When Joe left the house to look around and find a flop, he was walking on air. He hadn’t planned to get married that soon but what the hell, a man had to have a girl of his own. He began doping out what he’d write Janey about it, but he decided she wouldn’t like it and that he’d better not write. He wished Janey wasn’t getting so kind of uppish, but after all she was making a big success of business. When he was skipper of his own ship she’d think it was all great.
Joe was two months ashore that time. He went to shore school every day, lived at the Y.M.C.A. and didn’t take a drink or shoot pool or anything. The pay he had saved up from the two trips on the North Star was just about enough to swing it. Every week or so he went over to Newport News to talk it over with old Cap’n Perry who told him what kind of questions the examining board would ask him and what kind of papers he’d need. Joe was pretty worried about his original A.B. certificate, but he had another now and recommendations from captains of ships he’d been on. What the hell, he’d been at sea four years, it was about time he knew a little about running a ship. He almost worried himself sick over the examination, but when he was actually there standing before the old birds on the board it wasn’t as bad as he thought it ud be. When he actually got the third mate’s license and showed it to Del, they were both of them pretty tickled.
Joe bought his uniform when he got an advance of pay. From then on he was busy all day doing odd jobs round the drydock for old Cap’n Perry who hadn’t gotten a crew together yet. Then in the evenings he worked painting up the little bedroom, kitchenette and bath he’d rented for him and Del to live in when he was ashore. Del’s folks insisted on having a church wedding and Will Stirp, who was making fifteen dollars a day in a shipyard in Baltimore, came down to be best man.
Joe felt awful silly at the wedding and Will Stirp had gotten hold of some whiskey and had a breath like a distillery wagon and a couple of the other boys were drunk and that made Del and her folks awful sore and Del looked like she wanted to crown him all through the service. When it was over Joe found he’d wilted his collar and Del’s old man began pulling a lot of jokes and her sisters giggled so much in their white organdy dresses, he could have choked ’em. They went back to the Matthews’ house and everybody was awful stiff except Will Stirp and his friends who brought in a bottle of whiskey and got old man Matthews cockeyed. Mrs. Matthews ran ’em all out of the house and all the old cats from the Ladies Aid rolled their eyes up and said, “Could you imagine it?” And Joe and Del left in a taxicab a feller he knew drove and everybody threw rice at them and Joe found he had a sign reading Newlywed pinned on the tail of his coat and Del cried and cried and when they got to their apartment Del locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t answer when he called and he was afraid she’d fainted.
Joe took off his new blue serge coat and his collar and necktie and walked up and down not knowing what to do. It was six o’clock in the evening. He had to be aboard ship at midnight because they were sailing for France as soon as it was day. He didn’t know what to do. He thought maybe she’d want something to eat so he cooked up some bacon and eggs on the stove. By the time everything was cold and Joe was walking up and down cussing under his breath, Del came out of the bathroom looking all fresh and pink like nothing had happened. She said she couldn’t eat anything but let’s go to a movie . . .“But, honeybug,” said Joe, “I’ve got to pull out at twelve.” She began to cry again and he flushed and felt awful fussed. She snuggled up to him and said, “We won’t stay for the feature. We’ll come back in time.” He grabbed her and started hugging her but she held him off firmly and said, “Later.”
Joe couldn’t look at the picture. When they got back to the apartment it was ten o’clock. She let him pull off her clothes but she jumped into bed and wrapped the bedclothes around her and whimpered that she was afraid of having a baby, that he must wait till she found out what to do to keep from having a baby. All she let him do was rub up against her through the bedclothes and then suddenly it was ten of twelve and he had to jump into his clothes and run down to the wharf. An old colored man rowed him out to where his ship lay at anchor. It was a sweetsmelling spring night without any moon. He heard honking overhead and tried to squint up his eyes to see the birds passing against the pale stars. “Them’s geese, boss,” said the old colored man in a soft voice. When he climbed onboard everybody started kidding him and declared he looked all wore out. Joe didn’t know what to say so he talked big and kidded back and lied like a fish.
