Growing Up (35 page)

“We won’t see each other again,” I promised.

She rented a room far uptown. I stayed away and tried not to think of her but found I could think of nothing else. Weeks passed. I went to the Saturday-night parties hoping she might make an appearance and went home dejected because she didn’t. I asked friends, as indifferently as possible, “Seen anything of Mimi lately?” Sometimes they had.

“I saw her at a party up on Calvert Street last weekend,” one of them told me one day.

“Who was she with?”

“Some guy in the advertising business, I think.”

“How’d she look?”

“Terrific.”

I seethed with hatred for the advertising business and everybody in it. Well, two could play at that game. I tried flirting with a girl named Mary. She was a psychologist. “The ease with which your hand extends backward from the wrist indicates strong latent homosexual tendencies,” she said. That ended that.

Then I heard that Mimi had moved again, that she was living in a house in North Baltimore with a friend named Ursula and her widowed mother. The widowed mother was a comfort to me. At least she’d maintain decorum when advertising men came calling.

“What’s become of Mimi?” my mother asked.

“I’m not seeing her anymore.”

“I thought you’ve been looking down in the mouth about something lately.”

“I haven’t thought about Mimi for months,” I said.

“I think you’ve done the wise thing, Buddy,” she said. “I always had the feeling Mimi never liked me. I don’t know why. I always tried to treat her just like I treated all the other friends you and Doris brought home.”

“I know.”

“All I’ve ever wanted, Buddy, is for you to have the chance to make something of yourself, but if you’re not happy, all the success in the world doesn’t do any good.”

“I’m happy,” I said.

“Then I’m happy too,” she said. “I just wish you’d look a little happier.”

At this pass, in fact, I was enjoying a taste of the world’s success. The
Sun
had finally brought me in out of the police stations and given me a desk and a typewriter. I was covering general assignments—class reunions, new animal arrivals at the zoo, neighborhood parades, after-dinner speeches. It was tiresome stuff, but I was fast at a typewriter. With a rented Royal and a typing manual I’d taught myself the touch system, and to perfect it, I’d written a 70,000-word novel in one three-month stretch, the summer of 1948. It was about a young newspaper reporter hopelessly in love with an unsuitable girl, and there was a gangster in it so vicious that he never once bent down to smell a rose. I mailed it away to several publishers who mailed it right back. Then I put it in the attic, intending to make some publisher pay a fortune for it after I became famous. Many years later I read Truman Capote’s criticism of another novel—“That’s not writing; it’s typing”—and dug mine out of a trunk and put it in the trash in dead of night. Typing it was, and thanks to the exercise I could make a typewriter rattle like a machine gun. This ability proved far more remunerative than my novel.

The
Sun
was always understaffed. One night its two regular rewrite men were off and I was one of three untested reporters sitting in the back of the city room pecking away at announcements of Hadassah meetings and YMCA elections. Suddenly all hell started breaking loose at the city desk. The editor walked back to my desk. “Which one are you?” he asked.

“Baker.”

“Are you the one that can type?”

“A little,” I said.

“Come up here and we’ll see,” he said.

I went up to the city desk and he pointed me to the rewrite desk beside the city editor. “Maulsby’s working an eight-alarm fire. You’ll have to take it,” he said.

It was surprisingly easy. After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that
journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of clichés. I began feeding takes to the city editor.

“Hold up on the fire story and pick up Carroll Williams. There’s an oyster war on the Eastern Shore, and he’s got three dead.”

Before I was well into that the editor interrupted again. “John Carr’s calling from the penitentiary.”

I switched to Carr. He was in a fearful state of nerves. He’d been sent to cover the hanging of a famous cop killer. All Maryland had hungered for this hanging for a year, and now, a few moments before he was due on the gallows, the condemned man had slashed his jugular with a razor blade and was bleeding to death in his cell.

“Think you can make it for the first city edition?” asked the editor.

It was simple. By two
A.M.
I’d written nearly five thousand words, almost the entire content of the local news pages.

Putting on his coat to go home, the editor said, “You ought to be working up here full-time.”

Before long I was. Under the
Sun
’s system, a rewrite man held one of the most important jobs in the city room. He worked hand-in-glove with the city editor, made snap judgments about story values, and, because the
Sun
prided itself on its literacy, rewrote a good deal of the copy ground out by the reporters. In recognition of his importance the rewrite man was paid better than most of the staff. My salary soared to $70 a week.

The pleasure of this triumph was oddly disappointing. I had only my mother to share it with. Naturally she was elated. “If you work hard and make something of the job, maybe you’ll be able to go to Edwin James and get a job on the
New York Times
,” she said.

I had no intention of asking mythical Cousin Edwin to do me a favor. That seemed like cheating. I was cocky enough now to believe I could get ahead without it. My mother’s pleasure was gratifying, but there was someone else I needed to share in my triumph, and without her it seemed less than exciting.

One night in the spring of 1949 I abandoned pride and phoned
the widowed mother. Yes, Miss Nash was in. Did I wish to speak to her?

“It’s me,” I said.

“How are you?” she replied.

“Fine. You married yet?”

“It doesn’t seem to be in the cards,” she said.

I ignored that. “I know I promised not to call you again. Is it all right?”

“I was beginning to think you meant it.”

“Have you missed me?”

“I’ve managed to survive,” she said. “How’s your mother?”

I ignored that, too. “I’ve missed you,” I confessed, though it hurt me to say it. “I wonder if you’d mind if I came by sometime and paid a visit.”

Two nights later I did. The widowed mother met me at the door. We would all sit in the parlor, she said. “Would you care for some tea?”

