Tomorrow! Page 3

  “Carryon!” he said, saluting her with mock solemnity.

  She laughed a little. “I’ve got myself in this, and a date later, when all I want to do is go down with you to our spot by the river and neck.”

  “I’ll be home,” he answered, “any evening for the next thirty.”

  “And as soon as Mother knows it,” she answered, grimly picking up her instrument,

  “she’ll raise heaven and earth to make it as nearly impossible as she can for me to see you at all.”

  “Still—you being twenty-four—”

  “But jobless and dependent.” She slammed the door. “I can’t fight them to the point where I’m really kicked out.”

  He wanted to ask why she couldn’t. He wanted to say, as he had said before, that there were young women, lovely ones, who managed to live on a lieutenant’s pay. But he knew what would follow any such suggestion. It began with the reminder that, when he ceased being a lieutenant in one more year, he wouldn’t have an income at all. When he was settled in civilian life, it would at first be on the minute income of a draftsman in some small architectural office in River City or Green Prairie. “Barely enough,” Lenore had said once in a bitter moment, “to pay my dry-cleaning bills.”

  “Do I call back?” he asked.

  “I’ll get a ride. This monkeyshine won’t break up till around eleven. Then we go to somebody’s house for what the older veterans of Civil Defense call refreshments and jollification.”

  “Ducky.” She swore and stalked down South Hobson Street, making better time than the traffic.

  He parked her car beside her house and saw, through the picture window, Beau Bailey sitting in a deep chair with the evening paper, a highball, and the top button, of his trousers undone. Hurriedly he crossed the lawn to: his own yard.

  Nora and Ted were studying.

  “I thought,” Chuck said to his brother, “you were supposed to be at the switch. One of the minute men?”

  “Oh, heck. I am! But they just repeated the same old baloney over and over and it got sickening.” His imagination, vivid when the “attack” had begun, was now a faded thing.

  Mrs. Conner had come from the hall with her darning basket. She smiled at her straight, thin son and sat down with a murmur of relief. “Ted’s been very faithful, really, Charles. And it is tiresome. This is your father’s fourth year. I don’t see how on earth he keeps up his enthusiasm.

  Ted said with scorn, “He’s enthusiastic about everything!” his voice cracked on the last word and he repeated it with dignity: “Everything. Besides, afterward they have beers and they bowl. Also it’s political. He’s getting to be such a big shot in this part of town, the next thing you know, he’ll he elected dogcatcher. Then he’ll be away from home every night, looking for old ladies’ lost poodles.” He yacked mightily at that sally.

  His mother laughed a little too.

  Charles picked up the evening paper and took his father’s chair under the green-shaded drop-lamp. He reflected somberly that it was odd how homesick one could get at an Air Force base in Texas and how soon the feeling evaporated when one actually got home.

  Nostalgia for home had been changed by some unwanted trick to nostalgia for the past.

  He was thinking about Lenore, in a wordless stream of pictures.

  Lenore in the days when he’d been younger than Ted, when he’d been given his own first jalopy by his father and learned to take care of it; Lenore, fifteen, half-tomboy and half-woman, more fascinated by machinery than he, adept, helping him, summer afternoons, when they sprawled together in overalls in the drive, under the car with wrenches, tightening bolts and swapping kisses that tasted faintly of engine oil, Lenore, taking the high school chemistry prize in her junior year, the physics award the year after, a pretty kid with a man’s aptitude for the sciences, encouraged by the teachers, who said she’d “go a long way.”

  The times, the times that went back as far as he could remember, when usually at her instigation, they “collected”—birds’ eggs, moths and butterflies, insects, stamps, coins, J and shells from the distant ocean that neither one had ever seen, then. . . .

  And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to. . . .

  Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary. . . .

  It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,”

  awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.

  “I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.

  His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”

  “If you’d only . . .” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.

  “If I’d only what?”

  She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”

  “Keep quiet!” Nora expostulated. “I’m studying!” She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.

  Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title Sins in Seven Streets. A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.

  Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.

  “What’s that?” he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”

  “You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss Tootlin’ Tim.”

