Some Came Running (95 page)

Also, she was learning to cook. They were teaching her.

His own self-cooked meal finished, Dave sat on, staring at Doris’s red-and-white checkered tablecloth. She had in the past month also become very friendly with Wally, whom she already knew, and with Dewey and Hubie and their girls. She played a good game of Ping-Pong and was able to beat himself and everybody else except Wally and sometimes ’Bama. She appeared to be an excellent loser. ’Bama had been talking lately about buying a secondhand billiard table and setting it up in the basement, too, and Doris was delighted and urged him to do it. Her pale blue eyes would light up like a child’s when they talked about it, and she would shake her old-cherrywood-colored curls excitedly. She was really a very pretty girl. Dave didn’t know what it was. He guessed he just didn’t like her. The only way he could sum it up was that she was “false,” was not what she seemed to be. But then which of us was? Still, he felt she was somehow dangerous. Old Janie felt the same way, too, apparently, though she was careful not to say anything. Christ! if ’Bama thought Ginnie Moorehead was dangerous—! At least Ginnie didn’t impose herself on all of them all the time. Ginnie was just a big pathetic slob. But ’Bama’s new mistress—!

Shaking it all out of his head as idle speculation anyway, and looking irately at the tablecloth and big brown candles, he was just getting up to get himself a cup of coffee when he recognized the motor of ’Bama’s Packard driving in on the driveway. Pouring the coffee, he heard through the open screen door’s two doors slamming, and then voices, male and female. That would mean that Doris was with him.

He poured cream in the coffee and took it back to the table and sat down and prepared himself to be pleasant. And just then, something struck him: Doris Fredric never talked of herself, or even thought of herself, apparently, as a rich girl. In fact, she was always looking for an opportunity to drag in some allusion—usually completely out of context—to the fact that she had little or no money. And yet, all of them who hung out at the house always thought of her as a rich girl, and in fact, she did not have to talk of or think of herself as a rich girl, because she always on a subconscious level acted like one, whether she herself knew it or not. But he suspected that she knew it. Certainly everybody else in Parkman knew that she was one of the wealthiest young people in town, her mother being Tony Wernz’s sister and all, and she stood to inherit a large part of the Wernz family interests—as well as some farms up around Morris through the Fredrics who were Amish, Old Janie had told him. And Doris must know all this. But of course she could just blank her mind out to it.

Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was she
was
a rich girl and they all of them knew it, and that had given him just now a sudden new insight into ’Bama. For the first time, he thought he could see why ’Bama had always been so strangely interested in Wally Dennis: Wally came from one of the older wealthier (or they once were) families of Parkman. And for the first time since he had met him, Dave thought he could understand now that strange, warm friendliness when they first met that was all out of proportion to the time they’d known each other: It was because he was Frank Hirsh’s brother and Frank Hirsh was a big wheel in Parkman, a comer. The fact that both of them, himself and Wally, were “writers” only added to the gambler’s sense of accomplishment at having them for friends. ’Bama was, it turned out, a snob—and not a rebel at all. But then, were not all rebels perhaps only inverted snobs who saw no way of getting the things they wanted and so eschewed them? That was all he himself had been, wasn’t it? out in Hollywood? And even after he came here, at first. And those very things—wealth, family, entrenched social prestige—the very things ’Bama himself did not have and sneered at—those were the very things about Doris that fascinated and flattered him. Dave felt let down. As though he had lost another ideal. He remembered all the times he had tried to get the tall gambler to go over to the Frenches’ big house in Israel. And how ’Bama had always refused, on some pretext or other, but the real reason, of course, was his feeling of inferiority.

It was a strange new picture of his old friend ’Bama, and Dave had barely time enough to adjust his mind to the idea of it before the two of them were through the screen door and in the room.

“Well,” Doris smiled, “the brooding novelist, mulling over some deeply thoughtful sequence of events.” Her summer dress looked very becoming on her.

“I was just looking at the candles,” he said pleasantly. “Where’d you get them, anyway?”

“Oh, those things,” Doris said, with a shy smile. “Just some cheap store somewhere.” That seemed to take care of that.

