“When will it be?” Nick asked Marci.
“We’ll announce it next month. And be married shortly afterward.”
“Come,” Gus said. “Now we must have some wine. And I will play whatever you want, Marci. And as long as you want.”
“I have often passed this shack and wondered about you. You are famous in Chicago for your goats.”
Pierro and Marci sat on the edge of the bunk and Nick sat on one of the old wooden chairs.
“What are your plans, Pierro?” Nick asked.
“Well, marriage is something I hadn’t really planned on so soon,” Pierro said. “One of my first reactions was to open an office here. That is if I can get the capital. Then I could do the kind of work I wanted. Go on along the lines I’ve been thinking, developing.”
“What about Bloomfield Hills?” Nick asked, without sarcasm.
“He can go to Bloomfield Hills if he wants,” Marci said. “I don’t care as long as he does what he thinks right. We’ve just been talking about that.”
“Bloomfield Hills was just a place to work, Marci. I told you that,” Pierro said.
“And Europe?” Nick asked.
“We’d still like that,” Marci said.
“But I think now I should get established first. It shouldn’t take long. Marci’s father is going to do what he can.”
“And I think we’re all convinced of his talent,” Marci said, a note of pride in her voice.
“No one questions that. Not even me,” Nick said seriously. “Will you be able to raise the money, Pierro?”
“I hope so. I think Old Pete will help.”
“I have a little,” Nick said. “I could help you with a little.”
“What the hell’s come over you today?” Pierro said to Nick. “Is he delirious, Uncle Gus?” Pierro had always called him “Uncle” though they were cousins.
Gus was pouring the wine.
“That’s wonderfully kind of you, Nick,” Marci said sincerely.
“And your stage career?” Nick asked her.
“I’ve wired my agency. I’ve cancelled out my summer show,” she said. Then, putting her hand behind her right ear and lifting her head high, she said in an almost perfect mimicry of Tallulah Bankhead: “I’m afraid, dahling, I’ve given my farewell appearance.” Then, bringing her hand down and changing her expression completely, she said: “Goddamn it, Pierro, come to think of it I never had a chance to make a farewell speech. That’s really thwarting for an actress,” she laughed an infectious laugh.
They all laughed. Nick liked her very much this night. Then Gus brought the drinks around and they toasted Marci and Pierro.
“Well, in a few years we ought to have the city sewed up,” Nick said. It was the first time tonight, Gus noticed, that Nick’s remorse seemed completely gone. “I’m going to work for Old Pete.”
“Why, is something wrong with that?” Marci looked around.
“Wrong?” Pierro laughed. “If those two are going to work together, it should be in a gym. Where they have a ring—I really didn’t think you’d go to work for him. I mean I thought you would eventually, maybe. But not now.”
“Well,” Nick said taking a sip of the wine, “I am going to work for him, nevertheless. And I’m going to try, Pierro. Hard. I only hope he’ll give me something to really do. Something in which I can feel some sense of accomplishment.”
“You know Old Pete,” Pierro said considerately, knowing exactly what Old Pete would do to Nick when he got him in the firm, and now feeling (in an odd way) suddenly very sorry for Nick.
“And what are your problems, Gus?” Marci asked conversationally, smiling.
“I used to be a great creator of problems. I worked so hard, for so many years, creating them,” he said and smiled, “that I thought it was time I retired from the creation of problems. It was a very difficult kind of retirement. Why at first I thought I would waste away and die,” he joked. “But obviously I did not die though, as you can see, I’ve wasted away considerably.”
Marci laughed that infectious laugh again, openly acknowledging her affection for Old Gus.
“Who was that lovely girl you had with you last night?” Pierro asked. “I must say she’s certainly the biggest improvement I’ve seen you make in that category.”
“She was very nice,” Marci said.
Nick hid the mention of her name masterfully: “She’s a widow,” he said.
“Very young to be a widow,” Pierro said. “But God, what some of these women can do with makeup. I’m glad you use hardly any, darling,” Pierro said to Marci. He seemed to speak differently to her now that they were engaged.
“Neither does Nora,” she looked over at Pierro admiringly for a moment. Then wondered again for a second why he would not sleep with her last night. My God, she had practically asked him. Then again she thought it must be a certain kind of refinement that was in him, a respect for her and the fact that he wanted to marry her. Certainly, she thought, he must have been thinking about asking me. It did not just come as a spur-of-the-moment gesture. No, Pierro was too well settled for that.
All that day it had been sifting into Pierro—the fact that he was going to be married. He had been up over fifteen minutes that morning before it had even occurred to him that he had asked her to marry him. It wasn’t that he was disappointed that he had, it just came as a surprise to him that he had asked her so unpremeditatedly. It had never occurred to him before—the actual proposing. How did one go about proposing, he had asked himself when fully awake? I imagine, he had then told himself, in much the same way as I did last night.
Gus picked up his zither and began to play. Nick and Pierro sang some of the laments with him and Marci hummed along. Nick didn’t feel like drinking too much but kept on getting a refill every time Pierro did. Nick had never seen Pierro drink so much so rapidly. After about an hour Nick could tell Pierro was beginning to get a little tight. It was incredible to Nick—Pierro getting tight.
