Some Came Running (169 page)

Of course, he Frank had been in on the whole thing, he told them: the handling of the soldier, the removal of Dave’s body, everything. The shot had been heard uptown, and when Sherm Ruedy and his deputy cop get there, the one-armed soldier boy had stepped out grinning and dropped his gun. Sherm and his deputy cop had roughed him up a little bit, getting him to the jail. But the guy just grinned at them in silence. Frank himself figured a little bit of pistol-whipping wouldn’t hurt him a damned bit. Especially since later he got off scot-free and was sent to a Veterans’ Hospital.

Of course, they had called him—Frank—right away. He had been working the Rotary Club hot dog stand on the square that night. He had gone down there right away. It was hard to tell it was even Dave: The .45 slug had hit him right square in the face. And, in fact, they had had to identify him from cards in his wallet before they called Frank. Later on, at the funeral, they had kept the casket closed. He had told them, down there on North Main where Dave lay, what undertaker to take him to: the best in town, of course. And he had stayed and waited for the ambulance and helped them load him in and had ridden down to the undertaker’s with him. He had, Frank told them, felt that was little enough to do for poor old Dave.

Dave had evidently been on his way out of town, when this guy shot him. Because he was carrying both a suitcase and a portable typewriter. The typewriter, when they opened it later, had evidently been broken when he dropped. Of course, he hadn’t opened it or the suitcase then but had only taken them home and kept them until the judge called him next day after having received the will, and then he had turned them both over to the judge. The manuscript, of course, as they knew, had been in the suitcase. Later on, at the inquest, Ginnie Moorehead had said that she hadn’t known that Dave was leaving and, indeed, knew no reason why he should want to leave. She herself had been uptown at the festivities with some friends, and Dave had stayed home by himself, and when she left him, he seemed perfectly happy and contented. But then, Frank said, that damned woman was liable to say anything. And, well, that was the whole story.

Gwen sat and heard it out, although it was exquisitely painful to her. Bob evidently felt the same way, from the look on his face. But curiosity is just too strong, no matter how painful the information. And anyway Gwen felt in some obscure way it was her duty to do it: to sit and hear all the gory details. And after Frank had finished, still fighting to keep from crying, Gwen told him calmly about the note Dave had included with the copy of the will he sent to her, and showed it to him.

Frank, of course, didn’t know anything about it or what it meant. Bob did, of course; they had talked about it earlier, that same day they received the will. That note, together with the will itself and the fact that he was leaving town, meant for both of them that Dave had come to some momentous decision—about his life, and about his writing; just exactly what it was, of course, they would never know. But there was no point in trying to explain any of this to Frank. He wouldn’t have understood it anyway; and anyway, Frank was having a hard enough time as it was over his brother dying, Gwen thought looking at him as he sat there solemnly. The manuscript itself lay on the judge’s desk, where the judge himself had placed it. They would, she said, attempt to put it into shape for him and see if they couldn’t get it published.

When Ginnie Moorehead finally came in, the homogeneity of the group seemed to disintegrate immediately. Gwen could not help but feel sorry for her: She was so obviously ill at ease before legality in any form. But when, later, she insisted that the manuscript belonged to her, Gwen could not help feeling anger and total disgust for her, either—just as strongly as she had felt sorry earlier.

His wife,
Gwen kept saying to herself with exquisite pain:
Dave’s wife.
It was such an agonizing thought, as she sat looking at the gross acquisitiveness of her, that Gwen thought she could not bear it. Bob, from his face, apparently knew what she was feeling; but she didn’t think any of the others did. She didn’t think she was still in love with Dave; but she did still feel love for his talent. And that this ignorant woman would sit there and try to claim his manuscript—which he had clearly left to herself and Bob—was insufferable. But what on earth would ever have made him
do it
? a man of his exquisite sensibilities? to marry a creature like this woman?

When the decision about the manuscript was made—with the judge’s cold-steel voice—and Ginnie had backed down, Gwen collected Bob and the manuscript and got them out of there as quickly as she could. They had no further business there; and she wanted to get out.

