Authors: James Jones
“So for fifteen hundred dollars extra, you get control of the business,” Dave said.
“Well, you said yourself you don’t know anything about business,” Frank said. “I do.”
“That’s true,” Dave said. “You’re right there. I guess.”
“On the other hand, you’d be gettin a little over two-fifths of the profits,” Frank said. He paused a second, “Eleven-twenty-fifths, to be exact. That’s more than a third. And you get none of the headaches.”
Dave nodded. “You mean you’d actually do all that for me? Just because I’m your brother? and I gave you the idea?”
“Well, no,” Frank said. “But I do need a partner. I don’t see why you shouldn’t profit by it.” Frank was beginning to feel high. And it wasn’t due to the liquor, either. Even if he was beginning to feel it a little.
“I don’t know,” Dave said. He shook his head. “You’re not just doin all that to get my money out of that bank?”
“Jesus Christ,” Frank said. “You think I’d throw away seven thousand dollars just to get your money out of the Second National Bank?”
“Well, no, but I could see where you might invest into a profitable thing like that, in order to do it. lt’d get you back whatever prestige you lost, and still make you a profit, too.”
“I ain’t lost any prestige,” Frank said. “Is that why you did it?”
“No,” Dave said. “I told you. It just happened to be the closest bank to the hotel.”
“Well,” Frank said, sipping his drink, “you’ll never find a better deal to invest that money in.”
“Well. I don’t know,” Dave said. “I don’t see how I can do it. I’ll need that money to get me back out to the Coast and to live on.”
“Then don’t go,” Frank said, crossing his legs. “Stay here.”
“Stay here! In this goddam town?”
“Well, sure,” Frank said. “Why not? Now just wait a minute, just hold your horses till I tell you what I been thinkin about.”
It was at moments such as these that he felt most alive he thought because he was seeing in his mind a deal like this and elaborating it, but not because during them he had developed his best money-making schemes, no. The thing itself was the thrill—
And if at other times like the unnerving scenes with Agnes and battles with Dawn and the times he thought Agnes had found out about Geneve Lowe or some other woman if then depression gripped him and fear ate at him these times like now made up for it and filled him back up again with the vitality and the enthusiasm—
Frank could see his life laid out straight ahead of him, happily married, a fine home and family, a prospering business, and unlimited prospects of success. Of ownership. Someday he’d own the whole damned town.
“Look here,” he said. “You stay here and run it. We pay you a livin wage out of the profits. You run the taxi stand and check the drivers in and out and handle the money. You live off your salary, and save all of your share of the profits.
“Hell, no young man startin out in business could ask for a better deal than that!” he said.
“What the hell,” Dave said. “I ain’t about to be startin out in business. And I ain’t about to be stayin in this damned hick town, either. Is that what you been workin it toward?”
“But why not?” Frank said.
“Because I never had to yet and I don’t want to now and I ain’t about to start. That’s why. I’m here for a week and then I’m takin my money out of that bank and I’m off for California. And you can get your lost prestige back some other way.”
“You think if I felt you’d lost me any prestige, I’d be tryin to make money for you?” Frank said.
“I don’t know,” Dave said. “You might. I never know what the hell you might do. What it amounts to is that I’d be your employee, isn’t it? That’d look good in the town. No thank you.”
“Not mine,” Frank said. “The firm’s. Of which you’ll be over two-fifths owner. And as such draw down over two-fifths of the firm’s profits. In addition to your salary. Eventually, you could quit the job part altogether.”
“In how many years?” Dave said with a grin that was almost a snarl. “Fifty? And in addition, you’d have me right here where you could keep me under your thumb, workin for you, and let everybody see how you handled Brother Dave. Huh!”
“Well, it would take you a while,” Frank said. “Naturally. I’ve been at it over twenty years myself and I’m not quite ready myself. But with you, I’d say in about five, if you really worked at it and put everything back into it. This town’s boomin, boy, and anybody who gets in on the ground floor of it now— There’s no limit to what the two of us together could do.”
“Yeah, with you as the boss, and me as the yesman.”
“No, as partners,” Frank said.
