Some Came Running (38 page)

“I want you to stay away from her, that’s what,” Frank said, his indignation almost getting away with him.

“What’s the matter?” Dave said, grinning, “you rompin her yourself?”

“No,” Frank said. “Of course not. I make it a hard and fast rule never to get involved with any of my help.”

“You do, hunh?” Dave said. “Then it’s a rule you made since I left here.”

“What I’m tryin to say is,” Frank said, “is that I’ve got a damned good office girl there. And I got no intention of losin her because she gets in some kind of a mess with you.”

“Okay,” Dave said, still watching him. “But don’t try to give me all this crap about you being such a damned plaster saint. Anyway, you flatter me unduly, I think.”

“It’s possible for some people to learn something from their previous mistakes,” Frank said with stiffened dignity, “though you may not be used to people like that.”

“Possible,” Dave said. “But not probable. And not you. Or me. But you don’t need to worry about me bein interested in your office girl. I’m not. However, if I was nothin you could say would stop me from tryin. See?”

“I don’t care about you,” Frank said. “Or what you say. Or what you think. You just keep away from my office girl, you hear?”

“I hear you,” Dave said. “And you heard me: If I want to, I will.”

Frank went to the door and then turned back. Dave was looking him coldly, and clearly, in a way Frank had never seen him look before. For a moment, he was afraid he had gone too far, without somehow realizing it.

“Look,” he said from the door. “I don’t want us to get in an argument. We’ve got a good deal here,” he said, shaking the contracts. “I’m just askin you to help me out with this girl, that’s all.”

“Then ask me,” Dave said. “Don’t try to tell me.”

“I am askin you.”

“You don’t need to worry,” Dave said. “I ain’t interested in your office girl.”

“Okay, boy,” Frank said and grinned and winked, opening the door. “I’ll probably need you in the next day or two. I’ll call you at the Douglas.”

“Okay,” Dave said. “Just call me.”

Frank nodded, and the last thing he saw as he closed the door was Dave—red-faced and wavy-eyed—heading for the table where the liquor was.

He walked back to the store. He did not know that after he left, his brother sat down staring at the shuttered windows and let come into his mind what he had been feeling all morning and all afternoon during the interview: wondered, blackly, why in hell he had ever let his money, and himself, get tied up in this damned taxi service that tied him down to Parkman. Frank did know, however—during the next week, when he was working himself frazz-leassed—that his brother Dave was not being of much use to him. Whenever he tried to get in touch with Dave at the Douglas, where he had registered, Dave was not to be found, was out somewhere, could not be got hold of. He even called Dave one night at eleven-thirty, and Dave still was not there. That was about the way Dave remembered all his promises, he reflected.

When he got back to the store, Edith was at her desk working. Without pausing to think about it—except to expect her to be deeply grateful to him—he told her about having talked to Dave. Instead of being grateful, she got madder than hell. Madder than he had ever seen her. And formal.

“If I’d known you were going to do that, Mr Hirsh,” she said crisply, “I’d never have told you in the first place.” Her eyes looked like a cloudy sky, threatening lightning flashes.

“I only did it to keep him from takin advantage of the fact he’s my brother and bothering you,” Frank said.

“Nobody bothers me, Mr Hirsh,” Edith said. “I’ve been taking care of myself ever since my mother died, and that was when I was in high school. I don’t need any help, from you or anybody, sir.”

“Well, I’m sorry, then,” Frank said, still taken aback. So she was interested in Dave after all, hunh?

“As long as my work at the store is satisfactory,” Edith said, seeming to relent a little, “and I don’t cause any talk that might be detrimental to you or the store, I think what I do outside of working hours is my own business, Boss.”

“Then you are interested in Dave, hunh?” Frank asked.

“No, sir, I am not,” Edith said vehemently. “I told you that. I wouldn’t lie to you about it.” She softened, and smiled. “I just feel you haven’t any right to try and take my welfare in hand without consulting me first, and taking things which I told you in confidence and using them. After all, I only work at the store eight hours a day.”

“I didn’t know it was in confidence,” Frank said.

“Well, it was.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” Frank said. “Look, here’s the contracts. There’s two or three small changes. And I want them notarized.”

