The Tight White Collar (21 page)

“I dunno when I begun wonderin' about other places, Doc,” she once said to Jess. “Places outside of Cooper Station and the Mills, I mean. But I did. Didn't do me no good, though. I was the only one and I had to help Pa with the cows and Ma with the house. They was never much for gallivantin'. Pa, he was happy to stay home after supper. He'd set there after he was done eatin' and read the paper and Ma, she set and read her Bible all the time after her first sick spell. But I used to go out on the porch at night. The stars was so big out there you felt like you could just reach up and grab yourself a whole bagful if you felt like it. I used to think I'd write poems about them stars someday. I went to school right up through the fourth grade but then Ma, she got took bad and after that I had to stay home with her. Your Pa looked after Ma. He was always good with her, makin' her laugh a little and easin' her pain and all. I guess I was sixteen before I started goin' out some. Yep. Sixteen. The year after Ma passed away. A whole bunch of us farm kids used to go around in Hap Elkin's old Model-A Ford, and I'm tellin' you, Doc, we had more fun in that old car than kids have today for all their shiny new convertibles. Pa, though, he'd have fits when I went off with Hap and the gang, but I didn't care none and as long as I stayed on helpin' him with the farm, he couldn't say much. Anyway, that was the year I met Conrad Fennell. I wasn't all fat the way I am now, Doc. I was slender like, with all my weight where it counted. My hair was long and black then, and Hap Elkins always used to say I had skin like cream. Anyway, we all went to a barn dance one night and that's where I met Conrad. He was playin' the cornet and right away he noticed me.

“‘What's your name, beautiful?' he says to me.

“And I says, ‘Marie Johnson. What's your name?'

“‘Conrad Fennell,' he says. Then he kind a bowed a little like and says, ‘Miss Marie, your servant!'

“Well, I'm tellin' you, Doc, I went for him right off. He was from Manchester and I only knew him two weeks when he asked me to get married. I thought Pa was gonna blow a fuse.”

“‘Where's he come from and what's he do?'”

“‘He's a cornet playin' man from the city,' I said, thinkin' I might as well get that over with.

“Well, Pa, he was never much of a one for cussin' but he cussed that night until I thought the air'd turn blue. Didn't do him no good, though. I married Conrad anyway, and we stayed right there on the farm so's I could keep on helpin' Pa. Conrad, he was supposed to help Pa too, but he never did get the hang of any thin' like milkin' or the plantin' or nothin' like that. He used to set around the house, writin'. Writin' all the time. Stories, poems, music. Conrad, he could write all kindsa things. Well, Pa, he was about crazy. He said as how no self-respectin' man with a wife would set around the house all day and not work.

“‘Well, Pa,' I told him, ‘Conrad is workin'. He's writin'.'

“But Pa, he couldn't see how anybody could call settin' around writin' work and he and Conrad was always at it, arguin' and cussin' each other out. At night, though, it was different. After supper, me and Conrad'd go for walks. We'd walk up the hill behind the farm and set up there and Conrad, he'd tell me these poems he made up. And afterward we'd go into our room and lay there in the dark and he'd tell me stories. Oh, Doc, you can't begin to think of the stories he'd tell me. He'd tell me about places I'd never been and he'd tell me so plain I could see them right there in front of my eyes. Well, anyway, I guess we was three or four months married when I found out I was in the family way. Pa, he said that was the last straw and that Conrad was gonna have to start helpin' around the farm. And Conrad, he tried, Doc. Don't you think he didn't. His beautiful hands got all callused and he was always sunburned. He tried and he tried hard but it was too much for him. Between Pa naggin' him all the time and the way I'd started gettin' heavy with the baby and all, it was just too much for him. He ran off one night. One night he told me a story and rubbed my back for me and after I was asleep he just ran off and I never saw him again. Well, Pa, he was good to me, I gotta give him that. He wouldn't let me do any work and he saw to it that I took care of myself and all. It was your Pa delivered little Ira. Named him Ira after Pa. I wanted to name him Conrad but if I had, Pa'd just have been more tore up than he was already and I didn't see no sense to that. I thought I was gonna die sure, for a while back there. It seemed like I was just hell bent on killin' myself with all the runnin' around I had done. Pa, he hired a woman to look after little Ira and I went off to Cooper's Mills and got me a job. I had a room and a job and didn't lack none for attention, I can tell you. It's true I ran around and drank like a fish for a while. But it ain't true what some folks say about my whorin' around when I lived in Cooper's Mills. I ain't never whored around, Doc. I never took no money from nobody. Sometimes fellers'd give me presents and buy me a few drinks but that don't make a woman a whore. But you wanna know somethin', Doc? All that drinkin' and runnin' around didn't do no good. I still used to wonder about Conrad and sometimes, even now, I still do. I wonder where he went and if he's happy and if maybe sometimes he's sorry he went. I look at little Ira, and he ain't so little no more. He's graduatin' from high school next June and he looks just like his Pa. And I catch myself wonderin' if maybe things shouldn't've been different. Anyway, Doc, that's how come I don't look to get married again now and why I never did, even when I was still young. Once somebody's had the best there is, it's mighty hard to be satisfied with second best. Somehow I never got the hankerin' to try.”

