Some Came Running (13 page)

It wasn’t only that he had hired her to replace the girl who married, at a time when she thought she’d have to go back to her old job at the telephone company. That was only part of it, and largely because he had this positive phobia about being disliked. He had a driving need to feel he was a benevolent employer. That was why that lecherous old bastard of a watch repairman could get his goat so easily. Edith understood all that. But it was a lot more than that. She felt protective. He was so incredibly, unbelievably innocent. Anybody could hurt him. Even though he thought he could hide it. And even though he thought he was cynically impervious to hurt.

Actually, of course, all the boss’s trouble lay at home, and that wasn’t her department. But a smart businessman like the boss should know better than to fool around with a she-tiger like Geneve Lowe. Edith had seen her often enough in the store, and taken enough sweet voiced arrogant phone calls, to get her number. Always that exquisite, greedy-bright, acquisitive look in the dark eyes in the thin face. Edith’s sympathy was all with the boss instead of Al. Al was lucky. Lucky somebody, anybody, had taken her off his hands for a while.

Sitting sprawled in the tailored suit, Edith smoked and let the feel of the silent store seep over her, soothe her. This was the time of the day she liked best. She stayed after work a couple of evenings every week, doing a lot of her real work then, completely alone for an hour, a thing which because of her grandmother who kept house for her father she could never accomplish at home. She would have stayed a lot oftener, but she didn’t want to give the impression she had to stay to keep her work up.

Anyway, if she stayed late every night the treasure of it would soon pall probably.

She snuffed out the cigarette and got out her drawstring-top sewing bag and worked on a blouse she had bought on sale her last trip to Terre Haute and was altering. By staying late, she had missed her regular ride home and would have to walk it. She didn’t mind.

Edith’s home was in the east end of town near the Sternutol plant where her father worked, in a section that had been just outside the city limits up to 1943 when Parkman had extended its boundaries to accommodate the war boom. Two short streets of identical bungalows at right angles to the highway-main street, a former adventure in real estate development by Mr Anton Wernz III. Edith, whose father had bought one on time and was still paying for it out of his salary, had lived there since she was six and could never get used to not seeing the white city limits sign as she crossed on the sidewalk the line where the mainstreet brick pavement ended and the highway slab began. There were no railroads in the east end of town so there couldn’t very well be a wrong side of the tracks, but the old city limits line served the same purpose and all her life Edith had lived about twenty-five yards on the wrong side of it.

Outside, it had turned colder. The drizzle of snow had stopped. The sidewalks gleamed wet under the street lamps. There were no stars. Winter was moving in.

Edith checked the locked door after her, and then stopped on the sidewalk and looked back at the store. She stood maybe thirty seconds, looking it right square in its display windows.

It represented a triumph, and her trick of staying late was partly a habit left over from her first months there, months of doubtful worry working always with the uncertainty hanging over her whether she would make the grade or be let go tomorrow. She had had to straighten out the mess left by the girl who had quit to get married she had done it in those evenings, working alone, without telling anyone, because she was afraid if she did they’d find out how little she knew and can her and as the months of uncertainty gave way slowly to the months of competence when she knew she’d made the grade and wouldn’t be let go she began to look back on those evenings of struggle and worry as the happiest time of her life though she knew they weren’t were probably the worst but the feeling persisted and so did the staying late habit.

The face of the store always said all this to her. And having looked at it, she turned and started home with a glance up at the lighted courthouse clock, which was never right, to get some vague approximate idea of the time, and feeling one word in her mind. History.

The courthouse of Parkman had been built upon this small eminence, which rose up out of the flat river prairie, so that the town flowed back down to the prairie away from it in all directions as if reluctant to leave it there, the town that had been laid out by some unsung Greek scholar come overland with his lexicon and Homer in his pack who probably would have preferred a real hill but did the best he could with what he had.

Edith walked down the gentle slope to the prairie on East Wernz Avenue, the main street, which became the highway at the end of the brick and had all the best homes on it. Parkman was a moneyed town. Oil as well as farming. And East Wernz Avenue proved it.

At the corner where she turned on Roosevelt, she could see down the line to the house and the lights were on in it, and when she came in the door, it was the same as if a day had not passed and her father was sitting with his shoes off, still in his work clothes, reading the Parkman evening paper.

