One raw March evening he took Emiscah to see “The Birth of a Nation.” The battles and the music and the bugles made them all jelly inside. They both had tears in their eyes when the two boys met on the battlefield and died in each other’s arms on the battlefield. When the Ku Klux Klan charged across the screen Charley had his leg against Emiscah’s leg and she dug her fingers into his knee so hard it hurt. When they came out Charley said by heck he thought he wanted to go up to Canada and enlist and go over and see the Great War. Emiscah said not to be silly and then looked at him kinda funny and asked him if he was pro-British. He said he didn’t care and that the only fellows that would gain would be the bankers, whoever won. She said, “Isn’t it terrible? Let’s not talk about it any more.”
When they got back to the Svensons’, Mr. Svenson was sitting in the parlor in his shirtsleeves reading the paper. He got up and went to meet Charley with a worried frown on his face and was just about to say something when Emiscah shook her head. He shrugged his shoulders and went out. Charley asked Emiscah what was eating the old man. She grabbed hold of him and put her head on his shoulder and burst out crying. “What’s the matter, kitten; what’s the matter, kitten?” he kept asking. She just cried and cried until he could feel her tears on his cheek and neck and said, “For crissake, snap out of it, kitten; you’re wilting my collar.”
She let herself drop on the sofa and he could see that she was working hard to pull herself together. He sat down beside her and kept patting her hand. Suddenly she got up and stood in the middle of the floor. He tried to put his arms around her to pet her but she pushed him off. “Charley,” she said in a hard strained voice, “lemme tellye somethin’… I think I’m goin’ to have a baby.”
“But you’re crazy. We haven’t ever…”
“Maybe it’s somebody else… Oh, God, I’m going to kill myself.” Charley took her by the arms and made her sit down on the sofa. “Now pull yourself together, and tell me what the trouble is.”
“I wish you’d beat me up,” Emiscah said, laughing crazily. “Go ahead; hit me with your fist.”
Charley went weak all over.
“Tell me what the trouble is,” he said. “By Jez, it couldn’t be Ed.”
She looked up at him with scared eyes, her face drawn like an old woman’s. “No, no… Here’s how it is. I’m a month past my time, see, and I don’t know enough about things like that, so I asks Anna about it and she says I’m goin’ to have a baby sure and that we’ve got to get married right away and she told dad, the dirty little sneak, and I couldn’t tell ’em it wasn’t you… They think it’s you, see, and dad says it’s all right, young folks bein’ like that nowadays an’ everythin’ an’ says we’ll have to get married and I thought I wouldn’t let on an’ you’d never know, but, kid, I had to tell you.”
“Oh, Jez,” said Charley. He looked at the flowered pink shade with a fringe over the lamp on the table beside him and the tablecover with a fringe and at his shoes and the roses on the carpet. “Who was it?”
“It was when you were in the hospital, Charley. We had a lot of beer to drink an’ he took me to a hotel. I guess I’m just bad, that’s all. He was throwin’ money around an’ we went in a taxicab and I guess I was crazy. No, I’m a bad woman through and through, Charley. I went out with him every night when you were in the hospital.”
“By God, it was Ed.”
She nodded and then hid her face and started to cry again.
“The lousy little bastard,” Charley kept saying. She crumpled up on the sofa with her face in her hands.
“He’s gone to Chicago… He’s a bad egg allright,” said Charley.
He felt he had to get out in the air. He picked up his coat and hat and started to put them on. Then she got to her feet and threw herself against him. She held him close and her arms were tight round his neck. “Honestly, Charley, I loved you all the time… I pretended to myself it was you.” She kissed him on the mouth. He pushed her away, but he felt weak and tired and thought of the icy streets walking home and his cold hallbedroom and thought, what the hell did it matter anyway? and took off his hat and coat again. She kissed him and loved him up and locked the parlor door and they loved each other up on the sofa and she let him do everything he wanted. Then after a while she turned on the light and straightened her clothes and went over to the mirror to fix her hair and he tied his necktie again and she smoothed down his hair as best she could with her fingers and they unlocked the parlor door very carefully and she went out in the hall to call dad. Her face was flushed and she looked very pretty again. Mr. Svenson and Anna and all the girls were out in the kitchen and Emiscah said, “Dad, Charley and I are going to get married next month,” and everybody said, “Congratulations,” and all the girls kissed Charley and Mr. Svenson broke out a bottle of whisky and they had a drink all round and Charley went home feeling like a whipped dog.
There was a fellow named Hendriks at the shop seemed a pretty wise guy; Charley asked him next noon whether he didn’t know of anything a girl could take and he said he had a prescription for some pills and next day he brought it and told Charley not to tell the druggist what he wanted them for. It was payday and Hendriks came round to Charley’s room after he’d gotten cleaned up that night and asked him if he’d gotten the pills allright. Charley had the package right in his pocket and was going to cut nightschool that night and take it to Emiscah. First he and Hendriks went to have a drink at the corner. He didn’t like whisky straight and Hendriks said to take it with ginger ale. It tasted great and Charley felt sore and miserable inside and didn’t want to see Emiscah anyway. They had some more drinks and then went and bowled for a while. Charley beat him four out of five and Hendriks said the party was on him from now on.
Hendriks was a squareshouldered redheaded guy with a freckled face and a twisted nose and he began telling stories about funny things that had happened with the ribs and how that was his long suit anyway. He’d been all over and had had high yallers and sealskin browns down New Orleans and Chink girls in Seattle, Wash., and a fullblooded Indian squaw in Butte, Montana, and French girls and German Jewish girls in Colon and a Caribee woman more than ninety years old in Port of Spain. He said that the Twin Cities was the bunk and what a guy ought to do was to go down an’ get a job in the oilfields at Tampico or in Oklahoma where you could make decent money and live like a white man. Charley said he’d pull out of St. Paul in a minute if it wasn’t that he wanted to finish his course in nightschool and Hendriks told him he was a damn fool, that book learnin’ never got nobody nowhere and what he wanted was to have a good time when he had his strength and after that to hell wid ’em. Charley said he felt like saying to hell wid ’em anyway.
They went to several bars, and Charley who wasn’t used to drinking anything much except beer began to reel a little, but it was swell barging round with Hendriks from bar to bar. Hendriks sang My Mother Was a Lady in one place and The Bastard King of England in another where an old redfaced guy with a cigar set them up to some drinks. Then they tried to get into a dancehall but the guy at the door said they were too drunk and threw them out on their ear and that seemed funny as hell and they went to a back room of a place Hendriks knew and there were two girls there Hendriks knew and Hendriks fixed it up for ten dollars each for all night, then they had one more drink before going to the girls’ place and Hendriks sang: