Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”

“Beau. You can’t fool me.”

“I’m not trying to!”

Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.

“Okay,” she said steadily. “Who was it?”

“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a business call.”

“Your business, though. Not the bank’s.”

Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”

The question allowed her to pretend the reality of a mere assumption. “So it was personal. Beau! What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”

Netta sat down on the arm of the huge, flower-print-covered divan the decorator had chosen for them. “You can tell me now or you can argue awhile. Either way, Beau, I’ll find out from you.”

His voice suddenly filled the room, taut, shrill, surprising him even more than Netta. “None of your goddamned business!”

“It’s really bad trouble, isn’t it?”

“Who said it was trouble?” His face had puckered like the face of a baby trying to decide whether to produce a tantrum or a spell of pitiable tears.

“How much is it going to cost us?”

“Netta—stop jumping to such crazy conclusions!”

She could tell, to a decibel, a hairbreadth, when he was lying and when he was not. She went on implacably, “If you’ve just hocked something—or borrowed on the cars….”

“What have we got to hock that isn’t already hocked, including the cars?” He stared at her with momentary self-righteousness.

She said, “Then it is money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.

“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more drink until you explain.”

He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”

“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance…!” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.

“How much money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—

thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed…!” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”

Tears filled Beau’s eyes. “All my life,” he recited, “I’ve done just one thing and one thing only, scrimped and sweat and slaved and hit the old ball, so you and Lenore could have a fine life. I have no pleasures of my own, no vices, no indulgences—”

She was looking at him, white-faced, oblivious to his stale stock of good providing.

“Those—‘bonuses,’ you called them! The ‘little windfalls,’ you said! The fur coat you got Lenore! The new deep-freeze you made a little killing just in time to pay for! All that ?”

“A man,” he responded in a ghastly tone, “can get so devoted to his family he’ll stop at nothing for their sake—”

Netta said a word she had learned in her childhood environs, monosyllabic and succulent-sounding. It was one of the first words she had ever known. She sat up. “You’ve been gambling !”

“How do you know?”

“Horses!”

“And I did all right.” Her guess seemed to release him. “And if I had some real dough to lay on the line, I could get back what I’m down—!”

“Where? What bookie. Jake! That was Jake on the phone!”

Now, for the first time, Netta was more frightened than angry. “Beau, do you really owe Jake Tanetti five thousand dollars?”

“I didn’t think it was that much. I thought—around three. But he says five.”

“Then it’s five.” Netta sat silent for a moment, her chest heaving. Once or twice she looked speculatively at Beau. Finally she smiled at him wanly. “Come over here. Sit beside me.”

“Net, I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”

She beckoned. Heavily, he rose and cautiously approached. He seated himself as gingerly as if the divan had been an electric chair. But Netta didn’t swat him or even yell at him. She just took his hand and held it in her own and stared at it and finally said, softly, “Beau, my boy, you’ve done some dumb things in your day, but—this is really Grade-A trouble. I’m not sore. I’m sorry.”

She meant it. Meant the compassion she displayed, the calm. Intellectually Netta knew that the only way to manage Beau now would be with gentleness. Anything harsh might easily snap the thin threads of his remaining pride and cause him to do something still more rash. Not suicide. But—he might confess to Minerva Sloan and throw himself (and her and Lenore, as incidentals) on the mercy of the old woman. There was no such thing as mercy in Minerva, Netta knew; she’d had a good deal of experience in the absence of mercy. So there was reason for her to hold her tongue and to treat Beau with restraint.

But something much deeper also moved Netta, something she did not understand. It was pity. She realized that she had never pitied Beau before; she had always, in fact, felt slightly inferior to him because of her background. Now, however, she suddenly felt equal. His descent to this level, his victimization by the bookmaker, even his gambling per se, as his way of trying to clamber from his eternally sticky finances, touched Netta in a familiar spot. Her mother, father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles had lived in this place, owing what they could not pay, guilty of merely taking a chance and losing, and faced in sudden consequence with the malignity of forces vastly mightier than themselves: rackets, unions, the law, the church, street gangs, hoods, noble powers that became suddenly evil and evil powers that were ceaselessly opposed to everybody, to life itself and letting live.

Netta came closer to loving Beau then than ever before.

“You’re the cashier of a big bank,” she said carefully, “so you can’t gamble. That means this business must not come out.”

“If I don’t pay Jake—”

“Sure. If you don’t—it will. That’s Jake.” She said it as if “Jake” were a force of nature, not a person. “So he has to get paid.”

“How?”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure. He’ll probably take something down….”

Beau brightened a little. “He said he would. Half now. Half later.”

“So, okay. All you need right off is two grand and a half.”

He shrugged. “Might as well be two million.”

“I’ve heard you say, Beau, you could lay your hands on fortunes, and nobody would be wiser for years.”

He pulled away from her. “The bank?”

“You said…?” she gestured casually.