Some Came Running (150 page)

It had all started, of course, with Frank asking to have Old Janie Staley and her granddaughter Edith seated “within the ribbon” at Dawn’s wedding. That was really incredibly dumb of him. He had handled it shrewdly, but it was nonetheless dumb. She had thought nothing of it at the time, what with Old Jane being sick and all. And, in fact, she had not thought of it at the wedding either when she saw them sitting there together. And yet, looking back later, it was as if in some automatic way, it had all registered with her right then, to be filed away and digested later. Mostly, it was Edith’s face: When she saw it then—so closed and so self-contained, so efficient and so careful—a girl that young just oughtn’t to have that kind of a face, Agnes felt. And it had struck her, forcibly.

She did nothing at the time, and indeed thought nothing, actually. Was not even suspicious. But later on, when Edith bought herself a house on her grandmother’s insurance money, the tumblers in Agnes’s head suddenly seemed to fall into place. In the first place, she was surprised to find Old Janie actually had that much insurance. It just didn’t seem like Jane. But the second thing, even more disturbing to Agnes’s rationality, was the fact that after Edith did buy and redecorate her house—she did not ask her father to come live in it with her!

Agnes could not quite bring herself to believe that Frank would ever actually buy the girl a house, even if he was sleeping with her. Not the way Frank liked money. And not the way he had been scraping everything together to put into his new shopping center. But then, that was largely a thing of the past now: the scraping; from now on it would be the collecting. And she had also become gradually aware that Frank had acquired really powerful contacts in Springfield. All of this added up together to the fact that he
could
have bought the girl a house; though Agnes still doubted it.

But then, everything had changed for them—in the past year. And now with the shopping center going steadily up every day, would be changing even more. They had become really rich. And were really viewed as such, in the town. It was clearly apparent from the invitations and offers of friendship Agnes had been getting: They were moving right up in with the Wernzes and the Scotts and the Crowders.

When, after repeatedly analyzing the knowledge presented her, she finally decided to make her move to find proof—or disproof—she found it amazingly easy to do. Just about everybody was willing to help her—without even wanting to know why. Agnes had discovered, finally, that she had almost limitless satellites.

She moved cautiously. First, there was the check Edith had received for the “insurance money.” Almost certainly it would not be from Frank himself; he would surely have had someone send it—if it were indeed from him. Second, there was the insurance itself.

The check she found out about from Mrs Florence Duboise, who worked at the Second National Bank as a cashier. Mrs Florence Duboise had been a member of Agnes’s former bridge club; and Agnes still saw her occasionally. Mrs Florence Duboise, at tea, was most obsequiously anxious to tell Agnes everything she knew about everything. So obsequious, in fact, that it rather disgusted Agnes; though, of course, she never let it be known. The talk, deftly, was brought around to poor old Janie Staley and her death. Agnes even wept a few tears—real tears they were—for Janie. She was so glad that Jane had been wise enough to have taken out insurance. Edith would never have been able to buy herself such a darling little house if it had not been for the thoughtfulness of Old Janie, and Agnes was very glad for her. When Mrs Florence Duboise left, Agnes had the name of the company upon which the rather large insurance check had been drawn.

The insurance Agnes handled an entirely different way. Although in her techniques of doing so she employed the same forces: She merely wrote a letter to another very dear friend of hers like Mrs Florence Duboise in Indianapolis. Mrs Georgia Sheldon was a divorcée who had made a good settlement and moved to Indianapolis and employed herself with one of the oldest insurance houses in the city, as a private secretary.

And Georgia was just as anxiously, if not as obsequiously, eager to be of help to Agnes as Mrs Florence Duboise was—what with the turn the fortunes of the Frank Hirshes had taken in the last year. In her letter to Georgia, she merely asked if Georgia could find out for her if any large insurance policies had ever been issued to Mrs Jane Staley. Agnes did not tell her why she wanted the information. She did not need to. Not with Georgia Sheldon: Georgia had not been private secretary to a big important man for years for nothing. She never said anything to anybody about anything; and she never asked anybody questions when questions were not needed. In her letter, couched in the form of simply a friendly, conversational letter, Agnes also asked if Georgia knew anything at all about an obscure little company in Springfield, and gave the name of the company that had been on the check.

