Authors: James Jones
It was half an hour later, after things had quieted down, and they had cleaned up and set the now very rickety table back up on its damaged legs, and Dave was sitting at it with a drink while the others made love, or talked, or drank—it was then that Wally Dennis came in, his face almost as black with rage as ’Bama’s had been earlier.
Dave had been sitting musing sadly over how ironic it would be if ’Bama did die: Then Doris Fredric could go down to his farm and buy produce anyway, and she would undoubtedly do it, too, and probably become his wife’s best friend after all. His widow’s, rather. Doris would see to that, by God. That was what he was musing about, and the sight of Wally surprised him. Wally had already had several drinks, and it turned out he had got them at the wedding reception: Dawn’s wedding reception. After proceeding to get himself eye-glazingly drunk, he told Dave about it. Doris had been at the wedding and reception, too. Dawn had married Jimmy Shotridge, Harry Shotridge’s boy, did Dave know him? Dave knew Harry Shotridge, by sight, but he did not know his son Jimmy; and he had not even known about the wedding, had not even had an invitation. But Wally had had one, and he had gone. But he had left early and gone on home because the drinks had made him mad and he was afraid of making a fool of himself. Doris, though, had still been there when he left. So she must have come straight here from there.
After he had said that, he shut up like a clam. He sat at the table with Dave and drank ferociously, looking at Dave occasionally with a black, sullen, angry look from the depths of which every so often sheer blind helpless panic would flash out.
And so, Dave thought drunkenly, still another ant had carried out still another grain of wheat.
Unable to say anything that might help him, Dave, in turn, told Wally about the scene with Doris Fredric while Wally stared at him and nodded his head and heard nothing. Once Rosalie Sansome came out into the kitchen to discover her boyfriend there, and Wally insulted her savagely, and she left in a huff. As seemed to be his only role anymore, Dave merely sat and said nothing. Gradually, all the others left, too, and finally Dave, too, left him there, still drinking, and drunkenly took his old plug, Ginnie Moorehead, upstairs to bed.
Well, so Dawnie had got married. And he hadn’t even known a thing about it. But of course they didn’t run in the same circles anymore, he and Frank. And it was obviously Frank’s doing, this marriage—Frank’s and Agnes’s both—and also that he had not received an invitation. Dawnie—he was quite sure—Dawnie would have sent him one.
I
T WAS QUITE TRUE
that it was Frank’s and Agnes’s doing that Dave did not receive an invitation, but it was not true that the marriage was their doing. The marriage, and for that matter most of the wedding, were all Dawn’s doing.
It was her campaign, she had planned it, and she herself had executed it, swiftly, and admirably. When she came home from school the last weekend in March and informed her parents that she and Shotridge were going to be married Easter Day, her parents were as surprised as Shotridge’s parents. At first, they were all against it: Agnes tearfully thought she was too young; and Frank wanted her to wait—once his bypass deal was through she could have her pick of any of the eligible wealthy young men in the Middle West, he said. But Dawn, after having conducted the triumphant major campaign she had just executed, was not about to be outmaneuvered by either one of them, good generals as they both were. She left school Friday afternoon, and arrived home early Saturday; by Sunday morning, both of them had given in. They both had always liked Shotridge anyway, better than Wally Dennis; and once the battle was decided, Frank said that, by God, they were going to have the best damned wedding Parkman had ever seen. Having won the war on both fronts, as it were, Dawn turned over to her mother the handling of the victory and went on back to school, after making only one stipulation: She wanted to be sure that her old pal Wally Dennis was invited. She told Agnes what kind of clothes she intended to wear, who her bridesmaids and the maid of honor would be, and left the rest of it up to her. As that was Sunday March the twenty-seventh, Agnes had exactly twenty-one days to get everything done; because she was going to do it Easter Sunday when she and Shotridge were both home for Easter vacation. Agnes, who wanted her to wait till June, bowed before this new tactical genius in her daughter. While the menfolks, Frank and seven-year-old Walter (whom Dawnie had met only for the first time this very weekend), relegated themselves to the kitchen, the two women sat down in the living room at Agnes’s secretary and worked it out for Easter. Once again, that new forcefulness, which Dawn had only so recently found, had triumphed.
She supposed, really, it was only the quality of growing up—of getting over a lot of childish romantic ideas you had as a kid—of, at last, realizing that as an adult you had responsibilities to the adult world you were going to live in. Once you came to face that, the forcefulness just naturally came to you. And she had put it to its first real acid test Christmas vacation, those few times she had seen him. Actually, of course, it had first come to her back early last fall, when she had stood on the porch and watched him drive away. But it had been such a totally new feeling, then, that she had not known what it was. At first, she had thought it was just the result of anger and fright. But then, as it had grown in her steadily up to Christmas vacation, when he had been writing all those letters—gradually cooler and cooler—and she could see for the first time into the depths of him—then she began to see what that new feeling of forcefulness really signified in her. But she was not willing to accept it blindly, even then. Objectively, coolly, she determined to put it to a real test at Christmas when she saw him again. The result was that it not only reenforced her opinions, it doubly reenforced her faith in both the strength—and the efficacy—of her new forcefulness.
When they had sat in his kitchen, that last time, and had talked for so very long, she had realized at last what a really un-grown-up person he was. He was a perpetual adolescent who had just refused to mature. A sex-crazy adolescent. And, vain, jealous, never thinking of anyone but himself, he remained just exactly that: a sex-crazed child. And when she hadn’t wanted to keep on talking sex with him forever, the only thing he could think of was that she had another man. So she had just let him think it.
