Some Came Running (60 page)

It was almost as if this were the same night he had been here before, and instead of having been away almost two months, had merely stepped outside a minute. Dewey and Hubie were here, and Raymond, and the same five girls, plus some others and their fellows he did not know. The same people, even, seemed to be sitting at the bar; and Old Jane Staley was in the corner booth with two old men. For a moment, he had a peculiar feeling that none of them had left, but had been here all that time, the perpetual hard-core nucleus of a never-ending party.

Even Edith Barclay was in the same back booth with her boyfriend, Harold Something. Dave was pleased to find he could not recall Harold’s last name. Over the heads, he caught Edith’s eye and grinned and waved arrogantly at her. She merely nodded, distantly.

Grinning back at her even more arrogantly, he walked on over to the booth where Dewey and Hubie sat crowded around the table with their own two girls, plus Rosalie, Mildred Pierce, and the shapeless Ginnie, seven in all.

“Wall,” Hubie drawled from where he sat squeezed between Rosalie and his own girl, Martha; “look who’s here. If it ain’t God’s gift to the VFW. I bet God’s gift to the VFW kin tell us, Dewey.”

“Tell you what?” Dave grinned. He suddenly felt fine. “Can I sit down?”

“Sure. Get a chair from one of the back tables,” Dewey Cole said from the end of the opposite seat where, as the fourth person, he had managed to perch one of his spare buttocks on the very end of the plywood. His other hung out in the air, where his leg was propped straight out to hold him up. His blue eyes shone happily. Next to him was his girl, Lois, and beyond her, Mildred Pierce, and squeezed into the corner the vague-eyed dumpy Ginnie. The table was jammed with beer bottles in all stages of emptiness.

Dave went back past the bar to get a chair. From the next booth back, the occupants of which were evidently a part of Dewey’s party and had been talking back and forth across the high booth back with them, a huskily built girl rared up and said something indistinct to Dewey across the head of Hubie. Everybody laughed, and he instinctively wondered if they were laughing at him. Next to her in the booth, he recognized the long horseface of Gus Nernst, erstwhile caretaker of Raymond Cole, and exchanged nods with him. At the rear, Raymond Cole himself sat at a table between two other men whom Dave did not know, but both of whom looked as muscular and as dumb as Raymond himself. All three sat drinking and staring down into their beer glasses without speaking, almost as if each was sitting alone at a different table. At least they did until Raymond looked up and saw Dave.

“Hello, there!” he said in a friendly shout. “How are you?”

“Hello, Raymond. How are you.”

“You looking for a chair?” Raymond shouted.

“Yes.”

“Here, take this one!” Raymond shouted. His two friends, who had looked up, had already looked back down. “We don’t need it. There’s only three of us.”

“Well, I’ve already got one spotted over here,” Dave said, feeling uneasy. He had meant to get one from the table nearest the booth of Edith Barclay.

“No. Now, by God, you take this one,” Raymond insisted. “We won’t never miss it. You
take
it, I say!”

“Well, all right,” Dave said, feeling it was best to humor him, and came over to get it. In spite of his unease with Raymond, he looked across at Edith Barclay who was watching him, and grinned arrogantly.

“Hello, Edith,” he grinned. “How are you?” It sounded snotty and unpleasant, the way he said it, even to him. He did not know why she always affected him like that. He wasn’t really that bad, really.

“Hello, Dave,” she said back, levelly. “How are you.”

“Oh,” Raymond said in a lowered voice. “Gee. I didn’t mess you up, did I? With the girl?”

“Who? What?” Dave said bending down.

“Oh, hell no. I don’t even hardly know that girl.”

“Are you sure?” Raymond said, eyeing him. “You’re not just saying that.”

“Positive.”

“Well. Glad to be friendly, glad to be friendly,” Raymond said, apparently appeased. “Take it away.”

“Thanks,” Dave said.

He hoisted the chair and started off with it, relieved to get far away from Raymond, but still aware of Edith watching him, and because of this, feeling powerful and tough and very dominating in a pleasing male way. To hell with these respectable women, he thought. He’d take the barflies anytime, even Old Rosalie. Go ahead and watch me, Edith, he thought.

