Some Came Running (134 page)

From the look on his mom’s face when she marched into the kitchen, he could tell she had had one, too. Her mouth with all those wrinkles was twisted around like she had just bitten into a green persimmon. Her eyes were screwed up almost shut. She had always wanted him to marry Dawnie—for Frank’s money, of course. He forced himself to grin at her.

Her own invitation was in her hands and she had made as if to lay it down in front of him, but then she saw his own and so continued to hold hers.

“Well, there you are,” she said vindictively.

Wally grinned. “Yeah, looks like a big deal, don’t it? We’ll have to think of some kind of presents to send.”

His mom’s mouth tightened up even more. “I told you—” she said, pushing the words out past the drawn lips.

“You told me what, Mom?” Wally cried out. “That you wanted me to marry Dawnie for Frank’s money? And I told you I wouldn’t marry her and work in that damned son-of-a-bitching store for anything in the world! Didn’t I tell you that?”

His mom’s eyes widened.

“Now for God’s sake, leave me alone!” Wally yelled. “And think up some kind of damned presents to send!”

His mom took a step backwards and blinked. She held out the personal “admission” card, with the
“within the ribbon,”
and the
“We want you both to be with us.”
on it, identical to his own.

“Yes!” she said viciously. “She’ll send me that! And send you one! And you know what it means, don’t you?”

“Sure I know!” Wally cried. “It means we’ll be dear friends of the family, and sit with all of them, and that all that time me and Dawnie spent together last summer was all only good friendship, that’s what it means! Okay, so what? Nothing ever happened between me and Dawnie anyway,” he said.

“It also means,” his mom said, “that it’s a polite way of getting rid of me. And you. We sit with the honored guests at the wedding, and after that—” She let it trail off, her mouth drawn up persimmonishly.

“Well, what the hell did you expect!” Wally yelled. “For her to go on being ‘best friends’ with you? She’ll be best friends with Eleanor Shotridge now.

“Jesus! but you make me
sick
at my
stom
mick sometimes, Mom,” he said thickly. “Now shut up! and leave me alone.” He seized his own invitation and cards and envelopes and tissue paper, and jumped up from the table and ran upstairs to his room, leaving her still standing there.

In his room, he shut the door, then looked at his typewriter sickly and laid the invitation and cards out on his desk and sat down and looked at them. All so
official.
Mr. James Harry Shotridge. Was that the Jimmy Shotridge that Dawnie never referred to by any other name but just plain “Shotridge”? Surely it couldn’t be. It must be somebody else, somebody she had met at Reserve. Yes, that must be it. Only, of course, it wasn’t, he thought sickly. He picked up the invitation again and brought it up close to his eyes. Dawn Anne— What a lovely name: Dawn Anne. Gee, he never would have thought
she
could do this to him, after as as intimate as they had been. He put the sheet back down. Then he picked up the outer envelope and stared at his own name and address on the front. It had been posted Saturday. He sat and looked at it sickly, and he wanted to beat his fists up and down on the desk. But he couldn’t, his mom would hear him. He wanted to bite and kick and tear, and throw his head back and and howl. Like a dog. But he couldn’t, his mom would hear it. He had never had anything in his life to hurt him so. She had given her virginity to him. She’d stood there in the woods, at dusk, bare to the waist in her skirt and bobby sox and saddle shoes; he could still see it; and then they had climbed into the backseat. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! He held it in, holding his belly muscles tight, the only sound a high faint keening in the back of his throat, until finally he had to gasp for breath. His head was charged with choked-off blood. That was dangerous: You could break a blood vessel in your head and die like that. All right then, he thought wildly, then go ahead and die! And he did it again: Ahhhhhhhhhhbhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! silently, held in. He looked down again at the invitation, the white paper appearing to be speckled with flecks of red, his eyes focusing themselves again upon those same two words as they always did:

at the marriage of their daughter

Dawn Anne!

Dawn Anne!

Dawn Anne— This time he could not hold it in. Sitting at his desk, he opened up his mouth and the long high drawn-out quavering howl poured out of him and filled the room, trickled out through the half open window and down the quiet street.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” and he didn’t care who heard, didn’t give a damn.

Almost immediately, he snapped back to full awareness, horrified by what he had done.

