U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [198]
wanted. But when Dick found out that he'd never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they'd gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn't do anything but tel his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of her-self who made a nice boy like him unhappy. "Jez, I'd make a fel er happy if I had the chanct," she said and burst out crying.
Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physi-cal things didn't matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick be-cause later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dol ars a week to cure him up and that he felt
-83-terrible about it. Dick and Hilds went on sinning Sunday evening when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fal he felt very much the man of the world.
In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the
Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector's he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who
asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick cal ed Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first edi-tions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper's wife, who was dead, had been an El sworth and a cousin of Dick's mother's. Dick promised to send him copies of al his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.
Al the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him. He'd heard about French letters and wanted to tel her about them, but it wasn't until the last day that Edwin had to go out and make parochial cal s. This time it was Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed and giggled together while they were making love. This time they didn't worry so much about sin and when Edwin came home to supper he asked them what the joke was, they seemed in such a good humor. Dick started tel ing a lot of cock and bul stories about his Aunt Beatrice and her boarders and they parted at the train in a gale of laughter.
That summer was the Baltimore convention. Mr. Cooper had rented a house there and entertained a great deal. Dick's job was to stay in the outer office and be polite to
-84-everybody and take down people's names. He wore a blue serge suit and made a fine impression on everybody with his wavy black hair that Hilda used to tel him was like a raven's wing, his candid blue eyes and his pink and white complexion. What was going on was rather over his head, but he soon discovered what people Mr. Cooper real y wanted to see and what people were merely to be kidded along. Then when he and Mr. Cooper found them-selves alone, Mr. Cooper would get out a bottle of Amontil ado and pour them each a glass and sit in a big leather chair rubbing his forehead as if to rub the politics out of his mind and start talking about literature and the nineties and how he wished he was young again. It was understood that he was going to advance Dick the money to go through Harvard with.
Dick had hardly gotten back to school as a senior the next fal when he got a telegram from his mother: Come home at once darling your poor father is dead. He didn't feel sorry but kind of ashamed, afraid of meeting any of the masters or fel ows who might ask him questions. At the railway station it seemed as if the train would never come. It was Saturday and there were a couple of fel ows in his class at the station. Until the train came he thought of nothing else but dodging them. He sat stiff on his seat in the empty daycoach looking out at the russet October hil s, al keyed up for fear somebody would speak to him. It was a relief to hurry out of the Grand Central Station into the crowded New York streets where nobody knew him, where he knew nobody. Crossing on the ferry he felt happy and adventurous. He began to dread getting home and deliberately missed the first train to Trenton. He went into the old dining room of the Pennsylvania Station and ate fried oysters and sweet corn for lunch and ordered a glass of sherry, half afraid the colored waiter wouldn't serve him. He sat there a long time reading The Smart Set and drinking the sherry feeling like a man of the