John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent

“You’d make a joke about anything,” Mary said. “But I’m glad. It’s better than grumping. So many men grump.”

And I was early. Red Baker wasn’t out yet. You can set your watch by that dog, or any dog. He’d start his stately tour in exactly half an hour. And Joey Morphy wouldn’t, didn’t show. The bank wouldn’t be open for business but that didn’t mean Joey wouldn’t be there working on the books. The town was very quiet but of course a lot of people had gone away for the Easter weekend. That and the Fourth of July and Labor Day are the biggest holidays. People go away even when they don’t want to. I believe even the sparrows on Elm Street were away.

I did see Stonewall Jackson Smith on duty. He was just coming from a cup of coffee in the Foremaster Coffee Shop. He was so lean and brittle that his pistols and handcuffs seemed outsize. He wears his officer’s cap at an angle, jaunty, and picks his teeth with a sharpened goose quill.

“Big business, Stoney. Long hard day making money.”

“Huh?” he said. “Nobody’s in town.” What he meant was that he wished he weren’t.

“Any murders, Stoney, or other grisly delights?”

“It’s pretty quiet,” he said. “Some kids wrecked a car at the bridge. But, hell, it was their own car. Judge’ll make ’em pay for repairing the bridge. You heard about the bank job at Floodhampton?”

“No.”

“Not even on television?”

“We don’t have one, yet. Did they get much?”

“Thirteen thousand, they say. Yesterday just before closing. Three fellas. Four-state alarm. Willie’s out on the highway now, bitching his head off.”

“He gets plenty of sleep.”

“I know, but I don’t. I was out all night.”

“Think they’ll catch them?”

“Oh! I guess so. If it’s money they usually do. Insurance companies keep nagging. Never let up.”

“It would be nice work if they didn’t catch you.”

“Sure would,” he said.

“Stoney, I wish you’d look in on Danny Taylor. He looks awful sick.”

“Just a question of time,” Stoney said. “But I’ll go by. It’s a shame. Nice fella. Nice family.”

“It kills me. I like him.”

“Well you can’t do nothing with him. It’s going to rain, Eth. Willie hates to get wet.”

For the first time in my memory, I went into the alley with pleasure and opened the back door with excitement. The cat was by the door, waiting. I can’t remember a morning when that lean and efficient cat hasn’t been waiting to try to get in the back door and I have never failed to throw a stick at him or run him off. To the best of my knowledge, he has never got in. I call the cat “he” because his ears are torn up from fighting. Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys? Perhaps six or eight hundred times that cat has tried to get in and he has never made it.

“You’re due for a cruel surprise,” I told the cat. He was sitting in a circle of his tail, and the tip flicked up between his front feet. I went into the dark store, took a can of milk from the shelf, punched it open, and squirted it into a cup. Then I carried the cup to the storeroom and set it just inside and left the door open. He watched me gravely, looked at the milk, and then walked away and slid over the fence in back of the bank.

I was watching him go when Joey Morphy came into the alley with the key to the bank’s back door ready in his hand. He looked seedy—grainy—as though he hadn’t been to bed.

“Hi, Mr. Hawley.”

“I thought you were closed today.”

“Looks like I never close. Thirty-six-dollar mistake in the books. I worked till midnight last night.”

“Short?”

“No—over.”

“That should be good.”

“Well, it ain’t. I got to find it.”

“Are banks that honest?”

“Banks are. It’s only some men that aren’t. If I’m going to get any holiday, I’ve got to find it.”

“Wish I knew something about business.”

“I can tell you all I know in one sentence. Money gets money.”

“That doesn’t do me much good.”

“Me either. But I can sure give advice.”

“Like what?”

“Like never take the first offer, and like, if somebody wants to sell, he’s got a reason, and like, a thing is only as valuable as who wants it.”

“That the quick course?”

“That’s it, but it don’t mean nothing without the first.”

“Money gets money?”

“That cuts a lot of us out.”

“Don’t some people borrow?”

“Yeah, but you have to have credit and that’s a kind of money.”

“Guess I better stick to groceries.”

“Looks like. Hear about the Floodhampton bank?”

“Stoney told me. Funny, we were just talking about it yesterday, remember?”