So they had taken the manuscript home. But once they got there, neither one of them wanted to talk about it; and they had simply put it carefully away. It was still too soon yet, would be too painful, to try to do anything with it now. And in the same way they both felt about the manuscript, they also felt about talking about Dave. The manuscript lay in its file, and the thought of Dave lay filed in their minds, for nearly another two months, while the pain of his violent death gradually faded away, before they ever took it out again.

Gwen had been home nearly a year before Dave died. She had come home in October of 1949, and he was killed in September of 1950. The school year, of course, was already started when she got back to Illinois; but then she had no more desire to teach at the college anyway; not anywhere else. It had just faded out of her out there in the desert sun of Arizona. She knew about his marriage, of course; but she had cleansed herself in Arizona. She had ridden, and swum, and gone for long walks in the foothills of the Catalinas, and whenever she wanted it she had had access to Cousin Wilson Ball’s jeep to make long trips out into the desert country: driving in the open jeep in just shorts and halter until she was as brown as any Indian, and the sun had cleansed her. The sun, and her own strong mind, had cooked Dave—or at least the pain of Dave—right out of her. The letter from Bob about Dave’s sister Francine had caught her just as she was finishing up the book. It was the one letter she had from Bob, and its answer was the only one she sent him. She had been suspecting something of this kind might come up over the book. But spending her cool early mornings working on it, and the rest of the day out in that glorious cleansing sun, she went ahead and finished it anyway. It was really a shame, she thought looking at the last page as she finished; because it was really a small masterpiece of the analysis of sexual drives in writers, in its own small way; and now she wouldn’t be able to publish it. Then she put it away and forgot about it until such time as she should go home. Because she knew, by then, that she was going home. Home to Parkman and Israel. Home to Bob and the
Last Retreat.

And with the book done, and back home now, there really wasn’t much for her to do: She still had no desire at all to teach anymore; somehow that had gone completely out of her. So she started in on a research on Hawthorne—something she had always planned to do someday—and began writing more conventional articles on that work, and some others on Whitman, whom she had always admired. All of them were sold, to one little college publication or another, and especially the Hawthorne pieces got an enthusiastic reception; and she began toying with the idea of expanding them into a book on Hawthorne. And, with all of this, she was reasonably happy. She had seen Dave just twice, over in Parkman, on the street; and both times they had both turned off so as not to meet. Perhaps it hurt her? Yes, perhaps it did; but not really very strongly.

She was, somehow a changed person; and she knew it. She could tell it just in her driving. She had, from a rather timid always-ill-at-ease driver, become a really excellent one. So much so that she had had to train herself to always be on the lookout for the cops. Perhaps this driving thing was due to all those long hours of herding Cousin Wilson Ball’s jeep over the back roads and highways of Arizona. She had certainly had plenty of practice. But there was more to it than just that, too. Her driving had become more forceful, more a dominating of the car, and she herself had become more forceful, too. She was just—changed. And she was happy.

And that was the way she was when she picked up the
Oregonian
that evening in September and was shocked to a standstill by the news of Dave’s killing: a very small, little item down at the bottom of the front page.

She knew all about the one-armed ex-Marine and Ginnie Moorehead, how Ginnie had gone off to Kansas with him and then come back to Dave, and Bob’s subsequent visit from the unhappy lover. He had told her all of it—reluctantly: It was clear he did not want to tell her; but she insisted on knowing, and so he had told her. And so, when she had read it in the paper, the evening of that same day when Dave’s Will and Testament had come in through the mail—another surprise, in itself—she had known the whole story. Whatever it was that Ginnie Moorehead had, it must be something—to keep so many men interested and chasing after her so long.

She had, of course, shown the piece to Bob and had him phone Frank right away. And, later, after the unpleasant scene in Judge Deacon’s office, and they had returned home with the manuscript, she found that another change of some sort had taken place in her: The Hawthorne work no longer interested her, and she laid the book aside. She could not free herself of a deep, obsessive guilt that, somehow, she herself was responsible for Dave’s death. More so than Ginnie Moorehead. More so than the boy who pulled the trigger.

