Some Came Running (52 page)

Here all that mattered was the work; and that was the essence of true creativity: just the work. The hell with the ego. Oh, how he wished he could take her to bed right now. He could show her what a lover
really
was. She’d never
had
a lover. He could really
love
her. High and enthusiastic and half drunk without a drink in him on his own creativity, he made notes and talked, talked and made notes, using Bob and Gwen as sounding boards to spread his ideas out before and throw his ideas against; and it was amazing what new ideas came to him, pungent visions and pertinent correlations he had never seen all four years in the Army. Right now he could hardly wait to get home and get started on the writing of it.

And yet in spite of all the exuberance, there was still that calm feeling of a peaceful weekend, and it permeated everything. Naturally, on Sunday, everything tapered off. Sunday couldn’t help but be an anticlimax. Nevertheless the ideas were there, the notes were down, the results existed.

As Bob said with a wry smile: “Now all you’ve got to do is write it.”

But it was a very peaceful anticlimax, Sunday. It was on Sunday that Dave accidentally made a discovery which puzzled him at first, but eventually convinced him more than ever that his basic theory about Gwen’s nymphomania was correct.

Wandering around the house (they had shown him the rest of the house before, at which he had discovered, as he had expected, that it was not nearly in so bad a shape as they had led him to believe), he had picked off a shelf a copy of Huneker’s
Painted Veils.

It had been a long time since he had read the book. At the time, he had read it mainly for the sex in it, but he could remember the rococo overly arty style, and it was interesting to look at it and speculate back. Dave leafed through the book, and that was when he made his discovery. And it shook him.

The book had Gwen’s name written on the flyleaf, and on page 46 in the same hand was a margin note. It was the scene of the “Holy Yowler” orgy of whiskey, religion, and sex. Just before it, where the hero is being amused at the drunk whore Roarin’ Nell, the writer (Gwen, it obviously was) had underlined the sentence, and in the margin written: “Horrible! Men always love to degrade women, don’t they!” And on the margin of the next page—where the orgy itself was in progress—was written in large, no uncertain words: “EVIL! THIS MAN IS EVIL!”

For a moment, Dave was shocked dead-still. There was no way he could correlate this to the Gwen French he knew—or thought he knew? The woman who had had so many love affairs, the woman to whom sex was a familiar, ordinary occurrence, surely could not have written this. This sounded more like some virgin spinster. And if there was anything which Gwen French was not, it was a spinster.

He put the book back in its place and stood staring its spine, feeling guilty as if he had been caught window peeping, and at the same time casting around wildly for an explanation. But of course, it all did fit in, really. That sense of “EVIL!” which obviously came from inside the writer of the note herself, only went to prove his theory. Just like how Gwen would go for weeks, for months, even, without any sex; trying to dominate it, trying to be pure; and then, when the pressure got too much for her, would kick over and throw a real blaster; and then crawl off to a corner, to gnaw her own guilts and sense of “EVIL!” It was the classic nymphomaniacal type, wasn’t it?

Feeling considerably better, now he’d worked it out, he turned to go back to the big kitchen, where Gwen and Bob were battling out a hard fought game of chess.
Cherchez la
mom! he thought, feeling as epigrammatical as Huneker. It was always the mother. Dear mom. Mothers might not lead happy lives, but they never let it hamper them from doing their job well, and installing that good old guilt that ruined everybody else’s.

He supposed he would have to go up and see his own goddamned mother, eventually, now that he would be staying in town. Dear Frank would insist on it.

In the kitchen, where Bob and Gwen sat at the chess table before the fireplace, he sat down to kibitz, still feeling more relaxed and completely peaceful than he had felt in years. Gwen was slowly but surely getting beaten at the chess. He sat back and let the afternoon slip lazily and luxuriously past him.

Monday morning, after a sound night’s sleep—his second in a row—and feeling like a different man from the Dave Hirsh of Friday, he called Frank at the store in Parkman.

“Where the hell have you been?” Frank wanted to know.

“Been? Why?”

“I’ve been tryin to get hold of you for days, that’s why!”

