Some Came Running (12 page)

Frank stopped and looked at him. “She tell you that, too?”

Al nodded.

“Because he wanted to save it, I reckon,” Frank said, and put his hand back on Al’s back.

“I can tell her you’re busy if you want?” Al offered.

“No. The customer is always right. And anyway she’d know better. You go ahead of me though, and I’ll wait a minute. Don’t want to look—” he hunted for the correct word.

“Solicitous?” Al suggested.

“That’s it,” Frank said. “You go ahead. I got to make a phone call anyway,” he said, and went back into the office and called the hotel for Dave. Two things: Don’t get mad, and invite him to dinner.

Edith listened to this conversation, too, working away and not looking up. After he hung up, feeling a little better, it was the best he could do under the circumstances anyway, Frank looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and turned on his heel to go up front, to the display room.

This was Frank’s jewelry store the heart of it familiar to him as the operating room to the surgeon and, he often thought, he was just as sentimental about it and its social service and as cold-blooded about the money it made.

Anyway he never failed to get a small prickle of pride when he walked into it as well as a slight sense of astonishment that he should be in the jewelry business, instead of some other.

It wasn’t much. Except for its stock, there was almost nothing to distinguish the place itself from almost any other store on the square. He had inherited both the furnishings and their arrangement from the tenant before him, a druggist. Ever since getting it he had intended to do it all over (with Agnes’s redecorating help) in modernistic style, but had never felt quite flush enough to lay out the dough although he always had dough for some other project, so the store remained, comfortably dingy and undistinguished, like an abused old friend who can always be abused because he is an old friend, but a stranger in town would have been hard put to find anything at all individual about it.

In this familiarity, then, stood Mrs Stevens and her about-to-be-married daughter, Virginia, surrounded by silverware place settings strewn up and down the glass cases, only one of them talking to Al, as Frank came up.

“Hello, Mrs Stevens?” he smiled. “And, Virginia. How are you?”

Al moved out of the way.

“We weren’t really meaning to select anything definite today, Frank,” Mrs Stevens, who plainly had no intention of giving up all this pleasure in one afternoon, told him. “We were just looking, weren’t we, Virginia.”

“Yes,” Virginia said levelly.

“That’s quite all right,” Frank said. “Look all you want. Make yourselves right at home.”

“We did want to see what you had,” Mrs Stevens said. “As I told Virginia, if it’s available in Parkman, Frank Hirsh will have it. But we didn’t want to bother you. Did we, Virginia.”

“No,” Virginia said.

“You didn’t bother me,” Frank protested. “That’s what I’m here for. I was sittin back in the office bored to death.” He turned to the girl. “I haven’t had a chance to offer my best wishes yet, Virginia.”

“Thank you, Mr Hirsh,” she said in that same level tone—as if she were concentrating hard on producing every word and gesture required of her, and jealously intent upon not showing one thing more.

“You don’t carry the Towle line, do you, Frank?” Mrs Stevens asked.

“No, I sure don’t, Mrs Stevens.”

Al had waited a minute, like Frank had taught him, and then moved off to wait on some of the other customers.

“But now if it’s Towle you’re interested in,” Frank said, “Old Simon Clatfelter across the square carries Towle, Mrs Stevens. I’d be glad to call him up for you?”

“Simon Clatfelter?” Mrs Stevens murmured. “
He
carries Towle?”

“Yes; fact is, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been able to stock it. Towle feels the town’s too small for two dealers. I’d be glad to call Simon for you, if you’d like to see what he has in it?” Frank offered.

“Oh no,” Mrs Stevens said. “Not today. I’m afraid it’s too late today.”

“Well, I’ve got a leaflet of Towle patterns around here someplace, if you’d like to look at it.”

“Oh no,” Mrs Stevens said and looked at her watch. “Well, yes. Perhaps for just a minute. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

“Why, no trouble at all,” Frank said. “I picked it up at the Chicago Gift Show last fall, when I was hopin to get Towle in. I’ll get it for you.” He turned around to a drawer.

“Well. All right. Yes, that would be nice,” she said. “We’ll just glance at it. Don’t you think that would be nice, Virginia.”

Virginia appeared to be lost in some bitter (or sweet, Frank suddenly thought) reminiscence or dream of her own. “Yes, that would be nice,” she said levelly.