Nick led Marci around the table in the Greek dance. Pierro clapped his hands to the music and applauded loudly when they finished.
“I think you’ve done wonders for him already,” Nick said to Marci, whispering. “I’ve always wanted to see him let his hair down.”
“Me too,” Marci whispered. For a second, when he saw the little-girl-pulled-a-quickie of her eyes, she reminded Nick of Yvonne. “Let’s ply him,” Marci whispered again.
Nick, ever available when it came to a conspiracy of any sort, was especially pleased about this one.
“You know, Marci,” Pierro said, “I think I’m getting a little drunk. I like it. I feel so light.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Nick grinned.
“Nick, Nickie boy,” Pierro said. Then, very seriously: “Do me a favor. Leave the room. Just for a second leave the room, uh?”
Nick was still grinning.
“I got a secret I want to ask Marci—Go on,” Pierro said like a little boy, then waved one arm drunkenly. “Leave, Nichol. I’ll call you when I’m done. One shecond.”
Nick went outside. The rain clouds had drifted out west and there was a strong, cool breeze coming from the lake. There was a heaven of stars and the moon shone on Gus’s garden. It made Nick feel odd, always, coming out of Gus’s shack and seeing all the cars traveling down the street about three hundred feet from the shack and the big buildings of the city surrounding the shack.
They called Nick back in a few moments later.
“Well, Marci and I have made a monumental decision,” Pierro said very dramatically.
This guy is really funny when he drinks, Nick thought. He’s actually got a sense of humour.
“You know what?” Pierro asked.
Marci was smiling at Pierro.
“What?”
“Marci and I have made a decision, that’s what.”
“The marriage is off,” Nick kidded.
“Shut up and listen,” Pierro said. “You know I could always take you,�
� he said drunken eyed and wavering. “Listen.”
“Well go ahead,” Nick said.
“Well, Marci and I, we decided, well, we decided,” he said kind of bashfully, “we decided we wanted you to be our best man. Didn’t we, Marci?” He spoke to Marci emphatically, as if the whole thing was Marci’s idea.
“Pierro decided,” Marci spoke softly to Nick. “I agreed.”
Nick was overwhelmed. He did not know what to say. Then turned back slowly.
“I play a happy song,” Gus said, picking up the zither.
“Thank you both,” Nick said before Gus started. Marci nodded and Pierro just waved his hand.
Nick carried Pierro out of Gus’s about two in the morning. He put him gently in his car, stretching him out on the back seat. Then he and Marci got in front. “He can pick his car up here tomorrow,” Nick said. “Do you have this effect on all your fiancés?” Nick asked.
“All,” she smiled. “I guess. This is the first”
“And for real.”
“For real.”
They drove Pierro home and Nick carried him upstairs quietly and, without waking his mother, deposited him in his bed.
When he came back down he said to Marci: “I think that did him a lot of good.”
“So do I,” she said.
He drove her home, walked her to the door, gave her a brotherly kiss on the forehead and left.
Driving to Winnetka the loneliness began to seep into him again. He wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be a good thing for him to get married. That maybe it would be settling for him.
When he got home, there was a lone light on the front porch. Pat was on the swing, in her negligée, reading.
“Hello,” he said.
She smiled. “It’s awfully early for you, isn’t it?”
“Come to think of it, it is. How about having a nightcap with me?”
She hesitated a moment. “With you I will—rum and Coca-Cola,” she said finally and smiled.
CHAPTER XXXII
TONIGHT, to him, she was almost everything the day had not been. She was like spring. Her eyes were green and she had a slightly tilted nose and she was not really pretty but like spring. He was still sad with the pain and humility of last night with Nora. But now it was a peaceful sadness, and almost pleasurable pain because, in this sudden calmness of sitting on the porch, he seemed in control of it, that he would be able to withstand it, bad as it was.
“You feel much better tonight,” Pat said.
“Yes, I think I drank too much last night,” he said. “I guess everybody did.”
She was still on the swing, rocking it gently. He was sitting in his favorite old wicker chair and outside he could see fireflies in the bushes. It was very quiet in the late night.
“My father drank too much too,” she said without a trace of admonishment.
They began to talk. He told her about how he had enjoyed his younger summer days up in Wisconsin, and how he liked the wilderness of Florida, and the sea, and finally about some of the places he had been to during the war,—the pleasurable things he had done and seen then.
His solemnity and formal politeness made her feel assured. She had sensed shame and anger and humiliation and helplessness seeing him with his worldly woman of the night before. And she had been frightened (of him? of her?) that, twice since she had met him, she had almost given herself to him, much as she loved him. She did not realize that to feel shame and resentment toward a man almost always whetted a woman’s appetite for him.
And suddenly as he spoke he thought he could actually smell the clean young virginal freshness of her; the youth of her radiating. He seemed humbled before this spring quality, treating it reverently.
