A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Poker Player’s Wife

Bettina (“Betts,” as he called her) had just finished rinsing out a pair of stockings in the hotel-bathroom, when Joe came in with the men he had rounded up for the game. It had taken him a little longer to connect tonight; he had been gone the better part of an hour.

“Fellows,” he said in that amiable, ingratiating voice he put on at such times, “this is the wife. Betts, this is Mr. Wallace. And this is Mr. Meany. And this here is — what’d you say it was again?”

“Roebeck,” answered the man whose name had been forgotten.

Mr. Wallace looked her over not too impersonally. “That’s a good name for a poker-player’s wife,” he said.

She laughed. She’d heard that before.

She wondered idly whether any of them had given their own right names. It didn’t matter too much what name you went under in a poker game among strangers, she supposed; what mattered was what kind of luck you had.

They found out they were short a chair. The only remaining one in the room was a ponderous overstuffed affair off in a corner, far too bulky to bring in close enough to the table to give its occupant comfortable access to the clockwise flow of the game. And besides, that would have left Joe’s wife with nowhere to sit except the edge of the radiator, which was deeply ridged and would have been insupportable for any length of time.

Wallace tame to the rescue. “I’ll go get one from my room,” he said. “I’m right on this same floor you are, just around the turn of the hall. Nine-twelve.”

Joe was genuinely surprised by the coincidence, she could tell. He probably wouldn’t have had to spend so much time approaching him if he had known about it.

“Let’s get down to business,” Roebeck remarked surlily, when Wallace had come back with the chair.

They seated themselves. Joe took out a new deck of cards and broke the seal. He was never, she reflected, without a new deck of cards. He might be without a penny in his pockets, without a roof over his head; without a shave, without a haircut, without a tooth-brush, without a watch (and she had known him to be without each of those things at one time or another), but he was never, he was never, without a fresh, unopened — and therefore patently unmarked — deck of cards somewhere near at hand.

“Five-card stud all right?” Joe said. They all assented. Joe took the joker out of the deck, chucked it aside.

She watched him shuffle. How often she’d seen him do this! It was a lovely thing to watch. The cards seemed to have a life of their own, dancing back and forth between his hands like flickers of light too fast for the eye to catch, and arcing at the center of their trajectory. The gold signet that was never off his finger glinted like a liquid blob of sunlight.

He splashed the cards out on the table in a semi-serpentine, like a stunted S. They each picked one for dealer.

Joe got the high card, Joe got the deal.

After that, the game commenced without further ado.

The first deal was dealt. There was that moment or two of silence she knew so well, that preliminary hush before the betting as each player studied his hand, marshalled the facts, planned his strategy. A silence so taut, so boding, it almost hurt to listen to it sometimes. She was glad each time when it was over. It was like waiting for a long roller to come crashing in to shore, it was like waiting for a sundered tree to come toppling down to earth.

The silence broke.

“I open,” Meany said suddenly, and pushed five dollars in.

The game was on.

She had to find something to occupy her time with. Reading was no good; she’d done so much of it she couldn’t stand the sight of the so-called woman’s-type of magazine any more. Anything deeper than that would have been difficult in a room crowded with smoking, card-playing men. She wasn’t a deep reader, anyway.

She went over to the bureau-drawer and got out some knitting she was working on. It was going to be a muffler for Joe when it was finished, although he wasn’t much of an outdoor man. She’d even thought of running a band of fringe across each end of it, when she got down that far, if it didn’t present too many difficulties. Her knitting wasn’t too good, but at least it gave her something to pass the time with during these (sometimes) nightlong games.

With it coiled in her lap, she settled herself in the only chair they’d left to her, the large overstuffed one in the corner of the room. It made for an odd contrast, the prim, old-fashioned act of knitting against the debonnair, up-to-date little dinner-dress she had on.

Joe kept her well dressed. It paid him in his business to have her attract the roving male eye. Then he took it from there.

Roebeck got up and changed his seat around to the other side of the table, but his bad luck went right after him. His face was sour as a crabapple.

Meany had taken off his coat. Damp patches showed on his shirt where it covered his armpits. She turned her eyes away with a flicker of aversion. It was a shirt of maroon and white stripes, but the maroon occupied more background than the white. He had black elastic armbands around his sleeves. She wondered if he ever bathed, without caring if he did or not.

“Raise,” one of them said.