  Tootlin’ Tim was apparently on the air, for a studio audience laughed and the Conner household was filled with the lunging, sepulchral explosion which represents the combined efforts of hundreds of persons, with nothing to do· and no sense of humor, to express what they regard as amusement.

  The same sound from the same source—radio laughter—was surging through millions of Middle Western homes at the same instant. It is an utterly savage sound, mirthless and cruel, usually inspired by the sadisms which constitute most popular humor. It is a sound that would stun to silence the predatory night noises of the wildest jungle, a sound of madness, mor
e frightful than screaming.

  2

  The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room where Beau, the evening paper in his lap, now slept. He snored lightly and he stirred from time to time. But whenever the TV set gave forth its collective guffaw, its mechanical replica of the mechanical mirth of morons who opened their mouths and chortled every time the emcee made sucking motions with his hands (and who slammed their mouths shut when the same all-pimple showed them his palms), whenever this rock-slide cacophony struck his ears, Beau’s belly jiggled in cadence, his snoring ceased and a miniature replica of the audience noise escaped him.

  Indeed, in many homes and public places, where people had no idea what program was on the air or what jest occasioned the brickbat risibility of the unseen audience, the mere sound elicted that response—a chuckle, cackle or snort. For they were so slavishly conditioned to this style of diversion, so inertly used to, the inanities which push-buttoned their sport, that the mere noise of other nitwits being tickled elicited the reflex. They laughed without knowing why, or even that they laughed. They laughed while drying dishes and emptying garbage and adding columns of figures and shaving and defecating and picking their noses and reading Sunday-school lessons and swallowing pork pies and custards and beer. They chortled.

  Beau, among them, though asleep and patently troubled in his slumber, nonetheless snored and snickered, tittered, nickered, nasalized and woke up with a start because Netta had spoken to him-yelled, rather, since her first words had been overridden by a fresh, oblong block of guffaw, and she detested above all else to be outshouted. All Beau heard, or needed to hear, was “Telephone!”

  He got out of his chair and buttoned the top of his fly as if the telephone were going to be able to see. Then, as if it had the additional power to do harm to him, he snatched up his highball and gulped it down protectively.

  He picked up the instrument and cleared his throat. His tone was suddenly buoyant and friendly, “Howard Bailey speaking.”

  “This is Jake.”

  If Netta had been in the hall she would have seen that Beau’s face lost all its color. The whisky, too, went out of his brain. Nothing was left but a pallid and wobbling man’s body, frantic eyes—but the voice intact, for Beau knew his wife would be listening though she could not look. She always listened.

  He said, after a pause, “Oh, yes. How are you?”

  A businessman, Netta decided upstairs. Somebody of whom Beau was slightly afraid, which didn’t mean much, since he was somewhat afraid of everybody. She looked down bitterly at the bedroom floor as if she could see through it and watch her husband standing below. She would have liked to listen in on an upstairs phone but Beau, six months before, with a remarkable show of determination had had the second-floor extension removed. It was an

  “economy measure” he had said, but she had known his true motive: to prevent her from eavesdropping on his calls.

  The voice that reached Beau was level, a little too level and, though not foreign, it used English in a fashion alien to Green Prairie—in a way which anyone familiar with American dialects would have identified as related to Chicago, to the South Side, to the period of 1920-1930. “Shallcot Rove ran fifth today, Mr. Bailey.”

  “Yes, I know. Of course.”

  “It puts the total up to five thousand, even.”

  Beau gave a little laugh. “As much as that, eh? I wouldn’t worry. I expect the market will take a turn for the better—”

  “No more ‘market,’ Mr. Bailey, until you pay up.”

  “I’ll come down and have a conference in a day or two . . .” Beau could feel the sweat forming and he could hear Netta on the stairs.

  “Yes,” the voice of Jake said flatly. “You come down to The Block tomorrow, to the horse room, Mr. Bailey. And I think you better bring the five thousand. If not all, then at least half. And half later—but soon. And no more bets. Frankly, I told the Bun not to take bets from you last week, till you paid. I was sore at the boys for doing it against orders. He is home sick now because I was so sore. I made him sick.”

  Jake hung up.

