Reggie held out his hand. “Well, put it there, Alec Borgia… I reckon you’re on the bourbon if you’ve been mingling with the conscript fathers.”
“Sure, I’ll drink bourbon… kids, I’m tired… I’m going to eat something. I didn’t have any supper. I just left the office.”
Reggie looked pretty tight; so did Pat. Jo was evidently sober and sore. I must fix this up, thought Dick and put his arm round Pat’s waist. “Say, did you get my ’gram?” “Laughed myself sick over it,” said Pat. “Gosh, Dick, it’s nice to have you back among the drinking classes.”
“Say, Dick,” said Reggie, “is there anything in the rumor that old doughface toppled over?”
“Mr. Moorehouse had a little attack of acute indigestion… he was better when I left,” said Dick in a voice that sounded a little too solemn in his ears.
“Not drinking gets ’em in the end,” said Reggie. The girls laughed. Dick put down three bourbons in rapid succession but he wasn’t getting any lift from them. He just felt hungry and frazzled. He had his head twisted around trying to flag the waiter to find out what the devil had happened to his filetmignon when he heard Reggie drawling, “After all J. Ward Moorehouse isn’t a man… it’s a name… You can’t feel sorry when a name gets sick.”
Dick felt a rush of anger flush his head: “He’s one of the sixty most important men in this country,” he said. “After all, Reggie, you’re taking his money…”
“Good God,” cried Reggie. “The man on the high horse.”
Pat turned to Dick, laughing. “They seem to be getting mighty holy down there in Washington.”
“No, you know I like to kid as well as anybody… But when a man like J.W. who’s perhaps done more than any one living man, whether you like what he does or not, to form the public mind in this country, is taken ill, I think sophomore wisecracks are in damn bad taste.”
Reggie was drunk. He was talking in phony southern dialect. “Wha, brudder, Ah didn’t know as you was Mista Moahouse in pussen. Ah thunked you was juss a lowdown wageslave like the rest of us pickaninnies.”
Dick wanted to shut up but he couldn’t. “Whether you like it or not the molding of the public mind is one of the most important things that goes on in this country. If it wasn’t for that American business would be in a pretty pickle… Now we may like the way American business does things or we may not like it, but it’s a historical fact like the Himalaya Mountains and no amount of kidding’s going to change it. It’s only through publicrelations work that business is protected from wildeyed cranks and demagogues who are always ready to throw a monkeywrench into the industrial machine.”
“Hear, hear,” cried Pat.
“Well, you’ll be the first to holler when they cut the income from your old man’s firstmortgage bonds,” said Dick snappishly.
“Senator,” intoned Reggie, strengthened by another old-fashioned, “allow me to congrat’late you… ma soul ’n body, senator, ’low me to congrat’late you… upon your val’able services to this great commonwealth that stretches from the great Atlantical ocean to the great and glorious Pacifical.”
“Shut up, Reggie,” said Jo. “Let him eat his steak in peace.”
“Well, you certainly made the eagle scream, Dick,” said Pat, “but seriously, I guess you’re right.”
“We’ve got to be realists,” said Dick.
“I believe,” said Pat Doolittle, throwing back her head and laughing, “that he’s come across with that raise.”
Dick couldn’t help grinning and nodding. He felt better since he’d eaten. He ordered another round of drinks and began to talk about going up to Harlem to dance at Small’s Paradise. He said he couldn’t go to bed, he was too tired, he had to have some relaxation. Pat Doolittle said she loved it in Harlem but that she hadn’t brought any money. “My party,” said Dick. “I’ve got plenty of cash on me.”
They went up with a flask of whiskey in each of the girls’ handbags and in Dick’s and Reggie’s back pockets. Reggie and Pat sang The Fireship in the taxi. Dick drank a good deal in the taxi to catch up with the others. Going down the steps to Small’s was like going underwater into a warm thickly-grown pool. The air was dense with musky smells of mulatto powder and perfume and lipstick and dresses and throbbed like flesh with the smoothlybalanced chugging of the band. Dick and Pat danced right away, holding each other very close. Their dancing seemed smooth as cream. Dick found her lips under his and kissed them. She kissed back. When the music stopped they were reeling a little. They walked back to their table with drunken dignity. When the band started again Dick danced with Jo. He kissed her too. She pushed him off a little. “Dick, you oughtn’t to.” “Reggie won’t mind. It’s all in the family…” They were dancing next to Reggie and Pat hemmed in by a swaying blur of couples. Dick dropped Jo’s hand and put his hand on Reggie’s shoulder. “Reggie, you don’t mind if I kiss your future wife for you just once.” “Go as far as you like, senator,” said Reggie. His voice was thick. Pat was having trouble keeping him on his feet. Jo gave Dick a waspish look and kept her face turned away for the rest of the dance. As soon as they got back to the table she told Reggie that it was after two and she’d have to go home, she for one had to work in the morning.
When they were alone and Dick was just starting to make love to Pat she turned to him and said, “Oh, Dick, do take me some place low… nobody’ll ever take me any place really low.” “I should think this would be quite low enough for a juniorleaguer,” he said. “But this is more respectable than Broadway, and I’m not a juniorleaguer… I’m the new woman.” Dick burst out laughing. They both laughed and had a drink on it and felt fond of each other again and Dick suddenly asked her why couldn’t they be together always. “I think you’re mean. This isn’t any place to propose to a girl. Imagine remembering all your life that you’d got engaged in Harlem… I want to see life.” “All right, young lady, we’ll go… but don’t blame me if it’s too rough for you.” “I’m not a sissy,” said Pat angrily. “I know it wasn’t the stork.”
Dick paid and they finished up one of the pints. Outside it was snowing. Streets and stoops and pavements were white, innocent, quiet, glittering under the streetlights with freshfallen snow. Dick asked the whiteeyed black doorman about a dump he’d heard of and the doorman gave the taximan the address. Dick began to feel good. “Gosh, Pat, isn’t this lovely,” he kept crying. “Those kids can’t take it. Takes us grownups to take it… Say, Reggie’s getting too fresh, do you know it?” Pat held his hand tight. Her cheeks were flushed and her face had a taut look. “Isn’t it exciting?” she said. The taxi stopped in front of an unpainted basement door with one electriclightbulb haloed with snowflakes above it.
They had a hard time getting in. There were no white people there at all. It was a furnaceroom set around with plain kitchen tables and chairs. The steampipes overhead were hung with colored paper streamers. A big brown woman in a pink dress, big eyes rolling loose in their dark sockets and twitching lips, led them to a table. She seemed to take a shine to Pat. “Come right on in, darlin’,” she said. “Where’s you been all my life?”
Their whiskey was gone so they drank gin. Things got to whirling round in Dick’s head. He couldn’t get off the subject of how sore he was at that little squirt Reggie. Here Dick had been nursing him along in the office for a year and now he goes smartaleck on him. The little twirp.
The only music was a piano where a slimwaisted black man was tickling the ivories. Dick and Pat danced and danced and he whirled her around until the sealskin browns and the highyallers cheered and clapped. Then Dick slipped and dropped her. She went spinning into a table where some girls were sitting. Dark heads went back, pink rubber lips stretched, mouths opened. Gold teeth and ivories let out a roar.