Ernie hadn’t had time to think about it until everythink was all over, and then he had started to shake but he felt pretty good about it too.
When it was really all over, he had been scared as anythink, and sick to his stomach going home on the bus, when he thought about the gun, how little and blue it was, and how it could of ripped right through his insides. Thinking about his insides was what had made him sick to his stomach.
For a day or so Ernie and the little kid had been almost as celebrated as Michel Jeremy, or Julie Templar herself. On-the-spot news services had taken blinding fiash-fotos of Ernie in his white coat looking at the gun, beink presented with a
new C-note by the Chamber of Commerce, makink like he was goink to throw the coffeepot. His tips reached, now, fantastic heights: even Miss Libya Hall sensed that he had done some think remarkable.
Ernie enjoyed being a hero, but it embarrassed him too. He blushed a lot and he press-pired somethink awful when they was takink the pictures, but his greatest satisfaction was in thinkin’ how well he had took care of the little kid. It seemed to him then that
The Man Upstairs Himself
knew what Ernie Prosser had done and, affably, approved it.
Servants’ Quarters
Furman, the Social Hostess, was very attractive and, when she remembered, she was from the deep, deep South. Furman wasn’t pretty. She had given up all
that
sort of thing simply ages ago. As it was now, the only time that Furman was at all pretty was after she had taken a hot bath. It was too, too dowdy and tiresome, of course.
Only Furman’s hazel eyes were the same once she had finished dressing. Her rosy flushes were subdued then under layers of pancake, wet ringlets curled into a sinuous pattern at her nape, her mouth was a flaring, scarlet curl of disdain.
When Furman was ready to go out, her hips shrank to inconsiderable proportions, her small breasts jutted bravely forward, and her soft, little old drawl became monumental. She was no longer pretty, but she was utterly, utterly smart. Furman admitted to twenty-six, and, for almost the first time in her life, she was in earnest. She had decided to get married.
Furman hadn’t thought much about who it would be; she had thought more about not getting up in the morning and a hot, comfortable dinner every night. Of course, she hoped he would be
too, too
attractive, but Furman was tired of working, tired of knocking around, and just thinking about getting married had made her feel so positively virginal that
before she left Cleveland, she had been measured for a new diaphragm. It was a sentimental gesture. There were times when Furman supposed that she was just plain old-fashioned. When Furman was not yet Furman (Furman’s name had been Peggy Donovan then) her mother had started going out alone and acting sort of funny and excited, and one night, she hadn’t come home at all. Her father was in Oklahoma then, he was almost always in Oklahoma, but old Emma had stayed on with Peggy until Aunt Di arrived. Aunt Di swore and got red in the face when she read Peggy’s mother’s letter, and after a while she had asked Peggy how she would like to go back to Chicago with her and be her little girl.
Peggy had never liked Aunt Di very well, even with all the money she was supposed to have. But she had said that she’d like it very much, thank you, because she didn’t know what else to do. Peggy had stayed with Aunt Di for quite a while, and it was then that she had learned her technique with old ladies.
Peggy’s father came on from Tulsa, and when he saw what a pretty girl she was, he had taken her with him. It had been the most wonderful part of Furman’s life. Jim Donovan had dressed her like an idol and called her Peg O’My Heart. Peggy had been the first girl at St. Brighida’s to have two fur coats.
Ad astra per aspera.
Furman still cried when she thought about the way her father had sort of slumped over at the breakfast table, just when they had been about to take that divine walking trip through Eire. After that, she had had to go back to Aunt Di’s big brownstone house in Chicago again, all in black, and Aunt Di had started being
small—
there was no other word for it—about money.
Aunt Di didn’t seem pleased or surprised or grieved. She had acted as if she had known all along that Jim Donovan, free spender that he was, would die without a penny to bless him. Aunt Di accepted Peggy as another Cross to Bear, along with
tic
doloreux
and her lower plate.
Aunt Di had sniffed, though, and got red in the face when Peggy mentioned Coming Out, saying that she had never heard of a Donovan having a debut on waxed floor except on her hands and knees, and sending her off to the priest to be talked to on the sins of Pride and Vainglory.
Aunt Di was now increasingly pious, and every time Peggy mentioned anything that involved spending money, Aunt Di took to her bed and pulled the sheet over her head, looking out from the sheet with her good eye and saying Hail Marys.
Aunt Di seemed to feel pretty good as long as no one mentioned money, but when Peggy needed a new fur coat or wanted a bunch of old junk put into a divine new platinum setting, Aunt Di had one of her attacks.
