100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. And he found he didn’t even think of marrying. He didn’t even want to come or go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck. Much has been written about the unwed, middle-aged woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of mind and body. In the male that same fussiness develops, and a certain primness, too. But he grows flabby where she grows lean.

  Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva’s, and on Sunday noon at Stell’s. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the home-made soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried to talk business with Eva’s husband, or Stell’s. His business talks were the old-fashioned kind, beginning:

  “Well, now, looka here. Take, f’rinstance your raw hides and leathers.”

  But Ben and George didn’t want to take f’rinstance your raw hides and leathers. They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take golf, or politics, or stocks. They were the modern type of business man who prefers to leave his work out of his play. Business, with them, was a profession—a finely graded and balanced thing, differing from Jo’s clumsy, downhill style as completely as does the method of a great criminal detective differ from that of a village constable. They would listen, restively, and say, “Uh-uh,” at intervals, and at the first chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glance at their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They treated Uncle Jo with good-natured tolerance. Stell had no children. Uncle Jo degenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the position of honored guest, who is served with white meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one of those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled and unsatisfied.

  Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.

  “It isn’t natural,” Eva told him. “I never saw a man who took so little interest in women.”

  “Me!” protested Jo, almost shyly. “Women!”

  “Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened schoolboy.”

  So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of fitting age. They spoke of them as “splendid girls.” Between thirty-six and forty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear way, about civics, and classes, and politics, and economics, and boards. They rather terrified Jo. He didn’t understand much that they talked about, and he felt humbly inferior, and yet a little resentful, as if something had passed him by. He escorted them home, dutifully, though they told him not to bother, and they evidently meant it. They seemed capable, not only of going home quite unattended, but of delivering a pointed lecture to any highwayman or brawler who might molest them.

  The following Thursday Eva would say, “How did you like her, Jo?”

  “Like who?” Jo would spar feebly.

  “Miss Matthews.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Now, don’t be funny, Jo. You know very well I mean the girl who was here for dinner. The one who talked so well on the emigration question.”

  “Oh, her! Why, I liked her, all right. Seems to be a smart woman.”

  “Smart! She’s a perfectly splendid girl.”

  “Sure,” Jo would agree cheerfully.

  “But didn’t you like her?”

  “I can’t say I did, Eve. And I can’t say I didn’t. She made me think a lot of a teacher I had in the fifth reader. Name of Himes. As I recall her, she must have been a fine woman. But I never thought of her as a woman at all. She was just Teacher.”

  “You make me tired,” snapped Eva impatiently. “A man of your age. You don’t expect to marry a girl, do you? A child!”

  “I don’t expect to marry anybody,” Jo had answered.

  And that was the truth, lonely though he often was.

  The following year Eva moved to Winnetka. Any one who got the meaning of the Loop knows the significance of a move to a north shore suburb, and a house. Eva’s daughter, Ethel, was growing up, and her mother had an eye on society.

  That did away with Jo’s Thursday dinner. Then Stell’s husband bought a car. They went out into the country every Sunday. Stell said it was getting so that maids objected to Sunday dinners, anyway. Besides, they were unhealthy, old-fashioned things. They always meant to ask Jo to come along, but by the time their friends were placed, and the lunch, and the boxes, and sweaters, and George’s camera, and everything, there seemed to be no room for a man of Jo’s bulk. So that eliminated the Sunday dinners.

  “Just drop in any time during the week,” Stell said, “for dinner. Except Wednesday—that’s our bridge night—and Saturday. And, of course, Thursday. Cook is out that night. Don’t wait for me to ’phone.”

  And so Jo drifted into that sad-eyed, dyspeptic family made up of those you see dining in second-rate restaurants, their paper propped up against the bowl of oyster crackers, munching solemnly and with indifference to the stare of the passer-by surveying them through the brazen plate-glass window.

  And then came the War. The war that spelled death and destruction to millions. The war that brought a fortune to Jo Hertz, and transformed him, over night, from a baggy-kneed old bachelor whose business was a failure to a prosperous manufacturer whose only trouble was the shortage in hides for the making of his product—leather! The armies of Europe called for it. Harnesses! More harnesses! Straps! Millions of straps! More! More!

  The musty old harness business over on Lake Street was magically changed from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly hive that hummed and glittered with success. Orders poured in. Jo Hertz had inside information on the War. He knew about troops and horses. He talked with French and English and Italian buyers—noblemen, many of them—commissioned by their countries to get American-made supplies. And now, when he said to Ben or George, “Take f’rinstance your raw hides and leathers,” they listened with respectful attention.

