Big Money (66 page)

“Wouldn't be so bad if we poisoned some of those western legislators,” said Dick.

Reggie held out his hand. “Well, put it there, Alec Borgia. . . . I reckon you're on the bourbon if you've been mingling with the conscript fathers.”

“Sure, I'll drink bourbon . . . kids, I'm tired . . . I'm going to eat something. I didn't have any supper. I just left the office.”

Reggie looked pretty tight; so did Pat. Jo was evidently sober and sore. I must fix this up, thought Dick and put his arm round Pat's waist. “Say, did you get my 'gram?” “Laughed myself sick over it,” said Pat. “Gosh, Dick, it's nice to have you back among the drinking classes.”

“Say, Dick,” said Reggie, “is there anything in the rumor that old doughface toppled over?”

“Mr. Moorehouse had a little attack of acute indigestion . . . he was better when I left,” said Dick in a voice that sounded a little too solemn in his ears.

“Not drinking gets 'em in the end,” said Reggie. The girls laughed. Dick put down three bourbons in rapid succession but he wasn't getting any lift from them. He just felt hungry and frazzled. He had his head twisted around trying to flag the waiter to find out what the devil had happened to his filetmignon when he heard Reggie drawling, “After all J. Ward Moorehouse isn't a man . . . it's a name. . . . You can't feel sorry when a name gets sick.”

Dick felt a rush of anger flush his head: “He's one of the sixty most important men in this country,” he said. “After all, Reggie, you're taking his money. . . .”

“Good God,” cried Reggie. “The man on the high horse.”

Pat turned to Dick, laughing. “They seem to be getting mighty holy down there in Washington.”

“No, you know I like to kid as well as anybody. . . . But when a man like J.W. who's perhaps done more than any one living man, whether you like what he does or not, to form the public mind in this country, is taken ill, I think sophomore wisecracks are in damn bad taste.”

Reggie was drunk. He was talking in phony southern dialect. “Wha, brudder, Ah didn't know as you was Mista Moahouse in pussen. Ah thunked you was juss a lowdown wageslave like the rest of us pickaninnies.”

Dick wanted to shut up but he couldn't. “Whether you like it or not the molding of the public mind is one of the most important things that goes on in this country. If it wasn't for that American business would be in a pretty pickle. . . . Now we may like the way American business does things or we may not like it, but it's a historical fact like the Himalaya Mountains and no amount of kidding's going to
change it. It's only through publicrelations work that business is protected from wildeyed cranks and demagogues who are always ready to throw a monkeywrench into the industrial machine.”

“Hear, hear,” cried Pat.

“Well, you'll be the first to holler when they cut the income from your old man's firstmortgage bonds,” said Dick snappishly.

“Senator,” intoned Reggie, strengthened by another old-fashioned, “allow me to congrat'late you . . . ma soul 'n body, senator, 'low me to congrat'late you . . . upon your val'able services to this great commonwealth that stretches from the great Atlantical ocean to the great and glorious Pacifical.”

“Shut up, Reggie,” said Jo. “Let him eat his steak in peace.”

“Well, you certainly made the eagle scream, Dick,” said Pat, “but seriously, I guess you're right.”

“We've got to be realists,” said Dick.

“I believe,” said Pat Doolittle, throwing back her head and laughing, “that he's come across with that raise.”

Dick couldn't help grinning and nodding. He felt better since he'd eaten. He ordered another round of drinks and began to talk about going up to Harlem to dance at Small's Paradise. He said he couldn't go to bed, he was too tired, he had to have some relaxation. Pat Doolittle said she loved it in Harlem but that she hadn't brought any money. “My party,” said Dick. “I've got plenty of cash on me.”

