Chip Harrison Scores Again

Twelve

“Geraldine? There was this thing I was sort of wondering about.”

“What we talked about awhile ago? I thought you might have been thinking about it.”

“Well, I was sort of doing some heavy thinking about the business. And then this one little point got stuck in my head, and I thought I would just ask.”

“Be my guest.”

“Well, I was sort of wondering what you would do if one of the girls, if Rita or Claureen, if one of them got pregnant.”

“I’d be powerfully surprised,” she said. “Rita’s step-aunt did a knitting needle abortion on her when she was fourteen, and they had to take out some of the parts you need if you want to have a baby. And Claureen had to go to the hospital for a scraping a year and a half ago and while he was in there the doc tied off her tubes.”

“Well, Jo Lee or Marguerite, then. I mean, you know, any girl who happened to work here.”

“Just any girl.”

“That’s right.”

“Any girl at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like Lucille Lathrop, even.”

“—”

“Chip, I’m an old woman. I’ve been years in the same business and seen every kind of man there is to see, and I can tell whether a man’s getting it or not, or if he’s the kind of man who wants it or not. And I know you’re getting it, and getting it regular, and I know you like what you’re getting. And you’re not getting it here where it’s all over the place for the taking, and you’re not out catting around, so where else would you be getting it?”

“You’ve known all along?”

“Took it for granted.”

“Does anyone else—”

“Claude Tyles asked what you were doing for love, and I imagine I led him to think you were alternating between Rita and Claureen. When did you find out she was pregnant?”

“This afternoon.”

“How long gone is she?”

“Almost two months.”

“She’s sure about it?”

“She seems to be.”

“Instead of stealing rubbers from around here, you should have told me and I would have gotten pills for her. You can’t count on rubbers, don’t you know that? Well, that’s under the bridge. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry the girl? Have an abortion? What?”

“I don’t know.”

She did something odd. She put her hand on top of mine for a minute, then gave a squeeze and took her own hand back.

She said, “Chip, if she just told you today then you’re in a bad way. You sure she didn’t tell you a week ago?”

“No. Why?”

“You didn’t suspect until today?”

“Never.”

“Because you’ve been walking round in grand confusion for better than a week, and if it’s not that it’s something else, and now with this on top of it you must be in a bad way.”

“I guess I am.”

“Chip, I’m too old to get shocked or disappointed or anything but older, and I can’t even get that too much. I’m not much for questions. But you got something that you got to tell to somebody, and I guess I can do a better job of listening than most. You can just put it straight out and not stop first to think how it’ll sound.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or you can tell me to forget it and I will. I’m good at forgetting. I can forget just about anything.”

“No,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where to start.”

The words were all there waiting, and once I opened the valve they poured out. A couple of times she filled in with a question but she didn’t have to do that very often. I just went ahead and talked until there were no words left. I probably said the same thing half a dozen times in different ways. If I repeated myself, she pretended not to notice. She sat there and took it all in until I was done.

Then she went to the bar and came back with a water glass full of something. She handed it to me and I looked at it.

“Just plain corn,” she said. For a minute I thought she was referring to what I had said. “Corn whiskey,” she said. “Drink it.”

“The whole thing? It’ll kill me.”

“The state you’re in, it would take a quart before you’d feel a thing. All this’ll do is settle you some. Go ahead and drink it.”

I finished it in three gulps. It went down like fire. I guess it settled me some.

“Now I’ll tell you a story, Chip. Story about a girl like Rita or Claureen, just a down-home girl who wasn’t much and wound up going with men for money. Her pa ran off when she wasn’t more than a bit of a girl and all she ever had from him was a postcard once in a while. Maybe she built him up a little in her mind but not all that much. Then one day after she’s been hustling for a time she hears from one of her aunts that got a telegram from Norfolk. My… this girl’s father was in a fight in a waterfront bar and some sailor broke a bottle over his head and he’s in the hospital with his skull fractured.

“So this girl goes to Norfolk to see her pa, and he’s in a hospital there. She visits him but he’s in a coma, and after a week he dies without ever coming out of it. And she makes arrangements to ship the body back here to be buried next to my mother.

“Now while this girl was in Norfolk… that’s two slips so far, I suspect you could put a name to this girl if you were pressed, couldn’t you? Doesn’t matter. This girl, while she’s in Norfolk, she meets this man and one thing leads to another. This man is in naval stores in Baltimore. A good family. He wants her to marry him and come on back to Baltimore.

“And it’s like a dream to her. This man, he’s rich, and he’s a good man, and he wants her to marry him. But she thinks, Now, how can I marry up with him when I’ve got all this in my past? And what if he finds out?

“So she decides to tell him, and she tells him. And he says what does he care, because that’s something that happened in South Carolina and what does it have to do with Baltimore, and as far as he’s concerned it never happened at all, and it doesn’t bother him one bit, and if it bothers her then she’s a fool, and he knows she’s not a fool.

“And she thinks, well, it’ll bother him in the years to come. But if it ever does she never knows about it, he never once throws it back to her, as it turns out.

