Some Came Running (93 page)

He had stayed to supper, of course. She had been pretty sure he would. After he’d first refused, they’d sat around and talked—about the family, and about when he was little, and all the good times the family used to have. And she had kept insisting that he stay and eat and finally he had agreed to. So she had taken him out in the kitchen with her and had him sit and talk to her while she got the meal. In a way, it was almost like having the family back, like Victor almost. Except that, of course, it wasn’t Victor or anything like Victor. Not really. But it was like the family, and she enjoyed every little minute of it.

“I was plannin to make a pie today,” she told him. “But I never got the time,” she smiled, her lashes growing damp.

But perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t, she thought after he was gone. Because he hardly ate anything. He must have already eaten his supper earlier, before he came, which was to say the very least thoughtless of him.

He would not pray with her, had indeed made it impossible for her to even ask, but after he was gone, she knelt by herself and prayed for him anyway. Because he had a closed mind to God was no need that she should have one toward him.

And after that, even though it was late and almost eight o’clock, she had called up Mrs Millar and told her all about the visit and the beautiful pillow from Florida. And then, she had gone to undress to go to bed. But before she undressed, she stood for several moments in the print silk dress Franklin had bought for her, and looked at herself in the bedroom mirror. When he had kissed her, she had gotten a tiny little of her lipstick on his mouth, and he had wiped it off and they had both laughed about it.

And she thought of poor Mrs Millar’s granddaughter and her marriage and what was in store for her. After seventeen years! she thought. When she had done everything she could for him, had borne his children, had shared his skimpy life. Her mind froze. And he had seen fit to run off with another man’s wife, and leave them all, after seventeen years. Left them in the lurch. And not only that, had then—when the woman threw him over—had the gall to come back and hang around town, without even so much as an apology, expecting her to take him back. Oh, she knew what he wanted. Even today, even though he never said a word.

But she was not just about to do it. She had never condoned his kind of sinfulness, or any other kind of sinfulness, in her life. She had not even spoken to him for over thirty years now. And she was not just about to start in to now. She had thought when she had married him that she could save him. There had been so much good in him once. And she had wanted, when she went home to God’s Heaven, for him to be there with her, together, as God had ordained it. But now it was too late.

She would not have had it that way. If there had ever been anything she could have done about it. But there wasn’t. Even now, he would not even now give up his sinful life. She knew all about his running around after that Old Jane Staley woman. Everyone in town knew about it. A common cleaning woman, she thought, who worked for his own son. There was nothing that could help him now. Well, it was upon his own head, Mrs Hirsh thought sadly, and began to undo her clothes. When she had climbed into her bed, she breathed deeply through her nose several times, enjoying the movement of air through her chest and lungs. Outside from the open window, the sounds of the summer night impinged themselves upon her senses. There was a good many consolations in living an honest, virtuous life, and one of these was that the Good Lord looked after His own and saved you from suffering. And she could say in all honesty, that no matter how bad things might have ever been, she had never really suffered.

She had always loved God and tried to do His work. When He had seen fit to send her six tiny babies, she had accepted them cheerfully, and loved them, and taught them, and done everything in her power for them. And somebody had only to look at them to see, to tell.

Mrs Hirsh rolled over in her bed and shut her eyes. My! it had been a pleasant, fruitful, interesting day, she thought.

W
HEN
D
AVE LEFT
his mother’s, he was thinking more than anything else about getting something to eat, but first he wanted a drink. In spite of how hungry he was, he couldn’t eat her cooking; he had the feeling it was like putting pure poison into your system. To have eaten the soggy grease-soaked floured beefsteak, and the mashed potatoes and gravy with pools of grease floating on it, would have killed him. Or very nearly so. He could not see why, if that was the kind of food she ate, it hadn’t already killed her. And for the first time since the episode of his car, he could really sincerely sympathize with Frank, if when he went to visit her he also had to stay and eat her cooking.