Actually, her first semester in Cleveland had been the most terrifying experience in her life. The school itself was all right, and she had made straight As. But the people she had fallen in with in her acting workshop outside the school frightened her. And the young actor (whom she had let
him
think she was going out with) had turned out to be almost as equally susceptible to the charms of men as he was to those of women. She had only had half a dozen dates with him before she lost him to another man. Dawn had only slept with him twice, and so she did not think of that as a love affair, she did not think of it as anything. But she had not bargained for that kind of a life when she started out intending to be a great actress. Those were not the kind of people she had intended spending the rest of her life among. And in addition, they were all so snide, so
highly
“sophisticated,” so very
very
“chi-chi,” that the few very small roles she did get though insignificant were nevertheless very volubly criticized by all of them in their snide way. You could only take just so much of that, either.
All that, coupled to what she found out for sure when she came home Christmas, was what decided her. And once she had made up her mind, she sat down and carefully thought out her campaign, and put it into action immediately.
Dawn had only seen Shotridge a few times, just to speak to, since the previous Christmas when she had run onto him out at the Country Club. Several times after that, during the rest of her senior year, he had driven down from Champaign to see her in drama club productions, and after one of these she had gone out to the Country Club with him for a few drinks. But after school was over and graduation, she had been spending so much time with
him
all that summer, so very many dates they had had, that she had hardly even seen Shotridge at all. Of course, he had seen them, around, and they had seen him. But after all it was only the kind of
normal
dating that all high school kids do; some girls “went with” the same boy for two or three years in high school, before they finally matured into real women. Some of them even pinned or ringed each other. She had never been pinned or ringed.
She knew, of course, where to find him. He would be out at the Country Club every evening he was home. And the next night after being down in
his
kitchen, she had got Frank and Agnes to take her. All she had to do was take some money in to the slot machines and after a while he appeared, at her elbow, breathing in that heavy way and exuding that despicable cologne. She had been very careful to act disdainful—an acting job never too hard to get into, with Shotridge; and before the evening was over they were dancing with the rest of the college kids home on vacation, and when she had finally allowed herself to loosen up a little and even laugh a little with him, poor old Shotridge had looked supremely happy. The next day was New Year’s Eve day, and they had spent the whole afternoon and evening together, with a date for dinner at the Club, and during the afternoon after the matinee she had seen Wally Dennis walking uptown: It was strange. She had hardly recognized him. Her old childhood pal had grown up to be almost a total stranger to her.
They had spent the next two days together, she and Shotridge, and before both she and Shotridge left to go back to school, she had invited him to visit her at Cleveland to see one of the productions she would be appearing in. That would be in mid-January, right after exams, and he could drive to Chicago, she thought, from Champaign and fly to Cleveland and she was to meet him at the limousine service terminal. That was what he decided to do: By taking the late-afternoon flight, he could be in Cleveland in time for dinner Friday evening. Dawn had never realized what a really forceful individual Shotridge was; she had always known Shotridge was sweet, but underneath that surface shyness was a really forceful personality she had never known about.That first time, they had had a quick dinner, and then had taken a taxi over to the workshop theater where she was appearing, and after the show had ridden back downtown and walked to the Hollenden where Shotridge was staying, for a drink, before she took the Euclid Avenue bus back to her sorority. The next two days, Shotridge rented a U-Drive and they drove the Memorial Shoreway along the lake and walked for a while in the cold air beside the lagoon, and Saturday night took in the show at the playhouse. Late Sunday Shotridge took the late evening flight back to Chicago in order to drive back down to Champaign in time for Monday classes. It was a truly lovely weekend, Dawn thought.
And so began a series of similar weekends that lasted for the better part of three months. In February and March, there was scarcely a single weekend that Shotridge did not fly to Cleveland to see her. Shotridge’s father had increased his allowance; and he gallantly spent money on her like a millionaire. Only rarely did he run so short that she would have to give him money from her own allowance from Frank, and they saw a side of Cleveland Dawn had never seen before. It was a gay, money-spending, safe way to live, entirely different from the somehow frightened, penny-pinching way she had lived last semester. And if Shotridge, after taking five whole weeks to screw his courage up to it finally, tried to put his hand on her when they were parked at a viewing point looking out over the lake, or at some other place, she let him when he kissed her. She did not, however, let him do any more than that. And when two weeks later, after finally getting up his nerve enough to ask her up to his room for a last drink, she went. But she was careful to do no more than that.
It was a cold, desperate, frightened game she played, as laughing gaily she went everywhere with him. Not so much a race against time as a race to find, and keep, perfect timing. And she worked at it coolly and carefully; she had to. Most of the time, she was completely, even desperately (he was really
very
sweet) in love with Shotridge; and loneliness and an odd vague fright drew her to him for comfort. But then, at other times, as if someone had run a stream of water down over the front of the movie camera, the picture would waver and then clear, and she would be looking at a totally different picture: She had learned a lot about men from
him.
The main thing was that she had given
It
up too easily, and too painlessly. She had done that simply because that was the way it had been, not knowing any better. And, of course,
he
was not as malleable as Shotridge. Some women it was really painful for, apparently; so apparently she was just lucky. One last point was that she should
never
have let on that she liked it, even though she did. Then the movie screen would shimmer again in front of her eyes, and she would be looking at the first picture again. Horrible loneliness for Shotridge would assail her. If it was the middle of the week, she would miss Shotridge so damned much that she would go out alone after her last class and go to movies just to take her mind off how much she loved and missed him.
She was prepared. The next weekend after she had been up to his room for the nightcap, he asked her up again, on Friday night, and again she went. That was the third weekend in March. And this time, she allowed herself to be talked into having a second drink, and then a third. Everything seemed to be right. At least, she thought it was. The funny thing was she wasn’t drunk at all, or even half drunk. She believed she could have drunk a whole
bottle
of whiskey, without feeling it at all. When Shotridge fumblingly unbuttoned a middle button of her blouse, she only protested feebly, and made her voice sound a little breathless.