“I’ve been over here in Israel visiting the Frenches.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Oh,” Frank said. He sounded surprised. “No wonder I couldn’t get hold of you. I’ve called just about everyplace else in the county.”

“What for? What do you want?”

“I wanted you to help me get the taxi service in shape to start operating, that was all,” Frank said sarcastically.

“Well, I’ll be over there in a half hour and help you,” Dave said. It was like coming out from under the water and taking off your face mask and looking at a totally different world, and realizing this and not the other was the real one.

“I already gone done it,” Frank said disgustedly. “It’s all ready—as soon as you can get here and start workin.”

“Then I’ll meet you at the store,” Dave said, “in half an hour.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Well, no,” he added. “Meet me at the taxi office instead. You know where it is? It’s on Plum Street, right behind the Foyer poolroom. No point in wastin time in comin here,” he added.

“Okay, then I’ll meet you there.”

“The drivers probably already be there,” Frank said. “I told them to report Monday morning. Before I found out I wasn’t goin to be able to get ahold of you.”

His voice sounded disgruntled and accusative and Dave did not bother trying to answer him. He just said goodby and hung up.

As he collected his belongings—not a hard job, since they consisted only of the clothes on his back, a stack of notes on the novel, and a shaving kit—he wanted very badly not to leave. It was not that he had really forgotten Frank and the taxi service; but he had removed them to where they existed only in his mind; and there he could control them. Now they were back full-force, in their own right.

Gwen had already left for school and he had said goodby to her then, at which time she had sternly admonished him to get right to work on the book while it was all still fresh. Now he took his leave of Bob—who was in old work clothes puttering around in his tool house out back—and for a moment he felt as if he actually, physically, could not leave. Bob must have understood how he felt, because he grinned wryly and invited him to come back any weekend or any other time, and to stay as long as he felt like. It was a very grand and very generous invitation, and what was more he knew Bob meant it. The secluded lovely yard with its big tall oaks and sycamores did not increase his pleasure at leaving a damned bit, either, as he walked to his car. He set out for Parkman in the little Plymouth with a feeling of going resolutely to meet his destiny, his miserable damned destiny.

As he drove out to the highway, something else was bothering him. He had discovered he wanted his money back, during this weekend. It was more important to him than he thought, in spite of his damned carefree gesture of throwing it away for a chance at Gwen French. He liked the feeling of having enough of it in his pocket and knowing there was more in the bank if he needed it. Apparently, in a business, you were still nominally the owner of your own money—in other words, you were still
worth
just as much—but you didn’t have access to any of it, and therefore it was just the same as if you didn’t have it. Well, if that was what business was like, the hell with business. Hell, if he had known the truth about Gwen French, he needn’t have turned his money over to Frank at all. But now, now the only thing he knew to do was to throw himself wholly and bodily into making this taxi service such a damned big success that he could eventually get his money back and get out; and the nervousness made him eager.

However, it turned out to be more bodily throwing than he had bargained for. From the moment he got out of his car in front of the little ex-lunch stand Frank had leased, he found himself submerged in a miserable, half-dead half-alive, hectic existence of work that was so demanding he hardly even found time to sleep, let alone write anything, and which lasted—the worst part—for over two weeks, and then continued on only slightly better for over a month until he finally rebelled.

The main thing was they had not hired any relief for him; consequently, he had to work from seven in the morning until after eleven-thirty at night, seven days a week. He even had to have all his meals except breakfast sent in. The other thing was that Frank had not thought to provide any system of bookkeeping or accounts except for some ready-made dispatcher’s forms he’d picked up somewhere and which in the end turned out to be so much more bother and time consumption than they were worth that they were discarded completely. As a result, he who had never done a damned bit of clerical work in his life, was left without any knowledge or system or records except some wildly scrawled junk in a spiral notebook that even he couldn’t read. A third thing, which
no
one could have foreseen, was that the taxi service caught on tremendously almost from the first day. Whether Parkman actually needed a taxi service or not, Parkman believed it needed one; and the result was the same. Frank had advertised the opening date in both the Republican and Democrat papers, and calls started coming in right away the very first day. Apparently, there was a large number of elderly women who could not, or did not like to drive, and an equal number of younger women whose husbands took their cars to work and left them no way to shop. These ladies provided an immediate backlog of business. Nobody knew how they had managed before “Frank’s Taxi Service”—as the firm was immediately dubbed by the town, despite the red checkered band on the cars—came along to save them.

