Some Came Running (157 page)

“I just want to make it plain to you that I’m not in good health,” Agnes said, crisply, wailfully, “and also the conditions under which I’m willing to come back. As far as you and I are concerned, it’s purely a business deal for the good of the child. I intend to sleep upstairs from now on, by myself.”

“Okay,” Frank said stolidly. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Agnes said. “Is that whore gone?”

“She’s gone,” Frank said. “But she’s not a whore. She’s a nice girl. I guess I done her more harm maybe even than I done you.”

“I expect so,” Agnes said thinly. “I expect so. What about the house?”

“Well,” Frank said; and then he lied. He couldn’t help it. “She wanted to keep the house, and since it was in her name, there wasn’t very much I could do about it. She’s having Judge Deacon rent it for her and give the money to her father.”

“You mean she’s not moved back out there with him?” Agnes said, looking a little surprised.

“No,” Frank said. “She’s leaving town. Already left, in fact. Moved to Chicago.”

“Well!” Agnes said. “And she kept the house? Well, there’s a pretty nice sum of money down the drain, isn’t it?” she said bitterly.

Frank did not say anything for a moment. He pulled his chin down into his neck, like a man out in a hail storm. “We can afford it,” he said shortly. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“Eight thousand dollars!” Agnes said.

“We can afford it,” Frank said again.

“Well, at least, the whore is gone!” Agnes said.

“What’s for supper?” Frank said, taking a drink.

“I don’t know,” Agnes said wailfully. “I’ll have to look around. Well!” she said more crisply. “Eight thousand dollars!”

Frank did not answer. If that was the way it was going to be, well, that was the way it was going to be. He turned to go and mix another drink. Hell, he had known what to expect, hadn’t he?

Agnes followed him part way into the living room. “Yes, I can plainly see that that girl was no whore,” she said bitterly. “I can see that by the way she insisted on keeping the house. Eight thousand dollars! Whoring’s going up.”

For a moment, he debated telling her the truth: that Edith had, in fact, wanted to sign the house back over to him; and that it was himself who had, because of his guilt, insisted on her keeping it. But that would only rile her up even more. And Edith was already gone. Well, if this was the way it was going to be, this was the way it was going to be.

Edith Barclay, three days earlier, had been thinking almost exactly the same thing; but in a slightly different way: If that was the way it was going to be, that was the way it was going to be. And better so, really, she added to herself. Better this way than some other way it might have all turned out. It was, she thought, somewhat similar to what the military analysts back during the war would have called “an untenable position.” Hers and Frank’s both; and always had been. She had always known, deep down, that if it ever came actually to the sticking point Frank would
stick
with Agnes. She had never thought it, consciously, but she had known. She had never
let
herself think it. It was funny what one’s mind could do to one if one allowed it to. The truth was, shibboleths were crashing down all over, for Edith Barclay. And she merely stood, and watched them smash, and felt nothing, really.

She never should have allowed herself to take the house. She had done that because of Jane. And she never should have let herself be seated “within the ribbon” at the wedding. She had done that because—? She didn’t
know
why. But even had she not allowed herself to do these two things, it would have made no difference. If not because of those two acts, then because of some others. Because it was, after all, an “untenable position”; and she had known it all along.

Love. What was love, after all? She didn’t know. She only knew what she felt. But she had learned—the hard way—that what she felt was not the whole of it. Not by any means.

She did not wait around any, once the job at the store was done. That same Saturday that she received her last pay check, she left. There was no point in staying and prolonging the unpleasantness. The new little girl was adequate to handle the work at the store now. So there was no point in staying any longer.

Her packing she had already done before, in the evenings after work. And her business with the house was already taken care of with Judge Deacon. Edith suspected, from the way the judge looked, that he guessed the whole story pretty clearly; but he did not say anything to her. All she had to do was pack the one bag she was taking, lock the door, and go. The rest of her things she had, in the evenings, moved out to John’s. Once she got settled in Chicago, and found an apartment, she would have John express them to her. The little house had grown increasingly empty the last week, as she packed and moved her things out to John’s. Even so, while it caused a hollowness in the house, she preferred doing it that way to spending two or three hectic days moving everything after she had quit the store. She was, she found, able to live with the hollowness in the house as easily as she was able to live with all the thoughts that she used to not let herself think, but which now she did think. It was just a matter of adjustment.