  So did Beau. He hung up fast and found, by listening to his wife’s tread, there was time to get back through the archway into the living room (sunken two steps since the remodeling) with the appearance of casualness. The wall then hid him long enough so that he was able to whip out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He contracted his abdomen in an effort to flush up a little blood, for he could see in the mirror wall around the fireplace that he was pale. He tipped the Scotch bottle over his highball glass, with his free hand—and when Netta came through the archway he was apparently imbibing the weak dregs of a drink, prior to pouring a fresh one.

  Even she did not realize he had just gulped four fingers of straight liquor.

  Netta was forty-eight and, though she had never had the coloring which made Lenore so peculiarly beautiful, she hall once possessed the same perfect features and the same unusual, slightly slanted shape of eye. Netta was a Hiver City girl, the daughter of a railroad brakeman who had seven other children. As a child, she had learned all I here is to know about the flea-bitten ways of life. Her world had been a mean street seen through second-hand lace curtains darned not to show. She had worked her way through normal school in near-by Lummus Center and taught second grade for two years. But she had never entertained an intention of making a career of teaching. Normal school had been her only feasible way of acquiring something resembling education. She had not even wanted real erudition—general or specific—merely its sufficient facsimile.

  Netta was pretty as a young woman; she was also durable and indomitable. Her personality was identical with her ambition which had been formed, delineated and defined to the utmost detail by American advertising. It is true, as advertising exponents hold, that advertising is educational and brings to millions a numberless bounty of cultivated benefits. It is also true, although the advertising exponents dislike to be reminded of the fact, that while their art creates a demand, often where demand did not thitherto exist, this same demand, in the case of multitudes, is greater than the fiscal capacity for its satisfaction or the cultural control for its employment. A struggle for additional revenue to satisfy cravings both synthetic and inordinate ensues everywhere in the land. Among persons whose morals are weak, the struggle becomes, ipso facto, unscrupulous.

  Had she been reared in a strict, Presbyterian family, Netta’s ethics would have been mighty indeed: she would have become a moral Midas. Unfortunately, her father, the brakeman, had been nominally a Methodist but actually merely an alcoholic. Her mother, though sporadically pious, by a kind of heritage from a backslid Baptist grandparent, was a woman of negligent libido with a chronic weakness for receiving and returning affection due, perhaps, to the small amount she ever received from or gave to her husband.

  The result was that Netta’s brothers and sisters, all younger, were in some hidden doubt concerning their true and probably several sires. Such circumstances obtain widely among the impoverished; they obtain at least quite often amongst the well-born and the well-heeled, too, though here they are differently regarded. In such latter circles, drunkenness may be known as

  “temperament” or “sensitivity” and loose sex manners in a mother may be designated as anything from “feminist pioneering” to what the country-club set does for fun. Poverty is deprived of such pretty tissues to put between human pretensions, and the almost universally rejected fact that people are, after all, animals.

  So Netta passed through childhood and into her early teens with one determination: to have nice things someday. The method was always apparent: marriage. In the Sister Cities it was easy for Netta to meet young men with money: they came to the dance halls, the saloons, the places of even more flagrant disrepute. They even came cruising in River City, through the gaslit district, driving large cars and looking for precisely what Netta was at sixteen.

  She learned much from them—though
at seventeen she barely escaped marrying a drummer of forty who had what she thought of at the time as “money.” She learned gradually that her end could be achieved only if she had adequate formal schooling, which was why she trained as a teacher. Tuition was free. She had found out, by the time she got her degree, that the style of man she wanted—rich, of course, important, social, urbane and worldly—would also have to be (if he were to marry her) weak and vain and somewhat gullible.

  She marked down Howard Bailey within ten minutes of their first meeting, at a picnic on the banks of the Green Prairie River in 1928. They were married—rather hastily and to the infinite puzzlement of Beau—and there Netta’s luck failed. In 1929 Beau’s father (who had owned an automobile agency in River City) shot himself to death, two weeks after the historic Black Friday, which wiped out other thousands of millionaires. Beau was left with nothing but his job in the Sloan Mercantile Trust Company. Curiously enough, Netta discovered that, though the self-evident thing to do was to get divorced and find a new spouse whose bonds and stocks had not been touched by the market collapse, she was by then attached to Beau in a way she could not fathom. His very weakness, his dependency, made her postpone repeatedly even talk of divorce.