Some Came Running (121 page)

“Because it was my real name. I thought it might bring me luck. Or something.”

“Luck!” Frank almost yelled. “Yes, that’s a lucky name all right, Herschmidt is. A very lucky name.”

“Well, I’ve used it; and I mean to go right on using it. On everything I publish. And I don’t see that there’s a whole hell of a lot you can do about it,” Dave said.

“Why don’t you get out of this town and stay out?” Frank said almost hopefully. “What the hell do you want to live here for, anyway? You don’t like it. You never did. Why not just leave? If it’s money you need, I can help you out.”

“Because I’m not ready to leave. When I do leave, I’ll leave because I want to go. Not because anybody else tells me to.”

Frank shook his head and turned the car around and started back toward the tall brick fenceless gate. “What do you hate me so much for?” he said. “Seriously: What have I ever done to you to make you hate me as much as you do and always be tryin to make a laughingstock out of me?” He turned right at the gate, then left back down the sidestreet where they had left Dave’s car.

“Just run me off from home,” Dave said. “At the tender age of seventeen, and before I could even finish high school. And with five dollars in my pocket.
Five dollars.”

“That was for your own good,” Frank said. “As for the five dollars, I didn’t have much money at the time.”

“You could have given me more than that. And there wasn’t any need to run me off.”

“Would you rather have stayed and married that farm girl?” Frank said. “Have you ever seen her since you got back? Big, fat, sloppy farm wife, with eight or nine kids? Would you rather done that?”

“We could have got me out of marrying her without having to run me off.”

Frank stopped beside Dave’s little Plymouth and rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay: I
made
a mistake. I was thinkin of the famly’s reputation. That was right when the Old Man had just got back, and the scandal was at its height again. But maybe I made a mistake. Okay. Is there any reason to hold that against me the rest of my life and hate me for it and try to hurt?”

“Damn you, I don’t hate you!” Dave almost shouted. “I don’t try to hurt you! I told you why I changed my name back and were so damned full of your own worries about your reputation that you didn’t ever hear me. Hell, I don’t hate you! I just think you’re so full of self-pity that it runs out of your ears, that’s all! You’re so goddamned worried about your goddamned reputation all the time that you can’t see nobody else in the world but you!”

“Well, it looks like somebody’s got to worry about it,” Frank said. “You sure don’t. And the Old Man don’t.” He rubbed his hand over his face again. “Go on, get out,” he said. “Go on back and see if you can’t think up somethin else to cause me trouble.”

“Why you miserable dumb son of a bitch!” Dave yelled. “Sure I’ll get out. And I’ll be careful not to tell anybody you drove up here to meet me, you sniveling bastard. So it won’t hurt your reputation any.”

“Thanks,” Frank said thinly. “Just do me one favor, will you?” he said. “Just forget you ever had a brother named Frank Hirsh who raised you and took care of you and put you through school, will you? Maybe then you’ll stop tryin to think up new ways of causin me trouble.”

“Sure I will, you respectable son of a bitch!” Dave cried. “You’re so
damned
respectable you can’t even
think
something unless the damn board at the Country Club tells you it’s all right to think it! Sure I will! And you just forget what a hard time you had trying to raise your younger brother to be like you.
You
forget
you
got a younger brother.”

He got out and slammed the door. Frank sat behind the wheel looking through the closed window at him for a moment, and he stood staring back. Then Frank and the new pale blue Cadillac pulled away from in front of him slowly, leaving him still staring, but at his own little Plymouth now. And as he walked across the street and climbed into it, he could not escape the feeling that just there, as they had stared at each other for one timeless second, four eyes staring, without anger, without warmth, without sadness, without anything, just four eyes staring at each other through a window, that just there two meager souls of two meager men had met and recognized each other as both had always tried to do and failed, had recognized and understood each other for what they both were. And once again Dave had that strange dark feeling of impending Doom that had been engulfing him so much lately. The thought struck him that he might not ever see his brother again. It was unreasonable because he would surely see him, if only on the street. Furiously, he started the motor and threw the little Plymouth into gear and drove away.

