Some Came Running (119 page)

Frank looked up at her. “You think she really has?” he said. “I’ve always liked her.” He stared down into his glass. “You know, I’ve been meanin to ask you about Janie for some time now. She don’t look well to me.”

“I know,” Edith said faintly. “I’ve tried to get her to go to a doctor, but she won’t. She just laughs and says there’s nothing wrong with her a good drunk won’t cure.”

“She’s lost an awful awful lot of weight.”

“I know. She just says it’s good for her. But I’m worried. You know she’s given up all her other jobs except at your house. Did you know that?”

“No,” Frank said. “She never mentioned it.”

“She’s even given up working for your brother Dave and ’Bama.”

(“Those bastards!” Frank interjected.)

“And I know she liked working there. But she says she’s tired of all these other jobs, says it’s time she started to retire. She says she’s been at your place the longest so that’s where she should keep on working—and then laughs and says: Unless she should get fired. You know Janie.” She paused. “I don’t know what’s the matter,” she said.

Frank was getting a little tired of Edith’s grandmother. “Well, she ain’t as young as she used to be. She probably just drinks too much, I guess,” he said, staring at his own glass and then raised it up and took a deep draught.

“No, no, I know it isn’t that,” Edith said; “she doesn’t drink half as much as she used to.” And suddenly, she was off on one of those strange fast desperate strings of talking of hers, which were the only times she ever really talked much at all, this time about her grandmother. She had called her a whore once, she said anguishedly. Once when she was mad. Her, of all people. To call Jane a whore. She went on and on, talking about when she was a little girl and Janie had took care of her, the words tumbling out faster and faster until Frank could hardly follow their meaning.

He waited, hardly listening, until there came a pause. “Well, you know, I’ve always thought it would be good for you to get away from there,” he said; “why don’t you let me buy you that house for yourself like we’ve talked about? Hell, I could buy it tomorrow, through a Springfield agent, and nobody would ever know I had anything to do with it. Wouldn’t have to be a big place, but—”

“No, Frank,” she said. “It wouldn’t work. Nobody would ever believe I’d ever gotten enough money together to buy a house. And right away they’d start looking for the reason. Anyway,” she said, “I don’t want to leave Janie now.”

Frank looked at her not knowing what else to say. They’d been over it many times before. It would make him feel so much better, if he could only just
buy
her something. Anything. But she never would take anything. He thought for a brief moment about saying something else about the adoption that might perhaps make her feel better, but decided against it. It was better not to even bring it up again. He had told her, at least, he himself. Nobody could ever say he hadn’t told her.

“Well, I guess we better get on back home,” he said wanly, and then for a moment sat watching her as she got up to dress. Never in his life again, he realized suddenly with a kind of miserable, desperate anguish, would he ever enter a motel room—or see one——without thinking of Edith Barclay. What a chain that was to impose upon yourself.

But of course, as soon as he let her out at the corner of Roosevelt and Wernz Avenue and drove on home, his happiness returned; and he could sit back and think of all of it with pleasure and comfort and release. Never in his life had he been so really truly happy.

I
F EITHER
D
AVE OR
W
ALLY—
or for that matter, his own sophisticated daughter Dawn—had in some way known about Frank’s moral anguishes and desperate fears concerning his sex life, they would have laughed—or else felt an adult’s consummate sympathy for him as a child. All of them had solved that problem for themselves long ago; Dave, a long long time ago; and Wally and Dawn, a younger generation still, had solved theirs last summer even before they had read any Kinsey.

Although Dawn, of course, perhaps, might have a different attitude now—now that she was engaged in that great and infinitely popular American preoccupation of changing lovers. It wouldn’t have bothered Dave, though.

But what did bother Dave was the matter of Old Janie Staley. When she came to them and quit, almost with tears in her eyes, it appeared to Dave as only one more manifestation of the downhill change which for some unknown reason had seemed to begin with the death of Raymond Cole.

