“You take a fellow like that now . . . hell, of what is he thinking? He is thinking of what I just said. You Wescott, have sold him a lot, on which he is going to build a house, a little home, or you have sold him a house already built.
“So he is thinking of where, and how, he will have to change the house. You know how it is, Wescott, a new coat of paint, new wallpaper in the living room, eh. He may have to put in a new bathroom. There is one, but he wants two. He likes to sit in the morning having his morning cigarette and reading his morning paper. At my house every morning I demand a cup of coffee. I take it in there. I read the paper. I light a cigarette. I sip my coffee. The cup of coffee is perched on the edge of the bath tub. Mine has a flat edge.
“You do not take the saucer in there. You spill a little coffee in the saucer and what have you? When you take a sip, after a puff of your cigarette, it drips down on you. The coffee sets you up for the day. I have the maid get up early at my house and bring it to me. Sometimes my wife calls to me.
“‘Well, A. P., are you going to stay all day? It is much better to have two bathrooms.”
A. P. paused.
“And so,” he said, “such a man comes to you, a man who is going to build a home. His mind is full of things, such as I have described. But with me now. . . . The two were interrupted by the two burlesque women who had come back along the hallway from the bar. One of the women again put her head in at the door of the room. To John Wescott there was something a little odd, and even thrilling, that two men, such as himself and A. P. had got into that sort of bar in that part of the town. It was a kind of adventure that, when his wife was alive, he wouldn’t have dared tell her about. There had never been many things he could tell his wife. He had got into a little habit. He imagined a kind of warm intimacy existing between himself and his wife that never had been a reality. As he seldom conversed with her he imagined conversations. He was doing it as he sat in the room with A. P.
“I must tell you about it, my dear,” he imagined himself saying, not to his wife, now dead, but to an imagined wife, he had himself now created.
“You see we were in there, my dear, having a drink, A. P. and myself, and this woman kept putting her head in at the door. She was all painted. To tell you the truth, my dear, she looked to me like a regular huzzy.”
“Huzzy” was a word that John Wescott would never have thought of using in a conversation with his wife Clara. It was, however, he imagined, the sort of thing A. P. might have been able to do. A. P. was the kind of man you couldn’t upset.
“Hello, baby,” he now said to the woman who had put her head in at the door. A. P. was like that, quick on the trigger. The woman laughed and went on her way.
A. P. continued his talk.
“Now, with me,” he said, “when it comes to one of my clients. . . .”
He hesitated. He lit a cigar. He seemed lost in thought. There was a look of something like sadness on his face.
“Often,” he said, “I begin thinking, I began life as a poor boy . . . I was a farm boy and then I was a clerk in a small store in a small town.
“I came away from there. I came here to the city.”
A. P. began relating to John Wescott his early experiences in the city. He had, he said, traveled a rough road. He was a big man, now grown fat and soft, but John Wescott could see that he had once been strong. He had been a common laborer, a soldier, a traveling salesman. He began writing advertisements for a firm he was with, doing it at first for fun, but right away it developed that he had a talent.
“It was a thing,” he said, “he never even suspected in himself.” Sometimes he regretted that he had not become a writer. In the advertising business he had gone straight up but, sometimes, when he was a little tired, or when one of his clients, now that he was at the head of a big advertising agency, became what he might call a little ugly or disagreeable, he often wished . . . he broke off again.
“I might have become a writer or a newspaper reporter, or, better yet, I might have stayed at home. I might have been just a farmer . . . you know, Wescott, tilling my own field, milking my own cows, hoeing my own corn, watching the wind, on a June morning, as it played in my ripe wheat.
“You have seen the wind, on a June morning playing in the ripe wheat, haven’t you, Wescott?”
John Wescott said he had.
“A free man,” said A. P. Again he began to throw words about and John Wescott was filled with admiration.
“So you see,” he said, “I am on my own land. It is not a big farm. It is a small one.
“There is a creek running through my farm,” he said. “At night I lie in my bed. I can hear the purling of the creek. I am tired, from honest labor in my own fields, and I am lying with my wife. She is a sturdy country girl, the daughter of a neighbor. I am a man who makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before.
“So, you see, Wescott, I am lying there. I am an honest man. I am upright. I reach out my hand and touch the body of my wife. I have the right, as you will understand, Wescott, to think of myself as one of God’s true men, one of God’s real men. There is my wife, lying now quietly asleep beside me in the bed and she is mine as the earth is mine.”
It was evident that A. P. was deeply touched by his own words. He became silent and sat fingering his drink. He and John Wescott were having an “old fashioned.” John Wescott was so touched that he felt like crying.
“It is so beautiful to hear him talk,” he thought.
He had often tried to say something of the kind to his wife when she was alive. He began speaking to her in his half-frightened, stuttering way.
“I was out again with A. P.”
He did not tell his wife of the drinking the two men did.
“When I go out with him there is always something said that I remember. He talks so beautifully.”
