Angels on toast, p.21
Angels on Toast, page 21
He ordered a double Scotch and knew that he was on his way to pinning one on, but Jay was right, there were complications that only a drink could straighten out.
“Tell you what, Lou,” said Jay, “I’d like to have you look over this pup of Ebie’s. I don’t know. I may be wrong.”
They had a couple for the road and then went out to look for the pup. The Western Union boy was returning him from Central Park and Jay waved to him. It was an English shepherd dog, enormous and unwieldy.
“You call that a dog?” Lou demanded. It looked as if two men were working it, like a vaudeville act. That was the pup Jay was taking out to Ebie. It struck Lou as funny and the two of them went down to Grand Central Station, laughing, the dog pulling them along. There was difficulty getting the dog on the train but with a drawing room it was arranged and they sneaked him in. The dog sat with an enormous mournful gray face looking from one to the other. It was the best time they’d had since they’d gotten into the Castles’ big money, and they slapped each other on the back and shouted with laughter.
Lou took his coat off and carefully hung it in the closet and Jay kicked his shoes off and they ordered three rounds of highballs so they wouldn’t have to wait. It was like old times. When the train started Jay rang for the porter.
“Who’s the engineer on this train?” he demanded.
The porter shook his head.
“Tell him I’d like to drive the engine from Stanford on,” said Jay. “Here’s my card.”
The porter took it doubtfully.
“You tell him,” urged Jay. “Tell him I’ll call the General Passenger Agent if he doesn’t. It’s Mr. Oliver.”
The porter was still doubtful.
“Before you put Mr. Oliver in the engine will you send back a pair of medium sized blondes from Car Number 856?” Lou asked seriously. “Here’s my card.”
The porter, for another dollar, was willing to be amazed and after he left Lou and Jay laughed again. The dog looked anxiously from one to the other. It was funny thinking of Ebie’s face when she saw the pony-sized puppy that Jay was bringing her.
“No kidding, how did Truesdale find Ebie?” Lou asked.
“He sold her a farm,” said Jay. “It was easy. Then she got sick and was stuck there. Ebie’s all right. Ebie doesn’t give a damn where she is so long as I get there once in a while.”
“Where’s Flo?” asked Lou and then chuckled. “Or do you know?”
“Sure I know,” said Jay. “When Whittleby got shaky so did Flo. Seemed to think it was my fault. Christ, nothing I could do. So she kept reminding me everything was in her name, God knows she had me there, and I’d better not count on her, so by the time Whittleby went under there were no surprises. She threw a fit and I walked out.”
“Jesus, Jay, she’s got everything sewed up,” Lou exclaimed.
“That’s the nice part,” Jay chuckled. “She can’t complain. She was so scared of being left out that she hung herself. Told me she’d been putting everything away in her own name for years. Her mother told her. Her mother says, on her wedding day, ‘Looky, Flo, you’re very happily married, but you must learn to put all the savings in your name against the day he runs out on you, the bastard.’ Something like that. So she did. So I says, ‘Okay, then you’re all right,’ and then I says, ‘Could you loan me fifty thousand to get back on my feet?’ and she says, ‘You don’t get any of my savings, don’t kid yourself, they’re mine’ so I says, ‘All right, then, I’m a bum, I’d only be using up your money’ and I walked out. It’s a wonderful thing, having a smart wife.”
“You mean you’re living with Ebie?”
“Sure, I’m living with Ebie,” said Jay. “Ebie doesn’t care whether we eat or not so long as I’m there. Those two play right into each other’s hands.”
Lou thought of Mary and of Mrs. Kameray and how they would never play into each other’s hands. He was irritated at Jay for thinking that the answer to everything was just throwing the pot of gold to the injured party and walking out. All right with Flo, but what did you do with a wife like Mary? And what did you do when you didn’t want to leave her, when she was the kind of wife you knew you wanted, the kind you should have, and you didn’t know what to do about it?
