Some Came Running (82 page)

“Edith, honey,’’ he said to the back of his mistress’s bent head, “I’m goin to have to go over to the Parkman and see that damned brother of mine.”

She raised her head and turned to look at him, no hint of anything on her face except the attentiveness of a good office girl. “Yes, sir, Mr Hirsh,” she said crisply; if anything she was even less friendly now than before—at least when they were here in the store.

“If there’re any calls of importance comes in for me, have them reach me over there,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that, Mr Hirsh,” she said, and nodded, and there was nothing but complete impersonality on her face. It was kind of titillating in a way, but he disliked it nevertheless. Christ, she almost never called him “Boss” anymore, or smiled. Sometimes he almost believed she actually disliked him, and became depressed and almost frantic. All this was only in the store, of course; when they were alone in bed, man, she was passionate as hell. But when they were in the office alone together like now, at least she could give him a lovin look.

But just then, just as he was thinking this, Al Lowe stuck his head in the door to ask about the account of a woman who wanted a Sunbeam coffeemaker and wanted to charge it, and Frank had to admit that this time for once Edith had been right.

“Sure, let her have it,” he said to Al. “She’s good for it.”

“Well, she already owes us over fifty dollars,” Al said.

“Let her have it!” Frank said. “She’ll pay. If it takes her a year. You got to remember, Al, that this business is based on good will and ‘trust.’ And refusin to let somebody that you know is good charge something, is
not
a good way to build goodwill.”

“Okay, Frank,” Al said, his open boyish face expressing admiration. “Just as you say.”

Frank tossed his head a little. “I didn’t mean to be irritable with you, Al. Dave’s back in town. I got to go over to the hotel to see him.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Al said.

“It sure as hell is,” Frank said, looking at him waspishly.

He had begun to suspect Geneve had her cap set for Tony Wernz IV—if only anybody could ever get Tony sober enough to be interested in a woman. You’d sure never think Al had the Bronze Star, or Silver Star, one of those medals like that, for bravery in action, he thought with a kind of irritable amazement.

Edith was ignoring both of them. Al’s eyes flickered toward her, lightly, before he brought them back to Frank.

“Don’t forget about those phone calls now, Edith,” Frank said, deliberately making his voice irritable at her.

“Yes, Boss,” Edith said, barely looking up, “I’ll remember it.”

“Was there anything else you wanted, Al?” he said.

“No. No, Frank. I just—” he said, and then his voice dropped, “wanted to say how sorry I was about Dave.” The voice lifted, “I’ll go take care of Mrs Catlett.”

“Good,” Frank said and got up. “Well, I guess I better get to goin over there.”

He got his spring hat and then paused to slip out of its tube and light, a cigar, but Edith did not even look up at him. An aura almost of coldness seemed to push him away from her. Well, Christ, I hope she knows what I was doin, and ain’t mad at her, he thought with a momentary twinge of panic, and looked back at her, and then walked out through the dim dusty storeroom. In the contrastingly clean bright display room, puffing on the cigar, he nodded to Mrs Catlett as he passed. Al was already wrapping her coffeemaker for her. The other clerk, a man now instead of the country girl who had finally married her soldier, was on the other side of the U of glass cases, polishing off the glass top.

He had decided to brave the May weather without his spring topcoat and at the door pulled down his coat skirts and his hat brim and stepped outside into the coolish bright day, the big fat Churchill resting comfortably between his teeth. He had already decided to walk around to the Parkman, instead of taking the Buick.

That damned Dave. Always causing him
some
kind of inconvenience!

Well, under his tutelage—gradually—Al Lowe had practically taken over the management of the store, so that he did not even need to be there at all if he didn’t want to. Al didn’t know it yet, but he already
was
managing the store—in just about everything but name. Frank had been carefully grooming him toward that. As soon as he found it out, he’d have the last thing he needed: the confidence. Then he would
be
the manager.

