My American

  The grief that fell upon her husband and daughter was dreadful, and the worst part of it was that they could not comfort each other, because they had never loved each other; and now that Edie, who loved both of them so much, had gone, they were like two strangers, suffering the same misery under the same roof, yet each quite alone.

  At first Tim did try to be kinder and more affectionate to Amy, because he knew Edie would have wanted him to, but it was no use. He never had been any good with the kid and she so got on his nerves, creeping about the place looking like a tiny old woman, that he soon gave up and relapsed into his own wretchedness. He had plenty to do keeping himself sober enough to do his day’s work without being sacked, and then getting through the evenings somehow with the help of drinks and gambling and Old Porty, and for the first few months after Edie’s death he saw very little of his daughter. Slowly, very slowly, the ghastly wound made by death began to ache less unbearably. Then boredom and restlessness fell on him like twin demons; for not only had Edie been the only person he loved, but she had made life endurable for him; while she was there he had felt there was some point in the business of living. Now she had gone, there was none. He kept his job because they would have starved if he hadn’t, and Edie wouldn’t have wanted Amy to starve, and to starve would be even more boring than to drag on in the job. But he did not care if he lived or died. Many men say as much: he meant it.

  A year after Edie’s death, they were both beginning to get used to it. Amy’s grief no longer offended her father’s sensibility quite so violently, for she had learned to keep her feelings even more to herself than was natural to her as a reserved child; and Tim was discovering how to keep the nicest possible balance between drunkenness and sobriety, being never quite sober yet showing none of the signs of being drunk and thus having the best of both worlds.

  She kept out of his way as much as she could. She had to get breakfast for them both, but he was usually out in the evenings and a good deal at week-ends with Old Porty and the rest of the boys, so it was easy for her to avoid him. He gave her thirty shillings a week for housekeeping, and thirty to Mrs. Beeding for the rent, and kept three pounds for himself. Amy did the shopping after she came home from school, and the cooking, and kept the rooms tidy, and once a month Mrs. Beeding scrubbed them over.

  It was a regular, quiet, busy life. If only she had not missed her mother so dreadfully and had not been afraid of her father, Amy would have enjoyed it; and she did manage to enjoy school and sometimes going to the cinema, pasting up her pictures and slowly filling exercise books with long exciting stories.

  Only there was no one to read them to, now. She went on reading them aloud, pretending that her mother was there listening, because often she got so interested that she forget anyone was supposed to be there, but it always ended in the same way, with her head down on her arms in an agony of tears.

  Tim knew that she wrote stories. He never asked her about them and she never spoke of them to him, but he was not so unobservant as to think his daughter a dull, stupid little thing because she was quiet; her school reports on all subjects, from Botany to Needlework, were rather surprisingly good. His attitude to her would have been the same had she been a beautiful, lively, glowing child. He did not like children; they bored him, and it was too much trouble to get to know his own. Poor monkey, was his tenderest thought of her; she doesn’t have much of a life. But she seemed content enough. He knew she fretted for her mother, of course. … Christ, so did he. There was nothing to be done about that. But she had her bits of things, and her school and that little horror Mona Beeding to run around with. It was a pity about her accent, and her thinness, but a man couldn’t be expected to hold down a job nowadays and be a dry-nurse into the bargain, and she would have to take her chance, that was all.

  CHAPTER III

  A WEEK AFTER Robert Vorst and his mother and aunt got back from Europe, the family gave a party at their home just outside Vine Falls to celebrate the return.

  The trees in front of the old white house were rosy and dark yellow, and some of the soft yet brilliant leaves lay about on the deep green grass. Sharlie Vorst, Bob’s mother, had left them there because she thought they looked pretty, and Webster Vorst, Bob’s father, did not mind them being there because that was not the kind of thing he noticed. The drive was crowded with cars. In a big room off the hall the radio was in full blast and some of the young people were dancing, and in a little closet half-hidden at the end of a passage and used as a store for overshoes and the children’s coasters, there was an improvised bar.

