Tomorrow! (5 page)

There was one rich man, especially, whose name adorned Netta’s mind year after year.

The fact that Lenore had once attracted and then rejected him was, quite possibly, the largest thorn in Netta’s thorny life. He was eminently eligible, extremely handsome, socially so impeccable that his in-laws would automatically be lifted to the top strata, and destined to be very rich; he was Minerva’s son, Kittridge Sloan.

If Beau’s family background was average, Netta’s had been far below the American norm; hence, in a real sense, she had improved herself far more than he. Furthermore, though both had skeletons in their private closets, though indeed Netta’s young womanhood (a closed book from the day she saw Beau) was the kind which reformers wrongly imagine leads invariably to a wretched end in some such place as Buenos Aires, the Baileys had attained a complete “respectability.” They found pleasure in that estate.

They were, according to their lights, good to their one child and they furnished her with what they truly believed to be a splendid home environment. They were worthy members of the River City Episcopal Church and rose early every Sunday morning, often in spite of painful hangovers, to drive across the Central Avenue Bridge to services. Netta taught a Sunday-school class and Beau, who had a fair tenor voice, led the hymns in Sunday school. Minerva Sloan was the Sunday-school superintendent. But even that fact, which explained why they traveled so far to attend church when there were many handier places of worship in Green Prairie, did not mean their faith was entirely opportunistic. They did believe in God, childishly, as the source of pleasures and gifts and undue punishments.

One afternoon a week Netta sewed with the colored women at the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, to be sure, a Sloan charity. But Netta enjoyed that afternoon sincerely: she liked colored people and felt, in a sense, completely at home with them. Moreover, Beau not only led Sunday-school singing out he contributed generously to the River City Boys Club, which was not a Sloan charitable concern, and he gave a certain amount of time to that rather sad American enterprise of “leading” boys. Beau was also a member of the Elks, Kiwanis, and the Society of Green Prairie Giraffes. He served as the perennial treasurer of all three. He was also an active Republican and had been a leading and early Eisenhower protagonist, after finding—

surreptitiously and owing to his acquaintance with the accounts—that Minerva had made a large contribution to the Eisenhower campaign fund. The measure of Beau’s stance in such matters was this: that if he had discovered Minerva was backing Stevenson, he too would have paid lip service to the Democratic Party, but without enthusiasm, and he would doubtless have voted for Ike secretly, denying it afterward.

The Baileys, in sum, were not intentionally evil people. Like many, they were engaged in striving toward that place in life where their hypocrisies, small dishonesties, speculations and shady deals would become
“unnecessary
.”
To them, as to millions of other American families, not only “keeping up” but “getting ahead” have priority over conscience; honor is a luxury they conceive of as desirable, even ideal, but possible only to those lucky few who somehow have run all the gantlets, crossed all the goals, and bought all the nationally advertised essentials, including airplane trips abroad, summer homes, large annuities and permanent vaults.

Theirs were the vices of ambition, which has come to be identified with progress, thus obscuring its other name—greed.

They were superficially much like their neighbors, the Conners, and only underneath unlike in certain ways. Neither Henry nor Beth Conner was greatly afflicted by the desire for things. Henry was content to stay forever the head of the accounting department of the J. Morse Company, the second largest hardware store chain in the state; Beth was not particularly interested in clothes, in country-club living, in “society,” in concerts or plays or lectures (doings regularly patronized by the Baileys), or even in modernizing her house or relandscaping her yard.

“She seems,” Beau once said perplexedly, “to
like
kind of beat-up housewares and sprangly bushes outdoors and old duds.”

In money contributed and time devoted, the good works of the Conners far outweighed the somewhat opportunistic benevolences of the Baileys. Henry Conner belonged to even more organizations—charitable, fraternal or merely sportive. Henry, indeed, was known to thousands of his fellow citizens, and his warmth and down-to-earth wisdom endeared him to them all. His younger son’s joke about his election to the office of dogcatcher was warranted: if he had desired office, Henry could have been elected to any of dozens. For that very reason he had been appointed a sector warden. Beau Bailey, on the other hand, while known to hundreds of the most prosperous citizens of his region, was not known to thousands—save perhaps as a dimly recalled face at a teller’s window, in the days before he had a desk and his own office.

Yet it was Beau who regarded himself as “important” in the community, a figurehead and social pillar. Netta shared that belief. Both Beth and Henry Conner would have deemed silly the suggestion that their family was “important.”

Such, in outline, was the background of Netta Bailey,
née
Meddes; such therefore was the etiology of her emotion when she carne downstairs while her husband was on the telephone, occupied by nothing more than a marriage-long habit of anxious inquisitiveness and a very slight feeling, not that the phone call was of a serious nature but that her husband had been a little quieter, a little more obsequious than usual. She saw now that Beau was frantically afraid. His swift effort to dissemble went to no purpose: She said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”

“Beau.
You can’t fool me.”

“I’m not trying to!”

Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.

“Okay,” she said steadily.
“Who
was it?”

“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a
business
call.”

“Your
business, though. Not the
bank’s.”

Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”

The question allowed her to pretend the reality of a mere assumption. “So it
was
personal.
Beau!
What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”

Netta sat down on the arm of the huge, flower-print-covered divan the decorator had chosen for them. “You can tell me now or you can argue awhile. Either way, Beau, I’ll find out from you.”

His voice suddenly filled the room, taut, shrill, surprising him even more than Netta. “None of your goddamned business!”

“It’s really bad trouble, isn’t it?”

“Who said it was trouble?” His face had puckered like the face of a baby trying to decide whether to produce a tantrum or a spell of pitiable tears.

“How much is it going to cost us?”

“Netta—stop jumping to such crazy conclusions!”

She could tell, to a decibel, a hairbreadth, when he was lying and when he was not. She went on implacably, “If you’ve just hocked something—or borrowed on the cars. . . .”

“What have we got to hock that isn’t already hocked,
including
the cars?” He stared at her with momentary self-righteousness.

She said, “Then it
is
money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.

“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more drink until you explain.”

He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”

“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance. . . !” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.

“How
much
money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—

thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed. . . !” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”

Tears filled Beau’s eyes. “All my life,” he recited, “I’ve done just one thing and one thing only, scrimped and sweat and slaved and hit the old ball, so you and Lenore could have a fine life. I have no pleasures of my own, no vices, no indulgences—”

She was looking at him, white-faced, oblivious to his stale stock of good providing.

“Those—‘bonuses,’ you called them! The ‘little windfalls,’
you said!
The fur coat you got Lenore! The new deep-freeze you made a little killing just in time to pay for! All
that
?”

“A man,” he responded in a ghastly tone, “can get so devoted to his family he’ll stop at nothing for their sake—”

Netta said a word she had learned in her childhood environs, monosyllabic and succulent-sounding. It was one of the first words she had ever known. She sat up. “You’ve been
gambling
!”

“How do you know?”

“Horses!”

“And I did
all right.”
Her guess seemed to release him. “And if I had some
real
dough to lay on the line, I could get back what I’m down—!”

“Where? What bookie.
Jake!
That was
Jake
on the phone!”

Now, for the first time, Netta was more frightened than angry. “Beau, do you really owe Jake Tanetti five thousand dollars?”

“I didn’t think it was that much. I thought—around three. But
he
says five.”

“Then it’s five.” Netta sat silent for a moment, her chest heaving. Once or twice she looked speculatively at Beau. Finally she smiled at him wanly. “Come over here. Sit beside me.”

“Net, I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”

She beckoned. Heavily, he rose and cautiously approached. He seated himself as gingerly as if the divan had been an electric chair. But Netta didn’t swat him or even yell at him. She just took his hand and held it in her own and stared at it and finally said, softly, “Beau, my boy, you’ve done some dumb things in your day, but—this is really Grade-A trouble. I’m not sore.

I’m sorry.”

She meant it. Meant the compassion she displayed, the calm. Intellectually Netta knew that the only way to manage Beau now would be with gentleness. Anything harsh might easily snap the thin threads of his remaining pride and cause him to do something still more rash. Not suicide. But—he might confess to Minerva Sloan and throw himself (and her and Lenore, as incidentals) on the mercy of the old woman. There was no such thing as mercy in Minerva, Netta knew; she’d had a good deal of experience in the absence of mercy. So there was reason for her to hold her tongue and to treat Beau with restraint.

But something much deeper also moved Netta, something she did not understand. It was pity. She realized that she had never pitied Beau before; she had always, in fact, felt slightly inferior to him because of her background. Now, however, she suddenly felt equal. His descent to this level, his victimization by the bookmaker, even his gambling per se, as his way of trying to clamber from his eternally sticky finances, touched Netta in a familiar spot. Her mother, father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles had
lived
in this place, owing what they could not pay, guilty of merely taking a chance and losing, and faced in sudden consequence with the malignity of forces vastly mightier than themselves: rackets, unions, the law, the church, street gangs, hoods, noble powers that became suddenly evil and evil powers that were ceaselessly opposed to everybody, to life itself and letting live.

Netta came closer to loving Beau then than ever before.

“You’re the cashier of a big bank,” she said carefully, “so you
can’t
gamble. That means this business
must not come out.”

“If I don’t pay Jake—”

“Sure. If you don’t—it will. That’s Jake.” She said it as if “Jake” were a force of nature, not a person. “So he has to get paid.”

“How?”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure. He’ll probably take something down. . . .”

Beau brightened a little. “He said he would. Half now. Half later.”

“So, okay. All you need right off is two grand and a half.”

He shrugged. “Might as well be two million.”

“I’ve heard you say, Beau, you could lay your hands on fortunes, and nobody would be wiser for years.”

He pulled away from her.
“The bank?”

“You said. . . ?” she gestured casually.

“My
God,
Net! I
said
so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.

You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s
out!”

“You got any different inspirations? Or better ones?”

“That one isn’t even an idea. Look, Net. I appreciate the way you’re taking this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No.
That
would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”

“Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”

“I could lose my joh—”