The 42nd Parallel (21 page)

After supper they drove round some more and Jerry got quiet and she felt constrained and couldn’t think of what to say. They went way out Rhode Island Avenue and circled round back by the Old Soldiers’ Home. There was no air anywhere and the staring identical streetlights went by on either side, lighting segments of monotonous unrustling trees. Even out on the hills there was not a breath stirring.

Out in the dark roads beyond the streetlamps it was better. Janey lost all sense of direction and lay back breathing in an occasional patch of freshness from a cornfield or a copse of woods. In a spot where a faint marshy dampness almost cool drifted across the road Jerry suddenly stopped the car and leaned over and kissed her. Her heart began to beat very fast. She wanted to tell him not to, but she couldn’t.

“I didn’t mean to, but I can’t help it,” he whispered. “It’s living in Washington undermines the will . . . Or maybe I’m in love with you, Janey. I don’t know . . . Let’s sit in the back seat where it’s cooler.” Weakness started in the pit of her stomach and welled up through her. As she stepped out he caught her in his arms. She let her head droop on his shoulder, her lips against his neck. His arms were burning hot round her shoulders, she could feel his ribs through his shirt pressing against her. Her head started going round in a reek of tobacco and liquor and male sweat. His legs began pressing up to hers. She yanked herself away and got into the back seat. She was trembling. He was right after her. “No, no,” she said. He sat down beside her with his arm round her waist. “Lez have a cigarette,” he said in a shaky voice.

Smoking gave her something to do, made her feel even with him. The two granulated red ends of the cigarettes glowed side by side.

“Do you mean you like me, Jerry?” “I’m crazy about you, kid.” “Do you mean you . . . ?” “Want to marry you . . . Why the hell not? I dunno . . . Suppose we were engaged?” “You mean you want me to marry you?” “If you like . . . But don’t you understand the way a feller feels . . . a night like this . . . the smell of the swamp . . . God, I’d give anything to have you.”

They’d smoked out their cigarettes. They sat a long time without saying a word. She could feel the hairs on his bare arm against her bare arm.

“I’m worried about my brother Joe . . . He’s in the navy, Jerry, and I’m afraid he’s going to desert or something . . . I think you’d like him. He’s a wonderful baseball player.”

“What made you think of him? Do you feel that way towards me? Love’s a swell thing; goddam it, don’t you realize it’s not the way you feel towards your brother?”

He put his hand on her knee. She could feel him looking at her in the dark. He leaned over and kissed her very gently. She liked his lips gentle against hers that way. She was kissing them. She was falling through centuries of swampy night. His hot chest was against her breasts bearing her down. She would cling to him bearing her down through centuries of swampy night. Then all at once in a cold spasm she felt sick, choking for breath like drowning. She began to fight him. She got her leg up and pushed him hard in the groin with her knee.

He let go of her and got out of the car. She could hear him walking up and down the road in the dark behind her. She was trembling and scared and sick. After a while he got in, switched on the light and drove on without looking at her. He was smoking a cigarette and little sparks came from it as he drove.

When he got to the corner of M Street below the Williams house in Georgetown he stopped and got out and opened the door for her. She got out not knowing what to say, afraid to look at him.

“I suppose you think I ought to apologize to you for being a swine,” he said.

“Jerry, I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll be damned if I will . . . I thought we were friends. I might have known there wouldn’t be a woman in this muck hole with a human spark in her . . . I suppose you think you ought to hold out for the wedding bells. Go ahead; that’s your business. I can get what I want with any nigger prostitute down the street here . . . Good night.” Janey didn’t say anything. He drove off. She went home and went to bed.

All that August her father was dying, full of morphine, in the Georgetown hospital. The papers came out every day with big headlines about war in Europe, Liége, Louvain, Mons. Dreyfus and Carroll’s was in a fever. Big lawsuits over munitions patents were on. It began to be whispered about that the immaculate Mr. Dreyfus was an agent of the German government. Jerry came to see Janey one noon to apologize for having been so rude that night and to tell her that he had a job as a war correspondent and was leaving in a week for the front. They had a good lunch together. He talked about spies and British intrigue and pan-Slavism and the assassination of Jaurès and the socialist revolution and laughed all the time and said everything was well on its way to ballyhack. She thought he was wonderful and wanted to say something about their being engaged and felt very tender towards him and scared he’d be killed, but suddenly it was time for her to go back to the office and neither of them had brought the matter up. He walked back to the Riggs Building with her and said good-bye and gave her a big kiss right there in front of everybody and ran off promising he’d write from New York. At that moment Alice came up on her way to Mrs. Robinson’s and Janey found herself telling her that she was engaged to be married to Jerry Burnham and that he was going to Europe to the war as a war correspondent.

