Fauna yelled, “Doc, come get your girl!”
Doc shook his head to try to wake up. It was a dream, a craziness, the crown, the veil, the virginity. “What in hell is going on?”
It happens that two people standing apart can dip into each other’s thoughts. Suzy read his mind or his face. An embarrassed red crept up her neck and darkened her cheeks. She closed her eyes.
And Doc’s mind read her pain. His world spun like a top. He heard himself say, “Fairy Godmother, I accept—my—girl.”
Suzy opened her eyes and looked in Doc’s eyes. Then her jaw muscles tightened and her eyes grew fierce; her sweet mouth hardened to a line. She took off the crown and veil, looked at them a moment, and placed them gently on an apple box.
The crazy trumpet put a samba beat to the “Wedding March” and a guitar took up the throbbing.
“Listen, you mugs,” said Suzy over the music, “I could live with a stumblebum in a culvert and be a good wife. I could marry a yellow dog and be nice to him. But good Christ! Not Doc!” Suddenly she turned and darted out the door.
Fauna plunged after her. There was no chicken walk out the back way. Suzy slipped and rolled down the embankment and Fauna rolled after her. On the railroad track they gathered themselves together.
“You goddam grandstanding bitch!” said Fauna bitterly. “What do you mean—‘not Doc’?”
“I love him,” said Suzy.
29
Oh, Woe, Woe, Woe![109]
One of the common reactions to shock is lethargy. If, after an automobile accident, one man is howling and writhing and another sits quietly staring into space, it is usually the quiet man who is badly hurt. A community can go into shock too. Cannery Row did. People drew into themselves, kept their doors closed, and didn’t visit. Everyone felt guilty, even those who had not planned the party. Merely to have seen it was enough.
Mack and the boys were doubled up with a sense of unhappy fate. It was their third try at doing something nice for Doc, and it was their third failure. They did not know where to turn to escape their own scorn.
Wide Ida became fiercely taciturn. Her customers drank in silence to escape the guilty rage they knew was just under her muscular surface.
Fauna grieved like a lost setter dog. In a lifetime of preposterous plans she had discovered some failures but never before a catastrophe.
Even the Patrón experienced little flashes of an emotion new to him. Always before he had managed to swap guilt for blame of circumstance or enemy, but now his accusing finger bent like a comedy pistol and aimed at his own heart. It was an interesting pain, but a pain nevertheless. He became kindly and thoughtful of all around him—an attitude that frightened people who knew him. There is nothing reassuring about the smile of a tiger.
As for Doc, he was undergoing reorganization so profound that he didn’t know it was happening. He was like a watch taken apart on a jeweler’s table—all jewels and springs and balances laid out ready for reassembling. For pain or frustration the human has many anodynes, not the least of which is anger.
Doc quarreled viciously with Old Jingleballicks, ordered him out, and told him never to return. Doc fought with the expressman over the quality of the service he had been getting, although it hadn’t varied in ten years. Finally he let the word be passed that he was working and did not want to see anyone from Cannery Row or anyplace else. He sat over his yellow pad, the neat pile of Suzy’s sharpened pencils beside him, and in his eyes the bleak look of shock.
Suzy was at once the cause and the victim of the disintegration of the Row. It cannot be said that trouble builds character, for just as often it destroys character. But if certain character traits, mixed with certain dreams, are subjected to the fire, sometimes…sometimes…
Ella, the waitress-manager of the Golden Poppy, was no less tired at ten in the morning than at midnight. She was always tired. She not only accepted this but thought everybody was that way. She could not conceive of feet that did not hurt, of a back that did not ache, or of a cook with a good disposition. At breakfast the row of gobbling mouths ruined her appetite and she never got it back. In the slack time around ten she cleaned and mopped the moist restaurant and swept the crumbs from under the counter stools.
Joe Blaikey came in for his morning coffee.
“Just making a fresh pot. Want to wait?” Ella said.
“Sure,” said Joe. “Say, Ella, you heard what happened down in Cannery Row Saturday night?”
“No. What?”
“I don’t know. There was a party. I was going to it. Time I got there it was over. Nobody wants to talk about it.”
“I didn’t hear,” said Ella. “Fight, you think?”
“Hell no. They’d talk about a fight. They love a fight. Everybody seems to feel kind of ashamed of something. Let me know if you hear anything, will you?”
“Okay. Coffee’s about ready, Joe.”
Suzy came in, dressed in her San Francisco suit—gray herringbone tweed, very neat and smart. She sat down on a stool.
“Hi,” said the cop.
“Hi,” said Suzy. “Cup of coffee.”
“Just going through the grounds now. Say, that’s a cute outfit,” said Ella.
“Frisco,” said Suzy.
“You moving out?”
“No,” said Suzy, “I’m staying.”
Joe said, “What happened down on the Row the other night?”
Suzy shrugged her shoulders.
“You won’t talk neither, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw!” said Joe. “Mostly they’d break their necks to tell. Suzy, if anybody got killed you better spill it. You ever hear of that material-witness stuff?”
“Nobody got killed,” said Suzy. And then, “Your name’s Ella, ain’t it?”
“Till now.”
“Remember you said you wasn’t never off shift?”
“Well, I ain’t,” said Ella.
“Would you give me a try? Watch me a couple weeks. Then maybe you could go to a movie.”
“Sister, you come to the wrong place. This joint don’t make enough profit to hire no waitress.”
“I’ll do it for my meals, and I don’t eat much.”
Joe Blaikey looked away. It was his method of paying attention.
Ella said, “What’s the gag, sister?”
“No gag. I want a job and I’ll sling hash for my keep.”
Joe turned his head back slowly. “You’d better tell—” he suggested.
“Sure I’ll tell,” said Suzy. “I’m going to fix myself up and I ain’t going to run away to do it.”
“What made up your mind?”
“That ain’t none of your business. Is it against the law?”
“Happens so seldom it ought to be,” said Joe.
“Come on, Ella,” Suzy begged, “give me a break.”
Ella asked, “What do you think, Joe?”
Joe’s eyes went over Suzy’s face. He dwelt for a moment on the dyed hair. He said, “You’re letting your hair grow out?”
“Yeah.”
“Give her a break, Ella,” he said.
Ella smiled a tired smile. “In them clothes?”
“I’ll go change. Take me maybe fifteen minutes. I can cook too, Ella. I’m a pretty good fry cook.”
“Go change your clothes,” said Ella.
Joe Blaikey waited in the street for Suzy to come back. He moved up beside her. “Don’t bitch Ella up,” he said gently.
“I won’t.”
“You look excited.”
“Joe,” said Suzy, “you remember once you said if I wanted to blow this town you’d lend me the dough?”
“I thought you was staying.”
“I am. I wonder could you stake me not to blow town.”
109
Oh, Woe, Woe, Woe!: From American Modernist expatriate poet Ezra Pound’s parodic “Song in the Manner of House man,” which appeared in his fifth collection,