Then Peggy would go to visit some of the girls she had known at St. Brighida’s, and after she had stayed long enough, her friends were usually glad to lend her enough to get back to Aunt Di’s.
Since Peggy was vivacious and gregarious, she was soon visiting not only her friends but her friends’ friends, and her friends’ friends’ friends. She did a little modeling, for fun, at
teas and drives and charity bazaars, and occasionally—when she simply
had
to have money—professionally.
Peggy’s figure, and the way she walked and wore hats, were divine, but she hated to get up before noon and, in the back of her mind, she couldn’t help thinking that Aunt Di couldn’t live forever, and that then she could move into one of those divine new apartment buildings on the Drive and everything would be divine.
Aunt Di had shown no disposition to die, but a slight stroke had rendered her even more ill-humored and in bed
all
of the time.
After that, Peggy visited her friends more and more, and then she had met Mr. Furman. Mr. Furman was considerably older than Peggy, but he talked a lot about how much he loved her, and he was almost as lavish with presents and money as Jim Donovan himself.
They had dinner together frequently, and after a bit, Peggy sometimes went away for long week ends to discreet, expensive resorts with Mr. Furman. Peggy returned from the week ends with a fat wallet and some rather good clips and brooches
and earrings. She didn’t like semiprecious stuff herself, but she needed to be told that somebody loved her, and she could usually sell the clips and brooches and earrings to her friends or her friends’ friends or her friends’ friends’ friends.
Mr. Furman told Peggy over and over again how much he loved her, how much he regretted his wife, his sons. He made heartening offers to set her up in business, a little apartment of her own. The business offers had never really appealed to Peggy, because that meant, she supposed, getting up early and going somewhere every day, and an apartment seemed
too unattractive
with Mr. Furman paying the rent, even if he did remind her of her father, for Peggy still remembered St. Brighida’s.
Ad astra per aspera.
And in spite of everything, Peggy couldn’t help feeling that something would happen to Aunt Di, old as she was and with all that money she was supposed to have.
Something had finally happened to Aunt Di all right, but the thing that had happened to Peggy in the meantime had made it of secondary importance. At first Peggy hadn’t known what was wrong with her, and then when she was pretty sure, she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, not even Mr. Furman, All that Peggy had wanted to do was get out of Chicago.
When she thought about it now, she didn’t see how she or anyone else could have got two thousand dollars out of Aunt Di, but she had done it somehow. Of course, the old lady was maundering, and Peggy had made the money a Corporate Act of Mercy. Aunt Di had not, however, been so maundering that she had neglected to mention the two thousand in her will as a debt that need not be repaid, and then she had left everything to the Sisters of Poverty.
Peggy had been in no position to break a will. She had been too busy writing to Mr. Furman and trying to get things straightened out. Mr. Furman was less gallant now than he had been in the days when he had gone off with her for long week ends to discreet, expensive resorts. Less gallant than might have been expected from a man who was prone to kiss her ten fingers and her ten toes, a man who loved her, he said, as he did his life.
In the end, Mr. Furman’s life had assumed an unwarranted importance to him. He had been having a little trouble with his blood pressure, and Peggy’s letters had made it higher still. Mr. Furman’s blood pressure had hovered around two forty before he created the annuity that helped keep little Donnie at school. Mr. Furman might have been more generous over a period of time, but his high blood pressure and Peggy’s letters had been too much for him, and there had been that awful piece in the papers, not that it was so very big. Little Donnie was so precocious that she had started school when she was three months old.
After that, Peggy had gone to Cleveland and done a little bit of everything. No one there remembered her as she was now; the annuity wasn’t quite big enough to pay for little Donnie’s school, and she had, somehow, to live herself. Donovan was, perhaps, a queer name for a little girl, but Peggy was accustomed now to girls with queer names.
The other models had names like Cinnamon and Zanzibar and Caramel and Parsley and Nougat. The queerer their names were, the more successful they seemed to be, and Peggy changed her name to Coral. They were all very gay, but the
maddest,
and Coral was the gayest of the lot.
Peggy/Coral wore great chokers and bracelets and anklets of white coral with )the well-cut basic blacks and whites and navies that she was able to buy at discount from the really smart shops. With a couple of quick ones in her, Peggy/Coral, barefoot and in a bathing suit, smiled engagingly at the photographer and threw real snowballs. In bare midriff and shorts, cotton play suits and resort dinner dresses, Peggy/Coral posed unflaggingly against prop cherry and magnolia and palm trees, tennis nets. It had something to do with real daylight, she knew that, but her gamin laugh froze to her face in the cold wind off the lake. She was lonely now too, and she sometimes thought about Aunt Di and about the boys who had wanted to marry her, but whom she hadn’t particularly wanted to marry, before she met Mr. Furman, when she had still thought that after Aunt Di died everything would be divine.
