Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [30]
’t have to do anything to make them terrible, but were just terrible people. Of course they usually did do something, but they didn’t have to. There was (Mrs.) Emily Shawse, widow of the late Marc A. Shawse, former mayor of Gibbsville, and one-time real estate agent, who had developed the West Park section of Gibbsville. Mrs. Shawse did not participate in club activities, but she was a member. She came down to the club summer afternoons and sat alone on the porch, at one end of the porch, watching the golfers and tennis players and the people in the pool. She would have a fruit lemonade on the porch, and have one sent out to Walter, her Negro chauffeur. She would stay an hour and leave, and go for a drive in the country, presumably. But if she wasn’t having an affair with Walter, Gibbsville missed its guess. No one ever had seen her speak with Walter, not even good-morning-Walter, good-morning-Mrs.-Shawse; but it certainly looked fishy. Walter had the car, a Studebaker sedan, at all hours of the day and night. He always had money to bet on the races, and he was a good customer at the Dew Drop Inn, where the Polish and Lithuanian girls had not been brought up to draw the color line. Julian prided himself on the fact that he had blocked the sale of a Cadillac to Mrs. Shawse. She had wanted one, or at least was ready to buy one in exchange for a little attention, in a nice way, from Julian. She had put him in a tough spot for a while. He couldn’t just say he didn’t want to sell her a car. He eventually solved the problem by telling her he would give her only a hundred and fifty in a trade involving the Studebaker, which then was worth, trade-in value, about six times that much, and when she still was not rebuffed he sent Louis, the pimply, bowlegged carwasher, with the demonstrator, instead of going himself. Mrs. Shawse kept the Studebaker. There was Harry Reilly s own nephew, Frank Gorman, a squirt if ever there was one. Frank got drunk at every last party the minute his mother went home. It was because of him that she came to the club dances. He was at Georgetown, having been kicked out of Fordham and Villanova, not to mention Lawrenceville, New York Military Academy, Allentown Prep and Gibbsville High School. Frank was a spindle-shanked young man who wore the most collegiate clothes, the kind that almost justify the newspaper editorials. He had a Chrysler roadster, a raccoon coat, adenoids, and some ability as a basketball player. He was a loud-mouth and a good one-punch fighter, who accepted invitations of the younger set as though they were his due. He was the kind of young man who knows his rights. His uncle secretly hated him, but always referred to him, with what was mistaken for bashful pride, as that crazy kid. There was the Reverend Mr. Wilk, who had had the club raided under the Volstead Act. There was Dave Hartmann, who wiped his shoes on clean towels and in seven years had not been known to violate the club rule against tipping servants and caddies, and who belonged to the club himself but would not let his wife and two daughters become members. Dave manufactured shoes, and he needed the club in his business, he said. Besides, what would Ivy and the girls get out of the club, when the Hartmann home was in Taqua? It d be different, he said, if he had his home in Gibbsville. Julian had another Scotch and soda. He wanted to go on thinking about the terrible people, all members of this club, and the people who were not terrible people but who had done terrible things, awful things. But now he got nothing out of it; it made him feel no better, no surer of himself. It had in the beginning, for there were many things he had thought of that were worse things than he had done. What Ed Klitsch had done, for instance. A thing that could have a terrible effect on a decent woman like Mrs. Losch; or it might have made Losch think that his wife invited Klitsch s little attention. And so on. But the trouble with making yourself feel better by thinking of bad things that other people have done is that you are the only one who is rounding up the stray bad things. No one but yourself bothers to make a collection of disasters. For the time being you are the hero or the villain of the thing that is uppermost in the minds of your friends and acquaintances. You can t even say, But look at Ed Klitsch. What about Carter and Kitty? What about Kitty and Mary Lou? Aren t I better than Mrs. Shawse? The trouble with that is that Ed Klitsch and Carter and Kitty and Mary Lou and Mrs. Shawse have nothing to do with the case. Two more kids looked at Julian and said hyuh, but they did not hover thirstily and wait for him to offer them a drink. He wondered about that again, and as it had many times in the last year and a half, Age Thirty stood before him. Age Thirty. And those kids were nineteen, twenty-one, eighteen, twenty. And he was thirty. To them, he said to himself, I am thirty. I am too old to be going to their house parties, and if I dance with their girls they do not cut in right away, the way they would on someone their own age. They think I am old. He had to say this to himself, not believing it for a moment. What he did believe was that he was precisely as young as they, but more of a person because he was equipped with experience and a permanent face. When he was twenty, who was thirty? Well, when he was twenty the men he would have looked up to were now forty. No, that wasn