Not only were Dewey and Hubie more troublesome drunk almost all the time, but something had happened at Smitty’s, too. The old-time sparkle their bunch had used to have there wasn’t there anymore; the life had gone out of it. And not only that, he and ’Bama had begun to lose at gambling. And now, on top of that, Janie had to quit them!

The change in the gambling wasn’t really very noticeable. They were not losing dangerously. But there was still enough of a change for both of them to note it. For over a year now, ever since they had started it out in Florida, they had been winning consistently a far higher percentage of poker hands than could ever be explained away mathematically or logically. And now that percentage had started to go down. ’Bama sat up around the kitchen filling sheet after sheet with calculations by which he figured out averages and percentages of both the hands they won and the amounts of money, working at it delightedly, trying to formulate for himself some theory about winning and losing which he could prove positively, apparently feeling none of the sense of possible impending doom which Dave felt. They were, he said, looking up from his calculations, definitely losing more. It was very slight, but there was a definite change, he said excitedly; he wanted to see if it kept on. And if so, why?

Dave knew as well as he did that if the percentages
did
keep on dropping, they would not be able to go on living like they were. The house, that new garden, the immensity of their liquor bill, the trips here and there, the freedom; they would lose them all. And Dave did not want to lose them; and that sense of deep impending doom settled over him lower and lower. What
could
be the cause? Dave wondered.
Could
it be that in some strange way Raymond Cole was, after all, sort of their lucky piece? a living talisman? But how
could
that be? when they had started they had hardly ever seen Raymond; and they really started in Miami, and Raymond hadn’t been there. Surely, it
could
not be the act of Mildred Pierce getting married; it hadn’t affected anything; one way or the other. The only other thing he could point to was his own having withdrawn from the race for Gwen French; but how
could
that have affected anything? His relationship with Gwen didn’t have any visible—or invisible—effect on
their
lives. How
could
it be that?

But what else
could
it be? except one—or all—of those three?

Could they have, he and ’Bama, committed some great—great—sin or other (it was the only word he could give it; the only word that fit), some great sin, then, that neither of them was aware of? so that whatever power or force it was that had protected them had suddenly been withdrawn? He had gloomily been thinking more and more about the strange talk he had had with Bob—and after that with Gwen—and what they had said about reincarnation and about the Group of Masters or Spirits or whatever you wanted to call them Who were supposed to be governing everything. Could They really exist like that? like Bob had said? And if so, what would they ever have wanted to give luck to him and ’Bama for in the first place? He and ’Bama went against just about every moral law that everybody taught was right. Hell, even the damned Communists wouldn’t want him and ’Bama, would think they were immoral. Why should these Masters or Spirits or whatever They were even be interested in two such “sinners” as him and ’Bama were? Why should They have given them this consistent luck? And then why take it away?

And most of all, with a voiceless almost unbelieving awe, he wondered about what Bob had said about artists, about writers, possibly being below—the very
greatest
of them just one step below—the lowest, lowliest Seeker or Disciple or whatever they called them. Jesus Christ! if that was so, that was
nowhere!
He himself was nowhere! Hell, he might as well be
dead! He
wasn’t even a
great
writer! As the house settled immediately into deterioration and uncleanliness just one week after Jane was gone, he wondered darkly, and tried to work on his book.

It was Gwen who got them another cleaning woman. He had continued going over there once or twice a week after the college had reconvened on January 3; even though he had more or less given up on the love affair, she was still helping him with his book. It was the twenty-fifth of January when Janie left them, and the house was bad enough after the first week; but after the second week it went from bad to worse. He and ’Bama tried to slick it up a little, but they could only awkwardly scut the surface dirt without making any inroad on the deep-down real dirt. Probably it wouldn’t have bothered them eight months or a year ago, but they had had it too good—with Janie’s consummate slick cleaning and polishing; and now without it it was horrible. Dave could only sit in his little writing room, which was not clean, either, and stagnate on his novel. When Gwen finally commented gently on how his work had fallen off in volume, he told her what was causing it (about Janie, that is; not about the bad poker luck and the growing list of mishaps); and she had said she would see if she couldn’t get her own cleaning lady to work for them. That was the middle of February, and he had been sleeping with Ginnie Moorehead again for almost a month—since a week before Janie left, in fact.