When her father died in early September it was a great relief to all concerned. Only, coming back from Oak Hill Cemetery all the things she’d wanted as a girl came back to her, and the thought of Alec, and everything seemed so unhappy that she couldn’t stand it. Her mother was very quiet and her eyes were very red and she kept saying that she was so glad that there’d be room on the lot for her to be buried in Oak Hill too. She’d have hated for him to be buried in any other cemetery than Oak Hill. It was so beautiful and all the nicest people in Georgetown were buried there.

With the insurance money Mrs. Williams did over the house and fixed up the two top floors to rent out as apartments. That was the chance Janey had been waiting for for so long to get a place of her own and she and Alice got a room in a house on Massachusetts Avenue near the Carnegie Library, with cooking privileges. So one Saturday afternoon she phoned from the drugstore for a taxicab and set out with her suitcase and trunk and a pile of framed pictures from her room on the seat beside her. The pictures were two color prints of Indians by Remington, a Gibson girl, a photograph of the battleship
Connecticut
in the harbor of Villefranche that Joe had sent her and an enlarged photograph of her father in uniform standing at the wheel of an imaginary ship against a stormy sky furnished by a photographer in Norfolk, Va. Then there were two unframed colorprints by Maxfield Parrish that she’d bought recently and a framed snapshot of Joe in baseball clothes. The little picture of Alec she’d wrapped among her things in her suitcase. The cab smelt musty and rumbled along the streets. It was a crisp autumn day, the gutters were full of dry leaves. Janey felt scared and excited as if she were starting out all alone on a journey.

That fall she read a great many newspapers and magazines and
The Beloved Vagabond
, by W. J. Locke. She began to hate the Germans that were destroying art and culture, civilization, Louvain. She waited for a letter from Jerry but a letter never came.

One afternoon she was coming out of the office a little late, who should be standing in the hall by the elevator but Joe. “Hello, Janey,” he said. “Gee, you look like a million dollars.” She was so glad to see him she could hardly speak, could only squeeze his arm tight. “I just got paid off . . . I thought I better come up here and see the folks before I spent all my jack . . . I’ll take you out and set you up to a big feed an’ a show if you want . . .” He was sunburned and his shoulders were broader than when he left. His big hands and knotty wrists stuck out of a newlooking blue suit that was too tight for him at the waist. The sleeves were too short too.

“Did you go to Georgetown?” she asked him.

“Yare.”

“Did you go up to the cemetery?”

“Mommer wanted me to go, but what’s the use?”

“Poor mother, she’s so sentimental about it . . .”

They walked along. Joe didn’t say anything. It was a hot day. Dust blew down the street.

Janey said: “Joe, dear, you must tell me all about your adventures . . . You must have been to some wonderful places. It’s thrilling having a brother in the navy.”

“Janey, pipe down about the navy, will yer? . . . I don’t want to hear about it. I deserted in B A, see, and shipped out east on a limey, on an English boat . . . That’s a dog’s life too, but anything’s better than the U.S.N.”

“But, Joe . . .”

“Ain’t nothin’ to worry about . . .”

“But, Joe, what happened?”

“You won’t say a word to a livin’ soul, will you, Janey? You see I got in a scrap with a petty officer tried to ride me too damn hard. I socked him in the jaw an’ kinda mauled him, see, an’ things looked pretty bad for me, so I made tracks for the tall timber. . . . That’s all.” “Oh, Joe, and I was hoping you’d get to be an officer.”

“A gob get to be an officer . . . ? A fat chance.”

