Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

So I began going with her. It all turned out bad, and I’ve said mean things about her, and maybe will say more. It seemed to me, and still does, that she was a spoiled, self-centered girl, but of course what I really held against her, and what she held against me, was that while I liked her a little bit I didn’t like her much, and not enough, after that one time, to pull her zippers, though of course I mumbled a lot about how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have to do our courting in the Goldfish Bowl, as we called the studio from then on. If I could have lived my life as I wanted to live it, I don’t think I’d have showed up at the Cartaret once a year. But I had no life to live. My money was gone, so those twenty dollars and thirty dollars every month didn’t come any more. And I couldn’t get any work. I was still an A-1 mechanic, and getting better from what I was getting in college, but there was no work. Even my father had none. In the house was nothing but gloom, whispers, and nerves. The Cartaret was a place to go, where there was something to do, and she was somebody to do it with. When summer came and Mr. Legg offered me a place on the desk I took it and tried learning to be a room clerk. I guess I did, somehow. Anyhow, I got so I could put up the mail in less than an hour, the worst chore a room clerk does. I figured out one thing: alphabetize everything, so all D. P. Jones’s stuff comes together before you start putting it in his box. Then you don’t have to look him up eight different times.

“Jack.”

“Yes, Mr. Legg?”

“Let’s talk about your future.”

“Time somebody did.”

“Have a cigar?”

“Thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“How many summers have you worked for us now?”

“Two.”

“I thought it was more.”

“No, my sophomore summer and last summer.”

“You graduate this year, Margaret tells me.”

“In June.”

“What had you thought to do?”

“Well, I’m taking my B.S. in mechanical engineering, and I had thought of going to Detroit and trying to get started there, but the way I hear it, things are pretty shot in the automobile factories, with labor being laid off all the time, and no technical people being taken on, on account of their own men, the ones already laid off, having first call. Of course, until the last couple of months, that hadn’t worried me, because I could have fallen back on football until things get better, but the cracked kneecap I got in the Georgetown game isn’t improving. I don’t limp, it’s nothing that’ll bother me, but it’s taken about two seconds off my speed. I mean it’s stiff. I—”

“That doesn’t upset me at all.”

“Yeah, but I played some pro, if you have to know.”

“I suspected it.”

“And — now that’s out.”

“I’m relieved. I think very little of sport.”

“To me, it was a means to an end.”

“May I stress that word ‘end’?”

“It’s ended, all right.”

“Then we’ll pay no more attention to it. Jack, you’ve impressed me most favorably, the short time you’ve been with me. How would you like the hotel business?”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think you’d make a go of it.”

“Is this an offer?”

“... It could be. It could very well be. I’ll go so far as to say I’d like it to be. But — you created the situation. It’s you that’s here morning, noon, and night, and it’s you who would continue to create a situation if you came in here permanently. Jack, before we discuss offers, I’d have to know your intentions toward Margaret.”

“Your feelings are inside, and I think you know about them. Your intentions are what you’re going to do about them, and frankly, Mr. Legg, it wouldn’t be fair to Margaret or you or anybody to put on an act that I wanted to do something about them when there’s nothing I can do. My father’s in a bad way. I’ve got no work, and I don’t know of any work. So far as my intentions go, suppose you tell me.”

“But if you had work?”

“Watch me.”

“Then let’s fix things up.”

“O.K., I’d like a chance to get a little money together, say three or four or five months to pay off a few things that have come up in my senior year and bulge the bank balance up a little bit, and then, say around October or November—”

“Fine, Jack. I like your attitude. Ah, before you go, I’d like you to know her mother will be — shall we say? — relieved. Not only pleased, but eased, in her mind. To be perfectly frank, with Margaret having notions of going to New York and concertizing, we’ve been concerned.”

“I don’t think you need be.”

“Why not, Jack?”

“I doubt if she’s got it.”

“... So do we.”

We were in his private office, a small paneled room with pictures of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Francis Scott Key and some Cartarets in it, and he came over from behind the desk and leaned close to me and let me have it out of the side of the mouth in a way you wouldn’t think a member of the Maryland Club would ever talk. “... We think she’s kidding herself, and badly. Frankly, when Harold Randolph was alive and the piano seemed something for a young lady and one could be proud of her but not alarmed about her, I was all for it. But then when that vaudeville business started, and Randolph died and this new crowd came in at the Peabody — we’ve been growing uneasy, uneasy, uneasy. Jack, am I making myself clear?”

Randolph was an F.F.V. that had run the Peabody Conservatory as long as anybody could remember. But somewhere around the time I entered college he had died, and Margaret had gone with some bozo from Texas that had pumped her full of stuff about temperament, and I knew what Mr. Legg meant. I just winked and he winked back. “Jack, suppose she did have it? It’s no life for a woman. I want her married. She’s crazy about you, so take it over. And Jack, I like that idea of getting a little stake, so you’re your own man. But don’t overdo. I mean, don’t worry about money. Soon as you’re married, get a baby started, so she — you get it, boy, get it?”

He cackled and laughed and shook hands and opened the door on a crack and peeped out and then opened a panel and in there were bottles and glasses and fizz water. So we had a drink and he laughed and clapped me on the back some more. It sounds like one nice guy talking to another nice guy about what had to be settled before they could do something nice for a pretty nice girl, and I wish I could tell it that way. But what I said, which was what I meant, makes no sense unless you know what had happened, over at the college, the week before, on a Friday afternoon that Denny and I had to spend there, on account of a test we both had coming up the next morning. Denny had long since forgotten about engineering, and switched over to psychology and business practice and advertising and some more courses like that, that he could piece together for a degree, but we were in the same calculus class and they were throwing a test at us. We were both good at math, and there was no need to bone the test, so it was just an afternoon to kill. About three o’clock he came in our room carrying a big carton, with a colored fellow behind him carrying another, and he acted pretty mysterious about it. Come to find out it was beer, and where it came from I don’t know, but if you ask me his father had given an order and then asked the bootlegger to stop by, on his way into the District, with a little for Denny. But of course, in a case like that, Denny would have to talk big about his “connections.” That didn’t bother me any. It was a hot day in April and I took the bottles out, then took one of the cartons to the drug store and filled it with cracked ice and came back and put the stopper in the basin and loaded some bottles in and put ice around them and pretty soon we were set.