She brought tea and cookies, and I sat on the sofa beside Mimi, the widowed mother studying me warmly as though I were a gentleman caller on the edge of courtship instead of a fool racked by love. We talked about the climate and newspapers and she told me what a splendid young woman Mimi was. When teapot and conversation were drained, I turned to Mimi in desperation and said, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

It was a balmy night. Strolling along, I poured out the story of my successes at the office, of the mighty $70 a week. “You’re just as self-centered as you always were,” she said.

“I wanted you to know, that’s all.”

“Your mother must be very happy.”

“Let’s forget my mother for once.”

“You can’t forget her,” she said.

“She likes you,” I said.

Mimi laughed softly.

“It’s true. She asked me not long ago why I never bring you out to the house for dinner anymore. She thinks you’re the one who doesn’t like her.”

“Sure,” Mimi said.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’d like you to come out for dinner on Sunday.”

“Jezebel is to be forgiven?” she asked.

“Don’t be sarcastic. Will you come?”

“I’ll think it over,” Mimi said.

When I walked her home, the widowed mother had surrendered the parlor. Mimi resumed her place on the sofa and didn’t object when I switched off the light. When we kissed I realized it was starting all over again. Had it ever stopped? I left a few minutes later whistling in delight and depressed about being a hopeless weakling.

When I told my mother Mimi would be coming for dinner she said, “So you’re seeing her again. I’m not surprised.” That was all, but I knew what she meant: “Just like your father.”

It took courage for Mimi to come, but come she did, and this time she came like a true duchess proudly asserting a claim, a claim on a rightful place at the family table. My mother felt the force and determination of this claim, unspoken though it was. “Mimi’s changed since the last time I saw her,” she said afterwards.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s turned into a woman,” she said.

Shortly after this I felt the change too. “How much longer are we going to live like this?” Mimi asked when I took her home one evening and we were standing at the door.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, when are we going to get married, and don’t tell me it isn’t in the cards.”

“It isn’t,” I said.

“For God’s sake, Russ, treat me like a human being. What do I have to look forward to with you?”

“You’re talking childish talk. Bad lines out of old Bette Davis movies. Don’t be childish.”

“You’re the child. Twenty-four years old and you’re still your mother’s favorite baby. Ask Doris. She sees it.”

“You’re really serious about getting married?” I asked. There
was a long silence. “I’ve been thinking about it,” I continued, “and I’ve done some figuring. I figure I’ll be able to afford to support a wife when I’m making eighty dollars a week. On seventy I can’t do it. Be a little patient. I’ll probably get another raise next year.”

“When you’re making eighty you’ll discover you need ninety, and when you make ninety you’ll need a hundred,” she said. “Good night.” And she slammed the door.

Well, we have evenings like that
, I told myself on the way home. Next week she announced she was moving to Washington.

“You’re kidding!”

She wasn’t. She’d found a job with the Wilmark Agency, a national detective service whose agents spent their lives shopping in client stores to catch employees robbing the cash register. “You can’t be a detective,” I said. “Everybody will laugh at me for going out with a cop.”

“Would you rather get married?”

“Come on.”

“Don’t say it—it’s not in the cards. I’m going to Washington.” And she did.

It was maddening having her in Washington. I could see her only once a week and then had to leave early in time to catch the last train back to Baltimore. Still, there was safety in distance, too. It might give her marriage mania time to cool. On my hurried weekend visits she seldom failed to tell me about the parties she’d attended during the week or to report on the sophisticated men she met at them. In glamorous Washington, sophisticated men were so much more commonplace than in Baltimore. She wished she’d moved there years ago. I retorted in outbursts of jealous rage, which always gave her the cue to reply, “Well after all, we’re not married, are we? It wasn’t in the cards.”

In November she announced she was leaving Washington for a six-week southern trip with a crew who would be looking for till robbers in the hotels and retail stores of the Carolinas.

“Six weeks? That means we won’t be together at Christmas.”

“I’ll be thinking of you,” she said.

“How many in your crew?”

“Three. One man and another girl.”

“You mean you’re going to be living in hotels with another man for six weeks?”

“I’ll write to you,” she said.

She did write. There were six letters in the first two weeks from towns like Rocky Mount, Gastonia, Spartanburg, letters warm with affection that began, “My dearest” or “Darling.” This long separation was apparently working to make her appreciate the treasure she had in me. The seventh letter was a poisoned dagger. There was a much, much too casual paragraph referring to the crew boss. What a fun-loving fellow he was, how poised, how manly. He was from Pennsylvania and had been a star running back on his high school football team. But intellectually, of course, not in my class. Awfully nice though. He’d even been teaching her to dance.

A football player! How could a woman I admired take the least interest in a football player? I was in turmoil. After all the years I had labored to improve her mind—a football player. And one, moreover—as she confided in her next letter—who referred to himself as “Kid Muscles.”

Oh, there was no doubt she was interested in this football player. I could read her like a book even at a distance of four hundred miles. An entire week passed with no letter from the South, and when one finally came it was not “My dearest” or “Darling” to whom she spoke, but to “Dear Russ.” Its tone was guarded, several pages of bread-and-butter ramblings that said nothing. What I read between the lines, however, was betrayal. A football player! It was too much to bear, and unable to bear it, I placed a long-distance call at midnight to the hotel at which she was staying. The operator rang her room. It was the first time we’d spoken since she left Washington.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“Of course. I just fell off to sleep,” she said. “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

We chatted about work for a few minutes, but I thought her
conversation unusually restrained. “Is there somebody there with you?” I asked.