Perhaps his run-in with Frank had a lot to do with his jumping onto Ginnie. Certainly, his brooding over this feeling of impending Doom did.

It started when he was driving her to the house from Smitty’s the next night after he had seen Frank. He was still brooding about his “interview” with Frank, and continued to for some time. Ginnie was excited about the appearance of “The Confederate,” too, but not exactly in the same way Frank was: Ginnie was proud of it. She had evidently in her slow dull way discovered that in a small way at least she was basking in reflected glory from it because she was—at least among the brassiere factory set—Dave’s “girlfriend.”

“Everybody’s been congratulatin me about your story,” she said, as he cut over from North Main to Plum to avoid the square. “Congratulating
you
!” Dave said.

“Yes,” Ginnie said. She had taken to saying yes lately, instead of yeah; that was the Doris Fredric influence. “You know. Because I’m sort of a friend of yours like.”

“Yeh?” Dave said. “Who?”

“Oh, all of the girls. They’ve all told me how much they liked it,” Ginnie said. “And a lot of the fellows, too.”

“Well, it’s the first I’ve heard about it. Nobody’s said anything to me,” Dave said. They were just passing the Hirsh Bros. Taxi Service on Plum, which was not closed yet. It was only ten o’clock. And he could look in and see Albie Shipe sitting at the old desk laboriously writing up his reports. The emotion of the taxi service during those early months when he had worked there leaped into him full-blown with all its many nuances, making him feel sad and even angrier. It had really been fun, and nice, in a lot of ways. He ought to write something about that some day; maybe he could get rid of it that way. “Have you read it yet?” he said.

“Well, no. I ain’t,” Ginnie said. “I want to be able to sit down with it all alone so I can really concentrate. But I bought a copy. In fact, I bought nine copies.”

“
Nine
copies!” Dave said. He had reached the city hall at the end of the block—Sherm Ruedy’s stamping ground, he thought—and he turned west on Lincoln. “Why
nine
?”

“Well,” Ginnie said complacently, “I brought one for myself. The other eight I autographed and give to some of the girls out the factory.”

“You did what!!” Dave cried.

Ginnie’s complacent look faded, and was replaced by that dull-faced, nervous look she got whenever anybody took her to task for anything. “Well, yeh,” she said nervously; “what was wrong with that? Just to a few of the girls, you know; like Mildred Pierce—I mean Bell—and Lois and girls like that. I thought it would be good publicity for you.”

Dave groaned. “Look!” he said. “You just don’t go around autographing somebody else’s story to anybody you want to. If there’s any goddamned autographing to be done, the goddamned author himself does it. See? Can you get that through your thick head?”

Ginnie put her hand up to her mouth and rubbed the corner of her lip with her fingertips.

“And don’t do that, either!” Dave cried. “My goddamned idiot mother used to do that; when she was thinking—or thought she was thinking! Friends of authors just don’t go around autographing the author’s book to people.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to do nothing wrong,” Ginnie said, snatching her hand down. “I was just—and besides we use to sign books to people for Christmas.”

“That’s different. That was a Christmas gift, and you didn’t know the author. But when you’re a friend of an author and go around autographing his books to people, you make yourself and him and everybody else look like a damned ass.”

“I don’t see what’s so different,” Ginnie said, less nervously and more angrily.

“Maybe you’re not bright enough to see it. So just take my word for it. It’s my story: I wrote it: And if I want copies of it autographed to anybody.
I’ll
do it. And I don’t need any goddamned help from
you,
dummkopf!” For a moment, Dave thought his head would burst. It was a profound personal liberty she had taken, but she was too damned dumb to even know it! “Of all the damned gall!” he said. “You got no right to just go around appropriating
my
story and autographing it to your stupid friends. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m your girlfriend,” Ginnie said smolderingly.

“Yeah? Well, that’s something else we better get straight. You’re not my girlfriend. You’re a pig that I happen to be sleeping with. And if you don’t like that, you can take it or leave it.”

“Well, everybody thinks I am,” Ginnie said.

“I don’t give a damn what they think. I’m telling
you
you’re not. See? And if I ever even
hear
of you buying any more copies of that damned story and
signing
them to people, I’ll kick you out so quick it’ll make your thick head ring like a goddamned bell. Got it?”