“Here we are,” Frank said, and spread it out on the counter. Covertly, he looked Virginia over. She was a rather attractive, wide-hipped girl. Slender but widely hipped. He did not remember having seen her since she started at Indiana. It was funny how little girls you had known all their lives and paid no attention to suddenly became big girls with wide hips and you noticed them. Virginia didn’t look too awfully hepped up about her forthcoming marriage he thought.

“Oh, they have some lovely traditional patterns,” Mrs Stevens said without looking up. “Why— Here’s Old Colonial. Why I had an aunt who had that.”

“You like the traditional?” Frank asked her, but looking at Virginia’s black hair parted in the middle, which fell loosely from both sides of her bent face as she looked, and thinking about young Arthur Bookwright and the Arkansas private. Harold Bookwright had (privately, of course) said that she looked like an awfully good piece. And he had not believed it.

Out in the office, the phone rang again. And he remembered Dave.

When it rang, everyone in the store instinctively stopped moving and stopped talking, with that intent self-absorption Americans always get when a phone rings and they hope or dread it is for them. Al Lowe went back to ask the girl who it was for.

“For you, Frank!”

“Be right there!”

The people in the store started living again.

“Modern is so plain,” Mrs Stevens answered him. “Silver should call up lovely visions, of court banquets, and lighted candles and romance.”

“I,” Virginia said suddenly, in a low but quite clear voice, “think I am more attracted to the plainness of the modern.”

The sudden murderousness of it with its deliberate implications startled all of them, even Virginia. Then the start faded off her face and was replaced by a bold look of audacity, with which she stared at her mother in the silence.

“Well, a lot of discriminating young people are buyin modern nowadays,” Frank said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Mrs Stevens said, and smiled. “I guess it’s just we old dogs who can’t change our spots,” she laughed nervously.

“For one thing, the modern’s very easy to keep clean,” Frank said. “Will you excuse me a minute, Mrs Stevens? Virginia? I have to get that phone.”

Mrs Stevens smiled. “Why, of course, Frank. You go right ahead.”

He half-bowed to them and went out back, hoping the call wasn’t about Dave, but thinking more about Virginia Stevens and her Arkansas private. Whatever he had, it was evidently what Virginia liked and appreciated. He must have really satisfied her. She had sure peeled the old lady.

Frank suddenly felt kinglike; and there was a diffusion of excitement all through his stomach as he answered the phone.

The call was another friendly call congratulating him on Dave’s safe return. This caller did not conceal his malice, either. But Frank hardly noticed because he was preoccupied with a bewitching picture of Virginia Stevens being satisfied.

He was careful not to look at Edith Barclay when he hung up. He sometimes had the feeling she could read his mind. He went back out front. He could hardly wait to get back and start looking at Virginia again.

The two women, mother and daughter, were still at the counter and talking to each other animatedly. Then they shut up, as he came closer. Mrs Stevens turned to him charmingly.

“We really must run along,” she smiled. “Thanks so much, Frank. You’ve been very helpful and I know we’ve taken up your time.”

“Not at all,” Frank said, restraining himself from looking at Virginia more than casually. “Glad to be of service.”

“Thank you, Mr Hirsh,” Virginia said in that same defiant-eyed peculiar voice.

“You’re quite welcome, Virginia,” he said. “And I want to wish you the greatest happiness.”

He stood at the counter as they went to the door, feeling exultant, not only because of having handled them so well, but also because he was now free to look his fill at the Arkansas private’s conquest—at least until they had got into their coats and opened the door and gone.

Frank watched her struggling into the coat, and was filled with an almost uncontainable exuberance. She was living proof of a theory dear to his heart, and which he had been trying to convince himself of for years.

Women, Frank now believed, loved only one thing more than bed, and that was the fiction that they did not love it at all.

In a lot of ways, she made him think of Al Lowe’s wife. But then, he knew what Geneve was like. And besides, Geneve did it for what she could get out of it. Maybe she liked it, but basically she did it for what she could get out of it, and that disqualified her. And anyway he did not consider Geneve respectable. Virginia Stevens, he did. Frank suddenly wanted badly to go to bed with his wife.

When Virginia and her mother had left, he went to call the judge about his invitation to Dave. He felt so kinglike, he even believed he could handle that problem without too much undue publicity.

