Some Came Running (20 page)

“Fine. Great,” Dave said, “an admirable project. Only, I wish you’d please keep me out of it, hunh?”

“Why,” she said.

“Because it happened a long time ago, and it’s a period of my life that’s past, and I’m done with it,” Dave said. “Done with writing. So I figure the less said about it the better. Maybe I don’t want my personality understood.”

“Well, I think you must be more or less prepared to accept that sort of critical publicity when you publish,” Gwen smiled at him. That small smile. “Otherwise you shouldn’t publish. I couldn’t very well do a critique of a group and then leave one of its main members completely out. Now could I?”

“Did you know that George Blanca had an affair with my sister, Francine?” Dave said.

“No, I didn’t,” Gwen said. “I suspected it.”

“They’re both married now. It would only cause them both embarrassment to bring something like that back up publicly.”

“Are you worrying about them? or about yourself?” Gwen smiled.

Across the room, Agnes was doing most of the talking, to Bob French, and Frank who had mixed them all scotch drinks was just sitting drinking, while pretending to listen. Bob French had gathered himself as if preparatory to getting up from the divan.

“Why do you want to do it?” Dave said. “And what made you pick our group, anyway? We weren’t even important.”

Gwen French— He still always thought of her like that, both names, he couldn’t help it. Gwen French paused to light another cigarette and then settled back.

“I suppose it came from knowing you, actually—at first, anyway,” she said. “You may not remember, but I was in high school with you. Two years behind you.”

“Vaguely,” Dave said; “you wrote an awful lot of poetry.”

“Very bad poetry,” Gwen said shortly. “I knew all about you and your leaving town. Before you graduated. Then about the time I first began to get really interested in literature your first stories began to come out. I was surprised; I would never have thought of you being a type that would make a writer. And I was interested. So I started following you. Through you I got acquainted with the rest of that group. I started collecting everything any of you wrote.”

She took a drag from her cigarette, then flipped her hand to clear the smoke and it looked like a gesture of dismissal.

“That was all it was. Just a sort of interest. And I kept it up. But then after a long time of watching I thought I began to see a sort of definitive relationship, a logical pattern, emerging from what happened to all of you. I think what intrigued me most was the failure. All of you failed. And all about the same time. All of you had high resolves and all of you failed. First Herman Daniel went home, and married his schoolgirl sweetheart, and settled down.”

“I didn’t fail,” Dave said. “Let’s just say I grew up. Outgrew it.”

She smiled. “Then Kenneth McKeean committed suicide over a girl. George Blanca started writing fairly good movie scripts and married a rich girl. And then you stopped writing altogether,” she said. “You haven’t written anything since that second novel, have you.” It was not a question.

“No,” Dave said stiffly. “Nothing.”

“I had high hopes of you,” Gwen French said. “Especially after I watched what happened to the others and it didn’t happen to you. But you didn’t write anymore.”

If she was disturbing him, and she was, she certainly wasn’t doing it on purpose he thought and didn’t have any idea that she was doing it.

“Finally,” she said, “later, I decided that you must have had some kind of a very deep or very unhappy love affair, which somehow or other affected you badly enough to make you quit writing.” She looked at him questioningly.

“I guess I’m not over it yet,” Dave said.

She nodded. “No, and you probably never will be.” She took another drag of her cigarette and flipped her hand again. “Well, you can see why I was intrigued. In every case a girl—sex—was involved in the failure.”

“How did you figure that out about me, though?” Dave asked stonily.

“It was the only possibility that fitted in with my theory,” Gwen French said. “But I wasn’t sure. Until just now. But I knew it had to be that. You see, each of you arrived at a crisis with a woman in which you either got what you wanted or didn’t. But either way, it destroyed you as writers. By destroying in you the hunger
to
write.”

“Maybe we just didn’t any of us have the talent,” Dave said.

“No, all of you had talent—in varying degrees.”

“The degree,” Dave said. “That’s the rub.”

