“Bernice!” I shouted over a number of heads, “Do you love me? Don’t do that!”
Suddenly all the printed peach-colored flowers left her, collapsed into a circle of rag around her feet. And she’d done it herself. “Oh, it’s warm in here, so warm in here!” she shouted.
“Bernice!” I wailed agonizedly, “don’t do that! Don’t you love me?”
She heard me then, and looked at me, and said, “Have you got a hundred dollars? If you have, then it’s all right with me.”
“I’ll get it, Bernice!” I almost screamed. “I’ll get it! Only don’t do that!”
I saw her wink at somebody, and she called back, “I’ll be waiting for you!”
Outside in the hallway I came up against Jerry, who was just coming in again. “Make her put her dress on,” I said, ridding my lapel of her hands. “I’m going to get a hundred dollars, so I can get her away from here.”
“You’re not a real man,” she said scathingly, “or you’d know how to get her away from here without a hundred dollars. And you’re not a sweet man, or you’d let her collect and then make her split it with you. I’m wise to you, you’re just some sap in love with her. Real love!” she grimaced, and flung her hands out after me derisively. “She can have you; I’m glad you passed me by!”
The elevator came up to the roof at the rate of a floor a year, but finally it got there, which was something. It went down again like dishwater in a choked-up sink. I tore out of it, and the plump doorman sat up alarmedly on his improvised couch and threw off the plush covering that was a table runner in the daytime. “Now what happened up there?” he said, “a murder?”
There were only two things I wanted to know, and I asked him both of them without bothering to answer.
“Twenty to eleven,” he said, “and there’s a phone right here in the lobby, but the management don’t like people to use it for outside calls.”
I looked at it, but it was right in the open, had no door, and I didn’t want him to listen, so I went out and found a drugstore on the corner. Something told me to get a lot of nickels at the cashier’s desk before I went in the booth; something told me I was going to need them. One call, I knew, would never do the trick; I’d have to keep on and on. I carried a fistful in with me and laid them on the little wooden slab under the phone.
The voices and the laughing were still ringing in my ears. Jerry’s liquor was still in my stomach, the sweat of agony I had shed those last few minutes, with Bernice up on the chair, still dampened the back of my shirt. And here — not a sound, just me alone, by myself, wondering whom to ring up first.
I took the receiver off and I put the first nickel in, and even as the nickel dropped and rang the bell, I had a sinking feeling to go with it; I knew it wasn’t going to be any use. Lending money to friends went out of style with buttoned shoes and mustache cups. But there was nothing like trying. And while I waited, I rapped the back of my hand against the wall of the booth, which was pine. They call that knocking on wood for luck.
Jackie Conway, “the boy who made good,” came to the phone. He had stopped being Jackie Conway quite some time before this, and was John Crandall Conway these days. There was only one stage he still had to pass through — the J. Crandall Conway stage. He had even stopped having his phone listed the last few months, but at least he still answered it himself, provided you knew the number. Forgotten was the time I had pretended to look for a room in his rooming house to enable him to smuggle his valise out while the landlady’s back was turned.
He was in the midst of a bridge game, he told me, but that was all right, it could wait five minutes. One strange thing about him, he actually did, I believe, like to be interrupted by phone calls while he was playing bridge. He thought it gave people the impression that he was much sought-after, a very busy man. And impressions counted for so much in his life.
I told him I had to have a hundred dollars, and could he lend it to me? “Gladly,” he said, “I’ll expect you to give me an IOU for it, that’s all.” It all seemed too good to be true.
“You drop around sometime tomorrow—” he went on. “No, tomorrow’s Sunday, isn’t it. Can you make it Monday morning—?”
I was forced to tell him I couldn’t, that I had to have it right tonight, right within an hour, or it wouldn’t be any good to me.
“You seem to be in a hurry,” he observed. “What’s the rush, what’s it all about?”
I couldn’t tell him that; I know that if I could’ve, I would have gotten the money from him right then and there. It would have been worth that much to him to be able to repeat so piquant a tale to all his friends, as host and as guest, for many months to come. He loves to play the scandal-monger.
“You in trouble of some kind, Wade?” he went on.
“No, I’m not in trouble, Jackie,” I said, “it’s just that I’ve got to have the money.”
So then he answered, a little coolly. “I’m afraid I can’t do it right tonight, Wade, on such short notice. If you can wait until Monday morning, I’d be only too glad to let you have it. Or if you can give me some inkling as to why you have to have it in such a hurry, I could even borrow it on my own responsibility from one of the boys that are up here with me right now (although I don’t like to do that), but I’d really have to know what you want it for before I could do that. It’s only fair, don’t you think?”
I lost patience then, and growled, “Oh, say yes or no, will you, Jackie, and get it over with! Either you will or you won’t. Which is it?”
He said stiffly, “You sound as though I were asking you the favor, instead of you’re asking me—”
“I’m asking you the favor, and you’re turning me down,” I interrupted, “is that right?”
“Unless,” he said, “you—”
“Good night,” I said formally, and hung up.
Next I tried Billy Cumberland, who came in from Duluth over the weekend seven years ago. He never went back to Duluth again. “Billy,” I said, “how’s chances of raising fifty dollars?”
So I put another nickel in and called up Eddie Ryan. He’d had a song out three months before, and they were still playing it on the merry-go-rounds at Luna Park. So I congratulated him about it, and he seemed surprised and said, “Wait a minute, are you sure I wrote that?” And then it all came back to him and he said, “Oh, sure! I remember now.” Upon which I said, “I want to borrow twenty-five dollars from, you, Eddie.” “Bring up your decimal point two places,” he answered tragically, “and I can accommodate you.”
I moved next door into a cooler booth and phoned Phil Broderick, who, being married, is afraid to refuse his friends when they endeavor to borrow money because of what his wife might think and say about him. She used to be a chorus girl. But just that evening, she was either out or out of earshot. He turned me down beautifully, as though he’d been rehearsing what he’d like to say on such an occasion for months past and never had the opportunity to use it before now. Incidentally, I had raised the ante to a full hundred once more, figuring that as long as I wasn’t very likely to get it anyway, I may as well try for the whole amount. People have more respect for someone who tries to borrow a hundred dollars than they have for someone who tries to borrow ten. Moreover, it’s very often less of a risk; they’re likely to get the hundred back, but they’re lucky if they ever see the ten again.