They went up with a flask of whiskey in each of the girls' handbags and in Dick's and Reggie's back pockets. Reggie and Pat sang
The Fireship
in the taxi. Dick drank a good deal in the taxi to catch up with the others. Going down the steps to Small's was like going underwater into a warm thickly-grown pool. The air was dense with musky smells of mulatto powder and perfume and lipstick and dresses and throbbed like flesh with the smoothlybalanced chugging of the band. Dick and Pat danced right away, holding each other very close. Their dancing seemed smooth as cream. Dick found her lips under his and kissed them. She kissed back. When the music stopped they were reeling a little. They walked back to their table with drunken dignity. When the band started again Dick danced with Jo. He kissed her too. She pushed him off a little. “Dick, you oughtn't to.” “Reggie won't mind. It's all in the family. . . .” They were dancing next to Reggie and Pat hemmed in by a swaying blur of couples. Dick dropped Jo's hand and put his hand on Reggie's shoulder. “Reggie,
you don't mind if I kiss your future wife for you just once.” “Go as far as you like, senator,” said Reggie. His voice was thick. Pat was having trouble keeping him on his feet. Jo gave Dick a waspish look and kept her face turned away for the rest of the dance. As soon as they got back to the table she told Reggie that it was after two and she'd have to go home, she for one had to work in the morning.

When they were alone and Dick was just starting to make love to Pat she turned to him and said, “Oh, Dick, do take me some place low . . . nobody'll ever take me any place really low.” “I should think this would be quite low enough for a juniorleaguer,” he said. “But this is more respectable than Broadway, and I'm not a juniorleaguer . . . I'm the new woman.” Dick burst out laughing. They both laughed and had a drink on it and felt fond of each other again and Dick suddenly asked her why couldn't they be together always. “I think you're mean. This isn't any place to propose to a girl. Imagine remembering all your life that you'd got engaged in Harlem. . . . I want to see life.” “All right, young lady, we'll go . . . but don't blame me if it's too rough for you.” “I'm not a sissy,” said Pat angrily. “I know it wasn't the stork.”

Dick paid and they finished up one of the pints. Outside it was snowing. Streets and stoops and pavements were white, innocent, quiet, glittering under the streetlights with freshfallen snow. Dick asked the whiteeyed black doorman about a dump he'd heard of and the doorman gave the taximan the address. Dick began to feel good. “Gosh, Pat, isn't this lovely,” he kept crying. “Those kids can't take it. Takes us grownups to take it. . . . Say, Reggie's getting too fresh, do you know it?” Pat held his hand tight. Her cheeks were flushed and her face had a taut look. “Isn't it exciting?” she said. The taxi stopped in front of an unpainted basement door with one electriclightbulb haloed with snowflakes above it.

They had a hard time getting in. There were no white people there at all. It was a furnaceroom set around with plain kitchen tables and chairs. The steampipes overhead were hung with colored paper streamers. A big brown woman in a pink dress, big eyes rolling loose in their dark sockets and twitching lips, led them to a table. She seemed to take a shine to Pat. “Come right on in, darlin',” she said. “Where's you been all my life?”

Their whiskey was gone so they drank gin. Things got to whirling round in Dick's head. He couldn't get off the subject of how sore he was at that little squirt Reggie. Here Dick had been nursing him along
in the office for a year and now he goes smartaleck on him. The little twirp.

The only music was a piano where a slimwaisted black man was tickling the ivories. Dick and Pat danced and danced and he whirled her around until the sealskin browns and the highyallers cheered and clapped. Then Dick slipped and dropped her. She went spinning into a table where some girls were sitting. Dark heads went back, pink rubber lips stretched, mouths opened. Gold teeth and ivories let out a roar.

Pat was dancing with a pale pretty mulatto girl in a yellow dress. Dick was dancing with a softhanded brown boy in a tightfitting suit the color of his skin. The boy was whispering in Dick's ear that his name was Gloria Swanson. Dick suddenly broke away from him and went over to Pat and pulled her away from the girl. Then he ordered drinks all around that changed sullen looks into smiles again. He had trouble getting Pat into her coat. The fat woman was very helpful. “Sure, honey,” she said, “you don't want to go on drinkin' tonight, spoil your lovely looks.” Dick hugged her and gave her a ten-dollar bill.

In the taxi Pat had hysterics and punched and bit at him when he held her tight to try to keep her from opening the door and jumping out into the snow. “You spoil everything. . . . You can't think of anybody except yourself,” she yelled. “You'll never go through with anything.” “But, Pat, honestly,” he was whining. “I thought it was time to draw the line.” By the time the taxi drew up in front of the big square apartmenthouse on Park Avenue where she lived she was sobbing quietly on his shoulder. He took her into the elevator and kissed her for a long time in the upstairs hall before he'd let her put the key in the lock of her door. They stood there tottering clinging to each other rubbing up against each other through their clothes until Dick heard the swish of the rising elevator and opened her door for her and pushed her in.

