Some Came Running (101 page)

“Of course, nothing will ever really be the same again now,” she said. “Even if we went. I suppose in her life every woman has one first lover that she heroizes, and who must, of course, let her down some way. It’s really just as well it’s happened like it has,” she said.

“Oh, Dawnie!” Wally said sort of hopelessly.

“You have your work,” she said; “and I have mine. I suppose school is what I really need anyway, before I try to make a break. I know that.”

Wally did not say anything, and they rode along a little way in silence, back toward town.

“Maybe in a year or two,” Wally said suddenly with a kind of eager hopefulness. “Maybe then, when I got my book done, you see. Then we could go in together.”

“Oh, sure,” Dawn smiled sorrowfully, “Of course. Well, we can always talk about that later, can’t we? But right now, Wally, I just want to go home. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh!” he said. “No, no. I’ll take you right there.”

“And you just keep on thinking that,” she said. She shrugged, “I’ll be all right tomorrow.”

Wally did not answer this. His face was still contorted, and now his mouth was drawn into a thin tight line. Getting a little mad, was he?

“Dawnie, I never meant to let you down,” he said after a minute.

“Oh, I know that,” she said. She didn’t hold it against him, she said. She understood. He had to think of himself and his work. Women were just different than men. They had all been trained to think that when they gave themselves, they were giving something really important. Men just didn’t feel that. Especially the first time, she added, if the woman happened still to be a virgin. Two or three times she mentioned her former virginity, matter-of-factly, in an effort to get at what she meant. Each time she mentioned it, he winced visibly. She watched his suffering coolly, wishing in a way that she could spare him, and tears welled up behind her eyes, tears of loss, and sympathy both for his suffering and her own.

“Will I get to see you again before you leave, Dawnie?” he said when he drove up in front of the house.

“Why, yes,” she said; “if you want to. You call me up.”

His face was still contorted, and the thin, rigid line of his mouth under the old baseball cap was still as tight as ever, and as she stood on the porch and watched him drive away she looked after him cold-eyed, a self-cognizant hollow shell of steel. He would never marry anybody. He just wasn’t that kind. Unless he happened to find one someday who played it exactly as he wanted, and never argued, some meek little mouse of a girl that he could order around like he did his mom, and otherwise he just, by God, wouldn’t marry. He’d sit in jail first, by God. Because nobody was ever going to make him do anything. In short, Dawn thought coldly, he was a total waste of time. For any woman.

Only when he was out of sight, did the panic and terror hit her again. She turned around and went inside and went up to her room and lay down on her bed, as cold as a statue, while every muscle and nerve inside her quivered in sheer panic and terror. It looked like it was school for her, and no other way out, and once again bourgeois society had triumphed. It seemed nobody in the world ever loved you enough to give up something for you. They loved you, of course, but not quite that much. And finally, she found herself thinking unaccountably of Shotridge.

Wally, on the other hand, felt only a vast sense of relief.

His face was stiff from the tension it had been subjected to, and every muscle in his belly was jumping uncontrollably. Panic and terror at his own spinelessness and lack of integrity assailed him. But as soon as he got away from her, it began to wane, leaving him only with a great sense of relief. Limp, weak, sweating profusely, he drove slowly away, in a fog of emptiness.

She was right, of course. He had done everything she said. Still, all he felt was only a great sense of relief, relief not to hear her plaguing voice anymore. And that made him feel even more guilty. What the hell? He had never told her he would go to New York with her. Or that he’d marry her, either.

It was only ten or ten-thirty. But he couldn’t work today. Goddam women anyway, he thought and turned north down the hill out toward Smitty’s Bar. What he needed was a drink, or several drinks.

Goddam it all! he thought, the whole damned thing was crazy. Insane! The wild hysterical plotting of a damned teenage ex-virgin! Completely irrational!

But he still could not escape a gnawing feeling that he had, in fact, let her down. And he could not get away from a sick feeling in his stomach when he thought of their woods up by West Lancaster, and of those lovely breasts of hers, and that mellow little body. And when he thought of her going off to school and maybe sleeping with some other guy, it was unbearable.

But if it was the end, then it was the end. Kismet! And down deep inside him some solid dependable rockhard something told him that it did not really matter anyway.