There were still occasional young men who wanted to marry her but they somehow weren’t quite—well—not that she was a snob,
but.
And most of them didn’t seem to have any money except for drinks so that she would probably have had to go on working anyhow, and it was working and being cold that she was trying to get away from.
Working and being cold, and the prop cherry and magnolia and palm trees made her dream of the sun, the South, a benign natural warmth that had nothing to do with borrowed mink coats and sips of brandy. Under the influence of her dream she began to acquire a cute, little old accent that disturbed and impressed Parsley and Nougat and Cinnamon and
Zanzibar.
The girls shared a furnished apartment in which they lived lives of periodic privation, eating crackers and milk for supper, going to bed at seven o’clock when they didn’t have dates. Parsley and Cinnamon and Nougat and Caramel and Zanzibar dressed and danced furiously, slept too little or too much. And so did Peggy/Coral. They set one another’s hair, massaged one another’s faces, plucked their eyebrows into thin arches of interrogation, watched one another’s hips. The girls with the queer names were fun but they weren’t somehow like the girls at St. Brighida’s,
ad astro, per aspera,
or her friends and her friends’ friends.
All of them were careful of the money they spent on food, what with custom-made bras and clothes and Clairols and electrolysis and the necessity for a decent address. She herself was so careful, what with little Donnie’s bills at school and dressing well enough to get jobs, that she was almost always hungry as well as almost always cold.
She attained a new skill at ordering. She always said that she wasn’t a bit hungry and dallied, considering soups, until she knew who was going to pick up the check. When the girls went Dutch, she dallied even more, tasting this and that, snatching bits off plates, finishing rolls and butter, unwanted potatoes. She was addicted to buns in her room, but on dates, she ate and drank surprisingly well.
Young men, in particular, found it disconcerting that a girl
with no appetite should eat so much, and gay young men from out of town who had bought her drinks and dinner married Caramel and Nougat, and later, Parsley and Zanzibar. Poor Cinnamon had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets in a south-side hotel room when the man to whom she
was engaged had decided not to get a divorce after all.
Suddenly she was left alone, and after that Cleveland seemed as cold and hungry and friendless as Chicago. In August, modeling fur coats, she already shivered at the approach of fall, another winter. She was restive, impatient with personable young men, thinking of zephyrs and warm blue waters, romantic backdrops of tropic moon and Royal Palm.
She went South now by degrees, Cincinnati, Washington, Atlanta, Birmingham, her warm dream inviolate, the sweet languor of her speech remarkable anywhere. It had been hard to get a job in Florida in August, but it had been easy to get invitations to dinner. She was suddenly lonely and frightened, for all that she was warm now, warm all the time, except for a little doubtful cold spot in her heart.
She grew increasingly lonely and more grateful for the random invitations to dinner. She was hungry now, not only for dinner but for all the love that she had somehow missed, hungry for the quick kisses, the warm affection, that her mother’s defection, Aunt Di’s parsimony, Jim Donovan’s careless death, and Mr. Furman’s perfidy had denied her.
She wanted now to be kissed, and after a certain point, everything was just sort of natural and friendly, not that she ever felt anything herself.
But even though she was
too
relaxed and glad that the whole thing was over, she always somehow hoped that her dinner partner’s earlier protestations would be love, that he would want to marry her now, take care of her and little Donnie.
As soon as she mentioned little Donnie, though, men treated her with a chilling new respect and stopped taking her out to dinner. Sometimes she had been faithful and unrequited for two or three whole weeks, crying into her pillow, pacing the screaming midnight through, but after a bit she
had been diverted by other faces, other invitations to dinner, drinks.
She had been greedily grateful for the job at the hotel and she had almost—but not quite—groveled to get it. Eschewing Coral for the quicker intimacy of Peggy, she had become suddenly
Mrs. Furman,
a pious widow-woman with a little daughter to rear as gently as she herself had been reared. Bringing everything to the interview, short of a rosary and lock of Mr. Furman’s hair, Furman had been the very essence of an aristocratic Southern belle brought to her knees by unkind fate and the plundering of General Sherman. Her education at St. Brighida’s was brought to the fore just as prominently as her career in Cleveland receded. She dredged up the names of all the prominent people she had ever met and a great many more she had never met. It had been a valiant last stand.