They were completely oblivious of her, she could tell that by looking at them. They didn’t even know she was in the room at all. It was a pretty tough thing, she had to admit to herself, to be a woman in a man’s world. But then if she hadn’t been one, there would have been no Joe for her, she reflected, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad arrangement after all.

He raised his head and looked over at her suddenly. Straight into her face, straight into her eyes. But he wasn’t seeing her, she knew. There was a lack of recognition there, a calculating blankness, that told her. He was seeing cards.

He’d been good to her. The races at Saratoga, the boardwalk at Atlantic City, when they were in the chips, as he phrased it. Rector’s, Shanley’s, Bustanoby’s, the holiday side of life. Cheesy hotel-rooms when they weren’t. But he always bounced back again. She would have loved him even if he hadn’t been good to her. She was that kind.

“Raise,” somebody said.

She wanted to yawn almost uncontrollably. Her needles stopped, slanted downward between her fingers, and she realized with a start of reawakening she had been on the point of dozing off.

“Raise,” somebody said again.

“Call down for another bottle,” Wallace suggested to Joe. “I’ll pay for it. I’m ahead in the game anyway.”

“Not for long you won’t be,” Joe promised grimly.

She got up and telephoned the order down for them herself, so Joe wouldn’t have to leave his chair.

“Thank you, my dear,” Wallace said, crinkling his eyes at her in a slyly lascivious sort of way.

Woman-wise, she caught the meaning of the look, and dropped her own.

“I’m through,” Meany announced dismally, folding.

“You can’t win your money back if you get up and walk away from it.” Wallace told him patronizingly.

Meany sliced his hand around past himself in refutation. “If your luck hasn’t changed this far into a game, it ain’t going to change any more the rest of the whole night long. I know that by experience. I’ve used up all my playing-with money, and I ain’t going to dig into my not-for-playing-with money. I’m a working man, and as it is I’m going to have to be working for nothing for the next two weeks.”

“Got trolley-fare?” Joe murmured insultingly.

Meany paid up and left, giving the door an angry crack after him.

“If a man can’t handle his cards, he shouldn’t sit in on games,” said Joe, tractably enough.

“He handled them all right,” opined Wallace. “He didn’t have any to handle, is what the trouble was.”

Meany was immediately forgotten (as every card-player is who ever left the table a loser) and the game went on as though he’d never been in it.

A chair scuffed back and she looked up. This time it was Roebeck who was on his feet.

“You quitting too?” said Joe, riffling the cards.

“I should’ve quit before I started,” growled Roebeck.

Wallace was adding up something. “That makes two-seventy-four,” he told Roebeck.

The latter reached into his pocket, brought out a mildewed bill-fold. “Here’s two hundred,” he said.

“And—?” Wallace asked.

“I’ll give you an I.O.U.”

“I don’t take I.O.U’s.” Wallace snapped back.

There was a tense moment. She stopped knitting, but Joe kept riffling away.

“Look, if I lost to you, you’d expect me to pay in full,” Wallace said. “Well, I expect it too.”

“Come on, play,” Joe barked impatiently.

Roebeck reached into a different pocket this time, counted out some crumpled bills. The door slammed dosed after him.

“Sore,” was all Wallace said.

“Well,” said Joe, “that separates the boys from the men. Now maybe I can do myself some good.”

“Maybe,” Wallace said drily.

She put her knitting aside altogether and began to watch the deal. A lot depended on it. Joe was in the hole already and going deeper every time around.

The deal began. Last deal of all, everything or nothing.

One up, one down. Joe an ace. Auspicious, she thought. Wallace a punk five.

Suddenly she was praying. She caught herself praying. God, be good to Joe. If he needs a jack, give him a jack. If he needs a full house, fill him a house. Women have prayed before. For love, for children, for beauty, for wealth. But what woman in the world ever before prayed for a king or a ten or a two-spot?

On the third card. Joe got a queen. Wallace a no-good three.

On the fourth, Joe got another ace. He was getting marvelous cards. He already had a pair exposed on the table. A little pulse high up under his cheekbone started to tick with suppressed excitement. She’d never seen that before, as often as she’d watched him play.

She went over and stood beside him, forgetting to breathe. He quietly turned up one corner of his hole-card with the edge of his nail, to let her see it. She could just barely make out the tip of the reversed red “A.” He had three of a kind, in aces! She knew enough to keep her face impassive. She bent over and touched her lips to the top of his head for a moment.

