The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three Page 4

  Dave, who was following Anne along the street, let her go into the house without catching up to her. In the hall upstairs he heard Anne answering her mother, who was calling sleepily.

  “Are you in for the night, Anne?”

  “Yes, I’m in, Mother,” Anne said.

  In his room, Dave sat on the bed, rubbing his face with his hand and trying to figure out what Anne would be doing with a guy who looked like a gangster. “No wonder her mother tries to keep an eye on her!” he thought. He felt both jealous and humiliated, and his only comforting thought was that she had promised to go out with him, too. Then he heard someone moving softly outside in the hall, tiptoeing downstairs. As he pulled his door open, he saw Anne, who still had on her fur jacket, halfway downstairs. With one hand on the banister she looked up at him, blinking, scared. He walked down toward her.

  “Where are you going, Anne?” he said.

  “Out for a little while,” she whispered, putting her finger up to her lips. “Please be quiet, or Mother will hear you.”

  “You’re going back to that guy you left down at the corner, I know,” he said stubbornly. “I didn’t think you ever sneaked out this late at night.”

  “Only when Mother’s had neuralgia and put herself to sleep.”

  “Anne, don’t go back.”

  “Dave, please; I’m in a hurry.”

  He stared at her, shaking his head; all evening while he had been at the armory watching the fights, he had been dreaming of the way she had kissed him. Now he felt that her delight at his birthday gift meant nothing, her kiss was just a casual incident, and that she was hurrying out, wearing the stockings he had given her as a first intimate gesture, to meet the man on the corner. She tried to push him aside. Stuttering with rage, he said: “I know all about that guy without even speaking to him.” When she didn’t answer, he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her back from the door. He was so full of jealous rage he tripped her and pushed her back on the stairs and tried to hold her there with a forearm across her chest.

  “You’re hurting me!” she gasped.

  “I’m going to pull those stockings off you,” he said, pushing her back roughly. Then she started to cry, as if he had hurt her badly, and all the energy went out of him. She was sitting on the stairs with one hand on her breast as she tried to get her breath.

  “You hurt me, you hurt me,” she whispered, biting her lip.

  “I’m so sorry, Anne.”

  “You’ve got to watch it, you can’t be that rough with a girl.”

  “I’m sorry, sorry,” he said, helping her up as if she had become so fragile he hardly dared touch her.

  “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Dave,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I know you like me.”

  “I’ve always liked you, Anne.”

  “I like you, too,” she said, taking a deep breath and looking as if she might cry again.

  “Why’s a girl like you going out at this hour?”

  “He’s all right, I’ve been going out with him for two years. He’s been good to me, he loves me. I’ve got so I love him.”

  “Is he waiting for you?”

  “Yes!”

  There was a sudden fear in his heart and he said haltingly: “If you want, I’ll leave the latch off the door, Anne!”

  “If you want, Dave,” she said, looking away. “Don’t tell Mother, will you?”

  “I won’t.”

  She went out. He waited, then he hurried up the stairs to put on his hat and coat. Mrs. Greenleaf must have wakened, for she called: “Did I hear you talking to somebody, Dave?” He said: “I guess you heard me coming in. It’s all right, Mrs. Greenleaf.” He tiptoed downstairs and went out to the street.

  Anne was quite a way ahead. By the time she reached the corner, he was almost up to her, but on the other side of the street. Seeing her coming, the man who was waiting, leaning against the post, tossed his paper into a refuse can, and without saying a word, took hold of her arm possessively. They went walking along the street. Dave stood watching, increasingly resentful of the man’s long, straight, wide-shouldered overcoat. Then he saw the light flash on Anne’s stockings. At first he felt glad to think that something of his was going with her. The couple turned a corner. Dave hurried after them, following for three blocks till he saw them turn into a brownstone rooming house. There was only one hall light in the house. Anne was standing behind the man while he bent down and fumbled with a key in the lock. As Dave stood there, clenching his fists and not knowing whether to be angry at Anne or her mother, he was desperately uneasy, for he remembered he had called out: “It’s all right, Mrs. Greenleaf.” Then he saw the man against the hall light holding the door open, and Anne went in, and the door was shut.

  A Girl with Ambition

  After leaving school when she was sixteen, Mary Ross worked for two weeks with a cheap chorus line at the old La Plaza, quitting when her stepmother heard the girls were a lot of toughs. Mary was a neat, clean girl with short, fair curls and blue eyes, looking more than her age because she had very long legs, and knew it. She got another job as cashier in the shoe department of Eaton’s, after a row with her father and a slap on the ear from her stepmother.

  She was marking time in the store, of course, but it was good fun telling the girls about imaginary offers from big companies. The older salesgirls sniffed and said her hair was bleached. The salesmen liked fooling around her cage, telling jokes, but she refused to go out with them: she didn’t believe in running around with fellows working in the same department. Mary paid her mother six dollars a week for board and always tried to keep fifty cents out. Mrs. Ross managed to get the fifty cents, insisting every time that Mary would come to a bad end.