Behind her ’Bama winked at Dave tiredly. “Hi, buddy.” There was a strong affection in his voice.

Dave, sitting with one elbow on the table, winked back, a wink that like his, had nothing to do with Doris was only friendship, and grinned. “Anybody feel like a game of Ping-Pong?” he said. Whether ’Bama was a snob or not didn’t matter. Neither did it matter whether or not he had first cultivated him, Dave, for obscure snobbish reasons of his own. Too many other things had happened since then, things that were important to a friendship and couldn’t be canceled out by anything.

“Whoo-o-o! not me,” Doris said. “I’m famished. And right now, I badly need a drink,” she smiled in a little-girl way and marched to the cabinet where they kept the bottles and pulled forth a Jack Daniels Black Label. She had been drinking a great deal more lately he thought than when she had first started coming. “What’s in the refrigerator?” she said.

“Steak and hamburger,” Dave said. “And some lettuce, if you want a salad.”

“Shall I fix us a steak?” Doris said, smiling back over her shoulder at ’Bama. She had already got two glasses out and now moved to the refrigerator and got ice cubes for them. She poured a double jigger in each and from the sink added water to one. Then opened the cupboard door below and drew out a bottle of 7-Up and filled the other glass to the brim with it. Then she turned around, holding the two glasses and smiling with what Dave could only call coyness at ’Bama. She leaned the top of her rump back against the countertop. There was a sort of dramatic pause, and then smiling, she raised her own glass—the one with the 7-Up—and drank, at the same time extending the other one out to ’Bama.

It was such a characteristic sequence of action from her, and at the same time pointedly deliberate “big operation,” that Dave watched it, hypnotized almost. It always made him cringe inwardly anyway, to see her pour 7-Up into such excellent whiskey.

’Bama, who had been watching her with a sort of appreciative amusement, came forward and got his glass. “Shore,” he said; “I could shore eat a steak.” He stepped to one side and reached behind her for the bottle and added more whiskey to his glass.

Doris smiled at him. “Well, I’ll get them right on,” she said.

In the end, however, it was ’Bama who had to tell her when the steaks were ready to turn, and when they were done enough. As she herself said, ruefully but at the same time sort of proudly, she had never learned to boil water until she started coming here.

Dave sat with them while they ate and had another cup of coffee by the light of the candles which Doris had lit and then turned the lights off, and finally, another drink after they had had several. Doris ate very slowly, and very little, sitting very straight up in her chair. She did not like her steak rare, but very well done. She ate only about half of it. When she had had several drinks, like she had now, her eyes took on a strange smoky look, and she would stare at you with them half-closed as if she were not seeing you. Many people’s eyes got more vivid and penetrating, but with Doris it was just the opposite, and if she kept on drinking, they finally got until she actually looked like a blind person, smokier and smokier until her irises seemed to merge with her eyeballs. It was not sexy looking at all. It was not deadly looking, either. All through the meal, she kept talking, demurely, about what they had done that day, how they had gone over into Indiana for a “little ramble.” Dave figured if they had done any rambling they had done it in the car.

And yet in spite of it all, he could see where she might be immensely attractive sexually. There was some kind of obscure smoky hate in her, and in her eyes, that made you want to break her down, dominate her. And something about her that seemed to ask, even beg, for exactly that. Though she would still hate you still more for it.

After the meal, while Doris demurely did up the dishes, ’Bama pushed his hat down over his eyes and slumped himself down in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“How’d the work go today?” he asked.

“So-so,” Dave said. “Slow. But good.” He was reluctant to talk about his work, or anything else personal, around Doris. And ’Bama, of course, knew it.

“Good,” the tall man nodded. “You goin over to Israel tonight?” he asked.

Doris had, after finishing the few dishes, got herself another drink and sat down with them and lit a cigarette herself.

“No,” Dave said. “Not tonight.”

“Well, we might as well go out and play a little poker then,” ’Bama said.

“You’re not going to work tonight, are you?” Doris asked, looking at him with her smoky eyes. She had picked up calling gambling “work” from them.