“Are we playing or making love?” Wallace demanded sourly.

You’ll find out in a minute, mister, she thought with an inward chuckle. She stepped back into the clear, and watched.

He had reason to be sour. He’d gotten the lowest card in the deck, a two, just now. His cards seemed to be getting worse all the time.

One more card to go.

“Well,” Joe drawled, “suppose we just make that another fifty.”

Wallace drained his glass, and a little piece of ice still left at the bottom of it clicked noisily against his teeth. “And still another,” he said imperturbably.

Joe should call him now, she kept thinking frantically, Joe should call him now. Nothing can beat what Joe’s holding. But she supposed he wanted to clean up good by raising him still further on the next card.

Wallace hadn’t gotten a picture-card through the whole deal. He got a four on the fifth card.

Joe got a six this time, but it didn’t matter, he already had it made.

Suddenly, she noticed something for the first time that nearly made her keel backward in consternation. The order in which the cards had come out had covered it up until now.

Wallace had gotten 5, 3, 2, 4. And even as she stared, horrified, he moved one of them out of line and rearranged it: 5, 4, 3, 2.

If his hole-card was a six — but no, she couldn’t believe in such sheer, blind, uncanny luck as that. The odds and averages were all against it. Even to build upward would have been incredible enough, but to build downward to a straight! And have every card come out to you, almost as though it were magnetized. That wouldn’t have been skill, that would have been pure magic.

He must be bluffing. And Joe must know that he was bluffing, bluffing flamboyantly, because Joe himself was holding three of a kind. Joe was a firm believer in the law of averages; he had once told her that. And the odds against there being a six-card in that hole were — well, with four sixes in a deck of fifty-two cards, and Joe himself holding one of them, were: three to forty-eight. Or in other words, one to sixteen. Joe’s favor. You couldn’t get any better odds than that. Joe knew what he was doing.

She breathed more freely again.

“It’s going to cost you,” Joe said thoughtfully, “five hundred dollars to stay in here.”

Wallace poked the tip of his tongue against the lining of his cheek and made a little lump there for a minute.

“I’m staying, at those prices,” he said calmly.

Joe must have felt he’d played around with him long enough; thought it was time to put him out of his misery. “Show me what you’ve got,” he said gruffly. He turned over his own ace-in-the-hole.

Wallace turned up a lowly six, but it gave him 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.

She heard the sound of a deep, shuddering moan coming out of someone, and it was herself.

Wallace got up and stood there waiting, hands on the top of his chair.

“I haven’t got enough cash on me,” Joe said. “Will a check do?”

Wallace didn’t answer for a moment. He looked over at her for some unfathomable reason, as if he were including her in Joe’s figurable collateral. Then he said quietly, “If it’s good.”

“It’s good,” Joe said, adroitly refusing to take offense.

She was suddenly terrifically frightened. How could he give him a check? Her eyes rounded when she saw him a check? Her eyes rounded when she saw him flip a pad of pale-blue blank checks onto the table-top.

“What first name’ll I put down?” he asked curtly.

“The initial M’s good enough,” Wallace said, equally short.

The two were hating each other, she knew, the way men sometimes did after the pent-up rivalry of a card-game such as this one had been.

Joe signed the check and spun it insultingly across the table to Wallace. His face was white as chalk. He was cleaned out. She knew it and he knew it. He wiped sweat off his eyebrows with the side of his thumb-joint. She was ready to cry, but what good would it have done?

Wallace picked up the check and waved it tauntingly almost in Joe’s face, pretending to dry it. Then he folded it, once over at each end, and put it inside his pocket. “Let’s hope for the sake of everybody concerned,” he said pointedly, “there isn’t any hitch when I cash this in the morning.”

No good-nights were said.

He went over to the door, opened it, and turned to look back at her. Then he had the unmitigated gall to wink at her over the top of Joe’s sombrely inclined head. The door closed after him.

The moment it had, she flew over beside Joe. “Joe—!” she began in a stricken whisper.

He flicked his hand warningly toward her, so she’d wait until Wallace was out of earshot.

She went over to the door and listened. Then she came back again, distractedly pounding her knuckles into her open palm. “Joe! Why did you give that to him? There is no bank. There is no account. Where’d you get them from, anyway?”

“I stopped in and told them I needed some one day. They thought I was a depositor and gave me a batch. I figured they’d come in handy to flash around once in a while.”

