Appointment in Samarra (13 page)

And then there were people. Terrible people, who didn’t have to do anything to make them terrible, but were just terrible people. Of course they usually did do something, but they didn’t have to. There was (Mrs.) Emily Shawse, widow of the late Marc A. Shawse, former mayor of Gibbsville, and one-time real estate agent, who had developed the West Park
section of Gibbsville. Mrs. Shawse did not participate in club activities, but she was a member. She came down to the club summer afternoons and sat alone on the porch, at one end of the porch, watching the golfers and tennis players and the people in the pool. She would have a fruit lemonade on the porch, and have one sent out to Walter, her Negro chauffeur. She would stay an hour and leave, and go for a drive in the country, presumably. But if she wasn’t having an affair with Walter, Gibbsville missed its guess. No one ever had seen her speak with Walter, not even good-morning-Walter, good-morning-Mrs.-Shawse; but it certainly looked fishy. Walter had the car, a Studebaker sedan, at all hours of the day and night. He always had money to bet on the races, and he was a good customer at the Dew Drop Inn, where the Polish and Lithuanian girls had not been brought up to draw the color line. Julian prided himself on the fact that he had blocked the sale of a Cadillac to Mrs. Shawse. She had wanted one, or at least was ready to buy one in exchange for a little attention, in a nice way, from Julian. She had put him in a tough spot for a while. He couldn’t just say he didn’t want to sell her a car. He eventually solved the problem by telling her he would give her only a hundred and fifty in a trade involving the Studebaker, which then was worth, trade-in value, about six times that much, and when she still was not rebuffed he sent Louis, the pimply, bowlegged carwasher, with the demonstrator, instead of going himself. Mrs. Shawse kept the Studebaker. There was Harry Reilly’s own nephew, Frank Gorman, a squirt if ever there was one. Frank got drunk at every last party the minute his mother went home. It was because of him that she came to the club dances. He was at Georgetown, having been kicked out of Fordham and Villanova, not to mention Lawrenceville, New York Military Academy, Allentown Prep and Gibbsville High School. Frank was a spindle-shanked young man who wore the most collegiate clothes, the kind that almost justify the newspaper editorials. He had a Chrysler roadster, a raccoon coat, adenoids, and some ability as a basketball player. He was a loud-mouth and a good one-punch fighter, who accepted invitations of the younger set as though they were his due. He
was the kind of young man who knows his rights. His uncle secretly hated him, but always referred to him, with what was mistaken for bashful pride, as that crazy kid. There was the Reverend Mr. Wilk, who had had the club raided under the Volstead Act. There was Dave Hartmann, who wiped his shoes on clean towels and in seven years had not been known to violate the club rule against tipping servants and caddies, and who belonged to the club himself but would not let his wife and two daughters become members. Dave manufactured shoes, and he needed the club in his business, he said. Besides, what would Ivy and the girls get out of the club, when the Hartmann home was in Taqua? It’d be different, he said, if he had his home in Gibbsville. Julian had another Scotch and soda.

He wanted to go on thinking about the terrible people, all members of this club, and the people who were not terrible people but who had done terrible things, awful things. But now he got nothing out of it; it made him feel no better, no surer of himself. It had in the beginning, for there were many things he had thought of that were worse things than he had done. What Ed Klitsch had done, for instance. A thing that could have a terrible effect on a decent woman like Mrs. Losch; or it might have made Losch think that his wife invited Klitsch’s little attention. And so on. But the trouble with making yourself feel better by thinking of bad things that other people have done is that you are the only one who is rounding up the stray bad things. No one but yourself bothers to make a collection of disasters. For the time being you are the hero or the villain of the thing that is uppermost in the minds of your friends and acquaintances. You can’t even say, “But look at Ed Klitsch. What about Carter and Kitty? What about Kitty and Mary Lou? Aren’t I better than Mrs. Shawse?” The trouble with that is that Ed Klitsch and Carter and Kitty and Mary Lou and Mrs. Shawse have nothing to do with the case. Two more kids looked at Julian and said hyuh, but they did not hover thirstily and wait for him to offer them a drink. He wondered about that again, and as it had many times in the last year and a half, Age Thirty stood before him. Age Thirty. And those kids were nineteen, twenty-one, eighteen, twenty.
And he was thirty. “To them,” he said to himself, “I am thirty. I am too old to be going to their house parties, and if I dance with their girls they do not cut in right away, the way they would on someone their own age. They think I am old.” He had to say this to himself, not believing it for a moment. What he did believe was that he was precisely as young as they, but more of a person because he was equipped with experience and a permanent face. When he was twenty, who was thirty? Well, when he was twenty the men he would have looked up to were now forty. No, that wasn’t quite right. He had another drink, telling himself that this would be his last. Let’s see; where was he? Oh, yes. When I was forty. Oh, nuts. He wished Monsignor Creedon would heed the call of nature. He got up and went out to the verandah.