Gwen shook her head stubbornly. It was a very female gesture. She had them every now and then, he thought, in spite of her irregular mannish face and figure. Perhaps that was the thing, the contrast, that made them seem more lovable. It was strange. All those years out there, with all those people, who hardly seemed real anymore, and Harriet Bowman. And all that time what was it? thirteen years? this woman back here, following it all. All her young years really and he hadn’t known. Very strange.

“I don’t believe talent is born in people,” Gwen said, still shaking her head. “Or rather, let’s say I believe talent is born in everyone. Only it’s usually unrealized. We’re all animals, you know. Lazy. But in your cases, this hunger to be loved caused enough drive in all of you and made you work hard enough and painfully enough to develop the talent that was already in you. In fact,” she said scientifically, like a researcher dissecting a dog in a lab, “I should say you all had talent. In varying degrees and in this order: Kenneth McKeean first, you second, Blanca third, Herman Daniel last.”

She stopped a moment, and then looked back up at him with a look of mild astonishment on her face. “You know, there might be another general principle for me there to cabbage onto,” she said. “McKeean, with the greatest—and the most developed—talent, couldn’t stand losing his love and killed himself. You, with the next highest, stopped writing, but didn’t kill yourself.”

“I thought about it a lot of times,” Dave interposed.

“But you didn’t,” she said; “and George Blanca, the third highest, married what he wanted: money, and then stayed, writing things he would never have written before, and believing them. Things McKeean and you could never have written because you were both too neurotic to believe them; the greatest test of normalcy, you know, is how much you can lie to yourself and believe. And Herman Daniel, with the least talent and therefore the most normal, gave it up completely and went into business back home.”

“You haven’t got a critical piece there,” Dave said. “You’ve got a novel.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I’m no creative writer. I learned that a long time ago, the hard way. I don’t have that drive, that abnormal hunger to be loved so badly. I guess my childhood was too normal, too happy.”

“Maybe you’re just unwilling to expose yourself,” Dave said angrily. “Writing is a lot like sex exhibitionism. Like the man on the street who is under a compulsion to take his genitals out and show them to people. Especially to women.”

“You’re right,” Gwen French nodded, “and what you say is very possibly true of me, too. Oh, we could go on talking about it for hours. The thing with me is I just have no desire to be a creative writer. Whatever the reason.”

“No,” Dave said. “And neither do I.”

Across the room, Bob French had relaxed and regathered himself several times. Now he regathered himself again, and this time he actually got up. Agnes was still talking.

“Oh, you have it all right,’’ Gwen smiled. She seemed to come back into herself from a long way off. “The only thing I worry about is that in not writing for so long a time you may never become as good as you might have done.”

“Oh, balls!” Dave said, wanting to shock her. How the hell were you going to argue with a woman who wouldn’t even admit that what you said was what you meant?

But he might have known. She wasn’t shocked. She just smiled tolerantly—that small smile—as if she understood him completely, and then crushed out her cigarette and picked up her nearly untouched scotch drink, and looked up expectantly at her father who was now coming toward them. “Don’t get up,” Bob French smiled, as if anticipating his daughter’s intention. “I’ve got to run along. A couple of old cronies and I are going over to Terre Haute to see the late movie,” he explained to Dave, “that’s why Gwen and I both brought our own cars. You stay as long as you want,” he said to her. “You two seem to be having a considerable conversation.”

“I have to be going, too,” Gwen said quickly. “I’ve got some papers to grade yet tonight.”

It was almost as if she had suddenly become frightened. As if she could not stand the thought of being left here. Without him. Or else she didn’t like the idea of him going out so late and was already beginning to worry. Because certainly it could not be me she was afraid of, Dave thought bitterly.

“You don’t have anything to do that won’t keep awhile, if you want to stay,” Bob French said.

“It just means I’ll have to stay up that much later, is all,” Gwen said. “You know you oughtn’t to be going anyplace so late,” she said, her voice changing, harshening. She had moved on the loveseat, gathering her weight as if to get up. Frank and Agnes had gotten up also, Frank holding onto his glass which he had refilled several times already.

“Don’t start mothering me, Gwen,” her father smiled. “Eventually, when I’m dead, you’re going to have to find some other object for your frustrated mother instincts.”

