Authors: James Jones
With all of this running haphazardly through her mind, Gwen laid down the paper she was reading without finishing it and slammed a B- on it and got up and went to answer the door.
She had no idea who it could be. Everybody who came to the
Last Retreat
in Israel used the side door on the cellar stair landing exclusively, just as she and Bob did, but none of them ever knocked. They just came on in.
She went down the steps and opened the door and saw a dumpy young woman with dull eyes and several chins in a new-looking winter coat, which nevertheless had already begun to show its wearer’s personal sloppiness. Behind her on the drive stood a battered weather-beaten black Ford coupe that Gwen did not recognize.
“Yes?” she said. “What is it?”
“Are you Miss French?” the dumpy girl said in a voice that matched her dull eyes. She could have been twenty, or forty. “Gwen French? The English teacher out the college?”
“Yes?”
The dumpy girl looked her up and down. “I thought you was. You’re awful purty,” she said.
“Well, thank you,” Gwen said; “but—”
“My name’s Ginnie Moorehead,” the dumpy girl interposed, “you probly don’t know me. But I know you. Least I know about you. I wanted to talk to you.”
Gwen looked her over again. So this was—to quote Shardine—“the biggest whore in Parkman;” the same who had sent Shardine running stiff-backed out of the house on Lincoln Street, simply by her presence. There was about her, in addition to her natural lumpishness and naturally dull eyes, the sort of held-in quality of a distrustful and watchful animal. And over and above, this quality, faintly, there was also something else: a sort of irascible, nervous hawklike quality which showed in a tiny brilliant pinpoint in the very deepest bottom of the dull eyes. Well, if this was “the biggest whore in Parkman,” it certainly did not speak very highly of the taste of the men, Gwen thought harshly, and immediately put this typically feminine reaction down.
“Well, won’t you come on in, Miss Moorehead?” she said pleasantly, and stepped back. The girl went ahead of her up the steps and into the kitchen without a word. Gwen followed, suddenly feeling sorry for the poor drab thing.
“My! this sure is a purty place!” Ginnie Moorehead said.
“Thank you.”
“But can we talk private here?” the girl said, looking about.
“Surely. There’s no one here but me. Come on over here and sit down,” Gwen said smiling at her, and led the way to the big table. The girl sat down without taking off her coat. “Will you let me take your coat?”
“No,” Ginnie Moorehead said. She rolled her eyes around at Gwen nervously.
Gwen smiled. “Well? What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Miss French,” Ginnie Moorehead said, trying—apparently—to achieve Gwen’s formal tone of address, but succeeding only in sounding like a child addressing a teacher: “Miss French, are you goin to marry Dave Hirsh?”
“Am I what!?” Gwen said sharply, stiffening.
“Are you and Dave Hirsh goin to get married,” she repeated, looking at Gwen dully, but steadily.
“Certainly not!” Gwen said stiffly. “Whatever gave you such an idea!”
Ginnie Moorehead put a forlorn expression on her face. “I just thought it. You see, he’s in love with you.”
“I think you must be mistaken,” Gwen said. “However, if he and I were getting married—which, I can assure you, we are not—I don’t think it would be any of your business, would it? Why do you ask?”
“Well, it is sort of my business in a way, Miss French,” Ginnie Moorehead said. “You see, Dave’s been sleepin with me for over a year. Ever since almost the first when he came to this town.” She looked at Gwen mournfully. “Course that was before he met you, I guess. I knew him real well, back then. He wanted to marry me, then. Before he met you.” She smiled sadly.
Gwen stared at her, torn between this invasion of her privacy which made her stiff, and a strong sense of revulsion at finding herself—in essence, at least—placed in the same category as this creature. And, over both, a sense of shame at her own snobbery for thinking of Ginnie as “a creature” like she did.
“I know I don’t look like much,” the girl said, as if reading her mind; “and I ain’t got a good reputation, especially like a fine lady like you. But he never use to let that bother him none before. When he use to hold me. And tell me all the things we’d do, someday, when he got his book done. When he use to kiss me and make love to me.”
“Really, Miss Moorehead!” Gwen protested.