Six little souls, she had said with tears starting in her eyes. My God! he thought. Six little souls God had given to her in His wisdom for her to take care of and to teach, she said. Dave had been honestly terrorstricken, thinking about it. And so this was the manner in which that ineffable and miraculous quantity we are so proud of and like to call the Human Soul got started in this world! A male like his Old Man and a female like his Old Lady met, competed, and mated. Each nursing a secret hunger and a secret vanity that the other was hardly even aware of. It might be all right for dogs, but it was hardly proper for that ineffable and miraculous entity we call the Human Soul. Powerfully frightened, Dave ran on down the second floor stairs of the Wernz Arms as if something was after him.

His Plymouth was parked out in front and he walked across the sidewalk and got into it. Under the trees along the street, children played a game of flag raid and people sat on their porches and down at the end of the block the overhead streetlight shot a cone of fuzzy light down. It was so much like his childhood, so little changed, after the passing of twenty-five years, that for a moment he sat and stared at the scene, mingled emotions rising in him. He started the little Plymouth and headed home, where there was gin and vermouth to make himself a good stiff martini, and some hamburger in the refrigerator he could fry.

He did not feel badly about taking the Florida pillow to his mother, or about lying to her about it. Hell, it had been the only bright spot of the visit. And it had just been too good to resist, when he had seen them in Terre Haute in that department store.

The truth was, he had done it as a sort of cold-blooded experiment, just to see if he could actually get by with it and to see if she was actually that bad, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. He wondered what Frank would think about it when he saw it there next Monday. Hell, he would probably believe the story, too.

Still half-chuckling to himself, he pulled the Plymouth up into the driveway. Inside, the house was clean and shining. Old Janie had only just been here yesterday and they had not yet had time to dirty it again. She was a real pistol, he thought switching on the kitchen lights and went to the refrigerator and got out the big cardboard meat scoop of hamburger and made himself a big patty of it on the countertop. After he put it on to cook in the skillet, he got the things out and made himself that martini.

They had taken to using the kitchen a great deal more now in the month Jane had been here. Partly that was due to Old Janie who cleaned it up spick and span for them once a week. But even more so, the increased use of the kitchen was due to ’Bama’s new girlfriend, Doris Fredric, who, of course, could not go out and eat with them in public, at least not here in town anyway.

Old Janie, he thought affectionately and sat down with the drink at the kitchen table. Ever since he was a kid she had been Frank and Agnes’s cleaning woman when he lived with them, and now here he was back here grown up and she was his cleaning woman, too. Janie was going to be one of his main characters when he did his novel on Parkman. It seemed to him actually that she had not changed an iota since those days back then when he was a kid; but he knew that this was only a mental illusion of his own. How old was she? at least sixty. That would have made her thirty-five back then, younger than he was now! Very strange.

Life was such an intriguing, entrancing thing; you felt you almost could never get enough of it, he thought happily. Life, I cannot get thee close enough, he thought paraphrasing the Millay. He had been like this for a month now, without a single letdown or fear to scare him into depression, and if he could have changed any of the circumstances of his life, he wouldn’t—except for just one, he thought thinking of Gwen. But maybe he wouldn’t even have changed that one. What the hell? he was happy as he was, wasn’t he?

Janie, in the month she had worked for them, seemed to have lost some of that enormous weight of hers. She looked, in fact, better than he could ever remember except for the deep dark-circles under her eyes which seemed to give her a sort of haunted half-frightened look and was probably due to too much drinking and her kidneys she was always bitching about. Or too much work. But God! the vitality she had! When he was through working for the day, which was usually around four, she would be about through with the house, and he would sit and drink a bottle of beer or two with her in the kitchen, and, if she felt in the mood, listen to all the latest scoop she had picked up on her rounds in the last week, and then he would drive her, either out to Smitty’s Bar or else home to the little house on Roosevelt. Usually to Smitty’s. She knew, it seemed, just about everything about everybody. She knew all about Wally and Dawn, and she knew all about ’Bama and Doris Fredric apparently, but she was always very careful not to say anything critical. She was, in fact, a living gold mine of material and at least half of this was due not so much to
what
she knew as to her judgment and her unique viewpoint of it. When he told her this, she just laughed and said that he might as well use it then because she doubted if she would ever have time before she died to write her life story and anyway if she did the sons of bitches would surely send her to jail, if they didn’t take all her bankroll on libel suits.