She could not talk to Bob about it. And during those near-two months—from the tail end of September to just past the middle of November—while both his manuscript and the thought of Dave lay quietly put aside in both of them, and the shocked pain at his death faded away somewhat, she brooded about it. Was she responsible?

But when, finally, in the middle of November, they got the manuscript out and began going through it, and the picture of Dave’s mind and thought and phraseology suddenly emerged from it, freshly, and shockingly alive, as if
he
were still alive, she could not keep quiet any longer.

There really wasn’t too awfully much work to do on the manuscript. Most of the love affair chapters were separate entities, and those had only to be just pulled out entire. But there were, as they read it through, various small allusions to the “little private” and the “little peasant girl”: All of these needed to be cut, too, and they both read it very carefully to make sure they missed none of them. And once this was done, the book was finished. They were both very careful to change nothing else: When they started on it, it was with the principle of not adding or changing even one word or comma that was not Dave’s own; and this they held to. Whenever an occasion came up that a transition was obscure because of a cut or of a missing love affair chapter, they solved it by more minor cutting rather than by adding anything. In all, it took them just a little over a week to do it all. And it was one of the most deeply satisfying—as well as one of the most exquisitely painful—experiences Gwen had ever had in her life.

And, after it was done and mailed in to NLL, and they finally heard from them, Gwen told Bob about her broodings over Dave and her sense of responsibility for his death. She felt that, honorably, she had to, now.

She did not know just exactly what it was that made her feel she
had
to do it. Perhaps, more than anything else, it was the simple fact that Dave had sent that copy of his will to them and had left them the manuscript, and that little note he had stuck in with it:
Should anything happen to me, the love affair should come out—entirely.
All of this—coupled to the fact that he was apparently leaving town—and Ginnie—indicated that some large change had taken place in Dave. It was also a vindication of herself and Bob: of the faith they had had in him; and, in the end, a proof of Dave’s own trust in them. He had left
them
the manuscript, not someone else. Because he knew that they sympathized with and shared his ideas and his beliefs. And because he knew he could trust them to edit it according to his purpose. And this meant a great deal to Gwen. It was also, as she realized, the cause of her guilt. She did not know what miseries of self-searching he had had to go through in order to arrive at this change of viewpoint. There just wasn’t any way of knowing now. But she did feel that if she herself had not failed him, he might still be here now to write other, greater books. That was the worst of all: He would never write the things he might have written. And Gwen felt that that was her responsibility.

God, how she hated being a woman! A silly, lying, vain, preening woman: playing at being the Pedestal: the universal “Conscience”—and all the time being sly and deceitful underneath the thin veneer of sweet and soulful respectability. And that was just what she had been! All her life she had worked at
not
being that kind of woman. She had seen Dawnie with her Shotridge—that same Dawnie she had once thrown a tantrum over, when she had read the handwriting on the wall. And she had seen Doris Fredric, with her sly lying so-virginal act she played to such perfection. Even Agnes—once so strong; and now a self-pitying semi-invalid—even Agnes, in her perpetual handling of Frank, had lived mainly by deceit. Perhaps all women
had
to live like this; but Gwen
refused
to believe it; and she had promised herself that
she
would never be like that.

And yet, when it had come down to it—when, with her own man (the only man she had ever really loved), she had been confronted with her own need to act—she had reacted just like all the rest. She had lied—about her virginity; and even more deceitfully than they, because hers was a tacit lie: She simply let him believe what he already thought. And out of what: out of vanity, and sheer pride. Out in Tucson she had hated him—hated him violently, every time the thought of him crossed her mind. And then, when she got back home, and found out that he actually had
married
that pig Ginnie, she hated him even more violently. Like those two times she had seen him on the street. And so, after promising herself never to do so, she had reacted just exactly like all the rest—like Agnes, and like Dawn, and like Doris Fredric: a lying, vain, preening, petty, jealous,
deceitful
woman.