It was all, of course, Old Jane, really. Old Jane and her diverticulitis and her discharge she had so desperately tried to hide. That was, really, what had made her take the house in the first place. It was, in a way, a sort of penance to Old Janie. Well, she had paid it, and so it had served its purpose. She was through with it. And she had felt that way ever since the night two weeks ago when Frank had come over to tell her about Agnes. She had been Frank Hirsh’s “mistress;” Frank Hirsh’s kept whore; and that was what she had wanted to be—because of Janie. Now it was over. Maybe in some secret way that was partly why she had taken the house; just in order to bring this end about that much sooner.

Certainly, anyone who thought they could fool Agnes Hirsh indefinitely were only kidding themselves. And now with the humiliation of being kicked out by her lover’s wife, she had in some obscure way, she felt, paid her debt to Old Jane. She could not, however, resist the one last luxury of telling it all to John. The last evening, when she took her last load out to his house, she sat and talked with him quite a little while, and explained to him how she was being kicked out by Agnes. Agnes had left Frank, she explained. Over her: Edith. The only way Frank could get his wife back was to kick her, Edith, out. That meant out of her job, too. Naturally, she was leaving town. John was, of course, naturally—in his dull way—distressed over his daughter. But more about the possibility of public scandal than anything else.

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about the publicity,” she had told him. “It’s all been kept very quiet.

“Of course,” she added coolly, “it will all get around town eventually, I’m sure. But it will never actually be
public
scandal; only
private
scandal.”

That, of course, distressed him even more: her allusion to his fear of publicity; and he tried to apologize. He was really a kind man; there wasn’t really anything mean about him. In fact, he was just too damned dull to even be capable of being mean. Edith sat with him in the kitchen of the little old house—so full of memories of Jane—and drank a last cup of coffee with him, and told him she was leaving tomorrow. Then she kissed him and said goodby.

And so on Saturday, there was nothing to keep her, once she got off work and got her one bag packed. That was the way she had planned it. And she was glad she had handled it this way, rather than waiting to do her moving. Carefully, she went around the little house making sure there were no lights left on, no water running. Then she picked up her bag and went outside to where the taxi—Hirsh Bros. Taxi Service, only it wasn’t called that—she had called, was waiting. In its own right, she had really liked the little house, and had enjoyed fixing it up. Well, she could do the same thing with an apartment in Chicago. The taxi took her uptown, and she caught the evening bus to Terre Haute where she was going to catch the train.

She had no regrets at all, and no fears. If she had it all to do over again, probably she would not have done it—knowing what she knew now. But then, how could she know now what she knew, if she had not done it? And as for going off to a strange city and looking for work, she had no qualms whatever there. She was good at her work, and she knew it; and she could
please
a man with the best of them, now—whether she herself liked it or not. She ought to make a nearly perfect private secretary.

Actually, she felt freer than she had ever felt in her life. Freer, and more unencumbered. And she could look forward with equanimity, even adventure, to anything that came.

Only once, really, as she left, did she have any real feeling of pain and unhappiness: After she got to Terre Haute, knowing she had something over an hour to wait for the evening Chicago train, she walked the block or so up to the Marine Room bar to have herself a cocktail, and maybe a sandwich. And that was when she saw Dave Hirsh.

He was sitting by himself over on the far side of the bar, having dinner, obviously pretty tight, and kidding loudly with the waitress. He did not see her. Edith gave up her idea of a sandwich and sat down on the near side, in the little room where they served only cocktails and ordered a manhattan. She did not want to speak to him. She had never liked him very well. But seeing him had momentarily stopped her. Round, blocky, fat-faced, ball-headed and barrel-bodied, he looked so much like his brother Frank that it made Edith’s stomach fall away with the memory of him: of poor old Frank. Frank her lover. He rose up vividly in her mind. So many memories of him. And her sorrow and pity for him, in spite of all his foibles, were still strong in her. Stronger even than she had expected.