“Yes, sir,” Edith said, taking them.

“Now about the changes,” Frank said, thinking he had really put his foot into it, and wondering why the hell he had ever bothered his head about it in the first place?

Well, he would see what happened with Dave. What he was planning, what he hoped, was that once he got the building and lot leased, he would turn it over to Dave to get fixed up and get the phones in and generally get it ready to start operating.

That was not the way it turned out, however, because when he finally got around to calling Dave two or three days later, he could not get him. He could not get him the second time he called, either. Nor the time after that. Nor any other time. So he finally wound up doing it all himself. As usual.

Dave, as a matter of fact, was having his own troubles. And he was spending a great deal of time at the Frenches’ over in Israel trying to solve them. Trying to realize his investment. It was a real job.

D
AVE HAD SAT FOR
a long time by himself in the hotel room, after Frank left with the contracts. As soon as Frank had closed the door, he had got himself another drink and sat down in the chair with it. Then he just sat, holding it, and because he happened to be facing that way, looking out the window. When he became aware of it, he got up and closed the venetian blind and sat back down.

He just couldn’t believe he had really signed those contracts, those goddamned contracts. Everything in him had cried out to him not to sign them. Even when he knelt down by the coffee table with the pen in his hand. But he had gone ahead and signed them just the same. Why? It was silly, but it was as if he felt he didn’t have a right not to sign them after letting everything go this far, and letting Frank think he would sign them. Some vague sense of—of justice, was the only word he could give it; of self-punishment. He hadn’t wanted to sign them all along, from the very beginning, and yet every time he had found a loophole that might have saved him he had covered it up. It was as if he had made sure from the very beginning to get himself in this position, for the very reason that he hadn’t wanted to, in order to punish himself for something. For living, maybe.

And now that he was in it he felt trapped like an animal. He was frightened. Fright spread over him, and panic was like another living presence inside his skin. It was himself he was afraid of. Any man who couldn’t depend on himself more than that. A guy who deliberately did things to punish himself. Christ, he was liable to wind up like Van Gogh cutting off one of his ears or something. Fear made him want to jump up out of the chair and run.

Hell, a contract was like an oath! Once you took it you were bound by it. Even though you changed your mind two minutes later, you were still bound to it. And so Frank had outsmarted him. With the very thing he had come here not to do.

This was the first time in his life Dave had ever signed a real, bona fide contract, and he felt as if he had just lost another virginity. He had been losing one virginity after another all his life, it seemed, and now here was another one. How many more firsts were there going to be for him to lose? he wondered. Before he was allowed to quit.

There was a constant tendency in him, he found, to just keep shaking his head. To have turned over all his money that way, to have signed himself up to stay in Parkman like that—and for what, to work in a lousy three-car taxi stand—it was almost more than he could bear to think about. And all of it because he had convinced himself with some crazy logic that it was worth it—
would
be worth it—to seduce this one woman. Gwen French.

The horrible thing was he thought he had figured it all out logically. But if he had figured it all out logically beforehand, that night in the snow on the square, now he could prove just as logically that he had figured it out wrong and should not have done it. That was the frightening thing. It didn’t leave you anywhere to stand. Logic. The ability to reason. Heh-heh. Yeh. It was a great trait in human beings.

Filled up with an unconsumed energy of misery and fright and self-accusation that had suddenly boiled over into a scalding inability to sit still, Dave got up and began to march around the room, the untouched drink glass in his hand, forgotten.

Well, he had done it now; he was in it. The fishhook was in his scrotum. He might as well collect his prize. If you can, that is. There was a frenetic desire in him get on with it, get the ball rolling. He was like a man who, having mistakenly agreed to get up on a stage before an audience and make a speech, now insists on going through with it down to the last bitter embarrassing dram of gall, even when everybody else wishes that in God’s name he would stop.

Prowling jitterishly about the room for all the world just like the caged animal he felt himself to be, he happened to look down at his hand and discover the drink glass in it. He stared at it a moment, and then set it down and sat back down in the chair to think. Gwen French. It wasn’t even sensible. But he had to seduce her now. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have anything at all to show for his five thousand dollars. What up to now had been one big lark suddenly had become a matter of extreme desperation. Grimly, he set about preparing himself for the first onslaught of the citadel, Bob French’s
Last Retreat
in Israel.

