He closed the book and rubbed at his eyes. “Sure. Ask me anything.”

  “When your mother died . . . how did you go on? How did you stop remembering?”

  “I didn’t. I haven’t.”

  “Then it—it never goes away?” It felt like the bottom of my soul had dropped out and left me with nothing at all.

  “It changes. You start remembering other things too. Things besides the death. You start remembering the life.”

  “The good parts?” Irene and I’d had fun when we’d roomed together. I wouldn’t mind remembering those parts.

  “And the bad parts. All of it. Together.”

  “Were you there when she died?”

  “No. She was quarantined, along with all the others.”

  “What if you had been? What would you have said? What would you have done?”

  “Nothing . . . at least, I don’t think I would have . . . maybe . . .” His gaze slipped from mine. “I might have told her I loved her.”

  Had I said anything to Irene? I couldn’t remember.

  “I don’t know . . . I just . . . as much as you might want to, you can’t stop people from dying.”

  But that was just it. Maybe I could have. If I’d dragged Irene out of the speakeasy when I’d first seen her, insisted that she come, maybe she wouldn’t have died. I should have made her take my help. I should have told her I didn’t like that Floyd of hers or the way he treated her. I should have done something.

  “You can only . . . I guess, when they’re leaving, actually dying, you can . . .” He swallowed. “You can let them know how much they meant to you. You know?”

  “I was at one of those . . . one of those speakeasies—”

  “What!”

  “And—just listen. Don’t say anything. While I was there, Irene died.”

  “Irene Bennett?”

  “She . . . I don’t know . . . maybe she drank some bad liquor or something.”

  “Ire
ne is dead?” He spoke the words as if he couldn’t quite believe them, and then he slammed the book shut, making me jump. “That’s why all this has to end. One way or another! And the sooner it happens, the better. For all of us.”

  “Just . . . will you listen? Please?”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked contrite. “I won’t say anything else.”

  “Nobody even noticed. She was there, she was laughing and dancing and then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.” She was alive and then she was dead. Had she even known what was happening?

  “Are you thinking it’s your fault?”

  “I don’t know, Griff. I mean, it wasn’t me who gave her the drink. I’d told her she oughtn’t be drinking. But I was there.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “But whose fault is it?” Didn’t it have to be someone’s fault she’d died?

  He rested a forearm on the ledger. “It’s the fault of people who made a law that can’t be enforced and the fault of the people who could enforce it but don’t and people like the mayor who ought to care but look the other way instead. But most of all, it’s the fault of all the people who think it just doesn’t matter. All the people who don’t care what happens to others just as long as it doesn’t affect them.”

  “What would you have done? If you had been there.”

  “At that speakeasy?”

  I nodded.

  “I would have tried to get her some help.”

  “But what if it was too late? What if there was no time?”

  “Then I would have taken her to the hospital.”

  “But what if there was no way to call an ambulance?”

  “Then I would have carried her there myself. I would have done what any decent person would do.”

  Maybe that was the problem. Maybe there just weren’t any decent people left anymore. “You wouldn’t have left her? Even if you could have gotten in trouble if you’d been there?”

  “Is that what people did?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “As if her death might spoil their good time?”

  “I don’t know that it was really like that.”

  “Then what was it like? Did they just refuse to notice because it would have been inconvenient? Is that how it was?”