Appointment in Samarra (10 page)

There were those among his parishioners who secretly resented Monsignor Creedon s serving on non-sectarian committees in community activities, but this sort of criticism could be traced to disgruntled Knights of Columbus. The Coal & Iron was ruled by the Masons, who admired Monsignor Creedon, and who tolerated the Knights of Columbus. The latter felt that their pastor ought to use his influence more frequently in advancing Knights. He never did. He used his influence in coaxing better company houses for the miners families out of the directorate; or in wangling contributions for poorer parishes than his own. The U.M.W.A. organizers and field workers hated Monsignor Creedon because he was so close to the bigwigs of the company. On the other hand, he did sometimes use his influence to help a Protestant. He got them bail, helped them get jobs. He had bought a Cadillac from Julian, instead of a Lincoln from the Ford dealer, who was a Catholic. He bought three Fords for his curates to atone for patronizing Julian s business. Three years ago he had driven his car, a Buick, to Julian s garage and went in Julian s office and said: Good morning, son. Do you have any nice black Cadillac sedans today? He bought a car right off the floor and paid cash for it. His curates cars went to the Ford dealer for repairs and service, but he always bought his tires and other needs at Julian s garage. Julian wanted to go to the bathroom after the dinner party stood up, and on his way to the men s locker room he had to pass Mrs. Gorman s table. He looked at Mrs. Gorman and she did not speak to him, but that was not unusual. But he felt the chill that passed between him and the men at the table. Kirkpatrick nodded politically and showed his teeth, but the doctors frankly snubbed him, and Monsignor Creedon, whose round, bluish face usually smiled sadly above that purple thing he wore under his Roman collar, nodded just once and did not smile. It took Julian a few seconds to figure it out, because in his dealings with Catholics he so often forgot to consider the Catholic point of view. But by the time he was alone in the men s room he had it figured out: they all regarded his insulting Harry Reilly as an insult to themselves. There was no other reason why he should throw a drink at Reilly, so it must be because he was an unattractive Irish Catholic whom he could insult freely. He did not believe they were quite right. But one thing he knew; if the Catholics had declared war on him, he was in a tough spot. In the Smith-Hoover campaign two men, one a jeweler and the other a lime and cement dealer, had let it be known that they were members of the Ku Klux Klan and were outspokenly against Smith because he was a Catholic. Those two were the only Gibbsville business men who had come out in the open. And now both of them were bankrupt. Drying his hands Julian thought it might be a good idea to sound out Monsignor Creedon, and he sat down to wait for the priest to come back to the locker-room. He pushed the button and told William, the locker-room waiter, to get a bottle of Scotch out of his locker and put it with two glasses and ice and clubsoda on a small table near the locker. He poured himself a mild drink and lit a cigarette. Men and boys wandered in, making cracks about his being exclusive. Bobby Herrmann came in and before he could say anything Julian told him to keep his trap shut. One or two of the younger kids showed by the expression of their faces when they saw the extra empty glass and the bottle of Scotch that they thought Julian was being ignored. It was pretty funny. They wanted to be nice, he could see, and they wanted to have a drink, but their wanting to be nice and their wanting a drink were not enough to make them associate with an outcast. What the hell had he done? he wondered. He had thrown a drink in a man s face. An especially terrible guy who should have had a drink thrown in his face a long while ago. It wasn t as if Harry Reilly were a popularity contest winner or something. If most people told the truth they would agree that Reilly was a terrible person, a climber, a nouveau riche even in Gibbsville where fifty thousand dollars was a sizable fortune. Julian thought back over some other terrible things, really terrible things, that people had done in the club without being made to feel they had committed sacrilege. There was the time Bobby Herrmann or Whit Hofman or Froggy Ogden no one knew which wanted to test a carboy of alcohol which Whit had bought. One of the three (they all were very drunk at the time) touched a match to the alcohol to see if it was genuine, and a table, chairs, a bench, and part of a row of lockers were ruined or destroyed before the fire was extinguished. There was the time a member of a visiting golf team was swinging a mashie in the locker-room and Joe Schermerhorn walked into the swing and got a broken jaw, lost his