“Oh, I know,” Ginnie Moorehead said. “I know. But now he’s comin over here so much the time, I don’t hardly never see him. After he’s been over here, he don’t want to touch me nor even want me around. So it ain’t too hard to see. Oh, I know,” she said again, “I know I ain’t no fine lady like you. But I’m a human bein, too. I got some rights, too. I know I don’t stand a chance with you. But don’t forget, he use to love
me,
too; before he met you. He use to hold
me
in his arms; and whisper things to
me;
and make passionate love to
me,
too.”
“You certainly do have rights,” Gwen said abruptly; “you certainly do have. Miss Moorehead, you don’t need to—”
“Why don’t you just call me Ginnie?” the girl said.
“What?”
“Well, we’re sort of friends, or acquaintances, you know.”
“Oh,” Gwen said. “Yes. Well. Well, what I was about to say, Ginnie, was that you don’t need to catalog all of your intimacies with Dave for me. I perfectly understand your position.”
“Don’t take him away from me, Miss French!” Ginnie Moorehead cried out. “He’s all I got!”
“I’m not going to try to take him away from you,” Gwen said. “Please don’t cry.”
“I’ll try not to, Gwen,” Ginnie said, peering at her over the handkerchief pressed against her mouth.
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Gwen said, “is that—whatever you may have thought, or whatever Dave himself may have told you, or inadvertently caused you to think, there is absolutely nothing between myself and Dave, and never has been. Consequently, I’m not your rival at all. You’ve made a mistake.”
“You got lots of other men!” the girl cried out again. “Don’t take
him
!”
Gwen could not think of anything else at the moment except getting her out of the house. Away. Anywhere. Besides, what if Bob should come home and find her here? and thus find out the whole farcical wretched story?
That
must never happen; she got up and went over to her and put one arm around her tenderly, and with the other raised her to her feet. Ginnie Moorehead was dully sniffling, with her head down.
“Now you must go on home, and don’t worry,” Gwen said. “Everything will be all right. You have no competition to fear from me, believe me. Dave and I have never been lovers, and are not about to be. I have only helped him with his writing some, that’s all. You’ve made a mistake.”
“I was so scared, Miss French,” Ginnie Moorehead said, looking at her carefully. Apparently, she was not yet entirely convinced.
“Well, there was no need to be,” Gwen said. “Now you just go on home and don’t worry. I was just getting ready to leave when you came, and I have to go out.”
“All right, Miss French,” Ginnie Moorehead said; but she still made no move to go. She continued to stare at Gwen, her dull face a twisted mask of forlornness—a sufficient disguise in itself to hide those target-round hawk-predator’s eyes and the quivering hungry eyebrows. And there was that set stolidness about her, which told emphatically that if she did not want to move there was nothing in God’s world that was going to move her. Oh, God! if Bob came in!
“If there ever had been any possibility of anything between Dave and me,” Gwen said, searching desperately, “which there never was, it would be gone now after what you’ve told me.”
Apparently, that was what Ginnie Moorehead wanted to hear, because without her even moving, the stolidness in her relaxed and she allowed herself to be led. “Come on, now,” Gwen said gently. “Don’t be unhappy anymore.” She walked with her down to the stairs at the other end of the kitchen, one arm still around her broad thick back, the other hand grasping her arm. It was sickening. It was physically sickening. There, at the stairs, she released her and took her other arm from around her shoulders, the skin of both of them burning dully within her, and watched her go on down to the landing.
“He’s a very fine man in a lot of ways,” Gwen forced herself to say, “as most men go. And he has a chance to be a very rich and very famous writer someday, if he is handled properly. Don’t forget that.”
At the last sentence, Ginnie Moorehead had stopped dead, one hand still on the knob.
“You ain’t goin to quit helpin him now, are you, Miss French?” she said.
“No. Of course not,” Gwen said. “There’s no reason why I should.”
“Thank you,” Ginnie Moorehead said. “Thank you so awful much, Miss French. For everthing. You’ve done set my heart at ease,” she said before she closed the door. “I really do got to go. I got to get my girlfriend’s car back. I borryed it to come over here.”
