“Okay. Well, thank you.”
“All right,” she said. She did not go to the door with him.
He did not look back, but he knew as well as he could know anything that Harry Reilly was watching him from an upstairs window, and probably Mrs. Gorman was watching with him.
He drove home, parking the car in front of his house, and went inside. He took as long as he could with his hat and coat, scarf and arctics. He walked slowly up the stairs, letting each step have its own full value in sound. It was the only way he knew of preparing Caroline for the news of Reilly’s refusal to see him, and he felt he owed her that. It would not be fair to her to come dashing in the house, to tell her by his footsteps that everything was all right and Reilly was not sore, only to let her down.
He sensed that she had understood the slow steps. She was in bed, the dazzling light coming in the windows from the west, and she was reading a magazine. It was
The New Yorker,
and not the newest one. He recognized the cover. It was a Ralph Barton drawing; a lot of shoppers, all with horribly angry or stern faces, hating each other and themselves and their packages, and
above the figures of the shoppers was a wreath and the legend: Merry Xmas. Caroline had her knees up under the bedclothes, with the magazine propped against her legs, but she was holding the cover and half of the magazine with her right hand.
She slowly closed the magazine and laid it on the floor. “Did you have a fight with him?” she said.
“He wouldn’t see me.” Julian lit a cigarette and walked over to the window. They were together and he knew it, but he felt like hell. She was wearing a black lace negligée that he and she called her whoring gown. Suddenly she was standing beside him, and as always he thought how much smaller she was in her bare feet.
She put her arm inside his arm, and her hand gripped the muscle of the arm.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“No,” he said, gently. “No, it isn’t.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “But let’s not think of it now.” She moved her arm so that it went around his back under the shoulder blades, and her hand moved slowly down his back, along his ribs, his hips and buttocks. He looked at her, doing all the things he wanted her to do. Her reddish brown hair was still fixed for the day. She was not by any means a small girl; her nose rubbed under his chin, and he was six feet tall. She let her eyes get tender in a way she had, starting a smile and then seeming to postpone it. She stood in front of him and kissed him. Without taking her mouth away she pulled his tie out of his vest and unbuttoned his vest, and then she let him go. “Come on!” she said, and lay with her face down in the pillow, shutting out everything else until he was with her. It was the greatest single act of their married life. He knew it, and she knew it. It was the time she did not fail him.
V
It was dark when Al Grecco bundled up, preparatory to starting his lonely drive to the Stage Coach. He bought cigarettes and chewing gum. He regretted that there was no one to see
him getting into Ed Charney’s “coop.” He liked doing that, driving away alone, in that car, before the muggs who hung around the Apollo. It showed them how he stood with Ed, compared to them.
It was an eighteen-mile drive, with a dozen tiny coal-mining patches to break up the stretches of lighted highway. The road was pretty good, but Al told himself that if he was any judge, it would be drifted again before he got home. In the patches the snow was piled high on each side of the streets. He counted only six persons in all the patches between Gibbsville and Taqua, the next fairly big town, fourteen miles from Gibbsville. That showed how cold it was. In all the houses in the patches the curtains were down, and the hunkeys, the schwackies, the roundheaders, the broleys—regional names for non-Latin foreigners—probably were inside getting drunk on boilo. Boilo is hot moonshine, and Ed did not approve of it, because if the schwackies once stopped drinking boilo, they would drink his stuff. Still, there was nothing to do about it. But it was cheating, in a way, for the schwackies to be celebrating Christmas; they celebrated Christmas all over again on January 6, Little Christmas. In each patch there was one exception to the curtained windows of the houses; that was in the doctor’s house. There was a doctor in each town, living in a well-built house, with a Buick or a Franklin in front of the house. More than once Al had found it a good thing to know, that the doctors usually kept one car in front of the house—either the Buick or Franklin, or the Ford or Chevvy. More than once Al had drained gasoline from the doctors’ cars, and never once had been caught.
