Clarkton (20 page)

“I have to see you,” he told her.

“Well, I can't see you. Not today.”

“I have to see you. Now.”

“Well, I can't. I can't talk here. I can't see you now.”

“You must! Don't you understand that you must! Do you want me to come to your house? I must see you.”

“No—don't come to my house.” There was a silence again, and then, “Where can I meet you?”

“You know where François' is? It's a filling station and saloon a little out of town—”

“I know.”

“The bus will let you off there.”

“I know. I can't talk now.” Then she hung up. Lowell went back outside and stood by his car, smoking, watching the last shreds of the clouds carded and tossed from the sky. But after about ten or fifteen minutes, he began to be chilled, and he got back in the car to wait. The station-attendant came over and asked him wasn't there anything he could do for him? but Lowell gave him a dollar, and said no, it was all right, he was waiting for someone. The mood, so delicious, so right, so sweet, began to leave him; it was almost forty minutes now since he had called; he began to feel like a fool, a reaction which he recognized and at the same time fought, countering it with speculation as to where they might go. He thought of the lodge and rejected the thought. It was right for the day before, when it happened, out of the heat with which it had happened—but not for now, not for the puritanical mood that possessed him. He decided that he would take her to dinner somewhere and talk with her; they had hardly said twenty words in the time they were together, but he was certain that the way he felt now, he could get inside of her, find her soul, breathe life into it, and draw it forth to blossom in the same beauty that her body possessed.

He ran out of cigarettes and went into the bar to buy more. About three or four men were there, drinking beer, men in the mackinaws, hunting caps, and corduroy breeches of the Massachusetts countryside in wintertime. “Ain't turned up yet?” the bartender asked. The men looked at him curiously.

After an hour, he started the engine of his car, and then he saw the bus stop, a little past the station, and saw her get off. She wore slacks under the same fur coat. She wore big mittens with rabbit fur on the outside, and she had a silk kerchief wrapped around her head for a hat. In the street, he might not have recognized her, and seeing her like this, he experienced a wave of revulsion. But his long wait forced him to carry through; indeed, the necessity was actually greater than ever now. He opened the door of the car, and she slipped in next to him, but when he tried to kiss her, it was awkward and bumbling, and she pulled away, shaking her head.

“Don't do that,” she said. “Why did you make me come all the way out here?”

“Are you sorry you came?”

“I don't care, now that I'm here.”

“I had to see you,” he said. “I had to talk to you. I want you to drive out somewhere and have dinner with me.”

“I'm not dressed to go out to dinner,” she said.

“We can go to a place where it won't matter.”

“Why can't you just tell me what you have to tell me right here?”

“It wasn't any single thing I had to tell you,” he explained slowly.

“Then why—”

“I had to speak to you. I had to talk to you, don't you understand?”

“No,” she said. “I don't.” Her voice was flat and emotionless, offhand and uninterested. She looked at her watch.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked, feeling wholly a fool, yet with the compulsion driving him.

“Yes—if you want to.”

He kissed her with closed lips.

“If you want to take me up to that place where we were last night sometime, that would be nice,” she told him complacently. “It would be nice to spend a weekend there sometime. But not now. I'm not free today. I got to go back.”

Silent, he sat there beside her for almost a minute. Then he nodded and said, “I'll drive you back.”

“You don't have to if you don't want to,” she said.

“I want to drive you back.”

“I live on Maple Street, but you don't have to go all the way. You could drop me off at Chestnut and First Avenue.”

It hadn't occurred to him before that she would be ashamed to be seen with him. He turned the car around, started back, asking her:

“Don't you care for me at all, Rose?”

“I like you,” she said flatly. “It would be nice to go up to the country with you again sometime.”

