Some Came Running (43 page)

“However,” he said, “you are both invited to accompany me to the Grange if you would like.”

“No thanks,” Dave said. “You two go and I’ll go on home. I don’t know the first thing about farming, or farming politics.”

“It isn’t really a farming or political organization anymore,” Bob said. “That was years ago. Today it’s only social.”

“Yes,” Gwen said almost sourly. “The women all get together on one side and talk about quilts and how to make pickles; and the men get together on the other side and talk about—what?” she asked, looking at her father.

“Mostly crops,” Bob said. “And whether to draw to an inside straight.”

“And whether to have another drink,” Gwen said.

“It is true,” Bob smiled, “that they sometimes discuss the virtues of homemade applejack over the boughten. Excuse me, I must get my coat.”

“Look,” Dave said, getting up from the table too. “Why don’t you two go ahead to the Grange meeting and I’ll go on home. That would be better all the way around.” Once again he had that feeling there was something going on here he was missing, was not in on. Whatever it was, he had no intention of spending two or three self-effacing hours here alone with Gwen, trying unsuccessfully and without confidence to make her. Or even spending two or three hours and not trying. It was all uphill work, doomed from the start, the way
this
evening had gone. “I’ve got some things I’ve got to do for Frank tomorrow anyway,” he said.

Another evening maybe, he thought, another evening might be a better one. After all, this was only the first time he’d been here.

“Nonsense!” Bob said. “I won’t hear of it. If Guinevere wishes to go with me, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay here by yourself and enjoy the books and records and the fire until we return.” He paused and looked back at them from the door, not one of the doors at the far end, but the single door up here in the sitting room end which led, he had said earlier, into the unfinished dining room. Standing there, with that long, spare frame above the long, spare legs in that stooped slouch, and grayed crew-cut head and the long, full mustache on the aging face, he looked so perfectly like the epitome of the professorial type, which, of course, in a way he was, that it didn’t seem fair. All he needed was glasses.

“You know I never go to those things,” Gwen said to him.

“Well then, you and Dave can stay here, and everything will have worked itself out just fine, and you will be here should young Wally come,” Bob said, and opened the door and went through it.

Neither of the younger people said anything for a moment.

“Well . . .” Gwen said finally, and got up and began to collect the dirty plates and silverware and salad bowls. “Honestly!” she said, “sometimes he makes me so damned mad.”

“I’ll help you with the dishes,” Dave said, moving to help her collect them. “Then I’ll have to be going. I’ve got a lot of things I have to do for Frank tomorrow.” Reaching for a plate he thought with amused self-derision of his love poem which he had intended to get said to her hook or crook tonight. Heh-heh. Yeah, that would be great now, wouldn’t it.

“No, no. You don’t need to,” Gwen said, intercepting him. “It’s no trouble. I have the dishwasher.” She finished stacking them and carried them down the room to the sink. “You make yourself comfortable and relax.”

“Well, I’ll have a cigarette and another cup of coffee,” Dave said. “But then I’ll have to get going.”

“You might as well stay awhile,” she said from the sink. “I’ve got a couple of things I want to talk to you about.” She went on about rinsing the dishes and fitting them into the automatic washer.

Dave poured himself another cup of coffee from the stove, without looking at her, and carried it back to the coffee table in front of the fire. The fire was still eating its way into the huge back log without any appreciable diminishment of it. He wondered how they had gotten that huge log in there. All he could think about now was getting away from here; from her, from Bob, from this place, from the whole thing. It was funny, how quick you got a yen to get gone once the sex issue went out of a thing. Loneliness ate at him.

Bob French came back in through the dining room door then, wearing his topcoat and his dark slouch hat, which Dave immediately recognized from high school, a dim, almost forgotten memory. He wore it a trifle aslant, and with the brim turned down all along one side, Continental style. It always gave him a gay, debonair, dashing look, which was lovable on him because he seemed at least, to be totally unaware of it. He also carried a stick, an ivory-headed one.

“I shall walk down to the hall!” Bob said, clutching his stick like a hammer and brandishing its knob in the air, “and I shall walk back from the hall! And I
will
not wear my rubbers!”

Gwen did not say anything.