Gwen’s cleaning lady was a Negro woman and a devout Methodist. She and her husband had worked for Bob and his wife, and later for Gwen, for years and years. There were three Negro families in Israel. (There were none in Parkman.) And all three of them had been there for generations, going almost as far back as the Civil War, in fact; and all of them belonged to the Israel Methodist Church. Gwen’s cleaning lady’s name was Shardine; Shardine Jones. Dave had met her many times over at the house in Israel. She was to come and clean for them in Parkman one day a week on Thursday, at Gwen’s suggestion, for a dollar an hour. Her husband was to drive her over in the morning and pick her up that evening. She came and worked one day—and left and refused to come back. And Dave chalked up one more item in his swiftly growing list of mishaps.

It was, actually, more or less Ginnie Moorehead’s fault about the new cleaning lady quitting. It wasn’t that Ginnie really did anything, or said anything. All Ginnie did was come in the house after she got off work at the brassiere factory and sit down at the kitchen table while Shardine Jones was still there. She did not even mix herself a drink, just sat down. But it was enough.

Shardine Jones was a good-looking Negro woman of thirty-six or -eight; she certainly did not look as though she had six small children at home. She had been more or less skittish all day. ’Bama, of course, had got up and got out as was his custom, and Shardine had only had a brief glimpse of him, but it was enough to widen the whites of her great dark beautiful eyes. Dave himself of course was around all day (trying to work) and that probably did not ease her any. Also, he made the mistake of inviting her to eat with him because he was trying to show he did not believe in race segregation. Shardine merely stared at him, almost contemptuously, and declined politely. Neither would she eat while he was in the kitchen. Finally, by peeking clandestinely around the door of his writing room and down the hall, he was able to see that she actually did rather gingerly get herself a tiny little something out of the icebox and eat it. Ginnie coming in was, evidently, the last straw.

Shardine did not say anything. She went right ahead and finished up her work carefully (she was an excellent cleaner), still looking skittish, infinitely polite, and when her husband arrived promptly on time came to Dave for her money. He paid her, and she thanked him very politely, and did not say anything about the fact that she was not coming back. In fact, it was only a few days later when he was over at the house in Israel that he even found out at all that she was
not
coming back, when Gwen—unable to keep from laughing a little—told him the story.

Naturally of course, he did not know that Gwen, because she was so sensitive of his feelings concerning her and her mythical love life, did not tell him the whole story, which was the reason for her laughing.

Shardine Jones had had her husband drive her directly to Gwen’s house when she left the house in Parkman. They did not stop or even slow down on the way.

Gwen was already home and was sitting before the big fire grading some papers, when Shardine burst nervously upon her through the back door. Her husband had apparently been ordered to remain out in the car.

“Miss Gwen, I not going to work at that place,” she said furiously. “What kind of a place you trying to send me to, Miss Gwen?” She was quivering with rage.

“Why, Shardine!” Gwen said, alarmed. “Did somebody do something to you?”

“No; and they never going to!” Shardine said. “You never told me that gambler ’Bama Dillert lived there. I’m a respectable married woman. I got six children at home. You don’t think I going to work at a place like that, do you?”

“Well, I never thought about it,” Gwen said, startled. “What’s the matter with it?”

“What’s the
matter
with it!” Shardine cried, her great dark eyes snapping. “Why, it’s the worse house of sin I was ever in in my life! Those people, they’re the spawn of the Devil, the worst lowlife bums and white trash in this part of the country. That Dewey Cole and that Hubie Murson, they both hangs out there with them chippies of theirs from the brassiere factory. There a whole
cabinet
full of liquor bottles in the kitchen. They don’t work, neither do they sow nor reap. All they do is sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink and
gamble.
You think I going to work for people like that?”