Ginnie did not answer, merely sat, lumpishly pulling her chin in—her chins, rather. She had lost ten pounds in the last month, but nobody would know it to look at her. Gradually, with dull slowness, her back stiffened furiously. Dave watched her, suddenly almost beside himself with rage.

“Of all the damned, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches in the whole damned world, you take the cake. A fat pig of a one-nighter with just barely enough brains to come in out of the rain, if somebody leads you. And then you got to go and get
lite
rary pretensions! Autographing
stories! My
story! And you haven’t even got enough damned brains to even sit down and read the thing! The biggest, fattest, dumbest, laziest, most worthless, most
stupid
whore in Parkman! Didn’t even complete the seventh grade! Autographing
stories!
Jesus,’’ he said disgustedly. “Jesus Christ!”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Ginnie said strangledly. It was as if her neck, stiff with rage now, had stiffened so much it had choked off her air.

“I’m doing it, ain’t I?” Dave said. “And what are you going to do about it?” In his blinding, infinite outrage, he had driven almost past the darkened house. He slammed on the brakes screeched into the driveway.

“You got no right to talk to me like that,” Ginnie said in a low, choked voice.

“I don’t, hunh? Well, you got no right to go around assuming possession of things that belong to me.” He rammed the car up the drive and stopped it jerkingly before the garage. “And, if you don’t like it, you know what the hell you can do, don’t you?” he said, and got out and slammed the door. He went on in the house.

’Bama was not there, of course, was off somewhere on some junket of his own. And neither was there anybody else there. He turned on the lights in the kitchen and flounced across it to the bar, the nerves in the inside of his elbows and knees quivering, got out ice, and rattlingly mixed himself a half a pitcher of martinis. Still swearing savagely, though at the moment he was so furiously mad he could not have said why and the rage had become an end in itself, he took the pitcher and a glass to the table and sat down and commenced to drink his way through them. Before he had drunk one cocktail glass of martini, he had begun to feel sick inside and ashamed of himself.

Perhaps if ’Bama had been there—or Dewey and Hubie—or even that bitch Doris Fredric—

Well, what the hell was she doing out there? He hadn’t heard any door slam. For a moment, he had a blind unreasonable panic when he thought she might have slipped out quietly and gone back to town. Guilt, it was more, instead of panic. He hadn’t meant to hurt poor old Ginnie. He looked down at his own fat belly; and felt his own double chin. He was damn near as fat as she was, as far as that went. Poor damned thing, he thought sickly. She hadn’t really meant to appropriate and move herself in, hadn’t really meant to assume possession of anything; it was just that she was dumb. And she wasn’t really so dumb, at that, exactly; she was just uneducated. How could you expect her to know what kind of a huge faux pas she had committed? In a way, she was sort of a female symbol of the failure of all of us, just as Raymond Cole was a male symbol of the failure of all of us. What the hell else could you expect her to be, except just what she was? A sudden warmth and pity and a willingness to overlook, bred of guilt and shame at the things he’d said to her, and coupled with a vague desire to teach her some of the civilized things somebody should have taught her long ago—as Sister Francine, luckily, had taught him—rose up in Dave. Hell, who knew what she might turn into eventually, if somebody would only teach her a few things? Well, what the hell was she doing out there? Dave gulped off the rest of his second martini and feeling very ashamed of himself, he went to the back door and walked out into the freezing cold night and over to the car. Ginnie was still sitting just as he had left her, except that her back was not as stiff as it had been then. He put his face up against the steamed-up window glass and stared in at her, and Ginnie slowly turned her head to look at him. What the hell? it was way below freezing, only eight or ten degrees above. And here she was just sitting out here. He opened the door.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” he said.

Ginnie continued to stare at him, her features almost indistinguishable in the darkness and her eyes only two dark pools of accusation in the shadow. “I ain’t doing nothing,” she said. “I’m just sittin.”

“Well, come on in the house,” he said. “Do you want to freeze?” He almost added: you damned fool. Not as an insult but only as a natural phrase; but he carefully refrained.