  At five that morning when the big frosty stars were flashing down over the red maples, the cases of liquor had come up through the dim dewy woods on the shoulders of Webster Vorst and the handyman, Myron Blodgett, and below on the road outside Carr’s gasoline station a car had driven quickly away.

  It was neither dignified nor a good example to his young sons for a man of fifty-six, owner of three newspapers founded by his grandfather and left to him by his father, to carry his own hooch at dawn through the woods. Webster Vorst knew this. He also knew that as a good citizen and a public figure in Vine Falls he should not encourage the Carrs by buying liquor made in their illicit still. They were worthless people, who had drifted in the last two years from mere shiftlessness and debt to law-breaking, and it was the duty of Webster Vorst to condemn them in the columns of The Vine Falls Inquirer, The Paul County Sentinel, and The Vinebridge Citizen and to have nothing to do with them in his private life.

  He knew this. But he did not feel it.

  Neither he nor the other respectable citizens of Vine Falls could look on the Carrs as dangerous bootleggers; they were just the Carrs, one of the oldest families in Vine Falls, whose fortunes had steadily declined, while those of the Vorsts had as steadily risen, ever since Webster’s grandfather had founded The Sentinel, The Citizen and The Inquirer way back in the eighteen-forties.

  Now the Carrs kept a gasoline and hot-dog store at the foot of the hill behind the Vorst place, and were making money by “alky-cooking” (illicit distilling). This was against the law. Everybody in Vine Falls knew it, but somehow it was not easy to take the attitude of stern, noble American citizens and hand the Carrs over to the Sheriff of the County (who would thus have lost his rake-off on the profits from the Carrs’ still) and it certainly did not occur to Vine Falls to refuse to buy the liquor the Carrs made. The sympathies of Vine Falls were secretly with the Carrs, and with the hundreds of other hijackers and alky-cookers all over America who were light-heartedly risking death from the prohibition agents’ guns so that honest red-blooded Americans might have a drink. Indeed, the whole United States, watching the battle in those golden years of the Coolidge Prosperity Era, felt itself back in the old cops-and-robbers game of its youth, and as the robbers stood for thrills and the defiance of a damfool law nobody wanted, public opinion towards the bootleggers was inclined to be indulgent.

  It would be unsporting, as well as difficult and inconvenient, to take strong action against the Carrs.

  Breaking the law was exciting, too. Respectable American business men could understand the kick the gangsters got out of it. Webster Vorst had delighted in that dawn journey through the hushed woods, the cold smell of the mist, the sudden shriek and flutter as a bird went up under his feet, making him feel eleven years old and a Redskin again! And every man who went off to a business convention with bottles of gin hidden in his grip, every woman who answered the whispered question through the speakeasy grille, felt the same excitement.

  Most of the older people and the children were in the garden behind the house, where the warm sunlight of an Indian summer afternoon made it pleasant to eat and drink on the lawn under the shady trees. It was just half-past four, and everyone asked to the party had arrived. As well as Vorsts and Viners and their relations of all ages, there were friends from Vinebridge and nearby towns with their children, and old people who could remember the passing of the prairie-schooners through Vine Falls on th
eir way to the Golden West fifty years ago; people who had seen the town’s two oldest families founded and watched Vorsts and Viners growing up and marrying each other and starting families in their turn.

  Charming faces these old people had, from which shone, as naturally as its scent floats from any woodsy bush, a dry and quiet humour. They liked to get hold of the children who were darting between the chatting groups and get them into corners, and ask them how they were getting on in school, and tartly accuse them, under a cool aged eye that was still able to quell any child living, of being “a sight too smart nowadays to come in sometime and eat one of my cookies; yes y’are, you’re real smart and grown-up, too smart for me nowadays.”

  “Bob,” said Mrs. Vorst to her younger son, who was leaning against an elm tree eating an ice. “Where’s all the rest of you … Stebby and Lou and Helen and Irene? They’re not down at Carrs’, are they?” suspiciously.