He thought sometimes that A. P.’s talk gave him at least a hint of what he wanted for his two sons, that they be, at least in ability to express themselves, like A. P., not like himself. It was A. P. who had given him an inkling of what his wife had meant when she spoke of culture, and sometimes, when he was speaking of his friend to his wife, she questioned him.
“Well, what is it he says? You say he has these wonderful ideas, that he says these wonderful things. What are they?”
It had been a kind of tragedy in John Wescott’s life that he had been unable to tell her.
“It is because I am so dumb. It is because I have no ability in words, no education, that I cannot make her understand how marvelous he sometimes is.”
It was the source of never-ending wonder that A. P. kept on wanting to have him as friend. In the little room at the back of the saloon A. P. got up from the table and put his head out at the door. He called to the bartender.
“Hey,” he called, “two more of the same.”
When the two drinks had come he began talking again. He spoke now of the clients of his advertising agency. They were for the most part, he explained, manufacturers.
Or there might be a patent medicine man. He came from some city, perhaps in the middle west.
“Let’s say Freeport, Illinois,” he said.
Such a fellow came into his office. A. P. began to expand again.
“It is in the early morning. These fellows always get up early. Perhaps he has come in on the night train.”
John Wescott felt a little guilty. He was himself a man, likely to get out of bed at six o’clock in the morning. When his wife was alive she stayed in her bed until ten. He got out of bed and walked about the garden surrounding his house. He sprinkled his lawn. He had always had a secret notion that people who could sleep until ten or eleven o’clock were sophisticated people. A. P. was explaining the relationship he had with his clients.
“So there the fellow is,” he said. “He is in the office early, sometimes even before the stenographers have come. Later he talks things over with the boys and then, of course, he wants to see and talk to the head of the house.
There are advertisements that have been gone over and o.k.’d. When all is done, I say to him . . . it is necessary, you see . . . what about dinner with me?
“And well enough I know what it means,” said A. P. He sighed softly.
He went on with his explanation.
“We go out,” he said. “Let us say that the man is from Columbus, Ohio. He is, we’ll say, more or less, you understand, a big man out there.”
“I understand,” said John Wescott.
He wasn’t at all sure that he did understand as yet, just what A. P. was driving at.
“At home he is what he is. He goes regularly to church. He is a man with a wife and children. It may be that he sings in the choir in his church. Let us say that he manufactures and sells a cure for rheumatism. It is an ointment that you rub on. It is going all right.
“At home, you see, day after day it is the same.
“You see, Wescott, I know how he feels. In his office he has a lot of stenographers, young things you understand, some pretty good-lookers. We will say that his wife is getting a little fat.” A. P. was fingering his drink. He was in the act of creating an imaginary figure. He was pleased with himself.
“You understand, Wescott, that a man like that, no matter what thoughts may sometimes be in his mind, has to be careful. He is well-known in Columbus. He is a good business man and a good business man does not get gay with the help in his office.
“And now you see he is in Chicago. He is unknown here. He is dining with me. We go to a place where there are girls, to a cabaret. We have a few drinks and, with our dinner, a bottle of wine.
“He is feeling safe. He is excited. I know what he wants. Let’s say that the girls, in the cabaret, when they sing, come down and walk among the tables. I’ll tell you what, Wescott . . . you take one of that kind . . . she knows her biz.
“She can pick them out. You understand, she doesn’t get gay with me. ‘Hello, Columbus,’ she says to him. To tell the truth I have sent a note by a waiter. She sings to him. It may be that she leans over close. Her breath is on his cheek. ‘Ain’t it rotten I have to work,’ she says to him. Very likely she whispers something like that in his ear, giving him the impression, you see, that her heart, in a way of speaking, has been pierced by the arrow of love, that she would like to chuck her job and go with him. I’ll tell you what by this time” (A. P. winked at John Wescott).
“Boy, I’ll say he is pretty hot.”
The expression on A. P.’s face had changed. A shadow seemed to pass over his face.
“So,” he said, “I take him to a show, a musical show.”
A. P. leaned forward and lowered his voice.
“You can’t come right out with a fellow like that,” he explained. “What you say to him is that you know a couple of girls.
“But first, after the show you go and have a few more drinks. You make him feel, you understand, that whatever happens, it is o.k. with you.
“You have told him about the girls so you go and call one of them up. You tell him ‘they are something special.’ So you give him the guff. They have an apartment out south, not so far from the University. You tell him that they are university students.”
A. P. sighed.
“Well, there you are, Wescott. Of course, by this time, I am myself a little high. I want to make him feel it is all right. I’ll tell you, Wescott, there is something, however, I have never done.”
There was a look of sadness and resignation in the presence of fate, on A. P.’s face.
“Anyway, Wescott, no matter how far I may have gone with one of them, you understand, when I am a little drunk, I have never kissed one of them on the lips,” he said.
* * *
A. P. had finished his tale. To John Wescott it was a revelation. For the moment he was rather ashamed of the comparative purity of his own life. He felt he ought to say something, tell some story of his own adventure. He began to tell A. P. about his relations with his own wife.
