Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

“Well, Jo Lee or Marguerite, then. I mean, you know, any girl who happened to work here.”

“Just any girl.”

“That’s right.”

“Any girl at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like Lucille Lathrop, even.”

“—”

“Chip, I’m an old woman. I’ve been years in the same business and seen every kind of man there is to see, and I can tell whether a man’s getting it or not, or if he’s the kind of man who wants it or not. And I know you’re getting it, and getting it regular, and I know you like what you’re getting. And you’re not getting it here where it’s all over the place for the taking, and you’re not out catting around, so where else would you be getting it?”

“You’ve known all along?”

“Took it for granted.”

“Does anyone else—”

“Claude Tyles asked what you were doing for love, and I imagine I led him to think you were alternating between Rita and Claureen. When did you find out she was pregnant?”

“This afternoon.”

“How long gone is she?”

“Almost two months.”

“She’s sure about it?”

“She seems to be.”

“Instead of stealing rubbers from around here, you should have told me and I would have gotten pills for her. You can’t count on rubbers, don’t you know that? Well, that’s under the bridge. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry the girl? Have an abortion? What?”

“I don’t know.”

She did something odd. She put her hand on top of mine for a minute, then gave a squeeze and took her own hand back.

She said, “Chip, if she just told you today then you’re in a bad way. You sure she didn’t tell you a week ago?”

“No. Why?”

“You didn’t suspect until today?”

“Never.”

“Because you’ve been walking round in grand confusion for better than a week, and if it’s not that it’s something else, and now with this on top of it you must be in a bad way.”

“I guess I am.”

“Chip, I’m too old to get shocked or disappointed or anything but older, and I can’t even get that too much. I’m not much for questions. But you got something that you got to tell to somebody, and I guess I can do a better job of listening than most. You can just put it straight out and not stop first to think how it’ll sound.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or you can tell me to forget it and I will. I’m good at forgetting. I can forget just about anything.”

“No,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where to start.”

The words were all there waiting, and once I opened the valve they poured out. A couple of times she filled in with a question but she didn’t have to do that very often. I just went ahead and talked until there were no words left. I probably said the same thing half a dozen times in different ways. If I repeated myself, she pretended not to notice. She sat there and took it all in until I was done.

Then she went to the bar and came back with a water glass full of something. She handed it to me and I looked at it.

“Just plain corn,” she said. For a minute I thought she was referring to what I had said. “Corn whiskey,” she said. “Drink it.”

“The whole thing? It’ll kill me.”

“The state you’re in, it would take a quart before you’d feel a thing. All this’ll do is settle you some. Go ahead and drink it.”

I finished it in three gulps. It went down like fire. I guess it settled me some.

“Now I’ll tell you a story, Chip. Story about a girl like Rita or Claureen, just a down-home girl who wasn’t much and wound up going with men for money. Her pa ran off when she wasn’t more than a bit of a girl and all she ever had from him was a postcard once in a while. Maybe she built him up a little in her mind but not all that much. Then one day after she’s been hustling for a time she hears from one of her aunts that got a telegram from Norfolk. My… this girl’s father was in a fight in a waterfront bar and some sailor broke a bottle over his head and he’s in the hospital with his skull fractured.

“So this girl goes to Norfolk to see her pa, and he’s in a hospital there. She visits him but he’s in a coma, and after a week he dies without ever coming out of it. And she makes arrangements to ship the body back here to be buried next to my mother.

“Now while this girl was in Norfolk… that’s two slips so far, I suspect you could put a name to this girl if you were pressed, couldn’t you? Doesn’t matter. This girl, while she’s in Norfolk, she meets this man and one thing leads to another. This man is in naval stores in Baltimore. A good family. He wants her to marry him and come on back to Baltimore.

“And it’s like a dream to her. This man, he’s rich, and he’s a good man, and he wants her to marry him. But she thinks, Now, how can I marry up with him when I’ve got all this in my past? And what if he finds out?

“So she decides to tell him, and she tells him. And he says what does he care, because that’s something that happened in South Carolina and what does it have to do with Baltimore, and as far as he’s concerned it never happened at all, and it doesn’t bother him one bit, and if it bothers her then she’s a fool, and he knows she’s not a fool.

“And she thinks, well, it’ll bother him in the years to come. But if it ever does she never knows about it, he never once throws it back to her, as it turns out.

“So she goes to Baltimore, and they’re married, and there were all these things she was afraid of, how his family would take to her and what his friends would think, and none of the things she worries about ever come to pass. She thinks maybe she’ll meet someone from her past and it’ll ruin everything, but none of this ever happens. There are all of these things she worries about and it turns out she needn’t have worried about any of them, because none of them ever come to pass.

“And she’s an intelligent girl, Chip. She has a good mind. She always educated herself and paid some mind to how people talked, and she goes on doing this in Baltimore, and his family and friends like her. They accept her completely. Completely. They never even think he married beneath him because they get to thinking that she comes from quality people down in South Carolina.

“She’s there for three years, and in that space of time she sees that the things that worried her are nothing at all. And she has a child. A little boy.”

She stopped talking and her eyes were focused into the distance at a point somewhere over my shoulder. Whatever she was looking at was in some other room.

“And one day she said I’m not me no more. And she put a few weeks into thinking on that, and one morning she left the baby with the maid and took a taxi downtown to the railroad station. She wouldn’t look out that train window for fear she might get off at the next stop. She just sat there, this fine lady in these expensive clothes, and she stared straight ahead and didn’t see a thing.

“She never looked back, ever.

“Whether they looked for her or not she never knew. She left him a note saying she was running off with another man. She figured if you want to hurt somebody you do it quick and clean, and if you want to do one thing decent it’s to have the guts to make people hate you if it’ll be easier for them that way. Because the hate won’t reach you because you’ll be out of it, and if it’ll sear another person’s wounds…”

She was silent for a long time, but I didn’t say anything because I knew she hadn’t finished.

Then she said, “Of course, she wasn’t the same girl who went off to Norfolk three years earlier. She saw things in a way she never would have seen them before. She knew how to talk like a lady. She knew manners. But she could let them slide off and nobody knew the difference. Except for what she knew of herself.