At the same time she was worried and angry with herself. There was something wrong and incomplete in her relations with all the men she had liked best and loved. They were
wrong, and circumstances were wrong; Jerome Walker had been too decent because she was too young; Joe Montgomery was the man she had loved most in her life, but because of an engagement with other people, she had not seen him on the night before she sailed; Ross Campbell, who was not a great love but certainly was the right man for her to marry, had turned into nothing, right before her eyes. And there weren’t any other men; led by Julian English there were a lot of men whom she had kissed or necked with, whom she disliked in retrospect with what approached a passion. Altogether she was contemptuous of the men she had known, no matter how tenderly she remembered minutes in automobiles, motorboats, trains, steamships; on divans or a few times on beds at house parties; on the porches of country clubs, in her own home. But she thought with anger that there was nothing of her that the race of men had not known—except that no one man ever had known her completely. Up to now the passion she had generated would have been enough to—she never finished that. She made up her mind to one thing: if she wasn’t married by the time she was thirty, she was going to pick out some man and say, “Look here, I want to have a child,” and go to France or some place and have the child. She knew she never
would
do that, but one part of her threatened another part of her with it.
Then, in the spring of 1926, she fell in love with Julian English, and she knew she never had loved anyone else. It was funny. Why, it was the funniest thing in the world. Here he was, taking her out, kissing her good night, ignoring her, seeing a lot of her and then not seeing her at all, going together to dancing school, kindergarten, Miss Holton’s School—she’d known him all her life, had hidden his bicycle up a tree, wet her pants at one of his birthday parties, been bathed in the same tub with him by two older girls who now had children of their own. He had taken her to her first Assembly, he had put clay on her leg when a yellow-jacket stung her, he had given her a bloody nose—and so on. For her there never had been anyone else. No one else counted. She was a little afraid that he still loved the Polish girl a little, but she was sure he loved Caroline the most.
They dodged being in love at first, and because they always had been friends, his seeing her increasingly more frequently did not become perceptible until he asked her to go with him to the July 3 Assembly. You asked a girl at least a month in advance for the Assemblies, and you asked the girl you liked best. It was the only one he ever freely had asked her to; she knew his mother told him to ask her to the very first one. The Assembly was not just another dance, and in the time between her accepting and the night of the dance they both were conscious of it. A girl gave preference in dates to the man who was taking her to the Assembly. “You’re my girl now,” he would say. “Or at least till after the Assembly.” Or she would call him up and say: “Do you want to drive to Philadelphia with Mother and me? You’re my beau now, so I thought I’d ask you first, but don’t say yes unless you really want to.” When he would kiss her she could tell he was trying to find out how much she knew. The long kisses in the beginning were like that; no overwhelming passion, but lazy and full of curiosity. They would halt in a long kiss and she would draw back her head and smile at him and he at her, and then without speaking he would put his mouth to hers again. He left it at kissing until one night when he brought her home from the movies and she went upstairs for a minute and saw that her mother was sound asleep. He was in the lavatory on the first floor and he heard her come down the back steps and try the kitchen door. They went to the library. “Do you want a glass of milk?” she said.
“No. Is that why you went to the kitchen?”
“I wanted to see if the maids were in.”
“Are they?”
“Yes. The back door’s locked.” She put up her arms and he came in to them. He lay with his head on her shoulder for a few minutes and then she reached up and pulled the cord of the floor lamp, and moved in on the davenport so that he could lie beside her. He rolled up her sweater, up to her armpits, and unhooked her brassiere, and she unbuttoned his vest and he dropped it and his coat on the floor.
“Don’t—don’t go the limit, will you, sweetheart?” she said.
“Don’t you want to?” he said.
“More than anything in the world, my darling love. But I can’t. I never have. I will for you, but not here. Not—you know. I want to in bed, when everything is right for it.”
“You never have?”
“Not all the way. Don’t let’s talk about it. I love you and I want you all the way, but I’m afraid to here.”
“All right.”
“Do that. Ah, Ju. Why are you so nice to me? No one else could be so darling to me. Why are you?”