From downstairs, he heard his mother’s terrified voice: “Wallace! Wallace! What’s happened! What’s wrong!”

His mind clicking swiftly, Wally jumped up and went to the dresser under the mirror and grabbed his Randall #1 All-Purpose Fighting Knife, which he kept there so he could practice with it before the mirror, unsheathed it, and slashed it down across his doubled-up index finger. The eight-inch blade was shaving sharp, and in his hurry, he slashed it much harder than he meant to. The knife cut his finger clean to the bone, and blood began to pour out of it. Staring at it, surprised, Wally put the knife down on the dresser and grabbed his handkerchief and wrapped it around the cut. Blood began to soak through it immediately.

Behind him, his mother was already at the door crying “Wallace! Wallace!” Wally met her there and thrust the bloodstained handkerchief and finger at her.

“It’s nothing,” he said calmly. “I just cut my finger.”

“But the way you yelled!” his mother said, her face still terrified.

“Aw, it just made me mad,” Wally said. “That’s all. Damn fool thing to do! It ain’t cut bad.”

Her face was as white as a sheet. “I thought you were dying!” she said.

Wally merely stared at her grimly. Yes, and I was, he thought.

His mom shook her head. “I do wish you’d quit playing with those horrible knives,” she said, looking at him anxiously. “Is it cut bad?”

“I wasn’t playing with it,” he said disgustedly, “I was sharpening it; and the damn thing slipped. No, I told you it wasn’t cut bad. Now, for God’s sake, Mom, leave me alone. I got to doctor this.”

“Do you want me to do it?” she offered.

“No, damn it! I’ll do it myself.”

Reluctantly, his mom turned to go back downstairs. “Please don’t play with those sharp knives anymore, Wallace,” she said.

“Damn it, I told you I was sharpening it!” Wally said. “And I don’t play with them. I
practice
with them. Please, Mom! Go away and just let me be.”

When she had gone, he shut the door and went back to the dresser where the knife was. It was stained with blood up both sides, and he got out another handkerchief from the drawer and awkwardly wiped it clean. Nothing in the world would stain a knife worse than blood. Only after he had done that did he take another look at his finger. The cut was between the knuckle and second joint, running down the thumb side of the finger. Blood still ran from it in a thick stream, and he held the handkerchief under it so it would not drip on the floor. In a way, he was kind of proud of it. Anyway, at least it had fooled his mom. And it would make him a good scar. Yeah, he thought, a nice scar, to remember the day he got the invitation to Dawnie Hirsh’s wedding by.

But now that he was safe with his misery again and alone, the sick feeling, the sense of disbelief, came back over him with a rush, making his stomach drop away from under him. Wrapping a clean handkerchief around the cut, he went back to the desk and sat down and looked at the invitation and the cards. Dawnie— Dawn Anne— He could still see her clearly as she had looked that first time up in the woods, and he thought he could not stand it.

He dropped his forehead down on the desk, his work forgotten for the day, sick, beaten, empty. And so much in love with what he had lost that it was like a physical hunger for food when there is no food. Dawnie— Dawnie—

Is this the Wallace French Dennis who drove her home so implacably that night? who sat in the car so emotionlessly and watched her go inside? Is this the Wally Dennis who quit her cold?

Yes. Yes, but he had never thought she would do something like this to him.

In the end, only anger came to his aid. Anger that she could do this to him, deliberately, just to spite him, after all that they had meant to each other, after all he
knew about her.
And hell, she loved it. Why hell, she was a regular damned
wanton!
And how in hell Jim Shotridge could ever keep her satisfied in bed he couldn’t figure. But in this direction lay danger, too; and as all the old memories flooded back in
proof
that she was just a damned
wanton,
the sick hungry bottomless feeling began to come back in him. So he put this thought down, too; and concentrated merely on sheer anger.

Angrily, in the next few days, he prepared himself. He would show them all. He took his mom’s old car to Terre Haute and spent a hundred dollars of his dwindling (almost nonexistent) fellowship money on a silver service for a present, and on the back of the platter he had engraved the legend:
“To Dawnie and Jim, Many happy days! Wally.”
For a moment, he contemplated having them engrave it to read:
“To Dawnie and Shotridge;”
like she always called him; but he was afraid it might be a little too much, and he did not want Shotridge getting wise. That would only ruin it. What he wanted was to fix it so that whenever she used that tea service, or even looked at it, she would remember. Remember Lake Audubon, and remember the woods at dusk out west of West Lancaster, and remember all the
other
times and places. And then let’s see how goddamned sanctimonious she could pretend to be!

