The 42nd Parallel (23 page)

When Johnny graduated from highschool as head of the debating team, class orator and winner of the prize essay contest with an essay entitled “Roosevelt, the Man of the Hour,” everybody felt he ought to go to college. But the financial situation of the family was none too good, his father said, shaking his head. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse who had been sickly since the birth of her last child had taken to the hospital to have an operation and would stay there for some time to come. The younger children had had measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and mumps all year. The amortization on the house was due and Mr. Moorehouse had not gotten the expected raise that New Year’s. So instead of getting a job as assistant freight agent or picking peaches down near Dover the way he had other summers Johnny went round Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as agent for a bookdistributing firm. In September he received a congratulatory note from them saying that he was the first agent they had ever had who sold a hundred consecutive sets of Bryant’s
History of the United States.
On the strength of it he went out to West Philadelphia and applied for a scholarship at the U of P. He got the scholarship, passed the exams and enrolled himself as a freshman, indicating BS as the degree he was working for. The first term he commuted from Wilmington to save the expense of a room. Saturdays and Sundays he picked up a little money taking subscriptions for Stoddard’s
Lectures.
Everything would have gone right if his father hadn’t slipped on the ice on the station steps one January morning in Johnny’s sophomore year and broken his hip. He was taken to the hospital and one complication after another ensued. A little shyster lawyer, Ike Goldberg’s father, in fact, went to see Moorehouse, who lay with his leg in the air in a Balkan frame, and induced him to sue the railroad for a hundred thousand dollars under the employers’ liability law. The railroad lawyers got up witnesses to prove that Moorehouse had been drinking heavily and the doctor who had examined him testified that he showed traces of having used liquor the morning of the fall, so by midsummer he hobbled out of hospital on crutches, without a job and without any compensation. That was the end of Johnny’s college education. The incident left in his mind a lasting bitterness against drink and against his father.

Mrs. Moorehouse had to write for help from her father to save the house, but his answer took so long that the bank foreclosed before it came and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway because it was only a hundred dollars in ten dollar bills in a registered envelope and just about paid the cost of moving to a floor in a fourfamily frame house down by the Pennsylvania freightyards. Ben left highschool and got a job as assistant freightagent and Johnny went into the office of Hillyard and Miller, Real Estate. Myrtle and her mother baked pies evenings and made angelcake to send to the Woman’s Exchange and Mr. Moorehouse sat in an invalid chair in the front parlor cursing shyster lawyers and the lawcourts and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

This was a bad year for Johnny Moorehouse. He was twenty and didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade. He’d sit in the musty little office of Hillyard and Miller, listing tenements for rent, furnished rooms, apartments, desirable lots for sale, and think of the Boer war and the Strenuous Life and prospecting for gold. From his desk he could see a section of a street of frame houses and a couple of elmtrees through a grimy windowpane. In front of the window was in summer a conical wiremesh flytrap where caught flies buzzed and sizzled, and in winter a little openface gas-stove that had a peculiar feeble whistle all its own. Behind him, back of a groundglass screen that went part way to the ceiling Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller sat facing each other at a big double desk, smoking cigars and fiddling with papers. Mr. Hillyard was a sallowfaced man with black hair a little too long who had been on the way to making a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer when, through some scandal that nobody ever mentioned as it was generally agreed in Wilmington that he had lived it down, he had been disbarred. Mr. Miller was a little roundfaced man who lived with his elderly mother. He had been forced into the realestate business by the fact that his father had died leaving him building lots scattered over Wilmington and the outskirts of Philadelphia and nothing else to make a living from. Johnny’s job was to sit in the outer office and be polite to prospective buyers, to list the properties, attend to advertising, type the firm’s letters, empty the wastebaskets and the dead flies out of the flytrap, take customers to visit apartments, houses and buildinglots and generally make himself useful and agreeable. It was on this job that he found out that he had a pair of bright blue eyes and that he could put on an engaging boyish look that people liked. Old ladies looking for houses used to ask specially to have that nice young man show them round, and business men who dropped in for a chat with Mr. Hillyard or Mr. Miller would nod their heads and look wise and say, “Bright boy, that.” He made eight dollars a week.

