Some Came Running (99 page)

She dozed a little while herself, aware of his arm resting across her and liking it there, some deep tension in her relieved. Then gently so as not to wake him she raised his arm and moved herself out from under it and went to the bath and came back and dressed. Then she stood looking down at him, smiling to herself. Whatever the tension was that was relieved in her, it wasn’t sexual, she thought. She just didn’t have any sexual tensions, and never had. And she didn’t believe that any woman did—unless there was something drastically wrong with her. Or had read some of this modernistic stuff like that
Kinsey Report,
about drives and abnormality. According to those kind of people, everybody in the world was abnormal! They talked about sex as if it was one of the most important things in the world, instead of what it really was; and all they did was make people more aware of it all the time. No, if there was a tension relaxed in her, it was the tension of love, not sex. She had loved him so long, and so hard. Whatever she lacked in sex, she more than made up in love. And he was finally learning it. Smiling to herself, she stood looking down at her husband happily. No real woman ever really liked sex. She liked the man.

As she turned to go out to the kitchen, Frank, as if he were subconsciously aware that she was going out of the room, sat up suddenly on the bed and sat staring at her, his eyes wide dark pools in the dimness, and she smiled and blew a kiss to him.

“Did you like it?” he said. “Was it really good? for you?”

“Of course, it was,” she smiled down at him.

“Did you, uh— Did you—” he fumbled.

“Of course, I did,” she smiled. “Couldn’t you tell? I’m going and fix your steak.”

Frank was biting his lip. “I shouldn’t have asked you that,” he said.

“Of course, you should have,” Agnes smiled, “why shouldn’t you have? Now you lie back down and go back to sleep. When I get it done, I’ll bring our meal in here and we’ll eat it together in bed.”

“No!” Frank said. “No, I’ll come out in the kitchen with you. I’ll, uh— I’ll mix us both a drink. Then, maybe, after we eat, and have a few drinks and all, we could, uh—”

“Again!” Agnes said, making a mock gasp. “Do you think it’d be good for you?”

Frank grinned. “Well, we’ll see, hunh?” he grinned. So he followed her out to the kitchen and mixed them both manhattans and sat down at the kitchen table as Agnes got the steaks out and put them on and then set about fixing up a salad, and as she fixed the meal they talked.

They had not talked so much in a long long time, she thought. It was fun. At first, they were both self-conscious. But after he had mixed them both another drink, both of them loosened up. And the talking was for both of them like a dam being cut through, she thought, and all that pressure that had been backed up for so long, came gushing out of both of them in a torrential stream of ideas and reminiscences and plans, and love. It all seemed so unreal to her, and yet, at the same time, it was the most natural thing in the world. This was the way it should always have been between them. And it was all so simple, really. All they had to do was just spend a little time together. Frank talked more than she did, mostly about the bypass deal. And then, after the second drink, although still a little embarrassed, he went on and told her his dreams about it. He wanted to do really big things with it. Last year, he had driven through one of those little suburban towns outside Cleveland and had seen a new twenty-five-million-dollar development going up there. New homes, big new shopping center, new plants and factories. And yet the town wasn’t much bigger than Parkman.

“Well, why can’t we do that here?” he demanded of her, “by God. That strip of land runnin between the bypass and the railroad, it would be a perfect spot for it. Not only new factories, but new homes, new businesses, a whole new town almost. Now, why couldn’t we do it?”

“No reason in the world,” she smiled. “All you have to do is believe in it, and be willing to fight for it.”

“Well, by God, we will do it,” he said. “I’ll do it. Myself.” And he went on, talking about the details of it. She hardly even paid any attention, because she was so busy thinking how happy she was. A year ago, she might have hooted at it, but not now.

It was only after they had both had several drinks, and were in the midst of eating, both of them laughing and talking, that Frank brought up something else, his face sobering.

“You know, if you won’t get mad, I’d like to ask you something,” he said haltingly.

“Of course, I won’t get mad. What is it?”

“What
would
you say to us adoptin a child?” he said embarrassedly. “A boy.”