  Mary met Harry Brown when he was pushing a wagon on the second floor of the store, returning goods to the department. Every day he came over from the mail-order building, stopping longer than necessary in the shoe department, watching Mary in the cash cage out of the corner of his eye. Mary found out that he went to high school and worked in the store for the summer holidays. He hardly spoke to her, but once, when passing, he slipped a note written on wrapping paper under the cage wire. It was such a nice note that she wrote a long one the next morning and dropped it in his wagon when he passed. She liked him because he looked neat and had a serious face and wrote a fine letter with big words that were hard to read.

  In the morning and early afternoons they exchanged wise glances that held a secret. She imagined herself talking earnestly, about getting on. It was good having someone to talk to like that because the neighbors on her street were always teasing her about going on the stage. If she went to the butcher to get a pound of round steak cut thin, he saucily asked how was the village queen and actorine. The lady next door, who had a loud voice and was on bad terms with Mrs. Ross, often called her a hussy, saying she should be spanked for staying out so late at night, waking decent people when she came in.

  Mary liked to think that Harry Brown knew nothing of her home or street, for she looked up to him because he was going to be a lawyer. Harry admired her ambition but was shy. He thought she knew how to handle herself.

  In the letters she said she was his sweetheart but never suggested they meet after work. Her manner implied it was unimportant that she was working at the store. Harry, impressed, liked to tell his friends about her, showing off the letters, wanting them to see that a girl who had a lot of experience was in love with him. “She’s got some funny ways but I’ll bet no one gets near her,” he often said.

  They were together the first time the night she asked him to meet her downtown at 10:30. He was waiting at the corner and didn’t ask where she had been earlier in the evening. She was ten minutes late. Linking arms, they walked east along Queen Street. He was self-conscious. She was trying to be very practical, though pleased to have on her new blue suit with the short stylish coat.

  Opposite the cathedral at the corner of Church Street, she said, “I don’t want you to think I’m like th
e people you sometimes see me with, will you now?”

  “I think you are way ahead of the girls you eat with at noon hour.”

  “And look, I know a lot of boys, but they don’t mean nothing. See?”

  “Of course, you don’t need to fool around with tough guys, Mary. It won’t get you anywhere,” he said.

  “I can’t help knowing them, can I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “But I want you to know that they haven’t got anything on me,” she said, squeezing his arm.

  “Why do you bother with them?” he said, as if he knew the fellows she was talking about.

  “I go to parties, Harry. You got to do that if you’re going to get along. A girl needs a lot of experience.”

  They walked up Parliament Street and turned east, talking confidently as if many things had to be explained before they could be satisfied with each other. They came to a row of huge sewer pipes along the curb by the Don River bridge. The city was repairing the drainage. Red lights were about fifty feet apart on the pipes. Mary got up on a pipe and walked along, supporting herself with a hand on Harry’s shoulder, while they talked in a silly way, laughing. A night watch-man came along and yelled at Mary, asking if she wanted to knock the lights over.

  “Oh, have an apple,” she yelled back at him.

  “You better get down,” said Harry, very dignified.

  “Let him chase me,” she said. “I’ll bet he’s got a wooden leg.” But she jumped down and held onto his arm.

  For a long time they stood on the bridge, looking beyond the row of short poplars lining the hill in the good district on the other side of the park. Mary asked Harry if he didn’t live over there, wanting to know if they could see his house from the bridge. They watched the lights on a streetcar moving slowly up the hill. She felt that he was going to kiss her. He was looking down at the slow-moving water wondering if she would like it if he quoted some poetry.

  “I think you are swell,” he said finally.

  “I’ll let you walk home with me,” she said.

  They retraced their steps until a few blocks away from her home. They stood near the police station in the shadow of the fire hall. He coaxed so she let him walk just one more block. In the light from the corner butcher store they talked for a few minutes. He started to kiss her. “The butcher will see us,” she said, but didn’t care, for Harry was respectable-looking and she wanted to be kissed. Harry wondered why she wouldn’t let him go to the door with her. She left him and walked ahead, turning to see if he was watching her. It was necessary she walk a hundred yards before Harry went away. She turned and walked home, one of a row of eight dirty frame houses jammed under one long caving roof.

  She talked a while with her father, but was really liking the way Harry had kissed her, and talked to her, and the very respectable way he had treated her all evening. She hoped he wouldn’t meet any boys who would say bad things about her.

  She might have been happy if Harry had worked on in the store. It was the end of August and his summer holidays were over. The last time he pushed his wicker wagon over to her cash cage, she said he was to remember she would always be a sincere friend and would write often. They could have seen each other for he wasn’t leaving the city, but they took it for granted they wouldn’t.

  Every week she wrote to him about offers and rehearsals that would have made a meeting awkward. She liked to think of him not because of being in love but because he seemed so respectable. Thinking of how he liked her made her feel a little better than the girls she knew.