“But flashing around isn’t filling one out. Joe, don’t you know it can spell jail? And he’s the kind will make sure it does. Joe, you shouldn’t have, I tell you!”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” he said, bunching a fist and backing it away from his luck, somewhere out there in front of his eyes. “Even the deal before I didn’t have enough cash to cover my losses. He wouldn’t take I.O.U’s, you heard him say that. I kept hoping I could win back on that last deal—”

“If it had only been a Saturday night, then we’d have until Monday morning at least to figure something out. But it’s a Friday, they stay open half a day tomorrow, and he’ll take the check around the first thing in the morning. Joe, we’ve got to get out of here, right tonight if we can.”

“We can’t,” he said. “Don’t you understand? We haven’t a nickel. We haven’t even enough to pay for this room. We’d have to skip out the back. We haven’t even enough for train-tickets. We’d have to walk along the side of the road looking for a lift from a horse and wagon. We’d be picked up in no time flat.”

“Then we’ve got to get it back.” She began to pace the floor, with her arms tightly wound around her, as though guarding some thought or idea she was carrying inside her. “We’ve got to get it back.” she kept repeating.

“Sure,” he said. “I suppose you think all I gotta do is knock on his door, ask him for it, and he’s going to let me have it, as simple as that.”

“No,” she admitted, “I know he wouldn’t give it to you.” She emphasized the pronoun, the “you,” a little, but he was too engrossed in the over-all problem to notice that.

“Joe,” she said suddenly, “take a drink.”

He poured one out for himself.

When his glass was down, she said: “Joe, take another.”

He took a refill.

He kept taking them after that, and she kept telling him to.

It seemed like only a minute later that his head was down on the table cushioned between his wrapped arms and she was standing over him shaking him awake.

“Joe,” she said briefly. “Here’s your check back.”

“Where’d you get it from?” he asked, looking blearily from it to her and back to it again.

“From the party you gave it to,” she said tersely.

His anger was slow’ to mount, but remorseless. Like fire flickering up a pile of dry leaves, and then at last — dazzling combustion. He’d risen to his feet. His eyes were sizzling like shorted fuses.

“So you went in there and got it,” he said. “Just like that.”

“I got it, that’s what matters.”

“No,” he flared. “You got it, ain’t what matters. You went in there, is what matters.”

“Joe, you don’t think—”

“I don’t think. What don’t I think? You got it the easy way? Is that what I don’t think? Well, you bet your life I don’t!”

“I didn’t get it the easy way, Joe. I got it the hard way. Please listen to me—”

His answer was a swift, silent blow. She went staggering back against the wall like a drunk. She didn’t even cry out, it was so sudden.

He went in after her and pulled her back toward him, away from the wall, so that he would have enough clearance to swing in a second time. Then he hit her on the other side of the face, with his left.

The terrible thing about women being beaten by their men is not the fact that they are women so much as the invariable lack of resistance. Even the weakest, the meekest, the most cowardly of men will offer at least a token resistance when another man strikes at him. A woman never, always provided the man belongs to her. It is as though something deep down inside her feminity were subconsciously saying to her, it’s a part of being loved, so I must submit.

“The hard way! The hard way!” he kept panting. “Only it wasn’t hard for you. It came naturally.”

“Joe,” she whimpered through bruised lips. “Don’t, Joe. I love you.”

“Love! Your idea of love is my idea of garbage!”

With that, he spat square into her face, and then he let her alone. She crumpled to her knees, and then sagged over against the arm of a chair, her head down as if in an attitude of mournful penance. She was crying, but you could only tell it by the way the back of her head was quivering. The dress had split open across her back in a long diagonal gash, from one shoulder almost across to the opposite hip.

“Now I’m going in there and take care of that bastard!” he promised her savagely. “And what you got isn’t anything compared to what I’m gonna give him! He won’t be in shape to fool around with other men’s wives for a long time to come, when I get finished with him!”

Without giving her another look he threw the door open and stormed out into the hall. She stretched out one arm after him in a vain attempt to dissuade him, but it was too late, he didn’t see it and it wouldn’t have stopped him even if he had.

She’d lifted herself up and was standing over a basinful of cold water, gently touching a wet towel to her hurt face, when he came bolting back again minutes later.

His face was almost gray with basic fear. “Why didn’t you tell me you killed him?” he said in a choked-up whisper.

“Did you give me the chance?” was all she said to that.