It could just as easily have been Dave, Frank thought with a kind of irritated sorrow. If he had settled down when he was young and worked hard and been a good citizen, like the rest of us.

Dave was going to be mad about his car. Well, that was just too bad. Frank still didn’t feel he had done wrong about it. Sure, he could have put it inside somewhere, and blocked it up, and taken the battery out, and drained the gas tank; it would have cost him a good bit; but he still could have done it. But what he had done he had done deliberately, to teach Dave a lesson. It was time he learned that he couldn’t always go running along through life expecting everybody else to take care of him all the time. And time he learned to have a little responsibility, whether it made him mad at his brother Frank or not. Someday he would thank him for it.

Two things were disturbing him—making him thoughtful—about Dave. One was the rumor, pretty well conceded to be fact, that he had taken off with ’Bama Dillert the gambler, when he left. He had nothing against ’Bama; he had played poker with him lots of times, and would again. But playing poker with ’Bama was one thing, and becoming his bosom friend was another. He had not said anything when Dave started running around with him; but when Dave took off with him for a four months’ trip somewhere, it was time somebody put him wise to just what kind of social status ’Bama had in Parkman. The other thing was that Dave had moved back into his old rooms at the Parkman. That could only mean that he had some money again. He was going to have to be cautioned about what kind of a spectacle he made of himself when he spent it. Parkman wasn’t big citified like wherever they had gone. It was a small town and you had to live accordingly. He was going to have to get settled down and get back to work like he should.

If he had just settled down when he was young, Frank thought again, he could have been just about anywhere by now. Managing the store, and lots of other things too. I would have been a good father to him. And he could have made me a fine son—if he’d only settled down.

But he wouldn’t. And so instead, it was Al Lowe who would be running the store. He probably would have turned the store over to Al completely before now, if it had not been that when he did he would get to see Edith just that much less. It was hard enough meeting her as it was. They had arranged to get away together two nights a week pretty regular, sometimes working in an extra night when it seemed safe—but even on those nights, they could only stay out safely till eleven or twelve, or at the very most one o’clock.

It had been a strange thing, he thought not without a certain vanity. Very strange. Here he had been, looking all around trying to find himself another mistress, and right there all that time under his very nose had been this young girl who was desperately in love with him. It must have been very hard on her. He was even inclined to feel more magnanimous to Agnes now; because if Agnes hadn’t seen fit to cause trouble between him and Geneve, he might never have found out about Edith.

How long all this had been going on, Frank had no idea. But then, suddenly—the night he had taken Agnes and Dawn out to the Country Club, just shortly after he had seen Geneve sitting down at the other end with Al and some others—it had just hit him, the idea, that Edith Barclay was in love with him. You could have knocked him over with a feather.

That was how it had started—with him, at least. With Edith, he didn’t know. She wasn’t a very talkative girl. Especially about herself. Except once in a while, like when she’d had a few drinks, but even then you couldn’t make much out of it that would help you later.

He had been very careful. He had merely watched. He did not put much trust in these sudden “ideas” that came to a person. They might come to you for all sorts of reasons.

But the more he waited and the more he watched, the more he became convinced that she was in love with him, and yet there was never anything he could actually point to as proof. There was never anything that might be construed as a sign she loved him. And yet in some funny odd way he had become more and more sure that she did.

The trouble had been—he thought now—he might be wrong. Might
still
be wrong. Christ, he didn’t want to look like one of these businessmen who were always trying to sleep with their female help. Or like Old Judge Deacon and that secretary of his he had been sleeping with for years and years. Long ago, when he first began to get somewhere, he had promised himself he would never again sleep with his hired help. But of course, if Edith Barclay was really in love with him, that made it different. Only, how was he to know? In the end, still unsure, he had been forced to approach it in a way that would make it look like he was not approaching it. If it wanted to be taken as an advance, it could, but if not, it would appear to be only fatherly friendliness on the part of the boss.

