"You don't need to do that," I said. "I can look that over in the morning before we open up."
"I'm quite capable of doing it."
"I didn't say you weren't."
"Thank you," she said. "I'm glad you feel I'm still of some value."
"Okay, be stubborn," I said. I took the keys and started to leave. "Where's the new cord for that motor?"
She looked blank.
I told her I'd bought a new cord and laid it by her breakfast plate that morning. "I thought you'd have sense enough to know what it was for. That cord's got a short in it."
"Why, how gallant of you, Joe!" she said. But she was scared.
I got the new cord and changed it, and threw the old one in the trash bucket. But the next time I was out there I saw that she'd dug it out and put it on one of the metal shelves.
And now that I think of it, it might have begun with her mother. The old lady never threw anything away. For months after she died, Elizabeth and I were throwing out balls of string and packages of wrapping paper and other junk.
I don't know. It's hard to know what to put down and what to leave out.
There was a lot of stuff on the radio and in the newsreels and newspapers. People getting run over, blown up, drowned, smothered, starved, lynched. Mercy killings, hangings, electrocutions, suicides. People who didn't want to live. People who deserved killing. People who were better off dead.
I don't suppose it was any different from usual, any different from what it always has been and always will be. But coming then, right at that time, it kind of tied in.
Day after day and night after night, there was a row. With one breath Elizabeth would tell us to get out; with the next she was threatening what she'd do if we tried.
"What the hell do you want?" I'd yell. "Do you want a divorce?"
"Be publicly displaced by a frump like that? I think not."
"Then I'll clear out. Carol and I."
"What with? And how would I run the show?"
"We'll sell the show."
"We can't. We couldn't get a fraction of its value from an outsider. I'm willing to give you credit, Joe. You're at least half the business."
That was true. A showman would know that. Anyone that was a showman wouldn't want to buy.
"I think I get you," I said. "You want me to give up any claim I've got on the business. Then you could peddle out at any old price and still have a nice wad."
She raised her eyebrows. "Such language, Joe! What would your parents think?"
"Goddam you!"
"How much, Joe? What will you give me to leave you in undisputed possession of the field?"
"You know damned well I haven't any money."
"So you haven't. Mmm."
There was more talk. Carol and me talking by ourselves. Elizabeth and me talking. The three of us talking together. Nagging and lashing out, and getting madder and edgier. And the stuff in the newspapers, and the newsreels, and on the radio. There were some Canadian travel folders, and a farmer's wife over in the next county who stumbled into a tubful of hot lard and was burned unrecognizably. There were the premiums on those insurance policies falling due. Twelve thousand five hundred dollars-double indemnity.
Then there was Elizabeth saying, "Well, Joe. I've finally hit upon a nice round sum."
And me, kind of shaking inside because I knew what the sum was, and trying to sound like I was kidding. "Yeah, I suppose you want about twenty-five thousand bucks."
There must have been something else, but I can't think of it now.
6
Our house, the show, I mean, is just four doors off of Main Street. On the corner, on our side and fronting on Main, is a dime store. On the opposite corner, cater-cornered from us, is the Farmers' Bank. Down the street a block is the City Hotel, and next door to it is the bus station and a garage.
I'm not taking credit for picking the location, but I couldn't have picked a better one if I'd done it. Any time you can get close to a bank, a hotel, a garage, a bus station, and a dime store-above all, a dime store-you've got something.
The average person might think a Main Street location would be better, but it wouldn't. It's too hard to park on Main.
I sat in the car a minute after I parked, feeling kind of good and proud like I always do when I look at the house. It's not as big as some city houses, but there's nothing to come up to it in a town of our size. And it's my baby. I built it all out of nothing.
We've got a copper-and-glass marquee that you couldn't duplicate for five grand, although naturally I didn't pay that. I had the job done by an out-of-town firm, and it just so happened that they couldn't get the work okayed by our local building inspectors. You know what I mean. So I settled for five hundred, and that, plus a few bucks for the inspectors, was all the marquee cost me.
The lobby is fifteen feet deep, spreading out fan shape from the double doors, with a marble-and-glass box office in the center. There's a one-sheet board on each side of the box office, glassed in with gold frame. The lobby walls have a four-foot marble base. The upper half is glass panels for display matter, with mirrors spotted in every three feet.
There's a carpet running from each door to the street.
That carpet would cost fifteen dollars a yard, but I got it for nothing. I was the first showman in this territory to lay a carpet through his lobby. I sold the equipment house on the -idea, showed them how it would be opening up a big new market, so they put it in for me. Of course, I let them take a picture of me in front of the house, and I gave them a testimonial and an estimate on the number of miles that had been walked on the carpet without it showing any wear.
The house doesn't have a balcony. The ceiling's too low. I don't mean we're cramped. We're twenty feet at the entrance, which is four feet higher than the average show ceiling. But it's not high enough for a balcony.
We've only got a ninety-five-foot shot from the projection booth to the screen, and the floor can't drop much more than an inch to the foot. I'd have to double the pitch for a balcony, and even now it hurts people's necks to-sit in the front row.
We get along pretty well without a balcony, anyway. I've got four rows of seats on tiers at the back of the house, extending up to the projection booth. Not full rows, of course, on account of the entrance and exit and the aisle down the middle from the booth door. It's more like loges.
When I put them in my customer liability insurance jumped a hundred dollars a year, because you can't tell when some boob might fall and break his neck. But the extra seating-space is worth it.
Jimmie Nedry, my projectionist, was just making a change-over when I went into the booth. He started the idle projector and put a hand on the sound control. At just the right instant he jerked the string that opens one port and closes the other. He pulled the switch on the first projector, lifted out the reel of film, and put it on the rewind. There wasn't a break of even a fraction of an instant. You'd have thought the picture all came in one reel.
"Well, Jimmie," I said, "how's it going?"
He didn't say anything for a minute, but I knew he was nerving himself up to it. I feel sorry for Jimmie. Any way I can I try to help him out. I've got his oldest girl ushering for me, and I use his boys as much as possible in putting out paper.
"Look, Mr. Wilmot," he blurted out suddenly. "Grace and me were talking last night, and we was wondering if you couldn't put her on selling tickets. She could sit down that way, and people wouldn't see that she was-couldn't see much of her. And-"
"I'd like to have Grace," I said. "But you know how I'm tied up. I just about have to use women from the Legion auxiliary. If it wasn't for that I'd jump at the chance to take Grace."
"We got to have a little more money, Mr. Wilmot. If you could use the boys some on the door, or taking care of the-"