Some Came Running (17 page)

He was already half mad. What with the painful discussion of Proust, and the abortively affectionate turn the whole evening had taken. He tossed off the rest of his drink, and was not relieved.

Dawn squirmed around in the chair facing him and settled herself to talk unaware she was exposing as she did so a portion of young thigh still faintly colored by summer tan.

“You were a protégé of Saroyan, weren’t you?” she said, “out
there.
”

Dave could not keep his eyes from looking covertly at the line of his niece’s skirt hiding the rest of her bare athletic thigh. Outwardly embarrassed, inwardly raging, he toyed with his empty glass and tried to stare at the cherry in it.

“Lord no, I never met the man.”

“I read your stories and the books. You know, the ones Aunt Francine sent us. They sounded a lot like Saroyan.”

“Oh, we all copied him,” Dave said, “during the thirties. Him or Steinbeck, if you lived in California. In the East, it was Thomas Wolfe. They were the only ones that sold.” Ought to make a recording.

He had not had a woman since a week before he was discharged. He wished now he had thought of that before coming down here where there weren’t any whorehouses. There used to be some down in Terre Haute when he was a kid. But doubtless the war had closed all those.

He sure hoped ’Bama wasn’t kidding about that woman.

“What’s it really like,” Dawn asked, “out
there
? Is it really as fabulous as they say it is?”

Her face eager, Dawn shifted her bottom in the chair and pulled her skirt down, instinctively, without even looking down or realizing it had been up. In spite of the relief he felt Dave suffered a tender regret, it was like watching the curtain come down on a play you had enjoyed.

“I don’t know what it’s like if you’ve got money. Without money, it’s just
like
everyplace else.”

“But you’re going back out there, though. Aren’t you?” Dawn said, smiling that brilliant seductive smile. All her former reserve seemed suddenly to have evaporated, as if she’d forgotten.

“Only because I’ve got a job waitin for me,” Dave lied, rolling the cherry around in the glass.

“At the studios?”

Dave nodded. If he had of had one, he’d be damned if he’d take it.

“Which studio did you work for?”

“Universal, mostly. RKO, a little.” It sounded almost good, when you said it that way. Seven class-Z westerns was what it really was, as a junior writer, and then they had never used a single line he had written.

“Oh, sometimes I wish I were a man!” Dawn said. “Men get to do so many more things than women do. I don’t think it’s fair.”

“Well, women can do lots of things men can’t, too,” Dave said. “I’ve often wished I was a woman.”

“What,” Dawn demanded. “Name one.”

He realized he’d dug himself into a hole. “Oh, lots of things,” he said vaguely.

“If you’re referring to sex,” his seventeen-year-old niece said without embarrassment, “even that isn’t true. Men get to go out and sleep with all kinds of women whenever they want, and nobody but their wives thinks a thing about it. But women can’t do that.”

“I guess that’s right,” Dave said, “except that some of them do.” He wished to hell Frank would come back.

“Oh well! That kind,” Dawn said, and shifted her woman’s bottom girlishly in the chair again, and went back to her point.

“Men get to do all kinds of things women don’t. You left home when you were my age and bummed around the country and lived your own life and had experiences. That’s what made you an artist. But what if I wanted to write? You think I’d ever get a chance to do that? Even if Frank and Agnes would let me, which they wouldn’t, I still couldn’t do it because I’m a female.”

“Are you writing?” Dave said, with relief.

“Oh no. Acting is my field. Didn’t Wally tell you?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. Movies?”

“Heavens, no! I don’t want to go to Hollywood,” Dawn said. “I want to really act.”

Dave nodded. “New York, then.”

“From what I understand,” Dawn said, “the only way to go to Hollywood is to go there direct from New York, anyway. With a name.”

“I guess it helps,” Dave said. He was suddenly aware that he was being complimented—complimented?—with the bestowal of confidences the rest of the family probably never had heard.

“I’ve made plans,” Dawn said. “I may not even go to college.”

“College never helped any kind of an artist,” Dave said.

“There, you just proved my point. That’s why I mean to go to New York and make my own break. But don’t tell the folks.”

“Well now, wait a minute,” Dave hedged. “That’s a pretty tough row to hoe in New York. There’s lots of competition.”

