John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

At noon he was just leaving for lunch when the office boy told him there was a lady on his phone. It was Gertrude. Her voice was trembly but she didn’t seem too terribly upset. She begged him to take her out to dinner that night somewhere where they wouldn’t be seen because the house and everything gave her the creeps and that she’d go mad if she heard any more condolences. He told her to meet him in the lobby of the Fort Pitt and he’d run her out to some little place where they could be quiet and talk.

That evening there was an icy driving wind. The sky had been leaden all day with inky clouds driving out of the northwest. She was so muffled up in furs that he didn’t recognize her when she came into the lobby. She held out her hand to him and said, “Let’s get out of here,” as soon as she came up to him. He said he knew a little roadhouse on the way to McKeesport but thought the drive would be too cold for her in his open roadster. She said, “Let’s go; do let’s… I love a blizzard.” When she got into the car she said in a trembling voice, “Glad to see your old flame, Ward?” and he said, “God, Gertrude, I am; but are you glad to see me?” And then she said, “Don’t I look glad?” Then he started to mumble something about her father, but she said, “Please let’s not talk about that.”

The wind was howling behind them all the way up the Monongahela valley, with occasional lashing flurries of snow. Tipples and bessemer furnaces and tall ranks of chimneys stood out inky black against a low woolly sky that caught all the glare of flaming metal and red slag and the white of arcs and of locomotive headlights. At one crossing they almost ran into a train of coalcars. Her hand tightened on his arm when the car skidded as he put on the brakes.

“That was a narrow squeak,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I don’t care. I don’t care about anything tonight,” she said.

He had to get out to crank the car as he had stalled the motor. “It’ll be all right if we don’t freeze to death,” he said. When he’d clambered back into the car she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Do you still want to marry me? I love you, Ward.” The motor raced as he turned and kissed her hard on the mouth the way he’d kissed Annabelle that day in the cottage at Ocean City. “Of course I do, dear,” he said.

The roadhouse was kept by a French couple, and Ward talked French to them and ordered a chicken dinner and red wine and hot whisky toddies to warm them up while they were waiting. There was no one else in the roadhouse and he had a table placed right in front of the gaslogs at the end of a pink and yellow diningroom, dimly lit, a long ghostly series of empty tables and long windows blocked with snow. Through dinner he told Gertrude about his plans to form an agency of his own and said he was only waiting to find a suitable partner and he was sure that he could make it the biggest in the country, especially with this new unexploited angle of the relations between capital and labor. “Why, I’ll be able to help you a lot with capital and advice and all sorts of things, once we’re married,” she said, looking at him with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. “Of course you can, Gertrude.”

She drank a great deal during dinner and wanted more hot whiskies afterwards, and he kissed her a great deal and ran his hand up her leg. She didn’t seem to care what she did and kissed him right in front of the roadhouse keeper. When they went out to get in the car to go home the wind was blowing sixty miles an hour and the snow had blotted out the road and Ward said it would be suicide to try to drive to Pittsburgh a night like that and the roadhouse keeper said that he had a room all ready for them and that monsieur et madame would be mad to start out, particularly as they’d have the wind in their faces all the way. At that Gertrude had a moment of panic and said she’d rather kill herself than stay. Then she suddenly crumpled up in Ward’s arms sobbing hysterically, “I want to stay, I want to stay, I love you so.”

They called up the Staple house and talked to the nightnurse who said that Mrs. Staple was resting more easily, that she’d been given an opiate and was sleeping quietly as a child, and Gertrude told her that when her mother woke to tell her she was spending the night with her friend Jane English and that she’d be home as soon as the blizzard let them get a car on the road. Then she called up Jane English and told her that she was distracted with grief and had taken a room at the Fort Pitt to be alone. And if her mother called to tell her she was asleep. Then they called up the Fort Pitt and reserved a room in her name. Then they went up to bed. Ward was very happy and decided he loved her very much and she seemed to have done this sort of thing before because the first thing she said was: “We don’t want to make this a shotgun wedding, do we, darling?”

Six months later they were married, and Ward resigned his position with the information bureau. He’d had a streak of luck on the Street and decided to take a year off for a honeymoon in Europe. It turned out that the Staple fortune was all left to Mrs. Staple in trust and that Gertrude would only have an annuity of fifteen thousand until her mother died, but they were planning to meet the old lady at Carlsbad and hoped to coax some capital out of her for the new advertising agency. They sailed in the bridal suite on the Deutschland to Plymouth and had a fine passage and Ward was only seasick one day.

that August it never rained a drop and it had hardly rained in July the truck garden was in a terrible state and all through the Northern Neck of Virginia it was no use pulling cornfodder because the lower leaves were all withered and curled up at the edges only the tomatoes gave a crop

when they weren’t using Rattler on the farm you’d ride him (he was a gelding sorrel threeyear old and stumbled) through the tall woods of white pine and the sandbed roads on fire with trumpetvine and through swamps dry and cracked crisscross like alligator hide

past the Morris’s house where all the Morris children looked dry and dusty and brown

and round along the rivershore past Harmony Hall where Sydnor a big sixfoot-six barefoot man with a long face and a long nose with a big wart on his nose ’ud be ashamblin’ around and not knowin’ what to do on account of the drought and his wife sick and ready to have another baby and the children with hoopin’ cough and his stomach trouble

and past Sandy Pint agin past the big pine

and Miss Emily ’ud be alookin’ over the fence astandin’ beside the crapemyrtle (Miss Emily wore poke bonnets and always had a few flowers and a couple of broilers for sale and the best blood in the south flowed in her veins Tancheford that’s how we spell it but we pronounce it Tofford if only the boys warnt so so noaccount always drinkin’ an’ carryin’ on down by the rivershoa an’ runnin’ whisky over from Mar’land instead o’ fishin’ an’ agoin’ out blind drunk and gettin’ the trapnets cut up or lost Miss Emily took a drop herself now and then but she always put a good face on things lookin’ over the picket fence astandin’ by the crapemyrtle bush visitin’ with the people passin’ along the road)

then down to Lynch’s Pint where old Bowie Franklin was (he warn’t much account neither looked like a bantam rooster Bowie Franklin did with his long scrawny neck an’ his ruptured walk couldn’t do much work and he didn’t have money to spend on liquor so he just fed his gray fowls that warn’t much account and looked just like Bowie did and hung round the wharf and sometimes when the boat was in or there were some fisherman in the crick on account of it blowin’ so hard down the bay somebody’d slip him a drink o’ whisky an’ he’d be a whole day asleepin’ it off)