James Cain - The Cocktail Waitress

“I told you there was a reason.”

“You did, and I accept it. It explains everything.”

He sat there and I stood there, and for a moment things were awkward, as when two people are so overwhelmed by emotion they can’t think of things to say. But then my mouth got in it again, with just one last peep over what had bothered me earlier. “Just the same,” I banged at him, in a somewhat peevish way, “you could have asked me into your house. It’s a simply beautiful house, and the least you could do was let me look at it, just once.”

“There was a reason for that, too.”

“I’m a little fed up on reasons.”

“Casanova, somewhere in his memoirs, says a woman knows only one way of expressing gratitude. If that way had occurred to you, the consequences could have been catastrophic.”

“Casanova?”

“He, of all men, ought to know.”

“You think I might have taken that way?”

“If invited in, you might have.”

“And you couldn’t have resisted?”

“No, Joan, I’m not at all sure I could. And it would have been fatal.”

He waited a moment, to let that soak in, and went on: “You’d have been left with a corpse in your arms, and a check no bank would honor-not till my estate was probated, and your chances then would have been slim, extremely slim, considering the characters of my stepchildren. And I know how badly you need the money, Joan. I wanted you to have it. So I had you sit in the car, I took no chances.”

“I see.”

“It’s a fiendish sentence to live under. I realize we haven’t known each other for very long, but there is no mistaking how you make me feel, and I know how rare it is, and if it weren’t for this thing I’d give my eyes to marry you, to be with you morning, noon, and night-all the time. But it can’t be.”

“You make me want to cry.”

“While you’re about it, cry for me.”

It took me a week to adjust, to catch up with this change that had come in my life, this tremendous, incredible change. Each afternoon I’d sit and look out the window, checking over things I could do with the money I had come into. It was a problem. I had the wherewithal now to get my son back for sure-but no way to explain how I got it, not and be believed, either by Ethel herself or the members of the court she’d hint to about the immoral things I must have done to get a man to pay me so much. Things that in the court’s eyes would make me unfit to be put in charge of a child’s welfare, and not just for now but permanently. I could hear her voice: Where would you have gotten such a quantity of money, Joan? I won’t use the word for what you are, but you and I both know the only thing you have to sell.

At the same time, doing nothing with the money was hardly sensible, not when I had it and needed it so dearly. I had to find something that could get me out of this bind eventually. And then one day, as I stared at that house across the street, I woke up. I had often admired it: a two-and-a-half-story brick cottage, painted white, with nicely mown lawn and cedar trees each side of the drive. But what woke me up was the sign on the front lawn: FOR SALE, with a realtor’s name on it, his address, and phone number. Suddenly I got up, went to the phone, and dialed. Then I hung up before anyone answered. In the Yellow Pages I looked up another real estate man, Ross P. Linden, with offices in Hyattsville just a few blocks away. I rang, made an appointment, and next day went in to see him. He agreed to take over the job of buying, and at the end of the week closed my deal. He had beat the price down from $35,000 asking to $28,000 offered and accepted. He charged me $1,000 for his work, which I thought reasonable enough considering what he did. Then I went out and bought furnishings for it. I bought them at auction sales, which for things of that kind are usually held at night. That meant taking time off from my job, first telling Bianca. “Telling her,” I said, not “asking her”- and of course she put up a squawk. But, if she wanted me to stay on, there was nothing to say but yes, so she said it, swallowing hard. At the end of two weeks, for $1,200, I had the house very well furnished, with living room and dining room suites downstairs, bedroom things upstairs, and very nice rungs all around. On top of the $ 1,200 in regular furnishings, I put out $495 for a color TV, a beautiful cabinet-size thing that I splurged on deliberately. Because, I was getting this place ready to rent, rent furnished to the kind of people who might be in Washington only a short time, but needed a place to live in, a nice place they could have for themselves, their family, and friends- and a color TV, I thought, would act as very nice bait, something that might well tip the beam, make them decide between my place and some other place, if they liked to watch Steve Allen or Perry Como or Dinah Shore, all of whom were now broadcasting in color, or Howdy Doody if they had a little one. And within a week of the purchase going through I had the house rented, for $450 a month, to a couple from Akron, Ohio, who had jobs of some sort with HUD. When the husband and wife both work, they don’t have to count costs too closely, and can afford a very nice rental. They didn’t have any children and their name was Schroeder.

So, I had spent $31,000 of my $50,000, but still had things to do. On the mortgage, just under $5,000 dangled, and I went to the bank and paid it. I can’t say what a relief that was, what a blessed load off my back, as well as an albatross from around my neck. It still left me with $14,000 of my $50,000, and I went out and bought a car. I didn’t buy a new car, but one off a used-car lot, from a man I knew fairly well, from his coming in to the Garden and sitting with me quite often. He had a very nice Ford, a sedan, nicely polished, two years old but with not too much mileage on it, for $1,100. It was green, to blend with my hair, and when I drove it around the block, purred nicely, as though in good condition. The only thing was, it still had its original tires, and they were beginning to get worn. But I had Mr. Goss put five new whitewalls on it, for just over $100, and lo and behold, I had practically a brand-new car for the price of half of one.

So, I had one house free and clear, with no monthly $110 due, and except for taxes and upkeep, no expense at all, and another house free and clear, paying me $450 a month, subject to taxes and upkeep. Or in other words, with the $19.15 tip I still got every night, or nearly $115 a week, and the $150 a week over that that I made in tips at the Garden, I had about $1,500 a month before taxes, and over $10,000 in savings, making me $50 a month, about. Considering that just a few months before I was practically on relief, I knew I wasn’t doing too badly. I also hadn’t heard a peep from Private Church since the day he’d come to my house, leaving me to conclude that neither my recent transactions, if noticed at all, nor Ron’s exhumation had raised any matter of concern to the police. So I was feeling pleasantly up, quite happy with myself, when I drove out to the Lucases’ Sunday, for my weekly visit with Tad. I played it straight with Ethel, making no explanations at all of the car except to say that I had it, and all she could do was stare, first at it, then at me, and say: “I see, I see, I see.” What she saw I didn’t quite know, or to be frank about it, care. I’d been working long enough to afford a used car, on what I was making now; it wasn’t like suddenly appearing with $50,000 out of nowhere.

Tad was all excitement, as I had hoped he would be, and I loaded him in for a ride I had in mind, to the university at College Park, where they had a dairy building, as part of their farm complex, where you can get ice cream of various kinds, experimental kinds, most of them wonderful, not at all like what they sell in “parlors” as they’re called. They brought a book for Tad to sit on, but I held him on my lap, and ordered something made with diced dates for myself and plain strawberry for him, as being pink, pretty, and tasty.