  Bob jerked his fair head towards a beautiful child in a white organdie dress who was standing round the other side of the tree and listening, with her hands behind her back, to one of the woodsy old persons.

  “Helen’s right there with Miss Cordell. She’s all right. I asked her if she would like to come with us and she said no, ’cause she was afraid she’d muss up her frock.”

  He did not look at his mother, but carefully scooped up the last bit of ice cream.

  “Where were you all going where Helen would muss up her frock?” probed his parent keenly. “You haven’t been down to Carrs’, have you?”

  He did not answer.

  “Have you, Bob?” irritably. “Are the others down there now?”

  “Oh, mother, we only went down for a minute to tell Francey she couldn’t come to the party, honest we did. ’NI came back right away to get this ice, but they just stayed down there a little while, just to kind of talk to Francey. They’ll be right back, they said so.”

  “Now, Bob, you go down there this minute and tell them to come back here right away,” she commanded, putting her thin, pretty brown hand on his shoulder and moving him unwillingly across the lawn towards the wood that marked the end of the Vorst land. “I told you this morning. I won’t have you running round with Francey and Dan any more, and here you are disobeying me already. Now, understand once and for all, Robert, you are not to go down to Carrs’ and play with Francey or talk to Dan. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, mother, but——”

  “Now just you promise.” She gave his shoulder a little shake, more like a push, and full of love, but she looked severely down into the grey eyes laughing up into her own.

  “Oh, Mom! Gee, I don’t want to. Must I?”

  “Yes, you must, and don’t say ‘gee!’ Come on, now, promise. Yes, I said ‘promise’. It’s as important as that. Come along, now. Hurry up.”

  “All right,” he said resignedly, and gabbled, “I-promise-on-my-honour-as-an-American-I-won’t-go-down-to-Carrs-or-play-with-Francey-Carr-again. Can I say ‘hullo’ to Francey and Dan if I see them on the street, Mother?”

  “Well … I suppose so. I don’t want you to be rude or unkind, but——”

  “Oh, Francey doesn’t mind what a fellow says to her. Jonas and me told her she was a cheap skate the other day. ‘Francey,’ we told her, ‘you’re a cheap skate’.”

  “Then that was very rude of you and Jonas and just what a couple of boys who were cheap skates themselves would say to a girl. Go on, now, run and tell the others to come right back.”

  She paused at the edge of the wood that went downhill, and he paused as well, looking up into her dark face and the long languid brown eyes that made the brisk matrons of Vine Falls say of her: Sharlie Vorst certainly has got that kind of elegant Southern look. Even the shortness of the white chiffon dress fluttering just below her knees and her closely-shingled dark hair could not spoil the dignity which came to her from her deep femininity and her strain of Creole blood.

  “Mother, is it because the Carrs are bootleggers you don’t want me to talk to Francey and Dan? Everybody says they are.”

  Mrs. Vorst hesitated. Then she said gravely: “Yes, it is. They’re in with a bad crowd, Dad says, a dangerous crowd——”

  “Gee!” said her son, with shining eyes.

  (“Don’t say ‘gee!’) And there’s nothing exciting or brave about them, either. They’re just …” she hesitated again—“…Rats, that’s all. I know all you children are always playing gangsters and Feds, and you think it’s mighty fine and thrilling, and Boone’s always talking about that time he saw Capone and his thugs walk into the theatre in Chicago with guns under their arms and everybody scared stiff … but you don’t understand. It isn’t thrilling at all, it’s breaking the law, and the Carrs and Capone are just rats. Remember that.” Her soft drawling voice made the words sound cool and bitter and true.

  “Yes, Mother. Gosh, wouldn’t I just like to pull in a gangster, though! Oh boy … oh boy … oh boy!” And he tore down the path into the woods, shouting over his shoulder, “I’ll be right back. You see!”

