The Collected Stories

  “You know something, Warren? Everything I ever wanted was taken away from me. All my life. When I was eleven I wanted a bicycle more than anything in the world, and my father finally bought me one. Oh, it was only secondhand and cheap, but I loved it. And then that same summer he got mad and wanted to punish me for something—I can’t even remember what—and he took it away. I never saw it again.”

  “Yeah, well, that must’ve felt bad,” Warren said, but then he tried to steer the talk along less sentimental lines. “What kind of work does your father do?”

  “Oh, he’s a pen-pusher. For the gas works. We don’t get along at all, and I don’t get along with my mother either. I never go home. No, but it’s true what I said: everything I ever wanted was—you know— taken away from me.” She paused there, as if to bring her stage voice back under control, and when she began to speak again, with greater confidence, it was in the low, hushed tones appropriate for an intimate audience of one.

  “Warren? Would you like to hear about Adrian? Laura’s father? Because I’d really like to tell you, if you’re interested.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, Adrian’s an American Army officer. A young major. Or maybe he’s a lieutenant colonel by now, wherever he is. I don’t even know where he is, and the funny part is I don’t care. I really don’t care at all anymore. But Adrian and I had a wonderful time until I told him I was pregnant; then he froze up. He just froze up. Oh, I suppose I didn’t really think he’d ask me to marry him or anything—he had this rich society girl waiting for him back in the States; I knew that. But he got very cold and he told me to get an abortion, and I said no. I said, ‘I’m going to have this baby, Adrian.’ And he said, ‘All right.’ He said, ‘All right, but you’re on your own, Christine. You’ll have to raise this child any way you can.’ That was when I decided to go and see his commanding officer.”

  “His commanding officer?”

  “Well, somebody had to help,” she said. “Somebody had to make him see his responsibility. And God, I’ll never forget that day. The regimental commander was this very dignified man named Colonel Masters, and he just sat there behind his desk and looked at me and listened, and he nodded a few times. Adrian was there with me, not saying a word; there were just the three of us in the office. And in the end Colonel Masters said, ‘Well, Miss Phillips, as far as I can see it comes down to this. You made a mistake. You made a mistake, and you’ll have to live with it.’”

  “Yeah,” Warren said uneasily. “Yeah, well, that must’ve been—”

  But he didn’t have to finish that sentence, or to say anything else that might let her know he hadn’t believed a word of the story, because she was crying. She had drawn up her knees and laid the side of her rumpled head on them as the sobs began; then she set her empty glass carefully on the floor, slid back into bed, and turned away from him, crying and crying.

  “Hey, come on,” he said. “Come on, baby, don’t cry.” And there was nothing to do but turn her around and take her in his arms until she was still.

  After a long time she said, “Is there any more gin?”

  “Some.”

  “Well, listen, let’s finish it, okay? Grace won’t mind, or if she wants me to pay her for it, I’ll pay her for it.”

  In the morning, with her face so swollen from emotion and sleep that she tried to hide it with her fingers, she said, “Jesus. I guess I got pretty drunk last night.”

  “That’s okay; we both drank a lot.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said in the impatient, almost defiant way of people accustomed to making frequent apologies. “I’m sorry.” She had taken care of the baby and was walking unsteadily around the little room in a drab green bathrobe. “Anyway, listen. Will you come back, Warren?”

  “Sure. I’ll call you, okay?”

  “No, there’s no telephone here. But will you come back soon?” She followed him out to the front door, where he turned to see the limpid appeal in her eyes. “If you come in the daytime,” she said, “I’ll always be home.”

  For a few days, idling at his desk or wandering the streets and the park in the first real spring weather of the year, Warren found it impossible to keep his mind on anything but Christine. Nothing like this could ever have been expected to happen in his life: a young Scotch prostitute in love with him. With a high, fine confidence that wasn’t at all characteristic of him, he had begun to see himself as a rare and privileged adventurer of the heart. Memories of Christine in his arms whispering, “Oh, I love you,” made him smile like a fool in the sunshine, and at other moments he found a different, subtler pleasure in considering all the pathetic things about her—the humorless ignorance, the cheap, drooping underwear, the drunken crying. Even her story of “Adrian” (a name almost certainly lifted from a women’s magazine) was easy to forgive—or would be, once he’d found some wise and gentle way of letting her know he knew it wasn’t true. He might eventually have to find a way of telling her he hadn’t really meant to say he loved her too, but all that could wait. There was no hurry, and the season was spring.

  “Know what I like most about you, Warren?” she asked very late in their third or fourth night together. “Know what I really love about you? It’s that I feel I can trust you. All my life, that’s all I ever wanted: somebody to trust. And you see I keep making mistakes and making mistakes because I trust people who turn out to be—”

  “Shh, shh,” he said, “it’s okay, baby. Let’s just sleep now.”

  “Well, but wait a second. Listen a minute, okay? Because I really do want to tell you something, Warren. I knew this boy Jack. He kept saying he wanted to marry me and everything, but this was the trouble: Jack’s a gambler. He’ll always be a gambler. And I suppose you can guess what that meant.”

