“Why should I want to?”
“To gloat, probably. Either you’d want to gloat, if you were absolutely out of love with me, or you’d want to see me if you still loved me.”
“You’re so wrong it isn’t even funny.”
“It isn’t even funny. Lord and Taylor! Wouldn’t that jar you? I’ll say. You tell ’em casket, I’m coffin. I’ll tell the world. Don’t take any wooden nickels…. I’m going.”
“Oh, go ahead. But remember, I’m not going to be home tonight. Not me. I’m going to call off the party, unless you want to have it. Anyway, I won’t be there.”
“That’s all right. It only makes it a different kind of a party.”
“Oh, there’s no need to tell me that. But you’d better be careful with your torch singer. She knows how to handle people like you.”
“You’re a dear. You’re a sweet girl. I knew you’d be a good sport about it. I knew all along you would be.”
“Oh, go to hell, you and your cheap sarcasm.”
“No wonder the chaps at the club say I’m hen-pecked,” said Julian. He regretted it the moment he said it; club was not a word he wanted to use now. “You’ll attend to the details about the party, calling people up and telling them I broke my leg and so on, will you?”
“Of course, unless you want to have it yourself and say I have a broken leg.”
“That’s better. I don’t mean about you having a broken leg. But it’s nicer for us to be agreeable and sort of phony about it. You know what I mean?”
“You’re the authority on phony, of course, but, yes, I know what you mean. I know.”
“All right, dear. Cheerio, I mean cheero. Stout fella.”
“Funny boy. You’re a scream.”
So he left.
9
Gibbsville moved up from the status of borough and became a third class city in 1911, but in 1930 the city still had less than 25,000 inhabitants (estimated 1930 population in the notebooks sent out by the Gibbsville banks to their depositors). In Gibbsville a party becomes an institution the moment the hostess tells her plans to one other person, and nothing short of a death or other act of God must postpone the party, once the invitations are given. To the persons who eventually had been invited and to those who wished they had, the English party got in the institution class a day or two after the Lafayette-Lehigh football weekend. On their way home from Easton Caroline and Julian decided to have a party “some time during the holidays.” They were riding in Whit Hofman’s car, with Whit and Kitty, and Kitty immediately said it would be a swell idea, and began to count off the nights when the party could not be given on account of conflicting parties. It couldn’t be given the night of any of the Gibbsville dances nor the afternoon of the tea dances. Kitty Hofman finally decided upon the date. “There’s the Junior League dance in Reading the night after Christmas Day,” she said, “but I’m sick of going to Reading. Let them come up here for a change. We go down there and spend our money on their lousy Junior League parties, but if we ever tried to have a Junior League in Gibbsville you know what support we’d get from Reading.”
No argument.
“So let them come to our parties this year,” Kitty continued. “The Assembly. That money goes to charity, doesn’t it, Whit?”
“In theory it does,” said Whit.
“It usually ends up with Whit paying for the Assembly,” said Julian.
“Don’t forget, you pay your share,” said Whit. “We all do. But they do come to the Assembly sometimes. Sometimes they do.”
“All right. Let them come again. Let’s not go to their Junior League dance. Let them help our charity. Caroline, you have your party that night. The twenty-sixth.”
“How about it, Ju? That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“You’re God damn right. I won a hundred dollars on the game. No, two hundred. But anyway, a hundred that I’ll get. Bobby Herrmann will owe me his hundred.”
“Well then, that’s settled. The twenty-sixth we’ll have our party. Our own crowd and some of the school kids, the ones that can drink. Not Johnny Dibble and kids that age, but a little older,” said Caroline.
“Oh, dear me,” said Julian. “My goodness sakes alive. Oh, my. We have to have Johnny. We must have Johnny Dibble. Why, he’s practically a Deke. No matter where he goes to college, he’s going to be a Deke.”
“Not if he goes to State,” said Whit.
“Right. Not if he goes to State. No Dekes at State. How’d you know that, Whit? You know more about D. K. E. than I do. Why can’t we have Johnny, Caroline? He’s a nice kid…. Well, kind of nice.”