  And then began the gaydog business in the life of Jo Hertz. He developed into a loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh pleasure. That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and crushed and ignored began to bloom, unhealthily. At first he spent money on his rather contemptuous nieces. He sent them gorgeous fans, and watch bracelets, and velvet bags. He took two expensive rooms at a downtown hotel, and there was something more tear-compelling than grotesque about the way he gloated over the luxury of a separate ice-water tap in the bathroom. He explained it.

  “Just turn it on. Ice-water! Any hour of the day or night.”

  He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a bright blue, with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of gold fittings and wire wheels. Eva said it was the kind of a thing a soubrette would use, rather than an elderly business man. You saw him driving about in it, red-faced and rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in the Pompeiian room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoon when doubtful and roving-eyed matrons in kolinsky capes are wont to congregate to sip pale amber drinks. Actors grew to recognize the semi-bald head and the shining, round, good-natured face looming out at them from the dim well of the parquet, and sometimes, in a musical show, they directed a quip at him, and he liked it. He could pick out the critics as they came down the aisle, and even had a nodding acquaintance with two of them.

  “Kelly, of the Herald,” he would say carelessly. “Bean, of the Trib. They’re all afraid of him.”

  So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been called a Man About Town.

  And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about in his mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the luxuriously furnished establishment of which he used to dream in the evenings when he dozed over his paper in the old house on Calumet. So he rented an apartment, many-roomed and expensive, with a man-servant in charge, and furnished it in styles and periods ranging through all the Louis. The living room was mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy and bloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or unclean
ly in the sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the rosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naïve indulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a great resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a schoolboy smacking his lips over an all-day sucker.

  The War went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll in—a flood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on shopping bent, entered a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on Michigan Avenue. Exclusive, that is, in price. Eva’s weakness, you may remember, was hats. She was seeking a hat now. She described what she sought with a languid conciseness, and stood looking about her after the saleswoman had vanished in quest of it. The room was becomingly rose-illumined and somewhat dim, so that some minutes had passed before she realized that a man seated on a raspberry brocade settee not five feet away—a man with a walking stick, and yellow gloves, and tan spats, and a check suit—was her brother Jo. From him Eva’s wild-eyed glance leaped to the woman who was trying on hats before one of the many long mirrors. She was seated, and a saleswoman was exclaiming discreetly at her elbow.

  Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returning, hat-laden. “Not to-day,” she gasped. “I’m feeling ill. Suddenly.” And almost ran from the room.

  That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone pidgin-English devised by every family of married sisters as protection against the neighbors and Central. Translated, it ran thus:

  “He looked straight at me. My dear, I thought I’d die! But at least he had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those limp, willowy creatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to keep softened to a baby stare, and couldn’t, she was so crazy to get her hands on those hats. I saw it all in one awful minute. You know the way I do. I suppose some people would call her pretty. I don’t. And her color! Well! And the most expensive-looking hats. Aigrettes, and paradise, and feathers. Not one of them under seventy-five. Isn’t it disgusting! At his age! Suppose Ethel had been with me!”

  The next time it was Stell who saw them. In a restaurant. She said it spoiled her evening. And the third time it was Ethel. She was one of the guests at a theater party given by Nicky Overton II. You know. The North Shore Overtons. Lake Forest. They came in late, and occupied the entire third row at the opening performance of “Believe Me!” And Ethel was Nicky’s partner. She was glowing like a rose. When the lights went up after the first act Ethel saw that her uncle Jo was seated just ahead of her with what she afterward described as a Blonde. Then her uncle had turned around, and seeing her, had been surprised into a smile that spread genially all over his plump and rubicund face. Then he had turned to face forward again, quickly.

  “Who’s the old bird?” Nicky had asked. Ethel had pretended not to hear, so he had asked again.

  “My uncle,” Ethel answered, and flushed all over her delicate face, and down to her throat. Nicky had looked at the Blonde, and his eyebrows had gone up ever so slightly.

  It spoiled Ethel’s evening. More than that, as she told her mother of it later, weeping, she declared it had spoiled her life.

  Ethel talked it over with her husband in that intimate, kimonoed hour that precedes bedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hair brush.

  “It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. Perfectly disgusting. There’s no fool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like that. At his time of life.”

  There exists a strange and loyal kinship among men. “Well, I don’t know,” Ben said now, and even grinned a little. “I suppose a boy’s got to sow his wild oats some time.”

  “Don’t be any more vulgar than you can help,” Eva retorted. “And I think you know, as well as I, what it means to have that Overton boy interested in Ethel.”

  “If he’s interested in her,” Ben blundered, “I guess the fact that Ethel’s uncle went to the theater with some one who wasn’t Ethel’s aunt won’t cause a shudder to run up and down his frail young frame, will it?”