“Shore,” ’Bama said. “Why not? We got to keep you up in the style to which yore accustomed, don’t we? Them goddamned Spencer rolls don’t grow out of my ears, you know.”

Ordinarily, Doris would have looked hurt, but this time she simply stared back at him expressionlessly, with those slow smoky eyes, while ’Bama himself stared back, coolly and amusedly. But then, breaking out of the stare abruptly, when she found she couldn’t outstare him, she threw back her head and shook her cherrywood-colored hair childishly and laughed.

“I guess it doesn’t really matter too much, does it?” she said. “Except that I thought you were already pretty well fixed for money, ’Bama.”

“Nobody’s ever well fixed for money,” ’Bama said without anger. “Well, come on, David. Let’s be a-goin,” he said and got up. “Just go ahead and make yoreself at home,” he said to Doris. “Maybe Wally or Dewey or somebody’ll come by and play you some Ping-Pong.”

“I think I’ll take a look at Dave’s new copy of Doctor Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,”
Doris said with a smoky smile. “I want to find out what men are really like.”

“Hell, I could tell you all that,” ’Bama said. “See you.”

They left her there, sitting at the table with her drink, but before they even actually got outside the screen door through which the summer night air circulated, she had got up and stretched herself and, walking with little pert steps, her small fine head held as always stiffly above her long straight neck, gone on into the other room indifferent to them, and as much at home as she could ever be in her own house. She had obviously made the move deliberately.

“I hope they don’t any of them romp her on the divan in the living room and ruin it,” ’Bama said as they got in the Packard.

It was the first time Dave had ever heard him make any definite comment about her at all, sexually. Taking advantage of this, Dave asked him the question he had been wanting to ask him for quite a long time.

“Are you?”

’Bama started the car before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know!” Dave exclaimed. “What the hell do you mean, you don’t know!”

“Just that,” ’Bama said. “I don’t know. I
think
I have. But on the other hand . . .” He let it trail off.

“Well, Jesus Christ!” Dave protested.

‘Bama didn’t say anything for a moment, and backed the car on out. Then he grinned. “But she’s good at lots of other things. You know that old saying about schoolteachers: If you get them in a car, they’ll have their head in yore lap—or yore head in their lap,” he grinned, “before you can even get the door shut.”

Dave could not help but grin back.

“Let’s try the Moose tonight,” ’Bama said.

“Sure,” Dave said. And so now, by God, he
still
didn’t know!

I
T WAS IN
A
UGUST
that Frank finally learned the more or less final disposition of the various bypass lands. The Greek’s men had come and gone so quietly that the supposedly up-and-coming little town of Parkman did not even know that they had ever been there. In the end, out of the eight landowners along the stretch of the proposed bypass, the men had been able to buy out only three. Of the three, they had had to buy the entire farms of two; but the third had been stupidly willing to sell, for a higher price than he anticipated getting from the state, that part of his land where the right-of-way would run plus a strip several hundred yards deep along both sides. Together with Frank’s own acreage he had got himself off of Old Lloyd Monds, that meant they had been able to buy out four of the eight—50 percent; which the Greek had told them would be a very good average. Actually, in acreage, they now owned somewhat less than 50 percent of the land along the bypass. But off-setting this was the fact that of the three entryways into the new highway, they controlled all except three of the twelve corners. Also, one of the purchases made by the Greek’s men adjoined Frank’s own two corners of the Route 1 junction, which meant that they would have plenty of land to build his shopping center. Of the three corners which they did not control, two were the key corners directly across the Route 1 junction from Frank’s own two. These were owned by a dairyman named Allis who had insisted upon selling this whole northeast corner to the state when he sold them right-of-way. As a result, the state now owned the northeast corner of the junction and would make a small piece of parkland out of it! Thus, two of the three corners which they did not control—the most important two—were, thanks to Allis, out of action as far as private enterprise was concerned. And from then on east to where the cutoff ran into town on the old road, there was no other entry road so all of that land—none of which they owned—was useless anyway. The other corner, the third, was the northwest corner of the furthest entry road to the west and could hardly cause them serious damage. Other than that, only the four cutoff corners—two on the west, two on the east, where the old road joined the bypass—could ever be used in competition against them.