From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [131]
“I have it all figured out. I’ve been here one year now, by the end of two years I’ll be ready to leave. I figured it all out before I ever came here.”
“Figured what out?” Prew said, seeing Stark and Maureen coming back toward them from the jukebox.
“How long I meant to stay,” Lorene said, and stopped.
“Oh,” Prew said. “Oh, I see.” He was hoping Stark and Maureen would go right on by, but they didn’t.
“Well I be dam,” Stark said, “look who’s heah. Hello, Princess. I thought you had retired already.”
“Hello, Maylon,” Lorene said serenely. It was, Prew thought, as if she was looking wide-eyedly clear through Stark and seeing all of him.
“You start out at the top, dont you kid?” Stark said to him. “How’d you manage to meet the Princess? just like that?”
“Mrs Kipfer,” Prew told him, feeling suddenly belligerent. “Why?”
“No kiddin?” Stark said, “Mrs Kipfer? She introduced you? Already?”
“Sure,” Prew said. “Why not?”
“Hell, kid, you really rate. It took me three trips down here before I even was allowed to meet her. And two more after that before she’d lay me. And even then she was reluctant. Aint that right, Princess?” he grinned.
“I lay anyone who wants what I’ve got,” Lorene said serenely.
Stark stared at her reflectively. “Damn,” he said, “aint she a Princess, though? She even looks like this Princess Elizabeth in the newsreels. Good bit older, of course, but like her. Every inch a Princess, ’ey Princess? every inch.”
Maureen laughed raucously and Stark grinned at her and winked.
Prew, looking at Lorene, realized suddenly she did look like a princess, Princess Elizabeth or any other princess, he thought, a serene poised princess, incapable of being ruffled, remote from life and men. Especially men, be thought, the thickness coming back in his throat again.
“She does, dont she?” Stark said. “I ask you. Dont she? Princess Lorene, the Virgin of Waikiki. I think I’ll go shake hands with the Mayor,” he said suddenly. “Is the latrine still where it use to be?”
“We never change nothing here,” Maureen said huskily. She grabbed Prew’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “Cmon, Babyface. I’ll ‘introduce’ you around.”
Lorene serenely offered no resistance, as Maureen pulled him across the room and sat him in a chair and perched herself heavily on his lap.
“This heres Billy,” she said, nodding at the small, dark, Jewish nosed, feverish eyed girl who had been at the jukebox with the soldier when he came in and was now sitting on his lap.
She turned back to Prew. “Stark says you dears goin to stay all night. You got a bottle, Babyface?”
“Nope,” Prew said, still looking back across the room at Lorene. “No bottle. I thought they dint allow it anyway.”
“They dont,” Maureen said. “Anyplace. But most places they let an all night job sneak one in. Here the old bitch even enforces it on them. We could still sneak one while she’s out in the hall, though. If we had one, that is.”
“You dont like Mrs Kipfer, do you?”
“Like her,” Maureen said. “I love her. She kills me. If it wasnt for her I dont know what I’d do for laughs. Her and her stinking highclass ways, acting like she’s Mrs Stinking Astor.”
“How’d she ever get in this business anyway?”
“Like any of the rest of them. Started at the bottom and worked up to being foreman.”
“She’s got a damn good figure for it.”
“And thats all the good it’ll do you,” Maureen laughed. “You might as well try to make the Queen of England. Listen, Babyface,” she said. “You look artistic, Stark says you a bugler. Imagine something for me. Imagine having your own mother run the whorehouse you work in, can you?”
“No,” Prew said. “I cant.”
“Then you can see what I mean,” Maureen said. “About laughs.” She yawned, almost in his face, and stretched her thin arms. “Lets see,” she said. “Hows our introductions comin? Thats Sandra,” she said, pointing to the other girl who had been sitting with the two sailors when he came in and who was still with them now, a tall brunette who wrinkled her pert nose as she laughed gayly with the sailors, shaking the glistening cascade of long hair whenever she laughed, which was often.
“She’s proud of her long hair,” Maureen razzed, almost indifferently now, from force of habit. “She also says she’s a college grad, some coed school in the Middle West. She’s writin a novel now, about her life