  His mother walked back to her guests, thinking about him, and about the Carrs, and remembering the excited, half-admiring note in Boone’s voice when he talked of Capone, and realizing that bootlegged liquor was at this moment being served to the young people as they danced. She was disturbed and rather apprehensive about the bar fixed up in the overshoes closet and those cases of rye coming up through the woods on her husband’s shoulder; she sometimes had a frightened feeling that the good fun of breaking a stupid law might end in something that all America would not find good fun at all. A man must have his drink, of course. Her people came from Louisiana and had the easy Southern tradition of lavish drinking. But … already bootlegging had ceased to be good fun in Chicago and Toledo and Detroit and had become a terror. And why should terror stop at three cities, when there was all America for the bootlegger to plunder?

  I wish Webster could get those Carrs run out of town, she thought, going up to old Miss Cordell and little Helen Viner.

  At twelve years old Helen was the beauty of the Vorst-Viner younger set. Old Miss Cordell used to say the child’s looks reminded her of Eva’s in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and then she would prophesy, as St. Clair’s friend does in the story, “By George, she’ll make some hearts ache, one day!” But so far Helen was neither coquettish nor vain, and her expression was even more beautiful than her face, with its pale skin and big dark blue eyes and dark red mouth. Her hair, the colour of a dead leaf, was short like that of all the other little girls that year in America, but it curled naturally and her mother had pushed it behind her tiny sensitive ears, making her look “downright old-fashioned,” as Miss Cordell had just been telling her. She had perfect manners, and an odd attractive sense of humour, and wrote poetry about the woods, but quite the most surprising fact about Helen was that all her tough young cousins loved her tenderly and never felt even a passing desire to push her face in. Bob and she were particularly fond of one another.

  Bob ran down the track through the woods until he came to a steep slope overlooking a clearing. At the far end was a shabby clapboard bungalow where hens scratched in the dust. It faced a road that ran through the woods and its walls were crowded with notices … HOT DOGS. GASOLINE. TOILETS. FREE AIR AND WATER.

  There was a rail fence all round the clearing, but in one place it was broken, and a child could climb through.

  In front of the wooden steps at the back of the bungalow three well-dressed children were standing round a fourth, a girl of thirteen with pale red hair, wearing a faded blue frock, who held up a black bottle. Bob slithered down the slope among the briars, not looking where he was going because he was watching the group in the yard.

  “Come on!” taunted Francey Carr, pulling the cork out of the bottle. She held it up again. “I dare you to!”

  Slowly, in disapproving silence, the two girls shook their heads. The boy, who was about eight, piped up:

  “I will, Francey Carr. I’ll drink it. I’m
not yellow. No, sir!”

  “Stebby Viner,” roared Bob, but without heat, “If you dare do any such thing I’ll lam you. Come on, all of you. Mother says you’re to come right home this minute.”

  Startled, the three turned round, then obediently came towards the gap in the fence where Bob was now standing, looking amiably yet a little contemptuously at the girl in the blue dress.

  “What you got there, Francey?” he inquired, giving his nine-year-old sister Lou a helping hand through the fence but not taking his eyes off Francey and her bottle.

  “Sump’n good,” nodded Francey, her face screwed up and her eyes almost lost in scornful wrinkles. “Want a drop?”

  “I guess not. Don’t want to be sick,” he said indifferently, turning away to follow Helen’s little brother Stebby.

  “Oh, you’re yellow, Bob Vorst, that’s what you are! ’Fraid cat!”

  “No, I am not, so there,” he retorted, not looking round. “Come on, all you kids, the ices have started.”

  “I’m mad at you, Bob Vorst!” Francey flew down to the fence and hung over it, showing all her little white teeth in a grin of rage. “I wouldn’t come to your lousy party now if you went down on your knees an’ asked me, I wouldn’t. We got more fun down here. Dan’s home, an’ we——”

  “Dan? Is he?” Bob turned round quickly as the four children began to climb the briar-covered slope towards the wood. “Gee, I’d like to see him! Is he round there now?”

  He started to run back towards the clearing, his face alight with excitement and pleasure, while Francey watched him, resting her chin on the black bottle, but suddenly he stopped, and turned back.

  “Where you goin’ now?” she shouted. “Come on. Dan’s inside. He’ll like to see you again.”