19.
F
ank Norman took Fern to dinner at the
Club, or it might be said that she took him, since it was his first visit to the Club and they went in her car. Norman had hoped that she would ask him to drive, but Fern loved driving and it never entered her mind. She told him, when they started off, “Actually, it's the only club, because the other one, the one over at Southdale, which has eighteen holes—this one only has nine, and they're bad—and more of everything, you understand, went under so badly during the depression that they opened up to everyone, Jews included. But here the food is wonderful, especially their steaks, which they do over hickory logs, and they always manage to have them too.”

Norman wanted desperately to say the right thing; he had never known a girl like Fern before, and he was also highly conscious of the fact that he had never known anyone like her. That she did not conform with his ideas of what she should be like, he put down to her being not merely a rich girl, but a rich girl whose name was Lowell, which he equated to a feeling he had since he was here, that if your name was Lowell in Clarkton, you did what you pleased, and what pleased you pleased others. Frank Norman had never had a date with a rich girl before—that is, a girl who came from one of the families he admired so fervently. He had grown up in Jackson Heights, in a neat red-brick house that was attached to another red-brick house, both of them half timbered and built in 1926 to sell at seventeen thousand dollars for the pair, or nine thousand dollars apiece. If Frank had heard his father say it once, he had heard him say a thousand times that his greatest mistake was not to have bought the pair and been able to take interest and taxes out of the other, and thereby live rent free. Frank's father was now office manager of Brady, Lance, Caldert & Simpson, a brokerage firm at 160 Broadway, in New York City, at the salary of seven thousand four hundred dollars a year; and he had started at the same firm thirty-three years before at only four dollars a week. During all of that time, he had never experienced a day's layoff or unemployment, not even during the period in 1929 when Brady, Lance, Caldert & Simpson had literally suspended operations for eighteen weeks, for during that time his salary continued. He had started with the firm as office boy and subsequently become a runner, filing clerk, clerk, bookkeeper, assistant head bookkeeper, cashier, personnel manager, and finally office manager. This, like the many “begats” which introduce the various parts of the Old Testament, had literally become a part of Frank Norman's lineage, and as meaningful to him as to his father, who had told him often enough, in the times when Frank was as yet too young to comprehend fully, “I'm a five-thousand-dollar-a-year man. I know it, and those who employ me know it. It's an important thing, Frank, to know your own worth, not to underestimate it, not to overestimate.” This, of course, was abandoned as a credo when Norman's salary went to six and to seven thousand.

But for all that Frank's father worked in the radius of Wall Street, Frank himself met only girls who lived in Jackson Heights and who went to the same high school as he did. In college, he met a number of boys who were a good deal richer than he was, but he discovered it was not easy to make friends of them and to enter their social world, even though his respect for them was calculated and complete. It wasn't until the army that his horizons really opened, and when he returned, Mr. Bruce Caldert obtained for him the position with Leopold and James, who, in the brief period he had worked for them, had only the best to report of his honesty, integrity, and ambition. In so many words, his ambition was to be rich; he did not abase that ambition and make it a mundane thing; he admired rich people; he admired the industry and the courage that brought them their riches, and he admired the graceful and laudable process they made of life. He was only twenty-five years old, and he was thankful that he lived in a land of such unlimited opportunity.

Frank Norman's chief charm was that he was neither a cynic nor a blackguard—and together they became a virtue. He was a person peculiarly gifted by the gods. He was an American, a white American; he was a Protestant-Episcopalian; he was educated; he had never in all his life wanted for anything within reason; he had been a Boy Scout and achieved the rank of Eagle; he had never doubted that money was the good body of all virtue; he respected American women, but admitted the fact that Irish and Jewish and Italian girls like to go to bed with men; he hated Soviet Russia in the matter-of-fact way a good Christian hates the devil; he connected masturbation, depravity, homosexuality, and marijuana smoking, and dismissed them by the fact of connection; he believed sincerely that poor people were lazy and that industrial workers were the rejects of society; and he was secure in the knowledge that next to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison was the greatest product of the twentieth century.