beautiful teeth and went a little bit nuts so that two years later, when his car went off the Lincoln Street bridge, people said it was suicide. Did they hold that against the visiting golfer? Hardly. He still visited the club and got drunk with the boys. There was the time Ed Klitsch wandered stark naked upstairs to the steward s living quarters and presented himself, ready for action, to the steward s wife. That was remembered as a good joke. There were innumerable vomitings, more or less disastrous. There was the hair-pulling, face-scratching episode between Kitty Hofman and Mary Lou Diefenderfer, after Kitty heard that Mary Lou had said Kitty ought to be suppressed by the vice squad. There was the time Elinor Holloway heroine of many an interesting event in club history shinnied half way up the flagpole while five young gentlemen, standing at the foot of the pole, verified the suspicion that Elinor, who had not always lived in Gibbsville, was not naturally, or at least not entirely, a blonde. There was the time, the morning after a small, informal party for a visiting women s golf team, when a Mrs. Goldorf and a Mrs. Smith, and Tom Wilk, the Reverend Mr. Wilk s son, and Sam Campbell, the caddymaster, all had to have the stomach pump. That was complicated by the fact that they were all together, in bed or on the floor, in Sam s room upstairs in the caddyhouse. There was the time Whit Hofman and Carter Davis got so sore at a New York orchestra that wanted too much money to play overtime, that they broke all the instruments and pushed the bass drum all the way down the club hill to the state highway. The result of that was a nice suit, some Philadelphia publicity, and a temporary blacklisting of the club by the musicians union. There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on. Julian had another drink and a fresh cigarette. And then there were people. Terrible people, who didn t have to do anything to make them terrible, but were just terrible people. Of course they usually did do something, but they didn t have to. There was (Mrs.) Emily Shawse, widow of the late Marc A. Shawse, former mayor of Gibbsville, and one-time real estate agent, who had developed the West Park section of Gibbsville. Mrs. Shawse did not participate in club activities, but she was a member. She came down to the club summer afternoons and sat alone on the porch, at one end of the porch, watching the golfers and tennis players and the people in the pool. She would have a fruit lemonade on the porch, and have one sent out to Walter, her Negro chauffeur. She would stay an hour and leave, and go for a drive in the country, presumably. But if she wasn t having an affair with Walter, Gibbsville missed its guess. No one ever had seen her speak with Walter, not even good-morning-Walter, good-morning-Mrs.-Shawse; but it certainly looked fishy. Walter had the car, a Studebaker sedan, at all hours of the day and night. He always had money to bet on the races, and he was a good customer at the Dew Drop Inn, where the Polish and Lithuanian girls had not been brought up to draw the color line. Julian prided himself on the fact that he had blocked the sale of a Cadillac to Mrs. Shawse. She had wanted one, or at least was ready to buy one in exchange for a little attention, in a nice way, from Julian. She had put him in a tough spot for a while. He couldn t just say he didn t want to sell her a car. He eventually solved the problem by telling her he would give her only a hundred and fifty in a trade involving the Studebaker, which then was worth, trade-in value, about six times that much, and when she still was not rebuffed he sent Louis, the pimply, bowlegged carwasher, with the demonstrator, instead of going himself. Mrs. Shawse kept the Studebaker. There was Harry Reilly s own nephew, Frank Gorman, a squirt if ever there was one. Frank got drunk at every last party the minute his mother went home. It was because of him that she came to the club dances. He was at Georgetown, having been kicked out of Fordham and Villanova, not to mention Lawrenceville, New York Military Academy, Allentown Prep and Gibbsville High School. Frank was a spindle-shanked young man who wore the most collegiate clothes, the kind that almost justify the newspaper editorials. He had a Chrysler roadster, a raccoon coat, adenoids, and some ability as a basketball player. He was a loud-mouth and a good one-punch fighter, who accepted invitations of the younger set as though they were his due. He was the kind of young man who knows his rights. His uncle secretly hated him, but always referred to him, with what was mistaken for bashful pride, as that crazy kid. There was the Reverend Mr. Wilk, who had had the club raided under the Volstead Act. There was Dave Hartmann, who wiped his shoes on clean towels and in seven years had not been known to violate the club rule against tipping servants and caddies, and who belonged to the club himself