“And so what would I have then?” Dave said, grinning. “No thank you. I have no desire to be a bourgeois Middle Western businessman. And if I did, I’m sure not goin to run any monotonous crappy little taxi stand for five years to do it. No, sir. Not me.”
“You don’t expect to get anywhere in the world with that kind of an attitude, do you?” Frank said, sipping his drink. “You don’t expect to make a fortune without workin at least a little bit for it, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Dave said. “I don’t care. Maybe not. The point is, I just misunderstood you. Hell, I could have done all that years ago if I’d wanted to do that.” Suddenly, just thinking about it, about being caught like that, he wanted to get up and run out somewhere, anywhere. Only there wasn’t any place to run to. Or anyone.
“What’ll you do when you get back to Hollywood?” Frank said. “You haven’t written anything at all for six years, have you?”
“I don’t know!” Dave half yelled. “That doesn’t matter! That’s not what we’re talkin about!”
Behind them, the four-chimed doorbell rang, seeming to take an eternity to get through its rigmarole of notes.
“That’s the Frenches,” Frank said. “You think it over.”
“I don’t have to think it over,” Dave said. “I know my answer right now.”
Agnes came through from the kitchen, going to answer the door. She did not look at either of them, as if she sensed her discretion was important right now.
“Listen to me,” Frank said, and his voice was clear but when he stood up he swayed a little. “I’m not bullin you. There’s goin to be a lot of big things come up in this town in the next few years. You and me could get in on it, and with some hard work and careful investin we could the two of us take this town away from some of those snotty bastards like the Wernzes. And I for one aim to do it. And if you’re smart, you will, too.”
“And what’ll you have?” Dave said, “when you do it?”
“I’ll have respect, and friendship, and the love,” Frank said. “All the respect and friendship and the worship they always give the big boy, and that you and me never got in our whole lives because our old man ran off with the doctor’s wife. That’s what.”
“No, you won’t,” Dave said. “They’ll just hate you more and laugh at you more.” He got up, too.
“Oh yes, I will,” Frank said. “Because when you’re the man with the money and the success everybody bows down to you, see? Now I’ll go mix us all a little drink.”
“Just don’t count on me,” Dave said as Frank swayed off to mix the drinks. Behind him, he could hear the voices of them as they came through the living room, and he turned around to look them over feeling bullish and glowering and half-drunk and unhappy. How were you supposed to feel when you met somebody who wanted to dissect your private life for a book to explain why writers are writers?
He was sure Frank had been trying to put it over on him, he reflected. He was sure because Frank hadn’t gotten mad at a single thing he said.
They came through the door toward him, the three of them, Agnes leading and talking back over her shoulder in that party voice, then the woman smiling, and finally the man, and it was the man who caught and held his attention.
He was a tall man, spare and very straight and he had close-cropped snow white hair, and with it an unusually full, iron-gray mustache, which was incongruous with such a short haircut and yet on this man belonged there. He was probably sixty-eight. But most of all, it was the eager mobility of the features, the almost childishly bright expectancy of the eyes, that caught and held you, as if in a crowded room you suddenly saw him and for no reason were just glad that he existed. Dave remembered him from high school with a different picture, doing both sides of the Hamlet duel scene with the yardstick, and wondered suddenly at the self-centered ignorance of youth that does not see.
But then, that’s probably all that keeps the young alive.
The woman, when he finally thought of her and looked, was different and yet the same. Sort of as if she had been consciously compounded of a given number of salient ingredients both of him and of her mother, whom Dave remembered as a large rawboned woman. She was tall, too, but there was more weight of bone in her, less fragility, yet a long-thighed delicacy of muscle, too, high, wide square shoulders under the slender neck, with long hair—so long as to be unstylish—but looking good in it, and Dave saw the thing in her that the gambler ’Bama Dillert had commented so positively upon, a tension, a quietly held in restraint, and in the very deepest bottom of the eyes where she no doubt thought that it was hidden this look of sexual (or would you say spiritual) expectancy. Not beautiful. Not beautiful at all. Yet giving a strangely unlogical illusion of beauty in a boyishly female way that you knew was an illusion but couldn’t help feeling anyway.
Dave was immediately positive he was going to like both of them, and felt even more bullish and glowering because he hadn’t wanted to.