All the rest of his life, whenever Jess thought of loneliness, he thought first of his father whom loneliness had made old before his time, and of Marie, the butt of every unkind joke in Cooper Station.

Once, Jess had asked Marie, “What if you had it to do over again, Marie? Would you still marry Conrad Fennell?”

Marie had smiled sadly, the way she always did when she had had a few drinks.

“Sometimes I ain't quite sure, Doc,” she said. “But most of the time I know I would.”

“You mean you'd let yourself in for all that pain again? And for the loneliness and wondering?”

Marie shrugged and picked up a dustcloth. “It wa'nt all loneliness,” she said. “I got plenty to remember and that's more than lots of folks've got.”

The third person that Jess Cameron thought of when he thought of loneliness was a man named Philip Hastings whom he had known during the Second World War. But even when the war was long over, he still did not like to remember Philip Hastings.

Hastings is going to be the voice of my conscience for the rest of my life, thought Jess ruefully. Goddamn him.

Jess finished his internship at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover just in time to be drafted into the army. He served four years with the medical corps, and spent almost three of those years on the islands of the Pacific. From the moment he received his commission and put on his uniform, Jess hated every single thing about the war. Even years later, he could not bear to talk of the waste, the terror, the helplessness of war and he could not understand the way old service men clung together when it was over, the way they sat around in bars and remembered the war, the way their eyes misted over as they remembered what the tones of their voices seemed to recall as the good old days. Jess never spoke of the broken and mutilated bodies and minds of men at war. He had patched, sewn, cut and bandaged and he knew he had done his job well. Except with Philip Hastings.

Philip Hastings had been a captain in the infantry. He came from Detroit, Michigan, where he had a wife and two sons. He carried pictures of his family with him at all times and he showed them constantly to anyone who would take the time to look.

“The wife,” he would say. “Her name's Gwenyth, but everyone calls her Gwen. That's my son Tommy there on the left. He's six, and believe me there are no flies on Tommy. Smart as a whip. Everybody says so. And that's my son Mike on the right. Three years old and a hellion. Believe me, if Mike doesn't grow up to be a fighter, I miss my guess.”

Everyone got a charge out of Captain Hastings. He was the perfect picture of the typical American husband and father who had been doing well at his job, had minded his own business and had voted for Roosevelt. And here he was now. In the infantry.

He was brought into the hospital with a broken arm.

“I don't know how the hell it could have happened,” he said. “I guess I landed wrong or something when I dived for my hole.”

“Christ, what a mess,” said Major Jess Cameron.

Jess fixed Philip Hastings' arm and then he arranged for the captain to spend several days at a rest area.

“You'll be out of it for a while,” said Jess. “But you'll be back. See you around.”

Exactly one week later, the captain was waiting for Jess in the hospital's small waiting room.

“Well, Hastings,” said Jess. “Welcome back. “You're my first customer this morning. Come on in. How's the arm?”

“Listen, Major, I'm not here because of my arm,” said Hastings.