  “What’d it mean?”

  “It meant money, that’s what it meant. Staking him, covering his losses, helping him get through the month until payday—ah, Christ, it makes me sick just to think of all that now. For almost a year. And do you know how much of it I ever got back? Well, you won’t believe this, but I’ll tell you. Or no, wait—I’ll show you. Wait a second.”

  She got up and stumbled and switched on the ceiling light in an explosion of brilliance that startled the baby, who whimpered in her sleep. “It’s okay, Laura,” Christine said softly as she rummaged in the top drawer of her dresser; then she found what she was looking for and brought it back to the bed. “Here,” she said. “Look. Read this.”

  It was a single sheet of cheap ruled paper torn from a tablet of the kind meant for schoolchildren, and it bore no date.

  Dear Miss Phillips:

  Enclosed is the sum of two pounds ten shillings. This is all I can afford now and there will be no more as I am being shipped back to the U.S. next week for discharge and separation from the service.

  My Commanding Officer says you telephoned him four times last month and three times this month and this must stop as he is a busy man and can not be bothered with calls of this kind. Do not call him again, or the 1st Sgt. either, or anyone else in this organization.

  Pfc. John F. Curtis

  “Isn’t that the damnedest thing?” Christine said. “I mean really, Warren, isn’t that the goddamnedest thing?”

  “Sure is.” And he read it over again. It was the sentence beginning “My Commanding Officer” that seemed to give it all away, demolishing “Adrian” at a glance and leaving little doubt in Warren’s mind that John F. Curtis had fathered her child.

  “Could you turn the light off now, Christine?” he said, handing the letter back to her.

  “Sure, honey. I just wanted you to see that.” And she had undoubtedly wanted to see if he’d be dumb enough to swallow the story too.

  When the room was dark again and she lay curled against his back, he silently prepared a quiet, reasonable speech. He would say, Baby, don’t get mad, but listen. You mustn’t try to put these stories over on me anymore. I didn’t believe the one about Adrian and I don’t believe Jack
the Gambler either, so how about cutting this stuff out? Wouldn’t it be better if we could sort of try to tell each other the truth?

  What stopped his mouth, on thinking it over, was that to say all that would humiliate her into wrath. She’d be out of bed and shouting in an instant, reviling him in the ugliest language of her trade until long after the baby woke up crying, and then there would be nothing but wreckage.

  There might still be an appropriate moment for inquiring into her truthfulness—there would have to be, and soon—but whether it made him feel cowardly or not he had to acknowledge, as he lay facing the wall with her sweet arm around his ribs, that this wasn’t the time.

  A few nights later, at home, he answered the phone and was startled to hear her voice: “Hi, honey.”

  “Christine? Well, hi, but how’d you—how’d you get this number?”

  “You gave it to me. Don’t you remember? You wrote it down.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, smiling foolishly into the mouthpiece, but this was alarming. The phone here in the basement flat was only an extension of Judith’s phone upstairs. They rang simultaneously, and when Judith was home she always picked up her receiver on the first or second ring.

  “So listen,” Christine was saying. “Can you come over Thursday instead of Friday? Because it’s Jane’s birthday and we’re having a party. She’ll be nine. . . .”

  After he’d hung up he sat hunched for a long time in the attitude of a man turning over grave and secret questions in his mind. How could he have been dumb enough to give her Judith’s number? And soon he remembered something else, a second dumb thing that brought him to his feet for an intense, dramatic pacing of the floor: she knew his address too. Once in the pub he had run out of cash and been unable to pay for all the beer, so he’d given Christine a check to cover it.

  “Most customers find it’s a convenience to have their street addresses printed beneath their names on each check,” an assistant bank manager had explained when Warren and Carol opened their checking account last year. “Shall I order them that way for you?”

  “Sure, I guess so,” Carol had said. “Why not?”

  He was almost all the way to the Arnolds’ house on Thursday before he realized he’d forgotten to buy a present for Jane. But he found a sweetshop and kept telling the girl at the counter to scoop more and more assorted hard candies into a paper bag until he had a heavy bundle of the stuff that he could only hope might be of passing interest to a nine-year-old.

  And whether it was or not, Jane’s party turned out to be a profound success. There were children all over that bright, ramshackle apartment, and when the time came for them to be seated at the table—three tables shoved together—Warren stood back smiling and watching with his arm around Christine, thinking of that other party at The Peter Pan Club. Alfred came home from work with a giant stuffed panda bear that he pressed into Jane’s arms, laughing and then crouching to receive her long and heartfelt hug. But soon Jane was obliged to bring her delirium under control because the cake was set before her. She frowned, closed her eyes, made a wish and blew out all nine candles in a single heroic breath as the room erupted into full-throated cheers.

  There was plenty to drink for the grown-ups after that, even before the last of the party guests had gone home and all the Arnold children were in bed. Christine left the room to put her baby down for the night, carrying a drink along with her. Grace had begun fixing supper with apparent reluctance, and when Alfred excused himself to have a bit of a rest she turned the gas burners down very low and abandoned the stove to join him.