Toying with the stem of her glass as she drank her drink, the idea popped into her head that she could go over there and pick Dave up and get a hotel room with him, and in that way—by sleeping with him—she could sleep one last time with—comfort for one last time, poor old Frank. A kind of private farewell, all her own.

But, of course, it was a silly idea. He wasn’t Frank. He was Dave. And she did not even contemplate it beyond that first wild moment when it popped into her head. It did not even bother her that she had thought it. Once, it would have.

Quietly, she sat and sipped her drink. She knew one thing anyway: She would not want to be Frank and Agnes Hirsh for anything in this world. She felt sorry, deeply, sincerely sorry, for both of them.

Then she finished her drink and walked out through the hotel lobby to catch a cab to the railroad station.

She could get her sandwich out there.

W
HEN
E
DITH
B
ARCLAY SAW
Dave Hirsh in Terre Haute without his seeing her, what she did not know was that Dave was out celebrating. He was having himself a sort of private bachelor dinner: He intended to get good and drunk and have himself a good big dinner and then make the rounds of the whorehouses one last time; after that, he was going to be a happily married man like everybody else. Dave had finally, after due and careful consideration, decided to marry Ginnie Moorehead; and tonight’s solo party was a sort of symbol of the decision.

He hadn’t told her yet, and he hadn’t even told ’Bama; and that was why he was out doing his celebrating by himself. What the hell, other people had bachelor dinners, didn’t they? Actually, of course, it wasn’t a true bachelor dinner. It wasn’t taking place the night before the marriage. But it was a bachelor dinner in the sense that it was taking place the night after the day of decision. Dave had turned it around and around for a couple of weeks, and the more he turned it around, the more it seemed the most rational out for him. After all, who the hell else would he—at his age, and with his prospects and looks—ever get to marry him? He wasn’t in love with Ginnie, at least not in the way he had once loved Gwen French; but in a way he did love her, too, he guessed: She was so extremely pitiable. But more important was the fact that she would make him a good wife; the very kind of wife that a writer ought to have. She would take care of him. He had looked it all over, had studied Ginnie closely the two weeks since she had been back from her Kansas fiasco, and finally he had decided. He couldn’t very well see how he could go wrong.

Ginnie had—after he sent her the fifty dollars General Delivery in Kansas—taken nearly two weeks to get home to Parkman. Perhaps it had taken her that long to sneak away from her crazy ex-Marine, but Dave did not doubt but what she had picked up some guy on the bus and had herself a several-day brawling party. She probably wouldn’t be Ginnie if she didn’t. But if she had, that didn’t bother him. Because after sending her the money, during the nearly two weeks it took her to get home, he had checked around Parkman and had found out for sure that she had been telling him the truth when she stated that she had not been out with anybody but him for nearly three months, before she took off with her ex-Marine. Naturally, this impressed him. But what impressed him even more was the Ginnie who arrived home chastened from Kansas.

Worn and wan after her three-month ordeal, she came right down to the house on Lincoln Street as soon as she got off the afternoon bus. She had lost a considerable amount of weight—but let’s face it, he thought: It hadn’t done much for her figure, and never would. If she only weighed eighty-two pounds, she would still look squat and fat and dumpy. But, after all, what the hell did that matter? That wasn’t what he was marrying her for.

Nevertheless, she had lost quite a lot of weight, and it did make her a
little
more palatable. But mostly, it was the change in her personality that both impressed and touched Dave. And perhaps even flattered him a little. After she had arrived at the house, she sat down with him and ’Bama and a bottle of whiskey and, her eyes haunted-looking, told them the tale of her ordeal. Dull as she was by nature (a good trait for a writer’s wife), she was nevertheless considerably more sensitized by her recent unhappiness. Repeatedly, while she was living with her new husband in Kansas, she said, she had been threatened by him with what was apparently a .45 Service Automatic just on the mere suspicion that she might have been toying with the idea of leaving him. And his old father wasn’t much better: a mean old son of a bitch, Ginnie said, dirty and unshaven, who wore nothing but ripe overalls, which she was forced to scrub by hand in a big tub, and whose sole opinion of women, apparently, was that they were ordained by God and by law to work themselves to death for the men they married.