“All right, we’ll have him, if you insist. He drinks as well as you do, for that matter. He’ll make a good Deke. Who else shall we blackball?” Caroline and Kitty worked on the list, and the next week it was in Gwen Gibbs’ column on the society page of the Standard. Gwen Gibbs’ column was a dumping ground for all society gossip on the Standard. There was no Miss Gibbs, of course. There was an Alice Cartwright, graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and daughter of the current Baptist minister. Miss Cartwright knew very few of the Lantenengo Street crowd and except for the Purim Ball and K. of C. Promenade she was not on any of the invitation lists. She certainly never for a second expected to be on the list of the invited guests for the English party. And she wasn’t. Yet the night of the party she was the only one who arrived at the attractive home of that leading young business man and that charming leader of the younger married set; in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Julian M. English.
Julian got afraid of something the moment he walked away from Caroline and climbed in his own car. He never looked her way again after he left her. He treated his car more considerately. He moved along, approaching the business district at a moderate rate of speed, extra-careful of the rights of other motorists and of pedestrians, and resolved that since he was already a quarter of an hour late for his date with Lute Fliegler, he would break the date entirely and without explanation. He did that with a clear conscience because he effected an exchange in himself: in exchange for accepting in advance the hell and the fury of what he was going to have to face with his father and Harry Reilly and the lesser stockholders in the company, who were going to have to save him from bankruptcy—he paid himself off by keeping the rest of this day to himself. If ever there was a man in a jam, he was it, he was sure. It was no more difficult to face a fist or to enter the front-line trenches than it was going to be to meet these people, especially his father. Nobody would have the crust to tell his father about the Stage Coach episode, because his father was a kind of man who would have the Stage Coach raided for less reason than that his son had been a fool there. But someone was sure to tell him about throwing a drink in Harry Reilly’s puss. It was the sort of thing Gibbsville men, their identities masked by hot towels, would be hearing often in the hotel barber shop for the next couple of weeks. And yet it was not so bad as the mess at the Gibbsville Club. The Polack lawyers would tell every—“Good Christ! Polacks are Roman Catholics!” Julian thought of that for the first time. And now he remembered seeing the emblem of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in the lapel of the man he had knocked down. “Is there anything I haven’t done? Anyone I haven’t insulted, at least indirectly?”…He tried to be honest and to figure out every possible bad angle to the last few days’ work, in order that he could go back and find something comforting. He thought of the bad way he had treated Caroline, the many bad ways; doing something that permitted her to accept disgrace, as with the drink thrown at Harry Reilly; doing something that publicly and unequivocally and personally humiliated her, which was going out with Helene Holman. His manner toward Mrs. Grady this morning—a thing Caroline especially (and, sometimes, a little unreasonably) campaigned against. And then, a little before he was ready for it, he thought of the thing that in its way was more important than anything between himself and Caroline; that thing was the never-to-be-buried discovery that all this time Froggy Ogden had been his enemy. That was worse than anything he could do to Caroline, because it was something that did something to him. It made a change in himself, and we must not change ourselves much. We can stand only so many—so few—changes. To know that there were people who he thought were his friends, his good friends, but who were his enemies—that was going to make a change, he knew. When was the last time there had been a change in himself? He thought and thought, rejecting items that were not change but only removal or adornment. He thought and thought, and the last time there had been a change in himself was when he discovered that he, Julian English, whom he had gone on thinking of as a child with a child’s renewable integrity and curiosity and fears and all, suddenly had the power of his own passion; that he could control himself and use this control to give pleasure and a joyous hiatus of weakness to a woman. He could not remember which girl it had been; to forget her had been a simple manifestation of his ego; the important part of the discovery, the change, had been a thing for himself, his own moment. But he saw how deep and permanent the discovery, the change, became. It was almost as important, and no doubt precisely as permanent, as the simplest discovery of physical manhood. And there again it was the change and not the act that had been lasting and great; for he could not recall with accuracy the circumstances of that discovery.