“Goodby,” Gwen said. As the door closed, she turned back to the kitchen—the same kitchen, it was; the same kitchen he had stood in so many times, and drunk in, and worked with her in, and laughed in with that bull-throated laugh; she had walked with him down the length of it to the door, too, and had stood at the head of the stairs looking down at him on the landing, as she had done now; the first time he had ever been here she had done that, him so drunk he could hardly stagger, and he had wound up going to sleep in a cornfield; the same kitchen, it was—and she stood looking at it frantically because it was not the same kitchen. It was not the same kitchen and nothing in it was the same. All the familiar things looked suddenly strange and new and different. And it never would be the same kitchen again, to her. Not now. She had an almost irresistible impulse to call up Shardine right now and start her to scrubbing; she herself would help her and they would scrub it all from top to bottom. She had the same feeling about her two arms, which still burned dully at her sides; she wanted to scrub them the same way, till the very hide of them rolled up like dirt. Convulsively, Gwen raised both her arms and rubbed them hard. But it was not enough and she dug her fingernails into them painfully. Well; well; well, at least, Bob didn’t come home and find out all about it. That was something, she thought, sickening at the very thought of it.
Almost dazedly, she inspected her forearms and the red-purple crescent marks of her fingernails in them. Childish. Yes. Childish. But what she wanted to do was tear them out by the sockets and throw them away on some trash heap somewhere. It was easy to know why Cranmer had thrust his own hand down into the fire at the stake. In crisis, she had not acted properly, either. She had not acted like the Gwen French she liked to think she was should have acted. She had lied, and had acted, and had been wishy-washy. She had been “genteel.” God! and she had put her arms around her—around that thing! God! Dropping her arms, she went back down to the table where the theme papers still lay and sat down staring blankly at the red pencil B– she had made just before answering the door.
Dully, she picked it up and put it on the graded pile and picked up the red pencil. Mechanically, she noted the name of the student on the next one and read the first paragraph and marked the paper C and put it with the others. Methodically and swiftly, wanting only to get done, she went on through the others the same way. For the first five, she read the first paragraph before she graded them, but after that she only read the student’s name. She had only to glance at the student’s name and she could tell automatically what grade he or she would in fact earn, if she read the whole theme through. She did not give any A’s. She gave three or four A–’s to students who invariably got A’s or A–’s, and with a kind of malicious pleasure she docked each paper one grade below what she knew in her mind it should have had. The little sons of bitches. They would all look at their papers tomorrow and say to each other that Miss French must have had a rough evening last night. Well, let them. Miss French had. But at least Bob had not come home.
When she finished them, she slid them into her briefcase and zipped it shut and laid it down on the end of the table where she always kept it. That done, she sat down again, not knowing what to do next. Her mind no longer mechanically in use, the sheer stomach-turning physical sickness of it all began to rise up again, dizzying, choking. She fought to keep from retching as it filled her nose and mouth. God! O God! Well, at least, the constant refrain ran through her mind again; at least, Bob had not come home and found out all about it.
So that was what they were like!? What
all
men were like apparently— Anything— No matter how horrible. Just any old thing, as long as it was female, and walked on two legs.
And her—with all those foolish romantic dreams—thinking all the time he was giving something
up
for
her—
was deliberately holding himself back to help
her—
was adjusting himself to her fears and foibles, patiently, lovingly, until she could find her own way clear with
him—
and all the time he was actually sleeping with that—that— She could find no word sick enough. An animal. A female animal. No mind, no brains. Why, she probably couldn’t even read the
words
in his novel, least of all
help
him with them! God! It sickened her.
Unable to sit still, wishing now that Bob would come home, she got up and walked across to the small mirror on the kitchen wall. All around the big room, wherever she had looked, she had seen a dozen Dave Hirshes, like some montage: all the thousand and one positions and attitudes and actions she had seen him make or take since he had first come here to this room. She had seen and heard them all. Now she looked at herself in the mirror, as if desperately seeking the one point left of solid ground: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the
dumbest
of us all?
Gwen French, the old maid,
Miss
Gwen French, Miss
Guinevere
French, the dried-up virgin old maid.