Agnes introduced them all to each other.
“Of course, of course,” Bob French said delightedly, clasping his hand, running those eyes eagerly back and forth over his face, an emotional blotter, getting impressions. Impressions that would be accurate, Dave thought. “I taught you your Shakespeare in high school. Not a very successful job of it though, I’m afraid.”
“You can’t get blood out of turnips,” Dave said. “Or pump it into them, either.”
“It’s sad,” Bob French said, “but it’s true. I might also say I’ve read all of your work, but I won’t. Although I have.”
Dave said nothing.
“How do you do?” Gwen French said. Her voice was low and very quiet, with a kind of quivering quality like a softly tapped drumhead stretched to the splitting point. She had much assurance. Self-contained. She hardly seemed to be looking at him at all, not out of shyness, out of assurance, but he knew she was carefully studying him.
For the book no doubt, Dave thought. Hirsh the goldfish.
“I understand you teach creative writing,” he said to her.
She smiled, the slightly belligerent dig not lost on her, and did not answer. There was no need to. Her father laughed delightedly.
“Maybe you would teach me,” Dave persisted. He knew it was bullish, but her father laughed again.
“She needs that,” he said. “Give her more.”
“I’m afraid my courses are all filled for the rest of the semester,” Gwen French said. “Maybe next year?”
“Manhattans?” Frank called in a clear voice from the buffet where he stood swaying very slightly.
The tableau broke up then and they all moved out into the dining room, Dave following the wide but boyish hips and long-boned thighs of Gwen French in the tailored suit.
“A manhattan will be fine, Frank,” she said in that voice. Self-contained. Assurance.
“Well, I want a martini,” Bob French said delightedly. “And don’t tell me you haven’t got the stuff.”
“You!” Frank said, grinning. “You would,” and bent down to the buffet door. “You’re too old to drink martinis, Bob, you know that.”
“Of course!” Bob French said. “That’s why I drink them! They give me a distinct illusion of youth.”
His daughter smiled at him tolerantly.
“It’s quite true, Guinevere,” he said. “Don’t grin.”
He was, Dave thought, the youngest one in the room.
He hoped dinner would sober him up a little.
T
HE
F
RENCHES DID NOT
actually live in Parkman at all, but in the little town of Israel five miles east on the banks of the river. When Robert Ball French retired from teaching two years before, he had astounded everyone by buying in Israel this big, old, square three-story mansion built during the last days of the river trade, and had proceeded to move himself and his daughter into it lock, stock, and barrel and live there. The house itself, as he described it for Dave at dinner, was down on the main street of the town the business street with its back to the river, set off from the two small blocks of businesses by a yard full of huge black oaks and sycamores. The “last retreat,” Bob French had called it jokingly, and having called it that to everyone for so long, finally named it that officially:
Last Retreat,
and had a sign with that name made of wrought iron and mounted it over the gate.
“Guinevere didn’t much like the idea at first,” he smiled. “Especially the name, she didn’t like the name.”
“I still don’t,” Gwen French said. “I think it’s mawkish sentimentality.”
“Well, you must allow an old man his little foibles, my dear,” Bob French said. “I think the name is very apropos, both for Israel and myself.”
Dave, whom the shrimp cocktail and chopped salad and now the deliciously rare steak he was still working on had sobered up considerably, watched them both affectionately. He remembered the town. Big, old trees, a single dusty weathering business street of one-story buildings, a number of big old Southern colonial houses left over from the riverboat days, and from the high bank back of the business street the river, the Wabash, curving away into the east. Bob French’s house would have that same view, situated as it was.
Even before Dave’s time the Parkman DARs had bought up the ancient courthouse left over from the old days when Israel was the county seat before it was moved to Parkman, and had converted it into a museum which almost no one ever bothered to visit. The Parkman DARs sort of claimed squatters’ rights on Israel. As the third or fourth oldest town in the state.
Apparently, now, it had become little more than a suburb of Parkman. Over half its people now drove the five miles into Parkman to work at Sternutol Chemical or the brassiere factory, shuttling their way in and out among the heavy diesels that never ceased spluttering through along Route 40. And even the rest of them who didn’t work there did most of their shopping there, even the farmers.