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

“Any wife has it in her, when the cards fall that way,” she said softly, with infinite wisdom. “Any wife. Even a poker-player’s wife.”

I was twenty-one, and the time was ’29, and the town was San Francisco.

The San Francisco of our dreams, all those of us who lived back inland, on the farms and in the valleys and on the upslopes leading toward the mountains. The San Francisco where the money was, the San Francisco where success was, the San Francisco where beautiful women were. Many of whom you’d love when you went there (or so you dreamed). One of whom you’d finally marry there and settle down with there.

I didn’t have much; you don’t have much at twenty-one. Then again, you have everything. I had a hotel-room that had cost me the standard two-dollars-and-a-half just off the upper end of Market Street, mine till three the next day. I had a valise in that hotel-room — originally my father’s, from his own young footloose days, but he had turned it over to me for my first trip away from home. In the hotel-safe for safekeeping (“The management is not responsible,” etc.) I had, I think, forty or fifty dollars.

But I had a job, a good one too, starting Monday morning at nine.

And this was Saturday night.

I’d come in two days ahead, just to make sure no one would get the job away from me by default. Trains could be delayed, anything could happen.

I’d had a meal, and I stood now in front of an Owl Drugstore some distance down Market from where I’d started out, looking at each girl going by. Each one who had no man with her. I was not truthfully what the period referred to as a “drugstore cowboy,” but there wasn’t any other way than this for me to meet a girl. The town was new to me. Back home I had a small notebook with various names in it, but here I didn’t know a soul.

Looking back now, it seems strange to think of the way the women dressed at that time. I don’t think at any time, before or since, was the dress of women more of a universal uniform, with less variation in it. They were all straight up-and-down-hanging things, completely shapeless, with no waists to them. They were like shifts or long undershirts down to the knees. The only variation that could possibly enter into them was that of color, and to a lesser degree, texture or fabric. And I don’t think, either, that at any time before or since has the natural configuration of women, their body-contours, been more toned down, more effaced. The ideal of the period was quite frankly the tomboyish figure or form, and to achieve this the bosom was ruthlessly flattened to invisibility, the waist was obliterated, and the curve of the hips was planed down. Their figures were like pipe-stem-cleaners. Even in the wearing of the hair the sex-differences were kept at a minimum, for not only was it worn cropped short by almost all women of every age, but many of the younger ones even had it shingled and razored on the back of the neck the way men did.

Of all the feminine attributes, only the smallness of the hands, the feet, and the facial features had not been tampered with in one way or another. Simply because they could not be, I suppose.

I stood there watching them all go by, and I wouldn’t have been twenty-one, and on my own in a brand-new town, if I hadn’t hoped for a signal from one of them that my company, my presence at her side, would be accepted. Once or twice I even made a false start, thinking I had seen such an indication, but because no additional encouragement was forthcoming, I lost my nerve and fell back again. I was not an expert Casanova or Don Juan or whatever the word for it is. Back in the small town I’d come from, each boy knew almost all the girls of a like age, and a procedure such as this was uncalled-for.

So the crowd passed back and forth, the halcyon street-crowd of a halcyon period, both alike carefree, untroubled by any cosmic fears of destruction, untroubled even by economic doubts or worries. Fun, a good time, was the only criterion.

The Golden Twenties, almost over, just about to end, but nobody knew that yet. They seemed intended to stay on forever. Oh, everyone knew the date on the calendar would change in just a few short months more, but no one thought the spirit of the times ever would.

Finally, just when I was about ready to give up and move on elsewhere, or else resign myself to spending the evening alone, my perseverance paid off. I looked into the eyes of someone going by, and she not only returned the look, she held it steadily, for as long as we were opposite one another.

There could be no mistaking it this time. She stood there poised at the brink of the sidewalk longer than was necessary in order to obtain a favorable chance to cross over safely. Several breaks in the cross-street traffic offered themselves, and she didn’t take advantage of them.

Finally she glanced very charily over her own shoulder, not all the way around but just enough to show me her profile, and smiled very slightly in interrogation. The smile plainly was meant to say, Aren’t you going to come over and speak to me? That’s what I’m waiting here for.

Someone more experienced than I at this sort of thing might have detected a touch of furtiveness about her bearing that detracted from it by that much, but I was too new at it to go in for nuances. Besides, in what other way could she have gone about it? She couldn’t be too obvious about it without the risk of attracting humiliating attention on the public sidewalk.

I stepped forward away from the glass drugstore-showcase — I had been leaning out from it interrogatively — and went after her, reached her, and stopped there alongside her.

We both smiled at each other, openly now, she as well as I.

“How are you?” I said, informally if not very originally.

“I’m all right,” she said. “How’re you?” Friendlily, if also not very originally.

After this opening gambit, the conversation picked up pace, even though it remained staccato for some time to come yet, due, I suppose, to our not knowing each other well as yet.

“Going any place?” I asked.

“Just out walking,” she said.

“All right if I come along with you?” I asked.

“If you want to,” she said demurely.

“I do want to,” I said. “I like your looks.”

“Thanks,” she smiled appreciatively. “I like yours too,” she said.

That ended the preliminary stage. We now knew each other, technically speaking. We were now indissolubly together for the space of the evening, and, as in the larger area covered by a marriage-ceremony, no one dared separate us or try to come between us. At least not without answering to me. She was now my girl, at least for the time being, and I was her date. Youth doesn’t go in for long-winded introductory build-ups.

“Want to go to a show?” I asked, as we finally breached the crossing that had held her back for so long.

“I don’t think so,” she said without enthusiasm. “I saw one last night.”

“Do you want to have something to eat?” was my next proposal of entertainment.

“I had something just a little while before you came along,” she said to that.

I had nearly run out of suggestions by now. “Well, do you want to have a drink, then?”

This, for the first time, was met willingly. “Sure, if you want to yourself,” was the way she put it.

“The only trouble is,” I had to admit, “I’m new here. I don’t know where any of the speaks are.”

“I don’t know where the speaks are myself,” she said, making a distinction. “But I do know a place we could go.”