  “All right,” Eva had retorted. “If you’re not man enough to stop it, I’ll have to, that’s all. I’m going up there with Stell this week.”

  They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his apartment when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected his master home to dinner that evening. The man had said yes. Eva arranged to meet Stell in town. They would drive to Jo’s apartment together, and wait for him there.

  When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, bands, crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole—quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years of indefatigable reading had brought them to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to.

  “Isn’t it dreadful!” Stell gasped.

  “Nicky Overton’s only nineteen, thank goodness.”

  Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all it was by inches. When at last they reached Jo’s apartment they were flushed, nervous, apprehensive. But he had not yet come in. So they waited.

  No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told the relieved houseman. Jo’s home has already been described to you. Stell and Eva, sunk in rose-colored cushions, viewed it with disgust, and some mirth. They rather avoided each other’s eyes.

  “Carrie ought to be here,” Eva said. They both smiled at the thought of the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy cushions, and hangings, and lamps. Stell rose and began to walk about, restlessly. She picked up a vase and laid it down; straightened a picture. Eva got up, too, and wandered into the hall. She stood there a moment, listening. Then she turned and passed into Jo’s bedroom. And there you knew Jo for what he was.

  This room was as bare as the other had been ornate. It was Jo, the clean-minded and simple-hearted, in revolt against the cloying luxury with which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actual furniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had been the fruit of Jo’s first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarleton danseuse who finds herself in a monk’s cell. None of those wall-pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed military brushes on the chiffonier (and he so nearly hairless!). A little orderly stack of books on the table near the bed. Eva fingered their titles and gave a little gasp. One of them was on gardening. “Well, of all things!” exclaimed Stell. A book on the War, by an Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with shoe-trees in every one of them. There was something speaking about them. They looked so human. Eva shut the door on them, quickly. Some bottles on the dresser. A jar of pomade. An ointment such as a man uses who is growing bald and is panic-stricken too late. An insurance calendar on the wall. Some rhubarb-and-soda mixture on the shelf in the bathroom, and a little box of pepsin tablets.

  “Eats all kinds of things at all hours of the night,” Eva said, and wandered out into the rose-colored front room again with the air of one who is chagrined at her failure to find what she has sought. Stell followed her, furtively.

  “Where do you suppose he can be?” she demanded. “It’s—” she glanced at her wrist, “why, it’s after six!”

  And then there was a little click. The two women sat up, tense. The door opened. Jo came in. He blinked a little. The two women in the rosy room stood up.

  “Why—Eve! Why, Babe! Well! Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “We were just about to leave. We thought you weren’t coming home.”

  Jo came in, slowly. “I was in the jam on Michigan, watching the boys go by.” He sat down, heavily. The light from the window fell on him. And you saw that his eyes were red.
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  And you’ll have to learn why. He had found himself one of the thousands in the jam on Michigan Avenue, as he said. He had a place near the curb, where his big frame shut off the view of the unfortunates behind him. He waited with the placid interest of one who has subscribed to all the funds and societies to which a prosperous, middle-aged business man is called upon to subscribe in war time. Then, just as he was about to leave, impatient at the delay, the crowd had cried, with a queer dramatic, exultant note in its voice, “Here they come! here come the boys!”

  Just at that moment two little, futile, frenzied fists began to beat a mad tattoo on Jo Hertz’s broad back. Jo tried to turn in the crowd, all indignant resentment. “Say, looka here!”

  The little fists kept up their frantic beating and pushing. And a voice—a choked, high little voice—cried, “Let me by! I can’t see! You man, you! You big fat man! My boy’s going by—to war—and I can’t see! Let me by!”

  Jo scrooged around, still keeping his place. He looked down. And upturned to him in agonized appeal was the face of little Emily. They stared at each other for what seemed a long, long time. It was really only the fraction of a second. Then Jo put one great arm firmly around Emily’s waist and swung her around in front of him. His great bulk protected her. Emily was clinging to his hand. She was breathing rapidly, as if she had been running. Her eyes were straining up the street.

  “Why, Emily, how in the world!—”

  “I ran away. Fred didn’t want me to come. He said it would excite me too much.”

  “Fred?”

  “My husband. He made me promise to say good-by to Jo at home.

  “Jo’s my boy. And he’s going to war. So I ran away. I had to see him. I had to see him go.”

  She was dry-eyed. Her gaze was straining up the street.

  “Why, sure,” said Jo. “Of course you want to see him.” And then the crowd gave a great roar. There came over Jo a feeling of weakness. He was trembling. The boys went marching by.