“So she goes to Baltimore, and they’re married, and there were all these things she was afraid of, how his family would take to her and what his friends would think, and none of the things she worries about ever come to pass. She thinks maybe she’ll meet someone from her past and it’ll ruin everything, but none of this ever happens. There are all of these things she worries about and it turns out she needn’t have worried about any of them, because none of them ever come to pass.

“And she’s an intelligent girl, Chip. She has a good mind. She always educated herself and paid some mind to how people talked, and she goes on doing this in Baltimore, and his family and friends like her. They accept her completely. Completely. They never even think he married beneath him because they get to thinking that she comes from quality people down in South Carolina.

“She’s there for three years, and in that space of time she sees that the things that worried her are nothing at all. And she has a child. A little boy.”

She stopped talking and her eyes were focused into the distance at a point somewhere over my shoulder. Whatever she was looking at was in some other room.

“And one day she said I’m not me no more. And she put a few weeks into thinking on that, and one morning she left the baby with the maid and took a taxi downtown to the railroad station. She wouldn’t look out that train window for fear she might get off at the next stop. She just sat there, this fine lady in these expensive clothes, and she stared straight ahead and didn’t see a thing.

“She never looked back, ever.

“Whether they looked for her or not she never knew. She left him a note saying she was running off with another man. She figured if you want to hurt somebody you do it quick and clean, and if you want to do one thing decent it’s to have the guts to make people hate you if it’ll be easier for them that way. Because the hate won’t reach you because you’ll be out of it, and if it’ll sear another person’s wounds…”

She was silent for a long time, but I didn’t say anything because I knew she hadn’t finished.

Then she said, “Of course, she wasn’t the same girl who went off to Norfolk three years earlier. She saw things in a way she never would have seen them before. She knew how to talk like a lady. She knew manners. But she could let them slide off and nobody knew the difference. Except for what she knew of herself.

“She was lonely, but she would have been that anywhere. She was where she deep-down belonged, whether it was better or worse for her to belong there. She never regretted it. She would be sad sometimes, and she would wonder what happened to that man in Baltimore, and to that baby…”

In another voice she said, “Somewhere along the way it gets determined just what a person is, and for the rest of his life he’s stuck with it. Whoever else he may try to be is just play-acting. I guess you know you’ll have to go, Chip.”

“I know.”

“I guess you knew it all along.”

“I guess I did.”

“Once you got to do something, there’s nothing but to do it. Tonight is better than tomorrow. You’ll take my car.”

“I can’t—”

“It’s no use to me. I haven’t driven it myself in ten years. It’s almost as old as you are. I don’t guess it has as many miles on it, though. You can drive, can’t you?”

“I have a license. I’ve used the Reverend’s car a couple of times on errands.”

‘This has a stick shift. You know how to work it?”

“In a sort of academic way.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. I’ll make the registration over to you. Oh, now, it’s not so much. A 1954 Cadillac, what would I get selling it? Not even an antique yet. That star of yours will guarantee against a ticket anywhere in the state, and by then you’ll be comfortable driving it. I let the girls use it. It runs all right. It’s still a Cadillac. Always will be, old as it gets.”

I said, “Lucille.”

“You want to take her along?”

“I don’t know.”

“She would go.”

“I know. I keep feeling I ought to take her.”

“You could take her with you. But she’d never really be with you. No more than you could stay here. Listen to me. You can hurt her now quickly or spend fifty years killing her by halves. Because whether you stay here or take her with you one thing is sure, and that’s that she will never complete you. And you would never tell her that but she would always know, and never know why.”

I swallowed.

“The Sheriff will get a report and he’ll tell her about it. You had an accident on a road out of town. You were driving my car, and you were in a wreck and were killed, and the body was shipped north for burial with your parents.”

“The Sheriff—”

“Claude will tell her that. He’ll get that report.”

“How?”

“From me.”

“Oh.”

“Claude Tyles knows all a man has to know about who you have to be whether you want to or not. Sometimes what you have to do is stay. Not in a place, necessarily, but with a person. He had to, and he did, and he knows. For my part, I’ll see she gets the baby taken care of. Whichever she wants, having it and then getting shut of it or just getting shut of it. If she’s even pregnant in the first place, which we’re none of us sure of. Chip?”

“What?”

“You can feel as guilty as you want to, but all it is is foolishness. What the two of you had was good for the two of you. Nobody can ask more than that. It’s no kindness to take something good and keep it going when it’s no good no more. She had a beautiful young romance and her lover died. Why, you’ll be more in her memory than you ever could have been in her life.”

She gave me a couple old suitcases of hers. I packed everything and put the suitcases in the trunk. I went back to say goodbye to her and she looked as though she wished I hadn’t.

“You send me a card from time to time. Just so I’ll have an idea of where you’re at. No need to sign it or the snoops at the Post Office’ll have something to talk about. I don’t get that much mail,” she said. “I guess I’ll know who it’s from.”