He tore along the highway, clipping off the fourteen miles to Taqua in twenty-one minutes. His best time was twelve minutes, but that was in the summer, with a load of “white”—alcohol. Twenty-one minutes tonight wasn’t bad. But he gave up trying to make time from Taqua to the Stage Coach. Too many turns in that road, and all uphill. You come to a fairly steep hill on that stretch, you climb the hill and think you’re set, but then you find it’s only the beginning of the real hill. Once you get on top of the hill it is only a few hundred yards
to the crossroads, which is where the Stage Coach is built. If you want to you can go on and climb some more hills, because the Stage Coach is built on a plateau, one of the coldest places in Pennsylvania. There has been an inn on the site of the Stage Coach as long as there has been a road. It was one of those things that had to be. Anyone who climbed that hill in the old days had to rest his horses—and get a toddy for himself. And motorists liked to pause there for the same reason. It was a natural place to stop traveling.
A wrought-iron coach-and-four, six feet long over all, hung from a post in front of the inn. The Stage Coach was only two years old, still new as Gibbsville things went, and Ed was making improvements all the time. A business acquaintance of Ed’s in New York had sent Ed a fat, rosy-cheeked young man to do the decorating. The young man had been driven once back to New York by the practical jokes of the boys, but Ed gave out the word to leave him alone, so the pansy came back and did a very good job of the Stage Coach. People from the cities often commented on the Stage Coach, how surprising it was to see such a really nice place in all that coal-region squalor.
Ed, of course, owned the place, but it was run by Foxie Lebrix, who had been headwaiter in one of the big New York hotels—which one he never would say. Foxie was a strong, bulky Frenchman, about fifty-five years old, with white hair and a black mustache. He could tear a deck of cards in half, or break a man’s jaw with a single punch. He also could cook stuff that only a few of the Lantenengo Street crowd ever had heard of, and just as few could pronounce. He was thought to be a killer, but nobody knew that for sure. Al Grecco treated him with respect.
“Hello, Fox,” said Al, in Lebrix’s office.
“Hello,” said Lebrix.
“The big boy tell you I was coming?” said Al.
“He dit,” said Lebrix. He was dipping a cigar in brandy, using his left hand, and giving the impression of not letting his right hand know what the left hand was doing. He saved the right hand for his little gestures. “Thee lady is resting,” he
tossed his head back to indicate upstairs. “She was a little onder the wather wan Ed phoned.”
“She know I’m coming?”
“She will. If you want the truth, she was cockeye dronk.”
“Oh, yeah? She’s liable to—”
“She wawnt leave the room. I have Marie to watch her.” Marie was Lebrix’s common-law wife. Anyhow, that’s what she said. “You want to see her? She started to drink when she got up, without eating breakfast. She can’t do dat. She can’t drink at all. But no. ‘It’s Christmas. I have to drink. I have to get dronk. It’s Christmas.’ God damn son of a bitch a bastard. I wish Ed would take her some other place. She is more trobble than she is worth.”
“Oh, well,” said Al.
“Aw, well. Sure. Aw, well. If I had a woman do like that you bet she would not do it twice.”
“Oh, well, you know how it is, Fox,” said Al.
Lebrix nodded. “Oh, pardon,” he said. “You have your dinner? Have a drink?”
“No, just a cuppa coffee.”
“Café Royale?”
“No, thanks, Fox. Just coffee. No drinks for me tonight.”
“Too bad. I’ll order coffee.” He pushed a button under the top of the desk and told a waiter to serve Al’s coffee. “Lots of reservations tonight. Several parties from Gibbsville, and a big dinner from Taqua. Jews. And that politician, Donovan, he has the nerve to reserve a table for ten for tonight. Cheap bastard son of a bitch.”
“He’ll pay,” said Al.
“Sure he’ll pay. He’ll hand me a century, like a big heavy spender, and I’m soppose to thank him politely, but then I give him his change and it’s ten sawbucks. The waiters are lucky if they get a tip. That’s the way he is, the cheap bastard son of a bitch. I’d like to give him a Mickey Finn. I never gave one of those in my life, but if I do, he will be the first.”
“You can’t do that.”
“
I
know. You want to sit with Helene tonight?”
“I guess that’s the best way.”
“Yes, I think so. Some of our guests, they get some of this so-called champagne in their bellies, and Miss Holman will begin to think she is Mistinguett.”
“What?”
“French entertainer. Yes, if your job is to keep an eye on her, you better be where she can see you so she will not forget herself. It’s Christmas, my friend. She may give something away.”
“Huh. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“So?” said Lebrix.