Dave grinned at him. “I’ll put some more wood on this fire, if you want, before I leave,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Bob said, “but there’s quite a trick to laying a good fire in a fireplace, you know. However, you go ahead and someday I will teach you how.”

“How did you get that great big back log on there?” Dave asked.

“There is a Negro man here in town who works some for me, amongst others,” Bob said. “He does all my really heavy work. We have several Negro families here in Israel.”

“I remember,” Dave said. “I used to play football against some of them. They always ran circles around us. Why don’t you hire me?” he said, looking around the room again.

“I’m afraid I could not afford you,” Bob said. “However, that reminds me. Why don’t you stay the night? We could talk some tonight when I return, if you like, and tomorrow I could show you our grounds.”

“I’d like to,” Dave said. “Very much. But I can’t. Have to get back to Parkman.”

“That’s too bad,” Bob said. “We don’t really have many people come here who really appreciate our place. Your brother Frank, for one, doesn’t think very much of it at all.”

“Dad,” Gwen said from the sink, but she was smiling affectionately. His airy mood had reached her, too. “You shouldn’t say things like that!”

“But it’s the truth, dear Guinevere,” Bob said. “I am not judging, I’m merely stating a simple fact.”

“The judgment is implied,” Gwen said.

“Not so,” Bob said cheerily. “Well, I must go. I hope we will have the pleasure of your presence again some time soon, Dave. And next time you come, bring some of that poetry, eh?” he said, winking. He went to the side door by which Dave had entered, and with a flourish of his stick let himself out. Gwen was looking after him, smiling. Then her face hardened, and she turned back to the sink.

“I don’t know what to do with him,” she said, not without a real anguish. “He’ll come home drunk tonight now. Whenever he goes out when he’s in this mood he always comes home drunk.”

“Him?” Dave said. “Drunk?”

“Yes,” Gwen said, “him. You didn’t know he drank like that, did you? Neither do very many other people. Mama and I have covered up for him for years. He was doing it when you and I were in high school, but you didn’t know it. And neither did anyone else.”

“You mean he’s an alcoholic?” Dave said, astounded.

“No, I don’t mean that at all,” she said. “He doesn’t do it often, just every once in a while. It’s mostly nervousness, and getting all screwed up. That’s why he doesn’t like to have guests or go out and why I don’t. He’s so softhearted, and he tries so hard to make everyone feel good. He can’t stand to see someone have a bad time. Just like this evening. I got upset, and you got upset, and poor Daddy tried to smooth everything up and make it a pleasant evening. And what difference did it make? In the end? And so he got terribly upset and all screwed up inside, and now he’ll come home drunk.

“That’s what you get with people,” Gwen said bitterly. She finished rinsing the dishes and put the last one into the washer and closed the lid and turned the timer to on. A low, rushing roar filled the kitchen. She turned back and went to cleaning the sink. “You can’t get two human beings together for more than five minutes at a time without something cropping up and some trouble of some kind starting, somebody’s vanity getting involved, some stupid petty little antagonism.” She had to talk in a near shout now, above the roar.

“Well, like you told me at Frank’s house, we are all of us still animals,” Dave said from the couch, “primitive animals.”

“Yes, but he’s civilized,” Gwen shouted. “One of the rare ones. That’s the tragedy. He’d be all right if it weren’t for people. So would the human race. If we could just live our lives without people.”

“No one can live his life without other people,” Dave said, mouthing the smug old platitude of governments because instead of feeling sympathy for her he was irritated with her.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Gwen shouted above the roar of the dishwasher. She now was cleaning off the countertop. “I’ve known it some small while.”

“Well, just between you and me,” Dave said, “I honestly fail to see why you give a damn. He’s not an alcoholic, is he? So what if he does get drunked up once in a while? He’s a poet. What difference would it make if somebody did find out about it?”

As she worked her way down the countertop toward him, she gradually lowered her voice. “Because he would have lost his job at the school,” she said now, turning on him, “that’s why. It’s very easy to be a poet and ignore public opinion, when you have a couple of women at home to do it for you.”

“Well, from the looks of this place,” Dave said, “he had enough money it wouldn’t matter if he lost the job or not.”