Edith, in her booth, was going on watching him. Both her face and her emotions were tightly closed against inspection. But she wasn’t thinking about Dave. He was, she had concluded, just about the biggest, ridiculously ludicrous, thoroughly distasteful single chunk of male vanity she had ever seen in her life. What she was thinking was something else. Like a startling revelation, she had just realized why he fascinated her. It was because—although there was nothing alike in their characters at all—he looked so much like his brother. Edith had just realized she was in love with Frank.

With that sort of heartstopping mental shock in which everything seems to stand utterly still, Edith wondered how it could have happened? She certainly hadn’t known anything about it, had she? It must have been going on for quite some time. In fact, now that she could see it, she could see where it had been. Apparently, at some unnamed point in the near two years she had worked for him, she had stopped loving her job and started loving her boss, without knowing it.

It was obvious why she loved him. She loved him because he had all those fine and gentle traits of character which his brother Dave obviously lacked. She loved him because he was shy, and pathetic, and lonely, and because he needed someone to cling to; in short, all the things his brother Dave was not. But all this was hardly the point.

The point was that the whole thing was ridiculous, and startling. It was not only startling, it was totally foreign. It almost wasn’t even her, she felt. Falling in love with a married man was not included in the list of probabilities, or even possibilities, that she had worked out for her life. It was not in her code of ethics, either. This was something that was going to require considerable thought and mental adjustment—in private. Certainly, she couldn’t do it here.

A married man almost old enough to be her father! Why, it wasn’t even believable! A short, fat, plaintive little German man who ran a jewelry store, and worried. And who was so
unstalwart
, and
unstrong-willed
, he couldn’t even handle his own affairs adequately, let alone somebody else’s. Who couldn’t even keep his own wife from dominating him. And yet all those things were the very same things which wrenched her heart whenever she thought about him.

With carefully unreadable eyes, Edith turned back to Harold Alberson and smiled and hunted for something to make conversation. What she wanted was to be taken home immediately, so she could think, but she knew better than to let that out. Harold would connect it with the way she had stared at Dave. And probably draw the wrong conclusions! she added crisply.

For a moment, Edith looked up at Janie in her corner booth with her two old geezers. Whatever Janie’s trouble—love, illness, depression, or fatigue—she was beginning to get over it now apparently and for the first time in her life Edith was actually glad to see her out with her decrepit boyfriends and not embarrassed by it. Was that why Janie had kept on running Frank Hirsh down to her all this time? Had Janie foreseen that this was going to happen? and been trying to protect her? Oh, if she could only get home, and be alone, and think!

She turned back to Harold, smiling warmly, and began to talk about how her grandmother embarrassed her running around with all these old guys like she did.

And to hell with her, Dave thought. There was plenty of other fish in the sea. The three women in that booth next to Dewey’s all had men with them, he noted; but that still left Mildred Pierce apparently unattached, before he had to fall back on Rosalie. He set the chair down at the end of the crowded booth.

“Now!” he said, sitting in it. “Tell you what? My voluminous knowledge is at your command.”

“Hey!” Hubie said. “Now you quit that swearin in front of these ladies here.”

Dave was looking at Dewey, but Dewey only made a shy grimace for an answer. Beside him Lois looked sullen.

“Wall, it’s like this, see?” Hubie drawled, answering for him. “Me and Dewey is seriously considerin reenlistin in the Army. Right now, they want men bad, and we could both git back in with our old ratings instead of having to go back in as privates, see? And we want to get your professional VFW opinion of whether we ought to or not to.”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” Dewey grinned, his handsome face beaming mischievously. “We both gettin sick of this damned town. Nothing ever happens around here exciting or romantic.”

“Damn you, Dewey,” Lois said. “I want a home for my two kids. You know I do.”

Dewey’s happy face suddenly expressed a deep mock sympathy, everywhere except in his eyes which snapped with good humor. “Well, honey, my advice to you is to find some nice fella that wants to get married and marry him,” he said.

“You go to hell, Dewey,” Lois said.

“Well, now, honey,” Dewey protested; “honestly, you can’t expect me to marry you and take care of them kids just because your first old man got killed in the war, can you? They ain’t my kids. It ain’t my fault he got killed by the damn Japs.” He winked at Dave. “By rights, them kids are the government’s responsibility. If they was my kids, it’d be different.”