It was the answer to this letter that came back to her early in August, nearly a month later. It had been a bad long month for Agnes—and not only because of the hot weather.

Most of the time, she felt guilty as hell. It was a shameful thing to do to poor Frank—when he so obviously, she was quite sure, loved her as much as he did. And, in fact, she told herself, over and over, she
couldn’t
believe that Frank was actually having a hot and heavy love affair with some strip of a girl when he and she had been so loving and close for so long. It would have been a personal affront of such magnitude that no husband in the world would have done it to his wife—not when he was loving her as much as Frank was. And Frank would not do that to her. And actually, she told herself, she was only writing the damned letter just to prove it to herself—just to
show
herself what a really foul, suspicious-minded bitch she was. And she hated herself for doing it.

But there had, she knew, been a noticeable falling-off of their lovemaking the past month or two. And she knew, also, that this was entirely her fault: She just was not as warm and ardent as she had been. She couldn’t help it. And she knew Frank had sensed it, and was disturbed by it. Although he never said anything. And most of all, she wanted to rectify this. If she could just clear her own mind, they could get everything back to what it had been. Maybe, when she proved to herself how wrong she was, she would confess it to him—if she was sure he would only be amused—then it would clear the air, and they would have back their old warmth and closeness.

Most of the time, truthfully, Agnes was wanting to kick herself right in the tail for being the kind of suspicious bitch she was.

But the rest of the time, she would be filled with such a furious anger at the thought that it
might
be true, that she would actually shake inside. If it was true—and he had been actually doing this to her, secretly, while she had been giving herself, her whole soul to him— Well, it was such a personal indignity, an actual
physical
indignity, to her, that she could hardly bear to even think of it. It made her feel sickened all over. If it was true, she would think flamingly, then she would make him pay, in some such horribly unspeakable way, that he would wish fervently that he had never even seen a woman before.
Any
woman. But then the guilt would return and haunt her, at what an unspeakable suspicious bitch she was. It just couldn’t be true.

When the letter from Georgia Sheldon finally arrived, Agnes sat with it at her secretary, unopened. Feeling weak and shaky and already half sick from days of stewing, she sat for a long time with it that way, unopened, and just looked at it. She was halfway tempted to throw it away and not open it. She was, in fact, almost afraid to open it. Either way, whether she was right, or whether she was wrong, she was going to feel terrible. If she was right, she would feel horrible and hopeless, degraded, at what he, Frank, had done to her. But if she was wrong, she would feel even worse, perhaps: She would have to face what a jealous, mean, suspicious old harridan of a bitch she really was. Actually, she wasn’t sure which was worse. Right then, she promised herself—before God—that if she was wrong, she would make a full confession of what she had done, make it to Frank this very night. No, it couldn’t be tonight; he was in Springfield again. Well, she would do it tomorrow when he returned. But even so, even after promising herself, she still sat and looked at the letter, looked a long time, without opening it. Finally, her fingers trembling, she got her letter knife and slit it.

It was all there. Neatly typed by Georgia, and couched in the same friendly type of letter she herself had written, it was all there. There had never been any large insurance policies issued to Mrs Jane Staley of Parkman, Illinois, by any company. There had been one small policy of five hundred dollars issued to her years ago by some obscure cheap firm. And the company in Springfield, which Agnes had mentioned, was
not
an insurance company but was an investment firm, bonds and real estate, and an insurance
agency.
She, Georgia, had had to go through a credit reference firm she knew to get this information, which was one reason she had not answered sooner. The firm was apparently a front organization, one of many, for a very wealthy speculator from Chicago and Springfield, and she gave the name of Frank’s Greek friend, who was in with him and with Clark Hibbard’s father-in-law in the building of the shopping center.