The system of inventorying Frank had instituted at the store was one in which all the work was done after regular hours. It was harder work, and longer hours, but he always gave everybody who helped a little bonus afterwards so that none of them would resent it. Usually, it took about two weeks. And this year, as they had last year, the three of them had done it, he and Edith and Al. As they had last year, which was Edith’s first year there, they instituted a system in which Al did the climbing around and called the items down to Frank who listed them on long sheets, which Edith in turn took and checked and corrected and copied up in quadruplicate on the typewriter. And, also as they had done last year, they made an arrangement whereby Al drove Edith home one night, and he Frank drove her the next. And that was where his plan fitted in.

He had figured he would have just about exactly two weeks in which to work; or, six times of driving her. On his evenings driving her, he had concentrated on talking to her about her life and her future and her ambitions, and advising her about them. If there was anything she ever needed or any kind of boost he could give her along the way, all she had to do was ask. When people went to work for him, they became part of his family. They belonged to the team. That was the only way a business could be run. Successfully. You had to have teamwork. And as far as he was concerned Edith was on his team and he would help her any way he could.

Edith herself did not say much; she seemed to just sort of sit there. She agreed with him, and once in a while she said yes, and once in a while she nodded.

And he still didn’t know if she loved him. He was sure, but he couldn’t prove it.

It seemed eons. And yet, by the end of the first week—that was three times of driving her—everything was decided. Decided, if not consummated.

On Friday night when he drove her home, he stopped the car as usual under the Roosevelt Drive streetlight (she still always had him let her off at the corner streetlight) and prepared to let her out. He was still talking, admonishing her about her future, and in the urgency of what he was saying he reached out—sort of subconsciously, in that he didn’t really anticipate it; and yet with full consciousness of what he was doing, too—and put his hand on her knee over her coat, and in a friendly way squeezed it with his fingers to emphasize what he was saying, but ready to remove it instantly and deny that it was anything but fatherly, which it wasn’t.

Edith did not do anything. She did not say anything, either. To all intents and purposes, she was unaware his hand was on her knee at all. So he decided to leave it there and keep on talking, while Edith continued to stare out through the windshield.

Then, just when he was afraid he was going to have to remove it because he had no more to say, she had turned to him and with a kind of terrifying groan which startled him with its sort of grim desperate quality, had practically flung herself upon him and kissed him passionately on the mouth. He had barely had time to get his hand out of the way. With his ears still buzzing from the way his heart had leaped, and yet with a rising sense of triumph, he tried as best he could to get his arms around her comfortingly and returned her kiss. For the moment, he did not even care that they were parked under the streetlight.

At the time, he had had a strange, not-pleasant feeling that she had known what he was doing all along; that she had with her cool, capable, efficient way made her deductions, and then made up her mind, and decided to go into it with full knowledge of what she was doing. But that was no way to go into a love affair, and afterwards he had decided that that startling, terrifying groan he had heard was the result of her passionate physical nature she had been trying to control. Later on, after he got to know her better, he was positive of it. Apparently, there was something about him that excited her tremendously. And yet she never seemed to get excited when he himself wasn’t. Apparently, it was only him who could bring it out in her.

It had been very uncomfortable in the car, both of them in heavy coats as they were, but he had held her to him as best he could and after the second long kiss had put his hand on her leg on the outside of her dress. Edith had not done anything. But after another kiss, she had pulled her mouth off his and said in a low quiet voice, “You better think what you’re doing.”

“I am,” he said, and reached for her mouth.

“I’m in love with you,” she said.

“I’m in love with you, too, Edith,” he said.

She looked at him and then smiled, as tenderly as he could ever remember anybody smiling at him before, and then reached up her mouth to kiss him again.

“Even if I am old enough to be your father,” he said. “I think I’ve been in love with you for a long time. And didn’t know it.” It was only then that he thought of the streetlight. Someday when the bypass had gone through, this street—Wernz Avenue—would become a sleepy backstreet; but right now it was the main road in and out of town. Even if it was late at night. Edith had apparently thought of it at the same time he did.