“I have never,” he said hesitatingly, “that is to say, you understand, with any one but my wife.”
He hung his head. He did not look at A. P.
“It may be that I haven’t the nerve.”
He plunged rather desperately into the story of how his own marriage had come about.
“You see, A. P., there I was.”
He told how he had begun working in the real estate office of his father-in-law and how his employer’s daughter sometimes came in. He did not look at A. P. as he told his tale. It was, he felt, after all, something a little not so nice, to speak thus, to another man, of the woman he had married. He explained how when she came into the office, and he was alone in there, he got up out of his chair and they shook hands. And then, one evening . . . he said that it had been a thing, at the moment very difficult for him to believe . . . it had seemed to him that, for just a moment, her hand had clung to his.
John Wescott hesitated in telling his story. He began to stammer. There was a drink set on the table before him and he swallowed it nervously.
There was a certain evening in the fall of the year. He had been working a little late in the office and it was growing dark. He had got up from his desk and was about to go home to his room when she came in.
“She said she was looking for her father but he had been gone for two hours.”
“We went together down the elevator and into the street.”
He explained to A. P. that he had wanted to ask her to have dinner with him at some restaurant but he didn’t dare. “I can’t express myself like you can, A. P., I have always wished that I could.” He had walked along with her that evening, this in the Chicago Loop, and they got over into Michigan Boulevard. There were all sorts of people walking along in the street, some of them well-dressed men and women, very evidently strolling about in the warm summer evening, and others were hurrying to the Illinois Central suburban train. To get to her home the woman he was with also had to take the Illinois Central but, he told A. P., when he was so frightened that he could barely speak, she had got suddenly almost bold. There was a little park over beyond the railroad tracks, to be reached by an overhead bridge and she had proposed that they go there and stand by the lake.
They did go. He tried to tell A. P. about it all.
“It was better out there,” he said. Pretty soon darkness came. As he talked he grew more like A. P. Words came to him more freely. He said that the waves were beating against some piling. “I don’t know why it was, but just looking at the waves, made me feel a little bolder,” he explained.
“I had never in my life kissed any woman but my mother,” he said. It was an explanation forced out of him. He told A. P. that he had been reared in a family where they never did kiss very much. “I never saw my father kiss my mother,” he said.
He spoke a little of his father and mother, telling A. P. that his mother had died when he was little more than a kid and that he had been raised by an uncle, a man who kept a small retail grocery store on a street over on the west side of Chicago.
“I was out there in the dark with her,” he explained, to A. P. “I never did know how it all happened. Suddenly I found myself holding her hand.
“And then we kissed and I asked her to be my wife.” His voice dropped to a half whisper.
“You wouldn’t marry me,” I found myself saying to her, and when she said she would, I was overcome.
“I just couldn’t speak. I couldn’t believe it.”
He said that, after a time . . . he didn’t know how long he stayed out there with her that evening . . . they came out of the little park and were again in the street. They were once more on Michigan Boulevard and he told A. P. that the streets were full of cars. People were going to the theatre, he thought.
“Of course,” he said, “there were, at that time, carriages too.”
He had got his eye fixed on a certain car. He told A. P. that it was standing near the curb and that it was, he thought that night, the grandest, the most beautiful car he had e
ver seen.
“It was so shiny and nice, and, oh the upholstery,” he said.
He said there was a man sitting in the car. He was trying to tell A. P. of how he had felt.
“I don’t know how to tell you how I felt. I haven’t your gift of words. I have always been so dumb. It was as though, as if that man . . . as if he had suddenly got out of the car and walked over to me . . . is if he had said, ‘Do you want this car? You can have it. Take it away.’
“As if . . . just like that . . . he had given it to me. I felt like that about her saying she would be my wife.”
John Wescott stopped talking and there was an embarrassing silence between the two men. It was A. P. who finally broke it. He got up from his chair and went and put his head out at the door. He called to the bartender.
“Hey,” he called. “Come on, a little service here. Give us two more of the same.”
White Spot
* * *
I AM quite sure that some of the women I had during this period never became real to me. I do not remember the names. They exist for me as a kind of fragrance as Ruth, Prudence, Genevieve, Holly, etc., etc. There was the very brutal looking very sensual woman seen one night in a low dive in Chicago. I would have been with certain business men on a spree. The business men were better when drunk. The shrewdness was gone. They became sometimes terrible, sometimes rather sweet children.
For example there was Albert, short, fat, baby faced. He was the president of a certain manufacturing concern for which I wrote advertisements. We got drunk together.
He had a wife who was rather literary and already I had published a few stories. Albert had bragged to her about me and once he took me to his house, in an Illinois town, to dine.
She would have talked only of books, as such women do talk. They can never by any chance be right about anything in the world of the arts. Better if they would keep still. They never do.
Albert being much pleased. “The little wife. You see, Sherwood, in our house also we have a highbrow.” He was proud of her, wanted to be loyal. As woman, in bed with her man, she wouldn’t have been much.