She took him to the Mabillion, where Jerry had taken her. At the door Joe peered in critically. “Is this the swellest joint you know, Janey? I got a hundred iron men in my pocket.” “Oh, this is dreadfully expensive . . . It’s a French restaurant. And you oughtn’t to spend all your money on me.” “Who the hell else do you want me to spend it on?” Joe sat down at a table and Janey went back to ’phone Alice that she wouldn’t be home till late. When she got back to the table, Joe was pulling some little packages wrapped in red and greenstriped tissuepaper out of his pockets. “Oh, what’s that?” “You open ’em, Janey . . . It’s yours.” She opened the packages. They were some lace collars and an embroidered tablecloth. “The lace is Irish and that other’s from Madeira . . . I had a Chinese vase for you too but some son of a bit . . . son of a gun snitched it on me.” “That was awful sweet of you to think of me . . . I appreciate it.” Joe fidgeted with his knife and fork. “We gotta git a move on, Janey, or we’ll be late for the show . . . I got tickets for ‘The Garden of Allah.’”

When they came out of the Belasco onto Lafayette Square that was cool and quiet with a rustle of wind in the trees Joe said, “Ain’t so much; I seen a real sandstorm onct,” and Janey felt bad about her brother being so rough and uneducated. The play made her feel like when she was little, full of uneasy yearn for foreign countries and a smell of incense and dark eyes and dukes in tailcoats tossing money away on the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, monks and the mysterious east. If Joe was only a little better educated he’d be able to really appreciate all the interesting ports he visited. He left her on the stoop of the house on Massachusetts Avenue. “Where are you going to stay, Joe?” she asked. “I guess I’ll shove along back to New York an’ pick up a berth. . . . Sailoring’s a pretty good graft with this war on.” “You mean tonight?” He nodded. “I wish I had a bed for you but I couldn’t very well on account of Alice.” “Naw, I doan want to hang round this dump . . . I jus’ came up to say hello.” “Well, goodnight, Joe, be sure and write.” “Goodnight, Janey, I sure will.” She watched him walk off down the street until he went out of sight in the shadows of the trees. It made her unhappy to see him go all alone down the shadowed street. It wasn’t quite the shambling walk of a sailor, but he looked like a working man all right. She sighed and went into the house. Alice was waiting up for her. She showed Alice the lace and they tried on the collars and agreed that it was very pretty and quite valuable.

Janey and Alice had a good time that winter. They took to smoking cigarettes and serving tea to their friends Sunday afternoons. They read novels by Arnold Bennett and thought of themselves as bachelor girls. They learned to play bridge and shortened their skirts. At Christmas Janey got a hundred dollar bonus and a raise to twenty a week from Dreyfus and Carroll. She began telling Alice that she was an old stickinthemud to stay on at Mrs. Robinson’s. For herself she began to have ambitions of a business career. She wasn’t afraid of men any more and kidded back and forth with young clerks in the elevator about things that would have made her blush the year before. When Johnny Edwards or Morris Byer took her out to the movies in the evening she didn’t mind having them put their arms around her, or having them kiss her once or twice while she was fumbling in her bag for her latchkey. She knew just how to catch a boy’s hand by the wrist and push it away without making any scene when he tried to get too intimate. When Alice used to talk warningly about men having just one idea, she’d laugh and say, “Oh, they’re not so smart.” She discovered that just a little peroxide in the water when she washed her hair made it blonder and took away that mousey look. Sometimes when she was getting ready to go out in the evening she’d put a speck of rouge on her little finger and rub it very carefully on her lips.

in the mouth of the Schuylkill Mr. Pierce came on board ninety-six years old and sound as a dollar      He’d been officeboy in Mr. Pierce’s office about the time He’d enlisted and missed the battle of Antietam on account of having dysentery so bad and Mr. Pierce’s daughter Mrs. Black called Him Jack and smoked little brown cigarettes and we played
Fra Diavolo
on the phonograph and everybody was very jolly when Mr. Pierce tugged at his dundrearies and took a toddy and Mrs. Black lit cigarettes one after another and they talked about old days and about how His father had wanted Him to be a priest and His poor mother had had such trouble getting together enough to eat for that family of greedy boys and His father was a silent man and spoke mostly Portugee and when he didn’t like the way a dish was cooked that came on the table he’d pick it up and sling it out of the window and He wanted to go to sea and studied law at the University and in Mr. Pierce’s office and He sang

Oh who can tell the joy he feels