“Of course,” she said; “you’re quite right,” and relaxed back into the loveseat.

Still smiling Bob French turned away, Frank and Agnes following him to the hall to see him out.

“Sometimes,” Gwen said to Dave, “sometimes I almost think he throws me at the head of every man we meet. Almost as if he wanted to get rid of me. But he couldn’t get along without me. What would he do without me to take care of him?”

“Probably find himself an elderly housekeeper and get along quite well,” Dave said.

“She might not enjoy looking to see if he had his head on every time he leaves the house. He’s the most forgetful man who ever lived.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” said Dave, who had been trying to do just that all evening. Then he had to laugh: The picture of Old Bob French going off without his head and his daughter running down the walk after him with it was too much. The spasm of laughter tickled up through his chest and burst out in a series of guffaws.

Gwen French continued to stare at him, as if she hadn’t the least idea what on earth he was laughing at, and expected a proper explanation.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when the spasm ceased. “It was just the way you described it. Look,” he said, “there’s just one thing I want to tell you about us. About that group of ours, when we were out in California.

“We didn’t any of us have any idea that anybody was going to be interested. You know? We were just living. Or trying to. All of us had romantic pictures about writing, and writers. Which we subsequently had beaten out of us.”

Gwen nodded, as if wondering why such an obvious and pointless statement.

“In all fairness, you ought to take that into account,” he said.

“But that was one of the most important things to me,” she said. “That, and the fact that you were all small writers, lesser writers. Those were my main points of force: You weren’t trying to hide anything. Big writers always start covering up their tracks, the moment they start to get big. That, together with all the myths about them, makes it doubly hard. You don’t know what’s true and what isn’t and besides, it’s harder to isolate what makes the big writers fail. They all succumb to their own particular romanticisms.”

“The realists, too?” Dave grinned.

“Especially the realists,” Gwen smiled. They looked at each other for a moment and it suddenly became a long moment, one of agreement, of understanding, one of those rare ones which need no words, perhaps the first real such moment they had had. Then Frank and Agnes came back into the room and Gwen got up off the loveseat.

Dave did not get up, and picked up his scotch drink. He was getting a little drunk again. Gwen French wasn’t, though. She had had only one manhattan before dinner, and her glass which remained sitting on the coffee table was her first drink after, and over two thirds of it remained untouched. It took her several minutes to get said all the necessary talking to Frank and Agnes preparatory to leaving. Dave remained seated, out of it, finishing off his drink. Then he finished off her glass, too. Hell with it. When they were about done talking, he got up.

“I’ve got to go, too, Frank,” he said. “Meetin some guys downtown.”

“Who?” Frank said. He was pretty tight, too, but his eyes were sharp.

“Fellow named ’Bama Dillert. Maybe you know him? And a couple guys named Dewey Cole and Hubie Murson.”

“’Bama?” Frank said. “The gambler and pool player?”

“Oh, not Dewey Cole,” Agnes said. “Not those two.”

“Why not?” Dave said. “What’s wrong with them? I met them all today and we going to have a couple drinks together.” He was aware of Gwen French watching him.

Frank did not say anything, did not commit himself. He had been in a lot of poker games with ’Bama Dillert.

“Because they’re no good,” Agnes said. “Why don’t you meet some decent people?”

“Because decent people bore me, Agnes,” Dave said. “Usually.” He couldn’t resist it. Her tone made him mad.

“I’ll get the car out,” Frank said, “and run you down.”

“Oh, there’s no need to do that,” Gwen French said. “He can ride down with me.”

Dave allowed himself to look at her, but indifferently. This was what he had been angling for all along. “Oh, I don’t want to put you out,” he said. “You’ve got things to do yourself, I’m sure.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” she said.

“All right,” he said, “then I’ll ride with you. If you’re sure you were going through town, anyway.”

“I’m sure,” Gwen smiled.

As if that settled it, they all started toward the hall doorway. As the women went ahead, Frank held Dave back. Dave turned around.

“Look, I don’t want you to forget that deal we were talkin about,” Frank said. “I don’t want to see you throw all that money away. I know what I want you to do with it. You think it over and let me know.”