After the call, he hurried into his topcoat, and winked at Edith Barclay, and told her to take the rest of the afternoon off. He left the store to go home and brief his wife about tonight’s dinner for Dave. By the time he pulled the car into the drive, the passionate desire for her was no longer with him.

E
DITH
B
ARCLAY DID NOT
take the rest of the afternoon off. Instead she stayed in the office and worked on up to closing time.

There wasn’t really much work to do. But had she taken the afternoon she’d only have spent it loafing in McGee’s Pharmacy drinking Cokes by herself with no one to talk to; or else in a shopping expedition she didn’t need and could ill afford; or in going home. It was too late for the matinee, and anyway she had a date for that tonight and had planned to stay after work and redo her nails.

Besides, she was upset about the boss. She knew a lot more about her boss than he gave her credit for knowing. It hadn’t taken much accidental listening to the boss’s phone conversations today for her to know what had happened.

Edith knew all about Brother Dave’s scandal. Edith’s grandmother had been the Hirshes’ cleaning woman for years and hated Frank Hirsh (and his success) as only an unsuccessful old woman could; it was her favorite topic, and one of her two favorite stories (the other was how Frank married Agnes for her father’s variety store) was the story of Brother Dave’s youthful scandal.

It was a silly scandal, Edith thought, one that could have happened to any two high school kids who didn’t know how to take care of themselves, but it could cause the boss a lot of embarrassment, especially if you took things like that hard, the way the boss did.

At five-thirty, Al Lowe came back to the office with the cash to lock up in the big square floor safe they both had access to. Edith heard him coming. She started filing some colored ad circulars.

“You staying late again?” Al said as he closed the safe.

“I have a few little things I want to get finished up before I leave,” she said without looking up.

“Well,” Al said, rising and leaning on the safe. “See you then, Edith.”

“See you tomorrow,” Edith said and continued filing.

Another of the things she knew about her boss that he did not guess she knew was that in her year there the boss had been carrying on a sporadic affair with Al Lowe’s wife. This had the effect of always making her dislike Al and feel irritated with him. She also knew (this from her grandmother, whose purpose in life was the acquisition of such things) that the affair had been going on since 1942, Al’s first year in the Army, and was the reason for Al’s job with Frank Herschmidt—a kind of sop, her grandmother said, a herring (her grandmother always insisted vehemently that Frank Herschmidt was Jewish, although the whole town knew for a fact the family was German) to draw Al’s big fat nose off the trail. But Edith had to admit to herself that as to facts this time, wherever it was Jane her grandmother got her information, for once the old bag was right. They were having an affair, all right. Just where Al figured in it Edith wasn’t sure. If he didn’t know about it, he was just plain dumb. If he did know, he was pretty smart and quite an opportunist. Whichever the case, she certainly had no intention of ever giving Al Lowe any opportunities for considering her as a possible consolation prize.

Self-conscious and angry, she went on with her filing (Al was already gone) filled with a disgust for him which wasn’t really disgust but her own fear that she might someday marry a man who would love and appreciate her so little he would allow her to step out on him if she wanted to or worse yet, would not even know about it.

Up front, the oblivious Al finished locking up. There was the mild confusion as he and the repairman and the country girl (Edith, too, always thought of her as the country girl) left, and then she was alone in the darkened store lit only by the fluorescent night-light up front and the two display windows that the night cop would switch off from outside at ten o’clock all around the square.

In the silence, Edith finished filing the circulars without haste. She leaned back and lit a cigarette, sprawling in the spring-backed chair in a very female way that would have been very attractive to a man, had one been there to see it.

Edith knew a lot of other things about her boss, too. She knew all about Old Man Herschmidt, about Frank’s numerous affairs through the years since he married Agnes, and she knew all about Agnes herself. She couldn’t very well help knowing, living day in day out in the same house with Jane her grandmother. There wasn’t much she could do to help about Brother Dave, but she did wish she could get the boss out of the clutches of that gold digger Geneve Lowe. He was such an easy mark, even if he did think he knew it all. Edith was new to the chronic disease of boss-fever, the occupational hazard of unmarried office girls, and sometimes the loyalties that possessed her concerning the boss got so violent they surprised her.