John Barclay did not look up. The hard, brassy smell of chemicals—which was the trademark of the Sternutol plant throughout town when the wind was right—hung faintly in the room.

“Daddy, go take your bath,” Edith said as she took her coat off.

“Aw now, Edith honey,” John Barclay said. “I just wanted to read the paper.”

“You can read the paper after your bath,” Edith said, sitting down to take off the white rubbers.

John Barclay folded the paper and put it on the footstool where his feet had been.

“All right, Edith honey.”

He stood up, and the nose-numbing, penny-in-the-mouth taste of chemicals eddied about the room like a visible blood-colored wind. A big balding meaty man, his chest still well-muscled beneath the undershirt that hung on him loosely, he picked up his denim shirt off the floor and went off walking stiff-jointedly to the bathroom in his stocking feet.

Edith went around the room after him, straightening it up. From the kitchen came the smell of liver and onions frying.

“Edith? Is that you, Edith?” her grandmother called, pretending she did not know who it was.

The voice was a very paean of querulosity, floating mournfully out of the kitchen on the hot cooking smell.

“Yes, Jane.” She collected her own things to take to her room. “What’s for supper?”

“I tried to git him to take his bath,” her grandmother hollered, “but he won’t pay any attention to whatever I tell him.”

It was a shameless lie. The huge figure—whom no one on earth ever would dare not pay attention to, if she demanded it—came slowly into eye range through the kitchen door, clad in the habitual faded-but-flowered wrapper which covered but could not contain her bulk.

“You ought to dust in here,” Edith said.

“I been meanin to,” Jane said, “but I been too tired. I didn’t know if you was comin home for supper or not,” she said. “You’re so late gettin home.”

Edith, who never failed to call home when she stayed downtown for supper, refused to be taken in. She said only: “I stayed after work to fix my nails.”

“Well, I didn’t know whether to fix you any food or not,” Jane said.

“I’m not very hungry. I’ll fix myself something.”

“Well, maybe there’ll be enough,” Jane said. “You say you got a date tonight?”

“Yes.”

“So have I,” Jane said brightly.

Edith wanted to swear. She was always a little disconcerted by her sixty-two-year-old grandmother’s dates, though she tried hard to hide it. It was dismaying to go into a local pub with a date and find Jane installed in a corner booth with a couple of old lechers, coyly egging them on in a loud contest for her affections. “Who with this time?” she said.

“Ohhh—a feller,” Jane said. She grinned and put her gnarled hand on her great hip. “Maybe two fellers.”

“Well, have a good time.” It wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t so big and fat, with those huge breasts and buttocks. Jane’s breasts bulged forth from the neck of her dress like some sort of fleshly muffler on an old woman with a bad cold. The sight always embarrassed Edith.

“I aim to,” Jane said, and the grin faded into a look of worn pain. “You want to finish gettin supper for me? My feet’re killin me.”

“I would, but I haven’t washed yet,” Edith said.

“My kidneys are goin bad on me, too, again I think,” Jane said. “I believe I’m gettin the gravels again.”

“Have you been taking your medicine?”

Jane snarled, suddenly, like a voracious wolf. “Ahh, that crap! That bastard is only bleedin me for my money I have to work so goddam hard to earn.”

Edith remained unworried. “Then you ought to go to somebody else.”

“They’re all alike,” Jane snarled. Her voice got muted. “They’s nothin wrong with me a little rest wouldn’t cure.”

“And rest is what you never get.”

“That’s right,” Jane said. “And you know it’s the truth, too.” She went back into the kitchen to stir the mess of calf’s liver and browning onions with her weaponlike fork. Always sick, forever in pain, at sixty-two she had more energy than ten men, and spent all her cleaning money that she didn’t spend on beer, on doctoring, in much the same way that some ladies have their breasts or organs removed in order to get a little attention. Edith understood all that; the only times she was ever
really
ashamed of her was when she came in the store, to buy some worthless trinket and haggle over the price. Jane came back to the door of the kitchen, still holding the fork, as Edith was about to go into her room. Her face had lighted up with happy malice, the intensity of her pain since it was obviously doing her no material good, forgotten. Whatever else she might be, Jane was a realist.

