Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“You think you can change the mind of Minerva?”

“Stranger things have been accomplished.”

“I better get to my typewriter.”

He watched her go—the magnificence of her hair—the absurdity of her make-up—the splendor of her bosom and hips—the fantastic smallness of her high-heeled shoes. His blood stirred and he half rose.

“Old ass,” he said of himself, aloud.

Just before daybreak, remembering he’d had no dinner, he went down to Court Avenue and Fenwick and had pumpkin pie and coffee at the Baltimore Lunch. Some raggedy women, charwomen from the tall buildings, were sliding trays along the vast cafeteria’s silver rails. A man—perhaps a once-respectable man—a bum now. One of his own reporters. A young girl in a yellow evening dress, a too-young girl, for the hour, with a disheveled college boy, slightly drunk. The white-dressed people behind the glass counters and steam tables looked sleepy.

He went back up in the lonely elevator and watched dawn invest the cities.

Life returned to the great building, where it had not quite perished in the long night. The presses, underground, shook it a little. Doors slammed. Elevators hummed at intervals. It didn’t sleep, quite. And as the light increased, the tower became a tympanum that vibrated in tempo with the increasing traffic down below.

When the sun cut deep into the man-made canyons, throwing aside the rectilinear shadows of the buildings, shining on windshields, bus tops, palisades of glass windows, he knew Minerva would be awake. She would be ringing for her maid. Getting coffee and a folded copy of the morning paper which she owned. Making phone calls to executives who would try, by alert rejoinders, to pretend they, also, greeted every daybreak with all snoring put aside, eyes open and a message to Garcia avidity for the new day’s commands. Coley knew.

His phone rang. “Lo?”

“This is Minerva Sloan.”

“’Morning, Minerva. How—”

“You’re fired, Coley.”

He put on his hat and coat when he went out that time.

Gossip can have good uses. It is deplored because its uses are so often opposite. They depend on who does the gossiping; through idle talk, the well-disposed sometimes find out about the hidden sufferings of others and go to their aid—or they learn the degree of temptation that resulted in a sin and so forgive the sinner. Without gossip, indeed, life would be dull and much of its subtle business would remain unfinished. It has, however, a poor reputation amongst conscientious people; they usually inhibit impulse if the material in their minds seems of a gossipy nature.

Silence can be unfortunate. If, before Chuck’s departure for the base in Texas, his father had let drop the fact that Beau Bailey had asked him for a loan of five thousand, Beau’s life might have been changed. For Chuck might then have reported noticing Beau, slugged and furtive, as he emerged from a shady building in The Block. Those two facts, if they had by chance come out at the dinner table, might have led Mrs. Conner to express certain observations and opinions she had kept to herself. They were, first, that Charles had returned to service in a concealed but very deep depression, second, that the newspapers had published a picture of Lenore and Kit Sloan and that Lenore didn’t seem very happy in the photograph, and third, that Beau was drinking more than ever while Netta, surprisingly, was going around like a cat with the canary well down and the feathers lapped clear. Nora, then confessing her innocent eavesdropping, could have confirmed what Charles had not disclosed and her mother only suspected: Lenore and Kit were, indeed, resuming an interest, Such, at any rate, were the facts and observations at the collective disposal of the family.

Had they been pooled, through gossip, they would certainly have led the Conners to the conclusion that Beau was in worse financial trouble than usual, that he had possibly done something desperate or illegal to try to scramble from his perennial difficulties, that Netta was

“throwing Lenore at Kit Sloan’s head”—with some success, and in the transparent hope of establishing a state of permanent family solvency—that Lenore had finally told Chuck their affection was impracticable and that their unexpressed “understanding” no longer existed, and that the neighbor girl was not pleased with the exploitation of her beauty.

If they had clearly realized all this, the Connors, being kind-hearted, would have acted.

They would have acted out of generosity, even if the lifelong love of their older son and their deep fondness for Lenore hadn’t been involved. Hank would have offered Beau the five thousand, selling a mortgage he’d taken for a friend, or cashing in some war bonds, or borrowing on his insurance or, perhaps, just asking for a loan from Mr. Morse, the owner of the hardware stores. But since, by and large, the Conners didn’t gossip, the bits and tabs of information which would have made clear a whole only hazily suspected were never assembled.

Beau’s “moral fiber,” such as it was, consisted of conflicts amongst fears. His capacity to be afraid, however, was considerable. A man who was a physical coward, and nothing else, would have capitulated if possible to the warning Jake had emphasized by having Toledo “slug him a couple.” But Beau was more afraid of prison than of blows; could he have served a term under an assumed name, he would have dreaded prison far less than social ostracism. He feared his wife next most of all persons, Minerva Sloan most.

Hence it was not until the last week in Octoher that Beau, made desperate by a series of ever-more-menacing (and constantly harder-to-explain) phone calls, decided to act. Jake, and Toledo, had taken to phoning him at the bank and their voices were not the sort Beau wanted to have the operator hear. Like many who commit crime, however, Beau was brought to the actual deed by idle opportunity as much as by resolve.

It was a period of pre-Christmas inventory.

From the vaults, methodically, with armed guards watching, a number of “portfolios” were fetched for checking. These were, of course, not cardboard “folios” but metal boxes containing lists, account books, receipts, letters, orders, and sheaves of certificates.

And it was while this routine checking was in progress late one afternoon that Miss Tully’s mother got a sudden appendicitis, called the doctor, was whisked to the Jenkins Memorial Hospital which, like the Presbyterian Church and some of the city’s finest residences, was situated on the shore of Crystal Lake. The hospital promptly informed Miss Tully an emergency operation was imminent; that distracted woman, who had served the bank for twenty-seven years (with a total absence of but eleven days), appealed to Beau. He was not very nice about it, but he let her go.

It left him with her work to be “shouldered” in addition to his own. He happened that day to have nothing whatever left to do. It was three fifteen, a rainy, raw afternoon, and the main floor, with cages all around and stand-up desks in rows in the center, was already empty of customers. The doors were closed and Bill Maine, the front-door guard, was reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post in a shaft of insufficient light that fell from the outer gloom through a high, barred window.

The bank was comparatively quiet. Business machines made more noise than voices. No clerk, of course, could hear the hard rain, for the roof was twenty-odd stories overhead and the rain fell straight. When Miss Tully departed, in still-damp, evil-smelling accouterments for foul weather, Beau was left in his office with three large deposit boxes and Miss Ames, his secretary, a niece of a vice-president, a recent business-school graduate, suffering now from a head cold.