but would not let his wife and two daughters become members. Dave manufactured shoes, and he needed the club in his business, he said. Besides, what would Ivy and the girls get out of the club, when the Hartmann home was in Taqua? It d be different, he said, if he had his home in Gibbsville. Julian had another Scotch and soda. He wanted to go on thinking about the terrible people, all members of this club, and the people who were not terrible people but who had done terrible things, awful things. But now he got nothing out of it; it made him feel no better, no surer of himself. It had in the beginning, for there were many things he had thought of that were worse things than he had done. What Ed Klitsch had done, for instance. A thing that could have a terrible effect on a decent woman like Mrs. Losch; or it might have made Losch think that his wife invited Klitsch s little attention. And so on. But the trouble with making yourself feel better by thinking of bad things that other people have done is that you are the only one who is rounding up the stray bad things. No one but yourself bothers to make a collection of disasters. For the time being you are the hero or the villain of the thing that is uppermost in the minds of your friends and acquaintances. You can t even say, But look at Ed Klitsch. What about Carter and Kitty? What about Kitty and Mary Lou? Aren t I better than Mrs. Shawse? The trouble with that is that Ed Klitsch and Carter and Kitty and Mary Lou and Mrs. Shawse have nothing to do with the case. Two more kids looked at Julian and said hyuh, but they did not hover thirstily and wait for him to offer them a drink. He wondered about that again, and as it had many times in the last year and a half, Age Thirty stood before him. Age Thirty. And those kids were nineteen, twenty-one, eighteen, twenty. And he was thirty. To them, he said to himself, I am thirty. I am too old to be going to their house parties, and if I dance with their girls they do not cut in right away, the way they would on someone their own age. They think I am old. He had to say this to himself, not believing it for a moment. What he did believe was that he was precisely as young as they, but more of a person because he was equipped with experience and a permanent face. When he was twenty, who was thirty? Well, when he was twenty the men he would have looked up to were now forty. No, that wasn t quite right. He had another drink, telling himself that this would be his last. Let s see; where was he? Oh, yes. When I was forty. Oh, nuts. He wished Monsignor Creedon would heed the call of nature. He got up and went out to the verandah. It was a fine night. (Fine had been a romantic word in his vocabulary ever since he read A Farewell to Arms, but this was one time when he felt justified in using it.) The fine snow was still there, covering almost everything as far as the eye could see. The fine snow had been there all the time he had been inside, having dinner, dancing with Constance and Jean, and sitting by himself, drinking highballs too fast. He took a deep breath, but not too deep as experience had warned him against that. This was real, this weather. The snow and what it did to the landscape. The farmlands that once, only a little more than a century ago, and less than that in some cases, had been wild country, infested with honest-to-God Indians and panther and wildcat. It still was not too effete. Down under that snow rattlesnakes were sleeping, rattlers and copperheads. A high-powered rifle shot away, or maybe a little more, there were deer, and there were Pennsylvania Dutch families that never spoke English. He remembered during the war, during the draft, when someone had told him about families near the Berks County line, but still in this county. They not only couldn t understand about the war; many of them never had been to Gibbsville. That alone was enough to make a story when he first heard it. Now he wished he had heard more. He resolved to go into it further, find out more about the peculiarities of his native heath. Who did Kentucky think it was that it could claim exclusive rights on hill-billys? I guess I love this place, he said. Good evening, son, said a voice. He turned. It was Father Creedon. Oh, Father. Good evening. Cigarette?

No, thank you. Cigar for me. The priest took a cigar from a worn, black leather case. He amputated the end of the cigar with a silver cutter. How are things with you?

Fine, said Julian. Huh. As a matter of fact, anything but fine. I suppose you heard about my performance last night with a friend of yours.

Yes. I did. You mean Harry Reilly?

Uh-huh.

Well, it s none of my affair, said Monsignor Creedon. But I wouldn t let it worry you if I were you. I don t imagine Harry Reilly likes to be missing the dancing and all that, but he s a reasonable kind of a fellow. Go to him and tell him you re sorry, and make him think you mean it. He ll listen to reason.