He had it sent out from Terre Haute, so his mom would not see it.

During the two weeks before the wedding, he did not go anywhere. Except to classes at the college. Some instinct of some fright, some fear of some embarrassment, kept him away. And anyway, he just simply did not feel like going anywhere. Thank God he had never talked to anyone about his love affair! Nobody really knew there had ever been a love affair. Love affair— Oh, God! Dawnie—Dawn Anne—
request the honor of your presence—

Only when he was working, in the mornings, was he near free of it. He would get up early, after a night of bad dreams, and he would plunge furiously into his work on his book, writing all morning long, sometimes not even sure what it was he had written. He did not have the heart to try and go back over it and read it. He just filed it carefully away, more pages per day than he had ever written in his life before. And plunged on ahead. Because only then could he be even momentarily free of it.

But the rest of the time, when he wasn’t working, he could only sit around and brood. Because he couldn’t concentrate to read anymore. When he would quit work exhausted at noon and come down for lunch, he would have to be pleasant and noncaring in front of his mom for forty-five minutes. That was even more exhausting. And when after lunch he would sit down with a book, he would read a few lines and the words would lose all sense,
at the marriage of their daughter—
Dawn Anne— If his mom was home, he would shut himself up in his room. To fool her, and to fool himself, he started working on model airplanes again and his old radio sets. If his mom was not home, he would simply sit, one leg up over a chair in the living room, staring at the horrible once-expensive furnishings; or go into the music room and play chords on the piano.

Once the wedding was over— Once he showed them at the wedding— Once that miserable, spiteful, deliberate, hateful wedding was over, he would be all right.

Ahh, Dawnie, he would think with a convulsion of agony— Ahh, Dawnie— If you only realized—

But that was just what he must never let her do. Or anybody else. He got back a little handwritten note from her, thanking him for the gift. His mom got one, too, for hers.

He got his good suit, his
one
suit—a really good royal blue gabardine—he got his suit all cleaned and pressed at the cleaners, had them press his best navy-blue tie, sorted out his best white spread-roll-collar shirt with French cuffs, and polished his best wing-tip black dress shoes himself. All of it fixed, all of it ready, so there would be no slipup.

Easter Sunday, he spent the morning lounging around in his room while his mom went to church, unable to write today, feeling nervous and somehow less agonizingly unhappy than he had been in the two whole weeks. It seemed to him that three o’clock and the time when he could begin getting dressed would never come.

Wally had only been to two or possibly three weddings in his life, none of them especially exceptional, so he was not at all prepared for the sight before his eyes as he and his mom arrived and went inside. First of all, when he drove up with his mom, he found that there were cars parked on both sides of the street for almost two full blocks in
every
direction from the Methodist church. At the three corners, nearest the church cops were out in the center of the intersections, directing traffic; and at the corner before the church itself stood Chief of Police Sherm Ruedy, looking very handsome in his new spring uniform. By the time Wally found a place to park, they were almost three blocks from the Methodist church. And the sidewalks, as he walked back to the church sedately beside his mom who had splurged and bought a whole new outfit, were actually crowded with people, all heading for the two main doors of the big ivy-grown stone church. He could not help feeling a little awed.

But the picture that met them inside as they entered and he handed the two “admission” cards to one of the ushers, that picture overawed him, even more: The entire church was banked with ferns and masses of white flowers, around every wall of the place, all the green in the world and masses of white lilies. Although they had arrived twenty minutes before the ceremony, the church was already filled with people. Looking out over it from the door, Wally judged there must be at least a thousand persons there. (Actually, he found out later, there were only some six hundred.) But he didn’t have time for more inspection then. The usher had accepted the cards, consulted his list, and now smiling and chatting to her quietly offered his
right
arm to Wally’s mom and escorted her down the right one of the two main aisles. Still stunned, Wally followed. At the white satin ribbon separating off the first twelve pews, already well-filled, the usher lifted off the ribbon, led them through, replaced it, and then escorted them to the second pew on the left or center section, where there were two seats vacant on the end. They sat down.