It was a fine night. (Fine had been a romantic word in his vocabulary ever since he read
A Farewell to Arms,
but this was one time when he felt justified in using it.) The fine snow was still there, covering almost everything as far as the eye could see. The fine snow had been there all the time he had been inside, having dinner, dancing with Constance and Jean, and sitting by himself, drinking highballs too fast. He took a deep breath, but not too deep as experience had warned him against that. This was real, this weather. The snow and what it did to the landscape. The farmlands that once, only a little more than a century ago, and less than that in some cases, had been wild country, infested with honest-to-God Indians and panther and wildcat. It still was not too effete. Down under that snow rattlesnakes were sleeping, rattlers and copperheads. A high-powered rifle shot away, or maybe a little more, there were deer, and there were Pennsylvania Dutch families that never spoke English. He remembered during the war, during the draft, when someone had told him about families near the Berks County line, but still in this county. They not only couldn’t understand about the war; many of them never had been to Gibbsville. That alone was enough to make a story when he first heard it. Now he wished he had heard more. He resolved to go into it further, find out more about the peculiarities of his native heath. Who did Kentucky think it was that it
could claim exclusive rights on hill-billys? “I guess I love this place,” he said.

“Good evening, son,” said a voice.

He turned. It was Father Creedon. “Oh, Father. Good evening. Cigarette?”

“No, thank you. Cigar for me.” The priest took a cigar from a worn, black leather case. He amputated the end of the cigar with a silver cutter. “How are things with you?”

“Fine,” said Julian. “Huh. As a matter of fact, anything but fine. I suppose you heard about my performance last night with a friend of yours.”

“Yes. I did. You mean Harry Reilly?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, it’s none of my affair,” said Monsignor Creedon. “But I wouldn’t let it worry you if I were you. I don’t imagine Harry Reilly likes to be missing the dancing and all that, but he’s a reasonable kind of a fellow. Go to him and tell him you’re sorry, and make him think you mean it. He’ll listen to reason.”

“I did go. Didn’t Mrs. Gorman tell you? I went to see him this afternoon and he wouldn’t see me.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t, eh? Well, the next time you see him tell him to go to hell.” He chuckled. “No. Don’t. I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience. A priest of God stirring up animosities and so forth and so on. I don’t know. You didn’t ask me for my advice anyways. But if you can forget for a minute that I’m a priest, and just between you and me, I think Harry Reilly is a horse’s ass.”

The old man and the young man laughed. “You do?” said Julian.

“I do. If you ever tell that I’ll fix your feet, young man. But that’s what I think.”

“So do I,” said Julian.

“We’re both right, son,” said Monsignor Creedon. “Harry is ambitious. Well, Caesar was ambitious. A lot of people are ambitious. I was ambitious myself, once, and I got a nice kick in the teeth for it. Ambition’s all right, if you know when to stop. As F.P.A. would say, I can take my ambition or leave it
alone. Oh, yes, ambition is all right, just as long as you don’t get too ambitious.”

“Do you read F.P.A.?”

“My God, yes. I get the
World
every day. Of course I’m a Republican, but I have the
World
delivered with the
Ledger
. I miss Broun, though, since he isn’t with the
World
any more. Do you read the
World
? I didn’t know Cadillac dealers could read. I thought all they had to do was make an X mark on the back of a check.”

“I never was meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer, Father,” said Julian.

“That sounded to me as though—you’re not a frustrated literary man, by any chance, are you? God forbid.”

“Oh, no,” said Julian. “I’m not anything. I guess I should have been a doctor.”

