Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

From a second paper bag he pawed out a number of soft, rounded buns, split through the middle and spread with hamburger.

“What’d you do, buy out the whole store?” she shrieked in an appalling cat-call.

“We’re gunna be here for a while, ain’t we?”

Her lack of comment indicated complete acquiescence.

“Wuddle your old lady say?” he jeered. The jeer was meant for the old lady, not for her.

A dripping beer can in one hand, crumbling hamburger in the other, he flung himself full-length on the white-enamel bedstead, crossed his heels and elevated them to the foot-rail.

“Ah, she’s a pain in the neck,” the girl screeched impatiently.

“They all are. Mine was too, until I got too big for her. Now she don’t make a peep. She better not, boy.”

She was still intent on her own maternal difficulties, not his previous ones. “She already thinks I’ve done this.”

“How diya know?” he shot at her.

“She’s all the time warning me about it.” She performed a savage parody, clasping her hands before her face, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling, and dragging down the corners of her mouth dolorously. ‘Oh, I only hope I’m not too late,’ she keeps moaning, ‘I only hope I’m not too late.’ ”

“Y’ better go around wearing a sign after tonight. ‘You’re too late.’ So she don’t have to worry about you any more.”

They both went into thunderclaps of laughter, as shattering as the dropping of ashcan lids on a cement pavement.

When the guffaws had stilled finally, he up-ended the beer can so that the last remaining drops would fall through the puncture into his open mouth, then cast it away from him with a clatter.

By now she was seated on the edge of the bed, with her back to him, head bent to the newspaper he had brought in.

“Whattiya gunna do, sit there all night reading the paper?” He pawed clumsily at her shoulder from behind, so that momentarily she half toppled over, then immediately righted herself again like a rubber plaything. She slashed her arm backwards at him, to ward him off. It was more a reflex than an intended blow. “Come on, babe,” he whispered.

“Lemme finish reading about this blonde first.”

“Why? Whadda you care? She’s dead, ain’t she? So what’s to read?”

Absorbed, she didn’t answer. “Ah, she was just a high-class tramp,” he said airily.

“But she wasn’t until she started,” she pointed out. “She wasn’t before. Everyone, even one of them, s’got to start sometime.”

She read a little further.

“I wonder what she was like. Then, I mean. At the start.”

“Like you are now,” he shrugged. She got up from the bed abruptly, went over to the tarnished mirror, peered into it, still holding the paper.

“Whattiya looking at?” he said idly, without watching her, blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

“Me, like I am now,” the girl said, bending forward even closer. Then she moved her head aside and down, and stared with equal intentness at the photo in the paper.

“Matter, you don’t know what you look like?” he mocked, but still without watching her.

“I know what I look like now,” she replied thoughtfully, “but I wonder what I’ll look like—” She didn’t finish it and her eyes went back to the paper once more.

She came away at last, still staring at the picture in the paper.

All of a sudden the paper rippled to the floor, its pages molting.

“I’m going home, Frankie.” She didn’t squall it. For the first time all evening — maybe all year and the year before — she spoke quietly.

“You — what?” He sat bolt upright on the bed.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I’m — I’m afraid.”

“Whatsa matter with you anyway,” he yelled. “I lived on the same street with you all my life.”

Her thoughts now seemed to be elsewhere.

“They always do. They always do. The first one of them all. And then after a while, they don’t live on the same street with you. And then after a while, they find you dead. Like her.”

Then, without saying anything more, she flung the door open and ran out.

He leaped from the bed and started after her. His foot stepped squarely on the face of the woman in the discarded paper as he flew through the open door after her.

The room was high up in the building. He leaned over the stair-rail and looked down. Her feet were pattering below him, around and around.

“Hey, Ginny, come on back!” he shouted down the stairwell. “Come on back, will ya!”

But the way she ran, the terrified way she ran, he knew she wouldn’t return. And he knew something else too. She wasn’t running like that because she was afraid of being pursued — she was running like that because she was afraid of the future.

The delivery truck drove up alongside the stand at exactly 9:29 P.M.

“Twanny-four returns,” Mom said.

The headline said, BLONDE BEAUTY SLAIN.

Mom sat back, propped her elbows, and waited.

The expensive black limousine had had to wait there for a traffic light. The man in the back leaned forward and said something to his chauffeur. The young colored driver, spruce in his uniform, immediately got out, crossed over on foot, and came up to the stand.

“Times?” he said.

“Not up yet,” said Mom.

“How about the Herald-Trib, then?”

“Not up yet either,” Mom said. “They don’t come up until eleven thirty.”

He looked a little disconcerted. He even glanced over to where he’d left the car, as if weighing the possibility of going back for further instructions.

But the light had changed meanwhile and the impeding limousine was being honked at by several blocked cars in back of it. “All right, I’ll take a tab,” he said quickly.

He snatched one up, turned away, and hustled back to his driver’s seat. He closed the door after him, started the car off then handed the paper over the seat to the man in the back.

The latter put the light on. When he saw the name of the paper he looked up questioningly. “What’s this, Bruce?”

“That’s the best I could do, Mr. Elliott,” the young chauffeur explained. “The Times isn’t out yet.”

His employer tucked it away in his coat-pocket sight unseen. “Oh, well,” he drawled good-naturedly. “I’ll just have to do without reading tonight.”

Bruce chuckled a little.

Mr. Elliott lit a cigar and watched the sights go by.

In the morning he found his wife June at the table ahead of him, as he always did. He liked to. Not that she had anything to do with preparing breakfast — that was the cook’s job; but, he always said to himself, she brightened up the table just by being there. With her yellow-jersey jumper and her little-girl hair hanging loose all about her head, she could have passed for a teenager.

He kissed her good morning, then once more for good measure.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, indicating what was outside the picture window.

“Each morning gets better than the one before. People who live in the city are such fools.”

His Times was there now, waiting for him. It came in every morning, of course. It was just that he had wanted to kill time by having something to read on the drive home last night. He furled it over, all the way back at the financial section. Those pages were the only ones he ever read carefully. However, before he’d quite finished, they had a problem on their hands. Oh, not a very large one, but one concerning Dickie, and any problem concerning Dickie always received full consideration. They were that kind of parents.

Amy brought him in with her. Amy was his governess (Bryn Mawr, post-graduate course in child care and training), and Bruce’s wife.