“Have you heard the latest big news?”

Edith stopped in the doorway. “You mean about Frank Hirsh’s brother coming home?”

“Haw!” Jane cried. “That son of a bitch! I bet he’s sweatin blood right now!”

“If he is, I certainly didn’t notice it at the store this afternoon.”

“You!” Jane hooted. “You ain’t dry behind the ears yet. You wouldn’t recognize it if he was. And if you did, you wouldn’t admit it.”

“That’s right. I sure wouldn’t. But it just so happens there wasn’t anything to admit.”

“Then he don’t know about it yet, that’s all.”

“How did you think I found out about it?”

“You could of found out lots of places. The whole damn town’s buzzin with it. It’s better’n Virginia Stevens’s marriage. And you stand there and try to tell me that damned Frank Herschmidt don’t even care.”

“All I said was, if he was upset he didn’t show it at the store.”

“Course he wouldn’t show it at the store, you ninny.”

“You’d better watch the liver,” Edith said. “You’ll burn it. And I have to wash.” She went on in her room.

“Wait’ll next Friday,” Jane called after her. Friday was her day at the Hirshes’. “I’ll be able to give you the straight dope then. Agnes never can hide her upset.”

She turned back into the kitchen, still holding the fork, the pleased malice on her face replaced by disappointment. She had thought surely this time she could get her goat. Many more times than not Jane was convinced her granddaughter had no more emotions or sensibilities in her than her damned stupid father. And Jane was becoming increasingly convinced that Edith was going to turn out to be a cold-blooded old maid of a virgin. Disdainfully, she thrust the fork down in the skillet. She had a heavy date tonight, herself. Someday she’d get married again and let them see how good they got along without her around here.

In her room, Edith hung up her coat pleased she hadn’t gotten angry. She already knew him better, in less than one year, than Jane did in over twenty. But then it was Agnes Jane really worked for, wasn’t it? Edith stopped her mind. That wasn’t her department. She got out of the bra and panty girdle which had ridged her flesh, and massaged the welts with her palms. She didn’t look at her nude self in the dresser mirror, not so much because of modesty as because it didn’t occur to her to look. Having eased the itch of her armor, she put on a housecoat to wait for her father to be through in the bathroom.

Edith, contrary to her grandmother’s wishful thinking, was not only not a virgin, she was twice-removed. Her first affair, but you could hardly call it an affair, she thought, was with a boy in high school, rather like the scandal of Dave Hirsh, except that she and her high school boy did not get caught. She supposed it happened to practically everyone. This one was the result of two things—one, a deliberate rebellion against the persistent advice of her widowed father, who kept warning her to beware of boys; and two, a strong curiosity aroused by all sorts of half-allusions from all sorts of sources (movies, perfume ads, overheard conversations, conversations participated in) as if sex were one of those faint stars seen indistinctly from the corner of the eye but which when looked at straight, disappears.

Her second—this
was
an affair, and lasted several months—was with a wounded veteran returned from the European Theater, during the time she was working at the telephone company. The main reason for this one was that she was beginning to feel that reasonless loneliness which comes with adulthood, and also because she felt sorry for him, not because he was wounded, but because he was so desirous of that in her, which seemed so vastly overrated to herself. Magnanimous was perhaps a better word than sorry, for the way she felt. It was like giving old clothes to the Salvation Army; you lose nothing, and yet get to feel generous. She supposed she did like it, in a way, but it was mainly because she felt she was giving him pleasure. Feeling that way, she supposed, it might well have blossomed into something finer. But when the veteran tried to teach her some of the more unusual ways of making love, she realized all her sympathy had been misplaced. And that was when the affair began to teach her something, something curious. A woman should be careful who she has an affair with, because once she enters it, something strange happens to her and she will cling to it through hell and high water for some reason and put up with almost anything before she can bring herself to break it off. With her veteran, she found herself hanging on to an unhappy association, hoping and rationalizing for some months before she got up courage enough to finish it, when he would not change. Since then she had not had a lover, and did not feel the lack, except that sometimes that peculiar pointless loneliness overwhelmed her. But dates helped take care of that.