“Well—” the priest stopped himself, but his tone made Julian curious.

“What, Father?”

“You won’t think this sounds awful? No, of course you won’t. You’re a Protestant. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve had my moments of wishing I’d taken some other life work. That doesn’t sound bad to you, because you weren’t brought up to believe in the true vocation. Well, I guess I better go inside. I keep forgetting I’m an old man.”

“How about a drink?” said Julian.

“I will if it isn’t too late. I’m fasting.” He looked at his big silver watch. “All right. I’ve time. I’ll have one with you.”

Surprisingly, no one had taken the bottle of Scotch off the table in Julian’s absence. The thieves, which was to say everyone, probably thought the owner of the bottle was in the toilet and was apt to surprise them in the act of stealing the liquor, a heinous offense.

“Oh, Scotch. Fine,” said the priest. “Do you like Irish whiskey?”

“I certainly do,” said Julian.

“I’ll send you a bottle of Bushmill’s. It isn’t the best Irish whiskey, but it’s good. And this stuff is real. Ed Charney sent
me a case of it for a Christmas present, heaven only knows why. I’ll never do anything for that one. Well, your very good health and a happy New Year. Let’s see. Tomorrow’s St. Stephen’s Day. He was the first martyr. No, I guess we better stick to happy New Year.”

“Cheerio,” said Julian.

The old priest—Julian wondered exactly how old he was—drank his highball almost bottoms up. “Good whiskey,” he said.

“That came from Ed Charney, too,” said Julian.

“He has his uses,” said the priest. “Thank you, and good-bye. I’ll send you that Bushmills tomorrow or next day. ’Bye.” He left, a little stoop-shouldered but strong-looking and well-tailored. The talk had given Julian a lift, and the air had sobered him up. The tails hanging over his buttocks, the sleeves of his coat, the legs of his trousers were still cold, covered with cold, from his stand on the verandah, but he felt fine. He hurried out to dance with Caroline and others.

The orchestra was playing Three Little Words. He spotted Caroline, dancing with—it would be—Frank Gorman. Julian cut in, being no more polite about it than he had to.

“Have we met?” said Caroline.

“Ouimet. The name of a golfer. Francis Ouimet,” said Julian. “How did you ever remember the name?”

“Where have you been? I looked around for you after I came down from the johnny, but were you anywhere to be seen? Did you greet me at the foot of the stairs? Did you come dashing forth to claim the first dance? Did you? No. You did not. Then an hour passes. And so on.”

“I was having a very nice chat with Father Creedon.”

“Father Creedon? You were not. Not for long. He’s been sitting with Mrs. Gorman and her party most of the evening. You were getting drunk and you just happened to give him one drink so you could truthfully say you’d been with him. I know you, English.”

“You’re wrong as hell. He was with me for a long time. And I learned something.”

“What?”

“He thinks Harry Reilly is a horse’s ass,” said Julian.

She did not reply.

“What’s the matter with that? I think so too. I see eye to eye with Rome on that.”

“How did he happen to say that? What did you say that made him say that?”

“I didn’t say anything to make him say that. All I said was…I don’t remember how it started. Oh, yes. He asked me how I felt and I said fine, and then I said no, anything but fine. I was standing outside on the verandah, and he came out for a breath of air, and so we got to talking and I said I supposed he’d heard about my altercation with Harry and I told him I’d been around to apologize, and I said Harry had refused to see me, and then Creedon said he thought Harry was a horse’s ass.”

“That doesn’t sound much like him.”

“That’s what I thought, but he explained it beforehand. He said he wasn’t talking as a priest, but just as man to man. After all, darling, there’s no law that says he has to dearly love all the people who go to his church, is there?”

“No. Well, I’m just sorry you talked to him about it. Even if he doesn’t go right back and tell—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You were never so wrong in your whole life. Father Creedon’s a swell guy.”

“Yes, but he’s a Catholic, and they stick together.”

“Oh, nuts. You’re trying to build this up into a world catastrophe.”

“Oh, yeah? And what are you doing? You’re trying to pass it off as though it were the least important thing in the world, just a little exchange of pleasantries. Well, you’re wrong, Julian.”

“Aw-haw. Now we’re getting to the Julian stage. I get it.”