“Your father and my father are not like the people of their land,” he was saying. “I know that, for I fought in those hills side by side with many who are relatives of your very own. You learn much about people, quickly, in war. It seems all of war is an urgency. A terrible, useless urgency—I wonder if that is why we Americans were so good at it—because of our keen sense of urgency. But of our fathers—they are not like us here in America, either. It must be hard for them. Not to be of their old world or the new one. To be rootless. I forget that of them so easily. It is a lack of tolerance. As much as I hate war you’d think I’d be more tolerant. I think, anyhow, that it is the lack of tolerance that causes war.”
“Of war I know little. But I’ve never thought of our fathers that way, Nick.”
“It is one of the things that makes America, that makes the drive of the people. Not only Greeks but all nationalities. The drive and strive to establish something for themselves—a land. For they feel without a land, all that migrate here. They are not truly of one or the other. I never understood that before the war. Still I am not tolerant of it.”
“Then there is more than just the conflict of the young and old, isn’t there?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But you feel this your country, really?” she asked as if she did not.
“Yes. When you have fought for it and seen those you have loved or admired die for it, it becomes your country more than ever. But I feel it from way back, too, like my father will never be able to feel it. I had a grandfather whom I admired greatly who fought in the Civil War. On the way back from Florida I stopped outside of Chattanooga and went to almost the very spot where he was wounded at in the Battle of Chickamauga Creek. Once, standing upon that site, I thought how strange it was that my own blood, blood that is in me now, was spilled upon that field before I was ever even born. And I wondered where will the blood of my sons be spilled. And I wondered if we really are of now, or of before, or of sometime tomorrow—that maybe merely in this, the short span of living, we are of all time.”
There were seconds of silence in the night.
“You know, Nick, I’m not afraid of you any more,” she said.
“Why?—Should you have been?”
“I was afraid of you. I’ve never known anyone like you,” she said placidly, innocently.
“Nor have I known anyone as sweet as you,” he smiled.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Then I’m even more disappointed in people,” he said and sipped on his drink which he had almost finished now. She had only taken a sip or two of hers.
“How many days will you stay?” he asked her.
“Three. Maybe four.”
“I’ll show you around then.”
“I’d like that, Nick.”
Now, suddenly, she remembered her aunt telling her that still in the hills of Greece the young groom must sometime during the wedding night bring the bloodied sheet of his bride to the home of his family to prove her virginity. But ingrained as it had been into her by her aunt, by her father, there was suddenly no longer any sanctity in the sacred membrane that was her hymen. She felt so safe with him now, secure with him now. And wanted him unashamedly. She wanted him to come over to her and take the clothes from her body and give herself to him fully and proudly. And wanted him to look at her, and feel of him, and love her. Now. Now. Now, the kindly passion welled in her.
Nick put his glass down and stood up. He stared down at her, then smiled. He moved toward her and she felt her stomach tremble hollowly and the vibrant feeling of her flesh on her arms and shoulders and she thought she was blushing but the kindly passion remained. He took her by the shoulders and she stood almost gasping for breath. Gently he took her head in his hands and he kissed her tenderly, compassionately. Her mouth was half open, quivering as she returned the kiss.
“Good night,” he said stepping back.
She stood there as if mesmerized. “Nick,” she said finally, weakly. But the “take me,” “take me,” “take me” that whirled in the kindly passion would not come out.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
“Good-night,” she said. “That’s all.”
And when he had gone she sat back down on the swing, quiveri
ng.
The next morning Nick called Nora early. When she heard his voice she said, “I’m sorry, Nick. Please don’t call again.” And hung up. He called her eight more times that day and four times she answered and when she heard his voice hung up. The other four times her answering service answered. Late in the afternoon, he drove down to her apartment and by tipping the doorman liberally got through the entranceway and rode the elevator up and knocked. She looked at him through the peephole and told him positively that he couldn’t come in. He knocked several more times but she wouldn’t answer or speak to him. When he got back home, he called Ellen the Fair and told her he was duty bound, family you know, to take Pat out to dinner but could he meet her or pick her up some place after that, around ten. She said to pick her up at her house. He took Pat out to Los Caballeros for an early steak dinner, much to Old Pete’s satisfaction, explaining to her before they left that he would bring her home early as he and Tuttle and Raul were having a meeting over at Raul’s regarding the coin-operated machine business. It was really unfortunate that the meeting had to be at night, he told her, but with him going to work at Old Pete’s office next day they were forced to make it this evening. She suspected he was lying but didn’t mind too much, was glad to go out to dinner, was pleased in a way at this new respect that he had begun to show for her since yesterday, and her kindly passion did not burn as strong.
Ellen immediately sensed Nick’s sexual urgency as hard as he tried not to show it. He was so damn stupid, she thought, overly casual. Anyone would be bound to sense it. She gave him a merry run. There were a few things on the scoreboard that hadn’t been evened out—like taking Nora to the wedding, for instance, and the fact that he hadn’t even called her since coming back from Florida. It took him a couple of hours before he realized she was on to him. Then slowly the enlightenment came and he knew he was paying. Somehow, some way, in some intuitive female way, he said to himself awed once again by female intuitiveness, somehow, some way this bitch-sensed I haven’t got Nora any more. Well, at least he could have called her. There must have been some excuse he could have fabricated for taking Nora to the wedding, he said to himself.
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