Agnes took another swallow of her drink and smiled. It was not as big a surprise to her as he was expecting it to be, or indeed even as big as she proceeded to let on. She had known for a long time that he had been toying with the idea, though he had never mentioned it. Especially since the taxi service when Dave had failed him.

“Adopt a child!” she said, managing to look embarrassed, but really giggling inside. “What on earth would we want to adopt a child for?”

“Well now, wait a minute,” Frank said, and stuffed his mouth with steak. “Let me explain,” he said around it. Under the drinks, he was acting a little bit lordly now—not nastily, just enjoyably. Such children they all were, she thought.

They were going to have a good bit of money now, he explained, and they pretty big business interests. Why shouldn’t there be a Hirsh to carry it on?

“Hell,” he said, “I can see it now. Frank Hirsh and Son Enterprises.”

“What about Dawnie?” she said, still smiling to herself. “How would it affect her?”

“Hell, it wouldn’t affect her at all. She’ll be in college. Would it?” he said.

“No-o, I suppose not,” Agnes said. She cut another bite of steak. “I don’t know if I would be adequate to the task, though,” she said.

“Hell, of course you would. Matter of fact, we’re only just now gettin to be old enough and wise enough to raise a kid. We really weren’t with Dawnie. Not that she didn’t turn out fine,” he hastened to add.

“That’s true,” she agreed. “But I don’t know. Sometimes they are a lot of bother in a home. Maybe you wouldn’t want to come home if it was noisy and got all cluttered up,” she smiled. Sometimes he was so cute, really cute, not “cute,” that she just couldn’t resist deviling him a little.

“Nonsense!” he said. “You know better than that, Agnes. Hell, I’d probably be here all the time. So much you’d get sick of me, I bet.”

“Yes, I’m sure I would,” she said, and then had to laugh.

“Now, we wouldn’t have to get a regular little baby,” Frank said. “We could get a slightly older one.”

“A younger child, three or under, is supposed to be the best,” Agnes said. “Then it wouldn’t know it had been adopted. Or wouldn’t care, by the time it grew older,” she said smiling.

“Hell,” Frank said, “even that don’t matter. We could do like I read in the
Reader’s Digest,
about this man and his wife who adopted an older kid. They told it that it was better off than other kids, because real parents had to take what they got; while they got to pick theirs,” Frank said. “Well, what do you say?”

“Well, why not?” Agnes smiled. “It might be fun. At least, we can look into it, can’t we?”

In the end, that was the way they left it when they went to bed. Frank would look into it. And Agnes would get some books on it and start reading up, in case they did do anything with it. But both of them already knew they were going to do it.

“We’ll have to talk to Dawnie about it,” Agnes said, happily. But she already knew what Dawn would say; Dawnie would be delighted. And what the hell? she thought, why not? She could already see ahead of her, down the years, how it was going to be. Their lives would be that happiness together that people were always hoping they would have, but never seemed to. She knew it as surely as she had ever known anything in her life, she thought vigorously. Because she would make it that! They both would.

When they went to bed, Frank, of course, did not want any more sex after all. He was too tired, and a little too drunk, and he never said a word about it. Neither did she. And after getting him in bed, she was able to get the copy of Dawn’s sex book back upstairs where it belonged. In a way, she was glad Dawnie had it. It wouldn’t hurt her to know a little something about men—just so long as she didn’t get to thinking that sex itself was important. She would have to talk to her, she reminded herself, about that.

W
HEN HER MOTHER FINALLY
told Dawn about the prospective plans for adopting a “baby brother,” Wallace French Dennis’s mistress was not very surprised. She had been aware for some time that there was a second honeymoon going on and it was quite obvious that her folks were sleeping together again. She did not view this new state of affairs as alarming or ridiculous. In fact, she thought it was rather cute of them, at their age. And it amused her that they should try so clumsily to hide it from her. She knew, of course, all about the Geneve Lowe affair and she was glad to see that both their vanities were finally allowing them to get back together again. And she was not in the least upset by the prospect of them adopting a baby—as she noted Agnes had obviously expected her to be.

“Why, I think it’s a wonderful idea, Mother!” she exclaimed. The two of them were sitting at the dining room table with the big floor fan going. “After all, you and Daddy are going to need somebody around here to be with, after I’m gone. And it won’t be too long until I’m gone. I think it would be a splendid thing.”