“Oh?”

“No. Listen, Major.” Hastings leaned forward and almost whispered. “I've got it.”

“Got what, Hastings?” asked Jess a little impatiently. He was very tired.

“V.D.,” replied the captain.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Jess. “A week out of the hospital, a cast on your arm and you managed to get into that kind of trouble. Are you sure?”

Captain Hastings burst into tears.

“Yes,” he sobbed. “I'm sure. There was a girl back there, a Red Cross girl. Honest to God, Major, I never meant it to happen, I just wanted to talk to someone. I just wanted to talk to a woman.”

“Hastings, pull yourself together,” said Jess. “Red Cross girls don't usually have V.D. Come on in. We'll have a look.”

“What am I going to do?” Hastings wept. “How will I ever face Gwen and the children, tainted the way I am now?”

“For God's sake, Hastings, shut up and hold out your arm.”

The Wassermann was negative.

“Hastings, sometimes it takes a while before we can be sure of these things,” said Jess. “I'm going to keep you here in the hospital for a few days and we'll see what develops.”

“I'll never be able to go home,” again cried Hastings. “Gwen will leave me and take the boys—”

“Will you stop blubbering,” Jess snapped impatiently. “You don't even know whether you have it or not. Come on, now. Go with the orderly and get into bed. You're just tired.”

“Oh, God,” moaned Hastings. “Oh, God, forgive me.”

“What's with him, Major?” the orderly asked later. “A nut?”

“How the hell do I know?” said Jess. “Guilty conscience more likely.”

Every morning, Captain Hastings was waiting for Major Cameron.

“Major,” he begged. “Help me. Listen, I've got it. You've got to do something.”

A week later, Philip Hastings' Wassermann again proved negative and Jess's careful examination showed him to be free of anything below the belt save for a rather puckered appendectomy scar.

“Well, Hastings,” said Jess. “Good news today. You're okay. Clean as a whistle.”

Captain Hastings stood with his shoulders bent and kept his eyes fixed on the floor.

“You don't have to worry about telling me the truth, Major,” he said. “I can take it. I know I've got it.”

Jess was tired. When he stopped to think of it, he could not remember a time when he had been as tired as he was now.

“Listen to me, Hastings,” he said and stood directly in front of the captain. “You haven't got V.D. There's not a damned thing wrong with you. Except for that arm you could get the hell out of here this morning and go back to your outfit. Now stop bucking for a section eight and get the hell out of here. I've got work to do.”

Philip Hastings just stood there with tears running down his cheeks and Jess supposed that there was something amusing about the conscience-stricken captain but he was too tired to laugh.

He'll get over it, thought Jess. He hates himself for sneaking a little bit of tail on the side, but he'll get over it. He'll go back to Detroit one day and start selling cars again and every time he has a fight with his wife he'll remember his little Red Cross girl with nothing but sweet memories.

But Captain Hastings did not get over it.

“Sir,” an orderly complained. “Captain Hastings keeps on my ass all the time. Keeps begging me for penicillin. Pulls his rank on me and everything else. Tells me he's going to the colonel, the general and to President Roosevelt if he has to because we won't help him.”

Jess sighed with annoyance. “Put Hastings on the list of men going back to the general hospital,” he said. “Maybe they'll have a psychiatrist there. In the meantime, give him shots of sterile water whenever he asks for penicillin and just keep him the hell out of my way.”

The tiny hospital buzzed with talk about Captain Hastings. He was not sick or really hurt and was, therefore, a welcome change from men with dirt-encrusted wounds and men who screamed for their mothers.

“Hear about Hastings?” the orderlies asked one another. “Shacked up with some broad back at the rest area and now he thinks he's got syph.”

“He's a riot to watch. Keeps swiveling his head around to look over his shoulder. Like his wife and kids were following him.”

“A real nut, that one.”

“Jungle jolly.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Just keep him the hell off my neck,” said Jess Cameron. “I haven't time to wet-nurse him.”

The night before Captain Hastings was scheduled to go back to the general hospital, he went into the latrine and put his revolver against his temple and blew his head off.