And after he had sat in Smitty’s and cooled himself down a little, he was even more sure of it. In the end, all that mattered was a man’s work, by God. What he produced. What he created. And not who the hell he was married to, or how many damned offspring he produced. Hell, any damned dog or cat could do that—and have more of them at one sitting than any damned human female.

They saw each other twice more, after that, before Dawn left. And both times, they went up to “their woods.” Dawn had made up her mind that she would not call him up, but finally—just four days before she and Agnes were to leave—he had called. And asked her if she wanted to go out that night. And then he had called again, the next night.

The first night, she would not let him sleep with her, and she hadn’t meant to any other time. Not that he had asked. He hadn’t. But, without saying anything, he had made it plain when they were at Glen and Gertrude’s, that he was available. She had chosen to ignore it.

But the second night, and she did not know just why, when he had again made it plain that he was still available, she had made it equally plain that she was amenable. And so, as they had the first night, they wound up driving to “their woods.” But the first night, they had only sat and talked.

Dawn did not really know why she changed her mind. Perhaps, in a way, it was because she felt that it was farewell—as Wally apparently also saw it. Though the fact didn’t seem to disturb him any.

But mostly, it was really a sort of experiment on her part. What she really wanted to find out was whether she still liked sex. After all, he was still the only man she had ever been to bed with.

What she found out was that she didn’t like it; and she didn’t dislike it. It just seemed to be sort of nothing, really. And in some way, what had once been in it before seemed now to have gone out of it entirely.

Of course, it still felt good physically. But that was to be expected. She could not help wondering, at the time, what it would be like sleeping with Shotridge also. Probably miserable, she thought. He was such an awkward, guilty, dumb jerk, Shotridge. He certainly would probably never be much like Wally, she thought looking up at him. Wally, she noted, had not had much to say.

Two days later, she left driving with Agnes to Cleveland.

D
AVE SUSPECTED SOMETHING
of all this between his niece and Wally. Sitting as it were at his pinnacle of observation in the house—writing hard every day and engrossed in his novel and his people to the point where he himself seemed hardly to live at all except in them, he was able to just sit back and watch what happened in everybody’s lives with a detachment he had always envied, and without ever becoming involved himself. And consequently, he was able to observe with more objectivity than he had ever achieved in anything before. He did not even have to go out, it appeared; everything came to him, at the house. All he had to do was sit—and work—and eventually reel after spliced reel of everybody’s life was delivered to him. Naturally, for Dave, it was a very salubrious setup.

And in the case of Wally, it was more than clear that something had happened. It was impossible to know just what. Except that it must have been something to do with Dawnie. Not that Wally ever said anything about her. He didn’t. But the mere fact that he never mentioned her indicated something; before, up until she had left for school, he had talked about her incessantly. But after she had left, he never spoke of her at all. He hung out at the house more and more, drinking more than he had ever drunk before and playing Ping-Pong avidly with everyone and anyone who would play with him. He still wrote in the mornings, of course. And he still attended his few classes at the college. But all the rest of his time, he was at the house until he became almost as much of a fixture there as the two owners themselves.

Dave knew from Gwen that Wally had come to her earlier in the summer with a fairly elaborate plan for revising his book. A plan which, in essence at least, Gwen had agreed with. It had to do with a new viewpoint about sex and love, Gwen had said without smiling in the least. That was all Dave knew. All he wanted to know, since he agreed with Gwen that her writers should not talk to each other, and that she should not talk to any, about each other’s books.

“Keep them writing,” she smiled. “Just keep them writing. Time, the great healer—and peeler—takes care of everything else.”

With Wally, it was clear that his new viewpoint about sex and love had come before whatever it was that had happened between him and Dawnie. And whether this more new development had further evolved his ideas about sex and love, Dave had not yet learned. But Wally was apparently learning—painfully—something about the vagaries of women. And the more caustic and cynical his new knowledge made him, the more Dave found he liked him. He had lost none of his brash self-absorbed confidence that was often a hard trait to get along with, so apparently Dawn had not clawed his soul too very deeply. By the first week of November—which celebrated Dave’s first year of return to Parkman—Wally had done something which, since Dave had known him at least, he had never done before. He had taken to going out with the brassiere factory girls and finally formed a more or less halfway alliance with the titian-haired Rosalie Sansome.