Eventually, Clark Hibbard even wrote one of his not infrequent back-page editorial columns for the
Oregonian,
which were called “Observing the Hubbub with Hibbard,” about the Hirsh taxi service and its important civic contribution; a column which incidentally—Parkman being a typical town composed mostly of practical political cynics—went largely unnoticed by everyone except Frank, who was proud of it.

Dave had neither time nor inclination to give a damn about the article. Finally, in desperation, after a week of it, he called Frank. Frank had been making inspection trips every day in his odd moments—plus a trip every night at closing time to check the receipts—but the only things he was interested in were how much money they were taking in, and whether all the calls for cabs were being filled promptly. He had already decided to buy another car out of their capital and add it to the fleet of three.

He came right away when Dave called him, and while Dave laid out the situation and showed him the confusion of fouled up papers, stood in the grubby little office helplessly, running his hand through his thinning hair with irritation.

“I don’t give a damn what you do!” Dave bellowed, his eyes wild with his desperation, “but you’ve got to do something! I can’t handle it. At the rate we’re going now, we won’t even have sufficient records to figure our taxes.”

Frank must have been pretty desperate himself, because he immediately picked up one of the phones and called the store for Edith Barclay. Dave, who was aware that he himself was actually only half as desperate as he acted, noted this with a sort of malicious pleasure. Not for anything less than a major calamity would Frank ever allow him to even get into the same room with his precious Edith. The truth was, Frank was as helpless as he. If Frank had ever done any bookkeeping, he apparently had forgotten it; and he knew for a fact that actually, in the beginning, back before Frank could afford himself an office girl, Agnes had done practically all his bookkeeping. So he had to call in Edith.

Edith, when she arrived and looked at the mess, only shook her head disgustedly. There wasn’t anything she could do with this mess. It needed a major revision.

“All right,” Frank said. “Do whatever you have to. I’ll pay you for the extra time. Get it fixed up, so there’s a workable system. Then teach him to work it.”

So for the next week, for an hour after the store closed and then again after supper, Dave worked side by side with Edith Barclay in an effort to straighten out the files and accounting of the “Red Checker Cab Company.” He got to know her pretty well—that is, if you could even use that term in connection with knowing Edith. He had offered to have her supper sent in with his and to pay for it, but this she had flatly refused. She would go away somewhere by herself and eat, and then she would come back, cool, distant, and competent, and go back to work. Dave was ill at ease with her because he could never get her to open up. She maintained toward him—in a way that was not insulting at all—an aloof reserve which puzzled him. Only twice did she ever say anything that was personal: once when he irately said that Frank should have thought of all of this before he started—at which she flared up with hot loyalty and snapping eyes, and gave him to understand that Frank had far too many important irons in the fire to put his valuable time on a small-change operation like this. The other time was when she herself, sitting there working, suddenly asked him if he had served in Europe. When he said yes, she asked if he had ever spent any time in France or Paris. He said yes, some. Whereupon she stared at him candidly for several moments as if trying to read something in him, and said nothing further, and went back to work. When he asked her why she had wanted to know, she said that she had seen he was wearing his uniform the night she met him and had therefore assumed he was a veteran. The answer was so deliberately meaningless that it left him irritated, as well as puzzled.

Just the same, Dave had to admire her competence and the efficient dispatch with which she worked. It was all really a very simple thing, when she had it all done. He could have done it all himself if he had known how. After she had it all set up, she went over it again with him, explaining how to write down each entry and why. Then she came back for a short while the next evening, carefully checked all his entries for the day, said she thought he could handle it now, and left. In a way, Dave kind of hated to see her go. He could certainly see why Frank felt she was valuable.