“Because I love you. I always loved you.”
“Oh, love! Sweetheart?”
“What, darling?”
“I can’t help it. Have you got a thing? You know?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it’d be all right? I’m so afraid, but it’s just as wrong to stop, isn’t it? Isn’t it just as wrong to stop?”
“Yes, darling.”
“I’m so crazy about…”
There were Lute and Irma Fliegler, Willard and Bertha Doane, Walter and Helen Schaeffer, Harvey and Emily Ziegenfuss, Dutch (Ralph) and Frannie Snyder, Vic and Monica Smith, and Dewey and Lois Hartenstein. From where he sat, at the side and to the rear of the orchestra, practically in the drummer’s lap, Al Grecco could see them all. He knew all the men by sight, and Lute Fliegler and Dutch Snyder he knew by their first names, and the others he knew to say hello to without his using any name on them and without their calling him Al or Grecco or anything but Hyuh. He knew Irma Fliegler to speak to; he called her Mrs. Fliegler. He knew Frannie Snyder to speak to; he could have called her Frannie or Baby or practically anything that came into his mind, but he never said more than hello, with a distant nod, to her. What the hell; she was married, even if that was no bargain she was married to that Dutch, and for all Al knew she had been straight as a dye (Al sometimes wondered how straight straight as a dye was; a dye wasn’t straight) for close on to two years. So there was no sense speaking to her. That loud-mouthed punk she was married to, if he saw her speaking to Al Grecco there was no telling what he would think. And do. And anyhow, you couldn’t judge a baby by just one night two years ago. Maybe that had been the only time she ever cheated on that loud-mouth, and you couldn’t hold that against her. She had been the easiest job of work Al ever had, or one of the easiest. He had known her in sisters’ school and then as they grew up he hadn’t seen much of her around town; just see her on the street now and then, and she’d say “Hello, Tony Murascho,” and he’d say “Hello, Frances.” And he read in the
paper where she got married to Dutch Snyder and he felt sorry for her, because he knew what Dutch was: a loud-mouth Kluxer, who was always getting his face pushed in for making cracks about the Catholic church, but was always trying to get dates with Catholic girls—and getting them. When Al read about the marriage he figured Frances had got herself knocked up, but he was wrong: what had happened was that Frances’s father, Big Ed Curry, the cop, had caught his daughter and Snyder in an awkward position and had given Snyder the choice of marriage or death. Al did not know this. He did know that it wasn’t long after the marriage before Dutch, who was known as Ralphie to some of the girls at the Dew Drop Inn, was around the Dew Drop again, a sucker for cigarette money and one of the most unpopular customers of the institution. So one afternoon, two years before the night at the Stage Coach, Al was driving through Collieryville and he saw Frances waiting for a bus and he stopped the car. “You want a ride?” he said.
“No—oh, it’s you, Tony,” she said. “Are you going back to town?”
“Nothing else but,” said Al. “Get in.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
“Okay. No skin off my ass,” he said, and reached for the door to close it.
“Oh, I don’t mean—I’ll go with you. Only, will you leave me off somewhere—”
“Get in and do the talking on the way,” he said.
She got in and he gave her a cigarette. She had been to her grandmother’s in Collieryville and she wanted a cigarette and accepted a drink and was easily persuaded to go for a short ride. The short ride was short enough: half a mile off the main road between Gibbsville and Collieryville to a boathouse on the Colliery Dam. There was something queer about the whole thing, like going with your cousin or somebody. He had known Frances as a little girl in school, and then all of a sudden one day you discover that she is a woman that has had her experience and all that—it was queer. It was like finding money on the street; you didn’t have to earn it, work for it, go on the make for it. And she must have felt the same way, because if there was ever an easy
lay she was it—that day. But she said on the way home: “If you ever tell anybody this I’ll kill you. I mean it.” And you could see she did. And she refused to see him again and told him never to call her up or try to see her. She was a little sorry, what she had done, but he could not be sure that even that was not putting on an act. He often thought of it. He thought of it now, watching her watching Dutch dancing with Emily Ziegenfuss, with his leg rammed in between the Ziegenfuss woman’s legs and trying to make out as if he was just dancing like anyone else. The son of a bitch. Frannie was all right. Al liked Frannie. But that Dutch—he’d like to paste him one. That was the trouble: women (he did not call them women, or girls, but another name which he used for all female persons except nuns) nearly always got the dirty end of the stick. Only once in a while they got a right guy, like Fliegler, for instance.
