“How I would love to take a holiday just with you. It’s been forever.”
“We’re short on unattached elderly female relatives. Put your mind to it. If only we could can them or salt or pickle them for a little while. Mary, madonna, put your mind to it. I ache to be alone with you in a strange place. We could walk the dunes and swim naked at night and I would tousle you in a fern bed.”
“Darling, I know, darling. I know it’s been hard on you. Don’t think I don’t know.”
“Well, hold me close. Let’s think of some way.”
“You’re still shivering. Do you feel cold?”
“Cold and hot, full and empty—and tired.”
“I’ll try to think of something. I really will. Of course I love them but—”
“I know, and I could wear my bow tie—”
“Will they put them in jail?”
“I wish we could—”
“Those men?”
“No. It won’t be necessary. They can’t even appear before next Tuesday, and Thursday is election. That’s what it’s for.”
“Ethan, that’s cynical. You aren’t like that. We’ll have to go away if you’re getting cynical because—that wasn’t a joke, the way you said it. I know your jokes. You meant that.”
A fear struck me. I was showing through. I couldn’t let myself show through. “Oh say, Miss Mousie, will you marry me?”
And Mary said, “Oho! Oho!”
My sudden fear that I might be showing through was very great. I had made myself believe that the eyes are not the mirror of the soul. Some of the deadliest little female contraptions I ever saw had the faces and the eyes of angels. There is a breed that can read through skin and through bone right into the center, but they are rare. For the most part people are not curious except about themselves. Once a Canadian girl of Scottish blood told me a story that had bitten her and the telling bit me. She said that in the age of growing up when she felt that all eyes were on her and not favorably, so that she went from blushes to tears and back again, her Highland grandfather, observing her pain, said sharply, “Ye wouldna be sae worrit[62] wi’ what folk think about ye if ye kenned how seldom they do.” It cured her and the telling reassured me of privacy, because it’s true. But Mary, who ordinarily lives in a house of flowers of her own growing, had heard a tone, or felt a cutting wind. This was a danger, until tomorrow should be over.
If my plan had leaped up full-grown and deadly I would have rejected it as nonsense. People don’t do such things, but people play secret games. Mine began with Joey’s rules for robbing a bank. Against the boredom of my job I played with it and everything along the way fell into it—Allen and his mouse mask, leaking toilet, rusty pistol, holiday coming up, Joey wadding paper in the lock of the alley door. As a game I timed the process, enacted it, tested it. But gunmen shooting it out with cops—aren’t they the little boys who practiced quick draws with cap pistols until they got so good they had to use the skill?
I don’t know when my game stopped being a game. Perhaps when I knew I might buy the store and would need money to run it. For one thing, it is hard to throw away a perfect structure without testing it. And as for the dishonesty, the crime—it was not a crime against men, only against money. No one would get hurt. Money is insured. The real crimes were against men, against Danny and against Marullo. If I could do what I had done, theft was nothing. And all of it was temporary. None of it would ever have to be repeated. Actually, before I knew it was not a game, my procedure and equipment and timing were as near perfection as possible. The cap-pistol boy found a .45 in his hand.
Of course an accident was possible but that is so in crossing the street or walking under a tree. I don’t think I had any fear. I had rehearsed that out of me, but I did have a breathlessness, like the stage fright of an actor standing in the wings on his opening night. And it was like a play in that every conceivable mischance had been inspected and eliminated.
In my worry that I would not sleep, I slept, deeply and as far as I know without dreams, and overslept. I had planned to use the dark pre-day for the calming medicine of contemplation. Instead, when my eyes jerked open, the tail of the cow in the lake had been visible at least half an hour. I awakened with a jar like the blow of driven air from high explosive. Sometimes such an awakening sprains muscles. Mine shook the bed so that Mary awakened, saying, “What’s the matter?”
“I’ve overslept.”
“Nonsense. It’s early.”
“No, my ablative absolute. This is a monster day for me. The world will be grocery-happy today. Don’t you get up.”
“You’ll need a good breakfast.”
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll get a carton of coffee at the Foremaster and I’ll raven Marullo’s shelves like a wolf.”
“You will?”
“Rest, little mouse of a mouseness, and try to find a way for us to escape from our darling children. We need that. I mean it.”
“I know we do. I’ll try to think.”
I was dressed and gone before she could suggest any of the seasonal things for my protection and comfort.
Joey was in the coffee shop and he patted the stool beside him.
“Can’t, Morph. I’m late. Annie, could you give me a quart of coffee in a carton?”
“It’ll have to be two pints, Eth.”
“Good. Even gooder.”
She filled and covered the little paper buckets and put them in a bag.
Joey finished and walked across with me.
“You’ll have to say mass without the bishop this morning.”
“Guess so. Say, how about that news?”
“I can’t take it in.”
“You remember I said I smelled something.”
“I thought about that when I heard it. You’ve got quite a nose.”
“It’s part of the trade. Baker can come back now. Wonder if he will.”
“Come back?”
“You get no smell there?”
I looked at him helplessly. “I’m missing something and I don’t even know what it is.”
“Jesus God.”
“You mean I should see something?”
“That’s what I mean. The law of the fang is not repealed.”
“Oh, Lord! There must be a whole world I miss. I was trying to remember whether it’s both lettuce and mayonnaise you like.”
“Both.” He stripped the cellophane cover from his pack of Camels and wadded it to push in the lock.
“Got to go,” I said. “We’ve got a special sale on tea. Send in a box top, you get a baby! Know any ladies?”
“I sure do, and that’s about the last prize they want. Don’t bother to bring them, I’ll come for the sandwiches.” He went in his door and there was no click of the spring lock. I did hope that Joey never discovered that he was the best teacher I had ever had. He not only informed, he demonstrated and, without knowing it, prepared a way for me.
Everyone who knew about such things, the experts, agreed that only money gets money. The best way is always the simplest. The shocking simplicity of the thing was its greatest strength. But I really believe it was only a detailed daydream until Marullo through none of his fault walked in his own darkness over a cliff. Once it seemed almost certain that I could get the store for my own, only then did the high-flown dreaming come down to earth. A good but ill-informed question might be: If I could get the store, why did I need money? Mr. Baker would understand, so would Joey—so, for that matter, would Marullo. The store without running capital was worse than no store at all. The Appian Way[63] of bankruptcy is lined with the graves of unprotected ventures. I have one grave there already. The silliest soldier would not throw his whole strength at a break-through without mortars or reserves or replacements, but many a borning business does just that. Mary’s money in marked bills bulged against my bottom in my hip pocket, but Marullo would take as much of that as he could get. Then the first of the month. The wholesale houses are not openhanded with credit for unproved organizations. Therefore I would still need money, and that money was waiting for me behind ticking steel doors. The process of getting it, designed as daydreams, stood up remarkably when inspected. That robbery was unlawful troubled me very little. Marullo was no problem. If he were not the victim he might have planned it himself. Danny was troubling, even though I could with perfect truth assume that he was finished anyway. Mr. Baker’s ineffectual attempt to do the same thing to Danny gave me more justification than most men need. But Danny remained a burning in my guts and I had to accept that as one accepts a wound in successful combat. I had to live with that, but maybe it would heal in time or be walled off with forgetfulness the way a shell fragment gets walled off with cartilage.
62
Ye wouldna be sae worrit: “My dear, you wouldn’t worry so much about what people think if you realized how little they care.” According to Jackson Benson, Steinbeck heard this line on a 1956 train trip from Sag Harbor to New York City.