“Being broke—I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it. The kind of sickness that can’t be cured except by a good third act—and I’m not able even to ask a girl to go to a show with me. Money? I’d like to bed myself down in the long green.”
“That’s simply not true.”
“Don’t act like a mother-in-law. Try to believe what I’m saying. I get twenty dollars a month. That’s sixty-seven cents a day. If I go to Sullivan’s Saloon and buy two or three beers, a pack of cigarettes, and a sandwich, I’ve burned up my whole income. Wait a minute.”
Under the troubled eyes of the nurse he took out a shallow handful of silver and of dollar bills.
“Here’s six bucks and a half. Mary, will you go to a show with me tonight?”
“No. You see me every day. You need somebody new.”
“I don’t want your advice. I want you. Come along, will you?”
“Of course I will. I’d love it.”
“That’s right. Pretend a little. Nine-tenths of any party is the pretending that goes into it.”
“Jimmy, don’t be difficult. I really want to go.”
“You know what you’re being?”
“What?”
“Bighearted,” he said, and walked away from her. Over his shoulder he called: “See you in a half hour?”
She had not moved from the spot where he left her. She was looking after him with worried eyes and forgot to answer his last question.
When he got to his room, he found Tom Collins stretched out on one of the iron beds. He was so thin that he looked like a vacant suit of clothes with a head and hands stuck in the apertures.
“How about a beer at Mike’s?” asked Collins.
“No.”
“How about two beers at Mike’s?”
“I’m taking a girl to a show.”
“You’re what? What sort of a girl?” asked Collins.
“One that likes to relax; that’s why she puts up with me. Nobody tries, and so nobody gets tired.”
“Maybe you’ve got something—for an internist,” said Collins. “Look out for that box on the floor…”
But he had given the warning too late and Kildare caught his shoe on the rough edge of a flat packing box that projected from beneath his bed. The old leather tore like paper. The whole toe of the right shoe was left in tatters. Kildare, looking solemnly down, wriggled his stockinged toes.
“Is that your only pair of shoes?” asked Collins.
“It is,” said Kildare, “and there goes my party for this evening.”
“Don’t be a dope,” said Collins. “I’ve got more cash here than I can use, and…”
“Quit it, Tom,” said Kildare. “But who brought this damned box?”
“Old Creighton, the carpenter. He said that he couldn’t pay you in cash so he brought you that.”
Kildare tore off the top layer of composition board, lifted the paper packing, and exposed a small model of the World’s Fair, done with a cabinet-maker’s most delicate miniature touch, from the needle-sharp trylon and perisphere to the amphitheatre on a blue sea of glass.
“A waste of time,” said Collins.
“Of course,” answered Kildare. “But that’s why my family will like it.”
Heavy tape was holding his shoe together when he went down to Mary Lamont with the big, flat box under his arm. She looked like somebody’s sister, not the probation nurse who had been working with him. It was the first time he had seen her out of uniform, and she took his breath. She had on a wine-coloured coat of a material as soft as camel’s-hair, and a hat to match with a quill of yellow and orange stuck in a brim that furled up or down by surprise. Also she wore a scarf the colour of sunlight.
“You’re too expensive,” said Kildare. “I couldn’t take you even on trial. Put yourself back on the shelf, Mary…I mean, seriously: Look what’s happened to my shoes, and now the only show I can take you to is a secondhand shop.”
She refused to stay behind in the hospital, however. The best of any party was simply to get out in the open, she said. So she walked over with him to the express office, where he sent off the Fair model to his mother in Dartford. Then they were in a cellar store buying for two dollars and eighty-five cents a pair of half-soled shoes that once had cost ten or twelve.
“Now what? A moving picture?” he asked.
“No. We can’t talk in a moving picture.”
“We’ll pick up a beer in Sullivan’s Saloon then,” suggested Kildare. But when he had her there in the back room he was worried. There were three mugs talking loudly at a corner table, and for the first time in all his hours at the old saloon, he noticed the sawdust on the floor.
“Is it all right for you to be in this sort of a place?” he asked.
“Of course it’s all right,” she said. “Men like to talk in dark corners.”
“There’s no giggle and jitter about you,” said Kildare. “That’s one of the ways you’re different…What’ll you drink?”
“Beer,” said Mary Lamont.
“You don’t want beer. I can be a little more expensive than that.”
“I want beer,” she insisted, “if it’s on draught.”
“I’m going to hate the blighter who marries you and takes you away,” said Kildare. “Hello, Mike. Two beers when you get a chance.”
“Okay,” said Mike. He went over to the corner table and said grimly: “Why don’t you guys pipe down and give the doc a chance to hear himself think?”
“What doc?” one of them asked.
“It’s Kildare,” said Mike. “Don’t you know nothing?”
“Is that him? I thought he’d be twice that size. Let’s take these into the bar…”
They went out. “Hi, doc. How’s things?” they said.
“Stay where you are,” urged Kildare.
“Ah-h-h, we know when a guy wants elbow room,” said one of them, and winked at the intern. This remark tickled them all, and they went into the bar on a great blast of laughter.
Mike came back with two wet glasses of beer.
“You shouldn’t have troubled those fellows,” said Kildare.
“Yeah, and why not?” asked Mike. “Why shouldn’t you have your beer in peace, like usual?”
He was rubbing off the table with a painful thoroughness, throwing side glances at the girl.
“We used to see a lot more of you, doc,” he complained. “But maybe you got better things to do with your time.”
“No, Mike. But I’m standing double duty now in the hospital.”
“He doesn’t like me,” said the girl as Mike left the room. “He thinks I’m a bad influence.”
“Mike? He likes everyone,” said Kildare.
Big Weyman, the ambulance driver, entered the room and lounged back toward the table of Kildare.
“Mind if I ask you something, doc?” he was saying.
“It’s all right,” broke in Mary Lamont. “It’s only I, Weyman.”
The ambulance driver stopped short.
“Yeah, what d’you think of that dumb Mike telling me the doc was in here with a—Excuse me, Miss Lamont.” Weyman went out in haste.
“Was he trying to take care of me?” asked Kildare. “Did Mike send for that gorilla of a Weyman because he thought…”
He sat up straight in his chair and looked angrily at nothing in particular.
“People are always going to try to take care of you,” stated Mary Lamont.
“Do you mind telling me why?” he asked politely.
“Because you get absorbed in things and forget about yourself. Bulldog, bulldog…you’re always finding a lost cause and locking your teeth on it. That’s why I’m picking on you, Jimmy. I want to find out what hurt you so much today.”
“Gillespie,” said Kildare. “Can’t you see that he’s burning his life out and pouring himself away working day and night on this meningitis experiment?”