Outside of the Strenuous Life and a lovely girl to fall in love with him there was one thing Johnny Moorehouse’s mind dwelt on as he sat at his desk listing desirable five and sevenroom dwelling-houses, drawingroom, diningroom, kitchen and buder’s pantry, three master’s bedrooms and bath, maid’s room, water, electricity, gas, healthy location on gravelly soil in restricted residential area: He wanted to be a songwriter. He had a fair tenor voice and could carry
Larboard Watch Ahoy
or
I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls
or
Through Pleasures and Palaces Sadly I Roam
very adequately. Sunday afternoons he took music lessons with Miss O’Higgins, a shriveled little Irishwoman, unmarried, of about thirtyfive, who taught him the elements of the piano and listened with rapture to his original compositions that she took down for him on musicpaper that she had all ready ruled when he came. One song that began

Oh, show me the state where the peaches bloom

Where maids are fair . . . It’s Delaware

she thought good enough to send to a music publisher in Philadelphia, but it came back, as did his next composition that Miss O’Higgins—he called her Marie by this time and she declared she couldn’t take any money from him for her lessons, at least not until he was rich and had made a name for himself—that Marie cried over and said was as beautiful as MacDowell. It began

The silver bay of Delaware

Rolls through peachblossoms to the sea

And when my heart is bowed with care

Its memory sweet comes back to me.

Miss O’Higgins had a little parlor with gilt chairs in it where she gave her music lessons. It was very heavily hung with lace curtains and with salmoncolored brocaded portieres she had bought at an auction. In the center was a black walnut table piled high with worn black leather albums. Sunday afternoons after the lesson was over she’d bring out tea and cookies and cinnamon toast and Johnny would sit there sprawled in the horsehair armchair that had to have a flowered cover over it winter and summer on account of its being so worn and his eyes would be so blue and he’d talk about things he wanted to do and poke fun at Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller and she’d tell him stories of great composers, and her cheeks would flush and she’d feel almost pretty and feel that after all there wasn’t such a terrible disparity in their ages. She supported by her music lessons an invalid mother and a father who had been a wellknown baritone and patriot in Dublin in his younger days but who had taken to drink and she was madly in love with Johnny Moorehouse.

Johnny Moorehouse worked on at Hillyard and Miller’s sitting in the stuffy office, chafing when he had nothing to do until he thought he’d go mad and run amok and kill somebody, sending songs to the music publishers that they always sent back, reading the
Success Magazine
, full of sick longing for the future: to be away from Wilmington and his father’s grumbling and pipesmoking and the racket his little brothers and sisters made and the smell of corned beef and cabbage and his mother’s wrinkled crushed figure and her overworked hands.

But one day he was sent down to Ocean City, Maryland, to report on some lots the firm had listed there. Mr. Hillyard would have gone himself only he had a carbuncle on his neck. He gave Johnny the return ticket and ten dollars for the trip.

It was a hot July afternoon. Johnny ran home to get a bag and to change his clothes and got down to the station just in time to make the train. The ride was hot and sticky down through peachorchards and pinebarrens under a blazing slaty sky that flashed back off sandy patches in scraggly cornfields and whitewashed shacks and strips of marshwater. Johnny had taken off the jacket of his gray flannel suit and folded it on the seat beside him to keep it from getting mussed and laid his collar and tie on top of it so that they’d be fresh when he got in, when he noticed a darkeyed girl in a ruffled pink dress and a wide white leghorn hat sitting across the aisle. She was considerably older than he was and looked like the sort of fashionably dressed woman who’d be in a parlorcar rather than in a daycoach. But Johnny reflected that there wasn’t any parlorcar on this train. Whenever he wasn’t looking at her, he felt that she was looking at him.