“I’ve got a friend there. Three guys—one talked with an accent, one with a limp. Three guys. Sure they’ll get them. Maybe a week. Maybe two.”

“Tough!”

“Oh, I don’t know. They aren’t smart. There’s a law against not being smart.”

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“Forget it. I talk too much. That’s another rule—don’t talk. I’ll never learn that. Say, you look good.”

“I shouldn’t. Didn’t get much sleep.”

“Somebody sick?”

“No. Just one of those nights.”

“Don’t I know....”

I swept out the store and raised the shades and didn’t know I was doing it or hating it. Joey’s rules popped around and around in my head. And I discussed matters with my friends on the shelves, perhaps aloud, perhaps not. I don’t know.

“Dear associates,” I said, “if it’s that simple, why don’t more people do it? Why does nearly everyone make the same mistakes over and over? Is there always something forgotten? Maybe the real basic weakness might be some form of kindness. Marullo said money has no heart. Wouldn’t it be true then that any kindness in a money man would be a weakness? How do you get nice ordinary Joes to slaughter people in a war? Well, it helps if the enemy looks different or talks different. But then how about civil war? Well the Yankees ate babies and the Rebs starved prisoners. That helps. I’ll get around to you, sliced beets and tinned button mushrooms, in a moment. I know you want me to talk about you. Everyone does. But I’m on the verge of it—point of reference, that’s it. If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, [17] If the laws of thinking are the laws of things: John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), A Realistic Universe: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1916): “Somehow the laws of thought must be the laws of things if we are going to attempt a science of reality.” In November 1939, Steinbeck asked Pascal Covici to send him five of Boodin’s philosophical works; he and Ricketts discussed Boodin’s ideas on the Sea of Cortez trip. then morals are relative too, and manner and sin—that’s relative too in a relative universe. Has to be. No getting away from it. Point of reference.

“You dry cereal with the Mickey Mouse mask on the box and a ventriloquism gadget for the label and ten cents. I’ll have to take you home, but right now you sit up and listen. What I told dear Mary as a joke is true. My ancestors, those highly revered ship-owners and captains, surely had commissions to raid commerce in the Revolution and again in 1812. Very patriotic and virtuous. But to the British they were pirates, and what they took they kept. That’s how the family fortune started that was lost by my father. That’s where the money that makes money came from. We can be proud of it.”

I brought in a carton of tomato paste, slashed it open, and stacked the charming slender little cans on their depleted shelf. “Maybe you don’t know, because you’re kind of foreigners. Money not only has no heart but no honor nor any memory. Money is respectable automatically if you keep it a while. You must not think I am denouncing money. I admire it very much. Gentlemen, may I introduce some newcomers to our community. Let’s see, I’ll put them here beside you catsups. Make these bread-and-butter pickles welcome in their new home. New Yorkers, born and sliced and bottled. I was discussing money with my friends here. One of your finest families—oh, you’d know the name! Everybody in the world does, I guess. Well, they got their big start selling beef to the British when our country was at war with the British, and their money is as admired as any and so is the family. And another dynasty, probably the greatest bankers of them all. The founder bought three hundred rifles from the Army. The Army had rejected them as dangerously defective and so he got them very cheap, maybe fifty cents apiece. Pretty soon General Frémont [18] General Frémont: (1813-90) Military officer and explorer who took part in numerous expeditions to the West. was ready to start his heroic trek to the West, and he bought the rifles, sight unseen, for twenty dollars apiece. No one ever heard whether they blew up in the troopers’ hands. And that was the money that makes money. It doesn’t matter how you get it just as long as you get it and use it to make more. I’m not being cynical. Our lord and master, Marullo of the ancient Roman name, is quite right. Where money is concerned, the ordinary rules of conduct take a holiday. Why do I talk to groceries? Perhaps because you are discreet. You do not repeat my words, or gossip. Money is a crass and ungracious subject only when you have it. The poor find it fascinating. But don’t you agree that if one becomes actively interested in money, he should know something of its nature and character and tendencies? I’m afraid that very few men, and they great artists or misers, are interested in money for itself. And you can kick out those misers who are conditioned by fear.”