For these and for other reasons, he wanted desperately to do the right thing with Fern Lowell. He wanted her to see him for the clean-cut and manly person he was, but along with that he sensed that her world was as strange to him as the monstrous and subversive underworld which Communists, enemy agents, union organizers, and others of like ilk inhabited. The only factor which helped to assuage his uneasiness was the knowledge of her fall from grace, the intimations of vague yet profound crimes which had caused her expulsion from school. Though he forgave her these crimes—he would have forgiven a Lowell anything—they helped to make her more attainable, his none-too-organized reasoning coming to the conclusion that the stain on her character made her less desirable, not to him, but to others. On the other hand, he had enough sense to tell himself that he must be more than usually wary of advances. An equitable balance between the two extremes would be about right, he thought.

After he had said that he liked steaks, that he was glad she liked them, and that the one thing they had certainly missed overseas was a good steak, the wogs not even knowing about steaks and most of them being forbidden to even eat meat, just like vegetarians, he spoke about Fern's mother, whom he had met that evening. (It always made him feel good when someone admired
his
mother.) “She's a wonderful woman,” he said. “She has real dignity.”

“That's a funny thing for you to say,” Fern smiled. “Most people think Mother is very beautiful. She is.”

“I know. But you'd be surprised, Fern—can I call you Fern?—how in my work you get to look for what's underneath the surface and what people's real character is.”

“Of course you can call me Fern. Did you think I would want you to call me Miss Lowell—all evening, Miss Lowell this and Miss Lowell that? What did you mean before when you said
wogs?
”

“Well, in the East—you know, I was with OSS in their big camp at Ceylon—well, in the East, you know, they're mostly niggers just like here in the South, and the GI's got to call them wogs, just a name. I don't know how it started.”

“Were you in Ceylon?”

“In Burma, too.”

“I guess you saw so much—you don't want to talk about that, do you?”

“It's a funny thing,” Norman said, “but most people don't want to listen. I don't mind talking about it—I guess I like to. They're very interesting countries out there, only not very civilized, and nothing like American efficiency. But everything is different, and life doesn't mean much out there—I mean the natives. Do you know, there are four hundred and fifty million people, just in a place like India? I guess it's pretty lucky they're not very efficient, because how long do you think we'd last if all those people who don't care anything about life and death had the atom bomb and other things?”

“Let's talk about the moon,” Fern said.

“It does seem that whatever you talk about, you always get around to the atom bomb. I've been working hard over at the plant. This is a wonderful treat, just like a furlough in the army. That's a wonderful moon, too.”

“You're a funny boy,” Fern said, “you're so serious. I've been trying to guess what you're doing there at the plant. Is it really some sort of secret-agent thing? Is that why Mr. Gelb looks like Ronald Colman or Bulldog Drummond or something? He would be so perfect for Hollywood!”

“Mr. Gelb is a very fine man—he's my boss. I guess he's one of the finest and smartest men I've ever known. We're not secret agents or anything of the sort,” Norman said, with comfortable doubt in his tones. “My own job is maintenance—in other words, the proper upkeep and protection of a plant on strike. It's a branch of industrial engineering, you might say. I took my degree in industrial engineering, and along with my OSS experience, this is the sort of thing I want to do. I like it.”

“It must be exciting,” Fern smiled; she couldn't keep from smiling, he was so straightforward and sincere. She thought he was the nicest boy she had known in a long time, and she was pleased that he was so good looking too.

They reached the Club, parked, and went into the big, rambling colonial building. Norman had been to country clubs two or three times with his friends, but they were resplendent gray-stone and stucco affairs in Westchester; this one was almost mean by comparison, but he sensed that it might be even more correct, in the same way the old New England house the Lowells lived in was undoubtedly correct. It was very warmly furnished inside, with glowing fires in almost every room. The bar, where Fern took him, was set up like a great old kitchen, with a six-foot hearth and long deal tables. He ordered a scotch and soda and Fern had a martini. He noticed that she knew most of the people there, but said hello casually, without troubling to introduce him.