“What’ll you bet you’re in the same old noose?” he said.
Jay didn’t get mad.
“Listen,” he said. “A noose is what everybody goes for. Soon as they get out of one they look around. ‘Where’s my new noose,’ they say, and nobody’s happy till they got the new one, love, business, it’s all the same; everybody’s got to have the neck in the old noose, it’s better than nothing. They call it a place to rest their neck. Everybody’s got to have a place to rest their neck, so long as it’s always out, anyway.”
The dog knocked over two of the waiting highballs lined up on the windowsill, so they rang again for the porter.
“How big is Danbury when we get there?” asked Lou.
“It’s a hat town,” said Jay. “They make hats.”
“I don’t give a damn what they make,” said Lou, “I’m just getting information. How big is the place?”
“All right,” said Jay. “It’s about seven and three-quarters.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the porter, “but the conductor says you got to wire New York for permission to run the engine.”
“Did you tell him it was Mr. Oliver?” asked Jay.
“Did you tell him he was with Mr. Donovan?” asked Lou.
“Are you the Lou Donovan that used to manage the Olympia Motion Picture Theatre in Rahway?” asked the porter.
He was. He was indeed. And the porter was the very same porter.
“How’s Mrs. Donovan?” asked the porter. “She sure used to play the organ nice. I certainly enjoyed Mrs. Donovan playing that there organ. The only high class feature we had.”
“That’s right,” said Lou, and suddenly it all came back, the old days in the afternoon, the run through of the film of the evening, Francie playing the organ to feel out what pieces to play, the colored porter pausing in his scrubbing to say how good it was, and Francie afterward in the beer place remembering that the porter had said he liked ‘I Loved You Truly’ particularly. And it made him feel very old to suddenly think of Francie with kindness, it made him feel old to want to remind her of those days, days she was always reminding him of, it was queer being in the other position. He thought, maybe that’s all Francie wants, not to sleep with me, just to talk over the same things, on the other hand he never had wanted to even talk over the same memories before this very instant.
“You sure put that movie house on the map,” said the porter fondly. “Don’t you remember how you used to always be yelling out for William, Mr. Lou?”
“I certainly do,” said Lou and slipped him a bill, feeling queer. It was the first and only time he had ever thought of any part of his past before Chicago as if it was a normal pleasant past, and a wave of surprise came over him that it hadn’t been a bad past at all. He’d had fun there in little towns with Francie, they hadn’t made a lot of dough, but when they did they enjoyed it. He couldn’t, at this moment, figure out just when he stepped out of his past and became a different man, despising his past and everything connected with it, but he would remember this moment as the time he went back and looked at his past freely, and saw it was as good as anybody else’s. Sure it was. Maybe it was in this present insecure period he was trying to catch on to anything that was solid, and if your past wasn’t solid, what was? Maybe that was all it was, but suddenly he felt that it was nothing to be ashamed of, years of scramming in and out of boarding houses, bills half-paid, jobs not paid for, no, it was part of something. And there was old Francie, sticking by like mad. Now that he thought of it he’d never had anybody stick to him like that. When he got going good that was what threw him, it made him feel as if he needed someone sticking to him. Well.…
“Tell the conductor to go ahead with the same engineer,” he said to the porter. “Act like nothing has happened.”
Jay looked at him.
“So the fluzy was your wife,” he said.
“Any objection?” said Lou.
Jay whistled.
“I’m just beginning to get you, pal,” he said. “You’re smarter than I thought. You know when I saw you going under for that Kameray phony I began thinking you were not so bright. I see now it was a gag to get Rosenbaum.”
Lou lit a cigarete. The big dog came over and put his feet on Lou’s lap. He had to laugh.
“I was going to give you a piece of advice,” said Jay. “I was going to tell you to stick to the gals at the Spinning Top or the hostesses there on Fifty-fourth Street. Same as you told me. The Kameray is a phoney. She even gets a percent on the suit you just bought. She calls up the store every time you buy anything and gets her percent. Ebie told me.”