“Not if you’ve got what it takes,” Dawn said.

“Well, a little college training wouldn’t hurt you there,” he hedged. He suddenly felt very inadequate to advise anybody, especially a seventeen-year-old niece with such a passion for acting it would allow her to tear up roots like a man furiously clearing a pasture.

“Well, if a person wants to do a thing,” Dawn said, looking pleased that she had frightened him, “he or she ought to do it, without trying to hedge or be safe.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dave saw Frank come into the dining room still holding his drink. Dawn heard him, and rearranged her face. Frank’s face looked congested Dave noticed, as if there must have been quite a scene in the kitchen. Probably over himself. Frank gulped off part of his drink and came into the living room smiling.

The scene in the kitchen had not been over Dave. It had been over the fact that Agnes had caught him sneaking drinks of the straight rye and had taken him to task for it with a whip-tongued vengeance. The result, of course, was, he wanted to drink more.

“What’re you two gabbin about?” he said cheerfully, taking Dave’s glass.

“We’ve been discussing Marcel Proust,” Dawn said.

“Who’s he?” Frank said.

“Oh, Daddy!” Dawn said, flushing.

“What’s the matter? Did I say the wrong thing?”

“You do know who Proust is,” Dawn said. “The writer. I was just talking to you about him the other night.” She hadn’t been. She had never read him.

“I don’t remember it.” Frank’s hearty laugh was a little too hearty, especially for a man with his embarrassed face. “My God, child. I can’t remember all the writers you talk to me about. I got to make a livin for this family.”

“He always acts like that,” Dawn said, smiling at Dave with desperate levity. “You’d think he never read a book in his life.”

“Well, I haven’t, except for one or two,” Frank grinned.

“Oh, Daddy! Please stop acting like a country farmer! It doesn’t become you!” Under the light smile on her face, there was an edge in her voice. She got up suddenly from the chair, collected her book, and walked with her woman’s body above which floated the desperate child’s face into the hall where the stairway was.

“Wait a minute. Where you think you’re going?” Frank said.

“Why, upstairs. To read,” Dawn said. “I can’t concentrate here with you men talking.”

“But supper’ll be ready in a little bit,” Frank said. “I mean dinner.”

“Well? Can’t you call me, silly?” Dawn said. “You’ll want your big chair. And I can’t read on the davenport.” She turned her smile upon Dave as she turned away and was gone before Frank had a chance to answer.

Frank looked for a moment as if he wasn’t sure whether he should order her back and reprimand her. Then he sank into the big leather armchair with an affected “Ahhh!” of satisfaction.

“She’s an awful tempermental kid,” he said proudly, and then realized he still had Dave’s glass in his hand. “Wait, I’ll get you another drink.”

“Thanks,” Dave said. He was debating whether he should ask Frank about the possibility of getting a woman in Parkman, and whether Frank would guess it was his daughter’s figure that had brought it on. He decided against. Frank would probably let on he didn’t know anyway.

On his way to the buffet, Frank furtively drank off the rest of his own drink. As he mixed them both new ones, he kept on talking about Dawn back over his shoulder.

“She’s really a very talented girl. But she’s awful headstrong. And now she’s got this idea about bein an actress. She’s always more or less wanted to be an actress. Myself, I think she ought to do somethin in the artistic line like that. she’s too smart and too egotistical to ever be happy as just a housewife. But now I think she’s got the idea that four years at college would just be wastin her time. Every time we try to talk to her about college, she just clams up on us. And she’ll graduate next June. It’s time she ought to be thinkin about her college.”

Frank left off working on the drinks to peek at the kitchen door, and then took a stiff shot of the straight rye. Then he went on talking about college. If acting was what his daughter wanted, by God, that was what she was going to have. But she was going to have to go to school, and that was all there was to it, and he was afraid he was going to have to set his foot down.