“I worry because of his health,” Gwen said. “He’s not as young as he used to be.” She came down from the sink, finished now, toward where he still sat on the divan before the fire. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You think I’m moralistic and narrow-minded. But that’s not what it is.” Instead of going on to the divan, or even to the other divan across the coffee table, she sat down at the big antique table in one of the ladder-backs and rested her elbows on the table, an action with so much of at-homeness in it that it showed she must have done it many times before, with just her father here. Or with no one here except herself.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “He’s so innocent and gullible. People take advantage of him all the time. He’s just naturally the kind of man people are always first to talk about, because he’s different. And I don’t want people to talk about him. They have no right to. And he’s so
damned
cute. And sweet.”

“He sure is that,” Dave said.

For a moment, they looked at each other, then simultaneously both grinned, and then laughed a little, thinking of Bob and his flourishing exit. As if he had succeeded in subtly outwitting both of them, the airy gay mood he had created for them in his leaving came back into the room, a tangible presence, as they thought about him.

“How’s your coffee?” Gwen smiled.

“It’s empty,” Dave said. He had completely forgotten it.

“I’ll make some more,” she said, and got up from the ladder-back and walked back up the long room to the stove.

“I don’t know what to do with him sometimes,” she said, and for a moment Dave didn’t know who she meant. “He knows more about people and life than anyone I’ve ever met. He sees completely through people as if they were windows. No one would ever know it, the way he acts, but he does. And he won’t use it. I’ve tried for years to get him to put what he knows into a novel, or at least a memoir. But he won’t do it. He just says poets should not try to write novels.”

“Maybe he’s right.”

“Perhaps for other poets, but hes not a poet. Or not
just
a poet. He’s much more.”

“There’s nothing wrong with poets,” Dave said. “I’ve always wanted to be one.”

“Yes,” Gwen smiled, “so did Tom Wolfe in his romantic foolish way.” She came back down the room, the coffeemaker working now, and sat back down in the same ladder-back. “After all, poetry is for children and young people,” she said. “And that’s whom most of it is written by—no matter what their age. What is poetry? It’s the evocation of an emotion. Fine. But novels not only evoke emotions in the reader, they also show what, and
why
they are
really
felt. They
explain
—or at least they should do.” She was looking at him dead seriously. “I’ve thought about it quite a lot.”

“And evidently, you’ve decided for the novel,” Dave said.

“Naturally, I have,” Gwen said. “Oh, I still love poetry very much.”

“You used to write it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes now, I go on regular poetry binges. But I know why I’m doing it. Basically, it’s several levels below the novel. Poetry’s at the level of adolescence, when it is sufficient to
feel
our emotions, without seriously wondering
why
we feel them.” She looked at him expectantly.

“What about the memoir?” Dave said, clearing his throat. He was thinking about his own poem, “Hunger,” and his proposed plans for it. Prospects didn’t look so good.

“Oh, that,” Gwen said. “He won’t do that, either. He just says that basically all memoirs are novels anyway.”

Dave laughed. “Maybe he is right.”

“Of course, he’s right,” Gwen said impatiently.

“The coffee’s ready.” She got up and came around to where he sat and bent to get his cup, and Dave found himself staring at the top of her delicate, well-rounded, enormously affective head. Then she was gone, striding up the room again. In a moment she was back, with a tray, and on it the coffeemaker, two clean cups, sugar, and creamer. She set it on the coffee table and sat down on the other divan across from him and looked at him.

“When are you going to start writing again?” she demanded softly.

“Well, I don’t know—” Dave began.

“Well, you’d better start thinking about it,” Gwen said. “It’s time you stopped all this silly nonsense about never writing anymore. You’ve never meant it, and you never will, and what’s more you know it. Don’t you?”

“Now just a—” Dave started.

“Don’t you?” Gwen repeated.

Dave sat and looked at her. Here was his chance. He had worked it all out how to tell her about the comic combat novel, how to bring the conversation around to it, and then ask for her help. And now she had saved him the trouble and brought it up herself. All he had to do was take advantage of the opportunity; and he couldn’t do it. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, he told himself, it wasn’t fair. All was fair in love and war, but this was taking an unfair advantage even he couldn’t take, he told himself. Then, looking into himself a little deeper, he admitted why it really was: He was afraid she wouldn’t believe him. Would divine it was only a seduction effort.