He backed a hand against his forehead. “No wonder you got the check back.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. If I’d’ve known it was going to happen, I would never have gone near there in the first place.” She held the wet towel against her lips for a moment, and it came away with two tiny scarlet scars on it. “I figured I could distract him in some way, if he had the coat already off and over the back of a chair, like, and slip it out of his pocket without him noticing. Or if he still had it on, sweet-talk him into giving it back; you know, promise everything, come across with nothing. But I didn’t realize what I was in for. He’d been drinking all through the card-game, you saw that. And he must’ve gone ahead drinking after he was back in his own room. And you can never count on drunks, they’re unpredictable. I was no sooner inside the door than he fastened a bear-hug around me that I couldn’t break out of. We staggered back against the edge of a dresser or table together, I didn’t see what it was. I managed to partly free one arm and I reached around in back of me to grab hold of something, anything. I didn’t care what. I fastened onto the handle of this icepick that was tilting up out of a bowl of ice, and I swung it around in front of me, to ward him off. I didn’t even lunge at him with it, just held it there. He stepped back in the clear, all right, but then he stumbled over his own feet or something and fell face-first against me, and the thing went through him as if he was made of lard. He even dragged me down with him in the fall, and I had to work one leg free out from under him before I could stand up again.”

She drew a deep, shuddering breath.

“That’s the story, Joe, and it’s a true one, not fake, not doctored.”

His eyes were black as shotgun-pellets with tension and anxiety. “Leave off of doing that,” he said, pulling at her urgently. “We’ve got to light out of here, we’ve got to get a move on fast. Maybe we can still make it by the stairs, so they don’t nab us coming down on the elevator. Somebody’s liable to go in there any minute and spot him. The door isn’t even locked.”

“No, Joe, no!” she insisted, putting her hand on his arm, as a brake. “That’s not the way to play it. We’ve got to stand up to it. If we run out on it, then we never stop running, until they finally catch up with us. And you know they’re going to catch up with us, they always catch up with you; whether it’s minutes from now or whether it’s months. Do you want that to be our life from now on? Always running, then hiding, then breaking out and running some more. And running where? Running from no place to no place, until finally we run straight into their waiting arms.”

“Stay here and wait for them to come? Own up to it?” he said bewilderedly.

She nodded rapidly. “Listen to me, Joe, and listen to me real good. I know you’ve got a quick, keen mind, or you wouldn’t be able to play cards the way you do. This is the difference it makes: by running out, we’re turning it into murder. And making it very hard to beat. By sitting pat and facing up to it, it stays just what it was: an accidental killing in self-defense. I can beat that. It won’t be any trouble at all. A woman defending herself against a man, protecting her honor. That may sound like a lot of bunk, but it still holds good. I don’t know what it will be like in the future, but this is 1910 and women are still pretty much up on a pedestal. I have the bruises to show them, the ones I got from you. There isn’t a man’s court in this country will bring in a conviction against me. Isn’t that the better way of the two, Joe? They’ll hold me for a few weeks until the trial comes up, and then it’ll be all over. We’ll be free for the rest of our lives, not have to fear any more, not have to run any more, not have to hide any more.”

“If it’s got to be that way,” he said at last, unwillingly, “then I’ll take it on. Not you. It’s up to me.”

“You wouldn’t stand a chance, Joe. A grudge between two men over a gambling-debt doesn’t create any sympathy. The check has to stay out of it. It only fouls up the issue. Here, let me have one of your matches, hurry up.”

She touched the flame to the edge of it, carried it into the bathroom, and flushed the bowl.

When she came back she said, breathing fast, but with satisfaction, not with fear, “Now it’s clear sailing all the way. Now, once past this point, every word I speak is the truth. I can’t be tripped and I can’t be tangled. That’s the beauty of it. As I’m telling it to you, my Joe, I’ll be telling it to them, the jury and the judge.”

There was a commanding knock on the door.

“There they are now,” she whispered.

“Open up. Police,” a gruff voice said.

She turned and looked at him, and smiled. There was no trepidation in the smile, none at all. Side by side, his arm tightly around her waist, they went over to the door together.

“Gee, Betts,” he murmured contritely at the last moment, “I didn’t think you had it in you. I didn’t think you had the moxie. Always so quiet, so mild. Sitting there knitting, all through the long games.”

“Any wife has it in her, when the cards fall that way,” she said softly, with infinite wisdom. “Any wife. Even a poker-player’s wife.”