Upstairs in the two little sloping-roofed rooms and bath, which she had decorated herself and liked to call her apartment, Dawn lay face down on her bed in a misery so overwhelming it made suicide seem enjoyable. She should never have let out her secret to Dave, he would almost certainly tell Frank. And she should
never
have taken
The Remembrance of Things Past
down there in order for Dave to see her reading it. But how was she to know the only artist in the family would think Proust was passé. Almost any other book would have been better. And Frank. Frank had made it ten times worse. And Agnes acting like a giggly schoolgirl. The book lay on the floor where she had dropped it, and she had no inclination to pick it up, now or ever again, who the hell wanted to read Proust, and she looked around her place, which she had done herself, and it all seemed horrible, horrible, and crappy, and middle class. Just like she herself, who had made it. Just like the crappy high-school dramatics training, and all the crappy middle-class Middle Western colleges with their horrible crappy middle-class dramatics, well she was not going to any crappy Midwest college and study horrible dramatics, they could say what they wanted, and they could just wait, by God, son of a bitch, and see. Swearing didn’t help. She wanted to die.

Downstairs, Frank brought the fresh drinks back into the living room. “As a matter of fact, I’m just as glad the girl did go upstairs,” he said, “because I’ve got somethin I want to talk to you about. Before the Frenches get here.”

“Yes? What’s that?” Dave said. He already knew though.

“Well,” Frank said, sitting down again with that same affected “Ahhh!” of satisfaction, “it’s about your plans. For the future.”

“That’s simple,” Dave said. “I haven’t got any.”

It had suddenly gotten like a poker game between them, in the room, as if it were the back room at the Elks or the American Legion. There should have been a few steel gray cones of tobacco smoked light coming down from the ceiling, Dave thought, remembering what a good poker player Frank always had been.

“It’s also about this money you’ve got deposited in the Second National Bank,” Frank said, sipping his drink.

“What about it?” Dave said.

“There’s no sense in us beatin around the bush,” Frank said. “A good friend of mine called me up and told me you deposited fifty-five hundred dollars in the Second National not ten minutes after you did it. And if you didn’t know that would happen, you’re a lot dumber than I think you are.” He grinned at Dave without rancor.

“I didn’t think anything about it one way or the other,” Dave said. “It just happened to be the bank nearest the hotel.”

“Well, it’s none of my business where you put your money. It’s not goin to break me, or seriously injure the bank I’m with. But I think you ought to plan to do somethin with that money.”

“I’m planning to live on it,” Dave said.

“You mind if I ask how you got it?”

“I won it. On the boat comin home from Europe,” Dave said.

Frank sipped his drink. “Well, I’ve given that money of yours a lot of thought in the last six hours,” he said. “And I’ve got an idea. As a matter of fact, you gave me the idea.”

“I did?” The poker tension was getting deeper. As Frank had intended it should, Dave thought. You’ve got to watch him, he’s got something up his sleeve, and he’s going to use it on you, just to get that money out of that bank. If for nothing else.

“And that’s one reason I figured I’d give you a chance to get in on it first.”

“Well,” Dave said, “I don’t—”

“It’s one of the best deals for a good investment I’ve seen in some time,” Frank interrupted. It reminded Dave of a heavy tank he had seen in France once, outside St Lo, rolling steadily and peacefully over a forest of young saplings. “You said something in the car tonight, Dave, about how this town ought to be able to support a taxi service. I never thought of it before, and neither has anybody else I know of, but it’s true.”

“Well, the only reason I said that—” Dave said.

Frank waved his hand. “It’s not important why you said it. It’s a helluva good idea. So why can’t the two of us go into it? I’ve got a little loose money to invest and if you want to put your fifty-five hundred dollars in, I’ll put up seven thousand dollars and make you a junior partner. I think that’s a fair deal.”

“I think it’s a lot more than fair,” Dave said. He meant it. Once more, he had been caught completely off balance. “But I’m just not interested in anything like that. A business.”

“And why not? We buy three or four good used cars,” Frank said, “I think I know where I can get us a deal on those. I’m a silent partner in the Dodge-Plymouth agency. And hire some drivers cheap and rent one of those little buildings just off the square for a taxi stand, put in a phone, and we’re in business. Not too much capital outlay. And it’d be a good little moneymaker from now on.”

“I’m sure it would be,” Dave said, “but I don’t know anything about business, Frank. Why don’t you put up the same as me and make me a full partner?”

“I don’t think eleven thousand dollars will be enough to swing it,” Frank said, sipping his drink. “Cars are awful high right now. Probably need runnin capital for the first two three months, too.”