Lou drank the second drink from the end. The dog watched him anxiously.
“Ebie’s a great girl,” said Lou, sore.
“Ebie’s crazy about you, too,” said Jay, pleased. “I used to wonder if you pulled anything on me when I was away, but I guess I was too suspicious.”
“I hope, I hope,” said Lou.
That was the way to look at it. Everybody was phoney, it made it better that way. The unbearable ache at the things he kept hearing about Trina was nothing but growing pains. You had to be a phoney to get anywhere in this world. Trina had to step faster than some because she’d had it tougher, that was all. You had to feel sorry for somebody like that, somebody that had to keep playing a game every minute just to get along.
“William,” Jay opened the door and yelled out, “bring me the funnies, will you, Mr. Donovan wants to see where Lil Abner is today.”
Ebie’s pup looked worriedly from one man to the other. It had a naturally woebegone face, its drooping whiskers adding to the funereal effect. Jay sprawled out on the seat and chuckled.
“Look at Handsome, will you? No kidding, Lou, did you ever see a dog with as much on his mind as old Handsome, here? Listen, Handsome, while you’re on your feet, hand me that last drink over there, will you? Might as well train you while I got this time on my hands.”
The porter came in with the papers which Jay decided to read aloud. Every time the porter came in Lou was reminded of some long forgotten remnant of his past. Come to think of it he and Francie had had a hell of a good time bumming around the country in those days. If anybody had any better time they hadn’t known about it. Tiptoeing out of that rooming house in Albany at two A.M. wearing all the belongings they could get on since the installment people had taken the wardrobe trunk back that day anyway; having to take the car going north instead of the one going south because they were afraid to wait. Breakfasting in the next town, worn out and punch drunk from all night riding and no sleep, and reading the ad in the paper that landed them his best job, the management of a Newark hotel. Then the fire that wiped out that job, then the free rent somebody gave them way out in the Jersey wilds and Francie got a job in some roadhouse, and some guy, maybe it was the manager, kept trying to make her, and one night Lou was waiting for her out in the dump where they lived, miles from nowhere, and when she was late, he got jealous, imagine that, jealous over old Francie, yes, jealous as all get-out, and what does he do but start walking the ten miles to the roadhouse just to see if that guy is keeping her there, and all of a sudden he remembers some kid down the road with a bicycle and he steals it and rides to the roadhouse, pedalling away against a wind for an hour and a half, his calves hurt still just remembering it, and when he got there he saw Francie playing for a big crowd of customers and like a fool he’d forgotten it was the night of some firemen’s banquet and the place was keeping open all night, and he felt like such a fool he didn’t even let her know he was there, but turned around and wheeled back home. She was there when he got home, the boss’ bus took all the help home, and she was worried sick not finding him, and they had a fight because he wouldn’t tell her where he’d been, and by God he never did, either.
“William,” Jay called the porter, “will you step up to the engine again and say Mr. Oliver will take over as soon as we pass South Norwalk?”
“William,” said Lou,” will you furbish up these glasses? There are four of us here.”
“Sure is good to see you again, Mr. Lou,” said William.
“I got held up here last fall in the hurricane,” said Jay. “Train from Boston got stuck just ahead of Providence and by golly we sat there for hours. Ferry boat sailed right up past the window. A couple of old bags and I got out and hired a brokendown taxi to drive us to South Norwalk. Fifty bucks. Took all day, what with roads washed up, trees floating around.”
“I was in the Biltmore in Providence afterward,” said Lou. “They showed me where the water came up in the Falstaff Room there.”
The porter brought the fresh supply of drinks and lined them up on the windowsill. The dog immediately knocked one over, and this set Jay off into roars of laughter.