  When she quit work to spend a few weeks up at Georgian Bay with a girlfriend, Hilda Heustis, who managed to have a good time without working, she forgot about Harry. Hilda had a party in a cottage on the beach and they came home the night after. It was cold and it rained all night. One of Hilda’s friends, a fat man with a limp, had chased her around the house and down to the beach, shouting and swearing, and into the bush, limping and groaning. She got back to the house all right. He was drunk. A man in pajamas from the cottage to the right came and thumped on the door, shouting that they were a pack of strumpets, hussies, and if they didn’t clear out he would have to call the police. He was shivering and looked very wet. Hilda, a little scared, said they ought to clear out next day.

  Mary returned to Toronto and her stepmother was waiting, very angry because Mary had quit her job. They had a big row. Mary left home, slamming the door. She went two blocks north to live with Hilda in a boarding house.

  It was hard to get a job and the landlady was nasty. She tried to get work in a soldiers’ company touring the province with a kind of musical comedy called Mademoiselle from Courcelette. But the manager, a nice young fellow with tired eyes, said she had the looks but he wanted a dancer. After that, every night Mary and Hilda practiced a step dance, waiting for the show to return.

  Mary’s father came over to the boarding house one night and coaxed her to come back home because she was really all he had in the world, and he didn’t want her to turn out to be a good-for-nothing. He rubbed his face in her hair. She noticed for the first time he was getting old and was afraid he was going to cry. She promised to live at home if her stepmother would mind her own business.

  Now and then she wrote to Harry, just to keep him thinking of her. His letters were sincere and free from slang. Often he wrote, “What is the use of trying to get on the stage?” She told herself he would be astonished if she were successful, and would look up to her. She would show him.

  Winter came and she had many good times. The gang at the east-end roller rink knew her and she got in free. There she met Wilfred Barnes, the son of a grocer four blocks east of the fire hall, who had a good business. Wilfred had a nice manner but she never thought of him in the way she thought of Harry. He got fresh with little encouragement. Sunday afternoons she used to meet him at the rink in Riverdale Park. Several times she saw Harry and a boyfriend walking through the park, and leaving her crowd, she would talk to him for a few minutes. He was shy and she was a little ashamed of her crowd that whistled and yelled while she was talking. These chance meetings got to mean a good deal, helping her to think about Harry during the week.

  In the early spring Mademoiselle from Courcelette returned to Toronto. Mary hurried to the man that had been nice to her and demonstrated the dance she had practiced all winter. He said she was a good kid and should do well, offering her a tryout at thirty dollars a week. Even her stepmother was pleased because it was a respectable company that a girl didn’t need to be ashamed of. Mary celebrated by going to a party with Wilfred and playing strip poker until four a.m. She was getting to like being with Wilfred.

  When it was clear she was going on the road with the company, she phoned Harry and asked her to meet her at the roller rink.

  She was late. Harry was trying to roller skate with another fellow, fair-haired, long-legged, wearing large glasses. They had never roller skated before but were trying to appear unconcerned and dignified. They looked very funny because everyone else on the floor was free and easy, willing to start a fight. Mary got her skates on but the old music box stopped and the electric sign under it flashed “Reverse.” The music started again. The skaters turned and went the opposite way. Harry and his friend skated off the floor. Mary followed them to a bench near the soft-drink stand.

  “What’s the hurry, Harry?” she yelled.

  He turned quickly, his skates slipping, and would have fallen, but his friend held his arm.

  “Look here, Mary, this is the damnedest place,” he said.

  His friend said roguishly, “Hello, I know you because Harry has told me a lot about you.”

  “Oh well, it’s not much of a place but I know the gang,” she said.

  “I guess we don’t have to stay here,” Harry said.

  “I’m not fussy, let’s go for a walk, the three of us,” she said.

  Harry was glad his friend was noticing her blue coat with the wide sleeves and the light brown fur.

&nbs
p; They left the rink and arm-in-arm the three walked up the street. Mary was eager to tell about Mademoiselle from Courcelette. The two boys were impressed and enthusiastic.

  “In some ways I don’t like to think of you being on the stage, but I’ll bet a dollar you get ahead,” Harry said.

  “Oh, baby, I’ll knock them dead in the hick towns.”

  “How do you think she’ll do, Chuck?” said Harry.

  The boy with the glasses could hardly say anything, he was so impressed.

  Mary talked seriously. She had her hand in Harry’s coat pocket and kept tapping her fingers. Harry gaily beat time as they walked. They felt that they should stay together after being away for a long time. When she said it would be foolish to think she would cut up like some girls in the business did, Harry left it to Chuck if a fellow couldn’t tell a mile away that she was a real good kid.

  The lighted clock in the tower of the fire hall could be seen when they turned the bend in the street. Then they could make out the hands on the clock. Mary, leaving them, said she had had a swell time, she didn’t know just why. Harry jerked her into the shadow of the side door of the police station and kissed her, squeezing her tight. Chuck leaned back against the wall, wondering what to do. An automobile horn hooted. Mary, laughing happily, showed the boys her contract and they shook their heads earnestly. They heard footfalls around the corner. “Give Chuck a kiss,” Harry said suddenly, generously. The boy with the glasses was so pleased he could hardly kiss her. A policeman appeared at the corner and said, “All right, Mary, your mother wants you. Beat it.”

  Mary said, “How’s your father?” After promising to write Harry, she ran up the street.