Newsreel XXI
Goodby Broadway
Hello France
We’re ten million strong
8 YEAR OLD BOY SHOT BY LAD WITH RIFLE
the police have already notified us that any entertainment in Paris must be brief and quietly conducted and not in public view and that we have already had more dances than we ought
capitalization grown 104% while business expands 520%
HAWAIIAN SUGAR CONTROL LOST BY GERMANS
efforts of the Bolshevik Government to discuss the withdrawal of the U.S. and allied forces from Russia through negotiation for an armistice are attracting no serious attention
BRISTISH AIRMAN FIGHTS SIXTY FOES
SERBIANS ADVANCE 10 MILES; TAKE 10 TOWNS;
MENACE PRILEP
Good morning
Mr. Zip Zip Zip
You’re surely looking fine
Good morning
Mr. Zip Zip Zip
With your hair cut just as short as
With your hair cut just as short as
With your hair cut just as short as mine
LENINE REPORTED ALIVE
AUDIENCE AT HIPPODROME TESTIMONIALS MOVED TO
CHEERS AND TEARS
several different stories have come to me well authenticated concerning the depth of Hindenburg’s brutality; the details are too horrible for print. They relate to outraged womanhood and girlhood, suicide and blood of the innocent that wet the feet of Hindenburg
WAR DECREASES MARRIAGES AND BIRTHS
Oh ashes to ashes
And dust to dust
If the shrapnel dont get you
Then the eightyeights must
The Camera Eye (29)
the raindrops fall one by one out of the horsechestnut tree over the arbor onto the table in the abandoned beergarden and the puddly gravel and my clipped skull where my fingers move gently forward and back over the fuzzy knobs and hollows
spring and we’ve just been swimming in the Marne way off somewhere beyond the fat clouds on the horizon they are hammering on a tin roof in the rain in the spring after a swim in the Marne with that hammering to the north pounding the thought of death into our ears
the winey thought of death stings in the spring blood that throbs in the sunburned neck up and down the belly under the tight belt hurries like cognac into the tips of my toes and the lobes of my ears and my fingers stroking the fuzzy closecropped skull
shyly tingling fingers feel out the limits of the hard immortal skull under the flesh a deathshead and skeleton sits wearing glasses in the arbor under the lucid occasional raindrops inside the new khaki uniform inside my twentyoneyearold body that’s been swimming in the Marne in red and whitestriped trunks in Chalons in the spring
Richard Ellsworth Savage
The years Dick was little he never heard anything about his Dad, but when he was doing his homework evenings up in his little room in the attic he’d start thinking about him sometimes; he’d throw himself on the bed and lie on his back trying to remember what he had been like and Oak Park and everything before Mother had been so unhappy and they had had to come east to live with Aunt Beatrice. There was the smell of bay rum and cigarsmoke and he was sitting on the back of an upholstered sofa beside a big man in a panama hat who shook the sofa when he laughed; he held on to Dad’s back and punched his arm and the muscle was hard like a chair or a table and when Dad laughed he could feel it rumble in his back, “Dicky, keep your dirty feet off my palm beach suit,” and he was on
his hands and knees in the sunlight that poured through the lace curtains of the window trying to pick the big purple roses off the carpet; they were all standing in front of a red automobile and Dad’s face was red and he smelt of armpits and white steam was coming out around, and people were saying Safetyvalve. Downstairs Dad and Mummy were at dinner and there was company and wine and a new butler and it must be awful funny because they laughed so much and the knives and forks went click click all the time; Dad found him in his nightgown peeking through the portières and came out awful funny and excited smelling like wine and whaled him and mother came out and said, “Henry, don’t strike the child,” and they stood hissing at one another in low voices behind the portières on account of company and Mummy had picked Dick up and carried him upstairs crying in her evening dress all lacy and frizzly and with big puffy silk sleeves; touching silk put his teeth on edge, made him shudder all down his spine. He and Henry had had tan overcoats with pockets in them like grownup overcoats and tan caps and he’d lost the button off the top of his. Way back there it was sunny and windy; Dick got tired and sickyfeeling when he tried to remember back like that and it got him so he couldn’t keep his mind on tomorrow’s lessons and would pull out “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” that he had under the mattress because Mother took books away when they weren’t just about the lessons and would read just a little and then he’d forget everything reading and wouldn’t know his lessons the next day.
