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’t quite right. He had another drink, telling himself that this would be his last. Let’s see; where was he? Oh, yes. When I was forty. Oh, nuts. He wished Monsignor Creedon would heed the call of nature. He got up and went out to the verandah.
It was a fine night. (Fine had been a romantic word in his vocabulary ever since he read A Farewell to Arms, but this was one time when he felt justified in using it.) The fine snow was still there, covering almost everything as far as the eye could see. The fine snow had been there all the time he had been inside, having dinner, dancing with Constance and Jean, and sitting by himself, drinking highballs too fast. He took a deep breath, but not too deep as experience had warned him against that. This was real, this weather. The snow and what it did to the landscape. The farmlands that once, only a little more than a century ago, and less than that in some cases, had been wild country, infested with honest-to-God Indians and panther and wildcat. It still was not too effete. Down under that snow rattlesnakes were sleeping, rattlers and copperheads. A high-powered rifle shot away, or maybe a little more, there were deer, and there were Pennsylvania Dutch families that never spoke English. He remembered during the war, during the draft, when someone had told him about families near the Berks County line, but still in this county. They not only couldn’t understand about the war; many of them never had been to Gibbsville. That alone was enough to make a story when he first heard it. Now he wished he had heard more. He resolved to go into it further, find out more about the peculiarities of his native heath. Who did Kentucky think it was that it could claim exclusive rights on hill-billys? “I guess I love this place,” he said.
“Good evening, son,” said a voice.
He turned. It was Father Creedon. “Oh, Father. Good evening. Cigarette?”
“No, thank you. Cigar for me.” The priest took a cigar from a worn, black leather case. He amputated the end of the cigar with a silver cutter. “How are things with you?”
“Fine,” said Julian. “Huh. As a matter of fact, anything but fine. I suppose you heard about my performance last night with a friend of yours.”
“Yes. I did. You mean Harry Reilly?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s none of my affair,” said Monsignor Creedon. “But I wouldn’t let it worry you if I were you. I don’t imagine Harry Reilly likes to be missing the dancing and all that, but he’s a reasonable kind of a fellow. Go to him and tell him you’re sorry, and make him think you mean it. He’ll listen to reason.”
“I did go. Didn’t Mrs. Gorman tell you? I went to see him this afternoon and he wouldn’t see me.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t, eh? Well, the next time you see him tell him to go to hell.” He chuckled. “No. Don’t. I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience. A priest of God stirring up animosities and so forth and so on. I don’t know. You didn’t ask me for my advice anyways. But if you can forget for a minute that I’m a priest, and just between you and me, I think Harry Reilly is a horse’s ass.”
The old man and the young man laughed. “You do?” said Julian.
“I do. If you ever tell that I’ll fix your feet, young man. But that’s what I think.”
“So do I,” said Julian.
“We’re both right, son,” said Monsignor Creedon. “Harry is ambitious. Well, Caesar was ambitious. A lot of people are ambitious. I was ambitious myself, once, and I got a nice kick in the teeth for it. Ambition’s all right, if you know when to stop. As F.P.A. would say, I can take my ambition or leave it alone. Oh, yes, ambition is all right, just as long as you don’t get too ambitious.”
“Do you read F.P.A.?”
“My God, yes. I get the World every day. Of course I’m a Republican, but I have the World delivered with the Ledger. I miss Broun, though, since he isn’t with the World any more. Do you read the World? I didn’t know Cadillac dealers could read. I thought all they had to do was make an X mark on the back of a check.”