Nevertheless, it had apparently flattered her and after that she went out of her way to tell him what went on in town. It was amazing what she knew about the private lives of the citizenry of Parkman extending generations back. It had apparently become a sort of hobby of hers.

When she had first come to work for them—after they had looked her up at Smitty’s and bought her a beer and talked to her about it, whereupon she had said immediately that she would love to work for them—Dave had caught her in the kitchen and had a cup of coffee with her and had laughingly in the course of the conversation said that she had better watch out and not let Frank know she was working for them, him and ’Bama, or she was liable to lose her job with Frank and Agnes.

He had only meant it as a joke, but Old Janie’s eyes had flashed dangerously.

“If any son of a bitch wants to fire me, honey,” she boomed, “all they got to do is say the word. That goes for you, too.”

“Hey! Hey!” Dave said. “I was just kidding you.”

“I know you was, honey,” Jane said and patted him on the hand. “I didn’t mean to scare you. But there’s plenty other jobs in this world. And any time anybody don’t like my work, or whoever else I work for or how I spend my own time, all they got to do is say so. And that goes for your damned brother, honey, and you, too,” she said, and looked at him a little nervously as if fearing he might take it as an insult to him rather than as the pride of her own personal code.

“I’m right with you,” Dave said grinning. “Them’s my principles, too. What do you think I’m gamblin for, instead of workin in that damn taxi stand of Frank’s?”

“Honey,” Jane bawled, “if I had the pardner you got, I’d be tempted to turn to gamblin my own self.” Then her face sobered. “But you don’t need to worry none about that damn brother of yours. That damn brother of yours has got too damn many skeletons in his own damn closet to ever start tellin me about mine,” she said.

It was plain to Dave, in spite of her constant castigation of him, that Janie had a strong—if contemptuous—affection for Frank. He felt somewhat the same himself.

Jane seemed to debate for a moment, then commenced to tell him what she thought about Frank and Agnes. It looked like to her, she said, that Frank and Agnes were just about to get engaged in a hot and heavy love affair again.

“You’re kidding!” Dave said. “They’ve hated each other’s guts for years!”

“No I ain’t kidding,” Jane said, “Here’s the way I got it figured. Frank had this mistress, see, name of Geneve Lowe. Her husband works for Frank. They was goin out before you even come here. Everybody in town knew it. Then Agnes gets on her horse and breaks it all up, just about the time you came. After that they’d hardly speak to each other for sevral months. Then suddenly, Frank starts bein nicer to her, nicer and nicer. Now how would you figure it?”

Dave shrugged. “He just got over bein mad, finally.”

“No, sir. Then you don’t know Frank very good,” Jane said. “No, sir. He’s got another mistress. And Agnes ain’t found out about it. That’s the way I figure it. The result is, he’s put one over on Agnes and so he ain’t mad at her no more. And she ain’t mad at him because she don’t know. As long as he can keep his new mistress without her findin out, they can be real red-hot lovers again.”

Dave was shocked. Even though it was all so logical. But it didn’t seem to bother Janie any. Instinctively, he felt a need to keep her from finding out that she had shocked him; but he might as well have whistled at the moon. “Well, she’ll find out about it sooner or later, won’t she?” he asked.

“Shocks you, don’t it?” Jane said with a grin. “Well, that’s the way people are, and you might as well get used to it. Sure, she’ll find out about it.”

“Well,” he said, “who’s the mistress?”

Janie looked at him with her deep dark-circled eyes and thoughtfully rubbed her chin where there was a mole from which three black hairs grew. “Well, I don’t know. I ain’t been able to pick up nothing on it. It must be somebody from out of town is all I can figure,” she said.