“Look at that face, Lou. Won’t Ebie die when she sees him? Looks like my old man, I mean that. By God the old man used to come home from the road on four legs, too, just the same as Handsome here. Used to hear him coming up the steps on his hands and knees, fried to the gills, and the old lady right behind him giving it to him. ‘So that’s what you do with your expense account? So that’s where the money goes? So that’s how you wear out your new clothes!’ and ‘Where’d you get that carnation in your buttonhole, you old bastard?’ I used to lie in bed, scared stiff, sorry for the old boy, you know. I was just a kid.”
“My old man was in insurance,” said Lou. “We used to move every spring. Akron, Erie, Buffalo, Evansville, Lansing—big houses, little houses, boarding houses, mansions—we never knew how we’d land.”
Lou looked at his watch. It was four o’clock.
“Say, what am I doing on this train?” he wanted to know. “I had a date with Florabella an hour ago. Where we going?”
“Take it easy, Lou,” Jay soothed him, “you got to relax, now, I mean that. We’re just running out to say hello to Ebie. You like Ebie. Ebie likes you. Then there’s Handsome. I couldn’t very well take an animal that size out there alone, could I?”
“Why me?” Lou asked. “Why didn’t you get Frank Buck?”
Jay yawned and pulled a newspaper over his face.
“Do me a favor, Handsome,” he instructed the dog, with a weary sigh, “entertain Donovan while I catch a nap.”
“How’m I going to get back?” Lou asked. “I can’t take time out like this with things the way they are.”
“Relax, Lou, for Christ’s sake. You got nothing to worry about but money and that’ll be gone in no time. Relax, old man.”
Resigned, Lou stretched out on his seat. He pulled the funnies over his eyes, and the old days, the old hard luck days came dancing past like an old flicker, and for some reason they didn’t seem bad at all, they seemed real, even fun, the panics and the triumphs seemed realer now than anything else, he couldn’t understand why that was unless it was age, with all its sentimental fog, creeping up on him, or maybe it was just his brain trying to keep from thinking about Trina and Rosenbaum and Mary and the kid back in Chicago, and a winter’s work gone to pieces. Maybe that was it. Anyway, the whirring of the wheels was soothing. The dog, Handsome, looked anxiously from one paper-covered face to the other, then back to the remaining highballs poised on the window-sill and moaned lugubriously.
TWENTY-ONE
Ebie was in her studio over the garage, having such breakfast as Buck Kinley, her colored handy man, was in the mood to serve. There was only warmed-over biscuits, bacon and coffee, so Ebie judged that neither Buck nor his wife Minelda was feeling very well this morning after their night in town.
“Where’s the cream?” she asked, not caring much.
“Minelda used it up this mawning,” Buck said, yawning. “She say she jes’ felt like drinkin’ some cream this mawning.”
Nothing to be done about that. Minelda was boss of this place. If something didn’t suit Minelda she was likely to take Buck and march right back to Asheville, leaving Ebie all alone on this godforsaken farm. Serve her right, too. You ought to be satisfied to let little-gray-home-down-by the-old-millstream-and-so-on be a tenor solo, your own fault if you bought the property. Your own fault, too, if you were fool enough to try to live in it and prove something or other about yourself that didn’t matter to anyone but you, and besides you got sick proving it. She couldn’t complain, really, about the getting sick part, because that was where Jay had suddenly showed up as the big protector. You’d think that finding her in bed with pneumonia was all he’d ever been waiting for. Now she was well and sick of the place, but it was Jay’s dream home, now, and she had to stay and be part of the song, me-and-you-in-the-little-home-down-by-the-old-mill-stream. That was what she always wanted, all right, then, what was she kicking about?
“Mis’ Vane, where’d you put that gin?” Buck asked.
“Buck, you’re not going to have gin before breakfast?” Ebie protested.
“Yessum,” said Buck, “that’s what I’m gonna have. Where is it?”
Ebie, resigned, motioned to the cupboard beside the stove and Buck hastened to help himself. He poured out a tumblerful and started downstairs with it.