They were driving south on the way to the club, down South Main Street. Caroline was smoking a cigarette and holding Julian’s hand. He took the hand away to do
shave-and-a-haircut
on the horn button, signaling to the Cadillac just ahead of their own.
“Who’s that?” said Caroline.
“A good prospect,” said Julian. “Young Al Grecco.”
“Who’s he? I know him by name. Who is he?”
“He’s a sort of a yes man for Ed Charney,” said Julian. The coupé in front turned off to the left, to the Lincoln Street bridge, and apparently Al Grecco did not hear the signal. He did not turn his head or answer with
bay-rum
on the horn of the coupé.
“Oh, he’s the one that went to Philadelphia for the champagne. Did he get it?” said Caroline.
“If Mr. Charney wants champagne, whoever is told to get it, gets it.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it. Why are people so afraid of him?”
“I’m afraid of him,” said Julian.
“You are not. You’re not afraid of anyone. My big strong man. My mate.”
“Nuts to you, sister,” he said.
“Don’t call me sister, and don’t say nuts.”
“Say masticate,” said Julian. “God, did you ever hear anyone like Mother? Did you hear her telling the old gent not to say masticate? You know she hasn’t the remotest idea why she doesn’t like the word.”
“I’ll bet she has. Women aren’t that dumb.”
“I say she hasn’t the remotest idea why she doesn’t like the word. Somewhere in the back of her mind the sound of the word has a dirty connotation, but what it is she isn’t sure. So she thinks she prefers simple language. Did you ever masticate?”
“None of your business.”
“Did you?”
“I’m getting a little tired of this,” said Caroline.
“So am I,” said Julian. They rode for a while, and then he said: “When are we going to have a kid?”
“I don’t know. When
are
we?” she said.
“No, seriously,
when
are we?”
“You know. The five years will be up soon.”
“The Five Year Plan,” he said slowly. “Well, maybe you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. Look at these kids, Jeanie and Chuck. Married less than two years, hardly more than a year, and Jeanie may have to have false teeth. Mind you, false teeth, and do you remember her teeth? She had the loveliest strong white teeth I ever saw—”
“Except yours.”
“Well, except mine. But hers were beautiful and just right. Smallish and nice and really sparkling. Mine are bigger, and they don’t sparkle.”
“They dazzle me,” he said. He snapped off the headlights. “We’ll use your sparkling teeth for headlights.”
“Put the lights on, you fool,” she said. “No kidding, it’s awful. She’s only twenty-one. Just twenty-one, and she’s absolutely a married woman. A married woman with a child. And—”
“And a husband. And what a husband.”
“Exactly!” said Caroline. “Chuck. That little twirp Jeanie. Why, he isn’t good enough to…”
“To what. Finish it.”
“No, I’m not fooling. Chuck running around with that girl from Kresge’s and the other day at bridge club Barbara Schultz spoke up and said, ‘Well, I think someone ought to defend poor Chuck.’ Poor Chuck! She said, ‘If Jeanie had taken the
trouble to keep herself attractive, Chuck wouldn’t chase after other girls.’ Golly it made me mad. She must have read that somewhere. I didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else, but you could see what everybody was thinking. Barbara’s such a fool for letting herself in for that. Why, she did everything but handcuff Chuck to make him marry her.”
“She did? I didn’t know that. I know they had dates, but I never thought—”
“No? Well, here’s something else you didn’t know. Mrs. Schultz was so sure Barbara was going to get Chuck that she made reservations for two for a trip around the world—”
“Well, she and old Stinker went around the world.”
“Yes, but Mother told me that she was in Mr. Schultz’s office when—”
“God damn it to hell!” said Julian. He stopped the car. “Crosslink broke. I might as well fix it now while I’m sober.” He got out of the car and fixed the link. They did not speak to each other during the five-minute wait. Cars drove by and one or two stopped, recognizing Julian and the car, asking if they could help, but he sent them on.
He started the car again. “Hyuh, baby,” he said. “What were we talking about? Had we finished with Chuck?”
“Mm.”
“What’s the mattah, honey sugah lamb pie, what’s the mattah you all?”
“Listen, Ju. Listen to me, will you?”
“Listen to you? Why, Mrs. English, one of the most attractive features of the Cadillac is the minimum of noise in the motor. Just let me show—”