Then he kissed her once more, and hurried down the long sun-dappled walk to where Bruce was waiting for him in the car.
“It’s a shame to go in on a day like this,” he said, taking a panoramic look at the Westchester landscape before getting in and closing the door.
“I can’t tell you how I sympathize with you, sir,” Bruce said, with just a touch of dryness. It was a genial sort of dryness, though, meaning, you don’t have to go in if you don’t want to, and you know it, but you’d still like me to feel sorry for you.
“As for you, young fellow,” Elliott warned him jocularly, “you’re in hot water with Amy. She thinks you were responsible for that tabloid.”
“Greater love hath no man,” quoted Bruce softly, “than he take a rap for his employer.”
“Who’s taking any rap for who?” Elliott brought him up short. “I squared that. I told her it was my fault.”
“I may as well be skinned for a wolf as for a sheep,” Bruce remarked as they sped along. “Amy’s standards of reading are so high I can’t even get up to them with my chin on the crossbar. Anything less than Proust is trash.”
“What sort of reading do you go in for, Bruce?” Elliott asked. “I’ve been meaning to ask you that.”
“Mostly mysteries. I drive a car, and I like things to move fast. They’ve got to be well-written, though.”
“They can be. I read them myself, quite frequently. If a mystery isn’t well-written, it’s not because it’s a mystery, it’s because the writer is a sloppy worker.”
They spent the rest of the drive into town discussing books in general, both mystery and non-mystery, and life itself, the greatest book of them all. Elliott found that he enjoyed it immensely. His driver was a college graduate, which he had always known of course, but in addition he was keenly intelligent, nimble-minded, and ambitious, which didn’t always necessarily follow. He was bound to get some place as soon as the door opened a little wider. This driving job was just temporary.
Elliott liked to know his fellow-men better, because he liked his fellow-men.
“Thank you, sir,” said Bruce when they’d reached the office.
“For what?” asked Elliott.
“At least you didn’t say I’m a credit to my race.”
“What race?” said Elliott blankly. “I don’t know what you mean.” And he actually didn’t.
“Pick you up at the same time, sir,” said Bruce, and drove off.
Elliott went upstairs to what he liked occasionally to refer to as “the grind.” If it was a “grind” (and it had to have some name, apparently), it was the most velvety, well lubricated, chromium-plated, air-conditioned grind conceivable. He didn’t even have to open his own letters. That was done for him. The one out of five that got through to him he could be sure would be worth his personal attention.
A little dictating — into a machine. A little phoning — here, there, around. From him, and more often, to him. Perhaps involving thousands and thousands of dollars — but you never would have guessed. Money was never even mentioned. The calls seemed to be mostly about golf, and the last country club dance, and the next country club dance, and how’s Evelyn, and June’s fine. And then an appointment for lunch would be set up, and after the lunch had come and gone, he’d be twenty thousand richer, or forty, or sixty, or more. Not at anyone’s expense. Certainly not at the client’s. The client went right along with him — twenty, forty, sixty. Not at the market’s, either. Because for everyone who sold, there was someone who bought. Just “the old grind.” Mystique.
By that time it would be 11:00 or 11:30, and he’d have Rico and Dotty up — Rico to trim his hair, Dotty to trim his nails. Not every day of course, about once in a week. Twice, if he and June had some big engagement on. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to go to a barber — the barber came to him. It was done just right — everything just right. Not too much talk — that would have been clownish; but not too little either — that would have been stiff and ungracious. Then they’d both leave, thanking him, and if he’d given them a little something more than the customary tip, which he did every now and then, he’d repeat his instructions, so they’d be sure to get them right.
“Now remember, buy at twenty, as I told you. Put the order in right away, so you’ll catch it on the fly first thing the market opens in the morning. But don’t hold on. Put in a ‘sell’ order at twenty-five and you’ll make a nice little profit. And, mind you this is just for you two. If you say a word to anyone, spread it around, it’s the last time I’ll ever—”
“I won’t even tell my own husband,” Dotty would vow.
“Good,” he’d say solemnly. “Because husbands have big mouths. I happen to be one myself, and I know.”
And by then it would be about time for whatever lunch date he had.
Today it was with Don Warren. Don Warren and Doug Elliott had been friends long before they became client and broker. In fact, they had been college classmates together. Don was waiting for him at their usual table, in their usual restaurant.
After he’d shaken hands with him and sat down, Elliott began to worry one fingernail with the corner of his mouth, moistening it and blowing his breath on it. “Dotty’s a very good manicurist, but this split goes down just below the cuticle. Even she couldn’t do anything with it. Except smooth it out a little.”
“How’d you come to do it?”
Elliott looked up at him disarmingly. “Strangling blondes,” he said with winning frankness.
Warren uttered the polite chuckle that friendship called for — but no more — then gave him a rueful look. “You’ve always had the weirdest sense of humor,” he complained.
Elliott strugged meekly. “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he mumured, then opened up the large menu-folder with the concentration of a man whose efforts to be sprightly have not been an unqualified success, and who therefore turns resignedly to something else...
John Steinbeck
How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank
© 1956 by John Steinbeck; originally appeared in “The Atlantic Monthly”
A surprisingly full study of an American small town — much of it by implication — by the famous author of THE GRAPES OF WRATH and TORTILLA FLAT...
On the Saturday before Labor Day, 1955, at 9:04½ A.M., Mr. Hogan robbed a bank. He was forty-two years old, married, and the father of a boy and a girl, named John and Joan, twelve and thirteen respectively. Mrs. Hogan’s name was Joan and Mr. Hogan’s was John, but since they called themselves Papa and Mama, that left their names free for the children, who were considered very smart for their ages, each having jumped a grade in school. The Hogans lived at 215 East Maple Street, in a brown-shingle house with white trim — there are two. 215 is the one across from the street light and it is the one with the big tree in the yard, either oak or elm — the biggest tree in the whole street, maybe in the whole town. That’s pretty big.
John and Joan were in bed at the time of the robbery, for it was Saturday. At 9:10 A.M., Mrs. Hogan was making the cup of tea she always had. Mr. Hogan went to work early. Mrs. Hogan drank her tea slowly, scalding hot, and read her fortune in the tea leaves. There was a cloud and a five-pointed star with two short points in the bottom of the cup, but that was at 9:12 and the robbery was all over by then.