Hubie laughed and looked at Dave. It was plain that if the last time Dave had seen them all here the girls had had the upper hand, the tables were now turned. Hubie’s girl Martha, who rarely seemed to say anything, sat looking down glumly at her half-empty beer glass. “Now, honestly,” Dewey grinned, “can you?”

“Aw, you go to hell, Dewey,” Lois said. “No. No, it wasn’t your fault any. You’re an awful stinker Dewey, you know it?”

“He sure is,” Rosalie said brassily.

“Now, look at that!” Dewey protested. “Ain’t that just like a bunch of women? You tell them the truth, and they call you a stinker.”

“What about it, Perfesser?” Hubie said in his nasal drawl. “What do you think?”

“Well, they do want men,” Dave grinned, playing along. “And if you had pretty good ratings, it’d be a good way to get them back, right now. In another year, they may change the ruling.”

“Why the hell don’t you keep out of this, fat boy?” Rosalie said.

“Now you just shut up, fullback,” Dewey said. “Or I’ll tackle you.”

Rosalie glowered at him, but subsided. Looking at her Dave got the impression that had it been anybody else but Dewey she might have offered to take him on. The fact that he had once been out with her did not titilate him at all now. He looked over at Mildred Pierce, who had so far not said anything, and remembered how he had wanted to try her out even back then, when he had heard her and ’Bama going to town in the next room. He guessed he
was
putting on a little weight, he thought; after all, two months sitting at a desk in that damned taxi office wasn’t exactly a waist-slimming operation.

“Sure,” Dewey had just said to him; “that’s what I say. Hubie was a buck sergeant and I was a staff. lt’d be silly to throw away ratings like that, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, it’s a lot of money,” Dave grinned.

Dewey nodded. “More’n we’d ever make in this jerkwater town.”

“What about Germany, Perfesser?” Hubie drawled. “We never got to Europe. Is it as nice for a soldier to be in as Australia?”

“Well, it’s a mighty nice place to be stationed,” Dave said, shaking his head and peering slyly at Rosalie. “That’s all I’ll say; in front of the girls. Germany’s a mighty nice place to serve in.”

“What about all them German fräuleins over there?” Hubie said.

“You go to hell, too,” Martha said in a low voice, without looking up. She sounded as though the swear words perhaps did not come as naturally to her as to the other girls.

“Is it true? what the guys say?” Hubie grinned. “I hear them fräuleins over there will do everything for you. Move right in with you and wash your clothes for you and cook and turn their pay right over to you, and you don’t even have to marry them at all.”

“That’s right,” Dave nodded. “They will if they like you. But then those European women are different from our women over here. Over there, the man’s the lord and master.”

Hubie nodded. “That’s just what I heard.” He turned to Dewey. “That’s what we ought to do, Dewey. Enlist for Germany. With out ratings back, and all that money—”

“You go to hell,” Martha said again, still staring at her beer.

“There! How do you like that?” Hubie said. “Is that fair or not? Her old man,” he moved his head at Martha, “Old Man Garvey—he runs a big old fillin station out in West End. He don’t want his daughter runnin around with no town bum and marryin him. He wants her to marry a nice boy who’ll run his fillin station. And then just because I—”

“I said I’d marry you,” Martha said, “except that Daddy and Momma wouldn’t let me.”

“There? You see?” Hubie said to Dave. “And yet she’s of age, she can do whatever she wants, can’t she? No, sir,” he drawled, “she just don’t want to marry Old Hubie, that’s all. And then just because I want to go back in the Army and try a little of that German stuff . . .” He rattled on.

Dave had been looking at Martha while Hubie talked, and so had seen the one brief look that she had turned upward at him—at Hubie. It was a look full of several things, and it filled him with a strange male exultation. It was a look full of frustrated possession, for one thing, the hunger for ownership; it was a look full of passionate desire, for another, the pure physical desire to feel sexually; and then in addition, larding it all over, was this indrawn expression of guilt because she did feel these things, coupled with an embarrassed look of shame because other people could obviously so easily see—if only by her very actions in being here—just exactly what she did feel. It was a short quick look, it didn’t last long; he had just happened to see it. But it made Dave want to shout out loud with triumph. It was the kind of look
he
would like to make that damned Edith Barclay feel, or Missy Gwen French.