All the same he got along very well at school and the teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things that weren’t fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.
The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home. Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till night. As if he didn’t know that he and mother were eating her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board, didn’t they? even if they didn’t pay as much as Major and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He’d heard Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor Mrs. Savage, such a sweet woman, and a good churchwoman too, and the daughter of a general in the army, had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though of course she did keep a very charming house and set an excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of working people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and all that. Anyway he didn’t think a highschool student ought to have to take time from his studies to do the chores.
Dr. Atwood was the rector of the St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday at two services while mother and his brother Henry S., who was three years older than he was and worked in a drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home weekends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel’s because it was so highchurch and they had processions and even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and having to keep his surplice clean and because he never had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand at the door and whisper, “Cheeze it,” if anybody was coming.
One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he’d walked home from church with his mother and Henry feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little on Dick’s arm and the purple and green poppies on her wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw Aunt Beatrice’s thin face looking worriedly out through the glass panel of the front door. “Leona,” she said in an excited reproachful voice, “he’s here.” “Who, Beatrice dear?” “You know well enough . . . I don’t know what to do . . . he says he wants to see you. I made him wait in the lower hall on account of . . . er . . . our friends.”
“Oh, God, Beatrice, haven’t I borne enough from that man?”
Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stagshorn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up her lips and said in a spiteful tone, “You boys had better go out and walk round the block. I can’t have two big hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp . . . run along now.”
“Why, what’s the matter with Aunt Beatrice?” asked Dick as they walked off down the street. “Got the pip I guess . . . she gives me a pain in the neck,” Henry said in a superior tone.
Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.
“Say, we might go around and have a soda . . . they have awful good sodas at Dryer’s.”
“Got any dough?”
Dick shook his head.
“Well, you needn’t think I’m goin’ to treat you. . . . Jimminy criskets, Trenton’s a rotten town. . . . In Philadelphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a block long.”
“Aw, you.”
“I bet you don’t remember when we lived in Oak Park, Dick. . . . Now Chicago’s a fine town.” “Sure I do . . . and you an’ me going to kindergarden and Dad being there and everything.”
“Hell’s bells, I wanta smoke.”
“Mother’ll smell it on you.”
“Don’t give a damn if she does.”
When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing. They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about Henry’s smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn’t make out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they could see that her eyes were red. “Boys, it’s your father,” she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down her face.
The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was scared. It was somebody he’d known when he was little; it couldn’t be Dad.
“For God’s sake, no more waterworks, Leona,” the man said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys’ faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the knees. “They’re good lookers both of them, Leona . . . I guess they don’t think much of their poor old Dad.”
They all stood there without saying anything in the dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, “Ha-ha-hav-have you been sick?”
The man turned to Mother. “You’d better tell them all about it when I’m gone . . . don’t spare me . . . nobody’s ever spared me. . . . Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost, boys, I won’t hurt you.” A nervous tremor shook the lower part of his face. “All my life I’ve always been the one has gotten hurt. . . . Well, this is a long way from Oak Park . . . I just wanted to take a look at you, good-by. . . . I guess the likes of me had better go out the basement door . . . I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven sharp, Leona, and that’ll be the last thing you’ll ever have to do for me.”
The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to the street.
Mother closed the door sharply.
“He’s going to
Cuba,” she said. “That’s the last time we’ll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this, your poor mother never can . . . at least he’s out of that horrible place.” “Where was he, Mom?” asked Henry in a business like voice. “Atlanta.”
Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.
They none of them went down to dinner although they were hun gry and the stairs were rich with the smell of roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty stepladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat. When he’d finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.