The afternoon grew overcast and it came on to rain, big drops spattered against the car windows. The girl in pink ruffles was struggling to put her window down. He jumped over and put it down for her. “Allow me,” he said. “Thanks.” She looked up and smiled into his eyes. “Oh, it’s so filthy on this horrid train.” She showed him her white gloves all smudged from the windowfastenings. He sat down again on the inside edge of his seat. She turned her full face to him. It was an irregular brown face with ugly lines from the nose to the ends of the mouth, but her eyes set him tingling. “You won’t think it’s too unconventional of me if we talk, will you?” she said, “I’m bored to death on this horrid train, and there isn’t any parlorcar though the man in New York swore that there was.”

“I bet you been traveling all day,” said Johnny, looking shy and boyish.

“Worse than that. I came down from Newport on the boat last night.”

The casual way she said Newport quite startled him. “I’m going to Ocean City,” he said.

“So am I. Isn’t it a horrid place? I wouldn’t go there for a minute if it weren’t for Dad. He pretends to like it.”

“They say that Ocean City has a great future . . . I mean in a kind of a realestate way,” said Johnny.

There was a pause.

“I got on in Wilmington,” said Johnny with a smile.

“A horrid place, Wilmington . . . I can’t stand it.”

“I was born and raised there . . . I suppose that’s why I like it,” said Johnny.

“Oh, I didn’t mean there weren’t awfully nice people in Wilmington . . . lovely old families . . . Do you know the Rawlinses?”

“Oh, that’s all right . . . I don’t want to spend all my life in Wilmington, anyway . . . Gosh, look at it rain.”

It rained so hard that a culvert was washed out and the train was four hours late into Ocean City. By the time they got in they were good friends; it had thundered and lightened and she’d been so nervous and he’d acted very strong and protecting and the car had filled up with mosquitoes and they had both been eaten up and they’d gotten very hungry together. The station was pitchblack and there was no porter and it took him two trips to get her bags out and even then they almost forgot her alligatorskin handbag and he had to go back into the car a third time to get it and his own suitcase. By that time an old darkey with a surrey had appeared who said he was from the Ocean House. “I hope you’re going there too,” she said. He said he was and they got in though they had no place to put their feet because she had so many bags. There were no lights in Ocean City on account of the storm. The surreywheels ground through a deep sandbed; now and then that sound and the clucking of the driver at his horse were drowned by the roar of the surf from the beach. The only light was from the moon continually hidden by driving clouds. The rain had stopped but the tense air felt as if another downpour would come any minute. “I certainly would have perished in the storm if it hadn’t been for you,” she said; then suddenly she offered him her hand like a man: “My name’s Strang . . . Annabelle Marie Strang. . . . Isn’t that a funny name?” He took her hand. “John Moorehouse is mine . . . Glad to meet you, Miss Strang.” The palm of her hand was hot and dry. It seemed to press into his. When he let go he felt that she had expected him to hold her hand longer. She laughed a husky low laugh. “Now we’re introduced, Mr. Moorehouse, and everything’s quite all right . . . I certainly shall give Dad a piece of my mind. The idea of his not meeting his only daughter at the station.”

In the dark hotel lobby lit by a couple of smoked oillamps he saw her, out of the corner of his eye, throw her arms round a tall whitehaired man, but by the time he had scrawled John W. Moorehouse in his most forceful handwriting in the register and gotten his roomkey from the clerk, they had gone. Up in the little pine bedroom it was very hot. When he pulled up the window, the roar of the surf came in through the rusty screen mingling with the rattle of rain on the roof. He changed his collar and washed in tepid water he poured from the cracked pitcher on the washstand and went down to the diningroom to try to get something to eat. A goat-toothed waitress was just bringing him soup when Miss Strang came in followed by the tall man. As the only lamp was on the table he was sitting at, they came towards it and he got up and smiled. “Here he is, Dad,” she said. “And you owe him for the driver that brought us from the station . . . Mr. Morris, you must meet my father, Dr. Strang . . . The name was Morris, wasn’t it?” Johnny blushed. “Moorehouse, but it’s quite all right. . . . I’m glad to meet you, sir.”