But then maybe—a thought which, strangely, had not occurred to him before—maybe a woman like that was, instead of being easier, actually the hardest type there was to make. She would know her way around, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t lose her head, would she? She would be able to pick and choose, wouldn’t she? And maybe after all she was really telling him the truth, when she said sex bored her and she wasn’t interested in it anymore.

Dave slumped down in the big chair, immersed in such a sense of defeat as he had not had in a long, long time. Oh, hell, he ought to just give it all up and take the hell off. Leave the money. Let Frank have it. He could always go back to Sister Francine’s in North Hollywood—the oasis, he thought—and live off of her and her husband. It would be rough, leaving on the bum again, after all these years, with no money now, hitching across country again, with no prospects. But he could do it. He had done it before. In fact, half of him hungered to do just that. Sneak away from this damned town in the black of night. And
never
come back.

There was a perverse satisfaction in the thought of embracing the defeat you loathed, hugging to you the failure you were ashamed of, and making both of them public by running off. A feeling that you were better off, because then nothing worse could happen to you.

No, sir! Not without a try, by God! he promised himself, getting up and striding back and forth across the room. A man had to be a man. A man had to have some spine. A man just couldn’t just quit. He would seduce Gwen French, or know the reason why.

It was over an hour since Frank had left, and Dave was already exhausted. He would stay. Here-I-come-ready-or-not, like the kids hollered playing hide-and-seek. Olly-olly-ocks-in-free.

There were a number of things he had to do first, the packing, the checking out, the getting the bank draft to Frank, the checking in at the fleatrap Douglas, all the insufferable mosquitolike details of remaining alive, alive and solvent. He went about them grudgingly, with irritation, jealous of the time they took. And all the time his mind gnawed away at him, as if it were a hungry dog for whom he himself had become his own bone: Why did you do it? Why did you do it? The people whom he had to address he did not even see; and several persons who spoke to him on the street by name he was not even aware of.

Finally, ensconced in his grubby little room at the Douglas, all of it done, he sat down to call them in Israel. Only, there was no phone in this room. He had to go out in the dark, grimy hall where beside a cobwebby unwashed-in-years window there was a box wall phone. It was a phone he was to become very familiar with in the next year, and he had a premonition about that as he looked at it. His vision told him he would become as used to it as he would to the Douglas Hotel itself.

The Stephen A Douglas Hotel was a three-story frame structure with a brick front two blocks off the square on Apple Street. All the north-south side streets in Parkman were named for fruit trees, all the east-west ones for shade trees. That is, he thought, the old ones were; but as the town had kept on growing, they had run out of tree names and begun naming them for famous persons; so that it was as if there were a line between the old town and the modern. Sandwiched in between two other business buildings, the Douglas possessed side yards, which three men could walk abreast in, if they didn’t mind the old tough but unproductive rosebushes, and out in front on the parking two big old laurel oaks whose roots were pushing up the sidewalk. Built after the Civil War, it was the first real hotel in Parkman, and a wood-and-brick reminder to all that here in Cray County existed a loyal knot of diehard Douglas Democrats who, in spite of A Lincoln’s martyrdom, still thought their man the Little Giant should have been elected. There it remained, for forty years the pride of Parkman, until after the turn of the century and the oil boom a new hotel was built to eclipse it on the site of what is now the Parkman and was called simply the Parkman Hotel until twenty years after that when it was remodeled and renamed the Hotel Francis Parkman and the Stephen A Douglas went still further into decline. Now it was the stopping place and hangout of tenth-rate businessmen, down and out oil speculators and prospectors, a few people who did nothing, and Dave Hirsh, its big ground-floor dining room—former scene of so much gaiety—long since converted into an insurance office. It had once had, also, the distinction of having been Parkman’s only whorehouse for a while, back during the oil boom, and to the more respectable this aura had never left it. Most of it was still owned by Judge Steven A Deacon, who had owned most of it then. There were only the two hotels in Parkman to choose from, and Dave could have gotten a much cheaper room at the Parkman but his pride would not let him. If he was going to have to move out of his two-room suite, and use a hall phone, he might as well go to the Douglas and really save money.