Dave could not help thinking a little wistfully of Dawnie, whose lush woman’s body he had often looked at covetously, and—always provided he had not been her uncle, of course—would have so liked to seduce; and whatever their trouble, he could fully empathize with Wally.

Anyway Dave was having his own minor troubles, and was still wishing he could get Gwen to love him just enough to go to bed with him.

And in spite of the fact that he was more or less resigned to it, and even actively enjoyed their “platonic” relationship, there were still times when frustration would rage through him at being apparently so near and yet at the same time so far, and make him want to do something desperate.

Why did women always have to be so damned “spiritual”? he wondered. Why did they always feel it was their duty to be “spiritual” and worry about a man’s goddamned soul? They couldn’t just sleep with you and love you, no. Why the hell couldn’t there be women who thought like men thought?

On the anniversary of his first year in Parkman, ’Bama, conspiring with Wally and Dewey and Hubie, threw a first year party for him. It was a surprise party—but Dave could tell there was something up somewhere. Nevertheless, when he came home to find the surprise party waiting on him, he dutifully pretended to be surprised. Nearly all the gang from Smitty’s were there, as well as other more or less indiscriminately invited guests. The house apparently was becoming quite celebrated in Parkman, and just about everybody—saving only Frank and the positively respectable element—wanted to get in on the act. For the first time Doris Fredric attended, moving about familiarly as if she had lived there since the place was leased. Just about the only people Dave had had any associations with since he came to Parkman who were not there—saving only Frank and the positively respectable element, of course—were the Frenches, and Wally told him later that he had wanted to invite them but that ’Bama had demurred on the grounds that it would be too lowdown a brawl for highclass college people. Dave, thinking of Gwen and Bob, could only laugh. Both of them, he was quite sure, would have loved it.

Ginnie Moorehead, as it happened, was not at this party, either. ’Bama, who was becoming increasingly mother-henish about him and his writing, had seen to that. And Dave, of course, knew nothing about it until afterwards. ’Bama had just decided they would ask only guys, who could bring girls if they wanted. Then, he apparently figured, if anybody liked Ginnie well enough to bring her they were welcome to. Of course, nobody did, although someone or other brought almost all the other brassiere factory girls. The result was that this party was not a loose mixed party at all, but one made up of couples, and there were no stag girls—in itself a rarity at the house on Lincoln Street. And except for a few of the type of Albie Shipe and Raymond Cole, the two hosts—himself and ’Bama—were the only ones without dates. No; there was one other: Doris Fredric. Because if she was supposed to be ’Bama’s date, no one would have ever known it. ’Bama paid no attention to her all evening, looking at her as if she were just one more strange party guest, and Doris herself moved through the house and about the party, apparently completely at ease, and at the same time ignoring both of them. And she left early. Although most of the gang who hung out at the house regularly stayed on late after the less familiar guests had gone.

As Clark Hibbard’s society editor would have written for the
Oregonian
, a good time was had by all. Everybody got mellowly drunk, there was not one fight, and after the more conventional elements had gone there was some bedding down upstairs by those who could talk their women into it. And as he sat drinking, a kind of spasmodic sentiment seized on Dave, as he looked around at all of them—his fellow citizens and Plebes, Romans all, he thought, the sturdy bricks of the empire-builders.

When he looked back over it, as he did that night after he finally got to bed, it seemed incredible to Dave how much his life had changed in the one year since he had come back to Parkman. He just was not the same person who had come here a year ago. He did not think the same, he did not act the same, and he did not look the same. By virtue of having cut himself down on his eating he had leveled off at just over two hundred pounds now—as against 155 when he got out of the Army. Not too much difference, but far too much for a man only five feet six inches tall. But as his body had softened, his mind had honed itself thinner and keener and much sharper. And as for the way he acted, belligerence was almost not ever in him anymore, nor anger, coming only rarely and when it did sweeping him with such a sudden blazing fury that for a moment he wouldn’t even know what he was doing, or care, something totally foreign to anything that had ever existed in his nature before, and which was almost always gone almost before he felt it.