“You really do?” her mother said. It was she who was surprised.

“But of course! What did you expect? me to throw a big tantrum?”

“It’s only tentative, you know,” Agnes said. “We haven’t definitely decided to do it yet.”

“Well, you should. And the sooner the better.”

“Well, we’ll see,” her mother said. “But we both wanted to know how you felt about it first.”

“Agnes, darling!” Dawnie said, and went over to her and put her hand on her shoulder. “Do you think I don’t know Daddy’s always wanted a son? To carry on his business? Oh, don’t look so shocked! I’m only trying to say that I think it’s the most perfect thing the two of you could do. I mean, you don’t think I’d ever want to take over Daddy’s business interests, do you?”

“You’d still always be our little girl,” her mother said; “No, but you might have a husband someday who might want to.”

“
If
I ever get married—and that’s a big
if—
it’ll be to someone who won’t need Daddy’s business interests, Mother. Someone who’ll be so busy with his own important work that he wouldn’t even have
time
for Daddy’s business if he wanted it. All I’m trying to say is that Daddy needs a son. You, both of you, do.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Agnes said. “Maybe we can all of us talk about it.”

“Of course!” Dawn said, feeling very protective toward them both. “We’re all of us adult grown-up people. Let’s get together and talk about it and act like it.”

It was the last week in August when all this came up. And immediately after, Agnes had launched into a nervous high-voltage discussion about sex. Dawn would be going off to college before very long and it was time she knew certain things, she said.

And then she proceeded to talk about sex, awkwardly and only in the most hazy general way, all as if she thought she were giving her daughter valuable and necessary information. From the heights of her own field experiences, Dawn could only look down at her pityingly, and pretend to listen attentively.

Dawn was already exhausted by the abortive discussion of the adoption, and one of the immediate exasperated vagaries that came in her head was the picture of what her mother’s face would look like if she should suddenly tell her that she herself had been sleeping with Wally Dennis now for close onto four months. She and Wally, at seventeen and twenty respectively, apparently already knew more about sex than her parents had found out in their whole lives. Dawn could not help feeling sorry for them; they probably didn’t either one get half out of their sexual enjoyment what they should.

For her mother’s benefit, and also to protect herself, she pretended to be embarrassed by the subject (which, in fact, was not hard to do) and wished wearily that this fiasco would soon be over with. Finally, with a sense of relief for both of them, she was sure, Agnes wound up the lecture by cautioning her to be very cautious with all boys, and Dawn agreed, heartily and embarrassedly. She had a date with Wally that afternoon to go swimming, and she left soon after. It was, she thought, probably as close as she and Agnes had ever been to understanding each other or were ever likely to be.

But as far as them adopting the little boy went, she couldn’t have been happier about it. It was not until almost a week later—when they had talked to Frank, and the folks had more or less decided to on ahead with it—that the real devastating force of it really hit her.

She was being replaced. She had grown up. She was on her own.

And from now on, she would continue to be on her own. She was, in effect, a displaced person—a regular DP. She was being kicked out of the nest. It was what she had always wanted, really, and there was a kind of pleasant excited terror about it that she enjoyed at first. But as she thought about it more and more the enjoyable terror, like a rising tone of sound that gets higher and higher until it finally squeaks out of hearing range altogether, raised its own pitch in her until it was no longer enjoyable but really and truly terrifying. Longingly, she began to look back to the time when she could have prevented it. Now it was too late. Now she had nobody to turn to except Wally, nobody at all.

Probably, it would not have struck her nearly so forcibly had it not been for the shopping expedition. Two days after they had talked to Daddy about the adoption (she didn’t want them
not
to adopt him, that wasn’t it at all), Agnes had announced at breakfast that the two of them were going to Indianapolis to shop for her school things. They had driven over that morning and had spent three whole days, and a great deal of money and had driven home the last afternoon with a carload of stuff, both of them totally exhausted. She had not even had time to call and talk to Wally, who, of course, was working then, but she had talked to his mother (whom, Dawn found, she was beginning to increasingly dislike) and told her to tell him she would be gone.