When he got outside the door he found the taxi waiting for him. He'd forgotten to pay the driver. He couldn't stand to go home. He didn't feel drunk, he felt immensely venturesome and cool and innocently excited. Patricia Doolittle he hated more than anybody in the world. “The bitch,” he kept saying aloud. He wondered how it would be to go back to the dump and see what happened and there he was being kissed by the fat woman who wiggled her breasts as she hugged
him and called him her own lovin' chile, with a bottle of gin in his hand pouring drinks for everybody and dancing cheek to cheek with Gloria Swanson who was humming in his ear: Do I get it now . . . or must I he . . . esitate.

It was morning. Dick was shouting the party couldn't break up, they must all come to breakfast with him. Everybody was gone and he was getting into a taxicab with Gloria and a strapping black buck he said was his girlfriend Florence. He had a terrible time getting his key in the lock. He tripped and fell towards the paleblue light seeping through his mother's lace curtains in the windows. Something very soft tapped him across the back of the head.

He woke up undressed in his own bed. It was broad daylight. The phone was ringing. He let it ring. He sat up. He felt lightheaded but not sick. He put his hand to his ear and it came away all bloody. It must have been a stocking full of sand that hit him. He got to his feet. He felt tottery but he could walk. His head began to ache like thunder. He reached for the place on the table he usually left his watch. No watch. His clothes were neatly hung on a chair. He found the wallet in its usual place, but the roll of bills was gone. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Of all the damn fools. Never never never take a risk like that again. Now they knew his name his address his phonenumber. Blackmail, oh, Christ. How would it be when Mother came home from Florida to find her son earning twentyfive thousand a year, junior partner of J. Ward Moorehouse being blackmailed by two nigger whores, male prostitutes receiving males? Christ. And Pat Doolittle and the Bingham girls. It would ruin his life. For a second he thought of going into the kitchenette and turning on the gas.

He pulled himself together and took a bath. Then he dressed carefully and put on his hat and coat and went out. It was only nine o'clock. He saw the time in a jeweler's window on Lexington. There was a mirror in the same window. He looked at his face. Didn't look so bad, would look worse later, but he needed a shave and had to do something about the clotted blood on his ear.

He didn't have any money but he had his checkbook. He walked to a Turkish bath near the Grand Central. The attendants kidded him about what a fight he'd been in. He began to get over his scare a little and to talk big about what he'd done to the other guy. They took his check all right and he even was able to buy a drink to have before his breakfast. When he got to the office his head was still splitting but he
felt in fair shape. He had to keep his hands in his pockets so that Miss Hilles shouldn't see how they shook. Thank God he didn't have to sign any letters till afternoon.

Ed Griscolm came in and sat on his desk and talked about J.W.'s condition and the Bingham account and Dick was sweet as sugar to him. Ed Griscolm talked big about an offer he'd had from Halsey, but Dick said of course he couldn't advise him but that as for him the one place in the country he wanted to be was right here, especially now as there were bigger things in sight than there had ever been before, he and J.W. had had a long talk going down on the train. “I guess you're right,” said Ed. “I guess it was sour grapes a little.” Dick got to his feet. “Honestly, Ed, old man, you mustn't think for a minute J.W. doesn't appreciate your work. He even let drop something about a raise.” “Well, it was nice of you to put in a word for me, old man,” said Ed and they shook hands warmly.

As Ed was leaving the office he turned and said, “Say, Dick, I wish you'd give that youngster Talbot a talking to. . . . I know he's a friend of yours so I don't like to do it, but Jesus Christ, he's gone and called up again saying he's in bed with the grippe. That's the third time this month.”

Dick wrinkled up his brows. “I don't know what to do about him, Ed. He's a nice kid all right but if he won't knuckle down to serious work . . . I guess we'll have to let him go. We certainly can't let drinking acquaintance stand in the way of the efficiency of the office. These kids all drink too much anyway.”