Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

“I thought it was our home.”

That touched me and I started to cry. He bounded over, put his arms around me and pulled me close to him. “What have you got that bum here for, Carrie? We can’t have her come between us! To hell with her! We—”

I pushed him away and stood up. More than anything I wanted to be in his arms and getting myself clear left me weak and trembling. But I drove myself to say what I had to say. “Grant!”

“Yes, Carrie, what is it?”

“That girl has to stay here.”

“All right, Carrie. I don’t get it, it seems to me a little money would dispose of her case a whole lot better, but if you say she stays she stays. But — keep her out of sight, will you? I don’t want to see her. I—”

“I will not keep her out of sight.”

“I warn you, Carrie, you had better keep her away from me or I won’t be responsible for what I—”

“You are going to accept her.”

“That — servant girl?”

“That servant girl is going to live with us until she can find some other place, she is going to eat with us—”

“With you. You can count me out.”

“With us!”

I fairly screamed it. Understand, I wasn’t saying exactly what I meant. Because by this time I had made up my mind that as soon as he accepted Lula, Lula was going out the door as fast as her legs would carry her, and her wet wash along with her. But I was not going to tell him this until I had gained my point.

When I yelled at him he lit another cigarette, sat down and waited a few moments, evidently to regain some sort of calm. Then he looked at me, smiled in what was meant to be a friendly way, and said: “There’s something back of this, Carrie. All right — here I am. I’m acting reasonably, I hope. I’m not trying to stir up a fight. Now will you tell me what it is? In words of one syllable, so I understand it all?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then, shoot.”

“Grant, I’m calm too — if you’ll overlook that little outbreak just now — and I’m not trying to stir up a fight either. This is what lies back of it. You think you’re objecting to Lula. That’s not it. You’re really objecting to me.”

“Why, that’s ridiculous.”

“You think it is, but it isn’t. Grant, Lula is my friend. She’s almost the only friend I’ve got. I admit she’s not much of a friend. I wish she was different. I bitterly wish she was different. But she’s not different. Lula is the world I came from. Perhaps it’s not much of a world, I don’t know. But it was my world and I can’t change it. The trouble with you is, you’re trying to pretend I was not part of that world at all. You’re trying to convince yourself that in some ways I was an exception, that I didn’t really belong in that world. Well, I’m an exception. I’ve got more gump than most girls in that world have got and I’ve found out by now that I’ve got more brains. I do better than they do. I make more money and I have more ambition. But whether I’m an exception or not, I was a part of that world and I’m still part of it. If it wasn’t for you, money would take care of Lula’s case, and I have money, anyhow a little bit, and I would be willing to take care of it. But I can’t keep you out of it. As you say, there you are, and if you don’t accept Lula you don’t accept me. I have done my best to accept your friends, to say nothing of your family. I have conquered my pride, eaten their bread and drunk their liquor, even when they told me I wasn’t welcome. You are going to do the same. When you sit down to the table and eat dinner with me and Lula Schultz, then I’ll know that it’s not true, some of the things that people say about you.”

“What do people say about me?”

“...That was a slip. I shouldn’t mention things that have been said about you, and I’m sorry.”

“I asked what they say about me.”

“They say you’re a snob.”

“All right. Perhaps I am.”

“I don’t really care what you are, Grant. I’m a snob, too, in a way. I’m terribly conceited and always thinking I’m more capable than other people and — I don’t care about that either. You can be what you are and I’ll not complain. But — you’ll have to accept me. I’ll take no less.”

“I accept you but I will not accept this — Lula. Whatever her name is.”

“Grant, whenever I have something difficult I always try to think it over a little before I come to a decision. Will you do that much for me?”

He came over, put his arms around me again and stood with me a long time, giving me little pats on the arm. “I’ll think it over, Carrie. But I know in advance the decision I’ll come to. I’ll not accept Lula.”

So he didn’t accept her, and she stayed on and on and on. Every afternoon she would go out on the pretense of seeking work but would be back by five-thirty, in time for dinner, for she always seemed to have a big appetite. But Grant hardly ever saw her. He left the apartment long before she got up, around nine o’clock most mornings, and didn’t come home until eleven or twelve at night.

Two or three days of this was bad enough, but when the story of my life began to run in one of the tabloids it was even worse. They had everything in there, from the orphan asylum to my girlhood on the farm, to my job as a waitress in Nyack, but they had it all garbled up, and although it was written in such a way as to seem friendly to me, it made your skin crawl, the things they put in. It was not signed, so it was impossible to tell who was writing it. The night after it started when Grant came home, I tried to get him to do something about it as it seemed to me they had no right to print my life story unless I gave my consent. But he merely shrugged his shoulders and said it didn’t make any difference. Next day I called Mr. Hunt and he said he would consult a lawyer. But the next morning when he called me back, he said the lawyer had told him they did have the right, provided the story was not malicious, and that while I could seek an injunction, if I wanted to, the probability was that I wouldn’t be successful.

I told him never mind, and the horrible story kept running and running, and when it got to the point of my marriage with Grant it revealed shockingly intimate details of our life together, until I thought I would go insane from reading it. Yet all I could do was sit every morning and every evening with Lula and listen to her gabble about how badly Grant treated me and what she would do if she were in my place.

One day around lunch time Grant came in with his mother. She made herself very agreeable, and I said nothing to indicate there had been any unpleasantness between us. I remembered that she liked an old-fashioned with Scotch, got out the tray and made her one, gave Grant a rye highball, and waited for her to say what she wanted. She came to the point very quickly. Smiling at me so that her eyes didn’t look like glass at all, she said: “I hear a little situation has developed in connection with the young lady who is staying here.”

My first impulse was to look surprised and act as though I couldn’t imagine what situation she meant, but on second thought I decided that frankness would probably be the better policy. So I said: “Yes, I’m afraid that’s true.”

“You feel some sense of loyalty to the girl, Grant tells me.”

“I feel some sense of that, and I also feel that she represents something I have to make an issue over with Grant. If I back down on Lula I’ve lost everything. I’ve renounced what I was, I can’t change myself into something else, and that will leave me being exactly nothing at all. I won’t be that.”

“In your place I wouldn’t either.”

She smiled then and turned to Waldo. “It’s just as I told you — a question of pride. Not stubbornness, not stupidity, not capriciousness. It’s pride, pure and simple, and you have to respect it.”