Agnes read it all through—at least the parts with the information—and then merely sat and looked at it. It was exactly what she had suspected. Her jealous, mean, bitchy, suspicious-minded mind had been exactly right.

Well, she tried to tell herself desperately, maybe she was still wrong. This didn’t prove that it was Frank who bought the house for her. Maybe it had been some other man, who also knew the Greek. She tried to cling to this thought, desperately, for a moment; but it wasn’t any good. Her mind wouldn’t let her cling to it. She
knew.

That was the worst. She did know. That he could do this to her—when they had been so very warm and close this past year. That was the most exquisitely hurtful thing of all. That he could, while making ardent love to her, actually do this to her. Agnes could not even describe to herself what it made her feel. Not long ago she had read a book on the Nazi war crimes trials and on the concentration camps, and in it had been a horrible picture of naked women being forced to run across a field. And that was how this made her feel. An actual violation of her person. A degradation no less strong than if she had been stripped naked and tied with a rope and dragged through all the filth and mire in the world.

Piecing it all together, she figured back and decided, accurately, that he had, in fact, been sleeping with this young chit of a whore
before
he had even gone back to sleeping with
her,
with Agnes. It violated every concept of love that she had ever had learned or believed. She had broken him loose from that damned coldblooded Geneve Lowe; and he had sulked for months afterwards. And she had known he would come back to her, and had waited patiently. And now she knew the
real
reason he had come back: He had gotten over his smart by taking up with this little chippy, when she Agnes did not know about it, and so had assuaged his vanity at being triumphed over; and that was why he had been willing to come back, magnanimously, to her. So really it hadn’t been love that had brought him back at all. Not love for her, Agnes, at all. What brought him back, really, was just that he thought he had outsmarted her, and could degrade her in that way. Yes, degrade her. So now, Agnes knew the whole truth. Weak and shaky, she sat at the secretary and looked at the letter, unbelievingly.

And not only that, he had bought his whore a
house.
And not only
that,
he had gone through his business friend the Greek—who had met Agnes herself, and had been right here in their home—to do it.

Well, she was not going to have it. She was not going to put up with it. He had destroyed her; but he was not going to continue to destroy her.

But, as she sat thinking about it in a flaming pain and rage, as she cast about in her mind for the best way to break this thing up, it suddenly dawned upon Agnes that there wasn’t really much of anything she could do about it. This situation was not the same as it had been with Geneve Lowe, not the same at all: Geneve had had her job and her reputation to look after. This girl, this Edith, held her job with Frank; only Frank could fire her. Also, what was more important, she had her house; and she could live in it forever if she wanted to. Her house, that was bought and was paid for and was in her own name.

You could not even go to her father about it. Although anyone who even considered going to John Barclay about
any
thing was already grasping at straws.

Frank had fixed it up so it was nearly ironclad. There were no handles sticking out anywhere for her to grasp. And that house—that changed everything. He would never have been able to have done it, would never have been able to get this far along with it, if she had not been off her guard. But she had been off her guard. And why? Because she had been fool enough, and soft enough, to think he was really in love with her again. Oh, fool, fool!

Well, it had always been that way, hadn’t it? Why did she let herself get taken in by him? The truth was, he had never loved her, even from the first. He had used her, just like he used everything and everybody in his life. But most of all he had used
her:
her work, her time and thought and planning, even her money—her own father’s store—were all the things that had put him where he was today. And what did he do with his first success? He went out and got himself a mistress, a cheap little mistress, and bought a house for her and installed her in it. And she, his wife, was expected to simply sit back and accept this humiliation in the eyes of the town.

Well, it was what she got for marrying beneath her: He was nothing but a bum, a jewelry store clerk, when she married him—and gave him her own father’s store. Agnes had broken him away from one trashy woman after another, all these years, and now here was another one—only this time he had gone even further—had bought her a
house!
What kind of a woman was it, who would accept a
house
from a married man?