  That left Warren alone with Amy, who stood meticulously applying her makeup at the oval mirror above the mantelpiece. She was really a lot better looking than Christine, he decided as he sat on the sofa with a drink in his hand, watching her. She was tall and long-legged and flawlessly graceful, with a firm slender ass that made you ache to clasp it and with plump, pointed little breasts. Her dark hair hung to her shoulder blades, and this evening she had chosen to wear a narrow black skirt with a peach-colored blouse. She was a proud and lovely girl, and he didn’t want to think about the total stranger who would have her for money at the end of the night.

  Amy had finished with her eyes and begun to work on her mouth, drawing the lipstick slowly along the yielding shape of each full lip until it glistened like marzipan, then pouting so that one lip could caress and rub the other, then parting them to inspect her perfect young teeth for possible traces of red. When she was finished, when she’d put all her implements back into a little plastic case and snapped it shut, she continued to stand at the mirror for what seemed at least half a minute, doing nothing, and that was when Warren realized she knew he’d been staring at her in all this privacy and silence, all this time. At last she turned around in such a quick, high-shouldered way, and with such a look of bravery conquering fear, that it was as if he might be halfway across the floor to make a grab for her.

  “You look very nice, Amy,” he said from the sofa.

  Her shoulders slackened then and she let out a breath of relief, but she didn’t smile. “Jesus,” she said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  When she’d put on her coat and left the house, Christine came back into the room with the languorous, self-indulgent air of a girl who has found a good reason for staying home from work.

  “Move over,” she said, and sat close beside him. “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, okay. You?”

  “Okay.” She hesitated then, as if constrained by the difficulty of making small talk. “Seen any good movies?”

  “No.”

  She took his hand and held it in both of her own. “You miss me?”

  “I sure did.”

  “The hell you did.” And she flung down his hand as if it were something vile. “I went around to your place the other night, to surprise you, and I saw you going in there with a girl.”

  “No you didn’t,” he told her. “Come on, Christine, you know you didn’t do that at all. Why do you always want to tell me these—”

  Her eyes narrowed in menace and her lips went flat. “You calling me a liar?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “don’t be like that. Why do you want to be like that? Let’s just drop it, okay?”

  She seemed to be thinking it over. “Okay,” she said. “Look: It was dark and I was across the street; I could’ve had the wrong house; it could’ve been somebody else I saw with the girl, so okay, we’ll drop it. But I want to tell you something: don’t ever call me a liar, Warren. I’m warning you. Because I swear to God”—and she pointed emphatically toward her bedroom—“I swear on that baby’s life I’m not a liar.”

  “Ah, look at the lovebirds,” Grace Arnold called, appearing in the doorway with her arm around her husband. “Well, you’re not making me jealous. Me and Alfred are lovebirds too, aren’t we, love? Married all these years and still lovebirds.”

  There was supper then, much of it consisting of partly burned beans, and Grace held forth at length on the unforgettable night when she and Alfred had first met. There’d been a party; Alfred had come alone, all shy and strange and still wearing his army uniform, and from the moment Grace spotted him across the room she’d thought, Oh, him. Oh, yes, he’s the one. They had danced for a while to some phonograph records, though Alfred wasn’t much of a dancer; then they’d gone outside and sat together on a low stone wall and talked. Just talked.

  “What’d we talk about, Alfred?” she asked, as if trying in vain to remember.

  “Oh, I don’t know, love,” he said, pink with pleasure and embarrassment as he pushed his fork around in his beans. “Don’t suppose it could’ve been much.”

  And Grace turned back to address her other listeners in a lowered, intimate voice. “We talked about—well, about everything and nothing,” she said. “You know how that can be? It was like we both knew—you know?—like we both knew we were made for each other.” This last statement seemed a little sentimental even for Grace’s t
aste, and she broke off with a laugh. “Oh, and the funny part,” she said, laughing, “the funny part was, these friends of mine left the party a little after we did because they were going to the pictures? So they went up to the pictures and stayed for the whole show, then they went round to the pub afterwards and stayed there till closing time, and it was practically morning when they came back down that same road and found me and Alfred still sitting on the wall, still talking. Ah, God, they still tease me about that, my friends do when I see them, even now. They say ‘Whatever were you two talking about, Grace?’ And I just laugh. I say, ‘Oh, never mind. We were talking, that’s all.’”

  A respectful hush fell around the table.

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” Christine asked quietly. “Isn’t it wonderful when two people can just—find each other that way?”

  And Warren said it certainly was.

  Later that night, when he and Christine sat naked on the edge of her bed to drink, she said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, anyway: I wouldn’t half mind having Grace’s life. The part of it that came after she met Alfred, I mean; not the part before.” And after a pause she said, said, “I don’t suppose you’d ever guess it, from the way she acts now—I don’t suppose you’d ever guess she was a Piccadilly girl herself.”

  “Was she?”

  “Ha, ‘was she.’ You better bet she was. For years, back during the war. Got into it because she didn’t know any better, like all the rest of us; then she had Jane and didn’t know how to get out.” And Christine gave him a little glancing smile with a wink in it. “Nobody knows where Jane came from.”