Then he began to feel a little angry at Irma Fliegler. He wondered whether she appreciated what a right guy she was married to. Probably not. She probably just took him for granted. That was the other side of it: a woman married a louse that beat her and cheated on her, and she got so she took that for granted; and another woman married a real guy, a square shooter from the word go, and she didn’t see anything unusual about that. Al almost but not quite reached the opinion that all women are so used to getting the dirty end of the stick that they took it for granted when they did get it, and took for granted they were going to get it when they didn’t. The hell with them. He wanted to forget about them.
But that was not possible here, at the Stage Coach. It was a woman’s place. All dance places, night clubs, road houses, stores, churches, and even whorehouses—all were women’s places. And probably the worst kind of woman’s place was a place like this, where men put on monkey suits and cut their necks with stiff collars and got drunk without the simple fun of getting drunk but with the presence of women to louse things up. Wherever there was an orchestra there were women, you could always be sure of that. Women singing the first words of songs: I got rhythm, Three little words, You’re driving me crazy, Thinking of you dear, My heart is sad and lonely for you
I pine for you dear only I’d gladly surrender. “Surrender my ass!” said Al Grecco, and looked across his table at Helene Holman, whom he hated now a thousand times worse than he ever had hated anyone in his whole life. All evening long he had been hating. In the early part of the evening he had hated the job Ed Charney had given him, the job of keeping tabs on Helene. She knew what he was there for all right, and she took it out on him, she took it out on him that Ed was staying home with his kid. And wife. She was the only person he could think of who had open contempt for him, and tonight it was worse than ever. “This is a swell way for you to be spending Christmas,” she said. And went on from there; why didn’t he get himself fixed up? What kind of a life did he lead? Was he nothing but a yes-man? Was he a unique? Did he know what a unique was? A unique, she told him, was a morphadite…. And he had had to take it for a couple of hours, getting no rest from her except when she would get up to sing a song. But then along about ten or eleven she began to lose her spunk. She got a little tired of panning him and she took a different attitude.
She was wearing a dress that was cut in front so he could all but see her belly-button, but the material, the satin or whatever it was, it held close to her body so that when she stood up she only showed about a third of each breast. But when she was sitting down across the table from him she leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and that loosened the dress so that whenever she made a move he could see the nipples of her breasts. She saw him looking—he couldn’t help looking. And she smiled.
“You wouldn’t want to get your teeth knocked down your throat, would you?” he said.
“And by who, may I ask?” she said.
“You wouldn’t want them nice molars all smashed, would you?”
“Aw-haw. Big talk. Little Allie is sore because—”
“Never mind about little Allie, baby. I’m telling you something for your own good. A word to the wise is sufficient.”
“I’m shaking all over,” she said.
He suddenly did not desire her, but he weakened in another
way. “Cut it out, will you? I’m not here because I want the job. You ought to know that by now.”
Her eyes stabbed at him. “All right, then, scram. Get outa here and leave me have some fun. My God.”
“Sure. Scram. Are you off your nut? Where would I go? I’d have to go plenty far if I went outa here before I get my orders. Plenty. I wouldn’t even get outa here. Wuddia think that French bastard would be doing when I left? Dya think he’d leave me go? He
would
not.”
“Oh, no?” said Helene.
That was interesting. It sounded as though the Fox had been making passes at Helene, which Al had suspected for a long time. But he didn’t care about that now. All he cared about now was for Helene to behave herself so he wouldn’t get in a jam with Ed. “I got my orders,” he said, “and I’m staying here whether I like it or not or whether you like it or not.”
“So I see,” she said.